Psychoanalysis in different countries and its future: problems of identity
Markus Fäh
Keynote speech
The 5th International Congress of ECCP, September 24-25, 2010
Kiev, Ukraine
Different ways of experiencing and listening, responding and intervening – different psychoanalytic identities!
In the history of the psychoanalytic movement different ways of experiencing the psychoanalytic situation as well as different ways of listening to the patient have emerged. They led to different ways of responding and intervening – and to different psychoanalytic identities. The author connects the development of psychoanalytic technique with cultural and sociopsychological aspects. He suggests consequences for the psychoanalytic discourse and practice in the future.
The speaker:
Markus Fäh, Ph.D., is psychoanalyst in private practice in Zurich, member of the International Psychoanalytical Organization, teaching analyst at the Freud Institute Zurich, professor at the Sigmund Freud University in Vienna. He lectures and gives seminars in different European Countries and is the author of many scientific articles and several books. Past President of the European Confederation of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapies. www.markusfaeh.com.
Psychoanalysis
as a method of exploration and study of the Unconscious and studying it has a
history of over hundred years. From its beginning as a Jewish Viennese science
and treatment method it has grown and developed to become an international
multicultural scientific community with different branches, different
organizations, thousands of practitioners all over the world.
The title of our conference suggests that there are problems of psychoanalytical identity. This is obviously so. The intriguing questions are: On which levels are the problems with psychoanalytical identity?
Is the psychoanalytical identity in itself a problem? Before all, is there anything like a psychoanalytical identity?
If this is the case: What is psychoanalytical identity?
Are there different psychoanalytical identities?
Is there an overarching idea of psychoanalytical identity which comprises all the different psychoanalytical sub-identities?
After all, how can psychoanalytical identity be achieved and secured?
How is it lost and refound?
How do psychoanalytical practice and psychoanalytical identity inter-relate?
How can psychoanalalytical identity be developed under the conditions of the postmodern Zeitgeist and the accelerated globalized society?
In the end, should should we replace the static concept of psychoanalytical identity by the more dynamic concept of the psychoanalytic position?
And
what is the relationship between psychoanalytical identity and specific
cultural identities?
1
Let us start with some basic issues. The famous Haslemere symposium 1976 focused on the question of psychoanalytic identity. One of its trivial and basic results was that the individual psychoanalyst is gathering his psychoanalytic identity mainly out of two sources: On one hand, by his daily work of analyzing his patients. The more he analyses, the more he practices the analytic stance listening to his patients in the analytic setting, the more he becomes an expert in searching for the emotional truth and experiencing the messages of the unconscious. He introjects the analytic experience, he is growing more and more at ease behind the couch, he is enjoying his free floating awareness, his work of listening and reverie and sometimes intervening to keep the flow of the patients speech going on. The other source of psychoanalytical identity is the integration of the individual analyst in the psychoanalytic culture, his local peer group of analysts as well as his contacts within the international psychoanalytica culture – by reading psychoanalytic publications, following the actual psychoanalytic discussions, by intervision and by scientific engagement.
A stable but flexible psychoanalytic identity therefore can be reached only when the individual analyst has enough patients to analyze, and when a local peer group or culture supports him as well as the integration in international psychoanalytic community gives him a frame of mind and feeling of belonging to a global large group.
The individual analysts personal way of working and therefore his personal psychoanalytic identity needs three sources : First, a satisfying and clinically rich working field, second a local psychoanalytic culture and peergroup rooted in the specific ethos of the country the analyst lives in, and third , his attachment to and communication with the international psychoanalytic community.
I will not focus long on the third element, the international psychoanlaytic culture. It is the main supplier of psychoanalytic texts and ideas, current findings, congress life, self esteem and pride to be part of an international movement. It also is the guardian of the the theoretical common ground of psychoanalysis which seperates us from the rest of the psycho-culture. J
I just mention some basic features of this international psychoanalytical common ground:
There is an Unconscious, therefore: The attitudes and acts of human beings have unconscious causes
Human beings are always in conflict
Our feelings are ambivalent (we kill what we love most)
Childhood experiences and infantile sexuality are essential
Attachment and transference are basic psychic facts
We analysts have the attitude of radical listening and experiencing
Nobody is „neutral“, countertransference colours the analysts experience
The main therapeutical concepts are resistance and transference
Aetiology of neurosis, psychosis or perversion is a dialectical effect of genetic inheritance and life experience
On the basis of this common ground there are many theoretical differences and sub-divisions and psychoanalytic subcultures, the classical Freudians, the Kleinians, the Kohutians, the Lacanians, the Bionians, and so on.. but there still is a common ground of psychoanalytic working models and clinical practice within the international psychoanlytical culture which overarches the different theoretical psychoanalytical cultures.
And this overarching psychoanalytic theory today includes also local, regional or national specifities whithin psychoanalytic culture.
2
So let me now turn to the second topic, the different national psychoanalytic cultures.
In psychoanalytic history, different national psychoanalytical cultures have contributed to the actual psychoanalytical common ground:
The traditional Freudian (Austrian, German) psychoanalytic culture
The Hungarian Psychoanalytic culture
The Anglo-American psychoanalytic culture
The British psychoanalytic culture
The French psychoanalytic culture
The Latin-american psychoanalytic culture
and many more...
New national psychoanalytic movements in the Eastern European Countries as well as in Asia and Africa are rising.
a
Let me begin with the traditional Freudian psychoanalytical culture and identity:
Freud treated his patients according to two models. The first model was his first topological model of the psyche: Conscious, preconscious, unconscious.
All there was to do in analysis was to render unconscious conscious. The neurotics suffered from their unconscious reminiscences – and as he was later to recognize – also their unconscious fantasies.
The natural drifting up of the unconscious was supported by the passive neutral and abstinent attitude of the analyst as well as by the setting,, lying on the couch, high frequency of sessions, analyst out of sight.
The other model of the classical Freudian apporach was the second topological model: Id, Ego, Super-Ego.
Where Id was, Ego will be.
The Ego became the central structure. The analyst had to ally himself with the sane part of the Ego, and to overcome the resistances of the ego
Psychoanalysis became Ego-Psychology.
The traditional Freudian analyst was a stern rational figure, carefully listening, and analyzing the resistances and the transference.
It fitted the culture of medicine, of enlightenment, of mastery of irrational feelings and impulses. To attain success and adaptation in life. To be a good capitalist, a modern thinker, a reliable father figure, a good mother.
The values of German and american culture merged with the psychoanalytical project.
b
The Hungarian approach was more romantic , passionate, gipsy like. Ferenczi and later on Balint focused on the first stages of the mother-infant-relationship, primary love.
The analyst had to facilitate a new beginning. And the new beginning was only possible if the analyst gave the analysand some little signs of love, of course not trivial drive satisfaction, but genuine sympathy, mild acting out, reacting warmly to the analysands wish for primary love. Only then was the analysand able to find in the analyst – in the words of Winnicott – a good enough mother figure where he could have trust and transfer also his negative feelings and his complicated patterns in an emotionally full and genuine and direct way.
This hungarian passionate love relationship analysis was radicalized by Kohut who demanded extreme empathy from the analyst.
In the warm bath of the empathy analysis the analysand could be cured. Hungarian passionate emotional culture was the mother womb to be penetrated by the psychoanalytic seed: A new psychoanalytic child was born, the passionate and emotional intense but in the same time precise and clear analysis.
c
The British psychoanalysts took another turn: For Melanie Klein and her followers the infant-mother-relationship and its traces in minds of the children and their analysands had to be recognized and understood.
The child was not only good, it was also profoundly evil, it was overwhelmed by its death drive and aggressivated by frustration and wanted to destroy the breasts and the belly of the mother, which lead to unbearable ambivalence conflicts, first warded off by splitting in the paranoid-schizoid position, then resolved in the more mature depressive position, when the child and later on the analysand learned to take care of the object, to protect it from its own destrucitivity.
British psychoanalytic culture was both very aristocratic and socialdemocratic : There had to be a good environment , a good analyst, a good society but also a strong demand that the individual had to be polite and social toward the Other and to control and overcome his envy and greed. Every one in Britain is very polite, even if he gives you hell.
d
Let us now take a look at the French analysts who declare themselves to be the true guardians of Freudian psychoanalysis, in all their different branches, above all of them Lacan who claimed to be more freudian than Freud himself.
The French culture is an erotomaniac culture, i do not have to remind you of all of the famous erotic literature about the fight between the sexes, desire and intrigue, take as an example Choderlos de la Clos „Dangerous Liaisons“. The seed of psychoanalytic thinking met the womb of french culture’s knowledge about speaking about sex and power, the child was French psychoanalysis, its most famous and most influential genius being Jacques Lacan. French psychoanalysis radicalized the subjects quest for ist own unconscious sexual desire, the impossibility to be fully aware of its own desire, the radical understanding of the symptom as an unconscious compromise, as a highly personal form of enjoying, jouissance.
French psychoanalysis is aristocratic and bourgeouis, it is radically anarchistic, philosophical, individualistic, it contains the taste of luxury and sexual freedom, it is proud and beautiful.
e
Just a few remarks about Swiss psychoanalytic culture. Freud had high hopes on his Swiss followers, especially Carl Gustav Jung, the protestant ambitious psychiatrist. He expected him to be his follower, he wanted to lay psychoanalysis in his hands, to break out of the Jewish Ghetto. But Jung disappointed him, broke with the primacy of the sexual drive.
The split between anarchy and freedom of thinking and opposition towards authorities on one hand, and square narrow-mindedness on the other hand is a characteristic of Swiss culture, the antagonism between the urban and internationalistic multicultural Swissness and the rural obsessional-compulsive way of thinking and living.
Psychoanalytic thinking merged with these two character traits. Psychoanalysis in Switzerland is on one hand radically free and pluralistic, but also a little bit boring, modest, and anxious. It has not the influence proportional to the number of practicing analysts. Swiss analysts are proud but shy.
f
I spare you exhaustive descritipns of Latin-american psychoanalytic culture, Italian, Irish, Dutch psychoanalytic culture., and so on...
I hope to have given you a certain scent of how psychoanalysis in different countries developed on the background culture of its „mother culture“and was woven into the local or regional cultural identity. Every psychoanalytic branch in every countrly developed a national psychoanalytic culture according to their respective national culture.
3
Let me now turn to the next question:
How can the psychoanalytical identity in different psychoanalytic cultures be developed and become a source and part of the psychoanalytical mainstream?
I think the development of psychoanalytical culture in a country has three steps or phases:
a
The first incubatory phase where small psychoanalytical groups get into contact with the international psychoanalytical community: Freud’s works are read, perhaps translated in the national language, foreign training analysts work together with this emerging working groups , and a first platform for a national psychoanalytic culture is laid. This phase can be very „wild“, there are no or only small regulations or evaluation procedures, even a lack of formal training programs.
b
The second stage is the phase of growth and consolidation: The national psychoanalytical culture develops in exchange with the international psychoanalysis as well from within, trainings insitutes develop, the first generation of training analysts often trained abroad takes over responsibilty to develop a national psychoanalytical culture, the second generation of young enthousiastic colleagues is won and there is a rapid growth of interest in the country for psychoanalytic issues.
c
The third phase is the paradigmatic phase: A specific national psychoanalytical paradigm is developed which is a part of the international psychoanalytic community and shares its common values but also is proud of its national specifities, the psychoanalytic child created in the primal scene between Freuds seed and the countries specific mother culture has grown up and makes its own way.
I think that many of the Eastern European Countries are in the first or second stage of this development , and I try to sketch some difficulties and challenges in the process of the development of a specific national psychoanalytic culture.
In the first stage, the problem is the establishment of a basic psychoanalytical training, the securing of personal analyses for every future analyst. The danger is the isolation of the very few analysts, and the challenge is to establish a veritable marketing campaign for psychoanalytic thinking within the virgin mother culture. Psychoanalysis has to seduce and persuade the innocent national mother culture.
The problems of the second stage are the standardization of training and evaluation procedures, to create a psychoanalytic culture, a functioning in-group communication, to establish some elements of formalization and bureaucracy as means of effective promotion of psychoanalytic issues. Put in terms of the primal scene: The second stage is the very act of intercourse and marriage between national mother culture and psychoanalysis, the falling in love and establishing a functioning and stable love relationship, to create a specific psychoanalytical child which has traits from both parents.
The problems of the third stage are the consolidation of the national psychoanalytic paradigm, the formal integration into national culture and society as well as into the psychoanalytic international institutions. The challenge is to avoid petrification of standards and bureaucracy, maintain creative psychoanalytic thinking and lively communication within the group.
I come to my conclusions.
In order to establish a speficic national psychoanalytic culture the arising and growing regional or national psychoanalytic community has to
– study the international psychoanalytical discourse and to establish a stable connection to the international psychoanalytical common ground, which represents the father element of the psychoanalytic identity of a local psychoanalytic group
– to link aspects of the specific national or regional cultural identity with psychoanalytic thinking and practice in a dialectical process, to keep a mature link with the mother earth, i.e. the local culture in a given region or country.
– This primal scene model of inseminating and nurturing the local mother culture, of forming and protecting the local group identity as well as the local indidivdual identity of an analyst has to develop over many steps of communication and integration.
– The process of creating a specific local cultural can be understood as a satisfying intercourse and love relationship between the psychoanalytic father culture and the national mother culture.
Where an individual analyst or a local groups of analysts is standing in this process, the main issue should be: How can we stimulate a fascinating and procreating love relationship between the psychoanalytic lover and the national virgin?