This essay is meant to address a problem that has haunted me for two years, leaving me confused, disgusted, yet able only to submit to its castration. Last July, because of the well-known awful incident involving Miaomiao and Zhang Tao, I discussed with Lin Zhi (not the Lin Zhi on Douban, but Linxia Fengzhi) the question: what is an analyst, how does one become an analyst, and how does one carry out analytic work? Later I charged forward, but remained limited by the narrowness of my thinking and vision, and by the dominance of professional discourse. Two weeks ago I ended my own analysis; a few days ago I happened to meet Dr. Wu Rui, and asked him about "the end of analysis" and "the aim of analysis." Inspired by both of them, and by my own reflection, I wrote this essay. In truth, it is stitched and patched together from the last few months. It is narrow, and its categories are messy. Tupinamba's The Desire of Psychoanalysis offers a series of critiques from a broader and stronger height. I should also point out that what I discuss here, like the vulgar psychoanalysis and vulgar practitioners I criticize, concentrates on the category of neurosis. I lack clinical experience. I look forward to Dr. Wu Rui's second book, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, which may show us a clinical practice different from the discourse of the domestic Huo Datong school.
I will try to discuss "the end of analysis." This discussion will lead to two results: first, because of its extimacy, the end of analysis does not exist; second, "the birth of the analyst" will be deconstructed as a whole deception. Once the end of analysis is destroyed, we will then discuss the analyst as a profession.
I. The End of Analysis
A discussion of the end of analysis must return to the aim of analysis. The aim of analysis is always mystified through endless cuts and transformations. Sometimes it is said to "help the analysand construct a personal history," sometimes to "realize that the big Other does not exist," sometimes to "speak the truth of the unconscious," sometimes to "assume one's own desire," sometimes to "modify the fundamental fantasy," sometimes to "traverse the fantasy." But in fact we all know that they have neither such benevolent positions nor such radical claims. Under pressure, they then explain these phrases as: "allowing the analysand to continue living in a way they are willing to accept." We truly do not know whether they want to domesticate an individual who is good at surviving (even though this person is expected to be "not normalized" and "not tested against reality"), or whether they want to manufacture a Nietzschean overman through listening and limited speech, someone who assumes all of their desire to the point of no longer seeing the big Other. What we can be sure of is that they do not intend to place the analysand on a line of flight. After all, they need an "end."
The legitimacy of psychoanalysis lies in its treatment of the sinthome or knot, not merely the symptom; this is how it distinguishes itself from many other schools. But the problem is precisely this: what exactly is this knot, or which knot is the one psychoanalysis names as such? If the root of the knot lies in the very society that produces madness, how can psychoanalysis finish processing it inside the analysis room?
If, on the other hand, this knot refers to the subject's constitutive lack, coming from the Real, then the aim of psychoanalysis authorized by the knot is said to be: "In the analytic process, we turn fantasy toward that which uses the absolute difference between this subject and other subjects, namely his symptom. In Lacan's final formulation, the symptom at the end of treatment, the sinthome, is the symptom reduced to its absolute point, identical with the subject's proper name." But what does this actually mean? Is analysis supposed to produce an overman of desire on the couch in the analysis room? Sitting beside the couch in a closed analysis room, does the analyst, by listening, speaking, and charging fees, astonishingly solve the constitutive lack of an individual human subject once and for all? On the contrary, there is no such thing as lack. To treat desire as lack is rather an effect, a misrecognition, produced by the flow of desire over the individual. Demand and response are always asymmetrical; the gap between them can never be closed. The premise of this gap is first that a demand has been thrown out, and that throwing is caused by the movement of desire. Therefore, rather than saying desire is a response to this fact and moves in order to close the gap, it is better to say that the movement of desire causes the gap to be identified. Life is fullness, not lack. Desire is "not satisfied with possession," not "not possessing."
In other words, the "end" of psychoanalysis does not exist. The aim of psychoanalysis is also "not at all to know the unconscious, but to face the unknown future; moving toward the future does not require a complete knowledge of oneself and history" (Wu Rui). It lies instead in how to transform and liberate oneself, how to unfold and generate life. This is precisely the path countless people, disciplines, and thoughts have tried to explore; psychoanalysis therefore must not exhaust itself to death within its own field, but should continually move outward. The unconscious is irreducible, and personal history is not a linear one-way road that can simply be sorted and deconstructed through clinical analysis. Going further: before the life-flow that continually unfolds and generates outward, rational knowledge and understanding are secondary. The truth of the subject can indeed be constructed under the impetus of clinical analysis, but on the plane of a full world, psychoanalysis is only one thing among others. In fact, Lacan's explorations and arguments are not mistaken; they even run close to Deleuze and Guattari. The problem is that the claim that a stable, regular, long-term clinical frame can thoroughly handle the knot is less the logic of analysis than the logic of business. This is a question of endless analysis, or, for large numbers of neurotic subjects, an ethical question: how to persist in one's desire, how to unfold one's life, how to move toward one's absolute difference. Psychoanalysis should distinguish two kinds of analysis: clinical analysis, and analysis outside the clinic. The latter is in fact life practice; the former is merely generated by the latter and serves as one of the forces that powers it. This is what I call extimacy.
II. The Birth of the Analyst
This section returns to last July.
In China one often hears: "Only the end of analysis can produce an analyst." There is a question here. We find that many respected French analysts had already begun practicing before any "end of analysis," including the Gilles Chatenay and Damien Guyonnet familiar to us. In Lacan, what we hear is only a constantly changing and very ambiguous description of "the end of analysis," plus the claim that it may "produce the desire of the analyst."
I do not think we should forget Gilles Chatenay's concise and forceful account of the moment he became an analyst, a moment he says came after he had already been "practicing" as one: "The psychoanalyst we speak of exists only by transference. Outside transference, he is like anyone else." Perhaps the analyst does not arise while speaking as an analysand to an analyst, but at the moment when, within a relation of transference, one happens to stand in "the analyst's position." The analyst is always produced afterward.
Yet within psychoanalysis, the length of analysis is constantly emphasized. This makes us suspect that the so-called "end of analysis" is merely a money-making mechanism colluding with the system of "training analysis." Take the Chengdu Psychoanalysis Center as an example. To become an analyst one must
2. Complete personal analysis: one must receive more than five years of personal analysis with an analyst at the center, and both analyst and analysand must agree that the analysis has ended
3. Receive case supervision from two supervising analysts or analysts, separately, at least once a week for at least three years.
This training system is entirely different from the radicality the Lacanian school proclaims for itself. On the contrary, it recalls the IPA institution that Lacanians so often criticize. Such a system produces a severe crisis: people without suffering are forced into analysis in order to "become analysts"; even if the analysand already wants to leave, must they continue speaking in the analytic space for the sake of a five-year certification, even if it violates the desire of their own speech? I will return to this in the third section.
Certain domestic voices keep echoing, loudly and powerfully: if you want to become an analyst, you must undergo the "training" of personal analysis. Certainty freezes here. We therefore have reason to ask whether this is really "training" or merely "certification." The "analyst" has never been a craft transmitted through teaching and inheritance. It is a position, a desire.
Look at Anna Shane's words: "Psychoanalysis is not a technique learned by studying theory, by personal training, and by demonstration." "After analysis, the former analysand may wish to take analysis up as a profession, or may wish to do something else."
In China, however, the analyst has clearly become a profession: "If you want to become an analyst, you must undergo the 'training' of personal analysis." This is precisely the opposite of Anna Shane's insistence that psychoanalysis is not a matter of first choosing and then being trained. Psychoanalysis becomes an industry, and the analyst becomes a product. We know what "industry" means under capitalism.
We must force the question of the perverse act called "analysis for the sake of analysis." In analysis for analysis's sake, does one "gain nothing," or does one gain the suffering manufactured by the analytic frame? In such a rigid system, what is gained: the truth of the unconscious, or an imaginary fraud jointly staged by analysand and analyst? How can an act resisting psychic difficulty, an act opposing power and command, end in "certification"? We must not forget that Freud's "lay analysis" and the schizoanalysis promoted by Deleuze and Guattari both insist that the key, and the only key, is how life should proceed. If psychoanalysis must move toward certification, toward an industry of "undergoing analysis in order to become an analyst," then we might as well declare: one can become an analyst without undergoing analysis. Psychoanalysis is not an interesting theory, nor is it the dinner-table clinic of "professionals" (professionals here can especially mean degree-holders) - not on the couch, but at their dining table. Psychoanalysis is an ethics of life and desire, not the meal of monopolists and lapdogs of capital.
"The quarrels, hostilities, and competition among analysts are every bit as savage as struggles among any other human group."
We oppose this linkage, this discourse of "analysis-becoming-analyst." There is no exact and stable connection between analysis and becoming an analyst. To oppose this ideology is not to deny certain facts, but only to smash the equal sign secretly drawn between the two.
III. The Analyst as Profession
Let us return from last July and walk out of that resentment, confusion, and conservatism. There is no "end of analysis," and there is no "birth of the analyst." The analyst is generated by the analyst's position: the position that stands in the void, split, able to bear the analysand's desire, separated from the ego. Rather than the natural result of clinical analysis, this is an ethical posture: a thorough respect for life and desire, an adventure willing to assume the analysand's desire.
This makes us think of the ridiculous posture of some of the most conservative analysts. They claim to be better at handling "neurotic problems such as emotional crisis, relationship problems, and self-identity," while in fact keeping a respectful distance from psychotic structure. This is only natural, because these professional analysts - professional meaning that they profit by doing clinical analysis, not to mention those who profit through psychoanalytic theory training - have no intention of taking any risk. They merely hope to use the credentials obtained from the analytic frame to make money, searching for and hunting down their long-term meal tickets. This question need not be discussed in detail, because it is in fact the ethical question of "love thy neighbor" discussed by Freud and Lacan. I only want to state a reality that exposes the hypocrisy of professional analysts: when the fees you receive from analysands are your source of income and support your life, what risk can you speak of, and where is the mercy in "hoping the analysand ends as soon as possible and leaves me"?
Yes, the professional analytic system is a holy trinity, a high-intensity framework of reproduction: high income, analytic threshold, analytic frame. The clinical analytic frame is regular and stable, so analysts can collect high, stable fees; this is a publicly recognized fact. It is also treated as common sense that becoming an analyst requires a certain duration of "clinical analysis," and that only the "end of clinical analysis" can make one "become an analyst." Before this holy trinity, the hypocrisy/love of wanting to help others, faith and frenzy toward the unconscious, and the fierce seduction of capital and economy together induce the analysand to produce a "desire of the analyst." After years of brainwashing and castration, they then promote this law everywhere. We have seen no small number of such cases in clinical examples: seduction is one; another is that some people possess an "unconscious" but lack a "consciousness" capable of thinking. Psychoanalysis today is increasingly becoming a framework for reproducing pain, rather than one path for exploring possibility.
Faced with this holy trinity, flexible time and flexible fees, as a pitiful binary structure, have lost almost all force. To reconstruct the ethics of psychoanalysis, we need to introduce a flexible third term: flexible sessions. Flexible sessions mean stripping away the stable, regular system of commodity exchange and thoroughly respecting the analysand's desire. The analysand decides the frequency and duration according to their own desire. Breaking this rigid frame reduces the possibility that the analysand becomes dependent on the analyst, and it also avoids the political-economic reproduction internal to psychoanalysis. At the same time, this act truly brings clinical analysis / psychoanalysis down from its overly sublime position.
Having said this, I do not mean that anyone can be an analyst. On the contrary, some people cannot become analysts even after undergoing analysis. I therefore do not intend to completely reject the claim that one must undergo clinical analysis to become an analyst; I only want to rewrite it by deleting the word "clinical" before "analysis." What is the analyst's position? It is the position that allows the subject to encounter their own desire. It is only one possible encounter within life.
With an extreme and casual simplification, we might say that the symptom is perhaps the effect of life structuring itself, for certain reasons, in a way resembling error, malfunction, or short circuit. Therefore we need all kinds of encounters. New thoughts, astonishing literature, words once unsayable, words never heard before, utterly different people, unfamiliar situations, even states never experienced - unacceptable slackness, boredom with nothing at all, action against anxiety, accepting anxiety and acting, not submitting to it. We form various connections with these encounters and thereby transform ourselves. Thought, action: everything can insert itself into, disturb, overturn, and reconstruct the chain of signifiers; everything can make the unconscious change. Analysis therefore will never lie paralyzed on its couch. It must and needs to push life outward eternally and without end. If we speak of analysis, then it is only "a current of force called analysis."
One also needs to beware the dangerous references of "illness," "medicine," and "treatment." They are in fact always standardized signifiers: how to find an objective, unquestionable, optimal solution, after which life is assembled onto the same track. But the problem is not there at all. People are always told that they are "ill"; they are not saying themselves that they are "ill." They are simply trapped, powerless, in pain, casting expectation toward an imaginary past in memory. This is therefore an ethical question. When people enter psychiatric outpatient clinics, wards, counseling rooms, treatment rooms, or analysis rooms, the question they raise is: "For some reason, or for reasons I do not know, my desire has been blocked. How should my life unfold?" Medicine and discourse should not be excluded. On the contrary, what needs to be done is to let other excluded things return, and to let things not yet counted, or not yet produced, be generated in this field.
Editor's note
Silmo's writing pushed me down from a passive position. Yes, there are too many absurd claims around us, yet we cover our ears while holding down these truths, hoping that an empty Other will give us a stable seat.
There is no "school," and there is no such thing as "the analyst." We must walk our own road. Analysis, psychoanalysis, or so-called "analysis" are only our crutches. Throw them away: the atrophied muscles will recover. We may even grow young again, with enough explosive power in the calves to dunk.
P4 Theater and You has recently published many critical essays on the difficulties faced in the Sinicization of psychoanalysis and the problems encountered in practice. We hope more practitioners can express their first-hand experiences, and we are especially willing to organize and publish them, with absolutely no censorship or rejection. We have also self-organized a "cartel group chat". We welcome output, sharing, collisions of knowledge made by your own hands, and the formation of various groups. The author of this essay is also in the group. The group is currently full; those who want to join can scan the QR code below.
Previous articles in the criticism column
What Is a "School"? | A Submitted Essay to EPS Psychoanalysis Xingzhi School
Event Criticism | The Double Standards of the School: A Discourse Analysis of the Editorial Committee's Reasons for Rejection
Rejected Submission | Increasing Types of Anxiety in Neurosis and Psychosis
A Foreseeable Crisis | The Path of Psychoanalytic Practice Must Be Opened by Oneself
