The Truth About Freud's Technique. Michael Guy Thompson
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replaces the original (internal) conflict with one that is “outside” of themselves, against which they are now embroiled. They become convinced, and need to feel convinced, that they’re being persecuted by someone to whom they’re attached.
This is best epitomized by delusional jealousy. The object of desire is protected from the aggression that jealousy always occasions by displacing it (the aggression) onto an intruder. Freud recognized that beneath this aggression was an attraction—but the object of that attraction has been repressed. Though the line between neurotic and psychotic jealousy is ambiguous, it can be understood in terms of the degree to which delusional jealousy is directed at someone who torments them, whether they are neurotic or psychotic. Whereas neurotics feel persecuted by their desire, psychotics feel persecuted by the object of their desire. In their experience, their relationship with that object is essentially tormenting. Recall how Freud accounted for our capacity to successfully “dissolve” the Oedipal complex, how “analyses seem to show that it is the experience of painful disappointment” (1961c, 173). In other words, our unwillingness to submit to the experience of disappointment arouses pathological defenses against it, whether these defenses are neurotic or psychotic. The acceptance of that disappointment—through one’s experience of it—enables us to accept the reality that we’re confronted with. While neurotics suppress a bit of “themselves” in their avoidance of disappointment, psychotics seek to disavow reality itself, “altering” it in elegant, though inevitably tormenting, symmetry.
As we saw in chapter 2, the tendency to disavow reality is supposed to begin with every child’s discovery that girls lack a penis or, alternately, that boys possess one. Children initially gloss over the apparent contradiction between their observation of the “missing penis” (in the case of the girl, the presence of a penis in boys) and the expectation—based on his preconception—of seeing one. The boy disavows the stark absence of the girl’s penis and “hallucinates” one instead. Yet, what is the reality in question? Is it the mere perception of the missing penis, which the child, horrified, disavows; or the child’s conception of what is lacking, fueled by his anticipatory imagination? Laplanche and Pontalis suggest:
If the disavowal of castration is the prototype—and perhaps even the origin—of the other kinds of disavowal of reality, we are forced to ask what Freud understands by the “reality” of castration or by the perception of this reality. If it is the woman’s “lack of a penis” that is disavowed, then it becomes difficult to talk in terms of perception of a reality, for an absence is not perceived as such, and it only becomes real in so far as it is related to a conceivable presence. If, on the other hand, it is castration itself which is repudiated, then the object of disavowal would not be a perception . . . but rather a theory designed to account for the facts. (1973, 120; emphasis added)
If psychotics can’t accept reality but choose, instead, to disavow and then remodel it with delusion and hallucination, what purpose does this “renovation” specifically serve? Wouldn’t they seek to obtain happiness because the reality they disavow is inherently frustrating? When psychotics resort to delusions and hallucinations to fend off—in fact, to change their idea and perception of—reality, to rearrange and remodel it, they do so, not to find alternate ways to achieve their desires but in order to protect themselves from them. But that isn’t enough. They have to dismantle the interhuman world that serves as the foundation, the scaffolding, of their existence. This is why, in the final analysis, reality isn’t the mere “concreteness” of a world that is perceived or ignored. It is the community of relationships where we reside and take part, where we take chances, commit errors, suffer failures, and enjoy success. Reality is our abode. It isn’t “inside” or “outside”—it’s where we live, suffer, and survive.
Freud’s essential insight into the nature of psychosis is epitomized by the significance he attributed to delusions and what they, in turn, tell us about our experience of reality. He realized that ostensibly crazy beliefs—just like other forms of phantasy—conceal a meaning that, when properly understood, makes our suffering intelligible, once we recognize how delusions—no matter how bizarre—convey a purpose. They tell us something about the people who experience them. The trend in psychoanalysis, however, increasingly conceives of psychosis as a “process”—impersonal to be sure. This process is governed less by drives and intentions—with meaning—than it is by “mechanisms” and “defense.” Whereas Freud was the first to employ denial as an essential feature of psychosis, he emphasized the inherent intelligence at the heart of delusion. Because of this intelligence we are able to know these people in their psychosis. They are not that different from ourselves, because they are a reflection of ourselves. They are us, and we, them.
Delusions, like phantasies in general, are a door to the unconscious. They are crucial elements of a dialogue that psychotics are having with themselves. Delusions, like all linguistic expressions, are actually acts of revelation. They contain a truth that, if discovered, can explain the nature of the reality that has become so unbearable to the person who avoids it. On the other hand, psychotics aren’t the only ones who suffer delusions! Freud’s most famous obsessional patient, the Rat Man, suffered them, too (see Part Five). Perhaps it is reasonable to say that there is a bit of the psychotic in all of us, that the gap said to separate “us” from “them” isn’t as wide as it seems.
5 Real Love and Transference-Love
One of Freud’s most valuable insights was the discovery that falling in love frequently occasions a peculiarly pathological reaction. The phenomenon of falling in love with one’s analyst, though initially perceived as a hindrance to the progress of therapy, soon became an essential and anticipated aspect of the treatment. Freud mused over the mystery of love in a variety of contexts and the question of its nature has become a cornerstone of analytic theory in general. My present concern, however, is more limited. I would like to examine Freud’s efforts to differentiate between “transference-love” on the one hand and real, “genuine” love on the other. Nowhere does Freud explore this distinction more poignandy—and ambiguously—than in “Observations on Transference-Love” (1958d). I will explore the practical import of this paper later when I review its contribution to psychoanalytic technique (see chapter 19), but for now I would simply like to examine those aspects of the paper that pertain to Freud’s conception of reality.
Freud’s objective in this paper was to advise analysts how to handle expressions of erotic yearnings manifested by their patients. While arguing that erotic demands should never, under any circumstances, be returned, Freud sympathizes with the unique difficulty analysts face if they hope to avoid alienating their patients in the process. Freud believed analysts “must recognize that the patient’s falling in love is induced by the analytic situation and is not to be attributed to the charms of his [her] own person” (160–61). Naturally, a person falling in love with her doctor (Freud typically uses a female patient as the prototypical example) may become the object of a scandal in the eyes of her relatives and friends. Yet, Freud insists that one’s patients should never be admonished against these feelings; nor should they be enticed to concoct them:
It has come to my knowledge that some doctors who practise analysis frequently prepare their patients for the emergence of the erotic transference or even urge them to “go ahead and fall in love with the doctor so that the treatment may make progress.” I can hardly imagine a more senseless proceeding. In doing so, an analyst robs the phenomenon of the element of spontaneity which is so convincing and lays up obstacles for himself in the future which are hard to overcome. (161–62)
Freud characterizes this phenomenon as one in which the patient “suddenly loses all understanding of the treatment and all interest in it, and will not speak or hear about anything but her love, which she demands to have returned” (162). Under this “spell of love,” the patient typically loses or denies her symptoms and “declares that she is well” (162). On encountering this behavior, some analysts may be tempted to assume that they’ve achieved a miraculous cure and that her being in love is tangible proof of the treatment’s success. On the contrary Freud suggests that, faced with this development, “one keeps in mind the suspicion that anything that interferes with the continuation of the treatment may