Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy
Jean Laplanche, in a short 2006 essay under the title Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, makes a clarifying distinction between these two modes. Analysis and therapy are by no means separate but rather reciprocal and interdependent—at least from the psychoanalyst’s perspective. Psychotherapy is the means of narrativization, meaning-making and organization generally, and is a task undertaken by the patient, assisted by the analyst’s attention, curiosity and containment: to use contemporary parlance, in psychotherapy the patient feels seen by the analyst. Psychoanalysis, by contrast, is a destructuring, even a kind of decomposition of psychical elements. Here the relation between analyst and analysand is asymmetrical; the figure of the analyst becomes (according to the patient) provocative and enigmatic. The patient is provoked by the analyst. It is precisely this enigmatic quality that forms the basis of the transference: the re-activation of the fantasmatic other within; the return of a time when self was an other. The analyst’s famous neutrality, or, as Laplanche says, their refusal, is the technique by which the internal other is activated. This refusal may be seen in such small acts as a refusing to shake the patient’s hand, or to engage in civil niceties such as asking “how are you?”, but is also the basis for the larger act of refusing to suggest that the analysis has any specific goal or outcome whatsoever. The goal, if there is one, is the patient’s to determine. Freud, for his part, named psychoanalysis psycho-analysis, because of the old Greek meaning of analysis, to undo or to loosen; a metaphor that fits well with the two phases of libido in his economic system: bound and unbound—or quiescent (ego) and mobile (unconscious) energies respectively. The analyst, by identifying certain repressed elements within the patient’s free association, assists in a loosening of the psyche. As such, synthesis, or putting the psyche back together, was never Freud’s concern, for he believed it would happen spontaneously, “inevitably” even, without his intervention.
Primordial Chaos 16, 1907, Hilma af Klint
