Putting the Psycho in Psycho-Analysis
Freud didn’t know what to do with the psychos; there was no transference, he claimed. To be fair I also do not know what to do with them either. Avoid eye contact? One encounters psychotic persons regularly in New York City. The feeling state—in me—is electrical; I feel like I’m being electrocuted; the air becomes dry and hot, I become dumb and paralyzed. Along with this ambient electrical charge I encounter a wall, a hard barrier between us that brooks no sympathy—the institutional wall itself. I find that I cannot imagine what this homeless person, reeking of piss, would have been like when sane; they must have always been insane, is what I assume, me being so well-adjusted, commuting home from work, deep in my square and cruel biases, well outside the asylum walls.
And yet, as Sinead O’Connor said: “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” The degree to which you are “sane” is the degree to which you accept the symbolic order of state ideology.
The reality is that, in this world, it would not take much to make me—or anybody—go insane. Such as: isolation, not sleeping for several days, domestic abuse, police violence, war, having zero dollars, being evicted, let alone being subjected to the ten thousand other cruelties produced by our “civilized” society.
It has come to our attention, then, that the true psycho-analyst is—a la Lacan—a secretary for the insane. Freud founded the field on the act of listening to the hysteric; whereas the doctors of the time treated these patients with contempt, their medical science rendered useless in the face of such irrational panic, Freud understood that the hysteric knows something; the hysteric knows in their body what the greater repressive Victorian society refused to acknowledge; namely: repressed sexuality is pathogenic.
Likewise, what the greater society, right here in New York City, refuses to admit or acknowledge, is what the psychotic person bears witness; they bear witness to the catastrophe. It is the express mandate of the so-called modern psycho-analyst to listen to what the psychotic person may attempt to communicate; to treat psychotic experience as more real than the repressed fantasies of our frantic work-a-day life. This is easier said than done for a major factor of psychosis is poverty and the well-adjusted psychoanalyst wants to be paid.
photo: 42nd street NY, (1969) Ed van der Elsken
