Report from Freud Reading Group (4)

Unendlicher Humanismus

Having completed our sex education by reading Freud’s Three Essays, we at FRG have now begun one of his late works, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” from 1937. The question is: how do we know when analysis ends? Why does it take so long anyway? In this Substack post I am going to collage some Adorno and Deleuze and Guattari to get a flavour of the range of the critique of psychoanalysis in these terms, but then end with some of the ways that Freud was always already ahead of the problem – if not ready with a solution, at least in the process of creating the frame, the theoretical register, by which the problem may best be perceived.

Numerous detractors have attempted to gotcha Freud and his people with the methodological issue of analysis’s supposed indefinite duration. The least charitable spokeswonks of mainstream behavioural and psychiatric therapy have been known to demean the methods of analysts whose patients take longer than a financial quarter to get back to work. The interminability of psychoanalysis must mean that it has no p-values worth mentioning, its undetermined time span incompatible with the evidence-based world. The value of this essay is that Freud makes no attempt to hide this problem; it’s never been psychoanalysis’ little secret. And he comes right out of the gate with a witty and prescient takedown – in fact, something of a historicisation that would remain up-to-the-minute – of some of the earliest attempts to make therapy clock in. For example, Freud suggests that Otto Rank’s ingenious theory of the birth trauma – that if you can address the primal neurosis of being born, all the adult neuroses would shrivel up – was

a child of its time, conceived under the stress of the contrast between the post-war misery of Europe and the ‘prosperity’ of America, and designed to adapt the tempo of analytic therapy to the haste of American life. We have not heard much about what the implementation of Rank’s plan has done for cases of sickness. Probably not more than if the fire brigade, called to deal with a house that had been set on fire by an overturned oil-lamp, contented themselves with removing the lamp from the room in which the blaze had started. No doubt a considerable shortening of the brigade’s activities would be effected by this means. The theory and practice of Rank’s experiment are now things of the past—no less than American ‘prosperity’ itself (216–217).

I like that his analogy with the fire brigade invokes those things that can’t be run at a profit, those which it would be most irrational to imagine subject to absolute efficiency imperatives at the expense of actually delivering public serves. The fires burning in everyone’s minds are not growth & innovation opportunities.

But the critique of endlessness is not made only by those whose priority above all is to get you back to work:

We don’t feel the need to attach the slightest importance to psychoanalysis’s claim to cure neurosis, since, for it, curing consists of an infinite maintenance, an infinite resignation … perhaps it will be discovered that the only incurable is the neurotic—whence interminable psychoanalysis. It is a cause for self-congratulation when one succeeds in transforming a schizo into a paranoiac or a neurotic. (Anti-Oedipus 410–411)

Deleuze and Guattari’s critique is actually incompatible with the American mainstream, because they consider psychoanalysis complicit with capital, a kind of holding pattern for an economic flow anchored to the ongoing production of a bourgeois mind – whereas the ego psychologists, presumably, think it’s a terrible shame how little the weak ego contributes to GDP. Another way of putting it could be Theodor Adorno’s very similar complaint, from his “Sociology and Psychology” essay that FRG also recently finished reading:

The societal antagonism reappears in the goal of analysis, which no longer knows, and cannot know, where it wants to get the patient, to the happiness of freedom or to happiness in unfreedom. It dodges the issue by giving the well-to-do who can afford it protracted cathartic treatment and the poor patient, who has soon to be back at his job, mere therapeutic support—a division that makes neurotics of the rich and psychotics of the poor. (94–95)

Adorno and D&G seem to lump psychoanalysis in with all mainstream psychology: the distinction between them that is so easy to draw today (a strange echo of the analytic/continental divide, always in danger of becoming a clichéd shibboleth) doesn’t hold for these philosophers, perhaps partly because of just how cynical they are about what it would take to put out the fire, but also partly because of a clear-eyed perception of the institutional capture that psychoanalysis suffered in the United States. Let’s say we return to Freud’s thoughts on the problem.

In section II, Freud lays out the twin factors of the constitutional and the accidental, or the strength of the instincts of the patient versus the contingent traumas to which they were subjected as children. Freud suggests that “only when a case is a predominantly traumatic one will analysis succeed in doing what it is superlatively able to do,” that is, correct the mistakes of the infantile ego, which was confronted with something that exceeded its defence mechanisms (220). This is when we can be confident that analysis has truly ended. Outside of this, things are less clear. But it seems also that both of those factors are effectively accidental: the constitutional factor is a kind of accident of birth. And the conclusive analysis of the traumatised patient might let them live the rest of their life free of neurosis, but Freud concedes that this itself might be just the result of “a kind fate which has spared him ordeals that are too severe” (220). E. F. focused on this quality of fatedness in our session this week: it is reminiscent of the clinical work of Fanon, who knew, and could, unlike Freud, make theoretically explicit, that the psychological troubles of his patients were due to a kind of fatedness, an ordeal within reality, that would not be soon ended and could not be analytically cured, namely, the fact of colonisation and racial oppression. Deleuze and Guattari make similar points about the economic in general:

Psychoanalysis has become quite a stupefying drug, where the strangest personal dependence allows the clients to forget, during the time spent in sessions on the couch, the economic dependencies that drive them there in the first place. (Anti-Oedipus 406)

And finally Adorno too allows psychoanalysis its proper place, but he has spent his essay principally arguing for its dislocative relationship with social and economic forces that press upon the psyche:

If someone makes a slip of the tongue and a sexually loaded word comes out, if someone suffers from agoraphobia or if a girl walks in her sleep, psychoanalysis not merely has its best chances of therapeutic success but also its proper province … The further it departs from this area, the more tyrannically it has to proceed and the more it has to drag what belongs to the dimension of outer reality into the shades of psychic immanence. Its delusion in so doing is not dissimilar from that ‘omnipotence of thought’ which it itself criticised as infantile. (96)

And so these philosophers all in a sense strive to reintroduce the analytic session to the unkind fates of its patients. But it is worth noting at least that, at this early stage of his essay, Freud has exactly this problem front and centre, the problem of an uncurable fate.

To see how Freud addresses this problem at his best, we should look at his letter to Fliess from April 16, 1900, with which the standard edition’s introductory note closes:

E’s career as a patient has at last come to an end with an invitation to spend an evening here. His riddle is almost completely solved, his condition is excellent, his whole being is altered: at the moment a residue of his symptoms remains. I am beginning to understand that the apparently interminable nature of the treatment is something determined by law and is dependent on the transference. I hope that this residue will not prejudice the practical success. It lay only with me to decide whether the treatment should be further prolonged; but it dawned on me that such a prolongation is a compromise between being ill and being well which patients themselves desire and to which for that reason the physician should not consent. The asymptotic termination of treatment is substantially a matter of indifference to me; it is for outsiders rather that it is a disappointment. In any case I shall keep an eye on the man . . .

We all thought this passage was worth lingering over and I want to reproduce our thoughts on it here as something that will guide our ongoing reading of this essay. The conflict between two claims – that psychoanalysis is interminable, a waste of everyone’s time, and ignorant of fate, versus the possibility of a complete cure – is delicately suspended by Freud in this letter. As E. F. also pointed out during our session, this conflict applies equally well to non-psychoanalytic therapies, and in this sense we should be in solidarity with CBT and medication-based approaches, all of which have their share of successes and failures. Freud’s insight in this letter is something of a higher register perspective: the decision concerning whether or not to prolong analysis is itself part of the content of analysis. Hovering in that asymptotic region between cure and illness could clearly be part of the patient’s complex: Munchausen’s is only one of many situations in which such a perspective becomes useful. Thus Freud reveals that, in turn, the decision to end analysis can be one of the analyst’s most effective interventions – this being in a sense an even stronger version of Lacan’s variable length sessions. Freud puts it to us here that, as an analyst, one’s principle responsibility is to make an informed choice about the variable length of the analysis itself. Freud comments on how in treating the Wolfman he “resorted to the heroic measure of fixing a time-limit for the analysis,” which happened to work well, and thus this essay is both a theoretical reflection and an eminently practical guide (217).

But I want to rehearse a final touch that E. Y. landed on as perhaps the essential revelation of this letter – and thus credit E. Y. with the ideas which here I propose merely to elaborate for reference – hidden in the final sentence, the off-hand reference to keeping an eye on the patient in question, regardless of whether the theoretical matter of the precise point of termination is settled. This is ultimately Freud’s practical and interminable humanism; when it comes down to it, sentimental as it might sound, the therapist’s responsibility is keeping an eye on their patient, even when things seem to be going well. Here’s a final quote from Anti-Oedipus in something of a different tone from their earlier harangue:

A great beauty animates this text of Freud’s [“Analysis Terminable and Interminable”]: an undefined something that is hopeless, disenchanted, tired, and at the same time a serenity, a certitude in the finished work. It is Freud’s testament. He is going to die, and knows it. He knows something is wrong in psychoanalysis. The cure tends to be more and more interminable! He knows that soon he will no longer be there to see how things are going. (Anti-Oedipus 82)

We can read Freud’s letter to Fliess into that last line. Deleuze and Guattari are talking about Freud not being able to steward psychoanalysis as a discipline in the right direction, and as their book develops it might seem that they are grateful for this and for Freud’s ability to let it go, such that schizoanalysis can render all its positive destructions upon it, let the air into Freud’s empty office, and so on. But that last line also recalls the gentle humanism E. Y. noted in the letter: when it comes down to it, Freud conceives of his job in the last instance as a friendly check-in, as seeing how things are going – and not just as a therapist, but as a theoretician. Maybe that’s one reason why he compulsively updates his published works, adding more and more examples to the Psychopathology; he just wants to keep everyone updated on how everyone’s going. Freud’s death means, regardless of whether he has successfully cured (or even more hopelessly Oedipalised) his patient, he will no longer be able to keep an eye on the man, which was really the best and most practical thing to which he could aspire, a program for which psychoanalysis might only have been a tool, and schizoanalysis another. I hope that cure never ends.