ON THIS SIDE OF THE ABSTINENCE PRINCIPLE. METAPSYCHOLOGICAL AND TECHNICAL ASPECTS OF ANALYST'S NEUTRAL POSITION

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

(Report read in October 2014 at the RPO conference on psychoanalysis techniques)

“For the health of art trying to reproduce life

it needs to be completely free. It lives on trying

and the very essence of trying is freedom. The only commitment

to which we can subjugate the novel, without the risk of being accused of arbitrariness, is a commitment to be interesting."

Henry James

The concept of neutrality of the psychoanalyst has become firmly established, and sometimes it is an example of metonymy - then it means and defines the profession of the psychoanalyst. In fact, this quality implies a professional commitment of the latter, and is a reflection of the mental work that must be carried out by him, a reflection of ethics and duty in relation to the one who is the analysand, and, in a broader sense, in relation to mental life, and to life. generally

Belonging to neutrality in the field of professional space is present everywhere, starting with the introductory interviews of candidates for analysts, and further is placed at the forefront of all psychoanalytic education.

Behind this concept is a multilevel process in which the analyst must follow a complex path: starting from the function and purpose of the basic rule of psychoanalysis, through the study of his own specific mental activity during the session, each time make a turn towards psychoanalytic thinking.

The rule of abstinence, analytical silence, neutrality, as well as ethical components, determine the attitude of the psychoanalyst to the technique of psychoanalysis.

While maintaining neutrality, the psychoanalyst perceives and examines all the material brought into the analytic frame by the patient, including conscious and unconscious attempts to violate his neutral position by the analysand, as well as those that are unconsciously organized by the work of his own psyche.

Psychoanalyst neutrality - a familiar concept and you can think about the origins of its appearance, referring to the primary sources of psychoanalysis, and give the floor to Freud himself. But we will not find anything about this in Freud's works, because this concept came to us from Anglo-Saxon authors, perhaps from Strachey (1924), later from Edmund Bergler (1937), who spoke of benevolent neutrality

The term neutrality was coined to translate the German Indifferenz used by Freud in Notes on Transference Love, a term that is also used in German chemistry, and which psychologically implies restraint rather than the emotional indifference classically associated with hysteria.

In his 1948 work Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis, Lacan, echoing the Freudian metaphor of the analyst as an opaque mirror, says that the analyst should take care to appear before the other as an “ideal of equanimity” and thus offer his patient the perception and response from the face of an impersonal character, deliberately devoid of subjective features. “We depersonalize ourselves,” writes Lacan.

Such a retreat into the background of the personality of the object in the analytic frame has a double purpose:

1. Do not obstruct the appearance in the transfer of elements of the unconscious;

2. Create a state of tension and anxiety to actualize and work through these elements.

The concept of neutrality is used in all psychoanalytic schools and is often interpreted in different ways. Perhaps we should outline some semantic field of this concept by considering the meanings and meanings that various psychoanalytic schools endow it with.

From the point of view of English authors, the concept of neutrality contains the logic of the Negative.

So, for example, Bion uses the expression of John Keats: “I was struck by the quality necessary for becoming a Master, mainly in literature - something that Shakespeare so supremely possessed. I'm talking about this ability to be absent, to be in uncertainty, in secret, in doubt, without worrying about looking for facts or reasons. " Bion adds: "I define it as a method to achieve that artificial blindness in which it is important to renounce memory and desire, and to extend this process to such attributes as understanding and sensory perception." This does not mean that "forgetting is enough: what is necessary is the desire to inhibit memory and desire."

This treatment of psychic reality in the analytic frame is reminiscent of the concept of "psychic chimera" by Michel de Musan, as well as the "ability of the analyst to dream during a session" by Thomas Ogden. The analyst giving interpretations from the chimera is perceived by the analysand as his other self, which facilitates the integration of the interpretation. This “transformation of emotional experience into the mental growth of the analyst and the analysand,” Bion writes, “contributes to the fact that it is difficult for both to“remember”what happened; to the extent that experience leads to growth, it ceases to be something to be identified. " This mental movement is a positive act that deserves to be considered from a metapsychological point of view.

Bion sets a matrix in which the absence condition is required for thought to be effective, just as sleep depends on falling asleep, that is, on regression with a bet on the latency of thoughts, and the necessary rejection of visible reality, contributing to the manifestation of regressive mental formations.

Here, in the conditions of formal regression, procedural operations are carried out, which are the generators of the libidinal economy. Bion's point "O" is thus symmetric to what Freud calls the "navel of sleep": every dream always carries in itself at least one point, one place, one specially marked topos, which defines it as: inaccessible, incomprehensible, incomprehensible, unanalyzed, a kind of navel, omphalos. And Freud adds that through this place the dream is tied, tied, tied or suspended with the help of some knot to the unknown (the French translation gives the word inconnaissable, unknowable), instead of the unknown, not (o) known, and this word "unknowable" well conveys the unresolvable, the insoluble, unbreakable nature of this indelible knot.

In Freud's writings on technique, the term abstinence first appears to express this attitude of abstinence. Freud encourages the analyst to refrain from any kind of satisfaction or reward for the patient. This recommendation will further give way to neutrality, which is interpreted in two directions - an impenetrable mirror and even benevolence, which later became Winnicot's holding and handling, permeated with generosity and compassion. It should be emphasized that in that era this sounded more like a recommendation than a requirement. At this time, Freud is puzzled, but still open to the search and a certain freedom of his students, recall the cases of Sabina Spielrain and Jung, or Fenerzi with his active technique.

In 1920, Freud, speaking of compulsive repetition, and increasingly taking into account the attractive force that exists on the other side of the pleasure principle, recommends that analysts maintain a certain degree of superiority. He contrasts the regressive quality of attraction with an active attitude of mastery and control. Subsequently, disappointed with the analyst's technical methods of active attitude, he introduces onto the psychic stage the Superego and his principle of the categorical imperative, the main vicissitudes of which is coercion. From this point on, he can rethink the question of the "spiritual responsibility of the patient in relation to the content of dreams" and the responsibility of the subject in relation to his unconscious and his mental life in general.(1925 - “Some additional remarks on the basic principles of dream interpretation.”) Since then, the participation in the transfer of regressive drives outside the pleasure principle has been taken into account, where, along with the transfer of the infantile, sexual and narcissistic, there appears a negative tendency to withhold.

The positive in the transfer masks the negative part of it. This negative part of the transfer contributes to the reduction of the field of thinking, the field of investment, especially the bodily and erogenous ones. Freud calls this type of associativity false and feigned. In relation to his super-self, the subject is involved in this compulsive repetition, in the submission to erase, destroy, annul, denying his involvement in the symbolic murder of the father. Freud thus introduces the theme of guilt, shame and mental pain.

After a long search for solutions about what analytic treatment should focus on, Freud arrives at what he proposes as an essential and fundamental goal of the construction of psychic processuality. It is this kind of work that contains the value of recognizing the reality of the traumatic. From now on, it is not a question of opposing and transforming regressiveness into the ability to develop, but, using the tendency to disappear, to force psychic reality to exist. This is where Freud's famous demand appears: "Where IT was, I must happen." Quite often, the transfer phenomenon is not realized spontaneously, and then the transfer consists of negativism, erasing memories, killing the part that is intended to invest, think and experience. And working through this modality of transfer allows you to open another part - the positive one, and make a turn towards the return of the repressed. It is not so important whether it is about love or hate in the negative part of the transference, but in the transference of denial there is a goal to make what was unconscious - conscious. Connect, in one way or another, the unconscious with consciousness. Thus, we are talking about the transfer of the gap that exists in psychic reality.

And Freud asks us a question that continues to be relevant to this day: "Should the analyst, in the name of a better future for his analysand, deliberately invoke this absent dimension, even search for it, exercising some compulsion that makes it appear in the arena of transference?"

All of the above is not only of historical interest. This allows us to get closer to the implicit value of the concept of neutrality. It is the professional destiny of the analyst and carries the requirement to carry out both passive and active mental work. Through his neutrality, the analyst provides the patient with passive accessibility for what the patient is capable of enduring, but he also actively coerces that which is unable to represent himself. Neutrality, therefore, is a condition for induction and a compulsion for the emergence of a transfer. Through his neutrality, the analyst appeals to the reality that is absent.

It has already been said above that the concept of neutrality excludes excessive involvement and conflict. But this obviously conflicts with what each analyst observes in the course of his work, especially when he perceives and experiences countertransference, and not only through the patient's discourse attacking the analyst and analysis, but also through inner activity. the patient, in which he entered into a contract with the denial and annihilation of the requirement of mental work, with the denial of mental life as such, with the destruction of the functions of the super-I, the symbolic order and the name of the father.

The clinical implications resulting from this are known as therapeutic adverse reactions. (A. Green (2007), Pourquoi les pulsions de destruction ou de mort?). Compulsioncaused by a negative therapeutic reaction can take many forms, starting with chronic recurrence; compulsive repetition; non-stop breakdown associated with compulsive repetition; the tendency to avoid all mentalization in favor of response and behavior; right up to a megalomaniac triumph that denies even the possibility of loss.

Such mental functioning leads to one result - the state of tabula rasa, mental desert. How can you remain neutral to such trends? It is not enough here to offer our sympathy, or to take military action to put an end to these negative tendencies. The analyst cannot work only with impulses of drives, desires and desexualization processes, offering the patient his tenderness and benevolence. In his counter-transference (and here it should be emphasized that counter-transference, just like transference, is an unconscious mechanism), in his counter-transference, the analyst cannot but deal with hatred, hostility, envy, etc., etc. in relation to his patient. The object is born in hatred. And this is true for both, the patient and the analyst.

The practice of any psychoanalyst is focused on a technique that promotes reparation, mental processing of the elements of the unconscious, integration and improvement of the patient's mental functioning. In 1938 (Essay on Psychoanalysis) Freud bequeathed to us "restraint" as the most preferred treatment of the patient in analysis.

The term "restraint" implies refusal. Refusal of desires in relation to the patient. The analyst, who restrains his desires for the patient, who, like a child, attacks the analysis, tests it for strength, seeking to extract any benefit from the satisfaction of the transference, the analyst, as another object, prohibits transgression and carries a prohibition, establishes a prohibition on incest and denotes the boundaries between the sexes and generations, can be used by the patient in his mental functioning and allow the patient to feel the inner conflict between the prohibition and the desire to break it.

Thus, the analyst's neutrality has a therapeutic value: the function of rejection transmitted by the analyst provides the patient with the opportunity to renounce his trauma and infantile pretensions to primary objects and invest his life by giving up the pleasures of compulsive repetition.