Cultures of Fetishism (26 page)

The phrase “
unfree
associations” was first used by Douglas Kirsner, an ener- getic and persistent senior lecturer who teaches philosophy and psychoanalytic studies at Deakin University, Australia, where twenty years ago he founded the Annual Freud Conference. In the late 1980s, Kirsner set out to examine the role played by psychoanalysts in generating and perpetuating what was then and still is the ongoing decline and crisis of psychoanalysis. His detailed investigations of the four major American psychoanalytic institutes (in New York, Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles),* revealed how the insti- tutes that train psychoanalytic candidates had arrested free speech and free inquiry, and by extension the free association process and “saying whatever comes to mind.” As Kirsner says in the introduction to his book
Unfree Associations
: “Psychoanalytic institutes have been notable as closed shops. Their solid walls have kept them sealed off and mysterious to the outside world, including the mental health professions and the academy. Authoritarian cliques, power struggles and intriques have predominated inside the institutes.”
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The question of psychoanalytic free expression has caught the attention of numerous scholars. In his introduction to
Archive Fever
, Derrida spoke of the principle of commandment, that is to say, the principle according to the law, or the place where the authority, of man or god, is exercised.
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To put his complex thoughts in plain terms, there is a tension between the analyst’s investment in the “mercurial and flowing” energies of the analytic situation,

*
Since I live and practice in New York City, I am most familiar with the politics of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. Although this chapter focuses almost exclusively on the authori- tarian cliques and power struggles within that training institute, the dynamics apply to the dozens of other institutes in the New York City area, as well as to those in Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago and the rest of the United States and the rest of the world; in other words, wherever psychoanalytic institutes exist. As Douglas Kirsner says in
Unfree Associations,
“Psychoanalytic institutes have been troubled everywhere and always. Whether they are medical, nonmedical, Freudian, Jungian, Kleinian, Kohutian or Lacanian,’ whether they are in New York, Chicago, Paris, London or Sydney, psychoanalytic institutes behave in strikingly similar ways.”

which allow the unforeseen, unknown, and possibly errant vitalities of the patient’s innermost psychic reality to emerge, and the principles of law and authority that are perpetuated in the psychoanalytic training institutes. Any potentially free expression can only be expressed if it is first domesticated and brought under the subjugation of a training institute—a phenomenon that Derrida refers to as “house arrest.”
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Otto Kernberg’s 1996 commentary, “Thirty methods to destroy the cre- ativity of psychoanalytic candidates,” published a few years before he became president of the International Psychoanalytic Association, deals specifically with the rigid structures and inflexible educational organization of the official institutes that are responsible for the training of psychoanalysts. “Thirty methods” was one of the documents that informed Kirsner’s investigation. Furthermore, I assume that Kernberg is suggesting that the rigidity and inflexibility of psychoanalytic training, which invariably stifles the creativity of the potential analyst, will create a ripple effect of deadening the interactions between analyst and patient.

What is it about the creative vitalities of the clinical situation that might be so frightening to the senior analysts who are responsible for training future generations of analysts? The last two sentences of Kernberg’s paper sum it up: “where there is a spark, there may develop a fire particularly when this spark appears in the middle of dead wood. Extinguish it before it is too late.”
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Usually candidates have been attracted to psychoanalytic training because they view psychoanalysis as a medium for expressing their own creative ener- gies. They view it as a culture that breeds and nourishes aliveness and cre- ativity. They are, at least in the beginning of their training, eager to express the fantasies, wishes, and thoughts that express their creativity. However, the authorities who keep the psychoanalytic enterprise under “house arrest” and have the responsibility of training these candidates have, in the course of their own training, been drained of their sap and turned into dead wood. Dead wood can all too easily ignite and then quickly turn to ashes when it is struck by a spark of creative energy.

Here, Kernberg was stating one of the fundamental principles of the fetishism strategy. Where there is an energy or force that is incessantly mobile and inaccessibly ambiguous, unpredictable, and uncontrollable, a source of vitality that “is as mercurial and as flowing, as compact of temperament and emotion as the human spirit,”
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destroy it before it runs amok and creates havoc with the commandments and laws established by the authorities. Psychoanalysis is a source of human vitality, but when it is brought under the “house arrest” of a psychoanalytic training institute, it becomes a breeding ground for dead wood. Before presenting a few of Kernberg’s “Thirty methods,” which have to do with the destruction of analytic creativity, I want to make a promise. Later on in this chapter I will show how analysts might employ an appreciation of the dynamics of the fetishism strategy to enable them to work more creatively

with patients and keep the therapeutic process alive and flowing.

Of the thirty methods for destroying the creativity of psychoanalytic can- didates that Kernberg ennumerated, I have selected only four, to convey the

spirit of his remarks. The first of Kernberg’s “Methods” depicts the tortuous pacing of the progress of the candidates’ educational experience: “If long periods of waiting in uncertainty become a regular part of their progression experience, they will tend, in turn, to become slow to respond and to take initiatives.”
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This tried and true method of indoctrinating psychoanalytic candidates will later on infiltrate their consulting rooms, showing up in the subtle ways that the well-trained analyst unconsciously inhibits the patient’s capacities for initiative.

A toleration for uncertainty is an essential aspect of an analyst’s creative response to a patient. Like free association, this toleration for uncertainty contributes to the heartbeat of the psychoanalytic process. However, when “waiting in uncertainty” is employed as a method of intimidation and indoc- trination it has the paradoxical effect of squelching an analytic candidate’s toleration for uncertainty and ambiguity. Therefore, when she is finally anointed as a fully qualified psychoanalyst, she will be uneasy with ambigui- ties and try to bring her patients’ free associations under house arrest.

Another method has to do with the use made of Freud’s writings, the Freud archive, the commencement or origins of psychoanalysis:

It is important for the instructor to keep in mind that it is the
conclusions
that Freud arrived at that have to be taught and memorized, not the
process of Freud’s thinking
: in fact, if the students acquire a grasp of the methodology of Freud’s thinking, which was unavoidably revolutionary, this may lead them to dangerous identifications with his originality and thus defeat the purpose of the isolated and exhaustive focus on his conclusions.
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In other words, the lulling repetition of Freud’s writings is employed to dampen any excitement that a candidate might feel about the revolutionary spirit of the mobile
process
of psychoanalytic thinking.

Quite a number of the methods Kernberg listed are directly concerned with upholding the authority of the institute. Since paranoid fear would dis- courage analytic candidates from advancing courageous initiatives or asking challenging questions, those analysts permitted to engage in the psycho- analysis of candidates, traditionally called “training-analysts,” should be instructed to report regularly on the therapeutic progress of the candidate.
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By the time Kernberg drew up his thirty methods, this sort of scare tactic had been eliminated and declared unethical by most psychoanalytic institutes. However, Kernberg contended that the long-standing habit of instilling paranoid fear in candidates continues to remain alive “in the irrepressible ten- dencies of some training analysts to indicate, sometimes openly, sometimes indirectly and surreptitiously, their feelings about the candidates entrusted to their care for a training analysis.”
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Kernberg also cautions that if the teaching faculty were imbued with a spirit of creativity, even all these other measures combined would not suffice to murder the creativity of candidates. The best guarantee for inhibiting the creativity of the teaching faculty is “the hierarchical extension of the

educational process into the social structure of the psychoanalytic society.”
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The most reliable tool for keeping candidates, and the entire faculty, and the entire society in line is for the training analysts to hold themselves apart from the general membership as the only ones who have authority and control.

And, in conclusion, after listing all thirty methods, to insure that there would be no opportunities for dilution, distortion, deterioration, erosion, and misuse of psychoanalysis, Kernberg offers the following piece of advice, which I called attention to at the outset. “Always keep in mind: where there is a spark there may develop a fire.”

When writing particularly about the New York Psychoanalystic Institute, Kirsner contends that the source of the murderous orthodoxy at that Institute has been misunderstood. “The real situation was quite contrary to the popular view that the institute was under the control of the most well known psychoanalytic theoreticians and clinicians—the founders of ego psychology.”
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According to Kirsner, these analysts may have exercised con- trol over intellectual matters such as who got published in the major journals, but they did not have any real power over the training of candidates.

Kirsner’s investigations led him to attribute the origin of these authoritar- ian trends in psychoanalysis to Otto Isakower, one of the dozen or so analysts who escaped the Nazi regime, found a home in the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, and set up what he and the group of emigre Viennese psychoana- lysts under his command referred to as the “only genuine psychoanalysis,” a brand of psychoanalysis unavailable to the vulgar and mechanistic Americans who, because of their cultural and intellectual limitations, were incapable of doing “real analysis.”

Isakower justified his domination of the Institute by pointing to the overly intellectualized theorizing of the Americans. According to Isakower, the American analysts were afraid of the unconscious. They were more interested in cure than in encouraging the patient to express what was on her mind. They were more interested in theory and the applications of theory than in tuning into the patient’s unconscious. When confronted with the power of the sexual and aggressive drives, they retreated to theoretical abstractions. Isakower believed that his concept of the “analyzing instrument” would help to counteract these Americanizations of psychoanalysis.

Basically the analyzing instrument describes an interaction between patient and analyst occurring in a dreamlike, regressed state in which images emerging in the patient evoke counterimages in the analyst. As she selectively communicates her counterimages to the patient, the analyst contributes to the unfolding of the patient’s imagery.
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Though Freud never wrote about an analyzing instrument per se, he did recommend a procedure analogous to Isakower’s analyzing instrument. He said that the analyst: “should surrender himself to his own unconscious activ- ity, in a state of even and partial attention to avoid so far as possible reflection and the construction of conscious expectations, not to try to fix anything that he heard particularly in his memory, and by these means to catch the drift of the patient’s unconscious with his own unconscious.”
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Isakower would insist that he was not talking about the analyst’s identifi- cation with her patient, but rather an identity between the states of mind of analyst and patient. When his colleagues requested that Isakower explain and elaborate this rather abstruse concept, he insisted that the analyzing instru- ment is not a permanent system within the psychic structure of the analyst. He said that one should think of this instrument only “in its activated state, when it is in rapport with the patient; or, better perhaps, to see it as a composite, consisting of two complementary halves.”
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Isakower would argue that theory is antagonistic to the analyzing instru- ment. The theoretical insights that might sneak into the analyst’s mind during the activation of the analyzing instrument should not be thought about, for they can only interfere with the emergence of the analyst’s counterimages. Such theoretical uprisings are in all probability defensive; resistances to the unconscious material that is about to emerge through the activation of the analyzing instrument.

Isakower had introduced his idea of the analyzing instrument in order to free analysts from being burdened by theory in their work His analyzing instrument has all the external markings of freedom of expression. However, several of Isakower’s colleagues have pointed to the authoritarian spirit of Isakower’s recommendation that it is better not to think theoretical thoughts. William Grossman, a training analyst at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, said that the recommendation “seems to introduce criticism, con- straints and rules into ‘free’ association . . . there is a kind of irony that this should be so when the goal is the free flow of thought.”
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Isakower’s analyz- ing instrument began to assume the form of a binding of free-flowing analytic listening, the very binding and constraining effect it had been designed to counteract. As Grossman pointed out, “It gradually changed— I think inevitably—into a set of prescriptive and restrictive injunctions aimed to exclude ‘inappropriate thoughts.’ ”
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