Cultures of Fetishism (28 page)

Perhaps this fear of conflagration helps to explain Charles Brenner’s firm and insistently re-iterated claim that there is no such thing as “free” associa- tions. “Nothing that anyone thinks or says is ever free from repression or other defenses. Every thought, every ‘association’ is necessarily a compro- mise formation among the various tendencies of the mind.”
31
While there is merit to Brenner’s idea that no human activity, not sexuality, not parenting, not friendship, not artistic creativity, not culture, can be entirely “free,” his descriptions of compromise formation do sometimes sound like an instru- ment for capturing and binding the ambiguities of the human spirit.

It was all of this
certainty
of structures and compromises and diagnoses and other mentalized containers that boxed in the creative energies of the patient and the analyst that Bion objected to. Although we can no more be free of memory and desire than we are able to freely, free associate, we should at least try to be free of
certainty
.

Maybe “Certainty” should be declared the motto of the fetishism strategy. In 1818, in a letter to his brothers, John Keats came up with a motto that could be enlisted to enable present-day analysts to oppose and undermine the fetishism strategy. To preserve a patient’s freedom of expression, the psychoan- alyst must be able to sustain a dialogue based on
negative capability
. When John Keats first formulated the idea of negative capability, he was not referring specifically to a quality of the poetic imagination, but more generally to the powers of a flexible mind and a certain way of approaching the ineffable complexities of life. Keats said that a person, “who is capable of being in uncer- tainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and rea- son”
32
will arrive at truth. On the other hand, “a man who cannot feel that he has a personal identity unless he has made up his mind about everything . . . will never come to truth so long as he lives, because he is always trying at it.”
33
Some thirty years after his famous pronouncement on memory and desire, Bion gave a talk that seemed to be re-iterating Keats’ lines on negative capa- bility. He had been invited to speak at the 1997 conference on so-called bor-

derline phenomena held under the auspices of the Menninger Foundation.

Bion introduced his remarks with a joke in French that set off a ripple of bewildered curiosity—that is, until he translated his joke into English. “
La reponse est le malheur de la question
.” “The response is the illness of the question,”
34
adding that the sentence had been loaned to him by the French analyst Andre Green, but that the tilted pronunciation of illness as Mahler rather than
malheur
was “my own original contribution.”
35

Bion’s
malheur
quip referred to Margaret Mahler, the famous child psychoanalyst, and more specifically to the ways in which her work was

representative of the United States brand of Ego Psychology—answering questions best left unanswerable, regulating and organizing behavior, and dividing up the inconsistencies and irregularities of human development into coherent stages and phases, and, of course, stifling “free” associations and creativity. Though I was one of Mahler’s close colleagues, I agreed with the drift of Bion’s commentary. From my clinical practice and from my research into child and adolescent development, I had come to understand that fruit- ful questions and uncertainties wither into stale conformities when sealed off into compartmentalized answers. Within recent years, moreover, I have come to recognize that Bion was unknowingly referring to one of the primary ways that the fetishism strategy infiltrates the clinical situation.

Shortly after the
malheur
-Mahler sequence, he announced that he was going to say the first thing that came into his mind. A free association, if you will. He said that he didn’t know what that would be, but he wanted to say it anyway. And then he did say it. “Bloody vagina,” “bloody cunt.” And then he proceeded to light off on a five-minute diatribe on the sacred and profane meanings of “cunt,” and “bloody cunt.”
36

Ostensibly he was making the point that when you are very angry with someone or something, the anger can be given a more genuine expression if you can be in touch with archaic and primitive language. Though his nasty chauvinism had many of the women bristling and a few of us doing a wild analysis of his association that slid so freely from Mahler to Cunt, most of the audience ended up agreeing with the overall intentions of Bion’s remarks. After Bion concluded his speech, Andre Green, one the most vociferous of the anti–Ego Psychology analysts, who had loaned Bion “
la reponse est le malheur de la question
,” walked up to the podium to give him a big hug.

Bion was furious with the fundamental goals of the conference, which were to answer all questions about that over-used and much misunderstood diagnosis “borderline” and to give precise definition to that term and to set up borders of inclusion and exclusion and to pin down the borderline diagnosis and thereby rob so-called borderline patients of their uniqueness and vitality. More generally Bion was out to stir up in the audience the emo- tional turbulence that lies beneath, “the superficial and beautiful calm that pervades our various consulting rooms and institutes.”
37
Without intending it, Bion was making a plea for
uncertainty
and
negative capability
.

In 1998, Jonathan Lear, a philosopher with psychoanalytic training, put these matters in a somewhat different context. He spoke before a group of analysts, making a plea for
unknowingness
. He began by offering his general thesis that “our end of the century American culture, like Oedipus Tyrannus, has been suf- fering from an overemphasis on knowingness,”
38
an intense and directed need to know, which serves as a defense against anxiety. He then argued that know- ingness is pervasive in our lives, that it is readily observed in the media’s cover- age of public life. Moreover, in psychoanalysis it is manifested in premature attempts to reach closure due to the inability of both analyst and analysand to tolerate the anxiety of not-knowing. This preoccupation, which entails an

all-consuming focusing of our energies on what we know, may in turn rob us of the opportunity to learn something more profound about our patients, our ana- lytic thoughts and attitudes, ourselves and the world around us.
39

In 2003, Muriel Dimen, an anthropologist with psychoanalytic training, brought her feminist perspectives to bear on the issue of knowingness. Dimen invites her readers to “stay in the knot of not knowing,”
40
to transcend either/or certainties and to think instead in the language of multiplicities and ambiguities. She proposes that “the mobile, dynamic space between dualities yields resolutions that in turn give on to new complexity . . .”
41
In other words, resolutions are temporary waysides, not permanent structures. They are not meant to halt the procession of ongoing new solutions. They are meant to invigorate new ways of looking at issues that had seemed to have settled into a state of quiescence.

According to Dimen, Desire is a site of uncertainty and multiplicity. Unfortunately, American culture is so saturated with ideals of independence, fortitude, and self-realization that many American psychoanalysts have no room for desire, which evokes feelings of absence, lack, and longing. Desire is discon- tinuous and enigmatic; “like invisible ink: it won’t show up until it gets wet.”
42
Desire is about suspended excitement and a longing for something not yet there. Desire does not settle into a state of amiable quiescence. Psychoanalytic practice comes to life when it opens up a space for the passionate, elusive, and unpredictable complexities of desire. Unlike traditional psychoanalytic practice, where the focus has been on cleansing the patient of the symptomatic excesses of her sexual desires, the principle of staying in “the knot of not knowing” allows the analyst to help the patient to bring back to life a desire that has been lost. “The knot of not knowing” keeps alive the aliveness of desire.

Knowingness, a variant of certainty, inevitably deadens the vitality of the clin- ical situation. It is the core of the fetishism strategy in psychoanalysis. Still another attempt to address the issue of knowingness that Lear and Dimen observed, and the certainty that I have been referring to as the motto of the fetishism strategy, was a 2004 essay by Ralf Zweibel, a German medical doctor who had been trained as a psychoanalyst. Alluding to his long-time collaboration with Hans Morganthaler, a German analyst who has yet to be translated into English, Zweibel asserted a principle that sounds very much like Bion: “When we initiate an analytic process with an analysand, we are confronted from the very first ses- sion with the emotional undercurrents of the unruly id. ... We should not believe that we can figure out or control this emotional movement.”
43
Citing Morganthaler’s work, Zweibel defines this emotional movement as “an expres- sion of aliveness.”
44
He adds that the analyst must be able to tolerate the anxiety, uncertainty, and doubt that arise in connection with this expression
45
of aliveness. John Keats might have been put off by the elaborate diagrams that Zweibel drew up to “capture” his theory of aliveness; but I imagine he would have been immensely gratified that his ideas on negative capability were still alive.

I shall now keep the promise I made at the outset of this exploration. I will demonstrate how a knowledge of the foreground-background principle of

the fetishism strategy might enlighten psychoanalysts about their daily clinical experience with patients.

Let us start at the beginning. In the early days of topographical theory, Freud postulated a consciousness above that censored an unconscious below, and the early followers of Freud spoke confidently of higher modes of mental activity inhibiting the lower levels. Psychoanalysis was construed as a technique for detecting the unconscious latent meanings that lay
beneath
a conscious manifest content. The dream was taken as the royal road to knowledge of the workings of the unconscious.

While dream interpretations are still crucial to our reflections on the patient’s psychic reality, most present-day analysts focus on the ways in which we articulate dreams with other features of the psychoanalytic situation. We now appreciate that a dream, usually thought to be the dwelling place of the latent, can itself be a manifest content. For example, a patient might introduce a dream in order to obscure and marginalize the painful latent affects and thoughts that are threatening to emerge in the transference- countertransference interaction.

As one outcome of these shifts in our spatial metaphors, we have moved from a static to a constantly shifting
dynamic
perspective on the relations between manifest and latent contents. Instead of regarding the clinical situa- tion as composed of upper surfaces and lower depths, we employ to our advantage (knowingly or unknowingly) one of the principles of the fetishism strategy—the foreground-background relationship. We focus our attention on the
shifting surfaces
of foreground and background. We do not accept one surface or the other as the true and only meaning.

When latent was presumed to lie
beneath
manifest, the latent content was frequently identified with truth or true meaning, while manifest content was presumed to be a species of sham or untruth, or at best a symbolic defensive structure designed to conceal some true latent meaning that lay beneath. This notion has persisted in other forms; for example, in the spatial metaphor favored by some present-day ego psychologists. These psychoanalysts issue a directive that psychoanalytic interpretations should proceed from surface to depth—as if the surface could not itself be psychologically deeper than what lies beneath it; as if one surface did not always contend with another; as if depth might not be a screen for what is a painful or frightening psychic reality of the manifest present.

Similarly, clinical experience has taught us to observe developmental sequences from the perspective of a patient’s current psychic reality, which includes transference-countertransference sequences evoked by the present psychoanalytic situation. Unlike physical maturation (material reality), which tends to be progressive, psychological development (psychic reality) is not linear or progressive. Consequently, as I have often maintained, “earlier is not necessarily deeper or even more influential than later.” For example, from the perspective of the manifest-latent interplay that characterizes psy- chic reality, memories of childhood trauma that emerge in the present clini- cal situation might be, and often are, retroactive memories constructed in

the present in order to screen out the traumatic elements that might other- wise emerge as an outcome of the immediate transference-countertransfer- ence interaction.

In the analytic situation, as in the patient’s life outside the analysis, whenever a symptom preoccupies the foreground, its vivid presence signals the possibility of an absence, and may be an indication of an effort to screen out, marginalize, or background another history of desire.

This spatial metaphor of shifting surfaces, each as psychologically deep as any other, has been derived from my understandings of the fetishism strategy. In contrast to the neurotic strategy whereby a symptom represents a compromise formation between desire and authority, between id and ego and superego, and the anxiety and depressive affects elicited by these con- flicts, the fetishism strategy, based on disavowal rather than repression, encourages a collaboration and simultaneity of manifestly antithetical forces that can coexist in a play of shifting surfaces. One fantasy or thought is brought to the foreground while another fantasy or thought is temporarily relegated to the background. In some instances one aspect of the sexual life preoccupies the foreground of a patient’s life, while another is relegated to the margins. Or, a neurotic symptom preoccupies the foreground while the intrapsychic conflicts and internalized personal relationships that are encap- sulated in the symptom are in the background and must be deciphered or interpreted. Or, a shameful, infantile self-representation assumes a com- manding presence both in a patient’s everyday life and in her analysis so that adult self and object representations that would otherwise arouse guilt and anxiety may remain in the shadows.