Abolish the Ring!
This text was written for “Transmission, Formation, and the Future(s) of Psychoanalysis,” a panel discussion hosted by the Minnesota Psychoanalytic Society & Institute. The event also featured contributions from Nate Koser and Jamieson Webster.
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The transmission of psychoanalysis involves not only a what, but a how—not just a content or a body of knowledge, but also a process in which particular social and political configurations predominate. The essential elements that define the process of transmission have remained remarkably stable throughout the history of our discipline (despite the many variations across time, involving a great diversity of languages, schools of thought, and other conditions specific to a subculture here or a burgeoning movement there). What endures through the vicissitudes of psychoanalytic history is an underlying structure that I will attempt to describe and to critique. My wager is that within the array of variations we can discern certain themes: leitmotifs that reliably return but that we rather symptomatically tend to ignore. I want to argue that this structural dimension—the way that psychoanalysis is transmitted—is itself a crucial part of the transmission. The how is transmitted with the what, the process and its structural leitmotifs with the content. Additionally, the processual invariants have a profoundly determinative impact on the evolution (or, as I think is often the case, the stagnation) of psychoanalytic knowledge. Ultimately I want to argue that psychoanalytic thought is not well, that something is rotten in the state of psychoanalysis, and that our best hope to revitalize it is by making radical interventions at the level that is most material and pragmatic: we need new structures, and on the way to the new, some destruction of the old is also necessary.
In order to illustrate the repeating structural dimension that I’ve alluded to, I want to use an emblematic scene from the life of Freud that I suppose will be familiar to many of you: I have in mind the establishment of the Secret Committee (also known as the Ring), which occurred in 1913 or 1914, in the wake of Freud’s falling out with Jung. The event of the creation of the Ring nicely encapsulates several characteristics of psychoanalytic communities that have reverberated throughout the history of our field.
First, it’s crucial to understand the Ring, in Roudinesco’s words, as an effort to “preserve the doctrine from all forms of deviance.” The schismatic departures of not only Jung but also Adler had exposed the nascent psychoanalytic movement to fragmentation and discord. The struggle was not just about power: Adler and Jung had each made theoretical elaborations that were too disharmonious with Freud’s basic conceptual paradigm for any semblance of uniformity of thought to be salvaged. The Ring seems to represent an impulse of purification and restoration of wholeness. Interestingly, the first moment is the imputation of heresy, from which arises the second moment, which is the crystallization of orthodoxy. The Ring is something like a closed set, intended to have unambiguous and impermeable borders.
This construction is plagued by internal contradictions, though, and its essentially paranoid aspiration to maintain the partitioning of two discrete domains (the inside and the outside) cannot be sustained. The first irony that we might want to point out is that figures like Adler and Jung were themselves once Freud’s darlings—insiders who later became outsiders. Furthermore, from our vantage point in history, we have the advantage of identifying yet another ironic twist: two of the stalwarts of the Ring—Ferenczi and Rank—will, before too long, be expelled from the inner circle themselves. If we stop here, we’ve simply highlighted a certain instability inherent to any partition (conceptual, social, etc.), but I think there’s something in this event that is more unsettling still: wasn’t it the case that psychoanalysis itself had been born in heresy? Wasn’t Freud’s discovery/creation something that arrived from radically outside the borders (of culture, of thought)? It would almost seem that a psychoanalytic project of “preserving the doctrine from all forms of deviance” is contradictory to the point of absurdity—because it credulously reifies the dichotomizations of reality that Freud’s own thought so powerfully subverted.
This orientation toward purification has enormous consequences not only for institutional politics but also for theory. In a seminar earlier this year, I presented a critical reading of the case of the Wolfman in which I tried to demonstrate that the pressure to theoretically batten down the hatches in response to Adler and Jung led Freud to make certain conceptual errors that I believe have been severely detrimental to the ongoing health and generativity of psychoanalytic thought. I would boil the errors down to the following: under the pressure to fortify his theory of the sexual etiology of the neuroses, Freud ends up leaping—too hastily in my opinion—from the dynamics of the single case to the establishment of purportedly universal structures of psychic functioning. Certain clinical phenomena glimpsed here and there are enshrined as abstractions to be anticipated behind every other clinical encounter, in an example, I believe, of what Whitehead called the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” Paranoid partitioning of the political space is accompanied by paranoid theoretical reasoning, a hubristic and totalizing sense-making that drowns out the anomalous, the enigmatic, and the singular.
This is our transmission then: the Ring as a closed set, perpetually haunted by what it has expelled (and that which it will expel in the days to come). The Ring was alive and well in the heat of the controversial discussions; it was alive and well when the hostility to the Use of an Object paper at the NY Psychoanalytic appeared to bring Winnicott to the point of cardiac arrest; the Ring was there when Kohut entered the room and Anna Freud turned her back, treating him as if he no longer existed, her body’s message like that of Michael Corleone to his brother Fredo: “you’re nothing to me now. You’re not a brother, you’re not a friend. I don’t want to know you or what you do.” The Ring, the Ring…we’re all speaking from within our little Ring, talking shit about those who are ousted and outside, who are nevertheless within their own Ring talking shit about us. Exiles like Lacan establish their own dominions from which others will be exiled, and so on and so on. I almost said ad infinitum, but I stopped myself, because that’s exactly what is at stake: disrupting this insipid infinity.
The dynamics of authority within the Ring are very simple and accord rather straightforwardly with the paradigm of Max Weber. In our psychoanalytic communities, first and foremost we have charismatic authority wielded by the genius, the luminary figure whose word takes precedence (Freud in the original instance, of course, but then a series of notable theorists like the aforementioned Winnicott and Lacan, but also Klein, Bion, and a handful of others). It matters not if he or she was once expelled from the circle of some other genius; within the Ring that has formed around this figure, his or her concepts are generally accorded the status of truth. Francois Recanati has recounted how Lacan’s charisma functioned within his school, noting that the Master’s words were considered sacrosanct whether understood or not. The writings that emerged from his circle tended to treat one of his utterances as the axiomatic a priori; but because it was also enigmatic, the game was to interpret what he might have meant, trusting that he knew what he meant, and that it was true. 50 years later I don’t think we’ve progressed one step on this score: the enigmatic axiomatic is still the jumping-off point of most Lacanian writing. And while Lacanworld might be particularly sick with this malady, I’ve unfortunately come to the conclusion that psychoanalysis writ large is positively awash in arguments made of nothing more than appeals to authority. Not even Einstein in the domain of physics is endowed with the kind of authority that the charismatic figures of psychoanalysis possess within our strange little field.
Can we break out of the Ring? Can we take a step toward dissolving the borders of our closed sets? Can psychoanalysis become less paranoid, less nostalgic, and less cult-like? I think it’s possible. To start, we need to cut ourselves a little less slack and stop accepting this repetition as inevitable by virtue of the Oedipus complex or some other self-reinforcing logic that absolves us of any responsibility to create structures that are less stultifying. We need to experiment with new collective configurations that subvert the way that power is currently articulated within our communities. We need a little entropy on the way to new and more flexible forms of order that will (hopefully) be more generative.
To close, I’m offering a series of proposals, principles, questions, and outcries. Some are more pragmatic, some are more conceptual. None of them are systematic or certain.
1. No more argument by appeal to authority: to say that somebody else said something as if this constitutes a truth claim is not sufficient. Tell me what you think about what they think. Tell me how it resonates in your clinic. Make something of your own, even when using the terminology of someone who came before.
2. I declare an immediate moratorium on universals in psychoanalysis. We have far too many of them, and all of them need to be mercilessly interrogated. Back to the singularity of the case, in its irreducible dynamism and complexity. Build from there, with humility.
3. Better to be alive than correct. The measure of the health of a body theory should be, in the spirit of Deleuze and Guattari, that we are creating concepts. Are we creating concepts?
4. No more self-satisfied pompous ignorance of other disciplines. Our conceptual achievements are modest, our results are dubious, and we could stand to learn a thing or two from people outside the broader Ring that is the field of psychoanalysis.
5. Wearing a button commemorating a bygone revolution does not make you a revolutionary; far from it.
6. Make a psychoanalytic school that moves like an avant-garde arts collective, or an anarchic alliance of researchers developing a new scientific paradigm.
7. No more students acting as passive receptacles. Produce something in order to learn something.
8. No more lectures, no more repeating yourself; do not commit the new cardinal sin of being boring.
9. More laughter! More mistakes!
10. Undermine the center, erode the border, discover the outside on the inside (and vice versa).
11. Transmit questions, not answers.
12. The courage of a dialectic that will never come to rest.
Bibliography
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What is Philosophy? (H. Tomlinson & G. Burchell, Trans.). Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1991)
Recanati, F. (2017, October 17). Recanati—Lacan 01 [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/1CC53hJQbBA
Roudinesco, É. (2016). Freud: In his time and ours (C. Porter, Trans.). Harvard University Press.
Weber, M. (1946). Politics as a vocation. In H. H. Gerth & C. W. Mills (Eds. & Trans.), From Max Weber: Essays in sociology (pp. 77-128). Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1919).
Whitehead, A. N. (1978). Process and reality: An essay in cosmology (D. R. Griffin & D. W. Sherburne, Eds.). Free Press. (Original work published 1929).