Psychoanalysis, Singularity, and the Becoming-Known

This piece was written for the occasion of “Psychoanalysis in the 21st Century,” an online event hosted by Universidad Unis in Minas Gerais, Brazil in March of 2023. I am grateful to Janilton Gabriel de Souza, who organized this wonderful encounter, and to my colleague Benoît Le Bouteiller, who also spoke at the event.

~

Picasso said it took him four years to paint like Raphael and a lifetime to paint like a child.[1] No doubt it is difficult to achieve virtuosity, but is it even more elusive to become a beginner?

For Nietzsche, echoing Picasso, the furthest stage in our development is to become the child, the child that is “innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelling wheel, a first motion, a sacred Yes.”[2] Again, the process taken to its logical end delivers us to a place that ironically resembles the beginning.

Psychoanalysis has its own iterations of this insight. Nietzsche’s “innocence and forgetfulness” seems to rhyme with Bion’s recommendation that the analyst suspend memory and desire.[3] Bion counsels us to forget—what we think we know about the patient, who they seemed to be last session, or last year. Forget also, he tells us, what you want for this patient, what you think they should want for themselves.

It’s a discipline of unknowing, of relinquishing preconceptions. Radical as Bion’s advice may sound to us, it’s perhaps no more radical than Freud’s “evenly-suspended attention,” his invitation to us not to grasp or try to remember things but merely to hover, to listen with everything we’ve got. To become listening.[4]

How often does the psychoanalyst achieve such a state? All these years later, do we know how to evenly hover? I will wager that we each have our moments. How about the field of psychoanalysis? Now, here, in the twenty-first century, can psychoanalysis go beyond virtuosity, mastery, and become a child again? Can this discipline of ours become an innocence, a forgetfulness, a new beginning, even a sacred Yes?

In the spirit of finding a new beginning, it might not be a bad idea to revisit the old beginning. What was the childhood of psychoanalysis like? Its infancy? The story has been told so many times, but I’ll tell it again.[5] Today I prefer to say it this way: there once was a person named Bertha Pappenheim who became troubled and anguished in a powerful and mysterious way. A doctor was called, a friend of the family. This doctor, named Breuer, encountered in Bertha’s suffering something unique, a process that eluded his comprehension. The usual strategies were employed—hypnosis, for instance—but soon Bertha asked something of Breuer that he had never been called upon to give to a patient before. She asked him to quiet himself, and merely to listen as she narrated the events in her “private theater.”

This unprecedented form of engagement between doctor and patient, which had a transformative effect on Bertha and her suffering, stuck in Breuer’s mind. Years later, he would tell a younger doctor about this singular event. As it happened, this younger doctor, who went by the name of Freud, was a man of extraordinary courage and creativity. He heard in the story of Bertha Pappenheim not only a strange enigma but a field of possibility, something to be explored further. Perhaps others who were suffering could be encouraged to speak freely? With this question guiding him, Freud set out into the unknown, experimentally, a little precariously. A new method was born. Better to say a new method was now in the process of becoming.

I tell the story in this way partially because I believe that Bertha Pappenheim, Anna O, doesn’t get nearly enough credit as a co-creator—perhaps even the primary progenitor—of psychoanalysis. It is also to highlight how this practice of psychoanalysis arises not out of a refinement of already existing knowledge but out of a rupture, a radical break with that knowledge. The singularity of the Pappenheim / Breuer encounter produces something utterly new. 

If we are listening—if we can become listening—we are always in an encounter with a singularity. It is not how Bertha’s process resembles the phenomenon called “hysteria” that ultimately matters, it’s the unique pathways that her particular symptom will generate, the unrepeatable transferential field in which something unprecedented will be created. So too with each one who comes to speak with us, so too with me and you.

This word, “singularity,” lives a wild and varied life. It has a prominent place in the discussion of artificial intelligence, but also in physics and math, and, as I hope to discuss at some length, in the arts.

These diverse uses of the word converge in the following way: in each context in which we speak of singularity we evoke a phenomenon for which the laws that generally serve us well in our mapping of reality reach a limit. The singularity is a site beyond or outside of the smooth functioning of category, of systematic knowledge, of the general order of things. The singularity follows its own law.

Dancing between outer space and inner space, shuttling between the furthest reaches of the cosmos and the most ineffable interiority of the human being, could we not say that there is something of the singularity waiting for us in either direction? 

From physics we learn that at the threshold of the black hole is an event horizon, beyond which the laws of general relativity no longer hold. On the other side of the event horizon, space and time do not behave in a recognizable way: we hear of an infinite curvature of spacetime, of the impossibility of ascribing standard conceptions of “where” and “when” to this je ne sais quoi.[6] There is even a theory that new universes, obeying their own unique laws, are born inside black holes.[7]

Mutatis mutandis, could we not speak of an event horizon in the subject, beyond which the known laws of psychic functioning can no longer guide us? Here we encounter the emerging, dynamic structure of the singular speaking-being. As a system, it may follow its own law—not a law that we can ever imagine or impose in advance, but one that reveals itself, perhaps never completely, through the process of speaking within the field of transference. Bertha Pappenheim’s innovation can serve as the template, but each subject, each pair of analysand and analyst, will create this field anew, in an entirely unique way.

In speaking of creation, we build a bridge between science and art. In the leap beyond the event horizon, something new is made, something is produced. The artwork can come to represent for us the creation of the subject from the place of his or her singularity.

Roscoe Mitchell, the great saxophonist, improviser, and composer, says, “find your own set of mathematics.” It is an invitation to discern the underlying logic of one’s desire. It is perhaps a question asked in harmony with Deleuze and Guattari, along the lines of: what are my desiring-machines? How do they work? How do they interact? What am I building—or trying to build—with this characteristic style that I have (even and especially within what appears to be repetitious and symptomatic)? How is my symptom already a sublimation?

One of the more useful applications of the concept of singularity is that made by Frederic Jameson in his work on postmodern aesthetics. For Jameson, singularity is the quintessential feature of the postmodern artwork.[8] Whereas prior to the advent of the postmodern we can speak sensibly about movements, schools, historical trends, it is Jameson’s contention that these conceptions no longer hold water. The artwork qua singularity exists in what he refers to as a “pure present without a past or future.” Here it is instructive to remember our reference to the infinite curvature of spacetime in the gravitational singularity. The postmodern artwork is, in Jameson’s terminology, a “singularity-event,” an unrepeatable assembling of ideas and materials in a manner that explodes the very conception of history, of progress, of advancement through stages of development.

For Jameson, the paradigmatic medium of the postmodern is the installation. Crucial for his conception is the fact that the installation is not an “object,” but an “event.” We can conceive of this distinction by contrasting installation with oil painting or sculpture. If these older forms produce art objects for us to behold, they are always in some sense decontextualized. Whether or not we encounter them in a gallery or a magazine, in the original or in a reproduction of some kind or another, the nature of this kind of work is such that it is qualitatively discrete from its environment. Picasso’s work remains within the confines of the canvas; what lies beyond the frame is strictly speaking outside of the purview of the work. Installation, on the other hand, is more like the context itself becoming the work. The aesthetic artifact is not a separable object but rather the arrangement of a space, the orchestration of various components in the environment to engender a particular kind of perceptual experience. Jameson speaks of “strategies” and “recipes” for generating these events.

We can find no better exemplar of the postmodern aesthetic as conceived by Jameson than Robert Irwin, the great installation artist whose life and work is chronicled in the remarkable book “Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees” by Lawrence Weschler.[9] This book, an extraordinary work of art in its own right, takes us through Irwin’s journey from abstract expressionism into a wider and wider field of aesthetic concern. Ultimately dissatisfied with the constraints of working within the frame, we see Irwin break out beyond two dimensions, creating works with a topography, a depth; then, in turn, Irwin’s attention moves from the canvas to the space itself—the walls, the lights, the totality of the space and its effect on perception. Eventually we find Irwin orchestrating whole vast outdoor environments, designing and beautifying various public spaces—in short, producing an oeuvre of “singularity-events.”

As wonderful as this book is as an itinerary through Irwin’s evolution as an artist, it is all the more valuable as a window into his conception of the creative act. We begin to see with Irwin that an artwork is the posing of a question, and that each work then begets new questions which will be posed through the creation of subsequent artworks, and so on ad infinitum.

With these reflections, I don’t intend to make an argument for a postmodern psychoanalysis. Rather, I want to focus on the singularity-event as already at the core of the psychoanalytic project—responsible not only for its birth in the Bertha Pappenheim / Josef Breuer encounter, but also for its continual resuscitation in the moments throughout psychoanalytic history in which the great astronauts of psychic space—Freud, Ferenczi, Klein, Winnicott, Bion, Lacan, and so many other names—cross a subjective event horizon and have no recourse but to become like Nietzsche’s child, Picasso’s child, to jettison their conceptual framework and to enter into the unprecedented and the unknown.

It is to say that the singularity is always present as a potential in the clinical encounter. In a parallel fashion, we should not be led by Jameson’s thesis to the idea that singularity is only aesthetically realized in the postmodern era. After all, what accounts for the ineffable allure of certain works, their capacity to produce a Joycean epiphany, if not that they are singular constructions that evoke in turn an utterly unique subjective phenomenology? What Jameson puts his finger on is that it is the postmodern that makes of this phenomenon the very raison d’etre of the aesthetic act—including at the formal and technical level. If historically the singularity-event was always a potentiality, it was one that was clothed in other pursuits somewhat alien to it: the achieving of certain aims within the coordinates of a given aesthetic program or paradigm, for instance. In the postmodern, the singularity-event is the program—a paradigm that defies any standardization or historicity.

If we take these notions of subjective event horizon and singularity seriously, we can state that the psychoanalytic endeavor is paradoxical in that it can unveil singularity like no other discipline and yet is equally capable of submerging what is unique in the subject, enshrouding the ineffable Real of the speaking-being in a dead knowledge.

All those courageous psychic astronauts I mentioned before ironically gave rise to schools of thought, producing whole lexicons and conceptual maps with which analysts habitually defend themselves against what is most enigmatic in their analysands, disciplining and domesticating the wildness of subjectivity. As inheritors of these systems of knowledge, we have a whole armamentarium with which we are at risk of doing violence to the singularity-event. 

This tension lives within us, because it is a contradiction at the core of knowledge itself. On the one hand, there is knowledge in development—that is living, moving, a process of something coming to be known. This knowledge tends to remain provisional, hypothetical, and humble. On the other hand, there is knowledge that I am calling dead—already crystallized, hardened, ossified. This is a knowledge that resists reappraisal, resists the new. This is the knowledge not of the child but of the master. This dead knowledge is all-too operative in psychoanalytic discourse. The necrosis spreads in our training institutes, in our supervisions, in our very analyses. Frank Zappa is purported to have once said that jazz wasn’t dead, but that it smelled funny. I would say the same for psychoanalysis here in the twenty-first century. It’s not dead yet, but there is a smell in the air that has me concerned.

I think of a scene I recently witnessed at a conference. A young clinician—a student—was asked to present a case and receive supervision from an experienced analyst in front of an audience (of which I was a member). The student was bright and curious, full of interesting observations about his patient. He had clearly paid close attention to the microscopic details of what the patient said and how it was uttered. He had gathered an enormous amount of fascinating historical material. And as he reported all this to the supervising analyst, his desire to understand was palpable. He was animated by a question. Who was this patient of his really? How to make sense of these various threads in the case, its aporias and contradictions? Maybe I imagined it, but it seemed to me that the audience too was animated by this desire. We had caught his curiosity.

However, there was already an unfortunate tendency to frame this question within a rigidified diagnostic paradigm. The open inquiry about the dynamics of the case was from the very beginning being constricted by this all-too-familiar query: was the patient neurotic or psychotic? Even with this stricture, this narrowing of the scope of our exploration, one could nevertheless feel the heat, the vitality, of the search. We didn’t know, and we were wondering together.

Then the supervising analyst spoke up. To my immense chagrin, the analyst declared the matter settled. Rather blithely, they issued an all-too confident diagnostic pronouncement and followed it with an exegesis on the student’s case presentation—one that resolved every uncertainty and dispelled every enigma. Every compelling aspect of this case, everything that just moments before had stoked our desire, making us want to know more, to go further—it was all put to rest, tucked neatly into bed and kissed goodnight. There was nothing more to wonder, to ask. Everything strange had been rendered intelligible, perfectly explicable within the prism of a diagnostic structure.

That stench of dead knowledge was in the air, to say the least. I felt as if I had witnessed a small crime—a violence done to the patient, to the student, and to psychoanalytic praxis. And this story is anything but singular, unfortunately. It is, I fear, emblematic of widespread trends in our field. In short, the enigmatic is perpetually being subjected to the order of the paradigmatic. This is the exact inverse of the operation I am proposing: for psychoanalysis to be up to the task of an encounter with the singularity-event, the apparently paradigmatic must be deconstructed to reveal its enigmatic core.

Recalling this story now, it brings to mind a lovely passage from Winnicott, in his 1960 paper “The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship.” I would like to quote this at length: 

“...The student analyst sometimes does better analysis than he will do in a few years' time when he knows more. When he has had several patients he begins to find it irksome to go as slowly as the patient is going, and he begins to make interpretations based not on material supplied on that particular day by the patient but on his own accumulated knowledge or his adherence for the time being to a particular group of ideas. This is of no use to the patient. The analyst may appear to be very clever, and the patient may express admiration, but in the end the correct interpretation is a trauma, which the patient has to reject, because it is not his.”[10]

It is true—on this particular day, at least to my ear, the student was wiser than the seasoned analyst, simply because he was alive to the question. He had become listening, become the child, probably manifesting a kind of naive wisdom borne of his inexperience. The student hadn’t yet become clever enough to traumatize the patient with the right answer, blotting out the patient’s own speech. The analyst, on the other hand, knew. As an old adage goes, the answer is the death of the question. Does psychoanalysis think of itself as a repository of answers? Or an incisive question that keeps venturing further into the unknown and the unknowable? Can psychoanalysis truly meet those that it purports to serve in their radical distinctiveness? Or will it perpetuate and perpetrate an endless series of reductive and reified applications of dead knowledge, producing nothing but more alienation?

It is possible, of course, to hear such a story and to contend that no great harm was done. I myself called it a small crime. But further along the spectrum of this kind of clinical thinking, we find something more sinister than reductionism: when we subsume the singular subject into the rule of the category, we also inflict upon them, subtly or not, forms of normativity which are ultimately about the wielding of power for disciplinary purposes.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the way that psychoanalysis has responded to the trans community in its struggle against oppression. As McKenzie Wark recently noted in a piece for Parapraxis entitled “Dear Cis Analysts,” when it comes to the treatment of trans persons, “psychoanalysis has no better a record than any other institution of control—and usually worse. Among talk therapy methods, it has the worst record when it comes to gatekeeping us, dismissing us, or practicing conversion therapy on us (at our own expense, of course).” Wark goes on to state that it is time “to ask what is wrong with the methods and concepts of psychoanalysis itself, rather than treating these horrors as mere deviations from ‘best practice.’ It’s time for some accountability for the failure of psychoanalysis when confronted with the reality of, and the needs of, trans people.”[11]

I want to focus on the second part of this remark: Wark’s call for psychoanalysis to examine the wrongs embedded in “the methods and concepts of psychoanalysis itself.” Using Wark’s language, I would suggest that the failure in the method is a result of the wrong use of the concept. When concepts precede the clinical phenomena, when  concepts are wielded defensively to shelter the psychoanalyst from the rupturing and destabilizing impact of the singularity-event, when the concepts operate as an a priori set of assumptions which impose strictures upon the analyst’s capacity to hear the unprecedented and the becoming known, then the concepts are degraded and become ideology. In turn, this degradation produces a method that is inherently normative in that it cannot help but reinforce whatever in the subject accords with the ideological frame and to ignore—or worse—oppose whatever in the subject deviates from it. The discipline and domestication of the subject’s singularity can take the more subtle form of an insidious ideologization of the interpretative act, or can be manifest in the more blatant, unabashed use of coercive suggestion. But in either case, what it amounts to is exactly the kind of exercise of power that Lacan warned was the inevitable recourse of those who are unable to sustain a praxis.[12]

Can psychoanalysis sustain its own praxis? A pathway of perpetually becoming the child, becoming listening, encountering the case as a becoming-known-to-itself? As these admittedly somewhat awkward formulations indicate, it is a question of “becoming” (as an essentially open and infinitely dynamic process) in tension with “being” (something closed, fixed, and immutable).

At a molecular level, these questions are perhaps in the hands of each individual person who authorizes themselves to function as a psychoanalyst. But as Deleuze and Guattari have argued, the molecular is always embedded in certain molar configurations; the rhizomatic and the arborescent are forever entangled in a generative tension.[13] Hence, without overlooking the importance of the singularity of the analyst, it is crucial for us to critique the discourses in which analysts find themselves entangled. To that end, I want to reflect on the state of psychoanalytic formation, training, and education.

With respect to how knowledge is developed and transmitted, I believe we psychoanalysts need to face up to the fact that in several important ways our field resembles a religion more than it does an art or a science. To demonstrate what I mean, I want to pose a question: what figure in the history of science occupies a position in which their words are axiomatic, merely because of the name attached to the words? Who in physics, for instance, enjoys a status of irreprochability—a status in which their pronouncements are assumed to be true merely because of who pronounced them?

Rack your brains, search your memory banks all you want, but you won’t find a single person. Not even Einstein enjoys the status in physics that Freud and Lacan enjoy in psychoanalysis. Not Niels Bohr, not Heisenberg, not a single one. Each of these seminal figures within modern physics—important as they are and as foundational as their work may be—is not above critique and questioning. Instead, their work forms part of the tapestry of the becoming-known that is the progress of science. In this open process, everything—no matter how intuitively or empirically certain in a given moment—is potentially subject to reconfiguration or even to the fate of being deemed obsolete.

When I was in high school, my physics teacher formed an alliance with LIGO (The Laser-Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory), a project that was just getting off the ground at the time. As a teenager, I did not adequately appreciate the significance of what LIGO was up to, but later I came to grasp that a central part of their mission was to generate data that would help the field of physics put Einstein’s theory of general relativity to the test. Think of this: Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves in 1916, and there wasn’t a hint of empirical evidence for his theory until 20 years after his death, in the 1970s. But even then, gravitational waves had not been directly observed. Enter LIGO. Fifteen years after I graduated high school, LIGO finally obtained direct evidence of gravitational waves—almost a century after Einstein had originally published his theory.[14]

You might protest and say that this is not a valid comparison. In a sense, your objection would be right. In psychoanalysis we cannot test our hypotheses with the same kind of empirical methodology. There will be no ultimate “proof” of a conceptualization of psychoanalytic case material in a manner that parallels LIGO’s successful detection of gravitational waves. But this is not the point that interests me here. What I find so compelling in this example is the fact that even Einstein’s theory—which held up to mathematical scrutiny and had already demonstrated a wide applicability in the field of physics—was not considered self-evident and beyond question.

The contrast I want to draw is between Einstein as a figure whose work is still considered ultimately provisional and open to rethinking and refutation within the progress of physics and, on the other hand, figures like Freud, Lacan, Klein—the giants within psychoanalysis whose theoretical formulations all-too-often function like axiomatic slogans that are assumed true because of who said them and which are consequently not adequately put to the test of the living, dynamic process that is the clinical encounter. We don’t have laser interferometers, but we have the speech of the analysand, the always unprecedented formations of the unconscious, the ever unpredictable vicissitudes of the transference. Theory can prove enormously helpful in illuminating some of these phenomena, but theory can also function as a defense against the unknown, that which escapes capture by the conceptual framework, that which invites new theorizations, new knowledge.

Similarly, if we turn to the arts, we find again nothing rivaling psychoanalysis’s zeal for the old, the dead, the bygone. Are there conservative and nostalgic trends in the history of art, music, theater? Of course, but they tend to be exposed for what they are: anachronisms, derivative works that are out of step with their time. You’ll recall that I began today’s remarks with a reference to Picasso. Why are we fascinated by the Picassos, rather than the legions of competent practitioners of a form who produce proficient but forgettable works? It’s because Picasso invents, innovates, opens up vistas that were never dreamed of before.

To return to Robert Irwin’s conception of the artwork as a provisional answer to a question or a set of questions, we want to also hear how he applies this notion to the culture and history of aesthetics. Irwin has the trenchant insight that it takes a certain kind of artist to have the courage to ask their own questions, and to keep generating new ones. If a Picasso lives the question, staying in motion, always becoming the child, there are others who find an original question at one time and then answer it forever, producing the same type of work for the rest of their lives, gilding the lily (as an old saying goes) over and over again. They stop becoming and are crystallized, ossified. But at least these ones had an original question at one time! How many, Irwin wonders, never have a question of their own, but only reproduce someone else’s answer to someone else’s question?

With great respect for the psychoanalysts who are walking in the way of Picasso, I think it is nevertheless necessary for us to admit that in psychoanalytic culture today—in our training institutes and forums, in our conferences, in our publications—what predominates is the reproduction of old answers to anachronistic questions. Prestige is most often accorded not to the innovative and the daring, and certainly not to those who know they don’t know; the titles and honors are conferred on the faithful, the loyal, the most dogmatic. If it is religiosity, it’s one more akin to that of the inquisitors than that of the Meister Eckharts (lamentably but predictably, our Eckharts are also tried for heresy and excommunicated).

Can psychoanalysis shake off its slumber, become less nostalgic and orthodox? Can we be as curious and as humble as the physicists who are at this very moment looking for answers to the problem of quantum gravity? Can we be as bold and experimental as the avant garde artists of our time who are producing singularity-events as we speak? Can our institutes reinvent themselves, becoming more like arts collectives or independent research institutes—somewhat anarchic alliances of analysts who are ever in the process of becoming? Can we admit that we still do not know what psychoanalysis is? That this art, science, praxis of ours is itself still becoming known to us, to itself, and that it is ours to shape in a solidarity of singularity? With these questions, let’s see what we can make together.

Notes:

1. Honan, D. (2012, January 27). See like a child, paint like Picasso. Big Think. https://bigthink.com/articles/see-like-a-child-paint-like-picasso/.

2. Nietzsche, F. (1954). Thus spoke Zarathustra: A book for all and none (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). Viking Press. (Original work published 1883)

3. Bion, W. (1992). Cogitations. Karnac.

4. Freud, S. (2001). Recommendations to physicians practising psycho-analysis. In J. Strachey (Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 12). Vintage. (Original work published 1912)

5. Freud, S. (2001). Studies on hysteria. In J. Strachey (Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 2). Vintage. (Original work published 1895)

6. Lea, R. (n.d.). Black holes and the event horizon explained. Space.com. https://www.space.com/black-holes-event-horizon-explained.html

7. PBS. (2022, March 30). Could the Universe Be Inside a Black Hole? [Video]. PBS. https://www.pbs.org/video/could-the-universe-be-inside-a-black-hole-wjsrtp/

8. Jameson, F. (2015). The aesthetics of singularity. New Left Review, (92), March–April. Retrieved from https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii92/articles/fredric-jameson-the-aesthetics-of-singularity

9. Weschler, L. (2008). Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees: Over thirty years of conversations with Robert Irwin. University of California Press.

10. Winnicott, D. W. (1986). The theory of the parent-infant relationship. In P. Buckley (Ed.), Essential papers on object relations (pp. 233–253). New York University Press. (Reprinted from the "International Journal of Psycho-Analysis," Vol. 41, pp. 585-595, 1960)

11. Wark, M. (2022, October 24). Dear Cis Analysts. Parapraxis. Retrieved from https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/dear-cis-analysts

12. Lacan, J. (2006). Écrits: The first complete edition in English (B. Fink, Trans.). W.W. Norton & Co.

13. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press

14. LIGO Laboratory. (n.d.). LIGO Lab | Caltech | MIT. https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/