Letter to a present-day Psychoanalyst (2022)

Letter to a present-day Psychoanalyst

 

Published online, March 2022.

Several months ago, I received a question. I am trying to respond—somewhat belatedly—through this letter to a present-day Psychoanalyst.

 

“ Hello,

What should we make of the reactions—especially the negative ones (the louder ones)—from popular psychoanalysts (sic) regarding gender studies and the like? For someone who wishes to move into the practice of psychoanalysis one day.”

 

Dear future colleague,

 

The current bipolar oscillation that has taken shape in psychoanalytic circles—between the supposed old reactionaries and the supposed activists regarding so-called gender issues—is not conducive to serious work. If, like others, I continue to welcome analysands of all kinds and to work with professionals responsible for patients engaged in transition pathways, I must express my dismay at the lack of high-quality debate on psychoanalytic clinical practice at the beginning of the 21st century—debate that could build on the emergences and discoveries currently unfolding in sexual affairs, without abandoning respect for each and every person.

 

Let us note that Gender Studies have become, in various forms, the preferred topic of a good number of psychoanalysts speaking publicly. Not gender, nor even gender clinic—which remains the only aim of interest for psychoanalysis in practice, before any other scholarly consideration—but Gender Studies, subtly replaced today by the regurgitated signifier Trans, served up in every possible way. I refer to these terminological nuances because these terms do not designate the same objects at all: we have Gender Studies, a fully-fledged field of research and teaching; Trans, which to date mainly designates the phenomenon as the social field identifies it; and finally gender clinic, a path of psychoanalytic practice and new theoretical elaboration.

But it is not this semantic current affairs that matters most in light of your question. What matters is that the experience of psychoanalysis never lacks irony, especially with potentates. That is what I would like to respond to you about. For this out-of-the-ordinary experience of speech and language—the analytic cure—has brought to light and set in circulation forms of knowledge about sexuality whose effects have been felt keenly, for more than a century now, by each and every person.

 

By way of reminder, in no particular order, a few pieces of knowledge arising from this analytic experience:

 

• the unthinkable nature of infantile sexuality,
• the drive and its ambivalence,
• fantasy as the support of desire,
• the sexual relationship that does not exist,
• the unconscious structured like a language,
• the instance of the letter to the unconscious,
• the Woman who does not exist,
• the untenable exception of the Father to the detriment of Men,
• perverse creativity,
• the intransmissibility of psychoanalysis in act,
• Etc.

 

On the basis of these results and their effects in our modernity—among which, in my view, the irresistible rise of gender, there would now be reason to be astonished, to bristle against the sexual developments they make possible in the wake of earlier openings; against certain extraordinary transformations; against the unheard-of, the frightening, and the unforeseen forms that the sexual modalities of speaking beings take in reality! This is, in any case, the path taken by certain colleagues as they mobilize against the dance of little letters (L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+, which acronyms the dominant “proper saying” in a poor way); against the inclusivity of a possible practice of language (·e, ·es); against children who do not want to become the Men and Women they are supposed to accept being without a word, and who cry out what we must help them to disentangle from the effects of sexuality today; against radical feminist dissociations; against the decline of patriarchy; etc.

What, then, are they opposing, if not directly the effects of Freud’s invention? That is truly the question all of this raises for me, without irony. For we can readily maintain that what is denounced or criticized is only the effect of psychoanalysis itself: the questioning of social and sexual norms, the loosening of authoritarian figures, the emancipation of dreams and of uses of speech, etc. Why, then, be surprised? What did these bearers of the Phallus of psychoanalysis—or careerists of morality and the dominant discourse—believe? That the Freudian plague would glorify and reify, for eternity, the civilization that gave birth to it (Oedipal civilization), from which it has been extricating itself, quite literally, since its beginnings by supporting its clarification? That the effects of the knowledge set in circulation by psychoanalysis in practice would not lead to new anthropological, even civilizational perspectives (including formidable transference effects outside the cure), through which humanity would mature and progress affectively and sexually, even in terms of drives? What did they hope for? To be reassured about the sexual precariousness of human existence? To be protected from what is to come, if it is troubling or dangerous (that would be the height of it)?

 

Gender is an effective agent of disturbance—the whole world knows it and has now experienced its effects; but it has also become a double agent, an element of language for communications professionals, including among “psychoanalysts” or those identified as such who, like apostles touched by the Holy Spirit, begin to speak as philosophers, sociologists, historians, political scientists, collapsologists, or fishmongers, but do not psychoanalyze the masses, and do not really reinvent psychoanalysis as a clinical practice that produces new theorization (without needing to offer cases to fascinate or vignettes to color, as a fairground of identifications). As a result, certain modernist, activist, or at-first-glance enticing proposals often do not go beyond the threshold of a skillful—indeed admirable—rhetoric, effective for the ideological battle (perhaps), but useless for psychoanalytic clinical practice. Yet I can continue to hope that this will happen, because it is what ongoing cures directly bring about as they work toward the experience of knowledge and the critique of knowledge from experience.

Each practitioner of psychoanalysis (analysand and analyst) must formulate its elements as they are created in the cure, and not at the bar counter or in discussions among colleagues or friends: that is not enough; one must go further; one must try. For gender is also an opportunity for psychoanalysis in practice and its theories to relaunch, sometimes very profoundly, conceptual elaboration, and to welcome what constitutes a return of the critique of knowledge carried out by the analytic act since Freud with regard to sexuality. In other words, psychoanalysis is facing a genuine ordeal of castration, which it would be unfortunate to approach in any other way (through disavowal, for example) than through the reform of knowledge to which it invites us. Put bluntly, it is hardly surprising that gender comes back to hit us in the face after having freed, through psychoanalysis, sexuality from the unconscious.

 

What did we imagine about the transference effects outside the cure for which psychoanalysis would in fact become responsible—about the effects of knowledge that the Freudian initiative set in motion in its time throughout society? That there would never be any initiative or act directly connected to the psychic treatment at work outside the analytic colloquy? That there would be no echo of the Freudian effect from the social, the political, the cultural?

I have posited that gender is an effect of the knowledge set in circulation about sexuality by psychoanalysis; it is notably a return of the biological as bedrock formulated by Freud, for which Lacan proposed surpassings that are very useful today—among them sexuation and the opening to what functions outside the Phallus for a subject to articulate with its function; it is an opportunity to let go of nothing of the Freudian demand and of all the other practitioners of psychoanalysis since, in order to continue exploring this enigma of sexuality.

 

This current moment of gender, of trans confronts us with some of our aporias, granted. Let us try to respond to them. We had not noticed the absence of psychoanalytic definitions of sex or sexuality, let alone gender, granted. What can we say better about this now? We thought that sexual orientation had a structural meaning; we were mistaken. We believed we had grasped the subtle formulas of sexuation proposed by Lacan, and that we could outwit the relativity of bisexual psychic constitution? It seems necessary to take them up anew. All of this as a method, so as not to let our reasoning fall into the neoliberal ease of the ready-made, of endless commentary, as certain supposed colleagues may do by yielding to the conveniences of usage. Likewise, it would be very worrying to be satisfied with technical and medical discourses, especially regarding the children concerned, always quick to disavow the known necessities of the subject of the unconscious that we aim to defend.

 

Please keep in mind, dear future colleague, that only the couch will provide you with solid information on this matter; it is there that you will, in turn, invent the sexual theory that deserves to be formulated in your experience, and that will singularly reinvent common psychoanalysis… And, as if by chance, question further: What do we know better about the relations between the signifier and the performative? What does the reification of desires do to desire in our time? What part of fantasy, the support of desire, seems to have petrified into a vector of jouissance? What would now be the underlying fantasy of a patriarchal culture tempted to switch on the cheap, by getting rid of constraints and frustrations in order to bring back the old masters and their abuses? etc.

 

On gender clinic, I have made a few theoretical proposals; I have tried; it is all available on the internet.

 

Thank you for the question; I look forward to reading you.

 

Yours sincerely,

 

Vincent Bourseul

 

PS: I will let you judge the “popular” character of certain people (cf. your question).