The only credentials I can write under are my own relation to the Lacanian orientation in psychoanalysis with the support of a few others who each have their own relation to Lacan’s teaching. I am responsible for my own words, but I can’t practise or think about what I am doing without some mates.
The past couple of years have confirmed what I already knew that psychoanalysis was political. On the agenda of New Labour is the reduction of risk in society. Building wooden stands in football stadiums is an unacceptable risk of immolation. I myself am a supporter of regulating the building industry. I am totally unwilling to participate in any scene that could be labelled ‘bloody Sunday’. About such scenes one is never certain whether the actions of governments have created them or calmed them. As the foundations of that conflict are exposed little by little, I don’t see how governments can walk away with clean hands. New Labour did well in Ulster. It is now scanning every nook and cranny of society for risk, and has stumbled on psychoanalysis. New Labour now wants to control risk at the level of psychical life in the same way risk has to be controlled in football stadiums or in Ulster. There is no doubt that it wants to control everything.
Psychoanalysis is about to become one of the risks that has to be managed by the State, according to New Labour’s risk management agenda. It does not want any risk to appear in society that it does not manage. It is therefore seeking State regulation of psychoanalysis. The idea of patient safety is attractive. The other parties are therefore supporting State regulation, and psychoanalysis is getting sucked into a field to which it does not belong, namely, into the field of Health. It is not even wanted there. The members of our electoral constituencies want to live another day after treatment in an efficient NHS. Medicine is already regulated. Therefore, in the matter of patient safety, should the politicians not undertake an investigation into the effect of their own unregulated policies on organisation in the NHS?
I am writing this during the 2010 general election campaign. Aware that I can write with plenty of cynical jouissance, I am putting it on my blog after the election. New Labour has a history of strengthening its iron grip on society. The Lib Dems and Tories want to be seen loosening their’s. Jack Straw’s idea of democracy that we should have a larger upper house than the U.S. Senate whose members should be elected for 15 years doesn’t seem to be a democratic idea but a way the politicians can have of strengthening their grip on society. If someone who has been the Secretary of three or four of the so-called great offices of State can have this idea of democracy, one understands that the Conservative leader can float the idea of giving the electorate its chance of sacking the MP. It could be a democratic idea but a rather absurd one requiring frequent by-elections. On the other hand, Conservatives are hoping for strong and stable government so that it can shake all the money out of our pockets in order to pay for what comes naturally to politicians, that is, spending money. What has become clear in the 2010 general election is that British democracy is constructed by bricolage. The man who has been so deluded as to think he rid society of the menace of boom and bust is putting himself forward as the hero who wants to play with democracy and the voting system.
When I read the Order that brought the Health Professions council (the HPC) into force, I realised that psychoanalysis in the Lacanian orientation and New Labour inhabit two different worlds. The HPC is New Labour’s own DIY and has been given enough power to wipe out the Lacanian orientation and not just a particular analyst who has been found guilty of some sort of felony. I am told that the two commonest sins of the analyst are sexual and financial exploitation of the analysand, that is, sexual assault and fraud, in other words, extremely serious transgressions. These problems have to be fought out in the criminal justice system.
Lacan reminds us that life is often compared to a voyage. New Labour’s risk management ensures that between birth and death the subject will always being taking the same trip. As a matter of fact these two transgressions of the analyst have the same effect and ensure that between birth and death the analyst is always taking the same trip. The supposition must be that risk management keeps society calm. Mr. Jenkins calls New Labour’s risk symptom a McCarthyism of terror in the Guardian, 23/4/10. McCarthyism is based on the second death. The Bible wants you to die twice.
The HPC would be called by my old comrades an ideological state apparatus and by my more recent colleagues the domain of the good. New Labour itself would say that it is part of its programme of modernisation. Its MPs experience an enormous virtue when their thoughts drift to modernisation. In many instances its programme has had the effect of a repressive state apparatus, more regressive than progressive. Lacan would have recognised it as the domain of the good giving birth to power.[1] If one finds oneself in a confrontation with New Labour, one can expect at best being sent to citizenship classes or at worst being smeared.
The ‘Alliance for Counselling and Psychotherapy against State Regulation’ was founded over a year ago to represent those of us against registration with the HPC. The Alliance recommends a stand against the HPC called principled non-compliance or PNC invented by Richard House. I became a member. I like this signifier PNC. I will pick out some principles from the Lacanian orientation. I am, of course, supposing that the Alliance allows fools to operate provided it’s not represented by them and under no obligation to follow them.
Principle no. one is, therefore, that of the fool. It involves clinical competence. Since there are in society some highly placed people who think that psychoanalysis is now dead in the water, the question arises whether anyone who practises it is clinically competent, whether it is possible to be clinically competent in a practice that is dead. Let’s say that treatment policies fall into two broad categories, treatment by the father and treatment by the mother. If you know how to enter the Oedipus, it will be treatment by the father. If you know how to make your way to the pre-Oedipal, it will be treatment by the mother. I draw a conclusion that Freud (1931) didn’t think treatment by the mother would be too good for the woman. Lacan doesn’t think that treatment by the master is good for anyone. Therefore, treatment by the father isn’t good for anyone, although a master can make the subject’s symptom disappear for a considerable time. I now think that the one and only time I ever caught Lacan adding something to technique has to do with this entrenched idea of treatment by the father and/or mother: letting the analyst’s neutrality wobble is something that has its uses, according to Lacan, provided it is not done at a time it could frighten the analysand. The sudden appearance of a fool instead of the analyst’s neutrality stands a good chance of changing the discourse ruled by the father. The analysand will also discover that it is easier to talk to a fool than to a master.
Principle no. two is the PNC of Antigone. I might not have the bottle to hold out in this manner if the New Creon should give me the Antigone treatment. One risked the Antigone treatment from New Labour for any attack on what seems to be a biblical use of intelligence, that is, by the method of revelation. It was, according to Hans Blix, a faith-based intelligence attitude. Mr. Blix then refers us to the article in The Economist (Oct. 4, 2003) in which thinking on WMD was considered to be in the style of medieval inquisitors convinced of the existence of witches.[2] It would be a good starting point for an inquiry on the difference between belief and knowledge. British politicians try to make up for the belief that its citizens lack.
The third principle is that psychoanalysis must not occupy the domain of the good. It is the analyst’s duty not to take up a position in this domain. A central register of a government constructed apparatus confers on the subject named in the register a right-to-practise. A right-to-practise proceeds to a right-to-power as exercised by the master. The analyst must, therefore, resist signing on with the HPC. The ethical proposition on which the organisation that transmits psychoanalysis should be based supports the analyst in beginning his career on a duty-to-practise where duty is not Kantian which is based on a moral law experienced with an immediate feeling of obligation. There is therefore nothing stopping Kantian duty having the effect of a right-to-enjoy. The analyst has a duty not to introduce his own jouissance. Du côté de chez Kant duty can be confused with a right-to-enjoy, and you’re in with a chance of introducing the second death.
The analysand in whom the analyst originates has a duty as well. There is a moral experience in psychoanalysis to be discovered in Freud’s slogan ‘Wo es war, soll Ich werden’. ‘Where it was, this is the domain the subject ought to occupy.’ Where it was, there has been a renunciation of enjoyment. This is the analysand’s Freudian duty.[3] ‘Es’ is the agency of enjoyment from which the command of the superego is heard. It is experienced as an obscure transgression that calls for punishment.[4] An obscure transgression + a call for punishment equals moral masochism. Once arrived in the domain of the ‘es’, the analysand’s duty is to oppose the morbid command of the superego.[5] Lacan doesn’t say it’s his Lacanian duty, but we can say that it’s his Lacanian duty to oppose the morbid command of the superego. The superego command gives the subject a right-to-enjoy which is then prohibited by calling for his punishment. The more it commands, the more intense the prohibition, and the more virtuous the subject becomes. By occupying the domain of the good we are subjected to a sin that did not exist before the law. Under New Labour for which society was the domain of the good sins multiplied. We must not comply with this multiplication of sin. There were already plenty before New Labour took power.
Those governments where belief and knowledge are confused tend to totalise knowledge. That’s the aim of a so-called ‘think tank’ often dear to governments. There is no other choice but to do this totalisation in language, in the Other of language, to use our jargon. The aim is to guarantee the Other, to make it the Other of truth, to make it complete and consistent, to stabilise it. By complete is meant it has to have enough signifiers to explain everything. By consistent is meant the Other must contain no contradictory elements.
In Seminar XI Lacan introduces us to Descartes’ Other which is the clear and distinct idea. Descartes’ Other is nevertheless deceptive. He desires an Other that would guarantee the truth and had to add a signifier to the Other in the hope that this Other of the Other, namely God, stabilise his deceptive Other.[6] The fourth principle is not to comply with the Other of truth, the Other of guarantee. There is no Other of the Other, that is, no metalanguage. There is only the Other that Descartes experienced as flawed in signifiers. Lacan would represent Descartes Other by crossing it with a bar. The barred Other is an Other that is unable to reply to everything, to explain everything, to make a theory of everything. It is decompleted of the signifier of the Father, and our belief fails. To completeness and incompleteness Lacan adds this term decompleteness, and we know then who discovered the flaw.
The rigour of logic goes so far, according to Gödel. Logic makes a decision on what is true and false. Aristotelian logic makes it in natural language. Modern logic creates an artificial language, that is, a formal system, in which the decision is made. (Examples of formal languages are Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica, Zermelo-Fraenkel’s Axiomatic Set Theory, Frege’s Foundations of Arithmetic.) Gödel’s incompleteness theorem asserts that the consistency of any formal language A cannot be proved by any statement within A. A statement S cannot be guaranteed as true or as false. It is undecidable. Lacan crosses the Other of language A with a bar. It becomes the barred Other, decompleted and inconsistent. Undecidability pushed Descartes towards the Other of the Other. The analyst may desire to provide an interpretation which attempts to complete the Other and to make it consistent, that is, to fill in the lack in the Other. Such an interpretation is neither true nor false but undecidable.
Is the analysand speaking a formal language? Lacan says that Freud’s drive is prohibited to psychologising thought.[7] Psychologising thought is done in natural language. In his introduction to the Foundations of Arithmetic Frege says that his method goes against psychologising thought. The notion of psychologising thought seems to be Lacan’s way of remarking on an incompatibility between language and drive, or since the notion of drive is itself enjoyment (jouissance), between language and enjoyment, an incompatibility that will not be maintained. Reduction of psychologising thought that could take a long time is to the Other that does not exist, that is, to the barred Other. The principle here is not to hand back truth into the hands of the Other.
The fifth principle is confidentiality of discourse which obliges us not to comply with the HPC’s insistence on good record keeping. The psychoanalytical discourse goes very far. Does it want me to transfer speech into a writing? Where does it want me to store these records? What does a government that has the desire to control society more robustly (a New Labour term also used by the Police) than ever want with good record keeping in this kind of practice? What does good record keeping have to do with the analysand’s safety? Good record keeping is implicated in the governmental tendency to totalise knowledge and stuffing the hole in the Other with it. It wants us to fill the hole in with records. I do not keep records of the speech of an analysand as part of the principle of confidentiality.
The Government floated a signifier known as CPD, continuing professional development. It, in fact, has been rather successful. The HPC will be controlling it. Psychoanalytical organisations of most sorts have always had a highly developed programme of CPD. According to Stepansky, it was intense enough and went far enough in the USA to produce a fractionation in the psychoanalytical community. Thanks to CPD one ended up with several psychoanalytical communities each guarding its distinct knowledge zealously.[8] Is this fractionation, as Stepansky calls it, a bad result? He seems to have some regrets that psychoanalysis has become a marginalised practice, but he doesn’t think it is a bad result. Psychoanalysis at the margins is freer, according to him. That may be the case in the USA, but there is a squeeze on freedom in the UK. (The Conservatives are not going to restore our civil liberties. The most natural coalition would be between New Labour and the Tories.) The HPC, being a New Labour structure, will exercise a unifying force on these practices. Knowledge will be transmitted by way of CPD and not by way of desire. The morality of power makes desire disappear in favour of the service of goods.[9] Power enjoys itself and gives itself a morality. It’s the famous tyrant who wants the good of his people. The sixth principle indicates to us that a rational subject must resist establishing a social bond with the HPC. The modern form of tyrant is the wise man. At the core of the social bond that New Labour wishes to establish is the myth of the wise man that is associated with the morality of power.[10]
The seventh principle is to inform the public and future analysands on my position in the matter of State Regulation of psychoanalysis by the HPC.
Richard Klein, Finsbury Park, London.
[1] Lacan, J., The Seminar, book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959-60), Routledge, 1992, p. 229.
[2] Hans Blix, Disarming Iraq, The Search for Weapons of Mass Destruction, Bloomsbury, 2004, pp. 263-4.
[3] Ibid., p. 7.
[4] Ibid, pp. 2, 7.
[5] Ibid., p. 7.
[6] Lacan, J., The Seminar, book XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1964), the Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1977, pp. 36, 39, 133.
[7] Lacan, J., ‘On Freud’s “Trieb” and the Psychoanalyst’s Desire’ (1964), Ecrits, W.W. Norton & Co., 2006.
[8] Paul E. Stepansky (2009), Psychoanalysis at the Margins, Other Press, N.Y.
[9] Lacan (59-60), op. cit., p.315.
[10] Lacan, J., ‘Proposition du 9 octobre 1967 sur le psychanalyste de l’Ecole’, Autres ecrits, Paris, 2001, p. 245.
