Psychoanalysis as Liberation from Moments

Psychoanalysis, in my opinion, can be best understood as a set of tactics, within rhetoric.

Persuasion is a beautiful thing.  When people disagree, they can fight, and one of them can defeat the other physically.  Or, they can try to persuade each other of their own worldview.  If this is successful, they will learn to understand each other, the two worldviews will come into harmony, and they will, at least in some sense, agree.  Sometimes the best way to persuade another person is through a straightforward logical argument, with a thesis statement, supporting evidence and reason, and so on.  But sometimes this is not the most effective tactic.

In the late 19th century, people were diagnosed with something called hysteria- something that is now no longer generally recognized as a legitimate medical diagnosis.  It was mostly women who were diagnosed with hysteria, and in fact the term has the same etymological root as "uterus."  Ancient Egyptians and Greeks had believed that hysteria was caused by the uterus traveling around inside a woman's body, giving rise to various disorders.  In the 1870s, Jean-Martin Charcot studied hysteria, which he called "The Great Neurosis," and considered to be a hereditary medical disorder that, he felt, explained the Medieval phenomenon of "demonic possession.  He made case studies of around 120 "hysterical" women - - including Marie Wittman, instutionalized in 1877 at Salpetriere, who became something of a celebrity hysteric, the subject not only of newspaper articles but also of famous paintings such as "A Clinical Lesson at Salpetriere" by Andre Brouilet (1887).  Charcot was said to hypnotize his patients and to operate them like puppets for his demonstrations in front of huge crowds of agog spectators.  In 1896, Charcot's young student, Sigmund Freud, wrote his own theory, "The Aetiology of Hysteria."

What does it mean to be hysterical?  We can picture the stereotype of someone in hysterics: typically, one imagines that the person is crying, or perhaps hyperventilating.  They may be sad, they may be angry, they may be afraid or worried or filled with anxiety or nervous or otherwise uncomfortable or frantic.  They may even be laughing.  In any case, their defenses are up, and they are unwilling or unable to listen to rational argument.  If one tries to reason with them, they will immediately say "No!" or some equivalent, without considering what one has to say.  The immediacy is the key.  U2 has a song, the refrain of which is, "You're stuck in a moment and you can't get out of it."  That is the essence of hysteria - the hysteric is a person who is stuck in a moment and can't get out of it.  The psychological defenses of a person suffering from hysteria are like a wall - an impasse, a kind of standstill.  Paradoxically, it's a situation in which there's a flurry of energetic movement, and yet nothing moves.

This is where psychoanalysis comes in.  Instead of a frontal assault on the wall of hysteria, psychoanalysis sneaks around behind enemy lines and tries to find a secret rear-entrance.  The psychoanalyst's surprise route is to ask the hysteric about their childhood, their parents, and so on.  Why?  The psychoanalyst is trying to break the hysteric out of the moment that they are trapped in.  In essence, the psychoanalyst is trying to restore a sense of story to the hysteric's life: a through-line, which connects events in their distant past, through the present moment, into the future.  And the psychoanalyst's greatest tool, greatest tactic, in the pursuit of the construction of this story, is a sense of the symbolic.  Through symbolism, the hysteric learns not only that their life is a story, but a story that has meaning.  The events of their childhood have a significance even for their lives today, and the promise of a lasting significance into the future.  Even our dreams, which people might otherwise brush off and forget as random nonsense, are given symbolic meaning.  Existentialists like to say that one's life has no given meaning, and that people give meaning to their lives.  This is what psychoanalysts do, by proxy: they give meaning to their patients' lives.  In short, a psychoanalyst mythologizes a patient's life.  This can be very powerful and effective, and can help people heal.

Freud saw sex symbolized in a variety of human endeavors.  For Jung, the central motivating force was not sex per se, but individuation - paradoxically against the backdrop of the collective unconscious.  Adler's "individual psychology," following Nietzsche, instead focused on power, and described how people form "superiority complexes" and "inferiority complexes."  And then came Viktor Frankl, and his idea of "logotherapy," which focused neither on sex nor on power, but rather on meaning.  For Frankl, the deepest drive, the deepest yearning that humans feel is the desire for meaning in their lives - and with the help of their therapist, people can indeed find meaning.

Perhaps hysteria never existed.  Or perhaps psychoanalysts cured hysteria.  Perhaps they built up our psychological antibodies, so that the general population developed a kind of herd immunity.  Or perhaps new strains of hysteria developed, and it mutated into different forms, more difficult to see as classic hysteria.  Who knows?

In any case, it's not clear that psychoanalysis is effective for anything besides classic hysteria, and it would be rash to assume that it is a panacea, a cure-all that can fix every kind of psychological distress.  Even for the classic hysteric, there may be side effects of psychoanalysis.  First, if the patient depends on the analyst for their life's meaning, this is a relationship of extreme dependence.  Second, psychoanalysis may work a little too well.  What I mean by that is that the psychoanalyst may analyze their patient, that is, they may interpret their patient, i.e., give meaning to their patient's life, and it will be too strong and lively an interpretation.  This may become a kind of fixed meaning for the patient - they may become overly defined by this analysis.  It may suffuse and permeate them in a way they can't escape.  In its own way, it may be even more confining than hysteria.  Rather than being stuck in a moment, they will now be stuck in a story.

It is interesting to compare psychoanalysis with Socratic dialogue.  They operate in a very similar way: through careful questioning.  Where Freud had his Id, Ego, and Superego, Plato had the tripartite division of the soul: Reason, Will, and Appetite.  But the goal of the two approaches is different.  Freud sought, through questioning his patients, to bring them to an emotional catharsis, which would allow them to realistically and rationally confront the neurosis brought on by their personal history.  His slogan was "where it (id) was, I (ego) shall be."  This meant replacing "hysterical misery with ordinary unhappiness."  Socrates instead brought his students to a rational aporia, which opened up the possibility of a divine mania, which was at the same time intrinsically erotic: confrontation with the beloved unknown.