Moutselou, Roxanne (2020) What can one expect from psychoanalysis, today? (PhD thesis), Kingston University, .
Abstract
This thesis examines the expectancy question in contemporary psychoanalysis. While in other psy practices, this question is approached in relation to the delineation of the treatment process and the results that can actually be delivered via specific methods whose effectiveness has been measured and approved, in the psychoanalytic clinic of the Lacanian orientation, this question is not as straightforward. Generally, it is contended to be a subversive practice which ultimately reveals the Other as non-existent at the level of a universally-valid meaning, and hence as a fantasmatic construction at a purely subjective level. When approached, this question takes on the value of a defense against a skeptical, or, most commonly, against a critical stance or attitude towards psychoanalysis in terms of its effectiveness and scientific validity. This defense is arguably what psychoanalysis considers precisely to be its specificity: its irreducibility to a discourse that claims mastery over its reality and its refusal to resort to a reduction of the subject to clinical categories which presumably contain the truth of the subject’s symptom(s) and offer ready-made recipes on how to readjust the subject to normalcy. My argument is that this subversiveness is nothing other than an ego-reinforcement that is centered around a convincingly demonstrated subjective contentment with the irreducible remainder of the symptom, namely with what is at once untreatable and attests to the fundamental singularity of the subject. What I examine is the ways by which this subversiveness is appealing to analysts and analysands alike, especially since the analytic process is claimed to be solely dependent upon the analyst’s position of non-knowledge in the clinical encounter. As I will show, the identification of the analyst with this position creates an ‘objective reality’ of, and for, psychoanalysis, allowing for the conditions of the formation of the unconscious and thus the possibility of proof regarding its effectiveness, a proof dictating the reinvention of psychoanalysis.
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