Out of You and Me
SECURITY: clinical conflict iI
Emmanuel Cairo, Chicken Shawarma, 2024
No one believes that what happens inside the analytic space stays there. That’s the whole point. What is worked through, worked out, and worked within the four walls and fifty minutes will refract outside in ways both perceptible and diffuse. But what about when what happens in one analytic space burrows far into another, long after the first has been terminated?
What I know of what happened inside that first space, between a friend (let’s call them SL) and their analyst, in the days just after October 7, comes from a series of frankly garbled and slightly shrill texts and voice memos sent to a longstanding group chat whose ambit covers everything from domestic squabbles to geopolitics to oozy gossip. Talking too quickly, muffled by the din of street noise around them, SL jammed all their distress, confusion, and betrayal into repeating—over and over again—the only thing their analyst had said in the last five minutes of their session: “Why didn’t they just leave?” They, here the third-person plural not the gender-neutral singular, were the people of Gaza, who had by then been subject to what Israel declared was a “complete siege.” Gripped by anguish and rage and terror at the violence that had been unleashed, it’s not as though SL assumed there was any universal position on what was happening. It’s complicated. The perfect psychoanalytic set up. There was only ambivalence, only grief without compensation, only anger at unreachable objects. Maybe this is why SL thought that, of all the places, analysis was where to work through the everything and nothingness. Maybe this is why SL believed the analytic compact would extend to this state of unbearableness.
SL, like many of us, goes to analysis seeking clarity, succor, or, at least, the kind of silence that allows us to imagine someone listening with minimal judgment. Over the first forty-five minutes of their session with their liberal, Upper East Side Jewish analyst, SL practiced the vulnerable volubility in which they had been so well-trained over years of analysis and therapy. Assume the transferential position. Trust the process. So we can forgive SL for not quite seeing how they had moved towards saying the unsayable without noticing the Rubicon as they crossed it. Transference here had blinded them. It would be a betrayal of the analytic relation to not say what SL had already understood to be unsayable outside the analytic space. It was already by then quite clear that any expression of untrammeled solidarity with the people of Gaza could only be uttered when sandwiched in condemnations of Hamas and October 7. That, in fact, to speak of the genocide being perpetrated on Palestinians by the state of Israel had to be only an occasion to condemn, condemn, condemn Hamas. SL, myopic in their transferential posture, missed the signs. And was therefore unprepared for the quiet, singular response by their analyst at the close: “Why didn’t they just leave?” In the scant minutes that were left in the session, SL tried to read every mitigated version of that statement, seeking confirmation and sameness from their transferential object. What they got instead was a clarity they couldn’t convey in the group chat. The rest of the sentence. “Why didn’t they just leave in 1948?” Why didn’t Palestinians just vanish at the advent of Israel? SL terminated the next day.
The continual invitation of the analytic space that we might within it utter the unspeakable is also, of course, the promise that we might be punished for it. SL’s termination wasn’t the punishment. Not really. Termination is inevitable; it is the point. No, the price of the unsayable here got meted out beyond the analytic space. It got group-texted into my psyche and then into my own analytic space. “Why didn’t they just leave” sits on the couch next to me every week, months later, as I do not say one thing that is so many things to my own analyst. My repertoire of the unsayable has grown by unexpected measures. It isn’t fair nor is it true to the promise of psychoanalysis to believe that what happens in one analytic space will translate legibly to another. I should not expect recognizable repetition. My own therapist—whom I understand to be an older, liberal Jewish lesbian—would have warned me against it if I had said as much. But I don’t, I haven’t. Despite talking for months and years before October 7 about Palestinian liberation and imagining the end of occupation and the critiques of Zionism to fill our regular sessions, I have relinquished something of what can be said in the analytic space now. For terrible, fearful, and utterly mundane reasons. For reasons that I am sure would be worthy and necessary of their own working through.
If, as Freud says in “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” the rule of analysis is that it must be “carried out in a state of frustration,” I, here in my unspeakable state, have conceded to a state of frustration that will prolong the psychoanalytic relation. If I am to say the thing, then I know that the tension will ease, there will be some (minor) satisfaction of the frustration. That satisfaction may be termination. That satisfaction may be the end of our analytic relation. And so I choose frustration. I proffer, as guard against the unspeakable, a host of other conflicts and symptoms to the analytic space as though they may compensate. In this way, perhaps the violence of the unsayable that I have taken into myself is psychically productive. As the decimation of life in Gaza continues, as I count before and after and during my session the number of children starved and civilians gunned down while waiting for flour, I talk about so many other things. Unearth new conflicts to fill the hour. Of course, I know, outside, that there is another option. That she might say a different thing, one affirming or monstrous or bland. Each session that I swallow the word Palestine and expel something less spiky its place, I think of the romance Freud imagined of transferential love when he wrote that “psycho-analytic treatment is founded on truthfulness. In this fact lies a great part of its educative effect and its ethical value. It is dangerous to depart from this foundation.” As though truthfulness is possible, in practice or in fantasy. As though the analytic space isn’t built on the danger of the unspeakable. As though that isn’t somewhere the point too. And so I embrace the betrayal of the compact, hold fast to the lie.
NB: Immediately after writing this, I told my therapist. Somewhere in the fifty minutes of talking around what is actually unsayable, she drops a tiny footnote: she is, you see, not Jewish at all.