Secondary Gain 003
The Anti-Advice Column of Parapraxis
Secondary Gain is an anti-advice column. It follows in the tradition of other psychoanalytic experiments that have opened up the consulting room using media: from Susan Isaacs’s advice columns in the interwar period and Winnicott’s radio broadcasts during World War II to experiments with radical radio, like Fanon’s understanding of the power of the radio in the Algerian Revolution and Guattari’s work on Radio Libre Paris in the late ’70s. Yet, in keeping with psychoanalytic principles, advice is not directly offered, and columnists don’t presume to offer treatment or cure or serve as a proxy for long-term care. Instead, three columnists come together to think with, and alongside, their questioner, who always has the final word.
Your columnists, writing under pseudonyms:
Dr. Harris C. is a psychoanalyst practicing in Brooklyn, New York.
Dr. Lina Donato is a Kleinian psychoanalyst in private practice.
Dr. Hodï Green is a psychoanalyst practicing in New York City.
Dear Secondary Gain,
Earlier this year, I asked my partner for a divorce. We had been together for ten years, married for three, separated for one. I asked them to move out after a series of betrayals, and took a year to think about how I wanted to move forward with our marriage.
I am in therapy myself (ten years total, five with the one I’m seeing now). I am also a student of psychoanalysis, a consumer of “therapy media,” and a reader of novels and films about love and loss. After the separation, I took a deep dive into this canon to try to understand what went wrong and use other people’s problems to reflect on my own. How do we forgive after someone has broken our trust? How do we decide whether we can save a relationship, or whether we want to? When do we choose ourselves over another person? How do we know if we were happy with them, if we could be happy with them again, if we are better off with someone else?
Here’s the problem: no matter how many Esther Perel podcasts or Couples Therapy episodes I have watched, my decision to leave does not hurt any less. But I keep reading, watching, and listening in case I find an answer for why, in the end, I decided to leave. My therapist, too, has a lot of patience helping me connect my insights to the present day, but I feel frustrated and stuck on the same questions: what happened, why didn’t it work, why couldn’t I forgive, when will it stop hurting.
What is the line between diagnosing a problem and not being able to let go?
Sincerely,
Loved and Lost
Dear Loved and Lost,
I feel you. I often wonder why the terrain of love is the most impassable. I remember at one point saying in heartbroken distress to my own analyst: “I wish there were a pill I could take to eliminate libido.” She replied: “That is the worst thing I have ever heard.” Point taken. Actually there is a sort of a pill for that, SSRIs, yet nothing can eliminate libido for those bodies that are occupied with speech and language.
I noted in your letter that you had been with your partner for ten years, and you have also been in treatment for ten years. I appreciate that you recognize the lack of utility of therapy media, all the while freely using it. Why not? As long as you don’t hope to find an answer in anything that is marketed for everyone. I was sitting down to write to you, and I saw a feature in The Atlantic on the twenty-four-year-old TikTok therapist who is now a nationwide bestseller. The article mentioned that she had “questionable credentials,” as if credentials mean anything at all for clinical work. I don’t see her project as so problematic—more symptomatic of our times. Perhaps another attempt to find a universal solution to suffering that can only be singular. When will we learn that such an attempt is complete folly? The coordinates that mark each of our modes of enjoyment and suffering couldn’t care less about what is healthy or good or just. In my experience with couples therapy, the best we can do is try to hone the intractable problem between two (or more) people and get them to find a way to live with it or leave it. At the end of the day, there is no formula for the “sexual rapport,” as Lacan called it. There is no relationship solution, no solving for the lack of sense in the sexual that Freud bumped into. It’s the ab-sense in the sexual field that founds and animates every relationship. We just hope that the union of two symptoms is bearable enough to allow for the contingency of love that makes life itself more tolerable.
Let’s go to your question, which is an excellent one. A well-framed question counts for a lot. In fact it’s often the best we can do in psychoanalysis, particularly when confronting impossibility. What happened, why didn’t it work, why couldn’t I forgive, when will it stop hurting? A what, two whys and a when. Love is in bed with knowledge if we follow Lacan and pursue Freud’s discovery of the phenomenon of transference. Knowledge has to do with the unconscious. What happens in love, the choice of a partner, the fantasy we have about relationships, and indeed what happens in a relationship are importantly unconscious. At least the important stuff is unconscious. Luckily by now, we know that “making the unconscious conscious” is a misconception of what happens in analysis. Consciousness has nothing to do whatsoever with the unconscious. They are not opposites or inverses. So perhaps for now you will never know those whys, whats and whens. One’s relationship to knowledge itself changes if an analysis is pursued toward its end.
What I could offer you is that after your next relationship, and then after the following one, you might be able to look back at this one that vexes you and see the outlines of an unconscious fantasy that you have employed, like we all do, to cover over something more painful than the aftermath of separation and divorce. Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel. I leave Lacan’s infamous aphorism without translation because that’s precisely the point—what is impossible to translate between two people. Keep going with your analysis, and see if you can make this impasse, the one that is fundamental to the sexual, speak even more.
Lots of love,
Harris C.
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Dear Loved and Lost,
I have the sense that being unable to forgive is linked with being unable to grieve, that grieving would be the way forward, a way of letting both your partner and yourself off the hook. In this way, grief and forgiveness go hand in hand. To grieve is to realize a loss, to face it, and with it, to accept disappointment, failure, pain—not in a state of blame but rather in a state of understanding. I am not sure it’s always possible to forgive, and certainly forgiveness is not always called for. But the problem is that without forgiving the other, one is in a state, potentially, of holding a grievance, which works against grief. Grievance is aimed at preserving the tie to the object, rather than letting go or modifying it. It is aimed precisely at NOT letting the other off the hook. And then ultimately it also means one doesn’t let oneself off the hook either—hence the feeling that you can’t quite free yourself.
Long ago, a student of mine referred to this kind of pain cycle as being married to the wound, so the first point to consider is whether that seems applicable—is the wound so alive because it preserves something of the bond. In this way, forgiveness is a way of separating; it entails being able to be separated from the source of your pain. Sounds like you might have slipped into a melancholia where you’re not able to actually feel the loss, but are caught in a series of self and other accusations that actually work to deny the loss. Keeping the pain alive keeps the relationship alive. Part of melancholia is the way we wind up identifying with the accusation we feel was leveled against us, by the now-lost object.
Sounds like in losing the trust in your spouse you have also lost a bit of trust in yourself. Maybe you have come to a feeling of uncertainty about whether someone else can love you. The intricacies of the way we hold our internal objects is one of the things that psychoanalysis can illuminate. Often, along with the experience of betrayal, there is the feeling of wanting to remove oneself, keep oneself at a distance—as if all faith in love is destroyed. Maybe you are holding yourself in place—out of fear or anger (and the fear of feeling loss)—and maybe this unwittingly is cutting you off from love.
With hopes for your recovery of your own feelings of love,
Dr. Lina Donato
*
Dear Loved and Lost,
Every day people lose objects to distraction, places to exile, people to death, memories to oblivion, and ideals to disillusionment. We also lose the love of a loved one, or our love for them. We lose the image or fantasy through which we used to see them, or who we felt we were as seen through them. Loss creates a hole within the whole of our experience. You are not alone.
Insofar as our most intimate sense of the world is constituted by our libidinal attachments to those who are closest to us, separations such as divorce have the capacity to shatter our sense of who we are and the ground on which we stand. We are left shaken, and it is as if our emptiness is consumed by questions (“Why didn’t it work?,” “How do we know if we were happy?,” “When will it stop hurting?”) that create parallel universes of doubt and anxiety.
Perhaps all losses undermine, in one way or another, our trust in the world, our feeling secure that it would never betray us with abandonment. Losses become ghosts that hover over the everydayness of our lives. Your questions without answers that could satisfy or pacify reverberate in me the feelings of a collapsed world (both our love for it and our being loved by it), of the world as a trusting partner who listens to our hopes and sorrows. Psychoanalysis says that sometimes questions that take over our minds cover up wounds that threaten us with an unbearable pain. We think—we doubt—to avoid feeling. This is an unconscious process; we would rather not think, nor doubt, but we just find ourselves “stuck on the same questions.”
Freud has shown us that once we love or desire an object (a person, an ideal, a nation), it is very hard, if not impossible, for us to abandon this love or desire. He says: “We only see that the libido clings to its objects and will not renounce those that are lost even when a substitute lies ready to hand.” Being stuck in questions shows both how terrifying a new world (of love) can be and how a part of us always remains devoted less to our love objects and more to the love we threw out into the world.
The philosopher Stanley Cavell speaks of the lesson Freud offers in his essay “Mourning and Melancholia” on the difference “between the pain of losing what a world has meant for us, and the pain of returning to a world which must contain loss.” The “must” is crucial here, and perhaps this plays a part in “not being able to let go,” a painful resistance that no one who loves or has loved is a stranger to. It can be arduous and indeed painful to receive the world as that which “exists for us only in its loss (you might say its absence), or what presents itself as loss,” as Cavell says.
No Esther Perel, no commodified form of mediatic “mental health,” and what has been called its “tyranny of happiness,” can mitigate this pain, which psychoanalysis tells us is at the heart of living a human life. Feel-good therapy media, which reduces the complexities and idiosyncrasies of loss and mourning to formulas, only makes people feel misunderstood deep down. I resist believing that people want to be happy at the expense of losing their soul.
If the world exists for us only in its absence, then life is, for psychoanalysis, an open-ended process through which we must practice constant exercises of loss, but also recoveries, and the lessons that only they can teach us. This takes the time, patience, and attention you have given to yourself during your analysis. Try to stick with it. Mourning has its own time. Perhaps the questions coming to an end without you needing to have all the answers will be the answer you’ve been looking for.
Warmly,
Hodï Green
Dear Secondary Gain,
How strange that a chorus of voices acknowledging heartbreak could be so comforting. When I shared these responses with my therapist, she mused over the intelligent and daunting idea of the world with which psychoanalysis presents us. It is both exciting and terrifying to know that there is nothing to do but open myself up to the truth that all we can do is learn how to lose better. I am not good at losing.
One response that astutely traced the shape of my pain was by Dr. Lina Donato, who said that I have lost trust in myself, in my ability to be loved, in love in general. This is the truth I keep returning to in my own analysis: I feel like a person who has lost her faith. And I am grasping, as Harris C. pointed out, for the comfort of the unconscious fantasy that covered over this knowledge, which, as a student of lack, I didn’t actually know.
To quote Lacan in Seminar XII: “love is giving what you do not have (to someone who doesn’t want it).” Right now, I fear that I live in a world where nobody wants what I do not have to give, and that instead of confronting the source of that fear, I keep retracing my steps to make sure that I will never give anything unbidden again. This ensures not only that I cut myself off from love, but that I refuse to move on to a new reality that includes that loss.
I’ll keep these responses in mind as I learn to love in the new world I find myself in, as they at least each remind me, in their own way, the small yet comforting truth that I’m not alone.
Warmly and with gratitude,
Loved and Lost