Secondary Gain 004
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.
Dear Secondary Gain,
The worst (sic) thing has happened to me, which is that I got (partially) what I wanted, and I demand that you fix my insecurities about it! Let me explain. You see, I wanted public recognition for my intellectual acuity—to demonstrate my effortless wit, my cool-headed perspicacity, and far-reaching sophistication—in the academic field and world of letters in which I tremble, agitate, move, and shake. It kind of worked, and I got some of that recognition. No, what am I saying? I fear that maybe I’ve had enough of that recognition! How did this come to be?
Well, in some sense, I decided to stop being an amateur social media commentator on my private, bookish passions, and started to write a bit about them, and then I aimed to become a working professional in that field. It’s worth saying, my dear advice-givers, that this field is your field, the work of clinical psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. I hadn’t fully absorbed what it would mean to start clinical work as a training practitioner, and I think I’m adjusting, as it were.
I’m such a fool, I feel, because it’s not been easy. What started as a bit, a little bit of theater, has now become, horror of horrors, my professional vocation and identity—a field I now represent in some refracted way. However foolish I might be, I need the APA to take me seriously, because I’m a serious clinician who fully knows, and is obedient to, the professional strictures, the ethics code, and so on. This evanescent but no less real pressure to be a professional clinician, I admit, has taken some of the fun out of thinking about psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic work as an amateur. I hadn’t planned to play the long game and become someone new through my training. Now my appetite is quite deferred, so much so that my appetite might have vanished altogether. It’s really freaked me out. My precious motivation has abandoned me just when I need it most to endure becoming a disciple of our practice. (In my analysis, I know that part of the thing here is that the appearance of selfless clinical work exploits my enjoyment of self-valorizing self-sacrifice, but that’s neither here nor there—just a, um, data point for your responses.)
Still, I’ve thought a bit about this, and I believe I’ve alighted upon the motivating contradiction here. Who knows if it’s exactly it, but this is part of the story I’ve started to tell myself that I want your advice on. I was inspired by your most recent battery of advice to the voyeuristic analysand who wanted to know a bit about their real analyst via how they represent their public life on social media. You did the right thing, in my view, and put the questioner’s question back to them, so they might think about it further. But you know what, I think they really had a point!
Who are these analysts, in public or private, really? Who am I as a clinician in training? A clinician in training is an extremely liminal identity, professionally speaking, and personally speaking it smacks a bit of fraudulence when I try to assume responsibility for that identity. “I’m not an authentic clinician,” yet, I tell myself at my most woundable. I worry my patients reserve similar judgment. In any case, when I’m in the consulting room, am I actually my authentic self or just some kind of function? Is this clinical function not a bit in tension with my public persona, let alone who I really think I am (whatever that means)? And given all this, what is the right clinical demeanor, exactly, on and off the field (to contort a sports metaphor)? If you’re a practicing clinician, who are you supposed to be in public? “Be yourself,” I suppose, as there are not many other options, but it never quite feels like that’s the full answer.
All in all, this heady mix of privacy and publicity, has made me feel insecure about being myself, which is shifting out from under my feet as I train and become disciplined into clinical work. After all, we clinicians are also the selves our patients see us as, and that’s difficult enough in the privacy of the consulting room, let alone when that difficulty becomes multiplied by the public social field.
Let me be simple now. The question is how can I be myself in public—how can I continue to write in public, think in public, be in public—while also juggling these various masks my patients put on me in order to work out their shit privately? It’s an ethical question; the APA even has guidelines on it, sort of. But I need real advice.
Ever thankful in advance,
Private Personae
Dear Private Personae,
What can I say? You admire yourself. Who doesn’t? I prefer the simplicity of Lacan’s formulation of narcissism: the enjoyment of the image of one’s body. I don’t really hear any problem with what you have presented in the well-written and fun letter you have addressed to us. You like to hear yourself talk and like to see yourself written? I’m guessing other people enjoy it too. It’s a win-win. I can also imagine that what you do publicly with words is a pretty good use of yourself, which is, of course, no more than a use of your symptom.
I have said this in other ways to other advice-seekers in this column. It’s worth saying it again. It’s a fundamental point about psychoanalysis that seems to be missed all the time in America, the land of individualism. We miss it because it’s so easy to be enamored with the idea that we are our ego. That we are something, anything, for the Other. That the Other might see who we are, like it or not like it, reject it, applaud it, whatever you like. At heart, this is the little delusion called the ego that gives some consistency to our being. It helps us get around in everyday life. To say that you are an analyst is no more delusional than to say you are a blogger or a woman or a good writer. You can relax and do your thing because you are not who you think you are, neither in public nor in private. Therefore you can continue being someone in public as long as you know that being is desire and desire is always the desire of the Other. Any persona you present will never be you because being is of the order of lack, lack-in-being, a want-to-be. We are mistaken about ourselves and so is everyone else.
See what works with each case in your practice. Some patients might love your public persona and want to talk about it in sessions. Feel free to ignore them. Maybe you have another patient who doesn’t want to know anything about you as a way to keep the Other at a distance; you could talk about what you are having for dinner. In analysis, we can read what is happening based on the effects of our interventions, because we never know what is going to work in advance. Basically, at one point in his Seminar, Lacan advises his audience that there is no need to put on airs, you can relax, because the patient will make a semblance out of whatever body is there in front of them anyway. The semblance they make of you is an image; it is not you. Why? Because strictly speaking you do not exist. What exists is the real of your symptom from which you work. Good to know about that. Accordingly, the formation of an analyst hinges on the analysis of that analysand, which one hopes is you.
Clinical psychology has nothing to do whatsoever with psychoanalysis. Follow the rules of your profession so you don’t go to jail and can keep practicing according to the law of the land. You can do what you want as long as it pushes each analysis to its end. Just don’t show your patients your private parts, and you’ll be fine. And get a supervisor who can help you make sure you leave your subjectivity at the door. Analysis is not about you; you are beautiful. Analysis is a discourse.
Yours,
Harris C.
*
Dear Private Personae,
Oh, you are raising such important questions about the persona of the analyst—how real is it, how real can it be? What does it mean to “be oneself” when working as an analyst? What are the implications of the analyst’s privacy, the analyst’s anonymity? And how does the ever-present reality of transference obtain, when under the spell of transference, the analyst is not the self-as-analyst—but must be an aspect of self that the analyst is willing to explore, to venture into, to dare to imagine? The patient will project into the analyst, and the analyst must be willing to become, temporarily that object—bad or good, hateful or benign, ideal or persecuting. And then how are you supposed to find, to locate, to feel like yourself, as an analyst in training, when you are—as we all are—still in formation?
It reminds me—perhaps idiosyncratically—of becoming a mother. People often talk about the experience of having a baby, but there is a gap between having a baby and feeling oneself to be a mother. Becoming a mother—to me—means that the baby/child must confer motherness on oneself. You don’t become a mother—or an analyst—in a vacuum, obviously. You come upon it in relation; you begin to inhabit it slowly, in relation. You become a mother, as you become a psychoanalyst, in the context of a social world, an institute, a peer group, your own analysis. You come to have confidence in your way of thinking—and your way of relating and learning, by virtue of these contexts, these relationships. And you come to know your vulnerabilities anew—in the analytic scenario—both as analyst and as patient. Taking hold of these, over time, you develop a sense of who you are. After a while, the gap between my analytic identity and my identity gets reduced, even though, when I work as a psychoanalyst, I am working and being in a way I am nowhere else. But some of how I work and be is absolutely drawn from who I am, my capacities, my strengths, and also, what O’Shaugnessy calls, my “no-go” areas.
You worry about fraudulence. I suppose the fraudulence would come if there were pretense, if there were a need to pretend to be something other than what you are. This makes me wonder about an idealization of the field. . . Is there some special knowledge you feel you do not yet have, but must pretend to have? Is there an idea of a particular posture or attitude that does not yet feel your own? The sense of knowledge, of a way one is as an analyst, does come, but it is never fixed; it is always subject to impact—depending on one’s patient, the interaction, the experience in the room. You are not, nor should you aspire to be, a fixed entity; you are in formation. . . Analysts, the best of us, know this. We are never once and for all. And I suppose the trick is to feel one’s bearings enough that this becomes tolerable.
And about the public / private thing. I wouldn’t worry about it too much. Transference will always have its say—regardless of (external) reality! And regardless of what you reveal publicly. I have had patients read very private things I have written and it doesn’t really seem to alter anything, except in maybe a session or two when they are acutely interested that I have had a certain kind of experience. But that fades, and transference returns.
Patients hear about us, and now, with googling, they can know all kinds of things—putting a check on the primacy of anonymity that was previously so crucial to analytic identity. I think it’s a good thing. That whole realm of the blank analyst has never been very good for anyone. And finding your way to an identity that is comfortable and real, but also supportive of the patient and the analytic process, is crucial. But it takes time. And time is valuable, inescapable. You can’t rush through. Part of the beauty is the painstaking time it takes to develop and the questions one asks as one goes. Make sure you have colleagues and peers with whom you can discuss and engage along the way who, in addition to your patients, will be crucial to your formation.
All the best with it.
Kindly,
Dr. Lina Donato
Dear Analysts,
Permit me the privilege to admire your respective responses. You’ve each beautifully spoken to different facets of my admittedly self-created dilemma. There’s so much inside it—a veritably internalized crisis of the position of the analyst, if I can put it that way. I’ve let this question gestate since I wrote you both, but I’ve not been able to answer it until you both lit up the core of the dilemma.
In this respect, let me also sharpen the contradictions of your respective responses. Even as I don’t exist, it’s not so easy to let myself go—to check my subjectivity at the door—but it’s true that analysis is not about me, that it’s a discourse, a playful theatre of what articulates itself and what doesn’t. Let my interventions be adequate to keeping that desire for articulation alive. Still, transference makes little objects out of my plural selves that don’t exist, and it is hard work to be adequate to the vicissitudes of that dynamic. Oh, to be an adequate object for anyone, even myself! Toward the beginning of my own analysis, I joked that I thought I was getting worse, that I was becoming wounded by the process, and I said, “Oh, no, I’m becoming that self-congratulatory thing, a ‘wounded healer.’” My analyst didn’t miss a beat: “You could eventually put it on a vanity plate.”
But knowing that I can’t forego this process—that my desire runs on the impossibility of giving up—I’ve come to appreciate the horizon you both share, but let me put it in my own imperative words (because those are the ones I tend to listen to): that I shouldn’t act and react in haste, that I should observe the ethics and boundaries of the profession, that I should keep myself available to mediation through supervision and the democracy of my peers, that I should trust what unfurls and develops, and that one part of what articulates itself in this process is my public life. And, finally, I should look to re-find a usable object of myself—one that tries not to contravene the analytic process, one that doesn’t put on airs or stiffens into a fixed program. Through these maybe I can secure the open-ended analytic process, even if I can’t secure myself.
As always, there’s a truth behind my earlier joke that I will leave you both with, and I think it has a political upshot: We probably can’t universalize this ethos—because its effects vary, and “cure” is elusive by any measure—but it’s beautiful to me that treatment for clinicians is about trying to heal oneself to be adequate to one’s world, so that you can help other people struggle in theirs. To me, that’s the hard-won principle of clinical work, and since it’s Mother’s Day, we could probably say it's a principle of mothering, too. May we keep that principle alive.
In solidarity,
Private Personae