By Andrea Hellemeyer
Psychoanalyst. Clinical Psychologist. MA in Psychoanalysis, University of Buenos Aires. Professor and researcher, University of Buenos Aires. andreahellemeyer@gmail.com
(Speech given at the conference on 26 September 2024: The effectiveness of psychoanalysis today. Amsterdam, the Netherlands.)
Good evening, everyone, it is a real pleasure for Grupo Tyché to be with you today and see a full room of people interested in psychoanalysis. Thank you very much for joining us. We also especially thank the people who are participating in the event virtually, from different cities and latitudes.
Today we will have two introductory interventions, by Lina Petraglia and myself, and then we will give the floor to our main speaker Luis Izcovich. At the end we will have time for a Q &A, and finally, we will be happy to have you join us for a quick borrel here in Spui, so we can get to know each other.
This event is the product of a work of thought and research that we have been developing at Grupo Tyché. Tyché is a working group formed by psychoanalysts who have their clinical practice in the Netherlands, and who have made the commitment to involve the psychoanalytic discourse in the conversation that takes place, in different areas of the social space, regarding the current problematics that question us.
We invite you to visit our website and get to know the members of Tyché as well as our work program. In fact, tonight formally marks the beginning of our activities for this second semester in which we will be working on the ethics of psychoanalysis.
The title we have chosen for today's event is: The effectiveness of psychoanalysis today. As you may have already noticed, the emphasis on today, which as a point de capiton (anchoring point) re-signifies the formulation, is certainly intertwined with the question of effectiveness.
Effectiveness and efficiency are two signifiers, master signifiers as Lacan names them, that have been gaining enormous preponderance in different spheres of our existence. Effectiveness and efficiency stand as organizers of the social bond, promising regulation through the supposedly good measure for all things. The right measure, the precise figure that will allow us to locate what has proven to be effective and what, due to its absence, must be separated, segregated, rejected.
This centrality of the figure, which we find in the forms of the protocol, model, evaluation curve, performance rating, has been gaining ground and spreading not only in the clinical field, but in many other areas where subjectivity, is produced.
Surely many of us have close examples of the effect of subjective suffering that this hegemony of incessant measurement causes in adult life in the world of work, and in children and parents, when the school operates under this logic.
Logic that bears the mark of the master discourse. Lacan, throughout his teaching, has taught us to limit the effects of master discourse. Among them, the identification of the subject to a signifier (S1) that becomes its own name: underperformer, underachiever and so on.
Name that has the particularity of being anonymous as the master signifier designates a generic category in which the subject is included as a mere element of the class, and, in this same movement produces a de-subjectivation.
The master discourse demands homogeneity. To do so it requires a rejection or exclusion of that element which has revealed as unassimilable when presented in its heterogeneous quality with respect to the established identity.
That is to say, the master discourse of effectiveness ignores the subjective sphere since it fundamentally seeks to identify and locate the individual. From this logic it operates by individualizing, in a plus or minus, with respect to a generic measure that is presented as synonymous to efficient performance, effectiveness. In this sense, any dispersion, any difference will be rejected, expelled.
Here then we introduce a first distinction that touches on the center of the ethics of psychoanalysis. The subject for psychoanalysis is not the person, it is not the individual, it is not the self, nor the consciousness nor the will. In this sense the subject does not belong to the record of the data, but precisely accounts for a discontinuity in the data.
The subject for psychoanalysis is what does not fit well, what does not make a series or a set. The subject is that which does not respond to a common measurement. In this way, the subject in its absolute singularity resists any kind of generalization and standardization.
This conception of the subject certainly contradicts the dispositives, discourses and practices that in different spheres of life push towards quantification and generalization.
In this line, for the analytical discourse, the subject is constituted at an ethical level. Why does the notion of subject belong to the domain of ethics? Because we know that ethics belongs to the field of decision.
To the extent that the person who suffers from a symptom, makes a slip of the tongue, or tells the narrative of a dream that has awaken them, will decide if this concerns to they or if it is a simply a matter of errors, or forgettable matters. If that, which is out of line with the common measure, it is in fact a question that directly point out to the subject.
In this way, analytical discourse introduces a distinction between what is said and the act of saying. Between speech and enunciation. To the willingness to say of the self, psychoanalysis proposes the location of the subject of the unconscious. This difference is central and supports the analytical act that leads those who come to a consultation, to the encounter with their own unconscious. With that which is foreign and unknown, but which is, at the same time, the most intimate and personal.
Thus, psychoanalysis distances itself from the discourses and practices that promote effectiveness understood as a plus or minus with respect to a common measure and introduces the subject of the unconscious in its absolute singularity.
Thank you very much.
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