For the closing, we have chosen a panel able to bring their thoughts on the issue of Control Analysis. The choice came from a reading workshop from the clinical cartel. We understand that there is a genuine concern at the EFBA. We find it crucial in relation to our ethic and our clinic. There are many reasons, but what we thought was that if the analyst is at least two -the one that produce the analytic act and the one that reads it and accounts for it- the princeps framework to question the analytic act is the Control Analysis, for what this space can be enlightening. It touches nerves that personal analysis hasn’t reached, and even in concluded analysis, it produces pending efficacies that were not able to achieve in another time.
_________________________________________________
Presentation by Verónica Cohen.
I began by thinking of three characters, three semblants of different discourses. The Analysand Subject, the one discovered by Freud, with a disposition to speak; the Supervisee Analyst, the one that comes to speak about his disposition for a case -who is also in an analysand position; and the supervisor analyst that we can call Teaching Analyst, the one who listens about the case.
The subject speaks. He knows without knowing and without knowledge about how he names himself. The analyst that speaks of the case, controls it. What does he control? The means of production of that speech. It would be a savoir-faire.
Savoir-faire there. It is not a technique, nor is it a division between clinical and theory. There is no theory, in psychoanalysis, without the analyst’s desire. It would be a philosophy. I like to put it in terms of a logic that knows about the unknown of the phallus and castration.
In Control Analysis one comes to speak of a case, but it is also the cavern Lacan speaks about in “Position of the Unconscious”, the cavern that opens up from the inside, only in the shadows of what occurs in another place, where something could find a way to be read.
Control Analysis deals with transferences and lateral transferences; with what makes us pregnant of truth with a fictional structure; with the inadequacy of the thing to the intellectual; and with what responds to another logic.
If it’s a question of subject oneself to something, it is to desire, not the phantasm; to put oneself under a signifier in order to produce it.
What can be taught when someone comes to speak of a case? The logic at stake, a conception of psychoanalysis in the way Lacan reads Freud.
Control Analysis does not replace Personal Analysis. It is necessary but not sufficient. Why? To be able to pass on, to teach such control of the means of production, what Lacan calls in “The Proposition…” the Agalma of the Analyst.
Teaching how to wait, to silence, to cut and not to link knowledge; Teaching a conception that comes from a trait, which begins with a primary repression, an empty space.
Teaching how to wait, to silence, to cut and not to link knowledge; Teaching a conception that comes from a trait, which begins with a primary repression, an empty space.
Naming comes from speech itself; it’s outlined in speech and it is re-signified retroactively, while re-signifying the former. Lacan called it Latent Nomination, the heart of the unconscious, a place of a speech that takes effects a posteriori.
If it wasn’t for the opportunity that something said can be re-signified retroactively, why would anyone bother with an analysis? It’s the opportunity in the speech itself. It’s a question of naming. What Lacan called a new presence in the world. To achieve something like that, it is necessary to learn not to diverge with knowledge, with what comes handy, with what it is convenient, etc.
Why would an analyst listen to a supervisee in control analysis? Perhaps, because of that logic that constitutes its Agalma, a logic that is not about the whole, but a logic that embraces a knowledge about the ex-sistence, a knowledge about having or not having, a knowledge that does not concern the being.
These issues are only passed through an analysis. Not only they leave a debt for the crime, as transformation from guilt to debt, but a debt with psychoanalytic discourse. The control analyst listens because there is a reason for the extension of the discourse at stake. A pending debt with the discourse where the guilt for the desire was solved, desire of death, hatred, envy, betrayal to convey; what is called pestilence.
What is called Supervision or Control Analysis can be a resistance when it substitutes an Analysis, because it impedes the path that puts the analysand on the path to put in cause his desire to analyze, his guilt solved in a debt, and his debt with the psychoanalytic discourse.
To transmit to a new one, something new. A knowledge about the void, an absence upon a name will be built and re-signified a posteriori. Retro-action over the “former” to put oneself under that name.
What can someone that comes to speak of a case teach us? What is it that arises in speech itself? What is outlined in speech that transforms the plot? An analyst that went through those steps can transmit the savoir-faire.
It’s a question of what is learned from one’s own unconscious in the Analyst's Analysis and in Control Analysis, through lateral transference. Therefore, it is from one’s own unconscious that one can learn what I called the control of the means of production of a speech.
Veronica Cohen.
__________________________________________________
Presentation by Cristina Marrone.
Control Analysis is one of the practices of psychoanalysis. But why one would have the impression to justify its existence? One could do without it as long as that is the consequence of having used it. Why? I'm going to make use of Safouan Lettres.
The internal structure of Control Analysis shed light on two essential points. First, that the transference always arises on the background of a certain countertransference, and second, what the analyst demands to whom is performing the control analysis is to read that countertransference.
However, the efficacy is only achieved if the category of power as such is call into question. But what kind of power are we referring to? How to understand it? The kind power we are dealing with is situated in direct opposition to the efficacy of the act.
Keeping the intervals that Lacan suggests for the three Freudian concepts -Inhibition, Symptoms and Anxiety- I propose Inhibition as the concept that strongly relates to the practice of control analysis. Moreover, the power that must be call into question to allow the efficacy of the act should be put into the account of the Inhibition. Inhibition that affects the analyst’s position in a particular way. Have not played the symptom and anxiety a role, already, for who is supervising in the experience of control? Undoubtedly yes.
Nonetheless, who comes to this experience is not there looking for a change in his subjective position; is not there looking for the signifier that represents him; on the contrary, he is there because of his position as analyst, position as object in the phantasm, object upon which he would try to take relief with respect to his patient.
Position from which the analyst -in transference- will erode the meaning, while extracting the letter, whenever possible. Inhibition opposes directly to the Act as a residual nucleus of jouissance, as a cork.
Inhibition is the concept that leads not only to the paralysis of the Ego and its functions –as the misery of obsessional neurosis clearly shows us- but also, this status of cork, relates the object to the most inertial aspect of the grammar of the phantasm.
Lets recall one of the latest findings on the subject when Lacan wonders, once again, what is Inhibition. The real is what makes us spin in circles; the real flees from us and that is why the inhibition takes place in the gap between the imaginary and the real. Now, if the inhibition occurs in such gap, it does so inasmuch as jouissance accumulates in the cord of the real with the consequent adherence to the image and a striking halt before the hole of the symbolic.
At that moment, the image is not produced from the hole, that is to say: the analyst's position does not oscillate -as semblant- between not knowing and not being. This is the core of Control Analysis: even when that hole in the symbolic is solved fundamentally with the analyst’s analysis, it is often not enough, since the power -that is not other than the power of jouissance- put it constantly at risk in each renewed encounter with the phantasm of his patient.
How to clear such hole through the second listening involved in Control Analysis, in transference? On “The economic problem of masochism…” Freud points out that the erogenous masochism goes with the libido in all its phases of development and borrows all of its changing psychical layers. Consequently, in each of the stations of the tour of the objects of the drive -oral, anal, phallic, voice and scopic- a masochist sediment will remain.
This sediment would be expressed -put it in Freudian terms- as empowerment drive or, even better, is the empowerment that turns into power of attraction, adherence of the erogenous masochism that can affect the analyst’s position as object of the phantasm for his patient.
There lies the power we seek: Nucleus of jouissance of the Inhibition, since it is not only a question of the analyst’s abstinence to the power that the transference makes possible, but also a question of struggling against the empowerment that -in excess- could capture him in its object position. How to beat such empowerment?
The power concerning the darkest trait of the real. To overcome such power will require a two-way job over the object. First, because of the slant of tenderness as first subtraction to the passion of the being, way in which excess is truncated although the object is kept. Second, because of sublimation, an act that introduces a cut in the phantasm.
The analytic act -on the side of the function of Sublimation- involves a change in the object itself and it reminds us that sublimation is not only a work of art. In sublimation the reproduction of the lack involves an ultimate cut. This is the structuring resource, paternal potency that enables to deepen the gap between imaginary and real, clearing away the hole of the symbolic. Control Analysis aims primarily at the recovery of the invention.
From the second listening, and due to a sublimatory effect, the inhibition of the first listening is cleared and raised, transforming the visible into readable, confronting the opacity of narcissism. Control Analysis, a practice that mirrors the position of the analyst, aims, ultimately, to the restitution of the psychoanalysis, re-produced anew in the core of each case.
(Reading a fable)
Momo, as the analyst, is summoned to clear the opacity of narcissism in the chronicity of a present without past or future, in the static time of inhibition. Thanks to that gap, which opens at the temporality, it becomes feasible the act as a rescue of the invention.
Cristina Marrone.
__________________________________________
Presentation by Isidoro Vegh.
Monica just named some of the reasons why this panel was proposed at the Symposium dedicated to Resistances. I think it's okay, because if we can recognize in the parish we walk, the Lacanian parish, something that between us has become an inhibition -as Cristina Marrone put it, and even when I may refer to another inhibition- maybe we can turn it into a symptom and do something better with it.
I mean, as so often said, responding to an error with a symmetrical position, is like winding up immersed in a symmetrical error. We know that the International Psychoanalytic Association demands, even today, two mandatory controls to be approved and performed by some of the few qualified analysts.
We know that everything that has to do with the analyst's desire cannot be established under the guise of a bureaucratic procedure. Also, to believe that this matter is solved by simply ignoring their practice is to make another mistake, and I believe that the mistake made in our parish was to put aside the practice of Control Analysis, practice that Freud proposed as one of the pillars of psychoanalysis.
According to Jones, Steckel –a practicing analyst and Freud’s patient- demanded Freud to talk about his cases after terminating his own analysis. Since then, Freud discovered that this was a valid way for the formation of the analyst.
Lacan was always classic on that subject and kept it that way as well as keeping the term didactic, and I believe that can be valid for us too.
I will put it in this way: the fact that control analysis is not mandatory does not mean that it is not necessary.
What are the structural reasons for that a young analyst -in addition to his didactic- also demands for a Control Analysis? As Veronica Cohen pointed out, they are not identical, they are distinguishable.
I believe there are contingent and temporary reasons; and there are necessary and structural reasons.
Regarding the former -which is the simplest to recognize- it is very rare, almost never happens, that someone begins his practice as an analyst at the end of his analysis. Lacan in “The Proposition…” teaches us that the end of the analysis comes about when the analysand passes from the position of analysand to the position of analyst. This is clear in theory, but in fact, never happens.
I didn’t do my journey like that and I guess neither of you. It is for practical reasons that the analyst is almost compelled to bring the obstacles in his practice to Control Analysis. This is just one side of the coin, the other side is much more important: even that one –who was able to finish his own analysis- would find Control Analysis very convenient and pretty helpful, for both structural and necessary reasons.
What does it mean that there are structural reasons?
I think that when Lacan moves forward in his theory to the point to propose the Sinthome, the fourth ring, as a part of the structure, Lacan is saying that there is something in the structure that is faulted and can only be solved in the real. Because the Sinthome is something that is played in the real, for an analyst it could easily be his own practice. Therefore, structural reasons: the fault in the structure of the analyst.
An irremediable fault, only solvable, like in any analysis, if beyond of what can be done with a parasitic jouissance from a symbolic perspective, it is also directed to some articulation suitable in the real. This is a structural reason for which the practice of the analyst emerges as an opportunity. Opportunity for what?
It can be for the worst and will then operate a perverse jouissance, where the phenomena described by Cristina may occur: a perverse jouissance experienced by the analyst as inhibition; or, the analyst himself operating the perverse jouissance on his analysands.
Supported through Control Analysis, the practice of the analyst can be seen as an opportunity for the better in its function of levy against this parasitic jouissance, facilitating creation and sublimation.
What is the structure of Control Analysis?
To begin with, we find an analyst that takes through his discourse whatever is happening in his practice with a patient. Takes his narrative to an analyst situated in a Function of Control. We have then, the analyst, his narrative, the patient which he refers to and the control.
What does the analyst’s narrative speaks of? Mainly, his patient’s sayings. Why? Perhaps to formulate his question, something that in that narrative comes as a question. This is not simple. and it’s usually easy to notice that as the analyst in formation becomes more experienced, the question to be formulated in Control Analysis becomes easier to grasp.
In the beginning the question cannot be formulated, what comes out -instead of the question- is the question in act, in the form of a slip. It’s the job of the control to be able to give that slip a value of a question. It would be a way of acknowledging the limits in act.
What kind of interventions the control analyst would carry out?
I think the control –it’s my position today- always begins with the narrative the analyst makes of his analysand. It’s possible that the analyst in control, after a while, may start sharing things about his own history. In that case, I believe it’s very important that the control only listens and intervenes on the narrative of the patient, not the analyst’s.
When this is not respected, usually appears what we might call a clinic of the control, which its classic manifestation is the triggering of conflicts in the analyst between his personal analysis and the control analysis. They begin to play as resistance to each other. I think it's an attitude of caution that the control intervenes only through the narrative of the analysand.
It will be by trying to take what the analyst says as an effect of the structure. This is a key point. Everything said by an analyst should be read as an effect of the discourse of the analysand being presented.
What is the primary task I find in Control Analysis today?
The first thing would be to encourage the analyst to the confidence of the discourse. That is to say, his own discourse and the analysand’s discourse, by helping the analyst -inasmuch as he is sensitive to his patient’s discourse- to discover the answers he is not capable of recognizing, although he possess those answers in his own discourse. It’s not about answers given by the control from the outside, but answers discovered within the sequence of the analyst’s narrative.
Secondly, to help the analyst assessing his own imaginary representations, and valuing his readings and affects as affections of the real. Why? Are we going back to the days of countertransference? No way. To reassess and to value affects, readings and imaginary representations would mean to acknowledge them, to accept them: by confronting them against the letter and contrasting everything the analyst receives as effect, without discarding anything that takes places in the session: this patient exhausts me, I love him, I feel sorry for her, whatever comes out.
The question will be: what -from all I’m experiencing in the session- is an effect? Effect -that triggered by the letter of the analysand- affects me as subject of the discourse.
What is the problem with that letter? Why even go to the control analysis? Because, in fact, the encounter with the unconscious is complicated for anyone, even for the analyst. The unconscious –all he wants- is to return. But there are resistances opposed to that return. What are the primary resistances that one usually notices in a Control Analysis?
The first obstacle to be removed is to help the analyst to trust in the letter he posses, even without knowing. He can count on something far more valuable than just listening to the meaning.
Secondly, to be flexible with the theory we have with respect to our patients. Once in a while it’s important to wonder: Is it really like that?
Thirdly, perhaps the most complicated, to contrast the analyst’s interventions against the letter he himself posses. Letter that may show another path for his interventions in addition to manage his parasitic jouissance in a different way.
Control Analysis is not about imparting knowledge; it is not either an artisanry teaching, as in know how to do it. It is about savoir AND faire. That is to say, savoir-faire-there. Savoir-faire with what? With his being.
It is crucial that the analyst has a good relationship with his being, with his entire being, with his kindness and even with his badness. If there is no such confidence in what his own being offers, the practice of analysis is impossible.
Isidoro Vegh.
Translated by Pablo Xavier Benavides.
