In Search of Freedom:

An Exploration of the Applicability of Concepts of Freedom for Understanding the Aims

and Effects of Psychoanalysis

A Dissertation

Presented to the Faculty

of

The Gordon F. Derner

School of Psychology

Adelphi University

______

In Partial Fulfillment

Of the Requirements for the Degree

Doctor of Philosophy

______

by

John Burke, M.A.

January, 2021

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COMMITTEE PAGE

Committee Chairperson:

Joseph Newirth, Ph.D.

Committee Members:

Karen Lombardi, Ph.D.

Michael O’Loughlin, Ph.D.

Laraine Wallowitz, Ph.D.

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Acknowledgements

Researching and writing this dissertation was a long and challenging process that pushed me to my limits. I would not have completed this project without the support of so many people.

To start, I am grateful to Joe Newirth for creating an open atmosphere for learning, for guidance, for encouragement, and for his generosity. You’ve been a great influence Joe and I feel very lucky to have had you as a mentor. I will miss our meetings. I would also like to thank

Karen Lombardi whose courses, co-leadership of our research group, critical perspectives, and warmth helped me develop my dissertation and grow as a thinker and person. Thank you to

Michael O’Loughlin for conversations about writing that were a source of inspiration, as was your enthusiasm for attending to subjective experience. And thank you to Laraine Wallowitz for participating in my dissertation committee along with Joe, Karen, and Michael.

I also extend gratitude to my patients, from whom I am always learning.

Finally, I could not have completed this dissertation without friends and family in my corner. Thanks to all the friends whose conversation and faith in me were lifelines, especially

Diane Conroy and Chris Reyes. Thanks to Zeynep Sahin for being an invaluable friend and ally at Derner and beyond. And deepest thanks for unwavering support and love to my parents, my siblings, Daniel and Grace, and my brother-in-law, Joel.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ………………………………………………………………………………………….. 5

Introduction: Is Psychoanalysis About Freedom? ………………………………………………. 7

Chapter 1: Freud’s Freedom: The Facilitation of Freedom in Freud’s Treatment of Dora and

Rat Man ………………………………………………………………………………………… 17

Chapter 2: Subjectivity as Freedom: The Development of Subjectivity in Winnicott’s

Thinking ...……………………………………………………………………………………… 72

Chapter 3: Symbolic Castration and Psychological Freedom: Preliminary Explorations of

Lacan’s Model of Psychic Development ……………………………………………………... 146

Chapter 4: Imprisoned in the Imaginary: The Case of the Incels …………………………….. 179

Chapter 5: Castration… and then?: The Further Freedom to be Found Through Possession of the Symbolic ..……………………………………………………………………………… 215

Conclusion: A Multiplicity of Freedoms in Psychoanalysis: Unifying Themes, Open

Questions, and Final Thoughts ……………………………………………………………….. 252

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Abstract

The psychoanalytic theory and treatment literature is vast and diverse, containing many different conceptualizations of the aim of treatment that are rarely compared (Lear, 2009). This dissertation hypothesizes that a meta-theme within psychoanalysis is the implicit aim of promoting the experience of psychological freedom, with different psychoanalytic models elaborating different understandings of freedom and its promotion based upon differing perspectives on psychological development and analytic technique, while also being united in privileging agentic subjectivity as a goal of treatment. These claims are developed through review of historically significant texts within the psychoanalytic literature, review of published case studies, discussion of cultural phenomena, and discussion of a psychotherapeutic case conducted by the author. Specifically, the author discusses the writing of Sigmund Freud and his

“Dora,” “Rat Man,” and “Little Hans” cases, the writing of Donald Winnicott and Margaret

Little’s account of her analysis with Winnicott (1985), the writing of Jacques Lacan, the contemporary phenomenon of “Incels” (alienated men who identify as “involuntary celibates”), and one of his own cases. Through discussion of these materials, it is argued that “freedom from” the interference of intrapsychic conflict is central in Freud’s model of treatment, while the work of Winnicott focuses on development of “freedom to” act as a vital, creative, separate, and secure subject. Finally, the work of Lacan complicates the question of freedom, conceptualizing psychoanalysis as a process by which subjectivity is claimed by the analysand who comes to center on their own desire, while also maintaining that this desire is shaped by the experience of living within a symbolic order that precedes the analysand. The conclusion of this study discusses the relationship between aggression and the experience of freedom and the importance of representation of experience in the development of reflective agency, concepts the author sees

6 to be emergent from the literature reviewed, as well as discussion of limitations of this study and areas for future investigation, in particular the need for interrogation of this dissertation’s intrapsychic conceptions of freedom in relation to collectively-oriented, socially-mediated forms of oppression such as racism, patriarchy, regimes of heteronormativity, colonialism, material impoverishment, and political repression.

Keywords: psychoanalysis, freedom, subjectivity, agency, Freud, Winnicott, Lacan, reflection, object usage, creative living, Incel, imaginary register, symbolic castration, dialectization, desire

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INTRODUCTION

Is Psychoanalysis About Freedom?

Patients enter psychotherapy seeking a variety of results: symptom relief, more satisfying relationships, support in a lonely world, and the list goes on. When considered in detail, each patient seeks something unique and what is sought from treatment evolves for the patient as time in psychotherapy progresses. In the more structured, symptom-focused treatments, both psychodynamic and cognitive-behavioral, this evolution in understanding of what is desired from treatment may remain implicit due to emphasis on diagnostic categories taking precedence over attention to the patient’s shifting self-understanding and emerging awareness of previously unknown fears and desires through treatment. Instead, the goals specified at the outset are reached, and the treatment ends. But even in these seemingly straightforward cases, when the overwhelming aspect of life that brought the patient into therapy is relieved, the patient may leave with a new retrospective understanding of the goal of their treatment. Looking back on their experience may show that psychotherapy achieved an end different from the wish for symptom relief that brought them into treatment.

For example, a patient may enter treatment citing lack of energy and isolation. If her or his vitality increases after treatment, what is the best description of the course of psychotherapy?

It can be said to have addressed the presenting symptoms, but by addressing presenting symptoms, does the patient not thus move into a new position in which he must then consider how he will live going forward? Did the treatment “resolve the depression” or did it bring him or her into a position to find his own questions about how to live? Likewise, another patient may enter treatment speaking of frustrations in social relationships and overwhelming anxieties.

Whatever intervention and process of change model the therapist applies, the patient comes to

8 feel less fear, leading to a new question: again, how do I prefer to live now that the thing that left me feeling I could not live is lessened?

What are the implications of these observations regarding the nature of psychotherapy? I hypothesize that psychoanalysis (or psychoanalytic psychotherapy) in fact contains an implicit goal, which is an orientation toward the promotion of human freedom, and the dissertation that follows will investigate this claim.

The question of psychoanalysis’s underlying orientation and the possibility that the development of human freedom is the organizing principle in treatment has generally remained unaddressed, with one exception, which is Jonathan Lear’s concept of analysis as a process for promoting freedom and discussion of the aspects of freedom emphasized by different psychoanalytic schools (2009). Lear begins by introducing the concept of “final cause” to the discussion of the psychoanalytic treatment. Regarding the definition of “final cause,” he writes,

“it is that towards which all the activities are aiming: it is what they are for, what they are aiming to promote” (p. 1308). Lear reasons that the choices made by the psychotherapist depend on what aim (i.e. what final cause) they conceptualize treatment to seek. He states his understanding of the importance of “final cause” most clearly when he writes (2009):

Philosophical inquiry lies at the heart of psychoanalytic technique. Even in the minutest

here-and-now moment of a psychoanalytic session, how can we evaluate it properly if we

have only the vaguest sense of what we are aiming for – or why we are aiming for that

and not something else?... [Clinical practitioners] cannot really understand their own

clinical activity if they lack understanding of what it is they are trying to bring about – or

why it is worthwhile to do so (p. 1315).

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Furthermore, Lear proposes that freedom is the aim of psychotherapy. My own interest in the topic arose prior to reading Lear’s article, but his comments regarding the place of freedom in treatment and the need for investigation into this topic align with my own. I find that he frames the issue very succinctly and I agree with his below cited (2009) argument placing freedom at the center of analytic practice:

I want to suggest that a wide range of analysts already agree (often implicitly rather than

explicitly) that psychoanalysis seeks to promote some kind of freedom, but freedom

functions as an open-ended signifier: it points us in the direction of openness, but

ironically is itself open-ended about what this might mean. Precisely because the concept

of freedom lacks determinate fixed boundaries, it is of special value: we are invited to

seriously consider – as well as play freely – with disparate images of freedom (p. 1300).

Lear then discusses the meaning of freedom and proposes that the freedom promoted by psychoanalysis has multiple aspects, emphasizing freedom of mind, freedom of speech, and freedom to be and let be, while also noting that this is a preliminary list. This is where my own argument departs from Lear’s.

Rather than developing the aspects that he presents, I will take Isaiah Berlin’s “Two

Concepts of Liberty” (1969) as my foundation for discussing the aspects of freedom promoted by psychoanalysis. Isaiah Berlin was a philosopher, critic, and historian of ideas who wrote and occupied a prominent position as a public intellectual in the middle part of the 20th century. He was born into a relatively affluent Jewish family in Latvia in 1909 and emigrated to Britain with his family following the Russian Revolution. After World War II, he wrote and spoke about the value of cultural pluralism and liberty, emphasizing the importance of differences between people, negotiation, choices between values, and free speech in social life and politics, in

10 contrast to the subordination of individual experience to a single truth and a single enlightened vision which he perceived to generate oppression in the Soviet Union (Berger, 1997). There was no one truth, one power, or one solution in Berlin’s view of the world.

These interests led Berlin to think and write about freedom, and my contention is that he presents a useful and cohesive framework for conceptualizing freedom and, therefore, that using his work as a foundation for exploring the centrality of promotion of freedom in psychotherapy will result in a more comprehensive understanding of freedom’s place in treatment and the implication of emphasizing this final cause.

In “Two Concepts of Liberty,” Berlin divides freedom into its positive and negative senses. The negative sense of freedom is freedom defined by the absence of interference in the individual’s pursuits (1969):

I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no man or body of men interferes

with my activity. Political liberty in this sense is simply the area within which a man can

act unobstructed by others. If I am prevented by others from doing what I could otherwise

do, I am to that degree unfree; and if this area is contracted by other men beyond a certain

minimum, I can be described as being coerced, or, it may be, enslaved (pp. 15-16).

He elaborates this conception of “negative freedom” when he writes (1969), “By being free in this sense I mean not being interfered with by others. The wider the area of non- interference the wider my freedom” (p. 16). Additionally, he further describes the link between negative freedom with the absence of interference with his claim (1969), “liberty in this sense means liberty from; absence of interference beyond the shifting, but always recognizable frontier.

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‘The only freedom which deserves this name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way,’ said the most celebrated of its champions [John Stuart Mill]” (pp. 19-20).

Turning to his concept of “positive freedom,” Berlin describes this aspect of freedom to be defined by the experience of self-determination (1969):

The ‘positive’ sense of the word ‘liberty’ derives from the wish on the part of the

individual to be his own master. I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself, not on

external forces of whatever kind. I wish to be the instrument of my own, not of other

men’s, acts of will. I wish to be a subject, not an object; to be moved by reasons, by

conscious purposes, which are my own, not by causes which affect me, as it were, from

outside. I wish to be somebody, not nobody; a doer – deciding, not being decided for,

self-directed and not acted upon by external nature or by other men as if I were a thing, or

an animal, or a slave incapable of conceiving goals and policies of my own and realizing

them… I wish, above all, to be conscious of myself as a thinking, willing, active being,

bearing responsibility for my choices and able to explain them by reference to my own

ideas and purposes. I feel free to the degree that I believe this to be true, and enslaved to

the degree that I am made to realize that it is not (pp. 22-23).

Unpacking these definitions of freedom, they can be summarized as “freedom from” and

“freedom to.” An individual who has “freedom from” seeks to actualize their wishes without interference. An individual possessing “freedom to” experiences a sense of control over their own will and life. While the two senses of freedom on the surface may be difficult to differentiate, they represent divergent conceptions of human experience. Negative freedom depends on a vision of human life in which it is the desire to be free from oppression that dominates. Positive freedom, on the other hand, identifies self-actualization as a central concern

12 in human life, and emphasizes the difficulty of knowing the will and having the means to actualize the will, rather than the problem of oppression.

While these definitions clarify the definitions of freedom this project will work from, their relevance with regard to mental life remains to be seen. Berlin’s focus is predominately political and historical. When discussing negative freedom he emphasizes the liberal philosophers and their claims regarding the need for preservation of essential rights by government, while when discussing positive freedom he explores the tension between political movements and governments seeking to expand access to self-determination and the impact expanded positive freedom (or corrupted conceptions of positive freedom in the case of authoritarian systems which claim access to knowledge of the will of the people) has upon negative freedom.

Therefore, to make these conceptions of negative and positive freedom applicable to psychoanalysis, I propose a shift from the political or historical to the psychic. Negative freedom is a valuable concept when considering the treatment process if in addition referring to freedom of citizens from interference by authority, negative freedom is extended to include freedom to experience thoughts and feelings without interference by additional psychological factors. In this extension of the concept of negative freedom, I include both conscious and unconscious impediments to experience, with unconscious defensive processes viewed to be blockages against freedom to think, feel, and act in the same manner as concrete oppression impedes liberty in the negative freedom side of Berlin’s model.

Regarding positive freedom, Berlin’s discussion emphasizes the individual’s experience in the political and economic spheres, but this project will focus on positive freedom in the psychological sphere. This is an extension of Berlin’s definition that aligns with existing

13 theoretical models of psychoanalysis focused on the shift from experiencing life as an object to feeling empowered as a subject through treatment. What the dissertation that follows will add to this existing conversation within the field is describing these models of the movement from object to subject as a process of growth in human freedom.

Negative freedom as promoted by psychoanalysis will be illustrated using the work of

Sigmund Freud. Specifically, his technical recommendations for psychoanalysts, his discussion of the role of repression and defensive processes as the sustaining engine of psychopathology, and his case studies will be emphasized. To make my argument, I will revisit his “Dora” and

“Rat Man” cases to show that Freud’s work with these patients can be understood as a promotion of negative freedom. In both cases, Freud uses his psychoanalytic method to address censorship of what is objectionable and unbearable, explains how this censorship has generated their symptoms, and proposes that when the patients can accept what has been censored then they will resume living their lives rather than remaining trapped in their symptoms. Dora and Rat Man must come to a place through therapy where they can experience the “absence of interference” from the defensive processes distorting their engagement with reality and thus derailing their lives. Hence, Freud’s treatment can be understood through the lens of negative freedom.

Positive freedom, in turn, is illustrated in the work of developmentally oriented psychoanalytic writers, particularly those influenced by Melanie Klein, such as psychoanalyst

Donald Winnicott. Winnicott’s discussion of “creative living” and “object relating” presents a psychotherapy oriented toward linking an individual with their unconscious life and facilitating the development of a capacity to recognize and actualize, in the world, the spontaneous impulses emerging from the unconscious, rather than living on a “compliance basis” dominated by the expectations of others (1971). He takes a predominately developmental perspective, and so rather

14 than working backwards through the overcoming of defenses, his treatment model focuses on the creation of a therapeutic setting which promotes regression and then follows the patient’s movement forward into new experiences. Also, he explores the phenomenon of hate within developmental and psychotherapeutic contexts, and I will discuss the valuable contribution his re-evaluation of hate makes to understanding of the emergence of subjectivity and experiences of positive freedom.

The roots of Winnicott’s ideas lie in the work of Melanie Klein and the shift from focusing upon genetic interpretation as the mechanism of change to emphasizing the power of the patient’s experience in the transference-countertransference situation in tandem with here- and-now interpretive work. The background of this evolution in psychoanalytic theory and practice will be discussed and I will argue that the importance of this evolution within psychoanalysis is highlighted when it is viewed through the lens of positive freedom. Discussion of Winnicott’s concepts will be complemented by the discussion of his treatment of the psychoanalyst Margaret Little, who I argue presents a clear example of a shift from living as an object to inhabiting subjectivity through the new experiences made possible in treatment.

Lastly, the work of Jacques Lacan will be introduced, and I will move beyond the concepts of positive and negative freedom. I argue that Lacan’s theorization of the imaginary register and symbolic castration (by which a child enters the symbolic order) have implications with regard to freedom, in that without symbolic castration there is entrapment in the imaginary register which leads to reactive, unreflective living that is decidedly unfree. Also, a Lacanian lens will be applied to my work with a patient and here I will address the limits of freedom and the transformative value of the capacity for symbolization and reflection. Analysis can facilitate an individual’s movement into a decentered position from which they might begin to see how

15 they have been born into a life not of their own making, as well as an acceptance and

“subjectification” of desire which leads to the subject letting go of patterns defined in reaction to the social order. This recognition unlocks a sense of self-determination and movement beyond old fears, a freedom that is negative in the removal of inhibitions as well as positive in that desire becomes “owned” by the patient, leading to the experience of agentic subjectivity.

Furthermore, Lacan presents a circumscribed vision of freedom, because the key signifiers are given rather than chosen and there is never total separation from the impact of history on desire. Through psychoanalysis an individual can move into a position in which they are “decentered from the consciousness-of-self” (Lacan, 2001, p. 59) and begin to see how they have been born into a life not of their own making. From this position, an individual can accept the mystery inherent in their desires rather than sleepwalking within their inherited system of meaning, but there is not total separation from the impact of history on their desires. Moreover, through this awareness they begin to see that the symbolic system in which they live is an inherited structure, beyond any individual, which is created by people in a subjective process

(rather than objectively representing an unchanging underlying reality), and which is in constant flux as cultures and language evolve. The capacity for creative engagement with the symbolic system is thus potentiated and creative engagement with the symbolic order can create space for living in ways other than what previously was possible.

In summary, in Freud the power of psychotherapy to overcome inhibitions illustrates negative freedom. In Winnicott, and Klein before him, the facilitation of new experiences in the psychoanalytic setting develops positive freedom. Finally, Lacan adds further nuance to the understanding of freedom in psychoanalysis by addressing the social/cultural system and shows that freedom is an aim of treatment but an aim that is perpetually on the horizon. My conclusion

16 will discuss the appearances of freedom in the work of these theorists and the cases presented, and will review my findings. I will also discuss future directions for research, why this work is important, and what has been most striking to me in my investigation of the intersection of psychoanalysis and freedom.

REFERENCES

Berger, M. (1997). Isaiah Berlin, Philosopher and Pluralist, is Dead at 88. New York Times, 1-14.

Berlin, I. (1969). Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Lacan, J. (2001). Ecrits: A Selection. (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Abingdon, UK: Routledge Classics.

(Original work published 1966).

Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and reality. New York: NY: Routledge.

Lear, J. (2009). Technique and final cause in psychoanalysis: Four ways of looking at one

moment. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 90(6), 1299-1317.

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CHAPTER 1

Freud’s Freedom:

The Facilitation of Freedom in Freud’s Treatment of Dora and Rat Man

Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic model is a challenging body of thought to engage because throughout his life Freud continued to refine his ideas. His willingness to continue thinking, rather than chiseling into stone a set of unchanging orthodox principles exempt from criticism, can be seen as a reflection of the freedom of mind toward which Freud aimed. One constant within Freud’s corpus, however, is the emphasis on negative freedom that runs through his approach to treatment of psychological problems. Specifically, his emphasis on “making the unconscious conscious” appears in his 1895 work Studies in Hysteria, co-written with Joseph

Breuer (1895/2004), and evolves throughout the course of his intellectual life. Negative freedom is present, according to Berlin, when an individual is “left to do or be what he is able to do or be without interference from other persons” (1969, p. 15). The chapter that follows presents a discussion of Freud’s model of treatment within the context of this concept of negative freedom, which can be thought of as “freedom from.” After I have situated Freud’s model of treatment within this negative freedom framework, two of his most famous cases – Dora and “the Rat

Man” – will be discussed with an emphasis on detailing Freud’s promotion of negative freedom through his psychoanalytic method. Additionally, impediments to freedom within Freud’s work will also be explored, both in the form of the power asymmetry within the analytic dyad as established by Freud, especially his emphasis on the analyst’s role as arbiter of reality, and in

Freud’s treatment of the transference in these cases.

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Negative Freedom

Negative freedom is a philosophical concept developed by Isaiah Berlin (1969), who drew from the British liberal philosophical tradition, in particular John Locke, to develop a definition of a type of freedom characterized by “the area within which man can act unobstructed by others” (Berlin, 1969, p. 16). Berlin is thinking about the political sphere, the sphere of state power over man, and hence his description of negative freedom emphasizes person against person coercion to limit the area of free action available. However, I argue this definition can be extended to the intrapersonal realm. In the same way that the state, a group, or another person can interfere with activity, so too can intrapsychic forces interfere with an individual’s capacity to think and act. The exploration of Freud’s model that follows will explore the idea that Freud focused on negative freedom. It is negative freedom within the mind that Freud’s psychoanalytic method expanded for his patients. Psychoanalysis expands this negative freedom by overcoming impediments to looking at traumatic and conflictual unconscious experiences, which allows what was previously expressed in symptoms to be worked through, leading to new outcomes where previously repetition prevailed. The defenses which maintain symptoms and repetition, arresting the individual in dissatisfaction and confusion, can be conceptualized as interfering factors which limit negative freedom in the same way that Berlin and others’ writing on negative freedom in the political dimension describe external coercion oppressing the individual. Later in this project,

I will discuss psychoanalytic thinkers who address social and cultural influences upon the individual but, in regard to Freud’s work, the concept of freedom discovered through treatment is a negative freedom focused on individual intrapsychic experience.1

1 This is not to say that Freud lacked a social conscience, even if the work of psychoanalysis as conceived by Freud is decidedly intrapsychic. Elizabeth Ann Danto (1998) and others, for example, have documented Freud’s sensitivity

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Additionally, before proceeding, I must clarify my level of inquiry. The arguments that follow are of a humanistic and subjective nature. Alternative lines of thinking focused on underlying biological states could be developed, and there is a vast philosophical literature on the topic of “free will,” but neither of these subject areas will be addressed. I am focused on subjective descriptions of experiences of thinking and feeling, and the verbal representation of experience, which are the basis for my discussions of psychotherapeutic technique, change in psychotherapy, and metapsychology. Freud wrote from a perspective informed by his era’s knowledge of biological anatomy, and with a basic foundation in philosophy, but he gave priority to the study of psychic life as it manifested itself in his consulting room when investigated through his psychoanalytic method.2 I too will prioritize the discussion of clinical experiences in this project.

The Freudian Model

Starting with Studies in Hysteria, Freud builds his method of treatment and his metapsychology on the foundational insights that unconscious life drives human behavior and that psychological symptoms result from unconscious phenomena. Throughout his ever evolving body of thought, his emphasis on the unconscious was unwavering and consistently central to his understanding of change via psychoanalysis. His metapsychology evolved greatly, while the emphasis on the discovery, verbalization, and working through of unconscious wishes and conflicts remained the focus of his psychoanalytic treatment.

to the social questions of the day, seen in the development of the Vienna Ambulatorium, a free psychoanalytic clinic treating adults and children that Freud supported. 2 For instance, Freud’s comments in The Ego and the Id come to mind: “To most people who have been educated in philosophy the idea of anything psychical which is not also conscious is so inconceivable that it seems to them absurd and refutable simply by logic. I believe this is only because they have never studied the relevant phenomena of hypnosis and dreams, which – quite apart from pathological manifestations – necessitate this view. Their psychology of consciousness is incapable of solving the problem of dreams and hypnosis” (1961, p. 13).

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In Studies in Hysteria, an early description of unconscious thoughts appears in Freud and

Breuer’s commentary on the traumatic memories precipitating hysterical neurosis. These traumatic memories continue to manifest in patient’s lives in the form of hysterical symptoms

(such as numbing, loss of voice, anorexia, etc.) but “unlike other [memories] from their past, are not at the patients’ disposal” (Freud & Breuer, 1895/2004, p. 12). Instead, “these experiences are either completely absent from the patient’s memory in their usual psychical state or only present in a highly summarized form” (Freud & Breuer, 1895/2004, p. 12).

Furthermore, they claim these memories are not present due to having not been properly

‘abreacted,’ with abreaction defined as release of emotions triggered by the experience and assumption of the experience into the normal network of memories through discussion. When abreaction has not occurred, Freud and Breuer attribute this to the psychical trauma being of a nature that “precluded a reaction, as in the seemingly irreplaceable loss of a loved one, or because social circumstances made a reaction impossible, or because things were involved that the patient wanted to forget” (Freud & Breuer, 1895/2004, p. 13). Also, traumatic experiences may fail to be consolidated into the normal memory system if they are experienced while the person is in an auto-hypnotic state such as extreme fear. This model of the unconscious presents a basic psychoanalytic premise in embryonic form: experiences which are overwhelming are kept out of consciousness and produce symptoms.

Later in the development of his model, Freud explicitly addressed the distinction between the conscious and unconscious aspects of psychic life. For example, in The Ego and the Id, he writes “We restrict the term unconscious to the dynamically unconscious repressed” (Freud,

1923/1961, p. 15). At this later stage in his model’s growth, Freud has introduced the ego and the super-ego, with the ego acting as the agent of the “reality principle” through functions such as

21 perception and reasoning, and the super-ego functioning as a moral authority. These agencies operate in relationship to the id, from which drives for satisfaction, most significantly sexual satisfaction, as well as destructive impulses emerge. “From this ego proceed the repressions”

(Freud, 1923/1961, p. 17), Freud writes, and he explains that the “Ego seeks to bring the influence of the external world to bear on the id” in order to substitute “reason and common sense” for unrestrained passion (Freud, 1923/1961, p. 25). However, under certain conditions, the application of the reality principle is evaded, leading to neurosis, which at this point Freud emphasizes is the result of replacement of compromise-based adjustment to reality with satisfaction through unconscious phantasy and daydreaming rather than satisfying adult sexuality and mature independence.

Freud’s emphasis on the unconscious provides a transition from his metapsychology into his method of treatment. Throughout his career, Freud’s writing on psychoanalytic technique placed the expansion of access to unconscious material at the center of treatment. This centrality of “making the unconscious conscious” holds true from Freud’s earliest treatment of hysteria through his late work.

Studies in Hysteria describes treatment by the method of compelling associations to symptoms, based on the hypothesis that symptoms are resolved when the causative events have been recalled and had accompanying affects simultaneously wakened, so that the experience and the affect can be verbalized in the greatest possible details (Freud & Breuer, 1895/2004, p. 10).

The initial method for achieving this process combined induction of a hypnotic state followed by encouragement for the patient to remember the circumstances in which the symptom emerged, followed by further instruction to associate further back as the related memories were explored.

Freud dropped the hypnotic method due to many patients being difficult to hypnotize and,

22 instead, if nothing were recalled, he applied verbal pressure to remember.3 Summarizing their cathartic treatment, Freud and Breuer state (1895/2004):

The method removes the effectiveness of the idea that had not originally been abreacted

by allowing its trapped affect to drain away through speech; it then submits the trapped

ideas to associative correction by drawing it into normal consciousness (under light

hypnosis) or by using the doctor’s suggestion to remove it (p. 19).

By making repressed traumatic memories conscious, the psychoanalytic method enables the person receiving treatment to express their experiences rather than acting them out as symptoms. While Freud’s methods of analysis would evolve, even at the stage of Studies in

Hysteria the basis for a conception of analytic treatment as the facilitation of negative freedom can be discerned. The patient’s condition is attributed to repression of traumatic memories, leading them to surface in the form of symptoms, and overcoming of inhibitions against remembering and feeling is the method of treatment. The patient’s in these early cases can be understood to lack the capacity to freely integrate their past experiences, due to their overwhelming nature or objectionability to propriety, and therefore Freud and Breuer take it upon themselves to unlock the patients’ capacity to remember, removing obstructions so that the natural cathartic abreaction process can occur.

By the time of his An Outline of Psycho-Analysis (1938/1964), written in 1938, Freud’s method has grown vastly more complex. Rather than compelling remembering through association, a broadened array of pathways by which uncovering of unconscious material can proceed is described and free association is established as the fundamental rule – rather than

3 Furthermore, for a time Freud added the “trick” of placing his hand upon his patient’s forehead and compelling them to remember when the associative process became stuck (Freud & Breuer, 1895/2004, p. 113-144).

23 answering questions or taking direction from the analyst, the patient’s role is to say whatever comes to mind. The analyst may infer unconscious meaning through the patient’s free associations, may translate the unconscious wishes expressed in the patient’s dreams back to them, may use the patient’s transference as a source of information regarding unconscious experience, or may recognize the unconscious meaning of linguistic errors (“slips”) made by the patient. Still, the central point remains – psychoanalysis is about overcoming repression.

Additionally, at this time Freud’s metapsychology had developed into the structural model, and in all of the interpretive endeavors described, the analyst is allied with the patient’s ego. According to Freud, the ego is the “coherent organization of mental processes” which is the seat of the experience of consciousness, controls movement, and has oversight of other mental processes (Freud, 1923/1961, p. 17). Using an analogy to make his model clearer, Freud likens the ego to the rider, and the id to a horse, with the rider seeking to direct the horse, but never fully in control (Freud, 1923/1961, p. 25).

Considering the nature of neurosis, Freud writes that “The necessary precondition of the pathological states under discussion can only be a relative or absolute weakening of the ego which makes the fulfillment of its tasks impossible” (Freud, 1938/1964, p.172). He compares the analyst to a third party observing a civil war, with the ego’s effort to obtain satisfaction in reality leading to conflict with “the instinctual demands of the id and the conscientious demands of the super-ego” (Freud, 1938/1964, p.173). In this situation the analyst becomes an ally of the ego,

“interpreting material that has been influenced by the unconscious… to give his ego back its mastery over lost provinces of his mental life” (Freud, 1938/1964, p. 173).

The analyst’s interpretations expand the ego’s access to previously repressed materials, and once accessible to consciousness, the ego can then find means of satisfying the drive that

24 was previously reaching expression through symptoms. What has been repressed is recovered

“by supplying Pcs. [preconscious] intermediate links through the work of analysis,” with the work of analysis being the interpretation of free association, dreams, transference, and slips described previously (Freud, 1923/1961, p. 21).

Furthermore, Freud describes the analyst stepping into the position of auxiliary super-ego as well. Through this process, “the new super-ego now has an opportunity for a sort of after- education of the neurotic” (Freud, 1938/1964, p. 175). A severe super-ego leads to inhibition, excessive guilt, and self-critical or self-destructive patterns, but through psychoanalysis the super-ego can be softened. The “demolition of the hostile super-ego” occurs as its unconscious influence is brought into consciousness and opened to rational critique by the ego, and also through the internalization of the analyst’s more compassionate attitude (Freud, 1938/1964, p.180). Finally, change occurs through psychoanalysis when unconscious internalization of lost objects is made conscious, allowing for mourning and relinquishment of these lost figures, including relinquishment of repetition of the pathologies of these lost figures, guilt, and the inability to establish new ties with living people due to ongoing attachments to those gone

(Freud, 1917/1957).

In all of these processes, Freud’s psychoanalytic method is seen to be facilitating negative freedom. In Freud’s presentation of psychoanalysis, pathological conflicts are addressed by removing them from the darkness of the unconscious and exposing them to the light of the ego’s attention. This can be understood as a negative freedom function. Repression blocks conflicts from consciousness, but the analyst’s intervention in the form of interpretation restores the individual’s freedom to face what has been shut out of awareness due to its objectionable or overwhelming nature. The function of the ego depends upon access to repressed drives and

25 memories. When defensive processes inhibit consciousness of these matters, they cannot become represented and worked through. Consequently, it is through access to consciousness that greater satisfaction becomes possible. Repression can be thought of as a form of oppression that is overcome through the psychoanalytic method. Hence, Freud’s freedom is a negative freedom because it comes about through the struggle to lift repressions that have kept unconscious psychical material out of awareness. Negative freedom is freedom from, and Freud’s method ultimately sought freedom from the forces that repress what is unpleasant about human experience or deemed unacceptable by the individual.

Dora

Published in 1905, the title of the paper is “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of

Hysteria” but the psychoanalytic tradition has remembered this as the “Dora Case” and it has been widely explored and critiqued as a representation of the evolution of Freud’s analytic method, as well as a representation of his patriarchal and domineering qualities (Moi, 1981). In this case study, Freud presents his analysis of a young woman named Dora, referred for treatment for somatic symptoms, depressed mood, and interpersonal problems. It is an incomplete case, because Dora left treatment abruptly after 11 weeks, but provides an example of

Freud’s method of analysis at this stage and his understanding of hysterical processes.

For the sake of my work, I will consider the place of freedom within this case. While he never states this explicitly, Freud aims to provide freedom to Dora in a few different forms. He aims to provide her freedom from her symptoms, and he aims to provide her with the freedom to enter a love relationship. His method of achieving these freedoms for her is through the establishment of a freedom to look – freedom to look at her conflicts and thereby resolve them, emerging from a freedom to look at the feelings which have previously been unacceptable to her.

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These are negative freedoms, because they involve removal of impediments to action, rather than development of spontaneous capacities.

However, while the aim is freedom, Dora appears to remain trapped at the end of the case. She leaves Freud with her symptoms unresolved and is reported to have lived an unhappy life marked by conflictual relationships and somatic complaints after her aborted treatment

(Deutsch, 1957). It could be said that she and Freud were trapped in stereotyped patterns of relating, that she and Freud together therefore could sustain the analytic process. I would also argue that she was trapped in Freud’s ideas. Freud emphasizes his inferences regarding past events in Dora’s life, focusing on information and intellectual understanding of her conflicts, while potentially emotionally charged conflicts between them are muted. My contention is that this entrapment is the result of the method of working Freud applied, and Freud himself recognized this problem and therefore began to attend more to transference in future cases.

However, Freud’s pioneering ideas on transference remained to be executed at this point, with his insights about Dora’s transference seen only in retrospect and without appreciation for the contribution of his own presumptuous and overpowering style to her negative reaction.

Introducing Dora

Dora is referred into psychoanalysis by her father. At the time of entering treatment she had recently moved to Vienna and was experiencing a variety of somatic problems (weakness, nausea, loss of voice, persistent cough, anorexia, fainting) as well as social withdrawal and depression. She was occupying her time with independent study, rather than endeavoring to find a husband as the norms of her class and era dictated, and initiation of treatment was prompted by her father’s discovery of a letter in Dora’s desk in which she proclaimed she would kill herself.

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At the start of the treatment, Freud has already received information about precipitating factors in Dora’s case from her father. In his telling of the case, he mixes this information with knowledge provided by Dora, starting off on a footing which already shifts focus away from

Dora as an individual and calls her subjective experiences into question. Freud reports that the psychological trauma precipitating Dora’s symptoms was a sexual advance made by Herr K, a family friend, after which Dora retreated into illness and pleaded with her father to break off ties with the Herr K and his wife. Freud acknowledged this precipitating event launched Dora’s present bout of hysterical illness, but states that a triggering incident such as this must have roots in childhood experience for the hysterical effects to be produced (Freud, 1905/1953a, p. 27), and his exploration of Dora’s history subsequently reveals hysterical symptoms predating the trauma.

This link between present symptoms and childhood experiences (and conflicts) necessitates a deeper process of analysis, pursued through interpretation of free associative content and dreams. Freud does not document the full process of gathering information through these psychoanalytic techniques, but instead presents his findings and describes the interpretation of these materials to Dora, along with her reactions.

Freud’s Interpretations

Tracking interpretations made by Freud is a challenge, because he appreciates the over- determined nature of actions and symptoms and uncovers multiple determinate for single events.

There are multiple layers in hysteria which Freud uncovers and tracing each connection creates a labyrinth which is difficult to navigate. In condensing the interpretations made in Dora’s case, I will focus on those which stood out, either as representative of Freud’s method, or as integral in the context of the case’s progression.

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Freud learns that Dora’s father has been having an affair with Frau K, Herr K’s wife.

Dora admonishes her father to break off ties with the K family after being propositioned by Herr

K, but additionally she is critical of her father for his extra-marital romance. This criticism is interpreted by Freud to be a disguised self-reproach on the part of Dora. He says that criticism of her father is displacement of her own guilt for having earlier facilitated her father’s association with Frau K. Furthermore, Freud links this criticism to a revived love for her father, which he indicates is the result of a regression following her rejection of Herr K. “She felt and acted more like a jealous wife” says Freud, and he ascribes this revival of an earlier love object (the father) as a retreat from unconscious love for Herr K (Freud, 1905/1953a, p. 56).

The central presumption Freud makes is that Dora unconsciously desires Herr K. This unconscious desire is detected by Freud in Dora’s report of an earlier incident in which Herr K embraced and kissed her when she was age 14. Dora reported experiencing disgust in response, which according to Freud was a reversal of sexual excitement into disgust, and a displacement of genital stimulation to a non-sexual part of the body (Freud, 1905/1953a, p. 29). Freud’s view is that it would be natural for Dora to desire Herr K’s affection, to be sexually excited by his advances, and to wish for a romantic match with him and, therefore, Freud sees her rejection and disgust to be hysterical reactions.

Additionally, Freud make a link between sexual excitement and Dora’s cough. In her various comments, he notes she is aware that while her father cannot have intercourse for medical reasons, oral sex is a possibility for him. Consequently, the “tickling in her throat” and cough are “a scene of sexual gratification per os between the two people whose love-affair occupied her mind so incessantly” (Freud, 1905/1953a, p. 48). After this symptomatic representation of a wish for fellatio is interpreted by Freud, Dora’s nervous cough vanished, he

29 reports. This supports the idea that drawing attention to what has been unconscious brings freedom from symptomatic representation of the repressed in Freud’s model, although Freud also notes that Dora’s cough had spontaneously remitted in the past.

There is a question in all of this, which is if Freud is correct that Dora desires Herr K, why does she not pursue a romance with him? Freud finds answers to this question in Dora’s dreams. It is an inhibition in her sexual development that is fueling Dora’s repression of her sexual wishes and subsequent hysterical symptoms.

Freud explores the origins of this sexual inhibition through analysis of two dreams related to him by Dora. The first dream is reported by Dora as follows (Freud, 1905/1953a):

A house was on fire. My father was standing beside my bed and woke me up. I dressed

quickly. Mother wanted to stop and save her jewel-case; but Father said: “I refuse to let

myself and my two children be burnt for the sake of your jewel-case.” We hurried

downstairs, and as soon as I was outside I woke up (p. 64).

Freud links the “jewel-case” with the female genitals based upon a meaning of jewel-case in German slang. He interprets Dora to be in the place of her mother and a reversal between

“saving” and “giving” of the jewel-case. Lastly, he suggests that with regard to the jewel-case, her father is in the place of Herr K. Hence a dream of escaping fire reveals a repressed sexual wish for Herr K. According to Freud, being saved by her father in her dream confirms once more that (1905/1953a):

The dream confirms once more what I had already told you before you dreamt it—that

you are summoning up your old love for your father in order to protect yourself against

your love for Herr K. But what do all these efforts show? Not only that you are afraid of

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Herr K, but that you are still more afraid of yourself, and of the temptation you feel to

yield to him. In short, these efforts prove once more how deeply you loved him (p. 70).

Regarding Dora’s response, Freud notes “Naturally Dora would not follow me in this part of the interpretation” (1905/1953a, p. 70).

Freud goes on to make further inquiries and interpretations. Dora has associated to her dream that her father had commented “it might be necessary to leave the room; that an accident might happen in the night” in reference to sleeping arrangements in their home which worried him. In combination with other elements of the dream (fire, waking by the father) Freud infers that Dora wet her bed in childhood. She recalls that she was a bedwetter, and she then spontaneously recalls that upon awakening from this recurrent dream she would always smell smoke. Freud links this smell of smoke to the wish for a kiss from Herr K, a smoker, or from himself (“since I am a smoker too”) (1905/1953a, p. 74).

Based on her history of bedwetting, and also of leucorrhoea (vaginal discharge, which

Freud associates with masturbation), Freud indicates to Dora that she had masturbated in childhood, and that repression of this premature sexual experience, leading to repression of sexual feelings more generally, is the source of her problems. Dora denies any memory of masturbating, but soon after wears a reticule (small handbag) which hangs at her waistline and which she opened and put her finger in while speaking with Freud. He interprets this symbolic act as a confession of her childhood masturbation. He also links this “secret” of childhood masturbation to her reproach of doctors (out of fear they would uncover the truth) and her reproaches of her father for passing venereal disease to her (displaced guilt over her own masturbation and subsequent leucorrhoea).

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Freud then makes a further inference, although here he indicates that the incompleteness of the analysis prevented him from confirming his belief through validation by Dora, relevant association, or symptomatic acts. He notes that Dora’s room was near the room of her parents, and that her father experienced breathing problems. He then suggests that Dora overheard her father’s labored breathing during sex with her mother, and that this “may very easily have made the child's sexuality veer round and have replaced her inclination to masturbation by an inclination to anxiety” (1905/1953a, p. 80). Subsequently, she became fearful of sexuality, so linked with overexertion and harm, leading her sexual wishes to appear disguised in the form of dysponea (labored breathing), causing an arrest of her sexual development.

Summarizing the ideas illustrated by this case, and the nature of Dora’s dilemma, Freud concludes (1905/1953a):

For if Dora felt unable to yield to her love for the man, if in the end she repressed that

love instead of surrendering to it, there was no factor upon which her decision depended

more directly than upon her premature sexual enjoyment and its consequence—her bed-

wetting, her catarrh, and her disgust. An early history of this kind can afford a basis for

two kinds of behaviour in response to the demands of love in maturity—which of the two

will depend upon the summation of constitutional determinants in the subject. He will

either exhibit an abandonment to sexuality which is entirely without resistances and

borders upon perversity; or there will be a reaction—he will repudiate sexuality, and will

at the same time fall ill of a neurosis. In the case of our present patient, her constitution

and the high level of her intellectual and moral upbringing decided in favour of the latter

course (p. 87).

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Freud then proceeds to describe Dora’s second major dream within the analysis and his interpretation of its meaning. Dora’s account of the dream is recorded below (1905/1953a):

I was walking about in a town which I did not know. I saw streets and squares which

were strange to me. Then I came into a house where I lived, went to my room, and found

a letter from Mother lying there. She wrote saying that as I had left home without my

parents’ knowledge she had not wished to write to me to say that Father was ill “Now he

is dead, and if you like you can come” I then went to the station [“Bahnhof”] and asked

about a hundred times: “Where is the station?” I always got the answer: “Five minutes.”

I then saw a thick wood before me which I went into, and there I asked a man whom I

met. He said to me: ‘Two and a half hours more.’ He offered to accompany me. But I

refused and went alone. I saw the station in front of me and could not reach it. At the

same time I had the usual feeling of anxiety that one has in dreams when one cannot

move forward. Then I was at home. I must have been travelling in the meantime, but I

know nothing about that. I walked into the porter's lodge, and enquired for our flat. The

maidservant opened the door to me and replied that Mother and the others were already

at the cemetery [“Friedhof”]' (p. 94).

Freud describes Dora’s associations to the various portions of the dream. Notably, the wood is linked with the female genitals through Dora’s association to a painting of woods with nymphs in the background that she had recently viewed. This link is based on the medical term

“nymphaea” for the labia major. Furthermore, Freud notes that Banhof and Friedhof are linguistically linked to Vorhof, another medical term for the female genitals. Through these connections, and through connections he notes between the structure of the journey in the dream

33 and the circumstances of Herr K’s propositioning Dora, Freud concludes “there lay concealed… a phantasy of defloration” (1905/1953a, pp. 99-100).

When he informs Dora of this conclusion, she recalls an additional section of the dream.

In this addendum, Dora goes to her room and reads a large book. Freud inquires if this book was an encyclopedia, and Dora confirms his hunch. This finding is validation for Freud’s observation that the sexual terms uncovered in analysis of Dora’s dream are drawn from medical terminology. Freud conjectures that she pursued her sexual curiosity by reading the encyclopedia as a child. Additionally, he also interprets this addendum to Dora’s dream to represent her wish to be left free to engage her sexual curiosity without interference (since at her dream’s end her father is dead and her family is at the cemetery, leaving her alone).

Dora then provided a final addendum, recalling herself going up the stairs. Associations to this element are explored, leading Freud to uncover that a reported case of appendicitis was not what it seemed. Freud becomes suspicious because of an association to reading about appendicitis in the encyclopedia (an act with sexual associations), and also because Dora’s appendicitis was accompanied by the medically non-related symptom of dragging her foot. Freud asks when she experienced this symptom, and Dora indicates it appeared 9 months after Herr K’s advance. This leads Freud to interpret it to be a phantasy of pregnancy, in response to the wish that she had accepted Herr K’s interest, rather than making a “false step” which is represented in her limp. Freud makes a summary interpretation (1905/1953a):

The assumption that underlies your phantasy of childbirth is that on that occasion

something took place, that on that occasion you experienced and went through everything

that you were in fact obliged to pick up later on from the encyclopaedia. So you see that

your love for Herr K did not come to an end with the scene, but that (as I maintained) it

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has persisted down to the present day—though it is true that you are unconscious of it.’—

And Dora disputed the fact no longer (p. 104).

Dora then tells Freud that she will leave treatment. She does so in a way reminiscent of a servant leaving her employer, which Freud remarks upon. This leads Dora to speak about a servant employed by Herr K, whom Herr K had slept with. Dora tells Freud that Herr K made a sexual advance to this woman in which he said, “he got nothing from his wife” (1905/1953a, p.

106). After their liaison, Herr K withdrew his interest from the servant. The woman wrote of this to her parents who instructed her to leave immediately, but she waited to see if Herr K would return his attention to her. He did not, and as a result of her waiting she was disowned by her parents.

From this information, Freud makes further inferences regarding Dora’s behavior. He says that Dora’s immediate dismissal of Herr K’s interest at the time of his advance was due to her recognition of similarity between his advance to her, which included the line “I get nothing out of my wife” and what he had said to the servant. Additionally, light is also shed upon her behavior after the incident, with her delay in telling her parents associated to the servant’s delay while waiting to see if Herr K’s interest would return. Freud says to Dora that she was testing

Herr K to see if he would continue his pursuit, differentiating her from the servant, or if he would retreat in the same manner. When he did not pursue her vigorously, she became unconsciously enraged, Freud says, leading her to tell her father of Herr K’s advance.

Freud closes his account of his time together with Dora by noting that she did not object to these final interpretations and that she gave a warm good-bye as she left.

Freud Versus Dora, Dora Versus Freud

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Freud attributes Dora’s departure to a wish for vengeance, with himself standing in for

Herr K as the target for her anger. However, while his arguments for the presence of a wish for vengeance and for displacement of this rage upon other targets by Dora are supported, reviewing the case it seems that other factors are operative as well, making her departure an overdetermined event. In terms of the arguments being forwarded by this dissertation, the link between Freud’s approach to interpretation and Dora’s departure are most relevant.

Freud interprets in a domineering manner, taking a brute force approach to the overcoming of resistances. This aspect of his technique at this early stage of the development of psychoanalysis is evident in the language used when describing the delivery of interpretations and comments. His comments are presented as facts to be acceded to, rather than propositions to be considered and accepted. In his treatment of Dora, her recognition of unconscious dynamics was understood to be the vehicle for recovery, without consideration for influence of the context

(and therapeutic relationship) within which she was ostensibly being led toward insight by Freud.

In combination with Freud’s own superior attitude, decisive one-sided interpretations result:

When I informed her of this conclusion she did not assent to it (1905/1953a, p. 37).

I informed Dora of the conclusions I had reached (1905/1953a, p. 100).

Furthermore, at times his attitude towards presenting interpretations take on confrontational, potentially mocking, or prosecutorial qualities:

Whom are you copying now? (Freud, 1905/1953a, p. 38).

… a fact which I did not fail to use against her (Freud, 1905/1953a, p. 59).

I was able to say to Dora: ‘Now I know your motive…’ (Freud, 1905/1953a, p. 106).

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Noting these qualities of his interpretation is not meant to remove confrontation or irony from the psychoanalytical repertoire, but to point out that Freud worked with Dora in an adversarial and superior manner. Moments of bringing patients face-to-face with an aspect of their behavior or speech (or the therapist’s reaction to something occurring) can deepen the patient’s emotional investment in the therapeutic process and facilitate insight and change, but use depends on the development of the case and timing. Likewise, with the use of humor.

However, at this point, Freud appears to be working without appreciation for these dimensions of the treatment. Rather than interpreting in the context of his understanding of his relationship with

Dora, direct comments on her unconscious are made whenever Freud reaches a point of believing himself to possess an understanding of a previously obscure aspect of her experience

(in particular her unconscious sexual wishes).

Consequently, with regard to freedom, here we see that Dora’s freedom within Freud’s conception is of a narrow nature. He is working to enable her freedom to think without repression, but he has a fixed idea of what she has experienced and repressed, which he is rigidly presenting back to her. Freud has recognized at this point that there is a resistance to looking at what is objectionable or frightening that the analyst must assist the patient in overcoming, but with Dora he is using a sledgehammer in pursuit of this opening up of her thinking. She is encouraged to bravely embrace the truth, while she is simultaneously expected by Freud to accept his perception of what is true.

Transference

This exploration of Freud’s interpretive style leads into a consideration of the factors underlying Dora’s flight from treatment. Why does she leave? Freud cites a fear of her erotic feelings towards him and a desire for vengeance as Dora’s motives for leaving. In regard to her

37 flight from desire for him, he notes that Dora’s detection of a smell of smoke after her jewel-box dream has transferential implications (1905/1953a):

Taking into consideration, finally, the indications which seemed to point to there having

been a transference on to me—since I am a smoker too—I came to the conclusion that the

idea had probably occurred to her one day during a session that she would like to have a

kiss from me. This would have been the exciting cause which led her to repeat the

warning dream and to form her intention of stopping the treatment. Everything fits

together very satisfactorily upon this view; but owing to the characteristics of

‘transference’ its validity is not susceptible of definite proof (p. 74).

Flight from erotic feelings is suspected to have fueled her departure from Freud. As for the wish for vengeance, here Freud sees himself in the place of Herr K in Dora’s mental life. She had sought vengeance against Herr K through her rejection of his advance and later her revelation of his behavior to her father, and Freud sees her departure from therapy as an attempt to wound him by blocking his aim of providing a successful treatment (1905/1953a):

I knew Dora would not come back again. Her breaking off so unexpectedly, just when

my hopes of a successful termination of the treatment were at their highest, and her thus

bringing those hopes to nothing— this was an unmistakable act of vengeance on her part.

Her purpose of self-injury also profited by this action. No one who, like me, conjures up

the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to

wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed (p. 109).

In these comments, Freud notes that her actions also benefitted her “purpose of self- injury,” pointing to the maintenance of secondary gain achieved through departure from

38 treatment. Freud sees Dora’s symptoms as a means for avoiding engagement in romantic life and for pulling sympathy and support from family and others. By departing from treatment, she can continue to do what she wants, rather than having to voice her objections to romantic engagement more openly or take on domestic responsibilities.

All these constructions made by Freud regarding Dora’s departure have argumentative weight to them. Given that the analysis was incomplete, their subsequent validation was not achieved through Dora’s confirmation or through relevant associations or developments in the transference, but as constructions they are supported by Freud’s explanation of his assumptions and the links he draws between Dora’s treatment of him and her treatment of others.

Moreover, in exploration of Dora’s departure, Freud advances the development of his concept of transference as a factor in psychoanalytic treatment. Freud first defines transference

(1905/1953a):

What are transferences? They are new editions or facsimiles of the impulses and

phantasies which are aroused and made conscious during the progress of the analysis; but

they have this peculiarity, which is characteristic for their species, that they replace some

earlier person by the person of the physician. To put it another way: a whole series of

psychological experiences are revived, not as belonging to the past, but as applying to the

person of the physician at the present moment (p. 116).

Freud then discusses the capacity of transference to interfere with the psychoanalytic process. He says that it is his failure to address the transference that resulted in Dora acting out towards him her fear of erotic feelings and her wish for vengeance. At this stage in his

39 development of psychoanalysis, Freud viewed transference as something to be overcome, rather than an integral part of the treatment.

Describing his work with Dora, Freud says “I did not succeed in mastering the transference in good time” (1905/1953a, p. 118). For example, he describes transference clues he had detected, such as distrust of him which echoed her distrust of her father and the theme of flight in her jewel-box dream, and he proposes that in response he might have used inquiry to bring about insight regarding the true target of her feelings, leading to further associations and development of insight (1905/1953a):

‘Now,’ I ought to have said to her, ‘it is from Herr K that you have made a transference

on to me. Have you noticed anything that leads you to suspect me of evil intentions

similar (whether openly or in some sublimated form) to Herr K's? Or have you been

struck by anything about me or got to know anything about me which has caught your

fancy, as happened previously with Herr K?’ Her attention would then have been turned

to some detail in our relations, or in my person or circumstances, behind which there lay

concealed something analogous but immeasurably more important concerning Herr K.

And when this transference had been cleared up, the analysis would have obtained access

to new memories, dealing, probably, with actual events (p. 118).

What is most notable with regard to the conception of freedom present in Freud’s treatment is that his discussion of transference puts the uncovering of links to past relationships at the center of working with transference. Transference is treated as something to be neutralized via exposure through interpretation, to prevent it from disrupting the priority of genetic interpretation. Transference interpretations may lead the patient to access new memories, but these are incidental gains along the way, not prioritized avenues of inquiry. Overall, Freud

40 argues that insight regarding transference will free the individual from the repetition it embodies, allowing the analysis to continue rather than being disrupted by resistances against free association viewed in misperception of the analyst as a previous figure or departure from treatment due to acting out of transference. The emphasis remains on freedom of looking, a negative freedom to apprehend what has previously been repressed, with repressions overcome through the analyst’s uncovering of the transferential links and presentation of them through targeted questioning (or presumably through more direct interpretation).4

What Freud leaves out of this examination of the transference is appreciation for the ways in which his own behavior may have contributed to Dora’s wish for vengeance. For instance,

Freud makes nothing of the fact that Dora entered treatment against her will. Writing of the events leading up to her psychoanalysis, he describes her symptoms and threat of suicide and then indicates “it was determined, in spite of her reluctance, that she should come to me for treatment” (1905/1953a, p. 23). Freud does not note the meaning of this or report any associations of Dora to this aspect of the treatment, nor does he comment upon the forced nature of her analysis. Her responses the advances of Herr K, her anger after this incident, and her dream of being saved by her father suggest Dora was grappling with the experience of being treated as an object by the men in her life and revolted against this into a wish for protective attention rather than manipulation. Consequently, her anger at Freud may have roots not only in her unconscious projection of anger at others, but in the real experience of her objectification being overlooked.

4 Freud will later develop a new position on the place of transference within psychoanalysis in his Introductory Lectures (1917/1963, Chapters 27-28) where he links change through psychoanalysis to working through of the transference neurosis.

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This same issue persists in the authoritative interpretations given to Dora by Freud. The most glaring example appears in Freud’s interpretation of Dora’s response to Herr K kissing her at age 14. Dora reported disgust is interpreted as a reversal of her pleasure, and a displacement of genital excitement. Freud’s foundation for these claims are his presumption that “this was surely just the situation to call up a distinct feeling of sexual excitement in a girl of 14 who had never before been approached” and that disgust could only be a reversal of “the genital sensation which would certainly have been felt by a healthy girl in such circumstances” (Freud, 1905/1953a, p.

29). While Freud starts from information provided by Dora, the story of the kiss and her disgust, it is his own beliefs from which his understanding of their meaning derive. He has taken the given information and run with it, and the possibility that Dora would react negatively to this, or that this negative reaction is meaningful in itself rather than defensive reversal of attraction, and therefore resistance to be overcome, is not considered. Also, he continues to consider Herr K’s interest in Dora to have the potential to lead to marriage, on the basis of his presumptions about

Herr K’s character and with disregard for the alternative possibility Herr K would have broken off relations with Dora after sleeping with her, as he had done with the servant.

Consequently, Dora’s rejection of his interpretations is seen as resistance to be conquered. Throughout the treatment with few exceptions she rejects Freud’s interpretations.

Instead of her assent, he relies on her associations following his interpretations for validation, or upon the clearing up of symptoms following interpretation in the case of her nervous cough. This is not to say that all accurate interpretations will be accepted verbally by the patient, but rather that the adversarial quality present between Dora and Freud is part of the treatment. Recognizing the links between Dora’s reaction to Freud and her feelings towards others in her life and past experiences would not neutralize Dora’s negative reaction to Freud because Dora is reacting not

42 only to associations between Freud and Herr K or her father: she is also involved in a relationship with Freud (colored in a distinct manner by her personality) and responding to

Freud’s actions as her analyst. Their interactions are the starting point for the working through of her past conflicts and trauma, and the links between the present and the past will follow from addressing what is happening in the present. I will return to this idea at the close of the chapter, because it related closely to the question of freedom and the limited of purely negative freedom to look as a therapeutic goal.

Lastly, Freud notes that Dora’s love for Frau K remained unaddressed. Freud infers a love for Frau K on the basis of Dora’s closeness with her, the admiring tone of her comments on

Frau K’s body (“she used to praise her ‘adorable white body’ in accents more appropriate to a lover than a defeated rival,”(1905/1953a, p. 61)), the deduction that Frau K and Dora’s spoke together about sexual topics, and the absence of anger at Frau K despite her siding with her husband and painting Dora as sexually preoccupied after Dora’s accusations of improper advances against Herr K. According to Freud, the conscious anger against her father over his affair with Frau K expresses repressed love for Herr K, as well as a repressed love for Frau K buried even deeper in Dora’s unconscious. Freud sees the forgiveness of Frau K in particular as revealing of Dora’s homosexual attachment to her and attributes the collapse of the treatment to neglect of this topic. In a footnote to his postscript, he identifies this homosexual love as “the strongest unconscious current in her mental life” and notes that “before I had learnt the importance of the homosexual current of feeling in psychoneurotics, I was often brought to a standstill in the treatment of my cases or found myself in complete perplexity” (1905/1953a, p.

120).

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This aspect of Dora’s life remained unaddressed in part because the treatment ended before it was reached. Dora never spoke of it, and Freud did not make any interpretations regarding love for Frau K. At the time of Dora’s treatment, Freud did not yet appreciate the significance of bringing homosexual feelings to consciousness in analytic treatment. This implies that the homosexual aspect of the case remained unaddressed because of Freud’s preconceptions.

The dominant conflict in Dora’s life was seen by Freud to be flight from her desire for Herr K, making heterosexual relations central and leaving homosexual relations neglected. It is possible that had Freud taken a less domineering approach to his interactions with Dora she may have revealed her attachment to Frau K. This would have required Freud to have a greater interest in

Dora’s freedom of speech within the treatment. Freud wanted to establish freedom to look at what was objectionable or painful by Dora but, as practiced at the time of her analysis, Freud’s method emphasized the freedom to see what he believed to be present, rather than putting the patient in control of the opening up of their own mind.

That said, if Dora had a high level of conflict homosexual feelings, which would not be surprising in a time when homosexuality was regarded as deviant and heterosexual marriage and procreation were the enforced norm, these feelings would be unlikely to be disclosed before a stronger bond of trust were established. Freud had conviction about his understanding of Dora, but this assuredness in his “reading” of the unconscious meaning of her actions and words proved incorrect, and the aggressiveness with which he presented his version of her story kept

Dora from bringing more of herself into the treatment. If the presumption of an unconscious erotic bond with Frau K is correct, Freud’s neglect of this experience may have further contributing to her transferring negative aspects of her relationship with Herr K and her father

44 onto Freud (as another overbearing but unseeing patriarch), and ultimately acting out of this transference via flight.

Overall, the brute force method both prevents information from emerging and does not allow for the transference to be worked through because in certain cases it will reinforce the negative transference to intolerable levels. Freud aimed to provide freedom to Dora: Through overcoming her repressions, he would give her freedom to look, freedom to acknowledge the truth, which in turn would provide freedom from her symptoms, freedom from repetition of unconscious conflicts, and freedom to enter into a love relationship. But in the end, she remained trapped. She and Freud together were trapped in a transference configuration that could not be understood and worked through and instead led to the collapse of the treatment. Dora was trapped in Freud’s ideas, and so she fled, again taking the path of flight in the face of the denial of the possibility of more explicit self-assertion being received.

Rat Man

There’s so much more to him than the rats, but Freud’s most famous treatment of an obsessional neurosis, first published in 1909, nonetheless goes down in history as the case of the

Rat Man. However, while Rat Man is the sobriquet history has recorded, Freud gives the man’s name as Paul, and this is the name I will use. By revisiting this case and bringing an eye for the concept of negative freedom, I will demonstrate Freud’s method to prioritize negative freedom and that this concept makes a contribution to understanding an end goal of Freud’s psychoanalytic method. I will also introduce the idea that emphasis on negative freedom leaves the therapeutic potential of the analytic situation, specifically the transference, under-theorized.

While the focus of Freud’s work with Paul is negative freedom, this case additionally shows the therapeutic power of action by the patient (and therapist) within the transference situation,

45 sowing seeds for future developments in psychoanalysis that address other aspects of freedom beyond the “taking away interference” model of negative freedom.

Paul was a “youngish” man who came to Freud for treatment of debilitating obsessions and compulsions. Specifically, just prior to entering treatment he had experienced the compulsion to undertake a complex series of actions related to repayment of a debt combined with an obsessional fear that if he failed to act as compelled then the woman to whom he was romantically attached and his father would receive the gruesome punishment of having rats burrow into their anuses.

Additionally, at the time that he entered psychoanalysis, he was floundering in dysfunction due to obsessions, compulsions, and prohibitions which prevented him from working or making life decisions. Despite more than adequate intelligence, his career had not progressed, and his romantic life was defined by difficulty proceeding toward marriage as expected despite having a longstanding attachment to a woman whom he could have pursued.

Review of the case by Freud reveals unconscious processes constituted an impediment to

Paul’s freedom at the start of treatment. They prevented Paul from working through the unconscious hate that he has split off and repressed, perpetuating his life’s failure to launch.

Freud’s method, as described earlier, was to force looking, and over the course of his treatment with Freud numerous incidents in Paul’s life were analyzed. Reviewing the interventions made by Freud and their impact shows the negative freedom producing quality of Freud’s treatment, but before Freud’s actions can be reviewed, some basic comments upon his understanding of obsessional neurosis are needed.

Obsessional Neurosis

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Freud’s description of obsessional neurosis within this case proceeds backward, starting with analysis of symptomatic actions and thoughts and following their roots to the underlying dynamics generating Paul’s problems. What he finds, is a persistent ambivalence between love and hatred: “somewhere in the prehistoric history of his infancy, the two opposites [love and hate] should have been split apart and one of them, usually the hatred, have been repressed”

(Freud, 1909/1955, p. 239). Consequently, derivatives of this repressed unconscious return as obsessional symptoms.

One way the repressed returns is through excessive guilt. In these situations, guilt is attributed to minor actions but in fact derived from a repressed memory of a more significant experience. For example, Freud cites a case in which a man in treatment ironed money to eliminate bacteria, a displaced act of conscientiousness in response to denied guilt over his molestation of young girls. The man acknowledged these molestations without remorse, but his guilt reappeared in the form of scrupulosity over spreading infection. According to Freud, “The affect is justified. The sense of guilt cannot in itself be further criticized. But it belongs to another content, which is unknown (unconscious), and which requires to be looked for” (Freud,

1909/1955, p. 176).

Freud also addresses the presence of compulsions and prohibitions in obsessional neurosis. Regarding compulsions, he explains that these acts represent a compensation for doubt

(Freud, 1909/1955, p. 243). Unconscious phantasy leads to doubt, for example doubt of love due to unconscious hated, which in turn the obsessional person attempts to neutralize through contrary actions. Furthermore, prohibitions enter the picture, because the process of neutralization via compulsive action is forever incomplete. The unconscious factor remains operative as long as it is unconscious, and so over time compulsions spiral rather than resolving

47 the inexplicable doubt and guilt, and so the person begins to limit their sphere of action via prohibitions. In this way, obsessional neurosis grows in complexity over time as symptoms compound.

Additionally, over time a form of regression occurs and “preparatory acts become substituted for the final decision” (Freud, 1909/1955, p. 244). In this state, thinking takes the place of acting, which sustains the situation of doubt. Freud addresses the value of a situation of doubt to the obsessional person, explaining that through uncertainty and doubt, the person achieves detachment from reality (Freud, 1909/1955, p. 232), leaving what has been repressed untouched and maintaining the unconscious conflict the person is defending against.

Finally, there is the question of how the initial experiences under repression have been ejected from consciousness and hidden within the memory. According to Freud, in obsessional neurosis, “the trauma, instead of being forgotten, is deprived of its affective cathexis” (Freud,

1909/1955, p. 196). Memories of the feelings, phantasies, experiences, and conflicts underlying the obsessive illness may be spoken of by the patient, but they fail to experience the emotions tied to what is recalled and so the feelings fail to be worked through.

Consequently, in cases of obsessional neurosis, Freud’s curative method is to force looking at what has been banished from consciousness. The patient must come to see what they have denied and to put words to the obsessional ideas that have remained vague (Freud,

1909/1955):

What happens is the patient, who hitherto turned his eyes away in terror from his own

pathological productions, begins to attend to them and obtains a clearer and more detailed

view of them (p. 223).

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In other words, through the psychoanalytic process, the patient must be “forced into remembering what he had forgotten” and “finding out what he had overlooked” (Freud,

1909/1955, p. 232). This forced looking is achieved through the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis, which is to say everything that comes to mind without censorship, through the following of associations, through the interpretation of dreams (although few dreams are discussed in this case), and through the presentation of interpretations by the analyst. When the patient hesitates to speak, he must be reminded of the fundamental rule and compelled to verbalize what is entering his consciousness.

Freud describes the recovery produced by the psychoanalytic approach to result from what has been unconscious becoming conscious. Once the repression is overcome, “everything conscious was subject to a process of wearing-away, while what was unconscious was relatively unchangeable” (Freud, 1909/1955, p. 176). For example, a hateful unconscious phantasy will produce ongoing guilt and obsessional ideas, but once revealed the underlying hate and accompanying guilt recedes over time, since time is a factor in the conscious sphere (but not the unconscious). Lastly, by bringing the unconscious into consciousness, it becomes possible for rational decisions to be made, according to Freud, rather than doubt and indecision prevailing.

Course of Treatment

Freud’s efforts to treat the Paul’s obsessional neurosis started with the injunction to say everything:

The next day I made him pledge himself to submit to the one and only condition of the

treatment---namely, to say everything that came into his head, even if it was unpleasant

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to him, or seemed unimportant or irrelevant or senseless. I then gave him leave to start

his communications with any subject he pleased (Freud, 1909/1955, p. 159).

In the initial part of the treatment, the outline of Paul's dysfunction is discovered. He experiences irrational obsessional fears that his father and his lady (the Standard Edition’s

English translation of Freud’s term for the woman Paul is ambivalently drawn toward) will be hurt. Additionally, he experiences a variety of compulsions and prohibitions, which are explored as the treatment proceeds.

Paul also provides recollections of his early sexual life at the start of treatment. He describes to Freud that at age 4 or 5 he touched his governess’s vagina, and that after this experience he had a “tormenting curiosity to see the female body” (Freud, 1909/1955, p. 160).

He would become excited viewing women and girls at the baths, and also touched another governess sexually. Around this same period, he also experienced the thought that his sexual thoughts were known to his parents and the feeling that something bad such as the death of his father would result from his thoughts, and therefore that he must prevent them.

Following the establishment of this partial outline of Paul’s issue, which establish the longstanding nature of a link between sexual thoughts and obsessive fears in his life, he then presents a complex incident which gives the case the “Rat Man” shorthand. While participating in army reserve training, a sadistic career officer tells Paul of a “rat punishment” in which a bowl filled with rats is put over a victim’s bottom and the rats burrow into the anus. Paul subsequently comes to fear this punishment will befall his father (despite his father being dead) and his lady if he does not repay a small debt related to the delivery of eyeglasses, and he experiences a series of obsessions and compulsions around this idea.

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Freud uses the process of free association to reveal more and more of Paul’s history and the nature of his obsessions. In doing so, his aim is to trace back the history of the obsessional illness to the generating experiences which have been repressed but continue to produce symptoms. Also, he seeks to develop understanding of the role of the illness in Paul’s life.

Neurosis derives from the return of the repressed, but it is also maintained by the secondary gains which the illness produces for the patient.

As stated earlier, ambivalence and guilt are at the center of obsessional neurosis, and this finding applies to Paul’s case – his obsessions replace action and through illness he evades choice. Freud links the intensification of Paul’s obsessional illness to the appearance of a new marriage prospect, which created a conflict between his attachment to his lady and the possibility of a family arranged match which would assure him a good career. Furthermore, this family arranged match is associated with Paul’s father’s wishes for him, in contrast to the love match

Freud sees present with his lady. Consequently, Freud writes, “by falling ill he avoided the task of resolving it in real life” (Freud, 1909/1955, p. 199).

Freud makes an interpretation presenting this explanation of the role of his symptoms to

Paul, but Paul rejects its significance. However, as the treatment proceeds, Paul then develops a transference phantasy in which he imagines that Freud wants him to marry his daughter, but Paul rejects this match out of love for his lady. Freud points out the analogy between this phantasy and Paul’s real experience of conflict between his love and his experience of his father’s wishes.

This is then traced backwards revealing Paul’s father’s position of opposition to Paul’s erotic life in childhood.

Paul continues to speak of his past experiences to Freud, discussing the place of masturbation in his history. He reveals memories of two times in which he masturbated after

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“fine moments,” such as when he heard a man blowing a horn in Vienna and after reading a passage of Goethe in which young Goethe, through a “burst of tenderness,” broke a curse preventing him from kissing his love. Freud interprets that the stimulation generated by these experiences came through their representation of “a prohibition, and the defiance of a command”

(Freud, 1909/1955, p. 204). He is bringing to Paul’s attention the conflict between external restraint and independent sexuality which traces back to repression of the memory of his father’s early interference with his sexual impulses and his related reactions.

Freud interprets multiple patterns of action which represent Paul’s unconscious ambivalence. For instance, Paul reports imagining that he is visited by his deceased father’s ghost while studying late at night, and then compulsively examining his penis in the mirror. This is interpreted to represent Paul’s split between identification with and satisfaction of his father

(through study) and defiance of his father (through sexuality). In another instance, Paul reports moving a stone from the road because he imagines his lady’s carriage could crash into it, and then compulsively returning to move the stone back into the road. Freud interprets this to represent the conflict between love (protection) and hate (sabotage) which Paul has for his lady.

In both these instances, Freud is making interpretations which highlight the unconscious elements Paul has repressed, his wish to defy his father and his wish for vengeance against his lady. By doing so, Freud brings these elements into the realm of the conscious, so that Paul can be freed from their repetition in obsessional thoughts and compulsive actions.

Based on the sources of information at his disposal (in this case predominately Paul’s speech and associations, his reported actions, and the transference), Freud constructs a summarizing interpretation. He says to Paul that when he was under age 6 he had been caught masturbating and punished by his father, leading to “an ineradicable grudge against his father”

52 and his father’s role as the “interferer with [his] sexual enjoyment.” Supporting the accuracy of this construction, Paul then recalled being told that as a young boy he had been beaten by his father for an unremembered transgression, and had flown into a rage, screaming at his father.

Paul linked this incident to cowardice and fear of blows, which Freud then attributes to Paul’s possession of an unconscious fear of his own rage. Further supporting this construction, Paul subsequently spoke with his mother about the incident, and she attributed his punishment to having bitten someone, possibly his nurse. As we know from his earlier recollection, there was a sexual element in Paul’s relations with his nurses.

Paul initially denies the value of this construction as an explanation for his obsessional illness. However, his subsequent transference to Freud replicates his relation to his father. In his deliberate actions, Paul is cordial with Freud, but in his dreams, daydreams, and associations,

Freud reports him to “[heap] the grossest and filthiest abuse upon me and my family” (Freud,

1909/1955, p. 209). Additionally, Paul gets off the couch in-session and moves away from

Freud, which he is able to link to a fear of being beaten, and when on the couch cowers and covers himself in the manner of someone expecting to be hit. Consequently, as this material is interpreted, Paul comes to accept Freud’s construction regarding his father’s interfering role in his sexuality and his repressed rage against his father.

The discovery of this lost chapter in Paul’s story subsequently allows for a complete interpretation of the “rat delusion.” Freud identifies Paul to have an identification with his father which was activated by military service, since his father was a soldier as a young man.

Moreover, his father had shared a story with Paul about an unpaid gambling debt from his military years, giving Paul’s small debt added stimulating effect. This identification set the stage for the obsessional thinking and compulsions that followed.

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Freud links the compulsion to return to the location of the military exercises with an unconscious wish to “try his luck” with a woman at the inn where he stayed and a woman at the post office in the town. This wish is disguised in the form of seeking to repay the lieutenants who had supposedly paid for the glasses on Paul’s behalf, with the proof of the unconscious motive coming through the fact of Paul’s knowledge that it was the woman at the post office and not either lieutenant to whom the money is owed. These unconscious wishes come into conflict with

Paul’s unconscious identification with his father (the representative of inhibition).

Regarding the obsessional fear of the rat punishment being given to his father and lady,

Freud finds multiple meanings in Paul’s associations. Most prominent is anal erotism. The rats are associated with money and with Paul’s father’s debt (spielratte is a German word for gambler). Rats are also interpreted by Freud to represent the penis and anal intercourse. Based on these constructions, Freud indicates “The story of the rat punishment… had fanned into a flame all of his prematurely suppressed impulses of cruelty, egoistic and sexual alike” (1909/1955, p.

215). In his unconscious, Paul is inflicting the rat punishment in all its symbolic permutations upon his lady and his father.

Freud also identifies a link between rats and children within Paul’s associations. This leads to the link of Paul himself with the rat (hence, the Rat Man). A rat “gnaws and bites” like young Paul, “but rats cannot be sharp-toothed, greedy and dirty without impunity; they are cruelly persecuted and mercilessly put to death” (Freud, 1909/1955, p. 216). Hence, we return again to Paul’s unconscious sexual passion and rage, and the fear of persecution these repressed drives arouse. Furthermore, rats are associated to children and Freud interprets the rat torture

(rats entering the anus) to unconsciously represent birth, based on the infantile phantasy of birth through the anus and because in dream interpretation opposites can be equivalent (i.e. entering

54 rectum = coming out of rectum) (Freud, 1909/1955, p. 220). Paul then reveals that his lady is potentially infertile due to an operation, while he desires children, leading to his hesitation to pursue marriage. Thus, Freud’s psychoanalytic work has uncovered another unconscious conflict

(the question of having a child) within the rat delusion and brought it to Paul’s consciousness.

Freud constructs a complex interpretation drawing all of this material together. The rat punishment and the interaction with the captain represent Paul’s aggression, while the conflict around repayment of the debt carries Paul’s ambivalence regarding satisfying or defying his father and the aggression and guilt attached. The indecision regarding traveling to repay the debt or return to Vienna represents both the question of obedience to his father and his ambivalence toward his lady. Freud closes the presentation of his interpretation with a report of the transformative impact of his construction: “When we reached the solution which has been described above, the patient’s rat delirium disappeared” (Freud, 1909/1955, p. 220).

Through the power of interpretation of the unconscious, Paul has been given negative freedom. Previously his repressed phantasy of sexual satisfaction, leading to punishment, leading to rage led him to suppress his sexuality, avoid conflict, and undertake compulsive rituals to cleanse himself of guilt (for fantasized transgressions), and he avoided action through obsessional thinking due to unresolved conflicts between love and hate. Once his unconscious has been brought into his awareness through his free association in session with Freud and

Freud’s interpretations, the constrictive and immobilizing impact of his unconscious repetitions can be overcome.

At the end of his report on the Rat Man, Freud reveals that his patient died at war. This sad end to the story prevents Freud from discussing Paul’s life after treatment. Still, Freud emphasizes the new freedom which he achieved through his psychoanalysis. He was freed from

55 the repetition of the early fears and guilt his precocious sexual activity generated. Freud’s pathway for facilitating this new freedom was a negative pathway. It emerged as Freud used interpretation to reveal conflicts that needed to be worked through. Once brought into consciousness through the psychoanalytic method, the repressed phantasies and wishes fueling

Rat Man’s symptoms could be dealt with by the reality-oriented parts of his personality, according to Freud. New pathways for compromise which would allow for satisfaction where previously ambivalence and guilty prevailed are presumed to have been opened, but Freud’s patient could not live out this freedom because his life was taken in the Great War.

Transference in the “Rat Man” Case

Freud discussed transference in the Dora case in the context of its interference with treatment. In the case of Paul, transference is relatively less emphasized. Its main role as presented by Freud is as a source of information. He describes Paul’s transference as follows

(1909/1955):

He [Paul] kept urging against the evidential value of the story [of his rageful reaction to

correction by his father] the fact that he himself could not remember the scene. And so it

was only along the painful road of transference that he was able to reach a conviction that

his relation to his father really necessitated the postulation of his unconscious

complement. Things soon reached a point at which, in his dreams, his waking phantasies,

and his associations, he began heaping the grossest and filthiest abuse upon me and my

family, though in his deliberate actions he never treated me with anything but the greatest

respect. His demeanour as he repeated these insults to me was that of a man in despair.

‘How can a gentleman like you, sir,’ he used to ask, ‘let yourself be abused in this way by

a low, good-for-nothing fellow like me? You ought to turn me out: that's all I deserve.’

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While he talked like this, he would get up from the sofa and roam about the room,—a

habit which he explained at first as being due to delicacy of feeling: he could not bring

himself, he said, to utter such horrible things while he was lying there so comfortably.

But soon he himself found a more cogent explanation, namely, that he was avoiding my

proximity for fear of my giving him a beating. If he stayed on the sofa he behaved like

some one in desperate terror trying to save himself from castigations of terrific violence;

he would bury his head in his hands, cover his face with his arm, jump up suddenly and

rush away, his features distorted with pain, and so on. He recalled that his father had had

a passionate temper, and sometimes in his violence had not known where to stop. Thus,

little by little, in this school of suffering, the patient won the sense of conviction which he

had lacked—though to any disinterested mind the truth would have been almost self-

evident (p. 209).

Through the transference, Freud indicates that Paul came to be convinced of the dynamics which he had previously denied – his unconscious rage against his father and fear of retribution. Commenting on this aspect of the case, psychoanalyst Hyman Muslin notes “The curative factors in the Rat Man are assigned to the relief obtained from the revival of the memories of father-hatred and an understanding of the complexities of the symptoms resulting from this revival” (1979, p. 569). This emphasis on transference leading to intellectual insight is reflective of an advance in psychoanalytic technique through the shift from seeing transference as an impediment to be overcome to a positive factor in treatment.

Beyond this discussion of transference as information leading to acceptance of genetic interpretations, other dimensions of the transference relationship are also suggested in Freud’s writing up of the case. For example, while Freud uncovers Paul’s repressed rage against his

57 father, Paul’s explicit recollection of his relationship with his father emphasizes their closeness

(1909/1955):

He then proceeded, somewhat disconnectedly as it seemed, to say that he had been

his father's best friend, and that his father had been his. Except on a few subjects, upon

which fathers and sons usually hold aloof from one another—(What could he mean by

that?)—, there had been a greater intimacy between them than there now was between

him and his best friend (p. 182).

This friendship is not negated by the rage revealed to persist in Paul’s unconscious. It’s likely that the positive aspects of his relationship with his father were transferred onto Freud, along with the anger noted by Freud in his discussion of Paul’s dreams, slips, and associations towards him and his family. This positive transference appears to have supported the treatment.

Paul also reported to Freud that he had a longstanding pattern of depending on re- assurance from others during periods of self-reproach and fear. According to Freud: “He had a friend, he told me, of whom he had an extraordinarily high opinion. He used always to go to him when he was tormented by some criminal impulse, and ask him whether he despised him as a criminal. His friend used then to give him moral support by assuring him that he was a man of irreproachable conduct, and had probably been in the habit, from his youth onwards, of taking a dark view of his own life” (Freud, 1909/1955, p. 159). Later in the treatment, Freud in fact did make comments providing encouragement to Paul, telling him “I told him I did not dispute the gravity of his case nor the significance of his pathological constructions; but at the same time his youth was very much in his favour as well as the intactness of his personality. In this connection

I said a word or two upon the good opinion I had formed of him, and this gave him visible pleasure” (1909/1955, p. 178).

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In his discussion of the transference in this case, Hyman Muslin links this action by Freud to Paul’s desire for reassurance (1979, p. 565). Muslin also notes that Freud’s educative comments to Paul, such as his explanation to Paul of the nature of displacement and reversal in the unconscious put Freud in the role of teacher (1979, p. 565). Here too, a positive transference between Freud and Paul appears to have been developing. Along with the position of reassuring friend, Freud was the teacher, with Paul as his engaged pupil. These positive transferences co- existed with the unconscious resentments discussed previously, and their establishment was beneficial to the treatment.

In other writings, Freud identified the importance of the positive transference as a source of motivation within treatment, and his statements are reinforced by Paul’s recovery in this case.

For example, in his Introductory Lectures (1917/1963), Freud remarks:

If the patient is to fight his way through the normal conflict with the resistances which we

have uncovered for him in the analysis, he is in need of a powerful stimulus which will

influence the decision in the sense which we desire, leading to recovery. Otherwise it

might happen that he would choose in favour of repeating the earlier outcome and would

allow what had been brought up into consciousness to slip back again into repression. At

this point what turns the scale in his struggle is not his intellectual insight—which is

neither strong enough nor free enough for such an achievement—but simply and solely

his relation to the doctor. In so far as his transference bears a ‘plus’ sign, it clothes the

doctor with authority and is transformed into belief in his communications and

explanations. In the absence of such a transference, or if it is a negative one, the patient

would never even give a hearing to the doctor and his arguments (p. 445).

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This aspect of the therapeutic situation emerged in the case of Paul, while in the case of

Dora is failed. As discussed previously, Dora’s negative transferences to Freud led to a collapse of her treatment. It appears that the balance between positive and negative transferences was different in Dora’s case, marked by both greater hostility and less warmth, in contrast to Paul’s unconscious hostility paired with greater trust and friendship in conscious awareness. It’s also likely that the more collegial tone Freud took with Paul helped the situation. With Paul his interpretations were made with conviction as in Dora’s case, but rather than overcoming resistance through argument as in Dora’s case, where at times he appeared to play the role of litigator, Freud took a more patient and educative tone with Paul.5 Freud was always refining his method, and this shift may reflect the later date of Paul’s analysis, it may reflect Freud’s patriarchal attitudes, or most likely it reflects both.

Additionally, the relatively controlled unfolding of the transference in Paul’s case stands out. Paul is able to express negative feelings toward Freud without the treatment collapsing.

Freud detects these elements and does not retaliate. In contrast, in Dora’s case her negative transference is expressed through her departure. Freud reconstructs a motive of vengeance when he reflects upon the case, but this vengeance was not able to be contained within the treatment.

Freud sees Paul’s recovery to emerge from his acceptance of the interpretations of his symptoms and the reconstruction of the forgotten past thereby developed. Concurrent to the process of developing understanding and widening Paul’s freedom to recognize his own wishes and conflictual feelings, there is also a process of containment of negative feelings toward Freud which occurred in the case. Is this too part of Paul’s cure? Turning again to Muslin’s

5 These real qualities of the analyst’s behavior would not be addressed for some time within the psychoanalytic literature.

60 examination of transference in this case, he notes that although no transference interpretations are noted by Freud, Paul’s interactions with Freud (specifically Freud as the object of his transference) included the “discharge of affects” along with the previously noted support for

Paul’s eventual conviction of Freud’s interpretations. This “discharge of affects” aspect of Paul’s interactions with Freud are not remarked on further by Muslin but represent an important and to be developed aspect of the psychoanalytic process. It appears to me that the effect of expression of previously repressed emotions and their containment is overlooked in discussion of the Rat

Man case, especially when the contrast between the containment achieved in Paul’s case in contrast to the collapse of treatment in Dora’s case. Freud emphasizes recovery of memories and understanding as curative in this case history, but there is also a here-and-now emotional component operating in the transference and this aspect of Paul’s relationship with Freud points to a positive freedom dimension within psychoanalytic treatment that compliments the negative freedom to recognize the unconscious. Paul was free to act and feel within the analytic space without Freud restricting him or reacting punitively.

Limitations of Freudian Freedom

While the Freudian model of treatment has been shown through the “Rat Man” case to proceed through the facilitation of negative freedom, there are limitations to Freud’s model with regard to overall freedom which must be considered. These limitations appear in the form of the analyst’s authority and the related issue of the possibility that prejudices held by the analyst may be imposed upon the patient under the guise of the analyst’s objective judgment of reality.

Freud recognized that the analyst’s role goes beyond simply presenting interpretations to the patient – the analyst also may function as auxiliary parent and educator according to Freud.

In these functions, the analyst facilitates growth of the patient’s ego or softening of the patient’s

61 critical super-ego by providing an identificatory object for the patient to internalize. However, this position as after-educator of the patient has the potential to constrain the patient’s freedom.

On this matter, Freud notes (1938/1964):

A warning must be given against misusing this new influence. However much the analyst

may be tempted to become a teacher, model and ideal for other people and to create men

in his own image, he should not forget that that is not his task in the analytic relationship,

and indeed that he will be disloyal to his task if he allows himself to be led on by his

inclinations. If he does, he will only be repeating a mistake of the parents who crushed

their child's independence by their influence, and he will only be replacing the patient's

earlier dependence by a new one. In all his attempts at improving and educating the

patient the analyst should respect his individuality. The amount of influence which he

may legitimately allow himself will be determined by the degree of developmental

inhibition present in the patient. Some neurotics have remained so infantile that in

analysis too they can only be treated as children (p. 175).

Here we see Freud emphasizing the preservation of the patient’s freedom, but also giving room for the abrogation of this freedom in the case of neurotics determined “infantile.” Freud encourages freedom for those he deems capable of exercising freedom, but not all people are capable of freedom in his eyes. And so, the analyst remains relatively neutral with certain patients, while taking on a more parental role in other cases.

This raises the question of what Freud’s criteria for relaxing neutrality might be. In practice, Freud brought his own perspectives into his interpretation of his patient’s material, which is not a surprise since escape from perspectivism is not possible. All interpretations are colored by the experiences the interpreter brings to bear. What stands out with regard to Freud’s

62 interpretations is his conviction that he is merely representing reality, rather than presenting a perspective on reality. This insight reveals the nature of the tension between fidelity to the ideal of preserving the patient’s freedom and imposition of authority within Freud’s work: It is his conception of reality and conviction of his own capacity to be an arbiter of reality that compromises the promotion of freedom otherwise central within the Freudian model of treatment.

The previous discussion of Freud’s presumptions in the case of Dora is relevant with regard to this topic. Based on Dora’s behavior and associations in combination with his understanding of the unconscious, Freud inferred Dora to have repressed love for Herr K, for example, as well as repressed sexual wishes toward Herr K and her father and repressed rage.

His conclusions were presented to Dora in a definitive manner, with the expectation she would accept his interpretations. Any disagreement by Dora was treated as resistance to be overcome.

Hypothetically, Dora’s reactions to Freud could have been treated as an opportunity for bringing her unconscious dynamics to life within the analyst-patient relationship, making room for her aggression to be expressed and explored. However, Freud’s uncover and educate approach to interpretation at this stage did not appreciate this type of freedom within the transference.6 This position reflects that psychoanalysis was still growing and Freud’s understanding of the relationship between transference and psychoanalytic cure was still being worked out.

Additionally, it is a reflection of Freud’s positioning of himself (and other analysts by extension) as assessors and arbiters of reality.

6 Freud’s later discussion of transference neurosis made the patients relationship with the analyst the central focus of the treatment, shifting emphasis off genetic interpretation and toward overcoming resistances and working through conflicts in the patient’s transferential experience of the analyst.

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The starting point for understanding Freud’s conception of reality is his philosophical foundation in positivistic science. In the 19th century, the positivist extension of enlightenment science emphasized that a single truth was present in each situation and that this truth was accessible through rational analysis of observed facts (Comte, 1988). While Freud simultaneously held humanistic positions, which can be seen in his embrace of literature and mythology, he was a man of his times who considered it his prerogative to apply logic in determination of the truth.

This philosophical perspective enters into the process of psychoanalysis through the reality principle. According to Freud, “Neurotics turn away from reality because they find it unbearable” (1911/1958, p. 218). This turning away from reality is the corollary of the weakening of the ego previously discussed. Turning away from reality leaves instinctual drives unsatisfied and unmodified, and phantasies unmodified, and so repetition of dysfunction and reliance on satisfaction in phantasy and daydreaming persist. In contrast, Freud attributes mental health to the psychic apparatus reaching the point of deciding to “form a conception of the real circumstances in the external world and to endeavor to make real alteration to them” when facing what is frustrating or disagreeable (1911/1958, p. 218). The function resulting is the reality principle, and according to Freud adjustment to life depends upon the action of the reality principle upon the unconscious wishes aiming toward unmitigated sensual satisfaction (i.e. upon the pleasure principle).

In particular Freud is concerned with the working of the reality principle upon sexuality, since he sees sexual instincts unmodified by the reality principle as the wellspring of neurosis and argues “the continuance of auto-erotism is what makes it possible to retain for so long the easier momentary and imaginary satisfaction in relation to the sexual object in place of real

64 satisfaction, which calls for effort and postponement” (1911/1958, p. 223). Consequently, overcoming neurosis, in Freud’s view, requires “educating the sexual instincts to pay regard to reality” (1911/1958, p. 223).

Now we are getting closer to seeing the potential for coercion within Freud’s treatment.

Freud equates health with the adjustment of the sexual instincts to reality. The sexual instincts vary by the individual, as Freud makes clear in his Three Essays on Sexuality (1905/1953b), but simultaneously there is an implication that they must undergo transformation through the reality principle if the person receiving treatment is to have a successful psychoanalysis. Moreover, while Freud sought to destigmatize “perversions,” making room for non-genital, non-procreative sexuality within his psychological system, he simultaneously brought a presumptuous mentality to his work, taking for himself the prerogative of judgment regarding what the reality of a patient’s inner life with regard to sexuality might be.

Consequently, a limit of Freudian freedom is revealed. While Freud generally endeavored to establish negative freedom in the lives of his patients by making interpretations to overcome repressions and resistance, his interpretations could take on a coercive quality when his judgment of the patient’s circumstances was colored by his particular conception of reality and failed to align with the patient’s subjective experience. For example, if Dora’s unconscious homosexual attachment to Frau K was “the strongest unconscious current in her mental life” as Freud notes in his retrospective assessment of the case, the absence of appreciation for this topic within her treatment may be linked to Freud’s emphasis on the accuracy of his own perceptions of reality.

In fact, he comments that his failure to address this topic was due to his not emphasizing the factor of homosexual dynamics within his model of mental life at the time of Dora’s treatment.

Consequently, we see that what Freud uncovers and interprets is influenced by what he looks for.

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This is an unavoidable fact given that Freud’s advocacy of “free floating attention” is a theoretical ideal while subjectivity colors all perception.

Additionally, the distinction between difficulty seeing what is not expected and presenting interpretations from the position of the reality principle’s authoritative agent is also important, as it highlights another potential issue. Mitchell and others have noted that Freud and subsequent analysts identified with psychoanalytic “orthodoxy” have emphasized a positivistic perspective which understands the psychoanalyst to possess asymmetrical authoritative access to the truth of the patient’s mental life. This special access is premised on the existence of a single definitive truth to be perceived and the analyst’s capacity to present this truth to the patient based on their superior objectivity and knowledge (Mitchell, 1998). Freud’s understanding of the truth is an asymmetrical positivistic perspective, and Dora’s case shows a shortcoming of treatment based upon presumption of authoritative understanding of the patient. Freedom to look at the truth and freedom to resolve conflicts without reliance on repression are Freud’s aims, but this pursuit of freedom can fail when the analyst takes an attitude of certainty that emphasizes the patient finding what he or she understands to have been hidden and most significant. This does not nullify the capacity of Freud’s method to facilitate negative freedom through the overcoming of defensive processes, but it highlights the sensitivity to the patient’s autonomy that this process demands and the danger present in the siren call that is the presumption of objective access to the patient’s mind and the authority to tell the patient what’s true in regard to their mental life.

Lastly, there is the topic of freedom in relation to the transference in the cases of Dora and the Rat Man. These cases were integral in Freud’s development of his theory of transference.

He defined transference for the first time in his assessment of the failure of Dora’s treatment, linking her reaction to him with her reactions to her father and Herr K and discussing the effect

66 of this transference. Freud proposes that because this transference was not addressed, Dora came to act out a wish for vengeance by quitting treatment. Regarding what might have been done,

Freud suggests that interpreting Dora’s negative feelings toward him, transferred from previous relationships, would have allowed the transference to be neutralized and enabled the uncovering and analysis of her unconscious life to continue.

In the case of Paul, the Rat Man, transference receives relatively reduced attention for its own sake. Freud uses Paul’s reactions to him as information regarding Paul’s unconscious rage toward his father. This allows him to develop a fuller understanding of Paul’s mental life and leads to interpretations that are accepted by Paul. Unlike Dora’s transference, the transference experienced by Paul is contained within the treatment rather than acted out. This is likely due to

Freud’s gentler approach with Paul, and the difference in the relationships being transferred onto

Freud in the two cases. Consequently, Paul has a greater range of motion to verbally attack Freud than was seen in Dora’s case. Paul insults Freud and his family (in his slips, associations, and dreams) while Dora just leaves.

Consequently, here too we see an issue of freedom. Paul is able to act more freely within the treatment than Dora, and Paul’s treatment proceeds positively while Dora’s case is a failure.

Freud would later refine his theory of transference and came to place overcoming resistances and conflicts within the transference at the center of treatment. Uncovering the unconscious remained central to Freud but he came to view the transference as the prime vehicle for this process.

Furthermore, his later model of treatment prioritized the revival of infantile conflicts within the transference and their working through in vivo in contrast to the previous focus on uncovering and processing the buried past. Through transformation of the relationship to previously repressed content in regard to the analyst, Freud proposed that a general re-organization of mind

67 occurred with conflict-arousing unconscious wishes becoming more accessible to consciousness and new solutions to old problems emerging (Freud, 1917/1963). These positions were not yet reached at the time of the Dora or Rat Man treatments and can be seen as solutions to some of the problems appearing in these cases. Where previously Freud emphasized the negative freedom to look at what was previously repressed as the road to recovery, his later theorizing took a broader view which still gave precedence to making the unconscious conscious, but emphasized that this process occurred within the transferential relationship rather than as a relatively abstract intellectual exercise.

Conclusion

Both the case of Dora and the Case of the Rat Man show that Freud emphasized negative freedom in his approach to treatment. The Rat Man case was completed, while Dora departed from treatment early, so it is the Rat Man case that better captures the impact of Freud’s negative freedom. In the end, Paul’s symptoms are reported to be reduced through Freud’s interpretive translation of them from actions representing repressed feelings and thoughts into verbalization of the wishes from which they have emerged. As a result, Paul can then work through his conflicts around these wishes, rather than repeating them as symptoms. In Dora’s case, she departed from treatment, seemingly due to unaddressed negative transference.

The transference is information. It is a process. It is not something to “master” but rather something that the patient and analyst experience. By conceiving of change as something achieved through knowledge, the experiential aspects of analysis, which are manifest in the transference are lost. In the case of Dora, Freud was still developing an understanding of transference. He did not address Dora’s impressions of him, rooted in transference and also his own patriarchal tone in dealing with her, and Dora departed treatment. Freud took a knowing

68 tone with her that limited her response to his interpretations. He did not take seriously her rejection of his comments, and in doing so he denied her the freedom to respond. An argument cannot occur if one party has already moved on to the next topic.

In the case of Paul, the Rat Man, the transference is also seen by Freud to provide information. It provided Freud information on Paul’s childhood conflicts with his father, which

Freud interpreted to provide Paul with new insight on the roots of his obsessional symptoms.

However, it appears that Paul found leeway to attack Freud which was absent in Dora’s case. In the transference he exercised a different form of freedom, the freedom of action, seen in his lashing out against Freud (in his dreams, phantasies and associations). Paul feared punishment, but Freud did not retaliate against these actions. Instead he thought about them and made interpretations, giving Paul an opportunity to work through anger at his father (represented by

Freud in the transference) which had previously been denied. Furthermore, Freud stands in for his father but also behaves differently from his father, which may be a contributing factor in the relaxing of Paul’s inhibitions. In Dora’s treatment in contrast, it may be that Freud’s conduct too closely resembles that of her father, preventing her from staying in the treatment. According to

Patrick Casement, “the patient needs to discover enough that is different in the analytic relationship to represent security, for the patient to then tolerate the re-experiencing of trauma in the transference” (1990. p.79).

Freud would later move the transference into the center of his model of treatment, as I have discussed. This shift is one of the most central within the development of psychoanalysis, as well as remaining relatively obscure to the lay public and even many psychotherapists, who continue to associate psychoanalytic treatment with the recovery of a lost past rather than the revival of the past within the transference. Here conceptions beyond negative freedom enter the

69 therapeutic picture. Freud’s emphasis on the transference is part of this shift, but Freud’s overall conception of psychoanalysis would continue to emphasize access to unconscious content even after the experiential working through achieved in the transference was elevated in significance.

This change will be explored further in the chapter that follows. Future practitioners, such as Donald Winnicott, developed the concept of the analytic space, which will be the subject of my next chapter. Analytic space is latent in Freud’s work but not theorized. It is the space where the Rat Man can rage against Freud. It is a space Dora did not have enough of. It is new experience rather than objective truth and the reality principle. It is space from which positive freedom develops for patients through psychoanalysis. Knowledge alone appears to not be enough – the Rat Man gained through insight and new experiences, and interpretations authoritatively presented to Dora did not lead to change in her life – there is also a need for new emotional experience in the process of therapeutic change.

REFERENCES

Berlin, I. (1969). Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Casement, P. (1990). Further learning from the patient: The analytic space and process. New

York, NY: Routledge.

Comte, A. (1988) Introduction to positive philosophy. (Frederick Ferré, trans.). Indianapolis, IN:

Hackett. (Original work published 1830).

Danto, E. A. (1998). The ambulatorium: Freud's free clinic in Vienna. International journal of

psycho-analysis, 79, 287-300.

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Freud, S. (1964). An Outline of Psycho-Analysis. In J. Strachey et al. (Trans.), The Standard

Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXIII (pp. 141-

207). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1938).

Freud, S. (1958). Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning. In J. Strachey et al.

(Trans.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,

Volume XII (pp. 213-226). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1911).

Freud, S. (1953a). Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. In J. Strachey et al. (Trans.),

The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume

VII (pp. 1-122). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1905).

Freud, S. (1963). Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis: Part III, General Theory of the

Neuroses. In J. Strachey et al. (Trans.), The Standard Edition of the Complete

Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVI (pp. 241-463). London: Hogarth

Press. (Original work published 1917).

Freud, S. (1957). Mourning and Melancholia. In J. Strachey et al. (Trans.), The Standard Edition

of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (pp. 237-258).

London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1917).

Freud, S. (1955). Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis. In J. Strachey et al. (Trans.), The

Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume X (pp.

151-318). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1909).

Freud, S. (1961). The Ego and the Id. In J. Strachey et al. (Trans.), The Standard Edition of the

Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIX (pp. 1-66). London:

Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1923).

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Freud, S. (1953b). Three Essays on Sexuality. In J. Strachey et al. (Trans.), The Standard Edition

of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume VII (pp. 123-246).

London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1905).

Freud, S., & Breuer, J. (2004). Studies in Hysteria. (N. Luckhurst, Trans.) New York, NY:

Penguin Books. (Original work published 1895).

Mitchell, S.A. (1998). “The analyst’s knowledge and authority.” Psychoanalytic Quarterly,

67(1), 1-31.

Muslin, H. L. (1979). Transference in the Rat Man case: The transference in transition. Journal

of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 27(3), 561-578.

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CHAPTER 2

Subjectivity as Freedom:

The Development of Subjectivity in Winnicott’s Thinking

In this chapter I will discuss the development of freedom via psychotherapy from the perspective of positive freedom. Positive freedom is the capacity for agency; it is experiencing oneself to have the power to make life choices, rather than being a passive vessel controlled by others. The positive aspect of freedom is rooted in the individual’s experience of action starting from within, in contrast to negative freedom which emphasizes removal of blockages to action.

My contention is that psychoanalytic psychotherapy can be conceptualized as a process of enabling an individual to take possession of this positive freedom. In particular, the mid-20th century developments in technique which are described in the writings of the Melanie Klein, the

British Kleinians, and Donald Winnicott, address this aspect of human experience. Klein’s work articulated a widening of the therapeutic field, giving increased importance to the full range of experiences occurring between patient and analyst. From this position, new ideas regarding human development could emerge. Starting from a Kleinian foundation, Winnicott articulated a model of psychological development which has profound implications for the question of human freedom. I will review this model and argue that positive freedom is at its center, and I will discuss the related developments in technique that Winnicott promoted. His treatment of

Margaret Little will be used for illustration, including illustration of the potential for idealization and treatment stalemate or infantilization.

What is Agency?

In my conception of agency, I find Roy Schafer’s arguments regarding action help clarify the topic. According to Schafer’s “action” model, “action is human behavior that has a point; it is

73 meaningful human activity; it is intentional or goal-directed deeds by people; it is doing things for reasons” (1973, p. 178). Within his framework, people who “claim” their actions in turn experience themselves to be “active, purposive, choice-making, meaning-creating, and responsible” (1973, p. 187).7 When I write about the individual possessing agency, it is this sense of ownership over his or her actions, generation of meaning, and felt capacity to impact the world that I am emphasizing.

Similar ideas regarding subjectivity have been presented in existentialist philosophical works such as Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity (1949). According to the existentialists, each person is thrown into their life situation (what Sartre termed “facticity”) but is able to develop perspective on their circumstantial situation. This capacity for perspective subsequently allows for freedom, as well as “bad faith” which is self-deception in order to preserve an existing state that one otherwise would reject (Sartre, 1943/1956). De Beauvoir’s classic example of bad faith is presented in The Second Sex, where she describes female acceptance of subordination to men as an abdication of responsibility (1949/2009).

These existentialist ideas apply with regard to agency and freedom because they describe the human capacity for making life choices. This choice-making agentic subjectivity is the positive freedom that interests me, and which I believe psychoanalysis develops. Also, I share de

Beauvoir’s sensitivity to the precariousness of freedom. While Jean-Paul Sartre argues that freedom to choose exists in all cases, his position is highly idealistic. Certainly, in the abstract, any choice is possible – a prisoner might choose suicide rather than being forced into an

7 Schafer writes with an emphasis on the development of agency through the reclamation of previously “disclaimed” actions (unconscious repetitions and defensive maneuvers) through psychoanalytic interpretation, while my own emphasis in this chapter is on new experience within the psychoanalytic frame leading to feelings of agency. Nonetheless, while emphasizing different pathways toward the development of agency, in both perspectives the end result is that the individual experiences that they are the active and responsible center of his or her life.

74 objectionable task, or an oppressed person might choose doomed rebellion over compromise and subjugation. These things do happen, but in the majority of cases, they do not. This might be argued to be bad faith, but it also suggests that freedom is more complicated.

Here de Beauvoir is very instructive. She argues that freedom is not a given but something developed. She shares Sartre’s belief in each person’s responsibility for shaping their world, but she also says that the conditions a person exists within can make it easier or harder or practically impossible for them to step outside their given state and claim freedom.

Hence, I see Schafer and de Beauvoir to align. Schafer’s concept of “action” and the necessity of taking responsibility for one’s life presented by de Beauvoir are descriptions of a life lived from the foundation of an internal life accepted and possessed by the subject. My concept of freedom emerged from personal and clinical investigation, but it does not rest only on my observations. It can be seen in the psychoanalytic and existential literature, and these perspectives add depth to the picture of positive freedom that I seek to present.

The Scene in London

Returning to the development of psychoanalysis, I am interested in linking the understanding of subjectivity and intersubjectivity within the British Kleinian group and the concept of positive freedom. Between the 1930s and 1950s, Melanie Klein and others moved the field of psychoanalysis forward by emphasizing emotional experience in the transference as the source of growth via psychoanalytic treatment. Klein’s background as a child analyst led her to introduce a wider conceptualization of the analytic encounter, incorporating the patient’s behavior, relation to the analyst and the analyst’s interpretations, and the countertransferential emotional experiences of the analyst in relation to the patient. This, in turn, illuminated new channels of meaning to be explored, leading to new understanding of early, “pre-oedipal”

75 experiences and innovations in metapsychology and technique. In the model of treatment that emerged, unconscious defensive processes continued to be interpreted, but these interpretations were intended to facilitate experience rather than produce intellectual insights, and changes in the patient’s relation to the world resulted from living through emotional experiences with the analyst. The historical roots of these experience’s continued to be explored and worked through, but only after thorough elaboration of the interaction between analyst and patient and the accompanying emotions occurring in the here-and-now, which became the primary analytic task.

Melanie Klein trained as a psychoanalyst in Budapest, and later Berlin, and moved to

London at the invitation of Edward Glover in the 1920s. She was known initially for her treatment of children, where she introduced the idea that children’s play could be treated as an interpretable form of free association. Children could therefore be psychoanalyzed and, furthermore, work with children provided an opportunity for direct observation of early emotional experiences that previously were only accessible via analysis of transference (Bion,

Rosenfeld, Segal, 1961).

Coming out of her work with children, Klein placed greater attention on pre-oedipal experiences. She introduced a developmental schema in which children started out relying on projection and introjection to defend themselves against unbearable anxiety and only over time developed the capacity for encountering others as separate, external entities with minds of their own. Her term for the early state of reliance on projective mechanisms is the paranoid-schizoid position, because this state is characterized by fear of the environment, due to the child’s projection of unbearable hate into the other and subsequent paranoia (or withdrawal, hence paranoid-schizoid). However, this state of affairs is not permanent. Over time, the child introjects the thinking function of their caregiver, who under typical circumstances has recognized the

76 child’s fear and responded compassionately, introducing a new element to the system. When the child establishes appreciation for their aggression, they feel guilt for their hateful impulses, and seek to make reparations to the other by caring acts. This awareness of the inevitability of hate in life and subsequent guilt led Klein to name this capacity the depressive position (1946).

Achievement of the depressive position does not mean one is forever in the depressive position – Klein thought in terms of states rather than stages. Emotional conflict and anxiety return all people to the paranoid-schizoid position at times, although some inhabit this position more frequently than others. Highlighting that movement between positions is a normative and valuable experience, Joseph Newirth describes these states as “parallel systems of organizing, apprehending, and generating experience, belief, and knowledge” (2005, p. 125). Moreover, he goes on to say that the continuous oscillation between positions leads to the destruction of old meanings and emergence of new meanings, presenting a dialectical vision of psychic life in which meaning is generated and regenerated by ongoing dialog along multiple vertices (inner- external, conscious-unconscious, subject-object, subject-subject). Nonetheless, while paranoid- schizoid position experiences are valued within this model, problems in living result when they predominate. Patients stuck in the paranoid-schizoid position frequently seek treatment for experiences of emptiness and meaninglessness, social alienation and conflicts with others, and other symptoms reflecting the lack of centered subjectivity that is defining of the paranoid- schizoid position (Newirth, 2005). A major contribution of the Kleinians to psychoanalysis is their exploration of how individuals come to be trapped in these states defined by anxiety, powerlessness, and emptiness, and how they might be helped in enlivening their worlds, experiencing security, and living with agency.

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Klein and those whom she trained approached psychoanalysis as a “total situation.” To quote Klein’s own definition: “It is essential to think in terms of total situations transferred from the past into the present as well as emotion defenses and object relations” (1952). Like Freud’s work with the Rat Man, where his movements in the room were interpreted, the Kleinians looked at everything happening between the analyst and patient as part of the treatment. Writing on the total situation, Kleinian analyst Betty Josephs elaborated on Klein’s ideas, describing psychoanalytic treatment as “the living out in the transference of something of the nature of the patient’s early object relationships, her defensive organization, and her method of communicating her whole conflict” (1985).

Crucially, this living out of early experiences within the analytic relationship makes transference a place where change occurs rather than just a source of information. The past is revived, and different outcomes to old conflicts become possible. This shift rests upon Klein’s model of growth as movement through the paranoid-schizoid position to the depressive position.

Here development depends on interaction between the individual and their objects, and consequently interaction between the analyst and patient is central in Kleinian technique.

Klein emphasized interpreting at the point of “maximum anxiety” and interpretation of unconscious phantasies present in the patient’s experience of the analyst, which leads patients to work with early emotional conflicts that would otherwise remain inaccessible (Steiner, 2017).

Because her ideas about the paranoid-schizoid position and projection offer a model for understanding the patient’s earliest experiences, the resulting regressions are able to be symbolized by the analyst and returned to the patient, rather than becoming enacted in flight from treatment or other acting out, or covered over with pseudo-insight. Wilfred Bion referred to this process as containment, describing the reception of projected aspects of the patient’s inner

78 world, delay of overt reaction during a period of processing through thinking about the situation

(memorably metaphorized as an act of digestion), with eventual interpretation returning the projected aspect of the patient’s inner world in a digested form the patient can accept (Schafer,

1994). Through this process, the patient is assisted in integrating experience that previously has been avoided and hidden. Furthermore, as noted earlier, the full range of the patient’s actions are content in the Kleinian model, not just verbalized thoughts and feelings, and the negative is expected and accepted, creating an atmosphere where the patients’ freedom to express all feelings is prioritized.

Through the analyst’s interpretations, the patient comes to recognize their aggression, rather than projecting it into others. Feelings such as rage are initially expressed toward the analyst, which represents a major shift in the experience of the patient who has not previously worked through these overwhelming emotions in dialog with another. As hate is understood, the pattern of turning away from the good object in which the patient has previously been locked (for example, turning away due to fear of hate would destroying the needed object) is loosened, allowing love too to be recognized (Steiner, 2017).

Overall, expression of affect is unlocked by closely following and interpreting the transference, but not by making links to the past (Josephs, 1985). Kleinian analysis is not a bloodless affair, but rather a living process between two people where emotional experiences that previously could not be addressed are revived and processed.

Klein describes the end result of treatment in her brief paper on the conditions of termination (1950), where she identifies termination to be indicated by the patient’s capacity for mourning, stating:

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By analysing as fully as possible both the negative and the positive transference,

persecutory and depressive anxieties are diminished and the patient becomes increasingly

able to synthesize the contrasting aspects of the primary objects, and the feelings towards

them, thus establishing a more realistic and secure attitude to the internal and the external

world. If these processes have been sufficiently experienced in the transference situation

both the idealization of the analyst and the feelings of being persecuted by him are

diminished; the patient can then cope more successfully with the feelings of loss caused

by the termination of the analysis and with that part of the work of mourning which he

has to carry out by himself after the end of the analysis (p. 204).

Klein highlights the capacity for mourning and, in the course of doing so, also illustrates her vision of psychoanalytic treatment as something that is lived through. Furthermore, and most importantly with regard to my aim of highlighting the relationship between psychoanalysis and freedom, she emphasizes that through psychoanalysis the patient reaches a point of contact with a separate and external outer world capable of being encountered and engaged with in a realistic manner (“a more realistic and secure attitude to the internal and the external world”), rather than isolation within paranoid-schizoid experience.

Returning to my proposition that psychoanalysis can be understood as a pursuit of freedom, this aspect of treatment is well described by Hanna Segal (1957) in her development of

Klein’s concept of symbol formation. To start, symbolization is the representation of one thing with another, in this case typically the representation by a person of an object from their inner life by something in the environment. The world gains meaning through the symbols projected into it, but if these symbols are seen to be identical to what they represent, a situation that Segal

80 terms a symbolic equation, they become persecutory and thinking may be defensively annihilated to escape unbearable perceptions.

Segal gives a classic example of this when she describes one patient who dreams of playing a violin duet with a young girl, whose associations reveal playing the violin as a symbolic representation of a pleasurable masturbation fantasy involving the girl. In contrast, she describes a psychotic patient whose thinking is so concrete that when asked why he did not play his violin anymore replied “Why? Do you expect me to masturbate in public?” (1957, p. 391).

Consequently, we see that it is essential that symbols come to be differentiated from the inner objects they symbolize.

This shift from symbolic equations to symbolization is parallel to the movement from the paranoid-schizoid position to the depressive position. The repetition of the process of object loss and recovery leads to a reduction of splitting and consolidation of a relatively stable good object.

In turn, a desire to preserve the good object leads to creation of symbols for expression of aggression and for re-creation the good object when it is lost. Additionally, symbolization strengthens differentiation between inner and outer reality, which is an important development in the context of my exploration of freedom within psychoanalysis. Quoting Segal:

“When a substitute in the external world is used as a symbol it may be used more freely

than the original object, since it is not fully identified with it. Insofar, however, as it is

distinguished from the original object it is also recognized as an object in itself. Its own

properties are recognized, respected, and used, because no confusion with the original

object blurs the characteristic of the new object used as symbol” (1957, p. 395).

Here Segal describes a person choosing to use objects in the external world based on their needs and wishes, as long as this use is in accordance with the properties of the object. There has been

81 a shift to free use from the previous state (i.e. the paranoid-schizoid position) where the person would have felt dominated by their objects, giving a powerful example of the shift toward agentic action in an interactive world that the Kleinians understand psychological development

(and psychoanalysis) to be.

Overall, these developments can be understood within this context because the depressive position experience is one in which the individual is not overwhelmed by persecutory anxieties and the defensive reactions they provoke. As a result, the individual can think about the world, hate and love in an objective way, and generally experience possession of their subjectivity rather than domination by the world. Said differently, the patient is enabled to live in relation to their environment, rather than feeling controlled by the environment (which until the depressive position is reached is a repository for anxiety-inducing and therefore projected aggressive feelings possessed by the patient). Furthermore, in the depressive position, other people are loved and hated based on their qualities, rather than the individual’s projections. Consequently, choices are made with regard to how life is to be arranged. One is freer to decide how to live when in the depressive position, although still subject to environmental realities and the qualities of the people present.

Additionally, the moralizing dimension of classical Freudianism is minimized. There is morality in the depressive position, in the form of recognition of the other, love, and reparation, but the authority of the analyst is in the form of an observing and feeling responder, rather than in the teacher and promotor of maturity. This matters in relation to freedom because it establishes a new position of greater freedom for the psychoanalyst. Within the Kleinian model, the analyst no longer is tasked with representing “Reality.” Rather, they reflect their own reality within the therapeutic encounter and present the patient with interpretations, which the patient responds to

82 as they wish. Change proceeds organically, starting from the patient’s inner world, through these moments, and the heuristic for intervention is protecting the unfolding of the transference in all of its primal affective power rather than encouraging growth along pre-established developmental lines and adjustment according to external expectations.8

To summarize, I see Klein’s work to put emotional experience, specifically transference- countertransference experience, at the heart of understanding the patient and facilitating change.

Her experiences treating children led to a re-orientation of treatment, centering it on early emotional life, which she was able to map out, developing techniques for facilitating these experiences, and arguing effectively that experience in the transference is what produces change in the patient. On their own, these developments can be shown to facilitate freedom, as I have contended above, and in the section that follows I will show how the work of Donald Winnicott, which emerged from the Kleinian milieu, presents a more explicit model for the birth of individual subjectivity through psychoanalysis. Winnicott more schematically described the process leading to subjectivity’s establishment, consolidating and expanding what is implicit in

Klein, as well as innovating in regard to analytic technique and understanding of the intersubjective context of development and treatment (Ogden, 1992; Ogden, 2001). Moreover, an example of the liberatory empowerment possible through psychoanalysis is provided in psychoanalyst Margaret Little’s recollection of her treatment with Winnicott, and this case will be explored in detail to illustrate the link between psychoanalysis and positive freedom.

Winnicott’s Gestures

8 Notably, Melanie Klein’s approach to child psychoanalysis was criticized by Anna Freud and others who felt that child treatment should have an educative (normalizing, moralizing) focus, rather than treating children as free subjects who would develop their own morality through the course of treatment.

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Within the Kleinian intellectual milieu of mid-20th Century London, the analyst Donald

Winnicott developed new ways of speaking about and understanding psychological life which put the question of freedom into the foreground of psychoanalytic treatment. Winnicott was born in Plymouth, England and raised in a prosperous home. Details of his relationship with his parents and the emotional qualities of his childhood home are scarce, leaving the impact of personal experience on his theoretical contributions obscure. With regard to freedom,

Winnicott’s wife Claire has related a potentially telling memory he shared with her of his father’s non-controlling stance (quoted in Rodman, 1987):

My father had a simple (religious) faith and once when I asked him a question that could

have involved us in a long argument he just said ‘Read the Bible and what you find there

will be the true answer for you.’ So I was left, thank God, to get on with it myself’ (p.

xxv).

While only a snapshot, this story suggests a respect for individual experience and judgment to have been conveyed to Winnicott by his father. Additionally, it indicates Winnicott felt a sense of relief when given autonomy, suggesting he was also familiar with the absence of this freedom.

Winnicott’s concern with freedom can also be seen in his commitment to maintaining his own voice, which he articulated in a letter written to Melanie Klein regarding developments within the British Psychoanalytic Society. Winnicott proposed to Klein that excessive use of specific Kleinian terms and stereotyped interpretations by analysts closely associated with Klein was leading this language to become ossified and restricting Klein’s innovations to a parochial enclave, rather than inviting others to take up Klein’s ideas and make contributions building on her thinking in their own language. He closes his challenging letter by saying (Rodman, 1987):

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This matter which I am discussing touches the very root of my own personal difficulty so

that what you see can always be dismissed as Winnicott's illness, but if you dismiss it in

this way you may miss something which is in the end a positive contribution. My illness

is something which I can deal with in my own way and it is not far away from being the

inherent difficulty in regard to human contact with external reality (p. 37).

This fascinating comment suggests that Winnicott understood his insistence on speaking his own language to be a personal matter with roots in his own character and history, as well as a manifestation of a general human conflict between individuality and conformity. Without telling us anything specific about Winnicott’s past, it implies an inner struggle for the maintenance of freedom and against constraint, forced compliance, and cant. To me, these examples from

Winnicott’s personal life support the idea that exploration of the tension between the freedom of the individual and their experience of the environment is a running concern relevant in much of his work. Additionally, Winnicott’s interest in examining this conflict gives credence to my interest in using his work to support my linking of psychoanalysis and positive freedom.

Winnicott’s Kleinian Roots

After boarding school and an undergraduate degree at Cambridge, Winnicott entered medical school, where he was first exposed to psychoanalysis. In 1923 he entered pediatric practice in London, and at this time committed himself to psychoanalysis, joining the British

Psychoanalytic Society and having a training analysis with James Strachey.

Winnicott treated children as a pediatrician, and in this role he saw that psychological difficulties could pre-date the Oedipal period (going against standard psychoanalytic understanding at that time) and linked these problems with difficulties in the child’s early environment and relationship with the mother (rather than attributing them to constitutional

85 factors in the child). Based on his interest in psychoanalytic understanding of early life, Strachey connected Winnicott with Melanie Klein, and she subsequently supervised his analytic work.

Speaking of what he learned in his 6 years of training with Klein, Winnicott later said (1962):

Thus a very rich analytic world opened up for me, and the material of my cases

confirmed the theories and did so repeatedly. In the end I came to take it all for granted

(pp. 174-175).

Here we see Winnicott identifying Kleinian thinking to have been thoroughly incorporated as a foundation of his thinking. In particular, he emphasized that Klein taught him to appreciate the inner psychic world constantly being expressed by patients, as well as the centrality of object relationships, projection, and introjection in analysis (Winnicott, 1962).

However, while Winnicott’s roots were Kleinian, he came to draw distinctions between his views and those of Klein and declined to identify as a Kleinian. His most clear departure from Klein was on the question of the environment, where he emphasized that the actual qualities of an individual’s early environment (specifically the qualities of the mother affecting the mother-child relationship) significantly influenced psychological development (1962):

[Klein] paid lip-service to environmental provision, but would never fully acknowledge

that along with the dependence of early infancy is truly a period in which it is not

possible to describe an infant without describing the mother whom the infant has not yet

become able to separate from a self. Klein claimed to have paid full attention to the

environmental factor, but it is my opinion that she was temperamentally incapable of this

(p. 177).9

9 For context, these strong comments on what Winnicott perceived as Klein’s neglect of the environmental dimension of the etiology of psychopathology came after her death, and they were followed by an attempt at reparation in which Winnicott speculation that “Perhaps there was a gain in this, for certainly she had a powerful

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Winnicott felt that Klein and her close associates minimized environmental misattunement and trauma as a factor in later problems and focused too exclusively on the child’s projection of unbearable hate and other defensive processes as the source of bad objects

(and by extension the source of psychopathology). Consequently, while Winnicott was with his

Kleinian colleagues in seeing the psychoanalytic process to be centered on the analysand’s internal life – their psychic reality – he differed in how he incorporated external factors in understanding the origins of his patient’s problems and therefore how he interpreted transference-countertransference situations.

Building on the concern with freedom seen in Winnicott’s interactions with Klein, concerns about compliance and inhibition – such as his concepts of the “False Self” and “object relating,” both explored later in this chapter – were an important line of clinical thinking for him.

On the flip side of these problems, Winnicott also wrote of the importance of spontaneity, creativity, and the feeling of being alive. In combination, these concerns can be conceptualized as exploration of the issue of positive freedom. To Winnicott, psychoanalysis was a process that created the opportunity for a patient to live their way out of a life of defined by compliance and inhibition. Through this process, individuals can come to experience a new sense of subjectivity defined by the possibility for spontaneity, creativity, and free responses to other people, as well as greater awareness of their circumstances, conflicts and choices when social constraints prevent spontaneous action. The section that follows addresses these processes in detail.

Winnicott’s Model of Development

Understanding Winnicott’s model of psychological development, and the possibility of development’s disruption through problems in the early caregiving relationship, illuminates the

drive to go further and further back into the personal individual mental mechanisms that constitute the new human being who is at the bottom rung of the ladder of emotional development” (1962, p. 177).

87 link between subjectivity from a Kleinian/Winnicottian perspective and positive freedom. A starting point for understanding Winnicott’s contributions is his emphasis on the necessity of a facilitating environment in the form of a primary caregiving person who adapts to the needs of the infant, with attention to the impact of the unique qualities of this caregiver in relation to the child (i.e. actual qualities originating in the other and separate from the projections of the child).

In his paper “Primitive Emotional Development,” Winnicott postulates that psychological life begins with a state of “primary unintegration” (1945, p. 145), in which bodily experiences, instinctual impulses, identity, and phenomena of space and time are discrete events without organization. Integration is an achievement, rather than a given, and it occurs through the child receiving adequate care, as well as through the organizing effect of erotic and aggressive instincts around which the ego develops. He writes (1945):

To be known means to feel integrated at least in the person of the analyst. This is the

ordinary stuff of infant life, and an infant who has had no one person to gather his bits

together starts with a handicap in his own self-integrating task, and perhaps he cannot

succeed, or at any rate cannot maintain integration with confidence.

The tendency to integrate is helped by two sets of experience: The technique of infant

care whereby an infant is kept warm, handled and bathed and rocked and named, and also

the acute instinctual experiences which tend to gather the personality together from

within (p. 150).

These ideas are well illustrated by an interpretation Winnicott reported later in his career.

After being in-session with a patient for about two hours during which she conveyed her experience of not mattering, emptiness, non-existence, and detachment through free associative

88 movement between memories and present feelings, followed by her observation that she cannot recall what she has said. Winnicott makes the following interpretation (1971):

All sorts of things happen and they whither. This is the myriad deaths you have died. But

if someone is there, someone who can give you back what has happened, then the details

dealt with in this way become part of you, and do not die (pp. 81-82).

No miracle follows this comment and the patient is reported to continue struggling with the question of her existence (and Winnicott’s). Eventually, she asks him a question, which he sees to be an important shift toward intersubjectivity, as there must be self and other for a question to be posed. What matters here for Winnicott is illustration of his patient’s regression to early formlessness, via relaxation in the analytic setting, and her subsequent manifestation of creativity (in the form of a question). Additionally, for me this case brings to life Winnicott’s proposition that “cohesion depends on holding” (Winnicott, 1960a, p. 145).

Winnicott continued to develop these ideas throughout his career, emphasizing the relationship between the environment and psychological development. Regarding integration, he would contrast the “continuity of being” that develops in a “good enough” environment, and the feelings of impingement which emerge in the absence of “good enough” conditions, writing

(1960a):

With ‘the care that it receives from its mother’ each infant is able to have a personal

existence, and so begins to build up what might be called a continuity of being. On the

basis of this continuity of being the inherited potential gradually develops into an

individual infant. If maternal care is not good enough then the infant does not really come

into existence, since there is no continuity of being; instead the personality becomes built

on the basis of reactions to environmental impingement (p. 145).

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“Good Enough”

With regard to this “good enough” early environment, Winnicott describes the caregiver

(referred to going forward as the mother, as this was Winnicott’s emphasis) to be tasked with

“holding” the child, both physically, and in regard to their emotional life. In the early period, when the infant is absolutely dependent on maternal care, without separation of the self from the environment, there is a need for care that is reliable, and furthermore, which “is reliable in a way that implies the mother's empathy” (Winnicott, 1960b, p. 48). The mother’s empathy is essential, because it is via identification with the baby that she can understand the baby’s needs, and in the initial stage “the nearer the mother can come to an exact understanding of the infant’s needs the better” (1960b, p. 50).

This state is extremely important for future psychological health because through holding, the caregiver is able to fulfill the child’s wishes (such as to feed) so that what the infant desires is presented as if by magic. Through this facilitated omnipotence, the infant feels itself to have creative power, and at the same time, whatever is delivered in response to the infants wishes enriches the infant’s inner world because the reality encountered is more complex than whatever was dreamed up by the child. These processes are discussed further when I present

Winnicott’s concepts of transitional phenomena and object use, which have direct implications for the link I propose between psychoanalytic treatment and positive freedom.

Overall, according to Winnicott, good enough conditions depend upon reliable provision of care that is characterized by empathic attunement to the child and (relatively) seamless meeting of the child’s needs and wishes. When what is needed is given in this way, a sense of cohesion and creative capacity is established which persists throughout life.

True and False Living

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Through his experience of working with more disturbed individuals and his work as a pediatrician and child analyst, Winnicott identified a cohort of individuals whose experience of the world was mediated by what he termed “the False Self,” the etiology of which he found in disturbances in the previously described early caregiving environment. This phenomenon is characterized by feelings of unreality or psychic deadness in combination with compliance or withdrawal (Winnicott, 1960a). The person can be understood to be living “as if” they were the person presented to the world (Deutsch, 1942), even achieving successes, while being dissociated from their emotional core and the original identity that was in embryo when they adopted their False Self. Winnicott identifies a defensive function to the False Self, seeing it as an attempt “to hide and protect the True Self, whatever that may be” (1960a, p. 142).

Specifically, what is defended against is loss of the caregiver, which would be catastrophic to the child, and therefore the child abdicates its feelings and needs in order to conform to what will preserve the caregiver. “The infant gets seduced into compliance,” says

Winnicott, “and a compliant False Self reacts to environmental demands and the infant seems to accept them” (1960a, p. 146). The child may grow up and show some “signs of being real” through introjection of “whomever dominates the scene,” but spontaneity is impaired, and in the most prototypical cases “compliance is then the main feature, with imitation as a specialty”

(1960a, pp. 146-147).

In contrast, Winnicott describes the “True Self” as the foundation of individual creativity and vitality (1960a):

The True Self comes from the aliveness of the body tissues and the working of body-

functions, including the heart's action and breathing. It is closely linked with the idea of

the Primary Process, and is, at the beginning, essentially not reactive to external stimuli,

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but primary. There is but little point in formulating a True Self idea except for the

purpose of trying to understand the False Self, because it does no more than collect

together the details of the experience of aliveness (p. 148).

Furthermore, he indicates that the True Self reveals itself in any “spontaneous gesture” and a person whose access to their True Self remains relatively free of defensive obstructions will feel real, unlike their counterparts in False Self states who suffer from “feeling unreal” and/or experiencing life to be futility (1960a, p.148).

Winnicott links the False Self with the mother’s inability to meet the child’s need for holding. As stated earlier, a child needs the presence of a caregiver who can respond to their actions and needs in a consistent and sensitive manner. Without being held in mind by the caregiver, a person will fail to develop a relatively coherent self representation and differentiation between self and environment, with problems of fragmentation, depersonalization, and dissociation resulting (Winnicott, 1945). Consequently, maintaining a connection to the caregiver is a matter of psychic life and death to the infant, leading to defensive adaptation to the caregiver’s needs. According to Winnicott (1960a):

The good-enough mother meets the omnipotence of the infant and to some extent makes

sense of it. She does this repeatedly. A True Self begins to have life, through the strength

given to the infant's weak ego by the mother's implementation of the infant's omnipotent

expressions.

The mother who is not good enough is not able to implement the infant's omnipotence,

and so she repeatedly fails to meet the infant gesture; instead she substitutes her own

gesture which is to be given sense by the compliance of the infant. This compliance on

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the part of the infant is the earliest stage of the False Self, and belongs to the mother's

inability to sense her infant's needs” (p. 145).

Put differently, in the “False Self” situation, the child takes up the task of managing the mother’s needs in order to preserve the illusion of security and prevent the disaster of a total collapse of the caregiving environment. Winnicott emphasizes maternal depression, but this process could also arise to manage the anger of the caregiver, or any other overwhelming quality, likewise leading to the child’s unconscious management of the caregiver. The case of Margaret

Little, which is discussed later in this chapter provides illustration of this diversion of development onto a track defined by compliance. To illustrate the process by which the child’s spontaneity is replaced by a false self that manages the parent, consider this example given by

Little (1985):

My mother did her level best to be a good wife and mother, sometimes successfully, but

anxiety made her a compulsive meddler, possessive and always interfering in other

people's concerns and relationships. She was a highly intelligent and gifted person, warm

and loving, but in a wholly uncoordinated way, being tragically damaged. The only

predictable thing was that she would be unpredictable; one had to live with it and find

ways of dealing with it. The only play possible — whether with toys, balls or words, etc.

— had to be hers; it was often good, but any play of my own would either be stopped or

taken over. Spontaneity, ‘idea, impulse, action … all one … together, knowing what to

do’ (Franks) was aborted (p. 26).

This example shows the experience of role-reversal producing compliance at a later age than the infant experiences that are Winnicott’s focus, but I see this as a screen memory also representing earlier dynamics that shaped Little’s development. She experiences her mother as

93 unstable and overwhelming, leading her to take up her mother’s play; play that was “often good” but never her own spontaneous action. These same processes occur in more archaic forms during infancy. As discussion of her treatment with Winnicott shows, she carried these early experiences of compliance and subsequent loss of spontaneity and security into her adult life with painful consequences.

Furthermore, Winnicott elaborates his idea when he specifies that the False Self can be seen as “a defense against that which is unthinkable, the exploitation of the True Self, which would result in its annihilation” (1960a, p. 147). This means, the False Self is protecting the child’s emotional core from being overtaken by the demand to protect the caregiver, and his equation of exploitation (i.e. acting under compulsion rather than in spontaneity) with annihilation highlights the immense value Winnicott placed upon freedom.10

Looking at the consequences of these developments, the constriction in behavior undertaken to manage the parent can be understood as “impingement” in the infant’s environment, and it leaves the underlying annihilation anxiety that has been avoided still unconsciously alive and active in the child’s psychic life. Subsequently, the child will bring this object relational system to future relationships, remaining unconsciously imprisoned due to annihilation fears, which in turn leads to what Winnicott terms living “on a compliance basis”

(Winnicott, 1960a; Little, 1987). Giving a further elaboration of these ideas in a later paper on creativity, Winnicott contrasted “creative living” against “a relationship to external reality which is one of compliance, the world and its details being recognized but only as something to be fitted in with or demanding adaptation” (1971, p. 87). Overall, when the False Self dominates, at

10 Further development of the idea that each person possesses a unique and “absolutely personal” core appears in Winnicott’s paper “Communicating and Not Communicating Leading to a Study of Certain Opposites” (1963c) and Thomas Ogden’s reflection “The Feeling of Real” (2018).

94 the unconscious level spontaneous, creative action is replaced with reactive compliance, with the clear implication that positive freedom, the freedom to live as a creative agent, has been blocked.

The End of Omnipotence

Under adequate caregiving circumstances, the individual moves through a series of experience that allow them to reach a state where they feel possession of themselves and interact in an agentic manner with the people in their world, who are experienced to be separate. This process starts with what Winnicott terms “transitional experiences.” In these experiences, the individual’s expectations of the world – prototypically, seeking milk from the mother’s breast – are met with provision of what the child conjures (1971):

The mother’s adaptation to the infant’s needs, when good enough, gives the infant the

illusion that there is an external reality that corresponds to the infant’s own capacity to

create. In other words, there is an overlap between what the mother supplies and what the

child might conceive of (p. 16).

Through this illusion of omnipotence, the child gains confidence in their creative power, as well as having their inner world nourished by the object encountered. The real breast provided is a richer experience than whatever the child imagined, and through this process the child’s object world is enriched. Subsequently, because of this incorporative experience, the child will envision something closer to reality when the breast is next conjured.

However, this Eden is fleeting. The mother eventually again takes up her life, returning to other responsibilities and interests (Winnicott, 1956). She is no longer so absorbed and identified with the baby, introducing her separateness through delays in gratification and incomplete attunement, and introducing frustration which arises in reaction to unmet wishes. When this

95 process proceeds in a gradual and tolerable manner, without gross traumas such as excessive maternal absence, then the child’s illusion of omnipotence ends and relatedness to the external world develops. In his paper “Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self,” Winnicott outlines one result of this process (1960a):

In the first case the mother's adaptation is good enough and in consequence the infant

begins to believe in external reality which appears and behaves as by magic (because of

the mother's relatively successful adaptation to the infant's gestures and needs), and

which acts in a way that does not clash with the infant's omnipotence. On this basis the

infant can gradually abrogate omnipotence. The True Self has a spontaneity, and this has

been joined up with the world's events. The infant can now begin to enjoy the illusion of

omnipotent creating and controlling, and then can gradually come to recognize the

illusory element, the fact of playing and imagining. Here is the basis for the symbol

which at first is both the infant's spontaneity or hallucination, and also the external object

created and ultimately cathected (p. 146).

Furthermore, after the illusion of omnipotence is withdrawn, the child must then give signals to solicit what is needed from the caregiver, contributing to the development of communication (Winnicott, 1960a). Thus, if the caregiver sustains perfect adaptation, rather than benefitting the child, this denies the child the opportunity for growth which comes from tolerable frustration, arresting the development of communication and relatedness to others in the world.

Finally, bringing together his ideas of holding, transitional space, and the child-caregiver matrix Winnicott would go on to develop his idea of “object use” which requires additional explication due to its importance with regard to linking positive freedom and psychoanalysis.

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Introducing Object Use

Exploration of the relationship between Winnicott’s ideas and the concept of positive freedom must address Winnicott’s idea of “object use.” In the latter part of his career, Winnicott moved away from emphasis on the ideas of True and False Self and toward the concepts of object relating and object usage. Object relating, like the False Self, is to experience other people and the world reactively, with interactions defined by responses of either compliance or control.

In contrast, in object use, the world is populated by objects (separate other people) which the individual can apprehend and respond to without feeling controlled or controlling.

Object use is the next stage after the transitional experiences described previously. Here the individual knows the other to be separate and operates in transitional space in which their projected inner objects overlap with the object encountered (a transitional experience), without demanding compliance from the other. Furthermore, the individual in this state can live in this transitional position with regard to other subjects as well, being what the other wishes, as long as occupying this position does not contrast too greatly with their inner experience.11

Winnicott describes the origins of the capacity for object use to lie in the relationship between caregiver and infant which has been described previously. At some point during the phase of withdrawal of the illusion of omnipotence, the child destroys the object (i.e. the mother) within the realm of his or her psychic life. Describing this process, Winnicott states (1971):

After ‘subject relates to object’ comes ‘subject destroys object’ (as it becomes external);

and then may come ‘object survives destruction by the subject.’ But there may or may not

11 Winnicott’s comments on the version of the False Self that is part of “normal life” are very applicable here: “The equivalent of the False Self in normal development is that which can develop in the child into a social manner, something which is adaptable. In health this social manner represents a compromise. At the same time, in health, the compromise ceases to become allowable when the issues become crucial. When this happens, the True Self is able to override the compliant self” (1960a, p. 150).

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be survival… The subject can now use the object that has survived. It is important to note

that it is not only that the subject destroys the object because the object is placed outside

the area of omnipotent control. It is equally significant to state this the other way round

and to say that it is the destruction of the object that places the object outside the area of

the subject’s omnipotent control. In these ways the object develops its own autonomy and

life (pp. 120-121).

This means the child acts freely without regard for the mother’s survival, thinking and acting without concern for her going-on-being. However, the mother is not destroyed, and by living through this experience, the child sees that the mother is separate.12 The child has a life of its own, as does the caregiver. After this, when something is desired, it must be found in the object. No longer does omnipotence reign – the other has its own life and each person “uses” the objects in their world, rather than controlling them (and being controlled by them).

In object use, the object relating status quo of controlling and being controlled is replaced by subject-to-subject relations. Winnicott leaves the meaning of destructiveness relatively vague, implying it to exist whenever the child makes the caregiver separate and outside their control,

12 These ideas are not exclusive to Winnicott. The Kleinian perspective on the establishment of the depressive position is summarized by Hanna Segal in her paper “Notes on Symbol Formation” (1957): In favourable circumstances of normal development, after repeated experiences of loss, recovery, and recreation, a good object is securely established in the ego. Three changes in relation to the object, as the ego develops and integrates, affect fundamentally the ego's reality sense. With an increased awareness of ambivalence, the lessening of the intensity of projection, and the growing differentiation between the self and the object, there is a growing sense of reality both internal and external. The internal world becomes differentiated from the external world. Omnipotent thinking, characteristic of the earlier phase, gradually gives way to more realistic thinking. Simultaneously, and as part of the same process, there is a certain modification of the primary instinctual aims. Earlier on, the aim was to possess the object totally if felt as good, or to annihilate it totally if felt as bad. With the recognition that the good and the bad objects are one, both these instinctual aims are gradually modified. The ego is increasingly concerned with saving the object from its aggression and possessiveness. And this implies a certain degree of inhibition of the direct instinctual aims, both aggressive and libidinal (p. 394). Here a process of loss and restoration is described, paralleling Winnicott’s model of destruction and survival. However, Winnicott is distinct in emphasizing the actions and qualities of the caregiver separate from the projections of the child, as well as for his concept of object use and the vision of intersubjectivity therein.

98 taking chances of loss through spontaneous action without regard for impact. Later in this chapter, I will give an illustration of this process when I explore Margaret Little’s account of her analysis of Winnicott. Regarding survival of destructiveness, Winnicott indicates that survival of destruction is manifest in maintenance of a consistent presence and attitude. Examples of failure to survive, on the other hand, would be retaliation, the caregiver’s emotional collapse, or withdrawal from the child. In terms of psychoanalytic working through of these processes,

Winnicott emphasizes that “survival” occurs when the analytic frame and the clinician’s inhabitation of the analytic role is sustained even under destructive pressure from the patient.

Winnicott and Freedom

Returning the topic of positive freedom, when the developmental processes described by

Winnicott have been possible, a feeling of agency is established and an individual has freedom in the form of spontaneous action (emerging from desires and impulses within the person) and creativity. Quoting his paper “Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self,” Winnicott characterizes the True Self as the origin of creative, personally unique action (1960a):

At the earliest stage the True Self is the theoretical position from which come the

spontaneous gesture and the personal idea. The spontaneous gesture is the True Self in

action (p. 145).

Positive freedom is implied in this concept in that Winnicott is describing the deepest roots of feelings of agency and the ability to act on impulses felt to be personally originated.

Furthermore, this line of thinking establishes a pathway from birth, through the omnipotence of early childhood, to agentic activity in an intersubjective context, which he terms object usage.

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Object use involves finding ways to live out what is desired through relations with separate others. This relationship to the world, and this experience of separation of self from other, enables continued experiences of spontaneity and the ability to maintain a creative relationship between inner life and the objective world, including maintenance of relationships marked by mutual object usage.

Here Winnicott’s understanding of play is a useful metaphor for a mature, creative relationship with others. In his paper “Playing,” Winnicott starts with an explicit link between play and freedom, stating “Now I shall discuss an important feature of playing… in playing, and perhaps only in playing, the child or adult is free to be creative” (1971, p. 71). He then goes on to describe the location of play (1971):

Whereas inner psychic reality has a kind of location in the mind or in the belly or in the

head or somewhere within the bounds of the individual’s personality, and whereas what

is called external reality is located outside those bounds, playing and cultural experience

can be given a location if one uses the concept of potential space between the mother and

the baby (pp. 71-72).

Here Winnicott is saying that play occurs where one person’s transitional experience overlaps with that of another. Taking this a step further, two people (or more) can come together and experience each other as potential space to be used and simultaneous separate and external beings. In this way, object use is a particular form of play, and freedom is present in terms of desire, as there is flexibility in seeking fulfillment. In terms of practice, freedom depends on what is found in the environment. To Winnicott, the healthy adult is a person who has a relationship with themself that allows relatively free access to their feelings and desires, who

100 feels free to seek what they want, and who is hopeful of finding others in the world who with whom these hopes and dreams can be collaboratively developed.

Lastly, it should be noted that, positive freedom in the form of a developed individual subjectivity and object use is not carte blanche freedom to act without awareness of the other or the possibility of consequences including guilt or retaliation. He suggests that awareness of the other and security result in a freedom that is tempered by concern for one’s impact on others and preservation of the environment (social and beyond). To quote Winnicott: “The adult is able to attend to his or her own personal needs without being antisocial, and indeed, without a failure to take some responsibility for the maintenance or for the modification of society as it is found.”

(1963b, p. 84). Freedom exists in dialectic with the material world and the subjectivities of others. The individual operates within the realm of material reality and with awareness of their emotional impact on other people, and simultaneously possesses an inner life and a creative relationship with the encountered world.

To summarize, when development has been successful, positive freedom is present in an individual’s ability to creatively interact with circumstances (to play) and to recognize the multiple meanings present in interactions, speech, and other aspects of life (to symbolize, to participate in the world as an interpreting subject), rather than taking what appears to be as a concrete fact demanding a right reaction (Winnicott, 1971; Ogden, 1986). In terms of freedom, psychoanalysis as conceived by both the Kleinians and Winnicott creates a pathway by which rigid “reflexive reactivity” (Ogden, 1986, p. 209) may become reflective subjectivity.

Implications for Technique

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As discussed earlier, Klein’s advancement of technique made explicit the experiential dimension of analysis – what happens in the transference is the source of change. Winnicott started from this understanding of the therapeutic process and introduced new technical ideas by exploring how his ideas about the early environment and developmental processes appeared in the analytic encounter. These ideas show the development of positive freedom through psychoanalytic treatment.

Winnicott focused on patients struggling with annihilation anxiety, rooted in fundamental concerns regarding “identity and security” (Little, 1987, p. 10) and the experience of feeling trapped in self-other relational patterns defined by compliance and fear (i.e. feeling unfree) which, as discussed previously, he traced to environmental “failures” in childhood (Winnicott,

1945; Winnicott, 1960b). In this, Winnicott followed the Kleinians in extension of treatment beyond conflicted “neurotic” patients to patients struggling to feel alive, safe, whole, and related.

Based on his understanding of the importance of the early environment, treatment of these patients starts with the provision of a setting characterized by comfort, reliability, and

“holding” (Winnicott, 1960b; Little, 1987). In the analytic setting, the patient can relax and return to the point where their developmental was disturbed, leading to new growth where previously development was distorted in the direction of self-negation, splitting of the self, and omnipotent defenses. Highlighting the potential for change that regression potentiates, Winnicott writes (1954a):

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Regression reaches and provides a starting-place, what I would call a place from which to

operate. The self is reached. The subject becomes in touch with the basic self-processes

that constitute true development, and what happens from here is felt as real (p. 290).13

With regard to regression and revival of the developmental process, Winnicott argued that for patients struggling with the sequalae of early environmental failure, the “analyst has to be the first to supply certain environmental essentials” (1947, p. 198). Specifically, Winnicott believed that the care, understanding, and reliability of the analyst – expressed in features of the analytic setting such as reliable presence, preoccupation with the patient, expression of love through positive interest, the comfort of the consultation room, communication of understanding, bracketing of the analysts personal life and moral judgements, objectivity, tolerance of aggressive fantasy, non-retaliation, and survival – “[reproduce] the earliest mothering techniques” and thereby invite a return to the point of development’s disruption (Winnicott,

1954a, p. 286).

Winnicott conceptualizes this as “holding” and it is a unique technical development based upon his understanding of maternal adaptation to her baby. He extends his ideas about the early environment into a metaphor for understanding the relationship between analyst and patient when early impingements have distorted or prevented the consolidation and differentiation of the self. Along with holding in the broad sense as described in the previous paragraph, Winnicott emphasizes the importance of specific moments of holding which develop the transference. In

13 Winnicott developed these ideas further in Playing and Reality, where he writes: “It is only here, in this unintegrated state of the personality, that that which we describe as creative can appear. This if reflected back, but only if reflected back, becomes part of the organized individual personality, and eventually this in summation makes the individual to be, to be found; and eventually enables himself or herself to postulate the existence of the self. This gives us our indication for the therapeutic procedure – to afford opportunity for formless experience, and for creative impulses, motor and sensory, which are the stuff of playing. And on the basis of playing is built the whole of man’s experiential existence” (1971, p. 86).

103 his paper “Withdrawal and Holding” he describes a series of such moments of holding through which defensive withdrawals were replaced with experiences of regression. For example, when his patient speaks about a medically unexplained headache felt to be “situated just outside his head,” Winnicott places this headache in the context of recent developments in the analysis (such as a recently reported dream) to make the interpretation “The pain being just outside the head represents your need to have your head held as you would naturally have it held if you were in a state of deep emotional distress as a child,” which he links to the absence of anyone in the patient’s life to hold him in an emotional breakdown after the death of his father (1954b, p. 260).

Winnicott indicates that the patient is affected by this interpretation, and then notes that

“The important thing is that I understood immediately what he needed” (1954b, p. 260). In these cases where the early environment has not “held” the patient, the provision of understanding in the form of timely and accurate interpretation is akin to the mother’s adaptation to the baby.

Understanding communicated to the patient therefore is holding, and it develops a relationship between analyst and patient which allows for regression and revival of the dependent state (1954, p. 261). This is an analytic recreation of the early caregiving environment in which mother holds baby in mind and cares for the baby in a way that “meets the omnipotence” of the child

(Winnicott, 1960b, p. 145). In turn, the patient becomes reconnected with previously dissociated feelings and can work through the developmental processes leading to object use that were not able to be experienced due to past environmental failure.

Beyond holding in the form of accurate and timely interpretations, holding represented in the therapist’s adaptation to the patient’s needs in the form of bracketing of their own subjectivity is also an innovative aspect of Winnicott’s work (Little, 1987; Slochower, 1996).

This aspect of holding is implicit in Winnicott’s paper “Hate in the Countertransference” (1947),

104 where he discusses the importance of understanding and using negative countertransference within treatment. Winnicott identifies “objective hate” reactions, differentiated from hate resulting from the analyst’s unaddressed conflicts and unique personal reaction to the patient, and says this objective hate may be communicated, or it may be recognized but unexpressed, depending on clinical judgment of the patient’s need.

This paper introduces the idea the child (and the patient) need expression of objective hate in order to recognize the reality of the external environment and the people in it. Within this idea, however, is also the idea that, if necessary, the analyst will tolerate hateful feelings induced by the patient, as a parent does with a child. Holding of the patient can require holding of hateful feelings, should the patient be regressed to dependence, and Winnicott indicates that the burden borne by the analyst may be expressed later when it will be of use to the patient, or in some cases never at all (1947):

If the analyst is going to have crude feelings imputed to him he is best forewarned and so

forearmed, for he must tolerate being placed in that position. Above all he must not deny

hate that really exists in himself. Hate that is justified in the present setting has to be

sorted out and kept in storage and available for eventual interpretation (p. 196).

These reactions are not communicated when the analyst’s objective hate feelings are such that their expression would disrupt the patient’s experience of being held. Winnicott emphasizes that even if not expressed to the patient, these feelings provide crucial information on the patient’s experiences, and that accepting them, even if they are held over, reduces the chance the analyst will unconsciously act them out. The strain which holding can place upon the analyst will be apparent in the section that follows and potential problems which can arise when the analyst’s objective hate reactions remain unexpressed will be discussed at the end of this chapter.

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It is also important to note that another way of saying this is to say that adaptation is present in holding. Addressing concerns that regression is dangerous to the patient, Winnicott writes, “The danger does not lie in the regression but in the analyst's unreadiness to meet the regression and the dependence which belongs to it” (Winnicott, 1954b, p. 261). There is a need for understanding of the patient in these phases of treatment, as well as reliability and survival of the frame, and the bracketing aspect of holding I have described, and it is when these needs are not met that the patient will act out and be in danger. Also, an essential idea underlying

Winnicott’s ideas about regression to dependence is that these patients experience their wishes as needs (1954a):

It is proper to speak of the patient's wishes, the wish (for instance) to be quiet. With the

regressed patient the word wish is incorrect; instead we use the word need. If a regressed

patient needs quiet, then without it nothing can be done at all. If the need is not met the

result is not anger, only a reproduction of the environmental failure situation which

stopped the processes of self growth (p. 298).

Luckily for us, when regressed, patients experience otherwise metaphorical elements of treatment in concrete ways, allowing verbal and gestural interventions and the analytic setting itself to achieve powerful impact upon the inner world of the patient (1947).

[The] provision and maintenance of an ordinary environment can be in itself a vitally

important thing in the analysis of a psychotic, in fact it can be, at times, even more

important than the verbal interpretations which also have to be given. For the neurotic the

couch and warmth and comfort can be symbolical of the mother's love; for the psychotic

it would be more true to say that these things are the analyst's physical expression of

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love. The couch is the analyst's lap or womb, and the warmth is the live warmth of the

analyst's body (p. 199).14

Finally, these ideas linking adaptation by the analyst, regression, and new developmental experiences take on further clinical relevance when linked with Winnicott’s idea of the object use. Winnicott understands the child to move from early omnipotence (which co-occurs with the early dependency period) into intersubjectivity through dyadic experiences with the caregiver, and in analysis these same processes are lived through (in regression and transference). The reliable analytic setting and holding function of the analyst enables the patient to go through the movement from omnipotence and object relating to object use. The patient is provided for by the analyst through maintenance of the environment, and over time challenged with interpretations and the expressions of hate, present, for example, in the fee and the setting of the session’s time boundary (Winnicott, 1947). As the mother’s primary maternal preoccupation comes to an end, so too does the analyst’s adaptation to the patient, although the specific details of this shift are left to be worked out in a new way in each case.

When the patient is ready, moments where needs are not met combined with projection of negative objects upon the analyst produce destructiveness toward the analyst. At these moments, the patient must see that the analyst survives, as it is through this process that the other moves outside the area of omnipotence (Winnicott, 1971) and new freedom becomes possible. Through this survival of destruction, the individual experiences the other (the analyst) to be separate.

Quoting Winnicott (1971):

14 Here Winnicott write of “the psychotic” but these comments should not be understood to apply only to individuals judged “psychotic” by the current DSM-5 diagnostic system. Winnicott is speaking of anyone who has experienced early environmental failure requiring treatment involving regression to dependence.

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[After] ‘subject relates to object’ comes ‘subject destroys object’ (as it becomes external);

and then may come ‘object survives destruction by the subject’. But there may or may not

be survival. A new feature thus arrives in the theory of object-relating. The subject says

to the object: ‘I destroyed you’, and the object is there to receive the communication.

From now on the subject says: ‘Hullo object!’ ‘I destroyed you.’ ‘I love you.’ ‘You have

value for me because of your survival of my destruction of you.’ ‘While I am loving you

I am all the time destroying you in (unconscious) fantasy.’ Here fantasy begins for the

individual. The subject can now use the object that has survived. It is important to note

that it is not only that the subject destroys the object because the object is placed outside

the area of omnipotent control. It is equally significant to state this the other way round

and to say that it is the destruction of the object that places the object outside the area of

the subject's omnipotent control (p. 120).

While the presumption would be to link destruction and aggression, Winnicott indicates that he is addressing a process that is developmentally prior to the feeling of anger,15 and remarks “there is no anger in the destruction of the object to which I am referring” (1971, p.

125). So, if destruction is not aggression as commonly understood, then what is destruction? As stated above, Winnicott defines destruction as placement of the other “outside omnipotence” (as well as making the other “external”). The meaning of this idea begins to take shape when we link it with Winnicott’s use of the terms “ruthless” and “cavalier” when describing this period of

15 Specifically, Winnicott says “It is generally understood that the reality principle involves the individual in anger and reactive destruction, but my thesis is that the destruction plays its part in making the reality, placing the object outside the self” (1971, p. 122). While casually made, the claim that “destruction” leads to appreciation for the external is a major revision moving away from preceding psychoanalytic models which based perception of reality on the experience of frustration (along with linking frustration and anger).

108 development (1963c; 1971, p. 121). To be ruthless and cavalier is not to destroy in an organized fashion, rather it is to act with indifference to impact.

Additionally, the idea of moving the other outside the area of omnipotence has further implication. As the life of the individual who has taken up a compliant relation to the world shows, omnipotent control over the environment is about more than just dominance.

Omnipotence is a way of being in which a person sees the other as an object to be controlled, whether through overt manipulation or the subtler dance of “I do what (I fantasize) you want so that you do what I expect” that is compliance. Consequently, putting the other outside the area of omnipotence means giving up control and, bringing these two ideas together, it is my understanding that Winnicott’s “destruction” is action taken without concern for impact on the other and without attempt to control the other. Hence, in terms of inner life, the other is effectively destroyed. Gone is the inner other that the person living in a state of omnipotence unconsciously generates and works so hard to control – instead there is the possibility of spontaneity, action, and openness to unpredicted reactions. Of course, this destruction can also play out in acts of aggression as well, as we shall see in the Margaret Little case, but I think it is very important that therapists be attuned to all manifestations of destruction, so as not to miss important but subtle developments.

For illustration, a fragment from my own clinical work provides an example of this phenomenon.16 A patient with whom I had been meeting for a number of years developed a dependent transference toward me based on my provision of empathic understanding and a confident stance toward life which had been absent in his experience of his relationship with his

16 This case is also discussed from a Lacanian perspective in chapter 5.

109 mother and father. We met twice a week for approximately 2 years, after which he began to express a desire to return to meeting once per week. I sought to explore this impulse and his experience of seeing me twice weekly, thinking that he was benefiting from meeting at this frequency and that through the concrete wish to meet less often he was communicating something more psychological that we could discuss. However, my patient did not have strong associations to what reducing frequency meant and there was no change in his wish to reduce the frequency of sessions after it was discussed. Once we had transitions to meeting once per week, I explored his perception of my reaction. He described having feared that I would lose interest in him or consider him stupid for his choice. However, he said that he had to act for himself, without thinking of how I would respond. I believe that in this sequence, object destruction was present. My patient moved me outside his area of omnipotence, acting without regard for my reaction. One indicator that there was a destructive element to the patient’s action is that he experienced it as a risk.17 After this, we continued to meet, and my patient reported that I had not changed. My separation from his fantasies was made clear in that what he had expected did not come to pass. It is the act of shedding omnipotence that stands out to me when the topic of

“destruction” is considered, not aggression or anger, important as they are.

I also want to expand upon the analyst’s demonstration of their survival, since it is only when destruction and survival are paired that object use emerges. According to Winnicott, “If it is in an analysis that these matters are taking place, then the analyst, the analytic technique, and the analytic setting all come in as surviving or not surviving the patient's destructive attacks”

(1971, p. 122). Put most basically, the analyst must keep living and the treatment relationship

17 The importance of risk within this process is implied by Winnicott when he describes the possibility of the death of the analyst as “risks that simply must be taken by the patient” during his discussion of destruction and survival within psychoanalysis (1971, p. 122-123).

110 must be maintained. One way that survival is expressed is through the “intactness of technique,” that is in maintenance of a reflective analytic stance. The analyst should stay the same, continuing to seek understanding and maintaining their non-judgmental position. Non-retaliation toward the patient for their thoughts, feelings, and actions expresses survival, as does maintenance of reliability.18 Lastly, Winnicott notes that verbal interpretations may be postponed

(even as the analyst is interpreting the situation to him or herself) because it is the fact that the analyst remains living and in-relation to the patient that matters most, while interpretation may

“spoil the process” should the patient experience these comments as “the analyst parrying [their] attack” (1971, p. 122). I will say more on this in the section that follows.

Overall, the consequence of this process is a solidifying of the experience of the self, leading the individual to know their inner life and to have a somewhat reliable map of their psychic experience, which is the foundation of identity. Adaptation can be withdrawn, because the patient has achieved the capacity to tolerate difference, consider experience symbolically, and to play (Little, 1986). The shift toward intersubjectivity is freeing. Inner psychic experience alone is a prison, as is absolute compliance to what is perceived to be demanded by the outside world (Ogden, 1986). Consequently, it is by bringing individual subjectivity into dialog with the subjectivity of the other (or more broadly with society) that fulfilling interactivity is achieved.

In order to illustrate the application of these ideas, I will discuss Margaret Little’s recollection of her treatment with Winnicott and her description of the emergence of her subjectivity through his more actively adaptive and holding interventions.

18 Non-retaliation, however, must be balanced with Winnicott’s previously discussed position on the importance of objective hate. Winnicott is describing maintenance of an objectively analytic role, which might include expression of hate through setting of boundaries, for example, as well as self-preservative acts by the analyst. There is a danger of masochism creeping into the treatment when non-retaliation is prioritized, and so self-awareness in the analyst to prevent acting out of subjective countertransference is essential.

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Bringing It All Together

To demonstrate the ideas that I have thus far discussed, I will now present the case of

Margaret Little. Little was an English psychoanalyst and wrote a number of influential papers herself. Her papers “Counter-transference and the patient's response to it” (1951) and “’R’ - The

Analyst's Total Response to His Patient's Needs” (1957) were among the earliest papers within the analytic literature to explore the positive value of countertransference. Furthermore, she wrote an account of her treatment with Winnicott, which brings to life the ideas I have been discussing, tying together the various concepts I have discussed and giving a living example of the birth of subjectivity and freedom that may occur through psychoanalysis.

Little describes her childhood as having been defined by her erratic mother, who lacked the capacity for sustained contact with reality or attunement to her children. Her father was a school master who she describes as sensitive but ineffectual, and who failed to intervene to address problems in the home. A representative description of Little’s relationship with her mother is provided when she writes (1985):

My mother did her level best to be a good wife and mother, sometimes successfully, but

anxiety made her a compulsive meddler, possessive and always interfering in other

people's concerns and relationships. She was a highly intelligent and gifted person, warm

and loving, but in a wholly uncoordinated way, being tragically damaged. The only

predictable thing was that she would be unpredictable; one had to live with it and find

ways of dealing with it. The only play possible — whether with toys, balls or words, etc.

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— had to be hers; it was often good, but any play of my own would either be stopped or

taken over. Spontaneity… was aborted (p. 26).19

She had an older sister and younger brothers and describes being treated as a nuisance by her sister. She found intellectual sustenance from her maternal uncle, but this was lost when he moved away. The cumulative effect of her experiences was the development of a false self presentation, paired with a failure of internal development with accompanying annihilation anxiety whenever situations requiring self-expression arose, such as romantic relationships.

Treatment Before Winnicott

Little initially received treatment from a Jungian in the mid-1930s, which she depicts as benefitting her through the humane support provided but having been without analytic rigor. This psychotherapist thought of her as neurotic, missing the paralyzing anxiety Little reports herself to have felt at that time, and made interventions of the supportive variety. He helped her separate from an enmeshed friendship she felt trapped within by emphasizing her independence from this friend, while leaving the underlying object relational pattern of compliance (and hidden omnipotence) unaddressed. Similarly, he told her “For the love of heaven, be yourself” (1985, p.

13) but does not address her response that she does not know how and does not even know what

“myself” is. With this therapist’s encouragement, Little trained at the Tavistock Clinic during this period and begins working as psychotherapist. The treatment ended after two years with the therapist seeing nothing major still to work on. This despite Little’s persistent anxiety and feelings of insubstantiality, and her inability to establish an intimate relationship.

19 Based on his experience of Little in the transference, Winnicott would tell her “Your mother is unpredictable, chaotic, and she organizes chaos around her” and “She's like a Jack-in-a-box, all over the place” (1985, p. 24).

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A few years passed and Little continued to be plagued with anxiety. Things came to a head in 1940, when she became emotionally overinvolved with a patient, leading her to seek psychoanalysis with Ella Freeman Sharpe, a member of the British Psycho-Analytical Society, working in a classical Freudian style. In their first session, Little lies rigid on the couch and screams “this can’t be real,” recalling an earlier one-off consultation with Sharpe in which she hallucinated Sharpe’s hair was mist or a spider’s web and then fled. Sharpe interprets this fear in terms of Oedipal dynamics, which Little feels “did not fit the intensity of my panic, which was far more than any mortal terror” (1985, p. 14). Instead she reports annihilation anxiety (1985):

My fear… was of utter destruction, being bodily dismembered, driven irretrievably

insane, wiped out, abandoned and forgotten by the whole world as one who had never

been (p. 14).

The analysis subsequently proceeds along these lines.20 Little feels extreme terror and paranoia, which is interpreted in terms of instinctual conflicts and infantile sexuality by Sharpe, with Little “trying to convey to her that my real problems were matters of existence and identity:

I did not know what ‘myself’ was” (1985, p. 15). She says that a psychotic transference defined by compliance develops, replicating her relationship with her mother (1985):

My hostility to her became fixed as a result of her inability to see the true nature of my

anxieties. But there was ambivalence, the positive elements being released by her pattern

of altered behaviour to me off the couch… [with her] treating me as if I were ‘a guest’ in

her house. Then she was very kind and warm, friendly and generous… For me this

20 In support of Little’s presentation of her treatment experience, Sharpe was known for her emphasis on linguistic symbolism (Netzer, 1982, p. 210). In addition to the fact she presumed Oedipal conflicts to be central in Little’s illness, I speculate that her emphasis on interpretation of the verbal material may have led to less attention being directed toward aspects of the total situation represented in Little’s terrified reaction to her. In contrast, we will see that Winnicott de-emphasized interpretation in his work with Little.

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brought back exactly the confusion and ambivalence that I had experienced with my

mother, so that in my psychotic areas Miss Sharpe became identical with my mother, who

had not been able to provide an environment where it was safe to be; Miss Sharpe's aim

was to provide one where it was safe to be sexual or hostile. I was hostile, and defiant,

but it was not safe; I became compliant, and dependent on her as I had been on my

mother from infancy (pp. 15-16).

According to Little, this transference remained unresolved throughout the treatment and led her to “fear retribution if I dared assert myself or challenge her in any way” (1985, p. 17).21

Sharpe perceives her to improve, with Little’s professional accomplishments particularly valued, while Little reports increasing feelings of unreality. In particular, Little suggests that there was an iatrogenic result from the combination of the unrecognized transference described previously in tandem with Sharpe’s treatment of Little’s reports from childhood in terms of fantasy, rather than consideration of the impact of true environmental failures (1985):

So I was doubly caught in the ‘spider's web’; I was the crazy one, not my mother; she

was the one who ‘knew’, as my mother, not I, had always known; while my recognition

of my own and my mother's psychosis was dismissed as phantasy. I was once again in the

confusing ‘Wonderland’ or ‘Looking Glass’ world of my childhood, where

simultaneously I ‘imagined things’ and ‘had no imagination’, where I could not but know

what I saw and knew, and ‘didn't know anything’ (p. 16).

21 It may also have been the case that aspects of Sharpe as a person were contributing to Little’s transference. Sharpe was known to have a nervous temperament (Netzer, 1982, 209), which may have contributed to Little’s compliance through a revivification of the reversal of roles occurring between Little and her mother (i.e. Little’s compulsion to protect herself through compliance and caretaking).

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The treatment carries on in this way for approximately seven years and, in the spring of

1947, they made plans to terminate at the end of that summer, with Sharpe reportedly seeing no reason to continue. What happens next is unfortunate. Little travels to a conference and while she is away Sharpe dies. Any chance of addressing the transference is lost, although it seemed unlikely to be processed regardless. Little meets with Sylvia Payne, a psychoanalyst in the

Independent Group, reporting that she “raved and wept wildly for an hour” (although what was said is not reported) and she reports having felt that with Sharpe “My real troubles were never touched” (1985, p. 18). Little indicates Payne recognized her to be very ill and refers her to

Marion Milner, whom she sees for a year, after which she begins treatment with Winnicott.

Enter D.W.W.

As with Sharpe, Little experiences terror in her first session with Winnicott. He says nothing until the end of their meeting, at which point he says “I don’t know, but I have the feeling that you are shutting me out for some reason” (1985, p. 20). Little experiences relief when she hears this, which she attributes to Winnicott’s tentative position, which admits not knowing and leaves space for her to contradict him. In this way, they are establishing a two- person analytic relationship. Winnicott is in dialog with Little, rather than standing apart and assessing her. I would also suggest that this initial interpretation is holding because Winnicott is addressing the pre-Oedipal issue of relatedness to the world, rather than the Oedipal issues that were Sharpe’s focus. He is working at the level of her problem and therefore Little has the experience of being understood, which is a holding experience.

Later in the analysis, Winnicott would explicitly identify his awareness of the severity of her illness, saying “Yes, you are ill, but there's plenty of mental health there too” (1985, p. 24).

When she shows anxiety in response to this comment, he adds, “But that [health] is for later on,

116 the important thing now is the illness” (1985, p. 24). Little feels this was an essential recognition of her experience which addressed the fear her illness would again be unseen or denied.

Because Winnicott sees that she is experiencing insecurity, confusion, and annihilation anxiety, he makes it possible for her to deal with these problems, rather than triggering her compliance defense by focusing on her health and psychoneurotic conflicts. Furthermore, she can develop trust in him based upon this recognition, in contrast to the withdrawal that misrecognition precipitated in so many of her past relationships.

“Holding” is also performed by Winnicott in his handling of the analytic process. His sessions with Little are light on interpretation. She sees this as Winnicott’s willingness to accept silence from her so that she can find herself rather than responding to him (1985):

I could not talk until I found a ‘settled’ state, undisturbed by any impingement such as

being asked to say what I was thinking, etc. It was as if I had to take into myself the

silence and the stillness that he provided. This was in such contrast with the disturbances

of childhood, my mother's anxiety-driven state and the general hostility from which I had

always felt the need to retreat to find quietness (p. 21).

This aspect of the treatment highlights the concept of formless experience that was previously discussed. Patients who have experienced environmental failure may need to experience “going on being” in the presence of a caregiver who is understanding and thinking, but not interfering, to allow for self discovery.

There are also more concrete enactments of holding which occurred in Little’s treatment.

Remember, Winnicott believed that wishes are needs for the infant in the holding situation.

Consequently, he follows this idea and provides literal holding to Little, such as holding her hand

117 while she cries, as well as taking a more active “management” role in her life such as arranging for her to travel with friends during his absence.22 Through this experience, reliability and safety expressed, allowing Little to regress, and in regression she can then work through experiences that have previously derailed her development (i.e. her reliance on compliance to mask her identity confusion and annihilation anxiety).

Through Holding to Finding

Reading Little’s account of her treatment with Winnicott, it stands out that the holding and regression experience Winnicott provided was in the service of emotional discovery. At first, the reliability and understanding that Winnicott present gives her the opportunity to find and express the feelings buried when she took her false self path of compliance. In the facilitating environment provided by Winnicott, Little’s imprisoned pain was unfrozen. She writes (1985):

He did not defend against his own feelings but could allow their full range and, on

occasion, expression. Without sentimentality he was able to feel about, with, and for his

patient, entering into and sharing an experience in such a way that emotion which had

had to be dammed up could be set free (p. 22).

Sadness is one feeling found in abundance as Little begins expressing herself. She tells him of the loss of a friend in her early school days and the guilt she felt after this friend died.

Winnicott cries, and then Little cries, mourning her loss for the first time. “He found himself tears – for me – and I could cry about it as never before,” she reflects (1985, p. 22). Right after this, Winnicott asks Little why she cries silently. She associates to a memory of being told her crying (when suffering from a toothache) was making others miserable and having felt pressure

22 Little herself defines holding as “taking full responsibility, supplying whatever ego strength a patient could not find in himself, and withdrawing it gradually as the patient could take over on his own” (1985, p. 21).

118 to minimize her pain. Winnicott, in turn, becomes angry and says, “I really hate your mother”

(1985, p. 23). He is shocked by the isolation inflected on Little as a child and how she was shamed. In all of these instances, Winnicott is empathizing and taking Little’s experiences seriously. Consequently, Little’s feelings are validated and she accepts them, leading to processing of her feelings toward her mother and internalizing understanding of the impact of her childhood upon the course of her life. This is not stated directly, but my understanding is that through the access to her feelings that Winnicott’s empathy provides, a full range of feelings replace her previous annihilation anxiety because his presence makes room for thinking where previously her unconscious fantasy was that thinking about her mother (which gives birth to anger toward her mother) would provoke her destruction.

Furthermore, “finding” of abilities for perception appears in a fascinating passage where

Little (a physician) correctly identifies that Winnicott is having a heart attack in session. He entered their session looking ill, which he attributed to laryngitis, but Little disagrees and sticks to her perception that he is having a coronary. The session was canceled and that evening

Winnicott phoned Little to tell her she was right. Little feels her spontaneous perceptive ability to be validated, writing “I was allowed to know the truth: I could be right, and I could trust my own perceptions. It was a landmark, and he knew it” (1985, p. 24).23 This empowerment of Little in relation to the world overturns the negation of her perceptions which she internalized as a child.

His recognition of her perception lets her trust herself, in contrast to her family, where she felt her perceptions were treated as fantasy. As a result, rather than choosing between compliance and annihilation, she can stand separately from Winnicott and have her own experience.

23 Interestingly, the phrase “I was allowed” appears in three separate passages in Little’s paper, supporting the importance of the theme of freedom in her work with Winnicott.

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Also, from the perspective of the analytic relationship, this moment also stands out in contrast to Little’s treatment with Sharpe. Little recognized Sharpe to have heart disease as well, but received no reply when she commented on Sharpe’s condition. She describes feeling expected to ignore Sharpe’s illness, even when Sharpe is exerting herself in a dangerous way. To me, this contrast between Sharpe and Winnicott highlights the importance of sensitivity to the nature of the patient’s observations. Of course, these observations can be defensive in nature, but they can also be the expression of a need to have one’s perceptive abilities validated. I see this need to fall within the general umbrella of Winnicott’s observation that omnipotence precedes the capacity for separation in development. Little needed to be right, so that later she could be wrong. She needed to have a foundation of perceptive power, and Winnicott gave this to her through his willingness to acknowledge her accurate perception of his heart attack. Though a seemingly minor event, for Little it was “a landmark.”

The Breaking of the Vase

Little lived much of her life against the backdrop of an intense fear that self-assertion would trigger retaliation, but through treatment with Winnicott this fear was processed and she gained access to her spontaneity and aggression. In turn, this made it possible to move beyond endless repetition of the turn toward compliance in relation to her mother which had been recurring since childhood and defined her experience prior to treatment with Winnicott.

The first instance where destructiveness appears is the somewhat infamous “broken vase” incident. The easiest introduction here is to quote the passage in full (1985):

In one early session with D.W. I felt in utter despair of ever getting him to understand

anything. I wandered round his room trying to find a way. I contemplated throwing

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myself out of the window, but felt that he would stop me. Then I thought of throwing out

all his books, but finally I attacked and smashed a large vase filled with white lilac, and

trampled on it. In a flash he was gone from the room, but he came back just before the

end of the hour. Finding me clearing up the mess he said, ‘I might have expected you to

do that [clear up? or smash?], but later.’ Next day an exact replica had replaced the vase

and the lilac, and a few days later he explained that I had destroyed something that he

valued. Neither of us ever referred to it again, which seems odd to me now, but I think

that if it had happened later on he would probably have reacted differently. As it was, it

felt as useless as my struggles with Miss Sharpe or my mother, and I forgot it until

recently (p. 20).

Little indicates despair with regard to ever being understood was acted out through her destruction of Winnicott’s vase and the trampling of the flowers. She considers suicide and then attacks a proxy for Winnicott instead. My understanding of Winnicott’s reaction – leaving the room – is that he could see no productive way to respond. Later in the treatment, perhaps he could have made an interpretation or set a limit, but at this stage all he can do is tolerate Little’s aggression. His leaving is a mystery, and it has been suggested Winnicott left because he could not tolerate his own aggressive feelings in this moment (Hopkins, 1998). Still, I believe this was a productive response, despite Little’s sense of it being useless and despite its enigmatic quality.

Firstly, if Winnicott is in the position of Little’s mother, who Little experienced as turning all interactions into demands for compliance, interpretation of the breaking of the vase had a good chance of being taken in as a repetition of this dynamic. Perhaps even his presence would have been too stimulating. Additionally, in the transference Little’s symbolic capacity is limited at this stage (seen in the previous discussion of abundant unsymbolized experience at this

121 stage of the treatment), adding another point in the column against interpretation. More building up of the basic security and awareness needed for tolerance of confrontation is needed before sophisticated use could be made of this moment. And so, the “useful” thing here is toleration.

Winnicott left, but he came back, and he did not retaliate. Although no symbolized insight is generated, at a more basic level, he shows himself to be a sturdy object. He has not retaliated and he has not left her, and so her experience of the environment is changed.

Of course, this course of reaction cannot be set as a rule. It’s a specific reaction of one person in their developing relationship with another. It emerges from Winnicott’s understanding of Little in that moment and from his character. Another person would have to find a different way to achieve these same results of expanding the freedom of action felt by their patient. Most people would not accept their vase being broken without response. Someone else might find a way to stay in the room or begin symbolization of the experience expressed by Little’s actions.

Furthermore, Winnicott’s decision against reaction has the potential to leave aggression unaddressed, which will be discussed just prior to the conclusion of this chapter.

To me, proof that this was a valuable interaction, despite the absence of limit setting or interpretation comes in the passage that follows. Little next describes a session in which she is

“seized with recurring spasms of terror” (1985, p. 20). She weathered these moments by clinging to Winnicott’s hands, and when they had passed, he held her head. When the session was ending,

Winnicott interpreted it as a reliving of the birth experience, which Little feels to be true, reflecting that “birth into a relationship, via my spontaneous movement which was accepted by him” (1985, p. 20) occurred that day. I believe that the act of holding which Winnicott made in his non-interpretation of Little’s breaking of his vase had made it safe for her to be spontaneous.

She could be born into relationship because Winnicott had not interrupted her developing sense

122 of trust. Through regression and holding, Little’s developmental trajectory has been restarted.

Little will subsequently experience previously blocked emotions and she reported her overall level of fear was drastically reduced after these incidents, never again to be at the level of annihilation anxiety.

Destructiveness and Object Use

Destruction (as understood by Winnicott) next appears when Little confronts her mother toward the end of her analysis. At this point, her perception of their relationship has solidified, as has her sense of cohesiveness, and Little becomes able to express anger freely toward her mother. She writes (1985):

The analysis seemed unending, and I blamed him for my failures. But then, in the

summer (1952), for the first time in my life, I exploded at my mother, at some piece of

her jibing and ‘clever’ nonsense. I told her exactly what I felt: that she was being unkind

and ridiculous, that she had had no business to marry or have children, and a great deal

more in the same strain, quite regardless of any effect on her (p. 29).

My understanding of this moment is that Little could reclaim her anger toward her mother when it had been held and reflected by Winnicott, and that integration of this anger then enabled her to spontaneously express it when her mother and her were in a situation that recreated the relationship that had so stifled Little in infancy and childhood. The moment of explosion is uncontrolled, and yet it has taken much work to reach this point. To give an analogy, in physics a nuclear reaction occurs when an excess of fissile nuclear material is put together, and through treatment Little has similarly built up fissile emotional material so that this interaction with her mother puts the balance of anger over the edge, leading to her explosion.

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In this moment, she declares herself decisively separate from her mother, with her separation evident in her ability to express herself without concern for repercussion. She is no longer confused by her mother. In this moment she knows her own point of view and can stand with it. Supporting my earlier contention that the destructiveness Winnicott emphasizes is defined by indifference to impact, rather than the more specific feeling of destructive rage, Little ends this recollection by noting that she acted without regard for the effect of her actions. In

Winnicott’s developmental model, destruction is about the escape from omnipotence that occurs when an individual relinquishes control over the other and acts without concern for their reaction. This may occur in the context of anger, but it is the risk that is taken when the response of the other is disregarded that is the freeing aspect of destructiveness.

Unfortunately, the potential for change present in this moment is not capitalized upon.

Little notes Winnicott replying “you’ve owed it to yourself for a long time” and identifies her actions as a new spontaneous self-assertion (1985, p. 29), but the moment is not built upon further. A holiday break from analysis occurs which interrupts whatever else might have been made of this. Little goes to Scotland where she injures herself while hiking, which she sees as the acting out of her guilt toward her mother. In the hospital, she enters a confusional state, which she says continued after the resumption of her work with Winnicott after the holiday break.

It is interesting to consider why nothing further was made of Little’s act of freedom in relation to her mother. The ill-timed vacation alone seems too concrete an explanation. I think the fact that Little asserted herself outside the analytic space, rather than in the transference, reduced the transformative potential of the moment. Winnicott had less to work with when she was asserting herself in relation to her mother than he would have had Little found a way to do

124 so with him. Perhaps she acted out with her mother what she could not express to Winnicott.24

Finally, there is the issue of the object’s survival of destructiveness. After the incident, Little’s mother wrote a letter in which Little reports “my ‘explosion’ was ignored and made useless, her possession of me reasserted” (1985, p. 29). Without a receptive response or analytic processing of the event, the transformative potential of Little’s destructiveness fades. She breaks contact with her mother, but still cannot set up herself as an independent subject.

“The Place Went On Being”

Little links her subsequent confusional state to her mother’s reassertion of possession of her, which she understands to have revived buried confusion distinguishing herself and her mother. Moreover, she also sees this moment to have revived confusion in regard to her sexual identity. She presumes that she projected her confusion into Winnicott during this period because, unfortunately, she herself cannot recall what occurred next in the treatment. A year passes in this state, and at the arrival of the following summer holiday, Winnicott tells Little that he wants her to be psychiatrically hospitalized while he is away, due to concern that she will kill herself. Little finds this reasonable and there is negotiation around what conditions she would require to accept hospitalization, and Little then enters the hospital.

This hospitalization proves to be the opportunity for Little to both be destructive and to process this experience (which she was unable to do earlier). Upon admission, she feels lonely, abandoned, and sad, spending time in her room, and writing poetry. About ten days into her hospitalization, she reports that despite asking to be left alone, she is repeatedly visited in her room. She spanks a ward maid, which is never explained, and is later visited by the hospital’s

24 This line of thinking would also account for Little’s subsequent amnesia – another iteration of her protecting Winnicott from her destructiveness.

125 deputy-superintendent, who insinuates her behavior will lead to her receiving ECT.25 Over the course of this day, anger build in Little, and in the evening she throws her food tray and smashes a lamp, prompting the hospital staff to put her into seclusion. She is paranoid during seclusion, but clings to a handkerchief given to her by Winnicott and a scarf she likes, with these items serving as transitional objects that sustain Winnicott’s presence for her.

The next morning, she is bathed, fed, and cared for by the head nurse of the ward. Little sees this experience as “regression to full dependence” through the holding provided by the hospital environment while she simultaneously remained connected to Winnicott who had arranged the hospitalization and was in contact via mail.26 Little says of the hospital, “the place went on being, and holding and looking after me, calm and apparently unperturbed” (1985, p.

33). Notably, the hospital also responded assertively to her aggression through the imposition of seclusion. Linking this experience to the earlier smashing of Winnicott’s vase, she writes (1985):

Something had again been broken (plates, lamp, etc.) but not me, and I was now in what

had become my real ‘nursery’, where it was safe not to control myself. The boundaries

were wide and flexible. It was psychically an extension of D.W.'s consulting-room

where, earlier, I had smashed his vase. I could now make clear to myself my choice

25 In Little’s recollection of spanking the ward maid, issues of envy, sadistic impulses, and sexuality are suggested, but remain unaddressed. The question of what went unanalyzed in Little’s treatment with Winnicott is raised, which will be discussed later in this chapter. 26 Winnicott’s collaborator (and analysand) Masud Khan makes a similar arrangement in the case written up in his paper “From Secretiveness to Shared Living,” where he sees a patient referred by a physician on the condition of the physician being available for management of crises. He describes explicitly stating to the physician that “of the total strain of this treatment, [you] shall have to carry seventy percent” (1983, p. 89.). Additionally, in this same paper he notes that pure analysis “that actualizes only and exclusively through the transference and the analytic process” is a myth and that “we and our work call upon others who do all the dirty work for us and carry its strain from our patients, be it their families, friends, or physicians” (1983, p. 92). These are interesting points to consider, which to me suggest that Winnicott’s handling of Little might fit a pattern more common than is realized, and that extra- analytical situations enrich growth when processed in treatment. Although, as was stated earlier, working through is likely to be more complete when conflicts are repeated in the transference and addressed with the analyst.

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between life and death… His putting me in hospital was a repetition of his reaction to that

earlier smashing, but this time the contact was not broken as it had been then, when he

left me alone with the wreckage I had made (p. 33).

Little indicates that the difference between Winnicott’s reaction to the smashing of the vase and her experiences in the hospital is the absence of a break in contact. This is an important idea and points to a weakness in Winnicott’s enigmatic method of responding to her aggression.

Was there a way for him to be non-retaliatory and maintain contact at that stage of Little’s treatment? In Winnicott’s defense, I think this comment leaves out the fact that at the time of smashing of the vase, she did not have the same psychic resources that she possesses at this point. Specifically, she has grown already in terms of her feeling of integrity and confronted her mother, which to me suggests that a limit setting but non-retaliatory reaction from the environment (an example of Winnicott’s objective hate) can be taken in without prompting the annihilation anxieties that plagued her earlier. Furthermore, she has the handkerchief from

Winnicott and a good object representation to project upon this item, allowing for transitional object experience that was impossible at the start of the analysis. In this way, Little’s ability to benefit from the hospital environment is a mark of the shifts that have already been accomplished in her treatment and points to the importance of context when comparing interventions and analytic choices.

In this holding environment, Little is able to think, unlike the situation with her mother where her mother’s reaction (and Little’s reception of it) derailed the possibility of growth.

Staying with the wreckage, Little finds herself relaxed. She paints a wild picture of a monster in the sea and she teases the staff occupational therapist (“A nice piece of schizophrenic art, what?”), with the head nurse laughing together with her about this “mad” piece (1985, p. 34).

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She writes “spontaneity was restored, even welcomed” (1985, p. 34). It has become acceptable to be aggressive and to be “mad,” without being destroyed or losing her sense of integrity.

Thoughts of suicide come to her briefly, but she rejects the idea of killing herself, stating “All at once I realized that it would be no real solution, only a victory for the crazy world I had struggled against all my life and too often complied with” (1985, p. 34). To me, what stands out in this moment, is the I that Little must feel herself to possess in making the decision against suicide. At last she is separate from “the crazy world” and can feel confident. This is the fruit of her years of work with Winnicott and of the particular moment in the hospital in which she was destructive and the environment went on being.

Little’s Freedom

Little then leaves the hospital and returns to treatment with Winnicott. They talk about her time in the hospital, and she shares poems and paintings with him. Illustrating her separateness and ability to tolerate difference, Little realizes that Winnicott’s reactions to her art belong to him (“I realized that his disliking a picture didn't mean I should destroy it”) and are something to consider rather than demands of any kind (1985, p. 34). She also describes a spirit of play becoming possible between her and Winnicott, writing (1985):

Quite a lot of the play through which I now grew psychically could have been like my

mother's: jokes, stories and nonsense… But these things were not used to defend against

anxiety, to ward off anger or excitement, or to deflect pain or unhappiness by making me

laugh. They were not forced on me, I could have them or not as I wished (p. 35).

During this stage Winnicott also expresses to Little the burden that her treatment has been to him. She has made many demands which he has met out of a commitment to her growth and

128 trust in the analytic process, and Little reports that appreciation for the sacrifice has been made on her behalf enriches her sense of her own value. Little has great appreciation for Winnicott which is strengthened as she recognizes how much he has given, but her emphasis is on the fact that she also grows in valuing herself through this appreciation rather than gratitude for his sacrifices. She must be lovable, for Winnicott has sacrificed for her.27

Finally, Little gives a description of her new view of Winnicott which succinctly illustrates Winnicott’s idea of object use (1985):

I became aware that the D.W. whom I knew was different from the D.W. known to

anyone else, even though others might know some of the same aspects of him. I ‘created’

him imaginatively for myself, and this because they and I were different, however much

we might all seem alike; it gave them their values and reality. Above all, D.W. became a

real living person with whom I had a relationship born years earlier and no longer based

only on transference (p. 36).

She is creating her Winnicott, while at the same time interacting with him in reality. She knows the aspects of him that he presents, and their relationship is based on more than transference. At the same time, she is also creating him at all times based upon her inner representation of him.

27 Little’s articulation of this insight casts new light on Winnicott’s claims in the paper “Hate in the Counter- transference” regarding the value of the patient becoming aware of the strain carried by the analyst, and by extension the “interpretation of the analyst’s hate to the patient” (1947, p. 202). Winnicott writes (1947): I believe an analysis is incomplete if even towards the end it has not been possible for the analyst to tell the patient what he, the analyst, did unbeknown for the patient whilst he was ill, in the early stages. Until this interpretation is made the patient is kept to some extent in the position of infant—one who cannot understand what he owes to his mother (p. 202). Through Little’s experience, an additional effect of interpretation of the analyst’s objective hate becomes clear. Along with enriching feelings of gratitude (guilt leading to the reciprocation of love), the patient may value themself more based upon awareness of the sacrifice made on their behalf.

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Outside of analysis, Little achieves many gains in this period. She finds pleasure in her professional life and artistic pursuits (painting and gardening); she has a relationship with her sister where this previously felt impossible; and she reports new capacities for functioning, saying she “could be and do, asserting myself without undue guilt or anxiety or paranoid reaction” (1985, p. 37). The treatment is ended in Summer 1955, then restarted after Little enters a sexual relationship which triggers Oedipal anxieties. She’s seen again for 18 months, on a once per week basis, to address this (no details of this phase of treatment are given), after which she ends her analysis. Winnicott tells her it’s time to take over responsibility for her own life and “be yourself” (1985, p. 37), and she can finally live out this liberty.

Freedom’s Limits

Little presents a hopeful picture of movement from compliance and terror into a feeling of self-possession, more accurate perception, vitality, and creativity. However, other sources suggest that Winnicott’s work with Little, and others, was incomplete. It appears that while treatment with Winnicott was enlivening and empowered patients to relate more freely to others and the world, aggressive and narcissistic trends were insufficiently addressed.

Linda Hopkins, a psychoanalyst and biographer of Masud Khan, for example, quotes colleagues of Little as describing her to have retained “grandiose” and “imperious” qualities even after her analysis (1998, p. 16). Similarly, analyst Harry Guntrip received treatment from

Winnicott which he experienced as a process of transformative enlivenment based Winnicott’s capacity to sustain his maternal transference, but Guntrip too experienced ongoing difficulties after termination, with others reported to have found him “hard-driving, omnipotent, and ‘off- putting,’” as well as remaining “prone to exhaustion” (Hazell, 1991, p. 153). Finally, there is the case of Masud Khan. Khan indicated having an analytic relationship with Winnicott that lasted

130 fifteen years (although other sources indicate he only received four years of formal psychoanalytic treatment from Winnicott), as well as collaborating with Winnicott in preparation of his publications from the 1950s through Winnicott’s death in 1971 (Hopkins, 1998;

Slochower, 2011). Khan was an influential analyst and brilliant writer but alienated himself from the analytic community through gross boundary violations, including sleeping with patients and students, as well as destructive and provocative behavior such as drunkenness and making anti-

Semitic comments in his final book (Hopkins, 1998). Consequently, his treatment is seen as a failure, as his ongoing problems far outweighed his gains.

Were these issues the result of an issue in Winnicott’s theoretical model? His personality? Some combination of the two? All three cases contain similar elements. A patient presents to Winnicott who displays impressive intellectual potential paired with serious relational problems that have not been helped by classical psychoanalytic treatment. In all three cases, the outcome is growth in relating paired with ongoing grandiosity. One issue that I consider prominent is the failure to meet aggression with aggression which occurred in Little’s case, and which appears to have also been an issue in the other cases as well (Hopkins, 1998). Winnicott wrote that it was essential for objective hate to be noted and expressed at some point in the treatment (1947), but it does not appear that this was always practiced.

For example, when Little broke his vase, Winnicott left the room, and when he returned this incident went undiscussed. As I stated earlier, this may have been due to his judgement that any interpretation would be have disrupted the holding environment he was establishing with

Little. Winnicott notes in “Hate and the Countertransference” that interpretation can be defensive in nature (1947), and perhaps he did not think Little yet had the capacity to take in any meaning from interpretation in this moment. In this same essay, Winnicott also links benefitting from

131 interpretation with the capacity to identify with the analyst, and from Little’s description of her state when she started treatment with Winnicott, these capacities were impaired. Consequently, the absence of limit setting and interpretation of aggression may have been due to clinical judgment. Michael Eigen makes a similar point in his assessment of Winnicott’s treatment of

Harry Guntrip, suggesting that Winnicott did not deal with Guntrip’s aggression because of his determination this was not yet tolerable for Guntrip, choosing instead to terminate with this issue unaddressed before his heart illness would have interrupted the treatment (1981). This generous assessment sustains the possibility that Winnicott would have gotten to the issue of aggression in a longer treatment of Guntrip.

But Little’s treatment was not prematurely terminated, and the issue of aggression could have been returned to later but was not. Winnicott writes of giving standard treatment to those with psychoneurosis (i.e. hysterical and obsessional problems) while using adaptations based on his ideas about the maternal holding environment in borderline and psychotic cases (Winnicott,

1971). In these cases, he proposes there is a need for a “preparatory period” (Winnicott, 1962) addressing basic issues of existence, identity, and relatedness before moving on to “classical” psychoanalysis (i.e. analysis of Oedipal conflict and working through of transference neurosis).28

However, in Little’s report of her treatment, envy, other aggressive issues, and the Oedipal conflicts which were Ella Sharpe’s focus are not indicated to have been addressed by Winnicott.

Aggression appeared in her breaking of the vase, and in her behavior while hospitalized, notably her spanking of a staff members and provocation of the occupational therapist in regard to her art. It is possible these dynamics were analyzed after Little consolidated her self experience and

28 Winnicott would later address this issue in terms of the patient’s capacity for “using” the analyst: “Many of our patients come with this problem already solved [i.e. object use] – they can use objects and they can use us and can use analysis, just as they have used their parents and their siblings and their homes. However, there are many patients who need us to be able to give them a capacity to use us. This for them is the analytic task” (1971, p. 126).

132 became more alive, related, and secure, but were left out of the account of treatment because she considered them of secondary importance. Given the pattern in Winnicott’s other cases though, and the ongoing grandiosity Little is reported to have displayed, this seems unlikely.

One factor that may have limited his capacity for engagement with aggression was

Winnicott’s health. Hopkins notes that Winnicott’s heart condition was exacerbated by stress, leading her to suggest that he modified his “mode of life,” including his way of working analytically, to avoid excessive agitation of the heart as might be provoked in a direct engagement with a patient’s aggression (1998, p. 36). Additionally, it has been suggested by

Slochower that Winnicott’s analysis of Khan was unsuccessful because he failed to address the idealizing transference that developed, with a need to be idealized and to idealize attributed to

Winnicott (2011). This need is speculated rather than definitively declared, toward the purpose of making space for others to recognize these (common) dynamics and their pernicious effects, rather than to denigrate Winnicott. In both Hopkins’ and Slochower’s assessment, characteristics belonging to Winnicott are seen to preclude the potentially generative “collisions” (Slochower’s terminology) that would have been produced had Winnicott addressed his patient’s aggression.

I also believe there is more than personality and the transference-countertransference processes specific to Winnicott and Little (or Khan, or Guntrip) at play in their aggression being under addressed. There is also the matter of how aggression is conceived by Winnicott.

Winnicott differed from the Kleinians in his rejection of constitutional aggression. He believed destructiveness was a part of development, but dealt with destruction in terms of phantasies of obliteration of the other (ruthlessness), and was doubtful of “[Klein’s] attempt to state infantile destructiveness in terms of (a) heredity [and] (b) envy” (1962, p. 178). Consequently, envy and aggression are not a central topic needing focus for Winnicott, even as he emphasizes the

133 importance of destructiveness in psychological development.29 In contrast, Sharpe addressed

Little’s aggressiveness when she was treating her. Her interpretations were poorly timed and iatrogenic according to Little, but that does not mean they were inaccurate. The important innovations made by Winnicott therefore should not be considered to supersede the value of previous work done on aggression and envy. There are gains which may be had through the holding environment and the type of destruction Winnicott emphasizes – the restoration of the self that these interventions enable is foundational for all else – but they also cannot be idealized and seen to provide a miraculous new and perfect life for analysands.

Additionally, I think the place of destructiveness in Winnicott’s model of object use must also be considered. I am interested in the feeling of freedom and the creativity described to be experienced when object use is achieved. Subject-to-subject relating in which each party finds a version of the other in the external world that is respected as separate but also overlaps with their projections enough so they can achieve desired emotional and instinctual satisfaction is as close to the ideal of freedom as I can imagine.

Also supporting the compatibility of object use and empathy, when discussing the trajectory of development, Winnicott theorized that (1963b):

Independence is never absolute. The healthy individual does not become isolated, but

becomes related to the environment in such a way that the individual and the environment

can be said to be interdependent (p. 82).

Lastly, Winnicott describes his version of the previously discussed Kleinian depressive position in his paper on “The capacity for concern” (1963c). In this state, which follows the

29Guntrip holds a similar view, writing “sex is primarily biological and then becomes personal, aggression is primarily personal and then becomes biological” (1971, p. 37); a quote which is admiringly cited by Khan (1972).

134 achievement of object use, ruthlessness and concern may co-exist, leading to empathy and identification, which presumably is a check against destructive action. “Concern refers to the fact that the individual cares, or minds, and both feels and accepts responsibility,” he writes, as well as claiming this capacity to be the “basis of the family” and “at the back of all constructive play and work” (1963c, p. 73). Here understanding becomes possible, as well as reparation and repair in the wake of aggression.

Still what happens when the subjects meeting each other in the transitional space that

Winnicott conceives the world to be do not align? Also, is there more to the relationship between destructiveness and repair?

Winnicott sees destructiveness as the foundation of creativity, because it enables object use by creating externality (1971, p. 125). Furthermore, as described previously, he separates destruction from anger, which is a more sophisticated phenomenon occurring in reaction to frustration. His destructiveness lacks anger and is characterized by “placing the other outside the area of omnipotence” and not protecting the object (1971, p. 122). Summarizing his linkage of destructiveness with relatedness to the objectively perceived other, he writes (1971):

From this moment [survival of the object], or arising out of this phase, the object is in

fantasy always being destroyed. This quality of ‘always being destroyed’ makes the

reality of the surviving object felt as such, strengthens the feeling tone, and contributes to

object-constancy. The object can now be used (p. 125).

So how do these elements relate to Winnicott’s earlier ideas about the place of responsibility and concern? I think this is an under-theorized aspect of Winnicott’s metapsychology. Winnicott was reportedly gentle and nurturing with patients, with a charming

135 writing style and a whimsical way of relating with children, leading the undercurrent of aggression in his work to be overlooked. However, psychoanalyst Charles Rycroft is on record describing Winnicott as having been self-centered and a “crypto prima donna” (as quoted in

Grosskurth, 1986, p. 399) and Rycroft quoted psychiatrist Aubrey Lewis of the Maudsley

Hospital calling Winnicott “the most aggressive man in London” (Rudnytsky, 2000, p. 74).30

Also, Winnicott wrote without accounting for what others had done in a subject area (1945) and made an expressed point of using his own language even when existing terms already exist

(1963c), both aggressive acts pointing to this under-appreciated aspect of his personality.

Correspondingly, the topic of Winnicott’s own relationship with aggression suggests to me that more examination of his handling of this subject in his writing and clinical work is needed.

Additionally, in the column of aggression being under-addressed in Winnicott’s model is the matter of the reports of Little and Guntrip’s ongoing grandiosity after termination and Khan’s boundary violations as an analyst, his provocations, and his narcissism. These people received new creative aliveness through the holding environment provided by Winnicott but seem to have emerged without addressing destructive aspects of their personalities and their impact on others.

Another way to look at this issue would be to say that Winnicott’s treatment helped Little to be more capable of action, through the lessening of her annihilation anxiety. Freedom to act is enabled, while the agentic side of freedom (in the sense intended by Schafer – agency that includes awareness and responsibility for disowned aspects of behavior) is less developed.

Winnicott writes of practicing “standard” analysis with the majority of patients, reserving the maternal holding environment for the small part of his caseload with problems in basic identity

30 Lewis’s perception of Winnicott’s aggression might have been a reaction to Winnicott’s suggestion in his paper “Hate in the Countertransference” that psychiatrists, of which Lewis was among the most prominent of his time, acted out unconscious hatred of their patients through procedures such as ECT and lobotomy (1947).

136 and security. Consequently, I see Winnicott’s model as Eigen saw Guntrip’s treatment. The regression and holding, which accepts destructiveness without retaliation (or even interpretation it seems), is just part of a longer process. When object use is achieved, then destructiveness must be interpreted more aggressively. Limits do not inherently emerge from empathy, and destructiveness does not dissolve as a person matures.

Winnicott produced a model of development that maps a course by which those who have had their growth toward subject-to-subject relating distorted toward a compliance-based pattern of managing the world can again develop toward creativity, aliveness, recognition of others, and feelings of freedom. There’s beauty in his metaphor likening the person in analysis to a bulb being enabled to become a flower (Rodman, 1987, p. 35), as in both cases the environment is necessary for growth while growth is simultaneously an organic process starting in the person or bulb. But growth in any direction runs into the matter of each person’s impact on others.

In consequence, I see a need for Winnicott’s writings on the value of the analyst’s hate to be strongly considered when seeking to understand his overall vision. While he may not always have acted in line with his writing, Winnicott wrote of the importance of the mother’s (or analyst’s) hate making them real to the other. This happens when the primary caregiver takes up their own life separate from the child, this happens when aggression is checked with confidence and limits are set, and in psychoanalysis this happens through the fee and the frame (including the ending of the session), and through interpretation’s that challenge patients to see aspects of themselves that they would prefer to disavow or inform patients of their impact on the analyst.

These actions are not precluded in Winnicott’s work, in fact they are elevated, but they may go overlooked due to Winnicott’s personal style and the image of analyst as “good mother” that

137 unfortunately obscures his more complex oeuvre and character in the popular clinical discourse, as well as being rooted in a stereotyped vision of the maternal.

Reduced emphasis on interpretation of aggression may also be traced to Winnicott’s rejection of the death instinct and doubts about constitutional envy (1962). I leave exploration of this issue to other scholars and hope someone will take up the task of thoroughly addressing the impact of Winnicott’s conception of the nature of aggression on his clinical practice and that of those whom he has deeply influenced. I would hypothesize that his shift away from understanding aggression as it had previously been conceptualized led to envy and spite receiving less clinical focus, even as he put “hate in the countertransference” on the map as never before and introduced his particular conception of destructiveness. The fact that the analysand’s discussed in this chapter continued to struggle with grandiosity would support this line of investigation.

Adding focus to the handling of hateful feelings and actions has implications with regard to the need for timely interpretations of hate and the question of the limitations of “holding” and the need to present the patient with the analyst’s person (including their objective hate) in a thorough analysis. Slochower, for example, has written about the need for solidity and confidence on the part of the analyst when encountering the patient’s aggression during a holding phase in treatment. Her ideas are well illustrated in the quote below, which addresses her approach to two patients who were both hostile, demanding, and volatile, while at the same time at a stage in treatment where they required reliable holding (Slochower, 1991):

This hold required that I limit the effectiveness of their demands and attacks and that I

counter overt and covert aggression with a firm but non-retaliatory response that

confirmed my aliveness (p. 716).

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Ultimately, awareness of others is needed for successful living with others. So while presenting the patient with their impact on others or interpreting their defensive aggression may serve in one sense to establish a limit to the patient’s freedom, in the larger sense these acts can also be seen as enabling freedom because the license to act without concern for consequence is ultimately self-destructive and therefore in terms of long-term satisfaction it is no freedom at all.

As we all live in the world of other people, the freedom within reach is one characterized by agentic subjectivity and the capacity to creatively pursue one’s desires. This is object use at its best. Winnicott valued destructiveness in fantasy, but concern and relatedness to others in the external world. While there is the potential for ruthless, selfishly destructive action if aggression is not addressed, this is mitigated when awareness of the other is part of the patient’s analysis, to their benefit as well as the benefit of others. Freedom includes the ability to be destructive, but it is not totally abstract and separated from impact.

Hence the positive freedom in Winnicott’s work is at the same time a constrained freedom. Individuals can be helped to achieve a sense of internal solidity that allows them to act in a creative way that actualizes their inner experiences in relationship with people in their external world. The constraint is awareness of their impact in combination with concern for others, which can develop through psychoanalysis. However, when envy and hate remain uninterpreted, this development is impeded and patients are likely to continue to have impaired awareness of the external world and to act out or project hate into others with aggressive results.

Overall, freedom is produced when annihilation anxiety is overcome and a shift toward object use is achieved, but the long-term outcomes are better for everyone when analysis also includes the working through of aggression leading to awareness of its impact and the internalization of limits. Saying this another way, health includes choosing to forego some

139 possibilities. With security and self-knowledge, when limits are encountered, when the impact of behavior on others can be anticipated and considered, and when aggressive aspects of the self are processed, more conscious decisions become possible, so that where compliance and unconscious aggression were, there will be choice. Then the lifelong task of creatively negotiating with the world can begin in earnest.

To Own the Self

In closing, Winnicott made a powerful contribution to psychoanalysis through his introduction of concern for the patient’s experience of aliveness. Through awareness of the possibility of deadness, he allowed the importance of aliveness to be appreciated, and originated a developmental model that included this dimension. Furthermore, his technical innovations such as his concept of holding, as well as his description of the process of movement from object relating to object use through the caregiver or analyst’s survival of destruction, and the subsequent awareness of separation and the externalness of others experienced by the child or patient, have helped subsequent analysts conceptualize and work with psychotic anxieties and other problems emerging from disruptions in the early caregiving environment. Margaret Little’s case shows that Winnicottian psychoanalysis can produce the experience of positive freedom, new spontaneity, and creativity for people previously struggling with feelings of entrapment, unreality, fear of annihilation, and paranoid compliance.

As argued in my introduction and the previous chapter, consideration of the concept of freedom leads to new perspectives on the analytic process and the outcomes of analytic treatment. Specifically, treatment of the issues addressed by Winnicott and using the techniques he described produces many effects, one of which I believe is the facilitation of the experience of positive freedom. Furthermore, when discussing Winnicott’s work with an emphasis on the place

140 of freedom in psychoanalysis, there are issues that must be thought through, such as the danger of leaving aggression unchecked and unanalyzed out of a misunderstanding of the concept of holding, but these complications do not annul the importance of the introduction of positive freedom as a psychoanalytic goal which Winnicott achieves. His freedom, the freedom he sought to give birth to through psychoanalytic treatment, and through his writing, is the subjective experience of owning oneself, always a paradox and a process. Finally, rather than the actions taken, it is the sense of creativity and aliveness that is the core of the freedom that I am discussing and which I see in Winnicott’s work.

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CHAPTER 3

Symbolic Castration and Psychological Freedom:

Preliminary Explorations of Lacan’s Model of Psychic Development

Chapter 1 emphasized the individual’s experience of inhibition of freedom due to internal conflicts, and chapter 2 discussed the subjective experience of freedom in the context of development and the individual’s relationship (intrapsychic and real) with the primary caregiver.

Both these perspectives give relatively minimal attention to the influence of social and cultural factors in psychological development. However, the question of psychological freedom also possesses a cultural dimension, which appears in every case to a greater or lesser extent because life occurs within vast and intricate social systems. How does the individual come to interact with the system of relationships and meaning into which they have been born?

Consequently, I propose that facilitation of psychological freedom – that is, the individual’s capacity to act relatively spontaneously and to act on the basis of their personal experiences, wishes, and feelings – also requires consideration of the individual’s relationship to the social world of family, culture, and language.

Furthermore, there is also the question of how an individual inhabits and relates to the social order at all, and the importance of establishing this capacity for symbolic relations. While the social order oppresses, it also regulates anxiety (through its structuring function) and allows for development of meaning and dialog. Lack of freedom of a different order – that is, a purely reactive relation to existence, and the experience of existence as constantly encroaching and threatening – is present when language is concrete and life with other beings is lived without the structure provided by the symbolic order.

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Arguably the most prominent and sophisticated development of the cultural dimension within psychoanalysis is that Jacques Lacan and the Lacanians. Lacan was a mid-20th century

French psychoanalyst whose seminars were extremely influential in France and, over time, throughout the world. With regard to my development of the link between psychoanalysis and freedom, Lacan’s work is fertile ground. Lacan theorized there to be the three registers of experience: the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. Broadly speaking, his work prioritized analysis of language, seeing all human activity to be mediated through symbolic systems, including unconscious life. In fact, he contended there was no unconscious without language

(Dor, 1985/1998, p. 130). Consequently, because language is a cultural phenomenon and inseparable from social relations, psychic life is overwritten by the social order (a linguistic phenomenon). Using these ideas, Lacan developed a psychoanalytic model which specifically designated speech as the location of psychoanalytic activity and which put the relation of the individual with their social world – called “the Other” in his work, as I will discuss – at the center of treatment.

Regarding Lacan’s methods, he proposed that it is through the unique way of speaking and focus of attention enabled by the psychoanalytic setting, epitomized in the practice of free association, that the subject’s certainties can be suspended, and they can begin to recognize their unconscious fantasies (1953/2006, pp. 32-33). Lacan described psychoanalysis as the work of articulating the truth of the patient’s desire within this particular environment and refers to the speech which emerges in this process as “full speech.” As fantasies move from the unconscious into speech, they cease to be repeated and become part of the subject’s history. To quote Mari

Ruti, “The disbanding of fantasies enables us to better listen to the idiosyncratic particularity of our desire” (2008, p. 504).

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With regard to this dissertation, the aims of treatment designated by Lacan concerned the analysand’s shift from being trapped in unsatisfying unconscious repetition and suffocating subservience to the Other, the social order encountered and internalized in childhood, to greater awareness of the nature of their world and decided action. Additionally, he linked the Oedipus complex to each individual’s establishment of a foundational relationship to the symbolic order, claiming this development as the key shift in the individual’s movement toward potentially claiming some reflective agency.

I believe Lacanian theory speaks to freedom in multiple ways. First, Lacan argued that the individual is liberated from enslavement to images when they achieve a shift away from exclusively imagistic relating and toward linguistic meaning. The Lacanians say an individual moves from a position of feeling they must be that which is desired, to seeking to have it, which in Lacanian language is the movement from being the phallus to having the phallus (or not having it). This is also called symbolic castration. In the chapter that follows I will discuss these ideas and their implications. Specifically, I review Lacan’s argument that through symbolic castration a subject comes to take a place within the symbolic system and gains the capacity for symbolic thinking and communication, emphasizing that the outcomes of greater security, understanding, and escape from the demand for perfection that symbolic castration produces are an emancipation. It should also be noted that symbolic castration is a developmental process, rather than an effect of treatment. Still, while symbolic castration resides within the realm of development and metapsychology rather than that of treatment, understanding this process suggests a unique type of psychological freedom that might be pursued and, furthermore, shifting from emphasis on the imaginary to emphasis on the symbolic is a potential outcome of treatment.

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Additionally, in order to illustrate the problem of enslavement to the image as conceptualized in Lacan’s work, I will also present a chapter discussing the phenomenon of Incel violence. “Incels” are a group of young males who identify as “involuntary celibates” and have perpetrated terroristic violence against women in multiple rampage incidents in recent years. I understand their rage to be rooted in an excessive focus on the imaginary register, leading to unbearable narcissistic injury that is externalized in hostility and violence. Their example highlights the importance of freedom as produced through symbolic castration by showing the enslavement to image that persists when there is not turn to symbolic relations and the imaginary register continues to dominate.

Furthermore, when image can co-exist with the meanings transmitted through the symbolic system, as is the case after symbolic castration, then it also becomes possible to relate to the symbolic system in a new way through analysis of the important signifiers in one’s life. As these signifiers are complexified, the individual becomes able to speak in new ways that make space for pursuing their desire, where previously they experienced repetition and impasse. This is a major part of the work of psychoanalysis according to the Lacanians. Additionally, Lacan’s later teaching introduces the idea of “traversing the fantasy,” the shift in position from expecting satisfaction through the Other to accepting responsibility for pursuit of satisfaction that is produced at the end of a psychoanalysis.

I will close my discussion of my Lacanian theory by discussing how analysis of signifiers and traversing the fantasy can also be understood as acts which create new freedom for the analysand. Here, in order to demonstrate the liberatory power of decentering and movement toward “full speech,” in this chapter I will present and discuss a case of my own, that of a young

Mexican-American man whom I’ll call Ulysses, including instances where development of the

150 capacity to decenter and to speak for himself led to separation from ideas of himself that had previously dominated his experience. This was not a Lacanian treatment, but I believe Lacan’s ideas are useful for conceptualizing my patient’s experiences and change during treatment.

Ulysses’s case includes examples of conflicts in his life being intricately related to familial and cultural patterns and inherited meanings in areas such as the role of the son, cultural identity, and the process of courtship, highlighting the explanatory power of Lacan’s theorization of the symbolic order. Moreover, I will describe how Ulysses’s increased articulation of emotional experiences through speech was accompanied by a complexification in his understanding of his life and a decentered perspective, and I will discuss the meaning of a change in his relation with me to illustrate traversal of the fantasy. Lastly, the conclusion of this chapter will review the various points of intersection between the concept of freedom and Lacanian psychoanalysis, with an emphasis on insights regarding freedom generated by Lacan’s work.

Lacan and the Origin of the Lacanian School

Jacques Lacan was born and educated in Paris, where he trained as a psychiatrist. He was involved in psychoanalytic and artistic circles in the 1920s and1930s, and he entered psychoanalysis in 1932. His entry into analysis was soon followed by entry in the Société

Psychanalytique de Paris (SPP) as a ‘candidate member’ in 1934 and full SPP membership in

1938 (Bailly, 2009, p. 9). His first major presentation was his paper “The Mirror Stage” which was given at the 1936 meeting of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA). This paper introduced Lacan’s conceptualization of the advent of the self-image, which he argued was created when a young child, following weaning, both saw itself in the mirror and had this self-

151 representation ratified by the observing mother31 (Bailly, 2009). According to Nobus, Lacan’s work from the 1930s through the immediate post-war era worked through the implications of this insight, which will be discussed further as this chapter develops (2018).

Following the conclusion of World War II, Lacan emerged as a major force within

French psychoanalysis. His theoretical work advanced with his introduction of the conceptual distinction between the imaginary, symbolic, and real registers, his reading of the oedipal situation in terms of the paternal metaphor (the name-of-the-father) and theorization of the symbolic phallus, and his application of structural linguistics to conceptualization of the unconscious and psychoanalytic technique. He became an influential training analyst and his yearly seminars, started in 1952, gave him a platform for disseminating his ideas.

At the same time, Lacan was highly controversial. He drew the attention of the IPA, whose leadership was critical of Lacan’s practices. In particular, his use of variable length sessions was attacked. Within Lacan’s theoretical system, the practice ending analytic sessions before the standard 45-50-minute period, or extending them past this limit, was established to enable the analyst to use the “cut” of ending a session as a punctuation highlighting an important appearance of unconscious material. However, this was viewed by IPA authorities as a practice ripe for misuse, specifically exploitative shortening of sessions for the analysts gain. It was also claimed that Lacan’s use of short sessions allowed him to take on more analysands, supposedly creating a faction of analysts loyal to Lacan with a pernicious influence on French psychoanalysis (Bailly, 2009). Lacan left the SPP in 1953 as part of a larger conflict in the organization around training processes. He joined the Société Française de Psychoanalyse (SFP),

31 Lacan presented a more developed version of his mirror stage at the 1949 IPA conference, which was later published in his Écrits and can be considered a capstone to his work on this concept (1949/2006).

152 where his iconoclasm regarding psychoanalytic orthodoxy (specifically, the premises of ego psychology) and use of the variable length session were sticking points preventing the SFP from gaining IPA affiliation. In 1963 the IPA made the approval of SFP’s membership conditional upon the SFP’s removal of Lacan from the position of training analyst. At this point Lacan departed the SFP and formed the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP), breaking completely from the

IPA, and the EFP would be Lacan’s institutional home until just before his death in 1981.

A major underlying conflict, separate from the various personal antipathies and personal dynamics present in these conflicts, was Lacan’s divergence from the conception of psychoanalysis held by the ego psychologists. Lacan saw himself as champion of a “Return to

Freud.” While the ego psychologists, the dominant party within international psychoanalysis at the time, understood the goal of treatment to be strengthening the ego, leading to greater adaptation, Lacan considered the ego to be a mirage to be undermined, and believed that the work of analysis was to enable pursuit of desire which had been inhibited and distorted, rather than supporting the ego and its concerns for appearance (with resulting rivalry and aggression).

He considered his focus on the unconscious to be truer to Freud’s vision for psychoanalysis, and he viewed the ego psychological emphasis on adaptation to be a concession to the conformist social order of the day. Lacan also rejected the treatment goal of the patient’s identification with the analyst’s ego and Kleinian ideas regarding use of countertransference (specifically the work of Margaret Little), due to his belief that here too analytic technique was moving away from prioritization of the radical unconscious of the patient. However, it was his opposition to ego psychology that was most vehement, and which played into his conflicts with the IPA, as this institution was dominated by American ego psychologists in the post-war era.

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I believe these conflicts are valuable illustrations of the centrality of freedom in Lacan’s work. Here he is endeavoring to be free of orthodoxy and takes positions based on his own vision. In the conceptual points he is sticking too despite opposition, his emphasis is on respect for the otherness of the patient’s unconscious. He sees the work of the analyst to be the creation of conditions that loosen what has fixed the patient in place, specifically the fantasies of the ego, and it is on this point that his critique of ego psychology turns. In regard to the variable length session, here too freedom was emphasized. Lacan saw “the cut” as a tool for activating the unconscious; a disruptive addition to the analytic repertoire. Thinking holistically, the IPA saga can be read as a story of Lacan rejecting a normalizing vision of psychoanalysis and the consolidation of psychoanalytic authority. Upon these issues, he would not submit. I see Lacan’s rejection of ego psychology, his conflicts with the IPA, and the centrality of separation from the given order that is prioritized in his work, to be an acting out of his later theorization of the task of the subject in relation to the Other (i.e. social order) (1973/1977):

That is why he must get out, get himself out, and in the getting-himself-out, in the end, he

will know that the real Other has, just as much himself, to get himself out or pull himself

free (p. 188).

Turing back to Lacan’s career, from 1952 to 1980 he conducted a yearly seminar where his ideas were developed and disseminated. Additionally, Écrits, a collection of his written work, was published in 1966, and later translated widely, resulting in the further spread of Lacan’s ideas. Like Freud, Lacan continued to develop his work throughout his life. He initially focused on the concept of desire, with psychoanalysis conceptualized as a process by which the analysand could access the truth of his or her desire and separate from the Other’s control. Later

Lacan shifted his focus to the register of the real and analysis’s capacity to allow a person to take

154 responsibility for their jouissance (enjoyment) and pursue it more directly after experiencing the radical shift he termed “traversing the fantasy.” Lacan has always remained controversial, drawing criticism for obscurantism, paternalism, phallocentrism, nourishing a cult of personality, and selfish and narcissistic personal behavior. Still, clinical Lacanian practice grew widespread in France, as well as establishing a presence in many parts of Europe and the Americas.

Now I will turn to more in-depth examination of Lacan’s ideas, with attention drawn toward those aspects of his development of psychoanalysis that relate to the topic of freedom.

The Mirror Stage

As briefly noted above, Lacan’s first major contribution was his theorization of the mirror stage. According to Lacan, the young child lives without integration in the earliest period of life.

During this time the child has complete access to satisfaction in the care of the mother and therefore has no reason to develop representational thought, differentiation of self and other, or a self-representation – it simply enjoys. Then weaning occurs and the child experiences separation.

According to analyst Dany Nobus, at this point (2018):

Accepting the withdrawal of the breast requires that the child develops a 'me' (moi), as a

coherent agency in its personal conquest for food, whereas rejecting it means that the

child endeavours to refind the lost object, which in itself presupposes that it is able to

recognize and manipulate objects (p. 107).

This separation is a painful experience for the child. It is helpless and disorganized, flooded with frustration and fear. Then, Lacan said, the child has the experience of seeing itself in the mirror. The mirror image perceived has bodily integrity and attractiveness that the child does not feel. At first there is rivalry and aggression toward the apparently superior image in the

155 mirror. But by identifying with the image in the mirror, the child’s anxiety is dispelled.

Furthermore, the child’s image is recognized by the mother, whose praise for the child gives further satisfaction and contributes to the idealizing of the self-image.

Initially, Lacan wrote of the mirror in a literal manner, but over time he shifted away from emphasizing the mirror image itself. In the later iteration of the mirror stage, the visual and verbal dimensions of the process are entirely interrelated, with the image understood to be communicated by the mother and there being no need for the child to literally see its image

(Nobus, 2018, p. 120). Describing this relation between the imaginary and language, analyst

Marie-Hélène Brousse writes: “An image, for a human being, is always an image correlated with and regulated by the symbolic function” (1996, p. 122).

The importance of the mirror stage is that it installs the child’s ego; after this the child has a “me” around which its self-conscious is organized (Nobus, 2018, p. 103). Furthermore, in his discussion of the mirror stage and establishment of the ego, Lacan introduces the imaginary register. As previously noted, Lacan described experience falling into three separate dimensions, imaginary, symbolic, and real. The imaginary is the “realm of the senses” according to Lionel

Bailly, in particular the image (2009, p. 220). Putting a different spin on the imaginary, Bruce

Fink describes it as the aspect of experience centered on self-image and images of others – highlighting the link between the mirror and the ego (1997. p. 24). I’ll address the symbolic and the real at a later point, but for now the imaginary is in focus.

The linking of the ego with the imaginary register is extremely important within Lacan’s thought. Describing the staying power of the mirror stage and related concepts, Nobus writes

(2018):

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The mirror stage has always been viewed by Lacan as a solid piece of theorizing, a

paradigm retaining its value to explain human self-consciousness, aggressivity, rivalry,

narcissism, jealousy and fascination with images in general (p. 104).

In regard to the experience of the ego, its imaginary quality means that it will always be based on misrecognition. The child sees itself in the mirror and thinks that it is more than it is because the image perceived has the integrity it does not feel. In consequence, the ego is always aiming at ideals, trying to be what it idealizes in the mirror (Nobus, 2018). Also, along with being chimerical, the image is mercurial: sometimes we look great (grandiosity), other times not so much (self-loathing). Finally, the image, an exterior form, cannot capture what is unseen. It has no place for inner life and meaning, for needs and desires.

Lacan characterizes the ego as an alienating force as a result of these processes. The imaginary register distorts. It feeds manic visions of superiority and it disappoints. Furthermore,

Lacan says that conflict and rivalry are endemic in the imaginary. Since ideals are at play, the self and all others are perceived to be in competition. Each vies to be superior resulting in masochistic relations, aggression, and further rotation between grandiosity and inferiority. This dynamic plays out in the world and it plays out in the transference and countertransference according to the Lacanians.

Overall, the mirror stage is essential because the ego is needed to function.

Misrecognition is a curse, resulting in alienation, but it is the trade we make to overcome fragmentation, manage separation, and establish self-consciousness. Through his theorization of this stage, Lacan began his program of overwriting Freud with his own ideas. The mirror stage forms an important foundation for Lacan’s later work, introducing the imaginary register, setting

157 the stage for his emphasis on the subversion of the ego while also conceptualizing narcissism, rivalry, and aggression in a new way.

In terms of the question of freedom, I view Lacan’s writing on the mirror stage to highlight the reactive mode of operation that predominates when the image is prioritized. In the rivalrous reactions spawned by entrapment in the imaginary register, deliberation and choice in reaction is limited to nil. Battles are waged for supremacy, in the mind and in the physical world, without asking “why?” or “what is going on here?” or “what does this mean?” These situations, and the accompanying self and other representations, are miles away from decided agentic activity. Consequently, I see Lacan’s work examining the effects of the emphasis on the image in the mirror stage (and beyond) to sensitize us to a specific impediment to freedom that can occur

– imaginary capture.

Lacan’s Oedipus – What is at Stake

Lacan’s mirror stage leads into the oedipal situation and symbolic castration, which he presents as the outcome of the Oedipus complex. This process establishes the subject’s potential for agentic action in the world by establishing a unique place in the world for the subject and the basis for an understanding of social relations and society. Lacan argues that the external world is known and regulated by language, what he calls the symbolic order, because meaning and social systems are linguistic phenomena. The rules of society, both explicit and implicit, depend on words and relationships between words, in turn shaping how people interact and power relations within the system. Furthermore, self-conceptualization and conceptualization of others also depends on language, and it is language that gives meaning to bodily experience. Consequently, it is essential for a child to become gain a foothold in the symbolic world and a capacity for

158 thinking symbolically, including the use of metaphor, in order to understand the world and their place in it.

This theorization of the symbolic order leads into Lacan’s explanation of the importance of linguistics for understanding the unconscious mind and his conceptualization of the unconscious subject, two absolutely central premises in his extensions of the psychoanalytic model. With regard to the nature of the unconscious, Lacan emphasized that it is words

(signifiers) that are repressed, specifically the words and the links between words and affects that would bring overwhelming experiences to consciousness (1953/2006). In regard to the idea of the unconscious subject, Lacan held that repressed experience, including unconscious desire, reveals itself unconsciously in discourse (speech and meaning-saturated action). Consequently, analysis of symbolic discourse brings knowledge of the unconscious and reveals there to be a previously unknown agency at work. In Lacan’s own words: “I speak without knowing it. I speak with my body and I do so unbeknownst to myself. Thus I always say more than I know”

(quoted in Schwartz, 2012, p. 231).

Symbolic capacity is of extreme significance because it allows a person to delve into the meaning of this speech, to see what is said within what is spoken. If a person has the capacity to think metaphorically, that is to accept that one object stands in place of another, the subject may interrogate their speech to find meaning that had been outside their awareness. In psychoanalysis this questioning of speech, and the exploration of associations, leads an individual to develop awareness and allows new choices to be made. But without metaphor, there is only what is concretely present, with nothing to be questioned and no larger system of meaning possible – in the argot of today: “it is what it is.” And as was noted before, when the imaginary dominates, life is an experience of constant reaction. Summarizing these ideas in the language of this

159 dissertation, entry into the symbolic order creates the possibility of freedom because, among other effects, symbolic capacity creates the possibility for analysis, which in turn lets desire be known and inhibition understood (and thereby transformed).

These are the stakes of the oedipal process and the capacity for symbolic thought (i.e. metaphor) that it produces.

From Two to Three

Returning to the mirror stage, at this point the child is in a dyadic relation to the mother, experiencing total gratification when cared for and dejection during separation. Said differently, the child feels omnipotent when united with the mother, and persecuted when separated. Lacan referred to the infant receiving total care to be in a position of ‘l’Autre jouissance, or “Otherly enjoyment.”

To understand what this means, the concept of jouissance must be addressed. Where

Freud focused on pleasure as the result of satisfaction of drive tensions, Lacan introduced the concept of jouissance, which he retroactively read into Freud’s work. Jouissance is typically translated from French into English as enjoyment and usage, with a connection to the exercise of a legal privilege, such as enjoyment of one’s property. It also has a colloquial meaning of orgasm, adding another layer of meaning. Lacan indicated jouissance to accompany the functioning of a psychical or physical apparatus associated with a drive. Also, he said that jouissance does not crescendo and recede as occurs when a need is satisfied – it is a sustained enjoyment as long as an apparatus associated with a drive is in use (Bailly, 2009, pp. 118-119).

In the state of Otherly enjoyment, the child experiences its whole world to be attuned to its satisfaction, according to Lacan. Additionally, the mother’s power is felt to be absolute and,

160 through identification with the mother, the child experiences itself to be omnipotent as well. It’s a fantasy in the child’s mind, but it is experienced as real. Enjoyment in this early dyadic state is powerful and its memory remains with us unconsciously throughout life (Bailly, 2009, p. 121).

However, this state cannot last. In the section on the mirror stage, we saw that the child also contends with painful experiences of fragmentation and helplessness in early life, until the foundation of an ego is born through the image in the mirror. With the ego, the child has a place to think from – the “me” – setting new development in motion. The mother separates and turns to other activities and, according to Lacan, the child begins to think, “where does she go?”32 As the child lives with the question “where does she go?” it is taking in the words of the mother who gives various explanations of her absence such as “I’m having dinner with your father,” “I have to work,” and “I am going to bed now” (with someone other than you).

In Lacan’s terminology, this something that calls the mother away is called the paternal function, based on Lacan’s presumption that this will most often be the father. Specifically,

Lacan associates the paternal function with the name-of-the-father, that is, the symbolic “father” represented by the father’s name, rather than the presence of the real father, whose presence or absence is an extraneous detail in contrast to the essential question of the functioning of a symbolic third, a separate desired object, in the unconscious of the mother (1957-1958/2006, p.

465). Based upon this definition of the name-of-the-father, contemporary Lacanians emphasize that the paternal function is not connected to the father as man or husband, but rather that the point is that there must be some separate locus of meaning toward which the mother has responsibilities and desires (Bailly, 2009, p. 79).

32 An important Lacanian principle is that human beings perpetually hypothesize, interacting with the world through a stream of questions and hypothetical scenarios produced consciously and unconsciously (Bailly, 2016, p. 68).

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Furthermore, there is an element of authority that the child is introduced to in this period.

For example, the child may experience his or her demands to be relayed to a “higher court” when the mother gives answer’s such as “we’ll see what your father says” or “I’ll talk it over with your father” (Dor, 1985/1998, p. 105). Limits are established by the mother, and they often come in relation to the paternal function according to the Lacanians, as the father is the separate authority that is coming into focus for the child. The child had experienced the maternal dyad as one in which the mother (or the child) was all-powerful, but now the child discerns there to be a separate law constraining mother (and child). Also, limits might be directly spoken by the father, such as in the father’s separation of the child and the mother in more straightforward directives such as making the child sleep in his or her own bed or other limitations of the child’s Otherly enjoyment with the mother (Fink, 1997, pp. 92-93). Here the third is making itself known through the “no!” of the father, showing another form of the paternal function (Fink, 1997, p.

82). Summarizing the paternal function’s establishment of a symbolic law, Analyst Lionel Bailly says: “[The father] intervenes simply as bearer of the law, as the guarantor of a prohibition: the mother is not to be enjoyed without limits by her children” (Bailly, 2018, p.102).

From these experiences, Lacan claims that the child generates a rudimentary sense of “the law” and a representation of the desire of the mother. It is not named at this stage. It is experienced however, in the comings and goings of the mother. Hence the mother’s desire is an experience yet to be represented.

Lacan’s Linguistic Turn

Understanding what comes next requires a detour into Lacan’s linguistic system. Lacan drew from the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, who conceptualized language as an interrelated series of signs (Dor, 1985/1998, pp. 21-31). For Saussure, a sign consisted of a signifier

162 connected to a signified, with the signifier being a sound and the signified being the meaning represented by the sound. The network of signs is defined by the relationship between the signs, which allow chains of signs communicating complex meaning to be constructed. While drawing on Saussure’s structural linguistics, Lacan upended the system through two innovations. First, he showed that the link between signifier and signified is not permanent and each signifier can apply to an infinite number of potential meanings. Consequently, the meaning of speech depends upon metonymy (when a part stands for the whole) and metaphor (when one signifier stands for another). Additionally, Lacan said that the signifier has precedence over the signified. It is the metaphoric and metonymic meaning that the signifier carries, determined through its relation to other signifiers in the subject’s unconscious, that has the more significant meaning for the speaker.

For example, were I to report a dream of going to the beach, the simple sound-definition meaning would suggest a wish to visit the ocean, but tracing the other signifiers linked to beach might show all sorts of deeper meanings including mother, freedom, sun and so on which link up to themes that go far beyond what is explicitly said and which will have far more dominant position in my unconscious subjectivity. It is this quality that makes it possible for spoken language to mean something other than what was consciously intended. Lacan put unconscious subjectivity before the conscious ego in value to the subject and in terms of determination of action, so he emphasized following the metaphoric and metonymic chains of meaning behind the spoken signifier. This is how the unconscious subject in speech is discovered. Going back to his famous quote “I say more than I know” – we say more than we know because the signifier has precedence over the signified.

Escape to the Symbolic

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Where we left off, the child has the idea of the desire of the mother, but no representation for this. According to Lacan, the signifier for the mother’s desire is the phallus, not to be confused with the penis. Lacan described the phallus as an ever changing, never fully articulated signifier which forever escapes articulation by the subject but which is present in the unconscious as an elusive “missing link” signifier. This signifier represents the desire of the mother and so also represents the fulfillment of maternal lack. When this unconscious signifier is first generated, the child may think that it is the phallus to the mother. That is to say, the child believes it is that which the mother is lacking and which completes her. However, this is an imaginary register conceptualization of the phallus, which can lead to great difficulties because of its literalness. It is impossible to be the phallus, because there is no literal phallus. To seek to be it is to confuse the imaginary and symbolic registers, leading to grandiosity, persecution, and inferiority. I will discuss these points further in my section on the “Incel” problem.

Under typical circumstances, the child comes to see that it is not a question of being the phallus, but rather one of having or not having it. This knowledge comes through learning that it is the “father” that the mother wants (some symbolic third object outside the mother-child dyad), and then seeing that it is qualities of the “father” rather than the literal father that are what’s desired. Simultaneously moving this process of psychical growth forward is the limitation of gratification the child experiences, in terms of limits on enjoyment of the mother and in limits expressed toward self-gratification (“That’s not a nice thing to do” “We don’t do that around people” etc.). These limits force the child to appreciate its position in relation to the mother and the father, as well as solidifying the presence of the Other as a force in the life of the child. The child thus comes to know a growing system of meaning and values which it lives in relation to – what Lacan called “the name-of-the-father” and the symbolic law (Fink, 1997, pp. 66-70).

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Usually, a child sees that something outside the mother regulates her desire – she is called away to something else other than the child. Her desire is subject to another desire, which is called the symbolic law by Lacan and is represented by the name-of-the-father. Part of this symbolic law, importantly, is the incest taboo. There are limits to closeness of the mother and the child. As the child experiences these triangulated relations (mother-child-symbolic father/symbolic other), a link is formed between the name-of-the-father and the mother’s desire, which Lacan calls the phallus. The name-of-the-father stands in for the phallus, the primordial, never articulated signifier of the mother’s desire, and a foundational link is formed between experience and symbol.

This link is the foundation of language having meaning, according to Lacan and it brings the child into the symbolic order. This movement is termed symbolic castration, because the child accepts that it is not the phallus (the mother’s desire). Instead it is castrated – without the phallus – and the phallus is repressed and replaced with the name-of-the-father. The child comes to be subject to the law of the symbolic order, that is the ordering of relations produced by language. Fink describes the importance of this separation as follows (1997):

The child’s relationship with its mother is given meaning by the father’s prohibition; that

meaning is, we might say, the ‘first meaning,’ and it establishes a solid connection

between a sternly enunciated interdiction and an indeterminate longing for closeness

(which is transformed into desire for the mother as a result of the prohibition). The first

meaning, the fundamental meaning brought into being by the paternal metaphor, is that

my longing for my mother is wrong. Whatever else I may come to think of it later… that

first meaning, once established, is unshakable and cannot be uprooted (p. 93).

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This first meaning ties signifier (name-of-the-father) with signified (the incest taboo and the desire of the mother). The Lacanians see this link as the permanent foundation giving durable, intelligible and sharable symbolic meaning to language. Also, through the paternal metaphor, the child comes to experience symbols to have power over experience. A symbol separates and a symbol represents desire. Again quoting Fink, speaking about the linking of signifier and signified, and the importance of this development, he summarizes (1997):

[T]he result of the paternal metaphor is to tie a specific meaning to particular words

without regard to an absolute referent (that is, without appealing to a mythical absolute

reality beyond the reality created, or hewn from the real, by language). The paternal

metaphor creates a foundational, unshakable meaning. When everything else can be

thrown into question later, even the why and wherefore of this foundational meaning, it is

precisely because that original button tie – a kind of knot [referring to Lacan’s

metaphorization of the link between signifier and signified in the paternal metaphor with

the upholsterer’s button tie or “quilting point” which holds together button and fabric] –

was tied in the first place. It is this one stich that allows someone to assimilate the

structure of language. Without it everything comes undone (p. 94).

Moreover, he illustrates the impact of the absence of the paternal function with the case of a man named Roger, whom Fink presents (in part) to show what happens to language when there is no foundational link between word and meaning to build upon. Highlighting the disruption in this man’s relation to language, Fink writes (1997):

Roger reveals the following ‘Words frighten me. I’ve always wanted to write but couldn’t

manage to put a word on a thing… It was as though the words slipped off things... So I

thought that by studying the dictionary from A to Z and writing down the words I didn’t

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know, I would possess them all…’ Of course, Roger never manages to ‘possess’ them all

– that is, stop them from ‘sliding off of things’ – for there is no anchoring point for him

that could ever tie word to thing, or more precisely, signifier to signified. In the absence

of the fundamental button tie that links the father’s name or “No!” with the mother’s

desire, words and meanings, signifiers and signifieds, are condemned to drift aimlessly

(p. 107).

Additionally, the lack that is the experience of not being the phallus and the desire generated by the loss of the maternal object lead to efforts to re-possess the phallus. After this, the child has a path to follow. This path is the search for what has been lost (maternal desire) by trying to gain what was and is seen to be desired (signifiers representing the name-of-the-father, that is phallic signifiers). Summarizing these transitions, Dor writes (1985/1998):

The paternal metaphor marks the beginning of a radically structuring phase in the psychic

development of the child. In addition to inaugurating his access to the symbolic

dimension by freeing him from imaginary subjection to his mother [and life-and-death

imaginary rivalry with his father], it gives him the status of desiring subject. The benefit

of this acquisition is attained, however, only at the price of a new alienation. For as soon

as the ‘speakingbeing’ becomes a desiring subject, his desire is taken captive by language

and its original nature is lost. From here on it can be represented only substitute signifiers

that transform the object of desire into a metonymic object (p. 118).

Regarding these substitute signifiers, here Dor is referring to the fact that the lost object is never regained in full. Aspects of it may be experienced, but there is no return to being the phallus.

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To accept separation from the mother and the symbolic law is to be castrated, according to Lacan, because not being the phallus is accepted. When the child can accept that it is not the phallus and that someone else (the symbolic father) has the phallus (or might have had it at some point), the oedipal situation is resolved. After this the child will seek to get the phallus – “to covet it where it can be found” in the words of Joel Dor (1985/1998, p.108). Summing up the shift brought through these developments, Bailly writes (2018):

In accepting the paternal metaphor, the child gains the ability to use substitutes and

symbols, to move away from concrete thinking. At the very moment of acceptance of the

metaphor, the child seals its entry into the symbolic realm, becomes the castrated neurotic

subject and submits to the law of the prohibition of incest…. From this new position, the

child can move away from a dual relationship with his or her first object and engage his

desire, as a subject, toward substitutive objects in a hopeless but eventful and enjoyable

quest for the lost object (p. 104).

Here it must also be noted that while the language used suggests these are processes reserved for the male sex (castration, phallus), in the Lacanian understanding, their symbolic nature makes them universally applicable (Bailly, 2018, p. 107). Both male and female children are faced with the question “what does she want”? Both come to accept that they are not that which completes the other, after experiencing some enunciation of a limit by a figure apparently desired by the caregiver, which leads to recognition that the solution to their situation is to look for what is desired in the world outside the oedipal triad and family.33

33 For discussion on the topic of gender identity within Lacanian theory, the chapter “Gender Bending” in Lionel Bailly’s Lacan: A Beginner’s Guide (2016), chapter eight of Bruce Fink’s The Lacanian Subject (1995), and Colette Soler’s book What Lacan Said About Women are valuable starting points. Additionally, Deborah Luepnitz’s article

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Regarding the resultant development of desire following acceptance of the paternal metaphor, Lacan indicated that the name-of-the-father comes to represent the mother’s desire

(Bailly, 2018, p. 103) which also means the name-of-the-father is substituted for the phallus.

This is a metaphoric process through which the phallus and the mother’s desire are repressed, coming to be represented by the name-of-the-father signifier. Going forward, other signifiers can replace the name-of-the-father. Bailly describes this shift, writing that the paternal metaphor enables the child to “use substitutes and symbols to move away from concrete thinking” (2018, p. 104). This creates a fluid movement of meaning in the world of the subject, and their discourse is filled with increasingly elaborate (unconscious) symbolic meaning.

Also, entry to the symbolic order means that the subject is free of the earlier dyadic union. Grandiosity, omnipotence, and the need for perfection are overcome (or at least lessened) by the recognition that all are castrated and lacking. Seeking to have the phallus and be desired is the organizing fantasy going forward, rather than pursuit of static images of perfection. Released from the demand to be, the subject can seek to have. This is desire. Desire seeks to fill lack (by being desired), motivating the subject, even when the objects desired are hidden in layers of metaphor and lost to awareness.

On the flip side, where once separation was catastrophic, provoking unbearable anxiety and paranoia, in the symbolic the subject has a law to which it can refer. As in Freud’s famous

Fort/da game example, language gives control over terror and there is pleasure in this process

(Freud, 1920/1950). Unlike the imaginary, which is always in flux and where selfhood is precarious, there is stability in the symbolic order (Fink, 1997, p. 89). The other too is subject to

“Beyond the phallus: Lacan and feminism” (2003) reviews Lacan’s reception among feminist thinkers and is useful as an introduction to the interface of Lacanian theory and contemporary feminism.

169 the law, going back to the “higher law” the child observed the mother to obey, and hence the terror that was forever looming is lessened. The experience of limitation is painful and frustrating, but there is comfort in recognizing and learning to function within the symbolic order, which offers protection and a route to satisfaction (Bailly, 2009, p. 86).

The child gains recourse to a law, and it can relate to this law (and the whole world is covers) as an agent with some rights and expectations. Neither mother nor father are absolute after this and the child is protected against engulfment or abandonment or destruction. For example, where there was a perception of looming engulfment in the maternal, the self-contained mother-child dyad, a possibility which could be thrilling or terrifying, this is now forbidden to child and to mother. Now the child is turned outward to seek satisfaction in the world. The symbolic order structures this separation, cementing it as a central pillar of life thereafter.

Living in Language

More broadly, there is also an important shift away from earlier imaginary register relations that comes with symbolic castration. The issue of being is a concrete matter and inherently rivalrous – Am I the biggest? Am I the strongest? Am I the most beautiful? Am I the phallus? – while the symbolic order is a place where values and ideals are the currency of the day. Summarizing this shift, Bruce Fink writes (1997):

The overwriting of the imaginary by the symbolic… leads to the suppression or at least

the subordination of imaginary relations characterized by rivalry and aggressivity… to

symbolic relations dominated by concerns with ideals, authority figures, the law,

performance, achievement, guilt, and so on (p. 89)

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After this, the child’s desire will appear in metaphoric form and they will pursue objects of metaphoric value. The subject now lives in the symbolic order and engages in pursuits that are saturated with metaphoric meaning. Also, rather than a single desire there are multiple repressed signifiers corresponding to the multiple desires of the mother (Dor, 1985/1998, p. 150). What desirable qualities (phallic fragments) the subject seeks to possess evolves over time based on accumulating identification with newly encountered representatives of the Other, but the foundation remains the encounter with the Other in the oedipal situation and the desires (and structure of desiring) resultant from this process (Bailly, 2009, p. 127).

The subject can therefore be found in their speech. The earliest signifiers repressed, linked closely to the paternal metaphor, are known as “master signifiers” and form “the backbone upon which the subject is built” (Bailly, 2009, p. 133). While all desire is summarized by the symbol of the phallus, the phallus is forever unconscious while the master signifiers can be verbalized. This means that desire, wishes, fears, activity, and identity are expressions of the unconscious master signifiers. These master signifiers subsequently “orient” other signifiers in support of the ego, and as they appear in speech they are paired with opposite meaning in the unconscious (Bailly, 2009, pp. 62-63). A man who referenced being blessed, for example, could have an unconscious repressed counterpart signifier of “cursed” which has shaped his life and gone unaddressed. Bailly describes the reappearance of repressed signifiers, writing that “the unconscious is not within the subject’s control or even view, but it acts in spite of the ego, constantly throwing out signifiers that the subject has repressed” (2009, p. 49).

While the primary repression conceals the earliest signifiers, these unconscious signifiers continue to have an influence. The subject’s speech is distorted with incorrect word choices and mistakes and the unconscious continues to manifest in dreams. Fink describes a master signifier

171 as a word or phrase that “presents itself as a dead end, a stopping point, [something] that puts an end to association, that grinds a patient’s discourse to a halt” (2018, p. 38). The presence of a master signifier might also be recognized when speech becomes confused, choppy, slowed or otherwise distorted.

Consequently, the subject might choose to interrogate their speech to trace links to what has been repressed, thereby learning about the unconscious. So we see that in addition to freeing the child from confinement to the imaginary register, and freeing the child from everlasting mother-child union, castration and the paternal metaphor make psychoanalysis possible because it is through castration and the paternal metaphor that the subject entered the symbolic order, where speech contains unconscious meaning. It is the job of analysis to trace the unconscious signifying chains associated with these signifiers, whose meaning has been defensively concealed, as doing so reveals the subject to themself.

Overall, un the Lacanian model, acceptance of the paternal metaphor, also called symbolic castration, is the essential first link between signifier and signified which makes possible all other symbolic meaning, as well as the pursuit and achievement of meaning.

Little Hans

A short illustration of the importance of this shift can be seen in Lacanian analyst Cormac

Gallagher’s reading of Freud’s ‘Little Hans’ case study. In this case, Little Hans’s father consulted Freud, seeking to address his son’s anxiety, the nature of which unfolded over the course of the treatment. At the case’s start Hans is reported to have been extremely close with his mother, with Hans, in the words of Gallagher, “like an indispensable appendage which she has to have with her” (1998, p. 121). Lacanian theory claims that images rather than symbols dominate

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Hans’s existence at this point. From this perspective, Gallagher says that when Hans formulates the question, “what does she want?” and generates the (unconscious) concept of the phallus, he sees himself in this position, rather than his father. He is the imaginary phallus.

Being the phallus, however, is an insecure position and is called into question when Hans experiences inadequacy. For example, he recognizes his small size and “little widdlers,” and his mother rejects his request that she touch his penis. Later, the birth of his sister disrupts his close relationship with his mother and also alerts him to the possibility of a person without a penis

(Gallagher, 1998, pp.121-122). These observations create anxiety over the possibility of the collapse of the organization of his world around belief he was the phallus. This anxiety is then manifest in the form of phobias, starting with a horse phobia. Freud terms this as the binding of

Hans’s anxiety in his phobia (1909/1955, p. 117). Being the phallus has become terrifying to

Hans and his horse phobia hides this deeper anxiety and gives him something concrete he can manage. Additionally, his fear symbolically communicates his underlying concerns. Initially, he struggles with a vague question about the phallus, attached to horses due to their size and large penises. Later his phobias evolve to represent and bind concerns about his mother’s pregnancy and the threat of castration.

Freud intervenes by giving instruction to Hans’s father which center around making Hans aware of sexual difference and the need for separation, leading up to introduction of the idea of a jealous, castrating father. Hans registers some awareness of his father’s unique place in relation to his mother when he recognizes that his sister comes from something that happened between his mother and father. Then, expressing his need for separation, influenced by his search for a way out of his anxiety and by the information he has been given by his father, Hans insists his father must be jealous of his special closeness with his mother.

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Soon after this, he has a castration fantasy which crystalizes the oedipal process that has been underway. He imagines a plumber unscrews his penis and gives him another one. This is the movement from being the phallus to having the phallus. His dream is a shift from experiencing in the imaginary register to experiencing in the symbolic. Hans was in a dyadic relation with his mother where he had to be something (which produced anxiety) but has entered a triadic relationship between himself, mother, and the third, which is a relief. In this new relation, he can identify with the symbolic other, the phallus, represented by the father, thereby having a (potential) position in the wider world, and moving out of the mother-child dyad. The plumber has installed a new way of functioning, replacing imaginary-register being/not-being with the question of having/not-having. Where not-being produced anxiety, not-having is more manageable because it occurs within a symbolic context (rather than the immediate and potentially overwhelming imaginary register). Hans can seek to have through identification instead of being trapped in inadequacy. Subsequently, Hans’s symbolic castration and shift toward symbolic meaning and the solution of identification with the father is seen in his play where he takes the father role toward younger playmates (Gallagher, 1998) and Freud indicates

Hans’s castration anxiety to have been resolved.

Gallagher summarizes his understanding of the case, which I share, when he writes “The only way out of the shattering sense of inadequacy [for Little Hans] is through castration with the promise of legitimate possession of his father’s place, in time” (1998, p. 124). There is no way out but through, and it is through this experience that Lacan claimed the foundation of symbolic life is established. I see this symbolic castration as a growth of freedom, because even as limits

(the law) and loss (not being the phallus, separation) are experienced, entry into the symbolic system, where language has structure and meaning, and establishment of triadic relations,

174 symbolic identity, and desire, have the effects of ending capture in the imaginary register and the caregiver-child dyad and creating the possibility of reflective agency.

By accepting symbolic castration Hans is no longer in the unstable, anxiety-generating imaginary position he had occupied previously, where he thought himself to be all that his mother desired (and thought his mother contained all), while struggling with facts which could not fit with this understanding of himself and his mother.34 Hence, castration has its benefits.

Hans loses the phallus in the fantasy of the plumber’s visit, but he receives another, representing the imaginary nature of symbolic castration. Something feared to be shattering (castration, separation) in fact proves to be survivable and transformative. Hans and his father can co-exist in the symbolic, Hans can turn outward beyond the family, and through identification Hans can adopt values and ideals, which in time he may make his own.

Freed by Castration?

In summary, acceptance of the symbolic register is castration. The child starts in a dyadic imaginary position, one aspect of which is the fantasy of being the phallus. The phallus is not literally the penis, but rather that which is desired, specifically what the child fantasizes to complete the mother. This fantasy produces anxiety because being the thing that completes the other is an impossible task, and because the child soon sees that there is a rival for the mother’s desire – the father or some other third party. As a result, the dialectic of being the phallus is one where rivalry, inadequacy, loss, and anxiety are dominant. But when the child sees that she or he is not the phallus and that the phallus is something that the third has, rather than what the third is, transformation occurs. This is called symbolic castration because the child comes to recognize

34 Had his situation persisted longer, in addition to anxiety over inadequacy and instability, the stifling aspect of being the phallus would have also shown itself, including development of social retardation and relational warping produced by persistence in a dyadic world rather than entry to the symbolic.

175 their lack. They are not the phallus, and the phallus is a matter of having, not being.

Subsequently, there is a possibility of pursuing the phallus, that is pursuit of desirability, through pursuit of what is desired.

Moreover, in this movement, the child enters the symbolic order and subsequent symbolic experience rests upon this foundation according to Lacan. Symbolic castration introduces meaning to language because of the first meaning present in the first symbol. Lacan identifies “the-name-of-the-father” as this first symbol, linking the father’s name (a symbol) with the desire of the mother, that is, the phallus. The child sees that the mother wants something other than her or him, and this is represented by the-name-of-the-father, which creates a link between signified (the mother’s desire/the phallus) and signifier (the-name-of-the-father). As a consequence of this development, language and meaning are tied together, the child experiences language symbolically, and meaning making (and regulatory) power is invested in language.

After this, experience occurs within a symbolic order, and where experience was previously defined by bare images now there has come to be unconscious meaning to the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touches of life.

In Hans’s case, we see him move from the literalness of fearing actual castration to accepting separation and playing with a social role (the father). This is paradoxical freedom. The preceding state, defined by imaginary register experience and the question of being/not-being the phallus, was dominated by anxiety. Symbolic castration reduced anxiety, freeing Hans from his phobia and the paralyzing relational configuration it represented. He shifts into a life where language creates a social system and there is order and the possibility of meaning and relations based on meaning rather than image and physical domination. What role is taken and how it is understood will vary, but a role is a more secure thing than the rivalry, inadequacy, and fear of

176 engulfment or annihilation that precedes symbolic castration and entry into the symbolic order.

So, while he loses freedom in being given a socially mediated role, he gains freedom in that there is security and the potential for reflection in the symbolic order while the imaginary was defined by reaction, demand, instability, and rivalry.

In the following chapter, I will develop this idea through a contemporary example – that of the Incel – illustrating my argument that Lacan’s concept of symbolic castration relates to the experience of freedom. These men’s incomprehension of women’s desire, reactivity, and rage make clear that life in the imaginary register is a prison. But even as a stand-alone example, the case of Little Hans is a powerful illustration of the shift out of anxiety and into more free activity

(through identification) that comes when the imaginary experience of having to be is replaced with the symbolic experience of seeking to have.

REFERENCES

Bailly, L. (2009). Lacan: A beginner's guide. London, UK: Oneworld Publications.

Bailly, L. (2018). Lacan’s version of the Oedipus Complex. In Bailly, L., Lichtenstein, D., &

Bailly, S. (Eds.). The Lacan tradition (pp. 97-108). New York, NY: Routledge.

Brousse, M.H. (1996). The imaginary. In Feldstein, R., Fink, B., & Jaanus, M. (Eds.). Reading

seminars I and II: Lacan's return to Freud (pp. 118-122). Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Dor, J. (1998). Introduction to the reading of Lacan: The unconscious structured like a language

(J.F. Gurewich & S. Fairfield, Eds.). New York, NY: Other Press. (Original work

published 1985).

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Fink, B. (1997). A clinical introduction to Lacanian psychoanalysis: Theory and technique.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Fink, B. (1997). The Lacanian subject: Between language and jouissance. Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press.

Freud, S. (1955). Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In J. Strachey et al. (Trans.), The Standard

Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVIII (pp. 1-

64). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1920).

Gallagher, C. (1998). Lacan for beginners: Reading Dora and Little Hans. The Letter: Irish

Journal for Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Issue 13, 117-124.

Lacan, J. (1957-1958). On a question prior to any possible treatment of psychosis. In Lacan, J.

(2006). Écrits: The Complete First Edition (pp. 445-488). (B. Fink, Trans.). New York,

NY: W. W. Norton & Company.

Lacan, J. (1977). The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (A. Sheridan, Trans.; J.A.

Miller, Ed.). New York, NY: W.W. Norton. (Original work published 1973).

Lacan, J. (1953). The function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis. In Lacan, J.

(2006). Écrits: The Complete First Edition (pp. 197-168). (B. Fink, Trans.). New York,

NY: W. W. Norton & Company.

Lacan, J. (1949). The mirror stage as formative of the I function. In Lacan, J. (2006). Écrits: The

Complete First Edition (pp. 75-81). (B. Fink, Trans.). New York, NY: W. W. Norton &

Company.

Luepnitz, D. (2003). Beyond the phallus: Lacan and feminism. In Rabaté, J.-M. (Ed.). The

Cambridge Companion to Lacan (pp. 221-226). New York, NY: Cambridge University

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Nobus, D. (2018). Life and death in the glass: A new look at the mirror stage. In Nobus, D. (Ed.).

Key concepts of Lacanian psychoanalysis (pp. 101-138). New York, NY: Routledge.

Ruti, M. (2008). The fall of fantasies: A Lacanian reading of lack. Journal of the American

Psychoanalytic Association, 56(2), 483-508.

Schwartz, S. (2012). An ethics of the unconscious. British Journal of Psychotherapy, 28(2), 221-

234.

Soler, C. (2020). What Lacan said about women: A psychoanalytic study. New York, NY: Other

Press.

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CHAPTER 4 Imprisoned in the Imaginary: The Case of the Incels

The Case of Little Hans illustrates the liberatory consequences of the experience of symbolic castration as developed by Lacan. Through recognition of and identification with an external symbolic third, and by extension a symbolic order, psychic space is generated for Hans.

He experienced phobic anxiety in the presence of triggers (specifically horses) which evoked

“widdlers” and in situations where his unconscious aggression was aroused, but his anxiety receded when he shifted into symbolic functioning with the firmer installation of the incest taboo and the debut of identification in place of unbounded rivalry. This is the growth of freedom under good circumstances.

In the chapter that follows, I will examine the unfreedom that results when the shift to the symbolic order is impeded or barred. My claim is that psychological imprisonment results when the mirror stage is not transcended, when the imaginary register captivates and dominates. The case by which I will achieve these aims is that of the Incels, the self-proclaimed “involuntary celibates” whose misogynistic rage has made headlines in recent years. Moreover, through my reading of the “Incel” phenomenon, which is best understood when examined in the light of

Lacan’s ideas of the mirror stage, the imaginary, and symbolic castration, I will give further support to my argument that the concept of freedom recurs in many understandings of psychoanalysis and that freedom is a potentially useful meta-concept to be held in mind when working psychoanalytically.

Introducing the “Incel”

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The inertia characteristic of the I formations can thus be understood as providing the

broadest definition of neurosis, just as the subject's capture by his situation gives us the

most general formulation of madness—the kind found within the asylum walls as well as

the kind that deafens the world with its sound and fury.

– Jacques Lacan, The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function, 1949/2006, p. 8

On April 23rd, 2018, a 25-year-old man named Alek Minassian murdered 10 people in

Toronto by driving a van into the flow of pedestrians on a crowded city street. Prior to this horrific act, he announced his intentions via a Facebook post (Collins & Zadrozny, 2018):

Private (Recruit) Minassian Infantry 00010, wishing to speak to Sgt 4chan please.

C23249161. The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all of the Chads

and Stacys! All hail Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!

Unpacking the meaning of this message, it represents Minassian’s dedication of his actions to the Incel online community. Incel is shorthand for “Involuntary Celibate,” and the young men who post to the online forums of Incel are united in rage over sexual frustration.

They see themselves to be victims of a social order in which desirable but cruel and superficial women select partners possessing masculine looks and aggressive personalities, while “supreme gentlemen” such as themselves are excluded from sexual activity.

Their icon is Elliot Rodger, a man who in 2014 went on a killing spree he titled his “Day of Retribution” that left 2 women and 4 men dead, and 15 others injured, and to whom Minassian paid homage prior to his van attack. Rodger took his own life after this orgy of destruction, but he lives on through a YouTube video titled “Elliot Rodger’s Retribution,” which announced his intentions (“I don’t know why you girls aren’t attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it”),

181 and through praise he receives on Incel websites and message boards. This video remained accessible on YouTube at the time of my writing (Dixon, 2014).

Various explanations of the violent misogyny promoted on Incel websites and the increased number of men identifying with this ideology have been presented. For example, sociologist Michael Kimmel attributes Incel violence to “aggrieved entitlement” feelings arising when the outcomes these men expect (i.e. sexual satisfaction) – entitlements premised on gender-

, race-, and class-privilege – are not received (Beauchamp, 2018). Also targeting the cultural context fueling the Incel phenomenon, philosopher Amia Srinivasan’s article “Does anyone have the right to sex?” (2018) explains Incel ideology to be an outcome, in part, of these men’s unquestioning acceptance of and investment in the patriarchal social order’s hierarchal assignments of value and desirability to some and devaluation of others. I will discuss these arguments in the chapter that follows and make the argument that while they explain much regarding the misogynistic ideology which motivates those who identify with Incel, examination of the Incel phenomenon through the lens of Lacanian theory produces a more incisive understanding of these men and their violence.

Specifically, I believe that the men who identify with Incel are trapped in the Lacanian mirror stage and have not experienced or not accepted the symbolic castration that Lacan posits to be necessary for participation in the symbolic social world. Instead, they are obsessed with the imaginary register, resulting in bafflement regarding social life and aggressive outbursts in response to narcissistic injury rather than toleration of the lack of satisfaction which is inherent in life and which the symbolic register (i.e. language and culture) makes manageable. Their narcissistic and paranoid experience illustrates the unfreedom of life in the mirror. Further, if these men can be understood to be “imprisoned,” this supports an understanding of symbolic

182 castration as a pathway out of the prison of the imaginary and into the possibility of reflective action.

The Incel Phenomenon

There is no formal Incel movement. It has no specific leader, cells, or local chapter meetings. Rather it is a set of ideas discussed and endorsed by men over the internet. The central claims around which individuals who identify as “Incel” organize are discussed on a range of websites including Reddit, 4chan, and the incel.me forum,35 which overlap with other online discussions attracting aggrieved men such as the “Red pill” and Alt-Right message boards

(Beauchamp, 2018). The exact number of men in these online forums remains unclear, but the number of “involuntarily celibate” men in the United States has been estimated at 4.7 million

(Dewey, 2015).

Self-identified Incels are a minority within this population, but not an insignificant group.

While their presence is hard to quantify, acts of violence linked to Incel web-activity continue to occur, supporting the claim that “Incel” is an important phenomenon to analyze. Subsequent to

Elliot Rodger’s killing spree, in 2017 a man named Alexandre Bissonnette killed 6 people and wounded 17 others when he opened gunfire at the Islamic Cultural Center of Quebec City.

Canada. On the day of this attack, Bissonnette Google searched “Elliot Rodger,” linking him to this icon of Incel rage and by extension connecting the Incel ideology with Alt-Right xenophobic violence (Perreaux, O’Kane, White, & Clarkson, 2018). Furthermore, prior to the Parkland

Shooting, which killed 17 and wounded 17 more on Valentine’s Day 2018, gunman Nikolas

35 The Reddit platform has subsequently shut down the r/Incels community for inciting violence against women (Hauser, 2017), and the domain incels.me has been indefinitely suspended (Loos, 2019). Still, Incel-related online activity continues to be found in the histories of perpetrators of mass violence supporting the inference that the Incel ideology continues to have an online presence.

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Cruz posted the comment “Elliot Rodger will not be forgotten” on YouTube.com (Collins &

Zadrozny, 2018). Mass shooter Chris Harper Mercer who killed 9 people at Umpqua Community

College in Oregon in 2015 has also been linked to Incel (Dewey, 2015), and I have previously described the actions of Alek Minassian, including the Incel identification declared in his final

Facebook post (Yang & Campion-Smith, 2018). Finally, in February 2020, two women at a

Toronto massage parlor were stabbed, one fatally, by an unnamed 17-year-old who was reported to have a history of Incel-related online activity (Godin, 2020).

The unifying narrative of Incel – epitomized by Elliot Rodger’s words and actions – is one of victimhood. Incel identified men believe that women, referred to as “Stacys,” are shallow and only attracted to muscular “alpha” men, referred to as Chads. In contrast, “Beta” men, among whom they class themselves, are defined by genetic inferiority, such as low height, undeveloped musculature, and less prominent secondary sex characteristics, and thus are fated to rejection and involuntary celibacy. According to journalist Zack Beauchamp, within this mindset, “The Chad is the masculine ideal, one Incel men cannot emulate for reasons of poor genetics, while the Stacy is whom every Incel man wants to sleep with but cannot because they aren’t a Chad” (2018). The “Chad” and “Stacy” reference in Minassian’s Facebook post was a reference to this Incel narrative (Beauchamp, 2018).

This is additionally galling to those who identify with the Incel ideology, because they see themselves as more sensitive than the “alpha” men, and they complain of being overlooked despite offering women a “nice guy” who will be dependable and kind. Elliot Rodger, for example, un-ironically refers to himself as a “supreme gentleman” in his video manifesto, with repeated claims such as “It doesn’t make any sense” and “I should be the one” that highlight the feelings of confusion and rage over injustice that dominate the Incel psyche (Dixon, 2014). Later

184 in this chapter I will show that these ideas reflect a failure of the symbolic order. The Incel men are struggling with an imaginary dimension experience of being/not being the Lacanian phallus.

They see Chad to be the phallus, rather than understanding desirability as something symbolic that one might have or not have (which in the end no one definitively possesses) and which is defined through language rather than being an inherent, constitutional, permanent quality.

Additionally, Rodger’s video suggests there is a theme of total injustice, rather than nuanced examination of experience, in the Incel mentality. “All I ever wanted was to fit in and live a happy life, but I was cast out and rejected, forced to endure an existence of loneliness and insignificance, all because the females of the human species were incapable of seeing the value in me,” he says, collapsing all of his life into an oversimplified, Manichean explanatory story and a timeless moment of pain (Dixon, 2014). Also, the previously mentioned work of Srinivasan highlights the racist dimension in Rodger’s worldview, thus pointing to another example of the absence of nuance in the Incel mentality (2018). Her article quotes a written manifesto that he mailed to his parents, therapist, and others prior to his rampage, in which he lodges complaints such as “How could an inferior, ugly black boy be able to get a white girl and not me? I am beautiful, and I am half-white myself. I am descended from British aristocracy. He is descended from slaves” (2018). In these statements, his anger is linked with a feeling of racial entitlement that is extremely concrete and which categorizes people based upon a crude, unidimensional point-of-view.

These examples highlight that Rodger, and those who share his perspective, are using language in a superficial manner. They make simplistic judgements based on the assignment of value to categories that are taken literally. Size, appearance, and skin color are treated as status determinates which are accepted without any question, considered in a quantified manner, and

185 then crudely applied. This concrete style is a mark of functioning in the imaginary register and psychotic thinking. The way Rodger is arguing indicates these is no doubt in his mind – there’s no possibility the abstracted women he imagines to be rejecting him have a reason to do so; instead, to him, they are undoubtably wrong (Fink, 1997, pp. 100-101).

Rodger’s white supremacist presumptions also prompt reflection upon the racism endemic to the cultural environment of America and beyond, in which essentialized and hierarchical racial categories have been transmitted across generations and serve to maintain a status quo of white supremacy. Rodger’s reaction to seeing a black man with a white woman is not sui generis, but rather an irruption of the racism implicit in the cultural order transmitted through the structures of society, such as normalization of deprivation and violence against “non- white” groups, the images, language, and narratives presented in media and other cultural vectors, group and family experiences, and these factors bidirectional interaction with intrapsychic development. In particular, Rodger’s statement shows that language contains implicit splits that transmit essentialized differences conveying power relations and emotional force – he contrasts the category of “black” against the category of “white,” and links idealized qualities to his whiteness (“half-white,” “beautiful,” “descended from British aristocracy”) and denigrated attributes to his supposed black rival (“inferior,” “ugly,” “descended from slaves”), reproducing the racialized idealization/devaluation dichotomy he has taken in.

A growing literature within psychoanalysis has begun to address the field’s frequent failure to account for the social reality of racial oppression and the impact of a racist social order and cultural field upon individual development and group relations. Some draw upon the pioneering work of Martiniquan psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon, who argued that white essentializing of racial differences, anti-black in nature and occurring constantly in the

186 fantasies of white people, seek to occlude engagement with the subjective experiences of those categorized black and rather project upon them fantasies of inferiority, thus sustaining a hierarchical white supremacist social order (1952/2008; Knoblauch, 2020). A more recent, similar, line of thinking has highlighted the phenomenon of racially hierarchical evaluations which are taken into the unconscious through exposure to cultural and familial norms, and subsequently deployed to sustain group differences and hierarchy through denigration of those categorized Other (Dalal, 2006), while other clinician-theorists draw attention to intrapsychic processes, describing collective unconscious patterns such as those supporting white racial supremacy to be internalized as a result of identification and defensive processes in response to narcissistic vulnerabilities and injury (Layton, 2006). Furthermore, historical and sociological scholars have linked American and European racism and the social order it is so deeply intertwined with to the establishment and maintenance of a political and economic power hierarchy authorizing individuals designated “white” to exploit and dominate the non-white world (Burden-Stelly, 2020; Roediger, 1999).

Viewed in this wider context, I see Elliot Rodger’s racism as a defensive taking up of racialized cultural “splits” that precede him. In his desperate state, he draws on existing hierarchies built into the cultural order within which he lives. In Rodger, we see these racialized splits at work – existing power relations function as an oppressive force in society that authorizes oppression of non-white individuals, and these power relations are reinforced when individuals who experience themselves to be powerless (a psychological and interpersonal phenomenon separate from the reality of their social power; see for example the contrast between Rodger’s feelings of impotence, affluence, and unimpeded movement in society and firearm ownership) and embrace racism and the sense of superiority and power it provides them. In this way,

187 analysis of the racism in Rodger’s manifesto helps explain the growth of contemporary white supremacist movements (and the utterly transparent synonym of “western chauvinism”). Here too, alienated men are taking up pre-existing racist ideas present in the cultural milieu and investing themselves in them in ways that generate a sense of power and social status.

Consequently, this link between narcissistic vulnerability and deployment of racism helps explain the rise of other Incel-adjacent groups such as the Proud Boys and should be investigated further to better understand the psychological context of these phenomena.

Finally, although Rodger is drawing on symbolic racist vocabulary, I still understand him to be image-focused in his thinking and functioning in the world. There are racist hierarchical values attached to the vocabulary he deploys, but what makes his experience predominately imaginary register is that he deploys these terms as if they wholly natural and unquestionable, and he is thinking in terms of pictures. His rage is that the picture he expects to find (rich white boy gets pretty girl) is not realized, and instead of reflecting on the complex factors which might explain his frustration (a symbolic process), he is enraged. The dichotomization of imaginary from symbolic is found to be an oversimplification but, nonetheless, it is the image that reigns in

Elliot Rodger’s mind and because of this he is predisposed to paranoia and rage.

Expanding on this point, this concrete use of language and style of thinking indicate a failure of the symbolic. There is no metaphor in the prototypical Incel worldview. In Minassian’s

Facebook post, where he reports to duty, he is literally a soldier about to set out to war, which he then literally wages in his van attack. Also, a close viewing of Rodger’s video manifesto finds a dearth of symbolic language. He does not use metaphors. In presenting the injustice of his virginity, he claims that his BMW and designer sunglasses should have made him attractive, as if these symbols of power were literal magic talismans with magnetic force for attracting women.

188

He wants a “girl beside me” and “sex” as images – things he would possess literally, rather than experiences – and he complains about seeing “guys enjoying girls” as if the image is the experience. This objectification of women is a reflection of the objectification of everything in the imaginary register. Most chillingly, when paired with appreciation for the outcome of his rage, he says that on the day of his revenge (Dixon, 2014):

[N]ow I will be a god compared to you. You will all be animals. You are animals and I

will slaughter you like animals. And I will be a god. Exacting my retribution on those

who deserve it. You do deserve it. Just for the crime of living a better life than me.36

This last example might be considered metaphoric language were it not for the outcome of his actions. In his rampage he acted out his image of himself as an avenging god slaughtering lesser beings. Hence appreciating the failure of the symbolic in these cases is important because it helps to explain these men’s violent actions. In the imaginary, when metaphor is absent, words are more closely linked with action.

As a result of concrete thinking and the absence of doubt and reflection, superficial qualities (skin color, physical appearance, parentage) with values based on social norms have been taken in by Rodger without critical reflection, and he judges what he sees and his own frustration by these socially given criteria, remaining baffled by women’s desire and the manner in which his supposed inferiors generate social status and become desired. Note again, the bafflement behind his rage: “I don’t know why you girls aren’t attracted to me, but I will punish

36 Here the film Taxi Driver comes to mind. Late in the film, the audience hears protagonist Travis Bickle read aloud from his journal. In a cold tone, he viciously and precisely enunciates “All the animals come out at night - whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies. Sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.” Then at the film’s end, he himself acts as that rain when he invades a brothel and murders a pimp (Goldfarb, Phillips, & Phillips, 1976). Was Travis Bickle an Incel? His sexual frustration, concrete use of language, and eventual violence suggest so. Also, consider that most quoted and memorable scene of Bickle brandishing a gun while alone and looking into a mirror, asking, “You talkin’ to me?”

189 you all for it” he declared in his final series of YouTube monologues (Dixon, 2014). The imaginary without the symbolic is a place of confusion.

Moreover, Rodger’s was notably preoccupied with thin, blond, white women, pointing to another peculiarity of the Incel movement. The “Stacys” whom are railed against and targeted with violence are the women who meet the most superficial social beauty norms; these men critique society because they feel excluded, while also accepting uncritically the given social order. Also pointing to the emphasis on image, in his video manifesto, one of Rodger’s first accusations against the women of the world is “I do everything I can to appear attractive to you,” and when arguing for the injustice of his isolation, he cites his superior “style” and dress as factors that should have led women to sleep with him (Dixon, 2014). Image is dominant. Women are things to these men – defined by their concrete attributes and objects to be physically possessed – and these men are things to themselves, with their self-definition based not upon internal qualities or symbolic status but upon what they see in the mirror.

Overall, the basic premise championed by the Incel men is that they have been unfairly denied sex due to genetic inferiorities beyond their control and that rage is an appropriate response to their frustration. Furthermore, frequent arguments blaming feminism and the sexual revolution for their problems appear on Incel message boards. In the past, it is claimed, patriarchal order ensured that men were paired with women, but since women have been given choice in their sexual partners, they have ignored the “beta” men and only choose “alphas”

(Beauchamp, 2018).

This line of claims can be seen as a manifestation of what Michael Kimmel, a sociologist who studies masculinity, calls “aggrieved entitlement.” According to Kimmel (Nelson, 2014):

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The concept of aggrieved entitlement is an emotion I believe many white men feel in the

United States… They feel entitled, as white men, to the idea that this is their country, this

is their world… What they thought was their birthright was access to money, power, and

women. It's not that they expected to have it, but that they felt entitled to it. And so when

they see others getting it, they feel like it's an injustice.

The aggrieved entitled man believes that if he “plays the game right” he is due to receive what he wants. In the case of Incel men, this is sex. When what is felt to be an entitlement is not received, the men are consumed with rage. Most seethe and rant online; some take violent action.

Again quoting Kimmel, “Violence is the way you get even… It's retaliation. As [Elliot Rodger] says, it's the day of retribution. It's restorative. It's a way to retrieve your manhood” (Nelson,

2014).

In addition, the specifically misogynistic premise of Incel is frequently noted. Their depiction of women is entirely objectifying and sees women’s choice in the sexual sphere to be a problem (rather than progress), because in their gendered worldview women owe sex to men.

The appeal of these patriarchal ideas to a broad group of men can be seen in the popularity of the writing and videos of clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson, who has expressed sympathy toward aggrieved single men and cast them as victims of a shift toward a culture of choice in sexuality and marriage (Bowles, 2018). While he and others couch their arguments lamenting social change in biological, sociological or historical frames, their claims ultimately depend upon a vision of gender relations where male entitlement is seen as natural and aligned with functioning of the social order, or a volatile force which must be appeased. The revanchist anger of the Incel men, enraged by their sexual frustration and targeting this anger at women and the choices they make, aligns with this broader trend represented by Peterson and can be seen as taking the

191 widespread phenomenon of objectification of women and normalization of a patriarchal social order to the extreme conclusion.

Similarly, while they rage against what they feel has been taken, they continue to view women through the lens of predominate gender stereotypes within our society. Quoting

Srinivasan again, “Rodger’s desires – his erotic fixation on the ‘spoiled, stuck-up, blonde slut’– are themselves a function of patriarchy, as is the way the ‘hot blonde slut’ becomes a metonym for all women” (2018). As stated earlier, image is paramount. Elliot Rodger specifically wanted revenge on blond sorority sisters. In another revealing Incel post, quoted by the journalist Zack

Beauchamp, the poster refers to one woman as a “landwhale” and another as a “flat bitch” in the same rant, displaying the wholesale absorption of narrow beauty standards by the same men who decry their own perception that they have been marginalized for their looks (2018).

Lastly, the role of the internet as an incubator for extremism is cited as a factor in the spread of Incel ideology. Responding to the Alek Minassian Facebook post, Whitney Phillips, a communications scholar whose areas of study include online communities, “If it’s true37, it’s internet culture, fully metastasized” and “If it’s true, it’s the collapsing of all boundaries between online play and offline terror” (Yang & Campion-Smith, 2018). Discussing online misogyny in the New York Times, columnist Amanda Taub writes, “Even though these men may never meet in person, they can still derive a powerful identity. Men who previously felt disconnected may now feel a sense of belonging and importance” (2018). Furthermore, Kimmel adds that in these communities “People encourage you to feel more, and deeper. And they value what you say

37 In the article from which this quote is taken, Phillips was cautious in accepting the authenticity of the Facebook post attributed to Minassian, because of past incidents in which 4chan message board participants had perpetrated hoaxes to link 4chan to atrocities. Phillips indicates that group members take pleasure in such hoaxes and the notoriety of the message board. However, Facebook and Toronto police have verified that the post did come from Minassian (Yang & Campion-Smith, 2018).

192 that’s more and deeper” (Taub, 2018). Echoing this claim, Clinical Psychologist James Cantor, of Canada’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health has been quoted in the press stating “They

[aggrieved men, Incels] can gather in larger numbers than ever before and talk themselves into crazier ideas… or at least, the idea stopped sounding so crazy to them because they’ve put together a community where that’s all that they hear” (Yang & Campion-Smith, 2018). Overall, the premise that men turn to online communities for support and through engagement online become openly hateful and destructive is summarized by Beauchamp, who states (2018):

Men log on to complain about their loneliness and dating failures and end up getting

sucked into a community that encourages them to blame women and society for their

problems. And eventually, some of them decide to do something about it.

Nonetheless, while these arguments capture important aspects of the Incel ideology, there are factors that remain obscure. For example, while Rodgers and his peers are enraged because they feel denied sex, plenty of men outside the stereotyped masculinity of “Chad” find sexual relationships. To quote Srinivasan “plenty of non-homicidal nerdy guys get laid” (2018). And plenty who do not will never act violently. Consequently, this turns the question away from what grievances circulate within the Incel message boards and toward new questions: What maintains the alienation of the men of Incel? And why the violence? My contention is that the alienation experienced by the men of Incel becomes clearer when considered within the framework of

Lacan’s mirror stage, imaginary register, and understanding of the Oedipal situation and its relationship to recognition of lack and entry into symbolic discourse.

It seems that men such as Elliot Rodger are living in Lacan’s mirror stage and the earliest part of the Oedipus complex. They imagine being (or not being) what is desired, that is being the phallus. Rodger claims that he was shunned because of his physical traits and that women

193 preferred muscular “alpha” men based on appearance. He is locked in rivalry with other men, a brutal competition based on the crudest physical parameters, and women are judges capable of granting access to paradise or casting him into oblivion. With these stakes underlying his demand for recognition, it is no surprise he reacts violently to the experience of deprivation he experiences.

The Invasive Imaginary

The preceding comments linking Lacanian conceptions of the mirror stage to the image obsession present in Incel ideology and the aggressiveness of the Incel message boards and the

Incel killers are complimented by descriptions of a widespread shift toward the privileging of the imaginary in the modern world which have been made by psychoanalysts and other critics taking a Lacanian cultural studies perspective. Incel men demonstrate an extreme emphasis on the imaginary register that reflects trends appearing across the societies they inhabit, with their violence drawing attention to the danger bred when images and the command to enjoy predominate. Writing on this topic, Florentina Andreescu (2014) summarizes this shift:

Society’s shift from the predominance of language and of the symbolic register, to a

predominance of images and the imaginary register was noticed by Jonathan Beller, who

argues that cinema is the emerging paradigm for the total reorganization of society and of

the subject… Similarly Henry Jenkins notes the emergence of an era of media

convergence, in which media is present everywhere… which ultimately leads to the

“virtualization of everyday life”… In the imaginary, the subject seems isolated and

independent of symbolic order, perceiving himself or herself as self-sufficient. As

subjects lodged in the imaginary believe themselves to be independent, they fail to see

their symbolic bond with other subjects (p. 9).

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Elaborating on this insight, she writes, “The over-presence of images leads to a disconnect from a symbolic framework necessary for creating some sort of meaning” (2014, p.

10). The image saturation characteristic of modern life not only leads to disconnection between people, it makes the generation of meaning increasingly difficult, because the visual replaces symbolic speech. Even when speaking, potentially meaningful words related to other words are reduced to the images they evoke and imaginary ego relations predominate. With regard to the online world, where Incel ideology has been incubated, she writes “Such a communication medium allows a dominance of the imaginary and in the authors’ opinion leads to the rise of narcissism” (2014, p. 10).

In this online environment, it is not a surprise that the Incel men continue to feel alienated. They are living in a realm that is inherently incomplete, interacting in a disembodied way and separate from other people and from opportunities for engagement with a cohesive symbolic order. It’s been noted that there is no consistent rule of law on the internet, and this can be extended to the law as understood in Lacanian theory as well. On the internet the symbolic order is fragmented. Returning to Andreescu (2014), she notes that technology creates a situation in which “the extensive time of history, chronology, and narrative sequence implodes into a concern and fixation with the real-time present,” also known as liquid modernity (p. 12). In this situation, “social forms and institutions no longer have enough time to solidify and cannot serve as frames of reference for human actions” and “the sense of security guaranteed by one’s position (status) with the symbolic is hard to sustain” (Andreescu, 2014, p. 12).

Combine this with the increasingly tenuous opportunities for work promoted by the

“temp economy” (Hatton, 2014), the prevalence of “bullshit jobs” without growth or meaning

(Graber, 2013), increasing isolation as telecommuting replaces the office (Chokshi, 2017), and

195 the decline in engagement with social organizations (Putnam, 2000), and it is no surprise that the

Incel men are baffled by the nature of social interaction and desire. They blame feminism for giving women choices, because choice leads women to select “Chad,” scapegoating women’s gradual liberation for their own increasing enslavement. And in this world where meaning has been scrambled, what remains are images, contributing to their obsession with the “alpha” body and recourse to biological explanations for their failure to connect with women.

Furthermore, the privileging of the imaginary is also seen in the realm of dating.

Srinivasan comments on this in her discussion of contemporary desire, writing that “online dating – and especially the abstracted interfaces of Tinder and Grindr, which distil attraction down to the essentials: face, height, weight, age, race, witty tagline – has arguably taken what is worst about the current state of sexuality and institutionalized it on our screens” (2018). Again, the centrality of images in contemporary life, particularly idealized images, is highlighted.

Following on this observation, the prevalence of pornography online should also be accounted for when addressing the privileging of the imaginary by Incel men. There is no encounter with another subject when sexual gratification is obtained through voyeuristic stimulation via pornography. Furthermore, in addition to transforming sexuality from a two- person experience into a self-contained experience, viewing pornography is a controlled event – someone viewing porn browses a website and selects their fantasy, and they never have to encounter the randomness that comes from engagement with another person. Overall, these aspects of pornography can be hypothesized to also contribute to the dilemma of the Incel men.

Sexual activity restricted to solitary visual and self-stimulation is an imaginary register experience which compounds isolation, does not involve the desire of the other, and sustains anxieties around connection.

196

Whither Lack

Lacanian critic Todd McGowan has also discussed the contemporary emphasis on the imaginary register and the narcissistic relations this supports, describing effects resulting from restriction of enjoyment to the imaginary register. He claims that enjoyment in the imaginary register sustains fantasies of fulfillment, rather than leading the subject to recognize and accept lack in the other and the self (2004, p. 66). Describing this fantasy of wholeness, which is characteristic of narcissism, he writes (2004):

In the narcissistic relationship, rather than relating to a point of lack in the big Other (the

point of the objet petit a, that which is in the Other more than the Other), one relates to a

nonlacking image, an image of wholeness (p. 68).

The consequence of this imaginary relation is a false expectation of wholeness and a blindness to the reality that we all must live within the social order (McGowan, 2004, p. 20).

Rodger, Minassian, and the prototypical Incel seem to embody these ideas. Living in a world of images, they expect to be delivered by sex with an idealized woman, with this fantasy supported by the online pornography simulacra of sex.

In McGowan’s words, referring to the replacement of linguistic culture by imagistic entertainment, “[today] there is no symbolic authority demanding that subjects leave the imaginary realm and enter into the social world” (2004, p. 65). With regard to my argument, life in the imaginary register allows these men’s intersubjective difficulties to deepen rather than challenging them to interact or reflect. They remain enraptured in visions of completeness and the rage that accompanies its absence because they have not accepted lack as an inescapable experience.

197

Furthermore, as was discussed extensively in the previous chapter, in the imaginary register the subject experiences a dialectic of being/not being the (imaginary) phallus. One way that the case of the Incel men adds to the link I have developed between symbolic castration and freedom can be seen in the way that the imaginary predominates for these men. They are enraged by when the expectation of wholeness that dominates their fantasies crashes into the frustration that is endemic to life and they have no recourse to a symbolic order which would represent, make sense of, and thus ease their frustration. Furthermore, their efforts to be the phallus are characterized by fixed imagistic meaning. Being the phallus or not being the phallus, by which I mean being that which is desired and completes the other, is a matter of image to these men.

They imagine being a stereotyped ideal of masculinity will bring them magical union with an idealized female.

An important dimension of the liberation found in the symbolic is therefore illuminated.

In the symbolic, it isn’t necessary to be some fixed ideal. There is freedom to flexibly enact a symbolic position, to re-think the identifications taken, and even to re-interpret the meaning of symbols in creative ways. These ideas are developed further in the following chapter, but for the moment my argument is that the Incels’ fixation upon concretized idealized images, which they see as providing formulaic access to satisfaction, represent the imprisonment that occurs when a person lives in the imaginary register. It is an unfreedom rooted in having access to only fixed concepts, without symbolic meaning to explain frustration and to create the potential for creative engagement with the world.

To summarize, the privileging of the imaginary, lives lived online, and the replacement of intersubjective sexuality with pornography, separate many men from other people and from the

198 symbolic and the possibility for the generation of meaning and experience of security that the symbolic creates. Moreover, this toxic brew leads to violence.

Mirror Madness

Returning to Lacanian theory’s applicability for understanding Incel misogyny and violence, it seems that these men are confused by the desires of women and rage against their experience of deprivation (i.e. the absence of the sexual activity they claim as their entitlement) due to their capture in the imaginary register. The exact process by which the shift into the symbolic is inhibited among the men of Incel remains to be explored and will vary depending on the person. In some cases, this is due to the absence of symbolic castration. These individuals are psychotic and its likely they make up the bulk of the Incel mass-violence perpetrators. For example, there is a bizarre quality to the writings of Alek Minassian suggesting psychotic experience, and the surreally detached quality of Eliot Rodger’s video manifesto suggests extreme disturbance.

In other situations, it seems the individual adopting an Incel philosophy are repressing knowledge of castration but do have symbolic capacity. An example of someone at this end of the Incel spectrum is Jack Peterson, a young man profiled by the Huffington Post and the

Guardian in the wake of Alek Minassian’s rampage (Jeltsen, 2018; Ling, 2018). Peterson initially appeared in the press as an unofficial Incel spokesman, speaking about his identification with the term, describing why the online Incel community appealed to him, and arguing that the vast majority of online Incels were non-violent. However, his engagement with the press as an Incel supporter had an unexpected outcome. According to Peterson, the humanity, interest, and kindness he experienced from members of the press and others reacting to his press appearances

199 led him to question his Incel beliefs, to become more engaged IRL (that is, in real life rather than online), and even to begin dating.

In both cases, whether foreclosed or repressed for defensive purposes, the law of the desire of the other is rejected, and subsequently these men remain baffled and enraged by the system within which they find themselves. They have an obsession with the imaginary register, attributing their frustration to physical shortcomings, while the possibility of understanding their position vis-à-vis “Chad” and “Stacy” in a symbolic manner is beyond them. They are in a dialectic of being the phallus, repeating the frustrations of the Oedipal process, rather than the dialectic of having (or not having) the phallus, which might allow them to find new identifications and to thereby compete in the sexual sphere rather than seeking its destruction.

They cannot recognize the desire of the other, and so cannot seek to understand this desire and through identification find ways of relating to others effectively and obtaining satisfaction. When being the phallus is the question, reactivity reigns. With symbolic castration, the possibility of reflection and meaning are born, which in turn lead to perception of options, the possibility of choice, and deliberate action.

Furthermore, Lacanian theory specifically links the register of the imaginary (specifically the imaginary I, also known as the ego) with aggression. In his paper “Aggressiveness in

Psychoanalysis,” Lacan (1948/2006) explains this link, writing:

What I have called the "mirror stage" is of interest because it manifests the affective

dynamism by which the subject primordially identifies with the visual gestalt of his own

body… There is a sort of structural crossroads here to which we must accommodate our

thinking if we are to understand the nature of aggressiveness in man and its relation to the

formalism of his ego and objects (p. 92).

200

Lacan is saying that the child’s erotic attachment to his image is the source of aggressive energy. Furthermore, he elaborates on the link between aggression and the ego (1948/2006):

In the depressive disruptions constituted by reversals experienced due to a sense of

inferiority, the ego essentially engenders deadly negations that freeze it in its formalism.

"What happens to me has nothing to do with what I am. There's nothing about you that is

worthwhile." Thus the two moments, when the subject negates himself and when he

accuses the other, become indistinguishable; and we see here the paranoiac structure of

the ego that finds its analog in the fundamental negations highlighted by Freud in the

three delusions: jealousy, erotomania, and interpretation. It is the very delusion of the

misanthropic beautiful soul, casting out onto the world the disorder that constitutes his

being (p. 93).

Applying this model proposed by Lacan, Incel men such as Elliot Rodger establish a rigid self-representation (Lacan’s Ideal-I, the ego), drawing from both familial experience and cultural imagery and emphasizing a particular picture of masculinity (which is best represented in their descriptions of the qualities of “Chad”). When their desired image of themselves comes into contact with a reality other than that they imagine, this “depressive disruption” shatters the image holding them together, pushing them back to the level of “a fragmented image of the body”

(Lacan, 1949/2006, p. 78), which is then defended against by projection and violence.38 Recall

Lacan’s description of the narcissistic subject’s reaction when disrupted by experiences of inferiority: “What happens to me has nothing to do with what I am. There’s nothing about you that’s worthwhile” (1948, p. 93). And from this transformation follows violence. According to

38 This link between disrupted narcissistic states and violence is not only commented on by Lacanians; it also appears in the Freudian, Kleinian, and British Independent lines of thinking (Goldberg, 2013; Jukes, 1993).

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Judith Gurewich, “The experience of ‘not being’ is encountered when the child loses sight of this positive reflection [i.e. the mother’s loving gaze]: The joy of the mirror stage thus alternates with expressions of rage, anxiety, or avoidance of the mirror image” (1996, pp. 23-24).

In the Incel context, rage, anxiety, and avoidance appear as misogyny, the “beta uprising,” social anxiety, and withdrawal to the safety of the internet. The relevance of these aspects of Lacanian theory to Incel violence are perhaps most vividly clear when one returns to

Elliot Rodger’s justification for his actions and reads them through Lacan – “I was cast out and rejected, forced to endure an existence of loneliness and insignificance, all because the females of the human species were incapable of seeing the value in me [italics added for emphasis].”

Finally, returning to the work of McGowan, he indicates that there has been a shift away from socially demanded prohibition and toward a command to enjoy as the dominant social dynamics in the United States and Western Europe. This claim that the command to enjoy is the dominant social message is complex and deserving of further exposition, but for the sake of brevity, McGowan and other, such as Slavoj Žižek (1999), claim that in our age of mass media and omnipresent technology, the capitalist economy depends on consumers rather than producers, which leads to a demand that all consume and enjoy. One effect of this command to enjoy is that enjoyment becomes a public spectacle. Rather than occurring out of sight, enjoyment is publicly broadcast, leading to resentment among those who see themselves to be left out of the party. McGowan writes (2004):

To fail to enjoy publicly is to ostracize oneself, to miss out on what everyone else is

accessing. As a result, we are continually confronted with the image of the enjoying

other—a confrontation that produces the incivility and aggressiveness symptomatic of the

society of enjoyment (p. 117).

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Additionally, McGowan suggests that a “logic of stolen enjoyment” underlies the aggressiveness directed by those feeling excluded toward those they imagine have it all. These reactions are rooted in the totalizing either/or nature of imaginary register relations – the other’s enjoyment is experienced as stolen because in the imaginary register, life is a zero-sum game without compromise or mediating rules (2004, p. 20). Once again, we are reminded that

Imaginary register experience produces rivalry and aggression. McGowan uses the Columbine

High School shooters to illustrate his point, and I believe that acts of Incel violence drive it home even more clearly given that the Incel narrative explicitly cites their (supposed) exclusion from the paradigmatic act of enjoyment, sex, as the trigger for reactionary violence. Of course, these observations about the dynamics in contemporary society that contribute to Incel violence do not excuse their actions. Rather, they highlight the connection between capture in the imaginary register and the explosive violence enacted by killers such as Rodger and Minassian.

Freedom for the Incel?

To summarize my contentions, these men are living in the imaginary register, a dimension of experience defined by image and rivalry. They remain in the dialectic of being the phallus. They wish that their image alone would unite them with a woman and lead them to sexual fulfillment, when other men are seen to be preferred, they attribute this to concrete qualities of the other rather than recognizing that sexuality operates within a symbolic system.

As a result, they are trapped in inferiority and aggression, lacking the mediating influence of the symbolic to separate them from the narcissistic fragility, rivalry, and susceptibility to violent reactions when frustrated. When the image predominates and symbolic identity fails to solidify, then when the imagined self is not recognized, this produces annihilation and dismemberment anxieties, the experience of the other as a threat, and the perception of the other’s enjoyment as

203 theft. In turn this leads to aggression. Moreover, these men find themselves unaware that desirability is something one has rather than something one is, that being desired is never guaranteed, and that becoming desired requires contact, dialog, and risk. Perhaps most perniciously, they do not realize they might ask questions about themselves and the world that could help them feel better.

So, what might change the Incels’ position? Lacan makes a clear statement regarding the role of identification in transcending of aggression when he writes: “Oedipal identification is thus the identification by which the subject transcends the aggressiveness constitutive of the first subjective individuation… it constitutes a step in the establishment of the distance by which, with feelings akin to respect, a whole affective assumption of one's fellow man is brought about”

(1948/2006, pp. 95-96).” It is through this identification that “the whole process of man’s cultural subordination” (Lacan, 1948/2006, p. 96) is initiated. In the Incel men, this process of induction into the symbolic has failed, and thus they are enslaved to images. But engaging the symbolic might help those who can do so to move away from the prison of the imaginary. They could grow if they could reflect on their experience and begin understanding what has led them to be “involuntarily celibate,” rather than taking their status as a given. They might see how they have contributed to their position, and they might find new positions within the symbolic to embrace.

Additionally, symbolic functioning is especially relevant because the symbolic makes co- existence possible. The imaginary register is defined by violent competition but in the symbolic competition is regulated by the law. According to McGowan, “the word [i.e. the symbolic order] allows for a mutuality in relation to the object that remains impossible on the purely imaginary level; the word indicates the existence of a pact, an agreement between subjects” (2004, p. 22).

204

Use of language is the foundation of the social bond between people because it structures human identity, relations, and understanding. Also, as described above, the symbolic introduces distance between subjects that facilitates interaction. Again quoting McGowan (2004):

Because the symbol has the effect of eliminating enjoyment and carving out a neutral

space in which subjects can interact, I do not experience the other’s enjoyment

encroaching on me, as I would if I didn’t have an experience of the symbolic pact

governing the interaction (p. 22).

Structure is a form of freedom because structure generates space. Rather than feeling the actions of other’s as a threat or as theft, symbolic functioning replaces what were overwhelming experiences with their symbolic representation, and furthermore these symbols give complex representation to the working of the world rather than reducing life to the violent, zero-sum conflicts of the bare imaginary.

Additionally, in the symbolic register recognition that all people experience limits is possible. Unlike the rivalrous and immediate imaginary, where one person’s having is another’s lacking, a subject who has entered the symbolic may understand that all people lack and be consoled by this knowledge (McGowan, 2004, p. 17). Furthermore, the symbolic order has the effect of establishing shared norms around the seeking of enjoyment, in this case seeking sexual relations. Social life becomes comprehensible. McGowan summarizes the mediating impact of the symbolic and the negative impact of capture in the imaginary when he writes (2004):

It is for this reason that imaginary experience represents a danger to the social order even

though it is integral to it and remains firmly within it: subjects lodged in the imaginary

believe themselves to be independent and fail to see their symbolic bond with other

205

subjects. Thus, they see other subjects purely as rivals, rather than as partners in sacrifice

(p. 20).

Without symbolic castration (and the solace it brings) or when knowledge of castration is defensively repressed, Incel men lash out violently rather than making peace with the Staceys and Chads of the world through appreciation for shared dissatisfaction. They cannot make sense of the world. Where perhaps they might have recognized the law of desire, instead they remain puzzled. And the end result is that their unregulated frustration in combination with superficial, patriarchal, and misogynistic perspectives taken in from society creates a toxic and explosive brew of paranoid, rageful misogyny.

Consequently, when these men do enter the consulting room, recognition of the nature of their problems is essential. Social anxieties, maladaptive ideas, and poor communication skills are certainly issues, but the bigger topic that must be tackled is narcissism. There is a need in these men for engaging in symbolic thinking and for a shift away from imaginary rivalry toward reflection, identification, regulated competition, and connection to desire. In facilitating this shift, the intensity of the narcissistic anxieties generated when the fantasy of wholeness depends upon imaginary register confirmation must be appreciated. A shift from repressing lack through fragile imaginary identifications toward management of lack through language is essential.

Therefore, interventions targeting “dating skills” and “behavior activation” are going to be ineffective, even if this is what patients might proclaim to seek. Only through reflection leading to new experiences of the self and symbolically mediated social relations can the overwhelming experience of threat and anxiety that accompanies the experience of being/not being the phallus become the question of having the phallus; and it is living this question that could make social functioning possible for these men.

206

Returning to the briefly discussed case of Jack Peterson, his description of changes that he experienced after going public as an Incel are telling. In a video titled “Why I’m leaving

Incels,” Peterson says “I think I actually need to do something with my life. It can kind of just suck you into depression to be constantly looking at forums like Incels.me, because of the content, and because of how defeatist some of the attitudes can be” (Ling, 2018). This quote, and the reports of his efforts to date, suggest that reflection – a symbolic order process – is the origin of his change. He is thinking critically about the Incel narrative, where previously it was taken as concrete fact. Supporting this point, in Peterson’s profile in the Guardian, he partly separates himself from the concrete attribution of romantic isolation to physical attributes that dominates the Incel discourse, saying “Looks are probably not the primary factor here” (Ling, 2018). In turn, a new non-Incel identity is emerging. He seems to move beyond seeing the world through an unchanging imaginary register point-of-view. Additionally, he links the identity he had held to deep self-loathing, feelings of victimization, and desperation for connection. These links are interpretive acts, again pointing to symbolic functioning. Finally, he indicates that he began to think differently through interaction with kind others who did not hold his views, drawing attention to his capacity for dialog, another symbolic register experience.

Overall, placing his example in the context of this chapter, Peterson’s shifts in self- understanding and action support my analysis of the Incel phenomenon by linking symbolic order experiences such as reflection and dialog with an individual’s movement beyond the imprisonment in the imaginary register that the Incel identity represents.

From Reaction to Reflection

Through the Incel example, I believe a strong comment is made regarding my argument that the concept of freedom is useful for understanding the teleology of psychoanalysis. We see

207 that capture in the imaginary register, due to foreclosure or repression of castration, freezes these

Incel men in a narcissistic paranoid state. There is a failure of reflection leading to concretization of their worldview in supposed biological laws regarding what traits attract women, and without reflection they are trapped in dissatisfied isolation. They cannot consider how they came to be in their position, or connect and grow, instead further hardening their image-based view of their worth and their view of women that, besides its misogyny, is detached from the reality of lived social relations.

Lacanian thought powerfully connects the Incel experience to problems in the mirror stage leading to total investment in self-image. These men are narcissistically vulnerable with fragile egos, an imaginary register phenomenon, propped up through envious anger and lacking the stabilizing force brought by establishment of symbolic identity. They are in a dialectic of being or not-being the phallus, rather than having learned the phallus is something you have or do not have, and furthermore that the phallus is not anything. Additionally, Lacan emphasized the link between narcissism and violence, claiming that violence is endemic in the imaginary register because of the rivalry that prioritizing (or reifying) images produces. Furthermore, those captured in the imaginary experience the enjoyment of the other (here Chad) as theft of what should be theirs, because they have not internalized the norm of frustration that is born out of symbolic castration (McGowan, 2004, p. 187). Hence rather than “getting in the game” of social life, these men want to kill everyone involved.

I see the narcissism and misogyny displayed by the Incel men and the violence they enact as proof of Lacan’s theorizing of the Mirror Stage and the Oedipalization process. It is a sad example, but a valuable one.

208

Additionally, their case also highlights that desire is imprisoned in socially transmitted image ideals when symbolic reflective activity is absent. This point is made by Srinivasan in her previously cited article, and she builds on this insight with the proposal of a liberatory conception of desire as a remedy for the unreflectiveness of the Incel men. Specifically, she suggests openness to desire in place of conformity to ideals as the vector of change (2018):

What’s more, sexual desire doesn’t always neatly conform to our own sense of it, as

generations of gay men and women can attest. Desire can take us by surprise, leading us

somewhere we hadn’t imagined we would ever go, or towards someone we never thought

we would lust after, or love. In the very best cases, the cases that perhaps ground our best

hope, desire can cut against what politics has chosen for us, and choose for itself.

In contrast, without access to the symbolic, the Incel men act out their envy and rage unreflectively. Concrete images dominate experience. They are not buffered from the overpowering experiences of rivalry, persecution, and domination. Without symbolic castration, their capacity to reflect upon the organization of the symbolic order has not emerged. Meaning and symbolic representation of experience buffer against overpowering immediate sensations and trauma, as Freud’s fort/da example argued, but this is not present for the Incel men. They struggle to understand their situation, crying out “Why?” as was seen in Rodger’s final videos, rather than asking questions such as those posed by Srinivasan, which might lead them to let go of idealized images and to find desire in new places. Nor do they have the “map” toward satisfaction that identification and the meanings found in the symbolic system might provide, instead orienting toward the chimerical “Chad” and “Stacey” images that can only leave these men circling, lost and endlessly enraged.

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They want something impossible – they want to be instantly and perfectly fulfilled, on the basis of bare existence in the imaginary register – they want to be the phallus. Lacanian ideas argue that this will never happen because being the phallus is inherently unstable, dependent as it is upon the volatile imaginary register, which changes moment to moment and is riven with rivalry. Image and sensation are insecure foundations – there’s always someone bigger, the

(m)other always looks away and, even if she does not, to live within her gaze alone is still precarious because subjection to the other without the symbolic is subjection to an omnipotent and fickle master. Symbolic castration is liberatory because it moves the individual into a more stable realm. Rather than circling lost and endlessly enraged, in the symbolic meaning structures experience and can be interrogated, frustration becomes tolerable through its symbolization, and through symbolization of frustration there becomes a possibility of doing something about it.

Where feelings of persecution and rage had dominated, leading to a sense of being trapped in an unfair world, acceptance of the struggle to obtain satisfaction may emerge, along with the capacity to creatively conceptualize what might lead one toward satisfaction, including questioning of narrow, imaginary-register ideals, greater openness to desire (Srinivasan, 2018), and new ways of acting and being in the world.

I hope that this chapter has made clear the link I see between the idea of freedom and

Lacan’s understanding of psychic development. When the image predominates, absent of the symbolic, the individual is enslaved to the image, and satisfaction is imagined as the prize given to the most perfect image. This is unfreedom, and it breeds violence. But turning toward the symbolic register is a potential path forward. While the symbolic order can be a cage of its own, it includes space for thinking which is the foundation of a deeper type of freedom. The symbolic

210 makes possible reflective subjectivity, while subjectivity is reactive when the imaginary register dominates.

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CHAPTER 5

Castration… and then?

The Further Freedom to be Found Through Possession of the Symbolic

“Analysis can have for its goal only the advent of a true speech and the subject’s

realization of his history in its relation to a future.” – Jacques Lacan, “The Function and

Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” 1953/2006, p. 249

“… it is so important for the analyst to forge an interpretive space in which the patient

can begin to actively claim the signifier. The patient who is able to assert a degree of

interpretive authority… over time grows less afraid of the Other’s judgments; she

becomes increasingly capable of independent deliberation and action.” – Mari Ruti, “The

Fall of Fantasies,” 2008, p. 506

While the case of Little Hans and examination of the Incel phenomenon show that entry into the symbolic register brings the possibility of reflection and freedom from reactive enslavement to the imaginary, all is not solved through symbolic castration. For those who take a place in the symbolic order, a major source of difficulty comes in the form of the relation to the

Other. In this way, the symbolic order too is often experienced as oppressive. Entrapment in unthinking, rivalry, image obsession, and reactivity is left behind, but what follows is often entrapment in social expectations (or reaction against these expectations). In the chapter that follows, I will explore this dimension of freedom, the question of the subject’s position vis-à-vis the symbolic order, as well as Lacan’s vision of a different stance toward the symbolic order and how it might be developed through psychoanalysis.

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Complications with the Other

Before the implications of these ideas with regard to freedom can be addressed, an introduction to the Lacanian Other is in order. Lacan’s terminology differentiated a person’s experience of specific individuals (such as you, a specific reader of this dissertation), from their relation to the meaning and power present in the overall social order as organized through the symbolic (such as “the academy” or “psychoanalysis”), referring to the first as the other, and the second as the Other. The (big) Other has many representatives, the mother and the father most importantly, but also any other voices experienced as speaking for the social order. We are transferring our unconscious Other into the world all the time, and thus regularly experience aspects of the (big) Other in (lowercase) others.

Creating possibilities for agency and choice, the symbolic order, personified in the Other, gives recognition and validation to the identity of the subject (Bracher, 2012, p. 201), which authorizes action in the symbolically-overwritten world. On the other side, conflicted stances toward the Other give the structure of neurosis according to Lacan. In his introduction to

Lacanian diagnosis, Fink says that the hysteric’s relation to the Other is characterized by

“seeking to divine the Other’s desire and to become the particular object that, when missing, makes the Other desire” (1997, p. 120). As for the obsessional, this subjective position involves seeking “to neutralize or annihilate the Other” (Fink, 1997, p. 119). These positions (modes of desiring) create patterns of relating that fail to deliver the satisfaction the subject expects, and they are paired with dysphoric experiences such as anxiety, depression and confusion, as well as other defensive processes that manifest in symptoms and apparent dysfunction and bring individuals into psychological treatment. In Colette Soler’s presentation of these ideas, she describes the hysteric as acutely feeling their lack (and hence seeking to address it by being

217 desired by the Other) while the obsessional fears the Other’s lack intensely and avoids threatening intimacy (1996, pp. 50-51).

These relations to the Other are what Lacan terms the fundamental fantasy. The history of the subject’s infancy and Oedipal situation dictate the structure of this relation to the world, falling into general categories (hysteric, obsessional) but always unique to the subject.

Addressing this idea, Judith Gurewich writes, “this mode of desiring reflects the vicissitudes of the patient in making sense of what was expected of him or her as he or she was in the throes of the Oedipal situation” (1996, pp. 20-21). The fundamental fantasy reflects how the subject learned to seek gratification in the first environment and through this pattern of relation to the

Other, the subject over-and-over seeks to recreate these conditions (Bracher, 2012, p. 202).

Returning to the topic of freedom, experiences of entrapment in relation to the symbolic

Other are of a different kind than those entrapped in the imaginary. Across patterns of relation to the Other, the entrapment of the neurotic is entrapment in unconscious repetition resulting in dissatisfaction.39 Old relations are recreated again and again as long as desire remains unconscious and unanalyzed, with the effect of leaving the subject unsatisfied. Going into specifics, in the case of the hysteric, desire is unsatisfied because in seeking to be desired the subject loses sight of what else they might actually want or enjoy. These subjects are ensnared in an insatiable but barren desire to be desired. As for the obsessional, fear of the Other, that is fear of engulfment, leads to nullification of the Other. The cost of this nullification of the Other is feelings of deadness arising from the stifling of desire and isolation.

39 Circularity also occurs in the imaginary register, but I would argue that for the psychotic life is an ongoing iteration of a single sprawling and never-doubted story, in contrast to the neurotic’s experience of unconsciously recreating and repeating old relations.

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Overall, in these cases the capacity – the freedom – to pursue desire is inhibited, and the desire of the Other predominates. Speaking to this phenomenon, Mari Ruti says “when she [or he] allows herself [or himself] to be overrun by the desires of the Other – her [or his] existence feels empty, apathetic, and devoid of meaning” (2008, p. 503).

Turning to clinical practice, Soler’s description of this situation of being overrun by the

Other (or fleeing the possibility of being overrun) in terms of the power these stances give to spoken language (and by extension the social order), identifies questioning as the starting point for liberation of desire. “The subject petrified by the signifier is the subject who doesn’t ask any questions” (1996, p. 48), she says, linking the neurotic subject’s entrapment in the immobilizing power given to their representation of the Other (in language) with their resulting inability to question. In turn, further unconscious repetition occurs because it is only questions that might disrupt the positions (i.e. loss of self in seeking to fill the Other’s lack or flight from the Other) dictated by the fundamental fantasy. Consequently, Soler highlights a new path for the neurotic subject: asking questions. Lacanian technique links questioning and seeking meaning – questioning the signifier and by extension the Other – to movement out of petrified modes of being and toward desire (Soler, 1996, p. 48).

Lacan In Practice: Desire > Ego

Lacan’s ideas about the subject, the registers of experience, the mirror stage, Oedipal experience and castration, and desire lead to a distinct perspective on analytic practice and innovations in technique.

One key aspect of Lacanian practice is the emphasis on challenging the ego and the prioritization of the subject of the unconscious. Lacan viewed the ego to be inevitably based in

219 misrecognition and a source of alienation, so uncritically forming an alliance with the ego in the process of analysis was rejected. Instead, the analyst was to focus on facilitating the articulation of previously unconscious desire, at least in the treatment of neurotic subjects.40

Lacan’s theorization around desire is central to understanding this approach. According to Lacan, desire is the response to lack, which is the experience of human incompleteness. Based on early experience, desire becomes attached to a repressed representation Lacan terms object a, which is indicated to be the object that had provided the jouissance given up by the child when the initial bliss of being totally cared for is removed, and when the limits on enjoyments (self- pleasure and pleasure with the mother) are imposed by the paternal function (Fink, 1997, p. 66).

Addressing desire for object a, Lionel Bailly explains it to be “what is aimed at or sought after that seems to be contained within a particular object” (2009, p. 129), rather than the object (or person) consciously sought. Additionally, Lacan linked desire to the incapacity to “express what the Subject lacks” (Bailly, 2009, p. 220). Language does not have the capacity to fully express lack. It cannot be symbolized. The object a sought is only a fragment of what was lost, a partial representation, and the idea of regaining primordial fulfillment is fantasy. Consequently, the pursuit of desire is endless.

Following desire leads to jouissance. As discussed previously, jouissance comes in a wider variety than the conventional understanding of pleasure. It is enjoyment of doing what one desires and is tied up with the meaning of the act as much as whatever happens to the body.

Following desire is complicated in all cases, and especially in the case of the neurotic subject.

40 The Lacanian psychoanalytic tradition has developed unique understanding and approaches for treatment of psychosis and perversion which differ from what is described here. Chapters 7 and 9 of Bruce Fink’s A Clinical Introduction of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (1997) is a good introduction to these ideas for those interested, as are Lacan’s 3rd seminar and the book After Lacan (2002) by Willy Apollon, Danielle Bergeron and Lucie Cantin.

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According to Lacan, the neurotic is focused on the desire of the Other, rather than their own desire, but does not know this. They avoid achievement of whatever is supposedly wanted in resistance to the Other and obtain jouissance in covert ways. Returning to the example of the Rat

Man from chapter 1, analysis revealed that he felt compelled to marry someone acceptable to his parents but resisted satisfying them in this way. Instead, he took pleasure in remaining dependent, masturbation, sexual liaisons, and the expression of anger through frustration of the supposed wishes of his parents.

Or consider Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857/1959). Here we find a woman whose identity is forever in flux as she enjoys being desired and adapts to the fantasy at hand.

Throughout this novel she adapts herself to stimulate desire – she is pious when at the convent school and in her affairs she acts out the romantic and sensual ideals she knows through novels.

In all situations, she lives in a storybook version of her life, the Other’s story, never questioning the veracity of what she has taken and instead seeking to live it out by drawing others into the role of taking her to a better place, with ruinous results. Neither the Rat Man nor Madame

Bovary can pursue their desire directly. The Rat Man flees the Other while Madame Bovary seeks to live entirely in the Other. Their pleasure is tied up in conflictual activities, their own desires remain vague or disowned, and they cannot relax and enjoy what they might have.

Consequently, the issue at hand for the neurotic is knowledge of desire and separation from the Other, and I see the pursuit of these ends as another instance in which psychoanalysis illuminates a form of freedom and creates freedom for the analysand/subject.

The Master Signifier and Dialectization

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To make my argument about the freedom developed in psychoanalysis as conceived by

Lacan, his method must be further explained because, given his distinct terminology, understanding of his ends depends on understanding of his process. Specifically, it is by exploring Lacan’s concepts of the master signifier and dialectization, and the treatment outcomes of knowledge of desire and separation from the Other, that it becomes meaningful to say that

Lacanian psychoanalysis illuminates and produces freedom.

Thus, I turn to Lacan’s method, specifically the emphasis on knowledge of desire and separation from the Other that were his focus through the early 1960s (Johnston, 2013). To start, the direction of treatment in Lacan’s view is away from the imaginary register and toward the symbolic.41 In the early stage of analysis, imaginary register fixations, based in identification and rivalry, begin to be put into words and dissolved as a result of free association, the experience of transference, and interpretive comments from the analyst (Fink, 1997, p. 34). As these experiences are given language, the fragility of the self-image decreases through the analysand’s budding awareness of the symbolic order and their place in it, including integration of repressed desire (Bracher, 2012, pp. 192-193). Additionally, as the ego is questioned and associations are produced, there is growth in curiosity about the unconscious and the nature of one’s relationship with the Other. Imaginary relations are by no means eliminated, but the reflective and regulating powers of language make the analysand sturdier as the imaginary register becomes more intertwined with the symbolic.

41 Lacan’s later work would go further, moving beyond the symbolic to emphasize elevation of the drive and the register of the real as the final stage of psychoanalysis (Fink, 1997, Chapter 10). An exploration of the applicability/non-applicability of concepts of freedom to the late Lacan would be a fruitful area for future investigation.

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In the transference, the analyst becomes, for the analysand, that symbolic authority – mother, father, and law – that the analysand is in an unconscious conflictual relation with. But the analyst does not take up this position. Instead, the analyst maintains an enigmatic stance that expresses desire for further analysis and nothing else. Rather than wanting something from the analysand or seeking to produce a reparative enactment, which would be taking up the role of the

Other, the analyst is always seeking to draw attention to the unconscious. Another way of putting this is to say that “the analyst’s desire is to lay bare the subject’s jouissance” (Fink, 1997, p.

214), that is to uncover and reflect what the analysand gets off on. Splits in the subject are highlighted and interrogated, and demands made upon the analyst are frustrated.

Through this process, there is a clarifying of the relation with the Other and subjectification of the cause of desire – meaning the patient takes responsibility for pursuit of desire, rather than seeing it as something that will be delivered by the Other. Central to this process is Lacan’s concept of the fundamental fantasy. According to Lacan, the fundamental fantasy is the unconscious “guarantee of satisfaction” (Schwartz, 2012, p. 230) carried over from early life by the analysand, which generates the unconscious relational paradigm behind their conflicts, symptoms, and relational problems. In analysis, the fundamental fantasy is inferred from the collected symptoms explored and the transference that develops, and in analysis this fundamental fantasy is worked through. As the analysand recreates their fundamental fantasy in the transference, the analyst stays locked on the subject of the unconscious rather than getting drawn into the analysand’s demands. Over time, Lacan says that the combination of frustration of demands and enigmatic interpretation on the part of the analyst draw the analysand to return to and finally work through the question “what does the Other want?”

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In the short-term this produces clarification of the analysand’s relation to the Other. To understand this clarification process, a detour into the concept of the master signifier is needed.

According to Lacan, master signifiers are words around which the identity of an individual is organized (Bailly, 2009, p. 133), with the Name-of-the-Father as the original master signifier. As the child develops, other master signifiers are substituted for the Name-of-the-Father (Bailly,

2009, p. 81). The impact of these master signifiers is described well by the philosopher Matthew

Sharpe, who indicates “The importance of these master signifiers comes from how a subject’s identification with them commits them to certain orderings of all the rest of the signifiers”

(2002). Sharpe also addresses the clinical implications of this aspect of Lacanian theory when he writes (2002):

What Lacan argues is involved in the psychoanalytic process, then, is the elevation of

new ‘master signifiers’ which enable the subject to reorder their sense of themselves and

of their relation to others. Previously, for example, a person may have identified with a

conception of ‘decency’ that has led him to repress aspects of his own libidinal makeup,

which then return in neurotic symptoms. What analysis will properly lead him to do is

identify himself with a different set of ‘master signifiers,’ which re-signify the signifiers

he had unconsciously been addressing to the Other in his symptoms, reducing their

traumatic charge by integrating them into his symbolic (self-)understanding.

Through free association, recognizing the master signifiers, and free associating to them, the analysand comes to know their desire, since in the end the Name-of-the-Father stands in for the phallus, around which desire is formed. Furthermore, by doing so they make this desire the center of their identity, with a falling away of symptoms born of conflict between the subject’s desire and the desire of the Other which previously they had felt obliged to satisfy.

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Fink gives some helpful clarification with regard to identifying master signifiers through his examples of speech that halts the conversation (2018):

A master signifier presents itself as a dead end, a stopping point, a term, word, or phrase

that puts an end to association, that grinds the patient’s discourse to a halt. It could be a

proper name (the patient’s or the analyst’s), a reference to the death of a loved one, the

name of a disease (AIDS, cancer, psoriasis, blindness), or a variety of other things (p.

38).

Additionally, Lacanian theory includes a further insight with regard to the master signifiers: there are negative “counterfoils” paired with an individual’s master signifiers which are sources of anxiety for the individual. Writing about this phenomenon, Bailly says, “master signifiers have shadowy negative counterparts in the unconscious” (2009, p. 156) and he gives a number of examples of such counterfoils. For instance, he describes the case of a girl whose frequent references to being “lucky,” which often were nonsensical when examined, defended against a deep anxiety about being “unlucky” (which was rooted in a history of loss and disappointment) (2009, p. 62). Or in another useful example, he describes a woman deeply identified with master signifiers such as “logic” and “rationality,” to the point of chronic insomnia due to “an inability to stop thinking.” Her analysis revealed a childhood marked by suffering due to her mother’s “apparently illogical decisions,” which created a link between irrationality and the anxiety of vulnerability. By uncovering this association, she could work through her anxiety rather than unthinkingly fending it off through the signifiers of “logic” and

“rationality” (2009, p. 135). These counterfoils are in tension with the master signifiers and the work of analysis (in part) is investigation of these signifying chains.

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Resuming my discussion of the treatment, responding to the fundamental rule of free association, the analysand comes to speak master signifiers in the dialog with the analyst. The analyst is attuned to these master signifiers and when they are identified, for example due to a slip of the tongue or some other irregularity in speech, the analyst seeks to facilitate reflection on these emergences of the unconscious. For instance, a slip (an unconsciously determined error in speech) might be repeated back to the analysand, or an unverbalized affect might be noted (“You are smiling as you say that”). Also, the variable length session is intended to emphasize the unconscious by “punctuation” of the appearance of the unconscious in the analysand’s speech through the unilateral ending of the session. All these methods seek to arouse the analysand’s curiosity regarding what they say without realizing they are saying it, and by extension dialog between the conscious subject and subject of the unconscious that appears in their speech.

In turn, these interventions initiate a process of “dialectization” which was blocked when these signifiers were repressed. Dialectization is the development of links between master signifiers and the rest of the analysand’s network of signifiers. Linkage with other signifiers reduces the anxiety that previously surrounded the master signifiers and develops awareness of desire in the analysand (Fink, 2018), as well as making further links possible through this reduction of anxiety. Furthermore, dialectization reorganizes the network of signifiers. New perspectives and relations between the master signifiers emerge and the subject’s desire is elevated. Bailly presents a useful metaphor for conceptualizing this process (and a useful summary on the master signifiers) when he writes (2009):

The master signifiers are those that, for the Subject, have become quite detached from

their signifiers, but carry out the function of changing the meaning of the signifying chain

into one that supports the ego. It is one of the main tasks of analysis to unmask these

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master signifiers, and to bring to light the side of them that is hidden in the unconscious.

This may sound like a terrifying prospect for the ego, but Lacan never said that the ego

had to be demolished for the subject to be revealed. Rather, he used a metaphor in which

the ego was an edifice built around master signifiers in whose shadow their negative

counterparts are obscured. Analysis is therefore more like the movement of the sun that

brings these negatives into the light: the ego can remain intact, but now we can see the

whole thing more clearly (p. 64).

Describing this process as experienced by an analysand who has recently discovered ‘the best’ as a master signifier in her psychic life Bailly writes: “The analysand has to recognize the relationship between ‘the best’ and ‘second best’; only then can the master signifier lose its tension – the tension of being coupled with its anxiogenic counterpart – and become uncoupled, a process Lacan called ‘separation’” (2016, p. 194). For this analysand “second best” is an experience of rejection and loss, and it is when these anxiolytic signifiers are recognized to be unconsciously present in tandem with the master signifier of “the best” that this anxiety may be addressed. The case of Little Hans provides another illustration of this link. He fears horses because horse = large penis, and this signifier is unconsciously linked to the anxiety-saturated signifier “small penis,” which in turn is linked to an experience of himself as inadequate Hans.

Treatment therefore consists of uncoupling “horse” from “inadequacy” by talking about and developing representation of Hans’s fears, ultimately leading him to find a solution to his inadequacy fears (i.e. symbolic castration, as discussed previously).

Moreover, by linking the master signifier to other signifiers, knowledge of the unconscious is developed. No longer is the analysand “petrified”; now they have good questions to pursue, and the ultimate question is desire. What does one want and why? The answers to

227 these questions, as they develop through ongoing association and verbalization, are knowledge of the self, what in other psychoanalytic schools is called insight. In the end, there is no single answer ever settled upon. Rather desire is metonymic – it moves from object to object infinitely

(Fink, 1997, p. 26). Along the way, as previously unknown connections are realized, the emotion attached to repressed knowledge is expressed as well, reducing unconscious repetition. Fink summarizes the consequence of dialectization, when he says that through this process “Desire is set in motion, set free of the fixation inherent in demand” (1997, p. 26).

Supporting the argument of this dissertation, the concept of freedom is here linked with dialectization. The master signifiers (and their counterfoils) produce anxiety which immobilizes the analysand, binding the individual with a demand (and threat) experienced to come from the

Other. But when the master signifiers are dialectized, meaning is no longer fixed. New connections lead to new perspectives. Where there was a single concrete experience (“it is what it is”; “I’m an American”; “I’m a Catholic”), these moments become multivalent as they are put into dialog with the range of experiences represented in the analysand’s symbolic repertoire.

New master signifiers come to the center of the analysand’s identity, reorganizing experience, while old master signifiers which perpetuated conflictual relations with the Other lose their petrifying power. Being “the best” is no longer felt as a demand from the Other, provoking a rigid reflexive response through associations with repressed trauma,42 but rather is heard and felt in relation to anxieties that have been (or can be) verbalized and reflected upon. Over time. the power of the repressed anxiogenic signifiers is sapped as the subject comes to identify with symbolic castration (and lack), accepting what repression of these signifiers sought to hide. As a

42 Here I use the term trauma in its broad sense to refer to any overwhelming affect that has produced repression, rather than referring to a specific physical or sexual trauma. The broad definition includes these specific traumas, as well as other overwhelming infantile and childhood experiences such as unbearable levels of stimulation from any source, fantasies producing overwhelming sexual or aggressive feeling, and trauma related to separation.

228 result, the individual is less tied up in subjugating experiences of demand and instead pursues desire.

Traversing the Fundamental Fantasy

Eventually, through this discourse, the analysand comes to know that, in Bailly’s words,

“knowledge of its own desire is not held by the analyst but revealed through its master signifiers”

(2009, p. 160). How does this shift happen? Here we return to Lacan’s emphasis on the desire of the analyst and the concept of traversing the fantasy. The analyst’s desire is for the analysand to continue analysis (to keep coming to treatment and to keep associating and reflecting) and this is conveyed in an enigmatic and ever shifting manner. Through this stance, interrogating speech but otherwise remaining neutral and enigmatic, and not gratifying demands, the focus is placed on the analysand’s unconscious. Developments in the transference subsequently unveil the analysand’s fundamental fantasy. The analyst is cast as the Other, with whom the analysand seeks to recreate a past relation and thereby obtain the jouissance desired. But the logic of the fundamental fantasy is challenged by the enigma of the analysts’ desire. Instead of gratifying the analysand’s implicit demands, recreating the past by playing along with the given script, the analyst instead poses questions that seek verbalization of the transference at the same time it is being played out (Fink, 1997, p. 41), and ultimately aiming for dialog with the unconscious subject.

The analysand comes to see that while the analyst has been in the position of “the one supposed to know,” in fact it is their own knowledge that must take primacy. Where the analysand thought the Other was, they come to recognize their own desire. Quoting Sharpe

(2002):

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Lacan’s name for what occurs at the end of the cure is traversing the fantasy. But since

what the fantasy does, for Lacan, is veil from the subject his/her own implication in how

s/he experiences the world, to traverse the fantasy is to reavow subjective responsibility.

To traverse the fantasy, Lacan theorizes, is to cease positing that the Other has taken the

“lost” object of desire. It is to accept that this object is something posited by oneself as a

means to compensate for the experienced trauma of castration… The subject who has

traversed the fundamental fantasy, for Lacan, is the subject who has not ceded on its

desire. This desire is no longer fixed by the coordinates of the fundamental fantasy… It

can now avow without reserve that it is a lacking subject, or as Lacan will also say, a

subject of desire, but that the metonymic sliding of this desire has no final term. Rather

than being ceaselessly caught in the lure of the object-cause of desire43, this desire is now

free to circle around on itself, as it were, and desire only itself.

This is not a smooth process. The transference leading up to this shift involves significant anger due to recreation of the past relation to the Other and in response to frustration. On this point, Fink remarks that “the process is more likely to be messy, unwieldy, and hot to handle than to be cool, calm and collected” (1997, p. 71). Fink then quotes Freud’s description of the transference bringing past relationships back alive, and the necessity of recognizing that “it is impossible to destroy anyone in absentia or in effegie” (Freud, 1912/1958, p. 108). By living

43 For a poetic representation of capture in the lure of the object-cause of desire, consider the final lines of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, where narrator Nick Carraway describes Jay Gatsby’s pursuit of Daisy Buchanan, as an attempt to realize a dream that was “already behind him”: “I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night. Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

230 through and verbalizing this transference experience, a new relation to the Other, to object a, and to jouissance emerges. This shift is what Lacan called, traversal of the fundamental fantasy. As the fundamental fantasy is put into speech, and as the analysand sees that they, and not the analyst (the Other), possesses knowledge of their unique desire and the power to seek satisfaction, the analysand comes to assume desire for themselves rather than continuing to invest in the fundamental fantasy.

Lacan said that in the act of traversing the fantasy, the analysand subjectifies their desire.

Where previously the analyst was in the position of the cause of desire (object a), the analysand now subjectifies the cause. They’ve seen that aiming to fulfill the Other’s desire is putting the cart before the horse, because the Other’s desire is slippery – it changes, it’s impossible to fully know, fulfilling it does not bring the perfect satisfaction expected. The new path is to claim their desire as their own, abandoning the fundamental fantasy and no longer seeking completion in the analyst but turning away and seeking object a elsewhere. The analysand may desire the same objects and take similar positions in relation to others, but their experience is transformed because of the key internal change – now the subject recognizes and identifies with their action, claiming what had been unconscious or attributed to the Other (Bracher, 2012, p. 195).

This shift in the transference is accompanied by a shift in the relation to the Other across the analysand’s life. Their history is subjectified as well, and the life story shifts away from a narrative of grievance. Rather than living in reaction to the limitations on pleasure and power imposed by the parents, the disruption of the early child-caregiver dyad, and entry into the symbolic order with its laws and values, the analysand accepts these limits and “makes peace” with castration (Fink, 1997, p. 66). Instead of resentment and unconscious demands for compensation, the analysand accepts the limits of the symbolic order and the fact of

231 responsibility for the course of their life including their role in and reactions to past events. In

Schwartz’s words, there is a “change from suffering to a satisfaction that comes from having a choice” (2012, p. 221).

By claiming choice in past situations, the analysand separates from grievance and expectation with regard to the Other, that is the parents, and takes up a new position of responsibility. Given the world as it is, not as it was wished to be, and seeking to fulfill personal desires rather than the desires believed to have been given by the parents, separation is achieved, and life is felt to come into focus with action now possible. Desire has become decided, and the

Other’s power has been escaped. In Fink’s words, the subject “no longer cares what the other wants” and is “not put off by obstacles,” because now the subject knows their desire and has taken responsible for their own satisfaction (1997, p. 206).44

Freedom from the Other, Paradoxical Freedom

While previously I distinguished between positive and negative freedom, with Lacan these distinctions are difficult to maintain. There is taking away of impediments and simultaneously there is development of agency. What I see in Lacanian psychoanalysis is an ethos of freedom, with agency and capacity for action being achieved through separation from the Other and development of symbolic capacities.

The first iteration of freedom from the Other can be seen in the experience of entry into the symbolic through the effect of the paternal function; that is in symbolic castration. Through language and symbolic castration, the child is freed from the possibility of engulfment in the

44 Later Lacan would go on to address a further shift in experience, the movement from desire to the drive (Fink, 1997, pp. 205-217). These writings too could be seen to address freedom, in a way, representing an even more radical conception of human experience centered on freeing the subject to pursue.

232 mother-child dyad or the abjection of the mother’s perceived or actual turning away, as well as gaining symbolic identity and reflective capacity. Language allows for understanding of imaginary conflicts, giving the child some place in the symbolic world as well as a means for managing the self-image instability and rivalry endemic when image (and ego) predominate.

With this development, freedom from being (unconsciously) trapped in the dyadic world of the earlier child-caregiver relationship is achieved and there becomes the possibility of living reflectively rather than living in reaction to comparison, rivalry, and threatened loss. Though not often conceived this way, reflection and symbolization are a type of freedom, which is more clearly seen when contrasted against the mindless reflexivity they replace.

Furthermore, psychoanalysis creates the possibility that individuals defined in reaction to the Other – that is losing or distorting their subjectivity in reaction to the question “What does the other want?” – might come to focus on their own desire and leave behind their fundamental fantasy, which produced never ending replication of early relations to the Other. Separation from these early relations and focusing on decided desire is freedom for these individuals. Gone are the days of being “slavishly influenced” by others (Fink, 1997, p. 37). Where once they had felt controlled, stifled, or confused, now action towards ends they experience to be their own can be taken. When an individual can recognize themself and their difference from the Other, understand their own history, and see that their knowledge of desire is what matters, this is another level of freedom.

Finally, the analysand comes to possess a particular freedom through claiming desire and signifiers that were not chosen. Beyond regulating anxiety over engulfment or abandonment, beyond separation from the experience of being a slave to the social order, the analysand makes a choice to take responsibility for the unconscious, becoming separate from previously inhibiting

233 patterns of relating to the self, others, and the world through this shift, while at the same time making peace with the unconscious and accepting that it cannot be controlled.

In layperson’s terms, the Lacanian analysand becomes free to want what he or she wants, to pursue it, and maybe even to get some of it from time to time, but this liberation puts the unconscious in the driver’s seat, or perhaps more accurately in the navigator’s position, and there is no controlling the unconscious. It is only channeled, never subjugated. Thus, in the Lacanian model, becoming free of the Other does not mean the subject is entirely undetermined and every choice becomes possible. Sometimes the only choice is to accept – but this is an immensely powerful choice. Bracher sums up this outcome well when he writes that analysis is not a matter of the ego conquering and colonizing the id, as the ego psychologists described. Rather the subject relates to the unconscious as a “pilgrim or ethnographer,” resulting in accommodation and an end to unsatisfying and immobilizing internal conflict (2012, p. 192). There is new freedom to live when peace is made with desire. Thus, Lacan’s is a paradoxical freedom.

A Lacanian Outcome?

To see how these ideas look in practice, I’ll take the risk of speaking about a case of my own. I was not using a Lacanian approach in this case, by any means, but still the experiences of my patient and some of the developments in his treatment highlight Lacanian ideas and their relation to freedom.

Ulysses was referred into psychotherapy at a community mental health clinic as a teenager by his school due to truancy. He reported carrying himself as a tough guy at school, keeping a surly distance from others and never backing down from a fight. In session, in contrast, he was eager to talk about his life, soft-spoken, and sensitive. Symptomatically, he was

234 depressed at this point – he was isolated, disengaged, feeling worthless and down in mood – but looking back it feels most accurate to say he was lost.

My training was limited when we began working together and I focused on showing empathic interest. I would ask questions about what was happening and respond with validation and concern to his challenging experiences. Unconscious to both of us, a transference quickly emerged. Ulysses thought I had all the answers and that attending regularly would “fix” his life.

As Lacan described, I became for him “the one supposed to know” (1973/1977, p. 233).

He was the middle child of Mexican parents who had come to New York as adults and worked in the service industry. He had a tumultuous relationship with his mother, whom he sought to please and look after, and a distant relationship with his father, who he said was always working or out with friends. There was also a rivalry with his older brother, reported to be a bookish young man away at college, and he felt warmly and protectively toward his younger brother. As the treatment proceeded, Ulysses developed greater capacity for putting his experiences into words and as he symbolized his experiences, his relationship with the world began to change.

One early example of this shift came when Ulysses spoke with me about having felt bullied. While a bull of a young man in appearance, stocky and strong, he felt powerless at school as a freshman. He experienced himself to be an easy target for jokes as a relatively out-of- place Mexican-American in a school were his cultural group was the minority. He was teased for how he spoke, what he wore, his haircut, and his shyness, and felt vulnerable to being attacked or robbed. These experiences brought forward an emphasis on image by Ulysses. In defense against feeling weak and marginal, he adopted the look, language, and behaviors of a particular subgenre of hip-hop music called “drill,” including drinking coedine which was popular in this scene and a

235 marker of identity. In the Lacanian theoretical model, Ulysses was attempting to “be” the phallus that he saw in the drill artists he idealized.

When Ulysses talked about drinking coedine, I asked questions about what he felt when using the substance. He had a difficult time articulating anything pleasurable about the experience; it seemed it was the act in itself that had value to him – the image of it – and no emotional connection was communicated when he spoke about the acquaintances with whom he drank codeine. Soon after when again the topic came up, he became tearful and described a feeling of disappointing his mother by using drugs. He said that his parents had sacrificed on his behalf and that he wanted to repay them by doing something in life. Additionally, around this time he began speaking more about his Mexican heritage. He spoke of enjoying being Mexican and pride in his community – the food, time with family, the music his father exposed him to, dancing, sports, the jokes. Without any prompting on my behalf he then announced that he would stop all alcohol and drug intake, a commitment which he subsequently stuck to, although he would muse about insights he had while smoking marijuana throughout his treatment and the possibility of smoking it again, seeming to want my endorsement. You could say he turned from coedine back to mother’s milk, in the form of culturally-coded attitudes towards drugs which he focused on after this (“drugs will make you crazy” “drugs are for losers”).

Additionally, around this same time, he started attending school relatively consistently.

There was a shift from seeking to live out an externally discovered ideal, to being comfortable with something more personal. Part of this came in switching his clothes away from designer jeans and Air Jordan sneakers to more casual clothes (Vans sneakers, American Eagle jeans) with different cultural codes attached.

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Conceptualizing this phase of treatment from a Lacanian perspective, I believe that

Ulysses’s experience of speaking with me and the reflective position that I took, led to an articulation of “Mexican” and “son” as master signifiers. Elevation of these signifiers, in turn, was followed by a re-organization of his experience such that he could cope with past anxieties

(feeling weak and vulnerable) by explaining them and holding onto a sense of his own integrity and value. Consequently, rather than being pushed back onto reliance on imaginary-register sources of narcissistic power to endure challenges to his self-esteem and security, such as his drill music-inspired persona, which provided a sense of strength that was fleeting, fragile, and empty due to being disconnected from the larger network of signifiers that made up his life,

Ulysses could sustain a more durable identity (his symbolically-saturated sense of himself in his family and the self-worth associated with these images) as well as explaining his situation in new ways that went beyond self-criticism (“I go to a tough school”). One could say that part of the shift was in realizing he liked being Mexican and part of the shift was noticing his own feelings, but I believe, in fact, these two elements were intertwined. In noticing his own feelings, Ulysses connected with his identity, and in connecting with his identity, he discovered new feelings.

In terms of the concept of freedom as I see it to be present within the Lacanian model, these are preliminary movements. I would say that Ulysses had slipped into an imaginary level style of living under the stresses of his life and his depleted identity. Rather than having a clear identificatory pathway toward self-esteem and a place in the world, he had half a pathway. His mother and father gave identity to him, but it remained hazy for a variety of factors. So instead he turned to images that seemed to have power in his school and peer environment. By talking with me he could reconnect with the signifiers he was given and in doing so he moved away from the dominance of the image and into a more symbolic way of being. By beginning to reflect

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– to integrate emotional meaning with symbolic representation of experience – his sense of durability, worth, and agency expanded. Choices became a thing, where once life just happened.

The Power of Signification

Still, Ulysses continued to struggle with imaginary-register problems. He was working part-time in a kitchen and described physical fights with older male co-workers whom he felt had been verbally disrespectful toward him, painting a picture of an ongoing zero-sum competition for dominance playing out in his mind at work. After these fights, his mother expressed disgust and at one point told him “I have no son.” These rejections prompted feelings of guilt, self- loathing, and hopelessness, and his hopelessness even reached the point of thinking he would be better off dead. In session, Ulysses associated his rejection feelings to memories of being hit with a belt and given cold showers by his mother, and to feeling unloved. I made interpretations noting that it seemed he preferred to only see the good parts of his mother, and that shame flooded back when she became angry and rejected him. Ulysses did not respond to these comments in any noticeable way. Then in one session, when talking about this subject, I said,

“your mother can be very mean.” He didn’t cry or become angry at this point, but a look of wonder crossed his face. He said back to me, “I have a mean mother.” After this, he was no longer as retraumatized by his mother’s cruelty. He was hurt, and continued to strive to please her, but he didn’t feel abject hopelessness or think about killing himself when she was angry. 45

45 An interesting further thought regarding this new signifier of “mean mother” is the dual meaning of mean: I was pointing to his mother’s capacity to be rejecting and hurtful, but another definition of “mean” is average. Was Ulysses acknowledgment of his mean/average mother a concession to the symbolic law, which among other things can be thought of as a collection of “facts of life” such as the impossibility of achieving the perfect love that is imagined to have been lost when the child left the bliss of the early mother-child dyad? To quote Joe Biden, himself liberally borrowing from Daniel Patrick Moynihan but adding his own hopeful spin, “There is something about the Irish that knows that to live is to be hurt, but we’re still not afraid to live” (O’Dowd, 2020). If we substitute symbolically castrated for Irish, this line captures the aspect of the law I see at play here. In treatment, Ulysses could know he had a mean mother and still live.

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I believe this was an example of his mother moving out of the imaginary and into the symbolic for Ulysses. The unbound pain he had known when he was rejected and hurt by her was replaced with language – “I have a mean mother.” By containing her with this signifier, he was freed from the pattern of repetition he had known. He could better navigate his world because the signification of “mean mother” acted as a map. He knew what might come and also that pain would pass. Also, Ulysses’s new speech had the impact of modulating his pain. By signifying traumatic experience that had been unrepresented, Ulysses was able to live his life without being pulled into an overwhelming state of shame and hopelessness, which is a step toward freedom. In this way, the symbolic order creates space for living and opens up the world.

When there is representation then reflection is possible, with reflection leading to stabilization of experience as well as the possibility of evolving perspectives, choices, and agency.

Caught in the System

The system of signification is not just something that a subject generates however, it is also a network within which the subject is born. The given meanings of the words that surround us have implications for how life is lived – this is a Lacanian insight into the nature of culture. In

Ulysses case, this was very apparent in how his romantic life played out during treatment.

Ulysses had insecure, stressful, and distressing relationships with the two women he was with during the time we worked together. His first close intimate relationship came during a relatively early part of the treatment and was very tumultuous. Ulysses worried constantly that his girlfriend preferred one of her ex-boyfriends and was crushed by any sign of her pulling back. Consequently, he tried to spend every moment possible with her, which did not solve his problem of insecurity. Furthermore, when feeling insecure, he expressed himself through sullen withdrawal alternating with aggressive questioning. He and his girlfriend argued frequently and

239 had dramatic breakups and reunions. Additionally, both began skipping school to spend time together, and there was a pregnancy scare. His girlfriend’s mother eventually forbade the relationship, which his girlfriend accepted, and the relationship ended.

He started a relationship with his second girlfriend about two years later and, while

Ulysses’s sensitivity to any signs of distance remained, he talked about these concerns in therapy rather than acting them out in the relationship. It became clear that he was deeply fearful of disappointing his girlfriend, leading him to seek to avoid conflict by doing whatever he thought she wanted (although it was mostly unclear what she actually wanted from him). And as with his previous girlfriend, there were fears that she would prefer other men, which Ulysses again sought to nullify through constant contact.

Soon his girlfriend began sleeping over Ulysses’s family’s apartment. His parents did not object but his girlfriend’s parents, also immigrants from Mexico like Ulysses’s but more religious and conservative, stopped speaking with her after she stayed out overnight, based on the presumption she was encouraging gossip against the family and breaking the normative prohibition of premarital sex they expected her to share, according to Ulysses. When Ulysses’s parents learned his girlfriend’s parents were upset, their solution was to invite her to live with them. They asked Ulysses if he loved his girlfriend, and when he said yes they said she could move in and treated it as a settled matter that she would. Ulysses later explained to me that this was how potential scandals were handled in his parent’s home community and that while he and his girlfriend would not immediately marry, this solution of her moving in with their parents’ consent was seen as a socially appropriate compromise.

As for Ulysses, this development left him stunned. He described it as something which happened outside of his control. In part, this was because he feared disappointing his girlfriend

240 or his parents, and so felt his only option was to agree when this solution was offered. In this moment, they were trying to be understanding and helpful parents, he felt, and it would be disrespectful not to accept their proposal. As for his girlfriend, he reasoned that showing any ambivalence would make her think he didn’t want to be with her (as it would for him were their positions reversed). Lastly, he also wanted her to live with him, for the security this implied to him and simply to spend more time with her.

What stands out is not whether Ulysses wanted his girlfriend to move in or not, but rather the question of whether he felt he had choice in the matter, and this question of agency was layered within the cultural frame. Ulysses was doing what a son and lover does as he understood these ideas. Likewise, his girlfriend’s parents were acting within a cultural frame. A daughter who sleeps over her boyfriend’s home is to be shunned. And so too with Ulysses parents – they acted to neutralize the shame generated by the situation by taking in his girlfriend, thus following a cultural script. The episode concluded when Ulysses and his parents made a formal visit to his girlfriend’s home. He described he and his girlfriend as spectators watching as the generation above them came to an agreement. His father even brought a symbolic gift to open the process.

The proffered resolution was accepted by his girlfriend’s parents and she began living with

Ulysses.

Reflecting on these events, I recall a strong sense of spectating having been conveyed by

Ulysses. He watched as the cultural script revealed a new course in his life. Furthermore, he indicated also perceiving his parents to be acting under the influence of symbolic order norms.

They knew “the old ways” from their own growing up, and while they did not seem to see anything wrong with Ulysses having his girlfriend sleep over, when it became an issue with his girlfriend’s parents, they followed the script. Ulysses was aware that his life was happening

241 without him making conscious agentic choices, hence there was a quality of unfreedom to this moment. At the same time, Ulysses acted on his own desires – his desires to be with his girlfriend, to feel secure in his relationship with his girlfriend, and to be a grateful son – and so he was an agent in the situation as well. Still his agency would have been enriched had there been dialog around what was happening, dialog which might have alerted Ulysses to his conflicts

(relational insecurity, sense of duty) rather than leaving them acted out concretely.

Soon after she moved in, Ulysses girlfriend became pregnant. Repeating his earlier pattern of choosing silence over speech and the risk of conflict or the displeasure of the other, he said he had feared that suggesting contraception would have disappointed her, and so had not broached the subject. Once his girlfriend was pregnant, Ulysses wanted to have the child, but he simultaneously described feeling becoming a father restricted his future and he linked having a child to stories of his parents giving up their dreams. Additionally, as he explored his feelings, he revealed his sense that having a baby was a path to relational security. Returning to the cultural code presented in linguistic systems, for Ulysses baby equaled together forever, and this was an attractive solution to his fear of being abandoned by his girlfriend. Overall, I consider this phase of my work with Ulysses to illustrate the power of the symbolic code present in language that is saturated by meaning through the cultural order and the family. These meanings are received from the social milieu leading to the possibility that inherited patterns may be acted out without awareness and even with awareness these cultural meanings and influences persist.

Interestingly, for Ulysses, it was (perceived) demands from his parents and his girlfriend that were felt as burdens, while the broader cultural influences (around sex, relationships, and parenthood) were accepted or ignored within this relational context. Returning to the idea that psychoanalysis uncovers questions of freedom, my work with Ulysses thus suggests that it is not

242 in culture alone that a narrative of oppression or freedom is enacted, but rather that the experience of freedom or its absence emerges through the interaction of the relational and the cultural dimensions.

What do you want and who are you?

Life kept moving forward for Ulysses. When the baby arrived, he reported that he felt connected to his new daughter. Insecurity in relationship with his girlfriend came up less in sessions and development of his identity in terms of work and place in the world was a dominant theme. By reflecting on this final period in my work with Ulysses, I will illustrate another way that the process of dialectization may open up new meaning for a patient.

As related earlier, Ulysses had been subject to his mother’s verbal and physical rage.

Later in his treatment, after the birth of his daughter, Ulysses returned to reflection on his relationship with his mother. This was prompted by the return of his older brother from college, whose presence stimulated recognition of the harsher treatment he had received relative to his more reserved brother. An elaboration of Ulysses place in the family was developed with

Ulysses speaking about being the extended family’s “black sheep.” He recalled “chismes”

(gossip) between his aunts about him being “envidioso” (envious; covetous). He also recalled being treated as a unique problem within the family after supposedly being rude to his grandmother and refusing to give up his bed to her when she visited. Later there was an incident in which he went to school with a knife in his backpack, after which he was talked about by the family as a criminal. Finally, he shared that he was viewed as a disappointment when he stopped going to school and again when he had a child at a young age. The picture he described experiencing was that of a destiny of maladjustment coming to fruition as his life progressed, and these reflections cast further light upon Ulysses sensitivity to shame and his aggressive reactions

243 to being talked down to. The anger of his childhood was coming back to bear on the present-day stand-ins for his past persecutors.

What is powerful to observe here and what develops my thesis is that as Ulysses verbalized these experiences and identified the words which wounded him, he developed a new relationship to these words. For example, with regard to the word criminal, after his position in the family had been spoken about in depth, he said “they said I was the criminal, but I can see that’s not me.” Through dialog he was able to step outside the story and think about it, hence stepping beyond whatever fixed vision of his life others unconsciously held. Furthermore, discussion of these experiences led him to recognize and appreciate those people who did not subject him to a circumscribed identity and life, such as an uncle (by marriage) whom he felt saw him outside the expected pattern in which Ulysses was an incorrigible problem. This uncle spoke with him understandingly after Ulysses had fought with a cousin who called him a loser, and he felt his uncle treated him as a person who had reacted badly to a hurtful insult, rather than putting

Ulysses in the box of “bad” and writing him off.

He also identified ways that his mother did believe in him and value him, such as appreciation for his work ethic, willingness to support his education were he to go back to school, and enjoyment of his company, which could co-exist with her flattening of Ulysses to a few pejorative characteristics (“out of control” “stubborn”) when angry and the present harsh rejection or past physical abuse which accompanied these judgments. Where once his mother’s rage led Ulysses to uncontained anxiety, he became able to talk these moments, articulating his sadness over having received such harsh treatment while his brother did not. Reflection here came in fits and starts, with Ulysses and I frequently touching the feelings and meanings connected to these moments and then returning to less anxiety-laden subjects such as his search

244 for better work. Still, there was enough contact and reflection to initiate a process of enriching

Ulysses representation of himself beyond the caricature of the incorrigible “criminal” with which he entered treatment.

This is what Lacan termed “dialectization.” By uncovering repressed associations and working through the meaning and feelings uncovered, the system of meaning in which the subject is embedded can be reorganized so that what had generated anxiety is seen differently and the subject is at the center and is taking responsibility for their story. It becomes possible to see how these stories belong to others and for the individual to see how they have chosen their roles in these stories, including enjoyment of their position. In this way, new perspectives on old stories allow for signifiers to be claimed in new ways, which Lacan termed “subjectification.”

For Ulysses, this meant he could question the idea of himself as a lost cause, as well as seeing ways that he had contributed to his own challenges and even enjoyed the position of aggressor or outlaw. In terms of conscious work together, this shift was incomplete. Ulysses grew in awareness of his inner life such that he would reflect rather than mindlessly lashing out and acting his part as the criminal, and shame over his aggression decreased as he came to understand it’s connection to defending his fragile sense of himself, but there was never a discussion of his identification with these conflictual signifiers. Still, he largely made peace with his standing in the family as the outspoken outsider and at work grew less reactive and less prone to interpreting all feedback as demeaning criticism, suggesting that he was beginning to subjectify a representation of himself leading to comfort with his position in the family and integration of previously denied (and enacted) aggression with more conscious appreciation for his own power. He was coming to know himself, and so was more assured and less battered

245 about by experiences at work and home that had previously caused him to tumble into self- critical states or reactively aggressive enactments.

Twice a Week Is Too Much

There is also an example of Lacan’s concept of traversing the fantasy which can be read into my work with Ulysses. Towards the end of treatment, he told me he wanted to spend more time with his girlfriend and daughter and preferred to meet once per week (we had been on a twice weekly schedule). I inquired and he said therapy did not seem to be doing as much but that his main reason was not wanting to give up his time for therapy. We talked about his frustration with therapy feeling repetitive and not leading him to a career path as he wished it would. In the end he chose to follow through on his wish to cut back.

Afterwards he said that he had feared I would be mad with him or would “give up on him” for not coming twice a week, but that it was what felt best to him. At the time, I wished I had found a way to talk about emotions and meanings connected with his wish to reduce our frequency of meeting beyond the concrete reasons and general sense of therapy growing repetitive, such as articulating his disappointment and what he wanted, making links with past disappointments, or addressing the possibility of anger present behind his coolly expressed

“frustration” and talking about what made expressing anger toward me dangerous. But when I think about the case from a Lacanian point of view, I can see traversing the fantasy in his action.

Lacan said that traversing the fantasy happens when the patient comes to put his or her own desire first. The fantasy that pleasing the analyst will solve their problems loses sway as the patient takes responsibility for their pleasure. Ulysses did this. He imagined that I was going to solve his difficulty finding a career path and other anxieties, stating explicitly that he spoke about

246 his problems to me because he believed his doing so would lead me to “fix [his] life.” But, in the end, he chose to spend time with his family over me.

There were more sessions after this, including discussion of his growing appreciation for his girlfriend’s inner life. A few months later, my time at the clinic where I was seeing him ended, and we said goodbye. Ulysses had not comprehensively probed the depths of his unconscious, but he had made the moves he needed to move forward. He had learned who he was and started to think for himself about what he wanted. As Ulysses said to me in a session where we were speaking about either his relationship with his parents or his relationship with his girlfriend, “it’s like either you live your life or life lives you.”

The End is the Beginning

“And the end of all our exploring. Will be to arrive where we started. And know the place for the first time.” – Little Gidding, T.S. Eliot

My argument in this chapter has been that Lacan’s technique allows for an individual to take possession of their signifiers and that by doing so a new freedom is introduced for the subject. Chapters three and four focused on the imaginary, claiming that symbolic castration introduces separation from the engulfing early dyad, permeated as it is with anxiety, and from the compulsive competition that defines the imaginary register. With words there is a shift from image to meaning, as well as an introduction of limits, and experience is thus regulated. An example of this process was seen in the shift that my patient Ulysses achieved when he was able to represent his mother’s rejecting behavior through the signifier of “mean mother.” However, language in itself is not liberatory. In fact, language very often controls the individual (and the larger society). In Ulysses case this was seen as well. The sequence of events leading up to his

247 girlfriend coming to live with him was driven in part by the signifiers governing courtship, sexuality, and family relations within his family, his girlfriend’s family, and the cultures they carried with them (and which carried them).

Here is where the power of taking possession of the signifier is seen. Through the process of dialectization, an individual may take a reflective position in relation to the signifiers in their life, thereby subjectifying the system their inhabit. Ulysses came to question whether he was in fact the “criminal” his extended family spoke of him to be. This is the birth of a new freedom.

Where there was previously inertia – the playing out of a story set in motion outside of Ulysses awareness – reflection introduces the possibility he would have a say in his life. Furthermore,

Lacanian theory presents a step beyond this as well. The analysand may come to know their story and reflect on it, and then it is possible for their unique desire to be articulated. Where there was a fantasy of satisfaction through satisfying the Other, directly pursuing what is desired may instead take precedence. This dramatically plays out in the dissolution of the transference that is the traversal of the fundamental fantasy. I believe Ulysses decision to reduce his frequency of sessions is an example of this process. I would have preferred more articulation of the feelings and fantasies fueling his decision but, even though he thought doing so would lead me to reject him, he put his desire first.

Said most simply, the Lacanian model works on the questions of “who am I?” and “what do I want?” Psychoanalytic treatment is a unique method through which these questions are investigated. And as the patient gains insight into these questions, connecting with their history and their desire as these dimensions are evoked, a different relation to the world emerges. In this new relation, agentic action is possible. Subjectification of desire is a type of freedom. By knowing some of what had shaped his life, Ulysses could shift from being subject to the desires

248 of others to being his own subject. The patient comes back to the beginning and owns it for the first time, to paraphrase Eliot. This pattern occurs across multiple analytic models but I have focused on Lacanian theory in making this point, because Lacan very precisely articulated the developments over the course of treatment leading to such freedom and the end goal of a new capacity for directly pursuing desire (or the drive depending on the era of his thinking).

All this being said, the capacity for agency I am speaking of is not some absolute state achieved and thereafter forever consciously present. Please do not think that I am arguing for the possibility of perfect insight or total control. I am speaking of the achievement of a general sense of driving one’s own life, emerging from recognizing the key signifiers and desire and taking responsibility for them, thereby letting go of the fundamental fantasy and conflict with the Other.

After this shift, the person is living their life and enjoying the fruits of their work, with much of mental life occurring unconsciously and remaining unanalyzed due to an absence of need for analysis. Life is too complex to deliberate and probe the unconscious in all situations. We would be paralyzed, and it is not necessary. Furthermore, the question of what else might be happening unconsciously in an action always remains, as does the question of what other interpretations are possible. Returning to the case discussed, was Ulysses choice to reduce his number of sessions an act of claiming agency or a repetition of an earlier flight to precocious concrete independence? I have made my case for this act as a prioritization of his desire, but its meaning is open to other interpretations which would depend on Ulysses associations and reflection as well as putting this act in the context of what follows in his life, and even then we are making constructions rather than ever dealing in the absolute. So, treatment addresses the most conflictual situations which bind the patient, interrogating the signifiers present and challenging them to address their relation to the Other. Hopefully this leads to greater subjective freedom in

249 the areas where they suffer and they leave us and live a more satisfying, less constricted life.

After they have enough of an answer to the questions of who they are and what they want, then they can move forward. Analysis does not enable the patient to choose the answer to either question, nor are these questions exhaustively answered, but it makes it possible to choose to ask the questions, to take a perspective on the answers discovered, and to act from this position.

Finally, I again want to emphasize that I am talking about a particular type of freedom – the freedom of mind. There are endless societal limitations of freedom that people face each day.

Who can do what is a highly political question. Consequently, one might find the particular freedom of psychoanalysis limited and narrow. I will not deny that it is incomplete, but I do not think incompleteness negates its worth. Through analysis people gain the capacity to better respond to the structural unfreedoms in our world. Through analysis a patient might come to the place of starting their life in a new way, more freely pursuing their desires. Where once the social system set the limits of potential action and the limits of thought, instead these limits and strictures, and the structures from which they flow, might be questioned, disputed, subverted, reformed, or blown up. How Lacan exercised authority has been criticized, but in word if not in deed, he challenged people to be their own authority and this is a potential starting place for the achievement of social freedoms, as well as being a liberatory experience for the individual analysand.

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CONCLUSION

A Multiplicity of Freedoms in Psychoanalysis:

Unifying Themes, Open Questions, and Final Thoughts

As I reflect on this dissertation and all the dimensions of freedom explored in the preceding chapters, I find myself returning to Freud’s papers on technique and his evolving conceptualization of transference. An ethos of freedom suffuses his technical concepts, which form key parts of the foundation that defines psychoanalysis, and so it is no surprise to me in retrospect that the concept of freedom recurs in psychoanalytic practice and theorizing.

For example, Freud’s fundamental rule is that of free association. He advises analysts to start off the treatment by instructing analysands to say whatever comes to mind. Their subsequent associations are (hypothetically) free because the analyst does not seek to control what the analysand says, only to comment upon it and ask questions. There are many caveats to the idea of “free” association, including the fact that the analysand is directed to produce it and that it is inevitably affected by the transference. But the starting point is the insight that the analysand would benefit from trying to speak freely and being supported in this.

There is also freedom in Freud’s attention to dreams. Freud called dreams the royal road to the unconscious, and by this he meant that dreams communicate the unconscious mind of the analysand to the analysand and the analyst. The unconscious mind may modify a dream to conceal objectionable wishes from consciousness, but these processes occur spontaneously, freely, rather than under conscious control. Dreams are pure objects that we find. Some people go as far as to desire to never dream because of the unpredictability of these visitations from the unconscious. As with free association, in elevating the dream as a central experience to be addressed in psychoanalysis, Freud is putting freedom at the center of the analytic process. I see

253 free speech and dreams as a call to freedom, as both experiences involve subversion of control and the unleashing of the new, unplanned, unexpected, and unruly.

This association of the new with freedom has been discussed by psychoanalyst and philosopher Julia Kristeva, in her speech “Psychoanalysis and Freedom,” where she says (1999):

[N]o other modern experience, apart from psychoanalysis, offers such a prospect for

recommencing psychic life, and thus, in a sense, life as such−in the opening up of choices

that secures the manifold capacity for relationships (liens). This version of freedom is

perhaps the most precious, and most serious, gift that psychoanalysis has given to

humanity. Since Augustine, and against the weight of what is called historical or biological

“destiny,” psychoanalysis alone is willing to take on–and sometimes even to win–this

wager on the possibility of a new beginning (p. 12).

Again, the concept of freedom is applied to the analytic enterprise, here linking psychoanalysis with recommencement of psychic life that has been frozen and the possibility of new choices.

And there is transference. While Freud initially viewed transference as an impediment to treatment, one aspect of his genius was the ongoing evolution of his theory, and he later came to see the development of a transference neurosis, that is the repetition of past conflicts in the relationship with the analyst, as the curative factor in psychoanalysis. Of this, Freud said

(1914/1958):

The main instrument, however, for curbing the patient's compulsion to repeat and for

turning it into a motive for remembering lies in the handling of the transference. We

render the compulsion harmless, and indeed useful, by giving it the right to assert itself

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in a definite field. We admit it into the transference as a playground in which it is

allowed to expand in almost complete freedom and in which it is expected to display to

us everything in the way of pathogenic instincts that is hidden in the patient's mind (p.

154).

Freud here says that the analysand must be free in psychoanalysis. Free to speak, free to dream, free to play out within the analytic frame the unconscious conflicts that have been repressed. His metaphor is the free playground; not the classroom, confessional, sanitorium or gymnasium.

Thus, I see freedom to be at the center of the psychoanalytical method that Freud developed. This strikes me as I conclude my dissertation because while I have had many insights regarding different manifestations of freedom produced in psychoanalysis and implicit on the theories of Freud, Winnicott, Lacan, and others, I still find defining the place of freedom in psychoanalysis a challenge. Freedom seems to resist definition. Definitions may be proposed, but there is always another nuance to add. Returning to Freud’s foundational premises of free association, interpretation of dreams, and openness to the unfolding of transference suggests to me that a central reason why freedom recurs in psychoanalysis is that psychoanalysis started from technical recommendations that prioritized free expression and relaxing of control. I have looked at theoretical aims and clinical cases to define the place of freedom, but it is also central to the analytic process. In the vernacular of the 21st century, “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature” (Carr,

2018).

Farewell Berlin

At the start of this project, it seemed essential to find a framework for conceptualizing freedom. The work of Isaiah Berlin stood out as a resource to draw from, given that his

255 presentation of freedom in the essay “Two Concepts of Liberty” is widely known, and that I felt his conceptions of negative and positive freedom captured important aspects of mental experience if extended to the life of the mind. I theorized negative freedom in the psychological sense to be the absence of impediments to free thought, and positive freedom to be the experience of vital, self-aware, self-determining subjectivity. In chapter 1, I explored how

Freud’s work could be seen to facilitate “negative freedom” through the overcoming of inhibitions against recognizing conflictual psychic content and, in chapter 2, I proposed that the emphasis on experience within the transference-countertransference that was described by Klein and modified and theorized further by Winnicott had the effect of promoting “positive freedom.”

By my third chapter however, the value of these distinctions was eroding. One Berlin

Wall fell in 1989, symbolizing the incipient reunification of East and West Germany, and another fell in 2020, reducing the significance attributed to the distinction between positive and negative freedom. I believe my discussion of Lacanian theory in chapters 3 through 5 shows that there is both a taking away of sources of inhibition and a solidification of the agentic subject that occurs in psychoanalytic treatment, and thus I came to speak of psychoanalytic freedom as an integrated, nuanced phenomenon, rather than “positive” or “negative”.

Hence, I now find myself most concerned with the particular freedoms highlighted in the cases that I have discussed and the process of developing freedom. There is value in the models of freedom employed in each chapter – that is freedom achieved through taking away inhibitions, freedom achieved through activating the inner life and making intersubjective links possible, and the freedom of knowing what is desired and pursuing it, regardless of the unchosen randomness that originated desire – but what is being treated in these cases and how the analysand gets from trapped to a new, subjectified beginning is what I take away from this project.

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Freedom is…

Each case I have discussed reveals an impediment to freedom and so, I believe that revisiting these cases provides useful illustration of what freedom is and how psychoanalysis promotes freedom. My first chapter discussed Freud’s Dora and “Rat Man” cases. Dora is sent to see Freud by her father, after he finds a suicide note she has written. In his work with her, Freud makes a series of interpretation which lead up to his claim that she is repressing her love for Herr

K, a friend of her family and husband of her father’s mistress, Frau K, because she fears her own sexual desire and anger at her family. Dora leaves treatment after this interpretation. Assessment of this case history has often focused on Freud’s lack of concern for the patriarchal exploitation

Dora was fighting against, and I concur with these readings, as well as seeing these dynamics playing out in Freud’s interpretative approach. He seems to tell Dora what is true, rather than listening to all of what she is telling him. Freud acknowledges this, in part, in his postscript which notes that he was not prepared to see Dora’s homosexual attachment to Frau K.

My discussion of the Dora case emphasizes that Freud’s technique at this stage prioritized developing consciousness of instinctual conflicts. His understanding of Dora’s case places flight from her sexual impulses at the center of her illness, so he seeks to compel her to look at what she finds so objectionable. In this conceptualization of neurosis, defenses are the chains that bind and consciousness breaks these chains, which in turn makes possible new responses to what had been denied and liberation from repetition. However, Freud’s promotion of the freedom to look was in conflict with preconceptions of Dora’s conflicts and Dora’s negative transference onto him. She acted out her need for freedom in her flight from treatment, further pointing to the importance of freedom within psychoanalysis. Had there been more

257 freedom for Dora within the analytic frame, this acting out of her reaction to Freud may have been precluded and further insight about her conflicts and needs could have come to light.

My discussion of Freud’s “Rat Man” case flowed out of my discussion of the Dora case.

Freud again aims to interpret the material present in the patient’s free associations in order to facilitate the patient’s freedom to look and integration into consciousness of defensively repressed impulses and memories. Freedom is central in this treatment, as the patient, Paul, is unable to consummate his love for a woman he desires due to conflicts around transgressing the supposed wishes of his (deceased) father. Freud interprets unconscious wishes in Paul’s words and actions, leading him to become aware of previously repressed anger toward his father for censuring Paul’s pursuit of sexual pleasure and fear of his father’s capacity for violent reaction.

Bringing these repressed conflicts and wishes to consciousness is understood by Freud to enable

Paul to find some way to act on his desire, freeing him to move forward in life where he had been frozen. Additionally, Freud’s method has evolved at this point and the analytic setting here functions as the “playground” described earlier. Paul has freedom of movement within the consulting room and freedom to express his anger at Freud (in his dreams and free associations), which I attribute in part to a greater leeway and fondness afforded Paul as a man in contrast to the knowing approach taken with Dora. This freedom afforded Paul proves fruitful in that Freud discerns from these actions the great anger toward his father and fear of retribution that Paul continues to carry in his unconscious. Freedom within the transference is thus seen to be another instance where freedom can be seen to be a key element in psychoanalysis.

From this appreciation for the place of free action within the transference, I turned to the work of Melanie Klein and then Donald Winnicott. Klein’s work was of great value in my growing argument for the importance of freedom within psychoanalysis because of the

258 understanding of the transference-countertransference situation that she developed. Where Freud focused on the transference as a source of information, Klein and those influenced by her focused on the value of experience within the transference. The analytic frame is presented as a situation that revives past conflicts in vivo, as Freud also described, with the working through of the emotions arising in relation to the analyst given priority. Illustration of this shift is seen in the work of Donald Winnicott, who emphasized the instinctual experiences of his patients within treatment as a source of enlivenment. Winnicott’s adult cases focus on the new feeling and new life found by patients given freedom to feel through the attunement of the analyst. Among other things, Winnicott generated the concept of “false self,” which describes the experience of patient’s whose spontaneity had been deadened due to a premature demand for compliance by the environment, specifically a demand for compliance presented by maternal depression.

According to Winnicott, many children faced with this dilemma will respond with a compliant façade, which seeks to sustain the mother and is a defense against the fear that acknowledging the caregiver’s mental state will result in annihilation. I see the false self as another example of psychoanalysis identifying a condition of impaired freedom, as well as seeing it to further develop the meaning of freedom through the implicit link between spontaneity and freedom made by Winnicott.

Additionally, Winnicott also introduced the concept of “object usage,” a developmental

(or treatment) experience through which movement out of compliance and into subject to subject relating becomes possible through what he called “destruction of the object.” Prior to object usage, despite feeling constrained in a position of compliance, Winnicott says (ironically) this compliance is part of a fantasy of control over the caregiver – something along the lines of “if I do what you want, then you must be what I want” (i.e. alive). Shedding this fantasy is thus an act

259 of destroying the internal representation of the caregiver. After this the subject will interact with the caregiver and others found in the external world, rather than the internal version which it sought to control through compliance, and the annihilation anxiety unconsciously pervading the false self position is alleviated. New freedom is born, and after this, between the discovery of spontaneity in the holding environment and the jettisoning of compliance which follows object use, Winnicott supposes that the individual will be able to pursue opportunities to enact wishes and fantasies and to act more spontaneously, let the cards fall where they may.

The case of Margaret Little contains many of these elements, showing the type of freedom Winnicott implicitly addresses, as well as questions raised by Winnicott’s theories.

Little was a British psychoanalyst who was treated by Winnicott and published an account of her treatment. She highlights the impact of Winnicott’s holding interpretations, which addressed concerns about annihilation dating to infancy and early childhood, her absence of a consolidated identity, and rejection of relatedness, and sees his non-invasive but empathic stance to have enabled her to get in touch with unexpressed pain and impulses and anger that had never been acknowledged. These experiences lead her to have a sense of herself, emerging from being in touch with inner life. Later, while psychiatrically hospitalized, she regresses to dependence upon the hospital environment (and transitional objects representing Winnicott). In this state, she becomes aggressive and breaks things in her room, but there is no retaliation and she sees that the environment “goes on being.” This is interpreted as an experience of object use, after which

Little reports that she was able to relate to the outside world as something separate from herself, freed from omnipotence through the experience of the world going on being despite her destructiveness.

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Little’s case shows freedom is the ability to act. This freedom can be blocked by internal deadness and compliance, but psychoanalysis creates conditions for finding vitality and spontaneity and for moving outside compliance (by placing the other outside omnipotence).

However, Winnicott’s work also raises the questions about the relationship between psychoanalysis, freedom, and responsibility to others. Little was reported to have remained grandiose after her work with Winnicott and his analysand Masud Khan, was noted to have broken basic ethical norms in his own analytic work (Hopkins, 1998). Winnicott suggests that awareness of the separate other is accompanied by empathic concern and guilt over damage recognized to have been done to the other (1963), but is this outcome inherent to the growth that occurs in psychoanalysis? And if it is not, what is it that allows callous aggression, grandiosity, and narcissism more generally to persist? I have suggested that neglect of envy and general avoidance of interpreting the negative by Winnicott are factors to consider in addressing these questions, and I see this area to be fertile ground for future theorizing and research.

Finally, there are the cases I have discussed from a Lacanian perspective and the aspects of freedom they reveal. I contend that Lacan captures the inescapability of the influence of culture on psychic life through his conceptualization of the symbolic order, which he indicates to overwrite and thus shape human experience. Furthermore, insights regarding freedom are also present in his theorization of the three registers (Imaginary, Symbolic, Real), his re-reading of the castration as the moment of the child’s accession to the symbolic order and its rules, and his concepts of “subjectification” and “traversal of the fantasy” which address an individual’s movement from expecting desire to be fulfilled for them to taking responsibility for desire and the course of their life, and pursuing desire directly, even in the face of opposition.

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Drawing on psychoanalyst Cormac Gallagher’s reading of the case of Little Hans, I have shown that Hans was set free from phobic anxiety through his experience of symbolic castration.

This case of Freud’s deals with a young boy’s fear of horses and other anxieties, which are found to be symptomatic representations binding unconscious anxiety over inadequacy, Oedipal rivalry, and feared loss of his mother. Lacanian theory explains these anxieties to be the result of functioning in the imaginary register, which is an unstable, image-focused dimension of experience. When functioning in this register, as young children do, there is oscillation between feelings of omnipotence and abjection, based on whether the person sees themself to be perfect and beloved or rejected. Lacan indicated the child to posit itself to be the phallus to the mother, that is the thing that completes her, and then to be threatened by the thought that it is something else, such as the father, that she desires. This is the place that Gallagher proposes Hans found himself – questioning his mother’s desire and the nature of the phallus.

Within this rubric then, Hans’s dream of castration – he dreams that a plumber unscrewed his “widdler” and replaced it with a new one – represents movement from the imaginary register to the symbolic. This new widdler is the symbolic widdler, the symbolic phallus, and by recognizing the phallus as something that one has (something taken or added) rather than something one is, it becomes possible for Hans to accept his position in the larger order of the world, rather than persisting in seeking dyadic union with his mother. Freud wrote that Hans subsequently came to take on the father role in games, pointing to identification with his father, and his phobias ceased. Gallagher summarizes this development, stating: “The only way out of the shattering sense of inadequacy [for Little Hans] is through castration with the promise of legitimate possession of his father’s place, in time” (1998, p. 124).

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This is a movement into freedom for Hans and for all who take the step of entering the symbolic. In the imaginary, life is a constant struggle for position as the phallus, the ideal perfect one. In contrast the symbolic order provides space to be. Critical theorist Todd McGowan highlights the importance of the symbolic order when he writes, “Because the symbol has the effect of eliminating enjoyment and carving out a neutral space in which subjects can interact, I do not experience the other’s enjoyment encroaching on me, as I would if I didn’t have an experience of the symbolic pact governing the interaction” (2004, p. 22). Additionally,

McGowan highlights that the symbolic order, the law, makes interaction possible the meanings present in language create an implicit pact between all who speak (2004, p. 22). Furthermore, in the symbolic there is the possibility of identification, rather than endemic rivalry, and the possibility for reflection, since words have meaning and can be interpreted.

Turning to the Incels, men who identify as “involuntary celibates” and who explain their romantic isolation using the entirely concrete, image-based argument that women prefer more muscular and attractive men while rejecting them for their supposed “genetic inferiority,” their experiences show the imaginary register without the symbolic to be a prison. These men are locked into the rivalry that defines the imaginary register, seeking to be the phallus and feeling hopeless and attacked when they are not miraculously chosen by the women they imagine would deliver them from their isolation. Without the possibility of identification or reflection, they live in defensive reaction and rage against the world, perplexed because they lack the social map that the symbolic could provide, nor do they have the relief that the symbolic and the explanations for the structures of society potentially gives the romantically frustrated. In some cases, routes to identification and engagement at the symbolic level are possible to these men, as in the Jack

Peterson example provided in my chapter 4, while in other cases psychosis (the foreclosure of

263 the symbolic) is likely present. These are the cases that have resulted in terroristic violence against women. My point in presenting the example of the Incel men is that there is a decided lack of freedom in their experience of the world. They are locked in a distorted, simplistic, confused, painful and infuriating vision of the world, constantly reacting and unable to reflect on the meaning of what they experience. Consequently, the liberatory impact of entry into the symbolic is highlighted. With the symbolic, there is the possibility of reflection and also choice, foundational capacities for feeling free that Lacanian theory draw attention toward.

The final case discussed in this dissertation was that of my own patient, Ulysses, whose experiences I believe highlight the manner in which culture, transmitted through language, can shape a life, and the liberatory effects of symbolizing traumatic experience, dialectizing signifiers which previously have provoked anxious, defensive reactions, and traversal of the fantasy. As described in chapter 5, culturally determined expectations, encoded in language, were central in the chain of events leading to Ulysses girlfriend moving in with his family. What stands out to me is that this sequence, which resulted in a major life change for Ulysses, was that he experienced it as cultural auto-pilot – he felt everyone was taking a role in a pre-written play, including himself. Consequently, this highlights to me that culture can contribute to constriction of freedom, in that decision can be made without reflective choice, and in the pressure to go along with established norms (and threat of retaliation for free acts). Furthermore, this pressure, an impediment to freedom, is greater in some situations than others, and was particularly strong for my patient who feared disappointing others and being rejected. In this way, the Lacanian emphasis on language and the symbolic structure it creates helps to explain the constraining force of culture.

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Also, Ulysses’s felt freedom expanded as he spoke about his life. One instance of this expansion of freedom came when his mother’s rejecting and harsh treatment of him was verbalized. Where previously he was crushed and filled with self-loathing when she was angry with him, after the representation of his mother’s meanness in words, he faced her episodes of anger and criticism with more resilience. By representing his relational trauma, it ceased to be relived. Furthermore, Ulysses also grew in freedom when he reflected upon master signifiers triggering overwhelming states of shame and anger, such as his extended family’s identification of him as “envidioso” and “criminal.” By placing these terms in a wider dialog and understanding the context from which they emerged, they ceased to be facts determining his fate, but instead could be seen as perspectives and objects to think about. Finally, at the end of his treatment, Ulysses made decisions suggesting that he was pursuing his own desire, rather than living within the desires of others, highlighting a final aspect of freedom present in the Lacanian psychoanalytic model – what Lacan called “traversal of the fantasy.” Lacan saw escaping from the demands of the Other, that is family and society, and the subjectification of desire (claiming desire; taking responsibility for desire) as an outcome of psychoanalysis, and I see a clear link here to the concept of freedom. In Ulysses case, this meant shifting from the belief that I was going to “fix” him to making choices that involved doing what he wanted, as well as thinking about what he wanted in life and acting on these desires outside the consulting room. Freedom is knowing what you want and pursuing it or, as Ulysses said, “you live your life or your life lives you.” This is not to say that desire is something we choose – we are thrown into the world and there is a randomness to desire – but while the content is given, it is possible to become free to choose to pursue our given desire.

Unifying Themes and Emergent Questions

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While there are differences between the conceptualizations of treatment in the Freudian,

Winnicottian, and Lacanian models of psychoanalysis, I also see overlapping insights regarding freedom. One recurrent idea is that verbal representation of experience promotes freedom. In

Freud’s model, the patient must recognize their repressed wishes and learn what in their history has produced the conflicts communicated in their symptoms in order to be cured. This occurs through speech, as the patient free associates and the analyst interprets. The Rat Man hypothetically could have done something different once conscious that he also hated his beloved father and that conflicts around anger, wishing to transgress his father’s rules, and the prospect of having a child underlie ambivalence about his love interest. Sadly, instead he died in

World War I. Representation is also central in Lacan’s work and here too symbolic representation is linked with freedom. Entry into the symbolic order (castration) leads to a capacity for metaphor and acceptance of the symbolic law. The law in turn creates freedom by setting limits and offering roles which protect the subject from the instability and oppressiveness of the imaginary described in my discussion of Little Hans and the Incels. While the rules inhibit, through the reflection that language enables there is the possibility of uncovering and following desire. Additionally, signification of trauma and dialectization of the master signifiers can lead a person to become “unstuck” where previously they were frozen by the ongoing return of overwhelming affects.

Aggression also emerged as a unifying theme, appearing as a facilitator of freedom in my discussion of both Winnicott’s work and the Lacanian school. In Winnicott’s writing, “object use” is the process by which a person moves from functioning on a compliance basis to dealing with the world as a distinct subject. According to Winnicott, this transition occurs when a person can “destroy” the other in fantasy and thereby act without regard for the other. In Lacan,

266 aggression appears in the act of “traversal of the fundamental fantasy” which is theorized as the end of a psychoanalysis. In this act, the analysand ceases to expect that the analyst will deliver what they desire, and instead desire is pursued directly. This turning away from the transference is an aggressive act, as in Winnicott it comes out of a disregard for what the analyst wants (in the

Lacanian model, the analyst always wants more analysis). Furthermore, it may come out of frustration with the analyst’s neutral, non-gratifying position, adding another degree of aggression to the act by which the analysand becomes free. Considering these commonalities between theories that I have reviewed, I believe that the link between aggression and freedom merits further study. This seems to be a key ingredient in the increased sense of freedom that psychoanalysis can produce for patients, and I suspect further review of the literature would reveal more links between aggression and freedom, as well as clarifying how destructiveness and sadism relate to aggression and freedom.

Additionally, I see acceptance of difference as a recurring theme across my discussion of

Klein, Winnicott, and Lacan. The stage of object use that Winnicott describes involves recognition of the separateness of the other. At this point the individual no longer needs to control the other and thereby is free to interact spontaneously. Little, for example, describes being free to show her creative work to Winnicott at the end of her treatment and to be open to his unique individual reactions, rather than needing to receive a certain reply from him (1985).

Winnicott’s overall developmental trajectory links the capacity for accepting difference with freedom to roam the world and engage with others as others, seeking to find what is wished for while also incorporating new experiences when the persons we encounter differ from the inner representations projected upon them.

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Furthermore, in Lacan’s work separation is identified as a central aim. The individual separates from the Other through analysis of their signifiers and through separation from the analyst, coming to “own” their experience rather than feeling dominated by the environment, family, and culture. Consequently, there is the possibility of decided desire, a commitment to seek what is attractive and to seek to be what might make one desirable, regardless of impediments. In this outcome, the individual is shaped by their experience and the symbolic system they inhabit, but also separate from it as they seek to live out their unique desire.

This theme of separation raises additional topics for future consideration. How have the arguments I have developed been impacted by my own Irish-Catholic background? To me the question of freedom is deeply important, as I have felt in my own life that cultural and family patterns can be experienced as inhibiting demands, while at the same time I am deeply drawn to the safety and connection that tradition and family can support. More broadly, I write as someone coming from a “Western” familial, educational, and religious milieu – this is my cultural inheritance. How would someone coming from a different tradition, raised in a separate cultural milieu, such as one influenced by Confucianism or Buddhism, perhaps where collectivism or integrative thinking is emphasized, see psychoanalysis, the value I have placed on freedom, and the various conceptualizations of freedom that I have explored?

Finally, in the year 2020, with Americans again challenged to address the state’s ongoing violence against black and brown people, the call for change coming from Black Lives Matter and likeminded voices, the racist dog-whistle politics of Donald Trump and increasingly visible fascist elements, and the COVID-19 pandemic’s laying bare of economic inequality and unequal access to education and health care, the question of material freedom and the need for further understanding of the relationship between the social, the cultural, and the subject are inescapable.

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I believe that the types of freedom discussed in this dissertation, freedom of thought and freedom to act in spite of negative reactions one’s action might provoke can have meaning for all people. In the many situations of oppression which exist in today’s world where differences in gender, race, class, religion, sexuality, group identity, and other markers of identity provoke violence, deprivation, and stigmatization, the processes I am describing have the potential to strengthen voices that might challenge the existing order. But this is a hypothetical claim and I wonder how thinkers coming from marginalized and oppressed communities would respond to the ideas I have presented.

Additionally, there is a need for further investigation of the interaction between social and cultural structures and meanings and the psyche. To see society and the individual as functioning independently or to separate intrapsychic development from social and cultural influence are gross oversimplifications, and through my discussion of Lacan’s work I have sought to show that the experiences of individuals are inseparable from the symbolic system within which they live, as well as to show that reflection on key signifiers may lead to challenging of the social order. But there is undeniably much more to be said. Past and recent scholarship on the functioning of race, for example, has explored and theorized on the influence of white supremacist racism on the subjectivity of all people, its perpetuation of the traumatization of black individuals and other people of color, and its preservation of a racialized social hierarchy (Fanon, 1952/2008; Gump, 2010). Likewise, there are vast literatures on the social construction of gender, sexuality, and class, and how the formation of the psyche is affected by these contexts, as well as how individuals and groups challenge prevailing norms.

These vital investigations into the power of social and cultural forces upon human experience raise essential questions regarding the meaning of freedom, its value, and what my claims

269 regarding psychoanalytic thinking and clinical practice might add to existing discussions or where they might be challenged. Thus, the question of the interaction between the freedoms produced in psychoanalysis that I have discussed and material and political conditions remains to be explored, and much remains to be said with regard to the question of how the social climate affects the practice of psychoanalysis and the outcomes it aims for and produces.

In Closing

The metaphor of having put more on my plate than I could eat comes to mind as I conclude. “Freedom” was an immensely attractive topic, for personal reasons relating to my own struggles with the issue of compliance and resistance to the Other, and because I see liberation as a theme running through much of the psychoanalytic discourse. To address all of the intricacies of this massive topic was impossible, and choices had to be made along the way. I turned away from philosophical discussions of freedom because my focus ultimately is clinical, but much remains to be explored here. I also did not take the path of integrating theory, historical examples, and ongoing situations in which racial oppression, economic exploitation, colonialism, patriarchy, heteronormative hegemony, and other instances of domination and diminution keep individuals and groups marginalized, suffering, and denied self-determination. These are vital concerns when discussing freedom and an area for future research and thought should I continue my investigation of freedom in psychoanalysis. You could say that I had to put back some of what I had taken from the buffet and, even then, my friends and family can attest that the portion

I kept still caused some bellyaches.

Nonetheless, I did eventually digest my rich meal, and I believe my work produced valuable insights regarding the interaction of psychoanalysis and freedom. The recurrence of themes of liberation and new, more open beginnings from which an individual may pursue what

270 they wish for rather than feeling trapped is important. Additionally, there is a recurrence of the elevation of freedom within the analytic frame and deployment of techniques that promote free expression, especially expression of the unconscious. As patients begin to reflect and to understand what has oppressed them, internal and external, and as they begin to be driven by internal experience, emotions, instincts, wishes, fantasies, and desires, they feel empowered to be the authors of their own lives rather than living in a given and unsatisfying story, and they feel enlivened by contact with the vitality of the unconscious.

These outcomes are in Freud, Klein, Winnicott, and Lacan, and I see these outcomes as valuable targets to keep in mind for all who treat those who suffer. In my own practice, I aim more than ever to let go of omnipotent control and the idea of what might be best for patients and to trust the unfolding of the unconscious, a free agent that the analytic frame encourages and which, if allowed the space needed, will lead to patients expressing desires and overcoming inhibitions that have previously trapped them in repetition of the past. This ethos of not controlling the other is my final thought.

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