Ontological psychoanalysis

Вышел в свет выпуск №14 Антологии российской психотерапии и психологии — Антология всемирной психотерапии. Выпуск посвящен Второму межконтинентальному экстерриториальному конгрессу «Психотерапия без границ: Дети. Семья. Общество. Будущее» (31 октября — 4 ноября 2024, Москва и онлайн), на английском языке. Ниже прикреплена моя статья: Uglev S. L., ONTOLOGICAL PSYCHOANALYSIS (с. 162).

Annotation

Ontological psychoanalysis is a concept that pays attention to the ontological character of such parameters as the Other, time, space, causality, intersubjectivity, and interpretation. The basic idea of ontoanalysis is an idea of a phenomenon in the context of phenomenological distinction, which means a phenomenon that is unrelated to its content and is the cause of itself. Reference to this phenomenon, which is apsychological, is possible only through amechania, or inactivity. In this case, time can be ontologically considered as a special event in the conscious life, with space as a place that gives birth to a special event as truth and meaning, and causality as an excluded attribute for analysis, a sign of the appeared possibility. Intersubjectivity as the «transcendental We» or the human capacity to prolong a thought, even one begun hundreds of years ago; interpretation as induction. The analyst, or Other, as the creator of a particular text in a wide sense, including silence, inducting an engagement with an equivalent and witnessing such an engagement.

Аннотация

Онтологический психоанализ — концепт, обращающий внимание на онтологический характер таких параметров, как Другой, время, пространство, причинность, интерсубъективность, интерпретация. Основной идеей онтоанализа является идея феномена в контексте феноменологического различения, то есть феномена, не связанного со своим содержанием и являющимся причиной самого себя. Обращение к данному феномену, апсихологичного по существу, возможно лишь посредством амехании, или недеяния. В этом случае время можно онтологически рассматривать как особое событие жизни сознания, пространство — как место, рождающее особое событие как истину и смысл, причинность как исключённый для анализа атрибут, указатель на появившуюся возможность. Интерсубъективность как «трансцендентальное Мы»; интерпретацию как индукцию. Аналитик, или Другой, как создатель особого текста в широком смысле, включая молчание, индуцирующего встречу с эквивалентом и свидетель таковой встречи.

This article deals with a concept called «ontological psychoanalysis» or «ontoanalysis» for short. Ontological psychoanalysis simultaneously takes into account the ontological character of parameters such as time, space, causality, the Other, and intersubjectivity, expanding analytic interaction. Therefore, it assumes that the ordinary domestic time allotted within the analytic setting, the space of the psychoanalytic office, and even the relationship of life events of the analysand in time have a completely different, ontological character that cannot be disregarded.

In a letter to the Berlin physician Wilhelm Fliess and later in his The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, when discussing superstition and the «mythological worldview» Freud first uses the term «metapsychology» where μετά can be translated as «between, after, outside, through» a transition to something else. Introduction of this term itself means not only the emergence of a new discipline, psychoanalysis, but also the discovery of its basic mechanism, which exists outside psychology, that is, in fact, apsychological.

It should be noted that the term «ontological psychoanalysis» can rarely be found as a clearly defined direction, for example, within any psychoanalytic association. At the same time, the term «ontoanalysis» can be found in some works by foreign authors as a synonym for Daseinsanalysis

(in translation, for example, by Jordan Sher), while the similar term «ontopsychology», associated with the Italian theologian and sociologist Antonio Meneghetti, has a scandalous coloring and is almost not widespread in Russia. The use of the term «ontoanalysis» for the translation of L. von Binswanger’s existential analysis or even V. Frankl’s logotherapy can be found on the web.

Thomas Ogden expressed it quite clearly when he spoke of using the term «ontological psychoanalysis» to describe that dimension of psychoanalysis in which the analyst’s main task is to facilitate the patient’s attempts to become himself[1].

If we turn immediately to the essence of ontological psychoanalysis, it can be captured by the concept of «phenomenological distinction.» The very existence of the concept in a broad sense implies that the content of a phenomenon may or may not be related to the «wrapping» of the phenomenon itself, when the phenomenon is just a pretext, a wrapping of something else entirely. For example, when I don’t really like my neighbor, there is a reason for it: he once stepped on my foot and didn’t apologize. Either when the pleasant feelings while watching a retro TV series arise because of events in my childhood, in when watching it represented a special occasion. For example, at exactly 8 p.m. the whole family would sit down in front of the TV screen and watch Santa Barbara or Just Mary. There is always a cause here, and it is often the influence of the concomitant causes of events that the psychoanalyst interprets in the analytic session.

However, a phenomenon can also be unrelated to its content, i.e. it cannot be mentally developed, if one is consistent and carries out eidetic reduction to the end. In his famous work Psychological Topology of the Way the famous Soviet and Russian philosopher M. K. Mamardashvili writes: «And this is where all the roots of the complex phenomenological abstraction are laid (I have partially spoken about it), which requires us to grasp the existence of an impression as different from its own content. Why does this need to be done? For one simple reason: the content always contains our experience of that content, and our experience of any content always has as its element the idea of the cause of that content or impression. And reasons contain what Husserl already called preconditions, assumptions. Assumptions about how the objective world works. And these assumptions must be subjected to reduction… Thus, eidetic reduction is the operation by which we break or suspend the screen that exists in us. We suspend the representation, understanding that the objects — as the causes that caused in me those or other states, there is a screen between us and the world … Phenomenon is that (I am now a complex phrase, or rather, not complex, but containing, so to speak, the pronoun illegitimately construct) that shows itself in itself»[2].

The identification of this «‘It shows itself’ in conjunction with the absence of an original objective cause is the difficulty for the sake of which the whole methodology of work is changed. This concerns the causes of what we seem to have known and understood for a long time: separation anxiety, relationship dependency, burnout and grief. If in the classical version we have as a basis a theory and some description of work in similar, though not identical, cases, here the analyst has lost all the ground on which he could rely. For any similar case will always be different from ours, any familiar interpretation will always be wrong, and the theories we know about it will always be false. For when abstraction appears in psychology, psychology is no longer psychology. Because psychology is always about the concrete. Perhaps this is what W. Bion meant when he wrote that a psychoanalyst has no right to practice theory in his office, and what J. Lacan meant when he wrote about the refusal to know, to desire, to understand his patient. For, in fact, all the analyst has in this case is a situation of indeterminacy as to when this or that phenomenon will finally manifest itself, since both the analyst and the analysand lack any possibilities not only to bring such a moment closer, but also to prolong its action arbitrarily. This situation of uncertainty, of being in this state, can be characterized as an aporia or, in the ultimate sense, an antinomy, and the way of its resolution as amechania, or non-action.

The telos, the entelechy, the fullness of realization in nature and technology are surrounded by the halo of amechania[3]. Here again it is worth returning to this strange thought of V. V. Bibikhin in chapters 10-12 of The Forest about completeness. A woman does not need a man because of the seed, for genetic diversity. Nature invented parthenogenesis a very long time ago — it is even strange that science has not yet reached the very simple inventions that allow a woman to get pregnant and give birth without a man. Completeness, the entry of life, eidos — all in the description of the life of chickens, horses, bees, mollusks, dolphins: «It is important only not to rest on the criticism of Aristotle, who thinks that the skid is an unfertilized egg, but to think about the status of the inanimate animated, i.e. means the understanding of the living as real, self-moving and able to continue through the birth of an automaton. He proposes this category of the non-living being animated, i.e. life that has not entered into form, eidos.»[4]. Or in the same place, «the feminine brings everything, but in such a way that it is not everything, it does not get fullness.»

Thus, completeness, the masculine is not a genetic addition, but a bringing to completeness. Even now the article headlines are disturbing: «to the child born, all the traits of a woman’s previous sexual partners are passed on» — also a trace of Aristotle, by the way. «We have already realized that the ideal, the eidetic, the historical, the masculine gives to matter, the mother, the feminine only an elusive something that Akhutin calls, in relation to the Aristotelian eidos, «the final touch»: in this way the painter completes the painting in an incomprehensible way, with an elusive movement. Strange to say, matter (both the matter of the painting and biological matter) has everything, but without completeness. Completeness then is not everything, or it is everything in another sense, just as we say everything in opposite senses: «‘That’s it, no more’; ‘That’s it, enough is enough'»[5].

But doesn’t the analyst play the same role in bringing the analysand himself to fullness, to wholeness, without actually changing anything, just adding a subtle «finishing touch»? Without interfering in the mental space, without imposing his opinion, without applying techniques — just dropping a word in distracted listening? It is true that in this sense the analyst himself must be filled, that is, in the psychoanalytic interpretation, undergo his own long analysis. He must be the Other ontologically. It is amusing that in a sense we can say that the analyst is present in the life of the analyzand. It is true, however, that it is the word «presence» that one may immediately grasp: it is by the word «presence» that the analyst is present in the life of the analyzer. В. V. Bibikhin very accurately translated one of Heidegger’s fundamental ontological concepts — Da-Sein, «here-being», «the person who is here» (the latter translation belongs to R. May).

But let us return to amechania’s concept. «We are seized by an external force» — wrote I. Yalom in his work Explaining sex differences in existential isolation research. But by what kind of force? » Freud pays little attention to the relationship between sex and amechania, and this is an important aspect of it. Freud was half asleep when he finished his book on sleep. Sleep is his way into the unconscious. Where the unconscious works, it turns out to be the realm of the displaced precisely sex is not accidental, the impregnability of sex and the unconscious are one and the same, they are one and the same in that they are a filter, a wall of mesmerization: sex as a knot, a key moment, a ‘decisive’ (letting go, dissolving, when the genus risks throwing itself into full automaticity) step (becoming knowingly unconscious) — this is the ‘unconscious’ in the first place.»[6]. Sex is the thing that is closest to amechania, the automaton. In a way, this is what can be said of the dance or combat of the Shaolin monks, «The enemy can only be known in combat.» Why in combat? Because there is no time there for pretense, artificiality, foreignness. One delay on such and the battle will be lost.

It is especially worth noting the concept of insight in an ontological way, contrary to the widespread view of it as a sign or means of treatment, disputes about the nature of which still arise (F. Alexander, T. French; E. Kris). Insight is not just an «insight» that is «pushed» by the analyst, who already has knowledge, by any means necessary, but an ontological event of the same nature as, say, love, morality, freedom, or conscience. In other words, the insight is either there (accomplished, established in its own sense, allowing no other interpretations) or it is not, even if it seems to have occurred, for example, after a convincing analytic interpretation. In the second instance, even if the analysand’s external agreement with the analyst’s «authoritative opinion» is apparent, it is possible to assume that the insight will either not cause analytic change, or that there will be a subsequent backtracking and rethinking of such a proposed interpretation. Insight, to paraphrase M. Bulgakov’s words from The Master and Margarita, is never «second fresh», only first fresh. Insight in its own essence is a real, true idea, held in a certain structure and in the structure itself, a pulling together from various points of the packed experiences of consciousness, from which no meaning has been extracted. The Descartesian problem of apparentness, accompanied by joy as a special attribute. So here we are essentially talking about the being of thought.

This brings us again to the problem of conscious and unconscious, logos and mythos. Analysis here is not the ruthless dissection of the unconscious and bringing it into the light, into the plane of consciousness. Rather, analysis is a wandering between the two poles of the conscious and unconscious, like a man wandering through forest paths. Each sphere must stay in charge of itself; analysis in its limit is not reduced to the total interpretation and annihilation of the unconscious. It is in this wandering that fundamentally important questions about being are interrogated, updating and enriching our understanding. Analysis is mythopoetics; if we denote the conscious and unconscious as logical and mythological, the logos as «the collection of all that is relevant» and the mythological-sacral, we can find in analytic interaction a revelation of myth, a wonder and discovery of its beauty, its hiddenness, rather than a technical verbalization for therapeutic effect.

At the same time, interpreting is not at all a commentary of the analyst backed by his own experience. In some ways, this issue echoes the well-known problem of text, reader and writer, and is akin to Bakhtin’s idea that there is no author without a reader, just as there is no reader without an author. The problem of interpretation in psychoanalysis is the problem of creating a text, namely the text through which we read an event. Conversely, the text of the interpreted is something within which the person’s personality is born, the personality of the one who creates this text. This can be put another way: it is impossible to transmit understanding, but it is possible to induce understanding. Thus, the conventional «technique» for further change, without the analyst bringing something of his own, is induction, expressed in analyzing the analyst’s inner thoughts about himself, about the analysand, about what is going on between them, and, if necessary, describing what the analysand has said, rather than interpretation in the usual sense.

Perhaps the last statement requires clarification. It is well known that a key feature of psychoanalysis is the abandonment of the instance of the self, that is, its disruption rather than its strengthening, the analyst’s transition into an «unconscious» mode of operation, which opens the same for the analysand[7]. In essence, the analyst reacts to an event with content not comprehended in advance; his art consists in producing (producere — to produce, to unfold something to the fullness of its being) in the session such simple and sometimes surprising thoughts that will later appear (fecundity — an entity that shows itself not as it is, the opposite of phenomenon) as incomprehensible and commonplace. This cannot be accomplished rationally or by logical reasoning, except in the one and only case where the necessity for such an act is caused by unconscious processes. Whereas in psychoanalytical psychotherapy the points of reference are the use of one of the therapeutic technologies, in psychoanalysis the point of reference is the joint unconscious product of the analyst and the analysand, which will lead the latter to the point of entry into the ongoing act. The condition for such a product is the existence of an «analytic third»[8] or «psychological chimera»[9] (we can witness similar concepts in Baranger[10] and Green[11]).

We also cannot forget to dwell on such ontological parameters as time and space. Even from our own experience we know that time in the analyst’s office lasts somehow differently. The session flies by like a single moment, but for some reason it lasts unbearably long. Moreover, there is also something wrong with the space of an analyst’s office: it is different for each analyst. For some people, the analytical office is a big clock and flowers on the window, for some — a huge cupboard with books, for others — a gray wall and an old, shabby door. But, on the other hand, the study is a kind of condensed time, consisting of beads of meetings with one’s own consciousness, strung on the thread of everyday life — beads that are truly the time of one’s own life. Speaking in the strict, formal language of German classics such as M. Heidegger, we are talking about «authentic» and «non-authentic» time. Psychoanalysis is a time of «gathering stones», because the main human aspiration is to be realized, to come true. And thinking is included in this process.

To conclude the discussion of ontological parameters, we should say that strict adherence to the setting is certainly necessary for some analysands. But on the other hand, by making the setting a bureaucracy, by demanding from all analysands strict adherence to it under the threat of «resistance analysis», payment for missed sessions, personal inconvenience, the analyst makes the analysis in a sense dead. Since such a bureaucracy, as a programmatic, mechanical automaton, has no lapses into amechania, and is thus a disregard for the ultimate ethical purpose and substance of human life.

Therefore, the process of ontological psychoanalysis can be called «unfolding» rather than «training» «education» «inclination» «empathy» and so on. The analyst does not transmit his knowledge and experience; he contributes to the formation of the «equivalent» acquired in the process of his own analysis by cultivating the gisements profonds d’un sol mental, the «deposits of the psychic soil» of the analysand, being only a guide in the world of his analytic journey. The wholeness of the analyst echoes the theme of holiness, all the same things that could be said in a different way. «The consecration to the content of the conference adds nothing to the content of the conference, the sanctification of an apartment other than the importation of furniture into it, the apartment adds nothing to the content of the conference.»[12] This is a priestly function — just as the priest does not work miracles by his own power, so the analyst does not by his own power — he only does something that he allows to occur on his own, without any help from him, the analyst is the «shepherd of being». And the analytic, just like the priest, is a witness, a witness of confession and of accomplished changes, an oracle, a narrator and a poet of the being of thought.

References

1. Thomas H. Ogden (2019) Ontological Psychoanalysis or «What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?», The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 88:4, 661-684

2. Mamardashvili M. K. Psikhologicheskaia topologiia puti [Psychological Topology of the Path]. — M.: Merab Mamardashvili Foundation, 2014. С. 286

3. V. Bibikhin. Les (hyle) [The Forest (Hyle)]. SPb.: Vladimir Dal, 2024. С. 107

4. Ibid. С. 181

5. Ibid. С. 180

6. Ibid. С. 110 — 111

7. Bazarov V. A. Ot Freida k Lakanu: psikhoanaliz kak askeza [From Freud to Lacan: Psychoanalysis as Ascesis]. Retrieved from: https://youtu.be/oGGf5DE0R2g. Date: January 18, 2023.

8. Thomas Ogden. Analiticheskii tretii: rabotaia s intersub»ektivnymi klinicheskimi faktami [The analytic third: working with intersubjective clinical facts]. Retrieved from: https://vk.com/@semjonuglev-tomas-ogden-analiticheskii-tretii-rabotaya-s-intersubektivny. Date: July 02, 2023.

9. Michel de M’Huzan. Kontrtransfer i paradoksal’naia Sistema [Countertransference and the paradoxical system]. Retrieved from: https://vk.com/@semjonuglev-mishel-de-muzan-kontrtransfer-i-paradoksalnaya-sistema. Date: July 30, 2023.

10. Baranger, M. (1993). The mind of the analyst: from listening to interpretation. Internation al Journal of PsychoAnalysis 74: 15-24.

11. Green, A. (1975). The analyst, symbolisation and absence in the analytic setting (On Changes in analytic practice and analytic experience). International Journal of PsychoAnalysis 56: 1-22.

12. V. Bibikhin. Les (hyle) [The Forest (Hyle)]. SPb.: Vladimir Dal, 2024. С. 210.