The medical paradigm crosses us so much and is so involved in certain ways of thinking and conceiving some scenes, that it is at times overwhelming. It is in this key that many times it is thought that the “high” could be applied to an analysis. Hence also the prejudices that are usually spilled over psychoanalysis: that they are eternalized because analysts they do not discharge, because they manipulate and because they exercise the power to retain patients. More or less like this, since always, criticisms based on a practice as diverse as it is impossible to define have been poured on psychoanalysis -beyond the pretense of uniformity promoted by each of the different psychoanalytic institutions, “the” psychoanalysis does not exist-. I am referring strictly to the notion of discharge, a notion that carries with it an idea of health, illness and cure. And it is that, as Jorge Jinkis points out, “many times people educated by psychiatry and silenced by pharmacology resort to analysis”. It is difficult, continues the author, “to advance a step without dismantling that discourse”. In an analysis, then, it is not about curing because, Jinkis continues, “difficulties (inhibition, anguish, symptom) are not diseases”. On the other hand, because psychoanalysis “does not pretend to suppress any conflict” and because its way of conceiving symptoms is unprecedented and radically different from how medicine conceives them; the symptoms may be solutions to a certain sorrow. Psychoanalysis, then, “barely seeks to mitigate the cost of these solutions without normalizing them (…) recognizing in that singularity the limits of its action.” The suffering inherent to the fact of being alive cannot, according to Jinkis, be reduced and ordered in degrees of health and disease. And it is that “We talk about the danger of being alive”, as Fito Páez says or, in the words of Clarice Lispector: “And then comes the helplessness of being alive”.
It is for all these reasons that discharge is not a purpose, much less a purpose that must be prescribed by the analyst. This does not mean that endings cannot be thought of or, strictly speaking, how analyzes end. Beyond the different conceptions, theorizations, ideals and devices invented to think about what the end of an analysis is about, the truth is that, as Freud said, termination is a practical matter: “I do not intend to assert that the analysis as such is a work without conclusion. However one formulates this question in theory, the termination of an analysis is, I think, a practical matter. Every experienced analyst will be able to remember a series of cases in which he said goodbye to the patient forever «rebus bene gestis»”, something like “everything went well”. Along the same lines, Lacan said that an analysis ends when the analysand does not come any more. The different endings are, effectively, a matter made act and not a prescription, an authorization or a permission granted by the analyst as if he were a doctor. I was always struck by the complaint of those who wait for the other person to discharge them. If that is expected of someone, it is that they did not make that someone fall, it is that a guarantee is still expected from the other to make a decision. If, as Allouch says, “to conclude an analysis is to throw out the psychoanalyst who has fallen”, there is nothing that has concluded in the one who holds the other in a place of power. If an analysis has effects, it will no longer be necessary to request permission to leave, authorization will no longer be expected, nor will a common agreement be sought to conclude. Of course there must be those analysts who are not willing to fall, those who cling to the armchair, in the same way that they cling to the little places of power. But that’s another thing. Leaving an analysis, either because it is considered finished, or because something is no longer working, or because the transfer fell through, does not require authorization. And it is that having analyzed is also to stop asking the other for authorization, it is to stop giving explanations, it is to act and be able to stop the effects. Is it perhaps the step towards what is not known, it is a leap towards the exercise of a freedom that is not without vertigo. The way out of the analysis, for Allouch, is found -it is a finding- in a different place from the Freudian one: love and work; it is not about finding well-being but rather learning that, as Lacan said, “The Other is in no way a place of happiness”. And speaking of happiness, Lacan also said that an analysis does not have to be taken very far, “when the analysand thinks that he is happy to live, it is enough”. And he says it on North American soil, soil on which the obligation of well-being and happiness is at stake. That’s why he says “happy to live” and not “live happy”. And it is that an analysis does not have any objective, although it has, as Jinkis says, “a direction: as long as it is not previously determined, it is something that, in an analysis, can be discovered”.
I was always struck by the complaint of those who wait for the other person to discharge them. If that is expected of someone, it is that they did not make that someone fall, it is that a guarantee is still expected from the other to make a decision.
The transfer is a between two, so that, in the outcomes of an analysis, the analyst is also involved. Perhaps it will be a question of accompanying everyone who has taken that step to the door, it will be a question of enduring being a waste, of becoming the support of it’s. If there is an ethic in her position, she also encrypts herself there, in being available also to be disposed of in any of the possible ways. Not pretending to eternalize is also a way of analytic exercise. Because it is a question, also for the analyst, of not being, as Lacan says, a strong I, that which is a good employee.
Allouch says that agreeing to the fact that there are no guarantees, agreeing to the fact that the Other does not exist as a guarantor, is not easy: “It is about an exit, the closure of a subjective journey that, for some, emerges from the analysis, that for others it occurs by other means and that, for others, it simply does not occur”.
Leaving an analysis, ending it, is, many times, like leaving a love, like ending a love. How is it done? I do not know.
false territory, Irene Gruss
It stopped burning. not the log
but the momentum
the win, away,
there.
I don’t get there. There isn’t there.
What matters is that it stopped burning.
A.K.
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