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4.42 AVERAGE
4.42 AVERAGE
informative
medium-paced
Great introduction to the practical aspects of Freudian psychoanalysis. Need to read his book on Lacan next.
Bruce Fink’s book is a well overdue introduction to clinically-focused psychoanalysis, in a time where mainstream psychology seems to have abandoned its Freudian roots, or at least claims to have done so. For years psychoanalysis has helped provide a voice to suffering (to borrow Mark Fisher’s phrase). Yet, in the modern day the Anglophone world seems to have pushed psychoanalysis into Comparative Literature departments, some Social Science departments, and I’ve even seen psychoanalysis used in Archaeology and Ancient History. Basically, psychoanalysis gets more love in everywhere but its own field – Psychology. Even when it is taken seriously, clinically it seems to be only available for the bourgeois, the elder generation of the metropolitan elite in London and Manchester. Meanwhile, us proletarian folk are much more at home with the NHS disaster therapy called Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, or CBT as it’s often referred to.
So, why read a book on clinical psychoanalysis? Because, unlike the cynical psychiatrists may have you believe, psychoanalysis still has a great deal of application in the modern day. It is still practiced around the world, and even those therapists who reject it, ultimately have their methodological underpinnings rooted in the therapy pioneered by Sigmund Freud.
Bruce Fink, a leading psychoanalyst, and even more importantly a Lacanian psychoanalyst, the type who are known for unreadable jargon as well as being laughably inward looking and cultish, manages to provide a simplistic explanation of the methods and theory behind Freudian therapy. Almost no background is required in Psychology, or the Social Sciences for this book, as Fink takes the reader through case studies, and graphs explaining how and why Psychoanalysis works. He also takes a very important critique of modern psychiatry, which is too quick to psychopathologise and subject people to categorisation. One need only look at the enormous leaps in the DSM to see that mental illnesses have been constructed in a very questionable manner, mostly seen over by a bureaucracy, none of which are analysts and a large majority of the bureaucracy have massive incentives from drug companies to diagnose the nation and sell cures to prospective patients for their newfound illnesses.
Below, I’ve offered a brief summary of the copious amount of notes I’ve made for anybody who is interested. I can only recommend anybody with even a marginal interest in Psychology, the Social Sciences, Literary Criticism or Freud, read it. My email exchange with Bruce Fink and discussions with psychoanalysts, as well as my reading of psychoanalysis has helped inform some of the notes, but the book as a whole is pretty self-contained.
Introduction – Fink introduces himself as a psychoanalyst with decades of practices, decades of teaching, and seeks to give a quick overview of the book’s purpose, and arguments in favour of the scientificity of psychoanalysis.
Chapter 1 – In ‘Tracing a Symptom Back to its Origin’ Fink explores how repressed memories become pathogenic and become part of the signifying chain in our unconscious. M1/M2-M3-M4 Memory 1 here is repressed ‘/’ due to its traumatic phenomenology it produces. Fink here offers both a simplified Lacanian terming of symptomology (which he deems as much more useful and sophisticated) referencing the signifier/signified relationship, but he is careful as to not push the reader away from the orthodox Freudian framing of symptomology.
Chapter 2 – ‘The Unconscious is the Exact Opposite of the Conscious’ demonstrates how speech and symptoms elicit the pathogenic memory, in a hidden way. One might imagine the Unconscious here as a thing in itself, with the ‘/’ barrier representing repression. Now, the analysts job is to undue the ‘/’ repression, to get at the M1 memory, by decoding speech, parapraxes and symptomology. Examples of this may be disguising unconscious thoughts, or asserting things like “I don’t mean to be rude but…” or “my childhood was great!”. Defence mechanisms often get in the way, but Fink offers clear advice, from massively overlooked Freudian texts to help get through the defensive wall the analysand puts up.
Chapter 3 – ‘Dreams: The Royal Road to the Unconscious’. Often overlooked by modern analysts as a little laughable, Fink, like Lacan emphasises the importance of dreams in analysis. As Lacan explains “it is the very narrative of a dream – the verbal material – that serves as a basis for interpretation”. Taking Freud’s magnum opus ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, psychoanalysis teaches us that dreams are formed by the ‘dream work’ wherein thoughts are transformed and congealed into visual-affective experiences, which often contort the thought into a strange narrative. Now, the therapist must take this contorted narrative an demystify it, undoing the dream work through breaking down the dream, focusing on the key aspects of it, and framing it within the analysand’s real life context to figure out the ‘hidden’ (for lack of a better term) meaning. Dreams are a wish-fulfilment, and the hermeneutic goal of the analyst is to uncover the desire behind the dream, creating a consistent narrative which is convincing and makes sense within the Freudian paradigm. A dream at the Fountainbleu, may be associated with blue balls, to use Fink’s comical example. Or an anxiety dream may be the result of a past traumatic experience that the analysand didn’t feel sufficiently prepared for. In that example the anxiety would fulfil the wish of preparation for the trauma, which wasn’t there the in the first instance of the experience. Also, an important thing to note in this chapter is the discrepancies between Lacan and Freud. Freud saw symbols in dreams as fixed, whilst Lacan saw them as constantly moving, a chain of infinite signifiers which were not stuck, but consistently shifting. Of course one can probably think of the typical Freud-basher who would say something like “a room means a vagina” or some other silly example. But of course, these examples may not be as ridiculous as is thought, but oftentimes are mean-spirited attempts to trivialise, and perhaps defend against the scientificity of analysis.
Chapter 4 – ‘Obsession and the Case of the Rat Man’ explores one of Freud’s most famous and controversial case studies. For the sake of brevity I will not summarise this case study for fear of missing important details, but the main takeaway in this chapter is a focus on obsession, which for the obsessive, helps to hide the unconscious trauma they’re dealing with. For Ernst (the Rat Man) obsessing over the trivial helped him escape the growing responsibilities of his life in the Jewish mitteleuropa, under an authoritarian father, whom he feared. This case in enlightening not just for a look into the kind of lives of the patients Freud dealt with, but Fink also suggests that this case may be relevant in treating young people suffering from things like OCD, ADHD and ADD, who, in seeking attention for the outbursts, may be trying to avoid putting attention on their repressed trauma.
Chapter 5 – ‘Hysteria and the Case of Dora’. Freud’s bread and butter was hysteria, and Dora (Ida Bauer) proved to be another of Freud’s most important and controversial cases. There is still a lot of debate around hysteria and Freud’s blindness to the social construction, and inherent sexism in the term, a term which originates from the word ‘womb’, and a diagnosis which was used for centuries, to suppress women. Another point of contention for this case is Freud’s brashness and ignorance towards Ida Bauer, who he often ignored, or even worse, ofter life advice to (despite this being against almost everything he’d advised in print). Fink in this chapter is very critical of Freud, as he is for Lacan, but he does analyse the case to show the failings of Freud (despite the scientificity of his theories) and importance of transference and countertransference in analysis. Furthermore, Fink explains the usefulness of Lacanian theory in issues of femininity and sexuality, which were handled atrociously by Freud, due to his narrowmindedness and social conditioning. Instead of speaking for patients, and letting society determine our notions of normativity, we ought to listen to the patient and only reach analysis when the patient is “one step away” from it themselves (193).
Chapter 6 – ‘Symptom Formation’. Like chapter 1 this chapter develops the notion of symptomology from a Freudian viewpoint. Freud explains that ‘we’re all a little neurotic’ in the sense that, our unconscious minds work exactly the same, structurally. Repression occurs within us all, so we needn’t construct normative boundaries around mental health in an particularly authoritive way. Of course this doesn’t mean we ought to jump to a Foucaultian notion of mental illness, as hysteria and obsessiveness still exist and disrupt the wellbeing of analysands, but this is largely in response to the social being of an individual. For example, psychopathy would serve a personal well if they were a politician or venture capitalist. However, attention deficit disorder wouldn’t be useful in those same careers. So, the point is for the analyst to be as aware of the individual unsconscious mind, as they are for the social being and social situation of the analysand, something many analysts seem to forget. Symptoms form in different ways, in chapter one symptoms were explained through the M1/M2-M3-M4 repression diagram, but this isn’t the case for patients who suffer from psychosis for example. Instead, ‘psychotics’ suffer from foreclosure, which is structurally different to repression. Symptoms of non-psychotic illnesses are overdetermined, caused by repression, bring a jouissance with them, and are not the same as a structure, but are caused by a structure. This means that due to the structure of a hysterical person’s mind, their symptoms may produce a myriad of psychosomatic symptoms, but the analyst must help to reduce or transfer the symptoms into a manageable form for the analysand. This means that analysis isn’t a one stop cure, like fixing a broken leg or healing blindness. Structures are hard-wired, typically between the age 6-9, it is the interaction with experience that causes symptoms, whether in adulthood or earlier.
Chapter 7 – ‘Beyond Freud’. Rejecting Jungian and NeoFreudian theories of analysis, Fink defends his Lacanian approach and explains why it is consistent with Freudian psychoanalysis, unlike many other very sophisticated theories, and yet still provides a reasonable clinical application without jumping to the positivism of the APA, or the pseudo-spirituality of folks like Jung, or the Transference Analysis School. Fink also explains discrepancies and developments from Freud to Lacan with regards to the couch, timing in analysis, biases around sexuality, and the treatment of psychosis.
Appendixes – Appendix 1 provides a fantastic defence of Freud against the ‘Freud bashers’ who critique Freud for being an adventurist and sexist, by explaining Freud’s failures, but demonstrating the truthfulness of his assertions and situating his actions or mistakes within a historical context. Here we get a picture of a headstrong Jewish psychologist, who wasn’t fame hungry (his magnum opus sold 351 copies in its first year) but a dedicated analyst who worked extremely hard (perhaps too hard) and pioneered a theory, which with tinkering, can help reduce symptoms that disturb patients. Appendix 2 explains Suggestion, Appendix 3 and 4 explain the case studies from Chapters 4 and 5 in more detail, and appendix 5 lists some of the psychoanalytic descriptions of symptoms versus the DSM-5’s.
So, why read a book on clinical psychoanalysis? Because, unlike the cynical psychiatrists may have you believe, psychoanalysis still has a great deal of application in the modern day. It is still practiced around the world, and even those therapists who reject it, ultimately have their methodological underpinnings rooted in the therapy pioneered by Sigmund Freud.
Bruce Fink, a leading psychoanalyst, and even more importantly a Lacanian psychoanalyst, the type who are known for unreadable jargon as well as being laughably inward looking and cultish, manages to provide a simplistic explanation of the methods and theory behind Freudian therapy. Almost no background is required in Psychology, or the Social Sciences for this book, as Fink takes the reader through case studies, and graphs explaining how and why Psychoanalysis works. He also takes a very important critique of modern psychiatry, which is too quick to psychopathologise and subject people to categorisation. One need only look at the enormous leaps in the DSM to see that mental illnesses have been constructed in a very questionable manner, mostly seen over by a bureaucracy, none of which are analysts and a large majority of the bureaucracy have massive incentives from drug companies to diagnose the nation and sell cures to prospective patients for their newfound illnesses.
Below, I’ve offered a brief summary of the copious amount of notes I’ve made for anybody who is interested. I can only recommend anybody with even a marginal interest in Psychology, the Social Sciences, Literary Criticism or Freud, read it. My email exchange with Bruce Fink and discussions with psychoanalysts, as well as my reading of psychoanalysis has helped inform some of the notes, but the book as a whole is pretty self-contained.
Introduction – Fink introduces himself as a psychoanalyst with decades of practices, decades of teaching, and seeks to give a quick overview of the book’s purpose, and arguments in favour of the scientificity of psychoanalysis.
Chapter 1 – In ‘Tracing a Symptom Back to its Origin’ Fink explores how repressed memories become pathogenic and become part of the signifying chain in our unconscious. M1/M2-M3-M4 Memory 1 here is repressed ‘/’ due to its traumatic phenomenology it produces. Fink here offers both a simplified Lacanian terming of symptomology (which he deems as much more useful and sophisticated) referencing the signifier/signified relationship, but he is careful as to not push the reader away from the orthodox Freudian framing of symptomology.
Chapter 2 – ‘The Unconscious is the Exact Opposite of the Conscious’ demonstrates how speech and symptoms elicit the pathogenic memory, in a hidden way. One might imagine the Unconscious here as a thing in itself, with the ‘/’ barrier representing repression. Now, the analysts job is to undue the ‘/’ repression, to get at the M1 memory, by decoding speech, parapraxes and symptomology. Examples of this may be disguising unconscious thoughts, or asserting things like “I don’t mean to be rude but…” or “my childhood was great!”. Defence mechanisms often get in the way, but Fink offers clear advice, from massively overlooked Freudian texts to help get through the defensive wall the analysand puts up.
Chapter 3 – ‘Dreams: The Royal Road to the Unconscious’. Often overlooked by modern analysts as a little laughable, Fink, like Lacan emphasises the importance of dreams in analysis. As Lacan explains “it is the very narrative of a dream – the verbal material – that serves as a basis for interpretation”. Taking Freud’s magnum opus ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, psychoanalysis teaches us that dreams are formed by the ‘dream work’ wherein thoughts are transformed and congealed into visual-affective experiences, which often contort the thought into a strange narrative. Now, the therapist must take this contorted narrative an demystify it, undoing the dream work through breaking down the dream, focusing on the key aspects of it, and framing it within the analysand’s real life context to figure out the ‘hidden’ (for lack of a better term) meaning. Dreams are a wish-fulfilment, and the hermeneutic goal of the analyst is to uncover the desire behind the dream, creating a consistent narrative which is convincing and makes sense within the Freudian paradigm. A dream at the Fountainbleu, may be associated with blue balls, to use Fink’s comical example. Or an anxiety dream may be the result of a past traumatic experience that the analysand didn’t feel sufficiently prepared for. In that example the anxiety would fulfil the wish of preparation for the trauma, which wasn’t there the in the first instance of the experience. Also, an important thing to note in this chapter is the discrepancies between Lacan and Freud. Freud saw symbols in dreams as fixed, whilst Lacan saw them as constantly moving, a chain of infinite signifiers which were not stuck, but consistently shifting. Of course one can probably think of the typical Freud-basher who would say something like “a room means a vagina” or some other silly example. But of course, these examples may not be as ridiculous as is thought, but oftentimes are mean-spirited attempts to trivialise, and perhaps defend against the scientificity of analysis.
Chapter 4 – ‘Obsession and the Case of the Rat Man’ explores one of Freud’s most famous and controversial case studies. For the sake of brevity I will not summarise this case study for fear of missing important details, but the main takeaway in this chapter is a focus on obsession, which for the obsessive, helps to hide the unconscious trauma they’re dealing with. For Ernst (the Rat Man) obsessing over the trivial helped him escape the growing responsibilities of his life in the Jewish mitteleuropa, under an authoritarian father, whom he feared. This case in enlightening not just for a look into the kind of lives of the patients Freud dealt with, but Fink also suggests that this case may be relevant in treating young people suffering from things like OCD, ADHD and ADD, who, in seeking attention for the outbursts, may be trying to avoid putting attention on their repressed trauma.
Chapter 5 – ‘Hysteria and the Case of Dora’. Freud’s bread and butter was hysteria, and Dora (Ida Bauer) proved to be another of Freud’s most important and controversial cases. There is still a lot of debate around hysteria and Freud’s blindness to the social construction, and inherent sexism in the term, a term which originates from the word ‘womb’, and a diagnosis which was used for centuries, to suppress women. Another point of contention for this case is Freud’s brashness and ignorance towards Ida Bauer, who he often ignored, or even worse, ofter life advice to (despite this being against almost everything he’d advised in print). Fink in this chapter is very critical of Freud, as he is for Lacan, but he does analyse the case to show the failings of Freud (despite the scientificity of his theories) and importance of transference and countertransference in analysis. Furthermore, Fink explains the usefulness of Lacanian theory in issues of femininity and sexuality, which were handled atrociously by Freud, due to his narrowmindedness and social conditioning. Instead of speaking for patients, and letting society determine our notions of normativity, we ought to listen to the patient and only reach analysis when the patient is “one step away” from it themselves (193).
Chapter 6 – ‘Symptom Formation’. Like chapter 1 this chapter develops the notion of symptomology from a Freudian viewpoint. Freud explains that ‘we’re all a little neurotic’ in the sense that, our unconscious minds work exactly the same, structurally. Repression occurs within us all, so we needn’t construct normative boundaries around mental health in an particularly authoritive way. Of course this doesn’t mean we ought to jump to a Foucaultian notion of mental illness, as hysteria and obsessiveness still exist and disrupt the wellbeing of analysands, but this is largely in response to the social being of an individual. For example, psychopathy would serve a personal well if they were a politician or venture capitalist. However, attention deficit disorder wouldn’t be useful in those same careers. So, the point is for the analyst to be as aware of the individual unsconscious mind, as they are for the social being and social situation of the analysand, something many analysts seem to forget. Symptoms form in different ways, in chapter one symptoms were explained through the M1/M2-M3-M4 repression diagram, but this isn’t the case for patients who suffer from psychosis for example. Instead, ‘psychotics’ suffer from foreclosure, which is structurally different to repression. Symptoms of non-psychotic illnesses are overdetermined, caused by repression, bring a jouissance with them, and are not the same as a structure, but are caused by a structure. This means that due to the structure of a hysterical person’s mind, their symptoms may produce a myriad of psychosomatic symptoms, but the analyst must help to reduce or transfer the symptoms into a manageable form for the analysand. This means that analysis isn’t a one stop cure, like fixing a broken leg or healing blindness. Structures are hard-wired, typically between the age 6-9, it is the interaction with experience that causes symptoms, whether in adulthood or earlier.
Chapter 7 – ‘Beyond Freud’. Rejecting Jungian and NeoFreudian theories of analysis, Fink defends his Lacanian approach and explains why it is consistent with Freudian psychoanalysis, unlike many other very sophisticated theories, and yet still provides a reasonable clinical application without jumping to the positivism of the APA, or the pseudo-spirituality of folks like Jung, or the Transference Analysis School. Fink also explains discrepancies and developments from Freud to Lacan with regards to the couch, timing in analysis, biases around sexuality, and the treatment of psychosis.
Appendixes – Appendix 1 provides a fantastic defence of Freud against the ‘Freud bashers’ who critique Freud for being an adventurist and sexist, by explaining Freud’s failures, but demonstrating the truthfulness of his assertions and situating his actions or mistakes within a historical context. Here we get a picture of a headstrong Jewish psychologist, who wasn’t fame hungry (his magnum opus sold 351 copies in its first year) but a dedicated analyst who worked extremely hard (perhaps too hard) and pioneered a theory, which with tinkering, can help reduce symptoms that disturb patients. Appendix 2 explains Suggestion, Appendix 3 and 4 explain the case studies from Chapters 4 and 5 in more detail, and appendix 5 lists some of the psychoanalytic descriptions of symptoms versus the DSM-5’s.