Does Psychoanalysis Make You Human?

Now that psychoanalysis, especially the Freudian version, has passed from the mental health scene, we are now being confronted with post mortems. 

Dare I say that I am being generous. When we read Adam Blum’s attempt to explain psychoanalysis in Psychology Today we are struck by the utter vacuousness of it all. Dare I say that it is an embarrassing exercise, one that is so embarrassing that I hesitated before commenting about it.

Blum explains:

At its best, we imagine a psychoanalyst relieving our anxiety or depression through empathic responses to our thoughts and feelings, or perhaps bringing conscious awareness to whatever we are unconsciously doing. At worst, we picture someone lying on a couch, talking, while someone else sits behind it, not talking. (The unlikeliness that this arrangement should be helpful to anyone is one reason why there are so many actual cartoons about it.)

The arrangement is not just unlikely. It is bizarre, because it precludes face-to-face communication. It makes socialization impossible. Freud understood clearly that the purpose of this arrangement was to provide him unfiltered access to the patient’s mind. Presumably, if the patient is not looking at the analyst he can let his mind wander and can speak whatever obnoxious nonsense passes through it.

Blum is not finished. He offers his theory, namely that psychoanalysis is an education that makes us into human beings.

As I said, the word “vacuous" does it justice. Ask yourself what you were before psychoanalysis made you into a human being. He believes that we all need an education, presumably, in talking to people who refuse to look us in the eye, to become human beings.

Through this mutual formation of theory and practice emerges a picture of psychoanalysis that is as much a kind of education as a kind of cure — the very education that makes us into human beings.

A minimum of reflection will tell you that you are many things in the world-- a son or daughter, a father or mother, a husband or wife, an American or a Russian, and so on. Let’s not forget, executive manager and teammate. We identify ourselves by our membership in different groups. This membership gives us roles and offers rules that we are to follow. If the group succeeds we feel pride. If it fails we feel embarrassed and ashamed. 

In no case do we set out to become human beings. We are human by virtue of our DNA. No more, no less. You do not need to do anything to become human. Nothing can make you subhuman. What were we before we were human beings?

As for the notion of talking to walls, the purpose is to make us into something resembling disembodied minds, which is not the same thing as being human. If anything, it makes us angelic.

Blum continues to suggest that there is something seductive about the process. The analysand, staring at the wall, wants to interact with his analyst, to make some form of connection. Thus, the patient will try his damnedest to find the magic word that will awaken his analyst and help him escape from his Freudian shell.

But even when this goes very well — and especially when it doesn’t — this process has a distinct quality of seduction. Who is this person, a patient may start to wonder, who is so interested in the intimate details of my life? What do they want from me? Why am I bothered or tickled or just curious about that thing they said last time? And why did I have that weird dream?

To analyze means to break down, and when familiar ways of thinking about ourselves and our lives are disrupted by analytic work, we don’t know ahead of time what will come up, or what to make of what does. A desire forms to make sense of these new experiences, which in turn seduces us into becoming more curious about ourselves and our relationships.

As it happens in reality, when an individual is taught the bad habit of talking to the walls, of talking as though he cannot offend  his interlocutor, he becomes something like a disembodied mind. He does not become human. If he graduates from the process he will become more like the literary version of the disembodied mind, the great detective of Anglo-American detective fictions.

That is, he will become like C. Auguste Dupin, Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Jane Marple, Endeavour Morse, and so on. The one thing that characterizes these fictional beings is that they are not human. They do not have lives and do not have spouses or children. Saying that they are more or less human or humane is simply a misunderstanding.

There you have it. Psychoanalysis, as it is practiced by people like Blum, will teach you to think incoherently.