Ian Parker - Psychoanalytic Practice and State Regulation

This is not a question of state expansion into the maintenance of social well-being, but the unique point in which the state is interested in the capital, or the sovereign instance of utilizing power as violence, whether military or regulatory.

I would like to propose a little mental experiment, a conjecture that will take our problem to the next step. Consider the following scenario: (1) national criteria are established for educating analysts; (2) a control system for the application of these criteria is established; (3) the practical benefits and scope of psychoanalytic treatment (the ambit of psychotherapy, psychiatry, science, or technology) are delineated; and (4) the conditions for commercialization of this service in a secure and free market are determined. In other words, this scenario, which is quite probably the worst possible scenario, allows yet another extension. Even worse: what would come after the state? What will happen when states are forced to unify their regulations in accordance with the global market? Would we then have a single practical model for psychoanalytical education and application?

The objection could be as follows: no form of control is totally efficacious; there will always be, on the margins, contraveners or pirates who continuously break the rules or boycott what has been established. However, they will be the exceptions: those who have not studied psychology, those who have not received accredited training, and those who have turned against psychoanalytical associations. Probably, we will revive this same segregative debate: how do we regulate the charlatan psychoanalysts and the sub-psychoanalysts?

I hope that this conjecture makes clear how the problem of state regulation of psychoanalysis serves to illuminate how its impact is supported by segregatory logic, currently happening , and our place for charlatan psychoanalysts, sub-psychiatrists, and contraveners. This place of exception simply cannot be eradicated; it is a structural place when addressing the social implantation of psychoanalysis, as I hope that the worst possible scenario conjecture has demonstrated.

There are, however, two traditional strategies employed to handle this exceptionality. The first consists of reinforcing the barriers, like a small community that is apprehended and securely separated from society so as to maintain the functionality of its regulations. It is the policy of constructing walls inside walls inside walls. We then have a series of small communities with different solutions and varied resistance tactics, including minor compromises in relation to integration. This is the strategy of continuous negotiation and of resistance groups. This is the spontaneous solution that psychoanalysis encountered, in most countries, for the problem of its social insertion. In this case, the exceptionality is considered in the place of contradiction.

The second strategy consists of finding, within the community, a principle that becomes universal or that allows participation in a universal. This is the strategy employed by science and religion. We find a prevalence of this strategy in countries where psychoanalysis becomes a branch of psychiatry and even in those in which it is established as a university discipline. Here, it seeks to transform the exceptionality into a particularity, thus abolishing its structural place. The great risk of this procedure is that it exposes us to the passion functioning as the object of law, in this case reduced to regulating statutes. From many angles, including historical, there seems to be a consensus that when one becomes a psychoanalyst, one faces a question of instrumentalization of means and obedience to the rules of psychoanalysis that are actually unviable. This is evident, and we have to take into account that something expected of psychoanalysis is the questioning of the conformist attitude or the criticism of obedience to regulation.

In the first strategy, psychoanalysis adopts a para-political route; in the second, it adopts a meta-political route, if we take into account the categories proposed by iek (1999) and Rancire (2007). Para-politics is characterized by the reduction of politics to a system of alliances and agreements. Meta-politics is characterized by a reduction in politics to the level of demand administration. I argue that what we need, at this time, is really a policy that we express (proper-politics) that would be at the height of the response against the segregatory, which is expected from psychoanalysis in extension. Therefore, instead of these two strategies, I suggest a third that is loosely based on Lacans thesis that there is no universal that does not contain in itself a negative existence. Facing this debate to regulate or not to regulate, we need a third alternative, and I propose that this could be based on a kind of rule that would be intentionally paradoxical.

This would be the pragmatic paradox we encounter in proclamations such as: let us establish as a fundamental rule that no fundamental rules should be established. I do not know if there are many examples of this as, generally, when one considers regulation or any type of norm, one becomes obsessed with the idea that it has to work both theoretically and practically. A good rule is usually one that includes the greatest possible number of exceptional cases and responds to the greatest number of political interests. My proposal is that we turn our thinking upside-down. I invite you to try this exercise, like the ones that Jorge Luis Borges and talo Calvino had us try, that is, a kind of rule premeditatedly designed to reveal its innate paradox.

We have learned with the clinic that facing the superego and the sadistic maxim of the law, humour and irony are two important alternatives. We have also learned that witticism is not without consequences and that the interpretation of the structure is similar. However, I do not know if it would be possible to defend a regulation that contained a clear structural paradox. Why then, would we not be able to consider a route that was intentionally and explicitly deduced from this perspective?