Phillips - On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored

Brichardwasquiterightwhenhesaidtomewithhisusualmalice:Whenyoureinlovewithawoman,youmustaskyourself:WhatdoIwanttodowithher?
Stendhal, TheLifeofHenryBrulard

When Freud began to discover what we now think of as psychoanalysis, it was clear to him what it was to be used for. It was a new method, a potential form of cure, in the medical treatment of what were then called hysterical symptoms. And in so far as psychoanalysis was a medical treatment, the concept of cure seemed relatively unproblematic. Freud wrote:

I have often in my own mind compared cathartic psychotherapy with surgical intervention. I have described my treatments as psychotherapeutic operations; and I have brought out their analogy with the opening up of a cavity filled with pus, the scraping out of a carious region, etc. An analogy of this kind finds its justification not so much in the removal of what is pathological as in the establishment of conditions that are more likely to lead the course of the process in the direction of recovery.

In this concluding section of StudiesonHysteria (1895), Freud is interested in the consequences of his analogy. He is comparing talking to someone with a surgical operation, which now seems an unusual thing to do (for obvious reasons, surgeons dont tend to think of their work as a form of conversation). The operation, Freud suggests, is not the cure; it is only the prelude to the cure. By removing the pathological material the surgeon creates the conditions in which the cure can take place. The cure can begin only after the treatment has ended. The psychotherapist simply clears the way to establish the conditions requisite for recovery. Obstacles are removed to facilitate a possible process. But to believe in such a process, and to know what a cure is what recovery looks like the doctor must already know what a life is supposed to look like. In any analogy and Freud had to be preoccupied with analogies for psychoanalysis because it was so difficult to place two sets of largely tacit assumptions seem to join forces.

All of Freuds by now well-known analogies for the skill of the psychoanalyst are in one sense immensely reassuring. They orientate the curious very quickly. The detective knows a clue when he sees one, and has a recondite ability to read it; the archaeologist can imagine a past that makes sense of the rubble; and the doctor, of course, recognizes the symptoms of a disease. In each of these professions the pragmatic aims of their respective practices are apparently clear. All of these professions can formulate their aims because they have them (or vice versa). The vocabularies that constitute their practices are their idea of what they are attempting to do. And because their tasks are definable and teachable they will know what it is to fail. In other words, canonical texts, persuasive practitioners, and training institutions conspire to create the necessary aura of plausibility. Even if there are mavericks like Sherlock Holmes, they can be mavericks only against a backdrop of orthodoxy.