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Psychoanalysis and A Certain Gesture: Evnine’s Batman Meme Project and Its Parerga!ILast summer, I went to meet M., a prominent Israeli psychoanalyst. I travelled by train from Herzeliya, where I was staying with my brother, and walked from the station in Tel Aviv to M.’s office, about two to three kilometers away. The purpose of my visit was to discuss with M. the possibility of giving a presentation to psychoanalysts in Israel about my book-in-progress, A Certain Gesture: Evnine’s Batman Meme Project and Its Parerga!. The book defies easy description; it is a strange, genre-crossing work that mixes philosophy (understood in a very broad sense), self-writing, and graphic art. I was to explain to him what the connections were between my book and psychoanalysis, connections which I was sure existed and about which I was prepared to talk fluently. M. is a little older than me and of course a very experienced psychoanalyst as well as a very knowledgeable philosopher. Perhaps you can imagine how this felt. I am myself in analysis and I was acutely aware, as I entered M.’s office, that this was a place where psychoanalysis was conducted. The office was not large, but there was the iconic couch in it. And two chairs, into one of which M. ushered me, stating (quite unnecessarily, you can be sure!) that this was ‘the patient’s chair.' I was petitioning this older man for the chance to address a group of analysts. Petitioning this man who was vastly more knowledgeable about one of the subjects I wanted to speak about than I am; this man who was an analyst, in his own office, while I sat in what we had openly acknowledged was the patient’s place, but who even before entering the office was already investing this meeting with a lot of transferential feelings (as if it were a chance to have a friendly chat with my own analyst). If you guess that these were not propitious circumstances for me, you will not be wrong.I will not attempt to describe the contents of our conversation. M. was friendly, gracious, receptive… but skeptical, as it seemed to me; in any case, I felt I had not risen to the occasion, that I had come up short in my attempt to explain how my rather unusual project was connected to psychoanalysis. I left M.’s office and set off by foot back to the train station, stopping on the way for a bite of lunch. About 15 minutes away from the station, I noticed that the sole of my right shoe was flapping at the front! I had to adopt a careful gait not to aggravate it but despite my best efforts, with still about 5 to 10 minutes to go, the sole detached entirely and the symbolic castration was complete. I limped to the station, and from the station in Herzeliya to my brother’s home, where I threw out the shoes and put on a new pair.A month or so later, back in Miami, I was recounting this story to my analyst and was reminded of an incident that happened to me some 35 years ago, when I was about 22 and still living in my native London. I had studied music as an undergraduate but then became interested, more or less at the same time, in philosophy and psychoanalysis. I was able to enroll in an M.A. in philosophy (my very first philosophy teacher was the husband of Edna O’Shaughnessy, and Richard Wollheim and Jim Hopkins were also important presences), but not having studied the subject as an undergraduate meant that I was initially quite at sea and in need of guidance. At the instigation of a mutual friend, I arranged to see someone to get advice about what direction my studies might take. This person was an older man (though he was then younger than I am now) who, like M., combined interests in psychoanalysis and philosophy. In fact, he had trained at the Philadelphia Association and was part of the circle around R.D. Laing. I barely remember the meeting itself now. I’m sure this man was affable and offered whatever advice he could. But I know I came away with a sense of dissatisfaction, feeling that somehow, I had not done myself justice. One detail of the whole incident, however, remains strong in my memory. To get to this man’s office, I had to take a train and then walk some distance. At the outset of the journey, as I waited on the platform for the train, a bee flew up my trouser leg and stung me on the calf! I was in a lot of pain and would have postponed the meeting but I really had no easier way to get in touch with this man than to go find him, so I persevered.These two incidents mirror each other. Each included a longish journey that involved both train and walking. In each, I felt I had failed, perhaps having sabotaged myself, in an encounter with an older, more experienced man who embodied the intersection of philosophy and psychoanalysis. And in each, like the club-footed Oedipus, I had to limp – to the first encounter and from the second. These stories of defeat (or should I say, of “da feet”) are like book-ends, or parentheses, and I am trying hard, so far without success, to think what precisely is enclosed by them, to understand of what period or process they are the termini.III have spoken of my current project and its unusual nature. At the heart of it is this image: ,an image in which the younger, eager Boy Wonder, Robin, opens a conversation with the older, more experienced Batman, only to be rebuffed. The image is associated with what is called a meme – which means that many people add their own words to it and post the resulting image with text on-line. I have made about 120 memes using this image and my book will be an ‘edition’ of these memes, presented as if they were the oeuvre of some artist distinct from the editor, complete with extensive commentaries on each of them. The commentaries will be wide-ranging in topic and style, including forms of self-writing along with discussions of philosophy, literature and literary criticism, Judaica, and theology. So, how is psychoanalysis relevant to this project? Though the distinction between these ways is a little bit artificial, I would describe the relevance of psychoanalysis to the book under three headings. First, there is the composition of the book and its meaning to me, and how those relate to my own analysis. Secondly, there are aspects of the form of the work that grapple with elements of psychoanalysis. And thirdly, there are places in the work where I plan to discuss psychoanalysis explicitly, writing about free association from the perspective of the philosophy of language.IIII start with the first, which is the most important and yet most difficult-to-talk-about way that my book is related to psychoanalysis. The themes of the book and the themes of my analysis have intertwined and writing the book, writing this book, has been a product of the therapy and a major influence on it. It is hard for me to bring out just how intense the feedback has been at times between the development of the memes and the book around them, on the one hand, and the development of my analysis, on the other. And some of what I want to say on this score must await my second theme, the form of the work. But the examination of one of the memes will help me illustrate just how interconnected the book is with my analysis.In order to understand this, a certain amount of background is necessary. My desire to make memes with this particular image was quite intense and driven by some psychic impulse that was, initially, unavailable to me. But you analysts, no doubt, will already be way ahead of where I was in the beginning. For one way to describe what is depicted in this image is: a child is being beaten. This suggests that what fueled my desire to play with this image was some mixture of masochistic and sadistic impulses. And indeed, using this image, in conjunction with my talking about it in therapy, allowed me to see what was going on. It was not – at least as far as I am aware at the time of this writing – a matter of sexual phantasies connected with infantile scenes of punishment, but a representation of my own intense rejection of everything I feel in myself as being childish, eager, and desiring. As I write in the introduction of the book, talking about myself as if about another (and in the context of discussing a home movie made by my older brother in which I, age 7, played the part of Robin!):The image, we may conjecture, captures, for the artist, the constant war against the child he was and the child who still resides within; it offers both the sadistic delight of the adult in punishing his younger self for offering himself in this way, for colluding (and not just this once, we may be sure) in his own humiliation and the masochistic delight of that child for finally being put in his proper place, for being instructed, in no uncertain terms, on not making a fool of himself.So that’s a large part of what the image as such means to me. I have said that the book will take the form of an edition of the memes I made with this image, but what will the text in the book be about? In some sense, it will be (among other things) a philosophy book. But it should be obvious that its form alone will make it a very unusual and atypical work of philosophy. Its unusual form came to be associated for me very strongly with my own difficult relation to professional philosophy, a relationship in which I have felt, for a variety of reasons I will not go fully into here, an outsider. Part of the feeling of being an outsider stemmed from my own dissatisfaction with the usual ways of doing business in philosophy and as the book developed, I began to feel that this was a chance both to do philosophy in other ways, and to give voice to my dissatisfactions with the discipline.A final element of background before I turn to the meme I gave above. I was first in therapy in London, many years ago, with a man from the same circle to which the person in my opening anecdote belonged, another therapist-philosopher. I went for six years or so, mostly twice a week, and the impression that I carry of the therapy now (though this must be wrong!) is that in those six years, the total time I spent talking was probably not more than six hours. Talking in therapy, knowing what to say and being able to say it, has remained immensely difficult and I take this up from a theoretical point of view below. But things have gotten better for me in this regard over the years of my current analysis and so you could say that the analysis and the book have involved parallel processes of ‘finding a voice,’ within the therapy and within philosophy.Now for the meme. It is a ‘meta’ meme in that Robin’s text concerns the memes in my project. (Indeed, the memes here function as a synecdoche for the whole project, memes and commentaries together.) Robin says they have been a transformative experience. And given the background I have supplied, I hope you can see why. Engaging in the project of creating the memes and writing about them has been an experience in which I am transforming myself both inside the therapy, to a position of being able to talk, to express the more childish aspects of myself, and in philosophy, allowing myself to try to do philosophy in a way that is more meaningful to me personally, albeit at odds with professional and disciplinary norms. But Batman’s response is one of ambivalence. “Yes and no!!” he says. For the vehicle I have chosen to access new emotional and philosophical experiences, to liberate myself if you will, has been an image that represents an adult authority figure slapping down a childish, more playful and exuberant person. Transformation has had to hide itself in a gesture whose meaning, as I indicated above, is one of dismissal, severity, and rejection of childhood. Thus, indeed, my experience with these memes and the book they will be part of both has, and has not, been transformative. It has transformed, but taken up into itself the rejection of that transformation, perhaps in order to make the transformation safer. These reflections will themselves become part of the commentary on this meme. This is one example of how the book and my analysis have become intertwined.IVActually, I want to say something much stronger than that the book and my analysis are intertwined; I want to say that the book is a part of my analysis. But I struggle to find a framework within which such an assertion might be meaningful. Here are my still somewhat inchoate thoughts on the matter.In the philosophy of mind, the idea of the “extended mind” has enjoyed some popularity. The idea is that the human mind extends beyond the boundaries of the biological organism, into objects and processes in the world around. Some memory is stored in a person’s brain; some, in diaries and lists outside the person. If those diaries and lists meet certain conditions (which conditions is controversial), then they are, on this way of thinking, literally parts of the person’s mind. This is just one example but it is enough for me now. What I want to think about is the idea of an “extended analysis,” on the analogy of the extended mind: a way of thinking about analysis on which parts of the analysis itself (such as my book) may exist or occur outside the dyad of analyst and analysand, outside the confines of the analytic hour and consulting room.One of the epigraphs I have chosen for my book is the famous saying from the Mishnah: “Turn it and turn it, for all is contained in it.” Basing myself on my own, obviously extremely limited, experience, it has often felt to me that analysis is like using a magnifying glass to start a fire – an attempt to focus all that ambient sunlight into one white-hot beam (the fire being the transference). Or, perhaps a better metaphor for what I am talking about is that analysis attempts to project what is actually three-dimensional onto a two-dimensional plane. At any rate, it takes as a kind of working assumption that, in some sense, “all is contained” in the dyadic content, inside the consulting room. But there is an element of fantasy to this idea (of which, I think, analysts are completely aware). The three-dimensional reality fights back against this attempt at distortion. My own sense is that when analysts have talked about conducting analysis under the sign of abstinence, this is what they are really getting at. It’s not (or not just) the analyst’s refusal to gratify the patient’s wishes to know or to be reassured. It is the analyst’s insistence on bringing inside the two-dimensions (the dyad of analyst and analysand, the fixed time, the fixed location) something that cannot be done full justice to in less than three dimensions. It is the analyst’s role as guardian of this three- to two-dimensional projection. This may or may not be good therapeutic technique – I really cannot comment on that and I am not at all intending my remarks to be a challenge to the usual way of doing things. I merely note that since the reality is three-dimensional, it will, despite the analyst’s attempts to render everything in two dimensions, always exceed what occurs in the session. Not just that the patient’s life will exceed that – that is obvious; but that, in some sense, the analysis itself will exceed that. This, in very schematic and metaphorical terms, is how it is possible for my book, somehow, to be part of the analysis.That is just one example, and my case will be much stronger if I can show this at work in other ways too. During the period I was pondering how to strengthen my suggestion, I had a dream that involved me and another person who, in at least one respect, my associations linked to my analyst. But I also had a sense of a third person in the dream who remained shadowy and undefined. The next morning, as I continued with my pondering, it came to me that, in many analyses, there is a supervisor to the analyst, a shadowy third presence. (My own analysis is a control case and hence has a supervisor.) Here, it seems, is an excellent example of how an analysis can extend beyond the two-dimensional – and in fact, one interesting paper about how changes of supervisors impacted the analysis of one patient is called “Three Dimensional Treatment” (Greenspun 2011). Other papers deal with transferences patients develop to their analysts’ supervisors, or even to the training institutions where an analyst is based. One author (Luber 1990) distinguishes between cases where a transferential reaction to the analyst is, for various reasons, split up, so that part is experienced towards the analyst and part towards the supervisor (or institute) and cases of what he calls “genuinely triadic transference” phenomena. Here, then, are other materials, to place alongside my book, on which to construct some notion of what I wanted to call the “extended analysis.” [CLEARLY THIS REMAINS HIGHLY PROGRAMMATIC. NOT SURE HOW TO PURSUE, OR WHETHER I AM CAPABLE OF THAT.]But, and here I come to the second of my headings, all of these reflections about the extended analysis, and the metaphor of the projection of the three- into the two-dimensional, are to be found in the form of my book and I believe, though I have only begun to become conscious of this, that these aspects of the book’s form have indeed been responsive to my struggles with the analysis’s conditions of abstinence, as I characterized them above. Let me explain. The full title of my book is A Certain Gesture: Evnine’s Batman Meme Project and Its Parerga!. I gave the name “Batman Meme Project” to what will be the first 55 memes in my book. These were posted on Facebook between January and March of 2016 and culminated in a short film I made that gave a retrospective of many of the memes and introduced the three final ones. But, after the official end of the Batman Meme Project, I continued to make more such memes, and even another film. I used the term “parerga” originally to capture these further efforts. A parergon is something that surrounds (para) a work (ergon), as a frame does a picture, or the title, contents, and preface do a book, and so on. It was, however, already apparent to me that the book whose title proclaimed it was about the Batman Meme Project and its parerga was itself also a kind of parergon. The book was both about something, and part of that something. So the question of what belonged ‘inside’ (what exactly the ‘ergon’ was) and what was outside it (what the ‘parergon’) was unstable right from the beginning. The concept of parergon was like a lens through which I attempted, with the foreknowledge of failure, to force the three-dimensional into two dimensions, to put ‘into’ the work not just the work itself, but all sorts of thought and writing that were occurring outside of it. Hence the epigraph “turn it and turn it, for all is contained in it,” intended both seriously and ironically at the same time – just as, I believe, it could be used both seriously and ironically to describe the analytic situation.This sense of instability intensified as I grappled with the decision I had made from the beginning to split my own voice between that of the creator of the memes (‘the artist’) and that of the author/editor of the volume A Certain Gesture: Evnine’s Batman Meme Project and Its Parerga!. This split made it impossible for me, the person who both created the memes and was writing about them, to speak for myself. The split created its own ‘condition of abstinence’ for the work, a central and crucially felt omission that, I hope, will ultimately be a source of meaning. But partly because of the frustration with this condition of abstinence, I started a special Facebook page (now a blog) where I write about the project in my own voice. The anecdote with which I began the paper, my stories of the feet(!), was originally written for that venue and hence, in placing it here, I was actually quoting one of the book’s parerga. Here I quote another:Gerard Genette (yes, I’m still reading Genette’s Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation – it’s endless!) is now discussing the various functions of different kinds of prefaces (all quotations below from pp. 203-5). One function of the most common kind of preface (by the author; published with the text originally) is to explain the unity of the work it stands before. This is especially the case when the work is a collection of some kind. But some authors, he notes, make a point of eschewing the unity of the work and embracing its disunity. Roland Barthes, writing later of his collection Essais critiques, said “I explained in my preface why I didn’t want to give these texts, written at different times, a retrospective unity” but, somewhat contradictorily goes on to say “The unity of this collection can only be a question: What is writing?” … (And, talking of Barthes, how brilliantly the lack of punctuation speaks in his title Sade Fourier Loyola, the preface to which “emphasizes indirectly… the incongruous – indeed provocative – appearance of such a grouping.”)…I have come to realize that A Certain Gesture: Evnine’s Batman Meme Project and Its Parerga! is about exactly this - privileging disunity and disorganization over their opposites. The Wunderkammer, again: a curious assortment, a serendipity, a heap. But just how far down can disunity go in the book? Not all the way down, to the letters, which are organized into words, or to the words, which are organized into sentences, or to the sentences, which are organized into paragraphs and distinct commentaries. But above that, it is all chaos. The work has no thesis. There is not even a single theme or subject that it is about. Many quite unrelated themes crisscross each other in random ways. The voices in the work are multiple: the voice of the artist of the memes, which speaks almost only in the memes themselves, and the voice of the editor, who speaks in the commentaries and to whom the memes are the work of an other. My own voice? The voice of the one who composed the memes and wrote the commentary? It is barely to be found in the work at all! The very boundaries of the work are porous. That, after all, is the significance of the theme of parerga. Is the work A Certain Gesture: Evnine's Batman Meme Project and Its Parerga! itself one of the parerga of the Batman Meme Project? Is the book about itself? Part of itself?When an ergon, a work, is a text, a parergon is a paratext. Genette discerns within the category of the paratext two subdivisions: the peritext, which surrounds the text (preface, title, index, etc.) and the epitext, which is additional to it (the author’s diaries, letters, interviews, as they pertain to the work). Translating back into the language of the ergon, we may distinguish the parergon from the epergon. The posts on this blog are part of my book’s eperga. I now conjure in my phantasy a collection of these posts, published as a separate volume. Perhaps it could be called “A Certain Gesture: Evnine’s Batman Meme Project and Its Parerga!” and Its Eperga. Or perhaps, on the grounds that the eperga should have had a place in the main work and are here being offered as a supplement, Parerga and Paralipomena. (Paralipomena: outtakes. Funnily enough, Schopenhauer, whose title that originally is, has just intruded himself unexpectedly into one of the commentaries I am working on these days… ) Or perhaps Eperga to the Parerga. Or even, following Barthes’s lead, just Eperga Parerga.Supposing that volume of collected eperga to exist, what would its relation be to A Certain Gesture: Evnine's Batman Meme Project and Its Parerga!? It is somehow an off-shoot of the disunity of the main volume. It is because my own voice is excluded from that work in favor of the disunity created by separating myself into artist of the memes and commentator on the memes that I began to want to write here on Facebook in my own voice. But the original disunity now seems to spill over, preventing Eperga to the Parerga (I seem to have made my choice of title) from having a graspable relation to A Certain Gesture: Evnine's Batman Meme Project and Its Parerga!. They are, most definitely, not two parts of a whole! Nor is the volume Eperga to the Parerga, though it consists of eperga, itself an epergon to the main work. Nor a paralipomenon to it; nor a parergon. (Is this right?) And yet they are surely closely related. It seems their relation is ineffable. It defies conceptualization. I find myself haunted, almost to the point of nausea, by the thought of these two books, one on its way to existing, the other merely a product of my fancy (though made entirely of existing materials). Haunted by the thought of them and their unsayable and repellent intimacy.I say in this post that the collected eperga would not be a part, along with the main book, of a single whole. So, likewise, maybe I should revise my claim that my book is part of my analysis. Perhaps my book and my analysis exist in an unsayable and repellent intimacy!I will now speak about another way in which the form of my book is connected to psychoanalysis and this will lead, in the following section, to the development of some ideas I wish to include within the work, as part of its content. I have already raised the issue of talking inside the session. One prominent modality of talking inside the session is free association. I have come to understand that this concept means very different things to different analysts and is far from univocal. But surely at least one meaning of that idea is that by ceasing to exert conscious control over the connections between her thoughts, the patient will ‘give voice’ to other kinds of connections and forms of expression which the patient and analyst together can then direct their attention to. In this sense, free association is a kind of being quiet, a silencing of connecting speech in order for fainter voices to be heard. The form of my book also embodies this idea. By presenting the text as commentaries on the memes, sequential connections between sections of the text disappear – there is mere juxtaposition. And the connections between commentaries and memes, and within commentaries, are also often fractured. I hope, and intend, that the result of this will be to allow other meanings to shine through, meanings to which the writer and his readers can direct their attention, to make of them what they can.VBut free association, besides shaping the work, will also be one of its topics, for it has consistently baffled me, both at the practical and theoretical levels. One of the original memes of the Batman Meme Project is this:Christopher Bollas writes that “free talking is its own form of thinking” (2009, 23). That may be right, but it does not fully do justice to the extent to which it is also its own form of talking. True, a person can engage in free association by herself, without ever opening her mouth. But in an analysis, the patient is invited to engage in free association aloud, with another person. This introduces elements that are lacking when free association is seen merely as a “form of thinking.” I want to raise two sets of concerns about free association as a kind of speech, both stemming from work in the philosophy of language, specifically from J.L. Austin’s theory of speech acts and from Paul Grice’s account of conversation.Austin (1975) distinguishes between what he calls locutionary and illocutionary speech acts. A locutionary act is an act of uttering a sentence the language of which has a certain meaning. An illocutionary act is an act of, to adapt the title of Austin’s book, doing things in uttering those words. So, imagine the following scenario. An office manager, in the afternoon, is asked by a subordinate how to respond to some misbehavior by an employee. “Fire or just give a talking to?”. The manager replies “Fire!”. Later, as a member of an amateur theatrical society, the manager is in a play in which her character sees a fire in a theater and yells “Fire!” to warn the audience-within-the-play. In the second half of the play, our manager/actress sees there is, in fact, a fire in the theater and yells “Fire!” to warn the audience. We have three acts, A, B, and C, in each of which a woman says “Fire!”. While the acts are all homophonous, only B and C are of the same locutionary act kind. Their semantic content is about a (real or imagined) conflagration. A, however, is of a different locutionary act kind; the content is about the dismissal of an employee. Despite being of the same locutionary kind, however, B and C are of different illocutionary kinds. C is a warning; B is not a warning, though the actor may be said to pretend to warn, or warn-in-the-world-of-the-fiction, or something. A, by contrast, is neither a warning nor a pretend warning, but a command or directive. Kinds of illocutionary acts include: asserting, observing, commanding, questioning, warning, and indefinitely many others. I can best bring out why this is of interest in thinking about free association by considering an excellent paper by the Italian analyst Savo Spacal (1990). Spacal discerns several different models of free association, the observational, the productive, and the communicative, and links them to different theoretical paradigms of psychoanalysis and in particular, the role of the analyst in relation to the patient’s speech. The first he associates with Breuer and Freud. Breuer’s insight, according to Spacal, was that “a patient suffering from hysterical symptoms is able to understand the latent meanings of her own symptoms and behavior, provided that she is left free to investigate her own inner world” (421). Though Freud replaced Breuer’s use of hypnosis with the instruction to the patient to free associate, “Freud's modification left the investigative-epistemic priority of the patient intact” (422). Thus, “free association… was instituted primarily as an introspective modality, rather than a communicative one, or one producing material to be interpreted” (423). This way of thinking of free association is behind Freud’s famous injunction to the patient to “act as though… you were a traveler sitting next to the window of a railway carriage and describing to someone inside the carriage the changing views you see outside.” If a patient were to follow this injunction, her utterances would all be of a single illocutionary type: observation (which is itself a sub-category of assertion). Think of the railway traveler. She says “there are some cows in a field…the clouds are thickening… there is a waterfall….” Each utterance is an observation of what there is outside. She never commands or requests; if the person inside starts distracting her, she might turn away from the window and say “please be quiet” or “stop tickling me!” but these are interruptions in her activity, not parts of it. Likewise, she never questions. If she says “is that a pheasant?” it is a purely rhetorical question, or the expression of a doubt that prevents her from delivering her observations. It is not, though, a genuine question addressed to her companion, for her companion is safely inside, hearing her observations, and not jointly observing with her. Now think of the patient. She says “I am remembering that time that such and such… I am feeling cold in my left foot… I am thinking about what you said…” and so on. Again, she never orders; if the analyst distracts her, she might say “please be quiet” but that is an interruption of her activity not a part of it. And she never questions. If she observes, within herself, some curiosity about something, say about whether the analyst has read a certain book, she can offer an observation to the effect that she has that curiosity, but to report (to the analyst) that one is curious about whether they have read a certain book is quite different, a different kind of illocutionary act, from asking the analyst whether they have read it. (The first does not call for an answer, the second does.) Another curious feature of this model is that there is at best an accidental relation between when an observation is made and when what it is an observation of exists or occurs. In principle, the person on the train might relay their observations several minutes ‘behind’ what they are seeing at a given moment. So, in the analytic context, a patient might offer observations about what is occurring in her mind some time after those things actually occur. So, we have a nexus between an illocutionary picture – the patient makes observations, an epistemological framework – the patient looks inside and sees in herself what is going on, and a model of therapeutic interaction – the analyst assists the patient in her quest for knowledge and understanding (to do which the patient must offer aloud her observations), but is not, it turns out, essential. (In some ways, this nexus must have been virtually forced on psychoanalysis in its earliest moments. For the first analyst had (and could have had) no other analyst than himself. Freud’s own analysis was a self-analysis and very much cast by him in terms of a quest of discovery. He would write down his self-observations, like a scientist recording data. Whatever he did, his patients, in principle, could have done themselves.) But the idea that the patient merely makes observations about the contents of her mind – an idea suggested strongly by Freud’s very misleading image of the train and taken by Spacal as itself essentially connected to the epistemological and therapeutic aspects of the nexus, is surely separable from the other two elements of this nexus and, I think, ought to be rejected. Never mind that it sounds like an immensely tedious business for both patient and analyst. The real problem is this. The patient is supposed to speak freely, to freely express her thoughts. But freely expressing one’s thoughts is quite different from reporting on them. E.M. Forster says, in Aspects of the Novel, “How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?” This need not be always true, but it makes a very important point. In a normal context, where we speak and interact spontaneously, we do not first think something and then report the thought. We express ourselves in speaking. This is how it is that free association can include the asking of questions and issuing of requests or commands. Such speech acts cannot be reports of the contents of one’s mind since, by their natures as questions or commands, they are not reports at all. But they are, or can be, the free expression of one’s thinking in speech. Rejecting the idea that the patient is, in so far as she is free associating, confined to making observations about the contents of her own mind, need not, by itself, entail rejecting the other elements of the nexus – the conception of the patient’s activity as focused on her own attempt to reach self-understanding (the epistemological point) and the conception of the analyst as, essentially, a helper in this voyage of self-discovery (the therapeutic point) since they do not depend on the patient’s being confined to self-observation. What they do require, however, in place of that element, is the patient’s ability to know what she says.Spacal contrasts this way of understanding free association with that associated with Melanie Klein, what I called above the productive conception of free association. And one can immediately see that Klein’s conception of free association must be enormously different from the observational model from the continuity she asserts between free association in adult patients and play in child patients. The reason is obvious: play does not generally consist in acts that have any illocutionary force at all. Verbal play, as in stylized form we saw in the example above of the manager/actress, might involve a simulation of illocutionary acts, but even then the illocutionary force of the pretended act (warning, say) is not (or not necessarily) the illocutionary force of the act of pretending. When the play is heavily non-verbal, the disjuncture between the activity and the world of illocution is even more evident. For the most part, in playing, one is not asserting, questioning, commanding, entreating or performing any other illocutionary act. What one is doing, of course, is ‘producing material’ for the analyst to interpret. Playing is a mode of production, a particular mode of production for the child, in which the material that is produced has properties that make it appropriate and useful for the analyst to interpret in particular ways.All of this holds, mutatis mutandis, for free association in the adult patient, according to Klein. Talking, under the right conditions, is also a privileged mode of production in which the product is suitable for interpretation by the analyst. Free association is how the conditions that make the production of material by talking so useful are described. On this model, it is not clear whether the actual illocutionary force of a patient’s speech is relevant at all. (I will qualify this in a moment.) To speak a sentence with the illocutionary force of an assertion – to make an assertion – and to speak it with the illocutionary force of a suggestion – to make a suggestion – are, in many contexts, quite different. But it is not clear whether and why that difference should be of relevance on this model. In terms of the language produced, the material is just the same. It is, one might say, only the locutionary acts that are relevant on this way of understanding free association – which words one produces, not the illocutionary force one gives them. In uttering the sentence “I miss my mother,” the patient produces material concerning her missing her mother, and she does this equally whether she asserts that she misses her mother, wonders whether she does, conjectures that she does, or perhaps even denies that she does! I said above that I would qualify my assertion that on this model, the illocutionary force of a speech act is irrelevant. For the fact that a certain illocutionary force was associated with a given utterance, the fact that when I utter the words “I miss my mother” I am, say, offering a conjecture rather than making an assertion, may itself be material for interpretation. But to respond by interpreting the fact that someone has uttered the sentence “I miss my mother” with a particular illocutionary force is not at all the same as responding to the speech act in the way appropriate for its illocutionary force. So although illocutionary force, on this picture, is not wholly irrelevant, it is still not relevant in the way in which illocutionary force is, by its nature, supposed to be relevant in conversational situations.Spacal also considers a third model, though it is strange to call it a model of free association since his point is that, when analysis is thought of, not as with the original Freudian model as a patient’s efforts of self-observation, aided by the analyst, and not as with the Kleinian model as the patient’s production of material which the analyst interprets for the patient, but rather as the development of a special kind of relationship between patient and analyst, the special significance of free association fades away. Perhaps, then, free association has come to seem less germane or central to psychoanalysis precisely as relational models of psychoanalysis have come to prominence. In any case, there is little to say, from a speech act point of view, about the activity of free association in this context. The idea that the patient can express herself freely, of course, is still very much at the forefront, but the way of understanding this is in terms of an authentic encounter. The patient’s speech is now liable to be seen, largely, as her contribution to a dialogue. But opinion is divided on how like this dialogue is to dialogue as understood in extra-analytic contexts. And here, I think, the philosophy of language can help us see ways in which it is very unlike. Paul Grice (1975) suggested that conversations in general are governed by a principle of co-operation which directs participants to make their contributions to the conversation suitable to its goals. This ramifies into a number of more specific maxims that govern the relation between moves in a conversation (be relevant), the quality, the quantity, and the form of expression of conversational moves. The point of identifying these maxims, for Grice, is not to offer a generalization about how conversations typically go. He thought that one had to attribute to conversants knowledge and acceptance of these maxims in order to understand what happens in conversations. Specifically, he thought that conversants could succeed in deliberately communicating content that they failed to state by violating these principles and thereby forcing their partner to reconstruct the implied content as part of the explanation of why the maxim was violated. He calls this ‘flouting’ the maxims. One of his most famous examples is of a conversation in which A asks B whether Jones is a good philosopher, and B replies that Jones has good hand-writing. B has clearly flouted the maxim of relevance; because A accepts this maxim and assumes that B does, she can reconstruct that the relevant answer must have been one that B didn’t want to state. Since such an answer could only have been “no, Jones is not a good philosopher” A concludes that B has ‘implicated’ that Jones is not a good philosopher without having explicitly said it; and this whole event requires the assumption that both parties accept a maxim of relevance. Without acceptance of that maxim, B would not have had the ability to communicate that content in that way.Now think of an exchange like the above in the context of analysis. The patient is listing various people and saying whether she thinks they are good philosophers. But she doesn’t mention Jones, a significant figure in her life. The analyst says, “what about Jones? Is Jones a good philosopher?” and the patient says “she has good hand-writing.” It seems to me that the analyst here, other things being equal, should not take the patient to be implying that Jones is not a good philosopher. For that assumption to be warranted, one has to take the patient to accept (and to believe that the analyst takes her to accept) the maxim of relevance, i.e. to see the current statement as a flouting of that maxim and not just as not following it. But the specter of free association is hovering here. Among other things, an injunction to the patient to free associate seems to amount to a cancelation of the normal maxims governing conversation. To free associate means to take oneself not to have be relevant in everything one says. So a certain method of communication, one that relies on the existence of particular conversational rules and works by flouting those rules, is unavailable in a context of free association. [LOOK AT OTHER CASES OF CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURE IN GRICE TO SEE IF THEIR COUNTERPARTS WOULD FAIL IN THE CONTEXT OF ANALYSIS.]ReferencesAustin, J.L. (1975) How to Do Things With Words, second edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press).Bollas, Christopher (2009) The Evocative Object World (London: Routledge).Clark, Andy and David Chalmers (1998) “The Extended Mind,” Analysis 53, 10-23.Greeenspun, Wendy (2011) “Three Dimensional Treatment,” Contemporary Psychoanalysis 47, 386-405.Grice, H.P. (1975) “Logic and Conversation,” in Peter Cole et al., Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts (Elsevier).Lichtenberg, J.D. and F.B. Galler (1987) “The Fundamental Rule: A Study of Current Usage,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 35, 47-76.Luber, M. Philip (1991) “A Patient’s Transference to the Analyst’s Supervisor: Effect of the Setting on the the Analytic Process,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 39, 705-25.Mahony, Patrick (1987) Psychoanalysis and Discourse (London: Tavistock).Spacal, Savo (1990) “Free Association as a Method of Self-Observation in Relation to Other Methodological Principles of Psychoanalysis,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 59(3), 420-36. ................
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