Revista de Psicologia, Fortaleza, v.15, e024023. jan./dez. 2024

DOI: 10.36517/revpsiufc.15.2024.e024023

RECEBIDO EM: 01/08/2024

PRIMEIRA DECISÃO EDITORIAL: 29/10/2024

VERSÃO FINAL: 04/11/2024

APROVADO EM: 11/11/2024

Questions About the Institution and Training of the Psychoanalyst

Questões Sobre a Instituição e a Formação do Psicanalista

Laéria Bezerra Fontenele

Director of the Corpo Freudiano Escola de Psicanálise – Fortaleza, Brasil. Professor at the Federal University of Ceará, Brasil. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1356-7631. E-mail: laeria@ufc.br.

Abstract

This is a conference given by Laéria Fontenele at the invitation of the psychoanalytic institution called “Lacan Salon”, based in Vancouver (Canada), on June 15, 2024, through the Zomm Meeting. On this occasion, some questions were focused on the institution and training of the analyst, originating from the author's experience as a psychoanalyst and director of the “Corpo Freudiano Escola de Psicanálise - Seção Fortaleza” since 2021. In addition, it tried to specify the way of operating that characterizes the “Corpo Freudiano Escola de Psicanálise” as an institution dedicated to the transmission of psychoanalysis based on two logical forms inherent to the two modes of organization that are currently found in psychoanalytic institutions as systematized by Diana Rabinovich.

Keywords: Psychoanalysis; institution; analyst training.

Resumo

Trata-se de uma conferência proferida por Laéria Fontenele a convite da instituição psicanalítica denominada “Lacan Salon”, sediada em Vancouver (Canadá), no dia 15 de junho de 2024, por meio da plataforma Zoom. Na oportunidade foram enfocadas algumas questões sobre a instituição e a formação do analista, originárias da experiência da autora como psicanalista e diretora da Seção Fortaleza do Corpo Freudiano desde 2021. Além disso, tratou de especificar a forma de operar que caracteriza o Corpo Freudiano Escola de Psicanálise, como instituição dedicada à transmissão da psicanálise, a partir de duas formas lógicas inerentes aos dois modos de organização que são atualmente encontrados nas instituições de psicanálise conforme foram sistematizados por Diana Rabinovich.

Palavras-chave: Psicanálise; instituição; formação do analista.

I am grateful for this opportunity to bring up to our reflection and debate some questions about the institution and training of the analyst, which originate from our experience as a psychoanalyst and as the director of the “Corpo Freudiano Escola de Psicanálise – Seção Fortaleza”, since 2001. We were the second Brazilian section of the “Corpo Freudiano”, after its foundation in the city of Rio in 1994, which have allowed us to follow more or less closely the emergence of each of the nuclei and sections that were gradually arranged as a rhizome, in the sense metaphor given to this word by Deleuze and Guattari (1995): a type of organization that appears in contrast to a hierarchical and linear organization, within its branches having the power to communicate with each other fluidly in a horizontal direction, whose opening sets the tone for its complexity.

Our understanding of the process that resulted in the current arrangement of psychoanalytic societies will serve as support for the purpose we have chosen for today's occasion: to specify the way of operating which we believe characterizes the Freudian Body as an institution dedicated to the transmission of psychoanalysis.

We know that, if, on one hand, the aim of guaranteeing the survival of psychoanalysis beyond its creator, combined with the search for more adequate analytical training and the preservation of psychoanalysis as a science and treatment method, were the main reasons that guided efforts of Freud and his followers in favor of the institutionalization of psychoanalysis, on the other hand, the conflicts that, since then, have manifested themselves within the scope of the analytical movement have been serving to demonstrate the basic antinomy that exists between psychoanalysis and institution and the obstacles that it brings to the transmission and the elaboration of psychoanalytic knowledge.

From the birth of the first psychoanalytic institution to its current versions, the classic tripod (personal analysis, theoretical training and practice under supervision) remained the guiding principle of analyst training. Throughout the history of the analytical movement, several problems overlapped with its foundations, which led to its alienation from analytical logic and its attachment to a rigid protocol defined as a standard, by the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA), to be followed by all institutions affiliated to it. Disagreements surrounding aspects related to it led to several institutional crises. The one that subsequently resulted in Lacan's definitive removal as a member of the IPA stands out. In this case, the main consequence was the founding of a new institution, free from the yoke of the aforementioned association of which he was a member, that he named the Freudian School of Paris.

Lacan's critical reading of the analyst's formative practice, as it took place at the Paris Psychoanalytic Society, resulted in an unprecedented treatment of the nexus between institution, transmission and analytical training and its relationship with the classic tripod mentioned above, which was responsible for a profound transformation of the conception of analyst training and the institutional practice designed to ensure it. They summarize his commitment to pursuing a logic that would be more consistent with analytical training and, equally, his insistence on defending psychoanalysis from the imaginary and meaning-reducing effects that are inherent to the logic of the constitution of groups and of which psychoanalytic societies are no exception. The elaboration of unprecedented devices to be used in his School with this objective demonstrates that, for Lacan, the contradictory polarity existing between psychoanalysis and institution is central and irreducible and serves as evidence for the dimension of the impossible that is also at stake in the institutional work of transmission of psychoanalysis. However, he used this paradoxical relationship more to invent a way to get around it through its symbolization and less to accentuate the negative effects of its imaginary face.

From the new paths that his heritage opened for us, we have deduced the indispensability of adding a fourth element to the training tripod: the institutional work of the analyst, insofar as it enables ties to the transfer of work fundamental to the construction of the psychoanalyst's knowledge coming from their experience and the knowledge of psychoanalysis as a science. Thus, the discernment of the existence of an intrinsic relationship between the analytical experience, its scientific formulation and the training of the analyst must be considered as the main reason for assuming the relevance of introducing this fourth element to the tripod. We remember, in this regard, that it was Lacan's criticism of a certain vision of science, in which the IPA was supported and served to legitimize the institutional hierarchy, which contributed to the resumption of the relationship between psychoanalysis and science and to the demonstration that its transmission does not occur only through the delimitation of the use of certain paradigms, as is usually the case with science in general. For psychoanalysis, the distinction between the transmission of knowledge and the transmission of experience becomes essential. This, as it entails an untransmissible dimension inherent to the conditions that provide its singularity, cannot be understood by the scientific postulates of psychoanalysis, as its transmission follows paths in accordance with an ethics and a policy that are specific to it and that escape thought, said better, to conscious rationality, whose paradigmatic matrix was provided by René Descartes. In this sense, with Lacan, another logic capable of guiding institutional action begins to emerge, which is in accordance with the logic of unconscious knowledge.

Contemporary psychoanalytic institutions, which bear the marks of Lacan's contributions to analytical training, dialogue with this history full of polemics and controversies, so that the interpretation they make of it and the deliberations that result from it are embedded in their ways of practicing the teaching and transmission of psychoanalysis, which are not clearly discernible. Such ways of operating institutionally are in accordance with the structure and organization of the conditions that they consider to guarantee the path towards becoming an analyst for those who welcomed them with this mission.

Therefore, the question about the political position inherent to their positions regarding the fate of the psychoanalytic movement deserves to be asked. It is worth asking to what extent the discernment of these positions regarding the conception of this function are in accordance with the logic inherent to the analyst's desire which, being the result of an analysis, is also the condition for sustaining an institutional space coherent with the language deviations typical of the work unconscious sense-making process.

Due to the different positions and institutional contexts that emerged during the course of the psychoanalytic movement, especially after Lacan's death, a generalization about the analytical function of the institutions currently in force becomes inapplicable. Despite this, we perceive invariant elements that can be extracted from the legacy of the two masters regarding the issue of the institution's place for the transmission of psychoanalysis, which are important for the demarcation of a reference for the definition of a flexible orientation in the conduct of an institutional project aimed at analytical training and more consistent with the necessary contouring of the difficulties inherent in undertakings of this type. It is useful to this demarcation the fact that psychoanalysis as a knowledge, in its relationship with truth, was derived from a clinic free from the judgment of a priori categories and which was open to uncertainty, astonishment, failure and research findings inherent to each treatment. It is also essential to compare what the procedural nature of the analysts' experience can teach about this, as institutional action itself is the core of the subsidies for reflection on the scope and limits of such work. Occupying a place in an institution requires the analyst to be responsible for the unconscious and requires a return to the question proposed by Lacan: What does psychoanalysis teach us, how to teach it?

The openness that characterizes the way in which the “Corpo Freudiano Escola de Psicanálise” is structured aligns with the reiteration of this question and gives value to its conception of ongoing training. Its network format, in which one of the hallmarks of its DNA can be seen, sets the tone for the independence of its various nuclei and sections which, however, remain articulated around the common commitment to the foundations of psychoanalysis and the notion of ongoing training. According to this configuration, each section and nucleus of this network emerges as a differential fruit, as a result of its path followed until its foundation and its association with the specificities of how it pursues its consolidation. The idea of knowledge open to facing the problems that this experience provides is concerned with the School's commitment to advancing psychoanalysis.

Returning to the idea that each contemporary institution dialogues in its own way with the history of the psychoanalytic movement, the position of the “Corpo Freudiano Escola de Psicanálise” can be better outlined, in addition to its singularity, if we confront it with the logics inherent to the two logical modes of organization that are currently found in psychoanalytic institutions, as rigorously systematized by Diana Rabinovich (2000). According to this psychoanalyst, these logics directly affect the format assumed by the transmission of psychoanalysis and are equally possible to be found in action in psychoanalytic institutions. These are two forms of institutional organization that refer to the two sides that make up the sexuation formulas developed by Lacan: the Man side, positioned on the left and the Woman side positioned on the right of the logical quadrant in which he allocated them.

The Man side represents the logic of the closed set (all phallic) or logic of the phallic universal and in it Lacan writes a formula consisting of a statement with universal value: every x is subjected to castration (phallic function), but at the same time, below from it he coins a particular negation (there is at least one x that is not subject to castration). This denial acquires the value of confirmation of the universal affirmative formula, it is the exception that affirms the rule (the universal affirmative). In turn, the Woman side comprises the logic of the open set (logic of the whole and the phallic non-whole). On this side, the following formulas are coined, one below the other, respectively: “there is no x that is not subject to castration” and “it is not for all x that castration applies”, which results, in logical terms, in the impossibility of establishing an exception. however, there is no logical contradiction between the two of them, but rather an undecidable proposition.

The man formula and the woman formula consist of two logical ways of articulating love and its transference particularity. It follows from this that only the logic of the not-all can be equated with the psychoanalyst's denial of the universal carried out by Lacan (1977-1968) in his seminar “The Analytical Act” in which he launched the precept: There is a psychoanalyst. The retroactive reading of the formula “There is a psychoanalyst” based on the sexuation formulas provides clarification of the irreducible comparison, made by Lacan, of the analyst's position with the feminine position, as the analyst would be barred as universal in the same way as the woman. Neither can be placed in the place of the exception that founds the rule, which allows clarification regarding the place occupied by the analyst in the analytical discourse and its difference from other discourses, notably the therapeutic one. This comparison also makes it evident that, in Lacan's understanding, the analytical institution cannot be constituted or develop its formative project based on ties arising from the logic of the exception to the rule, which is more consistent with the ethics of Christian love than with the ethics of desire.

In this way, the rigorous consideration of the institution, through the logic of the not whole, allows the essential that is present in each analysis to be extracted from it, regarding the act that has, in its end, the power to produce a psychoanalyst, and that it would conform to the logic of becoming a woman. The fall of the unifying one and the break with the idea of a center become essential for theorizing the question of the end of an analysis and no longer the end of the analysis. In the same sense, doing without an irradiation center is essential for discerning the basic foundations of a psychoanalytic institution. That is why the dimensions of time and space, still according to Diana Rabinovich, prove to be essential for the conception of School and for the viability of its factual foundation.

In the same way that an analyst cannot be produced without the work that takes place in the course of his analysis, a School only allows conditions for its birth and consolidation through construction work. The School projects itself, based on this work, only in an a posteriori temporality (nachträglichkeit) and not through its previous idealization. The same can be said about teaching and transmission. As for space, as a psychoanalyst, Lacan would have thought of it according to the model of the ellipse, which would be more appropriate to him than that one of the sphere. This, however, would not be exclusive to characterize a psychoanalytic institution.

The logics of the sphere (whole) and the ellipse (whole and not whole) enable the creation of two institutional models. It is possible for a School to be constituted based on the logic of a closed set and of a radiating center. The IPA, for example, serves as a paradigm for schools that adopt this model. Even though it is formed by analysts from different societies that are spread across a large part of the world, in its more recent history, and it has opened up to different training models, it continues to be responsible for defining the fundamental principles and establishing ethical standards for be followed by its members, in addition, its policy of promoting the feeling of belonging to an international community, demonstrates the community logic that each person is part of a whole, and that despite differences that may appear, fraternity is pursued and associated with the idea of scientific progress to be achieved and the prestige that is sought in the sociocultural sphere.

However, other world organizations with a Lacanian orientation, despite their apparent network format, although they admit and defend the independence of the institutions that compose them and admit the autonomy of their management, show, in truth, that the logic of the network as an open set , falls apart when observing that this independence does not exist with regard to its statutory principles, as these are pre-defined and must be adopted by all the institutions that comprise it. Therefore, we cannot speak in this case of a mixed or intermediate model between the closed model and the open model, as the idea of a radiating center persists and it is incompatible with the ellipse model, in which this is not observed.

Therefore, following Diana Rabinovich's (2000) thought, an institution guided by the logic of the not whole is the most compatible with Lacan's thought and the only one that would allow us to think of possible freedom within the scope of institutional belonging, as its ties would be free from the unifying horizon of the ideal and would open up its teaching to the perspective of building knowledge and not producing knowledge in the manner of formal cognitive logic. Such conditions allow, at School, to project the distinction between the Law that makes symbolic transmission possible and the laws of exchange of men in culture.

Let us remember that the conduct of psychoanalysis teaching in the institution must take into account the transfer directed to the institution and, in the same way, its institutional or individual management differs whether what prevails is the logic of the whole or the logic of the open set. The history of psychoanalysis has provided evidence that a School founded on the logic of the One unified falls into a political position of monopoly on transfers and the tendency to articulate the transfer of work and analytical transfer in a rigid and closed way. The school model based on the logic of the open set implies, by logical development, that the articulation between these modes of transfer will not necessarily coincide, which favors the transmission work concerned within them. The way in which love is constituted for each person based on their relationship with the phallus and its implications in the analytical transference, as well as its transformation in the analytical path, serves as an indicator of the type of production of knowledge that is at stake in an analysis and at a School of Psychoanalysis. In other words, the School based on the logic of the open set allows the articulation between the knowledge of psychoanalysis and the knowledge of the psychoanalyst. This can be observed both from the coexistence between the universal and the particular and from the way in which negation is constituted on the side of the not whole, as it is a negation that affirms, but does not cause logical exclusion. Thus, as it is not a denial of the universal, it does not cause the denial of the exception.

Finally, we think that the structure and functioning of the “Corpo Freudiano” can be reduced to at least one invariant: the aforementioned logic of the open set (phallic and not entirely phallic). The lack of guidelines and prescriptions and the independence in the statutory constitution of each of its shoots, combined with the fall of the idea of community, consistent with the ethics of desire, makes its tangle a place inspired by the idea, developed by Alain Didier-Weil (1996), of place of insistence, based on the structural division of each analyst. This place serves as a substitute for the lack of knowledge about what makes an analysis and an institution of psychoanalysis effective. In addition to this invariant element, which allows us to place the “Corpo Freudiano” in relation to the logics that emerged in the trajectory of institutionalization of psychoanalysis, what is evident in its institutional project is the work of confronting its irreducible paradoxes. Furthermore, the hypothesis is that the School is a place that, guided also by the notion of crossing theory, thought by Marco Antonio Coutinho Jorge (2022), gives rise to the symbolization of clinical experience and psychoanalytic concepts.

Referências

Deleuze, G., Guatarri, F. (1995). Mil Platôs: capitalismo e esquizofrenia (Aurélio Guerra Neto e Celina Pinto Costa Trad.). São Paulo: Editora 34.

Didier-Weill, A. (2006). Por um lugar de insistência (Contra Capa Trad.). In A. Jorge, M.A.C. Lacan e a formação do psicanalista. (pp.107-120). Rio de Janeiro: Contra Capa.

Jorge, M. A. C. (2022). Fundamentos da psicanálise de Freud a Lacan, vol. 4: O laboratório do analista. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar.

Lacan, J. (1967-1968). L’acte psychanalytique. Séminaire 1967-1968. Paris: Publication hors commerce. (Document interne à L’Association freudinenne internacionale et destine a ses membres).

Rabinovich, D. (2000). O desejo do psicanalista: liberdade e determinação em psicanálise. (Paloma Vidal Trad.) Rio de Janeiro: Companhia de Freud.

Table of Contents

Start