_________?, Repeating, and Working-Through

I'm gonna confess something here first off. I haven't actually read very much of Freud's work. Up until this point, I've only read Three Essays on Sexuality, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, and various snippets here and there quoted by texts that I've read.

Why? I think primarily it's because I got the sense that Freud's work has many places where he had the right idea but the wrong approach. I didn't want to latch onto the wrong parts of his thought, but I also didn't want to just discard his ideas because I wasn't able to separate out the parts where he went off course from their more important core. Part of the reason that I'm choosing to read Freud now is that I feel more like I have a good sense for what aspects of Freud's work are crucial and where he gets himself tripped up by various assumptions or frameworks he was working off of. Lear talks of Freud's "legacy-as-task" and I think this a good way to approach Freud's work. He started psychoanalysis, a vibrant, flexible framework, knowing that it would undergo changes and that it would continue to be improved upon and rethought.

The essay "Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through" starts along these lines, with Freud looking backwards to how psychoanalysis had progressed up until that point. He describes the shift from using hypnosis in order to bring the "patient" back to the moment that was causing the symptoms, to using free association to access the moment or problem that was causing the symptoms. Eventually psychoanalysts no longer felt the need to hone in and interpret the one moment or problem themselves and instead focused on the resistances that were preventing the analysand from remembering that moment or problem. The focus was still on trying to "fill in the gaps in memory."

Initially, my cognitive psychological side reacted to this passage with abject horror. "This is it! The entire point is bringing up repressed memories? There is no such thing as a repressed memory! Memory doesn't work like that!" Cognitive psychology has described the ways in which memories are actively created and reconstructed, and during the "memory wars" cognitive psychologists went to great lengths to show that memories aren't concrete entities within the mind that can be plucked out by an adept psychotherapist.

Fortunately, I think that the core of this essay does not rely on this conceptualization of remembering. In reality, the remembering that Freud is outlining as the goal of psychoanalysis is very different from that kind of remembering, and there are several places within this essay where Freud seems to be very close to (or edging around) this realization. The first one is actually within that opening passage I just described, because it seems like the next logical step from a de-emphasis on the analyst uncovering the memories themselves would be relinquishing the entire focus on "uncovering" memories in the first place.

The next passage focuses on how repeating takes the places of remembering. People who cannot remember are forced to repeat, they are forced to act out their conflicts and symptoms rather than bear their memories. Freud says that everything that happens within the psychoanalytic situation starts out as a repetition -- the analysand transfers their prior relationships onto the analyst in the form of transference, and this is just one form of repeating. But strangely Freud does not describe what it would be like to act with remembering in mind -- that is, if repeating is acting out, then what would it look like for an analysand to act in some other way besides out? Presumably remembering would enable them to be acting in a different way than repeating, but it seems very strange to describe, for example, someone who decided to terminate an abusive relationship after going through therapy as "remembering," even though according to Freud that person would be acting based on their memories rather than repeating. This lack of symmetry between the two concepts tells us that Freud must need the word remember to be doing something besides just describing a recollection or uncovering of concrete memories.

Lear describes the unconscious as fundamentally different from the conscious, in that unconscious mental activity lacks "propositional structure." People don't act unconsciously so that they can accomplish anything -- they just act, specifically in a way that escapes their ability to effectively describe why. This view of the unconscious runs counter to the view that the unconscious is just a second conscious mind that is hidden (the view that Freud is leaning on here). If the contents of the unconscious aren't coalesced memories that have been repressed from consciousness but instead are loose pattens of connections that defy any sort of propositional structure, then obviously remembering needs to take a very different form.

Freud then discusses how analyzing the transference is crucial toward the interpretation of resistance and enabling the analysand to remember. This is very interesting, because it means that our "compulsion to repeat" is the same force which enables psychoanalysis to work. The cure and the symptom are intricately connected. I think this is why Lear describes the unconscious as "striving for consciousness," or as being developmentally oriented. Making the unconscious conscious doesn't involve enabling the analysand to uncover their own repressed memories -- instead, it is a way of enabling the analysand to develop a propositional structure for their unconscious actions. Remembering in this context does not refer to the recollection of repressed memories but instead to the creation of new "memories" -- lifting the complex patterns of associations in the unconscious into ways of thinking about the world that are not simply reactive repetition.

This shift in focus away from a view of the unconscious as a collection of memories that need to be remembered fits in nicely with the conclusion of this paper, where Freud talks about the concept of working-through. Working-through is the process by which the analysand takes the analyst's interpretation of the resistance and comes to understand that resistance on their own terms. Basically, Freud sees working-through as the hardest part of analysis, because although others can tell you what they think your problem is, it only makes a difference if you understand what they are saying on your own terms. If the process of making the unconscious conscious, of converting repetition into "remembering," is not a straightforward process of getting someone else to accept the analyst's version of their history, then working-through will be the most important part of psychoanalysis because that is where the loose associations of the unconscious are formed into conscious mental activity -- where the new ways of being are incorporated into the existing psychic framework of the analysand . Otherwise, working-through will just be a process of pressuring the analysand to accept the story that the analyst believes based on their interpretation.

According to Freud, working-through just takes time, and I'm not entirely sure if that makes sense. After all, there are ways of saying something to someone else that are more or less persuasive, and you can imagine two interpretations that convey the same sentiment but in completely different ways. Freud sees the process of working-through as "the part of the work which effects the greatest changes in the patient and which distinguishes analytic treatment from any kind of treatment by suggestion." This makes me wonder about other forms of therapy and what they do when the client refuses to accept whatever the therapist has to say -- in particular I know that a lot of cognitive behavioral therapy involves pointing out negative thought patterns.

One of the potential advantages of psychodynamic therapy over other forms of therapy (based on empirical studies I've seen) is that clients show improvement over time (rather than decreases as seen in other therapies, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy). If this is the case, then I think the process of working-through is the reason for this advantage. Gradual improvement post-treatment fits more with the conceptualization of "remembering" I have outlined in this post, because if remembering just required accepting the interpretations of the analyst and "uncovering" the "repressed memories" then the benefits of working-through would be less gradual and would occur within the context of treatment more than anything else.

As a side note, there is something about the process of working through that suggests that psychoanalysis does not just work with the unconscious. Part of "making the unconscious conscious" is learning the ways in which the unconscious already is conscious, the ways in which the analysand has already developed effectively, and hanging the work of psychoanalysis onto those parts. After all, what else is there for the unconscious to be worked into? I'm curious about this side of psychoanalysis -- Freud talks often about how dysfunction and conflict are everywhere in the psyche, but a lot of his theorizing requires the possibility of stability or successful negotiation of the conflicts of living.

Anyway, I haven't gotten as far in my reading list as I would have liked to, but I don't feel too bad for spending a lot of time on this essay, because it is, according to Lear at least, Freud's most important essay. After reading it and spending a lot of time thinking about it I can see why he said that, because you can see hints of where Freud's theorizing is reaching almost beyond itself to ways of thinking about unconscious that he didn't possess at the time. My next post will be about a few more essays on transference: "Observations on Transference-Love" and "Dynamics of Transference."

Other random notes about this essay:
- Here's my favorite passage:
"The main instrument, however, for curbing the patient's compulsion to repeat and for turning it into a motive for remembering lies in the handling of the transference. We render the compulsion harmless, and indeed useful, by giving it the right to assert itself in a definite field. We admit it into the transference as a playground in which it is allowed to expand in almost complete freedom and in which it is expected to display to us everything in the way of pathogenic instincts that is hidden in the patient's mind... The transference thus creates an intermediate region between illness and real life through which the transition from the one to the other is made. The new condition has taken over all the features of the illness; but it represents an artificial illness which is at every point accessible to our intervention. It is a piece of real experience, but on which has been made possible by especially favorable conditions, and it is of a provisional nature."

- Here's my least favorite passage:
"The patient brings out of the armoury of the past the weapons with which he defends himself against the progress of the treatment--weapons which we must wrest from him one by one." I don't really like what this implies symbolically about the analyst-analysand relationship -- that it is necessarily confrontational and requires the analyst to be seizing power from the analysand. After all, it's very easy to imagine someone whose problem is that they are always handing away their "weapons" to someone else, analyst included!
- This passage reminded of an article I read by McAdams, a psychologist who studies personality based on a "life story approach." He found that people who underwent therapy and conceptualized their illness as a outside force they were fighting were more likely to show improvements. Freud writes: "His illness itself must no longer seem to him contemptible, but must become an enemy worthy of his mettle, a piece of his personality, which has solid ground for its existence and out of which things of value for his future life have to be derived. The way is thus paved from the beginning for a reconciliation with the repressed material which is coming to expression in his symptoms, while at the same time place is found for a certain tolerance for the state of being ill." This is interesting to me, because Freud seems to be arguing that people need to think about it both ways at once -- mental illness is a part of personality AND an enemy to be fought off. I don't really know if that is possible, but it seems like if it was that would give you the best of both worlds, because it would combine self-acceptance with the will to work hard in therapy. I don't know if those two are mutually exclusive but this is definitely something I'll be thinking about. (I wonder if you would find an interaction effect between treatment modality and the narratives people told about their therapy -- for example, maybe this mixed point of view Freud outlines would correlate with improvements in psychodynamic therapy, but in cognitive-behavorial therapy improvements with only be correlated with conceptualizing the illness as an enemy.)