Nearing the start of another school year, a familiar end-of-summer dread was approaching. Rather than submit prematurely to the dread, I enlisted my analyst to help me think anew about my attachment to school over the last couple of weeks. I wanted space to feel my way through the fantasy as all the language and posts did not seem to account for or appease me in my search for “truth.”1
Taking the time to turn toward that work, which feels immensely personal, has affected some of my need to work through those thoughts in writing, in public, here.
But on my way to analysis last Wednesday, I overheard on my way out the door that there was another school shooting. The sudden shock of that event seemed to disrupt the buoyant energy that accompanies the start of a new school year; the loss amplified the dread I had been carrying; this was then followed by the long weekend. I took the opportunity to take a solo, four-day staycation retreat, writing, reading, processing— what better occasion than Labor Day weekend to continue thinking about work?
“Remembering, repeating, and working-through.” These words, the translated title of an essay by Freud, were introduced to me by way of a stoned studio encounter with Paul Ricoeur. I don’t typically call upon elicit substances to help me think through things or make art, but instinct is also my guide and given the mood here in Minneapolis, come Friday night I thought: “Yeah, it’s been a rough one. Fuck it.” I’m not sure what my plans were, but I picked up The Conflict of Interpretations (1969) by Ricoeur and settled on an essay: “Technique and Nontechnique in Interpretation,” translated by Willis Domingo.
I likely landed on this essay because in the opening paragraph, Ricoeur poses two questions: “(I) In what sense is psychoanalysis a technique of the night? (2) To what degree is it an iconoclasm of the intimate?”
Nowhere in the essay is it ever made explicit what “technique of the night” refers to— is it implied? It’s possible Ricoeur intended there to be some ambiguity or multiplicity on this front. “Technique of the night” made me think of “lady of the night,” acts of theft, robbery, duplicity; hidden messages, purloined letters, detective work, working under deep cover. It was pointed out to me the phrase could also suggest something of “the work” takes place at night, in dreams.
About dreams and dream interpretation, Ricoeur, following Freud, suggests: “the early communication of a purely intellectual interpretation reinforces resistances,” whereas the goal of the psychoanalytic treatment would be to “liquidate resistances.”
Still interested in understanding the work of psychoanalysis and the techniques through which such labor might take place, Ricoeur asks: “What, then, does the work of analysis consist in? It begins with the application of the fundamental rule that one must communicate in analysis all that comes to mind whatever the cost. This is work and not observation; it is a work of face-to-face encounter.”
That phrase “face-to-face” is repeated. (What/who does one face? What is one face-to-face with?) The Durcharbeiten, the working-through, must take place in the present, between doctor and patient, otherwise known as transference.
Freud, on the role of the analyst during transference lays out: “Cruel though it may sound, we must see to it that the patient's suffering, to a degree that is in some way or other effective, does not come to an end prematurely.”
This “working-through” seems to be essential to “the cure.” Psychoanalysis is not like other sciences in this way— its methods and outcomes cannot be evaluated via observation or data; Ricoeur: “For psychoanalysis, to proceed technically is to proceed like a detective. Its economics is inseparable from a semantics. This is why there are no ‘facts’ nor any observation of ‘facts’ in psychoanalysis but rather the interpretation of a narrated history.” Sorting through resistances; working-through half-meanings, theories, possible interpretations, memories, bad attachments, bad substitutes, and so-on. And suffering is unavoidable, it seems, though to what degree or for how long one might suffer, is inconclusive.
A technique of the night sounds: about right! Weird job. Wild hobby. Strange work. The only people who can attest to what happens during treatment are those who are immediately and intensely involved.