This question stirred in my memory an anecdote my late friend Abdelwahab Meddeb once told me about Ignaz Goldziher, the eminent Islamologist and secretary of the Jewish community of Budapest. In that period, barely a century ago, the relations between Jewish and Muslim clerics were of a quality impossible to imagine today.
Goldziher, still young, stayed in Egypt and found himself one day in the Great Mosque and Quranic university of Al-Azhar. He attended a debate among jurists on a question of inheritance. These eminent persons had been arguing for hours without managing to reach agreement. Tempers were rising. At one point, Goldziher asked permission to intervene in a debate that had all the characteristics of a dialogue of the deaf, and this was granted him.
“Your dialogue has no chance of succeeding,” he declared.
“And why is that?” the doctors of law asked.
“Because, my masters, as you know better than I, there exist four schools of Quranic law: Maliki, Shafi’i, Hanbali, Hanafi. At this moment you are taking no account of their difference. But if you reason as Malikis, this is the answer. If, on the other hand, you situate yourselves as Shafi’is, here is the solution. But in Hanbali law the solution becomes the following. Finally, as good Hanafis, it would rather be that one. But if you mix the four schools, no solution is possible.”
The jurists, astonished, ask the name of their brilliant interlocutor. Then they ask its meaning. On learning that Gold means “gold,” they propose that he henceforth bear the name Dahabi, dahab in Arabic designating the precious metal.
This anecdote, in its apparent simplicity, defines the nature and the epistemological conditions of all dialogue.
What is a serious dialogue — that is, the search, by two or several, for the solution to a problem? It is possible only on the basis of shared initial reference points. These common references allow the development of a dialogue — let us call it dialectical. In the absence of a shared starting axiomatics, we can have only a dialogue of the deaf.
The dialogue of the deaf, the one without common referential, is perfectly sterile and produces in the two protagonists nothing but frustration, even anger. It exhausts energies and only aggravates the divergences of departure. This is unfortunately the most general case.
In certain cases, however, owing to the will of the protagonists, dialogue does take place. What does it consist of? In the search for, or rather the construction of, that absent common referential. Step by step, it is a matter of accommodating, of translating, of adopting a system on which agreement remains possible. But such cases are rare.
In which cases do we observe the two types of dialogue described above? This question leads us to a better definition of the referentials of dialogue. Again, two possibilities.
Either these referentials are of the order of knowledge, or they are of the order of values, knowledge and values pertaining to radically heterogeneous domains. This heterogeneity has been recognized by the finest minds, from Maimonides to Poincaré.
In the case where the starting referential pertains to knowledge — the cas princeps (paradigmatic case) of science — the dialogue, should the protagonists be in opposition, transfers to the domain of experimentation, which will decide the matter. The initial divergence between protagonists will not be slow to dissolve in view of the results of experimentation.
But science is not the only domain where the referential can be shared. As in the case of the Goldziher anecdote, the domain of law, whether civil or religious, furnishes enough shared elements for the confrontation to be resolved. The same holds for the discussions, sometimes very long, of the Talmud, precisely because the exegetical rules are known, defined and accepted by the protagonists.
Even in the domains of art, aesthetics possesses enough rules to discriminate between works that are not art and those that merit the name. After which, tastes and aesthetic choices part the protagonists. This is even more valid in music, where the rules of composition border on the scientific.
But in most dialogues, those we describe as dialogues of the deaf, the protagonists’ referentials do not belong to the domain of knowledge, but to that of values. One need only think of the television debates that turn into free-for-alls.
Any confrontation of values has no chance of succeeding. The choice of values pertains in fact to no experimentation and no prior knowledge. It pertains to each person’s “freedom” and to an irrational choice bound up with subjectivity, with personal or family history, with the culture to which one belongs and within which one was formed. Immanuel Kant, in the Critique of Practical Reason, failed to define a common referential for debates on questions of ethics.
The confrontation of two subjectivities, each equipped with its system of values, cannot therefore succeed. It resembles a struggle to the death, symbolic to be sure, of consciousnesses. Even in the few cases mentioned earlier where dialogue results in a compromise, that compromise was possible only through taking into account a common term: the interest of the protagonists or of the groups they represent. That kind of dialogue is called negotiation. One yields on one point when the other yields on another.
In other cases, when the protagonists maintain courteous, even loving, relations, the dialogue results simply in the respectful acknowledgment of the two irreconcilable positions.
Does this epistemological preamble shed light on what is at stake in psychoanalytic dialogue?
The latter presents, again, two faces: that of the dialogue between practitioners of the same discipline, between psychoanalysts, and that of the dialogue between the patient and his psychoanalyst. For a psychoanalytic cure is indeed a dialogue, however singular it may be.
The dialogue between psychoanalysts ought to fall under the dialogue defined earlier as dialectical, since all practitioners, in principle, possess the same referential — at the very least the fundamental concepts defined by the founder of the discipline, Freud. Yet history and observation show us that this is not so. That history is a series of dramatic quarrels, of schisms with the formation of numerous chapels, the faithful of one of them rarely granting any interest to the work another chapel publishes. Within a single chapel, for example the one that defines itself as Lacanian, the fragmentation into rival sub-chapels continues ad infinitum. Or else these sub-chapels endow themselves with a charismatic leader whose word may not be contested. We are at the antipodes of the epistemological criteria of science, and there is no need to invoke Karl Popper to rule on the non-scientificity of psychoanalysis, which has become, over the years, a kind of theoretical Tower of Babel.
How are we to understand this state of affairs? One cannot detach oneself, especially when one has been a member of these chapels, from the idea that their functioning pertains to the religious and the dogmatic. I have argued that this situation is nothing other than a return of the repressed. To affirm the atheism of psychoanalysis, on the basis of an abyssal ignorance of all theology, was from the start a non-scientific bias.
No great scientist, from Newton to Pasteur, had ventured onto this mined terrain, a terrain pertaining to values and not to knowledge, relegating that question to the domain of private life. The analysis of religious feeling, one of the most natural and most intimate there is, ought to have been on the program of every cure. Lacan attempted the experiment, but without renouncing the prior postulate of atheism. This energetic repression, inscribed on the pediment of psychoanalysis, is, it seems to me, one of the causes, if not the cause, of the Babelization of psychoanalytic theories.
Let us turn now to the other face of psychoanalytic dialogue, certainly the more important — namely the one the practitioner maintains with his patient. It is obvious that, in most cases, the psychoanalyst and his patient possess, at the outset, and even after the end of the most successful cure, referentials of different values. It would be unfortunate were the cure to end in an identification of the patient’s values with those of his psychoanalyst. That would be a new form of alienation, alas frequent in so-called didactic analyses and a cause of a certain sclerosis of analytic theory.
More paradoxical still, practitioner and patient are formally invited to forget their prior theoretical knowledge, to arrange matters so that this particular cure ideally resembles the very first cure ever conducted, without the interposition of a prior knowledge that would function as prejudice and resistance. There is thus, from the outset, an elimination of any possibility of a knowledge referential.
How can dialogue be established and developed under such conditions? In the “simplest” way in the world: by the practitioner’s near-total silencing of his own systems of values and knowledge, thereby leaving the field clear for those of his patient. He should even consider the latter with a certain empathy, even feign to share them. One cannot draw a patient out of his subjective impasses if one does not accept, provisionally, to descend into them oneself. Psychoanalysis is neither coaching nor orthopedics. This attitude is defined by the expression “benevolent neutrality.”
But it sometimes happens that, in place of this “benevolent neutrality,” the two protagonists of the cure engage in a kind of arm-wrestling described as negative transference, as if the two referentials had entered into conflict — a conflict that results from interpretations by the analyst that the patient judges inappropriate.
In the most frequent case, however, the cure unfolds, borne by the light breeze of “benevolent neutrality.” It is one of the revolutionary aspects of psychoanalysis, namely its dissymmetrical character, in which one of the subjects keeps his own values under a bushel. As the cure has at times been compared to a surgical operation, benevolent neutrality has been likened to the asepsis the practitioner must maintain.
This dissymmetry has a double effect. At first, the analysand’s value system, occupying the whole terrain alone, will develop, perhaps even hypertrophy. But a value system, an “identity,” is strengthened only in opposition to others. So that the absence of opposition, solitude, brings about in the long run a certain softening of that system. This effect is precious, for the symptom, a subject’s suffering, finds in good part its origin in the value system he has adopted, or rather in the excessive rigidity of that system. This rigidity not only brings about difficulties in social relations, with the ensuing failures, but, moreover, it bars the road to the emergence of the subject’s desire, hampered by an ill-adapted value system. This rigidity is but one of the figures of the superego. Its softening — a consequence, among other things, of the psychoanalyst’s silence — will allow desire to emerge progressively, under the silent but obstinate pressure of the psychoanalyst.
The psychoanalytic discourse, as Lacan called it, would thus be a third form of dialogue in which the nothing, the silence, ends up triumphing — like the reed in the fable — over the rigidity of the oak, over potentially fanatical values.
This silence of the analyst, which will progressively confer on him the halo of a supposed knowledge, has another effect: that of creating transference, that strange amorous feeling. It is this love that allows this original form of dialogue to exist and to sustain itself.
This irenic scheme was overturned by Lacan with his introduction, into both the theoretical corpus and the conduct of the cure, of two notions articulated one to the other: that of truth and that of the analyst’s desire. “Benevolent neutrality” finds itself thereby subverted.
No, the psychoanalyst does not keep all his values under a bushel. The quest for truth, at least, becomes an actor in the cure. It is transformed, for the two protagonists, into a confrontation with truth — the truth of the family history first of all, often covered over with secrets whose weight is paid in the following generations. The factitious “reality,” purely imaginary, fruit of social compromises, finds itself thereby fissured.
The aim of psychoanalysis, as Lacan understood it, is not to adapt the subject to social proprieties, to his lies, but to live in better accord with his desire. In his seminar on “The Ethics of Psychoanalysis,”1 Lacan finds in the tragic figure of Antigone, in revolt against tyranny, a model from which psychoanalysts ought to draw inspiration. It seemed to me I saw in that reference an allusive criticism of the behavior of the analytic institution at the time of Nazism and of its cowardly compromises.2
In introducing the notion of the “analyst’s desire” and the necessity of its analysis, Lacan wished to put an end to the myth of the objectivity, even of the “asepsis,” of the practitioner’s interventions on the pretext that he has undergone a long so-called didactic analysis. But, beyond the anamnesis of his personal history, did the practitioner push his analysis as far as that of his desire to be an analyst — an unconscious desire, varying from one psychoanalyst to another? It seemed to Lacan that he did not. And yet, in the analytic dialogue between the practitioner and his patient, this condition seems essential, precisely so that the analyst’s desire does not come to introduce a bias into the conduct of the cure. Hence the project of his school, consisting in putting these propositions to the test through the device of the passe. We know that this project failed, and faced with that failure Lacan preferred to dissolve his school. Since then, the chapels, larger or smaller, claiming his teaching, struggle with this theoretical miscarriage in a kind of institutional autism.
In those golden hours — that of the first generation, then that of Lacan’s lifetime — psychoanalysis was a prodigious experiment in dialogue with the whole of culture, which conferred on it a great radiance. Since then, here it is, folded back into tedious intra-institutional debates that cannot interest the public.
In spite of this, after a fashion, the psychoanalytic dialogue between these practitioners and their analysands carries on. The power of the Freudian discovery transcends the institutional vicissitudes that obscure the message they are supposed to bear and transmit.