Have Psycho-Analysts Anything to do with the WEB?

 

Paulo Cesar Sandler, MD, MSc, Training Analyst, São Paulo

 

Some of the chiefest phenomenic expressions of inhabiting too much - let us say, too much time, too much dedication to - paranoid-schizoid position is perplexity, abhorrence and a sense of obnoxiousness when the "unknown and unexpected" unavoidable features of reality itself make their appearance. But when they do not make it? Reality is always unknown - one cannot know what will happen in the next day, in the next second. One cannot know for sure even if one will have a ‘next day’ or second.

It was this initial typically PS Phenomenic expression that pervaded me when I was faced with the prospect of an ‘Internet Meeting’ dealing with the possible relationships of this novel medium of communication and our own not-so-novel medium of communication, psycho-analysis itself.

After my initial bewilderment, and sensing that my own prejudiced codes of conduct - "Thus far and not further" as Bion writes in the Memoir (Bion, 1975), the cosy atmosphere of the already-know, or better to say, what the effect Memory and above all Desire causes us to hallucinate as already-known -- were at full bore, I decided to try my hand. After all, I judged as a very useful idea, to have a place (site is the accepted nomenclature) where the papers could be seen in advance. Nobody would be excempted from doing his or her homework, with this novel Internet...Let us see...

An explosion of renewed surprise. What a nice site, photographs and all, the possibility of excerpts of Bion’s Memoir, a much maligned work for the overall establishment (the micro-cosmos we call "psycho-analytic movement" as well the social cultured milieu, the intelligentsia) had and still has the very same reaction toward this most complete legacy Bion left us that I had toward the proposal. Those excerpts, wired all over the world! Will people read it and become interested? And that lovely photograph depicting brave Mr. Strachey and Dr.Bion, in the release of a seminal communicational device we still are not grateful enough (well, Bion was, as the photograph reveals and he writes in the Memoir), the ‘Standard Edition’.

New surprises, this time very serious - a mysterious "list". My clumsiness, perhaps still linked to my own fear of unknown, one of the most dim-witted-beings factory never heard before and after (for people who fear excessively what is unknown turn themselves moronic) still was at function (Sometimes some very serious complications may arise in people, for from this point to explosions of envy, it is a very small, quantum distance), produced an almost comical effect. I subscribed to the list, addressing to a mysterious "majordomo". And kept furiously sending messages after messages to Mr. Majordomo; I was a minor mind then, a newcomer to the WEB - that I installed in my own computer just to connect myself to the Turin’s (read Dr. Merciai’s) initiative. If it were not for the patience and kindness of Dr.ssa Parthenope Bion Talamo, that in a sweet way warned me "Well now you must send the messages to pages", all of you, colleagues, would be spared of my messages. Majordomo would be overloaded and it is up to you to decide if Parthenope is guilty of something or she was in some way, in this respect, useful to all of us...

But then I entered into that living, if still strange to me, "list". Right from the start, a lively sense hitherto unheard. Someone died, a friend, he was named Dr. Merkley. In hindsight, a farsighted man - he previewed we could end in a kind of Bion-group, or Tavistock-group. I think that myself and Dr. Eigen can vouch the usefulness of this, for example. It was really touching and just like a medical formation, which confronts us daily with that First-Among-Truths, Death. This was felt at least by myself as an unexpected alive event in what seemed to me dead - wires, a catodyc-rays tube, a keyboard. Browse a little more with that non-existent, pure electrical "arrow" "cursor", "mouse" - someone who seems to be very "active" (parameter, if debatable, still real - messages/month), for sure a nice person, a woman colleague, falls sick. The ‘aliveness’ factor in what was inanimate - from the sensuous apprehensible vertex turns to be enhanced.

SINCERITY

The Web provided a lost feature seminal to psycho-analysis, namely, sincerity. Establishment-backed initiatives, such as "didactic analysis", seemed to make wonders to evasion, collusion and lack of sincerity, as well the growing importance of "political" links. More far from sincerity, more far from analysis. Freud always stressed, Beethoven and Goethe-like, his personal tendency to be truthful. A striving Argentinean psycho-analyst, prematurely disappeared, Dr. José Bleger, dedicated one of his most useful books ("Interview an Groups") to his training analyst in a telling way; "To my training analyst, who also was my analyst". Many people in São Paulo made an "official" analysis, an "official" supervision, only to look for a real analysis with someone else, his status in the political-hierarchical sense in the institution notwithstanding. This happened during a spell of time, Bauhaus-like - just when Dr. Bion’s influence in São Paulo was at its heights. It was striking to see the opportunity of to be sincere in a most unexpected place!

It seems that the relative newness of the medium ensures its freedom from the establishment and its dead, inanimate features. All institutions are inanimate, and conform to the rules of the inanimate, Bion reminds us in A Memoir of the Future. The WEB is not an institution - yet. It is not an establishment. Perhaps the sincerity is possible in a still-non-socialised environment.

Why this? Well, this is not specific to psycho-analysts and much less to psycho-analysis. In the WEB, people are getting an opportunity to being sincere since its inception - the talking groups and their explosive popularity witness the fact. In this area we are a micro-cosmos echoing the macro-social organisation.

One must be careful in order to distinguish sincerity from rudeness, promiscuity and all kinds of lack of education of sphincter control.

 

FREE ASSOCIATIONS

The main fact that may interest us in this freedom-ridden environment should be the ability to allow for free associations - and voice them without the restraints of social codes, socialising, seduction (always a sexual-ridden phenomena), evasion, subterfuge. A most unexpected place, perhaps a safer stamping ground to the preservation of the wild species envisioned by Bion, in vol. of the Memoir? Psycho-analysis is a thought without-a-thinker. Perhaps the psycho-analytical establishment is not offering a safe enough, or facilitating-enough (after Searles and Winnicott) environment to this thought without a thinker, psycho-analysis. Is the WEB a propitiatory landing ground?

 

HYPOTHESIS: THE COUCH AND THE WEB OR TO SEE AND NOT TO SEE

Can the sensuous deprivation provided by the WEB be in any way linked with the sensuous deprivation provided by couch? The sincere and simple approach that allowed for Freud his intuition on the need of the couch, where the patient does not looks at the analyst, may be , as an analogy compared to fact that the participants of the talks with the WEB also do not look each other. Well, there are some electronic devices that will provide the illusion of images, though the so called "multi-media" links and so on. Perhaps the same sensuous deprivation can be seen as a facilitating factor in the emergence of free associations. But we have a very important consideration here. What I am stating does not has any implications to patients and analysts. In my experience, still very small (perhaps in our speedy, quantum-scale time prevalent nowadays, some months may equal to a prolonged experience?), this kind of analogy may -- it is only a hypothesis -- be valid to psycho-analysts "talking" each other through the WEB, but it does not serve to patients. Some experiences allow me to state that people may experience episodes of persecutory feelings and depressive emotional experiences through the WEB, or better to say, emotional experiences linked to PSó D. But observing groups of talk in the WEB, not composed by experienced psycho-analysts, I suppose that the events occurring are of a much larger scale. There is the possibility of a working group with a relative degree freedom of establishment-backed restraints. But there is no possibility to observe transformations in hallucinosis, for example, or even to observe emotional experiences in this setting.

One must consider that the voice "transmitted" through a telephonic line, or even voices and images, are not real voices or images. They are equivalents where the seminal "life" compound is extinguished. Even the "real time" touted by computer technicians is not real. There is a delay. The fact that we do not detect the delay due our limitations does not eliminates the delay. What the WEB - as well some earlier devices such as photographs, cinema, sound reproduction - can offer is something that resembles the original experience in the extent that out human sensa apparatus is frail. We cannot see radio waves; we cannot see pixels, or catodyc rays submitting an écran to a selected bombardment in the same sense we cannot see silver pigments exploded by light over a piece of paper; we cannot in fact have more that a delayed sound reproduction of an original voice. No electronic device can in fact apprehend, capture or transmit what appertains to the real of psychic reality, that has no form, no smell, no colour.

How to use intuition when the direct experiencing of emotional observation is not available and therefore no emotional experience can be experienced, in its aspect of linking objects? One can be responsive, stimulating, even seductive, or comprehending in the WEB, as well as aggressive, unpolite, misunderstanding. But can reverie be experienced without the physical presence of two people? Can real emotional turbulence be experienced without the physical presence of two people? In what extent the WEB partake features of the inanimate, alien to psycho-analysis?

 

CONCLUDING QUESTIONS

Perhaps the WEB may offer a more direct and sincere way of psycho-analysts talking each other. Obviously, matters linked to speedy transfer of bibliographic data and so on. Therefore I would state that the WEB can offer something to the psycho-analytic movement. Perhaps the WEB has nothing to offer to psycho-analysis itself, a "two-body" psychology, as would say John Rickman, between two animate beings.


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Paulo Cesar Sandler


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