Monthly Archives: March 2022

*FYI: this is this blog’s 300th entry

We don’t know what we don’t know. Circular thought. It’s popular, I notice: often employed, I simply mean. Not so much by patients, or clients (guys in my groups). The latter wouldn’t employ the term because they’re not sensible to its ironic, wistful purpose; the apparent longing.

Guys in my groups, my sex addict treatment groups, tolerate my invoking the unconscious, I wrote in “The group’s the thing”. Indeed, sometimes they run with the idea, though they prefer to say subconscious for some reason none of us know, perhaps because the “sub” prefix/qualifier denotes a shred of what they’d prefer to retain: a sense that they know what they’re doing, that intentions and wishes aren’t so far down in the mind. Otherwise, it’s useful to suggest that they don’t know what’s up, as in conscious, because that appears to defer responsibility. Seriously, can’t you get away with anything if you just say that it was unconscious. I didn’t mean it: “it” being an Id-like representative; an aggregate of bad behavior blended with notions of bad self. Well, this won’t do, suggests a finger-wagging psychoanalyst, only you wouldn’t see them wagging that finger if they sat behind your prostate (I meant prostrate–now there’s a Freudian slip), on-the-couch lying figure. You’d just hear the tsk tsk in their voice, feel the eyes rolling. Analysts are human, too, despite their reputations among some. They don’t like being stereotyped, or discriminated against, and they certainly don’t like their ideas being co-opted or misused. Responsibility, they invoke, sort of. You may not know this, but it’s incumbent upon you to keep thinking about what you don’t know, and in time, like any day now (like seriously, we’re waiting!), say something…ya know, real.

Some think that it’s time for psychoanalysis to move on, and I don’t mean that it should die (actually, some might want that—un or subconsciously) like my friend Jason did recently, but rather grow, evolve, as in strike out to new frontiers, go where no man or woman or not either has ever gone before. Some refer to this undiscovered country as the analytic third, while others will rightly think that it’s a cheesy Star Trek and then Shakespeare allusion. It’s both, or all three, I guess, which suggests that my thinking is not black and white, either/or, or binary. There is a triangular reality, like that of the Oedipal situation, come to think of it. Life was once the experience of a singular figure—an auto-erotic, narcissistic trip, wrote Freud, that later undergoes a watershed of development within a fraught relational triad. Not so, rebuked the likes of Winnicott after pointing out the air raid warning amid the so-called controversial conversations of the mid-century object relations revolution. Life, or the unit of consciousness, is a dyad of mother and child from the outset (or near enough), not a singular entity, he argued. As for the Oedipal triangle? Well, that comes later, Winnicott likely conceded, while asserting that its “drama” was not a primary cause of phenomena. Sure, the relationship’s the thing, agreed some contemporaries, plus many who followed them, especially feminists. Freudians re-asserted the triangle, reminded that life really moves on when the father enters the picture, bringing his baggage of Superego, in turn inherited from the primal horde. Klein and her followers deferred once, saying this does occur but earlier than when Freud said it would, plus it manifests as a web of intertwining projections and introjections. Lacan and his people said something else that I haven’t figured out yet, often using words like indexing, or expressions like “in the register of…”.

Psychoanalysis in this mid-century era was perhaps moving between the breast and the phallus, unsure as to the nexus of development, and half-thinking that growth and evolution hinged around our relationship to sex, but otherwise thinking that something more human (as in humanistic) and less Darwinian and animal-like was the truth: that we are relational beings, seeking intimacy, attachment, someone to talk to, and even before that, developing non-verbally a proto-self with a containing other, one who provides strength in an ambient if not omnipotent fashion, not cognitive interpretations that may aim at the unconscious. Ya know, we’re not just looking for someone to…ya know. Did you get that, those of you who think Psychoanalysis is or was phallocentric? It was Klein (a woman) and then Winnicott (yeah, a white guy) who pointed us in this direction…like, seventy years ago! Anyway, this dialogue as to what’s important has been going on for some time now, air raids notwithstanding, and it’s all gotten a bit tiresome I have to say, which may be why the dialogue’s being shaken up even more recently, with added elements that have also gotten short-shrift. It won’t be a dialogue anymore, you see. It will be something like a trilogue, to indicate an analytic third, which means someone or a set of someones who have previously been excluded.

Race. See, it’s time to talk about race. Again. Wait, I mean to really start talking about it. We’re often saying, aren’t we—I mean, in whatever circles, professional and not, that we’re in—that it’s really time to start talking about race. I said it once, I think, in a blog long ago: my “token” entry about the verboten subject. Race. It is to psychoanalysis in the 21^st century what sex was a hundred years ago: the thing we don’t talk about; the taboo; the thing about which we say, “we don’t know what we don’t know”. Talk about black and white thinking. We’ve forgotten the spectrum of colors in between. I won’t name them. That would be insensitive. That might cause racial injury, deliver an impact regardless of my intentions. But it is time for voices of color, people of color, and thinking in color, to have its say. They might start—indeed, they seem to start—by telling people like me, those at the top of the privilege charts (male, white, heterosexual: the anti-trifecta), that we don’t know things that others know. We can’t know things, as in the experience of people of color, of people like them, because we’re not them; because we haven’t had their experiences, and we’ve been barely aware of our own privileged experience, let alone their underprivileged existences. But we can learn and listen, even though we can’t really know the experience of the other, which shouldn’t stop us from trying to…well, we’re going in circles here, which is okay as long as we keep thinking. That is analytic thinking, I think.

In the meantime, I might continue to take refuge in the cozy bosom of universalism, the happy experience of commonality, which is what I’ve got; it’s especially gratifying when it occurs with those who are different from me in the catalogues of diversity. I have a new friend who loves soccer as much as I do, attaches meanings to its rituals that are at least analogous to my projections, and he is Portuguese, and his favorite team is a worthy institution, Benfica FC, while my favorite team is a mainstream option, the iconic Manchester United. See, sport: the universal language. I have a patient whose identities contrast with my trifecta: a woman, bisexual, and of Asian heritage, she laughs at the irony of her belief that upon several years of analytic therapy with me no one seems to understand her like I do. Or, less earnestly perhaps, I can point to the experience of a Mexican man in my practice—a tattoo-ridden, macho yet oddly genteel figure (perhaps “smooth” would be a better description) who womanizes, distances from intimacy, chases pleasure in the shadows, would bring Glock pistols to a fist-fight, drive fast cars towards cliffs if he could afford them. Regardless of where he is from, he would seem to fit the model of the libidinous, death-driven figure that Freud and others have envisioned; the kind of man who doesn’t seem “relational”. His is a decidedly male, “heteronormative” fantasy no doubt, one that is routinely castigated as toxic, narcissistic (as determined by past and present society), but he is not quite the dinosaur that many might wish him to be.

Yes, let’s not objectify him as he does others. He’s a human being, after all. He’s a sex addict as well, which is also a human being, albeit one with a lot to answer for. The latest dream he shared with me might have scared many, but it didn’t disturb him. Demons, he intoned casually. And gargoyles. Or, a kind of gargoyle, he amended with a smirk. These and other nasties had populated the fiery pit of his dream, but it didn’t rouse him. He didn’t wake up in a sweat, grabbing his nuts and looking down to see if his penis had been severed. It’s the punishment he anticipates, he smirked. But not from an afterlife. He’s got no fear of doctrinal fate; no dread of the fire and brimstone, or of sharp knives threatening an emasculating cut-off. Amid the trail of his chuckle, we let a silence settle, both of us lapsing into a still reverie. Somehow, we thought the same thing: what if the thing is not so much loss as absence, as in an absence of past as well as present. He frowned, curious about my thought. I was on to something, he figured, despite differences that were cultural, generational, and something else not easily pinned down. “You mean like no dick at all?” he asked, intuiting my thought. “Yeah,” I uttered. “Imagine there’s nothing there and you’re in the twilight zone peopled by these androgynous, phallusless creatures, and you ask, where’s my dick and they’re like, ‘what’s a dick?’ and you’re like, oh shit…”

Yeah, don’t tell me that some things don’t cut through time, differences of culture, of privilege that is legal, institutionalized and economic. Now, I know that transference and countertransference are not just dyadic phenomena, as Winnicott, Balint, Fairbairn, Benjamin, and whomever else has said. Yeah, I know there is an analytic third comprised of the separate worlds we were born into; divergent histories that preceded and steered both of our lives. But sex and addiction, two bread and butter topics in my day to day, have played reconciling agents, bridging gaps that would otherwise have created blank division. Dicks. Who knew? We knew. We knew all along, ever since the apple fell and the differences were there for all to see.