A Quick Reading of Jacques-Alain Miller’s “Psychoanalysis in Close Touch with the Social”
I have read this short essay many times over the years. There is something about it that seems to stand outside of Miller’s larger project — which, I think, puts jouissance at the centre rather than lack — and this is why, I think, perhaps, it is a text that I often forget. My inclination is usually to place Miller’s essay on the paradigms of jouissance at the centre of Miller’s project. I consider this to be a masterpiece which helps to orient a reading of Lacan in the same way that Lacan helped us to read Freud. I do not know much about the context of this particular essay — the one on psychoanalysis in close touch with the social — except that it is a translation (by Thelma Sowley) of a transcribe established by Catherine Bonningue, originally presented in French at PIPOL 3 “Study Days” on June 30th and July 1st of 2007. I also know that the presentation was oriented around questions having to do with the Psychoanalytic Centers of Consulation and Treatment in France, Spain, Italy, and Brussels. I shall treat the text, however, as an independent statement of broader applicability, since I know nothing of these centres.
Miller begins by returning to an old distinction made between pure and applied psychoanalysis. It seems that Miller would like to sustain this distinction, located on the side of pure analysis something of the ‘pass’ and its verification. The applied side of the distinction seems to concern something closer to therapy, therapeutic effects. He discusses the application of therapy in a seemingly ethical dimension by relating it to the possible relinquishment of pay: for the patient, but also, without pay for the practitioner. And Miller’s claim is that this is nothing new: short therapies and free treatments have already existed, but what changes, according to Miller, is the scale of this practice and the new ‘ad hoc’ version that had been initiated and implemented internationally.
Miller points out that this latter development would have been impossible if it were not for an abandonment of the old concept of the ‘setting.’ He describes this concept of the setting — in other words the ‘clinical setting,’ or the ‘frame’ — as antiquated. Indeed, this brings to mind the two tendencies that I noticed while in the New York analytic scene: on the one hand, an absolute regard for the sanctity of the ‘setting,’ which, of course, puts the ‘anal’ in ‘analysis,’ and, on the other side, the libertine approach which moves completely outside of the setting, into a movement: ‘walk and talk’ therapies, and so on. These twin tendencies seem to co-exist in the New York psychotherapeutic milieu. Miller has a disparaging view: “[all of this] would have been impossible if we still had as our reference the fossilized concept of the setting, understood only as the consulting room of the practitioner exercising in a private practice.” And Miller provides us with something of a point of view: “psychoanalytic effects do not depend on the setting, but on the discourse, that is, on the installation of the symbolic coordinates by someone who is an analyst, and whose quality as an analyst does not depend no the location of his consulting room, nor the nature of his clients, but rather on the experience he is engaged in.” This is a wonderful formulation because it begins not with a reified notion of a setting but rather with discourse: we often, in the American scene, conflate environment with clinical setting without recognizing that discourse is the fundamental environment of the analytic manoeuvre. It is by and through discourse that the subject is authorized and that the social link — clinical or otherwise — is established. But Miller adds to this the ingredient of an analyst, which, as a counter-point to the environment, that is, as its exception, or, rather, as the residual wastebasket of the discourse, propels something else against the master discourse of any given environment.
From the perspective of discourse, essentially and fundamentally, one can find also the possibility of the analytic discourse and of the analytic ‘act,’ and, finally, one can foresee the potential that is a ‘pass’ from that environment. Miller discusses, for this reason, nothing about the clinical setting and instead motions toward an understanding of the analyst as a ‘portable installation, capable of moving into new contexts, and, in particular into institutions.’ Does this not imply that the analyst is not context specific, because the context is nothing and the discourse is everything (or almost). If discourse is what constitutes a social bond then the analyst is always in close touch with the social, and the analyst is capable, therefore, of work on facebook, in academia, or in any number of contexts or institutions, social groups, and so on. When it is possible to mobilize the analyst within an institutional context, then — and we are led to believe, I think, that the discourse must open up this possibility — we can speak of the analyst’s location as an “Alpha Place” (Miller’s words).
The “Alpha Place” seems to me to be closer to a place of psychotherapy rather than psychoanalysis for Miller. I am not certain that this is what Miller has written, but it is something that I am tempted to read from his work. For example, the analyst’s function, within the Alpha Place, is not to “listen,” according to Miller, but rather to provide a “response.” And the response is always in the form of a question. At this point I stop to turn to the work of Marshall McLuhan. It is clear that psychoanalysis could have only been formed on the back of modern science, for a number of reason. Lacan makes this statement himself at one point. We might understand this also to mean that it is formed at the time of electronic media — what Marshall McLuhan referred to as the electronic age. For McLuhan all media are environments and we, as individuals, are its content. Similarly, for Lacan, discourse is the environment which produces and contains the subject. In the electronic age, for McLuhan, the university, as an institution — but all institutions transition into this — is no longer a place that involves students obtaining their interventions through passive reception of the message (e.g., as if from a radio). This impossible profession of pedagogy involves today participation, and the city becomes our classroom (McLuhan wrote a book of the same title, with his some Eric McLuhan; I was very fortunate to recently receive a copy of this from McLuhan’s grandson, Andrew). When the city is the classroom, in the electronic age, the role of the classroom shifts: our task, for McLuhan, is not to provide answers but rather to ask the right questions, so as to set students out to look and search for the answers that are already hidden out there (that they already have answers to, without knowing it). The question becomes important.
It is in this way that the unconscious becomes important. Miller says that “There can be an Alpha Place only if, by the operation of the analyst, the chattering turns out to contain a treasure, that of an other sense having the value of a response, that is, of the knowledge we call unconscious.” And then, finally, the Alpha Place is described as effective only when “the loop be closed by which ‘the emitter receives the from the receptor its own message in an inverted form.’ This has been my own approach in the classroom. I have described each class as its own singular space from which we strive toward an invention together. We explore material, somewhat, but in our own way, and as I hear the questions and knowledges that they are forming, my intervention is to reflect it back on them and, by the end of the class, to present them with the knowledge they themselves have constructed: to present them with their unconscious. It is, ultimately, an invention of the unconscious within the classroom, and, through that invention, the invention of a social bond together.
This next point seems quite important to me, personally, because I have witnessed it very nearly go off the rails: “[t]he emergence of such an instant of knowledge requires a severe control, because it is a spark that can set fire to the plain, I mean it can light for the subject the fire of a generalized interpretive delusion.” In one of my graduate seminars recently my students noticed the interventions I was making and one in particular began to move toward some interpretive enjoyments. At this point it became important for me to demonstrate the difference between our singular concepts of conspiracy theories and sociological theories: the conspiracy theory is the formation of a social bond (con- means to bring together, and -spiracy is ‘spirits’) which does not invent the unconscious but enjoys the delusion to no great effect. I attempted to show that Fredric Jameson’s work on ‘cognitive mapping,’ without a grounding ‘full speech,’ that is, is fundamentally untethered from the unconscious and unsustainable. Marxism is therefore not a conspiracy theory, but QAnon is.
We miss here the dimension of the ‘real’ unconscious.
The psychoanalyst — the pure psychoanalyst — for Miller does not distinguish between psychic and social reality. However, the institution, the applied setting, often does. For this reason, I claim, there is something redeemable in sociology in that it looks at the social bond, the structure and working of a social group, while, for the late psychoanalysis, neurosis, discourse as such, is constitutive of a social bond. It was Durkheim, actually, who once claimed that ‘language is a social fact,’ where social fact, for Durkheim, the French founder of the tradition of sociology, is an external, independent, and coercive element of structure which can be studied as the unique subject matter of sociology.
The new challenge is that subjects in the Alpha Places are often not connected to the social. The task of the analyst is therefore to bring them in contact once again with the social, which means, in other words, with the unconscious. Miller even seems to suggest that there is more clinical efficacy outside of the clinic because the clinic exacerbates the anti-social tendency: “An analyst can only function if he is in direct contact with the social, but in his consulting room, he can fail to realize this and entertain sweet dreams — Schwarmerei — of his extraterritoriality. Miller uses this as an opportunity, one that I find somewhat convincing, to remind everybody that ordinary psychosis has as one of its threefold externalities, a social dislocation. The challenge, however, is that increasingly the Alpha Place is challenged by administrators, funding bodies, and so on who “want figures, something quantifiable, numbers […] They want to produce results for statistics, classifying machines, computers.” Miller asks for this to be an opportunity to “formalized our clinic,” a rival to the DSM. I am not sure that I can get behind this request… but it is an interesting thought to continue thinking..
Miller proposes us to be forward thinking rather than to adopt what McLuhan named a “rear-view mirror” perspective: “the most ignorant and least likeable of the lot cry over the Name of the Father, dreaming of reestablishing its reign.” This is the current place we are at in the contemporary situation: a regress to an impossible patriarchal return of “Make America Great Again,” which, of course, can not anymore find coherency and consistency there and so must, anyway, relapse into conspiracy theory, or else, the other option is — and Miller misses this one — a turn toward capitalist pragmatic science (that other pragmatism of which we need to be VERY concerned): this is the new hegemonic mode of capitalist discourse. The third way, Miller’s way, and my way, is a know-how with the sinthome, that of invention. “We are,” claimed Miller, “as a time when the Other no longer exists.” And so, of course, we must invent the Other, because this Other is the place of sociability itself — the place of discourse, the environment.
Miller, however points a the following oppositions, again I agree: “This is the key to the shock of civilizations. What we thus name is essentially the opposition, the incompatibility, between the religious civilization [of the name of the father] and the merchant civilization [of capitalist discourse, I presume], between civilization dominated by the ideal ego and the one that the superego strictly speaking dominates, the superego whose imperative can be formulated Enjoy!.” Miller’s next line is so good, I must reproduce it: “The merchant civilization stigmatizes that of the ideal ego, and it is in turn stigmatized as perversion, corruption, immorality, jouissance-pride. We find between the two an enigmatic mix, today’s China, where we can observe both an authoritarian control of the Ideal and an extraordinary disinhibition of consummation.”
Our mission, claims Miller, is to once again institute “diversity,” which means, the diversity of enjoyment, not in a market-place but as the invention of sociability beyond the narcissism of libidinal capitalism. Miller claims here, controversially, that the Lacanian moment is perhaps passing. Slavoj once claimed that if Lenin followed Marx, and then came Stalin, then, Lacan followed Freud, and then came Miller. I do not think it works like this. I think that Freud was the Stalinist. That makes Miller the Marxist. It was Marx who, after all, knew how to invent: he invented the symptom. The pragmatism that differentiates the psychoanalyst’s know-how from the capitalist’s is, for Miller, the fact that the psychoanalyst doesn’t focus on what works — but on what fails: “the it never works.”
