“On the patient who pays Nothing,” or “Psychoanalysis is already Anarchist”
1
One of the most difficult questions that some must face within psychoanalysis concerns money. Recently, in a large clinic, the question of money was raised. Yet, it was raised with a number of presuppositions. I shall address two of these presuppositions: first, money is always bad, it is an unnecessary feature of capitalist society, and; second, money must be raised at a certain level in order to sustain the business. Here we have the conflation of psychoanalytic discourse with communist discourse. It is why I defend (sometimes) the possibility of an anarchist psychoanalytic practice against the communist one.
On the one hand, these two problems are related to another presupposition which may be revealed simply by pressing the question a bit further: psychoanalysis is a ‘need.’ Yet, we should challenge this position. If there is a need for psychoanalysis then this goes against its stated intentions: to promote the desire of psychoanalysis. The need of psychoanalysis is a position of admission into the clinic, to be reoriented during preliminary sessions; yet, there are practitioners who will claim that psychoanalysis should be available to everyone because they need help to live in this world, they suffer, and yet they do not have the means to pay for their treatment. This position invests too much efficacy in psychoanalytic treatment, in the particular abilities of its practitioner, and it disinvests treatment from its goal (which is to produce analysts, those equipped with the desire of the analyst). In a word, it demotes psychoanalysis to psychotherapy.
On the other hand, even the most radical clinics are spaces of sociality, that is, spaces of discourse, which, whether communist or capitalist (though, in the end, these often amount to the same discourse), struggle to sustain themselves as a business. Hence, they frequently insist that their practitioners introduce flat fees, minimal fees among their analysands, and then, from those fees, a certain percentage is extracted to sustain the business. I have witnessed how the more generous approach to fees in every case evolves into a less generous and more insistent extraction of minimal fees. Even the most noble attempt to sustain a radical practice lapses into the necessity to sustain itself as a corporate body. Here, the clinic demotes itself to the status of a business and obstructs the analytic clinic: why shouldn’t the extraction of fees from practitioners, offset through their analysands, undergo the same processes of ensuring or safeguarding the analyst’s desire as the individual clinic? The individual clinic becomes sabotaged by the capitalist discourse, even with the best of intentions.
It will be worthwhile to appreciate the role of money as an object within the clinic and to ask the corporate body whether it chooses psychoanalytic discourse or capitalist discourse.
Georg Simmel, in 1900, published The Philosophy of Money. In it he pointed out that one of the pivotal features of money within capitalist society is to separate the subject from its object. The ‘value’ of an object, in this case money, refers to its symbolic inscription, an inscription that comes in place of the fusion of the subject with its object. This introduces ‘lack’ inherent in sociability as such. In this sense, money — not its accumulation, as objet petits a, but its symbolic function of mediation — promotes individuation, the emergence of subjectivity as such, and therefore adopts a role that is neither necessarily capitalist nor communist. The capitalist discourse is without lack, though the modern master’s discourses make use of lack to propel a problematic/neurotic relationship to the master signifier.
We cannot rule out the possibility that money — like any object — adopts a function specific to its context/discourse. The problem with communist or capitalist orientations is that they presume in advance the function of money as an object ‘for All.’ Freud came close to this position when he reasoned that money was proximate to excrement and to the logic of the gift in anality, which made money a particular quality of objet petit a. As for Lacan, money, at one time, was thought to neutralize debt; by this he meant, I believe, that it could ward off the madness of a devouring Other. In other words, if you give up money, then, in a way, you also protect yourself from giving up your subject-position (e.g., lack).
Yet, during Lacan’s very last teaching, he demonstrated another principle of exchange inherent in money: the exchange of something that moves piece-by-piece and yet remains ‘whole.’ This he termed the ‘homogeneity of value.’ Money obtains value by remaining the same within multiple contexts. This is the great delusion of money within capitalist discourse. We have come to see the extent to which this delusion is shared by the communists. Psychoanalysis offers a counterpoint by reminding, as Lacan did, that it is the repetition of the piece-by-piece, case-by-case, context-by-context, or discourse-by-discourse, that one remains open to the psychoanalytic orientation toward money. This position, closer to anarchism, ensures not that one insist upon the practical necessity of money, but that one not be closed off to it.
2
It was a stroke of genius for Lacan to have included among the psychoanalytic objects, the ‘nothing.’
Domenico Cosenza, in his book A Lacanian Reading of Anorexia (2024) provides a wonderful presentation on the object nothing in his seventh chapter. He claims that the object nothing is, for Lacan, the most enigmatic of all of the objects, and, therefore, it obtains a special status within Lacanian psychoanalysis, and not just for the anorexic. On the one hand, it cannot be reduced to an erogenous zone, like the feces. Yet this, precisely, indicates something special about its relationship to the ‘hole’ and to the body: the nothing, unlike the others, has a special and problematic relationship to the hole. If it is proximate to the oral erogenous zone within anorexia then this is perhaps because it is the site of one potential traumatization/hole-making. The subject is perhaps traumatized by the food-signifier.
In the end, Lacan distinguishes between the object nothing and the oral object, but also between the nothing and the signifier. For this reason, perhaps we can say that the nothing is closer to what we can call a ‘sign,’ which is adorned by the speaking-body in one way or another. We can therefore find the object nothing in anorexia or psychosis, but also in the neuroses, both obsessional and hysteric. The object nothing is opened up as a question within the clinic by our patients, by my patients, but also made accessible in psychoanalytic discourse by discussions around ordinary psychosis.
We can say that the object nothing serves as a preliminary interface with the Other. This is why Cosenza suggests a dualism of the nothing: a side which is resolutely positive, on the side of jouissance and drive satisfactions, and a side that is dialectizable within the field of the Other (as in the neuroses). It is the first side of the nothing that interests me: the nothing object, on this side of the dualism, demarcates a zone of foreclosure; it is an object situated on the positive plane of non-negativized jouissance. Hence, in the popular passage from Lacan: the anorexic is not the one who rejects food-objects but who rather opts to ‘eat the nothing’ as a source of autistic satisfaction.
Today there are a prevalence of speaking-beings who come to analysis with the ‘nothing’ in their pockets. I have noticed several patients over the years who, for example, pay ‘nothing’ for analysis. This is what keeps the analysis from moving, and, at one point or another, a deadlock is established: analysis for ‘nothing’ or else the world with the continuation of the stubborn symptom. These patients carry their object around with them in their pockets, and yet, they never cease to promote the object to the status of lynchpin of their discourse. In one case, painting took on the status of currency, a ‘value’ was produced through the extraction of paintings as payment for analysis. The question must be asked: can painting transform itself into a world-building practice? The patient stacks the paintings up in their room, endless swirls like a Van Gogh, layered upon itself without punctuation: the painting must come to an end. The introduction of payment through painting gives value to the loss of the piece of art, an art-object which is not ‘nothing’ but which can be taken from the pocket and placed into the field of the Other.
Each payment must be taken afresh, each payment is taken one-by-one.
