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An experience we have to control every day1
Alain Vanier
If the crisis at the heart of psychoanalysis – a permanent and irreducible crisis –
is its transmission, control analysis must be its symptom.
In 1922, training analysis became mandatory, although it did not need to be as
in-depth as therapeutic analysis: it was thought sufficient if it led to a conviction
about the existence of the unconscious, possible to reach solely through the
experience of analysis. In 1927 and due to Ferenczi’s influence, it was agreed that
analysts should be more analyzed than their patients. However, eighty-four years
later, the contrast between the abundance of research dealing with analysis and the
analyst on the one hand, and the paucity of the literature on the question of
supervision on the other, is striking; of course with the exception of the works
produced by the French IVe Groupe, which made this very question the pivot of its
institutional connections. 2 Elsewhere we find very little, barring the occasional
sharply critical or polemical text, which shows the difficulty that has existed
regarding supervision since the beginnings of psychoanalysis, its different
conceptions remaining at odds with each other since the time of Vilma Kovacs and
her fundamental text.3 Moreover, there is not much we can actually add to this text,
since the majority of problems raised by the practice of supervision have already
been indicated here. Today, these tensions of control analysis, in terms of both its
conception and its exercise, remain unresolved, especially if we take a closer look at
our practice.
Paper presented at the Journée du IVème Groupe O.P.L.F. « L’écoute de l’écoute : contrôle,
supervision, analyse quatrième », which took place on March 17-18, 2007 in Paris. The first version
of this text appeared in Topique, n°103, Le Bouscat, L’Esprit du Temps, September 2008.
2
Cf. especially Topique n°1, La formation du psychanalyste (P.U.F.), n°18 Trajets analytiques (Epi),
n°97 L’Écoute transmise (L’Esprit du Temps).
3
V. Kovacs (1936), «Analyse didactique et analyse de contrôle », trad. M. Moreau-Ricaud, Topique,
n°18, Paris, Epi, 1977.
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2
*
Almost forty years ago, Conrad Stein questioned the analytic status of
supervision in the context of training. 4 Distinguishing between three “options”, a
control analysis, according to him, might represent:
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monitoring the candidate and the beginning of his practice;
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a new analysis, since it is often a demand for an analysis in disguise;
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instructing the candidate in the psychoanalytic technique.
To these three options we could add, together with Jean Clavreul, the practice
of defending the respectability of psychoanalytic institutions. Have these different
points ever been absent from supervision, as it was practiced in the past and it is still
today? Questioning them destabilizes a certain self-conceit, which too often governs
the relationship a “respected” psychoanalyst has to his own knowledge (savoir). We
could also examine the need for a “recognized” controller, or, as we often say, one
who has “experience” in this matter. Is the knowledge that is at stake in analysis
cumulative? If what is at stake in control analysis is indeed that the analyst has some
idea of what he is doing, the question remains as Nathalie Zaltzman puts it, namely,
“what do we expect from supervision that we could not expect otherwise?”5
*
It seems to me that the different aspects of the work of control and their
respective critiques refer to the variety of what we can see in what might today call
“the clinic of supervision” – which, we should notice, remains to be produced. This
clinic is variable to a high degree, depending on the analysts, patients etc. There are
demands for supervision which are in fact demands for analysis. Indeed, can this
aspect ever really be absent from a control, if we ask ourselves whether the demand,
the demand for a control, does not aim to restore the subject supposed to know,
C. Stein, « Sur la pratique des cures contrôlées » (1970), in La mort d’Œdipe, Paris, DenoëlGonthier, 1977.
5
N. Zaltzman, talk given at the Journée du IVème Groupe O.P.L.F. « L’écoute de l’écoute : contrôle,
supervision, analyse quatrième », which took place in Paris, 17-18 March, 2007.
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which would also make it a means of the resistance to analysis? Certain demands are
related to the fact that the fall of the subject supposed to know, crucial to the
movement of the cure, is not linked to the analytic process itself, but rather to a
difficulty in personal analysis. The latter is then interrupted because of the resistance
to his demise.
There also exist demands for supervision which are demands for authorization,
where for example the author of the demand comes to present each consecutive
situation with the aim of repeatedly obtaining a permission to start an analysis.
There are also demands addressed to a knowledge that could be shared, in view
of the solitude or even the distress, in which the young analyst finds himself, once he
discovers that his theoretical equipment is, even in the best of cases, of no great help
to him. He is therefore hoping to acquire an extra dose of technique, which could fill
in the void he feels to exist in the transferential situation. Does this feeling of
impotence and imposture, which the young analyst experiences, a feeling that leads
him to call upon knowledge as a remedy to this void, not disguise the fact that
imposture is at the heart of the analytic relationship, as Jean Clavreul rightly reminds
us?6 As he also adds, the fact that the beginner has these feelings is not a bad thing,
since being taken for someone else is indeed a part of transference. It is in fact better
that he should not take himself for the Other or believe himself to be an analyst, all
the more so because what is at stake is not so much adding to a knowledge as finding
the position which he holds in the analytic framework. 7 What the analyst knows is
not what he is supposed to know. From his own analysis, he has learned what it is
that determines him, he has separated himself from his identifications and should
know what orientates him on this level; he still needs to get rid of what prevents the
appearance of knowledge, of this other order of knowledge that is involved in
analysis. Clavreul emphasizes the fact that in this sense, the practice of control
analysis is not a transmission of knowledge but rather a reactualization of what acts
6
J. Clavreul, « Interview sur le contrôle », Patio, n°2, Paris, Evel, 1984.
Because what is at stake, Lacan will argue, is not only what the analyst thinks he is doing with his
patient but also what the analyst thinks his patient is doing with him.
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as an obstacle to the analyst’s desire of knowledge and what impels him to pursue,
with his patients, the experience he had began in his own analysis. What acts as an
obstacle are the analyst’s implicit theories – his prejudices, as Freud called them –
theories that must become obsolete so that the analytic knowledge may appear.
To sum up, the analyst’s position must be de-egotivized. We will notice that in
Lacan’s texts, such as “The direction of the treatment,” he moves between the first
argument – the analyst directs the treatment in the sense that he directs neither the
patient nor his life but gives the treatment its orientation – and the final formula – the
treatment is directed by the unconscious desire, the desire of the analyst, as he would
later say, as if putting the two proposition together. At the same time, we should not
confuse the time of the passe with that of the control. Although the passe is a
moment of this desire and its procedure acts as a framework allowing us to grasp it,
the control analysis is not there to control what happens to the desire of the analyst,
but rather to work on the way in which the analyst obstructs it. The passe has not
eliminated control as the necessary albeit insufficient condition of solving the entire
problem of transmission.
*
Likewise, the institutional question can be approached through the question of
community. What do analysts have in common, if it is not the practice of
psychoanalysis as a social link, which for each of them isolates what cannot be
shared as common? However, it is also what puts the whole community of analysts
to work and the movement through which each one of them bears the desire of
knowledge that animates him.
It is here that a certain dimension, not of technique but of savoir-faire, can
come to play a role in supervision, in the way that construction compensates for
interpretation when the latter becomes impossible. Here I would willingly agree with
what Maud Mannoni said about control analysis, namely that it is best to “take
whatever comes,” without obsessing over the purity of the demand and instead to
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consider, as in the beginning of analysis, that here too it is our responsibility to bring
the author of the demand to analytic control, at the expense of numerous detours,
sometimes long but inevitable, which are part of any substantial practice of control, if
it is indeed analytic. The figures I am referring to here, these “options,” in Conrad
Stein’s sense, seem to me a sort of imaginary lubrication, which nonetheless can still
lead to supervision. Similarly to the preliminaries of an analysis, here too the key
question is – as an effect of the act – to institute psychoanalysis. Does not each
analyst have to retrace all of Freud’s steps, repeating his gesture – of abandoning
hypnosis – because it is to this place that the demand is addressed: it is addressed to a
master in possession of knowledge.
If we approach these “options” as imaginary figures of what analytic control
really is, we will be able to trace it implicitly. Here I will rely on one of Lacan’s rare
definitions of analytic control, perhaps the only, which he gave very early on, at the
beginning of his teaching. In this short passage, he begins by a rather trivial
observation: as a third person, the controller can often hear better than the controlled.
First of all because he is not subject to the imaginary difficulty of the analytic
situation and is less caught up in the drift of identifications, but also because the
situation of supervision, as indirect testimony, obeys the ordinary laws of
transmission: the sender receives from the addressee his own message in inverted
form. The third place of the controller therefore allows him to hear better and to let
one hear better as well. The supervisor “manifests a second sight […] which makes
the experience at least as instructive for him as for the supervisee.” Lacan continues:
“The reason for this enigma is that the supervisee serves as a filter, or even as a
refractor, of the subject’s discourse, and in this way a ready-made stereography is
presented to the supervisor, bringing out from the start the three or four registers on
which the musical score constituted by the subject’s discourse can be read.” And he
adds: “If the supervisee could be put by the supervisor in a subjective position
different from that implied by the sinister term contrôle (advantageously replaced,
but only in English, by “supervision”), the greatest benefit he would derive from this
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exercise would be to learn to put himself in the position of that second subjectivity,
into which the situation automatically puts the supervisor.
There he would find the authentic path by which to reach what is expressed
only very approximately by the classic formulation of the analyst’s diffuse, or even
absentminded, attention.”8
Lacan will propose several terms to replace the name control analysis, such as
„super-audition“, but eventually he will go back to the initial „control analysis.“ We
may also note that the term „control“ has remained in the Lacanian tradition
generally.
We could translate the necessity „to maintain oneself in the position of a
second subjectivity“ as the subject’s division and the divided position of the analyst,
although this reading would be anachronistic vis-à-vis this particular text. Is the
controller’s role simply to read over the analyst’s shoulder? Our practice, the real of
our clinic, divides us. Faced with this real, it may appear tempting to seek new
identifications in order to strengthen the ego, as we see it, for example, in the
demand addressed to an admired analyst.
However, we intervene in the treatment less as subjects and more through this
very division, the mark of a desire that puts the object into play and in command –
the object as missing, though it is necessarily demanded as a semblance. This place
of the object offered as a semblance, which, as Lacan stresses, the analyst should not
mistake himself for, is at the basis of the analytic discourse. This object of the
analyst’s own division, as an impossibility to be in control of anything, is a principle
of radical otherness. It is what guarantees the very otherness of the Other, which the
neurotic dedicates himself to bringing into existence, as well as what constitutes the
basis of transference. The object a is demanded in its aspect of the partial object,
against the background of the object lost; however, it is sustained by and based on
8
J. Lacan, Écrits, Paris, Seuil, 1966, p. 253 ; trans B. Fink, New York, Norton, 2010, p. 210.
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what the analysis will reveal, i.e. the object as real, the nothing fundamentally
missing and never lost.”9
The psychoanalyst is a place, an operator of the cure. This place can only be
held by someone who has gone through the experience of analysis. To occupy this
place, which the analyst supports starting from the initial pretense, when the demand
is addressed to him, is only possible on the condition that he does not get lost in the
labyrinth of unifying identifications into which he is invited. The said position of the
“second subjectivity” therefore demonstrates the division of the analyst at work.
Between the two poles of his division, he represents the place from which he listens;
what is at stake in this division is this nothing: the real of the missing object. This
division indeed reminds us of the distance the analyst maintains, as an effect of his
desire, between his idealization by the analysand and the separating object of which
he is the support. This becomes articulated, unfolded, in this second situation – and
not a double situation, as the etymology of the word control might indicate10 -- which
is connected to the deployment of a third, whose position the analyst comes
temporarily to occupy. The controller embodies one of the poles of this division;
analytic control therefore articulates what is missing in knowledge in order for the
experience to add up, and this lack manifests “what can be grasped in a flash, beyond
the limits of knowledge.” The controller occupies this place temporarily – with “a
few others” -- so that the analyst may then be able to bear “the experience we have to
control every day:” to control this crucial next-to-nothing, the adjustment and the
right positioning of which is decisive for analysis. To control nothing, yet each and
every day.
Trans. Kristina Valendinova
In this sense, we could argue that Winnicott’s transitional object has the function of giving lack the
meaning of a loss. Cf. A. Vanier, « A propos de l’objet a », Figures de la psychanalyse, n° 18,
Ramonville Saint-Agne, Érès, 2009.
10
Control originally designated “a register (a role) held as a double, one serving to verify the other
(hence contra). Cf Dictionnaire historique de la langueg francaise (dir. A Rey), Le Robert, Paris
1992.
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