Secondary Gain 002
The Anti-Advice Column of Parapraxis
Secondary Gain is an anti-advice column. It follows in the tradition of other psychoanalytic experiments that have opened up the consulting room using media: from Susan Isaacs’s advice columns in the interwar period and Winnicott’s radio broadcasts during World War II to experiments with radical radio, like Fanon’s understanding of the power of the radio in the Algerian Revolution and Guattari’s work on Radio Libre Paris in the late ’70s. Yet, in keeping with psychoanalytic principles, advice is not directly offered, and columnists don’t presume to offer treatment or cure or serve as a proxy for long-term care. Instead, three columnists come together to think with, and alongside, their questioner, who always has the final word.
Your columnists, writing under pseudonyms:
Dr. Harris C. is a psychoanalyst practicing in Brooklyn, New York.
Dr. Lina Donato is a Kleinian psychoanalyst in private practice.
Dr. Hodï Green is a psychoanalyst practicing in New York City.
Dear Parapraxis,
I happened upon my analyst’s Twitter account, and now I can’t stop visiting it. I say “happened upon” because we have overlapping online acquaintances and because the account is not under his name. You may wonder how I know it is him. It is not that well hidden and he has a photo of himself in his profile. His account is public.
This raises a number or questions for me: Is he the same person online as he is in our sessions? Would he want me to see this account and know these (mundane) things about him? More generally, how can we know other people and be known by them? Is the person online my analyst or is he my analyst only in our sessions? Is he just playing a part?
To me, this seems different than simply running into him at a café or the grocery store. Those encounters would be awkward but fleeting. But online, I can look at his account without him knowing that I have done so. Or I can see his replies to our shared online interlocutors. I wonder if he looks at my account?
I don’t know how to bring up this topic in our sessions. Even if he isn’t upset by it, I fear what it all means for me. Am I a stalker? Am I obsessed with him? Am I just curious about him because of the imbalance in the relationship—he knows a lot about me, and I know very little about his nonprofessional life. Am I using his account to soothe myself in his absence? Have I become dependent on him?
All of these questions concern me, but there is even more. By looking at his Twitter account, I have learned things about him that make me question our alliance. For example, he has multiple houses, he’s a landlord, and his kids go to private schools. My own class background is quite different: food insecurity, neglect, indebtedness. And yet, I have found him empathetic when I explore my childhood injuries and their effects in the present. But now that I know his empathy is merely abstract, I’m having a hard time trusting him as much as I used to. I have been seeing him multiple times a week for about four years and I suddenly feel myself tightening up and second-guessing our therapeutic relationship. Maybe it is all built on me thinking he’s a different kind of person than he is. But then again, I’m not supposed to know any of the details about his life that are giving me these feelings. Can I rekindle trust in him? Is this just a problem I created for myself by looking for him online?
Sincerely,
How Can We Know Each Other?
Dear Watcher,
A guilty, now not-so-secret, pleasure offset by righteousness—definitely hard to look away. We could take you off the hook and string up this analyst-landowner by noting that the Twitter account is public. He put those images out there. They are his responsibility. Besides, who doesn’t look at porn on the internet? It is a product of “the empire of images” fueled by technology and capitalism. But we shouldn’t diffuse an opportunity to use this for your analysis. A useful place to get to work with the business of analysis can be an instance where someone encounters subjective division, torn between opposing feelings, ideals, beliefs, pleasures, and prohibitions—in your words, “A problem I created for myself.” Why would someone create a problem for themselves?
First, everyone does. Second, because the problem is also usually a solution in a problem’s avatar. We could say the same thing about a solution: it is a problem soon to appear. What can psychoanalysis tell us about how to exit from the problem-solution binary? Your case takes us to an essential point: by discovering a sexual style. This letter presents a classic one: the voyeur. Stalking? If you insist. Obsession? Imprecise. What seems to be happening is a certain position of satisfaction (and disturbance) circling around an object: the gaze. The fun part about what Jacques Lacan called the “objects a” is that they belong neither solely to the subject nor to the Other. You have commendably displayed the logic for all to see: I look at him, but also wonder if he looks at me. The idea here is that it’s not the analyst you depend on. It is the gaze. You can’t stop looking.
Voyeurs don’t settle for the thrill of sneaking a peak. They produce their jouissance by looking in order to get caught, to catch the gaze of the Other. It’s not so much the pleasure of watching your father undress through the keyhole, but the fact that someone else in the house might see you seeing. With your words printed in public, we see you watching the analyst. Anyone can look at this magazine if they buy it, which means that your analyst might see us seeing you seeing him: the infinite refraction of the universal gaze facilitated by Twitter. Twitter does have a reputation as the platform for DIY pornography.
I’d be missing a chance to make an Oedipal joke if I didn’t point out the phrase “I’m not supposed to know.” I probably shouldn’t mention that when Oedipus discovered the horror of knowing what he had done, he promptly blinded himself. I will anyway, because who can resist going for the thing you shouldn’t? Not me. In our digital era where images proliferate, the superego is no longer what commands us not to look, but what compels us to keep looking and to never stop enjoying.
From the horror of knowing to a desire for knowledge,
Harris C.
P.S. Please don’t gouge out your eyes. Oedipus went out of style in 1962, once Lacan delivered Seminar X: Anxiety, the one in which he departs from the Oedipal myth and the Freudian impasse of castration by advancing the concept of the object a.
*
Dear How Can We Know Each Other?,
What a scene you have depicted, one we all now can see and appreciate, for you have conveyed it vividly and in earnest.
The analyst in me wants to point out that you say you happened upon this “because you have overlapping Twitter accounts”—but have you not left something out? You happened upon it does not do justice to how you happened to happen upon your analyst’s Twitter account. Happened upon takes your desire out of it, disconnects desire from intentionality and consciousness. Still, your desires permeate the scene, and I want to think with you about the fact that this scene takes place outside of your sessions. As is the case with the Twitter world, while utterly public (outside the exclusivity of the analytic dyad), it also constitutes a private sphere, an alternate site, where a different kind of relating takes place. In this world apart from your sessions, your analyst achieves a different legibility. You are learning facts about him, and some of the facts are disquieting. His children go to private school. He owns houses. He has children. He is a landlord. And he is elsewhere.
I wonder—what might have been going on in your treatment to prompt this detour into the public/private territory Twitter provides? The detour affords a space where doubt is made present, where fear about yourself can be felt, where uncertainty about his capacity can be observed and partially articulated. I have the feeling from what you describe that this has not happened so much when you are together—that is, in the privacy of your analytic sessions.
Thanks to Twitter, however, you find yourself wondering many things about him and you ask yourself a series of questions. The questions you ask are indeed analytic questions and you suggest you wouldn’t be able to ask them with and of him, nor with and of yourself. I wonder what interferes?
No doubt the onslaught of information you have found and he has made public has stirred deep feelings—suspicion, uncertainty, upset; why he would not protect you from knowing these things might be one of your concerns. Now that you are in contact with these feelings, they seem to you to be on their face disruptive to the analytic relationship rather than part of it—building it—deepening it. Could it be that you have felt you had to push away any doubt or fear about your analyst—and that what has happened via Twitter can help you trouble your feeling about a way you have had to relate to him? And I wonder why you now think that his empathy is abstract.
That seems to be your stumbling block as you imagine going back to him and telling him of your discoveries and what they have evoked for you. You believe that what you have discovered about the difference in your lives now renders him incapable of a more real empathy. Many people have the idea that only sameness generates understanding, but understanding a person, and coming to know them, does not entail having to be like them. In fact, that kind of empathy often derives from a narcissistic identification, more than a real effort to apprehend an other. What you are writing calls to mind what Edna O’Shaughnessy has described as an enclave. An enclave in analysis is a kind of refuge set up when the patient feels they must closely fit in with the analyst to forge a sense of safety, but all the difficult stuff—all the aggression, mistrust, and misgiving—must be kept out.
Learning about your analyst via Twitter has set off various fantasies for you—maybe ones that felt forbidden in the room—when it’s just you two. I can imagine that taking these up with him will enhance your relationship, even if it feels a bit scary to do so.
I think this touches on what it means to actually depend on someone. What does it mean to actually trust? The separate zones of Twitter and your treatment have generated a world where you determine what you get to know about your analyst without his knowing that you know. This affords a kind of control that is the very opposite of dependence.
And yet, what you have happened upon is potentially very fruitful—not only for your treatment but for your own self-furthering. The questions you raise are such important ones, and ones not to be alarmed by or to turn away from. See what happens when you meld the worlds of Twitter and treatment. I imagine that taking the experience from Twitter into your treatment will mean navigating painful feelings of difference and uncertainty. But hopefully this will be a precursor to establishing a more real trust.
Kindly,
Dr. Lina Donato
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Dear How Can We Know Each Other?,
Socrates says that Prometheus gave humans a “most dazzling fire” that he stole from the gods. The philosopher adds, not without mystery, that the gift of fire allows us to partake in the knowledge of the “one and the many.”
One interpretation of the myth reads it as an image of the origin of the human capacity for the technological and the political. It occurs to me that your preoccupations gravitate around these two realities and signifiers. We make useful things out of fire, but also sit around it to talk about our human affairs, to experience connectedness, to deal with our differences. Maybe a question we both share is, “How can we know each other through what we make or do, and through the ways we talk to one another?” This is a basic question of psychoanalysis (if not the most basic one). It has been complicated by the multiplication of the self in a virtual/digital sphere that has infiltrated the “real world.” Who is my real analyst? Who is the real me? What is real analysis? What is the real?
The virtual is not new. It is as old as having a language, or as painting figures on a cave’s wall. What Freud calls “psychic reality,” inseparable from speaking and doing, is the original human virtuality from which all its modulations spring—such as writing or videogames or Twitter or psychoanalysis.[1] Our life is also virtual in the sense that, for psychoanalysis, a part of who we are is a myth or fable told by another, or a projection of an other’s mind. Our being is inseparable from how we were thought by our caretakers, how they imagined us and kept us in mind, how they spoke to us and about us, how they were our first mirrors; but also, how they held us in their arms, how they made our bed, our food, how they tied our shoelaces. In turning us into a center of attention, or a center of activity, our caretakers make one our multiple states of being: hungry me, burping me, smiling me, angry me, farting me, sleeping me, babbling me. In tandem, their multiplicity also becomes one for us. We become simultaneously one and multiple.
The movement between oneness and multiplicity ideally fluctuates; it is flexible and fluid, in tune with the comings and goings of life. A too rigid oneness can petrify all spontaneity, while too much multiplicity—online, offline, online, offline—can feel confusing, dangerous, untrustworthy, chaotic, groundless, in pieces and fragments, inconsistent (are people just playing a part, are they not who they seem to be?). This is the experience of some people who have never been kept in mind over time, or only unreliably so, among other reasons due to material scarcity and emotional neglect. People who undergo this calamity search for objects, relationships, and activities to soothe or narcotize an anxiety that threatens to annihilate them. There is a psychic injury that makes a part of their selves retreat into a well-hidden place.
I am not saying that this has been your experience,[2] but it seems to me that, placed at the intersection of capitalism and the fetishization of screens, we all share a feeling of aloneness that is the sociopolitical version of the trauma of having never been seen.[3] This is especially true and dramatically obscene in those who are forced to be the most vulnerable on account of their race, gender, immigration status, ethnicity, class, and so on. Who are we when we are not seen, kept in mind, or reflected by big media corporations, social discourses, and political institutions? Is psychoanalysis one of these discourses and institutions? In being vexed by the class difference between you and your analyst, and in asserting that his empathy is therefore abstract, you seem to be indirectly posing this question.
Psychoanalysis is part of the world. The power differentials between patient and analyst in terms of gender, race, or class, for example, will be carriers of personal meanings to be explored, but they also define a historical and sociopolitical reality in which the dyad is immersed. So collective histories and power imbalances are inevitably and unconsciously reenacted between you and your analyst. A good analyst is open to discuss, analyze, and contest the power dynamics present within the therapeutic space—such as ones based on class difference, to name a major preoccupation of yours. These dynamics embody broader power structures at the core of the patient’s suffering. Without claiming to know you, I wonder if this might be partially your case, hence your hesitation to bring up to your “well-off analyst” the discovery of his Twitter account, the information it has disclosed, and all that this has stirred up in you. Why not raise these issues?
As if you were sitting around a fire, I invite you to try to talk to your analyst about your concrete anxieties and questions associated with the new challenges posed to psychoanalysis by the technological and the political. You owe it to yourself, which is an entirely different kind of indebtedness. In this way, the analytic process could be, to go back to Socrates, a place in which to partake of the knowledge of the one but also of the many.
Virtually,
Hodï Green
[1]. I recommend you read the book Human Virtuality and Digital Life by Richard Frankel and Víctor J. Krebs on this topic.
[2]. I don’t know you; psychoanalysis takes the long way home when it comes to knowledge of the other, and the unconscious always discredits what we thought we knew. But if my words reverberate in you in some way (though they may not), I trust psychoanalysis will help you. My response to you follows my own associations to your questions and doubts, I place your words in new contexts, I connect them to new words, and to experiences and ideas of my own. Perhaps you’ll feel motivated to play with my words, and in so doing you’ll find new uses for them. I wonder if this is the analytic way of knowing each other.
[3]. Sándor Ferenczi, the Hungarian psychoanalyst, talked about a “traumatic aloneness” that causes the mind to crack; it pains me to see how the minds of the many sometimes crack every day.
Dear Parapraxis Analysts,
As in my own sessions, questions beget questions. But many of your questions felt like answers to my own questions. For that and the reading recommendations, I thank you heartily.
The Ariadne’s thread through these responses seems to be my desire to be seen. Ironically, by not bringing my own seeing of my analyst into my analysis, I am limiting his ability to see me, which is what I truly desire. I really have recreated my own problem.
Even so, I will not gouge out my own eyes, especially after considering how essential the gaze is to my current self. Who would I be without it? My own trauma of not having been seen does make me wonder if it is possible to be seen by anyone, even as I sit with my analyst, who sees (me) quite well. I had not thought of my own watchful stance as being related to my fear of dependency, but rather to my desire to know. Knowledge, even superficial, has felt like control in a self-soothing way—an attempt to keep the annihilating anxiety at bay. It has worked to some degree, but it is not without costs. Your responses have highlighted some of those costs: secrecy, feeling alone, less intimate relationships, a deep fear of uncertainty.
You’ve prompted me to consider that I don’t literally have to follow Ariadne’s thread out of this maze of my own creation. I could find an alternate way out that is not a simple retracing of previous steps. Maybe a new path, where I join my analyst around a fire and reveal my secrets. While scary, this seems possible. Who knows what he will see or what kind of self-knowledge will emerge?
Sincere thanks,
How Can We Know Each Other?