The values of articulation: aesthetics after the aesthetic ideology

The eThical FoundaTion oF analyTic acTionWe shall give up the idea that there are special classes of processes that prepare or propel mental activity, that is to say, classes that are qualitatively different from the mental activity they prepare or propel; for now everything is an action.-Roy SchafeR (1976, p. 13)An ethics essentially consists in a judgment of our action, with the proviso that [the judgment] is only significant if the action implied by it also contains within it, or is supposed to contain, a judgment, even if it is only implicit. The presence of judgment on both sides is essential to the structure.-JacqueS Lacan (1959-1960, p. 311)A fter Schafer and Lacan, Renik (1993a,b) and Friedman (1993, 2007), and, more or less, the entire relational tradition (Harris 2011), it is by now a commonplace to say that psychoanalysts are interested in their own activity-that is, our activity, what we are doing with our patients, what we, as analysts, say, feel, and imagine. Analysts have grasped the ways in which their internal worlds shape, illuminate, or constrain engagement with, and perhaps the very emergence of, the patient's subjective experience. Analysands talk in the hope we will receive their message generatively, openly, all the while taking the risk that we might misrecognize, not hear, and fail to witness what they want us to recognize, hear, and witness. This risk involves, as Shulman (2016) says, "a bid for utmost intimacy" (p. 706); the emotional stakes are high. In this context, it is no wonder we care deeply about how we act and why we act as we do. This is why what we concern ourselves with is Training and Supervising Analyst, San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis.

Section: Ac T I O N a S C A R R I E R O F J U D G M E N T ( O R R E A S O N I N G -I N -Ac T I O N )mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Ethical Foundation of Analytic Action

Wilson¹

2016

“…Whichever we might prioritize, it seems to me clear that our attempts to represent ourselves, our thoughts and commitments, involve each of us who writes in a project of giving shape to the inchoate, the hitherto unformulated. This is a project of emergence, of articulation that, as Charles Altieri (1996) observes, "involves not only a modification in language but a modification in selves who have to interpret why they find satisfaction in it and who have to indicate what consequences might follow from that act of identification" (p. 84). I am modified by how I say what I say.…”

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confidence: 99%

My Partners in Conversation

Wilson

2023

I write to speak when my partners in conversation are not with me. My voice won't carry that far, so I write to them. They are many, in truth. Some are still around, and some have left the planet. I'm not sure how far back to go in assembling these people. As Jerry Garcia sings in Morning Dew, "Where have all the people gone, my honey? Where have all the people gone, today?" "There's no need for you to be worryin' about all those people. You never see those people, anyway."Yes. I never see those people anyway. I'm speaking of the ones who are truly gone. They live as an audience of beloved ghosts, both shadowy and close, when I write. Lillian Young was my high school English teacher in Los Angeles. Short of stature and stylish in her way, she commanded great respect from her students, whom she addressed as "friends." "Friends, what is Roethke's language doing in the first two stanzas of this poem?" "Friends, how do we make sense of the difference between Ellison's naive protagonist in this scene with the trustee and Bledsoe and the tone of the narration of the scene?" I write for Mrs. Young, in the vain hope that she's still reading my stuff and offering her trenchant comments in the margins, and is still teaching somewhere, somehow.There are others who lurk in that ghostly backroom offstage, such as my father, who didn't read a lick, by which I don't mean he was illiterate, only that he had no interest in what I had to say. He couldn't muster the desire to listen well. As sometimes happens with those who don't listen well, we might care especially intensely that they would.Most of us have such assemblages of people we have loved and with whom we still speak, if only in our heads and at times on pieces of paper or, more commonly now, on computer screens. For me they form, together, a kind of ideal audience, that group that live in the shadows because they are dead, with whom, therefore, I can have the kind of timeless conversations that populate my dreams: usually hushed, muted, gestural, a kind of spending conversational time together in emotional slow motion.There is also an element of "If you could see me now" in my relation to this ideal audience.

“…Can we even assert its existence, if the analyst is finding himself acting as much as, or even more than, faithfully carrying out something planned? We can only agree when Altieri (1996) observes, “our most passionate actions tend to reveal far more than the performing consciousness takes account of (p. 82)” [1199].…”

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confidence: 99%

Impossible Ethics

Ackerman¹

2020

The proper practice of psychoanalysis repudiates a rule-based code of ethical conduct. A conflict exists, however, between Freud’s rejection of the Biblical commandment to love one’s neighbor as oneself and his development of psychoanalytic techniques that demand something very much of this ilk. Other essential conflicts in analytic practice include the impossibility of removing the analyst’s desire from the analytic relationship, the unruly nature of unconscious processes in both analyst and analysand, and the après-coup nature of ethical recognition. A discourse of ethics is recommended in which analysts are called on to consider the ethical demands of each clinical moment. Ethical demands on the analysand, as well as the analyst, bring to light the way in which analysis rests on the foundational ethical situation into which humankind is born.