Place - It's Not About the Couch
Does Psychoanalysis Intellectualize the Emotions?
Contrary to what is habitually presumed, psychoanalysis is not the
intellectualization of one's life or emotions, but the one contemporary discourse
that does not ‘de-realize’ passion and suffering into the mere expression
of emotions or feelings of pain. To see how this is so, it suffices to observe
what happens in the communication of an emotion in everyday life: there is
a moment which always goes beyond a mere spontaneous feeling and requires
a clarification, not only to oneself, but to others. In this respect,
an emotion is always encountered two times: as emotion and as ‘thinking of
emotion’. Without pushing this analysis any further, it is simple to
recognize that this 'thinking of emotion' does not introduce anything exterior
or alien to the emotions, but rather situates the problem and necessity of
their expression vis-a-vis the ‘other’. Indeed, for every emotion there is
already a sign of emotion which is said to express it: happiness = a smile,
sadness = a frown, etc.
In a general way, an emotion is
always anticipatable in signs: that is to say in a doxa — the representations
of the social group, family, and friends. But the moment an emotion is no
longer expressible as a sign is the moment it presents a para-doxa,
which then reveals a failure of expression in the form of a passion.
Take two people in love, for instance, constantly faced with the problem of
revealing their emotions in signs which are continually insufficient to the
task of communication: one being fooled by a kiss, the other kissing a fool;
the wife claiming she was an idiot to listen to her husband's promises, the
husband claiming he did not notice she was an idiot because he was in love.
Here, not only does it become evident that language is insufficient to the
expression of an emotion, but it seems by this very fact to allow one to
say the opposite of what signs normally mean: for example, one calling the
other a 'pig' in order to say 'I love you.'
Otherwise stated, emotions reveal themselves as passions to the degree that
the speaker is left in a state of suspended certainty as to what they are.
What is certain, however, is not such passions as love or hate, but the resulting
passion of ignorance which their signs produce. For this
reason, psychoanalysis is not a place you go to think about or intellectualize
your emotions, but to articulate the ignorance of a passion: an emotion
that simultaneously asserts and denies its own comprehension. This is
because in what is commonly called an emotional experience, there is no need
to introduce an intellectual dimension that would interpret it: the emotions
are never simply opposed to the 'thinking of emotions.' Rather, any emotional
experience automatically includes the clarification of its own 'un-thought'
— an ignorance which is not merely a difficulty of expression, but what Freud
would call a repression. By calling a problem of emotional expression
a repression, psychoanalysis displaces the question of emotions from an immediate
expression of the self to a revelation of what is systematically ‘other’
in the recognition of the self: the question of desire and passion.
It is in addressing this ‘other’, that psychoanalysis does not
de-realize the passions, for it neither attempts to objectify the 'internal
causes' of this otherness in a psychology nor moralize it with 'exterior causes'
in a philosophy or religion. Rather by focusing on the immanent Other of
an emotional experience, it reopens an investigation into the cause of desire
and passion in the formation of anything mental: the mental being by definition
ill, or at least symptomatic, to the extent it is affected by the material
of its paradoxical expression — its language, signifiers, and writing.
In conclusion, on the one hand, it is easy enough to recognize that
the major clinical discoveries of psychoanalysis have consisted in analyzing
the symptom as a desire to be read and written, whereas normative psychology
and psychiatry have only imagined the symptom as forms of mental illness.
On the other hand, it has been art and literature which have pointed towards
the symptom by addressing the public in the language of the passions — and
often in signs which counter the norms of any particular society in which
they are found. It was psychoanalysis which reintroduced an interrogation
of the passions into a medical discourse by taking seriously their irreality,
not merely as the expression of a fiction or imaginary, but as a guide to
a real repression in the life of the individual. Neither art nor psychiatry,
psychoanalysis opens up the reality of suffering and passion, in the sense
that their repression would find a place to be listened to, constructed, and
read — and not simply reduced to an intellectualization or sublimation of
the individual's interior feelings of pain and emotion.
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