regime

When Miss L came to see me, she was complaining of physical malaise, anxiety and sleep disturbance. We initiated a face-to-face psychotherapy. In all this time, I had a diffuse impression that I was waiting for something to happen. That elusive something was to make possible a «true» analytic therapy, comparable to what comes up with other patients: some free associations, some memories, some insights, some working-through of transferences, all accompanied by some affective halo. These terms suggest a minimum, to express the "analytic lack" of this therapy.
While Miss L was talking, I thought: "What a pity that such a beautiful, lively woman had no lover". It was the thought of another woman that would have wished to share her patient’s enjoyment of life and, at the same time, it was the thought of the virtual man with whom she could have lived together.
Aged thirty-six, Miss L lived between her parents and her job. I say "between" in order to delimit a place where there was nothing. The suggestion of this imaginary place came to me from the fact that, beginning with the day when she no longer complained of her symptoms, the patient came to have moments when nothing was crossing her mind. These moments did not last long, and whenever a thought came, it was that in the last sixteen years, she never had a personal life (a close relationship).
When I use a spatial metaphor of the type "a place where there was nothing", I correlate it with the temporal metaphor: "a time when nothing happened". These metaphors were not communicated to the patient. Between a false communication and a reduced one, I preferred the latter, which was focused on facts of life.
Towards the end of her adolescence, Miss L had a liaison with a man who abandoned her afterwards. When she had told her about that, her mother asked her to keep everything secret, from her father as well as from the rest of the world. This enclave fact, together with all afferent unconscious wishes and phantasies, functioned like Freud’s "Hohe Markt in Vienna" (1916), which he used as a metaphor for resistance to analysis: if such a place were declared free of arrests, then all evil-doers in town would gather there - when the patient holds something back while being under treatment, this element crystallizes around it an entire psychic sector. Miss L’s (from Bucharest) "Hohe Markt in Vienna" "purged" her life of what she called "personal"; hence my impression of lack of depth. I considered this enclave element as being not so much an element of etiology, as a representative or a factual expression of deep psychic processes that led to her particular life situation.
Now that the therapy is over, I appreciate that in its course there were two significant moments, in which the patient and I functioned as an analytic couple.
The first moment occurred at the end of a session in which Miss L talked about our country’s poor political, social and economic situation, and about her dissatisfaction with the fact that a communist mentality hampers our becoming a capitalist country - and her working in an international project meant she had first hand knowledge of the subject. As she was bringing reasons for her dissatisfaction, the citizen inside me was agreeing with her, finding that no one could have more eloquently expressed such a reality. At that time, just after the 1989 revolution, one could hear these ideas expressed, in various forms, everywhere: among intellectuals, in the subway, on television.
Had we been somewhere else, I would have certainly approved of what she said. Yet the analyst inside me was not interested by this commonly shared reality, therefore I just listened to her, within the reality of our session. Meanwhile, the patient had already stated that she would like to emigrate. Then she was silent, looking at me. In my mind there took place a short fight between the "citizen" side and the "analyst" side, both of them agreeing that I must say something. What came out was a compromise question (meaning, on one hand, to preserve the topic of the discussion and the superficiality of its level, and on the other to avoid the enunciation of an opinion and invite Miss L to continue): what was the country she would like to emigrate to?
Before continuing with her answer, let us start a parenthesis here. In that sequence of time, while Miss L kept silent, waiting for my comment, I was not concerned with the content of what I was to say, but rather with the form, as I wanted to re-orient the patient’s attention toward herself without provoking by so doing a rupture of the discourse. At the conscious level I had no curiosity as to where she would leave to, nor had I any hypothesis about what her answer would be. I avoided asking her to say what crossed her mind because, from my experience with this patient, such a non-specific invitation would have been perceived by her as at once inquisitorial and freeing, and would have made her more defended. A second element in this parenthesis would refer to how I managed to have the time to weigh all these possibilities, given that Miss L had her eyes on me, hanging to me for an answer. This reasoning is a reconstitution of what I suppose happened in the analyst’s mind in that brief span of time. The reconstitutions of this type are being made starting from what the analyst thought during the session, from her (his) mental state at that moment, from what happened afterwards and from the general manner of the analyst and the patient’s functioning together. I would have not put the same type of question to another patient with the same discourse. Finally, when I refer to the way in which my mind functions in Miss L’s presence, I have in mind a combination between the manner of thinking that I have with all my patients, and the manner of thinking that I have with this particular patient. The particularity comes from the counter transference as an element of the patient’s transference. For example, the fact the I use the phrase "analytic couple", or the fact that during that particular session I oscillate between two different levels of communication (the manner of the "citizen" and the manner of the "analyst"), shows, among other things, that the patient’s transfer is a "parental" one, like in the presence of the parents’. Parenthesis closes here.
Therefore, I asked Miss L what country she would like to emigrate to. She replied that she does not know why, but her choice would be Asia. Well, all Romanians who wanted, at that time, to emigrate for a better economic standard of life, had in mind Western Europe, or the USA, or Canada, or at least Australia, but never Asia. At that moment, no longer able to share Miss L’s perception of Romanian realities, the citizen inside me succumbed.
Thus, the analyst remembered: in the patient’s childhood, her parents had worked for several years in China.
In the first part of that period, the daughter lived with her parents. In the second, the parents decided that she was to return to her home country in order to attend school, wishing in general that their daughter pursued a university education and obtain a social status better than theirs. The schoolgirl lived for two years with her grandparents, concentrating on her studies. This concentration, which continued after her parents’ return, was fruitful: she made it through University, and then she earned good money from the jobs she held.
The analyst also remembered that in a previous session the patient had said that her education had prevented her from enjoying life, and that, had she been an ordinary worker, she would have been happier.
Let us return to the first significant moment, the "emigration" moment. After she stated that she would go to Asia, I told her that there was a place there where once she had been happy. The way in which Miss L received this makes me believe that she did understand the link I had thus indicated between her past and her present, a link which highlights "Asia" as an internal place, the "habitation" of which would lead to her having a personal life.
In what follows I shall refer to the second significant moment, the "child" moment.
Several months before the "child" moment session, the patient had started talking about wanting to take a lover and not being able to do so. These sessions would alternate with others in which she would talk exclusively of her job. Her mate would have been the person who accompanied her in society and supported her from a material point of view. The impossibility to find such a mate she attributed to her incapacity to approach a man. Then there appeared the theme of the baby, which seemed split from the theme of the man. The child would have been the person who helped her in her old age, after her parents had died. Meanwhile, the patient had fallen in love with a man. Initially, knowing that the man was married and had children, she had determined that everything was to be confined to a physical relationship, which was to put an end to the sixteen years period in which she had not had sexual intercourse.
This brings us to the "child" moment session. We both knew that it was the penultimate session of the therapy. In the course of its duration she told me that her rendezvous with her lover had continued, letting me understand that he loved her too, but that for her part she was determined that their relationship remained secret, in order to protect his family. Then she changed the subject and turned to her job. Towards the end, she came back to her wish of having a baby. Given that having a baby seemed to the patient more feasible than having a man, the patient was foreseeing that she would have to bring up the child all by herself. Here starts the "child" moment. She says: "The problem is what the world would say [about my having an illegitimate child]". I say: "It depends upon what you consider is more important for you [the feeling of shame or the desire to have a child?]". All along, the verbal dialogue was doubled by a non-verbal one: the patient looked at me questioningly, with the corner of her eye and with raised eyebrows, as if furtively, and then initiated what I would call a roguish smile. I somehow took over her smile, closed my eyes and raised my shoulders, in a gesture of lazy helplessness.
The roguish smile took me back to a discussion we had had during the therapy about Miss L’s childhood, in which she would rather remember what kind of temperament she had as a child: frolicsome, which makes me place her smile in her "Hohe Markt in Vienna" and in "Asia". Her questioning look automatically identifies me with "the world", as the question of the patient could be translated, as "Aren’t I right if I think that you wouldn’t be against?" I accept the identification and give the answer of a weakened Superego: "All right, I’ll grant you that, I’m not enthusiastic about it, but I don’t see how I could be against it."
The "child" moment expresses a process that developed throughout the course of the therapy: Miss L projected onto me a Superego that forbade a "personal life" to her, and then she persuaded that Superego to give in. The fact that I did not approve her made the projection possible, and the fact that I did not disapprove her made the persuasion possible. Both of which unfolded during my silences. In my turn, I identified myself with her projection, which made it into a projective identification. My identification with her Superego comes out, for example, of my appreciation that she is not a good-enough patient for an analytic therapy. During the "child" moment, the moment that she had had in her adolescence with her mother is now being re-enacted with me, with the difference that now the mother, "tired", gives up forbidding her daughter to tell the father and the world about her personal life. A child would "tell" everybody that Miss L had a sexual relationship with a man.

Conclusions

An effect of this therapy was a diminution of Miss L’s "Hohe Markt in Vienna" isolation. The thing was possible in the circumstances of an analytic waiting opposed to the analyst’s civic expectation. Analytic waiting is not deprived of desire, but it contains a non-specific desire for the well being of the patient, an evenly suspended desire. Such a waiting presupposes an ideal model of the analytic session. This therapy is far from the ideal model, but it was a therapy to the extent in which it aimed at achieving it. This model requires a device, which includes the neutrality of the analyst and the fundamental rule in the spatial-temporal dimension of the session, which favours an analyzable transference. It is preferable to use the term "setting" rather than the term "device", because it illustrates better a situation that has a form and a limit, similar to the dream, to maternal care, and to incest forbiddance (Roussillon, 1995). The setting has also a cultural dimension, but the neutrality of the analyst (or the extent to which the analyst tends to it) confers to the setting an essentially individualizing character that, in analysis, takes the maximum form of the patient’s narcissistic regression.
The objection could be expressed that one did not need too much neutrality to sense and to communicate to the patient the link between the emigration theme and her past, or in other words, between spatial and temporal emigration. Yet, it is only the non-symmetrical analytic position, which is opposed to the "civic", symmetrical one, which afforded communication at the specific "emigration" point, when the patient was intellectually immersed in "society", but emotionally disposed to understand more about herself.

The supposed influence of totalitarianism

As long as my Romanian fellow citizens live in a culture which shares with the Western world the common denominators of maternal care, incest prohibition and the possibility of a "personal life", the classical analytic setting can be for them too the ideal analytic model. The deeper pattern of these individuals’ mind functioning was not modified by their having made the experience of a totalitarian regime. Had Miss L not had at her disposal a post-totalitarian society to prop up her communism/capitalism metaphor to express the relation public/private and their relationship with the Superego, she would then have used another metaphor, one consistent with that other social reality, but expressing the same internal reality. The totalitarian experience may constitute a source for metaphors describing the functioning of the individual, but it cannot be relevant for the analytic investigation of psychic reality. The more does the investigation remove itself from the ideal analytic model - even to the point of leaving the setting altogether -, the more it approaches common sense which is tributary to social functioning. Thus, the social functioning becomes more and more emphatically indicative of a manner of thought less and less psychoanalytical.
Knowledge of post-totalitarian society may reveal the functioning of its psychoanalytical community. At one point I was tempted to draw a parallel between the phenomenon of "double" patient-analyst relationship (in which the two systematically develop a common activity outside the analysis, and parallel with it) - on the one hand -, and the lack of separation between institutional powers in the totalitarian state - on the other. This lack leads to conflicts of interest and to a "personalization" of functions. Now I think that establishing an analytic setting depends rather on the personal analytic experience of the analyst, while at the same time necessitating, for its maintenance, an institutional setting of the professional group, which is to invest the analytic setting as an ideal analytic model.
The future of psychoanalysis lies in preserving the ideal model of analytic setting and in deepening research inside the therapy session, not outside it, in its allying itself with the sciences about the individual, not with those about communities.
All this supposes that we, the analytic groups from post-totalitarian societies, do have things to learn from the Western professional and institutional experience of psychoanalysis, whereas it could hardly be said that the Western analytic community can have any use of our own social experience. One day we may be their original partners in analytic research. Until then, our Western colleagues can indeed help us, with an evenly suspended desire, to achieve an institutional setting capable to sustain the "old" analytic setting.

REFERENCES

FREUD, S. (1916). Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. S. E. 16.
ROUSSILLON, R. (1995). Logiques et archéologiques du cadre psychanalytique. Paris: PUF, 1995.

[1]Part of the present paper was presented at the Conference of the European Psycho- Analytical Federation, in 2001. The context then was the international psychoanalytical community’s implicit expectation that analysts from the post-totalitarian world would contribute ideas inspired from their experience under the dictatorship. The title of the respective conference section was "The influence of Ideology and Idealisation in Post-Totalitarian Society".