Saying the Unsayable: Mistakes in Psychoanalysis

This essay is part of an e-flux Notes series called The Contemporary Clinic, where psychoanalysts from around the world are asked to comment on the kinds of symptoms and therapeutic challenges that present themselves in their practices. What are the pathologies of today’s clinic? How are these intertwined with politics, economy, and culture? And how is psychoanalysis reacting to the new circumstances?

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Race in Analysis and Other Obstacles to Speech

B, a woman in her early thirties, contacted me about the possibility of doing a remote psychoanalysis. In our initial telephone conversation, she explained her motivation to begin analysis with these words: “I’m scrambling to configure my life in a way that I can imagine as my own. I would like to think about death and dying: not as an abrupt end, but as an escape. I have a desire to understand what death and dying mean to me. I’m wishing for it, but also terrified by it.”

B gives some initial indications about her life. Her career is adjacent to the mental health profession, and her own work focuses on Black girls who have been victims of violence. In her profession, however, she is one of only a tiny number of practitioners who are Black. She complains that her perspective is not valued by her colleagues, who tout the diversity she brings to their practice but undercut her contributions. B grew up in a close-knit community in the rural South, and was raised in a predominantly Black denomination of the Pentecostal church where her father was the senior pastor and her mother was a “church mother” who led purity classes for girls and provided spiritual guidance for the women in the congregation. Several years ago, B’s mother died of cancer. Her death was devastating for her daughter, both because they were extremely close and because B was acutely aware of how much her mother sacrificed to her family and community, very much at the expense of her own passions and talents. She recognizes the irony of her mother dying from ovarian cancer after a life spent subordinating her own desires as a woman to the demands of motherhood. B struggles to reconcile the importance of church and family in her life with the feeling that both have conspired to trap women in traditional roles and subordinate their needs to those of the men and the community. Today she lives and works in another part of the country, but still feels tremendous responsibility for her widowed father and her brothers—all of whom are somewhat insecure in their own lives at the moment and reliant upon her for constant help. Eventually she falls silent, and after a few moments I ask what she’s thinking. She replies, “I’m thinking that I’ve betrayed my people.”

Implicit in this first session is a question that concerns the censorship of the feminine in B’s life: If this is what it is to be a woman, then how can B go on living? How can she honor her mother and her sacrifice, without becoming her? Adjacent to this question, however, is another, which has to do with what it is possible to say to another person, and whether, or how, it might be received. Can she talk about how she was formatted by her religious education, and the submissive behavior and dutiful maternity it promoted, without betraying her father and her church or reducing the Black community she grew up in to an ethnographic curiosity? This hesitation or doubt seems to hover over the next session, without being made explicit.

In the third session, B reports that she has been feeling “light-headed.” Asked when the symptom appeared, she says that she googled me after the last session and found my faculty webpage (I also teach in a university). “I was looking at your bio and publications,” she says, “and I was overcome by this strange sensation of light-headedness: the room kind of tipped over. The articles were on philosophy and cultural studies, there was nothing there about practicing psychoanalysis. How did you manage to follow these different disciplinary practices? I feel light-headed as I think about it.”

When B falls silent, I invite her to say whatever comes to her mind. “I had a dream last night. The image was of looking down from above at a street where someone was crossing: an aerial view, maybe from a building or a tower, of someone crossing at a crossroads.” Associating to the dream, she says that

the building is white, like marble or ivory: the “ivory tower.” I never felt I was in control at the university, that I had a place. There’s someone down below who is crossing the street. The whole environment contrasts with X [the town where she grew up]. In X there are no buildings where you look down on people like that. I feel my work alienates me from where I’m from, my family, people who are like me. People are navigating things down there, trying not to get hit by traffic! And I’m not there.

B’s spell of light-headedness was triggered by the sight of my webpage, where my white skin and light hair are clearly visible in the profile photo. I therefore decide to return her words to her in the form of a question: “Can this light-headed person in an ivory tower hear what I have to say, or does she just look down on people at a crossroads?” B is clearly startled when she hears my words, but doesn’t deny the interpretation.

This is a problem every analyst must grapple with: what are the obstacles to speech on the side of the analysand? Freud invariably foregrounds repression and resistance, or the rejection from consciousness of the thoughts the analysand is unable to avow and her resistance to what returns in the dream or the symptom. In addition to these, however, every subject is also confronted with the problem of the unsayable (what cannot be said or is forbidden to say in a given cultural context) and, most fundamentally, with the censoring of a dimension of her experience that cannot be named, that is alien to language and inaccessible to consciousness, and that therefore becomes inscribed in the body.

B is struggling with the unsayable. She fears, no doubt for good reason, that her speech as a Black woman will be unreceivable to anyone who doesn’t share her background and experiences. At issue is what Willy Apollon calls the “structure of the address,” which establishes the limits of reality by determining, within a given culture, what counts as real in the language that structures the social tie, and therefore what one can or cannot say to another person.1 The structure of the address constitutes the other to whom one speaks as the guardian of the limits of the receivable, and thus as someone who can only hear what is already named and recognized as credible. One consequence is that the speech of a Black woman, and more importantly the experiences to which it attests, are not receivable within the shared language of the collective. (Just consider the outrage with which some greeted the slogan “Black Lives Matter,” and its replacement by “All Lives Matter”—a translation that apparently sacrifices nothing, but in fact censors an entire realm of experience and social relations.)
 

Legitimate or not, however, B’s fear arguably leaves unquestioned another assumption: namely that someone with the requisite background really could hear her, that she might hold out hope for an ideal interlocutor who could truly receive her speech. Such an assumption would only reify the structure of the address by reducing its sphere of operation to a specific community or subculture, where there may be fewer limits on what can be said but where it will never be possible to address that part of the living being’s experience that is at stake in speech, and especially what Lacan calls “full speech”: a censored part of the living being’s experience that cannot pass through language. If there is to be any true speech, therefore, the analyst must vacate the place of the Other of the address: first by identifying who the analysand is addressing when she speaks (the expert who might solve her problems, the disapproving parent who can never be satisfied, the white academic who threatens to reduce everything to an object of cultural studies …), and then by figuring out how to withdraw from that position. The transference creates an address for the censored, but only on the condition that the locus of the address remain empty. Apollon writes that when Freud decided to let the hysteric do all the talking, he effectively broke with the structure of the address. By remaining silent, and neither responding to nor validating what the analysand says, the analyst empties out the place of the Other she addresses, rupturing the structure of the address to create a space for speech that is no longer constrained by the receivable.2

In the example cited earlier I’m certainly not suggesting that I could ever fully leave the place B assigns to me, especially as a white person: analyst or not, I have my limitations and biases like everyone else. The point about my reformulation of her words is not that it shows me to be above the anticipated racial and cultural biases that make it difficult for her to speak freely, but rather that the analytic session is a place where the unsayable not only can be spoken, but will be spoken—whether the analysand likes it or not. In B’s symptom of light-headedness, and in the condensations and displacements of the dreamwork, I heard something she said without saying it: and now she hears it too. This is because the transference opens a space for something that cannot be expressed in language by soliciting the speech of the body, which can then become an object of work in the analysis.

With the opening of the transference, the real work can begin, which involves not just the unsayable but the censored. Through a series of symptoms and acts, B starts to examine what has been repetitively staged in her life without her being aware of it: a suicide attempt at sixteen when she drank a bottle of cleaning fluid (a passage à l’acte she now understands as an attempt to eliminate the sinfulness her upbringing ascribed to women, even at the cost of her own death), but also the bulimia she’s kept hidden since adolescence—a cycle of binging and purging that stages both her hungry pursuit of alternative ways of expressing her sexuality and her inability to swallow any of the more “liberating” models that are pushed on her from all directions (kink, gender fluidity, BDSM, women partners …), all of which are just so many versions of censorship. What she speaks about now is much less receivable than anything she said in the first weeks: she has never experienced any pleasure in sex, only the extinction of her desire to live. With this realization, B begins to become aware of an unconscious quest acting within her that cannot be satisfied by any model or object, and that urgently requires the creation of a new means of expression.

The Analyst’s Mistake, or The Trouble with Being Helpful

My first example concerned an obstacle to speech on the side of the patient, of a type that will be familiar to any analyst. My second example involves a mistake I made in the handling of this same analysis about a year and a half later. It shows how the analyst can become an obstacle to the analysand’s speech by introducing the structure of the address into the session in a way that is much more subtle, but also more insidious.

In the session in question, B reports a dream in which she goes with her ex-boyfriend to visit his parents’ house. Every detail is as she remembered, with one exception: the front door has been moved, and it’s no longer clear how to get in and out. The dream narrative concludes with these words: “There’s an old rotary phone on the table, and the numbers are somehow marked. For whatever reason I take a picture of this phone on the way out, as if this is how I’m going to remember to call the house.” The associations turn on some questions that have been preoccupying her for a while now: how to keep her family together after her mother’s death; the ex-boyfriend she thought she would marry, but who turned abusive; questions of home, where she belongs, and whether anyone in her life is really there for her.

When B stops speaking, I highlight an element of the dream that she didn’t address: taking a picture of the phone on the way out. “That’s how I was supposed to remember to call,” she says. “Numbers: I was almost sneaking to take this photo. Are those numbers on the phone the clue to the number of the house? They were kind of blurry and hard to make out. Maybe there was a four …? I’m not sure.” I say, “Straining to remember a number …,” and end the session there. As I say those words, an expression comes across B’s face that is hard to place—falling somewhere between sadness, shame, and anger.

In the next session, B reports a series of failed acts that have to do with forgetting: she forgot about an important work obligation, she neglected to change her clothes after working late and falling asleep on the couch, and she missed a self-care appointment:

I felt like no matter what I did, good habits and all that shit, ultimately I was going to be the one who got neglected in the end—I was going to have to neglect myself. I was thinking again about our last session, trying to remember the number four. This has been bothering me. It’s like there’s an impossible urge to do everything right [she begins to cry]. Not just to do everything right, but to get everything right—even about myself. Trying to know myself, to remember something. I’ve been trying to figure out how to talk to you about this, because I judge myself for everything I might say. You don’t even say anything, and yet I still wonder about what you’re thinking. The number on the phone: I was trying to get it right. I’ve always had difficulty remembering things, including dreams. My mother had the same thing: forgetfulness. I forget things other people remember. I have to do a lot more work to remember things … my recall is not right.

 

Then the number four. When the first-year anniversary of my mother’s death was approaching, I forgot the date. It was April fourth, 4/4. My aunt called to see how I was doing, but I had in mind that my mother died on April 11—the day of her funeral. I forgot the date, she had to tell me. I have an altar in my house for my mom. It’s not taken care of because I’ve been neglecting myself. The last flowers were still there, the candle had burned down, the water had evaporated from the dish. I saw how neglected it looked, and I started talking to my mom out loud. I said, “Sometimes I have to pretend like you’re not gone, because I can’t be in contact with your death all the time.” There’s so much I have to remember: not just that loss, but other things—things my family won’t talk about, or forgot. My dad will remind me, “Your mother used to be forgetful too, she would always lose things.” But she had so much responsibility all the time. And the fact that it was made fun of … it was like dying was her greatest escape. In the end, when she was in so much pain, she would say: “I can’t stay here like this.”

One could look at this example and say that my intervention involving the dream was a good one, because of what it yielded: the failed acts, the memory of forgetting the anniversary of her mother’s death and the self-reproach attached to it, how she is called upon to do the work of memory for others and to perpetuate her mother’s self-effacing role in the family, her identification with her mother in seeking forgetfulness—even death—as a kind of escape.

I call it a mistake, however, because I know why I asked the question: I was trying to be useful. As a result, I unwittingly inserted myself into the series of people who are making demands on her—specifically, the demand that she take responsibility for remembering. By adhering to the classic Freudian technique, questioning the elements the analysand didn’t speak about or on which the dream places special emphasis, I was actually confronting her with an ideal of behavior: “to get everything right—even about myself.” This is where the structure of the address comes back in, and makes my act not only counter-transferential but even violent. She speaks, and I respond, unnecessarily, with a question: which has the effect of turning what she says into something she says to her analyst. The session therefore ceases to be a space for her own speech and becomes a space where she speaks to satisfy someone else.

I’m not suggesting that it is always wrong to ask a question, of course, only that the context and the reason matter. This woman is at a point in the analysis where she is confronted with the censored, and not the repressed. That is, her difficulty is not a matter of overcoming resistance to something she is unwilling to face, but of dealing with the censoring of her desire as a subject by the sexual models forced on her from all sides: a censorship that has left her wondering whether the only possible escape is death. Most importantly, she is speaking—and has been for some time. There was therefore no need for me to introduce the questions or repeated phrases that an analysand at an earlier stage of analysis often requires to learn how to work with a dream or symptom or to trigger new associations. My intervention at this stage was gratuitous, and the analysand received it as a negative judgment or taking-to-task—as if she were failing to uphold her side of the bargain. The reason I felt compelled to ask the question was not that she wasn’t really speaking, but precisely that she was. I often feel overwhelmed by what this analysand is facing, from exploitation, violence, and rape to the temptation to end her own life, and I am all too aware that I have nothing to offer her beyond a space for speech.

But the worst mistake an analyst can make in such a situation—and the most vain and narcissistic—is to try to be helpful: to imagine that the analysand needs our help or that we can be of some assistance. To entertain this illusion is to break with the necessary foundation of any true analysis, the vacating of the place of the other. In the practice inaugurated by Freud and still maintained today, the analyst sits behind the analysand to interrupt the structure of the address and facilitate free association and the emergence of full speech. This is why, as Apollon stresses, it is essential that the analyst remain silent. If not, she is simply “talking behind the analysand’s back” [parler dans le dos de quelqu’un] and so undermining the transference as an address to an empty locus where there is no other to respond, approve, or judge.3