Psychoanalytic Sedition

The following essay was written as part of a weekly seminar I conducted. I was moved to write it when a member of the seminar used the word "Seditious" to describe psychoanalysis. The use of this word prompted good discussion, and even after the seminar ended its work for the week I continued to to think about the question: Is what psychoanalysis does seditious?

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The First Question: What is sedition?

When we meet last week, we used a very interesting signifier: Seditious.

Since last week I’ve been spending a great deal of time asking myself: /Is a psychoanalytic act always a seditious act?/ To answer the question we will need to know, in what Winnicott might have called a “good enough” way, what the word “seditious” signifies. After we do that we can ask other questions…

If we type define the term “sedition” into a search engine, it presents the following definition:

Sedition is the “incitement of resistance to or insurrection against lawful authority.”

Having established this definition as a good enough starting point for what sedition signifies, we will now move to the psychoanalytic act.

The Second Question: What is the Psychoanalytic Act?

One of the many things that makes psychoanalysis different from other forms of psychotherapy is how the psychoanalyst verbally responds to what the analysand says and does. A psychoanalytic interpretation is a cut, it cuts into the finely woven tapestry of the ego, of the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, and reveals what the construction of our identity hides.

Well spoken words, spoken at the right moment, will inflict a seditious cut. This cut will weaken the semblant (a combination of imaginary and symbolic) of identity which has held the real of drive and desire at bay. In this way, the psychoanalytic act is seditious. It resists the forces of the imaginary-ego and the symbolic-superego that have colluded to keep what the subject desires disappeared. The psychoanalytic act of interpretation is an un-concealing of something heretofore hidden in the unconscious, that when brought out has an effect of forcing a reorganization of the symptom of repression.

Keeping in mind that the symptom of repressing, rather it starts out as a solution to a problem, specifically the problem of a drive or a genuine desire that can’t be satisfied. The cutting away at the integrity of this symptomatic solution of concealment is the cutting away of structure of the subject.

(Psychotherapy, which is not psychoanalysis, will attempt to shore up the strained walls of the symptom, to reenforce the subject’s defensive identity.)

In this way the cut of an interpretation is what we might, nowadays, call an intervention.

The Third Question (s): What do we interpret or intervene in?

Interpretation of what? — The way the analysand is implicated in disappearing of their desire. While others (i.e. “mental health professionals”) are content to look the other way, the analyst uses words to cut and expose that the real — as it exists as a drive or a desire — still lives even though it has been buried deeply and for a long time.

Interviewing in what? — In the analysand’s desire not to know what they desire. The process of the analysand enacting their desire to be ignorant of their Other desire, to confront the real that is the living death drive in the unconscious.

The Fourth and Last Question: Why do this?

Is it to free the real that is the unconscious, the parlêtre, the drive (i.e. the death drive), the desire of the Other? No, it is not. 

The reason to engage in the seditious un-concealing cut of the psychoanalytic act is to show the analysand that within them there is a monster, and covering up the monster, or pretending that it does not exit is the best way to make that monster stronger.

If we are to live a life that is not destroyed by whatis monstrous we must be aware that the monster lurks, not only out there in the world, but inside the semblance of a well behaved civilized self we present to the world every day.