Hi,

I'm Neil Gorman (LCSW, DSW, AP), and this Lacanian Mojo, one of my two email newsletters. (The other one is called The Gorman Limit.) I try my best to send out an edition of Lacanian Mojo one time per month, usually around the middle of the month. But this will be the second edition of LM that you get this January.
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This edition will tell you about something I'm reading and what reading it is making me think. In particular, how reading it makes me think about how an experience of analysis can get at the real.

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Review:

In the last edition of Lacanian Mojo, I mentioned that I'm reading The Aims of Analysis by Thomas Svolos now. The second chapter in that book is about getting a "handle on the real" through an experience of psychoanalysis. One of the arguments made in the text is that to get a handle on the real, an analysand will have to go through an experience of analysis. During that experience, the analysand will move through a few different phases. I found the way that Svolos talks about the different phases incredibly interesting and useful.

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An analysis that starts & amplification:

On pages 76-80 of the text, Svolos talks about how at the beginning of any experience of analysis (or during the first analysis for people who work with more than on analyst), an analysand will often experience the wide-open plane of psychoanalysis. They can talk about whatever they want to, so they try to free associate, they talk about dreams, memories, make connections through just talking and seeing where things go. This process amplifies the unconscious and whatever is going on in the unconscious. This amplification is very important. It is a necessary part of an analysis.
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The Problem with Amplification, or Moving from an Analysis that Starts to one that Lasts:
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The problem is that the process of amplification could go on forever and ever. An analysand could show up and continue to talk and discover different things about themselves and their unconscious. But at a certain point, that might not be all that useful. (Some might say it is a stalled analysis.) At some point, the analysis will move into a different phase, where something else starts to happen: a process of rectification, refining, or reducing to what is essential. Or, to put it differently, getting to what is real in the analysand's experience.

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An analysis that lasts & reduction:

Svolos also talks about the process of reducing, where an analysand will stop amplifying and exploring their unconscious and find something within all that has been brought up through the amplification, which is important, and then really focus on that thing.
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Another way to describe the thing that an analysand might find through the process of amplification is "something real," something that is fundamental to them, vital to understanding how why they have chosen to live their lives in the way they do, or, to put it differently, something specific about their singular form of symptomatic suffering. This particular, singular, idiosyncratic aspect of the analysand's suffering has something of the real in it.
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Often the real thing at the core of an analysand's symptom is a reaction to trauma, to something that wounded the analysand and wounded them in a way they have never fully recovered from.
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What stands out to me as I read The Aims of Analysis is how through analysis, through talking to someone --to an analyst-- who listens to you in a very closely and responds in a particular way, an analysand might eventually zero in on a singular aspect of their traumatic past, and the way they unconsciously attempt to "come to grips" with this traumatic (real) aspect of their past by creating symptom that can hold them together.
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(As always, we would do well to remember that symptoms are solutions to problems before they are problems themselves.)
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My way of thinking about all of this:

I'm currently thinking about this process of amplification turning into reducing through a metaphor—the metaphor of mining something ore and then refining the ore.

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When the ore is refined, a lot of it is brought into a forge, and a blacksmith will then heat it up and hammer away at it. The smithing process, of hammering away at the ore, knocks off all the useless brittle junk around or within the ore. It reduces the ore to the useful substance we call metal. This process of a blacksmith stripping away all the unnecessary junk around ore and then making the ore into metal that can be used is, I think, an excellent way to think about what happens in the analysis. At first, the analysand will mine the ore of their unconscious, and the analysand will bring up all sorts of ore through their attempts at free associations. As they mine, they discover ore that is rich in (real) good material. Eventually, enough of this material will have accumulated that the analyst will call attention to it, will make the analysand aware of the valuable parts of their speech. When this works, the analysand might stop mining (amplifying their unconscious) and start to refine (focus on) a particular thing in their speech that has to do with the real.

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Fin:

I'm not sure how interesting or useful this will be for all of you, but I hope you find something interesting and/or useful in it.

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I also hope you pick up a copy of The Aims of Analysis and give it a read.

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P.S.

There are more episodes of The Gorman Limit Podcast up. You can listen to them here, and subscribe to the podcast here.

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Word count: 936

Words to date this year: 3,120