The symptom as artifice

October 7, 2021 – 00:00

Psychoanalysis is a practice of substitute formations. This means that we never act directly on conflicts that make people sick.

For example, someone has a coworker with whom he gets along well. One day he begins to treat her with hostility, without knowing why or justifying his mistreatment – something that the analyst makes him notice, since those same features of his partner were there before and did not prevent the bond. Then, that person places that his hostility began from an episode that modified the distribution of his tasks. Thus, the analyst can establish that this event was relevant to activate an aspect of the fraternal complex of this person: from that moment, the hostility is revealed according to the competition and rivalry with which, let us say, he disputed. the place with his sister regarding the mother’s love.

This is a simple and classic example, which serves to situate how Unconscious root conflicts are not experienced directly, but through actual conflicts.

The point is that the analyst you have to be aware of this substitute capacity. In other words, the analyst can suspend the assessments that the patient has about his suffering so that he can notice its artificial nature – even if the pain is real. This is a way of understanding what Freud meant when he said that the cure cannot allow substitute satisfactions or must restrict them.

On the other hand, substitute formations imply a satisfaction and we can ask ourselves to what extent substitute satisfactions can be limited in an analysis. The first problem is to believe that an analyst can limit something other than through the association rule. Freud tried and, for example, told his patients not to make decisions during analysis. Today this is unthinkable. For example: some of our patients are not in a position to live an eroticism that is not affected by symptoms and inhibitions, they are the ones who have at most sporadic ties from which they then flee because they cannot have an affective commitment with another person. Today it would be impractical for an analyst to suggest that they quit that habit until some basic conflicts have been resolved. It is an inescapable substitute satisfaction of the device – for reasons of time. The same with regard to some intrinsic to the treatment and that concern current (ideal) expectations about what is expected of a therapist – for example, that their interventions do not hurt narcissism, that is, “do not tell me anything that I do not like ”. It only remains to work to find an alternative way – in accordance with the Freudian idea that one libidinal position is only renounced when another is found.

Let’s go back to the initial idea: the cause of our suffering is a conflict that we cannot resolve. Then we change that conflict for another, which is called “symptom”; from then on, the symptom makes us suffer, but it is a conflict that we take advantage of.

*Psychoanalyst. Last edited book: Hypermodern miseries. Why do we live so badly?