What We are Left With: Psychoanalytic Endings

Abstract

This chapter explores the question of what might be the legacy of a psychoanalysis in the context of a broader examination of issues of 'trace', loss and mourning and hence of subjective temporality. It begins with a brief look at psychoanalytic ideas about the end of analysis. especially those derived from Kleinian and Winnicottian perspectives (Klein, 1950; Winnicott, 1953), evoking these in the familiar context of loss and melancholy. A critical reconsideration of the fashionable use of melancholia to suggest a way of recovering past loss leads to an account of an alternative understanding of the endpoints of analysis to be found in two related Lacanian ideas: that of 'expectation' and 'subjective destitution'. The second part of the chapter examines two short episodes from Gerard Miller's (2011) film, Rendez-Vous Chez Lacan. In these, two analysands of Lacan describe their encounters with him in terms that might be idealized, but also evoke a sense of continuing personal reworking and lived affective resonances, and of continuing gratitude. This is starting to suggest that there may be traces of powerful encounters that are not melancholic, but rather provoke the subject to some kind of new engagement with history, especially in the context of personal and social trauma. The final section of the chapter examines Cathy Caruth's (1996) controversial theory of trauma, in particular her Lacanian-inflected reading of a traumatic dream discussed by Freud. Whilst Caruth's conceptualization of trauma is highly problematic in its generalizing and ahistorical framing, this particular analysis suggests that one legacy of an intense encounter of the kind represented by psychoanalysis-as of anything that has been gone through and then 'left behind'-is a kind of difficult awakening. This raises issues of 'afterwardsness', of the haunting of the present by the past, and of what might open our eyes to the future. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)