English

3 Punctuati ng

It is a fact, which can be plainly seen in the study of manuscripts of symbolic wn'tings, whether the Bible or the Chinese canonical texts, that the absence of punctuation in them is a source of ambiguity. Punctuation, once inserted, establishes the meaning, changing the punctuation renews or upsets it; and incorrect punctuation distorts it.

- ucan (2006, pp. 3 0-3 1 4)

A SPEAKER CAN BE THOUGHT of as providing a certain punctuation of his own discourse, akin to the punctuation found in written texts, by pausing at certain points, stressing certain words, rushing through or mumbling others, repeating specific phrases, and so on. This is the preexisting punctuation, in a sense-the punctuation that corresponds to the reading of his discourse suggested by the speaker himself, the punctuation that corresponds to the meaning the speaker himself attributes to his own speech. This preexisting punctuation sometimes allows for only one reading, a reading that may be superficial and uninteresting, even to the speaker (it is all too easy to read, in that sense), but sometimes it makes the text difficult to read in any way whatsoever. The listener is at times faced with mumbling (which can make a particularly important or sensitive point hard to follow), with selective stress on one part of a statement when it is another part of the statement that seems more important, or with well-paced speech about mundane subjects followed by a torrent of words about more sensitive topics (the very rush of the words seeming to belie a wish to conceal). Here the preexisting punctuation seems to obscure the speaker's meaning or present his words in such a way that only the meaning he wants to convey is discernible in them.

The analyst-in attempting to slow the analysand down, get him to repeat more clearly words that he has muttered under his breath, and explain himself a bit more fully-tries to bring about a shift in that preexisting punctuation. An

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PUNCTUATING 37

analysand of mine once placed a period after the comment "My brother was of no importance." In an effort to turn that period into a comma and encourage the analysand to elaborate upon the comment, I responded with a quizzical "Hmm?" which led him to pause a moment and then say that something a friend once told him had just occurred to him: "1 hate my brother; why shouldn't I kill him?" Adding a question mark (as we saw in Chapter 2) can lead to the addition of a further statement that completely reverses the meaning of the preceding statement (someone whom one might want to kill hardly seems to be "of no importance"l).

Part of the analyst's task is to provide a slightly different punctuation, a punc­ tuation that brings out meanings in the "text" of the analysand's speech that had not been visible before. Texts like the Bible or Aristotle's works-which often had no punctuation whatsoever in their earliest forms--can be under­ stood quite differently if we punctuate them in one way instead of another, and debates have raged for centuries over their correct interpretation. We need not begin with the assumption in the analytic situation that there is any one correct punctuation or interpretation of the analysand's speech, to con!=lude nevertheless that some ways of punctuating ate more productive than others. We begin with a text that has a certain ready-made punctuation provided by the analysand and attempt to read it in a way that destabilizes or upsets the analysand's take on its meaning and is thus transformative for the analysand.

Aiming at the Repressed

With our free-floating attention we hear what the analysand said, sometimes simply due to a kind of equivocation, in other words, a material equivalence [two words or expressions that sound exactly alike]. We realize that what he said can be understood completely differently. And it is precisely in hearing it completely differently that we allow him to perceive from whence his thoughts emerge: They emerge from nothing other than the ex-sistence of llanguage. Llanguage ex-sists elsewhere than in what he believes his world to be. I

- Lacan (1973-1974, June H, 1 974)

How does one know what to punctuate? After all, the analysand makes a very wide variety of statements; which ones should be punctuated?

Since part of the psychoanalyst's overall strategy with neurotics (once a certain amount of trust has been put by the analysand in the analyst due

1 L1anguage (lala.due) is a complex concept in Lacan's work, and I will not go into it here except to say that it is what allows two words (such as sects and sex) to sound exactly alike when spoken.

38 Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique

to her attentive listening to the analysand) is to aim at the repressed, one answer is easy: One can punctuate-that is, reiterate, repeat with emphasis, or emphatically say "hmm" after-any (and potentially every) manifestation of the unconscious.2 There are far more of these than the usual slips of the tongue or sudden forgetting of what the analysand was about to say, but it is astonishing the degree to which people who have been practicing for a long time do not hear or folIow up on even these blatant manifestations.

Here are some other examples of obvious or not-so-obvious manifestations of the unconscious:

• Words are often begun, then stopped, and then begun anew, sometimes allowing for another reading. For example, one of my analysands stum­ bled as she ostensibly tried to say "exasperated"; instead she said "ex-, ex-, ex- . . . exasperated," which could be read as an insistence (albeit unconscious) on the degree to which she was exasperated at having been "dumped" by the man she was talking about-at having become his ex-lover.

• Words are often begun in the wrong place. One of my analysands started to say "my behavior," but dropped the "be" of "behavior." He caught and stopped himself just after he said something that sounded a lot like "my hate." Since this was a bit of a stretch ("hav," pronounced like the first syllable of "haven," being close in sound but not exactly the same as "hate"), I might not have punctuated it had the analysand not already made it clear that he had a good deal of resentment toward the person he was talking about. However, it worked very effectively to draw the analysand out regarding his minimally avowed anger with the man his behavior was directed at.

• Sentences are often begun but then trail off. One of my analysands was talking about his mother and said, "My mother is pretty, pretty, pretty . . . " As he paused for quite some time (looking, as it turned out later, for the word prosaic), I simply stopped the sentence there by saying, "Your mother is prettyi' By stressing words and expressions the speaker had not stressed, we put a different spin on the very same text and

2 GiI\ ( 1 982, p. 63) defined neutrality as "giving equal attention to all the patient's productions"-that is, to everything he says or does in the course of a session. The focus here on the unconscious should make it clear how unsuitable the concept of neutrality is for productive psychoanalytic work. Gill himself gave far more attention to anything that smacked of transference, whether by way of allusion or resistance, than to other things (see Chapter 7), suggesting that his own approach is anything but neutral.

PUNCTUATING 39

we encourage the speaker to pay attention to this different spin and elaborate on it.

Often the speaker will begin a sentence in a certain way and then do one of the following things:

• Break off in the middle of the sentence and begin a new one on a different subject (for example, "I really wanted to . . . . Anyway, the point is . . . . "). Here we must try to get the analysand to finish the first thought-it seems to have been avoided or censored by him, perhaps having met with his disapproval once he got part way into his discussion of it.

• Break off in the middle and reconstruct the sentence, presumably pre­ serving the same thought, all the while avoiding what was to come next in the sentence as originally prepared in his mind (to whatever degree sentences are, indeed, prepared in advance in a speaker's mind). Once again, we must try here to get him to go back and complete the thought as initially formulated.

Obviously, there are people who almost systematically reconstruct their·sen­ tences as they speak, but this need not convince us that something other than avoidance is at work; avoidance and evasiveness are perhaps simply more en­ demic to their way of speaking than they are to that of other people.3

Indeed, as I mentioned in Chapter 1 , the analyst must be vigilant in detect­ ing all forms of avoidance in speech, whether that avoidance occurs through ellipsis (intentionally or unintentionally leaving out certain words in a sen­ tence), circumlocution (using a convoluted form of expression instead of the word or idiomatic expression that came to mind), or any other rhetorical device.

Avoidance means that a part of the story is being left out, and it is our responsibility to ensure that missing parts are restored to the greatest extent possible. Although it is never possible to tell the whole story (to tell the "whole truth," as Lacan said, 1 973, p. 8), it is nevertheless important to encourage the analysand to tell as much of the story as he is able to at a particular moment in time. Not to do so is a failure on the analyst's part to actively pursue all signs and traces of the repressed, which is ultimately tantamount to resistance on the analyst's part to the progress of the analysis; in this sense it can be under­ stood as part and parcel of the analyst's countertransference (see Chapters 4 and 7).

l Certain American politicians have been known to chronically reconstruct their sentences as they speak, and this should perhaps be taken as a gauge of their forthrightness (or lack thereof).

40 Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique

Statements preceded by disclaimers like "here's a ridiculous thought for you," "the stupidest thing just came to mind," "I'm sure this has nothing to do with anything," or "this is totally irrelevant" should always be given the utmost attention (note that nonverbal cues, like yawns expressing boredom or an utterly flat tone of voice, can just as easily serve as disclaimers). Such disclaimers are often made when the analyst asks the usual "What's going through your mind?" after the analyst has highlighted something or made an interpretation and the analysand has lapsed into momentary silence. The analysand does not seem to want to reckon with what crossed his mind in the intervening moment and resorts to downplaying its importance. As soon as he terms an idea that has occurred to him "stupid," "irrelevant," "farfetched," "dumb," "trite," "absurd," or "out of the blue," the analyst can be sure that it is not. Lacan ( 1 998a, pp. 1 1-1 3) went so far as to say that it is precisely with such stupidities that we do analysis. Such terms are defenses against thoughts that the analysand deems unseemly or off-topic and thus does not wish to mention.

Often a thought that initially appears to be a distraction or diversion from the topic at hand ("I was thinking about my boss again") turns out, upon ex­ ploration, to be absolutely germane-which is, no doubt, why it occurred to the analysand right after the analyst's punctuation or interpretation. Such dis­ claimers need not be viewed as suggesting "bad faith" or "deliberate" resistance on the analysand's part: The analysand is quite often duped by the seeming irrelevance of images, thoughts, and feelings that arise at specific moments in the therapy, and-following the conventions of everyday conversation-tries to stay on topic (a counterproductive habit of which the analyst must try to break him).

A similar strategy to that manifested by disclaimers can be seen in com­ ments that are made in an offhand manner by the analysand so as to suggest that they are unimportant. A dream may be casually announced early on in a session as having been a nightmare, but no mention of any nightmarish qualities is forthcoming when the dream itself is described. It is only when the analyst reminds the analysand of the earlier remark that he specifies the nightmarish quality or recounts the nightmarish part of the dream that had been left out. It is as if the analysand adopts a strategy of telling the analyst something important and then attempting to distract her from it, as if to say, "Please don't make me talk about it!" In a word, the analysand seems to both want and not want her to notice something, and she must always side with the part of the analysand that wants her to notice (not with the analysand's defenses) .

PUNCTUATING 4 1

. Sometimes the crucial association to an event or figure i n a dream may come in the form of a stray or offhand remark made after the analysand has left the armchair or couch and is on the way out the door, when he thinks that it is too late to discuss it that day (those who practice the variable-length session might prefer to have the analysand sit or lie back down at that point and prolong the session; see Chapter 4). The analyst must not fail to remind the analysand of the comment at the next session should the analysand himself not mention it or seem to have forgotten it.

Parts of a dream that are left out when first recounted, and only remem­ bered after the association process has begun during the session, are usually of particular importance to the understanding of the dream. Similarly, when the analytic work has proceeded beyond the initial stages with an analysand, the analyst-rather than having to actively encourage the analysand to associate to each and every element of the dream, which takes a good deal of work on the analyst's part and must often be kept up for many a month, failing which the analysand will likely take shortcuts in attempting to interpret his dreams--can confine her efforts to encouraging the analysand to associate to those elements of the dream to which he did not spontaneously associate, thereby emphasizing what has been left out of his associative and interpretative work. It is this continual emphasis on what has been left out of the story (recounting a particular even't, a family dynamic, a dream, a fantasy, or a daydream) that allows the analyst to keep targeting the repressed.4

" Unprovoked Denials and Overemphasized Assertions

Negation is also a way of admitting something. -Laean ({974-{975, March { 8, {975)

Another kind of statement the analyst should usually punctuate is what I call .the "unprovoked denial." In this form of denial, the analysand insists that Something is not the case even when no one has claimed that it is. One of my 1:

� Here I am speaking as though something left out of a story were actually repressed, whereas repression $'toper generally involves something far more encompassing, that it be something left out of all the !�ories the analysand tells, whether to the analyst or to himself. Nevertheless, I think there is some iheuristic value to the notion that something left out of any particular sentence or story is repressed, flUst as a footnote bears a certain repressed relation to the text from which it has been extracted. Strictly f$peaking, however, suppressio" might be the correct term for this.

42 Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique

analysands once stated that since our last session a memory had come back to him, but he hastened to add, "1 don't think it has anything to do with my sexual orientation." He then proceeded to tell me that when he was six his cousins insistently told him that very soon he would turn into a girl, claiming that previously they too had been members of the opposite sex and had changed from one sex to the other around his age. They swore him to secrecy, making him promise not to talk with his mother about this. It does not seem to be much of a stretch to simply remove the "not" in his unprovoked denial and read this as though he himself recognized at some level that this event, which he admitted to having found quite distressing at the time, played some role in his current sexual orientation.

In such cases of unprovoked denial, one can always ask why someone is taking the time and energy to deny something that no one in the context at hand (in this case, in the analytic context) has in any way suggested or affirmed. One could retort that given what he knows of psychoanalysts, the analysand is simply trying to forestall a conclusion that he assumes the an­ alyst will jump to. True as this may be of certain analysts, the thought nev­ ertheless occurred to the analysand first, in a rejected or projected form­ in other words, it was attributed to the person he would be speaking with about it later-and, indeed, in the case of the analysand just mentioned, it was he himself who first put the idea into my head that this might well be related to his current sexual orientation (I had not yet even heard the story).

Such unprovoked denials are as common in everyday life as they are in the therapy context: The introductory remark "1 don't mean to be critical, but . . . " is a blatant warning that your interlocutor means to be critical, just as the introductory remark "I'm not trying to be cruel, I 'm just saying that . . . " is a clear indication that your interlocutor recognizes that he or she is in fact trying to be cruel, at least at some level.

Similar to unprovoked denials are what I call "overemphasized assertions." Here the analysand (or politician, business leader, or someone else) affirms something so forcibly and repeatedly that the listener begins to wonder why: If the speaker so fervently believes what he is saying, why does he feel the need to stress it so appreciably? One of my analysands said, "I absolutely, positively, clearly remember . . . ," leading me to suspect that he perhaps was in fact not quite so sure he remembered what he was claiming to remember; there had been no display of incredulity on my part, since he had just introduced a new topic and I had no idea what he was about to say. Here again, the speaker seems to "protest too much."

UNCTUATING

Taken Out of Context

[Psychoanalysis is] a practice that ;s based upon the ex-sistmce of the unconscious. - Lacan (1973-1974, June J J , 1 974)

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,n obvious way of punctuating someone's discourse is to repeat it back to im verbatim, thereby highlighting, underlining, or underscoring it, as it were. ometimes simply hearing the exact same words repeated by someone else neds new light on them, alI owing them to be heard differently. At other mes, it may be more helpful to repeat back only some of the words in ne analysand's discourse, isolating just one or two words from their original ontext to highlight the fact that the analysand used, for example, the exact lime locution to qualify his lover as he used several minutes earlier to qualify lis mother . . Many idiomatic expressions have multiple meanings, and reiterating only

ne idiomatic expression used by the analysand in his statement may shed a ery different light on the meaning of the sentence than the analysand had iriginalIy intended. When, for example, one of my analysands was describing dream and said, "In the dream I was holding an object of some sort and I ran

Iver to give it to her," I simply repeated back "give it to her," recaIling, as I lid, the importance of that phrase in the analysand's sexual fantasies (it being Il'onounced by someone who was not clearly identified in the fantasy, telling lim to have sex with a woman) . Isolating the expression alI owed the analysand & dwelI less on the enigmatic peculiarities of the object as it was presented in he dream (devoid as it was of qualities) and what it might mean to give it to bmeone as a gift, and instead to consider one of the figurative meanings of he expression. � In another dream, the same analysand saw a woman he knew and noticed he was wearing a red blouse. He then looked down, "as if I wanted to transfer he red from her upper body down to the lower half, as if I wanted to see red." Fo "see red" obViously also means to get angry, and it clearly made more sense o repeat only those polyvalent words and not the whole of the analysand's tatement. (In this case, the analysand noticed the double meaning himself and tIed to a considerable nexus of ideas.) ;, Sometimes it is not the idiomatic expression itself that is ambiguous but �ther the way that it is incorporated into the grammar of the analysand's enun­ �ation. For example, an analysand of mine was talking about his relationship �th his wife and came out with the statement "I was trying to earn her keep." then I queried, "Her keep?" he realized that he had turned things around in

44 Fundamentals of Psychoonalytic Technique

such a way that it was not clear whether he was saying that he was trying to be kept by her or to pay for her. A short time later, the same analysand was talk­ ing about another woman and complained, "Her regard of me was withering." When I responded with "Withering?" he heard both the sexual connotation and his intended meaning (which probably only the context could have revealed) that her good opinion of him was waning. He subsequently realized that regard can also be understood as to gaze or look: To be looked at by her made him wither.s

When faced with the description of a long, complicated dream to which the analysand initially professes to have few or no associations, it is often useful to highlight words or phrases in the dream that can lead off in several different directions because of their polysemy. In a detailed dream with several scenes in it told to me by one analysand, there were at one point some monks sitting at a round table singing a happy song to each other, but it had "a false ring to it," he commented. "Round table" could obviously lead to a couple of different trains of thought, but it was the words "false ring" that, when I repeated them to the analysand, led to several sessions of material regarding his marriage, the external circumstances (visa problems) that had led to it, the sort of false ring he had bought for the occasion (silver instead of gold), its eventual replacement by a gold ring that was subsequently lost in a fire, and so on. "We weren't taking the thing seriously," he remarked. He indicated that he wanted to escape from the institution of marriage, which he associated with his father. Although his father was always saying that "you must be joyful," it did not ring true to the analysand-rather, it seemed to be a put on, a joyful

5 Casement ( 1 99 1 ) provided an interesting example of taking what the analysand says out of context,

If a patient were to say, "My boss is angry with me," this can be silently abstracted as "someone is angry with someone." Who is angry with whom then remains unclear . . . . It could be a statement of fact, objectively reported; it could be a reference to the patient's anger, projected onto the boss; it could be a displaced reference to the transference, the therapist seen as angry; or it could be an oblique reference to the patient being angry with the therapist. (p. 37)

In essence, Casement has simply taken the word anger out of context, allOWing it to be applied in as many possible ways as he can think of. I would add that when the analyst takes words and phrases out of context in this way and repeats them back to the analysand, the analysand often responds by saying something like "That's actually an expression my mother used to use . . . . "

Note that by taking words and expressions out of context, the analyst is simply reversing what the unconscious does in the course of dream formation. As Freud ( 1900/1958, pp. 1 65-188) told us, the dream takes "day residues," such as comments someone. made or statements read somewhere the day before, and recomposes them in different fashions so as to disguise what is really at issue in the dream. When the analyst takes them out of the context of the dream's manifest content, she allows the analysand to recall their original source in the day residues, residues that may include the analyst but that should not be presumed to do so in all cases (it is but one possibility among others) .

PUNCTUATING 45

'face "he put on for [the family]," For the analysand to become a husband was to 'become like his father, whom he characterized as asexual, domesticated, and a fine, upstanding member of the community who was devoid of desire. And, 'indeed, although the analysand's wife-to-be and he had been passionate about each other before the marriage, he was no longer as attracted to her afterward .

• Taking the potentially polyvalent words "false ring" out of context led to a great deal of previously undiscussed material. as well as to a discussion of his 'ideal of marriage as a pledge t'o "the one special person" who "would cure me, make me whole . . . I could relax into being who I was really supposed to be."

Welcoming IIlncoherencell

There is nothing but rhetoric. -IAcan (1974-1 975, January 21 , 1 975)

Confining one's punctuations to manifestations of the unconscious is certainly the safest approach the analyst can adopt, in the sense that it minimizes the impact of her own agenda-such as wanting the patient to realize something in particular, get to a specific point, or accomplish a certain goal-and mos't faithfully adopts the analysand's unconscious as a guide for the course of the therapy.

Nevertheless, such manifestations sometimes do not suffice to get the ball rolIing at the beginning of an analysis; certain patients make very few slips in the early sessions, and profess not to recall dreams, daydreams, or fantaSies, giving the clinician precious little to punctuate and thus no obvious means of participation other than showing that she is listening attentively.

What, then, is the analyst to highlight, reiterate, or punctuate? Anything that suggests that the analysand is working hard to be coherent when speaking to the analyst. For example, the analysand may say, "but that's a long story," and then begin to change the subject, or may say, "but that's not what I was .trying to get at." Such phrases indicate a drifting (perhaps unintended) in the patient's associations and thoughts toward certain areas of his life story that then get censored when the patient remembers the point he was trying to make. In such cases, a conscious intention to remain coherent and not get off on a tangent, to portray oneself to the analyst as clear and as capable of making sense, begins to override the "freer" direction of the patient's asso­ :ciations, and the analyst does well to encourage the patient to follow that drift-implicitly indicating that the analyst is not in any way requiring the analysand to appear coherent. It is the analysand's ego that seeks to force

46 Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique

his thoughts and speech to be coherent, whereas it is his "free associations" (as unfree as they ultimately are, in a deeper sense) that allow us a glimpse of the repressed.

We do not assume that the analysand is of one mind-indeed, we assume that the analysand is inhabited by contradictory thoughts and desires, some conscious, some preconscious, and some unconscious-and we certainly do not want to be complicit with the analysand's ego when it attempts to impose coherence and consistency on what comes out of the analysand's mouth. We do not in any sense accuse the analysand of being inconsistent when inconsis­ tencies appear (whether the analysand contradicts himself in discussing what he feels or what he wants in the course of a session or from one session to the next)-indeed, we strive to highlight the ways in which he is not of one mind, in which he is a "divided subject," as Lacan (2006, p. 693) put it.

The Analyst as Artist

[It is our task to bring] out from the start the three or four registers on which the musical score constituted by the subject's discourse can be read.

- Lacan (2006, p. 253)

A fine painter can be thought of as looking at "the same thing" other people look at, seeing something different, and making it visible to us: The painter reveals-renders perceptible-something we had not seen before. In the case of van Gogh, it might be the humanity in an old pair of shoes, in the case of Monet, it might be the shimmering colors in a garden under the influence of the hot summer sun. A photographer does something similar with light and textures: She uses films, filters, shutter speeds, and aperture settings to bring out something that is there-already there, waiting to be seen, as it were-but that is not seen without her help. A novice musician strives to play the notes written on the sheet music at more or less the correct speed, but the accomplished musician subtly brings out, by varying speed and stress, the multiple melodies or voices implicitly there in the very same notes (as in the fugue by Bach on the cover of this book).

That might be one fruitful way of thinking about what we as therapists do as well: We bring out something that is there-already there, waiting to be heard-but that is not heard without our help. As one of my analysands once put it, his desire was like a murmur, a heart murmur so faint no one had ever heard it before, not even him, until he began his analysis.