Any serious thinking about
(classical or modern) psychoanalysis implies really serious thinking about some
concrete personalities and psychoanalysts. Psychoanalysis is deeply personal
experience, not just abstract theory.

The names of Donald Winiccott and
Jacques Lacan are, I believe we could say, among the most important symbols of
the future possibilities of the modern psychoanalysis. Their well-known
theoretical contributions (their interests in human development, dynamics of
personality and psychotherapy) and of course a great number of followers makes
them so important for us now.  We all know that Winnicott and Lacan are do not
share the same basic theoretical and practical positions concerning the most
fundamental questions of psychoanalysis. Their positions could be seen as
divergent, as mutually exclusive. But also, we could see them as (potentially)
complementary.

Ireland’s recent book, entitled The
Art of the Subject. Between Necessary illusion and Speakable Desire in the
Analytic Encounter, can be seen as an important attempt to provide a kind
of creative synthesis. A synthesis of Winnicott’s and Lacan’s ideas about
psychoanalysis. In the focus of author’s interest is a question of human
singularity and analytically deeply rooted intuition of the importance of human
relatedness towards the Other. Winnicott’s ideas about transitional objects and
transitional phenomena are skillfully related to the famous Lacanian
conceptions of the Other. Mardy Ireland is more than just well informed in the
matters of psychoanalysis. She can think creatively about classical Freud, the Kleinian
school (especially Bion), Ogden, Green, Lecours; she can be clearminded and (if
necessary) critical about modern infant observational methodologies.  Her
clinical illustrations are convincing, her discourse is complex yet easy to
follow.

The various possible levels of
symbolization (so important for human development and psychoanalytic practice)
are seen in reference to the subject’s relatedness to his own body experience
and to the other. The subject’s experience of his own (not just biological, but
personal) corporeality is the function of his (ontologically fundamental)
object relatedness, and the same object relatedness that is always deeply
triangular.

From
the moment a pregnancy is known, a third enters the prenatal scene through
woman’s imaginings of her yet-to-beborn infant, as some "one" who
will be an Other itself. These unspoken fantasies  are crucial elements in
weaving baby’s safe, or not safe, psychic net. The threads a mOther uses to
weave such a psychic net are not random æ they are culturally and familiarly
determined. Each culture has its own consensual expectations of how the world
is to be ordered.

As we have seen, there is always imaginary third. But
also, there is (or there must be) the symbolic third.

A
particularly impactful facet of the Symbolic Third concerns mOther’s degree of
integrative thinking and feeling capacities, that is, to what extent she is
able to allow, to give form to, and to express experience, and to what extent
is she able to recognize and respect the psychic boundaries of another person. But, of course, symbolization does not entirely
capture the whole of human being’s experience. There is always something more,
something other, something unsymbolized.

The relational structure of the human being implies
great amount of freedom and contingency. Ireland’s word for this would be art-making. The analytic encounter is a structure akin to the
triangular configuration of the infant-mother matrix. Being a psychoanalyst
implies being and working in the field of continual intersection of symbolized
and unsymbolized. From the beginning of an analytic encounter and increasingly
over time, the subjectivity of the analyst and the analysand is subject to
distortion. The distortion depends upon the movement and force of all those protosymbolic
particles (in Imaginary) of both the analysand and the analyst upon the
analytic dyad.

The main importance of this book, I believe, lays in
its author’s courage to see things from rather different perspectives. It is
not necessary to agree with her in all of her ideas. On the contrary, the
questions are more important than the answers. And the questions that are posed
here represent the richness of this book. The method is original, her style is
thoughtful and evocative.

This book could be of great use for
psychoanalyst-practitioners and for all those interested in complicated
questions of human personality (its development, its structure and its
dynamics).

© 2004 Petar Jevremovic

Petar Jevremovic: Clinical
psychologist and practicing psychotherapist, author of two books (Psychoanalysis
and Ontology, Lacan and Psychoanalysis), translator of Aristotle and
Maximus the Confessor, editor of the Serbian editions of selected works of Heintz
Kohut, Jacques Lacan and Melanie Klein, author of various texts that are
concerned with psychoanalysis, philosophy, literature and theology. He lives in
Belgrade, Yugoslavia.

Categories: Psychoanalysis