Impossible Knowledge: On Teaching Psychoanalysis

One of the ways Freud classified psychoanalysis (in “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” 1937) was as an “‘impossible’ profession in which one can be sure beforehand of achieving unsatisfying results.” Psychoanalysis was, he wagered, in some way comparable both to education and to government whose status as “impossible” has been known for much longer. Having spent a good deal of time over the last few years considering — in attempting both to learn and to teach — the theoretical overlap between psychoanalysis and politics, this insight of Freud’s is never very far from my thoughts.

If each field taken on its own terms is “impossible,” what are we to understand as the aim in the teaching of psychoanalysis and politics? For surely, “impossibility” is another way of recognizing a certain lack or incompleteness of knowledge inherent to the system of thought itself and, if this is the case, then the question is not simply one of pedagogy but, in fact, reflects directly back onto the theory underpinning Freud’s point concerning psychoanalysis’ “impossibility.” For Freud, what is clearly at stake is not only the transmission of a piece of knowledge but the imparting of an impossible knowledge, the transmission of a system of thought within which the hole or rupture in knowledge can itself come to the fore. It is only in the relation — or more precisely the impasse — between knowledge and “impossible knowledge” that the workings of the unconscious itself come to light. The problem that Freud then faces, and we in our turn, is how to teach a “knowledge” that is, in effect, only in absentia, that is as a lack or impossibility in knowledge? It is in overcoming this disjunction between the unique “knowledge” of psychoanalysis and the limits of “understanding” that the experience of one’s own analysis becomes invaluable. It is, no doubt, in the dynamic of the treatment itself that the force of “the hole in knowledge” makes itself felt most insistently and productively.

My concerns are primarily aimed at the academic side of the psychoanalytic institution, outside the realm of training analysis. In the latter field, however, I should point out that the problems involved in the institutionalization of psychoanalytic knowledge have been repeatedly broached, for example, by Balint and Winnicott. tion of non-analytic regulations. To what extent does academia — which shares with the training institutions a relatively slavish respect for hierarchy, dogmatism, and reverence for figureheads — participate in this repression? And, if it does, is it not time to recognize that the biggest threat to the future of psychoanalysis might, in fact, reside in the unanalyzed acting out of its self-proclaimed followers? (A point that makes the complete absence of clinical experience in many academic theoreticians even more problematic.)

Let us note that part of what characterizes the impossible professions is that they are founded on a recognition of the necessity of dissent. Without an inherent tension, analysis, government, and pedagogy fail to thrive, fail to sustain the kind of frisson upon which they depend for their continued renewal. Without a transference-induced tension, analysis fails; without debate, liberal government becomes a farce; and without intellectual debate and disagreement, pedagogy devolves into indoctrination. We could, in other words, say that the impossible professions are those that are founded on a certain inherent rupture and thus gloss Freud’s statement concerning their “impossibility” as the diagnosis of those fields whose ends cannot be conceived of as the eradication of opposition, as the erasure of friction. When the institution ceases to act as a support of a system of knowledge, and becomes instead an end in itself (in the same way that the fetishist takes his fetish), it takes itself for a truth — indeed, the truth — and demands recognition as such.

Now, it is this insistence on the truth of the institution that I fear has contributed to the continual ruptures that have been the bane of psychoanalysis since Freud’s death and the “truth” of the institution has, for many psychoanalysts, taken precedence over its founding “impossible knowledge.”

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