What is Psychoanalysis by Marissa Keep

The cohosts of the Ordinary Unhappiness podcast, Abby Kluchin PhD and Patrick Blanchfield PhD are scholars of psychoanalysis, however they are not clinicians, so they offer a unique perspective on what psychoanalysis is. The following is a condensed summary of the topics touched on in their first episode titled “What is Psychoanalysis?”

The hosts identify two key aspects of psychoanalysis. The first is ambivalence. A person can feel more than one way about something, and that’s okay! This is a quintessential concept of psychoanalysis. The second is the concept of overdetermination. The idea is that that every thought, feeling, or experience has a surplus of meaning and can mean one thing at one time and another at another time, and this process goes on infinitely. It also means that each person’s experience is made of multiple parts working together to make up a greater totality. The sum of all these pieces of experience is greater than its parts. It is impossible to determine a single essential driving part that resulted in an experience, thus our experience as humans is always overdetermined. 

Another term the hosts introduced was the phrase “suppose-to-know,” which was coined by the influential French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. The hosts use this term to refer to their position as podcast hosts who listeners are turning to, and supposing that they know what they are talking about in regard to psychoanalysis. Kluchin and Blanchfield talk about how they reside in that position with anxiety, given their proposal that no single person has complete knowledge of anything. If anyone attempts to say that they do, they are trying to pull one over on you!

The hosts talk about how those who are suffering and seek help from a psychoanalyst are trusting that the professional has some idea how to help them. The analyst becomes the one who is supposed to know. The hosts elucidate three important dimensions of the work of psychoanalytic practice: 1) the precise clinical work that analysts are trained in, 2) the broader knowledge of how people work, and how minds work, that analysts accrue throughout their practice, and 3) the application of psychoanalytic ideas to better understand and investigate institutions, groups, politics, literary texts, and so on. They call this “putting culture on the couch.” 

Kluchin and Blanchfield explain that psychoanalysis “wagers on the inexhaustibility of meaning,” which suggests that there is always something more to be understood. Psychoanalysis involves dismantling one’s life experience, looking at all the parts, and using inductive reasoning to understand it. (Inductive reasoning happens when one makes an inference based on an observation.) They note that life is messy and does not come in neat little packets of clearly labeled information, thus the method of psychoanalysis fits well with the complexity of life. 

In her closing remarks, Kluchin offers this hopeful comment: “Psychoanalysis is about what can happen with two people in a room talking to each other. There is infinite possibility present in that.”

Link to podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/4pYIJVa8V0J4xAjbsyrHUa