WELCOME
TALKING CURE: WHY PSYCHOANALYSIS?
Psychoanalysis is a response to suffering. What can be expected of an analyst? An analyst is someone who is able to bring us close to the vital yet traumatic connection between mind and body that reveals itself in speech. The simplicity and effectiveness of the psychoanalytic process that starts at this point stands in contrast with the complicated things that have been said about it. Some elucidation, therefore, is needed.
The analytic process focuses on the connection between what we say and what we feel, speech and body. This is where it hurts. The process aims, firstly, to take the sting out of the suffering that you bring with you and that is unique to everyone. Secondly, it allows to bridge the urgency of a complaint with the experience of speech. "Psychoanalysis is a symptom", Jacques Lacan said, because the symptom emerges out of what is impossible in one’s existence.
Psychoanalysis therefore allows us also to speak about what one wants not to know. We do not want to know about our unconscious while wanting to know about it all the time because when speaking to an analyst we can be truthful about what we say. Truth matters because it makes sense. It matters even if you enjoy keeping some things secret. Everyone has a secret but it does not have to cause us to suffer. It is not a secret that there are those who believe in psychoanalysis and those who doubt it. Doubting keeps us in touch with truth because truth is the door to discovery. In analysis everyone can ask: How can I know about what causes me to suffer?
Since its invention well over a century ago, psychoanalysis has had enemies, especially from a variety of quick fix therapies of happiness and well-being. This is partly the effect of confounding psychoanalysis with psychotherapy and counselling that operate in a different way. It is not the task of psychoanalysis to promise to reach the goal of happiness, to fix and to correct, replacing one reality with another that is more socially common and standard. What psychoanalysts do not do is to make promises they cannot keep. They rather facilitate conditions for what in the amorous, professional and social life of a single subject does not work. Therefore, the aim is to make room for what may seem to be of no significance and for what does not make sense. During the psychoanalytic process some obsessions can become less relevant, discomforts of the body less anguishing, and failures in any area of life less paralysing and burdened with meaning. Those who believe in psychoanalysis and its process only do so as a result of having gone through the experience that has changed them in the way that is different for everyone.
CREDENTIALS
Bogdan Wolf (PhD), psychoanalyst and author
My psychoanalytic formation has started in the early 1990s, just after graduating from philosophy where a fragment of the teaching of Jacques Lacan made a strong and indelible mark on the sensitivity of a young intellectual. So much so that a desire to the analytic cause, sparked and inscribed in this way, paved the way to know more and in effect for growing participation in the life of the Lacanian psychoanalytic bodies (congresses, seminars, clinical presentations, workshops, study-days, publications). In effect, this pointed to seeking membership in the New Lacanian School and the World Association of Psychoanalysis. Studying Freud and Lacan in the School follows from the orientation based on transference and transmission of psychoanalysis. The School activities, in the UK and elsewhere, serve to testify to the clinical work of the community of psychoanalysts.
The analytic practice that has developed over decades covers a broad area of working with people who are subjected to the experiences of suffering and of crises. This may lead to supposing a knowledge in an analyst which would lead to an idea of a cure. The experiences of suffering vary from difficulties in love and social bonds to unbearable anxiety, feelings of depression, loss, guilt, problems with the body, obstacles in life that seem insurmountable and other traumatic forms of existence. In addition to the clinical practice, from 1998 I acted as the founding editor of the Psychoanalytical Notebooks, a review that testifies to and disseminates psychoanalytic theory and work in the Lacanian orientation that continues strong to-day under a new editorship. There are also books and numerous texts to my name published in reviews and journals in several languages in print and online. More details can be found on this website.
