I have been doing some writing, part of a project I call 'Unself-Help'. This is the start:
Self-help and psychoanalysis are incompatible. Despite attempts to turn some of the offshoots of psychoanalysis – such as attachment theory – into digestible ideas for people to work on individually, psychoanalysis itself doesn’t offer much in that vein. This is in part because it doesn’t have an unambiguous idea about what it means to be well; being effective or successful might be viewed as a form of narcissistic madness by some psychoanalysts. Even the alleviation of suffering is not necessarily seen as an object to be aimed at; Freud’s famously pessimistic comment that he wanted to change ‘neurotic misery into ordinary unhappiness’ is unlikely to place a psychoanalytically informed view of self-help at the top of the bestseller list. In ‘Civilisation and its Discontents’, he comments, ‘One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be ‘happy’ is not included in the plan of ‘Creation’.’ This being the case, it seems reasonable to ask: ‘what is psychoanalysis for then?’
Psychoanalysis is not a series of ideas about what it means to be a top-notch human being, or, indeed, how you might become one, or how to be chipper despite everything. Rather, it is a very particular way of interacting that is designed to bring about certain forms of insight. This way of interacting precludes the approaches that underpin self-help. As Alessandra Lemma argues, psychoanalysis depends upon the ‘analytic attitude’, essentially, a mode of being with someone which is unobtrusive and largely neutral:
This attitude represents in itself an intervention because most patients will relate in highly idiosyncratic ways to the analytic therapist’s reluctance to answer personal questions, to offer advice or reassurance or to structure the session. The patient’s reactions to the person of the therapist then become the target of exploration and provide a route into the elaboration of the patient’s internal world … .
It is not really possible to offer a self-help manual without offering ‘advice or reassurance’, so what I offer here is unself-help. If I don’t try to persuade you, or imagine I can solve your problems, or offer you a consolatory sop, what can I do? Perhaps rather than trying to make you feel better, in the sense of easing your worries or sadness, I might enable you to feel better, in the sense of being more aware of what you feel and why you feel it. Though the careful listening embodied in psychoanalysis may not make you happy or successful, it might enable a deeper form of living: as Lemma suggests, it might enable a greater – or at least a less anguished or defensive – knowledge of your ‘inner world’. Perhaps we can work to replace the ‘neurotic misery’ of feeling like a prisoner of your own mind with the ‘ordinary unhappiness’ of a life in the world.
And this is the end:
The strangeness of the human animal cannot be overestimated. Our internal worlds are full of fantasies and memories, projections and identifications, words and signs both understood and completely enigmatic. Given this complexity, though we may often be happy, it is perhaps wise if we do not expect it. What we can do is be alive to this intricacy, this convolution, turn ourselves towards it, rather than trying to simplify ourselves in a manner that conforms to a notion of normality or effective function. Our weirdness is to be celebrated as well as endured. The unexamined life is not worth living; a life spent trying to understand ourselves without pre-judging the outcome, and being open to our fellow humans, is a life well-lived.
When we suffer, as all of us must, we should not turn inwards, we should not aspire to solipsistic self-help. We should turn to each other. And perhaps we should try psychoanalytic therapy, because it is a place in which we can meet the variety of our selves and learn not to fear what we find.
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