The way to oppose the University Discourse is to unmask its S1, its underlying values, and expose the hidden Discourse of the Master. Greenberg describes the entrenchment of specific values by way of institutionalised knowledge in the opening of his paper, describing various theoretical excesses in the name of incest, breast or failure.
The Hystericisation of the Analyst
What happened between Hoffman and his analysand? We can look to writing by Muller and Gentile for a more negative assessment. Muller claims that,
The Third is likely to be misrepresented through ignorance, neglect, malice, and narcissistic illusion. When therapist and patient reach an impasse in treatment, one can usefully look to see how the Third has been eclipsed, often by the therapist’s failure to recognize the patient’s position and the patient’s relation to the Third. Betrayal by a representative of the Third, with its associated eclipse of the Third, is an essential feature of psychological trauma (238).
Gentile elaborates on the phenomenology of such a situation,
…when a closed dyadic process prevails, instead of impelling therapeutic action toward thirdness and intersubjectivity, agency gets mired in a trapped, perverse state of ‘twoness’ – a state of phenomenological confinement that elides the space of intersubjectivity and symbolic communication. In the collapsed state of twoness, fusion-based dynamics, power relations, and brute force yield a relatedness that looks like, but actually precludes, psychological intimacy (623).
Certainly, the demand of Hoffman’s analysand could be interpreted as an attack on thirdness, where the established boundaries of the psychoanalyst’s and psychologist’s roles are undermined and two are collapsed into one.
There are some points of concern. As Casement (2001) discusses, such moments of crisis often entail the analysand communicating that aspect of their experience that has been unbearable and that they may have observed being unbearable for significant others. Casement cautions that responding to such a portrayal with a significant deviation from the current analytic frame may be taken by the analysand as a signal from the analyst that the analyst has reached the limit of what they can engage with from an analytic position – hence the analyst’s move to a different position. A danger is that the analysand will take note, and from that point circumscribe what they bring to the analysis. This may sometimes explain why significant deviations from the frame may lead to a subsequent period of calm in the analysis. This characterisation of the impasse as a communication or portrayal serves as a reminder that ‘acting out’ can be regarded as more than just resistance or ‘misbehaviour’, and may be the only way some patients can remember (Freud, 1913(b)). Perhaps Hoffman’s analysand was communicating the message, ‘It was unbearable, it feels unbearable, I’m being unbearable, (love me)’. Hoffman’s response could be read as saying, ‘I can’t bear it either’. Greenberg comments that:
It is always, of course, tempting to find a way to take on the role of a new, good object rather than feeling drawn, inexorably, into enacting something old and ugly (375).