Whilst acknowledging Derrida’s ideas of “donating affirmation” as being one of the hallmarks of the analyst’s positioning, Weatherill seeks to designate the theological as providing “the ground [for psychoanalysis] and guards it against the violent unleashing forces” which he compulsively insists is the Anti-Oedipal legacy (186; my italics). One might say it is none other than he who engages in a ‘violent unleashing.’ Curiously, at one point, he co-opts the history of animal magnetism, mesmerism and trance states, ‘right down to psychoanalysis’ as all being part of a ‘theological legacy’ apparently because “all have the whiff of the miraculous about them” (185). That is as maybe but all hope is dashed that there be a recognition of the validity of the claim that ‘Psychoanalysis is merely a chapter in the history of trance’ when he sets up the false oppositionality between analysis and mere listening. At the heart of the psychoanalytic tie is the axiom hearing is being heard; the possibility of hearing the multiplicities of what we, the analysand, are saying is an effect of the facilitating environment, an effect of being heard. All quite other than an effect of the efficacity of the analyst’s words.
Towards the end of the book, Bion is quoted as follows: he “envisages the creation of ‘mental faeces,’ as ‘the proliferation of fragmented envy’” (222). As Weatherill rightly points out, “envy is wildly indiscriminate” (223) – precisely as our man is, with regards to the subtleties and complexities of all these disparate thinkers, all congealed into the homogenised pen of the Anti-Oedipal. So often, it can feel as if those herded into this unpriviledged enclosure appeared to be having too much fun, too much enjoyment, provoking this desperate nostalgia. “How did we lose the great and medieval Catholic vision?” (186). Whilst Derrida’s suggestion that contemporary Christianity “is incapable of reflecting on the orgiastic mystery that Platonic thinking incorporates” (Derrida, 1995: 24; Weatherill, 2017: 208) might be one answer, I cannot resist the following anecdote. I was leaving a coffee shop in Miami a few years back and I came across a bumper sticker proclaiming ‘Not all Catholic priests are paedophiles’ – to which the obvious rejoinder might be: ‘But a lot of them were.’
References
Derrida, J. (1995 [1992]). The Gift of Death. The University of Chicago P.
Derrida, J. (1998 [1996]). Resistances of Psychoanalysis. Stanford UP.