By MARCIO SALES SARAIVA*

Commentary on Mirta Zbrun's book

“There are three aspects of what would become the training of a psychoanalyst established by Freud: personal analysis, supervision of practice and study of theory” (p. 27). It is from these three pillars that psychoanalyst Mirta Zbrun, from the Brazilian School of Psychoanalysis (EBP), wrote The training of the analyst, revisiting the history of the psychoanalytic movement and its divergences regarding the technique and training of analysts.

Mirta Zbrun defends the importance of the School by stating: “The psychoanalyst is trained, and this is a fact and a necessity. There are no natural psychoanalysts; if there were, there would be no need to train them, it would be enough to discover them” (p. 29).

How does this training take place? Is it a distance learning course?

If it is at the end of analysis that the analyst is born, the theme of the end of analysis, since Freud, is deeply connected with the formation of the analyst. Mirta Zbrun develops a Freudian-Lacanian argument, especially inspired by the “last Lacan”, the texts after 1973.

“From the 1970s onwards, using the Borromean knot as a basis, Jacques Lacan moved away from the clinic of meaning to move towards a psychoanalysis outside of meaning, a psychoanalysis without a “point of enough”, the point of upholstery. In these years, there was a shift from the end of analysis as a crossing of fantasy to the end of analysis as identification with the sinthome” (p. 30).

First, it is necessary to understand that, according to Jacques Lacan, the cure in psychoanalysis involves the subject recognizing his fundamental lack in the symbolic. This void cannot be filled by language or by any total meaning. Analysis leads the subject to explore the edges of this void, represented by fantasy, understanding that this is an attempt to name and cover up this lack. The cure occurs when the subject accepts this incompleteness and ceases the incessant search for an unattainable meaning or completeness, freeing himself from the alienating subjugation to his fantasies.

There are other phenomena involved at the end of the analysis. Jacques Lacan mentions the “identification with the symptom”. At the beginning of the analysis, the subject seeks relief from his symptom, which is essential in the clinical experience. Over time, the symptom, which was a “subjective opacity” (p. 94), ceases to be a problem to be solved and becomes a clue to self-understanding, acceptance and psychic support (Borromean knot).

At this point, the symptom becomes a sinthome. “Identification with the sinthome” allows the subject not only to find relief from his old symptoms, but also to restructure his psychic life, dealing with the lack in a more creative, meaningful and liberating way.

“We are at Jacques Lacan’s last formalization of the end of analysis: a beyond the construction of fantasy and its journey towards the recognition of the symptom as sinthome, which will place the subject at the end of the process. The analysis will be finished” (p. 99).

On page 116, Mirta Zbrun discusses further the end of analysis and its convergence with the birth of the analyst in the School. This process includes the “un-being” (dissêtre, fruit of subjective destitution), castration (acceptance of structural lack), the subjectivation of death (dismantling of illusions about oneself), the decay of fantasy and the radical reconfiguration of the subjective position before the Other.

According to Mirta Zbrun, the end of analysis in Jacques Lacan is not a moment of healing in the usual sense, but a process of destitution of the illusions and fantasies that sustained the subject. It is the acceptance of an identity that is not fixed, but divided and marked by lack. By integrating this lack and getting rid of the illusions that sustained his fantasy, the subject achieves a new form of subjectivity, less subjugated and alienated, more conscious and, paradoxically, empty.

It is no coincidence that it is at the end of this process of analysis that the analyst is born. Not as a result of a diploma or regulation, but as a consequence of a long deconstruction involving analysis, theory and supervision. “Because becoming a psychoanalyst is a forced choice – either the scholarship or life – and implies a movement that involves the being, that involves a transformation” (p. 118).

So what is an analyst? “The analyst will be left to be a remainder, a remnant, to erase himself, as Thomas Aquinas says at the end of his monumental Summa Theologica"Palea sicut”[All straw, dung]” (p. 121).

Wouldn't there be, in this image of the psychoanalyst, echoes of the Christian mystical tradition, Zen Buddhism or Taoism?

Writing about the end of analysis based on the Freudian and Lacanian tradition, Mirta Zbrun proposes that, instead of identifying with the analyst (and his position of supposed knowledge), the subject begins to identify with his own lack, his emptiness, or what Jacques Lacan calls “lack-to-be”. This emptiness is the space that allows the subject to find a new way of orienting himself in life, now “guided” by the object a – the object that causes desire and is always unattainable, but which moves the subject. This object is refractory to any fixed identification and guides the subject towards that which keeps him linked to existence.

At the end of the analysis, when the analyst is born, the subject no longer pursues teachers or is guided by other people's lights. He finally finds an internal compass, drawn by the lack and echoes of the desire that never ceases. By accepting his symptom, he embraces the mystery of himself. And so, he begins to walk gently, as if he were feeling a light breeze of freedom touching his face, aware that knowing is always not knowing.

Who, after all, dares to tread the path of this lightness, where the ground is made of questions and the horizon, of silence?

*Marcio Sales Saraiva is a sociologist and PhD student in psychosociology at UFRJ.

Reference

Mirta Zbrun. The training of the analyst. Petropolis, KBR, 2014, 170 pages. [https://amzn.to/3ZSjWsJ]

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