Bespoke: The psychoanalyst, the tailor and the torturer

In a conversation with a colleague some years ago now, he made the following observation posed as a question: “Have you noticed how so many misfits are drawn to psychoanalysis?” In the brief discussion which followed it was clear that what was being given voice to in this question was not a moral judgment; that there was in any way a right kind or a wrong kind of person or individual who was fit for psychoanalysis. Rather, what the question importantly poses is precisely the possibility of a separation – a lack of fit, a mis-fit – between a saying and a person or individual. The importance of such a distinction lays in the fact that it allows the possibility of not succumbing to a fundamental psychological prejudice which makes a state of being - a person, an individual, a human being; me, you, he, she, even the precious “I”, fit with a saying.

If not as a moral judgement whose effects are profoundly personalising, humanising and individualising, how then are we to take this misfitting so characteristic of psychoanalysis and those drawn to it? What perhaps most characterises that species of misfit which is particularly drawn to psychoanalysis is that they are possessed of the realisation that they are not at one; that they do not make one, with what they say. The absence of fit we're referring to therefore, belongs to the speaking being itself; that being which is said to speak. An absence of fit between the saying and what is said makes of talking, of speaking, no easy matter; all the more so when it is the kind of speaking which is intensified within the experience of an analysis. Indeed, anyone who has taken up the invitation to free associate – “say, say anything without regard for what is said - and the value of what will be said is given in the fact of its saying,” will realise the kind of torture, of torsional force, inherent in the speaking being’s attempts to speak.

An analysand amidst convulsive sobbing says, “It hurts so much to speak today.” Today and every day, one might say, as this is not an entirely unknown occurrence in psychoanalysis, whether accompanied by frank tears and assertions of pain or not. The torture involved in speaking is always palpable as it is pushed to a point of encounter with its own impossibility.

Such a misfitting then, is fundamental or inherent to the speaking being itself to the extent that speaking is encumbered by the pediment of being, stitched into the fabric of the functioning of language in an ill-fitting way. When someone addresses themselves to an analyst, when someone seeks an analysis, they arrive, precisely, with a sense of something ill-fitting in this relation of speaking and being. The analysand presents with an illness in the sense of an ill-fitting garment; ill-fitting in the manner in which the pediment of their being has been stitched, has been fitted, into the fabric of language.

So, what does an analyst do with a misfit? Well, make them fit of course! A question however which arises concerns the nature of the fitting proper to analysis.

We earlier noted the onto-psychological bias of the personalising, individualising or humanising of language given by the pediment of being. To make fit at this level would be to reconstruct the garment, to alter the garment, in the image and likeness of the person; to individualise it, to personalise it in an eminently humanist manner. This is our first hesitating entry into the domain of the bespoke. In this context, “bespoke” resplendent with the buttoning, pick-stitching and embroidery of humanist zeal, speaks of the “tailor made” as a tailoring to individual specifications. In the therapeutic field, it carries the highly personalised and even culturally sensitive notion of the tailor-made treatment which takes account of the fashionably “whole” person.

To the extent that no analysis is generic or indeed repeatable; to the extent that every analysis is singular, it is tempting, is it not, to situate it as coincident with this conception of the bespoke as a tailoring to individual specifications. We would do well, however, to exercise some prudence in not travelling so hastily in this direction. The notion of the bespoke which we are attempting to open here ought not allow the singular to be so readily stitched and sewn to the personal or individual. Such would constitute a return to the pediment or predicative aspect of being which becomes an encumbrance or impediment to speaking, to talking.

This, I am arguing, is not the kind of tailor the analyst is. If not to individual specifications, how then does the analyst make fit? Are we simply to introduce the reverse; that the analyst allows the analysand to fit with the structure of language? A neat reciprocal solution after all!

The fitting which analysis engages in is neither to make language fit with individual specifications, nor to make the individual fit with language in some kind of universalising, ideological submission. Rather, it becomes a matter of making language fit – to make it convulse; to engage the torsional, equivocating, twisting force of language. In short, to make language torque. The bespoke in psychoanalysis might be understood therefore as a torquing which twists free of the personal, the individual and indeed, the human; twists free of the pediment of being which funds the “said” as the “said -i-ment” of saying.

The bespoken in psychoanalysis therefore arises when language is made to fit, to convulse, to equivocate, in order to twist free of the pediment of being and to stir the “said” laid down as the “said-i-ment" of meaning. At this point of twisting free, language is encountered as embedded or latent, not with meaning, but with “torque”. Language “torques” as a torsional or twisting force which begins to approach the tortuous as evidenced in Lacan’s assertion in The Third Discourse of Rome of November 1974, that “language, (which) is truly something which can only advance by twisting and winding itself up, by contorting itself in such a way that, after all, I cannot say I am not giving an example of it here. One must not believe … that I do that so much from gaiety of heart. I would prefer that it be less tortuous.” ²Lacan, Jacques. ‘L’Etourdit’, in Scilicet, Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1973.

The function of alteration or of fitting in this sense belongs to the torsional aspect - the torquing - of language itself; not to those speech impediments which acquire the title of individuals, persons or even humans. Do we not hear this when Lacan, having dissolved his School, says, “I expect nothing from individuals and something from a functioning” precisely at that point where a School of individuals loses its singularity in becoming a pediment, and therefore an impediment to speech? Lacan, Jacques. ‘Letter of Dissolution’, in Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment. Norton, NY, 1990.">³ What we encounter in the bespoken however, is something of the voice which is free to be other than substance; a voice which no longer sounds like the voice of any individual, therefore dehumanised. Such a torquing, such a saying, constitutes a displacement of human speech in favour of the speaking of language itself as bespoken.

Jean Baudrillard in his work Impossible Exchange bemoans the creeping coextensivity between meaning and what is human; the fact that “We are moving everywhere towards an elimination of the Inhuman, towards an anthropological integrism which aims to submit everything to the jurisdiction of the Human.”Baudrillard, Jean. Impossible Exchange, Verso, London, 2001.⁴ In a chapter in this work entitled “An End to Freedom” his contempt for individualism is forcibly put. “Identity is a dream that is pathetically absurd. You dream of being yourself when you have nothing better to do. You dream of yourself and gaining recognition when you have lost all singularity. … Identity is this obsession with appropriation of the liberated being, but a being liberated in sterile conditions, no longer knowing what he is.”Baudrillard, Jean. ‘An End to Freedom’, Impossible Exchange, Verso, London, 2001.⁵ Baudrillard calls for a destabilising of this drive to humanism and individualism by the infiltration of a viral or inhuman thought.

In this sense, it is not human freedom which is capable of producing this torquing voice, which will always falter and stutter at the point of its pretended individualism. With fitting, as the convulsing of language, however, we find in the saying as bespeaking, an echoing of language itself in its “it-saying”; an “it-saying” which does not condescend to the speech “impedimented” and “said-i-mented” “I-saying” as guarantee of the human, the person and the individual.

Now, the inhuman is not the inhumane. This is a first point to make in relation to what I will now go on to contend, with some hesitation concerning the possibilities of being misunderstood, regarding torture.

Firstly, I want to be clear that I am not making light of the sadism, cruelty and suffering visited upon people by torture. I am also however not wanting to make light of the action of psychoanalysis by making of it yet another individual psychotherapy. Psychoanalysis involves, as I have been arguing, a kind of torsional force, of torture, apparent to anyone who has been in analysis where they come to experience something of what it is to speak, to torque, in a manner which does not leave the speaker unaffected. The question which then arises concerns both the points of connection and the points of difference between psychoanalysis and torture.

I will begin with some of the differences as proposed in a paper – A note on psychoanalysis and the crime of torture - by Justin Clemens and Russell Grigg published in the Australian Feminist Law Journal in 2006. Clemens, J and Grigg, R. ‘A note on psychoanalysis and the crime of torture’, Australian Feminist Law Journal, 2006.⁶

Grigg and Clemens ask: “What interest could psychoanalysis have in the crime of torture?’ They cite Brian Staggol who, writing in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy in 1987, wrote that: “torture is the antithesis of the therapeutic process.” They conclude from this that: “The therapeutic process requires the testimony of victims, the (often public) listening to and inscription of their stories, over a protracted period of time. If torture drives at the hostile takeover of a victim’s entire existence, to the point where even the very words they speak are no longer permitted to be their own, psychoanalysis depends, above all, on ‘free association’, on the patient talking and talking about anything whatsoever - until the patient is finally able to assume responsibility for his or her freely uttered words.” (p. 173)

There is no contesting that this sounds very reasonable, very human, very responsible.

It is however a point of view - that psychoanalysis implies an assumption of responsibility for one's words, freely uttered and claimed as one's own – that I find myself in disagreement with. The position taken regarding torture by these authors is claimed with respect to an assertion of the rights of the individual enshrined in the “therapeutic process”. Accordingly, in their argument, if we are to differentiate torture from psychoanalysis, we have to accept the helping hand of psychotherapy. This is, in my view, and according to the argument I have been trying to develop here today, an insufficient differentiation, the cost of which is a renunciation of the singularity of psychoanalysis whose fate would be to find itself buried under the sediment of the therapeutic process.

Let us consider then the question of the differences between psychoanalysis and torture when we do not accept the helping hand of psychotherapy. Firstly, and most importantly, psychoanalysis unlike torture is not a means of gathering information, gaining knowledge or getting at the truth, through making an “individual” talk. It also ought not go without saying that the saying, the torquing which psychoanalysis seeks, does not proceed by way of a mortification of the flesh and the sadism with which it is overseen. The body, the flesh, is involved in psychoanalysis but not via its mortification. Rather, through a disturbance, a convulsion, a quivering produced through the action of the word which retains the capacity to displace the sentimentality of sadism as merely a personal profit drawn from the torsional force of language.

Now to the more difficult and provocative question of the fundamental points of connection between psychoanalysis and torture. Firstly, that both psychoanalysis and torture constitute an extreme form of speaking which, in separating itself from the domain of the therapeutic, moves within the realm of the inhuman. This is so to the extent that the person, individual, or human being is not the subject of primary concern. It is this very disregard for the human individual which allows for a torquing through which a saying is able to be heard twisting free of a stuttering "said", encumbered as it inevitably is by the ill-fitting weight of being. In twisting free, the voice becomes free to be something other than encumbered substance. Secondly, but not indifferent to the first, a recognition that the promise of the freedom or liberation of the individual, the person, does not bring about an overcoming of the impediment to speech, underwritten by being, but rather simply augments it.

Our impedimented stuttering speech, divorced from its torquing, remains merely an aspiring convulsion insofar as it retains a reference to the promise of freedom of the individual rather than the promise of language. It is the promise of language itself where psychoanalysis places its bet; a promise of language given as its fitting, convulsing, torquing. In this, psychoanalysis may at times be a torture, but the analyst not a torturer. The analyst is not the one who wields the hammer, or turns the screw. What the analyst wields is an invitation; an invitation to speak allowing a torquing saying to be produced in analysis; a saying which leans more to torture than ever to the well-owned words of the psychotherapy said-to-be, individual.

References

¹ Analyst of the School. The Freudian School of Melbourne, School of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. ^

² Lacan, Jacques. ‘L’Etourdit’, in Scilicet, Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1973. ^

³ Lacan, Jacques. ‘Letter of Dissolution’, in Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment. Norton, NY, 1990. ^

⁴ Baudrillard, Jean. Impossible Exchange, Verso, London, 2001. ^

⁵ Baudrillard, Jean. ‘An End to Freedom’, Impossible Exchange, Verso, London, 2001. ^

⁶ Clemens, J and Grigg, R. ‘A note on psychoanalysis and the crime of torture’, Australian Feminist Law Journal, 2006. ^