Difference between revisions of "Suggestion"
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suggestion (suggestion) In nineteenth-century French psychiatry, the | suggestion (suggestion) In nineteenth-century French psychiatry, the | ||
Revision as of 03:17, 18 May 2006
suggestion (suggestion) In nineteenth-century French psychiatry, the
term 'suggestion' referred to the use of hypnosis to remove neurotic
symptoms; while the patient was in a state of hypnosis, the doctor would
'suggest' that the symptoms would disappear. Taking his cue from the French
psychiatrists Charcot and Bernheim, Freud began using suggestion to treat
neurotic patients in the 1880s. However, he became increasingly dissatisfied
with suggestion, and thus came to abandon hypnosis and develop psycho-
analysis. The reasons for Freud's dissatisfaction with hypnosis are hence
fundamental for understanding the specific nature of psychoanalysis. How-
ever, it is beyond the scope of this article to enter into a detailed discussion of
these reasons. Suffice it to say that in Freud's later work the term 'suggestion'
comes to represent a whole set of ideas which Freud associates with hypnosis
and which is thus diametrically opposed to psychoanalysis.
Following Freud, Lacan uses the term 'suggestion' to designate a whole
range of deviations from true psychoanalysis (deviations which Lacan also
refers to as 'psychotherapy'), of which the following are perhaps the most
salient:
1. Suggestion includes the idea of directing the patient towards some ideal or
some moral value (see ETHIcs). In opposition to this, Lacan reminds analysts
that their task is to direct the treatment, not the patient (E, 227). Lacan is
opposed to any conception of psychoanalysis as a normative process of social
influence.
2. Suggestion also arises when the patient'S RESISTANCE is seen as something
that must be liquidated by the analyst. Such a view is completely foreign to
psychoanalysis, argues Lacan, since the analyst recognises that a certain
residue of resistance is inherent in the structure of the treatment.
3. In suggestion, the interpretations of the therapist are orientated around
signification, whereas the analyst orientates his interpretations around meaning
(sens) and its correlate, nonsense. Thus whereas in psychotherapy there is an
attempt to avoid the ambiguity and equivocation of discourse, it is precisely
this ambiguity which psychoanalysis thrives on.
Suggestion has a close relation with TRANSFERENCE (E, 270). If transference
involves the analysand attributing knowledge to the analyst, suggestion refers
to a particular way of responding to this attribution. Lacan argues that the
analyst must realise that he only occupies the position of one who is presumed
(by the analysand) to know, without fooling himself that he really does possess
the knowledge attributed to him. In this way, the analyst is able to transform
the transference into 'an analysis of suggestion' (E, 271). Suggestion, on the
other hand, arises when the analyst assumes the position of one who really
does know.
Like Freud, Lacan sees hypnosis as the model of suggestion. In Group
Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud shows how hypnotism makes
the object converge with the ego-ideal (Freud, 1921). To put this in Lacanian
terms, hypnotism involves the convergence of the object a and the I. Psycho-
analysis involves exactly the opposite, since 'the fundamental mainspring of
the analytic operation is the maintenance of the distance between I - identi-
fication - and the a' (S11, 273).