Philosopher and Psychoanalyst Jared Russell on the question: What is Psychoanalysis?

Jared Russell was a colleague, writing collaborator, and dear friend who passed away in 2022. He was also the author of three important books on psychoanalysis. We were both heavily involved in the journal that I founded in 2014, The Undecidable Unconscious: A Journal of Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis(Nebraska UP). Jared followed me in the position of Managing Editor and we both were Co-Editors of the 2015 volume. Jared and I co-wrote the "Foreword" of the 2015 volume, which I have posted here.

I love Jared's concise and rather brilliant answer to the question, "What is Psychoanalysis?" below.

Jared was posed this question during a conference at his training institute, the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis, a psychoanalytic institute founded by Theodor Reik. Reik was a psychoanalyst who trained as one of Freud's first students in Vienna, Austria, and was a pioneer of "lay analysis" in the United States. Like Jared and myself, Reik came to his analytic training from academia and was not trained as a doctor or a psychologist. (You can read about Freud's important short book, The Question of Lay Analysis, here.)

Jared was simply brilliant, and a beautiful human being. He will be dearly missed.

Jared Russell: Unlike other forms of treatment that are widely supported by insurance agencies and academic research funds, psychoanalysis does not provide topical solutions to problems posed by entrenched forms of cognitive or behavioral pathology. Psychoanalysis is not a managerial strategy; it does not help the subject better to manage his or her destructive thinking or behavior. Psychoanalysis aims instead at the fundamental transformation of the subject him- or herself, and in such a way that less symptomatic and more creative and rewarding forms of thinking and behaving will inevitably follow.

In contrast to manualized forms of mental health counseling (CBT, DBT, TFP, etc.), psychoanalysis is a radically singular practice that promotes individuation. To this extent, it does not respond to the question “What is…?” in the way these other disciplines do. What psychoanalysis offers is an experience in excess of the demands of the consumer of therapeutic services who wants to know so as to calculate in advance what clinical experience promises.  As an experience of the emergence of the unconscious, psychoanalysis is fundamentally an encounter with the unpredictable. Clinical practice is the transmission of this experience in the form of a tradition linking the generations.

It seems to me that what Peter has called the “candidate of the future” is the figure of the consumer of analytic education. It is by means of this figure that psychoanalysis ruins any relation to its potential future as a tradition and as a discipline. Psychoanalytic institutions must not conform to the demands generated by marketplaces of professional training. Analytic institutes must refuse to become professional training schools. It was precisely this reduction that both [Theodor] Reik and Freud opposed and that [the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis] originally responded to as a form of institutionalized yet mindful resistance.