Secondary Gain 005
The Anti-Advice Column of Parapraxis
Secondary Gain is an anti-advice column. It follows in the tradition of other psychoanalytic experiments that have opened up the consulting room using media: from Susan Isaacs’s advice columns in the interwar period and Winnicott’s radio broadcasts during World War II to experiments with radical radio, like Fanon’s understanding of the power of the radio in the Algerian Revolution and Guattari’s work on Radio Libre Paris in the late ’70s. Yet, in keeping with psychoanalytic principles, advice is not directly offered, and columnists don’t presume to offer treatment or cure or serve as a proxy for long-term care. Instead, three columnists come together to think with, and alongside, their questioner, who always has the final word.
Your columnists, writing under pseudonyms:
Dr. Harris C. is a psychoanalyst practicing in Brooklyn, New York.
Dr. Lina Donato is a Kleinian psychoanalyst in private practice.
Dear Secondary Gain,
Can I give my analyst a gift when my analysis ends?
Sincerely,
MM
Dear MM,
Why not? In fact, why wait until the end to give your analyst a present?
I am an analyst, you know, and I just love when patients give me presents. I am taking care of someone who always brings me the most delicious little things around various holidays. She is such an excellent baker, and a tasty treat to accompany the afternoon coffee really brightens up the day. I often find that especially after someone has spent so long in your consulting room, they have a decent sense of your taste.
I guess I have a question for you though. Why do you ask if it’s ok? In analysis you can just do things and see what happens, more or less with impunity, more or less. Let your analyst deal with what you give. They have likely been managing what you have been bringing them for years. You bring your dreams, your words, your body, your money. To top it off, you have been proffering what you don’t have, that is to say what you lack, session after session. At least one hopes that is the case, otherwise there is no analysis to show for all those sessions. Perhaps your analyst has been able to receive all this in such a way that you have come to understand something about how objects are exchanged in the great economy of satisfactions, in between desire and jouissance, between what is symbolic and what is real. After all, psychoanalysis must be paid for, in some form, in order for it to work well.
First of all, you have to give something up. Often it’s a matter of giving up a particular relation to the worst of your life. Impossible to give away your symptom—what would be left of you then? But you can certainly try to give up the object that causes your desire. My own analyst recently changed her WhatsApp pic to a quotation from Jacques Lacan, “Happiness is denied to whomever does not renounce the pathway of desire.” Give it up!
What gets left behind in analysis? How about your being. When Lacan says renounce the pathway of desire, this is another way of saying renounce the pathway of being. Being and desire are cut from the same cloth—I am this, I am that, this is who I am, I want to be this, I want to be that, I will never be . . . In the series of all the fictions being spit out during analysis, we can see the way in which being itself is a phenomenon of what you don’t have, of your lack-in-being (manque-à-être). This is the gift one offers to an analyst. This gift must be returned back to you.
You have asked about giving a present when your analysis ends. It’s going to be difficult to say that your analysis ends without passing through what Lacan called désêtre (dis-being). If you have not evacuated your being (and your wallet), that is to say drained away all the meaning from the bank account of the symptom, you haven’t said the last word (that does not exist). What is the real object of exchange in the world? What gets passed around, gifted and re-gifted so many times that the image on the coin gets worn off? Words, like money, like presents, circulate in discourse, the course of the world. Pay it forward baby!
Always,
Harris C.
*
Dear MM,
Ah, an age-old question. When I was in my training analysis, I would spend quite a lot of time musing about the gift I might give my analyst. I thought of concert tickets, a book that was meaningful, a recording of a piece of classical music that we had spoken of during one of my sessions. In the end inhibition prevailed and I talked about these ideas and did not act upon them. Of course there is no absolute rule—except the prevailing, underlying rule of analysis—one it must be said is much in dispute these days—the rule of thought over action. It’s constricting for sure, and in truth when it comes to gift-giving, there is no hard and fast rule.
Of course you can give your analyst a gift. I personally prefer it when my patients do not give me a gift. I feel that at the end of analysis there is so much feeling, so much going on—just with the ending, that a gift becomes a slightly intrusive presence. This is not necessarily an opinion or feeling shared by other analysts. It may be highly idiosyncratic of me. My feeling about the ending of analyses is: they are huge. I spent hours contemplating the ending of my own—and when my patients are terminating, I spend long periods of time working at a good termination—and then having so many feelings in the last hours. In that sense there may not be a need for an actual, concrete gift. The gift is in your presence, and being present in the termination, more than in giving a present!
When I think of the act of gift-bringing in my own practice, two very different instances come to mind. In one case a patient spoke for weeks about bringing a gift at the end of analysis. As she spoke, I could feel a strange sensation. Was she forewarning me, somehow, as though this “gift” was more of a way to gauge my interest in receiving her, more than an expression of her appreciation? I confess that her notion of gift-giving felt more confrontational than generous—as though a test that I might fail or pass. Would I allow a gift? Would I reject a gift? And, of course, all of this was meaningful in the terms of her treatment where issues about my interest in her and feelings for her had been paramount. At her last session, she did, indeed bring a gift. It was a sculpture, made of wires and very abstract, and not particularly to my taste, nor particularly something I could link with my patient. I remember feeling saddened by it. I wish we hadn’t needed this “gift”—I felt the gift sidetracked our ending rather than marked it.
On another occasion a different patient brought me a gift—a little book of poems she had written with a very beautiful title, A Species of Melancholy. This moved me enormously—for it expressed so much of what had brought her to analysis in the first place and what we had been able to work towards in our work together. It was so her and hence a real gift to me.
I tell you this to say—just think about it. Gifts are an expression of many things, but tucked in with the gift is usually a wish. A wish you have about your analyst, about an impact you want to make, along with something you want to give. I really think that you can end with your analyst and convey your appreciation and your gratitude without anything additional—that is an enormous gift. And the gift of your time, presence, participation, honesty, all the work you have done—this is a gift to your analyst. If there is more you feel you must bring, certainly you can. But I would just consider— like everything else one does in treatment—perhaps it is useful to speak about it first to locate the hidden meanings. Congratulations on terminating your treatment.
Warm wishes,
Dr. Lina Donato
Dear MM,
Here are some associations inspired by your question.
Often patients bring a dream to their analyst as a gift. Or a new symptom. Or anything juicy to analyze. Patients unconsciously intuit the kinds of things that will spike the analyst’s interest and desire in a way a gift does. They are also unconsciously attuned to the kinds of things that will inflate the analyst’s narcissism in feeling that they are doing a great job. But a gift can also be a Trojan horse. A delicious soup given as a gift by an analysand who hates their analyst, could hide a poisonous army. The analyst fears drinking the soup. But how literal or metaphoric are presents offered in the analytic space? Maybe the analyst’s fear reflects a projected poisonous host of things inside the nourishing soup of the patient’s mind. Their unconscious plan is to put such poisonous intruders inside the analyst, so they see what they feel like. The patient’s projection is a form of unconscious communication, which is in line with what psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion said. Gifts communicate the experience of what it’s like to be me, it is a putting in common the ecstasies, catastrophes, and ordinary happenings that form our life. Or maybe they communicate that there is no individual me but rather an us that extends to others in the way dreams continue to live and change when we tell them to someone else. In this sense gifts, like dreams, would demand dissemination. The gift that keeps on giving. The dream that keeps on dreaming. Perhaps patients give us gifts (dreams or soups) with the secret hope that we will circulate what they mean through our other patients. Maybe, then, there is no final receiver of a gift. When patients give me gifts, I sometimes feel that I owe them something in return. But in what currency do we pay the patient back? Owing something in return seems to be a kind of giving back or perhaps a turning back. Gifts remind us of a past that is alive in the present. (Why would we give a gift to someone if there wasn’t a history we shared?) Please pardon my word play here: if gifts are presents, or perhaps the shape that our different presents take, then gifts are reminders of a life that lives in the gift. Or reminders that we should live in the gift. Is this the same as saying that life is a gift? A gift at the end of the analysis is perhaps a way of moving forward but looking towards the back to keep in mind a long history: in return. In a way this is the simplest way of describing how people live. I think the philosopher Kierkegaard says something like this. So a gift at the end of analysis, though overdetermined by all kinds of meanings (I leave you with a mask that I thought was me; we will keep in touch, this has not ended, the analy - sis and you extends inside my mind; I am grateful for you failing me the right way—as Winnicott would say; I am not leaving you alone, the gift will keep you company; you are indebted to the pain I shared with you, etc.), might be something so simple as telling your analyst that, thanks to the analysis, you will live with the awareness that the gift (of life) reflects how your past always leads to the gratuitousness of the present. This is a form of grace. Nobody has to give you a gift, nor life must give you a present. Installed in the gift (of the present) there is nothing but invention, creative living, and gratitude.
I hope you take my words as a little gift for you, and that it helps you decide if you should give a present to your analyst when the analysis ends.
With curiosity about which gift you would give your analyst,
Hodï Green
Dear Secondary Gain,
When I saw that my question had been selected, I was initially filled with excitement as I read through the responses. However, that feeling was quickly followed by the anxiety of having to formulate a reply. Articulating myself, taking a stance, or—as I’ve come to call it during analysis— speaking from a connected place is something I’ve found challenging. I used to excel at putting on a “costume,” which got me far in some ways, but at the cost of feeling somewhat disconnected from myself and others.
So, you can imagine my mixed emotions when I finished reading the three responses. I found myself wishing for an anti anti-advice column, something that could provide a concrete answer I could “present” here. Your replies got me thinking about the connection between the words costume, presentation, and present. I began to ask myself: what am I really trying to “perform” for my analyst by giving her a gift?
Of course, part of me wants to acknowledge the special relationship we’ve had over the past four years, to make sure she knows how thankful I am. But that, she already knows. I want to be a “good analysand,” someone she won’t forget. That too, she knows. But there’s also a fear: what felt so special to me may have been, for her, simply part of the job—professional care and empathy, but not necessarily anything “special.”
This is where my doubt and need for your advice stemmed from. However, after reading your different perspectives, I’m reminded once again that there’s no polished stance, no clear-cut answer, no big Other—except what feels right to me. And for now, I’ll sit with your responses and see what unfolds within me until the end of analysis.
Thank you so much for your 3 gifts to me.
Sincerely,
MM