Since Freud developed psychoanalysis, different schools have proliferated proposing important modifications, both in the technique and in its objectives. It´s easy to see something common in all these approaches, something that groups them in the psychoanalytic field, as has been described by Dr. Jonathan Shedler. It might be harder to make sense of their differences. I am making here a preliminary attempt at describing the different objectives of some psychoanalytic branches.
There is an approach to psychoanalysis that aims to produce meaning. This meaning can be understood as the interpretation of a truth which was hidden, repressed, in the patient. It can also be seen as the construction of something that was absent from the patient, but could be useful to him. Thus, Little Hans´ fear of leaving the home and being bitten by a horse could be construed as “really meaning” that he was afraid of his love towards his mother and of his father castrating him for it. The acquisition of a conscious account of some psychic phenomena helps to manage them and to dissolve the symptoms that expressed them.
Sometimes, people suffer from the awareness of certain mental contents (desires, prohibitions, etc) and try to eliminate them from their consciousness. This can be done by the use of the aforementioned repression or activating other “defence mechanisms”. Thus, consciousness loses access to the troubling mental contents and gets impoverished. Another approach to psychoanalysis is directed towards the removal of these defences. As a result of this, unconscious material becomes conscious, which leads to a similar situation to that of the model described in the previous paragraph. However, there is an important technical difference between interpreting the contents, which secondarily lowers the defences, and working primarily on the defences, which secondarily frees contents into consciousness.
Both models of psychoanalysis use the transference in their work. That is, the repetition in the relationship with the psychoanalyst of patient´s past patterns of relation or the actualization of his drives in the consulting room. Thus, hidden pathogenic material emerges in the here and now of the therapeutic relationship, becoming amenable to psychoanalytic interpretation.
Other psychoanalytic approaches go beyond using the transference as a means to access mental contents and focus on the transference itself. They explore the relationship with the therapist, with its expectations, projections, enactments, etc. Rather than looking for intrapsychic material of the patient, this method looks for interpersonal material in the relationship between the patient and the analyst.
While the previous models focus on contents of the mind (seen as individual or relational), the early Lacan took another approach to psychoanalysis. Instead of ascribing a fixed meaning to words, Lacan used the concept of signifiers as means to produce meaning in a loose connection with the signifieds. The signifiers form part of a chain with other signifiers, which influence the production of signification. Thus, the meaning emerges from the complex relations between signifiers and signifieds, not as a predetermined consequence of an isolated semantic element.
The discourse is formed by a succession of signifiers, which are linked to each other. What links the signifiers in the discourse is something between them, desire. Thus, if every time someone uses the signifier “father”, it is followed by other signifiers related to destruction or damage, we can suspect that there is some aggressive desire towards a father figure.
The early Lacan focused his psychoanalytic work on the logic of the signifiers, trying to elicit the emergence of desire. He showed some contempt towards the work on “contents” of the unconscious, considering that it remained at a superficial level that he called the “imaginary realm”. This included the previously mentioned use of the transference (which Lacan considered “imaginary transference”). Lacan used the “symbolic transference” but that´s another issue I won´t go into.
The later Lacan observed that after freeing the desire, many patients didn´t improve, but conserved their symptoms. He postulated that patients found a “jouissance” in their symptoms, that they were engrossed in them and refused to let them go. In this situation, the treatment wouldn´t consist on clarifying meanings or on freeing the desire, but on renouncing the jouissance. Meaning itself could be a form of jouissance, binding the patients to the psychoanalytic process but blocking any progress. Here, Lacan proposed that the interpretation was limited as a therapeutic tool and introduced what he called “psychoanalytic interventions”, like the scansion and the variable-length sessions, in order to distance the patient from his jouissance.
The practitioners of all these different techniques claim them to be psychoanalytic. However, they may argue that others are not. The strife is particularly acute between Lacanians and the rest of the psychoanalytic world.
It´s difficult to establish what works best for the patients (and that´s assuming that there is a technique which is superior to the rest for all the patients). Training as a psychoanalyst is a long and costly process which makes the analyst invest emotionally in his work, thus rendering him subjectively implicated and potentially biased for making a comparison.
If we are struggling to compare psychoanalysis versus other schools of psychotherapy, comparing different psychoanalytic branches might be even harder. A good way to start might be clarifying what these approaches consist on. This is a very incomplete introduction, but I hope it helps.
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