A Note on the BBC Tavistock Series, 'TALKING CURE'

The subject of Therip's current lecture series is 'Psychoanalysis and the Media'. It seems that the perception of psychoanalysis in the media has changed. Whereas formerly most sections of the media (press, television, radio) were indifferent or hostile to psychoanalysis, today we see and hear psychiatrists/psychotherapists regularly on television and radio and read their columns in newspapers and popular journals. Increasingly psychoanalytic culture is being incorporated into popular culture. A noteworthy instance of this trend is the recent Tavistock series on B.B.C. 2, 'Talking Cure', with which I am far from comfortable, and I write to share my disquiet with the membership. 

First, of course, there is the sense of voyeurism: we are invited to eavesdrop. No ethical permissions, sought and obtained, can entirely eliminate the sense of intrusion, when the audience identifies with the eye of the camera to see what IS not-to-be-seen and to hear what is not spoken for us. The exposure to public gaze of private problems and private grief creates a novel form of appropriation, a kind of psychic strip-tease that borders on the perverse. In his talk to Therip on the 19th of February, Nick Temple, Chairman of the Tavistock Clinic, expressed the concerns that were felt, quite properly, for possible damage to the patient. But I see as for more damaging its effect on the millions of viewers, who become complicit in the process.

Second, there is the question of authenticity, guaranteed in this case by the B.B.C., which, with minor concessions, maintained overriding editorial control. The wholeness of one or more therapeutic sessions is 'broken up into digestible pieces, minced morsels’[1] which are selected, edited, cut and re-assembled into an artificial unity to fit the requirements of a given programme slot. But authenticity, as Benjamin said, is not reproducible.[2] What is lacking is the unique living presence of the original in time and space; what is substituted is a television image, a construct, an artifact. an appearance, which can be reproduced at will to satisfy the demands of the consumer.

In an age characterised by the relentless march of international capitalism, psychothe:py has been lifted from its habitat to become a commodity on the media market.

Some qualifications are necessary. The 'patients' for this series were procured by advertisement, not quite real patients. And the presence of the cameras introduced an element of falsity or performance into the session from the outset: one eye on the therapist and one eye on the camera. Therapy has been induced for our purposes, like the kiss in a film that is enacted for us to see. As against this, we must, I think, be grateful that, although we visited consultations, counselling and group and family sessions, no attempt was made to lay bare the psychoanalytical experience itself. What follows are some preliminary observations on the representation of psychoanalysis.

In the Phœdrus Plato makes a distinction between what we might call a no-thing which passes itself off as a thing. He is discussing with Phædrus the invention of writing, which he distinguishes from speaking by a number of figures: the living word to the dead letter, reality to appearance, the original to the copy, remembering to repeating, the inside to the outside, the fruitful to the barren, medicine to poison, truth to lie. Truth for Plato was the nourishment of the soul (a kind of psychic food), and lies its poison. But this truth (colourless, formless, intangible), having no sensible qualities, cannot be seen, or heard, or touched: it is apprehended by a special mental faculty (nous). Although we cannot expect an exact correspondence between Greek categories and our own, the thrust of Plato's argument is to emphasize the mutative quality of a living presence in the here-now, 'at the time' and 'in the place', compared with the empty replication of a written account, which can be passed from hand to hand when the speaker himself is no longer there. Just as the portrait remains after the sitter has left; and in this instance the case history remains but the sessions have gone. For Plato the copy is not merely unsatisfactory, it is misinformation that in its way is fraudulent.

In his Introduction to Second Thoughts (a book of collected papers containing a number of case histories), Bion observes that there has been an evolutionary change in his views since the papers were written: 'I do not regard any narrative purporting to be a report of fact, either of what the patient said or of what I said, as worth consideration as a "factual account" of what happened'.[3]

He elaborates on this statement in a Commentary at the end (and elsewhere in his work). Like Plato, Bion stresses the ineffable nature of an experience devoid of sensible qualities ('which cannot in fact be seen or smelled or heard, for one is not listening to what the patient thinks he is saying').[4] The receptor organ of this experience Bion calls 'intuition' (cf. Plato's nous): 'I prefer this term [intuited] to "observed" or "heard" or "seen" as it does not carry the penumbra of sensuous association’.[5] The interpretations of the analyst are understandable to the patient for they refer to a shared experience. The reader of the case history or the television viewer does not have this advantage. What makes an interpretation - at least in intention - a true representation and a written text or a film recording of that same interpretation a misrepresentation is the fact that the first takes place in the presence of the thing itself out of which it is produced, while the second is a no-thing, a reproduction, a copy, a faked appearance which substitutes for a reality that always lies outside it. Like going through the motions of a ball game in the absence of the ball. In his later work Bion used fragments of case material only illustratively, preferring in general the greater authenticity of imaginary examples, and at the last he turned to fiction as a more reliable vehicle for truth.

Between Bion and Lacan there are points of correspondence, hitherto I believe unexamined. Both rejected the case history, virtually absent in Lacan, as a mode of transmitting psychoanalytic knowledge. And, like Plato, both mistrusted the written word, 'which drifts allover the place, getting into the hands not only of those who understand it, but equally of those who have no business with it' (Phœdrus 275). Each in his own way was remarkable, a genius if you like, one within the Establishment ('loaded with honours') and the other of course cast out ('excommunicated'). But it was not only Lacan who challenged the Establishment; in his thinly disguised self-portrait of the mystic and the group, Bion describes the tension between the disruptive potential of the messianic idea and the official organisation set up in its name to routinise, control, disseminate and neutralise it.[6] Sensitive to the (mis)interpretations put on the printed word, Bion at one time resolved to transmit his knowledge orally through his analysands (an idea given up as 'esoteric '). In the same vein Lacan said of the use to which the academy would put his texts: 'Their interest will be that they transmit what I have said literally; like the amber which holds the fly so as to know nothing of its flights.'[7] To this we can add his footnote at the end of Seminar xi that he put 'Ecrits' on the cover of his collection because 'a writing in my sense, is made not to be read'. It has been suggested that Lacan saw himself in his seminars as 'speaking psychoanalysis', as though he was replicating or mirroring his object, as though the unconscious was speaking him.[8] Hence his famous style, 'a half-speaking', as he called it, 'a technique which realises that truth can only be half-spoken'.[9] It is of interest here that Bion never prepared his lectures, waiting, as it were, for it to happen through him.[10] A writing not-made-to-be-read (or. as Bion put it, to be read and then forgotten) requires a very particular engagement by the reader to contribute to it of his own (du sein), and to see between and beyond the words which always point to more than is said, like a signpost to a distant place. Without a Lacanian background I am not equipped to push the subject further.

These preliminary reflections on the representation of psychoanalysis seem to have brought us a long way from the Tavistock 'Talking Cure', from the simulacra of no-things which pass themselves off as things. Deliberately so. Of course, as Temple said, the series, however artificial, still conveys something of the 'flavour' of the original. And the aim was to promote the 'talking cure' as an alternative to more mechanistic and sometimes 'brutal' psychiatric interventions. In this, at least. we are at one.