Psychoanalysis brackets external reality to read all material as inner-psychic communication

Evidence

The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan is famous, amongst other things, for his aphorism that the efficacy of analysis as a talking cure lies in the fact that within its special setting and frame “nothing real happens.” He was referring to the fact that everything that is brought into play in the analysis from outside - events in everyday life, social or political situations in which the patient is caught up - all this is interpreted in relation to the patient’s feelings towards the analyst, which in turn are held to be a repetition of earlier patterns of relatedness towards parents, dominated by infantile fantasies and defense mechanisms. In other words, the analyst suspends judgment as to the wider significance or facticity of the external event in order to concentrate on its unconscious meaning for the patient through the chain of associations and memories it evokes. … This procedure has been called the analytic epoche; the interpretive frame wrapped around the patient’s utterances systematically brackets out everything to do with the “real referent” and instead considers them as communications between different, splitoff, parts of the inner self or (m)other, as mediated by the analyst’s presence and hence overdetermined by the dynamics of transference (Spence, 1994). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1266

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ‘analytic epoche’ — the bracketing procedure central to the chapter’s argument about how psychoanalysis explains racism.