Science, Ethnography, and Psychoanalysis
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Hello and welcome to The Speaking Body Podcast. I'm your host, Neil Gorman. Today's episode is going to be another short solo episode — just me talking directly to you about an idea that really builds on the content I put forward in our previous episode.
What I want to do first is briefly return to that content for a short review. In that episode, I made a couple of different claims. I'm going to lay them out in a somewhat chronological way here.
Claim number one is that psychoanalysis is an extremely unique clinical practice.
Claim number two gets into what makes it unique. That claim was that psychoanalysts are people who, when they encounter a patient assuming that the psychoanalyst knows things about them — about their unconscious in particular, about their symptoms, and so on — are also at the same time giving the person in the position of the psychoanalyst a lot of power and authority. I think that psychoanalysis is a practice that demands that an analyst does not take up that supposition of knowledge, does not take up that authority, either. When somebody is acting as an analyst, what they are doing is allowing their patient to make that supposition. They don't stop them from making it, but they don't take it up. They don't say, "Yes, you are correct to assume that I know all these things." What they do instead is take up a position based on their lack of knowledge.
There is a saying from Lacan about love, which I'll translate from French here into English: "Love is giving that which you do not have to somebody who does not want it." I think that aphorism applies not only to love, but to a clinical practice of psychoanalysis as well. In clinical psychoanalysis, what an analyst does is give their patients their lack — which is a kind of strange idea. What I mean by that is that when a patient comes and assumes that the analyst knows something, the analyst does not confirm that supposition. What they do instead is offer the patient their curiosity. Curiosity comes from a lack of knowledge, so when you are offering your patient curiosity, you are offering them what you don't know — your lack of knowledge. In a way, you are giving your patient that which you lack. And a lot of the time, not every time, the patient isn't going to like that. That is not going to be what they want. But that is what happens within an experience of psychoanalysis. So that's my review of the content from the previous episode.
Let's move into the content for today's episode. Here is the thing I want to put forward: the way that I am describing how a psychoanalyst works — the way I am saying clinical psychoanalysis works — is not something that is totally unique to psychoanalysis in and of itself. I do think that it is unique to psychoanalysis within the psychotherapeutic marketplace here in the United States where I practice. I say that because it seems to me that most other forms of psychotherapy practiced in the United States are predicated on the idea that the therapist or mental health professional does in fact know things that their patients don't. Many mental health professionals are trying to offer their patients something — trying to give them knowledge, trying to teach them skills, trying to give them, as I sometimes say with air quotes, "tools for their toolbox."
Psychoanalysis does not do those things, because if you are doing all those things, you are going along with the supposition of knowledge. The patient thinks that you have the tools for the toolbox. The patient thinks that you know things they don't. The patient thinks you can teach them things. And if the mental health expert actually goes along with that and says, "Yes, I will offer you the tools, I will try to teach you the skills, I will tell you things I know" — that is going with it. And I think that is by far the norm within most psychotherapies in the United States today. Psychoanalysis is pretty unique in that it does not do that. It doesn't stop the person from making that supposition, because you can't stop people from assuming things, but it doesn't take it up.
So I think psychoanalysis is unique within that psychotherapeutic marketplace, but I don't think it is unique to psychoanalysis period, full stop.
When I was thinking about this after making the last episode, I was trying to think about other things that function in this way, and I came up with two.
The first one is science. Now, that might sound a little bit strange to some people, so hear me out. I am not a trained scientist, so please bear that in mind as I say all this. The way that I think science works is that scientists know a lot about something — it could be physics, chemistry, biology, or some other area — and then they run experiments. But the thing about those experiments is that they are not actually an attempt to prove what the scientists already know. What these experiments are, I believe, is an attempt to answer a question that they don't actually know the answer to. That is what I think scientists are doing when they are doing science.
For example, a scientist might want to know what happens when they give a certain substance to mice and then have those mice run through a maze. They actually don't know what is going to happen when they do that. They don't know if the substance is going to make the mice get through the maze faster or slower, or have no effect at all.
So they run the experiment and observe what happens. Let's say the substance had no effect at all — it didn't make the mice run faster or slower. They time the mice, get a sense of how long it takes them to run through the maze on average, then give a group of mice the substance and have them run through the same maze, and it's exactly the same. It doesn't change anything. They go, "Okay, we've learned that this substance doesn't seem to have any impact on mice running through a maze." Then another scientist in a different location could run the exact same experiment.
Now, when they run the experiment a second time, it might look as if what they are doing is trying to prove that this substance has no effect on mice's ability to run through a maze. But that's not actually what they're doing. What they're doing is trying to answer a new question: Is this replicable? Was what happened the first time a fluke, or is it something that can be replicated? If it is replicated, they go, "Okay, we've now done this twice — that's two data points. Let's have somebody do it a third time and see what happens." And maybe the third time it comes out the same again. Okay, we've probably learned that this substance isn't having much of an effect. But sometimes what happens is they might run it once — no effect, twice — no effect, and the third time, there is an effect. What happened there? A whole new set of questions opens up. Why did it seem to have an effect the third time when it didn't the first two times?
This is very similar to psychoanalysis. When you're an analyst listening to a patient tell you things, you're going to learn things and make connections. You might offer an interpretation to the patient and see what happens. But when this is working well, the interpretations we offer are not some kind of final answer that unlocks the mystery of life. They are things that might create a new kind of connection, a new form of knowledge — but that new form of knowledge leads to even more questions. In this respect, I think that science and the clinical practice of psychoanalysis operate in a very similar way. I would go so far as to say that they share a similar ethic.
Another thing that operates this way is the practice of ethnography. Ethnography is a qualitative research methodology where a researcher goes into a place that is unfamiliar to them and watches what happens there. They have lots of questions about what they can learn as a result of going to this place and observing how people do things.
Ethnographers can go to many different places. I'll use the United States as an example. I live in the Chicagoland area and I'm pretty used to it — I understand how people think and feel about a variety of things here generally. Now, if I were to go to a bar in Texas and start watching how people conducted themselves there, there would be some differences between what I'm used to and this new place. And if I were an ethnographer, I might think, "What can I learn about how people live by paying really close attention to what happens in this bar in Texas?" It doesn't have to be something like that, either. It could also be going to a radically different place — somewhere where the culture is very different, the language is different, the food is different, and so on. If I were to leave the Chicagoland area and travel to rural China, there would probably be a lot more differences than if I went to Texas. But in both cases — whether I'm going to Texas or rural China — if I am being an ethnographer, I am not going into these places saying, "I know about this bar in Texas, I know about rural China." What I am doing is thinking, "What can I learn about this bar in Texas? What can I learn about rural China and how people live there?"
So ethnographers, like psychoanalysts, are people who — this is my claim — take up a position of not knowing about the place they are going to. Not knowing about the people there, not knowing what is natural or normal in these places, not knowing what is taboo or forbidden. They go to those places and try to learn these things. And also like psychoanalysis, and also like science, this is not from a place of judgment.
They don't observe and then necessarily go, "Okay, what I'm seeing here — this is right, this is wrong, this is ugly, this is beautiful." That's not what they're doing. They're trying to learn. They are genuinely curious people who want to understand something about a place that is, to some degree, foreign to them.
I think that scientists, when they run experiments, are often just trying to find things out. They're not trying to find things out in order to make some moralistic claim about what they've learned. They're just trying to learn. And I really do think that if you look across these three things I've been describing — science, ethnography, and psychoanalysis — you can see a very similar ethic connecting them.
Now, of course, there are obvious differences between these as well. They are not the same thing, and I hope you don't think that is what I'm saying. They are different — very different in some important ways — but I do think there is an ethic that connects them. If you find that an interesting idea, that's nice. If you think it's a stupid idea, that's also fine. I would love to hear from anyone who wants to react to this in any way.
If you want to get in touch with me and share your thoughts, you can do so by going to speakingbody.substack.com. That's the website for this podcast. There you'll find all sorts of different ways to get in touch with me and share your thoughts, reactions, ideas, critiques, and challenges.
But let me bounce back to this idea of ethnography for just a moment and make a reference. There's someone who does really interesting work that I'm a huge fan of. His name is Chris Arnade. He also has a Substack called Chris Arnade Walks the World. He calls himself a pop ethnographer — which I think is a great framing — and he goes all over the world to places that are radically different from the places he grew up in. What he does whenever he goes to these places is take up exactly this ethic I've been trying to describe.
He goes in thinking, "I am a visitor here. There is so much I don't know about this place, so much I don't know about the people who live here. I am really interested in trying to figure out what I can learn from these people." He is not interested in going into different places and identifying something and saying, "That thing they're doing over there — that's crazy, that's stupid, that's messed up." He doesn't do that. Sometimes he sees things and might have that kind of knee-jerk reaction internally, but I think he's pretty good at setting that aside and asking, "Well, maybe there's actually a reason why people are doing these things that seem crazy or weird to me. Maybe I could ask them why they're doing them." And so he does. He goes places, walks around, and tries to figure out why people are doing the things they're doing, why they're making the choices they're making, why they hold the beliefs they hold. It is a really fascinating thing, and I deeply admire the way that Chris Arnade shares his work through his Substack. If you haven't checked it out, I would certainly urge you to — I think it will be well worth your time.
In one of his recent newsletters — which I'll link to in the show notes for this episode — he made a distinction between what he calls thick culture and thin culture. He said: thick culture is the plot that we follow, while thin culture is the stage settings. I want to take that and redescribe it in a more psychoanalytic way. I believe that the unconscious is the plot that we follow, while the way that we consciously go about our lives is the stage settings.
I thought that was interesting because it showed the way that a pop ethnographer said something that could be very easily restated in a more psychoanalytic way.
Okay. I think I've laid out this idea, and hopefully I've done so in a way that actually makes sense — that makes sense outside of my own head. If I've done that, great. I'm very interested in hearing from you, the audience of this podcast. If there's anything you want to share with me in reaction to this episode or previous episodes, I would truly appreciate it.
And as always, I want to end by saying: there are so many things you could give your time and attention to — so many podcasts, so many YouTube videos, so many baseball games, and so on. I sincerely appreciate the fact that you've given me your time and attention for the duration of this episode. If you want to support the podcast, you could tell other people about it — that would be really great. If you find it interesting, the people you know who are of a similar mind will probably find it interesting too. And if you leave a review and a star rating in whatever app you use to listen, that helps as well. If you're willing to do any of those things, I would greatly appreciate it.
Having said all that, I'm going to be done here for today. Until the next time I'm in your ears — take care.