JA Miller on “Common Sense” in Psychoanalysis

Common sense, it’s what everyone agrees on. Psychoanalysis finds itself fundamentally in default with respect to the agreement that grounds common sense. Psychoanalysis means nothing if not that common sense is the effect of repression. This situates our place, apart, and isolates psychoanalysis, to make it the object of a segregation. ¹

Unlike other practices psychoanalysis is very interested in what stops things from making sense, what does not work, what its in the way of sense. Psychoanalysis investigates the ways we repeatedly don’t make sense (to our self and to others).

Perhaps this is because psychoanalysis is a process that would not appear to make sense when one first encounters it.

Regardless, it is only by not being concerned with making sense as an overt “goal” of treatment that at the psychoanalytic process produces a sense of sorts —an idiosyncratic sense where the individual comes to enjoy the ways they don’t make sense because they keep life interesting.

Or, to put it a different way, psychoanalysis helps people become less interested in a common sense that they frequently work against because they find it boring, and become more interested in a non-common sense that is more interesting.

Many people have attempted to make psychoanalysis fit into other disciplines, to make it no longer a segregated praxis. (This can be seen most recently in the efforts of many people to integrate psychoanalysis and neuroscience.)

Seeing the segregation of psychoanalysis as a flaw is, of course, an option. However, perhaps we might consider the possibility that the separateness of psychoanalysis from other “common” disciplines to be a feature rather than seeing it as a bug that needs to be edited out of the psychoanalytic source-code.

Miller says a little bit later in the same essay.

From where we stand, the look back at the past half-century shows that it was only for a brief moment that we could have believed that psychoanalysis was in agreement with the movement of the sciences. We must register the fact that psychoanalysis has since then returned to a segregative status that behooves us to assume instead of denying it.²

Could those of us who work for the psychoanalytic cause come to stop experiencing the symptom of our segregation (our aloneness) as something we need to cure, and instead experience our separateness as a sinthome we enjoy?