Reflections on Cure, or “I/Thou/It”

Abstract

Cure is a topic much on our minds but rarely in focus. This paper probes what systematizes this protean thing called cure, hoping to open it to new meaning. It reveals cure as a moving target; illustrates several ways of putting a working definition together; and, while reflecting on three treatments, considers cure as both state and process. Cure's vernacular definition is not unknown to analysts: recovery from illness, a state of well-being restored. But psychoanalysis also deems the mind's heart a rupture that does not heal: if we are our scars, then there is no return to a state of continuous well-being, because none never existed. In both daily clinical life and the long run, as some clinical examples illustrate, we cannot choose between these two meanings, but must rather operate in the difficult tension, the irony, between them.

Notes

¹This project began in 1981, when Sue Shapiro, Ph.D., and I gave a well-attended workshop at the annual retreat of the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy. Its title: “What DoWe Really and Secretly Believe Is Mentally Healthy?” Note the “really” and the “secretly.” Even then, we were puzzled about the doubleness in which we were working.

This essay has benefitted from many critiques, including especially Stephen Seligman's astute editing.

²More than Freud, Groddeck (1923/1961) was sanguine about disciplinary authority. “To keep the patient from ever doing it,” he wrote, “there is the safeguard of the police, of custom, of the anxiety bred in him for centuries before” (pp. 134–135). Freud (1908), in contrast, understood the irony, having already indicted these civil safeguards as irremediably key to the illness that psychoanalysis calls upon itself to cure. Civilization requires restraint, disgust, shame, and repression, making sublimation and neurosis necessary partners. That cure is only putatively achievable by reason intensifies another irony that would not, however, be recognized for another two generations.