Is There a Cure in Psychoanalysis? A Clinic for the Untreatable

ABSTRACT This work aims to explore the dynamics of the cure in psychoanalysis, passing through a literary perspective. We begin by locating the idea of cure in psychoanalysis as the cure of the intractable, by thinking the logic of the cure through an aesthetic dimension. Next, we advance the idea of a literary subject, with the myth as a guiding element of a literary body that sustains its own existence. We adopt Kafka’s idea of minor literature to understand the fragmented subject inserted in the culture. We then propose the neologism 'vereedades’, playing on the proximity of the words ‘truth’ and ‘path’ in Portuguese ('verdade' and 'veredas') to explore curative dynamics, in which the subject explores his/her own style.

"Psychoanalysis cures" (p.426) was the answer that Herrmann (2000) gave to a psychiatrist colleague when asked what, in practice, psychoanalysis does that a drug treatment does not.The cure in psychoanalysis distances itself from the medical conception.Sofio (2015) explains that curing in psychoanalysis is not to be confused with healing, "medication heals (operates on the symptom) and Psychoanalysis cures" (p.71).Healing is pragmatic, it is intended to fix something, to return to the previous state, tributary to the restitutio ad integrum [restoration to an original condition] of medical practice, whereas curing in psychoanalysis implies care for desire (Herrmann, 2000).This desire causes the subject.For Herrmann "what is healed without being cured comes back worse" (p.426).Freud (1915Freud ( /2010) ) distinguishes the furor sanandi [passion for curing people] from the effects of psychoanalysis, pointing out that both efforts will always have a place in therapeutic practice.Freud (1915Freud ( /2010) ) says: "in medical practice there will always be room for the 'ferrum' and the 'ignis' side by side with the 'medicina'; and in the same way we shall never be able to do without a strictly regular, accurate psycho-analysis [psicanálise acurada]" (p.228, emphasis added).Strachey (Freud's translator into English) explains, in a footnote, that Freud refers to an aphorism by Hippocrates when he mentions iron, fire and medicine: "Those diseases which medicines do not cure, iron (the knife?) cures; those diseases which iron cannot cure, fire cures; and those which fire cannot cure, are to be reckoned wholly incurable" (Hippocrates quoted in Freud, 1915Freud, /2010, p. 228, footnote), p. 228, footnote).
When referring to the Hippocratic aphorism Freud keeps the first three categories of diseases under the control of medicine, placing the fourth and last category, which is incurable, under the scrutiny of psychoanalysis.In other words, there where Hippocrates placed incurable diseases is the domain of accurate psychoanalysis (from Latin accuratus, 'done with care').
Psychoanalysis can only cure, then, as long as its specific work is not dissolved by an effort to restore any kind of supposed previous state of wholeness.The logic of the cure might instead have more to do with the states of "aesthetic convalescence" Baudelaire, Poe, and Nietzsche described in the late 19 th century.At the time, Charcot sought at the Salpêtrière hospital an organic explanation for his patients' hysterical symptoms.Freud's exposure to this scene led him on a different path, of course, that of inventing a mode of listening to his patients engaged in "the talking cure," to put it in Anna O.'s terms.Listening and talking here follow the thread of the body, to discover its unique mode of eroticization and sensibility, beyond the organism's functioning.(Negrete, 2020) The cured patient, for psychoanalysis, is the one who cares for him/herself (Herrmann, 2000).This article aims to explore the dimension of the cure in psychoanalysis, proposing its relationship with a kind of personal, corporal and aesthetic literature.Instead of restitutio ad integrum, the psychoanalytic cure explores the possibilities of being in the world.Thus, those who care for themselves, are the ones who recognize the particularities and singularities present in themselves and manage to do something with them in order to launch them to another dimension, both aesthetic and curative.

MYTH AND BODY: THE SUBJECT AS LITERATURE
The fable 220 of the Latin poet Hyginus (64 BC, 17 AD) whose title is "Cura" narrates the creation of the man.This fable was also used by Goethe (1994) in the second part of Faust, as well as by Heidegger (2002) in "Being and Time"; Brazilian authors in the field of psychoanalysis, such as Rocha (2000), Herrmann (2000) and Dunker (2011), used it to address the issue of curing and self-care.We continue with the fable: Once when "Cura" 1 was crossing a river, she saw some clay; she thoughtfully took a piece and began to shape it.While she was thinking about what she had made, Jupiter came by."Cura" asked him to give it spirit, and this he gladly granted.But when she wanted her name to be bestowed upon it, Jupiter forbade this and demanded that it be given his name instead.While "Cura" and Jupiter were arguing, Earth arose, and desired that her name be conferred upon the creature, since she had offered it part of her body.They asked Saturn to be the judge.And Saturn gave them the following decision, which seemed to be just: "Since you, Jupiter, have given its spirit, you should receive that spirit at death; and since you, Earth, have given its body, you shall receive its body.But since "Cura" first shaped this creature, she shall possess it as long as it lives.And because there is a dispute among you as to its name, let it be called "homo", for it is made out of humus (earth)" (Dunker, 2011, pp. 193-194;Herrmann, 2000, p. 429;Rocha, 2000, p. 160).
Based on Hyginus' fable, we think about the subject's destinies: after death, the body belongs to Earth, the spirit to Jupiter, but, during life, the subject inspires care.According to the philologist Nascentes (1955), to cure has its etymological root in the verb to care, "the cura is the man who takes care of souls" 1 We adopted the same solution as Herrmann (2000) and Dunker (2011) for the translation of the Latin word Cura.Rocha (2000) chose the translation as 'Angústia' (Anguish, in English).In order to exemplify it, the first verse in the original and the adopted translation follow: Cura cum fluvium transiret / "Cura" was crossing a river.
(p. 146).Curing and caring have an etymological approach in their origin.Following the author in this etymological line, caring refers to the Latin verb cogitare, which means to think and care.The meaning highlights that "in what we take care of, we always think" (p.145).
Entering the various possible directions for "Cura", central interest of this work, Dunker (2011) explains that "Cura", in Latin, accepts a wide range of meanings within the semantic field of care, in all its complexity and contexts.The author points out a series of possible understandings for cure, such as: incumbency, vigilance or guard, treatment, restlessness, and also says that it can be understood as the qualification of the loved object.Herrmann (2000), in the same vein as Dunker, explores the multiple meanings present in curing, as in a curatorship when the curator is the one who takes care, who directs; the curate of a parish is synonymous for priest; and even in shamanism curing is practiced, of inscribing something in the chain of cultural meaning -as examined by Lévi-Strauss (1958/2008)

in Structural Anthropology.
There is still a last meaning for cure, present only in Latin, which is a kind of literary work or book (Dunker, 2011;Herrmann, 2000), demonstrating an original association between the word cure and the literary.
Returning to the fable, "Cura" uses clay as raw material for her masterpiece, and she works in clay "immersed in her thoughts" (Dunker, 2011, p. 193).Here we emphasize a question of translation: the verb that describes the action of "Cura" in clay is fingere, which, according to Cunha (2002), is defined as the act of simulating, inventing and fantasizing; or still, to form, to make work of clay, to devise (Sousa et al., 1992).Therefore, "Cura" uses clay as a support to give shape to what came from her fantasy.She pretended that the clay was something else, the human being, and this one comes into existence through her imaginative invention.So, when "Cura" emerges from immersion into her thoughts, along with her comes the human being.
As explored by Puchner ( 2019), clay tablets are the oldest supports for writing.Mud and clay are the first repositories in which a narrative was deposited, only later came papyrus, paper and, finally, the canvas.It was in clay that the first fundamental literatures were written.Mud or clay is the basic raw material of many civilizations.Moreover, it also appears as an element present in several mythologies, as in the fable above, and in the myths of Indigenous American peoples, as presented by Lévi-Strauss (1985/2010); as well as in Judeo-Christian mythology.We thus have a dual function of clay and myth, both as a support for the narrative and as a constituent element of it.Clay proves to be a propitious material for the deposit of the highest field of symbolization.
The potter works the clay to give it shape according to his desires and needs -vase, a tablet, a bowl, for example -and then there is the ornamentation with drawings, symbols, and writing.There, the artist represents.
The tablets allowed the crystallization of the oral tradition coming from the poets, from the fingere -like the one "Cura" undertakes in the fable of Hyginus.The tablets, made of clay, approach something very human: narrative--as malleable and solid as clay.There is a symbolic approximation between the material that supports the writing and the material that composes the writing, that is, between the clay and the narrative.We can still follow the line of thought: if there is a connection between the creation of humans and clay, as represented in various mythologies, and these same mythologies were written in clay, on tablets or ceramic, then we can think of an inscription of these narratives in the material that makes up the human, the flesh, the body.That is, the body is the clay tablet of the narrative -that is where the myth derives.The body represented in clay shapes the myth through the process of symbolization.The body is the master guide in metaphors, clay assumes the role of the body as a support for the myth.
For Eliade (1963Eliade ( /2006)), myth is always a foundational narrative, we still have, in Freud's (1921Freud's ( /2011) ) words, that "myth … is the step by which the individual emerges from group psychology.The first myth was certainly the psychological, the hero myth; the explanatory nature myth must have followed much later" (p.103).Thus, the individual had to first constitute himself psychologically, create the myth of his own existence, a fiction of himself as hero, and only then create the world around him.Only after the creation of the fiction of the self can the individual tell his story, a fundamental literature.The subject is constituted by language, and it is in this condition, as Lacan (1953Lacan ( /2008) ) points out, that the creative function resides.In this remainder of the process of acculturation and the establishment of civilization is where the fault that sustains the subject resides, which is "between 'nature' and what is politely called 'culture'" (p.66).
In the psychoanalytic clinic, the subject speaks, there is a telling and a retelling there, a repetition of the (re) construction of his own history and constitution of his narrative.The overlap between individual and collectivity in psychoanalysis appears in the clinic and the analysand seems to try to account for his individual myth which, in turn, is referred to the existing myth in the culture.We are all subject to the civilizational arrangement in which a structural flaw that cannot be assimilated by culture remains.In the clinic, there is a reformulation of the mythical formula that sustains speech, which has been taking its form through the ages, which escapes language as a structure, but sustains it as form and truth.The subject in the psychoanalytic clinic seeks to give meaning to her narrative, understanding her position before herself and others.There is work done in what we call a fundamental literature of oneself, a clinic that embarks on the path of aesthetics, building and treading unique solutions for the subject to explore its potential.Meneses (2010) explains that there is a therapeutic function in the composition of a literary work.Like myths, literature has an organizing function, "creation through words -as in the mythical narrative of Genesis -is always a conquest of Chaos" (Meneses, 2010, p. 135).Similarly, Badiou (2002) explains that, understood by psychoanalysis, "art has a therapeutic function .... From this it follows that the norm of art is its usefulness in treating the affections of the soul" (p.12).
The body is the scene where the narrative of the subject is inscribed.If different cultures used mud and clay as a writing support, the fundamental myths had already been inscribed on the body.For that is where desire dwells, that is where the curing process takes place, and that is where the elusive truth resides.The repetition of the word "there", not by chance, reminds us of savoir-y-faire (Lacan, 1977a), which can be translated as 'knowing how to be there', 'knowing to get along with' or even 'knowing how to figure it out'.Lacan explains this know-how (savoir-faire) is different from "getting the hang of it" (p.44) (savoir-y-faire), because the y-faire indicates that one cannot "truly grasp the thing in concept" (p.44).In other words, it is about knowing how work with what's left of your sinthome after the psychoanalytical work.Yet if, on the one hand, one can only "make do" with the sinthome, as untreatable leftover, by no means should this "doing" be taken to imply a state of resignation, just as the effects of this doing should not be confined to the individual.Instead, the sinthome at the end of analysis can be conceived as the intimate stuff -or style-of a subjective act that sustains desire beyond the self and beyond culture.Lacan (1976) explains that the subject does not identify with her unconscious at the end of an analysis, which would be impossible considering the quality of what is unconscious, but she identifies with her sinthome.Sinthome, continues Lacan, "is what is known, it is even what you know best, without that going very far" (p. 7).The curing process of an accurate psychoanalysis promotes a subject cured by virtue of dealing with the sinthome, what is most unique to her, a subject who puts something of herself, who invents and, at the same time, discovers in her body and in her every action a style.
Style has something to do with truth.With this truth that is handled and learned to be dealt with, the truth that remains.Because, in this way, style is how the sinthome is handled, it is knowing, exactly, how to get a handle on (savoir-y-faire) what remains of an analysis.This style, in itself, is at the same time invented and discovered, because it has to do with the truth.Herrmann (2012) proposes a formula: I//T//D, in which truth (T) appears as a tension between invention (I) and discovery (D).Based on the idea of Herrmann ( 2012), the style is invented, and when it is invented, it seems that it was always there, that it had been discovered.Herrmann (2003) says that "curing is an act that leads to an effect" (p.178); we add: a style effect, as Lacan said to Laurent (1998), is the result of curing in psychoanalysis, and this style effect in turn enables the subject to act in the world from the position of a desire with its own guidelines.Kafka (1976) created the expression minor literature -Kleine Literaturen 2 -in 1911 to describe Jewish literature made in Warsaw and Bohemia.The author elaborates a reflection on the positive attributes that connect the literature made by small nations in all its potential and enumerates the characteristics and effects of this literature that go beyond the literary universe, having a real impact on the social formation and on the political discussion of that context.

FOR A MINOR LITERATURE
A small nation's memory is not smaller than the memory of a large one and so can digest the existing material more thoroughly.There are, to be sure, fewer experts in literary history employed, but literature is less a concern of literary history than of the people, and thus, if not purely, it is at least reliably preserved.For the claim that the national consciousness of a small people makes on the individual is such that everyone must always be prepared to know that part of the literature which has come down to him, to support it, to defend it -to defend it even if he does not know it and support it (Kafka, 1976, p. 133, emphasis added).Kafka (1976) proposes that minor literatures have their strength precisely in what should make them more fragile and weaker.The political aspect of defending literature as memory appears in the form of a literature to be defended by those who share a certain consciousness.There is support, from each of the individuals who form this small people, for the existing memory in this body of literature.The writer points out that everyone has a "part of the literature which has come down to him" (p.133).We understand, therefore, that the formation of this individual as a member of this people partakes in the memory present in literature and, therefore, there is a two-way street between literature and individual so that the former is supported by the latter, while the latter's consciousness is shaped by the former.
2 Kleine Literaturen has been translated to portuguese at other times as small literature, rather than minor literature, as adopted here.Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2014) disseminated the translation as minor literature from the work Kafka: For a minor literature.However, as Teixeira (2018) argues, relying on authors Casanova (2002), Corngold (2004), Thirouin (2007) and Lecler (2013), "this is not a simple translation mistake, but a somewhat appropriate artifice of the term to a problem much more Deleuze-Guattarian than Kafkaesque" (Teixeira, 2018, p. 127).
We can bring the notion of minor literature for Kafka to the context of psychoanalysis, supporting the idea of the narrative that sustains the subject.Although the narrative alone is not enough to access the truth of the subject's desire, it is necessary to recognize the symptom that guides this narrative, the disruptions.As Lejeune (2008) claims: "all men who walk on the street are narrative-men, that's why they can stop standing" (p.104) -in the notion proposed by Kafka for minor literature, we might say that every subject is structured as a minor literature.Taking the proposed parallel forward, this subject can, like a small nation, "digest the existing material more thoroughly" (Kafka, 1976, p. 133).What is at stake in an analysis is less a matter of the subject's description of life -his coldly exposed story -than a field of autofiction, the living story, which moves according to the telling.
The subject is woven by a narrative that is trying all the time to solve the conflict that drives the narrative forward, but such conflict is of the order of an enigma, and, therefore, insoluble.Ricoeur (2016) points out that in a lifetime there is the constitution of the narrative identity.The subject is defined by the literary, going through the time of a life and seeking to tell his story woven according to a literary logic.The latter does not demand the existence of the being to be depleted; a character is not being narrated all the time, but the narrated fragments are intersected in anecdotes that together form a minor literature, as we are proposing here.Short stories -we could call them in this context, which function as the constituent fibers of life just like the mythemes for myths, as Lévi-Strauss (1958/2008) mentioned -that, superimposed, reveal the structures that support those plots.
The style effect that the analytical cure points to occurs in this minor literature, which structures the subject herself.In a psychoanalytic process, we seek not to dispel the constitutional enigma, which, as mentioned previously, we take to concern the intractable, but rather to walk along with it, as a fundamental part that composes itself, understanding, in this way, the cure as a possibility of taking care of what is considered unmanageable within itself in a different way, exploring the varieties and possibilities of experiencing the effect of the cure, an aesthetic effect.

THE VEREDADES 3 OF THE CURE
The term cure, points out Herrmann (2003), is used in more than one sense in psychoanalysis.First, it refers to the treatment itself, to submitting to the process of analysis.That is, the subject undergoes a psychoanalytic cure; second, cure can also be understood as the goal of analysis, the end of analysis; ultimately, analytic care is concerned with the care of the subject's desire beyond the pleasure principle and beyond the individual, at the same time as this desire is the most unique part of each human being, and thus the source of an unequivocal style.This last, broader sense can give the central idea of how curing can be understood in psychoanalysis.
"So, what is curing for us?" (p.430), asks Herrmann (2000) to an audience of psychoanalysts, answers: "the cure that psychoanalysis is about is the cure of desire.Cured, man heals from desire.[a cura de que se trata na psicanálise é a cura do desejo.Curado, o homem cura do desejo]" (p.430).Desire is what the subject must care for.It is necessary, continues the author, to be careful!Beware, here, in more ways than one, so beware of traps on the way -stay alert!-as with what inspires self-care."And the worst: the stone that we stumble is ourselves, there is no way to escape" (p.430).Herrmann warns that in psychoanalysis, cure does not mean promoting the ego to a dimension of supremacy in the psyche, it is not imposing a dictatorship of the ego; on the contrary, the author continues, "in fact, we are always somewhat lost, and analysis is not intended to end this state of internal wandering" (p.432).
Guimarães Rosa (1985) opens the short story Se eu seria personagem ("Whether I'd be a character") with the sentence: "Note and meditate on this.For myself, I am anonymous, the depths of my thoughts do not understand my words: we only know about ourselves with much confusion" (Rosa, 1985, p. 155).Herrmann (2000) points out a proximity to the analysis, "Guimarães Rosa accurately portrays how the deepest, most important part of me, where desire lives, does not understand my words and how, in this anonymity, we only get to know of ourselves with much confusion" (p.432).What can be understood by "much confusion" in someone's life can indicate many human circumstances, but certainly the analytical process is one of them.The opening of Guimarães Rosa's tale brings the dimension of the double existence in the subject, the one who is anonymous to himself, and, therefore, another, a character in a literary work that is, at the same time, reading and writing himself.
Returning to the different meanings of the word cure beyond psychoanalysis, we still have the notion of it as a literary work.The subject -the one who commits to the process of her own cure-is the curator of her own life, of a personal and singular literature, of her minor literature.In psychoanalytical practice, a kind of draft is made in a manuscript (Willemart, 2009) of what is said and repeated in analysis, which embodies the writing.This literature is made within the analysand's speech by "plagiarizing, imitating, parodying, paraphrasing, minimally altering, making the necessary mistake a little when recounting, rising and pouring ingeniously" (Herrmann, 2002, p. 112).
It is an auto fictional composition, as the subject invents and discovers his story, as we see in the Herrmannian formula I//T//D.The body is the memory of a literature, the body is a literature, literature takes the body, a body of language, a literature made of flesh.
The analysand is the curator of this work, which is hers, which is her being.The work is a literary arrangement that seeks to narrate a life experience, always missing, through what can only be half-said.The curing process in psychoanalysis is a work of literature on the subject, of a literary arrangement in the minor literature that sustains the being.The cure is a work with the truth.Literature is an instrument for working with the truth.We can think with Goethe, in his autobiography, about his motive for writing: And thus, began that tendency from which I could not deviate my whole life through; namely, the tendency to turn into an image, into a poem, everything that delighted or troubled me, or otherwise occupied me, and to come to some certain understanding with myself upon it, that I might both rectify my conceptions of external things, and set my mind at rest about them.The faculty of doing this was necessary to no one more than to me, for my natural disposition whirled me constantly from one extreme to the other.All, therefore, that has been confessed by me, consists of fragments of a great confession; and this little book is an attempt which I have ventured on to render it complete (Goethe, 2017, p. 343).
The little book that Goethe reports writing as an attempt to complement the fragmentary confession of his life, his own literature of himself, is his minor literature.His work with literature is a confession, something to deal with himself; an attempt, always partial, to reveal beyond what is possible to reveal about himself.But, as Freud (1926Freud ( /2014) ) tells us, "Confession no doubt plays a part in analysis-as an introduction to it, we might say.But it is very far from constituting the essence of analysis or from explaining its effects.In Confession the sinner tells what he knows; in analysis the neurotic has to tell more" (p.188).In an analysis, one must say what one does not know that one knows, a legitimate meeting of one with oneself, the care for desire, where one can explore the possible paths of oneself, the paths along which one's own history is made.
The analysand narrates his fragments, weaving a narrative and exploring the possible meanings, a posteriori, of his own history.It transforms, we can say, into a story of curing, of caring for truth and desire.Herrmann (2012), when dealing with the psychoanalytic method and its relationship with truth, says: The psychoanalytic method, even though it is not a philosophy, or perhaps precisely because of that, makes it possible to momentarily overcome the powerful resistance against experiencing the universe of possible, the almost limitless variety of possibilities of experience that the protean human soul is endowed with.This, by the way, is the ultimate truth of the psyche, from the clinical point of view: the truth of the possible.This is the path of a psychoanalytic cure, the rupture of each imprisoning field of the experience of being (Herrmann, 2012, p. 69).Lacan (1977b) deals with the question of truth and variety -the truth of the possible (Herrmann, 2012), therefore -creating a neologism: vari(e)dade [in French: vari(é)té], formed by the junction of the words truth (French: verité) and variety (French: variété), being spelled "with the little silent 'é'" (p.122), explains Lacan, taking the final form of varité.This neologism implicates the truth as a variety of the sinthome, which points to a singularity.To explore oneself as varité is to launch oneself into the universe of the possible.Such a solution requires a malleable apparatus to encompass such a variety of truth, so many possible forms and solutions.Thus, we return to the narrative, constituting the subject's identity, which launches us directly to the Lacanian aphorism: "I am not a poet, but a poem.A poem that is being written, even if it looks like a subject" (Lacan, 1976(Lacan, /2003, p. 568), p. 568).
To undergo a psychoanalytic process is to walk the paths of care of the subject, the varité of the I, to assume it as one's own history.We add, as presented in the title of this seminar session, to the Lacanian neologism the idea of path, paths, spelling veredades, recognizing the narrative to explore, like Riobaldo, narrator character and protagonist of Grande Sertão: Veredas (Bedeviled in the Badlands), which tells us "The Sertão is within ourselves" (Rosa, 2001, p. 325).In other words, it is by treading the path of an analysis that the fate of truth is found, it is along one's path that the possible truths, the veredades, are explored.

CONCLUSION
In the course of the article, we propose a reflection on the idea of cure in psychoanalysis, without the expectation of closing the infinite possible contours for it.We made a dialogue between curing and literature, proposing curing as the exploration of the paths of life.Psychoanalysis twists the concept of cure, entering the aesthetic dimension of being, intractable and irremediable; it places the subject before the helplessness of being, which comes to be understood by what Lacan (1977b) called varité.
The defense that psychoanalysis is a curing procedure implies a new understanding of what curing is, moving away from the medical conception and approaching a literary conception, as we propose.The cure assumes an auto fictional dimension, or auto frictional as Doubrovisky (1977) says, in which the experience of an analysis refers to another sense of exploring and composing the subject.
We can then say in Freud's words (1926Freud's words ( /2014) that "psychoanalysis is a procedure for curing" (p.126) using an "art of interpretation" (p.188) that brings to light another scene, enabling a rearrangement of the subject in its literariness.Psychoanalysis is a procedure for curing, and we have seen how many meanings are contained in this statement: the analysis itself, the care of the subject, the end of an analysis, curatorship, and, finally, a work.The subject, the curator of her life, can, in a psychoanalytic process, choose to tell this story.This story that she is.Paz (1982) said that there is no poetry without a poem; thus, making a connection with Lacan (1976Lacan ( /2003)), there are poems that write themselves, their poetry, and they have the form of a subject.