Unconscious Cook: On the Speed and the Temporality of Analytic Processes in Digital Contexts

This article’s account of analytic speed includes 8 linked propositions. First, analytic speed is not reducible to treatment duration or session frequency; it begins from Freud’s idea of variable stride and indeterminate duration. Second, speed is ontological: Psyche is movement, duration, and activity rather than a static substance. Third, speed must remain unsaturated, because the analytic process unfolds across multiple historically varying heterogeneous registers at once. This unsaturation of speed allows for a dynamic conception of analytic temporality. Fourth, digital media reveal and intensify plural distributed temporalities already operative in unconscious life. Fifth, analytic speed has both kinetic and dynamic dimensions: movement across places and channels and rhythm of qualitative transformation across affects and positions. This processual character of transformations is figured through the notion of co-metabolization whereby psychic reverberation of the digestive system is supplemented with the exteriority of cooking. Sixth, the unconscious has relative speeds, because analysis unfolds across a nonstandard spectrum of bodies, media, algorithms, institutions and histories operating at unequal tempos. Thought is taken to have a foot in non-sensuous processes of organizing sensory experience such as numbering and measuring whereby the quantitative dimension of digitalization meets the ontological character of lived psyche. Thus, the seventh proposition, the analyst’s task is not necessarily the completion of the journey, full exposure of the unconscious, but attunement to these relative speeds in ways that keep the dynamic unconscious alive. This requires analysts to be mindful of their defenses of bad-me and not-me in their difficulties mentalizing and metabolizing digitalization. Eighth, analytic speed today is inseparable from a political genealogy of communication, quantification, security and real-time control.