The Subject of Lacan: A Lacanian Reader for Psychologists

The Subject of Lacan

SUNY series, Alternatives in Psychology Michael A. Wallach, editor

and

SUNY series in Psychoanalysis and Culture Henry Sussman, editor

The Subject of Lacan A Lacanian Reader for Psychologists

Edited by Kareen Ror Malone and Stephen R. Friedlander

STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2000 State University of New York Cover photo: Untitled, copyright © 1988 by Constance Thalken All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, address the State University of New York Press, State University Plaza, Albany, NY, 12246 Production by Kristin Milavec Marketing by Anne M. Valentine Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The subject of Lacan : a Lacanian reader for psychologists / edited by Kareen Ror Malone and Stephen R. Friedlander. p. cm. — (SUNY series, alternatives in psychology) (SUNY series in psychoanalysis and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7914-4623-9 (alk. paper). — ISBN 0-7914-4624-7 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Psychoanalysis. 2. Lacan, Jacques, 1901– . I. Malone, Kareen Ror, 1955– . II. Friedlander, Stephen R., 1944– . III. Series. IV. Series: SUNY series in psychoanalysis and culture. BF173.S8454 2000 150.19'5—dc21 99-048450 CIP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Angel Medina and the memory of Henri Freeman, not just teachers but Teachers —SRF

To my mother and father —KRM

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments

xi xiii

Introduction, Kareen Ror Malone and Stephen R. Friedlander Part I Lacan and Psychological Theory, Kareen Ror Malone

1

19

1 The Cartesian Subject without the Cartesian Theatre, Slavoj £i¶ek

23

2 The Origins and Self-Serving Functions of the Ego, John Muller

41

3 Socializing Psycholinguistic Discourse: Language as Praxis in Lacan, Suzanne Barnard

63

4 Lacanian Psychoanalysis and the Neurotic Orientation of Religious Experience, David Metzger

79

vii

viii

Contents

5 No Laughing Matter: Girls’ Comics and the Preparation for Adolescent Femininity, Valerie Walkerdine

91

6 Homosexualities from Freud to Lacan, Robert Samuels

111

7 Jouissance in the Cure, André Patsalides and Kareen Ror Malone

123

Part II Lacan and the Clinic, Stephen R. Friedlander

135

8 The “Third Party” in Psychoanalysis, Stephen R. Friedlander

141

9 The Analytic Relationship, Bruce Fink

157

10 Some Reflections on Lacan’s View of Interpretation, Mario L. Beira

173

11 How Analysis Cures According to Lacan, Mark Bracher

189

12 The Treatment of Psychosis, Willy Apollon, Danielle Bergeron, and Lucie Cantin

209

13 Lacan and Family Therapy?! Opening a Space for Lacan in American Clinical Practice, Daniel L. Buccino

229

Part III Lacan, Psychology, and Culture, Kareen Ror Malone

243

14 How the Fact That There Is No Sexual Relation Gives Rise to Culture, Ellie Ragland

251

15 Femininity and the Limits of Theory, Paola Mieli

265

Contents

ix

16 Why Do People Take Prozac? Anxiety, Symptom, and the Inhibition of Responsibility, Patricia Gherovici

279

17 Lacan’s Social Psychoanalysis: Religion and Community in a Pluralistic Society, David S. Caudill

297

18 Lacan in America, Donna Bentolila

317

19 Looking for Lacan: Virtual Psychology, Ian Parker

331

20 Executors of an Ancient Pact, Lúcia Villela

345

Glossary of Lacanian Terms List of Contributors Index

361 369 373

Figures

6.1 6.2

An Application of Lacan’s Schema L An Application of Lacan’s Schema L (#2)

114 116

7.1

The Borromean Knot and Jouissance

128

9.1

Simplified L Schema

164

14.1 The Borromean Knot

258

xi

Acknowledgments

The editors wish to thank Sheila Sowecke, William Fettig, Denise Oglesby, and Clay Bohnet for their diligent and careful editorial assistance on The Subject of Lacan. As well, Nancy Farmer was, and is always, helpful with acquiring “hard to acquire” reference information. The editors also appreciate the financial assistance for translating costs given by the office of Dean of Arts and Sciences, State University of West Georgia. Index by Clay Bohnet. We gratefully acknowledge the sources of the following material: An earlier version of “Lacan’s Social Psychoanalysis: Religion and Community in a Pluralistic Society” by David Caudill appeared in vol. 26 of The Cumberland Law Review, pp. 124–144, 1995–1996. An earlier version of “No Laughing Matter: Girls Comics and Preparation for Adolescent Femininity,” by Valerie Walkerdine appeared in Critical Developmental Psychology, J. Broughton, ed., 1987, Plenum Publishing Corporation. Schema reprinted from p. 193 of Ecrits: A Selection by Jacques Lacan, translated by Alan Sheridan. W. W. Norton and Company. © 1966 by Éditions du Seuil. English translation © 1977 by Tavistock Publications. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton and Company, Inc. An earlier version of “The Origins and Self-Serving Functions of the Ego” by John Muller appeared in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on the Self, J. Suls and A. Greenwald, eds., pp. 79–106, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. xiii

xiv

Acknowledgments

“The Analytic Relationship” is an earlier version of Chapter 3 in A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Theory and Technique by Bruce Fink, Cambridge Massachusetts, © 1997 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. An earlier version of “Jouissance and the Cure” by André Patsalides and Kareen Ror Malone appeared in Anamorphosis: Journal of the San Francisco Society for Lacanian Studies, no. 1, 1997, pp. 3–12. André Patsalides was the sole author of the original article. An earlier version of “The Treatment of Psychosis” by Willy Apollon, Danielle Bergeron, and Lucie Cantin appeared in Mental, no. 2, March 1996, pp. 31–50. An earlier version of “Lacan in America” by Donna Bentolila appeared in Periódico El Øtro. Special thanks to the director, Jose Mèndez. “Mirrors” in Dreamtigers by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Mildred Bower and Harold Moreland, © 1964, renewed 1992. By permission of the University of Texas Press. A version of “The Cartesian Subject without the Cartesian Theatre” by Slavoj £i¶ek has appeared in Cogito and the Unconscious (Duke University Press). © Slavoj £i¶ek. An earlier version of “The ‘Third Party’ in Psychoanalysis” by Stephen Friedlander has appeared in Clinical Studies: International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 1, (1995). © Stephen Friedlander. “Femininity and the Limits of Theory” by Paola Mieli appeared in Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought, 16 (1993) #3. © Paola Mieli. From “The Freudian Things: Construction and the Archaeological Metaphor” by Kenneth Reinhard, published in Excavations and Their Objects: Freud’s Collection of Antiquity, Stephen Barker, ed., Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. © 1996 State University of New York. “Scheme L” in Les Écrits by Jacques Lacan. Copyright © Éditions du Seuil, 1966.

Introduction Kareen Ror Malone and Stephen R. Friedlander

Invitation to a Reading

P

sychology and psychoanalysis have, and always have had, many interests in common: personality and social interaction (conflict and affiliation, conformity and obedience), psychopathology (mood and thought disorders, anxiety), and developmental theory (gender identity, cognitive development, differentiation, and language acquisition), among others. However, at least until recently, a majority of psychologists were contemptuous of psychoanalysis, whose practitioners never committed to meeting standards for producing knowledge according to the canons of empiricism and positivistic science. Although it does not always fully assume its role, psychoanalysis is, in many of its foundational precepts, a serious challenger to the natural science paradigm of psychology. Of course, there have been other dissenting voices, too. Humanistic and existential psychologists as well as phenomenologists roundly criticize the psychology establishment for exclusive reliance on objective research methods (Giorgi, 1992; Bugental, 1963; Aanstoos, 1994). These voices have been joined by new trends in psychology such as social constructionism, feminism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, and

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other alternative programs that are changing the zeitgist of the discipline. Meaningful dialogue between the communities of psychoanalysis and psychology is much more viable now since a confluence of interests between these disparate groups is evident in • aggressive, sophisticated challenges to the hegemony of positivistism; • widespread concern with representation and the beginning of systematic exploration of the connection between representation and subjectivity; • and demands that psychoanalysis take ethics and social context explicitly into account in its conceptualization of psychological life. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, an exceptionally incisive but relatively unknown thinker (in North American circles), has long been in conversation with psychology (Boothby, 1991), but his trenchant criticism of the field contributed to an atmosphere in which there would seem to be little incentive for extramural exploration on either side. However, so many contemporary psychologists reject the assumptions about subjectivity and consciousness that provoked Lacan’s original rebuke of psychology that we feel the time is ripe for intellectual exchange. We do not expect psychologists to “fall in love” with Lacanian psychoanalysis on first meeting, but if critical psychologists, all those invested in social constructionist and feminist psychologies, and clinicians ignore Lacan (for whatever reason), they will miss a singularly valuable resource. Psychoanalysis (especially Lacanian psychoanalysis) is vital to the whole spectrum of the humanities (think of literary textual study, cultural studies, feminist studies), outside disciplines that are frequent sources of inspiration for wouldbe reformers of psychology. Given the proximity of psychoanalysis to psychology, and the influence it wields in these outside disciplines, it behooves the editors and contributors of The Subject of Lacan: A Lacanian Reader for Psychologists to campaign for greater awareness of Lacanian psychoanalysis and its rich significance for psychology. Accordingly, we invite psychologists, hopefully in a straightforward and gracious manner, to look thoughtfully into his work. But first, a few words about the difficulties ahead.

Introduction

3

Obstacles to a “Cross-Cultural” Dialogue A fruitful encounter between psychoanalysis and psychology faces great difficulties under the best of circumstances. Even psychologists who criticize their own discipline tend to view psychoanalysis with a wary eye. Humanistic psychologists decry its supposed determinism and pessimism (e.g., Giorgi, 1992; Riebel, 1982). Phenomenological and existential psychologists generally reinterpret the data of psychoanalysis in terms of latent rather than unconscious meaning (e.g., Wertz, 1993; see Lacan, 1973/1981, p. 153). At best, most feminists maintain an ambivalent relation to psychoanalysis because, as they see it, psychoanalysis reinforces normative concepts of masculinity and femininity (e.g., Hare-Mustin & Marecek, 1990). Moreover, the triumph of certain schools of psychology over psychoanalysis within academe has been coded into psychology’s textbooks, a legacy that “respectable” psychologists take for granted (Hornstein, 1992). On the surface, Lacan seems a poor candidate for improving relations between psychology and psychoanalysis. For one thing, he relies heavily on seemingly archaic Freudian terms such as phallus and castration, so skeptics could say he represents “the worst parts” of psychoanalysis. And phrases such as “the subject is founded in lack” smack of an esoteric vocabulary that some would regard as unsuited to science. Finally, Lacan’s trademark—“a return to Freud”—could cause some readers to assume that he adheres to the biologistic determinism, phallocentrism, and normative developmental agenda commonly attributed by dectractors to Freud. So, one might well ask, must the attempt at rapprochement between psychology and psychoanalysis revolve around Lacan? Much of the English-language psychological literature on Lacan is produced by authors who are not explicitly trained in “Lacanian psychoanalysis.” Even when they themselves have positive impressions of Lacan, they may stumble on some of the more obscure turns in his thinking. For example, in a discussion of psychoanalytic notions of gender, both Stephen Mitchell (1996) and Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer (1996) refer to Lacan’s and Freud’s “phallic monism.” Mitchell implicitly equates the phallus with the symbolic/structural function of paternity and with the penis, a fairly common attribution that seems consonant with a few comments in Lacan’s writings. Although Lacan and Freud are concerned with a concept that they both call the phallus, the conflation between Freud and Lacan

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obfuscates what Lacan meant by the phallus—a unique “signifier” that transforms discourse and psychic structure. People who charge Lacan (1966/1977b) with phallocentrism generally fail to realize that he repeatedly warned against conflating phallus with penis. Citations to citations—Mayer cites Mitchell who cites ChasseguetSmirgel—contribute to a reputation that obscures Lacan’s distinction between “the phallus” and the penis. The resulting confusion belies the unique significance of Lacan’s analysis for an understanding of paternity and patriarchy (see Roof, 1996). Misunderstandings such as these may cause an “underutilization” of insights that Lacan could provide to truly innovative American psychoanalysts such as Mitchell and Mayer. Lacan is an ally in struggling with perennial conundra that inscribe the psychoanalytic field, such as the relationship between biology, affect, and culture (Mitchell, 1996, p. 56). Psychologists and psychoanalysts have allegiances to very different conceptions of subjectivity that give rise to divergent practices and academic programs (Frosh, 1989), an important root of their difficulties with establishing fruitful intellectual exchange. Lacan consistently and ferociously repudiated any approach to subjectivity that equated it with consciousness. This commitment puts him (along with Freud) at odds with a mainstay of Western culture, where the subject is usually conceptualized and researched in terms of material that consciousness provides: affect, awareness, will, perception, etc. Lacan insisted that idealization of the autonomous individual would lead to disaster for science, and he elucidated—as no one has done before or since—the circular reasoning behind our rationale for taking consciousness as the basis for psychological science. He named this line of thinking “psychologizing.”

The Question of “The Individual” The image of the self as integral (wholistic) and autonomous has virtually defined Western culture since its beginnings. Both popular and academic psychologies rely on this outlook. Lacan was extremely antagonistic to this conception of the self and devoted to exposing the fallacy of the “integrated self.” The rise of social constructionist thought has broadened psychology’s interest in the issue, although social constructionist theory (e.g., Gergen, 1989) continues to be haunted by the charge of relativism: If identity is truly constructed, does this mean that persons can fashion themselves in any manner they wish? Constructionists have yet to decide what

Introduction

5

constraints are at work. Their failure to understand the effect of the medium (language) on the message (our being) compromises the way they handle the issue (this is, in fact, the question of the “self ”). Critics of psychology, seeking inspiration for alternatives to a purely empiricist psychology from other academic fields, frequently take what might be called a linguistic turn (Samuels, 1993). Theorists of signification from Jacques Derrida to Judith Butler focus on the “decentered subject” formed in the performative hollow of language itself. Critical theorists within psychology emphasize the relational, nonsubstantive nature of the subject. Narrative theorists throw new light on the formations of the subject in research, therapy, and in the effort to conceive subjectivity itself (Simblett, 1997; Gergen, 1994). Subjectivity is a fluid nexus of performative and discursive effects, which circulate within every cultural and intersubjective context. Such assertions about representation and subjectivity dispense with individualistic notions of self, but a full comprehension of these effects still lies ahead of us. It is not enough to say that there is a relationship between representation and subjectivity— “Psychoanalysis . . . reminds us that the facts of human psychology cannot be conceived in the absence of the function of the subject defined as the effect of the signifier” (Lacan, 1973/1981, p. 207 [italics added]). A specific, elaborately articulated theory of the effect of the signifier in its inscription on human being is Lacan’s central contribution.

The Question of Representation Psychology has grappled with the problem of representation from its inception. The effort takes various forms, such as interest in individual differences, in how clinicians make diagnoses, and in cognitive psychology ad infinitum. The issue of representation defines almost the whole of social psychology, and it was the founding concern of Gestalt psychology. It is constantly discussed by psychologists identified with intellectual movements as diverse as social construction, feminism, cultural psychology, history of psychology, postmodernism, hermeneutics, and the faction that asserts that “narrative truth” is the hallmark of therapeutic practice. Those involved in studying representation understand clearly that “representation as imprint” on some mutable surface is not an adequate idea. The philosopher Ian Hacking (1992), for example,

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invokes “dynamic nominalism” in discussing the historical development of psychological categories such as “the homosexual.” Although he makes an important distinction between the representation of objects and the performative effect of speech on humans, there is still a significant gap in describing specifically how “people spontaneously come to fit their categories” (p. 70). But that is a most essential question, is it not? It is essential because it provides the fulcrum of asymmetrical effects that constitute the sorts of power relationships now being investigated as the cultural outside to the psyche (e.g., gender and desire). Although awareness of the connection between identity and representation has grown (Cushman, 1991, 1990; Bohan, 1992; Sampson, 1994), psychologists still lack an adequate theory of subjectivity. Some psychologists use Derrida or Foucault without appreciating the need for fully reformulating their own concept of subjectivity. Other, more sophisticated treatments of Derrida see subjectivity emerging from language (e.g., Barratt, 1993; Elliot & Frosh, 1995; Hollway, 1989), and these writers reinforce the idea that any analysis of narratives and social phenomena requires an interpretative framework that incorporates unconscious dynamics (see also Malone, 1995; Parker, 1994, 1997; Walkerdine, 1996). Lacan’s theory explains the link between subjectivity (subject positions, reflexivity, embodiment, etc.) and representation. Those who contend that psychology’s objectivistic, objectifying procedures do not and cannot provide us with adequate answers about “the nature of our being human”—a concern that originated with what was called a humanistic critique (Bugental, 1963)—will find this reasoning advantageous. There are many who believe that the focus on individual agents, a disregard for cultural context, and the tendency to overlook the subtle complexity of language, reflexivity, and desire are costly mistakes. Psychologists who hold these critical perspectives on psychology will also benefit from alternative, more ample demonstrations of ways that research and practice on self-encapsulated individuals hinder our ability to understand difference (individual particularity and cultural variations), the Other, and what is grandly called “human nature.” We cannot afford to characterize subjectivity in terms of (a set of) fixed properties or attributes, for instance, rationality, need for attachment, etc. We must reject the vision of an isolated subject as the atavistic shadow of American ideology and psychology’s experimental method. Intersubjectivity and reflexivity are essential ideas. The same issues pertain to clinical practice, where Lacan took pains to differentiate his version of psychoanalysis from psychol-

Introduction

7

ogy. He characterized the latter as “the objectification of certain properties of the individual,” whereas “[p]sychoanalytic experience unfolds entirely in the relationship of subject to subject, which means that [it] preserves a dimension that is irreducible to psychology. . . .” (Lacan 1966/1982, p. 62). Were it otherwise, the insights of psychoanalysis would never transcend “a psychology that re-invigorates its menial tasks with social exploitation” (Lacan, 1966/ 1977c, p. 297). Psychologists who appreciate that life has dimensions that go well beyond imputed individual properties or biology will find a like-minded thinker in Lacan.

Integrating the Cultural Context into Psychological Theory The influx of cultural analysis into psychological inquiry compels an ideological awareness that too often eluded our discipline, but even as we begin to rectify the problem a number of residual questions trail these new formulations. Are the “psychologized” individuals of different eras equivalent historical products, for instance, the middle-class neurasthenic of the Victorian period and the avid participants in Oprah Winfrey’s confessional theater? Historical formations of individuality and interiority as typified by the foregoing examples definitely influence psychological discourses about subjectivity, leading us to ask whether subjectivity is anything more than social constructions of selfhood. Butler’s (1997) multilayered theory describes a complex relationship between top-down iteration of cultural norms and the “real” of subject bodies in order to “account for subjectivation . . . [by] recourse to a psychoanalytic account of the formative or generative effects of restriction or prohibition” (p. 87). Although we may not end with the same answer as Butler, Lacanians implicitly pose the same questions: What insights into “subjectivation”can we expect from clinical work? How can a subject founded on cultural identifications be somewhat more than a product of their effects (i.e., a subject that is also a site of resistance)? From what stuff is such a subject made? Can a purely discursive/ cultural account of the psychological explain how transgression “snags” human desire? If we do not bravely address these questions, the new critical paradigms in psychology will resemble their empiricist brethren—retreating from understanding the complexity of the subject, replacing natural metaphors with historicist categories (Dean, 1994). Perhaps the subject is a metaphor. If so, what are the structures of

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substitutions that give this subject being and desire? These subtle questions are Lacan’s own questions. The Questions of a Clinical Praxis Lacanian psychoanalysis is grounded in clinical practice, and is in continuous pursuit of understanding the typical impasses that dog clinical work. Thus, as we would expect, Lacanian theory articulates the nature of psychological transformation. More uniquely, it also deliberately addresses how psychoanalysis (or any other clinical practice) falls into the ideological trap of merely supporting adjustment to certain societal norms (see Fink, 1997). Despite its clearly clinical aims, Lacan’s work in this area is often less well known than it deserves. A pervasive misinterpretation of Lacan preempts a specific contribution to a long-running dispute within North American psychoanalysis. For many analysts, the significance of relational dynamics versus classical emphasis on insight and interpretation mark competing allegiances within psychoanalytic practice. Lacan is typically seen as endorsing a view of the analyst as a detached observer/interpreter who objectifies the analysand through a “logocentric” theory of subjectivity (e.g., Barratt, 1993, pp. 158– 159). In the context of postmodernist and constructionist thought, a relational, nonhierarchical approach is presumed to offer a more emancipatory kind of psychoanalysis (e.g., Harris, 1996). By contrast, Lacanians are seen as intent on objectively ciphering the destiny written in the analysand’s language. Without passing judgments on the relative merits of relational versus classical paradigms in psychoanalysis, we suggest that Lacan cannot be easily situated within the terms of this dispute. Lacanian theory cuts across the most recalcitrant differences between the parties in this debate about analytic approach by redefining the problem using a different mapping of the subject. Subjective structures are not situated within “the self ”—they function transindividually within the clinical and other meaningful intersubjective settings. This move entails changes in the conceptualization of various key psychoanalytic terms, such as transference, interpretation, and “the object.” Enter “The Signifier” One ongoing problem in social construction/postmodernism/ hermeneutics is how to understand “the signifier.” Gergen (1997)

Introduction

9

says: “[L]anguage operates performatively and constitutively; it is employed by communities of interlocutors for purposes of carrying out their relationships—including the local constitution of the real and the good” (p. 729). (Although this brief quotation does not do justice to Gergen’s work, it does show the significance of the signifier within it.) The above quotation is intended to suggest a broader problematic within social construction, that is, how the relationship between subjectivity and language remains ambiguous. What is the constitutive effect of language? Default to an assumed agency who answers to relational exigencies obviates a clear articulation of language’s constitutive effects. The linguistic turn is thus never fully exploited because, (as with cultural critique) it never accounts for “the logic of the signifier.” This logic has implications for all future theories of subjectivity and representation. The logic of the signifier does not mean that language operates as a closed, functional system, a costly but common misreading of Lacan. If we explore the logic of the signifier, we can see that relational responsivity is not simply transparent, nor are the Others with whom we speak particularly self-evident in their aims and desires—not because they are intentionally disingenuous but rather because they are constrained by the process of signification itself (contrast with Shotter, 1998). The signifier’s logic determines that something highly significant and out of the control of consciousness emerges in the cusp between body and speech. The constraints of speech in relation to our bodily being defines our “communities of interlocutors” in yet unexplored ways. At another level, the logic of the signifier means that we have to be extremely precise when we invoke the place of the Other. Are we referring to the (m)Other, “Symbolic Other,” “the Other of the unconscious,” or the imaginary other of ordinary discourse? As psychology shifts its focus from individualistic to relational and cultural parameters, it will need to account for the Other as locus of the signifier more precisely.

Enter “The Body” Partly because mainstream theory cannot provide a sufficient account of how signification generates “being,” a number of social constructionists have turned to questions of the body (Bayer, 1998; Stam, 1998). Traditional psychology treats body “as an object” while social construction engages in “conversations about the body” (Bayer

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& Malone, 1996, p. 610). Sampson (1996), in a trenchant critique of the failure of narrative approaches to deal with embodiment, asks to us consider forms of embodiment and the body’s situatedness in the world as coeval with our enculturation within the linguistic community. We are urged to recognize the facticity of the body as a pragmatic, emotional, and sensate given, and to attend to “the body” as an autonomous domain that merits careful consideration. This is an important move, but it still begs the question of an interface between body and signifier. What account can we give of the mythic encounter between “biology” and a communicative logic that transforms it? What if the body, while retaining all its visceral density, is filled with echoes of the Other? Dean (1994) characterizes the body in these terms: When language . . . hits the body, its impact produces not merely the subject of the signifier but the subject of desire. Language is the agent of the cut that produces subject and object through the same action. Think of the symbolic order as a net settling over the corporeal form . . . slicing the body into erotogenic zones by drawing the body’s jouissance into pools at its corporeal borders. (p. 97) Our argument touches the quagmire of debates about social construction, but the same observations apply to various incarnations of a new outlook on narrative. Family therapy, relational psychoanalysis, and more qualitatively feminist methodologies are stretching the envelope of narrativity. Without developing a precise notion of the “why” of rhetorical effects and the “how” of such effects, no amount of countertransferential sharing or listening to the words of the client/research subject can preclude unintended ideological effects (see White, 1993). Such effects derive from the structure of speaking; this can only be addressed by a theory that seriously questions the moments when body, desire, and the Other are constituted within speech.

Taking the Ethics and Social Context of Psychology into Account The turn from the monadic individual to intersubjectivity fostered renewed interest in culture. A subject constituted through representation essentially takes on the character of a matrix of inscrip-

Introduction

11

tions influenced by power and social context. Current markers of subjectivity (such as interiority), for instance, may simply reflect the social and political forces of a particular historical epoch (Pfister, 1997). Recognizing the inherently historical context of psychological discourse, some psychologists turn to hermeneutics to find an ethical bearing for the new concepts of self, individuality and science (Fowers & Richardson, 1993; Kirschner, 1993; Stigliano, 1993). Feminists and social constructionists chastise traditional psychologists for their unreflective adherence to conceptual schemata that narrow the range of possibilities that would define human subjectivity, an unforeseen consequence of psychology’s reliance on liberalhumanist rhetoric (Kitzinger, 1989; Squire, 1989). Morawski (1994) uses poststructuralist strategies to reshape the methods and epistemology of psychology to bring the field into closer alignment with the certain theoretical demands arising from feminism. Moss (1994) advocates using hermeneutic approaches that self-consciously employ “subjective” assessments to supplement the standard “objective” techniques in educational measurement. These are instances of psychologists pushing the limits of psychology by questioning prevailing ideas of subjectivity and the discipline’s customary mode of understanding (so-called objectivity). From the other side, concerns that are essentially psychological pervade much of contemporary political discourse and cultural criticism—identity, abortion, gender, the family, and sexuality, to mention a few. In contrast to mainstream behavioral science, Lacanian theory resists pressure to usurp public discourse with an allencompassing psychologism (Bracher, 1993; Brousse, 1991; Caudill, 1997; Ragland-Sullivan, 1989; £i¶ek, 1989, 1992). Our chapters on culture put issues in a psychoanalytically cogent context without claiming authority to settle disputes between contending parties— there is no claim to “expert knowledge” at a substantive or policy level (Friedlander, 1995). The value of Lacanian thinking for analyzing representation, identity, gender, and sexuality is now widely recognized in the humanities and social theory (Butler, 1990, 1993; Merck, 1993; Brennan, 1991; Dews, 1987). However, one of the biggest difficulties we face as psychologists is choosing where to begin to address the myriad objections and casuistic misunderstandings that function as barriers to a full appreciation of Lacan’s contribution. Lacan’s radically innovative theorization of subjectivity and representation should be read by clinical practitioners, of course, but we aim to introduce Lacanian thought to all psychologists who reimagine the aims and methods of psychological praxis, research, and theory.

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His work has powerful implications for studies of gender and sexuality, representation, and the psychological determination of the social world. We urge our colleagues to weigh Lacan’s sagacious critique of mainstream psychology, and to familiarize themselves with his vision of new disciplinary practices and concepts. In behalf of this project, we will outline some of the points where Lacanian theory intersects traditional areas of interest in psychology, and provide a succinct summary of themes in Lacanian work that are useful in this context.

What Is “Lacan” About? Lacan’s explorations of the Other (the locus of the signifier) enabled him to specify both the social and interpersonal implications of our structuration as subjects, since the Other exists in both the personal and social dimensions. By attending to the communicative logic of the signifier and the place of the Other in symbolization, Lacan’s work provides a much-needed link between private discourse (such as that of the clinic) and some contemporary discourses on the self, sexuality, and identity going on in diverse public arenas. A distinctive feature of Lacanian theory is an unwavering emphasis on the central significance of language in the structuration of the psyche. Language intrinsically entails a division in being; without it, there would be no “subject of the unconscious.” Division originates in, and is continuously maintained by, a logical disjunction between the order of jouissance (primary process satisfaction)—which links body to experience—and the order of representation—which founds communication and intersubjectivity. Lacan borrowed the idea of the Symbolic Order from the anthropologist Lévi Strauss, and modified it to dovetail with Freud’s conceptualization of the Oedipus complex. Lacan used the Symbolic Order to connect the division of consciousness with human beings’ ambivalent efforts to accept civilization. The emphasis on language and speech in Lacanian thought approximates some aspects of “poststructuralism,” although Lacan is certainly not identified with this position. He conceives of a subject whose equivocal bodily being is determined by his or her induction into language. Each subject encounters a nonlinguistic jouissance that critically defines how s/he takes up the reality given by speech— that is, intersubjective existence “subjects” one to a reality that consists of speech. Such a subject is not in a position of pure pos-

Introduction

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sibility so much as caught in the impossibilities of (his or her) desire—at once a subject of desire and its victim (Fink, 1990). Put differently, the unconscious as a concept negates a simple correspondence between the practices of representation and the subjectivity created out of representation. One aspect of (inter)subjectivity is indeterminate but nonnegotiable—Lacan calls it “the Real.” The Real defines a point where Lacanian psychoanalysis and other psychoanalytic approaches can have a particularly fruitful exchange in that all approaches recognize the tight relationship between physicality (the upkeep of the infant) and the desires that brought the child into being. The fall out from this process is called the “object a,” a remainder of (lost) jouissance that marks our incorporation into speaking and desire. The object a mediates the subject’s relationship to the Real. Like a transitional object, it resides at the interface between the embodied unconscious subject and the domain of meaning and intersubjectivity. The Lacanian Real is a topological concept that refers to something that necessarily lies beyond speech. It is not a thing in itself, a pre-given kernel of being. The Real is unsayable, and, as such, it embodies the desire that motivates speech, including the repressions that underlie identification and the failures and impasses of symbolization. The Real can be observed in clinical work when there is anxiety or a break in the client’s narrative. At a cultural level, the Real is often implied in images of horror, fantasies of enjoyment without limit, and in death. Lacan explains how the body—the “lived body,” as distinct from the organism that biological science takes as its object—is constructed in relation to trauma and desire. Trauma is comprised of more than painful exigencies of individual life. Trauma also includes much of what is presumed to be “natural” and “universal” in human development (e.g., the installation of sexual difference). The tacit demand that one embody sexual difference, by accepting a gender identity, means relinquishing the other gender’s presumed advantages; this is “traumatic” in itself. Efforts to accommodate this demand foster constricting identity myths and symptom formation. Without this reciprocal, rhetorical inductions would leave us cold, unable to evoke us. The “object” and the “body” of which one speaks in psychoanalysis are created, like the repressed, through retroactive effects of signification. This body and that object are not “material” bodies, although they are, for that reason, no less powerful. The Lacanian idea of the object leads to particular clinical practices, the description of which (see section II of the anthology),

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should dispel notions of Lacanian psychoanalysis as a merely linguistic version of the biologism associated with the Freudian perspective. To assume a smooth transition between the “natural” and the social, as most developmental theories tend to do, or to treat the body/subject as no more than an inscriptive surface, as constructionists sometimes do, are ideological activities in Lacanian eyes. A theory of trauma has the special value of introducing slippage as well as suffering into subjectivity. If the body were simply a smooth surface of inscription or a negotiated reality, the mechanics of representation would either completely usurp the subject, or serve as mere tools to be “used” by the subject. One has, in either case, nothing but a new version of humanistic psychologies where a flexible ego seems to organize itself in the processes of representation. Lacan’s attention to the role of trauma in the constitution of the body and his explication of the category of the Real enable him to deal with the effects of language in a balanced way, showing that this subject is not absolutely usurped by speech. Such considerations are important for current psychological theory as well as contemporary clinical concerns with respect to the construction of the self within narration and intersubjectivity (Mitchell & Black, 1995). In sum, Lacan’s subtle articulation of the working of the signifier in intersubjectivity, in gender relations, and in the relationship of the real to the body would greatly assist many in the field to understand how we come to desire within cultured realities and respond to them with words.

Conclusion The above constitutes a brief introduction to the purposes of this volume but it also invites psychologists to begin reading Lacan. This invitation is echoed by the efforts of the contributors. The following chapters show a number of ways in which Lacanian psychoanalysis can enrich psychology. Although neither a panacea nor nominee for paradigmatic exclusivity, Lacanian psychoanalysis offers significant “shifts” in perspective that merit consideration. As is well known, understanding Lacan can be an arduous process. One may view this volume as an initial effort to mark out the stakes of such a venture. We have divided the text into three sections, each preceded by an introduction that orients the reader to that section. “Lacan and Psychological Theory” brings together aspects of Lacanian thinking with more general conceptions of

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psychology. “Lacan and the Clinic” addresses specific questions of clinical approach, technique, and provides some case material. The final section, “Lacan, Psychology, and Culture” looks to the blossoming interest in psychology and culture. As well, it speaks to the now much expanded field of cultural studies.

REFERENCES

Aanstoos, C. (1994). Mainstream psychology and the humanistic alternative. In F. Wertz (Ed.), The humanistic movement: Recovering the Person in Psychology. (pp. 1–12). Lake Worth, FL: Gardner Press. Barratt, B. (1993). Psychoanalysis and the postmodern impulse. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Bayer, B. (1998). Introduction: Re-enchanting constructionist inquiries. In Bayer, B. & Shotter, J. (Eds.), Reconstructing the psychological subject: Bodies, practices, technologies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Bayer, B., & Malone, K. (1996). Feminism, psychology, and matters of the body. Theory and Psychology, 6, 667–692. Bohan, J. (Ed.). (1992). Seldom seen, rarely heard. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Boothby, R. (1991). Death and desire. New York: Routledge. Bracher, M. (1993). Lacan, discourse, and social change. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Brennan, T. (1991). An impasse in psychoanalysis and feminism. In S. Gunew (Ed.), Feminist knowledge: A reader (pp. 114–138). London: Routledge. Brousse, H.-M. (1991). Feminism with Lacan. Newsletter of the Freudian field, 5, 113–129. Bugental, J. F. T. (1963). Humanistic psychology: A new breakthrough. American Psychologist, 18, 563–567. Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble. New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter. New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (1997). The psychic life of power. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Caudill, D. (1997). Lacan and the subject of law: Toward a psychoanalytic critical legal theory. Atlantic Heights, NJ: Humanities Press. Cushman, P. (1990). The empty self: Towards a historically situated psychology. American Psychologist, 45, 599–611. Cushman, P. (1991). Ideology obscured: Political uses of the self in Daniel Stern’s infant. American Psychologist, 45, 599–611.

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Dean, T. (1994). Bodies that mutter: Rhetoric and sexuality. PRE/TEXT, 15, 81–117. Dews, P. (1987). Logics of disintegration. London: Verso. Elliot, A., & Frosh, S. (Eds.). (1995). Psychoanalysis in contexts. London: Routledge. Fink, B. (1990). Alienation and separation: Logical moments of Lacan’s dialectic of desire. Newsletter of the Freudian Field, 4, 78–119. Fink, B. (1997). A clinical introduction to Lacanian psychoanalysis: Theory and technique. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Flax, J. (1993). Disputed subjects: Essays on psychoanalysis, politics, and philosophy. New York: Routledge. Fowers, B., & Richardson, F. (1993). Individualism and aggression: A hermeneutic analysis of Huesmann and Eron’s cognitive theory of aggression. Theory & Psychology, 3, 351–374. Friedlander, S. (1995). Concluding comments. Psychoanalytic Review, 82, 703–707. Frosh, S. (1989). Psychoanalysis and psychology: Minding the gap. New York: New York University Press. Gergen, K. (1989). Warranting voice and the elaboration of the self. In J. Shotter & K. Gergen (Eds.), Texts of identity (pp. 70–81). London: Sage. Gergen, K. (1994). Realities and relationships: Soundings in social construction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gergen, K. (1997). The place of the psyche in the constructed world. Theory and Psychology, 7, 723–746. Giorgi, A. (1992). Whither humanistic psychology? The Humanistic Psychologist, 20, 422–438 Grosz, E. (1990). Jacques Lacan: A feminist introduction. London: Routledge. Gurewich, J. (1997). The Lacanian clinical field: Series overview. In Joel Dor (Author), J. Gurewich & Susan Fairfield (Eds.), The clinical Lacan (pp. vii–xii). Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Hacking, I. (1992). Making up people. In E. Stein (Ed.), Forms of desire (pp. 69–88). New York: Routledge. Hare-Mustin, R., & Marecek, J. (1990). Gender and the meaning of difference. In R. Hare-Mustin & J. Marecek (Eds.), Making a difference (pp. 22–64). New Haven: Yale University Press. Harris, A. (1996). Animated conversation: Embodying and gendering. Gender and Psychoanalysis, 1, 361–384. Hollway, W. (1989). Subjectivity and method in psychology. London: Sage. Hornstein, G. (1992). The return of the repressed: Psychology’s problematic relations with psychoanalysis, 1909–1960. American Psychologist, 47, 254–263. Kirschner, S. (1993). Inescapable moralities: Psychology as public philosophy. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 13, 87–90.

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Kitzinger, C. (1989). The regulation of lesbian identities: Liberal humanism as an ideology of social control. In J. Shotter and K. Gergen (Eds.), Texts of Identity (pp. 82–98). London: Sage. Lacan, J. (1977a). The agency of the letter or reason since Freud. In A. Sheridan (Trans.), Écrits (pp. 146–178). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1966) Lacan, J. (1977b). The signification of the phallus. In A. Sheridan (Trans.), Écrits (pp. 281–291). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1966) Lacan, J. (1977c). The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious. In A. Sheridan (Trans.), Écrits (pp. 292– 326). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1966) Lacan, J. (1981). The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis (J.-A. Miller Ed., A. Sheridan Trans.). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1973) Lacan, J. (1982). Intervention on transference. In J. Mitchell & J. Rose (Eds.), J. Rose (Trans.), Feminine sexuality (pp. 61–73). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1966) Malone, K. (1995). Sexuality and the law: A Lacanian analysis of date rape. Psychoanalytic Review, 82, 669–681. Mayer, E. (1996). Psychoanalytic stories about gender: Moving toward an integration of mind and body. Gender and Psychoanalysis, 1, 239–248. Merck, M. (1993). Perversions. New York: Routledge. Mitchell, S. (1996). Gender and sexual orientation in the age of postmodernism: The plight of the perplexed clinician. Gender and Psychoanalysis, 1, 45–74. Mitchell, S., & Black, M. (1995). Freud and beyond: A history of modern psychoanalytic thought. New York: Basic Books. Morawski, J. (1994). Practicing feminisms, reconstructing psychology: Notes on a liminal science. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Moss, D. (1990). Thoughts on two seminars of Jacques Lacan, with a focus on their difficulty. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 71, 701–713. Moss, P. (1994). Can there be validity without reliability? The Educational Researcher, 23, 5–15. Parker, I. (1994). Reflexive social psychology. Free Associations, 4, 527– 548. Parker, I. (1997). The unconscious state of social psychology. In T. Ibáñez & L. I Íñiguez (Eds.), Critical social psychology (pp. 157–168). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Pfister, J. (1997). On conceptualizing the cultural history of emotional and psychological life in America. In J. Pfister & N. Schnog (Eds.), Inventing the psychological (pp.17–62). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ragland-Sullivan, E. (1989). Seeking the third term: Desire, the phallus, and the materiality of language. In R. Feldstein, & J. Roof (Eds.),

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Feminism and psychoanalysis (pp. 40–64). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Riebel, L. (1982). Humanistic psychology: How realistic? Small Group Behavior, 13, 349–371. Roof, J. (1996). Reproductions of reproductions: Imaging symbolic change. New York: Routledge. Sampson, E. (1994). Identity politics: Challenges to psychology’s understanding. American Psychologist, 48, 1219–1230. Sampson, E. (1996). Establishing embodiment in psychology. Theory and Psychology, 6, 601–624. Samuels, R. (1993). Between philosophy and psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge. Shotter, J. (1998, February). Bakhtin and Wittgenstein: Dialogicality and (a poetic approach to) the understanding of culture. Paper presented at the Culture and Cognition Series. Georgia Institute of Technology, February. Simblett, G. (1997). Leila and the tiger. In G. Mark, J. Windale, K. Crocket, & D. Epston (Eds.), Narrative therapy in practice: The archeology of hope (pp. 121–157). San Francisco: Jossey Bass. Squire, C. (1989). Significant differences—feminism in psychology. New York: Routledge. Stam, H. (Ed.). (1998). The body and psychology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Stigliano, T. (1993). The moral construction of the self. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 13, 48–61. Walkerdine, V. (1996).Working-class women: Psychological and social aspects of survival. In S. Wilkinson (Ed.), Feminist social psychologies: International perspectives (pp. 145–163). Buckingham: Open University Press. Weeks, Jeffrey. (1985). Sexuality and its discontents. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Wertz, F. (1993). On psychoanalysis and academic psychology. American Psychologist, 48, 584–585. White, M. (1993). Deconstruction and therapy. In S. Gilligan & R. Price (Eds.), Therapeutic conversations (pp. 22–80). New York: Norton. £i¶ek, S. (1989). The sublime object of ideology. London: Verso. £i¶ek, S. (1992). Enjoy your symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and out. New York: Routledge.

PART I Lacan and Psychological Theory Kareen Ror Malone

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s Ian Parker suggests (chapter 19, this volume), psychological theory generally lacks a certain degree of selfreflexiveness. This deficiency reflects the cost of dispensing with investigations that do not pay off in the currency of “provable” ideas; it implicates the field’s investment in experimental innovation at the expense of clarifying and refining the logic of its own conceptions. Theoretical eclecticism is all one could expect from the precarious objectivity of a discipline that anxiously hovers between “social science” and “natural science.” The status of theory in psychology is complicated further by clinical psychology, a collection of knowledge-building practices that are not exactly tailored to experimental verification despite being institutionally allied to “the science of psychology.”

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Cognitive psychology is the only theory that might currently claim hegemony in current academic circles. Although the study of cognition typically operates under assumptions that would be antithetical to the Lacanian apprehension of subjectivity (i.e., rational and individualistic approaches to cognition), new disciplinary possibilities continually emerge that could easily move studies of memory, “the cognitive unconscious,” language, and social cognition toward a more Lacanian apprehension (see Moscovici, 1993; Muller, chapter 2, this volume). This conjecture does not even begin to assess the future of “hot” and “wet” areas in cognition, those areas that might easily lend themselves to conceptions of subjectivity that account for nonrationality in an adequate manner. Part I contains three significant contributions to issues regarding processes of cognition in psychological theory. John Muller (“The Origins and Self-Serving Functions of the Ego”), while introducing the reader to Lacan’s Imaginary Order in terms of its effects on the ego, clearly implicates social cognition and more general issues in cognitive theory. Although the term ego always has that psychoanalytic ring, Muller spells out Lacan’s idea that “the ego” is really none other than the presumed or posited “self.” This self is a ghost (homunculus or other organizing principle, e.g., adaptation) postulated in almost all psychological theories of cognition and social action. According to Muller, psychologists have misconceived the true nature of this functional agency and its origins. Slavoj £i¶ek (“The Cartesian Subject without the Cartesian Theater”), working with presuppositions from cognitive psychology, pushes this notion of the self or subject that underlies current models of cognition. By uncovering and deconstructing presuppositions about the self or subject common to most models of cognition, £i¶ek demonstrates that Dennett’s understanding of subjectivity specifically overlooks the type of formative moment of which cognitive systems could be said to be “the symptom,” namely, the impossibility of our self-conscious assent into our own subjectivity. Suzanne Barnard (“Socializing Psycholinguistic Discourse: Language as Praxis in Lacan”) follows £i¶ek’s philosophical interrogation with a further critique of the Platonic assumptions that compromise Chomsky’s work in psycholinguistics. While £i¶ek will talk of the impossibility of assuming certain moments in our own subjective genesis, Barnard will re-cast those moments in the terms of particularity in the praxis of everyday discourse (also see Patsalides and Malone, chapter 7, this volume). In the obsession with synchronic closed systems that can be “simulated” by computers, those in cognitive science as well as those within psycho-

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linguistics shortchange the actual elusiveness of daily human speech. In discarding the messiness of particular exchanges for the formal beauty of grammatical or functional systems, they also foreclose any understanding of how lack and thus desire enter speech. Here we return to £i¶ek (and even to Muller). All three chapters point to the essential significance of considering human desire (lack, gap, impossibility) in understanding the processes of human cognition. Religion has become a sort of a lost soul in psychology—a lost soul that cannot seem to find its rightful grave. We conflate the psyche, variously, with psychobiological entities, cultural constructs, or (purely “rational”) cognition, but a bothersome question remains: What significance does “the psychological” have for whatever it is that we understand through religion? Contemporary mainstream psychology, uneasily yoked to religion, tends to ignore this question, ceding it by default to members of the transpersonal and humanistic wings of the community of psychologists. David Metzger (“Lacanian Psychoanalysis and the Neurotic Orientation of Religious Experience”) pits psychoanalysis against religion in terms of the conflicting norms for articulating a relationship to the Other which he attributes to them. Metzger never recoils from the atheistic stance commonly imputed to psychoanalysis, and he poses some very uncomfortable questions to those who would rely on religious study and toil for aid in their quest for authentic being. However, despite his disparagement of religion, Metzger implicitly shows that psychoanalysis is no less dependent upon a hard-won understanding of the Other than the life of religion. Valerie Walkerdine’s chapter (“No Laughing Matter: Girls’ Comics and the Preparation for Adolescent Femininity”) leads us to the familiar terrain of developmental psychology by juxtaposing some of the latter’s fundamental issues with Lacanian concepts. Hers is not a purely Lacanian piece, but she uses Lacanian theory to subvert the idea that development consists of moving through normative stages in a lock-step sequence. Walkerdine offers an alternative (non-)developmental picture, in which layers of fantasy mediate subjectivity at the interface between individual experience and particular sociocultural milieus (see also Walkerdine, 1996). The final two chapters in this part examine psychological theory from an explicitly psychoanalytic point of view. Robert Samuels (“Homosexualities from Freud to Lacan”) critiques Freud’s theorization of homosexuality and some common misprisions of Freudian theory, which all too often inspire oppression of gay men and lesbians as well as alternative ideas and “identities” for gay men and lesbians (Merck, 1993). Some scholars impute a heteronormative

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bias to Lacanian theory, but other readers of Lacan make the opposite point (e.g., Dean, 1997). Irrespective of the variety of interpretations that Lacan receives, the stakes of the debate on homosexuality go beyond political necessity. Lacanian ideas of sexuality and sexuation can contribute to an alternative conceptualization of the psychologist’s stance in the clinical setting. As well, sexuation is conceived in relation to the formation of the Symbolic Order (the latter, of course, intersects questions of the political). Using Lacan, Samuels explains how “homosexualities” in Freud contribute directly to the formation of psychological structure. The final piece by André Patsalides and Kareen Malone (“Jouissance in the Cure”) serves as a transition into the clinical section. This chapter dispels the idea that Lacan is all about ratiocination. Seeing Lacan as simply intellectualizing and conceptual arises from readers’ impoverished understanding of “the signifier.” The reign of the signifier also means that the body and our relationship to the body of another is irreversibly transformed. This transformation that refigures bodily enjoyment and that introduces what Freud called the Death Drive is conceptualized under the Lacanian rubric, jouissance. Jouissance marks the contradictions and particularities elaborated in the first three chapters of this section. It is that which brings the question of the body to bear on the question of the signifier; it is, if I may say so, the specific motivational matrix under which cognition labors.

REFERENCES Dean, T. (1997, April). Lacan meets queer theory. Paper presented at the conference on Sexuation, New York. Merck, M. (1993). Perversions. New York: Routledge Moscovici, S. (1993). The return of the unconscious. Social Research, 60, 41–93. Walkerdine, V. (1996). Working-class women: Psychological and social aspects of survival. In S. Wilkinson (Ed.), Feminist Social Psychologies (pp. 145–162). Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press.

1 The Cartesian Subject without the Cartesian Theatre Slavoj £i¶ek

I

n his attacks on bourgeois ideology, Lenin liked to emphasize the need for a thorough knowledge of one’s enemies: in an ideological struggle, the enemy often perceives what is truly at stake in the struggle more accurately than those closer to us. Therein resides the interest, for those who endorse the Lacanian notion of subjectivity, of the emerging school of German and American followers of Dieter Henrich—the basic project of this school is to counteract the different versions of today’s “decenterment” or “deconstruction” of the subject by way of a return to the notion of subjectivity in the sense of German Idealism (see, as a representative recent volume, Karl Ameriks and Dieter Sturma [Eds.], 1995). Their central endeavor is to demonstrate how the dimension of subjectivity is irreducible: the subject’s self-acquaintance is alwaysalready presupposed in all our acts, that is, the gap between the 23

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subject’s immediate self-experience and the mechanisms of its objective genesis is constitutive, which is why one cannot reduce the subject to an effect of some underlying objective process. However, instead of engaging in a direct dialogue with Henrich’s school, it seems more promising to confront it with another figure of the “enemy” of Lacanian psychoanalysis: the contemporary endeavors by cognitive sciences to provide an empirical/evolutionary account of the emergence of consciousness. The representative example here is Daniel Dennett’s (1991) Consciousness Explained, a work that, precisely, wants to accomplish what Henrich’s followers consider a priori impossible: the genesis of consciousness, of the self-conscious subject, out of the biological evolutionary process. Although Dennett’s propositions regarding the dispersed multitude of narratives fighting for hegemony within the human mind and the lack of any Agent coordinating this pandemonium often sound close to deconstruction (Dennett himself approvingly quotes the ironic definition of “semiotic materialism” from David Lodge’s Nice Work), the temptation to be avoided is precisely the hasty conclusion that Dennett is a kind of deconstructionist wolf in the sheep’s clothing of empirical science. There is a gap that forever separates Dennett’s scientific evolutionary explanation from the deconstructionist “meta-transcendental” probing into the conditions of (im)possibility of the philosophical discourse. The basic premise of Dennett’s “heterophenomenology” is that subjective experience is the theorist’s (interpreter’s) symbolic fiction, his supposition, not the domain of phenomena directly accessible to the subject: the universe of subjective experience is reconstructed in exactly the same way we reconstruct the universe of a novel from reading its text. In a first approach, this seems innocent enough, self-evident even: of course we do not have direct access to another person’s mind, so we have to reconstruct an individual’s self-experience from his external gestures, expressions and, above all, words. However, Dennett’s point here is much more radical. In a novel, the universe we reconstruct is full of “holes,” not fully constituted: when Conan Doyle describes the flat of Sherlock Holmes, it is in a way meaningless to ask how many books there were exactly on the shelves—the writer simply did not have in his mind an exact idea of it. And, for Dennett, it is the same with another person’s experience in “reality”: what one should NOT do is to suppose that, deep in another’s psyche, there is a full self-experience of which we only get fragments. Even the appearances cannot be saved. This central point of Dennett (1991) can be nicely rendered if one contrasts it with two standard opposed theoretical stances that

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are effectively solidary: first-person phenomenalism—even if my mind is merely a software in my brain, nobody can take from me the full first-person experience of reality—and third-person behavioral operationalism—in order to understand the mind, we should limit ourselves to third-person observations that can be objectively verified, and not accept any first-person accounts. Dennett undermines this opposition by what he calls “first-person operationalism”: the gap is to be introduced into my very first-person experience, the gap between content and its registration, between represented time and the time of representation. A nice proto-Lacanian point made by Dennett (and the key to his heterophenomenology) is this insistence on the distinction, in homology with space, between the time of representation and the representation of time: they are not the same, that is, the loop of flashback is discernible even in our most immediate temporal experience. The succession of events ABCDEF . . . is represented in our consciousness so that it begins with E, then goes back to ABCD, and, finally, returns to F which in reality directly follows E. So even in our most direct temporal self-experience, a gap akin to that between signifier and signified is already at work: even here, one cannot “save the phenomena,” since what we (mis)perceive as directly experienced representation of time (the phenomenal succession ABCDEF . . .) is already a “mediated” construct from a different time of representation (E/ABCD/F . . .). “First-person operationalism” thus emphasizes how, even in our direct (self-)experience, there is a gap between content (the narrative inscribed into our memory) and the “operational” level of how the subject constructed this content, where we always have a series of rewritings and tinkerings: “introspection provides us—the subject as well as the ‘outside’ experimenter—only with the content of representation, not with the features of the representational medium itself ” (p. 354). In this precise sense, the subject is his own fiction: the content of his own self-experience is a narrativization in which memory traces already intervene. So when Dennett makes “ ‘writing it down’ in memory criterial for consciousness; that is what it is for the ‘given’ to be ‘taken’—to be taken one way rather than another,” and claims that “there is no reality of conscious experience independent of the effects of various vehicles of content on subsequent action (and, hence, on memory),” we should be careful not to miss the point: what counts for the concerned subject himself is the way an event is “written down,” memorized—memory is constitutive of my “direct experience” itself, that is, “direct experience” is what I memorize as my direct experience (p. 132). Or, to put it in Hegelian

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terms (which would undoubtedly appall Dennett): immediacy itself is mediated; it is a product of the mediation of traces. One can also put this in terms of the relationship between direct experience and judgment on it: there is no “direct experience” prior to judgment; what I (re)construct (write down) as my experience is already supported by judgmental decisions. For this reason, the whole problem of “filling in the gaps” is a false one: there are no gaps to be filled in. Let us take the classic example of our reading a text that contains a lot of printing mistakes: most of the mistakes pass unnoticed, since, in our reading, we are guided by an active attitude of recognizing patterns, we, for the most part, simply read the text as if there were no mistakes. The usual phenomenological account of this would be that, due to my active attitude of recognizing ideal patterns, I “fill in the gaps” and automatically, even prior to my conscious perception, reconstitute the correct spelling, so that it appears to me that I read the correct text. What if, however, the actual procedure is different? Driven by the attitude of actively searching for known patterns, I quickly scan a text (our actual perception is much more discontinuous and fragmentary than it may appear), and this combination of an active attitude of searching and fragmented perception leads my mind directly to the conlcusion that the word I just read is “conclusion,” not “conlcusion,” as it was actually written? There are no gaps to be filled in here, since there is no moment of perceptual experience prior to the conclusion (i.e., judgment) that the word I’ve just read is “conclusion.” This (somewhat simplified) example also renders clear Dennett’s (1991) point that the opposition between (what he calls) “Stalinesque” and “Orwellian” interpretation is irrelevant: it is wrong to ask if I first, for a brief moment, perceive the word the way it is actually written (“conlcusion”) and then, after a brief lapse of time, under the pressure of my search for recognizable patterns, change it into “conclusion” (the “Orwellian” brainwashing, which convinces the subject who first sees five fingers, that he actually saw four fingers), or if there is no actual perception of the misspelled word, so that the corrective misreading occurs already prior to my act of (conscious) perception (the “Stalinesque” pre-perceptual manipulation in which there is no moment of adequate perception of “conlcusion,” since all I am ever aware of are already falsified memory traces, so that the Theatre of Consciousness is like the courtroom stage in Stalinist show trials). There is no limit that separates what goes on “before” our direct “live experience” (the pre-perceptual, preconscious processes) from what goes on “after”

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(the memory inscription, reporting, etc., on our experience), no It (a direct moment of experience) where the presubjective processes are magically transformed into the Event of Sense, into the subjective Experience of Sense, to which then refer later acts of reporting, memorizing it, etc. It is, on the contrary, the very act of judgment, the conclusion that “it is so,” that makes us perceive the previous presubjective confusion as the consistent Experience: “We don’t first apprehend our experience in the Cartesian Theatre and then, on the basis of that acquired knowledge, have the ability to frame reports to express. . . . The emergence of the expression is precisely what creates or fixes the content of the higher-order thought expressed. . . . The higher-order state literally depends on—causally depends on—the expression of the speech act” (p. 315). The perfect example of this point, of course, is a situation in which I become aware of a “deep” attitude of mine, when, in a totally unexpected way, without any premeditation, I simply blurt something out. Dennett quotes here the famous passage from one of Bertrand Russell’s letters to Lady Ottoline, in which he recalls the circumstances of his declaration of love to her: “I did not know I loved you till I heard myself telling you so—for one instant I thought ‘Good God, what have I said?’ and then I knew it was the truth” (Clark, 1975, p. 176). Far from being an exceptional feature, this is the basic mechanism that generates meaning: a word or a phrase forces itself upon us, and thereby imposes a semblance of narrative order on our confused experience; there is no preexisting “deep awareness of it” expressed in this phrase—it is, on the contrary, this very phrase that organizes our experience into a “deep awareness.” In literature, an outstanding example is provided by the very last lines of Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train: in contrast to Hitchcock’s film version, Guy does also kill Bruno’s wife, and, at the novel’s end, police detectives who have been closely monitoring him for some time, finally approach him in order to take him in for questioning. Guy, who has been preparing for this moment for a long time and has memorized a detailed alibi, reacts with a confessionary gesture of surrender that takes even him by surprise: “Guy tried to speak, and said something entirely different from what he had intended. ‘ Take me’ ” (Highsmith, 1982, p. 256). It is wrong to “substantialize” the attitude expressed in Guy’s last words, as if, “deep in himself,” he was all the time aware of his guilt and nourished a desire to be arrested and punished for it. There was, of course, a confessional “disposition” in Guy, but it was competing with other dispositions, ambiguous, not clearly defined,

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and it won over due to a concrete contingent constellation; not unlike Kieslowski’s (1981) early Blind Chance, which deals with three different outcomes of a man running for a train: he catches it and becomes a communist official; he misses it and becomes a dissident; there is no train and he settles down to a mundane life. This notion of a mere chance that can determine the outcome of a man’s life was unacceptable to communists as well as to their opposition (it deprives dissident attitude of its deep moral foundation). The point is that in each of the three cases, the contingency that gave the “spin” to his life would be “repressed,” that is, the hero would construct his life story as a narrative leading to its final result (a dissident, an ordinary man, a communist apparatchik) with a “deep necessity.” Is this not what Lacan referred to as the futur anterieur of the Unconscious which “will have been”? The title of chapter 8 of Consciousness Explained (“How Words Do Things with Us”) makes the point clear by means of a reversal of Austin’s “How to Do Things with Words”: our symbolic uiniverse is a pandemonium of competing forces (words, phrases, syntactic figures . . .), a universe of tinkering and opportunistic enlisting, of the exploitation of contingent opportunities. Lincoln’s famous quip “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all of the time” is logically ambiguous: does it mean that there are some people who can always be fooled, or that, on every occasion, someone or other is bound to be fooled? It is wrong to ask “What did Lincoln really mean?” Probably, unaware of the ambiguity, he simply wanted to make a witty point, and the phrase “imposed itself on him” because “it sounded good” (Dennett, 1991, p. 244). Here we have an exemplary case of how, when the subject has a vague intention to signify and is “looking for the right expression” (as we usually put it), the influence goes both ways: it is not only that, among the multitude of contenders, the best expression wins, but some expression might impose itself that changes more or less considerably the very intention to signify. Is this not what Lacan referred to as the “efficiency of the signifier”? Dennett thus conceives of the human mind as a multitude of vaguely coordinated “software”: programs created by evolution to solve some particular problem, and which, later, take over other functions. The structure of the human mind is that of overdetermination: in it, we find neither isolated particular organs with clearly defined functions, nor a universal Master-Self coordinating between them, but a permanently shifting “improvised” coordination—some particular program (not always the same) can tempo-

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rarily assume the coordinating function, that is, some specialists can be temporarily recruited as generalists. The human mind is a pandemonium of competing forces: words impose themselves, want to be spoken, so that we often say something without knowing in advance what we wanted to say. The function of language is thus ultimately parasitic: not only do words and phrases seem to impose themselves on us, trying to gain the upper hand, fighting for hegemony, but the very fundamental relationship between language and human beings who use it can be reversed—it could be argued that not only do human beings use language to reproduce themselves, multiply their power and knowledge, etc., but also, at perhaps a more fundamental level, language itself uses human beings to replicate and expand itself, to gain new wealth of meanings, etc. (here, Dennett refers to Dawkins’s notion of “meme” as the smallest unit of the symbolic reproduction). What really happens when, for example, a man sacrifices his material well-being, his life even, for some Cause, that is, for “an Idea” (say, for his religious belief)? One cannot reduce this “Idea” to a shorthand for the well-being of other human beings: this man literally sacrificed himself for an “Idea,” he gave precedence to the strengthening of this “meme” over his own life. So it is not sufficient to say that men use Ideas as means of communication among themselves, as mental patterns to better organize their lives and cope with dangerous situations, etc. In a way, Ideas themselves use men as the expendable means of their proliferation. The first, obvious result of this account is that it allows no place for the philosophical subject, the Cartesian cogito or transcendental Self-Consciousness, nor for (what appears to be) its opposite, the Freudian Unconscious as the hidden agency that effectively “pulls the strings” of our psychic life: what they both presuppose is a unified agent (the Subject, the Unconscious) which controls and directs the course of events, and Dennett’s point is, precisely, that there is no such agent. (Incidentally, with regard to this precise point, Lacan fully agrees with Dennett: the Freudian Unconscious is not another, hidden Controller, the Ego’s puppetmaster, a shadowy double of the Ego who effectively pulls its strings, but a pandemonium of inconsistent tendencies that endeavor to exploit contingent opportunities in order to articulate themselves.) Dennett’s (1991) account of the spontaneous, “mechanistic” emergence of a narrative out of the encounter between the subject’s attitude (interest, “thrust”) and a series of ultimately contingent responses/signals from the real (pp. 10–16), intends to get rid of the Unconscious as the hidden Narrative Master staging and controlling everything behind the scenes, and to show how a narrative can

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emerge out of opportunistic tinkering. His example is that of a party game in which the dupe is told that while he is out of the room, one member of the assembled party will relate to all others a recent dream. When the dupe returns to the room, he can ask anyone in the room questions, the answers to which have to be a simple “Yes!” or “No!” The point of the game is for the dupe to guess from the contours of the dream the identity of the dreamer. However, once the dupe is out of the room, the rest of the party agrees that there will simply be no dream: they will answer the dupe’s questions following some simple rule unrelated to their content— say, if the last letter is from the first half of the alphabet, the answer should be Yes!, otherwise No!—with the proviso of noncontradiction. What thus often emerges is a ludicrous and obscene narrative to which there is no author: the closest to the author is the dupe himself, who provides the general thrust by means of the direction implied by his questions, while the rest is the result of a pure contingency. Dennett’s point is that not only dreams, but even the narratives that form the cobweb of our daily existence, emerge in this way, by means of opportunistic tinkering and contingent encounters. Although this explanation involves a model materialist procedure, accounting for the appearance of a coherent and purposeful Totality of Sense from contingent encounters between two heterogeneous levels (the subject’s cognitive thrust; signals from reality), one is nonetheless tempted to counter it with an argument homologous to Kant’s rejection of the empiricist claim that the entire content of our mind comes from sensual experience: the problem Dennett does not resolve is that of the very form of narrative— where does the subject’s capacity to organize its contingent experience into the form of narrative (or to recognize in a series of events the form of narrative) come from? Everything can be explained this way except the narrative form itself, which, in a way, must already be here. One is tempted to say that this silently presupposed form is Dennett’s Unconscious, an invisible structure he is unaware of, operative in the phenomena he describes. Are we then back at the Kantian idealist position of a formal a priori as the condition of possibility for the organization of our contingent experiences into a coherent narrative? At this point, it is crucial to take into account one of the fundamental lessons of psychoanalytic theory: a form that precedes content is always an index of some traumatic “primordially repressed” content. This lesson holds especially for the formalism encountered in art: as it was emphasized by Fredric Jameson, the desperate formalist at-

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tempt to distinguish the formal structure from any positive content is the unfailing index of the violent repression of some traumatic content—the last trace of this content is the frozen form itself. The notion of autonomous form as the index of some repressed traumatic content applies specifically to the narrative form. This brings us to Jameson’s other thesis, according to which, narrative as such is ideological, the elementary form of ideology: it is not only that some narratives are “false,” based upon the exclusion of traumatic events and patching up the gaps left over by these exclusions—the answer to the question “Why do we tell stories?” is that the narrative as such emerges in order to resolve some fundamental antagonism by way of rearranging its terms into a temporal succession. It is thus the very form of narrative that bears witness to some repressed antagonism. So, back to Dennett: the fact that “we are all storytellers” has to be grounded in an act of “primordial repression.” Where, in Dennett, do we find traces of the absence of this repression (to use the somewhat outdated jargon)? Dennett (1991) draws a convincing and insightful parallel between an animal’s physical environs and human environs, not only artifacts (clothes, houses, tools), but also the “virtual” environs of the discursive cobweb: “Stripped of the ‘web of discourses,’ an individual human being is as incomplete as a bird without feathers, a turtle without its shell” (p. 416). A naked man is the same nonsense as a shaved bird: without language (and tools and . . .), man is a crippled animal. It is this lack that is supplemented by symbolic institutions and tools, so that the point made obvious today, in popular culture figures such as Robocop (man is simultaneously super-animal and crippled), holds from the very beginning. The problem here is: how do we pass from “natural” to “symbolic” environs? The unexplained presupposition of the narrative form in Dennett bears witness to the fact that this passage is not direct, that one cannot account for it within a continuous evolutionary narrative. Something has to intervene between the two, a kind of “vanishing mediator,” which is neither Nature nor Culture. This In-between is silently presupposed and jumped over by Dennett. Again, we are not idealists: this In-between is not the spark of logos magically conferred on homo sapiens, enabling him to form his supplementary virtual symbolic environs, but precisely something that, although it is also no longer nature, is not yet logos, and has to be “repressed” by logos. The Freudian name for this Inbetween, of course, is death drive. With regard to this In-between, it is interesting to note how philosophical narratives of the “birth

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of man” are always compelled to presuppose a moment in human (pre)history when (what will become) man is no longer a mere animal and simultaneously not yet a “being of language,” bound by symbolic Law; a moment of thoroughly “perverted,” “denaturalized,” “derailed” nature that is not yet culture. In his anthropological writings, Kant emphasized that the human animal needs disciplinary pressure in order to tame an uncanny “unruliness” that seems to be inherent to human nature—a wild, unconstrained propensity to insist stubbornly on one’s own will, cost what it may. It is on account of this “unruliness” that the human animal needs a Master to discipline him: discipline targets this “unruliness,” not the animal nature in man. This in-between is the “repressed” of the narrative form: not nature as such, but the very break with nature, which is (later) supplemented by the virtual universe of narratives. This premonition of Kant’s was further developed by F. W. J. Schelling, one of his main followers within German Idealism. The basic insight of Schelling, whereby, prior to its assertion as the medium of the rational Word, the subject is the “infinite lack of being unendliche Mangel an Sein,” the violent gesture of contraction that negates every being outside itself, also forms the core of Hegel’s notion of madness. When Hegel determines madness to be a withdrawal from the actual world, the closing of the soul into itself, its “contraction,” the cutting-off of its links with external reality, he all too quickly conceives of this withdrawal as a “regression” to the level of the “animal soul” still embedded in its natural environs and determined by the rhythm of nature (night and day, etc.). Does this withdrawal, on the contrary, not designate the severing of the links with the Umwelt, the end of the subject’s immersion into its immediate natural environs, and is it, as such, not the founding gesture of “humanization”? Was this withdrawal-into-self not accomplished by Descartes in his universal doubt and reduction to cogito, which, as Derrida (1978) pointed out in his “Cogito and the history of madness,” also involves a passage through the moment of radical madness? Are we thus not back at the wellknown and often-quoted passage from Jenaer Realphilosophie, where Hegel characterizes the experience of pure Self, of the contractioninto-self of the subject, as the “night of the world,” the eclipse of (constituted) reality? The human being is this night, this empty nothing, that contains everything in its simplicity—an unending wealth of many representations, images, of which none belongs to him—or

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which are not present. This night, the inner of nature, that exists here—pure self—in phantasmagorical representations, is night all around it, in which here shoots a bloody head— there another white ghastly apparition, suddenly here before it, and just so disappears. One catches sight of this night when one looks human beings in the eye—into a night that becomes awful. (Verene, 1985, pp. 7–8) So, back to Dennett again: we may seem to have erred far from his evolutionary-scientific problematic, and well into the murky waters of metaphysical speculation. Here, however, a reference to psychoanalytic experience becomes crucial. Does Hegel’s brief description—“here shoots a bloody head, there another white ghastly apparition”—not fit perfectly with Lacan’s notion of the “dismembered body” (le corps morcelé)? What Hegel calls the “night of the world” (the fantasmatic, presymbolic domain of partial drives), is an undeniable component of the subject’s most radical selfexperience, exemplified, among others, by Hieronymous Bosch’s celebrated paintings. In a way, the entire psychoanalytic cure focuses on the traces of the traumatic passage from this “night of the world” into our “daily” universe of logos. The tension between the narrative form and the “death drive,” as the withdrawal-into-self constitutive of the subject, is thus the missing link, the moment that has to be presupposed if we are to account for the passage from “natural” to “symbolic” environs. Within the symbolic space itself, this vanishing point of the “withdrawal-into-self ” is operative in the guise of what Lacan calls the “subject of the enunciation,” as opposed to the “subject of the enunciated” (the subject’s symbolic and/or imaginary identifications). The moment Descartes interprets cogito as res cogitans, he, of course, conflates the two. The reduction of the subject to what Dennett calls the “Cartesian Theatre” (the stage of selfawareness in which we immediately experience phenomena, the place where the objective neuronal, etc., bodily mechanisms “magically” produce the effect of phenomenal [self-]experience) is another version of this conflation, of the reduction of the subject of enunciation to the subject of the enunciated. However, what about the Kantian rereading of cogito as the pure point of self-consciousness, which does not designate any actual self-awareness, but rather functions as a kind of logical fiction, as the point of virtual self-awareness that is as such already actual, that is, operative? I could have become self-conscious of each

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of my mental acts if I had chosen to probe into them, and the awareness of this possibility already determines the way I actually behave. For Kant, consciousness is always-already selfconsciousness, but not in the sense that, whenever I am aware of the content of my thoughts, I am simultaneously aware of myself being aware of this content. This is not only patently untrue, but also, if this were the case, we would be caught in the vicious cycle of infinite regression: am I also conscious of my being conscious of my object-directed consciousness?, etc. In his concise account of the status of Kantian Self-Consciousness, Robert Pippin (1989) emphasized how Kantian Self-Consciousness points toward the fact that our consciousness of objects is “implicitly reflexive” (Pippin also speaks of “implicit awareness” or “potential awareness”). When I assert (or desire or imagine or reject . . . ) X, I always-already implicitly “take myself ” as the one who is asserting (or desiring or . . . ) X (pp. 19–24). Perhaps the best example is that of “spontaneously” following a rule (as when one engages in speech activity): when I speak a language, I am, of course, not actively conscious of the rules I follow—my active focusing on these rules would prevent me from fluently speaking this language; but, I am nonetheless implicitly aware that I am speaking a language, and thus, following rules. Self-consciousness is not an additional reflexive turn of the gaze from the object one is conscious of upon oneself, but is constitutive of “direct” consciousness itself: “to be conscious of X” means that I “take myself” to be related to X, that is, that my relation toward X is minimally reflective. This minimal reflexivity is not to be opposed to prereflexive spontaneity in the standard sense of the contrast between being directly immersed into an activity and maintaining a reflexive distance toward it. In the ethical domain, for example, the contrast between spontaneously doing one’s duty, since “it is part of my nature, I cannot do it otherwise,” and doing my duty after a tortuous self-examination—the two are strictly synonymous. The Kantian notion of “spontaneity” means precisely that I, the subject, am not directly determined by (external or internal) causes: causes motivate me only insofar as I reflexively accept them as motifs, that is, insofar as I accept to be determined by them. In this sense, Self-Consciousness means that every immediacy is always-already mediated: when I directly immerse myself into an activity, this immersion is always grounded in an implicit act of immersing oneself; when I follow my most brutal instincts and “behave as an animal,” I still remain the one who decided to behave in that way, however deeply repressed this decision may be.

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Self-Consciousness is thus, in a way, even less than a softwareprogram; it is a pure logical function, even symbolic fiction or presupposition (the point conceded to Dennett), which is nonetheless necessary for the functioning of the subject in “reality”: there is no subject who, in the full presence of self-awareness, reflects and decides—it is just that, in the way I effectively act, a reflective attitude of deciding is always-already presupposed. We encounter here again the difference between subject and Self: the Self, of course, is a mere “Center of Narrative Gravity,” while the subject is the void itself filled in by the ever-changing Centers of Narrative Gravity. Kant thus wholly endorses the famous Humean rejection of the notion of substantial Self, that is, his claim that, no matter how attentively he probes introspectively into the content of his mind, he always encounters some particular, determinate idea, never his Self as such: of course, there is no Self in the sense of a particular substantial representation above and beyond other such representations. No stable substantial content guarantees the unity of the subject; any such content would involve an infinite regress, since it would mean that the Self is in a way “a part of himself,” as if the subject can encounter, within himself, a part that is “his Self.” Consequently, Kant also accepts the claim that the subject is not directly accessible to himself: the introspective perceptions of my inner life are no closer to the noumenal dimension than the perceptions of external reality, so that, for Kant, it is not legitimate to posit the direct coincidence of the observer and the observed. This coincidence is not what Kantian SelfConsciousness (“transcendental apperception”) is about: To postulate such an identity would mean, precisely, to commit the “paralogism of pure reason.” Dennett is at his best when he viciously demolishes the standard philosophical game of “let us imagine that . . .”—let us imagine a zombie who acts and speaks exactly like a human, that is, whose behavior is indistinguishable from a human, and who is nonetheless not a human, but merely a mindless machine following a built-in program—and of drawing conclusions from such counterfactual mental experiments (about the a priori impossibility of artificial intelligence, of a biological foundation of mind, etc.): his counterquestion is simply, “Can you really imagine it?” The Kantian SelfConsciousness involves a similar gap: although one can imagine self-consciousness accompanying all the acts of our mind, for structural reasons, this potentiality can never be fully actualized, and it is this very intermediate status that defines Self-Consciousness. For that reason, one should counter the mystique of “self-acquaintance”

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as the primordial, unsurpassable fact, with the claim that SelfConsciousness emerges precisely because there is no direct “selfawareness” or “self-acquaintance” of the subject: The Kantian Self-Consciousness is an empty logical presupposition that fills in the gap of the impossibility of direct “self-awareness” Henrich (1982) himself makes this point in his own way: the “person” is the psychophysical individual, a living being with a place among all mundane things, part of the common life-world; while the “subject” is the point of self-consciousness that does not coincide with any specific feature of the world—it is rather the void of the One, to which every thinkable and experienceable content should be related, insofar as it is thinkable and experienceable. What one should do in order to accomplish the crucial passage from the subject of self-acquaintance to the subject of the Unconscious, is simply “de-psychologize” the former, erase all traces of “actual self-experience” and purify it into a pure logical function (or, rather, presupposition) of an X, to whom attitudes are attributed. The Lacanian “subject of the Unconscious” is thus not the prediscursive reservoir of affects and drives, but its exact opposite: a pure logical construct, devoid of any experiential content and as such beyond reach for our self-experience. Lacan’s term “subject of the signifier” literally means that there is no substantial signified content that guarantees the unity of the I; at this level, the subject is multiple, dispersed, etc. The subject’s unity is guaranteed only by the self-referential symbolic act: “I” is a purely performative entity; it is the one who says “I.” Therein resides the mystery of the subject’s “self-positing,” rendered thematic by Fichte: when I say “I,” I do not create any new content; I merely designate myself, the person who is uttering the phrase. This selfdesignation nonetheless gives rise to (“posits”) an X that is not the “real” flesh-and-blood person uttering it, but, precisely and merely, the pure void of self-referential designation (the Lacanian “subject of the enunciation”): “I” am not directly my body or even the content of my mind; “I” am rather that X that has all these features as its properties. The Lacanian subject is the “subject of the signifier,” not in the sense of being reducible to one of the signifiers in the signifying chain, but in a much more precise sense: when I say “I,” that is, designate “myself” as “I,” this very act of signifying adds something to the “real flesh-and-blood entity” thus designated, and the subject is that empty X that is added to the designated content by means of the act of its self-referential designation. Let us recall the typical attitude of a hysterical subject who complains how he is exploited, manipulated, victimized by others,

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reduced to an object of exchange. The subjective position of being a passive victim of circumstances is never simply imposed from outside; it has to be at least minimally endorsed by the subject. He, of course, is not aware of active participation in his own victimization—this unawareness, precisely, is the “unconscious” truth of the subject’s conscious experience of being a mere passive victim of circumstances. The (Lacanian) subject of the Unconscious is thus neither the standard subject of self-awareness, nor the dispersed multitude of fluxes that explode the subject’s unity: this opposition between the “unified” subject of self-awareness and the dispersed presubjective multitude is false because it relies on the exclusion of the “empty” subject as the “vanishing mediator” between the two. Therein resides the gap that separates Lacan (who is here much closer to Kant and Hegel) from the immediacy of the subjective “self-awareness” or “self-acquaintance” on which Henrich and his followers (especially Manfred Frank) insist: for Lacan, to designate this “implicit reflexivity,” which constitutes the core of subjectivity, as “self-acquaintance,” already goes too far in the direction of phenomenology, and thus obfuscates the radically nonphenomenological status of the subject as a pure logical presupposition, a priori inaccessible to any direct introspective insight. In order for me to recognize myself in an other (say, my mirror image), I must already be minimally acquainted with who I am. To be able to exclaim in front of a mirror “That’s me!” I must have an idea of who this “me” is. Lacan’s answer to this is that two levels are to be distinguished here. The identification with a mirror image is the identification with an object that effectively cannot ground the dimension of subjectivity; for that reason, this identification is alienating and performative: in the very act of recognizing myself as that image, I performatively posit that image as “me”—prior to it, I was nothing, I simply had no content. Who, then, is the “me” that recognizes itself as that image? The point is that this “nothing,” previous to imaginary recognition is not a pure absence but the subject itself, that is, the void of self-relating negativity, the substanceless X to which attitudes, desires, and the like are attributed. I cannot be acquainted with it precisely because its status is thoroughly nonphenomenological. Any act of “self-acquaintance” already relies on a combination (or overlapping) of two radically heterogeneous levels, the pure subject of the signifier and an object of imaginary identification. Dennett is thus right in emphasizing how our conscious awareness is fragmentary, partial, discontinuous: one never encounters “Self ” as a determinate representation in and of our mind. However,

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is not the conclusion to be drawn from this that the unity of the subject, that which makes him a One, is unconscious? Again, this subject is not some positive content, inaccessible to our conscious awareness, but a pure logical function: when the subject conceives himself as One—as that One, to which acts, attitudes, etc. are attributed (or, rather, imputed)—this One has no positive content that would guarantee its consistency. Its unity is purely logical and performative: the only content of this One is the operation of assuming as “mine” a multitude of acts, attitudes, and so on. One is thus tempted to claim that, while Dennett may well succeed in “explaining” consciousness, what he does not explain, what awaits to be explained, is the Unconscious, the Freudian Unconscious which is neither the presubjective (“objective”) neuronal apparatus, the material vehicle of my mind, nor the subject’s fragmentary self-awareness. Where, then, is the Freudian Unconscious? Again, Dennett is right in undermining the phenomenological attempt to “save the phenomena”; he is right in demonstrating how what we take to be our direct phenomenal (self-)experience is a later construct, based on a mixture of discontinuous perceptions, judgments, and the like. In short, Dennett demonstrates the reflective status of our phenomenal self-awareness: it is not only that phenomena point toward a hidden transphenomenal essence; phenomena themselves are mediated, i.e., the phenomenal experience itself appears (is materialized-operationalized) in a multitude of its particular phenomenal vehicles, gestures, and so forth. A multitude of actual phenomena (fragmentary phenomenal experiences) point toward the Phenomenon itself, the construct of a continuous “stream of consciousness,” a Theatre, a screen in our mind in which the mind directly perceives itself. Once we have demonstrated how direct (self-)experience never effectively occurs in our consciousness, one can only “save the phenomena” by way of introducing the “bizarre category of the objectively subjective—the way things actually, objectively seem to you even if they don’t seem that way to you” (Dennett, 1991, p. 132). Our actual phenomenal (self-)experience is a fragmentary and inconsistent mixture of perceptions, judgments, and such, while Phenomenal Self-Experience is precisely what is never given to us in direct experience. While Dennett evokes this hypothesis of the “objectively subjective” only to reject it as a senseless, self-defeating paradox, one is tempted to conceive this level of the “objectively subjective” as the very locus of the Unconscious: does the Freudian Unconscious not designate precisely the way things appear to us

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without our ever being directly aware of them? In this sense, as Lacan points out, the subject of the Unconscious is not a given but an ethical supposition, that is, there has to be an X to whom the “objectively subjective” unconscious phenomena are attributed. Complicity between the pure subject of the signifier and the “objectively subjective” Unconscious allows us to save both, the Unconscious as well as the cogito, by proving that, far from excluding each other, they effectively presuppose each other: As Lacan put it, the Cartesian cogito is the subject of the Unconscious. There is, however, a final misunderstanding to be dispelled here: the attribution of the “objectively subjective” fantasy to the cogito does not mean that, beneath the everyday subject that we are in our conscious lives, one has to presuppose another, “deeper” subject who is able to experience directly the unconscious fantasies inaccessible to our conscious Self. What one should insist on, in contrast to such a misreading, is the insurmountable gap between the empty subject ($, in Lacan’s “mathemes”) and the wealth of fantasies: for a priori topological reasons, they can never directly meet, since they are located at the opposite surfaces of the Moebius band. The dimension of fantasy is constitutive of the subject, which is to say there is no subject without fantasy. This constitutive link between subject and fantasy, however, does not mean that we are dealing with a subject the moment an entity displays signs of “inner life,” that is, of a fantasmatic self-experience that cannot be reduced to external behavior. What characterizes human subjectivity proper is rather the gap that separates the two. Fantasy, at its most elementary, is inaccessible to the subject, and it is this inaccessibility that makes the subject “empty.” The ultimate meaning of Lacan’s assertion of the subject’s constitutive “decenterment” is not that my subjective experience is regulated by objective unconscious mechanisms that are “decentered” with regard to my selfexperience and, as such, beyond my control (a point asserted by every materialist), but rather something much more unsettling. I am deprived of even my most intimate “subjective” experience, the way things “really seem to me” (the fundamental fantasy that constitutes and guarantees the kernel of my being), since I can never consciously experience it and assume it. According to the standard view, the dimension that is constitutive of subjectivity is that of the phenomenal (self-)experience—I am a subject the moment I can say to myself: “No matter what unknown mechanism governs my acts, perceptions and thoughts, nobody can take from me what I see and feel now.” Lacan turns this standard view around, saying that the “subject of the signifier”

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emerges only when a key aspect of the subject’s phenomenal (self-)experience (his “fundamental fantasy”) becomes inaccessible to him, or “primordially repressed.” The Unconscious is the inaccessible phenomenon, not the objective mechanism that regulates my phenomenal experience. We thus obtain a relationship that totally subverts the standard notion of phenomenal (self-)experience, that is, of the subject who directly experiences himself, his “inner states”: an “impossible” relationship between the empty, nonphenomenal subject and the phenomenon that remains inaccessible to the subject—the very relation registered by Lacan’s formula of fantasy, $—a.

REFERENCES Ameriks, K., & Sturma, D. (Eds.) (1995). The modern subject: Conceptions of the self in classical German philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press. Clark, R. W. (1975). The life of Bertrand Russell. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Dennett, D. C. (1991). Consciousness explained. New York: Little, Brown and Company. Derrida, J. (1978). Cogito and the history of madness. In A. Bass (Trans.), Writing and difference, (pp. 31–63). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Henrich, D. (1982). Fluchtlinien. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Highsmith, P. (1982). Strangers on a train. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Kieslowski, K., (Director) & Boguslaw, L. (1981). Blind Chance. [Videocassette] (Available from Contal International, Inc., New York). Pippin, R. (1989). Hegel’s idealism: The satisfactions of self-consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Verene, D. P. (1985). Hegel’s recollection. Albany: State University of New York Press.

2 The Origins and Self-Serving Functions of the Ego John Muller

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or an American audience, what is, perhaps, most troubling in Lacan’s work is his persistent and insulting attack on what he calls the American hymn to “the autonomous ego” (Lacan, 1966/1977, p. 306). Historically, and culturally, we place a high value on individualism, and you can hardly pick up a psychoanalytic or psychological text that does not put so-called healthy ego functioning in a central place: the ego is the measure of reality, strengthening the ego is taken to be a desirable end of treatment, and the analyst’s ego is the norm and model for the patient’s ego development. In Lacan’s view, this perspective is radically incompatible with the Freudian revolution, a revolution that Freud himself (1917/1955, p. 139) compares to two major previous dislocations: First, when Copernicus dislodged the earth from the center of the universe, and then, when Darwin dislodged the human species 41

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from its privileged position in the order of beings, a dislocation whose consequences are still being felt in our schools. Freud, in turn, reveals that the ego is not master in its own house, and Lacan (1975) takes this third revolution very seriously, going so far as to view the ego as “the mental malady of man” (p. 22). This idea of Lacan’s comes directly from the field of psychoanalytic experience, in which the many levels of discourse are open for inspection. Psychoanalysis constantly demonstrates the fact that speech always says more than the speaker intends, as we see in the intrusive Freudian slips, the body speech of symptoms, the punning and homophonies of ordinary speech, and the ongoing fantasies and intermittent dreaming we all engage in. The Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz (1978) writes: “The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person, for our house is open; there are no keys in the doors and invisible guests come in and out at will.” The ego tries precisely to pretend that I am just one personality, possessing the identity and status of master of the house. Lacan described the ego as “the armor of an alienating identity” (1966/1977, p. 4) that insulates us from responsibility for the implications of unconscious desire. A good deal of experimental research on the self, depression, and aggression fits well with Lacan’s conception of the ego. For Lacan, the ego originates, is rooted in, takes its structure from, the mirroring mode of relating. Moreover, there is ample experimental evidence that the functions of the ego are essentially self-serving, with depression, in part, resulting from the ego’s inability to sustain illusions. Aggression, in turn, can be considered as a defensive response of the ego. It is hoped that an appreciation of the Lacanian ego will serve to revitalize thinking about psychoanalytic concepts and provide fertile theoretical ground for experimental research at the same time.

The Ego in Freud Rapaport (1967) finds four phases in the history of psychoanalytic ego psychology. In Phase 1, Freud lays stress on the role of defenses against remembering and reencountering certain experiences of reality. In Phase 2, begun when Freud made his assertion that many reports of infantile seduction were actually fantasies, the stress was placed on repression as the result of ego instincts. This is consistent with Lacan’s view of the ego as distorting, defensive, and self-protective (although Rapaport, of course, does not say this).

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This congruence extends into Phase 3, beginning after the 1914 paper on narcissism. Rapaport (1967) writes that in this period “Freud repeatedly indicated that he expected the theory of the ego to arise from the study of narcissistic neuroses [i.e., psychosis]” (p. 74). In The Ego and the Id the ego is presumed to differentiate out of the id, arises from identifications with abandoned objects, includes the structures responsible for resistance, and “is first and foremost a bodily ego” (Freud, 1923/1961, p. 26). Ego functions are still organized around the perception-consciousness system, and in that context the ego has an adaptive function insofar as it is selfprotective in the face of external dangers, such as the threat of death, the loss of the protecting mother, or the fear of castration (1923, pp. 57–59). This self-protective function, however, is not commensurate with a notion of ego autonomy, and Rapaport (1967) can only speak of “Freud’s implied conception of autonomous synthetic functions of the ego” (p. 750).

The Ego’s Origin in the Mirror Phase Lacan theorizes that the ego originates through the process wherein the infant visually recognizes its reflection in a mirror and responds to it with evident delight. In this archetypal moment the experience of visual self-recognition is positively charged for the infant—that is, not trivial; the essential structure of this experience is identification, wherein the assumption of an image has transformative impact on the subject; and this identification, which will be called “ego,” will go on to have primarily self-serving, defensive, and alienating functions. Lewis and Brooks-Gunn (1979) provide an empirical base of controlled observations that essentially support Lacan’s description of the infant before the mirror. Among the nine-month-old infants, 81 percent showed smiling behavior before the mirror, 80 percent cooed or babbled, 88 percent touched the mirror, and 38 percent engaged in rhythmic imitative behavior before the mirror. Although, perhaps, this constellation of behavior is not quite the jubilant response described by Lacan, Lewis and Brooks-Gunn (1979) conclude “the infants were quite interested in the mirror” (p. 37). More to the point, however, is finding that such measures of interest decreased with age, suggesting that the initial moment of recognition, what Lacan (1966/1977) calls the “Aha-Erlebnis,” had already taken place, for the most part, by the age of one year. None of the younger children, moreover, acted coy or silly before the mirror, as

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some of the older children did; Lewis and Brooks-Gunn (1979) note that acting “silly or coy has been seen as a measure of selfadmiration” (p. 44) and we can interpret that such narcissistic engagement can only occur after the mirror identification is firmly established (as in the older children). Lewis (1997) likewise dates the onset of what he calls “self-conscious emotions” (embarrassment, envy, empathy) only after the mirror identification. Lacan firmly distinguishes between this visual Gestalt, the mirror-reflection of the human body, that the infant takes to be oneself, and the self or the subject. Nor is the psychoanalytic ego to be equated with what Freud calls the perception-consciousness system as structured by the reality principle. “Our experience shows us that we should start, instead, from the function of méconnaissance [misunderstanding] that characterizes the ego in all its structures” (Lacan, 1966/1977, p. 6). The ego is related to a schema, as defined in contemporary work on self-schemata, namely, the self as “a complex, person-specific, central and attitudinal schema” (Greenwald & Pratkanis, 1984). We need to keep in mind the fundamental difference, found in Freud, between the level of unconscious processes, unconscious knowing, unconscious speaking, unconscious desire, and the level of consciousness. For Lacan, the true subject is the subject of the unconscious, not to be confused with the ego, which functions in consciousness as a structure of identification. Thus, we may distinguish: • Subject as unconscious knowing and desiring; • Ego as structure of identification; • Self as set of attributes posited in light of the ego; • What we can call the “domain of oneself,” that field of experience that includes the eight senses of ego described by Allport (1964) as well as the body, one’s possessions, and one’s desired objects. In this framework the self is always in quotation marks as a set of propositions, a kind of propaganda script promoted by the ego in order to sustain a sense of identity and continuity (see Jones & Pittman, 1982, for an extended formulation). The ego, moreover, is an object for the subject, in part, because it is an other for the subject, for its origin as reflection grounds it in exteriority. To see oneself in the mirror is to see another looking back.

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Lacan stresses that the infant is “jubilant” in this moment of recognition and identification because in this moment there is an experience (structured in the visual image) of the mastery, stature, and coherence that is in sharp contrast with the consequences of prematurity. For Lacan, these consequences are more than just the prolonged dependency stressed by Freud and others. The infant’s prematurity comports a neuro-muscular discoordination and felt bodily fragmentation and, along with this, a visual precocity. Thus, Lacan (1966) wrote in 1948: It is in function of this delay in development that the precocious maturation of visual perception takes its value of functional anticipation. There results from it, on the one hand, the remarkable salience of the visual structure in the recognition—so early, we have seen—of the human form. On the other hand, the opportunities to identify with this form, if I can put it so, receive from it a decisive pay-off which goes to constitute in man this imaginary knot, absolutely essential, that obscurely and across inextricable doctrinal contradictions psychoanalysis has, however admirably, designated under the name of narcissism. (p. 186, author’s own translation) We do not know, to be sure, if and how the infant is actually conscious of its biological status, but this is not Lacan’s point in any case. He, like Freud, lays great emphasis on the retroactive impact of subsequent experiences. Thus, adolescent sexual excitement retroactively influences how childhood experiences are remembered and understood from the vantage point of adolescent knowledge (see Laplanche & Pontalis, 1973, pp. 111–114 for further elaboration of this notion of “deferred action”). Likewise, to threaten the place of the ego causes anxiety insofar as it has a retroactive effect and allows a resurgence of the experience of bodily fragmentation. The visual Gestalt of the human form, coherent, erect, and masterful, promises a stability, unity, and wholeness that are in contrast to what Lacan (1953) calls the “corps morcelé,” the “body in bits and pieces” (p. 13). The identification with this visual Gestalt allows the body image to serve as a defensive mask, concealing the aboriginal state of fragmentation and the experience of bodily fragmentation that may reemerge under stress. Thus, when the integrity of the body image is attacked or threatened (as, for example, in competition or in the process of psychoanalysis when ego defenses begin to be dismantled) the subject experiences

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the anxiety associated with bodily fragmentation. (There is also an impulse to aggression, and we shall return to this.)

Recognition, Identification, and the Transformative Effects of the Image Contrary to the neo-Freudians (especially the Americans in the tradition of Hartmann, Rapaport, Kris, & Erikson) who proclaim that the ego and its correlative, the reality principle, provide objective access to what is, Lacan insists that the ego is essentially narcissistic and biased. The ego is primarily concerned with defending its position and appearance, is prone to luring and being lured, is ready to distort and deny facts to preserve illusions, and works toward creating mirroring objects—not just in others but also in statues, monuments, automobiles, and so on. This is accompanied by an exaggerated sense of one’s own importance and the pervasive use of projection, so much so that Lacan states that the subject’s ordinary cognitions are a form of “paranoiac knowledge,” which Lacan (1966/1977) defines as “the most general structure of human knowledge: that which constitutes the ego and its objects with attributes of permanence, identity, and substantiality, in short, with the form of entities or ‘things’ that are very different from the Gestalten that experience enables us to isolate in the shifting field . . .” (p. 17). Lacan wrote in 1946: “We think we can designate in the imago the proper object of psychology, precisely in the same way that Galileo’s notion of the inert material point was the foundation for Physics” (1966, p. 188, author’s own translation). The reflection in the mirror is an imago insofar as it is a visual image and representation of oneself. When the subject establishes an imago based on its mirror reflection (either in the mirror or a relationship in which the other reflects oneself) and identifies with it, the subject becomes caught up in what Lacan calls “the imaginary order,” the order of visual images where lure, disguise, and captivation are the salient features. It would be instructive to apply the Lacanian framework to the large body of research on imitation (Yando, Seitz, & Zigler, 1978). Kagan (1981) presents data indicating that infants begin to imitate an adult’s behavior around nine to ten months of age, but, thereafter, peer imitation increases with age, especially after two years (see also Muller, 1996). This is the period when mastery smiles begin to appear during pursuit and upon attaining a goal in soli-

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tary play (after one year, according to Kagan, 1981), and this is the time (eighteen to twenty-four months) when evaluative standards emerge, as indicated by attention to broken toys, missing upholstery buttons, as well as distress following an adult model’s performance, taken to be an indication of apprehension “because of a self-imposed obligation to perform actions” that the child is not sure he or she can implement (Kagan, 1981, p. 54). Imitation functions as a central variable for self-serving concerns in the findings of Thelen and Kirkland (1976), who summarize research indicating that “being imitated leads to increased attraction toward the imitator, increased allocation of rewards, and reciprocal imitation” (p. 692). They found that among school children, subjects tend to like and imitate, in turn, not the younger, but those older children (presumably of higher status because of their age and observable mastery) who imitated them. The same subjects also rated their own performances as higher when they were imitated by an older child than when a younger child imitated them. Indeed, being imitated by a younger child appeared to be aversive. The effects of mirroring and being mirrored even serve to influence punitiveness. Berkowitz and Dunand (1981) found that subjects in a hot room punished a peer most severely when the peer was not bothered by the heat (as they were), and were least punitive when the peer seemed to share in the suffering: “In sum, we come to like those who (we believe) have the same emotional feelings we do when they are exposed to the same unpleasant condition” (Berkowitz, 1983b, p. 114).

Self-Serving Functions of the Ego Without mentioning the work of Lacan, Greenwald (1980) presented a review of findings from the areas of memory, persuasion, and attribution research that support Lacan’s view of the ego as distorting, defensive, and self-serving. Cognitive biases such as egocentricity (self as the focus of knowledge), conservatism (resistance to cognitive change), and a self-serving feature Greenwald calls “beneffectance” (perception of responsibility for desired, but not undesired, outcomes), all “play a role in some fundamental aspect of personality” and, moreover, “are pervasive in and characteristic of normal personalities” (p. 603). Subsequent research (e.g., Ross, McFarland, & Fletcher, 1981) supported Greenwald’s thesis. These biases are much more in evidence when a specific domain, namely,

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the domain of oneself, is at issue or when ego-involvement as indicated by actual or manipulated arousal levels (Gollwitzer, Earle, & Stephan, 1982) is made to vary. The self-serving function of beneffectance, “the tendency to take credit for success while denying responsibility for failure” (Greenwald, 1980, p. 605) is illustrated in a study by Johnston (1967). Subjects were told that each had a partner with whom they had to perform a task of skill, and feedback was given to each “team” (there was, in fact, no partner). Afterward, in cases of above average performance, subjects took credit for the success, while the assumed partner was blamed in cases of below average performance. Even with average performance feedback designations, a subject tended to believe that his or her above-average performance had been lowered by the below-average performance of the assumed partner. Ross and Sicoly (1979) also reported that subjects accepted more responsibility for the group’s product than was attributed to them by the other participants. Subjects tend to deny responsibility for negative consequences of their actions in an equally self-serving manner. Harvey, Harris, and Barnes (1975) had subjects believe they were administering shocks to someone in a learning task (as in Milgram, 1963). Subjects believing they gave severe shocks claimed less responsibility for the learner’s distress than those giving mild shocks, even less responsibility than subject observers attributed to them. This pattern of “asymmetrical attributions” after success and failure has been taken to be a “firmly established finding” (Gollwitzer, Earle, & Stephan, 1982, p. 702). The motivational versus cognitive aspects of this phenomenon, however, have been debated. Miller and Ross (1975) proposed that an information theory model rather than self-esteem enhancement would account for the findings in the following way: 1. people expect success more than failure; 2. people take responsibility for expected outcomes (and, therefore, take credit for success); 3. people tend to perceive a relation between effort and intended outcome (and, therefore, take credit for success). However, Sicoly, and Ross (1977) found ample evidence for the motivational hypothesis. They asked seventy female college students to read pairs of suicide notes and to discriminate the genuine from the fake. Being told this was a social-sensitivity task, they

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were systematically given either successful or failing scores and were asked to rate their degree of responsibility for success or failure. Then they were asked to rate the accuracy of a confederate’s feedback that took the form of systematically overvaluing or undervaluing the subjects’ observed self-ratings of responsibility. Once again, the results indicated that subjects were more willing to take responsibility for success than for failure. Subjects also rated the confederate’s evaluations of their responsibility as more accurate when they received excessive credit for success or exoneration for failure. In addition, these same subjects (in the success-more responsibility and failure-less responsibility conditions) went on to rate the confederate as more perceptive, more likable, more confident in their judgments, and as having more information on which to base them. Stephan et al. (1979) manipulated high versus low expectation for success on an experimental task along with the basis of these expectations (ability or task difficulty) with two groups of male undergraduates. The results of two studies supported the self-serving bias, namely, that subjects claim they are responsible for success, and attribute failure to task difficulty, independent of the basis for their expectations or whether the expectation is confirmed. Lau and Russell (1980) examined newspaper articles covering sports events and found that players, coaches, and sportswriters tend to attribute internal reasons more for winning than for losing, that those with greater ego-involvement (players and coaches) do this more than others, and that, once again, these results were not a function of expectancies. In a review of more than seventy-five attribution studies, Zuckerman (1979) found “very little evidence of self-serving attributions” (p. 248) in studies oriented around influencing others (as in teacher-student or therapist-client paradigms), but in twentyseven of thirty-eight attribution studies regarding the outcome of subjects’ own performance, self-enhancing and self-protective effects were found (showing that subjects take more credit for success and less for failure). No self-serving bias was found when both self and other performed independent tasks, but studies in which self competed with other provided clear support for the self-serving bias (that success results from skill or effort, while failure is due to luck). In a review of more than thirty studies, Bradley (1978) also finds support for the self-serving bias. Green and Gross (1979) likewise confirm this pattern of findings. Subjects were asked why positive or negative evaluations were given by another person under varying conditions. When subjects were the target persons, they attributed the positive evaluations to themselves and the negative

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evaluations to situational circumstances; when a third person was evaluated, positive and negative evaluations had no effect on the attributions. Zuckerman (1979) concluded that “the motivational explanation is more effective than any of its informational alternatives” (p. 276). The ego’s distorting effects on cognitive processes can be seen in other situations that are, quite literally, self-serving. Sackheim (1983) stresses the adaptive value of self-deception. Taylor (1983) analyzed the beliefs and treatment course of women with breast cancer. The patients who do best make exaggerated (and illusory) attributions that they or their physicians can control the illness, and they also make self-enhancing social comparisons (no matter how severe their illness, they claim to be better off than some others). As Taylor indicates, loss of such illusions appears associated with depression. When depressed subjects are compared with nondepressed subjects, a pattern of self-serving attributions characterizes the nondepressed: they exaggerate others’ positive views of them (Lewisohn, Mischel, Chaplin, & Barton, 1980); they are more likely to attribute control over uncontrollable events (Alloy, Abramson, & Viscusi, 1981); they tend to minimize the amount of negative feedback others give them (Nelson & Craighead, 1977); they overreward their own performances (Rozensky, Rehm, Pry, & Roth, 1977); and they make internal attributions for their successes, while their failures are blamed on external factors (Abramson & Alloy, 1981). These and other findings are highly consistent with a Lacanian view of the ego that places its self-serving, distorting, and defensive cognitive features in the forefront.

Ego as a Source of Aggression Toward the end of his life Freud (1938/1964) wrote: “The desire for a powerful, uninhibited ego seems to us intelligible; but, as we are taught by the times we live in, it is in the profoundest sense hostile to civilization” (p. 185). Ten years later, Lacan delivered a paper at the Eleventh Congress of French-language Psychoanalysts in Brussels, titled Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis (1966/1977, pp. 8–29; see also Muller & Richardson, 1982, pp. 42–66). In this paper, Lacan roots the impulse to aggression squarely in the narcissistic structure of the ego. By adapting the Hegelian master-slave dialectic regarding the origin of self-consciousness (Muller & Richardson, 1982, pp. 64–66), Lacan is able to consider aggression in the intersubjective framework of the desire for recognition.

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Lacan (1966/1977) states the major thesis of the essay: “Aggressivity is the correlative tendency of a mode of identification that we call narcissistic, and which determines the formal structure of man’s ego and of the register of entities characteristic of his world” (p. 16). Lacan (1966/1977) states that a specific image accompanies aggressive intentions: “These are the images of castration, mutilation, dismemberment, dislocation, evisceration, devouring, bursting open of the body, in short, the imagos that I have grouped together under the apparently structural term of imagos of the fragmented body” (p. 11). He supports his claim with observations about a series of cultural practices such as tattooing, incision, circumcision, and even fashion. He points out that “pulling off of the head and the ripping open of the belly are themes that occur spontaneously to [the] imagination” of children between the ages of two and five (p. 11). The paintings of Hieronymous Bosch provide “an atlas for all the aggressive images that torment mankind” (p. 11). Dream fragments reveal the same themes. We see the same focus on bodily fragmentation in the “cruel refinement” of man’s weapons at the earlier, “craft stage” of his industry (p. 12). In this way, we are led to see the image of the fragmented body as the core psychological content of the impulse to aggress. In the phenomenon of transitivism, wherein children identify with one another’s visual image, Lacan (1966/1977) finds the groundwork for what he calls the “aggressive relativity” that marks the ego from its very origin (p. 19). As a result of such identification with the other, the subject desires what others desire in the arena of competition and admiration. In addition, under the critical pressure of an essentially unattainable ideal ego, we observe “the depressive disruptions of the experienced reverses of inferiority” (1977, p. 20). When an adult’s “bad internal objects” are invoked in situations of inferiority, there can follow a “disconcerting” and “fragmenting effect on the imago of the original identification” (1966/ 1977, p. 21). The unifying effect of the original identification serves to bind the infantile image of the fragmented body; when this identification is challenged by the image of competing with another, or when the subject’s demand for recognition is refused, or when the bodily coherence, so maintained, is attacked physically, the response is aggression. Thus, the aggressive imagery of bodily fragmentation is the inverse of the Gestalt of the unifying ego and, thereby, aggression is held in correlative tension with narcissism. Lacan (1966/1977) ends his essay by relating his view of aggression to the social, global arena of war: “The pre-eminence of aggressivity in our civilization would be sufficiently demonstrated

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already by the fact that it is usually confused in ‘normal’ morality with the virtue of strength” (p. 25). A view of human activity that sanctions aggression in the name of moral strength and competition is disruptive of social bonds; the “promotion of the ego today,” furthermore, leads to isolation (p. 27). Therefore, the “instinct of self-preservation” must be reexamined given the link between aggressive mastery, and, for example, heart disease (Carver & Glass, 1978). We see how the fear of death can become psychologically subordinate in man “to the narcissistic fear of damage to one’s own body” (Lacan, 1966/1977, p. 28) and, specifically, to the narcissistic desire to maintain the coherence of the body image, grounded in the original mirror identification that dispelled fragmentation. From this perspective, we can hypothesize the following: 1. The impulse to aggress will follow any challenge to the narcissistic position of the ego, in increasing severity of retaliation for: a. disagreement with one’s opinion; b. refusal of praise or recognition; c.

insults and direct assaults on self-esteem;

d. direct physical injury as a challenge to felt bodily coherence, mastery, and unity. 2. To the extent that strength, control, and coherence have been valued as masculine in a given culture, men will show more overt aggression than women and androgynous women more than feminine women. 3. All of the above will vary with situational and social factors that mediate and structure an individual’s aggressive responses. Just as the ego maintains self-serving functions in the sphere of cognitive attributions (as discussed earlier), so, also, it can be seen that the ego will mediate aggressive responses to any challenge of its position. This viewpoint attempts to encompass both a body-based as well as cognitive approach to aggression. It is body-based insofar as physical pain “can be a fairly potent stimulus to aggression in a wide variety of species” (Berkowitz, 1983a, p. 1136), precisely be-

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cause pain threatens the experience of bodily integrity. The cognitive aspects, in human beings, are crucial insofar as “anger is a response to some perceived misdeed . . . more than anything else, anger is an attribution of blame” (Averill, 1983, p. 1150). We become angry most often at those we know and love (Averill, 1983), not simply because of frequency of contact, but because it is precisely from them that we desire to be recognized and to be mirrored, and when we are denied such recognition, we become angry. And this applies equally to men and women (Frodi, Macaulay, & Thome, 1977). But such cognitive factors are not necessarily conscious, for a Lacanian framework, stressing the unconscious work of signifiers that structure responses, also concurs with an emphasis on the conditioning of associations that cue aggressive responses, in accord with what is now termed “associative network theory” (Bower, 1981). Cues are perceived and contextualized in relation to a surrounding network of place, time, and people without conscious awareness (Marcel, 1983; Shevrin, 1980; Shevrin & Dickman, 1980; Silverman, 1976), as well as in the network of conscious associations as a signifier.

A Constraints Model of the Ego The Lacanian view of the ego can, I think, be conceptualized in terms of constraints placed on knowledge of a domain, the domain of oneself—constraints placed on how we come to know it, that is, in a distorted manner. Greenwald (1982) considers personality development as including a “self-system” that functions as a “protected domain” associated with a set of “cognitive biases” (p. 154). Keil (1981) writes: “Peirce was preoccupied with the following question: Given the multitude of hypotheses that can be based on a particular set of observations, how is it that science makes any progress?” (p. 198). Peirce’s answer was that we are predisposed to generate some hypotheses rather than others, and Chomsky argues for such a predisposition in the case of the child learning to speak. “Knowledge acquisition cannot proceed successfully unless the inductive devices that apply to various cognitive domains are constrained in their outputs” (Keil, 1981, p. 19). Following Chomsky, Keil (1981) defines constraints: as formal restrictions that limit the class of logically possible knowledge structures that can normally be used in a given cognitive domain. Constraints reduce such a class toward a

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limited class of naturally learnable concepts. This does not mean absolute learnability—that is, that non-natural concepts cannot be taught with extensive training—but merely that such concepts are much less natural. A dog can, with extensive training, be taught to walk on its hind legs, but such behavior is still non-natural. (p. 198) Keil (1981) argues for the existence of detailed constraints because “much of cognitive development cannot be understood without reference to them” (p. 197). He goes on to say that “knowledge [in a given domain] undergoes change but nonetheless honors a uniform set of constraints throughout development” (p. 202). This implies, therefore, that the preschooler’s knowledge is not essentially different from the adult’s. Examples of such work on knowledge domains and constraints include Chomsky, Wexler, and Culicover (1980) and Fodor (1975) on language, Osherson (1977) on natural deduction systems, Keil (1979) on basic categories of existence, and Gelman and Gallistel (1978) on numbers. Gelman (1979), for example, suggests five basic principles for successful counting: 1. The one-one principle—each item in an array must be tagged with one and only one unique tag. 2. The stable-order principle—the tags assigned must be drawn from a stably ordered list. 3. The cardinal principle—the last tag used for a particular count serves to designate the cardinal number represented by the array. 4. The abstraction principle—any set of items may be collected together for a count. 5. The order-irrelevance principle—the order in which a given object is tagged as one, two, three, and so on, is irrelevant as long as it is tagged but once and as long as the stable-order and cardinal principles are honored. Number words are arbitrary tags. The evidence clearly supports the conclusion that preschoolers honor these principles (p. 901). And she asserts that preschoolers can do this by the age of two and one-half years.

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These principles, as such, are not constraints, for Gelman’s principles “are probably not stated in sufficiently general or formal terms and are probably consequences of more powerful, abstract constraints that are yet to be discovered. Nonetheless, they illustrate how natural knowledge of counting might be restricted” (Keil, 1981, pp. 211–212). Similar sets of constraints can be found that are specific to such domains as moral reasoning, aesthetics, naturalistic knowledge of mechanics, certain spatial and orienting skills, classification skills, causal thinking, etc. Keil does not address the possibility of a domain of oneself, although such a domain appears to be at least as important as the others. Keil (1981) asks whether there are “general principles that enable one to tell what aspects of knowledge are and are not likely to be tightly constrained” (p. 223). While awaiting further empirical support, he offers five “suggestive guidelines” that are useful for exploring the notion of a domain of oneself whose constraints constitute the ego. Keil’s first guideline is that “the more complex and abstract the knowledge, the more constraints are needed at the cognitive level” (p. 23). He argues that the “richer the knowledge to be acquired, the more tightly constrained it will have to be at the highest possible levels of description, if acquisition is to proceed successfully” (pp. 223–224). The domain of oneself is surely among the more complex and abstract domains of knowledge—Is this not what the history of philosophy, a good part of theology, and numerous other disciplines, including literature and psychoanalysis, reveal?—but we must leave open for now the issue of whether and in what ways such knowledge is “scientific.” What kind of “tight constraints” are specific to this domain? We do not yet know, but Greenwald’s work on the biases of egocentricity in the fabrication of memory, conservatism as resistance to change, and beneffectance offers some clues about biases that (along with others) are consistently operative in how we construe or, rather, misconstrue this domain. When Lacan (1966/1977) insists that “a misconstruing” is “essential to knowing myself [un méconnaître essentiel au me connaître] (p. 306), is this not a constraint specific to the domain of oneself ? Keil’s (1981) second guideline is that “strongly constrained knowledge is knowledge that is acquired relatively effortlessly and rapidly, and usually without formal tutelage. Moreover, it is knowledge that is universally acquired” (p. 224). This describes, quite adequately, some features of how we come to know the domain of oneself, features that include vision, the construction of space, properties of the image, and the mirror phase in which self-

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recognition originates through the child’s spontaneous identification with the reflected image of the body as Gestalt. Knowledge from the mirror phase (the reflection is recognized as “I”) arrives effortlessly and, presumably, universally. Keil’s third guideline for discerning when a domain is tightly constrained is that “tightly constrained knowledge appears to be less open to conscious introspection. This principle is a likely corollary of the prior principle that such knowledge is acquired without specific instruction. . . . In a related vein, this principle suggests that the acquisition of constrained knowledge is less susceptible to manipulation by means of learning strategies and other sorts of conscious manipulations” (p. 224). In the case of the domain of oneself, this principle is central because it opens the way to an eventual elaboration of the unconscious/conscious distinction as well as to a more rigorous delineation of how the set of constraints (ego), by necessity, skews this domain and results in an intrinsic misconstrual of it. This domain of oneself, moreover, is seen to have limited accessibility to conscious thought, as argued by Freud (1900/ 1953) and, more recently, in Bowers and Meichenbaum (1984) and Westen (1998). In addition, there is widespread skepticism about the degree to which once-acquired knowledge (or misconstrual) of this domain is open to conscious manipulation (Argyris, 1976). Keil’s (1981) fourth guideline states that “highly constrained knowledge may also carry a much stronger sense of anomaly than less restricted knowledge. Anomalies in different domains might include ungrammaticality, certain perceptual illusions, anomalous number systems, and bizarre moral laws” (p. 224). Every therapist witnesses anomalies in the domain of oneself: peculiar obsessional thoughts and compulsions, strange notions about oneself felt as unique phenomena, hysterical bodily symptoms, many of the neurotic phenomena that we are ordinarily told are unwanted, incomprehensible, crazy. Keil’s (1981) fifth guideline takes the form of “an intuition that restrictive constraints are better characterized as constraints on structure than as constraints on process” (p. 224). This seems reasonable with regard to the domain of oneself, where the constraints of the ego set limits not on content or on processes as such, but rather on how they are structured through the mirroring mode, looking and being seen, competitiveness, egocentricity, conservatism, defensiveness, beneffectance, etc. By conceptualizing the ego in this way (as constraints that structure the domain of knowledge of oneself), we need not view the ego as an organization of knowledge (Greenwald, 1980), but rather as the organization whereby

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knowledge about the domain of oneself is structured. The ego, therefore, is not the substantive content, but rather the skewing lens, the source of méconnaissance about the domain of oneself. It is precisely this distorting function of the ego that Lacan claims has been overlooked by the ego psychologists in their zeal to defend its autonomy, synthetic functions, and veridicality.

Summary The first experience of self-recognition before the mirror, then, is no casual, passing moment. It constitutes an identification with an image and has a transformative effect. By identifying with its reflected image, the infant makes a profound shift from actual experience to an idealization of experience. The idealized form of this “I” promises a cohesion that contrasts with the previous feeling of bodily fragmentation, a mastery that is immune to any sense of insufficiency and helplessness, and an imposing stature not apparent in its lowliness. This first captivation by an external image forms the basis and provides the model for all subsequent identifications and, therefore, for what is commonly spoken of as “ego identity.” But contrary to the prevalent perspective that prizes such ego identity and makes the ego the agency of adaptation to reality, Lacan calls attention to the ego’s fundamentally defensive and distorting role. The ego, spawned in the mirror phase, is a defensive structure that serves to camouflage the anxiety of bodily fragmentation. Once installed, it is prone to competitive threats by the images of others, and it maintains its own position with rigidity (Argyris, 1976). The subject, in identifying its image as itself, mistakenly locates itself in an external prosthesis, measures itself against an external idealization, and, thereby, distorts its own reality. Thus, a fundamental misconstrual is structurally instituted in self-consciousness, so that, henceforth, the ego will mark for the subject “his discordance with his own reality” (Lacan, 1966/1977, p. 2). Thus Lacan (1966/1977) repeatedly speaks of “the méconnaissances that constitute the ego,” “the function of méconnaissance that characterizes the ego in all its structures” (p. 6), especially in its speech, “in those reactions of opposition, negation, ostentation, and lying that our experience has shown us to be the characteristic modes of the agency of the ego in dialogue” (p. 15). When the distorting illusion of ego mastery is lost, depression ensues; when it is threatened, aggressivity follows.

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Abramson, L. Y., & Alloy, L. B. (1981). Depression, nondepression, and cognitive illusions: Reply to Schwartz. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 110, 436–447. Alloy, L. B., Abramson, L.Y., & Viscusi, D. (1981). Induced mood and the illusion of control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 41, 1129–1140. Allport, G. (1964). The ego in contemporary psychology. Personality and Social Encounter, Selected Essays. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Argyris, C. (1976). Theories of action that inhibit individual learning. American Psychologist, 31, 638–654. Averill, J. R. (1983). Studies on anger and aggression: Implications for theories of emotion. American Psychologist, 38, 1145–1160. Berkowitz, L. (1983a). Aversively stimulated aggression: Some parallels and differences in research with animals and humans. American Psychologist, 38, 1135–1144. Berkowitz, L. (1983b). The experience of anger as a parallel process in the display of impulsive “angry” aggression. In R. Geen, & E. Donnerstein (Eds.), Aggression: Theoretical and empirical reviews: Vol. I. Theoretical and methodological issues (pp. 103–133). New York: Academic Press. Berkowitz, L., & Dunand, M. (1981). [Misery wants to share the misery]. Unpublished raw data. Cited in Berkowitz (1983b), p. 130. Bower, G. H. (1981). Mood and memory. American Psychologist, 36, 129–148. Bowers, K., & Meichenbaum, D. (Eds.). (1984). The unconscious reconsidered. New York: Wiley. Bradley, G. W. (1978). Self-serving biases in the attribution process: A reexamination of the fact or fiction question. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36, 56–71. Carver, C. S., & Glass, D. C. (1978). Coronary-prone behavior pattern and interpersonal aggression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36, 361–366. Fodor, J. A. (1975). The language of thought. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell. Freud, S. (1953). The interpretation of dreams. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 4 & 5, pp. 1–626). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1900) Freud, S. (1955). A difficulty in the path of psycho-analysis. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 17, pp. 135–144). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1917) Freud, S. (1961). The ego and the id. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 19, pp. 12–66). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1923)

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Freud, S. (1964). An outline of psychoanalysis. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete works of Sigmund Freud (Vol 23, pp. 144–207). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1938) Frodi, A., Macauley, J., & Thome, P. R. (1977). Are Women always less aggressive than men? A review of the experimental literature. Psychological Bulletin, 84, 634–660. Gelman, R. (1979). Preschool thought. American Psychologist, 34, 900–905. Gelman, R., & Gallistel, C. R. (1978). The child’s understanding of number. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gollwitzer, P. M., Earle, W. B., & Stephan, W. G. (1982). Affect as a determinant of egotism: Residual excitation and performance attributions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 43, 702–709. Green, S. K., & Gross, A. E. (1979). Self-serving biases in implicit evaluations. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 5, 214–217. Greenwald, A. G. (1980). The totalitarian ego: Fabrication and revision of personal history. American Psychologist, 35, 603–618. Greenwald, A. G. (1982). Is anyone in charge? Personalysis versus the principle of personal unity. In Jerry Suls (Ed.), Psychological perspectives on the self: Vol. 1, (pp. 151–181). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Greenwald, A. G., & Pratkanis, A. R. (1984). The self. In R. S. Wyer, & T. K. Srull (Eds.), Handbook of social cognition. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Harvey, J. H., Harris, B., & Barnes, R. D. (1975). Actor-observer differences in the perceptions of responsibility and freedom. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32, 22–28. Johnston, W. A. (1967). Individual performance and self-evaluation in a simulated team. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 2, 309–328. Jones, E. E., & Pittman, T. S. (1982). Toward a general theory of strategic self-presentation. In Jerry Suls (Ed.), Psychological perspectives on the self: Vol. 1, (pp. 231–262). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Kagan, J. (1981). The second year: The emergence of self-awareness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Keil, F. C. (1979). Semantic and conceptual development: An ontological perspective. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Keil, F. C. (1981). Constraints on knowledge and cognitive development. Psychological Review, 88, 197–227. Lacan, J. (1953). Some reflections on the ego. International Journal of Psycho-analysis, 34, 11–17. Lacan, J. (1966). Écrits. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Lacan, J. (1975). Le séminaire de Jacques Lacan. Book 1: Les écrits techniques de Freud, 1953–1954. (J.-A. Miller, Ed.). Paris: Editions du Seuil.

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Lacan, J. (1977). Écrits: A Selection (A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1966) Laplanche, J., & Pontalis, J.-B. (1973). The language of psychoanalysis. New York: Norton. Lau, R. R., & Russell, D. (1980). Attributions in the sports pages. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39, 29–38. Lewis, M. (1997). The self in self-conscious emotions. In J. Snodgrass, & R. Thompson (Eds.), The Self across Psychology: Self-recognition, selfawareness, and the self concept. New York: The New York Academy of Sciences. Lewis, M., & Brooks-Gunn, J. (1979). Social cognition and the acquisition of self. New York: Plenum. Lewisohn, P. M., Mischel, W., Chaplin, W., & Barton, R. (1980). Social competence and depression: The role of illusory self-perception. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 89, 203–212. Marcel, A. J. (1983). Conscious and unconscious perception: Experiments on visual masking and word recognition. Cognitive Psychology, 15, 197–237. Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67, 371–378. Miller, D. T., & Ross, M. (1975). Self-serving biases in the attribution of causality: Fact or fiction? Psychological Bulletin, 82, 213–225. Milosz, C. (1978). Bells in winter (C. Milosz & L. Ballee, Trans.). New York: Ecco Press. Muller, J. (1996). Beyond the psychoanalytic dyad: Developmental semiotics in Freud, Peirce, and Lacan. New York: Routledge. Muller, J. P., & Richardson, W. J. (1982). Lacan and language: A reader’s guide to Écrits. New York: International Universities Press. Nelson, R. E., & Craighead, W. E. (1977). Selective recall of positive and negative feedback, self-control behaviors, and depression. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 86, 379–388. Osherson, D. N. (1977). Natural connectives: A Chomskean approach. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 16, 1–29. Rapaport, D. (1967). A historical survey of psychoanalytic ego psychology. In M. Gill (Ed.), The collected papers of David Rapaport (pp. 745–757). New York: Basic Books. Ross, M., & Sicoly, F. (1979). Egocentric biases in availability and attribution. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37, 322–336. Ross, M., MacFarland, C., & Fletcher, G. (1981). The effect of attitude on the recall of personal histories. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 40, 627–634. Rozensky, R. H., Rehm, L. P., Pry, G., & Roth, D. (1977). Depression and self-reinforcement behavior in hospitalized patients. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 8, 31–34.

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Sackheim, H. A. (1983). Self-deception, self-esteem, and depression: The adaptive value of lying to oneself. In J. Masling (Ed.), Empirical studies of psychoanalytic theories: Vol. 1, (pp. 101–157). Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press. Shevrin, H. (1980). Glimpses of the unconscious. Psychology Today, 13, 128. Shevrin, H., & Dickman, S. (1980). The psychological unconscious: A necessary assumption for all psychological theory? American Psychologist, 35, 421–434. Sicoly, F., & Ross, M. (1977). Facilitation of ego-biased attributions by means of self-serving observer feedback. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35, 734–741. Silverman, L. H. (1976). Psychoanalytic theory: “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” American Psychologist, 31, 621–637. Stephan, W. G., Bernstein, W. M., Stephan, C., & Davis, M. H. (1979). Attributions for achievement: Egotism vs. expectancy confirmation. Social Psychology Quarterly, 42, 5–1. Taylor, S. E. (1983). Adjustment to threatening events: A theory of cognitive adaptation. American Psychologist, 38, 1161–1173. Thelen, M. H., & Kirkland, K. D. (1976). On status and being imitated: Effects on reciprocal imitation and attraction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 33, 691–697. Westen, D. (1998). Psychology: Mind, Brain, and Culture (2nd ed.). New York: John Wiley & Sons. Wexler, K., & Culicover, P. W. (1980). Formal principles of language acquisition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Yando, R., Seitz, V., & Zigler, E. (1978). Imitation: A developmental perspective. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Zuckerman, M. (1979). Attribution of success and failure revisited, or: The motivational bias is alive and well in attribution theory. Journal of Personality, 47, 245–287.

3 Socializing Psycholinguistic Discourse Language as Praxis in Lacan Suzanne Barnard

The Crisis in Psycholinguistics

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lthough language is often invoked as a uniquely human accomplishment, the study of language in psychology has failed to capture language as a human and, therefore, essentially social and ethical phenomenon. In particular, since the formation of psycholinguistics as a discipline almost half a century ago, theoretical accounts of language have been framed almost exclusively using descriptive language and explanatory forms imported from the natural, physical, and mathematical sciences. Drawing metaphors for the language-subject relationship primarily from neurobiology, artificial intelligence, and computer science, 63

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psycholinguists typically privilege nativist and cognitivist models of language development and use. These models have been adopted, however, without much reflection on broader questions concerning their implicit assumptions about language, human subjectivity, and social interaction. Over the past two decades, psycholinguists have increasingly recognized the failure to reflect on such basic assumptions as a significant obstacle to understanding the psychological, social-interactional, and ethical-political nature of human language. Many have underscored the disparity between psycholinguistic theory and recent psychological approaches that emphasize the role of language in forming the social institutions and discursive practices within which the subject is recognized (e. g., social constructionism and hermeneutics), but few psycholinguists have attempted a serious reconciliation of these traditions. Instead, attempts at recuperating the social and intersubjective dimensions of language use have taken the form of post hoc alliances with various linguistically oriented social science and humanities subdisciplines, including sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and philosophical pragmatism, to name just a few. To be fair, psycholinguistics has benefited from the shift in focus this strategy has effected—the shift has lent legitimacy to the study of sociolinguistic phenomena and has contributed to the emergence and consolidation of “socially oriented” subdisciplines such as discourse analysis and pragmatics. Ultimately, however, even these “new” approaches remain limited by a reliance on many of the same basic assumptions of the nativist and representationalist models that have dominated the field since its inception. As the European psycholinguist Ragnar Rommetveit (1983) has argued: Recent expansion of socio, -psycho-, and linguo-linguistic theory . . . consist to a large extent in a proliferation of auxiliary hypotheses about social-interactional features of human language tagged onto or superimposed upon a shared heritage of Cartesian assumptions about its nonsocial, individual psychological essence. The tacitly taken-for-granted image [of the subject] . . . is essentially that of an asocial, but highly complex computational and information processing device. And the pattern emerging when we try to combine recent multidisciplinary “pragmatic” theories into a coherent whole is indeed a rather blurred and incoherent picture. (p. 91)

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In proclaiming that they appeared doomed to repeat the errors of their nativist and representationalist predecessors, Rommetveit was one of the first to suggest that the emerging “social” psycholinguistic subdisciplines would not ultimately provide the much-hoped-for resolution to the discipline’s “social” crisis. Since then, an increasingly well-developed body of critical literature has borne out Rommetveit’s prediction. The current state of affairs in psycholinguistics is one in which the pragmatic and socialinteractional dimensions of language are observed, analyzed, and theorized without any serious questioning of the rationalist model of the subject nor the representationalist model of language implicitly informing such work. As a result, language is understood to be “social” to the extent that it serves as the transparent communicative intermediary between the ideal domains of a monad subjectivity and an “objective” reality. The theoretical impasse that this state of affairs represents has a very complex history that I will only partially elaborate here. My particular interest in this history is to highlight certain of its “symptomatic” trends, ones that highlight most dramatically the rationalist and structuralist biases that have produced this chronic crisis. These are perhaps most evident in the work of Noam Chomsky, whose “Universal Grammar” has arguably been the single most significant influence on theory and research in mainstream psycholinguistics. Chomsky’s ideas have radically shaped the character of American psycholinguistics as a discipline and, in spite of the fact that his work has been persuasively criticized on multiple grounds, Universal Grammar and its progeny continue to gain currency both in the United States and around the world (cf. Bickerton, 1995; Chomsky, 1993; Pinker, 1994). His work dramatically illustrates the way in which rationalist approaches to the subject and traditional structuralist approaches to language have been complicit in psycholinguistics’ failure to account for the language-subject relation in fundamentally social and ethical terms. Although it has significantly influenced contemporary theory in language philosophy, communication theory, and literary criticism, the work of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan has received almost no attention in the psycholinguistic literature to date. Although the institutional, disciplinary, and national boundaries that have separated his work from American psycholinguistics make such neglect predictable, his work is profoundly relevant for addressing the historically persistent problems in theorizing the relationship between language and subjectivity. In particular, Lacan’s

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displacement of the Cartesian cogito and his reworking of the Saussurean sign provide a productive contrast to Chomsky’s psycholinguistics—a contrast that highlights the points at which Lacan’s approach might most usefully be engaged as an intervention in the crisis of psycholinguistic theory. Lacan’s account of the unconscious and the role of rhetorical functions in structuring the language-subject relation is particularly useful as an intervention because it avoids the theoretical problems perpetuated by both Universal Grammar and those critiques of Chomsky that reduce the social dimension of language to “social interaction” or “intersubjectivity.” Finally, his work provides an alternative foundation from which the articulation of theoretical and methodological strategies for “socializing” contemporary psycholinguistic discourse might proceed.

Of Syntax, Signifier, and System: Language and Logic in Chomsky, Saussure, and Lacan Chomsky’s early conception of language represented in many ways a sharp break with the American structural linguistic approaches that preceded it. Perhaps the most significant difference was that whereas most American structuralists were interested in breaking language down into its “smallest” constituent parts, Chomsky was interested in understanding the properties of language as an irreducible whole (Benveniste, 1971). Thus, he developed a synthetic approach to analyzing language structure, one in which syntax is taken as the basic dimension of analysis. By taking linguistics’ object to be this synchronic system—a system fundamentally characterized by a set of relations—Chomsky implicitly aligned himself with the tradition of European structural linguistics, perhaps most clearly with that of Ferdinand de Saussure. In Saussure’s linguistics, the synchronic system of language (“la langue”) is constituted by a set of relations between signs. Saussure defined langue as the collection of signs that characterize a language at any given moment, and that, when abstracted from the actual flow of discourse, can be seen to form a system by virtue of their differential relations. In Chomsky’s case, this system is characterized as a set of relations between syntactic categories. Chomsky identified this idealized system as “linguistic competence,” and defined it as the basic syntactic categories of language and the principles of their transformation from surface to deep structure. Saussure and Chomsky also both emphasized the privileged status

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of this system with respect to linguistic performance, or speech. As Chomsky (1964) remarks: Clearly, the description of intrinsic competence provided by the grammar is not to be confused with an account of actual performance, as de Saussure emphasized with such lucidity. . . . Saussure regards langue basically as a store of signs with their grammatical properties, that is, a store of word-like elements, fixed-phrases, and perhaps, certain limited phrase types. . . . (p. 23) Thus, just as speech is for Saussure a residuum of irregularity, linguistic performance is, for Chomsky, equally degenerate. In both cases, then, the proper object for grammatical theory is to be gained by an idealization of the system behind the superficial facts of language performance. Although Chomsky and Saussure describe the units comprising the linguistic system rather differently, both their accounts ultimately betray an implicit mentalist bias. In linking signification either to the mental concept (Saussure’s signified) or to an invariant set of logical categories (Chomsky’s syntax), both theorists effectively reduce language to its function in an idealized realm of communication, and circumscribe its domain within that of conscious thought. For example, Saussure envisioned language as a series of articulations operating along the margin of two planes— that of the “vague, shapeless mass” of prelinguistic thought and that of the inarticulate material of prelinguistic sound (Saussure, 1986). Thus, he theorized the function of language (langue) to be that of an “intermediary” between the realm of chaotic, amorphous thought and that of the malleable material of sound. The result was neither the transformation of preexisting ideas into material form, nor the transformation of pre-articulate sounds into ideas but, rather, the production of “thought-sound” divisions or signs, which function to produce a “mutually complementary delimitation of units” (1986, pp. 110–111). It is this conceptualization of the sign that allows Saussure to make the now well-known claim that la langue is a system of oppositions or differences in which there are no positive terms. Although Saussure recognized that syntax was a component of langue, he insisted that there was ultimately no fundamental difference between a sign and a grammatical fact, and consequently, that syntax was derivative of the value relations between signs. Chomsky’s approach incorporates the notion that language is

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governed by a capacity for grammar that is in some sense more basic than either the set of differential values constituting langue, or the mental contents or “concepts” that are sustained through the sign (the “signified”). This is so because syntax expresses a generalized logic of relationships between terms of categorical types. In his characterization of the basic categories of syntax, Chomsky drew from a tradition that dates back to the seventeenth-century Grammar of Port-Royal. In this tradition, “reasoning” is characterized primarily as operating on a series of “judgments” (“X” is [related to] “Y”) which are linked together within a deductive structure of logic; the form of judgments, as well as the reasoning that operates on them, is seen as reflected in the linguistic structure of the clause (in the case of the judgment) and the deductive relations between them (in the case of reasoning). Thus, consistent with the tradition of rationalism from which he drew, Chomsky’s theory of syntax is ultimately based on a generalized system of propositional logic. For example, in his positing of the sentence (or clause) as the minimal unit of linguistic analysis, Chomsky is tacitly relying on the linkage of syntax—the basic categorical relations constituitive of the clause—with a mental structure that corresponds to the logical distinctions and relations assumed by the delineation of the categories themselves. Although in his later work he complicates the picture somewhat by describing syntax as encoded in speciesspecific neurobiological structures, Chomsky’s understanding of universal grammar is founded on this very notion of language as rooted in a limited set of formal, logical category relations that he sees as reflective of the forms of human reasoning via linguistic thought. This implicit logic operating at the heart of universal grammar is perhaps the most significant defining characteristic of Chomsky’s theory. In its affinities to Saussure’s notion of langue as an abstract synchronic structure, Chomsky’s universal grammar parallels Lacan’s notion of language as a symbolic order in several significant ways. Chomsky’s universal grammar is an abstract synchronic system that is formalizable in its “law-like” and autonomous functioning. It is also a “transindividual” structure that is both outside of and irreducible to its appropriation by individuals in and through speech. Finally, it has provided one of the few psycholinguistic models for understanding language in terms of an atemporal system defined by a set of internal structural relations rather than as a network of representations based on associative relations between words and their “referents.” However, in founding linguistic competence on Cartesian rationalist principles alone, Chomsky installed

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the latent mentalism in Saussure’s notion of the signified at the center of transformational grammar. In addition, in his dismissal of language “performance” as secondary to competence, he fails to adequately theorize the intersection between the structural ordering that is language and the social subject that comes into being through language. As part of the French intellectual scene influenced by LéviStrauss’s attempt to instate structural linguistics as the paradigm of scientificity for all social sciences, Lacan turned to Saussure for a model of the structure and operation of language in the practice of psychoanalysis. Thus, as early as 1957, Lacan was proclaiming what appeared to him to be a truth forgotten by most analysts since Freud, namely that psychoanalysis had found in language the real object of its investigation. For example, in “The Agency of the Letter, or Reason Since Freud,” Lacan (1966/1977) queries: “And how could a psychoanalyst of today not realize that speech is the key to that truth (the ‘truth’ of psychoanalysis), when his whole experience must find in speech alone its instrument, its context, its material, and even the background noise of its uncertainties?” (p. 147). However, in claiming that the psychoanalyst has no other means with which to explore the functioning of the psychological subject than speech and its laws and structures, Lacan marks a preoccupation with the psychological subject significantly absent from Saussure’s work. In taking psychoanalysis to be a “science” whose “object” is language, and whose “subject” is the subject, Lacan was ultimately led to radicalize Saussure’s construction of the sign, and thus to rework Saussure’s account of the nature of the relations that constituted the system of language. At issue for Lacan in Saussure’s theory of the sign is the problematic status of the “signified,” or concept. Founded on the conceptualization of the sign as a “unity” in which the signifier (or phonic image) is indivisibly linked with its signified (or the concept to which it refers), Saussure’s account of langue betrays a subtle complicity with representationalist theories of meaning. For, while Saussure does emphasize that the “signified” is a mental concept (rather than a “real” referent), which only has meaning in its differential relation to other signifieds in the system, his emphasis on the unity and indivisibility of the sign reifies the signified within the langue defining a given linguistic community. For while Saussure emphasizes the arbitrariness of sign at the abstract level of langue, the relationship between the signifier and signified in a particular linguistic system is fixed, as Saussure (1986) says, “by virtue of a sort of contract signed by members of a community” (p. 14). Within

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this model, Saussure effectively reduces the sign to its role in the communication of a transparent meaning (the “concept”) within the reciprocal dyad of “addresser” and “addressee” within a speaking community. In the final analysis, then, the sign serves to represent the signified in a fairly straightforward and transparent manner. Ultimately, Lacan jettisons Saussure’s notion of the sign, and rewrites its functioning in terms of what he calls an algorithm. In the process of “algorithmizing” the sign, Lacan first reinscribes the relation between the signifier and signified as a heterogeneous one, one in which the two are separated by a “bar” representing a barrier to any one-to-one correspondence. In so doing, Lacan destroys the parallelism between what Saussure understood to be the two orders, and uncouples the signifier from the signified in the closed circuit of communication as Saussure envisioned it. One can perhaps best understand Lacan’s emphasis on the “bar” as a shifting of the “difference” that Saussure located between the signs constituting langue, to a difference within the sign itself. In other words, instead of marking a differential value between signs (and thus, between concepts), Lacan installs “difference” in a “gap” within the signifier-signified relationship, in a relation of nonidentity of the sign with itself. Based on his experience of the particularity of the analysand’s discourse in the psychoanalytic relationship, Lacan suggests that the signifier can in no way be understood to “carry” the signified in the manner of the one-to-one correspondence described by Saussure. Thus, he states, “If linguistics enables us to see the signifier as the determinant of the signified, analysis reveals the truth of this relation by making the ‘holes’ in meaning the determinants of its discourse” (1966/1977, p. 299). To the extent that we can speak of a signified at all, then, it is only as an effect of a process of signification, the source of which lies in the relationships among signifiers. The effect of this emphasis on the irreducible “resistance” at the heart of the sign is, then, to underscore the primacy of the signifier in the production of sense. Consequently, the “signifier does not depend on signification, but is its source” (Lacan, 1973/ 1981, p. 282, italics mine). Defined as such, a given signifier refers, not to a signified (a “meaning,” or mental concept, as in Saussure), but ultimately to another signifier in a structure of signifiers likened by Lacan to a “chain” (1966/1977, p. 153). In instituting a “linguistics” in which the sign is replaced by a pure operativity of the signifier, Lacan’s transformation of the sign amounts to displacing both the categorical referentiality to which the sign is submitted in Chomsky’s universal grammar and the

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Cartesian subjectivity for which it is supposed to function. However, whereas Chomsky’s universal grammar reflects a preference for the basic categorical relations constituitive of a rationalist propositional logic, the “logic” of Lacan’s symbolic order is simply a general functional relation characterizing a metonymical process, which Lacan ultimately links to the subject via the psychoanalytic logic of desire. Thus, Lacan’s algorithmizing of the sign produces a description of the process through which the subject emerges in and through discourse and leaves there the trace of his or her own particular logic. While condemned to submit to the symbolic in a manner parallel to the preinscription of syntax in the ideal speakerhearer, through discourse the Lacanian subject is implicated in the production of a secondary signifying system, one most generally and simply described as an appropriation and transformation of the symbolic that, in its divergence from the symbolic marks the presence of the subject (Kristeva, 1989).

Language and the Subject in Chomsky and Lacan Although his first efforts to articulate a theory of language as syntax were conspicuously devoid of any sustained reference to the subject of language, in attempting to account for the synthetic function behind the propositional logic of syntax, Chomsky was forced to consider the role of the subject. In his Cartesian Linguistics, Chomsky (1966) explicitly aligned himself with the idealist Cartesian position of universal innate ideas—in this case, the universal set of basic categorical relations that “are” the essence of language— as well as the Cartesian account of the subject as cogito. He effected several things in the process, including the grounding of the normality of idealized utterances in the domain of universal innate ideas, and the intuitive rationality of the ideal speaker-hearer in the self-presence of the Cartesian ego. Thus, in much the same way that the cogito—as self-contained, transcendental, and rational ego—possesses “truth” through certainty in knowledge, the Chomskyan subject—as locus of syntactic synthesis—possesses the “truth” about language as reflected in his or her intuitive “certainty” about grammaticality and the “wellformedness” of utterances. As Chomsky (1965) explains: Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speakerlistener, in a completely homogeneous speech community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such

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grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of language in actual performance. (p. 3) Since the tacitly knowing subject of language is transcendent to the “subject” of linguistic performance, he or she is also unaffected by language as a temporal and material phenomenon. Thus, although Chomsky admits of “conditions” affecting the deployment of language in speech, his ideal speaker-hearer functions ultimately as a sort of uncommitted automatic processing device (Hörmann, 1981). In proclaiming that “[We must] set out from the conception of the Other as the locus of the signifier,” Lacan shares Saussure’s and Chomsky’s very general characterization of language as “outside” of or other to the psychological subject (1966/1977, p. 310). However, his analysis of the relationship between the subject and language as “Other” distinguishes his notion of the symbolic order from both Saussure’s langue and Chomsky’s universal grammar in several significant ways. For Lacan, the symbolic order is both the particular linguistic system into which the subject is born (the language of “others”) and, more abstractly, language defined by its basic algorithmic and “lawlike” functioning (language as “Other”). As it is first mediated by the child’s “others,” language constitutes what Lacan calls the “discourse of the Other”; as it is itself lacking in an origin, Lacan refers to language as simply “Other.” Based on this understanding of the “otherness” of language, Lacan draws his conclusions about the particular nature of the psychological subject from the significance of the fact that the subject first comes into being through this Other of language. For example, Lacan (1966/ 1977) emphasizes the role of language—the proper name, in this example—in conferring the possibility of subjective recognition: [T]hus the subject, too, if he can appear to be the slave of language is all the more so of a discourse in the universal movement in which his place is already inscribed at birth, if only by virtue of his proper name . . . the tradition that discourse itself establishes . . . lays down the elementary structures of culture. And these very structures reveal an ordering of possible exchanges which, even if unconscious, is inconceivable outside the permutations authorized by language. (p. 148)

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Thus, to become a subject is to be sustained in and through time by submitting to language and, specifically, to being “marked” as “one” by a proper name. And, to have a name is to be positioned within the symbolic order—it is, for example, to be situated at a particular place in a kinship structure that is marked by generation and sexual difference. However, to take up one’s name and, by implication, one’s place in language, is to submit to a positioning in a structure that one did not choose—a place reserved for one even before his or her birth. Lacan suggests that it is this taking up of one’s preinscribed position within the “Other” of language that constitutes an original division or “split” in subjectivity between the subject “in” language (the ego, in psychoanalytic parlance) and the subject “of ” language (the subject). This alienation or lack that constitutes the subject is the result of the impossible necessity of the subject’s coming into being through submitting to representation in the “foreign” structure of language. The particular way in which Lacan understands the subject and the signifier to be implicated each within the other can perhaps be most clearly understood in relation to their intersection at the juncture of the linguistic “message” and the linguistic “code.” Although Lacan approached the question of the speaking subject’s relation to language from several different angles, he drew heavily from the structural linguists’ discussion of linguistic “shifters” (e.g., Jakobson, 1971; Benveniste, 1971). Shifters were of particular interest to Lacan as they are pronouns that depend for their meaning on the particular message in which they occur, and thus are clearly linked to the position of the speaking subject. In theorizing the emergence of the subject in discourse, Lacan focuses on the particular function of the personal pronoun “I”—the signifier that marks both the enunciatory position (the “place” from which the utterance is produced), and the “object” of the statement (the person identifying him or herself as the subject of the statement). In contrast to Saussure’s system of signs—in which the unity of signifier and signified reinforces the collapse of the statement into the utterance—Lacan’s radicalization of the sign serves to accentuate the gap between the level of enunciation and the level of the statement. Since the distinction between these two levels can only be relevant for a speaking subject, the shifter “I” can be understood as the locus of the simultaneous representation and disappearance of the subject in discourse. Thus, “the shifter, a singularly remarkable property in linguistics, is . . . diverted into an irremediable gap between statement . . . and enunciation, which is

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the impossible identification of the speaking subject” (Nancy & LacoueLabarthe, 1992, p. 116). In other words, the subject—constituted as such by speaking from the position of the “I”—cannot be represented or “signified” by the “I,” but can only be marked at the place of the gap between the utterance and the statement. As speaking subject (that is, as subject of enunciation), it cannot coincide with its being-representedby-a-shifter (that is, as subject of the statement). In place of the traditional referentiality of the sign we find that, according to Lacan’s (1973/1981) well-known dictum, “the signifier does not represent something (a ‘meaning’ or concept) for someone, but represents the subject for another signifier” (p. 207). Here, “signification”—to the extent that it can still be called such— is understood to operate on a signifier-to-signifier basis through the mediation of the subject, rather than on a subject-to-subject basis through the medium of the signifier. Within this system, the subject can be understood as the gap between the statement and the utterance that the possibility for iterability produces. In other words, the subject simultaneously depends on the (re)iterability of the signifier for the possibility of recognition as a subject, and—in the singular temporality and particularity of his or her desire—disappears at the very juncture marking the transition from the “utterable” (the utterance) to the “iterable” (the statement).

Toward an Understanding of Language as Praxis At the heart of psycholinguistics’ inability to account for language as a fundamentally social and ethical phenomenon is both its embeddedness in the rationalist tradition and, perhaps even more significantly, its failure to theorize the consequences of the radical “otherness” of language for the emergence and recognition of the psychological subject. The implications of founding the study of language in the rationalist tradition are profound, and have been played out within psycholinguistics in a predictable and increasingly repetitive fashion. Chomksy’s implicit appropriation of propositional logic in formulating the defining characteristics of syntax, as well as his uncritical reduction of the speaking subject to the Cartesian cogito mirror the theoretical blindspots characteristic of the discipline as a whole. Chomsky’s adoption of the rational subject—as distinguished by its ideality and by its innate knowledge—determined that his original interest in understanding the autonomous structure and functioning of language (in syntax) would be short-circuited within

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the limits of the accepted rationalist models of “thinking” and “judgment.” Because the “original” state of the rational subject is one of isolation and self-containment, the project of articulating the linguistic relationship between the subject and its world (including other subjects) becomes mired in questions concerning how language operates as a medium or conduit for communication. For Chomsky, the structure of language is coextensive with the subject of “absolute” knowledge (the ideal speaker-hearer). For Lacan, the structure of language determines that the “knowledge” of the subject is never absolute; indeed, it determines that the locus of the subject marks a point of profound nontransparency of meaning, a point of incommensurability between meaning, the subject, and the signifier. Lacan suggests that it is the taking up of the Other of language that constitutes a division or “split” in subjectivity between the rational, “thinking” subject and the “unconscious,” performative subject of language. In reworking the structuralist notion of language as a symbolic order, Lacan further articulates the way in which the preexisting structure of language provides the very possibility of an enunciative position from which any subject may be recognized. Thus, in a reversal of the position articulated by Chomsky, the subject is only manifest in and through its realization in the social field of language. This subject is produced within language as a preexisting structure which—although autonomous in its functioning—has the “possibility,” as Gayatri Spivak (1997) says, of “being activated by what we colloquially call motives” (p. 360). Thus, although the subject can only be recognized as such by identifying with its preinscribed position within the structure of language, within discourse, the speaking subject “intend[s] with [language], . . . critique[s] intentions within it, . . . [and] play[s] with it through signification” before leaving it for the use of others after his or her death (Spivak, 1997, p. 360). For Lacan then, in discourse the speaking subject produces a secondary signifying system, one that relies upon la langue and has a discernible relation to its categories, but that superimposes its own organization and specific logic. In other words, while the speaking subject is simultaneously brought into being and sustained by language, the subject is also manifest in language through the peculiarities of logic left as traces in his or her discourse. “Language is thus used here as the act of speech (parole), converted into that expression of elusive and instantaneous subjectivity which forms the condition of dialogue” (Benveniste, 1971, p. 67). This amounts to saying that the language studied by psychoanalysis can in no way be confused with the formal object-system that la langue represents for modern linguistics.

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In a reversal, then, of the accepted view in psycholinguistics, Lacan contends that we must ultimately understand language as a praxis. It is, in fact, a very “ordinary” practice that extends across the entire field of human activity and is, moreover, manifested and known only through its exercise in discourse. When it is theoretically contextualized in this manner, language is understood as irreducible to either an abstract synchronic structure or to a transparent tool in the service of conscious intentionality. In its opacity, it determines that the subject speak beyond his or her means by speaking from the radically transindividual space of the Other. It is, then, only after the fact, that this essentially linguistic and performative knowledge can be reinscribed as the conscious “understanding” of the rational subject. As Kristeva (1989) states: Psychoanalysis renders impossible the habit commonly accepted by . . . linguistics of considering language outside its realization in discourse, that is, by forgetting that language does not exist outside the discourse of a subject, or by considering this subject . . . as equal to himself. . . . The subject is not; he makes and unmakes himself in a complex typology where the other and his discourse are included. (pp. 274–275) Psycholinguistics as a discipline, both historically and presently, has developed under the assumption of language as a monolithic object—static, atemporal, and asocial. The approach to language as a praxis articulated here necessitates that psycholinguistics shift its attention from the study of language as an atemporal and monolithic object toward a study of the process of the becoming of meaning through language. Ultimately, perhaps, through the notion of language as the practice within which both the subject and meaning are produced and reproduced, psycholinguistics can rediscover the profound significance and fecundity of what Althusser (1970) has called the “simplest” acts of our existence: listening, speaking, reading, writing.

REFERENCES Althusser, L. (1970). Lire le capital. Paris: FM Petite Collection Maspero. Benveniste, E. (1971). Problems in general linguistics (M. E. Meek, Trans.). Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press.

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Bickerton, D. (1995). Language and human behavior. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Chomsky, N. (1964). Current issues in linguistic theory. The Hague: Mouton. Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of a theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chomsky, N. (1966). Cartesian linguistics. New York: Harper & Row. Chomsky, N. (1993). On the nature, use, and acquisition of language. In A. I. Goldman (Ed.), Readings in philosophy and cognitive science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hörmann, H. (1981). To mean—to understand: problems of psychological semantics (D. A. Janowski, Trans.). Berlin: Springer-Verlag. Jakobson, R. (1971). Selected writings: Volume 2. The Hague: Mouton. Kristeva, J. (1989). Language, the unknown: An initiation into linguistics (A. M. Menke, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. Lacan, J. (1977). Écrits: A selection (A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1966) Lacan, J. (1981). The four fundamental concepts of psycho-analysis (A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1973) Nancy, J.-L., & Lacoue-Labarthe, P. (1992). The title of the letter: a reading of Lacan (F. Raffoul & D. Pettigrew, Trans.). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Pinker, S. (1994). The language instinct. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc. Rommetveit, R. (1983). Prospective social psychological contributions to truly interdisciplinary understanding of ordinary language. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 2, 89–104. Saussure, F. (1986). Course in general linguistics. La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing. Spivak, G. (1997). In a word: Interview. In L. Nicholson (Ed.), The second wave: A reader in feminist theory. New York: Routledge.

4 Lacanian Psychoanalysis and the Neurotic Orientation of Religious Experience David Metzger

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ow is it possible to speak about religious experiences? Descriptions of religious institutions, rites, theological disputes (what we might call “religious culture”) are common enough. But when we try to speak about the experience of a religion, we find that, like many other so-called “experiences,” religion has something particular about it, something beyond our ability to identify differences and similarities within a range of behaviors. As Norman Malcolm (1989)—a former student of Wittgenstein’s—has remarked: If I were to learn what pain is from perceiving my own pain, then I should necessarily have learned that pain is something that exists only when I feel pain. For the pain that serves as 79

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my paradigm of pain (i.e. my own) has the property of existing only when I feel it. That property is essential, not accidental; it is nonsense to suppose that the pain I feel could exist when I did not feel it. (p. 63) This suggests, in other words, that speaking about our “experience of some things” (pain, for example) may require that our experiences of these things (which we presume to be fundamentally subjective) be an essential property of the “things” we are experiencing. However, if the thing experienced does not exist outside of a particular subject’s experience of it, the existence of some sort of pathology is assumed; it is thought that a subject cannot be both right (about the thing) and paranoid or hysteric or obsessive compulsive. Pathology is then assumed to be a summation of error, false starts, slips of the tongue, a way of speaking about someone’s unconscious identifications. But where does such an approach to pathology and epistemology leave us in the consideration of religious experience? As some analysts see it, it leaves us needing to get into analysis and to get out of religion. Simply put, if outside of the clinic, we can equate truth with existence (where were you on the night of the murder?), then there is no reason why we should view religious experience as anything other than error: religion is the curious presumption of a (first) cause or explanation that nobody needs. Other analysts and psychotherapists have argued that the “presumption of a (first) cause or explanation” is precisely what the analytic session constructs (Miller, 1993, p. 32). They see that religion and psychoanalysis provide the same service—at least, psychoanalysis and religion share an interest in the “why?” whereas legalistic and scientific discourses have begun to work more with the “what?” Taking this argument more directly into the sphere of analytic experience, we might equate “the what of science and law” to “civilization” and the “why of analysis and religion” to “its discontents.” From this standpoint, religion and analysis are both techniques—not sciences or social systems—but ways to help people shoulder the burden of their social identities (Friedlander, 1997, p. 152; Fromm, 1960, p. 86). That is, both religion and psychoanalysis work with individuals who presume to know “what” has happened to them (there has been a loss of something) but they are not so certain about why “the what” has happened. At this point, I think we have chased down the logic behind psychoanalytic accounts of religious experiences as pathologies or as “universal neuroses”:

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1. Those who experience “loss” (what has happened to me?) often ask “why?” 2. Both religious practice and neurotic behavior attempt to ask and answer “the why” without the unconscious. So, where does the why come from? And why should it be of such a concern? In “Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxieties,” Freud (1926/1954) relates the why to birth trauma. He suggests that people who are traumatized (and we are all traumatized by birth) continue to respond as one would in the presence of danger even when the danger is no longer present (p. 134). A Lacanian would see that Freud’s statement identifies two facts of human existence: 1. Human beings must learn how to live in a world whose demands cannot be met by eating, defecating, reproducing, hearing, seeing, and making noise; 2. Human beings must learn how to eat, piss, shit, fuck, listen, and speak because they require assistance in performing these tasks. What one is driven to do is related to what can be demanded of one. The question “why?” thus takes two forms. One form is, “Given that I’m human, why am I still driven to do these things?” (which, for many, is equivalent to the question, “Why must I die?”). And the other form is “Why was I born? To eat, shit, piss, fuck, look, speak, and listen for/to you?” These formations of why then lead us to consider the curiously logical range of behaviors identified in the psychoanalytic clinic. For example, we might say that the neurotic’s request for an analysis is prompted when what he/she is driven to do no longer clearly relates to what can be demanded of him/her. And we might go on to say that the premature ending of an analysis might signify the failure of the analyst to sustain, for the analysand, the promise of a dialectical relationship between the drive and the demand. In these terms, a neurotic client may leave analysis to show his/her allegiance to the promise of such a relationship between drive and demand. Of course, the dynamics of this clinical situation are not so simple to understand, since neurotic clients try to provoke suggestions at every given moment in the therapy. We can relate this statement to our previous discussion of the two forms of why: the neurotic’s principal demand is to know why they are either dead or

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alive, why they are not what everybody wants them to be, when they are what they are at the level of the unconscious (man, desire, or something desired). Note that I did not include “woman” as a choice. This is not an omission; rather, a statement: There is no point of identification for “woman” in the unconscious. A Lacanian would suggest that this is one of the things that Freud and Lacan learned from the analysis of female hysterics. The hysteric seeks and finds an identity at the level of the unconscious in order to hold off the emergence of the Real. Then, the female hysteric asks herself, “Am I a man or a woman?” In other words, “Given that I can construct an identity for myself at the level of the unconscious (where there is no identity position for Woman), how is it possible that (why is it that) I should not be a man?” Male hysterics would not be able to identify unconsciously with Man because they would not be able to explain the intrusion of the Real in their lives if they did so; the unconscious would be enough for them, and it is not. In other words, the male hysteric’s question might be understood as “Given that I can construct an identity for myself at the level of the unconscious (where there is an identity position for Man), how is it possible that I should be the Other of Man? (The terms Other and Real are explained later in the essay.) Using more conventionally psychoanalytic terms, we might say that the neurotic wishes to know why being “this” (unconsciously) for everybody doesn’t make “everybody” “that” for/to the neurotic. For this reason, a Lacanian would suggest that entering an analysis or therapy is not an indication that the analysand/client wishes to change (Fink, 1997, p. 3). The neurotic uses the analysis/ therapy (which is “bought and paid for”) to show how he/she is not lacking an identity for “anybody.” Of course, constructing an “anybody” is quite difficult, so the neurotic turns to analysis/therapy for assistance. The neurotic’s hope is that, by doing away with the unconscious as such, he/she might live according to something other than the dictates of his/her fantasies while, at the same time, not giving up on his/her fantasies. That is, his/her fantasies might, in the throes of transference, emerge as real (Soler, 1996, p. 25). Understandably, this particular orientation of the neurotic’s emergence in the analytic session may be difficult to understand without the help of a specific example or case. With this difficulty in mind, let us turn to a case study introduced in Freud’s short essay, “Compulsive Acts and Religious Experience.” Reviewing that short essay will also provide us with the opportunity to examine Dr. Freud’s claim/assumption that the transference relation sustained in the

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analysis of neurotic patients has something to tell us about “religious practices.” In these terms, our investigations might presume not to introduce Lacan to the uninitiated; after all, there are already more than enough introductions to Lacan. Perhaps, we can see how a Lacanian orientation of analytic practice might respond to the diagnostic and therapeutic challenges presented by the neuroses—a concern that is at the heart of Freud’s (1907/1959) examination of religious practices in terms of obsessive behaviors (pp. 17–18). Freud focuses his discussion of “obsessive acts and religious experience” on one question: How is it possible for us to discern the meaning of an obsessive act, given that, by definition, an obsessive act would appear nonsensical? A Lacanian may respond to this question with another question: “Can an act performed in order to ensure the Other’s absence be performed in the Other’s absence?” What is the Other? The Other is the place or position for that which lends sense to a person’s actions. Imagine walking into the post office and seeing a person crawling on the floor while saying “Ouch, Ouch, Ouch!” You wonder, “Why are you doing that?” The person notices you staring and tries to smile, though noticeably in pain, “I dropped lighter fluid on my knees.” Having overfilled your Zippo a few times yourself, you ask, “Can I help?” You understand that Zippos can be placed in the front pockets of jeans; you understand that, when Zippos are overfilled, lighter fluid leaks out. You also understand that methyl butane creates heat when it evaporates. You might also understand all of these things from the experience of others or by deduction. But these different ways of knowing are not the Other as Lacan understood it. So, the Other isn’t meaning; in effect, meaning is how we identify the similarities in our experiences, in the experiences of others, and in the experiences represented in language; meaning and similarities can take the place of the Other. But they are not the Other, and they leave little room for it. So, where is the Other? In the Real. At least, we might say that the real is one possible refuge for the Other. When one sees that one’s image in the world cannot support the existence of the Other (that the image cannot make a human subject), one assumes that one’s body (the real of one’s body and not the image) is the Other. What is the Real? Is it what’s left after language, symbols, narratives, experiences have accounted for one’s behavior/errors? No, there’s still the unconscious, which can account for human behavior and can help us to answer the question, “But how did you get lighter fluid on both knees?” But, if the unconscious doesn’t account for the behavior, then there is the Real.

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Understandably, Lacan’s statements regarding “the Real” emerged from his work with psychotic or schizophrenic patients, since they believe themselves to be the missing link that makes sense of it all (the Other) when language, experiences, other people, and the unconscious have all failed to support the Other’s presence. Everyone is not psychotic. In fact, for the neurotic, the body cannot account for his/her existence as a human subject, forcing the Other to enter into the symbolic order. We can now return to our two questions. Freud’s: “How is it possible for us to discern the meaning of an obsessive act given that an obsessive act, by definition, would appear nonsensical?” Lacan’s: “Can an act performed to ensure the Other’s absence be performed in the Other’s absence?” Both questions ask us to consider how neurosis is possible. The answer is that neuroses are possible only if the unconscious is not real—that is, only if the patient is not psychotic or delusional. From a Lacanian standpoint, Freud’s identification of religious practices with neuroses means that religion emerges in the absence of the Other—that a god, for some, could take the place of the absent Other (that is, god could be “what makes sense,” as one sees in many varieties of fundamentalism) or god could be the absent Other (that is, god could be the unconscious “whose absence doesn’t make sense”). Either way, what we’ve identified is not a form of delusion (“I am anybody’s Other”), but a fantasy (“I am this for the Other”). A neurotic client may go on to demonstrate compulsive behavior if he/she understands that his/her actions are the cause of the Other’s absence. Freud (1907/1959) illustrates the idea with the following case: A woman who was living apart from her husband was subject to a compulsion, namely, that whenever she ate anything, she had to leave what was the best of it behind. For example, she would only take the outside of a piece of roast meat. This renunciation was explained by the date that it first appeared: the day after she had refused marital relations with her husband. That is the point of origin for the practice of giving up what was the best. Freud’s case shows us something about the logic of sacrifice. Unlike rituals in which one uses one’s own body to conjure the absence of the Other, in sacrifice, one uses a body other than one’s own to conjure the absence of the Other. One uses what might be termed, “the Other’s body” to ward off the Other. The Other’s body in this example is “the best of whatever she ate.” The woman evokes the Other’s body (a piece of roast meat/her husband) as a substitute for the Other’s presence when she accepts what this act

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might signify (“giving up the best”). This is not to say that her husband was the best, nor to say that she thought her husband was the best—only that “what her husband means as a substitute for the Other” makes sense even in the Other’s absence. In fact, one might wonder if Freud’s (1907/1959) interpretation (“your husband is the best”) did not fulfill the analysand’s desire to make sense of her life even in the Other’s absence: The same patient could only sit on one particular chair and could only get up from it with difficulty. In regard to certain details of her married life, the chair symbolized her husband, to whom she remained faithful. She found an explanation of her compulsion in this sentence: “It is so hard to part from anything (a husband, a chair) upon which one has once settled.” (pp. 120–121) We see above a confirmation of a general pattern: the Other’s absence is essential for there to be a place for her to sit; that is, she throws her own body into the mix, conjuring the Other as what her acts signify for the Other (namely, its absence): “It is so hard to part from anything.” Notice as well that anything is easily oriented in terms of a disjunction requiring no negation: anything = chair or husband. Notice that Freud’s patient did not formulate anything = chair or not-chair. Not-chair has no meaning; it is a formal distinction whose truth relies more on logical structure than meaning (what we might presume to be talking about). In the absence of the Other, what the compulsion means for the woman will have to do; the object, “chair and/or husband” will need to be more true than any other “anything” could be. Freud (1907/1959) has shared with us something of the logic of compulsion, but we haven’t yet said much about its fuel: Over a period of time she used to repeat an especially noticeable and senseless obsessive action. She would run out of her room into another room in the middle of which there was a table. She would straighten the tablecloth on it in a particular manner and ring for the housemaid. The latter had to come up to the table, and the patient would then dismiss her on some indifferent errand. In the attempts to explain this compulsion, it occurred to her that at one place on the tablecloth there was a stain, and that she always arranged the cloth in such a way that the housemaid was bound to see the stain. The whole scene proved to be a reproduction of an experience in her married life which had later on furnished her with a problem

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to solve. On the wedding-night her husband met with a not unusual mishap: he found himself impotent, and “many times in the course of the night he came hurrying from his room into hers” to see once more if he could succeed. In the morning he said he would feel ashamed in front of the housemaid who made the beds, and he took a bottle of red ink and poured its contents over the sheet; but so clumsily that the red stain came in a place that was very unsuitable for his purpose. With her obsessive action, therefore, she was representing the wedding-night. “Bed and board” between them make up marriage (p. 121). We see here how the logic of compulsion presented in earlier examples might be historicized. Even when the Other is supposed to be there, it isn’t; there’s something in its place (the woman in this example). What is more, as the man approaches the object (what the analysand fantasizes about being for him), he flees back into the Other room where he can sustain an erection. The husband cannot leave his place in the Other—he is not himself in the position of “what makes sense in the absence of the Other.” His failure will mean something for the Other. Therefore, the Other must be duped—not avoided or held off. Indeed, this failure can itself function as Other, if one leaves a sign in the absence of their bodies. “You see,” the sign says, “ ‘what makes sense in the absence of the Other’ does work as Other.” I say sign here but only for the Other. For the analysand, the red ink stain may function as an identity; she is the absence of the Other: Another compulsion—writing down the number of every bank note before parting with it—had also to be interpreted historically. At a time when she was still intending to leave her husband if she could find another, more trustworthy man, she allowed herself to receive advances from a man whom she met at a watering-place, but she was in doubt as to whether his intentions were serious. One day, being short of small change, she asked him to change a five-kronen piece for her. He did so, pocketed the large coin and declared with a gallant air that he would never part with it, since it had passed through her hands. At their later meetings she was frequently tempted to challenge him to show her the five-kronen piece, as though she wanted to convince herself that she could believe in his intentions. But she refrained, for the good reason that it is impossible to distinguish between coins of the same value.

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Thus her doubt remained unresolved; and it left her with the compulsion to write down the number of each bank-note, by which it can be distinguished from all others of the same value. (Freud, 1907/1959, p. 122) We see here the conditions under which this analysand is able to make a demand of the Other. She considers leaving her husband for someone who is “more-Other,” more trustworthy—someone capable of performing the signifying function made possible by the Other in its absence. But she makes a demand of the Other, “can you change a five-kronen piece?” The Other makes possible an exchange but suggests that this exchange is no longer possible because she and her demand might function in place of the Other. The Other, one might say, drops “meaning” into her lap. And this fantasy allows her then to strain out any nonsense in her life (leaving the best for the Other), leaving her to make sense without the Other—without the unconscious. Earlier, I had spoken of the patients’ fear, but it is important to note that these examples do not provide a formula for phobia. Quite the contrary, as Freud notes, the patient, in this instance, has the potential for paranoia—allowing all that is in the Other to be organized around the meaning, the sacrifice, that drops in her lap. But this is not so much the case either. The patient may choose to speak as a hysteric by placing what she means for the Other, rather than the unconscious, in the place of the Other. Or, she can continue practicing her compulsive behaviors—working so that there is no place for any meaning, knowing that these behaviors are performed in the absence of an Other that has the potential to be Real. For the hysteric, her identity as “what it means to be Other” would then open onto a series of prohibitions that would help keep her self (the ego ideal in Freudian terms) safe from any scandal whatsoever. However, for the obsessional, the temptation to enjoy (in secret) would be too great. Freud’s neurotic orientation toward religious practices should not be taken too far, however. We shouldn’t take what has been discovered in the light of analytic transference and indiscriminately apply this analytic knowledge to situations within which the analyst’s presence is not felt. The relationship of religious and analytic practices cannot be explored simply by means of an analogy. In fact, Freud’s turn to religious practices as a source of information for the treatment of neurotic clients marks, in some fashion, a failure in his understanding of analytic practice. At least, Freud

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(1907/1959) seems to admit as much in the little essay we’ve been considering: In place of a definition [of “obsessional neurosis”] we must for the time being be content with obtaining a detailed knowledge of these states, since we have not yet been able to arrive at a criteria of obsessional neuroses; it probably lies very deep, although we seem to sense its presence everywhere in the manifestations of the illness. (p. 117) Religion and analysis do not shine in the same transferential light, but it is also true that what takes the position of agency in the analytic discourse is not coordinated as a discourse in terms of religious practices. In other words, religious practice may be meaningful, but this is not enough to ensure that a religion might be practiced in the Other’s presence. As with compulsive acts, religious practices may be performed in order to ensure the Other’s absence, for fear that the Other might only appear as Real. Religious practice allows us to consider that the Other might be embodied, but embodying the Other does not guarantee that the Other exists as such—just as psychoanalytic practice allows us to consider that the Other might exist as a subject (a particular kind of subject represented by the analyst’s emergence in transference) but we should not take for granted that the Other-subject, the analyst, is the Other. Lacan’s statement that the unconscious is structured like a language would, in fact, counter such an assertion because there is an Other only if there is no signifier capable of bearing the burden of the Other’s identity as a subject. One might say that this signifier is lost when the human subject enters into language and the human subject spends the rest of her/his life trying to find it. With only a little humor, one might say that a Lacanian love story ends with the identification of a signifier that can bear such a burden: the Other disappears as such because another subject is enough. The emergence of religious experience and practices in an analysis may indicate that an analysand wishes to evoke enough of the Other, wishes to experience enough of the Other’s presence (“the best part of the Other”) that his/her actions might be shared with others: “You see, there is an Other. Now, do you see why I act the way I do?” But the rapport between religion and psychoanalysis has a very carefully determined limit: While the analysand or analyst may search for a guarantee of his/her religious speech, analytic discourse can provide only a guarantee of the particularity

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of the analysand’s language. Religious experience and psychoanalytic practice do not encourage the conflation of the symbolic and the Other in order to save the Other (from the Real)—as we see in the neurotic patient. The goal of analysis is to help the analysand avoid the Real Other whose presence is felt in psychosis. For this reason, we should be careful not to assume that psychoanalysis is a religion. Lacan (1973/1978, p. 59) said, “For the true formula of atheism is not God is dead . . . the true formula of atheism is God is unconscious.” We might then associate this position with the frustration Freud seems to have felt with trying to distinguish between the phenomenology of religious experiences and analytic approaches to the neuroses. Indeed, it may appear that psychoanalysis attempts to save the Other from the Real. But this is not the case. Even though, for some clients, an analysis may move the Other from a position in the Real to a position in the unconscious, this is not the aim of analysis but a particular technique. The aim of the analysis is to fill up the unconscious with the Other, so much so that the “subject” must learn to live somewhere else—thereby encouraging neurotic patients, in particular, to live (not with the Other) but with themselves and others.

REFERENCES Fink, B. (1997). A clinical introduction to Lacanian psychoanalysis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Freud, S. (1954). Inhibitions, symptoms, anxiety. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 20, pp. 75–174). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1926) Freud, S. (1959). Obsessive acts and religious practices. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 9, pp. 115–127). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1907) Friedlander, S. (1997). The confluence of psychoanalysis and religion: A personal view. In C. Spezzano, & G. Garguilo (Eds.), Soul on the couch. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press. Fromm, E. (1960). Psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism. In D. T. Suzuki, E. Fromm, & R. De Martin (Eds.), Zen Buddhism and psychoanalysis (pp. 77–141). New York: Harper & Brothers.

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Lacan, J. (1978) Seminar XI: The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis (J.-A. Miller, Ed., A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1973) Malcolm, N. (1989). The problem of experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miller, J.-A. (1993). To interpret the cause. Newsletter of the Freudian Field, 3, 30–50. Soler, C. (1996). A passion in transference. Newsletter of the Freudian Field, 5, 21–49.

5 No Laughing Matter Girls’ Comics and the Preparation for Adolescent Femininity Valerie Walkerdine

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his chapter is a consideration of how girls are prepared for initiation into romantic love and other heterosexual practices. I have chosen to examine this preparation for adolescent sexuality as it is mediated by children’s fiction, especially girls’ comics. Such an inquiry allows us to discuss the relation between cultural forms and the psychological production of feminine desire. At the primary school level, young girls are confronted with, and inserted into, ideological and discursive practices that position them with regard to specific patterns of meaning serving to produce and reproduce femininity. In such positionings, the organization of psychological life permitted by family dynamics is of primary strategic importance for the “social” preparation of feminine sexuality. These family dynamics, as psychoanalytic studies have indicated, 91

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encourage the young girl to detach her desire from the mother and reattach it to the father or, rather, to the phallic representation of the paternal. Cultural forms embody such dynamic shifts symbolically. They assist in the preparation of means for inserting the girl into romantic heterosexuality by capturing the psychological conflicts that are dealt with in phantasy situations and by presenting possible resolutions for these conflicts.1 It will be the purpose in what follows to identify and examine some of the cultural practices that locate the girl in the struggle over heterosexual femininity. As Freud (1908/1956) has suggested, “The constitution will not adapt itself to its function without a struggle.” The girl does not passively assume a female role model; she does not easily accommodate the demands of standard feminine practices. Heterosexuality is achieved as a solution to a set of conflicts and contradictions in familial and other social relations. Rather than telling us something basic about the nature of the female body or mind, the observation that the girl appears to accept voluntarily the position to which she is traditionally fitted demonstrates the power of those practices through which a particular resolution to the struggle is produced. In particular, because they are specifically designed to engage with the production of girls’ conscious and unconscious desires, girls’ comics prepare for a “happy ever-after” outcome, in which the finding of the “prince” or “knight in shining armor” emerges as the obvious solution to a set of problematic and often overwhelming desires.

Modern Psychoanalytic Theories of Female Sexuality If fiction represents phantasies by the use of textual devices that engage with the desires of the reader, then this would suggest a very different understanding of the development of gender than the one most commonly asserted. Those approaches stressing roles and stereotypes suggest a girl who is already rational, who intentionally takes in information or takes on roles. By contrast, psychoanalysis offers a dynamic model in which there is no simple or static reality perceived by children. Central to the psychoanalytic reality is the production of complex and tortuous relations, conscious and unconscious, centered upon the girl’s relations with her family. The account that psychoanalysis offers presents a subject who is more resistant to change than a rationalist account might suggest and who is engaged in a struggle in relation to the achievement of femininity.

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Recent advances in the study of texts make use of psychoanalysis in understanding the production of textual identities. Many such accounts use the work of Jacques Lacan (e.g., 1966/1977), who has taken advantage of developments in linguistics and semiotics to rework Freud’s account of psychic development. This means that Lacan has been able to understand the production of textual fictions and psychic phantasies in the same terms. Lacan reworked certain basic concepts from Freud, but they both share the stress on the oedipal relation and the castration complex as central to an understanding of female sexuality (Mitchell & Rose, 1982). Although there have been some feminist appropriations of psychoanalysis, they tend to stress preoedipal relations with the mother and consequently do not understand the father (or phallus, in Lacanian theory) as central to sexuality. Moreover, such accounts have not so far analyzed cultural practices or ideological relations with either the same tools or the same depth as Lacanian-influenced theories of representation. For these reasons there follows a very brief exploration of certain key concepts in accounts of female sexuality. Freud located the production of sexuality in the relations of the family. His various clinical researches converged on the conclusion that actual interactions or family relations are lived by the participants through the framework of complex systems of psychic phantasy relations—hence the importance of working through certain wishes in phantasy, particularly in relation to the mother. Freud insisted that the pain of separation from and the loss of continuity with the maternal body pushes the infant into a struggle to possess the mother, to be dependent and yet to control her availability. The experience of psychic distress caused by the inevitable failure of the mother to meet the child’s insatiable demands sets up a particular dynamic between them. Freud distinguished between need and wish (or desire). He recognized that the phantasy created in the gap between possession and loss was not made good by any “meeting of needs” because the satisfaction would only be temporary and the object of desire would both constantly shift and be out of reach. The presence of siblings produced a rivalry and therefore jealousy in relation to the mother, setting up its own particular familial dynamic. However, the presence of the father, whose possession of the mother creates further rivalry, is of crucial importance to Freud’s account of the production of sexual difference. Although the little boy struggles for possession of his mother—in competition, therefore, with the father—the little girl can never possess the mother. Freud therefore postulates the struggle for the

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transfer of desire from the mother to the father to account for female heterosexuality. Subsequent schools of psychoanalysis (particularly object relations accounts) have tended to differ from Freud along a variety of dimensions. The first difference concerns the countering of the stress on oedipal, and in that sense paternal, relations with the mother. Although Freud agreed that he had underexplored the importance of the preoedipal attachment to the mother, he fought against the way in which theoretical focus on relations with the mother occurred at the expense of downplaying the paternal function and sexual differentiation. Along with the stress on the mother, particularly in object relations accounts, there is also the diminution of emphasis on wish or desire and the development of normative accounts based on the fulfillment of need (see Mitchell & Rose, 1982, especially Mitchell’s introduction). Such accounts move toward the possibility of practice of the adequate meeting of the child’s needs by the mother. Lacan counters the current stress on meeting the child’s needs. Instead he emphasized the gap between needs for bodily comfort, food, and so on and the way in which demand always exceeds satisfaction. Freud demonstrated the way in which infants hallucinated the milk that had been withdrawn by the breast, or played games in which the presence and absence of the mother was controlled in phantasy. In this sense, Freud concentrated on the creation of phantasy in the gap between need and wish fulfillment. Lacan developed Freud’s insight by his stress on desire. He argued that the satisfaction of need is an illusion and one sustained by practices that produce phantasy or imaginary resolutions. Although infants are clearly gratified by the mother, this gratification “contains the loss within it” (Mitchell & Rose, 1982, p. 6). The price paid for consciousness is the first recognition of the mother as other, and therefore of the me/not me split. Lacan uses the example of an infant’s gaze at its own reflection in a mirror to stress the idea that singularity and identity are illusory. The infant is dependent and relatively powerless, but apprehending the mirror image creates an illusion of unity and control. Lacan’s account then stresses the importance of the acquisition of language by the child as the means for control over both the initial loss of the mother and the capacity for self-reference through maintenance of the illusion of an ego in control. Lacan describes complex relations that operate in language and phantasy and then operate on conscious and unconscious relations of identification. The problems of sexual difference relate to the

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contradictory paternal and maternal identifications involved in being/having the object for the mother, making good the loss, and having/being in control by having or being the phallus. It is in this sense that sexual identity is taken never to be a secure achievement because there is no easy fitting into available roles. However, because language and phantasy play such a crucial part, identities created in the everyday locations that the child enters—schooling, in texts, and so forth—offer occasions for imaginary closure. They engage with psychic conflicts, identifications, and resolutions. They are therefore crucial to social and psychic change and yet problematic at the same time.

The Nature of Children’s Fiction A moment’s consideration will reveal how pervasive phantasy is in the cultural productions that adorn our everyday lives. Fabulous and tantalizing rewards are dangled before us constantly through the media, particularly in the form of prizes for various competitions, which often take the form of all-expenses-paid trips to exotic and remote parts of the world. The implication is that I, an ordinary person, can suddenly be special: that phantasy and reality meet. Of course, it could be said that we are at liberty to ignore these incitements. Surely, we can just switch off the radio or television. But what if such messages are not the kinds of things that we can choose to ignore? What if their very power resides in the way that they provide a vehicle for, and even create, the form and content of our struggle to “be someone”? Modern cultural practices contribute to our very biographies in this way by stimulating the production not only of realizations of the bourgeois dream but by interpolating the subject who is dreaming, that is, also the dream itself.

The Appeal of Phantasy Girls’ comics are a particularly powerful form of the dream and its realization because they engage, at the level of phantasy, with the hopes and fears mirrored in the media. More than that, they implicitly offer guidance as to how young girls may prepare themselves to be good enough to “win” the glittering prizes: the man, the home, the adventure, and so forth. They do this, but they do it at a level that the alternative images or role models for girls simply

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cannot reach. They work on desire. In her analysis of the adolescent magazine Jackie, Angela McRobbie (1982) discusses the codes through which adolescent femininity is constructed and therefore may be read. The positions that magazine offers relate to heterosexual practices about “getting and keeping a man,” and although preteen comics do not do this in any overt sense, what happens is that they engage with the construction of femininity in such a way as to prepare young girls for the fate that awaits them. How, then, are young girls prepared? In most cases, textual devices turn around stories based on classic fairy tales. They end with “happy-ever-after” solutions, mostly around the insertion of the girl into an ideal family. Meanwhile, in getting there, the girls in these stories are apparently hapless victims of circumstance, scorned, despised, and hard-done-by. The resolution in the family is, I will argue, the oedipal resolution played out. The happy family is produced through the traumas associated with the loss and abandonment of the mother in favor of the oedipal love of the father. And, as we know, the father simply precedes the prince, or knight in shining armor. The heterosexual practices of the magazine, Jackie, then, offer a solution, a way out of the misery of the femininity struggled over in the pages of these comics. The comics that I have chosen to examine below are two of the most popular among junior schoolgirls in Britain: Bunty and Tracy.2 For the most part, these stories develop themes of family relationships through particular kinds of narrative devices. I will concentrate mainly on devices that allow certain very distressing issues to be the focus of the stories. The narratives are nearly all about girls who are victims: of cruelty and circumstance. Eleven are about girls who do not have, or do not live with, their parents. Indeed, the circumstances are so fantastic that they would, on the surface, appear to bear very little relation to the lives of their young readers. I say “on the surface,” because it is precisely the organization of phantasy (rather than of reality, as presumed by the realist approach of antisexist literature) that is so important in understanding the relation of such literature to the organization of desire.

Phantasy and Reality The very “unreality” of the stories presented in these magazines is one of their chief strengths, not one of their weaknesses. They engage with exactly the type of issues raised by Freud, fostering the experience of problematic emotions and suboptimal circum-

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stances through the use of devices that permit identification of the young readers with the heroine in the text. They not only allow the process of working out conflicts but also encourage certain resolutions or products in the form of specific life styles and practices. The market targeted for these comics appears to be prepubescent working-class girls. The stories themselves involve phantasies about family, sexuality, and class, constructing heroines who are the victims of foul deeds yet persist in the face of personal injustice. This struggle takes the form of a feat of endurance that always eventuates in triumph but is essentially private. In contrast, boys’ comics deal chiefly with overt bravery and visible fights against injusticeactivities that are openly celebrated and rewarded, in public. Traditionally, in relation to matters of sex and class in children’s literature, such material has been regarded as biased, unreal, and therefore bad, and consequently requiring the antidote of an appropriate “realism.” But such realism is based on a rationalist politics of cognitive transformation-change accomplished through dictating the correct, undistorted account of reality. What are such children to do with realist texts when confronted with what is represented in them as their reality? What if the readers do not recognize their lives and themselves in the texts? What if they are resistant to recognizing what is portrayed? What about their desires to have something and be someone different? Reality is not something that can be hidden or distorted in any simple sense. Rather, what is called for is an examination of the materiality of the phantasies created in literature such as these comics, in terms of both what is spoken and how, what is understood, how dilemmas are posed, and what kinds of resolutions are proffered. Traditional fairy stories are hardly realistic; they are quite phantastic, bearing little or no resemblance to the lives of ordinary children. Yet they act powerfully in terms of important themes about potential realities. The realist, “tell it like it is” stories do not touch on such possibilities at all. Comic book stories, on the other hand, touch directly on such possibilities. They describe difficult lives and miserable circumstances, but in such a way as to offer solutions, both phantasized and practical, affording escapes in the form of alternative constructions of what and who one might be. The stories romanticize poverty and portray masochistic ways of celebrating it rather than bemoaning it. Poverty is shown to be desirable precisely because it can be suffered virtuously, transcended nobly, and left behind rapidly. Poverty is always accidental. Contingent, too, are the wicked families who oppress those in their charge. The sorry state of children is the natural result of

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tragic circumstances. Making these troublesome conditions fantastic is the chief narrative device employed to render them tolerable: the child protagonists are translocated into a different geographic location or historical period and into surrogate families. In the majority of stories, the children are fated not to live with their biological line but with substitute families in which they are subjected to cruel and unusual treatment. Such narrative devices help make possible the engagement of the reader with difficult material. Where an identification with a reality presented as mirroring the life of the readers may well be rejected as “unlike me” or “too close for comfort,” identification at the level of phantasy remains a possibility. The distance or difference renders these stories more, not less, effective. And such an effectivity is far beyond the reach of a simple realism. Attempts to alter children’s outlook through use of realist texts and counterstereotype description concentrate on images. These may be true or false, good or bad. But these images are not rationally or passively appropriated—they are actively engaged with and constructed as imaginary fulfillments of wishes. Fiction is not a mere set of images, but an ensemble of textual devices for implicating the reader in the phantasy. In consequence, a complex psychic organization of an image occurs rather than a simple and direct response to that image. The reader who engages in such a fiction lives a real life that is, at the same time, organized in relation to phantasy. To interpret children’s fiction in this way yields quite a different view of its presentation, its impact on, and its significance for the lives of young girls.

Fiction and Phantasy in Girls’ Comics Types of Narrative I will now proceed to an examination of serial stories in two of the most popular of prepubescent girls’ comic books, Bunty and Tracy, with the purpose of identifying and interpreting the major themes underlying their content. The stories are very distressing indeed: dreadful events befall their heroines. Even when the girls are presented in an ordinary family setting, the stories tend to center on the resolution of certain problems, often concerned with internal family relations. The girls are often the object of gross injustices: they are continually misunderstood and misjudged. A repetitive

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theme is that, despite everything, the girls engage in selfless and brave acts of helpfulness to others. My interpretations are based on eighteen stories from Bunty (1982), and Tracy (1982), which were selected to represent the predominant types of plots and themes. The following synopses give the reader an idea of typical storylines: • A girl is helpful and does kind deeds except when she puts on a glove puppet. Then her character undergoes a total transformation and becomes angry, vicious, and generally evil. As soon as she removes the puppet, she has no recollection of her bad deeds. • A girl is perfect at school—clever, beautiful, helpful, and sensible—but her cleverness and good deeds make her the object of envy. She becomes unpopular and, as a result, unhappy. • A girl lives with her mother, who has lost her job. The girl fears she will have to sell her treasured camera but averts this eventuality by using it ingeniously to make money by taking and selling photographs that turn out to be related to good deeds for others. • A girl has a mother who is a teacher and who chose to teach in a rough comprehensive school where she persists in her attempts to reform the children. Through ingenious good deeds the girl helps her mother to manage the school, but without her mother finding out who was responsible. • A Victorian serving girl who has been frozen for a century in a block of ice (!) is found by a family with a daughter of similar age who passes the serving girl off as her cousin. Let us take a typical “orphan” story. In “Joni the Jinx,” one of the weekly captions reads, “When orphan Joni Jackson was adopted by Kate and Robert Stewart, she looked forward to the kind of happy family she had always dreamed of. But things didn’t quite work out as planned. . . .” In this story, the adoptive parents are eager to do their best for Joni, but when they get to discussing how to present themselves properly to the social worker, the latent tensions between husband and wife are brought to the fore, resulting in an argument. Joni, thoughtful and helpful as she is, takes this to be her fault in the sense that it is her presence that has occasioned the disagreement.

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“Cherry and the Chimps” is a story about an orphaned girl whose parents were lost in a plane crash. A wicked couple finds her living with chimpanzees in Africa. They use her as a servant to run their chimp circus act for them, and they constantly abuse her. Cherry’s misery is alleviated only by the reappearance of her real parents who, it turns out, were not actually killed in the plane accident. “She’ll Stay a Slave” is a story about Jenny, also an orphan, who is enslaved by her cruel cousin. Jenny is, predictably, very clever and helpful, despite the fact that her wicked cousin is always exploiting her and trying to spoil her efforts. The resume caption reads, “Jenny Moss lived with her Aunt Mary and Uncle John. Her cousin Paula treated her like a slave and Jenny put up with it, as she mistakenly believed that Paula had saved her life after an accident. Jenny was one of three girls being considered for a scholarship to Redpark College—but Paula tried to spoil Jenny’s chances of winning as she did not want to lose her slave.” The stories’ endless victimizations come in further and more macabre varieties. One concerns a girl whose grandfather, a ventriloquist, coerces her into acting as his dummy because he is ill. Another involves a girl who is pressed into service by wicked relatives in a circus act in which she has to behave like a robot. She takes both pain and humiliation without a word because she believes these relatives are paying the hospital bills for her sick brother. Another plot centers around Victorian orphan sisters, one of whom, after a series of worsening disasters, suddenly turns blind.

Recurrent Themes Certain themes recur persistently in the story lines of these comic serials. First, let us consider the predominant tendency toward producing girls as victims. Certain recurrent elements function in the plots to circulate specific meanings and present key signifiers on the phantasy level. Chief among these are miserable circumstances and intentional acts of cruelty, which are presented as occasions for adventure. Cruelty as excitant is used at the phantasy level to romanticize practical obstructions and intractable situations and to advocate a passive rather than active posture in the face of aggression. The daunting life worlds encountered by the heroines are offset by their own unselfish helpfulness. This virtue endows them with the capacity to achieve great feats, as long as these actions are

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taken out of a concern for the other. However, there is always the threat of failure: how could one ever be selfless enough? The protagonist’s key personality characteristic of altruism is highlighted by the unremittingly self-interested, ruthless, and treacherous nature of the other children or older relatives in the stories. As noted by McRobbie (1982), the good, timid girl is typically blond, whereas the bad ones, scheming “bitches,” are brunettes. Modest and uncomplaining selflessness is self-justifying, leading to a confidence in one’s own virtue and righteousness and thereby providing a potential resolution to the dilemma—good deeds are ends in themselves. Bad times are celebrated as the condition that makes possible personal triumph through self-abnegation and wishful thinking. The various contrivances of the plot conspire to produce bourgeois individuals whose femininity is associated with their determined passivity. Psychic suppression of need is reinforced by the vision of the longed-for happy family. The heroines sustain their belief in their power to bring about the transformation of the artificial surrogate family structure into the desired and genuine one. The latter takes the form of the typical bourgeois setting of the nuclear group, typically portrayed as residing in a comfortable house furnished with the requisite possessions and secured by the needed monetary resources. In this way, class and gender relations are structured through the same medium.

Romance: Preparing for “Mr. Right” The themes that appear in contemporary cultural forms such as comics act as powerful signifiers evoking struggles that are central to the production of femininity and female sexuality. Although the significations we have been discussing are not often overtly sexual, in certain important ways they may help to prepare girls for current adolescent heterosexual practices that appear to offer an escape from conditions of victimization. Although heterosexuality is not an overt issue, other features of femininity are generated in the comics in such a way as to make “getting your man” the sole outcome. The romantic resolution of desire for adolescent girls is well illustrated in McRobbie’s (1982) analysis of romance in Jackie. McRobbie observes that romance is the key to sexuality, not sex per se. The moment of bliss, as signified by the first kiss, is the dominant motif. Girls’ lives are portrayed as dominated by the emotions of jealousy, possessiveness, and devotion, which generate the conflicts

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between girls. Other girls are made into enemies, typically because the heroine must get a boy and keep him. What one girl can achieve in getting a man is constantly threatened by others with the same designs; insecurity is constantly reproduced. The contradiction, which is underplayed in the magazine but is brought out by McRobbie, is that although getting and keeping men is a constant struggle for girls, the potential for romance is ubiquitous—from bus stop to disco. The arrival of the knight in shining armor is the typical solution. What this solution conceals is that keeping a man is itself a serious threat to happiness ever after. It is because having a man is identified as the natural resolution to problems of female desire that it continues to act so powerfully, even in the face of contradictions. The getting and keeping of the man demonstrates that the girl is “good enough” and “can have what she wants.” The qualities so clearly expressed in the comics—victimization, selflessness, and helpfulness—relate to loss and to the forming and relocation of desire in the person of the ideal male savior. That women have a continued sense of lack of worth, of rejection and guilt, relates specifically to the constellation of meanings associated with the qualities necessary to become the object of desire of the man, and therefore potentially to quench the overwhelming desire in relation to the loss of the mother. In order to reach a deeper comprehension of the situation of women, we must realize that it is not a case of a series of roles, identities, or images that are fitted onto girls. Nor is it a matter of certain stereotypically feminine behaviors that are sanctioned in preference to others. Rather, we must understand the relationship between those practices that not only define correct femininity and masculinity but produce it by creating positions of occupancy and by channeling psychic conflicts and contradictions in particular ways. Good girls are not always good, but where and how is their badness lived? What is the struggle resulting from the effort to be or live a unitary identity? In the comics, good girls and bad girls are utterly different, mutually exclusive personalities. It is exactly such “personality theories” that help to create a “truth” informing those current practices that position girls in identity. In such practices, relational dynamics and shifting identities are denied in favor of a fixed and measurable unity. In consequence, the possible varieties of formation are ignored: naughty girls might be maladjusted or juvenile delinquents, for example. Lacan’s most important contribution is his assertion of the centrality of signification that allows us to understand the produc-

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tion of meaning and of the links in the chain of desire. Comics as constellations of meaning are not removed from, but actually take part in, that formative process. They help to produce the very semiotic chains through which desire is recognized and the very discourses and practices that fix desire and channel its resolution into particular cultural forms. Comics do not “tell it like it is”; there is no psychic determinism that they represent. Their very constellations of meaning provide vehicles for the content of gender differentiation and for the resolution. If they did not do so, they would not be so successful as cultural products. Psychoanalysis does not help us to understand the internalization of norms of femininity through processes of identification. This would be to operate as though girls, in identifying with the texts of comics or with the position of their mother, “became feminine.” Rather, what we must understand is the relation of cultural products and practices to the production and resolution of desire. Such relations are not fitted easily onto girls but are struggled over. We must grasp the way in which that conflict is lived and the relationship between specific content and the solutions proffered to psychic and material struggles.

The Canalization and Fixing of Desire As soon as we identify any kind of fit between the meanings produced within the comics and those expressed in dialogue or interview, we can no longer argue easily that girls are simply shaped or molded from the outside by stereotyped images. Nor are the readers of comics simply constituted by the relations of signification within the text, as some structuralist accounts have implied. Approaches that stress conformity to stereotypes or passive imposition of structures miss the centrality of desire to understanding the complexity of the relationship between cultural products and subjectivity. Cultural practices do not simply engage in a process of imposing normalization. They participate in the formation of desire, fuelling its flames, and thereby canalize it, directing it toward investment in certain objects and resolutions. Reading is nevertheless an active engagement, a struggle for both meaning and identity, and the role of desire and action means that readers do not identify with the heroines always in the same way. It is the production of girls as characters within stories, as objects within particular discourses, that generates and sanctions certain sorts of intellectuality and certain forms of femininity.

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Educational practices are a locus at which the production of intellectuality and the production of femininity intersect. At this point of convergence, we must examine the process by which desire becomes channeled and fixed in relation to particular ideological content, a process of psychosocial mapping. Elsewhere (Walkerdine, 1981) I have used the concept of positioning in discourse in order to elucidate the multiple and contradictory ways in which individual subjectivities are produced and fixed in terms of tile positions that a particular discourse makes it possible to be taken up. Although this notion permits one to understand the multiple rather than singular nature of subjectivity, my previous treatment did not address the way in which a specific individual is produced in relation to any particular nexus of positionings. I was therefore subject to the accusation of having espoused a kind of “discourse determinism.” A further development of the argument is therefore required: an account of the relation of the production of desire to its fixing and grafting onto particular signifiers in the discourse (Venn, 1982). In returning to the concept of positioning, it is necessary first to stress the historical specificity of discourse: What counts as the norm is historically variable. When we say a particular girl is good, is “good” a position fixed in relation to the truth values of particular discourses at a given point in time? For example, what counts as “good at math” depends on those discourses related to modern schooling that govern what counts as mathematical and how mathematics is construed and generated, discourses that are themselves subject to historical change (Corran & Walkerdine, 1981; Walkerdine, 1983). The slippage between the signification of “good” in terms of attainment and “good” connoting “well behaved” is important to understanding how girls can maintain a position within early education that allows them to be both feminine and clever. It is the relations between the significations present within different discourses and the positions afforded by those discourses that are at the root of the production of identity. Identification—the fixing of a subject in a position—cannot take place outside the normative structure of discourse. But the fact that one position rather than another is taken up depends on the mechanism of desire. In Lacan’s terms, it is precisely the relationship between particular significations that produces the chaining of the unconscious and the incorporation of those signifiers in constellations—“regimes of truth,” in Foucault’s (1977, 1979, 1980) terminology. It is the relationship between the production of discursive practices, regimes of truth, and apparatuses of social administration

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that provides the machinery for the generation of positionings. The actions of a girl are given various readings in order to locate her in relation to the normative evaluations embodied in the discursive practices. The particular positions generate specific significations that key into desire and channel it. Certain signifiers fix the girl’s identity and establish her position as a subject in relation to a regime of truth and meaning, so it is through the operation of these certain signifiers that she is able to be publicly recognized. (These identificatory processes can be concretely demonstrated in interviews gathered for a work in progress that will be published by the Girls and Mathematics Unit of the Institute of Education, University of London.) The individual girl ultimately is “subjectified” through her subjection to the normative structure that these signifiers imply. The “interdiscourse,” the slippage of signifiers between one discourse and another, allows for a chaining that links together a complex of positionings and sediments the continuity between them. At the same time, there are differences in content of the same signification as we shift positions in the interdiscourse to allow for the emergence of discontinuities and contradictions that split the subject. For example, a professional woman is both powerful and powerless, depending on whether she is positioned as a professional or as a woman. Where the two significations meet, they are bound to produce problems at the level of reading the woman’s actions and of others’ reactions to her. Such problems will have to be recognized and resolved in some way by the woman. Anxiety around desire will be expected in such a situation. In development, although there may be a temporary appearance of noncontradictory identity, similar conflicts may arise as soon as the girl enters a new set of practices, such as adolescent heterosexuality. The resolutions of these conflicts of desire, for instance, in terms of the image of Mr. Right, will have widespread implications for her future positionings as an adult woman—how she cultivates her own feminine “charms,” for example. These in turn will have particular psychic consequences, which will be played out in relation to others through the mechanisms of projection and introjection that we saw illustrated above in the girls’ comics. It is important to realize that in the complex of discourses and their various intersections, particular others will not necessarily have the same significance to different girls. A good example here is a conversation that I recently had with my sister. We were recalling our childhood experience of our father. Had there been a fly on the wall, it would surely have thought we were talking about

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two different men. I recalled a father who was all good, for whom I worked hard; I felt that I was “his girl.” My sister remembered a father who was weak and ill and in relation to whom she felt too powerful. It is precisely such ambiguities that make it impossible to simply read off the positionings of girls through a simple model of their insertion into family and school. The relationship between positioning, signification, and desire is too complex for such a model.

New Strategies of Intervention: What Are the Possibilities of Subjective Transformation? Once one realizes the significance of desire and phantasy in the incorporation of girls into discursive practices through cultural products such as comics, it becomes less surprising that the rationalist interventions stressing new, counterstereotypical content fail to work. The reactionary response to such failures has been, “If counterstereotyping fails to produce new social conditioning, then the traditional definitions of femininity must be valid.” But given the argument in this chapter, quite a different account can now be given of the failure of those interventions. The rationalist approach, which points to the need for alternative literature for girls, often aggravates the very problem it is designed to ameliorate. For example, feminist literature for girls often depicts women engaged in activities traditionally undertaken by men. In such images it is the mother who, as it were, wields the phallus: In a 1983 alternative book produced for and by beginning readers under the auspices of Division 5 of the London Education Authority, there is an illustration of a mother holding a spanner (wrench). The phallic element is quite important in interpreting textual material, according to psychoanalysis. According to modern psychoanalytic theory, one major problem for girls in the formation of female gender is the move away from desire for the mother that accompanies the recognition that she, originally perceived as the omnipotent Phallic Mother, does not, in fact, possess the phallus. Although social changes have brought about a situation in which women can indeed fill positions that invest them with the phallus, this is not to imply that such positions provide coherent or noncontradictory identities. Lacan has argued that the phallus is a “fraud,” since men do not possess it either but rather perpetually struggle to attain it. For women to aspire to be the Phallic Mother is equally fraudulent. This

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should not be taken as an argument that modern shifts in workrelated practices are unimportant, or that girls should not grow up in relationship to a powerful mother, or that phantasied approaches toward the phallus are not significant in encouraging awareness of opportunities. However, the phallus cannot ensure safety, much as marriage does not guarantee living happily ever after. Alternative fictions must be imagined with an awareness of the identities and positions that traditional fiction produces for girls and with attention to the complex relational dynamic that underlies the struggle involved in constituting femininity (or masculinity). It also must be planned with an awareness of the ambiguity of textual revision: the alternative texts may have quite variable meanings and quite different consequences. By examining how present cultural practices deal with conflicts and offer resolutions to them, it may be possible to reach an understanding of how those practices work, what they speak and what they do not, what phantasies they do and do not tolerate, what forms of sexuality they encourage and what they foreclose. Since conflicts of desire persist throughout life, it might be possible to envisage, by way of new interventions, texts promoting fictive engagements with both present and future struggles, with both small and large resolutions, from presence or absence of the mother to the arrival of Mr. Right, or the prince. If current fictions produce such powerful effects, we too, if we are to find other possibilities, must work on the production of dreams. Two concepts, elaborated in the work of Venn (1982) may be useful in a consideration of possible subjective transformation: the notions of forgetting and the recanalization of desire. In Lacan’s account of the production of the subject, the subject is not pregiven but is produced out of the separation from the mother-other. Until the infant can mark and recognize that separation, it is not constituted as a subject. Pecheux’s (1982) concept of forgetting refers to the way in which the subject places in its own way the greatest possible obstruction to change when it ignores the constituted character of the self and imagines itself to be the rational and free subject of the cogito. If we posit ourselves as subjects of free choice, we become incapable of recognizing the constitutive character of the regimes of truth that produce us. It is the mechanism of desire that is responsible for this forgetting. It operates to repress our separation and pain of loss. Our loss of the constitutive character of our subjectification through the fixing of our desires calls for a deconstruction, a practice that allows us to take apart the takenfor-granted in the construction of subjectivity and to examine its socially and historically specific character.

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I would argue that it is precisely changes relating to the insertion of the girl into heterosexual practices and her relocation to a new constellation of meanings that makes forgetting a significant part of subjective transformation. Venn (1982) refers to this kind of process as “recanalization of desire”: It is not a . . . purely rational exercise, since rational arguments alone are not sufficient to change hearts and minds: they simply present another possible and competing “field of Identity” or ideomorph, but without engaging with the subject’s investments. So it seems to me that the process of changing subjects and of politicization must involve, in addition, another (or others) who can function as Other: a leader/hero, a mentor, friend, lover, or a cohesive group enabling a cathartic recanalization of desire, and thus, the relocation of the subject. (p. 318) Such a recanalization of desire that cathartically diverts the girl and gives rise to forgetting can be a function of phantasy, because heroines can resolve conflicts in a variety of ways and lovers can take up a variety of positions. We should hold fast to the significance of the phantasied here, rather than that of everyday functional reality. The needed other is not a role model because the construct of role model, with its accompanying practical interventions, does not require the same investment of desire or call for the same deconstruction of signification that transformation in the universe of fiction and phantasy does. By revealing the gaps and silences, fictional narratives facilitate the voicing of previously unspoken problems. Those problems, although suppressed in the discourse, are experienced by women every day. But to be confronted, they must first be spoken and made to signify. The act of voicing and deconstruction are preludes to the recanalization of desire, which is our imperative in our struggle for self and social transformation. After all, it was only the princess’s desire that transformed the frog into a prince.

NOTES 1. In psychoanalysis the term phantasy is used rather than fantasy. This is because the term is intended to be wider in usage than simple

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imaginary production, relating broadly to the “world of the imagination” (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1973, p. 314). 2. The comics analyzed in this paper (Bunty and Tracy) come from D.C. Thompson & Co., Ltd., Dundee, Scotland. Published in 1982.

REFERENCES Corran, C., & Walkerdine, V. (1981). The practice of reason. Vol. 1: Reading the signs of mathematics. London: University of London Institute of Education. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish. London: Allen Lane. Foucault, M. (1979). History of sexuality (Vol. 1). London: Allen Lane. Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972–1977 (C. Gordon, Ed.). Brighton: Harvester Press. Freud, S. (1956). Family romances. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 9, pp. 237–241). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1908) Lacan, J. (1977). Écrits: A selection. London: Tavistock. (Original work published 1966) Laplanche, J., & Pontalis, J.-B. (1973). The language of psychoanalysis. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis. McRobbie, A. (1982). Jackie: An ideology of adolescent femininity. In B. Waites, T. Bennet, & G. Martin (Eds.), Popular culture, past and present. London: Croom Helm and the Open University Press. Mitchell, J., & Rose, J. (Eds.). (1982). Feminine sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école Freudienne. New York: Norton. Pecheux, M. (1982). Language, semantics, and ideology. London: MacMillan. Venn, C. (1982). Beyond the science-ideology relation. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Essex, England. Walkerdine, V. (1981). Sex, power, and pedagogy. Screen Education, 38, 14–25. Walkerdine, V. (1983). The historical construction of the scientific truth about girls. Paper presented at the Second International GASAT Conference, Oslo, Norway.

6 Homosexualities from Freud to Lacan Robert Samuels

A

s many commentators have recently pointed out, Freud’s usage of the concept of homosexuality is so widespread and diverse that it threatens to overwhelm his entire theoretical system (Abelove, 1993; Dollimore, 1991). From the beginning of his work, homosexuality is used to explain such diverse phenomena as the causality of psychosis (Freud, 1911/1963), neurosis (Freud, 1905/ 1962,1909/1963), and perversion (Freud, 1905/1962), as well as the development of civilization (Freud, 1913/1963,1930/1985), and the limits of analysis itself. Through this heterogenous usage of homosexuality it is clear that Freud does not equate it with a particular stage of sexual development or a specific pathology. In fact, Freud’s work lays the groundwork for Lacan’s radical rejection of the notion of a normal form of sexuality.

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112 Robert Samuels Following Freud, Lacan argues that the normal is only the norm-of-the-male. In other words, psychoanalysis has no true, universal concept of the normal. This refusal to promulgate a normalized form of sexuality has been implicit in psychoanalysis ever since Freud (1905/1962) called heterosexuality a problem that has to be worked on: Thus from the point of view of psychoanalysis the exclusive sexual interest felt by men for women is also a problem that needs elucidating and is not a self-evident fact based upon an attraction that is ultimately chemical in nature. (p. 2, note 1) In other terms, to paraphrase Lacan, there is no natural sexual relation. Heterosexuality as well as homosexuality is something that has to be created and constructed. It is this lack of a natural relation between the sexes that in part determines the essence of the unconscious and what Freud calls the bisexual nature of infantile sexuality. A logic of homosexuality can be constructed with concepts that Lacan introduced to psychoanalysis. In particular, the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic enable us to distinguish between what may be called psychotic, neurotic, and perverse homosexual desire (Samuels, 1993). From a Lacanian perspective, we can posit that psychotic subjects are dominated by the consequences of a foreclosure of the symbolic order of social signification and regulation (Lacan, 1966/1977, pp. 179–225). The unavailability of the cultural Other and the reality principle results in a return of the foreclosed signifiers (the symbolic order) in the Real. Neurotic subjects, on the other hand, avoid the Real by organizing sensations and thoughts into an Imaginary world (narcissism and idealization) as a defense against castration (the Symbolic). In perverse sexuality, the Imaginary echoes the Symbolic structures and scenarios of neurosis without the concomitant sacrifices that castration entails. (In establishing this logic of Freud’s and Lacan’s theories of sexual desire, we must keep in mind that most of Freud’s investigations of homosexuality deal exclusively with masculine sexuality and that all subjects are fundamentally bisexual from a Freudian perspective.) The Logic of (Homo)-Sexuality In the beginning of his ground-breaking Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud (1905/1962) employs the term “inversion” in

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order to upset the “normal” conception of sexual development and to introduce his notion of universal sexual “aberrations.” Inversion is first used to designate a reversal in object choice: “There are men whose sexual object is a man and not a woman, and women whose sexual object is a woman and not a man” (p. 2). Inversion also implies a reversal of sexual identification, when Freud refers to the argument that a homosexual male “feels he is a woman in search of a man” (p. 10). These two ideas, reversal of the object and reversal of gender identification, are often confused in Freud’s own work and in later theories of homosexuality. It is essential to distinguish clearly between a change in object-choice and a change in gender identification, for it is clear that some men believe themselves to be a man in search of another male (change in object), while other men identify themselves as being a woman in search of the opposite sex (change in gender identification). Freud also argues that some subjects are attracted to objects that combine attributes of both sexes, “There is a compromise between an impulse that seeks for a man and one that seeks for a woman, while it remains a paramount condition that the object’s body (i.e., genitals) shall be masculine” (p. 10). Here, Freud argues that the male invert searches for a bisexual object so that he can reproduce his own bisexual nature. The structural differences among these distinct forms of masculine homosexuality are implicit in the Three Essays, where Freud (1905/1962) attempts to articulate a logic of sexual inversion by distinguishing between “absolute,” “amphigenic,” and “contingent” inverts. According to Freud, absolute inverts are people whose “sexual objects are exclusively of their own sex. Persons of the opposite sex are never the object of their sexual desire” (p. 2). The absolute invert then is equated to the logical quantifier “All,” as in “all sexual objects are of the same sex.” The second logical category of inversion is the “amphigenic” or bisexual. “In that case their sexual objects may be equally of their own or of the opposite sex” (Freud, 1905/1962, p. 2). In this structure, Freud indicates that “some” of the libido is directed toward objects of the same sex, but not “all.” The final category of inversion is the “contingent”: “In that case, under certain external circumstances—of which the inaccessibility of any normal sexual object and imitation are the chief—they are capable of taking someone of their own sex as their sexual object “ (p. 3). The inversion occurs sometimes, but not always. Furthermore, what is essential in the determination of this form of homosexuality are the external factors of the inaccessibility and imitation of the object.

114 Robert Samuels This three-way distinction in type of inversion points to the three concepts of homosexuality employed by Freud in his later work. There, absolute inversion is superseded by an examination of the specific pathological structures of perverse homosexuality. The second level of “amphigenic” inversion or bisexuality, developed by Freud in the Three Essays and other essential texts, is the core of infantile and unconscious sexuality. Freud’s (1905/1962) position throughout his work is that there is no recognition of sexual difference in the initial stages of sexual and social development, and therefore every subject is bisexual. Psychoanalysis considers that a choice of an object independently of its sex—freedom to range equally over male and female objects—as it is found in childhood, in primitive states of society and early periods of history, is the original basis from which, as a result of restriction, in one direction or the other, both the normal and the inverted types develop. (pp. 11–12, n.1) As this note (added in 1915) makes clear, Freud conceives of bisexuality as the initial form of sexuality; “inversion” develops from restrictions on the initial polymorphous state of sexuality. In order to trace the different stages of Freud’s logic of sexual desire and inversion, I will turn to Lacan’s schema L, as shown in figure 6.1 (Lacan, 1966/1977, pp. 193–196). Following Freud, Lacan posits that the initial state of being for every subject (S) involves an unmediated access to the real of bodily enjoyment and freedom from any form of social regulation. In the second stage, the original mode of polymorphous desire is replaced by a desire for unity and identity that is modelled on an ideal image of pleasure (a′). In the third

(Unconscious Sexuality) S

(Adjected Desire) a

a’ (Narcissism)

A (Social Desire)

Figure 6.1 An Application of Lacan’s Schema L

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phase of this logic, all modes of desire are transformed and mediated by the symbolic discourse of law and language (A), resulting in a condition that Lacan (1966/1977) summarizes with the formula “the desire of the subject is the desire of the Other.” Here, human sexuality is determined by social reality and symbolic castration, although the object a designates the refusal of desire to be completely regulated by either imaginary narcissism or symbolic sexual difference. This object a represents all of the forms of sexuality and identity that the dominant social order abjects and excludes. The original subject, born without any relation to the Imaginary other (written as a′) or the Symbolic Other (written as A), knows nothing of sexual difference and lacks any capacity to recognize the Other and the Other’s sexuality. In this sense the subject’s infantile sexual experiences are bisexual or multisexual (as the term polymorphously perverse suggests). For Freud (1905/1962) the initial state of bisexual infantile sexuality is equivalent to the unconscious (p. 210). In other words, on the level of the unconscious there is no recognition of sexual difference and therefore this original form of inversion is in reality not an inversion at all because there is nothing to invert. With the primary state of bisexuality, one finds a complete rejection, or in Lacan’s terms, “foreclosure,” of sexual difference, which implies a rejection of castration. On Lacan’s schema L, the subject of the unconscious is placed in the opposite corner from the Other (A) of sexual difference. This indicates that for Lacan and Freud, there is a radical foreclosure of castration that defines the causality of psychosis and the nature of the unconscious. However, we shall see that this very notion of “polymorphous perversity” is misleading, because perversion as a pathology is a form of sexuality that has to be developed and that depends on the recognition of sexual difference, even if that difference is denied. On the level of infantile sexuality, therefore, it is incorrect to speak about a “perversion” because there is no recognition of an objectchoice nor is there the distinction between having and not having the phallus. On the other hand, in the case of the absolute invert, the exclusivity of the object-choice points to the recognition as well as a denial of the difference between the sexes on a Symbolic level. With the contingent invert, we find two elements that allow us to attach this logical category to the structure of the neurotic and the concept of narcissism. The first factor is the inaccessibility of the object, and the second is the influence of imitation. In a note added to The Three Essays in 1910, Freud introduced his concept of narcissism to account for inversion.

116 Robert Samuels Future inverts, in the earliest years of their childhood, pass through a phase of very intense but short-lived fixation to a woman (usually their mother), and that, after leaving this behind, they identify themselves with a woman and take themselves as their sexual object. That is to say, they proceed from a narcissistic basis, and look for a young man who resembles themselves and whom they may love as their mother loved them. (p. 11) In this form of contingent inversion, the subject identifies with the parent of the same sex after that parent has become inaccessible as a love object. In other words, identification replaces object-choice. Within this narcissistic structure, it is the image of the self that the subject falls in love with. We find this relation between the ego and its narcissistic object in Lacan’s schema L on the Line a——a′ in figure 6.2, which articulates Lacan’s notion of the Imaginary mirror-stage. In the state of narcissism, the subject falls in love with the reflected ideal-ego (a′)—the image of his self as a young boy—from the position of identifying with his mother as ego-ideal I(A). On Lacan’s schema, we can place this ideal between the symbolic Other and the imaginary other. Lacan helps to distinguish between these two concepts by arguing that the ego-ideal is the place from which the subject wants to be loved, while the ideal-ego represents the object that is loved. We shall see how this narcissistic structure of desire defines the pathological state of the neurotic homosexual. To further elucidate differences between the bisexual (amphigenic), narcissistic (contingent), and perverse (absolute) forms of homosexuality, I will discuss examples from clinical practice. The first case has the structure of a bisexual panic disorder, the

(Bisexual Subject) S

a’ (Narcissistic Object)

I (A) Ego–Ideal

a

A (Symbolic Other)

Figure 6.2 An Application of Lacan’s Schema L (#2)

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second case is a neurotic narcissistic personality disorder, and the third is a sadomasochistic perversion.

Mr. A: Bisexuality and Psychosis Mr. A came into therapy because of a lack of certainty concerning his sexual preference, panic attacks, hypochondriacal complaints, and concerns that turned out to be mild paranoid delusions. He described his anxiety in these terms: “On Friday I realize that I should call people up to do something socially . . . Saturday I sleep late so I don’t have to call anyone . . . on Sunday I become depressed because I didn’t see anyone and by Sunday night, I feel a tightness in my chest and I’m sure I’m going to die.” During a particular anxiety attack, he would become conscious of his lungs and his other bodily parts. This made him feel disgusting, tired, and weak. He felt that he was losing his hair and dying and that he was nothing in relation to what he should be. One time, he hallucinated that people’s bodies were grotesque and that their inner parts were exposed. He often had the sensation that other people’s bodies or his own were fragmented and coming apart. Once he saw a man that he was attracted to come out of a door; suddenly he saw “a stream of confusion” go up his body and past his face. In this translation of an internal feeling of confusion into a perception of an external object, we see his incapacity to symbolize his confusion over his sexuality manifest as a “return in the Real” of his confusion. In the case of Mr. A, the sensation that his body is becoming fragmented is associated with his inability to determine his sexual identity. He reported that when he looked into the mirror as a child, he did not know if he was a girl or a boy. His mother dressed him as a girl to represent the girl she never had. The uncertain nature of his sexual identity and desire made self-recognition very problematic, and left him exposed to recurring feelings that his body was coming apart. Confusion about sexual identity and sexual orientation is directly implicated in his homosexuality: At least I know that if I am attracted to him, I must be a man attracted to other men and therefore I must be gay—but, at the same time, maybe I’m a woman in a man’s body who likes other women in men’s bodies and in that way I’m a lesbian. Or I could be a woman in a man’s body who likes men and

118 Robert Samuels therefore I could be straight, or even a man who likes women in men’s bodies; then I’m still straight. Now I’m confused if it’s me or my body that makes me sexual. In psychosis and transiently in extreme panic, the subject’s unconscious comes to the surface, and the uncertainty surrounding sexuality is tantamount to a psyche in which the subject of the unconscious is insufficiently differentiated from the self-image.

A Narcissistic Personality Another form of homosexuality is by a man with a narcissistic personality disorder. Mr. B is extremely preoccupied with the way that others perceive him and the way that he looks to others and the way he sees them. If he finds something that he likes in someone else, he tries to identify with it or take it for himself. He admires those who appear to have mastered the social game, and he hopes that being around such “achieved people” will allow him to acquire some of their talent for social adaptation. He wants others to admire him and find him attractive. If he does not get attention or approval, he becomes withdrawn and shy and gives the impression of being a snob or distant. His relations to others are narcissistic, grandiose, and exhibitionistic. He attributes his homosexuality to a bad relation with his father—whom he never respected and who never represented an ideal of masculinity for him—so he always looked for that masculine ideal in others. An adult neighbor who used to pay attention to him and do masculine things with him was the first source of this masculine ideal. Later, this role was filled by a series of lovers. His self-centered narcissism shows up in a small incident that began with him seeing a newspaper on a bench. He thought he should read it, but it was only about sports and he has no interest in sports because he can’t identify with the players. He therefore discarded the piece of paper in the same way that he discards others that don’t interest him directly. Homosexuality represents a way to relate to an ideal image of himself, but since the image of the ideal always remains in the external world, there is no relief from feeling that he has no identity of his own. He once said, “It’s strange that all my lovers look just like me and yet I’m still not happy with the way I look.” We can say that Mr. B, in contrast to Mr. A, is fixated on the Imaginary (mirror stage). He confuses object-choices with

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identifications. He not only wants to be like his ideal masculine figure; he also wants to love that ideal. He seeks in his lovers a form of idealization and repetition where he refinds his own lost object, which is ultimately his own ideal self.

Sadomasochistic Homosexuality The third case is an example of sadomasochistic perversion. As opposed to Mr. A and Mr. B, Mr. C has virtually no problem acting on his “desires.” In fact he usually has two or three relations or sexual interactions going at the same time. These relations show a remarkable split between purely sexual, exciting relations and more romantic, tender relationships. Mr. C was concerned about his continual involvement in unsafe sex. He knew that unprotected sex is wrong, but the risk excites him. Not only does he feel good when others “sacrifice” their body for him, he sees the risk of death as an ultimate sign of love. C has no resistance to describing his sexual acts. Virtually free from neurotic inhibitions, he tries to force sexuality into the Symbolic realm of culture and discourse—he openly describes wearing costumes for men and allowing himself to be “forced” to urinate on lovers and to insult them. He asserts his sexual identification and his sexual orientation with absolute certainty: a man that loves other men. He is openly intolerant to “queens” and bisexuals. In this sense, we can say that he denies his own unconscious bisexuality in order to affirm the “certainty” of his homosexuality. However, a series of dreams about sexual uncertainty haunts his unconscious. In one dream, he was going to enter another man from behind but the other man only had a flat surface with a hole rather than an ass. As he began to enter him, the man’s head turned slowly to face him. His associations reflect the effort he makes to deny his anxiety about sexual difference. The two men in the dream don’t face each other during intercourse as heterosexuals usually do, “so they don’t have to worry about being judged.” Since the head of the lover turns around, so that the homosexual act becomes, in a sense, a heterosexual one, the hole without an ass suggests an attempt to blur sexual difference—the hole could either be an anus or a vagina or both combined together—and thus a projection of his own unconscious bisexuality. “Attacking from behind” lets him think of himself as an active, aggressive male. The turning head sets the stage for him to be recognized by another male, which, he hopes,

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would allow him to overcome the shame and disgust that defined, for Freud, the essence of the absolute pervert. In the Three Essays, there is constant tension between perversion defined as the original state of all subjects and perversion as a refusal of neurotic conflict. The direct expression of perverse sexual drives represents an attempt to override shame, disgust, and fear that cripple the neurotic’s sexuality. In Lacan’s theory, it is precisely the recognition of the Symbolic Other that allows the subject the ability to move beyond his Imaginary world of narcissism. In the structure of perversion, this “Other” is represented by the recognition of the Other sex and the Other person outside of the subject’s own ego and narcissistic objects. The Other is also the place where the subject seeks to have his or her sexual desire recognized by another person in a Symbolic form of sexual representation. In the case of Mr. C, he wants to be recognized by another man as being a man who loves other men. He can do this only by presenting his sexuality in exaggerated form (i.e., wearing uniforms and barking orders). Freud concluded that the neurotic’s sexuality is restricted because he or she is afraid and ashamed to overidealize the sexual object. Only the strength of the drive allows the perverse subject to override the inhibitions that immobilize the neurotic ego. Freud will later elaborate on this theory of the perverse idealization of the disgusting love object in his text “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love.” His initial explanation for this phenomenon is that the subject becomes impotent in front of a love object that reminds him of an idealized and loving incestuous fixation (248). Therefore, in order to avoid the taboo object, the subject has to split his objects between sensual ones and what Freud calls “tender” or “affectionate” objects. It is through this process of debasement that the subject is able to detach the desired object from any combined feelings of sensuality and affection. Mr. C could only make love to men that were smaller than he; he was impotent with larger men. He idealized his mother but later grew to hate her. The larger men that render him impotent may remind him of childhood when he was smaller than his object and felt overwhelmed and intimidated by his mother’s affection and power. In order to avoid this situation, and in fact to reverse it, he chooses lovers who are smaller than he. In this way he avoids re-encountering the incestuous object-choice. He openly states that he can only make love to someone he doesn’t care about, and this lends a quality of transgression and/or disgust to the act. If he meets someone who may be good for him, someone with whom he

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could possibly have a long term relationship, he turns off sexually. This split between desire and love also corresponds to a split in his sense of himself. He complains that he cannot control his sexual urges and often engages in unsafe sex. Part of him wants to stop this, and another part does not want any limit on pleasure. The perverse subject is torn between the death drive, which forces jouissance into the symbolic realm of the Other, and the imaginary, which structures the idealization of the self and its ideal objects. For Lacan, the death drive represents the essential tie between death and sexuality. It is the role of psychoanalysis to separate them by cutting this lethal connection. Freud’s theories of homosexuality are as complex and diverse as his theories of heterosexuality. Through Lacan’s schema L and his conceptualization of the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic, we can begin to articulate the logic of Freud’s fundamental diagnostic categories. The point of this work is not to pathologize homosexuality but to undermine the monolithic conception of this mode of sexual desire.

REFERENCES Abelove, H. (1993). Freud, male homosexuality, and the American. In H. Abelove (Ed.), The lesbian and gay studies reader. New York: Routledge Press. Dollimore, J. (1991). Sexual dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Freud, S. (1962). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. New York: Basic Books. (Original work published 1905) Freud, S. (1963). Notes upon a case of obsessional neurosis. Three case histories. New York: Collier Books. (Original work published 1909) Freud, S. (1963). Psychoanalytic notes upon an autobiographical account of a case of paranoia (dementia paranoides). Three case histories. New York: Collier Books. (Original work published 1911) Freud, S. (1963). Totem and Taboo. New York: Collier Books. (Original work published 1913) Freud, S. (1985). Civilization and its discontents. Freud: Civilization, society and religion. New York: Penguin Books. (Original work published 1930) Lacan, J. (1977). Écrits: A selection. New York: Norton. (Original work published 1966) Samuels, R. (1993). Between philosophy and psychoanalysis: Lacan’s reconstruction of Freud. New York: Routledge Press.

7 Jouissance in the Cure André Patsalides and Kareen Ror Malone

Introduction

I

n American circles, Lacanian psychoanalysis is often associated with structuralism, linguistics, and the supervalence of the signifier and language in the understanding of the unconscious (e.g., Mitchell & Black, 1995; Barratt, 1993). One, in fact, cannot fully understand the import of Lacan without a substantive appreciation for the role of language and speech within psychoanalysis and for the human subject (Lacan, 1966/1977b). However, the Lacanian subject is heterogeneous and arises out of the effects of the signifier’s instantiation and within the context of its transmission. It is this broader context of effects that is missed in the North American reading of Lacan. As a result, the innovative nature of equally significant Lacanian concepts, such as the objet a or jouissance, are often overlooked. The former is glossed as something like object relations and the 123

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latter as something like orgasm, while Lacan’s emphasis on the signifier takes center stage. Unfortunately, this vague assimilation obscures Lacan’s important recasting of the biological and psychological qua the structure of the drive, and his conception of the object as the presupposed of the lost cause of desire. As one delves more deeply into the Lacanian corpus, it becomes apparent that his formulations of jouissance, objet a, the signifier, the real, imaginary, and symbolic, stretch the traditional Western antinomy of the mind versus body to its limit. Lacan’s theoretical innovations reinvigorate the psychoanalytic field and they cannot be recognized if we continue to see his contribution as asserting language as a monolith that simply dominates subjectivity. Theorizing Jouissance? In psychology, the body is usually conceived using metaphors from biology (evolution), mechanics, or through models of consciousness. At some point, however, the frames of adaptation, functionality, transparency, and rationality break down. There is an extremity to the human condition (whether its result is survival or destruction) in which privation, sacrifice, and defeat become, in a sense, inverted in their psychological meaning. Rather than being goaloriented functional organisms, human subjects sometimes insist in repetitions that work against their self interest. One finds a suspicious pleasure in one’s complaints, one is drawn to “dis-satisfying” sexual objects, one’s sense of duty becomes deliciously rapacious in its demands. In another context, one can consider a patient’s symptoms as founded, in part, in these anomalous pleasures—which are different from secondary gain. Symptoms are, of course, metaphors (Lacan, 1966/1977c), but there is as well an intrusive enjoyment— jouissance—in the symptom. The attempt to simply remove the symptom, advocated in some psychotherapy circles, leaves the subject’s relationship to that jouissance untouched. Lacanian psychoanalysis, on the contrary, recognizes and theorizes the “causation” and subjective effects of that jouissance. Jouissance is precisely what does not fit into the coherent network of signifiers that are available to the patient—it reflects the difficulty between subject and body, a difficulty that creates a certain excess and indicates that either term is irreducible to the other. As is the case with all of Lacan, one cannot understand the concept of jouissance without factoring in the unresolvable rela-

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tionship to the Other. Jouissance cannot simply be defined through the categories of affect but it can be theorized through the three registers of the Imaginary, the Real, and the Symbolic. Lacan’s elaboration of the analytical concept of jouissance appeared for the first time in “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” (1966/1977a), although it was mentioned in some of his previous texts (Lacan, 1958/1966a; Lacan, 1958/1966b;1959/1966c). In the seminar Encore (1975a), Lacan gave his most elaborate articulation of two forms of jouissance: the phallic jouissance, and the jouissance of the Other. In La Troisième, “The Third,” Lacan (1974) refers to the third jouissance—“jouis-sens”—the jouissance of meaning, which is the jouissance of the unconscious. Retroactively we could say that Freud invented psychoanalysis in order to deal with this mysterious third jouissance. Jouissance and the Limit of Sexuality In “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire,” Lacan (1966/1977a) addresses jouissance in relationship to his new matheme “S(Ø),” which he defines as “the signifier of a lack in the Other” (p. 316). This matheme, subsequently defined in this text, marks a turning point in Lacan’s teaching. S(Ø) has multiple meanings: that within the Other a lack exists, that truth is never ultimate, and that nothing is all. Put differently, the Other lacks the signifier that would define the subject and tell him his truth—the Other is therefore castrated. S(Ø) thus signifies a certain “minus one (–1) in the whole set of signifiers,” and denotes “that there is no Other of the Other” (p. 316). S(Ø) is “what the subject lacks in order to think himself . . . that which is unthinkable for him” (p. 316). Lacan defines this unthinkable as the place that reaches beyond language. At one level, it is the signifier that first identifies the subject by a name, by a “proper noun” to which the subject responds. But Lacan tells us that something is “defective in the sea of proper nouns” (p. 317). Even the signifier most proper to the subject fails to fully identify him or her. Moreover, this failure refers to what is most essential to the subject’s being. What is lacking is the very Being of the subject that returns as objet a, this place beyond designation that is in lack of a signifier. “I” am in the place from which a voice is heard clamouring “the universe is a defect in the purity of Non-being.” And not

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without reason, for by protecting itself, this place makes Being itself languish. This place is called jouissance and it is the absence of this that makes the universe vain. (Lacan, 1966/ 1977a, p. 317) Although one could not claim that Freud uses the concept of jouissance in the same way, Freud employed the term jouissance. In a paper, written in French, on the etiology of the obsessive neurosis, Freud (1896) explicitly mentions the “anticipated sexual enjoyment” (jouissance sexuelle anticipée) for which the obsessive neurotic blames himself (p. 6).1 As well, Freud (1905/ 1953b) seems to refer implicitly to an idea close to Lacan’s concept of jouissance in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, where he elaborates on the paradoxical—both pleasurable and unpleasurable—nature of sexual tension within the pleasure principle. Freud seemed aware not only of the limits of his theory of homeostasis, but also of the fact that there was a “problem . . . how it can come about that an experience of pleasure can give rise to a need for greater pleasure” (p. 210). In a sense, Freud intuited the existence of a jouissance beyond the pleasure principle that is linked precisely to the subject’s confrontation with, and transgression of, an inherent structural limitation to sexual desire, which is, after all, defined by the signifier. Jouissance, in Lacanian terminology, incorporates, yet goes beyond, Freud’s intuitions. In French, jouissance is, in part, judicially defined and spelled out as the subject’s use and enjoyment of all the advantages of a specific object or privilege. Lacan’s jouissance refers to use and enjoyment but ominously appeals to what lies “beyond the pleasure principle” (the principle of satisfaction and homeostasis), as well as what goes against the pleasure principle. According to Lacan, jouissance is of a negative order, serving neither the pleasure principle, self-conservation, nor the discharge from excitement. Jouissance is instead intimately related to the death drive. As Lacan suggests, every drive is ultimately a death drive. Lacan (1966/1977a) states that jouissance asks for more; that it exceeds (the homeostasis of) the pleasure principle: jouissance, he said, longs for the “infinitude that brings with it the mark of its prohibition” (p. 319). It is the longing for infinitude in jouissance that constitutes a threat to the subject’s life itself. Therefore, in order for life to be maintained, the pleasure principle, desire, and the signifier come to limit jouissance. One can see here that, in a sense, sexuality comes to function as that which attempts to mark

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and organize jouissance. In fact, Lacan wrote that “it is pleasure that sets the limit on jouissance” (p. 319). The pleasure principle that regulates the primary processes of condensation and displacement, sets a limit on jouissance, more specifically on the jouissance of the unconscious. Here one finds a hint of Lacan’s third jouissance, namely, the jouissance of meaning (of coding, of lettering, and of ciphering), that is, the jouissance of the unconscious and of the dream. The limit against jouissance is maintained as long as we dream and continue to sleep without waking. If dreams are fraught with an excess of jouissance the subject is awakened. As jouissance can potentially threaten life and extinguish desire, desire itself must be seen as the second limitation on jouissance. To quote Lacan (1966/1977a), “Desire is a defense, a prohibition against going beyond a certain limit in jouissance” (p.319). In order for the subject to continue to desire, jouissance must be limited. After the pleasure principle and desire, the signifier comes to constitute the third limitation on jouissance. But this is not a simple relationship where the signifier controls jouissance. More precisely, the signifier both permits and prohibits jouissance. Lacan (1975) in his seminar Encore clearly elucidates this double function of the signifier—as material and final cause of jouissance—which on the one hand permits jouissance (is “the cause of jouissance”), and on the other, “stops jouissance” (gives us its limit) (p.27). If language did not exist, jouissance, as that which exceeds the pleasure principle, would be inconceivable. Language marks jouissance in its particularity but also marks how jouissance functions for the human subject. Further, language, that is, the laws of representation, signification, and identification, also determines jouissance as human sexuality. Our sexuality is basically intellectual. One’s sexual object choice is ruled by signifiers (representation, identification), and not by instincts.2 It is language that intervenes on the body to render a specifically human jouissance. Finally, it is the inscription of images/letters of (lost) satisfaction and desire, evoked in our relationship to the Other’s body, tone and voice, that evokes this jouissance which is “in us more than us” (Lacan, 1973/1978). Within this mapping, one can clarify how jouissance relates to sexuality. The lack of a sexual “instinct” that would determine the choice of our sexual object implies that, as Lacan would say, “there is no sexual rapport.” Because of this lack of “sexual rapport,” everything ends up being sexual in the Freudian unconscious. Were the sexual biological, it would exhibit a field of predetermined behaviors. The body’s specular image is what channels libido toward the body

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as object, the body as locus of jouissance (Lacan,1967, p. 72). But even the specular image fails to represent what is conveyed by the erectile organ through desire: “thus the erectile organ comes to symbolize the place of jouissance . . . as a part lacking in the desired image” (Lacan, 1966/1977a, p. 320). Orgasm, because it has an end, indicates the same lack, that is, that jouissance is what is left languishing after coitus ends (Lacan, 1973, p. 23). As Freud had suggested, jouissance always points to what is anticipated, what is desired beyond the limit traced by the object, by the organ, by the signifier, and by the image. The Modalities of Jouissance Using “La Troisième” (Lacan, 1974), the following tries to show how Lacan locates the three jouissances in relation to the intersections of the three Borromean circles of the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary (figure 7.1). These relations are figured in the following graph. Note that the three registers circle the “objet a,” which Lacan defines as “the to-be-elaborated nucleus of jouissance” (p. 199).

Imaginary Body

(JO) a

J of meaning

(ΦJ) Real Symbolic

Figure 7.1 The Borromean Knot and Jouissance

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What Lacan calls phallic jouissance (ΦJ) is located at the intersection of the Symbolic and the Real, and thus participates in both registers. While it is a part of the Symbolic (the order of language, law, and culture) and the Real (the impossible, what cannot enter into a dialectic with the signifier), phallic jouissance lies outside the Imaginary, which Lacan (1974) identifies with the body. Because this jouissance is caused by the signifier, Lacan calls it “the out-of-the-body jouissance” (p. 189). Phallic jouissance is what we encounter in the analytical session, in the sense that the sexuality of the subject in analysis is conveyed through language, that is, signifiers. The phallic jouissance supplements the lack of the body’s jouissance, which in its status as the jouissance of the Other is lost for the speaking being. The jouissance of the Other (JO), that is, the jouissance of the body, is located at the intersection of the Real and the Imaginary, and participates in both registers. This jouissance lies outside the Symbolic, outside of language: it is therefore unspeakable. Lacan identifies the jouissance of the Other as the feminine jouissance, but this does not imply that it is limited to women or that every woman “has” it. Lacan (1974) also identifies this jouissance as the mystic’s jouissance: “It is clear that the mystics’ essential testimony (regarding this jouissance) is precisely to say that they feel it, but that they know nothing about it” (p. 190). This para-sexual jouissance (“beside” sexual jouissance) can only be suggested through poetry and words of love—“parole d’amour” (Lacan, 1975, p. 71). Furthermore, this jouissance, inaccessible to the speaking being, or experienced exceptionally as an inexpressible bliss, is the jouissance of life. The best idea that we could have about this jouissance of a body closed on itself, enjoying itself, is the jouissance of the animal. Both Lacan and Freud have proposed the cat as a paradigm of this jouissance.3 Lacan has even wondered if the vegetable realm does not participate in this jouissance (pp. 187–188). The third jouissance—“jouis-sens” (as Lacan writes it)—the jouissance of meaning is located at the intersection of the Imaginary and the Symbolic. It is the jouissance of the unconscious. It answers the question why it is that the unconscious continues to code and cipher. The motor of this unconscious jouissance is lalangue, which “hinges” the language that we speak and the unconscious that desires. Lalangue conveys the jouissance of the unconscious. Formal linguistics is primarily interested in studying the phonetic, syntactic, and semantic rules and regulations of language as a closed system of codified differences. The function of linguistics is to constitute language as a coherent, complete system that is able

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to respond even to its own exceptions and inconsistencies. Language is presented as a whole in the sense of an all-graspable system. Both clinical experience and everyday life teach us that there are holes in this whole system. Spoken language is far less consistent than linguistics would have us believe. The spoken language, the “language being Used”—the “U” language of H. Curry— is twisted, endlessly sliding, winding, self-referential, and logically inconsistent (Miller, 1975-76). The more we speak inconsistently, the more we express and reveal of our own desire. Psychoanalysis, with its “rule” of free association that propels the production of nonsense, exclusively relies on this principle of inconsistency. Lalangue also carries all the parasites of speech: sounds, stuttering, muttering, rumbling, etc. Linguistics is that enterprise that attempts to create a scientific metalanguage of the spoken language as a way of covering up, ignoring, and negating the lack and holes of speech toward which the subject’s desire is directed. From the Lacanian perspective, which states that nothing is all or whole, and that language implies inconsistencies and holes, which we write as S(Ø), lalangue would be the “not-all” of language. Lalangue is that which bubbles, springs forth, weaves, and dwells parasitically within the holes of language S(Ø). The letter, as it is formed in writing, is the “unity element” of the lalangue (Lacan, 1974, pp. 192–194). But every lalangue is unique to a subject and carries traces and remains of his or her unconscious. Alliterations, assonances, and phonetic similarities are the elements that weave and animate lalangue.4 Lalangue constitutes the woof of the unconscious and provides the foundation of the Symbolic. The jouissance of meaning, which is the jouissance of the unconscious, is located in lalangue. This is why, in “La Troisième,” Lacan (1974) indicates that the voice as “objet a” is the carrier of lalangue. The Third Jouissance and the Position of the Analyst Lacan attributes little basic knowledge to the analyst. The analyst knows that the unconscious is a knowledge that does not know that it knows, a knowledge articulated and contained in lalangue, and revealed through free association. The analyst also knows that, in order to extract any knowledge from the unconscious, one has to work through lalangue. The analyst is aware that the subject’s unconscious lies hidden within lalangue. He has the ethical duty to “civilize” the jouissance of the objet a through lalangue (Lacan, 1974, p. 189). To be an analyst means to read and interpret a

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symptom, which is an inscription ciphered in the body, and to clarify the analysand’s relation to jouissance. Analysts are requested to counter the Real and to interpret symptoms. The symptom is not only reducible to the phallic signification, that is, to what is speakable and comprehensible. The symptom is also related to the Real, to the enigmatic “objet a” which the signifier and the discourse try to circle. Therefore, Lacan would say that to interpret is not to translate or to give more meaning, for this would only nurture and feed the symptom. The analytical interpretation is to be founded on the signifier in its fundamental equivocal function, beyond any identification and beyond any univocal meaning. The analytical interpretation, as Lacan stated, provides the subject with more “jouis-sens” while removing the subject from its imaginary identification with univocal signification. In the cure and the practice of analysis, analysts have to use lalangue in order to draw something from the “objet a” toward a letter, a signifier: from the unspeakable to the speakable, “from the littoral to the literal,” from a litter to a letter (Lacan, 1971, pp. 3–10).

NOTES 1. Freud published a couple of texts directly in French. “L’hérédité et l’étiologie des nevroses” was published in Revue Neurologique, IV, 6, (1896). Freud writes “cette jouissance sexuelle anticipée.” J. Strachey translates: “this anticipated sexual enjoyment,” (p. 155, Standard Edition, Vol. III, pp. 141–156). The French text was published under Névrose, Psychose et Perversion. P.U.F., Paris, 1973, pp. 47–59. 2. I would like to mention the interesting elaboration on this topic given by Serge André in his seminar 1982–1983, Brussels, unpublished. 3. In his paper “On Narcissism,” Freud (1914/1957) mentions the spell of a child and the charm of a cat as the model for this self-enclosed narcissism that attracts us. Lacan (1974) in “La Troisième” says: “purring is the jouissance of the cat . . . it looks to be coming from all of the body” (p. 179). 4. We could find, in some of Freud’s basic texts, an illustration of what Lacan calls lalangue. In Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Freud, 1901/ 1960) we find Freud’s famous Aliquis example. When invited to freely associate to the word that had disappeared from his memory, namely

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AIiquis, Freud’s travel companion responded: “Good. There springs to my mind, then, the ridiculous notion of dividing up the word like this: a and liquis . . . what comes next is reliquim (relics), liquefying, fluidity, fluid” (p. 9). In The Interpretation of Dreams, chapter II, “The Method of Interpreting Dreams,” Freud gives us another example: “The oriental ‘dream-books’ (of which ours are wretched imitations) base the greater number of their interpretations of dream-elements upon similarity of sounds and resemblance between words. The extraordinarily important part played by punning and verbal quibbles in the ancient civilizations of the East may be studied in the writings of Hugo Winckler [the famous archaeologist]. The nicest instance of a dream-interpretation which has reached us from ancient times is based on a play upon words. It is told by Artemidorus [Book IV, Chap. 24; Krauss’s translation, 1881, 255]: ‘I think too that Aristander gave a most happy interpretation to Alexander of Macedon when he had surrounded Tyre [τυροζ] and was besieging it but was feeling uneasy and disturbed because of the length of time the siege was taking. Alexander dreamt he saw a satyr [σατυροζ] dancing on his shield. Aristander happened to be in the neighbourhood of Tyre, in attendance on the king during his Syrian campaign. By dividing the word for satyr into σα and τυροζ he encouraged the king to press home the siege so that he became master of the city (σα τυροζ = Tyre is thine). “Indeed, dreams are so closely related to linguistic expression that Ferenczi has truly remarked that every tongue has its own dream-language” (Freud, 1900/1953a, p. 99).

REFERENCES André, S. (Unpublished). Untitled seminar of 1982–1983. Brussels, Belgium. Barratt, B. (1993). Psychoanalysis and the postmodern impulse. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Freud, S. (1896). L’hérédité et l’étiologie des nevroses. Revue Neurologique, IV, 6. Freud, S. (1953a). The interpretation of dreams. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vols. 4 and 5, pp. 1–625). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1900) Freud, S. (1953b). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 7, p. 210). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1905) Freud, S. (1957). On narcissism. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud

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(Vol.14, pp. 73–102). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1914) Freud, S. (1960). Psychopathology of everyday life. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 6, p. 9). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1901) Freud, S. (1962). Heredity and the aetiology of the neuroses. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 3, pp. 141–156). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1896) Lacan, J. (1966a). La jeunesse d’A. Gide. In Écrits, (pp. 739–764). Paris: Editions du Seuil. (Original work published 1958) Lacan, J. (1966b). La signification du phallus. In Écrits (pp. 685–696). Paris: Editions du Seuil. (Original work published 1958) Lacan, J. (1966c). Sur la théorie du symbolisme d’Ernest Jones. In Écrits (pp. 697–716). Paris: Editions du Seuil. (Original work published 1959) Lacan, J. (1967). La Logique du Fantasme. Lettres de l’Ecole Freudienne, 5, 72. Lacan, J. (1971). Lituraterre. Literature, 3–10. Lacan, J. (1973). L’Étourdit. Scilicet, 4, 5. Lacan, J. (1974). La troisième. Lettres de l’Ecole Freudienne, 16, 178–203. Lacan, J. (1975a). Le séminaire de Jacques Lacan. Book XX: Encore, 1972– 1973 (J.-A. Miller, Ed.). Paris: Editions du Seuil. Lacan, J. (1975b) Le séminaire de Jacques Lacan. Seminar XXII:RSI, 1974– 1975. Ornicar?, 2,3,4,5. Lacan, J. (1977a). The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious. In A. Sheridan (Trans.), Écrits: A selection (pp. 292–323). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1966) Lacan, J. (1977b). The function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis. In A. Sheridan (Trans.), Écrits: A selection (pp. 30– 113). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1966) Lacan, J. (1977c). The agency of the letter in the unconscious or reason since Freud. In A. Sheridan (Trans.), Écrits: A selection (pp. 146–178). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1966) Lacan, J. (1978). The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis (J.-A. Miller, Ed., A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1973) Lacan, J. (1982). Le symbolique, l’imaginaire, et le réel. Bulletin de L’Association Freudienne, 1, 4–13. Miller, J.-A. (1975). Theorie de lalangue (rudiments). Ornicar? 1. Miller, J.-A. (1975–1976). U ou Il n’y a pas de méta-langage. Ornicar? 5, 67–72. Mitchell, S., & Black, M. (1995). Freud and beyond. New York: Basic Books.

PART II Lacan and the Clinic Stephen R. Friedlander

A

fter some years of reading the primary and secondary literature on Lacan, I wondered: “This is a great intellectual exercise, but . . . what are the implications of this theory for clinical work? Does this theory really affect procedure?” I believe I stand for many clinicians in raising this question. Lacan’s theory developed, as Freud’s did, from experience practicing the “talking cure.” It is obvious, but by no means trivial, that Lacanian theory offers an antidote to the runaway medicalization of psychotherapy in this country. He furnishes a rationale for opposing an ever-expanding insistence that therapists rely on “new,” “empirically validated” techniques. Although the literature of the North American psychoanalytic community offers little evidence of it, Lacanian psychoanalysis converges with many current trends in this field, notably, the rise of the relational paradigm, the “reevaluation” of the importance of gender for psychoanalysis, further investigation of linguistics and cultural factors, and new interest in 135

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narcissism and “intersubjectivity.” Transference happens to be the epitome of intersubjectivity. So, for that matter, are the diversely repressive and liberating effects of having to “say everything.” Lacan’s rigorous analysis of representation enable him to put clinical examination of self- and other-representations on a firmer “intersubjective” footing. These are some of the reasons why we think his approach to these topics will be compelling reading for psychoanalytic psychologists. Personally, I found Lacan’s ideas stimulating from the start, but his texts were not sufficiently transparent for me to know whether his theory entailed a new approach to my practice. Was some sort of esoteric behavior, some occult technique, necessary for me to earn the “honor” of calling myself “a Lacanian analyst”? Or was I one simply because I read and liked Lacan? Now, twenty-five years away from my first encounter with Lacan, and fifteen years since I had read enough Lacan to pose the question to myself, I am still not sure I can answer it. (I stopped worrying about it eventually just as I gave up trying to decide if I “appreciate” classical music—I love the music, and whether I am learned in the field of musicology or not doesn’t matter to me.) I am now inclined to modify the question about the relation between Lacanian theory and clinical practice. The really important issue seems to be, “How can experienced psychoanalysts-psychotherapists appreciate Lacanian theory and understand its relevance for their practices if they are completely unfamiliar with it? Or worse, biased against it by distorted readings and misconceptions found in many secondary sources?” Nearly everybody reading Lacan remarks about how difficult his writing and his theory are, and we, the editors, chose not to eliminate these redundant charges from the texts in our own work— it is a fact with which everyone coming to Lacan must contend. Proponents and apologists for Lacan frequently defend against the charge of obscurity by using his own argument: that Lacan’s writing is like the unconscious itself. I found that to be true enough, and this rationale helped me tolerate the confusion and uncertainty long enough to absorb a working understanding of the theory. (Moss [1990] addresses the “problem” of Lacan’s difficulty with astonishing creativity and readers are encouraged to consult this resource.) A larger reason that American analysts and other clinicians have little familiarity with Lacan and little appreciation for its relevance to their work is that the bulk of the writing in English on Lacan is devoted to theory. Clinical case studies in English are

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in decidedly short supply. Relatively few clinicians present their own work and show how the theory applies to phenomena that other clinicians encounter in the framework of their own practices. This reality provided one impetus for the publication of this book. (It is ironic, in fact, that many of the authors of chapters on theory and culture criticism in this book are practicing clinicians themselves—Muller, Barnard, Patsalides, Samuels, Mieli, Gherovici, Minnerly, and Lopez—but we drew on their exceptional insights about theory and their understanding of culture for this work, even when their preference might have been otherwise.) In any case, Section Two offers clinicians a privileged view of how Lacanian theory applies to clinical practice. It contains three types of writing: lucid summaries of Lacanian theory in relation to clinical technique (Fink and Bracher), three clinical case presentations or vignettes (Friedlander, Beira, and GIFRIC [Apollon, Bergeron, and Cantin]), and a vigorous appeal by Buccino for family therapists to consider the usefulness of Lacan in a field that is manifestly not self-defined as psychoanalytic. The chapters by Fink and Bracher indicate the pivotal significance of Lacan’s ideas of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. Both writers explain in their own fashion how knowledge of these three orders weaves itself into therapeutic strategies. Fink (“The Analytic Relationship”) focuses particularly on analytic neutrality and what Lacan calls “the analyst’s desire” in the immediacy of clinical practice. Following a similar path, Bracher (“How Analysis Cures According to Lacan”) explicates “working through” in terms of the registers of the Imaginary, Symbolic, and the Real. He looks at Lacan’s evolving thought about clinical efficacy and differentiates this approach from other psychoanalytic theories. Both authors highlight Lacan’s insistence on a new articulation of what is transformative about psychoanalysis in terms of the foundations of the science. My chapter (“The ‘Third Party’ in Psychoanalysis”) is comprised of case material that illustrates the clinical significance of the Symbolic. The woman in treatment appeared unable to respond to her own desires because of problems with respect to the desire of the Other. In my judgment, this difficulty reflects a problem in her position vis-à-vis the Symbolic Order. When the existence of a “third party” was ironically marked within the analytic discourse, there was a sharp transformation in her speech and in her relation to social conventions and limitations. Out of that moment she began to organize a structure that opens the possibility of knowing/ having a desire of her own.

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Taking another perspective on the Symbolic, Mario Beira (“Some Reflections on Lacan’s View of Interpretation”) illuminates Lacanian interpretation. He demonstrates a way of listening that utilizes the innate polyphony of language to disclose “the place” from which the Other speaks. He illustrates at the same time how the analyst deploys a certain sort of attention in order to glimpse the brief moment when unconscious desire speaks. Apollon, Bergeron, and Cantin describe the treatment of psychosis by innately psychoanalytic means. Here, too, questions of subjectivity are a prevailing concern, and an appreciation of the meaning of the Symbolic, Real, and Imaginary registers is critical to the treatment approach. These three psychoanalysts describe a broad-based treatment that is oriented to what they characterize as an analytic evocation of savoir. Their very successful work with young, psychotic adults indicates how systematically positioning the analyst within this intellectual framework creates opportunity for the discourse of the subject and for the transformation of suffering. Buccino (“Lacan and Family Therapy”) challenges usual ideas of the incompatibility of diverse theoretical systems. He integrates Lacanian ideas with innovative conceptions in other therapeutic fields, especially family therapy, and asserts that recent developments in family therapy could be enhanced by the incorporation of Lacanian ideas and practices. Merely keeping certain psychoanalytic tenets in mind cannot ensure that the unconscious is truly addressed in one’s clinical practice. Buccino shows how therapies that are at least nominally nonpsychoanalytic do in fact encounter the structural and signifying effects that Lacan would call the unconscious. Readers may presume that the portrayal of “the Lacanian clinic” by our authors is not altogether uniform and logically consistent— where one writer suggests doing things his way, another clinician appears to recommend something different. Is that not strictly inevitable in psychoanalysis? The heterogeneity of clinical practice will never be banished by theory, no matter how comprehensive and perspicacious theory becomes. “Lacanian theory” is more like a language than a “scientific” theory—the former being susceptible to an infinite variety of usages and valued because of it, rather than uniform and nomological, as the latter aims to become. It is true that Lacan aimed for precise characterizations of the clinical phenomena he encountered. His formulas and topological constructions aim to formalize structures in universal terms. Still, we would be well served to follow the admonition of Jacques-Alain Miller (1994):

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[Lacan’s] work is a teaching. . . . [F]ollowing his star requires that we do not synchronize and dogmatize this teaching, that we do not hide but stress its contradictions, its antinomies, its deadlocks, its difficulties. For a teaching on the analytic experience is like a work in progress and implies a back and forth motion between text and experience. (p. 75) Lacanian theory is constructed in such a manner that clinicians who use it will learn a great deal from their clients: learn not only particulars of their patient’s subjectivity, but learn, in many instances, something about their own subjectivity as well. However, whatever “new understanding” accrues to the analyst as a result of exposure to Lacan’s theory is not as likely to reflect the analyst’s “identification” with the pathos of the patient’s plight or the heroism of his struggle as might occur in analysts relying on alternative versions of psychoanalytic theory that emphasize empathy, maintaining the therapeutic alliance, or accurate “interpretation” by the analyst of “unconscious conflict.” The analyst who concentrates on discerning how the symbolic works in the specific clinical relationship with each patient will encounter himself “as Other” by encountering differences, over and over again, between himself and “the other” who inevitably takes the analyst’s spoken words to mean something the analyst never foresaw.

REFERENCES Miller, J.-A. (1994). Éxtimité. In M. Bracher, M. Alcorn, R. Corthell, F. Massardier-Kenny (Eds.), Lacanian theory of discourse, (pp. 74–87). New York: New York University Press. Moss, D. (1990). Thoughts on two seminars of Jacques-Lacan, with a focus on their difficulty. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 71, 701– 713.

8 The “Third Party” in Psychoanalysis Stephen R. Friedlander

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ontroversy about method has been endemic in the culture of psychoanalysis since the Freud-Ferenczi split: Is interpretation the essential factor in all psychoanalytic cures, or do nonlinguistic processes govern the outcome (i.e., must there be a healing relationship) in some or all cases? For many analysts today, these alternatives are no longer regarded as mutually exclusive. Nevertheless, the issue that divided Freud and Ferenczi, namely, a differentiation between what may be called an intrapsychic approach and an interpersonal or intersubjective one, continues to be a focus of theoretical debate, especially in North America (e.g., Brenner, 1982; Cooper, 1989; Gedo, 1979; Gill, 1994; Meissner, 1991; Mitchell, 1988; Oremland, 1991). Lacan (1966/1977c) is like a third party, so to speak, between “classical” Freudians and Ferenczian reformists. His theory does 141

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not readily assimilate to either side of the historic controversy. Part of the reason is because a rigorous analysis of the functions of language calls into question certain dichotomies that have organized philosophical discussion in the West for two millennia (Ragland-Sullivan, 1986). As Lacan and others have explained (Rorty, 1989), language vitiates dichotomous categories such as the distinction between internal experience and external reality or between truth and fiction. When psychoanalytic theory incorporates a formal understanding of speech and language, many fundamental psychoanalytic entities, such as ego and object, acquire new connotations. Lacan’s work on “the signifier” obliges analysts to reexamine some of their most cherished assumptions about desire, destiny, and knowledge. While most analysts feel called upon to “interpret” something to an analysand from time to time (i.e., explain an aspect of the latter’s experience), this is not the crux of analytic work as Lacan conceived of it. And, moreover, while no analyst can avoid being emotionally moved during the ebb and flow of analytic dialogue, and while unusually benign relatedness cannot by any means be excluded from the psychoanalytic process, neither explanations nor willing compensation for irregularities in an analysand’s emotional functioning constitute the unique and essential character of psychoanalytic method. In fact, exhaustive concern with these elements distracts analysts from their objective, which is to position themselves in the dialogue in such a manner that analysands develop a knowing relationship to the signifier. The idea of “adopting a position” may not seem to accord well with the prevailing concept of “intrapsychic” work, but neither does it involve what advocates of the said viewpoint disparagingly refer to as manipulation of the transference. Whatever efforts analysts need to make so as not to focus so exclusively on the patient’s experience that their own involvement in the process remains opaque, nor to expose the analysand to frustration that his psyche cannot handle without external assistance, nor to claim a specious authority to define experiences in the analytic setting unilaterally—that is, whatever needs revising in early conceptions of psychoanalytic theory and practice according to the lights of object relationists, self psychologists, and social constructivists, these matters are not the central focus of Lacanian theory either. If psychoanalytic process is thoroughly permeated by language, as it surely is (Lacan, 1966/1977a), it is no less certain, according to Lacan (1966/1977b), that language itself structures the psyche. Lacan credited Freud with this profoundly nonobvious discovery, a

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point that is by no means universally accepted even today. Be that as it may, on the strength of his highly original re-reading of Freud, Lacan promulgated a version of psychoanalysis in which the unconscious is conceptualized in terms of a subject’s relation to “the signifier” (Lacan, 1966/1977c). In this context, a knowing relationship to the signifier would mean that the analysand arrives, under ideal circumstances, at an enhanced understanding that conduct must be grounded in speaking, which effectively means foregoing the direct expression of instinctual impulses through action. Such an understanding gives depth to the more generally acknowledged goal of psychoanalysis, which would be for analysands to become intimately familiar with those particular signifiers that are distinctly important in their own biography. The idea that human beings are subjected to language and suffer because of it became acutely pertinent in one analysis at the precise moment an analysand expostulated about a “third party” which, so she claimed, I had “introduced” into the analytic situation. She was genuinely outraged about this, and she questioned whether further analysis was possible. In that psychoanalysts are almost universally inclined to regard their work as dyadic in nature, most would agree with the patient that—should her assessment of the situation be accurate—the analysis may have been fatally compromised. However, the enunciation of those particular words actually marked a major turning point in analysis: The analysand’s usual tendency to express concepts through action began to shift at this time toward sustained analytic inquiry. Lacanian theory provides a framework for understanding what was occurring at that time and why her analysis moved forward. In that I neither explained anything at this critical junction, nor endeavored to provide any sort of compensatory function by “holding” or “mirroring” the analysand, this vignette offers an exceptional opportunity to observe the “thirdness” of Lacanian thinking plainly. The third party, which disrupted—or so it appeared to the analysand—the private relationship presumed to be necessary for analytic work—and in such an alarming fashion—was, I shall contend, a representation of existence in a discourse-based culture and the renunciation of instinctual gratification that comes with it. A “third party” such as this is, in fact, precisely the point of origin for the unconscious. The patient’s frantic protest reflected an inchoate realization that she would “lose” her freedom to engage in secret opposition to the mores of civilized life. In point of fact, her objective in analysis had been, from the start, to liberate herself from

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a compulsion to repeat her self-defeating rebellion against the strictures of sexual convention. What is more, the supposed loss of freedom reflects a change in psychic structure that suggests a passage from the mother-daughter matrix in which she had been confined up to that time to a framework that is significantly more complex. A capacity for reflective choice can develop only when this third party becomes effectively established as an unconscious representation. The newly productive course of her free associations, the subsequent unfolding of transference, and, in particular, an especially dramatic dream all suggest that a psychic restructuring of this very sort was beginning to get underway at the moment when she became cognizant of “the third party.”

A Clinical Case Approaching the age of thirty, Sissy (a pseudonym) realized that she could not refrain from having extramarital affairs. She had had psychotherapy once before when the conclusion of an affair forced her into depression. The first therapist, according to her, told her she was “cured” after little more than a year of once-aweek psychotherapy. He also told her, so she reported, that she had an Oedipus complex but made no effort to explore with her what this meant. Now, involvement in yet another extramarital liaison brought her to see me. An event in her mother’s childhood touched the lives of all members of Sissy’s family. Sissy’s grandfather was murdered while on an errand to get something for Sissy’s mother (his only daughter), and the family, according to Sissy, thereafter tacitly regarded the child as somehow culpable. The widowed grandmother eventually moved in with Sissy’s family when Sissy was seven, nominally for a brief convalescence, but she remained with them for thirty years because Sissy’s mother could not conceive that she had a right to ask her mother to go if her mother wanted to stay. The patriarch’s death fostered constricted lives in his heirs, whereas the death of the matriarch was immediately liberating: All of the survivors breathed a collective sigh of relief. The dominant feature of Sissy’s memory of her childhood was the repeated trauma of being catheterized for recurring bladder infections (which were caused by a congenital defect). The focus of such extraordinary attention on a little girl’s pubic area from the time she was four until the onset of puberty could not fail to be significant. (A surgical remedy was known to be available from the

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outset, but a decision was made to defer surgery until after puberty so as not to interfere with her physical development.) She recalls being penetrated through a pelvic orifice by a man who was nice to her except when forcing her to accept his tool. Her mother admired the man who did this and collaborated with him. Analysis would eventually suggest that her repetition compulsion (multiple extramarital affairs) derived from an impaired capacity to realize what she wanted: The tie to her mother left her unable to acknowledge that she organized her own life. She could consciously consider the desire of others and adopt a stance toward it (compliance or resistance), but she could not articulate her own desire in a differentiated way. From an analytic standpoint, this problem had to do with the lack of a crucial point of reference (the nature of which will be clarified below) in the unconscious. During college, she married her high school sweetheart, and they have remained married ever since. There are no children and, at least on Sissy’s part, none are wanted. She graduated from college summa cum laude but never considered having a profession of her own—a matter that, in retrospect, is quite disappointing to her. Her husband has been quite successful in his business, and she manages a large branch office for him.

The Opening Gambit Sissy’s first communication in our opening session was, “I don’t know really why I’m here. I made an appointment last spring and then cancelled.” The act of cancelling prefigured numerous conscious and unconscious attempts to neutralize my influence still to come. In any event, she commenced her third extramarital affair in the interval between the initially contemplated first appointment and the actual first appointment. We may take note of a mild, but perhaps significant, peculiarity in her diction: Really is awkwardly placed in the sentence. It would be more conventional and fluent to say “I really don’t know . . .” or “I don’t know why I’m really here.” The placement of the signifier could be said to represent her tendency to delay action either insufficiently or for too long. For the first few years, analysis dealt mainly with ups and downs in the relationship with her best friend, an older woman. They loved to talk about their extramarital affairs and gossip about their friends. Sissy ruminated about the anger she felt when difficulties arose between them, but she never saw her friend’s demands as an indication of the latter’s narcissism and selfishness

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(which Sissy’s description of their involvement suggested to me). When Sissy began a full-time job, she could no longer be a steady companion. Her erstwhile friend withdrew her affection and cultivated new acolytes. Sissy regularly accused me of lying, as, for instance, when I cancelled appointments because of illness or travel. She imagined I kept my regular schedule in the office except for the appointment with her. She was sure that deceit was essential to my therapeutic strategy—I wanted to make her mad to see how she would “handle it.” Although she was convinced that I operated in this way, she never suggested that my supposedly mendacious character constituted any obstacle to the continuation of the treatment. On the contrary, she said that “all therapy is lying.” The authority for this cynical outlook was none other than her previous therapist, who was said to have made this statement to her husband while she was his patient. Her intense distrust influenced the analytic process broadly. The only significant issue we managed to clarify effectively in the first phase of treatment was that language is sexual—words are instruments of pleasure that touch and even can penetrate her body and excite her sexually. She refused to speak freely because she anticipated that her words would arouse my lust, something she had to guard against since, as she said later, I would be powerless to refrain from acting out my feelings directly (as she herself was to that point).

The Repetition Compulsion As the relationship with her best friend waned, she gravitated toward a man she met while doing volunteer work. He was the paid staff member assigned to coordinate the project on which she worked at the time. They spent more and more time together during and after work. She denied having any romantic intentions but secretly engaged in sexual activity that came to include telephone sex and petting in various degrees of undress. When a certain level of intimacy made it all too plain to her that she was progressing toward another full-blown extramarital affair, she criticized the therapy as ineffective because it had not stopped her from behaving in a potentially self-destructive fashion. She finally decided to consummate the affair and announced the day after she did, “I didn’t have to sleep with [him]. I did it because I wanted to.” From a psychoanalytic perspective, her claim

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is quite equivocal, but the actual words she used were profoundly important. In matters of emotion, Sissy consistently saw herself as dominated by the will of others. She had never acknowledged in my presence having a desire of her own before this moment. (This session will hereafter be referred to as “the index session.”) “Going to the doctor’s office” was the archetype of all experience; it embodied the unilateral imposition of her mother’s will. She recalled the experience of being held down by several adults while she writhed and screamed in futile protest. Every failed effort to negotiate some way out of catheterization further discredited the idea of communicating with words: If neither pleading nor “rational” exchange were of any avail, no effort to get what she wanted through speaking was worth the breath it required. As these memories were rehashed in analysis, the mother’s difficulty with having to witness Sissy’s torment moved into the foreground, and she came to understand that the suppression of her own cry to spare her mother anguish had been the template for her conduct in many situations. The words I wanted to, uttered in the index session, launched a revolution. In less than a month, she spontaneously described the genetic basis of the repetition in classic terms: It is not all right for me to have sex with my husband. . . . It’s like my mother is against it, like [my husband] stands for my dad, and my mother won’t allow it. So, the only way that it is okay for me to have sex is to have it with somebody else. Readers should understand that she never mentioned anything like this before nor heard about it from me. The emergence of a self-analyzing function coincided precisely with experiencing herself moving beyond the position of a slave to the (M)other, a move that was inaugurated, as I said, by a proclamation that she did what she wanted to do with her lover. We cannot assume that real change occurred from the sexual acting out of defiance as this was followed by an acting out of submission to the dictates of her mother (as she understood them). What might truly be called psychoanalytic change resulted from a new relation to signifiers of desire: the words “I wanted to” in reference to sexuality. For a moment, selfconsciousness veered toward congruence with the desire of the unconscious subject. Sissy began to make analysis into a true project, something she wanted to do, in distinct contrast to being someone who is made to undergo an aversive experience.

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The Signifier of the Symbolic Order Sissy immediately determined that she would never sleep with her lover again, a choice that was, we may infer, another element of the repetition compulsion. She expected their recent intimacy to open the way for an unconflicted “Platonic friendship” between them, but the reality was quite different. She fluctuated during the following year between flirting with him, complaining that he was cold to her, and castigating him whenever his communication caused a resurgence of erotic feelings in her. She was alarmed and perplexed when images of him appeared spontaneously in her dreams and reverie: Why, she moaned, did she think of him at all “when the relationship is over?” a phrase that hints of the shallow and concrete way she thought about relationships: She assumed that a “relationship” had no reality beyond the pragmatic behavior that expressed its surface. A few months after the index session she asked, “What kind of treatment is this? Am I in psychoanalysis?” “Yes,” I said (a departure from my usual procedure), opening the door to a barrage of hostile questions: Why had I not told her about this before now? Is it not well known that psychoanalysis is ineffective and anachronistic? Why did I use it on her? What credentials did I have to do psychoanalysis? She threatened to terminate immediately since she just “discovered” that I “manipulated” her into treatment “without consent,” a serious malfeasance (in her view) because it constituted a repetition of her childhood trauma: (Actually, I was adhering exactly to an agreement made at the outset: She was to say whatever came to mind, and I would listen. If there were anything I could say to help her, I would. Why, therefore, should it matter if we gave our work a name?)1 When Sissy denounced me for imposing my will, it revealed her own desperate concern with power. Even if this complaint was idiosyncratic in some respect, it seemed to reflect a general human predicament: powerlessness to determine the whole of reality. Lacan’s contribution to psychoanalysis owes much to his insistence that language itself institutionalizes this impotence: By and large, we must use tools forged by others (we do not make up words ourselves), which they may regard as meaning things we never intended to say. Because Sissy’s outrage about a perceived abuse of power resulted directly from the specification of a name, I concluded privately that we had reached a point where the symbolic order (Lacan, 1988) was acquiring some new significance.

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She spent much of the following year complaining that it was impossible to resolve her problems, partly because memories and dreams of being with the now-repudiated lover and enjoying his company kept recurring. Encounters with him in reverie and sleep routinely led to eating binges alternating with self-recrimination. She complained frequently of being depressed, an affective state for which she had virtually no tolerance. At these times, she threatened to renounce all efforts to obtain satisfaction from people. The only safety, she implied, lay in complete isolation from others—in other words, a life outside of language.

The Desire of the Other Occasional remarks that she had “learned” that she “had to” end the affair were symptomatic of continued dissatisfaction with her position in life. She portrayed her decision to withdraw from the affair in terms of an earlier defeat—bowing to the will of another, compelled again to sacrifice her satisfaction for the happiness of someone else. The irony, from my perspective, was that she could have whatever she wanted—to continue with the affair or the marriage—but she was unable to see it in this light. Gradually, it became evident to me that what was at issue here was the fact that there should be any limit on wish fulfillment whatsoever. A limit of this sort became known to her and subject to conscious reflection for the first time in this particular form: She found that it was impossible to continue the affair and remain married, as her husband, possibly sensing that her amorous involvement with another man threatened the marriage, had begun to press Sissy for more intimacy. In this situation, she was both free—it was up to her to decide with whom she wanted to make a life—and constrained (“held down”), ironically compelled to be “free” within limits. The limit was not stipulated by any external authority; it was a structural feature of intersubjectivity. The impossibility of total wish fulfillment made Sissy seethe with resentment. Her husband’s every wish infringed on her; she was completely uninterested in what pleased him. (The only reason she ever gave for staying with him was that he provided material support and social status at levels her lover could never match.) The problem, analytically speaking, was that she had not made a distinction between desire of the other and desire of the Other. Her lover, her husband, and myself, individually and severally, represented the

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former (other with a small o). The unconscious, as Lacan is renowned for having said, is the discourse of the Other (other with a capital O). Symptoms provide a type of satisfaction that Lacan called “the jouissance of the Other,” gratification that I derive but, of necessity, I must not count as pleasure for “me.” For instance, sometimes Sissy represented her mother as someone whose demand must not be resisted; at other times, her mother’s pleasure defined precisely what Sissy deigned to thwart. She was essentially at liberty to employ either image without understanding that it pleased her, in a certain context, to think of her mother in one or the other way. If the object causes desire, as Lacan maintained, the construction of the object, in whatever terms, represents a partial fulfillment of a wish. As I came to represent the object for Sissy, a great change in the discourse took place: The jouissance of illicit sexual escapades and manipulative communication was rechanneled into fantasy— particularly, fantasies about doing things to or with or against me. One day, she asked, “Why is it that, after this much time [i.e., approximately five years], we are not closer?” She said, “Maybe our personalities are not compatible.” Beginning then, Sissy started to notice—or at least talk about—how she found it necessary to protect herself from being close to me: She believed she had to guard against my critical judgments of her, against my relentless wish to control her, and against every possibility of my becoming interested in her sexually. With a growing interest in determining what I wanted from her, explicit investigation of the transference became more feasible. Concern about my desire came into focus in a very decisive way about sixteen months after the index session. I was asked to present a case at an out-of-state psychoanalytic conference, and I immediately considered discussing Sissy’s case. When I took notes one day to have a sample of her discourse, she queried acidly, “Exactly what do you intend to do with those notes?” After exploring her associations to the question, I decided, influenced no doubt by her attack on me for not having obtained consent to do “psychoanalysis,” to tell her I would present my work with her to a group of analysts. The previous storm paled in comparison to her diatribe on this occasion. She raged about the violation of confidentiality and the grotesque imbalance between us whereby I was allowed to do “anything” I wanted to do without any input from her. She summed up my failure, saying, “You introduced a third party.” (At an appropriate time, I told her I would only present the case if she consented.)

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The “third party” is a symbolic construct created to render something enigmatic into something that is understandable—in this context, the “enigmatic something” was the hypothetical, yet intensely significant “other” who waited to hear what I would say about her. Lacan (1993) fashioned the term “the name of the father” to distinguish a symbolic element around which the unconscious organizes from the socio-legal entity of a “real” father or surrogate. The “third party” refers unconsciously to the original third party of childhood: not Sissy’s father per se, but the father as represented to the child by the mother. For example, a mother might say to a child who misbehaves, “Wait until your father hears what you have done.” Sissy imagined a menacing third party of this sort: an audience of analysts who would be contemptuous and critical alternately of her and of me. Where representations of the third party are “foreclosed,” a psychotic personality structure results (Lacan, 1993). Sissy was not psychotic, despite the quasi-delusional character of her belief that I tried to provoke her to anger while simultaneously attempting to cover my malicious action—that is, cancelling her appointment and then lying about why. However, her persistent tendency to rely upon action in lieu of words might be interpreted as indicating some miscarriage in regard to establishing the name of the father as an unconscious structure. In fact, her actual father does not come up often in the analysis, but when he is mentioned, it is usually in one of three contexts: the fragile state of his health (for the last twenty years), the futility of his complaints about having to put up with a mother-in-law he did not like for three decades, or his constant readiness to indulge Sissy during her childhood.

The Dream After two weeks of enraged protest, Sissy appeared to recognize the irrational quality of her complaints and take some satisfaction from the emergence of understanding. She reaffirmed her commitment to the analysis and settled into the work of free association. Approximately eighteen months after the index session (“I wanted to do it”) and two months after blowing up over identifying her treatment as psychoanalysis, evidence that the analysis had moved decisively forward came in the most convincing form—a dream of unprecedented character, the significance of which lies in the unambiguous demonstration of “the subject of the unconscious” responding to situations with signifiers.

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In this dream, Sissy’s mother called to tell her that her father was sick and “the doctors wanted to cut off his penis.” Later in the dream, her mother called again, complaining about how difficult it was to reach Sissy. The mother said her father was doing much better and that “he didn’t want this therapy done—he didn’t want his penis cut off.” This dream opened a period of concentrated work on the issues of freedom and sex, which stirred up intense transference and countertransference. This dream shows that an analytic cure is in the works even though the issues are still unconscious. For instance, Sissy can recognize primary process material for what it is and discuss it without shame: “In the dream, it [i.e., castration] somehow made sense, but when you think about it, it doesn’t make sense.” This explicit reference to castration may be the best indication we have that analysis is progressing. In Freud’s writing, castration appeared to mean the loss (or threatened loss) of a sexual organ. For Lacan, castration is a product of, and representation of, encounters with an intrinsic limit on the possibilities of wish fulfillment. Lacan used the same term Freud used because people represent demands for a limit on their sexual enjoyment as damage to, or evidence of some primordial injury of, their own body—as a de facto indication, in other words, that they are inferior. The unconscious is a response to the brutal truth that no one escapes castration. A subtle but essential element of castration is that it derives from a child’s recognition that her parents are themselves castrated. Since a mother cannot put all concerns aside to ensure the happiness of her baby, since she is forced to turn to someone else for happiness, one must conclude that Mother is not whole herself. If the one who is the source of my being and the original locus of control searches for satisfaction, if She is not fully equipped to satisfy herself, it is impossible to believe that anyone can be whole. Her statement in telling me the dream, “It was about my mother calling me to say my father . . .” can be translated as “[M]y mother [was] calling me to say . . . [‘ You have a] father.’ ” Thus, the “castration” dream announces that the name of the father is now becoming a signifying factor in her unconscious. Rather than taking the dream as a text requiring interpretation (translation from her language into my language), or explanation (translation of particular, personal experience into evidence of a general phenomenon), Lacan treated the dream as an interpretation by the patient of the analytic encounter. Therefore, I confined myself to making comments to “punctuate” her speech so she might remain unemcumbered in thinking about her position: She had just

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become someone who could speak about her problems, using dreams and free association, instead of acting them out. Sissy was finally becoming the hysteric she always appeared to be, employing compromise formations in lieu of enactments. My unstated hypothesis that the dream marked a moment of structural change was indirectly validated when she stated four months later that something “changed” in December (the time of the dream). She did not know what happened to her nor exactly how she had changed since then. She just felt that her existence was somehow different. Approximately a year after the crisis over naming the treatment “psychoanalysis,” we had an interesting exchange. Referring to the many questions she tends to ask, she said, “If you answer my question, I get what I love. That’s how I tell if you love me or not. . . . At moments, it seems like you love me.” The reference to love is significant in light of previous denials that there could be a caring relationship between us ever. However, the next words she spoke, in so casual a manner, quietly marked a successful return to a scene of nominal trauma. With her next breath, she mentioned that there are other times than those in which I appear to love her, times when “we’re doing our routine. We’re doing analysis.” Readers may notice the taming of hostility implied by her direct endorsement of the signifier analysis without overlooking an important implication in her use of the first person plural pronoun. When Sissy said that we are doing analysis, implying that she can function cooperatively, that she can decide what she wants to do and apply herself to it on a sustained basis, it seems that her sense of personal agency is no longer constrained to the alternatives of either being merged with her mother’s desire or opposed to it.

Summary Sexuality seemed to bring nothing but vexation to Sissy when treatment began. While her interest in sex was negligible at most times, she was unconsciously compelled to enter into extramarital affairs that threatened to upset everything she had consciously arranged for her life. In brief, she got overt sexual satisfaction only when transgressing normative limits on sexual expression (that is, only in the context of episodic marital infidelity). A dramatic breakthrough dream coincided with the emergence of a new capacity for symbolic relations with others. Although a price must be paid for this achievement (relinquishing immediate satisfaction), submission to the strictures of castration put Sissy in

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a position to have a desire of her own. The loss caused by having to speak is largely compensated by the recently discovered and newly appreciated gratifications indigenous to dialogue, the essential concerns of psychoanalysis informed by Lacanian theory. Given the tendency to emphasize the analyst’s gift to the patient in contemporary discussions of psychoanalytic theory—either a gift of “insight” conveyed from analyst to patient in the form of explanatory interpretation, or a gift of “love” (optimal emotional responsiveness) from the analyst that enables patients to overcome the supposed emotional deprivation of their early lives—it may be useful, even necessary, to confront the paradoxes of Lacanian theory to account for factors that do not fit so well in other rubrics. My silence, my refusal to direct her thinking, and my acquiescence to an accumulation of frustration within the analytic setting brought her face to face with the ineradicable uncertainty of meaning. If these elements had any constructive effect, it must have something to do with the intrinsic (but sometimes overlooked) value of engaging the “third party” through the discourse of the Other.2 Thus, I have focused mostly on the way this opportunity to explore the contours of desire induced and enabled Sissy to reexamine her knowledge about herself. As she acknowledged the uncertainty of her previous grasp of the subject, she began to appreciate the cost of self-deception and the emptiness of trying to be what she is not. Analysis showed that the presenting problem reflected an inability to participate in a covenant of language. The recurring opportunities that analysis gave her to talk about herself in a setting intentionally organized to make the symbolic structure(s) of experience evident led to an immersion in early memories, especially memories involving suffering and antagonistic relations with others. As these memories became more vivid and cognitively distinct, the symbolic and imaginary dimensions of contemporary experience became more apparent to her. The more Sissy spoke, and, in particular, the more she went beyond the banal and benign signifiers she customarily used to describe herself and her relations with others, the more intelligible her experience became to her. Passing through the crucible of transference enabled her to discover that historical meanings impose themselves on the present (and vice versa). The emergence of a capacity for reflective choice, and the modulation of hitherto unbridled impulses is modelled in Sissy’s analysis. Her remarkable dream—that explicitly depicts the mature subject’s nativity in an intense struggle with castration—follows her frantic exclamation about a “third party” intruding on our

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relationship. This cry heralds the advent of a new kind of speech, embodied in newly productive free associations and the dramatic unfolding of richer transference phenomena. Between the outcry and the dream, we are witness to a very welcome psychic restructuring that owes everything to the possibility of creating a moment for meeting “the third party” in discourse. The creation of such moments can never be achieved directly through instrumental reasoning and deliberate action. Those moments come about only when analyst and analysand alike become subject to the law of the signifier.

NOTES 1. To be more precise, we did not give a name to what we were doing so much as pronounce the name by which the world at large designates that particular form of therapy. In any case, I never established what the word psychoanalysis meant to her, although it obviously meant more than one would think. Perhaps “You’re in [psycho]analysis” reminded her of “urinalysis,” the procedure that always preceded catheterization. 2. There were times when I did give explanations and emotional support. In order to focus on the distinctive features of Lacanian theory and illustrate their clinical relevance, I did not explore those incidents in this report.

REFERENCES Brenner, C. (1982). The mind in conflict. New York: International Universities Press. Cooper, A. M. (1989). Concepts of therapeutic effectiveness in psychoanalysis: A historical review. Psychoanalytical Inquiry, 9, 4–25. Gedo, J. (1979). Beyond interpretation: Towards a revised theory of psychoanalysis. New York: International Universities Press. Gill, M. (1994). Psychoanalysis in transition. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press. Lacan, J. (1977a). Écrits: A selection (A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1966) Lacan, J. (1977b). The function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis. In A. Sheridan (Trans.), Écrits: A selection (pp. 30– 113). New York: W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1966)

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Lacan, J. (1977c). The agency of the letter in the unconscious or reason since Freud. In A. Sheridan (Trans.), Écrits: A selection (pp. 146–178). New York: W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1966) Lacan, J. (1988). The seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud’s papers on technique 1953–1954 (J.-A. Miller, Ed. & J. Forester, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton. Lacan, J. (1993). The seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The psychoses 1955–1956 (J.-A. Miller, Ed. & R. Grigg, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton. Meissner, W. W. (1991). What is effective in psychoanalytic psychotherapy? The move from interpretation to relationship. Northvale, NJ: Aronson. Mitchell, S. (1988). Relational concepts in psychoanalysis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Oremland, J. D. (1991). Interpretation and interaction: Psychoanalysis or psychotherapy? Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press. Ragland-Sullivan, E. (1986). Jacques Lacan and the philosophy of psychoanalysis. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Rorty, R. (1989). Contingency, irony, and solidarity. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

9 The Analytic Relationship Bruce Fink

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he role in which the analyst is cast by his or her analysands at the beginning of treatment depends a great deal on what they have heard and/or read about analysis, which in turn depends on their socioeconomic background, their education, and their cultural milieu. Generally speaking, however, people’s view of doctors and healers in modern-day society, above all in consumer societies such as the United States, is not what it once was. The respect for the doctor or healer which seems to have prevailed in certain eras in certain parts of the world has given way to an increasing lack of respect, attested to in the medical field by the often heard demand for “a second opinion.” As early as 1901, Freud (1901/1960) mentioned a medical colleague of his who told him that the Turks in Bosnia and Herzegovina were “accustomed to show great confidence in their doctor and 157

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great resignation to fate. If [their doctor] has to inform them that nothing can be done for a sick person, their reply is: ‘Sir, what is there to be said? If he could be saved, I know you would have saved him’ ” (p. 3). Freud was no doubt struck by the contrast between the respect for doctors among the Turks and the treatment he received from his own patients in turn-of-the-century Vienna. In America today, people tend to be somewhat skeptical of what their physicians tell them, and extremely skeptical of the therapeutic powers of psychotherapists. Study after study in the popular press has thrown into question the usefulness of psychotherapy; therapists of different schools sling mud at each other to win partisans; health insurance companies often consider any therapy with the prefix “psycho” in it to be worthless; and the media depict nothing but therapists who take advantage of their patients and who are more deranged than their patients in the first place. In short, psychotherapy has been largely discredited in the United States, and is often no more than a last resort. It is often only after someone has been to general practitioners, gastroenterologists, chiropractors, psychiatrists, and acupuncturists—all to no avail— that a psychotherapist is finally contacted. To the American mind, the psychotherapist is often assumed to be someone who could not hack medical school, who flunked college math or science, and whose experience of human nature may be no more profound than that of radio talk-show hosts. Americans have no more faith in psychology or psychoanalysis than they do in astrology and palmistry (indeed, often less). People very often come to therapy absolutely unconvinced that the therapist can help them, and openly skeptical of the kind of knowledge the therapist professes to wield. How then are we to understand Lacan’s (1973/1981) well-known claim that the motor force of analysis is what he refers to as “the subject supposed to know” (p. 232), usually presumed to imply that the analysand attributes vast knowledge of human suffering to the analyst, assuming, right from the outset, that the latter has the knowledge necessary to make a difference? Clearly this calls for some explanation. Is it simply that what works in France does not work in America? In our times, respect for the analyst’s knowledge is greater in some countries, cities, and circles than in others. In Paris, for example, psychoanalysis is a daily topic of discussion in the media, is introduced in high school philosophy classes, and is generally held in fairly high esteem. The French do not seem to believe, as do Americans, that biology is at the root of everything, and that

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medicine will someday be able to eliminate all mental anguish and suffering. Indeed, in Paris the individual psychoanalyst benefits from a generally positive view of the field of psychoanalysis in the eyes of the population at large. In a few parts of the United States, the general skepticism about analysis is not so widespread. In New York and Los Angeles, for example, and above all in artistic and intellectual circles, there are more people (whether they are in analysis or not) who would assume that analysts have knowledge about human problems such as anxiety, fear, stress, and guilt. And if, in the course of their lifetime, they are led to consult an analyst, they tend to immediately view that analyst as someone who knows more than they do about their symptoms and neurosis. In other words, the analyst is automatically considered a “subject supposed to know” by such people. What is the effect of this cultural difference? It simply means that certain people (New Yorkers, for example) are more open to the effect of analysis right from the outset. When people attribute knowledge and thus power to a doctor, it means that they are open to any and all suggestions he or she might make. If we think back to Mesmer and Charcot, it is clear that their patients were extremely suggestible due to their reputations as miracle healers. If Charcot hypnotized a patient who apparently had been unable to walk for years and made the suggestion to her that she could now walk, the patient was very often ready and willing to believe him. Freud, on the other hand, complained that when he practiced hypnosis, he was never able to hypnotize people the way clinicians could in the wellknown clinics where “miracle cures” were everyday events, for the patients who came to him did not have the same faith in his powers: in the early years of his practice, there was no “aura” of healing around him. His patients thus were not as suggestible. That changed as Freud’s reputation grew, but as the effects of suggestion are generally short-lived, requiring the therapist to repeat the same suggestions over and over at regular intervals, Freud gradually moved away from relying on suggestion alone. If his patients presumed he had a vast store of knowledge and were thus more open to the effect of the treatment, so much the better; if not, he could do without that presumption. In other words, a patient may be quite suggestible and open to the analyst’s influence at the outset, and may even feel somewhat relieved of anxiety that has been mounting over time just by making an appointment with an analyst (in some cases merely by thinking he or she could make such an appointment), but that improvement is due to what is

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known as the “placebo effect.” In other words, it is not an effect of psychoanalytic treatment, strictly speaking, but merely of the patient’s preconceived notions. In certain cases, the fact that the patient puts the analyst in the position of “the subject supposed to know” can actually be detrimental to his or her analytic work. Indeed, a patient who comes to the analyst in a highly suggestible state, sure that the analyst is the one with all the knowledge, is far less likely to realize that it is the patient him or herself who must engage in the serious analytic work of association. Such a patient may be more inclined to briefly state his or her consciously formulated problem and await the analyst’s indubitably brilliant solution. The analyst may have all the diplomas in the world, and a reputation second to none, but if he or she is not able to go beyond suggestion with the patient and engage the patient in the analytic process, the treatment will amount to nothing more than the administering of placebos.

The Subject Supposed to Know If psychoanalysis does not rely on the analysand’s belief in the knowledge and power of the analyst—if it is not, therefore, a form of faith healing—what is the role of knowledge in the establishment of the analytic relationship? The subject supposed to know something of importance in psychoanalysis is the analysand’s unconscious. If there is an authority to be respected in the analytic setting, it is the manifestations of the unconscious in the analysand’s slips, mistakes, surprise, and so on. The “final authority” in the analytic setting thus resides in the analysand’s unconscious, not in the analyst as some sort of master of knowledge who immediately grasps what the analysand is saying and the meaning of his or her symptoms. The analyst, by systematically emphasizing the unconscious, and by confining his or her interventions to punctuation and scansion at the outset, does not present him or herself as someone who has already seen it all a hundred times and thus immediately understands. Yet the analysand, who is perhaps paying attention to manifestations of the unconscious for the first time, tends to view the analyst as the representative or agent of every such manifestation. The analysand does not take such manifestations upon him or herself, but instead refuses responsibility for them. Responsibility is thrust upon the analyst, and the analyst must agree to occupy the place of those

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manifestations, those unknown quantities. Thus, it might be said that it is not the analysand’s unconscious that is the ultimate authority, but rather the unconscious as manifested via the analysand; for such manifestations are disowned by the analysand as foreign or other, as not his or hers. Thus it is that, in a roundabout way, the analyst becomes associated with the analysand’s unconscious, with its incomprehensible manifestations, with the unknown or x, that appears in the analysand’s speech. The subject supposed to know, that is, the unconscious “within” the analysand, is rejected by the analysand and projected onto the analyst. The analyst must agree to occupy the space of or stand in (or sit in) for the unconscious: to make the unconscious present through his or her presence.

The “Person” of the Analyst The analyst may encourage this or discourage it. Clearly, insofar as the analyst is unwilling to keep his or her own personality out of the analytic relationship (that is, resists being a place-holder for or representative of the analysand’s unconscious), he or she reinforces most new analysands’ assumption that the analyst is a person more or less like themselves. In the course of the preliminary meetings, the analyst must allow a shift to occur in the analysand’s mind: the analyst must shift from being another person to being an other person (“person” under erasure); in other words, the “person” of the analyst must disappear if he or she is to stand in for the unconscious. He or she must become a more abstract other, the other that seems to speak inadvertently, in the slips and cracks in the analysand’s discourse. In a word, he or she must stand in for what Lacan calls the Other with a capital O: that which the analysand considers to be radically foreign, strange, “not me.” That is not the analyst’s final position, as we shall see below, but it already makes it clear why analysts must keep their personal feelings and character traits out of the therapy, revealing as little about themselves, their habits, likes and dislikes, as possible. Every individualizing feature of the analyst gets in the way of the analysand’s projections. The less concrete and distinct the analyst seems to the analysand, the easier it is to use him or her as a blank screen. When the analyst is viewed by the analysand as just another person like anyone else, that is, as similar to the analysand, the

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analysand is likely to compare him or herself to the analyst, seeing him or herself in the analyst, imitating the analyst, and ultimately competing with the analyst. The relationship that arises in that situation is characterized by Lacan as predominantly imaginary. By qualifying it as “imaginary” Lacan does not mean that the relationship does not exist, but that it is dominated by the analysand’s selfimage and the image he or she forms of the analyst. The analyst is loved insofar as the analysand’s image of him or her resembles the analysand’s self-image, and hated insofar as it is different. As the analysand measures him or her self against his or her image of the analyst, the foremost question is “Am I better or worse, superior or inferior?” Imaginary relations are dominated by rivalry, the kind of rivalry most of us are familiar with from sibling rivalry. It is at the level of imaginary relations that analysts who are concerned with acting the part of the master of knowledge are challenged, if not unseated, by their analysands, such analysts mistaking their authority as representatives of the unconscious with the authority associated with keeping the upper hand (Lacan, 1966/1977, p. 235). In other words, the ultimate authority in the analytic situation lies, to their minds, in the “person” of the analyst, and they thus set out to prove to their analysands that they know more than their analysands, and attempt to establish their power on that basis. The imaginary is the level at which Lacan situates what most analysts refer to as “countertransference”: it is the level at which the analyst gets caught up in the same game of comparing him or herself to his or her analysands, sizing their discourse up in terms of his own—“Are they ahead of me or behind me in their comprehension of what is going on here?” “Are they submissive to my wishes?” “Do I have any control over the situation?” “How come this person makes me feel so lousy about myself?” Lacan’s perspective is not that countertransferential feelings do not exist, but rather that they are situated at the imaginary level and must thus be set aside by the analyst. They must not be revealed to the analysand, as that situates the analyst and analysand at the same level, as imaginary others for each other, both of whom are capable of having similar feelings, hang-ups, and insecurities. It prevents the analysand from casting the analyst in some Other role! Often it is not easy for analysands to give up the notion that the analyst is not going to act with them like everyone else with whom they interact. Assuming the analyst consistently maintains his or her position, however, a good many imaginary phenomena tend to subside. One patient manifested his grudging acceptance of this

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unusual sort of relationship when he said to a therapist I supervise: “So I guess this means you’re not going to be my woman.” Up until then he had been propositioning her, asking her to coffee, lunch, and dinner, acting as if she were just any other woman he might meet somewhere and strike up a relationship with. Here he seemed to have finally accepted the fact that she was an Other like no other.

Symbolic Relations At an early stage in Lacan’s work, the goal in analysis was to eliminate the interference in symbolic relations created by the imaginary, in other words, to get imaginary conflicts out of the way so as to confront the analysand with his or her problems with the Other. What are symbolic relations? One simple way of viewing them is as one’s relation to the Law, to the law laid down by one’s parents, one’s teachers, one’s religion, one’s country. Symbolic relations can also be thought of as the way people deal with ideals that have been inculcated in them by their parents, schools, media, language, and society at large, embodied in grades, diplomas, status symbols, and so on: Are they inhibited in their pursuit of the objects and achievements that have been recommended to them? Do they pursue them compulsively? Do they avoid pursuing them altogether by dropping out? Do they only pursue them indirectly, in the hopes of attaining them without really trying, without really putting themselves on the line? Do they furtively break the law in the secret hope of being caught? Are getting married and having children, widely advocated as the ideal ways of life, associated with anxiety and indefinitely put off? Is embarking on a career and aiming at social and financial success engaged in only in such a way as to ensure failure? In short, what is the stance they adopt with respect to the ideal objects designated by the parental Other, the educational Other, the social Other? Symbolic relations include all the conflicts associated with what is commonly referred to in psychoanalysis as “castration anxiety.” Analysands, for example, often cannot directly pursue things they claim to want because that would involve giving in to what (they think) their parents want them to do. To attain a particular goal would thus, to their minds, be tantamount to satisfying their parents’ wishes. “Anything but that!” “God forbid!” “I would never give them such pleasure.” They would sooner live their whole lives in opposition to the demands made and the ideals fostered by the

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parental Other than let anything they do serve that Other. Thus, all of their behavior is, in some sense, a protest: it secretly or not so secretly defies the Other’s wishes. Consciously, of course, they may believe there are all sorts of reasons why they engage in such behavior that have nothing to do with their parents or with rebellion against social ideals. Nevertheless, they have made themselves into living symbols of protest. In the early 1950s, Lacan suggests that one of the aims of analysis is to clarify and modify the analysand’s symbolic relations, that is, the analysand’s stance with respect to the Other (the parental Other, the Law, social ideals, and so on). With two simple categories, the imaginary and the symbolic, he provides a model (figure 9.1) of the analytic situation that suggests that symbolic relations involve the unconscious (hence, the word subject in the upper left-hand corner) and the Other, whereas imaginary relations involve the analysand’s own ego or self-image and the ego of other people like him or herself (ego' in the upper right-hand corner). Analysis aims to progressively dissipate the analysand’s imaginary relations with his or her friends, colleagues, brothers, and sisters (which tend to preoccupy analysands in the early stages of analysis) through the work of association—known as “working through” or, as Lacan often puts it, “the work of transference”—in order to bring into focus the analysand’s symbolic relations. Indeed, very often the key to the analysand’s imaginary relations lies in the symbolic: a man’s intense rivalry with a brother, for example, may well stem from the way the parents (the parental Other) gave that brother special treatment, or considered him smarter or better looking; his homosexual attachment to another man his own age may well be related to their similar positions with respect to a symbolic Other, an older teacher or supervisor, for example.

ego'

ar in ego

ax i

im

ag

is ax

y

ic

l bo

m sy

s

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Figure 9.1 Simplified L Schema

Other

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Thus, the goal of analysis, as Lacan conceptualized it in the early 1950s, is to pierce through the imaginary dimension that veils the symbolic, and confront the analysand’s relations to the Other head on. The imaginary and the symbolic are at cross purposes in this conceptualization. To emphasize the symbolic is to diminish the importance of the imaginary. If, however, the analyst allows him or herself to be cast in the role of someone like the analysand (an imaginary other as opposed to the symbolic Other), it is the analyst’s ego that becomes situated at one end of the imaginary axis in juxtaposition to the analysand’s ego, and analysis bogs down in rivalrous power struggles and identifications. By falling into the trap of imaginary identifications, the analyst loses sight of the symbolic dimension, “the only dimension that cures,” as Lacan says.

The Analyst as Judge Who is the analyst? He who interprets by taking advantage of transference? He who analyzes transference as resistance? Or he who imposes his idea of reality? —Lacan

Carefully avoiding the first pitfall, that of situating him or herself as an imaginary other in relation to his or her analysand, the analyst must be aware that further pitfalls await him or her. For the analysand has, as we have all, come to expect certain things of parental and authority figures: approval, disapproval, recognition, punishment—in a word, judgment. Not only does the analysand expect judgment: he or she may well demand it! The analyst who successfully skirts the trap of being viewed like the analysand (and of comparing him or herself to the analysand), may well become viewed as a kind of priest to whom one confesses one’s sins, and then awaits the exaction of penitence and atonement. The analyst here may be projected into a God-like position: that of the all-knowing Other fit to deliberate on all questions of normal and abnormal, right and wrong, good and bad. Apart from the fact that the analyst is by no means fit to deliberate on such issues, providing such judgments is detrimental to therapy. Telling analysands that certain thoughts or fantasies are bad, for example, or that certain impulses or desires are abnormal, is likely to make them stop talking about them in therapy,

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despite their persistence outside of the therapy context. Telling analysands that other thoughts or fantasies are fine and normal can have the same effect, for it impedes analysands from bringing out all the reasons for which they themselves don’t consider such things fine and normal. It may at first be relieving and gratifying to the analysand to hear an authority deem normal what the analysand had considered problematic, but that salutary effect of suggestion ultimately stops the analysand from delving into his or her own qualms and reservations. And since speech is our only lever in therapy, as soon as an analysand stops talking about something, we cannot hope to bring about any change whatsoever in that arena. If analysands stop talking about certain aspects of their experience because we have inhibited them with positive or negative judgments, we can do nothing for them; indeed, the withholding of thoughts regarding one aspect of life is likely to make all of our efforts regarding other aspects fruitless as well. More problematic still is that the analysands of even the most vigilant analyst often interpret a sigh, a cough, or even silence as a sign of disapproval or censure. Analysands are so used to being judged by the parental, academic, or juridical Other that they supply the judgment in their own minds even when it is not forthcoming from the analyst, even when the analyst has in no way, shape, or form passed judgment. Judgment has become so thoroughly internalized that it is pronounced without any action being required on the analyst’s part. In other words, the analyst not only has to be careful not to suggest disapproval in any way, but he or she has to be vigilant to preempt or undo the analysand’s attribution to the analyst of disapproving attitudes. Whenever the analysand expresses his or her sense that the analyst disapproved of something, the analyst has to make it matter for interpretation: the analyst neither accepts nor refuses the projection, but finds it a fruitful field for association, elaboration, and interpretation. The analyst obviously suggests thereby that it is the analysand who has projected such an attitude onto the analyst (assuming that the analyst did not, consciously or unconsciously, convey such an attitude), and incites the analysand to wonder why he or she has projected that particular attitude. By not directly denying having had such an attitude and focusing instead on interpretation, the analyst tries not to thwart future projections by the analysand—for that would dissipate the transference that is so essential to the working through of conflictual relations. Instead, the analyst allows transferential projections to continue, interpreting not the fact of transference—“You’re project-

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ing that attitude onto me”—but its content, that is, that which is transferred or projected, seeking to link it anew with its source or point of origin. By the very nature of his or her work, the analyst is often associated, in the analysand’s eyes, with “Establishment” values: hard work, academic success, renunciation, seriousness, capitalism, and so on. The fact that the analyst dresses in a particular way, lives in a certain part of town, decorates his or her home or office in a certain style, and subscribes to specific magazines found in the waiting room often leads the analyst to be viewed as the representative of certain values by the analysand—values the analysand may reject lock, stock, and barrel, unsuccessfully try to embrace, or successfully pursue but feel alienated in that very pursuit. Such values are obviously attached to the “person of the analyst,” that is, to the analyst as an individual, but the analysand is likely to attribute those values to the analyst even in his or her role as analyst. The analyst must thus vigilantly highlight such attributions as interpretable—as more telling of the analysand than of the analyst. The same is true of positive judgments the analysand attributes to the analyst. The analyst is not there to approve of the analysand’s behavior, but analysands very often seek to win the analyst’s approval by second-guessing his or her values and attempting to realize them, second-guessing his or her desire and attempting to fulfill it, becoming what they believe the analyst wants them to become. This is but another neurotic strategy which, instead of leading to the subject’s separation from the Other, brings on ever greater dependence. It generally repeats prior relations to the parental Other in which the subject has tried to satisfy the parents and then secretly disobey or disappoint them, or satisfy them at his or her own expense. When the analyst knowingly or unknowingly provides the analysand a sign of approval, the effect is often one of pure suggestion: the analysand comes to believe that he or she is doing the right thing or getting better, attempts to build upon the approved behavior, and yet remains dependent upon the Other’s opinion. Should the analysand then spend his or her vacation with people who do not endorse the analyst’s view, the analysand, still slavishly influenced by other people’s views, ends up throwing everything back into question. The question in such a case becomes, “Whose influence is stronger, the analyst’s or the friends’?”—which is ultimately the wrong question. The effects of suggestion last only as long as the relationship with the analyst lasts, assuming the analyst has the most influence over the analysand’s life.

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A therapist I supervise was somewhat astonished by what seemed to be a miraculous improvement in one of her patients to whom she had indicated that therapy was not about the therapist befriending the patient and supporting her as a friend might, but rather about making the patient able to support herself, so to speak. By the next session, the patient’s insistent demands for support had already ceased, and within four sessions the patient reported a newfound sense of independence and happiness. Despite the immediate therapeutic value for the patient of such a solution, it seemed quite clear that the improvement was due primarily to suggestion, and that the patient had as yet made no enduring progress. She had glimpsed one facet of what the therapist wanted from her, and had set out to provide it, thereby subordinating her own desire to the therapist’s. The Analyst as Cause Abdicating the role of imaginary other, the analyst is very often cast in the role of judge by the analysand, and yet the analyst must abdicate that tribunal as well. Highly discriminating in terms of what he or she emphasizes during analytic sessions, encouraging the analysand to talk about certain things and not about others, he or she must nevertheless abstain from passing judgment on the analysand’s actions in the “outside world,” or on the analysand’s fantasies and thoughts. Neither imaginary other nor symbolic Other, what role is left for the analyst? As we saw before, many analysands tend, at an early stage of analysis, to thrust responsibility for slips and slurs onto the analyst. As one patient said to her therapist, “You’re the one who always sees dark and dirty things in everything I say!” Analysands often see no more in a slip than a simple problem regarding the control of the tongue muscles or a slight inattention. The analyst is the one who attributes some Other meaning to it. As time goes on, however, analysands themselves begin to attribute meaning to such slips, and the analyst, rather than standing in for the unconscious, for that strange Other discourse, is viewed by the analysand as its cause: “I had a dream last night because I knew I was coming to see you this morning.” In such a statement, very often heard in analysis, the analyst is cast in the role of the cause of the analysand’s dream—“I wouldn’t have had such a dream were it not for you.” “The dream was for you.” “You were in my dream last night.” Unconscious formations, such as dreams, fantasies, and slips, are produced for the analyst, to be

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recounted to the analyst, to tell the analyst something. The analyst, in that sense, is behind them, is the reason for their production, is, in a word, their cause. When the analyst is viewed as an other like the analysand, the analyst can be considered an imaginary object or other for the analysand (which Lacan writes as a′, a being the first letter of autre, the French word for other; Lacan puts it in italics to indicate that it is imaginary; in juxtaposition to a′, the subject’s own ego is written a). When the analyst is viewed as a judge or parent, the analyst can be considered a sort of symbolic object or Other for the analysand (which Lacan writes as A for Autre, Other). When the analyst is viewed as the cause of the analysand’s unconscious formations, the analyst can be considered a “real” object for the analysand (which Lacan writes as object a). Once the analyst has maneuvered in such a way that he or she is placed in the position of cause by the analysand—cause of the analysand’s dreams and of the wishes they fulfill, in short, cause of the analysand’s desire—certain manifestations of the analysand’s transference love or “positive transference,” typically associated with the early stages of analysis, may well subside, giving way to something far less “positive” in coloration. The analysand may begin to express his or her sense that the analyst is “under my skin,” like an irritant. Analysands who seemed to be comfortable or at ease during their sessions at the outset (by no means the majority, however) may well display or express discomfort, tension, and even signs that they are rebelling against the new configuration, the new role the analyst is taking on in their lives and fantasies. The analyst is becoming too important, is showing up in their daydreams, in their masturbation fantasies, in their relationships with their significant other, and so on. Such a predicament is generally not what people expect when they go into analysis, and indeed non-Lacanian analyses often never go this far. Certain analysands are inclined to break off their treatment when they sense that the analyst is taking on an “intrusive” role in their lives, and many analysts are loath to invite, shoulder, and deal with such feelings (sometimes referred to as the “negative therapeutic reaction”). Indeed, the very theory of therapy such analysts embrace considers such an intrusive role to be unproductive. Lacan, on the contrary, considers it the Archimedean point of analysis, that is, the very point at which the analyst can apply the lever that can move the symptom. The analyst in the position of cause of desire for the analysand is, according to Lacan, the motor force of analysis; in other words, it is the position the analyst must

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occupy in order for transference to lead to something other than identification with the analyst as the endpoint of an analysis (identification with the analyst being considered the goal of analysis by certain psychoanalysts). “Negative transference” is by no means the essential sign indicating that the analysand has come to situate the analyst as cause of desire: it is but one possible manifestation of the latter. Nevertheless, the attempt by therapists of many ilks to avoid or immediately neutralize any emergence of negative transference—which, after all, is but the flipside of transference love, love and hate being intimately related through the essential ambivalence of all affect— means that aggression and anger are turned into inappropriate feelings for the patient to project onto the therapist. Patients thereby learn not to express them in therapy; or, if they do express them, the therapist quickly seizes the opportunity to point out that the patient is projecting, that is, that the anger or aggression is not really directed at the therapist, thereby defusing the intensity of the feeling and the possible therapeutic uses of the projection. Anger and aggression are thus never worked out with the therapist, but rather examined “rationally.” Consider, by way of contrast, Freud’s (1915/1958) characterization of analysis as a struggle or battle between analyst and analysand: The patient regards the products of the awakening of his unconscious impulses as contemporaneous and real; he seeks to put his passions into action without taking any account of the real situation. [The ensuing] struggle between the doctor and the patient . . . is played out almost exclusively in the phenomena of transference. It is on that field that the victory must be won—the victory whose expression is the permanent cure of the neurosis. It cannot be disputed that controlling the phenomena of transference presents the psychoanalyst with the greatest difficulties. But it should not be forgotten that it is precisely they that do us the inestimable service of making the patient’s hidden and forgotten erotic impulses immediate and manifest. For when all is said and done, it is impossible to destroy anyone in absentia or in effigie. (p. 108) In other words, it is only by making psychical conflicts—such as aggression against one’s parents or hatred of a family member— present in the relationship with the analyst that they can be worked through. To work them through does not mean that they are intellectually viewed and “processed,” but rather that the internal li-

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bidinal conflict that is holding a symptomatic relationship to someone in place must be allowed to repeat itself in the relationship with the analyst and play itself out. If verbalization (putting things into words) is the only technique allowed the analysand, a true separation from the analyst and from analysis never occurs. Projection must be allowed to go so far as to bring out all the essential aspects of a conflict-ridden relationship, all the relevant recollections and dynamics, and the full strength of the positive/negative affect. It should be recalled that one of the earliest lessons of Freud and Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria (1893/1955) was that verbalization of traumatic events without reliving of the accompanying affect left symptoms intact. Transference, viewed as the transfer of affect (evoked in the past by people and events) into the here and now of the analytic setting, means that the analysand must be able to project onto the analyst a whole series of emotions felt in relation to significant figures from his or her past and present. If the analyst is concerned with “being himself” or “being herself,” or with being the “good father” or “good mother,” he or she is likely to try to immediately distance him or herself from the role in which the analysand is casting him or her by saying something such as “I am not your father” or “You are projecting.” The message conveyed by such a statement is: “Don’t confuse me with him” or “It is not appropriate to project.” But the analyst would do better to neither encourage nor discourage the case of mistaken identity that arises through the transfer of feelings, and to let the projection of different personas occur as it will—unless, of course, it goes so far as to jeopardize the very continuation of the therapy. Rather than interpreting the fact of transference, rather than pointing out to the analysand that he or she is projecting or transferring something onto the analyst, the analyst should direct attention to the content (the ideational and affective content) of the projection, attempting to get analysand to put it into words. Not to dissipate it or prohibit it, not to make the analysand feel guilty about it, but to speak it. Here the analyst works—often more by asking questions than by interpreting—to reestablish the connections between the content (thought and feeling) and the persons, situations, and relationships that initially gave rise to it.

REFERENCES Freud, S. & Breur, J. (1955). Studies in hysteria. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of

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Sigmund Freud (Vol. 2, pp. 3–17). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1893–1895) Freud, S. (1958). On transference love. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 12, pp. 159–171). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1915) Freud, S. (1960). Psychopathology of everyday life. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 6). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1901) Freud, S. (1963). Introductory lectures on psychoanalysis. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 16, pp. 448–463). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1916) Lacan, J. (1977). Écrits: A selection (A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1966) Lacan, J. (1981). The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis (J.-A. Miller, Ed., A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1973)

10 Some Reflections on Lacan’s View of Interpretation Mario L. Beira

Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question. —E. E. Cummings

J

acques Lacan is perhaps the most difficult and complex thinker of this century. Despite the complexity of his thinking and the difficulties of his “writing style,” however, it is my conviction that his interpretation or reading of Freud involves a genuine developmental advancement for psychoanalysis, offering the psychoanalytic clinician a profound set of refined tools with which to practice his craft. Beyond being a complex theoretical thinker, Lacan was first and foremost a working clinician. As in the case of Freud, he came to develop, sharpen, and revise his thinking over the years in light of his experiences with his patients and the phenomenology of the clinical encounter. 173

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Indeed, I dare say that the entirety of the body of Lacan’s oeuvre, approximately thirty-three volumes of material, has as its principal aim nothing more than the very logification of the concepts with which Freud came to found and father psychoanalysis, involving a profound reflection on their import for clinical praxis. For this reason alone, Lacan’s work merits serious attention. My purpose here will be to introduce the reader acquainted with psychoanalysis, but not Lacan, to some reflections on how Lacan came to view the psychoanalytic act of interpretation. I will frame and develop my exposition by reference to my work with a patient I treated for approximately two years. The reader should bear in mind that what I offer here remains but a simple, sketchy, and passing introduction to a very complex topic.1 Lacan was specially attracted to Freud’s early work, in particular The Interpretation of Dreams (1900/1953), The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901/1960a), and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905/1960b). Those familiar with these texts will recall that Freud therein is singularly attracted to the symptom, the psychopathological production, as structured along linguistic lines. It was Lacan’s (1966/1977) view that Freud maintained this position throughout the entirety of his writings: In the complete works of Freud, one out of every three pages is devoted to philological references, one out of every two pages to logical inferences, everywhere a dialectical apprehension of experience, the proportion of analysis of language increasing to the extent that the unconscious is directly concerned. (p. 159) Freud’s emphasis upon language led Lacan to some fundamental conclusions that served to guide his return to Freud and to a reinterpretation of Freud’s work. Attending closely to the very letter of Freud’s texts, Lacan argued that the work of clinical therapy must be founded on an analysis of the patient’s verbal productions. The unconscious not only reveals itself, “speaks,” as it were, in and through the patient’s verbal creations, as Freud himself first realized—but the very logic of the unconscious and the symptom is itself linguistic, structured like a language. Connecting psychoanalysis to language in this way has major implications for the art of interpretation. Approaching the matter in introductory, if not crude, terms, interpretation becomes a symbolic operation aimed at tapping the linguistic structure that ties or maintains the symptom in place for the patient. To quote Lacan (1966/1977): “the symptom resolves itself entirely in an analysis of

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language, because the symptom is itself structured like a language, because it is from language that speech must be delivered” (p. 59). The first priority of the analyst thus becomes careful, attentive listening to the language of the patient, usually directed at the analyst in the form of demands and complaints. Lacan held that it was counterproductive to the work of analysis for the analyst to give in or respond favorably to these. This is because the very possibility of gaining understanding of the unconscious logic of the symptom and its structure in large part depends on access to the repressed desire fuelling such demands and complaints (see Lacan, 1966/1977, pp. 95, 276). Lacan sees the unconscious as composed of linguistic elements (signifiers) that point beyond themselves to other “signifiers” and other lines of signification unique to the patient’s experience and history. In listening, the task of the analyst is to “understand which ‘part’ of the patient’s discourse carries the significative terms” (Lacan, 1966/1977, p. 44). In a strictly phenomenological sense, the patient’s very words carry the very truth behind his or her demands, complaints, and symptoms. The trick for the analyst lies in being able to harken to the specific points of density in the discourse (meaningful or key signifiers) that provide a point of entry into the repressed elements structuring the patient’s presenting and bothersome symptoms. Anna O, Josef Breuer’s patient and the first analytic patient, dubbed psychoanalysis the “talking cure.” Lacan, for his part, never ceased reminding analysts of the meaning and implications behind this basic founding fact and he was the first analyst after Freud to fully reflect on its implications for the theory and praxis of our field. As for the actual work of interpretation, Lacan (1966/1977) offers the suggestion that “to the analysis of resistance is to be opposed symbolic interpretation” (p. 46). This implies that rather than focusing on why the patient is not verbalizing in this or that way, the analyst should instead intervene so as to facilitate the opening up of the patient’s discourse in its unconscious dimension. This process is promoted by the analyst’s ability to offer the patient an evocative, symbolic reply that resonates and speaks to his or her individuality, unique experiences and history (Lacan, 1966/1977). Leavy (1983), one of the first American analysts to take Lacan seriously, reminds us that in Lacanian psychoanalysis the word of the analyst should match “the word of the patient not as signified but as another signifier. Interpretation does not nail down meaning, it rings bells, or, as I like to put it, interpretation aims not at

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closure but at disclosure” (p. 16). This view of interpretation is directly linked to Lacan’s (1966/1977) own convictions about the role and nature of language, reminding us as he does of the fact that “the function of language is not to inform but to evoke” (p. 86). I quote this passage from his work to further our reflections on the subject of interpretation: “Analysis consists in playing in all the many staves of the score that speech constitutes in the registers of language and on which depends the overdetermination of the symptom, which has no meaning except in that score ” (Lacan, 1966/ 1977, p. 79). If the function of language is indeed not to “inform” but to “evoke,” as Lacan proposes, this suggests that the work of analysis involves not a “providing of information” to patients but of helping them enter the process of searching for basic unconscious determinants unique to and shaping their desire and symptoms. Freud himself, we recall, proposed psychoanalysis as involving a work of “decoding,” a process often leading to discoveries about basic linguistic elements shaping and determining the life and symptoms of the patient and uniquely particular to him or her. We know for a fact that our patients are constantly posing questions to us while in therapy, expecting, seeking, or demanding either an answer or a cure. Our duty as therapists in the Freudian tradition, however, is to abstain from providing positive advice or quick-fix solutions, not only to help patients “recognize” the truth of their repressed and censored desire, but to remind the speaking subject in therapy that every genuine answer to a personal question necessarily involves a personal quest for an answer. The analyst should ideally aim to help patients pose and assume their questions as truly being their own (Lacan, 1966/1977). This process not only helps strengthen the patient’s resolve and commitment to the work of therapy but to realize the therapeutic relationship as ultimately grounded upon a symbolic pact between two human subjects (Lacan, 1966/1977). Lacanian psychoanalysis aims to unlock the discourse, or reminiscences of the patients in analysis in order to help them “recollect” and possibly “rewrite” their history (Lacan, 1966/1977, p. 48). This view of psychoanalysis carries important consequences with regard to the act, logic, and purpose of interpretation. It is clearly different from the conception most American-trained psychologists, even those graduating from psychoanalytically oriented programs, are taught. Accustomed to ego and self-psychological models, psychoanalytic clinicians in this country tend to view interpretation in terms of imparting positive knowledge or information to patients.

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This vision of interpretation assumes the clinician as “more knowing” and better “adjusted” than their patients. In the Lacanian model, the analyst acts to “bracket” the demands of the patient while at the same time placing himself as “dummy,” as one who “does not know,” in order to help the patient with the important task of verbalizing their desire and recounting their history and to allow for the emergence of the unconscious (the Other). Lacan was well aware of the fact that it was not easy for therapists to maintain themselves in a position of “non-acting.” The task grows doubly difficult for the clinician who has been taught, as is generally the case in this country, to intervene so as to eliminate ambiguity and tension in the therapeutic relation and to act to reduce the patient’s stresses and anxieties as quickly as possible. Lacan teaches that little of value or genuine significance takes place within such a framework except for short-lived imaginary cures and existential alienation.

I The interpretation must be prompt in order to meet the terms of the interloan [entreprêt]. — Jacques Lacan

Although Lacan is often imagined by American practitioners as only a theorist, his ideas on interpretation were by no means mere philosophical or linguistic abstractions. The following clinical vignette illustrates how evocative interpretations function to facilitate the emergence of unconscious and unsymbolized material during therapy. It also serves to illustrate how Lacan’s emphasis on the signifier organizes and informs his conception of interpretation. The patient—we will call him Mr. R—was a Ph.D. candidate and assistant to a world-renowned scientist. He was in his early thirties when he presented himself for treatment at a university counseling center where I worked as a pre-doctoral clinical intern. His initial complaint was that he felt so depressed that he was unable to bring himself to complete his doctoral dissertation. This state of affairs was not due to a lack of talent. He had published widely and, despite not having completed his doctorate, was becoming well known in his field.

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During the initial sessions, the patient also discussed his difficulties with women. Despite the fact that he had much opportunity to date—he was a talented jazz musician in a band that played clubs where he regularly had a chance to meet members of the opposite sex—he found himself unable to approach women or even to respond to their advances. He yearned for intimate contact and a relationship with a female, but had not dated for more than a year. Mr. R described a life of nearly complete isolation, stagnation, and boredom. He was unable to motivate himself to get out of bed on most mornings and frequently suffered from deep anxiety, which he attempted to reduce by masturbating (sometimes up to five or six times a day). After a few sessions, the patient confided that he often felt angry with himself. He recounted that he once caught a glimpse of his reflection on the back of a cooking pan and felt a strong urge to hit himself on the head. Mr. R went on to disclose that he also felt suicidal at times. The policy of the university clinic where I functioned as an intern was that all patients expressing any form of suicidal ideation required screening by our consulting psychiatrist. I referred the patient to Dr. F (a senior training analyst who also acted as consulting psychiatrist to the center’s clinical staff) for evaluation. Dr. F. expressed serious concern about Mr. R’s condition and suicidal ideation. He saw that Mr. R was “an extremely intense individual” who presented a complicated and difficult clinical profile and who was in need of more frequent and intensive therapy than could be provided at a university counseling center, and suggested that it would be more beneficial to Mr. R to discontinue therapy with me and to see Dr. F in his private office outside the university. Mr. R agreed and began therapy with Dr. F. After about two weeks, however, the patient showed up at the university counseling center requesting to talk to me. During a brief discussion, Mr. R told me that he had decided to discontinue therapy with Dr. F and wanted to know whether I would “take [him] back.” He also requested that I call Dr. F to inform him of his decision. I stressed that I felt it important for him to discuss and explore his decision with Dr. F himself, responding to his request with something like: “What do you take me for, your mouthpiece?” Explaining that his university health insurance covered only part of his therapy with Dr. F, and the money he needed to pay out of pocket left him in a financially difficult situation at the end of the month, he preferred to see me at the university counseling center, where therapy was offered either free of charge or at a minimal rate. Moreover, he felt he had been gaining from his ses-

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sions with me before being asked to switch therapists. Mr. R was adamant about quitting therapy with Dr. F and returning to therapy with me. He also made it clear that he would not be calling Dr. F and that, unless I would see him at the center, he would discontinue therapy altogether. How is one to respond to such a blatant manipulative demand and appeal? Needing to follow the dictates of administrative policy, I decided to consult the director of the center who, under the circumstances, suggested I phone Dr. F to appraise him of the situation and to consult with him on the case. Dr. F interpreted Mr. R’s decision as a clear sign of a deep disturbance and of the patient’s unconscious desire to “self-destruct.” However, in light of the fact that the patient clearly needed to be in therapy, Dr. F advised that I resume seeing Mr. R. I agreed, but with the working understanding that I be able to consult with him should Mr. R’s clinical picture grow more desperate. Mr. R resumed therapy with me on a once a week basis for about a period of eight months, a period lasting the rest of the academic year and until my internship at the university concluded. During this time, discussion centered mostly on Oedipal issues. It became more and more clear that Mr. R felt guilty about surpassing his father by virtue of obtaining a doctorate. Exploration of this subject began to lessen his depression. He not only became more energetic and productive, but prepared to complete his dissertation as the academic year drew to a close. During this time he also discussed his difficulties with women, and in particular his fantasy that if he became world famous in his field and made “lots of money”—as his mentor at the university had done—he would be able to attract and procure a woman for himself, indeed buy any woman he desired! Mr. R also requested to continue therapy with me at the end of the year. Since my position at the university clinic was by now up, he was transferred to a community mental health center outside campus where I kept an office and saw patients during the day. He continued his therapy with me without missing a session during the summer and was able to finish his dissertation during this time, successfully defending the work at the beginning of the fall semester. Most of his presenting symptoms had by then significantly lessened, with all thoughts of suicide by then gone. His difficulties and conflicts with women, however, continued and Mr. R began more and more to discuss and explore this issue in his therapy. At the same time, and now that he had completed his degree, Mr. R began to schedule job interviews. He was particularly excited

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about a company based in Holland that offered to fly him to Amsterdam, all expenses paid, for an interview, an invitation Mr. R accepted. The session just prior to his departure was particularly productive, with Mr. R feeling that his life was now moving in a positive direction. Mr. R was typically very businesslike, serious, intense, and hard working in his sessions. At the end of the session prior to his departure, however, he acted jovial and relaxed. As we walked to reach my office door at the end of the session, Mr. R hesitated and, turning to me in uncharacteristic fashion, added, in these very words: “I’m really looking forward to visiting Amsterdam . . . It’s my first trip abroad, you know.” I recall my having responded by saying: “Have fun.” The patient returned from Holland a week later. The intervention I wish to detail occurred during his first session back from his trip abroad. Mr. R seemed highly excited as he entered my office. He was somewhat out of breath and, in an excited and slightly agitated state, went on to say: I am not sure what it is that you’ve done, but I can’t believe how well things are going and how well I feel . . . The interviews in Amsterdam went great . . . These people treated me like royalty . . . They put me up in a great hotel and I had a chance to see much of the city . . . Great jazz clubs! . . . I felt so affirmed by the experience that as I was walking around the red light district I decided to hire a prostitute . . . Have you ever been to Holland? [I provided no answer, continuing to listen to his words instead] . . . Well I am sure you know how the country is typically portrayed . . . You know . . . I think of windmills, tulips and wooden shoes . . . No sooner had he completed his sentence than I found myself saying: “What if you were to choose?” Mr. R was somewhat taken aback, shook his head and said: “That reminds me of a joke . . . Do you know what’s better than fingers on a piano? . . . Two lips on an organ!” I remained silent. Feeling the weight of my silence, the patient began to settle into his own silence and emerged from it with these words, “You know I am having thoughts about my mother . . . She’s very conservative and traditional about sex . . . I am not sure I’ve told you this but she actually studied at one time to be a nun.”

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Mr. R then proceeded to examine the messages about sexuality his mother communicated to him as he grew up. He was also led to recall some of the messages he received from the teachers and nuns when he attended Catholic school as a child, recounting how his mother and teachers had made him feel that sex, and sex outside marriage in particular, was something dirty, celibacy and selfdenial being the ideal. After he verbalized and explored the theme for five or six minutes, and following a natural pause in his narration, I intervened: “You’ll have non of it?” The patient once again seemed taken aback, this time adding: That reminds me of another joke . . . Have you heard the story about the man who marries a nun . . . They say he gets none in the morning, none in the afternoon and none in the evening! At this time I got up and called the session over, punctuating or scansioning his discourse in order to symbolically communicate to him in action my belief that what had just transpired was genuinely important in the history of his therapy.2 Mr. R began to actively date a few weeks after the session, engaging in an erotic love affair with a woman whom he later took to his parents’ home some four hundred miles away for them to meet. On arrival, he announced to them that he and his girlfriend would be staying together and sharing the same room. What do the interventions here outlined say about the nature of the unconscious and the work of interpretation in therapy? We know that the Freudian therapist is trained to listen beyond the surface or intended meaning of the patient’s words, responding to a deeper, hidden meaning and logic (a logos) that is not known to the patient, a desire secretly insisting within the flow of verbal associations, symbolically linked to the symptom and which, in Lacan’s (1966/1977) view, is but a metaphorical construction (p. 175). Lacan says: We always come back, then, to our double reference to speech and to language. In order to free the subject’s speech, we introduce him into the language of his desire, that is to say, into the primary language in which, beyond what he tells us of himself, he is already talking to us unknown to himself, and, in the first place, in the symbols of the symptom. (1966/ 1977, p. 81)

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The responsibility of the psychoanalytic clinician, in short, dwells in his or her ability to direct the patient into the dimension of his unconscious desire, what Lacan (1966/1977) labelled “the discourse of the Other” (pp. 264, 285). This suggests that the therapist aims not to duplicate or confirm the words of the patient but rather to reply to unconscious meaning through interpretation. This is precisely why Lacan, in context of his 20th Seminar, was led to remark: What is at stake in analytic discourse is always this—to what is uttered as a signifier [by the patient], you [analysts, therapists] give another reading than what it [consciously] means. (Felman, 1987 p. 21) Viewed as a creative act, interpretation aims not so much at communicating or imparting information to the patient but at responding to a hidden appeal which the patient, unbeknownst to him or her, puts into play by virtue of speaking, appealing, or demanding to and of the analyst. The magic of psychoanalysis lies in the fact that interventions offered at this “other” level have the effect of loosening or altogether vanishing a symptom by virtue of disentangling and releasing its imprisoned meaning.

II An interpretation whose effects are understood is not a psychoanalytic interpretation. It is enough to have been analyzed or to be an analyst to realize that. —Jacques Lacan But humor is also the joy which has overcome the world. —Søren Kierkegaard

The intervention I offered my patient through my evocative question was somewhat thought out, but I must also explain that I experienced it somewhat as a surprise. Much of its guiding logic and of the effects it produced only became clear to me after I had the opportunity of reviewing the events leading up to and subsequent to the interpretation in question. It dawned on me that the word “abroad” in the patient’s statement just before leaving my office and departing for Amsterdam could also be read as signifying “a broad” (i.e., a woman). Helping

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to inscribe my words as such for the patient was the fact that I in turn responded to his “This is my first trip abroad” statement by offering a casual “Have fun.” At an unconscious level of communication (again I was not aware of this at the time) my response had the effect of communicating to the patient that, while in Amsterdam, he ought to have fun with “a broad.” Given the structure of the personal fantasy he had discussed previously—that if he made enough money he would then be able to procure a woman for himself—it grew clear to me that Mr. R responded to my rejoinder by actually acting upon his fantasy. Unconsciously propelling him to do so was not only my “Have fun” statement but the fact—which he learned during the interview— that the job paid much more than he had anticipated. In his Rome Discourse, Lacan (1966/1977) proposed that recognizing the dialectical nature of psychoanalysis necessarily led us to recognize the role of language in its praxis as involving a communication “in which the sender receives his own message back from the receiver in an inverted form” (p. 85). Lacan promotes that therapists intervene in an evocative fashion, inverting the patients’ message, while returning or echoing back to the unconscious dimension of their communication (the discourse of the Other), of which he remains unaware. [W]e learn that analysis consists in playing in all the many staves of the score that speech constitutes in the registers of language and on which depends the overdetermination of the symptom, which has no meaning except in that order. . . . There is therefore no doubt that the analyst can play on the power of the symbol by evoking it in a carefully calculated fashion in the semantic resonances of his remarks. This is surely the way for a return to the use of symbolic effects in a renewed technique of interpretation in analysis. In this regard we could take note of what the Hindu tradition teaches about dhvani, in the sense that this tradition stresses the property of speech by which it communicates what it does not actually say . . . we shall be able to restore to speech its full value of evocation by a discreet search for their interferences, using as our guide a metaphor whose symbolic displacement will neutralize the secondary meanings of the terms that it associates. . . . For in its symbolizing function speech is moving towards nothing less than a transformation of the subject to whom it is addressed by means of the link that it establishes with the one

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who emits it—in other words, by introducing the effect of a signifier. (Lacan, 1966/1977, pp. 79, 82–83; my emphasis) My interpretation surely had effects for the patient. I took the words “tulips and wooden shoes” and, neutralizing their intended or conscious meaning, returned them to the patient through my evocative question and in order to deliver him the “discourse of the Other” or what I took as the unconscious meaning of his communication. I heard “tulips and wooden shoes” as “two lips” and “wouldn’t choose,” themes related to what Mr. R had been discussing during the sessions prior to his departure for Holland. If, as Freud says in his dream book, “flowers” often function as symbols for the female genitalia, a “two lip” flower comes even closer to symbolizing what the patient, time and time again, saw as “forbidden fruit.” Rather than nailing down any specific meaning, the “bang bang” of my interpretation jolted him into further disclosure and verbalization of material previously unsymbolized. The remaining signifier in his statement also appeared to tote an unconscious meaning, one further verifying and confirming the logic of the unconscious structure to which I responded with my intervention. When examined closer and at the level of the letter, (which Lacan so often urged the analysts he trained to do) the word “windmills” can easily be interpreted as composed of two words: “win” and “mills.” In view of the patient’s fantasy about women and money, I heard “windmills” as “win millions.” In this instance, “windmills, tulips, and wooden shoes” operated as signifiers that, heard Otherwise than at a superficial order of meaning, pointed to the logic of his unconscious desire and conflicts. Heard this way, these signifiers condensed, snarled, and tied together an entire formation of conflict with which the patient had been wrestling in therapy. As such, they operated in his discourse as “nodal points” packed with meaning. My evocative intervention not only helped to set the resonances of the patient’s own speech into motion—they also served to unpack and unravel a signifying chain, strings of unconscious meaning attached to and suspended from these nodal points in his discourse (Lacan, 1966/1977). The therapist working in the spirit of the analytic tradition must above all listen not with his ego but rather by creatively exercising his unconscious, as Freud (1912/1958), in his papers on technique, urged young analysts to do. Lacan (1966/1977) himself was to pick up on this dimension of Freud, as the text of this passage helps confirm:

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[I]t is not about him that you have to speak to him, for he can do this himself, and therefore, it is not even to you that he [the patient] speaks. If it is to him that you have to speak, it is literally of something else, that is, of something other than that which is in question when he speaks of himself, and which is the thing that speaks to you, a thing which, whatever he says, would remain forever inaccessible to him, if in being speech addressed to you it could not elicit its response in you and if, from having heard its message in this inverted form, you could not, by returning it to him [in an act of interpretation], give him the double satisfaction of having recognized it and making him recognize its truth. (pp. 130–131) Although a cigar may at times be just a cigar, from a strictly analytic standpoint, a joke is never and only just a joke. The particular jokes produced by Mr. R during our exchange served to point directly to his repressed desire and his personal unconscious, to the locus of the Other (Lacan, 1966/1977). Indeed, the very jokes he provided in response to my intervention served to confirm that my interpretation had indeed hit the mark. It was not by accident, for example, that his first joke made reference to music (fingers on a piano), since he himself was a musician. For Lacan, psychoanalysis has less to do with delivering “insight” to patients than with hitting upon the significative terms, nonsensical or otherwise, that maintain the symptom in place and repetitively insist through their discourse, begging to be recognized. This takes place only through the gift of language, a loan that alone is granted to man and through which reality comes to us. Through its polysemy and multiple resonances, language provides the only possible field within which the analyst can operate and function. I will add that Mr. R continued in therapy for a few more months after the session and before accepting a lucrative job offer that required him to relocate out of state. Mr. R clearly benefited by his nearly two years of therapy with me. More importantly, however, by the time he terminated therapy with me, transference was no longer to this or that clinician but rather to the truth of the unconscious (the Other) as locus of the truth of his desire. In the Freudian tradition, this remains the greatest and most lasting gift any therapist can offer a patient. During his final sessions with me, Mr. R made it clear that he wanted to continue with his therapy in his new city and said that,

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since he would now be drawing a significant salary, he had decided to reaffirm his commitment to therapy and to undergo a formal analysis. Whether or not my particular interventions and the exchanges that ensued between Mr. R and me reflect or violate the logic of the analytic process remains open to debate. We know that Freud himself enjoyed a good joke and was quite humorous with patients at times, even within the analytic hour. Despite this, the theory and role of wit in psychoanalysis has remained largely neglected. Lacan (1966/1977) showed a serious interest in the subject while reflecting on its value for matters of technique and clinical praxis. Indeed, if we take him at his word, the funnier things grow during the process of analysis, the more the process itself affirms the spirit, if not the very letter and meaning, of Freud (Joy).3 In the words of Lacan (1988): The closer we get to psychoanalysis being funny the more it is real psychoanalysis. Later on, it will get run in, it will be done by cutting corners and by pulling tricks. No one will understand any longer what’s being done, just as there is no longer any need to understand anything about optics to make a microscope. So let us rejoice, we are still doing psychoanalysis. (p. 77)

NOTES 1. Throughout this paper, I will be mainly focusing on the work of the “early Lacan.” Those wishing more information on Lacan’s concept of interpretation should turn to his landmark essay of 1958, “The direction of the treatment and the principles of its power” (Lacan, 1966/1977, pp. 226–280), as well as to his seminar of 1958–1959, Desire and its interpretation, and 1968–1969 The psychoanalytic act. Those seeking to further acquaint themselves with the theories of Lacan and their value for clinical praxis, should consult the work of Bruce Fink, in particular his most recent book, A clinical introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Cambridge: Harvard University Press (1997). 2. Starting in the early 1950s, Lacan began to experiment with the length of the analytic session. Appealing to the intersubjective and dialectical nature of analysis, Lacan argued that the standard fifty minute hour frequently only served to block and alienate the patient’s speech in analysis.

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This seems especially true, as Lacan pointed out, with obsessional neurotics who will often wait until the very last minute of the session to disclose something important or who, in some cases, will toil to seduce the analyst with endless boring analysis of peripheral material, saying nothing meaningful or of value during the hour, as if waiting, and hoping, for the death of their analyst while killing time. The unconscious reveals itself in time and it takes time for the unconscious to reveal itself, said Lacan, but the obligation of the analyst resides in intervening so as to precipitate the advent of the patient’s unconscious desire, facilitating the progress of dealienation of her on his discourse, and the realization of his or her truth. According to Lacan (1966/ 1977), time-variable or short sessions, the analyst’s ability to call the session over at any time, provides an important tool he or she can use to break the discourse of the patient “in order to deliver speech” or else to “punctuate” or “fix” the meaning of their locutions (p. 101). The International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA), of which Lacan was a member during the 1950s, later invoked Lacan’s practice as a reason for their decision to ban or “excommunicate” him from the Association (in November 1963). Ironically, in Paris today, even members of the IPA no longer adhere to a fifty minute hour in their practice and Freud himself, as the case of the Wolf Man bears witness, certainly experimented with the role of time in analysis, pondering on the question of its effects. The reader may wish to consult the 3rd section of Lacan’s “Rome Discourse,” especially pages 95–101. 3. The reader unfamiliar with German will note that the surname of the founder of psychoanalysis, Freud, means “Joy,” as Lacan (1985) himself was to remind his audience: “Freud, the very name’s a laugh—Kraft durch Freud (strength through Freud [joy]), there’s a programme for you. It is the most hilarious leap in the holy farce of history” (p. 157).

REFERENCES Cummings, E. E. (1972). Complete Poems: 1913–1962. New York: HarcourtBrace Jovanovich. Felman, S. (1987). Jacques Lacan and the adventure of insight. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Freud, S. (1953). The interpretation of dreams. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vols. 4 & 5). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1900)

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Freud, S. (1958). Papers on technique. Recommendations to physicians practicing psychoanalysis. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 12). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1912) Freud, S. (1960a). The psychopathology of everyday life. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 6). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1901) Freud, S. (1960b). Jokes and their relation to the unconscious. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 8). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1905) Kierkegaard, S. (1946). A Kierkegaard anthology (R. Bretall, Ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lacan, J. (1977). Écrits: a selection (A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York: W.W. Norton and Company. (Original work published 1966) Lacan, J. (1985). Feminine sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the ecole freudienne (J. Mitchell and J. Rose, Eds., J. Rose, Trans.). New York: W.W. Norton and Company. Lacan, J. (1990). Television. New York: Norton and Company. Lacan, J. (1988). The seminar of Jacques Lacan, book I, Freud’s papers on Technique, 1953–1954. (J.-A. Miller, Ed., J. Forrester, Trans.) New York: W.W. Norton and Company. Leavy, S. (1983). The image and the word: further reflections on Jacques Lacan. In J. Smith and W. Kerrigan (Series Eds. & Vol. Eds.), Interpreting Lacan: Vol. 6. psychiatry and the humanities. New Haven: Yale University Press.

11 How Analysis Cures According to Lacan Mark Bracher

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n the eyes of American clinicians, Lacan often appears more a self-indulgent, hermetic French philosopher or wild, whimsical therapist than a practitioner of psychoanalysis. Indeed, Lacan’s neologisms, highly allusive style, convoluted syntax, and quasimathematical formulas, graphs, and topologies, not to mention his experimentation with short sessions, have led some American analysts to play Rush Limbaugh to Lacan’s Freud and dismiss Lacan’s work as mere psychobabble. Behind his maddeningly abstruse style and his sometimes unconventional practices, however, lies a “return to Freud,” by which Lacan meant a return to the fundamental realities and questions opened up by the psychoanalytic process— realities and questions that Lacan felt were being misunderstood or ignored entirely by an analytic theory and practice which, to

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Lacan’s view at the middle of this century, were becoming increasingly dogmatic and ritualized. Lacan saw the task of psychoanalysis at this time as being not to systematize and codify an already acquired knowledge concerning the psychoanalytic process, but rather to interrogate further the nature of that process itself. And this meant inquiring into the fundamental structures and processes constituting human subjectivity, examining the states of these structures and processes in psychological dysfunctions, and investigating the therapeutic effects of various aspects of the psychoanalytic process.

The Nature of Psychological Conflict For Lacan, as for many analysts, the psychoanalytic process aims to resolve psychological conflicts, which are the primary cause of various kinds of human suffering. The basic conflict is between that part of oneself which one acknowledges and identifies with and those features of oneself that are anathema to this first part. The root of this conflict, according to Lacan, is a fundamental division—a radical incommensurability—between the biological human organism and the socially, linguistically constructed human subject.

Symbolic versus Imaginary In the 1940s and 1950s, Lacan saw this division as a conflict between the Symbolic order and the Imaginary order—or, simply stated, between words and images. In the formulations of this period, the Imaginary order is seen as harboring experiences that have been registered but not symbolized, and hence not integrated into the social (and socializing) system constituted by the Symbolic order. On the one hand, the subject identifies with certain “master signifiers,” such as woman, wife, or mother, which are constituted in the Symbolic register. But at the same time, she identifies with other positions and desires at the level of the body image, which is constituted in the Imaginary order, and these positions and desires often conflict with the Symbolic-order positions. Hence, the “radical difference between the symbolic and the imaginary orders” (Lacan, 1978/1988b, p. 306), “a conflict between [the] symbolic pact and the imaginary relations which proliferate spontaneously within every libidinal relation” (p. 261).

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The Imaginary points of identification and desire are present as impressions or imprints (Lacan uses Freud’s term Prägung) in the subject’s imagistic memory: This Prägung . . . is at first located in a non-repressed unconscious. . . . Let us say that the Prägung has not been integrated into the verbalized system of the subject, that it has not even reached verbalization, and not even, one might say, attained signification. This Prägung, strictly limited to the domain of the imaginary, reemerges in the course of the subject’s progress into a symbolic world which is more and more organized. . . . Then, when it does in fact emerge . . . after having entered into the life of the subject . . . on the imaginary plane it takes on its status as a trauma. (Lacan, 1975/1988a, pp. 190–191) A paradigmatic example of an Imaginary-order impression that might later become traumatic is a young child’s visual image of the primal scene registered before the child was able to assimilate the image into Symbolic-order (verbalized) moral and gender categories.

Symbolic versus Real In the 1960s and 1970s, Lacan came to see the fundamental psychological conflict in terms not of two different systems of cognition and memory (Symbolic and Imaginary) but of a radical incommensurability between system and non-system. On the one hand, subjectivity is a function of systems—Symbolic and Imaginary, or verbal and imagistic—that organize different perceptions, memories, thoughts, feelings, desires, and enjoyments in relation to each other. On the other hand, however, there are also present within subjectivity “impressions without memory” (Braunstein, 1992, p. 176), which constitute what Lacan calls the Real. Lacan defines the Real as that which resists symbolization absolutely. The Real, not to be confused with “reality,” refers to those forces inside and outside of the subject that are not only radically unsymbolizable but also un-image-able, and that disrupt the Symbolic and Imaginary orders in various ways. The Real has its roots in our earliest experiences, before either language or stable perceptual fields were established and began forming “experience” through linguistic and imagistic categories. The Real also includes intense events (or

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aspects of events) of our later life that cannot be fully grasped by our perceptual or cognitive structures and categories. The Real, like Lacan’s earlier notion of the Imaginary, is thus by definition “traumatic,” insofar as it is unassimilable by the systems that structure subjectivity, yet continues to exist and insist, thus influencing the contours of these systems as well as their operations. The paradigmatic example here might be a young child’s experience of sexual abuse that produces not just a visual image but a bodily experience that exceeds the capacities of the child’s Symbolic order to assimilate it. The Aim of Psychoanalytic Treatment The aim of psychoanalytic treatment, in Lacan’s view, is to achieve a cessation of hostilities between the two sides of the internal conflict—that is, between the Symbolic and either the Imaginary or the Real order. Lacan expressed this aim by referring at various times to Freud’s formula of analysis: “Wo es war, soll Ich werden.” This formula is often read as articulating a kind of imperialistic and colonizing agenda for the ego in relation to the id: the ego must take over and cultivate the territory originally held by the id. Such a program of colonization, conversion, or domestication definitely plays a role in the psychoanalytic process as conceived by Lacan, particularly in Lacan’s earlier thinking. But Lacan contests the ego-psychological view of psychoanalysis as a process of strengthening the ego by annexing the id. As his thinking evolves, Lacan increasingly emphasizes accommodation of the id rather than its assimilation by the ego. Rather than a general, a governor, or a missionary sent in to conquer, rule, or convert the id, the ego in the psychoanalytic process is more like a pilgrim or an ethnographer, in that it changes its own categories in order to accommodate the alien modes of being of the id.

Integrating the Imaginary into the Symbolic In Lacan’s early thinking, where the fundamental conflict is conceived in terms of Symbolic versus Imaginary, the ego is seen as a function of the Imaginary order, and the psychoanalytic process is conceptualized as dissolving the ego’s Imaginary fixations—which constitute symptoms—and integrating them into the Symbolic order. The unverbalized and unintegrated Imaginary order impressions produce conflict in discourse and in life: “There is an inertia

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in the imaginary which we find making itself felt in the discourse of the subject, sowing discord in the discourse, making it such that I do not realize that when I mean someone well, I mean him ill, that when I love him, it is myself that I love, or when I think I love myself, it is precisely at this moment that I love an other” (Lacan, 1978/1988b, p. 306). Analysis reconciles the conflict between Imaginary and Symbolic desires by helping the subject verbalize, and hence identify and avow, the unconscious desire embodied in the unverbalized Imaginary imprint: “It is precisely the exercise of the dialectic of analysis which should dissipate this imaginary confusion, and restitute to the discourse its meaning as discourse” (Lacan, 1978/1988b, p. 306). Such verbalization means identifying various positions with which the ego has identified in its Imaginary, unconscious memory: “The first phase of analysis is accomplished in the passage . . . from what, in the ego, is unknown to the subject to this image in which he recognizes his imaginary investments” (Lacan, 1975/1988a, p. 186). “The unconscious notion of the ego, of the subject, . . . is made up of what the subject essentially fails to recognize in his structuring image, in the image of his ego—namely, those captivations by imaginary fixations which were unassimilable to the symbolic development of his history—this means that it was traumatic” (p. 283). These Imaginary fixations are evoked and exposed in the Imaginary dimension of the transference: “The floating, spoken relation with the analyst tends to produce, in the self-image, sufficiently repeated and wideranging variations, albeit infinitesimal and limited, for the subject to perceive the captating images which lie at the base of the constitution of his ego” (pp. 181–182). Analysis produces its effects by verbalizing these captating images: “What is involved in analysis? That the subject be able to totalize the various accidents the memory of which is retained in [his Imaginary unconscious] in a form closed off to him. It only opens up through verbalization” (Lacan, 1978/1988b, pp. 283–284). The process that Lacan describes here involves what the American psychologist Wilma Bucci (1985), citing empirical studies of Paivio and others, explains as the linking of two different memory systems, the verbal and the imagistic or perceptual: The goal of [psychoanalytic] treatment is to reach representational schemata stored in long-term memory which may be nonveridical and nonadaptive and a source of distress. Such schemata are to a large extent stored in the non-verbal system, inaccessible to retrieval because of dynamic factors and

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with defense systems blocking linkage to the verbal mode. Thus the referential connections have been blocked or have never been made; however the contact to the repressed schemata must be made by words. The psychoanalytic process involves activation of these schemata by free association, interpretation, and other means, and translation of the stored memory schemata into external speech. (p. 597) The key to this process is not just the translation of images into words but the assumption of repressed desire that this translation entails. When the Imaginary fixation is confronted by the analysand, his desire emerges. Lacan (1975/1988a) states: Desire emerges in a confrontation with the image. Once this image which had been rendered incomplete is completed, once the imaginary facet which was not-integrated, suppressed, repressed, looms up, anxiety then makes its appearance. That is the fertile moment. . . . It is . . . at the exact moment when what is close to bursting open in the imaginary is then also present in the verbal relation with the analyst, that the interpretation must be given so that its decisive value, its mutative function, can have an effect. . . . The subject’s desire is there, in the situation, both present and inexpressible. To name it, so Strachey says, is what the analyst’s intervention must confine itself to. (pp. 187–188) Verbally articulating the mute desire contained in the image allows the subject to own a previously rejected part of himself or herself.

Verbalizing the Real In this early formulation of the psychoanalytic process, the distinction between images and fantasies is undeveloped, and both one’s idealized self-images and one’s fantasies are conceived of as belonging to the largely private and unconscious Imaginary order, and as conflicting with the public, social categories of the Symbolic order. By the 1960s, Lacan’s perpetual redrawing of the terrain of the analytic process had come to relocate the fundamental division in subjectivity that analysis works with. On the one side lay the ego, a function of the Imaginary order with its body images and of the

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Symbolic order, source of values and ideals constituting the ego ideal. On the other side lay the Real, which is the ultimate ground of drives, fantasies, and symptoms. The two crucial elements of the psychoanalytic process are now seen to be what Lacan refers to as crossing the plane of identification and traversing the fundamental fantasy. Crossing the plane of identification means recognizing the relative and contingent nature of our fundamental ideals and values and passing beyond the inhibition and anxiety that oppose our engaging in (or even contemplating) actions or enjoyments that contradict these ideals.1 Traversing the fundamental fantasy involves coming to recognize the nature, the contingency, and the inescapability both of one’s preferred objects of desire (the active position in the fantasy) and of one’s preferred mode of functioning as the object of the Other’s desire (the passive position in the fantasy). In this formulation of the psychoanalytic process, the construction of the fundamental fantasy, like the mapping of the unconscious dimensions of the ego, involves colonization or assimilation by the Symbolic order. The construction of the fundamental fantasy involves what the Lacanian analyst Nestor Braunstein (1992) describes as the deciphering and translation of a primordial, uncodified jouissance (i.e., a profound enjoyment or gratification beyond pleasure) from the Real of the infantile body, onto which it was imprinted, into the semiotic system constituted by the Symbolic order. The earliest, infantile experiences of jouissance, Braunstein (1992) explains, are “asubjective, acephalic impressions, made on no one, matrices of a writing where a subject will have to come into being” (p. 176). “These impressions without memory . . . are the manifestation of an originary real of the subject, anterior to symbolization, which is jouissance itself ” (p. 177). These impressions then become transcribed, ciphered, encoded to form a system of perceptual signs anterior to speech and not accessible to consciousness. Taken together, these perceptual signs constitute the id: “a ciphered register of impressions of jouissance that have marked the flesh of the proto-subject, . . . flesh which will become body thanks to that blow” (pp. 177–178). “The id is a group of graphic grammatical elements, submitted to no organizational hierarchy, . . . jouissance anterior to subjective organization” (p. 179). Organization only arrives with language. Braunstein (1992) compares the disorder of the id to a bowl of lottery balls, where numbers are inscribed that mean nothing in themselves. A disorder of scriptural marks that acquire their meaning

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only at the moment of the drawing, when they are drawn by chance and then form a sequence due to chance, . . . which puts them in relation with a preexisting symbolic matrix . . . which will provide with meaning the series of balls drawn by chance. . . . Only the signifier will be able to institute an order in deploying these elements of writing in a diachrony. (p. 178) The analyst’s job, as Braunstein (1992) formulates it, is to help the analysand “to recover that possibility of jouissance that is entangled in the system of the id” (p. 180). And the way to do this is to articulate that jouissance in language: Jouissance, jouissance of the imprinted body . . . , can be recovered only in having recourse to . . . language and meaning. . . . The body is . . . the [compact] disk of inscriptions or ciphered enregisterings. The analysis will thus be a process of reading with a needle or laser beam that renders audible that which is inscribed and unknown of the subject: jouissance itself. (pp. 182–183) The analyst, that is, scans and deciphers a subject’s discourse in order to decipher the unconscious and gain access to the id. The analyst then directs the analysand’s attention to these aspects of his discourse, allowing the analysand to recognize and verbalize (and hence assume) the repressed desire expressed there. In Lacan’s later thinking, during the 1970s, mapping the ego and its unconscious dimensions and constructing the fundamental fantasy continue to play important roles in analysis. But during this final decade of Lacan’s thinking, the emphasis falls increasingly on the impossibility of ever completely assimilating the Real into the Symbolic order and hence on the necessity, as the final stage in the analytic process, of accommodating the Real. This final task involves recognizing and accommodating the Real-order kernel of jouissance at the core of one’s symptom—a profound mode of gratification that can be identified and recognized by language or the Symbolic order but never reduced to the Symbolic order or totally assimilated into it. Rather than attempting to dissolve or colonize this Real kernel of jouissance, one must learn to live with it and through it in ways that do not produce unbearable conflict. At this point of analysis, the normal meaning of the formula “Wo es war, soll ich werden” is reversed. Here the “I” (“ich”) is more like a pilgrim or a suppliant than a missionary or governor. The task

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here is, as Lacan variously describes it, for the analysand to assume his fate (Pommier, 1987, p. 215), “learn to operate with his symptom” (Lacan, 1977b, p. 7; Pommier, 1987, p. 216), or “identify with his symptom” (Harari, 1988, p. 142). A group of Lacanian analysts has recently described this point as follows: The real of the symptom . . . , as a kernel of irreducible jouissance beyond the formal envelope of the symptom, maintains its irreducibility for everyone at the end of treatment. [The most advanced conclusion of analysis] would be a beyond of the identification with the symptom that would permit a “knowing how to operate with the symptom,” to the extent that once the irreducible aspect of the real kernel of his structure is located, the subject would consent to make himself the dupe of the structure. (La Conclusion, 1994, pp. 158–159) The result of this final step in the analytic process is that, as Lacan (1973/1981) put it in 1964, “the experience of the fundamental fantasy becomes the drive” (p. 273). That is, rather than functioning as a mere fantasy, a tantalizing but forbidden (and usually unconscious), unactualized scenario of ultimate fulfillment, one’s fundamental desire now finds a more or less automatic and unconflicted path to gratification—a process that Jacques-Alain Miller has defined by inverting the terms of Freud’s statement to produce the formula: “Wo ich war, soll es werden.”

The Analyst’s Strategies in the Psychoanalytic Process For Lacan, the key to understanding how the analytic process works is to grasp the relation between language and desire in that process. “Speech,” Lacan (1966/1977a) says, “is all-powerful in the treatment” (p. 275). This statement means several things. First, it refers to the fact that speech constitutes the medium of analysis and also provides the fundamental tools of analysis. But more importantly, it also indicates that it is the analysand’s speech—its form as well as its content—that offers the most valuable clues concerning the existence and the nature of the unconscious elements that must be brought to light. And finally, Lacan is saying here that the analysand’s working through her conflicts occurs when, having recognized her unconscious desire through its manifestations in the form and content of her discourse, she assumes this

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desire, owns it, in verbally acknowledging it to the analyst. “That the subject should come to recognize and to name his desire,” Lacan (1978/1988b) says, “that is the efficacious action of psychoanalysis” (pp. 228–229). Integration of unconscious desire can occur only through language: “Desire is only ever reintegrated in a verbal form, through the symbolic nomination—that is what Freud called the verbal nucleus of the ego”2 (Lacan, 1975/1988a, p. 174). The avowal of one’s desire can be recognized by the qualities of “full speech” and “coherent discourse” in the subject’s expression (Lacan, 1966/1977a, p. 275). By “full speech” Lacan means an utterance that expresses the subject’s own thoughts and feelings, as opposed to “empty speech,” which is just mindless chatter, conventional, cliched, and alienated—that is, expression of the external Other’s desire. By “coherent discourse” Lacan means a way of speaking that is not fundamentally conflicted and self-contradictory. Thus, the way one recognizes whether the subject’s avowal of his unconscious desire is achieved is through the form of the subject’s discourse. A discourse that is both expressive and coherent indicates that such an avowal has occurred. A clichéd and conventional discourse, in contrast, indicates that the subject’s own desire remains repressed, in thrall to the external Other’s desire. And an incoherent discourse indicates that the repression is flawed and that the repressed is returning, but still without the avowal of the subject and without confronting the external Other’s desire. Lacan once said that before an analysis is complete—that is, before the analysand’s avowal of her desire is complete—the analysand tends either to speak of and from herself without speaking to the analyst, or to speak to the analyst but not of and from herself. The end of analysis is signalled by the analysand’s speaking of and from herself and to the analyst—i.e., avowing her desire to the Other—and this discourse will be both expressive and coherent, comprehensible by the Other (cited in Harari, 1988, p. 110).

Rectification with the Real In Lacan’s formulation, psychoanalysis promotes the assumption of unconscious desire through a strategy that comprises three basic factors: rectification with the real, engagement of the transference, and interpretation. The first step is for the analysand to recognize that his own actions, based on motives (desires) that he may know nothing of, have served to produce a situation that he consciously opposes. That is, the analysand is confronted with evidence that he

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has been unwittingly instrumental in bringing about the very reality he complains of. As an example of this “rectification of the subject’s relations with the real” (Lacan,1966/1977a, p. 237), as he calls it, Lacan cites the Dora case, in which Freud “reduces Dora to realizing that she has done more than merely contribute to the great disorder of her father’s world, the damage to which forms the object of her protest, but that she was in fact the mainspring of it” (p. 236). The key is to get the analysand to recognize that she is at least complicitous in her suffering, if not the sole instigator of it. The analysand must recognize that she is at least partly responsible for her own problems, because without such recognition there will be no motivation for her to examine her own desires.3 Development of the Transference Once the analysand begins to recognize that his problems are at least partially the result of his own action and hence of an invisible desire that motivates this action, the task then becomes to identify exactly what this desire is. This means helping the analysand come to recognize and understand his own internalized Others which govern to a significant degree his relations with and even perceptions of external Others. The transference is the fundamental means through which this recognition is made possible. As Lacan (1978/ 1988b) explains: The analysis consists in getting [the analysand] to become conscious of his relations, not with the ego of the analyst, but with all these Others who are his true interlocutors, whom he hasn’t recognized. It is a matter of the subject progressively discovering which [internalized] Other he is truly addressing, without knowing it, and of him progressively assuming the relations of transference at the place where he is, and where at first he didn’t know he was. (p. 246) “The relations of transference” that Lacan refers to here involve the analysand’s attempts to get the analyst to function as a particular type of Other in order to (re)produce a specific type of relationship from which the analysand derives profound gratification. Like Freud, Lacan viewed the transference as the central means through which a person’s unconscious desire and the ensuing conflicts manifest themselves in analysis. “The decisive part of the work” of psychoanalysis, Freud (1916/1963) declared,

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is achieved by creating in the patient’s relation to the doctor— in the “transference”—new editions of the old conflicts; in these the patient would like to behave in the same way as he did in the past, while we, by summoning up every available mental force [in the patient], compel him to come to a fresh decision. Thus the transference becomes the battlefield on which all the mutually struggling forces should meet one another. (p. 454) Freud (1912/1958a, p. 104) noted that “finally every conflict has to be fought out in the sphere of transference.” He declared: The transference thus creates an intermediate region between illness and real life through which the transition from the one to the other is made. The new condition has taken over all the features of the illness; but it represents an artificial illness which is at every point accessible to our intervention. It is a piece of real experience, but one which has been made possible by especially favorable conditions, and it is of a provisional nature. (1914/1958b, p. 154) What this means is that in analysis, the analysand will, for example, imagine that the analyst is acting, thinking, or feeling the way one of the analysand’s parents used to, because such a relation with the Other provides a profound gratification, or jouissance, to the analysand, even if the relation is unpleasant or even painful. If the analyst does or says anything that lends itself in any way to being construed as an instance of this parental position in the infantile scenario, the analysand will seize upon that element and exfoliate it, often focusing exclusively on it and turning the analyst in some way into as near a replica of the parent as possible. Such transference repetition of infantile relations with the Other is not limited to a subject’s mistakenly imagining that another person possesses certain qualities or attributes; it can also involve the subject’s actively, albeit unconsciously, seeking out someone who actually possesses such attributes, or manipulating someone into playing the kind of role that the subject finds most satisfying in the Other. Thus, someone who has had in childhood a very strong experience, either positive or negative, with regard to authority, might seek a severe taskmaster as an employer or teacher, or do things to get a teacher or supervisor to assume an authoritarian stance, because such a relation with the Other is profoundly gratifying to this subject.

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Transference thus functions as the foundation of psychoanalytic treatment, because it engages and brings to light the fundamental conflicts between the ego and its internalized Others, which promise unconscious enjoyment of various sorts. If an analysis is conducted properly, Lacan (1978/1988b) says, “what happens happens between the ego of the subject—it is always the ego of the subject which speaks, ostensibly—and the [subject’s internalized] others” (p. 246). Lacan identifies three basic types of Other, each operating in the transference and promising its own particular type of gratification. An Imaginary other is basically another person, an equal (friend, colleague, rival, competitor, enemy), and the gratifications one gets from an Imaginary other include narcissistic mirroring as well as the enjoyments of rivalry, competition, aggressivity, and hatred. A Symbolic Other is an authority or system—a source or embodiment of knowledge, belief, or truth. It can be an individual or a collective, such as an institution, a discipline, or a profession. The fundamental gratification we get from Symbolic Others is recognition, validation of our identity—that is, validation of the worth of our ego ideal and assurance that we embody this ideal. The Real Other is the mythical object that provided our earliest (bodily and existential) jouissance, including the bliss of unregulated eating, eliminating, gazing and being gazed upon, listening, and being listened to. We had to leave behind this object of bliss when we assumed our position in the civilized, social symbolic order, but we continue both to yearn for it, insofar as it promises to restore our lost bliss and wholeness, and to fear it, insofar as its return would disrupt our Symbolic-order identity. We are all continually trying to find or produce those relationships with these Others that provide us with the various sorts of gratification that we believe we need in order to face life. This means, first of all, that every encounter with another person involves the Imaginary-order dynamics of identification, rivalry, and aggressivity. Analysands often try to engage analysts in an ego-toego relationship that will provide them with Imaginary-order narcissistic gratification. Some analysands will try to relate to the analyst as a friend or colleague who will give them encouragement and moral support. Others relate to their analyst as a model to identify with. And still others try (usually unconsciously) to engage their analyst in a relationship of rivalry, competition, or mutual aggressivity, challenging the analyst’s actions or competence. In each of these instances, the analysand is trying to engage the analyst

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in a relation that offers the analysand’s ego a familiar and reassuring Imaginary other. Similarly, every encounter with an external Symbolic Other, or (actual or potential) authority figure, involves an attempt to gain recognition and validation—of one’s ego ideal and/or one’s ego. If such recognition is not forthcoming, one may try to gain it by changing one’s behavior (so as to more fully embody one’s ego ideal) or by changing one’s ideals (e.g., identifying with attempting to enact ideals that one presumes the Symbolic Other will be more likely to validate). One’s relation to external authorities—individuals, institutions, discourses, including one’s analyst and also psychoanalysis as a discourse or an institution—thus always enacts and expresses the particular qualities or values that one seeks to embody and consolidate as one’s ego ideal. In addition to functioning as an Imaginary-order object of identification, love, and aggressivity and a Symbolic-order authority, object of love, and object of identification, a person who is a transference object also functions as the Real Other, the object of the subject’s drives and fundamental fantasy, those situations through which one experiences one’s most precious but unconscious gratification (in the case of the drives) or seeks to recover lost gratification (in the case of the fundamental fantasy). That is, in addition to the analysand’s Imaginary-and Symbolic-order identifications and desires, the analysand’s unconscious libidinal and aggressive drives and fantasies also come to operate in relation to the analyst, and the analyst must allow this and even facilitate it. As Lacan puts it, the analysand loves the analyst, but because there is something else in the analyst that functions as a semblance of the part-object, or object a, the analysand also mutilates the analyst, treating her as though she had no authority and no intrinsic worth at all (see Lacan 1973/1981, pp. 267–269). In this aspect of the analytic relationship, the analysand treats the analyst not as a respected Authority (Symbolic Other) or even a fellow human being (Imaginary other), but rather as a Real Other—a piece of shit, a piece of ass, a mouth, or a gaze—something to be used, used up, and discarded, a mere means for attaining the analysand’s own gratification. In other instances, the analysand will try to function as an object a for the analyst, deriving gratification from, for example, being a shit or an asshole or the apple of the analyst’s eye. The analyst’s positioning of herself in terms of these three Others in the transference is critical in determining whether a particular course of treatment is analysis or some other mode of therapy. The

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analyst must keep these unconscious elements in play, preventing them from being repressed and avoided. To keep them in play requires, first of all, not gratifying the analysand in any register, because if a person’s desires are gratified, these desires will remain unconscious, since there will be no motive to become aware of them. At the same time, however, the analyst must take care not to deliberately frustrate the analysand’s desires, for such an act would establish the analyst as the analysand’s rival and reduce the analysis to an Imaginary-order competition between two egos, allowing the analysand’s unconscious desire once again to escape detection. To keep the analysand’s unconscious desire in play, the analyst must thus for the most part avoid speaking from the position of the Imaginary other (a friend or rival) or the Symbolic Other (an authority figure)—the position to which she is interpellated by the analysand’s demand for recognition—and instead take up the position of the Real Other or object a in the analysand’s drives and fundamental fantasy, keeping the object a continuously in play in such a way that the analysand can gradually recognize it as the core of his own desire and come to grips with it. The key means that the analyst has at her disposal for keeping the object a in play is her desire. In Lacan’s view, the nature of the analyst’s desire determines whether or not an analyst is really an analyst or is instead a counselor, a moral guide, a companion, or some other sort of therapist. The analyst’s desire, as Lacan defines it, is for “absolute difference,” which means that what she desires is not that the analysand come to embrace a certain value or ideal, or even achieve happiness or get better, but rather that he come to encounter that absolute difference both from the analyst and from himself that is the core of his unconscious desire and gratification. The analyst’s desire thus operates in opposition to the analysand’s demand for recognition. That is, the analysand’s unconscious subject position is by definition antithetical in fundamental ways to any conscious subject position, and insofar as the analyst is committed to the analytic process, her paramount desire in the analytic situation will always be for this absolute difference to be activated and realized. Insofar as she desires anything else, she is not operating as an analyst, and she risks undermining the analytic process. Of course the analyst is never just an analyst; he or she is also a citizen in society, and so on. So there may be times when just being an analyst vis-à-vis the patient is not sufficient. But insofar as the analyst is operating as analyst, from the analytic position, the analyst’s desire is by definition for absolute difference. It is important to realize that this desire is not a role the analyst as-

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sumes or some position that the analyst takes up by virtue of some imperative from the superego. It is a desire that the analyst comes to inhabit primarily by virtue of experiencing the process of his or her own analysis. In fact, it is precisely having this desire that, in Lacan’s definition, defines the transition from being an analysand to being an analyst. One might say that the point at which one finds oneself living this desire is the point at which one becomes an analyst, which is one of the reasons that Lacan maintained that to be an analyst, one ultimately validates oneself, on the basis of one’s own desire, rather than getting validated by some professional committee.

Interpretation While the transference is key to engaging and enacting unconscious desire, interpretation is crucial for bringing this desire to recognition and thus putting the analysand in a position to avow and assume it as his own. The basic process of interpretation, in Lacan’s view, involves highlighting the unwitting expression of unconscious desire in the analysand’s speech. As Lacan (1966/1977a) puts it: “In order to free the subject’s speech, we introduce him into the language of his desire, that is to say, into the primary language in which, beyond what he tells us of himself, he is already talking to us unknown to himself ” (p. 81). The way the analysand is already talking to the analyst without knowing it is through various unconscious formations, including self-contradictions, inconsistencies, ambiguities, equivocations, puns, double-entendres, slips of the tongue, and omissions, as well as rhetorical strategies and stylistic elements (tone, diction, syntax, and so on). Psychoanalytic interpretation thus involves returning the analysand’s message to him in such a way that he can hear it as his own message and thus begin to assume the unconscious aspects of his ego as well as other unconscious desires and enjoyments expressed in his message. To help the analysand assume the unconscious desire that he unwittingly expresses in his discourse, it is most effective if the analyst does not communicate her own insights to the analysand but instead points the analysand back to his own discourse. “[The analyst] doesn’t have to guide the subject to a Wissen, to knowledge,” Lacan (1975/1988a) says, “but on to the paths by which access to this knowledge is gained. He must engage him in a dialectical operation, not say to him that he is wrong since he necessarily is in error, but show him that he speaks poorly, that

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is to say that he speaks without knowing, as one who is ignorant, because what counts are the paths of his error” (p. 278, emphasis added). The simplest form of such an interpretation is simply the analyst’s repeating verbatim a word or phrase spoken by the analysand that seems to have potential significance that the analysand is not aware of. Psychoanalytic interpretation proper, in Lacan’s view, thus does not involve the analyst’s providing explanations of the analysand’s behavior or desires, nor does it involve encouraging the analysand to construct explanations of himself, for such procedures promote selfobjectification rather than assumption of desire. Interpretation should also avoid engaging the analysand in self-observation, for the same reason (see Lacan, 1966/1977a, pp. 130–131). Engaging the analysand in self-observation simply reinforces her identification with and investment in her idealized self-image, and this reinforcement motivates her to misrecognize her actual self (distorting it to conform with her ego ideal) and to avoid recognizing her unconscious desire. What the analyst must do is to address that part of the analysand that the analysand does not recognize as herself, which includes unconscious dimensions of her ego as well as unconscious desires and enjoyments that are antithetical to her ego and self-image. The form of the analyst’s statements is thus crucial. Lacanian analysts try to avoid propositional statements—statements that lend themselves to immediate agreement or disagreement, opting instead for statements that require interpretation on the part of the analysand before they have any definite meaning at all (Harari, 1988, pp. 212–230; Braunstein, 1994). Responses of this sort include proverbs, verb or noun phrases rather than sentences or clauses, and citations or quotations of some other speaker, especially the analysand. Such utterances allow the analyst to avoid suggestion to the greatest degree possible and to engage the analysand in the active process of recognizing and assuming his own desire rather than simply agreeing or disagreeing with the analyst’s observations. For the key to analysis, in Lacan’s view, lies in recognizing and assuming one’s unconscious desire and enjoyment not in an objectified form—such as an inferred reality or an intellectual proposition—but as a living force in the here and now. It is this fundamental aim—the desire for the analysand to experience her own absolute difference in the here and now— that must determine not only the form and content of the analyst’s utterances but everything else that the analyst does as well, if the analytic process is to be not only truly effective but also ethically defensible.

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1. Crossing this plane thus involves the sort of superego modification that Strachey describes. 2. See Michael Franz Basch, 1985, for a similar account of the way in which verbalization integrates into the ego forces from other semiotic systems, which were previously unconscious, cut off from the ego. 3. This is not to say that there are no victims, or that victims have asked for their victimization. Nor is it to suggest that changes in the external world are not essential to ameliorating human suffering. Rather, it is a recognition of the fact that one’s own unconscious desires, identifications, and meanings often participate both in producing the victimization and in perpetuating less than optimal attempts to cope with or overcome the victimization.

REFERENCES Basch, M. F. (1985). Interpretation: Toward a developmental model. In A. Goldberg (Ed.), Progress in self psychology (Vol. 1, pp. 33–42). New York: Guilford Press. Braunstein, N. (1992). La jouissance: un concept Lacanien. Paris: Point Hors Ligne. Braunstein, N. (1994). Conjugating and playing with the fantasy: The utterances of the analyst. In M. Bracher, M. W. Alcorn Jr., R. J. Corthell, and F. Massardier-Kenney (Eds.), Lacanian theory of discourse: Subject, structure, and society (pp. 154–162). New York: New York University Press. Bucci, W. (1985). Dual coding: A cognitive model for psychoanalytic research, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 33, 571–607. La Conclusion de la cure: Variété clinique de la sortie d’analyse. Paris: Eolia, 1994. Freud, S. (1958a). The dynamics of transference. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 12, pp. 97–108). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1912) Freud, S. (1958b). Remembering, repeating, working through. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 12, pp.145–156). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1914)

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Freud, S. (1963). Analytic therapy. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 16, pp. 448–463). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1916) Harari, R. (1988). Un pratique de discours en psychanalyse. Paris: Point Hors Ligne. Lacan, J. (1977a). Écrits: A selection (A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1966) Lacan, J. (1977b). L’insu que sait de l’une bévue s’aile à mourre. Ornicar? 12, 13. Lacan, J. (1981). The four fundamental concepts of psycho-analysis (J.-A. Miller, Ed., A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1973) Lacan, J. (1988a). The seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud’s papers on technique, 1953–1954 (J.-A. Miller, Ed., J. Forrester, Trans.). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1975) Lacan, J. (1988b). The seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The ego in Freud’s theory and in the technique of psychoanalysis, 1954–1955 (J.-A. Miller, Ed., S. Tomaselli, Trans.). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1978) Pommier, G. (1987). Le dénouement d’une analyse. Paris: Point Hors Ligne.

12 The Treatment of Psychosis Willy Apollon, Danielle Bergeron, and Lucie Cantin

General Problematic Willy Apollon

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his title merits a few explanatory remarks. It refers to the title of our book Traiter la psychose (Treating Psychosis), published in 1990 within a very specific framework. Its aim was to publicize the results of a report on our practices at the Psychoanalytic Treatment Center for Young Psychotic Adults in Quebec, the “388,” both within Quebec and throughout North America in particular. The present paper delineates the argument running through our research and our clinical advances. The Framework Since 1982, we have been operating a Psychoanalytic Treatment Center with an average capacity of sixty psychotic patients,

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supported by a contract with the government of Quebec that allows relative financial and administrative autonomy. The Center, situated within the city of Quebec, has administrative links with the Centre Hospitalier Robert-Giffard, and sponsors university internships for young professionals in the medical, psychiatric, psychological, and anthropological fields. The staff includes psychiatrists, who head the treatment teams, psychoanalysts affiliated with GIFRIC (The Interdisciplinary Freudian Group for Research and Clinical Interventions) who oversee individual analyses, and clinical staff members, social worker, etc. The Center is open twentyfour hours a day, 365 days a year. The client can make use of the Center’s services at any time, and can even receive help at home in an emergency. The Center has seven beds, divided between five rooms, for in-house treatment of the crisis. Each employee receives two hours of clinical psychoanalytic training and a half-hour of individual supervision per week. Our Method The theoretical framework in which the treatment takes place conditions its possibilities. In this setting, our aim is to connect the four logical facets of working that lead from the patient’s “spontaneous work”—which overdetermines the psychotic experience—to an experience under transference in which the subject encounters the desire of the analyst, there where the Other’s injunction was. This method is mandated by our clinical objective, which is to compel the psychotic to produce a savoir that can be deduced from the experience under transference. The new savoir will take the place of the delusional certainty at the base of the psychotic enterprise. Such a method is problematic within an institutional framework such as a hospital. When the individual is taken in charge by the institution and administered all kinds of treatment supposedly in accordance with his “needs,” the subject is placed in a paranoid position that condemns the transference to veer into erotomania, on the one hand, and on the other, engages the spontaneous work of psychosis in a clinical impasse leading to crises that then necessitate a biochemical, or even physical, control. The Structure of a Method of Treatment What is important about the way the method is put in place is that it allows for the possibility of a treatment founded on an ethics that supports the psychotic’s analysis. The first aim of the method is

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thus to establish a new ethics in the way the psychotic is approached, one that addresses him as a subject and requires a response from him: what we have designated within the theory as the “constraint.” Hence, even when a psychotic is referred by an attending psychiatrist, he cannot be accepted at the Center except on the condition of making a demand, through some minimal step. From the outset the client also knows that he will be undertaking a psychoanalytic treatment at the Center and that his analysis will be the ethical axis of his treatment. Furthermore, he knows that from the moment he is admitted at the Center, he will have to be responsible for his own affairs, and that his admission marks the end of his being taken care of by someone else. When he meets with the admission committee, only his word is taken into account. A “learned ignorance” defines the way in which he is listened to. This attention to the client’s word marks a radical departure from his prior experience, since neither his dossier, nor the comments that have been made about him in the discourse of others—attending physicians or parents—have ever addressed his own speech, to constitute him as an object of preoccupation, or of care. Our first aim is not to give a diagnosis, but rather to listen to a subject and to help him give shape to what he believes to be his fundamental question, around which he will be given the opportunity to elaborate a savoir, or to found a new ethics. If necessary, a psychiatrist will intervene to complete the patient’s psychiatric history and give a mental examination. This intervention is necessary to insist upon the distinctness of two domains that will remain separate for the duration of the treatment: the necessary control of the effects of psychosis, on the one hand, and, on the other, the necessity of speech. Phase One: The Spontaneous Work of Psychosis. This method links together four logical phases in the treatment. The four logical phases in the treatment are not articulated through a chronological series as much as through the structures of clinical constraint that condition the treatment and may, depending upon the subject’s ethics, reach a logical end. The first phase is determined by the spontaneous work of the psychotic subject. Clinical experience has allowed us to deduce that every psychotic subject is engaged in an enterprise that defines his psychosis in its singular way of relating to some defect that he discovers in the Other. The psychotic “works,” and it is on this basis that we recognize his structure and distinguish it from that of the neurotic. He works on an enterprise that is controlled not by

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him, but from elsewhere. In the first phase of the treatment, he is put in the position of having to define for those who listen to him the objective and the particularities of this singular enterprise in which the Other enlists him. One of the first surprises for the psychotic who comes to the 388 is doubtless discovering for the first time someone who is prepared to listen to him, instead of being only interested in his symptoms, his behavior, and his reaction to medication, the attitude he encountered elsewhere. In this position, defined structurally by the listening ear that creates a kind of rupture in the place of the Other, he begins to uncover, even as he describes it, his capture in a work whose aim is to repair a fundamental defect in the Other, which calls into question the very order of the universe. What was rejected until now as a delusion, a breakdown to be combated with the weapons of science and the corrective strategies of psychoeducation, is here counted as his word, and becomes an object of investigation for the treatment team. Phase Two: The Working Constraint within the Treatment Team. Under the direction of the psychiatrist responsible for the individual course of treatment, the treatment team is formed by the client, the clinician responsible for his care, a social worker, and the psychiatrist. The team conceives of a treatment plan, applies it, evaluates it, and corrects it. But all of this work is determined by the client’s involvement. By coming to the Center, he has committed to undertake the work of analysis. The team’s function is to support him in this work. The team welcomes the psychotic’s crisis. It waits for it. Until the client has had his first crisis at the 388, he is merely someone we listen to and who speaks to us from time to time. He is not yet fully a subject as such, captured in the jouissance of the Other. This is the time of the preliminaries to the treatment. We have designated this crisis as the “inscription crisis,” the one that marks the subject’s entry into the program of treatment. It supposes the activation of the transference. It has a very specific function, all the more so in that the client is the one who decides whether or not to have the crisis at the Center; for he could just as easily arrange to be hospitalized as soon as the spontaneous work begins to break down. The crisis will thus be at the core of the team’s work within the treatment program. The team’s work must take into account all of the client’s activities both at the Center and outside of it, as well as his relations with the other clients and all of the staff at the Center. Since its modalities are overdetermined by the fact of the

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analysis, which calls the “spontaneous work” into question, the crisis brings to light the signifiers determining the patient’s articulation to the Other, as well as the objectives and the modalities of the work to restore the order of things, in which the jouissance of the Other has secretly confined him. Hence, the treatment team is concerned not with targeting the constitutional or temperamental effects of the crisis through medical or biochemical means, but rather with welcoming the subject there where the work of analysis has provoked an outburst of the psychotic discourse. During this time of crisis, the team encounters the particularities of what has been endangering the health, physical integrity, and social autonomy of the individual in his capture by the Other. The subject’s relation to the “internal object,” the response of his drive to the voices, and the particularities of his destructuration of space and time will all determine the way in which the psychiatrist will direct the team to support the subject in his relation to the jouissance of the Other. During the crisis, their interventions have one guiding principle: to maintain contact with the subject. The Center has no means of physical restraint, no medical equipment, no supply of medication, no isolation room. The client’s word is really all we have to work with. He realizes this and honors it, just as we do ours. Third Phase: Sustaining the Subject’s Speech in the Restoration of the Symbolic. This phase involves the most essential part of the clinical practitioner’s work, which we describe as a restoration of the subject’s relation to the symbolic. The central challenge of the clinical practitioners’ work is to uphold the position that social coexistence is necessarily based upon rules to which everyone must submit, and that the relation of one person to another is defined solely by the way in which his word enters into this relation. All of the clients’ relations with the Center’s staff—clinical practitioners, social workers, artists, psychiatrists, and administrators—are determined by and negotiated through speech. This principle, which precludes expression through acts or gestures—or through violence against oneself or against other people or property—is effective only if every aspect of the treatment is grounded in the transference, in which the subject responds to the desire of the analyst. We have learned from experience that every time this principle is compromised, the treatment encounters an impasse that jeopardizes its clinical objective. The role of the clinical practitioner is thus to maintain for the client the symbolic framework of a life lived in relation to others,

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both at the Center and within the community at large. The clinician supports the client in his speech and in his responsibility for his life and his coexistence with others, within the framework of the laws common to society as a whole. Even in the midst of a crisis, in fact, the client is required to maintain a sufficient level of social interaction, both at the Center and outside of it. He maintains his living space, keeping his room neat and participating in shared activities such as cleaning, preparing meals, and washing dishes. In the course of certain crises—and especially during the one that we call the “third,” because of its place in the logic of the treatment—the client often has no trouble keeping up with his social activities. He goes to work, or to his school or university. Most of the time he can stay at home, coming to the Center after work or once he has finished his courses or other regular occupation, and then returning home in the evening to spend the night there. At this point, the analytic work within the client’s analysis has taken on another dimension, which may make it possible for the crisis to be treated within the analysis alone. But this is true only for clients who are very advanced in the analytic work of constructing a knowledge or savoir, one that would put a limit to, and eventually take the place of, the delusion. Fourth Phase: The Individual Analysis. Beginning in the second year of his treatment at the very latest, each client at the Center undertakes a personal analysis. Its contingencies are centered around the desire of the analyst, which determines the methodological strategies as well as ethics and the logic of every aspect of the psychotic’s treatment at the 388. Everything is thought out in view of the psychotic’s analysis. Our experience with the analysis of psychotics has confirmed as a rule the clinical hypothesis we put forward when we opened the Center: the only thing that can counterbalance the subject’s psychotic certainty is the discovery that he is called upon to make about the defect in the Other, an experience he is led to by the constraint of the analyst’s desire under transference, and that he must then transmit according to a certain logic. This fourth phase, that of the analysis, has its own logic where the treatment of psychotics is concerned, which includes three different dimensions. First, there is the phase preliminary to the analysis, which is unique for every subject and acts as an indicator of a possible means of relating to the analyst’s desire. Without fail, a moment comes when the client begins preparing for “his” analysis. Perhaps

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he buys a notebook and begins writing down his dreams. Or he starts talking about his analysis to his clinical practitioner or to his peers who are already in analysis. Over the years, the clients establish in this manner different ways to approach the key moment in the treatment that the entry into analysis represents. The second dimension of the analysis is the logic determining the way the experience itself unfolds, as we have identified and formalized it with the clients of the 388. We will discuss it in more detail in the two other sections of this chapter. Here, we would like to emphasize the third part, because of the stakes it raises for the other two. It has to do with the theoretical and clinical importance that we attribute to the subject’s need to elaborate a savoir about his experience that puts a limit to the delusional certainty: a savoir that he transmits first to his analyst, and then to a third party at the Center. As he constructs this new discourse, he draws upon his own experience of the signifier. He is able to elaborate what he henceforth calls “his” psychosis, by distinguishing its different facets, its “precipitating event,” and its successive stages. He may even offer an account of the logic of his delusion, by delimiting its structural effects within the history that he constitutes himself, through the experience to which the analyst bears witness. And as he begins to forego medications, delusional ideas, and hospitalizations, he is also able to explain the reasons behind this decision, as well as the rationale behind the alternatives he chooses. This elaboration takes time, and can happen only on the condition that the analyst’s attention—his ear—is sustained by his desire. The transmission that sustains this elaboration opens the possibility of a new savoir, overdetermined by the vertiginous experience of the analysand’s encounter with the analyst’s desire as the support for the defect in the Other. The challenge for the analyst is learning to calculate how far such a savoir must be taken in each individual case, so that the structure it elucidates for the subject concerning the defect in the Other can take over where the desire of the analyst leaves off. The subject’s calculation of the logical end term results in a particular savoir about a response that he might now be able to make to the defect in the Other.

The Structure of the Psychotic Experience Danielle Bergeron At the 388, we have committed ourselves to listening to the psychotics. At every level of treatment, we ask them to tell us what

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has happened to them. What then have we gathered from their accounts of the experiences? Certain elements, which may appear only within the framework of the analysis under transference, come back again and again. In general, the psychotic attests to the existence of a defect in the order of the universe, a “dysfunctioning” in the world. He learned of it one day through a revelation, which typically came to him by “voices,” or while he was reading a text: most often the Bible, but sometimes a newspaper or a book. Most psychotics say that they also know the solution to this grave problem. The psychotic advances a discourse that indicates how a new order of things could be restored. The psychotic also speaks of an “internal object” within his body, through which the Other—the devil, the United Nations, the army, the C.I.A.—has taken possession of him. Through the intermediary of this object, he says that he has become a captive to the jouissance of the Other, which has insinuated itself into the most intimate recesses of his being through a traumatic break-in. Sometimes the psychotic identifies this “internal object” through which the Other enters into him as an “organ,” whose properties have little to do with any known physiological function. Or he identifies it as an “object” that the Other has deposited within him, and which remains forever inaccessible: a needle placed in his head during an operation, a transmitter installed in the palm of his hand by the American army, the heart of Christ beating in his abdomen, a microphone hidden inside his tooth without his knowledge, and so on. Moreover, the psychotic is plagued by voices that are feeding on his mind like parasites. They make comments about his relations with other people, make fun of him, insult him, dictate his conduct or criticize it, promise misfortune if he doesn’t keep quiet, or issue contradictory imperatives. For some patients, this situation gives rise to symptoms: the work drains them to such an extent that they lack all energy, and have to remain in bed to recuperate; they sleep with difficulty, especially after those days when they have managed more or less successfully to respond to the voices; they no longer dare speak to their friends or acquaintances, never knowing in advance what words the voices will make come out of their mouths. In essence, the symptoms give visibility to the delusion; they inscribe the jouissance of the other in the letters of the body. Another aspect of the structure emerges out of listening to the psychotic: the delusion, controlled by the voices and the “internal object.” All of his energy is invested in the task that he has been charged with: to reconstruct a universe without any defects, and to

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uphold a new order of things for the benefit of humanity. This salvational enterprise, which defines the delusion, occupies all of the psychotic’s time and engages him in a very particular kind of social bond, a kind of exceptional relation to others. He expresses a lack of interest in daily activities, which is often misconstrued as a lack of competency that the psycho-educator must somehow mitigate. The Psychotic Discourse By emphasizing the notion of a psychotic discourse, we aim to elucidate the structure that would account for the psychotic’s relations to the jouissance of the Other in his undertaking to repair its defect. Since we have come up against this kind of structure many times, we have tried to identify the different elements of the psychotic experience that would allow us to evaluate the subject’s position within it. We have determined that the revelation of the Other’s defect, the “internal object,” the delusion, and the mission are the four constitutive elements of a logic through which the spontaneous work of the psychotic, elaborated by his discourse and even his symptoms, takes on meaning. The History of a Spontaneous Undertaking to Repair the Other “Many times,” says SB, “I was emptied out, drained of my energy by the demon that I had called to my aid. In the blink of an eye I lost all interest in my studies, and failed. I threw myself into sex, drugs, alcohol. Then I felt guilty for not being as I was before, for having chosen hatred and sin in the place of love. So to save myself from my revolt against God, I began praying and sacrificing myself for others. I fear the wrath of God. I have to atone for my sins to escape damnation. “Everyone has a reserve of strength and tenderness in their body. When it is emptied, which is what happened with the demon, you’re at risk of being overtaken by magic. The magic spell that was cast on me placed me in spiritual communion with those who are in trouble. I know that they’re suffering without them having to tell me. When I sense that they’re having problems, I can’t prevent myself from taking them on: I’m like a sponge. I feel invaded by other people’s emotions, like I’m responsible for them. I think it’s a telepathic virus: when people have problems and I try to help them out, I end up taking on all of their misery.

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“For a long time now I’ve felt that I should help people: it’s something larger than me, it overwhelms me—like a kind of tension inside. I suffer for others. I started to think I was Christ, taking on all of the sins of the world. As a child, I heard the voices of the Holy Spirit: they told me how to act and what to do, they gave me advice, they pointed me in the direction of harmony and love. They told me to strive for perfection, to stop sinning, and to obey the ten commandments. I tried to do what they said. But since my crisis, they’ve become too severe and unpleasant.” A Traumatic Event: The Encounter with an Unassimilable Real. In the first session, SB gives the analyst the indications necessary to determine his position. He begins by saying, “I live in the air, I can’t keep my feet on the ground, in reality; that’s why I want to undergo analysis.” SB has nothing to ground him; he lives in the “air,” suspended over a void. He asks the analyst to provide him with a symbolic framework for his life. Then he recounts a recurring dream that he had as a child: “I’m lying on a bed and then I fall into the void.” This little dream, like his demand for analysis, might appear to be inconsequential. But isn’t it significant that even while his body is pressed against the physical structure of the bed, he has the impression of falling—and into the void, no less? These two enunciations take on even more weight in relation to the memory he later recounts to the analyst, who “desires to know” what, in his past, had given rise to this repetitive dream. When they are resituated first within the thread of the analysand’s associations, and then within the subjective experiences that he brings to the following sessions, these enunciations reveal fundamental aspects of the truth for this subject. This dream reminds SB that when he was very little, his father, who had an “explosive” temper, had twice given him a spanking because he was out of control and was exasperating his mother. Logically, the memories associated with the demand for analysis and the dream of falling into the void must also have something to do with this void. The hypothesis that free association reveals a logic to unconscious phenomena is operative with psychotics as well, but only on the condition that the analyst, in the position of the missing Other, upholds and insists upon the flaw in the symbolic and act as an “anchoring point” for the signifier’s drift. Here, the logical sequence of the analyst’s words serves to mark the fact that if the spanking his father gave him in an explosive moment where he lost control brought him into the void, it is because the

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real of the jouissance he was faced with was not balanced by the signifier, because it was outside of the symbolic. The “Precipitating Event” of the Delusion and the Enterprise to Repair the Other. This event was at the source of SB’s imaginary disorganization, as witnessed by the subsequent apparition of the voices of the Other—the superegoic imperatives detached from the symbolic chain and “unleashed in the real,” as Lacan says (1966, p. 583). Overdetermined by the religious themes of his time, the imaginary Other assumes the voice of the Holy Spirit who dictates SB’s conduct, engaging him through its injunctions in a work to repair the symbolic Other, who turned out to be unable to give any meaning to the spanking, which SB consequently experienced as a wrong to be righted. From his childhood onward, SB feels that he has been charged with a mission, which the delusion elaborates: that of repairing the wrong in the Other—in the form of sin, hatred, and suffering—by striving for perfection and sacrificing himself for others. For this child, the event of the spanking marked his encounter with a real unassimilable by the signifier, what we have called the defect in the Other—or, with Apollon (1999), the “unfoundedness” of the symbolic. How did this simple spanking assume such a monumental importance for SB? Other children have certainly been spanked by an angry father, but without being traumatized by it for the rest of their lives. Why did this encounter with an abusive jouissance remain unassimilable for him, and why did it not undergo repression as it did for other children? It is because for this child, the foreclosure of the Name of the Father left him “suspended over a void,” without anything to buttress the excess that had invaded his father, and that through him had inscribed itself upon his flesh. The importance that this incident assumed, which of course emerged only once it had been resituated within the narrative of his life experience, is what justifies our deduction that this child was in a psychotic structure. A few sessions later, the status of this memory as a “precipitating event” in which SB encountered the hole in the Other was confirmed. While elaborating upon his mission, SB relates a situation where he had to heal his brother of cancer. The analyst’s question, “Before him, was there anything else?” leads to the following memory. When he was little, his mother asked him to be a good boy so as not to get his father mad, because he was under a lot of pressure. But because of his wild behavior his father got mad

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at him anyway, and erupted in an unexpected rage. This element is what determines the form that his mission, and his infantile delusion, will take: the father’s rage becomes a wrong for which he blames himself, that he will have to repair through his irreproachable behavior—thereby also avoiding the repetition of the trauma caused by the introduction of the real of jouissance. All of our psychotic patients under transference have identified some such “event” that took place in their childhood, before adolescence, that provoked a gradual slide away from speech: their first encounter with the defect in the Other as a hole in the universe. The Crisis: The Failure of the Spontaneous Work. At the 388, we make a distinction between the “precipitating event” that enlisted the psychotic in a work sustained by the delusion, wherein he devotes himself completely to repairing the Other, and the “crisis” that indicates a “failure of the spontaneous work” of psychosis. In most cases, the crisis occurs after the onset of adolescence. This is the time when the disorganization of social bonds and the symptoms undermining the psychotic’s physical unity begin to appear. But the crisis may never happen at all. As long as nothing happens to challenge the aims of the delusional work, and provided that this production remains sufficiently compatible with his social life, even a delusional person may not appear “sick.” The psychotic crisis consists of three elements. The first is the challenging of the mission’s success by some element of reality. With every psychotic it is possible to locate some trait, sign, or new event in his life that suddenly calls the success of the mission into question. The second element is the recalling of the “precipitating event.” When the crisis happens, the psychotic will identify some “detail” in his life that he credits with having plunged him into the crisis, such as SB’s appeal to the demon. This “detail” is significant because it runs counter to the work of restoring the Other and offsets the spontaneous work of the delusion, on the one hand, and on the other because this incident in his present-day life recalls the traumatic event in childhood that had provoked the encounter with an unassimilable real. The third element of the crisis is the shattering of the structure, which marks the failure of the spontaneous work. The new fact, the “detail,” emphasizes the fragility of the delusional construction and ruptures the structure that had bound together the defect in the Other, the voices, the “internal object,” the delusion, the mission, and the psychotic’s sense of election. According to Lacan, this rupture is what brings on “the cascade of repairs and alterations of the signifier, from which the growing disaster of the imaginary

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emerges until a level is reached at which signifier and signified stabilize in the delusional metaphor” (Lacan, 1966, p. 577). The only thing that will now allow the patient to emerge from the crisis is a reorganization of the structure of the experience, one that integrates the new elements causing the destabilization of the initial structure in order to reestablish their place within a reinforced delusional formation, more complex and more rigid than the first. After his first crisis, for example, SB develops the notion that he has been possessed by a telepathic virus, an “internal object” that makes the action of the demon all the more effective. This demon is this Other who violates him by breaking in to steal a jouissance, and who keeps him in its service through the intermediary of an “object” inside his body that attests to his election, explaining his peculiarity as well as his devotion to the salvational mission. To conclude, we will underline one particularity of the crisis “under transference” as it occurs at the 388. When the psychotic in analysis encounters the defect in the Other, through the transference with the analyst, a psychotic crisis not only may be triggered, but is precisely what the analyst is waiting for. Like the “spontaneous” crisis, it also marks the failure of the spontaneous work. But it differs from the spontaneous crisis in that it follows upon the constraint that the analyst’s desire places upon the work of the delusion. This crisis arises because the analyst, who never relents on the defect in the Other, puts the psychotic in the position of no longer being able to escape the question of the Other’s defect. The Entry into Analytic Work and the Production of Savoir Lucie Cantin We have made a wager with the psychotic: to leave the narrow perspective that considers the relation of psychoanalysis to psychosis as one of mere application. The psychotic has “responded” by teaching us that he can enter into the work of analysis, as an analysand, in order to produce a savoir that can sustain him in his relation to the hole in the symbolic, instead of the delusional certainty that served to mask it over. The Representation of the Defect in the Other and the Subject’s “Response” We believe that the installation of the transference with the psychotic must be considered differently than with the neurotic. The

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psychotic doesn’t suppose that the analyst knows something that the psychotic does not know. Instead, he supposes that he himself possesses a savoir that presents itself as seamless, infallible and well founded. In relation to the psychotic, the analyst occupies the position of a lacking Other, whose attitude is one of “learned ignorance.” The mere “desire to know” is insufficient if the analyst (or the place of the analyst) is to avoid being reduced to the status of a mere depository for the psychotic’s savoir, or serve merely to sustain the infinite deployment of his “discourse” by lending the support and attention upon which it feeds. To say that the analyst is in the position of a lacking Other is thus to emphasize that his role is above all to question the savoir of the psychotic. In his prior experiences of treatment, it is most often the psychotic himself who has been the object of questioning, subjected to the scrutiny of a medical, psychiatric, biological, or even psychoanalytic savoir that essentially maintained him in the position of an object of “scientific knowledge,” faced with an other who “knows.” But here the analyst’s desire interpellates the subject, by interrogating its savoir and upholding the requirement that the analysand formulate in words, through symbolization, what has until now been communicated only in the imaginary or through gestures. The psychotic thereby encounters an Other who does not know, or rather who is able to know only what can be spoken. Moreover, this Other does not believe he is crazy, but rather supposes that there is a truth inscribed in what the psychotic has until now experienced only in the mode of alienation and aggression, and proceeds to interrogate that truth. If the analyst’s desire interrogates the psychotic’s savoir, it can only mean that it is rooted in the logic and the structure that control his experience of the signifier. Through the analyst, the psychotic himself now encounters a “supposition”: the supposition of a truth, of a “savoir inscribed in the real” of experience. It is to this “supposition” that the psychotic “responds,” incited to take the risk of addressing his word to another person, without at first knowing what he is investing in this “response.” But our goal is not so much that the psychotic “respond” to the analyst’s desire, but rather that he take over and assume this “desire to know” that in the first phase of the treatment was sustained by the analyst alone. Possessed of this desire to know, the psychotic can then work toward the production of a new savoir: one controlled not by the injunctions of the voices and the imaginary of the mission, but rather by the logic of the signifier, which it causes the subject to experience for the first time. The subject thus makes a passage from a field controlled by the imaginary and by the

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jouissance in which the singular savoir of the psychotic is grounded, to a field regulated by the logic of the structure, and therefore by the symbolic and the signifier. This transition is of capital importance in the treatment of the psychotic. It constitutes a veritable “pass,” a moment of “passage,” in which the psychotic subject constitutes himself as subjected to and confronted with the law of language and its defect, rather than with the jouissance of an Other. The moment at which the psychotic “perceives” or “glimpses” a logic other than that deployed by the delusional certainty marks the appearance of the subject as such, and the necessity of an ethical decision as to whether or not he will pursue the analytic work. Indeed, this is the moment when certain psychotics choose to return to the hospital; but this time they go either with full knowledge of the reason why (en toute connaissance de cause) they are returning to the hospital or, as one patient said, out of a refusal to “dream, since dreams call into question my imaginary and my understanding of existence.” We maintain that this time of passage, in which the psychotic may choose to become an analysand, is conditioned by what we have called the putting into doubt of the delusional certainty. More precisely, the psychotic’s entry into the desire to know and the analytic work presupposes the chipping away of the delusional certainty. At this point we must offer one further specification concerning the analyst’s position in the psychoanalysis of a psychotic. Since what is at stake is the production of a savoir that will allow the psychotic to bear the defect in the Other, the constraint applied by the analyst’s desire must accomplish two things at once. It must keep open the question of the hole in the symbolic—its “unfoundedness”—through the representation of a structural defect, linked to language. But at the same time, it must not give up on the requirement that the subject produce a savoir in the field of the signifier.

The Undercutting of the Delusional Certainty and the Production of Savoir The casting into doubt of the delusional certainty, which prevents it from becoming persecutory or being interpreted as a challenge to the psychotic’s word (i.e., causing him not to be believed), cannot come “from the analyst.” For it must not derive from anything that could be interpreted as another savoir, whose foundation would challenge that of the psychotic in the name of reason, “common

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sense,” “psychoanalytic theory,” or any other “common” reality. Instead, the logic of the signifier must come to cast doubt upon the psychotic certainty and object to the delusional interpretation. By requiring that the psychotic speak (that he put into words what the crisis staged precisely because it was outside of speech, that he recount the moment at which the psychosis was unleashed and the delusion elaborated, that he relate the content of the voices), and above all by requiring and obtaining from the psychotic that he dream, the analyst summons the signifier in its relation to the defect in language. For some patients—the schizophrenic whose delusion is limited to a few barely articulated ideas, and who for years has been at the mercy of incessant “voices,” or those patients whose psychosis developed in childhood or at the moment of puberty and for whom the flourishing delusion that has given meaning to their life for ten or fifteen years has monopolized all of their subjective space—the dream may itself be apprehended as an aggression, either because it hinders the unfolding of the delusion, or because it is assimilated to the voices or thoughts introduced into their heads. In these cases, where the logic of the signifier may not be discovered by the patient himself, the delusional certainty is called into question by the effects of the analyst’s representation of the defect in the Other in his relation to the psychotic. The analyst’s representation of this defect, and the desire to know that he maintains, finally provokes the questioning of the delusional certainty through a “response” on the part of the subject that, although it may at first be very subtle, nonetheless attests to an opening in the opacity of the psychotic savoir. One patient, who for years had been absolutely certain that “people were speaking through her mouth,” and who even refused to allow these phenomena to be designated as voices by psychiatrists “who didn’t believe her,” came to her session one day and said, “I would like to talk again about how I think my actions are controlled by others.” Another patient began a session by bringing up a particular aspect of his delusion, presenting it for the first time as though it might be a daydream. Although clinical experience shows us that a dream always comes in response to the analyst’s desire, the dreams that the psychotic recounts at the beginning of the analysis are often mere prolongations of the delusional elaboration. They follow its logic, and frequently even take on its form. In the same way, the work the psychotic does after recounting the dream (following the method of analysis that we have indicated to him, involving the remains of the day, free association, links with his childhood, and so on) is

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inscribed within the elaboration of the psychotic “discourse.” Nonetheless, the dream furnishes signifiers that may be seized upon by the analyst, who will interrogate their link to the subject’s history. The psychotic has no history. Unlike the neurotic, he doesn’t present any mythical narrative that might serve as a link between traumatic episodes, which instead remain isolated, scattered, and disconnected, like so many bad encounters with the real. In the case of the psychotic it is the analyst who, on the basis of the signifiers furnished by the dream, as well as the delusion or the report of the patient’s crises, will question the link with the patient’s subjective history and eventually locate a few decisive events in the subject’s life. The history is produced by and through this symbolization. Before this work sustained by the analyst’s desire is undertaken, these events do not, strictly speaking, exist, in the sense that the subject did not know that they had been decisive for him; they had remained in the real, outside of discourse. The signifiers repetitively furnished by the dream and related to the subject’s history, the events that gradually turn out to have been decisive, the recurring elements in his crises, the mode and the repetitive form in which the subject encounters the defect in the Other through previously unsymbolized events—all of these elements constitute a savoir. As it takes form, the analyst sends it back to the subject in the form of question, which frequently cause the psychotic to smile or even laugh. He discovers in them a logic that functions all by itself, one that has eluded him until now but which is nonetheless inscribed in everything that used to seem nonsensical to him. When it happens that one of the analyst’s questions in the course of a session is left unanswered, and a dream then responds to it by furnishing the elements that allow a forgotten memory to resurface, the psychotic discovers a logic other than that controlled by the imaginary of the delusional solution, or what the imaginary constructs to account for the voices, injunctions, and nonsensical acts produced by the crisis. It is a moment of real vacillation, at which the psychotic can assume the position of an analysand by dedicating himself to the analytic work, to the production of his dreams and the savoir they allow him to construct, rather than to the delusion. Although this is the moment in the analysis at which some patients “decide” to stick with the delusional solution, for the majority it is a moment of enthusiasm and liberation, in which the subject appears by assuming speech. He sees himself subjected to the law of language and to the structure of an experience, rather than to the

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whims of an imaginary and persecutory Other. Henceforth, a “desire to know” (désir de savoir) will guide the work that he undertakes between sessions, and even in moments when the analysis has been halted. Not until this point can the psychotic enter into the supposition that the analyst is possessed of a knowledge. The psychotic works at constituting a savoir that he produces by transmitting it to the analyst. For example, he begins to account for the modalities and singular experiences that have marked his encounter with a hole in the symbolic; to identify a structure of repetition through a series of events in his life, marking out a subjective position that he was or still is unable to occupy without vacillation; to explain how the delusional certainty “descended” upon him, and perhaps even to find a signifying formula that defines it, accounting for what it was masking over. In short, he produces a true savoir there where the psychotic certainty and the delusional solution once came to mask the defect in the Other. Certain written testimonials, destined for the analyst, provide an account of the analysand’s position that the psychotic assumes by taking responsibility for the production of the savoir as well as its effects. One patient writes: I believe that something fundamental and profound has changed within me. An enormous illusion is gone. Often I’m tempted to say that I feel like I did before my first “social psychosis,” even if I know that it’s not true. In fact, I think that I’ve come to understand certain things since then, and have even closed up a few wounds. I’ve noticed that I have a funny way of doing things, which resembles the way I work in the laboratory. I will describe the way I work in the laboratory: there’s an experiment to perform (a hypothesis). I set up everything I need to complete the procedure (that is, I gather all the necessary materials and establish the protocol). I do the experiment (manipulate the data). Then I collect the results and finally draw the appropriate conclusions from the experiment. For certain hypotheses, though, I have to do many experiments before I can accept that I’ve made an error, because there’s a whole emotive process that comes in to reinforce, weaken, or destabilize my position. When we report how favorably many of the psychotics have “responded” to our wager, we frequently hear the objection that we

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are dealing only with “Lacanian” psychotics, meaning those “who talked”—the implication being that they were not really sick since they were able to be treated by psychoanalysis. The publication in 1990 of Treating Psychosis allowed us to give an account of the “seriousness” of our clients’ cases, and to report the results we have obtained. Since then, we have had the opportunity to make further progress, most notably concerning the logic of the psychotic’s analysis. Our experience allows us to affirm that the psychotic can enter into the desire to know, and, in the position of an analysand, can work toward the construction of a savoir with which he can bear the very thing that once precipitated him into the crisis and its delusional solution.

REFERENCES Apollon, W. (1999). Psychoses: L’offre de l’analyste. Conférences et Écrits, Collection “Le Savoir analytique.” Québec, Canada: Éditions du GIFRIC. Apollon, W., Bergeron, D., & Cantin, L. (1990). Traiter la psychose. Québec, Canada: Éditions du GIFRIC. Collection Noeud. Lacan, J. (1966). Écritis. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

13 Lacan and Family Therapy?! Opening a Space for Lacan in American Clinical Practice Daniel L. Buccino

Lacan in America?

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he resistance to Lacan in the American mainstream psychoanalytic world is well known and well documented. Lacan himself and his closest followers did little but antagonize the international and especially the American psychoanalytic establishment. Perhaps the cool response to his ideas in the United States reflects a tendency of Lacanians or those interested in his thought to focus on talking to “the wrong people.” Given the grave difficulties facing American psychoanalysis these days, due in no small part to the ravages of managed mental health care, the academicians and clinicians who are interested in Lacan 229

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may profit from looking for alternative audiences. Instead of focusing exclusively on psychoanalysts, we may direct our attention to those communities that, while not explicitly “psychoanalytic,” may be closer theoretically to Lacan’s point of view. Behind this ironic (and perhaps to many Lacanians, heretical) strategy is a plan to have more discussion of Lacan with progressive psychologists and therapists who are genuinely interested in the evolution of theory and practice. It is my hope that such dialogue may help ensure that ideas vital to the larger Freudian project survive. Therapists in the intellectual vanguard are actively exploring diverse theoretical innovations such as social constructionism (Cushman, 1995; Gergen, 1991), narrative therapy (White & Epston, 1990; Zimmerman & Dickerson, 1996), solution-focused therapy (deShazer, 1994a) and feminist reclamations of Freud (Luepnitz, 1988; Mitchell, 1974). These four areas—social constructionism, narrative approaches, solution-focused, and feminist therapy—are of particular interest to many family therapists. In my travels and consultations over the past several years, I have found more people who know of and are interested in Lacan among “family therapists,” “narrative therapists,” and “brief therapists” than among mainstream psychoanalysts, so this chapter is specifically addressed to them.

Feminism and Family Therapy Much of contemporary American clinical discourse, and family therapy literature in particular, is dominated by an essentialist, feminist notion of women’s unique “ways of knowing” and of the core “woman’s self ” as being defined always only “in relation.” (John Gray’s runaway best-seller Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus cemented these antinomical positions into the popular psyche.) These essentialized notions of woman have given rise to a reciprocal literature that urges a reclamation of “women’s ways of knowing self-in-relation” as an antidote for the disconnected and disaffiliated man (Real, 1997). What all this grasping for domestic harmony and relatedness misses are some of the core components of subjectivity that psychoanalysis addresses, often, but not always that of unconscious conflict and aggressivity. Deborah Luepnitz’s (1988) important book can help us reclaim Freud for family therapy, in order precisely to better deal with the elements of conflict that haunt our consulting rooms. While not prescribing an easy crossover—men becoming more relational, like

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women, and women becoming more ruthless in business, like men— Luepnitz describes the profound structural implications of a patriarchal culture that is largely father-absent. In our contemporary culture, where real fathers are often physically absent, the power of the Freudian (Lacanian) discovery of the symbolic and the structural status of the Phallus, in relation to castration have immediate relevance. For men and women, whether a father was really absent or not, the encounter, for instance, with the Name of the Father is of the utmost significance. Freud and Lacan offer a theory that accounts for the effects of an absent father on psychic structure. Even when the family includes a “real father,” we have to consider the structural implications of every subject’s coming into being in relation to the Name of the Father, the Other, the Phallus, and castration. Luepnitz (1988) and Mitchell (1974) provide indispensable aid for everyone, male or female, who seeks to understand the complicated trajectory by which people become sexed, speaking beings. The many conflicts family therapists see, especially insofar as they relate to fathers, ultimately reflect the alienation that is inherent to subjectivity. Given the complicated structures of subjectivity per se and the intertwining of family histories in marriage, an essentialist, feminist prescription seems far too simple. Luepnitz and Mitchell underline the complexity of family relations and gender identity but also provide a guide in their revisiting of psychoanalytic theory. Those familiar with the works of Luepnitz and Mitchell and their keen awareness of the realities of contemporary clinical practice, will want to move into fuller engagement with the work of Lacan precisely so as to understand the clinical implications of the Phallus and the Name of the Father for structuring all subjectivity.

Reconstructing Lacan: Social Constructionism and Family Therapy Social constructionism as a school of thought and strategy of textual and political engagement is not specific either to psychoanalysis or to family therapy, although family therapists (deShazer, 1989) and psychoanalysts (Buccino, 1993; 1997) are both beginning to employ social constructionist strategies to explode some of the political and economic subtexts of apparently value-neutral theories and technologies of the self. This approach may effectively liberate patients and clinicians from overly reified, commodifying conceptualizations. While this critical theory is useful in itself and

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opens space for Lacan, it clears only half the ground that might otherwise lead to fuller consideration of Lacan. The intellectual projects of psychoanalysis, feminism, and family therapy variously demonstrate that family life and politicoeconomic forces influence subjectivity, but only to a degree. Of course, capitalism alienates us all, and a patriarchal, yet father-absent, culture creates other frictions and fissures. But sociopolitical and social constructionist approaches miss the fact that subjectivity is profoundly and intrinsically traumatic. When subjectivity is distressing, it is not simply a function of contingent external forces causing problems. Personal history certainly crosses with cultural effects and individual trauma, but the Lacanian return to Freud reminds us, first of all, that we are forced to assume our subjectivity, and secondly, that this process changes us in the most intimate domain of being. The intimate space is defined in terms of the intersection of language, the Phallus, and the Other’s desire (see Malone, 1997, for a concise note on this point).

Talking about Lacan: Narrative/Family Therapy In the work of contemporary narrative therapists, especially Michael White (1997; White & Epston, 1990), we see the opening for Lacan begin to widen. The names of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida are appearing in the narrative therapy literature (but almost as ornamentation rather than as a serious theoretical approach to either utilize or critique). Derrida’s name, and his exceedingly complicated and wide-ranging work (especially since his recent reengagement with psychoanalysis) often appear to be cited just so the author, who may lack a full appreciation of what deconstruction means, can use the word anyway. This interest in a different kind of theory to inform clinical practice (other than the standard Bowenian, Milanese, systemic, strategic, structural, or psychoanalytic schools of family therapy), though nascent, seems promising. The family therapy community appears to be more open to these other discourses than is the increasingly insular, self-referential mainstream psychoanalytic community where the debates remain centered on drive versus self-psychological versus object relations theories. Like social constructionism, narrative therapy seeks to repoliticize experience and challenge the structures and ideologies of the dominant culture. Much like social constructionist approaches too, narrative approaches are attentive to the always contextualized

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expressions of experience and the ambivalent, ambiguous truthvalues of language and of experience. The narrative therapists agree with Lacan (1975/1988) that we do not register history veridically so much as know that we are always only rewriting it. One major problem with the narrative approach is that it takes language at face value, or, at least, solely on a symbolic level, rather than dealing with the fact that alienation is inevitable simply because the Subject is determined by his assumption of language. The narrative therapy approach fails to analyze the structure of subjectivity in relation to the Phallus and to the castration that marks one’s access to language (for men and for women) because it lacks the tools to do so. Lacan created the necessary tools, which are a function of the three registers—Symbolic (language), Imaginary (image and fantasy), and Real (the omnipresent but inaccessible “impossible” kernel of experience)—which are “knotted together.” The knotting of the three Lacanian registers destabilizes what appears to be a coherent sense of self—this deceptive appearance being an artifact of looking at things in terms of only one register (the Symbolic). While deconstructing an essentialist dominant culture, narrative therapy posits an equally reified but somehow more authentic (in its own terms), and richly and thickly described, personal story or self-narrative, which is thought to “provide the structure for life . . . it is constitutive of life” (White, 1997, p. 6). The structure of subjectivity highlighted in Lacanian psychoanalysis is generally elided in narrative therapy because it works strictly with symbolic terms. The Lacanian perspective helps advance and bracket the politics embedded in the narrative metaphor. Whereas Michael White may want to assist his clients in escaping unnecessary restrictions on their lives by deconstructing society’s oppressive narratives, the narrative model, in general, assumes a coherent, autonomous selfhood. Lacan explains the oppressive effects of societal structures in terms of the Symbolic and the Imaginary. His theory indicates that the subject must also encounter and work against the ego’s own oppressive oppression in its illusion of mastery, wholeness, and truth. The subject is barred; the subject is not the self; and “the ego is the enemy”—seeking to trap the subject in the ruses and fantasies of the Imaginary (e.g., the mirror stage wherein the infant perceives him/herself to be more capable than is true). Insofar as narrative therapy remains largely concerned with the operations of the Symbolic, it is especially vulnerable to entrapment by the lures of the seemingly omnipotent ego and its promises of autonomous selfhood.

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Lacan’s (1973/1978) later work continues to converge with the interests of narrative therapists, but, paradoxically, it diverges in a profound way at the same time. Michael White and his narrative therapy followers (see Zimmerman & Dickerson, 1996) would probably agree with Lacan that psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis in particular, is not just concerned with discovering the secrets of the unconscious. Narrative therapy, like some psychoanalyses, wants to tell a story about the patient’s past and unconscious as they are elaborated and constructed in the clinical discourse in the transference situation. Meaning is created secondarily in the telling that constitutes the treatment process. This narrative strategy is consistent with the Freudian discovery of the mechanism of deferred action. Lacanian psychoanalysis leads to a unique appreciation of the unconscious as lost. The unconscious is where we “can’t think to think,” and the work of analysis consists in large part in coming to grips with this original lost cause—the unconscious itself. We’ll never be able to construct a narrative powerful enough to explain this structuring, yet destabilizing inevitability. We can appreciate the effects of the unconscious in all three registers, most tangibly yet ironically in the Real, but we can never decode its hidden meanings because, in fact, it has no hidden meanings beyond the impact of its effects and status as lost. The unconscious emerges at the margins of discourse, in jokes, puns, and slips of the tongue, and then slips away again. It is impossible to grasp directly. So, rather than focusing on creating a narrative to account for the unconscious, Lacan (1973/1978) quotes Picasso: “I do not seek. I find” (p. 7). The emphasis is on discovering the effects of the unconscious and of the signifier on the subject. Narrative therapy offers a model that is linguistically oriented and politically engaged, but Lacan’s theory grants us access to an even more radical and profound theory of subjectivity that is both more alienating and more liberating.

“Let’s Talk about It!”: Lacan and Solution-Focused Therapy Steve deShazer is one of the best-known proponents of solutionfocused psychotherapy, which aims to work efficiently to help patients imagine what “better” might look like and construct solutions to bring it about. In two recent publications deShazer (1994a, 1994b) specifically acknowledges Freudian and Lacanian influences on his

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work, and, probably without knowing it, enacts a uniquely Lacanian pedagogical style. Lacan once said to a group of his followers, “You all worry about being Lacanian. Me, I’m a Freudian.” And deShazer (1994a) says that too: “Freud said it all.” Beyond the identical pedagogic stance, there are other similarities between deShazer and Lacan and some dramatic differences. DeShazer might agree with Lacan’s invocation of Picasso: “I do not seek, I find.” DeShazer eschews a position of therapist as omnipotent master directing treatment as he sees fit in favor of a more cooperative position of listening to his patient’s discourse for possibilities and solutions. Though deShazer does not use the same words to articulate it as such, one of the most Lacanian features of solution-focused therapy is couched in terms of the analyst’s desire. Like psychoanalysts, solution-focused therapists do not presume to know what symptoms mean or what direction the treatment should take or how much time it requires. A Lacanian analyst “does not give way on his desire.” For the analysand, this encounter with the Other’s desire is perplexing, and negotiating this encounter in the transference becomes a central force in the direction of the treatment. “Going through the fantasy” during treatment entails forsaking the assumption of an omniscient, omnipotent therapist by the patient, who must come to terms with the structural implications of the encounter with the Other in the transference as both castrated and desiring. This is why each treatment is unique to the logic and temporality of each subject’s unconscious and why a “solution” can always only be “found” to have been useful after the fact. To “seek” solutions directly is to shut down the unconscious. In Words Were Originally Magic deShazer (1994b) uses a chapter on Lacan to acknowledge the shifting referentiality of speech and language and the ensuing traps, but his chapter is mainly spent punning on the homophony of “whole” and “hole.” deShazer’s reading of Lacan is quite limited and relies exclusively on secondary and tertiary sources, and this route seemingly restricts him to a consideration of the lack or “hole” at the heart of the Symbolic, so although deShazer invokes the authority of Freud and Lacan as strategy and accessory, he comes up short in considering the full psychoanalytic implications for subjectivity traced by Lacan’s study of language, the role of the Phallus, the Real, and the inevitability of castration. There may be solution-focused opportunities to stumble across these possibilities and utilize a chance encounter to build solutions, but deShazer loses sight of crucial elements of this theory. In the end, deShazer’s (1994b) and White’s (White & Epston, 1990)

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poststructuralist, hermeneutic approach expose us to the possibility of endless signification that is never grounded and delimited. This open-endedness is potentially politically liberating, but misses some of the bedrock found by psychoanalysis. Language provides each subject with a set of unique and creative opportunities, but Lacanian psychoanalytic rigor reminds one that there are also rules of the game. A subject can make a move while playing a game which reflects his unique intelligence and creativity, but the game itself is structured by, and in fact made possible by, a set of rules that transcend his individual subjectivity. This crossing of subject and structure is also seen in the intersection of each subject’s personal history with that of his family and his society, which would exist without the subject’s encounter with it. These crossings, which decenter subjectivity in relation to the structure of language, point to the ethical burden of psychoanalysis. Lacan’s (1966/1977) best translation of Freud’s central but misunderstood and overly reified axiom, “Wo Es war, Soll Ich werden,” reminds us that “there where it was . . . it is my duty that I should come to being” (p. 129). In Lacan’s formulation he insists that the subject not only assume the potential generativity of language, but also come into being “in and as the unconscious. . . . (He) insists the subject take on “its” past as the foreign and unknowable language of someone else, the desire of the Other” (Reinhard, 1992, p. 28). Again we see that through gaining access to language (despite the symbolic “hole” in its heart) the subject “must assume the trauma of the past not as an external catastrophe that forced itself upon me, but as the material cause most foreign insofar as it is most intimately my own” (Reinhard, p. 29). But continuing a bit more with Ken Reinhard’s (1992) important and useful essay, “The Freudian Things: Construction and the Archeological Metaphor,” we can see the implications for Lacan of the knotting together of the three registers for each subject in the crossing of language and structure as well as to point us to the final section of this chapter. The subject that emerges there is both subjected to (alienated into) and subjectivized by (separated from) the signifiers and desire of the Other. The ethical imperative of Lacanian psychoanalysis thus takes up the call of a reverse archeology: the subject must attenuate its claims to unified meaning and nonalienated being as an ego in order to punctually emerge and disappear “there,” on the other side of its imaginary self-

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representations, in the gap in the symbolic order where the real irrupts. (p. 29) Though deShazer may see the holes in the symbolic he doesn’t look long enough to realize the horrifying implications of the real.

“Constructions in Analysis”: Lacan and Solution-Focused Therapy Sherlock Holmes once said, “It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.” In this final section, I would like to consider briefly how revisiting Freud’s archeological metaphor of surface and depth in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy points to more unrecognized common ground between psychoanalysis and seemingly nonpsychoanalytic approaches where Lacan has something to offer. One of the most tenacious stereotypes among clinicians is that psychoanalysis is somehow deep and long-acting while solutionfocused, or brief therapy, is superficial and temporary. This stereotype persists in large part because of insufficient consideration of the primary source of psychoanalysis, the work of Freud (particularly his later work), which so few clinicians, even psychoanalysts, still bother to read. Most clinicians forget that Freud’s own theory evolved over time. Initially, Freud focused on catharsis, but with the dawn of the twentieth century, his interest turned to the role of interpretation, and later, to the function of transference. Moving away finally from doctrine and omniscience, Freud adopted an almost “solution-focused,” utilitarian interest in whether the constructions produced by his patients were useful in simply increasing or decreasing symptoms. Freud became less interested in whether he or his patients were “doing it right,” or “doing it by the book” because he realized that, within broad parameters, he and each patient were creating unique experiences as they went along. Freud avoided falling into the trap that many contemporary, institutionally affiliated psychoanalysts do— the trap of minimizing positive therapeutic effects or outcomes that are not deemed to be properly psychoanalytic. Much like Lacan, Freud might have said to his doctrinal American followers, “You all worry about being psychoanalytic. I’ll just do more of what works.” The operative myth of much contemporary psychoanalysis is the archeological metaphor—that one must go back in time, and

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down through layers of the psyche to get to the unconscious kernel of genetic material that is linked to current symptoms. But the Freud (1937/1964) who wrote “Constructions in Analysis” and Lacan, with his interest in the topology of knots and surfaces, leads us to a position quite near that of the solution-focused family therapists. Preoccupation with the archeological metaphor, with mucking around the depths looking for historical material, can function as a resistance to constructions and to doing things differently in the present and future. Doing things differently today with regard to one’s symptoms changes one’s relationship to the past and to the very materiality of the historical, archeological material. Of course every Lacanian realizes that patients enjoy their symptoms on a certain level and do not give them up readily, but there is at least a consideration of the Escher-esque quality of the space of psychoanalytic work and that, like a simple Möebius strip, one can be working on surface/depth, past/present, inside/outside, conscious/ unconscious, and problem/solution at the same time. In “Constructions in Analysis,” Freud (1937/1964) regards symptoms as representations of “stuckness,” of something not working. Constructions are a way out, a way to account for symptoms while imagining something better. Freud reminds us that symptoms are dynamic and constantly evolving to evade explanation and dissolution. But so too are constructions. In a perpetually shifting effort to make sense of one’s symptoms and historical material the construction of solutions also is a dynamic process that requires recollection and reconstructions from the past. In the constructionist metaphor as set out by Freud, and elaborated in some ways by Lacan, and in others by Reinhard, we see that the work of psychoanalysis can always only be the simultaneous preservation and destruction of memories. Even if we endorse the archeological metaphor and simply seek to uncover memories and elements of things from the past, these findings are not self-explanatory. Our patients must tell a story about them, construct a narrative that explains, not only the origins and meaning of excavated material individually, but relate them to the personal history of the subject who unearths them. In the case of real antiquities, burial guarantees their survival; excavation often leads to their destruction. Buried artifacts exist not so much as monuments of history but rather as monuments to history, which symbolize the passing of time more than anything else (Reinhard, 1992). To find them is also to discover that we are not there, that now is not then, that we have moved on. To refind a buried trauma is not just to remind oneself of one’s victimization,

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but also to construct an alternative hypothesis that emphasizes the fact that time passed and one survived. While the roots of trauma are being unearthed, its effects are being destroyed by the yawning fissure of time. To excavate a memory is only half the therapeutic work. Finding the artifact begins the second phase, where further work is required to construct a meaning for it and any related symptoms, as well as to construct an alternative narrative of the subject involving the excavation and consequent destruction of the psychic artifacts. These bidirectional movements—the going back and going forward, the going up and going down—are well appreciated by deShazer (1994b), who cites the great detective Dupin in saying, “Truth is not always in a well” (p. xi). Just as constructions gained a privileged place over abreaction in Freud’s work, we can appreciate the displacement of archeology in Lacan’s late work on topology and his seminar on the purloined letter (Muller & Richardson, 1988). Lacan’s and deShazer’s attention to the detective story reminds us that sometimes the best place to hide something is in plain view. Perhaps even more than many psychoanalysts, solution-focused family therapists don’t want to miss that possibility.

Lacan in America? I have been wide-ranging and perhaps more evocative than analytic in this chapter, but my intent was to enact a uniquely psychoanalytic strategy of reading. Rather than adopting the strategy of many Lacanians, hammering away at the American resistance to Lacan, I tried to join the resistance, to understand it and go around it. It is a well-known clinical axiom that if you want to entrench resistance, you oppose it. To dissolve resistance, one must join it, go with it, move into it. So I have sought to locate places in the discourse of contemporary, nonpsychoanalytic family psychotherapy, which is frequently informed by postmodern and poststructuralist thought, where consideration of Lacan might meet the least resistance. I tried to anticipate resistance to Lacan as it might emerge from places in these other discourses where theory comes up a bit short, therapists using ostensibly nonpsychoanalytic models might profit from a Lacanian extension. If American psychoanalysis is to survive, it must appeal to nonclinicians and to young clinicians who most likely have not had a strong academic exposure to the work of Freud or Lacan. The latter, in particular, often start their careers with very difficult

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patients who are either psychotic, substance abusing, and/or antisocial—people who are not typically thought to be good psychoanalytic prospects. So engaging in discussion of some of the theories of practice that clinicians are utilizing to make sense of these very difficult clinical circumstances may allow us to convey the utility of Lacan. By pointing the way to learn from our patients, even the psychotic, we may have some hope not only for the implantation of Lacan but for the survival of our profession. The “psycho-things” (psychiatry, psychology, psychotherapy, psychoanalysis) are the only clinical domains that must always preface a conversation with a statement of the practitioner’s philosophical orientation. This factionalization is increasingly a threat to the viability of talk therapy. Rather than continuing to fight about what is most authentically psychoanalytic, or most Lacanian, or whatever, I have tried to focus on core elements of the Freudian discovery, free association, the unconscious discourse, and the transference relation, and show that these phenomena exist in places that initially might not appear psychoanalytic but that would all benefit from inclusion of the work of Jacques Lacan.

REFERENCES Buccino, D. L. (1993). The commodification of the object in object relations theory. Psychoanalytic Review, 80, 123–134. Buccino, D. L. (1997). The third analysis of Mr. Z: Self psychology and the failure of empathy. Clinical Studies: International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 3, 61–76. Cushman, P. (1995). Constructing the self, constructing America: A cultural history of psychotherapy. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. deShazer, S. (1989). Resistance revisited. Contemporary Family Therapy, 11, 227–233. deShazer, S. (1994a). Freud and Erickson said it all. Journal of Systemic Therapies, 13, 15–16. deShazer, S. (1994b). Words were originally magic. New York: Norton. Freud, S. (1964) Constructions in analysis. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud. (Vol. 23, pp. 257–269). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1937) Gergen, K. (1991). The saturated self: Dilemmas of identity in contemporary life. New York: Basic Books.

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Gray, J. (1992). Men are from Mars, women are from Venus: A practical guide for improving communication and getting what you want in your relationships. New York: HarperCollins. Lacan, J. (1977). Écrits: A selection (A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1966) Lacan, J. (1978). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XI: The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis (J.-A. Miller, Ed., A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1973) Lacan, J. (1988). The seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book I: Freud’s papers on technique. (J.-A. Miller, Ed., J. Forrester, Trans.). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1975) Luepnitz, D. (1988). The family interpreted: Feminist theory in clinical practice. New York: Basic Books. Malone, K. (1997). Between image and voice: Body representation and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Clinical Studies: International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 3, 103–113. Mitchell, J. (1974). Psychoanalysis and feminism. New York: Random House. Muller, J. P., & Richardson, W. J. (Eds.). (1988). The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and psychoanalytic reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Real, T. (1997). I don’t want to talk about it: Overcoming the secret legacy of male depression. New York: Scribner. Reinhard, K. (1992). The Freudian things: Construction and the archeological metaphor. Unpublished manuscript. Department of English, UCLA. White, M. (1997, September). Unpublished workshop handouts: Narrative therapy renewed. Baltimore-Washington Brief Therapy Institute, Columbia, MD. White, M., & Epston, D. (1990). Narrative means to therapeutic ends. New York: Norton. Zimmerman, J. L., & Dickerson, V. C. (Eds.). (1996). Special issue on narrative. Journal of Systemic Therapies, 15, 1.

PART III Lacan, Psychology, and Culture Kareen Ror Malone

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sychologists and other scholars are working to develop an explicit account of the subtle, intricate ways that cultural interests and horizons affect the theories and research of psychology (e.g., Parker & Shotter, 1990; Bohan, 1992). Acknowledging the impact of culture on this putatively disinterested, “objective” science has not always set well with psychologists of a more traditional stripe (Morawski, 1994; Gergen, 1973). Many psychologists, however, have altered their therapeutic approaches (White, 1993) and research strategies (Wilkinson, 1996) as a result of examining the effects of culture on their discipline. “Cultural effects” are sometimes assumed to represent an unnoticed intrusion of a private prejudice common to a given group of researchers or theorists. So, for instance, • Freud (is deemed to have) paid so much attention to “the penis” because he had one and it was important to him; 243

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• Psychologists are indifferent if not antagonistic to interests of the underclass because psychologists are middle-class. Cultural effects may also refer to specific forces that shape psychological research and theorization, forces that derive from social investments with real economic and political payoffs for psychologists and the social order in which they operate (Hare-Mustin, 1994), as, for instance: • Particular implications of the various discourses of gender go unquestioned; • Research on race and intelligence wallow in a history of unchallenged racism; • Military research grants shape our ideas of cognition in certain directions (Bowers, 1990); • Depictions of poor women serve obvious class interests. (Reid, 1993) Pushing the parameters of cultural critique to their limit, one could say that the discipline of psychology is beholden to, and so participates in, power formations that are particularly well suited to the functioning of the modern state (see Parker, chapter 19, this volume). It might be said that psychology not only reflects the culture within which it came to be, but that in its very approach to humans, psychology as a social institution enforces certain forms of social subjection through the confessional evocation of interiority and through an array of other disciplinary practices that are both subtle and seductive (Pfister & Schnog, 1997). Conceptions of identity, difference, individuality, and particularity are “manipulated” by the theories, data, and therapies generated by the discipline. Psychology, as a result, shows itself to be not only complicit with specific social interests (military grants, social benefits of sexism) or stupidly imprisoned in convention (Freud was blinded by the prejudices of the Victorian period)—psychology seemingly finds itself in an uncomfortable intimacy with practices that strike precisely the point where subjectivity and “subjection” are linked. The simple recognition that psychology and culture are interrelated is a significant step in the right direction. Psychology’s

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early aspirations to being a natural science and the research designs that lent themselves to such aspirations often precluded a broader awareness of social and cultural effects on cognition, emotions, attribution, or “psychic” reality in general. The aim was the universal. It may, in fact, be the case that one can not possibility determine “pan-cultural” effects without firstly considering cultural differences and specificities. However, the issue becomes the degree to which the examination of these cultural effects involves more than collecting cross-cultural data or comparing local knowledges (Bracher, 1993). It may require that we deepen our sense of the interrelationship between body, cognition, and other psychological “entities” with the cultural context in which they arise (Hutchins, 1998). Culture may be more than a different “input,” stimulus, or modelling; the category of culture may be a vehicle for retheorizing subjectivity itself—and here we return, indirectly, to the question of subjectivity and subjection. Something important emerges from within the asymmetry between subjection (as in the case of being subjected to someone or something) and the experience of subjectivity (of being “a being who desires”). This intersection concerns feminism and its theoretical controversies inasmuch as feminism exemplifies the interlacing of boundaries that marks cultural analysis per se (Segal & McIntosh, 1993). Simple aphorisms—such as “the personal is political”—opened new corridors of theory, research, and political practice. Now we must ask: • What is the relationship, for instance, between heterosexuality and the political critique of patriarchy (Kitzinger, Wilkinson, & Perkins, 1992)? • Should this question be posed to psychologists and therapists? • What are the stakes of gender? • Are gender and sexuality best approached in terms supplied from sociology (gender roles and socialization practices) as applied to biological givens and which possibly result in (largely untheorized) psychological “data”? • Isn’t the turn to thinking gender (or doing it) an effort to nudge these terms forward?

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Such questions form the leading edge of feminist work on culture and psychology. In keeping with this orientation, Section Three begins by exploring the meaning of sexual difference (Ragland, chapter 14) and the question of the phallus (Mieli, chapter 15). Given the tendency to see Lacan as “phallocentric” and dismiss him for that “failing,” we must take pains to demonstrate how important his new ideas about sexual difference are for every investigation that wants to take the relationship between culture and psychology into account. Although usually simply chalked up to biology, sexuality and heterosexuality remain largely untheorized (Chodorow, 1994). Many have seen psychoanalysis as that which “de-constructs” and conceptualizes sexuality and sexual difference (Brennan, 1991). Despite legitimate worries about a hetero-normative bias, a thorough understanding of the effects of sexual difference as a psychic inscription would seemingly require an understanding of what sexual difference is and how it implicates itself into such unrelated domains as the production of knowledge and the experience of sexual desire. Part of the appeal of Lacan for many feminists outside of psychology is the Lacanian willingness to engage in a cultural, rather than sociological, exploration of the meaning of gender. Ellie Ragland interprets Lacan’s theorization of the failure of biology to encompass sexual difference and desire (“How the Fact That There Is No Sexual Relation Gives Rise to Culture”). Why does sexuality so often “misfire,” despite enormous efforts to ensure its success? Far from reaffirming the stereotype of a misogynistic, “phallocentric” Lacan, Ragland indicates that the absence of a signifier for sexual difference enables the “papering over” of experience that we call culture. She goes on to explain how the “substitutes” for the absence of this signifier, partial drives, and “the little object a” work. These substitutes are neither heterosexual nor homosexual in any usual sense; they are “the stuff ” of the subject that organizes his or her desire, his or her body, and the correlative constitution of the world. Paola Mieli works with Lacan’s appropriation of Freud’s concept of the phallus (“Femininity and the Limits of Theory”). The phallus in Lacanian theory is not a physical organ—it constitutes a point of reference for the subject positions we call masculine and feminine. The masculine position subsumes all that is entailed in the construction (through imagination) of a system of signification that claims to represent “all there is.” Femininity represents the position based on acknowledging the “limits of theory” (see also Fink, 1995). Some might argue that these posi-

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tions recapitulate traditional myths of men and women, but Lacanians understand this “gendering” in terms of “the body’s” relationship to the signifier and to the impasses deriving from such an incongruous relationship. Seen in this light, gendering is not ascribed to any particular anatomical configuration (even if the difference is still essential). The other chapters in this section offer Lacanian perspectives on various discrete cultural formations in contemporary society. The key to this attempt lies in balancing the conditions of a particular historical context with the claims of subjectivity and psyche as found (typically) in Lacanian clinical work. The authors avoid the potential reductionism of cultural analysis by relying on a new metapsychology employing uniquely Lacanian concepts: the Symbolic Order, the Other, and other nonindividualistic terms. Patricia Gherovici, using Lacan to read Freud, works with material gathered in a clinical setting—actually, two different settings—in order to translate the patients’ “complaints” into subjective impasses that define a particular sociocultural group’s relationship to the “Other.” While moving between two domains of application, she brings up a significant Lacanian theme in cultural work—how historicallygiven social conditions organize the possibilities of freedom and action for individuals and groups. She makes a convincing argument that requests for medications such as Prozac and Xanax manifest the installation of individuals in culturally specific symbolic milieus—as do the practitioners who are all too willing to abet those “desires” through the promotion of drug therapies. David Caudill, like Gherovici, addresses cultural diversity with terms derived from the Lacanian clinic. Caudill insists that a theory of workable cultural diversity cannot be constructed in terms of hypothetical “rational formal subjects” who inhabit a domain of public life divested of all particulars of individual identity. He insists that both social and psychological theory need to embrace the nonrational dimensions of existence. Meaning is “sutured” to human beings through the operation of these irrational phenomena. Caudill explains how Lacanian concepts such as the Other and an application of the analytic ideal of neutrality are key to a worthwhile theory of social problems such as ethnic diversity and religious pluralism (“faith” versus certain knowledge). Donna Bentolila’s chapter (“Lacan in America”) focuses on individual responsibility. She, like the other authors, thinks of the issue in terms of a relation to the Other. Echoing Marxist laments about the interpretation of Freud in North America, Lopez reviews the history of Lacan’s reception in the United States. Her chapter

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also suggests the kinds of questions a culture must pose to itself to respond fully to the enigma of subjectivity. Ian Parker turns Lacan in a new direction (“Looking for Lacan: Virtual Psychology”). He suggests that current historical conditions such as the virtualization of subjectivity demand a new understanding of how the subject is formed. Lacan’s reading, rather than one founded in Western traditions of the self, will in all likelihood be more relevant to the permutations of human existence that we encounter in the next century. While working with current fantasies of our future through an analysis of popular films, Lúcia Villela (“Executors of an ancient pact”) exploits the Lacanian concept of the imaginary. As our society makes more and more techno-gadgets “in our own image,” Villela’s psychodynamic consideration of one’s subjective position in relation to this “double” may prove quite telling. The author also makes another important move; she addresses the question of a psychological methodology of the “cultural artifact.” Such methodological reflections are exceedingly important for a psychology that would truly accept the challenge of understanding cultural context.

REFERENCES Bohan, J. (Ed.). (1992). Seldom seen, rarely heard: Women’s place in psychology. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Bowers, J. (1990). All hail the great abstraction: Star wars and the politics of cognitive psychology. In I. Parker & J. Shotter (Eds.), Deconstructing social psychology (pp. 127–140). New York: Routledge. Bracher, M. (1993). Lacan, discourse, and social change. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Brennan, T. (1991). An impasse in psychoanalysis and feminism. In S. Gunew (Ed.), Feminist Knowledge: A Reader (pp. 114–138). London: Routledge. Chodorow, N. (1994). Femininities, masculinities, sexualities: Freud and beyond. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press. Fink, B. (1995). The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gergen, K. (1973). Social psychology as history. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 26, 309–320. Hare-Mustin, R. (1994). Discourses in the mirrored room: A postmodern analysis of therapy. Family Process, 33, 19–35.

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Hutchins, E. (1998, February). The cultural context of cognition and computation. Paper presented at the Cognitive Science Colloquium, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA. Kitzinger, C., Wilkinson, S., & Perkins, R. (1992). Theorizing heterosexuality. Feminism and Psychology, 2, 293–322. Morawski, J. (1994). Practicing Feminisms, Reconstructing Psychology: Notes on a liminal science. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Parker, I., & Shotter, J. (Eds.). (1990). Deconstructing social psychology. New York: Routledge. Pfister J., & Schnog, N. (Eds.). (1997). Inventing the psychological. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Reid, P. (1993). Poor women in psychological research: Shut up and shout out. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 17, 133–150. Segal, H., & McIntosh, M. (Eds.). (1993). Sex exposed: Sexuality and the pornography debate. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers. White, M. (1993). Deconstruction and therapy. In S. Gilligan, & R. Price (Eds.), Therapeutic conversations (pp. 22–80). New York: Norton. Wilkinson, S. (Ed.). (1996). Feminist Social Psychologies. Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press.

14 How the Fact That There Is No Sexual Relation Gives Rise to Culture Ellie Ragland

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he American literary critic and theorist Stanley Fish (1991) told a group of academics attending a conference on “The Rhetoric of Controversies” that he was writing a book entitled The Domestic Quarrel. He said such a quarrel is constituted in that moment when one looks at one’s intimate partner and wonders who he or she is, who the self is, how one got to be in the position of quarrelling so, and how one could ever get back to “even keel.” Telling the audience that there is something important to consider in an event so trivial as a domestic quarrel was surprising, but Fish further surprised them by surmising that all of the conference participants had been personally involved in such a controversy within the prior twenty-four hours. 251

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Fish’s thesis echoes Lacan’s (1975) well-publicized declaration that “there is no sexual relation,” that is, no stable basis for harmonious oneness between woman and man. Lacan contended, moreover, that culture, defined here as the ensemble of men and women and the representations that inhabit them, arises from this fact. One corollary of this proposition is that cultures do not function smoothly because there is no relation of oneness or harmony between men and women. In both cases, a germinal idea for Lacan’s thought can be found in Freud’s (1930/1961) Civilization and Its Discontents: We are accustomed to say that every human being displays both male and female instinctual impulses, needs and attributes; but though anatomy, it is true, can point out the characteristic of maleness and femaleness, psychology cannot. (p. 106) Biology is clearly irrelevant for psychic differentiation of the sexes as far as Freud is concerned. Lacan improves on the Freudian theory of sexual difference with a new theory of psychic structuration in terms of desire. Speaking beings and desiring bodies, are organized in terms of the real, imaginary, and symbolic orders. Every particular subjectivity functions like or rather “is” a “knot” that ties the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic orders together, collectively forming what Lacan calls the order of the sinthome (Lacan, 1974). Sexuation, a new term for the process by which gender is installed as a psychic structure, does not necessarily accord with physical characteristics. As well, sexuation refers to much more than what Anglophone scholars typically comprehend by the phrase “doing gender,” that is, analyzing roles enacted in the service of cultural norms, institutional power, and perceived self-interest (roles within the reach of consciousness). Lacan claims that consciousness exists specifically because of gender identifications and the “knots” associated with gender. The absence of any singular signifier of difference between the sexes makes gender identity or sexuation problematic. Gender, in other words, is always more than the sum of biological or sociological components. It seems that the subject represents inanimate objects to him or herself by function of this: There is no sexual relation. There

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are only speaking bodies . . . who create for themselves an idea of the world as such. The world, the world of being, full of knowledge (savoir), is only a dream, a dream of the body insofar as it speaks, because there is no recognizing (connaissant) subject. There are subjects who give themselves as correlates of the object a, correlates of the word (parole) jouissante. (Lacan, 1975, p. 114; emphasis added) Lacan analyzed the stakes of gender identity and the impasses of human sexuality in Le séminaire XX: Encore (1975). He demonstrated that the intimate knowing promised us by the sexual relationship is inherently impossible. Note the careful distinction between savoir and connaissance (in the previous quotation) which raises questions about the nature of knowledge per se. That is, Lacan emphasizes that there is a gap between every being who supposes himself full of savoir (knowledge) and the reality that no essential sujet connaissant (knowing subject) exists except in terms of jouissance. With two words—savoir and connâitre—Lacan confronts his interlocuters with the novel idea that conscious knowledge is just a scotoma of what we know. In reality, there are no beings who are “full of knowledge” (although the world is full of those who suppose themselves and others to be so possessed), no subjects who truly know what gives rise to the words they speak. They do not know consciously (savoir), but unconsciously, they know (connâitre). The passions evoked in that context generate human desires, bodies, and thought, but not knowledge as conscious understanding. In the absence of a sexual relation, “subjects” appear as being and knowing, but such subjects, constructed from identifications, only appear to know (Lacan, 1975). That is, the subject of academic and popular psychology is only “a semblant” situated between the symbolic—convention, language, and so forth—and the as yet unknown real, the impossible and the unsayable (Lacan, 1975). Cultures do not run smoothly, in part, because of this gap between the sexes, but cultures do maintain a high degree of group unity by filling in the cracks and stopping up the holes of individual doubt, fear, or anxiety by “master discourse” identifications with conscious knowledge. Strategies for managing sexual difference sustain “the subject of savoir,” as a kind of self-identity. But Lacan taught that the “subject-self ” is divided, as attested to by his or her mutual interdependence with other subjects and their objects of desire.

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The subject is divided between the real, the trauma that is the subject’s own existential cause, and the illusions of being that constitute consciousness as a protective coat that covers over “cuts” inflicted to constitute the real. Insofar as consciousness protects the subject from its own void places—from anxiety—it follows that: the subject . . . [is] able to believe that the world [knows] as much as he. The world is symmetrical with the subject, the world that I called the equivalent of thought the last time, the mirror image of thought. That is why there has been nothing but fantasy insofar as knowledge was concerned up until the advent of the most modern science. (Lacan, 1975, pp. 114–115) By “the most modern science,” Lacan means contemporary mathematics, topology, and the black holes of contemporary physics with its strings and shards that structure matter, as well as modern logic. Lacan’s Notion of the Object The radically innovative character of Lacan’s formulation of sexuality and of being itself can only be appreciated by understanding his conception of the object a, the real, and the subject. In the beginning Lacan used “object a” to refer to the appearance of an object as “other” (autre means other in French). Later, Lacan used object a to mark moments when the real impinges on experience, giving rise to an order of experience designated as the “imaginary.” The object a is experienced between the moment of losing “an object” (which one assumes one has had only once it is lost) and the lingering effects of that experience that give rise to the memory of the concrete wisps of meaning Lacan called unary traits. As such, the object a challenges the imaginary consistency of seemingly discrete, whole objects. In Lacanian theory the a priori of psychoanalysis are the Urobjects that connect the body to desire and desire to language. Freud specified two objects around which desire circulates: the breast and the feces. Lacan added two more such objects that he discovered in his work with psychotic clients: the voice and the gaze. As object a, the gaze cuts into the flesh of the subject (of the quaternary real, imaginary, symbolic, and the sinthome), the gaze rendering judgments and forming ideals. This cutting is what Lacan calls a primordial experience of castration. The object a is the (sometimes invisible) point where one’s language and one’s sense of being

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an integral whole are punctuated by the real. Thus, the gaze is not just an act of looking at another in certain ways, lasciviously or otherwise (e.g., Mulvey, 1975). Everyone is an object of the world’s gaze, a ubiquitous gaze that can never be reduced to how any individual sees the world. The gaze is not reduced to a function of the organ of scopophilia; it is sui generis a function by which one sees oneself as an object seen in the eyes of others. Thus, the gaze is not involved in all perception; it is the medium of (self-)consciousness, the Urexperience of self, and the formal representation of judgment that Lacan equated with the ideal ego, an unconscious formation where the imaginary and symbolic meet. The gaze is decisive in our determining the unconscious subject’s place in relation to his/her ideals and judgments. In this sense, it belongs neither to men or women (although the former may be more readily stimulated sexually by the visible). The real comes into language as a fixation, an affect constituted where language intersects with images and words. Therefore, the real of trauma is not defined by the objective reading of a historical event; it is defined by its effect of cutting into the imaginary consistency of the self that experiences itself as whole. The real is not absolutely unattainable (like Plato’s ideal forms) but enters language as an impasse in self-expressive speech, an impasse that can be unravelled and unblocked by words because such impasses were originally appended to flesh by words and images—by the Other. What we offer others is actually an object a, a response that bespeaks the lack of any signifier for defining gender difference. The effort to utilize language to forge an identity quickly takes on the force of drive itself. The “am I . . . ?” ’s proffered to the other become, in effect, a demand for the other to confirm the myths on which our own ego relies—a demand, in other words, that the other tell you that you are that which your symbolic imaginary ideals demand you to be. Demand-laden discourses ultimately result in profound alienation, because they aim for the fulfillment of existing as a whole (i.e., undivided) being. Thus, we tend to base our identity on what is by definition “not myself ”—or that which exists only apart from myself (the other’s validation that my true identity and my preferred identity are identical). In everyday life, we get support through asymmetry (sexual difference) and symmetry (equality), but the price we pay for that security is continued ignorance of the cuts and discontinuities that constitute the subject in a series of many traits that Lacan called the sinthomes that are radically repressed in the real.

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An infant cannot acquire the language to build and defend an Ident-i-kit on one side or the other of the sexual divide without becoming a subject of desire. Through its relation to the function of difference itself, the subject-to-be develops into “a subject of desire.” It is a desire that takes the form of thinking, “If so-and-so would only do this, be this, feel this, think this, then I . . . .” Desire is also the structure of a lack (of wholeness) in being. But traits of desire become attached to specific words and images as we strive to represent ourselves to other subjects (signifiers). Each subjectto-be “desires” initially only through the medium of “the desire of Other.” Were we capable of desire without the intervention of the Other, desire would be simply equivalent to need. A desiring subject evolves as a function of language and the drives, as a metonymy of signifiers that implicates that which seems to cause another subject’s desire. Although metonomy is the desire to substitute something immediately present for something lost, the substitutions themselves have the structure of metaphor, desire as such is symptomatic—a metonymy waltzing around a metaphor— of the radical loss of objects and memories that are not only lost trait by trait, but, moreover, were never possessed (Dunand, 1995). One can even say that subjective division exists in the unconscious and has the structure of fantasy (S
a). The object a is not produced as a lost object; rather, this object continues to produce itself in a stream of fantasy hallucinations, continually responding to the subject of desire who asks for more and more satisfaction. Any object, any part of a whole—including a shiny nose or the pump of a high heel shoe—can function as an object a because the real “thing” is gone, irremediably lost forever, except in the sporadic return of unary traits. The object a symbolizes any object— whether it is the object of philosophy or the object of object-relations theories—that is radically absent and lost (Lacan, 1994). The object a sutures lacks in three types of jouissance: • A niggling sense of an ungraspable meaning just outside of one’s reach (the jouissance of the uncompleted Other [ø]); • The lack-in-being that makes of the subject one who desires, wants,and/or lacks an innate jouissance [Φ]. Thus, the divided subject depends on others and things for libidinal completion; • The moment between fleeting encounters with an objectcause-of-desire and its loss, which necessitates a constant

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effort to reconstitute the ego’s unary traits, to perpetuate a jouissance of the unconscious by filling the lack in desire (–φ). Each type of jouissance marks a different kind of limit organized around an object a. • The jouissance of the Other resides between the imaginary and real; • The jouissance of the phallus resides between the real and the symbolic; it is a jouissance of (sexual) difference that is effaced by language; • The jouissance of the unconscious is situated at the point between the symbolic and the imaginary where the subject, divided by the object a, lacks a fullness of self or being. These points regarding jouissance can be understood through the three principal categories of the Borromean knot (figure 14.1) or topological unit. Lacan (1975) advised analysts not to play with substitute objects—“I ask you to refuse what I offer because it is not ‘that’ ” (p. 14). Every request or demand points to something else meant by the words. “I ask you,” Lacan says, “to refuse.” If the very structure of asking—on which the world of culture, exchange, and the demands of love hinge—carries with it the implicit pressure for the other to refuse what one offers, is Lacan saying we are all primordial masochists? I think, rather, he is saying that we cannot allow ourselves to acknowledge what material is being offered, or what material is being asked for. That is, we ask the other to refuse what we offer because we are offering a substitute for the real thing, for a love that negates division and guarantees oneness. Still, this gap between the meaning of what one asks for and what one receives or wants, drives us to seek satisfactions that are not what they appear to be. In the same passage in Encore, Lacan (1975) continues, “The object a is not being at all. The object a is that dimension of the void implied by any demand . . .” (p. 114). Every object is inadequate in itself, but the object a—it gives affective life to inert language. Still referring to the formula advanced above—“[I]t is not that” means that there is only a request for the object a in the desire of any demand, for the object that would succeed in satisfying jouissance—which would, then, be the supposed Lustbefriedigung—in what one improperly calls the geni-

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I Ø a

R

–φ

Φ ∑

S

Figure 14.1 The Borromean Knot NOTE:

The representation of the Borromean knot indicates the necessary interdependence of Lacan’s three registers that define subjective functioning. The legend of the figure: R = Real S = Symbolic I = Imaginary These are the three principal representational categories of the Borromean unit. In the intersections, Lacan placed three mathemes, which formalize jouissance as having both a logic and meaning in the different categories: Φ; -Φ; Ø. The Φ is the positivized or negativized phallus which represents the jouissance of language; the jouissance of the Father’s name signifier; the jouissance of a local (universal) order of codes, rules, and linguistic descriptions of concrete and abstract things. The – φ is the negativized phallus which gives a “sense” of there being something that “means” beyond the words being written or spoken. The Ø is the jouissance of the Other that is unconscious. When it is barred, the Other veers toward an emphasis on the void in the real (which concerns trauma not pleasure). Last, I have placed the sigma in the Real. In what Lacan called the knot or the sinthôme that ties the three orders together, giving a different consistency and a different “sense” to each of them. The knot partakes of each order, both keeping them separate from one another and anchoring itself most profoundly in the Real of the first order where traumatic losses (cuts) inscribe themselves as unary traits or marks of jouissance that are primordially repressed. Lacan places the “knot” both on the side of master signifiers of identification (S1s) that constitute the particular conditions of jouissance in the real, as well as on the side of sublimation of the Father’s name signifier insofar as ideologies are sublimations of the Father’s name.

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tal drive in the psychoanalytic discourse, the one where a relationship would inscribe itself, which would be the full relationship— unwritable—of the one with what remains irrreducibly the Other. I have insisted on this, that the partner of this “I,” which is the subject, subject of any sentence of demand, is not the Other, but what comes to substitute itself for it [the Other] in the form of the cause of desire—that I have diversified into four, insofar as it [the cause of desire] constitutes itself diversely, according to the Freudian discovery, from the object of sucking, from the object of excretion, from the gaze and from the voice. It is in the capacity of substitutes for the Other that these objects are clamored for, and are made cause(s) of desire” (Lacan, 1975, p. 114).

From Gender to Object and Sexuation Gender identity in our culture aligns masculinity with the “all” of the universal and femininity with the “not all” of the particular. On the masculine side, the general structure of desiring involves taking the position of “the lover.” One actively seeks to fill a lack by taking a desired object, be that a person, an image, a thing, or an event. Identifying what one knows as the “all” of knowledge is commensurate with a masculine epistemology, which fosters the illusion of consciousness, namely, the belief that what one sees and knows is all of what there is to see and know. Lacan opposes this illusion with the proposition that individuals are gazed at, more looked at than looking at. In other words, we exist more profoundly as objects (of the gaze) than we do as possessors of knowledge. Freud presumed that an active self is masculine (the one who desires the feminine). Lacan explains how the masculine position supplements and amplifies the illusion of masculine potency (although the active, for him, merely means the position of lover; not masculinity per se). The same logic would apply to today’s politically aware male, even though his posture in the spectacle would change. To be seen as desiring women is uncool, susceptible to being labelled sexist. (Another means of marking one’s position within the world gaze as masculine must be found.) Such a man demonstrates that he desires women by not looking at them, for example. One could extend this logic of the gaze in relation to desire and jouissance to every libidinal position. The logic would remain consistent, but the semiotic coding is ever changing. Masculine identification is gradually attached to a logic of difference, which leads to identification with the universal (“all”) of a

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given symbolic order (i.e., social) code. The masculine identity depends intrinsically on differentiating itself from the feminine “not all.” For Lacan the feminine involves the real of drive pulsations in the imaginary body, continually cut into by the real. What varies from culture to culture, from age to age, from person to person, is not the structure of the feminine, but the particularity of its intertwined forms of icon (image), index (the real mark), and the name (the symbolic) (Pyle, 1997). In feminine sexuation the sexual difference opens onto the void itself—the empty places in the Other who is only “supposed” to be full of knowledge and being. Thus, the void—located on the feminine side of sexuation—becomes the referent of all meaning. Language refers to losses of the object a underlying our quest to fill up loss. This is precisely what moves us to speak. Objects, things of the world, “suture” the cuts and compensate for losses; people try to deny the losses by grasping at things, beliefs, love, and sex, but these substitute objects never yield the gratification hoped for from the substitutes for the object a. If the subject could achieve an ongoing satisfaction when he or she attains objects of desire, he or she would not ask for anything more—there would not be anything more to ask for. We would be programmed robots, driven by nothing. Robots are robots precisely because they have no desire. The flat, mechanical language of early film robot figures is, indeed, an appropriate rendering of humans as language-creatures who are completely unanimated by desire. With the axiom, “there is no sexual relation,” Lacan seeks to prove that the subject can represent inanimate objects to himself or herself by function of the fact that he or she can “hallucinate” or fantasize satisfaction to compensate for loss. This means, not that human subjects are monads, but that the object a functions at the limit point of each order (the real, imaginary, and symbolic). At the level of the alienation intrinsic to representations, we can be said to speak from signifying chains that were imposed on us. At the level of the cut, we manifest affects and drives. We do not “relate” to each other via some preordained harmony, then. Rather, we make pacts of peace by naming the real of conflict so as to tame it with false covers. We make semblances of unities by identifying with images and icons. We give (or refuse) ourselves as gifts in all three orders, wondering if we look good enough (in the imaginary); whether we can satisfy the other (in the real); what our words are worth (in the symbolic). When Lacan says that culture exists because there is no sexual relation, he also means the “culture” of one person and his or her

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“world.” To prevent lack and loss from making us into monads (or psychotics), we are driven to produce culture. And insofar as the masculine and feminine positions differ, the key element lies in the response to the sexual difference, which pushes the masculine to identify knowledge with language, and imposes on the feminine the burden of taking up the real as a problem. Masculine and feminine positions differ, but not along gender lines. In the sense that the feminine is real jouissance seeking to encompass language, a parôle jouissante would be, to my thinking, the antithesis of a patriarchal or obsessional word. The latter word would be one that strictly adhered to symbolic rules, a desiccated language that relies on guides such as Roberts’s Rules of Order, where all jouissance is spent from language, and speaking is, indeed, only phallic. In R.S.I. Lacan (1974–1975) recasts the three modes of identification in Freud’s (1921/1955) Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, to show how the cultural is introjected into the individual: Lacan’s first identification is to a primordial signifier or symbol whose limit is that of the law of convention on which the symbolic order is founded (S1). There is an intersection here between the symbolic name of a cause and the real of the inscribed effect. The second identification is to a unary trait of imaginary identity, such as a moustache or a cigar. The intersection here would be between the imaginary and the symbolic. The third identification is to hysteria, or the desire of the Other, which reveals the loss of the object underlying the lack-in-being. Both lack ($) and loss S (Ø) open onto the order of the real. The intersection here would be between the imaginary and the real. In general, the Name of the Father implements symbolic castration by representing an imposed limit on enjoyment of the mother. Thus, the first identification makes a knot or limit that is called the paternal metaphor, or the law of language. The law operates by substituting an ideology or belief system for the lack of a guarantee surrounding the Name of the Father. The subject deals with the knot through a series of identifications. The first Freudian identification, as conceptualized by Lacan, then, is with the symptom and is equal to the unary traits that mark the real of sinthomes. In a larger sense, these are equal to symbolic castration, really to the “no” of Freud’s primordial father which Lacan reinterpreted in Encore as establishing a limit of a “no”—the law of (the incest) taboo—on a child’s enjoyment of the primordial Other, the mother. The second identification consists of imaginary fixations that dwell between the memory of an image or an icon and its affective residue

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in the real. This second kind of identification makes it impossible to speak of purely masculine traits or purely feminine traits. The third identification is to the lack-in-being which sends everyone rushing to identify with examples in the social, with master discourses, with master signifiers, with any fodder that will fill up the gap, lest the structure of the void confront one head-on with the real object a and what lies behind it: its own loss or absence. Cultural norms appear at the opposite end from psychosis, then, so we can define “norms” as a desire to avoid any anxiety stemming from lack or loss. Insofar as the “norms” are only created in reaction against a fundamental hysteria within each person, any identification with a logic of the whole or the “all” is understandable. There is no such thing as “the patriarchy” that excludes women from language, for women too try to close out the void. But there is a prisonhouse of obsession where identification with the word pronounced as law, with the voice and gaze that carry the superego, make the obsessional a prisoner in his own house, as well as controlling those around him lest they disturb his desire, which he tries to silence. But any woman who finds her “solution” to the existential dilemma of being in his certainty, must, then, encounter her problem. There is no sexual relation, Lacan said. This lack gives rise to speech as proof of the lack of a unifying relation, the lack that calls for a social link. Speech bears the burden of forging a social bond, which does not exist in the nondialectical absolutism of jouissance, which is the antithesis of speech. At a place of thirdness between language and jouissance, Lacan infers the object a, which speaks the body and about which the body speaks. “It” materializes language around the drive to satisfy desire, destroying the illusion that either a couple or a sexual “identity” will ever become One. Here, we can see that feminism cannot create a world in which there is a sexual relation of oneness and harmony. One would do better to think about the question of difference alongside examples such as the television chewing gum ad—sorry, I forgot the brand name!—where a boy lying up against a clock is madly chewing gum while a voice hurriedly speaks against the ticking clock whose hands are moving slowly. “He just can’t find an end to his satisfaction with brand X,” says the announcer. The clock metaphorizes the timing of the unconscious, the time of desire, moving in disjunction with the boy’s drive, his mad rush for satisfaction. While the announcer promises us that this gum can do what no other gum can do, give ongoing satisfaction, he also gives us a Lacanian example of the real. The words of the announcer give the lie to the human fantasy of closure, of blissful satisfaction to be found in the right object: just what no gum, by definition, can

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ever do. Contemporary examples multiply endlessly; pantyhose without runs, and on and on and on. There is no sexual relation, Lacan says as a beginning point. He seems to blame this lacking oneness for everything else, proposing that culture is constituted by the ways in which a given society copes with the reality of the sexual difference and the myriad denials and quests that circle around it. All the while, individuals deny another fact. At the heart of the domestic quarrel—that space where some Oneness is hoped for—there will always be a void because the void lies within one’s own Other as lacking and incomplete.

REFERENCES

Dunand, A. (1995). The end of analysis. In R. Feldstein, B. Fink, & M. Jaanus (Eds.), Reading seminar XI: Lacan’s four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis (pp. 243–256). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Fish, S. (1991, May). Unpublished conference remarks. Paper presented at the conference on the Rhetoric of Controversies in Literary Criticism, University of Waterloo, Canada. Freud, S. (1955). Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 18, pp. 65–144). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1921) Freud, S. (1961). Civilization and its discontents. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 21, pp. 59–148). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1930) Lacan, J. (1974). La troisième. Lettres de l’Ecole Freudienne, 16, 178–203. Lacan, J. (1974–1975). Le séminaire livre XXII: R.S.I. Unpublished. Paris: France. Lacan, J. (1975). Le séminaire livre XX (1972–1973): Encore (J.-A. Miller, Ed.). Paris: Seuil. Lacan, J. (1992). The seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VII: The ethics of psychoanalysis. (J.-A. Miller, Ed., D. Porter, Trans.). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1986) Lacan, J. (1994). Le séminaire livre IV (1956–1957): La relation d’objet. (J.-A. Miller, Ed.). Paris: Seuil. Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual pleasure, narrative cinema. Screen, 16, 6–18. Pyle, C. (1997). Lacan’s theory of language. In Proving Lacan: The interdisciplinary force of psychoanalytic evidence. Unpublished manuscript.

15 Femininity and the Limits of Theory Paola Mieli

Tra un fiore colto e l’altro donato l’inesprimibile nulla (Between one flower gathered and the other given the inexpressible Null). —Giuseppe Ungaretti

E

ver since Freud’s notion of a “dark continent,” psychoanalytic theory and theory in general have referred to femininity as an enigmatic domain. While male sexuality is assumed to be inherently intelligible in its sequence and in its articulation, female sexuality remains obscure. With the awareness of sexual asymmetry, theory runs into a difficulty. More precisely, it seems that in approaching the question of femininity, theory comes up

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against a limit, a point of the unknown. But how much does this limit reveal about the nature of theory itself ?

Sexual Difference and the Supremacy of the Phallus With the discovery of the “polymorphously perverse” character of infantile sexuality, Freud indicated how for both sexes, sexuality is first organized around erotogenic zones, those erogenous “borders” of the body where a privileged exchange with the other—the mother or the caretaker—takes place. Only in 1923, when introducing the notion of an infantile genital organization, did Freud resolve the question of the passage from this original sexuality to the establishment of genital supremacy. For both sexes the infantile genital organization is founded upon the supremacy of the phallus; to have it or not to have it becomes the question. This configuration determines two positions toward castration: on the one hand the belief in having the phallus and the anxiety about losing it; on the other the belief of having lost it and the wish to get it back. Freud discovers that for both sexes the relation to the phallus points to a fundamental loss or lack: Since everyone has to reckon with castration anxiety, the assumption of human sexuality necessarily confronts a loss and loss as such. If the phallic organization points to a symmetry between genders, the way in which the castration complex relates to the oedipal configuration establishes, according to Freud’s late writings, a basic asymmetry between them. “Whereas in boys the Oedipus complex is destroyed by the castration complex, in girls it is made possible and led to by the castration complex” (Freud, 1925/1961a, p. 256; italics in the original). Freud’s point of view is very well known. What I wish to recall here is simply the fact that the complexity revealed by sexual asymmetry is grounded in the recognition that both sexes initially have the same “object,” the mother. The veering away from this first object to a new one, to the father, is at the root of the “complication” represented by female sexuality. It is a complication that male sexuality seems to escape, but, as we shall see, only seems to. Nevertheless, it is precisely this complication that calls into question the privileged relationship that infants of both sexes have with the same primordial object, the mother, as well as the status of this object in itself. Following Freud’s remarks, Lacan re-elaborates the oedipal configuration and elucidates the reasons for the mysterious su-

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premacy of the phallus. What the infant, in his helplessness, desires, is his mother’s desire, on which the infant’s recognition and survival depend. The mother in fact is not a pure “object”; she is a desiring subject, with her power to grant or deny assistance and care, with her moods and her universe. The fact that she is a desiring subject presupposes her “missing” something: Desire presupposes a lack, something missing to be desired. As a desiring subject, then, the mother is lacking something: In this respect, castration is first encountered in the mother. Lacan (1994) calls the “phallus” the signifier for this lack in the mother, in this original Other. The phallus is not a thing, not an object, not an organ; the phallus is the signifier of the desire of the Other (Lacan,1966). In this respect men don’t have it any more than women.

The Phallus as Signifier Lacan’s interpretation of the Oedipus complex is grounded in the notion of the signifier. I will not discuss in this particular context the function of the phallus as signifier in relation to Lacan’s theory of language, to his articulation of the dialectic between speech and language in the constitution of human subjectivity. I will simply recall an aspect of Lacan’s notion of the signifier in the framework of the oedipal configuration. All human beings are part of a social universe and occupy a precise place in the network of relations that characterize the world of their parents, their substitutes, of the people who wanted them to live and grow. A child is the “effect” of the desire of the Other insofar as his/her coming into being and his/her survival depend upon such a desire; a desire that takes place in a symbolic order (language, culture, traditions, ethical values, etc.) and that is conveyed through language. The child’s name, for instance, as well as its position within the family and the social network, convey its parents’ history and expectations, the signifiers of their desire, marking the destiny and the child’s symbolic debt. If the signifier of the desire of the mother is the phallus, the child wants to be the phallus in order to fulfill that desire (Lacan, 1966). In a first structuring moment of the oedipal articulation the child experiences itself as the phallus, as the object of the mother’s desire. As Freud (1941/1964b) remarks, “[C]hildren like expressing an object-relation by an identification: ‘I am the object.’ ‘Having’ is the later of the two” (p. 299). In the next structuring moment of the oedipal configuration, the child acknowledges the presence of a

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third term in the scene of this privileged, dual relation with the mother: Through her own speech and manner, she indicates the presence of something else that she desires. Before being embodied in a real person, the function of the father is represented by a signifier that comes to substitute for the signifier of the mother’s desire. This signifier is what Lacan calls the Name of the Father. Linguistics designates the outcome of a substitution between signifiers as “metaphor”; accordingly, Lacan (1994) refers to the specific substitution taking place in the oedipal configuration as the “paternal metaphor.” It is interesting to recall here that, prior to genetic mapping, which in and of itself is organized thanks to a system of signs, the only means of “knowing” the father was by the mother naming him. This emphasizes her subjection to language as well as the general inscription of human identity in a symbolic order. Let’s observe that natural languages imply a trinary structure inherent in the action of speaking. In an exchange between two people, a third party can be evoked by deploying a third person pronoun (he/she/it/they), to bring absence in the field of presence. The space of symbolization is only possible through the designation of what is absent; which is why death is a constitutive part of such a space. The function of the father is first introduced by speech. In its dual relation with the mother, the child’s life is subject to her will, to her whims; in a word, the infant is subject to her “law.” With the acknowledgment of a third term in the scene, a new law is introduced: The signifier of the Name of the Father comes to represent what makes up the law of the mother’s desire. It grounds the symbolic law that regulates the relation between the mother and her child through interdiction: not only does it come to rescue the child from the mother’s whims, but it also sets up the premises of the incest prohibition and consequently of the threat of castration. In a third structural moment of the oedipal configuration, the father appears as the one who “has” the phallus, who has the signifier of the mother’s desire. At this point his function is represented by a real person (the real father or his substitute in relation to the mother’s desire). The attribution of the phallus to the father forces children of both sexes to face a fundamental inadequacy: not only is he/she not the phallus, the signifier of the mother’s desire, he/she doesn’t even have it. The child is faced with castration, and the outcome of this oedipal crisis will decide its sexuality. In short, one could say that the boy will generally solve the problem of castration by identifying with his father, with the only one who seems to have escaped such a danger, and, in becoming a male by

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proxy, he will play with the illusion of having what he doesn’t have. By reproaching her mother for being castrated, on the other hand, the little girl will generally confront her own lack, her own impossibility to fulfill her mother’s desire. Identifying with her mother and turning toward a new object, she will encounter the phallus through a substitution, in keeping with the famous “symbolic equivalence” Freud (1931/1961b) describes. If, according to this equivalence, the penis of the father takes on such a symbolic value, it is precisely because it substitutes the imaginary phallus of which the girl feels her mother deprived her. I won’t elaborate here on all the possible resolutions of the oedipal configuration, those resolutions that in fact define the sexual identity of a person (independently from their gender), and the different structures of neurosis—hysteria, obsession, phobia—as well as the structures of perversion and psychosis. What I want to stress here is a simple point, often misunderstood (for instance by certain feminist criticism): If the phallus is a pure signifier, the symbol for the lack in the Other, nobody “has” it, but anyone might have access to it, independently from its gender. The phallus is the symbol of an unattainable jouissance. Lacan introduces the term jouissance, in place of pleasure, in order to designate the complexity of the phenomenon of sexual fulfillment and the enjoyment related to it, an enjoyment that involves, as Freud (1920/1955b) indicates, not only pleasure but also its “beyond.” As symbol of unattainable jouissance, the phallus indicates the relation between law and desire. In Totem and Taboo, Freud (1913/1955a) shows how the barrier against incest and the oedipal complex are two sides of the same coin. The emergence of desire is of a piece with the appearance of a prohibition. Through his myth of the murder of the primordial father Freud shows how the relation between law and desire sets up the interdiction (and consequently loss or sacrifice) as the condition for symbolization, for civilization. Although the father is an obstacle to the attainment of jouissance (of the fulfillment of desire, of the enjoyment of the mother’s body) murdering him doesn’t open the way to jouissance but rather strengthens its prohibition. As Freud states, the result of such a murder is a totem, that is, a symbol which through language has the function to regulate sexual and social relationships. The creation of the totem coincides with the establishment of interdiction: The very fact of belonging to a certain totemic, prohibition-bound tribe regulates sexual choices, according to the universal assumption of the prohibition against maternal incest.

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As a substitute for the murdered father, as a symbol of authority, the totem represents the founding of a moral and ethical law that is the basis of civilization. Its function, however, is rooted on the very structure of language. Only thanks to a linguistic system of signs, for instance, is it possible to establish the social identity of a person: whether one belongs to a certain tribe, or a certain family. From this standpoint, the totem is not just a symbol; it also acquires the function of a signifier, which orders the network of social relationships. If a certain jouissance is radically prohibited, lost together with its object (the mother’s body), a structural gap will be created by “the difference in amount between the pleasure of satisfaction which is demanded and that which is actually achieved,” as Freud (1920/ 1955b, p. 42) states. This difference defines what I would term as the path of the messianic quality of desire, providing “the driving factor which will permit of no halting at any position attained” in human life (Freud, 1920/1955b, p. 42). Lacan (unpublished b) calls “phallic jouissance” the limited satisfaction that can be achieved, that is allowed by the symbolic order, by the interdiction of the primordial object: “une jouissance ‘apèritive,’ ” Lacan says—“a`-pèreitive,” an appetizer—a jouissance that is “never it” (ça n’est pas ça), a jouissance that as it occurs evokes what is missing.

Theory as an Answer In Totem and Taboo, Freud (1913/1955a) remarks that the birth of civilization implies not only the birth of moral law, but also the birth of theory. Representing the passage from the unconscious to preconsciousness, the myth of the primordial father represents at once the division of the subject and the invention of theory. By theory Freud means a construction of thought, the fruit of the same psychic activity at work in the secondary elaboration of dreams or in the creation of systems. Its characteristic is to “create order,” to create coherent relationship between things, to such a degree that thought, as Freud (1900/1953) puts it, doesn’t hesitate to produce a false coherence for its own sake. Starting with the stage of the formation of systems, “two sets of reasons can be assigned for every psychical act that is consciously judged—one set belonging to the system and the other set real but unconscious” (Freud, 1913/1955a, p. 65). The necessity for coherence at any cost, for rational explanations, according to Freud, is the result of repression and functions both as relief from an

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emotional conflict (for instance the ambivalence toward the death of the father) and as its concealment. Even phobias, obsessions, delusions, Freud observes, are examples of this activity of thought. From this point of view, Freud is well aware that repression and censorship inform every production of theory, including his own. Freud suggests a succession of three systems of thought: the animistic, the religious, and the scientific. The passage from one theory to the other marks the passage from a more complete vision of the world to one considerably less so. A movement away from the original omnipotence of thought toward incompleteness, loss, and a progressive renunciation of narcissistic drives. It is a movement away from the illusion of the perfect explanation of the world to the acceptance of the unknown, to the acceptance of the provisory, flawed nature of every construction of thought. In this framework, Freud deems scientific the advent of a system of thought that is well aware of the limit in which thought itself is grounded, and in so doing maintains a dialectical relation with its own productions. If, on the one hand, the tendency of theory to construct answers is the result of repression, on the other this tendency responds to the nature itself of conscious thought as a “surrogate of desire” (“der Ersatz des halluzinatorischen Wunsches”) (Freud, 1900/1953, p. 567; Freud, 1900/1942, p. 572). Thought “inherits” its messianic quality from desire and its search for solutions, for answers, will move toward refinding a mythical lost completeness. From this point of view, every construction of thought reveals its symptomatic or mythic quality. Confronted with the discovery of sexual difference, children encounter a difficulty of thought. Little Hans’s “philosophical” assumption, when faced with the sex of his little sister—“the widdler will get bigger” (Freud, 1908/1959a)—rests on his faith in the theory that all living creatures have a phallus. Children’s sexual theories—the phallic theory, the cloacal theory, and the sadistic theory of coitus, each of them responding to the mysteries of origin and of sexual difference—are analogous, Freud (1908/1959a) observes, to the adult’s attempt to solve theoretical “problems of the universe which are too hard for human comprehension” (p. 215). Children’s sexual theories emerge as a response to something unthinkable about sexual difference. According to Freud (1908/1941; 1909/1959a) the desire for knowledge does not awaken spontaneously: It is the result of “die Not des Lebens,” the exigencies of life (p. 213; p. 175). When the child’s position within the family is shaken, for instance by the oedipal prohibition or by the arrival of a newborn baby, the desire for

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knowledge is aroused. Marked by libidinal development and the psychosexual stages, the desire for knowledge connects actual eroticism with a danger, with a threat for the child. This danger reflects the acknowledgment of an interdiction in response to the urgency of erotic drives. In the framework of Lacan’s oedipal configuration, this desire to know relates also to the mother’s desire: insofar as the child acknowledges that he/she is not the phallus, is not the signifier of the mother’s desire, a privileged dual relation is broken and the question of knowing how to fulfill the mother’s desire remains open. This question is complementary to the enigma of the mother’s sex. The mother’s body, as Freud (1909/1959b) remarks, is the object “of the most intense sexual curiosity” (p. 239). Nevertheless, children’s investigations constantly reach the same “dead end”: the theory according to which the mother has a phallus. The castration of the mother induces a difficulty of thought, a denial, a rejection (Verwerfung) (Freud, 1908/1941). Freud notes that even when the psychosexual constitution of the child suggests the presence of the vagina, for instance through the wish to break or the aggressiveness related to genital eroticization, the theory of the phallus still arises in response to an impossibility of thought. If the mother’s sex is unthinkable it is not only because its acknowledgment involves the threat constituted by castration, but also because it “locates” the place of a jouissance the child supposes the mother experiences (Chatel, 1986). These two principles—the threat of castration and the mystery of the mother’s jouissance—are dialectically interdependent. The jouissance of the mother’s body is unknowable: it belongs to the domain of a Real, out of symbolization. Lacan’s category of the Real, as distinguished from “reality,” designates the domain of what exists but is outside symbolization. To say that the impossibility of knowing the jouissance of the mother’s body is the implicit consequence of the incest prohibition is to equate such an impossibility with the law of desire, the law that establishes interdiction as the condition for desire per se. This very impossibility reflects the trinary structure of the symbolic order. The function of the third, comes to sustain the void that separates the child from the mother, that separates the subject from its origins. In its position as original Other, the body of the mother is the “unforgettable thing,” das Ding, which constitutes the first external loving but potentially hostile “unknown,” and toward which the subject is oriented (Freud, 1895/1966; Lacan, 1986). It is precisely by virtue of the subject’s distance from das Ding, from this “thing” that lies

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outside symbolization, that the universe of the subject’s desire and signification can emerge and symbolization thereby take place. In keeping with Freud’s idea that danger is what provokes the need for knowledge, Lacan (unpublished a) suggests that it is horror, and not desire, that “presides” over knowledge. I will not discuss in this particular context the various implications of Lacan’s remark. Let us simply observe here that the horror provoked by the jouissance of the mother’s body signals the proximity to this original Other, which is threatening insofar as the distance from it is what allows the subject’s desire—and thus the subject’s very being—to exist. This horror is a response to the encounter with something unknown and unknowable, to the encounter with a void, with a limit of symbolization. Taking the form of horror of castration, the horror of the mother’s jouissance represents as absence the impossibility of knowledge. The impossibility of knowledge is shaped into an imaginary absence that translates the encounter with a limit of symbolization into a threat to the body, into the fear of a real injury or loss. Children’s sexual theories emerge as the “phallic form” in response to a lack, that is, a lack of symbolization. They emerge to rescue the subject from the Real of unthinkable jouissance, filling with desire the gap opened by coming up against the unknown. Oedipus, he who knows how to answer the riddle of the Sphinx, is ignorant of the truth of his own history. Among many other things, his tragedy marks a certain relation between knowledge and interdiction. Oedipus’s knowledge frees him and the Thebans from the horror of the Sphinx: It cuts off her devouring jouissance. If he solves the riddle with what I would call a “dream,” the dream of theory, it is only to be awakened by the risk he takes in his own desire to know. Having challenged the limit of knowledge, having crossed the threshold of interdiction and transgressed the secret of the jouissance of the mother’s body, Oedipus’s theory collapses in horror. His self-induced blindness is a plea for ignorance, the reestablishment, through castration, of the limit of symbolization. As a “surrogate” of desire the movement of thought is implicitly characterized by a search for a solution: The encounter with the Real, however, the surfacing of the enigma and the vertigo of the impossible resolution, opposes its messianic quality. The more theory provides responses to the unknown, the more these answers appear as objects by which desire halts the emergence of a lack. Being inexhaustible by definition, these theoretical objects offer a solution that favors and reawakens the movement of desire itself.

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Femininity and Theory As Piera Aulagnier Spairani (1967) has remarked, femininity is the name given by the subject of desire to the object when this object “cannot be named because it is lacking” (p. 69). In this respect femininity represents both the outcome of the law of desire and the encounter with a limit of signification. If in common parlance the word lacking acquires a negative connotation—with all the debasement and misrepresentation that traditionally accompanies its connection with the notion of femininity—this very fact reveals the symptomatic quality of the prejudice that it stages. This prejudice, however, is structurally rooted in thought’s messianic quality. Why, in fact, would lack have inevitable negative connotations, if it weren’t for the illusion of an existing wholeness? In being associated with the lack of the object, femininity is not the prerogative of a gender but the necessary correlative of the very nature of desire, which in order to exist, presupposes a missing object. As the various vicissitudes of the oedipal configuration show, the privileged object of desire is by definition subjected to a lack. Independent of gender, then, the assumption of one’s own femininity implies, along with the recognition of sexual difference, the acknowledgment of the loss of a mythical completeness, the assumption of that symbolic castration that, according to Freud, marks the culmination of the analytical treatment. In representing the law of desire, femininity points to the illusory quality of any position—let’s call it “phallic”—that presents itself as whole, as whole without loss. From this point of view, it is not surprising that theory meets with a difficulty in considering the question of femininity. If theory tends to find answers in order to oppose or to fill the lack—the lack of symbolization—emerging through the encounter with the Real (the real of jouissance, for instance, as well as the real of life and death, of the uncertainty of the human being in the universe), in considering the question of femininity theory comes up against its own limit, the point where, since something cannot be named because it is lacking, theory manifests its own structural incompleteness. From this perspective, one could say that the question of femininity appears to be fundamentally antitheoretical, or the fundamental point that makes a dialectical use of theory possible and desirable. We cannot take a single step forward without theorizing, as Freud (1937/1964a) puts it, since theory is the product of thought, as surrogate of desire, in its relation to the world, to the reality

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principle, since theory guides the human relation to the universe. The acknowledgment of the limit of theory doesn’t imply its negation—which would constitute a new mythology—but rather, a functional use of it, that is to say the assumption of the provisory, partial character of every system of thought as well as the abandonment of the illusion of finding a final, or exhaustive, vision of the world. By welcoming the advent of science (in Totem and Taboo and in his late writings), Freud meant to welcome the end of religion, the end of both a transcendent and a full explanatory conception of the world; he meant to welcome the advent of a relation to theory characterized by the acceptance of error, by the awareness of the division introduced by the unconscious in human subjectivity and the consequent relativity of every production of conscious thought. After half a century, we may wonder how much Freud’s belief in this sublime and humble definition of science (as well as his wish to place psychoanalysis among the sciences) wasn’t idealistic, another dream of theory. In fact we saw and see the discourse of science often becoming a new religion, with its project to master the world, to manipulate sex, death, and life, with its “fetishization” of the possibility to find adequate answers. We have seen and see the discourse of science, especially thanks to dizzy technological developments, often supporting the human illusion that symbolic castration (the inaccessibility of the object of desire, deterioration, death) can be avoided. With the assumption of femininity, men and women have the power to unmask the imposture of every discourse that claims to be absolute and universal, the power to relate to theory dialectically. Let us note, then, that it is precisely in their complaints about what they are lacking, that women are caught in a “male logic,” that they embrace a phallic discourse of wholeness, by which somebody exists who has what they don’t have. Demands and complaints about their “difference” (often expressed by a sense of inadequacy, physical or intellectual, a sense of inferiority, as well as by a need for revenge) define women’s so-called “penis envy”; an envy that in fact appears to be symmetrical with the male illusion of having the phallus. In complaints of this kind, women remain anchored to a phallic position and a phallic jouissance, often manifested by a neurotic symptomatology, unaware of the universe of the supplementary jouissance opened up by femininity. If, on the one hand, women have every right to demand political, economical, and ideological equality with men, putting a stop to endless, vicious discrimination, on the other hand, in doing so, they should avoid endorsing

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a phallic discourse. Sometimes they confuse the issue of their rightful political equality with the denial of sexual difference; denying the Real and supporting an imaginary discourse of wholeness, women support the phallic illusion of avoiding symbolic castration. This is what prevents some of them from fostering an alternative ethic and an alternative vision of the world. The fixation on complaint, which translates anatomical evidence into an imaginary inferiority or infirmity, deprives women of their privileged access to femininity. The very fact that girls share an anatomical similarity to their mothers, inscribes them in the oedipal configuration in a different way than boys, precipitating their confrontation with the loss of the primordial object and loss in general. Whereas men are prone to perpetuate an illusion of wholeness attributing to their penis the symbolic value of the phallus and imposing their phallic illusion as a remedy for their endless castration anxiety, women generally are faced with their being “a non-whole” early on. In this respect they are favored in unveiling the illusory premises of every discourse of wholeness. A woman’s imaginary proximity to the body of her mother facilitates a captivating relationship that grounds, together with a process of identification, a primordial jealousy. If this is the source of a structural love/hate relation that determines a perennial demand for love as well as a fundamental rivalry—subsequently displaced onto various objects—the very proximity with the mother’s body also makes for a special access to femininity. Being faced with their relation to their mother, to the imaginary Other, on the one hand, and with their wish for the phallus on the other, women are exposed to sexuality and jouissance in a way that is structurally double, that is fundamentally “non-whole.” Whereas, in supporting their illusion of having what they don’t have, men sustain a direct relation to the phallus, women relate to the phallus as something exterior, which could be received from the outside world. This very relation of exteriority toward the phallic symbol creates a sense of exteriority toward the symbolic in general (Chatel, 1989). Femininity indicates how a part of oneself can be experienced as escaping symbolization. It is precisely the jouissance that exists but cannot be spoken, that cannot be expressed through language, that Lacan (1975) calls “feminine jouissance.” In the constitution of a social and symbolic order the jouissance of the mother’s body—of this original Other— is radically interdicted. The term phallic designates the limited, partial jouissance of the organ that can be experienced due to such interdiction, due to the human dependence from the symbolic or-

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der, a jouissance that constantly shows the difference between its limited satisfaction and the fulfillment that aims to be achieved. Feminine jouissance is not the jouissance of the Other. It is not the interdicted jouissance one mythically expects to complement the phallic one, its necessary correlative for the longed for fulfillment. Feminine jouissance, on the contrary, is the jouissance of the Real of the body supplementing phallic jouissance: a “surplus” and not a complement, pointing beyond the phallus. Existing and escaping from symbolization, feminine jouissance expresses the limit of language and its beyond. We call it “feminine,” despite the fact that it can be experienced by both sexes, since it is only through the coming-into-being of one’s femininity, only from a position of “nonwholeness,” that its universe opens up. Its existence doesn’t eliminate the phallic jouissance, but supplements it. Femininity shares in and animates the project of the poet, this “bearer” of the historical truth, as Freud (1937/1964a) terms him, when in challenging the limit of language, he evokes through language what cannot be said.

REFERENCES Aulagnier-Spairani, P. (1967). La femininité. In Le désir et la perversion (pp. 55–89). Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Chatel, M. M. (1986). Le savoir, il s’invente. Littoral 19/20. Chatel, M. M. (1989, May). Is there a female specificity? Paper presented at Après-Coup Psychoanalytic Association, New York, NY. Freud, S. (1941). Uber infantile Sexualtheorien, Gesammelte Werke, Vol.VII. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag. (Original work published 1908) Freud, S. (1942). Die traumdeutung uber den traum. Gesammelte Werke, Vol. II/III. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag. (Original work published 1900) Freud, S. (1953). The interpretation of dreams. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 4 and 5). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1900) Freud, S. (1955a). Totem and taboo. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 13). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1913) Freud, S. (1955b). Beyond the pleasure principle. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 18, pp. 7–64). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1920)

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Freud, S. (1959a). On the sexual theories of children. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 9, pp. 209–226). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1908) Freud, S. (1959b). Family romances. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 9, pp. 237–241). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1909) Freud, S. (1961a). Some psychical consequences of the anatomical distinction between the sexes. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 19, pp. 248–258). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1925) Freud, S. (1961b). Female sexuality. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 21, pp. 223–243). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1931) Freud, S. (1964a). Analysis terminable and interminable. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 23, pp. 216–253). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1937) Freud, S. (1964b). Findings, ideas, problems. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 23, pp. 299–300). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1941) Freud, S. (1966). Project for a new scientific psychology. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 1, pp. 295–343). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1895) Lacan, J. (1966). Écrits. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Lacan, J. (1975). Le séminaire de Jacques Lacan. Book 22: Encore, 1972– 1973 (J.-A. Miller, Ed.). Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Lacan, J. (1986). Le séminaire de Jacques Lacan. Book VII: L’ethique de la psychoanalyse (J.-A. Miller, Ed.). Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Lacan, J. (1994). Le séminaire de Jacques Lacan. Book IV: La relation d’objet 1956–1957 (J.-A. Miller, Ed.). Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Lacan, J. (unpublished a). Le séminaire de Jacques Lacan. Book XXI: Les non-dupes errent. (Lectures given in Paris, 1973–1974). Lacan, J. (unpublished b). Le séminaire de Jacques Lacan. Book XXII: R.S.I. (Lectures given in Paris, 1974–1975). Ungaretti, G. (1914). Eterno. In L’Allegria. Milano: Mondadori, I Meridiani, 1969.

16 Why Do People Take Prozac? Anxiety, Symptom, and the Inhibition of Responsibility Patricia Gherovici

When we consider how in our present unpsychological epoch neuroses appear in a hypochondriacal guise, masked as organic diseases, we need not to be surprised to find the neuroses of olden times masquerading in a demonological shape. —Freud

T

his paper explores the wide appeal Prozac holds for middleclass Anglo-Saxon patients and contrasts the appeal of Prozac with a marked preference of Xanax among the Puerto Rican low-income population in the North Philadelphia Hispanic ghetto.

The author wishes to thank Michael Plastow for his helpful comments. This piece is dedicated to the memory of Henri Paul, who died behind the wheel.

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The stories of two patients, Emily and Margarita, raise serious questions about the promotion of mood regulation by a chemical intervention. Both treatments resemble the iatrogenic induction of addiction to illegal drugs in their structure. The extensive use of chemicals as an answer to social and psychological difficulties has been critically assessed from a number of perspectives. The following examines quite precisely the intersection between the social and psychological that is “covered over” by popular medical treatments to “psychiatric” problems. But rather than treating medication merely as a form of social control or as biological reductionism, this chapter will invoke the Lacanian idea of subjectivity as the pivot from which we can understand the more pernicious effects of contemporary psychiatric solutions such as Prozac. I use the Lacanian concept of subjectivity to contrast psychopharmacological treatment with the effort to promote meaningful change through a particular use of speech, according to a process that is a hallmark of psychoanalysis. Subjectivity transcends common assumptions about the significance of cultural and class differences for clinical practice. For Lacan, the word subject is significant in psychoanalysis because it implies not just an individual but a person who is subjected, that is, divided by his or her unconscious, coming into being through castration, and entering into a social universe ruled by desire and difference. My use of subjectivity also suggests that the race, class, and culture of patients must relate to their singularity and specificity as individual human beings.

“Listening to Prozac,” Once More Emily, a writer in her mid–thirties, came to see me because she was depressed. She had been in therapy before, but this time, she said, she was taking the medication prescribed by her family doctor, Prozac. Emily declared that the effect of Prozac on her depression had not been remarkable. Although she accepted her doctor’s prescription, she had not freed herself of the signs and symptoms of depression that made her begin this medication. She still considered herself depressed while stating that she “no longer cares,” “she is not concerned any more.” However, in spite of her recurring depression, she felt that she was more productive now, could concentrate on her work while being less severely critical of herself. Her frequent writer’s blocks had disappeared, and she paid less attention to what others thought of her.

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What was she taking the well-known antidepressant for? Was she perhaps trying to obtain what the famous Prozac advocate Peter Kramer (1993) claims is one of the major responses to the medication? Did Emily take Prozac for its purported qualities as a life enhancer, to “feel better than well?” Not precisely. The fact that Emily was “not feeling well but . . . no longer feeling it,” as she put it, seemed to be an attempt not at solving her current conflicts but a way to stop caring about conflict in her life. She said that she only came to see an analyst because a good friend of hers insisted upon it. In Talking Back to Prozac, Peter and Ginger Ross Breggin (1994) describe the reasons that Prozac became the most widely prescribed psychiatric drug. They believe that nearly everyone now knows a person who is taking Prozac, and they foresee a growing escalation in the consumption of Prozac. The Breggins contend that Prozac entered a new phase with the publication of Kramer’s (1993) bestseller, Listening to Prozac, becoming the drug that people who consider themselves normal take to enhance their lives. Although pharmaceutical companies have manufactured antidepressants for years, no psychotropic medication had yet reached the celebrity of Prozac, a drug that has been on TV, on the covers of major magazines, that can be discussed on talk shows and at cocktail parties. What is it that fuels its popularity? In 1996 Prozac’s sales in the United States totalled $1.73 billion (“Use of Antidepression Medicine for Youngsters has soared,” 1997). This burgeoning market for antidepressants puts in question the claim that drugs are the cheap alternative to the costly conventional psychotherapies. One could argue that the promotion of drugs such as Prozac has given rise to a legal drug culture. A recent cover of Newsweek (February 7, 1994) said: “Shy? Forgetful? Anxious? Fearful? Obsessed? How Science Will Let You Change Your Personality With a Pill.” The blind belief that Prozac is the only answer to depression, conceived of only as a chemical imbalance, suggests an ideology that would presuppose that biology is destiny. If you take the famous pill, you can erase any kind of conflict, but what are we finally medicating, shyness, loss of memory or anxiety and fear? Anxiety and fear of what? The wide use of Prozac in middle-class America is significant for at least two reasons: Prozac is taken by those considered otherwise normal, and as Kramer (1993) claims, Prozac diminishes sensitivity. This decrease in patients’ sensitivity seems to be precisely what Emily describes as “not feeling well but no longer feeling it.” When sensitivity decreases, the sense contained in a symptom also does. No sense or meaning can be produced when the

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sensation that something is wrong has been numbed. Freud, for instance, would always warn psychoanalysts against the temptation of getting rid too rapidly of the symptoms, before they could start talking. Moreover, given Prozac’s appeal to so-called normal individuals, one might surmise that everyone and everybody, it seems, wants to erase symptoms before they have a chance to talk. By suppressing rather than resolving symptoms we are simply medicating the human condition. Is this perhaps a way of preventing us from claiming our full humanity as free and responsible beings? My contention is that Prozac promises anesthesia—this is a loss of awareness or sensation, where depression seems to demand privation and renunciation. And because of its fame and popularity, I will explore the Prozac phenomenon as a metaphor allowing us to understand problems, such as the crisis in collective and personal responsibility, whose implications affect the American society at large.

A Fundamental Lack Prozac is fundamentally a medication for depression. Since what we find at the core of any depression is loss, the failure to be able to lose betrays a failure to assume castration, to assume lack. In Mourning and Melancholia, Freud (1917/1957) addresses the difference between melancholia and mourning. Since profound mourning may bring about the same pain as melancholia, we can assume that melancholia is also a reaction to the loss of a loved object. Mourning is a direct response to an identifiable loss of a loved person, or the loss of some abstraction such as an ideal, liberty, fatherland, and so on, which may have taken the place of a loved one, whereas melancholia seems to be a state of grief that develops into a morbid condition. Whether the reaction is pathological or normal, loss has such an important effect because any lost object (that could have existed or not in reality) functions ultimately as a representation of the primal lack that, according to Lacan, constitutes subjectivity. Although he remains close to Freud, Lacan starts from the conviction that subjectivity is not given but acquired. When a child is born, the mother will initially experience him or her as a part of herself, an extension of her body: The child will be “mom’s little thing.” For the child, the mother will not be perceived as a separate being, but as a part of the child itself. The baby is not initially able to establish any difference between her own mouth and the breast that is feeding her. How could then these two (mother and child)

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that seem to constitute one become discrete entities? This is a critical juncture in the genesis of subjectivity, as the outcome of this process of differentiation will form a precise kind of person according to a structure that could be closer to neurosis, or to perversion, or to psychosis. What element would Lacan say is needed for this separation between the two to come about? It is the term he calls the phallus. Lacan asserts that Freud’s castration theory refers to a third term that intervenes in the relation between the mother and the child and is crucial in the process of subjective signification. This third term, the phallus, becomes the object representing what is not there and will never be there, it represents absence. Neither the mother nor the child, nor anyone for that matter can be or have it. Both mother and child have to renounce the phallus. The mother may be fulfilled by the pleasures that the child provides, yet the child will not be “all” for her; the m/Other will want to watch TV, go for a walk alone, see friends, continue with her work, make love with her lover, etc. The child is not only faced with the challenge of accepting an anatomical contingent fact (having or not having a penis) but above all with the inevitable reality of lack (which causes desire). Paradoxically, when there is no lack, one experiences emptiness, fear, or death. In Lacanian ethics lack is crucial. It is lack that allows for the function of language; it is the absence of the mother that allows the child to call her. At the same time, the very reliance on language changes the logic of the subject. Since tender childhood, when the child starts to use language to ask for things, another register is entered and this new life of symbolic communication brings about a loss. If the child wants to be hugged by mom, the use of speech (asking for it) transforms everything. Words and the requested hug are not identical. The mother may offer her a bottle instead of a kiss, or the child may be asking for something else when asking for a hug (like demanding more love from the mother). The fact that she is speaking introduces a loss, since the object can be evoked in its absence and since the child uses words in order to address someone else. Nature succumbs to culture in this passage through language, and every child becomes a subject by virtue of this transition. Such a lack has a paradoxical function: on the one hand it makes the subject incomplete, and can become the kernel of a neurosis, whereas, on the other hand, lack makes subjectivity possible. Our creativity, capacity to desire, humor and depression, culture and its inevitable discontents, conflicts and the permanent search for their resolution make our existence human. Lacan

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proposes an ethics of psychoanalysis in which the cure is directed precisely in light of this idea that subjectivity is constructed around lack.

Castration Anxiety Freud’s followers, in spite of various differences, agree on the priority of the Castration Complex, a complex that hinges upon lack and the progressive constitution of subjectivity. Children evolve infantile sexual theories that make them believe that everything comes equipped with a phallus, their mothers as well. When the phallus is seen not as an imaginary completion but as a signifier of lack, it also functions as the object of what the child supposes is the mother’s desire. Trying to satisfy and therefore become her object of desire, the child may develop into the child the mother wishes her to be, becoming, consequently, the shy or sweet or sick child, or the double of someone else, and so on. This fantasy of being all for the mother is broken by the intervention of the father (or whatever represents this third party) who intervenes by saying NO to both child and mother and positing the phallus as something forever lost, absent, and missing. In the resolution of the Oedipus Complex the phallus becomes therefore a signification of something lost and forever out of reach that no one has or is. Fundamentally, then, the Castration Complex is structured by the psychic consequences of the absence of the maternal phallus. Lacan contends that the neurotic subject will try to become the maternal phallus by incarnating what the mother desires. In Lacanian terms, neurotics could be defined as those who do not completely renounce the desire of becoming the maternal phallus. If loss lies at the heart of depression, can we say that the treatment of depression achieves a suppression of loss? Is the current American fascination with Prozac a way to eclipse lack? I will venture to say that Prozac functions like a universal supplement that would alleviate the subject’s difficulties in accepting loss, insofar as loss relates to the fundamental lack and castration anxiety. In this sense, this attempt is not different from other means of attempting to fill the gap in an imaginary way, through food, alcohol, cigarettes, cocaine, enemas, relationships. When lack is not encountered in its function as prohibition, it cannot function in the creation of desire as that which opens new vistas and possibilities. Consequently, lack is only experienced in its dimension of privation and never as an access to desire.

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Inhibition and Anxiety The so-called “cosmetic psychopharmacology” inaugurated by Prozac (Kramer, 1993) promises a makeover, a cosmetic fix that transforms the pain of depression into a permanent state of suspension where the depression is “touched up” but never really resolved. Zetzel (1970) stated that the capacity for emotional growth is grounded in the ability to bear anxiety and depression. Why does our culture now expect to suppress this possibility of growth? In a culture pressured by the demand for constant productivity, the message promised in Prozac’s capsule is compelling. Yet, in its “desensitization,” Prozac’s secondary effects are agitation, panic, and anxiety (Breggin & Breggin, 1994, p. 153). The side effects of Prozac are significant because they help us understand why this drug is so pervasive in one American subculture and not in another. When I worked with disenfranchised inner-city Hispanic Americans,1 I discovered that those patients did not take Prozac as often as the middle-class American patients that I treat in private practice. Prozac is never very popular in the barrio, even though medication in other forms is in great demand. Hispanic patients often wanted the pastilla china (peach colored pill), the 0.5 mg 110’s unit dose of Xanax. Alprazolam or Xanax, an agent of the benzodiazepine class, indicated for the management of anxiety, is also sold as a street drug, and traded illegally on barrio corners. The clinic’s Hispanic patients would often get upset if the psychiatrist suggested psychotherapy and refused to prescribe Xanax. (In my experience, the psychiatrists I worked with were quite cautious when prescribing Xanax, possibly trying to avoid the physical dependence that the drug may produce.) These patients readily agreed to therapy but were adamant in their demand for Xanax. They wanted fast relief for the symptoms of anxiety. I find this difference in medication preferences extremely revealing. Is it due to cultural overdetermination or is there some biochemical reason at stake? Why would English-speaking Americans take Prozac for depression while their Hispanic American counterparts complain about anxiety and prefer Xanax? What role do class, race, and language play in the presenting symptoms of patients? How universal can the effects of psychiatric drugs be, if we see such clear-cut differences within two ethnic groups of American citizens? Prozac has often been described in the media as the “National Prescription Drug.” But many Hispanic Americans—whose preferences may not be taken into account by the news media as much

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as preferences of mainstream Prozac takers—reject this national symbol and adopt Xanax instead. Why? It may have something to do with certain socioeconomic elements that are commonly disregarded in discussions of this topic. The population I treated in the North Philadelphia ghetto lives below the poverty level. A study of this group (which is mainly of Puerto Rican origin) found that they were worse off than the majority of blacks or whites or even other Hispanics (Ericksen, Bartelt, Feeney, Foeman, Grasmuck, Martella, Rickle, Spencer, & Webb, 1986). Fifty-four percent of the females and 48 percent of the males live in poverty, and there is little likelihood that they can ever become part of the productive segment of the U.S. population (Ericksen et al., 1986). For these patients, who have survived three generations of unemployment, conflict does not manifest as an impairment in the ability to concentrate at work. They have no paid job to return to. In thinking of this population, the “Pro” of Pro-zac stands out: Prozac is the pill of the “Pro”; it helps professionals return to the work force, medicating loss so that the need for mourning is suppressed and production is not interrupted. Copjec (1994) focused on the demand that today’s society makes for a return, for a gain. This logic rejects the idea “that something might be permanently lost, utterly irretrievable for all time” (p. vii). This foundational idea of loss, Copjec says, “makes psychoanalysis such anathema within capitalism” (p. viii). In contrast to these hegemonic ideals, the patients in inner-city Philadelphia reside at the margin of capitalist production. This socalled Hispanic community lives within the closed frontiers of the ghetto. It is a community that faces all the expected challenges of poverty, urban violence, pressures to acculturate, the constraints of race and class, the difficulties of language barriers, segregation, and marginalization. They come to the clinics haunted by anxiety and panic attacks. To understand the conundrum of this divergence between the depression of the middle-class and the anxiety of this poorer Hispanic community, I use Lacan and Freud. Lacan (1962–1963) formulated an algebraic matrix derived from Freud’s (1926/1959a) triad of “Inhibition, Symptom and Anxiety.” Freud’s point of departure is the analysis of two common ways of describing pathological phenomena: inhibition and symptom. Freud conceives of inhibition as a restriction of a normal function. Freud illustrates the concept of inhibition with examples among which we find inhibition of the working capacities. The major signs include decrease in the will to

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work, defective performances or reactive symptoms, such as fatigue, vertigo, nausea, which force the individual to stop working. A symptom, on the other hand, is a sign of a pathological process. Middle-class Americans who use Prozac correspond to Freud’s concept of inhibition; destitute Hispanics who use Xanax correspond to anxiety. We reserve the term symptom for describing a phenomenon of speech, since symptoms appear as such in psychoanalysis mainly through the speech of the analysand.

The Discreet Charm of Prozac The dimension of the other is crucial in understanding the subjective changes that come from taking Prozac. Kramer (1993) observes that Prozac has spectacular transformative power over patients’ sense of their selves. Paradoxically, they report on the one hand that they feel truly like “themselves” while admitting, on the other hand, that they no longer feel truly “themselves.” The patients who take Prozac feel like another person. My thesis is that Prozac can modify the sense of self because it anesthetizes the dialectic egoego ideal. Those who take it seem not to experience the usual tensions, vacillations, and ups and downs that characterize the sense of self (Freud’s Selbstgefuehl). Kramer (1993) admits that Prozac makes patients develop the interpersonal style that our culture favors, catapulting people into a manufactured mode of personality, a supposedly self-sufficient subject, subjected to the prevailing rules of the social/sexual/economical marketing complex. There is one serious problem, however: it is a subject without a past, without the conflicts and possibilities generated by history (p. xv). Prozac’s effects are very far reaching—shaping the subject’s individuality as if it was made up of a bundle of correctable flaws, erasing difference according to the prevailing mandates of the market. Rather than a chemical mood regulation, psychoanalysis as a system of cure aims at revealing the unconscious desire concealed in symptoms. Lacan conceives of the symptom as a word literally trapped in the body. Psychoanalysis as a talk therapy works with speech, defining language on the one hand as the site of possible truth and liberty, and on the other hand, as that which reveals the split produced by the unconscious. To truly relieve the pain and resolve the symptom, the patient needs to open up to the discourse of the unconscious.

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Let us return to Emily. Her depression became a symptom when she started talking about it. Her decision to see me articulated a question. In spite of the fact that the medication was taming the symptom she was still suffering and wanted to understand why. During our initial appointment, I asked Emily why she came to see me, and how I could help her. She answered that something was wrong with her and she wanted to find out what it was. That wish was already an excellent point of departure. It transformed her depression from being a dysfunction that only had to be suppressed into a signifying symptom that could be cured. Emily mentioned that she had taken a different antidepressant (Tofranil) before Prozac but stopped because it caused gastric problems. “I was taking nothing,” she explained, “I was certain I needed to take something. I feel very empty inside, it is so pathetic. I can’t feel so empty.” Emily was choking with “nothing” and “emptiness.” What was her depression expressing?

Anxiety Here Lacan’s elaboration on Freud’s conceptualization of anxiety is helpful. The experience of anxiety is related to the idea of fear, although fear has an object whereas anxiety has not. In his seminar Lacan (1962–1963) treats anxiety as Freud did: anxiety is a signal of a “vital danger.” However, in regard to whether this danger has a real object Lacan (1962–1963) departed from Freud, insisting that anxiety is not without an object. That is, according to Lacan anxiety is essentially anxiety about something, which, if we could define it precisely, would help us understand the trilogy of Prozac/ Inhibition, Anxiety/Xanax, and Symptom/Speech. For Lacan, anxiety is not the signal of the fear of a lack, as Freud suggested (e.g., anxiety produced by birth), but the fear of the lack of a lack. It is not nostalgia for the maternal womb that engenders anxiety but the fear of reentering it. Similarly, what provokes anxiety is not the alternation of the presence and absence of the mother. Children usually like to reenact in play this presence-absence because the possibility of absence gives presence its security (Lacan, 1981). The most anxiety-provoking situation is a mother who is never absent. When there is no possibility of lack— as with a mother who is always there, feeding the child, changing diapers, always present, never allowing any empty space—the mother’s enjoyment of the child does not seem to give any space for the child to want or demand anything.

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The treatment of a patient from North Philadelphia will illustrate the Lacanian perspective on lack. Margarita suffered intense anxiety and would often take Xanax. Her life had been marked by very severe traumas. When she started her treatment she had just separated from a very violent and abusive husband. Most recently her eldest son was killed under horrid circumstances while paying a visit to Margarita’s mother. The haunting killing of Margarita’s son, however, changed things radically between her and her mother. This is a very complex case, in which there was abundant tragedy, but the brutal physical violence she experienced at the hands of her husband is less central to our understanding of this life than the kidnapping and assassination of her son. The latter functioned as a fragile inscription of lack that allowed her and her mother to have a relationship, albeit a precarious one. Margarita had a lot of difficulties mourning her son (as if she needed to maintain him as a permanent loss, never being able to go beyond what has often been described as the initial reactions in the process of mourning). For her part, Margarita’s mother was touched by the loss of her grandchild in a strange way: it allowed her for the first time to relate to her daughter from whom she had been estranged. The grandmother took center stage, appearing on TV to discuss this highly publicized crime, and acted as if she were the mother of the murdered boy. She did not speak of losing a grandson, only of a “lost child.” Margarita’s mother did not seem to know what was missing, her grandson or her own daughter. This threatened to erase Margarita from the transaction—losing not only a child but herself as the mother of that child—although she finally became her mother’s daughter when she was somehow identified in relation to the lost/dead boy/son.2 The horrific killing of the child, this highly traumatic death, became somehow the signifier of lack that allowed mother and daughter to interact in the symbolic. The real trauma, the unspeakable death of the child, inscribed a void between the two women. Before the loss of her son, it was as if nothing was missing. Anxiety served to constitute the missing void. As Lacan (1962– 1963) notes, “[A]nxiety appearing there about everything which manifests itself at this place, to confuse us, as I might say, as regards the structuring function of this void” (December 12, 1962). Anorexia confirms the necessity of a void for the emergence of desire. In anorexia there is an appetite for “nothing.” “Nothing” is eaten. Lack is taken as an object. This extreme case illustrates the necessity of lack to start desire, and the fact that desire may work against nature. In anorexia, the biological need is forgotten in a

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dramatic way. However, the distortion of the need that desire introduces is evidenced every time we open a menu in a restaurant: our hunger is no longer simply hunger. It has to be transformed into something else that is overdetermined by culture, desire, etc. For instance, we may be starving, but if our religion proscribes it, we will not eat meat. Desire takes on what has been bereft in the dimension of need until the object of need is lost and then replaced by the object that causes desire.

That Obscure Object of Desire Through Freud’s elaboration on mourning we can see that the process of mourning has to do with an identification with the lost object. Whereas the object of the need can be lost, the object of desire is mythical, it never existed as an actual object and yet has to be “lost” to inscribe the phallus as signifier of lack. Lacan (1962– 1963) adds that we mourn people of whom we can say, “I was his lack.” More specifically, we mourn people vis-à-vis whom we do not know whether we fulfill this function of being at the place of their lack (January 30, 1963). What we give in love is essentially what we do not have, and when what we do not have is returned to us, this gift reveals how much we have failed the person in representing his or her lack. Emily said she was depressed: Was she then in a position of mourning or in one of melancholia? Which object had she lost? Emily’s mother died of breast cancer when she was forty-three years old and Emily was just nine years old. With that precedent, Emily feared that she would not live beyond the age of forty. There was a strong identification with her mother, who wanted Emily to be a writer—her mother had been a frustrated writer and named Emily after a celebrated poet. Emily was taking Prozac because this alone permitted her to overcome the difficulties she faced when writing. Her working inhibition hinged around not being able to fulfill some aspect of her mother’s desire. Was Emily positioned as the imaginary phallus of her mother? Was Emily completely done with mourning her mother? Emily took an important and liberating step by choosing speech—a speech that implicated her. Before, there had only been the silence of the medication that excluded her, as a subject, from her symptom. Emily came to analysis in order to begin the mourning she had been postponing for a long time. When she put words where before there had only been the unsurpassable wall of her

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mother’s death, Emily saw her depression as the materialization of an alienation that might be resolved through an analytic cure. In mourning, Freud says, one is identified with the lost object and experiences devaluation because that object had been the unconscious support of castration. Lacan calls this object “objet petit a” (object little a). This object is an object constituted as a remainder in the relationship of the subject to the Other (M/Other).3 The object little a proposes that limit and excess coincide. The object little a is on the one hand an elusive object that avoids symbolization, a leftover, an object that embodies fundamental, constitutive lack and thus causes desire. Prozac seems to erase loss and contradiction by making those who take it desensitized to conflict. Rather than using conflict for some constructive purpose, that is, for transformation and development, conflict is suppressed. As Freud teaches us, conflict can create neurosis on the one hand, but it also makes it possible for us to be human subjects. Subjectivity emerges in this surplus engendered through conflict and impossibility. Hispanic Americans in their role as a minority may well be positioned as surplus subjects, revealing through their dire realities the underlying structure of exploitation and alienation. Their poverty and disenfranchisement calls up the idea of lack, although their symptom of anxiety suggests a closeness to the object little a. Anxiety is the sign of the appearance of the object little a, which is defined as the object that relates desire and anxiety. This object is a chimerical object that causes desire. It is supposed retroactively as the cause of desire whereas in fact it materializes the void of desire and its constitutional lack. Margarita’s consumption of Xanax had a “hypnotic” effect. “I feel good when I take it,” she would say. “It calms me down; it makes me sleep.” Margarita would be able to defer the confrontation with her guilt and collapse in a trance-like sleep. She would not have been able to work, as would normally have been the case had she taken Prozac. Whereas Prozac works at the articulation between the ego ideal and the ego, Xanax brackets the ego completely and brings about an instant regression that corresponds to blissful oblivion. The problem was that Margarita could not forget the horror of her son’s death. With time, the effect of Xanax was less and less effective, forcing her to increase the dose by “borrowing” pills from friends. When she started therapy, the seemingly endless escalation of intake seemed to halt. Then she called me on the phone just when she was about to take the medication, choosing to speak rather than silencing her pain.

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To Be the Same or Not to Be The examples of patients who ask for Prozac and those who demand Xanax may correspond to different ways of facing desire. Individuals experience desire, a very abstract concept in the theory of psychoanalysis, through various dilemmas and burning issues. The enigmatic desire of the mother may create anxiety for babies, insofar as the baby faces the question: What am I for the Other? The baby responds to this mystery by identifying with some lost object connected with the mother (Lacan gives a limited list that includes the breast, feces, the gaze, and the voice). The model of the lost object is the placenta, emblematic of a body part that belongs neither to the mother’s body nor to the child’s, a part from which one must separate in order to exist. The four objects mentioned before incorporate loss in a similar manner (for instance, the breast is part of the baby when the baby is fed, yet it also belongs to the mother from whom the baby has to be weaned, etc.). We may wonder what happens when this question, What does the Other want? operates in a wider social reality, which leads me back to the Hispanics who are placed by the Other—represented by mainstream American culture—in a marginalized position. This marginalization has the effect of lumping people together in an amorphous mass from which difference is erased. I could even go as far as to say that the main disease of “normal” mainstream Americans is their atomized state, whereas the main disease of the marginalized sector of the population is enforced massification. It seems, therefore, that depression would be caused by being too much of an isolated individual unit, wherein there is insufficient social mediation for the transformations of desire. Anxiety sends back the collective symptom to the social body (see Gherovici, 1997, for a more extensive analysis of links between the Hispanic notion of La Raza and the Freudian concept of masses.) Hispanics are not pressured by depression the way they are by anxiety. Why are they anxious? Because everyday life in the ghetto implies a level of struggle for survival that overwhelms our ordinary capacity for representation. The absence of a socially acceptable verbalization for traumatic experiences that become “normal” by force of repetition inevitably generates anxiety. The anxiety functions as a remainder and reminder of the unspeakable. Even their most particular forms of expression, such as ghetto looks, salsa, and merengue, have now become fashionable and mainstream. Therefore, subjectivity cannot transform itself into individual speech but is reduced to subjection.

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The clinical implications of the use of Prozac, as exemplified by Emily, or of Xanax, in Margarita’s case, are that these drugs function as a supplement that prevents symptomatic formations from emerging as interpretable symptoms. Symptoms that do not function within transference remain at the level of acting out and are thus deprived of signifying value. What about the ethical repercussions of chemical manipulations? For instance, if your dear mother dies in a tragic accident, and if by way of an effective pill you can feel fine and happy as if this event had never occurred, aren’t you becoming bland and heartless? We are witnessing a situation in which our society tends to simply numb rather than address and resolve pain. The current fascination with cosmetic psychopharmacology is an indicator of a disquieting trend: the tendency to erase subjective responsibility. The symptom, the third element in Freud’s trilogy, understood in a Lacanian perspective becomes a signifying factor: It speaks. Like any other patient, Emily and Margarita came to see an analyst thinking the analyst would know something about why they suffered. However, this does not mean that the analyst knows in fact. Their supposing that the analyst knows produces the transference that allows analytic work to start. As we have already seen, transference is what allows an inhibition or anxiety to become a symptom. Transforming suffering into speech, a body can be freed of the shackles of pain by metaphorizing the pain through a word that will name it. The only gateway to a cure is speech, listening to the unconscious knowledge contained in symptoms rather than “listening” to a pill. Speaking in psychoanalysis can change persons to the extent that the analyst can sustain the illusion of being the object cause of desire—and there are periods of time when the analyst actually is this object petit a. In the end of an analysis, the analyst will precisely fulfill the fate of any object that stands for a, that is, as a remainder or a leftover, the analyst will be discarded. This discarding, which is to say the completion of the cure, takes place when the word trapped in bodily pain is freed. Both Margarita and Emily overcame their resistance to speech by understanding that medication was simply postponing the resolution of their problems. They made good use of transference and talked their way to a cure. To believe that one conquers any conflict by simply numbing it implies a major renunciation. Without our capacity for feeling sad, wrong, or unhappy, we may be able to keep up with our busy lives, but, in the end, be less responsible, less conflictual, and thus less human.

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1. The definition “Hispanic” is highly problematic. Hispanics are not simply those who speak Spanish. “Hispanic” seems to be a construct collapsing categories of race, language, and class. 2. The grandmother’s own lack was missing because she was in fact not the mother but the grandmother of the lost child. Was Margarita’s mother expecting Margarita to be a son, a son who had been offered to her after she had appropriated the dead son? Only when Margarita’s child was killed could she be recognized by the mother. And yet this child initially appeared to function only as a plug in the void, a stopper to prevent Margarita from emptying herself facing her mother. 3. For the child, the mother embodies the Other who desires the phallus.

REFERENCES Breggin, P., & Breggin, G. R. (1994). Talking back to Prozac. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Copjec, J. (1994). Supposing the subject. New York: Verso. Eriksen, E., Bartelt, D., Feeney, P., Foeman, G., Grasmuck, S., Martella, M., Rickle, W., Spencer, R., & Webb, D. (1986). The state of Puerto Rican Philadelphia: Research on Philadelphia and the greater Delaware Valley Region. Philadelphia: Institute for Public Policy Studies, Temple University. Freud, S. (1957). Mourning and melancholia. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 14, pp. 243–258). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1917) Freud, S. (1959a). Inhibitions, symptoms, and anxiety. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 20, pp. 77–156). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1926) Freud, S. (1959b). The neurosis of demoniacal possession in the seventeenth century. In E. Jones (Ed.) & J. Riviere (Trans.), The collected papers of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 4, pp. 436–472). New York: Basic Books. (Original work published 1923) Gherovici, P. (1996). “The Puerto Rican syndrome.” Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, 1, 2.

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Gherovici, P. (1997). “The Hispanic La Raza: Psychoanalysis and Losing (The) Race.” Clinical studies: International journal of psychoanalysis, 3, 1. Kramer, P. D. (1993). Listening to Prozac. New York: Viking. Lacan, J. (1962–1963). The seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X: Anxiety 1962–1963. Unpublished version. Lacan, J. (1981). The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis (J.-A. Miller, Ed., A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1973). Showalter, E. (1997). Hystories: Hysterical epidemics and modern culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Shy? forgetful? anxious? fearful? obsessed? How science will let you change your personality with a pill. (1994, February 7). Newsweek Magazine, Cover. Use of antidepression medicine for youngsters has soared. (1997, August 10). New York Times, p. 1A. Zetzel, E. (1970). The capacity for emotional growth. New York: International Universities Press. £i¶ek, S. (1989). The sublime object of ideology. New York: Verso.

17 Lacan’s Social Psychoanalysis Religion and Community in a Pluralistic Society David S. Caudill

Groups, no less than individuals, in fact more so, are composed of different, competing, clashing voices, perspectives, and narratives. Since there is no unitary group perspective, but . . . [a] construction of group identity, the perspectives of those outside a group may very well be part of the narrative of that group about its own identity. Intergroup dialogue very often takes the form of each group articulating the perspective it has of the other for itself, and groups contest these perspectives of each other, which very often harbor prejudice, denigrations and/or phantasmagoric idealizations of each other. —Seyla Benhabib

A

nalysts thrive, intellectually and economically, on people who want to work through their internal conflicts, misunderstood relationships, identity crises, and hidden (or silently harbored) fantasies. If Seyla Benhabib is right, groups can 297

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suffer the same way that individuals needing therapy do—that is, both within themselves and with others. So groups, too, “no less than individuals,” can be appropriate subjects of psychoanalysis.1 In this chapter, it is my intention to focus on the issues of intergroup conflict and identity. More specifically, I argue for the relevance of Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory for understanding the current controversy over the place of religion in American law and politics. Psychology, too, has begun to address such questions of morality, value, and group identity. Once out of the comfortable confines of their scientism and thus made aware of the cultural embeddedness of many of their discipline’s most cherished concepts (e.g., individualism), psychologists must come to grips with the theoretical, moral, and epistemological challenges that necessarily define the possibilities of their theories of human nature (e.g., Richardson, 1998; Martin & Thompson, 1997). Such debates now concern the viability of the liberal notion of the subject and the place of values and faith in the founding of communities. The following directly enters into these most pressing questions of subjectivity and community. Whether entire societies or cultures are appropriate subjects of psychoanalysis is another, old, question (Freud, 1927/1961) and involves some difficulties I hope to avoid or at least bracket.2 The neoMarxian tradition of ideology has, for decades, run up against the charge that no shared way of thinking exists in any society, so that even if a ruling ideology is identified, questions persist as to who believes it (Thompson, 1984, pp. 32–34). On the other hand, groups within a society make easier targets for psychoanalysis. That is not to say that all groups are alike in their structure and functions. Rather, they constitute subcultures with readily identifiable features, whether due to self-selection, shared beliefs, or a common situation. Within the psychoanalytic establishment, Bruno Bettelheim, who was clearly interested in analyzing entire cultures and even cross-cultural phenomena (such as prejudice and aggression), studied and wrote about GIs returning from World War I, the kibbutz, Nazi concentration camps, and American education (Szajnberg, 1994). The distinction between cultural and group psychoanalysis is not neatly drawn, but might be illustrated by contrasting Fromm’s (1969) psychoanalytic social theory with Aichhorn’s (1935) study of street delinquents. Reich’s (1970) work on fascism is harder to classify since it might be viewed either as an analysis of German culture during the Third Reich or as identifying a group phenomenon within German culture (i.e., Nazi ideology cannot have cap-

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tured those who just went along or those who resisted). Outside the clinical tradition, Talcott Parsons (1949) hoped to appropriate psychoanalytic insights for sociology; significantly, in Essays In Sociological Theory his exemplar was American youth. Psychoanalysis gave Parsons the principal clues for understanding that group’s desire for independence from adult authority, its compulsive conformity among peers, and its romanticism. Moreover, Parsons did not believe that such a mass social phenomenon was simply part of growing up (i.e., a physiologically based matter), but that it was linked closely to American social structures. As to Lacan, because of his attention to language as an unavoidable structuring force in individuals, much of his work can be seen as an analysis of culture as a whole. Because Lacan was primarily a clinician, some effort is required to see the implications of his work for social theory and for my own focus in this essay on groups in political and legal dialogue. Nevertheless, Lacan’s theoretical framework suggests that others and their discourse are crucial for self-construction, which takes place primarily by establishing a social identity. In fact, Benhabib’s (1994) description of groups in the excerpt above is a fairly accurate summary, probably unintended, of Lacan’s notion of the human subject—“composed of different, competing . . . narratives,” and constructed out of the perspectives of others as those perspectives are articulated, denigrated, misrecognized, and/or idealized (p. 188). As often noted, the Lacanian subject is a subject or slave of language where he or she is articulated, and of others from whom he or she obtains a fictional image of a unified, perhaps rational and autonomous, self. While this account of the subject fading (or disappearing) into language and relationships seems to coincide with the postmodern turn toward cultural determinism and moral relativism, Lacan also emphasizes both the particularity of the subject in, and the ethical responsibility of the subject for, his or her own unique desires and his or her own relation to loss (or “lack”). Thus, Lacanian theory is attractive to contemporary scholars in literary theory, critical psychology, and cultural studies who seek a basis for the critique of anything, once rationality is revealed as a social construction. For example, Marshall Alcorn (1994) notes that while some statements by Lacan would suggest that the subject is “simply a linguistic construct, an illusion produced by language effects,” the subject only “disappears in the sense that a particular component,” the ego, “can no longer aspire to control self-components and functions” (p. 28). Thus, while the subject is determined by historical,

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social, and linguistic forces, each subject also “appropriates discourse and expresses discourse in its own unique way” (p. 32). By rough analogy to world weather conditions, Global patterns of discourse reflect the shared libidinal styles of large numbers of speakers loosely united as a community by the discourse that structures their identities. Within each singular human subject, however, discourse can become uniquely configured, produced and repetitively expressed by local conditions . . . that are particular to each individual subject. [Opportunities for] resistance and conflict between local . . . and global discourse are frequent and ongoing. (pp. 31–32) In psychoanalytic theory, of course, the subject is also in conflict with itself. The particularity of the subject, restored by Lacan in the face of postmodern cultural determinism, is immediately qualified by the particularity of unconscious desires, fears, fantasies, and even language. This is the flip side (the pejorative sense) of resistance: we resist, by repression and denial and by fictional explanations, coming to terms with uncomfortable “realities” about ourselves. If there existed a subject-in-control, who could simply become conscious of such matters, if the weakened ego could simply become strengthened, the unconscious would be less problematic. But for Lacan, the unconscious is not another source (alongside culture and language) of determinism. The unconscious is not, that is, merely the seat of our personal instincts or drives. Rather, the unconscious is where culture and language, where the symbolic and imaginary orders, capture the subject most effectively, because the effects of others and of language are typically hidden. That is why the distinction between clinical analysis and social theory breaks down in Lacanian theory. Traditionally, in psychoanalytic methodology, the focus is on influential, unconscious structures, while in political theory the focus is usually on conscious associations. Using Lacan, my intention is to combine those tendencies by seeking a psychoanalytic account of certain political choices. I offer my commentary on Lacan as an invitation to consider his views in relation to contemporary debates in law and politics. As to Lacan and psychoanalysis, Lacan (1981/1993) forty years ago correctly observed that analytic literature contains “flagrant and permanent contradictions that are brought into play whenever basic concepts [of psychoanalysis] arise” (p. 29). Nowadays, for example,

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when a fundamental Freudian notion, such as the Oedipus complex, is discussed by expert analysts, disagreements arise over both its meaning and its fundamental character (Sacks, 1985), such that one should expect no more (but no less) disciplinary unity under the term psychoanalysis than one expects under the terms philosophy or psychology. Significant overlaps exist between Lacanian theory and many of the post-Freudian schools of psychoanalysis. No attempt is here made to identify such common ground, nor do I claim complete originality on the part of Lacan for the analytic conceptions identified as Lacanian.

Lacan: Beginning with the Global Patterns, toward Finding the Kittens

Everything that in human behavior belongs to the psychological order is subject to such profound anomalies and constantly presents such obvious paradoxes that the problem arises of knowing what needs to be introduced in order for a cat to find its kittens. (Lacan, 1993, p. 8)

There are two senses in which Lacan makes global statements. The first and most obvious are his references to language systems and other culture-wide phenomena, including sexual identities, religious traditions, and the scientific establishment. The second sense is not unrelated, but must be distinguished because it has more to do with individual clinical phenomena, namely the psychological structures that recur in all subjects. That is, even while Lacan (1981/ 1993) stresses the particularity of the subject in his or her desires, the structuring of the subject in discourse “is also absolutely heartbreakingly generic, human all too human” (p. 54). Given the above, Lacan’s (1981/1993) seminar on the psychoses is interesting not only because of his challenge to revisit the famous Schreber case and to rethink the category of psychosis as a fundamental failure in the operation of the symbolic order,3 but also because of his description of normalcy that necessarily accompanies such an account.4 Early in the seminar he defines psychology as “the whole of the biological individual’s behavior in relation to his natural environment,” and the seminar’s focus on psychosis does not seem to limit the scope of Lacan’s observations about that

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whole (p. 7). For example, he summarizes his abstract and foundational theory of the three orders of human existence: the symbolic, “beyond all understanding, which all understanding is inserted into, and which [disrupts] human and intrahuman relationships” (p. 8); the imaginary, the world of images that captivate and ensnare the subject (e.g., others whom we like, or would like to be like, or would like to like us), but which are “completely taken up and caught up within, remolded and reanimated by, the symbolic order”; and the real, which is, in Lacan’s later work, not our perceived “reality” but reality itself, and thus never known directly (p. 9). Such an exercise in “grand theory” is necessary for Lacan in his attempt to recast all of “academic psychology,” a framework of explanation that for Lacan has failed to come to terms with normalcy. Hence, Lacan (1981/1993) cites examples of descriptions of paranoia that describe the behavior of everyone, remarks that “we all have something in common with delusionals” (p. 48), and jokes that Schreber’s delusional world-system “is as coherent as are many philosophical systems of our time” (p. 55). “To be a psychoanalyst is simply to open your eyes to the evident fact that nothing malfunctions more than human reality” (p. 82). This view of our symbolically constructed universe invites certain approaches to religion and science as both epistemic “systems” and sources of group identity. Lacan is neither unscientific nor always a critic of science. At one point he looks to biology for progress regarding the role of images and imagination, but he sees science as discursive and as involving articles of faith derived, for example, from the JudeoChristian tradition (“God/Nature doesn’t deceive” [p. 65]).5 Lacan is remarkably ambivalent about religion, which is often (following Freud) viewed by analysts as delusional. Lacan observes in passing that Schreber’s delusional “theology” has absolutely nothing in common with “authentic religious experience” (p. 288). We simply are, Lacan observes, formed within the Judeo-Christian tradition. Certain things are thereby unthinkable to us, such as a fixed celestial sphere; and certain features of that tradition, such as the idea of God “making us live in fear and trembling,” and our particular notion of guilt, fundamentally color our experience (p. 288). I find Lacan’s approach refreshing, having grown tired of the tendency in psychoanalysis to denigrate religion, almost as if it is a pathology to be cured. To be certain, his is no lofty view of religion, but neither is it critical. Religious beliefs exist in the symbolic order, which is for Lacan a fact, neither good nor bad (though particular beliefs are always subject to criticism). As a religious believer in a supposedly pluralistic society, that is the kind of neu-

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trality I would appreciate from my lawmakers and judges. Moreover, that kind of neutrality is part of the essence of psychoanalysis, as will become clear as I discuss how a Lacanian analysis proceeds.

Lacanian Therapy: Deal with It, the Kittens Are Gone [P]sychoanalysis finds its justification in the effort to help a person articulate his unconscious desire and perhaps to act accordingly. Thus has Jacques Lacan defined the ethic of psychoanalysis in distinction to the ideal of an adaption to social norms. (Schneiderman, 1986, p. 2) The idea of the talking cure, of the analysand’s free association and the analyst’s listening for clues and offering interpretations, is not for Lacan a method of access to instincts, desires, feelings, or “affects” unrelated to language. Rather, it is language that structures desire. The structure of a patient’s discourse is not a vessel for some primary content to be analyzed, but is rather the key to analytic understanding—the content is secondary. Thus, Lacan, in a move that sounds like linguistic reductionism, highlights the signifier and its place in a “chain” of signifiers as the determinants in human life. Discourse preexists birth, then the subject enters to the symbolic order, and thereafter his or her destiny is laid out. Such a formulation does not really, I will show, imply determinism, but it is for Lacan an important first step toward recognizing what analysis is about: “in unconscious matters the relation of the subject to the symbolic is fundamental” (p. 118).6 Analysis is not about inner and personal instincts and drives but about discourse and its effects in constructing and capturing the subject. The cure or the end of analysis is not to rise above discursive structures, but to understand one’s place therein. In Lacanian terms, “the cause of the subject lies in the unconscious,” rather than in biology, sociology, or some other cause exterior “to the person’s history” (Bergeron, Cantin & Apollon, 1994, p. 31). However, that unconscious is produced by the “child’s encounter with language,” which, interestingly (after the statement above rejecting biology and sociology), results in “a loss in the satisfaction of biological needs,” as the subject is inscribed in his or her “socio-culture” (p. 31). This loss of satisfaction or “. . . jouissance the human being lacks shapes his relations with others, his projects,

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failures, choices, symptoms, fantasies, intentions, dreams, career, and so on” (p. 31). The unconscious, structured like language, has a logic of its own to be uncovered in analysis. The analytic situation is an artificial laboratory wherein the patient explores his or her unconscious, which is both unique to his or her life experience and typical in its logical structure. In Lacanian analysis, the patient does the work of discovery, while the analyst provides an “other” to address. Early in the analysis, the patient usually expects a real relationship to develop, as well as an authority figure to confirm, love, guide, judge, and satisfy the patient. Later in the analysis the patient comes to understand the traditional Freudian notions of neutrality (the analyst does not take sides in conflicts or offer moral guidance), abstinence (the analyst does not respond to love or hate as a real person would), and the “blank screen” (the patient can project anything onto the analyst, who does not reveal much of himself or herself) (Lasky, 1993, pp. 150–159). These arrangements, together with the rule of free association (whereby anything, even an embarrassing thought, that comes to mind should be mentioned), are intended to create a discourse outside of moral or social criteria, where that which is repressed or represented in symptoms (bodily or in relationships) can be spoken, and where fantasies can be “worked through” (i.e., in Lacanian terminology, “examined . . . from every angle of the expressible to the point of delimiting, with signifiers, the bit of real equivalent to him, that lost object evanescent like the horizon, which sums up and causes him” [Bergeron et al., 1994, p. 36]). Without attempting to further summarize the details of the discovery of one’s desire, lost object, signifier, and so forth, I want to highlight the notions of analytic neutrality and ethical responsibility in Lacanian theory. The two are related. Even as the analyst’s nonjudgmental attitude allows the subject access to new knowledge, the “subject must assume it and take responsibility for it” (Bergeron et al., 1994, p. 37). Significantly, nothing in this formulation relies on categories of illness. The categories of pathology indicate particular structures and involve failures in symbolic and imaginary operations that are not shared by everyone, but the theory itself is one of human experience generally. Normalcy involves insertion into the symbolic and imaginary chaos of language and relationships, and no one escapes the web of misrecognition, misunderstanding, mistakes, and bizarre unconscious language that Lacan describes. What does this theoretical framework contribute to the analysis of groups in political and legal conflict? First, there is growing

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interest among social theorists, in light of recent advances in cognitive science, in the notion of the collective unconscious in any culture. A major barrier to the development of the theory of a collective unconscious is that it sounds like Jung or Freud, and anything of this ilk is definitely out of fashion in mainstream psychology. However, many believe that “shared motivations and significations, just as the representations rooted in language and culture, because they are the work of a collectivity, cannot be entirely conscious” (Moscovici, 1993, p. 40). Applied to an entire culture, one might question how much is really shared, but as to groups who share beliefs, the renewal of interest in a collective unconscious appears promising. Second, Lacan’s particular approach to the subject is already a group affair, since the subject does not identify with everybody in the imaginary order, nor does the subject find direction in all language. Rather, the others from whom we seek an identity and the chain of signifiers on which we ride (as on “rails”) to our destiny are a more limited constellation. Willy Apollon (1994), a Lacanian analyst, focuses in one study on urban gangs, and particularly on their views toward women; Mark Bracher, a Lacanian literary theorist, engages in discourse analyses of antiabortionists (Bracher, 1993) and of anti-Kevorkians (Bracher, 1995). Both of these scholars employ Lacanian clinical conceptions in what must be viewed as social-theoretical analyses of groups. Third, and finally, the ideal of the analyst’s neutrality in Lacanian (and in traditional Freudian) theory seems particularly important to the social psychology of groups. The level to which psychoanalysis “aspires” is fundamental desire, without respect to its immorality or asociality (which are why the subject keeps desire hidden) in sociocultural terms. Similarly, early judgments in group analysis, that the goals of the group are unacceptable, eclipse an inquiry as to what the group really wants. A simple example might be a group of dual-worker parents who falsely accuse daycare center employees of child abuse; our condemnation of their hysteria and lies may stop us short of sensing their collective loss of the American dream of raising their own children (Caudill, 1994). Thus, the severely limited Lacanian notion of “cure” takes on a pluralistic quality—the analyst does not demand change but only selfunderstanding and responsibility. I turn now to the “discourse of freedom” concerning religion in law and politics, but with a significant handicap. Lacan (1981/ 1993) specifically identifies the discourse of freedom, in his critique of notions of self-autonomy and rationality, as delusional. He even

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recommends that analysts, as analysts, stay out of such “common” political debates; those are not the sort of questions that his theory is meant to address. By naming the discourse of freedom delusional, however, I believe Lacan unwittingly invited psychoanalytic reflection on the debate over religion in law and politics.

Community and Pluralism: The Kittens Are All in Parochial Schools The discourse of pluralism, really, is one of resignation, not hope. Some hope remains that people with different world views can coexist. But in pluralism we give up on the hope that everyone can agree on fundamental matters of meaning and morality. Liberal theorist John Rawls, for example, proposes a realm of “public reason”—if we set aside our differences and identify the areas where our views “overlap,” we can find a basis for just government and maximum liberty. Rawls is also famous for his “veil of ignorance” thought experiment, wherein we might each make political decisions as if we did not know our race, class, or gender, thus ensuring fairness by setting aside bias. Within the debates over religion in law and politics, communitarians identify the tendencies among liberal theorists such as Rawls to expect too much sameness (for example, too much common sense or decisive rationality), to forget our social constructedness, and to maintain an unworkable distinction between public and private aspects of our lives (e.g., politics is public but religion is private). However, these are tendencies, not doctrines, since liberal theorists concede our sociality and then identify the communitarian tendency to ignore our individuality, our need for common ground, our shared forms of discourse, and our liberty. But everyone in the debate wants neutral government, pluralism, and individual liberty, terms that depend upon a theoretical framework for meaning. While communitarians claim to balance the tension between liberal (or libertarian) thought and conservative (or authoritarian) thought, liberal theorists such as Rawls would claim the middle ground between the excesses of authoritarianism and anarchism, or between libertarian thought and communitarianism. The general concern with Rawls among those who identify themselves strongly with a community—for example, feminists (such as Linda Hirshman [1994]),7 critical race theorists (with whom

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Hirshman sympathizes), and religious believers (for whom Hirshman has little sympathy given the history of segregation and antifeminism within religious ranks [pp. 1863–1865]) 8—is that while Rawls asks each to strip away his or her identificatory and community ties in order to enter the sphere of public reason, Rawls himself does not seem to be stripping anything away. That is, only if one assumes that the political subject is essentially or primarily a disembodied, self-creating rationalist, does it follow that one’s gender, race, family, neighborhood, and income level are secondary and dispensable (since they are the sources of bias). I have the same reaction to Rawls’s theory of pluralism even while it seems so friendly to “private” religion. I share with Rawls’s critics the sense that his theory of public reason is only a version of pluralism, not pluralism itself, and that it is a particular view of the good life, not a mere procedure for mediating such views. I share with various communitarian critics of Rawls their discomfort with the public/private distinction, with the individualism of liberal theory, and with the related downplay of the social construction of individuals. More to the point in the present essay, I think that Lacanian theory offers the basis for an account of pluralism that is more communitarian than liberal, more generous toward religious activism in law and politics than a theory of public reason, and more accurate in its phenomenology of culture, community, and religion than many competing accounts.

Zˇizˇek with Skillen and Marshall Slavoj £i¶ek (1992), a social theorist who freely appropriates Lacan in his analyses of Western culture, notes that for Lacan the “subject of democracy is not a human person, man in all the richness of his needs, interests and beliefs. . . . [The] preamble of every democratic proclamation, all people without regard to (race, sex, religion, wealth, social status), . . . [involves] an abstraction of all positive features, a dissolution of all substantial . . . links . . .” (p. 163). Ironically, Lacan’s pathological subject of psychoanalysis is here represented, the fading subject who lacks an identity and must “fill out its constitutive lack . . . by identifying itself with some mastersignifier guaranteeing its place in the symbolic network” (p. 163). £i¶ek argues that the notion of democracy implies a “formal, heartless abstraction” that leaves no place for genuine community and links democracy to Gesellschaft, “society as a conglomerate of

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alienated individuals, and not with Gemeinschaft” (pp. 163–164). The problem “is not that this abstraction proper to democracy dissolves all concrete substantial ties, but rather that it can never dissolve them” (p. 164). Democracy requires “a contingent moment of positivity, of material ‘content,’ ” which it finds in the nationstate (planetary or universal democratic movements having failed “to arouse political enthusiasm” [p. 165]). A national cause and the myths of nationalism organize collective enjoyment but are threatened by otherness, by any community that does not share in the sameness of the majority. Thus, the “new social movements,” such as ecology, feminism, and the peace movement, “continually emphasize their unwillingness to become political parties like the others” (p. 164). At the same time, however, they make it clear that their aim is much more radical than that of the ordinary political parties: what they are striving after is a fundamental transformation of the entire mode of action and belief, a change in the “life paradigm” affecting our most intimate attitudes. (£i¶ek, 1992, p. 164) Forming a political party is a concession to the status quo; calling for new structures of pluralism is much more threatening. According to £i¶ek, this antagonism must be assumed and not eluded by a democracy that absorbs diversity. £i¶ek does not address religious freedom, but James Skillen’s (1994) recent work on Christian pluralism is remarkably similar in several respects. Briefly, Skillen argues for both confessional and structural pluralism—the former a reference to coexisting ways of life and the latter a reference to differentiation of social structures (such as government, schooling, family life, art, and so forth). Skillen then identifies a “deep commitment to an undifferentiated ideal of the United States as a nation” (p. 39). [If] the deepest religion for a majority of Americans entails faith in the nation itself, understood as “one people”, and if that majority cannot reach a political agreement to disagree about a variety of cultural matters[,] . . . then [such] civil-religious faith in America . . . [will express] itself through political and legal processes that dictate singular, usually majoritorian, winnertake-all outcomes of public contests over matters such as education, sexual practices, the arts and more. (pp. 39–40)

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What £i¶ek (1992) calls the “totalitarian temptation” in all attempts to concretize democracy is here described by Skillen. One reads in Skillen an attempt to save American democracy by asking it to “assume its antagonism.” Paul Marshall (1994), a Canadian political theorist and fellow traveller of Skillen’s, distinguishes two popular Christian approaches to social pluralism: accommodation along liberal lines, and trying to achieve a Christian society (which implies a fear of liberal pluralism). Rejecting both, Marshall notes how liberal visions of pluralism lead to a large measure of homogenization of society. To clarify his critique of liberalism, Marshall contrasts two exaggerated positions, Nozick’s libertarianism and Amish religious communities. The stark contrast is necessary since the alleged neutrality of liberal theorists such as Rawls seems fair to religious communities, and would seemingly be problematic only to theocratic reconstructionists. That neutrality might be summarized as “believe what you want, but don’t impose your beliefs on others” (p. 147). Nozick’s version of pluralism is also attractive at first glance, since his ideal society is composed of voluntary communities that, in turn, are composed of informed choosers. But the right to choose “overrides the right of any community to claim (and, hence, honestly believe) that it holds to the truth” (Marshall 1994, p. 149). Consider, for example, an Amish community where each member is advised (and educated and informed enough so that the advice means something) that they are and should be free to leave at any time, that the community respects this right and will not insist that communal solidarity comes before individual will. (pp. 149–150) Obviously, there is no longer a traditional Amish community under such terms. A Rawlsian might say let it go,9 but the Amish would resist becoming a liberal association.10 Marshall (1994) agrees with MacIntyre that “[l]iberalism . . . provides a distinctive conception of a just order which is closely integrated with . . . the terms set by a liberal polity” (p. 150). Liberal principles are not neutral with respect to rival conflicting theories of the human good (McIntyre, 1988). Hence, liberal theorists are impositional in setting the terms of the debate and in helping sustain a particular social and political order. Rather than rejecting pluralism as the problem, Marshall (1994) argues for a Christian theory of pluralism, which could “receive wide support from

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those who are not Christians if it promised genuine institutional and communal diversity” (p. 158). I mention the exaggerated example of the Amish—he could have selected the Mennonites as well—because the idea of a Christian community in America has been called into question. Peter Drucker (1994) notes the passing away of traditional communities that involved involuntary fate and a claim on the entire person in the knowledge society, a society characterized by organizations, mobility, and voluntary associations (p. 72). Much of the work by scholars such as Skillen and Marshall is aimed at creating community, asking Christians to see their faith as involving not only church affiliation but a Christian way of life in the family, in the workplace, and in political activity. If one’s religious faith does not direct one’s affairs in the various spheres of human life, then some other faith perhaps unwittingly will take up the slack. Does Lacanian theory help thinkers such as Skillen and Marshall? In other words, does a psychoanalytic perspective informed by Lacan help those who enter, against his advice, the discourse of freedom? I think so, and I identify below several features of Lacanian theory that offer a meeting point. Group Psychoanalysis “An analogy is not an argument . . .” (Lacan, 1981/1993, p. 289). There is some irony in Lacan’s (1981/1993) insistence that psychoanalysis is not concerned with “the sphere of common discourse, with its profound rifts as to the essence of mores and the status of the individual in our society” (p. 134). Psychoanalysts’ concern, he says, is “the effect of discourse within the subject” (p. 135). Discourse, a term that implies language and its use in interhuman relations, is, however, not an individual matter. Even when Lacan recognizes the particularity and uniqueness of the subject’s desire, he locates desire within the symbolic order and not in biological drives or instincts. Even when the particular unconscious discourse of a subject is in question, the external but internalized other of culture and law operates like a collective unconscious. In what sense, therefore, is Lacan avoiding common discourse? The answer lies in Lacan’s (1986/1992) unique account of the ethics of psychoanalysis and the supposed neutrality of the analyst’s position in analysis. In his ethics, Lacan identifies the search for the good or the common good as a barrier to desire, not in the usual sense of a regulator of our instincts, but as a failure to come to terms with desire. Ethics, for Lacan, is assuming responsibility for

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one’s desire. It implies recognizing, for example, one’s desire for mastery over certain others, and understanding one’s lack (in terms of one’s childhood and how effective one’s absorption of one’s culture has been) and how one has attempted to fill it in. Analytic neutrality consists in withholding moral judgments and in refusing to master or be mastered (by satisfying demands) by the subject. Early in the analysis, such neutrality serves to foster disclosure (since moral judgments might bring shame and repression, and mastery or being mastered allows the subject to retain his or her illusions), but the notion of neutrality also confirms that at the end of analysis the patient, not the analyst, is responsible for change. The fact that this sounds as though analysis produces free, informed, rational subjects is precisely why Lacan (1981/1993) warns against entering into the delusional discourse of freedom. We seem to need to feel in control of our affairs, that we have certain rights as individuals, and that others agree with us. Nevertheless, Lacan argues, “this is an intimate, personal discourse which is a long way from coinciding with the discourse of one’s neighbor on any point whatsoever” (p. 133). As discouraging as this is for Lacan, he resigns himself to an enigma: “We all remain at the level of an insoluble contradiction between a discourse [of internal freedom] that is at a certain level always necessary and a reality to which, both in principle and in a way proved by experience, we fail to adjust” (p. 134). Living in “the modern world’s cultural arena is essentially going round in circles,” that is, anchoring a notion of human freedom in the particularized subject simply highlights that subject’s constitutive relationship with others and with language (p. 134). While one cannot base an account of the good life or a critique of religion on Lacan, one can, on the basis of Lacanian theory, question any account of pluralism that presumes rational subjects who rise above constitutive discourse and identifications with others. Likewise, appeals to common sense or science fail, under Lacan’s account of discursive and identificatory subjectivity, as leverage for any particular theory of pluralism. The meeting point between Lacan and those religious pluralists who challenge liberal and libertarian accounts of pluralism lies in their respective recourse to personal belief as the only source of certainty. Conclusion The terms used in academic discourse often carry unintended assumptions. This is particularly clear in contemporary psychology, where brain researchers and cognitive scientists describe active

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processes in the brain that unwittingly sound like people doing things (Tinnin, 1989a; Stillman & Walker, 1989).11 A similar problem persists in social theory, where the term group, as in a religious movement or a street gang, implies a single unity. Even in the tightest religious community, it is clear that its members harbor various personal doubts and resistances. And in contemporary voluntary associations generally, no community exists in traditional terms. Nevertheless, human existence involves relationships, identifications, and language, which create islands of meaning. Allowing such islands to exist is the goal of pluralism, and political theories of pluralism attempt to describe how national unity is nevertheless possible. When one enters the pluralism debate with a view that all theories are faith-based, and that there is no common sense, the response might be that one has asserted that “anything goes.” But a particular person, and a particular group, need not really believe that anything goes, only that certainty is a matter of faith. A theory of pluralism that denies a realm of public reason is nevertheless a theory of pluralism, but it is based on a neutral view of beliefs that is analogous to the analyst’s position in Lacanian theory.

NOTES 1. The term group is used in this chapter to refer to a social unit. A group could be religious, political, or an ethnic community. “Group” does not refer to group therapy or “combined psychoanalysis.” 2. While an individual and a society can each be said to have a history comprised of a series of experiences that relate both to a physical environment and to outsiders (for society, e.g., international relations), and notwithstanding the unification by common language and institutions (e.g., law) that structure a society’s members’ lives or its shared ways of thinking (e.g., a shared bias), the diversity of any modern society remains a serious complication. 3. In psychoses, the primary signifier of law or division (i.e., in Western culture the father) is foreclosed or missing. 4. “[W]e are not here to give the psychology and phenomenology of those closest to us. We have to attain it, as usual, by means of a detour, via those furthest from us” (Lacan, 1993, pp. 74–75).

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5. “It’s out of the question that it, matter, should deceive us. This step is not at all obvious. Nothing less than the Judaeo-Christian tradition was required for it to be taken with such assurance. . . . [The] expression act of faith is not out of place. . . .” (Lacan, 1993, p. 65). 6. “The unconscious is fundamentally structured, woven, chained, meshed, by language” (Lacan, 1993, p. 119). 7. In her critique of Rawls, Hirshman (1994) argues “that given the real difference in physical strength between the sexes, no theory of the disembodied self can adequately generate political justice for the weaker group” (p. 1891). In her introduction to that argument, Hirshman highlights the ongoing communitarian concerns with the “abstract and de-sexed players” in Rawls’s Original Position thought experiment, the “amputation of the public sphere from the rest of life,” in his prescriptions, and the metaphysical assumption of a moral psychology of autonomous individualism that he denies having assumed (pp. 1860–61). 8. “While Rawls seeks to accommodate religious differences, he ignores the gender and racial demands of religion” (p. 1865). 9. See Rawls 1975, p. 549. Marshall (1994) dislikes Rawls’s sanguine view that if a “conception of the good is unable to endure and gain adherents under institutions of equal freedom and mutual toleration, one must question whether it is . . . viable . . . and whether its passing is to be regretted” (p. 150). 10. “In this liberal society, communities are not left free, but are constrained to become liberal associations” (Marshall, 1994, p. 150). 11. See Stillman & Walker 1989, p. 413, response to Tinnin (1989a): “the homunculus problem . . . plagues some conceptualizations of ego function”; and Tinnin’s (1989b) reply: “If one attributes to a brain agency the capacity for active censorship or repression, this immediately raises the ‘homunculus problem’ ” (p. 414).

REFERENCES Aichhorn, A. (1935). Wayward youth. New York: Viking Press. Alcorn, M. W., Jr. (1994). The subject of discourse: Reading Lacan through (and beyond) postructuralist contexts. In M. Bracher et al. (Eds.), Lacanian theory of discourse: Subject, structure, and society (pp. 19– 45). New York: New York University Press.

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Apollon, W. (1994). The discourse of gangs in the stake of male repression and narcissim. In M. Bracher et al. (Eds.), Lacanian theory of discourse: Subject, structure, and society (pp. 204–219). New York: New York University Press. Benhabib, S. (1994). In defense of universalism yet again! A response to critics of situating the self. New German Critique, 62, 173–189. Bergeron, D., Cantin, L., & Apollon, W. (1994, Spring/Summer). The end and the ends of analysis as a principle of the task of becoming an analyst. International Federation for Psychoanalytic Education Newsletter, pp. 31–43. Bracher, M. (1993). Lacan, discourse, and social change: A psychoanalytic criticism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bracher, M. (1995). Doctor-assisted suicide: Psychoanalysis of mass anxiety. Psychoanalytic Review, 82, 655–668. Caudill, D. S. (1994). Social hysteria and social psychoanalysis: A response to Brion’s “The hidden persistence of witchcraft.” Law & Critique, 5, 31–51. Drucker, P. (1994, November). The age of social transformation. The Atlantic Monthly, pp. 53–80. Freud, S. (1961). The future of an illusion. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 21, pp. 3–56). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1927) Fromm, E. (1969). Escape from freedom. New York: Avon Books. Hirshman, L. (1994). Is the original position inherently male-superior? Columbia Law Review, 94, 1860–1881. Lacan, J. (1992). The seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VII: The ethics of psychoanalysis, 1959–1960 (J.-A. Miller, Ed., D. Porter, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1986) Lacan, J. (1993). The seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book III: The psychoses (J.-A. Miller, Ed., R. Grigg, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1981) Lasky, R. (1993). Dynamics of development and the therapeutic process. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Marshall, P. (1994). Liberalism, pluralism, and Christianity. In J. Chaplin, & P. Marshall (Eds.), Political theory and Christian vision: Essays in memory of Bernard Zylstra (pp. 143–162). New York: University Press of America. Martin, J., & Thompson, J. (1997). Between scientism and relativism: Phenomenology, hermeneutics, and the new realism in psychology. Theory and Psychology, 7, 629–652. McIntyre, A. (1988). Whose justice? Which rationality? South Bend, IN: Notre Dame Press.

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Moscovici, S. (1993). The return of the unconscious. Social Research, 60, 39–93. Parsons, T. (1949). Essays in sociological theory, pure and applied. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Rawls, J. (1975). Fairness to goodness. Philosophical Review, 84, 536–554. Reich, W. (1970). The mass psychology of fascism (M. Higgins & C. M. Raphael, Eds., V. R. Cartagno, Trans.). New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. (Original work published 1946) Richardson, F. (1998). Beyond scientism and postmodernism. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 18, 33–45. Sacks, M. (1985). The Oedipus complex: A reevaluation. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 33, 201–216. Schneiderman, S. (1986). Rat man. New York: New York University Press. Skillen, J. W. (1994). Recharging the American experiment: Principled pluralism for genuine civic community. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books. Stillman, R., & Walker, J. (1989). The anatomy of mental unity and volition: An alternate view. Psychiatry, 52, 410–413. Szajnberg, N. (1994). Bruno Bettelheim: Culture in man, man in culture, and a language for both. Psychoanalytic Review, 81, 491–507. Thompson, J. (1984). Studies in the theory of ideology. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Tinnen, L. (1989a). The anatomy of the ego. Psychiatry, 52, 404–409. Tinnen, L. (1989b). Response to Stillman & Walker. Psychiatry, 52, 414– 415. £i¶ek, S. (1992). Looking awry: An introduction to Jacques Lacan through popular culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

18 Lacan in America Donna Bentolila

O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo Deny thy father and refuse thy name . . . ‘Tis but that name that is my enemy. Thou art thyself, though not a Montague. O be some other name! What’s a Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot, nor arm, nor face, Nor any part belonging to a man. What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet. So Romeo would, were he not Romeo called. Retain that dear perfection which he owes, Without that title, Romeo, doff thy name; And for thy name, which is no part of thee, Take all myself. —Shakespeare

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s you can easily imagine, Lacan in America implies the encounter, one could even say the clashing, of two languages, two cultures, two quite different philosophical traditions. While Lacan represents a very broad intellectual tradition in the European theatre, on the American side, analysts in general lean toward a less theoretical, more pragmatic orientation. Thus, by way of introduction, in order to understand Lacan’s relation to American psychoanalysis, we may well begin with an examination of what took place with Freud in America. In 1909, after working in Vienna for many years in what he termed “splendid isolation,” Freud made his first and only journey to the United States at the invitation of Stanley Hall. He was welcomed enthusiastically and received honorary recognition, even at a time when his European peers were refusing to give credence to his work. The warm atmosphere of acceptance in the United States offset the skepticism and indifference bestowed upon Freud in Europe’s bastions of knowledge. Freud wondered why this paradoxical and enigmatic country welcomed him more sincerely than any other. How was he able to capture the imagination of this people so many years ahead of others, and particularly so much earlier than in France? The fact of the matter was that Freud was bringing the Americans “news”—new ideas—which implied progress, a notion they highly esteemed. To the Americans, Freud represented the possibility of lifting repression and attaining that precious value called liberty, which in turn would become a source of well-being and happiness. Yet, could it be that the Americans failed to recognize “the plague” Freud was bringing upon them? Perhaps Freud didn’t know that the plague produces antibodies! Whatever the case, the fact is that this mutual fascination faded quickly, replaced by his realization that the all too enthusiastic acceptance of “psychoanalysis” failed to produce a true understanding of Freud’s basic concepts. Rather, psychoanalysis was popularly misinterpreted as the solution to any and all problems, and America’s disillusion with the new ideas of psychoanalysis soon relegated it to the fields of medicine and psychology. However, the contribution of a generation of European analysts, who settled in exile to escape the Nazi horror, brought the effervescence of Freudian thought to the fore once again in America. The training of psychiatrists as analysts became a reality, culminating in the decade of the 1950s, in the heart of the IPA, which was Manhattan in its period of greatest splendor and power.

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Considering this infusion of new life in the community of practitioners, as well as the tremendous intellectual energy and creativity devoted to scientific and technological advances as we near the end of the century and the millennium, it seems incredible that psychoanalysis should have become the focus of such relentless, furious, and devious attacks from the scientific and cultural domains as it has (e.g., Frederick Crews, 1988, gloating over the publication of four new tomes purporting to discredit any scientific validity for Freud’s theory or any degree of personal integrity for Freud himself). What is there about psychoanalysis that inspires such repulsion and antagonism? Is it just because Freud knew that he had discovered an unknown land and, like Amerigo Vespucci, began to lay out his cartography, mapping a hysterical subject as though this were a new continent of knowledge? What is so threatening about that knowledge that, in response, hysteria is depicted as an entity that is disappearing from the established dominions of North American psychiatry?

The Repression of Hysteria In current clinical practice, we don’t encounter the “hysterical attacks” à la Charcot with the same frequency that Freud witnessed at La Salpetrière. Indeed, with the passage of time we find a great prevalence of other types of clinical manifestations, tending toward depressive reactions or borderline phenomena. The elimination of “hysteria” from the DSM-IV appears, to me, to be no mere accident. Rather, this exclusion bespeaks a far more serious and consistent repression of the truth of psychoanalysis. To repress hysteria is to repress the fundamental discovery of the juncture of language and the unconscious—the grounding of the Unconscious in the determination of our body, our sex, our symptoms, and our destiny—a highly disquieting discovery, in the sense that it reveals how unconscious determination obeys the laws of language, operating beyond the control of the awareness of conscience. Let us not forget that the talking cure was indeed inaugurated by the hysteric, by those women who led Freud to listen to their speech, to hear their words, and in so doing, to translate their physical pain into psychic pain. Thus, although the physical symptoms may not be the same or as prevalent as before, every suffering person who comes to treatment and wants to understand his or her suffering bears the initial mark of the hysteric in inaugurating his or her own talking cure.

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Therefore, I propose that we revise some traditions and idiosyncrasies of our present culture, which, in my understanding, have been shaping the obstacles that aim to suppress the most disquieting aspects of Freudian discovery. My examination of this issue can guide us in reflecting upon the possibilities or impossibilities of broaching the teaching of Lacan in the United States. As we know, Jacques Lacan placed the beginnings of his teaching under the sign of a return to Freud. By reading Freud from the German original, Lacan required analysts to return to the foundations of psychoanalysis, which meant reading the original texts of Freud in a most attentive and critical way. In examining Lacan’s return, we must be aware that to return is not to repeat. Rather, the return implies a recovery of what was most original in the Freudian discovery, that is, that the unconscious operates under the laws of language, insofar as man is a speaking being. Lacan avoided the risk that the discipline of psychoanalysis would be engulfed by medicine or by psychologism by making a clear distinction between what he saw as the essence of the Freudian theory, and the successive deformations it suffered. In rethinking the works of Freud, Lacan considered that one could find the authentic direction of Freud’s initiative again, by way of following his project—the study of the unconscious—and not abandoning it in favor of other projects, such as the study of the ego, or its functions. Yet one of the major obstacles to reading Lacan lies in the fact that, to say the least, Lacan is not easy, and in the majority of cases produces considerable irritation. It is a type of reading that inflicts a narcissistic wound. We know Lacan used his enigmatic style to convey the workings of the unconscious, and the only option he afforded us was his claim that in order to read his Écrits, there was no way out but to . . . read them! Yet, will American analysts be willing to take on that labor of reading when it is also so difficult for them to understand what it’s good for? From another standpoint, we are lately faced with all kinds of alternative therapies, as well as the long-standing blooming of shortterm psychotherapies. These therapies recondition the subject, relieve the symptom, silence the anguish, provide a quick solution, or offer miraculous medications. We know that for Lacan, these things lead to the worst, in the sense of a suppression of human subjectivity and of our capacity to speak in order to understand ourselves. Perhaps, we can see what Lacan saw in most therapeutic “fixes.” Faced with promises of happiness, economic success, a defense against aging, and even a quest for immortality, how do we explain away human suffering? How do we account for the absence of an adequate and all-

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satisfying object? Can our culture accept that the well-being of the subject can only be sought in the articulation of the well saying—a well-being that is never without its margin of error, its lack? As Lacan (1975) stated, “[T]here is no progress, because what one gains on the one side is lost on the other.” Another serious obstacle lies in the problematic nature of issues pertaining to different conceptions of ethics. Traditionally, in the conception of ego psychology, the analyst is considered as a whole subject, with a strong and healthy ego, as opposed to the patient, who will try to modify himself in order to adapt to current cultural values. Will it be possible in this context to understand the ethics of Antigone, who renounced happiness, marriage, love, wellbeing, and even life itself, in order to not “give up on her desire”? Can adaptive psychoanalysis compare the position of the analyst with that of Socrates, considering that both had to pay such a high price for their refusal to accept the idea that they—and not the gods of the polis—authorize themselves, and that the separation between them should become a habit (ethos)? The worst crimes can be committed in the name of gods such as Goodness, Science, Love, and Religion, with which most of us identify and which feed our symptoms and inhibitions. This position does not imply that the analyst operates outside of law but, rather, that the direction of psychoanalytic treatment involves being able to avoid the imposition of gods who would control us—not from the heavens—but from the weight of arguments emanating from the culture that surrounds us and dwells within us. Another important obstacle, in my opinion, is the dream known as “The American Way of Life,” which, if it remained a dream for the subject, would simply be some type of formation of the unconscious, common to any neurotic structure. But the dream that everything is possible reached its peak following the Second World War, when the United States assumed the role of masters of the world on a political, military, and economic level. Does not the frenzy to retain power necessitate belief in one’s complete and unfailing knowledge? Such a belief would keep one pressing for certainties (which are not the same thing as guarantees), with the inevitable outcome of a fierce rendering paranoid of human bonds, the elimination of hazard and contingency and, therefore, of individual responsibility. The consequence of this dynamic could be that extreme necessity and enormous difficulty in relating to one another, so zealously denounced in David Reisman’s (1950) The Lonely Crowd. Additionally, all the precautions that therapists now find themselves obliged

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to take, given the ever-present threat of malpractice suits and other forms of social demand, have produced a desperate hope in wonder drugs, in the neuro-biological wave (with its efforts to explain away human destiny in terms of guaranteed causes), or in the longed-for genetic map, the famous “GENOME.” Still, could there possibly be neurones of desire? Will we be able some day to discover the gene that explains the experience “of falling in love”? Will it tell us why we fall in love with one person but not another? Or will writers, poets, psychoanalysts, and philosophers always have more to say about these questions? With so many chemical dosages, will we be able to attain a very modern theory of Hippocratic humors, or a postmodern alchemy that will produce the happiness drug?

The Inevitable Traumas of Sex and Death Faced with the trauma of sex and the inevitability of death, however, human beings typically react by mystifying or veiling the full weight of these human constants. Rather than face the fact of our own castration, we humans look for easy answers by attributing knowledge to something outside of ourselves, as has been done since time immemorial with god. Psychoanalysis after Freud and Lacan, however, not only reminds us of the fact of our castration but reveals how the formation of symptoms points in the direction of our fragility and a possibly liberating truth. It was Freud, after all, who reminded us of the importance of error as signifying a truth that has been repressed. This suggests that the analyst must necessarily place himself outside the panacea of knowledge in order to facilitate the patient’s engagement with his or her own desire and its individual truth. But modern psychoanalysis, basing itself on science and biology, has effectively repressed this principal cornerstone upon which Freud had founded psychoanalysis. Indeed, modern psychoanalysis often unthinkingly reflects modernity and its world view. Increasingly, we see the sexes becoming more homogenized and the differences between them more repressed, whether it be through the theory of the “self,” which through its asexual nature seems to be loved precisely for being neither a man nor a woman—or through the growing influence of certain feminisms. For example, the chameleon-like Madonna presents us with a sex symbol that attempts to re-edit the myth of the androgynous, an order wherein laws are demanded that legalize same-sex marriages, wherein maternity/

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paternity is subverted and the patronymic loses importance (paternity being that which produces a cut from the body of the mother and, in turn, records the child in the social body). Thus, in a society where the elementary kinship relationships of parenthood are beginning to totter, will there be room for a theory that, beginning with Freud and specially emphasized by Lacan, attributes such structuring importance to the paternal function?

Lacan and American Psychoanalysis So many obstacles! So much resistance to a thought so different and a language so alien as Lacan’s. Perhaps it may not be without irony that it should rightly be from the heart of the IPA that we are presently hearing the call to save psychoanalysis from Otto Kernberg (1990), who proposes, by the way, to introduce Lacanian thought. Kernberg, reviewing nine papers, all of which indicate a crisis in our discipline, concludes that psychoanalysis in America has been shipwrecked, so to speak. The authors of those papers attribute the crisis to the fact that fewer and fewer medical doctors enter the profession, to the animosity of psychiatrists who emphasize empirical research, to the proliferation of psychotherapies, to the classification of mental disorders in the DSM-II, and, as a corollary, to the serious problem that psychoanalysis is not covered by insurance. Alerted by these readings, Kernberg sharply criticizes the psychoanalytic institutes, which, in his opinion, have been transformed into technical schools or religious seminars. Indoctrination, idealization of training analysts, and an atmosphere of paranoia suggest that these systems have to be decentralized in order to render their authoritarian order less rigid. Kernberg’s effort to save psychoanalysis has the merit of attempting to make us aware that other schools, among which could be included the Lacanian school, instead of constituting a threat, could actually offer enrichment. He also has the wisdom to recognize that changes cannot be accomplished through cloistering inside of institutes. Any change must rather come through an affiliation with the university community. And, in keeping with Freud’s ideas on lay analysis, Kernberg advocates bringing psychologists into the field without any stigma derived from not being medical doctors. If indeed Kernberg’s appeal to the multiplicity of theories and practices does lead to an eclecticism whereof the accumulation does not produce a sum, it is promising that after ten years of silence regarding Lacan’s work, he should open a crack through which a

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dialog could be initiated. This would be a cautious and problematic dialog, however, since Kernberg warns of the need to protect against intellectual terrorism and charismatic proselytism, inasmuch as he believes that the “Return to Freud” and a turn against Klein is a political fact. This mostly implies that the reading of Freud may become as religious as the reading of the Bible. All of these warnings constitute a wall of contention against acknowledging the teachings of Lacan. However, if the impregnable Berlin Wall has fallen, as well as the Victorian ideology under the hurricane-strength winds of Freud’s (1905/1953) Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, why wouldn’t it be possible for Kernberg, in the capacity of the authorized spokesperson for American psychoanalysis, to foster a new dialog along these lines, particularly when he ends his paper with a desperate cry for us to reverse the trend of the lack of vitality and creativity of psychoanalysis? But how to do it, since one could say that studying Lacan in the United States runs counter to its deep-rooted tradition of rejecting theory and intellectualism? Although Lacanian terminology is used profusely by literary critics, departments of philosophy, departments of cultural studies, departments of women’s studies, gay studies, etc., the fact is that Lacan’s work in America suffers from a particular dissociation between acceptance in the academic world, where the texts are studied rigorously, and its repression in the clinical field. How do we find the way to bridge that gap?

The Importance of a Clinical Lacan Addressing this gap is possibly the greatest challenge facing us for the transmission of Lacan’s work in the United States. This task is made even more complicated by the ambiguity of Lacan’s notion of transmission. We are well aware that the question of the transmission of psychoanalytic knowledge is no simple affair. Psychoanalytic knowledge and psychoanalytic practice are not matters of knowledge and application in the typical sense. In 1978, the last conference of Lacan’s school in which Lacan was in attendance was dedicated to the question of the transmission of psychoanalysis. At the conference, John Muller and William Richardson, two American analysts who work with Lacanian psychoanalysis, asked Lacan what his purpose was in wanting to translate his Écrits (1966/ 1977) into English the previous year. More specifically, they wondered why Lacan would ever want to have his Écrits translated

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into English, considering Lacan’s seemingly ambivalent relationship toward the dissemination of his ideas within the United States. Lacan, ever faithful to his paradoxical style, answered them while making a gesture with his hand “Pour forcer la transmission” (To force its transmission). Muller (1991) said that “this was paradoxical, not only because of his general disdain for things American [sic] but more specifically because at the final session of the Congress Lacan concluded that psychoanalysis was not transmissible” (p. 484). According to Lacan (1978), psychoanalysis is nontransmissible because no written transmission is sufficient to communicate the truth of psychoanalysis. One cannot simply apply the techniques of a master or learn “counseling skills,” insofar as such strategies with their implicit theories of subjectivity are authoritarian and reify the dialectic of analysis. They also usurp the analysand’s singularity. Given these limitations, an ethical psychoanalysis is nontransmissible in any usual sense. It is for this reason that every psychoanalyst finds himself (sic) forced to reinvent psychoanalysis. In fact, it is in the direct experience of one by one that psychoanalysis must be reborn or recreated (every time an analysis is undertaken). This recreation or rebirth must take place in clinical practice, and as a result of the increasing importation of Lacan’s clinical work into the North American psychoanalytic and therapeutic scene. This transmission occurs not only through written works but also through the psychoanalysis recreated through works where clinical practice can be accounted for. What then about Muller and Richardson’s question? Why the desire to translate the Écrits into English? How is it possible to force the transmission of psychoanalysis if psychoanalysis is intransmissible or at least so tied to a praxis in which one’s own personal analysis is an essential requirement? And even more so, why put such a delicate matter into a process where it must be reformulated in the terms of a new language? It is true that different languages present a barrier, but that is yet another obstacle. In Freud’s (1950/1966) letter 52 to Wilheim Fliess, he notes that the working of the unconscious has much to do with translation, insofar as repression can be understood as a failure of translation. We must remember that translation comes from the Latin translatus, and that Freud himself pointed out the relationship between traduttore-traitore (translator/traitor), a relationship that produces an inevitable effect on the reading of a work, even when the author is read in the original. Even a true reading implies the production of a new text, as occurred with Lacan’s famous return to Freud.

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The clinical moment and more literary encounter with Lacan can partially converge in a certain approach and through a certain clinical and ethical responsibility. Thus, despite the many resistances, one could say that Lacan’s transmission has begun to flower through a minority of people who study it rigorously, but also bring forth testimony of its clinical effectiveness. For the clinic is where one faces the generativity of encountering the new, that which surprises, the Other that opens the path for the encounter with one’s truth. In this regard, the clinical presentations conducted by several Lacanian analysts at the Austen Riggs Center—a prestigious psychiatric hospital with a long history of involvement with psychoanalysis, and the setting where several analysts responded to a call by John Muller to organize the Lacanian Clinical Forum in 1986—opened the way for fading out the American analysts’ phantasm that Lacanians are self-declared purveyors of the truth. These analysts were able to transmit fundamental concepts of Lacanian psychoanalysis solidly and rigorously through their articulation of clinical practice. An atmosphere of interest and respectful exchange developed, providing both an invitation and a challenge to continue this dialogue. In other words, the Lacanians managed to leave an impression of Lacan, first and foremost, as a clinician with a vision of the Freudian discovery, not as a cognitive possession, but as a retroactive knowledge; not as an acquisition, but as an event that must take place again in every analysis.1 I would like to suggest that this exchange could become ever more possible now, in that one could say that the longed-for “American Dream” stopped being such, and, in its place, one might as easily speak of the “American Nightmare.” Self-control collides with forces that we cannot manage, and no one is so certain any longer that we are the masters of our destiny, or that the deified ego can struggle against those impossible ills that everyone encounters. In some way, they have been warned that this will not work, and there now appears a desire to escape that enchantment. All this leads me to think that Lacan’s teachings can revitalize psychoanalysis in the United States, ultimately because they can provide other reasons, new theoretical openings and tools for thinking it. A teaching that, in the manner of a well-directed analysis, can produce a precious gift as long as it is not instituted in the place of an unquestioned authority and knowledge. Although Lacan always believed that North American thought was irreducibly hostile to his own, the fact is that he entered the

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United States, not through the path of psychiatry or the psychoanalytic institutes, but through the work of literary critics, professors of language, philosophers, etc. In other words, through all those who were open and sensitive to the way in which Lacan allowed himself to be worked by language, through all those enamored of that particular style in which the Unconscious speaks to us, which, like poetry, is always Other, always a saying that surprises us with unexpected, unforeseen, and multiple meanings. By drawing heavily from modern linguistics, Lacan retranslated Freud’s basic dream mechanisms—condensation and displacement—into two central figures of speech—metaphor and metonymy—while at the same time underlining the dominant function of language in the talking cure in terms of symptoms, slips of the tongue, parapraxis and so on. The seed has already been planted, and it is blooming in the academic setting and in related disciplines. We should recognize that authors such as Wilden, Felman, Gallop, Muller, Richardson, Fink, Schneiderman, Forrester, Ragland, and others approach Lacan, and an increasing number of important analysts, are striving to recenter Lacan’s teachings on the clinical. Study groups have begun to form, which at the present time operate in all major American cities. In conclusion, then, I should like to refer again to the entity that, with its challenge to established knowledge, made the birth of psychoanalysis possible: Hysteria. Indeed, Freud’s reading of what those hysterical patients said promulgated that incipient knowledge of psychoanalytic theory. Therefore, in my understanding, it is our point of urgency and our impending task to ensure that in the United States hysteria should not become dislodged from the field of neuroses, and therefore silenced, whether by sending them to the field of borderlines, to psychiatry, or into hospitalization. Here, Lacanian theory can be a great help to us in bringing about a rebirth of psychoanalysis, of learning, and the general and continued advancement of knowledge. One way of assuring this is to remember that Freud’s discovery was Promethean. In the same way the mythical figure snatched a spark of knowledge from the sun, each analyst sees himself forced to repeat that act of symbolic appropriation during a cure. To give Lacanian psychoanalysis a place in the United States, then, implies the desire to keep the discovery of Freud alive in this surrounding; an unending desire for deciphering and withstanding the interminable enigmas of human subjectivity.

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1. Such a path has been opened through several institutions created during recent years, among which we will name only a few: Lacanian Clinical Forum (Stockbridge, MA) Nomos (New York), Aprés Coup (New York), Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis (Berkeley, CA) Lacanian American Clinic (New York), GIFRIC (Canada), in order to foster the continued development of psychoanalysis through the exchange between North American, South American, and European analysts.

REFERENCES Bentolila López, D. (1992). Lacan en los Estados Unidos. Rosario, Argentina: Homo Sapiens Editores. Bentolila López, D. (1992). Es posible el sujeto dividido en los Estados Unidos? Typescript. Crews, F. (1988). Beyond Sulloway’s “Freud”: Psychoanalysis minus the myth of the hero. In P. Clark, & C. Wright (Eds.), Mind, psychoanalysis, and science (pp. 235–256). Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell. Freud, S. (1953). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 7, p. 210). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1905) Freud, S. (1957). On the history of the psychoanalytic movement. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 14, pp. 7–66). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1914) Freud, S. (1960). Jokes and their relation to the unconscious. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 8, pp. 1–238). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1905) Freud, S. (1966). Extracts from the Fliess papers. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 1, pp. 233–242). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1950) Gay, P. (1988). Freud, a life of our time. New York: W. W. Norton and Co. Kernberg, O. (1990). The current status of psychoanalysis. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 41, 45–62. Lacan, J. (1975). Untitled. (B. Johnson, Trans.). Paper presented at the Kanzer seminar, November 25, 1975, Yale University, New Haven, CT.

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Lacan, J. (1977). Écrits: A selection (A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1966) Lacan, J. (1978). Conclusions. Congress et Journees: Lettres de L’ Ecole. Freudienne, Paris, July 6 and 9. Bulletin Internationale de l’Ecole Freudienne de Paris, June 1979, Volume 1, 25. Lacan, J. (1992). The seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VII: The ethics of psychoanalysis, 1959–1960 (J.-A. Miller, Ed., D. Porter, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1986) Muller, J. (1991). Lacan’s transmission. Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought, 11, 483–533. Riesman, D. (1950). The lonely crowd. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Shakespeare, W. (1984). Romeo and Juliet. In John Dover (Ed.), The complete works of William Shakespeare (p. 741). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

19 Looking for Lacan Virtual Psychology Ian Parker

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s critical psychology gains a more established foothold as a viable theoretical alternative to the traditional paradigm and as it articulates its particular forms of research and cultural analysis, it is pressing to make sure that we fully absorb the extent of critical psychology’s challenge to the discipline. Once a psychologist, it is easy to fall back into being a psychologist again. What does this disciplinary seduction entail? As a form of resistance to psychology, psychoanalysis is a valuable resource for some critical psychologists, but not because we are interested in disciplinary matchmaking. Under careful examination, an examination made more possible by Lacan, one can perceive the radical difference between the split subject of psychoanalysis and the unified psychological subject ministered/monitored by well-intended practitioners. As well, the psychoanalytic permeation of current Western 331

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notions of subjective life and its parallel exclusion and misappropriation by psychology should give critical psychologists pause. Is their founding mandate to craft a more socially reflective psychology equally liable to the tradition’s exclusions? Does critical psychology buy psychology’s image of psychoanalysis? To tease out these issues will require approaches from many angles, from the cultural contexts of psychoanalysis and psychology to a question of the former’s potential radicality. Such inquiries cannot be separated from articulating psychology proper as a particular kind of apparatus that functions in relation to psychoanalysis and in relation to culture.

Why Are Some Psychologists Looking for Lacan? Increasing numbers of psychologists are turning to psychoanalysis. One set of reasons for psychologists turning to psychoanalysis is closely related to concern about what psychology is and what it does. There is greater openness to new ideas in the discipline now, after the paradigm “crisis” of the 1960s and 1970s, and an increased disciplinary anxiety in the face of discourse analysis, feminist politics, and postmodern infusions (Parker, 1989, Burman & Parker, 1993; Kvale, 1992; Griffin et al., 1998). And although psychoanalysis predates the major paradigms of behaviorism, cognitivism, and humanism, its Lacanian incarnation wraps it up much more attractively. Through Lacan, some of us are finding our way back to a new Freud. This Freud is a strange shape-shifter who is able to take discursive, feminist, or postmodern form depending on how psychologists want to read him. But this does not fully answer the question. Indeed, there could be no single answer to the question as to why some psychologists are looking for Lacan, because psychology is no single unified enterprise. A behaviorist link with Lacan, for example, need have no necessary consequences for the way humanists harmonize his ideas with theirs (Parker, 1995). Although there would seem to be logical conceptual effects of a psychoanalytic breach in the core of one paradigm upon the others, psychology is a discipline that has managed to hold itself together by efficiently sealing sections of the hull off from each other. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify two kinds of answer to the question of Lacan’s relevance, two contradictory sets of reasons. Both sets of reasons, and their contradictory tension, emerge in the wake of the formation of “critical psychology,” which cuts across and against paradigm boundaries (e.g., Fox & Prilleltensky, 1997; Ibáñez & Íñiguez, 1997). This critical psy-

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chology is a heterogeneous object in a network that recruits ideas from outside the discipline in order either to challenge or corrode it. Critical psychology gathers together the many different objections to the way the discipline normalizes behavior and pathologizes those who do not fit in. It brings together progressive practitioners in partnership with those who use psychological services and who are willing to challenge abuses of power and ideological prescriptions for subjectivity in capitalist society.

Security Operations There have been repeated attempts to draw psychoanalysis and psychology closer and equally vigorous attempts to keep it at bay. Many early researchers made use of psychoanalytic theory, and some prominent figures in present-day psychology textbooks, who are presented as antithetical to Freud, were actually active members of psychoanalytic organizations. Luria, who helped found the Russian Psychoanalytic Society, and Piaget, who was a member of the IPA, are two examples (Roudinesco, 1990). Against this, and as part of the reaction by experimental psychologists, the editor of the golden jubilee edition of the American Journal of Psychology warned its readers of the dangers of dabbling with psychoanalysis as an “immigrant subject” disseminating “a lurid doctrine of lust in little children” (Bentley, 1937, p. 464). As the “immigrant subject,” psychoanalysis adapted itself to something akin to the kind of mental functioning that psychology could recognize. Psychoanalysis started to become more alluring, and the discipline, which has always been adept at absorbing and neutralizing foreign bodies when they are keen to seek approval, started to select the most compliant elements. This is where trends clustering around ego-psychology and its successors were happy to confirm what real psychologists have always known. And so the existence of developmental stages was ratified and universalized, internal cognitive representations as coherent discrete bases of rational thought were identified and legitimized, and self-sufficient individualism was celebrated and normalized (e.g., Stern, 1985). The most obvious poisonous fruits of this alliance in prescriptions and proscriptions for mental health and sexuality were a focus of discontent in the 1960s and 1970s (Kitzinger & Perkins, 1993; Parker et al., 1995). The cohabitation suggested by critical psychology’s interest in Lacan repeats neither psychology’s traditional repudiation of psychoanalysis nor its usual assimilation. Once psychology had been

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dissolved into symbolic processes by discourse analysts, once it had been located as an expression of patriarchal structures by feminists, once it had been fragmented into the play of little stories by postmodernists, psychology as a positivistic science became manifestly insufficient, found lacking. A new approach founded on psychological principles was not enough, and some began to look farther afield, until they found Lacan (e.g., Hollway, 1989; Walkerdine, 1991). There had been a good deal of flirting with others around the Freudian field (object relations and so forth) while Lacan watched and waited, and the flight into therapy that has attracted many on the left outside psychology also structured the courtship, but at last reading Lacan’s potential for a critical psychology seems possible. In some cases these inquiring psychologists have fallen hard, and this book is testimony to that, while in others Lacan has translated into the soft discursive, feminist, postmodern plaything en route to the real thing. The “real thing” in these cases might be Klein or Bion and does then threaten to look once again like psychology (e.g., Frosh, 1997). The incessant return of psychoanalytic precepts to digestible psychological categories is a deep problem, and one that impels us to look for a different answer, a different way to work with psychoanalysis. Subversion of the Subject There is value in remembering the past links between psychologists and Freudian ideas, and this is particularly important because of the way they have been so ruthlessly screened out, the way that active amnesia in the discipline is such that now “psychoanalysis is the repressed other of psychology” (Burman, 1994, p. 104). On the one hand, psychology detests its historical tie to psychoanalysis with concepts that are now mocked for being unscientific nonsense. On the other hand, representations of psychoanalysis in psychology textbooks are distorted so that it does seem as if Freud found ages and stages in development, as if he treated cognitive ego functions as autonomous, and as if the architecture of psychoanalysis rested upon the existing natural sciences (Richards, 1989). So, to show how deeply indebted psychology is to genuinely psychoanalytic concepts at the very same moment as it forecloses its past association with Freud is to deconstruct what the discipline holds most dear. A critical psychology might emphasize such links, even to the point of “constructing” them in our analysis of psychology— employing psychoanalytic vocabulary to dismantle the delusory structure that underpins the discipline, for example—because we suspect that they are too much for the discipline to bear.

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This is why we look to Lacan. Here, we find psychoanalysis that refuses basic psychological categories. Perceptual processes are structured by forms of fantasy that are not reducible to “vision” or “interpretation.” Cognitive processes are not reducible to “mechanisms,” still less to “consciousness.” Memory is not reducible to the accurate or faulty recall of past events. Once the interior space of psychology is opened up in this way, rendered impossible as a positivism, then disciplinary specifications of development, personality, and social behavior become equally untenable. More broadly, this work supports a fundamental challenge to the image of “the rational unitary subject” (e.g., Henriques et al., 1984). Lacanian psychoanalysis is not psychology. Psychology, Psychoanalysis, and Culture Psychology Psychology is not simply a collection of theories, but it is embedded in a dense network of practices inside and outside colleges and clinics that focus upon the individual and which observe and regulate activity and experience. This network forms the “psy-complex” as an apparatus of power integral to Western culture (Ingleby, 1985; Rose, 1985). This apparatus constitutes subjects as patients, clients, consumers, or users of psychological services, but it also constitutes subjects who service the apparatus. To be a “psychologist,” then, is to assume an identity and professional function in a system of representations of the individual subject and to engage in the calibration and control of others. This is to become one of what Lacan, referring to those who were “busying themselves psychologizing analytic theory,” called “active practitioners of orthopaedics” (Lacan, 1979, p. 23). It is also to subject oneself to a disciplinary regime in which one becomes, as an exemplar and representative of the profession, a psychological subject. A disciplinary regime operates in such a way as to prescribe certain forms of subjectivity that guarantee the power of reigning apparatuses of knowledge, such as psychology, as if they were true, and to prescribe, as evil, perverse, or unnatural, forms of resistance to the “truth.” This is why critical psychology is not a psychology at all, and refuses to become one. Rather, it operates as a series of perspectives that tackle the way the psy-complex functions, the way the discipline mirrors present-day culturally specific and historically bound assumptions about human nature, experience, and behavior, and the way its personnel make it so. Critical psychology defines itself in relation to psychology, but not with a view to reforming it

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or replacing it. Its target is a discipline that constructs what it pretends to discover and which always refinds its object, the alienated competitive subject of capitalist society, because it is structured around the ideological preoccupations of that society. Any articulation of subjectivity that would extend beyond this framework and its reductions is an object of suspicion (unscientific and so forth). As far as subjectivity is concerned, psychology traditionally accepts psychoanalysis only on condition that it is filtered in such a way that it suppresses any intimations of unconscious fantasy. The reemergence of humanist strands in the discipline recently under cover of discursive, feminist, and postmodernist critique means that it is also possible for a version of psychoanalysis to return in this sort of psychological theorizing but only insofar as it glorifies the direct expression of experience. This phenomenological default to the experiential requires a psychoanalysis cleansed of an accurate picture of the Freudian unconscious. Of course, there is room for the careful incitement of personal “experience” in the psy-complex. In fact, some sense of confession on the part of subjects, as they carry out the work of self-examination and speech within the forms of discourse that psychologists are able to understand, is a necessary correlative to the more overt regulatory practices that those psychologists work to devise and enforce (Foucault, 1977, 1981). Notwithstanding this, subjectivity still threatens to erupt from within as an irrational unreasonable challenge to the discipline. This is doubly dangerous to psychology, though, because this insistence of the subject inside the discipline is also a reminder of the role of culture as something that structures what the discipline does. Culture is ceaselessly repressed as the Other of psychology, and psychoanalysis saturates contemporary culture, the very culture that psychology pretends to explain (Parker, 1997a). For all the recent talk in the discipline about the value of ordinary “common sense” and “everyday reasoning,” the presence of psychoanalytic notions in Western society means that common sense and culture have to be carefully inspected before they are deemed sufficiently ordinary to be allowed in.

Psychoanalysis Psychoanalysis emerged at a historical moment when there were profound economic changes, which threw into question experiences of identity as tied to a particular location and opened it to the ravages of the marketplace. Not only was the speed of change

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accelerating in the eighteenth century, but the new industrial proletariat was torn from the land and their labor was transformed into a commodity that had no fixed value but was dependent on the price of other commodities. This disturbance, in what would come to be romanticized as the “natural” rhythms of life and the disruption of what now feels to be a lost “natural” relation with others, requires something like psychoanalytic subjectivity and something like a psychoanalytic practice of remaking connections that have been alienated and concealed from the subject (Parker, 1997a). Freud succeeded in capturing a sense of the creation and disturbance of the self at a cultural level and in reading social processes in his case histories through the optic of hysterical misery as they became refracted and refashioned as narratives to be told to another. Nearly a century later, Lacanian psychoanalysis both forces the pace of the progressive tendencies in the field and more faithfully reflects changes in capitalism in recent years. Neither aspect is free of ambivalence, of dangers, of reactionary consequences. With respect to the history of psychoanalysis, the Lacanian movement has operated as a force on the left. From the association with Surrealism in the early 1930s through links with the student revolt in the 1960s, Lacan and his followers, sometimes enthusiastically and sometimes very reluctantly, have been mobilized to develop critiques of adaptation and ideology in capitalist society (Macey, 1988; Roudinesco, 1990). The notion that the unconscious is exterior to the subject, as an Other to the subject, as the discourse of the other, makes it possible to conceive of “mental” processes as culturally embedded. Gender is no longer wired-in as an essential biologically defined form of identity, but can be respecified as formed in relation to a symbolic order (Mitchell, 1974; Squire, 1989). It is here that Lacan connects with some of the discursive and feminist work in psychology, making it much more appealing than ego-psychology to those working in those traditions. Lacan retrieves a conception of meaning as always-already social, as directed to objects that are structured as if they were ordered like “signs.” In this recasting of Freudian notions through the lens of the subject’s relation to the signifier, Lacan unravels Freud even as he returns to him. It is this thematic within Lacanian psychoanalysis that blends so nicely with the similarly deconstructive impulse of critical psychology. Lacanian psychoanalysis also anticipated some of the more significant mutations in capitalist culture, and it is by virtue of this that it is sometimes described as “poststructuralist” or “postmodern” (e.g., Sarup, 1988). However, it would be more accurate to say that

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Lacan’s reading of Freud emerges from within the context of Hegelian phenomenology in France and he then articulated this reading with structuralism (Miller, 1996). There is thus a tension in Lacanian psychoanalysis between the “subject” and “structure” that helpfully problematizes even while it reproduces the opposition between the “individual” and “society” (Henriques et al., 1984). So, the “subject” is exteriorized within a field of meaning, the realm of the other that it does not control, while the “structure” is interiorized as something that gives meaning to the subject as an effect of the signifier (Lacan, 1973/1979). Lacan’s decentered subject of representation considerably predates the development of postmodernism. While the term postmodern is misleading, however, it does capture something of the seductiveness of his work for some critical psychologists at the very moment that this characterization of what he is up to misleads us. Lacan is not “postmodern,” and neither for that matter is late capitalist culture and psychology (Parker, 1998), but something of the predicament that we find ourselves in as subjects in some sectors of culture does chime with Lacan’s account of the subject. The economic restructuring of capitalism after World War II has exacerbated some of the tendencies to fragmentation and narcissistic disturbance that were present from the middle of the last century. The growth of the information and leisure sectors has also stimulated the development of spaces within the social where it is possible to experience a sense of dispersed symbolically mediated subjectivity that approximates conceptions of mirroring and misrecognition that Lacan emphasized. The virtualization of relationships such that significant others are no longer necessarily present to the subject and the fabrication of electronic environments and persona within them such that one’s own subjectivity becomes experienced as artifice, mean that there is now a form of mental space that seems to escape the real and to constitute an “ego” that is entirely dependent on the symbolic (Parker, 1997a). The consequences of this are overplayed in postmodern writing, for the labor of those who work in the service sector and the time the customer may spend in electronic “free space” away from everyday life are still conditioned by patterns of exploitation. But what the growth of such total media accomplishes is the production and consumption of spaces for the virtualization of subjectivity that have consequences for the fantasies that subjects in the “real world” have about what is real and what is constructed. These consequences are played through in different arenas, from the overlap of communities consuming designer drugs and those writing virtual

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reality game software, to those who exit cyberspace to engage in what they now experience as “reality-hacking,” to those who understand what is going on in a science fiction film when there is recursive loop in time-space and the identity of the protagonist is fictional. It is in the context of this virtualization of spaces for the emergence of symbolically mediated subjectivity in late capitalism that it makes sense to talk about the development of “cyberpsychology” (GordoLópez & Parker, 1999).

Culture Psychology and psychoanalysis did not develop out of nowhere with culture as a mere backdrop, but they each have served as forms of practice and each have played a part in Western culture in constituting forms of subjectivity. Psychology has operated as a form of intellectual and professional practice through the psy-complex, and it has both drawn upon and contributed to theories of self. Action and experience, and our reflections upon who we are and who we could be, have been mediated by descriptions of behavioral reinforcement, of the mind as operating like a computer, or of human needs as ascending through levels of self-actualization. However, much to the annoyance of psychologists who are keen to popularize their theories and who want their subjects to speak accurately about their psychology within an acceptable vocabulary, psychoanalytic discourse has proven itself at least as dominant a form of self-representation. Studies in the late 1950s in France and in the United States in the 1960s have each picked up this circulation of psychoanalytic concepts and the ways in which people come to believe that they do indeed have an unconscious, defense mechanisms, and childhood conflicts (Berger, 1965; Moscovici, 1976). Given this cultural embrace of psychoanalysis, it is possible to track the way different forms of psychoanalytic subjectivity are circulating in culture using the methodological device of the “discursive complex.” A discursive complex is structured into the symbolic order and it also structures the subjectivity of those who speak it (Parker, 1997a). Discursive complexes are systems of statements that constitute objects, including things such as emotions and the paraphernalia of psychoanalytic theory. In this respect they are very like the “discourses” that Foucault and then critical approaches to discourse analysis in psychology have focused upon (Parker, 1997b). They also organize subjectivity around patterns of action and experience that render us into beings who feel deep

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down that psychoanalysis is true for us (Parker, 1997c). If we read the signs of cyberculture carefully, for example, we find elements of high-tech Lacanian theory—organized around the power of symbolic systems to recreate us as we use them, around memory as something fragile and uncertain, and around reality as at the mercy of those who define it (Parker, 1997a). In William Gibson’s (1993) cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, for example, cyberspace is “a consensual hallucination.” This symbolic space is already like the unconscious understood in psychoanalytic terms, and this language system invades the subject and becomes a kind of unconscious for them. Neal Stephenson’s (1993) Snow Crash describes something similar in the “Metaverse” as “a fictional structure made out of code,” and here people are represented as pieces of software called “avatars.” Selves can be written and rewritten as machine code in other cyberpunk accounts, such as Rudy Rucker’s (1985) Software. Language, in these accounts, is no mere resource for the subject to speak, and there is an image of the very language system that gives us a sense of self twisting around and sabotaging our attempt to understand ourselves. As we read cyberpunk and imagine ourselves in virtual reality, then, we are entering a Lacanian symbolic universe. In cyberpunk writing there are also psychoanalytic notions of the past in relation to others, and in the ways in which significant others recreate a form of reality for the subject. In Jeff Noon’s (1993) Vurt, the novel takes virtual reality as a technological form and uses that as a template to describe the way forms of self are destroyed and recreated at different levels of the symbolic through different colored chemical feathers. Pat Cadigan’s (1992) Fools revolves around Marva, a method actress who must trace the internal structure of a series of memories that now inhabit her and that she must perform as if they were real. Marva oscillates between different versions of truth and the past, and the novel lurches from one kind of subjectivity to another as different forms of memory are activated. Here is memory as a process that will always bewitch and betray us. Rather than simply recalling events from the past, these representations inhabit us and frame what we know. Memory retroactively transforms who we imagine we were and leads into a future that then reshapes what was. There is also a powerful anxiety about the real in cyberpunk writing. In Gibson’s Neuromancer, the real of the body is referred to as the “meat,” but even here there is an uncertainty about whether that real is only a delusion. Rather than being a stable reference point, “reality” is as uncertain as anything else. Even when more

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extreme characterizations of the real—often as “meat”—appear in this writing, they are still quickly undermined and dissolved into software, just as the “real” must answer to the “symbolic” in Lacanian psychoanalysis (rather than the reverse). Quite strange specifications of language, memory, and reality are reconfigured as discursive complexes of “the symbolic,” “deferred action,” and “the real.” In this way psychoanalytic subjects are formed, and these psychoanalytic subjects may well now to all intents and purposes be Lacanian subjects.

Conclusions Many things have changed in the discipline so that there is space for “discursive psychology,” “feminist psychology,” “postmodern psychology,” and even discussion in the journals of the contribution of “critical psychology.” Is this not the time, an opportunity for a constructive reflection upon what psychology is doing, and might not Lacanian psychoanalysis be an example of something new that might help us speed that process of progressive change? It is certainly true that psychology has changed in recent years, and there is space for us to play with alternative frameworks, but the role of psychology as a practice as part of the psy-complex is intact and, if anything, all the more efficient and triumphant than before. New forms of advice, counseling, empowerment, and self-help are better than psychometric tests, forced medication, professional abuse, or electroshock but they also function as soft buffer zones, often as areas of intermediate treatment through which people are assessed before being referred to the more obviously unpleasant coercive core of the apparatus. And here even well-meaning Lacanian psychoanalysts will often have to participate, unwilling or not, in practices of diagnosis through which the subject of the psy-complex may accumulate a psychiatric career. This is a warning against what we end up doing if we operate as psychologists. To work with and through the field of Lacanian psychoanalysis may be quite another matter, a cultural matter. The reason why discussions of Freud and Lacan seem so interminable and obsessive is that psychoanalysis is so deeply woven into the fabric of our culture. It is there in our gossip about other people’s experiences and strange ideas and it is there in our talk about ourselves. We speak psychoanalytically when we do not realize we are doing it, and that psychoanalytic discourse then makes us who we are. This is why we need to develop a way of capturing

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the way positions are constructed in this discourse, the way psychoanalytic subjectivity is formed, as virtual psychology. Then we will know where to look for Lacan and why he helps our critical work in and against the discipline.

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Lacan, J. (1973). Of structure as an inmixing of an otherness prerequisite to any subject whatsoever. In R. Macksey, & E. Donato (Eds.), The structuralist controversy: The languages of criticism and the sciences of man (pp. 186–200). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Lacan, J. (1979). The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis. (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Harmondsworth: Penguin. (Original work published 1973) Macey, D. (1988). Lacan in contexts. London: Verso. Miller, J.-A. (1996). An introduction to seminars I and II: Lacan’s orientation prior to 1953 (I). In R. Feldstein, B. Fink, & M. Jaanus (Eds.), Reading seminars I and II: Lacan’s return to Freud (pp. 3–14). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Mitchell, J. (1974). Psychoanalysis and feminism. Harmondsworth: Pelican. Moscovici, S. (1976). La psychanalyse: Son image et son public (2nd ed.). Paris: Presses Universitaire de France. Noon, J. (1993). Vurt. Littleborough: Ringpull Press. Parker, I. (1989). The crisis in modern social psychology, and how to end it. London and New York: Routledge. Parker, I. (1995). Everyday behavior(ism) and therapeutic discourse: Deconstructing the ego as verbal nucleus in Skinner and Lacan. In J. Siegfried (Ed.), Therapeutic and everyday discourse as behavior change: Towards a microanalysis in psychotherapy process research (pp. 447–467). New York: Ablex. Parker, I. (1997a). Psychoanalytic culture: Psychoanalytic discourse in western society. London: Sage. Parker, I. (1997b). Discursive psychology. In D. Fox, & I. Prilleltensky (Eds.), Critical psychology: An introduction (pp. 284–298). London: Sage. Parker, I. (1997c). Discourse analysis and psychoanalysis. British Journal of Social Psychology, 36, 479–495. Parker, I. (1998). Against postmodernism: Psychology in cultural context. Theory & Psychology, 8, (5), pp. 621–647. Parker, I., Georgaca, E., Harper, D., McLaughlin, T., & Stowell-Smith, M. (1995). Deconstructing psychopathology. London: Sage. Richards, B. (1989). Images of Freud: Cultural responses to psychoanalysis. London: Dent. Rose, N. (1985). The psychological complex: Psychology, politics and society in England 1869–1939. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Roudinesco, E. (1990). Jacques Lacan and co.: A history of psychoanalysis in France, 1925–1985. London: Free Association Books. Rucker, R. (1985). Software. London: ROC. Sarup, M. (1988). An introductory guide to post-structuralism and postmodernism. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

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Squire, C. (1989). Significant differences: Feminism in psychology. London: Routledge. Stephenson, N. (1993). Snow crash. London: ROC. Stern, D. N. (1985). The interpersonal world of the infant: A view from psychoanalysis and developmental psychology. New York: Basic Books. Walkerdine, V. (1991). Schoolgirl fictions. London: Verso.

20 Executors of an Ancient Pact Lúcia Villela

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ince the beginning of the century, a number of polarities, such as nature and culture, contingent and universal, inner and outer, have functioned as organizers for the work of those trying to understand the intricacies of the human mind, whether from a philosophical, anthropological, psychological, or psychoanalytic point of view. In the last few decades, these polarities have been especially central to the work of anthropologists and psychoanalysts. Contemporaneously, the desirability or undesirability of such differentiation—in fact, their very feasibility—have been central to the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan, whose theories have played a crucial role in providing a framework for the interdisciplinary study of man and society. And why should that matter for the elucidation of Lacan’s importance for the work of psychologists in general and psychoanalysts in particular? In a paper entitled Intimacies and boundaries: The performance and reperformance of the law in psychoanalysis and elsewhere, 345

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Barratt (1997) throws new light on the relationship between inner and outer, by discussing the ethics of psychoanalysis, in terms of a distinction between the normativity of codes and the lawfulness of boundaries. Codes are culturally specific, contingent (for instance, where and when one should or should not burp). Boundaries are more powerfully encoded, universal. Boundaries have to do with such distinctions as me and not me, with masculine and feminine, with conscious and repressed. But inner events though they may be, their operation is culturally and contextually circumscribed. Such awareness of the interdependence of inner and outer is a characteristic of many different orientations in current psychology (e.g., Critical Psychology, Cultural Psychology) and in any number of psychoanalytic theories. Therefore, it is not surprising that one of the best descriptions of the psychoanalytic process is that given by a psychoanalytically sophisticated anthropologist, in his article on symbols as efficient agents (Lévi-Strauss, 1958, pp. 186–205). In analyzing the process of shamanistic cure, Lévi-Strauss (1958) describes how the shaman uses “specific psychological representations . . . to combat equally specific physiological disturbances.” Through songs that create a “psychophysiological mythology,” and through actions that evoke a “ritualized social cohesion, the shaman renders acceptable to the mind pains which the body refuses to tolerate” (pp. 186–205). This type of cure, Lévi-Strauss claims, places shamanism on the borderline between physical medicine and psychoanalysis. The process is different from medical treatment because the relationship between germ and disease is external to the patient, while the relationship between a belief in monsters and disease is internal and symbolic. (Lacan might argue that both relationships are internal and symbolic.) It is different from psychoanalysis because the myth that establishes the symbolic relation is socially given and does not necessarily correspond to personal experience, while in the psychoanalytic cure the patient himself constructs an individual myth with elements drawn from his past. In the shamanic cure, the shaman speaks for the patient; in the psychoanalytic cure the patient speaks and may even “put words in the mouth of the analyst” (Lévi-Strauss, 1958, p. 195). The shaman does not elicit personal information from his patients. Therefore we may conclude that remembrance of things past—which is often considered one of the keys of psychoanalytic therapy—“is only one expression of a more fundamental method which must be defined without considering the individual or the collective genesis of the myth” (Lévi-Strauss, 1958, p. 199; emphasis

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mine). In our industrial civilization there is no longer space for mythic time outside man himself, except for politics, Lévi-Strauss adds, and it is from this lack that psychoanalysis derives some of its characteristics. I’d like to take exception to this statement by Lévi-Strauss about the loss of space for mythic time outside man himself. Besides politics and psychoanalysis, our society has evolved a very complex and symbolically effective mythic dimension—the cinema. In this chapter I shall illustrate the usefulness of Lacanian psychoanalysis and structural anthropology to psychology by applying the theories of Lacan, Lévi-Strauss, and their followers (especially Willy Apollon and Christian Metz) to the psychological study of this mythic dimension. In Questions posed by psychoanalysis to anthropology, Apollon (1995) expanded, in Lacanian terms, the description of psychoanalysis given by Lévi-Strauss in terms of symbolic efficacy. Apollon’s premise was that for anthropology these questions are basically political, having to do with the specific and the contingent; for psychoanalysis they are basically ethical, having to do with universals, such as the ethics of being human. However, for each individual subject, that ethic of being human can only be articulated through the specificity of a given culture. Mental illness—and we might add its social counterparts, such as oppression and violence— is a sign that the articulation of the universal to the specificity of a culture was somehow damaged for a given subject. Apollon (1995, 1996) reasserted the tenor of Freud’s (1930/1961) discontent with civilization in Lacanian terms. Man is ruled by language in his thinking, his self-awareness, his ascension to the symbolic order of what Barratt (1997) calls codes and boundaries. But language, man’s strength which gives him an uniqueness other animals do not have, is also his weakness. It is imperfect, full of holes and defects that limit its power to express “reality,” to express what Lacan calls the real. These defects shut man off from what Lacan calls jouissance, that is, from that immediate and unambivalent satisfaction that a hungry animal has when it eats its prey—a satisfaction that for the moment is total (or so we assume), even when the satisfaction brings about the consumption and destruction of the object that satisfied the original desire, in this case, the prey that satisfied the hunger. Language with all the distances, differentiations, and ambivalences that it brings to our awareness, with all the laws and codes that will forever circumscribe us in whatever society we belong to, makes jouissance impossible for that speaking animal we call human. So in order to

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hold its members together, a society must offer some compensation for the loss of that immediate and total satisfaction that we assume (nonspeaking) animals have. The problem is twofold: on the one hand a society must veil as best it can the fact that its laws and codes are arbitrary, in order to maintain its credibility; on the other, it must somehow console us for the impossibility of ever attaining the jouissance we seek. The next sections of this chapter will examine the problematic outlined above as encoded in one of the most popular cultural artifacts of our time, films.

Film as Myth In his poem “Mirrors,” Borges (1963) tells us that he always felt a horror of those impenetrable crystals where we see our inverted reflections: I ask myself what whim of fate Made me so fearful of a glancing mirror. (p. 60) If we think of the silver screen as a mirror of our shared wishes, conflicts, and fears, then the muted pain of these two lines can be an organizing metaphor for the not at all muted pain of such films as Alien, Aliens, The Terminator, and Blade Runner. Mirrors are infinite, elemental executors of an ancient pact, they tell us we are mere vanity, the reflection of a face that gazes as it is gazed upon. Borges prepares us for what would happen if the mirror glanced back, maybe too soon, too intrusively; and if, instead of reflecting our illusion of cohesion, it broke into pieces that allowed us to see the shape of our own desires. My argument assumes that films are the myths of our times; and that myths, poetry, fairy tales, and narratives in general are metaphoric attempts to understand and explain the perceived realities of our own selves, our future, our world. They are ways of working out contradictions that refuse to be solved and that otherwise might never be expressed. For both Lévi-Strauss (1958) and Lacan (1966/1977; 1979), the contradictions inherent in relationships between the contingent and the universal can only be expressed in mythic form, whether they are found in a shamanic treatment or in the discourse that takes place in the analytic office. The mythic character of film narratives is especially clear in science fiction and horror films, two genres that have enormously

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grown in popular and critical appeal, and genres in which the questions of origins, birth, death, and sexual differences are thematically approached. Tarratt (1970) suggests that science fiction reflects both society’s anxieties about its own technology and power to destroy, and the individual’s anxiety about repressed sexual desire. What does it mean to be sentient, alive, and human, as contrasted with dead, nonsentient, or locked in some sort of involuntary (as in Aliens) symbiosis? And what does it mean to be a man, what does it mean to be a woman? A number of relatively recent films and plays—such as All of Me, Ghost, Switch, and Prelude to a Kiss— have explored the possibility of being both dead and alive or both man and woman in the same body. In the consulting room, too, these two questions, at one time considered diagnostic, are now being mentioned by all types of patients. These thematic concerns of science fiction films illustrate our currently painful preoccupation with questions of personal and social identity; our uncertainties about who and what we are as individuals, and as members of our own society; our uncertainties about the boundaries of our own species and sex. They also illustrate our grandiose dreams of technological control, the fear-provoking power to duplicate ourselves, to travel in space and time, and to meet different sentient species. In these questions, science fiction could be said to find its own doubling in a proliferation of current psychoanalytic theories that share their concerns about the human subject. Is the human subject cohesive or fragmented, adaptive or eternally discontented and fated to accept its own alienation as a prerequisite to the attainment of a transcendent decentering and intersubjectivity? This chapter focuses mostly, but not exclusively, on Blade Runner, in order to explore concepts of organic versus mechanic and human born versus artificially fabricated; to explore concepts of gender and sexual differences; and to explore the linkage of these concepts with the repetition compulsion that both Freud (1920/ 1955b) and Lacan (1966/1977) placed in that dark area beyond the pleasure principle.

Methods and Rationale This chapter assumes that the screen reflects back our conscious and unconscious shared wishes; that movies are the myths of our times, and that myths, poetry, fairy tales, and narratives in general are metaphoric attempts to understand and explain our world as we perceive it. That is, movies are a reflection of our shared values.

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These assumptions are not falsifiable. They can only be granted as reasonable or rejected; still, the list of those who have granted them is impressive. As early as 1725, Giambattista Vico (Bergin & Fisch, 1984) was claiming that myths were civil histories written in poetical form. Since Freud (1906/1959; 1919/1955a), Lévi-Strauss (1958), Lacan (1966/1977), and Metz (1975), this list has been growing at an exponential rate. Lévi-Strauss (1958) describes the myth as having a pattern that is both synchronic and diachronic, both reversible and nonreversible. He also argues that, in a narrative, it is the outcome that determines the story. If so, then a film should be read backward as well as forward, especially where a forward reading uncovers a break in the previously established logic of the narrative. This paper also subscribes to his notion that all versions of a myth are parts of that myth. In the case of a film, that includes public and critical reaction; production history, if publicized; and published reports of televised interviews with the filmmakers. Editing, cuts, and restored versions, when available, are a great help in identifying the repressed in the film. Before proceeding with the description of assumptions and of methods used, a caveat is in order. In the analysis of a specific cultural product, it is important to realize that the repressed motives and desires that can be identified are neither those of the individual makers of the product nor those of the characters in the narrative. An individual (whether writer, director, editor) cannot (and should not) be analyzed without her or his participation in the analytic process. The characters are doubly spoken—by their own language and that of the text—so the film as structure must also be heard. Thus, what we see on the screen are our own individual faces as members of a collectivity, our own individual faces as mirrored and filtered through the institutional system that underwrites the making of a film. One goes to the movies because one wants to. In order to survive, the industry must arouse, in the spectator, the desire to pay for his and her ticket; the film industry must cater to our desire to narrow the gaps between demand, desire, and experience. In analyzing the narrative itself, I follow a somewhat modified structuralist technique: I attempt to identify a number of mythemes and bundles of relations, as Lévi-Strauss (1958) did in his analysis of the Oedipus myth. Mythemes, story, and plot can then be analyzed using concepts from both psychoanalysis and structural anthropology.

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Through its uses of images, filmic texts as such add a number of complexities to both psychoanalytic and structural concepts. Metz (1975) describes film viewing as a regressive, dream-like experience induced by the darkened house, the silence of the spectators, the inhibition of movement, the relative comfort of the padded chairs, and the perceptual characteristics of the image—all of which encourage suspension of disbelief. In this regressive state the pleasure principle is enhanced—as well as that which lies beyond it— and primary functioning in general is encouraged. The cinema is thus an imaginary signifier that restores the early experiences of primary and secondary identifications from that time of life that Lacan (1966/1977) calls the mirror stage, that time when the child, with great jubilation, first recognizes its own image in the mirror. However, it is the image of others that we see on the screen. By definition the process involves voyeurism and fetishism. Metz (1975) is also interested in formal notions of representation and devises a system of transformations around four axes of binary operations, a system somewhat similar to Piaget’s mathematical groups. For instance, the axis metaphor/metonymy (which is referential) could combine with the axis paradigm/syntagma (which is discursive) to generate a metaphor presented syntagmatically. Metz (1975, p. 189) gives, as an example, the opening sequence in Chaplin’s Modern Times, in which a flock of sheep and a crowd of people are juxtaposed. Their contiguity in sequencing suggests similarity (although it could also suggest contrast, it is the comparison of two alternatives that constitutes the comparative—that is, the metaphorical—unit). In Blade Runner, while Deckard is being recruited back to the unit by Bryant, the chief of police, Bryant’s second in command, Gaff, is shown making little origami figures. The camera focuses on Bryant and Deckard, then on Gaff and the paper figure—which at that point we cannot see clearly enough to identify. Deckard tries to leave but is stopped by Bryant, who makes it clear that Deckard’s life will not be so easy if he refuses, he’ll no longer be a “cop,” he’ll be just “people.” Deckard stays. The camera focuses on the origami and we see it’s the stylized shape of a chicken, a metaphor for Gaff ’s current opinion of Deckard as “chickenhead.” A metaphor can also be presented paradigmatically. For example, flames may substitute for a love scene: instead of a graphic love scene, the camera may just shift to flames, suggesting the intensity of feeling that accompanies the expression of sexual love. In Blade Runner, the camera shifts from Deckard and Rachel making

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love to a holograph of a beautiful oriental woman advertising a Chinese restaurant. The comparison here is by contrast, the agonizing intensity of their relationship and the depersonalized world that surrounds them.

The Filmic Text: Blade Runner Blade Runner, a film directed by Ridley Scott, with a screenplay by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, is based on a novel by Phillip K. Dick (1968). It is the story of the conflicts and changes wrought upon hunter and hunted, in the course of a chase in which Earth’s authorities attempt to keep away from the earth, or to destroy, a group of organically engineered beings called replicants. It was released in 1982, widely reviewed, and by 1988 it had made nearly fifteen million dollars in box office rentals. Because of its status as a cult film and its emphasis on technology and its discontents, Blade Runner works well to demonstrate the relevance and nature of the problematics discussed in earlier sections. As all versions of a myth can be considered part of the myth, I will take into consideration not only the original commercial release, but also the novel on which it was loosely based, and the director’s cut, which was released after its cult status was achieved. The movie version, in its commercial release, will be privileged; significant differences and oppositions will be mentioned; where one text makes explicit what the other implies, the continuity of the narrative will be kept. Blade Runner takes place in the Los Angeles of 2019, in an Earth almost totally contaminated from the fallout of the last war, the World War Terminus. No one seems to know what the war was about, who started it, or who, if anyone, was the winner. Dust and pollution have turned day and night into a constant twilight into which flames sprout from chimneys at short intervals. Death and emigration to other planets have considerably reduced the population; those remaining cluster together in the center of town, seeking some kind of comfort and protection from loneliness. Computer technology reigns and animals have all but disappeared from the face of the earth. The owls went first, then the birds followed, and now most animals, even insects, have become extinct or are in danger of extinction. The few remaining cost a mint (thirty thousand dollars and up for a goat), bring great prestige to their owner and often become the center of their lives. Those who can’t afford real animals buy electronic ones that simulate real

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animal behavior and appearance to perfection. As Bruno (1990) suggests, in the Los Angeles of the blade runners everything is simulacra. All citizens are strongly encouraged to emigrate to other planets by the United Nations, which assigns one organically engineered android to every approved emigrant. But to emigrate every potential colonizer must pass physical, genetic, and mental tests, in order to protect the survival of the species in its new environment. Those who cannot pass the test, for whatever reason, are classified as “specials” and not allowed to leave the earth. Remaining on Earth is tantamount to eventually becoming special, because of the increasing pollution. Yet people cling to the planet and to each other’s geographic proximity, accepting sterilization, if necessary, to remain on Earth. The underlying wishes, conflicts, and fears that pervade the text of a film are often articulated in its first few moments. In Purple Rain, for instance, the set of binary oppositions around which the narrative is organized is presented in thirty-seven fastshifting frames that take place in the first seventy-one seconds of the film (Villela & Markin, 1987). In contrast to the movies of old, Purple Rain, like many other films of the ’80s, attempts to pull the viewer immediately into the illusory reality of its setting by filling the screen with both images and sounds the moment the lights in the theatre go down and the screen lights up. It is only then, when the illusion is partly established, that the cinematic apparatus intrudes for a few brief moments, while technical credits and information are superimposed on the images on the screen. Blade Runner goes back to the older and more straightforward ways, in which the apparatus announced itself, with musical accompaniment, before the viewer was drawn into the screen mirror. Only the music in Blade Runner is uncanny, suggesting danger, strangeness. Freud (1919/1955a) defines the uncanny as that which is novel and strange in a way that leads back to the familiar and long known. In Blade Runner, the video tape format itself introduces an uncanny contradiction, starting, as if to illustrate the theme of the film it distributes, with a corporate intrusion upon our time: We have to wait four full minutes, while the distributing companies display their names and logos, before we can get to the viewing of the movie. The film itself starts, like Star Wars, with a written text that addresses us as both viewers and members of the fictional community to be viewed—and hence can be taken as both story and history by the audience:

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Early in the 21st century The Tyrell Corporation advanced robot evolution into the Nexus phase—a being virtually identical to a human—known as a replicant. The Nexus replicants were superior in strength and agility, and were at least equal in intelligence to the genetic engineers who created them. Replicants were used Off-world as slave labor, in the hazardous exploration of other planets. After a bloody mutiny by a Nexus 6 combat unit in an Offworld colony, replicants were declared illegal on earth—under penalty of death. Special police agents—Blade Runner Units—were ordered to shoot to kill, upon detection, any trespassing replicants. This was not called execution. It was called retirement. These organically engineered beings of superior strength and endowment, in both body and mind, were fabricated by the Tyrrell Corporation to do work in outer space and in the construction of off-world colonies orbiting the earth. However, the difficulty in distinguishing them from humans might cause a problem. All they lacked to be fully human and capable of taking over the leadership of the worlds—not just in space but also on Earth—were emotions and childhood memories. Childhood memories are problematic among both replicants and those born of woman. For both, memories of childhood and family seem to be reconstructed through photographs, not remembrances of things past. While both humans and replicants treasure their real or fake memories of childhood, the children themselves do not seem to be valued, and their almost complete absence from the world of 2019 may indicate that children, too, are endangered species. However, in contrast to the extinction of animals, their absence goes unremarked and unlamented. Children are only seen in one short scene, in which a small group of three or four kids of different sizes scavenge the streets near the spot where Deckard, the blade runner, has parked his car. They throw sticks at his car and scatter into the shadows when a police helicopter approaches. Deckard does not seem to notice them. This surprising unconcern suggests that the very urge to reproduce may have gone the way of the owls, making sterilization a small price to pay for staying on Earth. Tyrrell and his genetic engineers are aware that, given time and a variety of lived experiences, the replicants could become

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totally undistinguishable from the population at large and supplant their makers. To avoid that possibility, they limit the replicants’ life span to four years. It was for that reason that a Nexus 6 combat unit escaped and fought their way back to earth to persuade, or force, Tyrrell to increase their life span or to leave it indeterminate. On arrival, they attempted to storm and enter the corporation headquarters but were stopped by the police. One of the six members of the combat unit is killed; the others escape. Even in November of the year 2019, when the mutinous replicants arrive in Los Angeles, they can only be distinguished from those “inter urinas et feces nasciti” when subjected to the Voigt-Kampff empathy test, which measures pupillary reaction to emotions. Except for Rick Deckard, a blade runner who can no longer stomach the job, the attitude of police and citizens towards the replicants in general is one of antagonism, of cruel and ruthless violence, although the replicants themselves do not resort to violence until attacked. Nevertheless, they are called skin jobs and mercilessly pursued, with no attempts at convincing them to lay down arms and negotiate. Sebastian, one of the genetic engineers, who is prematurely aged as the result of a rare disease, is their only friend. It is an interesting contrast to the attitude of the police and citizens to the cyborg in The Terminator, directed by James Cameron. Although considerably more ruthless and violent, the Terminator evoked fear but merely defensive violence. While the replicants—a much more flattering copy of humans, copies who end up showing themselves more humane and altruistic than the humans who hunt them—evoke tremendous hostility from the authorities and from the population in general, as if the closer the copy the greater the antagonism. Lacan explains our fascination with and antagonism toward the double, the Other, the Doppelgänger, in terms of the events of the mirror stage—that period between six and eighteen months during which the baby first perceives its image in the mirror, with great jubilation. The jubilation and sense of unity come from the perception of the body as a spatially unified gestalt and results in the formation of the ego, which for Lacan is a far from integrative, reality-testing agency. The ego is our rival, our weaver of illusions, our con man. This unified gestalt—perceived out there in space— conflicts with the still-turbulent jumble of sensations inside the infant, so that a sense of alienation as well as a sense of unity is established. The contrast between this sense of unity out there in space and the jumble of sensations inside leads to an extreme aggressivity toward that seemingly unified rival we see in the mirror.

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It is in this sense that Lacan (1979) says that man constitutes himself out of his own suicide: what Freud calls the death drive is partly the experiencing of this primordial splitting. The ego that is so constituted is the ideal “moi,” formed out of an identification with (as well as alienation from) that primordial other, who is not only out there in space but is visible in a reversed, inverted manner. This is what Lacan calls a primary or narcissistic identification and it provides the model for identification with others. Since this is a primordial and presymbolic identification from which we never recover, it follows that we are likely to be both fascinated and repelled by our ability to duplicate ourselves, whether through mirrors, photographs, works of art, cybernetics, or the still not viable science of cloning and genetic engineering. Duplication, as well as the feeling of sameness in exclusive group memberships, both confirms and explodes our illusory dream of cohesiveness, of a stable identity. To the extent that sex is a reproductive process, it participates in this conflicted illusion making. There is a narcissistic basis to all forms of love, and Lacan goes so far as to say that the “I” is an “other.” “It is in this erotic relation, in which the human individual alienates him from himself, that are to be found the energy and form on which this organization of passions we call the ego is based” (Lacan, 1966/1977, p. 19). Thus related to both identity and suicide, it’s no wonder the double strikes terror. Rick Deckard, the blade runner, quit his job when he could no longer stomach the task of retiring replicants. But now he is pressured to come back, because of his aptitude for giving and interpreting the Voigt-Kampf test. “We need your magic!” the chief of police tells him, and makes clear that if he refuses he’ll join the ranks of the “little people,” of the masses of Orientals and Caucasians and Hispanics that roam the streets without either hope or comfort. Rick accepts the inevitable but things get further complicated when he falls in love with Rachel Tyrrell, a replicant made in the image—and with the memories—of Tyrrell’s niece. Having received memory implants, Rachel does not know she is a replicant— the only one fabricated without a predetermined termination date (or so Tyrrell tells Deckard; we never know it for sure). The romance between Deckard and Rachel is all the more unexpected because there seems to be a surprising lack of desire in the world of Blade Runner. Only the replicants seem to desire, their desire intensified further by the anticipation of death. The novel tells us that the empathy humans claim replicants lack turns out to be predicated on the use of a device called an “empathy box” and on their not sharing the humans’ deep concern

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over the fate of animals, a concern made traumatic by the danger of extinction. The novel also makes clear the enormous effect that the extinction of animals has wrought upon men (women exist but have practically no voice in the world of Blade Runner): their zest for living is gone. For their part, lacking a history of growing up in a world populated by animals, the replicants are more concerned with solving the problem of their own artificially determined life span. This takes us back to Apollon’s restatement of the problem of man’s discontent. The defect of language makes jouissance impossible for the speaking being, and in order to hold its members together a society must offer them some compensation for the loss of that total and immediate satisfaction that we assume nonspeaking animals have. From the combination of novel and movie versions, we know that the extinction of practically all nonspeaking animals so deeply affected man, that concern with their welfare became both a human duty and a characteristic, a sign, a badge of membership in the human race. Empathy meant both potential identification with animals and potential merging with other humans through the agency of the empathy box. It was not the ability to make ethical choices based on emotions that the replicants lacked but that new human trait, possibly born out of mourning for those beings that we assume achieved a jouissance beyond our reach; for without their presence we might not be able to as much as fantasize what jouissance might be like and might end up lacking not only jouissance but also desire. For that kind of loss no palliatives would be enough—not religion, drugs, or technology. The problem is twofold: on the one hand society has to veil as best it can the fact that its laws are arbitrary, in order to maintain credibility; on the other, it must compensate its subjects for the impossibility of ever attaining the jouissance we seek. The society of Blade Runner has failed in both tasks. So our provisory hypothesis is that Blade Runner presents a situation in which there was an unbearable increase in the demands of a technological society, with a consequent increase in the conflicts between the individual and society, and an exacerbation of inner and material needs that technology could not fulfill. Furthermore, society lost its credibility when the authorities themselves did not follow the rules established by law in their treatment of their subjects. Technology reigns but in a sort of master/slave relationship in which the Tyrrells of the world act like gods. Thus, man creates, in his image, a better endowed and less needy version of himself, and

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then inflicts on his Doppelgänger the pains and premature death he fears will be his own fate. The replicant is then that image we love, because it gives us an illusion of power and unity; but love turns to hate when it returns, in inverted form, our own lack of unity and mastery. This spiritual death of humankind, related to the death of instinct and animals, is covered up by the horror of Tyrrell’s killing and the apparent altruism of Roy Batty in saving Deckard’s life. Roy Batty, the mutinous replicants’ leader, had managed to gain access to Tyrrell’s chambers. As they meet face to face, the following dialogue takes place: Roy: It’s not an easy thing to meet your maker. Tyrrell: What seems to be the problem? Roy: Death. Tyrrell: The fact of life. Roy does not accept Tyrrell’s argument that the intensity of his experience makes up for his short span of life and is in fact predicated on it. Nor does he believe that Tyrrell, should he want to, would not be able to increase his life span. Roy kisses his creator on the mouth, proclaims his love for him, and crushes the creator’s skull and eyes—a clear murder of the father in the real of the text. After that, defeat of the one who killed the father was mandatory and presumably aimed at the restoration of the law and social order. But the violence, the talk of death, the extinction of animals, and that final murder of the father cannot be ignored. In light of these events, Roy’s release of the dove of peace is unconvincing, as is the sight of Deckard and Rachel driving off into the distance (a wish repressed in the director’s cut, which edited the final scene out). Still, Roy’s and Deckard’s last words lead us back to the wish that hope may spring eternal in both human and replicant heart. In one of the movie’s final scenes, Roy and Deckard are fighting on the roof of a tall building, when Roy realizes from the rigidity in his hands that cellular degeneration has set in. Rather than kill Deckard, as he was about to do, he uses his last burst of strength to pull Deckard up from a ledge on which he had fallen. As he dies, Roy says: “I’ve watched sea beams glisten in the darkness near the Tanhouser Gate. All those moments will now be like tears in the rain. Time to die.” And Deckard, looking at the dying replicant, adds: “I don’t know why he saved my life. Maybe in these last moments he loved life

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more than he had ever before. Not just his life. Everybody’s life. My life. All he wanted were the same answers the rest of us want: Where do I come from? Where am I going? How long have I got? All I could do was sit there and watch him die.” If the screen is indeed our shared mirror—part of a larger symbolic pact made long ago—if it reflects the human mind, then Freud may indeed have accurately predicted our unavoidable discontent. Aggressivity, Lacan (1966/1977, pp. 25–27) says, is evident in the way our culture confuses force and violence with strength; in the high regard we have for the notion of struggle; in Darwinism, imperialism, and capitalism. The presence of this barbarism that destroys the cultures we study can be connected to the absence of forms and rituals in our society, to the abolition of polar male/female principles, to the promotion of ego-based individualism, and to a technology that subordinates man to machine. And our choices, as presented in Blade Runner, are either to go back to the more human and simpler ways of yesteryear, or to plunge forward into the regime of the brother (MacCannel, 1991), where authority will be as oppressive as it has been under the law of the father, without the predictability that makes it bearable. Woven into the text of Blade Runner through the uncanny reflection of the double/replicant, we could articulate the underlying mythemes as follows: 1. Animals have jouissance, and we humans do not. 2. Animals do not have a language, and we humans do. 3. If we give up speaking, maybe we too can achieve jouissance. 4. If we stop speaking, we’ll die as subjects. 5. Therefore let us. . . .

REFERENCES Apollon, W. (1995, October). Questions posed by psychoanalysis to anthropology. Paper presented at the Society for Psychological Anthropology, San Juan, Puerto Rico. Apollon, W. (1996). A lasting heresy, the failure of political desire. In W. Apollon and R. Feinstein, Lacan, Politics, Aesthetics. Albany: State University of New York Press.

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Barratt, B. (1997, October) Intimacies and boundaries: The performance and reperformance of the law in psychoanalysis and elsewhere. Paper presented at the IFPE Conference, Ann Arbor, MI. Bergin, T., & Fisch, M. (1984). The new science of Giambattista Vico. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Borges, J. (1963). Mirrors. In Dreamtigers. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Bruno, G. (1990). Ramble city: Post-modernism and blade runner. In Kuhn, A. (Ed.), Science fiction cinema (pp. 183–195). Alien zone: Cultural theory and science fiction cinema. London: Verso. Dick, P. (1968). Do androids dream of electric sheep? New York: Ballantine Books. Freud, S. (1955a). The uncanny. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 17, pp. 217–252). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1919) Freud, S. (1955b). Beyond the pleasure principle. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 18, pp. 3–64). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1920) Freud, S. (1959). Delusions and dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, (Vol. 19, pp. 3–96). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1906) Freud, S. (1961). Civilization and its discontents. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 21, pp. 59–148). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1930) Lacan, J. (1977). Écrits: A selection (A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1966) Lacan, J. (1979). The neurotic’s individual myth. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 48, 386–404. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1958). Structural anthropology. New York: Basic Books. MacCannell, J. (1991). The regime of the brother. London: Routledge. Metz, C. (1975). The imaginary signifier: Psychoanalysis and the cinema. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Tarratt, M. (1970). Monsters from the id. In Grant, B. (Ed.), Film genre: Theory and criticism. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press. Villela, L., & Markin, R. (1987). Adolescent film preferences: The world of purple rain, a psychodynamic interpretation. Adolescent Psychiatry, Vol. 2, 119–132.

Glossary of Lacanian Terms Stephen R. Friedlander

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t has been said before: most readers experience some confusion in their first encounter with Lacan. Seemingly inconsistent, possibly even contradictory usages of words can be found throughout his work. It was no different with Freud than it is now with Lacan—the vocabulary of pioneers of great stature goes through many transformations as their thinking evolves. Some of the confusion arises because Lacan uses “ordinary language,” but gives unconventional meanings to otherwise easily understandable words. This could suggest that a glossary would be quite helpful. A brief philological digression sheds other light on the prospect of domesticating Lacan’s language for an English-speaking audience. Consultation with the Oxford Universal Dictionary shows that gloss and glossary have equivocal connotations themselves, to wit: Gloss (v 1):

To veil with glosses; to explain away; to read a different sense into.

Gloss (v 2):

To veil in specious language; to render bright and glossy. . . .

Glossary (sb):

A collection of glosses; a list with explanations of abstruse, antiquated, dialectal, or technical terms; a partial dictionary. 361

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Although Lacanian language meets at least two of the OED’s conditions for a glossary, no strategy will succeed in eliminating mystery from Lacan’s terminology. Firstly, the ambiguity reflects the dialectical course of Lacan’s theory building. A greater difficulty reflects the degree to which Lacan’s thinking departs from the fundamental categories of Western culture, which are generally structured in terms of polar opposites. For instance, philosophical and scientific discourses are largely founded on, and continue to rely upon, dichotomous conceptions such as true/false, inner/outer, imaginary/real, material/mental, literal/figurative, etc. Lacan directly challenges the heretofore unchallenged hegemony of binary thinking, developing his own unique system of triadic categories referred to as RSI (see below). The attempt to dispel confusion about Lacan’s words by suggesting unequivocal meanings for individual terms thus veers uncomfortably close to the second definition of gloss given above. An old parable came to mind while I was pondering this dilemma. A naïve man, contemplating conversion to Judaism, demanded that Shammai and Hillel, two legendary rabbis, explain Judaism while “standing on one foot.” Affronted, perhaps, by such an importunate request, Shammai beat him with a stick. Hillel said, “What you would not have done to you, do not do unto others. All the rest is commentary. Now go and study.” Were one to demand some concise but equally meaty summary of Lacanian theory, we might use one of Lacan’s own dicta, such as “The unconscious is structured like a language” or, “The unconscious is the discourse of the Other.” Unfortunately, neither of Lacan’s epigrams are as transparent as Hillel’s. Being less wise than either Shammai or Hillel, I agreed to provide a glossary, but I hereby deny that that which you have before you is any sort of official lexicon. Rather than attempting to compress complicated ideas into succinct formulas, and to smooth all difficulties away at the same time, I try to suggest some provisional alignment between familiar concepts and the exotic innovations created by Lacan for describing the human mind as it functions in the midst of others created by Lacan. After reading this material, readers would be well advised to do as Hillel said, namely, to “go and study.” Jouissance refers to a basic feature of primary process operations, that those experiences tinged with jouissance have a uniquely compelling motivational valence that makes them refractory to change. The language used to describe jouissance commonly implies that a

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sense of enjoyment, a heightened degree of “pleasure” as it were, accompanies it, but this is potentially misleading. Whenever jouissance is associated with experience, the subject of that experience can—and generally does, in fact—deny finding pleasure in it. Presenting problems typically cloak jouissance in a mask of pain and helplessness. Self-image furnishes the accoutrements of (rationalizations for) maintaining ways of life that preserve jouissance. The fundamental implication of jouissance is that some aspect of psychic life outside of and antecedent to socialization is in play. Subject: Lacan uses this term strategically to differentiate what he calls the subject from terms that are related in ordinary language: the self, the person, the ego, etc. Subject has a venerable, even esoteric history in philosophy, but its essence is simple and familiar: Given that a sentence expresses a complete thought, and that every sentence has a subject and a predicate, “a subject” could be any agent associated with any verb: that is, whoever engages in thinking, feeling, or acting (in the past, present, or future); or (given a verb in the passive voice) anyone subject to being thought about, or to serving as object of another’s feeling, or to being acted upon by others. Freud’s unique contribution to this fundamental philosophical issue is the conception of “a subject,” which entails subjective experience (meaning) without necessarily entailing conscious volition or intention. The subject (i.e., of psychoanalysis) does not exist ab initio. The formation of the subject commences with the first transformations of jouissance in infancy, and concludes with the subject’s “incorporation of language” (q.v.). This process, by the way, coincides with “the incorporation [of the subject] into language” and an assumption of desire (q.v.). This explanation may seem quite unwieldy, but it has the virtue of focusing attention on the value of a rigorous, psychoanalytically specific conception of the subject. Lacan’s “subject” will eventually be indicted as the hitherto anonymous “Other” who thought, felt, and acted in ways that the social/historical individual repudiates for him/herself. Why is the subject not the same as the self, some readers may ask. Because the innocent (if not actually noble) being one has in mind at the moment of saying “ ‘I’. . . .” is little more than a decoy. It is the “good self image,” which “normal people” construct and deploy to deflect attention from the true “subject.” The latter, which exists by default, is properly called either “the subject of the unconscious” or “the subject of desire” (q.v.). Practically speaking, this subject will only be discovered through psychoanalysis, and even

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then, “discovered” only in the sense that it is synthesized through iterative acts of identification, interpretation, and construction. Lacan has another innovative use of the term subject: the sujet supposé savoir (the subject [who is] supposed to know). This “supposed” subject is based on an image of a person who knows all the important information that the analysand needs to know—i.e., someone who “knows” what the analysand wants, what kind of success or failure he will have in attaining it, what difficulties lie along the way, and how he may minimize suffering and sweep obstacles from his path. For Lacan, the essence of transference is not the affect that arises in the analytic setting—signs of symbolic gratifications and losses at play in “the transference”—so much as it is the supposed prior knowledge attributed to the analyst. Language requires many prior understandings (generally institutionalized as “correct” grammar and semantics, etc.). In the sense that language-use always manifests a setting already shaped by actual and imagined interlocutors, Lacan indicates that language is the medium of intersubjectivity and its very rubric. However, the larger implications of this statement depend on coordinating the concept of language with other technical concepts: the Law (q.v.), the symbolic (q.v.), and death (q.v.). One may say that language controls its users (i.e., carries the force of law with them) in the weak sense that whoever would speak must work (to a large extent) within the scope of these agreements. However, language also controls users in a strong sense, in that adults are obliged to seek and find satisfaction with/from others through symbolic means (i.e., language limits an individual’s activity by capturing and confining it within “the symbolic order” of cultural demands and taboos). One of the earliest manifestations of “language,” for example, is the word no, which comes, through personal experience, to function as a substrate for a later development: one hears no and accommodates the imputed speaker’s demand, even though no actual individual vocalizes the word in the external world. The development of language is thus symbolically tantamount to killing the “free spirit” who was formerly free to express his impulses directly and immediately. The phallus: Lacan employed the term phallus for the specific purpose of distinguishing a material object and biological organ (penis) from a pure abstraction and symbolic organ (the phallus). From its origin as representation of a thing one may or may not have, the phallus is elaborated into a very complex concept: it

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represents whatever one may retain or lose, may once have possessed (and belatedly discover that it was somehow lost or removed). The phallus is a metaphor—the prime metaphor, in fact—that represents, prior to an experience in psychoanalysis, the supposed benefits or negative consequences of being, or at least appearing to be complete (appearing to have the phallus) or appearing incomplete (appearing to lack the phallus). Psychoanalysis enables people to experience lack differently, so that the phallus, merely by representing something that is (or will be) absent, founds a symbolic order. In this order, the possibilities of absence and lack constitute an organized framework for the unconscious. The phallus “says” that no one, neither others nor “the Other,” is spared the experience of lacking. Thus, the phallus orients the subject’s primordial relationship to language (the object to which his or her speaking is directed) and to others (the nature of his or her appeal to the Other). By virtue of expectations associated with it, the phallus embodies the concept of value per se, a condition of “having it” that promises idyllic well-being and contentment. However, people who imagine that they “have it” cannot sustain the project of imagining that they have it without the help of others who tend to imagine that they do not have it. Those who imagine that they do not have it themselves—often with reinforcement from those who want to believe that they themselves do have it—may try to get one of the latter to allow them the use of “it” for their pleasure. (Readers are cautioned not to try to understand this while standing on one foot.) RSI (Real-Symbolic-Imaginary): many readers new to Lacan stumble here because the technical meaning of these words qua psychoanalytic concepts is nearly the opposite of the meanings of these same words in everyday speech. Lacan’s real, for instance, does not refer to a consensually validated “reality,” nor does “imaginary” mean false rather than true. Neither, for that matter, does “symbolic” simply mean that some “this” stands for a certain “that.” One cannot grasp the psychoanalytic real, imaginary, or symbolic as conceived by Lacan by taking these words one at a time. Readers should instead think of the great variety of meanings that the colors red, yellow, and green have in ordinary life and contrast them with the definitive meanings the same colors have in the context of traffic control. There, each color means what it means— and means only that—because each is an element in an articulated system of color signs. That is, each color “means” something in the context of a system of conjoint, differential interpretations—must

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I stop or go?—for everyone who belongs to the community that contrives and sustains the symbol system. In the same spirit, one can appreciate Lacan’s way of redefining the meaning of real, symbolic, and imaginary for psychoanalytic purposes. It is as follows: The Imaginary includes all elements of personal experience that are individually constructed as perception or meaning. Such elements of perception and meaning appear self-evidently true unless one takes them self-consciously as interpretations of a personal “reality” that is susceptible to reflection and criticism. Since individuals are capable of validating any idea they want to believe, the Imaginary encompasses everything that is potentially “true.” It is comprised of images (in whatever sensory modality) for which all points in the perceptual field strictly correspond to a point in the image—in other words, an identity between object and percept supposedly exists. The Symbolic is, properly speaking, not an element of experience but a constraint on experience. The fact of being constrained (or having been constrained or of expecting to be constrained) is susceptible to representation as a personal experience of being weak, inferior, or incomplete (dismembered). Infants live outside the symbolic order and are oblivious to it because they lack the cognitive means to integrate experience with a self-conscious idea of itself having the experience. Neither can infants entertain the thought that their own conception might be incorrect in the eyes of another—it’s “true” to them. There is only one set of eyes in infancy and in the imaginary. Ideas such as “you” (“me”) and “yes” (“no”) become established as frameworks of meaning for individuals only as they develop a capacity to apprehend objects in terms of a system of differences. Obviously, this happens only through language, where signifiers are sorted and combined according to the constraints of the culture and the setting. The Real is something one never gets hold of—the psychoanalytic correlate of Kant’s thing-in-itself. Like philosophy’s Ding an sich, the real consists of phenomena that have an impact on experience without being reducible to the universe of images and language. The real consists of whatever (“all” of the “whatever” and only that but no more) remains beyond one’s capacity to represent an experience of “things.” In other words, the Real affects people, despite the (mostly unconscious, ultimately futile) efforts people make to wall themselves off from it. Although psychoanalysts divide experience into discrete categories theoretically, “experience” is never actually confined to any single component of the RSI consortium—the three components

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are, as Lacan says, “knotted together.” Even in nonsymptomatic conditions, one never escapes from or transcends the imaginary. No matter how “well analyzed” one comes to be, the Imaginary permeates awareness. Therefore, no effort is made in psychoanalysis to eliminate any single component of RSI, nor to assist someone in arranging for one component of the psyche to “master” another. Analysts undertake to enable analysands (a) to use language in ways that attest to their subjection to the Other (e.g., the Symbolic order), (b) to recognize their inextinguishable exposure to the order of the real, and c) to accept as true that they will never find a relationship that spares them from having to take up the burdens of “language.” Desire arises from a sense (conscious or no) of lack. Normally, when psychoanalysts speak of desire, they conceive of it in terms of specific, identifiable objects or actions that fulfill a specific wish or realize a specific impulse. That is, the word desire is commonly thought of in the same way as wish and impulse. In contrast to the familiar usage, desire for Lacan is more an Ur-form of wish or inclination to action. Desire remains, even after every “needed” object has been attained and every wish-fulfilling experience transited. Desire is to wish and impulse as the Lacanian (i.e., the psychoanalytic) real is to “real” in the ordinary sense—desire is lack, in other words, and desire remains even in the midst of partial, transitory satisfactions as an enduring sense of lack which drives psychological life. Speaking as Buddhist in outlook if not profession, Lacan claimed that all desire is ultimately a desire not to desire. Speaking from a Hegelian sensibility, Lacan identified “the desire to be recognized” as the fundamental desire. By explaining how the formation of individual desire results from experience with “language,” Lacan reinvents Oedipal theory as a process of synthesizing desire, jouissance, subjectivity, language, RSI (especially, the symbolic), and the object (a), the phallus. Jouissance of the Other, J(O): Babies are enabled to develop by parents who “love” them and provide in a more or less adequate way for their survival and maturation. By the same token, parents have fantasies about the baby—some expectations, that is, that being the parent of a baby will be a source of pleasure in and of itself, which is to say that parents expect something (which they never put into exact words) from the baby. What this means, in Lacanian terms, is that the baby is the object of unremitting

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jouissance, a condition that is, from time to time, variously thrilling or mortifying for the baby, according to the contingencies of what the parents expect without saying it in so many words. Object a: Mental representations are, of course, constructions of the mind. The object a and the phallus have the unique character of being constructions that no one recognizes as a construction, much less as their own construction. The phallus founds the possibility of desire by representing/constituting an object that “the other” desires. The object a stands for the essence of the other’s otherness and an innate desirability associated with otherness. The object a is, in other words, one of a pair of psychic productions that establish as true what is certifiably untrue, the “fact” that the psyche can have contact with an unmediated, potentially wishfulfilling reality. At the very same time that we emphasize the uniquely personal quality of object a, in that each individual constructs an irreducibly idiosyncratic object a for himself, the object a derives from, and constantly points back to, the intersubjective domain. This object embodies jouissance, as the following considerations imply. Parents are presumed to fantasize that their baby is, or will become, an object that satisfies their desire—e.g., a desire to feel complete, to be recognized, etc.—and the baby registers the parents’ tacit wishes as overwhelmingly powerful demands. In the face of these outside forces, babies (people) cannot avoid asking a question with which they grapple endlessly: “what must I be (for the other)?” The child’s response to this enigma is a “fantasy” (an unconscious theory) of what the parent wants (but never says in so many words). This fantasy, which the object a anchors in the mind, is not truly a childhood construction in the simple sense; the fantasy is unconsciously elaborated in later life and masked as a memory of what the baby thought/fantasized.

Contributors

Willy Apollon, Ph.D. (Sorbonne), is Consulting Psychoanalyst at Psychoanalytic Treatment Center for Psychotics; Director of Research on Family Structures at Groupe interdisciplinaire freudien de recherches et d’interventions cliniques (GIFRIC) and is coresponsible for the training of psychoanalysts at GIFRIC. He is an editorial member of Savoir: A Journal of Psychoanalysis and Cultural Analysis. Suzanne Barnard, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Psychology at Duquesne University. She has published on Lacanian, French feminist, and poststructuralist approaches to gender, the body, and sexuality and is currently coediting a collection on Lacan’s Seminar XX. Mario L. Beira received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Duquesne University. He is currently working on a commentary on Lacan’s lecture (and undelivered seminar) on the names-of-the-father and editing a collection of essays on the subject of the proper name and its conceptualization in the history of psychoanalysis. He resides in Miami, Florida. Donna Bentolila received her degree in clinical Psychology at the National University of Arsario, Argentina. She is an original member of the Lacanian Clinical Forum, faculty of the Southeastern Florida Institute for Psychoanalytic Psychology, editor and translator of Lacan in the United States, and author of numerous articles.

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Contributors

Danielle Bergeron is a Psychoanalyst and Psychiatrist. She is Director of the Psychoanalytic Treatment Center for Psychotics, Clinical Professor at Laval University, Department of Psychiatry, and is a Supervisor and coresponsible for training of psychoanalysts at at Groupe interdisciplinaire freudien de recherches et d’interventions cliniques (GIFRIC). She is editorial member of Savoir, a Journal of Psychoanalysis and Cultural Analysis. Mark Bracher is Professor of English and Director of the Center for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society at Kent State University. He is editor of the Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture & Society. His most recent books include The Writing Cure: Psychoanalysis, Composition and the Aims of Education and Lacan, Discourse, and Social Change: A Psychoanalytic Cultural Criticism. He received his psychoanalytic training at Cleveland Psychoanalytic Institute. Daniel L. Buccino works in the Adult Outpatient Community Psychiatry Program at the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center and maintains a private practice in Baltimore, Maryland. He is on the clinical faculties of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine as well as the University of Maryland, Smith College, and Catholic Schools of Social Work. Lucie Cantin, M.Ps., is a Psychoanalyst and Psychologist. She is Assistant Director of the Psychoanalytic Treatment Center for Psychotics. She is a Supervisor and coresponsible for training of psychoanalysts at Groupe interdisciplinaire freudien de recherches et d’interventions cliniques (GIFRIC). Clinical professor at the school of psychology at Laval University, she is also editor of Savoir, a Journal of Psychoanalysis and Cultural Analysis. David S. Caudill, J.D., Ph.D., is the author of Lacan and the Subject of Law and Disclosing Tilt: Law, Belief, Criticism, and coeditor of Radical Philosophy of Law, a reader in alternative legal theory. He is a Professor of Law at Washington and Lee University, and publishes regularly in legal and interdisciplinary journals in the fields of law and psychoanalysis, law and religion, and jurisprudence. Bruce Fink is Professor of Psychology and clinical supervisor at Duquesne University. He received his Ph.D. in psychoanalysis from the University of Paris VIII. He is the author of The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance and A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis. He is the translator of the forthcoming edition of Lacan’s Écrits and is a member of École de la Cause Freudienne. Stephen R. Friedlander, Ph.D., is the founder of the Friedlander Center for Leadership Development, which offers psychoanalytically informed education and consultation on personal and organizational effectiveness.

Contributors

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He has been in private practice of psychoanalysis since 1980. Author of articles and reviews on a variety of clinical and theoretical issues. He is also the editor of Confronting the Challenges to Psychoanalysis. Patricia Gherovici, Lic., is a Lacanian analyst in private practice and a founding member and organizer of the Philadelphia Lacan Study Group and Seminar. She has published numerous papers internationally and is on the editorial board of Clinical Studies: International Journal of Psychoanalysis. She is the former clinical director of a Latino mental health clinic in North Philadelphia’s “barrio” and is presently working on a book on Puerto Rican experiences. Kareen Ror Malone is Associate Professor of Psychology at State University of West Georgia and is on the Women’s Studies faculty. She has published articles in the areas of social construction, feminism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, experiential psychotherapy, and social cognition. David Metzger is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Old Dominion University. He is the author of The Lost Cause of Rhetoric: The Relation of Rhetoric and Geometry in Aristotle and Lacan and coeditor of bien dire: A Journal of Lacanian Orientation. Paola Mieli is a practicing psychoanalyst in New York City, cofounder and president of the Après-Coup Psychoanalytic Association, faculty member of the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis (Berkeley) and School of Visual Arts (NYC). She is author of numerous articles on psychoanalysis. John Muller is Chief Psychologist and Director of Education at the Austin Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. He is the author (with William J. Richardson) of Lacan and Language: A Reader’s Guide to Écrits and most recently of Beyond the Psychoanalytic Dyad: Developmental Semiotics in Freud, Pierce, and Lacan. Ian Parker is Professor of Psychology, Discourse Unit Department of Psychology and Speech Pathology, Manchester University. His books include De-constructing Psychopathology (with D. Harper, E. Georgaca, T. McLaughlin, and M. Stowell-Smith), Psychology and Society: Radical Theory and Practice (coedited with R. Spears), Psychoanalytic Culture: Psychoanalytic Discourse in Western Society and De-constructing Psychotherapy. He is a member of Psychology Politics Resistance. André Patsalides is a psychoanalyst and faculty member at the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis, Berkeley, California. He is teaching and supervising faculty at University of California at San Francisco, Mt. Zion Hospital, McAuley Psychiatric Institute. He is also Professor at the University of Louvain, Belgium, and member of the Belgium School of Psychoanalysis.

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Contributors

Ellie Ragland is Professor of English and Literary Theory at University of Missouri. Dr. Ragland has taught in the department of psychoanalysis at the University of Paris. She was the editor of the Newsletter of the Freudian Field (1987–1994) and is the author/editor of numerous of books. Her most recent are Essays on the Pleasure of Death: From Freud to Lacan and an edited volume, Critical Essays on Jacques Lacan for the G.K. Hall series on World Authors. Robert Samuels teaches at University of California at Santa Barbara. He is author of Between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis: Lacan’s Reconstruction of Freud and of Hitchcock’s Bi-textuality: Lacan, Feminisms, and Queer Theory. Lúcia Villela was born in Brazil, practices psychoanalysis in Chicago, and teaches courses in theories of personality and film at Chicago State University. She has published articles on psychoanalysis, film, and the history of Brazilian psychoanalysis. Valerie Walkerdine is a British Psychologist, who works at the intersection of Critical Psychology, poststructuralism and psychoanalysis. She is currently Foundation Professor of Critical Psychology at the University of Western Sydney, Nepean, Sydney, Australia. Her latest book is Daddy’s Girl: Young Girls and Popular Culture. Slavoj Zˇ izˇek is researcher at the Institute for sociology and philosophy, University of Ljublana, and faculty at Institute for Social Sciences, Slovenia. £i¶ek received his Ph.D., in psychoanalysis from the University of Paris— VIII. He is editor of the following series of books: Analecta, Wo es war, and SIC. His books include The Sublime Object of Ideology; Looking Awry; The Plague of Fantasies, Cogito and the Unconscious (Ed.), and The Indivisible Remainder. His work has appeared in numerous languages.

Index

Aanstoos, C., 1 Abelove, H., 111 Abramson, L. Y., 50 absence, 268 accidents, memory of, 193 aggression, 42, 50–53, 57, 222, 359 Aichhorn, A., 298 Alcorn, M., 299 alienation, 73, 222, 231 Alloy, L. B., 50 Althusser, L., 76 Ameriks, K., 23 analysand, 160 and knowledge, 204 Other of the, 161 unconscious of, 161 analysis, 183, 205 aim of, 192 Archemedean point of, 169 dialectical, 186, 193 effect of, 159 as imaginary, 162 of language, 142 metaphor in, 181 motor force of, 158, 169 of political choice, 300

self and, 147 the situation of, 304 as struggle, 170 of text, 350 time in, 187 and understanding, 303 wit in, 186 the work of, 142, 199, 200, 367 analyst, 160, 165, 196, 202, 334 to be an, 204, 335, 341 as cause, 168, 169 desire of the, 203, 213, 214, 235 detached, 8 as to be discarded, 293 and ethics, 130, 182, 236 as Other, 162, 163 person of the, 161, 167 role of the, 157 as supposed to know, 293 André, S., 131n 2 anomalies, 56 anxiety, 105, 163, 288, 289, 291 body image and, 45, 46, 57 castration and, 266 and consciousness, 254 lack and, 289

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374

Index

anxiety (continued) norms and, 262 responsibility and, 292 Xanax and, 285 Apollon, W., 219, 303–305, 347, 357 a priori, 254 Argyris, C., 56, 57 associations, 181. See also free association authenticity, 233 authority, 161, 162 and Kant, 32 Averill, J. R., 53 Barnard, S., 20 Barns, R. D., 48 Barratt, B., 6, 8, 123, 346, 347 barred, 70, 233 Basch, M. F., 206n 2 Bayer, B., 9, 10 Benhabib, S., 297, 299 Bentley, M., 333 Benveniste, E., 66, 73, 75 Berger, P. L., 339 Bergeron, D., 303, 304 Bergin, T., 350 Berkowitz, L., 47, 52 Bickerton, D., 65 biology, sexual difference and, 246, 252 Black, M., 14, 123 blank screen, 304 body Bosch’s, H., 33, 51 and cognition, 245 dismembered, 33 infantile, 195 maternal, 93, 272, 276 in narrative, 10 and the Other, 84 Bohan, J., 6, 243 Boothby, R., 2 borders, erogenous, 266 Borges, J., 348 Borromean knot, 257, 258 boundaries, 346

Bower, G. H., 53 Bowers, K., 56, 244 Bracher, M., 11, 245, 305 Bradley, G. W., 49 Braunstein, N., 191, 195, 205 Breggin, G. R., 281, 285 Breggin, P., 281, 285 Brennan, T., 11, 246 Brenner, C., 141 Breuer, J. 175 Brooks-Gunn, J., 43, 44 Brousse, H.-M., 11 Bruno, G., 353 Bucci, W., 193, 195, 196 Buccino, D. L., 231 Buddhism, 367 Bugental, J. F. T., 1, 6 Burman, E., 332, 334 Butler, J., 7, 11 Cadigan, P., 340 Cantin, L., 303, 304 capitalism, 232, 286, 359 late, 338 method and, 336 Carver, C. S., 52 castration, 112, 125, 143, 152, 233, 254, 266, 280 anxiety, 163 complex, 284 horror of, 273 knowledge and, 322 the Other and, 231 structures of, 153 symbolic, 115, 261 Caudill, D., 11, 305 cause existential, 254 first, 80 idea of, 29 lack as, 262 lost, 234 object, 290 retroactivity and, 291 of subject, 303 unconscious, 234

Index certainty America and, 321 faith and, 312 Chaplin, W., 50 Chatel, M. M., 272, 276 Chodorow, N., 246 choice fixation and free, 107, 108 reflective, 144, 154 Chomsky, N., 20, 53, 54, 65–70 the subject of, 71, 74 cinema culture and, 348 and the imaginary, 351 and myth, 347, 349, 359 Clark, R. W., 27 class gender and, 107 psychology and, 244 symptom and, 285 clinic, subjectivity in the, 280 code, 96, 346 cogito, 107 Cartesian, 29 as displaced, 66 unconscious, 39 cognition, 97, 245 anxiety and, 254 coherence and, 270 concealment and, 271 construction and, 271 dialectical production of, 271 fantasy and, 335 cognitive models, 64 science, 24 communication, 70, 306 community, voluntary, 309 complex castration, 93, 284 discursive, 339 oedipal, 284 psy-, 339 condensation, 327 conflict, 190, 193, 291 channeling, 102

375

consciousness origin of self, 50 transcendental self, 29 construction, 238, 347 savoir and, 227 context, 253 Cooper, A. M., 141 Copjec, J., 286 Corran, C., 104 Craighead, W. E., 50 Crews, F., 319 crisis inscription into, 212 psychotic, 212, 220 critique of liberalism, 309 of neo-Marxian ideology, 298 of rationality, 305, 306 self autonomy and, 305, 306 Culicover, P. W., 54 culture, 91, 101, 107, 243, 244, 290, 336, 339, 359 binary of, 362 as category, 245 effects of, 244 father absent, 231 the forms of, 92 power and, 95 practices of, 103 the production of desire, 103 Prozac and, 285 sexual relation and, 260 symptom and, 293 Cummings, E. E., 173 Cushman, P., 6, 230 cyber culture, 340 cyber psychology, 339 das Ding, 272 Dean, T., 7, 10, 22 death anticipation of, 356 desire and, 356 drive, 31, 121, 126, 356 deconstruction, 107, 108, 283 deferred action, 234

376

Index

delusion, 217 demand, 94, 255, 350 the hysteric, 82 language and, 283 the neurotic, 81 democracy, abstraction and, 307 Dennett, D., 20, 24–39 depression, 42, 50, 57, 290 mediation and, 292 Prozac and, 280 science and, 281 Derrida, J., 5, 32, 232 deShazer, S., 230, 231, 234–237, 239 desire, 103, 181, 194, 253, 256, 348, 350, 367 of analyst, 203 articulating, 194 death and, 356 as defense, 127 feminine, 91, 102 fixation of, 104 interpretation and, 204 to know, 222, 224 maternal, 272, 292, 294n 3 and mythical objects of, 195, 290 need and, 256 and Oedipus theory, 367 the organization of, 96 the production of, 104 recanallization of, 103–108 semiotic chains of, 103 subject of, 256 thought and, 271 Dews, P., 11 dhvani, 183 dialectics, 287 master-slave, 50 of praxis, 183 Prozac and, 287 dialogue, 103 analytic, 142, 186 conditions of, 75 Dick, P. K., 352 Dickerson, V. C., 230, 234

Dickman, S., 53 difference, 70 culture and, 292 erased, 292 identity and, 253 language and, 257 sexual, 93, 114, 115, 246, 252 discourse of the analysand, 70 analytic, 182, 304, 334 coherent, 198 complex’s of, 105 determinism, 104 freedom and, 305 gender, 244 master of, 253 meaning and, 193 of the Other, 72, 154 patterns of, 300 philosophical, 24 positions in, 104 psychotic, 216–218, 225 structure of, 104 subject of, 303 discovery, Promethean, 327 displacement, 327 Dollimore, J., 111 dream, 151 the bourgeois, 96 mechanisms, 327 Drucker, P., 310 Dunand, A., 256 Dunand, M., 47 Earle, W. B., 48 echoing, 183 ecology, 308 editing, 350 education, practices of, 104 ego, 164, 201 a colonizing, 192 constitution of, 193 as distorting, 50 ideal, 116, 195, 287 love and, 356 as object, 44

Index origin of, 42, 43 of the other, 164 See also schema L Elliot, A., 6 empathy, 139, 357 emptiness, as expression, 288 Epston, D., 230, 232, 235 Erikson, E., 286 Escher, M., 238 essence, transphenomenal, 38 essentialism, 230, 231 ethics, 210, 211, 236, 304, 310 chemicals and, 293 ego psychology and, 321 lack and, 283 event, of sense, 27 evoking, decoding as, 176 excess, 291 existing, 80 experience, direct, 26 exploitation, patterns of, 338 exteriority, 44 family dynamics, 91, 93 fantasy, 39, 338, 368 fundamental, 4, 195, 197 knowledge and, 254 perception and, 335 phantasy and, 108n 1 father absence of the, 231 as intervention, 284 jouissance of the, 258 loneliness of the, 92 murder of the, 269, 358 name of the, 261 rage of the, 219, 220 Feeney, P., 286 Felman, S., 182 femininity, 96, 102, 246, 259, 274 bourgeois, 101 dialectics and, 275 heterosexual, 92 as non-wholeness, 276, 277 as object identification, 269 obscure, 265

377

signification and, 104 subject of, 92 symbolization and, 276 feminism, 256, 308 counter-stereotyping and, 106 cultural analysis and, 245 developmental theory and, 93, 106 the pre-oedipal and, 93, 94 psychology and, 334 Fink, B., 8, 13, 82, 246 Fisch, M., 350 Fisch, S., 251 Fletcher, G., 47 Fodor, J. A., 54 Foeman, G., 286 foreclosure, 112, 151 form, 205 Foucault, M., 104, 232, 336, 339 Fowers, B., 10 Fox, D., 332 fragmentation, 45, 51, 348 free association, 194, 218, 304 Freud, S., 3, 4, 42–45, 83–89, 93, 94, 96, 111, 121, 135, 159, 173, 189, 197, 231, 237–239, 283–293, 318–325, 327, 332– 334, 337, 338, 347, 350, 353, 363 Analysis Terminable and Interminable, 274, 277 Analytic Therapy, 199, 200 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 269, 270, 349 Civilization and Its Discontents, 252, 347 Compulsive Acts and Religious Experience, 82 Constructions in Analysis, 238 Die traumde utung uber den traum, 271 Dynamics of Transference, The, 200 Ego and the Id, The, 43 Family Romances, 92, 272 Female Sexuality, 269

378

Index

Freud, S. (continued) Findings, Ideas, Problems, 267 Future of an Illusion, The, 298 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 261 Heredity and the Aetiology of the Neuroses, 126 Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxieties, 81, 286 Interpretation of Dreams, The, 132, 174, 270, 271 Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 174 Letter 52 to Wilheim Fleiss, 325 An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 50 Papers on Technique, 184, 185 Project for a New Scientific Psychology, 272 Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 157, 174 On Sexual Theories of Children, 271 Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes, 261 Studies on Hysteria, 171 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 12, 113–116, 120, 126, 324 Totem and Taboo, 269, 270 On Transference Love, 170 Uber Infantile Sexual Theorien, Gesammelte Work, 271, 272 Uncanny, The, 350, 353 Friedlander, S., 11, 80 Frodi, A., 53 Fromm, E., 80, 298 Frosch, S., 4, 6, 334 futur anterieur, the unconscious and the, 28 Gallistel, C. R., 54 gap, 25, 70, 73, 74, 93, 108, 284 content registration and the, 25 in culture, 253 difference and, 270 gaze, 94, 252,

illusion and the, 94 object a and the, 254, 255 self consciousness, 255 in theory and practice, 324 Gedo, J., 141 Gelman, R., 54 gender, 82, 101, 247, 252, 337 the all and, 259 culture and, 253 development, 92 differentiation, 103 discourse, 244 formation of, 106 Georgaca, E., 333 Gergen, K., 4, 5, 8, 9, 230, 243 gestalt, 56 visual, 44 Gherovici, P., 292 Gibson, W., 340 GIFRIC, 210 Gill, M., 141 Giorgi, A., 1, 3 Glass, D. C., 52 Gollwitzer, P. M., 48 Gordo-López, A. J., 339 gratification, 201 Gray, J., 230 Green, S. K., 49 Greenwald, A. G., 44, 47 Griffin, C., 332 Grosmuck, S., 286 Gross, A. E., 49 Hacking, I., 5, 6 Harari, R., 197, 198, 205 Hare-Mustin, R., 3, 244 Harper, D., 333 Harris, A., 8 Harris, B., 48 Harvey, J. H., 48 Hegel, 25, 338, 367 madness and, 32 Henrich, D., 24 Henriques, J., 335, 338 Henwood, K., 332 heritage, the Cartesian, 64. See also cogito

Index hermeneutics, 64 heterosexuality, 92, 245 female, 94 insertion in, 108 Highsmith, P., 27 Hirshman, L., 306, 307, 313n 7 history, 175, 225, 233 artifacts of, 238 desire and, 177 freedom and, 247 object a and, 236 production of, 225 Hitchcock, A., 27 hole, 70 whole and, 235 Hollway, W., 6, 334, 335, 338 homosexuality, 111, 118 a logic of, 112 Hörmann, H., 72 Hornstein, G., 3 horror, 273 the unknown and, 273 hunger, culture and, 290 Hutchins, E., 245 hypnosis, Freud and, 159 hysteria, 261 America and, 319 as fundamental, 262 I, 196 Ibáñez, T., 332 icon, 260 id, 192, 195 idea, as cause, 29 ideal ego, 116, 255 image, 194 speaker-hearer, 72, 75 idealism, German, 23, 24 identification, 103, 104, 193, 195, 356 first, 261 gender, 113 with an image, 43, 191 maternal/paternal, 95 identity construction, 297, 299 demand and, 255

379

differentiation, 283 illusion and, 94 negation and, 260 neurosis and, 269 non, 70 sexual, 95, 96 traditional positions and, 107 unitary, 102 ideology, 91, 104 narrative therapy and, 233 neo-Marxian, critique of, 298 struggle and, 23 ignorance, learned, 222 image, 98 body, 190 ideal, 118, 194 phonic, 69 self, 116, 194 imaginary, 37, 118, 119, 162, 164, 302, 366 analyst in the, 168 attributions, 48 cinema and the, 351 closure, 95 order, 46, 190 other, 201 rise of the, 254 vision and the, 351 imago, 46, 51 sexual identification and, 45, 52 imitation, 46 impressions, 191, 195 in-between, 31 index, 147 session, 147 industry, demands of, 350 infant and the mirror, 43 sexuality of the, 266 Ingleby, D., 335 inhibition, 286 Íñiguez, L., 332 insecurity, reproduction of, 102 inside/outside, 238 institution, 210 psychology as an, 244 subjection and, 105

380

Index

integration, 192 intentionality, 76 interpretation, 26, 131, 141, 166, 182, 204 art of, 174 work of, 175, 177 intersubjectivity, the rubric of, 364 intervention, 160, 181, 187, 284 chemical, 280 method and, 211 See also father; la troisième inversion, 113, 183 absolute, 113 irreducible jouissance, 197 resistance, 70

Kernberg, O., 323, 324 Kierkegaard, S., 182 Kieslowski, K., 28 Kirkland, K. D., 47 Kitzinger, C., 11, 245, 333 knowledge, 75, 322 the all of, 259 of the analysand, 204 fantasy and, 254 interdiction and, 273 the mirror stage and, 56 paranoiac, 46 retroactive, 45, 326 sexual difference and, 246 Kramer, P., 281, 285, 287 Kvale, S., 332

Jakobson, R., 73 Johnston, W. A., 48 Jones, E. E., 44 jouissance, 121, 127, 196, 197, 256, 347, 357, 362, 363 being in play, 363 Borromean knot and, 257, 258 feminine, 129, 276, 277 the infant and, 368 of language, 258 limit and, 257 mystic, 129 nondialectical, 262, 272 object a and, 256 of the Other, 150 phallic, 129, 270, 275 project and, 303 the real and, 272, 277 satisfaction and, 277 uncodified 195 judgment, 166

Lacan culture and, 299 the excommunication of, 187 as intervention, 66 narrative therapy and, 234 phallocentrism and, 246 the return to Freud, 189, 232 the transmission of, 325 lack, 73, 256, 283, 290 anorexia and, 289 anxiety and, 289 cause of speech, 262 the cure and, 284 desire and, 284 ethics and, 283 wholeness and, 274 Lacoue-Labarthe, P., 74 la langue (lalangue), 66–68, 75, 129, 130 language, 65, 68, 124, 127, 185, 257, 347, 357, 364 defect of, 224 demand and, 283 dichotomies, 142 function of, 67 in interpretation, 175 as opacity, 76 Other of, 73, 75 as praxis, 76 primary, 204

Kagan, J., 46, 47 Kant authority and, 32 empiricism and, 30 formal a priori, 30, 254 the real and, 366 self consciousness and, 34–36 Keil, F. C., 53–56

Index psychology and, 63 as sexual, 146 as social, 65 theorizing, 65 truth and, 233 Laplanche, J., 45, 109 Lasky, R., 304 la troisième, 125, 143, 151, 154 Lau, R. R., 49 law, 163, 269, 298, 303 desire and, 269 moral, 270 Leavy, S., 175 letter, the, 130 Lewis, M., 43, 44 limit, 107, 149, 215, 291 of theory, 275 linguistics, 70, 121 the elements of, 175 formal, 129 method of, 73 object of, 66 performance and, 72 psycholinguistics 63, 76 Lodge, D., 24 logic generalized, 68 semiotic code as a, 259 structure of, 68 of the unconscious, 184 logos, as repression, 31 loss, 93, 254, 274, 282, 304 depression and, 284 of ideal, 282 Luepnitz, D., 230, 231 Macaulay, J., 53 Macey, D., 337 Malcolm, N., 79 Malone, K., 6, 10, 232 Marcel, A. J., 53 Marecek, J., 3 Markin, R., 360 Marshall, P., 309, 310, 313n 9 Martella, M., 286 Martin, J., 298 masculine, 246, 259

381

master signifier, 190, 307 mastery, 46 master-slave, 50 narrative, 233 unity and, 358 Mayer, E. L., 3 McFarland, C., 47 McIntosh, M., 245 McIntyre, A., 309 McLaughlin, T., 333 McRobbie, A., 96, 101 meaning, 83, 234, 281 artifact and, 239 discourse and, 193 jouissance of, 129 listening for, 181 production of, 103 sutured, 247 méconnaissance, 44, 55, 57, 299 media, 95 mediator, a vanishing, 31 Meichenbaum, D., 56 Meissner, W. W., 141 melancholia, 282 memory, 340 Merck, M., 11, 21 metaphor absence and, 268 archeological, 237, 238 construction, 181, 238 the cure and, 293 linguistics and, 268 maternal, 106 metonymy and, 256 paradigm and, 268 paternal, 106, 261 prime, 365 prohibition and, 268 subject of, 63 method artifact and, 248 intervention and, 211 metonymy. See metaphor Metz, C., 347, 350, 351 Milgram, S., 48 Miller, D. T., 48 Miller, J.-A., 80, 130, 338

382

Index

Milosz, C., 42 mind coordinated software, 28 mind/body, 124 mirror stage, 56, 94, 351. See also ego; image; imaginary Mischel, W., 50 Mitchell, J., 93, 94, 230, 231, 337 Mitchell, S., 3, 14, 123 Möebius strip, 238 Morawski, J., 11, 243 Moscovici, S., 20, 305, 339 Moss, P., 11, 136 mourning, 282, 288–291 object of, 291 Muller, J., 20, 46, 50, 239, 325 Mulvey, L., 255 myth, 347, 349, 359 as diachronic, 350 as synchronic, 350 name, 260 of the father, 157, 231, 261, 317 proper, 72 Nancy, J.-L., 74 narcissism, 45, 50–53, 116 narrative approaches, 230 deconstruction and, 233 discourse, 104 gaps in, 108 phantasy, 96 self, 35 therapy, 232 unconscious in, 29, 30 values and cultural, 349 need, 94, 256 negation, 252, 253 Nelson, R. E., 50 neurosis, kernel of, 283 neurotic, 112 demand, 81 emergence, 82 obsessional, 187 neutrality, 304, 305 ethics and, 310

law and, 303 responsibility and, 311 Noon, J., 340 noun, proper, 125 object, 216, 262 choice, 113, 127 of desire, 195 of grammatical theory, 67 ideal, 121 internal, 216, 217 of linguistics, 66 lost, 119, 254, 290, 292, 304 primordial, 270 of psychoanalysis, 69 theoretical, 273 unconscious, 254 whole, 254 object a, 114, 115, 123–128, 203, 246, 254, 256, 257, 368 absence of, 262 gaze as, 254, 255 history and, 236 limit and, 260 organized, 257 phallus and, 368 voice as, 130 void and, 262 object little a, 291 anxiety and, 291 object relations, 94 Oedipus complex, 284 and the sphinx, 273 theory of, 367 vissitudes and, 274 Oremland, J. D., 141 organ, 216 organization, 195 orientation, philosophical, 240 Osherson, D. N., 54 other desire of the, 149 internalized, 310 Other, 83, 221 absence of the, 85, 88

Index of the analysand, 161 analyst in the, 168 body of the, 84 castration and the, 231 defect in the, 214–220 desire of the, 150, 149, 232 discourse of the, 72, 154, 182, 183 the double and the, 355, 358 encountering the, 235 of hysteria, 261 as incomplete, 256, 263 jouissance of the, 129, 150, 216, 257 as language, 73, 75 locus of the, 185 original, 272 the real and the, 201 as symbolic, 163, 164, 201, 202 transference and the, 199 Parker, I., 6, 19, 243, 332, 333, 336–340 parole, 75, 261 Parsons, T., 299 passage, 223 past/present, 238 pathology, 80, 333 patriarchy critique of, 245 structure and, 231 Pecheux, M., 107 peculiarity, in diction, 145 performance, linguistic, 67, 69, 72 Perkins, R., 245, 333 perversion, 120 pervert, 112, 121 Pfister, J., 11, 244 phallic mother, 106 phallocentrism, 246 phallus, 106, 107, 231–233, 246, 258, 283, 364 anxiety and the, 266 desire and the, 269 as fraud, 106 jouissance of the, 257, 270 maternal, 284

383

object a and the, 368 prime metaphor, 365 theory of the, 272 unique signifier, 4, 269 phantasy, 92, 93, 98 desire and, 96 fantasy, 108n 1 the organization of, 96 production and, 93 public and private, 97 See also fantasy phenomenology, 336 hetero-phenomenology, 24 Phoenix, A., 332 Pinker, S., 65 Pippin, R., 34 Pittman, T. S., 44 placebo, 159 pluralism, 312 Christian, 308 the cure and, 305 poetry, 277 polarities, 345 Pommier, G., 197 Pontalis, J.-B., 45, 109 positioning, 104, 102 feminine, 246, 259 illusion and, 274 imaginary, 193 masculine, 246, 259 psychotic, 217 postmodernism, 299, 334, 338 poststructuralism, 236 prägung, 191 Pratkanis, A. R., 44 praxis dialectical, 183 language and, 76 Prilleltensky, I., 332 process language and, 176 psychoanalytic, 142, 160, 197 prohibition, 268, 269 jouissance and, 270 Prozac, 280, 287 conflict and, 280

384

Index

Prozac (continued) ego and, 291 history and, 287 listening to, 281 as metaphor, 282 normal and, 281 symptom and, 281 the work force and, 286 Pry, G., 50 psychoanalysis in America, 229 anthropology and, 347 the breach of, 332 discourse and, 310 groups as subjects of, 298 history of, 336, 337 normalizing, 333 shamanism and, 346 work of, 238 psychology, 335, 336, 339 critical, 331, 332, 335 cultural critique of, 244 ethics and, 321 the institution of, 244 morality and, 298 as natural science, 245 power and, 244 research and force in, 244 research in, 243, 244 psychopharmacology, cosmetic, 285, 293 psychosis, 118, 312n 3 normalcy and, 301 void and, 218 psychotic, 84 analysis, 210 analyst of, 222 signifier, 223–225 structure, 216, 225 subject, 112, 212 punctuation, 181, 187 Pyle, C., 260 Ragland-Sullivan, E., 11, 142 Rapaport, D., 42, 43 rational examination, 170

interventions, 100, 106 politics, 97 subject, 74, 247, 335 Rawls, J., 306, 307 reading identity, 320 Lacan, 320 meaning, 103 Real, T., 230 real, the, 13, 83, 88, 191, 192, 195, 254, 258, 272, 302, 365, 366 accommodating, 196 fixation and, 255 jouissance and, 272, 277 and the Other, 255 return of, 117 solution in, 273 and theory, 274 realism, 97, 98 reality, 97 recognition, 106, 199 language and, 72 self, 57 transference and, 199 register, symbolic, 190 Rehm, L. P., 50 Reich, W., 286 Reid, P., 244 Reinhard, K., 236, 238 Reisman, D., 321 relation sexual, there is no, 252, 253 virtual, 338 religion faith and certainty in, 312 and freedom, 308 law and, 298 in psychology, 21 as technique, 80 representation, negation and, 252, 253 repressed logos as, 31 primordially, 30, 31 translation, 325 resistance, irreducible, 70

Index responsibility, 160, 311 of analyst, 182 ethics and, 304 Prozac and, 282 revolution, the Freudian, 41 Richards, B., 334 Richardson, F., 11, 50, 239, 298 Rickle, W., 286 Riebel, L., 3 Rommetveit, R., 64, 65 Roof, J., 4 Rorty, R., 142 Rose, J., 93, 94 Rose, N., 335 Ross, M., 47, 48 Roth, D., 50 Roudinesco, E., 333, 337 Rozensky, R. H., 50 RSI, 258, 261, 367 Rucker, R., 340 rules, 236 rupture, 212 Russel, D., 49 Sackheim, H. A., 50 Sacks, M., 301 Sampson, E., 6, 10 Samuels, R., 5, 112 Sarup, M., 337 Saussure, F., 66–70 savoir, 210, 211, 214, 215, 221, 253 the analyst and, 215 constructing, 227 the psychotic and, 222, 224 scansion, 181, 186, 187 Schelling, F. W. J., 32 schema L, 114, 116, 164 schizophrenia, 84, 224 God and, 84 science depression and, 281 fiction, 349 Freud and, 275 Schneiderman, S., 303 Schnog, N., 244 Schreber, 301, 302

385

Segal, H., 245 Seitz, V., 46 self analysis, 147 artifact, 233 awareness, 33 coherent, 233 consciousness, 34–36 construction, 347 identity, 253 recognition, 57 reference, 94 substantial, 35 theorizing, 231 semiotic, code, 259 sense, 281 sentence, 68 separation, 93 sexuality, 93 demand and, 94 feminine, 91, 93 hetero, 92 homo, 111 identity and, 269 infantile, 112–115, 266 neurotic, 120 normal, 111, 112 political equality and, 276 polymorphous, 115 theory and, 271, 273 sexuation, 22, 82, 252, 260 feminine, 260 See also gender; identification; metaphor shamanism, 346 Shevrin, H., 53 shifters, 73 Shotter, J., 9, 243 Sicoly, F., 48 sign, 68, 70 signification, 74 centrality of, 102 deconstruction of, 108 desire and, 105 femininity and, 104 phallic, 131 signified, 70

386

Index

signifier, 74, 175 difference and the, 252 efficiency of the, 28 jouissance and the, 127 lack of a, 125, 126 the logic of the, 9, 222 master, 190 meaning and the, 70 as phonic image, 69 the psychotic’s, 223–225 pure operativity of the, 70 Silverman, L. H., 53 Simblett, G., 5 simulation, 352, 353 sinthome, 252, 255 Skillen, J. W., 308–310 social construction, 64, 231, 299 Soler, C., 82 Spairani, P. A., 274 speaking, 231 speech, 197, 214 act of, 27 full, 198 of a sexed being, 231 subject of, 75 Spencer, R., 286 Spivak, G., 75 split, 73, 75 the Freud-Ferenczi, 141 surplus and, 291 theorizing, 65 virtual, 248 See also subject; subjectivity spontaneity, 34 work and, 210 Squire, C., 11, 337 Stam, H., 9 Stephan, W. G., 48 Stephenson, N., 340 Stern, D. N., 333 Stigliano, T., 11 Stillman, R., 312 Stowell-Smith, M., 333 strategies, methodological, 66 Straus, L., 12, 69, 345–350 structuralism, 103, 123

structure approach and, 236 as chain, 70 constraint and, 211 of experience, 225 gap and, 270 synchronic, 76 unconscious, 184 void and, 262 Sturma, D., 23 subject, 29, 73–75, 164, 263, 363 bisexual, 112 decentred, 338 of desire, 256 as dispersed, 36 as empty, 39 of enunciation, 33, 36, 74 hysterical, 36 Lacanian, 71, 123, 280, 299, 337 mastery and the, 311 as metaphor, 7, 63 of narrative, 299 neurotic, 112 as not a self, 35, 363 object a and, 230, 257 perverse, 112 production of the, 107 psychotic, 112 qualified, 300 rational, 107 of resistance, 7, 193 of Schelling, 31 of the signifier, 36 speaking, 75 split, 73, 75, 105, 287 supposed to know, 160, 161, 364 unity of the, 335 subjection, 292 freedom and, 311 subjective experience of sense, 27 recognition, 72 transformation, 107, 108 subjectivity, 5, 104, 191 as acquired, 282 in the clinic, 280

Index irrational, 336 irreducible, 23, 24 as a knot, 252 logocentric theory of, 8 monad, 65. See also Chomsky, N. sexual difference and, 93, 114, 115 subjectivization, 238 suggestion, 159, 167 supplement, drugs as, 293 surface/depth, 238 surplus, 291 Surrealism, 337 symbolic displacement, 183 malfunction, 302 register, 190 symbolic order, 68, 72, 148, 258, 302, 366 infant and, 366 See also Borromean knot; language; Other symptom, 150, 181, 183, 238, 281, 287, 293 language and, 285 and the pharmacy, 293 and the real, 197 synchronic structure, 68, 76 system, 66 syntax, 66–68 system mythological, 350 non-system, 191 psychic relations, 93 Szajnberg, N., 298 Tarratt, M., 349 Taylor, S. E., 50 technology, the double and, 248 text, 93, 98 analyzing, 350 development, 93 fiction and, 93 holes in, 24 political, 231

387

psychoanalysis and, 106 sexual identity, 97 Thelen, M. H., 47 theory academic, 302 asexual, 322 castration and, 283 communication, 306 critical, 231 culture and, 243, 244 desire and, 367 developmental, 103 difference and, 271 dream of, 273 general, 304 Lacanian, 138, 139, 154 law and, 270 liberal, 306 moral, 270 the phallus and, 272, 276 real and, 274 unthinkable, 271 therapist family, 231 the Freudian, 181 therapy family, 232, 238 feminist theory of, 230 solution focused, 230, 234, 237 Thome, P. R., 53 Thompson, J., 298 time in analysis, 187 of representation, 25 representation of, 25 unconscious and, 187 See also scansion Tinnin, L., 312, 313n 11 totem, 269, 270 transference, 164, 166, 169, 171, 200, 221, 293 counter, 162 libidinal conflict and, 171 transformation, 107, 108 transition, 223 transitivism, 51

388

Index

translation, 325 trauma birth, 81 event of, 218 subject of, 254 treatment, 280 medication and, 280 method of, 210 speech and, 290 subject of, 213 unique, 235 truth, 187, 222, 233 regimes of, 104, 107 unary traits, 254, 256, 257, 261 uncanny, 353 unconscious, 300 of analysand, 161 as cause, 234 collective, 305 emergence of, 177 exterior, 337 the Freudian, 29, 38 jouissance and the, 257 as lost, 234 as narrative master, 29, 30 origin of, 142–145 point of reference in, 145, 184 subject of the, 36–39, 44, 151, 193, 236 unity, 38 Ungaretti, G., 265 universal, the, 245

universal grammar, 65, 66, 68 atemporal system, 68 and the symbolic order, 68 Urwin, C., 335, 338 Venn, C., 104, 107, 108, 325, 338 verbalization, 206n 2 Verene, D. P., 32, 33 victimization, 100 Villela, L., 353 Viscusi, D., 50 voice, 130. See also object a, gaze as Walker, J., 312, 313n 11 Walkerdine, V., 6, 21, 104, 334, 335, 338 Web, D., 286 Wertz, F., 3 Westen, D., 56 Wexler, K., 54 White, M., 10, 230, 232, 233, 235, 243 whole, 94, 235 Wilkinson, S., 243, 245 wish, 93 fulfillment, 149, 152 writing matrices of, 195 Yando, R., 46 Zetzel, E., 285 Zigler, E., 46 Zimmerman, J. L., 230, 234 £i¶ek, S., 11, 20, 307–309 Zuckerman, M., 49, 50