The Treachery of Images

The scene was the mass uprising of students and workers across France in 1968. Famously, Lacan engaged with some of the students involved in the attempt at revolution. Two IPA analysts, writing under a pseudonym, denounced the students as would-be Stalinists acting out their infantile Oedipal problems. The IPA analysts, however, were not merely expressing a political opinion, but explicitly articulated their position in terms of the psychoanalytic jargon of their school, lending it a veneer of ‘scientific’ authority. It is a good example of University discourse, in other words, in that it places (psychoanalytic) knowledge at the centre of what in fact is a thinly-veiled partisan political intervention. (This great piece by Rabaté discusses the episode at length).

The Ethics of Psychoanalysis

 

The following is taken from one session in a series of introductory seminars as part of the Lacan Circle of Melbourne’s activities.

 

There is an interesting remark by Miller, in a paper from 2012 on the aims of psychoanalysis. ‘The psychoanalyst’s routine is therapeutic. His business is with the symptom that has to be cured.’ Psychoanalysts can put on airs, and ascribe lofty goals to their practice, but people come to consult with an analyst because something is causing them suffering. As Miller says, ‘If somebody goes to see a psychoanalyst for the sake of knowledge and not to get rid of a symptom it is not very certain that his demand can be received’.  So, whatever one may learn of oneself in the course of analysis, analytic praxis is not reducible to a quest for knowledge.

CBT and Scatology

“Freud was full of horseshit”. These are the words of Albert Ellis, co-founder of CBT and originator of what he calls Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT).

Ordinary Psychosis

There are no shortage of psychoanalytic theories of psychosis. The Lacanian account of psychosis that derives from the 1950s – and which we may think of as ‘classical’, in Lacanian psychoanalysis – can be found best expressed in Seminar 3, and the paper entitled ‘On a question prior to any possible treatment of psychosis’ in the Écrits. To put it very simply, psychosis is conceived of as a structure, not a checklist of symptoms, or a particular phenomenological condition. Where neurosis is characterised by the fundamental operation of repression, and perversion by disavowal, in psychosis, foreclosure is paramount. To illustrate: in repression, signifiers and thoughts become unconscious. It is as if they were swept under a carpet; out of sight, but leaving a lump, nonetheless. In foreclosure, not only is the same material not swept under the carpet, but it is never admitted entry in the first place. This has ramifications for a subject’s entire place and function within the symbolic order (i.e. the order of discourse and law). It is as if a set of organising principles are lacking, at least, relative to those found in neurosis under repression.

Against the ‘understanding’ of psychosis…

I may say that in the last teaching, Lacan is very close to saying that all of the symbolic order is a delusion, including his own construction of the symbolic order.

Action of the Structure – Then and Now

I recently read a newly-translated text by Jacques-Alain Miller, entitled ‘Action of the Structure’, a translation of which can be found here. The essay has been translated as part of the Concept and Form project, which undertakes to publish seminal papers from the 1960s French journal, Cahiers Pour L’Analyse. (For those interested, the website is a great resource on this obscure chapter of French philosophy).

On Psychoanalysis and Same-Sex Marriage

France has been the center of lively debate on the topic of same-sex marriage (SSM), and many prominent psychoanalysts (Jacques-Alain Miller and Eric Laurent among them) there have contributed to the discussion. What can psychoanalysis contribute to this debate?

As early as Seminar XIV (The Logic of Phantasy), Lacan repudiates the notion of men and women possessing any ‘natural’ complementarity, as if they constituted something like a lock-and-key, or nut-and-bolt pairing. Indeed, such a pairing makes no sense unless one is operating from a position of some kind of transcendental teleogy. The notion of having an ‘other half’ – a typical expression in English to describe one’s partner – is itself an Aristophanic myth, as found in Plato’s Symposium. What is mythic, however, is by no means ‘natural’. (Incidentally, Aristophanes’ myth allowed for homosexual as well as heterosexual unions).

Indeed, opponents of SSM sometimes conflate the ‘normal’ with the ‘natural’. Heterosexual, genital sexuality may have once been a norm, but even so, a norm is a flimsy (and in this case, outdated and arbitrary) basis for legislating human sexual relations. As Pierre-Gilles Guéguen put it in a talk earlier this year, human sexuality is ‘deranged’. There is nothing ‘natural about it, which is to say, like all of the other ‘natural’, ‘biological’ functions (eating, sleep, excretion, etc), it is subject to rigorous socialisation, regimentation and codification from the earliest hours of life. There can be nothing natural about human sexuality, as, popular reifications notwithstanding, it doesn’t wander about unencumbered by historical context, unmediated by language.

For this reason, Lacan made the provocative argument in Seminar XX that ‘Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel’, which is to say, there is no intrinsic rapport or sexual relation between the sexes, Aristophanic fantasies aside. Each couple must construct it, anew, and on an ongoing, partial, and provisional basis. And from this, it follows that, whatever one’s objections to marriage per se, there are no legitimate objections against SSM in particular, at least, not from a psychoanalytic perspective.

Disavowal and its Vicissitudes

One of the biggest questions for Lacanian psychoanalysis in the 21^st Century – perhaps the biggest – is the question of psychosis. The classical formulation of clinical structures largely divides them into two (and then to subsequent sub-types). These two structures are, of course, neurosis, and psychosis, which correspond to the operations of repression (Verdrängung) and foreclosure (Verwerfung) respectively. One question is whether these two categories are adequate to capture contemporary clinical phenomena and, if not, what alternative formulations may look like, especially with respect to ‘borderline’ symptoms. (It is not the patient, but only ever the clinician who is on the ‘borderline’, hovering between a diagnosis of neurosis or psychosis). The later work of Lacan points to this (the theory of the Sinthome), as does Jacques-Alain Miller’s notion of ‘ordinary psychosis’, and Paul Verhaege’s theory of ‘actualpathology’. These are still early and contested formulations; I’m yet to see much of Verhaege’s work applied in the Anglophone world (though happy to stand corrected if such work exists), and much of what is said or ordinary psychosis could, on closer inspection, apply equally to regular, extraordinary psychosis.

On the Passage from the ‘Structuralist’ to the Later Lacan

In discussion with certain colleagues in recent times, I thought it useful to reflect on Lacan’s shift from a ’structuralist’ psychoanalysis rooted in linguistics (in the 1950s) to his ‘late’ work, which I figure to date from around the time of Seminars XVI and XVII. (Structuralism is in quotes here as Lacan, for his part, denied being a structuralist per se). To put it very schematically, there are several reasons why I believe Lacan moved away from the clinic of the 1950s, with its language derived from Saussure and Jakobson, to his later period. I present some of these reasons here, without claiming that the list is any way exhaustive: