There is a tradition among certain psychoanalytic writers and schools, to decline any engagement with the world outside of analysis. In this tradition, psychoanalytic literature becomes a continual exegesis of the master(s), devoid of reference points to the world beyond. Thankfully, Eric Laurent and his colleagues are most definitely not of this tradition, as Laurent’s new book, Lost in Cognition, demonstrates amply. Continue reading
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 Heterosexual, genital sexuality may have once been a norm, but even so, a norm is a flimsy (and in this case, outdated and arbitrary) basis for legislating human sexual relations.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.
Archives of a Divided Subject 