A Short Refutation of Behaviourism

Behaviourism began with the aim – we might say Heideggerean ideal – of practicing a science which does not think. Instead of the subjective methods of interview and introspection, behaviourists constructed an ‘objective’ observational model, in which, allegedly, antecedents and consequences would be causally strung together without the need for conjecture or inference. All of this was pinned to a transformation of the human subject into an object, and moreover, an object which functioned primarily as a learning machine, and whose workings could be understood without any reference to an inner world. (Not to mention without reference to others’ inner worlds – it was not for nothing that Wittgenstein considered behaviourism a kind of solipsism).

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: