Welcome to the day



THE EMERGENCE OF LACANIAN PSYCHOANALYSIS

Ian Parker

I will briefly review the context for the emergence of Lacanian psychoanalysis from out of the International Psychoanalytical Association, as a way of introducing Lacan’s work.

The development of Lacan’s work has to be understood in relation to a theoretical background – that is, psychoanalysis elaborated by Freud – and an institutional background – that is, the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). Those two reference points, Freud and the IPA, are closely linked, and it is possible to see the history of Lacanian psychoanalysis as a process of disentangling those reference points. Along the way Lacan accumulates a number of other theoretical resources from outside psychoanalysis, and no doubt we will touch on some of those resources today, but it is always with a view to returning to Freud, or, as Lacan sometimes put it, returning to the meaning of Freud.

The IPA was founded in 1910 by Freud and his followers in Nuremberg, and the first president was Carl Jung. Freud had proposed Jung as ‘permanent president’ of the IPA,[1] but was relieved when Jung eventually resigned after three years of the presidency in 1914.[2]

Jung’s break from the IPA is worth attending to because Jung made it clear that he was developing something that was quite different from psychoanalysis,[3] and called it ‘analytical psychology’.[4]

Key differences between Jung and the IPA are relevant to debates over the relationship between Lacanian psychoanalysis and the IPA tradition.[5] So, why was Freud so pleased to be rid of Jung?[6]

First, psychoanalysis is concerned primarily with questions of ‘form’ rather than ‘content’. The Oedipus complex, for example, does not prescribe roles for women and men so that each child can really be in love with mother and want to kill father. The ‘father’ and ‘mother’ are, rather, functions that may be physically embodied in the same individual care-giver or distributed among many others. What is most important are the formal properties of the relationship; the infant’s love for its first object is broken by another figure so that the infant may be inducted into wider social relationships. Jung, on the other hand, fills out the formal structures with collective material from mythology that is imagined to be present as content to each individual. A Jungian learns the content of myths so that each person can be read as if they were a container of tarot card characters.

Second, psychoanalysis focuses on the disjunction between consciousness and the unconscious; the unconscious is not conceived as being like another version of consciousness that can be accessed and harmonised with what we are immediately aware of, and the unconscious does not contain a centre that can be detected so that real intentions can be brought to the surface. If dreams are, as Freud said, a ‘royal road to an understanding of the unconscious’ it is because dreams help us track around the boundaries of the unconscious, not because the road actually leads into it so we can see it as it is. Against this, Jung relies on a number of holistic assumptions in which there is unity of self and potentially there is unity between consciousness and layers of the personal and collective unconscious.

Third, psychoanalysis treats every appeal to divine forces as a sign of pathology, as symptomatic, and religious ideas are seen as illusions or delusions that provide varying measures of comfort or security. The questioning and dismantling of all ‘ideals’ makes psychoanalysis necessarily atheist, and its clinical and political practice arose as part of the tradition of the Western Enlightenment allied with scientific inquiry. Jung, on the other hand, sought to ‘reconnect’ individuals with a domain of spiritual experience, and this is a domain which combines what he sees as essential and universal in life.

The departure of Jung was therefore an opportunity for Freud to clarify psychoanalysis of a number of temptations in clinical practice. The temptations include: to decipher underlying content (and then, for example, to interpret what the real meanings of the symbols in dreams are); to discover real selves (and then, for example, to recognise and validate this whole self as it finds its way to conscious awareness); and to wallow in mysticism (and then, for example, to provide reassurance with respect to particular ideals that the analyst also shares).

However, this clarification was not sufficient to protect psychoanalysis forever, and the existence of the International Psychoanalytical Association was certainly no guarantee that Freud’s work would not also start be influenced again by the idea that we must be concerned with content, unity of the self or spirituality.

Powerful historical forces eventually pressed the IPA into a shape that was protective of psychoanalysts but not of psychoanalysis as such; as with the operation of any defence mechanisms, protection led to distortions and then to the sedimentation of the distortions so that anything that questioned its own particular orthodoxy was viewed as a threat.

Psychoanalysis was virtually destroyed in central Europe with the rise of Nazism in the 1930s, and the analysts fled. The IPA apparatus shifted to the English-speaking world, and a particular version of psychoanalysis that was concerned with the adaptation of individuals to society developed that complemented that painful process by which the émigré analysts had to adapt themselves to new social conditions.[7]

The dominant tradition in the United States came to be known as ‘ego psychology’, and this is a tradition that took literally Freud’s formulation of the aims of analysis in his new introductory lectures in 1933, that ‘Where id was, there ego shall be’ The formulation continues ‘It is the work of culture – not unlike the draining of the Zuider Zee’.[8] Here you can see individuality, adaptation and civilisation closely tied together; these things are actually what we have to see as problematic in order to enable psychoanalysis to take place.

In the ego psychology tradition there was once more a conception of the unity of self, something that built upon what the practitioners saw as a ‘conflict-free sphere of the ego’.[9] Even in the dissident Kleinian tradition that was allowed to remain inside the IPA, it was hoped that analysis would enable the ego to become, ‘the captain of the soul’.[10] Meanwhile, the Kleinians have been elaborating detailed specifications of the content of the mind, and in the object relations tradition, as a third main strand in the IPA, there has been some rapprochement with spirituality, with practitioners declaring allegiance to a range of theological traditions, ranging from Roman Catholicism to Buddhism understood as a religious system of thought.

The project of strengthening of the ego went alongside the strengthening of the IPA. By 1953 measures were being taken to silence or expel those who were too far out of line. The separation of Lacan from the IPA was a long drawn out process that lasted for ten years, from 1953 to 1963.

When Lacan agreed to found a new group of psychoanalysts in Paris, Société Française de Psychanalyse, he did not realise that the formation of this group separate from the French section of the IPA would thereby exclude him and his colleagues from IPA membership.

It was the occasion for the explosion of theoretical, clinical and political differences, and commissions of inquiry into Lacan’s work that would eventually lead to the IPA to recommend that he not be permitted to continue training new analysts. It was that decision that forced the break.

There are three key conceptual issues that are worth keeping in mind.

The first concerns structure. The particular oedipal arrangements that Freud describes need to be conceptualised as formal arrangements. Lacan’s attention to language – manifest in the well-known pronouncements that ‘the unconscious is structured like a language’ and the unconscious is the discourse of the other’ – emphasise the formal properties of language as a symbolic system. Language is a structural system of differences that form the subject and it provides a particular kind of space for the subject to speak about itself, and mislead itself about what it is. The Oedipal discovery of a ‘third term’ which separates the infant from its first love object can thus be conceptualised as the entry into language, into the symbolic.

The second key conceptual issue concerns the gap that cannot be closed in human experience between consciousness and the unconscious. For Lacan this is a division that operates not only between consciousness and the unconscious, but also at the level of the subject as a divided subject of the unconscious formed at the moment the infant learns to speak, at the moment the infant enters the symbolic. That speaking is also a splitting; attempts to unify the person or to strengthen the self-conception that someone has of themselves in their ego is to reinforce something false, necessarily false.

The third conceptual issue concerns truth, for as we speak a language we cannot but tell lies about ourselves. The particular kinds of lies that each of us tell are structured by the signifiers that are to hand at certain key moments in our lives as we learn to speak. We reproduce the particular most significant audiences for those lies as we speak in analysis, in transference. This transferential aspect of speaking is the only site we have for speaking the truth, and that truth will thus only be fleeting and half-said.[11] This means that Lacan is dead against the comforting notion that the analyst can build an alliance with an analysand in which transference is absent, or that there is a position outside the transference from which the analyst can decide what is true and false.

Despite all this bitter history, there is still recognition by many psychoanalysts inside the IPA and in the various Lacanian organisations that there is much to be learnt from each tradition.

One of the reasons for the dialogue now opening up might be that conditions for psychoanalysis are getting more difficult. Insurance companies demand cheaper more efficient ‘evidence-based’ treatments than psychoanalysis can provide. Those psychoanalysts who have tried to make psychoanalysis fit to jump through the supposedly scientific evidence-based hoops are now all the more worse affected when the rules are tightened up and they are excluded.[12] The news magazine of the IPA, International Psychoanalysis, refers in nearly every issue in recent years to the ‘crisis in psychoanalysis’, and a recent issue online (June 2005) has an article by the outgoing president Daniel Widlocher (a former analysand of Lacan’s) that mentions disagreements with Lacanian groups and argues for ‘dialogue’.[13]

Reviews of psychoanalysis produced by leading IPA members now even explicitly refer to Lacanians who are inside the IPA.[14] One unfortunate exception is the IPA group in Britain, which is quite hostile, and so we face particular problems here; the dispute over the use of the label ‘psychoanalyst’ are an expression of this, but it is a dispute that is meaningless in many other parts of the world. If we include those practising in the Latin-language countries, about half of the practising psychoanalysts in the world are outside the IPA.[15]

Psychoanalysis started with the attempt to conceptualise and treat hysteria. The map of the body that enables the subject to produce physical symptoms does not correspond to organic muscle groups, and it is therefore clear that there is a psychic cause to the particular pain or paralysis in question. Maps of the world are just as revealing of underlying symptomatic assumption and problems in dealing with history.

Jacques Derrida pointed out that the IPA constitution which was ratified at the 30th Congress in Jerusalem defines the three main geographical areas of the IPA’s world: ‘[1] America north of the United States – Mexican border; [2] all American south of that border; and [3] the rest of the world.’ Derrida, who was born in Africa, then proceeds to a close reading of the constitution and its notion of ‘human rights’ to raise questions about the naming of Latin America and the ethical practices that psychoanalysts have been confronting in that part of the world, and of naming ‘torture’ as a particular problem that analysts have been implicated in.[16]

The current listing of ‘IPA Constituent Organisations’ rectifies this problem, to an extent: Still, there are again three main geographical areas; [1] ‘Europe, including Australia, India and Israel’, [2] ‘Latin America’ and [3] ‘North America including Japan’.[17] Can we do better than this?

Lacan was just about to commence the eleventh year of his Seminar in 1963 when the news came through, the night before, that he had been definitively excluded from the IPA. That Seminar was to have been on ‘The Names-of-the-Father’,[18] and from what we have of the introductory session it seems that Lacan was to going to explore a pluralisation of forms of authority in contemporary society. This raises a number of questions about some fundamental changes in the structuring of human experience, about changes at the level of form rather than mere content. These are changes that also impact on the supposed unity of the ‘Name-of-the-Father’ (as a key signifier that replaces the desire of the mother in the Oedipus complex),[19] and changes in forms of spirituality that suppose God to be the most significant Name of the Father. The one session provides a first opening to address what are now termed by Jacques-Alain Miller and his followers ‘contemporary symptoms’ that are not governed by the old clinical structures of neurosis, psychosis and perversion.[20]

It also raises a question about the pluralisation of psychoanalysis. Lacan’s response to what he referred to as his ‘excommunication’ from the IPA was to stop the seminar and commence a completely new Seminar as Seminar XI, the one we now know as ‘The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis’ (those concepts being the unconscious, the drive, transference and repetition).[21]

Lacan commented that now is not the time to talk about ‘the names of the father’, and perhaps we could see this refusal as a lost opportunity, even a sign that the response to exclusion incited a bureaucratic closure of debate around Lacan that would mirror the bureaucratic closure of the IPA.[22] And it should be said that this closure was around a leader who was vain and manipulative, and the Lacanian association led by his son-in-law, that now calls for the ‘reconquest’ of the English-speaking world, is at least as tightly organised as the IPA.

Lacanian psychoanalysis is profoundly problematic, but it does still provide theoretical resources to conceptualise Freudian ideas and re-conceptualise its own practice.

One way of doing that is to look at the different specific concepts that Lacan elaborates, and use them as we find them useful in relation to art, culture or the clinic; such concepts include the symbolic, imaginary and real, the object petit a, name of the father, identification, unary trait and jouissance. The risk is that each concept then becomes adapted and incorporated into a framework that is non-psychoanalytic, into what Derrida terms ‘apsychoanalyticism’.[23] Sometimes it is worth taking that risk so that we can focus on some key concepts.

The other way is to trace the logic of different versions of Lacan as elaborations around different names of Lacan.[24] Then we may be able to find ways of making sense of these different Lacans so that we can start to piece together a Lacan that might work for us.

This paper was presented at Manchester Psychoanalytic Matrix on 3 April 2006 as an introduction to the day, and followed by papers by Christian Ingo Lenz Dunker and Kazushige Shingu.

-----------------------

[1] The proposal was relayed to the congress by Ferenczi. Gay, P. (1988) Freud: A Life for Our Time. New York: W.W. Norton. (p. 218)

[2] Freud wrote to Abraham (who was to be the next IPA president), ‘I cannot suppress a hurrah’, Gay, p. 241.

[3] There had been another earlier rift, when Alfred Adler had left in 1911, just before the second IPA congress, to set up his own ‘individual psychology’ as an alternative to psychoanalysis, and that approach hardly exists now, not impinging at all on psychoanalytic debates. Freud told Jung ‘I have got rid of Adler at last’, Gay, p. 224. There are now a few elderly men in London who deliver advice and a form of counselling that was not deemed to be psychotherapy, even less psychoanalytic psychotherapy, when the group applied for, and was refused, membership of the UKCP.

[4] Now, however, the old differences between psychoanalysis and ‘analytical psychology’ are even more important in Britain because some Jungians have campaigned to be included in ‘psychoanalytic studies’ in the universities, and now the psychoanalytic psychotherapy section and analytical psychology section of the UKCP have combined into one new organisation, and the College of Psychoanalysts – UK includes Jungians.

[5] Jung needs to be noted before he can be dispensed with in this context also because some similarities can be identified between commonsensical versions of Jungian and Lacan theory. Could it not be said, for example, that the Jung’s ‘collective unconscious’ is like Lacan’s ‘symbolic’, that both Jung and Lacan prefer a monistic conception of drive to Freud’s consistent dualism, and that both perspectives worry away at the relationship between specific qualities of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ within us? In each case, the ostensible similarity actually obscures deep differences between the two perspectives: the collective unconscious exists underneath experience enriching the self, while the symbolic divides the subject, structuring the unconscious as its other; unlike Jung’s unitary conception of a life force, the drive is divided in Lacan such that every drive is a death drive; and the relation between men and women which functions as complementary animus and anima in Jung, is an impossible non-relation for Lacan. In each case, the difference between Jung and Lacan is a difference that demonstrates Lacan’s adherence to Freudian analysis and Jung’s departure from psychoanalysis. Psychology textbooks and undergraduate programmes still tend to run together ‘Freudjungandadler’ as if they were one theorist, to be got out of the way as quickly as possible in the history of psychology. Richards, B. (1989) Images of Freud: Cultural Responses to Psychoanalysis, London: Weidenfeld Dent.

[6] Freud declared that he was happy to be rid of ‘the brutal holy Jung and his pious parrots’, Gay, p. 241.

[7] Jacoby, R. (1983) The Repression of Psychoanalysis. New York: Basic Books.

[8] Sigmund Freud (1933) New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (Lecture XXXI: The Dissection of the psychical personality), in Freud, S. (1964) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXII (1932-1936) (London: Hogarth Press), p. 80.

[9] Hartmann, H. (1958) Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation. New York: International Universities Press (originally published 1939).

[10] Hanna Segal argued that ‘…a psychoanalytical treatment aims at making a person be captain of his soul’, in Bourne, B., Eichler, U. and Herman, D. (eds) (1987) Voices: Psychoanalysis. Nottingham: Spokesman/Hobo Press. (p. 95)

[11] ‘I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there’s no way, to say it all. Saying it all is literally impossible: words fail. Yet it’s through this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real.’ Lacan, J. (1987) ‘Television’, October, 40, pp. 7-50. (p. 8).

[12] See, for example, Westen, D., Novotny, C. and Thompson-Brenner, H. (2004) ‘The empirical status of empirically supported psychotherapies: Assumptions, findings, and reporting in controlled clinical trials’, Psychological Bulletin, 130, (4), pp. 631-663.

[13] ‘We must specifically define the points of agreement and disagreement between our own and other forms of training. In particular, the Lacan-inspired groups have widely differing conceptions of training and we must engage with those who wish to talk to us.’ Widlocher, D. (2005) ‘The President’s column’, International Psychoanalysis, 14, (1), pp. 7-8.

[14] For example, Robert Wallerstein, speaking as IPA President at the 35th Congress in Montreal in 1987, described ‘…the present-day worldwide theoretical diversity in which we have existing side by side the American ego psychological (and by now post-ego psychological) school, the Kleinian, the Bionian, the (British) object-relational sometimes narrowed down to the Winnicottian, the Lacanian (largely outside but to a considerable extent in Europe and Latin America [and in Montreal] inside our official ranks), and even in the United States … Kohut…Mahler … Schafer…’ (p. 7). Wallerstein, R. (1988) ‘One psychoanalysis or many?’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 69, (5), pp. 5-21.

[15] There have been discussions in different parts of the world between Lacanians and members of the IPA, and friendly conversations between one of the presidents of the IPA, Horacio Etchegoyan, and Jacques-Alain Miller (Lacan’s son-in-law) speaking for the World Association of Psychoanalysis, which is one of the main Lacanian groups. Etchegoyan, H. and Miller, J.-A. (1996). Silence broken, Revista Argentina de Psiquiatría, 7, (26), 260-274. Available at (accessed 3 November 1999).

[16] Derrida explores ‘…the IPA’s geographical schematism, apoliticism, and even apsychoanalyticism in the name of a certain conception of human rights.’ Derrida, J. (1988) ‘Geopsychoanalysis: “…and the rest of the world”’, in C. Lane (ed.) The Psychoanalysis of Race. New York: Columbia University Press. (p. 75); ‘What is that form of violence that we call torture? Where does it begin and end? What is the status of the suffering inflicted or undergone in torture? What is the substance of torture? The fantasy of torture? The symbol of torture?…no trace of any such concern is to be found in the discourse of the IPA.’ (p. 79)

[17] IPA ‘Constituent and Other Organisations’, (accessed 8 March 2006).

[18] Lacan, J. (1963) ‘Introduction to the Names-of-the-Father Seminar’, in Copjec, J. (ed.) (1987) Television, Dossier on the Institutional Debate, October, 40.

[19] Lacan, J. (1981) The Psychoses: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III 1955-1956 (translated with notes by Russell Grigg, 1993). London: Routledge.

[20] Britton, H. (2004) ‘Contemporary symptoms and the challenge for psychoanalysis’, Journal for Lacanian Studies, 2, (1), pp. 56-62. It is ‘late Lacan’ that transforms these categories with a completely new take on the symptom as holding together ‘Borromean knot’. Thurston, L. (ed.) (2002) Re-inventing the Symptom: Essays on the Final Lacan. New York: Other Press.

[21] Lacan, J. (1973) Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, translated by Alan Sheridan, 1979). Harmondsworth: Penguin.

[22] Gallagher, C. (1996) ‘High Anxiety: A theoretical and clinical challenge to psychoanalysis’, The Letter, 6, pp. 1-23.

[23] Derrida (1998) op cit., p. 75.

[24] Even the name ‘Lacan’ is not the same in every language, as Lacan liked to claim in the seminar on identification, for example. Lacan, J. (1961-1962) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book IX, Identification, translated by Cormac Gallagher from unedited French manuscripts.

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download