Lacan1

Jacques Lacan belonged to the second generation of French psychoanalysts which, thanks to the arrival in France of Rudolf Loewenstein, was the first to benefit from a training analysis of sufficient quality and duration. Lacan left the Société Psychanalytique de Paris and the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1953, following a controversy over the short sessions he gave his patients. For Lacan, the anxiety of being absorbed by the object is the principal anxiety from which the anxieties of separation, castration or fragmentation are derived, which may explain why he did not keep his patients for a sufficient length of time. Lacan transformed his difficulty into an advocated technique, which he justified by making a critique of the classical technique. He founded his own international psychoanalytic association, in which selection only occurs when the analyst is already at a very advanced stage in his career (‘the authorization of an analyst can only come from himself’). We are indebted to Lacan for having drawn the attention of analysts to the role of language, and especially of words with a double meaning, in the genesis of interpretation, but his theory of language, founded on the assimilation of psychoanalysis to structural linguistics and anthropology, has collapsed. Many of Lacan's other theoretical contributions, such as the renewed interest in the après‐coup, the place of mirror relations in narcissism, the distinction between what he calls jouissance and the orgasm, or between the ‘real’ and reality, have been gradually integrated by analysts who accept neither his technique nor his laxity in training.     

Lacan and Social Psychology

Jacques Lacan kept silent on the topic of social psychology, never referring to it, not even to criticize it. But this has not impeded Lacanian theory from inspiring diverse critical approaches to social psychology. After reviewing these approaches, the article examines Lacan's different explicit positions with respect to psychology, the social and what he called psychology of the social field. This allows us to infer the implicit manner in which Lacan would establish his silent relationship with social psychology. On the basis of this relationship, we outline an original proposal for a Lacanian critical approach to social psychology that might lead to an alternative transindividual metapsychology. Our proposal precisely differs from others in that it attempts to consider and elucidate Lacan's own attitude regarding social psychology.     

Balint After Lacan ... and After

This paper examines Balint and Lacan's views about regression and symbolism, language, and transference. The author points out their similarities, their differences, and then proposes a synthesis through his approach of history, genealogy, trauma, and crisis. Freud's notions of masochism, of fixation (innate or phylogenetic) may thus be renewed, leading to the analyst's capacity to cope with deep regression and borderline (Balint) psychosis and perversion (Lacan) or to psychosomatics, including epilepsy.     

The Neighbor Between Rosenzweig and Lacan

Death is the persistent kernel of a human life in both Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory and Franz Rosenzweig’s theology. Lacan’s reformulation of the Freudian drive conceives of death as the annihilating force behind each person’s desire. Accordingly, the other assumes death’s absolute impenetrability. Rosenzweig likewise insists that perpetual acknowledgement of death must individuate a human life; however, his theology of revelation allows for the disclosure of the absolute Other in a commandment to love. Two ethics proceed from these two figures of death: a Lacanian ethics of distance and a Rosenzweigian ethics of communitarian love. Finally, I consider whether a Rosenzweigian posture toward the neighbor must be predicated on a transcendent faith.     

The significance of Jacques Lacan.

The contemporary French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, has offered a reinterpretation of basic Freudian concepts that is to a great extent based on the structural linguistics of F. de Saussure. Certain fundamental ideas of Lacan, such as his views that "the unconscious is structured like a language" and that "the unconscious is the discourse of the Other" are examined here, and an attempt is made to place them in perspective in psychoanalysis.     

Self-Formation and the speculative: Gadamer and Lacan

Abstract

Gadamer’s project in Truth and Method is as much about truth in the human sciences as it is about human subjectivity, for, following Heidegger, he claims that truth is reducible to method (technical rationality) only if one is misled by old Enlightenment subject/object dualisms. Posing the question of the possibility and nature of truth in scientific thinking, where a strict division between subjective and objective has fallen away, Gadamer belongs, as one of its inaugural figures, to an alternative tradition of philosophical complexity, which implicates environmental systems (culture, ideology, institutions), embedded in language, in the constitution of human subjectivity.

With these theoretical shifts in mind, what caught my attention in a press report concerning the trial of (subsequently convicted) serial killer, Stewart Wilken (“Boetie Boer”), was the strangely anachronistic question that dominated the front page of a Port Elizabeth newspaper: “Boetie: Is he Sick or Evil?” This question, in my view, harks back to a questionable framework of Enlightenment autonomy, which depends upon the easy technical rationality of clear-cut dichotomies. In what follows I hope to show that in acknowledging the role of complex interrelations between cultural and other systems, a tradition of philosophical complexity justifiably claims a more adequate framework for understanding self-formation than that underpinning the discourses at work in Wilken’s trial. I shall draw on Gadamer’s hermeneutic model of an “embedded” subject, which is based on his speculative model of “play” outlined in Truth and Method, and supplement this with Lacan’s psychoanalytic account of subject formation.     

Psychoanalysis and theology: Jacques Lacan and Paul

The nature of humanity—or the human situation-has been an area of thought intensely studied by theologians and philosophers for centuries. In more recent times, however, psychology has made serious advances into this field of inquiry. It has been able to provide insights applicable to previous theological ideas. The author brings to the reader's attention his twofold purpose: to present an interpretation of the human situation as understood by Jacques Lacan—as informed by such forerunners as Sigmund Freud and Martin Heidegger— and expressed by psychoanalytic method. These same ideas are then examined in light of the writings of St. Paul. From a sensitive study of these two thinkers the author has been able to draw numerous correlations pertinent to contemporary studies within religion and psychology.is in the private practice of psychotherapy at the Peachtree-Parkwood Mental Health Center in Atlanta. He is an Episcopal priest. For their thoughtful suggestions and editorial assistance, the author is grateful to: Dr. David M. Moss, The Seabury Institute for Pastoral Psychotherapy, and Jean Levenson, M.Div., Darby Printing Company, Atlanta.     

The ecstatic and the theory of Jacques Lacan

Historically, psychology attempted to become a science of the mind, but failed for various reasons. These included (a) the apparent barrier between objective and subjective data, (b) ignoring of individual differences, (c) experimenter bias, (d) culture boundedness, (e) insufficient training of observers, and (f) a limited, Newtonian physics view of reality. This article argues that humanistic and transpersonal psychology can lead the way to a more comprehensive and effective science of mind because we have new methods today to deal more effectively with the limits imposed by these problems.     

Thinking in the space between Winnicott and Lacan

The author, following André Green, maintains that the two most original psychoanalytic thinkers since Freud were Donald Winnicott and Jacques Lacan. Winnicott, it has been said, introduced the comic tradition into psychoanalysis, while Lacan sustained Freud's tragic/ironic vision. Years of mutual avoidance by their followers (especially of Lacan by Anglophone clinicians) has arguably diminished understanding of the full spectrum of psychoanalytic thought. The author outlines some basic constructs of Winnicott and of Lacan, including: their organizing tropes of selfhood versus subjectivity, their views of the "mirror stage", and their definitions of the aims of treatment. While the ideas of Winnicott and Lacan appear at some points complementary, the goal is not to integrate them into one master discourse, but rather to bring their radically different paradigms into provocative contact. A clinical vignette is offered to demonstrate concepts from Lacan and Winnicott, illustrating what it might mean to think and teach in the potential space between them.     

The cabinet of Dr. Lacan

Conclusion Obscurity is not the worst failing, and it is philistinism to pretend that it is. In a series of brilliant essays written over the last fifteen years Stanley Cavell has consistently argued that more important than the question whether obscurity could have been avoided is whether it affects our confidence in the author.Confidence raises the issue of intention, and I would have thought that the primary commitment of a psychoanalytic writer was to pass on, and (if he can) to refine while passing on, a particular way of exploring the mind. Indeed this is how Lacan himself proposes that his work should be judged. The aim of my teaching, he writes, has been and still is the training of analysts.For decades now Lacan has been insisting that the nature of this commitment has been systematically obscured, particularly in North America. Training has become routinized, and analysis itself has become distorted into a process of crude social adaptation. There is much here to agree with. Yet two questions must be raised. Has Lacan devised a more effective method of training analysts? And, would one expect this from his writings?Neither question gets a favourable answer. All reports of his training methods, over which he has now brought about three distinct secessions within the French psychoanalytic movement, are horrifying.¹³ It is now, I am told, possible to become a Lacanian analyst after a very few months of Lacanian analysis. And what pedagogic contribution could we expect from a form of prose that has two salient characteristics: it exhibits the application of theory to particular cases as quite arbitrary, and it forces the adherents it gains into pastiche.¹⁴ Lacan's ideas and Lacan's style, yoked in an indissoluble union, represent an invasive tyranny. And it is by a hideous irony that this tyranny should find its recruits among groups that have nothing in common except the sense that they lack a theory worthy of their cause or calling: feminists, cinéastes, professors of literature.Lacan himself offers several justifications for his obscurity, about which he has no false modesty. At times he says that he is the voice, the messenger, the porte-parole, of the unconscious itself. Lacan's claim stirs in my mind the retort Freud made to a similar assult upon his credulity and by someone who had learned from Lacan. It is not the unconscious mind I look out for in your paintings, Freud said to Salvador Dali, it is the conscious.This article originally appeared as a review (The New York Review of Books, January 25, 1979) of the three books listed under References.