Object-Relations and Cultural Narratives in the Analysis of Racism: Theorizing Subjectivity After Klein and Lacan

This paper discusses two approaches to racism in the psychoanalytic literature—one based on Kleinian object-relations, and another based on Lacan’s theory of language as central to subjectivity. It is argued that the Kleinian method relies on drawing parallels between object-relations at the psychological level and social relations in the external world, and this limits its understanding to a narrow catalogue of psychoanalytic concepts. A Lacanian/post-Lacanian approach begins from the structure of cultural narratives and is more sensitive to social variations. Using examples from anthropology, it is argued that both theories are crucial for a robust analysis of racism.     

A Look Beyond the Mirror—What He Saw and I Didn't: Reply to Commentary

Altman's commentary challenged this author on both a personal and a theoretical level. On a personal level, she was encouraged to explore her knowing at one moment but not knowing at another, her own self-interest in the position of beneficiary. Thus, the mechanism of disavowal that underpins liberal racism was revisited in a more clinically oriented manner.

On a theoretical level, Altman's response invited a more refined exploration of liberal racism as it differs from blatant racism. It also facilitated a more nuanced application of Lacanian and Kleinian theory to this matter.     

The making of a tragedy: perversion in the perception of truth

A type of wilful blindness can pervert an individual's perception of truth or reality, not because that reality is too much to hold, but because it is distasteful. Undesired. The case of Adam will be used to explore perversion as it twists an analytic process, affecting the transference and countertransference in ways that are difficult to see. Theorists of Freudian, Kleinian, Lacanian, and Jungian traditions are drawn from to explore potential roots to this perverted turn, and the way it can rigidify an individuation process. The anxiety that haunts this case echoes Jung's anxiety as he wondered if the stone saw him or he saw the stone. Object and observer blend when both analyst and patient hide from themselves and one another, knowing the truth of what is being discussed but blind to it.     

Commentary on Nikolay Mintchev’s “Object-Relations and Cultural Narratives in the Analysis of Racism”

Nikolay Mintchev’s (this issue) consideration of the use of psychoanalytic thought as a critical framework for the analysis of racism focuses on the differences between the Kleinian and Lacanian schools. While his depiction of their differences and the relevance of those differences for social theory is fundamentally fair and accurate, he overlooks the fact that as clinical theories, they may indeed have more in common than their apparent differences suggest. Their shared attention to the importance of unconscious fantasy and to the mechanisms of transference or the encounter with the Other in clinical work undermines the rigid distinction between them that is necessary for Mintchev’s thesis. By accepting the common view of their differences, Mintchev assumes a weaker version of each and sacrifices the dialectical dimension of psychoanalytic thought that indeed enhances its utility as social analysis.     

Overcoming the Shame of Cancer

The author describes the silencing and dehumanizing effects of being diagnosed with cancer. This experience evolved from a sense of being totally stunned, to being flooded with shame, and finally to be able to reenter an experience of subjectivity through the support of his family, friends, and community. He describes his personal struggle to disclose having cancer to his patients and supervises and the incredible beneficial effects of disclosure and being virtually and actually held and cared for. The author describes from Relational, Kleinian, and Lacanian perspectives his understanding of the effects of self-disclosure in reestablishing the capacity for symbolization and the ability to create personal meaning.     

THE NEED FOR TRUE CONTROVERSIES IN PSYCHOANALYSIS: THE DEBATES ON MELANIE KLEIN AND JACQUES LACAN IN THE RÍO DE LA PLATA

Controversies are part of the process of scientific knowing. In psychoanalysis, the diversity of theoretical, technical and epistemological positions makes the debate particularly necessary and by the same token difficult. In this paper, the author examines the function of controversies and the obstacles to their development, taking as examples the debates held in the Rao de la Plata (Buenos Aires and Montevideo) during the nineteen seventies, when the dominant Kleinian ideas came into contact with Lacanian thought. The author examines different examples of argumentative discourses, using concepts taken from the theory of argumentation. The major difficulties encountered did not hinge on characteristics pertaining to psychoanalytic theories (i.e. the lack of commensurability between them), but on the defensive strategies aimed at keeping each theory's premises safe from the opposing party's arguments. A true debate implies the construction of a shared argumentative field that makes it possible to lay out the different positions and see some interaction between them and is guided by the search for the best argument. When this occurs, controversies promote the discipline's development, even when they fail to reach any consensus.     

Symposium: On the Interface of Kleinian and Intersubjectivist Approaches to a Clinical Case

This symposium is the first of what we hope will be a series on the interface between Kleinian and intersubjective/relational approaches to psychoanalysis. There are some commonalities between these approaches that may not be entirely obvious. The Kleinian clinical approach organizes the internal world in terms of internal object relationships, and relies on attention to certain aspects of the countertransference as the central data source for analytic work. Both of these qualities provide an immediate link to the two-person model so central to the relational turn. At the same time, the Kleinians' radical insistence on the primacy of the internal world and in particular, the world of the primitive phantasies, runs counter to the relational interest in the equally important role of actual, social reality. This contrast is perhaps most acute in their approaches to the analyst's participation in the analytic dyad, which is meant to be limited to particular analytic functions in the Kleinian approach, but acknowledged and used as a part of an interpersonal relationship in the relational model. As the Kleinian perspectives gain currency in the United States and international interest in the relational approach grows, an exploration of these complex conceptual and clinical differences and similarities seems quite timely.     

Return to Hegel

This article argues that Hegel read Lacan. Put less paradoxically, it claims that situating Hegel within a Lacanian paradigm results in an understanding of the future as still open and of history as not ended. Absolute knowing, on this model, is the recognition of the way in which history has developed, not a claim that it can advance no further. The article aims to persuade those who might otherwise dismiss Hegel – for example, persons au courant with poststructuralism – that he still can make a decisive contribution to current debates.     

“When Reparation Is Felt to Be Impossible”: Persecutory Guilt and Breakdowns in Thinking and Dialogue about Race

This paper examines the problem of white liberal guilt from a Kleinian perspective, considering both the reparative potential of guilt in the depressive position, as well as the ways in which racial guilt can become diverted to an internal experience focused more on the self than on the harmed other, inspiring ways of thinking and acting that have little to do with repair. Drawing especially from the Kleinian concept of persecutory guilt, which describes the form guilt can take “when reparation is felt to be impossible”, I examine the consequences of white liberal guilt as expressed in the United States today. In particular, I argue that white liberal self-idealization and self-reproach – positions summarized as “this is not who we are” and “this is all that we are” – can function as two sides of a coin, grounded in splitting and in divergent yet related forms of exceptionalism. As an alternative, I propose thinking about reparation within the realm of the ordinary, and consider what this might entail.     

Tracking the Lacanian unconscious in language

This paper makes two contributions to the emerging field of Lacanian discourse analysis (LDA); one, by way of theoretical exposition and a second, oriented toward the challenges of empirical analysis. In the first section of the paper, I illustrate and develop upon the elusive Lacanian notion of the unconscious structured as a language. This discussion yields a series of important ideas: the assertion that a matrix of latent significations shadows any utterance; the distinction between statement/enunciation; and the concept of repression-in-language. These concepts provide a platform for the second section of the paper which draws on textual material collected by the Apartheid Archive Project in order to demonstrate a particular procedure of LDA. This procedure entails an attention to discontinuous narrative components and the role of symbolic juxtapositions. It points, furthermore, to the value of making novel combinations of given textual elements as a way of querying what may be repressed in the text. Two important conclusions are drawn from this discussion, each of which indicates a priority for Lacanian practice. Firstly, the idea that the ongoing work of symbolic juxtaposition may be more profitable than ‘depth’ interpretations in conducting analysis. Secondly, that facilitation of lateral significations and associated significations should take priority over the aim of extracting a single over-arching message.     

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.     

Reading Formations of Subjectivity: From Discourse to Psyche

This article represents a critical overview of strategies to examine subjectivity in discourse, highlighting a series of methodological approaches, which seek to manage the tension between discourse studies' focus on social and cultural structures, and psychoanalysis' interest in unconscious motivations. One aim is to trouble the supposed opposition between discourse analysis and the psychosocial approach and to regard the latter as a possible extension of insights established by the former. It is argued here that psychosocial readings in general, and Lacanian approaches more specifically, offer a cautious, nuanced way of introducing psychoanalytic ideas into the analysis of texts. The first part of this article offers examples of discourse analytic approaches, which have explicitly sought to incorporate psychoanalytic notions, followed by a discussion of Lacanian discourse analysis – a method shaped directly by this psychoanalytic school's concern with language. The article concludes with a series of methodological injunctions for conducting a psychosocial form of textual analysis.     

“Das Ding”: Excessive Existence: Discussion of “Melancholic Psychosis”

Derek Hook’s (this issue) excellent paper provides illustrations of complex Lacanian concepts through the relatively rare presentation of Lacanian case material. His paper lends itself to reading Freud with Lacan. This reply to his paper engages such a reading to show that the idea of the over present object emphasised by Lacan is prefigured in Freud in his 1917 paper on Mourning and Melancholia. My reply to Hook affirms the additional clinical themes he introduces and indicates that these themes would be anticipated if, as Lacan argues, melancholia is seen to be underpinned by a psychotic structure. Finally, the reply argues for a resurrection of the Lacanian notion of Das Ding, as it connotes differently to objet a despite overlaps in meaning and the fact that in later Lacan the term Das Ding was dropped.     

What's so different about Lacan's approach to psychoanalysis?

Clinical work based on Lacanian principles is rarely compared in the psychoanalytic literature with that based on other principles. The author attempts to highlight a few important theoretical differences regarding language, desire, affect, and time between a Lacanian approach and certain others that lead to differences in focus and technique, related, for example, to interpretation, scansion, and countertransference. Lacanian techniques are illustrated with brief clinical vignettes. In the interest of confidentiality, identifying information and certain circumstances have been changed or omitted in the material presented.     

Reply to Commentaries

In reply to my discussants, I take up their questions on the subjects of foolishness, the analyst's dreams, and the unnamed patient. My responses to them bring me back to my own father to ask questions that had not been asked yet about my mother's release; back to the return of my patient after years of absence, and the additional history I learned then; and back to Lacan's seminar and my Lacanian analytic training to question that approach to the treatment of madness.     

Envy and difference

This paper explores five examples of envy, examining the similarities and differences between the clinical situations. The theory relating to envy is extensively reviewed and a critique of the Kleinian position is offered, suggesting that the aversion to separation and difference is not only prior to, but also has explanatory precedence over, the functioning of envy. Kleinian examples are explored in this light. The experience of separateness and difference is understood to lead to a number of outcomes: envy, admiration, competitiveness, a sense of low self-esteem and inadequacy, or a fear of being envied. It is argued that the individual's particular personality organization and their associated relational pattern will determine their experience of envy. Examples of schizoid, borderline, narcissistic and hysteric functioning in relation to envy are examined in some depth. The link between these phenomena and the death instinct is touched on.     

How Françoise Dolto links Lacanian psychoanalysis with the Christian Gospels

This article introduces to an English-speaking audience of pastoral therapists, the writings of the French Lacanian psychoanalyst, Fran?oise Dolto (1908-1988) on the links she discovered between the most profound question raised by Lacanian psychoanalysis in its dynamics effects and the questions raised by the Christian Gospels. The author summarizes the main points of Dolto's Lacanian thought and where she departed from Lacan in her interpretation of the unconscious ethic of desire. Using Dolto's three writings on Lacanian psychoanalysis and the Bible, as well as material from her published clinical studies, the author illustrates Dolto's approach to the Bible, the parable of the Good Samaritan, and her application of the dialectical principles of desire in three case studies.     

Melancholic Psychosis—A Lacanian Approach

Drawing on the conceptual resources provided by Lacanian accounts of melancholia and the death drive, and by means of reference to a clinical case summary and the film Into the Wild, this paper hopes to open up new ways of thinking about melancholic psychosis. The paper foregrounds a series of clinical themes that may be grouped under the rubric of “problems in symbolic fixit”: difficulties in receiving gifts, inability to mediate relations of intimacy, yearning for anonymity/disappearance, and the condition of the twilight world. These themes, while not obviously associated with Freud’s account of melancholia, represent areas of diagnostic priority for a Lacanian approach attuned to the role of symbolic processes and the traumatic “real” object.     

Reflections on Klein's radical notion of phantasy and its implications for analytic practice

Analysts may incorporate many of Melanie Klein's important contributions (e.g., on preoedipal dynamics, envy, and projective identification) without transforming their basic analytic approach. In this paper I argue that adopting the Kleinian notion of unconscious phantasy is transformative. While it is grounded in Freud's thinking and draws out something essential to his work, this notion of phantasy introduces a radical change that defines Kleinian thinking and practice and significantly impacts the analyst's basic clinical approach. This impact and its technical implications in the analytic situation are illustrated and discussed.     

Some Questions About Divergences and Similarities Between Kleinian and Intersubjective Approaches: Reply to Commentaries

In this response I focus on some key issues raised by the different approaches of Kleinian and intersubjective clinicians. In particular, I raise questions about how the analyst's subjectivity is to be understood, given that the analyst needs to offer something that is over and above her pure subjective reaction. I also discuss projective identification and its implications for understanding the analyst's subjectivity.