The Lacan Tradition

Lionel Bailly, David Lichtenstein, Sharmini Bailly, Lionel Bailly, David Lichtenstein, Sharmini Bailly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781780491516
• eBook ISBN: 9780429866364
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The Lacanian Tradition is unique among psychoanalytic schools in its influence upon academic fields such as literature, philosophy, cultural and critical studies. This book aims to make Lacan's ideas accessible and relevant also to mainstream psychoanalysts, and to showcase developments in Lacanian thinking since his death in 1981.

The volume highlights the clinical usefulness of such concepts as the paternal metaphor, the formula of fantasy, psychic structure, the central role of desire and the interlinking of the individual subject in the matrix of the Other. While these themes are woven through all the papers, each is a highly individual reflection upon some aspect of Lacanian theory, practice or history.

PART I

SOME HISTORICAL REFLECTIONS

CHAPTER ONE


The changing forms of a research programme

Bernard Burgoyne

Introduction

There are many interpretations of the differing phases and periods which can be found in the development of psychoanalysis constructed by Lacan over a period of fifty years. These interpretations usually propose answers to a number of questions. What are the problems addressed in each of these periods? Do the solutions proposed in one period replace those found before? What are the divisions between the various periods, and why did they come into being? Do the formulations put forward in later periods—and particularly in his last period, that of the introduction of a topology of knots—allow for a reconstruction of all, or of many, of Lacan’s previous results? The thesis that I maintain here is quite straightforward: it is that there exists throughout the body of Lacan’s writing a programme that is constitutive of the direction of his work. This programme remains central throughout all the developments that he introduced over these five decades; and it is this programme that explains the choice of problems addressed in the successive phases of Lacan’s thought. Both clinical and theoretical problems are included within this programme: it intended from the beginning to relate conceptual and clinical theses. The programme could be called Lacan’s General Topology programme, since there is one fundamental problem that is placed at the centre of this programme: it is the problem of the nature of psychic space.

This General Topology programme itself contains seven distinct programmes: each of them being a development of previous periods of his work. Before giving the fuller detail of these—which I will call programmes [R1] to [R7]—I will first of all give an outline sketch of their structure. Some explanation of their content, and of the relations between them will follow.

The first research programme [R1] addresses the structure of psychic space—paths, boundaries, limits, interiors, the relations between outside and inside, neighbourhoods, disconnection.

[R2] concerns itself with the effectiveness of dialectic in the analytical situation, and also in wider situations.

[R3] focuses on desire, the dialectic of its recognition, and its interpretation.

[R4] bears on the relation of jouissance and desire.

[R5] investigates a field that can be called the embodiment of relationships.

[R6] contains a (clinical and mathematical) renewal of the original form of his General Topology programme, placing it at the centre of research, and finding new axes of development.

[R7] addresses the particular topological structure of the Borromean Knot.

The timing of these periods may give rise to some discussion: I shall try to refer any transition to a particular year, and sometimes to a particular month of that year. A number of themes can be found from the start of these programmes—desire, dialectic, identification, and the structure of the mind. In each of the epochs of Lacan’s work, I will present selected elements of his writings that I take as exemplifying the main characteristics of his work throughout that period.

R1

By 1931, after five years of psychiatric publications, Lacan’s work had begun to maintain an explicit focus on psychic structure, and more particularly on signifying structure and its relation to dialectic. His paper “Structure des Psychoses Paranoïaques” (Lacan, 1931) was given in July of that year in Paris: in it he presented paranoia as moving towards a halting of judgement, one brought about by an “unboundedness—a virulence—of the logical function”. This excess brings with it “the appearance of rigour” accompanied however by an absolute “lack of variation”. The structure of paranoia, he claimed, will incline all judgements towards a system, and it is this system that will impede the “dialectical faculty”.

“Under the influence of some triggering cause, often hidden, sometimes represented by a toxic episode […] [or] an emotional trauma, there comes into being a sort of precipitation of significant elements, impregnating at the start a throng of incidents which the subject stumbles upon by chance, and whose bearings for the subject become suddenly transformed.” This delirium occurs only in certain sectors of the mind, and not in a network. It produces a broken logic, and—pari passu—it is organised around desire. In describing the structure of the mind in these terms, some mathematical notions have already been introduced, amongst them network and bound; Lacan continues this when he claims that the sector affected by the paranoia is the sector of interpretations that are “within the angle opened up by the precipitating event”.

This paper then begins to construct some concepts that allow for a formulation of the activity of dialectic in the structure of the mind. It investigates the nature of this dialectic and the forms it can take: from the functioning of logic within the “awakening” of the first notions of reasoning, to the debilities introduced into this function by the system of the paranoia. The propositions of this logic contain some preliminary proto-mathematics which have bearings on what will later become the space of signifiers: it is within such a space that there can be “a sort of precipitation” of a number of signifying elements which become significant in the life of the individual. But this space is not yet formed by means of explicit mathematical notions.

Lacan continued to work on these notions: some two years later he returned to an explicit consideration of these themes. He was one of the participants at the eighty-fourth Congress of the Swiss Psychiatric Society, in October 1933—together with, amongst others, Jung, Menard Boss, and Théodore Flournoy from Switzerland; and Henri Claude, Raymond de Saussure, Jean Lhermitte, and Henri Ey from France. Lacan wrote a “compte rendu” of the session held on hallucination at this Congress, and his report was published in the journal Encéphale in November 1933. Lacan started his account by commenting in particular on the problem of the relation between sensation, perception, and representation: this is one of the problems that had led Freud to formulate his initial theory of psychic space in 1895 (Freud, 1950a [1895]). In addition, Lacan raised questions of the relation between imagination and sensation in the construction of a hallucination, and, in relation to the presentation by Henri Ey, the problem of the relation between the organism and the structure of psychic space. Lacan then moved on to present problems that would inform his own researches over the oncoming years: he agreed with Flournoy as he described the view “commonly held in psychoanalysis” that psychogenesis is constituted “by the realisation of a desire”. Lacan noted that Lhermitte added to this “dynamism of desire” additional functions of “the hallucinatory state”, and Lacan presented both of these concepts—particularly in relation to the presentation by Morel—in relation to the problem of interior language. Additional problems of the speech apparatus were raised by Morel—again continuing the initial problems of psychic space raised by Freud in his early work (Freud, 1891b). Lacan, in his comments on these themes, can be seen to sketch out the beginnings of a theory of differential representation within the space of signifiers: he referred to the paper presented by Montet: “rien ne possède de signification sinon par rapport à autre chose”—“nothing possesses any power of signification except in relation to something else”.

There are explicit—though rough and ready—references to mathematics in his commentary: “les discriminations […] de nos théories ne sont que le reflet de cette relativité entre un nombre infini de singularités”—“the discriminations made by our theories are only the reflection of this relativity between an infinite number of singularities”. Lacan chose to place the emphasis here on questions of truth in relation to a science of the mind: “il semble que le problème qu’on agite ici […] c’est le problème de la vérité”—“it seems that the problem that one is working with here […] is the problem of truth”. There are found together then in these themes questions of the Imaginary, of the structure of signification, and—in relation to the development of the child—of the “evolutionary phases of the constitution of the real”. It would take some twenty years for these themes to take the form of the theory of the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real: but the beginnings of it are here, in relation to a theory of the structure of psychoses, and the structure of psychic space.

By 1936 Lacan was regularly working with questions of the existence of paths and chains connecting elements of psychic structure (Lacan, 1936): I have described this in some detail elsewhere (Burgoyne, 2003). In describing the function of the analytical rules of free association, he constructs them as laws of non-omission and non-systematisation. The formulation he gives to this I have described as follows: “What is apparent in his description of this structure is its proto-mathematics. He calls the implementing of the law of non-systematisation ‘respecting succession’—preserving, that is, the relations of order. He describes the ‘chaining’ or connectivity between the elements of the material presented to the analyst, and the relation of the fragments of this material to the structure of which they are a part. The initial chaining of the narrative is different from the one that the analytical work is trying to construct. These are all notions that call on the terms of mathematics, and the question of formalisation in these texts is already present” (Burgoyne, 2003).

[R1] contains an investigation of paths and structure: the framework of the mind is here being investigated in terms of the topology that constitutes psychic space. The question then arises: by what means is access to the material of this framework hindered? Lacan’s answer is that this is the main function of the ego.

Lacan’s text on the “mirror phase” contains this hypothesis, which most radically differentiates his work from the programmes more generally accepted in the Anglo-Saxon world: that the ego—far from being an instrument that constructs any kind of realistic adaptation to the world—is an instrument of systematic misunderstanding and misrecognition [“méconnaissance”], undermining by its very functioning any means of access to the history of the analysand. Such a theme exists in Freud’s work: it is the notion of “false connection” (“Falsches Verknüpfung”) that Freud takes to characterise the way that the ego constructs reality by means of a web of fictions¹ (Breuer & Freud, 1895d). Initially Freud had found the clinical origins of this problem in the relation between negative hallucination and false connection. One could put things then in the following way: “Effectively, the false connection articulated by Freud is Lacan’s méconnaissance” (Burgoyne, 2015).

Elisabeth Roudinesco has been able to reconstruct much of the original content of Lacan’s paper of 1936.² Roudinesco has also brought to the attention of historians the content of an unpublished article that Lacan had written in April 1936—for Alexandre Kojève. In this second essay three main themes appear—“the ego as a source of illusion and error”; “the I set out as the subject of desire”; and “desire as the function of revelation of the truth of being” (Roudinesco, 2001). These themes clearly raise many problems for a formulation of the aims of psychoanalytic technique. The relation that they propose between the ego and “the subject of desire” entails that access to what is real in the psychic life of the analysand has—of necessity—to use techniques that do not rely on any functioning of the ego. Lacan’s aim then is to determine the properties of human subjectivity that allow for the side-stepping of this functioning of the ego.

In their construction of recommendations regarding the technique and aim of analysis, both Freud and Lacan seek to move from away reality to the Real that underlies it—to a real that the fabrications of reality conceal. Access to what Lacan will later call the Real is gained by means of pathways through the structure of the psychic apparatus—through, that is, the spaces of the mind. The ego is not an ally of the analyst in seeking to open such pathways: rather the ego of the analyst, the ego of the analysand—as well as the ego of any theorist of psychoanalysis—hinder and resist the gaining of access to the Real. So here in [R1] the theme of méconnaissance raises questions of epistemology and questions of technique, as well as questions of the relation of psychoanalysis and science.

Very early in this period, Lacan makes a number of explicit references to the literature of the philosophy of science. His Do...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the Editors and Contributors
• Series Editors’ Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: Some Historical Reflections
• Part II: Some Central Concepts
• Part III: Some Clinical Reflections
• Part IV: Beyond the Clinic
• Index