Context
The day is Monday, November 7, 1955. Lacan’s “return to Freud” is in full swing, having been heralded two years earlier in his manifesto-like écrit “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis.” Nine days later, Lacan gives the opening of his third seminar on The Psychoses (1955–1956) (Lacan, 1993). The preceding two annual seminars – Freud’s Papers on Technique (1953–1954) (Lacan, 1988a) and The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis (1954–1955) (Lacan, 1988b) – already establish many foundational aspects of this defiant new heretical Freudian orthodoxy, along with other contemporaneous texts subsequently included in the Écrits.
The time and place of the original presentation of what becomes the renowned écrit “The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis” is doubly significant in Lacan’s eyes. First, it allows him to return to Freud’s Vienna, the site of the momentous discovery of the unconscious proper. Second, it is the eve of what would have been Freud’s one hundredth birthday (May 6 being the exact date of this centenary).
By 1955, Lacan already is well acquainted with countless representatives of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA), as well as Anglo-American ego psychology, neither of which he viewed favorably. In his “Notes en allemand préparatoires à la conférence sur la Chose freudienne,” the fragmentary written basis for his original 1955 Vienna presentation, Lacan (1987) pointedly contrasts his teaching as per le Séminaire with the “harmful” American embrace of the presumably “autonomous ego” and corresponding “objectification” of the subject qua subject of the unconscious. Instead of the listeners in physical attendance that November in Vienna, Lacan portrays the real addressees of his intervention then and there as everyone and everything actually bound up with Freud as the discoverer of the unconscious. Freud’s legacy is affirmed as stubbornly surviving its betrayals and bastardizations at the clumsy hands of his supposed adherents and heirs in the IPA and its ilk (“not so as to mark the site of a deserted locus, but to mark that other site my discourse is now closing in on”; Lacan, 1987: 10). This “other site” alludes to the “other scene” as a phrase designating the specifically analytical unconscious, that is, what Lacan’s “return to Freud” aims to recover and reveal in its true significance.
Situation in time and place of this exercise
The title of the opening section of “The Freudian Thing” clearly announces that Lacan is beginning this écrit by contextualizing it both historically and geographically. This opening section’s very first paragraph characterizes Freud’s home city as “a crossroads of cultures” (334, 1). Lacan indicates that this cosmopolitan physical location itself represents a locus of socio-symbolic convergences. He implies that the density of this condensation is part of what endows Freudian psychoanalysis with its allegedly universal import for humanity as a whole.
Lacan invokes Freud’s characterization of his revelation of the unconscious as another Copernican revolution (334, 1), following in the wake of the shift from geocentrism to heliocentrism. He identifies Vienna qua place of the discovery of the inherently extimate unconscious as, so to speak, the center of the decentered/decentering. For Lacan, the “eclipse” of Freud as “prophet” of the unconscious begins long before Freud’s death. Lacan portrays Freud-qua-Actaeon as already being turned on by the “hounds” that are his first set of disciples, his turn-of-the-century hunting party.
Lacan presents himself as the “herald” of a “return to Freud” seeking to combat the above-mentioned eclipse (334, 3). He cites as evidence for the urgency of such a return specifically within psychoanalytic circles “the symbolic scandal” of the fact that the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA), the organization founded by Freud and supposedly dedicated to his cause, had no involvement whatsoever with the commissioning of “the commemorative plaque marking the house in which Freud pursued his heroic work” (334, 3). The members of the IPA, as akin to the dogs who blindly attack their master Actaeon, fail to grant Freud the recognition that even a Viennese society stained by anti-semitism awards him (symbolized here by the plaque commemorating 19 Bergasse).
For Lacan, this symptomatic failure to recognize Freud by the IPA is of a piece with the fact that his “return to Freud” appears to many non-Lacanian analysts to be heterodox and even blasphemous. In Lacan’s eyes, he finds himself in a topsy-turvy conjuncture in which Freud is respected by non-analytic, German-speaking gentiles and disparaged by supposedly analytic Freudians. Hence, he concludes, something must be terribly rotten within the state of psychoanalysis in the middle of the twentieth century.
Lacan provides a narrative of Freud’s fate over the course of the past half-century. Lacan’s telling of this tale focuses especially on the role of the two world wars in driving the dissemination of psychoanalytic ideas and techniques beyond the geographical confines of Europe (335, 3). Lacan derisively depicts “the United States of North America,” the haven for so many fleeing analysts, as a place “where history is denied with a categorical will that gives enterprises their style,” a social landscape displaying “a cultural ahistoricism,” namely, that of American capitalism (335, 5). Lacan’s accusation here is that those who found themselves having to make their analytic livings in the wake of the Second World War in the United States went about custom-tailoring Freudian psychoanalysis for their new American clients and audiences—and, in the process, distorting to the point of inversion the real truths at the heart of Freudianism properly conceived. Lacan considers the classical ego psychology of the mid-twentieth century forged by the troika of Heinz Hartmann (President of the IPA in 1955), Ernst Kris, and Rudolph Lowenstein (the latter having served earlier as Lacan’s training analyst) to be an American immigrant psychology. This psychology is one in which the healthy ego qua conflict-free sphere of autonomous, adaptive agency is these immigrants’ offering, for the sake of their own adaptation and acceptance, to a public thoroughly immersed in the market ideology of the free individual. Under real and perceived pressure to fit into their new home, these post-Freudian bastardizers of Freudianism allegedly give in to the wants of Americans as, in Lacan’s dismissive picture, potential and actual patients looking to hire technical specialists willing and able to deliver the result of turning dysfunctional neurotics into well-adjusted members of the bourgeois socio-economic order. In these circumstances, Lacan asks apropos the American refugee analysts, “How could they avoid… slipping into becoming managers of souls in a social context that demands such offices?” (335–336, 6). They succumbed to the temptation to mistake themselves for being equal to their analysands’ transference fantasies.
The “corruption” of these analysts amounts to their giving in to transferential demands from their analysands for them to occupy the position Lacan subsequently, in Seminar XI, identifies as that of “the subject supposed to know” (Lacan, 1977). Lacan articulates the situation thus: “It is to return to the reactionary principle that covers over the duality of he who suffers and he who heals with the opposition between he who knows and he who does not” (335, 4). This “reactionary” substitution is of a piece with the medicalization of the analytic profession both Freud and Lacan criticize, with “the opposition between he who knows and he who does not” being instantiated as the difference between the medical expert (i.e., the analyst as doctor) and his/her ill client (i.e., the analysand as patient) (335, 4).
However, in an inversion of the standard doctor–patient relationship, in which knowledge resides on the side of the doctor and ignorance on the side of the patient, the analyst–analysand rapport is one in which knowledge resides on the side of the analysand and ignorance on the side of the analyst. That is to say, the symptoms and pathologies addressed within the analytic clinic, unlike the ailments and maladies treated by somatic medicine, arise from the unconscious as a knowledge which does not know itself. The properly practicing analyst, by contrast with the medical expert “in the know” who dispenses authoritative pronouncements backed by the authority of scientific medicine, is limited to being the handmaiden of the analysand’s unconscious knowledge, merely allowing it to speak for itself.
On Lacan’s assessment, the woeful Americanization of the psychoanalytic world spearheaded by the ego psychologists descended from Anna Freud involves eclipsing the unconscious behind the overblown adaptive, autonomous ego. It also involves the trend towards an insistence that analysts be psychiatrists with medical backgrounds. This medicalization of the profession both turns upside down the true knowledge-link between analyst and analysand by replacing it with the doctor–patient one, as well as cuts off the Freudian field from its interdisciplinary roots. The above-characterized Americanization of the international psychoanalytic community is a large part of what makes a “return to Freud” à la Lacan so urgent.
Lacan refers to Jung’s comment to Freud, as they approach New York harbor and the Statue of Liberty, “They don’t realize we’re bringing them the plague” (336, 2). Lacan’s retelling in this context of the perhaps apocryphal story contains a number of notable details. To begin with, his description of the Statue of Liberty quite deliberately is a close paraphrase of the original French name for this gift given by France to the US. The theme of “liberty” and the site of Ellis Island directly link up with Lacan’s emphasis on the American obsession with “freedom” as deleteriously infecting analysis via its immigrant ego psychologists. Lacan hints that the US reciprocates France’s gift by sending Freud back to Europe with the Trojan Horse of an analysis corrupted by the hyper-individualist ideology of “the land of the free.” More generally, France itself gets the plague of American individualism in exchange for its present of the Statue of Liberty. The “antiphrasis” (336, 2) Lacan mentions is double. First, the “illumination” of France’s statue-gift is, in fact, its opposite, namely, “darkness.” Second, Freud’s reported words to Jung, on Lacan’s interpretation, invert the real significance of this moment of contact between Freud and America. For Lacan, these words should say instead, “We (i.e., Freud and company) don’t realize they (i.e., the Americans) are bringing us the plague (i.e., the alienating self-objectification of the autonomous ego and a blindness to the unconscious)” (336, 2).
The depiction of Freud as receiving “punishment for … hubris” (336, 2) foreshadows Lacan’s soon-to-follow casting of him in the role of Actaeon later in “The Freudian Thing.” Nemesis, the Greek goddess of retribution directed against the hubristic, takes Freud’s words and puts them in the mouth of la Liberté éclairant le monde (with Lady Liberty saying to her compatriots about Freud, Jung, and European analysts, “They don’t realize we’re bringing them the plague”).
Lacan depicts the diaspora of European analysts, traumatized by two world wars, as falling into the clutches of the very defense mechanisms discovered by Freud and his disciples. In so doing, these analysts repress “Europe” in terms of its cultural and intellectual histories as well as its alternatives to Anglo-Saxon capitalism. In forgetting they also, so Lacan implies, lose the ability to recognize their master Freud and that for which he really stands. One can see here Freud’s traitorous hunting dogs already beginning to gather and circle. The very Thing Freud-as-Actaeon discovers (i.e., the unconscious-as-Diana, with her powers of Verdrängung) is what turns his hounds (via their repressions) against him.
Lacan stipulates that: “we are not seeking to emphasize a return of the repressed here, but want to use the antithesis constituted by the phase that has passed in the psychoanalytic movement since Freud’s death to show what psychoanalysis is not” (336, 4). The “repressed” in “return of the repressed” refers to what Lacan portrays as post-Freudian analysts’ repressions of Freud himself. Lacan is warning that his “return to Freud” should not be misunderstood merely as an attempt to repeat unaltered the original contents of Freud’s texts. Lacan’s “return to Freud” is repetition-with-difference, an après-coup revivification of Freud’s corpus that stays true to this original while, at the same time, inventively making it speak to new questions, concerns, and interests.
The adversary
The second sentence of this section nicely captures the unity-in-tension between universality and particularity operative in Freudian analysis. On the one hand, Freud’s accounts of psychical life ostensibly encompass the full range of humanity in its entirety. On the other hand, these accounts, grounded on a distinctive conception of the unconscious, emphasize the irreducible idiosyncrasy and uniqueness of each and every psyche.
Lacan quickly proceeds to predict that his audience will be uncomfortable with and wary of his recourse to the word “truth” (337, 3). This “power of truth” (338, 1) designates an unconscious that inevitably manages to express itself no matter what defense mechanisms (repression, etc.) are brought to bear against it. The repressed unconscious is never completely silenced and reduced to impotent nullity, never entirely repressed. The repressed always returns, namely, invariably resurfaces in whatever (dis)guises within consciously experienced reality.
When Lacan mentions “the power of truth … in our very flesh” (338, 1), he clearly has in mind not only the conversion symptoms of hysteria, but also Freud’s physical parapraxes, the bungled actions of “the psychopathology of everyday life” (Johnston, 2014). Freud’s “Warheitsdrang”—this would be a drive-like pressure, as in the Drang of the Freudian drive (Trieb), of/to truth (Wahrheit)—is absolutely central to Lacan’s reflections in his 1955 écrit.
Lacan claims that post-Freudian ego psychology creates for itself intractable, insoluble problems both metapsychological and clinical by too sharply distinguishing between, on the one hand, a surface of defense mechanisms mobilized by a conscious ego and, on the other hand, a depth of unconscious memories and energies. The path originally departing from Anna Freud’s defense analysis (which, in Lacan’s eyes, is also a defense against analysis itself) and running through the Hartmann-Kris-Lowenstein triumvirate deposits its follower in the disorienting and dangerous “Bondy forest” (now a northeastern suburb of Paris, Bondy, as a forested region during the Middle Ages, was a perilous haunt of violent criminals) (338, 2).
Lacan then speaks of “the big clodhoppers” (338, 4). He thus depicts his analytic foes as putting the awkward, clunky clogs of their framework (i.e., an ego-psychological analysis of defenses) on the feet of the dove as a biblical image for truth. Thus burdened, the dove no longer can carry aloft the truth. These “clodhoppers” both are entirely unfit for dove’s feet as well as “swallow up the bird occasionally” (i.e., the truth gets buried and hidden in the unwieldy trappings heavy-handedly slapped onto it) (338, 4).
Lacan has his post/pseudo-Freudian rivals retort by accusing him of being an “ideologist” (338, 4). Lacan additionally has these cloddish rivals appeal to the economic dimensions of analytic discourse in justifying themselves. Lacan replies—“But at the point at which truth has already been brought to bear, the bird escapes unscathed when I ask, ‘Economical for whom?’” (338, 4).
Lacan’s critical question suggests several points. To begin with, he insinuates that his ego-psychological foes have profited both libidinally and financially from their corruption of Freudian analysis. Pandering to American capitalist ideologies of supposed freedom and individualism, these immigrant analysts have gotten rich in post-war America by popularizing theories and therapies in which they enjoy the status of being authority figures whose own egos are thrust forward as embodying the standards of adaptation, autonomy, health, rationality, and reality.
Lacan’s barbed question “Economical for whom?” also alludes to a distinction absent from ego psychology (as well as non-Lacanian versions of analysis generally) but pivotal for Lacan himself. This is the distinction between ego and subject. Lacan develops a conception of subjectivity proper as unconscious, with the ego correspondingly being stripped of a subject-like standing and demoted to the position of an overdetermined object whose seeming autonomy and spontaneity are false masks covering over other determinants.
Lacan’s idea of subjectivity-beyond-the-ego is integral to his critique of ego psychology, with him drawing broadly and deeply from the history of modern philosophy in developing this analytic theory of the subject. His derisive “adversary” views such a theory as merely the frivolous speculative decadence of a French intellectual dilettante. Lacan’s hostile, dismissive interlocutor reflexively rejects everything associated with the entire Western philosophical tradition from ancient Greece onwards. This narrow-mindedness is of a piece with the quite non-Freudian transformation of psychoanalysis into a medical specialization. Analysts trained according to a medicalized model of analysis (“specialists like us”; 339, 1) tend either not to be interested in philosophy and the “human sciences” as a whole or to adopt a sour grapes attitude to the liberal arts education.
Lacan then proceeds to single out the distinctiveness of the “Freudian discovery.” He specifies that: “Freud was able to precipitate a whole casuistry into a map of Tendre” (339, 2). The “cas...
