Lacan, Discourse, Event: New Psychoanalytic Approaches to Textual Indeterminacy

Ian Parker, David Pavón-Cuéllar, Ian Parker, David Pavón-Cuéllar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134658510
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Lacan, Discourse, Event: New Psychoanalytic Approaches to Textual Indeterminacy is an introduction to the emerging field of Lacanian Discourse Analysis. It includes key papers that lay the foundations for this research, and worked examples from analysts working with a range of different texts. The editors Ian Parker and David Pavón-Cuéllar begin with an introduction which reviews the key themes in discourse analysis and the problems faced by researchers in that field of work including an overview of the development of discourse analysis in different disciplines (psychology, sociology, cultural studies and political and social theory). They also set out the conceptual and methodological principles of Lacan's work insofar as it applies to the field of discourse.

Ian Parker and David Pavón-Cuéllar have divided the book into three main sections. The first section comprises previously published papers, some not yet available in English, which set out the foundations for 'Lacanian Discourse Analysis'. The chapters establish the first lines of research, and illustrate how Lacanian psychoanalysis is transformed into a distinctive approach to interpreting text when it is taken out of the clinical domain. The second and third parts of the book comprise commissioned papers in which leading researchers from across the social sciences, from the English-speaking world and from continental Europe and Latin America, show how Lacanian Discourse Analysis works in practice.

Lacan, Discourse, Event: New Psychoanalytic Approaches to Textual Indeterminacy is intended to be a definitive volume bringing together writing from the leaders in the field of Lacanian Discourse Analysis working in the English-speaking world and in countries where Lacanian psychoanalysis is part of mainstream clinical practice and social theory. It will be of particular interest to psychoanalysts of different traditions, to post-graduate and undergraduate researchers in psycho-social studies, cultural studies, sociology and social anthropology.

Part I

LACAN, AND FOUNDATIONS OF A NEW RESEARCH PARADIGM

1

DISINTEGRATING NARRATIVE RESEARCH WITH LACAN¹

Stephen Frosh

Much of the appeal of qualitative research to students and academics alike is that it seems to offer a more holistic understanding of the human subject; it seems to oppose the atomizing tendency to be found particularly in psychology, with its reductionist vision of how to explain human behaviour. The impulse among qualitative psychologists is to take a kind of moral high ground in which what is left out of conventional psychology is rescued as in fact most significant – the ‘subjectivity’ of the subject, the meaning-making activity through which people forge their lives, their narrativizing core. There is a great deal to be said in favour of this: much of psychology is indeed reductionist, mechanical, fissiparous. The brain drives the mind, so let us see which bits of the brain light up when the subject is at work on some task; anxiety floods through us, so let us count the words that disappear from our lexicon as a consequence; people run towards trouble, so let us measure their steps. Qualitative psychology enters here as part of a turn in the so-called ‘human sciences’ towards the rolling-up of experience into narrative form: without discounting the reality of events, the key research question becomes not what happens to a person, but how this is accounted for, how it is put into a frame that makes sense. This humanizes reality, placing the emphasis on the agentic, meaning-making activity of the research (and human) subject.

Over time, the narrative turn in the social sciences has become increasingly important, with much qualitative research sharing its interest in reproducing, or re-presenting, the personal versions of experience that subjects describe. This usually means taking some kind of text that has originated with a person – perhaps in an interview or a diary – and subjecting it to an analytic process that breaks the text down in order to rebuild it in a more convincing way and make it a more coherent narrative. A person tells a story, but on the whole it is not very well told: it has too many twists and turns, too many characters that contradict each other, too many gaps. The researcher examines this and rewrites the text, presenting it as a set of themes that constitute a whole. However fragmentary these themes might be, the research task is to make some sense of them, to tell, that is, a better story. This story can have various tendrils and connections; indeed, it is a regular and important function of qualitative research to uncover broader contexts that give meaning to the story, for example by reference to societal discourses, or maybe even to the Freudian unconscious (Frosh et al., 2003; Hollway & Jefferson, 2000). But a story it is nevertheless, something with shape and direction: for instance, in Labov’s familiar framework, it is structured into an abstract, an orienting passage, a complicating action, an evaluation and a resolution (Labov & Fanshell, 1977). In the course of this, the agency of the participating subject is restored: he or she is made into a speaker, with a point of view, someone positioned in discourse but nevertheless there, speaking to us from the page. We can identify the person through her or his speech; that is what a subject is. Recovering this subjecthood, this special nature of the individual, is a moral task, after all.

What can be wrong with this? On the face of it, it precisely coincides with an ethical and political act of resistance to the totalizing tendencies of globalization and the continually growing cultural hegemony of Western capitalism. It offers a ‘voice’, as people usually say, to marginalized individuals and groups whose views and experiences would otherwise be discarded – and, indeed, much qualitative work has had this goal and has consequently focused on groups usually pushed out of view through racism, sexism or other modes of oppressive practice (e.g. Mama, 1995). In many ways, the focus on restoring agency has an excellent philosophical and political grounding in Habermas’s (1968/1987) notion of emancipatory practice, which, while embedded in a discussion of psychoanalysis, has resonance for all work that purports to rescue the truth of the subject through attending to and repairing broken narratives. Indeed, it might be suggested that the coalescing of hermeneutic approaches in psychoanalysis and narrative approaches in qualitative research around the notion of emancipation is a significant theme in contemporary social science (Frosh, 2006).

Habermas presents a powerful argument to differentiate psychoanalysis from the empirical sciences on the grounds of their differing relationship to a subject–object divide. Empirical (one might say here, quantitative) methods ‘aim at disclosing and comprehending reality under the transcendental viewpoint of possible technical control’ (Habermas, 1968/1987: 176); psychoanalysis, on the other hand, is premised on the promotion of a meaning-filled link between the analyst and the one ‘studied’, the object who in being communicated with becomes a subject. More strongly still, psychopathological states are characterized by a kind of alienation in which the subject is separated from her or his own subjecthood: that is, experiencing oneself as an object, split from one’s meanings (wishes, desires, etc., in the Freudian scheme) and thus showing symptoms, is precisely what psychoanalysis sets out to remedy. ‘Split-off symbols and defended-against motives unfold their force over the heads of subjects’, writes Habermas, ‘compelling substitute-gratifications and symbolizations’ (p. 255). Psychoanalytic understanding is, therefore, a process not of seeking mechanical causes, but rather of restoring an identity between the subject and her or his own subjecthood. Habermas proposes that: ‘the experience of reflection induced by enlightenment is precisely the act through which the subject frees itself from a state in which it had become an object for itself. This specific activity must be accomplished by the subject itself’ (pp. 247–248). The act of interpretation aims to provide for the analysand the opportunity to seize hold of lost or hidden meanings and re-own them; it is consequently a causal process, where cause is located in the reconstitution of transformative meanings and not in the identification of specific psychic facts.

Having been offered such a heavyweight banner under which to march towards an emancipatory approach to the reconstitution of personal meanings, it seems carping to suggest that there might be something wrong with the idea that rebuilding narrative coherence is an estimable goal for those who find themselves on the margins of hegemonic discourses. One can argue that just as individuals benefit in the psychotherapeutic domain from being able to speak their stories and have them reflected back in a way that enables them to be owned, so in the political domain it is precisely through the coherent articulation of subjugated narratives that oppressed groups become empowered. The histories of feminism, gay and lesbian rights and black consciousness are clear examples here. Nevertheless, there is something about this turn to narrative that is disconcertingly familiar from a long series of attempts to redefine identities, attempts that very often result in stronger versions of the same. The margins might contest the centre in this way, for sure, but how much changes? How much of what goes on here is a tactical attempt to give confidence to people who might otherwise lose hope, by telling them that their experiences actually make sense?

I take as my textual source here a brief critique of the trend towards ‘narrativism’ in psychoanalysis (as in other social sciences) from Jean Laplanche (2003), who argues that making a coherent narrative can be seen as a defensive process. Summarizing, Laplanche makes a point that can be taken as a general comment on the relationship between psychoanalytic therapy and psychoanalytic understanding but also has broader implications for the integrating tendency of much qualitative work:

The fact that we are confronted with a possibly ‘normal’ and in any case inevitable defence, that the narration must be correlated with the therapeutic aspect of the treatment, in no way changes the metapsychological understanding that sees in it the guarantee and seal of repression. That is to say, that the properly ‘analytic’ vector, that of de-translation and the questioning of narrative structures and the ideas connected to them, remains opposed in every treatment to the reconstructive, synthesizing narrative vector.

(p. 29)

Limits to making sense, to making connections, have to be set. The point here is that it may be consoling, therapeutic even, to have sense made of one’s mystifying miseries, one’s uncertainties and partial understandings. It can indeed be empowering: we are made into agents; we are subjects with something to talk about. We do not even have to be completely sold on the idea of narrative coherence to accept that it might have an important part to play in an ebb-and-flow process of living in the world: understanding and deconstructing might take place sequentially, so that meanings come into the frame, allow identity to be stabilized and defended, and then once this has been absorbed new challenges occur, things get taken apart and have to be struggled with once more. However, even the advocacy of cyclical coherence misses an important point, one that has been central to modernist as well as post-structuralist and postmodern sensitivities and concerns: this is the idea that the human subject is never a whole, is always riven with partial drives, social discourses that frame available modes of experience, ways of being that are contradictory and reflect the shifting allegiances of power as they play across the body and the mind. Freud clearly knew this and articulated it in what Laplanche (1997) calls psychoanalysis’s ‘Copernican revolution’, whereby the subject is no longer capable of being taken as the source and repository of psychic life. What postmodernism adds here is the notion that this ‘decentring’ can never be reversed through somehow returning agency to the subject, because the riven subject cannot be seen as a whole – there is, simply, no external point from which the true story of the subject can be told. Laplanche’s (2003) formulation is pretty exact here: the ‘properly analytic vector’ is ‘that of de-translation and the questioning of narrative structures and the ideas connected to them’ (p. 29). In other words, however much, for therapeutic and strategic reasons, one might want to make a coherent narrative out of a subject’s chaotic account, don’t believe a word they say.

To summarize so far: there is a need to hold on to this dialectic, this movement between fragmentation and integration, the part and the whole, without desperately seeking resolution. Qualitative research lives in the tension between, on the one hand, a deconstructionist framework in which the human subject is understood as positioned in and through competing discourses and, on the other, a humanistic framework in which the integrity of the subject is taken to be both a starting- and end-point of analysis. In the first approach, which has the advantage of being anti-humanist in the sense of not positing a foundational ‘essence’, and so is less prone to ideological compromises, there is the recurrent problem of agency and resistance: how can one ever become other than what one is positioned as being? If one is ‘positioned’ by discourse, how does change ever occur? Criticism of some hard-line post-structuralist accounts is relevant here: for example, Benjamin’s (1998) complaint that Lacanian psychoanalysis fails to engage with the ‘authorship’ of the subject and hence to articulate possibilities for people to grasp their futures differently. In the second approach, visible, for example, in some narrative psychology, it is common to chide psychological research for its tendency to fragment the subject and to present qualitative approaches as a way to return to a holistic understanding of the person. This is presented as an advance in terms of both epistemology and morality: something special is pointed to, often silently, that works within the subject to act as an irreducible point of resistance, a place of safety or genuineness, which can never be explained away. However, the romantic view that arises from this is not only at odds with some of the more critical perspectives that bear on the emergence of qualitative psychology, but, if one follows Laplanche’s argument, it also serves psychosocial functions best understood as defensive. For this reason, it is important to mount a critique of the tendency to produce integrated ‘narratives’ of experience and to argue for the importance of maintaining the vision of a subject in fragments. In what follows, however, I want to do this without adopting the extreme position in which fragmentation is celebrated: the history of psychosis is as good a place as any to turn to for evidence that being broken into bits is not a subject position to be advocated (Frosh, 1991). Instead, by employing a sleight of hand in which the opposition to the integrating tendency is presented not as fragmentation but as multiplicity, I will suggest that the aspirations of qualitative work are served best by adopting the notion of an over-determined subject, of a way of being that is ‘excessive’, too much.

On not saying what can’t be said

Once in a while, an academic paper seems to strike some kind of nerve among readers and to be taken up, albeit gently and often by friends of the author, as if it reflects a general sense of something going on. One such paper of mine first appeared in 2001 in an obscure journal, the International Journal of Critical Psychology, and was reprinted in the book After Words a year later (Frosh, 2002). This seems to have gained much of its audience by virtue of its title: ‘Things That Can’t Be Said: Psychoanalysis and the Limits of Language’. In it the discursive turn in psychology was praised for the advances it has brought in restoring meaning to psychological investigation, but then criticized on the grounds that ‘there exists a large variety of different psychological experiences of considerable emotional force which lie outside narrative—even outside of what can be spoken’ (p. 135). The paper goes on to suggest ‘that these experiences can be central elements in people’s lives, key components of psychological functioning, and that they have a specific connection with trauma and the processing of traumatically troubling events’ (p. 135). Following a development of these themes through investigations of gender, psychotherapy and Holocaust testimony, the concluding rhetoric runs:

Things that can’t be said are at the core of our experience, we are what they are. Once they are symbolized, they no longer traumatize as much, it is true, and there is a kind of responsibility to do something with them because of this. But this does not make it easy, and there are times when putting things into words is a deep and painful loss.

(p. 149)

It is pleasing, of course, that this work has to some degree been taken up by others, and that it is part of a broad attempt, by discursive psychologists (e.g. Billig, 1999) as well as by critical psychologists (Parker, 2005a), to look at the wa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Lacanian theory, discourse analysis and the question of the ‘event'
• I Lacan, and Foundations of a New Research Paradigm
• II Discourse, and the Elaboration of Concepts for Analysis
• III Event, and Analysis of Indeterminacy in Discourse
• Index