Psychology After Lacan

Connecting the clinic and research

Ian Parker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317683209
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Ian Parker has been a leading light in the fields of critical and discursive psychology for over 25 years. The Psychology After Critique series brings together for the first time his most important papers. Each volume in the series has been prepared by Ian Parker and presents a newly written introduction and focused overview of a key topic area.

Psychology After Lacan is the sixth volume in the series and addresses three central questions:

• Why is Lacanian psychoanalysis re-emerging in mainstream contemporary psychology?
• What is original in this account of the human subject?
• What implications does Lacanian psychoanalysis have for psychology?

This book introduces Lacan's influential ideas about clinical psychoanalysis and contemporary global culture to a new generation of psychologists. The chapters cover a number of key themes including conceptions of the human subject within psychology, the uses of psychoanalysis in qualitative research, different conceptions of ethics within psychology, and the impact of cyberspace on human subjectivity. The book also explores key debates currently occurring in Lacanian psychoanalysis, with discussion of culture, discourse, identification, sexuality and the challenge to mainstream notions of normality and abnormality.

Psychology After Lacan is essential reading for students and researchers in psychology, psycho-social studies, sociology, social anthropology and cultural studies, and to psychoanalysts of different traditions engaged in academic research. It will also introduce key ideas and debates within critical psychology to undergraduates and postgraduate students across the social sciences.

1 Jacques Lacan

Barred psychologist

This first chapter reviews a series of contradictions between the discipline of psychology and what Lacan had to say about the human subject. It thus takes us beyond an ‘introduction’ to Lacan for psychologists to provide an introduction to alternative critical psychological, even ‘anti-psychological’ ways of thinking about who we are. Lacan is characterized here with reference to the elaboration of his theoretical and clinical work, with the focus primarily on his own writings. I go quite systematically through the way that Lacan’s account of ostensibly ‘psychological’ questions, such as personality and memory, is quite different from the way that psychologists usually understand them.

What I mean by ‘psychology’ here is the academic and professional domain of theory and practice developed in Western, specifically Anglo-American culture to describe and explain behavioural and mental processes. It is worth bearing in mind that some other psychological traditions outside the English-speaking world, particularly in Latin America, have drawn on Lacan’s work. I also show how Lacan’s work differs from apparently ‘critical’ approaches, like discursive psychology, inside the discipline.

There is such fundamental incompatibility between Lacan’s work and psychological views of the individual subject that attempts to assimilate the two traditions are misconceived. This means that psychologists looking to Lacan for answers must question underlying assumptions about theory and methodology in their discipline if they are to take his work seriously. The incompatibility between Lacan and psychology also has important consequences for clinical psychologists who may wish to adopt ideas from the Lacanian tradition, for it highlights the dangers that psychology holds for psychoanalysis if psychological theories and methodologies are taken on good coin. The motif of Lacan as ‘barred psychologist’ is designed to emphasize these arguments as well as the distinctive account of the human subject that his work entails.

There have been a number of recent attempts to repair the lost historical links between psychology and psychoanalysis, and the work of Lacan is increasingly invoked as an alternative analytic tradition that might appeal to psychologists. In some cases there is a reaching across from psychology into Lacan’s work as a resource (e.g. Frosh, 1997), and there are also some attempts to bridge the gap by those more directly involved in Lacanian practice (e.g. Malone and Friedlander, 2000). However, the way the appeal to Lacan functions in this renewed communication between psychoanalysis and psychology is largely through miscommunication. It risks indulging an imaginary misrecognition of what Lacan actually has to say to psychologists concerning the assumptions they make about the human subject and what they do.

As we know, Lacan trained first as a psychiatrist (and practised as such through the rest of his life), and then as a psychoanalyst in Paris in the 1930s. Disagreements about theoretical issues (particularly the development of US ‘ego-psychology’) and questions of practice (particularly over short and variable-length analytic sessions) led to his eventual exclusion from the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA), an ‘excommunication’ effected by the demand that he should not train analysts. Since his death in 1981, the Lacanian orientation has grown to now inform the practice of about half the psychoanalysts in the world, with the main concentration being in the Latin countries. This skewed geographical distribution of psychoanalysis facilitates the attempts of the US-based IPA often still to deny Lacan’s contribution.

This chapter addresses the problem from a certain position, with a certain address in mind. The question of from where I speak and to whom I am speaking is particularly important in this context, for psychology operates on a model of science that often excludes an attention to the subjectivity of those involved in it as researchers, while for Lacan (1986/1992: 19), ‘psychology … is nothing more than a mask, and sometimes even an alibi, of the effort to focus on the problem of our own action’. My training is as an academic psychologist working with ‘critical’ perspectives in the discipline and with psychoanalysis outside it. This chapter is primarily directed to psychologists who may be curious about Lacan but who know little about his work, and this means that the argument does risk already adopting a language that reconfigures subjectivity as something ‘psychological’. The effort to render Lacanian concepts intelligible to an audience of psychologists may thus perform the very problem that the chapter revolves around: that Lacan may be thought to be compatible with psychology.

The purpose of this chapter is to review how Lacan approaches domains of human experience traditionally studied by psychology. The argument is that he is relevant not as a new version of psychology that may improve the discipline, as some sympathetic writers would have it, but as an alternative to psychology; as far as Lacan (1975/1991: 278) was concerned, ‘psychology is itself an error of perspective on the human being’. Lacanian psychoanalysis provides a series of theoretical frameworks, not a single closed system, that help us to think in an entirely different way about what are usually taken to be ‘psychological’ phenomena.

This is important for two reasons. First, each attempt to make Lacan’s work compatible with traditional academic psychology necessarily entails a particular kind of distortion of his work. Although a brief review of Lacan’s work focused on one problematic, such as this, may render his often cryptic writing and transcribed public seminars more accessible, that accessibility produces a loss of meaning at the very same moment that it appears to facilitate understanding. The immediate impression that one ‘understands’ an argument, a text or another person lies, in Lacanian terms, on an ‘imaginary’ axis governed by processes of mirroring in which we recognize or, more to the point, ‘misrecognize’ that which we have already expected to see there, that which owes more to what we ourselves are than what is other to us (Lacan, 1949). Second, Lacan’s teaching and writing were bound up with a practice of analysis that was concerned with questioning the truth claims of psychological experts and the attempts, evident in the endeavour of dominant tendencies in US psychoanalysis, to adapt individuals to society. Lacan’s (1953: 38) argument, that ‘the conception of psychoanalysis in the United States has inclined towards the adaptation of the individual to the social environment, towards the quest for behaviour patterns, and towards all the objectification implied in the notion of “human engineering”’, would seem to be relevant at least as much to Western psychology as to ostensibly ‘psychoanalytic’ ego-psychology (Ingleby, 1985).

Both ‘understanding’ and ‘adaptation’, then, are anathema to Lacan, and each needs to be questioned and rethought. Lacan was not, nor should he be thought of as, a psychologist. Towards the end of the chapter I will make the case that he would be better characterized as a ‘barred psychologist’, and that what he offers to psychology, if anything, is something that helps us to unravel and reflect upon the assumptions psychologists make about who they are and what they do. What psychologists do is structured by a system of theories and practices, and what coherence there is to psychology is given by this system as a disciplinary apparatus (Rose, 1985). To many of those about to be recruited into it, this disciplinary apparatus first manifests as a ‘syllabus’. So this chapter addresses different areas of psychology that comprise the core syllabus for undergraduates in the English-speaking world and then turns to more general conceptions of the individual before reviewing the implications of a different kind of engagement by psychologists with Lacan’s work.

Individual cognitive psychology

Mainstream Anglo-American psychology (in which the agenda is largely set by US texts and journals and which has a profound influence in shaping the discipline throughout the English-speaking world) is now underpinned by a model of the individual as ‘information-processor’ (Lindsay and Norman, 1972). A reaction against Pavlovian and Watsonian behaviourism in the 1950s, which tended to deny the relevance of internal mental states, led to the development of ‘cognitive science’, and investigation of problem-solving and memory governed by at least implicit, and often explicit, computational metaphors (Winograd and Flores, 1987). This shift of focus, designed to capture processes happening inside the head, has increasingly defined what psychology should be. Even alternative approaches, such as Skinnerian radical behaviourism and descriptions of cognition as modularized and distributed, have operated with reference to the information-processing model (Fodor, 1983).

Psychoanalysts would recognize this model as a version of ‘ego-psychology’ (e.g. Hartmann, 1939/1958), for there are strong assumptions here about the independent existence of central command processes that are studied as if they operate in an integrated way even while notions of skill, error, faulty functioning and incomplete heuristics always accompany the model. Psychological studies of intelligence, personality and social skills then take this model as given, and they typically issue in recommendations for cognitive behavioural treatments for inadequate functioning (e.g. Trower et al., 1978). Here psychology adopts a Cartesian dualist view of a necessary division between thinking and the body in which reason is viewed as operating from a single point of certainty beset, as a condition for its own pre-eminence, by doubt. Lacan’s work throws this cognitivist model of the individual into question on a number of counts, of which we may briefly note four here.

Thinking in language

First, thinking is understood by Lacan to be something operating within language, and so as an activity that is public and social rather than private and individual. For Lacan (1981/1993: 112), ‘thought means the thing articulated in language’. This means that it would be misplaced to investigate ‘thought’ as something occurring inside the head as if it were then necessarily outside language, and a Lacanian understanding of thinking in language also entails a rejection of notions of ‘communication’ as the transmission of thoughts from one head to another through a transparent medium, with language assumed to be such a medium (Shannon and Weaver, 1949). The formal structure of language itself also constitutes the content of the communication, through internal relations that operate independently of the subject. It would be possible, by way of this focus on shared social processes, to connect Lacan here with work on ‘practical cognition’ drawing on Russian activity theory and US ethnomethodology (e.g. Lave, 1988). In this way, it may seem as if it were possible to build a bridge across to Lacan.

However, what is missing from this work is any account of the unconscious, which for Lacanian work as a form of psychoanalysis, of course, is crucial. For Lacan, however, the unconscious is not equivalent to ‘non-conscious’ thought that is prevented by various cognitively conceived ‘defence mechanisms’ from coming into awareness. The unconscious is produced when the infant enters language as the structured domain of meaning that lies beyond our grasp as individuals. This language, which alienates us at the very same moment that it creates a channel of communication with others, comprises ‘signifiers’ structured into discourse, into a symbolic realm. This is what Lacan refers to as the ‘symbolic order’, and so the symbolic order determines the sense that is given to our words and the sense of lack that arises from our failure to master it. The symbolic order is always ‘other’ to us, and so a Lacanian conception of the unconscious is of it as the ‘discourse of the Other’; it is a relay of desire and site of individual cognitive ‘accomplishments’ (to use an ethnomethodological term) as well as communicational activity. A shift to ‘practical cognition’ (Lave, 1988) is not sufficient to account for the role of the symbolic order and its effect in the human subject as the domain of the unconscious. In this respect, Lacan’s account of ‘cognition’ in relation to language is completely at odds with anything recognizably psychological.

Meaning and memory

Second, there is a shift from questions of mechanism to questions of meaning. Here, Lacan sometimes employs a phenomenological description of the ways in which things in the world mean something to the subject. This is the point in his early writings where he elaborates a view of the human being and its relation to ‘Being’ that is very close to Heidegger (1928/1962), and which thus makes plausible a comparison with hermeneutics in psychology (Packer, 1985). However, this Heideggerian account of ‘Being-in-the-world’ is supplemented by Lacan, transformed theoretically, and so ineluctably overturned. As Lacan (1981/1993: 104) puts it, ‘remembering necessarily takes place within the symbolic order’. The symbolic order does provide a space or, in Heideggerian terms, a ‘clearing’ for the subject, but the organization of signifiers is out of the grasp of the subject, and these signifiers within the discourse of the Other – as unconscious – determine how the subject will come to be and the sense that they have that they are always lacking something. For Lacan (1981/1993: 111), ‘a recollection – that is, a resurgence of an impression – is organized in historical continuity’.

One implication of this can be seen in the radically different way Lacan accounts for déjà vu. Cognitive explanations appeal to physiological accounts of delays in neuronal pathways, for example, to explain why people sometimes have the experience of seeing things already seen, but for Lacan (1981/1993: 112),

Déjà vu occurs when a situation is lived through with a full symbolic meaning which reproduces a homologous symbolic situation that has been previously lived through but forgotten, and which is lived through again without the subject’s understanding it in all its detail. This is what gives the subject the impression that he has already seen the context, the scene, of the present moment.

Although a phenomenological account often seems to be evoked in Lacan’s work, then, the symbolic organization of memory makes that experience of ‘meaning’ something quite different, something that must obey the logic of the signifier. To treat ‘meaning’ as self-sufficient and independent of the symbolic would be to render it, in Lacanian terms, as an imaginary order of experience. This imaginary realm that gives us the sense of ‘understanding’ and ‘communication’ is very important, but Lacan’s description of the unconscious as discourse of the Other in the realm of the symbolic order reveals this imaginary domain as illusory and so as a quite mistaken ground upon which to construct any scientific account of what the human subject is and how it came to be. The phenomenon of ‘memory’, then, is another of those ‘cognitive’ phenomena that are outside the subject, and so it is not amenable to ‘psychological’ investigation.

Cogito and body

Third, Lacan displaces the Cartesian cogito in such a way that thinking and being are seen as operating in relation to one another but not from the same point. He explicitly challenges the presumption of cognitive psychology that an understanding of the nature of human thinking is also an insight into what it is to be a human being. One of his formulations of the relationship between thinking and being, then, is ‘I think where I am not therefore I am where I do not think’ (Lacan, 1957: 166). The human subject is seen as split, as ‘barred’ from any full presence or self-identity, and this split subject is rendered by Lacan by means of the figure

, the ‘barred subject’. This divided nature of subjectivity raises two problems for cognitive psychology to do with mental activity that lies outside consciousness and with the body.

Lacan reinterprets ‘Being’ as described by Heidegger (1928/1962) as the unconscious in the field of the Other, and from this reinterpretation he develops an account of ‘thinking’ as not separable from the body, but as always proceeding through symbolic activity. The use of Heideggerian reflections on the human being in relation to ‘Being’, particularly evident in Lacan’s early work, gives rise to an account of subjectivity as decentred from the place where thinking is usually assumed to operate in cognitive accounts, but also an account of it as embodied (Richardson, 1980). It would then be possible to connect such an embodied conception of thinking with critiques of cognitive psychology from within philosophy that have taken as their prime target work on ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI). Heidegger (1928/1962) has been an important influence in such work, for example in the claim that computers would need bodies in order to be able to be correctly ascribed with ‘intelligence’ (Dreyfus, 1967). What differentiates Lacan from these critiques, however, is his reinterpretation of the relation between the body and ‘Being’. And to turn from mainstream AI to ‘embodiment’ will not solve the problem, because for Lacan the body too is radically ‘decentred’ from the subject.

Rather than the body being a site of ‘Being’ where thinking really takes place, however, it is seen as the ‘real’ basis through which symbolic activity must pass (Soler, 1995). For Lacan, t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series foreword
• Series preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: psychology after Lacan
• 1 Jacques Lacan: barred psychologist
• 2 Lacan, psychology and the discourse of the university
• 3 Everyday behaviour(ism) and therapeutic discourse: deconstructing the ego as verbal nucleus in Skinner and Lacan
• 4 Socio-critical methods of investigation: four strategies for avoiding psychoanalysis
• 5 Lacanian ethics in psychology: seven paradigms
• 6 Psychoanalytic cyberspace, beyond psychology
• References
• Index