Cultural Theory and Psychoanalytic Tradition

David Fisher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351524490
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The culture of psychoanalysis has many traditions and multiple schools of theory and thought. This work presents informative and original investigations into three overlapping areas of psychoanalytic tradition: the history of psychoanalysis; psychoanalytic culture criticism; and the application of psychoanalytic methods to the study of history. In this carefully crafted evaluation of various authors and subjects, Fisher's perceptions are informed by a deep and comprehensive knowledge of the psychoanalytic movement, its interaction with the wider context of European cultural and political history, and its philosophical and clinical origins.

In examining the history of the movement, Fisher attempts to discover the fundamental inspiration of psychoanalysis by returning to the origins of the discipline. Freud is the central figure here, but Fisher also looks to the second generation of European analysts, including such maverick figures as Lacan and Spielrein, and mainstream figures as Fenichel to gain insight into the multidimensional and creative personalities who were drawn to Freud and his ideas. In his discussion of psychoanalytic culture criticism, Fisher analyzes symbolic meanings and psychological themes from a variety of written works. In an analysis of Freud's Civilization audits Discontents, the author argues that the figure of Romain Rolland is pervasive throughout the text as symbol, muse, stimulus, and adversary.

Reading analytic theory and applying it to personalities and situations from the past allowed historians to address issues of their own inner world and to develop breathtaking possibilities for understanding the past. Brilliantly written and historical and critical in method, Cultural Theory and Psychoanalytic Tradition offers valuable insights into significant themes and ambiguities in the diverse areas of psychoanalysis. Intellectual historians and psychoanalysts will find reliable introductions and springboards f

Part I

The History of Psychoanalysis

1
Lacan’s Ambiguous Impact on Contemporary French Psychoanalysis

Theory is good, but it does not prevent things (facts) from existing.

—Charcot to Freud

For twenty weeks in the fall and winter of 1885-86, Freud visited Paris. He came not as a tourist, but rather to absorb contemporary French discoveries in neuroanatomy, particularly the innovations in research on hypnotism, suggestion, and hysteria. Freud’s work with Charcot at the Salpêtrière clinics in Paris left a significant scientific and personal impact. Charcot represented for him a model teacher and an exemplary scientific observer of mental illness. During one of Charcot’s lectures, a precocious theory builder asked the French master how he could reconcile his factual findings with the theoretical constructs of contemporary German physiology. Charcot replied: “La théorie, c’est bon, mais ça n’empêche pas d’exister” (Theory is good, but it does not prevent things [facts] from existing). The questioner was Freud. And he valued this thought throughout his life as an injunction to integrate theoretical postulations with clinical material, conceptual constructs and observable data.¹

Freud was fascinated and irked by the city of Paris. He called Paris a “magically attractive and repulsive city.” We know impressionistically from his letters that he felt secluded and estranged in the French capital, that his moods shifted between feelings of exhilaration and depression. Scientific knowledge alone seemed insufficient to bridge the cultural gap between the provincial Austrian Jew and the cosmopolitan Parisians. Like so many short-term visitors before and since, Freud judged the Parisians inaccessible and mysterious; they were cold, detached, and difficult to engage in human contact. Yet there was something about Parisian life that was theatrical and passionate. He found the Parisians irresistibly appealing, and he longed to be intimate with them. One senses that, despite his penetrating insight, Freud had trouble figuring out the French. He felt “gobbled up,” eerie, weird, not quite able to fathom the intricate secrets of the city and its inhabitants. To plumb its unfathomable depths, he relied on literary works, above all, on nineteenth-century novels, such as Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris. Before departing in February, 1886, he exclaimed: “What an ass I am to be leaving Paris!”²

Freud’s ambivalence toward Paris anticipates the twentieth-century French reaction to his historic discovery, psychoanalysis. It is cultural ambivalence that characterizes the history of psychoanalysis in France during Freud’s life and after his death. The full story of the penetration of and resistance to psychoanalysis in France will have to account for the slow, uneven, and partial transmission of Freud’s ideas and techniques. These narratives have attempted to explain the transformation of Freud’s thought into an idiom comprehensible to contemporary Frenchmen.³ Sherry Turkle’s book, Psychoanalytic Politics, was the first English volume to address these issues; she concerns herself primarily with developments in the recent past, that is, since World War n, and more specifically, since the events of May-June 1968. Her thesis is that the resolution of French collective ambivalence toward psychoanalysis has been revolutionary, and she cleverly subtitles her volume, Freuds French Revolution.⁴

Jacques Lacan was the revolutionary figure of French psychoanalysis. This essay will focus on his theory; his oscillation between genius and buffoon; his style of intellectual life, particularly his borrowings from French surrealism; his megalomania; his innovative approach to psychoanalytic technique and to psychoanalytic training; and finally, his ambiguous impact on contemporary French psychoanalysis.

In some respects, Lacan’s theory began where antipsychiatry ended. Like Laing and Cooper, Lacan admitted no essential difference between the normal and the pathological. He was more deeply pessimistic than Freud about relieving or even ameliorating man’s neurotic misery; for him, it was absurd in the late twentieth century to be sanguine about mental health, happiness, or fortification of the ego. He was more optimistic than Freud (and close to the surrealists) in designating desire, sexuality, symbolism, self-expression, and language as potential agencies of personal gratification and self-knowledge.

To his great credit, Lacan attempted to fill a key gap in Freudian theory. Many orthodox psychoanalysts accept Freud’s dichotomy between the individual and his environment. For Lacan, the psychological and the social were inseparable, interdependent; the realms “interpenetrate.” The social cannot be excluded or bracketed out from an analysis of character. He held that the family and early childhood were the individual’s first experience of society, and that the mind had powerful mechanisms to internalize society. Given these internal psychic mechanisms, most of which are outside conscious control, Lacanian psychoanalysis tried to decode the psycholinguistic modes of social and cultural discipline. Thus, Lacanian inquiry focused on the perspective of how society and law entered the individual, with particular reference to the role of language and symbol for conferring social meaning.

Through language theory, Lacan provided a conceptual understanding of the multiple ways we carry law in our heads: either through shame, guilt, and morality, or through metaphorical mechanisms of internalizing culturally acceptable limits. Lacan saw the “I” as “decentered,” “entrapped,” that is to say, as permanently fragmented. Because the subject emerges out of an alienated environment, even the deepest needs and impulses of the individual are products of, formed and deformed by, society. This radically shifted the therapeutic burden of psychoanalysis away from Freud’s commitment to increase consciousness, individual autonomy, and mature interdependence. Lacan saw the subject as divided, facing irreconcilable conflicts; wholeness was a utopian wish, inappropriate to an individual who lived in an estranging, post-industrial society, inaccessible given the everyday anomie of modem social life, hopeless given the permanent pressure of the unconscious on our psychic structure.

In the Lacanian framework, the subject never existed in isolation, was always defined in relationship to “Others.” These “Others,” particularly the mother and the father, remain permanently unreachable for the child, symbolic objects of temptation and seduction, desires that remain eternally unfulfilled. Lacanian psychoanalysis rejected the goal of building coherent, fully centered egos, just as it insisted that normal people experience the same splits and inner discontinuities of the mad. Lacan and his disciples had nothing but contempt for ego psychology, for those analysts who studied the ego’s capacities for defense and adaptability, for those who posited adjustment, autonomy, freedom from conflict, and even creativity in the secondary process. For Lacan this Anglo-Saxon deviation from Freud muted the revolutionary spirit of psychoanalysis, and represented the smugness, mindless optimism, and social engineering of contemporary psychotherapy. For him, the ego was conceived almost as if it were the enemy: the goal of treatment was to clear it out of the way, to break down the misrecognitions which reside there.

Lacan postulated a dramatic moment in the development of the ego at the “mirror stage.” The mirror stage occurs between the ages of six and eighteen months before the infant has acquired full motor coordination, mastered language, or separated himself from his mother. It is a period of life marked by the baby’s insufficiency and dependency. Upon seeing himself reflected in a mirror, the child achieves a form of self-recognition which has both a positive and negative component. It is positive in that he views his body as a whole, jubilantly recognizing that his body is not fragmented or mutilated. It is negative in that the child’s image of himself is registered in an inverted, symmetrical mirror image, frequently alongside of his mother’s image. The mirror stage is bound up with his primal identification and blending with “Others”—that is, with other children and above all with his mother’s body and desires. According to Lacan, the mirror phase allowed the subject to pass into the “imaginary” realm.

The mirror stage is linked to Freud’s writings on the pre-Oedipal stages of the child, particularly primary narcissism. It coincides with the child’s fusion with his mother. But Lacan argued that this merger with the Other is fundamentally alienating because the subject cannot distinguish its own body and desires from those of the mother, in fact, the mother’s body and desires are often imposed on the infant. In short, Lacan connected early ego development to identification with the child’s double (other children) or with his mother (the Other). This devalued the ego, leaving it in a nonautonomous, highly subordinated position. Moreover, the ego was trapped in this fictitious situation because the process of the mirror stage was almost completely unconscious. Thus, the subject remains not only ignorant of his condition, but misled, a victim of faulty knowledge. The “I” is formed by the loss of the subject in others. The process of objectification consists of imitation and erotic identification with the introjected images of the bodies and desires of others.⁵

The unmediated, misleading entry into the imaginary, however, is only a precondition for the “symbolic” stage—a Lacanian idea which coincides with Freud’s Oedipal stage of psychosexual development. The mirror stage confuses and distorts the subject’s awareness of himself. The symbolic stage is fundamentally social and triangular. It is mediated by the father. When the father intervenes the child has reached the age of three to five. The symbolic stage prepares him for the restrictions and regulations of life in society. Just as he is the one who has the phallus, so too is the father the carrier of speech. Through a fearful identification with the father—he is at once a rival and a love object—the child internalizes the norms, values, interdictions, and laws of society. By passing to the symbolic, the child’s sexuality is tamed, subjected to socially acceptable limits and taboos.

Thus, Lacan’s variation on the Oedipal complex implied a social and linguistic dimension: when the child takes on the father’s name and the father’s no (a word play in French: le nom-du-père and le nondu-pdre), he is taking on a socially acceptable identity with clear rules and prohibitions. Yet the child pays a price for access to the symbolic. He is permanently separated from his mother, deprived of his earliest and deepest object of desire. Symbolically castrated by the father, deprived of his sexualized and narcissistic identification with the mother, the child gains passage to civilization through the agency of language and through his identification with his father.⁶

The social implications of Lacan’s teachings made it acceptable to a post-1968 Parisian audience of intellectuals and students, who were politicized and temperamentally left-wing. Lacan may, in fact, be viewed as a theoretical and poetic bridge between the social and the psychological, who attempted to introduce nuances in the stages connecting character and milieu. Lacanian psychoanalysis surely fueled the fashionable but amorphous notion of the politics of the personal, an idea now current in French feminist-psychoanalytic circles, just as it resonated in existential-Marxist circles from the late 1960s until 1975. Lacanian psychoanalysis was primarily a cultural force, a sophisticated pedagogy. Thus, what was “liberating” about contemporary Lacanian psychoanalysis operated on the level of consciousness, perception, and education, not in concrete shifts in individual autonomy or health, certainly not in changes in political constellations. It may even be seen as an instrument of order given the privileged role of the father in his teachings. Lacan, likewise, subordinated psychoanalytic technique and clinical praxis to theoretical and even literary considerations.⁷ Science for him revolved around theory building, the postulation of a radical and persuasive theory of knowledge.

Lacan polemically rejected the idea of an autonomous ego, viewing it as an illusion. For him the ego was the realm of deep resistance, the repository of absence, incompleteness, and spurious knowledge. Lacan’s writings on the subject posited a permanently fragmented ego, decentered, empty, mobile; he practiced psychoanalysis with no expectation of providing coherence, cure, or reliable strength to the ego.

If the unconscious is structured like a language (according to Lacan’s famous dictum), then that structure is coherent and universal only if one grasps its endless displacements, its disobedience, and its untamable quality. The unconscious is the discourse of the Other insofar as we carry gaps, incapacities, permanently unfulfilled longings in us all the time.

Lacan claimed that contemporary psychoanalytic theory mistakenly attempted to discipline or unseat the primary process by rendering it a closed universal system. He asserted that the unconscious cannot be bottled up, categorized, domesticated, immobilized. Part of Lacan’s project was to extricate psychoanalytic discourse from the arbitrary constraints of Freud’s followers and codifiers. Returning to Freud meant returning to the unconscious at the level of language. It was here, supposedly, that one thinks dangerously, that one’s ideas oscillate between symbolic absences and presences. By language Lacan was referring to the signifier, or to the sound realm of speech. The signifying chain was the best guide to the unconscious, along with the study of metaphor and metonymy. In Lacan’s theory, consequently, there was an abundance of word play, jokes, puns, and witty reworkings of speech patterns. This approach was consistent with his postulation of the unconscious as plural, layered, involuted, uncodifiable, and unstoppable. Lacan’s id, following his surrealist precursors, was poetic, polyphonic, and overdetermined. Because the unconscious does not recognize negations, much of Lacan’s theory played on contradiction and self-contradiction. Many readers are dismayed by his style, without realizing that for him nonsense is neither simply nonsense, nor accidental, but rather that it represents a form of abundance. The unconscious is our home, yet it knows no limits, no destination, no c...