The Self Between

From Freud to the New Social Psychology of France

Eugene Webb

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780295805306
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

After the disappointing events of the 1960s, including the loss of Algeria, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the American war in the former French colony of Indo-China, people in France began to look seriously to Freudianism in the transformed version of Jacques Lacan, for a new way of understanding human relations and the relations between human beings and society. The movement in France is not specifically psychoanalytic but developed against such a background. Psychoanalytic thought acquired the kind of centrality in French intellectual life once associated with existentialism and Marxism and later with structuralism--a centrality it probably never possessed in the United States, even at the peak of its popularity. The movement was a reassessment and rethinking of Freud's thought and influence, and it iwa a movement that was almost unknown to the American public.

CHAPTER 1

The Cultural Situation of
Psychoanalytic Thought in France

ANYONE looking at the French intellectual scene in the 1970s and 1980s would have to be impressed by the pervasiveness of Sigmund Freud’s influence. Psychoanalytic thought, even if not psychoanalytic activity itself, had acquired the kind of centrality in French intellectual life once associated with existentialism and Marxism and later with structuralism—a centrality it probably never really possessed in the United States, even at the peak of its popularity. As one of the people interviewed in Paris in the late 1970s by the sociologist Sherry Turkle put it in describing the cultural status of psychoanalysts, “After all, they’re the only visible intellectuals around—the existentialists’ cafés have given way to the psychoanalysts’ couches.”¹

It took a long time, however, for the Freudian thought to attain that eminence in France, and it met with a great deal of resistance along the way.² Freud’s acceptance in France had to wait, moreover, on an adaptation that would make him assimilable to French ways of thinking. This purpose was eventually served by his filtration through the thought of Jacques Lacan, who drew from Freud what could be effectively recast in the mold of French linguistic, literary, and social interests. The intellectual historian H. Stuart Hughes has remarked that the French resisted psychoanalysis until they had produced in Jacques Lacan an “indigenous heretic” whose interpretation of Freud by way of structuralism and linguistics gave him a Gallic flavor that made him palatable.³ Although Freud had been of interest to a small number of important thinkers as early as the 1920s and 1930s, most notably André Breton and Jacques Lacan, it was not until the publication of Lacan’s Ecrits in 1966 that psychoanalytic thought became a topic of wide and serious discussion among French intellectuals, and it did not become widely accepted by the French public until after 1968, in the aftermath of the student uprisings. The disillusionment that soon set in when the upheaval of May 1968 did not produce the utopian changes the protesters had hoped for resulted in a multiple disappointment with previously prevailing schools of thought and led people to look seriously at Freudianism, in its Lacanian transformation, for a new way of understanding human relations and the relation between human beings and society.⁴ Since that time, the quantity of literature published in France on psychoanalysis has multiplied explosively, as have discussions of psychoanalytic themes and theories on television talk shows and among the general public.⁵

The picture of a Freudian hegemony in French thought that these facts might foster should not, however, be taken at face value. France has remained France, and the French Freud is a Freud considerably altered. He won acceptance in France over the resistance of a long and deeply rooted tradition of indigenous French thought on questions of human psychology, and his thought is already being reexamined in ways that penetrate to its foundations and challenge it radically. It is this French movement of reassessment and rethinking, as yet almost unknown to the American public, that is the subject of this book.

This is also to a certain extent the story of a return of French psychological thought to French roots in the thought of such thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as Gabriel Tarde, Gustave Le Bon, Pierre Janet, and Emile Durkheim, among whom psychology tended to be much closer to sociology than it has generally been for the Freudian tradition. One important difference between Lacan and the more recent thinkers to be studied here was that even when he was thinking in ways that were quite original, Lacan represented his thought as aiming at a return to Freud.⁶ The later thinkers are, in varying degrees, explicitly critical of the fundamental premises of Freudian thought and offer radical alternatives to it. As will be explained in the chapters that follow, these new currents differ from Freudian thought in a variety of ways, not the least of which is that they tend to seek the source not only of mental disturbances but of normal psychology and the personality as such in interpersonal relations.

Certainly Freud, with his central Oedipal triangle and his teaching that the ego is not master in its own house, undercut any belief in the autonomy of the individual as a subject. Still, the psychological schema he eventually worked out (ego, id, and superego), even as it dethroned the ego, provided a new basis for belief in the individual self. The difference was that it was a larger and more complex self made up of both conscious and unconscious components, with the result that even those forces beyond the individual’s conscious control could be conceived of as within him—in his “unconscious.” Marie Balmary, an analyst in Lacan’s tradition who has rendered explicit and further developed some of the extensive critique of Freud that remained implicit in Lacan, has argued, as will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter, that Freud’s theory that symptoms are the fulfillments of libidinal drives, places the essential dynamic within the individual and reduces the importance of the interpersonal.⁷

One major mark of the difference between the traditional Freudian orientation in this respect and that of some of the newer thinkers to be studied in this volume is the term coined by René Girard, Jean-Michel Oughourlian, and Guy Lefort, in their highly influential Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World,⁸ to designate the distinctive approach to psychology they were proposing there: “la psychologie interdividuelle” or “interdividual psychology.” The purpose of the term “interdividual,” as Oughourlian subsequently explained it in The Puppet of Desire,⁹ was to emphasize the radically social character of human psychology—so radically social that the self as such had to be conceived of not as individual but as a function of all the relationships in which the person (or “holon” as Oughourlian termed him, following a coinage by Arthur Koestler) is involved. (The term “holon” was coined by Koestler to refer to something that can be thought of as a whole considered in relation to the parts it comprises and also as a part considered in relation to a more comprehensive system.)¹⁰

Oughourlian describes his conception of the “interdividual self” in the following manner (Puppet of Desire, pp. 11–12):

I have always thought that what one customarily calls the I or self in psychology is an unstable, constantly changing, and ultimately evanescent structure. I think . . . that only desire brings this self into existence. Because desire is the only psychological motion, it alone, it seems to me, is capable of producing the self and breathing life into it. The first hypothesis that I would like to formulate in this regard is this: desire gives rise to the self and, by its movement, animates it. The second hypothesis . . . is that desire is mimetic. This postulate, which was advanced by René Girard as early as 1961, seems to be capable of serving as the foundation for a new, pure psychology—that is, one unencumbered by any sort of biologism. We have chosen to call this interdividual psychology.

As this passage indicates, at the heart of the currents of thought we shall be examining is a particular anlaysis of human psychology that is centered on relationships, and especially on relationships that have to do with patterns of desire that are communicated, usually without either party being explicitly aware of it, from one person to another. In the process, they shape the personalities of those involved and are reshaped in turn.

As Oughourlian interprets it, the causality of the relationship can be formulated either in terms of what is called “influence” or in terms of imitation, or “mimesis.” The holon and the other, as he terms them, are linked in a field of force: looked at from one side it can be read as suggestion or influence worked upon the passive holon by the other, and looked at from the other side it can be read as the active reaching out in mimesis by the holon toward the other as a possible model (see, for example, Puppet, pp. 28–29, 97–98). As René Girard has put it, with regard to the latter perspective: “Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.”¹¹ The belief that we are the originators and full owners of our desires, “the intimate conviction that our desires are really our own, that they are truly original and spontaneous,” is, says Girard, “the dearest of all our illusions,” and he goes on to add: “Far from combatting such an illusion, Freud flattered it.”¹²

On the other hand, the idea that desire is mimetic means two things that undercut the foundations of most traditional thinking on the subject and that could hardly be less flattering to our pretensions. One is that our desires are not validated by some inherent property of the objects that we find desirable: we do not reach out toward objects because of an intrinsic desirability in them that elicits (and justifies) our movements of desire; rather, prompted by a vaguely felt sense of insufficiency or incompleteness, we seek out something to desire, some object that may give us the feeling that if only we possessed it, we might find satisfaction in it and come to rest. The other is that far from being autonomous in relation to other people, we are acutely dependent on them. Even when we defy the world in the pursuit of our desires, it is the world that pulls our puppet strings.

The implications for an understanding of human motivation, it should be apparent, could hardly be more radical, even when one bears in mind that the position of interdividual psychology involves a qualifying distinction between “appetites and needs,” which can have specific objects and offer genuine satisfactions—as when one is hungry or thirsty and seeks food or drink—and “desires” in the sense in which Girard and Oughourlian use the terms, which are inherently artificial and lead to no real satisfaction but only to further craving.¹³

Certainly it has been the assumption of all previous schools of psychological thought, as of commonsense thinking generally, that desire is elicited by objects. This has been a particularly important assumption for Freudianism, which emphasizes the fundamentally biological character of all desire. For Freud, as is well known, there was one fundamental desire that underlay and set the pattern for all others: the sexual drive, and especially the desire for the first sexual objects to arouse it, such as the infant’s mother or whatever “pflegende Weib” (“nurturing woman”), may have played a similarly central role in his early life.¹⁴ As Girard phrased the issue, “For modern students of desire, the main question has been: what is the true object of human desire? To Freud, for instance, our ‘true’ object is always our mother. From the mimetic standpoint, this makes no sense. Desire can be defined neither by its object nor by some disposition of the subject.”¹⁵

What this implies amounts to a Copernican revolution in psychology. Perhaps an even better analogue would be the shift to Einsteinian relativity, since in this view there is no longer an absolute point of reference either in the object of desire or in its subject, as there had been for earlier thinking. As Oughourlian stated the issue with reference to his two hypotheses referred to above (that desire gives rise to the self and, by its movement, brings it into existence; and that desire is mimetic): “These two hypotheses make it necessary to revise earlier psychologies, since these are psychologies either of the subject or of the object. They demand that one renounce the mythical claim to a self that would be a permanent structure in a monadic subject” (Puppet, p. 12).

This shift of paradigm was prepared, of course, by earlier developments. It was anticipated in part by the Lacanian revision of Freud, which put more emphasis on the relativity of both personal identity and desire than did Freud himself, even though it tended, as the various schools of psychoanalysis usually have, to attribute the source of its own original contributions to Freud’s “true intent.” Lacan was perhaps even more inclined than most founders of Freudian schools to interpret his own ideas as a rediscovery of the true meaning of Freud, but in many respects the meaning he found there led clearly in the direction of the quite non-Freudian, or even anti-Freudian, lines of thought currently pursued by Girard, Oughourlian, Balmary, and the others to be considered here.

Lacan introduced the main body of his 1936 essay, “Beyond the Reality Principle,” for example, with the statement, set entirely in capital letters: “ALTHOUGH LIMITED ...