Getting the ‘Psycho’ Out of Psychoanalysis
This is Part I of a four part series introducing the Oedipus Complex and it relevance to contemporary psychoanalysis.
Part II, Oedipus Warped can be found here.
In effect, classical psychoanalysis, preoccupied above all with interpsychology, that is to say with individual psychological reactions determined by social life and family life, has not directed its attention to objective knowledge. It has not seen what there was special for the human who quits his/her fellow humans for objects, as with the super-Nietzscheans who, climbing towards a higher mountain, also leave their eagle and serpent to live among the stones. And yet, what a curious destiny, more curious still considering the century we are living in! Our whole culture is being ‘psychologized’, where the interest of the human is extended into the press and novels, with no more exigency than it be original and certain of finding a devoted daily readership. It is remarkable at such a time that we can still find souls who think of sulfate. This return of thinking of stones, is without a doubt,to psychologist’s eyes, a regression to a mineralized life. … There is a long book waiting to be written about the devalorization of objective and rational life that proclaims the bankruptcy of science from the outside, without ever participating in scientific thought. But our task is more modest: we must bring out the resistances to epistemological obstacles within objective scientific research.
Gaston Bachelard, The Formation Of The Scientific Mind (La Formation De L’Espirit Scientifique, Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1938, p.183–184.)
Part I: Situating the Obstacles
The set of problems developed in this article begins to articulate the obstacles posed by the practice and theory of contemporary psychoanalysis.
Much is at stake, historically, scientifically, and clinically by situating such obstacles whose importance, not only in the realm of psychoanalytic theory but in the practice of its ethics, is superseded only by their difficulty.
The greater the obstacle the greater the risk. Indeed, such risks are conducive to the assimilation of psychoanalysis to a humanistic field of the psyche. Someone attempting to practice analysis today is often directed towards becoming a social worker, psychiatrist, psychotherapist, psychologist, neuroscientist, or life-coach as a way to instinctively ground analysis in an institution, while a clinical field of obsession, fatigue, and delirium can always be an optional escape.
No doubt, those few who have somehow managed to sustain the ordeal of these difficulties while bequeathing to us something still psycho-analytic have been held to high esteem, at least by their contemporaries.
But contemporary psychoanalysis, especially in the eyes of the general public, has fallen into rather hard times since it is constantly threatened by the tedium of its psycho-techniques and bizarre connotations of its psycho-vocabulary: penis envy, castration complex, incest, parricide, pipi, turds, etc., etc. have created a phantasmagoria that few seem convinced of these days.
Moreover, analysis as a whole seems to offer little to any student today who would seek to confront these obstacles in a more direct, if not less tedious and obscene way.
If an explication comes along that claims to do precisely this, that can show how to found these obstacles by resolving them in a more general theory and practice, it is likely to be well received by a younger generation. Especially if such explications can be arrived at before old age and in such a way that does not confuse the acquisition of psychoanalytic knowledge with hazing, years of debilitating licensing obligations, and the received wisdom of a grandma or grandpa.
A fairly recent example of such an explanation is, of course, the case of Jacques Lacan who has been heralded as opening up psychoanalysis to a whole new generation and, if we believe the modern-day commentators, as singlehandedly ‘returning to Freud’ in a way that did not bypass its obstacles but resolved them in a critical construction.
No longer does Lacan invite us to look into the unconscious as a dark cave (psyche in Greek) or something we have inside our head, but as what “is structured like a language” and as every bit exterior as the “highways of Baltimore”.
No longer are we asked to believe that we have an Oedipus Complex inside us and that we secretly want to sleep with our mothers and kill our fathers, but that there is a logic of sex that renders these obscenities every bit as quaint as an old fashioned peep show.
No longer are we even asked to believe that we should — or can — be analyzed by others, whether they are called doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, or psychotherapists. On the contrary, since Lacan, each patient, as analysand, becomes responsible for their own analysis, while the analyst works as a guide, or more precisely, at the place of a transitional object to stabilize the process.
Finally, just as we are not promised by Freud that there is a place for the psyche in the ego, neurons, or consciousness, we are not given a guarantee by Lacan that the place of analysis can occur in the session or its institutionalization; on the contrary, what is required is a theory of discourse and a topology of the subject.
In the end, it is Lacan’s ability to get the ‘psycho’ out of analysis that began to respond to quandaries of practice and theory that had plagued it for so long.
Or to pose it another way: how does the linguistic, logical, and mathematical methodology developed by Lacan give a place to the subject that overcomes the ever-recurring ideology of the psyche in psychoanalysis?
The last thing I want to do here is to dispel the enthusiasm that began in the ‘60’s in France, then spread throughout Europe, North and South America, but if one dwells upon the recent eulogies and re-institutionalizations of a Lacanian discourse, it is not for sure that it is not in line to suffer the same fate as that of Freud.
The obstacle of the ‘psycho’ is still here today, while the difficulties of disengaging it from analysis is always relieved by a facile instinctive gesture to psychology, psychotherapy, psychiatry, neuroscience, coaching, etc., etc.
The attentive and critical work of Lacan concerning the tradition of Freud has barely begun. My question in these forthcoming articles does not address Lacan as a thinker or clinician but concerns a much more narrow question of how he proceeded to disengage the psycho from psychoanalysis by isolating its obstacle in a linguistic, epistemological, and mathematical-logic problem.
(Part II — Oedipus Warped: A Crack in the Translation-Tradition)