This is a Lacan thread

So I thought about Lacan again today after reading an article on the trauma recovery industry in the New Yorker, where the stated idea of these "debriefings" is to in repeating the story, develop a narrative of how and why the event happened and thus remove its power. A pretty traditional theraputic thang actually, except the Lacanian twist is if you take the "shock" to be the unbearable glimpse of the "real" -- i.e. contingency, irrationality, etc. and then say that the story developed will necessarily be false, that sanity is in the ability to create and trust the false narrative which gives reason to an unreasonable world, to find a story which isn't more true but just more trustworthy, to attribute to the random attack/disaster/etc. you suffered some sort of "meaning" and purpose.

Simultaneously tho, to recognize that it IS just a story you tell yourself and not any sort of "truth" beyond your own.

(Which gets to some Zizek on Lacan vs. Rorty which I had gr8 thoughts on at the time but need to go back to)

So the Koganesqe question is what is gained by applying this crudely Lacanian line of thought to trauma recovery ppl? Is it another thing so obvious as to not be worth dealing with? Does its reflexive self-evidence give it a psychological and theraputic utility, if not a rationalist one in expanding knowledge?

You've been drinking, haven't you?

a little. talk about lacan!

I read that story in the New Yorker. More later...

What thread is that, so I know what you're talking about?

humanity has always had the blessed, well evolutionised tool of being able to convince itself of that which is cannot, does not see and alternatively of blinding itself to that which it does. By poking out the eyes with the symbolic falsehood, danger can be minimised to a point of dealability and the "schocking" relaisation that our lives are meaningless constructs foundering in a sea of death, despondency and overwhleming cruelty against each other is neatly shifted aside and sublimated by the return to normalacy, the delusion/illusion and possible allusion to of control.

you might be right queen G about how how theory blinds us to what is actual, real, visible or whatever. Certainly there's enough mumbo jumbo around to alert us to the way that theory can lead us astray.

Nevertheless, certain things that we can't see are also real, like magnetism and privilege. These things can only be recognised from the effects they have or through indirect reference (such as looking at how iron filings gather around a magnet, or by comparing the treatment of a Prince caught smoking dope with an unemployed man in South London caught smoking dope). In these cases, theory doesn't blind us to what we see, theory allows us to see what it is that we're looking at.

You know those documentaries about how some film or other was made years ago? I often get the impression that the vivid anecdotes told by the participants have ben gilded over the years, with the result that they've become unreliable. But also comforting andmore etertaining. I saw Susan George, for example, recounting how she put Sam Peckinpah in his place about the sex scenes in "Straw Dogs". I may be wrong, but I think she was post-rationalising from a feminist point of view.

Whether this type of retelling about yourself is a good idea or not, I don't know. If each time you retell, you change the event, you surely move futher away from understanding that event and from being honest with yourself, becvause what you are doing is covering up, with yourself as the dupe. On the other hand, if the cover-up becomes the new truth, does it matter?

As for Lacan, I think he exaggerated the extent to which the subconscious has a language that can be deliberately tinkered with. You might be able to rewrite the story of your argument with your wife, but not the story of the day you reversed your car by mistake and ran over the postman. His death, and your responsibility for it, remains a fact in other people's consciousness than your own.

it sounds like Bourdieu. Who is it?

Uh-uh. It's a notorious ILX bugbear, I'll give you that clue.

its from "Intellectual Impostures" isn't it?

ok, found it. Now what?

Close but no cigar. It's from a Richard Dawkins ::ducks:: review of Intellectual Impostures.

and?

Lacan is tough but Zizek on Lacan is scarily very very clear!

maybe i'm not so clear tho, coz i'm working this through.

the question is what's the use of a shift between "our stories are never fully true" and "our stories are NECESSARILY never true"?

the tricky part is the use is in the context of therapy and not scientific investigation -- not an argument about philisophical limits of knowledge and progress, but about the way in which emotions progress.

this is what makes it appealing to me -- not an argt. about the failure of rationalism, but that rationalist criteria don't actually explain how the brane works and a different set of logics -- "dream logic" -- is necessary to account for how ppl actually function.

Calling psych grads: how is Lacan received within his own discipline, ie not in philosophy/english/film?

why was this thread not longer? and why didn't any psych grads answer enrq's question?

Lemarie's book on Lacan is frustrating and weird. Zizek on Kant is good so far though.

There are some other threads with more Lacan content.

as for this:
Calling psych grads: how is Lacan received within his own discipline, ie not in philosophy/english/film?

I'm not, but I know quite a few psych-grads and psychoanalysis is basically ignored at this point in the USA, except for some lingering ego-psych (not something Freud or Lacan would endorse anyway). It's viewed as arcane (and too time-consuming and expensive) over-intellectualization at best.

I should say that refers to the USA attitude towards pychoanalysis in general. Freud is viewed as this unfortunate father of psychology. Lacan is virtually unknown. However, he's much more popular in practice (i.e. not just as academic theory) in certain countries - especially in Latin America, France of course and, I believe, Italy. Is it a coincidence that they're all Catholic countries? I'm actually curious about this.

I think in Y Tu Mama Tambien, the girlfriend's mother at the beginning is described specifically as a Lacanian analyst.

Also, it's fun to replace "Chaka Khan" with "Jacques Lacan" when singing "I Feel for You".

As in, "Jacques Lacan... Jacques Lacan... Jacques Lacan let me rock you, let me rock you Jacques Lacan. Jacques Lacan it's all I want to do"

(sorry)

I'm so glad I'm not the only person who does that.

Spencer, I may never be able to listen to "I Feel For You" again without thinkingthat. I'm mot sure whether to bless you or curse you.

and yer right abt the ref in Y Tu Mama Tambien, i remember being struck by that the first time i saw the film.

I might have to do a psychoanalytic reading of Alias now .:Horrors:. about how identity in the show is constructed as continually shifting between different states of subjectivity, which sounds vaguely Lacanian. What's a good beginner's guide, without having to read more of his actual stuff (though isn't there a lecture he gave to philosophy students that's supposed to be relatively psychoanalytically jargon free?)?

I used to have 2 or 3 volumes of his lectures. Never successfully made it through them and sold them off, but I wish I had kept them and eventually read them. The few psych. majors I've talked to gave blank looks when I brought up his name.

There's a good discussion of memory and psych. and such as it relates to the art of Mike Kelley here: http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue1/article8.htm

So what should I read first? His "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter,'" Jane Gallop's Reading Lacan or Zizek's Looking Awry?

Did I just subject myself to my own Gaze when I stumbled across the posts I made while still in the throes of juvenile intellectualism, which cause me no end of shame?

http://www.psychiatrie-und-ethik.de/infc/1_gesamt_en.html

"Raymond Tallis
The Shrink from Hell



This is a review of Elizabeth Roudinesco’s Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925–1985, translated by Jeffrey Mehlman and published in London by Free Associations Books in 1990. The translation is that of the second and final volume of Roudinesco’s history of French psychoanalysis, which was published by Editions du Seuil in 1986, under the title La Bataille de cent ans: histoire de la psychanalyse en France, 2. Tallis’s review appeared as ‘The Shrink from Hell’ in The Times Higher Education Supplement, 31 October 1997, p. 20.





Future historians trying to account for the institutionalised fraud that goes under the name of ‘Theory’ will surely accord a central place to the influence of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. He is one of the fattest spiders at the heart of the web of muddled not-quite-thinkable-thoughts and evidence-free assertions of limitless scope which practitioners of theorrhoea have woven into their version of the humanities. Much of the dogma central to contemporary Theory came from him: that the signifier dominates over the signified; that the world of words creates the world of things; that the ‘I’ is a fiction based upon an Oedipalised negotiation of the transition from mirror to symbolic stages; and so on.



The English translation of this biography by one of his disciples is therefore an event of the first importance. It is a harrowing read, but no one who inflicts on students Lacanian readings of literature, of feminism, of the self, of child development, of society, or of life, should be spared the experience.



Lacan was born in 1901 into a wealthy middle-class family and trained as a doctor. He was attracted first to neurology but soon abandoned this because the patients’ troubles were too ‘routine’, as his biographer (who clearly sympathises with his inhumanity) explains. If Elizabeth Roudinesco’s account is accurate, he must have made a hash of his first case presentation to the Société Neurologique: his patient, she says, supposedly had ‘pseudobulbar disorders of the spinal cord’—a neurological impossibility. (The innocence with which Roudinesco reports all kinds of clinical cock-ups makes this book a particularly disturbing read for a medic.) Abandoning neurology was obviously a wise career move. Unfortunately, though he lacked all the qualities necessary to make a half-way decent doctor (e.g., kindness, common sense, humility, clinical acumen and solid knowledge), Lacan did not abandon medicine altogether, only its scientific basis.



He chose to be a psychoanalyst where, instead of elucidating diagnoses, he could impose them. He fastened on Marguerite Pantaine, a tragically deluded woman who had attempted to kill a well-known actress. For a year, he and Marguerite were, according to Roudinesco, ‘inseparable’. (She had no choice, being in detention.) The elaborate story he concocted about her became the basis of an entire theory of the sick soul and formed his doctoral thesis. In the great tradition of psychoanalysis, ‘he listened’, Roudinesco says, ‘to no truths other than those which confirmed his own hypotheses’. More precisely, the truth was that which confirmed his hypothesis: into her case, ‘he projected not only his own theories on madness in women but also his own fantasies and family obsessions’. For this soul-rape Lacan was awarded his doctorate and his reputation was made. To the end of her days, Marguerite remained bitterly resentful of the use he had made of her. With good reason: Lacan’s crackpot theories, partly expropriated from Salvador Dali, probably prolonged her incarceration. To add insult to injury, he ‘borrowed’ all her writings and photographs and refused to give any of them back.



Lacan published few further cases of his own. Instead, he recycled some of Freud’s well-known cases, in pursuit of his avowed aim of restoring the truth of Freud’s ideas which he believed had been traduced by Freudians. Unfettered by data, he was free to soar and to promulgate those large, untestable and obscure ideas—they were too difficult even for Melanie Klein to understand—that made him into an international superstar and which were cherished by his followers and are foundational for theorrhoeists. His doctrines—a magpie muddle of often unacknowledged expropriations from writers whose disciplines were alien to him, cast in borrowed jargon and opaque neologisms—were Rorschach ink-blots into which anything could be read. Lacan’s ideas were insulated against critical evaluation by his writing style, in which, according to Roudinesco, ‘a dialectic between presence and absence alternated with a logic of space and motion’.



The most powerful support for his doctrines, however, was the aura which surrounded him. Lacan was a handsome dandy and, like many physically attractive psychopaths, he was able to command unconditional love. He exploited this to the limit in support of his boundless appetite for wealth, fame and sex. He kept his disciples, who ‘worshipped him like a god and treated his teachings like a holy writ’, in constant fear of excommunication: the absence of Lacan was an ontological catastrophe equal to the absence of God. Anyone who fell under the spell of the Master laid aside their critical sense. He justified his intellectual terrorism on the grounds that he was surrounded by enemies whom he had to fight. One lot of enemies he conspicuously did not fight were the occupying German forces during the second world war. Although he remained in France, he so ordered his affairs as to be entirely safe and entirely comfortable. He felt, according to an admirer, Jean Bernier, that ‘the events that history forced him to confront should have no effect on his way of life, as befits a superior mind’. As a doctor he had many privileges and he made full use of them.



The major battles of his life were therefore in peace-time, most notably with the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) from which he was eventually expelled in 1963. Lacan portrayed this break as the result of an ideological conflict between the old school and the progressive, true Freudians represented by himself. Actually it was about his greed. He needed to maximise his throughput of patients in order to finance his lavish lifestyle. (He died a multi-millionaire.) He started to shorten his sessions, without a pro rata reduction of fee, to as little as ten minutes. Unfortunately, Freudian theory fixes the minimum length of a session at 50 minutes. Lacan was therefore repeatedly cautioned by the IPA. According to Roudinesco, he gave several lectures to the Société Psychanalytique de Paris arguing that shorter sessions produced a beneficial sense of frustration and separation in the patient, ‘turning the transference relationship into a dialectic’ and ‘reactivating unconscious desire’. Additionally, he lied to the IPA about the duration of his sessions. Despite this belt-and-braces approach, he was rumbled and out he went.



Faced with loss of income, he established his own French School of Psychoanalysis, over which he had absolute power. Its work, Roudinesco says, ‘concentrated on desire, transference and love, and all of these came to be focused on the person of Lacan himself’. Now he could make his sessions as short, and as expensive, as he liked. Even when they had contracted to a minute or two, he would often see his tailor, his pedicurist and his barber while conducting his analyses. In the final years, the process of shortening reached its natural conclusion in the ‘non-session’, in which ‘the patient was not allowed either to speak or not to speak’ as Lacan ‘had no time to waste on silence’. With the help of non-sessions he averaged 80 patients a day in the penultimate year of his life. Non-sessions were perhaps an improvement on sessions, in which, disinhibited through dementia, he would indulge his bad temper, raging at patients and occasionally punching them or pulling their hair.



The calamitous consequences of his style of doctoring were entirely predictable: his clients committed suicide at a rate that would have alarmed a man armed with less robust self-confidence. He claimed that it was due to the severity of the cases he took on but it may also have had something to do with the way he would start and stop analysis at whim and would sometimes cast aside, at very short notice, people who had been under his ‘care’ for years. The brilliant ethnologist Lucien Sebag killed himself at 32 after having been discharged abruptly from treatment—because Lacan wanted to sleep with Sebag’s teenage daughter. Not that Dr Lacan was always so constrained by such exquisite moral scruples. He frequently chose his mistresses from his training analysts (who were additionally vulnerable because they relied on him for the pass necessary for them to practise as Lacanian analysts) and also from his ordinary analysands. In his defence, Roudinesco points out that Lacan never pursued the physical side of things in his consulting rooms. One suspects that, given the design of the analysts’s couch, this was dictated by mechanical rather than ethical constraints.



On the principle of credo ut intelligam his disciples still believed him even when, in his last few years, he was manifestly suffering from multi-infarct dementia. He became obsessed by a particular mathematical figure called a Borromean knot, in which he saw the key to the unconscious, to sexuality and to the ontological situation of mankind. His quasi-mathematical, pseudological fantasies—the culmination of the cargo cult science of his school—propounded in interminable seminars, were agonised over by his congregation who suffered appallingly from their inability to make sense of them. They felt unworthy of the Master. Even his episodes of aphasia, due to ministrokes, were taken to be ‘interpretations’, in the technical sense of conveying ‘the latent meaning of what the analysand has said and done’. When, towards the end, he became deaf and his responses were even more disconnected from what was said to him, this occasioned protracted arguments among his followers over the meaning of his words and deeds. Even when, in his last year, Lacan’s mind was entirely vacant, he was still brought to meetings ‘to legitimise what was being done in his name’ and ‘suggestible people heard him speak through his silence’.



When he died in 1981, total war broke out among his disciples. Within a decade, there were 34 associations claiming to be the sole representative of the true spirit of Jacques Lacan and the sole heirs to his intellectual estate. Even now, 15 years after his death, this extraordinary charlatan can still command the adoration of the vulnerable and the gullible. Roudinesco, for all that she dishes enough dirt to hang Lacan ten times over, seems to forgive him everything for his ‘genius’ as a clinician and thinker. Nor does she question any of his fundamental ideas, though in the course of a 500-page book she disdains either to expound them in any coherent way or to offer any evidence for them: she is too busy with splits, schisms and influences. It is apparently enough proof of their truth that Lacan asserted the doctrines associated with his name.



His lunatic legacy also lives on in places remote from those in which he damaged his patients, colleagues, mistresses, wives, children, publishers, editors, and opponents—in departments of literature whose inmates are even now trying to, or pretending to, make sense of his utterly unfounded, gnomic teachings and inflicting them on baffled students. Aleister Crowley, the 20th-century thinker whom Lacan most resembles, has not been so fortunate in his afterlife.



Lacanians may argue that the great edifice of the Écrits is not undermined by revelations about his life. The Master’s thoughts should be judged on their own merits. However, in the absence of any logical basis or empirical evidence, the authority of the thought has derived almost completely from the authority of the man. The discovery that Lacan was the shrink from hell is not, therefore, irrelevant. Roudinesco’s biography is consequently an act of liberation on behalf of those students, forced by uncritical teachers who do not know Stork from butter, to try to understand and make sense of his nonsense. This act of liberation is all the more compelling for being the work of a disciple and thus in part involuntary."

Note, not presented as my opinions, regarding either theory or lacan.

i think the amount of discomfort and foaming-at-the-mouth inarticulate rage that theory causes in more conservative minds more than justifies it's existence.

haha lacan is about as conservative as it gets.

i meant conservative about empirical evidence, the hard "kick-the-tires" brand of thinking

not in the political sense.

i mean fuck, if half of that piece is true, where the fuck are you coming from? the suicide rate of his poor analysands is kind of shocking, no?

"in the absence of any logical basis or empirical evidence, the authority of the thought has derived almost completely from the authority of the man" is a judgement that stands. does it not set off alarm bells that only eng lit and film studs grads take his stuff seriously, as opposed to people involved in, you know, psychoanalysis.

if you think the need to base thinking on evidence is 'conservative', you're an idiot.

ugh...that's not what i mean. i'm not even specifically talking about lacan ffs. just that in the realm of say literature or psychology...
well here sterling clover said it better than my retarded branee can:

this is what makes it appealing to me -- not an argt. about the failure of rationalism, but that rationalist criteria don't actually explain how the brane works and a different set of logics -- "dream logic" -- is necessary to account for how ppl actually function.

-- Sterling Clover (s_clover), Saturday, January 24, 2004 12:30 PM (3 years ago)

this is why i don't post on these threads, i just can't ever say anything right

"my retarded branee can"

i can't even spell right

what would lacan say about that

"that'll be 500 francs" apparently

zing