What Explains Jacques Lacan's Success by Didier Anzieu

 

Power comes to those who desire it strongly and know how to handle collective psychology skillfully in order to get it. One would have thought that in a psychoanalyst his phantasy relationship to power, his desire for narcissistic omnipotence, his fascination with the dialectic of master and slave and his propensity to behave as a strategist  because it is easier and more advantageous in managing conflicts with others than to speak truthfully – one would have thought that these tendencies, marked as they are with the stamp of pregenitality, would have been sufficiently analyzed and decathected. One would likewise have thought that a psychoanalyst would have quickly learned by experience that the prolonged and solitary exercise of power makes one a persecutor (and persecuted), and that the more absolute power is, the more its wielder tends to exempt himself from common law, to pander to his passions, to unleash his madness, and to reincarnate that image of the father of the primitive horde, omnipotent, egotistical, and cruel, who was described  so well by Freud.

But something else is also needed: this man, who idealizes himself and demands to be idealized, must put ideas forward. Lacan never lacked ideas, even if he rarely cited his sources when his ideas were ‘borrowed’ from others and even if, in order to increase ‘suspense’ he was tacitly twisting the meaning of an everyday word or concept in philosophy  or linguistics. Lacan put a host of ideas into circulation that not only interested analysts, but professors of Letters or Philosophy, Jesuits and Dominicans, professional writers and thinkers, and a whole world badly in need of new words in the absence of accurate thoughts. He got debate going again, he encouraged stylistic research in writing, he rejuvenated the figures and tropes of old rhetoric by drawing a parallel between them and unconscious defense mechanisms, and he had hopes that it would be possible to formalize the logic of the primary psychic processes. Here is a list of his ides, without claiming either that they are in any particular order or that they are exhaustive: the mirror stage; the distinction between the three registers of the imaginary, the symbolic and the real: the other distinction between desire, need and demand; the role of the signifier in the articulation of phantasy and discourse, and the endless parade of signifiers; the splitting of the subject; the name of the father and its foreclosure in psychosis; how unconscious formations are produced by metaphorical and metonymic processes; deep seated alienation through displacement into the Other’s place; the human being [ etre humain] as a speaking being [parlete], which structures itself by means of language [lalangue, in a single word], etc.

The statement that Lacan gradually focused upon (namely that the unconscious is structured like a language –a prudent formulation, since this ‘like’ leaves the door open for many analogies), if we take this statement as a scientific one, it can neither be proved nor refuted, since by definition, of its very essence, the unconscious eludes knowledge founded on verbal thought.. I cannot say whether I agree or disagree with the statement, since I know nothing about it, and nothing can be known about it.

Lacan wanted to detach psychoanalysis from American influence, which would make it into a branch of psychiatry, behaviorism, and even neuro-physiology of the brain (Freud started out from the latter beginning). Lacan tried to re-situate psychoanalysis within one of the essential areas opened up by Freud, namely within the world of culture, together with the unconscious substructure included in culture, which Freud brought clearly to light. This considerable development of the human and social sciences soon after the Second World War, and also of anthropology, provided the latter is taken in its broad sense and not reduced to ethnology, gave Lacan the idea of a rapprochement with the anthropology of Levi-Strauss, the linguistics of Jakobson, and the structuralism subsequently developed by Barthes. Lacan reminded us that the qualities necessary for a psychoanalyst are every bit as much the products of a training in literature, philosophy, and anthropology as one in medicine, neuro-biology, and psychiatry. Here he was absolutely right.

One could write –and, indeed, books have been written –about each of his ideas. Unfortunately, mixing in Lacanian circles, familiarity with these notions, and facility in playing with them in conversation and making them glitter with myriads lights, have done little to help Lacan’s followers to acquire a clinical sense and to work psychoanalytically with their patients. These ideas do not standup well to the test of clinical practice. Thus, when I began psychoanalytic practice with and thinking about groups, I started off with the Lacanian distinction between the imaginary, the symbolic and the real. But I had to abandon it after some years of vain effort because it only provide me a superficial description of the phenomena. I owe it to my reading of Melanie Klein and then Bion that my mind ha been opened up to the levels of anxiety and the different types of phantasies that are mobilized in group situations.

For Lacan and his followers – or rather, his imitators, the analyst’s  role is reduced to floating attention, which they call ‘listening’, and to engendering sufficient frustration by means of systematic silence to bring the patient’s phantasies to light. But confronted with the later, the patient is supposed to pick out the infantile attitudes they conceal, which he will renounce when he establishes their infantile character – what a utopia! - and also the forbidden desires they contain, which will then turn out to be possible and will transform an individual lost among illusory longings into a subject with desires – and to hell with other people, whose desires are not compatible with his own!

There is no longer  one single psychoanalytic  theory, any more than there is a single uniform theory in modern physics. There are psychoanalytic theories in the plural –each more appropriate for a certain type of patient or even analyst, or for a particular moment in treatment. Psychic functioning is of a variety and richness (and sometimes poverty) that defies all classification, and all systematized structural explanation. The psychic Self increasingly appears to be composed of disparate pieces; some are distinct and coherent, or different but still tending to agglutinate; others are felt to be strangers by the ego; still others are deported and encapsulated on the periphery of the mind, where they constitute a hidden Self, a silent source of depression. The same disparity is found in references to theory. Each psychoanalyst, depending on his personality, style, experience, and patient, turns to more or less diverse bits of psychoanalytic theory that give him something to hold onto- make no mistake about it – a symbolic  warrant for his psychic work of understanding and his psychoanalytic work of interpretation.

Nothing is ever established in the human sciences because fear of death, the desire for eternity, the dream of absolute power, and many more  expedients besides that are linked with archaic processes keep cropping up repeatedly no matter what scientific, pedagogic, or political systems have actually developed.