In 1991, Richard Boothby’s first book appeared–Death
and Desire: Psychoanalytic Theory in Lacan’s Return to Freud provided
English-speaking readers with a sustained treatment analyzing Lacan’s engagement
with perhaps the most notorious and controversial of Freudian concepts,
namely, the infamous death drive (Todestrieb). Not only did Boothby
manage to successfully elucidate a facet of Lacanian theory that had, up
until then, received comparatively little attention, but he also displayed
a thorough, nuanced understanding of the ultimate philosophical stakes
of the death drive, both in terms of its relation to the history of philosophy
as well as its consequences for contemporary theoretical issues. Unfortunately,
this gem of Lacanian scholarship was allowed to lapse out of print. Ten
years later, Boothby offers the reading public a second volume that also
concerns itself with Freud, Lacan, and various currents in philosophy.

Freud as Philosopher is, even by the author’s own admission,
a slightly misleading title, at least upon first glance. Boothby’s topic
throughout the book is, predominantly, the details of the oeuvre of Jacques
Lacan (ironically enough, the figure mentioned in the sub-title is the
real focal point of the volume). Of course, the justification for this
is that Lacan presents himself as the initiator of a “return to Freud,”
a sustained effort at recuperating the genuine import of Freud’s discovery
of the unconscious. In Lacan’s eyes, most prevalent strains of Freudianism
have nothing to do with the truths contained in Freud’s work; rather, Lacan
sees Freud as having suffered a systematic distortion and bastardization
by those who claim to speak in his name. Furthermore, Boothby’s choice
of title has its justifications in that an essential feature of the Lacanian
revivification of Freudian thought resides in the manner in which Lacan
demonstrates the incredibly far-reaching significance that Freud’s ideas
have for philosophy and, more generally, the history of ideas.

Boothby correctly identifies Freud’s metapsychology (instead of his
more “empirical” labors on case studies from the clinical domain) as the
ultimate bedrock on which psychoanalysis as a whole rests. The overarching
theoretical framework established
vis-à-vis the originary
positing of such fundamental concepts as, among others, “unconscious,”
“drive,” “repression,” and “sublimation” literally opens the vista within
which evidence of these very same concepts appears. In other words, Freud
is not an inductive scientist, despite his burning desire to fancy himself
as such. On the contrary, unlike the experimental procedure associated
with the natural sciences, psychoanalysis makes it possible to see “factual
evidence” of its theories, not by making the attempt to derive them from
an observation field supposedly purged of all prior assumptions and mediating
notions, but by first properly establishing its meta-level foundation (so
that the evidence for this foundation can be accurately identified and
interpreted-the components of such pathological structures as neurotic
symptoms in the lives of individuals aren’t always obvious to a theoretically
untrained eye, and might be missed by a positivist-style attempt to proceed
from brute empirical observation to a subsequent set of thus-derived generalizations).
The best way to understand the role of Freud’s metapsychology is as a two-fold
set of basic, “transcendental” concepts: on the one hand, these concepts
represent some of the underlying conditions of possibility for the formation
and existence of human reality as it’s experienced by the psyche; on the
other hand, these concepts serve as possibility conditions for the analytic
interpretation of this same field of human experiential reality (in short,
as possibility conditions shaping both the subject of psychoanalytic investigation
as well as the procedures of the agent-analyst carrying out this investigation).
Thus, as transcendental, the foundation of Freudian psychoanalysis cannot
be construed as a jumble of factual claims abstracted from a handful of
therapeutic case studies. Succinctly put, the a priori gesture of
positing the metapsychological structures constitutive of subjectivity
must precede the a posteriori buttressing of this structure through
the empirical materials that are capable of being gathered exclusively
in the wake of this very gesture. Hence, because of the epistemological
and methodological underpinnings of psychoanalysis, Freud is, indeed, much
more of a philosopher than either he or many of his readers, both sympathetic
and critical, would like to believe. Boothby grasps this well, and makes
a strong, articulate case for viewing the Freudian corpus from this perspective.

The central thesis of Freud as Philosopher hinges on the tension
between words and images: the main argument is that the unconscious, as
shaped by the mechanics of repression, is primarily established by the
antagonistic dynamic operative between verbal-linguistic processes and
the modalities of specular, imagistic (re)presentation. Boothby begins
with the Gestalt theme of the distinction between figure and ground (or,
put differently, between form and field). Within the visual field, for
example, a focus on one part of it requires a blurring of the clarity and
distinctness of the rest of the field, transforming the thus-excluded part
into a hazy “fringe” or “halo” enveloping the highlighted object of attention
(Boothby uses such references as the paintings of Claude Monet and the
psychological writings of William James to underscore this motif of the
surrounding “dispositional field”). Boothby proceeds to trace the importance
of the Gestalt notion of a dialectical oscillation between figure/form
and ground/field for the three main representatives of phenomenology: Edmund
Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (the latter two being
colleagues of and influences on Lacan).

Basically, as far as psychoanalysis is concerned, Boothby’s program
is to press the ideas and metaphors at play in both Gestalt psychology
and phenomenology into the service of clarifying the fundaments of metapsychology.
He understands Lacan’s recasting of the Freudian theory of the unconscious
as amounting to the supposition of a dispositional field in which a conflict
between words (the Lacanian category of the Symbolic) and images (the Lacanian
category of the Imaginary) establishes the line of demarcation between
the restrictive sphere of the consciously accessible and the inaccessible-yet-influential
domain of the unthematized repressed. The Imaginary ego’s intensive investment
in particular “images” (for instance, the signified referents of conscious
speech directed at the “little other” of intersubjective communication)
inevitably results in a structurally determined distortion whereby the
broader Symbolic horizon (i.e., the “big Other” as the battery of signifiers)
shaping the very contours of the ego’s selective focal points fades out
of the same picture that this horizon itself contributes to shaping. Boothby
shows how, at least during the period of the 1950s, Lacan organizes his
conception of the unconscious around the dual poles of the Imaginary and
the Symbolic (as epitomized in, for example, the well-known “Schema L”).

Given this cursory presentation of the rudiments of Boothby’s thesis,
a reader familiar with Lacanian theory might be wondering, at just this
moment, what place Boothby assigns to Lacan’s third category. That is to
say, what about the Real? Is he suggesting that the “return to Freud” can
be adequately grasped through reference to merely two out of three of the
elements of the, so to speak, Lacanian holy trinity? Freud as Philosopher
proceeds to address the category of the Real through a novel reinterpretation
of what Lacan means by das Ding (a term taken up from both Kant
and Heidegger, which Lacan first introduces in an explicit fashion during
the seventh seminar of 1959-1960). In essence, Boothby makes a case for
viewing the term “other” as one of those special tripartite Borromean switch-points
found throughout Lacan’s thought (i.e., as a juncture knotting/conjoining
all three of Lacan’s categories): the “little other” refers to the specular
image generating the kernel of the ego in the mirror stage, as well as
the accessible visage of other individuals qua alter-egos encountered
by this ego; the “big Other” refers to the trans-subjective symbolic order,
the overarching socio-linguistic domain molding the subjects produced within
it; and, finally, after presenting the Imaginary and the Symbolic forms
of “otherness” respectively in this light, Boothby treats the Lacanian
das Ding as referring to what the ego cannot discern “behind” the
accessible Imaginary-Symbolic façade of another’s presence, what
remains inscrutable and enigmatic about one’s neighbor or love-object (this
being the other as the “Real Thing,” the hidden-yet-proximate [non-]presence
of the desires of the Other). This third, Real dimension of alterity is
the unknown desire of those confronting the individual, others who never
cease to disturb the subject, always forcing the question “What do you
want?” to be posed again and again.

This notion of a third sense of otherness at the level of the Real leads
to Boothby developing an elegant explanation of what’s involved in a “Lacanian
theory of sacrifice.” A sacrifice isn’t so much a matter of offering an
item that one knows is desired by another. When people sacrifice objects
to their gods, they don’t do so as a straightforward, exchange-style transaction
between mortals and deities. Rather, the function of the sacrificed object
is to give body to the troubling mystery of what, if anything, these obscure,
divine others want from human beings, to domesticate an intolerable background
permeated by the threatening proximity of unknown, alien wants. The sacrificial
ritual provides the stable Imaginary-Symbolic framework within which an
answer to the question of the desires of the (Real) Other is conjured up
ex
nihilo. Humans don’t give the gods things that the gods already desire
and unambiguously request; instead, they give the gods things so as to
create the calming illusion of there being determinate wants in the gods
that, reassuringly enough, can be sated by the repeatable act of sacrificing
a definite, fixed kind of item through a set, ritualistic practice. Of
course, the same process is, for Lacan, at play between the child and its
mother: in fact, the Lacanian “phallus” can be concisely defined as, precisely,
whatever object the child latches onto as symbolizing its answer to the
question of what its (m)other supposedly wants. Without the pacifying,
stabilizing intervention of everything situated under the rubric of the
“paternal function” (i.e., the phallus, castration, the Name-of-the-Father,
and so on), the nascent subject-to-be is in danger of being plunged into
psychosis by virtue of never achieving sufficient distance from the stifling,
smothering gravity of the maternal “Thing” and its seemingly unquenchable
desires-hence, Lacan asserts that one’s choice, as an Oedipalized individual,
is “Père ou pire” (“Father or worse”).

As far as this review is concerned, there are two points of criticism
worth mentioning. In both cases, the problem has to do with Boothby allowing
himself the luxury of giving a stripped-down, streamlined presentation
of Lacanian concepts, a presentation that belies the actual complexity
and semantic richness of these concepts as they appear within Lacan’s texts
and seminars. First, Boothby characterizes the distinction between the
registers of the Imaginary and the Symbolic as, respectively, a difference
between visual images and the words of a given language. He leads readers
to assume that, for instance, the category of the Symbolic is simply Lacan’s
own idiosyncratic way of referring to any sort of linguistic structure.
For Lacan, natural languages are themselves, at certain of their levels,
sub-species of the larger framework referred to as the symbolic order;
the latter is a much broader notion than the former, and hence they shouldn’t
be equivocated between without reservation. Boothby admits this at one
point, acknowledging that he risks obfuscating the other facets of meaning
that certain terms and concepts possess within the teachings of Lacan.
And yet, despite this admission on Boothby’s part, he continues throughout
the book to speak as though the two Lacanian categories of the Symbolic
and the Imaginary translated into the difference between words and images
(this would be an instance of the psychoanalytic mechanism of “disavowal,”
of “I know full well, but nonetheless…”).

The difficulty with Boothby’s handling of these notions becomes easily
apparent if one recalls that, for Lacan, one can relate to the words of
articulated language in an Imaginary fashion, and, inversely, images can
function in a fully Symbolic capacity. In the former case, the speaker
and/or listener can grasp speech not as a “chain of signifiers” (i.e.,
as a series of acoustic and graphic materials, each of whose value is determined
through its connections and differential relations with other such elements),
but, instead, as a sequence of signs (namely, in terms of the consciously
intended meaning presumed to control the process of enunciation, the supposed
signifieds deliberately aligned with the enunciated signifiers). The latter
case (i.e., images participating in the Symbolic register) is writ large
across the whole of psychoanalysis, particularly as the imagery of dreams
and the role of the body image in symptom formation. The image of a bodily
organ, in instances of hysterical disorders or neurotic tics, becomes a
heavily invested feature of the libidinal economy by virtue of its significance
as defined by its place, as a Vorstellung, within the broader psychical
matrix of ideational representations.

The same problem occurs in the interpretation of the Real offered here.
Boothby writes as though the Real amounts almost exclusively to the foreign
alterity of the Other as das Ding (although this is a productive
angle of interpretation, it fails to do justice to the complete range of
senses that this especially slippery third category has in Lacan’s work).
Rather than being an explanation of the meaning of the Real per se in Lacanian
theory, this amounts to an application of this category to a specific topic/theme
that, thus far, the Real hasn’t been applied to in any clear and precisely
delineated way.

Hence, the fundamental flaw of Boothby’s approach is that it runs the
risk of presenting the three Lacanian registers of the Real, the Symbolic,
and the Imaginary as each being tied to a specific kind of content: the
Real refers to the enigmatic Other, the Symbolic refers to the words of
natural languages, and the Imaginary refers to visual imagery. On the contrary,
for Lacan, these three terms designate a formal framework through which
the entirety of the “contents” characteristic of the unconscious and subjectivity
take shape and generate their effects. However, this means that all types
of ideational, mnemic elements, ranging from auditory traces to visually
imprinted memories, participate simultaneously in multiple registers. In
Lacanian theory, language has its Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary dimensions
(designated as the letter, the signifier, and the sign respectively), each
coming to the fore in turn when one views language from different possible
positions/perspectives. The same holds for psychically significant images.

Overall, despite some of its simplifications of Lacan, Freud as Philosopher
is a solid piece of philosophically oriented psychoanalytic theory. Boothby
is a skilled writer, someone who provides the reader pleasure both through
evocative descriptions of his subject matter and carefully chosen examples
as well as through the numerous flashes of insight illuminating the some
of the dark, neglected corners of the Lacanian textual edifice. This is
one of the better English-language engagements with Lacan to have appeared
in the past several years. Nobody who claims to have an interest in the
unfolding dialogue between psychoanalysis and philosophy could make a valid
excuse for not having this volume in their own home library.

 

© 2001 Adrian Johnston

 

Adrian Johnston
recently completed a Ph.D. in Philosophy at SUNY Stony Brook. His dissertation
was Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive.

Categories: Psychoanalysis, Philosophical

Tags: Psychoanalysis