Anti-American diatribes repeatedly
surface in Lacan’s teachings. For
Lacan, heaping scorn on the “American way of life” is the obvious, appropriate
rhetorical complement accompanying a sustained and carefully developed critique
of ego-psychology (i.e., of any approach to analysis that seeks to strengthen
the patient’s ego through helping it “adapt” to “social reality”). In the Lacanian imagination, the United
States is often depicted as a giant, homogenous conformity factory, a place
where psychoanalysis is inevitably betrayed and bastardized in being pressed
into the service of an ideologically overdetermined effort in which individuals
are treated as mere cogs in the pragmatic functioning of the capitalist
machine. Only through the rebellious
originality of the Gallic spirit, the breath of fresh Parisian air exhaled
through the lips of the “absolute master,” is there hope of a “return to” or
“rescue of” Freud, of revivifying the subversive significance of the
unconscious so as to turn it against the crass, technocratic usurpers of the
Freudian legacy.

Anyone who takes a moment to consider this position
ought to immediately conclude that it rests upon a murky mixture of inaccurate
generalizations, cultural prejudices, and gross factual distortions. The myth of “Lacan versus America” is a
story which Lacan is certainly complicit in fabricating, and which many of his
followers are clearly guilty of uncritically perpetuating. In one of the contributions to this sizable
collection of essays, Catherine Liu (in her piece “Lacanian Reception”) reminds
readers that ego-psychology wasn’t an indigenous, “home-grown” product of
American culture, but an analytic approach imported to America by Central
European immigrants fleeing from the Nazis and finding themselves in a new,
unfamiliar social arrangement. Any
interpretations and critiques of American psychoanalysis qua ego-psychology, including Lacanian ones, must, in order to be
taken seriously, grapple with the historical details of this process of
cross-cultural fertilization. 
Additionally, even if the portrayal of America and its relation to Freud
offered by Lacan is basically accurate—even if one suspends suspicions about
Lacan’s unjustified biases—it bears asking whether the situation remains the
same today, whether the U.S. is still the land of “adaptation at all costs.”

To take one gratuitous step further in using a
couple of culinary metaphors familiar to Americans, one might even, in a
half-joking way, go so far as to propose that perhaps Lacanian theory is
already partially Americanized without knowing it. At the clinical level, varying the length of sessions custom
tailors the treatment to the needs of the individual analysand (the “short
session” could easily be advertised to consumption-oriented Americans with
not-so-long attention spans, despite Lacan’s explicit intentions to the
contrary, as a kind of “fast food” version of analysis). And, at the theoretical level, Lacanian
thought is an interdisciplinary melange, an intellectual smorgasbord in which
connoisseurs can sample conceptual items of all sorts (from psychoanalysis,
philosophy, literature, mathematics, and so on). Who says Lacan is inherently unpalatable to Americans? In his 1974 interview broadcast on French
television, alluding to just how wealthy he has become through the practice of
analysis, Lacan smugly refers to himself, in English, as a “self-made man” (Je suis un ‘self-made man.’). 
Don’t Americans love a good entrepreneur?

Lacan in America brings together eighteen
contributors, all of who share the conviction that the time is ripe for a
long-overdue reconciliation between Lacan and America. The essays in this four-hundred-page tome
cover a wide range of topics: the
relation between Lacanian psychoanalysis and American psychology, the distinctiveness
(and, in some cases, dubiousness) of Lacan’s handling of Freudian texts, the
conduits through which Lacan has been introduced to the United States, the
debates (crucial for feminism and queer theory) about whether or not
Freudo-Lacanian ideas are thoroughly “phallocentric,” Lacan’s engagements with
mathematics and the sciences in light of the “Sokal affair,” as well as the
overlaps between Lacan’s work and major themes in philosophy—it should also be
noted that this list is far from exhaustive.

In the seventeen pieces gathered here, it seems as
though practically no stone is left unturned. 
Nearly every aspect of the multi-faceted Lacanian textual object is
brought into view and addressed in at least one way or another during the
course of these discussions. In
addition, rather than being yet another collection of rabid disciples
mindlessly praising the complete correctness of Father-Lacan’s jargonized
dogma, Lacan in America opens the
space for new queries and criticisms to be directed at Lacanian theory: Shouldn’t Lacanian thought, instead of
always having recourse to ahistorical notions of “structure,” pay more
attention to the details of history as well as the ever-changing field of the
present socio-economic order? What
would a historically contextualized and up-to-date, twenty-first century Lacan
look like? Mustn’t it be asked again
whether or not the “paternal function,” especially today, is indeed as central
as Lacan depicts it to be? Similarly,
how accurate are Lacan’s predictions regarding a “decline of the paternal imago” in light of what has transpired
since his death in 1981? And, overall,
is Lacan, as he so often claims, a faithful interpreter of Freud? Or, in fact, does he break with Freud in
such a radical manner that, even today, those engaged with the Freudian field
have yet to really ask themselves how the clinic and its underlying
metapsychological framework must be reconceived “after Lacan?”

Of course, due to considerations of space,
summarizing all seventeen contributions plus the editor’s substantial
introduction to this volume isn’t possible within the confines of the present
review. Attempting to do so would
result in inflicting interpretive injustices upon each and every author handled
in what would be an unacceptably cursory manner. So, instead of reducing each piece to a trivial sound-byte,
attention is selectively focused on five essays that are particularly
interesting and illuminating: Michel
Tort’s “Lacan’s New Gospel,” Néstor A. Braunstein’s “Construction,
Interpretation, and Deconstruction in Contemporary Psychoanalysis,” Arkady
Plotnitsky’s “On Lacan and Mathematics,” Joan Copjec’s “The Body as Viewing
Instrument, or the Strut of Vision,” and Christopher Lane’s “The Experience of
the Outside: Foucault and
Psychoanalysis.”

Tort’s approach demonstrates the utility and
fruitfulness of carefully considering threads of socio-cultural, ideological
influence subtly under-girding Lacan’s ostensibly ahistorical,
quasi-philosophical discourse. 
According to Tort, the Lacanian “glorification” (if it can be referred
to in this manner) of the “paternal function” (i.e., the Nom-du-Père, the paternal metaphor, symbolic castration, etc.) must
be seen, at least partially, as symptomatic of a cluster of motifs forming part
of the French Catholic background against which Lacan’s ideas emerge. Tort goes on to highlight a strikingly
extreme polarization at the core the Lacanian recasting of the Oedipus
complex: on the one hand, the maternal
figure is portrayed as a dissatisfied, insatiable, all-devouring creature
threatening to destroy the child through objectification, through reducing
him/her to a de-subjectified, passive object of desire; on the other hand, the
paternal figure (or, more accurately, the signifier-emblems of paternity)
promises to liberate the young, nascent subject-to-be by intervening in such a
way as to provide a means of gaining distance from this (s)mother-monster.

In his version of the Oedipal scenario, Lacan lays
out a forced choice of sorts—Père ou pire,
father or worse (“or worse” being, of course, psychotic dissolution in the
suffocating embrace of the mother). The
value of this aspect of Lacanian theory resides in its correction of Freud’s
often one-sided version of familial dynamics, a version wherein the mother is
the alluring love-object for the child and the father is the threatening,
anxiety-inducing castrator (Melanie Klein’s work already corrects this Freudian
myth of the maternal, showing that the infant’s relation to the mother is far
from amounting to a blissful, pre-paternal Nirvana). However, Tort’s reading suggests that, arguably, Lacan doesn’t so
much rectify this Freudian one-sidedness as merely invert it. Instead of the soothing, lovable mother and
the menacing, loathed father, one gets the frightening, ravenous mother and the
domesticating, stabilizing father. This
“rejection of the feminine,” justified by a reliance upon religious,
ideological, fantasmatic glorifications of paternity—anyone who bothers
perusing Lacan’s seminars is free to see for themselves the kind of sources
from which he borrows in shoring up his theoretical claims concerning the
nature of women and the Name-of-the-Father—is, in Tort’s view, a problematic
feature of psychoanalysis that still has yet to be fully and properly dealt
with by its adherents. He concludes his
essay by asking, “Does psychoanalysis consist of pursuing the sinister work of
religion by other means? Or more
prosaically, will it demolish the great illusion that monotheistic religions
have created over the past four millennia?” (pg. 187).

  In
“Construction, Interpretation, and Deconstruction in Contemporary
Psychoanalysis,” Braunstein begins his assessment of a particularly important
difference separating Freudian and Lacanian understandings of analytic
procedure by uncovering lingering contradictions in Freud’s final texts. In the late 1930s, Freud introduces a
concept he designates “construction.” 
During the course of an analysis, the analyst will produce an
interpretation that he/she is strongly convinced must refer to a truth about the
analysand’s past. This conviction stems
from the fact that such an interpretation, one that has this seductive ring of
truthfulness in the analyst’s ears, elegantly and exhaustively ties together
that various associations and symptoms presented by the patient. In many instances, analysands are eventually
able to confirm the analyst’s interpretation by unearthing the repressed
memories referred to by the analyst as first-person recollections. However, sometimes, no such “recovered
memory” comes to light. An
interpretation that lacks this confirmation is dubbed a “construction.” Freud proposes that constructions are
necessary when the nucleus of the patient’s pathologies is so deeply buried, so
forcefully repressed, that it’s practically impossible to undo the blockage and
liberate these eclipsed experiences.

Braunstein proceeds to delineate a series of
tensions and contradictions plaguing the later Freud’s musings on the process
of analysis. In his discussion of
constructions, Freud appears to indulge himself in believing that a complete
retrieval of the past is, at least in principle, possible. And yet, his own theory of repression,
centered on “primary repression” as the ultimate “prime mover” behind the
various unfolding chains of repressed elements in the psyche, denies the very
possibility of uncovering any final terms, any irreducible memory-kernels in
psychical life. In connection with this
point, Braunstein also advances a thesis resembling Jean Laplanche’s focus on
the alien desires of others, including, as a key example, the mother’s
unconscious desires and how they indiscernibly-yet-decisively shape the
emerging Oedipal subject (a recent collection of Laplanche’s essays translated
into English, Essays on Otherness, is
quite worthwhile examining apropos of these ideas). According to Braunstein, maternal desire isn’t itself an
“object,” “experience,” or identifiable set of “ideational traces” in the
unconscious, so it can’t, despite its psychical centrality, be recovered as a
distinctive group of repressed mnemic materials (thus thwarting any analytic
approach conceived of along the lines of the persistent archaeological metaphor
favored by Freud when describing the task of the analyst). Similarly, Braunstein argues that Freud
vacillates between two dissimilar ideas; he contends that Freud conflates
“construction” and “reconstruction.” 
The former entails a hermeneutic approach to analysis, where what really
counts in the cure is providing the suffering patient with some sort of
meaning, some type of narrative whose importance stems not from its factual
truth-value, but, rather, from its power to convince and heal. Reconstruction is something slightly
different. It involves the
above-mentioned desire for a total, exhaustive picture of the patient’s life
history (a desire frequently found as much or more on the side of the analyst
as on the side of the analysand). It
concerns itself, no doubt in vain (given Braunstein’s claims), with factual
accuracy as measured against the standard of the analysand’s
recollections. For Braunstein, Lacan’s
basic fashion of practicing analysis is a response to precisely these sorts of
problems and inconsistencies in the Freudian theory of the clinic. Instead of stranding practitioners between
construction and reconstruction, Lacan shows that analysis is best conducted as
a process of “deconstruction,” a gradual dismantling of the narratives,
fantasies, and interpretations of life historical facts brought to sessions by
patients already brimming over with too much “meaning,” too much
“understanding.” Analysis cures not by
constructing or reconstructing, but by undoing the spontaneous
self-constructions/reconstructions forming integral parts of the ego and its
constellation of symptoms. Braunstein
concludes by suggesting that a psychoanalytically informed reconsideration of
Wittgenstein’s philosophy promises to further clarify the Lacanian clinic in
its relation to language and meaning (the essay that follows, Erich D.
Freiberger’s “‘Heads I Win, Tails You Lose’: 
Wittgenstein, Plato, and the Role of Construction and Deconstruction in
Psychoanalysis and Ethics,” takes its lead from Braunstein in pursuing a
comparison between Wittgenstein and Lacan).

The writings and seminars of Lacan are peppered with
complex visual graphs and extended meditations on mathematics, topology, logic,
and set theory. A series of interlinked
debates surround this dimension of the Lacanian project: Is Lacan attempting to reduce psychoanalysis
to a hyper-formalized imitator of the natural sciences? Should Lacan’s recourse to mathematics and
topology be seen as a pedagogically motivated employment of a few handy
metaphors? Or, is he seriously
maintaining that these formal models are something more than merely
illustrative devices for his own concepts? 
Can Lacanian “mathemes” be dismissed as irrelevant, misleading
by-products of what some suspect to be a parallel development between his
increasing reliance on these formal constructs and his growing senility during
the last decade of his life? There are
already (although primarily in French) several detailed studies of Lacan’s
employment of the formal languages upon which the modern sciences are
grounded. The merit of Arkady
Plotnitsky’s “On Lacan and Mathematics” is to put these debates into dialogue
with the issues arising specifically from the Sokal affair and the (primarily
American) “science wars” being conducted within and between various segments of
academia.

Instead of hopelessly trying to tackle the whole
range of mathematical concepts borrowed by Lacan in the space of a single
essay, Plotnitsky wisely chooses to examine a single example: Lacan’s references to imaginary
numbers. In a chapter of their book Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science,
authors Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont take Lacan to task for what they treat as
his utterly illegitimate misappropriation of the terminology of science. They assert that Lacan “steals” ideas from
mathematics, ideas that he lacks a proper understanding of, in order to coat
his own obscurantist theoretical apparatus with a false veneer of “scientific”
legitimacy. In his defense of Lacan
against Sokal and Bricmont, Plotnitsky, rather than either minimize to the
point of negligibility Lacan’s usage of mathematical concepts or launch himself
into familiar tirades against the hegemony of the sciences, uses the history of
mathematics itself to vindicate Lacan. 
Displaying an impressive degree of erudition regarding his chosen topic,
Plotnitsky convincingly demonstrates that Lacan may, in fact, understand the
philosophical implications of negative and imaginary numbers—these implications
are best discerned through an appreciation of the history of mathematics and
the sciences—better than his scientist-critics. Because of their ahistoricism, itself a product of biases
internal to the contemporary scientific field and its deeply engrained
epistemological habits, Sokal and Bricmont often inadvertently simplify the
disputed scientific/mathematical concepts in question. Furthermore, Plotnitsky observes that Lacan
never makes absurd claims to the effect that psychoanalysis grounds or explains
mathematics; nor does Lacan propose
that, by borrowing certain mathematical concepts, he thereby succeeds in
transforming analysis into a science akin to physics. Instead, Lacan merely aims to show that certain logical
structures and paradoxes embedded within the numerical domain are mirrored by
specific signifying dynamics endemic to psychoanalysis and its (Symbolic)
subject. The Lacanian wager here is
that reflecting on the former might yield insights into the latter. Is science, and the truths it produces,
meant only to be enjoyed by scientists? 
Must one be a mathematician in order to be licensed to speak of numbers
and their properties?

Joan Copjec, a familiar name in English-language
Lacanian scholarship, addresses the link (or, perhaps, non-rapport) between
psychoanalysis and “embodiment theory” as a general anti-Cartesian trend
permeating the American academy. 
Proponents of the “embodied subject” endlessly rant and rail against the
Cogito’s haunting of Western thought,
continually issuing emphatic reminders to themselves and others that “bodies
matter.” Lacanian psychoanalysis is
seen as yet another Cartesian marginalization of the body; Lacan gives pride of
place to “the signifier” and its structure, thereby ignoring corporeality,
affectivity, and so on. But, Copjec
asks in “The Body as Viewing Instrument, or the Strut of Vision,” what kinds of
“bodies” are embodiment theorists talking about? Simply affirming that “the body” is important, that human beings
have bodies, is a trivial point not worth paying attention to when taken at
face value. What sort of insights could
the brute declaration “I have a body” possibly hope to produce?

One of Copjec’s central theses is that
Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis promises a far more philosophically satisfying
investigation into embodiment than what comes out of the mouths of the agitated
advocates of a “return to the body.” 
These advocates usually offer a choice between two flawed options: either an experiential “lived body” entwined
with an amorphous perceptual self of sorts (i.e., the phenomenological option),
or, alternatively, an empty, socially constructed husk, a tabula rasa for the transcription of “power” (i.e., a vaguely Foucauldian
option). Copjec maintains that the
psychoanalytic concept of Trieb poses
a direct challenge to these ways of envisioning embodiment that has yet to be
genuinely thought through by those who so frequently babble about bodies—“of
all Freud’s notions, that of the drive has had the least success in attracting
supporters; it obliges a kind of rethinking that only the boldest of thinkers
would dare to undertake. The question
one must ask is: How does drive
determine human embodiment as both a freedom from nature and a part of it?”
(pg. 279). Or, similarly, how should
one set about explaining the manner in which “human nature” is, by being
simultaneously and always-already entangled in “soma” as well as “psyche” (the
latter including the concrete impacts of the socio-symbolic order on the
individual), neither a pure corporeal substantiality nor a constructed, virtual
epiphenomenon? Copjec uses discussions
of gaze and body, particularly the issues raised by Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth
Century and subsequently taken up by film theory, in a struggle to work
through the implications that metapsychology harbors as regards embodiment (in
this task, she relies on Lacan’s analyses of the gaze, the visual field,
perspective, and subjectivity from seminars eleven and thirteen).

As one might have already sensed prior to the
present juncture, a contemporary figure playing in the background of many of
these ongoing debates is Judith Butler. 
Certain arguments mentioned above are echoed in Butler’s exchanges with Slavoj
Žižek in Contingency, Hegemony,
Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on
the Left, particularly the problem of negotiating between structural and
historical axes of analysis in Lacanian theory. Part of her project, as spelled out in The Psychic Life of Power: 
Theories in Subjection, is to wed Foucault and psychoanalysis so
that they mutually supplement each other. 
Why should one combine these positions? 
Foucault’s delineations of the workings of “power” lack any
carefully-explained model of psychical subjectivity as the object of these
forces; however, psychoanalysis fails acknowledge and incorporate Foucauldian
insights into the fundamentally historical, contingently-mediated nature of the
subject. In short, Butler is searching
for a metapsychology of the socially constructed psyche (on a related note,
Frances L. Restuccia’s piece “The Subject of Homosexuality: Butler’s Elision” succinctly blows holes in
Butler’s claim, also from The Psychic
Life of Power, that heterosexual identity is erected upon the foundations
of a fundamentally disavowed “passionate attachment” to the same gender, that
“foreclosed” homosexuality underlies society’s artificial sexual norms). Going back to the texts of Foucault, according
to Christopher Lane in “The Experience of the Outside: Foucault and Psychoanalysis,” reveals the
ultimate futility of this Butlerian endeavor. 
Any marriage between Foucault’s constructivist position and Lacanian
psychoanalysis can only result in the suppression of the latter’s explanatory potentials.

Lane’s argument is clear, straightforward, and easy
enough to grasp. He contends that an
absolutely fundamental assertion/assumption in psychoanalysis is that the
subject is constitutively “out of joint” with “reality.” What else could Freud mean when he speaks of
the impossibility of “educating” the unconscious, or when he later depicts the
id as utterly ignorant of the external world? 
Of course, this isn’t to deny that the psyche is profoundly affected and
modified by the sensations, experiences, and influences constantly streaming
into it from “the Outside.” 
Nonetheless, what Lane does deny is the notion that subjectivity is a
passive, receptive surface, a malleable receiver or container of normative,
socio-cultural patterns and processes. 
Copjec cites Lacan’s remarks from the eleventh seminar about “failures
of causality” and “gaps” between causes and effects as fundamentally important
conceptualizations to keep in mind when approaching the unconscious. Similarly, Lane stresses that the interactions
between psychoanalytically conceived “human nature” and its trans-individual
environment cannot be mapped out along the lines of predictable pathways, such
as, for example, ideological stimulus “x” always leading to subjectivity effect
“y.

Categories: Psychoanalysis