Psychoanalysis Contra Philosophy: A Reading of Lacan’s Seminar II
Since the birth of Lacanian psychoanalysis, there has been an emergence of theoretical traditions speculating the relationship between philosophy and psychoanalytic thought. Many, from the French post-structuralists to the contemporary Slovene school have appropriated psychoanalytic concepts to bolster their own system of ontologies and social theories for better or for worse. The two French thinkers, Alain Badiou and Jean-Claude Milner who were contemporaries of Jacques Lacan, have proposed that Lacan’s oeuvre is anti-philosophical at its core — meaning it is opposed to or indifferent to the philosophical tradition. Indeed the latter camp in my opinion are correct, however, what I wish to present is not another reiteration of Lacan as an anti-philosopher, but rather to give an exegesis regarding the status of psychoanalysis and the limits of philosophical and phenomenological systems according to Lacan himself. I must also note that I do not attempt to give a precise definition of philosophy and phenomenology, as that would lead me into the process of doing philosophy/phenomenology itself— a process whose interiority is already contentious between the history of philosophers themselves. I will only describe how Lacan perceives these traditions in light of his own teachings.
Historical remarks
During the 1950s Jacques Lacan would organize what we would now know as his seminar teachings, under the banner “A Return to Freud”. These early seminars were held at Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris, with a selective group of established psychoanalysts and various Parisian intellectuals. Figures such as Octave Mannoni, Ernst Kris, Paul Valabrega, Jean Hyppolite, Serge Leclaire, and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis would play a key role in the early seminars of the 1950s. In Seminar I (1953-1954) Lacan established the core teachings of Freudian technique vis-a -vis the papers on technique and the metapsychological papers published by Sigmund Freud. The initial return to Freud consisted in a criticism of ego psychology whilst laying out the structural framework from which Lacan would rest his teaching on (i.e. the symbolic, imaginary, and the real). To put it bluntly, contemporary psychoanalysis has gone astray from Freud's theory of the unconscious as a clinical aim, in favor of strengthening the ego’s psychic defenses. Lacan demonstrates throughout his exegesis of Freud’s papers on technique that 1.) the ego serves one function, that of misrecognition. 2.) The unconscious is structured like a language. 3.)Whenever there are two bodies we must account for a third, that of speech and language. 4.) The Transference is established through the symbolic order of language and speech, rather than through an intersubjective relationship. However, a year later in Lacan’s second seminar (1954-1955) he transitions from a purely clinical examination of psychoanalytic technique, to a rigorous examination of Freud’s metapsychological theories within the context of modern science and philosophical discourse. This is in my opinion where Lacan makes theoretical demarcations between psychoanalytic theory and philosophical thought.
Freud’s Copernican Revolution
In order to understand the theoretical orientation of psychoanalysis and modern philosophy as a whole, we must understand the conditions which made both possible. Here I am referring to the infamous Copernican revolution— a term that designates a radical epistemological break from a prior worldview. The astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus proposed the theory of a heliocentric universe, in which the sun, not the earth, was at the center. Following this speculation, it would be Galileo Galilei who would confirm this through scientific investigation, marking a major break from the traditional worldview of Christianity in which the cosmos was a closed system, to an infinite Universe giving birth to a new form of episteme, formally known as modern science. It is from this major break that modern philosophy begets itself from Rene Descartes cogito ergo sum. The cogito marks a new trajectory in philosophy, moving from the Aristotelian and scholastic metaphysics to one of the subject. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant, is also said to have created another Copernican revolution with his transcendental philosophy i.e. the faculties of understanding, and the noumena. However unlike the Copernican revolution in science which is constituted by a major epistemological break, the history of philosophy has been a reaction from either Descartes’ cogito or Kant’s critical philosophy, never reaching any point of novelty, but always returning to the same starting point. This scientific revolution led someone like Charles Darwin to create another shift in modern science with his evolutionary theory of natural selection, depriving the human species of any primacy over the animal kingdom. God himself could not have saved our Ptolemaic dynasty, (nor) Mother Earth from being decentered by the indifference of Science, nor could his divine grace guarantee us a place holder within the hierarchy of the food chain, but surely the devil in disguise cannot take away our holy instantiated ego, right? According to Lacan, Sigmund Freud delivered the final blow to humanity with his Copernican Revolution, decentering man from himself by showing that the ego is not the master of its own house, and the arbiter of his own destiny can neither be found in God nor in Nature.
a.) Truth arises from error
Freud’s decentering of man consisted in his discovery of the unconscious. While the unconscious existed in many other notions such as: genius, will, or romanticist creative impulse (Von Hartmann), Freud discovered an order of processes that defy the traditional conception of conscious thinking. From texts such as Entwurf, Traumdetung, Beyond The Pleasure Principle, etc. Freud shows that the unconscious is not a thing but an unlocalizable mechanism where thought is of a different order of logic. We can see this operation with studies of the dream work where condensations and displacements occur, the parapraxis which function through slips of the tongue, the use of jokes, negations, kettle logic, and other manifestations. What Lacan wants to reiterate is the fact that the ego only serves as a symptomatic function, of defending against the unconscious and misrecognizing its own suffering. This is what psychoanalysis after Freud failed to understand. Unlike Freud, Lacan was extremely well read within the tradition of philosophy and will make his first point of contention with modern philosophy as a whole in the beginning of seminar II. Modern Philosophy has invested itself within an impotent search for knowledge, but it is through psychoanalytic experience that the function truth takes primacy over a theory of knowledge; and while philosophy once speculated about Truth, the truth that psychoanalysis ascertains, is of a different nature than philosophical speculation. The topic of truth over knowledge is brought to everyone’s attention following a lecture presentation given by the philosopher of science, Alexandre Koyrè. His presentation was on Plato’s dialogue the Meno, in which according to Octave Mannoni, Koyrè made a common error of conflating platonic maieutics with psychoanalysis, as they both reveal a forgotten truth. This could be further from the case, as maieutics allows one to remember a forgotten truth of the soul which is passed down through the process of metempsychosis. Psychoanalysis on the other hand, deals with a forgotten historical truth of the individual. While Lacan sympathizes with Mannoni’s concerns, Lacan wishes to take a different approach to the lecture on the Meno. The moral of the story is Truth arises from error, Lacan exclaims, and in the Meno, we see this operation in its nascent state from the interactions between Socrates, Meno, and the slave boy.
Let us briefly examine this dialogue in order to understand what Lacan is transmitting to us. In Plato’s dialogue, Socrates engages in a philosophical discussion with a sophist by the name Meno. Meno is a student of a famous sophist named Gorgias, who in Meno’s words can teach one all about virtue. As per usual, Socrates reels his interlocutor into a series of questions and demonstrations, ultimately leading the interlocutor to fall victim to their own contradictions and incoherencies. The Meno is no different. Meno’s error is that he believes that rhetoric can teach Virtue and that what he has learned from Gorgias is an episteme of aretè (human excellence). The reality is that Meno is a bad student, because he fails to understand that the Sophist does not teach a science of human excellence, but rather a method of properly handling discourse. Lacan remarks, “the aim and paradox of the Meno is to show us that epistêmê, knowledge bounded by a formal coherence does not cover the whole field of human experience, and in particular there is no epistêmê of what brings about perfection, the aretè of this experience.” In other words, there is no epistêmê of virtue. If this is the case, is it futile to even systemize the human experience? I think this is where Lacan wishes to make Truth rather than knowledge the prime factor of his teaching. After leaving Meno perplexed by his own misunderstanding, Socrates demonstrates an experiment using Meno’s slave. According to Socrates, this boy knows practically everything at his disposal, even if he was not taught formally. The only thing Socrates' experiment requires is that he is fluent in Greek. Socrates traces a square within the dirt, with a surface measurement of 4. He asks the slave boy to double the surface of the square to equal a measurement of 8. Intuitively the slave extends all four corners of the square, however he quadruples the measurement of the surface in the process, making the measurement equal 16. According to Lacan’s interpretation of the dialogue, he refers to this as an imaginary intuition that leads to error. After Socrates acknowledges the slave boy’s mathematical error, he points him in the right direction by indicating that reducing the square by half will necessarily lead him to the correct answer of 8. According to Lacan, this is a symbolic effect that allows truth to be revealed. “There is a fault line between the intuitive and symbolic elements…” and from this formal procedure “we get 8 which is half of 16 and at the center of the square, 4 surface units, and an irrational square root of 2, but the square root of 2 isn’t given by intuition.” So while indeed, maieutics is not the same as the psychoanalytic method with regards to truth, psychoanalysis generates a similar effect where truth can be expressed from an error as seen in the Meno. Where psychoanalysis diverges from Plato, is the function of the symbolic emergence of effects over a priori knowledge. This truth is the unconscious truth, a truth of the subject that speaks. I will elaborate more on the topic of the subject later. We must ask ourselves, what is the symbolic order for Lacan? and how does this notion elucidate the psychoanalytic experience of modern man in light of contemporary discourse i.e. philosophical discourse?
b.) symbolic order
To start off with a simple definition of the symbolic order, it is a machine. A machine that begets mortal man and not the other way around. You just need two elementary functions to create a simple machine. After that more effects can be generated from this simple interplay. Say for instance, you have a gadget that functions off of a twist and pull, and bam you have a bop it. The wonders of this effect can then allow one to add more features such as twist it, flick it, shake it, pull it, and bop it (joking!) For Lacan, following the structural anthropological tradition of Claude Levi-Strauss, the symbolic order is a formal order or arrangement that structures a given clan, kinship, or alliance. This order operates off what is known as a combinatory factor, in which certain elements grouped together create a new order of logic. Say for instance, a certain arrangement produces an exogamy or in other cases endogamy society. The production of certain rules, laws, and customs also in effect bear with it a certain prohibition relative to the laws and customs, i.e. the prohibition of incest. Everything in the symbolic order is in accordance with symbols which combine with other symbols. Lacan appreciates the intervention of Strauss' use of the symbolic as a way to overcome the nature vs culture dichotomy. However, he ends up letting God out of the front door only to bring him in through the back door. This is because Levi-Strauss struggles to ground this notion in a materialist manner, falling prey to a mystical automatism of the symbolic or worse a collective unconscious. Lacan does however align with Levi-Strauss, insofar as man is inside of a machine, and not the other way around. “Speech envelopes the subject, and is everything that is constituted through him by his family, neighbors and the community. This constitutes him as a symbol and as a being. He then copulates to create more symbols and beings.” Now philosophy has hitherto started from a presupposition of Man, of the ego, or of consciousness in relation to an object for consciousness; and while there’s nothing wrong with starting with presuppositions, it is the framework of the presuppositions that are put into question for Lacan. Philosophy cannot help but place man or a conception of man in the center. Even vitalism and philosophy of consciousness in all their attempts to undermine the limits of scientific materialism, end up falling prey to the fetishism of their object as much as the scientist fetishizes their method. To be fair, Lacan is not simply disregarding the ego, man, or consciousness, he is just not allowing psychoanalytic thought to be guided by these notions that have been held onto by the hands of modern man like capitalist holds on to his profit.
Lacan, unlike Levi-Strauss, is interested in modern man, who is enveloped within contemporary discourse, and within this discourse, takes himself into account and his fellow neighbors in the form of symbols. Man is made by the machine, and is also propelled by the destiny of his own suffering. “Man of today entertains a certain conception of himself that lies between naivety and sophistication. The belief he holds that he is constituted this or that way partakes in a certain current of diffuse, culturally accepted notions. He may think that it is a result of natural inclinations, whereas in fact, in the present state of civilization it comes to him from all sides.” The symbolic for Lacan is not wholly natural for man, and it is the imaginary relation, the narcissistic investment of oneself and the intersubjective bonds we have that make us perceive what is symbolically contingent, is in fact our natural modus operandi. The symbolic is indeed a machine, but it is a machine that is articulated and differentiated through the medium of language. Lacan will not say this explicitly in this seminar, but let us recall his Ecrits on The Function and Field of Speech and Language. The emphasis on symbolic articulation is something that goes beyond an imaginary subjectivism, and intersubjective dyad to something trans-subjective via the function of the signifier. He will only use the term symbol throughout this seminar, but he has in mind the logic of the signifier which allows for presence and absence, plus/minus, or 1s and 0s. This is structure for Lacan, but this structure is not the structuralist notion of structure which is hyper symbolic, synchronic, and subjectless. Structure has very much to do with the subject that emerges from the combinatory effect of symbolic articulations, but we must also account for its imaginary and real dimensions in relation to structure. What is the subject for Lacan, and how does this relate or differ from philosophy, given that modern philosophy from Descartes to French phenomenology have used the concept of subject?
The Subject contra Consciousness
As I have mentioned in the beginning of the essay, modern philosophy oriented its focus within its tradition by putting into question the knower or the thinker. It was Descartes whose Cogito sparked the historical thread regarding this discourse, differentiating the [res cogitan] thinking I whose existence is predicated off thinking/doubting, and [res extensia] body or world. Fast forward, we have the birth of phenomenology — a method of getting back to the things themselves as coined by its founder Edmund Husserl. This tradition would bracket out experience only taking into account what one may describe and know through the idea of intentionality; consciousness being what is consciousness of something. Martin Heidegger, a student of Husserl would transform this discipline into an inquiry of fundamental ontology— what is meant by Being; dasein as in Being-in-the-world; phenomenology is what reveals Being in the light of its discourse. The phenomenological thinker that Lacan has in mind in this seminar is Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty was a French philosopher influenced by Husserl and Heidegger, and in his fidelity with the project proposed notions like freedom, the primacy of consciousness, gestaltism, unity of experience from the point of the body. This project stemming from his infamous work Phenomenology of Perception would spark a huge polemic for Lacan in light of his teachings. What he is at odds with is the primacy of a subject that is conflated with consciousness, unity of experience, and gestaltism. To be charitable to Merleu-Ponty, he does not take consciousness as a form of substance, but rather from experience. Consciousness is a synthetical unity structured by perception. He even goes so far as to locate the errors of the cogito of a purely thinking being. This leads him to find the unity of consciousness within the frame of the body, a body that is and does. Mearleu-Ponty is no stranger to the realm of psychology, psychoanalysis, and cognitive sciences. He seeks to add phenomenological insights within these disciplines to forge a new way of looking at the human sciences— sciences that take into account human facticity. Lacan’s critiques are delivered in his lesson entitled A Materialist Definition of the Phenomenon of Consciousness and The Circuit in which he responds to a presentation given by Maurice Merleau-Ponty entitled Philosophy and Psychoanalysis. In this first lecture listed above, Lacan critiques any discourse that centers consciousness as the object of its discourse. From my own perspective it seems as if this is a regression from the Copernican Revolution of Freud, making consciousness the center rather than the unconscious. Moving from the heliocentric world, back to the Ptolemaic world. But this isn’t a simple choice of words, like Pepsi vs Coca Cola; there are theoretical differences between the two. Lacan acknowledges that Freud doesn’t have a sophisticated theory of consciousness in his topography of the psychic apparatus. He does not know what to make of consciousness in light of the theory of the ego and the unconscious. Lacan puts it bluntly— consciousness is just a surface. It is a surface where an image can be produced. It is not something that can take itself as an object of transparency like in phenomenology. This surface is a materialist definition because it relies on a set of relations. This relationship is an interplay of the surface of the body, eyeball, light reflected off the surface of the world and back to the body relationship. The key point of this materialist relationship, (that is consciousness), is that it produces an image that Lacan metaphorically compares to a recording machine— camera.
I would like to inform the reader that this is a caricature of Lacan’s experiment of the inverted bouquet. This schema is an optical experiment in which there is a bouquet with its flowers facing right up, while the vase points upside down. In front of the bouquet is a revolving concave mirror, which allows for an image of a right side up bouquet to appear depending on the observer’s vantage point. This schema is a materialist account for his Mirror Stage essay, which adds a more structural dimension to the birth of narcissism in Freud’s theory of the ego. Another variation of this experiment introduces another element, that of the plane mirror. This version allows for the sustainment of the image despite the vantage point of the observer, however the observer may also see themselves looking at the image. What the optical schema and the metaphor of the recording machine illustrate for us, is that there are preconditions that are established for the birth of the ego, which is not equivocal to consciousness. The ego serves a function which is a misrecognition. It is a misrecognition of the subject, who is lured by this specular image falls prey to the illusion of bodily unity, saying I am that. So when phenomenology takes the I or ego as the site of agency or a for-itself they simply remain in an imaginary constitution. They fail to account for the misrecognition of the subject. Subjectivity for philosophy remains caught in the illusion of the ego, or the primacy of consciousness, whether as substance or as gestalt unity. The subject for Lacan is neither consciousness nor the ego. What is the subject then? The subject is no thing and to make matters worse, the subject is no one. And yet it is what speaks truth? The subject is an effect of what emerges from the combinatory factor, but never as something present in the system but only as an absence presented by the symbol in articulation through speech and language. It is an idiot counter that tries to account for itself in the counting process— like the little boy who says “I have three brothers: Paul, Ernst, and me. It is tied to this process of counting and accounting, never fully totalizing, but always failing and repeating. In other words, yes the machine is a structure, but like a machine it breaks down. Its own constitution cannot help but allow it to break down, because it is constituted by an error— an error that can only be revealed from the speech of free association.
Psychoanalysis and the Death Drive
The last point that Lacan criticizes in phenomenology i.e. Merleau-Ponty is regarding the rapprochement between phenomenology and psychoanalysis. According to Merleau-Ponty's concluding remarks, he believes psychoanalysis and phenomenology both have the same goal, as they aim toward a humanism in which we may have a better understanding of man and his relationship to others. But Lacan exclaims, psychoanalysis cannot be a humanism because of Freud’s discovery of the death drive. The theory of the death drive takes a central role in this seminar as Lacan thinks this is what lies at the heart of Freud’s theory of the unconscious. In my transmission of this seminar, it is the death drive that cannot make psychoanalysis a humanism, nor can it be conceived on the philosophical grounds which takes subjectivity to be correlated with consciousness. To understand what death drive is and what Freud terms the compulsion to repeat, we must look briefly at the model in which he grounds these concepts. Average readers of Freud tend to reduce his theory of the psychic apparatus to a crude biological reductionism. And while we cannot ignore references to biological concepts in his theory of the instincts and sexuality, it would be erroneous to deduce that Freud was thinking biology. In fidelity to Lacan’s reading of Freud, what Freud’s model rests on is a theory of energetics, using the laws of thermodynamics within his framework to describe nervous illness. Like the laws of thermodynamics, Freud designates two systems, the primary process and secondary process— also referred to as the pleasure principle and reality principle. The organism is governed by the pleasure principle which aims to discharge excitation and reach homeostasis. This corresponds to the first law of thermodynamics which is concerned with the conservation of energy in a given system. However, based on the conflict that the pleasure principle encounters with the demands of the reality principle — the excitation of external reality onto perception-consciousness, entropy increases within the system's production. If we take Freud prior to the theory of the death drive, then the pleasure principle discharges this entropy in the form of the wish-fulfillment found in his Traumdetung. We can assume that this theory of the pleasure principle finds itself a circuit of homeostasis within the setting of the psychoanalytic session. The pleasure principle is ultimately a mechanism of ends, which means it does not want a pleasurable object as its end, but the cessation of pleasure. However in his 1920 work Beyond the Pleaure Principle we find that the theory of the drive and its tendency of repetition compulsion contradicts the original aim of the pleasure principle. Never finding satisfaction in a dream, but returning to it in a different form, or in a nightmare. Freud acknowledges the events of repetition compulsion occurring within the transference of traumatic neurosis patients— never working through their symptoms from the vantage point of the pleasure principle, but always repeating. This created an unsolvable problem for Freud. The fort/da example of Freud’s grandson experiencing separation from the mother and thus reenacting the scene with symbolically charged games of casting the toy away and refinding it, only to repeat the process, is Freud’s attempt of tracing this phenomena in early childhood years, in order to theorize the development of instinctual life. To bring this full circle, using Lacanese terms, this is what Lacan wishes to enlighten us with, in his notion of the subject that repeats itself through a symbolic articulation of the plus and minus or presence and absences. The machine is a build up of an embedded memory for the subject to repeat the process ultimately to fail and break down.
So does this mean that we are we ultimately fucked? Are we doomed to just live in a prison of repetition? Not quite. Remember truth arises out of error, but in order to expand upon this, let’s return to the pleasure principle and the reality principle. I have already explained that the pleasure principle is aimed based and yet does everything but aim at pleasure. However the reality principle does more than just provide harsh and external pressure from man’s reality. Many according to Lacan have just explained this process as learning from mistakes. You touch a stove top and burn your finger, you have unprotected sexual contact and you get the clap, or you pick a fight in the bar and you get your face bashed in. All in all, you learn not to do the same thing. But this is too naive, and we know that this doesn’t quite work out for our neurotic patients that just can’t get it right. Lacan says that the reality principle consists in making the game last. It does not oppose the pleasure principle, but it husbands our pleasures, according to Lacan. It allows us to operate within the symbolic coordinates of our reality whilst renewing the starting point of the pleasure principle towards its destiny, making sure we don’t get too much and end our neurotic tendencies too soon. How the death drive and its repetition compulsion play into this dynamic according to Lacan is precisely what Freud observes regarding its insistence. It’s not a simple repetition of the same thing, but rather something that produces something new, something of novelty. In invoking Kierkegaard's text Repetition, Lacan shows that Kierkegaard’s character does not experience the same infinite pleasure as before upon his return to Berlin. He begins to retrace his steps by memory, but this attempt leads him to utter failure. But this experiment places an important emphasis on the nature of repetition, which is essential for all advancement. To really drive the point home Lacan shows how learning and repetition function for the analytic work through the story of Gribouille.
“You know the story of Gribouille. He goes to a funeral, and says - Many happy returns! He gets himself in a mess, gets his hair pulled, goes back home - Come now, you don't say 'Many happy returns' at a funeral. you say - May God rest his soul. He goes back out, comes upon a wedding - May God rest his soul! And he still gets into trouble. Well that is what learning is, so analysis shows us, and that is what we come upon in the first analytic discoveries - trauma, fixation, reproduction, transference. What in the analytic experience is called the intrusion of the past into the present pertains to this order. It is always the learning of someone who will do better next time. And when I say that he will do better next time, that means that he'll have to do something completely different next time.”
To repeat is to do something new, rather than the same thing but better than before. But this is only insofar as the repetition of the drive allows for an intrusion of the past, a past not of one’s chronological history, but of a history symbolically constituted in the unconscious that acts as a rupture in the analysand’s field of meaning — a rupture which is also the truth that constitutes the subject as well as its error. If there is anything that separates what psychoanalysis does from philosophy, this is it. We derive our praxis through the experience and testimony of the subject who speaks their truth from error, in order to repeat. Psychoanalytic experience does not operate off a priori givens or phenomenological reduction of phenomena, and it certainly cannot find knowledge in the illusions of man’s consciousness. All that Freudian and Lacanian teachings reveal to us, is from the function of speech and language.