Psychoanalytic Politics: Freud's French Revolution

...the imposition of complex meanings is therefore alienating, and since the meanings are socially constituted, it is repressive as well...

...Psychoanalytic Politics: Freud's French Revolution Sherry Turkle / Basic Books / $12.50 Steven Lagerfeld When Freud wrote that "the final decisive battle" over the future of psychoanalysis would be fought "where the greatest resistance has been displayed," he undoubtedly did not anticipate that the future of the battleground might also depend upon the outcome...

...This discovery may include the realization that he is exploited and the realization that, in his lack of a coherent "self (due to the intrusion of society through language) he is not very different from people whom he has been characterizing as "crazy...

...And how can anyone write about French intellectual life-in which the only goal often seems to be to produce a "discourse" more dizzying and dazzling than the one before -without humor...

...For Freud, psychoanalysis was a therapeutic process-he was not "indifferent to the notion of 'cure' "-from which the individual would emerge capable of objectively recognizing and balancing the demands of society (embodied in the superego) against others...

...In infancy, the ideal state in this view, the connection between things and their signifiers is direct and primitive...

...It could also be that, despite the radical import of Lacanian ideas, their acceptance signals a turn toward an absorption with the self paralleling that on the American Left in recent years...

...Freud's characterization of psychoanalysis as a "plague," for instance, comes to serve as a validation for Lacan's overtly political project, when in fact Freud was referring to the unavoidable and regrettable cultural consequences of the acceptance of psychoanalysis...

...One indication of how impenetrable these formulations are is that a New York Review of Books writer was compelled to admit, if only in a footnote, that he did not wholly grasp one of them...

...Lacan provided the Left with a theory of "how society enters the individual," which filled the immediate need to explain the ineffectiveness of the 1968 revolt...

...Psychoanalysis as a liberation strategy thus becomes a kind of political activity: The embracing of psychoanalysis as political consciousness raising is a far cry from the traditional Leftist attack on psychoanalysis for "adapting" the subject to social oppression...

...This causes problems...

...Steven Lagerfeld is assistant managing editor of the Public Interest.This important development is the subject of Sherry Turkle's Psychoanalytic Politics: Freud's French Revolution...

...On the Left and among intellectuals they have certainly filled a gap, but in the notoriously fickle French intellectual world Lacan may well turn out to be a passing vogueafter all, the "new philosophers" succeeded him in popularity with a quite different vision...

...A particularly traumatic event in this process was the paralysis of French society during the student revolt in the spring of 1968, which revealed the fragility of the French social order and deeply challenged the efficacy of Frenchinstitutions...

...Like Marcuse with his "one-dimensional man," Lacan purports to demonstrate that people in a free society are not free...

...But perversely the Left was also shaken...

...Thus she quotes a prospective Lacanian patient worrying about his acceptability: "I am not an interesting case, suffering and illness are not interesting...

...To the extent that psychoanalysis enabled men consciously to examine these previously implicit demands it was plague-like, but it was never Freud's design to free men of them altogether...

...This is the conclusion to be drawn from the popular reaction to psychoanalysis in France, where the public, although it is aware of Lacan's radical message, sees in him the personification of a more or less conventional psycho analysis which it looks to for "an swers...

...It is important only insofar as it contributes to the production of Lacanian theory, which is to say ideology...

...That resistance was based on a powerful intellectual tradition with its own psychological perspectives and an institutional order which managed to withstand the pressures of modernity in this century better than most, despite France's many political upheavals...

...Her account is insightful, informative, and often even entertaining...

...Although one of his most controversial ideas is that an analyst cannot be accredited by an institution, but must "authorize" himself to practice in the manner of a poet, Lacan has established at the Freudian school "a hierarchy on the basis of theoretical sophistication...

...And Lacan has constructed an astonishing system at his Freudian School of Paris to insure that the production of ideology will take precedence in the profession...

...The theory is of course much more elaborate than this summary would suggest and Lacan, in his extraordinarily recondite style, addresses a broad range of other phenomena...

...But psychoanalysis is too inefficient to serve* as the primary political vehicle for Lacan...

...His writings are quite difficult and, to complicate matters, he has recently taken to "writing" in mathematical symbols...

...But in France, which certainly qualifies as the land of greatest resistance, this may well prove to be the case...

...stresses personal discovery instead...

...According to Lacan, society controls the individual through language, which can be characterized as a system of complex, socially-determined symbols used to "signify" particular things...

...The failure of the revolt imperiled the Left's intellectual moorings in existential Marxism -the politics of personal liberation had misfired-and forced open the door to a revolutionary new psychoanalysis and Jacques Lacan, its leading light in France...

...Lacan, radically indifferent to the notion of "cure...

...Lacanian psychoanalysis parodies the Freudian in its quest for an objective outlook, but this turns out to be a non- therapeutic and self-defeating process: The individual, brought to the realization that he is imprisoned from within by society, is faced with a new and very political project...

...Various thinkers on the Left have taken up Lacan's theories to fashion new political programs, and it has even become acceptable for intellectuals within the more orthodox Communist Party to discuss psychoanalysis...

...But through all this Lacan's intent remains recognizable enough...

...Miss Turkle employs humor to good effect, for while she is in some sympathy with Lacan's cause, she is able to point out the absurd and sometimes harmful aspects of Lacanian psychoanalytic doctrine...

...These thinkers assume the alienating effect of language to be a phenomenon of capitalist society- socialist society would restore man to the Eden of primitive and satisfying connections/This "linguistic liberation" has as its inevitable corollary sexual liberation, for as with Marcuse, Reich, and other Freudian radicals, capitalist society in the Lacanian view is sexually oppressive...

...Here at least, the patient's anxieties are not misplaced-Lacanian psychoanalysis is rigidly theoretical and political in its orientation, and is only secondarily concerned with therapy...

...Miss Turkle might have added that Lacanian psychoanalysis is also a "far cry" from Freud's conception, but throughout Psychoanalytic Politics the "French Freud" is too readily identified with the real Freud...

...The theory is a curious hybrid of psychoanalysis and structuralism...

...It is difficult to say how effective this strategy has been or how much influence Lacanian ideas now exert in France...

...This popular "triumph of the therapeutic," as Philip Rieff once described it, indicates that perhaps Freud's "plague" will triumph over Lacan's after all...

...Society thus insinuates itself into the unconscious, where it is immune to conventional strategies of liberation...

...Potential analysts who demonstrate (through a process known as the "pass") that they are capable of making theoretical contributions become "School Analysts," while those who do not are relegated to secondary status as mere clinicians...

...The prospective patient quoted earlier, in his fear that his case would not prove an "interesting" basis for theoretical speculation, is a victim of this concern...

...But this resistance has eroded as social change has gradually undermined the authority of French institutions, from the Church to the university, in everyday life...