The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis by Jacques Lacan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is my second time reading this book.
In his attempt to correct Freud, bring him up to date, Lacan approaches the same metaphysical abstraction as so many post-structuralists. A big part of psychoanalysis’s problem stems from methodology. In order to help his patients, Freud had to determine what normalcy was. And he did this through the cultural signs that were available around him. Lacan’s abstraction of these terms is an attempt to get away from the original limits of Freud and get at the principles of what Freud was talking about. The ordering that Lacan utilizes in order to center the subject is actually pretty deft. He approaches sort of sideways, from the abstraction of human desire as drive — in doing so, he places us in relation to the subject, but only from the angles at which we can see it. The distortion apparent in the subject’s view of itself, the only part where we can come to understand itself as as being — in essence, torsion in a field of the symbolic. Whether this happens through the other, or through itself, or through drive or any other conception is not as important.
What’s interesting about this difficult structure is that Lacan’s highlight follows a very familiar path. We need to have two things to measure itself against. This could be a phallic and a drive. It could be the other and its gaze. It could be the analyst and the subject. Really, there are so many available! Each of these different metrics presents for us different normalcys, different ways of sparking what may be normal. Ultimately though, Lacan is able to get us back to normalcy only when we approach the imaginary and symbolic regimes in conjunction with their phallic suture. This master signifier becomes the unit that marks the weave of meaning, in the same way that money is used as a filter in our current civilization to codify relative values.
While this is terribly interesting and a good gauge of what Lacan is talking about, what is missing in all of this psychoanalytic structure is the need for agency. We can retroactively stamp the structure onto any story or person or event we like. But we have a hard time trying to figure out how to get us back to where we need to go. The point of all this is to find out what normal is, so that we can help patients recover their sense of person, or their direction, or whatever is wrong. And that becomes a huge issue as to why psychoanalysis starts to lose its prestige today.
Of course, this is just a seminar about the conceptual framework. But shouldn’t this approach also be considered? We take this thought for granted because, I assume, we enter the seminar already believing.
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