Bernard Burgoyne seminar – 9 February 2008 – London

Aim of seminar is a general round-up on subject and speech in Lacan – bringing the various threads together with specific reference to the essay “Function and Field” in Écrits [though in practice BB keeps digressing and doesn’t get very far on his stated project!]

Focus on crucial 1953-58 period when Lacan puts together a “war machine” and launches an “assault on the dominant psychoanalysis of the times, namely ego psychology”.

Roots of ego psychology are in a series of shifts from Freud’s original programme – shifts Lacan sees as progressive deviations, hence calling for a “return to Freud”.

Psychoanalysis starts off as analysis of material – ie what is said by the analysand in the session (“an asymmetric contract where the analysand agrees to speech”). After 1918 Freud begins to talk more about resistance as key factor, and there is a corresponding shift to seeing psychoanalysis as analysis of the resistance that impedes the production of material.

Between 1927-1930 the “second stage” gets junked altogether and the emphasis is on analysis of resistance full stop. Wilhelm Reich identifies resistances with “character”. Anna Freud identifies resistance with “defences of the ego”. So there is another shift to analysis of ego.

This trend takes off in 1930-35 with Anna Freud and the “troika” – Kris, Hartmann, Loewenstein. Intensified after psychoanalysts are expelled from Vienna by the Nazis and end up in the USA postwar. Ego psychology becomes dominant paradigm for next three decades or so. Its aim is to strengthen your ego, help accommodate it with others’ egos, and thus incorporate you into society.

For Lacan, in contrast, the ego is not a reliable foundation, something to be strengthened and nurtured, but is all about of “méconnaissance” – misrecognition, false connection, distortion, misunderstanding. The ego keeps you in comfortable illusion – “reality” as opposed to “the real”. NB this “reality v the real” opposition (which is much more natural in French) is heavily influenced by surrealism.

[Question from me: What was Freud doing all this time? If ego psychology was such a distortion of his work, why didn’t he put a stop to it? BB replies that nobody really knows the answer to that question, but he notes that during this time Freud was old, ill and in constant pain, battling cancer since 1922 (the year of the last major psychoanalytic congress held in Berlin) – perhaps he was simply unable to intervene in the running of the IPA?]

So: Lacan goes for the version of the ego found in the early Freud, where it is the agency responsible for maintaining the barrier between consciousness and the unconscious, for creating false connections between conscious ideas that mask the links to unconscious representations. This network of false connections is what we call (conscious) reality.

Hartmann argued that the ego couldn’t all be false connections, otherwise our minds would have no natural capacity to coordinate with reality. So there must be a “conflict free zone” in the ego, an area free from false connections that psychoanalysts should locate and strengthen.

Lacan’s response is that false connections are ubiquitous and inescapable. It cannot be a site for any kind of coordination with reality. Therefore the psyche = ego + something else, an x factor. Aim of psychoanalysis is to access this x, which Lacan calls the subject. (Not a term Freud uses, though close to his “Es” or “id”.)

Lengthy digression follows on the philosophical roots of all this. BB argues that the ego psychology tradition is heavily influenced by English empiricist philosophy, in particular John Locke, who was a central ideologist of the 1688 Whig takeover (aka “Glorious Revolution”). His notion of a natural faculty of reason, a “common sense”, corresponds to the “conflict free zone” in the ego.

Freud’s intellectual influences, in contrast, are from the Scottish Enlightenment – in particular David Hume (who Freud translated at the age of 23) and Dugald Stewart (who comes up with the notion of transference and even wrote a book on the interpretation of dreams!). Hume in particular draws links between affect, memory and ideas, arguing that affect produces strong but short-term ideas, while memory creates weaker but longer lasting ideas.

[There are other even more bizarre links (not ones Freud was aware of), eg Samuel Taylor Coleridge coming up with the term “psychoanalysis” in 1805 with reference to Greek mythology, John Keble coming up with “repression” to describe the functioning of poetry in 1835...]

Lacan draws out all this background stuff about the relationship of psychoanalysis to philosophy, science and mathematics – makes it explicit. As for his philosophical influences, around this time the two prominent ones are Hegel and Rousseau.

In particular Rousseau argues that human relationships with objects are no kind of spur to development out of the “state of nature” – a point echoed by Lacan who describes object relations as “ineffable and stupid” – what spurs us into language, reason, memory, culture etc is our faculty of “compassion” combined with a traumatic encounter with other people, the field of intersubjectivity, what Rousseau calls the general will (“volonté générale”).

This “forcefield” of the general will becomes the Other in Lacan (in contrast with the “others” that the ego psychologists bother about). Rousseau in the “Geneva Manuscript” version of The Social Contract explicates the general will as “the reasoning in the absence of passions of what one can expect of the other and the other can expect of one”. Replace “expect” with “demand” or “desire” and the psychoanalytic parallels become clear.

ends