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"Freud" et "Lacan"

Paru dans The Edinburgh Dictionary of Continental Philosophy, Edited by John Protevi, Edinburgh University Press, 2005.

LACAN, JACQUES (1901-81)

French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, who redefined Freud's work in the Écrits (1966), the Autres écrits (2001) and 26 Seminars held between 1953 and 1979. Lacan's output is characterised by its conceptual coherence and by the huge body of knowledge put to work: philosophy (Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Koyré, Kojève, Popper); logic (Aristotle, Boole, Hittinka); mathematics and topology (Gödel, Moebius, Cantor); linguistics (Saussure); game theory; literature (Sophocles, Jaufré Rudel, Arnaut Daniel and courtly love, Shakespeare, Sade, Claudel, Gide, Duras); religion (Judaism, Christianity); mythology and art - no field of human endeavour is left untouched by Lacan.

Lacan's formidable contribution to the practice of psychoanalysis will not be treated here. Instead we will consider the following two points as those most relevant to philosophy: (1) a (pre-) ontology of the subject arrived at via the elaboration and refinement of Freud's theories, which he submits to a logical and mathematical formalisation, in order to ensure their pertinence and transmissibility; (2) an epistemology in which psychoanalysis operates as a reflective link repo­sitioning the humanities and hard sciences, a repositioning that results in an ethics of singularity.

Lacan's (pre-) ontology of the subject is deeply rooted in a medieval philosophical controversy, the quarrel of universals, where he positions himself squarely on the realists' side. With a caveat against any idealism still lingering on either side of the quarrel, he posits his own brand of materialism: matter, in his theory, will be language, 'the signifier transcended into language'. Boole, Tarski and Saussure, among others, have shown this linguistic matter susceptible to a mathematical and logical formalisation. Lacan will go one step beyond towards topology and the theory of knots and strings. Signifying matter therefore organises the underlying structure of Lacan's symbolic-real axis (the axis of the signifier and the unconscious) and can be rigorously, up to a point, formalised.

As a matter of fact, for Lacan, language, contrary to what it was for medieval thought, is not a projection of an internal soul or thought onto the world, a representation of something that pre-exists it, but is a material exteriority that obeys its own laws and thus structures the human subject and the vision this subject has of the world. This allows him to position himself outside the entire Western philosophical tradition (for which a self-transparent consciousness is an almost insuperable tenet) and to map out, as far as possible, the logic of the unconscious as a place ('another stage', as Freud would say) where 'something' thinks. The unified thinking subject thus gives way to a split subject, divided between conscious and unconscious thinking, and mastered in part by the signifying chain hidden in the unconscious.

In return, the philosophical tradition and the different world-views it promotes are reread as instances of a forgetting or repressing of unconscious thinking. However, the unconscious resists a complete formalisation, be it mathematical or topological: this defines it as an impossible real, beyond any possible representation. Indeed, because of Gödel's incompleteness theorem (in sciences), and because of the existence of an unrepresentable unconscious (in humanities), no at­tempt at a totalising representation of reality is possible: as he says in Radiophonie (1970), 'Nothing is whole'. Any world-view (including philosophy) that falls prey to the seduction of totalisation proposes an imaginary structure that represses the real unconscious. This situates Lacan, as he claims in Seminar XI (1964), in a pre-ontology; the impossible unconscious is neither a being nor a non-being, but an interdicted being, whose existence differentiates the psychoanalytic view from philosophy's (in particular the Presocradcs and Heidegger).

Lacan's epistemology substitutes for the question, 'is psychoanalysis a science?' another one, 'what would be a science that would include psychoanalysis?' Going beyond the seemingly irreducibility of science and humanities, Lacan unifies them around a void, which conjoins matter's and the unconscious's ultimate resistance to formalisation. Indeed, Lacan's enlightening of science by psychoanalysis, and vice-versa, constitutes the cornerstone of a general epistemology that avoids the trap of a metaphorisation of science itself. Lacan uses scientific tools like topology and knots and strings theory according to their own principles, even if he submits them to a special use that is hard to comprehend for mathematicians and even harder for humanists. Although it is 'general', Lacan's epistemology will not be a totalising one, because of our representations' inherent incompleteness. Seen through the prism of psychoanalysis, science appears as the ultimate symbolic repression: 'Science is the abolition of the subject'. This repression that cannot be held in check because there is no internal reason for its possible entropy: its expansion is limitless, as is the universe it inhabits.

This does not mean that Lacan takes refuge in a desperate irrationalism. Quite to the contrary, he uses science's tools to map out where resistance is possible. Hence his recourse, outside of science (there is no ethics of science in itself), to an ethics of desire in Seminar VII, The ethics, of psychoanalysis (1959-60). We may call it an 'ethics of singularity', since Lacan calls on individuals not to make any conces­sion about their own desire, in order to hold in check the increasing demands of the superego and the symbolic order, of which science is an integral part. This ethics is at the same time entirely logical (it is the only form the subject can oppose to its own abolition by science) and paradoxical: how can we not make concession about our desire, if, according to Lacan, it is unconscious, therefore impossible to incarnate in an image? How can we resist the expansion of the superego if it is also beyond the reach of our consciousness?

The answer to these questions, for the psychoanalyst, and perhaps for all of us, is to take subjects one by one, and always stress the ability of singular analysands to finally tolerate what is a structural lack of figuration for the unconscious core of our being. As far as the broader society is concerned, Lacanian ethics may be summarised as a word of caution about the repression of singular desires by the agglomeration of individuals as numbers in a set (the probability calculation of life insurance is here a good example), lest these desires reappear under the wildest, most phantasmatic and most aggressive forms of the return of the repressed.

ANTIPHILOSOPHY

A term used by Lacan in several sense.

(1) It indicates one of the disciplines - along with linguistics, topology and modern logic - necessary to the psychoanalyst's schooling. Lacan intimates that psychoanalysis, an ethics of singularity, should not take itself for a philosophy, when the latter is defined as a vision of the world that absorbs singularity in a totalising structure. Thus, for Lacan, psychoanalysis will never replace philosophy and instead constitutes itself as an antiphilosophy. (Conversely, calling psychoanalysis an 'antiphilosophy' encourages philosophy to liberate itself from psycho­analysis, as Deleuze and Guattari do in Anti-Oedipus (1972).)

(2) The categorisation of psychoanalysis as 'antiphilosophy' is also the consequence of philosophy's categorisation, by Lacan, as an avatar of the Master's discourse in the theory of discourses proposed in Seminar XVII, L'envers de la psychanalyse (1969-70); here, Lacan also follows Freud, when the latter assimilates a philosophical system to a paranoid psychosis, that is a vision of the world that is coherent only because it eliminates the Real. Philosophy, for Lacan, is a discourse of mastery, and as such, it is positioned in exact opposition to the analyst's discourse, which is non-mastery because it takes into account the unconscious.

(3) Finally, antiphilosophy heralds a psychoanalytical rereading and criticism of the entire tradition of Western philosophy, which can be summarised as follow: philosophy is regularly accused by Lacan of not noticing that thinking depends on speaking, that we are thinking beings only because we are speaking beings, as evidenced by Hegel's not noticing that, in the master-slave dialectic, a third linguistic structure positions the master and the slave and masters them.

FREUD, SIGMUND (1856-1939)

Viennese neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis.

Freud's initial formation in neuropsychiatry has noth­ing to do with the field he created later. It will give his work a scientistic bent that at times confuses his theory, whose real object is the signifier's symbolic effects on man. However, he will never abandon his claim for a scientific status for psychoanalysis, lest it be confused with magic, religion or a traditional, hermeneutic 'art of interpretation'. The discovery of the unconscious comes from two sources: first, his practice as a psychiatrist forces him to identify mental illness that have no identifiable physical causes — hysterical female patients play a determining role here; second, a dream in 1897 on the anniversary of his father's death, which will lead him later to the laying out of the Oedipus complex and to the redaction of The Interpretation of Dreams, begun the same year.

The Freudian discovery can be summarised in two words: 'It (or Id) thinks'; there is in man an agency that thinks beyond the grasp of conscious thinking. Freud will devote his life to mapping out his breakthrough and its consequences. His first description of the human psyche (known as the first topography) distinguishes three agencies: unconscious, consciousness, preconscious; there relationships are en­visioned in the terms of nineteenth century thermodynamics and neurobiology: for example, the preconscious is like a dam containing the huge energy reservoir of the unconscious, and consciousness is an apparatus responding to external stimuli. The second topography, built around 1918 and ushered in by the publication of Beyond the Pleasure Principle and The Ego and the Id, will get rid of this neurological background by renaming the three agencies the id, the ego and the superego; Freud shifts to an anthropomorphisation, with the id as a locus for drives and desires, the ego representing the individual, the superego standing for parental authority and cultural and societal rules and constraints. In parallel, the first, monist conception centered on the libido is substituted by a dualist view, which sees the psyche as the locus for a struggle between two primordial forces Eros (the libido) and Thanatos (the death drive). Following his central reference to the Oedipus complex, which is present in his work from the very beginning to the end, Freud boldly extends his foray into the terminology borrowed from mythology. He thus shifts the emphasis of psycho­analysis from neurology to the effects of symbolism: 'The theory of drives is, so to speak, our mythology. Drives are mythical beings, great by their indetermination' (Standard Edition, XXIII, p. 148); however, the references to natural sciences remain ensconced in the work (for example, the death drive as a return to the non-organic). The real object of psychoanalysis remains ambiguous in its founder's own mind.

The fundamental hypothesis of psychoanalysis is the shift from natural (animal) instinct for reproduction of the species (in German, Instinkt) to the notion of drive (in German, Trieb) that is a desire that does now obeys symbolic and linguistic determinations instead of the Darwinian law of reproduction of the species. As such nothing in the human domain should escape the purview of psychoanalysis, as Freud's work itself, with its numerous branchings out into religion, literature, mythology and art, testifies. As far as philosophy is concerned, the relationship of psychoanalysis with it is an uneasy one.

Freud's influence on philosophy has been immense, especially in France, often under the influence of Lacan's reading of his work. For confirmation, one may mention Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, among others. However, Freud's relationship with and impact on philosophy is, for the most part, negative and critical: he sees philosophy as mythical, inasmuch as most philosophers do not take the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century into account. Hence, in Totem and Taboo (Chapter II, section 4) psychosis is described as 'a caricature of a philosophical system', and Kant's a priori mental categories are viewed as 'projections of the psyche' (Gesammelte Werke, XXII, p. 132) In,  brief, philosophy,  for Freud, is another belief system. These objections to Western philosophy are addressed to its main trend from Socrates up to Hegel's 'absolute knowledge', a trend that believes that man can gain a self-explanatory, wholly conscious of itself, view of being. This goes against the essence of Freud's discovery, which supposes that consciousness is not the whole of thinking, that there is another stage, the unconscious, where thinking occurs beyond the grasp of consciousness. Since psychoanalysis denies the possibility of a wholly self-revelatory consciousness, it cannot be assimilated to phi­losophy and, unlike philosophy, it has no world-view (Weltanschauung) to propose, no all encompassing interpretation of human thought (an old temptation of philosophers). Reason is the master of only a small part of the human house, its light doesn't reach into the basement and consciousness is not the essence of the psyche. This leads Freud to link psychoanalysis, not to Western philosophy, but to the decentring of humanity produced by Copernicus' heliocentrism. Hence Freud de­liberately puts psychoanalysis and his entire life work under the aegis of the scientific revolution ushered in by Galileo in the seventeenth century: 'In my opinion, psychoanalysis is not able of building for itself a special vision of the universe. Psychoanalysis does not need to do so: being a part of science, it can throw its lot with science' (New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Seventh Lecture, 1932). This claim for scientific status for psychoanalysis is not without causing ambiguities in Freud's and his followers' work, in so far as Freud will cling up to his death to metaphors borrowed from the natural sciences, whereas the objects of psychoanalysis are effects of language on mankind. So, psychoanalysis has to borrow its methodology from a science of language, not hard sciences. But that is another story that will be written by Lacan.

IMAGINARY ORDER

That which, in Lacan's theory, replaces Freud's ego agency. Its contents are the 'signifieds', that is significa­tions and representations produced by the ego processes of identifica­tion and projection on the objects of the world. As such, it is always built between two poles, the ego itself and its mirror-image, the other (little ο).

The imaginary order is in charge of actualising repression; it has to be assimilated to what has been known before psychoanalysis as 'reality', which is grasped by Lacan as an imaginary construct. Hence, imaginary reality has to be differentiated in principle from the Real, which is the locus of meaning and truth as opposed to significations belonging to and consisting in the imaginary order. The imaginary order is subordinated to the Symbolic order, the Other (capital O), by an absolute determinism: the chain of signifiers is the determinant that will organise the signifieds and representations carried by the imagin­ary order. Early on, Lacan defined the orders as mathematical sets. The imaginary order would be the set comprising all the representations of an individual as he or she shares them with his or her group, community, ethnicity, nation, etc. As such, the imaginary order defines a subject's particularity, through which he identifies himself as part of a group.

The notion of the imaginary does not make sense per se, but only in relationship to the other sets distinguished by Lacan, the Real and the Symbolic order, and only in the mapping out of their respective positioning in the 'topology of the subject'.

REAL

That which replaces Freud's unconscious in Lacan's theory. It is the locus of singularity, defined as an interdicted being that escapes any formalisation and representation: it is impossible (to represent) and cannot be called an order, as are the Symbolic and the Imaginary. As such, it overlaps with the real in science, which the incompleteness of our mathematical representations prevents us from knowing in its totality.

Escaping any formalisation, the Real is the set where truth, meaning and sense are to be. We have only partial access to the Real, through lapses, dreams, and bungled actions: 'The unconscious is to not remember what one knows' ('La méprise du sujet supposé savoir, Autres Écrits, 2001). Hence, 'Truth can be told only in half, because, beyond this half said, there is nothing to say. (...) Here, in consequence, discourse disappears. We don't speak about what is unutter­able' (Seminar XVII, 1969-70).

If we follow Lacan in grasping femininity as an existence without representation, the ultimate meaning of the Real is that that there is no sexual rapport, that is it is impossible to write a logical rapport between man and woman, since one side will always lack an adequate signifier to represent itself. This notion does not make sense per se, but only in relationship to the other sets distinguished by Lacan, the Imaginary order and the Symbolic order, and only in the mapping out of their respective positioning in the ‘topology of the subject’.

SUBJECT, TOPOLOGY OF

A mathematical formalisation by means of which Lacan hoped to transmit his theory unencumbered by the interferences that always appear in human communication, since everything, in any given algorithm, is totally transmissible and not subject to the loss that occurs in communicating in common language. The latest stage of Lacan's formalisation deals with the way by which the different orders (Real, Symbolic order, Imaginary order) are organised in any given human subject. As a model, he borrows the Borromean knot from knot theory.

To best understand this model, it is necessary to redefine the sets that will be tied together to represent the structure of the subject:

R    (the Real) = There is ... that is nothing more can be affirmed of the unconscious, since we only partially know its content.

S     (the Symbolic order) = There is difference, that is there is a set of signifiers, which define themselves only through their relative and negative difference to each other.

I      (the Imaginary order) = There is similarity, that is there are signifieds, defined by the intersubjective play of projections and identification; through this play we define our signifieds: our ego, our consciousness, our representations, 'reality'.

Once the three sets are defined, we can represent them, as in set theory, by three circles. These three circles, in their turn, can be materialised by strings. The human psyche can then be written in a particular Borromean combination of the three sets ('Conférences et entretiens dans des universités américaines', Scilicet, 6-7, 1976).

There are only two minimal conditions for this representation to work: (1) every set has to be defined by properties unique to it, and (2) if one string is cut, all strings are loosened, that is each set is indispensable to the existence of every other set.

In this diagram: R = Real; S = Symbolic; Σ = Symptom; I = Imaginary. To hold the three sets together, it is necessary to add a fourth element: the symptom. The symptom is a signifier, more precisely a metaphor, unthinkable outside a rhetoric of the uncon­scious, which produces the individual as a unique combination of the three exigencies: 'The symptom is the peculiar notation of the human dimension', Lacan states in the same text.

For this last topology, Lacan claimed a particular status; stressing its originality, he asserted that it was not a metaphor, a figuration or an image but a real notation of the human psyche, the real being indexed four times in the schema by the void: 'I am trying to constitute another geometry, which would deal with the being of the chain. It has never, never been done. This geometry is not imaginary; contrary to the one of triangles, it is real; it is knots of strings’ (‘Séminaire de Caracas’, 1980).

The fecundity and power of the Borromean representation of the subject can be best indicated by filling in the sets with a series of approximate synonyms and then establishing their respective relation­ships. For example, the set of the Real may comprise notions that are impossible to represent fully: truth, meaning, desire, femininity, God and singularity; the Imaginary set includes signifieds, representations ('reality') and particularities shared by a group of human beings; and the Symbolic set contains signifiers, the laws (of language, of society) and conceptual generalities. This is, however, only an indication of possibilities that cannot be developed in this space.

SYMBOLIC ORDER

In Lacan's theory, the set of signifiers. Lacan gives to the concept of signifier a tremendous extension, since any object in the human sphere is marked by the primacy of language and thus conceived as a signifier. Also, he stresses the supremacy of the symbolic order: for him, it is the foundation and beginning of all psychic mechanisms. For example, the universal prohibition of incest (and hence the change for animal instinct to human desire) depends on its formulation through the symbolic order. Lacan posits the symbolic order's radical otherness by designating it as the Other, at first external to subject, then interiorised: 'The exteriority of the Symbolic order in regard to the person is the notion of the unconscious itself (Écrits, 1966). The symbolic order determines the subject by its signifying chains, undermining the ego's autonomy. Indeed, the ego is submitted to a radical determinacy that it chooses to largely ignore.

The symbolic order is a universal characteristic of humanity; a group can be said to be human only if it is subordinated to a symbolic structure. At the same time, this mark of humanity is specified according to linguistic groups: any existing language determines a symbolic order particular to a certain community. At the level of the symbolic order resides the broadest level of generality: this is where general statements can be made, where through a given language, societies put their signifiers in common; this is where the superego and cultural constraints function.

This notion does not make sense per se, but only in relationship to the other sets distinguished by Lacan, the imaginary order and the Real, and only in the mapping out of their respective positioning in the 'topology of the subject'.