7 ms·

Book Review: A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis

45 points by feross 5y ago

scarecrowbob 5y ago
I've read this, and I am currently working through Fink's _The Lacanian Subject: Between Language And Jouissance_. There are some interesting points in the work (enough to keep me looking at it over the years), but I find this area of thought to be a deep and confusing set of ideas. At this point, I am not sure there's really a lot of "there" there in general. I've been trying to figure out this line of thought for more than a decade and some change. But I've never been in a position where I could afford to engage in psychoanalysis, so maybe the Lacanian practitioners I know who tell me I won't really get "it" without actually practicing as an analysand or analyst are right. I suppose they'd know. However, I've really enjoyed a lot of the cultural marginalia generated by psychoanalysis. Other than Zizek, I think that Alone's writing here was quite interesting: https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/ https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/
- lmt55 5y ago
  I would say that the 'mirror stage' is a clear and concrete idea (not necessarily clearly and concretely elucidated by Lacan) which, while it doesn't have the same status as a scientific statement about the mind, provides a helpful illustration, with some explanatory power, of how the 'self' is formed. (Note that when I say 'a scientific statement about the mind', I would regard very little of the scientific discipline of psychology as meeting this standard. In most cases it is also far less interesting than psychoanalysis.) Of course, many people are content that they are able to live with a 'sense of self', without worrying about how it is constructed. That doesn't mean that it's not an interesting, useful or accurate idea.
philosopher1234 5y ago
I wonder if folks would have a better time with Freud than Lacan. Lacan is not a settled matter among clinical psychoanalysts, in fact I reckon the majority of them aren’t so fond of him. I would think of Lacanian psychoanalysis as a distinctive strain of thought, different from Freudian, kleinian, etc. psychoanalysis is hard to understand, but some of it is a fair bit easier than Lacan. Which is not to say that Lacan is the future modality held back by conservative/regressive institutions, though he may be.
edmcnulty101 5y ago
Better than the Laconian pens.
Sakos 5y ago
Entertaining read. I particularly enjoyed the comments.
beepbooptheory 5y ago
In another world, where the interdisciplinary cards fell a little differently, and the history of clinical psychiatry sustained talking therapy in lieu of pharmaceutical hegemony, I think programmers of all types would read Lacan a lot more. Not for any one of his clinical findings, but as so many lessons in system design. As so many lessons in the determining nature of syntax. As inspiration for they way infrastructure determines superstructure. The clinical stuff was obviously the most important thing to him, but it doesn't even touch on his thoughts about language, which turns out to be thoughts on cybernetics, and the spontaneous effects of making some variables static and others dynamic, so to speak, that's really all it is. That, IMO, is where the good stuff is, if your not an analyst.
omeze 5y ago
I found “How to Read Lacan” by Zizek a great introduction as someone who has 0 psychology or philosophy background. As another poster mentioned Im still not sure how much “there is”, but I found the concept of the Other to be interesting. But I also don’t think it’s too healthy outside of a clinical setting to try and reduce human desire to a formula. People should try to understand each other one-on-one without diagnosing or labeling either party’s behavior. It feels like a lot of interest in Girard and Lacan stem from trying to manipulate or predict people, which may be a useful tool some of the time (doctor <> patient) but is no way to live day-to-day!
- mhh__ 5y ago
  Maybe I shouldn't just before reading but the way philosophy has to be prefaced by "How to read X" makes me so glad we have mathematics in physics. Physics is concise, but more importantly can be wrong. I don't mind reading a bit of philosophy every now and again but at some point I just have to put it down because it's so long winded. Even ignoring the somewhat revealing tendency to borrow terminology from other subjects, there's no sense of urgency in the writing. Perhaps it's best transmitted orally instead.
  - bbatha 5y ago
    The conciseness of math and physics has to do with notation that’s been developed over centuries and taught over the course of over a decade to students in most developed countries. I’m sure if you went to your “Math for x non-stem degree” course at your local university you’d see students equally befuddled by a soup of notation and terms they haven’t encountered.
    - mhh__ 5y ago
      The notation exists because it can be applied to the field, because the field can be applied to reality. It's not solely invention. Engineers love ruining physics but at very least they can still be ugly rather than bloated.
      - 5y ago
tgv 5y ago
I can't understand why people fall for such obscurified nonsense. The concepts are based on one person's rather poetic imagination, and they are, like everything else in psycho-analysis, notoriously lacking evidence of any relation to reality, even by the low standards of psychology. To think that it is more than time-passing for attention seeking rich people is delusional.
- lmt55 5y ago
  How do you know?
- shimonabi 5y ago
  Exactly. I don't agree with Chomsky about much lately, but he sure is right about postmodernism. It's nothing but posturing and obscurantism. When my fellow countryman Žižek says something interesting every now and then, I always view it as a broken clock being right 2 times a day.
xtiansimon 5y ago
Psychoanalysis cut from whole cloth, without recourse to brain scans. What could go wrong?
- joeberon 5y ago
xtiansimon 5y ago
“…the Other is the abstracted mishmash of everyone you’re seeking the approval of.” Really? Seems like a term like ‘the Other’ should apply more broadly. Like calling poltergeist only the Civil War dead…
- scarecrowbob 5y ago
  In this form of analysis the capital-O Other has a specific meaning: "The capital-O Other refers to two additional types of otherness corresponding to the registers of the Symbolic and the Real. The first type of Other is Lacan’s “big Other” qua symbolic order, namely, the overarching “objective spirit” of trans-individual socio-linguistic structures configuring the fields of inter-subjective interactions. Relatedly, the Symbolic big Other also can refer to (often fantasmatic/fictional) ideas of anonymous authoritative power and/or knowledge (whether that of God, Nature, History, Society, State, Party, Science, or the analyst as the “subject supposed to know” [sujet supposé savoir] as per Lacan’s distinctive account of analytic transference). But, as already becomes evident in Lacan’s first few annual seminars of the early 1950s, there also is a Real dimension to Otherness. This particular incarnation of the Real, about which Lacan goes into greatest detail when addressing both love and psychosis, is the provocative, perturbing enigma of the Other as an unknowable “x,” an unfathomable abyss of withdrawn-yet-proximate alterity (in his 1895 Project for a Scientific Psychology, to which Lacan refers repeatedly, Freud depicts this alterity in the guise of the Nebenmensch als Ding [Neighbor-as-Thing])." https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lacan/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lacan/
  - lmt55 5y ago
    In other (npi) words, the Other is the entity that we think about when we imagine how other people in general will think or feel. I believe in (say) the validity of money because I think that shopkeepers will accept it. But shopkeepers also only believe in it because they think other people believe in it, and those people that the shopkeepers want to pay also think that other people believe in it, including me and the original shopkeepers. We describe this state of affairs by saying that I believe in money since I know that the Other also does.
dimatura 5y ago
When I started my undergrad I was quite interested in various fields related to cognitive science, but in my country there was no way to major in that. I started a psychology major, and while I did get to take courses related to cogsci, and work part time in more neuroscience-y research, I also had to take several courses in clinical psychology and not one, but two! courses on psychoanalysis. They were taught by profs that were very much into Lacan. My conclusion after all this coursework (and several books outside the syllabus) is that while these ideas are sometimes interesting from a literary and, let's say, continental philosophy angle, they're of dubious clinical value and totally bunk from a scientific point of view. I had to stop myself from laughing sometimes when it came to the pseudo-mathematical formulations because they really are nonsense (for a good summary on that aspect, see Sokal's "Intellectual Impostures"). This wasn't the only reason, but I ended up switching majors to CS to focus on AI/ML (a good decision in retrospect!). Years later, I still think of Freudian and Lacanian ideas sometimes, though - they do have a certain appeal.
INGELRII 5y ago
General comment about theoretical systems like Lacanianism. They seem to have these common features: 1) They are self-contained systems. They may be interesting in the terms of sci-fi worldbuilding, but you must suppress critical thinking and just absorb them or they fall apart. 2) Experts tend to discuss in the terms of what the founder or important figures meant. Understanding the subject is interpreting what few people said and thought. Right and wrong is about right interpretation. 3) Advance happens by forking or dissolving into smaller groups with different interpretations. There are main divisions, sub divisions, and so on. I find hard to understand these kind of systems. There may be some initial core ideas that are interesting to ponder, but building whole system seems very limited and dogmatic. If there is no way to create synthesis or settle questions among experts who disagree, and the only way is to branch, is there anything there? -- edit: My null hypothesis for the effectiveness of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in clinical setting is that the theory or method is just a framework that A) helps analysts and patients that understand and work well together to find each other. Like Trekkie getting into therapy with a Trekkie fan therapist, or a Chatholic patient having therapist with Catholic backround. B) it gives some needed structure, the theoretical framework itself is not that important. C) the real help comes from interacting and talking with a person intimately. In this sense, anything goes as long as it's not outright harmful.
- pfortuny 5y ago
  The thing is we discard Aristotelian Natural Science as obsolete and nonsense (which it is) but somehow some people take these systems seriously because 'modern philosophy', whatever it is... To me this is completely unbelievable. Especially given the pseudointellectualism in which those systems are based. But, you know, 'psychoanalysis'...
  - lmt55 5y ago
    Doesn't your example illuminate why systems of thought like psychoanalysis are useful? We currently don't know concretely how psychological phenomena like consciousness, happiness, selfhood, desire are formed or what they consist of. We know they exist, because we experience them 'in normal human experience'. Analogously, Aristotle did not know anything concrete about how atoms, energy, time, cells in the body worked. But his natural philosophy created a speculative framework to talk about these things, explore possibilities, and try to relate what was known or observed, to what might possibly be true. The potential advantage of modern theories like psychoanalysis, is that today we are able to make a clear distinction between falsifiable scientific knowledge, and other types of statements about the world. Thus, we can evaluate Lacan's thought on the correct level - as a form of philosophy which gives us a way of thinking about certain matters without attempting to provide definitive information.

45 points by feross 5y ago

I've read this, and I am currently working through Fink's _The Lacanian Subject: Between Language And Jouissance_. There are some interesting points in the work (enough to keep me looking at it over the years), but I find this area of thought to be a deep and confusing set of ideas. At this point, I am not sure there's really a lot of "there" there in general. I've been trying to figure out this line of thought for more than a decade and some change. But I've never been in a position where I could afford to engage in psychoanalysis, so maybe the Lacanian practitioners I know who tell me I won't really get "it" without actually practicing as an analysand or analyst are right. I suppose they'd know. However, I've really enjoyed a lot of the cultural marginalia generated by psychoanalysis. Other than Zizek, I think that Alone's writing here was quite interesting: https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/ https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/

lmt55 5y ago
I would say that the 'mirror stage' is a clear and concrete idea (not necessarily clearly and concretely elucidated by Lacan) which, while it doesn't have the same status as a scientific statement about the mind, provides a helpful illustration, with some explanatory power, of how the 'self' is formed. (Note that when I say 'a scientific statement about the mind', I would regard very little of the scientific discipline of psychology as meeting this standard. In most cases it is also far less interesting than psychoanalysis.) Of course, many people are content that they are able to live with a 'sense of self', without worrying about how it is constructed. That doesn't mean that it's not an interesting, useful or accurate idea.

philosopher1234 5y ago

I wonder if folks would have a better time with Freud than Lacan. Lacan is not a settled matter among clinical psychoanalysts, in fact I reckon the majority of them aren’t so fond of him. I would think of Lacanian psychoanalysis as a distinctive strain of thought, different from Freudian, kleinian, etc. psychoanalysis is hard to understand, but some of it is a fair bit easier than Lacan. Which is not to say that Lacan is the future modality held back by conservative/regressive institutions, though he may be.

edmcnulty101 5y ago

Better than the Laconian pens.

Sakos 5y ago

Entertaining read. I particularly enjoyed the comments.

beepbooptheory 5y ago

In another world, where the interdisciplinary cards fell a little differently, and the history of clinical psychiatry sustained talking therapy in lieu of pharmaceutical hegemony, I think programmers of all types would read Lacan a lot more. Not for any one of his clinical findings, but as so many lessons in system design. As so many lessons in the determining nature of syntax. As inspiration for they way infrastructure determines superstructure. The clinical stuff was obviously the most important thing to him, but it doesn't even touch on his thoughts about language, which turns out to be thoughts on cybernetics, and the spontaneous effects of making some variables static and others dynamic, so to speak, that's really all it is. That, IMO, is where the good stuff is, if your not an analyst.

omeze 5y ago

I found “How to Read Lacan” by Zizek a great introduction as someone who has 0 psychology or philosophy background. As another poster mentioned Im still not sure how much “there is”, but I found the concept of the Other to be interesting. But I also don’t think it’s too healthy outside of a clinical setting to try and reduce human desire to a formula. People should try to understand each other one-on-one without diagnosing or labeling either party’s behavior. It feels like a lot of interest in Girard and Lacan stem from trying to manipulate or predict people, which may be a useful tool some of the time (doctor <> patient) but is no way to live day-to-day!

mhh__ 5y ago
Maybe I shouldn't just before reading but the way philosophy has to be prefaced by "How to read X" makes me so glad we have mathematics in physics. Physics is concise, but more importantly can be wrong. I don't mind reading a bit of philosophy every now and again but at some point I just have to put it down because it's so long winded. Even ignoring the somewhat revealing tendency to borrow terminology from other subjects, there's no sense of urgency in the writing. Perhaps it's best transmitted orally instead.
- bbatha 5y ago
  The conciseness of math and physics has to do with notation that’s been developed over centuries and taught over the course of over a decade to students in most developed countries. I’m sure if you went to your “Math for x non-stem degree” course at your local university you’d see students equally befuddled by a soup of notation and terms they haven’t encountered.
  - mhh__ 5y ago
    The notation exists because it can be applied to the field, because the field can be applied to reality. It's not solely invention. Engineers love ruining physics but at very least they can still be ugly rather than bloated.
    - 5y ago

tgv 5y ago

I can't understand why people fall for such obscurified nonsense. The concepts are based on one person's rather poetic imagination, and they are, like everything else in psycho-analysis, notoriously lacking evidence of any relation to reality, even by the low standards of psychology. To think that it is more than time-passing for attention seeking rich people is delusional.

lmt55 5y ago
How do you know?
shimonabi 5y ago
Exactly. I don't agree with Chomsky about much lately, but he sure is right about postmodernism. It's nothing but posturing and obscurantism. When my fellow countryman Žižek says something interesting every now and then, I always view it as a broken clock being right 2 times a day.

xtiansimon 5y ago

Psychoanalysis cut from whole cloth, without recourse to brain scans. What could go wrong?

joeberon 5y ago

xtiansimon 5y ago

“…the Other is the abstracted mishmash of everyone you’re seeking the approval of.” Really? Seems like a term like ‘the Other’ should apply more broadly. Like calling poltergeist only the Civil War dead…

scarecrowbob 5y ago
In this form of analysis the capital-O Other has a specific meaning: "The capital-O Other refers to two additional types of otherness corresponding to the registers of the Symbolic and the Real. The first type of Other is Lacan’s “big Other” qua symbolic order, namely, the overarching “objective spirit” of trans-individual socio-linguistic structures configuring the fields of inter-subjective interactions. Relatedly, the Symbolic big Other also can refer to (often fantasmatic/fictional) ideas of anonymous authoritative power and/or knowledge (whether that of God, Nature, History, Society, State, Party, Science, or the analyst as the “subject supposed to know” [sujet supposé savoir] as per Lacan’s distinctive account of analytic transference). But, as already becomes evident in Lacan’s first few annual seminars of the early 1950s, there also is a Real dimension to Otherness. This particular incarnation of the Real, about which Lacan goes into greatest detail when addressing both love and psychosis, is the provocative, perturbing enigma of the Other as an unknowable “x,” an unfathomable abyss of withdrawn-yet-proximate alterity (in his 1895 Project for a Scientific Psychology, to which Lacan refers repeatedly, Freud depicts this alterity in the guise of the Nebenmensch als Ding [Neighbor-as-Thing])." https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lacan/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lacan/
- lmt55 5y ago
  In other (npi) words, the Other is the entity that we think about when we imagine how other people in general will think or feel. I believe in (say) the validity of money because I think that shopkeepers will accept it. But shopkeepers also only believe in it because they think other people believe in it, and those people that the shopkeepers want to pay also think that other people believe in it, including me and the original shopkeepers. We describe this state of affairs by saying that I believe in money since I know that the Other also does.

dimatura 5y ago

When I started my undergrad I was quite interested in various fields related to cognitive science, but in my country there was no way to major in that. I started a psychology major, and while I did get to take courses related to cogsci, and work part time in more neuroscience-y research, I also had to take several courses in clinical psychology and not one, but two! courses on psychoanalysis. They were taught by profs that were very much into Lacan. My conclusion after all this coursework (and several books outside the syllabus) is that while these ideas are sometimes interesting from a literary and, let's say, continental philosophy angle, they're of dubious clinical value and totally bunk from a scientific point of view. I had to stop myself from laughing sometimes when it came to the pseudo-mathematical formulations because they really are nonsense (for a good summary on that aspect, see Sokal's "Intellectual Impostures"). This wasn't the only reason, but I ended up switching majors to CS to focus on AI/ML (a good decision in retrospect!). Years later, I still think of Freudian and Lacanian ideas sometimes, though - they do have a certain appeal.

INGELRII 5y ago

General comment about theoretical systems like Lacanianism. They seem to have these common features: 1) They are self-contained systems. They may be interesting in the terms of sci-fi worldbuilding, but you must suppress critical thinking and just absorb them or they fall apart. 2) Experts tend to discuss in the terms of what the founder or important figures meant. Understanding the subject is interpreting what few people said and thought. Right and wrong is about right interpretation. 3) Advance happens by forking or dissolving into smaller groups with different interpretations. There are main divisions, sub divisions, and so on. I find hard to understand these kind of systems. There may be some initial core ideas that are interesting to ponder, but building whole system seems very limited and dogmatic. If there is no way to create synthesis or settle questions among experts who disagree, and the only way is to branch, is there anything there? -- edit: My null hypothesis for the effectiveness of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in clinical setting is that the theory or method is just a framework that A) helps analysts and patients that understand and work well together to find each other. Like Trekkie getting into therapy with a Trekkie fan therapist, or a Chatholic patient having therapist with Catholic backround. B) it gives some needed structure, the theoretical framework itself is not that important. C) the real help comes from interacting and talking with a person intimately. In this sense, anything goes as long as it's not outright harmful.

pfortuny 5y ago
The thing is we discard Aristotelian Natural Science as obsolete and nonsense (which it is) but somehow some people take these systems seriously because 'modern philosophy', whatever it is... To me this is completely unbelievable. Especially given the pseudointellectualism in which those systems are based. But, you know, 'psychoanalysis'...
- lmt55 5y ago
  Doesn't your example illuminate why systems of thought like psychoanalysis are useful? We currently don't know concretely how psychological phenomena like consciousness, happiness, selfhood, desire are formed or what they consist of. We know they exist, because we experience them 'in normal human experience'. Analogously, Aristotle did not know anything concrete about how atoms, energy, time, cells in the body worked. But his natural philosophy created a speculative framework to talk about these things, explore possibilities, and try to relate what was known or observed, to what might possibly be true. The potential advantage of modern theories like psychoanalysis, is that today we are able to make a clear distinction between falsifiable scientific knowledge, and other types of statements about the world. Thus, we can evaluate Lacan's thought on the correct level - as a form of philosophy which gives us a way of thinking about certain matters without attempting to provide definitive information.