Rogers, A. G. (2009) ‘A Place for Lacan in Critical Psychology? Four Memos and a Gap’,
Annual Review of Critical Psychology, 7, pp. 5-15
http://www.discourseunit.com/arcp/7.htm
A PLACE FOR LACAN IN CRITICAL PSYCHOLOGY?
FOUR MEMOS AND A GAP
Annie G. Rogers
Introduction
It would seem a wonderful idea to offer Lacan a place at the table and to use
his seminars and the extensions of his contributions to psychoanalysis beyond
his death to further a series of conversations with scholars and activists
associated with the most critical sector of psychology. And yet, for what ends, I
wonder, and with what possible distortions?
The field of critical psychology has been emerging over several decades.
It is scattered across different languages, cultures and continents, and
comprised of researchers and activists who have engaged with projects as
various as a critique of discourse analysis from a feminist perspective, to a
cultural-historical accounting of psychology and its effects on particular ethnic
groups (Gill, 1995; Burman, 1998; Pickeren, 2004). Adherents of critical
psychology participate in activities that include work for social justice, human
rights, and mental health liberation across the globe, including the North and
South Americas, Great Britain, Germany and South Africa, to name a few
locations. These various international enterprises, while still quite fragmented
(Sloan et al., 2006), rely on a critique of the science of psychology and a
challenge to its moral, political, and scientific status (Fox & Prilleltensky,
1997). Critical psychology projects around the globe protest the way psychology
treats human beings as objects, and pursue humanistic ideals of the liberation
and well being of local groups through community psychology initiatives (see
for example, Martín-Baró, 1994; Nelson & Prilleltensky, 2004). Until recently,
Lacan was not of much interest to critical psychologists, and, with a few
exceptions (Billig, 1999; Malone & Friedlander, 2000; Parker, 1997), the field
as a whole did not take part in the ‘world of psychoanalysis’, Lacanian or
otherwise.
I come to this essay as a clinical psychologist who is entirely disaffected
from my own field, and as a researcher in the narrative tradition who has
found the framing of qualitative methods in psychology out of synch with my
thinking and that of psychoanalysis more generally. As a professor in a unique
liberal arts college in the USA, Hampshire College, I invite undergraduates into
a serious engagement with psychoanalysis through Freud and Lacan. I
associate myself with the Freudian School of Québec, its practices and the
various paths it creates into an ethics. I offer four memos, a set of sketches, to
open up conversations—in order to create a gap in thinking where, if it is
possible, Lacan might enter as a perturbing presence.
5
Rogers, A. G. (2009) ‘A Place for Lacan in Critical Psychology? Four Memos and a Gap’,
Annual Review of Critical Psychology, 7, pp. 5-15
http://www.discourseunit.com/arcp/7.htm
Memo one: in which a discourse must crumble
For a long time critical psychology has embraced discourse as key to
understanding social processes and social constructions (see for example,
Potter and Wetherell, 1987; Gergen, 1999). Enlarging the scope of this
enterprise by turning to Lacan provides a new turn in considerations of
discourse. Ian Parker (2001, 67) offers an analysis of psychology through
Lacan’s four discourses. He remarks that psychoanalysis offers “quite different
understandings of subjectivity” for critical psychology. Yet critical psychology
itself is part of and implicated in traditions and practices that are not easily
compatible with psychoanalysis—for instance, the idea that we are storied into
being (Curt, 1994), or the advocacy for particular mental health practices,
ideas that are simply not compatible with the focus of psychoanalysis: the
subject of the unconscious.
For Lacan, the world of the human is structured by discourse, but it is
not enough to analyze the various discourses that structure a society (Lacan,
2007). What has become inaccessible to society, to science, and I would
venture also to many critical psychologists, is the human being as the subject
of the unconscious. The unconscious of Lacan’s theory, like that of Freud’s, is
inaccessible to us all, except in one way: through the effects of speaking, and in
particular of speaking about dreams, speaking into the ‘unsayable’ (Rogers,
2006), speaking and slipping into what was not intended, speaking and
wandering into connections that startle the speaker with a new knowledge, or
savoir, that she1 will build as the unconscious - in opposition to consciousness
and the discourse of the ego.
The discourse of Lacan, then, is not only a matter of the four discourses
he defined for us to consider - the discourses of the master, the university, the
hysteric, and the analyst—but also a matter of a discourse that crumbles in
psychoanalysis. At the heart of psychoanalysis is the imperative that the
discourse of the ego, (what we believe, what we hold most dear, what we aspire
to be), must crack and crumble and fall in order for the unconscious to offer a
new logic and language to guide our ethics. And what replaces the discourse of
the ego? Horror: the horror that fantasies and repetitions have guided us in all
our choices without our knowing.
To engage with discourse as a kind of analysis of social understandings,
interpersonal negotiations or performances, - that is, as a kind of dance with
words to elaborate a theory - misses the point of Lacan’s discourse, which was
designed to undermine such enterprises, to tickle the unconscious in his
listeners, and to further the aims of psychoanalysis as a practice of ethics, a
point I’ll take up in the third memo.
I alternate the use of she and he as personal pronouns to refer to human beings in general
through the use of the particular.
1
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Rogers, A. G. (2009) ‘A Place for Lacan in Critical Psychology? Four Memos and a Gap’,
Annual Review of Critical Psychology, 7, pp. 5-15
http://www.discourseunit.com/arcp/7.htm
Memo two: in which the Other is not a social “other”
Critical discourse analysis commonly constructs the “other” as though the
“other” were a person or an outcast group relative to the speaker or writer
whose discourse has been examined. For instance, a critical discourse
analysis of children’s books published in the USA that used India as an
imagined space, argues that the books “maintain popular expectations about
India that are dictated by colonial stereotypes,” and show a “discomfort with
multiculturalism” by creating “a concept of the ‘other’ which is socially,
temporally and spatially removed from the here and now” (Roy, 2007, 10). As I
read this analysis of language, I wonder about the subject speaking. To whom
or what, does he speak? This notion of the “other” as a societal grouping that
creates stereotypes removed from “the here and now” is very far from the
subject of the unconscious and the effects of speaking in psychoanalysis.
Perhaps the best place to begin is with the subject before he is a subject
at all. The human being, born into human society through language,
experiences language as a break, a trauma that alienates the being from the
natural functioning of his body by writing over it with signifiers (Cantin, 2002).
As the child becomes a speaking being, he makes an address in order to be
recognized. That circuit of recognition, whereby a gesture becomes a word, or a
word a gesture, depends upon his reading of the Other, and here the Other is
the desire of the Other, and that is, most emphatically, not another individual.
Rather, for Lacan, the Other is “the locus of speech and, potentially, the locus
of truth, which can be called on, even from the position of the unconscious”
(Lacan, 1977, 129), and which, latent or not, is always already there.
Before speaking, during what Lacan calls the mirror stage, the infant
makes a profound mis-recognition in a world of doubles and images that Lacan
calls the imaginary. The infant becomes alienated as a subject through an
image, an ideal of his own coherence that is pure illusion. This illusion makes
a space for the ascent of the ego, and “the ego hasn’t a clue about the subject’s
desire” (Lacan, 1988, 44). As the young child begins to speak, he makes
himself recognizable through this ideal image and the limits of the receivable
determined by his society, which structures what can and cannot be conveyed
through his discourse. Yet, in speaking, he also creates a space for truth to
break through beyond the limits of the ego. How does this happen? The effect
of speaking is an anticipation of something already there. Lacan says, “[T]he
signifier, by its very nature, always anticipates meaning by unfolding its
dimension before it” (Lacan, 2002, 153). As we enter speaking, we are caught
in a chaining of signifiers from which there is no escape. We speak on two
levels at once: on the one hand, we know what we consciously mean and wish
to convey, and on the other hand, we do not hear our own words as they speak
something quite other than what we intend to say. In this latter sense, truth
has a chance to speak, in spite of all our efforts to shut it up, as we also speak
to the Other of the unconscious.
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Rogers, A. G. (2009) ‘A Place for Lacan in Critical Psychology? Four Memos and a Gap’,
Annual Review of Critical Psychology, 7, pp. 5-15
http://www.discourseunit.com/arcp/7.htm
For Lacan, in fact, “the unconscious is the discourse of the Other” (Lacan,
1977, 16), and human desire is “the desire of the Other” (1977, 38). These two
ideas, central to Lacan’s thinking, imply that we do not use language as a tool
of communication, but rather language uses us to have its say. Through
speaking we are bound in the circuit of the Other in discourse and desire.
Lacan asks, “[W]ho then is this Other to whom I am more attached than I am
to myself, since, at the heart of my ascent to my own identity it is still he who
agitates me?” (2002, 172). There is something of endless desire and wandering
in the subject’s relation to the symbolic and the Other. There is also a danger,
a sense of the nearness of death. Richard Boothby (2001) sums up the
position of the speaking subject very well:
Carried along by a stream of signifiers, the speaking subject can at any
moment be delivered over the falls. Entrance into the signifying chain
replays the essential paradox of the encounter with death: the only
certainty is the presence of uncertainty. What is “deathly” about the
subject’s relation to the symbolic is precisely the way it tends to frustrate
the dream of simple coherence promised by the imaginary (157).
The coherence of much of what passes as a critical discourse analysis,
with its overlay of identity politics, cracks apart in relation to the speaking
subject, that is, he who is the subject of speech through the Other of the
unconscious.
Memo three: from castration to a singular truth to ethics
Several times already I have invoked the idea of “truth” without any
explanation of what Lacan means, anticipating this memo in which I might
make a space for his idea of truth, which I interpret both through his works
and my particular path into truth.2
For Lacan truth is eruptive, coming from the unconscious. Truth
emerges as cause, après coup, retroactively. And truth is a savoir, knowledge
built in relation to the unconscious. Because there are limits of the symbolic,
of language to ‘say,’ we carry the residual of the real, what is outside of
imagining or naming. Truth does not reside in the reflections of a self-reflective
subject, and, as I hope I’ve made clear, this is not the subject of the
unconscious. Truth is, perhaps, a phrase that cannot lay a ghost to rest.
Something persists within and beyond language. What is this insistence, and
what is ghostly about it? Truth leaves a trace, a trail, through the effects of
speaking, and psychoanalysis, based on speaking, becomes a thread
The path I articulate has been made through my own encounters with the unconscious in
analysis and beyond, through my reading of Lacan, and through my ongoing association with
The Freudian School of Quebec.
2
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Rogers, A. G. (2009) ‘A Place for Lacan in Critical Psychology? Four Memos and a Gap’,
Annual Review of Critical Psychology, 7, pp. 5-15
http://www.discourseunit.com/arcp/7.htm
connecting signifiers in relation to deciphering dreams, a gateway to
unconscious fantasies and emerging symptoms of the body (the body will have
its say), until the point that discourse crumbles, and the ego flounders, without
a compass. The analyst, originally the sujet supposé a savoir translated as the
“subject supposed to know” (Lacan, 1977, 233), is a construction, for the
analyst is actually split and barred from knowing, and has no answers when it
comes to the analysand’s desire. What grinds to a halt then, for example, is the
discourse of the hysteric, making complaints and seeking answers externally
(only to refute them). Then the analysand takes up something else: a new
ethics.
Castration is an experience of irreversible loss in which one discovers
that the Other as the locus of truth is lacking, as the subject is also lacking.
This experience has nothing to do with the loss or lack of a physical organ, but
works as a metaphor for a radical loss of jouissance3 in the Other as a site
where the subject may be made whole. This loss of jouissance opens up the
Other as an experience of lack so irreversible that it is a an experience of nonbeing. What lies on the other side of castration is the freedom to discover
desire, desire as endless, based on a lack that can never be filled. As Lacan
says in Ecrits (1992, 324), "Castration means that jouissance must be refused
so that it can be reached on the inverted ladder (l'èchelle renversè) of the Law of
Desire”.
But that jouissance, refused, cut off from the subject in the social link, is
also the source of a singular truth—truth as cause—that cannot be ignored by
the subject of the Other of the unconscious. To go through castration is to
discover a problem of tragic dimensions: it is not possible to live without that
jouissance coming from the unconscious, a jouissance that cannot be
symbolized and in that way enter the social link, so something new must be
done with this jouissance. This is not a problem that has a solution. It is a
problem that creates a narrow path into a new ethics, an ethics—in relation to
desire.
Ethics is not a matter of locating oneself in relation to social privileges or
grievances, nor is ethics a moral code for a society, nor a set of political
imperatives, nor a blueprint for the acts of a group. Lacan wrote about ethics
in relation to desire, and did this in relation to Sophocles’ Antigone (Lacan,
1992). From the start of the play, she lives her life, knowing what is already
lost to her, and in this way moving beyond what limits others in this family and
societal drama. She does not imagine the Other as complete or whole, as
having any answer that pertains to her situation in relation to her brother’s
unburied body. She has moved into the position of the barred subject, alone,
facing her death. In this way, she confronts the signifier of a lack in the Other
at the symbolic level, and knows that no other can define her being through a
Jouissance is an elusive term that changes several times in Lacan’s thought. Jouissance is a
constant drive; it goes beyond the pleasure principle, and is experienced as an anxiety that
threatens to overwhelm the subject; it is “a path toward death” (Lacan, 1991, 17).
3
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Rogers, A. G. (2009) ‘A Place for Lacan in Critical Psychology? Four Memos and a Gap’,
Annual Review of Critical Psychology, 7, pp. 5-15
http://www.discourseunit.com/arcp/7.htm
fixed law to live by, that the other is castrated, just as she is. She is no longer
a person who acts simply of her own free will; rather she lives in an ethical
position that pertains to the ethics of desire. She encircles the lost thing, to
mark a place of a lost cause as the signature of her life. For Antigone, the act of
burying Polynices marks a place for his being with her own death, felt as her
destiny, written by the gods.
What does this have to do with psychoanalysis? Towards the end of
Seminar VII (1992, 319), Lacan argues, “[D]esire is nothing other than that
which supports an unconscious theme, the very articulation of which roots us
in a particular destiny, and that destiny demands insistently that the debt be
paid, and desire keeps coming back, keeps returning, and situates us once
again in a given track, the track of something that is specifically our business”.
Lacan defined a single ethical imperative: not to cede ground relative to one’s
desire. In this position, one moves from being bound to an Other in the
demands of others, or an Other as a symbolic authority, to the discovery that
one has only one’s own unconscious as Other, as a companion with respect to
the risks of desire.
Memo four: the transmission of psychoanalysis
The transmission of psychoanalysis is not a matter of becoming familiar with
the texts of psychoanalysis, nor of learning to make use of the translations of
Lacan’s orated seminars. Psychoanalysis does not depend upon taking a set of
courses, following the program of an institute, mastering key points of theory,
or amassing hours of supervised cases and a required number of years on the
couch. One can sit at the head of a couch and make interpretations, even be
certified as a psychoanalyst, and yet remain unable to transmit psychoanalysis
as an experience of the unconscious that constrains an analysand to discover a
new ethics, an ethics founded on desire. What drew me into psychoanalysis, first through Lacan (in the company of those who could guide me as a reader),
and then through the Freudian School of Quebec and its use of the Passe4, - is
the question of ethics with respect to psychoanalysis and its transmission.
To speak to the idea of transmission, I must now turn to Lacan’s objet a,
the object-cause of desire.5 This is not easy for me to formulate, in part
because it is so far from the field of critical psychology, and in part because I
want to find words that will evoke a sense of what is at stake in the objet a.
Since the objet a does not exist in reality, I will have to speak around it. At a
certain point in analysis, - beyond assuming castration and a reorienting of the
The Passe, invented by Lacan, is the means by which analysands become analysts by
transmitting their experiences of encountering the unconscious beyond analysis, through a
procedure he invented. The Freudian School of Québec has elaborated the Passe into two
phases: Passe a la Entrée, and Passe Conclusive.
5 The objet a is understood here as an object that can never be attained, but sets desire in
motion. There is an important implication for treatment; the analyst must be able to situate
himself as a semblance of the objet a, the cause of the analysand’s desire.
4
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Rogers, A. G. (2009) ‘A Place for Lacan in Critical Psychology? Four Memos and a Gap’,
Annual Review of Critical Psychology, 7, pp. 5-15
http://www.discourseunit.com/arcp/7.htm
subject with respect to the Other and the jouissance of the Other - the barred
and divided subject, cast into solitude in relation to her own unconscious,
assumes the place of the cause of desire. She seeks a form for the traumatic
cause of her own advent as a subject. The desire of the Other, experienced as
an intimate foreignness within, leads to the traversing of the fundamental
fantasy, inferred in relation to the subject’s position with respect to the Other
as language and desire. It is not possible to know directly that which brought
her into her existence as a subject, and yet, to transmit psychoanalysis, she
must inhabit that which caused her.
Freud’s maxim, “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden,” translated as “Where id
was, there ego shall be,” but perhaps more accurately “Where it was, there I
shall be,” has been construed as a movement from the unconscious to
consciousness at the end of analysis. But, for Lacan, rather than shoring up
the ego through psychoanalysis, the analysand comes to a place where he
must alter the "moorings of his being" (cf. Lacan’s Écrits, p. 527). “Where it
was, there I shall be” may then be understood in the following way. Where “it”
was the discourse of the Other, riddled with the Other’s desire, that caused me
as a subject of desire—“there” the subject says “I”: I chose that, that which I
am unable to control, which shaped my body, my life, and all my suffering.
The subject, at the end of analysis, seeks the hallucinated object, the lost
cause of desire, which is the objet a as a bit of the real, a fragment of lethal
jouissance that causes desire, and without which, life is not worth living.
Willy Apollon, in concert with Danielle Bergeron and Lucie Cantin, and
the members of the Freudian School of Quebec, articulates an elaboration of
Lacan’s objet a, as the hallucinated object of the voice, an object falling from
the effraction of the being before birth, carving out through jouissance a
singular desire. In Apollon’s own terms, the analysand is driven into an ethical
exigency through the experience of the Passe to search for this hallucinated
object:
In the attempt to find everything that could help him articulate his
unconscious position within the fundamental fantasy, he will then go
back to the key signifiers of his analytic experience and to the letter
where jouissance inscribed itself within his body at the moment of the
effraction, the response of the drive, and the work of the symptom. It is
within the midst of this search for unconscious markers of what
underlies subjectivity that a hitherto unsuspected representation of the
unpresentable object will impose itself upon the subject and plunge him
into a work of construction, which, as its forms impose themselves, will
reveal how the object taking shape in the work had, at the various stages
of the process, as well as in every aspect of his life, always been at the
heart of the logic that articulated his being in relation to a jouissance
that he never did and never will be able to control. The attachment of
the subject to this real then becomes the motor of his very existence
(2002: 37-38).
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Rogers, A. G. (2009) ‘A Place for Lacan in Critical Psychology? Four Memos and a Gap’,
Annual Review of Critical Psychology, 7, pp. 5-15
http://www.discourseunit.com/arcp/7.htm
Having fully acceded to castration, discovering the origins of becoming a
subject, and the assembling of objet a in this way, the analysand becomes a
true analyst. “The motor of his very existence” drives the transmission of
psychoanalysis.
Here you can see how far we are from the world of psychoanalysis as
ideology or theory, how far we are from the removal of symptoms in the name
of good mental heath, or for the good of society. I hope that it is possible to
discern, even if you cannot make full sense of these passages, how close
psychoanalysis is to the heart of what it means to be human, failing, flawed,
without the possibility to present that unpresentable jouissance within us, and
yet fully responsible for that remaining bit of jouissance that keeps us each
alive as it drives us in our speech and acts.
A gap, and the invitation to fall into it
A gap may be understood as a discrepancy, and a lack. I will first speak to the
idea of discrepancy. Critical psychology, a set of practices and methods,
aspirations and social justice projects, created in response to a crucial and ongoing critique of the field of mainstream psychology, has a distinct and crucial
place in psychology. Peter Gilford (2007, 5) argues, “As cognitive neuroscience,
managed care, psychopharmacology, and larger market forces drive
mainstream psychology to a full embrace of a narrow scientific determinism,
the perspective of critical psychology has become more important than ever
before”. Critical psychology is a vital project in the face of recent trends within
psychology; the implication of no critique whatsoever is chilling. Although
Lacan has been critical of psychology, particularly ego psychology, his critique
called for a return to Freudian psychoanalysis and the elaboration of key
Freudian ideas with respect to the unconscious. The discrepancy here between
the two fields is striking. Critical psychology is largely a field of the social and
political, and Lacanian psychoanalysis is a field of the Other of the
unconscious.
Might these two different enterprises speak to one another? I’m not
certain of an answer here, which opens up a gap as a lack, an uncertainty. I
am not certain because in the first place I do not think it is possible to
transpose the terms of one field and use them in another when the two fields
are based on vastly different premises. In this case, I believe that they are
vastly different in the ways each defines its own logic regarding cause, truth,
and knowledge.
I could argue, in fact, that each field refuses or remains
ignorant of the accepted modes of thought of the other, and the modes of
transmission of the two fields is also very different.
And yet I remain poised here with a question of how the alterity of the
unconscious in Lacan’s definition of the subject (the subject of language and
truth) might inform a field that radically refuses the objectification of the
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Rogers, A. G. (2009) ‘A Place for Lacan in Critical Psychology? Four Memos and a Gap’,
Annual Review of Critical Psychology, 7, pp. 5-15
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human, as critical psychology has done and continues to do. I realize that in
the world of psychoanalysis, even and perhaps especially in Lacanian circles, a
glib grasp of theory can obscure crucial questions of how the ethics of the
analyst meet with the failures of a social world. I have no answer to that
problematic, nor would I trust anyone else’s answer. But the question stays,
and perhaps there is something at this juncture of critical psychology and
psychoanalysis that calls out for us to fall into a gap between these fields.
To explain this invitation, I must cross back to the idea of the gap as a
lack. The idea of lack is connected with desire in Lacan’s thought. This is the
case for the young child, who, encountering the barred Other in castration,
enters the symbolic register in which language points toward a receding
horizon, with something always unsaid and unsayable. Encountering the lack
in the experience of analysis, the analysand comes to see that signifiers
encircle the work of the dream to its naval, “a knot of the real” (Bergeron, 2002,
84). The analysand eventually comes to see that this is not particular to
dreams, but there is a lack in the Other of language and desire. This
realization of lack opens up the analysand’s desire, and, knowing that desire
comes alive in the face of a lack, the analysand stops seeking answers and
satisfactions that close down desire. The analysand comes into a new relation
to the Other. Lacan (1992, 309) alludes to this relation through the poet Paul
Eluard, ‘le dur desir de durer’—‘the difficult desire to endure’—and says, “[T]hat
is nothing more than the desire for desire”.
For each field, what must be kept alive in the face of a lack? This is the
question at the heart of my invitation to fall into a gap, a gap that
acknowledges certain discrepancies, yes—but more importantly, a gap as a
place where there are no answers, where assimilation is not possible, and
where the questions we each raise in our separate fields lead nevertheless to
imperatives to act—in speech and in deeds—to sustain our humanity through
desire, against the odds of our own destruction and implication in it.
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minorities and American psychology, 1966-1980. History of Psychology, 7(1), 564.
Potter, J. and Wetherell, M. (1987). Discourse and social psychology: Beyond
attitudes and behaviour. London: Sage.
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Rogers, A. G. (2009) ‘A Place for Lacan in Critical Psychology? Four Memos and a Gap’,
Annual Review of Critical Psychology, 7, pp. 5-15
http://www.discourseunit.com/arcp/7.htm
Rogers, A. (2006). The unsayable: The hidden language of trauma. New York:
Random House.
Roy, S. (2007-05-23). “A Critical Discourse Analysis of Representation of Asian
Indian Folktales." Online PDF:
http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p171178_index.html.
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Biographic details:
Annie G. Rogers, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychoanalysis and Clinical Psychology
at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. She is a member of The
Boston Circle of the Freudian School of Québec, as well as a member of The
College of Psychoanalysts in Ireland. Her work traverses two fields:
psychoanalysis and creative writing. The recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship in
Ireland, and a Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard University, she is the author of A
Shining Affliction (Penguin Viking, 1995), Charlie’s Chasing the Sheep (Lismore
Books, 2003), and The Unsayable: The Hidden Language of Trauma (Random
House, 2006), as well as memoir, short fiction and poetry. Dr. Rogers is
currently engaged in considerations of psychoanalysis and ethics through
writing and aesthetics in relation to the Freudian School of Quebec.
Address for Correspondence:
annierogers@gmail.com
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