The 'Return to Freud':

Within the work of Freud, there exists a deep theoretical ambiguity. In the formative years of his career, he had been influenced by the deterministic thought of Hermann von Helmholtz, and throughout his life he continued to believe that psychoanalysis' discoveries would be supported by neurology and physiology. However, in spite of this commitment to determinism in the realm of the psyché and his inclination towards biological modes of causal explanation, Freud's analytical pratice was grounded in the interpretive understanding of human speech. The balance between the determinstic and hermeneutical aspects of Freud's thought proved too unstable to maintain for his followers, and with Jung and Adler during his lifetime, and moreso after Freud's death, psychoanalysis began to fragment into a series of tendencies and schools. While theorists such as Wilhelm Reich emphasised the libidinal nature of psychic energy, most of Freud's later critics, such as Fromm, Horney and Binswanger, stressed the social and hermeneutic dimensions of psychoanalysis.

Against the backdrop of these divergent currents of psychoanalytic theory, Lacan called for a 'return to Freud'. For Lacan, later psychoanalysts had understood Freud's thought only superficially, and had so cautiously adhered to his ideas that they had served to block rather than to induce scientific investigation of the mental process. As well as attempting to disinter Freud's thought from various facile glosses that had been heaped upon it, Lacan also wished to correct certain parts of Freudian doctrine by reference to others. In his view, Freud's central achievement was the discovery of the unconscious. In the model of the psychical apparatus which Freud held from The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) to the 'metapsychological' papers of 1915, the unconscious appears as an independent system, opposed to the 'preconscious-conscious' system. It is this version of the unconscious that Lacan uses as his critical conceptual tool for correcting Freud from within. In Lacan's view, Freud's central insight was not that the unconscious exists, but that it has structure. This structure affects in innumerable ways what we say and do: in our dreams, slips of the tongue, jokes, symptoms, verbal and physical mannerisms, the unconscious seeks disguised expression, and in thus betraying itself becomes accessible to analysis. However, in order for us to know the structure of the unconscious, we must first be prepared to admit its inexhaustible capacity for displacement. On the one hand, a psychical energy causes and maintains repression, but on the other a different energy seeks to push the repressed contents of the unconscious in the preconscious-conscious domain. For Lacan, the unconscious speaks in the face of repression and censorship.

Lacan and the French Left:

Turkle and Ferdinand Dosse both claim that Lacan had a hand in the extremely contentious politics surrounding the pioneering psychoanalysis program at the University of Paris VIII at Vincennes. This was a program headed by Serge Leclaire, annexed to the philosophy department headed by Michel Foucault. At the outset all of the members of the program were also members of the Freudian School of Paris [French acronym EFP, for École Freudienne de Paris]. Lacan was not a member of the program himself, but his son-in-law was. The department suffered from a number of difficulties: one was that Lacan was not himself in charge. Leclaire became exasperated with the program's lack of autonomy, intellectual and institutional, both from Lacan and the philosophy faculty and left the University. The department was to go without a chair for three years.

Second, the program had limited degree status. A degree from Vincennes was not initially a clinical qualification to practise psychoanalysis, which caused considerable objection among the students. When Lacan gave a lecture at the University in 1969, in which students interrupted to complain about their lack of qualification through the program and refused to accept his objection that psychoanalytic knowledge was distinct from other forms of knowledge taught by the university and therefore should not be credentialed equally. In addition to his concern about granting clinical authority Lacan was against granting any academic credit for work in the program. Students unhappy with the program's seeming lack of interest in clinical experience left the program to undergo analysis or simply stopped attending lectures. Miller's inclusion in the program was a problem in that his avowed Maoism was in apparent contradiction with his university position given that Maoism set the abolition of the university as a goal. Such contradictory and conflicted attitudes toward authority and education are often taken as the hallmark of Vincennes generally (ironic jokes about a Gaullist strategy to preoccupy the many factions of the French academic left by giving them a university to administer), but this problem seems unusually acute in the psychoanalysis program.

Third, Lacan's subsequent involvement in the program, which began in 1974, was regarded as heavy-handed and was a further source of frustration for the clinically included. Lacan was retooling his views of psychoanalysis heavily and was determined to give it a more profoundly scientific character. He declared the previous efforts of the program a failure, appointed himself to a position in the department, and had Miller elevated to the position of chairman. In the same period Luce Irigaray proposed to offer a course on material developing in the wake of her first book on psychoanalysis and feminine sexuality and was rejected. This rejection was perceived as petty antagonism of a critic indicative of a further curtailment of intellectual freedom in a program seemingly shackled to Lacan's agenda. Later decision to grant clinical standing by degrees from the program were taken as signs of outright hypocrisy serving to assure Miller of unreasonable powers in Lacan's name.

In this period the EFP fell apart, sparked in large part by the rise of the parallel organization Confrontations, which René Major helped found with the support of Jacques Derrida. Confrontrations harnessed much of the dissent that emerged in the French psychoanalytic community in response to Lacan's insistence on mathematical aspects of his scientific conception of psychoanalysis. The clinical emphasis of Confrontations drew in those less inclined toward issues they viewed as hermetically theoretical or philosophical. In some respects Confrontations might be taken to be a necessary element of the psychoanalyic community, but the EFP went so far as to remove Denis Vasse, then serving as its vice president, from office for his participation. EFP broken down into factions, and a number of factions otherwise sympathetic to Lacan walked became restive because of what they viewed Miller's increasing hegemony as dictatorial in ambition. As questions were raised about the democratic nature of the EFP, Lacan became increasingly ill with colon cancer. A letter dissolving the EFP was circulated, affixed to a Lacanian signature whose authority was contested by allegations of a Miller forgery or dictation imposed upon a gravely ill Lacan. The matter splattered headlines everywhere. Louis Althusser showed up to denounce the proceedings of a meeting to found a new organization, the Freudian Cause. It became increasingly difficult to determine whether Lacan was speaking with his own voice or if Miller were appropriating his authority in a bid to consolidate power. Turkle has suggested that many who wished to think themselves loyal to Lacan expressed this in imagining that they were only defying the machinations of a scheming son-in-law.

Lacan died in hospital after a hemorrhage left him in a coma.

Criticism - Key concepts

• Mirror stage
• The Other
• The Name of the Father
• Unconscious as the language of the Other
• Oedipal drama and the Oedipal signification
• Objet Petit a
• Signifier/ Signified
• Desire
• The Drive
• Jouissance
• The Phallus
• Das Ding
• The Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic

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