Jacques Lacan and the Structure of the Unconscious

Jan Miel
Yale French Studies, No. 36/37, Structuralism. (1966), pp. 104-111.
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Mon Jun 18 10:36:42 2007
Jan Miel
Jacques Lacan and the structure of the unconscious
Over thirteen years ago, a conflict which had been developing for
some time within the Socie'te' psychanalytique de Paris erupted into a
crisis, a crisis which ended in the resignation from the Society of five
of its leading members: Drs. Daniel Lagache, Jacques Lacan, Fran-
~oi s eDolto, Juliette Favez-Boutonier, and Blanche Reverchon-Jouve.
As none of these wished to separate himself from the International
Psycho-analytical Association, but only to escape the domination of
the hierarchy of the Paris Society, their case was taken up at the 18th
International Congress and they were to be considered for member-
ship as an independent French psychoanalytical group, to be called
the Socie'te' Franpise de Psychanalyse. In spite of the fact that there
was precedent for such a split (e.g., in the New York Society) in
which both groups were then recognized, the Central Executive ruled
that the five French analysts had in effect separated themselves from
the International Association by their resignation from the Paris So-
ciety; as a result, they were not even allowed to be present at the
discussion of their case, which, as was pointed out at the meeting,
was "anomalous and unfair."
As to the reasons for this split, the group headed by Lagache
and Lacan claimed it was purely a question of personalities. One of
the "personalities" involved, the reigning Princess of the Paris Soci-
ety, Dr. Marie Bonaparte, said on the contrary it was a question of
discipline in the matter of training. The two interpretations are per-
haps not incompatible: the sort of personality which would insist
on "discipline" (in the sense of total submission in a theoretical
disagreement) in a supposedly scientific society is bound to create
conflict and ultimately rebellion. In any case, "discipline" (or the
personalities representing it) carried the day in that 18th Congress;
none less than Miss Anna Freud reproached the Lagache-Lacan
group with that impardonable sin of "carrying the quarrel . . . into
the outer world" (they had in fact published a short circular clarify-
ing their reasons for resigning, primarily for the benefit of the stu-
dents in training, about half of whom chose to follow the new group) ;
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as a result Miss Freud refused to allow them even provisional mem-
bership pending an investigation.
A committee was formed for the purpose of investigating the
crisis in French psychoanalysis, to report back at the next congress.
At the 19th Congress, the President, Dr. Heinz Hartmann, simply
announced that thecommitteehad doneitswork andthat the Central
Executive had decided to exclude the new group from membership.
Thereason advancedwas that thegroupdid not offer adequatetrain-
ingfacilities, a reason which loses someof its point if one recallsthat
thenewSocie'te' Fran~aise de Psychanalyse had only been in existence
forthree years,while theParis Society, in all its decades of existence
had only just succeeded in establishing a training institute. Therewas
no discussion either at this Congress or at the earlier one of any of
the issues involved - even the question on which "discipline" had
tobe invoked wasneveropenlystated.l
Suchprocedures must inevitably seemto us in the "outer world"
- outside theinternational psychoanalyticEstablishment - grotesque
andbarbarous. Theypoint, however, tooneof thefundamentalissues
dividingthe Socie'te' Frangaise de Psychanalyse from the International
Association - if not from all its members. The question involved is
nothing less than, Is psychoanalysis a science? And it is his answer
to this question that will, I think, be seen ultimately to be the most
imporant contribution of Dr. Jacques Lacan, and perhaps the most
importantcontribution sinceFreud.
When the newly formed group held their own first Congress in
Rome in Septemberof 1953,Dr. Lacan's long paper on the "Func-
tion and Field of Language and the Word in Psychoanalysis" was
quickly hailed as akind of manifestoof the groupandbecame known
familiarly as the "Discourse of R ~ m e . " ~ He subsequently undertook
to edit a more-or-less annual publication entitled La Psychanalyse,
the first volume of which, on "Language and the Word," appearing
in 1956,attracted the attention of linguists, philosophers, anthropol-
lThe relevant parts of the Reports of the 18th and 19th International Psycho-Analytical
Congresses may be read in the Internutional Journal of Psycho-Analysis, XXXV (1954),
276-278; and XXXVII (1956), 122.
VeeLa Psychanalyse, No. 1 (Paris, P.U.F., 1956),81-166.
Yale French Studies
ogists, and literary men, as well as those specially interested in psy-
choanalysis. Subsequent volumes on psychoses, feminine psychology,
structuralism, etc. have maintained an extremely high level and Drs.
Lacan and Lagache now occupy positions of great prominence in
European psychoanalysis, in spite of the fact that their names are
still anathema to the International Association, and it is considered in
the worst possible taste for members even to allude to them, much less
read or quote them.
What then is Dr. Lacan's position on the scientific status of
psychoanalysis, and how does it relate to his position vis-8-vis the
International Association? Let us look first at the doctrine to which
he is opposed, a doctrine he finds all too widely accepted and which
he refers to as "neo-Freudian." It consists in regarding Freud as a
good doctor who was "lucky enough" (Ernest Jones' phrase3) to
make certain discoveries of great therapeutic value; however, Freud
never really knew what he was doing and, in his attempts to formu-
late a general theory explaining what he found, involved himself in
many inconsistencies or even in such "mystical" flights as the notion
of the primordial Father or of the death instinct. Consequently - as
this position has it - what must be preserved at all costs are the
outward forms of the psychoanalytic interview and the methods of
training new analysts, as well as those features of interpretation which
are most mechanical and thus most easily transmitted; Freud's con-
cern with the posteriority of his doctrine and his establishment of
the Central Committee are taken as evidence that he himself accepted
this view and wished to preserve an orthodoxy which was essential
to the functioning of the system as therapy.
Now one has only to read the correspondence of the period pre-
ceding the defection of Rank and Ferenczi to see that the last view is
totally erroneous: Freud's attitude was always that their pursuit was
scientific and that orthodoxy and conformism were completely out
of place.4 Jacques Lacan, however, goes much farther in what he
3In The Life and Wo r k of Sigmund Freud, I11 (New York, 1957), 44
Wee, e.g., in Jones, idem, p. 60.
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calls the "return to Freud." He maintains that Freud knew very well
what he was doing and that his theoretical formulations, although
naturally they will need both revision and expansion, are nevertheless,
in spite of the difficulties they present, the only sure guide we have
for a truly scientific development of psychoanalysis. For if it is ever
to develop beyond a mere shamanism whose power and prestige de-
pend entirely on a rigid set of initiation rites, if psychoanalysts are to
become more than the overpaid psychopomps they are on the way to
becoming (at least in this country), leading the upper middle classes
through their trivial personality crises to a happier "adjustment to
modern living" - then surely this development will have to be scien-
tific, achieved through a continual testing of new theories against a
background of discoveries already made, and of truths already ac-
quired.
It is easier to invoke scientific method, however, than it is to
apply it, especially in a new area, and one involving man's mental
life. But surely the basic requirements of any science are that its
object be defined and that it have a method of observation and
analysis appropriate to that object and capable of discovering its
laws. Now the object of psychoanalysis is simply what Freud dis-
covered, namely the unconscious. As to the method appropriate to
its study, Freud showed us where to observe it: in dream material
and free association, primarily. To find the tools for analyzing this
material, we have only to recall -as Dr. Lacan never tires of remind-
ing us - that all the material available to the analyst is verbal: what
is analyzed in the psychoanalytic interview is not the patient's dreams,
but the patient's report of his dreams. We should not be astonished,
then, that Freud spends so much time analyzing linguistic associations,
puns, slips of the tongue, etc.: linguistic analysis is in fact the method
appropriate to the study of the unconscious. At the time of Freud's
discovery, however, modern linguistics had not yet been invented
(Saussure's lectures were not published until 1916, sixteen years
after The Interpretation of Dreams), and Freud had to invent his own
categories and terminology to describe what he found. But as Dr.
Yale French Studies
Lacan shows, this terminology can be translated directly into the
terms and categories of modern structural linguistics, and the cor-
respondence between Freud's terms and system and the structures
discovered by modern linguistics is so close and so striking that Dr.
Lacan was led inevitably to what is perhaps his most startling con-
clusion, that the structure of the unconscious is the structure of lan-
guage.
Now the consequences of this principle are first and foremost
methodological. Linguistic analysis is thus the method appropriate to
the scientific study of the unconscious, not just because psycho-
analytic material is verbal, but because linguistics can be shown to
offer us the best available model to account for the structures and
laws of that material. Further, modern linguistic science has devel-
oped very rapidly and with its very substantial body of factual and
theoretical material, it now offers the one solid basis for the future
progress of a field which has been too long fallow, fertilized only by
vague biological analogies and an even vaguer adaptational psychology.
This does not mean that man is not biological or that we need
abandon such a concept as the instinctual drive to understand him.
The point is that the drive as it reports to us through the unconscious
is no longer the organic mechanism which the biologist can study and
account for: it is verbalized, and as a result its structure is entirely
different and needs different methods of analysis. In the same way
man's relation to society presents only vague and unfruitful parallels
with the adaptational life of lower organisms; to account for this
relation in detail one needs a structural anthropology - Lacan's
revolution in psychoanalysis has many affinities with the thought of
LCvi-Strauss.
But another consequence of the structural approach adopted by
Lacan is that our theory of the personality must be revised to account
for the peculiar dominance of language and linguistic structures in it.
Now one of the main themes of Dr. Lacan's thought over the years
has been the ambiguities in the Freudian theory of the ego - the ego
as reality-principle in the perception-consciousness system, alongside
Jan Miel
the destructive and even suicidal force of the ego in the theory of
narcissism. In an early paper, he outlined the theory of the impor-
tance of the mirror-stage in the early development of the child, that
is, the child's discovery of, and complete fascination with its own
image in a mirror. This represents, for the child, usually for the first
time, the image of itself as a unified controllable body; it is an image
which will govern his relations with other children, turning them
frequently into games of master and slave, actor and spectator. And
here the rejection of reality is obvious: for the reality of one's own
sporadically controlled, partially perceived body is substituted the
image of a unified, controllable one; for the real recalcitrant indi-
viduals in one's peer group, one attempts to substitute an obedient
image of oneself. And yet such a stage seems essential to the develop-
ment of an ego at all.
The development of language shows a similar necessity. The
abstractive nature of language, which in fact makes human knowledge
possible, amounts to a similar denial of reality. The imposition of
single forms or terms on the disparate variety of what we experience
is what enables us to know and control our environment, and is
essential to intellectual development. Yet this very essential function
of language, when it is not part of a human dialogue, and thus sub-
jected to the ordinary laws of human discourse and dialectical think-
ing, can apply all its powers of displacement, condensation, transfer,
to a denial of reality governed entirely by the pleasure principle. Thus
is constituted the "forgotten language" of the unconscious, an archaic
language lurking beneath our supposedly objective discourse, just as
our primal narcissism lurks beneath all our relations to others. Under-
lying both is an illusion, an illusion of autonomy, objectivity, stability,
where there should be a recognition of intersubjectivity and becom-
ing. The psychoanalytic interview, by suppressing normal dialogue -
the patient does not talk to the analyst, and the analyst does not reply
except to point out that the patient usually means something other
than what he says - recovers the archaic language and with it the
primal relationship expressed in the transference; the two, the linguis-
Yale French Studies
tic structure and the relational structure, are inseparable, for it is the
linguistic structure which renders possible the fixity of the fixation, the
repetitiveness of obsession.
In his analyses of the primal narcissism in the structure of the
personality, as well as in his effort to understand the unconscious in
terms of a larger philosophical framework, Dr. Lacan has been
greatly influenced by his extensive knowledge of phenomenological
and existential philosophy. For those within that tradition, his writ-
ings are filled with insights which have already stimulated new ways
of thinking about the person and his relation to meaning. But those
addicted to empiricism and logical analysis, to whom the Continental
way of philosophizing is both strange and suspect, should not ap-
proach his work with a bias - any more than existential thinkers
should be put off by his recourse to linguistic analysis and even to
combinatorial mathematics; his eclecticism is always founded on what
Freud's discovery and his own empirical observation seem to demand.
As will be seen from the text which follows, his thought is the very
opposite of an obscurantism or mysticism of any variety. It is rather
an attempt to bring the obscure and the mysterious - whether they
originate in the depths of our illusions and fantasies, or in the height
of our aspiration toward meaning and value - into the purview of a
thought that is rigorous and in the best sense scientific. And we need,
perhaps, to be reminded by Dr. Lacan that the goal of scientific rigor,
as also of psychoanalysis, is not to acquaint us with a "reality" which
is and must always be unspecifiable and unverifiable, but rather to
restore us to that domain to which as human beings and users of lan-
guage we are condemned and, which we commonly call the truth.
A final word about Jacques Lacan's style. As a friend or doctor
to some of the leading artists and poets of this century, and himself
an acute critic of literature, Dr. Lacan does not begrudge himself the
advantages of a complex literary expression. His style, called Mallar-
mean by his own colleagues, is distinctive and at times immensely
difficult - deliberately so, for reasons that he partly elucidates in the
introduction to the following text. In the translation of that text (in
Jan Miel
fact, one of his most accessible) the choice has been consistently for
clarity rather than for an imitation of the precise effect of the original.
In some cases a single- (not to say simple-) minded formulation
may have replaced what was more accurately presented through a
poetic ambiguity; however, in a text which is after all primarily didac-
tic, this seemed the only course to follow. Those who read French
will, it is hoped, turn to the original and enjoy its challenge as much
as did the translator.