Technologies of the Self (was Re: The death of John L. Simon, Lincoln Brigade)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Ted:
>> Even when psychoanalysis attempts to address the social, it can only posit
>> it as if it were an individual writ large.  In psychoanalysis, history as
>> such doesn't exist -- only "ontogeny that recapitulates phylogeny" as in
>> _Totem and Taboo_, _Moses and Monotheism_, and _Civilization and Its
>> Discontents_.  Here, individualism and organicism work as evil dialectical
>> twins.
>
>this seems like a very strange claim, for a number of reasons.
>(1) practitioners, students, and advocates of psychonanalysis
>hardly sit around agreeing with each other about much, so how
>can you dismiss it as a unified and disembodied practice?

No kidding.  Schisms in the Freudian Church have been endless and may rival
those in Christianity:

Marcelle Marini writes in _Jacques Lacan: The French Context_ (1992):

*****   Consider the following extraordinary situation: in France, as of
July 1985, to my knowledge, no fewer than _fifteen_ groups with different
names all claimed to be practicing the most orthodox form of
psychoanalysis, namely Freud's.  Yet, there is no guarantee that since then
one of them has not split up, shut down, or, for that matter, that several
friends didn't decide out of the blue to form a group by creating a new
association according to the law of 1901.  Because the fear of a takeover
is very strong, such an association would need meticulously elaborated
statutes and a complicated theoretical preamble in order to distinguish
itself from the others. (9)    *****

This not even counting the "unorthodox," such as Jungians.

But they are all still the technologies of the self (or the hermeneutics of
the self), as Foucault said.  Psychoanalysis is a "secular" heir to
Christianity, and in this sense, Lacan is correct to express his admiration
for St. Paul, Luther, etc.  "As everybody knows, Christianity is a
confession" (Foucault, "Sexuality and Solitude" [1980]).  And so is
psychoanalysis.  Foucault writes:

*****   I would like to underline that the Christian discovery of the self
does not reveal the self as an illusion.  It gives place to a task which
cannot be anything else but undefined.  This task has two objectives.
First, there is the task of clearing up all the illusions, temptations and
seductions which can occur in the mind, and discovering the reality of what
is going on within ourselves.  Second, one has to get free from any
attachment to this self, not because the self is an illusion, but because
the self is much too real.  The more we discover the truth about ourselves,
the more we have to renounce ourselves; and the more we want to renounce
ourselves the more we need to bring to light the reality of ourselves.
That is what we could call the spiral of truth formulation and reality
renouncement which is at the heart of the Christian techniques of the self.
("Sexuality and Solitude")   *****

The purification of desire -- whose truth, according to Lacan, is lack --
is the objective of both.  Time to join a monastery?

Yoshie