Fantasy Ideology, Lacan

RE earnest at tallynet.com
Tue Aug 20 09:33:54 PDT 2002


But most Freudians are very leery of Lacan. I regularly read the major journals, including the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, and his influence on current analytic thinking is muted at most. The reasons for this are many. Personally, while I was initially intrigued by his drawing on Hegel and such, when I read of his unpredictable behavior in sessions, e.g. stopping them abruptly, I wrote him off as a puffed-up jerk. Among current analysts, I think Andre Green draws on his work in the most interesting and useful way, as in The Work of the Negative.

Warming to the subject -- har! -- here's this from Green: "But the Rome address on "The function and field of speech and language in Psychoanalysis" still bears its trace with the memorable analysis which Lacan made of the Fort-Da [Freud's account of a child tossing a spool over the edge of a bed and pulling it back up, working over the comings and goings of his mother, according to Freud]. It is indeed in these few paragraphs that the Hegelian inspiration of Lacan's thought finds it fullest expression, giving an account of the combined effects of childhood, the status of absence, the emergence of self-consciousness, alienation from one's own productions (sound, signifier and sign), the conflict between various aspects of the psyche in their relation to language and the subject's relationship to death. But this happy episode was not to last, for Lacan's thought was to respond to the siren calls of the signifier, and then to that of topography where references to languages and history were gradually supplanted by other, more 'scientific' ones."

In short, as Lacan blew off a developmental account of the subject, his notion of transference became reduced to theoretical coordinates, and this set up the short sessions in which he slid into playing the cranky Papa ordering the infantalized analysand out of the room.

----- Original Message ----- From: "Jeffrey Fisher" <jfisher at igc.org> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Tuesday, August 20, 2002 1:01 AM Subject: Re: Fantasy Ideology, Lacan


>
> On Monday, August 19, 2002, at 10:11 PM, Kelley wrote:
>
> > At 08:29 PM 8/19/02 -0400, RE wrote:
> >> Not sure why this is seen as Lacanian, it could be written by anyone
> >> who
> >> wants to emphasize the narcissistic aspect of someone's political
> >> involvement, or perhaps to characterize that person as a narcissist who
> >> cannot engage others except as objects.
> >
> > so what makes Lacanian political analysis different from conventional
> > Freudian analysis. In the hands of quite a few people, Lacanian
> > readings aren't much diff. from Freudian readings--at least on this
> > list.
>
> unless i'm mistaken--which i admit is quite possible--most good
> lacanians would consider themselves pretty good freudians . . .
>
> j
>
>



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