- by avoiding working with resistances, Lacan misses a way of collaborating with the analysand. Resistance analysis doesn't have to imply declarations by the analyst that the analysand is "in a state of resistance to an interpretation." Rather, it can start from looking closely at how the analysand shifts about in their presentation (the resistance appears as a counterpressure, an inhibition, to their own expression of desire), drawing this to their attention, and being able to *show* them that these deflections have meaning. E.g., the analysand talks about their pride in something they've done, starts to trail off, and you move to pick up what was going on at the shift. These days some of the most interesting work in psychoanalysis, by writers such as Paul Gray, Marianne Goldthorpe, and Fred Busch, places emphasis on this "close process analysis." It's not a complete model of analysis, but it's a good way of setting up part of the working relationship with the analysand, you don't do a lot of razzle dazzle depth interpretation, leaving them in awe of you and broadly doubtful of their own abilities.
- The idea of avoiding "triumphs of self-awareness" in favor of an appreciation of the decentered nature of subjectivity glides over major optional understandings of what self-awareness can involve. Leaving aside the question of whether accurate recovery of repressed memories is possible (it is, but it's hard to know when), "triumphs" can also include recovery of key organizing fantasies that involve reifications of the analysand. E.g. a patient suddenly recalls a fantasy played out with toy cars in which his younger brother was popping out in a James Bond ejector seat. The brother died shortly afterwards, and the patient thinks of himself as responsible, and the fantasy, in which he throws the brother out of the car, is a key organizer. It one-sidedly captures, "proves," that the patient is cruel. By bringing out this horrible "truth" about analysand in the session, its reifying potential lessens. I've never understood how talking about sliding signifiers adds much liberatory power to this conception of the therapeutic process. Attuning a subject to "the essential drift of language" seems disembodied, abstract, hyperexistentialist.
Randy ------------------------------------------------ review "Lacan based his ideas about the nature of the ego on Wallon's work with primates and their experience of confronting their image in a mirror. Lacan insisted that the ego in its essence is a paranoid structure based upon alienating identifications. The notion of autonomous ego functions, so precious to ego psychology, represents a denial of the narcissistic foundation of all perception and self-assessment. This is why Lacan distrusted academic psychology, ego psychology, and all other appeals to consciousness and cognition. The analyst must not engage the analysand at the Imaginary level, addressing his or her observing ego in the analysis of resistances. Nor should one rigidly interpret unconscious content. The analyst takes advantage of the polyvalent nature of important signifiers by highlighting them, thereby furthering the free associative process. The nonsensical aspect of signifiers (as purely formal sounds or letters) leads, through free association, to further sense. These signifiers have personal meaning to the analysand because they embody important memories and/or fantasies that have been repressed. Thus, the analyst never imposes content; the analysand discovers a kind of shifting content that is always conditioned by the essential drift of language. Analysis does not, Roudinesco concludes, "provoke any triumph of self awareness, any recovery of the unconscious by consciousness, or of the id by the ego. It uncovers, on the contrary, a process of decentering, in which the subject delves, through speech, into the loss of his mastery, that is, into his Oedipal state" (p. 255).
Roudinesco's statement concerning the analytic process seems both true (the oedipal situation is, by definition, a losing battle) and unsatisfying (as, no doubt, it is intended to be). Lacanian theory is radically formalist, and radically dismissive of content. One is left believing that within the psychoanalytic process all the analyst can do is punctuate signifiers. Lacanians claim this is the only convincing epistemological (and ethical) position the analyst can take. By intervening at the level of the analysand's speech, the analyst is said to be addressing the subject's unconscious but not appealing to, or influencing, the subject's conscious assent (i.e., the analyst addresses the "subject," not the "ego"). The analyst never puts the patient in the alienating position of having to agree or disagree with an interpretation.
However epistemologically pure this vision of analysis may be, we immediately encounter a number of logical impossibilities. What does it mean for the subject to elaborate his or her unconscious desire, if, 1) that desire is born of lack and insatiability (again, desire takes on a formal, nearly Imaginary, character), and 2) if the subject's ego is to be wholly mistrusted? What is the perceiving instrument of the analysand's unconscious desire if not some aspect of the analysand's consciousness? Further, why is the analyst's perception of important signifiers exempt from narcissistic influence [i.e. are we going overboard with the Phallus??] (and therefore epistemologically pure), while his or her interpretations of resistance or unconscious fantasy are unavoidably self-affirming and therefore alienating for the analysand? It is clear from the extended comments Roudinesco elicited from several of Lacan's analysands that they felt helped by him. Many felt understood, free to speak in a way they never had before. What is the nature of this help if the ego can only misuse it? Roudinesco attempts some answers to these questions, but she resorts, as most Lacanians do, to issues of ontology. Dialogue stops at this point, and one is left, like the alienated analysand, to agree or to disagree."