Therapy versus Lacanian Psychoanalysis

Ian Parker

Psychoanalysis is incompatible with psychotherapy (Lacan 1979). The encounter between analyst and ‘analysand’ (who is usually positioned in therapeutic discourse as the ‘patient’ or ‘client’) will of course include elements of therapy and even of counselling. But the unravelling of the self and of a narrative of personal history that holds a sense of identity in place may be unbearable. This task of reflexive deconstruction that an analysand embarks upon in psychoanalysis is very difficult, and they may hesitate at times for good reason, or for bad reasons that it may be necessary to honour.

Lacanian psychoanalysis, faithful to the original Freudian project of subversion and enlightenment, has revolutionary implications for our understanding of the individual subject and for the transformation of society, but the subject of analysis has more to lose than their chains. Although the analysand may seek relief from a painful symptom, it is another matter entirely to give up a symptom that also by its very nature provides so much comfort and satisfaction. Practitioners of a Lacanian approach will carefully attend to those moments in which the analysis slides into therapy, and there will be times when the therapeutic aspects of the work will predominate. However, to put the Lacanian argument against therapy at its strongest here may also indicate how therapy, which appears to provide a progressive alternative to psychology, is so often merely its twin. Let us take nine elements that appear in various combinations – and weighted differently in cognitive, humanistic and psychodynamic schools – in therapy.

1. The attainment of empathy serves to sabotage what is most radical about psychoanalysis, for the sense that one has empathised with another serves to make them the same as oneself. This is the fundamental error of hermeneutics that aims to ‘understand’ the other. Against this reduction to the level of ‘imaginary’ identification, the task of the Lacanian psychoanalyst is ‘to obtain absolute difference’.

2. The attempt to bring about some form of harmonisation between aspects of the self serves to cover over the contradictions that make someone into a human subject in the first place. Instead of trying to make the unconscious consistent with consciousness or, worse, trying to wipe it out altogether, Lacanian psychoanalysis attends to the ways in which each subject deals with their own points of impossibility.

3. The notion that we should dispel illusion and bring about a more veridical relation to the social world serves to obscure the ways in which every image of ‘reality’ is always already suffused with fantasy. To speak the truth in Lacanian psychoanalysis has nothing to do with accurate perception, and moments of truth for the analysand will precisely be those moments when they find a way of speaking in and against what is usually taken to be empirically true.

4. The idea that we should search under the surface of spoken interaction and excavate a deeper reality behind language serves to mislead us as to where the unconscious is and how it works. The unconscious as ‘the discourse of the other’ lies in the gaps, stumbling points in speech, and for the subject to speak from the unconscious is for them to find a way out of the romantic fantasy that there is something hidden that can be unearthed.

5. The idea that we should educate someone about what is right or wrong or as to how they should understand themselves is anathema to Lacanian psychoanalysis, and serves to turn therapy into the privilege of an expert caste. Every moment the analyst thinks they know best is a moment of ethical failure that betrays the task of opening a space for the analysand to make of their own analysis their own ethical practice.

6. To attempt to normalise certain kinds of behaviour or experience may in the short term bring relief, but it serves to adapt the subject all the more efficiently to an idea of what is normal. Lacanian psychoanalysis does not work with any categories that divide the normal from the abnormal, still less does it treat the ‘ordinary unhappiness’ that can be made out of hysterical misery at the end of analysis into something ‘normal’.

7. To treat certain kinds of behaviour or experience as pathological merely serves to transform them from things that the analyst may not understand into elements of a moral and moralising narrative. Lacanian psychoanalysis does not use descriptions of clinical structure to identify what should be changed, but to comprehend the direction of the treatment, and ‘resistance’, for example, is viewed as ‘on the side of the analyst’ not the analysand.

8. To render treatment into a process that can be made susceptible to prediction as part of ‘evidence-based’ practice serves to close off what is most illuminating about the work of analysis. Lacanian psychoanalysis retrieves from Freud the notion of ‘deferred action’, in which it is only after an event that we make it into something traumatic or something that may then be narrated in and out of the analysis.

9. To promote rationality as the touchstone of conscious understanding serves to divide rationality from irrationality, and to reify both. Lacanian psychoanalysis opens a space for ‘rational’ reflection after moments in which ‘irrationality’ come into play through forms of ‘act’ that change the symbolic coordinates of a life and which then call for interpretation.

Different forms of therapy are an eclectic mixture of these elements, and it is understandable that some of them should be attractive to psychologists. However, empathy, harmony, empirical truth, hidden meanings, moral education, normalisation, pathologisation, predictive validity and rationality are not notions that challenge psychology. Therapy complements psychology, and ‘critical psychology’ that seeks access to therapy risks falling into line as yet another component of our old flexible friend, the psy-complex. The psy-complex, of course, also includes the talking and doing of ‘psychology’ way outside the consulting room, and the most pernicious forms of ‘therapy’ are now carried out at the outer reaches of the psy-complex, where they pretend to be part of a radical new alternative to old psychology. This is why therapeutic categories should be treated with suspicion by critical psychologists, and that suspicion should be directed as much to the practice of therapy when it operates as the soul of a spiritless condition under capitalism as to therapeutic ways of talking about the self, for these reproduce the worst of popular cognitivist, humanist or spiritualised forms of ideological mystification. Lacanian psychoanalysis, on the other hand, refuses therapeutic categories, and it refuses all forms of psychology in its search for something more critical.

References
Lacan, J. (1979) The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Harmondsworth: Penguin.