Lost in Cognition

Psychoanalysis and the Cognitive Sciences

Eric Laurent, Adrian Price

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429915864
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book examines the pretensions of the new paradigm in psychology that has put itself forward as the model for the future of the clinical disciplines, thereby seeking to put paid to psychoanalysis. What is this paradigm shift? It goes by the name of cognitive-behaviourism. Where does it come from? From the United States. Until the nineteen-sixties, behavioural psychology had enjoyed a certain prestige in the US. It was later disqualified by the objections from the linguist Noam Chomsky who held that no learning procedure could ever account for linguistic ability. This ability was surely innate, Chomsky argued, and so he set about hunting out the organ of language. Behaviour had to be complemented by a machine for taking cognisance, a machine that was innate and which conformed to the post-Chomskyan model. It took the discipline some thirty years to deck itself out in new clothes. The advances in biology, in neurology, and in the nebula that resulted from them under the 'neuroscience' label, oversaw this change.

PART I

HOW IS THE SUBJECT INSCRIBED?

CHAPTER ONE

Chomsky with Joyce

The following lecture was delivered at the École de la Cause freudienne on 11 April 2005. Under Serge Cottet’s chairmanship, Jacques Aubert and Éric Laurent were invited to present the recently published Book of Lacan’s Seminar, Le Sinthome.

When you look at Jacques Lacan’s admirable Seminar XXIII in the form it has now found,¹ with its superb and serene knots, matched up with Lacan’s 1975 lecture, with the surprising “Reading notes” by Jacques Aubert, and finally with Jacques-Alain Miller’s “Note threaded stitch by stitch”, one can scarcely imagine our dread back then as we sat in the audience of Lacan’s Seminar.

In November 1975, we could but take measure of our unfathomable ignorance.

First of all, there was Joyce, whom we thought we had read when we were younger. We knew that this was just a first entry into reading Joyce, but we did think we had crossed the threshold. Now all of a sudden we found ourselves back on the outside. We simply weren’t on the right page. We would have to start from scratch. It was “all hands on deck” to try to get hold of a copy of the Viking Press edition of Finnegans Wake, which wasn’t easy to come by. The Richard Ellmann biography was essential reading, as were a host of other items.

Our first impression was that this was a vast undertaking. And what about the knots! And the diagrams! How would we ever make head or tail of it? We formed work groups, cartels. The blind leading the paralytic. We soon got through the available books on the knots—there weren’t many at the time. We lived in a kind of empty trance and each new session of the Seminar gave us the feeling that there was no way of finding a road into the Seminar itself.

Suddenly, in December 1975, a glimmer of light came peeping through. Lacan had just got back from the US and was speaking about Chomsky (Lacan, 2005a, pp. 27–43). We were acquainted with Chomsky. We had been able to take advantage of the lessons of Jean-Claude Milner, who was and has long remained the leading French Chomskyan. We thought, therefore, that we might find something here, some point of support. Next, in February 1976, a lesson of the Seminar ended with the following declaration: “Mad […]? […] this is not a privilege, […] in most people the symbolic, the imaginary and the real are tangled up […].” (Lacan, 2005a, p. 87)

We were starting to understand. For some of his audience a door was opening: we were hearing the flipside to “On a question prior to any possible treatment of psychosis” (Lacan, 2006, pp. 445–458). What had been established, or so we believed, as a radical distinction between madness as a result of foreclosure, and that which is not affected by foreclosure, was now being displaced. Between neurosis and psychosis, which hitherto stood apart like two distinct continents, there emerged a passage of generalisation. We didn’t understand everything, but an altogether different world was fanning out for us, which we were just starting to glimpse. Likewise, the knots looked to be a theoretical instrument that was highly abstract (a long way from where we were standing) and yet clinical and pragmatic. The many indications about rectifying the “slipped knot” by means of the sinthome lay in this direction.

Amongst these indications, the discussion on Joyce’s Catholicism that followed the lecture which you, Jacques Aubert, delivered in March 1976, holds an important place (Lacan, 1977a, pp. 16–17). Jacques-Alain Miller, Philippe Sollers and yourself each spoke on that occasion, and by way of reply Lacan gave some utterly fresh clinical indications. This was an instant of seeing. The building of Joyce’s Ego revisits what features in “On a question prior to any possible treatment …” in terms of an imaginary prosthesis. Starting off from the sinthome, this building of the Ego allows one to take up the writing of the “slipped knot”.

What you have shared with us this evening² develops this question of the building of the Ego and allows us better to understand Lacan’s indication concerning Joyce’s “duplicated imaginary” (Lacan, 1977a, pp. 16–17).

At the time, this clinical indication given at the conference was crucial. Whereas the indications given in the Seminar on the duplication of the symbolic and the symptom were open to a good many readings, his indication of a “duplicated imaginary” that produces an “imaginary of security” offered a pragmatic translation of this duplication. In the wake of this instant of seeing there followed a lengthy time for understanding in which we still find ourselves today, thirty years on, but clearly this was the moment when our eyes were first opened. In November 1976, the clinical section got underway. The adventure of the clinical section was the time for understanding the indications that emanated from this point, from this flipside of the 1958 “Question”.

An incandescent clinic

This clinical enquiry allowed Jacques-Alain Miller to differentiate carefully between the first and second clinics of Lacan. The first was focused on the Name-of-the-Father and its modalities whilst the second encompasses both the pluralisation of the Name-of-the-Father and, above all, the fact of language taking charge of jouissance. In the second clinic, the common nouns take charge of jouissance. What you have shared with us this evening, Jacques Aubert, clarifies the clinical perspectives that need to be used to show the point of passage from proper name to common noun, via the pluralisation of proper names. I shall take up your formulation on the neologistic use of Nego:

I draw your attention to the fact that the passage from nego, with a lower case “n”, to Nego with an upper case, is very clearly the passage not only from the space of the letter to the space of the name (which is not merely the space of the proper name), but specifically to a space for the act of naming.

This act, here associated with writing, both duplicates and shifts in a decisive way the value and weight of the Ego, which, after all, is a pronoun, that is, something that by definition comes to the place of the name. There is a “duplicated pronomination”. Duplication is introduced between the Ego and its new symptomatic name, Nego. This duplication forms the matrix of the pluralisation of the new nouns that can be introduced into the common language, into the language of the master.

It is clear that the fact that there are two names that are proper to the subject was an invention that spread as the story unfolded. That Joyce was also called James links up in a succession only with the use of the alias: James Joyce also known as Dedalus. The fact that we can pile up a whole stack of them ultimately leads to one thing: it introduces the proper name into the essence of the common noun.

Nego is …

Jacques Aubert: … Joyce’s first neologism.

Éric Laurent: What the psychiatric clinic has termed “neologism” may be approached as a particular use of nouns. We may read the neologism as a word that belongs to the symptomatic languages that psychotics invent. Replacing Ego by Nego makes a negation appear in the place of the ego. More precisely, this substitution forms a hole. This way of hollowing out language, this introduction of an empty place, is distinct from the way in which Aristotle introduced the function of the place in his logical arguments by introducing letters.

The possibility of “place” was introduced into philosophical language on the basis of the Aristotelian syllogism. Starting off from this basis, one can deduce that if all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, then Socrates is mortal. Socrates can be replaced by a letter and can be missing from his place.

Jacques Aubert has let us see how the common signification of a language can be found in a different way. It can even become entirely formed of holes, formed of new words or new ways of using common words. It may be said that at the end of Finnegans Wake, each word is a letter that is taken up in highly singularised networks. The Joyceans have to draw on their full gamut of knowledge to reconstruct them and to share them with us. This is why we go on reading your editions of Joyce.

The hole-less body and modular organs

Before I come back to this point, I would like first of all to take a detour via what Lacan introduced in December 1975 when he said the following about Chomsky:

Dealing as he does with linguistics, I might have hoped to see in Chomsky some slither of appreciation of what I have been showing with respect to the symbolic, that is, that it maintains something of the hole […].

It is impossible, for instance, not to qualify the set formed by the symptom and the symbolic as a false hole. However […] the symptom subsists in so far as it is hooked onto language […].

That Chomsky should assimilate to the real something that in my eyes belongs to the realm of the symptom, that is, that he should mix up the symptom and the real, is very precisely what took me aback. (Lacan, 2005a, p. 39)

That was back in 1975. Chomsky’s programme was still blithe. He still thought that he could sustain his programme, given a few tweaks. For Chomsky at that time, mixing up the symptom and the real amounted to declaring that language is an organ. This was how Chomsky himself came to mend what was thwarted in the Artificial Intelligence programme.

We can consider this cognitive programme to have got underway—although this is a somewhat arbitrary start-point—with Gödel’s theorem. In 1932, Gödel replied to a mathematical problem that David Hilbert had voiced some fifty years hence. The problem that Hilbert posed runs as follows: given any mathematical proposition, can a way be found to decide whether it is true or false? This problem is known as the Entscheidungproblem, the “decision problem”. Gödel demonstrated, fifty years later, that this couldn’t be done. You don’t need to be dealing with a particularly complex system, as in arithmetic, to meet propositions that cannot be qualified either as true or as false. For this, Gödel invented a method that consisted not only in taking arithmetic statements as such (coding), but also in reducing any statement produced in the system to the form of a sequence of numerical figures.

This is what Alan Turing developed four years later, in 1936. He published the first article to perfect a logical “universal machine” (Turing, 1937), the same that thereafter bore his name. The “universal machine” enables any mathematical function to be defined on the basis of its calculability by the machine. This was achieved in concordance with the recursive functions that had been established by the logician Alonzo Church.

From this there emerged a current of thinkers who wanted to reduce all language, including the natural languages, to a mode of calculus. They thought it should be possible to show that speaking is a form of calculus and that a language stems from systems of calculus in general. This was the Artificial Intelligence research programme. Moreover, Herbert Simon, who was associated with this project, wrote a book with the fine title, The Sciences of the Artificial (Simon, 1969). For Simon, the artificial, the artefact, is reduced to a calculation that one should be able to turn into a science. The results obtained during the Second World War on the decipherment of encrypted messages gave encouragement to this perspective. Thereafter, however, they noticed that it was impossible to establish regularities in a language that would allow all the oddities of natural languages to be reduced to a calculation.

The limitations of this programme first started to appear in the 1950s, and this was when Chomsky put forward a programme that took off from a different standpoint. He wanted to develop a transformational model of the mind’s cognitive capacities, conceived of in terms of information processing rather than logico-mathematical calculus. This information processing stems in part, but only in part, from logic and mathematics, from syntax transformation rules. It also had to be articulated with the laws of the living organism. This is the processing of information that has come from the living organism, or the living being treated as information. In a stroke of genius, Chomsky rewrote the existing structural grammars of the natural languages. He turned them into particular cases of rigorous rules of transformation that fall into the logico-mathematical category. So it was that he tried to obtain a universal grammar founded on these rules. At first, he enjoyed considerable success on the path of this universal grammar, or “language of thought” (LOT). This led him, along with his student Jerry Fodor, to specify what he understood by LOT-processing “modules”. The evolution from the broad conception of language-calculus to the module that defines the specific task of a part of the mind is particularly clear in Fodor’s work.

After writing The Language of Thought in 1975, Fodor published The Modularity of Mind in 1983. This latter book teases out the consequences of the work of an English psychologist, David Marr, whose findings on vision had been published posthumously in 1982. Marr set himself three distinct objectives. He argued that one has to determine: (i) the task of the visual system, that is, the computational transformation that it carries out; (ii) the algorithm that it implements in order to do so; and (iii) the manner in which this algorithm is materially realised in cerebral tissue (Marr, 1982, pp. 24–25).

This led to what Jean-Claude Milner called “Chomsky’s sophisticated theory”. More precisely, Milner underlined the new definition of the organ that this fresh approach entails:

A good illustration of the sophisticated theory is met in David Marr (1982): according to the traditional conception, which is accepted as much in public opinion as it is in philosophy or in science, the organ of vision is none other than the eye, and, inversely, the best definition of the eye is to make it the organ of vision.

Now, in Marr’s theory, the organ is not the eye but the full set of interdependent anatomical devices that allow a reply to be given to the question “what is where?” These devices are numerous and heterogeneous. Each of them contributes in modular fashion to articulate one of the elements of the pertinent response. In other words, the somatic approach only attains a dispersed multiplicity; the definitory unit of the organ can only be obtained in functional terms, the question “what is where?” (which Marr lifts explicitly from Aristotle) being merely a roundabout way of defining the visual function. The visual organ as such can only be specified in relation to this function. It has no other unity but this. One may consider the word “vision” to designate, somewhat ambiguously, both the organ, O (and in this sense vision is strictly speaking an organ) and the function, F. Thereafter, the material unity that the eye seemed to constitute is reduced to sheer appearance: this material unity may be compromised, but still the actual unity of the visual organ will not be called into question. (Milner, 1989, p. 207)

The new paradigm of cognition thus defines a pluralisation of modules that give rise to a whole host of new organs housed in a body in which they proliferate. In 1975, when Lacan was returning from the US, Chomsky still thought that he was dealing with one organ. From 1980 onwards, there was a multiplication of organs, they were abounding. This gave us a body covered in organs, covered in modules. These organs function in an almost autistic way, leading Fodor to declare that the current state of affairs is tantamount to a modularity “gone mad” (Fodor, 1987, p. 27).

Jean-Claude Milner considers that in spite of this excess the fact of having grasped language on the basis of cognitive modules that respond to precise questions of the “what is where?” sort, (rather than on the basis of a law, of the universal syntax sort) allows precise forms of knowledge to be defined. Th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE EDITION Loss and cognition
• PART I: HOW IS THE SUBJECT INSCRIBED?
• PART II: IMPOSSIBLE EVALUATION
• PART III: PSYCHOANALYSIS AND COGNITION
• EPILOGUE The new pathways of loss in the DSM-5 impasse
• REFERENCES
• INDEX