Lacan's Return to Antiquity

Between nature and the gods

Oliver Harris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317590576
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

Chapters 1, 2, and 5 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781138820388

Lacan's Return to Antiquity is the first book devoted to the role of classical antiquity in Lacan's work. Oliver Harris poses a question familiar from studies of Freud: what are Ancient Greece and Rome doing in a twentieth-century theory of psychology? In Lacan's case, the issue has an additional edge, for he employs antiquity to demonstrate what is radically new about psychoanalysis. It is a tool with which to convey the revolutionary power of Freud's ideas by digging down to the philosophical questions beneath them. It is through these questions that Lacan allies psychoanalysis with the pioneering intellectual developments of his time in anthropology, philosophy, art and literature.

Harris begins by considering the role of Plato and Socrates in Lacan's conflicted thoughts on teaching, writing and the process of becoming an intellectual icon. In doing so, he provides a way into considering the uniquely challenging nature of the Lacanian texts themselves, and the live performances behind them. Two central chapters explore when and why myth is drawn upon in psychoanalysis, its threat to the discipline's scientific aspirations, and Lacan's embrace of its expressive potential. The final chapters explore Lacan's defence of tragedy and his return to Ovidian themes. These include the unwitting voyeurism of Actaeon, and the fate of Narcissus, a figure of tragic metamorphosis that Freud places at the heart of infantile development.

Lacan's Return to Antiquity brings to Lacan studies the close reading and cross-disciplinary research that has proved fruitful in understanding Freud's invention of psychoanalysis. It will appeal to psychoanalysts and advanced students studying in the field, being of particular value to those interested in the roots of Lacanian concepts, the evolution of his thought, and the cultural context of his work. What emerges is a more nuanced, self-critical figure, a corrective to the reputation for dogmatism and obscurity that Lacan has attracted. In the process, new light is thrown on enduring controversies, from Lacan's pronouncements on feminine sexuality to the opaque drama of the seminars themselves.

1

‘Surprised by truth’

Socrates, Plato and the Lacanian seminar

You know that the schools of antiquity were gradually deserted. They were schools to which students came to hear people speak. They were what Lacan, when he founded his own school, called ‘a refuge from civilization and its discontents.’ He viewed his own school on the model of the schools of antiquity: a place of refuge from civilization and its discontents. When we read Plato, it is clear that there was passion around the schools – people wanted to know if the playboys of the time would come to hear Socrates or not. It was trendy. It was big news.

Jacques-Alain Miller (1996, p. 218)

We can’t discourage curiosity enough – these aren’t lectures for the fashion-conscious. If they come in order to believe that we are going to turn psychoanalysis into an extension of the Platonic dialogue, they are wrong. They should get better informed.

Jacques Lacan (1991a, p. 20)

Introduction

There are myriad Platos, as there are myriad faces of psychoanalysis. From one angle, both are engaged with society, establishing universal principles to help men and women find happiness, suggesting how we might improve ourselves and the communities we live in. From another angle, they present such profoundly alternative models of truth that they must resist easy assimilation if their challenge to the status quo is to remain meaningful; they seek to unsettle complacency with new ways of thinking – ways already shaped by society’s resistance – and therefore remain aloof from the crowd.

The aloof Plato is the defiant figure devoted to the rebel Socrates. His Academy is situated beyond the city that sentenced his master to death. Psychoanalysis is born of a less violent social rejection, but Freud’s confrontation with hostility to his ideas is evident throughout his writings. And it is often a point of pride: in the words of one psychoanalytic dictionary: ‘It is true of any scientific discovery that it takes shape not by following the dictates of common sense but by flying in the face of it’ (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1974, p. vii). Public resistance to previous paradigm shifts looms large in Freud’s thoughts. Men such as Copernicus and Darwin introduced ideas that were not just new but potentially indigestible. As such, psychoanalysis must be prepared to do the same. Indeed, this is a particular challenge for a discipline concerned with our own minds, about which we might understandably feel we know best, and concerning which a timeless, instinctive ‘folk psychology’ abounds. Psychoanalysis must be wary of the very recognition it craves if it is to avoid lapsing into easy over-familiarity (read as ‘an extension of the Platonic dialogue’, for example). And its quest for truth may prove no help or comfort at all. Lacan (2007) depicts Freud sailing towards New York Harbor, commenting that ‘They do not know we are bringing them the plague’ (p. 336).¹ This is the dark Freud of Civilization and its Discontents, of the inexorable death drive, the interminable analysis, one from whom even his own disciples must part company if they are to present themselves as men of medicine.

An ambiguous place in society obviously has implications for the institutions by which these schools of thought are passed on. Jacques-Alain Miller, comparing Lacan’s founding of the École Freudienne de Paris to Plato’s Academy, has in mind Lacan’s own comment in Seminar VIII: ‘The Academy was a city, a refuge reserved for the best and brightest’ (Lacan, 2015, p. 84). Both Lacan and Miller touch on a complex implication, however: sanctuary can become a form of snobbery. To complete the paradox, the snobbery then seduces the very crowd it had sought to avoid. Hence the ambivalence that can be heard in Miller’s description: was the passion that came to surround the Academy a threat to its status as refuge? Was it the reason it eventually emptied? Having escaped civilization, civilization flocked to it. And, if this is the case for Plato’s Academy, what does it say about Lacan’s use of the Academy as a model? Lacan, in his own quote about Plato, is dismissive of the ‘fashion-conscious’. Yet it is no secret whose seminars became the trendiest, the biggest news.²

Lacan’s ongoing engagement with Plato centres on this question of how knowledge relates to the society around it, a question explored in the content (and manifest in the form) of both Plato’s dialogues and Lacan’s seminars. Should truth feel familiar or unfamiliar? The apparent complexity and dogmatism of Lacanian theory has struck many as elitist. He is beset by accusations of fraud, described as ‘an amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatan’ (Goldwag, 2007, p. 101; see also Webster, 2002³), his theory ‘an incoherent system of pseudo-scientific gibberish’ and his writings revealing ‘a narcissistic enjoyment of mystification as a form of omnipotent power’ (Minsky, 1996, pp. 175–176). This chapter is born of working with the Lacanian texts and realizing that if they are, indeed, infamously mystifying and seductively powerful, it is for two reasons: their origins in live presentations and a deep, abiding suspicion about ‘knowledge’, the experience of imparting and acquiring it.⁴ The two factors are, of course, entwined. It is the live seminar, via his engagement with Socrates and Plato, that provides Lacan with a means of teaching sceptically, provocatively, as a defence against ‘knowledge’ itself.

What kind of knowledge is psychoanalysis?

While Plato set up his academy in the leafy northwest suburb of Athens, Lacan’s seminar moved through the Paris of the 1950s and 1960s on a journey that tells its own story of resistance. Changes of venue came about as a result of splits and controversies, but were enabled by successive institutions promising a fitter home, a new audience, a safe refuge. Much of this chapter centres on Lacan’s second seminar (1953), which followed his forced resignation from the Société Psychanalytique de Paris when controversy over his analytic and training methods came to a head. The seminar marks his entry into the new Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP). As such, it is no surprise that questions of truth, knowledge and pedagogy arise.

This is the context for Lacan’s outburst in the quotation at the head of this chapter: ‘We can’t discourage curiosity enough – these aren’t lectures for the fashion-conscious’. Why should a parallel between psychoanalysis and Platonic dialogue cause Lacan anger? I’d like to explore this question via the context of the seminar as a whole. Seminar II presents an occasion for Lacan to get things straight. Following directly from his forced resignation, it is a traumatic moment but also an opportunity. Entry into the SFP has allowed Lacan to shape a new teaching routine. It will take place at Saint Anne Hospital, the capital’s main mental hospital. Lacan is 52 years old and his own theory is at an advanced stage of development. He is conscious of the baggage students will bring, conscious of what he has elaborated and how he must take pains to define his theory in opposition to the endless, easier ideas about Freud circulating. The relationship between psychoanalysis and Plato is a good place to start.

When Lacan rebukes those attending his seminars who believe that psychoanalytic treatment might resemble a Platonic dialogue, Freud and his disciples must shoulder some of the responsibility. Parallels between Freud and Plato had long been asserted: Oskar Pfister (1921) and Max Nachmansohn (1915), students of Freud, had linked Freud with Plato in papers that received Freud’s approval. Nachmansohn writes: ‘Of all thinkers of the western world Plato was the first to observe our subject deeply and to describe it plainly’ (p. 76). Freud isn’t averse to the association. In his 1920 preface to the Three Essays on Sexuality, Freud (1905) writes: ‘Anyone who looks down with contempt upon psychoanalysis from a superior vantage-point should remember how closely the enlarged sexuality of psychoanalysis coincides with the Eros of the divine Plato’ (p. 42).⁵

Plato is distinct amongst Freud’s classical references. Sophocles, with Oedipus, gives body to a universal truth; Empedocles lends Freud the cosmological opposition of Philia and Neikos (unity and strife) to draw upon metaphorically. But neither Sophocles nor Empedocles could be seen as being on an equivalent intellectual quest as Freud.⁶ A comparison with Plato is natural enough if psychoanalysis pursues the same questions as the philosopher – how do we become whole and content? – even more so if it places the erotic life at the centre of its ‘philosophy’ alongside self-knowledge and the balancing of appetites. Finally, there is the link between the Socratic dialogue and an analytic session, both dissipating false opinions through conversation alone – a connection possibly supported by Freud’s 1879 translation of an extended essay by John Stuart Mill in which he comments at length on the functioning and effects of Socratic questioning.⁷

Lacan’s concern will be to demonstrate what is fundamentally different about psychoanalysis. His outburst regarding Plato and the ‘fashion conscious’ in the midst of Seminar II occurs during a debate prompted by a paper delivered the previous evening by philosopher and celebrated historian of science, Alexandre Koyré, entitled ‘Problems of the Platonic dialogue’. Koyré is an iconic figure when it comes to Lacan’s thoughts about teaching. Alongside his friend, colleague and fellow émigré Alexandre Kojève, he was responsible for the influential seminars on Hegel that shaped an intellectual generation including Jean-Paul Sartre, Raymond Queneau, Georges Bataille, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and André Breton (see Drury, 1994). It is in these seminars at the École Pratique des Hautes Études that Lacan, in a telling phrase, describes himself as being ‘initiated into Hegelian philosophy’ (2009, p. 42). What Koyré is doing here is partaking in an educational experiment of Lacan’s, one that alludes to both Plato’s Academy and Freud’s projected college of psychoanalytical education.⁸ Alongside the weekly seminars, the new teaching routine Lacan established at Saint-Anne initiated a series of lectures by other philosophers and intellectuals including Jean Hyppolite, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Claude Lévi-Strauss, who often then took their place in the audience for Lacan the following day.⁹ The plan is to facilitate a cross-fertilization of ideas, and the reader gathers that Koyré’s paper achieved this, inspiring a lively debate regarding the relationship between analytic technique and Socrates’ technique of maieutics, whereby he draws out latent knowledge from his interlocutor through subtle questioning (maieutics literally refers to midwifery).

Discussion had apparently spilled beyond the confines of Koyré’s seminar into the night, the training analyst Octave Mannoni particularly concerned about how this comparison echoes commonplaces about psychoanalysis adopted by the ‘general public’. At Lacan’s instigation, he reiterates his comments about maieutics and analysis:

I would like to challenge this all too easy assimilation by drawing attention to the fact that for Plato, there is a forgotten truth, and maieutics consists in bringing it to light, in such a way that the dialogue is a mixture of truth and error, and dialectic is a kind of sieve for truth. In analysis, it isn’t the same kind of truth, it is a historical truth, whereas the first kind appears, from one point of view, as a truth of natural science.

(Lacan, 1991a, p. 15)

Mannoni highlights a category of truth that is not absolute and universal but specific to a patient and a context. Lacan wants to follow this further, seizing on the opportunity to bridge his theory and Koyré’s lecture. Koyré’s comments on Plato’s dialogue, the Meno, he argues, ‘can, without any undue contrivance, be inserted into the framework of the teaching being developed here’. And he asserts that the function of the Tuesday lectures is to help ‘crystallise the questioning left dangling at the outer edges of the domain we are investigating in the seminar’ (Lacan, 1991a, p. 4). Distinguishing between the use of psychoanalysis to recover the truth of an individual psyche and Socratic dialogue to bring out universal philosophical truths is important and introduces a question that will shape the year’s seminar: what exactly is psychoanalytic knowledge? What are the seminar’s attendees (mostly in training) gathered to learn? And, when the training is complete, exactly what form of expertise will someone on the couch be paying for? Indeed, Lacan’s first response to Mannoni’s concerns over the eagerness of the ‘general public’ to ‘tag psychoanalysis on to Platonism’ shares his disdain:

There are two sorts of public, the one here, which at least has a chance of finding out what’s what, and the other, which drops in from all kinds of places, to sniff out a little of what’s happening, which thinks this is funny, a subject for passing comments on, for dinner-table conversation, and which understandably gets a bit lost. If they want to find out which way is up, all they need to do is to be a bit more assiduous.

(Lacan, 1991a, pp. 19–20)

Lacan’s response is significant for more than its peevishness. It defines the seminars as an exclusive intellectual space, or even process, but, with the demand for attentiveness and rigour, they are by no means arbitrarily so. Part-timers seek a reflection of what they already believe (i.e. psychoanalysis as Socratic dialogue) and do not realize the intellectual upheaval demanded of them.

The Meno is a valuable starting point for Lacan’s seminar because it explores the definition of knowledge and its place in society. It opens with a question from Meno himself, a wealthy political figure: ‘Can you tell me Socrates, is virtue something that can be taught?’ The question is forced upon Plato by the success of the Sophists, freelance professors who travelled through Greece providing an education concerned with citizenship and political leadership of a kind neglected by the established schools (Meno had been a student of the Sophist Gorgias). This practical education was particularly sought after in Athens, with its fledgling democracy, where the Sophists thrived by providing a curriculum focused on rhetoric and debate. Plato refers to the Sophists collectively as ‘the teachers of areté’, most often translate...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The meaning of a return
• 1. ‘Surprised by truth’: Socrates, Plato and the Lacanian seminar
• 2. The myth of sexual reproduction
• 3. Creation and castration: Making something out of nothing
• 4. Exploiting tragedy: Psychoanalysis, fate and free will
• 5. Unknown pleasures: Orgasms and epistemology
• Index