Jacques Lacan: The French Context

305 Pages·1993·23.434 MB·English

by  Marcelle Marini

Jacques Lacan
THE FRENCH CONTEXT
Marcelle Marini
Translated by Anne Tomiche
t.4
Rutgers University Press
New Brunswick, New Jersey
Jacques Lacan
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Marini, Marcelle.
[Jacques Lacan. English]
Jacques Lacan : the French context / Marcelle Marini; translated by Anne
Tomiche.
p. cm.
Translation of: Jacques Lacan.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8135-1851-2 (c1oth)-ISBN 0-8135-1852-0 (pbk.)
I. Psychoanalysis. 2. Lacan, Jacques, 1901- . 3. Psychoanalysis-
France-History. I. Title.
BFI09.L28M3613 1992
150.19'5'092-dc20
[B) 92-9652
CIP
British Cataloging-in-Publication information available
Originally published in French by Editions Pierre Belford, 1986
Copyright © 1992 by Rutgers, The State University
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
To Doctor Edwige Eliet-Bronislawski who died in 1983;
she was my analyst and my friend.
Contents
List of Abbreviations ix
Introduction 1
PART I LACAN AN D
PSYCHOANALYSIS 7
I. Lacan Came and Went 9
II. Lacan's Theoretical Itinerary 31
III. Lacanian Landscapes 74
PART II DOSSIER 93
I. Chronology 95
II. The Works of Jacques Lacan 139
Appendixes 251
Notes 259
Bibliography 273
Index 289
List of Abbreviations
A.E. Analysts of the Ecole (E.F.P.).
A.M.E. Member Analysts of the Ecole (E.F.P.).
A.P. Practitioner Analysts (at the E.F.P.).
A.P.F. Association Psychanalytique de France (1964), affiliated with
the LP.A.
E.C.F. Ecole de la Cause Freudienne (1981)
E.F.P. Ecole Freudienne de Paris (1964-1980)
E.N.S. Ecole Normale Superieure, an important place of teaching,
located in Paris at the rue d'Ulm.
E.P. Evolution Psychiatrique, both the name of the organization and of
the journal.
E.P.H.E. Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, an important place of research
in France.
LJ.P. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, the LP.A. 's journal.
LP.A. International Psycho-Analytical Association (1910).
R.F.P. Revue Fran~aise de Psychanalyse, the S.P.P.'s journal.
S.F.P. Societe Fran~aise de Psych analyse (1953-1964)
S.P.P. Societe Psychanalytique de Paris (1926), affiliated with the I.P.A.
Introduction
The career of Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) covers more than' fifty years of
work and struggle, a span of over fifty years in the troubled history of psy
chiatry, psychoanalysis, and intellectual life in France (from surrealism to
phenomenology, then to structuralism).
Jacques Lacan: psychiatrist; psychoanalyst; clinician and theoretician;
teacher (almost thirty years of seminars open to a diversified audience who,
as early as 1966, crowded eagerly to attend); lecturer at the Ecole Pratique
des Hautes Etudes; and founder in 1964 of his own group, the Ecole Freu
dienne de Paris. He was its sole director until 1980 when he, and he alone,
decided to dissolve it, only to invite, immediately thereafter, those who
wanted to go on with Lacan to form around him what was to become the
Ecole de la Cause Freudienne. This was the last gesture of an old and sick
man who bequeathed to his son-in-law, Jacques-Alain Miller, an institution
that could look after Lacanian orthodoxy, spread it through the world, and
defend a teaching that was mainly oral, and therefore, fragile. It was Lacan's
name that allowed the Department of Psychoanalysis at the University of Paris
at Vincennes to be created in 1969, including, shortly thereafter, a clinical
section, which was a very controversial decision in psychoanalytic circles.
As early as the end of World War II, Lacan participated in editorial initia·
tives. At the time of the success of Ecrits, in 1966, Lacan was the director of
a series, "Le Champ freudien," at the Seuil publishing house. Some of his
own texts, but mainly the books of the members of his group [les siens), were
published there. Publication in such a series constituted a stamp of member·
ship. Finally, he was famous for the cases he presented at the Hopital Sainte
Anne, where he was a much sought·after lecturer and was often invited
abroad. Lacan was a personality not only in the intelligentsia but in all of
Paris as well. Such fame and glory seems incongruous with the romantic
figure of the excluded, the accursed, and the unrecognized genius that is often
part of his legend.
In fact, Lacan is the best-known French theoretician of psychoanalysis.
Indeed, he was the first one, inasmuch as one speaks of Lacanianism as one
speaks of Jungianism, KIeinianism ... or Freudianism. Abroad, Lacanian
psychoanalysis is often synonymous with French psychoanalysis, which, as
we shall see, is problematic. He is even sometimes called the French Freud.
2 INTRODUCTION
This increasing confusion among a name, a theory, and the broad and open
field of psychoanalysis as a discipline led me to dedicate this book to my
analyst, now gone without having left a single piece of writing. Take it as an
homage to unknown psychoanalysts, to all those men and women who spend
their lives alleviating intolerable and unnamble S,.uffering, by their listening
...
and their speech. They help everyone (men or women) individually move
toward a different way of being with oneself, with others, and with the world,
neither hoping for, nor imposing, nor making anybody believe in a miracle.
They, themselves, must come to tenns with the successes or failures of daily
work. They are the forgotten in the history of psychoanalysis.
Lacan is the most controversial psychoanalyst, in part because, as a fear
some polemicist, he assailed all other theoreticians, including his own stu
dents-to some extent with the help of the wonderful lightning rod he created
for himself in 1953, "the return to Freud." The character himself seduces,
fascinates, revolts, but rarely leaves anybody indifferent. Anecdotes about
him abound, just as they did about Salvador Dali whose appetite for provo
cation and whose art of display and scandal, in tum, fascinated Lacan. But
the stakes here are higher because Lacan practices, legislates, and theorizes
in a domain that deals with the unconscious and in which an individual's
future, even his life, is on the line. Eccentricity in behavior and in speech
may be the sign of a mode of thinking outside nonns ("too far ahead," the
Lacan-Master said), but nonetheless, it cannot guarantee the real value, the
truth, or even the originality of a theory. Understandably, the fight is raging
among Lacanians, anti-Lacanians, non-Lacanians, ex-Lacanians, and now
among Lacanians of a different allegiance.
In his "Address to the Congress in Rome," in 1974, Jacques-Alain Miller
showered Lacan with praise: "Lacan the master"; "Lacan the enseigneur"
{and not the common enseignant, teacher; "Lacan the hysteric," but in the
manner of Socrates whose speech is authentic; "Lacan the educator"; "Lacan
the analyst" who is at the same time "always analysand." One also ought to
1
read Gerard Haddad's article in the journal L'Ane, which appeared shortly
after the Master's death: "I testify for Lacan," "a prince of the mind"; "a
new Socrates who invited the young to express the full speech that they have
in them"; "a convict of psychoanalysis or a saint"; only the "limping ones"
came to him, not "the Trissotins of clinical practice";a and, as a final note:
"Lacan, a pervert, a liar, a swindler, an inducer-of-suicide? Alas! the poor
people!" Carried along by his own momentum, Haddad even states that
"he does not know any work clearer than the seminars." However, Lacan
2
rejected clarity of expression as too univocal and, as early as 1956, he
a. Throughout the text, lettered footnotes are the translator's; numbered endnotes are
the author's. Trissotin is a character in Moliere, characterized by his pretentiousness
and his affectation.
Introduction
3
claimed with pleasure and not without irony his title as the "Gongora of
psychoanalysis."
3
Criticism of Lacan started in 1953 and became more and more violent
through the years. It can be summarized by the following three judgments.
"Lacan's specific practice is a perversion of psychoanalysis by seduction,
manipulation of transference, and lies. His increasingly abstract theory
"4
rejected some fundamental aspects of psychoanalysis, aspects that were never
theless required for the efficiency of its practice, in favor of a strictly linguistic
and logico-mathematical conception of the unconscious and of the subject.
As for the suicides, the failures, and the disasters among some of his analy
sands, they were not "gossip from Orleans": they were actual facts, but they
were difficult to evaluate in relation to the number of psychoanalytic treat
ments conducted in France.s In any case, one can say that, on all these points,
Lacan kept obstinately silent, except to reassert that, for him, to "cure" pa
tients was an irrelevant project.
So, who was Lacan? Was he a visionary, a shaman, or a guru? Was he an
analyst who, at last, was a scientist, the inventor of the graphs and the math
emes meant to become the foundations of the analytic experience-to the
point that, for some, he has substituted himself for Freud so that there would
be no need to read any other analyst, except for critical purposes? Was he a
sorcerer's apprentice or an exemplary practitioner? With its doctrinal wars,
psychoanalysis in France today seems to repeat the old religious wars. In such
doctrinal wars one wonders about the importance given to the patient (or to
the analysand). This is reminiscent of Wladimir Granoff's amazing statement,
at the beginning of Filiations: he calmly asserted that he did not have any
means to decide who was a good or a bad analyst, but that, nonetheless, he
could provide "safe landmark:; by which to know who is a Freudian or who
is not." These were disturbing comments because they were often true. Such
6
comments passed by word of mouth or through the networks of personal or
institutional relations. How could we not end this series of questions about
Lacan with Althusser's heartrending scream, addressed to Lacan, at the time
when things were coming to an end between them: "Magnificent, pathetic
Harlequin" ?7
If we tried to judge on tangible evidence, that is, on the whole of Lacan's
works, we are indeed embarrassed, because few texts are really accessible to
a broad audience. Of course, there is Ecrits (forty thousand copies sold in a
short period of time). However, Ecrits comprised only a selection of texts
written before 1966; some of them are difficult to read, because of Lacan's
writing itself and because they are cut off from older texts or from the teaching
given in the seminars since 1953. The publication of the seminars in book
format took place late and in dispersed order: Television was published at the
very moment of its broadcasting in 1973; it was only in 1975 that the 1932
thesis on paranoia was reprinted, at the time of the publication of Seminaire I