Adrian Johnston

The Training of Analysts to Come

This chapter is an explication of the thirteenth section (“The Training of Analysts to Come”) of “The Freudian Thing.” This final section brings Lacan’s 1955 ecrit to a close by outlining what psychoanalysis would look like in the future if it were to be renewed by the “return to Freud” advocated here and elsewhere. Lacan envisions replacing the narrow specialization of an analytic training inappropriately modeled on medical schooling with a broadly interdisciplinary approach to forming analysts closer to the model of a liberal arts education. Additionally, detailed readings of Freud’s texts informed by this broad educational background are essential in Lacan’s vision of analytic training. Finally, Lacan calls for analysis perpetually reinventing itself in response to ever-ongoing changes in its socio-cultural surroundings.

The Thing Speaks of Itself

This chapter is an explication of the third section (“The Thing Speaks of Itself”) of “The Freudian Thing.” In this section, Lacan appropriates the Greek myth of Diana and Actaeon. He casts Freud as Actaeon and Diana as the unconscious (i.e., “the Thing” as repressed truth). The latter, in this section, “speaks of itself,” declaring that, “Me, the truth, I speak.” Lacan’s prosopopoeia of the speaking unconscious Thing challenges non-Lacanian analysts’ conceptions of psychical defense mechanisms. In particular, Lacan objects to notions of defenses as succeeding in eclipsing altogether the unconscious (for him, by contrast, repression is always the return of the repressed). Pascal’s aphorism about Cleopatra’s nose also is brought up to introduce the importance of language for psychoanalysis.

Resistance to the Resisters

This chapter is an explication of the sixth section (“Resistance to the Resisters”) of “The Freudian Thing.” This section is devoted to developing a powerful critique of ideas about “defenses” and “resistances” originating with Anna Freud’s 1936 The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense. Underestimating the expressive potency of unconscious truths, Anna-Freud-inspired ego psychologists fail and/or refuse to see and interpret the returns of the repressed that occur in and through analysands’ very efforts to defend against or resist the repressed. This section’s title indicts these analysts for thereby “resisting” the unconscious, with Lacan calling for resistance against these resisters. He relatedly rebuts ego-psychological notions about the role of the analysand’s ego in the analytic process.

Situation in Time and Place of This Exercise

This chapter is an explication of the first section (“Situation in Time and Place of this Exercise”) of “The Freudian Thing.” Lacan opens his 1955 ecrit by employing references to the location of its original presentation, Vienna, so as to reflect upon the position of Freud in relation to European history and culture. In so doing, Lacan brings to light the revolutionary and subversive facets of Freud’s epoch-making discovery of the unconscious. He then sharply contrasts these thus-illuminated facets with the bastardizations and betrayals Freud suffers at the hands of the post-Freudians of the International Psychoanalytic Association. The ego psychology dominant in the English-speaking analytic world comes in for special criticism as a dangerous pseudo-Freudianism.

The Thing’s Order

This chapter is an explication of the fifth section (“The Thing’s Order”) of “The Freudian Thing.” Its title refers to Lacan’s account of the symbolic order (an order into which human beings are drawn by the mirror stage). Saussure’s structuralist rendition of uniquely-human natural languages is avowedly foundational for Lacan. He employs the Saussurian tripartite distinction between “sign,” “signifier,” and “signified” to recast psychoanalytic symptoms as signifiers rather than the symptoms-as-signs of somatic medicine. Additionally, Lacan connects Hegel with Saussure, using this connection to argue against the Anglo–Saxon individualism coloring ego psychology. He also reflects upon the lamentable theoretical and technical consequences of the misinterpretations of Freud crystallized in English and French mistranslations of Freud’s “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden.”

The Locus of Speech

This chapter is an explication of the eleventh section (“The Locus of Speech”) of “The Freudian Thing.” Lacan ties together the position of the analyst, the speaking unconscious subjectivity of the analysand, and the big Other qua symbolic order (i.e., “the locus of speech”). He goes on to justify his quasi-structuralist reconstruction of the Freudian unconscious, explaining why and how the Saussurian theory of the signifier, in particular, is invaluable for properly appreciating Freud’s discovery. The libidinal-motivational and affective-emotional dimensions of psychical life, as well as its representational-cognitive dimensions, are accounted for in quasi-structuralist terms. Moreover, Lacan maintains that a clinical-analytic focus on the Symbolic axis of language helps to guard analysis against insidious ideological influences.

The Other’s Discourse

This chapter is an explication of the eighth section (“The other’s Discourse”) of “The Freudian Thing.” The start of this section continues to spell out the critical upshots for ego psychology of the prosopopoeia of the talking lectern from the previous section (“Interlude”). Via this prosopopoeia, Lacan here accuses the ego psychologists of anti-analytically exploiting transferences and engaging in indoctrination, projection, suggestion, and infantilization vis-a-vis their analysands. However, he proceeds to acknowledge that the ego has a legitimate, albeit limited, use-value in the analytic process. Although, for Lacan, the ego is inherently defensive and resistant as regards the unconscious, it can and does serve as a negative index for the returns of the repressed (via its slips, stumbles, weakness, or fragmentation).

Materialism without Materialism: Slavoj Žižek and the Disappearance of Matter

Slavoj Žižek’s two most recent major philosophical works, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (2012) and Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism (2014), both strive, as their subtitles indicate, to reinvent for the twenty-first century the Marxist tradition of “dialectical materialism.” Although this philosophical label is closely associated with such names as, first and foremost, Friedrich Engels and V. I. Lenin, Žižek seeks to develop a permutation that deviates markedly from the classical Engelsian and Soviet versions. As is to be expected, he pursues this via his characteristic blend of German idealism and psychoanalysis, utilizing the work of G. W. F. Hegel and Jacques Lacan in order to creatively update dialectical materialism.

Absolutely Contingent: Slavoj Žižek and the Hegelian Contingency of Necessity

One of the red threads of Slavoj Žižek’s entire intellectual career up through the present is the enactment of a ‘return to Hegel’ partly modeled on Jacques Lacan’s ‘return to Freud.’ In diametrical opposition to received exegetical wisdom about Hegelian philosophy, Žižek maintains that Hegel’s is the philosophy of contingency par excellence. Furthermore, in his defenses of Hegel against commonplace objections and caricatures, Žižek turns the very features of Hegelian thought provoking these objections and caricatures into the precise means of debunking them. Herein, I focus on Žižek’s handling of the interrelated issues of the end-of-history closure and apparently fatalistic-teleological character of Hegel’s System. In so doing, I develop an immanent critique of these Žižekian efforts, presenting Hegelian criticisms of Žižek’s Hegelianism, ways that point to how Hegel remains relevant for contemporary Marxism.