The Ego Psychologists In Lacan’s Theory
If from a North American perspective Lacan has long seemed ambiguous in his basic ontological terms—a figure dispersed into his own discourse and so fundamentally inaccessible but as a series of traces—the recent work of Elisabeth Roudinesco (1990) has enabled us to approach the meaning of Lacan as an historical as opposed to a purely textual or theoretical subject. 1 Indeed, for the tradition of what one might call French-American Freud—whose roots are traceable to the landmark special issues of Yale French Studies edited by Jeffrey Mehlman in 1972 and Shoshana Felman in 1977—Lacan presented himself, and so was received, not so much as a human subject in history but as a radically decentered text. And throughout the 1980s this was the Lacan who continued to fascinate, the Lacan whose text, in never being susceptible to “full” understanding or mastery, generated a tremendously suggestive if ambiguously open-ended kind of hermeneutic power (Gallop 1985, 20; Felman 1987, 5; Felman 1985, 165; Ragland-Sullivan, 1986 xxi).
In his turbulent textuality Lacan, in fact, was often a virtual reification of “the discourse of the Other” itself:
[We] all have difficulty with the unconscious. This is what Lacan’s language makes us hear, even as we are unable to control, or grasp exactly, what the difficulty is about. Lacan speaks enigmatically. But the enigma is about us: about our own relation to the difficulty of our own unconscious; about the nontransparency between speech and the speaking subject.
(Felman 1987, 164n)
Ambiguity, incomprehensibility, and yet force: “A great number of the pages I was reading did in fact seem incomprehensible [End Page 209] , but at the same time they profoundly moved me” (Felman 1987, 5). In this very influential model of contact, one is seduced by Lacan, but the seduction has nothing necessarily to do with his being understood in any conventional sense:
On June 16, 1975, Jacques Lacan gave the inaugural address of the Fifth International James Joyce Symposium in a large auditorium of the Sorbonne filled with perhaps a thousand people. The hall was decorated with bas-reliefs of French immortals surrounded by wreaths. It was my first trip to Europe and my first symposium paper, and I was enormously impressed though I had hardly any French. In a neat grey seersucker suit, Lacan was a magnificent, charismatic figure. David Hayman later recalled to me that Lacan held everyone spellbound near the beginning by pulling out a large handkerchief and blowing his nose with panache. He spoke for about forty-five minutes with great eloquence in a deep, sonorous voice that rolled off each syllable with exquisite timing.
(Brivic 1991, 29: 17)
If, reading or hearing Lacan, one can experience a kind of oral jouissance, one may equally feel the disconcerting violence (and yet strange satisfaction) of being broken into and entered by an alien discourse:
Lacan’s writing disconcerts us precisely because it is consumed by a “fire” that can never be located by the discourse of Meaning. Reading Lacan is like . . . surrendering ourselves to a blindness that works us over and thinks us through without our necessarily ever achieving an exhaustive understanding of it.
(Felman 1985, 140)
In connection with Felman’s famous reading of (Edmund Wilson’s reading of) Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (Felman 1985), one remembers, perhaps inevitably, that James’s story, among many things, is about a central character’s erotic relation with an absent though strangely potent figure of proscription and authority. Lacan, indeed, is the Master who [End Page 210] does not reveal himself after the first seduction, the seduction whose “main condition” is that we should “take the whole thing over and let him alone” (James 1966, 6). It is the Master’s silence that produces the effect of desire, and desire, conceived in the Lacanian register, is always desire of the Other’s desire, i.e., of “the impossible.” In the words of Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, “Anglophone readers . . . express the hope that someone will explain Lacan to them in their own terms. This is simply impossible. To do so would permit an interlocutor to retain assumed meanings, providing the comfort of resolution, but only the illusion of understanding” (1986, x).
In celebrating the ambiguous textual function of Lacan, the American Lacanians seem to have kept faith with an unmistakable Lacanian desire and intention: “A certificate tells me that I was born. I repudiate this certificate: I am not a poet, but a poem. A poem that is being written, even if it looks like a subject” (Lacan 1981, viii). And if Lacan is primarily a poetic text, not a human subject, then “the heated gossip about the controversiality of Lacan’s behavior and personality [can] be bracketed. No matter how legitimate these questions might be in a different context, they are irrelevant to this one: they merely stand in our way of learning from Lacan” (Felman 1987, 164n). Naturally, such a bracketing gesture can only be a temporary measure at best, even as it raises the question of the meaning of “the will not to establish any linear correspondence between the itinerary of a life and the elaboration of a theoretical enterprise” (Roudinesco 1990, 101).
In what follows, then, I want to inquire into some of the insufficiently remembered biographical, historical, and political contexts that helped overdetermine Lacan’s texts dating from the early Cold War period. For it is the displaced and sometimes disguised ideological legacy of the Cold War that has tended to shape the nature of Lacan’s delayed (and ongoing) North American reception and re-deployment. I am interested especially in the scene of Lacan’s famous attack on Ego Psychology and what have come to be known as its essential errors of “biologism” and “psychologism.” As channelled into the mainstream of American post-structuralism by Mehlman’s “French Freud . . .” issue of Yale French Studies [End Page 211] (1972), Lacan’s argument assails an Ego Psychology which perpetually suits itself to a “genetic, adaptative, or functional scheme” and hence, in general, to “the metaphorics of continuity” (Mehlman 1972, 48:6). In sum, to cite the oft-cited words, “it is precisely this lapse into vitalism which constitutes what we have called Freud’s repression of his own discovery. . . . For however nuanced its observations, in terms of the radical thrust of Freud’s thought, ego psychology would constitute the institutionalization of the repression of the discovery of repression” (Mehlman 1972, 48:6–7). Even though I use the past tense to speak of the Lacanian critique of Ego Psychology, it would be a mistake to view that critique as somehow locked away in some remote historical scene, for it still reverberates as a kind of superego function in contemporary debates about the practice of psychotherapy, the interpretation of texts, and the constitution of the postmodern subject. 2
I (re)turn, then, to a debate which Lacanian discourse, by definition as it were, perpetually keeps alive, focussing special attention on “La chose freudienne”—“The Freudian thing, or the meaning of the return to Freud in psychoanalysis,” a lecture delivered at the Neuro-psychiatric Clinic in Vienna in November 1955 and later expanded for inclusion in Écrits. The essay in its main elements consists of a series of accusations against Ego Psychology and an extended discussion of Saussure, exercises which prepare the ground for a word-by-word reading of Freud’s famous dictum, “Where Id was, there Ego shall be,” which brings Lecture 31 of the New Introductory Lectures, “The Dissection of the Psychical Personality” (Freud 1933a), to a close. The main outlines of Lacan’s narrative are well-known: in the course of Ego Psychology’s passage to success and institutional power in America, the essential meaning of the Freudian project was betrayed in service of an American culture based on profit. Thus, for Lacan, this transplanted “American psychoanalysis” was nothing but a facile medical program, based on “the reactionary principle operant in the duality of the sick and the healer, the opposition between someone who knows and someone who does not” (Lacan 1977, 115), aimed at adapting human subjects to the values of an American ideology, practice, and “style”: “a cultural ahistoricism peculiar to the United States of America” (Lacan 1977, 115): [End Page 212]
But its practice in the American sphere has been so summarily reduced to a means of obtaining “success” and to a mode of demanding “happiness” that it should be pointed out that this constitutes a repudiation of psychoanalysis [. . . .]
(Lacan 1977, 127) 3
This theoretical and ideological condemnation of Ego Psychology is subsumed under the sign of “betrayal,” a theme vividly established in the essay’s opening gambit, in which Lacan cites the
commemorative plaque marking the house in which Freud pursued his heroic work—the scandal being not that this monument was not dedicated to Freud by his fellow citizens, but that it was not commissioned by the international association of those who live from his sponsorship.
Such a failure is symptomatic, for it reveals a betrayal that comes not from the land in which Freud, by virtue of his tradition, was merely a temporary guest, but from the very field that he has left in our care, and from those in whom that care was entrusted, from the psychoanalytical movement itself.
(Lacan 1977, 114–115)
As Mehlman, in a stunning and indispensable analysis, has recently reminded us (Mehlman 1990), the theme of betrayal and Lacan’s moral indignation are sustained by an allegory in which the relationship of Freud and the Ego Psychologists is structured according to the myth of Acteon and Diana. The ego psychologists appear in the role of the betraying hounds who track down and dismember the Acteon/Freud, Lacan himself having already assumed, in the space opened by Freud’s scattering dismemberment, “the role of herald” (Lacan 1977, 114), that is, the official messenger, the one who conveys the news of what he calls “the primary meaning” (Lacan 1977, 116) of the posthumous Freudian communication, the gist of which concerns the subject’s primordial alienation with respect to its own mirror-image and the discourse of the Other. 4 [End Page 213]
Naturally, this scene, “Freud among the hounds,” together with Lacan’s acknowledgment of what he calls “a persecution that did not strike blindly” (Lacan 1977, 115), cannot fail to invoke its primary point of reference, namely Freud’s arrest in Vienna by the Nazis in 1938 and his subsequent passage through Paris “on his way to exile and death in London” (Mehlman 1983, 123). This is indeed the primal scene of betrayal, and it was publicly condemned at the time with rage by André Breton, who anticipated by seventeen years Lacan’s characteristic figure for representing Freud’s betrayers: “The illustrious master, the mind in whom the ‘More light’ called for by Goethe has found its true incarnation, he who has given so many in the world our reasons for being and acting, Freud, at the age of 82, falling into the hands of a wretched troop of soldiers and finding himself specifically marked for the fury of imbeciles and dogs!” (cited in Roudinesco 1990, 33). Roudinesco’s study allows us to note the striking contrast between the actions of Breton and Lacan in this instance: “When Marie Bonaparte received Freud on his road to exile, Lacan did not attend the gathering she organized in Freud’s honor. He would later say that he did not want to pay homage to the Princess” (Roudinesco 1990, 134). 5
At “the risk of effacing the thin barrier between legitimate interpretation and paranoia of a particularly sensationalistic sort” (Mehlman 1983, 4), I want to speculate that, “not only by virtue of the echoes it evokes, but by the structure it implies” (Lacan 1981, 4), Lacan’s placing of Freud among the “imbeciles and hounds” of 1955 functions additionally as a “manifest imaginary scene” (to deploy Slavoj Zizek’s formulation from another context) “which effectively holds within it the place of what this imaginary scene must ‘repress,’ exclude, force out, in order to constitute itself. It is a kind of umbilical cord tying the imaginary structure to the ‘repressed’ process of its structuration” (Zizek 1991, 52). The turbulent quality of Lacan’s “secondary scene” of 1955 would in this sense be expected to bear the signatures of a condensation and a displacement, of a defense and an elaboration, of a primary scene it is always already too late to ward off. For Lacan, it is clear, in 1955, Freud’s essential betrayers were neither the Nazi dogs nor anti-semitic [End Page 214] Europe in general but the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) now headquartered in New York City, an organization constituted at its core by a group of Jewish refugees—some of whom were analyzed by Freud himself—whose European careers were shattered by Nazism. Moreover, to Lacan, the Ego Psychologists betrayed Freud from what a certain Christian tradition would cite as the worst of all possible motives, that is, for money: “It is certainly easier to efface the principles of a doctrine than the stigmata of one’s origins, more profitable to make one’s function serve demand. . . . this constitutes a repudiation of psychoanalysis” (Lacan 1977, 115, 127). 6 This association of American psychoanalysis with, on the one hand, “commercial mentalities” (Lacan 1977, 38) and the “means of obtaining ‘success’” (Lacan 1977, 127), and, on the other, the betrayal of Freud, cannot fail to conjure the scene of the archetypal sell-out in the garden of Gethsemane.
Was Judas ever a faithful disciple before his betrayal of Christ? In accordance, it seems, with the mechanisms of deferred action, Lacan is careful to insist, absurdly, that the Ego Psychologists never at any point had any legitimacy in their relation to a Freud who was always already repudiated and who continues to be repudiated,
a repudiation that occurs among too many of its adherents from the simple, basic fact, that they have never wished to know anything about the Freudian discovery, and that they will never know anything about it, even by way of repression: for it is a question here of the mechanism of systematic méconnaissance in so far as it simulates delusion, even in its group forms.
(Lacan 1977, 128, Lacan’s emphasis) 7
“They will never know anything about it, even by way of repression”: what has been repressed, rather, is a “Europe” left behind and forgotten by a “diaspora” of “emigrants”:
For Europe seems rather to have been effaced from the concerns, the style, not to say the memory, of those who [End Page 215] left, together with the repression of their bad memories.
(Lacan 1977, 116)
“Those who left”: This is a striking formulation insofar as it invokes a conventional narrative of the Jews as a nomadic people in whose nature resides the impulse always to move on, a narrative that blurs the distinction between voluntary emigration and involuntary flight—let alone deportation “to the East.” 8 It is remarkable too that Lacan would invoke this narrative even while signalling his awareness, with the phrase “a persecution that did not strike blindly” (Lacan 1977, 115), of the uncompromising circumstances faced by his former colleagues (including his own analyst, Rudolph Loewenstein) within an objective historical context of European crisis, “political disintegration” (McGrath 1986, 15), anti-Semitism, war, and mass murder. 9
We know enough about Lacan’s immediate context in 1955 to make the vehemence of his attack against Ego Psychology amply if not absolutely intelligible; that vehemence issues clearly enough from those intellectual, theoretical, and institutional differences that were being played out within the psychoanalytic politics of his contemporary scene (Lacan 1981, 1–13; Turkle 1992). Writing in the aftermath of “the first schism” of 1953, the splitting of the French psychoanalytic movement into the Société psychanalytique de Paris (SPP) and the Société française de psychanalyse (SFP), the latter having been excluded from the IPA, Lacan, in 1955, seeks recognition and legitimacy, and casts himself in the role of the betrayed, the exiled, the “excommunicated” (Lacan 1981, 3), the scapegoat of those now in power in the SPP and the IPA (i.e., Anna Freud and Heinz Hartmann, above all). 10
It is easy to appreciate Lacan’s predicament, to be impressed by the magnitude of his ambition to develop and disseminate his own body of psychoanalytic theory while marking out a path for the hypothetical “completion” of the Freudian project. 11 At the same time one cannot help but often admire the speculative genius of Lacan’s close reading of the texts of Freud themselves, even as one may reject the imperializing and arrogant notion that one can legitimately “return to Freud” only through Lacan, “as if the first had had [End Page 216] no history and could receive its prestige only through a confrontation with the second” (Roudinesco 1990, 103). One understands Lacan’s need to establish mastery of a hermeneutic project and intellectual adventure; one accordingly grasps the logic if not necessarily the affect of Lacan’s totalizing condemnation by which Ego Psychology could be expelled from the field even while being retained as the horizon against which an evolving doctrine could be defined.
Still, this already so rich, complex, and overdetermined “manifest scene” seems insufficient to explain the sheer ferocity, vulgarity, and, indeed, virtuosity of Lacan’s abuse. There is, as I have been suggesting, something excessive here, something “gratuitous, paradoxical, enigmatic and . . . genuinely repetitive” (Lacan 1991a, 66); it is as if, to borrow a line from Flannery O’Connor, “there was not enough scorn in the world to cast upon this idiocy” (O’Connor 1955, 57). The diatribe proceeds variously by way of derision, sarcasm, and, perhaps worst of all, mimicry:
The ego is a function, the ego is a synthesis, a synthesis of functions, a function of synthesis. It is autonomous! That’s a good one! It’s the latest fetish introduced into the holy of holies of a practice that derives its authority from the superiority of the superiors.
(Lacan 1977, 131)
But the last find is the best: the ego like everything else we’ve been dealing with of late in the human sciences, is an o-pe-ra-tion-al notion.
(Lacan 1977, 132)
At this point I am aware of a protest, which, although ruled like music paper, I am not sure how to name: the thing is, it concerns what has no name in any language, and which, being generally referred to by the white-nigger notion of the total personality, sums up everything that a facile phenomenology-psychiatry, in our society of stationary ‘progress’, trumpets in our ears.
(Lacan 1977, 133)
. . . analytic imbecility projects neuroses into the notion of the weakness of the ego.
(Lacan 1977, 136)
[End Page 217]
If this ritual annihilation of the “Other” position must be seen as performing a kind of necessary theological function within a context of a doctrinal and institutional battle, one wonders to what extent it is possible to separate (in a delicate operation) the meaning of Lacan’s return to Freud from the intensity of this nasty and polemically overdetermined discourse. Such an operation is especially difficult insofar as the meaning of Lacan is assumed to be inherent in the legacy of a certain discourse and “style”:
Any return to Freud resulting in a teaching worthy of the name will occur only on the path through which the most hidden truth becomes manifest in the revolutions of culture. That path is the only formation that we might pretend to transmit to those who follow us. It is called: a style.
(Lacan cited in Mehlman 1983, 120). 12
It is when Lacan’s style becomes inseparable from a certain tone of “seigneurial condescension” (Mehlman 1983, 27) that it becomes most objectionable, and, to say the obvious, this tone is always the ugliest, the most condescending, and the most unFreudian when Lacan is referring to the Ego Psychologists. 13
In the kind of historical inquiry which I would like to begin outlining below, it will therefore be necessary to summon some of the original human targets of Lacan’s polemic, among them Marie Bonaparte, Ernst Kris, Heinz Hartmann, and, especially, Lacan’s analyst in the 1930s, Rudolph Loewenstein. A place for Loewenstein’s voice is both implied and demanded by the rhetorical scene I have been discussing. I refer specifically to a book Loewenstein started to write in France in 1941 and published ten years later in both English and French: Christians and Jews: A Psychoanalytic Study, (Psychanalyse de l’antisemitism), in which we encounter an answering voice, before the fact as it were, to Lacan’s assault. Loewenstein’s voice possesses a certain undeniable historical rootedness and legitimacy in what, from the point of view of the Ego Psychologists, was a debate held behind the scenes. 14
Loewenstein’s book is a psychoanalysis of anti-Semitism and the causes leading up to the Shoah. Specifically, it is an [End Page 218] attempt to answer “the riddle of the survival of the Jewish people and the Jewish religion . . . .: why did they survive, and how did they survive. In other words, to what psychological and social adaptations do they owe their survival, and how have they paid for this survival?” (Loewenstein 1952, 166):
Undoubtedly there were personal motives for making such a study. For what, naturally, would be the frame of mind of a man who, although born in pre-1914 Russian Poland, had for many years completely identified himself with France only suddenly to find himself morally rejected by his adopted country because he was a Jew.
(Loewenstein 1952, 11)
Reading Loewenstein’s book, that is to say, it is impossible to forget the obvious, namely, that Ego Psychology traces its origins not, of course, to America, but first of all directly to Freud and Vienna and, more broadly, to a European environment in the 1930s which was “anti-Jewish in its essence” (Mehlman 1983, 4). 15
And so there were plenty of good reasons why the Ego Psychologists held the view that “the whole process of man’s psychological growth and development is a series of conflicts and attempts to adapt to a changing environment” (Loewenstein 1952, 27). As Roudinesco reminds us, “Viennese by origin, Hartmann, like Kris, belonged to that central European tribe of Jews that had been forced to flee pogroms and change languages, diplomas, and cultures numerous times” (1990, 168). In this context the question of the ego’s role in the drama of “adaptation” had not merely metapsychological but also explicitly political, social, “racial,” and economic dimensions. Accordingly one wonders to what extent Lacan is tired of this socio-historical theme of “adaptation” and “the metaphorics of continuity” (Mehlman 1972, 48:6) as it inevitably runs through the work of “a certain Diaspora intent on ending its wanderings” (Roudinesco 1990, 168).
What is particularly galling to Lacan in the 1950s is the remarkable (i.e. appalling) success of psychoanalysis in America’s market economy. Indeed the success of the institution of psychoanalysis in America continues to be taken as [End Page 219] damning evidence of “its alertness to the immense profits to be had from the normalizing of its discourse . . .” (Bersani 1986, 103). 16 In Loewenstein we find an explicit discussion of what one might call the metaphorics of success and money within the context of psychoanalysis, Jewish history, and anti-semitic stereotyping. He observes that the “rapid” success of Jews in new lands has ever been taken as proof of their
special predilection and special talents for business. But before taking up this question of special talents we should mention two other possible motivating factors: ambition, and love of independence. Both would steer them toward careers offering relative freedom and a chance to be their own master. . . . [F]or several centuries money represented [the Jews’] only means of surviving persecution and expulsion.* Even after their legal emancipation, money remained one of the few means, together with intellectual and artistic achievement, of acquiring a respected and respectable social status. Moreover, for men who have suffered humiliations, money is a tool of revenge and rehabilitation. [*This is again true in our times].
(Loewenstein 1952, 123, 125).
In the discourse of those who would be satisfied with nothing less than a comprehensive dismissal of the work of all who “have followed the line of Heinz Hartmann’s New York School and objectified an ego psychology that erroneously depicts the ego as an agent of adaptability, synthesis, and integration—an agency of the total person—thereby giving ever greater sway to the role of consciousness in determining being” (Ragland-Sullivan 1986, 5; my emphasis), it is as if the rhetorical act of coupling “American psychoanalysis” with “money” originates from within a space magically immune from the “system of market relationships” it condemns. To cite Max Weber’s memorable words:
The capitalistic economy of the present day is an immense cosmos into which the individual is born, and [End Page 220] which presents itself to him, at least as an individual, as an unalterable order of things in which he must live. It forces the individual, in so far as he is involved in the system of market relationships, to conform to capitalistic rules of action. The manufacturer who in the long run acts counter to these norms, will just as inevitably be eliminated from the economic scene as the worker who cannot or will not adapt himself to them will be thrown into the streets without a job.
(1958, 54–55) 17
Given the private histories of the founders of Ego Psychology, the more reasonable and more genuinely Freudian conjunction of terms in this context would be “psychoanalysis” with “work”:
No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis as work; for his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community. The possibility it offers of displacing a large amount of libidinal components, whether narcissistic, aggressive or even erotic, on to professional work and on to the human relations connected with it lends it a value by no means second to what it enjoys as something indispensable to the preservation and justification of existence in society. Professional activity is a source of special satisfaction if it is a freely chosen one—if, that is to say, by means of sublimation, it makes possible the use of existing inclinations, of persisting or constitutionally reinforced instinctual impulses.
(Freud 1930, 80n)
When Loewenstein goes on to speak of the “humiliations” suffered by a people who have wished to leave the ghetto and participate in the cultural and economic life of a wider society, he allows us to approach from another angle the meaning of the central importance of the ego in the version of psychoanalysis we have been discussing. Loewenstein’s theme in this context is not so much the ego per se as the damage that is done to the ego in the course of individual and collective [End Page 221] history: “The accumulation of traumatic experiences during the centuries of persecution and of ghetto living did even more serious psychological damage” (Loewenstein 1952, 169). Since “[m]ost Jews suffer from a profound, ineradicable doubt of their own intrinsic worth” (Loewenstein 1952, 139),
successful Jews are trying to compensate for all the humiliations they suffered in the past not only because they were poor but because they were Jews. It is in some ways an attempt to rehabilitate the whole Jewish people through their own success.
(Loewenstein 1952, 130).
At this point I would note that the need for work, recognition, and the esteem of others accords quite naturally with the quintessential Lacanian emphasis upon the ways in which the subject is constituted in the field of the gaze of the other:
You can see that what this throws into relief isn’t, as is usually believed, the concrete, affective dependency of the child in relation to supposedly more or less parental adults. If the subject asks himself the question what kind of child he is, it isn’t in terms of being more or less dependent, but as having been recognised or not, having or not having the right to bear his name as the child of so-and-so. It is in as much as the relations in which he is caught up are themselves brought to the level of symbolism, that the subject questions himself about himself. For him, when it occurs it is a problem of the second degree, on the plane of the symbolic assumption of his destiny, in the register of his auto-biography.
(Lacan 1991a, 42; emphasis added)
For Loewenstein much of the damage that is done to a man’s concept of himself—“in the present state of civilization, it comes to him from all sides” (Lacan 1991a, 4)—originates quite unmysteriously from an “unconscious” deeply embedded in “the big Other”—the world of institutions, laws, and alienating social relations. 18 [End Page 222]
Loewenstein forms this view, additionally, on the basis of the empirical evidence of his experience of the negative transference in the analytic relation: “At some point in the course of analytic treatment almost all non-Jewish patients will manifest varying degrees of anti-Semitism” (Loewenstein 1952, 30). Thus the Jewish analyst habitually finds himself in a good position to appreciate the fact that “[i]n psychoanalysis the analyst takes the rap for all the patient’s accumulated aggressions of childhood, adolescence and even maturity” (Loewenstein 1952, 32). In the context of the politics and experience of this conception of the transference and the unconscious, for Loewenstein as for Freud, there was nothing on the planet but the values and forces associated with the ego’s power of analysis, reality-testing, reason, and rationality that could hope to succeed against the persistence and tyranny of “emotionally-charged fictions” (Freud 1977, 216), including those modes and structures of fantasy and repression which were inseparably bound up with “the vast anti-Jewish machine” (Mehlman 1983, 30) of Western civilization. 19 In the shadow of the memory of the mass psychology of Fascism, what was being expressed, in this register, was a belief in the importance of the ego in face of an ever-expanding “internal [and external] foreign territory” (Freud 1933a, 57).
It would not be difficult to show that some of the most important ethical and theoretical roots of Ego Psychology are traceable to the very Freudian texts Lacan attempts to lay claim to in “The Freudian thing,” especially “The Dissection of the Psychical Personality” (Freud 1933a), in which Freud summarizes what he earlier presented in The Ego and the Id and described in the essay “Femininity” as “the first beginning of an ego-psychology” (Freud 1933b, 112). In these works Freud tells us that “Psychoanalysis is an instrument to enable the ego to achieve a progressive conquest of the id” (Freud 1923, 56); or that “analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient’s ego freedom to decide one way or the other” (Freud 1923, 50n). Even the French Surrealists, to whom Lacan owed a great deal for his own understanding of “the encounter between the Freudian unconscious, language, and the decentering of the subject” (Roudinesco [End Page 223] 1990, 26), were capable of understanding Freud pretty clearly on this matter. Wrote André Breton in the Surrealist Manifesto of 1924,
If the depths of our mind contain within it strange forces capable of augmenting those on the surface, or of waging a victorious battle against them, there is every reason to seize them—first to seize them, then, if need be, to submit them to the control of our reason.
(Breton 1969, 10)
From Breton’s interpretation it is a rather smooth transition to the famous words of Freud’s Lecture 31 of the New Introductory Lectures which Lacan quotes and then subjects to a word by word reading: “Where id was, there ego shall be. It is a work of culture—not unlike the draining of the Zuider Zee” (Freud 1933a, 80), a formulation whose complex metapsychological registers are continuous with social and political ones. The rich and often unstable complexities of Freud’s argument notwithstanding, its ethical desire seems clear enough in its recognition of the compelling necessity of the fundamental “ego function” of “reality testing,” whereby “the contrast between what is real and what is psychical, between the external world and the internal world,” in Freud’s words (Freud 1923, 36), can be established. This was a function all the more in need of bolstering in view of the ego’s powerful tendencies toward a “refusal to recognise the facts, [toward] rationalisation and compulsive defence against instinctual demands” (Laplanche and Pontalis 1973, 139), tendencies that become exponentially more dangerous when implicated in “the mechanism of systematic méconnaissance in so far as it simulates delusion, even in its group forms” (Lacan 1977, 128; Freud 1921). 20
In its most basic function the ego for Freud was therefore what the ego psychologists said it was, an “agency of adaptation” (Laplanche and Pontalis 1973, 130) which “seeks to bring the influence of the external world to bear upon the id and its tendencies, and endeavours to substitute the reality principle for the pleasure principle which reigns unrestrictedly in the id” (Freud 1923, 25). 21 We may be excused if we have [End Page 224] arrived at the impression that Lacan in 1955 has little but scorn for any such definition of the ego, or that psychoanalysis might be in a position “to give [the] ego back its mastery over lost provinces of . . . mental life” (Freud 1940, 176) and so assert a measure of freedom with respect to its “three masters” (Freud 1923, 56). 22
Here, then, is Lacan’s reading of the famous Freudian aphorism: “‘There where it was’ (‘Là où c’était’). . . ‘it is my duty that I should come to being’” (Lacan 1977, 129). This formulation is worth considerable meditation. 23 But in the meantime, it is not difficult to understand why the Ego Psychologists would have considered Lacan’s reading—with its idealization of the unconscious and its radical “capitulation of the centers of agency” (Thompson 1978, 3)—quite alien to the spirit of the Freud they knew and to the texture of their own historical experience.
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Footnotes
1. I have also found especially valuable in this regard the work of Bowie (1991) and Borch-Jacobsen (1991).
2. Respecting the history and current practice of American psychoanalysis, Lacan’s judgement has assumed a kind of conventional and hegemonic status. The whole matter is neatly summarized in a popular and widely-disseminated anthology of critical theory, which introduces the selections from Lacan in the following manner: “The significance of Freud’s work . . . is that the ego is not master in its own house. Precisely this aspect of Freud had been forgotten, when after the Second World War psychoanalysis migrated to America and adapted—to its considerable financial advantage—a way of life alien to it—optimistic, naive, unreflecting, without the faintest notion of the death drive, without any sense at all of the dialectic at the heart of things. Psychoanalysis became ego-centered in America, with the point of therapy being for the patient to adjust happily to the world as he or she found it. For Lacan no such adjustment is possible.” Etc. (Latimer 1989, 500).
3. Mehlman observes that “Lacan’s critique of America is generally assumed to come from the ‘left’ of liberalism” (1983, 120). Roudinesco’s work allows us to begin to adumbrate the complex ways in which Lacan’s critique was mediated by a Cold War politics and its early-twentieth-century antecedents, specifically the Soviet denunciation of “Jewish” capitalism, “bourgeois individualism,” and Freudian “pansexualism” (Roudinesco 1990). Additionally, as Tony Judt observes, “the issue of communism—its practice, its meaning, its claims upon the future—dominated political and philosophical conversation in postwar France” (1992, 1). In a world divided into “immense power-blocks, set objectively upon collision” (Horkheimer and Adorno 1972, ix), the pressure was enormous to identify with one side or the other: “all experience was divisible and measurable according to a single criterion of choice. This choice was between ‘class blocs,’ represented on the one side by the Soviet Union and all it had come to stand for, and on the other side by its enemies . . .” (Judt 1992, 164)——that is, of course, the United States. Hence, as Jean-Paul Sartre recollected in 1969, “In 1952, when I wrote Communists and Peace, the essential political choice was the defence of the French Communist Party, and particularly of the Soviet Union, accused as it was of imperialism. It was essential to reject this accusation if one did not wish to find oneself on the side of the Americans” (1969, 119)—or, more generally, as Roland Barthes put it in his preface to Mythologies, “the essential enemy (the Bourgeois norm)” (1973, 9). More work needs to be done to determine the complex ways in which Lacan and his texts were entangled with this Cold War scene and discourse, particularly the extent to which his conception of the unconscious was offered as a radical subversion of “the American way of life” (Lacan 1981, 127) and “the conformist therapeutics” (Lacan 1981, 135) of American psychoanalysis: “whilst the discovery of the unconscious is still young . . . it is an unprecedented opportunity for subversion” (Lacan 1981, 135). Hence, as Ernesto Laclau points out, from a certain Marxist-structuralist perspective “. . . Lacanian psychoanalysis is presented as the only psychological theory which contains a notion of the subject that is compatible with historical materialism” (Laclau 1989, x).
4. See also Lacan 1981, 188, in which he himself takes up Freud’s position of the hunted Actaeon: “The truth, in this sense, is that which runs after truth—and that is where I am running, where I am taking you, like Actaeon’s hounds, after me. When I find the goddess’s hiding place, I will no doubt be changed into a stag, and you can devour me, but we still have a little way to go yet.” This is immediately followed thus: “Did I perhaps represent Freud to you last time as some such figure as Abraham, Isaac and Jacob? In his Le Salut pours les juifs, Léon Bloy depicts them as three equally old men who are there, according to one of the forms of Israel’s vocation, squatting around some piece of canvas on the ground, engrossed in that eternal occupation of dealing in second-hand goods” (1982, 189). For pertinent commentary, see Mehlman’s “The Suture of an Allusion: Lacan with Léon Bloy” (Mehlman 1983).
5. “As an adolescent, [Marie Bonaparte] was passionately interested in the Dreyfus case. She, who was to uphold the cause of the Jews all her life, was unable to contain her indignation. . . . She saved 200 Jews from the Nazi persecution.
In the same spirit, she acted as hostess in France to refugee psychoanalysts from Central Europe and Germany, before their departure for the United States, and lent them her support. Among these was R. M. Loewenstein, who, before his departure, actively contributed to the French psychoanalytic movement by training many analysts” (Stein-Monod 1966, 412).
6. “The Pharisee and the shopkeeper interest us only because of their common essence, the source of the difficulties that both have with speech, particularly when it comes to ‘talking shop’” (“The function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis,” Lacan 1977, 38). Of course, for Lacan, “the Pharisee and the shopkeeper” and the bourgeois individual with his commercial mentality are associated with institutional power and oppression (the International Psychoanalytical Association), not, as they are in Horkheimer and Adorno, with opposition to a larger “totality” which seeks to eliminate them: “The risks of competition led to the more productive centralized form of retail trade represented by department stores. The individual—the psychological corner-shop—suffers the same fate. He arose as a dynamic cell of economic activity” (Horkheimer and Adorno 1972, 203).
7. Cf. Derrida’s analogous observation of a decisive moment of Foucault’s Madness and Civilization: “it implacably judges psychoanalysis in the past, in the present, and even in the future. For psychoanalysis is condemned in advance. No future is promised that might allow it to escape its destiny once it has been determined both within the institutions (and supposedly inflexible) structure of what is called the analytic situation and in the figure of the doctor as subject” (1994, 20:248; Derrida’s emphasis). It may be interesting to note that in his essay on “The mirror stage,” dating from 1936 and revised in 1949, (Lacan 1977, 1–7), Lacan is nothing if not an ego psychologist, for whom Anna Freud is not yet an enemy: he cites “Miss Anna Freud, in the first part of her great work,” on the defences of the ego and “the function of méconnaissance that characterizes the ego in all its structures, so markedly articulated by Miss Anna Freud” (Lacan 1977, 5, 6).
8. Again Mehlman, in the context of his discussion of Lacan and Léon Bloy: “Already it may be intuited that the unassimilable abjection of the Jews, their fidelity to that (faithless) abjection, will play so large a role in the economy of Christian experience as to constitute the irreducible medium within which the Christian drama will be played out” (1983, 25). See also Rudolph Loewenstein: “It is interesting to note that the legend of the Wandering Jew first made its appearance in the thirteenth century, at the very time when mass expulsions of Jews from Western Europe were in progress. The myth provided the Christians with historical and religious justification for expelling them” (1952, 46). Loewenstein continues in a footnote: “Similar currents of collective psychology made their appearance in France after the defeat of 1940. Many Frenchmen began to talk . . . . of the migratory tendencies of the Jews” (1952, 46). Finally, Loewenstein notes that “. . . Jews have been obliged so many times throughout their history to adapt to a succession of ‘host’ countries that they have developed a sense of the relativity of national absolutes” (1952, 55). Loewenstein, by the way, served in the French army in 1940 (Loewenstein 1966, 470).
9. “In the hiatus between the International Congress in 1938 and the one in 1949, the membership of the International dropped by sixty-four, and most of those people were Nazi victims” (Young-Bruehl 1988, 281). See also Haddad: “One must reread through this coded perspective the 1957 seminar on L’Ethique de la psychanalyse. Why has Antigone—a woman who preferred to give up her life and to share the fate of her dead brother left unburied, rather than accept the order of a tyrant no matter what his name is—entered the field of psychoanalysis here? Let us go even further: if we are to interpret things in this way, where is the relationship between the conduct of the directors of the I.P.A.—who refused the only true fate worthy of a psychoanalyst, that of Antigone—and the synagogal structure of the I.P.A., denounced in Seminar XI? Precisely in the status of extra-territoriality—this will not to share a common destiny—which characterizes (alas!) the common orientation of the synagogue” (1994, 85:214).
10. “Nobility is surely the right word for his welcome to someone in my position—that of a refugee otherwise reduced to silence” (Lacan 1981, 2).
11. See Kermode’s discussion of “Matthew”: “He grants the old text its sanctity and its perpetual force, but he always assumes that in an important sense it is not complete in itself. The event or saying foreshadowed in the old text is fulfilled in the new, and the new is therefore validated by it; but it also contains and transcends it. The relation of the new to the old is a typological relation; though the old was complete and invited no addition it must nevertheless be completed. It is as if history and story acquired a new and unexpected dimension. . . . The excess of B over A is what transforms A and fulfills it. Fulfillment requires transformation, and transformation entails a certain excess” (1987, 388).
12. “There is no way of following me without passing through my signifiers, but to pass through my signifiers involves this feeling of alienation that incites them to seek, according to Freud’s formula the small difference. Unfortunately, this small difference makes them lose the full significance of the direction I pointed out to them. Heavens, I am not so touchy, I leave everyone to go his own way in the direction that I point out . . .” (Lacan 1981, 217).
13. Cf. also these additional random examples—by no means a thorough inventory—from other places in Lacan’s work: “Where have we got to today? To a theoretical cacophony, to a conspicuous revolution in positions. And why? In the first place, because the metapsychological work of Freud after 1920 has been misread, interpreted in a crazy way by the first and second generations following Freud—those inept people” (Lacan 1991a, 10). “Mr Hartmann, psychoanalysis’s cherub, announces the great news to us, so that we can sleep soundly—the existence of the autonomous ego” (Lacan 1991a, 11). “It is certainly no contribution to the theoretical status of psycho-analysis for a writer like Fenichel to reduce, by an enumeration of the ‘main sewer’ type, the accumulated material of the psycho-analytic experience to the level of platitude” (Lacan 1981, 11). On Fenichel, it may be interesting to note that, after he died in 1946 at the age of 48, Anna Freud, in the context of “the psychoanalytic movement and its difficulties,” wrote to Kurt Eissler of “the great need we have just for people like Fenichel with his inexhaustible knowledge of psychoanalysis and his inimitable way of organizing and presenting his facts” (cited in Young-Bruehl 1988, 281).
14. Freud to Heinz Hartmann, June 29, 1953: “It is an indubitable fact that Lacan trained his candidates by analyses of less than an hour a week and then forced their acceptance, which will certainly mean the ruin of a future psychoanalytic society [with such members]. If the IPA covers the situation up in any way, then it will have ruined all attempts in Europe to create order in the methods of training” (cited in Young-Bruehl, 1988, 355). See also, especially, Lacan 1990: “A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment” (49–80).
15. Hartmann, “one of Freud’s favourite pupils” (Jones 1987, 652), was analyzed by Freud, lived and worked in Vienna from 1920 to 1938, with the exception of one year at the Berlin Institute, moved to Paris after the Nazi occupation of Austria in 1938, and arrived in New York in 1941. The first version of his essay, “Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation” (1939) was presented before the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1927 (Loewenstein 1966, 470–471). Of course, the pattern of “the Westering of psychoanalysis” (Mehlman 1990, xi) toward New York (i.e., in terms of a certain ideological geography, the center of the capitalist world) corresponds exactly with the pattern of twentieth-century Jewish expulsion from Hitler’s Europe: the first wave beginning with the burning of the Reichstag on February 27, 1933, the signal for the beginning of Nazi persecutions; the Austrian Anschluss of 1938 (and the voyage of Freud from Vienna through Paris to London) and the outbreak in the same year of official anti-Semitism in Italy; the fall of France in 1940 and the gathering of refugees in places like Marseilles, from which the lucky ones departed for America, the last open haven. See Alexander 1966, Crawford 1953, Duggan 1948, Fleming 1969, and Fermi 1968.
16. However, Bersani goes on to observe that “if Freudian thought is, and must be, a reflection on (and of) an ontologically grounded equivalence between our most intense pleasures and a potentially catastrophic failure to adapt, then the therapeutic intention in psychoanalysis can hardly be written off as a merely evasive tactic” (1986, 6).
17. We are told by Loewenstein (1966, 471) that “Max Weber’s lectures on sociology . . . made a deep impression on [Hartmann] and influenced his later thinking.”
18. The political subject (hardly the political unconscious) of Ego Psychology, then, is not so much the “healthy,” “stable,” “coherent” ego as the traumatized ego, the impoverished and humiliated ego, “the embattled individual [and] . . . the ‘damaged lives’ of cultural outsiders” (Jay 1973, 218). Emigrés from Hitler’s Europe and naturalized American citizens, what Lacan called “the triumvirate who work in New York, Hartmann, Loewenstein and Kris” (Lacan 1991b, 24), in both their personal histories and early research interests, bear significant and almost entirely neglected similarities with those of the Frankfurt School: both groups of Jewish refugees believed in collaborative research and publication and approached in their work central aspects of the same subject: the study of the ego and “the authoritarian personality;” the mechanisms of absorption and cooptation into or complete annihilation by “the totality;” the critique that one encounters everywhere in Freud’s work, of the fascist tendency of the individual submerged in the mass (see, especially, Kris and Speier 1944). Within an evolving Cold War perspective and the memory of fascism inherent in it, “the real danger lay not with those who overemphasized subjectivity and individuality, but rather with those who sought to eliminate them entirely under the banner of a false totalism” (Jay 1973, 52).
19. “M. HYPPOLITE: That is what is most profound in Freud. But there’s also the rationalist in him.
His thought deserves to be qualified, at the highest level, and in the firmest manner, as rationalist, in the full sense of the word, and from one end to the other. This text, so difficult to penetrate, around which we have been turning, makes present the most lively, the most pressing demands of a reason which never abdicates, which does not say—Here begins the opaque and the ineffable. He enters, and even at the risk of appearing lost in obscurity, he continues with reason. I don’t believe there is any abdication on his part, nor any final prostration, nor that he ever renounces working with reason, nor that he retires to the mountains, thinking that everything is just fine as it is” (Lacan 1991a, 69).
20. See Lacan’s “Aggressivity in psychoanalysis,” in which he attributes a méconnaissance to Freud on the question of the ego’s powers of perception: “The theoretical difficulties encountered by Freud seem to me in fact to derive from the mirage of objectification, inherited from classical psychology, constituted by the idea of the perception/consciousness system, in which Freud seems suddenly to fail to recognize the existence of everything that the ego neglects, scotomizes, misconstrues in the sensations that make it react to reality, everything that it ignores, exhausts, and binds in the significations that it receives from language: a surprising méconnaissance on the part of the man who succeeded by the power of his dialectic in forcing back the limits of the unconscious” (1977, 22).
21. It would be hard to improve upon Malcolm Bowie’s summary of the relevant matter: “Far from adopting a unified view of selfhood from classical psychology, Freud found the human mind to be all too plainly self-divided and disputatious. His mental models, far from being clear-contoured experimental hypotheses, easily came apart into riddles and paradoxes. The notion of an integrated ego, buoyantly pursing its goals and deflecting its antagonists, has the force not of an observable fact or of a logical necessity but of a wish, a hope, a recommendation.
Lacan reduces The Ego and the Id to a caricature of this recommendation and pays no attention to the detail of Freud’s arguments. . . . For Freud, all hopes of perfect self-possession were idle, and the dealings between id, ego and super-ego could never be expected to reach a final point of settlement. His tripartite mind, like its bipartite predecessor, had conflict as its inescapable native condition. The mind had integrative capacities, of course, and the skilled therapist could cooperate with these during treatment, but no peaceable kingdom, where all mental ghosts and demons would finally be laid to rest, awaited the human subject and his travelling companions at the end of their journey. Analysis was the enemy of such illusions, and offered the mind no release from its unceasing internal dialectic other then the one that death had already promised it” (1991, 21, 96).
22. The conclusion of Zizek’s Looking Awry therefore comes as something of a provocative and eminently debatable surprise: “Freud’s ‘copernican turn,’ his subversion of the self-centered image of man, is thus not to be conceived as a renunciation of the Enlightenment, as a deconstruction of the notion of the autonomous subject, i.e., of the subject freed from the constraint of external authority. The point of Freud’s ‘Copernican turn’ is not to demonstrate that the subject is ultimately a puppet in the hands of unknown forces that escape his grasp (unconscious drives, etc.). It does not improve things to exchange this naive naturalist notion of the unconscious for a more sophisticated notion of the unconscious as ‘discourse of the great Other’ that makes the subject the place where language itself speaks, i.e., an agency subjected to decentered signifying mechanisms. Despite some Lacanian propositions that echo this structuralist notion, this sort of ‘decentering’ does not capture the objective of Lacan’s ‘return to Freud’. . . . [Lacan] assumes without restraint the fundamental gesture of the Enlightenment: a refusal of the external authority of tradition and a reduction of the subject to an empty, formal point of negative self-relation” (1991, 169).
23. “But I am saying that Freud addresses the subject in order to say to him the following, which is new—Here, in the field of the dream, you are at home. Wo es war, soll Ich werden” (Lacan 1981, 44). “Where it was, the Ich—the subject, not psychology—the subject, must come into existence” (Lacan 1981, 45). For Freud, speaking of “the instinctual repression upon which is based all that is most precious in human civilization” (Freud 1920, 42), the coming into existence “there” for the human subject is, precisely, what is to be resisted: “Civilization has been attained through the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction, and it demands the same renunciation from each newcomer in turn” (Freud 1915, 282). “Generally speaking, our civilization is built up on the suppression of instincts. Each individual has surrendered some part of his assets—some part of the sense of omnipotence or of the aggressive or vindictive inclinations in his personality” (Freud 1908, 186). In the end, therefore, it seems that Bruno Bettelheim understands Freud better than Lacan does in this instance: “[Freud] wanted psychoanalysis to be compared to the wresting away from primordial elements of areas that could be made available for cultural achievement” (Bettelheim 1983, 63).
