Introduction
IN THIS BOOK I FOCUS ON A LACANIAN QUESTION: HOW DOES A PERSON support his or her separate existence as a subject? How, that is, does he or she sustain a vital presence as a speaking being against all the many forces that fragment, negate, and depersonalize? Although Lacan deserves credit for directing attention to this crucial issue of the subject in analytic work, numerous other theorists using the vocabularies, variously, of ego integrity, identity, and self have also touched on the problem, which has recaptured contemporary interest through the perhaps overused concept of intersubjectivity. The fragile or vulnerable self of Kohutian analysis that is so much the focus of clinical attention today (and with good reason) is a familiar example of this reorientation of clinical theory. This leads me to wonder what it is about "having a life" that we usually take for granted but that is lacking or so vulnerable to doubt in some patients and perhaps for most reflective people at difficult times. More broadly, I would like to explore what reading Lacan can offer us as a critique or supplement to the English language authors with whom North American analysts are most familiar and who have provided most of our understanding of the clinical issues raised by patients complaining of this problem.
Aside from its purely philosophical references, intersubjectivity in psychoanalytic theory has been a corrective to a naive view of the natural emergence of a "self" from a series of inborn maturational processes engaging a normal expectable social environment—a fallacy that collapses all that is unique and mysterious about culture and the way it provides identities and roles for human beings in the interest of fitting into a narrow psychobiology. Against this reductionistic conception, intersubjectivity has emphasized the social field organized by the symbolic framework of language, which makes the "self" a much more tenuous and vacillating sort of entity than we like to think. It is this point upon which Lacan, in taking up his reading of Freud, insisted over and over again throughout his career.1 Yet, as its tendency to overuse demonstrates, the term intersubjective can be endowed with many meanings, including a simplistic one that seems to reify the notion of self and suggests the possibility of a full and complete relationship, a notion that Lacan consistently rejected.2 So we remain in need of a more careful explanation of the concept of intersubjectivity, especially in relation to psychotherapeutic practice.
Lacan is known for his prodigious effort to open psychoanalysis to a dialogue with other "human sciences" such as linguistics, philosophy, and anthropology, which his biographer, Roudinesco (1993), sees as his greatest achievement. He may have been the first to bring the age-old problem of the subject to the foreground of analytic practice and to emphasize its divided and shifting nature, split by language, but his contribution is often cryptic and demands both unpacking and revision in the light of other major theorists. English-speaking analysts, of course, generally refer to "the self" in their writings, avoiding the technical and experimental connotations of the term "subject," which may come easier to users of romance languages. However, the use of an apparent substantive, the self, can lead to misconceptions, among which is a quasireligious idealization of some soullike essence inside the person. The same may be said for Erikson's earlier concepts of identity and ego identity. For this reason, these latter terms have been objects of criticism by many Lacanians, who detect in them a level of psychoanalytic naivete, if not a malign will to social engineering, that has provided an "other" to these embattled but numerous analytic dissidents.
It is not my purpose to delve into the history of these various terms, which continue to play a political role in psychoanalytic circles. I would merely observe that the conceptions of the ego psychologists, Erikson's theories of identity, and Kohut's use of self are much more subtle than these critics usually allow.3 The question, however, is not the truth or error of any of these necessarily incomplete theories, but, I suggest, their sharing an at once scientific (psychological) and clinical quest to grasp conceptually the elusive object of psychoanalytic practice—the ineffable nature of the unique named human being who lives within a universe structured from birth to death by language and who is capable of possessing and losing a sense of permanence and embodiment. Although these terms map onto somewhat different traditions, I believe that both subject and self are attempts to grasp the true signified of our analytic work, perhaps better captured by Freud's ambiguous use of Ich or "I" than by the narrower, artificial term Ego.
In many respects, as Green (1975, 1999) consistently and cogently argued, contemporary psychoanalysis has undergone a major transformation in which primary conceptual and therapeutic attention has been redirected toward the origins of the self and the maintainance of its sense of aliveness and engagement in the world. Modell (1993) proposed this paradigm shift as one replacing Freud's structural theory, that deuxiéme topique of the French. One often hears this new focus on the subject/self attributed to a change in the pathologies of psychic life, perhaps the result of increasing social disorganization and the decline of stable communities that have undermined the formation of strong personal identities. The great structuring institutions of family and religion, which traditionally anchored the self in moral and ethical principles, have lost much of their vigor, whereas the questioning of norms in sexuality and gender, along with much greater freedom and opportunity for the pursuit of personal pleasure, have loosened the wrappings of identity and modified the old ideals and limits that structured the Western subject. All these changes have created a cultural ground increasingly alien to the context in which psychoanalysis originally evolved, one that conceived of individuals as autonomous centers with firmly delineated boundaries and contained psychic spaces. The recognition that people are much less crisply defined and in many respects permeable to other subjects with whom they are in interaction has transformed our understanding of the treatment situation, which we now understand as an intersubjective experience structured by what the analyst brings to it and by the evolution of the new relationship established. Perhaps our clinical understanding has surpassed our theoretical explanations, the latter still enmeshed in models of the mind that have in many respects outlived their usefulness.
At the same time, in the present state of affairs we are saturated with newer concepts and models that lack mutual articulation. Although Winnicott was far from a systematic theoretician, he is increasingly the object of our attention and will be central to our inquiry. Kohut and self psychology transformed the American analytic landscape, and in France Lacan rewrote the book in his circuitous "return to Freud." These authors rarely mention one another, although many parallels leap out for the attentive reader, as I will try to point out. Fortunately, we have other important thinkers to help us, notably Arnold Modell, whose Psychoanalysis in a New Context (1984) bridged Winnicott and object relations with American ego psychology and contemporary philosophical currents, and André Green, who performed a similar function in relation to Lacan. Both Modell and Green remained strongly committed to a Freudian heritage.
I see this present work as continuing a mediation between contemporary practice and these theoretical currents as they touch on the central existential and clinical problem of the fragile subject or, in the American idiom, the enfeebled, weakly cohesive self. My goals are to draw out some common threads from these varied discourses that may be useful to weave into a newer model of psychotherapeutic work and to contribute to the evolution of psychoanalysis away from a neurobiological or mechanistic reductionism, while safeguarding its indispensable features from too cozy a relationship with the dominant cultural ideologies. Often, it seems, the disappointed or embarrassed turn away from Freudian metapsychology, most of which has failed to hold up in fulfilling its goals as a scientific framework and has left analysts clinging to scraps of theories or a reliance on the beneficent aspects of the two-person relationship involved.4 Although this tendency sometimes approaches the caricature attacked by Lacan with some vitriol in his assaults on the conformism and social adjustment allegedly supported by American psychoanalysts, I do not share his viewpoint "against adaptation" (the title of Van Haute's [2002] recent interpretation of Lacanian theory). I am certainly not attempting to represent a rigorous Lacanian view, which often ends up simply rehashing the difficult rhetoric. Rather, I want to provide a reading of Lacan through my American-trained, Freudian lenses for what it can offer clinicians interested in understanding more about their patients and themselves. Adaptation to Life, the title of George Vaillant's (1977) important study of male development, is a good term to describe the process of sustaining a self, and his book was a major influence on my own clinical thinking. Nonetheless, the language of adaptation may be too compromised at this point, the vocabulary of ego psychology too mechanistic, so that we need to move on to other, hopefully richer, ways of pursuing the development of psychoanalysis.
I believe that Lacan still has much to teach us in this respect, despite his notorious obscurity and the absence of detailed clinical accounts in his writings. He mainly reinterpreted, sometimes brilliantly, the published cases of others. Although many people think of him as more literary philosopher than therapist, Lacan was engaged principally in the practice of psychoanalysis his entire life, and his theories seem to have been motivated to a great extent by his dissatisfaction with then current practices. It is from this angle, in fact, that I wish to approach his writings, leaving the assessment of his vast theoretical project to others better qualified than I.5 The other major thinkers on whom I draw—Winnicott, Kohut, Modell, and Green—tend to be more experience and clinically near, and all attempted to revise basic psychoanalytic concepts, especially those concerning the basic issues of existence with which I am dealing. The contributions of Arnold Modell and Andre Green have been particularly helpful to me in this effort. In the following chapters, I develop some of the fruits of my readings of these authors, and offer a synthesis of theory in an attempt to indicate possible answers to the questions I have raised. Against Lacan, I argue for the central function of affect as knitting the individual to the social framework that anchors subjective existence. I see affect not simply as concerned with fantasies and images but as a symbolic activity that provides modes of expression able to be intersubjectively shared and communicated. In this respect, I propose a reinterpretation of Freud's concept of the ego ideal, suggesting that it functions to mediate private experience with narrative models provided by the culture. These models carry ideals and values that channel self-experience away from purely narcissistic preoccupations and thereby protect against the fragmentation of self described from different perspectives by Kohut and Lacan.
In chapter 1, I discuss Winnicott's analysis of Margaret Little, in order to illustrate the clinical problem that is my theme and to lay out some of the crucial issues in treatment. Chapters 2, 3, and 5 address theoretical issues raised by Lacan and others (always attempting not to lose sight of the clinical reference point). I try to maintain a dialogue between Kohut and Lacan, who I see as aiming at a common clinical object, despite the divergence of their two theories. Throughout, I attempt to sustain an anthropological perspective on human behavior as a corrective to the narrowness of cultural vision that I believe constricts psychoanalysis today. To further illustrate my ideas, I present two extended cases in chapter 4 and a briefer one in chapter 5. Finally, in chapter 6, I use material from the autobiographical writings of Louis Althusser as another point of entry into the problem with which I began: What makes it possible to be the subject of one's own desire and to sustain a personal existence—to have a life?
1Lacan (1953-1954) developed his notions of intersubjectivity at some length in Seminar 1, Freud's Papers on Technique, one of his most accessible presentations.
2See, for example, Lacan's (1959-1960) satirizing of the concept of inter-subjectivity, subjectivity, in which he portrayed a kind of mutual narcissistic manipulation game.
3Lacan's critique of ego psychology is rampant in his Écrits (1966) but is presented more readably in The Seminar Book II (1954-1955), in which he attacked Erikson's developmental model. See Miller (1987) for a Lacanian critique of Kohut.
4A recent publication by a team of market researchers hired by the American Psychoanalytic Association reported that analysts see themselves as empathic, engaged helpers, who "support the individual in his or her struggle to become the whole self" (Zacharias, 2002, p. 5). Analysis was described as "a relationship in which one can reveal his or her deepest secrets." Apart from the obvious public relations slant of these statements and their echoes of contemporary pop psychology, one might wonder what these analysts believe they have to offer over any other empathic, helping relationship?
5The results are surely mixed at this point and touched by polemic. Especially in France, it may still be too soon to expect a balanced assessment. For critical readings of Lacan, see Roustang (1986) and Borch-Jacobsen (1990). For a mainstream Freudian overview of his contributions, see Diatkine (1997). Van Haute (2002) provides a remarkably clear and sympathetic explanation of one important Lacanian text, which also touches many related topics. Roudinesco (1993) undertakes an assessment of Lacan's oeuvre in her biography, especially highlighting his intellectual accomplishments. Perhaps the best introduction to Lacanian theory and practice for North American clinicians is Fink (1997).