symploke

The present collection makes an important contribution to our understanding of Lacan’s idiosyncratic reception in America. Lacanian and post-Lacanian psychoanalysis are widely practiced France, Italy, and throughout South America, and enjoy substantial influence in Eastern Europe and the United Kingdom. In the United States, however, Lacan’s work is seen primarily as a literary and cultural theory rather than as the teaching of a practicing clinician engaged in the training of other clinicians (Malone). The reasons for this disparity are complex and varied, but can be in large part traced to the continuing hegemony of a positivist model of knowledge in academic psychology in the U.S. Indeed, while strict behaviorism may no longer be the dominant research paradigm, the ghost of B. F. Skinner has yet to be fully exorcised. Thus, when I recently proposed to the chair of the Psychology Department at the University of South Carolina that she co-sponsor a conference on psychoanalysis, she smiled and said with knowing condescension, “Allen, you know it’s not testable.”

Now what testability in such contexts normally means is the production of quantifiable, repeatable results. These are good things if one wants to build a bridge or market a new HIV drug. The psychology demanded by such epistemological requirements, however, is of necessity normative since its aim is to produce models that will be applicable in the broadest number of possible situations and will be as little influenced by individual idiosyncrasies as possible. This is the psychology of institutional normalization, industrial management, and criminology. It is in short the reified psychology of commodification. It is, thus, by definition forever at odds with the premises of the talking cure.

Free association, the interpretation of dreams, and the practice of the case history are irremediably tied to the particularity and unrepeatablity of the signifying chain. Lacan’s great polemic with American ego psychoanalysis, [End Page 264] Anna Freud, and the members of the IPA is with their acceptance of this positivist definition of knowledge and the resultant deformations and domestications of Freud’s most radical insights that followed. The price psychoanalysis paid for its pursuit of academic respectability in the United States was its transformation into a body of positive doctrine with normalization and adaptation as its professed goals. Lacan’s refusal of such compromises led to his banishment from American clinical psychoanalysis, even as the domesticated form of psychoanalysis adopted in the United States failed to gain the scientific respectability it so desperately craved. In the last analysis, the logic of the signifier itself, its fundamental structure of difference, precludes the talking cure’s results from ever being reduced to the repeatable.

The story of these conflicts and negotiations form the core of this collection of essays. Originating from a 1998 international conference held at the University of Pennsylvania, “Turn of the Century—End of Analysis?” this volume uniquely combines the perspectives of clinicians, historians of psychoanalysis, and cultural theorists to provide a comprehensive overview of the debates swirling around the Lacanian project in the United States. The essays are cross-referenced and frequently debate one another directly. The reader comes away with a real sense of the liveliness of the arguments that must have taken place at the actual conference. Defenses of ego psychology are mounted and attacked (Malone, Smith). Lacan’s problematic stances toward Jews (Robins), Catholicism (Tort, Robins), women and homosexuals (Restuccia, Gurewich, and Blévis) are thoroughly and openly debated, as is the state of American psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis.

Even those essays that are not successful on their own terms are often revelatory. Thus, Paul Roazen’s “What is Wrong with French Psychoanalysis? Observations on Lacan’s First Seminar” presents a detailed pedantic critique of the seminar, noting places where Lacan’s dates are off or where his remarks sound intemperate. Aside from the fact that Roazen seems to forget that these are in fact classroom lectures—who among us would want every off the cuff remark we made at the lectern minutely parsed for its accuracy?—his critique is revelatory...