structuralism in psychoanalysis

S T R U C T U R A L I S M I N P S Y C H O A N A L Y S I S

M a r i o Rendon

Some old subjects seem to have recently gained new life. A redefinition of psychoanalysis has been suggested by Jacques Lacan, who claims that ego- psychology, with its stronghold in both Freudian and neo-Freudian thinking, is a misunderstanding of Freud's purpose. At stake in this debate is the issue of psychoanalysis as a scientific enterprise and its place in the context of West- ern reason. In Althusser's words, if psychoanalysis is to claim the status of a science, it must at least define its object, its theory, and its practice2 The practice of psychoanalysis is the psychoanalytic cure, but the theory of psychoanalysis still shows serious deficiencies; it does not often go beyond the descriptive or classificatory level. At times, a mere translation of behavior into metapsychological or otherwise "theoretical" terms is offered as an explanation for or, alternatively, as that which will assuage the patient's need for understanding.

Because of the lack of a firm definition of its object and the subsequent obscurity of theoretical formulations, many have--for the sake of recognition-yielded to the scientific claims of other disciplines. It is as though the scientific establishment would refuse to recognize psychoanalysis unless it were under the aegis of another discipline. Anthropology, sociology, philosophy, psychology, neurobiology, and perhaps others have been and will be tried as mentors for admission to the scientific forum. According to Lacan, psychoanalysts have capitulated by abandoning the true object of their discipline, namely the unconscious.

To develop the theory of the unconscious we must return to Freud, particularly to some of the most neglected of his works such as "The Interpretation of Dreams," "Jokes and their relation to the Unconscious," and "The Psychopathology of Everyday Life," to mention only those which Lacan calls "canonical." A reorientation of the study of the unconscious as initiated by Freud would have to introduce students of psychoanalysis into the methodology of linguists, historians, and mathematicians? It is worth noting at this

Mario Rendon, M.D., Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, New York University Medical Center; President, Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis of the Karen Homey Institute and Center.

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis Vol. 39, No. 4, 1979 (~ 1979 Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis 0002-0958/79/040343-09501.00

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point that, in opposition to other structuralists, Lacan gives history its deserved rank in psychoanalysis.

The disciplines mentioned above--linguistics, history, and mathematics--as well as others in the realm of the human sciences, such as anthropology, psychology, philosophy, literary criticism, and economics have been more or less shaken by a recent methodological movement called "structuralism." According to its followers, this movement has freed their domains from previous constraints, such as excessive historicism, compartmentalization, or atomistic reductionism. 3 Structuralism postulates ac- cordingly that models for the scientific study of an object can be built without necessarily having to resort to the diachronic or evolutionary aspects of the constitution of that object. Furthermore, structuralists say, the intelligibility of the object resides within itself and comes through by the analysis of the synchronic or present totality of that object and, particularly, by the study of the relationships between the component parts and the laws regulating those relationships. By studying the totality of the object and eschewing expla- nations which have their basis on objects external to it, compartmentalization and reductionism are avoided. By studying relationships, rather than parts, further atomistic reductionism is eluded.

Let me stress the fact that a structure is a model of the object, and not the object itself. Also, a structure exhibits the characteristics of a system that consists of several elements connected in such a way that change in any one of them necessarily brings about related changes in the rest. By modifications of such a model, groups of models of the same type become possible, and eventually, by means of such transformations, prediction becomes possible. 4

Structuralism, as we can see, is similar to systems theory. However, one of the main differences is its emphasis on the unconscious. This fact places structuralism in opposition to previous attempts, mainly by phenomenologists and existentialists, to deny the unconscious or simply to reduce it to concepts such as Merleau-Ponty's non-sense or Sartre's bad faith. In fact, Claude Levi-Strauss, the leader of the structuralist movement, has deemed the unconscious to be also the object of the anthropologist, s Similarly, and before Levi-Strauss, Troubetzkoy, a linguist, has proposed in his structuralist man- ifesto that the focus of linguistics be shifted from conscious to unconscious processes. 6 According to Levi-Strauss, structuralism has placed linguistics at the vanguard of the human sciences.

As we know, the unconscious is the unifying thread in all psycoanalytic schools. It is, one might say, the sine qua non of psychoanalysis. Perhaps because clinical practice makes it so obvious, in spite of the disparate di- rections of psychoanalytic thinking, and in spite of the theoretical lags, the unconscious remains the foundation of psychoanalytic practice (the interpretation). This does not mean that we have made any strides in the

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advancement of the understanding of the unconscious since Freud. It remains perhaps the most problematic area in psychiatry, to the point where some, entrenched in their positivistic views, would like for it to be dismissed with a stroke of the penZ For this it is definitely too late, because, as Lacan has pointed out, the commotion caused by Freud's discovery has reached the roots of traditional philosophy, thus striking right at the core of homo sapiens' narcissism. Freud has turned Descartes' famous and long-standing ' I think, therefore I exist," into something like "1 think from where I do not even think I exist.>,s,p.202

Thus, ego psychology would, according to Lacan, follow a positivistic and Cartesian model, the ultimate aim of which would be "to adapt" the individual to the predominant or prevalent values, as perhaps represented by the values of the analyst himself. In this respect, psychoanalysis could simply be homologous to suggestion or shamanism, a comparison which, although not in a pejorative way, has been suggested by Levi-Strauss. 9

I do believe that one of the main accomplishments of Lacan is to have been able to reintegrate Freud into the discourse of Western reason. The articula- tion however, is at a level which has not been favored by large segments of that reasonmnameiy, the philosophy inaugurated by Hegel. Dialectics, with its principles of movement, totality, and negation, laid the foundations for all scientific developments of the last two centuries. One of the main sources for the often-voiced difficulty in understanding Lacan is the lack of familiarity which prevails in our circles regarding the dialectical method of Hegel and his disciples. Europe, in contrast, has had repeated waves of neo-Hegelian movements, such as phenomenology, dialectical theology, and existen- tialism, the constant interlocutor of which has been Marxism. Structuralism belongs to the same tradition; and psychoanalysis, the naive application of the dialectical method to the psyche by Freud, is now being integrated into that historical movement by Lacan. This seems particularly relevant when human scientists from fields other than psychoanalysis have been calling upon the Freudian discovery, the unconscious, to be at the center of modern reason.

But the unconscious of Freud remains unique. It is not the same as the unconscious of the structuralists in anthropology, linguistics, or psychology. For them, the unconscious is no more than an adjective, as is illustrated, for example, by some of the descriptions given by linguists to this concept. Two levels of language, such as the so-called semanthemes or morphemes, which are basically units of meaning, are opposed to phonemes or their distinctive features, units of sound, as conscious versus unconscious. This is as if we were to apply the same qualifications to consciousness versus the electromagnetic activity of the brain. The homology does not make sense because the two levels are so entirely different. In a similar fashion, both Levi-Strauss and

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Piaget define as unconscious the "lack of awareness" of certain mechanisms or laws governing group or individual behavior. In this respect, unconscious as an adjective differs diametrically from the topographical concept of Freud. It seems, moreover, particularly in the later works of Levi-Strauss, that the structuralist tendency to look for universal binary oppositions (an otherwise ancient Hegelian theme), may lead to the type of reductionism that structuralism set out to overcome in the first place. Levi-Strauss said:

As historical knowledge is claimed to be privileged, I feel entitled (as I would not otherwise feel) to make the point that there is a twofold antinomy in the very notion of an historical fact. For, ex hypothesi, a historical fact is what really took place, but where did anything take place? Each episode in a revolution or a war resolves itself into a multitude of individual psychic movements. Each of these movements is the translation of unconscious development, and these resolve themselves into ce- rebral, hormonal or nervous phenomena, which themselves have reference to the physical or chemical order. Consequently, historical facts are no more given than any other. It is the historian, or the agent of history, who constitutes them by abstraction and as though under the threat of an infinite regress. ''l°'p'2s~

What is the unconscious for Freud? It is in his early topography that Freud used the unconscious as an object, a locus, and not simply as a predicate. Later on, in his structural model, Freud moved to use the concept more as an adjective, a quality of the newly coined structures of the psychic system. It is in the topographic sense that the unconscious of Freud is most original, a true discovery. A subsystem of the psyche wherein repressed contents are located, the unconscious is not simply part of the physiological or the psychological given, it becomes a formation or a resultant of the action of opposite forces representing nature and culture in conflict. The repressed contents---namely ideas and affects representing drives--are governed by specific mechanisms of condensation, displacement, and symbolic transformation and follow the laws of the primary processes (mobility of free energy, absence of negation or doubt, indifference to reality, and subordination to the pleasure-unpleasure principle, the aim of which is restitution of perceptual identity). It is precisely in his discovery of these mechanisms and their operations where Freud has been found to have a common ground with the modern structuralists.

First of all, the Freudian concept of distortion (Entstellung) or the effect of the dream-work, whereby latent thoughts are transformed into a disguised manifest content, is akin to what Saussure described as the sliding of the signified from under the signifier in the diachronic evolution of a language21 A model similar to this was used by Freud as early as 1896 in his Letter 52 to Fliess, in which he talks about re-transcriptions or successive registrations of memories during successive periods of development. 12 Repression is for Freudmin this model--a "failure of translation."


Secondly, it is to the credit of Freud's genius that a modern linguist, Roman Jakobson, would find in all existing languages the same polarities that Freud had also found in the unconscious. Metonymy, or association by contiguity, and metaphor, association by similarity, have been equated respectively to Freud's condensation and displacement. 13 This linguistic common ground has encouraged Lacan to state that "the unconscious is structured like a language." Repression itself has been compared to the mechanism of metaphor; its substratum, desire, has been deemed to have a metonymic nature.8.p.212

How does the unconscious of Lacan add to the unconscious of Freud? First, it does so by placing it within the context of modern science and philosophy; second, by the notion of trieb, so unfortunately translated into English as instinct, which has been very much replaced by the notion of desire. Fur- thermore, Lacan states that if one only reads Freud and not the authors of his summaries and compendiums, one realizes how secondary and hypothetical the theory of the instincts was for him. Desire, the wish-fulfillment of Freud is the content of the unconscious, and it is different from need and demand. An unexhaustible reservoir, desire (Freud's "'energy") is eminently human and has its origins at a certain developmental point where the infant enters humanity through the imaginary and the symbolic. Desire is genetically related to phantasy and language, as well as to the triad of the Oedipus complex. Besides its origins in Freud, with its connotation of hallucinatory satisfaction (wish-fulfillment of dreams), the concept of desire also has roots in the philosophy of Hegel, where human desire is essentially desire for the recognition of the other.

Another important contribution of Lacan's concepts to the notion of the unconscious is the role of the concept of The Other. There is perhaps no concept that has more different connotations for Lacan than the concept of the other. In this respect, Lacan is again close to Hegel's concepts of objectifica- tion, externalization, and the different forms of alienation. The unconscious comes from otherness; it is not an ineffable that appears within the monadic subject. Genetically, the unconscious originates first in the image of the other as an alter-ego, and second in the fact that laws, including language among them, are already there waiting for us at the moment of our birth. In this respect, we commonly delude ourselves by thinking that we make language; on the contrary, it is language which makes us. A commonly quoted statement of Lacan is that "the unconscious is the locus of the other." Also, referring back to the Cartesian motto, he says, "1 am spoken, therefore I exist."

The relationship between the real and the imaginary has been a particular point of emphasis in Lacan's theory since his early paper on the mirror phase? 4 Between the ages of six and eighteen months, the child, although still in a state of powerlessness and motor incoordination which places him at a

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level of intelligence lower than an anthropoid, can (as the anthropoid cannot) already anticipate, on an imaginary basis, the unity of his body. This occurs by the representation of the mother's body, which serves as a mirror. Following leads from comparative psychology (Wallon) and ethology, Lacan arrives at this formulation, which he considers fundamental and which, according to him, is the basis for all further identifications and has its basis in the human prematurity of birth (fetalization of Bolk). The imaginary bears on all the relationships of the subject with his ego and with others. The concept of lack, immaturity, or powerlessness is paramount here, as is the necessary de- pendency on the other; Hence Lacan's statement that all knowledge is paranoid, i.e., it comes from the other. The relationships that originate during the mirror phase are the roots of the intricate dialectic relationships between selfhood and otherness.

Beside the psychoanalytic orders of the real and the imaginary is the order of the symbolic, the one which for Lacan has priority because it constitutes the human subject by introducing him to the signifier. The word, the instrument of psychoanalysis and also the ultimate crystallization of culture, must find again the central place that Freud gave it. Neglected by psychoanalysts after Freud, philology occupies one of every three pages of Freud's writings. 8'p'194

Nevertheless, words may be devoid of substance; this is usually the case at the beginning of treatment, when the subject is excentric or coming from somewhere else besides himself. By empty speech, Lacan means that the references of the subject at this stage are incongruous with himself, or perhaps have as their source the alienated self. The cure converts empty speech into full speech, which is the mode of communication predominating at the end of treatment.

The subject himself is compared by Lacan to a discourse. According to him, it is like a book with pages or lines missing (the unconscious), which we, analysts, are called on to help replace. Whatever is missing in that part of the discourse that is worded or conscious is waiting for us to read it in the other parts: memories, symptoms, dreams, parapraxes, jokes, traditions, etc. In this respect, the unconscious is essentially an intersubjective phenomenon; it has its essence in human discourse, in the fact that it is addressed to others. The analyst becomes part of that intersubjectivity, as is profusely demonstrated in all of Freud's cases.

Perhaps the major contribution of Lacan is to have shown that the unconscious of Freud was vitiated by his ideological background, namely the positivism and the individualism of the nineteenth century. Because the unconscious is an intersubjective phenomenon, it necessarily follows that its study has to be considered in the light of intersubjectivity. References to the monadic subject or the abstract individual are eminently arbitrary and mystifying. The structures of the unconscious refer to that dialectical relation-


ship between self and other, whereby self is of necessity constituted by the other, and the other is not only that person in front of me, but also generic man, law, language, culture, and myself--myself as an unconscious or alienated other which intrudes upon my discourse to say something else.

I have touched upon some of the main topics of the Lacanian teachings. Many I have left untouchedwparticularly those referring to mathematical formulations and topology. Suffice it to say that these are areas which have provoked great interest not only among psychoanalysts, but also among mathematicians, who have started to study some of Lacan's writings, is

In reference to Karen Horney's theory, as it was pointed out by Van den Daele, 16 it can be said that her theory has the elements of a structuralism, particularly because of its emphasis on holism and its attempt to find universal binary opposition--that is, idealized image versus despised self. ~7 Also, Hor- ney's ternary structure of intrapsychic as well as interpersonal analysis is an attempt at universal synchronic understanding. ~8 Furthermore, the emphasis on the synchronic in the doctor-patient relationship places Homey closer to the structuralists. The early Homey, following late Freud, was concerned with the role of culture in neuroses, and here the present Lacanian effort to bring linguistics into the forefront of psychoanalysis may be most relevant. Also, the elaboration of the imaginary order by Lacan may be of benefit in understanding the genetic aspects of Horney's central theme, the idealized image.

I could not conclude without mentioning, at least briefly, the larger problematic behind structuralism, one deemed as central tothe philosophical issues of this century. This is the opposition between structure and history, between the synchronic and the diachronic. This issue has been reflected in psychoanalytic practice also where the recovery of infantile memories has been opposed to the so-called here-and-now2 91 believe that the dichotomy is false. Historicism as a pars pro toto or metonymic form of alienation is no better than antihistorical structuralism. Moreover, structuralism as a partial object cannot remedy its counterpart, historicism. Only a dialectical integration of history and transference as basic coordinates of the cure is at this point viable.

Summary

Structuralism is a methodological movement which has succeeded exis- tentialism in Europe; its equivalent in the United States is systems theory. Structuralism has embraced many different sciences, from mathematics to linguistics, psychology, anthropology, and psychoanalysis, to mention only a few. In contrast to systems theory, however, structuralism places a great deal of emphasis on the concept of the unconscious. The unconscious for most structuralists, with the exception of Lacan, is not the same as the unconscious

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for Freud and psychoanalysis. To the structuralists, unconscious is an adjective that refers basically to the lack of the quality of consciousness of certain group and individual processes or functions. The unconscious of Freud is a noun--a locus or a topography that develops in the course of the individual's history. We could say that, until proven otherwise, the unconscious of the structuralists remains pre-Freudian and takes us back to the state of affairs which could not be resolved by philosophers such as Leibnitz and Schopenhauer.

Lacan redefines the unconscious as the true object of psychoanalytic science. He recommends rereading Freud in the light of modern structuralist and philosophical developments. He postulates that the unconscious is structured like a language and, as discovered by Freud, can be studied by a structuralist methodology similar to that of linguistics. Distortion, metonymy, and metaphor are examples of processes that are fundamental to both languages and the unconscious.

One of the objectives of Lacan's teaching is to redirect psychoanalytic investigations from the ego--which has occupied both Freudians and neo- Freudians~to the study of the unconscious. Lacan has also stressed the intersubjective essence of the unconscious as a language, and in this respect has made an important connection with the philosophy of Hegel.

One of the main characteristics of structuralism as a whole is its antihistor- icism. The opposition between structure and history is a problem about which there has been a great deal of polemics, being deemed by some to be the central philosophical problem of our century. This opposition has also per- vaded psychoanalytic practice. It is suggested that only a true dialectical integration would be able to overcome the splitting.

References

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11. de Saussure, F. Course in General Linguistics. New York: McGraw Hill, 1966. 12. Freud, S. Letter 52. In ]. Strachey (Ed.), The standard Edition of the Psychological

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se nos revela en la experiencia psicoanalitica. In Lacan, J. Escritos. Mexico City: Siglo veintiuno editores S.A., 1972.

15. Perez Peffa, E. Topologia Psicoanalitica. Unpublished manuscript. 16. Van den Daele, U Horney's theory of neurosis: a developmental-structuralist

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Althusser et al. Estructuralismo y Psicoanalisis. Buenos Aires: Ediciones. Nueva Visi6n, 1971.

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