Some Gender Issues: Charles, Lacan, and Explanatory Power

I appreciate the chance to discuss Marilyn Charles’s “Women: The Dark Continent,” which stimulated me to review my own 1976 comments about feminine psychologies in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (JAPA). I use the plural term because the culture of a young girl in a favela in Brazil and the world of my older women PhD friends in the hamlet of Berkeley, CA are quite different. The two groups do share a female body and some societal male oppression. As a “social progressive” I applaud Charles’s declaration of independence from what she calls paternalistic “authorities in the psychoanalytic liturgy.” Her emancipation arrives a little late—about three decades after Jane Gallop in 1982 concluded that feminist psychoanalytic thought was deeply enmeshed in patriarchal language and its system of representation.

Dr. Charles’s current essay and her recent book Working with Trauma: Lessons from Bion and Lacan (2011) ignore the contributions of Juliet Mitchell, Karen Horney, and Nancy Chodorow, all clearly identified as feminists. A disinterest in social gender studies might explain why both her 2014 book and this current essay are bursting with laudatory references to Jacques Lacan, from whose views of women Charles reports she is freeing herself. If ever there was any psychoanalyst more arrogantly a male chauvinistic than Freud it would be Lacan, the French philosopher and psychiatrist who died in 1981.

In his system the “phallus” (more or less the physical penis) is the privileged signifier of signifiers. A woman without the phallus is the phallus, but she always retains it in the imaginary realm anyway. So while she is never entirely castrated she remains capable of phallic jouissance (“endless pleasure”). Can Dr. Charles separate such masculine pronouncements from Lacan’s other contributions to the clini-

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cal enterprise of psychoanalysis? Accomplishing this feat is not as easy as maintaining my devotion to the music of Wagner, while continuing to hate his Anti-semitism. To separate psychological theories from cultural bias is most difficult. Only in a hard domain of science can sorting and separating of hypotheses be accomplished with some precision. Scientific theories must be parsimonious, testable, and falsifiable, involving measurable quantification and accurate prediction while utilizing evidence, experiment, and replication.

By contrast, all current analytic treatment perspectives share with religious ideologies the risk of becoming captive to cultural bias, prejudice, and odd ideas of founders or enthusiastic promoters in search of fame and fortune. Dr. Charles eloquently shares her valiant effort to free herself from such dangers and entanglements. I agree with her implicit opinion that neither the theories nor the practices of psychoanalytic therapies are scientific. However, this by no means implies that we can’t apply psychological theories and hypotheses to psychotherapeutic interventions and make decisions as to which are better and which are worse. It is not an inter-rater agreement, “reliability” that is crucial in this matter, but rather it is high explanatory power. Understanding obtained by answering “why” questions has almost unlimited potential for unifying disparate phenomena, ranking them according to necessity, and identifying causes that justify our stronger beliefs about what works (Peter Lipton, Inference to the Best Explanation, 2004). Good explanations account for a broad array of facts, are readily comprehensible, parsimonious, and coherent, generative of other fruitful discoveries, and have a logical fit with other empirical evidence.

The preceding criteria permit assessment of the value of a psychological system used to anchor treatment efforts for psychiatric or analytic patients. Here are a couple of examples. Anton Mesmer (1734-1815) in France thought he could use animal magnetism to direct the flow of a universal fluid to heal the sick. He failed to restore sight to a blind musician stimulating skeptics to ask “why.” A committee including American Benjamin Franklin concluded that the method did heal (it had reliability). However, the group

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concluded that the employment of suggestion (what we call “placebo”) was involved and the technique’s successes were explained through patients’ self-delusion or illnesses running their natural course.

The explanation for the curative claims of Mary Baker Eddy’s (1821-1910) Christian Science is more difficult to assess. She maintained that the sick could never be healed by any material methods like medication or hygiene. Her own ill health she attributed to “malicious animal magnetism.” Death, she believed, was an unreal, untrue delusion. None of her claims involved quantity or identification of a body organ like the “wandering uterus” that obstructs vital flows to explain hysterical symptoms in ancient Greece. The Christian Science approach to healing may retain some plausibility and legitimacy. Most of its explanatory components are not suitable for experimentation or falsification. So decisive and reasonable refutation is not attainable as it is for the psychological method in the next example.

Some psychologists claim mental illnesses may be cured through the use of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). The method has good success, according to testimonials of patients and practitioners. This treatment requires 20 to 30 seconds of eye movements or auditory tones plus speaking about the history of emotional symptoms. Allegedly this brief ritual produces healing of impairing emotional consequences of trauma through inducing neurobiological brain changes. However, when I apply the above criteria for excellent explanation, EMDR fails. Without substantiating brain study evidence, I conclude that EMDR is pseudoscience. Its advertised success must depend on non-ocular, extra perceptual variables such as conditioning, desensitization, or placebo.

Readers may compare the explanatory power of Lacan’s views with my recent psychodynamic understanding of what I consider constitutes effective psychiatric treatment (American Journal of Psychotherapy, May 2014). The patient was a middle class American nurse, 40 years of age who had been sexually assaulted by a high ranked officer while serving in the army a decade earlier. Because of her inability to co-operate with one particular male team mem-

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ber she decided to resign and look for other less remunerative work. Extensive exploration of the situation revealed he physically looked like the man that had raped her years earlier. This assigned partner had traits of a rigid authoritarian personality that characterized her father and to some extent her current therapist. Exploring and understanding this explanation using the concept of transference repetition was helpful to the patient’s capacity to remain in her work position.

Would Lacan’s formulations have been equally helpful is a question not easy to answer. Still, this uncertainty does not modify my conclusion, which is that it is explanatory power, not brilliance, reliability, or scientific validity, that determines the value of psychological hypotheses for the treatment of an emotionally traumatized woman. Therapists can and should make informed rational choices between Lacanian investigation, psychodynamic interpretation, revised animal magnetism, and EMDR. Stimulated and enlightened by the illumination of women’s “dark continent” offered to us by Dr. Charles, perhaps now you, the Clio’s Psyche reader, can better decide.

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