Lacan, Literature, and Psychoanalysis

My opportunity to receive psychoanalytic training at the Cleveland Psychoanalytic Institute materialized out of thin air in 1985-1986 when, in my first year of teaching in the English Department at Kent State University, the department chair, Robert Bamberg, received a grant from the Ohio Board of Regents for over $500,000 to enhance the department’s offerings in critical theory by, among other things, paying the lion’s share of psychoanalytic training expenses for three faculty members from the department.

My interest in psychoanalysis (aside from an undergraduate infatuation with Jung) was only about four years old at the time, having originated from my participation in a psychoanalytic reading group at the University of Texas at Austin, where I was teaching at the time. One of my primary research interests concerned the effects that literature can have on subjectivity, and my participation in that reading group demonstrated to me that psychoanalytic theory offered the best conceptual tools for understanding such effects. So when the opportunity to receive psychoanalytic training presented itself, I eagerly embraced it as the ideal way to learn more about the workings of human subjectivity and thus to understand the psychological effects of literature.

In retrospect, I would say that my general expectations were largely fulfilled: the training helped me understand complexities and recognize nuances of thinking, feeling, and behavior that I had not previously been cognizant of. The way in which this new understanding came about, however, was a bit different than I had anticipated. I had expected the course work (the “didactic” part of the training) to be the most useful. I had imagined that the courses would provide me with a systematic understanding of human mental functioning, and that my personal analysis (the “training analysis”) and my supervised clinical work with patients would provide the concrete experiences that exemplified and substantiated the theory. While this expectation was met to a modest degree, the relation among individual courses and between the courses and the clinical experiences was not what I had anticipated.

In the first place, this relationship was

Page 51

more often one of tension and even disjunction and incoherence than of integration and coherence. There was no discernible logic or overarching aim to the sequence of courses: a course in Freud’s early writings was followed by courses in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and a series of courses devoted to the various developmental stages from infancy to old age, along with a course on Freud’s major cases, one on perversion, another on instincts, and so on. Nor was there any discernible connection between the courses and our clinical work. Above all, I felt that the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis — the processes through which psychoanalysis promotes psychological change — needed to have much greater emphasis and focus in the curriculum. It seemed to me that this process — the raison d’être of psychoanalysis — was largely ignored in the courses which focused primarily on psychodynamic structures and development rather than on therapeutic strategies and techniques.

This lack of coherence among courses and between courses and clinical experience was exacerbated for me by the fact that my scholarly work was grounded primarily in the theory of Jacques Lacan, who was (understandably, I suppose) viewed with great suspicion by a number of senior faculty at the Institute. It was made clear in several courses that Lacanian ideas were not acceptable topics for discussion, so I was continuously struggling to integrate three rather separate realms of experience: my clinical experiences (personal analysis and work with patients), my didactic training at the Institute, and my reading and writing in Lacanian theory. By the time my training ended in 1993, I felt that I had achieved such integration to a modest degree and that the results had been worth the effort (which continues today). But I also believed that greater results could have been achieved through considerably less effort if the course work had been more coherent, less historical and hagiographic, more connected with contemporary clinical realities, and more inclusive of other psychoanalytic theories (Lacanian, Kleinian, self psychology, object relations). This was apparently also the perception of many others at the Institute, for shortly after I finished my course work, the entire curriculum was revised to make it more inclusive, relevant, and coherent.

Also contrary to my expectations, the indispensable part of the training proved to be my personal analysis and my clinical work with patients. My own analysis benefited me both personally and professionally, helping me recognize and work through a number of desires, fantasies, enjoyments, and defenses that I had been oblivious to and that had kept not only my personal relationships but also my teaching and my scholarship from being as productive and fulfilling as they could be. I am now much more aware of the complex of psychological needs and conflicts that I and other teachers and students bring to the classroom, and I have altered my teaching practices as a result. I am, for example, much more sensitive to the way a teacher’s enthusiasm can operate on students in transference in ways that are, whatever the teacher’s intentions, inevitably seductive and/or authoritarian and therefore ethically problematic. I have come to see writing problems as functions more of what I have come to call the psychopathology of everyday prose than of lack of knowledge or skill. As a result, I now see helping students to recognize and work through certain intrapsychic conflicts as being essential to helping them become effective writers. And I see a similar process as being essential to becoming a more effective teacher. By examining what was motivating me in my teaching and my scholarship, I have come both to alter my own pedagogical and scholarly aims and procedures and to question many of the fundamental practices of English studies. The result is that I now see many of the pedagogical and scholarly practices in English studies as functioning more to defend against anxiety and provide narcissistic and aggressive gratifications for English professors than to provide real human benefits for our students and for society at large. More generally, and most importantly for my own scholarship, I have become more sensitive to the complex psychological needs and conflicts that underwrite all social problems (whether by producing the problem more or less directly, as in gang violence, or by interfering with rational strategies for dealing with the problems, as in opposition to gun control or enthusiasm for incarceration and execution of criminals), and I now believe that the most valuable role that English professors and other cultural critics can play is as psychoanalysts of culture and society, illuminating the various psychological needs and conflicts that underwrite social problems, and finding ways to help people recognize these needs and work through them (or find alternative satisfactions for them).

This professional agenda, the formulation of which resulted in substantial part from my

Page 52

personal analysis, has probably reduced the quantity of my publication, in two ways. First, most other English professors are not particularly eager to hear my critiques of our discipline’s current scholarly and pedagogical practices, and, as a result, it has been more difficult for me to publish much of this material. Second, this agenda has motivated me to co-found a new organization, the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture & Society (co-founded with Marshall Alcorn of George Washington University), and to edit its journal, the Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society [see notice on page 67], which cuts significantly into my own writing. But this reduction in quantity of publishing is more than compensated for by the conviction that my current scholarly work has the possibility of producing some real human benefits, as opposed to simply another body of articles and books that may be read by a few other scholars but would ultimately change nothing. Thus, while my psychoanalytic training has probably made my work more difficult and more frustrating in certain ways, it has also made it more meaningful and more gratifying.

Page 53