Almanac of Psychoanalysis; Psychoanalytic Stories After Freud and Lacan - Review by James M. Mellard http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2342/is_3_32/ai_55082386/?tag=content;col1 Ed.

Ruth Golan, Gabriel Dahan, Shlomo Lieber, and Rivka Warshawsky. Tel Aviv: Groupe Israelienne de l'Ecole Europeene, 1998. 227 pp. $25.00. Initially, because of how it is situated within what Elisabeth Roudinesco calls "Lacanian legitimism" (428), the Almanac of Psychoanalysis: Psychoanalytic Stories after Freud and Lacan may seem as interesting for the politics it exhibits as for the essays and other pieces included in it. The volume is a collection of eighteen texts produced by the Israeli Group of the European School of Psychoanalysis. The group intends to produce, each year if possible, a new volume such as this one. It includes a brief introduction by the editors, but more important is the volume's thematic introduction. It is byJacquesAlain Miller and Eric Laurent. Laurent is the titular president of the European School of Psychoanalysis of the Freudian Field. Miller is the son-in-law of Jacques Lacan. He and his wife Judith in effect inherited the family business. Together, they created the Cause Freudien and l'Ecole de la cause freudienne (the School of the Freudian Cause). Because they head the parent organization of that "Lacanian legitimism," Miller, as the clinician, becomes the head at least symbolically of all such organizations, of which there are several dozen around the world. Thus it is with considerable warmth that the editors of the Almanac express their gratitude to both Miller and Laurent for allowing the group to use their jointly delivered talk as the thematic point of departure for this volume. With Laurent and, especially, Miller at the head of the table of contents, the editors mean to suggest that all the essays in some fashion belong within the legitimized school of Lacanian theory and practice That claim, if indeed it is that, is perhaps more important to the members of the Group than to literary critics interested in Lacanian theory. The keynote piece by Miller and Laurent is called "The Other Who Does Not Exist and His Ethical Committees." Published originally in La Cause Freudienne 35 (February 1997) and translated into English by Michele Julien, Richard Klein, Kevin Polley, Mischa Twitchin, and Veronique Voruz, it came from the seminar of 1997 conducted in Paris at the School of the Freudian Cause. The main theme of the seminar was the crisis of ethics in a time when all seemingly agree that there is no primally grounded Other, no god or first cause or foundational law. The editors of the Almanac claim this crisis lies at the center of their collection, for they insist that "psychoanalytic practice must address this Real crisis while at the same time upholding the inexistence of the Other" (13). In the essays in the collection, the authors attempt - not always very directly - to connect this thesis to issues ranging from sexual identity to child psychosis to anorexia, modern art, and logic and mathematics. To manage these topics, the editors divide the collection into sections under the headings "Today's Civilization and the Discontents about the Real," "The Answer of Psychosis," "Concerning the Object," and "Interpretation and Truth." Some of the more interesting essays in the collection are Gabriel Dahan's "The Clinics of Management," Colette Soler's "Plus-Un of Melancholy," Laurent's "From Saying to Doing in the Clinic of Drug Addiction and Alcoholism," Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger's "Supplementary Jouissance," and Riva Warshawsky's "The House, the Car, the Camera, the 'Sudden Attacks': A Clinical Case." But however much any of these hews to the thesis of the introduction, none of them does as much as Miller and Laurent to make this volume worth purchasing or to clarify the politics within which the volume is situated. Because it outlines the latest version of the history of Lacanian theory, Miller's

section of that introduction alone explains the politics and makes the Almanac worth buying. Given Miller's status as the one who speaks now as the reigning "Father" of "Lacanian legitimism," it is perhaps more important to present his history of the "new" Lacan than to address any of the other essays at all, however attractive some of them may be. Thinking within the context of Civilization and Its Discontents and Freud's persistent theorization of the Oedipus complex, Miller aims directly to locate Lacanian theory as the basic ideology of apostmodern culture (or "civilization," the word he typically uses) very different from that of the nineteenth century (which, Miller says, lasted until the end of World War I). Because the Symbolic order is different in the Victorian and the postmodern epochs, the orders (Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic) forming the Borromean knot of subjectivity itself relate differently. As Lacanians and others know, Lacan uses the famous schema L to represent the "structure" of the subject. The "L" is a simple rectangle containing a cross whose points originate in the corners. The two vectors of the cross represent the Symbolic and the Imaginary. The point where they cross represents the "hole" from or through which the Real might irrupt (this "hole" sounds much like the fabulous "wormholes" of science fiction through which subjects enter alternate universes). In what Miller thinks of as the"old" Lacan, the Symbolic could cross the line or vector of the Imaginary. Not so in the subject of the postmodern age. Says Miller, "[T]he contemporary symbolic [...] is far from being up to puncturing, crossing the imaginary, as was illustrated in Lacan's schema L, [...] where the arrow of the symbolic crosses the axis of the imaginary even if it is perhaps checked, sometimes stopped, [or] slowed down" (21). This is to say that in the subject posited by Freud and the early - "old" - Lacan, the Symbolic enjoyed some hegemony over the Imaginary. The Symbolic of the later Lacan, Miller suggests, seems almost given over to the Imaginary. There once was a "clear, striking opposition between [them]," but Lacan offered "the notion of a dialectical crossing of the symbolic in relation to the imaginary," nowadays the one seems folded into the other so that each becomes harder to identify. "Henceforth," says Miller, "the contemporary symbolic no longer achieves this dialectical crossing on which the Lacan of old indexed analytic experience. On the contrary, one might even believe that the symbolic is dedicated to the image when one sees how, in our computers, it is concealed as hardware behind the screen on which it shimmers as semblant." Thus Miller offers us a Lacan who relativizes Oedipus and therefore the concept of subjectivity. "Our" subjectivity, concomitant with the postmodern, is no longer quite Freud's or even that of Lacan's 1938 Family Complexes. The assumption here is that while the status of psychoanalysis is not at all jeopardized by historical relativism, the invention of psychoanalysis and some of its concepts was in fact culturally determined. Because the specific guise of the father in the Oedipal complex is rooted in the status of the idealized Father (indeed, God the Father) in the Victorian age, Miller contends that, mutatis mutandis, the "father" of our time will have changed with the times. Because Lacan always believed in "the inexistence of the Other," Miller claims, we should never construe Lacan as an endorser of an unchanging Oedipus. "The reign of the Name-of-the-Father," says Miller, "corresponds in psychoanalysis to the epoch of Freud. If Lacan extracted it, brought it to light, formalised it, it is not in order to adhere to it, to develop this Name-of-the-Father, but to put an end to it" (16). Lacan put an end to the Name, Miller contends, when he introduced the notion of Names-of-the-Father. Whereas in the Freudian epoch subjects might still believe in the reality or truth of the Other in the Name-of-theFather, in the Lacanian epoch the Other no longer exists as such. "The inexistence of the Other," says Miller, "truly opens up what we will call the Lacanian epoch in psychoanalysis. And this epoch is our own. In other words, it is the psychoanalysis of the epoch of errancy, the psychoanalysis of the epoch of the non-dupes," of those who are not fooled by the Name-of-the-Father (17). In the Lacanian epoch, the Other has become a fiction, a fabrication, a "seeming," a semblant. Of postmodern subjects Miller

says, "Whether explicitly, implicitly, [or] in misrecognising it, unconsciously, they know that the Other is only a semblant." Whereas in the "Freudian epoch" the crisis involved the Symbolic order, in the Lacanian the crisis involves the order of the Real, not "reality" (which is always structured by the cultural Symbolic), but the "impossible" Real beyond language and the Symbolic. Miller says this crisis emerges from the "vertiginous dematerialisation" of postmodern life. While he does not mean to suggest that the Real disappears, he does stress that between Freud and Lacan our "sense" of it changes and becomes more problematic. Heretofore the discourses, first of religion and then of science, have validated the Real for Western civilization, but lately even science - in such theories in physics as the uncertainty principle- has undermined it for postmodernists. Although Freud could outline a "Project for a Scientific Psychology," Lacan would never think of his project as scientific beyond trading on the "scientificity" (my word) of his primary model, linguistics (see my "Inventing Lacanian Psychoanalysis"). Nonetheless, though the discontents of postmodern civilization focus on the reality of the Real, Lacan always insists not only that there is a Real, but that the discourse of psychoanalysis absolutely depends upon it. Thus it matters little that our epoch regards the Other and the Father as a semblant or suggests even that everything "is nothing but semblant." It is inconsequential, because, as Lacan has said, "One can make do without the Name-of-the-Father on condition that one makes use of it" (18). Or, to put it differently, "One can only make do without the Name-of-the-Father qua real on condition that one makes use of it as semblant" (19). We can do without a real Father, that is, as long as we use a substitute in the structural place where the "Father" must play "his" role. In Miller's view, Lacan's notion of the three orders and of subjectivity depends crucially on social relations, "the social bond." The symptom itself is "social." "How," asks Miller, "can we operate every day in our practice without inscribing the symptom in the actual context of the social bond which determines its form [...]?" (23). To answer this question, Miller indicates that in his seminar (of 1997) not only will he and Laurent "affirm the social dimension of the symptom," but also that they will consider how it fits into the thesis of the inexistence of the Other. "To affirm the social in the symptom, the social of the symptom," Miller tells us, "is not in contradiction with the thesis of the inexistence of the Other. On the contrary, the inexistence of the Other implies and explains the promotion of the social bond in the emptiness which it opens up." In the subject, one element of this bond, Miller suggests, lies in identification. "[I]denfification as such," he insists, "precisely forms the social bond. It is a social bond in itself." Given his sense of identification, Lacan would encounter no difficulty in adjusting to the cultural changes wrought, particularly in America, by feminism or those involved in changing attitudes toward homosexuality. Miller says, for example, that "the identification with the signifier to be a woman [...] has led to the juridical and political emancipation of women, up to the specifically ethical revolt of feminism, the incidence of which makes itself felt at all levels of the new American way of life." Moreover, to take another example, Miller asks, "What is it that remains invariable in homosexuality and what is it that changes when the social Other henceforth greets it in a completely different way, and when a new norm is in the process of being elaborated, conferring on the homosexual bond a novel and mass legitimacy?" Oh, brave new world! As an index of the massive change between the epoch of Freud and that of the Lacan of the "new" Lacanians (see my "Lacan and the New Lacanians"), Miller readdresses the matter of the Oedipus and the discontents of civilization in the context of semblants and the inexistence of the Other. His exemplary "civilization" is America's, to which he refers as the US, "UnitedSymptoms." The United States becomes a paradigm for postmodern civilization because its history predisposes it in the direction of the new discontents founded on identifications and the order of the Imaginary. To Freud,

says Miller, Europe has tended to identify with the leader in a vertical identification that "activates sublimation" in ways conducive to the rise of powerful demagogues (do we need to mention Hitler?). By contrast, says Miller of Freud's claims, the United States "sacrifices this [sublimation] to the benefit of what one could call the horizontal identification between themselves of members of society. Not identification with the plus-one," that is, the one who stands above the law in order to establish the Law, "but horizontal identification between the members of the society themselves" (24). It is Miller's view that, in the United States and, by extension, in the postmodern civilization of which it is the model, such pervasive horizontal identifications represent "a foreshadowing of the Other which does not exist, and of its replacement by the circulation of the ethical committees." Thus in the "United Symptoms" of the postmodern subject, the drive expressed in the subject in the agency of the superego derives from civilization itself. For Miller's new Lacanianism, caught up in the Other as semblants, civilization becomes "a system of the distribution of jouissance through the use of semblants" (25). From this perspective of civilization as superego, "a civilisation is a mode of jouissance, and even a common mode of jouissance, a systematised distribution of the ways and means to jouir," to enjoy. Whereas the "old" Lacan of the Symbolic, desire, and renunciation saw jouissance as the veritable death of subjectivity itself, thenew Lacan anticipates a civilization that has turned jouissance into its salvation. Thus if themajor neurosis of the Freudian epoch involved the Oedipus complex and the Father, that of the new postmodern age involves the inexistence of the Other and the semblants of the Father. For the new Lacan, the decline of the Freudian myth of the primordial Fatherwas a result of "the deficiency of the father, whose personality is absent, humiliated, divided or a sham" (26). If there is a "major neurosis" of our time, Miller contends, "one could say that its principal determinant is the inexistence of the Other - in so far as it rivets the subject to the pursuit of surplus-jouissance." "The Freudian superego," says Miller, "produced things like prohibition, duty, and indeed guilt." These phenomena in turn cause the Other to exist because in their being "the semblants of the Other" they "suppose the Other." By contrast, the Lacanian superego commands the subject to enjoy, jouis. While "[t]his," says Miller, "is the superego of our civilisation," it remains linked to the Freudian epoch and Freud's conceptualization of the superego. Indeed, says Miller, not only does the Lacanian superego "account [for] the elements gathered by Freud," but it is also "the truth of the Freudian superego." With its command to the subject to enjoy the once forbidden jouissance, the new Lacanian superego has become "the new regime of contemporary civilisation," that which Juliet Flower MacCannell calls the "regime of the brother." Where, as single or collective subjects, are we left by this relativization of Oedipus and the inexistence of the Other in postmodern "civilization"? It certainly does not leave us cured or situate us all as members of some edenic utopia. Mainly, we are left with a different set of discontents. While the aims of the movements of postmodernism (feminism, gay liberation, multiculturalism, postcolonialism, and the like) are to liberate their affected subjects into the position of an identificatory "brotherhood," there is no guarantee that their achievements will solve all our personal or collective problems. Even if all the goals of postmodernist movements are met, the structure of human subjectivity will remain the same. That is why Lacan says it makes no difference whether subjects believe in the reality of the Other or merely act as if they believe in it. In the structure of the subject, as in much human activity, there must remain the place - the plus one - of the Other of authority, the place where signification - at least momentarily - stops slipping. That place does not disappear. In Lacanian theory, the plus one or the Other or the "Father," under whatever names, is that which stands outside the "all," the collective, in order to give the collective its authority. It is the plus one who says that something is "not all." In social life, we need that "not all," for, as Gabriel Dahan says in "The Clinics of Management,"

"Totalitarianism is synonymous with anything that operates under the logic of 'all,' while rejecting the possibility of 'not all'" (Almanac 69). Despite the manifold laudable goals of postmodernist movements, we must conclude that, even if they could, they should not eliminate the "plus one." Without it, things can be worse. As Lacan suggests, in seminar nineteen (1971-1972) called ". . . ou Pire" (". . . or Worse"), we may have the Oedipal father - or worse, the primordial father who lusts for the death or enslavements of us all. While it may well be that the shift from the epoch of Freud to the epoch of Lacan represents progress in the history of the subject, that remains to be seen. James M. Mellard Northern Illinois University Other Works Cited MacCannell, Juliet Flower. The Regime of the Brother: After the Patriarchy. New York: Routledge, 1991. Mellard, James M. "Inventing Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Linguistics and Tropology in 'The Agency of the Letter.'" Poetics Today 19.4 (Winter 1998): 499-530. -----."Lacan and the New Lacanians: Josephine Hart's Damage, Lacanian Tragedy, and the Ethics of Jouissance." PMLA 113 (1998): 395-407. Roudinesco, Elisabeth. Jacques Lacan. 1993. Trans. Barbara Bray. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. James M. Mellard (jmellard@niu.edu) is professor of English at Northern Illinois University. His books include The Exploded Form: The Modernist Novel in America (1980), Doing Tropology: Analysis of Narrative Discourse (1987), and Using Lacan, Reading Fiction (1991). He has published regularly on Lacanian theory since 1984. Recent publications include "Lacan and the New Lacanians: Josephine Hart's Damage, Lacanian Tragedy, and the Ethics of Jouissance" (PMLA, May 1998) and "Inventing Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Linguistics and Tropology in 'The Agency of the Letter'" (Poetics Today, Winter 1998). He has edited Style since 1995. COPYRIGHT 1998 Northern Illinois University COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group Bibliography for: "Almanac of Psychoanalysis; Psychoanalytic Stories After Freud and Lacan Review" James M. Mellard "Almanac of Psychoanalysis; Psychoanalytic Stories After Freud and Lacan Review". Style. FindArticles.com. 23 Nov, 2011. COPYRIGHT 1998 Northern Illinois University COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group