Lacan, Plastered

As collected here, the three lectures of My Teaching provide an entryway into Jacques Lacan’s place in the “doctrine” of psychoanalysis as Lacan illustrates the playful wordplay and associative structure of his technique by weaving together such topics as the origin of language, the training of psychoanalysts, and the function of the subject. The readings for this week piggyback off of the Freud essays we’ve read so far this semester, but we didn’t get away from Freud at all; Lacan’s incessant homage to Freud extends beneath the content—and even at this level, Lacan’s teacher crush is quite obvious—to the logic which supports it, the Freudian device of looping—a systematic recursivity built directly into the structure and form of the psychoanalytic process which then carries over into psychoanalytic writing. At one point in the lectures when Lacan is entertaining the question of why it’s important to teach and to learn psychoanalysis, a point that he returns to as the looping technique would dictate, a few times, he makes it personal by calling attention to what he sees as the crisis within psychoanalytic teaching and training, which is the “propaganda” that “the psychoanalytic crew” have been peddling amongst themselves (11). One of the pieces of “sales patter” (11) that Lacan offers is that, to those within its disciplinary confines, “psychoanalysis [is] purely and simply a therapy, a drug, a plaster, a magical cure,” though he’s quick to explain that “that is certainly not what psychoanalysis is” (12). To get to the bottom of this matter, Lacan, responding to the simplistic (to him) notion that psychoanalysis can be “described as a cure,” suggests the following route:

We first have to admit that, if that is what it was, we would really have to ask why we force ourselves to put it on, because, of all the plasters, this is one of the most fastidious to have to put up with. (12)

When he says that “we first have to admit,” Lacan is pulling another Freudian trick, which is to assume that everyone listening already agrees with him insofar as psychoanalysis is not as simple as “a cure” and that it therefore needs further elaboration, one best seen through the corrective lens Lacan will here offer, nay, insist upon. The English translation offers us a rather sloppy syntax situation with the repeat of the word “that” before and after that first comma. The first “that” begins a restrictive clause that (like this one) restricts the meaning of “admit” to that which we must admit, “if that is what it was.” This second “that” is not the same as the first “that.” Whereas the first “that” set us up to hear the restrictions on “admit,” the second “that” is a demonstrative pronoun, looping back to the idea that “psychoanalysis [is] purely and simply a therapy, a drug, a plaster, a magical cure.” Indeed, the entire appositive, “if that is what it was,” loops back to point to the last statements Lacan made about the current crisis in/of the psychoanalytic discipline. The word “if” alerts us to the fact that there’s some uncertainty as to the veracity of the “propaganda” that psychoanalysis is simplistic sales patter. The presence of the word “if” also makes me skeptical of two other syntax choices before and after it: in “we first have to admit,” Lacan positions the listeners into a hypothetical future, not into a literal present--the present of action; and the word which follows, “was,” in the subjunctive mood in English, denotes that whatever was actually was (or, that the hypothetical was literal). These “slips” on either side of the “that”s, when questioned against “if,” cast doubt on whether the writer himself knew upon which side of the line he stood.

As for the “if that is what it was,” the tone seems flippant or sarcastic, as though Lacan’s trying to admonish whoever might think that way in the first place, but because the “was” denotes that it was (whereas a “were” would denote that it could be, hypothetically, counterfactually), I’m no longer sure myself if Lacan knows what he’s admitting to. He is issuing a command—even if it is issued in a syntactically half-hearted kind of way—a command that issues a second command: “We first have to admit that . . . we would really have to ask why.” In other words, we have to admit that we would have to ask. Why would Lacan tell us that our first steps in this process is to admit that we would have to ask? Is part of the crisis in the psychoanalytic community a refusal to ask questions? Is there some sort of fear, shame, or degradation associated with the having to ask? Something, perhaps, about performing not knowing? While important to the larger work and to my own understanding of psychoanalysis, these questions are not answered within this small excerpt, but the general mood and aura of the psychoanalytic profession at the time is perhaps captured in the question the “we” have to ask themselves: “why we force ourselves to put it on.” The “it” here loops back to “psychoanalysis,” but not the psychoanalysis that is only a cure and that trained psychoanalysts are not knowing (Lacan is obsessed in these essays with who knows what); Lacan is talking about either of the psychoanalyses, the one that is what they say it is and the one that isn’t. It’s the one that both Lacan and these other psychoanalysts put on, as he indicated by yoking himself together in the “we.”

Though I’m running out of space and time to write with only these first few words considered, I want to jump to two words in the “because” part of Lacan’s sentence (which I will here subordinate because Lacan does J). First, note that he slips into present tense, giving up the pretense that he’s still talking about a hypothetical future admission we could make and moving instead into the admission he’s making in the present: that “of all plasters, this is one of the most fastidious to have to put up with.” There are other plasters, psychoanalysis isn’t the only one. At the same time, this plaster—this plaster which can be both a short-term medical bandage saturated with healing salves and ointments and a substance that begins rather pliable but eventually hardens into a rigid, rough exterior—this plaster is one of the most “fastidious” to have to put up with. As though the couching language of “to have to put up with” weren’t off-putting enough, the word “fastidious” is wretched; from the OED, it’s all these things: that creates disgust; disagreeable; distasteful, unpleasant, wearisome; loathsome; full of pride, scornful; difficult to please. Lacan’s Freudian slips between “were” and “was” and between “would be” and “is” (as in, this “would be” one of the most fastidious instead of it is), alongside the overt use of words that basically amount to a façade of disgust and scorn—from even this quick analysis of form versus content, it appears as though Lacan has some pent-up anxiety about the profession’s ability to ask questions which will crumble their plasters to reveal a crew of fastidious psychoanalysts to put up with.