Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences

The problem I would like to try to address is the following: why does Freud’s modification of the definition of psychoanalysis arrive at this conclusion, which radically separates psychoanalysis from psychology? To try to deal with this problem, to try to raise it, is practically to question the place of psychoanalysis. The presentations that you’ve heard so far have shown you that the question of the location of concepts within psychoanalysis was fundamental for their definition.³ I think that the same can be said about psychoanalysis itself: the question of its location within the domain of the objectivity of existing sciences or possible sciences is essential for its own definition. And if I didn’t want to avoid abusing an image here, I’d compare the description that Lacan gives of the subject of discourse, which is constantly haunted, as if by its absolute condition of possibility, by the empty site from which its discourse is uttered, with the situation of psychoanalysis itself, which, in Lacan’s thought, is constantly haunted by the site that it could occupy in the domain of the objectivity constituted.

Where is psychoanalysis situated? What is its place? What is its location in a space that does not yet exist? What are its borders with existing disciplines? What are its nonborders with existing disciplines? These are the kinds of questions that constantly haunt Lacan’s thought. And it’s no exaggeration to say that they also haunted Freud’s thought. What is equally striking, in both Lacan and Freud, is the following paradox. We find in Freud, as in Lacan, a twofold preoccupation: radically separating psychoanalysis from the discipline that claims to be the closest to it (psychology) and, on the contrary, trying to attach it to disciplines that are apparently distant from it (sociology, anthropology, or ethnology). This way formulating the problem and envisaging its solution might give new significance to certain texts of Freud’s that have too often been considered simply aberrant, precisely insofar as people had a psychological conception of psychoanalysis: texts like Totem and Taboo, The Future of an Illusion, and Civilization and Its Discontents, that is, texts in which Freud tried to give a sociological status to concepts that seemed to be psychological. Perhaps at that point he brought them closer to their true place, but it may also be that, not having succeeded in locating the psychoanalytic concepts within psychoanalysis itself, he found it very difficult to locate psychoanalysis within an existing objectivity.

Why, in fact, is psychoanalysis seeking its place? I would like to propose the following hypothesis, which it seems impossible not to make after the presentations we’ve already heard concerning Lacan’s interpretation of psychoanalysis ⁴: if psychoanalysis actually represents the rise of a radically new scientific discipline, if it’s true that Freud modified, as he says himself, the definition of the psyche, if it’s true that Freud made a genuine scientific discovery, if then it’s true that in psychoanalysis we’re dealing with the rise of a new scientific discipline, that is, with the designation, specification, individuation of a new scientific object, to understand which new concepts are being proposed: if all that is true, in the case of Freud we’re dealing with a phenomenon of which the history of culture was already aware. We’re dealing with the rise of a scientific discipline that presents itself as totally new with regard to a field that was constituted earlier. We’re dealing with the rise of a new truth, of a new knowledge, thus with the definition of a new object that breaks with the field constituted earlier: breaks with a field against the background of which this new discipline stands out. A field that is already occupied, that is an ideological field in which it has no place…. In the history of human culture we can observe phenomena of the same kind during the rise of a new scientific discipline, whether in the case of Greek mathematics, Galilean physics, Marx’s theory of societies, etc. To the extent to which we’re dealing with an epistemological break, with a rupture in the continuity with the earlier field, we’re dealing with a phenomenon of rupture that contains in itself, like a real virtuality, a capacity to upset the field against which it stands out. That’s the first point. But, at the same time, this rising up against the background of a field in which all the places are taken occurs under conditions such that the rise has a tendency to be contested and revoked by the field against the background of which it rises up. The rupture that a new scientific discipline introduces into a field in which all the places are taken, in fact, poses problems for the thinker or scientist who tries to define his new object, problems that are at first practically insoluble. This rupture has to be carried out within the field itself where it is supposed to intervene, practically in the language itself with which this new discipline has to break. That is why this remark of Freud’s, “after having modified the definition of the psyche,” is itself related to the psyche. And all the Freudian terminology itself relates to the concepts on the basis of which Freud conceives his discovery and with which he has to break. It’s no accident that the psychology of the unconscious is defined as the negation of a psychology of consciousness. This legacy and this condition Freud cannot avoid weigh very heavily on the destiny of his thought.

The inevitable result of the rise of a new discipline against the background of an ideological field is that this ideological field tends to cancel the discipline, tends to deny the rupture, that is, to digest the new discipline that rises up as its own contradiction and its own challenge. And that’s what’s happening in the history of psychoanalysis, in which we see psychoanalysis disappearing under the impact of the mastication, psychoanalysis being digested either by biology or by psychology. The essential question will be why the discipline that digests psychoanalysis most of all is psychology. Why, in other words, did psychoanalysis rise up against the background of psychology? And why is it that this field is its most immediate field? The final consequence of this situation is that the recognition of this rupture, that is, of its specificity, is possible only through a total restructuring of the field against which this rupture rises up through a complete and real modification of this field, through the instauration of a new field, of a new border within this field: in short, through a redistribution of the places. That is why we can say that the problem of the place of psychoanalysis in the domain of the human sciences is a problem that arises in two ways. Psychoanalysis has no place in a field in which all the places are taken, and it is in that way that it will appear to be outside the field, as not having a border with it, as occupying an empty place. The second aspect of the problem of the place of psychoanalysis is that psychoanalysis cannot occupy a place in this field unless this field is itself completely restructured, that is, unless its topology is completely changed by it, unless the very nature of this field is modified by it. Does psychoanalysis alone suffice to modify the topology of this field, that is, to change its nature and its internal divisions? That’s an open question. Lacan thinks, in fact, that psychoanalysis can restructure the field on which it has risen up. That may be beyond its possibilities.

We’re going to try to see how, against the background of the existing field, we can make an initial attempt to locate psychoanalysis. Here I’ve made a somewhat schematic drawing that represents what might be called an initial attempt to locate psychoanalysis.⁵ What we’ve learned from Lacan’s interpretation is that psychoanalysis concerns the little child’s becoming human, that is, his integration into culture through the defiles of the signifier, that is, through the defiles of culture itself and the a priori culture that conditions any acculturation of this little biological being that is a little human biological being [sic]. This little biological being becomes a child starting from the moment he has crossed the boundary of the Oedipus complex, from the moment he is integrated into the machinery, that is, into the distribution of roles that are imposed on him by the kinship structures that are reflected in the order of the signifier through which he expresses his need in the form of a demand. The problem is then the following: what does the little human being encounter when he achieves the state of little human child? If psychoanalysis concerns, in fact, this passage from the biological to the cultural, the passage from the little biological being to the little human child, what does the little human being encounter when he enters culture after having passed through the defile of the signifier? In the current state of the field of the human sciences, it might be thought that he encounters a psychological reality, that he will become a psychological subject, and that psychology will be the point where the individual human is integrated into culture, that is, into human relations. Psychology, which will then be replaced by a new discipline: psychosociology…. I can give you an example of this interpretation—about which, I hasten to say, you all know this already: that it’s abstract; the example of the interpretation proposed in the ideology of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly in the ideology based on Condillac, that of wild children. If you have an opportunity to read Dr. Itard’s reports on the wild boy of Aveyron… you can find them in Lucien Malson’s Les Enfants sauvages where they have just been published.⁶

You know that the eighteenth century took an interest in this problem of the passage from nature to culture; and one of the examples on which eighteenth-century reflection focused was that of so-called wild children: wolf-children, calf-children, pig-children, etc.—that is, children who were picked up in the woods, who lived with animals, and who were found in a state in which there was nothing human about them, but instead they had an animal behavior that made them seem to be little wolves, little bears, etc. Here’s what we can say about the essential characteristics of these wild children, although it’s obviously pretty difficult to really verify it, because it’s possible that a certain number of perceptions—ideological perceptions—played a role in defining these characteristics. The first characteristic is that they go on all fours; the second is that they do not speak and almost never learn to speak, a very interesting phenomenon; the third is that they show no sexual desire; the fourth is that they cannot recognize themselves in a mirror; the fifth is that they can’t smile. These characteristics, which were summed up not by eighteenth-century philosophers but by anthropologists who have reflected on these examples, are perhaps not without interest insofar as a whole series of contemporary studies, in particular those of Spitz,⁷ have connected all these phenomena that an experimental child psychology can observe and that play an essential role in Lacan’s and Freud’s thinking about the phenomena we are studying.

Let’s take the example of the wild boy of Aveyron studied by Dr. Itard, who worked and taught at an institute for the deaf and dumb (quite near here, as it happens) and had been assigned to study the wild boy of Aveyron by the minister of interior, at the time,⁸ who was eager to promote the sciences. What is extremely interesting about this case is that Dr. Itard implemented a pedagogy based precisely on the hypothesis that this wild child was a biological being who had to be integrated into society by teaching him human behaviors as if he were a psychological subject. In other words, the pedagogy Itard applied was a Condillacian pedagogy that tried to restore the continuity between the biological individual and the psychological subject. The most interesting example, because it challenges the concept that is essential to our reflection here, is that of language, is that of the attempts Itard made to teach the child to speak. He got very disappointing results, but what’s interesting is to see how he reflects on his own disappointment. The first thing Itard noted was that this young savage was sensitive to sounds that were completely insignificant for a cultivated man, for example the sound that is made when shelling a nut, but he was completely insensitive to a rifle shot fired behind his back, and completely insensitive to the human voice. And the only human sound, the only human vowel that he finally recognized, was the vowel o—that’s why Itard gave him the name of Victor:

There we have, so to speak, the identification of a conditioned reflex. And our good doctor, after he’d succeeded in establishing this point of contact, this mooring, with a vowel, tried to develop language: “I had reason to think that the vowel ‘O,’ having been the first heard, would be the first pronounced, and I found it extremely fortunate for my plan that this simple utterance was, at least so far as the sound was concerned, the sign of one of this child’s most ordinary needs.”

There we have the theoretical basis on which this pedagogy was to be developed: the word is conceived here as the sign of a need. A whole philosophy of language is implicit here: a sign of a need, the need of an individual, of a psychological subject who is going to be defined by his needs, and who will have to use language as a system of signs serving as a mediation of his needs. And here’s what’s going to happen:

I have quoted this text at length to give you an example of an interpretation in which this becoming-human of the biological subject is interpreted in relation to a whole ideology of the psychological subject defined by his needs, and language comes in simply as a theory of the sign in relation to the thing, needs being themselves related to the thing: the thing has to be obtained by language as a means of communication with another who will give it to the child. Need is determined, it is expressed, in a sign that passes through another person who gives the thing, and the thing is directly related to the need. The circle is thus completed, but it causes the presence of two subjects to appear: the one who speaks (the subject who utters) and the one who understands language and causes to appear a particular status of language in which there is an unequivocal relation between the sign and the thing signified, between the signifier and the thing signified. There you have the whole ideological background, which involves an imaginary machinery: that of two subjects communicating through language, this means of communication between two subjects being itself a means of signifying a thing that is signified by the linguistic signifier. That is, you find in all this a structure in which the subjects communicate through language, itself in direct relation with the thing, the thing being itself in direct relation with the needs of language. Everything is flattened out: the subject and his needs are one and the same, and it’s through this twofold identity that communication is possible.

That is the background of the ideological conception with which the break in modern linguistics was to take place, a break that Lacan was to take advantage of. This flattening, this horizontal character of the two subjects in their alterity, of two subjects defined by their needs, in other words, the identity of the subject and his needs, on the one hand, and, on the other, the identity of the sign, of the signifier and the signified—all that forms a similar structure and belongs to the same fundamental problematic. That is the basis on which the subject is defined as a psychological subject: and it is this imaginary machinery, this imaginary theory that Itard tries to use to introduce the little biological being to the quality of a psychological subject. And it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work, but, on the other hand, he observes phenomena as aberrant as the one through which an expression turns out to be related to manifestations of joy, with a whole sort of show that can also be related to the presence of a certain little girl associated with these words, etc. All these phenomena are aberrant for him and don’t enter into his conception.

All that to give you an idea of the cultural background, the ideological backdrop, against which we can try to conceive this becoming-human of the little human animal. Thanks to what Lacan has explained to us, we know that, so far as we’re concerned, that’s not how it works. We know that in analytic practice the psychoanalyst is dealing, in the subject facing him in therapy, with what we can call the traces of this archeology, that is, with the currently present traces of this archeology, that is, with the currently present traces of what happened at the crucial moment of the integration of the little human being into the cultural world. And what’s crucial—this is what Lacan insists on, and it’s his great discovery—is that this becoming-human that is going to be represented for you by this vector,¹⁰ “passage from the biological to the cultural,” is in reality the effect of the action of the cultural on the biological. What is represented here by this vector must actually be represented by another vector: it is the cultural that acts on the biological, as the condition of the possibility of integrating the little human animal. Instead of dealing with this “biology → culture” vector, we’re dealing with a very different structure in which culture produces this forward movement: we’re dealing with an inversion of the determination. It’s through the action of culture on the little biological human being that his integration into culture takes place. Thus it’s not the becoming-human of the little human being that we’re dealing with, it’s the action of culture, constantly, on a little being other than culture itself, which culture transforms into a human being. That is, we’re actually dealing with a phenomenon of investment whose vector is apparently oriented toward culture, whereas in fact it is culture that constantly precedes itself, absorbing the being that is to become a human subject.

The second consequence of Lacan’s reflection is that what precedes the becoming-human of the little human being isn’t psychology, it’s not the psychological subject, but what he calls “the order of the symbolic,” or what I would call, if you will, the law of culture. It’s the law of culture that determines the passage to culture itself. I believe that we have to understand it in its full dimension. And first of all by opposing it to what this fundamental discovery opposed itself: a problematic of the relation between nature and culture that is reflected in an ideology of which I gave you an example regarding Itard and that is reflected in the form of the psychological development of the little biological being. This is the famous problem of eighteenth-century philosophy, that of the transition from the state of nature to the state of society. This problem is raised in a paradoxical way that Rousseau pertinently criticized. All the terms are present, for example, in Rousseau’s critique of Hobbes. In the philosophy of the transition from nature to society, the ideology of the eighteenth century represents this transition as one between two states: from one distinct state to another distinct state. And if you’ve kept this critique in mind, the sense of Rousseau’s criticism of Hobbes is to bring out the ideological circle involved in this conception.

What is the sense of Rousseau’s criticism of Hobbes? Rousseau says to Hobbes, and more generally to all the natural-law philosophers, that they’ve pretended to imagine a being that is only nature, whereas in reality they’ve projected onto the state of nature the structures of the state of society. They’ve pretended to represent as noncultural a being that in fact they’ve endowed with all the cultural properties necessary to conceive the state of society from which they’ve abstracted him. That’s the sense of Rousseau’s introduction to his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Among Men. And Rousseau’s criticism is extremely profound insofar as he brings out a truth that we can still endorse today, namely that what the philosophers of nature conceived in the passage from nature to society is simply the conditions of the possibility of the existence of society, conceived in the form of nonsociety. The subject who is conceived as “man in the state of nature” is represented as endowed with all the attributes, potential or developed, that actually belong to a subject of the world of society, that is, to a cultural subject. And that is doubtless why an important revolution in the thought of Rousseau in the second Discourse consists precisely in not conceiving the problem of the transition from nature to society in terms of the individual, but in terms of the species: not asking, as Condillac had, what a given individual becomes, how a given individual might develop, but instead conceiving the development of society as a social phenomenon. That is, he conceives the permanent antecedence of culture or of society with respect to its own cultural development, conceives the fact that society always precedes itself. Now it is such fundamental truth (which Rousseau later abandons precisely in the attempt to represent, in the form of a natural man, the political and social ideal to which he is attached) that we find in Lacan’s reflection. Culture always precedes itself, and it is this precedence, this perpetual antecedence of culture with respect to itself, that is represented by this circle. And, to tell the truth, we have to note that if we take things a little seriously, in psychoanalysis we are never dealing with the direct observation of this antecedence of culture with [respect to] itself at the moment when the infant becomes a human child, when the little biological being becomes a human child. In reality, we are always dealing with an ulterior phenomenon, with a phenomenon that is situated within culture, because in the case of analytic therapy it is a question of a practice addressed to a human being who has been a human child: when we talk about the becoming-human of the little human biological being we are dealing with a first recurrence. It is this first recurrence that raises so many problems for classical psychoanalytic theory, which is psychological in inspiration, in particular the problem of whether the recollection at work in therapy is a phenomenon of reality, whether it corresponds to realities. This phenomenon of recurrence, which corresponds, for example, to the famous problem of whether the primal scene, which Freud said might be so traumatizing, should be considered a historically real scene or a fantasy. A difficulty that we also find in the problem of abreaction and in the problem of regression. In other words, the problem of recollection in associations, in rules, in interpretations, the problem of abreaction, and the problem of regression, three essential concepts on which Lacan reflects, are problems connected with the fundamental fact that the recollection at work in analytic practice is not taken seriously in psychological theory. In other words, it is because what takes place in analytic practice is not seen as taking place, in fact, within a constituted cultural world, in a subject who is already a subject of determined society, a subject of culture, that all these problems are posed in terms of the relations between the biological and the psychological. All these false problems that Lacan points out (the problems of recollection, abreaction, regression, etc.) are problems that arise from neglecting the fact that what is conceived as the antecedence of culture with respect to itself in the human development of the little biological being is in fact situated within culture itself. In other words, the precession of culture in its relation to biology is a precession of culture with respect to itself that is situated at the cultural level in psychoanalytic practice.

It is here that another consequence appears. How is it possible to conceive the identity of the signification of this precession of culture with respect to itself that is at work in analytic therapy in relation to the retrospective localization that is assigned in recollection, abreaction, regression, etc., as concerning the becoming-human of the little biological being? The problem raised here is absolutely insoluble in a psychological theory of the unconscious, and it’s a problem that Lacan confronts and resolves, it seems to me, by making it clear that it is precisely through the insistence of relationships constituted in the whole cultural development of the cultural being from the time when he is a little child through the conditions of possibility of this insistence in language, that is, in the order of the symbolic (whose meaning we will have to explain later on), that the possibility of this recurrence is founded. In other words, this recurrence is possible because temporality, which it is impossible to conceive with a psychological subject, is subjected to conditions of possibility that are not the social frameworks of memory, in the sense in which Halbwachs understood them,¹¹ but are identical with the structure of the symbolic that is subject to the model of language. This is because the cultural development of the little human being who has become an adult, subject to therapy, is subject to this condition of possibility as a condition of the possibility of his own temporality, because it is possible to found this recurrence, and to speak of the human development of the little biological being at the time of the therapy, that is, at a time when this little biological being is a human being and is no longer anything but a human being.

It’s on that basis that we can grasp the relations between psychoanalysis and psychology: on the basis of this paradoxical situation and on the basis of its misunderstandings. I would like to give you a few clues—you already know the gist—that manifest in a concrete way the paradoxical situation of psychoanalysis in the field in which it arises. I was saying that the emergence of a new scientific discipline, which is destined by its very novelty to express itself in an existing terminology, that is, to stand out against this background, produces an ambiguous situation, particularly the temptation to relapse into this background; in any case, it produces, on the part of the ideological field against which it stands out, the temptation to absorb it. That is the second point of this presentation, in which I would like to talk about psychology, giving you two examples of psychology’s attempts to digest psychoanalysis and trying to reflect very schematically on what this psychology that tries to absorb psychoanalysis is.

The first example of psychology’s attempt to digest psychoanalysis is the one made by Anna Freud. In an issue of the Revue française de psychanalyse devoted to honoring Freud, there is an article by Anna Freud entitled “La contribution de la psychanalyse à la psychologie génétique.”¹² If you’re patient enough to look at it—it’s not very long, it’s very schematic, it’s very caricatured, it’s very representative… it can be summed up this way: Anna Freud’s whole effort consists in conceiving psychoanalysis as the interiority of the biological or psychological in order to relate it to the social.¹³ All the preexisting categories are retained, are naively retained; it’s just that the psychological subject becomes a subject that has a biological interiority—that of the “id,” of the instincts, of drives, of tendencies, etc.—that is going to be related to society. Whence arises a whole series of conflicts. Psychology becomes the “ego,” which is the central category of Anna Freud’s whole theory. She declares, for example, that “in the history of psychoanalysis, genetic investigation has evolved from the study of libidinal development to that of inhibiting forces, it has established the description of the two main, simultaneous and parallel lines that the human personality follows in its growth.”¹⁴ The human personality appears to be double, and it is the interest of psychoanalysis to have doubled the former psychological subject with a new internal reality: “The genetic data drawn from this twofold observation in the course of analysis permit us to enlarge our knowledge of the origin and development of the two aspects of an individual’s personality. Regarding instinctual tendencies, this work has in its time allowed us to reconstruct the pregenital phases of libidinal development… and later on [the phases] of the concomitant development of aggressive tendencies. Regarding the ego and the superego, it has allowed us gradually to understand their origin and to show these aspects of the personality.” And here’s the key sentence: “It is on the basis of a simple, central point, the consciousness of sensations of pleasure and displeasure, that the complex organization of the ego responsible for important functions (such as perceptions, memory, reality-testing, the synthesis of experience, the mastery of motor functions) and the major task of serving as an intermediary between the external world and the internal world develops; and so far as the superego is concerned, it represents and imposes the moral requirements of the social environment within the individual personality.”¹⁵ In this personality, in this psychological subject of Anna Freud’s,¹⁶ we are dealing with what she calls a double personality, with two fundamental elements of the personality: the id, which is biological (the drives, the instincts, etc.), and the ego, which is in a conflictual relationship with the id, that is, it tries to defend itself against its aggression, against its excesses of aggressivity, etc., and which exists, at the same time, in relation to reality. The ego then occupies an extremely difficult position, because it is obliged to synthesize the id’s aggressions with reality’s requirements. Reality is twofold: it is both the perceived reality, in other words, the objective world, that is, the norms, that is, ethics. These norms and ethics are to be represented in the form of the superego, which always challenges, in the same way, the relation between a subject and an external reality—this external reality being that of the objective world, of the world that can be perceived, and at the same time the reality of ethical norms, etc. The conflict between the subject and external reality develops within this subject, which includes three agencies. That is to say, psychoanalysis has simply introduced two new dimensions into the interior of the subject, dimensions that are only the reflection, the establishment, the repercussion, so to speak, on the basis of the subject still conceived as the “ego,” the central subject of its relationships with reality. A reality that is twofold: both theoretical reason and practical reason, and is thus found invested within the subject in the form of the ego: the ego being this central position that tries to remain central, that tries to maintain its position against the aggressions of the id or of social reality (in the form of the superego or the objective external world). It is on that basis that Anna Freud’s theory of “the ego’s defense mechanisms” is developed.¹⁷ And on that basis a whole tendency of psychoanalysis is centered on the “ego’s defense mechanisms,” that is, on the mechanisms through which the subject succeeds in keeping itself centered on the ego, which is the function of a synthesis at once theoretical and practical.

This interpretation of psychoanalysis, this psychologizing theory of psychoanalysis, leads to important technical consequences that Lacan constantly points out, particularly to the primacy of the analysis of resistances. That is to say, to the primacy of the resistances that the ego uses as defense mechanisms to protect itself, to protect its synthetic function, against all the external world’s aggressions, and especially against the capacities for aggression represented for it by the psychoanalyst, who is an ego stronger than its own that threatens the internal equilibrium of its own unity. I won’t linger on this theory, which leads to absolutely extraordinary consequences, because the problem finally ends up, in Anna Freud’s work,¹⁸ in a kind of total obscurity regarding the possibilities of an encounter between the ego’s mechanisms and those of the id. It’s simply by chance that we happen to observe a certain number of constant relationships between the id and the ego, etc. It amounts to a veritable dissolution of all of Freudian theory.

As a second example of the digestion of psychoanalysis by psychology, we can cite the example of Lagache. Lagache tries to give an explanation of Lacan’s “Rome Discourse.”¹⁹ And he gives an explanation of Lacan’s relationship in terms of existential philosophy, appealing specifically to Sartre and dissolving the reality of psychoanalytic theory in a fashionable psychological philosophy that, in truth, reconstitutes in a modern form the old psychological temptation to which Anna Freud yielded.²⁰ We can say that Anna Freud represents, so to speak, the old classical psychology, that of the ego as a moral subject based on a duality between the interiority of the subject and the exteriority of the objective world, that the latter is the perceived objective world of social norms, the ethical norms dominant in society, society’s moral demands. And we can say, on the contrary, that Lagache’s attempt gives the psychological subject a new status in which this exteriority is reabsorbed into a philosophy of existence, into a philosophy of consciousness, into a philosophy of intentionality. It is extremely amusing to see that Lagache’s whole effort to interpret Lacan tends to explain to Lacan that Lacan’s main contribution consists in deobjectifying psychology, that is, in disalienating the subject, of dereifying it, etc., whereas, in reality, Lacan’s effort consists in an elaboration of objectivity that is the precondition of any understanding of the subject. What is also interesting is that Lagache, in his response to Lacan, shows his own theory of the doctor-patient relationship by resorting to a term that Lacan had quoted from some psychoanalyst or other: psychoanalysis is a “two-body psychology”;²¹ it’s a psychology that questions two subjects, one opposite the other. And it resolves [the problem] in a psychology of intersubjectivity, in a psychology that causes another kind of subject to appear: not the psychological subject with its biological background, as in Anna Freud, but the subject as a subject of meaning, the subject in which the structures revealed by Lacan are dissolved into simple structures of meaning (meaning for a consciousness), that is, into a veritable psychology of intentionality. And it’s no accident that Lagache connects up with Politzer, who had tried, precisely, to substitute for the structures of the Freudian unconscious a psychology of first-person drama, that is, a psychology of consciousness.

What is the essential criticism Lacan addresses to psychology’s attempts to digest psychoanalysis? His essential criticism bears on the following point: every attempt made by psychology to digest psychoanalysis is based on a confusion between the subject and the ego, that is, on a misunderstanding of the function of the ego in the subject, which is precisely to be a function of recognition and misunderstanding. Lacan’s second fundamental objection is that the psychology at work in this attempt to refute psychoanalysis is also based on a confusion between structure and meaning, a confusion that is possible only on the basis of a philosophy of consciousness. In other words, the psychoanalysis presented in this psychological form undergoes the fundamental structure of psychology, that is, the fundamental structure according to which the human subject is supposed to be identical with the human ego, that is, it is supposed to have the centered structure of the human ego. On that basis, the essential theme of Lacan’s criticism can be put in the following way: if we reduce psychoanalysis to the typical structure of psychology, we no longer understand what the unconscious is. As soon as we try to reduce psychoanalysis to psychology, the unconscious becomes an interior of consciousness; either a biological id, something that falls short of the ungraspable subject interior to the subject, or simply the experienced but occulted sense, the nonsense that is always the risk taken by meaning experienced in the intentionality of consciousness. That is the fatal nature of this centering of the subject on the ego, that is, of the subjection of the structure of the subject to the imaginary structure of the ego, and in that way, in the very measure that the unconscious becomes immanent to the psychological subject, this essential dimension of the unconscious that is its transcendence is lost: a transcendence manifest in the Freud’s own works, insofar as the unconscious is sought as something beyond the subject, conceived as something beyond the psychological subject. This transcendence of the subject is what modern psychology, and in particular Sartrean or Politzerian psychology, seek in intersubjectivity. The transcendence of the unconscious is conceived—for example by Lagache, after Politzer—as that of the immanence of the alter ego: the unconscious is invested in what is conceived as the condition of possibility of its transcendence, that of a transcendental intersubjectivity, at the very level of the experienced. It is there, obviously, that the most important point is situated: this transcendental intersubjectivity, which appears as the site of the unconscious in a psychology of the Politzerian or Sartrean type, or inspired by phenomenology, this intersubjectivity, conceived as the transcendental condition of possibility of psychological alterity, has the same structure as that of the psychological subject. This is the point that we have to try to show with a little precision. In both cases—whether it is a matter of an interiorization of the unconscious, in the form of the biological or in the form of meaning, or of a recognition and its transcendence in the form of a transcendental intersubjectivity—we seem to be dealing with the same structure through which the real structure of the subject is subjected to the imaginary structure of the ego, that is, to the same centered structure.

Why does psychology present itself in this form? That’s the point I want to examine now by asking: what is psychology? Where does psychology come from? What is its past? What are its arrears? What are the scars that it still bears today? Here it’s not a question of producing a historical study: I simply want to try to give two or three clues preparatory to a possible study. The very idea of a psychology presupposes a certain number of fundamental structures that make it possible. These fundamental structures are those that identify three realities of differing status: the individual, the subject, and the ego. Psychology is possible only through the identification of these three terms, that is, through the theoretical presupposition that the subject is an individual possessing the structure of an ego. This constitution supposes and imposes this identity as real. But it suffices to inquire into the status of the three terms thus presented to see that they’re not at the same level, in other words, that they don’t have the same content, and that this identity lumps together three signifiers that don’t have the same signification, that can’t be identified. The individual is a concept that can have a meaning in the domain of biology, that can have a meaning in the division of labor, in the division of social functions. The subject is a concept that also has a meaning in the social division of labor and particularly as a subject to which a certain number of behaviors are imputed, whether they are moral behaviors or political behaviors. It is no accident that the subject designates the one that is subjected, whereas in the classical function of psychology the subject designates the one who is active. It is this reversal, for example, that creates the whole paradox of a psychology whose origin is manifestly political: the subject is the one who is subjected to an order, who is subjected to a master, and who is at the same time conceived in psychology as being the origin of its own actions. This means that it is a subject of imputation, that is, that it is the one that has to justify its own acts, its own behavior, to a third party. And if we consider the ego, which is the third term in this identification, we see that, itself, it appears connected with quite different structures, with a quite different problematic. It is especially connected with a properly philosophical problematic that develops beginning in the seventeenth century, with a problematic that makes the subject appear as an ego, that is, as a subject of truth, as a subject of objectivity.

We can conclude from this, in a first approximation, that the three terms whose radical identification is the presupposition of any psychology are in truth three heterogeneous terms. The biological individual, whose place can be assigned as such either in the biological field or in the field of the division of labor, that is, in the field of the division of roles in society, is one thing. The subject is a subject of imputation, that is, he is the one who has to obey orders and must justify his obedience and his acts, whether these orders are moral, political, religious, etc. And the ego corresponds to a third function, which is a “veritative” function, a function of synthesis, a function of objectivity. So it is the synthesis, if you wish, of these three conditions, of these three objects, that is the condition of possibility of any psychology. If we try to see what there is behind this condition of possibility, proposed to psychology as if it could be taken for granted, if we try to see on what condition a psychology could be constituted, we’ll find ourselves confronted by rather curious and rather interesting phenomena. I’d like to show that a psychology is made possible as the by-product of a political ideology, a moral ideology, or a philosophical ideology, and that this by-product can have a twofold character: either that of a normative pathology of the ideology that produced it or that of a mirror foundation (fondement en miroir) of the ideology that produced it.

As an example of the first case, I shall take Plato. Obviously, the concept of psychology is a recent concept, since it appeared only in the eighteenth century, and the French word did not appear until Charles Bonnet used in around 1750.²² We know that this term is owed to Wolff,²³ but it was introduced in France by Charles Bonnet. Thus it is paradoxical to speak of psychology with regard to Plato, since in fact psychology was never thematized as a discipline during the classical period of the Greek philosopher. All the same, I would like to point out that, as early as the age of Greek philosophy, structures were established that were later to be adopted and that appear as conditions of the possibility of a psychology. So far as Plato is concerned, I would like to take the well-known example of The Republic, that of the tripartite division of classes referring to the tripartite division within the subject. Plato, inquiring into man, tells us we can read in capital letters what the nature of man is by reading it in society; it’s easier to read a text in capital letters than in small letters. To understand man, he refers us to the structure of society, and when he studies the structure of society he refers us to man, that is, he refers us to a human subject in which the structure of society is to be founded. Now, this subject is itself conceived as constituted by a tripartite structure, the epithumía, the thumós, and the noûs. If we analyze Plato’s procedure, we see that this human subject, conceived as constituted by a tripartite structure, is in fact the by-product of the political problems that Plato is trying to resolve. It is simultaneously the reflection of these political problems in the individual and the expression of this political problem presented as its solution and its foundation. It is a foundational pathology: it’s because, in fact, there are three agencies in man, the epithumía, the thumós, and the noûs, that a true order can be established in society, or, on the contrary, a confused disorder can reign instead. It is the confusion of these three agencies in the individual that can lead to the confusion of classes in society. We see here that the tripartite structure in the human subject is expected to resolve the problem of the division of classes in society. But this transfer of the difficulty, presented in the form of a solution, leads to paralogisms that it is amusing to follow in the detail of The Republic: particularly in the fact that everyone being presented as constituted by a tripartite structure; we see that, in accord with the classes, each person is actually reduced to one of the functions of this tripartite structure. The artisan is only epithumía; if, by chance, the artisan were something other than epithumía, disorder would ensue; the guardian is only thumós, and if, by chance, he was noûs or epithumía, disorder would ensue; and the king, the philosopher-king, is only noûs. There is a contradiction between the structure of the human being and the function this structure is supposed to perform in society; Plato’s solution is to simply substitute for the tripartite structure a hierarchy among the functions in the human subject, that is, to immediately invest a possible psychology with a moral. It is the ordering of the three agencies in the human subject that appears as the condition of possibility of the ordering of the classes in society. We see here what role is played by the establishment of this structure of a possible psychology in Plato’s work: to justify the pathology of politics, to justify the fact that the social order is not what it should be, and, at the same time, to found a social order that would be what it should be. But this social order cannot be founded as such in an individual except on the condition of denying the objective meaning of the structures established that could found a psychology and of transforming it immediately into morals. Politics becomes morals in the individual; morals being, in the guise of the constitution of a subject that can be the object of an objective study, nothing but the establishment of an order that, in the subject, realizes the condition of possibility and the foundation of the order that are supposed to be worked out in society.

What I’ve said up to this point can be summed up in the following manner: there is no possible psychological subject in Descartes except as a subject of error, that is, as a shadow brought into the pathological by a subject considered as a normal subject, the subject of truth. The question is then the following: why should the truth be expressed, why is it expressed in Descartes in the form of the ego? Why is the truth expressed by the constitution of a subject of truth? Why is there this emergence of a subject of truth as the constitution of truth itself? It’s an extremely important phenomenon because it’s the origin of the whole of Western philosophy, and the refutation that Spinoza gives of it is a refutation that has disappeared into history, that has been literally submerged by the development of the later problematic, and that has perhaps not yet reemerged except in a lateral and allusive form.

Why is there a subject?… Maybe the necessity of having a subject of truth is imposed precisely by Descartes’s problematic, which is a problematic that opposes truth to error. It is perhaps in these concepts of truth and error that we find enclosed the requirement of the emergence of a subject as a subject of truth. It is, in fact, entirely striking to see that these concepts of truth and error are the fundamental concepts from which the requirement of a subject of truth emerges. And it is perhaps in the area of the idea of error that we find the meaning of the concept of truth that is opposed to it. What is error, in fact, for a philosophy like that of Descartes? Error is conceived only as the negative other of truth: error is the concept of the nonconcept, but conceived not in its specificity but as the nonconcept of the concept. Error is thought of as reflected on the basis of truth, without, however, this recurrence of truth over error being conceived in its concept. In other words, error is thought of simply as the exterior of a truth, as exclusion from a truth, without the relation to this outside being examined. The relation of error to truth is conceived as a dividing up, that is, as the result of a judgment, as a dividing up that establishes an exclusion, that establishes a condemnation, a dividing up pronounced by the concept of truth itself. But this relationship of exclusion is not examined in the dividing up established between error and truth. In other words, if we can consider that the relation of a truth to the error that it denounces as its own negative reflection manifests not a dividing up but a scission, it is in the misunderstanding of this scission, conceived in the form of a dividing up, that the origin of the emergence of the subject of truth would have its origin. In fact, this relation conceived as a dividing up is the equivalent of a judgment, of a judgment that decides things. And in this judgment that decides things and that consequently misunderstands the scission in the form of a dividing up, we would be dealing with two distinct functions that would not be conceived in their distinction. We would be dealing with the utterance “A is A, non-A is non-A,” that is, “the truth is true, error is erroneous,” and, on the other hand, we would be dealing (this being a pure utterance, that is, a pure observation) with the judgment that decides things, the judgment that separates, that is, that decides between two values without being reflected otherwise than in the form of judgment. That is to say, a philosophy of judgment like that of Descartes necessarily seems to be necessarily connected with a certain type of relation between a truth and an error conceived in the form of a dividing up—without the act that establishes this dividing up, that is, the foundation of the distinction being examined. A philosophy of judgment would thus be founded on a certain negative relation of truth to error, on a distinction conceived as a dividing up and not as a scission, and it is on that basis that the category of the subject as subject of truth would be established. Obviously, the category of the subject as subject of error is also established on that basis, at once as the pathology of the subject of truth and as its aleatory precondition. And that is how Descartes reflects the whole past of his own philosophy, that is, all the confusion, all the error, that preceded him. Then the question that arises would obviously be why it was necessary that such a philosophy emerge as a philosophy of judgment. In other words, if we can establish the following correlation between truth and error,²⁴ this scission necessarily leads to a philosophy of judgment, which necessarily leads to a philosophy of the subject that decides between truth and error. Why does the relationship of truth to error bring about the appearance of the subject of truth? The whole problem is why the subject of truth appears to be necessary to conceive the distinction between truth and error. All this resides in the fact that error is conceived as the contrary of truth, as its pure negativity, that is, the fact that the distinction between error and truth, the scission between error and truth, is not examined.

In epistemological retrospection we can clearly assign the difference, we can think what the conditions of the possibility of this distinction were: we can now determine, by historical study, what the conditions of possibility of the distinction between truth and error were. For Descartes, error has a precise content: it’s Thomist philosophy, it’s Aristotelian physics; the truth is the new physics, it’s Galilean physics. All this is the result of a historical process that Descartes does not examine. But we can’t explain the appearance of this philosophy, and thus of the subject in which it reflects the judgment that it pronounces on the relation of truth to error, solely by reference to Descartes’s illusion. We have to try to account for this function of illusion, for this misunderstanding of a scission that is a historical break, that is, a cultural break, [for this misunderstanding] of the emergence of a new scientific discipline that was conceived in the form of a philosophy of judgment. I can, obviously, only propose a hypothesis: in the philosophy of judgment, Descartes conceived the historical relationship of a new knowledge to an old one in the form of what he had to account for to culture, that is, in a category of the subject of imputation, of the moral subject. That is to say, in a category that is itself caught up in a world of moral imputation: in the world of responsibility. And that’s the whole ambiguity of the judge, of judgment: the judge is the one who pronounces a condemnation, who pronounces an exclusion, but in terms such that he can account for them; he’s the one who takes the responsibility for deciding on the judgment through which he attributes to one what is his and to the other what is his. In this case we are dealing with a contamination of the ethical categories by the moral and religious categories of the subject of imputation, of the theoretical reflection on the advent of a new scientific discipline.

I think it would be rather simple to show, in a third example much easier to develop, that, starting in the eighteenth century, psychology is always produced by the same schema (since it is in the eighteenth century that psychology is truly born). I believe it would be rather easy to show that the constitution of the psychological subject, the constitution of its functions, that is, the determination of what is to be studied as psychological in a psychological subject from the eighteenth century on, is determined by the dominant philosophy of the eighteenth century: by sensualist empiricism. Starting in the eighteenth century, psychology appears essentially as the by-product of a philosophy of knowledge of a new kind and new style. From that moment on, psychology is not simply the pathological subject of a subject of truth: it becomes the equivalent of philosophy, precisely insofar as sensualist empiricist philosophy identifies the two subjects, identifies the subject of truth and the subject of error in its theory of the empiricist subject. From that moment on, the fundamental problem of perception, the fundamental problem of sensation, enters by rights into psychology, not as a pathological problem, but as a problem of foundation. From that moment on, with the development of the natural sciences and neurophysiology, psychology’s relation to physiology enters by rights into psychology, that is, the study of the foundations enters by rights into the perceptive function assigned to the subject by the eighteenth-century empiricist sensualist theory of knowledge. What would be interesting to study in this correlation is the role of language, about which I said something a while ago, precisely insofar as it necessarily appears in connection with the whole eighteenth-century empiricist sensualist theory of knowledge, as having to constitute the very possibility of the objective utterance and as having to resolve the problem that is projected as resolved in the psychological subject instituted by empiricist philosophy. I don’t have time to go into detail; I simply want to offer this suggestion.

Consequently, if we want to sum up the fundamental structure that makes it possible for a psychology to exist, I would say that psychology appears to fulfill a twofold function…. Psychology appears as the pathology of the theoretical, the moral, the political, or the religious. On the one hand, as [their] pathology and, on the other, as a pathology on which [they can be founded], that is, as a pathology that can be reversed into normalcy. Thus pathology appears as a mirror phenomenon in which the subject of objectivity reflects the possibility of its not being what it is and, at the same time, the possibility of being what it is. In this phenomenon, in which a function is assigned to psychology that is the function the theoretical subject cannot assume, under these conditions, in which psychology appears as responsible for providing the foundation, the function that the theoretical subject, the moral subject, the religious subject, or the political subject delegates to it—in all these cases we are dealing with a veritable mirror function: a mirror of misunderstanding in the form of understanding.²⁵