PUBLISHER’S NOTE TO ‘FREUD AND LACAN’

Louis Althusser agreed to let New Left Review reproduce the following article, which was written in 1964 and published in the French Communist Party journal, La Nouvelle Critique.

In a letter to the translator (21 February 1969), Louis Althusser wrote: ‘There is a danger that this text will be misunderstood, unless it is taken for what it then objectively was: a philosophical intervention urging members of the PCF to recognize the scientificity of psycho-analysis, of Freud’s work, and the importance of Lacan’s interpretation of it. Hence it was polemical, for psycho-analysis had been officially condemned in the fifties as “a reactionary ideology”, and, despite some modification, this condemnation still dominated the situation when I wrote this article. This exceptional situation must be taken into account when the meaning of my interpretation is assessed today.’

Louis Althusser also warned English readers that his article contained theses that must ‘either be corrected, or expanded’.

‘In particular, in the article Lacan’s theory is presented in terms which, despite all precautions, have “culturalist” overtones (whereas Lacan’s theory is profoundly anti-culturalist).

‘On the other hand, the suggestions at the end of the article are correct and deserve a much extended treatment, that is, the discussion of the forms of familial ideology, and of the crucial role they play in initiating the functioning of the instance that Freud called “the unconscious”, but which should be re-christened as soon as a better term is found.

‘This mention of the forms of familial ideology (the ideology of paternity-maternity-conjugality-infancy and their interactions) is crucial, for it implies the following conclusion – that Lacan could not express, given his theoretical formation – that is, that no theory of psycho-analysis can be produced without basing it on historical materialism (on which the theory of the formations of familial ideology depends, in the last instance).’

AUTHOR’S PREFATORY NOTE

Let us admit, without prevarication: anyone today who merely wants to understand Freud’s revolutionary discovery, who wants to know what it means as well as just recognizing its existence, has to make a great theoretical and critical effort in order to cross the vast space of ideological prejudice that divides us from Freud. For not only has Freud’s discovery been reduced, as we shall see, to disciplines which are essentially foreign to it (biology, psychology, sociology, philosophy); not only have many psycho-analysts (notably in the American school) becomes accomplices to this revisionism; but, more important, this revisionism has itself objectively assisted the fantastic ideological exploitation whose object and victim psycho-analysis has been. Not without good reason did French Marxists once (in 1948) denounce this exploitation as a ‘reactionary ideology’ which furnished arguments for the ideological struggle against Marxism, and a practical instrument for the intimidation and mystification of consciousnesses.

But today it must also be said that, in their own way, these same Marxists were directly or indirectly the first victims of the ideology they denounced; for they confused this ideology and Freud’s revolutionary discovery, thereby adopting in practice the enemy’s position, accepting his conditions and recognizing the image he had imposed on them as the supposed reality of psycho-analysis. The whole history of the relations between Marxism and psychoanalysis depends essentially on this confusion, this imposture.

That this was particularly difficult to avoid we can understand from the function of this ideology: ‘the dominant’ ideas, in this case, were playing their ‘dominating’ role to perfection, ruling unrecognized over the very minds that were trying to fight them. But it is explained by the existence of the pyscho-analytic revisionism that made this exploitation possible: the fall into ideology began in fact with the fall of psycho-analysis into biologism, psychologism and sociologism.

We can also see that this revisionism could derive its authority from the ambiguity of some of Freud’s concepts, for, like all inventors, Freud was forced to think his discovery in existing theoretical concepts, i.e. concepts designed for other purposes (was not Marx, too, forced to think his discovery in certain Hegelian concepts?). This will come as no surprise to anyone at all familiar with the history of new sciences – and at all careful to discern the irreducible element of a discovery and of its objects in the concepts in which it was expressed at its birth, but which, out-dated by the advance of knowledge, may later mask it.

So a return to Freud today demands:

1. Not only that we reject the ideological layers of the reactionary exploitation of Freud as a crude mystification;

2. but also that we avoid the more subtle ambiguities of psycho-analytic revisionism, sustained as they are by the prestige of certain more or less scientific disciplines;

3. and finally that we commit ourselves to a serious effort of historico-theoretical criticism in order to identify and define, in the concepts Freud had to use, the true epistemological relation between these concepts and their thought content.

Without this triple labour of ideological criticism (1,2) and epistemological elucidation (3), which, in France, has been initiated in practice by Lacan, Freud’s discovery in its specificity will remain beyond our reach. And, more serious, we will take as Freud precisely what has been put within our reach, precisely what we aimed to reject (the reactionary ideological exploitation of Freud), or subscribed to more or less thoughtlessly (the different forms of bio-psycho-sociological revisionism). In either case, we would remain prisoners, at different levels, of the explicit or implicit categories of ideological exploitation and theoretical revisionism. Marxists, who know from their own experience the deformations Marx’s enemies have imposed on his thought, can see why Freud could suffer the same fate, in his own way, and why an authentic ‘return to Freud’ is of such theoretical importance.

They will concede that if such a short article proposes to introduce a problem of this importance without betraying it, it must confine itself to the essential, it must situate the object of psycho-analysis so as to give a first definition of it, in concepts that allow its location, the indispensable precondition for its elucidation. They will concede therefore that, as far as possible, these concepts should be introduced in a rigorous form, as in any scientific discipline; to vulgarize them in an over-approximate commentary would banalize them, while an analysis that really drew them out would require much more space.

An accurate assessment of these concepts can only come from the serious study of Freud and Lacan which each one of us can undertake; the same is true for the definition of the still unsolved problems of this theoretical discipline already rich in results and promises.