Book Review: A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis | Hacker News Reader

Book Review: A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis

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45 pointsfeross32 comments

In another world, where the interdisciplinary cards fell a little differently, and the history of clinical psychiatry sustained talking therapy in lieu of pharmaceutical hegemony, I think programmers of all types would read Lacan a lot more. Not for any one of his clinical findings, but as so many lessons in system design. As so many lessons in the determining nature of syntax. As inspiration for they way infrastructure determines superstructure. The clinical stuff was obviously the most important thing to him, but it doesn't even touch on his thoughts about language, which turns out to be thoughts on cybernetics, and the spontaneous effects of making some variables static and others dynamic, so to speak, that's really all it is. That, IMO, is where the good stuff is, if your not an analyst.

General comment about theoretical systems like Lacanianism.

They seem to have these common features:

1) They are self-contained systems. They may be interesting in the terms of sci-fi worldbuilding, but you must suppress critical thinking and just absorb them or they fall apart.

2) Experts tend to discuss in the terms of what the founder or important figures meant. Understanding the subject is interpreting what few people said and thought. Right and wrong is about right interpretation.

3) Advance happens by forking or dissolving into smaller groups with different interpretations. There are main divisions, sub divisions, and so on.

I find hard to understand these kind of systems. There may be some initial core ideas that are interesting to ponder, but building whole system seems very limited and dogmatic.

If there is no way to create synthesis or settle questions among experts who disagree, and the only way is to branch, is there anything there?

edit:

My null hypothesis for the effectiveness of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in clinical setting is that the theory or method is just a framework that

A) helps analysts and patients that understand and work well together to find each other. Like Trekkie getting into therapy with a Trekkie fan therapist, or a Chatholic patient having therapist with Catholic backround.

B) it gives some needed structure, the theoretical framework itself is not that important.

C) the real help comes from interacting and talking with a person intimately.

In this sense, anything goes as long as it's not outright harmful.

(2) really reminds me of that bit in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions about pedagogy. In some fields you can determine the truth of a statement without reference to who said it. Innovators are seldom the best explainers so you have dedicated textbook writers who rephrase insights in ways easier to understand. In fields where this isn't possible students have to be taught with original sources.

The thing is we discard Aristotelian Natural Science as obsolete and nonsense (which it is) but somehow some people take these systems seriously because 'modern philosophy', whatever it is... To me this is completely unbelievable. Especially given the pseudointellectualism in which those systems are based.

But, you know, 'psychoanalysis'...

Doesn't your example illuminate why systems of thought like psychoanalysis are useful?

We currently don't know concretely how psychological phenomena like consciousness, happiness, selfhood, desire are formed or what they consist of. We know they exist, because we experience them 'in normal human experience'.

Analogously, Aristotle did not know anything concrete about how atoms, energy, time, cells in the body worked. But his natural philosophy created a speculative framework to talk about these things, explore possibilities, and try to relate what was known or observed, to what might possibly be true.

The potential advantage of modern theories like psychoanalysis, is that today we are able to make a clear distinction between falsifiable scientific knowledge, and other types of statements about the world. Thus, we can evaluate Lacan's thought on the correct level - as a form of philosophy which gives us a way of thinking about certain matters without attempting to provide definitive information.

But we know several ways in which this way of thinking is incorrect. First, it is based on revelation, or the direct experience of one analyst with a handful of patients. We know that we cannot achieve any meaningful scientific conclusion for the broad topics you mention from this kind of data. Second, this way of thinking is averse to tests, and to the extent it has been tested, it failed. Psychoanalysis has been tested empirically, and it is simply not producing great therapeutical effects.

Your rather generous interpretation could equally apply to quantum coaching or any other modern fad that is clearly wrong, because even though we don't know everything, it conflicts with what we know.

You are literally evaluating psychoanalysis as a scientific theory in this response - which is exactly what I pointed out we should avoid doing if we want to understand its value. Lots of types of thought and culture do not have scientific content, and yet are valuable.

Psychoanalysis, when tested empirically, produces therapeutic effects no worse than other talking therapies. In fact the great empirical paradox of therapy is that they are all similarly successful, regardless of the exact details of the theory they are based on.

> In fact the great empirical paradox of therapy is that they are all similarly successful, regardless of the exact details of the theory they are based on.

But if that's so, isn't that saying that the theory is irrelevant? And if so, why do I care about Lacan? Okay, so he's got a theory. So do lots of other people, and they all work just as well in practice.

It is saying that the purpose of trying to understand what Lacan had to say is not to achieve empirically proven therapeutic effects, either as a patient or as a therapist, yes.

> You are literally evaluating psychoanalysis as a scientific theory in this response - which is exactly what I pointed out we should avoid doing if we want to understand its value. Lots of types of thought and culture do not have scientific content, and yet are valuable.

I'm not sure what other "types of thought and culture" you are referring to. A superhero movie certainly is entertaining, can make you think and it's not a scientific theory. However, the big difference is that a movie does not make empirical claims or promises to have access to a method of self-knowledge, nor does it try to explain mental disorders. Psychoanalysis is mainly a service that promises empirical effects, and therefore should be treated empirically. Furthermore, Freud certainly envisioned it as a scientific theory, and so did many of its followers. I just don't think that this defense of psychoanalysis as having some sort of entertainment value, despite its absurdity, is a saving grace.

Your second point only reinforces what I'm saying. If any type of therapy has the same effect, then they are all placebos. Their effect is comparable to homeopathy, which is none. Homeopathy is certainly a different "type of thought", that is, an incorrect one.

Typically when someone uses the word "nonsense", I stop trying to explain, because I see it as a judgment of worth made prior to full understanding of the topic at hand. I guess I labor under the assumption that anyone who writes something (at least, something intended to be public) always has a "sense" they're attempting to express, and that I should strive to understand what exactly this "sense" is before I make a judgment call. In other words, I feel like I should be able to reconstruct the logic of their argument, even if I disagree with some of the leaps they make.

Of course, making sense of Lacan is indeed an undertaking, because his work is so discursive ("return to Freud" x Enlightenment x Classical phil) and also in a peculiar seminar medium, so I don't blame people for not wanting to make an attempt, especially since Lacan in particular would require suspending one's axiomatic presuppositions about epistemology and ethics (knowledge and goals), assuming one is mostly familiar with scientific or technical fields of study. Typically in a case like that I would simply say "I don't know enough to say", whereas a judgment of "nonsense" is effectively a signal of faith rather than pure non-comprehension.

What I'm saying is that I applaud your efforts to communicate (and think you're basically correct in your interpretation, although perhaps not phrased in a way that will immediately click with readers here), and wish you luck, but I have a feeling based on experience that it will end in frustration.

For the average mental disorder, it is equally as effective to be treated with psychoanalysis compared with any other psychological treatment [1], although it is notoriously one of the longer and most expensive forms of therapy. So, your hypothesis c is likely correct. However, I disagree that it is not harmful. For some conditions, you would find an effect for homeopathy simply because of the placebo effect. What we see with psychological treatments is very similar, but to straight out call them pseudoscience ruffles a lot of feathers. Psychoanalysis and other sorts of garbage take space in university, they get a lot of attention in media/culture, and in the end they are not delivering much at all.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22227111/

I can't understand why people fall for such obscurified nonsense. The concepts are based on one person's rather poetic imagination, and they are, like everything else in psycho-analysis, notoriously lacking evidence of any relation to reality, even by the low standards of psychology. To think that it is more than time-passing for attention seeking rich people is delusional.

Exactly. I don't agree with Chomsky about much lately, but he sure is right about postmodernism. It's nothing but posturing and obscurantism.

When my fellow countryman Žižek says something interesting every now and then, I always view it as a broken clock being right 2 times a day.

How do you know?

I've read this, and I am currently working through Fink's _The Lacanian Subject: Between Language And Jouissance_.

There are some interesting points in the work (enough to keep me looking at it over the years), but I find this area of thought to be a deep and confusing set of ideas.

At this point, I am not sure there's really a lot of "there" there in general. I've been trying to figure out this line of thought for more than a decade and some change.

But I've never been in a position where I could afford to engage in psychoanalysis, so maybe the Lacanian practitioners I know who tell me I won't really get "it" without actually practicing as an analysand or analyst are right. I suppose they'd know.

However, I've really enjoyed a lot of the cultural marginalia generated by psychoanalysis. Other than Zizek, I think that Alone's writing here was quite interesting:

https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/

I would say that the 'mirror stage' is a clear and concrete idea (not necessarily clearly and concretely elucidated by Lacan) which, while it doesn't have the same status as a scientific statement about the mind, provides a helpful illustration, with some explanatory power, of how the 'self' is formed.

(Note that when I say 'a scientific statement about the mind', I would regard very little of the scientific discipline of psychology as meeting this standard. In most cases it is also far less interesting than psychoanalysis.)

Of course, many people are content that they are able to live with a 'sense of self', without worrying about how it is constructed. That doesn't mean that it's not an interesting, useful or accurate idea.

When I started my undergrad I was quite interested in various fields related to cognitive science, but in my country there was no way to major in that. I started a psychology major, and while I did get to take courses related to cogsci, and work part time in more neuroscience-y research, I also had to take several courses in clinical psychology and not one, but two! courses on psychoanalysis. They were taught by profs that were very much into Lacan. My conclusion after all this coursework (and several books outside the syllabus) is that while these ideas are sometimes interesting from a literary and, let's say, continental philosophy angle, they're of dubious clinical value and totally bunk from a scientific point of view. I had to stop myself from laughing sometimes when it came to the pseudo-mathematical formulations because they really are nonsense (for a good summary on that aspect, see Sokal's "Intellectual Impostures"). This wasn't the only reason, but I ended up switching majors to CS to focus on AI/ML (a good decision in retrospect!). Years later, I still think of Freudian and Lacanian ideas sometimes, though - they do have a certain appeal.

I found “How to Read Lacan” by Zizek a great introduction as someone who has 0 psychology or philosophy background. As another poster mentioned Im still not sure how much “there is”, but I found the concept of the Other to be interesting. But I also don’t think it’s too healthy outside of a clinical setting to try and reduce human desire to a formula. People should try to understand each other one-on-one without diagnosing or labeling either party’s behavior. It feels like a lot of interest in Girard and Lacan stem from trying to manipulate or predict people, which may be a useful tool some of the time (doctor <> patient) but is no way to live day-to-day!

Maybe I shouldn't just before reading but the way philosophy has to be prefaced by "How to read X" makes me so glad we have mathematics in physics.

Physics is concise, but more importantly can be wrong. I don't mind reading a bit of philosophy every now and again but at some point I just have to put it down because it's so long winded. Even ignoring the somewhat revealing tendency to borrow terminology from other subjects, there's no sense of urgency in the writing.

Perhaps it's best transmitted orally instead.

The conciseness of math and physics has to do with notation that’s been developed over centuries and taught over the course of over a decade to students in most developed countries. I’m sure if you went to your “Math for x non-stem degree” course at your local university you’d see students equally befuddled by a soup of notation and terms they haven’t encountered.

The notation exists because it can be applied to the field, because the field can be applied to reality. It's not solely invention.

Engineers love ruining physics but at very least they can still be ugly rather than bloated.

Surely there is no connection between the appropriateness of the notation to the subject and the appropriateness of the subject to reality.

Non-Euclidean geometry has applications to reality, but before these applications were known, how did they determine that the notation would appropriately apply to the field?

I wonder if folks would have a better time with Freud than Lacan. Lacan is not a settled matter among clinical psychoanalysts, in fact I reckon the majority of them aren’t so fond of him. I would think of Lacanian psychoanalysis as a distinctive strain of thought, different from Freudian, kleinian, etc. psychoanalysis is hard to understand, but some of it is a fair bit easier than Lacan.

Which is not to say that Lacan is the future modality held back by conservative/regressive institutions, though he may be.

“…the Other is the abstracted mishmash of everyone you’re seeking the approval of.”

Really? Seems like a term like ‘the Other’ should apply more broadly. Like calling poltergeist only the Civil War dead…

In this form of analysis the capital-O Other has a specific meaning:

"The capital-O Other refers to two additional types of otherness corresponding to the registers of the Symbolic and the Real. The first type of Other is Lacan’s “big Other” qua symbolic order, namely, the overarching “objective spirit” of trans-individual socio-linguistic structures configuring the fields of inter-subjective interactions. Relatedly, the Symbolic big Other also can refer to (often fantasmatic/fictional) ideas of anonymous authoritative power and/or knowledge (whether that of God, Nature, History, Society, State, Party, Science, or the analyst as the “subject supposed to know” [sujet supposé savoir] as per Lacan’s distinctive account of analytic transference). But, as already becomes evident in Lacan’s first few annual seminars of the early 1950s, there also is a Real dimension to Otherness. This particular incarnation of the Real, about which Lacan goes into greatest detail when addressing both love and psychosis, is the provocative, perturbing enigma of the Other as an unknowable “x,” an unfathomable abyss of withdrawn-yet-proximate alterity (in his 1895 Project for a Scientific Psychology, to which Lacan refers repeatedly, Freud depicts this alterity in the guise of the Nebenmensch als Ding [Neighbor-as-Thing])."

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lacan/

In other (npi) words, the Other is the entity that we think about when we imagine how other people in general will think or feel.

I believe in (say) the validity of money because I think that shopkeepers will accept it. But shopkeepers also only believe in it because they think other people believe in it, and those people that the shopkeepers want to pay also think that other people believe in it, including me and the original shopkeepers.

We describe this state of affairs by saying that I believe in money since I know that the Other also does.

So it's a synonym for "common knowledge” in the technical sense distinguishing between “you know that I know that you know” and “everybody knows”?

edit: …or rather, that which exists _because_ of it being common knowledge?

As I understand it, not so much.

More like "how we see ourselves through our assumptions about how other people see us."

Psychoanalysis cut from whole cloth, without recourse to brain scans. What could go wrong?

Entertaining read. I particularly enjoyed the comments.

Better than the Laconian pens.

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