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A wry joke that spread among North American psychoanalysts went something like this: “How do you know a mafioso is a Lacanian? He makes you
a proposition you can't understand.” But the inability to understand was partly a refusal to understand. Now that Lacan has had a great influence on French psychoanalysts, and through them, on some Latin American and British analysts, as well as some in China and other places, it may be time to figure out what so many analysts find useful in his ideas.
This book by Marilla Aisenstein makes this more possible now than it has been in the decades since Lacan first conceived and taught his then radical and apparently “overly obscure” theories. Aisenstein makes no attempt to explicate Lacan; rather, she holds up a mirror to Lacanian ideas as they have influenced others. I want to try to understand her ideas from the point of view of contemporary conflict theory.
Aisenstein gives us a picture of the evolution of her thought and that of the Paris Psychosomatic School, where she was trained and eventually became president. Speaking for that society, she differentiates French thinking about technique, as centering on “a surprise effect which short-circuits secondary processes, aiming directly at primary processes” (p. 6). But she also asserts that for the Psychosomatic School, affect, not language, is the conceptual tool of analysis. The Lacanians, by contrast, privilege language. In addition, she differentiates the schools by emphasizing the psychosomatic group's attention to countertransference. According to Aisenstein, Lacanians do not regard countertransference as crucial to understanding patients. This concise account of the differences between Lacanian clinical theory and that of the Psychosomatic School seems to me to be quite useful.
In another key, Aisenstein cites the use of countertransference in understanding analysands’ communications. Again, this seems now to be a universal tenet embraced by all schools of psychoanalysis oth