Lacan and the Americans: Part 2

In an earlier article (Leader 2021a) I sketched out some of the prejudices and mistaken beliefs about psychoanalysis in the States that are ubiquitous in Lacanian circles. Dialogue between Lacanians and the practitioners and theorists of what Sergio Benvenuto (2021) has called “Austro-German psychoanalysis transplanted to the USA”—to acknowledge the contribution of emigré analysts—had been historically stalled by competing interests and a rather staggering amount of misinformation circulating on both sides (though mostly the Lacanian one).

Americans tended to be portrayed as stupid, greedy proponents of extreme forms of ego psychology, which was itself seen as an avatar of market capitalism and conformist politics. The vital, rich traditions of American psychoanalytic thinking that offered critiques of ego psychology, explored the effect of capitalism on human subjectivity, and developed alternative research programs were just completely ignored, and authors cited only if an idea could be seen as a weak approximation of something Lacan had himself said.

These prejudices were an effect not only of the antagonism between Lacan and his professional adversaries but also of the contemporary culture wars of the 1950s and the anti-U.S. propaganda of Gaullism in France (Simpson-Berryman 1967b; Guilbaud 1983; Lebovics 1999). Lacan's later lecturing visits to the States were hardly helpful here, and the contrasting reactions to his interventions bring out nicely the polarities at play: for some, divine encrypted wisdom requiring reading groups and endless years of study to decipher; for others, a muddled mixture of dogma and aphorism that was more about theater and spectacle than psychoanalytic research. Both of these perspectives would presumably be nuanced today when we factor in the question of power relations both within and between psychoanalytic groups.

Interestingly