You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The work of Jacques Lacan can be understood, in no small part, as a sustained challenge to the psychoanalytic establishment, which he saw as destroying Freud's radical project. Remember that whereas Freud had said that the worst possible training for a psychoanalyst would be medical school (Freud, 1926/1950b), the American group decided that only physicians could become analysts. This absurd reversal persisted until the well-known 1986 case of Welch v. American Psychoanalytic Association.
Remember also that Freud worked courageously to depathologize homosexuality, insisting that we are born with a bisexual disposition. The Oedipus complex of each individual has two sides—same-sex and cross-sex. Unfortunately, the same-sex story—according to which each little boy desires his father and sees his mother as a rival—has been erased from much psychoanalytic training and practice.
This bowdlerization of psychoanalysis outraged Lacan. He worried, presciently, that the ego psychologists wanted above all to help people adjust better to social norms, and that the vigorous pursuit of the truth of the unconscious—including the analysis of dreams—would be lost. I say “presciently” because I've noticed that many patients and supervisees who have already had long analyses come for treatment asking: “Do you think dreams are important? My analyst didn't seem interested.” Jeanne Wolf Bernstein (1999) has suggested that dream work has been set aside in favor of an overvaluation of countertransference as our new “royal road to the unconscious.”
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Lacan worked under the rubric of “the return to Freud.” (He is known often to have said, in effect: It's up to you to be Lacanian; personally, I'm a Freudian.) So it won't surprise you