Response to Bruce Fink

Bruce Fink offers an open and clear exposition of his Americanized Lacan, which is to say, Lacan without the “preciosity” and opaqueness that has in the past driven many analysts into defensive resistance to his major contribution to psychoanalytic thought. There is almost no moment when one feels reading Fink that we do not know what he is talking about. However, he does not give us a session in vivo, so we are more or less left to surmise what he might say in any given session. About his perspective as analyst, however, he leaves us in no doubt. And as for his Lacanian perspective on psychoanalysis, there is no doubt in my mind that he has something to say to all psychoanalysts. The difficulty lies in sifting out what can be useful, what, on examination, represents a limitation in the psychoanalytic field he portrays, and what seems downright antithetical to the best practice of psychoanalysis.

Fink acknowledges his Americanization of Lacan. American too is the context of his comparative study. He seems to be speaking primarily, even exclusively, of American psychoanalysis when he writes of psychoanalysis today. Unlike Lacan, who took on as his theoretical adversaries the distinguished ego psychologists of his day—Hartman, Kris, Lowenstein, the latter his first analyst—Fink addresses himself primarily to an anonymous and, it seems to me, in his one extended example, a relatively weak psychoanalyst, poorly grounded in understanding of the frame and the process. It is a psychoanalysis that has diminished into a kind of psychotherapy that even he acknowledges is not representative of non-Lacanian psychoanalysis: he hypothesizes alternative non-Lacanian interpretations that might be agreed upon by the psychoanalytic community at large in order to debate technique with the clinician he critiques. Straw men abound in this paper, which may be a result of the limitation of Fink’s exposure to contemporary psychoanalysis in the US. More ominously, Fink may be addressing a pe