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I would like to argue that the “post-colonial” ethos that is pervasive today in Lacanian-influenced feminist and cultural studies is equally at work in contemporary American psychoanalysis. While some sophisticated trends in feminist theory have emphasized the power of hysterical resistance as a factor for social change, new perspectives in American psychoanalysis have been promoting a model of a self no longer compelled to adopt the ideals of the phallocratic system. In both cases, the most radical insights of the Freudian discovery have been eclipsed, and as a result the repressed has returned in an unexpected way. While the modern psychoanalyst—who has declared hysteria obsolete—unknowingly favors in Monsieur Jourdain fashion the demand of the hysteric over her or his desire, the “Lacanian” theorist seems to promote the hysterical structure as the desirable new paradigm of subjectivity. This shift, while emotionally, socially, and culturally productive, nevertheless ignores the function of symbolic castration as a condition of communication and creativity.
As a social theorist turned psychoanalyst, I would like first of all to offer my condolences to my ex-colleagues—i.e., the neo-Marxists and neo-Weberians of today—who are now pressed to swallow heavy doses of Lacan if they want to catch up with the present expertise of those who have taken on what is currently called cultural studies and the post-colonial ethos: that is, a no-man's-land for sure, a woman's land maybe, but certainly a land where the subject is no longer the master of its own house, where the ego has fallen off the horse of the id, and where our beloved category of the social has been scribbled over with the graffiti of signifiers without meanings.
I don't want to be conservative; I have no intention of gluing the subject back together with the belief that as human beings we can be responsible for what we are and what we do. Yet the function of psychoanalysis as a factor for social change must be a