The Lure of the Already There and the Lure of the Before: Psychoanalytic Theory and Historiography1

What can Lacanian theory offer to historiography? This was a question that I began to consider in a recent article in Radical Philosophy (Evans), and which I will now attempt to develop further. In the earlier article I attempted to refute

the charge of ahistoricism that is often leveled against Lacanian theory. Basing myself on a reading of some of Lacan's earlier works, I showed that Lacan does not view concepts such as the Oedipus complex or the ego as designating eternal and immutable aspects of the human psyche. On the contrary, a close reading of Lacan's texts shows that these and other features of the psyche are presented by Lacan as phenomena that arise at specific moments in history. By grounding psychic structure in historical processes, Lacan makes it clear that no account of subjectivity, psychoanalytic or otherwise, can claim an eternal, ahistorical validity. Psychoanalytic theory must therefore be read as a description of how subjectivity is constructed at a particular historical moment.

This in itself is not a particularly bold claim. Many others have argued along precisely these lines. The general injunction to be aware of the historical limitations of the categories of thought is a central tenet of all those traditions of critical thinking that trace their descendence, in some way or another, from Marx. What is original about Lacan's remarks on the historicity of psychic structures is that they come from the pen of a psychoanalyst. Whereas Fromm, Marcuse, and others associated with the Frankfurt School were not slow to remark on the historicity of Freud's theories of the mind, most psychoanalysts before Lacan had either completely sidestepped the issue or taken up an implicitly ahistorical stance. Lacan's explicit affirmations of the historical relativity of psychoanalytic theory are therefore unusual, and mark the beginning of a trend in which psychoanalysts themselves begin to question the implicit ahistoricism of previous psychoanalytic theory.

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