Psychoanalysis and Historicism

We write as colleagues from different disciplines—one of us academic, the other clinical—and with different agendas, but we share a commitment to developing Lacanian theory. We are therefore immensely grateful to Mark Bracher for forming APCS, launching JPCS, and initiating debates on a range of important topics. We especially appreciate Bracher's effort, in his most recent Editor's Column (“Always Psychoanalyze! Historicism and the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society”), to make clear the specificity of the psychoanalytic approach in contradistinction to others. In the spirit of debate this Association fosters, we would like to pursue such distinctions, hoping to enlarge the space of interdisciplinary dialogue where cultural critics and clinicians talk to each other.

We are particularly interested in the crucial distinction between Lacanian clinical process and other kinds of psychoanalytic clinical practice. Bracher is certainly right that some psychoanalytic theorizing serves to secure narcissistic closure, thereby ironically promoting the elaboration of identity-based expressions of subjectivity that contribute to social intolerance. He contrasts this with psychoanalytic clinical process, which provides an opportunity to examine the fantasies that constrain desire —a strategy that might ultimately derail some of the pernicious effects of identity politics. However, we find this comparison of psychoanalytic theory and practice potentially misleading and would like to clarify exactly what's at stake in drawing such comparisons.

Our experience of therapeutic process as theorized and practiced in North American psychoanalytic clinics runs quite contrary to what Bracher leads us to expect. Indeed, to our dismay, much psychoanalytic practice is in the service of—if not specifically devoted to—securing precisely the narcissistic closure that Bracher derides. Although traditionally Lacanians have targeted ego psychology in order to stake their claim, by this