The Lacanian Paradigm

The recent APCS conference on “Social Symptoms” brought together psychoanalytic thinkers from a diversity of perspectives, although the dominant paradigm present at the conference was (and has always been) clearly Lacanian. Listening to Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's post-conference comments both last year and this year, I wanted to reflect on what the difficulties feeling a part of this conference are for me, a psychoanalytic thinker from another paradigm. I personally do not have a problem with the difficult language or the creation of new language characteristic of the Lacanian paradigm. What at times makes the conference less than comfortable for me are two things: the presumption on the part of many speakers that the Lacanian paradigm is psychoanalysis, and a particular spirit in which Lacan is all too often invoked.

The first panel I attended featured Jon Brenkman, Tim Dean, and Drucilla Cornell. Brenkman was discussing the lack of fit between social critique and psychoanalysis; psychoanalysis was equated with Lacan. His argument suggested to me that there may not be a good fit between Lacanian theory and social criticism (although I later heard a few papers that cast doubt on this proposition), but, in equating psychoanalysis and Lacan, he buried the possibility that some of the many other versions of psychoanalysis that exist might be better equipped to address social symptoms. Although I am sure arrogance was not Brenkman's intention, the equation of Lacan and psychoanalysis leaves the non-Lacanian feeling excluded and condescended to. This feeling recurred when Drucilla Cornell opened her remarks with an anecdote in which she was telling colleagues at a conference on game theory that the following week she would be attending a Lacan conference. This is not a Lacan conference, my inner relational analytic voice protested.

Tim Dean's contribution helped me formulate the second source of my discomfort at APCS conferences. Dean spoke of alternative ways t