You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Alain Badiou and Élisabeth Roudinesco Translated by Jason E. Smith, Columbia University Press, New York, 2014, 82 pp., $19.95 paper, ISBN: 978-0-231 165112
The recently published dialogues between French intellectuals Alan Badiou and Élisabeth Roudinesco make for fascinating reading, particularly when they consider the relationship between Lacan and psychology. The message here is clear-cut: from the perspective of Lacanian theory and practice, psychology is the enemy. As Roudinesco notes, “Lacan never stopped criticizing psychology as a false science” (pp. 10–11).
He opposed every form of identitarian closure that denies the alterity that constitutes us and he opposed the behaviourism and cognitivism that have reduced man to his naturality, reduced him to his biological being, to his body and his brain. (pp. 28–29)
When Roudinesco asks, “Are psychoanalysts destined to become psychologists…?” one cannot help but wonder what exactly she has in mind by “psychologists”. Her answer, with its obvious echo of Michel Foucault, is not long in coming: psychologists are “technicians of the soul” (p. 66). Understood in this way, psychology is both naively positivistic (a form of scientism), and necessarily tied to the objectives of a type of disciplinary normalization whereby – staying with Foucault – subjects must be assimilated into the contemporary judgments and values of society. A threefold attack on the various forms of psychology’s alleged reductionism (the respective reductionisms of behaviourism, cognitivism, and latterly, of neurology and neuroscience) is thus extended by means of a political assault which considers “psychologism” a “blatant ideological program” (p. 30).
The terms of this rejection of psychology are thrown into sharper relief when Roudinesco responds to a prompt by her interviewer, Christine Goémé:
C.G.: Isn’t one of the most important aspects of the Lacanian enterprise the fact that it stands in the way of any and all psychologization of the subject?
E.