Psychoanalysis in a Lyric Mode

All I can do is assert—with more passion than proof— a psychoanalytic mode that is more lyric than rational, more metaphysical than scientific. It has long been commonplace in our profession to say that Freud always hoped psychoanalysis would find itself on firm scientific footing, in which case his speculations would be replaced by biology and chemistry. My reading of Freud's disclaimers about psychoanalysis is that it was his way of deferring the scientific question to some future time, thereby clearing a space for his more theoretical and often hypothetical, philosophical, and even novelistic pursuits. In my reading, he is being a bit sly, coy even. What struck me in my recent reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle was that Freud quite offhandedly writes that even should we find a firmer basis in science for psychoanalysis, the fact is that we are always having to rely on what is a figurative, metaphoric language because that is what science has to do. That is, we grasp for available language to explain what we see and what we do: the language of biology, the language of neurology and brain science, the language of quantum physics, even, as with Lacan, the language of linguistics. In his psychoanalytic writing, Freud tried out a variety of languages to get at psychoanalysis from different perspectives: the biological, the psychological or behavioral, the sociological and anthropological, the evolutionary or “phylogenetic,” the novelistic, the historical, and even the mythic.

Thinking now of Laplanche's explication of the concept of “leaning on”—as in the human sexual drives “leaning on the vital order” of the whole body in its anatomic and biological functions—it occurs to me that our theory is also, by necessity, having to lean on the languages available to us and, in particular it seems, the scientific languages available to us. But we are not single-celled structures, nor electrons under a microscope, nor brains, nor computers, nor completely constructed like