Psychoanalytic Theory - Come For The Answers, But Stay For The Questions
We understand that there are disputes about the degree to which Lacanian theory provides the right answers to basic ontological, epistemological, and psychological questions. We happen to think that there's something quite suggestive about a robust Continental theory that converges with so much of the American rhetorical and pragmatic tradition (Burke and Lacan's emphasis on the constitutive but disruptive role of the negative; Peirce and Zizek's insistence that belief is precisely that which affects behavior; the psychoanalytic foregrounding of intersubjectivity; etc). But on an issue like "what does it mean to be human," we suppose that reasonable people of good intentions can sincerely disagree.
Still, it seems churlish to insist that psychoanalytic theory has no value, even as a sensibility or heuristic for uncovering interesting problems. The fundamental psychoanalytic gamble - that the split subject's knowledge has little to do with the operation of her desire - reframes old questions in ways that are genuinely exciting. That it also suggests some alternative approaches and answers is true, but it would be valuable even if it the substance of the theory itself turned out to rank obfuscatory mysticism.
The introduction of the split subject hammers a wedge between cognitive processes and jouissance. The fundamental Stoic ethical problem of the "weakness of the will" is reinterpreted as a post-Frankfurt idea that "you can know how ideology manipulates your desires, and yet enjoy it anyway" - that's already not nothing. But it also insists on fixation and sublimation, and so suggests things like "ethicists who fixate on unethical transgressions and perversions are more likely to be unethical". That of course, turns to be true. And while that suggestion isn't unique to psychoanalytic theory, it's hard to get it rigorously out of most nontrivial psychological theories.
After the jump, what Zizek's "what if you hooked a rat up to electrodes and made it run around" thought experiment has to do with criminal psychopathology:
We've talked a little bit about Zizek's mind-controlled rat thought example:
Zizek has an elegant example on this point. Imagine a rat that's being moved around by scientists - the scientists control its actions through electrodes that they have plugged into its brain. They push this button, the rat moves left; this button causes it to go right. The crucial biological question is 'how does the electrical pulse go from that part of the brain to the leg", and it can probably be explained fully on those terms. But there is still an interesting question (interesting for humanities people, at least) that is not exhausted by that explanation. We might call it the psychoanalytic question: how is that experience subjectivized? In other words, how does the rat experience the impulse to move right or left? Is it experienced "coercively" as a compulsion from without - does that rat experience the physical action of moving his legs this way and that without knowing "why"? Or is it experienced as a compulsion from within - does the rat seem to itself to conclude that it wants to move this way and that?
The insistence upon the irreducibly psychoanalytic dimension of subjectivity resonates across the humanities and social sciences. Not accounting for this dimension - or, more often, trying to reduce it to a "more fundamental" dynamic - has been somewhat less than productive. It turns out the scientific and social scientific methods might be inadequate - even in principle - for describing how, whether, or when subjectivity is experienced psychotically:
The Reason Magazine article examines why, when it does arise, the evidence is largely based on descriptions of the person's mental state and why recent advances in understanding mental illness don't really help very much. One of the main reasons is that studies that find differences between people with mental illness and those without, do so on the group level. The same differences might not be present when comparing any two individuals. In other words, on average, there are mind and brain differences between people affected by mental disorders and unaffected people, but the individual variation is so great that you couldn't reliably say it would be present in one particular person.
What they should have written is that "recent advances in biological approaches for understanding mental illness don't really help very much." We can think of a couple of recent books, all the way at the very end of the alphabetized bookshelf, that might help a little more. And even if Zizek's answers turn out to be unhelpful or untenable - the psychoanalytic emphasis on the opaque dynamic of subjectivized experience calls attention to a theoretical structure that, no matter how hard social scientists try to repress it, insists upon returning.
References:
* Why don't ethics professors behave better?: [Mind Hacks]
* The Psychoanalytic Pushback Against Philosophy Of Consciousness [IIS]
* Mind the gap: science and the insanity defence: [Mind Hacks]
Previously:
* Disturbingly, Quantitative Analysis May Have Methodological Shortcomings - Blogosphere Edition
* What If The Lacanian Gaze Wasn't Totally Stupid?
* Cog Sci Blog Roundup
