The Lacanian Unconscious Vs. Pop Second-Wave Feminist Psychology That Ruins Peoples Lives
There's a post up at Philosophy of Memory - one of our favorite blogs and one of our many creepy academic crushes - about efforts to help victims with false memories implanted during recovered memory therapy. One of the more charming excesses of second wave feminism, recovered memory hypnosis seems thankfully to have slipped into disrepute.
But as it spiraled downward, that model of psychotherapy dragged down more legitimate versions with it. Now even talk of repression raises eyebrows and bad memories. The irony is that recovered memory hysteria rested not only on bad social policy and bad neuroscience, but also on bad psychoanalytic theory. This passage from the Philosophy of Memory post is particularly relevant:
Storm’s case is similar to those of many other patients who underwent recovered-memory therapy that revealed sordid histories of sexual abuse and demonic ceremonies. Although the scientific literature suggests that traumatic events are rarely, if ever, repressed or forgotten, this type of therapy was widespread in the 1990s and is still practiced today. Only after several high-profile lawsuits did the American Medical Association issue warnings to patients about the unreliability of recovered memories... Recovered-memory therapy relies fundamentally on the notion that some memories are so unspeakable that the mind represses them to protect itself. Decades of research conducted by neurobiologist James L. McGaugh of U.C.I. suggest, however, just the opposite—that one key function of memories is to recall threatening situations so that they can be avoided in the future.
Along with the scientific literature, another theory of mind that denies that trauma can be successfully repressed is psychoanalysis. There are two related issues here, one architectonic and one a little downstream, after the jump.
(1) In contrast to pop psychoanalysis, the Lacanian unconscious is precisely not something that is repressed. The Lacanian unconscious is absence as such - the inability of any signification or fantasy to stay stable. Zizek goes further, explaining that the idea of repression is a story that we tell ourselves to cope with negativity as such. If the reason why our identifications are unstable is because we've repressed something, then there's always the hope of figuring out what we've repressed in order to "get healthy." The true horror is that there's nothing that's been repressed. There's nothing to recover. Behind the mask is - absence.
(2) Even more fundamentally, successful repression is impossible. The "repressed" real - in this register, negativity as such subjectivized in all kinds of contingent ways - always returns. You don't need vapid hypnosis to do it - it will return symptomatically all on its own. Furthermore - and this is a critical point - the real returns as a symptom, not as itself. Structurally this makes sense, since the real - the repressed "it" - doesn't properly exist (again, the hope that we've repressed something is itself a way of coping with constitutive lack).
The Thing that causes symptoms is never a thing. It does not have positive content. The idea that psychotherapy could recover it as itself is the most basic fantasy of all. Recovered memory therapy, then, is an entire psychoanalytic theory built on the most fundamental story that the split subject tells herself. It should have been easily cracked as shoddy theory as well as deleterious social practice. But pop psychology and shoddy science journalism have strangled the public sphere to such an extent that even the dumbest ideas about the human mind gain traction if they can strike the right note of New Age faux sophistication.
References:
* Reversing False Memories [Philosophy Of Mind]
Previously:
* Quantitative Hints Of The Big Other
* Believe It - Lacanian Theory Wiki
* Gender And The Sacred In Ancient Greece (Plus: The Dangerous Anachronism Of Identification-Driven Classical Scholarship)
