Lacan, Science and Determinism

Keywords
Lacan, the unconscious, free will

Van Staden And Hinshelwood's commen-taries raise a number of issues, but there are two particular themes common to both that we pick up in this response.

The first theme concerns the reconcilability of Lacanian theory to the disciplines of analytic philosophy and "Anglo-American positivist psychiatry." This is closely related to the relationship between the unconscious and the empirical sciences discussed in the editorial (McConnell and Pickering 2005). The second theme concerns the relevance of Lacanian theory to our understanding of free will and the structure of the mind.

Lacan, Analytic Philosophy, and Scientific Psychiatry

First, psychoanalysis or psychotherapy generally should not try to reunite with neuroscience because of the fundamental difference in their approaches to the patient, which is likely to mean that even if a theoretical rapprochement can be found, a working relationship is unlikely.

Although there are many facets of Lacan's theory that were not addressed in our paper and even if many of those are totally irreconcilable to analytic philosophy, we believe that we have addressed the most ontologically fundamental issues and that these can genuinely contribute to and challenge analytic philosophy of mind.

As Hinshelwood points out, psychiatry does operate with a philosophical basis, critical (or sometimes relatively uncritical) scientific realism (even though it may not be acknowledged), and it as such it can legitimately be contributed to or challenged by the philosophical aspects of Lacanian theory outlined in our paper.

In fact, the theoretical basis is evinced in van Staden's commentary when he remarks on the relation between Lacanian theory and psychiatry: " . . . the unconscious is not only structured like a language but actually reflects and is produced by linguistic interaction between the subject and others. This is a difficult claim to verify, no doubt, but it prompts further related questions . . . whether the conscious mind is structured like a language" (van Staden 2005, 78). And one must ask whether this is the kind of claim that can be verified or whether it is a hermeneutic claim (in somewhat the way suggested by Jaspers), serving more as a framing belief to allow people to make sense of what has influenced them in their life histories and is currently played out in their relationships with others. We would lean toward this interpretation of the unconscious, explicitly distancing ourselves from any overreaching, quasi-scientific realism about unconscious contents and mental structures, but clinging to the thought that dealing with such contents is an essential part of the therapeutic encounter.

Looked at in this way, both the Lacanian unconscious and conscious mental life bear the imprint of language due to the subject's immersion and participation in the symbolic realm. This may seem a "difficult claim to verify," but because verification is linked to the scientific framework of inquiry rather than the hybrid that is clinical knowledge, we would better regard it as being difficult to establish as an axiom of therapy. The linguistic structure of the conscious and unconscious mind is, on this account, a conceptual implication of the role of the symbolic register in thought and not a thesis that requires verification (a Wittgensteinian thesis espoused by a number of contemporary philosophers, including Dummett and Davidson).

As it happens, cognitive science has found linguistic structure to be important in operations of the cognitive unconscious (arguably different from the dynamic unconscious due to the former's dependence on scientific experiment and the latter's connections to life history rather than mere psychological or cognitive traits [see Gillett and McConnell 2005]). Given that language and problem solving are so closely intertwined, it would suggest that cognitive science was overlooking something important rather than damaging Lacanian theory if linguistic structure did not appear on cognitive science's "radar." So, how does language logically (in the sense defended by Husserl and Frege, that is, to do with the sense or content of thoughts not merely the processes underpinning one's contingently evolving stream...