Traversing Psychosis: Lacan, Topology, and ‘The Jet-Propelled Couch’

Reaching back to his 1951 collaboration with Georges Th. Guilbaud, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Émile Benveniste, Jacques Lacan had a life-long fascination with topology.¹ From his invocation of the torus in his 1953 Rome Address, through his turn in the 1960s to the Möbius strip, Klein bottle, and cross-cap, Lacan’s near obsessive engagement with topology culminated during the next decade in his seminars on the Borromean knot and his reading of le sinthome in James Joyce. Increasingly, Lacan relied on topological figures to theorize the relationship of scientific knowledge to psychoanalytic truth. But equally important, topology advanced Lacan’s later social observations on material culture, information media, and what Jacques-Alain Miller and Eric Laurent have recently described as the “Ordinary Psychosis” of the contemporary public sphere.² Whether endorsed or declaimed, Lacan’s topological speculations—their rigor or lack thereof—have been the subject of heated critical debate.³ Less attention has been paid, however, to the pertinence of Lacanian topology to clinical practice and literary reading. Striking linkages, however, among Lacanian psychoanalysis, science, and the literature of psychosis can be discerned in the clinical settings of Robert Lindner’s midcentury-modern memoir The Fifty-Minute Hour (1954).

A graduate of Bucknell University, Robert M. Lindner received his M.A. and Ph.D. in Psychology in 1935 at Cornell University where he then taught for two years. Returning to Bucknell, he served as an assistant psychologist and later chief psychologist at the U. S. Penitentiary at Lewisburg. During the 1940s, Lindner entered private practice as a lay analyst in Baltimore, and was associated with the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis (NPAP), founded by his mentor Theodor Reik. Lindner was not only on the editorial board of Psychoanalysis—that later merged with the NPAP’s Psychoanalytic Review—but he also served as editor for the authoritative collection Explorations in Psychoanalysis: Essays in Honor of Theodor Reik (1953). Not unlike Reik, Lindner expanded the popular audience for psychoanalysis in the United States in works that presented arresting case studies such as his “hypnoanalysis” of the psychopath “Harold,” the subject of Rebel Without a Cause (1944), whose title was adopted in the 1955 film of that name by Nicholas Ray starring James Dean. In Lindner’s famous dictum, “the psychopath is a rebel without a cause, an agitator without a slogan, a revolutionary without a program” (p. 2).

In addition to analyzing the American penal system in Stone Walls and Men (1946), Lindner made provocative psychoanalytic observations of American society in works such as Prescription for Rebellion (1952) and Must You Conform? (1956). The latter volume stemmed from a series of talks that Lindner delivered for the 1954 Hacker Foundation Lectures. Lindner’s at the time controversial subject matter—reflected in such titles as “The Mutiny of the Young,” “The Instinct of Rebellion,” “Must You Conform?” and “Education for Maturity”—left many in his audience “outraged by the theme of these four pieces, alienated by the thesis around which they were composed, and provoked to bitter comment by the ideas they contain” (1956, p. vii). Lindner’s expanded volume of these lectures would include two more incendiary pieces, “Homosexuality and the Contemporary Scene” and “Political Creed and Character.” Lindner refused, according to Martin Duberman (2002), “to conflate homosexuality with pathology (or nonconformity of any kind with mental illness)” (p. 65). Lodged instead against the repressive containment culture of the McCarthy era as well as the normalizing tendencies of American ego psychology, Lindner’s critique, in Russell Jacoby’s (1986) account “bucked the analytic and cultural trends of the 1950s . . . He stood at the end, perhaps beyond the end of a long and far-reaching tradition of dissenting and political Freudians” (p. x).

Similar to the lay analyst Ernst Kris in his fascinating case studies of psychotic artists such as sculptor F. X. Messerschmidt, Lindner in The Fifty-Minute Hour offers highly stylized, literary renderings of what he called “True Psychoanalytic Tales.” Not insignificantly, in his case studies of psychosis—and no more so than in his treatment of the...