The Subject of Lacan: A Lacanian Reader for Psychologists

PART I Lacan and Psychological Theory

19 PART I Lacan and Psychological Theory Kareen Ror Malone A s Ian Parker suggests (chapter 19, this volume), psychological theory generally lacks a certain degree of selfre flexiveness. This deficiency reflects the cost of dispensing with investigations that do not pay off in the currency of “provable” ideas; it implicates the field’s investment in experimental innovation at the expense of clarifying and refining the logic of its own conceptions. Theoretical eclecticism is all one could expect from the precarious objectivity of a discipline that anxiously hovers between “social science” and “natural science.” The status of theory in psychology is complicated further by clinical psychology, a collection of knowledge-building practices that are not exactly tailored to experimental verification despite being institutionally allied to “the science of psychology.” 32582 Part I 4/18/00, 9:22 AM 19 20 Kareen Ror Malone Cognitive psychology is the only theory that might currently claim hegemony in current academic circles. Although the study of cognition typically operates under assumptions that would be antithetical to the Lacanian apprehension of subjectivity (i.e., rational and individualistic approaches to cognition), new disciplinary possibilities continually emerge that could easily move studies of memory, “the cognitive unconscious,” language, and social cognition toward a more Lacanian apprehension (see Moscovici, 1993; Muller, chapter 2, this volume). This conjecture does not even begin to assess the future of “hot” and “wet” areas in cognition, those areas that might easily lend themselves to conceptions of subjectivity that account for nonrationality in an adequate manner. Part I contains three significant contributions to issues regarding processes of cognition in psychological theory. John Muller (“The Origins and Self-Serving Functions of the Ego”), while introducing the reader to Lacan’s Imaginary Order in terms of its effects on the ego, clearly implicates social cognition and more general issues in cognitive theory. Although the term ego always has that psychoanalytic ring, Muller spells out Lacan’s idea that “the ego” is really none other than the presumed or posited “self.” This self is a ghost (homunculus or other organizing principle, e.g., adaptation) postulated in almost all psychological theories of cognition and social action. According to Muller, psychologists have misconceived the true nature of this functional agency and its origins. Slavoj £i¶ek (“The Cartesian Subject without the Cartesian Theater”), working with presuppositions from cognitive psychology, pushes this notion of the self or subject that underlies current models of cognition. By uncovering and deconstructing presuppositions about the self or subject common to most models of cognition,£i¶ek demonstrates that Dennett’s understanding of subjectivity specifically overlooks the type of formative moment of which cognitive systems could be said to be “the symptom,” namely, the impossibility of our self-conscious assent into our own subjectivity. Suzanne Barnard (“Socializing Psycholinguistic Discourse: Language as Praxis in Lacan”) follows £i¶ek’s philosophical interrogation with a further critique of the Platonic assumptions that compromise Chomsky’s work in psycholinguistics. While £i¶ek will talk of the impossibility of assuming certain moments in our own subjective genesis, Barnard will re-cast those moments in the terms of particularity in the praxis of everyday discourse (also see Patsalides and Malone, chapter 7, this volume). In the obsession with synchronic closed systems that can be “simulated” by computers , those in cognitive science as well as those within psycho32582 Part I 4/18/00, 9:22 AM 20 Part I: Lacan and Psychological Theory 21 linguistics shortchange the actual elusiveness of daily human speech. In discarding the messiness of particular exchanges for the formal beauty of grammatical or functional systems, they also foreclose any understanding of how lack and thus desire enter speech. Here we return to £i¶ek (and even to Muller). All three chapters point to the essential significance of considering human desire (lack, gap, impossibility) in understanding the processes of human cognition. Religion has become a sort of a lost soul in psychology—a lost soul that cannot seem to find its rightful grave. We conflate the psyche, variously, with psychobiological entities, cultural constructs, or (purely “rational”) cognition, but a bothersome question remains: What significance does “the psychological” have for whatever it is that we understand through religion? Contemporary mainstream psychology, uneasily yoked to religion, tends to ignore this question , ceding it by default to members of the transpersonal and humanistic wings of the community of psychologists. David...