The Subject of Lacan: A Lacanian Reader for Psychologists

2 The Origins and Self-Serving Functions of the Ego

41 2 The Origins and Self-Serving Functions of the Ego John Muller F or an American audience, what is, perhaps, most troubling in Lacan’s work is his persistent and insulting attack on what he calls the American hymn to “the autonomous ego” (Lacan, 1966/1977, p. 306). Historically, and culturally, we place a high value on individualism, and you can hardly pick up a psychoanalytic or psychological text that does not put so-called healthy ego functioning in a central place: the ego is the measure of reality, strengthening the ego is taken to be a desirable end of treatment, and the analyst’s ego is the norm and model for the patient’s ego development. In Lacan’s view, this perspective is radically incompatible with the Freudian revolution, a revolution that Freud himself (1917/1955, p. 139) compares to two major previous dislocations: First, when Copernicus dislodged the earth from the center of the universe, and then, when Darwin dislodged the human species 32582 Chap 2 4/18/00, 9:24 AM 41 42 John Muller from its privileged position in the order of beings, a dislocation whose consequences are still being felt in our schools. Freud, in turn, reveals that the ego is not master in its own house, and Lacan (1975) takes this third revolution very seriously, going so far as to view the ego as “the mental malady of man” (p. 22). This idea of Lacan’s comes directly from the field of psychoanalytic experience, in which the many levels of discourse are open for inspection. Psychoanalysis constantly demonstrates the fact that speech always says more than the speaker intends, as we see in the intrusive Freudian slips, the body speech of symptoms, the punning and homophonies of ordinary speech, and the ongoing fantasies and intermittent dreaming we all engage in. The Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz (1978) writes: “The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person, for our house is open; there are no keys in the doors and invisible guests come in and out at will.” The ego tries precisely to pretend that I am just one personality, possessing the identity and status of master of the house. Lacan described the ego as “the armor of an alienating identity” (1966/1977, p. 4) that insulates us from responsibility for the implications of unconscious desire. A good deal of experimental research on the self, depression, and aggression fits well with Lacan’s conception of the ego. For Lacan, the ego originates, is rooted in, takes its structure from, the mirroring mode of relating. Moreover, there is ample experimental evidence that the functions of the ego are essentially self-serving, with depression, in part, resulting from the ego’s inability to sustain illusions. Aggression, in turn, can be considered as a defensive response of the ego. It is hoped that an appreciation of the Lacanian ego will serve to revitalize thinking about psychoanalytic concepts and provide fertile theoretical ground for experimental research at the same time. The Ego in Freud Rapaport (1967) finds four phases in the history of psychoanalytic ego psychology. In Phase 1, Freud lays stress on the role of defenses against remembering and reencountering certain experiences of reality. In Phase 2, begun when Freud made his assertion that many reports of infantile seduction were actually fantasies, the stress was placed on repression as the result of ego instincts. This is consistent with Lacan’s view of the ego as distorting, defensive, and self-protective (although Rapaport, of course, does not say this). 32582 Chap 2 4/18/00, 9:24 AM 42 The Origins and Self-Serving Functions of the Ego 43 This congruence extends into Phase 3, beginning after the 1914 paper on narcissism. Rapaport (1967) writes that in this period “Freud repeatedly indicated that he expected the theory of the ego to arise from the study of narcissistic neuroses [i.e., psychosis]” (p. 74). In The Ego and the Id the ego is presumed to differentiate out of the id, arises from identifications with abandoned objects, includes the structures responsible for resistance, and “is first and foremost a bodily ego” (Freud, 1923/1961, p. 26). Ego functions are still organized around the perception-consciousness system, and in that context the ego has an adaptive function insofar as it is selfprotective in the face of external dangers, such...