The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative

From Lacan to Darwin

From Lacan to Darwin Dylan Evans This is the story of an intellectual journey. It starts with my enthusiastic embrace of the ideas of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and ends with my eventual rejection of those ideas some five years later. Between those two events, I wrote a book about Lacan, which has since become a standard reference text for those working with Lacanian theory.1 Nowadays, eight years after the dictionary was published, I occasionally receive e-mails from puzzled Lacanians who have noticed that the author of one of the key reference books in their field has gone on to write other books with such obviously non-Lacanian titles as Introducing Evolutionary Psychology.2 The most interesting thing about these e-mails is not so much their content as their tone, which tends to be one of shock, dismay, or anger that a former disciple should have betrayed the faith so completely. They may not use such religious references explicitly, but it is clear from their vexation that it is more than just an intellectual matter for these correspondents. They do not see my change of mind as the result of an honest and sincere search for truth but as a betrayal, an apostasy, a fall from grace. This essay is an attempt to go beyond such simplistic descriptions to explain exactly how and why I came to change my mind. Before I begin my story, however, I should perhaps first explain why it belongs in a book about literary theory. Lacan was a psychoanalyst, not a literary critic—a fact that would hardly need stating in those parts of the world, such as France and Latin America, where his ideas are known to more than a tiny minority. Go to a psychoanalytic clinic in Paris or psychiatric hospital in Buenos Aires and chances are you will find a therapist putting Lacan’s ideas into clinical practice. In the English-speaking world, however, hardly any therapists have even heard of Lacan. In Britain, the United States, and Australia, the few people who have heard of him tend to be literary critics and cultural theorists. In these countries, Lacanian ideas are used primarily as tools for critiquing works of literature and other cultural artifacts. But to whatever use you put a set of ideas, nothing useful is going to come out if the ideas themselves are fundamentally flawed. Whether used in the clinic or the seminar room, Lacan’s ideas are hopelessly inadequate because they are predicated on a false theory of human nature. I came to realize this when I started to treat patients—the clinical reality did not fit with Lacan’s theory. Liter38 ary scholars are less likely to notice the discrepancy, since textual interpretation is much more malleable than phobias, panic attacks, and other symptoms experienced by real, live human beings. It is my hope that, by sharing my intellectual journey with those literary scholars who still use Lacanian theory, they may also come to realize the inadequacy of Lacan’s conceptual edifice. Lacan in Argentina I first came across Lacan when I was working in Argentina in 1992. Much to my surprise, I discovered that psychoanalysis was a major cultural force there. In fact, there are more psychoanalysts per capita in Buenos Aires than anywhere else in the world, even New York. The prestige and authority attached to psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires came as quite a shock to me, coming as I did from a cultural milieu in which Freud was almost completely absent and held in low regard. For I had recently graduated from a British university, where I had studied linguistics within a thoroughly Chomskyan framework. In Britain, you can graduate in a cognitive science like linguistics or psychology without ever reading anything by Freud. In Argentina, over 70 percent of a typical psychology degree was given over to psychoanalysis. And much of that was specifically Lacanian. The different value attached to psychoanalysis in Argentina made me call into question the received view in Britain. Why had I simply gone along with the dismissive attitude to Freud present in my own country rather than judging it for myself? Who was to say that the received view in Britain was superior to the received view in Argentina? I began to suspect myself of being rather ethnocentric in my views about knowledge. Curious to know more, I teamed up with some Argentinian psychoanalysts who used to meet on a weekly basis...