After Lacan: Clinical Practice and the Subject of the Unconscious (review)

This wide-ranging collection of essays, stemming from the clinical work of Willy Apollon, Danielle Bergeron, and Lucie Cantin, compellingly elaborates psychoanalytic concepts in a manner that must interest anyone concerned with the practical import of Lacan's work, but also anyone drawn to Lacanian theory. Diverse as they are, the essays nevertheless cover the core Lacanian concepts, those crucial to an understanding of the uniqueness of Lacan's account of psychic structures.

The authors are founding members of GIFRIC (Groupe Interdisciplinaire Freudien de Recherches et d'Interventions Cliniques et Culturelles), a group of Lacanian-influenced analysts working in Quebec, who actively train mental health professionals interested in learning, or learning more, about a distinctly Lacanian approach. Involved in both cultural research and practical, clinical work, the group stands out for its pioneering psychoanalytic work with psychotic patients.

Whereas most psychoanalysts are reluctant—when they do not refuse outright—to treat psychotic disturbances, GIFRIC actively works with psychotics, employing a psychoanalytic method that emphasizes the importance of dreams and their chain of signifiers. Freud referred to dreams as "the royal road to the unconscious," and although it is often thought that psychotics do not dream, GIFRIC demands of their psychotic patients (as a kind of payment) the recounting of their dreams. This they consider a way gradually to begin piercing the psychotic's delusion. For the delusion is not simply problematic because it fails to correspond to some "objective" reality, but, above all, because it is a seamless vision that does not allow for any ambiguity, that is infused with certainty. Dreams, to the contrary, contain signifiers that, through association, open up to other signifiers. Dreams involve strange, peculiar narratives that suggest possible but not certain meanings; they introduce doubt and hence shake the absolute conviction of the delusion. The logic of the dream is different from the logic of the delusion, and thus can help puncture its flawless certitude. In Lacanian terms, the delusion involves a symbolic that is subordinated to an imaginary, whereas dreams involve an imaginary that is subordinated—through language, through the signifiers with which we represent and associate dreams—to the symbolic.

For those who already know a fair bit about Lacanian psychoanalysis, then, the most interesting and innovative aspect of this collection will probably be the material on psychotics and psychosis, especially the analysis and the examples of how the psychotic is ensnared in an attempt to embody the jouissance of the Other. The authors provide a fascinating account of the way in which the psychotic delusion is both a response to being positioned as object of the Other's jouissance, and at the same time also an attempt to find a solution to, and an escape from, this positioning.

Lacan's understanding of the subject and the unconscious underlies GIFRIC's work, not only on psychosis, but also on more common psychic disturbances. Following Lacan, the authors discuss hysteria and obsession as types of neurosis with quite different structures; they also explicitly differentiate them from, and provide an absorbing analysis of, what can be classified as "perversion" (in the psychoanalytic, not the normative sense, of course). As well, they delineate why the hysteric may be attracted to the pervert, why s/he may find a temporary (though eventually disastrous) solution to her/his problem in the position of the master adopted by the pervert; the pervert takes the place of the Other and helps deny lack, repress castration, and seems willing to take responsibility for the hysteric's jouissance.

The concept of jouissance, portrayed by Lacan as beyond the pleasure principle, is in this collection of essays even more insistently elaborated in relation to the death drive. Two other Lacanian concepts that GIFRIC takes up and develops in its own...