Introduction—Lacan in America

The articles in this collection revolve around intersections between Lacanian psychoanalysis, its reception, its disjunctions, and its traces in the context of the United States. The concerns of each author overlap across the areas of media studies, literature, historiography, ideology critique, and clinical practice. What is it that has been lost in translation and in transmission of Lacan from the French to the American scene? What might be drawn from the missed encounter between Lacanianism and the United States? How might we read Lacan or use Lacan for reading in an American context?

In “Jacques-Alain Miller in America,” Will Greenshields explores the reception of Lacan’s work in the United States and Miller’s response to this reception. Greenshields explores the radical differences between French and American forms of psychoanalysis, conveying the cultural and clinical aspects involved in the resistance to Lacan in the US outside of Slavoj Žižek’s application of psychoanalysis to readings of popular culture. The article provides an overview of the distinctions between Lacanian psychoanalysis and American ego psychology but also takes up criticisms of Lacan’s work from American analysts while exploring and contextualizing Miller’s various responses to these criticisms. Greenshields also conveys the complexity of Lacan’s reception in the US in university departments and among the American psychoanalytic schools. He finally presents Miller’s assessment of America as a hypermodern civilization under the demand to “Enjoy!” and draws out an elaboration of the development of ordinary psychosis as a category in relation to American culture.

In “Psychoanalysis: Critiques and Possibilities, Then and Now,” Hilda Fernandez- Alvarez provides an overview of the emergence and development of La Borde clinic, a psychiatric institution in Cour-Cheverny, France, which incorporated a Marxist Lacanian approach in the treatment of people suffering from mental illnesses. This clinic marks the appearance of institutional psychotherapy and had major influence on Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. Fernandez-Alvarez compares this example of institutional psychotherapy in France that was borne out of the revolutionary spirit of the 1968 protests to the current globalized, evidence-based psychotherapies, whose main approach consists in the implementation of hegemonic cognitive-behavioural modalities and what Lacan called “the university discourse.” Fernandez-Alvarez conveys the limits and possibilities of these two extremely opposed approaches to mental health.

In “Lacan with Frost,” Dan Collins raises the unlikely question of reading Lacan alongside American poet and playwright Robert Frost. The article suggests that just as Lacan used the Marquis de Sade to read Immanuel Kant, one might also use Frost to read Lacan and vice versa. Collins conveys Frost’s poetic and uncanny anticipation of the optical schema that Lacan formulates in order to demonstrate the clinical notion of the gaze. Collins suggests, however, that the uncanny relation between Frost’s and Lacan’s respective presentations of the gaze may not simply be the result of the effects of Nachträglich but might rather be understood as two authors at work on the same structure at different times, places, and modes of expression.

In “Purloined Paranoia: The Insistence of Schreber,” Daniel Adleman explores the layers between American scholar Eric Santner’s reading of Freud’s reading of Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. In this light, Freud’s reading of Schreber becomes a way to read Freud. Through Santner’s neo-Lacanian approach to criticism, Adleman unpacks the queer, obsessive, and paranoid undertones in Freud’s attempts to elaborate and establish the originality of his own ideas in relation to the mimetic rivalries taking place at the beginnings of psychoanalysis. With a turn through media theory, Adleman also explores how Schreber’s memoir operates as an incitement of anxiety or paranoia in each successive reader who “tremulously looks over their shoulder as they project their accusation of projection forward” through the noise of previous readings and the historical state of affairs, raising questions about the fantasy of the ego as a site of subjectivity and agency, truth and autonomy.

In “Film Theory after Copjec,” Anthony Ballas raises questions surrounding Joan Copjec’s intervention into psychoanalytic film theory in “The Orthopsychic Subject” and this...