The Subject of Lacan: A Lacanian Reader for Psychologists

PART III Lacan, Psychology, and Culture

243 PART III Lacan, Psychology, and Culture Kareen Ror Malone P sychologists and other scholars are working to develop an explicit account of the subtle, intricate ways that cultural interests and horizons affect the theories and research of psychology (e.g., Parker & Shotter, 1990; Bohan, 1992). Acknowledging the impact of culture on this putatively disinterested, “objective ” science has not always set well with psychologists of a more traditional stripe (Morawski, 1994; Gergen, 1973). Many psychologists , however, have altered their therapeutic approaches (White, 1993) and research strategies (Wilkinson, 1996) as a result of examining the effects of culture on their discipline. “Cultural effects” are sometimes assumed to represent an unnoticed intrusion of a private prejudice common to a given group of researchers or theorists. So, for instance, • Freud (is deemed to have) paid so much attention to “the penis” because he had one and it was important to him; 32582 Part III 4/18/00, 9:33 AM 243 244 Kareen Ror Malone • Psychologists are indifferent if not antagonistic to interests of the underclass because psychologists are middle-class. Cultural effects may also refer to specific forces that shape psychological research and theorization, forces that derive from social investments with real economic and political payoffs for psychologists and the social order in which they operate (Hare-Mustin, 1994), as, for instance: • Particular implications of the various discourses of gender go unquestioned; • Research on race and intelligence wallow in a history of unchallenged racism; • Military research grants shape our ideas of cognition in certain directions (Bowers, 1990); • Depictions of poor women serve obvious class interests. (Reid, 1993) Pushing the parameters of cultural critique to their limit, one could say that the discipline of psychology is beholden to, and so participates in, power formations that are particularly well suited to the functioning of the modern state (see Parker, chapter 19, this volume). It might be said that psychology not only reflects the culture within which it came to be, but that in its very approach to humans , psychology as a social institution enforces certain forms of social subjection through the confessional evocation of interiority and through an array of other disciplinary practices that are both subtle and seductive (Pfister & Schnog, 1997). Conceptions of identity , difference, individuality, and particularity are “manipulated” by the theories, data, and therapies generated by the discipline. Psychology, as a result, shows itself to be not only complicit with specific social interests (military grants, social benefits of sexism) or stupidly imprisoned in convention (Freud was blinded by the prejudices of the Victorian period)—psychology seemingly finds itself in an uncomfortable intimacy with practices that strike precisely the point where subjectivity and “subjection” are linked. The simple recognition that psychology and culture are interrelated is a significant step in the right direction. Psychology’s 32582 Part III 4/18/00, 9:33 AM 244 Part III: Lacan, Psychology, and Culture 245 early aspirations to being a natural science and the research designs that lent themselves to such aspirations often precluded a broader awareness of social and cultural effects on cognition, emotions , attribution, or “psychic” reality in general. The aim was the universal. It may, in fact, be the case that one can not possibility determine “pan-cultural” effects without firstly considering cultural differences and specificities. However, the issue becomes the degree to which the examination of these cultural effects involves more than collecting cross-cultural data or comparing local knowledges (Bracher, 1993). It may require that we deepen our sense of the interrelationship between body, cognition, and other psychological “entities” with the cultural context in which they arise (Hutchins, 1998). Culture may be more than a different “input,” stimulus, or modelling; the category of culture may be a vehicle for retheorizing subjectivity itself—and here we return, indirectly, to the question of subjectivity and subjection. Something important emerges from within the asymmetry between subjection (as in the case of being subjected to someone or something) and the experience of subjectivity (of being “a being who desires”). This intersection concerns feminism and its theoretical controversies inasmuch as feminism exemplifies the interlacing of boundaries that marks cultural analysis per se (Segal & McIntosh, 1993). Simple aphorisms—such as “the personal is political ”—opened new corridors of theory, research, and political practice. Now we must ask: • What is the relationship, for instance, between heterosexuality and the political critique of patriarchy (Kitzinger, Wilkinson, & Perkins, 1992)? • Should...