The Subject of Lacan: A Lacanian Reader for Psychologists

19 Looking for Lacan: Virtual Psychology

331 19 Looking for Lacan Virtual Psychology Ian Parker A s critical psychology gains a more established foothold as a viable theoretical alternative to the traditional paradigm and as it articulates its particular forms of research and cultural analysis, it is pressing to make sure that we fully absorb the extent of critical psychology’s challenge to the discipline. Once a psychologist, it is easy to fall back into being a psychologist again. What does this disciplinary seduction entail? As a form of resistance to psychology, psychoanalysis is a valuable resource for some critical psychologists, but not because we are interested in disciplinary matchmaking. Under careful examination, an examination made more possible by Lacan, one can perceive the radical difference between the split subject of psychoanalysis and the unified psychological subject ministered/monitored by well-intended practitioners . As well, the psychoanalytic permeation of current Western 32582 Chap 19 4/18/00, 9:36 AM 331 332 Ian Parker notions of subjective life and its parallel exclusion and misappropriation by psychology should give critical psychologists pause. Is their founding mandate to craft a more socially reflective psychology equally liable to the tradition’s exclusions? Does critical psychology buy psychology’s image of psychoanalysis? To tease out these issues will require approaches from many angles, from the cultural contexts of psychoanalysis and psychology to a question of the former’s potential radicality. Such inquiries cannot be separated from articulating psychology proper as a particular kind of apparatus that functions in relation to psychoanalysis and in relation to culture. Why Are Some Psychologists Looking for Lacan? Increasing numbers of psychologists are turning to psychoanalysis. One set of reasons for psychologists turning to psychoanalysis is closely related to concern about what psychology is and what it does. There is greater openness to new ideas in the discipline now, after the paradigm “crisis” of the 1960s and 1970s, and an increased disciplinary anxiety in the face of discourse analysis, feminist politics, and postmodern infusions (Parker, 1989, Burman & Parker, 1993; Kvale, 1992; Griffin et al., 1998). And although psychoanalysis predates the major paradigms of behaviorism, cognitivism, and humanism, its Lacanian incarnation wraps it up much more attractively. Through Lacan, some of us are finding our way back to a new Freud. This Freud is a strange shape-shifter who is able to take discursive, feminist, or postmodern form depending on how psychologists want to read him. But this does not fully answer the question. Indeed, there could be no single answer to the question as to why some psychologists are looking for Lacan, because psychology is no single unified enterprise . A behaviorist link with Lacan, for example, need have no necessary consequences for the way humanists harmonize his ideas with theirs (Parker, 1995). Although there would seem to be logical conceptual effects of a psychoanalytic breach in the core of one paradigm upon the others, psychology is a discipline that has managed to hold itself together by efficiently sealing sections of the hull off from each other. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify two kinds of answer to the question of Lacan’s relevance, two contradictory sets of reasons. Both sets of reasons, and their contradictory tension, emerge in the wake of the formation of “critical psychology ,” which cuts across and against paradigm boundaries (e.g., Fox & Prilleltensky, 1997; Ibáñez & Íñiguez, 1997). This critical psy32582 Chap 19 4/18/00, 9:36 AM 332 Looking for Lacan 333 chology is a heterogeneous object in a network that recruits ideas from outside the discipline in order either to challenge or corrode it. Critical psychology gathers together the many different objections to the way the discipline normalizes behavior and pathologizes those who do not fit in. It brings together progressive practitioners in partnership with those who use psychological services and who are willing to challenge abuses of power and ideological prescriptions for subjectivity in capitalist society. Security Operations There have been repeated attempts to draw psychoanalysis and psychology closer and equally vigorous attempts to keep it at bay. Many early researchers made use of psychoanalytic theory, and some prominent figures in present-day psychology textbooks, who are presented as antithetical to Freud, were actually active members of psychoanalytic organizations. Luria, who helped found the Russian Psychoanalytic Society, and Piaget, who was a member of the IPA, are two examples (Roudinesco, 1990). Against this, and as part of the reaction by...