Derrida Vis--vis Lacan: Interweaving Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis

Chapter 12 The "Talking Cure":Language and Psychoanalysis

12 The ‘‘Talking Cure’’: Language and Psychoanalysis Introductory Remarks Lacan sees in Edgar Allan Poe’s tale ‘‘The Purloined Letter’’ an uncannily perspicacious illustration of certain aspects of his psychoanalytic theory, which in most respects is so well adapted to his purposes that it might have been written expressly to suit them. He hints, however, that it is precisely insofar as Poe was not consciously expounding a psychoanalytic theory that he unconsciously and therefore all the more accurately arrived at certain psychoanalytic insights. I shall offer a brief synopsis of the tale below, with the caveat that Lacan scrutinizes many of the apparently extraneous (but psychoanalytically significant) details I shall have to pass over in the retelling. In examining his interpretation of this story in his ‘‘Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’’’ I shall focus first on his demonstration of how Poe’s tale, which involves an intentional and illuminating engagement with the necessary components of any tale, ‘‘a drama, its narration, and the conditions of that narration,’’1 illustrates the structural interrelations between the orders of the Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic. In his seminar, he capitalizes on both the literary metaphor and the ambiguity of the story’s axial motif (namely, the ‘‘letter,’’ which allows for the play of multiple metaphorical manipulations) to demonstrate that these orders can and must be understood in linguistic terms. This accords with his insistence on the fundamental importance of a linguistic theory in psychoanalysis and undergirds his call for psychoanalytic theory to situate Freud’s fundamental 348 concepts ‘‘in a field of language’’ and to order them ‘‘in relation to the function of speech.’’ In his words: ‘‘I would assert that the technique cannot be understood, nor therefore correctly applied, if the concepts on which it is based are ignored. It is our task to demonstrate that these concepts take on their full meaning only when orientated in a field of language , only when ordered to the function of speech.’’2 As many commentators have noted, then, Lacan’s so-called return to Freud may be characterized as a reminder to analysts that psychoanalysis remains at bottom the ‘‘talking cure.’’ Yet, because he revises the linguistic presuppositions that underpin Freud’s basic concepts to take account of structuralist and more contemporary poststructuralist developments, his emphasis on the role of language in psychoanalysis simultaneously constitutes an important revision of Freudian theory.3 Accordingly, an important thread in the complex theoretical web he weaves around Poe’s tale is that three unconsciously occupied subject positions , constitutive of the Symbolic Order, impose specific discursive points of view on individuals, which condition the conscious narratives by which they aim to recount the ‘‘drama’’ (or, synonymously, the ‘‘event’’).4 I shall argue here that these three logical orders of signification that constitute the ‘‘conditions of the narration’’ can be described easily enough in the familiar terms of Derrida’s ‘‘plural logic of the aporia.’’ Having laid out Lacan’s account of the structural interrelations between the Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic, as illustrated in Poe’s tale, I shall turn to his analysis of the logic governing the displacement of an individual from position to position and the consequences of such shifts. Again, Poe’s tale might have been written expressly for the purpose of examining three important interrelated points. (1) One may discern an initial progressive movement from a position of ideological blindness through transgressive insight to analytical insight. (2) In this movement, occasioned by the irruption of an event and the associated motivating force of one’s desire for mastery, there is a kind of intersubjective relativity at work, which places/displaces individuals in relation to one another. (3) One may also discern a strange reverse logic of retrogressive slippage in this movement, or a kind of blindness associated with every form of insight, which again has to do with the force of one’s desire for mastery. Turning finally to the application of this theoretical edifice to the question of psychoanalytic intervention, it is clear that for Lacan its efficacy depends on the psychoanalyst’s grasp that the fundamental question of mastery underpins both the principle of unconscious structuring and the logic of displacement in the intersubjective network. As I shall explain in more detail, the insight that he derives from Poe’s tale is this: to the extent The ‘‘Talking Cure’’: Language and Psychoanalysis 349 that one misrecognizes analytical...