There is no shortage of former Freudians who have abandoned the field and turned their talents to writing testimonies against Freudianism or psychoanalysis in general. Often these are semi-autobiographical accounts of their own shift in allegiance and recount in personal terms the reasons for their abandonment of the discipline. Perhaps the most celebrated amongst these is Jeffrey Masson thanks to his rise to the position of Project Director of the Freud Archives and his subsequent publication of work condemning not just Freud, but psychoanalysis, psychiatry and psychotherapy in general.
In this post I look at three Lacanian writers who have since turned their back on Lacanian psychoanalysis. Of course, there are more than three, but these writers are of particular interest due to the quality of their work written whilst Lacanians, and for the reasons they have given subsequently for why they are no longer. I have cited each of these authors numerous times in the articles written on this site, and this is testament to the high regard in which I hold them. I have refrained from describing these authors as ‘anti-Lacanian’, despite their stated abandonment of the Lacanian field. Rather, in each case I point the reader in the direction of their current work and link where possible to their own explanations as to why they abandoned the Lacanian orientation. Fortunately, they have not been silent in publishing their respective reasons for this abandonment on the web, so in each case I include links to their respective sites where possible, and encourage anyone interested in finding out more to start from there.
First, Dylan Evans. This name will probably be the most familiar to Lacanian readers thanks to his excellent An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Whilst these days there is a wealth of secondary literature about Lacan’s work, with many authors contributing introductory works, when Evans’ dictionary was first published in 1996 it was a giant leap forward for anyone trying to study Lacan’s work. There is a lot to be said – some of it by Lacan himself – for not reducing Lacan’s thought into bite-sized, systematised chunks which the dictionary format so easily lends itself to. However, Evans’ dictionary is an extraordinary achievement which – at least as far as I am aware – is still unsurpassed today. It remains an absolute must-have reference for all Lacanians, in much the same way that Laplanche and Pontalis’ The Language of Psychoanalysis is for psychoanalysis in general.
Evans abandoned psychoanalysis for the field of evolutionary psychology in the late 1990s. Just as he wrote the inaugural English-language introductory dictionary to Lacanian psychoanalysis, so he has since written an introductory text to evolutionary psychology. His own account of his move from one field to another – From Lacan to Darwin – makes fascinating reading and can be found here.
Second, Stuart Schneiderman. Schneiderman was one of the first Americans to travel to France to study under Lacan and to undertake an analysis with him. He edited one of the early English-language publications on Lacan’s work, Returning to Freud: Clinical Psychoanalysis in the School of Lacan. Amongst his other works from his Lacanian era are an interesting book on The Rat Man case history, and Jacques Lacan: The Death of an Intellectual Hero, which traces the fraught and divisive events in Lacan’s School during the time that Schneiderman was part of it in the 1970s, towards the end of Lacan’s life. Personal anecdotes about Lacan as an analyst and the political schisms that dominated his final years are presented by – at least as he tells it – one who did not ‘take sides’.
Schneiderman now practices as a life coach in New York City. He maintains a regularly updated blog on which he posts much that is critical of the psychotherapies. He can also be found on Twitter. His own account of why he abandoned psychoanalysis is on his site here. Schneiderman’s present-day criticisms of Lacanian psychoanalysis are all the more intriguing given that, at least to a Lacanian reader, he appears to now embraces the very ideas that he attacked so effectively before. As a sample, I can recommend his excellent paper on affects written from a Lacanian perspective and available free online here. Scheiderman’s article spurred me to undertake my own study of Lacan’s work on this subject.
Third is Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen. His best Lacanian work is Lacan: The Absolute Master, published in 1991. Also worthy of mention is The Freudian Subject from 1988. The book for which he is now best known, however, is Le Livre Noir de la Psychanalyse, a title currently only available in French but which translates into English as The Black Book of Psychoanalysis. This title teasingly recalls The Black Book of Communism, and like that work it seeks to document all the failures of psychoanalysis since its inception. It caused quite a stir when it was published in France in 2005 and provoked a rebuttal in the shape of L’ Anti-Livre Noir de la Psychanalyse, edited by Lacan’s son-in-law, Jacques-Alain Miller.
To a greater extent than the other two authors, Borch-Jacobsen has continued to produce work engaging with psychoanalysis, particularly on the history of psychoanalysis and of psychiatry in general. These are brilliant and insightful. I particularly recommend two recent books: Remembering Anna O.: A Century of Mystification and Making Minds and Madness: From Hysteria to Depression. He is currently Professor of Comparative Literature and French at the University of Washington, Seattle.
By Owen Hewitson, LacanOnline.com
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There’s another writer you should probably consider reading, his name is Jean Allouch. He is all about Lacan too.
Your page is rather intersting, I will spread the word!!
Thanks for the heads up, Roger – Allouch is a great writer. It’s a pity hardly any of his stuff is translated into English. In French though there is an excellent book of his which is basically a series of anecdotes from Lacan’s practice – Les Impromptus de Lacan, I think it’s called. Not all of the anecdotes are diamonds but there are a few absolute gems. I’m going to write something about it on this site because it’s so little known to the English-only speaking audience. I think he also did a very thorough book on Aimée – Marguerite, ou l’Aimée de Lacan. I haven’t read it though, so can’t comment.
A very interesting read! I was familiar with Dylan Evans’ jumping overboard, but not Schneiderman and Borsch-Jacobsen. Thank you for this.
Evans’s embracing the scientific tradition of evolutionary psychology is very fascinating, and makes me wonder whether he holds the view that human psychology can be reduced to bio-chemical processes, a positivist view Lacan would certainly reject. I remember Freud writing an extensive criticism of Darwin in Beyond the Pleasure Principle–that he got the mechanism of evolution wrong, posing instead the term ‘involution’! That would be an interesting point of comparison. I wonder if anyone has written on Darwin and Freud on this account?
Thanks for this post and your terrific site. As you say, what these three critics of Lacan have in common is that they are all quite good writers and are hard to simply dismiss out of hand. Interestingly, Schneiderman seems have been motivated by a conversion to the right and is today a kind of tough guy, tough love neo-con “coach” with lots of “wake up and smell the coffee” and “get on with it” solution focused advice for misguided and weak kneed liberals. What is the same, maybe, about his pre and post Lacanian stance is that he is still anti-authority (now it’s the ruling authority of neo-liberal culture he’s against and enjoys opposing). He reminds me a bit of what playwright David Mamet has morphed into. Evans, whose arguments should be given serious consideration, apparently might have been better off sticking with his own personal analysis and saving himself a lot of grief and madness. After leaving the Lacanians and joining the neo-Darwinians, he ended up, by his own account (to be published in book form by him soon, of course) severely depressed and “detained” (whatever that means) in a psychiatric hospital after attempting to build a post-apocalypse utopian rural experimental community. A first hand account a few years ago in the Daily Mail published by one of the participants of this strange, comic and disastrously uninformed endeavor sort of makes Lacan look the picture of sanity. I don’t think this has changed Evans’ views on Lacan, but a little modesty might be in order (especially his claim about the “harm” Lacanians somehow constitutionally cause, although words, most certainly, like a scalpel, can be used to harm or heal). At least Lacan ended his days carrying string, silently tying and untying knots. Sounds pretty harmless to me. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-465271/The-aim-set-idyllic-rural-commune-did-things-horribly-wrong.html
Thank you for the informative post. I just finished studying Evans’ ‘From Lacan to Darwin.’ What seems to me to be taken for granted by Evans is the following assertion: ‘Every phenomenon in this world could be subject to scientific scrutiny through scientific methods.’ Paradoxically though, it is the very cognitive science or, say, philosophy of mind that sort of confess to their inability to resolve issues such as the hard problem of consciousness. Lacan’s secret premise seems to be that mind is only asymptotically related to the brain, so it cannot be approached through the lens of exact sciences.
Thank you for this. It seems to me essential to arrive at “anti-Lacanianism” as part of the endless deconstructive/paradoxcal process. The disappointment with Schneiderman and Evans seems to me their absolute rejection of Lacan and Freud in favour of essentially reductionist discourses. As if they took to Freud and Lacan in totality and now reject them with equal totality. Schneiderman for instance suggesting that psychonalysis legitimises rape – an outrageous misrepresentation of Freud’s understanding of masochism. Both could benefit from reading Borch-Jacobsen and Francois Roustang (the unconscious is unstructured like an affect) with their emphasis on psychoanalysis as the continuation of hypnosis and it power.
@Rob Weatherill: excellent point re essntialism / totality. One problem I have is that the majority of these critics, like M Onfray, write in French and no one but MBJ is translated into English