Lacan and Culturalism: A Chronicle of an “Untimely” Resistance to Psychoanalysis

Freud and the Premises of Culturalism

In “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness,” which was first published in the journal Sexual-probleme—edited by the German sexologist Max Marcuse—Freud (1908) sets out the opposition between sexuality and culture, thus anticipating his later formulations in The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and Its Discontents. In this text, he was discussing late-nineteenth-century ideas found in the works of Otto Binswanger (1896), Wilhelm Erb (1893), and the American George Miller Beard (1881, 1886). These works anticipate every one of the axioms of culturalism. In them, we find the prevalence of the “society-personality” dyad and the guiding idea that, since subjectivity is the product of society, the appearance of a “new” form of nervous illness is correlated to “new” modifications of society. This “new” nervousness, described clinically in terms of an absence of limits and subjective constraints, reflects the traits of the liberal society that emerged in the context of the Industrial Revolution. In this sense, it already differed from, and preceded, Freud’s discussion of the types of symptoms that ensue from castration, and which involve hindrances and inhibitions. In these “pre-Freudian” conceptions, the “subject” is thus conceived of as the product of its environment, which in turn is described as having undergone recent mutations that both overwhelm and shape the subjectivities of their age: the disruption of moral ideals, the correlative unbridled pursuit of money and property, the rise of competition, the intensification of stimuli—an intensification that involves the loss of modesty—and the globalized extension of communication networks (not, in this case, the internet, but instead the telephone and the telegraph!). As will be shown later, in recent years and long after Freud’s death, analysts have emphasized the poisonous effects of the expansion of pornography, liberal capitalism, and the internet; claiming to be “new,” critiques of this sort are in fact old, some of them even older than psychoanalysis!

Freud, in “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness,” took an unequivocal position toward what he refers to as “these and many other similarly-worded opinions,” an expression that shows that such conceptions were neither rare in his time nor unknown to him, and were even relatively commonplace. For him, the problem “is not that they are mistaken but that they . . . leave out of account precisely the most important of the aetiological factors involved” (Freud 1908, p. 185). The sexual etiology of the neuroses is both irreducible and always particular. For this reason, neurotics must be approached case by case, a situation that prevents him from drawing conclusions that are too general about social trends. In short, and Freud would remind us of this occasionally, the lack of sexual satisfaction is constitutive of desire, and this is the case whatever the social and political context may be. This lack is inherent in the satisfaction of sexuality and the drives, and it is the invariant consequence of castration, which Freud thought of as a complex that could not be circumvented, and then as an irreducible “bedrock” (Freud 1937, p. 232). ⁴ If the true cause of the discontents within civilization derives not so much from historical and cultural contingency as from the very constitution of sexuality and desire, then “the injurious influence of civilization reduces itself in the main” (p. 185) to the relative and environmental determinants specific to a particular cultural ecosystem. Freud never modified this position: the sexual is the most significant and efficacious of etiologies, and the preculturalists neglect this decisive factor in order to privilege cultural etiology, which is always variable and relates to historical developments. As will be seen later, this was indeed the case with mid-twentieth-century culturalism, which candidly acknowledged its break with Freud.

Doctrines such as those of Erb and Beard implicitly deplore a loosening of social norms, which has supposedly been responsible both for the decline of morality and modesty and for the emancipation of sensuality. Freud (1908) examines these ideas because they are exemplary cases of precisely what he is quite correct in attacking: the “harmful suppression of the sexual life of civilized peoples (or classes)” (p. 185). Such ideas are thus built upon a reactionary foundation, which has been covered over by a supposedly empirical assessment of the “current” state of affairs. ⁵

Similarly, in breaking with Alfred Adler, whose theory reserved a large place for social determinants of the individual, Freud argued that he underestimated the place of sexuality in the etiology of the neuroses; instead he privileged the function of the ego and the processes that involve secondary elaboration and rationalization. Accusing Adler of “hopelessly mix[ing]” the “biological, social and psychological meanings of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine,’” Freud (1914, p. 55) unequivocally rejected use of the term “psychoanalysis” to designate the Adlerian movement. When he became aware of the spread of Adler’s ideas, especially because of G. Stanley Hall’s interest in them, Freud wrote to Sándor Ferenczi on May 16, 1914: “Next he [Adler] will be called to America to free the world from sexuality and to base it on aggression!” (Freud and Ferenczi 1993, p. 554). Indeed, according to Freud, Adler and Jung, in order to gain mainstream approval, shared an attempt to dull the cutting edge of the truths brought out laboriously by psychoanalysis. This evasion at the heart of Adler’s doctrine takes on the appearance of progressive thought, but is really “too far-reaching an adjustment to the demands of actuality” (Freud 1914, p. 58).

These remarks of Freud’s are particularly important, for they prefigure several dominant themes of culturalism. These themes are not limited to its emphasis on current conditions, its account of the individual’s formation and “self-actualization,” its blunting of sexual causality, and its correlative promotion of social and cultural determinants; they also extend to the concern with addressing a general readership and the popularization that this implies.

It is also not too far-fetched to think that the reasons for the success of culturalism in American psychoanalysis derive from these conditions and that culturalism has its roots not in Freudianism or even in “neo-Freudianism,” but in Adlerianism. This highly pertinent hypothesis was advanced by Fritz Wittels (1939), who felt that the term “neo-Adlerian” was more appropriate than “neo-Freudian” for the movement represented by Karen Horney. ⁶ H. L. Ansbacher (1953) revived this argument in 1952 and circulated a questionnaire to members of the American Psychoanalytic Association to determine whether they considered “neo-Adlerian” to be more adequate than “neo-Freudian.” The majority of respondents found “neo-Adlerian” to be more precise. Many of them also believed that neither term was entirely adequate and that a new one should be proposed. ⁷ For his part, Ansbacher, who sympathized with Adler’s theories, reached the lucid conclusion that the success of “neo-Freudianism” in the United Stated really amounted to the success of the Adlerian approach. ⁸ This position should not be disregarded, and it has not been. For example, following Wittels and Ansbacher, Russell Jacoby (1975) explored the connections between the “neo-Freudian” culturalist movement and Adler’s work; even more recently, Slavoj Žižek (1994) has taken up this critical perspective.

The Critical Reception of American Culturalism: A Few Decisive Remarks

Erich Fromm undertook a critique of Freud’s “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness” in an article published in the journal of the Institut für Sozialforschung of the University of Frankfurt, an institute that had been directed by the philosopher and sociologist Max Horkheimer since 1931. Titled “Die gesellschaftliche Bedingtheit der psychoanalytischen Therapie” (Fromm 1935), this article was later translated into English as “The Social Determinants of Psychoanalytic Therapy” (Fromm 2000). Strangely enough, Fromm saw in Freud’s text the proof that the founder of psychoanalysis adhered to the bourgeois values of fin-de-siècle Vienna; such a conclusion, which is contrary to fact, seems to result from a prejudice against Freud’s real positions.

The philosopher Theodor Adorno, another member of the Frankfurt School, who had joined Horkheimer in New York, was hardly sympathetic to psychoanalysis but developed an intelligent and acerbic critical reading of the culturalist movement in a lecture, “Revised Psychoanalysis,” which he delivered in 1946 to the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Society. ⁹ In it, he argued that when the “neo-Freudian” or “revisionist” school—terms that referred mainly to Fromm and Horney (Adorno 1972, p. 14)—made the environment an essential cause that determines the subject, they were merely uttering “platitudes” (p. 15); their arguments transform psychoanalysis into “higher-level social services,” ¹⁰ which had “come to terms with common sense,” thereby becoming “universally acceptable” (p. 27). For him, Horney’s undervaluing of sexual libido in favor of social determinants amounts to nothing more than a form of “righteous indignation” (p. 28). In thus losing its subversive qualities, psychoanalysis is made acceptable for “social conformism” (p. 29). These criticisms of Adorno’s are very close to Freud’s, who saw in Adler a willingness to yield to the requirements of present circumstances and common sense. Adorno also remarked that Horney’s emphasis on the importance of current social conditions was in the service of a pragmatic spirit, which was seeking to banish the past and determinants that stretch back to childhood.

Finally, Adorno criticizes, quite appositely, Horney’s strong interest in the new: she was a neo-Freudian concerned with New World psychoanalysis (rather than that of “Old Europe”) and its “New Ways.” Nevertheless, her understanding of novelty is hardly original, and instead resembles the procedure of trite advertising slogans: her promotion of the “new” is entirely bound up with “mass production, which proclaims that every standardized gadget is something unprecedented, which has never been seen before” (p. 40). This is a strong thesis: while culturalist ideas seem to question dominant ideologies—Fromm (1956, pp. 100–201), for example, denounced “capitalistic societies”—they end up by allying themselves with the principles of those ideologies.

Marcuse, who was also a member of the Frankfurt School, opposed Fromm more directly in the 1950s. He focuses especially on Fromm’s conception of love, showing how, in reality, “progressive” culturalist ideas are conformist at the precise point at which they seem most critical, and moralistic where they seem most political. Contrasting psychoanalytic ethics with the “idealist ethics” of culturalism, he argues (pp. 257–260) that there is a flaw in this idealism: it assumes that changing society will liberate human beings. But this assumption disavows psychic reality in favor of social realty. Žižek (1990) takes up this criticism, pointing out that, for the Frankfurt School, the problem with the culturalists is not so much that they longed for a nonrepressive society (which is quite commendable) but instead that they thought that a completely free individual could exist, an individual who would be constrained by neither repression nor internal limitations. This “individual without limits” is a fiction that, as we have seen, can be found in the preculturalist works discussed by Freud; it is present also in the recent work of some French psychoanalysts, as will be discussed below. ¹¹

In a sense, as Žižek stresses, the members of the Frankfurt School, in criticizing revisionism, were undertaking a sort of “return to Freud,” which prefigured that of Lacan.

In the 1970s, Russell Jacoby (1975) developed the notion of “social amnesia”; this designates the manner in which certain ways of developing psychoanalysis have suffered from a collective forgetting of its foundations. He was thus continuing earlier criticisms of neo-Freudian revisionists, while also arguing that Alfred Adler, R. D. Laing, and David Cooper were a part of this movement.

Let us turn to Horney’s programmatic text, New Ways in Psychoanalysis (1939), which was translated into French in 1951. Three years later, in 1954, the French psychoanalyst Jean-Bertrand Pontalis published an article whose title parodied Horney’s work: “Les mauvais chemins de la psychanalyse ou Karen Horney, critique de Freud [Wrong Ways in Psychoanalysis, or Karen Horney as a Critic of Freud].” Like Adorno before him, Pontalis noted that Horney had psychologized and sociologized psychoanalysis, a revisionist approach that could well have seductive effects on readers. Criticizing the naive claims that the subject’s lack of satisfaction is the result of privations imposed by society and that sadism, rather than being linked to the death drive, is simply a reaction to environmental influences, Pontalis emphasizes that Horney’s work contains “a certain number of very widespread misunderstandings of what it criticizes and errors in its conclusions, which would be well worth our while to recognize quickly” (pp. 218–219). This indication of the urgent need to identify such misunderstandings and errors suggests that culturalist ideas were already pervading the French psychoanalytic community in the 1950s. It was, indeed, during the same period that Lacan made his uncompromising criticisms of culturalism.

A Contraband Flag

Scholarly research suggests that although Lacan may not have read Marcuse, he was familiar with Adorno and Horkheimer, whose work had inspired his articles “The Family Complex in the Formation of the Individual” (Lacan 1938, 1988) and “Kant with Sade” (Lacan 1963). Nothing indicates that he was aware of the content of Adorno’s 1946 lecture, but he had certainly read Horney’s work, either in English or in French, and it is highly probable that he had also read the severely critical article by his analysand Pontalis. Consequently, he was well aware of the presence, in the psychoanalytic publications of his time, of the “sociological tendency sometimes referred to as ‘culturalist’” (Lacan 1955, p. 298), and also deplored that psychoanalysis was generally “becoming increasingly environmentalist” (Lacan 1957–1958, p. 151).

Although his remarks about culturalism are relatively rare, most of them were made in the 1950s. It has frequently been observed that Lacan’s references to Anglo-American authors tended to occur during this period, and became rarer in the 1960s and afterwards. This change probably took place because his relation to various institutions also changed; until 1963, he had been a member, first, of the Société psychanalytique de Paris (Paris Psychoanalytic Society), which was affiliated with the International Psychoanalytical Association, and then of the Société française de psychanalyse (French Society for Psychoanalysis), which was seeking to become a constituent society of the IPA. In this context, Lacan was still situating himself in a dialogue with English-speaking psychoanalysis. After 1964, when he founded his own school, the École freudienne de Paris (the Freudian School of Paris), this ceased to be the case. From that moment on, the audience of his seminar changed, and he devoted his energies to refining the foundations of his doctrine, giving less attention to works produced within the IPA.

For Lacan, culturalism was “the most questionable aspect of the development of psychoanalysis in the United States” (Lacan 1964–1965, June 23), and he did not hesitate to qualify this movement as a “contraband flag” (Lacan 1960, p. 688). This expression resembles the one used by Ernest Jones (1955) in his discussion of Freud’s sense of irritation that the analysts who dissented from his theory were “sailing under false colors” (p. 362). To compare culturalism to a “contraband flag” is tantamount to saying that this movement was smuggling in all sorts of counterfeit commodities, which were then being called Freudian and psychoanalytic.

One of Lacan’s unchanging positions was to consider that the opposition between the two major movements of American psychoanalysis during this period—ego psychology, with its supposed “biologism,” and “neo-Freudianism,” with its attachment to the sociocultural field, an opposition, as it were, between nature and culture—arose from a “false antinomy” (Lacan 1964–1965, June 23). For Lacan, these movements had much in common: they both assigned a central place to the ego ¹² and its function of adapting to reality, which, for the human being, is always a social reality. Further, Lacan never really believed (or wanted to believe) in Freud’s naturalism. He therefore gave very little credence to the “biological” orientation of the theory claimed by, or imputed to, ego psychology; this tendency “of course has nothing biological about it except the terminology” (Lacan 1955, p. 296). This fashion of placing ego psychology’s biologism in perspective goes a long way toward lessening the opposition between it and culturalism. Nevertheless, it cannot be said that Lacan considered ego psychology to be as problematic as “neo-Freudianism.” His reference to culturalism as the “most questionable aspect” of what happened to psychoanalysis in the United States indicates that this movement and its divergences from psychoanalysis seemed worse than what could be seen in ego psychology.

Yet although he clearly considered the culturalist movement an adversary of psychoanalysis, Lacan was able to recognize the quality of some of its most eminent representatives. Thus, for example, he did not hesitate to highlight the importance of Erik Erikson’s commentary on Freud’s dream about Irma’s injection (Lacan 1978, p. 155). Likewise, he paid homage to Horney as an “innovator on the clinical plane” (Lacan 1957–1958, p. 274), as well as for the subtlety of her observations on both the castration complex in female homosexuality and the unconscious sources of a daughter’s identification with her father (see Horney 1924).

On March 9, 1955, Lacan made a remark that says much about his position on culturalism. He refers to

a man called Erikson, who describes himself as an advocate of the culturalist school—for the good it will do him! This so-called culturalism consists in emphasising in analysis those things which, in each case, depend on the cultural context in which the subject is immersed. This aspect has certainly not been ignored up until now—I am not aware of Freud, nor those who might specifically qualify themselves as Freudians, ever neglecting it. The question is to know whether this element should be given pre-eminent importance in the constitution of the subject [Lacan, 1954–1955, pp. 147–148; emphasis added].

For Lacan, the cultural factor, even if it must be taken into account, does not have this preeminent importance in the constitution of the subject. If psychoanalytic treatment is directed in a privileged way by the “referential systems made available to [the subject] by the state of cultural affairs to which [s/he] is a more or less interested party” (Lacan 1953–1954, p. 50), then the subject will get lost in what Lacan calls “empty speech”: superficial talk that carries the subject away from unconscious truth. Such truth cannot be reduced to the configuration of the sociocultural environment. What takes precedence in this constitution is not the subject’s culture but the subject’s structure. The term “structure of the subject” designates a strict and unconscious logic of signifiers, a logic that is composed, for example, of the symptom, the position in sexuation, the montage of the drives, and the way that fantasy has been put together. Unlike the historical development, cultural contingencies, and social phenomena in which the subject is plunged, this structure never varies. Unlike the subject’s various types of identification, the formal envelope of the symptom, and the scenarios that the fantasy inhabits, which are modified by the contingencies of history, the structures of the subject, the symptom, and the fantasy are invariant. ¹³ Lacan, throughout his theoretical work, always defined the subject in terms of the cut between two signifiers. It is a pure effect of language, which is located in the gaps within what is said. This subject has no qualities, is “a mere point of fading [évanouissement]” (Lacan 1973, p. 224), and cannot be subsumed within any assigned ethnicity or gender (Lacan 1973–1974, January 15). The subject is thus not coextensive with the person and cannot be reduced to the identifications that represent it in the social field, although these identifications themselves do vary according to the historical period and discourse within which the subject is located. This fundamental irreducibility to social and identity assignments (which are the signifiers of the Other) also constitutes the subject’s fundamental liberty. Each psychoanalyst has a responsibility to be attentive to new ways of expressing subjective suffering, which do change according to the period. Yet although analysts must get their bearings in relation to the new forms of demands that are addressed to them, they orient themselves in the treatment by means of structural markers involving the economy of desire; such markers are, as it were, “untimely.” In the course of his teaching, Lacan sought to define this structure of the subject on the basis of various theoretical models, a history I will not recount here. The development of these various formalizations draws, of course, on concepts that could be found in the knowledge of his time; what Lacan was trying to grasp through them, however, is neither contingent nor does it exist only in relation to a particular cultural atmosphere. It is connected to the fundamentally linguistic “constitution” of the subject, whatever the geographical and historical latitude in which any particular subject may be found. This constant reference to structure explains why Lacan was equally dismissive of ego psychology, with its supposedly biological causality, and culturalism, with its social causality (see Lacan 1958, p. 16).

Lacan seems to have understood that his conception of the unconscious as “structured like a language” could lead people to believe that his doctrine included culturalist elements, since language can, of course, be considered a social and cultural phenomenon. He sought to defend himself, however, against such a risk of confusion, and this is why, in a note added in 1966 when the Écrits first appeared, he stated that he “claim[ed] to contribute” to culturalism “in no regard” (Lacan 1966a, p. 608). Earlier, he had stated clearly that his doctrine’s promotion of the relation between humans and the signifier had nothing to do with culturalism; the relation to the signifier does not designate the human being’s “relationship to language as a social phenomenon.” Instead, it involves a relation with a linguistic order in which we always come up against immutable laws of substitution (metaphor) and combination (metonymy). Such laws participate in “instituting the subject” of the unconscious and preside, for example, over the conditions in which symptoms are formed (Lacan 1966b, p. 578).

Our hypothesis is that Lacan, fearing that analysts would misinterpret his teaching by confusing his orientation with culturalist presuppositions, anticipated, without knowing it, the ways in which some of his students would go astray.

In this context, it is worth noting that, during his seminar Problèmes cruciaux pour la psychanalyse [Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis], Lacan (1964–1965, June 23) asked Jacques-Alain Miller ¹⁴ to discuss “Psychoanalysis and the American Scene: A Reappraisal,” an article by the psychoanalyst and addiction specialist Norman Zinberg (1965), which had been published in the French-English journal Diogenes. In this long and detailed article, whose great documentary interest was recognized by Lacan, even if he did not consider it to be a theoretical or clinical landmark, Zinberg shows that there is a connection between the popularization of psychoanalysis and its progressive deformation. He argues that, in the United States, psychoanalysis had been the victim of its own success, for it had become the vehicle of analysts’ determination to gain social recognition and acceptance: “the farther psychoanalysis moves” away from treating the “unpleasant ideas stemming from the drives,” the “more acceptable it becomes in many circles. And when acceptability becomes a wish in itself, the more likely is analysis to give up what makes it special and be swallowed up by its popularity” (Zinberg 1965, p. 105).

This remark is not unrelated to Freud’s similar reticence and Adorno’s criticisms in 1946. Yet this attempt to assimilate psychoanalysis did not involve only its popularization. Zinberg also showed that it had been brought into the university under the colors of interdisciplinary research and that this had led it to be watered down. This interdisciplinary use of psychoanalysis gravitates around the same polar opposites: sometimes psychoanalysis moves toward psychopharmacology, and sometimes, under the influence of culturalism, it turns toward the social field. This movement toward the social occurs in terms both of epistemology—with its incorporation into cultural anthropology in the work, for example, of Margaret Mead—and of its extension into areas in which psychoanalysts could intervene: prisons, courts, hospitals, cinema, industry, social relations and social work, etc. ¹⁵

In his commentary on Zinberg’s article (Lacan 1964–1965, June 23), Miller argued that in the United States psychoanalysis had sutured the class struggle, in conformity with both capitalism and the concern for the “pursuit of happiness.” ¹⁶ In this way, the culturalist movement of American psychoanalysis “was attempting to bring about this adequation between human beings and their environment.” This adaptive and utopian goal was very far from the acceptance of castration, which creates lack while instituting desire; for Freud and Lacan, this acceptance was the true horizon of analysis. In this context, it becomes possible to grasp the difference between two understandings of psychoanalysis: the first is oriented by both consenting to castration and renewing the subject’s relation to unconscious desire, which is the correlate of castration; the other seeks to optimize the individual’s position so that “all skills can be exploited fully,” as Adorno (2007, p. 31) put it. This second conception recalls Lacan’s criticism of psychoanalysis as “human engineering” in 1953 (1956, p. 204). ¹⁷

Zinberg (1965) concludes his article by calling upon Americans to think about the future and, referring again to Erikson, to resist the “promotion” and watering down “of our discipline. We may at this time come close to having a second chance. It is hard to be patient, but perhaps by our example we can help the burgeoning analytic institutes in Europe and Japan to avoid our mistakes and spare their countries so many bad jokes” (p. 107). More than fifty years after Zinberg expressed this warning and this hope, one can wonder whether American psychoanalysts still believe they will be given a second chance. In the United States, what, at present, is the status of both neo-Freudianism and the critique of it? It is possible that the rehabilitation of Fromm’s work ¹⁸ and the success of the humanistic approach—especially by way of relational psychoanalysis—are more recent forms of culturalism in American psychoanalysis. ¹⁹

In Europe, and particularly in France, forty years after Lacan’s death, almost no one is still interested in culturalism. While there are a few exceptions (e.g., Di Mascio 1995), it is rare even to read the word “culturalism” in the French psychoanalytic literature. While culturalism has, unfortunately, very rarely been approached from a critical perspective by American psychoanalysts, French psychoanalysts seem to view it as a sort of museum piece, which has its place in the gallery of American psychoanalysis, but which is entirely unrelated to them.

However, the influence of culturalism has not dissipated, and indeed the approach remains alive and well. In fact, one might say that it is quietly and covertly thriving in France, which is precisely the country where one would have least expected to find it.

The Return of Culturalism: The French Situation

In France, despite the many kinds of psychotherapies that are available today on the “mental health” market, psychoanalysis has managed to preserve a unique place for itself. Psychoanalytic activities—the organization of conferences, the publication of books and articles in specialized journals—continue to thrive. Lacan’s teaching has marked the various currents within French psychoanalysis, and psychoanalytic presentations and publications often refer to Lacanian notions; they do so in a more or less precise way, depending on the author and the psychoanalytic school to which he or she belongs.

Nevertheless, for about twenty years, a considerable movement toward culturalism has been observable among psychoanalysts, not only through their presentations and publications, but also through the politics of analytic schools and associations. This has occurred despite the fact that they almost never use the term “culturalism,” and certainly do not claim to be culturalists. This absence of the term from French discussions has even made the culturalist arguments that are being developed more, rather than less, powerful. In all of this, it is easy to discern the irony of history. Lacan had understood that his work could be confused with culturalism and had distinguished his approach from it. Nevertheless, culturalist ideas are now returning and being extended by means of expressions and (misused) arguments drawn from his teaching.

In 2002 Charles Melman ²⁰ published a book-length interview in which he announced that, in our age, ²¹ the subject of the unconscious has undergone a profound change. Basing his argument not only on his own clinical experience but also on news items and anecdotes about everyday life, Melman (2002, 2009) claims that we are now dealing with “new subjects” ²² or, to be more precise, a “new psychic economy” (nouvelle économie psychique, or NEP); the acronym for this term deliberately evokes Lenin’s “New Economic Policy.” Melman argues that the current political economy, based on “neoliberal” capitalism, acts to determine a psychic economy whose principles, requirements, and especially flaws are homogeneous to it. According to this perspective, libidinal economy is thus modeled on the market economy, free trade, and globalization; therefore, according to Melman, it is characterized by a removal of all kinds of barriers and subjective limits.

The “new subjects” (Melman 2009, pp. 233–234) of this “new psychic economy” therefore have a looser relation to castration (as a limit) and thus to oedipal prohibitions. As a result, the sexual reality of their unconscious and their (new) symptoms, which, for Freud, is based on the repression of sexuality, would be less important. Instead of repressing their drives, these new subjects would act on them and would lack sexual inhibition. The result, still according to Melman, is the form of exhibitionism that is being noted nowadays in society in general, and especially in its cultural productions. Finally, he deduces from this that these subjects, who are without “limits” (Melman 2009, p. 228), are ill-suited to transference and recalcitrant to analytic treatment. This creates a serious and unprecedented difficulty for psychoanalysis, submitting it to a forced choice: either it must adapt to this “new psychic economy” (or whatever one chooses to call it) or it will disappear.

Melman’s work is exemplary in the precise sense that it has served as an example and a model. Upon its publication, it had a great success in France, and since then many analysts have made exactly the same argument; this has occurred even when they claim to disagree with Melman and use a somewhat different vocabulary. This is particularly the case of Jean-Pierre Lebrun, Melman’s interlocutor in the book-length interview. Lebrun went on to edit his own collection of books at Éditions Érès, a major publisher of psychoanalytic works in France. The series was initially titled “Humus, Subjectivity, and the Social Bond,” and in terms of sales, it has been relatively successful. Its editorial line involves the attempt to understand the subjective changes observed by psychoanalysts as they take part in “social life.” In early books in the collection, the editor described its orientation:

This collection welcomes texts that attempt to theorize how the contemporary mutation of the social bond has affected subjectivity. Its field is located at the interface between psychoanalysis and the social sciences, and to this end calls upon both research in the latter and elaborations—theoretical as well as clinical—in the former [Lebrun and Volckrick 2005, front matter].

This analysis of the social psychopathology of these “new subjects” serves as a continuation of a social criticism that aims especially at capitalism; this criticism had already been found in Fromm’s work. Yet this ideology of the new psychic economy—which describes a form of both society and subjects that is simultaneously unbridled and marked by loss—is a renewal of what Lacan, now long ago, had called a “cliché of decadence” in society (1959–1960, p. 251; translation modified). Such a cliché is hardly new and has occurred repeatedly throughout history, not only in the domain of psychoanalysis. It can already be found in the social/clinical descriptions of Erb and Beard, as well as, to some extent, in the work of Lasch. It is also significant that numerous psychoanalysts who locate themselves in this movement invoke the authority of facts they have observed and upon which they base their opinions. Lacan thought that this form of empiricism, which appeals to “clinical facts” without questioning the conditions of meaning that lead us to consider something to be a fact, was a sort of ideological divergence from psychoanalysis. He called it a “question-begging appeal to the concrete” (Lacan 1966b, p. 578). The French epistemologist Gaston Bachelard (1938, pp. 33–63) referred to this as an approach by means of “primary experience” and saw it as an epistemological obstacle. This propensity to place the legitimacy of experience and “field” observation at the forefront of her argumentation can also be found in Horney, especially when she invoked Bronisław Malinowski in opposition to Freud (Di Mascio 1995, p. 196).

When these “new subjects,” who are impelled by an unlimited and uninhibited thirst for jouissance, ²³ are observed in contemporary society, they are considered to be radically new. These descriptions are actually more akin to tracing-paper copies of the patients who suffered from “nervous illness,” the condition that Wilhelm Erb had already unearthed in the nineteenth century, and which had given rise to “many other similarly-worded opinions” (Freud 1908, p. 108). For Melman and numerous other psychoanalysts who are interested in how the subject has changed in relation to political, social, and cultural mutations, the subject of the unconscious is not an effect of structure. It is instead a direct and covariant effect of culture. The language that determines the subject is thus reduced to a social phenomenon.

This is quite precisely an updating of the culturalist divergences that Lacan had identified in the 1950s. Indeed, the very use of the word “new” and its synonyms—the “new psychic economy,” “new symptoms,” “new subjects,” like so many products of neoliberalism and contemporary society ²⁴ —is vulnerable to the same criticism Adorno had leveled against Horney. It is intimately allied with the mass production of commodities that “have never been seen before” (Adorno 1972, p. 40). Ironically, this is the same mass production that these psychoanalysts are criticizing. Thus, this culturalist conception of a “new subject” may well be only one more product on the market, a product that is being promoted by the same psychoanalysts who are criticizing globalization. In this regard, it is worthwhile to recall Freud’s comment (1924) that “it would be interesting to devote a whole study to mental reactions to novelty; for under certain . . . conditions we can observe . . . a thirst for stimulation which flings itself upon anything that is new merely because it is new” (p. 213), or at least because it is thought to be so.

As for the society that would supposedly be without limits, where sex would be everywhere and the limit would be nowhere, Lacan downplayed both its importance and its impact on the subject of the unconscious. For him, “The invasion of sexomania is nothing more than an advertising campaign” (Granzotto 1974, p. 29). As such, “it’s a fad, part of the feigned liberalization” of our regular lives. In other words, it is a lure, an illusion, like religion, which makes us believe that we can free ourselves from castration, lack, and the impasses upon which desire is founded. In believing that they can identify a limitless world filled with unrestrained, “liberated/liberal/libertarian” new subjects, these psychoanalysts may well turn out to have been duped by such “feigned liberalization”; as a result, they may also be the most fervent consumers of this advertising phenomenon. ²⁵ Marcuse (1955), who was not a clinician, remarks that, in our consumer society, “precisely because we can visualize the universal satisfaction of individual needs, the strongest obstacles are placed in the way of such satisfaction” (p. 268). No uninhibited or liberated subjects are to be found here; on the contrary, at the moment when all appetites have been whetted by consumerism, castration, as a psychic process that cannot be eliminated, reappears in the symptoms of the time. Desire never ceases to have to deal with its own constitutive limits.

It could also be wondered whether such weakening of unconscious sexuality in this new psychic economy, is not, instead, a characteristic of those analysts’ own position. Like Horney, many psychoanalysts of today are turning away from the sexual “meaning” (and its constitutive impasses) that has always been specific to psychoanalysis (and is always coordinated with castration), and are privileging the subject’s social determinants. In this respect, the recent success, among psychoanalysts in the French university system, of gender studies is probably yet another sign of the return of culturalism. The promotion of the term “gender” as a social construction of sexual identity, as opposed to “sex,” which is supposedly essentialist and naturalist, often enables psychoanalysts themselves to criticize Freud and, once again, to highlight the primary importance of the sociocultural context in the constitution of the subject. Although Lacan was certainly aware of the concept of gender (see, for example, his brief discussion of Stoller’s Sex and Gender (1968a,b) in his seminar (Lacan 1971, p. 31), he himself never assigned a specific place to it. This did not prevent him from considering that the subject’s sexuation is not identical to anatomy; a man can have a “feminine” position in sexuation and a woman can have a “masculine” sexuation. For Lacan, sexuation is subject neither to biological criteria nor to social determinants and environmental influence. Instead, it involves an unconscious positioning and a mode of jouissance that would be singular for each subject.

In France today, there have been very few carefully argued criticisms of the concept of the “new subjects.” With a few exceptions (such as, for example, Koren [2010]), critics have not, or not yet, focused much attention on the hidden influence of culturalism. They have, however, shown how these works rely on a recurrent misappropriation of notions and quotations from Lacan’s teaching, which they have taken out of context. These include the phrases “the social decline of the paternal imago” (Lacan 1938, p. 60) and “the unconscious is the political” (Lacan 1966–1967, p. 317), as well as the amalgamation of the notions of “subject” and “subjectivity” (see Guérin 2010, 2019; Porge 2009; Zafiropoulos 2001). This is more than an epistemological problem. Its clinical repercussions are considerable, at least insofar as it is held that these “new subjects” cannot be treated with psychoanalysis. ²⁶

In France during the last twenty years, current events and stories in the media have contributed to the move toward culturalism in psychoanalysis. Indeed, institutional and media attacks on psychoanalysis have multiplied recently and have had serious effects, particularly on the social position of analysts and the way they are viewed by society.

In 2004 the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm) published a report on the performance of psychotherapies that concluded that psychoanalysis is ineffective. The methodology of this report was, to a great extent, biased in favor of quantitative methods and behavioral techniques of learning and training. It was sharply criticized by the analytic community, and the minister of health at that time ended up disavowing it publicly. That same year, a law was passed concerning the conditions under which the title of “psychotherapist” could be used.

Psychoanalysts, especially Lacanians, were hardly in favor either of considering psychoanalysis a form of “psychotherapy” or of having any status determined by the state. In response, a large number of psychoanalytic associations, including those with the largest memberships, banded together into a “contact group” in order to advance the specific interests of psychoanalysis. This merger, in fact, masked positions that were very different, and even divergent, in the French psychoanalytic “community”: some were not opposed to the state’s legitimization of psychoanalysis; others wanted an Order of Psychoanalysts, which would be managed by analysts themselves; some rejected both of these options (see Aouillé et al. 2010).

Finally, in 2012, France’s Regional Health Agencies repudiated the psychoanalytic approach as a way of treating autism. In parallel, there was a rush of books, documentaries, and newspaper articles denouncing various supposed dangers of psychoanalysis; these were often produced at the behest of interest groups hostile to the field. Advancing what at times borders on conspiracy theories, they asked that psychoanalysis be excluded from public institutions.

Confronted with this increasingly unfavorable climate, more and more analysts have yielded to the temptation to prove, to both the general public and the state, the legitimacy, usefulness, and social desirability of their discipline. In July 2018, the contact group of associations went on to issue a report on “the advances and contributions of French psychoanalysts in the fields of mental health, youth, and culture” (Keller and Landman 2018). ²⁷ The next year, this report was published as a book titled Ce que les psychanalystes apportent à la société [What Psychoanalysts Contribute to Society] (Keller and Landman 2019). As I was writing this article, these same authors were editing two other works, with similar titles: Ce que les psychanalystes apportent à l’université [What Psychoanalysts Contribute to Universities] (Keller and Ducousso-Lacaze 2021) and Ce que les psychanalystes apportent aux personnes autistes [What Psychoanalysts Contribute to Persons with Autism] (Landman and Ribas 2021) This strategy aims to promote psychoanalysis in all spheres of society in order to create an adequation between it and its environment. To this end, they are turning more and more toward the social field, hoping, by popularizing analytic concepts, to make it legitimate and acceptable within the academy.

One cannot help wondering, however, whether this policy indicates, in Zinberg’s words, that “acceptability [has] becom[e] a wish in itself.” This wish is seeking fulfillment by means of a culturalism that, in France, dares not speak its name. It was this same wish that, in 1965, Zinberg, whether rightly or wrongly, considered to be the cause of the degradation of psychoanalysis in the United States. With respect to this, Freud himself made no concessions when he wrote in a letter to Paul Federn on April 21, 1932, that

when national and psychoanalytic interests come into conflict, the latter must not give way. . . . You are right to note that analysts, on the whole, are hardly capable of living up to these exigencies, but that should not keep us from voicing them after the fact. If you ask little, you will get nothing at all [Freud 2018, p. 177].

Conclusion

Each psychoanalyst has to face the exigencies that make psychoanalysis an experience unlike any other. Which should psychoanalysis fear more: attacks coming from the outside, which wish to get rid of it, or the more insidious attacks which gnaw away at it from within and which come from analysts themselves, who want to preserve it and make it lovable? It is impossible to conceive of psychoanalysis and the unconscious without also conceiving of the resistance to psychoanalysis and the resistance of psychoanalysis. It is in this tension—which can never give rise to a consensus—that psychoanalysis as theory and practice finds its own, always precarious, limit or perimeter. It is on this razor’s edge that psychoanalysis reveals itself to be, in Marcuse’s words, “a radically critical theory” (1955, p. 238). Psychoanalysis must remain there, never recoiling from the controversies it engenders, controversies that animate it by punctuating its history and contributing to its dialectical progress. This is why, in examining the culturalism of both the past and the present—the culturalism that is found both here and elsewhere, in both France and the United States—I not only treat it as a form of resistance, but also assume and accept the consequences of this critical position. I hope to have opened up several lines of questioning, and that these might provide some elements for research and debate. For example, what are the current forms of culturalism in American psychoanalysis, and why have they been so successful in the North American ecosystem? How do contemporary psychoanalysts view recent forms of culturalism? In France, where culturalism has been repressed, what are the pathways by which it has made its return in psychoanalytic theory and practice? How has this return manifested itself in the positions taken both by Lacanian analysts in particular, and by other psychoanalytic schools, which have tended to embrace the social discourses that are dominant at a given time? These questions set out some of the terms and challenges for the development of a true contemporary politics of psychoanalysis.