Abstract
This is a most interesting book that clearly serves a double purpose. On the one hand, Parker introduces and explains key concepts from Lacan’s work, such as clinical structures or jouissance and the object. In a theoretical, but vivid way, he reviews the Lacanian conceptual apparatus and explains how Lacan and later Lacanian authors work with this apparatus. By doing so, Parker delineates Lacanian psychoanalysis from other theoretical schools, such as object-relational or intersubjective psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, psychology, and psychiatry. In addition, he makes connections with related Freudian concepts, for example, transference and the unconscious, which Lacan interpreted in a particular way. In this respect, the book connects with other excellent introductions to Lacanian psychoanalysis (e.g., Fink, 1995; Nobus, 2000).
On the other hand, Ian Parker’s book is quite unique in that it situates the discussion of Lacan’s work in a broader analysis of what he calls the psy-complex under contemporary capitalism. Indeed, for those who wonder why and how Lacanian psychoanalysis finds a place in the broad fields of critical psychology and critical psychiatry, this book is a must-read. Reviewing the cultural history of psychoanalysis, Parker pertinently states that there is “a tense, sometimes uneasy, but mainly compliant relationship between psychoanalysis and capitalism” (p. 89), mainly due to the fact that psychoanalysis was, and is, frequently absorbed by psychology and psychiatry. Parker, by contrast, believes in the subversive role of psychoanalysis and situates its innovative value and role in opposition to dominant psy-discourses, which are intrinsically interwoven with, and compliant to, capitalism.
For example, psychiatry and psychoanalysis start from a completely different kind of materialism. Whereas psychiatry seeks to ground its practice and concepts in (neuro)biology, psychoanalysis works on the materiality of speech. They also start from different epistemological positions, which implies a different position in relation to truth. Parker illustrates this very well by pointing out the specificity of the psychoanalytic position via Lacan’s discussion of Descartes’ cogito ergo sum. Crucial for Lacan is that the cogito is not identical with the sum: thoughts never coincide with a person’s being. The structural difference between them implies the lack, which is the dimension all subjectivity gravitates around. The Lacanian concept of the unconscious is closely related to this lack. The very fact that the enunciating subject is never adequately expressed or reflected in the content of the statements that define the I or the ego, implies a remainder of nonarticulated being. Indeed, the unconscious takes shape as aspects of being that are not compatible with the ego and relate to the subject’s connections to others and to its own history are articulated. Another difference between psychiatry and psychoanalysis can be found in how clinicians deal with diagnosis. Whereas psychiatry imposes culturally sanctioned ideas on deviance and normality through its nosological categories, psychoanalysis seeks to break through such alienating tendencies: “Our task is to trace how these categories are historically constituted and to engage with them as lived positions in relation to structures of power in contemporary capitalist society” (p. 40).
What is distinctive about Parker’s book is the particular attention paid to the sociopolitical embeddedness of (Lacanian) psychoanalysis. This is illustrated, for example, in his discussion of class relations and the Freudian Oedipus complex, which reproduces particular historically specific child rearing relationships. Another example is Lacanian clinical structures, which are seen as modes in which the subject lives in late capitalism rather than as underlying pathological formations. While he doesn’t elaborate Lacan’s matheme of the capitalist’s discourse, Ian Parker most adequately describes how nowadays the human subject is an isolated individual, who is torn between a relation to capital and a relation to the labour process that is treated as a commodity. In this context, these relations are reconfigured as if they are things, and individual distress is psychologized. This brings Parker to a discussion of how the practice of psychoanalysis might lead to a subjective assumption that one is marked and determined by contemporary capitalism. Indeed, Lacanian psychoanalysts “refuse to adapt their analysands to social norms, and they also actively disrupt the ideological elements of capitalist society that are the building blocks for the discipline of psychology” (p. 103).
Another issue debated in this book concerns the relation between Lacanian psychoanalysis and psychotherapy qua “ideological complex concerned with the management of the self” (p. 127). The two enterprises differ crucially at an ethical level. Whereas a therapeutic ethos is directed to an idea of what is good for a client—an idea that is highly influenced by the political-economic context in which the therapist and client work, Lacanian psychoanalysis acts in line with an ethical commitment to difference as that which is symbolically constituted. In this respect, psychoanalysis “insists on the importance of disjunction” (p. 148): disjunctions between signifiers and affects, which bear witness to how feelings are shaped via “culturally-mediated historically-local forms of understanding the self” (p. 148); between the individual and the social; and between the clinical and the political, so that therapeutic reasoning doesn’t function in a closed ideological loop that confirms a particular view on the self. On a clinical note, Parker properly concludes that the most that can be hoped for is that the clinic as real operates as a space that is extimate to the society that encloses it; it provides a moment of separation from social relations so that a renewed encounter with them might be from another position, a moment that can be re-enacted, perhaps, outside the clinic too. (p. 198)
To conclude: this book offers a refreshing interpretation of Lacan’s work, in which clinical and critical issues are equally well discussed and elaborated.