Psychoanalysis In Search of Itself: Jacques Lacan, T. S. Eliot, and the Seductions of Modernism

Abstract

“I journeyed to London, to the timekept City,Where the River flows, with foreign flotations.There I was told: … ” [et la suite]—T.S. Eliot, “Choruses from ‘The Rock’,” 153

[1] T. S. Eliot, “Choruses from ‘The Rock’,” in The Poems of T. S. Eliot. Vol. 1: Collected & Uncollected Poems, eds. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (London: Faber & Faber, 2015), 153.

The argument underpinning this essay is relatively simple, although to the best of our knowledge it has not been previously formulated as such in the literature on Lacanian psychoanalysis, neither in its features and contours, nor in its repercussions. When, during the Summer of 1953, Lacan set himself to work on the lengthy theoretical position paper that was to have served as the focal point of discussion for the 16th Conférence des psychanalystes de langues romanes, the acrimonious split that had divided the French psychoanalytic community during the month of June prompted him to recover the foundational principles of psychoanalysis by radically transforming the way in which Freud’s brainchild had developed following his death. In 1953, Lacan thus took advantage of an institutional crisis to change the face of contemporary psychoanalysis, with the purpose of retrieving and reinstating its true value. We shall never know what Lacan would have written if he had done so as a member of the Société psychanalytique de Paris rather than the newly established Société française de psychanalyse, yet the content of his text is most likely to have been substantially different, if only because he would not have experienced the same urge to expose his colleagues’ numerous misconceptions of psychoanalytic theory and practice, even less the need to outline a completely new programme for psychoanalysis. As Lacan himself put it in the opening paragraph of his report: “The discourse that the reader will find here warrants an introduction that provides some context. Because it bears its mark.”...