Wordability

I have always been puzzled by the cult of Lacan within literary circles.

The extreme, the dazzling implausibility of the ideas themselves is matched by the bottomless lack of evidence for them. Take the ‘mirror stage’ for example, the one idea everybody knows in Lacan.

Lacan began by describing an experiment called the ?mirror test? which his friend, the French psychologist Henri Wallon, had performed in 1931. Wallon had compared the reactions of human infants and chimpanzees to seeing their reflection in a mirror. He found that at around the age of six months both humans and chimpanzees begin to recognise that the image in the mirror is their own. However, Wallon claimed there was an important difference between the subsequent reactions of the human infant and the chimpanzee. The human infant becomes fascinated with his reflection, and leans forward to examine it more closely, moving his limbs to explore the relation between image and reality. The chimp, on the other hand, quickly loses interest, and turns to look at other things.
Lacan used this observation as a springboard to develop an account of the development of human subjectivity that was inherently, though often implicitly, comparative in nature. Human subjectivity was only understandable by contrasting it with that of our nearest relative, the chimpanzee.

This is by Dylan Evans, a Lacanian apostate, now a Darwinian. My only reaction to this proposal has always been the same – Huh?

Not so (at first) Evans, who went so far as to practise Lacanian psychotherapy. His undoing came when at last he found a place where people asked the right questions.

I returned to the UK in 1997 to take up a place in the philosophy department at the London School of Economics, a college of the University of London. The atmosphere there could not have been more different from that in Buffalo. The department of philosophy had been founded by Karl Popper, one of the
giants of analytic philosophy, and his influence was clearly visible. The qualities admired in writing here were clarity and concision, not empty rhetorical flourishes and baroque digressions.
And above all, people demanded evidence. No matter how obvious (or how weird) your opinions seemed to be, they were worth nothing unless you could back them up.
That’s when I began to realise, with growing alarm and shame, that I had never really asked myself what the evidence for psychoanalysis was! I had simply been carried along by the panache and stylistic flourishes of two great wordsmiths – Freud and Lacan – without pausing to ask the most important question of all: on what evidence did they base their far-reaching claims?

Shhhh.