000 Laplanche, Theories and Theory (Long note)
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date: 202408161039
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Among the most valuable lessons bequeathed to us by Jean Laplanche is the demonstration that psychoanalysis is a discipline with its own definite method and object, and, just as importantly, that theory itself is a research field in which one can carry an open-ended inquiry thanks to the method invented by Freud. These two aspects converge in proposing that psychoanalysis is open to revisions inasmuch one holds firmly to that specific method and does not lose sight of its object. This, of course, is more easily said than done, since psychoanalysis borders with a number of other disciplines dealing with the human condition (biology, medicine, psychology, anthropology, sociology, philosophy) and that many authors are tempted to borrow uncritically from them in their approach to the object of psychoanalysis.
Laplanche has proposed that the specific object of psychoanalysis is the repressed Sexual, and, more broadly, that psychoanalysis deals with the human being as self-symbolizing or self-theorizing. This self-theorization is obviously closely linked to the proposal already mentioned, that psychoanalytic theory itself can be explored with the aid of the Freudian method. In other words, psychoanalysis is a self-analyzing discipline. This may sound as a problem as we seem to state that psychoanalysis deals mainly with theories. An observation that would apparently comfort the Freud bashers who dismiss psychoanalysis as « just a theory » – meaning: with no empirical data to rest on.
In what follows I intend to radicalize Laplanche’s ideas a little more by proposing that not only theory is a legitimate domain where the psychoanalytic method applies, but that theories are our most important… empirical data. I believe it is a most original and illuminating Laplanchean idea, that (infantile) theories are actually all that patients bring to their sessions and, more broadly, that these theories operate at every level of the human condition. In a word, at the specific human level, theories are all we have.
Let us first look into the meaning of the word « theory ». The Greek etymological source, theorein, means gazing at something, having a view on something. A theory, therefore, could merely represent a certain view of things or events; a view that one hopes to be not just accurate, but to allow for a certain generalization. It follows that a theory is necessarily selective, extracting from the manifold a number of facts from which to draw a coherent and operational statement, an assertion that can be shown to be based on such facts, but which new facts could contradict, requiring a change in the theory.
The selective nature of a theory is not a limitation, but is actually what makes it effective, though not all encompassing. ^[Indeed, all theories are necessarily about a fragment of the universe, and a theory that would try to express the totality, supposing it were possible, could simply not be spoken because one could find no standpoint from where to describe such totality.] Effectiveness requires that theorists restrict their theory to a certain area of the real. A given theory, then, though compelling when used within precise limits, would blatantly fail were it confronted with a wider observational basis. This is why, following Karl Popper, to be worthwhile a theory must contain at its core the possibility to be refuted. A theory is poor indeed if it will not risk encountering contradiction, which, when one thinks of it, is another name for reality.
Speaking of Popper, he once had a long conversation with the ethologist Konrad Lorenz during which they agreed that there are many forms a theory can take, from abstract formulations to concrete manifestations. For example, they agreed that the eye is a theory of light. This means that, in their view, a theory is not necessarily an abstract formulation, but that it can be embodied in a certain physical or physiological entity. One could here think of a telescope or a microscope as other examples of an embodied theory of light, and these in turn remind us that Freud (1900) had referred to these optical instruments as metaphors of the psychic apparatus he had construed through his study of dreams.
In that line of thinking, we could say that the analytic setting too, with its corresponding method, is an embodied theory of the psyche. One could object that the analytic setting was simply an expedient. Freud himself said that he resorted to using the couch merely because he found it tiresome to be stared at by his patients hours on end. The final form taken by the setting was achieved through trials and errors. This raises an interesting question about the development of theory – something Freud brilliantly addressed in the opening paragraphs of “Drives and their Vicissitudes” (1915). Interestingly, Popper, whose dismissal of psychoanalysis as “pseudo-science” is notorious, stated something similar, that theories are inventions we produce by trial and error. We will get back to this later; for now, let us just consider with Freud that we do not build theories by induction from purely empirical experience and that, on the contrary, we always begin with having certain ideas that we refine by confronting them with observations and experimentation, a to-and-fro between theory and experience that yields better theories, with no final truth ever reached.
If apply Popper’s and Lorenz’s notion – that the eye is a theory of light – to the analytic setting, it means that a patient entering the analytic room is in fact meeting with the embodiment of a psychoanalytic theory about how their (and their analyst’s) mind works. This is not very different of what goes on when a medical patient enters the cramped space of an fMRI machine, the scanner being but a materialized theory of how a strong electromagnetic field interacts with body tissues. The main difference between the analytic setting and the fMRI machine is that the latter deals with the physicality of the patient’s body and of electromagnetic waves, while our psychoanalytic machine is there to deal with…
Wait! I was going to write: « with an immaterial mind » ! This would have been a serious, though common, mistake. What must be « kept in mind », indeed, is that the Freudian and Laplanchean take on the psyche does not involve any body/mind dichotomy. There is no way of dealing with the psyche as separate from the body. Freud’s (1924) famous quote: “The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego…”, reflects a fundamental view, but one which is easily lost of sight because, being immersed in a “talking cure,” our attention is mostly turned towards the verbal aspect of the analyst-patient interaction, so that the body’s presence and importance can be easily ignored. This is a problem that would require a long digression, but which I will only be addressing tangentially in what follows.
The conception of theory I am using makes us consider each patients we encounter in analysis as the embodiment of a certain theory of their self and of their world. I am not stating anything new if I say that their way of presenting themselves, their general appearance, the way they dress and move, the tone of their voice, the rhythm of their speech, and so on, can all be viewed (theorized!) as the incarnation of a certain self-concept, i.e. a theory of themselves. But let me be very clear: I am not saying « a theory that the patients entertain about themselves »; I am saying a theory which they incarnate, or if you will, the theory that they are.
The French analyst Piera Aulagnier (1975) went in that direction when she wrote: “The I is nothing more than the knowledge that the I may have of the I” (1975, p. 5 and 98). The redundancy in this definition may convey a sense of frailty implying that the I is “just” discourse; but one could also think of this as proof of the sturdiness and power of discourse or knowledge – hence of theory. I suggest that the way Aulagnier defined the “I” can be extended to the whole psyche. But there is more. After our patients enter what we could call the « analytic machine, » and as the psychoanalytic dialogue evolves, we discover that the problems they are struggling with are also the consequence of a number of theories that have taken shape in the course of their life and which they unknowingly carry in their heads and bodies. So we have a theory that is incarnated by the self, and within the self there are theories at work that are implemented, for instance, as symptoms or relational patterns. A number of these were at work in “Little Hans”. Freud called them “infantile sexual theories” and he proposed that they form a template for neurotic symptoms.
Freud, however, would probably not have said that the boy’s phobia of horses was a theory incarnate. He rather held the view that theories, imagos or fantasies lurk behind and give way to symptoms through some mysterious leap. He therefore considered Hans’s infantile theories as directly observable versions of what adult patients entertain unconsciously. Which is undisputable. Except that these abstract theories are not the whole story. Freud thought that Hans’s infantile theories explained his symptoms (DID HE?). Here again we encounter the problem of the mysterious leap from fantasy (or abstract theory) to symptom. [What I am proposing, on the contrary, is that the symptom is in itself an embodied theory, and, in this respect, the abstract theory could be viewed as a tentative rationalization the psyche gives to itself for those other more concrete theories that operate in its midst. In this view, the « mysterious leap » from psyche to body is simply non-existent. Physiological and psychological components converge into a theory of self and the world we call a symptom.]
[The fact remains that for Freud, at the time of writing the case of Little Hans, the abstract infantile theories are mostly unconscious, though they can be guessed or reconstructed thanks to the work of analysis. They are seen as forming the weft of fantasies, daydreams, dreams and symptoms, but also of creative bursts (if one has a talent that can make use of them). What he did not consider is that all these manifest expressions are based on infantile theories much in the way a theory of (visible) color is based on a theory of (not always visible) electromagnetic waves.]
The prevalence of infantile sexual theories complicates our discourse about theory, because here we are saying that our patients’ difficulties in life are driven by some theories they carry within themselves, most of the time unknowingly. A first problem could be formulated like this: if it is theories that occupy the patients’ minds, then isn’t psychoanalysis just a variant of the Socratic method, a kind of maieutics by which the analyst induces change in the patient by inviting them to modify their theories? We sometimes get the feeling that many analytic interventions we hear about are of that kind. This view, however, misses an important point, namely, that the theories we are referring to are not intellectual formulations or opinions that could be reformulated and corrected^[This is the picture we get concerning cognitive therapies where it is a matter of correcting tha patient’s erroneous assumptions.]. If, basing ourselves on Popper’s and Lorenz’s paradigmatic idea that the eye is a theory of light, we say that the patients’ bodies, the way they are lived, are just as much their theory of life; that their symptoms are theories of their relationships with significant others, and in particular of their fundamental anthropological situation (Laplanche), then we can easily see that no effective treatment could result from a Socratic exchange. The patient may understand something about their « wrong » assumptions, but changing something in the theory they actually incarnate is another story.
[The need for theories to be actualized in the transference.]
The conception of theory and theories I am trying to expound entails a number of corollaries which run counter any « Socratic » or « conversational » brand of treatment. A first corollary is that we do not possess our infantile theories; that they rather possess us, and actually drive us. As you can see, I am using here the concept of possession, to which I will come back later on. In the meanwhile I wish to underline the word « drives » and suggest that the theories I am talking about are driving forces; they are, if you will, the semiotic and semantic manifestation of the inchoate drives that, according to Freud, populate the repressed unconscious. The infantile theories could therefore refer to what Socrates called his daemon. And just as the daemon in question can be oppressing, it is also a source of inspiration and creativity. Indeed these theories function in primary process, hence are more plastic than secondary process thinking and they lend themselves more easily to what we could call psychic Darwinism.
Having thus introduced a « theory » theory of the drives I do not have long to walk before reaching Laplanche’s theory of seduction with at its base the Fundamental anthropological situation. The situation in question needs a bit of unfolding lest we take it as a generic version of seduction. Jacques André, a long time colleague and companion of Laplanche, has pointed out that one can easily agree wth the universality of the Fundamental anthropological situation, but that the model of seduction should be limited to what he refers to as the normal-neurotic model. If I understand him well, the process of seduction, with its ensuing implantation of the sexual, is like the luxury version of what happens in the Fundamental anthropological situation, in which, instead of seduction, many patients have encountered maltreatment, negligence and hatred ^[check André’s text and interview in the Brazilian journal.]. Unless I misread him, he would not call these other kinds of encounter « seductive »; he rather seems to consider seduction as a positive outcome, whereas in the case of negligence and other situations of duress, the sexual would not be operative. He therefore seems to draw a line between seduction and the many forms of impingements, to use a Winnicottian term, that can badly disturb the baby’s « going on being ». This, I believe, requires a serious discussion since it poses an interesting challenge to– and proposes a specific interpretation of Laplanche’s theory of generalized seduction and, further on, of what the Sexual is about.
A hint of where I think André’s and Laplanche’s ways do part is present in the notion of a « sexual death drive » that laplanche has proposed in replacement of Freud’s « death drive ». The adjunction of « sexual » to « death drive » is, in my understanding, not the mere addition by Laplanche of a sexual lining to the Freudian drive for destruction. It means that the unbound sexual drive is in and by itself destructive. Hence, the abuse, negligence, maltreatment and hatred enacted in the adult’s interaction with the infant are as many versions of seduction proper, where the sexual is not absent, but works under its destructive, unbound guise.
Saying this I do not mean to dismiss André’s critique in a sleight of hand. I find that his critique must be seriously heeded as it points to the need to refine Laplanche’s theory in order to better specify what we mean by « seduction ».
My previous development about Theory and theories is, I believe, quite useful on this regard. Laplanche’s General theory of seduction supposes that the compromising element in the message is the untranslatable feature that stays in the « psychobiological skin » of the receiver and that, resisting translation, it is therefore primally repressed, forming a source-object of the drive. In this description, the compromising or enigmatic part of the message corresponds to the excess of sexual excitation non-consciously elicited in the adult interacting with the child. But one wonders if this description pays enough attention to the precise meaning of the word « seduction », which, derived from the Latin se-ducere literally means driving astray, imposing a detour towards oneself. This intrinsically narcissistic dimension of the process of seduction has not, to my knowledge, been openly dealt with in Laplanchean studies. But it so