What has he ever done of significance, why is there some sort of cult based around him ?
His work is just absurd big words or evident truths. Psychoanalysis in general is very hit and miss, not eveybody wants to fuck their mother and kill their father. So why is so widely popular ? He honestly reads like a charlatan.
Other urls found in this thread:
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Because he worked on a very difficult subject and saw some success in figuring out how the human mind works. And we are talking about a subject which advanced equipment and scientists can't describe accurately. He didn't write books either, the texts you read are probably collections of notes from his lectures and seminars, and were never meant to be read like a coherent book.
Surely you would have no problem telling us about some of the insights that he managed to gain then? I mean if I claimed that someone managed to gain great insights into any other field by thinking about it really hard where other scientists failed using advanced measurement equipment you would be at least a little sceptical, surely?
Furthermore, where is this work applied? If Lacan has, as you say, succeeded even a little in figuring out 'how the human mind works', surely his work would see use by more than lefty cultists and Sniff Man? Plenty of people have a great interest in knowing how the human mind works, does Lacanian psychoanalysis get used in therapy or for Taylorist optimisation or in military psyops? I genuinely don't know the answers to the above questions, they aren't rhetorical.
Also the fact that his works are actually compiled notes and lectures is an even bigger indictment of him. It's one thing to waffle on a bit while writing a book-length text - I wouldn't recommend it but I can understand that you want to fully explore your subject. It's unforgivable to fail to exercise maximum economy of words for maximum clarity when delivering a speech. If you know what you're talking about and have a coherent point to make about it there is absolutely no excuse for failing to make it clearly and concisely. STEMfags are always expected to have Feynman levels of skill in this regard. Why don't other fields of study ever seem to be held to the same standard?
What do leftcoms generally think of psychoanalysis?
France and several different Eastern European countries (and not just Slovenia lol)
He's always had a sizable French following, the problem is that it took a long time for his work to get translated into English, so he remained relatively obscure for a few decades after his death outside of where he was already popular
Lacan is fairly consistent in stating that his 'Ecrits' is not meant to be understood as some kind of manual. It's a literary text, and the idea, I'm pretty sure, is that its meaning is delivered in the phenomenological experience of the reading itself, rather than the actual meaning of the words (at least that's how its been explained to me). Kind of bullshit imo but his style of delivery really has nothing to do with the validity of his ideas.
Lacan is a nightmare to deal with on his own. In order to make any sense of him, its essential in my opinion to both 1. have a decent enough grasp of Freud's system of thought, considering that Lacan does really pick up where the guy left off, and 2. some good secondary sources. I'm sure you've seen that Introduction to Lacan by Fink floating around, and Zizek is actually really helpful when you are struggling with the finer details of parts of Lacanian theory (e.g. the whole four discourses thing). I get why he puts people off, but in my experience working with Lacan is incredibly intellectually rewarding. If you have a background or interest in psychoanalysis/phenomenology it's a must.
To put it metaphorically, you should approach Lacan the way a rocket enters Earth or any other celestial body. You don't go directly into it, because you will crash. You have to read introductory works first before you can land.
Sorry, that's my own academic-speak leaking through. I should have specified that I meant 'where' in the sense of 'in which particular fields', ie, what problems are his system of analysis used to solve?
OK well if that's actually a thing that is being claimed by or about him then I'm tempted to discard him out of hand because that is just ridiculous. No other academic that I've ever heard of has or would do that, because that's an objectively awful way of communicating your ideas.
I hear this said all the time, but I never hear anyone explain what Lacan clarifies for them. That's how I would define the term 'intellectually rewarding': something that clarifies a complex problem/phenomenon in a way that helps me solve it or understand it better. To me, a good test of whether something has been intellectually rewarding is whether it enables me to explain the concept under investigation to others.
I'm not looking to touch down on the surface, I've had enough academic waffling for a lifetime. I just want someone to show me a satellite image and point out where the WMDs are. I mean, this guy gets praised by leftists, right? So his work must have some relevance to the task of destroying capitalism? I couldn't care less about psychoanalysis or 'phenomenology' (which is just neuroscience without the science as far as I can tell?), I just want to know what's so crucial about his work in the context of the class struggle - or at least, why every leftcom ODing on theory seems to think it is.
Lacanian theory is used primarily in clinical therapy (although it increases to disappear at an alarming rate, for what I am almost certain are political (aka the pharmaceutical industry's tightening grip on psychotherapy) reasons), sexuality theory, film studies, and of course, critique of capitalism.
I agree. Many Lacanians would shit on me here, but the guy clearly loved to stroke his ego by speaking in a highly metaphoric and obtuse manner, which is a legitimate criticism of his work. However, this has no bearing on his actual ideas. Again I think secondary sources are vital, especially if you're not fluent in French.
Lacan is scientific insofar as he integrates linguistic theory into Freudian ideas of the structure of subjectivity. One of psychoanalysis' most essential contributions is that it allows us to entirely do away with the divide between the individual/particular/"pathological" and the social, and instead allows for us to understand possible reasons for things such as what desires particular political movements are meeting. For example, there HAS to be a certain degree of psychological content behind the reception of an authoritarian figure such as Stalin (sorry tankies). As Zizek has famously demonstrated, the phenomenon of stalinsim is perfectly explained by Lacan's notion of the big Other, something that can only emerge between a plurality of speaking subjects. Any analysis of culture benefits positively from Lacan's insight that the individual subject is a byproduct of the social, and not the other way around. Towards any positive leftist action, a Lacanian understanding of ideology is crucial, particularly in these times.
Installing authoritarian leaders that massacre their own people is What Russians Do.
OK well if Lacan has explanations more nuanced than this kind of essentialist bullshit I could get on board with him more I suppose
Psychoanalysis is, for me, probably the most radically anti-essentialist system of thought we have today.
Oh hey, I just remembered, someone said this in another thread in response to someone asking why Lacan is so omnipresent on the Left:
Is this a serious position of Lacan or Lacanian thinkers? Because if so I'm hopping on the 'Lacan can get fucked' bandwagon, even if I do like anti-essentialism.
If you know so incredibly little why are you so eager to pick a side?
lol i think whoever said that was just memeing
You don't have to fully digest Lacan to recognise treating communism as a 'pipedream' as one of the key mistakes that enables all the shittiest opportunism in left-wing politics.
Alright, I thought that might be the case. Really offended my sensibilities though, you know?
Also, knowing incredibly little about Lacan != knowing incredibly little about Marxist theory and history. I've read enough other shit to pretty handily identify a shitty do-nothing position wrapped in radical raiment. You'll often find that getting people to sum up their positions forces them to remove the smokescreen of words that they throw up to conceal a fundamentally nonradical position. Luckily if is to be believed that isn't the case with Lacan?
If you think that any psy-discipline being used as a tool in the optimization of the exploitation of labor or in imperialism is a net positive then your a retard. Go look at CBT & Positive psychology if you want to see a psy-discipline in Taylorist optimisation or in military psyops.
Honestly reading from some of your posts you sound like some STEMtard who despite being nominally leftist is uncritical to the prevalent bourgeois ideology of scientism and positivism in STEM.
Are you the same idiot from the Badiou & Zizekcore threads?
I wouldn't go near the sniff man thread if you paid me, but yeah I caused some butthurt in the Badiou thread by asking for literally one useful or substantially original insight Badiou had come up with. See how much nicer I am when someone can usefully respond to that line of questioning?
Also the first part of your reply there makes me think that you don't believe the ability to effect predictable changes in the real world is a valid measure of an academic discipline's effectiveness as a way of understanding the world. Do you realise how fucking dumb that makes you sound?
Guilty as charged on the STEMtard thing though. Also, if you could explain why consciousness and human psychology should be outside the valid range of scientific inqury' I would be much obliged. If you can't do that, maybe lay off the accusations of scientism. You sound like every arts student I had to put up with when they droned on and on accusing me of marginalising 'alternative ways of knowing' without ever specifying what one of those alternative ways might actually be.
Lacan speaks about desire, the way we come to do so, the several subjective structures, discourses and more.
But that is not important since you are here just to shitpost in bad faith, apparently.
Psychoanalysis accounts for the effects of signifiers in the development of symptoms, and it deals with this through speech. Psychology, on the contrary, obsesses over putting every condition in fixed categories without regard for the source of the patient's symptom, instead resorting to things like CBT or ego psych where you are basically told to just like feel good man. Worse, however, is the fact that it almost always deals with problems as if they were the result of chemical imbalances, even though we don't know what makes one balanced. Perhaps it's about being functional in capitalism?
lacanonline.com
I thought I was being quite civil before you came in here screechinng about 'stemtards get out reeeee'.
OK first of all you seem to think I'm under the impression that psychology is any less a pseudoscience than psychoanalysis, which is incorrect. I never intended to defend psychology or psychiatry - your summary of their reductionist pitfalls and true functions is absolutely correct. I just get annoyed when instead of saying 'psychology is a reductionist way of understanding a complex system like the human brain, and complex systems demand that we adopt more sophisticated analysis methods due to their irreducibility', like a normal chaos mathematician or physicist describing a double-pendulum system would, you instead decide to turn it into some purple-prose literary epic and spend the next few decades accusing people of not doing a thing that they definitely do to great effect in their own fields.
Not the same person.
I can't answer for Lacan, since he is dust by this point, but other writers have expanded on psychoanalysis in a way that is easy to understand. Lacan wrote in the way he did to avoid understanding because he saw understanding as imaginary: you understand things through metaphors, one situation compared to another, which is why pushes forward that one should take things as they are, similar to how we come to be in language, out of nothing. Still, his Ecrits were not meant to be read, since those were rather notes of his.
There are plenty of things in the world most people don't understand, and yet they can tell an expert from a non-expert. I don't know how to fly a plane, but if I see somebody repeatedly doing stunts with a plane without crashing, I can guess that there is some skill involved. There will be no such demonstration with Lacanian or "Freudian Marxists" or what have you. You are about to reach the insane core of ruling class thought, where some people just repeatedly claim to have some superior insight that you plebs could never get, they are like, soo supersmart and different from yout that they are basically a different species. Therefor, they should get total authority over anything. Believe us that we are wise because we say we are wise and we are wise so you know that we are right, and since we say that we are wise, that means that we are wise.
If Lacan's theory is not whatever random bullshit Lacan spouts, then why couldn't his followers notice when he went insane from dementia?
envy, the post
See, it's responses like this that make me think the poster you're replying to might be right. I mean, this kind of accusation simply doesn't get levelled at people in any other scientific field. From undergrad onward the measure of our success as a scientist is our ability to explain your work to non-experts. Your thesis examination panel will have at least one person from entirely outside your field, to make absolutely fucking sure that some basic part of your work is communicable to outsiders.
And then we get to Lacan. All of a sudden everything's topsy fucking turvy, and asking for any kind of summary or abstract or thesis statement in plain fucking English yields only people screaming in your face about being a STEMtard or not reading all the preparatory books or being too stupid or envious or some sort of rootless cosmopolitan wrecker. If anyone other kind of academic acted like their work was too complex and rarefied to resist summarisation for the lowly plebs they'd rightfully be laughed out of the fucking faculty.
pick a pronoun and stick with it or go back to tumblr, faggot
say high to mathematics
What the fuck are you talking about? Mathematicians love developing helpful analogies in order to better communicate their perverse love of numbers and shapes to the masses. Have you ever actually talked to a mathematician? They'll fucking talk your ear off trying to help you understand their ridiculously abstract shit.
Then there shouldn't be mathematical problems that only 20 people or so in the world understand.
There's a big difference between being able to communicate the basic idea well enough to understand and having the level of understanding that lets you innovate in the field, though. You could explain how an operating system works to someone within an afternoon. It would take years for that person to write a new one, though.
A few things, off the top of my head:
1) He remained faithful to dialectical materialism (as opposed to Deleuze, Foucault, Habermas, Analytical Marxists, etc.) and heavily influences 21st century materialist ontology. At the second half of the 20th century it became obvious that classical Marxist materialism contained hasty simplifications. (See Zizek's rants on Lenin's Empiriocriticism – a work loved by Karl Popper.) How communists understand the world directly influence their praxis.
2) He is crucial for understanding the capitalist zeitgeist. Concepts and problems of commodity fetishism, (class) consciousness, representation, surplus value are at work in Marx's oeuvre. Lacan read Hegel and Marx and was in contact with several Marxists of his time and further developed/updated these concepts, or gave them completely new footings. If you want to understand ideology you can't go around him (or Althusser, for that matter). For class struggle a sufficient grasp of ideology is crucial, for class struggle is inevitably a struggle in ideology as well.
3) His theory of the four discourses is crucial in understanding possible social links, and possible transformations thereof. If you want to understand what distinguishes certain human institutions (parties, universities, workplaces), gatherings, or historical periods (Stalinism, late stage capitalism, revolutionary upheavals) you need not go further. He's certainly "useful" (ech) if you want to think about post-rev institutions and want to be prepared for the challenges we will face, being able to keep the subversive edge of the revolutionary institutions while at the same time keeping them efficient and sustainable.
4) Lacan struggled with his own institution as well. After the death of Freud the International Psychoanalytic Institution became a conservative force, betraying the spirit of Freud's work for the letter. A very similar tendency was at work in Marxist parties. With these two we have a common root: a group of people and their relationship to knowledge, training new cadre, keeping the subversive edge, updating the basics without betraying the project itself. His proposed institution of "the pass" is an attempt at solving these difficulties and provides lessons for radical collectives as well.
5) Psychoanalysis can help you, modern psychology is a tool of bourgeois control (biopolitics). No, really.
Follow this Lacan course and make up your mind for yourself:
1997 → 2007 → 1995:
mega.nz
Study help:
mega.nz
Find a Lacanian analyst:
lacanonline.com
LOL PHYSICS IS SIMPLY WRONG
WHAT IS A QUANTUM FIELD
THEY JUST BE WRITING STUPID SHIT NOBODY EXCEPT A SMALL GROUP CAN UNDERSTAND
NASA IS A CULT
HUEHUEHUHEUHEUHUHEUHE
Isn't this what Zizek is doing with Lacan?
Envy of a non-existing skill? Phantom Envy - is that a word yet? Looks like we are innovating the field of psycho-analysis in this very thread!
Take a random positive integer. If it is odd, multiply by three and then add one. If it is even, divide by two. You take the integer that is the result of this, and apply the rules again. And again, and again, and again, and again. Hypothesis: Whatever integer you start with, a program that applies these rules will at some point get to one.
You know enough math (and English) that, if I give you the integer 10, you can apply the rules and tell me that this procedure does indeed go to one at some point, right? What if I told you the hypothesis was published in the 1930s, and some very bright mathematicians tried to find a proof for or against it, but failed. See, I can talk to you about cutting edge mathematical results, and even stuff beyond cutting edge results, as of today nobody has come up with a proof yet.
en.wikipedia.org
Now talk to me about the cutting edge mathematics only a handful of people can understand, and explain them to me in a way that increases that handful to most of the worlds population.
Wow, you are so magnificent. Please tell us more about cutting edge math in simplified language even the plebs can understand.
Ginjeet is that you, why are posting with the Leninhat flag
next thing you'll tell me is that you tried to read Hegel from first hand sources
Why are you doing this in a lot of theory threads? You are trying to identify posters on an anonymous board. It is truly a regressive attitude and contrary to the community's interests, not to mention completely off-topic. Would you rather have more namefags and tripfags?
I'm going to start reporting these under "identity-forcing."
it is the study of the structure of our experience through that experience
Translated from Pomonese to English: Lacan used terms from other authors, but with meanings completely different. To think of doing that with a word as an act of refurbishing, how bamboozled by language do you have to be?
Thanks for giving me something, dude. all the smugposting about how stupid I must be for asking for a basic summary. If you don't mind, I had a couple more questions.
2) How did Lacan (develop | update) the (concept | problems) of surplus value specifically?
4) This "the pass" system is intended to stop organisations becoming conservative? From the summary on wikipedia, it sounds like a sort of 'professional accreditation' system where you advance to the higher level once you've demonstrated to other high-level members that you're contributing to the progress of the organisation with your work. Then a jury confirms the whole thing later? Is that about the long and short of it? I guess I can see how that's a nice idea, but even in the wikipedia summary it sounds like the spirit of the system was being thwarted even before Lacan had kicked the bucket. I'm not going to discard anything based on a wikipedia article, but from that summary it sounds like yet another person fetishising an organisational form and expecting it to stave off organisational conservatism/entropy/inaction. I doubt he was silly enough to think that, though.
Thanks for the readings, I will give them a look-in once I've cleared my backlog. Bad news is that the current projected finish date is 2067. Good news is that's the magical '50 years from now' that lots of people seem to think is when communism will happen.
Guattari and Foucault were like a million times better than Lacan.
We can't do that with bicycles either
Not that user but I could elaborate on Lacan's ideas. Mind you I've only read one introductory book.
What it's concerned with is finding different psychical structures and their causation. Thus far Lacan found three: psychotic, perverse, and neurotic. Each of those is linked with the symbolic function of our parents/caretakers - the mother is the original desire and the father (or even his name, anything that would serve as a third party) is the barrier that comes in to block the child from the mother. Each of those also has sub-categories in how that structure is expressed, but that's irrelevant right now. Neurosis is the standard "normal" structure and is characterized by doubt, psychosis in contrast is characterized by absolute certainty - for example, when hallucinating, the neurotic would question what he's seeing while the psychotic would be certain it's real or is a sign for something and therefor significant. The pervert is somewhere in between the two, and I'm not entirely sure myself how to describe him whether with or without jargon.
The father, or anything to play the role of the father, could even just be his name, is basically the Law. The psychotic is without Law, the neurotic is with too much Law, and the pervert is actively trying to find a Law. The Law is what cuts the original desire (the function of the mother). The task of psychoanalysis is to go beyond neurosis which is to overcome the Law. Lacan didn't believe psychical structures can change after a certain age and if you're psychotic you gotta live with the hand you were dealt, but that doesn't mean you can't find a way to cope with it.
Although I'm skeptical towards him, what made me attracted to Lacan's thought is that he focused mainly on how our (that is, each and every one's personal) language functions and identified psychical structures through that function. What I've read thus far seems fairly consistent to me and every critique I've seen is just an attack on him.
I'm…not sure how that's a response to either of my questions? Have you replied to the wrong post here?
It's not an answer, it's just the basics of Lacan so you could see what sort of direction one would go if tackling the question of capitalism.
Are broad personality types (?) really how you would go about 'tackling the question of capitalism'? I mean I think Marx's method of starting with the methods by which we produce the things we need to live might a better starting point.
Sorry, that was churlish. I just didn't see any connection between neurotics and psychotics and capitalism. Seemed like a big jump to me.
Also, when you say he 'found three psychical structures', what do you mean by this? How did he find them, how did he confirm their existence? What defines a psychical structure? How did he demonstrate that his schema was a more valid way of classifying psychical structures than any other?
or am i guilty of 'scientism' again
I have no idea man I'm not a Marxist, I just assumed you wanted to know about Lacan since no one communicated his ideas clearly itt. I would assume that if you wanted to critique capitalism using his methods you'd start with the
It's not personality types, it's psychical structures. It doesn't matter if you're shy or overt, what matters is in what structure the trait is expressed.
That he managed to identify them.
He didn't, as far as I know, he said his work is meant to be interpreted, which is off-putting, I know. On the other hand, judging by your other posts, if you consider psychology and psychiatry to be a pseudoscience as well, then give Lacan a go given there aren't many alternatives out there. Plus just because he didn't confirm doesn't mean it's wrong, as I said the ideas are consistent.
The relation to the Law and desire, identified by the language used.
No idea I'm new to it as well, you'll have to find out yourself by further reading his followers' works. But that's what intrigued me, he's taking an approach concerning linguistics.
That's a completely different question you can determine for yourself. If you are it is only up to you what you do with it.
That's a good question, and as someone who studied cognitive science, psychoanalysis doesn't attract me because it doesn't give a fuck about low-level cognitive processes.
I don't know much about Lacan's theories, but Freudian ones were based on Greek and Roman mythology, and while he managed to get great insight on how the psyche works during the early 20th century, psychoanalysts still doesn't seem to take into account how our brains physically work to this day.
They see the brain kinda like an immaterial black box and it's a mistake. Psychiatry need to be criticized because it obviously serves the imperatives of capitalism, but at least, their categories and drug designs are based on the material characteristics of the human brain.
CBT try to modify unhealthy thinking patterns, which can be good for certain things, mainly anxiety disorders and phobias, and inappropriate for some others
Psychology != psychiatry
But we need to have a more sociological approach to clinical psychology IMO.
It's true that presently, it doesn't concern too much with the socioeconomic environment of patients. But I don't think psychoanalysis does either.
That said, I like the use of the big Other Lacanian concept by Zizek when he analyzes political issues.
Why even care whether Lacan himself wrote well or made much sense?
His concepts and theories have influenced several thinkers, and they're useful concepts and theories. I don't even understand him very well, for I've only encountered him on the works of the Sniffer, Badiou and another introductory book, but concepts like the Big Other and object a are neat tools for analysis.
Well, and I'm not suggesting that this is the case, but if Lacan doesn't make sense because his entire pseudoscientific edifice is complete nonsense, then that's potentially a huge problem, right? Like if he's just waffling on with a bunch of made-up shit, and other subsequent thinkers have used his concepts, then there is a very real risk that they are just as wrong as he is because they're working from his utterly ridiculous basis. We should care whether Lacan actually makes any sense because if he doesn't then there is a real risk that his nonsense has infected subsequent thinkers and made them into nonsense too. Garbage In, Garbage Out. If you use concepts that are fundamentally garbage in your 'analysis', there is every possibility that the analysis you create will in turn be garbage. (I hate how this term has become some abstract, universally applicable thing, by the way - "Oh this concept will help me in my ~analysis~" - Your analysis of what, motherfucker?)
...
Marx? Heidegger? :^)
I used it abstractly like that because I'm honestly not knowledgeable enough to truly defend Lacan. But I think Zizek, for example, makes great points using Lacanian language, and he is as much a Hegelian/Marxist Hegelian as a Lacanian (I think he himself has said that Lacan is only a tool for understanding and articulating Hegel for him - so we'd really need to look at Hegel rather than Lacan to attack him in the manner you explained!)
Anyway, philosophy is full of people misunderstanding the previous philosophers, or deliberately reading them in a different way. This means that critiquing the original source doesn't really work.
Thanks for all the interesting replies.
Why use psychoanalysis instead of regular, "rigorous" psychiatry and psychology ?
WEW
No particular reason to use any over the others. Mainstream psychology has no canonical discipline with its thousand of schools, and psychiatry is training to be a pharmaceutical shill. Psychoanalysis is basically psychological philosophy, in a sense. Pick whatever you like fam.
Two are empirical, the other is not. The choice should be obvious.
That's why it talks about penises and other absurdities in such length
Philosophy would be better if it used methods of epistemology
Random question: did Lacan ever write much about religion, namely Christianity?
Comparisons can also be drawn between Lacan's three Orders and trinitarian theology.
Following Hegel, Zizek denies the distinction between the immanent and economic Trinity, between the generation of the Son and the creation of the world. For him, the absolute in itself (Father) negates itself in order to empty itself without remainder into the world (Son), of which the Christ is a singular sign, constituting a kind of first death or kenotic emptying of the Father/God. That negation is in turn negated in the Crucifixion, in which nothing less than the God(-man) himself dies, which allows the emergence of the collective "spirit". The supreme moment of dark lucidity is Jesus' lament "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" At that point, the horizon is wiped out, and the cold black truth is exposed that no one (save ourselves) is coming over the horizon to save us, that we are sustained by no overarching cosmic support. We are on our own. Just as in psychoanalysis, the treatment is over when the patient realizes there is no "Big Other" (God or Man, Nation or Party, Father or Big Brother, Lacan's symbolic order or what Derrida called the "transcendental signifier").
critics of lacan always say they want a 'concise, plain english summary of his points' without realizing that the guy doesn't have specific points, he wasn't making an 'argument' per se as much as he was developing a system, which is much more difficult to explain quickly
But he does, you stemcuck.
Because psychology and psychiatry are not – and can not ever be – sciences, yet they pretend to be, and they get legitimization from the capitalist order because their normalizing tendencies, their wast resources for crowd control, their profitability; simply because they provide a useful toolset for class rule. They construct the model of the "average/normal/healthy human" based on arbitrary observations that also happen to overlap with capitalism's interests.
On the other hand psychoanalysis follows a completely different route. Unlike psychology it does not wish to wipe out the individual under banners of arbitrarily constructed "diseases" and "disorders" and does not and will never claim to be a science, because, simply it is impossible to construct a science of the individual.
TL;DR me on Hegel – otherwise you are a cultist and Hegel is a pseudo-scientific and problemati'c person.
So did Jameson, Althusser, Zizek, Ranciere, Arch Getty, Trotsky, Badiou, Adorno, Eagleton, Johnston, Dean, Ruda, Meillassoux, and a bunch of other insignificant bastards.
Even among its fiercest theoretical enemies it was preferred over psychology: Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, etc.
Lévi-Strauss, Balibar, Benjamin, Marcuse, Salecl, Agamben, Zupancic, R.D. fucking Wolff, Dolar…
Bump for good theorertical discussion
They use the scientific method, based on falsifiable hypotheses and empirical data.
It doesn't mean every paper on a psychology journal uncover an absolute truth, but it provides a solid foundation for research on how the mind works.
First of all, the situationists did the same criticism of psychoanalysis and Lacan back in the days (see youtube.com
You can see any attempt to soothe the mind as a tool for boosting workforce productivity and capital gains for the bourgeoisie.
But even then, I think this kind of criticism is misguided. It's like the 70s leftists who destroyed mainframes and thought computers had nothing good to offer. They weren't able to envision the possibilities offered by the soon-to-come microcomputer revolution and the Internet.
It's not because your enemy use a tool that this tool is fundamentally evil.
The left would actually benefit from reading more material on social psychology.
The infamous Milgram and Asch experiments show how easy is it to pressure people into doing shitty or objectively wrong things for example.
You can't just dismiss a whole field of research with "muh individuality" as an argument.
Moreover, psychology isn't just clinical psychology, but also entails cognitive (post-behaviorist), developmental (Piaget), neurological, comparative (humans vs non-humans) approaches to the study of the mind, just to cite a few of them.
If anything, psychoanalysis is only a single approach in psychology. But I don't think psychoanalysis can't explain why amphetamine abuse may provoke psychotic episodes on many different individuals for example, while psychopharmacology can, or at least try to find the answer through the analysis of empirical data.
I agree that the fixed categories of the DSM are stupid and psychiatry, as practiced in our contemporary capitalist societies, is pretty terrible.
It's true that "it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society" in lot of cases, and I'm too lazy to formulate more specific valid criticisms of psychology that could resonate with that quote, but you sound like you decided to take your side in this war after reading a couple of Zizek books without knowing what the other side has to offer tbqh lad.
bump because this thread is about to die, no one replied to me ( ) and i need to fulfill my ego on a primary level right now
bump for good theoretical thread
...
not too big of a divide my guy
lacan loved to pretend that he didn't like philosophy or something but there's no lacan without hegel
not to mention, i, at least, get the same enjoyment out of psychoanalysis research that i do philosophy
That's because he is.
None are particularly scientific tbh
Lol no they dont. The APA arbitrarily defined depression, anxiety, etc. and psychologists work with these arbitrary categories. It's bullshit pseudoscience that is popular because it reinforces capitalism and is profitable.
Stop using this fashionable buzzword, it means nothing more than "word I don't like".
Am I using it incorrectly? Conditions were assigned symptoms based on no evidence and then put into practice immediately with no independent review.
I don't know anything about psychanal but fraud is rampant in psychology and psychiatry. They're still selling drugs that have been proven to not even work as placebos.
Hey, I know this thread is pretty dead, but can any Lacanian on this board explain to my why Lacan is truly the most anti-essentialist thinker of our times? Some anons have mentioned it in passing, but I'm curious as to how? I've come to the opinion that most philosophies that attempt to be anti-essentialist almost always end up being essentialist and deterministic in ways they didn't expect, how is Lacanian Psychoanalysis any different? pic unrelated
If anxiety is an arbitrary category for you, then I guess you never had a panic attack.
The mental states described by these categories often correspond to specific and measurable types of neural activity. Anxiety is associated to amygdala hyperactivity, and depression to a lessened activity of the serotonergic system for example.
Of course, these categories aren't perfect and need to be refined. I personally think OCD is more a spectrum than a disorder and is linked to addictive thought patterns, for example. But instead of rejecting everything psychology has to offer, we should be critical it within its own framework IMO.
Also
Don't forget you have the blood of Giordano Bruno on your hands.
(Me)
Forgot to add that psychoanalysis also has """arbitrary categories""" at its core, namely neurosis (i.e. anxiety disorders) and psychosis.
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Most experiments on psychology can't be reproduced or have such a faulty design that it barely qualifies as "science"(whatever the fuck that may be).
American social psychology is a joke on itself, a bad joke. even. It's only purpose is to support the dominant ideology and how it affects us.
That's one of the worst offenders of pseudo-scientific shit. Some spookiest shits I've read on my life was from so called "cognitive scientist".
Psychology does not offer anything worthwhile to the left, it's theories are at it's core designed to control populations not to understand them. If fucking Foucault got this, then you can as well.
Fairly certain the post-structuralists like Deleuze and Focault are more anti-essentialist than le juiceissance man
If you think psychology is to be condemned here, psychoanalysis is a much much worse offender. It is even a joke for someone not to realize.
If psychoanalysis were more popular, it would be criticize in the same exact manner just like it used to be by other leftists. any method that purports to help you will or can be used to pacify others and to get them working fine with the dominant ideology. Just like the recent bs that has been happening with "Western Buddhism".
Why do leftists sound exactly like Alex Jones?
Everything is a conspiracy to them.
That's why I'm asking tbh. The impression I get from Lacan is that he isn't really all that "anti-essentialist" at all. Especially because he talks about phalluses so much. And I know that phalluses aren't penises in Lacanian theory, but I just want to know why Lacanians on this board consider him so anti-essentialist, because I've seen them claim this more then once, and if it's true that interests me quite a bit.
So philosophy is outwards, psychoanalysis is inwards?
Can you give some examples ? I'm genuinely curious, I have a degree in cognitive science and I'm pretty certain there are some stupid or harmful studies coming out of the discipline, but your half-assed dismissal won't convince me.