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Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture
Jacques Lacan, one of the most influential and controversial French thinkers of the twentieth century, was a practicing and teaching psychoanalyst in Paris, but his revolutionary seminars on Freud reached out far beyond professional they were enthusiastically attended by writers, artists, scientists, philosophers, and intellectuals from many disciplines. Shoshana Felman elucidates the power and originality of Lacan's work. She brilliantly analyzes Lacan's investigation of psychoanalysis not as dogma but as an ongoing self-critical process of discovery. By focusing on Lacan's singular way of making Freud's thought new again--and of thus enabling us to participate in the very moment of intellectual struggle and insight--Felman shows how this moment of illumination has become crucial to contemporary thinking and has redefined insight as such. This book is a groundbreaking statement not only on Lacan but on psychoanalysis in general. Felman argues that, contrary to popular opinion, Lacan's preoccupation is with psychoanalytic practice rather than with theory for its own sake. His true clinical originality consists not in the incidental innovations that separate his theory from other psychoanalytic schools, but in the insight he gives us into the structural foundations of what is common to the practice of all the transference ation and the psychoanalytic dialogue. In chapters on Poe's tale "The Purloined Letter"; Sophocles' Oedipus plays, a case report by Melanie Klein, and Freud's writings, Felman demonstrates Lacan's ediscovery of these texts as renewed and renewable intellectual adventures and as parables of the psychoanalytic encounter. The book explores these How and why does psychoanalytic practice work? What accounts for clinical success? What did Freud learn from the literary Oedipus, and how does Freud text take us beyond Oedipus? How does psychoanalysis inform, and radically displace, our conception of what learning is and of what reading is? This book will be an intellectual event not only for clinicians and literary critics, but also for the broader audience of readers interested in contemporary thought.
169 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1987
2 people are currently reading
129 people want to read
About the author
Shoshana Felman
21 books21 followersShoshana Felman is an American literary critic and current Woodruff Professor of Comparative Literature and French at Emory University. She was on the faculty of Yale University from 1970 to 2004, where in 1986 she was awarded the Thomas E. Donnelly Professorship of French and Comparative Literature. She specializes in 19th and 20th century French literature, psychoanalysis, trauma and testimony, and law and literature. Felman earned her Ph.D. at the University of Grenoble in France in 1970.
Felman works in the fields of psychoanalytic literary criticism, performativity theory, feminism, Holocaust testimony, and other areas, though her writings frequently question, ironize, or test the limits of the very critical methods being employed. Often in her writing a reversal will occur so that the critical vocabulary gets subjected to and converted into the terms of the literary or cultural object being scrutinized rather than simply settling the meaning of the object; thus in Felman's style of criticism there is no fixed hierarchy of theory over and beyond the reach of the literary object. As such, her methods share an affinity with deconstruction, for which she is sometimes associated with the Yale School and colleagues such as Paul de Man.
Jacques Lacan is a significant influence on Felman and she was among the vanguard of theorists—and perhaps foremost among those addressing Anglophone audiences—to rigorously apply his concepts to the study of literature.
Since the 1990s Felman has written texts on testimony and trauma, particularly in the context of the Holocaust and other collective trauma.
Felman works in the fields of psychoanalytic literary criticism, performativity theory, feminism, Holocaust testimony, and other areas, though her writings frequently question, ironize, or test the limits of the very critical methods being employed. Often in her writing a reversal will occur so that the critical vocabulary gets subjected to and converted into the terms of the literary or cultural object being scrutinized rather than simply settling the meaning of the object; thus in Felman's style of criticism there is no fixed hierarchy of theory over and beyond the reach of the literary object. As such, her methods share an affinity with deconstruction, for which she is sometimes associated with the Yale School and colleagues such as Paul de Man.
Jacques Lacan is a significant influence on Felman and she was among the vanguard of theorists—and perhaps foremost among those addressing Anglophone audiences—to rigorously apply his concepts to the study of literature.
Since the 1990s Felman has written texts on testimony and trauma, particularly in the context of the Holocaust and other collective trauma.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
January 17, 2018
Dry, overly academic emphasis on the implications of psychoanalysis on reading and pedagogy. Only in the final chapter, “Beyond Oedipus,” does a glimmer rise. I don’t think the word “phantasy” is used once whereas “radically” is on every page. The focus is narrow and the prose (perhaps didactically) repetitive. Here’s an indicative excerpt, see if you can sniff out Lacan buried under all the Derrida and de Man:
“The history of reading has accustomed us to the assumption—usually unquestioned—that reading is finding meaning, that interpretation can dwell only on the meaningful. Lacan’s analysis of the signifier opens up a radically new assumption, an assumption that is an insightful logical and methodological consequence of Freud’s discovery: that what can be read (and perhaps what should be read) is not just meaning but the lack of meaning; that significance lies not just in consciousness but, specifically, in its disruption; that the signifier can be analyzed in its effects without its signified being known; that the lack of meaning—the discontinuity in conscious understanding—can and should be interpreted as such, without necessarily being transformed into meaning.”
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that the book is uninteresting or entirely pedestrian, not at all, but this kind of tedious poststructuralist cant has basically been de rigueur for Yalies since forever, and there’s a lot of it here. Its heyday had, now it’s just humdrum. If you’re not yet conversant in Lacanese, you’ll probably derive more, but this is not the most scintillating approach. Happily, for such a short book, it’s glutted with great quotes regardless of the service into which they are conscripted. Lest I seem uncharitable, here’s a more promising excerpt from the Introduction:
“Reading is an access route to a discovery. But the significance of the discovery appears only in retrospect, because insight is never purely cognitive; it is to some extent always performative (incorporated in an act, a doing) and to that extent precisely it is not transparent to itself. Insight is always partially unconscious, partially partaking of a practice. And since there can never be a simultaneous, full coincidence between practice and awareness, what one understands in doing and through doing appears in retrospect: nachträglich, après coup.”
You’ll recall, Dear Reader, the ferocity with which this cabal—an entire generation of Taylorized Francophones—misrecognized themselves as “anti-Hegelians.” Post-millennial Minervas, we can only say: lulz.
In the end, Felman’s clearly competent rhetoric climaxes, for me, in a few sentences which dramatize the intrinsic circularity (*eek!* Dialectics!) of the drive for knowledge, albeit in lit crit argot qua “fictions we live by.” Or one could say that it fulfills the back cover’s promise to explore psychoanalysis “not as dogma but as an ongoing self-critical process of discovery”:
“The myth is not pure fantasy (!), however, but has narrative symbolic logic that accounts for a real mode of functioning, a real structure of relations. The myth is not reality, but neither is it what it is commonly understood to be—a simple opposite of reality. Between reality and the psychoanalytic myth, the relation is not one of opposition, but one of analytic dialogue: the myth comes to grips with something in reality that it does not fully comprehend but to which it gives an answer, a symbolic reply… Misleadingly, the Oedipus appears at first to be a myth of possession (of a kingdom, of a woman, of the solution to a riddle, of one’s own story). But, as it turns out, the Oedipus is not the myth of the possession of a story, but the myth, precisely, of the dispossession by the story—the dispossession of the possessor of the story.”
“The history of reading has accustomed us to the assumption—usually unquestioned—that reading is finding meaning, that interpretation can dwell only on the meaningful. Lacan’s analysis of the signifier opens up a radically new assumption, an assumption that is an insightful logical and methodological consequence of Freud’s discovery: that what can be read (and perhaps what should be read) is not just meaning but the lack of meaning; that significance lies not just in consciousness but, specifically, in its disruption; that the signifier can be analyzed in its effects without its signified being known; that the lack of meaning—the discontinuity in conscious understanding—can and should be interpreted as such, without necessarily being transformed into meaning.”
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that the book is uninteresting or entirely pedestrian, not at all, but this kind of tedious poststructuralist cant has basically been de rigueur for Yalies since forever, and there’s a lot of it here. Its heyday had, now it’s just humdrum. If you’re not yet conversant in Lacanese, you’ll probably derive more, but this is not the most scintillating approach. Happily, for such a short book, it’s glutted with great quotes regardless of the service into which they are conscripted. Lest I seem uncharitable, here’s a more promising excerpt from the Introduction:
“Reading is an access route to a discovery. But the significance of the discovery appears only in retrospect, because insight is never purely cognitive; it is to some extent always performative (incorporated in an act, a doing) and to that extent precisely it is not transparent to itself. Insight is always partially unconscious, partially partaking of a practice. And since there can never be a simultaneous, full coincidence between practice and awareness, what one understands in doing and through doing appears in retrospect: nachträglich, après coup.”
You’ll recall, Dear Reader, the ferocity with which this cabal—an entire generation of Taylorized Francophones—misrecognized themselves as “anti-Hegelians.” Post-millennial Minervas, we can only say: lulz.
In the end, Felman’s clearly competent rhetoric climaxes, for me, in a few sentences which dramatize the intrinsic circularity (*eek!* Dialectics!) of the drive for knowledge, albeit in lit crit argot qua “fictions we live by.” Or one could say that it fulfills the back cover’s promise to explore psychoanalysis “not as dogma but as an ongoing self-critical process of discovery”:
“The myth is not pure fantasy (!), however, but has narrative symbolic logic that accounts for a real mode of functioning, a real structure of relations. The myth is not reality, but neither is it what it is commonly understood to be—a simple opposite of reality. Between reality and the psychoanalytic myth, the relation is not one of opposition, but one of analytic dialogue: the myth comes to grips with something in reality that it does not fully comprehend but to which it gives an answer, a symbolic reply… Misleadingly, the Oedipus appears at first to be a myth of possession (of a kingdom, of a woman, of the solution to a riddle, of one’s own story). But, as it turns out, the Oedipus is not the myth of the possession of a story, but the myth, precisely, of the dispossession by the story—the dispossession of the possessor of the story.”
June 28, 2021
Shoshana Felman here spends time helping us understand why Lacan is important to literature or how he can be used for literary endeavours. She starts by outlining that although we think separately of either Freudian psychoanalytic theory and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory the two are usually interlinked--and even if we are aware of it, the distinction should be kept further apart much more than we would like. Thus Felman does for Lacan what he did to Freud in showing the ingenuity of his work. She does this by explaining why his seminar on Poe is important not only for psychiatric students but also students of literature (imagine that!). Moreover, Felman addresses Lacan's own anxiety about pedagogy and whether psychoanalysis could be taught in following the thinking of Freud who also felt that one cannot teach psychoanalysis without some form of transference and in the process learning to psychoanalyze themselves.
These insights and adventures are what Felman argues are important for literature in that with Freudian psychoanalytic frameworks we spent a great deal of the time reading the text as a symptom of the author, glued to the analyst's chair looking for signs. And yet comes Lacan who says the character's insight into themselves and their events should be part of the psychoanalytic process, turning the unconscious not necessarily into a set of labels by which to prescribe characters but a process of language that makes privy even our protagonist the chance to partake in the analyst's chair. From this process, readers and scholars alike can learn something about the pedagogy of psychoanalysis Felman asserts in contemporary (and literary) culture. Brilliantly researched and argued, I recommend alongside Zizek's How to Read Lacan and Adam Phillips' Promises Promises: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Literature.
These insights and adventures are what Felman argues are important for literature in that with Freudian psychoanalytic frameworks we spent a great deal of the time reading the text as a symptom of the author, glued to the analyst's chair looking for signs. And yet comes Lacan who says the character's insight into themselves and their events should be part of the psychoanalytic process, turning the unconscious not necessarily into a set of labels by which to prescribe characters but a process of language that makes privy even our protagonist the chance to partake in the analyst's chair. From this process, readers and scholars alike can learn something about the pedagogy of psychoanalysis Felman asserts in contemporary (and literary) culture. Brilliantly researched and argued, I recommend alongside Zizek's How to Read Lacan and Adam Phillips' Promises Promises: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Literature.
March 23, 2018
Understanding Lacan is like solving a mind puzzle; it requires a great deal of imagination. This is a great book to start with Lacan. Starting Lacan with his own texts was a dead end to me. I had a look at Zizek's 'How to read Lacan'. It wasn't helpful either. But in this book, Felman, as an educator, nicely explains Lacan.
One last thing, if your intention is to read Lacan and you read this book as an introduction to Lacan, probably the first 100 pages (end of chapter 4) are enough.
One last thing, if your intention is to read Lacan and you read this book as an introduction to Lacan, probably the first 100 pages (end of chapter 4) are enough.
February 20, 2024
Mostly celebrating it for C4 'Psychoanalysis & Education: Teaching Terminable & Interminable', which gives a good synthesis of Plato, Nietzsche, Freud, & Lacan for pedagogy. It might be old hat to people better read in pedagogical theory but was new to me.
A few reviewers are recommending it as intro to Lacan, but I would dispute that & point people to Joan Copjec, Liz Grosz, or Dylan Evans's dictionary. That said, Felman is an underread theorist & deserves reconsideration.
A few reviewers are recommending it as intro to Lacan, but I would dispute that & point people to Joan Copjec, Liz Grosz, or Dylan Evans's dictionary. That said, Felman is an underread theorist & deserves reconsideration.
May 7, 2018
I've never been a big fan of Felman's work, which too often gets bogged down in dull technical details and language that swamps her better ideas. In Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight, this problem is not banished entirely - Felman's language is still unnecessarily florid - but that is compensated for by the fact that this particular bone contains a lot more meat than usual.
Felman begins the book charmingly by describing how she first stumbled to Lacan as a graduate student, and then how that understanding was supplemented by her own encounters with analysis. From there she states her ambition to "articulate and to reach into the significance of Lacan's insight, beyond the literal perception (the dogmatization) of his text, his acts, his practice, and his clinical techniques" (p.15). This is a relief, for the worst commentators on Lacan are usually those who try to formalize his ideas into a neat schematic package.
Chapter 2 considers the case of how to read Poe using psychoanalysis, with Felman contrasting Lacan's famous interpretation of "The Purloined Letter" with studies by Joseph Wood Krutch (1926) and Marie Bonaparte (1933). We are in familiar territory here, as Felman essentially replays the chapter from Writing and Madness: Literature/Philosophy/Psychoanalysis about good and bad psychoanalytic readings of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. The subtlety of the Lacanian reading is not to *apply* psychoanalysis to the text as a kind of critical template, but to show the "interimplication" of literature and psychoanalysis "in each other" (p.49).
Chapter 3 looks at Lacan's "return to Freud" by arguing that the principle of self-reflexivity and auto-critique are built into the Freudian framework. Freud himself, Felman shows, repeatedly turned away from the revolutionary implications of his work, and so had to perform his own "return to Freud." Felman claims that Lacan takes this core principle and runs with it, echoing as it the self-reflexivity built into other new discourse like modern physics.
Chapter 4 examines the implications of such self-reflexivity for psychoanalytic views on pedagogy. Felman looks at how Freud and Lacan break down the authority of the master/student relationship: instead, the master merely becomes the one who has learned how to learn, and it is this this open-ended process that is passed on to others.
Chapter 5 is titled "Beyond Oedipus," but it begins by considering a famous case by a rival therapist, Melanie Klein, and examines why, in Lacanian terms, her technique succeeds. Felman then looks at two versions of Oedipus: Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus. In the first play, Oedipus has misrecognized knowledge about himself, and must learn how to see correctly; in the second play, he now has that knowledge and must learn how to accept it. Felman compares these two stages to moments in Freud's work, from The Interpretation of Dreams (discovery) to Beyond the Pleasure Principle (acceptance). Coming after Freud, Lacan is naturally more interested in the latter two texts.
Felman's book succeeds beautifully in what it sets out to do, namely, to provide an overview of Lacan's thought that shows readers why he is a great thinker while remaining in the spirit of his work. She could, I suppose, be a little more realistic about the very real gap that existed between the ideal of Freudian and Lacanian principles and how they worked in real life - both had notoriously authoritarian habits, especially with regard to the psychoanalytic institutions that belie their deconstruction of authority. But then, that task lies beyond the purview of this book, which sets out to show us the real promise of what psychoanalytic theory can do, given a chance.
Felman begins the book charmingly by describing how she first stumbled to Lacan as a graduate student, and then how that understanding was supplemented by her own encounters with analysis. From there she states her ambition to "articulate and to reach into the significance of Lacan's insight, beyond the literal perception (the dogmatization) of his text, his acts, his practice, and his clinical techniques" (p.15). This is a relief, for the worst commentators on Lacan are usually those who try to formalize his ideas into a neat schematic package.
Chapter 2 considers the case of how to read Poe using psychoanalysis, with Felman contrasting Lacan's famous interpretation of "The Purloined Letter" with studies by Joseph Wood Krutch (1926) and Marie Bonaparte (1933). We are in familiar territory here, as Felman essentially replays the chapter from Writing and Madness: Literature/Philosophy/Psychoanalysis about good and bad psychoanalytic readings of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. The subtlety of the Lacanian reading is not to *apply* psychoanalysis to the text as a kind of critical template, but to show the "interimplication" of literature and psychoanalysis "in each other" (p.49).
Chapter 3 looks at Lacan's "return to Freud" by arguing that the principle of self-reflexivity and auto-critique are built into the Freudian framework. Freud himself, Felman shows, repeatedly turned away from the revolutionary implications of his work, and so had to perform his own "return to Freud." Felman claims that Lacan takes this core principle and runs with it, echoing as it the self-reflexivity built into other new discourse like modern physics.
Chapter 4 examines the implications of such self-reflexivity for psychoanalytic views on pedagogy. Felman looks at how Freud and Lacan break down the authority of the master/student relationship: instead, the master merely becomes the one who has learned how to learn, and it is this this open-ended process that is passed on to others.
Chapter 5 is titled "Beyond Oedipus," but it begins by considering a famous case by a rival therapist, Melanie Klein, and examines why, in Lacanian terms, her technique succeeds. Felman then looks at two versions of Oedipus: Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus. In the first play, Oedipus has misrecognized knowledge about himself, and must learn how to see correctly; in the second play, he now has that knowledge and must learn how to accept it. Felman compares these two stages to moments in Freud's work, from The Interpretation of Dreams (discovery) to Beyond the Pleasure Principle (acceptance). Coming after Freud, Lacan is naturally more interested in the latter two texts.
Felman's book succeeds beautifully in what it sets out to do, namely, to provide an overview of Lacan's thought that shows readers why he is a great thinker while remaining in the spirit of his work. She could, I suppose, be a little more realistic about the very real gap that existed between the ideal of Freudian and Lacanian principles and how they worked in real life - both had notoriously authoritarian habits, especially with regard to the psychoanalytic institutions that belie their deconstruction of authority. But then, that task lies beyond the purview of this book, which sets out to show us the real promise of what psychoanalytic theory can do, given a chance.
November 12, 2014
This book is a fantastic introduction to Lacan. Not surprisingly given the subject, it is not an entirely easy read, but the author is passionate about her subject and writes clearly and compellingly. I have read several books on Lacan and so I thought I had some idea what he was about, but this book has transformed my understanding and I do now feel much closer to what he was trying to do. I always thought he was intellectually brilliant, but Felman has persuaded me that it is not all (or possibly at all) just academic brilliance for its own sake. I certainly think Lacan's writings are an intellectual tour de force and Felman's book is an appropriate tribute to them. Well worth reading.
January 15, 2015
This book taught me to stop worrying and start sort of understanding Lacan, as well as see the purpose in psychoanalysis. It did lost me a bit in the Beyond Oedipus chapter, but it's given me a glimmer of hope, and it was actually an interesting read in itself.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews