Psicoanálisis y ciencias humanas: Dos conferencias (1963-1964)

by Louis Althusser

Las dos conferencias publicadas en el presente volumen fueron pronunciadas por Louis Althusser durante el seminario sobre Lacan y el
psicoanálisis que se llevó a cabo en la Escuela Normal Superior de París durante el año universitario 1963-1964. Se trató del tercer seminario organizado por Althusser, después del de 1961-1962 sobre el joven Marx y el de 1962-1963 sobre los orígenes del estructuralismo.

Genres: Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Philosophy

Kindle Edition

First published November 1, 1996

About the author

Louis Pierre Althusser (1918–1990) was one of the most influential Marxist philosophers of the 20th Century. As they seemed to offer a renewal of Marxist thought as well as to render Marxism philosophically respectable, the claims he advanced in the 1960s about Marxist philosophy were discussed and debated worldwide. Due to apparent reversals in his theoretical positions, to the ill-fated facts of his life, and to the historical fortunes of Marxism in the late twentieth century, this intense interest in Althusser's reading of Marx did not survive the 1970s. Despite the comparative indifference shown to his work as a whole after these events, the theory of ideology Althusser developed within it has been broadly deployed in the social sciences and humanities and has provided a foundation for much “post-Marxist” philosophy. In addition, aspects of Althusser's project have served as inspiration for Analytic Marxism as well as for Critical Realism. Though this influence is not always explicit, Althusser's work and that of his students continues to inform the research programs of literary studies, political philosophy, history, economics, and sociology. In addition, his autobiography has been subject to much critical attention over the last decade. At present, Althusser's philosophy as a whole is undergoing a critical reevaluation by scholars who have benefited from the anthologization of hard-to-find and previously unpublished texts and who have begun to engage with the great mass of writings that remain in his archives.

Reviews

[Elliot · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m not particularly an Althusser fan but this was a surprisingly lucid and helpful work. Does a great job of situating psychoanalysis in relation to other “human sciences” like sociology, anthropology, and psychology- making a claim for PAs genuinely scientific (theoretical rather than ideological) character. This is particularly fascinating because this work precedes Althusser’s work on Marx and Althusser’s understanding of the “epistemological break” that happens between the early and late Marx- which is really developed first here in Althusser’s understanding of Freud’s relationship to psychology.

Althusser also does a great job of situating what Lacan’s return to Freud entails and his need to rethink Freud’s imported concepts (Kant). Pretty interesting stuff for anyone into Lacan. Finishes up with some opaque but novel reflections on Descartes and Spinoza.

[no]

boring & rather confusing.

[Benjamin Britton · Rating 4 out of 5]

“They are of strategic interest not only because they first reveal... the deep intellectual influence exerted by Lacan’s thought on Althusser’s own theoretical task in these years—the return to Marx, which involved a struggle against psychologism as well as against any philosophy of consciousness, but also because they involve a concept at stake in Althusser’s philosophical program of elaborating a theory of ideology in general—the concept of the subject.

In contrast, the new program established by Althusser, which requires Lacan’s decisive contribution, would make possible a renewal of the encounter between psychoanalysis and the human sciences, an epistemological reflection on their articulation emancipated from anthropologism and psychologism. This would also mean a real encounter between psychoanalysis and philosophy, based on a radical redefinition of psychoanalysis itself and of its own scientificity.

The central question, inherited from Lacan, is thus: what is the essence of psychoanalysis, and what is its specific, scientific, object?

These texts by Althusser, so deeply informed by Lacan’s work, might also be read as a laboratory for the concept of “epistemological break” (la coupure épistémologique). This concept, borrowed from Bachelard’s epistemology, makes possible a distinction between science and ideology, and its use will be determinant in Althusser’s later texts (For Marx and Reading Capital, in 1965) in the context of the “return to Marx.” These texts are concerned with the scientificity of Marxism and historical materialism in the context of Marx’s revolutionary discovery, the discovery of the continent History, leading to the constitution of historical materialism: a scientificity that must be constructed on the rigorous distinction between the young Marx’s writings, still influenced by Feuerbachian humanist ideology, Hegelian idealist philosophy, and classical political economy, on the one hand, and on the other Marx’s mature works such as Capital, freed from anthropologism and historical teleology, after the “break” represented by The German Ideology in 1845.

Lacan’s return to Freud is exemplary in that respect. It is a decisive attempt to transform and systematize, within the theoretical field of psychoanalysis, the conceptual apparatus inherited from Freud, and to reveal the “epistemological break” through which psychoanalysis emancipates itself from its ideological background.

The analogy between Lacan’s strategy and Althusser’s some years later is particularly significant on this epistemological level, and it could explain Althusser’s insistence on what he sometimes calls his debt (as a philosopher and as a Marxist philosopher) to Lacan.

Pascale Gillot
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“THROUGH AN interpretation of Lacan, we shall seek to determine the place of psychoanalysis in the human sciences today, in 1963. There are two fundamental preconditions for this determination: 1. that we know precisely what psychoanalysis is and 2. that we know precisely what the general domain of the human sciences is.

Obviously, there was somebody named Lacan, absolutely unintelligible. . . .

One last, extremely important, point: psychoanalysis approached the general object of the human sciences by approaching anthropology. This is already found in Freud or at least apparently in Freud: Totem and Taboo, Civilization and Its Discontents, The Future of an Illusion. All these books deal with cultural phenomena, and thus anthropological phenomena, and they all present themselves as having the ambition to extend psychoanalytic concepts to the disciplines of anthropology and history that deal with cultural objects.

Now, what interests us the most, after the theory, are the theoretical consequences of the thing.

That’s Lacan’s basic demonstration regarding psychotherapy. Philosophy has to falsify the experience of reality, of the analytical practice itself, in order to be able to declare it to be philosophical.

Lacan is a historical phenomenon: we have to look into him. What is clear is that he’s unintelligible for us Latins; he’s enclosed behind a whole series of enigmas, hidden behind a whole series of coats of arms. In short, he presents himself in a form that is Gongoresque—since he has applied this adjective to himself—underneath a form theoretically and deliberately baroque, like a kind of wild beast: I believe that expression is not excessive; you have to have heard him scream to know that he is a man of an absolutely extraordinary aggressiveness, of a splendid maliciousness in which he certainly realizes himself as an individual who passed by way of surrealism.

And in the current forms of the organization of the psychoanalytic world, that is, in the juridical, social, economic structures of the psychoanalytic world, I think there’s no other way out than nastiness, on the one hand, and, on the other, a behavior of theoretical impos- ture through which, by pretending to say something incomprehensible, he says something perfectly clear, but to make it pass he needs to protect himself through the form of incomprehensibility he imposes on us.

If you go to Lacan’s seminar, you’ll see a whole series of people praying before a discourse that is unintelligible to them . . .

the theoretical work undertaken by Lacan is characterized by a radical, conscious, resolute refusal in which the resolution and the consciousness match the theoretical content. I mean that he’s a guy who’s resolute, not at all out of a decision made by the will, but on the basis of the theoretical certainty that what he says is founded.

Lacan doesn’t say we have to reject what exists from the theoretical point of view because reality is something else. He gives us two things: he gives us the nonconcept—excuse me, more exactly the concept and the non-concept at the same time...

Under such conditions, translating Lacan is a very important cultural necessity, and it interests us directly, if only in order to be able to read what he writes, of course.

What interests us is the theoretical question that we are raising: what is the relation, not factual, concrete, actual, but theoretical, the relation de jure—I return now to what I said at the outset—between psychoanalysis and the human sciences? To answer that question we have to define the essence of psychoanalysis.

The situation is such that this point is found in this world; in my opinion, there are two mooring points. The first . . . is the theoretical consequences of the problematic inaugurated by Marx, but that’s something else. And the other is the work of someone who has nothing directly to do with Marx and who says, today we have a theoretical mooring point, and it’s the only mooring point we have, not in the whole world, but very precisely in the world of psychology, in the world of the relation between psychology, psychiatry, etc., in the world that concerns the relation between psychology and psychoanalysis, and this mooring point is the possibility of a consistent, rigorous, valid, theoretical definition of psychoanalysis: that’s what Lacan gives us.”
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“Where is psychoanalysis situated? What is its place? What is its location in a space that does not yet exist? What are its borders with existing disciplines? What are its nonborders with existing disciplines? These are the kinds of questions that constantly haunt Lacan’s thought. And it’s no exaggeration to say that they also haunted Freud’s thought.

We’re dealing with the rise of a new truth, of a new knowledge, thus with the definition of a new object that breaks with the field constituted earlier: breaks with a field against the background of which this new discipline stands out. A field that is already occupied, that is an ideological field in which it has no place. . . . In the history of human culture we can observe phenomena of the same kind during the rise of a new scientific discipline, whether in the case of Greek mathematics, Galilean physics, Marx’s theory of societies, etc. To the extent to which we’re dealing with an epistemological break, with a rupture in the continuity with the earlier field, we’re dealing with a phenomenon of rupture that contains in itself, like a real virtuality, a capacity to upset the field against which it stands out.

The rupture that a new scientific discipline introduces into a field in which all the places are taken, in fact, poses problems for the thinker or scientist who tries to define his new object, problems that are at first practically insoluble.

Lacan thinks, in fact, that psychoanalysis can restructure the field on which it has risen up.

And what’s crucial—this is what Lacan insists on, and it’s his great discovery—is that this becoming-human that is going to be represented for you by this vector, “passage from the biological to the cultural,” is in reality the effect of the action of the cultural on the biological.

The second consequence of Lacan’s reflection is that what precedes the becoming-human of the little human being isn’t psychology, it’s not the psychological subject, but what he calls “the order of the symbolic,” or what I would call, if you will, the law of culture.

Culture always precedes itself, and it is this precedence, this perpetual antecedence of culture with respect to itself, that is represented by this circle.

I was saying that the emergence of a new scientific discipline, which is destined by its very novelty to express itself in an existing terminology, that is, to stand out against this background, produces an ambiguous situation, particularly the temptation to relapse into this background; in any case, it produces, on the part of the ideological field against which it stands out, the temptation to absorb it.

And on that basis a whole tendency of psychoanalysis is centered on the “ego’s defense mechanisms,” that is, on the mechanisms through which the subject succeeds in keeping itself centered on the ego, which is the function of a synthesis at once theoretical and practical.

On that basis, the essential theme of Lacan’s criticism can be put in the following way: if we reduce psychoanalysis to the typical structure of psychology, we no longer understand what the unconscious is.

Why does psychology present itself in this form? That’s the point I want to examine now by asking: what is psychology? Where does psychology come from? What is its past? What are its arrears? What are the scars that it still bears today? Here it’s not a question of producing a historical study: I simply want to try to give two or three clues preparatory to a possible study.

The very idea of a psychology presupposes a certain number of fundamental structures that make it possible. These fundamental structures are those that identify three realities of differing status: the individual, the subject, and the ego. Psychology is possible only through the identification of these three terms, that is, through the theoretical presupposition that the subject is an individual possessing the structure of an ego. This constitution supposes and imposes this identity as real.

The individual is a concept that can have a meaning in the domain of biology, that can have a meaning in the division of labor, in the division of social functions. The subject is a concept that also has a meaning in the social division of labor and particularly as a subject to which a certain number of behaviors are imputed, whether they are moral behaviors or political behaviors. It is no accident that the subject designates the one that is subjected, whereas in the classical function of psychology the subject designates the one who is active.

And if we consider the ego... It is especially connected with a properly philosophical problematic that develops beginning in the seventeenth century, with a problematic that makes the subject appear as an ego, that is, as a subject of truth, as a subject of objectivity.

The biological individual, whose place can be assigned as such either in the biological field or in the field of the division of labor, that is, in the field of the division of roles in society, is one thing. The subject is a subject of imputation, that is, he is the one who has to obey orders and must justify his obedience and his acts, whether these orders are moral, political, religious, etc. And the ego corresponds to a third function, which is a “veritative” function, a function of synthesis, a function of objectivity. So it is the synthesis, if you wish, of these three conditions, of these three objects, that is the condition of possibility of any psychology.

I’d like to show that a psychology is made possible as the by-product of a political ideology, a moral ideology, or a philosophical ideology, and that this by-product can have a twofold character: either that of a normative pathology of the ideology that produced it or that of a mirror foundation (fondement en miroir) of the ideology that produced it.

All the same, I would like to point out that, as early as the age of Greek philosophy, structures were established that were later to be adopted and that appear as conditions of the possibility of a psychology.

If we analyze Plato’s procedure, we see that this human subject, conceived as constituted by a tripartite structure, is in fact the by-product of the political problems that Plato is trying to resolve.

It is the confusion of these three agencies in the individual that can lead to the confusion of classes in society. We see here that the tripartite structure in the human subject is expected to resolve the problem of the division of classes in society.

What can the possibility of a psychology be in Cartesian philosophy? It can’t be a psychology of the ego, of the ego cogito, insofar as the subject of the ego is here a subject of objectivity, that is, a subject of truth.

The psychological subject that appears here as the precondition of the subject of objectivity is the subject of error; at the same time, it is the subject of error being able to convert itself into a subject of objectivity. Psychology can thus be founded in Descartes as concerning the concept of the nonconcept of the ego, as concerning the possibility that the ego is not this transparency itself that constitutes it as a subject of truth, as a subject of objectivity: that is, as concerning its own past.

The question would be whether Spinoza’s abandonment of the subject of objectivity as the condition of possibility of any affirmation of truth doesn’t lead to a radical modification of the subject of this pathology of truth.

there is no possible psychological subject in Descartes except as a subject of error, that is, as a shadow brought into the pathological by a subject considered as a normal subject, the subject of truth.

It’s an extremely important phenomenon because it’s the origin of the whole of Western philosophy, and the refutation that Spinoza gives of it is a refutation that has disappeared into history, that has been literally submerged by the development of the later problematic, and that has perhaps not yet reemerged except in a lateral and allusive form.

Why is there a subject? . . . Maybe the necessity of having a subject of truth is imposed precisely by Descartes’s problematic, which is a problematic that opposes truth to error. It is perhaps in these concepts of truth and error that we find enclosed the requirement of the emergence of a subject as a subject of truth.

And it is perhaps in the area of the idea of error that we find the meaning of the concept of truth that is opposed to it. What is error, in fact, for a philosophy like that of Descartes? Error is conceived only as the negative other of truth: error is the concept of the nonconcept, but conceived not in its specificity but as the nonconcept of the concept.

The relation of error to truth is conceived as a dividing up, that is, as the result of a judgment, as a dividing up that establishes an exclusion, that establishes a condemnation, a dividing up pronounced by the concept of truth itself...
In fact, this relation conceived as a dividing up is the equivalent of a judgment, of a judgment that decides things.

And that is how Descartes reflects the whole past of his own philosophy, that is, all the confusion, all the error, that preceded him.

In other words, if we can establish the following correlation between truth and error,
this scission necessarily leads to a philosophy of judgment, which necessarily leads to a philosophy of the subject that decides between truth and error.

In epistemological retrospection we can clearly assign the difference, we can think what the conditions of the possibility of this distinction were: we can now determine, by historical study, what the conditions of possibility of the distinction between truth and error were. For Descartes, error has a precise content: it’s Thomist philosophy, it’s Aristotelian physics; the truth is the new physics, it’s Galilean physics. All this is the result of a historical process that Descartes does not examine.

I believe it would be rather easy to show that the constitution of the psychological subject, the constitution of its functions, that is, the determination of what is to be studied as psychological in a psychological subject from the eighteenth century on, is determined by the dominant philosophy of the eighteenth century: by sensualist empiricism.

What would be interesting to study in this correlation is the role of language, about which I said something a while ago, precisely insofar as it necessarily appears in connection with the whole eighteenth-century empiricist sensualist theory of knowledge, as having to constitute the very possibility of the objective utterance and as having to resolve the problem that is projected as resolved in the psychological subject instituted by empiricist philosophy.

Consequently, if we want to sum up the fundamental structure that makes it possible for a psychology to exist, I would say that psychology appears to fulfill a twofold function. . . . Psychology appears as the pathology of the theoretical, the moral, the political, or the religious. On the one hand, as [their] pathology and, on the other, as a pathology on which [they can be founded], that is, as a pathology that can be reversed into normalcy.

In this phenomenon, in which a function is assigned to psychology that is the function the theoretical subject cannot assume, under these conditions, in which psychology appears as responsible for providing the foundation, the function that the theoretical subject, the moral subject, the religious subject, or the political subject delegates to it—in all these cases we are dealing with a veritable mirror function: a mirror of misunderstanding in the form of understanding.”

Louis Althusser

[Noah · Rating 2 out of 5]

First lecture is mostly unnecessary, other than its setting-the-grounds for the second, and its interesting take on the reception of Freud in early 20th century France. The second, on the other hand, is a very worthwhile (and worth re-reading) take on the relation between psychology and psychoanalysis, on a pre-Althusserian-ideology take on the relation between ideological and scientific ventures.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book ends on a footnote which explains that recording had stopped. Probably a good thing. Not exactly the most exciting read concerning psychoanalysis. It’s two lectures by Althusser and they hold very little implications. Althusser rehearses some minor talking points and theoretical disputes psychoanalysis has had.

[Durakov · Rating 3 out of 5]

This feels a little dated, but I found the attention paid to how psychoanalysis differs from psychology to be useful. Otherwise, this is a minor and slight work.