06/10/2021
We hope you're doing well and thank you for your commitment to the field! We've just posted a new blog on our website (https://www.psychstudies.net/blog/). We hope you visit it and enjoy the excerpt below:
Whereas Lacan’s concepts are complex, both philosophically and logically, my reading of his work suggests that he sought to promote creative and relevant applications by clinicians, and that his constructs can be very helpful in guiding one’s thinking in the clinical process.
I do not consider myself to be a “Lacanian,” nor do I apply his concepts in what some may consider an “orthodox” manner. Rather, as a practicing psychoanalyst and psychologist of over 35 years, I have sought to integrate the wisdom from many theories and mentors. Lacan’s Écrits includes discussions of art, literature, religion, culture, philosophy, and music, all as expressions of the human experience that are essential for venturing into a serious consideration of the psyche.
My original attraction to Lacan came from my interest in psycholinguistics. As linguistic creatures, our conscious thoughts are structured by our language. Lacan, perhaps more than any other psychoanalytic theorist, emphasized the role and function of language as the organizer of the mind.
Language serves as a vehicle for communicating subjective experience into a shared collective objectivity. In speaking, the person enacts their language to externalize what is intuitively known internally. This externalization is always an approximation of the internal known, and thus constitutes a compromise formation. In this way, speech is symptomatic of the unconscious since this linguistic translation is an approximation, adapting the subjective into the objective, with some aspect of that private experience being lost and changed in translation. The important question for psychotherapy is, what is being approximated? For Lacan, the answer is the patient’s personal truth. The speaker (Subject) works toward expressing a personal private truth by speaking in a language that is not their own but is required to be used for social discourse. The fact that all participants of that language/speech process are expected to use their language conventionally makes neurosis inevitable.
When engaging in speech, the Subject’s motivation is an unconscious derivative of a subjective truth. This truth is “known,” but ineffable. Lacan confers upon psychoanalysis an ethical directive to allow the patient the authority to know their self. The medical agenda for reducing or eliminating symptoms is at complete odds with Lacanian therapy. Emotional suffering, in this regard, demands understanding by and for the patient alone. Implicit in this suffering lies a passion and desire that eludes direct linguistic expression, yet may be knowable from recognizing the limits set by language.
Lacan was most concerned with the phenomenological over a mechanical or biological understanding of mental experience.
To read more, please go to https://www.psychstudies.net/blog/
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