Lacanian Psychoanalysis in Polish Academia

The situation of Lacanian psychoanalysis in Polish academia is multifaceted enough to escape any simple diagnosis. For that reason I will not present hard data backed by statistics today. Rather than build the illusion of an objective report on the state of Lacanian psychoanalysis, I will try in this talk not to suture the subject, and to take my own place of enunciation into account. My closing reflections will therefore, by design, lack the alibi of complete knowledge and neutrality.

Engagement with psychoanalysis varies from one university and faculty to another. For the sake of order, I distinguish two academic spaces in this commentary. The first I call the clinical field, by which I mean the academic milieus connected with psychology; to the second, non-clinical field I assign above all philosophy and cultural studies. Geography plays a part too: the situation can differ radically from one Polish city to another.

The clinical field

It will surprise no one that university psychology departments are dominated by cognitive science and a culture of evaluation. The university tends towards homogenisation, demanding statistics, standardisation and measurability, which has led to the marginalisation of psychoanalysis in the name of a hard scientific model and the primacy of cognitive-behavioural therapies. In courses on the history of psychology, psychoanalysis is invoked as a relic of the past, and every now and then one comes across an academic waging a private crusade against Freud.

Even so, among some psychology students there are research groups actively oriented towards Lacanian psychoanalysis in its clinical dimension. In Kraków, the Psychoanalytic Section of the Psychology Students’ Research Group at the Jagiellonian University works closely with the Kraków Circle of Psychoanalysis of the NLS. Events are held regularly, often with practising psychoanalysts who are members of the Kraków Circle, and the organisers see a lively interest in Lacan’s thought. In Poznań, the Lacanian Psychoanalysis Research Group at the Faculty of Psychology and Cognitive Science of Adam Mickiewicz University also attracts students, as the attendance at the meeting with Katty Langelez-Stevens in April this year showed. I was unable, however, to find any student group in the psychology departments in Warsaw working strictly with Lacanian thought.

The non-clinical fields

The exclusion of the signifier “Lacan” from the psychology departments in Warsaw no doubt returns in the real of this city, in the humanities faculties¹. For instance, the Contemporary Thought Research Group, based at the Faculty of Philosophy and the Faculty “Artes Liberales” of the University of Warsaw, has for more than a year been holding meetings devoted to reading Lacan’s texts. In the non-clinical fields, student conferences held in many academic centres are currently surprisingly popular. Last week the Warsaw student psychoanalytic conference Art, Pleasure, Body (Sztuka, przyjemność, ciało) drew participants from various disciplines and cities. A similar dynamic can be seen in Toruń, where the Student Philosophical Research Group of Nicolaus Copernicus University reads Lacan regularly, and where he was not absent from the local conference Interweavings of a Polyphony of Perspectives (Przeploty polifonii perspektyw) either. In Katowice, Lacan’s texts are read in the Research Group on Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Social Philosophy at the University of Silesia, which also hosted an academic conference in May. In Kraków, the annual PPKK conference (Psychoanalysis – Psychotherapy – Cultural Critique) makes the effort to bring theory and practice together.

Nor can one fail to mention the Centre for Psychoanalytic Thought at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, whose mission is to bring together researchers working on psychoanalysis from philosophical, historical, cultural, literary, psychological and clinical perspectives. The Centre also runs the journal Wunderblock. Psychoanaliza i Filozofia, in which one not infrequently finds references to articles published by members of the Circles in the journal Psychoanaliza. Although Lacanian psychoanalysis is not its sole subject of research, it is an important point of reference.

Inspirations

What draws people to Lacanian psychoanalysis today? On the one hand, certainly the structural and post-structural Lacan, who provides tools for a penetrating analysis of culture in the broad sense. On the other hand, clinical questions: relations between the sexes, the formulas of sexuation, or the axiom that there is no sexual relation. In today’s world of Ones-all-alone, isolated from one another, the Lacanian attempt to circle this real remains as relevant as ever. (If you have other ideas, I invite you to share them in the discussion.)

Conclusions and challenges

I have the impression that Lacan’s ideas live a life of their own and stimulate people from various milieus to think, often in complete detachment from the clinic. As Jacques-Alain Miller remarks with a note of bitterness in his course Illuminations profanes, in today’s supermarket of philosophies everyone can find their own truth²; Lacan, too, has been given a shelf there. Miller adds that when we detach Lacan’s concepts from the clinic and from the speaking body, we risk turning them into a dead letter. Nevertheless, from my perspective it is precisely in the non-clinical fields that Lacan enjoys far greater recognition today. Though still outside the mainstream, Lacanian psychoanalysis is finding its place at the university by side paths. I believe that interest in psychoanalysis is growing all the same, although I will not present any research on the subject today. Student activity resembles what Lacan called the vacuole of jouissance³: a vacuole suspended in the intercellular space of the university. It is a contingent effect of the fact that somewhere, in a given milieu, a desire was born that managed to set a group of people to work and did not die out.

In my view, a similar desire is a challenge and a stake for the members of the NLS Circles as well. It is in the nature of desire to die out unless it is sustained. I cannot forget the point made by Ève Miller-Rose at the last Question d’École of the ECF in Paris in January this year: the School is not so much an association of psychoanalysts as an association for psychoanalysis. The School’s activities are not meant to serve its members alone, but psychoanalysis itself. In his course La vie de Lacan, Miller recalls that Lacan spent his whole life trying to lead psychoanalysts out of the ghetto in which the belief that the analytic experience is incommunicable encloses them. Accepting the marginalisation of psychoanalysis is therefore at odds with Lacan’s own desire; he did not want to create a closed enclave. He wanted, rather, the School to be able to answer questions about the analytic experience clearly, instead of hiding behind the excuse that it is incommunicable⁴.

To conclude, let me recall a sentence by Paul Valéry:

We civilisations now know that we are mortal⁵.

Psychoanalysis need not last for ever, and the fear of the act should not obscure this dimension from us.

Footnotes

1. Cf. J. Lacan, Réponse au commentaire de Jean Hyppolite sur la « Verneinung » de Freud, in: Écrits, Paris, Seuil, 1966, p. 388. Orig.: « ce qui n’est pas venu au jour du symbolique, apparaît dans le réel ». ↩

2. J.-A. Miller, L’orientation lacanienne. Illuminations profanes (2005–2006), lesson of 7 June 2006, unpublished; transcript available at jonathanleroy.be. Orig.: « il y a un supermarché des philosophies aujourd’hui, qui permet à chacun de trouver sa vérité ». ↩

3. J. Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre XVI, D’un Autre à l’autre, Paris, Seuil, 2006, p. 224 (lesson of 12 March 1969). Miller comments on this passage in the same lesson of Illuminations profanes, 7 June 2006. ↩

4. J.-A. Miller, L’orientation lacanienne. La vie de Lacan (2009–2010), lesson of 12 May 2010, unpublished; transcript available at jonathanleroy.be. Orig.: « Lacan a passé sa vie de psychanalyste à tenter de les en faire sortir. Il aurait voulu que ce qu’il appelait École soit en mesure de répondre à l’interrogation sur l’expérience analytique, sans se réfugier derrière l’incommunicable. » ↩

5. P. Valéry, La Crise de l’esprit (1919), in: Variété, Paris, Gallimard, 1924. Orig.: « Nous autres, civilisations, nous savons maintenant que nous sommes mortelles. » ↩