Lucian Blaga University, Sibiu

MA in English Language and Literature

Evolution of Critical Trends in the 20th Century
Course convenor: Ana-Karina Schneider, PhD

Lecture XI: Language and Socialisation: Psychoanalytic Theories

Psychoanalysis is the investigation of “the discourse of the subject, whether living or fictional,
through which desire is expressed” (Barker in Wolfreys & Baker 75). In its earlier stages, it applied
Freudian methods in analysing either the author or characters based on what was revealed about
them by the text. “[P]sychoanalysis displaces the subject by deprioritising the role of consciousness
as the origin of physical and mental behaviour” (Lewis 16): the unconscious is foregrounded. It was
initiated by Dr Sigmund Freud of Vienna in the first half of the twentieth century. There are
currently an impressive number of schools of psychoanalytical criticism, but what they all have in
common is that they

find structural images in the mind which point to the way that the present is determined by the past in
terms of the subject’s sexual history. The beginning of this history is seen in every case as the sense of
loss the subject experiences upon its separation from the mother’s body.… Psychoanalytic theory brings
out the intentional aspect of language through its concentration on the relationship between sexuality
and social role: the unconscious aspect of utterance cannot be left out, when, as clinical practice has
borne out, sexuality is so much the component of intention. All such utterance is concerned with the
search for representations bound up with the satisfaction of drives. The literary text is a form of
persuasion whereby bodies are speaking to bodies, not merely minds speaking to minds. (Wright 764, my
emphasis)

One of the most seminal terms produced by Freudian psychoanalysis is displacement, one of the key
activities involved in the transformation of latent dream-thoughts into manifest dream-content (the
other is condensation). It is the dream-process that diverts attention from potentially damaging
material such as painful memories, fears and forbidden desires, which are masked by their
association with apparently unimportant symbols, objects or situations. As Barry Lewis points out,
“[t]he importance of Freudian displacement to literature is that it encourages the critical gaze to
penetrate the surface of the text and look for the substrata of meaning, unconscious avoidance or
refiguration of content” (16).
The various stages and schools in the development of psychoanalytical criticism reflect the
changing view of the dynamics of the unconscious, and hence incite to different kinds of reading,
based on different ideological assumptions. Some of these schools are:

1) classical Freudian criticism: it focuses on the complex relations between desire and figuration,
which must needs involve an analysis of tropes, an area in which it overlaps with literary studies; it
proposes a dynamic model of the psyche, in which the pleasure principle conflicts with the reality
principle; and
2) post-Freudian criticism. This, in its turn, is represented by various trends:
2.1) Jungian criticism: the personal unconscious is the repository of the repressed contents of the
collective unconscious common to all cultures; the act of creation is an autonomous complex
 originating in this unconscious, and the only decoding method is what Carl Gustav Jung calls
amplification, whereby images of the personal unconscious are immediately extended to those of
the collective;
2.2) ego-psychology: Norman Holland: projects the Freudian transference and counter-
transference, projection and counter-projection on the reader rather than the author and shows
how the literary work challenges and then reassures the reader’s identity; see Reader-Response
theory;
2.3) object-relations theory: Melanie Klein, Margaret Mahler, D.W. Winnicott: the mother is
transformed into parts/ “objects” (e.g. breast, face etc.) that are not differentiated from other objects
in the outer world that the child relates to, though distinguished from the subject; creativity stems
from the desire to make reparation for the imaginary damage once inflicted by the infant in the
throes of innate aggressive and destructive impulses on the primal good object, the mother;
2.4) Lacanian criticism: It is said that there are in fact two Freuds: the “American” Freud of the
id-ego-superego psychoanalysis, and the “French” Freud of semiotics and metapsychology, the
precursor of Jacques Lacan. As Jill Barker sums up, “Where Freud dealt with the construction of
the subject through its lacks and desires, Lacan elaborates the moments when that construction is
an essentially linguistic act. Language institutes loss, but it is also both a response to loss, and an
attempt to seize power over loss” (in Wolfreys & Baker 77);
2.5) Kristevian criticism: Julia Kristeva explains negative figurations of the female body and
especially of the mother’s body in many cultures as an attempt to “abject” what is perceived as
engulfing and threatening. Michael Ryan explains that the mother “is figured as the matter against
which cultural symbol formation works. Cultural symbols distance us from the world by putting a
sign in the place of a thing, a symbol in place of a material object. In this way, the mind, especially
the male mind, can abstract from and protect itself from what threatens it” (99). Kristeva proposes
an alternative representation of the mother-child relation as chora, i.e., the mother and child
holding and comforting each other, using a pre-symbolic, semiotic mode of communication.
2.6) schizoanalysis: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: desire is not rooted in lack, but is
unaccountably present from the start and it tends to one or the other of two poles: a schizophrenic
one which ‘deterritorializes’ desire, constantly shifting boundaries, and a paranoiac one, which
‘territorializes’, marking out certain directions for desire;
2.7) psychoanalytic feminist criticism: influenced mainly by object-relations theory in England
and America, it purports to demonstrate that the feminine, like any other term, is to be regarded not
as a natural given, but as a construction. Some of these feminist psychoanalysts reverse the order of
priorities, focusing on what the experience of child bearing and child rearing does to the mother,
rather than the child, in terms of the tension between desire and socialisation; etc.

The strongest of these schools has been the Lacanian one. Jacques Lacan combines
psychoanalysis with structuralist linguistics, but regards each signifier as invested with unconscious
desire. Hence the gap between the inner private experience of bodily need and the outer public
interpretation of it. Through language, need is addressed to the Other (other subjects in the sign
system) in the form of a demand of absolute love, which the Other has not got to give. What is left
over is unassuaged desire, desire for recognition of the Other’s desire. It follows that there is no
fixed meaning, either latent or manifest, which subjects can rely on and share, yet the text constantly
lures the reader, mirror-like (and also like the image of the Mother), with the promise of the
wholeness he lacks, and entraps him in a structure of repetition.
 According to Lacan, love could be defined as the desire to get from the other what they cannot give,
and to give what they have no use for.

Lacanian psychoanalysis focuses on the text itself as subject: the text evinces loss, wishes and desires
which are imprinted in language itself, since absence and desire generate language (the words stand
for that which is absent). It treats events in the narrative as ‘symptoms’, at once ‘real’ (it is not useful
to think of them as fictional) and metaphoric of a psychic structure. It looks for evasions,
ambivalences, points of intensity, patterns in the use of certain words which reveal that which the
text has repressed.
The text is also Law, the symbolic order of language, and the master-signifier is the phallus,
while the reader is at the mercy of language; at the same time, by assigning an unconscious to the
text, Lacan allows that there will always be gaps in it that neither the author nor the reader will
finally be able to fill in. For Lacan, the self remains a fiction throughout life, acquiring a provisional
identity by giving up the (maternal) phallus. Castration is seen here as a symbolic event suffered by
both sexes, irrespective of their biological sex.

Other representatives: Harold Bloom, Shoshana Felman, John T. Irwin, Robert Con Davis.

Currently, psychoanalytic literary criticism focuses on the ways in which the structures of
loss and desire are expressed through the discourse of the subject, thus opening up the text to
complex metaphoric readings. Jill Barker explains the evolution of psychoanalytical criticism as
follows: “Freud’s original perceptions about the psyche have been altered through the contribution of
later thinkers into a redefinition of the subject as linguistic: people are not just producers of
language, but are themselves constructed by the linguistic structures within which they function. ...
For the psychoanalytic literary critic the events of the narrative can be read as symptoms; they are at
one and the same time ‘real’ within the narrative, and metaphoric of a psychic structure” (in
Wolfreys & Baker 76). She goes on to quote Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory: “by reinterpreting
Freudianism in terms of language, a pre-eminently social activity, Lacan permits us to explore the
relations between the unconscious and human society” (qtd. Barker in Wolfreys & Baker 76). The
unconscious itself, according to Lacan, is shaped like a language and in fact comes into existence
under the impact of language and socialisation and the distancing they produce between desire and
expression. The impact of structuralist and poststructuralist theories of language consists in refining
and explicating the construction of the subject in language: “Using the term ‘subject’ recognizes that
the person who says ‘I’, and who claims to be unified, independent and consistent through time is in
fact shifting and variable, contingent on circumstances and, most importantly, constructed by the
signifying codes within which he/she functions” (Barker in Wolfreys & Baker 78).

Further reading:

The Return to/ of the Unconscious

La mort du Père enlèvera à la littérature beaucoup de ses plaisirs. S’il n’y a

plus de Père, à quoi bon raconter des histoires?
 (Roland Barthes)

One of the landmarks in Faulkner criticism, John T. Irwin’s book Doubling and Incest / Repetition and
Revenge. A Speculative Reading of Faulkner (1975) also represents a turning point in American
psychoanalytical scholarship. Its essayistic, circular, open-ended form enacts and analyses the reflection of
Freudian theory in Faulknerian prose. What emerges is a proliferation of father-son relationships, both within
the Yoknapatawpha saga and outside, signalling the complications of the ways in which the individual is
formed by, and relates to, the world – be it fictional or real, imaginary or symbolic. The book thus marks a
major departure in the direction of Lacanian theory.
In this essay I chart the territory covered by Freudianism, Lacanianism, and Lacanians. Lacanian
psychoanalysis, in dwelling on literary works as conforming to the laws of an internal world of their own,
avoids the speculativeness of earlier Freudian enquiries into the life and creative mechanisms of the author.
At the same time, in being informed by linguistics, from which it extrapolates many of its assumptions
regarding the organisation of the psyche and the signifying processes, Lacanian theory makes itself available
to discussions of the formation and functioning of communities and civilisations. As the work of Michel
Foucault demonstrates, psychoanalysis spills into the study of culture, history and society with fruitful
consequences.
William Faulkner repeatedly insisted that he had never read Freud and that all he knew about
psychology he had learned from his characters and his poker playmates. John T. Irwin explains that this claim
was probably not at all a facetious statement of the writer’s independence of mind; rather, “he had learned
enough about Freud’s ideas to want to avoid the threat to his own creative energy and enterprise that might
be posed by a sense of his own work having been anticipated by Freud’s” (5). One might even be tempted to
say that, out of an exacerbated anxiety of influence, Faulkner had preferred not to know his “Father” at all. Yet
he would be a rather unique case in American literature: Freud’s theories were widely spread among the
intelligentsia in the first half of the twentieth century – witness Faulkner’s own reminiscence about having
picked up all he knew about the psychologist in conversations with writing friends, in New Orleans. In
criticism, too, Freud had a prestigious following, albeit restricted to his ego psychology. Yet, around the middle
of the century, the unconditional enthusiasm for his theories of the psyche was petering out, to a certain extent
due to the temporary momentum gained by the competing Jungian approach and Northrop Frye’s seminal and
creative deployment of it in The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957).
According to Robert Con Davis, André Bleikasten, Richard Brodhead, and others, Irwin’s book
Doubling and Incest / Repetition and Revenge represents a crucial turning point in American criticism. The
publication of Irwin’s essay marks the moment when psychoanalysis’ critical potentials are re-evaluated and
reintegrated in literary criticism. In its new guise, psychoanalytic criticism will embrace the latest developments
in the so-called French or Lacanian Freudianism, an approach at the crossroads of structuralist (especially
Jakobsonian and Benvenistean) linguistics and Freudian psychoanalysis.
A number of features distinguish this reinterpretation of Freud from the older variant of
psychoanalysis. Jacques Lacan’s contribution was a very close reading of Freud that foregrounds certain
elements in the earlier psychologist’s theory and recontextualises them through a sophisticated interpretation
of the psyche as a system similar to that of language. Essentially, the new approach capitalises on Freud’s
analysis of literary and mythical characters as patients revealing an ur-scene (i.e., an initial, or primal,
incident) of trauma whose interpretation could then be used to understand the ailments, anxieties, desires,
frustrations and obsessions of actual people. Of Freud’s theory, few tropes were retained: the many-levelled
structure of the psyche, with the inherent tensions caused by their vying for control and the ultimate lack of a
definitive power hierarchy among them; the resulting schizophrenia, the pre-eminent disease of
postmodernity; the perpetual regress to an anterior traumatic scene; the return of the repressed in the form of
symbols, symptoms, and unintentional revelations. The Oedipal scene of triangular desire becomes, in
Lacanian psychoanalysis, a sequence of two-dimensional relationships, in which the son’s recognition of his
autonomy from the body of the mother marks his entry into the Symbolic order of the non/ nom du père (“the
law of the father,” which regulates social behaviour), in which the mother’s role is negligible. Lacan’s theory of
ego formation and his conclusion that “we are where we think not” (i.e., our true self is in the unconscious,
rather than in the conscious mind) have shaped some of the most important theories about modern society,
and have shed light on many of its paradoxes.
Lacan relies on Saussure’s, Jakobson’s, and Benveniste’s explications of language as a system of
bilateral signs in which there are no positive terms, only differences, and in which meaning itself, to the extent
to which it can be captured, is strictly relational and provisional. The psyche is governed by the same rules
that regulate language, and subject to the same irregular slidings of the signified under the signifier, and of the
signifier from one position to another in a paradigmatic chain similar to the one described by Saussure in
linguistics, but in which the position that has just been left (i.e., a signifier) slides under the new one thus
becoming a signified. In Lacan’s elaboration of the Benvenistean binary of spoken subject/ speaking subject,
the conscious is the former, as revealed in the “material” manifestations of need and articulated demand. The
unconscious, conversely, is the ever-elusive signified, the seat of desire, made manifest only in the brief gaps
that open up as the signifier performs its instance/ insistence or agency. The former, then, belongs to the
Symbolic order, and is therefore the subject’s Other, that which is conditioned by the external law of the father.
The unconscious – which is generated as a result of the entrance into the Symbolic through repression of the
original desire for the mother – is in its turn a structure of signifiers that are externally over-determined.
Therefore, the unconscious, too, is the Other, although the two are never to be confused: they are, as Lacan
puts it, “radically ex-centric” to each other; their relation is one of split, division, and conflict.
Roman Jakobson’s discussion of aphasia brings the working of the psyche into even closer relation to
literary tropes. In his seminal essay entitled “Two Aspects of Language and Two Aspects of Aphasic
Disturbance” (1956), he distinguishes two types of aphasia, metaphoric and metonymic, that operate in
normal verbal behaviour. Jakobson develops these two types of disturbance using as his starting point
Freud’s psychic processes of identification and symbolism, on the one hand, and synecdochic condensation
and metonymic displacement, on the other (in Rivkin & Ryan 94). He then extends his discussion not only to
differentiate between the functioning of language in poetry and prose, respectively, but also to explain the
privileging of metaphor or metonymy by certain artistic trends (92-4). His findings have become hugely
influential in structuralism and poststructuralism, as well as in Lacanian psychoanalysis.
In Lacanian literary theory, not only is the psyche described as a system characterised by the same
differential principles that are encountered in language, but the text itself is assumed to have an unconscious
which can be subjected to the interpretive grid of the twin processes, “identification as misrecognition and
desire and its frustration” (in Knellwolf & Norris 185), but whose functioning can only be described
provisionally. This is an interdisciplinary method which detaches the text from all referentiality and agency and
grants it what might be called, in Robert Con Davis’ phrase, the “psychoanalytical anthropomorphism of the
text” (Davis 1981: 3 – author’s emphasis). It places the father figure qua absence at the centre of the text and
traces the origins of his conceptual existence in his concrete manifestations. Davis sums up:

Since the operations of the psychoanalytical subject and the text are synonymous – rather, since textuality is an
inscription of the subject…a literary narrative shows aspects of such unconscious processes as seduction, primal
scene, and castration – the operations of repression – and these operations (as corresponding functions in narrative)
constitute the fictional substance of a text, what the Russian formalists called the text’s “literariness.” (3)

In other words, according to psychoanalytic theory, what makes a text “literary” is the fact that it functions on
the basis of the same principles that govern the unconscious and it reproduces in its structure the same
tensions and partial resolutions.
Davis then goes on to develop a theory of paternal-filial triangulation based on Irwin’s seminal essay
and applied to the Odyssey, whereby he establishes the primal scene of paternalist law-giving not in the
Oedipal myth, but in an earlier conflict between the gods. Odysseus and Zeus are caught up in a complex
father-son relationship with innumerable ramifications, in which they are both sons and fathers, and their
attitudes to their sons are informed by their fear of their own castrating fathers, on whom they had exacted
revenge. Kronos’ devouring of his sons (rather than be threatened with the fate he had inflicted on his father
Uranus) was the moment when he also destroyed authority, since authority exists only as long as there is
somebody it can be exercised on. In saving his own life, Zeus was also recuperating fatherhood and authority,
marking a crucial reversal – hence his role as protector of fathers and children and giver of the law against
filicide and patricide.i
In this model the son’s desire leaves behind the classical Oedipal fixation on the mother, and
becomes connected with the father, in time reasserting the father’s law. The origins of the unconscious are not
in the father’s “no” to the son’s desire for the mother, but in the son’s subsequent desire for what the father
stands for: the phallus as symbol of both power and authority – and the lack thereof. That is also where the
“origins” of the literary narrative are to be found, according to Davis: “Narratives begin with the binding of the
son’s desire to the father” (13). That binding is expressed in the third term, the conceptual grasp of the
premises of the binding, the equivalent of the factual substance of the narrative, what Peter Brooks calls a
narrative détour (qtd. 13). It is a mediation of the conflict between the scene of the filial desire as against the
paternal “no,” and the son’s “no” to his own son. This mediation is to be found in the “dilatory space” (Brooks’
phrase, qtd. 13) (or rather time) of the narration. Davis concludes:

The symbolic father of…any narrative, is a principle of function that stands behind the mechanisms (the primal
fantasies) of seduction, primal scene, and castration. All of these functions are “unconscious” in that they are
inherent to narrative structure. First among them, however, is the single principle of meaning that precedes the
plurality of narrative meanings and stands behind all narrative developments, much as Kronos’ paternal rebellion
(from its beginning already in a line of paternal rebellions – therefore, already a repetition) stands behind The
Odyssey.… For, within the symbolic constellation lies the lack at the origin that authorizes narrative and intelligibility:
that lack is the primal trace of paternal authority. (25)

The relevance to narrative of “Lacan’s elaboration of the subject as the process of signification,” Davis
explains in his Epilogue, is that “Lacan actually deconstructs the phallocentric cast of personal identity and
finds, in its place, a chain of always partial objects empowered to operate as a system of signification” (185).
Implicated in Lacan’s unity of the subject is always the fundamental split against which that unity acquires its
meaning.
To extrapolate, the primal family scene takes place between father, son, and a third, a mediator, who
is alternately a forefather/ Spirit/ Law/ Symbolic Order. The father pre-exists the son and enacts an always
already existent law; in becoming a father he assumes the role of what Davis calls “wise child,” the link
between the law of the father and the son. Yet he is also an absence, whose presence is manifested in the
traces of his absence, especially in the language of his law; he is the Symbol, the logos, the phallus, the
power – in sum, the object of desire. The father and son positions are fluid: the son supplants the father in the
role of a father to his own sons, whereas the father positions himself vis-à-vis the son as against that which
constitutes him as a father, and thus a manifestation of his own absent father. The father, then, is a function
(see also Bleikasten in Davis 1981: 114), and the inevitable sliding of the son into the position of the father is
comparable to the sliding of the unconscious under the conscious: the former is not completely suppressed
but it is contained and restricted by the laws of the symbolic, made invisible, as it were, except in the traces of
its own absence – i.e., the regression of the now son-less father back to the son position. The third element,
the mediation, is what regulates and makes possible these permutations. In narrative terms, it represents the
long series of events whereby the end is shown to have inhered in the beginning. The narrative, then, is by
definition the subject’s infinite regress in search of origins, which are always elsewhere, in language and
ideology.
Davis’ theory of narrative and meaning as originating in lack and desire is one possible illustration of
the working of psychoanalysis in literary studies: a dynamic dialectics, whereby literature yields meanings that
illuminate psychoanalysis (both as theory and practice), just as the latter unravels the intricate texture of the
narrative. An equally productive approach was that stemming from Harold Bloom’s theory of the “anxiety of
influence” (1973). In his highly influential book of that title, he proposes that the modern writer (especially
since Milton), in his quest for originality and renown, chooses early on, from amongst the literary tradition, a
“father figure,” a writer whom he deeply admires and wishes to surpass in skill and success. M.H. Abrams
explains this predicament in A Glossary of Literary Terms:

The belated poet unconsciously safeguards his own sense of autonomy and priority by reading a parent-poem
‘defensively’, in such a way as to distort it beyond his own conscious recognition. Nonetheless, he cannot avoid
embodying the malformed parent-poem into his own doomed attempt to write an unprecedentedly original poem; the
most that even the best belated poet can achieve is to write a poem so ‘strong’ that it effects an illusion of ‘priority’ –
that is, an illusion both that it precedes the father-poem in time and that it exceeds it in greatness. (qtd. Cuddon)

In other words, the writer who unconsciously feels the influence of a precursor, will do his best to both erase
and outrank that influence, but the process is never complete – witness the plethora of criticism dealing with
texts comparatively and pointing out influences.
This rejection is tantamount to an attempt to free oneself from all forms of immutable authority, Time
included: castration, the dreaded act whereby the Father marks the Son, is, after all, a synecdoche for death.
The traces of the influence, however, are there, in the younger writer’s work, and they establish a complex
dialogue between texts across generations, known as “intertextuality” (a term coined by Julia Kristeva).
Richard H. King, in A Southern Renaissance (1980), explains the modernist writer’s will to originality, which is
also a will to immortality (his creation of an imaginary world being his attempt to withstand time and death), in
terms of both Freudian and Lacanian triangulations of desire and social integration. It emerges that absolute
originality is impossible: the text always already inserts itself in a series with which it initiates a long-term
dialogue and which validates it only to the extent to which the former embraces and modifies the latter’s
language.
Yet psychoanalytical theory does not stop at the level of the literary text. Julia Kristeva, in an early Tel
Quel article entitled “Semiotics: a critical science and/or a critique of science,” urges semiotics to become a
“semiotics of production” (qtd. Selden 245), that is, to admit both the Marxist assessment of the value of
products and the Freudian emphasis on the process of signification into the study of semiotic signs. The
consequence is the recognition of the dual nature of language as both representation and production,
corresponding to the conscious and the unconscious, respectively, and its translation into the symbolic and
semiotic stages of signification. This amounts to a cross-disciplinary explanation of the nature and provenance
of poetic language, which is shown to originate in the irruption of the semiotic into the symbolic structure of
socially-sanctioned language (see Celia Britton in Selden 245-50). John Duvall explains Brian McHale’s
theory of period code dominants in similar terms. McHale is said to pick up the Lacanian elaboration of
Benveniste’s binary, according to which the conscious is knowing, while the unconscious is being, and applies
it to his delimitation of postmodernism from modernism. Consequently, the latter privileges the epistemological
dominant, while in the former the ontological mode has pride of place (in Duvall & Abadie ix). What all these
approaches have in common is the recognition of psychoanalysis’ methodological potentials, its value as an
interpretive grid.
The return to/ of psychoanalysis in American criticism, then, is a return of the repressed, a revaluation
of the interpretive possibilities opened up by the recognition of unconscious processes. It is also a return to
preoccupations with “the exact definition, status and role of signifying practice in relation to the individual
subject and society” (Britton in Selden 252). In this respect psychoanalysis is contiguous with the neo-Marxist
mission of identifying the way in which meaning is historically sanctioned and universalised. But
psychoanalysis is even more closely connected with feminist, gay and postcolonial studies, which, in addition
to having appropriated the tenets of Freudian and Lacanian theory, also have a very strong political agenda.
From this quarter, the most legitimate objections to psychoanalysis’ claims point out that, not only does
psychoanalysis focus almost exclusively on a subject that is fundamentally the Western (white) male as law
giver, but it audaciously draws sweeping generalisations about what is universally valid in human nature, in
total disregard of historical, ideological or gender circumstances, what Philip Weinstein generically calls “[t]he
social engine of producing narratives of normative identity” (in Duvall & Abadie 23). Lacan himself has been
variously accused of promoting a phallogocentric [i.e., centred around the authoritative Word of the Father],
patriarchal, bourgeois idealism, and his style is rather infamous for its elitist obscurity.
The easy line of defence against such indictments is to designate them as symptoms of the anxiety of
influence. Yet there is a more complex aspect to ideologically-based critiques, one that has to do with their
various sociological commitments: such approaches do not allow much agency to the subject itself, but regard
it as socially overdetermined and rather static. Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, focuses primarily on the
individual qua “subject alive and in motion that never can be known directly, but can be known only in its
absence, in the traces it leaves behind: in the presence of an absence that is language” (Davis 1981: 185).
Lacan’s nom/ non du père has an ineluctable social component: its very existence would not be possible
without society’s sanction, even while subject-formation is individually circumscribed.
Psychoanalysis’ most important connection, however, as we have seen, and its most pertinent
critique, resides with linguisticsii: poststructuralism and Lacanian psychoanalysis are irremediably and
mutually informative,iii rooted as they are in the complex processes that grant meaning to language and make
communication possible. From a poststructuralist perspective, psychoanalysis appears to be much too secure
in its belief that there are transcendent universal meanings of human identity which can be reached through
its scientific protocols, while what it appears to be doing is draw hermeneutic circles and generate more
narratives in need of explication, out of the sheer impulse to infinite diagnosis.
The defence mounted by recent psychoanalytic critics like Davis is precisely that this approach is
useful strictly to the extent to which it represents a method of deconstructing the text and revealing its
“unconscious” linguistic and narrative devices, the “paternal gift” of language that “makes narration an ever
present possibility” (1981: 189). This is also the aim – to the extent to which it can be said to have a precise
aim – of deconstruction. The epigraph I have chosen for this discussion (and which – in a gesture that Lacan
would no doubt have appreciated – I have purloined from Bleikasten’s essay in Davis 1981: 115) is a very
effective way of showing their interdependence: if there are no fathers, there is no point in devising and telling
stories.
i
Davis then notes the archetypal quality of the pattern, which is repeated by Odysseus in relation to his various father- (Laertes,
Zeus) and son- (Telemakhos, suitors, suitors’ relatives, his people) figures, and it ends in the reaffirmation of the father’s (Zeus’)
authority, with whom he seals a contract of non-aggression against the suitors’ relatives, and of his own reinstatement as father
to Telemakhos and his people. Moreover, the critic traces in this the most fundamental principles of any religion of sacrifice, in
which the Father (“he that is,” Jehovah – see 18) must cast himself into another, the son, since “One” is the integer, a negative
quantity, which cannot hold meaning except in relation to “others”/ “many.” But as the “other” (or “two” in arithmetic) comes into
existence, a third element inevitably must be allowed: the relationship/ comparison between “one” and “two.” One such
paradigmatic series is One, Mind (that which knows the One), and Life (that which makes the knowing possible and sustains it).
Another is the Augustinian Trinitarianism: Father, Son and (Holy) Spirit/ Soul (of Man).
Furthermore, the son’s existence must be reasserted through the sacrificial death and resurrection, which is also a
reaffirmation of the father’s authority and good will. The soul (Davis’ “wise child” who “knows his own father,” a phrase he
borrows from The Odyssey), for whose benefit this conflict is perpetually re-enacted, (and by whom “the law must be recognized
freshly [every time], as if for the first time” – 22) “mediates the difference between father and son, a difference that in turn
derives from a previous lack of conflict” (20). The “lack of conflict” belonged to Kronos’ narcissistic world of perfect harmony, the
One that was as yet unique, while Zeus introduces a series of “productive conflicts that allow children to survive, and, in this
way, knowledge of the father and of the world comes into being.” The “wise child” signifies “a binding of conflict and unity (son
and father), desire and law, in narrative time.” Davis emphasizes: “unity is not being imposed on conflict (such an imposition
Lacan calls a ‘scandalous lie’), but is structurally part and parcel of conflict” (20). And vice-versa.
ii
In the Epilogue to The Fictional Father, Davis summarily dismisses critiques coming from the province of Marxism and
feminism. Yet he reckons with Gayatri Spivak, who “deftly deflates [Davis’ “psychoanalytic confrontation with narrative
structure”] as ‘the tropological or narratological crosshatching of a text’“ resulting merely in a proliferation of allegorizing
narratives (186). The fact that Davis accepts the challenge posed by Spivak amounts to a recognition of the legitimacy of the
type of critique she represents.
iii
Richard Macksey tells the anecdote of how, at the Johns Hopkins “structuralist” symposium of 1966, when Lacan was told that
among the participants there was also a young French philosopher named Jacques Derrida, “a little cloud, like a man’s hand,
passed over the Master’s face” (in Davis 1984: 1006). In the “Liminal Note” to the same volume, he also mentions Derrida
among those who resisted the influence of the Ecole freudienne de Paris (844). Celia Britton also mentions Derrida as the
thinker who has exposed the inconsistencies in Lacan’s thinking most pertinently (in Selden 207), although he was far from
immune to his achievements (211).