Social and Personality Psychology Compass 7/5 (2013): 261–274, 10.1111/spc3.

12025

Lacan and Social Psychology

David Pavón-Cuéllar*
Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo

Abstract
Jacques Lacan kept silent on the topic of social psychology, never referring to it, not even to criticize
it. But this has not impeded Lacanian theory from inspiring diverse critical approaches to social
psychology. After reviewing these approaches, the article examines Lacan’s different explicit positions
with respect to psychology, the social and what he called psychology of the social field. This allows us to
infer the implicit manner in which Lacan would establish his silent relationship with social psychology.
On the basis of this relationship, we outline an original proposal for a Lacanian critical approach to
social psychology that might lead to an alternative transindividual metapsychology. Our proposal
precisely differs from others in that it attempts to consider and elucidate Lacan’s own attitude regarding
social psychology.

Lacan’s Silence
Enrique Pichon-Rivière (1972) narrates that in 1969, while discussing one of his works,
Lacan asked him: “Why social psychology, why not psychoanalysis?” It was as if the French
psychoanalyst did not understand or accept that his Swiss-Argentine colleague spoke of social
psychology and not just psychoanalysis.
If one is a psychoanalyst, then why speak of social psychology? We can better appreciate
the importance of this question when we recall that Lacan systematically avoided the topic
of social psychology, never mentioning it, not even to criticize it, dismiss it, or explain
why he never spoke of it. This is strange, for Lacan often refers to all the other human and
social sciences that relate to, or neighbour on, his own work, even those that he judged most
dangerous and questionable. Why, then, did he maintain this hermetic silence with respect to
social psychology? This silence is intriguing, seems highly significant and, in and of itself,
justifies an exploration of Lacan’s relationship with social psychology.
To begin, if Lacan never openly referred to social psychology, then how are we to go
about exploring his relationship with this field? One possibility – and the one chosen for this
article – would consist in probing his attitude to what he called the psychology of the social field
and then moving on to examine, separately, his explicit relationships with, first, psychology
and, second, the social, in order to, finally, see how these two relationships might be
articulated and infer the way in which Lacan would implicitly establish his relationship with
social psychology. All of this should make it possible to elaborate and sketch our proposal for
a critical Lacanian approach to social psychology that might lead to an alternative
transindividual metapsychology. However, before expounding our original proposal, it is
necessary to first re-examine the context of the relationship between social psychology and
Lacanian psychoanalysis, and then review other analogous proposals that precede ours, but
have always proceeded along a different path, with no attempt to elucidate Lacan’s own
attitude towards social psychology.

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262 Lacan and Social Psychology

Social Psychology and Lacanian Psychoanalysis

When one reflects upon the relationship between Lacanian psychoanalysis and social
psychology, the first point to be clarified is whether these two fields are the same or different,
proximal or distant, tightly linked or completely disconnected one from the other, and
comparable or irreducible one to the other. Here we find two apparently opposed opinions.
At the pole of the maximum differentiation between the two fields, there is Ian Parker’s
(2003) blunt assertion that Lacanian psychoanalysis “is not” social psychology (p. 105). At
the other extreme, that of approximation and close linkage, stands Jacques-Alain Miller
(2003), who thinks that “Lacan’s most constant orientation” rests upon the Freudian idea that
“individual psychology is, from the outset, a social psychology” (p. 113).
The opposition between Miller and Parker vanishes when we probe more deeply into the
arguments that sustain their respective opinions. The social psychology that Miller (2003)
perceives in Lacanian psychoanalysis corresponds to a “primordial transindividuality”
(pp. 112–113) that Parker also discovers in Lacan’s theory and in his “view of each individual
human subject as always already social” (pp. 104–105). This always already social individual of
which Parker speaks is precisely the one that underlies, in Miller’s words, the individual
psychology that is, from the outset, a social psychology.
The difference between Parker and Miller does not reside in their respective representations
of the Lacanian perspective, both of which are adequate and concordant, but, rather, in their
ideas regarding social psychology and its relationship with Lacan’s theory. Though these ideas
are diametrically opposed, both emerge as accurate conceptualizations. We understand well that
Miller can closely link Lacanian psychoanalysis to a Freudian social psychology tied to individual
psychology, based on the configuration of the family, traced back to the primordial horde and
explained on the basis of a double identification (vertical-symbolic with the leader, and
horizontal-imaginary with one’s peers), which would be constitutive not only of individuality
but also of society (Freud, 1989). But it is also understandable that Parker denounces a
fundamental incompatibility between Lacanian psychoanalysis and a social psychology of
behaviourist and cognitivist inspiration that has developed over the last century, and which sets
out from a simplistic idea of something social arising from the aggregation-integration of
individuals, but remaining separated from them and being placed outside them (environment,
authority, facilitation), between them (influence, imitation, communication, conformity,
group dynamics, interpersonal attraction), through them (crowd phenomena, representations,
identities), or inside them (attitudes, prejudices, stereotypes, cognition, cognitive dissonance,
self-concept).
Unfortunately, in academic circles, the mainstream approach in social psychology has not
been the psychoanalytical one that Miller has in mind, but the one where Parker finds a
fundamental incompatibility with Lacan. It is true that, in terms of domination, the
behavioural-cognitive paradigm has been rivalled, for almost three decades now, by alternative
tendencies – usually gathered under the general heading of “critical social psychology”
(Gough & McFadden, 2001) – that go beyond the separation between the asocial individual
and the multi-individual social. These new tendencies, inspired in social constructionism
(Gergen, 1985; Burr, 1995) and/or discourse analysis (Potter & Wetherell, 1987; Edwards &
Potter, 1992), seem “closer” to the Lacanian perspective, as they adopt a critical stance towards
the empiricism and positivism of traditional psychology, dismiss “the notion of separate
enclosed cognition”, and occasionally acknowledge the determination of “mental processes”
by language (Parker, 2003, pp. 106–107). However, even here, it is not difficult to discern
certain deep discrepancies that underlie the “misunderstanding” between the Lacanian perspective
and these new tendencies in social psychology (p. 107).

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Procedural differences that contrast constructionist-discursive psychologies and Lacanian

psychoanalysis can be seen between the psychological inference of comprehensible processes
and the psychoanalytical unravelling of incomprehensible conundrums, between the
methodological imperative of exhaustiveness and that of incompleteness, and between
conformity and inconformity with good sense and plain rationalism (Pavón Cuéllar, 2010).
There are also profound notional divergences between consecutive-constructive psychological
duration and the impulsive-retroactive Lacanian temporality, between achievements and
symptomatic failures in construction, between the exclusion and inclusion of a subject distinct
from the enunciated one, and between a limited emphasis on discourse and an ongoing interest
in what escapes, challenges, disrupts or supports it. Lacan would question social constructionism
for its common sense “questioning of common-sense ways of understanding human beings”
(Burr, 1995, pp. 10, 12–21). Many of the taken-for-granted assumptions we find in Gergen
(1985), such as “negotiated understanding” (p. 268) and “shared intelligibility” (p. 273), would
be resolutely rejected and contemptuously relegated to the category of the imaginary by Lacan.
This French psychoanalyst would also insist on putting forward his thesis that we do not use
language, but language uses us, against Potter and Wetherell (1987) and their well-known
definition of the “interpretative repertoires” as “recurrently used systems of terms used for
characterizing and evaluating actions, events and other phenomena” (p. 149).
In both the old behaviourist-cognitivist tradition and the new constructionist-discursive
trend, mainstream social psychology clearly contradicts Lacanian theory. This contradiction
precludes setting out from Lacan and attempting to draw closer to conventional social
psychology without this approach also entailing distancing, dissent and questionings. Hence
the unavoidable critical tone of Lacanian approaches to non-Freudian social psychology.

Critical Lacanian Approaches to Social Psychology

Parallel to the development of non-Freudian social psychology, there has been a long and
prolific psychoanalytical tradition of social research that systematically uses Freud’s ideas,
reiterates or renovates his social psychology, and often supplements it with concepts taken
from Klein, Lacan and other authors (for a comprehensive review, see Lapping, 2011). This
tradition feeds the emerging field of psychosocial studies, which usually has a sociological
location and remains isolated from conventional social psychology (Frosh, 2003). Here again
we confirm the irreducible differences between the psychoanalytical tradition and the
dominant perspectives in social psychology, differences that suffice to justify important
divergences between the current Lacanian approaches to social psychology in its Freudian
and non-Freudian forms of expression.
In its attempt to approach Freudian social psychology, the Lacanian perspective tends to
consist in a reinterpretation, deepening, or simple reproduction and translation into Lacanese.
This way of proceeding, which may well lack a fecund critical element, is the one that
usually penetrates into psychosocial studies and prevails among psychoanalysts, philosophers
and other intellectuals who are poorly versed, or little interested, in mainstream social
psychology (e.g. Z  izek, 1989; Pommier, 1998; Miller, 2003). At the other extreme, we
find psychologists and other scholars who are both attracted by Lacan and very familiar
with mainstream social psychology, which often dominates in their academic milieu
(e.g. Parker, 2003; Hook, 2008; Branney, Gough & Madill, 2009). The Lacanian
approach to this social psychology, which is sometimes presented symptomatically as
an approach to social psychology, tends to be one that is fruitfully critical, deconstructive,
polemic and schismatic, but does not always avail itself sufficiently of social psychology’s
advances in the psychoanalytic tradition.

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If we focus on Lacanian critical approaches to mainstream social psychology, it is easy to

distinguish, at first sight, two types of approaches, namely, theoretical ones, or those centred
on critical discussions of the theory, and methodological ones, or those based on the
contributions of a method that has theoretical and critical implications. In chronological
terms, the first were those that intervened at the level of methodology and, specifically, in
discourse analysis. Their origin dates back to the works of Pêcheux (1969, 1975), Pêcheux
and Fuchs (1975), and D’Unrug (1974), but it was not until recent years that we would find
ourselves before a plethora of critical–theoretical–methodological discussions regarding
the possible contributions of Lacanian theory to discourse analysis in social psychology
(Parker, 1997; Georgaca, 2005; Hook, 2006; Frosh, 2007; Ducard, 2007; Branney, 2008;
Saville Young & Frosh, 2009). These discussions developed parallel to concrete utilizations of
Lacan in discourse analysis (Frosh et al., 2003; Frosh, 2007; Hook, 2011; Saville Young,
2011), systematizations of the application of Lacanian notions to social psychology
(Pavón Cuéllar, 2006) and, especially, the conception, elaboration and implementation
of Lacanian discourse analysis (Parker, 2005, 2010; Pavón Cuéllar, 2010; Neill, forthcoming; Parker
& Pavón-Cuéllar, forthcoming).
Over the last 10 years, together with critical–theoretical–methodological studies, we have
also witnessed the development of critiques of social psychology from the vantage point
of Lacanian theory. This began with works that contrast the psychoanalytic-Lacanian
perspective with psychology in general, and that entail an implicit or explicit questioning
of certain notions of social psychology (Parker, 2000, 2001, 2003). Then there are critical
Lacanian approaches that are directed at specific theoretical currents of social psychology,
such as social constructionism (Georgaca, 2005) and the discursive turn (Hook, 2006; Pavón
Cuéllar, 2006, 2010; Malone & Roberts, 2010). This is how Lacanian psychoanalysis came to
be imposed as a resource of critical psychology (Parker, 2004; Frosh, 2007; Hook, 2008;
Parker & Hook, 2008; Malone, 2012) and was used to justify editing an issue of the Annual
Review of Critical Psychology (ARCP) devoted exclusively to Lacan (Owens, 2009).
That issue of ARCP contains contributions of Lacanian inspiration that broach the topic of
social psychology in very different ways. At one extreme, the reconciler Dashtipour (2009)
utilizes Lacanian psychoanalysis to develop the theory of social identity and, more
specifically, the notion of “social creativity”. At the other end – the belligerent and
combative one – we find the implacable critique of mainstream social psychology in, for
example, De Vos (2009), who denounces psychologization through the Milgram’s exper-
iments, and Pavón Cuéllar (2009), who insists upon the incompatibility of, on the one
hand, Lacanian psychoanalysis that deals simultaneously with the real, the symbolic and
the imaginary, and, on the other, the exclusive consideration of the imaginary in cognitive
theory, of the symbolic in discursive psychology, and of the symbolic taken as the real in
behaviourism. Between these two extreme postures, Dunker and Parker (2009) look for
a way to secretly introduce the Lacanian optic through a critical work in a research
environment that is essentially hostile to Lacan. In that same line, Branney et al. (2009)
reflect on the utility of Lacan and, particularly, of his theory of the four discourses, for
the questioning of psychology and psychologization in the very heart of the critical and
discursive perspectives.
In all of the aforementioned works, even the most conciliatory ones, what stand out are
the profound differences between Lacanian theory and mainstream social psychology. This
is why it is never a question of simply fusing or synthesizing the two fields. To the contrary,
the separation is always maintained, as it is understood that the Lacanian approach to social
psychology can only be a critical one, and it is recognized that its contributions must be
transforming, and even disruptive and subversive.

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Another common denominator of the works mentioned above lies in the use they make of
Lacanian theory. Lacanian psychoanalysis emerges as a general orientation, an epistemological
paradigm, a way of seeing things, even a state of mind that moulds our approach to mainstream
social psychology. Although they use materials extracted directly from Lacan’s oral and written
works, the formulas and notions employed tend to be the most well-known and representative
ones, their use is heterodox and unpredictable, and the way they proceed is very flexible and
eminently creative. Lacanian psychoanalysis is one that inspires, not one that restricts. In an
authentically critical approach, this free attitude is the best thing that one can have, the most
meritorious and fruitful, though it is convenient to complement it with a more timid inquiry
that limits itself to systematically elucidating the hypothetical relationship that Lacan himself
might have established with social psychology. This is the research direction in which we
now intend to take the first steps.

Lacan and Social Psychology

The individualist projection

We must begin with what may well be Lacan’s clearest assertion on social psychology. In
1957, the French psychoanalyst writes on a “psychology of the social field” that “projects
its schemes” in “maps” in which there are only “individuals, the only points admitted to
be joined by relational vectors” (Lacan, 1999a, p. 449). This psychology of the social field is
apparently the same one to which Lacan would return, a few months later, when he refers to
the “psychologists that project individual relations onto the inter-human, inter-psychological
or social field, on group tensions” (1998a, p. 197).
In these two extracts from Lacan, the psychology of the social field is the psychology of the field in
which psychology itself projects individual relations or schemes of relational vectors among individuals.
Individuals and their individual relations are the only object of the psychology of the social
field. For this psychology, therefore, there are no group, social or transindividual elements
that transcend the individuality of subjects. Hence, the most important aspect for Lacan’s
social theory is absent, namely, the transindividual signifier that represents and divides a subject
who is no longer an individual, undivided and indivisible, but precisely a divided subject.
The nonindividual subject of Lacanian psychoanalysis does not fit into a psychology of the
social field that only admits the existence of individuals. To the degree in which it only admits
the existence of the individual projected onto the social field, this psychology can be described
as an individualist projection. We can understand that this projection is not accepted as a social
psychology by Lacan. It is clear that there is nothing social in it. The only social aspect, and it is
not present in the projection, is the social field upon which the projection is made.
The social field is indeed social, but the psychology of this field is not. If our deduction is
correct, then we can begin to understand why Lacan does not speak of social psychology. But
we may ask: Is there no other social psychology, the one that Freud refers to, which admits a
fundamental transindividuality, a structure whose relations are not only individual, and a division
of the subject between its identification with a leader and its alienation in the masses? Why does
Lacan not address this social psychology either? We can only begin to respond to this question
once we have reviewed how Lacan relates himself critically to psychology and the social.

Lacan and his critique of the psychological

Lacan has a bad relationship with psychology. This relationship is forged not only on the basis
of theoretical and practical divergences but also on personal and institutional conflicts

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266 Lacan and Social Psychology

between Lacan and a psychoanalytic movement dominated by the desire to assimilate

psychoanalysis to psychology. Any such assimilation is flatly rejected by Lacan.
For Lacan, “the distance” between psychology and psychoanalysis must be maintained
(1999a, pp. 214–215). There is no “possible accord” of psychoanalysis with psychology
(p. 179). Psychoanalysis “contradicts” psychology (2001a, p. 376). The “dominion of validity
of what is called ‘psychology’ (reality) has nothing to do with the level (the signifier) upon
which psychoanalysis rests” (1990, pp. 159–160). What Lacan finds between psychoanalysis
and psychology is an essentially negative connection characterized by nonrelation, distance,
disagreement and contradiction.
The Lacanian idea of the negative connection between psychoanalysis and psychology is
inseparable from the no less negative way in which Lacan represents psychology. In this
representation, for starters, psychology is “an error of perspective” (1998b, p. 423), is “poorly
grounded” (1999a, p. 257), and adheres to an “illusion” (1999b, p. 340). In spite of all this,
however, psychology is sure of both itself and its verity. Lacan denounces “the security of
psychologists”, that, since it is founded upon nothing but error, emerges as “affectation”
(1999a, p. 44) and “pedantry” (1999b, p. 224).
The pedantry and affectation of psychology are revealed through its objectivist, materialist,
positivist and scientificist pretensions. In its objectivism, and in contrast to a psychoanalysis
based on “the relationship of subject to subject”, psychological “manoeuvring” reduces the
“subject” to an “object” (Lacan, 1999a, pp. 213–214). This “mirage of objectification”
(1999a, p. 115) remains “solidary” with the “discourse of opinion” (1999a, p. 416). That which
is opined is what determines that which is objective. Objectification will depend on the ideological
determination of a certain inter-subjective common sense. Thus Lacan distinguishes objectifi-
cation from objectivity.
For Lacan, psychology is not an objective science but an objectivist and objectifying
discipline. “Conceptual erosion” is what makes it possible to “objectify” certain residual
concepts that have been isolated, solidified and hardened over time, as in the case of sensations,
sentiments, impressions and other “objects” of psychology (Lacan, 1999a, pp. 73–74). All these
“objects” are nothing more than objectified ideas that can even be converted into behavioural,
physiognomic or cerebral material things upon which all “materialism” of psychology is
grounded (p. 74). Psychological objectification may thus entail materialization or “reification”
(1999b, p. 347), as well as positivization of that which has only a negative existence as that which
cannot be penetrated by thought because of conceptual erosion. The eroded, compact and impenetrable
concept is separated as an object and becomes a seemingly “material” thing, but “is simply not
positive, which excludes objectivity and materialism” (1999a, p. 73).
Because it lacks materiality, objectivity and positivity – the only poor guarantees of
scientificity that psychologists have to offer – their psychology has no right to present itself
as a science. Psychology, for Lacan (1999a), is not science but “scientificism” that takes
science as the “object” of its “passion” and “prostration” (p. 79). In its inflamed veneration
of science, psychology displays an accentuated “religious” aspect that Lacan emphasized
when denouncing its foundations of “illumination” and “obscurantism” that contrast with
the simple “enlightenment” of psychoanalysis (1998b, p. 394; 2001a, p. 143).
Unlike a psychoanalysis that holds to the real and to the symbolic value of the “signifier”,
psychology lets itself be carried away by the imaginary reality of a “signification” (Lacan,
1990, pp. 246–252). This “imago” is “the very object of psychology” (1999a, p. 187).
Psychology is “the dominion of the imaginary” (p. 80). The imaginary framework of
“narcissism” borders upon “the entire field” of psychology (1990, pp. 216–217). This frame-
work is what allows psychology to conceive the “ego” as a form of “autonomy” (p. 159) and
to postulate “the unity of the subject” (1999b, p. 275).

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The unity of the subject and the conception of the autonomous ego, like the assumption
of the individual “adapted” to his “environment”, are based upon the psychological principle
which holds that “everything must fit together” (Lacan, 1981, p. 95). Lacan rebels against
this normative principle, insisting that there are always “anomalies” (p. 16) or “things
that do not fit” (p. 95). These things are not recognized by psychologists, according to Lacan,
because psychology depends upon an “ideal” of “unity” and “homogeneity” (1999b,
pp. 311–312). This case confirms that “all psychological science is affected by the ideals of
the society in which it is produced” (2001a, p. 130).
Society purposefully chooses its psychology. Our psychology, for example, must “serve”
certain “interests” in “current society” (1999b, p. 313). In this neoliberal capitalist society,
psychology never ceases to serve the interests of a capital that requires adapted beings, good
workers, and good consumers. This is how our psychology displays “its low uses of social
exploitation” (p. 278) by “explaining” how “to behave” in the “society dominated by capital
accumulation” (1965).

Lacan and his critique of the social

Though Lacan invokes society to criticize psychology, his relationship with the concept of
the social itself is almost as critical as the one he establishes with the discipline of psychology.
In both cases, we are dealing with categories that are both epistemologically dubious and
ideologically suspicious. Lacan ends by disassociating himself clearly from them, never even
mentioning them except to question and problematize.
Before falling into the category of the questionable and problematic, the social was axiomatic,
basic and central for Lacan. As eloquent examples we would mention the conception of the
“social ego” as the coronation of the “specular ego” (Lacan, 1999a, p. 97), the “function of social
relationship” of “most psychic phenomena” (p. 80), and the definition of the “original order of
reality” as a configuration of “social relations” (2001a, p. 27). This insistence on the fundamental
and structural character of the social is one of the distinctive traits of the young Lacan’s
reflections.
It is only after 1950 that Lacanian psychoanalysis self-imposes a “limitation on the individ-
ual”, thus keeping itself on this side of the threshold of “sociological objects” and focusing on
that which “plays a basal function in every society” (Lacan, 1999a, pp. 125–131). In the mature
Lacan, society no longer fulfils this function, for something different comes to play the basal role
there. Henceforth, the social is no longer basal; it ceases to be at the basis, at the infrastruc-
ture, and stops determining, deciding and explaining everything in the psyche. In other
words, it ceases to be the explanans, that which is the fundamental and the structural in
the psyche, and becomes the explanandum, that which is explained, founded and structured
by that psychic with which psychoanalysis concerns itself. That psychic then becomes
language, acquires a signifying infrastructure, and is placed at the basis, while the social is
transferred to a kind of superstructure. By 1956, in addition to discarding “the notion of
society as responsible for that which happens to the individual”, Lacan (1981) recognizes that
the concept of “society” itself can be “called into question” since it is a simple “signifier” that
“does not signify anything” (p. 210).
After reducing society to a simple signifier, Lacan proceeds to represent it as something
that “is founded” upon a “discourse” (1991, p. 146), and as a “social link” that is nothing
more than “discourse” (1978, p. 70). In this perspective, the so-called social bond ceases to
consist in an “inter-subjective relationship” to take on the form of an “inter-signifying
relationship” in which there are no subjects and where only the signifiers that “represent
the subjects for other signifiers” associate (2007, p. 10). Instead of a direct relationship

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between real subjects, there is nothing but a connection between their symbolic representatives,
between their masks, names and attributes, between words or signifiers, between “the master”
and “the slave”, between “the westerner” and “the other”, and between different positions
within the structure of language. But this reduction of society to the signifying structure, this
recognition of the “symbolic” character of the “structure” of “society” (1999a, p. 131), does
not impede Lacan from reserving the term “culture” for the symbolic order and the signifying
structure of language, while relegating “society” to nothing more than the name of the
“degradation” of this “culture” (1998a, p. 264). Society is thus not even something purely
symbolic, a discourse or a signifier, but a “disintegration” of language as the symbolic unity
of culture (1959).
Culture loses its symbolic unity because of social dissociation. And this dissociation is the
only way in which society exists from a Lacanian perspective. From this viewpoint,
dissociation can be found everywhere in society. There is the fundamental partition among
social classes or between masters and slaves, and the correlative intimal division of each
subject between its own mastery and slavery. There is also the elemental differentiation
among associated subjects, among their unique experiences of the symbolic unity of culture,
and among their irreducible particularities, their incommensurable symptoms, their
unconnected objects, their unrelated words, their disparate enunciations of the Other’s
discourse, and the unconscious concerning each one of them.
Social dissociation is the truth of society for Lacan. Thus, for him, this truth lies in the
not-being of society. The social consists in its inconsistency, in its rupture, in the absence
of the only real relationship, the “sexual relationship” (Lacan, 2007, pp. 65–71) that “is
lacking in all forms of society” (1975, pp. 186–187). This only goes unnoticed because
the lack, castration, disappears behind “the mirror” as “fragile frame of the imaginary
relationship” (2001b, pp. 246–247). It is here that all the reality of the social is displayed,
an imaginary reality, the “unreal reality called psyche” that is the concern of “psychology”
(2004, p. 24).

Our Lacanian Critical Approach to Social Psychology

Signifiers vs. significations

In the Lacanian perspective, in which the social is imaginary and psychology deals with the
imaginary, there seems to be nothing as viable as a social psychology that deals with the social
imaginary. This imaginary is that which seems to be divided artificially into behaviours,
attitudes, stereotypes, representations, identities and other objects that turn out to be just
products of conceptual erosion, but that social psychology must study in order to avoid
the subject.
Instead of listening to the signifier that represents the subject for another signifier in an
inter-signifying relationship, social psychology prefers to concentrate on the signification
that it attributes to the signifier, on the inter-subjective social relationship that it imagines
between the signifiers and on everything else that common sense dictates to it through its
ideological determination. All of this is objectified, through surveys and experiments, by a
social psychology that is just as objectivist as every other psychology, with which it also
shares materialist, positivist and scientific pretensions. However, like other psychologies,
social psychology must be characterized by a religiosity that not only leads it to the
scientist veneration of the science that it does not practice, but also to believe devotedly
in the objectivity, materiality and positivity of that which it imagines, as is the case, for
example, of society in itself, imagined as a consistent totality in which everything fits.

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Dissociation vs. society

Following the aforementioned psychological principle which holds that everything must fit,
social psychology presupposes a social totality into which it makes all objects fit, and with
which it covers up everything that does not, i.e., irreducible singularities, unique experiences,
unconnected objects, unrelated words, disparate enunciations, incommensurable symptoms,
anomalies and irregularities, disruptions and subversions, the absence of relationships,
maladaptation and fragmentation, structural incongruities and absurdities, and disaggregation
and degradation; that is, the dissociation that characterizes the social as conceived by Lacan.
We can say, then, that the truth of the dissociation of society, the negative truth of its not-being,
disappears behind the imaginary reality that is positivized and objectified by social psychology.
This is how positivist, objectivist social psychology dissimulates all that is threatening in the truth
of the social: on the one hand, the possibility of that which is heralded by disruptions and
subversions, that which must not be but can come to be; on the other, the impossibility of
the social, its inherent dissociation, its disintegration into irreducible singularities, as well as its
internal tearing, conflict, class struggle, and its “group tensions” that vanish behind “the individ-
ual relations” that “psychologists project onto the social field” (Lacan, 1998a, p. 197).
The truth of unfitness must be hidden from the eyes of those who believe they are
working for that in which they fit. People must not realize the inherent dissociation of the
social, the structural incongruities and absurdities of the symbolic system of culture, its lack of
internal harmony and congruence, this unsatisfactory and even unbearable inappropriateness
that Freud (1962) calls Unbehagen, which also evocatively means discontent, pain, discomfort,
uneasiness or annoyance. While all of this must be methodically eluded, overlooked and
concealed by social psychology, it remains one of the central questions that psychoanalysis seeks
to elucidate.
In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the Unbehagen is explained, tentatively, on the basis of the
intrinsic unsuitability of the symbolic system of culture for a subject who cannot subsist in the
system without making an effort of nonsatisfaction of drives, a “labour” of “renunciation” of
“the real” of “enjoyment” (jouissance), which must logically be “excluded” from “the symbolic”
(Lacan, 2006, pp. 17–19, 327). This renunciation is the basis of culture in Lacan (2006).
Freud (1962) also thinks that “culture is built upon a renunciation of instinct” and “presupposes
a non-satisfaction” (p. 44). Our nonsatisfaction would thus be necessary for culture; therefore
culture would be, in a sense, the nurturing of our nonsatisfaction.
Most of our activities would thus become unsatisfactory labours exploited by the symbolic
system of culture. But this exploitation must be invisible in order to be tolerable, and tolerated
in order to be perpetuated. This is why, in order to continue exploitation, the system requires
social psychology and other ideological resources that serve to objectify harmonious images of
the social. These conciliatory and calming images allow social psychology to justify itself by
demonstrating its low use of social exploitation and its complicity with the system.

Division vs. individualisation

To preserve the cohesion of the symbolic system of culture, and to conjure up the always
threatening social dissociation, social psychology offers unitary images in which society
appears as that which is common to a uniform, homogeneous complex of individual particles.
Each particle, each monad, must prove and sanction the whole. But the whole divides each
particle, divides each subject between the whole and something else, between identification
with the political state and alienation in civil society, between the One and the Other, and
between citizenship and life (Marx, 1844). It is here that the individualist projection, like the

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270 Lacan and Social Psychology

Bourgeois State constitution, must operate in order to achieve socialization and ultimately unify
the cultural order through the individualisation of its subjects. First, the individualist projection
conceals the division of each alienated subject, its alienation or separation from itself, its split
between identity and alterity, by reducing it to an individualized social identity that seems to
obey the same fusing principle that we find in citizenship or nationality. Then this same
projection reduces the transindividual battlefield of class struggle to a mass of uniformed
individuals who are more or less deviant, but always related, similar and comparable among
themselves, identical to themselves and identified with each other, just like members of the
same society or citizens of the same State.
When showing “the Marxist side” of the “experience indicated by Freud”, Lacan (1986)
endorses Marx’s “pertinent” critique of Hegel, rejects the Hegelian “abstract solution” of a
State that transcends social dissociation and “particular necessities” (pp. 246–248), and would
certainly not disagree with the classic Marxist conception of the State as a “predicate” of a
social “subject” (Marx, 1843), as “an organ for the oppression of one class by another” and
as “the creation of ‘order’, which legalizes and perpetuates this oppression by moderating
the conflict between classes” (Lenin, 1976, p. 10). A modern and liberal way of moderating
this conflict and unifying society lies in the political–juridical pulverization of dangerous and
conflictive social classes into weak, inoffensive and profitable citizens, taxpayers, or voters.
And it is by this same token that hypermodern, neoliberal psychology, as an “ideological
apparatus”, achieves socialization through a psychological, individualizing “interpellation”
(Althusser, 1970) that recreates the agent of traditional modern ethics, a self-identical,
self-aware and self-governing individual that has nothing to do with the Lacanian divided
subject (Neill, 2011).
In both ideological–psychological and political–juridical individualisation, the individual
ego becomes confounded with a social identity. Society becomes one, identical to itself,
through its identification to its individualized member, who also becomes one through this
same identification. All of this can be illustrated, from the outset, by the Hobbesian figure
of Leviathan. The body of the State is united by the body of the King, the only accomplished
citizen in an absolute monarchy, but one who multiplies in modern liberal democracies,
though without losing its original unity. This unity is preserved through the uniformisation
of people, through the juridical–political equalization of citizens, through the ideological–
psychological normalisation of individuals, through their standardization and their resulting
sameness or homogeneousness, which allows us to count votes, to disregard the intimal
division and unquantifiable singularity of each subject, and to make a certain use of quantitative
methods in social psychology.
Individual unity affirms and confirms social unity. Both imaginary unities reflect to each
other in a specular surface that is not unrelated to what Lacan (1999a) explains concerning
the mirror stage. It is the mirror that covers “disintegration” with “orthopaedic forms of
totality” that become “armours” of “alienating identities” (pp. 92–99). It is the same mirror
with which individualist social psychology conceals individual division and social dissociation.
In Lacan’s terms, that which is hidden here is “the real” of “the division” that “the subject
introduces” into both “the individual” and “the collective” (pp. 290–291).

Refutations vs. confirmations

In a Lacanian perspective, both the social and the individual are internally disjointed by that
which represents the subject. The social is dissociated between classes, fathers and brothers,
masters and slaves. The individual is also divided between mastery and slavery, paternity
and fraternity, verticality and horizontality, identity and alterity, and identification and

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alienation. This individual division cannot be abstracted from the social dissociation. Both are
the two sides of the same subject’s splitting. This is what we learn from Freudian social
psychology. However, even in this nonindividualist version, social psychology presupposes
the positive existence, not only of the psychology of the social, distinct from the psychology
of the individual, but also of the social that has its psychology and is distinguished from the
individual. These assumptions, based on their mutual support, are rejected by Lacan, for
whom, as we noted at the beginning, there is no distinction between the social and the
individual, nor between social psychology and individual psychology, just as there is no
positive existence of the social or the psychological. This could explain, at least in part,
why Lacan avoids speaking of social psychology.
As Lacan himself asked Pichon-Rivière, why speak of social psychology? To speak of social
psychology, even of a critical kind, would mean confirming the social through the
psychological and the psychological through the social, while Lacan strives, rather, to refute
the one by the other, as he does when he establishes, separately, his two relationships with
the psychological and with the social. When we cling to these relations and their possible
articulation, as we have attempted to do, our critical Lacanian approach to social psychology
cannot but consist in a radical objection and impugnation of that which we are approaching.
The imaginary reality of social psychology must be excised here and transcended through a
gesture that leads us to the symbolic milieu of transindividual metapsychology, which
negatively encompasses the real of the subject, of individual division and social dissociation.
This might well be what is of greatest interest to Lacanians in social psychology. And it is
most surely not social psychology.

From Social Psychology to a Lacanian Transindividual Metapsychology

As Lacanians, we should not proceed through the social–psychological methods of individualist
projection, individualizing interpellation and ideological–psychological individualisation. Nor
should we reduce the divided subject to an artificial asocial individual abstracted or extracted
from the social before being projected into it, aggregated-integrated in it, and confounded-
identified with it. Neither should we reduce social dissociation to a society either composed
by individuals or reflected and confirmed by an individuality that would, in turn, be reflected
and confirmed by its social identity.
In a Lacanian transindividual metapsychology, we would not focus on either the mirror
images of social and individual unities or the meaningful imaginary realities of inter-subjectivity
and objectivity, inter-subjective communication and objective attitudes, conformity and
prejudices, influence and stereotypes, etc. We would not religiously believe in these intelligible
significations. Rather, we would question them and return to the perceptible signifiers, the
structure and the structural inter-signifying relationship. We would listen to the signifier that
represents the subject to another signifier and would dare to analyse discourse as is, as something
symbolic, without understanding too much, without assigning our imaginary meaning to the
words analysed, and without avoiding the real, the letter, the enunciating subject and its
revelation through the event of the irruption of the truth.
As Lacanians, we should focus on the singularity of each event and each subject, and
scrutinize case-by-case, instead of making things easier through generalizations and oversimpli-
fications. Instead of assuming the social as a conciliatory and comprehensible homogeneous
whole in which everything fits, we would consider its dissociation, its disaggregation, its
degradation, its infighting and its class-struggles. We would strive to explain all this on the basis
of the irreconcilability and unceasing confrontation between the repressed or exploited real of
our life, of our irreducibly singular drives and desires, and the repressing and exploiting power of

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272 Lacan and Social Psychology

the economic and political symbolic system of culture, whose functioning would require a
concealing-appeasing imaginary reality created through psychology and other ideological
devices. But we could also avoid all-encompassing explanations, make a science of the
particular, and concentrate only on the evidence of incommensurable symptoms,
unconnected objects, or unrelated words. However, in this latter case, we would be making
a kind of pataphysics or, rather, patapsychology, not exactly a “metapsychology”, which
demands a general meta-theoretical analysis of psychological theory (e.g. Stam, Rogers &
Gergen, 1987), as well as a movement “beyond psychology” for the purpose of explaining it,
critically-reflexively relating to it, and, ultimately, disrupting and subverting its “prejudices”
(Lacan, 1998b, pp. 173–180, 259).
The explicative, critical-reflexive and disruptive-subversive metapsychological operation
must be applied to metapsychology itself, which will have a natural tendency to stabilize,
solidify, answer its questionings, objectify its issues and become psychology again. Such a
psychologisation has to be avoided through an inflexion that would markedly distinguish
our Lacanian transindividual metapsychological approach from current psychosocial accounts
that turn into bad psychologies upon adopting nonreflexive, “normative” or “untruthful”
stances (Frosh & Baraitser, 2008, pp. 362–363). These accounts might need a Lacanian
metapsychological inflexion in order to detain “psychosocializing”, resist “deradicalization”
(Burman, 2008, pp. 374–375) and “redeem the promise” of “a radical approach to power
and ideology” (Parker, 2010, p. 170).

Short Biography

David Pavón-Cuéllar is Professor of Social Psychology at the Universidad Michoacana de San

Nicolás de Hidalgo (State University of Michoacán, Morelia, Mexico). He has taught psycho-
analysis in the University of Paris 8 (France). He has authored books such as From the Conscious
Interior to an Exterior Unconscious: Lacan, Discourse Analysis and Social Psychology (London, Karnac,
2010), Marxisme lacanien (Paris, Psychophores, 2009) and Le révolutio-m’être, application des notions
lacaniennes à l’analyse de discours en psychologie sociale (Paris, Psychophores, 2006). He is the
co-author of Configuraciones psicoanalíticas sobre espectros y fantasmas (México, Plaza y Valdés, 2011)
and co-editor (with Ian Parker) of Lacan, Discourse, Event. New Analyses of Textual Indeterminacy
(London, Routledge, forthcoming).

Endnote
* Correspondence address: Faculty of Psychology, Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolas de Hidalgo, Primero de Mayo 243
Centro, Morelia, Michoacan 58000, Mexico. Email: pavoncuellardavid@yahoo.fr

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