The Psychoanalyst As Textual Analyst

Jacques Lacan / Jonathan Scott Lee; Boston : Twayne Publishers, 1990 (100-131 p.) Chapter Five The Psychoanalyst as Textual Analyst Despite the facts that Lacan was essentially a psychoanalyst, that his teaching seminars were meant primarily for analysts in training, and that his published writings were grounded in a dose reading of Freud's texts through the prism of his own experience as a psychoanalyst, in the United*States Lacan's work came first to the attention of literary critics. Indeed, nearly a decade after his death, in this country Lacan remains read much more often in academic departments of literature than in psychoanalytic institutes, and the vast majority of the many articles and books in English dealing with Lacan are written from the perspective of literary criticism. 1 On the one hand, this-fact about the intellectual appropriation of Lacan is largely due to the enthusiastic response of North American literary critics to recent French theoretical writings in general; Lacan has come to be read in circles of literary theoreticians trained on the works of Roland Barthes and Jacques Dcrrida. On the other hand, Lacan's position in current literary criticism is to a great extent a product of the contingent fact that the first mature essays of his published in English—"The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious" (1957) and "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter' " (1956)—both appeared in the influential literary critical journal, Yale French Studies, in 1966 and 1972, respectively,2 and included rather direct discussions of literary texts and figures of speech. As a matter of fact, Lacan's seminars of the 1950s included a great deal of literary commentary. Using his thorough knowledge of ancient literature and of the French classics, Lacan was able to illustrate quite casually with literary examples his points about the importance of language and speech to the proper theorizing of the psychoanalytic experience. In the course of the 1950s, Lacan's use of specific literary .texts underwent a profound development. Where he began by using these texts simply to illustrate points of psychoanalytic theory, he eroded the decade by using literary texts and psychoanalytic concepts in 1OO The Psychoanalyst as Textual Analyst IOI tandem to develop something approaching" a new aesthetics. It is to three examples of extended literary analysis that I turn in the present' chapter.3 Poe's "Letter" In 1966 Lacan chose to open the mammoth collection of his writings, Ecrits, with "Le seminar sur 'La Lettre volee' " ("Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter' ") (£, 11-61). 4 This text had its origins in the seminar of 1954-55, devoted in general to the role of the mot in Freudian theory and technique (see S 2, 207-40/175-205). For its appearance in the Ecrits, the version first published in 1957 was augmented by a twenty-page trio of introductory texts provocatively printed after the seminar's text. To introduce his writings to the general public by beginning with a commentary on Edgar Allan Poe and by elaborating an already difficult text with an extensive and obscure introduction suggests that Lacan thought of this text as doing more than simply developing a psychoanalytic reading of Poe's tale. Indeed, the reader who comes to the "Seminar" expecting some sort of psychobiographical approach to Poe, some sort of account of the way "The Purloined Letter" reveals the character of its author's neurosis, is bound to be surprised by Lacan's commentary.5 Not only does he not treat the literary text as a symptom of Poe's illness, but he does not even ap r proach the tale directly with the aim of/writing a commentary on it. r Rather, Lacan uses Poe's text essentially to introduce his own theory of "the role of the signifier—and thus of speech and language—in the constitution of human subjectivir£j"The Purloined Lerr