Revisiting Lacan
Alexander Kalogerakis
Adieu Lacan, a film by Richard Ledes, offers much to the psychoanalytic viewer. The movie, a fictionalized version of a treatment conducted by Jacques Lacan in the 1970s, relies on two accounts by Betty Milan, the patient in the treatment. Milan, herself a psychiatrist and Lacanian analyst, wrote the play Goodbye Doctor (2008), and a novel, Lacan’s Parrot (1997), both of which use her treatment and later collaboration with Lacan as source material. I will review the movie from my perspective as an analyst trained primarily in the Freudian ego psychology tradition, and offer some thoughts related to technique, pathogenesis, development, and culture.
The movie is set almost entirely in the consulting room. We see an analysis represented by fragments of fourteen sessions over three years. But we are also privy to the thoughts of both main characters. For clarity, I will refer to this cinematic version of Lacan as “the Doctor,” as Milan does in her play.
Soon after “Seriema” begins treatment, she tells the Doctor about her immigrant family and how they were disappointed that she was a girl. This is followed by information about her two miscarriages, which prompted her husband to leave her. After the first miscarriage, she was told she had a medical problem but did not pursue treatment, a decision that led to the second miscarriage. The Doctor is surprised and underlines her choice to not seek treatment. He is starting to interest Seriema in the power of her unconscious. Then he abruptly ends the session.
This is the first of several such endings in the movie. It shows Lacan’s technique of the variable length session. According to Bruce Fink (2019), these unexpected endings are intended to highlight something important that has just happened, and to promote the patient’s reflection on this new information.
Cutting sessions is part of a larger technical approach in which the analyst aims to frustrate and puzzle the patient, and stimulate the patient’s curiosity. Lacan said that good analytic interpretation, especially early in treatment, is like the Delphic oracle’s utterances: intriguing but unclear (Fink 1997).
I have thought about the use of session length as a technique and wondered how else to achieve the laudable goal of highlighting important information in the therapeutic moment. I might do this via defense analysis. When new material appears, be it affective, historical, related to a wish or to the transference, and the patient moves away from it, we are watching a defense in action. We can point it out, thus drawing attention to the original material, but also to the defense against it. This may help the patient know her own mind: wish, defense, superego functioning, and often something about her character as well. These feelings trouble you, and this is how you tend to handle them.
In an early monologue, the Doctor comments on his patient’s “passion for ignorance.” According to Fink (2019), “Lacan went so far as to call the ego our ‘mental illness’ owing to its will not to know” (p. 316). As a result, it is only the analyst’s desire to have the patient express everything related to her unconscious that can overcome her resistance. Freud emphasized repression and resistance, of course, but later (1937) broadened his conception: “our therapeutic work is constantly swinging backwards and forwards like a pendulum between a piece of id analysis and a piece of ego analysis” (p. 238).
Transference-countertransference material, though evident, is not directly addressed in the treatment. For instance, the identification of Seriema’s avoidance of medical treatment coincides with the Doctor’s refusal of his own cancer treatment. Connected to his thoughts about this are feelings about his daughter, paternal feelings that may also enter the transference-countertransference. Similarly, I was curious that when the patient says her husband has been married several times previously and that she does not want to be like the other wives, the Doctor tells her to think about this and ends the session, without raising the transference aspects of the material. Perhaps Seriema wants to be his unique patient. She says his gaze bothers her, but he does not ask about this. He asks about an amulet with the image of an eye that her Black nanny Maria had given her, which she believes is protective. It gives her a “sealed body.” Is this a body sealed off from erotic feelings in the consulting room?
The amulet comes up again later, when it is lost. Here the doctor is prescriptive, joining in his patient’s magical thinking. He tells Seriema to go find it or get another as fast as she can. In a voice-over, he says analysts are gums or actors, who do whatever it takes to keep an analysis going.
This idea of the analyst as an actor or a guru sits poorly with me. It sacrifices neutrality and abstinence, and recalls the young Freud pressing his hand on the brow of his patients to help uncover memories, a technique of suggestion. Andre Green, among others, criticized Lacan for a lack of neutrality and even analytic seduction (Benvenuto 1996).
Maria is a complex figure. As Forrest Hamer (2002) has noted, in American culture black skin may be associated with badness, but also with what is vital and exciting. Maria is presented in dream material dancing and encouraging the patient’s powers of seduction. Seriema’s accusation that the Doctor wants her to be a “noble savage” may be a projection of her idealized view of Maria as an Other who supports Seriema’s wish for instinctual gratification, unlike her mother, for whom everything was a sin.
Later we learn that Seriema had been expected to act like a boy, emulating her father, and to reject the attention of boys, keeping her father as the only important male in her life. As she becomes a more skilled analysand, the Doctor notes her growing ability to listen to herself, and, paraphrasing Freud, tells her that if you can’t remember your past you will repeat it. An example of a curative piece of remembering is of an hallucination of rats. Seriema associates rats with the Arabic name of her father, and the Doctor tells her that now that she has made this connection she will no longer hallucinate. The lifting of a repressed memory obliterates the symptom.
The movie elucidates the fantasy at the core of Seriema’s neurosis, an incestuous wish to carry her father’s baby. The Doctor tells her she now knows what she needed to find out and ends the session. He explains to the viewer that her father had imposed his desire on her, making motherhood impossible.
This construction is crucial to Lacan’s thinking. The problem for neurotics is that they have succumbed to the demands of the Other’s desire. The solution is to find their own desire, free of the Other’s, to become subjects rather than objects. Fink (1997) writes that parents’ desires cause our own desires, and, though this is normal in child development, it later is experienced as an intrusion. Lacan (1972), in an interview, said “the individual is . . . dependent on what he has expected from the world, especially on all the things which have been transmitted to him through . . . the language spoken by his mother. And it is through this that he has received such significant, dominant messages, the desire of which begins to shape and mark his whole destiny. . . .
There is a clarity and simplicity to these principles that I appreciate. However, I suspect that for Seriema and most analysands, the patient is subject to several overlapping fantasies that guide one’s mental life and can result in pathology. In analysis, these fantasies are revealed in multiple, shifting transference-countertransference manifestations. Even before they met, Seriema hoped to become a favored child of the great doctor. Later, she tells him, “I thought you were my father.” More obscure is the appearance of transference material about her mother. For instance, Seriema’s mother too wanted her to be a boy, for her own unexplored reasons. The mother remains a two-dimensional figure.
Freud considered the problem of complex interacting pieces of a neurosis in “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (1937). One of his concerns was whether all of the relevant unconscious material had emerged in a treatment. He thought that an analyst, mindful of potentially important omissions, could introduce these to the patient just before termination. At the movie’s end the Doctor says. “It’s time to stop because you don’t want to be free of your father just to be chained to your analyst.” In a given analysis, it may be that someone becomes relatively free of one pathological internalized object relationship, but not others, and this can be revealed in further work. But Freud declares that this kind of introduction by the analyst may not help. This recalls Freud’s statement in an earlier work (1912) that “hidden and forgotten erotic impulses . . . cannot be destroyed in absentia or in effigy” (p. 108). That is, to be useful they must be manifest and alive in the transference.
Freud (1937) also turns to the question of pathogenesis. Earlier, he offered that hysterics suffer from reminiscences. Late in his theorizing the picture was more complex, and included the strength of the drives and factors that could affect them, including deformations in the ego and whether these were repairable. Subsequent decades of work by psychoanalysts, developmental psychologists, and neuroscientists have enriched our understanding of how endowment interacts with the environment, and the impact of both traumatic and nontraumatic experiences on mental structure, factors minimized in the movie.
Near the end of the film, the Doctor states that the patient is no longer against herself and the analysis is therefore over. This is as close to the idea of structural mental conflict as we see in this fictionalized treatment. Being no longer against oneself can be conceptualized most usefully as progressive freedom from pathological compromise formations. Here I suggest that there is a degree of overlap between conflict theory, viewing analysis as leading to compromise formations that allow for greater pleasure, and Lacan’s emphasis on promoting the patient’s freedom from the dictates of the Other, leading to a greater experience of subjectivity and one’s own desire.
“Analysis Terminable and Interminable” is not only one of Freud’s last statements on technique, but is also the work of a terminally ill analyst. By the time it was written, Freud had had several surgeries on his mouth and a recurrence of cancer. In the movie, the treatment ends in 1978. Lacan died of colon cancer in 1981. Freud questioned the promise of analytic treatments and offered some ideas about its limitations. We see no such ambivalence in the Doctor with Seriema. He asserts the need for analysis and the power of analysis. I was struck by this depiction of late-life Lacan as more akin to a younger Freud (1900): Freud the conquistador. This dovetails with Lacan’s repeated efforts throughout his career to return to Freud, and also with his theoretical proximity to Freud’s topographic rather than structural model of the mind.
One of the puzzles presented in the movie is that of language and culture. For the Doctor, the analysis is not complete until they have solved this puzzle. For Seriema, the Doctor was not only an eminent psychoanalyst, but a leading member of the French intellectual elite, something highly valued in her family. Thus, she is trying to connect with a fantasied ancestral font. By seeking analysis in this way, Seriema places herself in a situation of liminality. This term, from anthropology, signifies an in-between state, a transition accompanied by disorientation. The movie suggests that entering into this state of disorientation was crucial to Seriema’s personal growth and ability to engage in analysis. Choosing analysis in French, rather than in her native tongue, reflected both a wish and a resistance. In this way, the movie offers a timely reminder that every analytic encounter involves two individuals, each with a distinct cultural, racial, ethnic, and gender identity. Sometimes we ignore this part of the analytic situation, preferring to sanctify core analytic concepts as universal and immutable. But if we do, we run the risk of losing opportunities to help the patient and to enhance our analytic understanding. We are much better off doing the hard work of adapting analytic concepts to progressively encompass the multifaceted identities of our patients and ourselves.
Gore Vidal said that movies were the lingua franca of the twentieth century, that is, a common language among people with diverse native tongues. I believe that with Adieu Lacan Richard Ledes presents an artistic vision of a psychoanalytic lingua franca, a common language spanning the unconscious, wishes and desires, the developmental story, transference, resistance, and, perhaps, the legacies of both Freud and Lacan.
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REFERENCES
BENVENUTO, S. (1996). Against Lacanism: A conversation with Andre Green. Journal of European Psychoanalysis 2, online.
FINK, B. (1997). A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
FINK, B. (2019). On the value of the Lacanian approach to analytic practice. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 100:315-332.
FREUD, S. (1900). Letter from Freud to Fliess, February 1. In The Complete
Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904, ed. J.M.
Masson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986, pp. 397-398.
FREUD, S. (1912). The dynamics of transference. Standard Edition 12:99-108.
FREUD, S. (1937). Analysis terminable and interminable. Standard Edition 23:216-253.
HAMER, F.M. (2002). Guards at the gate: Race, resistance, and psychic reality.
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 50:1219-1237.
LACAN, J. (1972). Jacques Lacan giving a lecture at the Catholic University of Louvain in 1972. YouTube.
MILAN, B. (1997). Le perroquet et le docteur [Lacan’s Parrot]. La Tour—d’Aigues, France: Editions de l’Aube.
MILAN, B. (2008). Goodbye Doctor (a play), transl. C.E. Landers. In Analyzed by Lacan: A Personal Account. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023.