Spurious has written an excellent series of posts on Bruce Fink’s Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis (here, here, and here). I cannot recommend this book highly enough, especially for those who have come to Lacan through Zizek without any clinical grounding, and who thus have all sorts of fanciful ideas as to what takes place in an analysis or about the status of the subject, language, act, affect, symptom, real, and structure. Of course, I’m a bit partial to Fink for reasons independent of his scholarship, so I might not be the most objective of judges. Fink also released another book earlier this year, entitled Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique: A Lacanian Approach for Practitioners, that sheds a lot of insight on clinical practice, and which is also filled with examples from actual cases.
More here.
Larval Subjects . 
August 2, 2007 at 5:48 pm
From Spurious’paraphrase of Fink on Lacan
“As such, the analyst’s interjections in the session must be polyvalent if he or she to avoid spoon-feeding the analysand, and creating a relationship of dependency, whereby he or she stands in relation to the analyst as a child to a parent, or a pupil to a teacher.”
When I read these words I asked myself what this might say about teaching literature–interpreting the written word, especially to first or second year students where classroom experiences have too often strung them out in an anxious tension between uncritical affective response and equally uncritical prescriptive formulas, leaving them paralyzed in a frozen block of imaginative repression? How difficult it is to break through their habit of feeding back what they think you want to hear, and how natural it sounds to substitute, teacher for analyst, and student for analysand in Spurious’ paraphrase:
Then what do we do with the fact that, as teachers, we cannot escape our role as authority figures? How do we integrate that into the demands made upon us by the text? Is it possible, in our teaching, to slip in and out of this role–to stand aside before the text–to encounter it with our students, freeing ourselves (and them) from being dispensers of fossilized knowledge? If, “as Fink puts it, there must be a pedagogical element in analysis…[and] the analyst is in some sense a teacher, is there an analogy for the teacher to become, in some sense, and analyst, not of the relationship of the student to their unconscious, but to the text as a manifestation of unconscious of our culture? And what of the danger, mentioned in the section on Pedagogy, of losing the poem as poem?
August 3, 2007 at 3:10 pm
I concur that Fink is an excellent resource for suspending the Zizekian hegemony popular in introductions to Lacan today. I am currently devouring “Reading Seminars I & II: Lacan’s Return to Freud,” which is edited by Fink, as well as Jaanus Maire and Richard Feldstein– with contributions by those listed and many more.
I would like to hear more from Jacob about the conventional-in-the-classroom teacher-student relationship as an analytic of “not of the relationship of the student to their unconscious, but to the text as a manifestation of [the] unconscious of our culture.” That is a vein I am very interested in as well, but not along the lines of a Jungian collective unconscious, but (as worded at Spurious) of the unconscious as “socially produced.”
August 3, 2007 at 5:50 pm
Jacob, I’ve struggled with these questions as well and still have no satisfactory answer. Mark Bracher has attempted to address these questions from a Lacanian perspective in the context of teaching composition. However, Bracher’s proposals often strike me as being too close to expressivist positions.
http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Cure-Psychoanalysis-Composition-Education/dp/0809322218/ref=sr_1_3/002-5103999-0600860?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1186161285&sr=1-3
Off and on I’ve toyed with the idea of what I call a “pedagogy of alienation”. Students enter the classroom with the assumption that they already have clearly defined beliefs that “are their own” and that texts can simply be read and immediately comprehended. Recently, one of our professors had students write their final essays on “their own personal philosophies” (something of which I strongly disapprove, as I see it as having deeply limited pedagogical value, and reinforcing the view that “everyone has their own opinions” without those opinions in any way being challenged). The results of this assignment were predictable: All the students talked about how they’re individuals, how they don’t think like other people, how they’re a bit maverick in their thought, how they question everything. Yet oddly, when the students came to recounting their various beliefs, they were the most ordinary of cliches. In other words, the students are simply repeating dominant cultural narratives and “truisms”, while experiencing these as individual and unique.
The question, then, is how can we break with cliche? What pedagogical technique can be employed to, at the very least, open the possibility of a break with doxa? I do not think this is possible until the student begins to become strange or foreign to himself and the self-evidences of the meaning of texts is called into question. This is what I have in mind by “alienation”. When an analysand enters analysis, he’s convinced that he knows what the problem is, wishes for the analyst to give him a solution to that problem (advice on how to have a better love life, how to be successful, how to earn friends, etc), and that he says what he means and means what he says. The early sessions of analysis involve the controlled production of alienation or division in the analysand.
1. Rather than focusing on what the analysand means to say or intends to say, the analyst instead focuses on those elements of the analysand’s speech where the unintentional occurs (slips of the tongue, double meanings, inversions, contradictions, etc).
2. Rather than focusing on the analysand’s gratifying self-portraits, the analyst draws attention to the bungled actions the analysand recounts.
3. Through the variable length session, the analyst punctuates the analysand’s speech at certain points, shifting the meaning of discourse in a variety of ways.
In all of these cases, the unity of the analysand in the imaginary is called into question. Gradually the analysand comes to question whether something else might be speaking in him of which he is not aware, whether there might be another discourse and set of desires at work. Through this, the analysand’s being as a cliche gradually comes to be abolished, and the discovery of a singular desire gradually unfolds.
The way in which the analyst comports himself towards the analysand resembles the way in which Socrates comported himself towards his interlocutors. Socrates’ interlocutors always manifest the quality of hubris in that they take themselves to be masters of what they’re saying, and to have knowledge of something in particular. Because these subjects take themselves to be complete they are unable to think or learn, for why would someone think or learn if they did not experience themselves as lacking? Just as we do not eat when we’re full, we do not think when we experience ourselves as being complete. Socrates’ strategy is to alienate these subjects from themselves, revealing that they do not know what they think they know. In this, perhaps, they will begin to pursue what they lack. Socrates is thus a sort of Lacanian analyst.
In my own classroom (I teach philosophy, but always from the standpoint of primary texts), I look for assignments that will simultaneously invite cliches, but which depart from these cliches. In this way, I hope to produce a sort of encounter with the otherness or the strangeness of a text. For instance, I might give an in-class writing assignment that asks students to explain Hume’s distinction between “impressions” and “thoughts or ideas”. I give this assignment precisely because I know the students will mess it up. Inevitably the vast majority of students write something like “According to Hume, impressions are the way we think of another person or the way we ‘feel’ about a particular situation.”
I’m delighted by these sorts of answers. Here students are reading the text in terms of their familiar linguistic competence, thinking of things like “first impressions” and projecting this on to the text. Of course, when Hume speaks of impressions he’s referring to nothing of the sort, but rather he’s referring to “sensations” distinguished by their liveliness and vitality, or their degrees of intensity. With an assignment like this, the familiar (here the word “impressions”), suddenly becomes unfamiliar. They come to see that the self-evidence of the world, their familiarity with the world, can in fact be a way of not seeing the world or text at all. A little bit of the void, division, or alienation is thus introduced into the student’s thought process and they become capable of active or reflective reading, where the text, even though written in their own language, comes to be experienced as a foreign language that must be learned. Indeed, that might be one of the central goals: to make the familiar become the foreign… To make their self-identity become a stranger. Until we become strangers to ourselves, I think, it’s impossible for us to be free. Rather, we are simply repetitions of the cultural milieu in which we exist, repetitions of the cliche or the order-word.
As for the issue of abdicating the position of the master, that is far more difficult. A number of professors I know take strong positions in the classroom. I think this is a mistake, as it situates you in the position of the master. Instead, I strive to make my position as indeterminate as possible, arguing now this case, now that case, without ever revealing which case I advocate. When I teach Nietzsche I’m passionately Nietzschean. When I teach Augustine, I’m passionately Augustinean. When I teach Kierkegaard, I strive to completely advocate for the knight of faith, only to turn around the following week and advocate for Sartre’s heroic atheism. In short, I refuse to endorse any position or reject any position, returning the question to my students whenever they ask me which position is right.
August 3, 2007 at 6:30 pm
Hi Larval,
thank you for discussing your ‘teaching’ technique of making the familar unfamilar. It has given me plenty ‘food for thought’ in next year’s seminar classes. I also like your ‘schizophrenic’ teacher/master, who adopts/simulates all roles to create a post-identity form of teaching in the favour of becoming multiple. From my own perspective I think this has political relevance in challenging the dominance of capitalism, which most people have accepted along with the discourse of individualism (which is nothing other than a group fantasy).
March 30, 2011 at 1:09 am
what exactly is meant by lacan’s clinical structures?