Lacan and free speech: series overview
June -July 2024
I am currently writing a series of articles about Lacanian psychoanalysis and free speech. This is a brief overview of the whole series. I also offer Lacanian psychoanalysis online.
I should warn the reader that I’m doing a lot of handwaving here. Nothing in these articles really amounts to an argument, strictly speaking. At this point, I’m merely gesturing towards a more developed thesis — one which I hope to elaborate in the not too distant future. I have neither the time, nor enough familiarity with the relevant texts, to embark on such an arduous task right away. I beg my readers, therefore, to be patient with me while I attempt to provide, if not yet the finished book, at least the chapter headings, and leave it to them to write the chapters themselves.
1. What does free speech really mean?
This article distinguishes between the classical Greek understanding of free speech and the modern debasement of this noble ideal, and introduces the Aristotelian distinction between public and private. It thus sets up the thesis for the whole series, which is that psychoanalysis can be seen as a modern form of free speech.
2. The critique of philhellenism
This article develops the claim, outlined in the first article, that what is called “free speech” today has nothing to do with the concept as it was originally developed in Ancient Athens. As such, it is neither free, nor does it even constitute, in one highly significant sense, speech at all. The only truly free speech today is psychoanalysis — and specifically Lacanian psychoanalysis, since Lacan was the first of Freud’s followers to understand what Freud was really saying.
This article proposes a novel reinterpretation of the whole Lacanian project in terms of the theoretical framework elaborated by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition (1958). The central idea is that psychoanalysis is a uniquely modern form of free speech. The article sketches a broad outline of the history of free speech in what we now call the West (Europe and the former British colonies in North America and Australasia).
I claim that free speech in the West has so far taken three forms. The first two existed in Athens during the fifth century BCE: first politics, and then philosophy. With the execution of Socrates in 399 BCE, free speech came to an end in Athens. For the next 2,300 years there was literally no place for free speech in the West. It was only when Freud invented psychoanalysis that free speech was finally reborn in the West, in the confines of the psychoanalyst’s consulting room, which paradoxically emerged as a new kind of public (i.e. not private) space.
4. Arendt, Lacan, and schema L
This article maps the four key terms of my story so far — the public, the private, the social, and the intimate — onto Lacan’s schema L. It also explains how certain key terms in which we frame political debate today — such as public, private, and even the term politics itself — have come to acquire very different meanings to the relevant Greek terms in which Aristotle framed his own approach to politics. The gap between the way Aristotle framed the debate and the way in which we approach politics today significantly hampers our attempt to grasp the true meaning of free speech.
5. The distorted mirror of Rome
This article describes some of the problems that have arisen, for modern discourse in English, from the fact that Aristotle’s legacy has largely come down to us via the intermediation of Roman writers and their infelicitous rendering of Greek terms like politeia into Latin ones like res publica. I argue that the Latin terminology of Cicero and other Roman authors has, in a sense, functioned analogously to the imaginary barrier in Lacan’s schema L; it is a kind of looking glass through which the thought of Aristotle has reached us in a distorted, inverted form.
In this article I continue my discussion of some of the problems that have arisen, for modern discourse in English, from the fact that Aristotle’s legacy has largely come down to us via the intermediation of Roman writers by discussing another example of how Latin mistranslations obscure our understanding of Aristotle. My focus in this article is on the term public. Whereas the previous article focused on a Greek term (politeia) that has no Latin cognate, the opposite is the case here; there is no Greek cognate for the Latin publicus. So when Benjamin Jowett translates Socrates’ famous statement οὐκ εἰμὶ τῶν πολιτικῶν (Gorgias, 473e) as “I am not a public man,” we know something fishy is going on.
7. The social and the intimate
This article looks at the rise of the social and the intimate and how they came to eclipse the public/private distinction.
This article introduces the concept of para-public space.
This article finally attempts to make explicit what has, up to now, been my implicit redefinition of the phrase free speech.
10. How Freud rediscovered the art of the gadfly
This article argues that psychoanalysis is to medicine what philosophy is to politics.
11. What Ida taught Freud about psychoanalysis
This article explores one of the major obstacles to free speech in psychoanalysis: countertransference.
12. The immortal life of Ida Bauer
This article argues that, far from being a failure, Freud’s treatment of Ida Bauer (“Dora”) was, for Ida and Freud, a great success.
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A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR: Dylan Evans is the author of An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 1996), which was described by Slavoj Zizek in the following terms:
Evan’s book fully deserves the qualifications usually found on the covers of mass-market bestsellers (“unputdownable”, “page turner”). This breathtaking achievement undermines the false opposition between high theory and simplified popularisation: it provides one of the rare examples of a genuine elitism for the masses, combining the highest conceptual rigor and detailed knowledge of the most intricate twists of Lacan’s teaching with the capacity to present concepts in a clear and articulate way. It is a safe bet that, in a couple of years, this book will become a standard reference.
