The Dissent Reflex
August 29 2024
A Reichian interprets Lacan.
The authors who today call themselves psychoanalysts, what does this mean? Are they psychiatrists? Philosophers? Why do some of them seem to have a parallel specialization in film studies? It may have become a profitable niche or at the very least a job with social value apparently, for those with a capacity for analysis to ingratiate themselves into a purely cultural milieu, as the managerial interpreters of a supposedly unknowable social unconscious. Enough of today’s known figures of what might be termed a theory industry, subscribe to the ideology of Jacques Lacan that allow me to take liberties by terming his school of thought the hegemonic psychoanalysis. For a figure who never believed in a stable concept of mental health, unlike his contemporary Wilhelm Reich, it strikes as an equally absurd notion that the hegemonic psychoanalysis finds legitimate expression outside of the confines of bourgeois culture. The hegemonic psychoanalysis would appear to have installed itself as a centrality within radical theory that should as a fog of ideology becomes clear develop into a subject of deep suspicion regarding the integrity of the present state of ideology critique. These days it might be possible to speak of a crisis of ideology, an impasse in leftist identity. One way to shortcut the problem is that it consists in identifying what theory and practice is the most authentically radical. However we live in an era of ideology critique in which the very idea of authenticity has been theorized away as so much naive stupidity, to a similar extent that the classic idea of ideology as false consciousness has been made the antithesis of radical chic. The origin of this turn was the unquestioned adoption of the hegemonic psychoanalysis which naturalizes alienation.
One only needs to compare the hegemonic psychoanalysis with a historical example of its radical alternative to get this point. The hegemonic psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan and its practitioners mistake an incomprehensibly obscure reiteration of a reality principle for what is in essence state structures. Yet was this to be treated materially as it is in the work of Wilhelm Reich, it would shatter the essentially transcendental idealist quality of what gives Lacanianism its dense layer of mystification. For Lacan what is a fairy tale postmodernist obfuscation immured in textuality, is for Reich in a phrase the origins of patriarchal authoritarian civilization. The difference between their two approaches is thus almost the equivalent of telling the truth versus making up a patronizing fable to explain where babies comes from. The theory of death drive is this fairy tale for adults who as if felt because it was more sinister, abstract and intellectualized than a fable, meant it was therefore true.
The concept of drive as a Lacanian category I assert results in a picture of false necessity that is no less than a denial of the material force of ideology produced by the state. What is claimed in Lacan’s negative concept of desire as being constitutive of the human condition as such is no more than sociological conditioning. Yet this dialectical interaction of the sociological on the biological that makes up the nature of a conditioning process is absent from the dualist model of consciousness proposed by a theory of drives in which, drawing from An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, they “differ from biological needs in that they can never be satisfied.” This insatiable quality I would argue, and which I believe the Reichian theory bears out is the precise effect of authoritarian mediation on the formation of the psyche, constituting the primary experience of all homo sapiens indoctrinated within the confines of class society or authoritarian civilization.
The structure of the psyche governed by a negative force of desire is posited as an ontological reality in Lacanianism. The idea that drives “do not aim at an object but rather circle perpetually around it”[1] is taken as a cosmic fact. This essentially alienated predicament authoritatively asserted to be a permanent universal feature of human reality is professed as inescapable or unalterable because it’s necessitated or constituted by the absolute ontological existence of a “gap” or a “split” or a “lack.” But insisting this feature is ontological rather than sociological results in the paradoxically idealist conclusion that drive is a purely ideological force. Of course this obscures its eminently knowable material basis in the concrete operations of class society.
It is for this reason that the status of the hegemonic psychoanalysis within radical theory should be radically questioned, especially within the current authoritative ideology critique, where one might suggest it was producing an ideology effect. What this would amount to is in essence a propagandistic effect of ideology within ideology critique itself. To speak of the effect is thus to speak of a distortion. And it would appear this distortion originates from integrating the hegemonic psychoanalysis into the present form of ideology critique.
Speaking of distortion, or intellectual propaganda, I should make it clear what I mean by the character of a hegemonic psychoanalysis that naturalizes alienation. This is apparently necessary considering there isn’t a consensus over the universal undesirability of such a condition. Although many people still desire the chains of capitalism, in what I understand used to be referred to as “false consciousness,” so what do you expect. By alienation I mean both the present fact of the social separation of individuals from a capacity to exist freely in an environment in which they play a natural part, outside of the current form of authoritarian mediation; and the general assumption that there was a period of time in which the homo sapien was able to live in such a state, namely, one that was free from state structures of authoritarian mediation. That which naturalizes or seeks to naturalize alienation therefore is whatever views this middle petrified condition—where authoritarian mediation is a permanent universal—as a fact, not only of life, and present life, but also of, or akin to the very laws of the universe.
I thus call in the spirit of free and open thought for a healthy rebellious questioning of all Lacanian categories. To begin to pinpoint what I hold is their most egregious error, one only needs to consider the centrality of a concept of death drive for the hegemonic psychoanalysis. However, for present purposes I’ll stick to solely the category of drive in Lacanian thinking. If one wants to go to the root of why psychoanalysis might be integral for ideology critique or Marxism or radical theory, if one is not only unfamiliar with the figure of Wilhelm Reich but also how his theory of psychoanalysis is fundamentally at odds with that of Lacan’s, there is no more relevant place to start. Contrasted with the Reichian model it seems fairly accurate to identify within Lacanianism the general remnant of Freudian dualism, a framework that is inherently anti-dialectical. A prime example of this Lacanian dualism seems to be the hard distinction or dichotomy between instinct and drive.
Making a dualist distinction between the biological and the sociological or nature and culture seems the ground out of which drive becomes a purely ideological category in Lacanianism, although this is constructed on a pseudo-materialist conception of an ontological “gap” or “split.” It’s logical to speak of alienation again here because in my understanding, the nature of this “split” is used to justify why this condition is inescapable. Integral to how Lacanians view human consciousness the “split” is, again drawing from An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, “a general characteristic of subjectivity itself; the subject can never be anything other than divided, split, alienated from himself.”[2] Moreover it must be pointed out how the Lacanian unconscious as marked by this alleged ontological “split” or an effect of it is also a determining force of the total domination of human consciousness, and sometimes one even suspects, human agency, by pure ideology, or if you’d like, language. To the extent that one can refer to any number of common Lacanian platitudes reflective of this absurd idealist position this typical academic definition from Purdue University of that exceedingly obscure Lacanian notion of “Real,” apparently sums up what reality is to Lacanians as “the state of nature from which we have been forever severed by our entrance into language.”[3]
Reich essentially accounts for the same in what I would argue is a far more profoundly materialist way in The Function of the Orgasm as “authoritarian patriarchal society of some four to six thousand years” or our “six-thousand-year-old patriarchal authoritarian culture.”[4] What Reich indicates is in my view the real object of psychoanalysis. Human psychology does exhibit an obvious “split,” however for Reich this antithesis within our character structure isn’t inevitable or natural or linguistic, although it is the origin of the Freudian unconscious or what he would describe as the antisocial unconscious. The implication is indeed that the antisocial unconscious is in short artificial, a product of the historical imposition of patriarchal authoritarian civilization, or state structures.
Wilhelm Reich was an iconoclastic figure who got himself kicked out of psychoanalysis for being a Marxist and kicked out of Marxism for being a psychoanalyst. He developed a critique of “Red Fascism” based on his opposition to authoritarian character structure or in his categories, the revolutionary versus reactionary character. The revolutionary character is one who has in essence overcome neurosis, a prospect that is presupposed as impossible in Lacanianism.
Similar to the proclaimed permanence of alienation, neurosis—to my knowledge an archaic term for generalized mental illness—shares its “constitutive” quality. This is evidenced here in another commonplace of academia from the University of Hawaii Department of English, that “neurosis [for Lacan] is an inescapable condition of human consciousness because the psyche, caught up in its identification with an illusory, unattainable imago of wholeness and in its ultimately unfulfillable desire, can never attain the ‘equilibrium’ or ‘self-awareness’ that we commonly associate with ‘normal’ mental health.”[5]
Reich if it was not already clear has much to contribute in terms of critiquing authoritarian leftist psychology. This perhaps organizes him as a type of heterodox Marxist, akin to the quality of Marxism one sees for example from the former Situationist International. My foremost interest in critiquing drive therefore has to do with the causality of theory and practice in the perennial question for ideology critique regarding what constitutes the true barrier between the successful outcome of a proletarian revolution. My titular provocation thus consists of bringing back into consciousness the rigorously materialist conclusion of Wilhelm Reich suggesting there’s a primary biological desire within the homo sapien to be free and equal. In other words, whereas the Lacanian framework denies that egalitarian autonomy could ever be consciously realized, due to the ideological theory of drive, for Reich it was a scientific finding that drive split off from a primary drive frustrated by the compulsory mediation of authority, into what he called a secondary drive. For Lacan all drive is the secondary drive, whereas for Reich, the secondary drive is the consequence of a frustrated, thwarted, manipulated, and forever unsatisfactory, blockage of what is primary. Although this is more my interpretation of it, what I believe Reich discovered as a primary drive was the human capacity to desire egalitarian autonomous social orders.
There being such a long tradition of associating such a conclusion with childishness, it must be brought up in the context of ideologies of orthodox Marxism or authoritarian leftism, why the theory and practice of spontaneous anti-hierarchical proletarian revolt is so often “diagnosed” as an “infantile disorder” to them. The psychologically telling ambivalent attitude of Structuralist Marxist Louis Althusser to the revolutionary events of May 68 seems relevant to consider, given the figure appears to be an early historical example of the importing of Lacanian thought into Marxism, and for its, in my view, perplexing, association with a radical left. Quoting from a 15 March 1969 letter to Italian Communist Party member Maria Antonnetta Macciocchi, in which he’d been asked to provide an analysis of the May events, the professor isolates the student portion of the uprising as a manifestation of an “international movement. . . one of the spontaneous forms of the class struggle, waged—generally in utopian-leftist forms—in a petty-bourgeois environment and provoked, in the final analysis, by the present phase of imperialism.” He claims that “the power. . . of traditional bourgeois ideology” has been all but defeated at this point in world history, continuing. “This defeat has created a vacuum, a wide-open door, which leaves Marxist-Leninist ideology virtually hegemonic, even if petty-bourgeois strata in revolt seek the way to Marxism-Leninism in ‘infantile,’ utopian, ideological forms. After all, we know that utopianism (anarchic, anarcho-syndicalist, neo-Luxemburgist and generally ‘leftist’) is only an infantile disorder which will be cured if, as Lenin said, ‘it is properly treated.’”[6] It seems fair to speculate, leaving behind the question of the efficacy or rightness of horizontalism, that the psychological quality which responds to the theory and practice of egalitarian autonomy as “infantile” appears to be a clear manifestation of statist or patriarchal authoritarian conditioning. This quality I’m prepared to assert is the structure of an inculcated command/obedience relation which is no less than the basic structure of class society itself. Class society at the level of the individual mind and body or psychosomatic unity conditions it or shapes it to its ends through a process that might be thought of as the internalization of alienation, producing knowable, measurable effects amounting to what Reich detected in his clinical practice.
Returning to Lacanianism, I’d like to quote Thesis 202 from The Society of the Spectacle. “Structuralism is thought underwritten by the state.”[7] This text maybe exemplifies the type of Marxist thinking which agitated for the “wild cat” nature of the revolutionary events of May 68, derided as “infantile” in the previous example. Perhaps it may serve to poetically illustrate in sum my criticism of a hegemonic psychoanalysis claiming that an effect of the state was universally applicable to the human mind. To reiterate, this shares an identity with the claim that a condition of alienation was intrinsic to the human experience. One might say a defining quality of state ideology was that it’s able to frame itself, the power of its ideas, as if they were a determining force on reality, in ways that were tantamount to the very laws of reality itself. In a relative sense this is true, because the abstractions of the state are made real through the use of force, of which, conditioning is the ideological equivalent; meaning the state as such is their actual material basis. Returning to the particular Lacanian category of “drive” then separating this out becomes a clear obfuscation, mostly of the force of coercion that is posited as an absolute necessity when it is a relative or contrived, artificial force or imposition.
The force of coercion excluded from Lacanian drive is the material basis of the negative quality of desire treated ideologically when assumed to be attributable to an actually existing ontological “lack.” This “lack” is inculcated into human psychology through a conditioning process that is above all else, the conditioning to obedience, or the training of the biological core to require authority for its regulation. This is more or less identical to a conditioning to the loss of autonomy. The Lacanian premise that alienation is intrinsic correlates with the negative concept of desire whose obvious implication is that alternative social possibilities are inherently utopian or impossible to realize. It seems to run identical in lines of thinking that believe in the paradoxical notion that the state is required to overcome the state. The Reichian hypothesis is thus maximally relevant in considering the role of state structures as either a necessity for or obstacle to the realization of communism. This is a hypothesis that does appear to assert the primacy of a drive to egalitarian autonomy, over its secondary repression out of which is built a conditioning to obedience or a need for a master (or rather, “master signifier” in Lacanianism). Whether or not one construes this need for a master as desirable, it seems clear at least based on the Reichian hypothesis that it cannot be said to be absolute or an intrinsic, immutable component of human subjectivity. Moreover this hypothesis goes a step further in asserting our deeply ingrained patriarchal authoritarian conditioning constitutes the prior material kernel of the political problem of present day circumstances. For a central question in Reich is asking not why proletarians revolt but rather why they don’t—a question the hegemonic psychoanalysis appears to answer through what is in my view a fundamentally flawed theory of “enjoyment.”
If this view smacks of the unsophistication stereotypically attributed to anarchists, ask one’s self to what extent pseudo-sophistication can be employed as a form of intellectualizing to avoid confronting what are in essence extraordinarily simple commonsense notions of material fact. Consider for instance what it is about that character of Marxist that wants to do away with Young Marx, ultimately coming to conflate, perhaps immaturely, a conservative resignation to the hegemony of alienation as the mark of being a socially valuable adult. A “worker,” perhaps.
It is much easier to rationalize one’s servility to the status quo when perceiving it as nothing more than the inevitable consequence of unconscious desire dictating that all strivings are pointless granting that the transcendental authority of state permanence is an immutable fact. When this ideology of hegemonic psychoanalysis is applied to ideology critique the result appears to be a theory that not only naturalizes alienation but also claims that all of life is ideological. It results in a theory of “the subject” that is taken at face value for correct, most suspiciously within radical theory, where the injection of basic Reichian critique reveals that condition to be nothing more than authoritarian or antisocial subjectivity. Primary to this authoritarian subjectivity is a dissent reflex. Indeed, authoritarian subjectivity is conditioned on the frustration or blockage of this dissent reflex.
A desire for freedom being primary is frustrated and forever denied by the state and its authority, manifesting as the erroneous ideology that desire itself—or perhaps we might think of it as the human imagination—was cut off from physical interaction with the tangible world. Alternatively it seems to be a conception of the imagination that was entirely under the purview of a mediating authority. It is hard not to find an identity with agency here, leading to the basic critique of drive as a Lacanian category that it gives us a false picture of necessity. It is easy to show how it does this by demonstrating the dichotomy it makes out of instinct and drive, nature and culture, in a way that is self-evidently idealist in its philosophical dualism. If it was to be considered materialist it seems it would be so more in a bourgeois reductivist psychiatric sense. Its concept of drive I maintain is not so much wrong, as actually being indicative of the character of secondary drives, in the Reichian theory, or alienated or manipulated desires.
Marxism has nothing of a drive theory. However it appears there’s a component within the Lacanian category of drive that enables a similar error often attributed to “vulgar” Marxists in reducing necessity down to that of a purely economic or ideological drive. It is perhaps my sensitivity as a poet to the creative potential of negativity in the human imagination that puts me most in opposition to the reductivist dualistic negative concept of desire central to Lacanianism. It likely drives this resonance with the categorically different Reichian view on the same, as in his own words, “sexual energy is the essentially constructive, positive and productive force in the psyche.”[8]
[1] Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. (Routledge: 1996, 2006.) pg. 47
[2] Idem, pg. 195
[3] Felluga, Dino. “Modules on Lacan: On the Structure of the Psyche.” Introductory Guide to Critical Theory. Jan. 31, 2011. Purdue U. Aug. 28, 2024. http://www.purdue.edu/guidetotheory/psychoanalysis/lacanstructure.html
[4] Reich, Wilhelm. Volume 1 of The Discovery of the Orgone. The Function of the Orgasm. Sex-Economic Problems of Biological Energy. (Vincent R. Cargafno translation. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973.) pg. 232; 7
[5] Zuern, John David. “Neurosis.” Lacan: The Mirror Stage. 1998. University of Hawaii. Aug. 28, 2024. https://www.english.hawaii.edu/criticalink/lacan/terms/neuro.html
[6] Macciocchi, Maria Antonietta. Letters from inside the Italian Communist Party to Louis Althusser. (Stephen M. Hellman translation. London, NLB. 1969; 1973.) pg. 312-314
[7] Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. 1967. (Ken Knabb translation. Bureau of Public Secrets, 2014.) pg. 108
[8] Reich, Wilhelm. “Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis.” Sex-Pol Essays, 1929-1934. (Edited by Lee Baxandall. Translated by Anna Bostock, Tom DuBose, Lee Baxandall. Vintage Books Edition, 1972.) pg. 16
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