Psychoanalysis . . . as anti-psychology?
Understood in this way, psychology (which, importantly, is inclusive of the psychotherapeutic) is naïvely positivistic (a misguided form of scientism). It fails to engage the Otherness that lies at the heart of subjectivity; it falls prey to the illusion that the human subject can be approached as a consistent, self-enclosed identity. Psychology, moreover, is necessarily tied to the objectives of a type of disciplinary normalization whereby – staying with Foucault – subjects must be assimilated into the contemporary judgements and values of society. A three-fold attack on the various forms of psychology’s alleged reductionism (the respective reductionisms of behaviourism, cognitivism, and latterly, of neuroscience) is thus extended by means of a political critique which considers ‘psychologism’ a ‘blatant ideological program’ (p. 30).
C.G.: Isn’t one of the most important aspects of the Lacanian enterprise the fact that it stands in the way of any and all psychologization of the subject?
É.R.: Yes. The rejection of psychology is a constant in Lacan’s work. Lacan had one hell of a horror for this discipline . . . for him, psychoanalysis was precisely an anti-psychology. He had contempt for the American school of ‘ego psychology’, focused as it was on the ego or self. He wanted more of the unconscious, more of the real, in order to avoid the pitfalls of the psychologization of existence that amounts to no more than the behaviourist domestication of consciences.
To the claims that psychology is a mode of human engineering and a false science that is unreceptive to the reality of the unconscious, we must now add three more allegations: 1) that it reduces the category of the subject to an ego, 2) that it studies behaviours so as better to regulate them and 3) that it is mechanistic (behaviourist) in its operations.
Badiou adds to Roudinesco’s comments when he advances that Lacan was a ‘ferocious adversary’ of any adaptive (i.e. psychologized) vision of psychoanalysis that would be content
with training the human animal to conform to its social environment, transforming it into an animal subjected to dominant values that would no longer have any reason to ensure . . . nonconformity [or] . . . 「excessive originality」.
(p. 21)
