The psychoanalysis of Freud and Lacan

A prominent geneticist was recently interviewed on national radio about his recent book,
where he reported that DNA decides most of our personal characteristics. He was rather
sniffy about the work of Freud from a scientific point of view. He joked that these days Freud
is mainly studied in English departments. I was rather perplexed by this apparent dismissal of
psychoanalysis in favour of genetic analysis as I have always been rather disappointed by
genetic analysis of my own personality. Such analysis somehow does not shed much light on
what I am trying to achieve and why I am trying to achieve certain things. Literature on the
other hand has provided me with many resources in making sense of who I am and how we as
humans more generally make decisions. The nuanced approach to studying literature in
English departments or more social scientifically oriented fields provides rich understandings
of the human condition that transcend results achieved through scientific analysis.
Psychoanalytical thinking, as understood by Freud and Lacan, is predicated on a reality
centred on two people talking in a doctor-client relation for the benefit of the client. This
benefit can be understood in various ways. This chapter introduces aspects of Lacanian
psychoanalysis towards unfolding some alternative accounts of human subjectivity that
underpin this book.
Put rather simplistically, Sigmund Freud, the originator of psychoanalysis, saw the benefit
of psychoanalytic consultancies as being about achieving a resolution, possibly a cure, by
helping the subject to overcome distortions in their attempts to make sense of the world.
These distortions, he claimed, were caused by unconscious forces having unexpected or
undetected impacts on everyday actions. The unconscious was an ever-present phenomenon
in such work but, according to Freud, this was like an iceberg making only a small part of
itself visible. The task of psychoanalysis was to better understand how and why it functioned.
Freud’s work passed through many phases and his influence is diverse, spanning many
conflicting interpretations through successive intellectual eras. Whilst originally motivated by
activating neurological shifts in his patients Freud’s legacy might be better understood in
retrospect in terms of enabling patients to reassess their pasts with view to opening-up and
making visible alternative paths for the future, by opening new storylines. That is, the
treatment was later interpreted as being predicated on the idea of the patient building new
stories about themselves, highlighting alternative elements of their past in telling the story of
who they were now, thus opening alternative futures for themselves. Freud’s own patients
were often seen as having developed unhelpful accounts of their histories that piloted them
through both the real and imagined obstacles of their lives.
For the “ego psychology school” in the post-war United States, led by émigré analysts
including Freud’s daughter Anna after her father’s death, the ego was understood as a
biological entity to be strengthened in line with a supposed model of good citizenship – a
preferred endpoint, or cure. That is, the analytical process had an endpoint in mind shaped by
socially preferred ways of living, to rid the patient of the unhelpful accounts he or she had of
themselves.
 In contrast, Jacques Lacan (e.g. 2006), who became the most famous, albeit controversial,
psychoanalyst to follow in Freud’s path promoted the shift from bio-scientific to narrative
emphases in interpreting Freud’s work. The task for Lacan was not to remove supposed
distortions in speech in the style of Sigmund and then Anna Freud but rather to learn from
speech to see what it revealed. Such speech was scanned for symptoms of what Lacan called
“the truth of desire”. Lacan (1990) in a TV broadcast once famously declared, “I always
speak the truth”. By this he meant that whatever he, or anyone else, says reveals things about
the speaker about which the speaker is not necessarily aware. Not so much distorted then as
shaped by experience and aspiration. By understanding how emotional flows of a patient
were activated Lacan could, as an analyst, better understand how these shaped the patient’s
actions that geared into the outer world. In this way actions were explained. These actions,
however, were not corrected against a model that was supposed to be correct in advance.
Psychoanalytical theory is not new to the field of education. Deborah Britzman (1998,
2003) has used the work of Anna Freud and Melanie Klein to investigate problematical and
ambivalent aspects of teaching. Meanwhile, Pitt and Britzman (2003, p. 756) have argued
that a growing body of psychoanalytic educational research, through its emphasis on concepts
such as the unconscious, phantasy, affect and sexuality, has worked “to unseat the authorial
capabilities of expression to account exhaustively for qualities of experience, to view history
as a causal process, and to separate reality from phantasy”. Over thirty years ago, Henriques,
Hollway, Urwin, Venn and Walkerdine (1984), Shoshona Felman (1987) and others have
took the work of Lacan to explore issues of pedagogy and learning. The authors in a book
edited by Sharon Todd (1997) discussed the place of desire and fantasy in teaching and
learning. Other authors broaching this territory include Brown, Hardy and Wilson (1993),
Appel (1996), Pitt (1998), Jagodzinski (2001), England and Brown (2001), Atkinson (2002;
2004; 2011; 2017), Brown and England (2004; 2005), Brown, Atkinson and England (2006),
Brown, Devine, Leslie, Paiti, Sila’ila’i, Umaki, and Williams (2007), Brown and McNamara
(2011) and Brown (2011). More recently, Deborah Britzman (2015), Tamara Bibby (2011)
and Matthew Clarke (in press) have produced books looking at different aspects of
psychoanalysis in the context of education.
Practitioner research in education as understood in this book is concerned with providing a
convincing account of the teacher researcher’s connectedness to the situation he or she is
studying. Thus, psychoanalysis can provide both a tool and a theoretical framework to such
research. The task of psychoanalysis is to disrupt as well as to confirm what we see.
Similarly, the reflective research process intervenes in its object. That is, the process of
research transforms the human subject it sets out to document. In the sections that follow
there is an attempt at using a psychoanalytic frame to provide a way of looking at research
data that might open the possibility of such fresh perspectives where notions of subjectivity
become rather more complex. The purpose of such research is often to generate new and
fresh perspectives that enable courses of actions that might not have been detected so easily
prior to the research. And unlike so much research today, the conclusions of the research are
not specified in advance in ideals like “effective teacher”, “raising standards”, etc.
The sections of this chapter each tackle terms from Lacan’s theoretical armoury.