Lacan’s Return to Antiquity is the first book devoted to the role of classical antiquity in Lacan’s work. In it, I pose a question familiar from studies of Freud: what are Ancient Greece and Rome doing in a twentieth-century theory of psychology? In Lacan’s case, the issue has an additional edge, for he employs antiquity to demonstrate what is radically new about psychoanalysis. It is a tool with which to convey the revolutionary power of Freud’s ideas by digging down to the philosophical questions beneath them. It is through these questions that Lacan allies psychoanalysis with the pioneering intellectual developments of his time in anthropology, philosophy, art and literature.
“A brilliant book of amazing clarity and insight, and endlessly intriguing in its implications and intimations.’
-Adam Phillips, psychoanalyst, essayist, general editor of the new Penguin Modern Classics translations of Sigmund Freud.
“In this brilliantly researched and masterfully written book, Oliver Harris explains why the study of Plato and Aristotle is as important for the development of Lacan’s thought as the reading of Freud himself… Avoiding the Bacchic frenzy that often accompanies the contemporary Lacan-cult, this book stands out as a new beacon, which will cast its light on the roots of Lacanian psychoanalysis for many years to come.”
-Dany Nobus, Professor of Psychoanalytic Psychology, Brunel University London; Chair of the Freud Museum London.
“ In this sparkling study, Oliver Harris shows how fruitful for Lacan’s ideas, no less than for Freud’s, were the writings of classical authors from the Presocratics and Plato to Plautus and Ovid. The deep-rooted connections of ancient myth, philosophy and literature with Lacan’s insights into sexuality, creativity and fantasy allow Harris to present an original and engaging exploration of key texts for both psychoanalysis and the Classics.”
-Dr Armand D’Angour, Associate Professor of Classics, Oxford University.
Three standalone essays from the book are available to read for free online:
‘Surprised by Truth’: Socrates, Plato and the Lacanian Seminar
The Myth of Sexual Reproduction
Unknown Pleasures: Orgasms and Epistemology
Here’s the book’s introduction:
The Meaning of a Return
Lacan’s career is devoted to re-engineering the shock of psychoanalysis. For a generation that had seen Freud’s theory become fashionable to the point of cliché, he seeks to make it unfamiliar again, even threatening. As such, one might expect him to shake off Freud’s fascination with Ancient Greece and Rome as itself antiquated, a dusty Victorian crutch for a new way of thinking. Yet, of all Freud’s disciples, it is Lacan who turns to classical antiquity with the greatest passion. Over 30 years of teaching, he draws on the work of Homer, Heraclitus, Herodotus, Democritus, Parmenides, Epicurus, Theophrastus, Anaxagoras; the Schools of the Stoics, the Skeptics and Pythagoras; the dramatists Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes. From Rome, he discusses works by Lucretius, Ovid, Plautus, Plutarch, Pliny, Cicero, Longus and Livy. By far the greatest attention is given to the trio of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle; combined, there are 31 entries for Plato and Aristotle in the index of the Écrits. By way of comparison, there are 10 entries for Lévi-Strauss, 6 for Roman Jakobson and 8 for Ferdinand de Saussure.
This is not the Lacan of popular or scholarly imagination. There are books devoted to Lacan and science, Lacan and politics, Lacan and philosophy, but no extended study of Lacan and classical antiquity. In attempting to fill this gap, this book makes two broad arguments: one relating to the role of this classicism in Lacan’s teaching, the other to the value of approaching his work in this way.
Freud’s classical references provide Lacan with the entry point he needs to revise psychoanalysis under the cover of orthodoxy. Lacan (2007) considers Freud’s allusions to Greek philosophy and declares that they bear witness to “a properly metaphysical apprehension of what were pressing problems for him” (p.319). “Problems”, especially those elided by other analysts, are what Lacan seizes upon: What exactly is the unconscious? Does libido have a physical existence? Why did Freud formulate a death drive? Confronted head on, these questions reveal the deeper, metaphysical implications of psychoanalysis, questions of ontology and epistemology, that will allow Lacan to express the value of Freud’s thought in new ways.
By far the most pressing question, and the one underlying all others, concerns the intellectual status of
psychoanalysis itself. Is it a science? Or more like art, or even religion? Ancient Greece, where we find myth, science, philosophy and drama confronting each other self-consciously for the first time, is a powerful precedent for a discipline whose problems are never entirely separable from the question of its own genre. The question of what kind of truth psychoanalysis represents is bound to the question: What form of knowledge is commensurate to the human mind? Do we need a special discipline of our own? For the Ancient Greeks, the relationship between man, nature and forces beyond both remained open to investigation. This investigation bridged imaginative and empirical approaches. As Lacan pursues something unique, and uniquely problematic, about human psychology, Ancient Greece and Rome provide more valuable precedents than both the rigid cosmological schema of Judeo-Christianity and a complacent, post-Darwinian consensus according to which humans are just one animal amongst many.
The second argument informing this study concerns the benefit of approaching Lacan’s work through its literary and philosophical references, rather than by seeking a fixed theory, leading, as it does, to an appreciation of the richness and complexity of the seminars themselves. We know Lacan’s teaching chiefly through transcripts of live events, excerpts of a conversation that extended across three decades of public seminar courses. Behind the forbidding, almost inhuman books published under his name are occasions involving discussion, jokes, puns, improvisation and an evolving intellectual milieu. Antiquity is not an archive for Lacan but an active battleground on which he takes his place alongside thinkers he admires and whose own investigations he feeds off (and who are often in his audience). Lacan’s readings of Plato emerge from the groundbreaking seminars of intellectual historians Alexandre Koyré and Alexandre Kojève. Discussion of Parmenides and Heraclitus allows for confrontation with Heidegger and Sartre. Ovid’s myths provide common ground with the erotic philosophy of Pierre Klossowski. Lacan’s classical references serve as his own points de capitons, quilting points that connect ideas amongst these thinkers as well as concepts within his own ever-evolving theory. In a competitive and performative intellectual environment they are part of the seminar’s drama, a challenge to the growing crowd he attracts, and one that places intellectual history (and psychoanalysis’s unique contribution to it) in the foreground.
In attempting to read Lacan’s texts closely, to situate them in their intellectual context and trace the development of his ideas, this book is part of a comforting tradition: the university’s answer to the problem of what one is to “do” with psychoanalysis. While less common as an approach to Lacan, precedents abound in the thriving field of “Freud Studies.” Interest in Freud’s classicism has extended well beyond those directly involved in psychoanalysis itself. Scholars return to Freud’s classical references (Oedipus, Narcissus, Empedocles, Rome, Egypt) to discover how an apparently new mode of thought could enter existence and become epoch-defining. Ernest Jones’s reverential three-volume The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (1953) helped mythologize Freud’s intellectual journey, which in turn attracted and gave material to more acute readings such as Henri Ellenberger’s The Discovery of the Unconscious (1970) and Frank Sulloway’s Freud: Biologist of the Mind (1979). In all these, Freud’s classical education plays a starring role, allowing him to pursue questions of sexuality and psychology beyond the confines of neurons and cell biology. Freud enters uncharted intellectual territory by drawing upon a combination of well-established disciplines bound to a distinctly 19th century, Central European worldview or Weltanschauung.
Freud’s recourse to myth and poetry, naturally, provides ample material for those seeking to discredit the intellectual credentials of psychoanalysis (see the work of Frederick Crews, 1995, or Richard Webster, 1996). Recently, they have inspired more nuanced studies in an intellectual environment less concerned with establishing the truth value of psychoanalysis than with tracing networks of association in Freud’s thought, understanding the processes of reading, writing and memory that underlie his quest. Superior examples include Graham Frankland’s Freud’s Literary Culture (2000) and Richard Armstrong’s Compulsion for Antiquity: Freud and the Ancient World (2005). These historicize Freud’s work, pursue ideas as they develop over his career, and explore the function that particular figures and texts serve for him. Freud’s classicism becomes entwined with questions of nationhood, Judaism, Freud’s childhood, his friendships and his unique intellectual ambitions.
“Lacan Studies,” to the extent that such a thing exists, is a different beast. This certainly reflects the difference between Freud and Lacan on a general level – Freud’s artful, narratively-rich essays versus Lacan’s defensive, unapologetically difficult seminars – but also more specific factors. The distinct academic field that has grown around Freud’s writing has thrived on the solidity and universality of the official texts. Freud arrives in the form of a standardized complete works, dense with scholarly apparatus and with that crowning signifier of a stable text, a six-volume concordance to match those for Shakespeare and the Bible. This is not to mention the readily available information on Freud’s childhood (8 hours a week studying Latin, 6 hours a week learning Greek), his fully catalogued library at Maresfield Gardens and, of course, the preserved consulting room itself with its collection of antiquities: a crossroads for Freud’s life, theory and clinical practice.
The history of publishing Lacan’s teaching, far from clarifying his development, has added to the complications. Écrits, the first publication in his name, comprising a compilation of papers spanning 30 years, eventually appeared in 1966 when Lacan was 63. None of the annual seminars into which he had put the vast majority of his thought and work appeared until Lacan was persuaded to allow Seminar XI to be transcribed in 1973. Two years later, his first seminar of 1953 appeared, alongside the twentieth one. To date, 14 of the 27 seminars have been officially published in French. The situation is even more patchy in English: The Écrits received a complete English translation only in 2006. Now, 30 years after Lacan’s death, English translations of the majority of the Lacanian seminars still remain unavailable other than as bootlegs, whether from a specialist bookshop or online. What’s more, under the dutiful supervision of his son-in-law Jacques-Alain Miller, the officially published texts have the un-annotated rawness of bootlegs, kept purposefully free of any significant introduction, annotation or notes (this will be explored further in Chapter One).
The situation is similarly unsettled with regards to biographical sources. Lacan’s classicism, like Freud’s, can be traced to a particularly thorough schooling.[i] And, as with Freud, his acquaintance with Greek and Roman authors was clearly a point of pride in adulthood; the seminars reveal Lacan’s knowledge of Greek and Latin, for example his close engagement with Aristotle’s Greek (Lacan, 1998, p. 52) and with the Latin poetry of Lucretius (1991, p. 227). But it is not possible to study the actual texts Lacan worked with due to the absence of archives and the selling-off of his estate, including his library. Roudinesco discusses the missing library in her recent book Lacan: In Spite of Everything (2014), the impossibility of knowing exactly which books Lacan read, which passages he marked, how he gathered his references for the seminars. She sees this as part of a larger suppression of supplementary material, connected to the conscious decision to publish Lacan’s oral oeuvre without biographical notes or contextual references.
Repression manifests itself in activity. The repression of sources, according to Roudinesco, has encouraged “an escalation of interpretation which becomes excessive” (p. 122). This interpretation, significantly, is still carried out by a generation that knew Lacan in person, often individuals who were trained and treated by him, who have their own first-hand knowledge of the social and intellectual contexts in which Lacan worked, and who fought over his legacy in the immediate aftermath of his death. One of these fights involved Roudinesco herself in conflict with Jacques-Alain Miller. Roudinesco’s monumental biography Jacques Lacan (1997) contains a wealth of clues as to the sources and significance of Lacan’s classicism, but it is a resource that few practicing Lacanians draw upon in print, partly for reasons of academic tone but partly because of professional alliances (Roudinesco is scathing of Miller’s involvement as Lacan’s editor). So a division appears: Lacan’s biography on one side, still founded on rumor, anecdotes and general notoriety, and Lacanian scholarship on the other, producing dense texts for the initiated, rich with neologisms and topology.
The difference between Freud studies and Lacan studies has had clear consequences. In Lacan’s case, the fragmentary publication, minimal annotation and concentrated exegesis has exacerbated the effects of his notoriously difficult style, widening the gap between those already initiated into it and those outside. As a result, the use of Lacanian concepts in scholarship can seem either clumsy or provocative or both. In the words of one academic, while Roland Barthes proves “an ever-graceful option” and Foucault “an acceptable turn,” Lacan remains “a prospective breach of etiquette” (Flaxman, 2003). This partly reflects how he is used when people do turn to his ideas, often raided for concepts with which to forward arguments regarding a book, film or art work; applied rather than studied.
As well as making Lacan more human, a more overarching study throws light on the texts we use. By way of example, Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1977) presents itself, for readers of English, as an apparently stand-alone introduction rather than a compilation of 10 years’ thought recharged and repackaged for a new audience of elite philosophy students at the École Normale Supérieure; Seminar VII’s (2008) consideration of tragedy and Seminar VIII’s (unpublished) reading of Plato’s Symposium are read, independently, concerning ethics and transference but rarely for ideas that bridge the seminars and evolve between them; Seminar XX (1998) appeared in English initially as fragments in an anthology concerning feminine sexuality while, read as a whole, the seminar is as much concerned with Aristotle and Parmenides (see Mitchell & Rose, 1985). Roaming across the decades, the distance across which themes, characters and texts recur is striking. The seminar of 1969 sees the return of the slave in Plato’s Meno, central to discussions in Seminar II (1991) in 1955. In the second seminar, Lacan recommends reading Parmenides, a dialogue he gets around to discussing 18 years later in Seminar XX. Each instance carries traces of the earlier discussion while reflecting significant developments in Lacan’s thinking. Within the winding, 30-year performance of his teaching, Lacan is always subtler, more complex and more self-conscious than a singular exegesis of his theory could convey. Any individual expression of an idea is a palimpsest of its previous incarnations, a hub of echoes and allusions as well as revision. This applies to none more than to apparently basic sounding ones such as “subject,” “other,” “real” or “unconscious.”
This study is a series of explorations rather than a comprehensive survey, discreet but interlinked essays that reflect the loops and intersections of their subjects. I concentrate mainly on the philosophers of Ancient Greece rather than Rome, although the Roman poet Ovid plays a large role in the final two chapters. The first two chapters center on Plato, but in significantly different ways. Chapter One, “Surprised by Truth: Socrates, Plato and the Lacanian Seminar,” continues this introduction’s consideration of the seminar project itself. Plato (and the elusive Socrates) gives Lacan a means of thinking through the meaning of teaching. The fact that a clinical analyst is likely also to be a teacher of psychoanalysis and, finally, a writer of psychoanalytic literature is sometimes taken for granted, yet these activities – therapeutic, pedagogic and literary – each have their own relationship with authority, and so operate their own processes of transference. This becomes important as Lacan’s own fame spreads while, within his theory, truth is becoming an ever more suspect concept. With the help of Plato’s dialogues, the seminar itself becomes a means of exploring pedagogical anxieties.
Chapter Two, “The Myth of Sexual Reproduction,” concerns a different anxiety, anxiety over the role of Greek myth in psychoanalytic theory. What implication does the centrality of figures such as Oedipus and Narcissus have for the scientific aspirations of psychoanalysis? The question involves a deeper and more complicated one: can human sexuality be understood “scientifically” or does its wayward nature demand a new method of analysis entirely? I consider the role that Aristophanes’ myth of Eros (from Plato’s Symposium) plays for both Freud and Lacan. For Freud, it arises at moments of theoretical struggle. Lacan returns to Freud’s impasses, but by employing a closer reading of Plato in conjunction with the new insights of Claude Lévi-Strauss, he can turn the category of myth to his advantage, making it a tool to probe the limits of what we can conceive.
In “Creation and Castration: Making Something out of Nothing,” I extend this consideration of myth to cosmology and creation myths in psychoanalysis. I ask why Lacan comes out repeatedly on the side of “creationism” over evolutionism. This relates to a problem at the heart of Freud’s elaboration of psychoanalysis: the difficulty of situating an initial, primal event at the origins of a trauma, when trauma itself depends upon the relation between an event and a previous incident. As Lacan recognizes, it is a problem akin to philosophy’s struggle to account for prime movers. Lacan’s return to Aristotle’s exploration of cause in the Physics, in particular the concept of tuche (“luck” or “chance”), bridges this chapter with the next, “Exploiting Tragedy: Psychoanalysis, Fate and Free Will.” Freud’s appropriation of Greek tragedy – and, with it, tragic fatalism – has led to criticism of psychoanalysis. For Lacan, tragedy and fate form part of a larger exploration of interpretation and point of view. This is something that Aristotle and the tragic dramatists themselves recognized, and it reflects the value tragedy retains for psychoanalysis.
The final chapter, “Unknown Pleasures: Orgasms and Epistemology,” explores a tradition of mythologizing the female orgasm. It centers on the figure of Tiresias and his claim that women experience greater pleasure in sex than men. Lacan declares that the transgendered Tiresias should be “the patron saint of psychoanalysis.” This provocative assertion pertains to the controversies of jouissance and psychoanalysis’s theories of feminine sexuality more broadly, but also to the wider, intractable questions on which the discipline is founded. When is knowledge about other people’s pleasure really just a fantasy? And when might we want to maintain this: our fantasies of others and others’ fantasies of ourselves? This includes the fantasy of knowledge, our desire to know and for others’ to attempt to know us. Lacan is unafraid to challenge the very presumptions on which psychoanalysis is founded, asking what it is we want when we seek an answer to the riddle of ourselves.
References
Armstrong, R. (2005) Compulsion for Antiquity: Freud and the Ancient World, Ithaca, Cornell University Press.
Barker, S. (1996) Excavations and Their Objects: Freud’s Collection of Antiquity, Albany, SUNY Press.
Crews, F. (1995) The Memory Wars: Freud’s Legacy in Dispute, New York, New York Review of Books.
Ellenberger, H. (1970) The Discovery of the Unconscious, New York, Basic Books.
Flaxman, G. (2003) “Past imperfect, future unknown: The discourse of theory,” Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory, vol. 4, no. 2, [online]. Available at http://www.jcrt.org/archives/04.2/flaxman.shtml (accessed 3/4/2015)
Frankland, G. (2000) Freud’s Literary Culture, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Gamwell, L., and Wells, R. (1989) Sigmund Freud and His Art: His Personal Collection of Antiquities, Albany, SUNY Press.
Jones, E. (1953) The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, New York, Basic Books.
Lacan, J. (1977) Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (ed. J-A. Miller, trans. A. Sheridan), London, Penguin.
Lacan, J. (1991) Seminar II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis (ed. J-A. Miller, trans. J. Forrester), New York, Norton.
Lacan, J. (1998) Seminar XX: Encore – On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge (ed. J-A. Miller, trans. B. Fink), New York, Norton.
Lacan, J. (2007) Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English (trans. B. Fink), New York, Norton.
Lacan, J. (2008) Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (ed. J-A. Miller, trans. D. Porter), Oxford, Routledge.
Mitchell, J., and Rose, J. (1985) Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne, London, Norton.
Roudinesco, E. (1997) Jacques Lacan (trans. B. Bray), New York, Columbia University Press.
Roudinesco, E. (2014) Lacan: In Spite of Everything (trans. G. Elliot), London, Verso.
Scully, S. (1997) “Freud’s antiquities: A view from the couch,” Arion, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 222-233
Sulloway, F. (1979) Freud: Biologist of the Mind, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.
Webster, R. (1996) Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis, New York, Basic Books.
Winter, S. (1999) Freud and the Institution of Psychoanalytic Knowledge, Stanford, Stanford University Press.