ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Lacan’s critique of psychology that, he argues, functions principally in the imaginary register. With its objectifying tendencies, psychology attempts to grapple with something ostensibly more primary than spoken language and inordinately emphasizes and bolsters the ego, particularly through linking treatment to adaptation. The multiple failures of psychology to adequately grasp the subject are not only errors of theorization, they represent also missed curative—which is to say ethical—opportunities for the subject. In contrast, Lacan’s approach to psychoanalysis, with its anti-objectivistic, anti-developmental, anti-adaptational, and ego-subverting arguments, offers a highly antithetical alternative to the discipline of psychology.
