ABSTRACT
Lacan and Sullivan have elaborated very different psychoanalytic idiolects. So different that native speakers from each may be unable to understand each other. What could ‘dismantling the alienating structure of the imaginary’ mean to an analyst trying to ‘break the hold of parataxic distortions’? Well, more than one may think at first glance. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, a comparative study between the works of Sullivan and Lacan, who come from very different intellectual cultures that can be contemptuous of each other at times, has never been done. Both of the idiolects are grounded in the language of Freud; but while Sullivan elaborates his dialect in explicit contradistinction to it, which perhaps hides more overlap than meets the ear, Lacan elaborates his explicitly as an extension of Freudian language, which in turn minimizes important differences. Visiting a foreign land and developing a bilingual perspective helps sharpen one’s fluency in ‘our’ interpersonal idiolect. The concept of the unconscious is the vehicle for these travels. The radically different terminologies conceal a surprising degree of similarity between the two approaches, especially when it comes to clinical considerations around distortions (whether we call them parataxic or imaginary), the self (that can be referred to as the self-system or the ego), and the unconscious.
Sauvayre and Hunyady have contributed a creative comparison of the role of the unconscious, anxiety, and trauma in the theories of Jacques Lacan and Harry Stack Sullivan. In the course of this comparison, and their creation or description of a single “idiolect” that they believe accommodates both theories, they offer views useful in describing the means by which any task of comparative psychoanalysis might be addressed. After summarizing the authors’ arguments, I offer some thoughts about their conclusions.
