Introduction

What does Lacan have to do with the political? Isn’t Lacan that obscure mystical psychoanalyst turned philosopher who has nothing to do with any consideration of the political domain? This is one of the possible responses the title of this book can generate. In this kind of response we find at work two different objections to the project undertaken here. The first one is related to the general idea of bringing together psychoanalysis and the political. It is an idea that seems to be alien to both social scientists and psychoanalysts—although it is certainly hoped that the readership of this book will not be limited to these two professional categories. The first of these two categories of prospective readers is always suspicious of any reduction of the level of the social, the ‘objective’ level, to an analysis at the level of the individual, the ‘subjective’ level, and not without good reasons. There is no doubt that psychological reductionism, that is to say the understanding of socio-political phenomena by reference to some sort of psychological substratum, an essence of the psyche, is something that should clearly be avoided. As it has been correctly pointed out by Wrong, psychoanalytic reductionism in the study of socio-political problems (such as attributing war to outbreaks of repressed aggression, the Russian revolution to a revolt against ‘the national father image’ and ‘German National Socialism’ to a paranoid culture, that is to say, treating ‘society as a patient’ having a collective unconscious or superego and suffering from a psychopathological disorder) has deservedly given psychoanalysis a bad name among historians, sociologists and political scientists (Wrong, 1994:172). ¹ In that sense, Fredric Jameson is in principle right when he draws our attention to Durkheim’s stern warning from Les Règles de Méthode Sociologique (The Rules of Sociological Method) that ‘whenever a social phenomenon is directly explained by a psychological phenomenon, we may be sure that the explanation is false’ (Durkheim in Jameson, 1982:339). ²