ABSTRACT
There is a problem with the concept of representation in computer science; it is very simplistic and kind of a poor concept because it is divorced from the history of Western thought, unlike psychoanalysis, which can be traced back to the Greeks, both in experience and knowledge. The computer model doesn’t have the relationship to jouissance – that is the problem; there is no jouissance in a computer model. Therefore, you would have a psychiatry without the human experience which would be a real, lamentable condition, because then it would be psychiatry becoming just like a machine and something that a computer could do. The computer will replace the psychiatrist, the human psychiatrist, because the computer will be able to read all the signs and give the right medicine and a better diagnosis than a human being because it can review all the literature. The computer would be a better psychiatrist, but that wouldn’t be psychiatry anymore, because psychiatry means the healing of the psyche. I will raise my objection, so that we put this computer psychiatry model in its place as a necessary and important tool to use perhaps. Psychiatry will have to be regulated by humans as a human discipline … not as something that could be replaced by computer programming.
Lacan is aware of what formalization means in mathematics. The problem is that it leads some people to say that Lacan formalized psychoanalysis – you know, like Freud invented it and Lacan formalized it. Mathematicians criticize this idea because Lacan didn’t really formalize it, in the sense that his formalization is not translatable into arithmetic. He formalized psychoanalysis in a conceptual philosophical sense. So, in this case, he got it right that these letters must be replaced with numbers. And this is why they are somewhat formalized because they can also function within the Principia Mathematica. When you have letters that function within numbers, as in the Principia Mathematica, you have a formalized system. But since Lacan’s theory in general cannot be translated into numbers, it is strictly speaking formal in a logical sense, but not in a mathematical sense.
What I mean is that you could have small rings of string, or large rings of string, or multiple numbers of string. But whatever the size, the shape is always there. The numbers that could be represented are of an infinite variety. Formalization is not standardization and is attained by the shape itself, but the shape and the shape configuration could be changed into any infinitude of numbers. It could be scaled, it could have a big ring, I could have a small ring, I could bend it this way, I could bend it that way. It would always be a relative number, based on how it is that you formulated the shape.
