The Althusser-Lacan Correspondence as Ground for Psycho-social Studies

Abstract

This article discusses a possible dialogue between Marxism and psychotherapy based on the letters between Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan, exchanged between 1963 and 1969. This dialogue forms the ground for a dialogue between what has come to be known as the "critical tradition" and the "clinical tradition" which, in turn, becomes the ground for imagining what could be called "psycho-social studies". From the letters, this article explores three thematic angles: the angle of the "old" as Foucauldian askesis; the angle of the "beyond" as Marxian/Freudian theoretical form, or, put another way, the angle of the "break" as internal transition from ideology to science; and the angle of the "forbidden" as the Lacanian Real. In doing so, the article reflects on how these three angles could create conditions and conduits for a dialogue between post-metaphysical understandings of Marxism and psychotherapy. LEFT FIELDSThe context of this article is the difficulties we have had with the vanguardist attitude of Marxist organisations and with the adaptationist attitude of the mental health sciences.Marxists stand for change, but this change has been made to fit the framework of historical materialisma framework that offers legitimating ground, for instance, to the colonisation of Tibet by communist China. Such colonisation is in turn legitimated in the name of progress, growth, developmentalism, scientism, and secularisation, as also liberation from what Chinese secular orthodoxy views as recalcitrant religious orthodoxy in Tibet. The Marxist labour of change was also instituted in haste. It was done without the kind of "work on the self " that Freud foregrounded and Foucault talks of in Psychology stands for individual change, whereby the "changed" became only one more pawn in the existing language game: the more the patient changed, the more the world remained the same, and the more the world changed, the more the Marxist vanguard remained the same.This necessitates a rethinking of both the idea of change and the idea of the world. We also need to think of the trajectory of change in the clinic and in the space of the political, as well as the connection between them; and to understand the two kinds of inertia that confront change or transformational praxis: a normative order that pathologises unreason and an exploitative order that facilitates appropriation of surplus labour by excluding the workers the performers of surplus labourfrom it.This paper is thus about the "clinical practice of psychoanalysis as catalyst of personal change and its intersections with social change" (Parker, 2011, p. 1). It is also about the political practice of Marxism as catalyst for social transformation and its intersection with self transformation. In another sense, it is about "revolutions in subjectivity" in the context of clinical work and the question of "subjectivity in revolutions" (ibid., p. 199) in the context of larger social transformation. Pavón-Cuéllar (2010) has discussed the relation between Marxism and psychology in terms of...

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