Lacan’s Critique of American Ego Psychology and Ideology

Starting in the 1950s, Lacan presents a radical critique American ideology. One of his main arguments is that European analysts who immigrated to the U.S. developed a form of psychoanalysis called ego psychology, and this new theory and method was driven by the desire to be successful in the economy and culture of the United States: “But its practice in the American sphere has so summarily degenerated into a means of obtaining “success” and into a mode of demanding “happiness” that it must be pointed out that this constitutes a repudiation of psychoanalysis, a repudiation that occurs among too many of its adherents due to the pure and simple fact that they have never wanted to know anything about Freud’s discovery, and that they will never know anything about it, even in the way implied by repression: for what is at work here is the mechanism of systematic misrecognition insofar as it simulates delusion, even in its group forms.” In other words, not only did these immigrant analysts want to find success for themselves, but they also sought to focus on having their patients successfully adapt to the American culture of happiness. Lacan insists that this focus on social conformity and pleasure represents the opposites of Freudian psychoanalysis, and so it is his task to reverse the negation of Freud.

In arguing that the American ego psychologist were sharing a group delusion based on repressing Freud, Lacan highlights that instead of helping people to discover the hidden truths of their unconscious, these immigrants from Germany sought to focus on strengthening the autonomous egos of their patients: “It is not difficult to understand why it was among these Beatitudes that the theory of the “autonomous ego” first appeared. How could we but admire the strength of those who initiated the grand project of disintellectualization, which, extending little by little, represents one of the most fertile challenges by which a civilization can assert its strength, those challenges that it forges within itself ?” As a massive anti-intellectual movement matching an anti-intellectual culture, the American psychoanalysts are represented here as trying to protect and enforce the egos of their patients.

While many of these psychologists and psychoanalysts see the ego as the locus of reality testing and cognitive synthesis, Lacan shows how the ego is primarily a defensive structure based on the illusion of the ideal ego matching the ideals of the general culture. Through its use of intention, attention, repression, and inhibition, the ego provides the self-illusion of control and individual difference, and yet Freud insists that there is always an unresolvable conflict between the social and the individual: “Be that as it may, it solves the problem of the analyst’s being. A team of

egos, no doubt less equal than autonomous (but by what stamp of origin do they recognize each other in the sufficiency of their autonomy?), offers itself to Americans to guide them toward happiness, without upsetting the autonomies, whether egoistic or not, that pave with their nonconflictual spheres the American way of getting there.” For many of the ego psychologists, the ego represents a non-conflicted mental space leading to happiness and autonomy, yet Lacan points out that the individual has to be recognized by others, and so the individualist is often really a conformist.

Lacan adds that for this generation of immigrant psychoanalysts, they used this American theory of the ego to change analytic practice: “Thus he prefers to fall back on his ego, and on the reality about which he knows a thing or two. But here he is, then, at the level of “I” and “me” with

his patient. How can he manage it if they’re at each other’s throats? It is here that we astutely count on the secret contacts we must have on the inside--named, in this case, the healthy part of the ego, the part that thinks like us.” From Lacan’s perspective, the main problem with American psychoanalysts is that they seek to get their patients to conform to their own sense of reality through a process of mutual identification. Instead of the analyst being neutral, and allowing the patient to free associate without censorship, the goal of this type of therapy is to produce a shared sense of reality and ego control.

This mode of analysis then is presented by Lacan as a form of misrecognition and misunderstanding: “Here arises the ambiguity of a misrecognizing that is essential to knowing

myself . . . For, in this “rear view,” all the subject can be sure of is the anticipated image—which he had caught of himself in his mirror—coming to meet him. I won’t go back over the function

of my “mirror stage” here, the first strategic point I developed as an objection to the supposedly “autonomous ego” in favor in psychoanalytic theory, whose academic restoration justified the mistaken proposal to strengthen the ego in a type of treatment diverted thereafter toward successful adaptation—a phenomenon of mental abdication tied to the aging of the

psychoanalytic group in the Diaspora owing to the war, and the reduction of an eminent practice to a Good Housekeeping seal of approval attesting to its suitability to the “American way of life.” Since the original ego psychologist were immigrants trying to assimilate to American society, they transformed analysis into a process of social adaptation. Moreover, by tracing this mode of misrecognition back to his theory of the mirror stage, Lacan reveals how we first gain a sense of our unified self by identifying with an external image in a mirroring manner. Thus, what makes the ego a space of non-conflict is the fact that it is formed by anticipating the image of the self in the image of the other. Since the image is always bounded, unified, and coherent, it gives the self a sense of internal unity, which does not really exist in reality.

Lacan insists that this formation of the ego shapes the way the self perceives external objects in an idealized, totalizing way: “Be that as it may, what the subject finds in this altered image of his body is the paradigm of all the forms of resemblance that will cast a shade of hostility onto the world of objects, by projecting onto them the avatar of his narcissistic image, which, from the jubilation derived from encountering it in the mirror, becomes—in confronting his semblables—the outlet for his most intimate aggressiveness.” While the identification of the self with a unified external object may produce a sense of happiness and control, it also unleashes aggression because the self realizes that it is not as peaceful and unified as the image it sees in the other. Furthermore, since the other is seen as ideal, one becomes envious of the other’s unity and pleasure.

Due to the fact that many of these immigrant analysts were escaping war, they shaped their sense of self and psychoanalysis on a need to find mental peace on an imaginary level: “Since the time when the first sound of the Freudian message rang out from the Viennese bell to echo far and wide, many contingent factors have played a part in this story. Its reverberations seemed to be drowned out by the muffled collapses brought about by the first world conflict. Its propagation resumed with the immense human wrenching that fomented the second and

was its most powerful vehicle. It was on the waves of hate’s tocsin and discord’s tumult—the panic-stricken breath of war—that Freud’s voice reached us, as we witnessed the Diaspora of those who transmitted it, whose persecution was no coincidence. The shock waves were to reverberate to the very confines of our world, echoing on a continent where it would be untrue to say that history loses its meaning, since it is where history finds its limit. It would even be a mistake to think that history is absent there, since, already several centuries in duration, it weighs all the more heavily there due to the gulf traced out by its all-too-limited horizon. Rather it is where history is denied with a categorical will that gives enterprises their style, that of a cultural ahistoricism characteristic of the United States of North America.” The idea here is that American culture often denies history, and this lack of historical consciousness shaped the people who were escaping the horrible history of the first two world wars.

This lack of historical awareness in the United States is analyzed by Lacan in the following manner: “This ahistoricism defines the assimilation required for one to be recognized

there, in the society constituted by this culture. It was to its summons that a group of emigrants had to respond; in order to gain recognition, they could only stress their difference, but their function presupposed history at its very core, their discipline being the one that had reconstructed the bridge between modern man and ancient myths. The combination of circumstances was too

strong and the opportunity too attractive for them not to give in to the temptation to abandon the core in order to base function on difference.” As a key part of assimilating to a new culture, it is essential for the individual to repress their own history, and this lack of historical awareness goes against the psychoanalytic focus on the past. If we then think of America as a society of immigrants, we can gain a sense of why history and psychoanalysis are repressed in this culture. Due to the desire for recognition, and the need to forget a painful past, one assimilates by conforming to cultural ideals, and this conformity then can provide the illusion that there is no conflict between the individual and society.

A side-effect of transforming psychoanalysis into ego psychology is that the emphasis is now on the difference between the one with knowledge (the analyst) and the one who remains ignorant (the patient): “It is to return to the reactionary principle that covers over the duality of he who suffers and he who heals with the opposition between he who knows and he who does not. How could they avoid regarding this opposition as true when it is real and, on that basis, avoid slipping into becoming managers of souls in a social context that demands such offices?” By taking on the position of the One who knows in the transference, the analyst gains a sense of self-idealization, which feeds the desire of the patient to be saved by the Other. However, the end result is that the patient is motivated to conform to society by identifying with the knowledge of the analyst.

Lacan goes as far as arguing that American psychology and therapy took on the structure of an obsessive-compulsive neurosis: “A technique is being transmitted there, one that is gloomy in style--indeed, it is reticent in its opacity—and that any attempt to let in critical fresh air seems to upset. It has, in truth, assumed the appearance of a formalism that is taken to such ceremonial lengths that one might well suspect that it bears the same similarity to obsessive neurosis as Freud found so convincingly in the practice, if not the genesis, of religious rites.” Just as obsessionals privatize religion by using rituals to create a false sense of symbolic order and repetition, the ego psychologists turned psychoanalysis into an empty ceremony since they eliminated the entire focus on unconscious content.

The implications of the this interpretation for American culture in general are tied to the promotion of the illusion of the autonomous self: “It is precisely this ‘autonomous ego’ that is offered as a target to a practice that makes its productivity a criterion of health, its adaptability to a medium a measure of success, and the ‘American way of life’ the ideal of the ‘human relations’ it is supposed to govern. One can see how this leads to the concept of the analyst as a ‘master of reality’ who, by virtue of his own ‘autonomous ego,’ is supposed to help the patient’s ‘feeble ego’ to its own autonomy in the name of free enterprise.” From this perspective, ego psychology trains its subjects to focus on their sense of being free individuals within a free market system, yet all of this freedom is coupled with the requirement to conform to the dominant culture. Furthermore, by pretending that the analyst knows the truth of reality, the patient is motivated to identify with the ego of the analyst, and here we find another level of alienation.

Lacan insists that this form of relationship instituted by the American ego psychologists feeds an investment in a capitalist social order: “This is why the term ‘human relations’ has found such a favorable reception in the United States, as the common denominator for a host of psychological practices which, under the label of free enterprise, are organized there in a sort of industrial concentration that makes their productivity a criterion of health and their adaptation to the environment a measure of success.” Since capitalism requires individuals to see themselves as free when they are being controlled by the system, it becomes necessary to produce the illusion of the free individual within therapy. Moreover, by celebrating the values of economic success and personal health, the patient is motivated to conform to cultural ideals.

The reason why I see this type of obsessional subjectivity as being shaped by a center-Right ideology is that the main emphasis is on feeding a sense of individual liberty through a process of radical social conformity. In an effort to enhance the ego’s sense of knowledge and innocence, guilt and doubt have to be overcome by the ideal ego identifying with the ego ideal, and it is this identification that produces the fantasy of an ego syntonic conflict-free zone. Thus, contemporary psychologists are so invested in replacing the mind with the brain and psychology with biology because they want to use their egos’ sense of symbolic order and meaning to repress their unconscious sense of doubt and guilt.

On a fundamental level, Lacan insists that social conformity and assimilation are the opposite of psychoanalysis: “The notion of the ‘adaptation of the individual to the group’—a notion that is as alien to the Freudian experience as it is possible to be—is the slogan under which psychoanalysis is currently being transformed into a technique for social orthopedics.” Psychology and therapy have thus become discourses of social conformity, and this mode of assimilation undermines history, the unconscious, and mental freedom.