America’s Lacan AprÈs Coup

Abstract

Lacan’s effect in America was dramatic but limited following his 1975 visit. His polemic with ego psychology in Écrits radically changed the way literary critics, notably feminist critics, thought about psychoanalysis, while in those same years—the 1970s and 1980s—American psychoanalysts, taken up with their own reactions to ego psychology, paid him little attention. Yet après coup, looking back at that period, Lacan can be counted among those who contributed importantly to a major shift in our conception of psychoanalytic process: our contemporary sense of acts of reading—including clinical listening—as acts in themselves, rather than as steps toward the interpretive determination of hidden meaning. In acts of reading inspired by Lacan, feminist critics helped free Freud’s theory of disavowal from its origins in the male anxieties of the castration complex. Speaking as the disavowed “others” of psychoanalysis, Lacan’s feminist readers also went beyond him in moving psychoanalysis toward acknowledgment of questions of social and historical reality, including its own. Regarding this evolution, it can be speculated that hidden behind the bitterness of the split in the 1950s and 1960s between Lacan and the once European, now American ego psychologists can be found an unconscious agreement. On both sides of the Atlantic, psychoanalysis had had its reasons, if different reasons, to disavow for years the ways it was implicated in the unspeakable trauma of recent European history.