5 :: SOCIAL THEORY SINCE FREUD
TRAVERSING SOCIAL IMAGINARIES
of social theory. However, a number of important objections have been made of
Habermas’s use of psychoanalysis. First, it appears that Habermas conflates
repression with the unconscious, and thus fails to consider the importance of other
unconscious processes and mechanisms such as fantasy, wish-fulfilment, projection,
introjection and the like (see Giddens, 1979; Whitebook, 1989). Second, and related to
this criticism, Habermas’s linguistic reconceptualization of the psyche, like Lacan,
erases the prelinguistic realm of unconscious passion, thereby screening from view
the role of affect in the constitution and reproduction of social practices (see Elliott,
1999). Finally, by discarding these vital elements of the Freudian conceptual field,
Habermas is left with an account of the unconscious which is essentially negative
and constraining—which is why he argues that, at a collective level, the unconscious
must be made conscious! What this overlooks, of course, are the creative dimensions
of unconscious fantasy and affect; these are dimensions of psychical experience,
I contend, which are fundamental to social life and critical self- reflection (see Elliott,
1999: chapter 3).
RETURNING TO FREUD: JACQUES LACAN
Many psychoanalytic theorists have identified loss as central to self-constitution.
From the fall from pre-Oedipal Eden, in which the small infant becomes separated
from the maternal body, through alarming and painful terrors of the Oedipal
constellation, and onto subsequent adult disappointments, rejections and negations:
loss infiltrates all emotional transactions between self and others, and so in a sense
is at the root from which desire flows uncontrollably. Yet while the intricate
connections between loss and selfhood have been underwritten throughout the
history of psychoanalysis, perhaps the most remarkable contribution remains that
elaborated by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. The world of illusion which
we fashion to avoid the traumatic and impenetrable mysteries of loss are for Lacan
the very stuff out of which we are made. For Lacan, the individual subject is
constituted in and through loss, as an excess of lack. In a radical revision of Freud,
largely through a widening of the horizons of psychoanalysis to embrace structuralist
linguistics and poststructuralist theories of discourse, Lacan makes lack the cause
which ensures that as human subjects we are continually falling short, failing, fading
and lapsing.
The writings of Lacan have been widely regarded (especially in the English- speaking
world) as inexhaustibly complex, and one reason for this may be that Lacan himself
believed it necessary to fashion a theoretical discourse at odds with itself in order
for psychoanalysis to do justice to the rich vagaries of emotional life. Another reason