An in-person seminar session of The “Structure” of Psychoanalysis Seminar

Instructor: Marcus Coelen

Affiliated with DasUnbehagen New York, Berlin School for Psychoanalysis after Freud and Lacan, Pulsion – International Institute of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychosomatics, and The Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis.

The third session (on November 7) was devoted to some elements of what is attached to the name Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure (1857 – 1913) is not only considered the originator of 20th-century linguistics, its generalizing tendencies via semiology, and the structuralist paradigm, but also a figure of heteroclite scientism. He coined the terms “diachronic” and “synchronic” to distinguish between historical and systematic approaches, which he both practiced. He also delved into a dimension of text, speech, and apperception in which “anagrams” are both examples and the name for a dimension otherwise difficult to determine. In all three orientations, something of the unconscious is at stake, which allows for an expansion of what comes with “structure” alone: unification, alienation, and dispersion could be names for it. In Saussure, structure might be originated but when he's voicing it, it never ceases to not be one. We referred to Saussure’s Course, his posthumous notes, as well as to some of his commentators (Arrivé 1994, Bravo 2011, Culler 1976, Maniglier 2006, Milner 1995, 2002, Utaker 2002, Starobinski 1971, Testenoire 2013).

Dissonance

A peculiar dissonance: Whereas no science or theory today would claim to be exclusively “structuralist,” would embrace “structure” as the first and last word on either the model or the real of its object, the term structure enjoys ample usage in psychoanalysis, especially where it defines itself under some influence of the teachings and writings by Jacques Lacan.

Structure

Does “Lacanian” psychoanalysis cling—for reasons perhaps justifiable—to a notion elsewhere seen as epistemologically obsolete? And then why? Or has the term simply fallen from a height of theoretical precision and rigor into the everydayness of language games where it is bestowed with a halo of gravity, and employed almost synonymously with “system,” “architecture,” “construction,” “inner core,” etc.? Is “structure” able to afford such imprecision? And what happens to structure—or to that, what the concept once tried to catch—if “structure” can mean almost anything and next to nothing? Is the sexual structural? Which afterlife of linguistic structuralism is implied in using “signifiers”? What do we inherit from the “elementary structures of kinship” in anthropology? Which resonances with “mathematical structures” could be taken into account? What affect does structure “trigger”?

Structures

And perhaps most importantly, how do the so-called “clinical structures,” or the “way someone is structured”—expressions often used as if designating the property, the inner make-up of a person, mind, or psyche—relate to the attempt at divesting psychoanalysis from psychology by minimalizing its vocabulary and projecting it onto a plane that is determined by the notion of “structure” and only a few others?

Questions

This seminar aims to address these questions and elaborate on their relevance for psychoanalytic theory and practice today. We will cover pieces of the history of structuralism as well as of the history of the term “structure” preceding or surrounding it; we will think through the theoretical implications of structure for psychoanalysis’s relation to contemporary science; we will confront the structure (in Lacan) with the psychic apparatus (in Freud) as well as the grid (in Bion); we will ask about “clinical structures” and their relevance in analytic work.