Is Psychoanalysis Weird?

 This is a paper I presented at the Summer University at Performance Arts Forum in St Erme, France, in late August of 2024, presenting alongside a small group of colleagues for a mixed audience, working towards the theme "Why Psychanalysis?"

Is Psychoanalysis Weird?

American party politics has recently put the signifier ‘weird’ front and centre in a way which is no doubt resonant, and is seemingly effective. It’s used there as a way of designating the strangeness of an out-group, and one can be reminded of Lacan’s idea of group identification [from his text on Logical Time, but this version from Éric Laurent's Racism 2.0]: 

1. A man knows what is not a man; 
2. Men recognise themselves among themselves; 
3. I declare myself to be a man for fear of being convinced by men that I am not a man. 

That is to say, we don’t know so well what ‘we’ are as a group except by relation to what we take to be improper to our group, to what is alien, or foreign to it. We claim to be of the group not so much because of what we stand for, but for fear of being cast as what is not part of our group. It’s a logic which is drawn from Lacan’s adaptation of Saussure’s idea of how signifiers work – a signifier is made with an arbitrary sign, given meaning by contrast to what it is not, for example D O G is an arbitrary arrangement of letters, and we don’t know what a dog is, except by contrast to it not being a cat, a horse, or a weasel… So it is with groups.

‘Weird’ is a way of saying that US Republican leaders don’t belong, are a foreign element, thus inducing a group effect which doesn’t require much to be said about a ‘we’ who are not Republicans, who perhaps make up the notionally ‘normal people’, the ones who are supposedly not ‘weird’.

There may be a twinge of unease for some about this setup, since for many people ‘weird’ in itself is not so very bad. It might designate that indeed one does not identify with a prevalent or ‘normal’ in-group, and why not? Indeed Lacanian psychoanalysis has its tradition of caution towards the imaginary common-sense of norms, and in-groups, preferring to return each to what is singular to each.

My question is – does this make psychoanalysis weird? Or is there another sense in which psychoanalysis might be weird, or not?

The C14th origin of the word ‘weird’ focusses on a particular kind of weirdness, to do with having the magical, ‘weird’, capacity to control fate, or destiny. And from this came the more modern sense of ‘weird’ as something uncanny, what Freud calls the unheimlich [SE XVII, 1919, p218-253], the un-home-like, which is the appearance in the field of normal experience of what is strange, what’s weird.

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One of the questions of psychoanalysis is how, or whether, it can allow someone to change what repeats in their lives, what we might call, their destiny. What can be changed and what cannot? 

Destiny corresponds to a word that Freud used (Schicksal, which Freud’s English translator Stachey translates variously as vicissitude, history, fate, fortune, lot, future, or destiny), and looking through his use of the word, I think that it corresponds to what Lacan calls the real. More often than not Freud’s Schicksal relates to the contingent given of the circumstances in which we find ourselves, which is what the real is for earlier Lacan, the hands one is dealt, to use a card game metaphor. That which has an aspect of chance, of contingency, about it, and an aspect of givenness.  We can see here the idea that the seemingly fixed givenness of the seasons once made of nature something real – a real which has no doubt eroded.

But in relation to the givenness, in repetition, or vicissitudes, of the drive we come to Lacan’s later idea of the real of the drive as what does not respond to the imaginary or symbolic, what we can’t change through working with meaning, or signification (imaginary or symbolic). There is something of the drives that does not correspond to the registers of symbolic or imaginary. There is something of the drive from the point of view of the symbolic that would be contingent in the sense of being outside of the order that the symbolic lends to the world. It’s important to psychoanalysis because we can say that there is something of the drives, a remainder at least, which we cannot address in analysis by symbolic or imaginary means. We might say that there is something of destiny which analysis doesn’t change.

Lacan used Aristotle to indicate something of the distinction between these two kinds of chance, two kinds of Schicksal, we might say. Lacan drew on his 1964 seminar on the ideas of automaton and tyche as two kinds of fate [Seminar 11, p.53-64]. Automaton for Lacan relates to the movement along chains of signifiers in which we’re caught as a kind of circumstance, which makes a fate of the automatisation of life through the signifier. I perhaps we might call this kind of fate ‘normal’, insofar as being caught in it is to be caught in the fixity or movement of the symbolic law. And certainly insofar as psychoanalysis allows certain kinds of flexibility with regards to the coordinates of the symbolic law, it can be weird, at least from the perspective of the norm which the symbolic law underpins (although less and less so, insofar as we are less and less in normative times).

The other kind of fate, of Schicksal, is that of tyche, which relates to the destiny of the drives insofar as there is something of the drives that are precisely not prone to be changed by symbolic or imaginary means.

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This C14th word weird has its etymological origin all the way back in the hypothesised prototype of the Indo-European languages, known as PIE - Proto-Indo-European. The PIE word *wert meaning “to turn or wind” – to turn in the sense of “a turn of events” and we can see how this lends itself to the ‘weirdness’ of being able to control the ‘turn of events’. We have from the same origin the German word ‘werden’ to become, the turning of being. 

Psychoanalysis has its aspect of engaging with the turns of events which bring us to where we are. In analysis subjects (people insofar as they are caught up and implicated in signifying chains) construct their story of these turns of events. The story of one’s becoming as we find the story tends to circle around common themes, the consistency of which lends them to be understood as one’s destiny.

But there is another turn to psychoanalysis, which is that the more we turn around these stories in analysis, the more we recognise that the stories, the truths we speak which gather in consistency, are only half truths, and can come to be understood as destinal fictions. What Freud called fantasies. How, after all, could all this diversity of stuff around us, so conveniently and consistently boil down to versions of the same old story, were it not that it’s all given a fictional dimension. A fantasy is a kind of individual way that one is caught in the signifying chain of the symbolic law, of social norms.

The point of an analysis is not merely to settle for the recognition of one’s fantasies, but to shrink them, so to speak, given that analysts are after all, shinks (it’s a joke that Jaques-Alain Miller makes in his book L’os d’un cure/Analysis Laid Bare).

Lacan’s attitude to being, and to becoming, shifts through his work, and it’s a shift that can in part be traced in his treatment of the word ‘werden’ – that German word for becoming which is etymologically connected to ‘weird’. Here’s a quote from The Subversion of the Subject in Lacan’s Ecrits:

Lacan refers to “…the imperative Freud raised to the sublime stature of a pre-Socratic gnome [means of knowing] in his formulation, "Wo Es war, soil Ich werden," which I have commented upon more than once, and which I am now going to inflect differently.”

We have here from Freud this werden, this being or becoming, from Freud’s aphorism about the what analysis offers, which is usually translated in English as “where it was, I shall be” Maria Bonaparte had it that this was an aphorism about the domination of the id by the ego, and so a whole line of psychoanalysis followed.

Picking up Lacan a little further along:  “Where it was just now, where it was for a short while, between an extinction that is still glowing and an opening up that stumbles, I can [peut] come into being by disappearing from my statement [dit].

An enunciation that denounces itself, a statement that renounces itself, an ignorance that sweeps itself away, an opportunity that self-destructs—what remains here if not the trace of what really must be in order to fall away from being?”

A few years earlier, Lacan had seen the role of analysis as precisely to bring the becoming of being to the Es [It], which he characterised as the letter S of the Subject. To give being to the subject. And here we have something different, we have the role of analysis as bringing the analysand to the place of the emptiness of being, to the S as barred. It’s what Lacan took from Freud’s idea of castration – we don’t have it, any fullness of being, any fullness of the signifier. All the totalising fantasmatic significations we make, all the meanings, that’s not it.

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Right before the start of Freud’s adventure in psychoanalysis he wrote about trauma. In his Project for a Scientific Psychology, in 1895, he noted the case of a girl, Emma, who had a bad encounter with a sweet shop owner who sexually assaulted her). This assault had not registered for her until later, when she saw the shopkeeper again, this time laughing. It was only in encountering this laughter that she was struck in anxiety with the trauma of the first event, and only following this that she developed symptoms. Freud hypothesised that to constitute a trauma requires these two events, which Lacan characterises as a signifier, and a second which comes to give meaning to the first. And there is a third element, which brings the patient to analysis - a symptom, the return of the repressed of this trauma. Supposed as a return of a repressed meaning.

Lacan’s account of this effect allows that a signifier all on its own has no meaning, and it is only through the provision of more signifying material that the value of the first comes to bare. Excuse this very compressed and reduced account.

There may be a question about the work of psychoanalysis – it can be understood that if we fully exhaust the knowledge there is to know about what troubles us, then there would be a relief of the symptom. Freud thought this – if one was to say the right thing at the level of the knowledge one could have about that first bad encounter, then we could be free from the symptomatic effect of the trauma. This has been found to have only limited use. And so it comes that the Lacanian answer at a certain point is to empty out the meaning accrued in response to the first signifier, to approximate the empty signifier, signifier 1, S1 all alone, emptied out of signification, an event, without meaning which can be taken as a pure contingency, a small matter of chance. Emptying out all the attribution of being, of ceaseless becomings, of turns of events, which can be attributed to this empty S1. There is in this an emptying out of the meaning of the symptom, and an emptying of much of the suffering that accrues from it through this.

There is a perspective from which perhaps psychoanalysis is weird, insofar as it is not a normative practice. It doesn’t orient itself by the common-sense of our times which finds its way into the blah blah by which we grasp emptily at our being in fantasy, and by which we orient ourselves conventionally in the world.

And analysis is not weird from the perspective of controlling one’s destinal coordinates. Analysis is not a mastery of the contingencies which underpin ones story. It’s the weirdness of a weird kind of werden, of a being that may become a falling away from being. A weirdness, I would say, of the falling away from the perspective of weirdness. Weird only from a normative perspective, from the perspective of that our blah blah blah which we shrink in analysis.

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There is another perspective though, that develops in and from the later Lacan, beyond the realisation of something of ones castration, beyond the perspective of the depletion of the meaning, and the easing of the symptom as a response of the body to problems of being. This is a perspective drawn out from the later and very last Lacan by Jacques-Alain Miller, and the implications of which are still being worked through. This is the perspective of the fate, the Schicksal, of the drive as such. We could see that if working through and shrinking of the signifying aspect of a trauma works, it is because there is a perspective from which the drive is connected to signification.  But the drive has an aspect which is not connected with all this meaning and signification, which is of a different order. This bit of drive which doesn’t correspond to any bits of imaginary or symbolic capture is what Lacan calls (in seminar XX) jouissance as such. The real of the drive, and analysis has its aspect in the end, of finding ways not to undo the fate of ones drives, but to find a style to live them. This may or may not result in an analyst who seems weird from a normative perspective, but it in any case, not weird from the perspective of controlling one’s fate.

Alasdair Duncan