Of course there is so much that is of great value in Lacan. But here again we can usefully follow Carey approving of Orwell’s observation to the effect that, in Joyce, Orwell detects a gradual death of feeling and its replacement by literary cleverness. In Dubliners, for instance, there is an identification with the suffering of the people, whereas in Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus is ‘intolerable’ and Leopold Bloom does not evoke much pity even when his situation is pitiful.
So when Roudinesco invokes (a return to) “humanist” psychiatry, before it is too late with the psi world now dominated by science, drug therapies, turning away from the subject and so on, this term “humanist” is very problematic for the post-structuralists. For them, care and improvement are sometimes synonymous with the death drive itself, with hints of crushing normative and adaptive assumptions. Consider the Lacanian versus ABA debate in relation to the treatment of autism (Weatherill 2018).
As Borch-Jacobsen (1991, 124) complains, “[W]as it really a psychoanalyst’s role to transform his office into the scene of a grandiose Greek tragedy [following desire, pure life, etc.] Wouldn’t this completely belittle patients’ request for solace and finally drive clients to despair…?”
There is the joke about the analyst who dies and goes to Heaven. An angel there offers to show him around. So, here’s the room for the Freudians; here’s the room for the Kleinians, and so on for the Winnicottians, Jungians, Attachment theorists, etc. Then the angel says sh…sh.., as they approach a high wall. Why keep quiet, he asks? Because behind the wall are the Lacanians and they think they are the only ones here.
The Death Drive Unbound
In the long shadow of WW1, all kinds of evils are identified widely and over-simplistically to do with the Enlightenment, Colonialism, Capitalism and the Imperialism of reason, and such like. The death drive has insinuated itself into the most intimate of places, creating what Baudrillard called The Transpiration of Evil (Baudrillard 1990) and Bruchner confirms that Europeans are growing timorous and self devouring: ‘the Old World is in danger of dying, like Rome, of obesity, and ectoplasm