Organised by:

  • Analytical space of Belgium
  • Espaço brasileiro de estudos psicanalíticos (Brazil)
  • Analytical Space of Bulgaria
  • Analytical space (France)
  • Georgian Space for Psychoanalysis
  • Irish psychoanalytic space (Association of psychoanalytic training and Freudian research)
  • Analytical space of Lebanon
  • The psychoanalytic circle (Morocco)

THE NEW STAKES FOR PSYCHOANALYSIS

The “new” issues? No, they have never ceased to be present because they are constitutive of our psychic reality as Freud already expressed in 1915 in Current Thoughts on War and Death: “We are, deep down, murderers.” We simply repress this truth in the name of the ideal of virtuous feelings that we call civilization.

The psychoanalytic movement, after Freud’s death, was for a long time the accomplice of this ideal and one of Lacan’s bets was to point out the source of this complicity in the elevation to the rank of model of a solipsistic Ego which had to adhere unreservedly to the ideals of civilization, a model which was the resumption of that of the Leibnizian monad which, let us be sure, is the model of our modernity.

Who says Leibnizian monad of course says ideal of harmony and the best of all possible worlds as evidenced by this soothing and blinding speech delivered in recent years: there has been no more war, therefore no more violence, for nearly 70 years; the end of history according to Fukuyama’s stupid expression.

More violence? But employees everywhere are faced with increasingly difficult precariousness; but the countries euphemistically called developing countries are everywhere faced with increasingly delicate political and economic instability.

And the war itself has never stopped, except to count for nothing the multiple conflicts of the last 70 years: partition of India, Indochina, Algeria, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Cambodia-Kampuchea, Iran-Iraq, Lebanon, Bangladesh War of Independence, Algerian Years of Embers, Iraq-1, Tutsi Genocide, Yugoslav War, Darfur, Congo-Kinshasa, Iraq-2, Libya, Mali, Yemen, etc., etc.

So Ukraine, what’s new? How are Putin and his clique different from Saddam Hussein and his clique massacring the Kurds and then invading Kuwait, again in the name of supposed irredentism?

Ah, few deaths compared to the second world war? But the Bangladesh war alone caused 10 million…

Thus, many countries have known nothing but war for decades, not to mention the insoluble problems that postcolonial countries are struggling with, and everywhere the precariousness of populations, all difficulties that are not without effects on the subjectivity of each.

But what is at the root of the violence exercised on salaried populations and postcolonial countries, or even the source of many wars? Violence has always been the condition of the subordination of populations and countries and we did not wait for Machiavelli to know it. Simply, since the 18th century, it is no longer the Prince who, explicitly, exercises it.

The world has changed. The surreptitious establishment of economic liberalism has completely changed the existence of men; the industrial revolution combined with the social division of labor has made it possible for the owners of the means of production to continually increase surplus value. Never before have considerable fortunes been obtained in this way, because until then the only way to make a fortune was through inheritance or pillage; now it was enough to have an idea of ​​production and, failing that, to borrow the means to achieve it. However, the benefit was twofold: it also resulted in the enslavement of the masses.

However, for it to last, it was necessary to ensure the complicity of the State. Because liberalism is not just an economic doctrine, it is also, and above all, reread Benjamin Constant, a form of political organization where the State must be reduced to its simplest expression for the benefit of economic actors who replace it. England succeeded in this transformation on the occasion of the Glorious Revolution (censitary parliamentary regime, creation of the Bank of England, the Stock Exchange) and France on the occasion of the Directory (censitary parliamentary regime of 1795 established against universal suffrage of 1793). It remained to transform international relations in terms of an international division of labor.

These are the pseudo-virtues of globalization praised by David Ricardo in his theory of comparative advantage: specialize each country according to its production capacities at the lowest wage cost and there will follow a reciprocal alienation between the States and therefore peace between the nations as… maximum profits for investors: all the foreign policy of England, France, the United States, etc. in the 19th century is based on this principle, following the example of colonizations.

Liberalism, that is to say the social division of labor as the international division of labor, is therefore our world, Tocqueville already noted this in 1835 when he observed the first strike movements in the United States which, surprisingly, were the work of shoemaker companions who were keen to maintain the centuries-old rights of corporations in the face of the division of labor which was increasingly becoming the rule with the precariousness which followed: if work is reduced to a piecemeal task that anyone can do, anyone can replace anyone.

The division of labor is the trick to ensure precariousness, but for it to work, it is absolutely necessary not to allow workers to organize themselves. Thus, the famous Le Chapelier law, which in France definitively put an end to corporations in 1791, also prohibited any union organization in order to leave each worker alone facing his employer in order to accept the conditions. The situation is even simpler in the colonies where forced labor was established, which continued until 1946…

The liberal ideology that prevails against the society of the Ancien Régime has the incredible talent of making people believe in what Tocqueville calls “equality of conditions”, quite simply because there is no longer any hereditary feudalism, and therefore everyone can become the owner of the means of production, a fictitious equality whose price is the disappearance of freedom in favor of a tyrannical power.

This is to say that no formal difference is to be distinguished between the Ancien Régime and the new because, reread Ibn Khaldoun, the immense Tunisian philosopher of the 14th century, there is no other political power than absolute, the maintenance of which depends on the same logic of the Whole whose formalization Lacan left us.

But the birth of the USSR and Nazi Germany changed the situation and forced a revision of liberalism which becomes neo-liberalism. Because in the meantime, following workers’ struggles, universal suffrage was established as the accepted workers’ organizations (Trade Union Act of 1871, Waldeck-Rousseau law of 1884, etc.). In a way, the ideal model of the classical theory of a rationality of choices calls for a correction: can we trust the vote of employees?

While many authors, from Hayek (The Road to Serfdom) to Friedman, have contributed to the theorization of neoliberalism (they all participated in the Lippmann colloquium of 1938 and are all members of the Mont Pèlerin Society), one of them stands out for the richness of his thought: Walter Lippmann, precisely. Heavily influenced by Freud, he was the first to formulate the need for liberalism to be the agent of its propaganda, that is to say, to obtain the consent of those who are its victims: the manufacture of consent is the necessary condition for the development of “democracy” organized by neoliberalism; the violence that characterized social relations in the 19th and early 20th centuries, of which the Haymarket Square massacre is the symbol, must be replaced by consent. Lippmann, thanks to Freud, understands that homo economicus is not, contrary to the assertion of classical theory, a rational agent and therefore that it is necessary to organize his will to arouse his adhesion and prevent him from indulging in disastrous doctrines (Marxism, Nazism): we cannot let men choose because they do not have the capacity to do so; They must be trained without their realizing it, so that modern “democracy” must be secretly run by “experts.”

In this respect, Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew, will be his most faithful disciple by revolutionizing advertising and completely shaping the American way of life. His book, Propaganda, which has become the bedside book of all business leaders as well as of… Goebbels, shows, if there was any need, that neoliberal democracy is based on an “invisible government”: propaganda.

Also, to gain everyone’s support, neoliberalism strives to eliminate all singularity (propaganda must be total, as suggested by the Holy Office and the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide) to organize everyone’s conformity to liberal consumerist values ​​by ensuring the erasure of all axiological reflection: the era of the media, starting with cinema, film news, magazines, advertising, television, but also the reform of education (transformation of school and university programs) will be the occasion for this permanent collective training (which is not far removed in its aims from the Homo sovieticus that Stalin called for) that Orwell stages in 1984.

The manufacture of consent is thus this supplement which allows Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” to work: the spin doctors act in the shadows so that modern “democracy” turns (to spin) in the right direction, that of the sustainability of trusts and the training of the masses in order to make salaried employment as precarious as possible and to finally realize the hygienist program of Bernard Mandeville and Adam Smith who already denounced the tendency of the “poor” to work little in order to remain most often idle and drunk, so that “the reduction of wages in factories, writes Smith, will be a blessing and will not do any real harm to the poor.”

But, above all, by repressing all singularity, and therefore all personal desire, neoliberalism reduces us to the sole subjective position of the consumer (happiness is indexed to purchasing power alone) and leaves each of us a serf of demand: with supply, we create demand, said Lacan, and in particular the demand for distinction (and not, as is so easily asserted, for identity).

Neoliberalism reduces each of us to being nothing more than an individual devoid of his own drive and waiting from outside to determine his own decision through purchase. For example, brands (of clothing (first affixed by Levi Strauss & Co on the 501 in 1936), watches, cars, residential areas, holiday destinations, etc.) are all determinations from which each of us ex-sists.

But these are features of distinction and not of identity: no ontological commitment can be expected from them. However, what is the logic on which the distinction arises? But that of logic phallic, that is to say, of the trait which distinguishes for the Other! So that the distinction has imaginary effects of ontological commitment: one believes oneself ontologically to be this or that.

We then understand the difficulty of castration, that is to say of going beyond the rock of phallic distinction, if one of its reasons is the concern of each person to be distinguished… by the Other, following the example of the imaginary virility of Alfred Jarry’s Supermale.

For the penis is not the phallus at all, but the simple imaginary support of distinction.
However, if the question of distinction by the effect of globalization arises similarly everywhere, there are other traits that are not without ontological impacts: war, hunger, the deterioration of the social environment, migratory exile and its fatal risks (rape, murder, drowning, etc.) that haunt those who survive it and those who consider it, so many violences that upset subjectivities.

The “new” stakes of psychoanalysis require us to take the measure of the constitution of psychic reality which comes as much from the Superego as from the Id, that is to say as much from societal discourse, and therefore from neoliberalism and the specific cultural values ​​of a country as from the social tragedies suffered, as from parental discourse.

The Oedipal sphere is not separate from the social sphere, as Freud constantly reminds us: Collective Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, The Ego and the Id, Civilization and Its Discontents, New Lectures, Why War? and Moses and Monotheism.

Each analysand has a double specificity: that of his family history and that of his societal history. Each country has a historical truth that is specific to it and that each analysand must manage to elaborate in order to subjectively tear himself away from it. Because if neoliberalism has ensured its reign over the whole Earth, globalization, it has only partially altered the historical truth of each country, neoliberalism and historical truth that are part of the logic of the Whole whose structure Lacan showed the inherent irreducibility, this Leviathan of which well before

Hobbes reminded him of the obvious. However, Lacan also pointed out that the imaginary effects of a fact of structure do not imply having faith in it: that one is summoned to fill the Other in order in return to be assured of existing, fact of structure, does not imply giving oneself over to it in order to ex-sist there, fact of castration opening onto the logic of the not-All.

It is in this respect that psychoanalysis is always revolutionary.

Pierre Marie

Booking information please email contact@espace – analytique.org