One potential use of psychoanalysis across disciplinary boundaries that hasn’t received much discussion is as a means of interrogating our own academic desires.  I want to indicate how I think such self-interrogation might serve the APCS (Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society) project of promoting social justice.  I want to pursue this issue in relation to a second issue that has interfered with the APCS aim of using psychoanalysis to promote social justice: namely, the issue of psychoanalytic ethics.  That is, one reason psychoanalysis has not yet made a substantial contribution to social change is that psychoanalytic clinicians and scholars have been uncertain about how to negotiate ethically the fact that increasing social justice requires changing people’s behavior.

The first thing we need to do when we consider using psychoanalysis to address social justice is to squarely confront the necessity of changing people’s behavior.  There are at least three different types of behavior that need to be changed in order in order to reduce injustice:
 

• Behaviors that are themselves immediately harmful to others, such as violence,  discrimination, and greed)

• Economic and political behaviors, including voting decisions, that establish and maintain conditions and institutions harmful to others (such as poverty, poor education, inadequate health care, and unequal opportunity)The various behaviors—and this includes most academic activities—that constitute inadequate responses to harmful realities:

The fact that academic  approaches to social justice, including psychoanalytically oriented approaches, usually overlook these necessary behavioral changes and focus instead on changing mistaken beliefs and faulty values is motivated in part by wishful and perhaps even magical thinking, but it is also partly due to ethical objections to changing other people’s behavior.  We worry, for example, that trying to change the behavior of others would implicate us in the kind of oppressive regimes of control that Foucault and his followers have widely exposed and denounced as unethical. We also fear that such an aim would be behaviorism rather than psychoanalysis, and we know that behaviorism is often not only ineffective but also manipulative and oppressive, and hence unethical.  Behavior modification of any sort evokes images of rats running in mazes and conflicts with the notions—still very much alive in our cuilture—of free will and self-determination as absolute and ultimate qualities of human existence.

Perhaps the most important reason, however, for our reluctance to think of our project in terms of changing people’s behavior is the fact that clinical psychoanalysis has long emphasized that ethical practice requires respecting the autonomy of analysands to the point of  being loath even to suggest certain behaviors to them, much less to actively work to produce such behaviors.   Thus the ethics of psychoanalysis would seem to preclude our pursuit of behavioral change.    Lacan’s ethical dictum in particular— “Have you acted in conformity with the desire that is in you?”—and his statement that from a psychoanalytic point of view the only thing that one can be guilty of is to have given ground relative to one’s desire, suggest that the only thing that psychoanalysis can legitimately concern itself with is the care of the self and its desires.  And this conclusion is reinforced by the rather caustic remarks Lacan makes about the harm that has been produced by efforts to achieve social good.

These ethical objections to behavioral interventions help to drive us to take refuge in the standard academic  hope that exposing and denouncing injustice or the ideology associated with it will be sufficient to produce social change.  As a result, psychoanalytic efforts to promote social justice are severely curtailed, reduced to little more than academic talk.  So we arrive at an impasse: the ethics of psychoanalysis, conceived of in this way, prevents us from using psychoanalysis in a way that would contribute significantly to social justice, and the only activity left to us is largely ineffectual.

If this is indeed the implication of psychoanalytic ethics, then I would say that what we need to do is simply to reject any claim that this psychoanalytic ethic might have to govern our efforts at social intervention.  Such a dismissal would be justified by the fact that such an ethic could have only an extremely limited sphere of application, extending not much further than the door of the analyst’s consulting room.  For no one could sensibly argue that it is never right to try to change someone else’s behavior: such an ethic would not allow us to protect our children from their own unsafe behaviors or ourselves from the behaviors of suicide bombers and disseminators of anthrax.  Moreover, the very attempt to apply this psychoanalytic ethic to social interventions contradicts itself, for it is itself trying to change the behavior of those who are trying to change destructive social behaviors.

Such a rejection of psychoanalytic ethics would not prevent us from using psychoanalytic knowledge of human motivations and psychoanalytic strategies of intervention to construct all sorts of projects for changing the behaviors that underlie social injustice.  As a consequence, renouncing psychoanalytic ethics would actually be a significant improvement on the way that psychoanalysis tends to be used across the disciplines today, ways that for the most part enact, whether deliberately or not, the presumed psychoanalytic ethic of non-intervention in behavior.  Although rejecting this ethic would help our project move forward toward its goal of social change, I believe that we can make even greater progress if we embrace the Lacanian  ethical principle and vigorously and rigorously pursue its implications.  If we do this, I think we will find that our own academic behaviors will be significantly changed in ways that will in turn more effectively and ethically promote those behavioral changes in other people that are necessary for increasing social justice.

Where, then, would we be led by pursuing the implications of the Lacanian ethical principle?  To put things very succinctly, we will be led to a position opposite to that normally assumed to be entailed by Lacan’s pronouncements.  Whereas the Lacanian ethic is usually taken to entail greater and greater self-involvement, my argument is that if we pursue the question of our own desire as far as possible, it will lead us not to self involvement but to a Lévinasian care for the other that is prior to being—a care for the other that we must enact in order to become subjects in the first place.

Rather than trying to spell out every step along the various paths by which we might pursue our desires to this conclusion, I want simply to indicate how four of Lacan’s pronouncements about desire point to this conclusion.

First, to answer the Lacanian ethical question, “Have I acted in conformity with the desire that is in me?” we must first identify the desire that is in us.  And one of the first things we realize when we do so is that, as Lacan says, our most fundamental desire is for recognition.

Second, this fundamental desire for recognition entails a second basic point that Lacan makes about desire: namely, that it is always desire of the other.  This can  mean a number of different things.  Most significant for my argument is the fact that the first and most basic desire that an infant has is to be desired by its mother, the mother’s desire here functioning as the most powerful instance of recognition.  Infants seek evidence that they are desired through the mother’s affective attunement with them, as well as through being gazed at,  being held, touched, cared for, spoken to, and listened to.  Some gratification of this desire is necessary for an infant’s survival, both psychological and physical, and as a result of this necessity, a primal concern for the other’s desire is built in to our very constitution as subjects; it is in fact the basis on which we become subjects and come to have a sense of self or identity.  Since the infant’s very being is dependent on the infant’s responding to the other’s desire, without a proto-ethical attunement to and concern for the other’s desire, the infant would never become a subject.

Thus one form, perhaps the most profound form, of desire as the desire of the other is empathy, or desiring for the other, in the other’s place.  Primal desire involves a primordial care for the other.  As Lévinas puts it, ethics is prior to being.  And the Lacanian ethical question, “Have I acted in conformity with the desire that is in me?” thus inevitably entails, at its deepest level, the question, “Have I acted in conformity with the desire for the other’s well being that is built into me?”

Third, our desire for the other’s welfare is reinforced by a third factor that Lacan emphasizes with regard to desire—namely, that human desire always involves desire in the second degree: it always involves the desire of desire.  Because we have multiple, often conflicting desires, each desire confronts us with the question, “Do I want to have this desire, or do I want not to have it?” In order to answer this question, we are led to assess the entailments and consequences of our different desires, to identify contradictions between different desires and/or their entailments and consequences, and on this basis to identify which desires we most desire and which actions will be most likely fulfill these desires.  Ultimately, we desire those desires that will bring us the most gratifying recognitions.  And the the most gratifying  recognitions are those that demonstrate that we, through our being or our actions, have fulfilled the desires— though not necessarily the demands—of other people: namely, helping others realize their desires, seeing these results in the real, and having others acknowledge one’s contribution not only through their words (S) and gestures (I) but also—and often most importantly—through changes in the real, in their state of being. Thus when we recognize care for the other as one of our desires, and assess the relative gratification it provides, this care tends to become a desire that we desire above all others and thus plays a greater role in directing our behavior.

Finally, the claim that pursuing the question of our own desire far enough ultimately leads to our desire for the other’s well being is also entailed by Lacan’s statement that analysis, pursued to its logical conclusion, leads the analysand to assume the analyst’s desire (Ethics 300-301), which is the desire for absolute difference.  By the desire for absolute difference Lacan means that the analyst desires that the analysand desire not the analyst’s own first-order desires—or the analyst’s ego, or ego ideal, or jouissance—but rather that the analysand desire to assume his or her own first-order desires, which in their concrete specificity may be radically different both from the analyst’s first-order desires and from the analysand’s own second-order desires.  This desire for absolute difference, which governs the entire analysis and which arises in the analysand at the conclusion of analysis, thus expresses in perhaps the purest form possible that primordial care for the other that is necessary in order for a subject to be produced by the other’s desire.

The logic of Lacanian desire thus entails that when one pursues one’s  own desire as far as possible, one winds up, in Moebius-strip fashion, caring for the other.  And such care, and the pursuit of our own desire that leads to it, are crucial in directing our academic behavior in pursuit of social justice, for two reasons.  First, without embracing our own care for the other—our own desire for others to realize their desires—we will lack the necessary motivation to carry our academic activity very far toward social change.   And second, without being in touch with the diverse forms and modes of our other desires—and especially our own subjective destitution and the anxiety, depression, and rage produced in us by crucial failures in the Other’s recognition of us—our primal care for the other will often be overridden by our fear of our own unacknowledged desires, and we will be unable either to understand or even to countenance the desires that are motivating the behaviors we need to change in order to promote social justice.  Only to the extent that we are in touch with our own deepest and most obscure desires and their frustrations can we eschew our more accessible and socially sanctioned desires to respond to people who are violent or prejudiced by exposing, denouncing, and punishing them, and address instead the particular frustrations and gratifications of desire in them that produce their destructive acts—frustrations and gratifications that we understand through the echoes of them that we find in ourselves.  Without recognizing these desires in ourselves, we will see no reason for resisting our desire to denounce and punish the others in whom we find these desires—which will also serve to keep our own unacceptable desires hidden from ourselves—and we will be unable to fathom the desires motivating the other’s harmful behavior and will thus have difficulty understanding how to intervene effectively and ethically to stop such behavior.  A monumental example of such failure is the US response to the September 11 terrorist attacks, with George Bush and other politicians, as well as many pundits, expressing genuine bafflement at how anyone could have the thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and behaviors that the terrorists manifested.  The consequence of this failure to understand the other’s desire, which results from a failure to acknowledge our own, may well be the production of more of the very behavior that the US has now mounted a war to stop.

The high stakes involved in our relation to our own desire make it incumbent on all of us involved to  interrogate our own desires on an ongoing basis, especially in relation to our academic activities.  We might start with the question:

“What desires motivate my pursuit of social justice?”
“Do I desire to have all of these desires, or do I desire not to have some of them?”

 More generally, we need to ask:

 —What desires are motivating my academic choices and activities:
    my specific scholarly goals and projects, my pedagogical goals, objectives, strategies, and
    techniques, and my other academic and professional activities?
 —What desires are motivating my scholarly, pedagogical, and professional projects?
 —What desires animate the particular academic activities that I engage in?
 —Why do I belong to the official and unofficial groups that I belong to?
 —What desires am I pursuing through my discipline’s

  a.  object(s) of investigation,
  b.  its modes and practices of investigation,
  c.  the form and content of its knowledge,
  d.  the ostensible purpose or use of this knowledge,
  e.  the actual purpose or use of this knowledge,
  f.  the organizational structures and group dynamics of the discipline, and
  g.  its audiences and modes of communication

With regard to each of these activities, we need to ask, “What forms of recognition and enactment am I seeking through this activity?” “Which of these desires do I desire, and which do I desire most?”

My argument is that by helping us identify, understand, and assume ownership of our own most profound and obscure desires, the ethics of psychoanalysis will help us to recognize more fully that the best way to realize some of our most powerful desires, academic and personal, is by helping to increase social justice.  And my desire is that as we more fully desire this desire, this care for the other, we will become more vigorous, rigorous, and hence successful in our pursuit of it in our academic work as well as in our lives generally.
 

Biographical Details

Mark Bracher is Professor of English and Director of the Center for Literature and Psychoanalysis at Kent State University.  He is a graduate of the Cleveland Psychoanalytic Institute (Research Associate, 1993), co-founder of the international and interdisciplinary Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture & Society, and founder and editor of JPCS: Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture & Society.  His most recent books include Lacan, Discourse and Social Change: A Psychoanalytic Cultural Criticism and The Writing Cure: Psychoanalysis, Composition, and the Aims of Education.  He has published numerous articles on topics such as violence, racism, postmodernism, and pedagogy.