Psychotherapy and Psychoanalytic Theories in Relation to MacIntyre’s Virtue Ethics

my paper given at the 2nd International Society For MacIntyrian Enquiry conference

knowing how to read antagonistically without defeating oneself as well as one’s opponent by not learning from the encounter is a skill without which no tradition can flourish.– Alasdair MacIntyre^[1]

the paradox of desire is not the neurotic’s privilege – Jacques Lacan^[2]

Throughout the course of his philosophical career, Alasdair MacIntyre has engaged psychotherapeutic and in particular psychoanalytic texts, authors, theories, and practices. On some occasions, the engagement is brief, carried out in a portion of a larger discussion or argument. His treatment of the character of the Therapist in chapter 3 of After Virtue provides an example, one demonstrating also that brevity does not correlate to superficiality or infertility of the engagement.

At other times, MacIntyre engages psychotherapy or psychoanalysis in more sustained ways, for instance Dependent Rational Animals chapter 8’s appropriation of Winnicot’s theories grounded in clinical practice. Other occasions squarely and directly focus on psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. Interestingly, with the exception of “How Psychology Makes Itself True or False” and the preface to the 2004 version of The Unconscious, all the published engagements of this third sort come from the period antedating After Virtue.

Another exception (not presently published however) would be MacIntyre’s discussions of Freud and Lacan comprising roughly one third of the Erasmus Institute summer faculty seminar he led in 2005. My aims here stem from participation in and reflection on that seminar, so I need to say a few more words, first about the 2005 seminar, and then about the aims of this paper.

The seminar’s title, Practical Rationality: Decision Theory, Aquinas, Lacan, gives some indication of its course of study. MacIntyre led participants into, and presented basic structures, concepts, and insights from three very different models or “standpoints,” reflexive and situated understandings, and traditions of practical rationality, the goal being, after developing adequate understanding of each model, to bring them into fruitful and evaluative dialogue with each other. Each model was studied not only as embodied in its most advanced form or proponent, but also in its most influential and fruitful sources.

Decision Theory was thus correlated particularly to its roots in Humean (and Hobbesian) moral theory, Aquinas with Aristotle, and Lacan with Freud (as well as several other psychoanalytic theoreticians). The studies followed out lines by now familiar to those conversant with main features and movements of MacIntyre’s work. Problems were raised for each of the three models, both internally, i.e. from within and using the resources of the model, and externally, i.e. from the standpoint of one of the other models. Each of the models was afforded the chance to resolve those problems by employing and further developing its own resources, or by drawing on and assimilating those from other models. Of particular interest here is the dialogue between Thomist Aristotelianism and what we might in parallel term “Lacanian Freudianism,”mediated and examined through the lens of MacIntyre’s thought.

This paper arises out of that portion of the 2005 Erasmus Institute seminar, and my continued study of and reflection on MacIntyre, Lacan, and the other thinkers they evaluate, draw upon, and criticize. Wanting to avoid from the start any false impressions of borrowed authority, I stress that this paper is not meant to represent or put into play a previously unavailable MacIntyrian text on Lacan. Esoteric airs of disciples from the inner circle assembling transcripts of the Master’s teachings may have appealed to Lacan, but do not, I sense, similarly appeal to MacIntyre, and given the guiding ethos of his work, should not appeal to his followers. It would be particularly ridiculous for me, not a disciple but a mere admirer who happened to participate in MacIntyre’s seminar as its most junior member, to make any such pretenses. While developing along lines of thinking derived from the seminar, this paper thus eschews any esoterically privileged references to the seminar for equivalent, and publicly available, references to MacIntyre’s published work.

The aims and subject matters of this paper go somewhat beyond but remain anchored in dialogue between MacIntyrian Thomist Aristotleanism and Lacanian Freudianism. The first part does not focus on Lacan specifically, but rather exegetically works through MacIntyre’s positive and negative assessments of various forms of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. The second part applies categories of MacIntyre’s virtue ethics to psychotherapy, then specifically turns to psychoanalysis, asking where it fits among MacIntyre’s typology of moral standpoints. The third part argues that Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis bear considerable resemblances to tradition-constituted enquiry. The fourth part then examines how and which conceptual resources from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis can be appropriated by MacIntyrian virtue ethics.

I. MacIntyre’s evaluations of types of psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic theory and practice are complex and ambivalent. From the start, there is a marked diversity of approaches to psychotherapy. Even in 1955 he could write that “[s]o many and so various are the theories and the therapies which can be included under this rather doubtful rubric that generalizations whether about clinical behavior or about theoretical justifications are extremely difficult to make.”^[3] Undaunted by this difficulty, we might still distinguish one set of approaches relying primarily on drug therapy, on surgery, or other physical means of cure, such as electro-convulsive therapy. Other sets of approaches take place principally through modification of behavior, the development, elimination, or redirection of habits. Yet another vast set of approaches include those working, whether to cure human subjects or to understand their psychology, primarily through the medium of discourse, i.e. the multifarious forms of “talk therapy,” and the psychologies based on, derived, from or serving them.

This is a category running from the ridiculous to the sublime and everywhere in between. In it, we might place both the books and the broadcasted mini-sessions of popular psychologists of the present (like a Dr. Phil or a Dr. Laura, or even the earlier and more thematically restricted Dr. Ruth Westheimer). A host of less off-the-cuff, often quite developed methods and theories fit under the rubric as well, as different from each other as Sartre’s existential phenomenology, Berne’s theory of games (which perhaps did more to popularize the term “inner child” than any other theory), Roger’s client-centered therapy, and the numerous schools and currents of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis, beginning from Freud’s fertile work, went off in many different, often mutually critical directions, continuing on for instance in the child-development psychologies of Melanie Klein and Charles Winnicot, in the American ego-psychology Lacan criticized so harshly, in Jungian and Reichian schools of psychoanalysis, and in Lacan and those influenced by him.

One very useful distinction MacIntyre makes, cutting through this diversity, is between approaches that take their main and ultimate bearings from effectiveness, and those in which striving after truth remains essential to the therapy of the individual subject, to the psychological theory, and to the practitioner’s reflexive understanding of the theory and the practice. Already in his 1955 “Cause and Cure in Psychiatry,” MacIntyre draws out this distinction, prefiguring his later analysis of the Therapist in After Virtue.

[W]e should naturally contrast the question, “Does the psychotherapist cause changes in his patient?” with the question “Does the psychotherapist bring to his patient’s notice considerations in the light of which the patient might begin to behave differently?” . . .

The mistake of compressing these two questions into one is surely parallel to the mistake made by protagonists of the emotive theory in ethics. They described changes in moral attitude in such a way as to seem to make it irrelevant whether the change was the result of some reasoned argument or the effect of some drug; and in doing so they did violence to the meaning of “moral,” suppressing the very contrast between attitudes which it is the function of “moral” to bring out.^[4]

As MacIntyre recognized, there are forms of psychotherapy which cannot substitute pragmatic effectiveness in place of the demands of truth. In psychoanalysis, “learning the truth about oneself plays an essential part in the cure. Psychoanalysts may be mistaken as to whether their explanations are in fact correct, but the whole assumption of psychoanalysis is that they are.”^[5]

This brings us to another set of factors accounting for the complexity of MacIntyre’s assessments of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. One of these is that it is difficult to render judgement as a whole on some psychotherapies, Freudian psychoanalysis in particular. In a 1965 essay, he remarks: “what is at first sight the same Freudian methodology appears capable both of crippling the intellect and of liberating it,”^[6] pointing out as examples of the latter works of Erik Erikson and Bruno Bettelheim, who “[b]oth exhibit a certain ambivalence towards the orthodox psycho-analytic tradition”, and who “[b]oth return us to Freud himself, but to a different Freud both from the Freud of orthodoxy and of each other.”^[7]

MacIntyre sees in Freud and his work a fruitfulness of possibilities at times exceeding or even contradicting his own expressed intentions, understandings, or assumptions. “What Freud showed us were hitherto unnoticed facts, hitherto unrevealed motives, hitherto unrelated facets of our life. And in doing so, his achievement broke all conceptual schemes – including his own.”^[8] In the hands of Bettleheim, Erikson, Winnicott, and Lacan, we witness Freudian psychoanalysis as a tradition of inquiry doing for itself what MacIntyre says a tradition in good condition does: raising problems, engaging in reflection on the adequacy of its own concepts, methods, and assumptions and seeking solutions in wider ranges of experiences and in dialogue with other theories or approaches.

One source of psychoanalysis’s fertility MacIntyre repeatedly identifies and early on regarded as problematic (to which we will return later) is that it consists in an intimately, perhaps inextricably intertwined set of key concepts, theories, interpretations, methods, and facts and experiences generated by its practice and interpreted by its theory, encapsulated is his criticism of its “tendency to specify too many ways in which the theory may be confirmed and not enough ways in which it might be falsified,”^[9] a problem also arguably marking numerous other psychotherapies. Another source lies in the fact that while Freudian psychoanalysis is not identical with ethics, it is very closely connected with it, much more so than Freud and many of his successors realized or acknowledged. MacIntyre argues in The Unconscious:

His whole method of treatment rests on an assertion that men can face and cope with their situation rationally, if only they are given the opportunity. Freud himself helps to conceal this from us by his vehement disavowal of any moral purpose in his work. Nonetheless he promotes a moral ideal for which rationality is central. If Freud did not believe that reasonableness is better than prejudice, the mastering of hate better than giving way to it, sympathy combined with objectivity better then blindness about the behavior of oneself and others, neither his theory nor his practice would have any point at all.^[10]

Just years earlier, he remarked: “It is difficult to resist the conclusion that analytic therapy is a kind of moral re-education of oneself. The morality too is familiar: its watchwords are reasonableness, love, self-knowledge, respect for fact. It is the liberal humanist morality in a new guise.”^[11] MacIntyre draws the conclusion: “It is surely because psychoanalysis has this moral dimension that its extensions outside the field of psychotherapy are so illuminating.”^[12]

There is also a negative side to this moral dimension of psychoanalysis, one shared analogously in our time with other psychotherapies, and MacIntyre identifies and critiques several different aspects of this negative side. He notes that in the problematic situation of modernity later described in After Virtue “the ethical implications of psychoanalysis” inevitably became “detach[ed] from the framework of moral and social certainties with which Freud surrounded it.”^[13]

Among the possible distortions are that “analysis can become therapy in the narrowest sense, evaluated by its success in the removal of symptoms,” accompanied by pretense of ethical neutrality. Alternately it becomes “capable of taking on a metaphysical character, supplying doctrinal answers on every topic. . . assuming a religious character.”^[14] Both of these theoretical stances take flesh in social embodiment: “the one in extremes of professionalization. . . .the other in the cult of analysis among intellectuals.”^[15]

In another essay, he raises a related question: “I know of no other example of a system of beliefs, unjustified on the basis of the criteria to which itself appeals, and unbacked by political power or past tradition, which has propagated itself so successfully as Freudian orthodoxy. How did it do it?” His answer is that the language and concepts of psychoanalysis becomes “the vocabulary of a segment of urban middle-class intelligentsia whose cultural situation deprived them of a large-scale theory at the same time as it made large-scale theory a necessity for them.”^[16] This diagnosis might be broadened in two ways in our times. Such a use of Freudian psychoanalysis, which still remains in style in some quarters, competes with uses of numerous other psychotherapies reduced in this way to ideologies. And, in an age of Donahue, Oprah, and Dr. Phil, many outside middle-class intelligentsia have both similar needs for large scale-theory and easy access to reductively commodified psychotherapeutic concepts and terminology.

This leads us to two further aspects of MacIntyre’s assessment of the negative side of psychoanalysis and psychotherapies, one of which crystalizes in the shape of After Virtue’s character of the Therapist. But equally important are a number of effects MacIntyre reveals psychology (including psychoanalytic and other psychotherapeutic theories, concepts, interpretative methods) to exert on and in our culture and ourselves. As “a new mode . . . of human self-knowledge,” psychology “cannot avoid conflict with other older modes of self-knowledge,”^[17] often, as we know from experience and from the comparative perspective historical narrative can provide, displacing or transforming these older modes in the process.

Psychology then “provides new models for self knowledge,” but even more importantly produces “a partially new self for us to have knowledge of,” only partially new since “the new psychological models of self-knowledge and self-hood have to coexist – even in one and the same person – with a variety of older models.”^[18] The cultural result is that “psychology has provided descriptions that have turned into prescriptions, theories which have been reworked as dramatic scripts,”^[19] and MacIntyre signals three main features of this dynamic.

The first, which MacIntyre maintains derived largely from psychoanalytic theory, is what he terms “the overinterpretative social mode,” i.e. one in which behavior and discourse is not to be taken at face value, but must be suspected and interpreted. One consequence of this is “that it becomes much more difficult to take the notion of an authoritative utterance seriously,” whether it be the authority of another or even of oneself.^[20] Another is that a new stress has been placed on understanding others at the same time that the concept of understanding has been greatly modified to “perceiving in him or her more and other than he or she perceives and acknowledges,” which then is understandably “experienced by its objects as an act of aggression.”^[21]

The second feature, deriving from social psychology, bears on rationality and its lack, contributing “a picture of irrational man . . . culturally influential whenever one person plans to manipulate another. . . advertisers, political campaign managers, and others succeed not only in acting on the hypothesis that the rest of us are by and large nonrational sheep, but also in communicating to us that that is how they think about us.”^[22] This picture and attitude does contain some truth, and corresponds to the situation of many in modernity, but it “confer[s] upon this egoistic elitism the appearance of the only possible attitude warranted by a scientific approach to the social world.”^[23]

The third feature is a new understanding of “adults not only as grown-up children but even as imperfectly grown-up children,” with effects of “sanctioned commingling of what once were the manners of the nursery with what were once the manners of the adult parts of the house” and “reduc[tion of] the would be heroic figure to adolescent of preadolescent size.”^[24]

All these negative features just presented lead us into and inform After Virtue’s critique of emotivism’s context and its embodying characters. Characters, as MacIntyre uses the term, are social roles specific to types of society or culture, that “place a certain kind of moral constraint on the personality those who inhabit them in a way. . . many other social roles do not.”^[25] In stronger terms, for characters “the demand is that in this type of case role and personality be fused. Social type and psychological type are required to coincide. The character morally legitimates a mode of social existence.”^[26]

He notes another key aspect as well. Characters are “the moral representatives of their culture and they are so because of the way in which moral and metaphysical ideas and theories assume through them an embodied existence in the social world. . . the masks worn by moral philosophies.”^[27] It needs pointing out that all characters do not embody emotivism. Also worth pointing out (though not followed up on here) is that psychotherapy’s negative aspects can and do take form not only in the character of the Therapist, but also in those of the Rich Aesthete and the Bureaucratic Manager.^[28]

Three key aspects of the Therapist cap off and encapsulate MacIntyre’s assessments of negative effects of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis raised earlier here. First, he or she represents “the obliteration of the distinction between manipulative and nonmanipulative social relations,” most specifically “in the sphere of personal life.”^[29] This correlates to the earlier noted reduction, truncation, and purely instrumental use of psychotherapeutic theory and practice. “The therapist. . . treats ends as given, outside his scope; his concern is. . .with technique, with effectiveness in transforming neurotic symptoms into directed energy, maladjusted individuals into well-adjusted ones.”^[30]

Second, the therapist is particularly badly-off in relation the moral fictions with which they work, and in a double respect. “The therapist. . .is not only the most liable of the three typical characters of modernity to be deceived, but is also the most liable to be seen to be deceived.”^[31]

Third, the Therapist corresponds to psychotherapy’s pervasive negative effects on wider culture. “[T]he concept of the therapist has been given application far beyond the sphere of psychological medicine in which it obviously has its legitimate place,” MacIntyre notes, mentioning education and religion as just two areas which “[t]he idioms of therapy have invaded all too successfully.”^[32]

II. At this point, MacIntyre’s explicit assessments of differing forms, positive resources, and negative social effects and embodiments of psychotherapy in general, and of Freudian psychoanalysis and its numerous adaptations in particular, have been brought to light. Considerably more illumination can be cast on psychotherapy and psychoanalysis by using central categories, concepts, and methods developed in MacIntyre’s works, and I do that here in two ways, one applying to psychotherapy in general, the other focused specifically on psychoanalysis.

First, I outline a set of questions applicable to psychotherapeutic practices and theories, questions whose answers reveal approaches’ moral adequacy, reflectiveness, and recognition and ordering of values. Second, I attempt to locate Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis within MacIntyre’s typology of moral enquiry. The conclusions of the second then raise the question whether Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis should not be understood in terms of tradition-constituted inquiry, a tradition rival to and possible to bring into dialogue with those MacIntyre draws on.

The earlier noted moral dimension to psychoanalysis reflects a more general point. Any approach to psychotherapy whatsoever, even those focused on mere effectiveness, possesses a moral dimension, which it embodies, presupposes, and attempts to impose, and which can be articulated in terms of moral theory. Of any particular theory or practice it can be asked: what is its overarching goal, its architectonic or final end? To ask this is to inquire about what kind of person, or at least what conditions of the person, the psychotherapy aims to produce from the persons it takes as its subjects. Here, we are actually raising questions about ethos, character, and human flourishing. We are also raising interrelated questions about the various goods of human life, their ordering and relations, and the final and highest human good.

Similarly, questions can be put about what kinds or what conditions of persons a theory or practice identifies with the illnesses, problems, even moral failures to be ameliorated or overcome. Related to this are questions about the identification of specific obstacles within the subject’s structures of desires, beliefs, and habits, or the matrix of his or her relationships, even his or her culture. There are yet other questions we can and ought to ask of such theories and practices. What sort of understanding of the emotions, of desires, of reason or rationality, of habits, of the will (if that last notion is even acknowledged) do they articulate or rely upon? How are personal, familial, role, and social relations understood? How are freedom, responsibility, and agency understood? In short, what moral psychology undergirds the psychotherapeutic practice or theory, what moral psychology is embodied, inculcated, and enacted in its practitioner and institutions?

Such questions of course are precisely the sort that would be addressed to alternate moral approaches by a moral inquirer of the tradition to which MacIntyre belongs, for they reflect achievements, interest, and distinctions recognizable by and important to members of that body of traditions. From within some psychotherapeutic approaches, or for some of their practitioners, these questions will appear irrelevant, naive, or even unintelligible. This reveals, on the part of these approaches and their associated moral theories, a lack of moral reflection, and an inadequate development or deprivation of intellectual and moral resources needed to carry it out.

Many of them remain confined within the problematic moral situation MacIntyre has progressively diagnosed and articulated. Some do this as reflections and embodiments of the moral theory and context of emotivism. Others reflect and embody assumptions and ideals of one or another of the rival moral theories, traditions, or versions of moral enquiry MacIntyre identifies and examines. If there is to be dialogue between Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalysis and MacIntyre’s contemporary recovery of Aristotlean and Thomist virtue ethics, a question must be asked about the former: what type of moral approach do they represent?

In a passage cited earlier, MacIntyre wrote that psychoanalysis represented the “liberal humanist morality in a new guise,” providing a suitable starting point here. We must avoid too closely identifying liberalism as a set of moral theories, practices, a type or ideal of self, a tradition, and a dominant social framework with the historical Enlightenment, or with Enlightenment as a version of moral enquiry. They are closely connected, since liberalism stems from the Enlightenment. It also continues on, however, in the aftermath of the Enlightenment project’s failure, inheriting its stripping away and marginalization of traditions, but developing attitudes different from the assumptions of Enlightenment about the attainability of moral consensus among rational individuals. As MacIntyre notes:

in the course of [its] history liberalism, which began as an appeal to alleged principles of shared rationality against what was felt to be the tyranny of tradition, has itself been transformed into a tradition whose continuities are partly defined by the interminability of the debate over such principles. An interminability which was from the standpoint of an earlier liberalism a grave defect to be remedied as soon as possible has become, in the eyes of some liberals at least, a kind of virtue.^[33]

At the risk of oversimplifying, let us say that in its forms and embodiments, liberalism resides in a continuum running from Enlightenment to emotivism, more adequately understood in terms of either extreme when it approaches them, but possessing a determinacy of its own. Two of liberalism’s determinate features MacIntyre notes are particularly relevant here.

First, a basic ideal of liberalism is the human self liberated from any formative traditions, practices, communities, even commitments, that it cannot recognize and autonomously choose as its own good, or as means or constituents thereof, “[e]very individual. . . equally free to propose and to live by whatever conception of the good he or she please . . . unless that conception of the good involves reshaping the life the rest of the community in accordance with it,”^[34] as MacIntyre puts it.

Is this ideal also one of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis? Arguably it is for some interpretations, theorists, and practitioners of Freudian psychoanalysts. Given his emphatically articulated views about the human subject, the vulnerabilities of both the developing and the mature human being, the imaginary identifications of the ego and its other, the unconscious structured as the symbolic register including particularly the law, the limited possibilities of recognizing and attaining our desires, and his interpretations of the culture and the people of Western modernity, one would have a difficult time, to say the least, arguing that liberalism’s ideal is one for Lacan, or typical Lacanian theorists and practitioners.

A second important feature of liberalism is the effects of compartmentalization on the self. As MacIntyre points out, liberalism’s commitment to there being no final, highest, or “overriding good,” brings the social result that “recognition of a range of goods is accompanied by a recognition of a range of compartmentalized spheres within each of which some good is pursued.”^[35] And, within these, “different kinds of evaluation, each independent of the other, are exercised in different types of social environment,” so that “to be educated into the culture of a liberal social order is. . . to become the kind of person to whom it appears normal that a variety of goods should be pursued. . . no overall good supplying any overall unity to life.”^[36] A “problem of the self in liberal society arises” for such morally fragmented selves, because “each individual is to present him or herself as a single, well-ordered will,”^[37] both to him- or herself, and in society.

In a reference to Lacan, MacIntyre writes: “Those who have most cogently identified . . . schism and conflict within the self, such as Freud and Jacques Lacan, have often not appeared to be threatening the liberal view of the self by their views, because along with diagnosis they have offered their own therapeutic remedies.”^[38] This does not mean, however, that Lacan endorses the liberal view of the self.^[39] Deep conflicts, (some of which are normal, others pathological), are concealed but also produced by the very presentation of such an integrated, conflict-free self, which Lacan associates with the ego, in his view actually a “set of defenses, of denials, of dams, of inhibitions, of fundamental fantasies which orient and direct the subject.”^[40]

Lacan’s therapeutic remedy does not consist in fully integrating the divided self, but at bringing the subject to more fully understanding, and thus being able to better but still only partially change, as well as accept, their condition. And, from a Lacanian perspective, liberal society’s and the liberal self’s compartmentalization are both highly suspect. Ironically, by the fact that the individual subject’s desire, their imaginary register of identifications and affectivity, and the symbolic register of the law, language and the unconscious each undergird and flow through all their putatively compartmentalized activities, evaluations, and parts of the self, and that Lacan regards the symbolic register as doing so for society as well, the Lacanian divided self involves unities revealing liberalism’s divided self as symptom and illusion.

If Lacan’s thought thus resists being placed in what MacIntyre correctly observes as a liberal tradition, where does he fit? It is unlikely any would suggest Lacan as a representative of the type of moral enquiry MacIntyre calls Enlightenment. What about what in After Virtue he discusses as “the Nietzschean diagnosis and the Neitzschean problematic,”^[41] and in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? as “post- Enlightenment relativism and perspectivism,”^[42] the basic viewpoint and project of Three Rival Versions’ “Genealogy”? Such a classification might be attractive upon first consideration for two sets of reasons.

Lacan does seem to be in the business of “unmasking,” of revealing more, different, and more troubling things going on in the human subject than what established philosophical, psychological, or religious doctrines or systems seem to say is there. Does he not unveil to us the play of illusion and phantasies in the subject, the structuring of human relations by a symbolic code imbued with and mediating power, the multifarious paths and patterns of desire of the psychoanalyzed subject and also of the analyst, the very decentering of the supposedly unitary human subject?

And considered simply in terms of his location in “continental philosophy’s” canon, should he not be a genealogist? After all, the fathers of the hermeneutics of suspicion include Freud as well as Nietzsche. Macintyre places other French post-structuralists such as Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida in the category. Why should Lacan not also be placed there?

By narrow enough reading of and reference to Lacan’s texts, one can be easily misled by his surface similarities to other “continental philosophers,” many of whom also harness Freudian concepts, deal in terminology and plays of desire, decentered subjects, and linguistic and social structures, and by complex and erudite analyses problematize the self-understandings of ordinary people and of other philosophers.^[43] Fuller attention to his texts reveals that Lacan does not fit the genealogical type. Consider three traits of the genealogist MacIntyre diagnoses.

First, the genealogist maintains truth and rationality as these are typically understood or relied upon by non-genealogists to be illusions, masks for contingent plays of power, preferences, domination, and exploitation. “There are,” for instance, “no rules of rationality as such to be appealed to, there are rather strategies of insight and strategies of subversion.”^[44] “Rationality is, and can be at best, no more than one of the provisional masks worn by those engaging in unmasking the pretensions to rationality of others.”^[45]

Second, the genealogist, if not to lapse into mere emotivism, will still remain motivated by and value a fundamental moral project, precisely that of unmasking the pretenses of others to truth and rationality, as well as justice, and moral goodness.

Third, the genealogist inconsistently and inevitably exempts his or her self, projects, and genealogical criticism from genealogy’s own reflexive implications. “Make of the genealogist’s self nothing but what genealogy makes of it, and that self is dissolved to the point at which there is no longer a continuous genealogical project,” MacIntyre writes, signaling this as problem for any such stance.^[46]

None of these traits apply to Lacan. He explicitly frames psychoanalysis as aiming at discovering truth and bringing rationality. Early in Seminar I, he states that Freud’s focus was “the truth of the subject,”^[47] adding: “The quest for truth is not entirely reducible to the objective, and objectifying, quest of ordinary scientific method. What is at stake is the realization of the truth of the subject.”^[48] In another place, he writes, “Freud’s discovery is the truth that the truth never loses its rights.”^[49] In Seminar 3, Lacan claims: “analysis is absolutely inseparable from a fundamental question about the way truth enters into the life of man. The dimension of truth is mysterious inexplicable, nothing decisively enables the necessity of it to be grasped, since man accommodates himself to non-truth perfectly well.”^[50]

Making a point also applying to the third trait, he continues: “Freud was taken up in the quest for a truth which engaged him totally, including there his own self, and hence also his presence with respect to the patient.”^[51] “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious” likewise explicitly connects the truth of Lacanian psychoanalysis to the subject both as analysand and as analyst. “[W]e cannot confine ourselves to giving a new truth its rightful place, for the point is to take up our place in it. The truth requires us to go out of our way. We cannot do so by simply getting used to it.” There, Lacan criticizes the “scholar, the sage, and even the quack,” for adopting the position of “the only one who knows,” exempting themselves from their analyses.^[52]

One would hardly expect of a genealogist that he speak, for example of “introduc[ing] rigor, coherence and rationality into what happens in psychosis.”^[53] Lacan writes, in a passage echoing one of MacIntyre’s own:

The simple-minded call it [i.e. neurosis interpreted by psychoanalysis ] the irrational, since they haven’t realized that Freud’s discovery is ratified by the fact that it first takes as certain that the real is rational . . . and then by noting that the rational is real. As a result, Freud can articulate that what presents itself s not very reasonable in desire is an effect of the passage of the rational qua real – that is, of language – into the real, insofar as the rational has already traced its circumvallation there.^[54]

Nor does Lacan’s admittedly ambivalent endorsement of a “goal of reintegration and harmony, I might even say of reconciliation”^[55] as “the goal Freud’s discovery proposes to man. . . Wo Es war, soll Ich werden.”^[56] This sums up, Lacan says, “the moral experience involved in psychoanalysis,” to which he devotes considerable attention in Seminar 7, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. While acknowledging the differences and distance between the ethics of psychoanalysis and other ethics, Lacan nevertheless observes that “we are submerged in moral problems,”^[57] that “evaluation, location, situation, and organization of values. . .that we propose to our patients, and around which we organize the assessments of their progress and the transformation of their way into a path, is supposed to be part of our work,”^[58] and he identifies “the deeper dimension of analytical thought, work and technique, as “ethics,”^[59] a term he clarifies by writing that “ethics essentially consists in a judgement of our action, with the proviso that it is only significant if the action implied by it also contains within it, or is supposed to contain, a judgement, even if it is only implicit.”^[60]

What lends the impression that Lacan would possibly fit the rubric of genealogy is that he does investigate and maintain human selves decentered, mistaken not only theoretically but even more in their action and lives about the nature of their own being and their desires, and bearing conflicts within itself and in its ongoing relations with reality, with the world of roles, meanings, desires, objects, and other people and their roles, meanings, desires, objects. But, his very projects and commitments presuppose and aim towards truth and rationality. It is simply that the realities that Lacan studies and describes are highly complex, obscure, and reflexive, and theory’s adequacy requires that it be as well. It is also that the truth of the subject is not the abstract, impersonal one sought and elevated to the ideal for all truth by the Enlightenment, but rather a truth appropriate to the particular human subject, a truth both requiring the subject to assume responsibility for it, and demanding to be adequately known some development on the subject’s part. On this matter of truth and the human subject, important similarities come to light between Lacan’s and MacIntyre’s robust conceptions of truth. Two of the latter’s themes illustrate this.

First, “[o]ne of the great originating insights of tradition-constituted enquiries is that false beliefs and false judgements represent a failure of the mind, not of its objects. It is mind which stands in need of correction.”^[61] He amplifies: “It is not. . . judgements which primarily correspond or conform to those realities about which they are uttered; it is the embodied mind which conforms adequately or inadequately to the objects, the res, the subject matter, and which evidences this adequacy or inadequacy in a number of ways, one of which is the truth or falsity of its judgements.”^[62]

In both Lacanian psychoanalysis and in MacIntyrian tradition-constituted rationality these truths are not only about matters external to the embodied mind, but also about the mind, both about the general human condition and about the particular embodied mind one is oneself, along with its relationships and narrative history. Failure of mind’s adequacy to its objects includes the object of mind’s own failures, and correlatively includes what constitutes and what the means are to its adequacy.

This leads to the second theme, that tradition-constituted inquiry differs importantly from both encyclopediac and genealogical modes by construing truth in terms of accountability, bearing on “the question of the relationship of those who affirm and deny to the truth by which they are measured and by reference to which they are to be held accountable.”^[63] The encylopediast regards truth and rationality as “independent of our apprehensions or strivings towards them,”^[64] while the genealogist both rejects and is rendered incapable of understanding accountability.

III. At this point, the possibility ought to be raised that psychoanalysis, particularly Lacan’s version, constitutes a tradition of moral inquiry more akin to, and possessing resources similar to, the pre-enlightenment traditions MacIntyre discuses and draws upon. This could be argued for more systematically and in greater detail, but here I focus on only a few features of traditions of inquiry.

The first is “part of what put the philosophical tradition which runs from Socrates to Aquinas at odds with the philosophical thought of modernity, whether encylopediac or genealogical,” or for that matter the forms of thought at home in the emotivist context, namely, “its way of conceiving of philosophy as a craft. . . and its conception of what such a craft in good order is.”^[65] From After Virtue on, these conceptions are associated with the concepts of practices, internal goods, the telos of human life, the narrative unity of a human life, and the virtues. One oft-cited passage reveals the constellation of concepts around that of practice

A practice involves standards of excellence and obedience to rules as well as a achievement of goods. To enter into a practice is to accept the authority of those standards and the inadequacy of my own performance as judged by them. It is to subject my own attitudes, choices, preferences, and tastes to the standards which currently and partially define the practice.^[66]

Before employing the light cast by several additional passages, we must pause to ask whether and how these concepts characterize psychoanalysis.

Clearly psychoanalysis is a practice. It possess and aims at characteristic internal goods, not least alleviation of neurotic symptoms, but also including understanding of onself and the human condition. Psychoanalytic theories construe the telos of human life or what would count as human flourishing in varied, and admittedly often obscure and complex ways, but this is still to have and use such a conception.^[67] And, despite the fragmentation of the self into different agencies, despite phantasies, projections, even Lacanian unattainable objects-a of desire, despite its conflicts, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis both work by aiding and guiding the subject in reconstructing a narrative unity to life.

Putting off the matter of the virtues for a moment, what about the authority of standards? These also structure psychoanalysis, in several ways which require being made distinct. For, we must distinguish between three different situations: the clinical practice of psychoanalysis, the training of psychoanalysts, and the study and possible adaptation or use by non-psychoanalysts of psychoanalytic theory. In all of these cases, psychoanalysis involves learning subjected to, guided by, and gradually coming to adequately understand standards. And here, several other passages provide additional illumination about the authority of standards and the student’s own inadequacies.

“It belongs to the concept of a practice,” Macintyre notes, “that its goods can only be achieved by subordinating ourselves within the practice to other practioners.”^[68] One way this happens is through “rational teaching authority” involved in any craft, whereby “we learn from a teacher and initially accept on the basis of his authority. . . precisely what intellectual and moral habits. . .we must cultivate and acquire if we are to become effectively self-moved participants in such enquiry.”^[69] An apprentice in a craft must learn “at first from his or her teachers and then in his or her continuing self-education,”^[70] and what this education involves is “identification of the defects and limitations of this particular person, as he or she is now, with respect to the achievement of [the telos of the craft]: defects and limitations in habits of judgement and habits of evaluation, rooted in corruptions and inadequacies of desire, taste, habit, and judgement.”^[71]

This dynamic will apply differently in the three situations. Training of psychoanalysts, involving the apprentice not only learning the craft but also undergoing analysis perhaps fits it most closely. The non-psychoanalyst studying psychoanalytic theory is in a situation analogous to a moral philosopher studying Platonic texts, in that by their own lights in order to progress in understanding those texts and the thinker behind them, some things have to be taken at first an authority, particular attitudes, beliefs, desires, and patterns of behavior may need to be scrutinized and modified, and in the course of study one might seek out and provisionally subordinate oneself to an expert in the texts and form of moral enquiry.

In the situation of psychoanalysis, the practitioner is in the position of an authority for the subject, the analysand, who is in fact engaged in a type of moral enquiry and practice, pertaining at the very least to their own case. Even in Lacanian clinical practice, where the analyst may allow long periods of silence, refusing to provide or impose interpretations so as to allow the unconscious of the analysand to come into speech, and despite Lacan’s derision of the authoritative posture of American ego-psychologists, the Lacanian analyst remains in an authoritative position initiating and guiding others in a MacIntyrian practice, and a moral inquiry structured as a craft.

Virtue poses a trickier problem for this interpretation of Lacanian psychoanalysis (though not one necessarily for other forms of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy),^[72] one I signal without claiming to resolve here. An essential component of moral inquiry as craft is that the individual learns “what it is about him or herself that has to be transformed, what vices need to be eradicated, what intellectual and moral virtues need to be cultivated.”^[73] Lacan, however, explicitly disavows an ethics of virtues and vices. Consider two passages:

Wouldn’t it be interesting to wonder about the significance of our absence from the field of what might be called a science of virtues, a practical reason, the sphere of common sense? For in truth one cannot say that we ever intervene in the field of any virtue. We clear ways and paths, and we hope that what is called virtue will take root there.. . . [B]oth in the means we employ and in the theoretical competence we insist on, the ethics of analysis. . . involves effacement, setting aside, withdrawal, indeed the absence of a dimension one has only to mention in order to realize how much separates us from all ethical thought that preceded us. I mean the dimension of habits, good and bad habits.^[74]

There is in Aristotle a discipline of happiness. He shows the paths along which he intends to lead anyone who is willing to follow him in his problematic, paths which in different spheres of human activity lead to the realization of one of the functions of virtue. Such virtue is achieved through :,F`J0H, something that is far from being a simple golden mean or a process linked to the avoidance of excess; instead, it is supposed to enable man to choose that which might reasonably allow him to realize himself in his own good. Please note that one finds nothing similar in psychoanalysis.^[75]

Two questions might be put here. First, is Lacan maintaining that vices and virtues, whether as conceptual categories, or as habitual structures of human subjects, are incompatible with, irrelevant to, or simply non-coincident but compatible with the practice, theory, and goals of psychoanalysis as he conceives it?

Second, may not this be a sign that Lacan himself is on some counts mistaken, and perhaps overlooks or is blind to key features of his own discipline? How else, for instance, should use or misuse, insightful misapplication or tin-eared and ham-handed misapplication of the bevy of difficult concepts Lacan introduces, explains, and applies be evaluated? Certainly it is not by a set of rules and procedures, nor by chance and happenstance, nor by the mere preferences and proclivities of the theorist or practitioner, nor by simple appeal to the Master’s authority, example, or dicta.

Additionally, MacIntyre argues persuasively that realizing the goods of any practice will at least presuppose three virtues.

We have to learn to recognize what is due to whom; we have to be prepared to take whatever self-endangering risks are demanded along the way; and we have to listen carefully to what we are told about our own inadequacies and to reply with the same carefulness for the facts. In other words, we have to accept as necessary components of any practice with internal goods and standards of excellence the virtues of justice, courage, and honesty.^[76]

Another feature of traditions of inquiry fruitful to consider here is how traditions develop through argument, interpretation, and epistemological crises, in relation to themselves and in relation to other traditions or determinate types of moral enquiry. Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis can be understood in these MacIntyrian terms.

With one exception, psychoanalysis’ development fits the developmental narratives of traditions of enquiry MacIntyre sketches in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and Three Rival Versions.^[77] One of these basic models charts the internal development of traditions from their contingent and largely non-reflexively rational beginnings to progressively more complex and reflexive socially embodied theories, “mov[ing] through stages, at each of which a justification of the scheme of belief as a whole could be supplied in terms of its rational superiority to the formulations of its predecessor.”^[78] Another charts the course of engagements of a tradition with other traditions, in the course of which it grapples with and attempts to understand and if possible answer, address or appropriate the standpoint, arguments, and conceptual resources of its others.^[79] In both cases, progress is made through encountering, formulating, and attempting to resolve problems arising either internally within the tradition or posed by another tradition or mode of enquiry, problems which may assume the shape and seriousness of full-blown epistemological crises.^[80]

Precisely what MacIntyre ascribes to traditions occurs in psychoanalysis’ ongoing development: “beliefs will be further articulated, amended, modified, and added to in order that, in a newer, revised form, they may provide answers to the questions thus raised and in that form transcend the limitations of their earlier version.”^[81] Beliefs operative in and constitutive of psychoanalysis are made more adequate to their subject matters through theorizing, borrowing from all sorts of cultural quarters,^[82] and clinical practice, and in the internal discussion and argument about the subject matters, the beliefs, and these resources used to adequate them.

Additional vectors of argument occur in a tradition, which according to MacIntyre “is more than a coherent movement of thought. It is such a movement in the course of which those engaging in that movement become aware of it and of its direction and in self-aware fashion attempt to engage in its debates and to carry its enquiries forward.”^[83] MacIntyre makes another closely related observation: “when a tradition is in good order, it is always partially constituted by an argument about the goods the pursuit of which gives to that tradition its particular point and purpose.”^[84]

Psychoanalysis includes both of these, and this contributes to explaining the numerous splits that occurred within its tradition, splits occurring over disagreements about the very conception of what psychoanalysis was and ought to be, what goods it was to serve,^[85] and how these were to be brought about, requiring scrutiny and transformation both of the analysand and of the analyst. Lacan’s theory in particular includes engagement and critique of rival interpretations internal to the tradition of psychoanalysis. His assessments of the failures and the values of rival approaches are quite specific. American Ego-psychology rests ultimately on misrecognition of the nature and limitation of the ego, and correlative misidentification of the tasks of the psychoanalyst. Jungian psychoanalysis disregards the historical conditions of the modern subject. Klein’s and by extension Winnicot’s objects relations theory, objects of controversy from the start in psychoanalytic circles, gain Lacan’s qualified endorsement.

Lacan’s interpreters have continued this work of engagement and assessment of rival interpretations of psychaoanalysis to the present. Lacan’s understanding of his own position is that, in contrast to the other school’s deviations from Freud, he returns psychoanalysis to study and reappropriation of Freud’s discoveries, insights and texts. Basing itself on these, and grappling with unresolved problems they raise, Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory nevertheless surpasses exegetical commentary and provides a further developed psychoanalytic perspective contributing new conceptual resources, a few of which we shall discuss momentarily.

As a tradition of moral enquiry, psychoanalysis will inevitably be drawn into conflict with other traditions. This occurs already in some of Freud’s works, and explicitly takes place in Lacan’s own texts, understandably so, because of a moral problematic inherent to psychoanalysis brought up earlier. If psychoanalysis is not to degenerate into a mere technical skill, evaluated solely in terms of psychological effectiveness, it inevitably involves claims of truth, both for particular clinical interpretations, and for its larger theory. As MacIntyre points out, “to claim that. . .an overall scheme of concepts and beliefs is true is to claim that no fundamental reality could ever be disclosed about which it is impossible to speak truly within that scheme.”^[86]

Such claims can be made by psychoanalysis from two fundamentally different standpoints. The first represents another degeneration of psychoanalysis, where it becomes a dogmatic system of concepts, beliefs, and practices reductively imposed on any rival theories. The second standpoint would ultimately require psychoanalysis to attempt to do all the things MacIntyre tells us working traditions do when in conflict with other traditions, leading up to demonstrating its rational superiority to its rivals, which “reside[s] in its capacity not only for identifying and characterizing the limitations and failures of that rival tradition as judged by that rival tradition’s own standards, limitations and failures which that rival tradition itself lacks the resources to explain or understand, but also for explaining and understanding those limitations in some tolerably precise way.”^[87]

IV. To carry through the project of bringing Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalysis and MacIntyrian virtue ethics systematically and entirely through such a conflict of traditions to the point where the rational superiority of one had been exhaustively and incontestably demonstrated, or where some new synthesis had been produced, exceeds the scope of this paper, as well as my own competencies in both standpoints. I suspect that bringing such a project off successfully would demand a scholar like MacIntyre’s depiction of Aquinas, “someone who inhabits both alternative conceptual schemes, who knows and who is able to utter the idiom of each from within, who has become, so to speak, a native speaker of two first languages, each with its own distinctive conceptual idiom.”^[88] Nevertheless, this can be carried out here in a more fragmentary, partial and incomplete way. Specifically, we can ask what MacIntyrian virtue ethics can learn, reflect on, and incorporate in its dialogue with psychoanalysis.

Before turning to one of MacIntyre’s own recent engagements in this, and then to Lacanian conceptual resources, it is useful to meditate briefly on MacIntyre’s appropriation of Winnicot’s child development theory in Dependent Rational Animals. The key there is to determine what Winnicotian psychoanalysis’ implications are for becoming an “independent practical reasoner.” After noting that this requires a child to “become adequately independent both of her or his own desires and of the undue influence of adults,” that this inevitably takes place through conflicts, and that we remain marked by “attachments” and “antagonisms characteristic of early childhood,” MacIntyre draws from psychoanalysis the insight that:

one outcome of failure to transforms the attitudes and relationships of early childhood is an inability to achieve the kind of independence that is able to acknowledge truthfully and realistically its dependencies and attachments, so leaving us in captivity to those dependencies, attachments and conflicts. Acknowledgment of dependence is the key to independence.^[89]

Psychoanalysis provides four things in this matter. It provides a understanding of the normal course of development for the child, its conditions, its obstacles, its good endpoint, and its possible bad endpoints. This also makes possible therapy capable in some cases of rectifying stunted and stymied development in children and adults. Psychoanalytic theory can also give us some idea of what to do so as not to mess up current and future children in our care. And, in all of this, it can provide us with an understanding of what virtue and vice mean in these matters.

It does this in two ways. It reveals “the qualities that a child must develop, first to redirect and transform her or his desires, and subsequently to direct them consistently towards the goods of the different stages of her or his life^[90]. . .the intellectual and moral virtues.”^[91] It also reveals the “virtues a mother [must] have, virtues fathers and other family members also [must] have, to provide the right kind of security and the right kind of responsive recognition,”^[92] traits that “involve a systematic refusal to treat the child in a way that is proportional to its qualities and aptitudes.”^[93]

Two axes of distinction bear on what psychoanalysis can teach us in this matter. One distinction bears on the subjects to whom its conceptual resources are to be applied, whether children in development, their adult care-givers, or children or adults in need of therapy. Another distinction is between the conceptual resources psychoanalysis provides, between better sets of concepts, theories, and warnings on the one hand, and conceptions of virtues and vices to be identified, then acquired and inculcated or avoided and rooted out. These distinctions raise a further point relevant here.

Psychoanalysis on its own does not actually provide us with all of these conceptual resources. It does provide us with sets of concepts, theories, and warnings, but it does not actually provide us on its own with an adequate understanding of virtues and vices. This comes instead through MacIntyre’s own virtue ethics interpretation of psychoanalytic theory, and this reveals one of the psychoanalytic tradition’s deficits (if it cannot productively appropriate these concepts). The Lacanian conceptual resources discussed here similarly take the form of concepts, theories, critiques and cautions rather than understandings of virtues and vices.

In the preface to the 2003 edition of The Unconscious, MacIntyre acknowledges several more general contributions the Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective can make to virtue ethics, specifically dealing with lack of self-awareness about our unconscious desires and their articulation. This lack takes place in two connected dimensions. We can lack awareness in our self-presentation to others (as well as to ourselves), “communicat[ing] more than we intend or are aware of and. . . other than we intend or are aware of.”^[94] We can also lack awareness in interpretation of others’ expression, “hear[ing] in the voices of others what I unconsciously wish to hear or fear to hear.”^[95] The same can be said about our own and other’s actions, roles, even appearances or attitudes. The standpoint, concepts and techniques of psychoanalysis permits insight into the hidden, unconscious, repressed actual contents and structures of our desires. “What is that we have to learn?” MacIntyre asks. “It is how to connect our lack of self-awareness with the misdirection of and the misunderstanding of our desires. . . . we need to learn how to understand our desires rightly and how to direct them rightly.”^[96]

Now, as MacIntyre rightly points out, it would be a mistake to suppose that we could come to recognize our unconscious desires only through psychoanalysis. He suggests that “[i]n our relationships with our good friends, with siblings, with spouses, we are sometimes able to learn to see or hear ourselves as others see and hear us and by doing so to correct our defective self-awareness and our closely related defective awareness of others,” and raises the possibility of “disciplines of everyday life in the family, in the workplace, in a variety of situations. . . transform[ing] us sufficiently so that we become at least beginners in such learning.”^[97] While acknowledging the truth of this, from a psychoanalytic perspective one might also suspect that these people and relationships will themselves be marked by similarly defective self- and other-awareness, by unacknowledged, misdirected, and distortive desires.

The psychoanalytic tradition can also make another important response to MacIntyre, which is that it does not merely bring to light inconsistencies between one’s conscious and unconscious desires and provide ways of accessing the unconscious. It makes three more determinate contributions. The first is a definite conception of the unconscious as such, that all human subjects will remain to some degree unconscious of certain of their desires. The second are the particular set of contents that psychoanalytic theory or practice claims to be unconscious and to bring to light, contents which themselves may provoke considerable resistance, as the notion of infantile sexuality did on Freud’s time. The third are the particular structures of the human subject, its relations, and the unconscious.

As MacIntyre notes, Lacan explicitly criticizes Aristotle, raising problems which must be addressed by any Aristotlean perspective. There are basically two main criticisms. The first has to do with our self-consciousness of our motives. Aristotle assumes “that we are able through reflection to discover what end it is towards which we are moved by our nature as rational animals, and that practical reasoning can direct us towards the achievement of that end,” but since we are inevitably the victims of “disruptive desires informed by unconscious thoughts,” such reflection and practical reasoning will always go astray. “Those who understand themselves in Aristotlean terms will misconstrue their actions and passions. . . They become the victims of a perversity they are unable to acknowledge.”^[98] A second criticism is that the true nature of human desire renders it ultimately unsatisfiable, so that the “best that can be achieved by anyone is to live out one’s life without denying one’s desire and yet facing up to the impossibility of satisfying it,” a stance “incompatible with any Aristotlean concept of eudaimonia.”^[99]

For the moment, let us defer MacIntyre’s interesting response to the second criticism, and turn to his response to the first. He acknowledges two key points, which provide common ground for the Aristotlean and the Lacanian.

First, the Aristotlean (and particularly the Thomist) can admit that “the project of achieving our good qua rational beings may be frustrated, distorted, and misdirected by a variety of influences of just the kind catalogued by Freud and Lacan.”^[100]

Second, “we learn from Freud and Lacan. . .that we cannot escape these particular frustrations, distortions, or misdirections by reasoning our way out of them or around them.”^[101] It would be a mistake, one Lacan seems to have inconsistently overlooked, to assume that rationality is no longer involved here. By “availing ourselves of the resources that psychoanalysis has identified for us. . . recognizing what reasoning cannot achieve, we are still acting on the best reasons that we have, that is, as rational agents.”^[102] As MacIntyre points out, for both normal and neurotic subjects, the realization that we can benefit from some “psychoanalytically informed attention” presupposes that to some extent we recognize “unconsciously generated frustrations, distortions, and misdirections are obstacles to our achieving our good.”^[103]

What are other resources then that Lacanian psychoanalysis can offer to MacIntyrian virtue ethics? Here, I will discuss three determinate possible contributions stemming from Lacan’s theory: first, his insightful criticisms of other moral theories; second, his fruitful distinction between the imaginary and symbolic registers, and third, the impossibility of attainment or satisfaction of desire. Two reminders need to be made at this point.

First, the distinction between contributing the resources of concepts, theories, newly available or intelligible experiences, and cautions and contributing new and fuller understanding of virtues and vices applies here to Lacan. He supplies us with the former, but virtue ethicists critically interpreting him would have to cull the latter from Lacan’s thought.

Second, Lacan is a difficult, complex, and dialectical thinker, and the Lacanian contributions discussed here are developed and attain their full meaning in the fuller scope in the theory, practice, and indeed history of psychoanalysis. The use, reference, and interpretations I provide here therefore, on the one hand are derived from and not substitutable for the larger theory to be found in Lacan’s works, and on the other hand may be regarded as contestable by his proponents.

Lacan provides criticisms of number of moral theories and perspectives, at times, e.g. in the case of Aristotle, at least partially off-base, but at other times with deep insight. Here, I will mention only four, in each of which some seemingly coherent and realizable vision of the good is revealed to conceal paradoxical structures which cannot entirely encompass or understand desire (and we might say, through Lacan does not say so, to entirely encompass the good and embody practical rationality) and erroneous conceptions about the human subject. Put in simplistic terms, we might say that his criticisms bear on two types of interrelated moral standpoints: those which focus on pain and pleasure, i.e. different varieties of hedonism; and those which focus on duty and the moral law.

Kant is the exemplification and purification of the latter, providing “a morality . . . that detaches itself purposefully from all reference to any object of affection, from all reference to . . . a pathological object, which simply means the object of any passions whatsoever.”^[104] Three main criticisms can be made from a Lacanian perspective. He points out that the moral law itself, as well as its imposition and recognition, will be rooted in and expressive of desires other than those permissible by it. The imposition of a moral norm also creates not only the possibility, but also the desire for and pleasure in its transgression. Additionally, the force and origin of the moral law is to be found in what Lacan calls the symbolic register, not in a purified and self-transparent rationality.

Under the example of De Sade, Lacan also explores the problematics of transgression, perversion, and subversion. The sadist takes pleasure in transgressing the strictures of the law, in doing the forbidden as well as in transposing it into a “ maxim that proposes a rule for jouissance,”^[105] namely “let us take as the universal maxim of our conduct the right to enjoy any other person as the instrument of our pleasure”^[106] What Sade reveals to us are the possibilities of transgressive pleasure, not only in breaking the law , but also in the pain, debasement, and ultimately annihilation of the other, but also its limits, self-deception, and sterility. A remark Lacan makes in discussing De Sade provides a bridge to his critique of Bentham: “there is no lack of Kantian echoes in the attempts to articulate moral systems that one finds in a vast literature that might be called libertine, the literature of the man of pleasure.”^[107]

Bentham and other utilitarians, of course, are hardly libertines, but what the remark reveals is an imperative to enjoy, to pursue pleasure in any hedonistic ethics, one which introduces the problem of the moral law into the heart of pleasure and enjoyment. This can be a problem for the individual pleasure seeker conceiving of him or herself as liberated, or for a person by virtue of the social role he or she inhabits (including that of the Rich Aesthete), or for a society as a whole, a condition Todd MacGowan argues is our own, after a “transformation from a society founded on the prohibition of enjoyment (and thus the dissatisfaction of its subjects) to a society that commands enjoyment or jouissance (in which there seems to be no requisite dissatisfaction).”^[108]

Utilitarianism is marked by the same problematic, and by misrecognition of desire. At the level of human needs, “the greatest utility for the greatest number”^[109] applies and Utilitarianism works, but remains unconscious of the full extent of our desires. One might ask whether the project of producing situations and subjects who maximize the pleasure and minimize the pain of oneself and others will itself conduce to maximizing pleasures and minimizing pains, and whether this is the most satisfactory way of understanding the objects and satisfaction of desires. Lacan points out two other related problems with the altruism Utilitarianism bases itself upon.

My egoism is quite content with a certain altruism, altruism of the kind that is situated on the level of the useful. And it even becomes the pretext by means of which I can avoid taking up the evil I desire and my neighbor desires also. That is how I spend my life . . .in a zone] . . .where all the neighbors are maintained equally at the marginal level of reality of my own existence.^[110]

Utilitarianism overlooks a common experience psychoanalysis reveals: “What I want is the good of others provided that it remain in the image of my own,”^[111] so that the exercise of practical rationality in Utilitarianism will recognize and satisfy real material needs, but in what goes beyond these it will move and remain within the imaginary registers of the particular subjects who happen to be carrying out the reasoning, projecting their desires, phantasies, ideal, and identifications, but likely ignoring those of the other.

A fourth target is not a moral theory as such, but the ego psychology Lacan relentlessly criticized, and associated, perhaps in some respects too closely, with the “American way of life.”^[112] Its goal was the establishment of a strong, autonomous ego. It identified the ego with the self, and held that the ego could become knowledgeable about its desires, and attain the satisfaction of its desires by getting beyond its defenses and rationalizations, adapting itself to reality, and identifying with the psychoanalysts’ strong and presumably well-adjusted ego as model.

In Lacan’s view, psychoanalytic “practice in the American sphere has. . . degenerated into a means of obtaining ‘success’ and into a mode of demanding ‘happiness.””^[113] The model of practical rationality, assuming desire as basic and non-rational, and attempting to rationally guide desire to “nonconflictual spheres,”^[114] i.e. where the persons’ desires, actions, and beliefs do not generate conflict within the self or in the relation of the self with others. What Lacan criticizes in this ego psychology bears striking on the one hand resemblances to the Humean model of practical rationality analyzed in Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, and on the other to the After Virtue character of the Therapist.

We turn now to another contribution Lacan can make to MacIntyrian virtue ethics, one rooted in a central feature of Lacanian theory: his distinctions and the relations he charts between the imaginary, symbolic, and real registers. All three of these registers are intimately connected in reality and in fact represent aspects of reality in the human subject. I will not say much about the real here, which is a very convoluted matter in Lacanian theory, except that for Lacan it is a technical term and concept of the theory, not to be identified with what we typically call “reality” in contrast to appearance, illusion, or epiphenomenon. Here, two aspects of Lacan’s theorizing about these registers may give the virtue ethicist food for mediation.

The first of these is the significance of the distinction between the imaginary and the symbolic registers. In order to see this, we have first to understand rudimentarily what these registers are. The imaginary is the register of affectively charged images, identifications of the subject with imagos of other persons, objects and partial objects of desire. It is also the register in which the subject’s ego is developed, existing in relation to its ego ideals (one’s construal of others populating one’s imaginary register) and the ideal ego (one’s construal of what one is and desires to be). The ego and the imaginary register remain characterized by typically unacknowledged but operative narcissism and by an aggressivity whose “intentional pressure” is evident to others and to the analyst in among other things “the implicit finality of his behavior and his refusals, in his bungled actions. . . in the demanding tone that sometimes permeates his whole discourse, in his pauses, hesitations, inflections, and slips of the tongue, in the inaccuracies of his narrative. . . . and often in his recriminations, reproaches, phantasmic fears, angry emotional reactions.”^[115]

A subject will often be unconscious of what transpires and inhabits his or her imaginary register, the imaginary world in which he or she plays out fantasies and which inevitably imposes itself upon interpretation of others and the shared world. But, there is also the symbolic register, which is the realm of language, of social roles and differentiation, and of structures such as the Oedipus complex. The symbolic register is also the locus of the Unconscious, which is structured both as a language and by objects Lacanian theory conceptualizes. The famous Lacanian mirror stage in fact ends in the infant’s entrance into and incorporation of the symbolic register, “inaugurat[ing]. . .the dialectic that will henceforth link the I to socially elaborated situations.”^[116] In fact, “development only takes place insofar as the subject integrates himself into the symbolic system, acts within it, asserts himself in it through the use of genuine speech. It isn’t even essential,” Lacan points out, “that this speech be his own.”^[117] Four other things are important to note about the symbolic.

First, for Lacan, the symbolic order is what makes us determinately and distinctively human. “The human order is characterized by the fact that the symbolic function intervenes at every moment and at every stage of its existence.”^[118] Second, it represents a totality that precedes the individual subject. As Lacan says, “It isn’t constituted bit by bit. As soon as the symbol arrives, there is a universe of symbols.”^[119] For the young child, “the symbol is already there . . . .it is enormous and englobes him from all sides. . .language exists, fills libraries to the point of overflowing, and surrounds, guided, and rouses all your actions.”^[120] Third, the symbolic order cannot be grasped or exhausted by the human subject who must progressively find himself, and negotiate his self-understanding and his relations with others and his desires within it. The result is that “it is in as much as he is committed to a play of symbols, to a symbolic world that man is a decentered subject.”^[121] Fourth, the symbolic order is an open one, in which “new things do emerge,”^[122] which takes determinately different shapes from culture to culture, and has undergone fateful historical transformations in the West.

The leads to a second aspect of relevance to virtue ethics. According to Lacan, one key mistake made by other forms of analysis is that of focusing exclusively on the imaginary and overlooking its normal interrelation with the symbolic, resulting in an incomplete understanding of the subject and its desires. The symbolic and the imaginary are interwoven in paradoxical structures, for instance that of sexual desire:

On the one hand, it seems that the symbolic is what yields us the entire world system. . . . On the other, there is no doubt either that the imaginary relation is linked to ethology, to animal psychology. The sexual relation implies capture by the other’s image. In other words, one of these domains appears to be open to the neutrality of human knowledge, the other seems to be the very domain of the erotization of the object

Matters are more complex however, for:

It is insofar as the function of man and woman is symbolized, it is insofar as it’s literally uprooted from the domain of the imaginary and situated in the domain of the symbolic, that any normal completed sexual position is realized. Genital realization is submitted to symbolization as an essential requirement – that man be virilized, that the woman truly accept her feminine function.

Conversely. . . it’s in the order of the imaginary that we find the relation of identification on the basis of which the object is realized as an object of competition. . .The initial opening of identification with the other, that is, with an object, starts from here. An object is isolated, neutralized, and as such particularly eroticized.^[123]

Adequate understanding of the human subject and its desires, whether oneself or others, whether from the perspective of psychoanalysis, or that of psychoanalytically informed virtue ethics, will thus require study not only of the subject’s imaginary structures but also their interweavings with the symbolic register, that is, understanding ourselves as rational animals both in our animality and as social, symbolically constituted creatures.

A last word needs to be said about the central Lacanian doctrine of the impossibility of attainment or satisfaction of desire, or put in even fuller terms, the satisfaction of not only one’s own desires but also of the other’s desires and a harmonious lack of conflict between them. And this last thing to be said is this: Lacan is to some degree correct in maintaining the impossibility of desire’s satisfaction for the human subject, the dependent and vulnerable rational animal, and he is likely correct in many of his analyses of why this is so. But he is only able to universalize and totalize it by foreclosing the possibility of desire’s satisfaction by and in God, by closing off a theological dimension to which, in fact, there are so many openings in his works that his closing it off must be interpreted either as a deliberate decision for which he does not provide rational justification or alternately as the product of his own play of unconscious desires.

MacIntyre provides a similar response, acknowledging: “any account of happiness which suggests that this is a world in which a wholly conflict-free and harmonious existence can be achieved is indeed an account disabled by phantasy.”^[124] The key word qualifier is “in this world,” however, and Thomas Aquinas among many others arrives at the conclusion that “the happiness to be achieved in this present life is inevitably imperfect and that no finite object or state of affairs is an adequate object of our desire for that which would complete our lives.”^[125] And here, only since it provides such an apt conclusion, I break with my rule of not citing notes from the 2005 Seminar. What reveals a failure of Lacan himself but perhaps not of his theory rightly reinterpreted is that for him, “the question ‘What would it be to be an object of the love of God’ is a question whose answers can only be fiction and illusion.”

Notes

^[1] Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, p. 233. Henceforth, MacIntyre texts will be referred to by the following abbreviations

AV After Virtue, 3^rd ed.

WJ Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

TRV Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encylopedia, Genealogy and Tradition

DRA Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues

U The Unconscious: A Conceptual Analysis (Bristol. Thoemes. 1997)

Pref Preface to the revised version of The Unconscious (Routledge. 2004

CC “Cause and Cure in Psychotherapy,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary volume 29 (1955)

FM “Freud as Moralist,” New York Review of Books, Feb. 20 1964.

PA “The Psycho-analysts: The Future of an Illusion?” Encounter, 24(5) (1965)

HP “How Psychology Makes Itself True - or False” in A Century of Psychology As Science, Sigmund Koch and David E. Leary, eds. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985)

Lacan’s texts will be referred to either by seminar in English translation and page number, or by article name and page number in the Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York. Norton. 2002)

^[2] “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power,” Ecrits, p. 533)

^[3] CC, p. 43

^[4] CC, p. 45

^[5] CC, p. 51. MacIntyre goes on to deal with two further at first paradoxical points.

1) Interpretations may be incorrect. They may be incorrect as the interpretation of a particular interpreter in a determinate situation, or the psychoanalytic theory itself may be mistaken, not least since “cures are effected by psychotherapists of different schools who make use of rival explanations which are prima facie mutually incompatible” (p. 52) The motivation of seeking the truth itself nevertheless plays an essential role: “it is surely important that the therapist both believes them to be correct and gives the patients so to understand as part of that compact of honesty between them which writers on psychoanalysis so greatly stress.” p. 51

2) The relationship between truth and effectiveness might by a critic be thought reversible, so that “the psychoanalyst only stresses the truth because he believes the truth to be therapeutically efficacious.” While this may in fact be the case with some practitioners, construing the relationship in this way reflects a misunderstanding (specifically a truncated and distorted understanding) of the theory of psychoanalysis and of how it construes therapeutic effectiveness.

^[6] PA, p. 38. Near the end of that article, he adds, “the sterility and the perversity are as Freudian as the perceptive fertility of a Bettleheim or an Erikson” p. 43.

^[7] PA, p. p. 42

^[8] PA, p. p. 43

^[9] PA, p. p.40

^[10] U, p. 93

^[11] CC, p. 58

^[12] CC, p. 58

^[13] FM p. 7

^[14] FM p. 7

^[15] FM p. 7. One can scarcely get more caustic than MacIntyre’s observation that “The standing of psychoanalysis in some circles is more like the vogue for phrenology than anything else.” p. 7 – give reference to Hegel and Skulls.

^[16] PA, p. 42.

^[17] HP, p. 897.

^[18] HP, p. 898

^[19] HP, p. 899

^[20] HP, p. 900. Analysis of the proliferation and transmutation of neurosis via the reflexive dynamic between psychological theory and practice, culture, and individual subjects. “One brief but not to cryptic way of putting what I am saying is: the publicizing and the vulgarization of the theory of neurotic symptoms has itself created new styles of and perhaps new types of neurosis. And insofar as the classical theory of neurosis fails to capture the roots of these new styles in neurotic belief about the theory of neurosis, it itself needs revision or at least extension.” HP, p. 900.

^[21] HP, p. 901

^[22] HP, p. 901.

^[23] HP, p. 902

^[24] HP, p. 903.

^[25] AV p. 27

^[26] AV, p. 29 one might have some doubts about this strong formulation, and about MacIntyre’s explanation contrasting the social roles of characters to “a quite different way in which a certain type of social role may embody beliefs so that the ideas, theories, and doctrines expressed in and presupposed by the role may at least on some occasions be quite other than the ideas, theories, and doctrines believed by the individual who inhabits the role,” p. 29. He uses a Catholic priest or a trade union official, who have lost their respective faiths, as examples. We can also conceive of analogous discordances, however, in cases of examples MacIntyre provides of the characters of Victorian England (Public School Headmaster, Explorer, Engineer), and Wilhelmine Germany (Prussian Officer, Professor, Social Democrat). The response would be to note that MacIntyre does not say that role and personality are fused, or that social type and psychological type do coincide, but that individuals inhabiting such roles are expected and pressured to do so. Still, one might object that this seems to also be the case with the Catholic priest or trade union official.

^[27] AV, p. 28

^[28] One example MacIntyre provides of this: the Aesthete, when unhappy, “will take himself to the therapist. . . and make of his therapy one more aesthetic experience” AV, 71.

^[29] AV, p. 30

^[30] AV, p. 30

^[31] AV, p. 73

^[32] AV, p. 31

^[33] WJ, p. 335

^[34] WJ, p. 336

^[35] WJ, p. 337

^[36] WJ, p. 337 A generational compartmentalization takes place as well, in which “childhood and old age have been wrenched away from the rest of human life and made over into distinct realms.” AV, p. 204

^[37] WJ, p. 347

^[38] WJ, p. 347

^[39] Not rejecting or criticizing every aspect or value of the liberal view of the self, Lacan has little sympathy for its various incarnations, and regards it as fundamentally self-deluded, as a few citations suffice to show. In “A Theoretical Introduction to the Functions of Psychoanalysis in Criminology,” he remarks that psychoanalysis revealed “the modern face of man. . . and it contrasted strangely with the prophecies of late nineteenth-century thinkers; it seemed pathetic when compared with the illusions nourished by libertarians and the moralists’ worries inspired by man’s emancipation from religious beliefs and the weakening of his traditional ties,” Ecrits, p. 106. He speaks of modern society as one “that covers over its irresponsibility with what the word ‘liberal’ once signified,” “Psychoanalysis and Its Teaching,” Ecrits, p. 381.

^[40] Sem 1, p. 17. Lacan gives numerous other characterizations of the ego, none of which bear much sympathy with the liberal self (or with numerous other construals of the self, for that matter). He gives two dense but fertile ones in “Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis”: “by ‘ego’ I designate [1] the nucleus given to consciousness – though it is opaque to reflection – that is marked by all the ambiguities which, from self-indulgence to bad faith, structure the human subject’s lived experience of the passions;[2] the ‘I’ that, while exposing its facticity to existential criticism, opposes its irreducible inertia of pretenses and misrecognition to the concrete problematic of the subject’s realization.” Ecrits, p. 89.

^[41] AV, p. 118

^[42] WJ, p. 353

^[43] In my view, Lacan himself, because of his deliberately dense and over-difficult writings, bears considerable responsibility for misinterpretations and fragmented uses of his works as genealogical subversion. His work is very fertile in connected and worked-out insights and concepts which deserve being thought through and mulled over (e.g. the Name (No) of the Father, desire as desire of the Other, the Unconscious structured as a language), but the aim of making the reader think hardly justifies his repeated preference for exercises in vain and self-indulgent eloquence in place of adequate specification, explanation, and systematization of those concepts and insights. Fortunately, the texts of his seminars, while still marked by such unexcused excurses into obscurity, are more clear than, and further develop concepts from his Ecrits.

^[44] TRV, p. 42 – see also MacIntyre’s discuss of Derrida in “first Principles, Final Ends, Contemporary Issues”, Selected Essays, v. 1. MacIntyre makes the point that “[T]hose genealogists who speak only of ‘true-from-a-point-of-view’ recognize in utterances about the truth, or what is ‘true as such’ a mystifying reified extension of their own concept,” TRV, p. 43 They will be thus unable to grasp the difference between the Encylopediast or Enlightenment conception of it and the tradition-constituted conception of it.

^[45] TRV, 117

^[46] TRV, p. 54 This is not the end of the story, since this question culminates in two others: “Can the genealogical narrative find any place within itself for the genealogist? And can genealogy, as a systematic project, be made intelligible to the genealogist, as well as others, without some at least tacit recognition being accorded to those standards and allegiences which it is its avowed aim to disrupt and subvert?” TRV, p. 55

^[47] Sem 1, p. 20

^[48] Sem 1, p. 21

^[49] “The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956,” Ecrits, p. 391

^[50] Sem 3, p. 214

^[51] Sem 1, p. 21

^[52] Ecrits, p. 433

^[53] Sem 3, p. 83

^[54] “The Direction of The Treatment and the Principles of Its Power,” Ecrits, p. 532. MacIntyre’s passage runs: “Freud is so often presented as undermining the rationalist conception of man as a self-sufficient, self-aware, self-controlled being, that we are apt to forget that although he may have abandoned such a conception as an account of what man ism he never retreated from it as an account of what man ought to be. ‘Where id was, there ego shall be.’ Freud’s whole recognition of unconscious purposes is a discovery that men are more and not less rational than we thought they were.” U, p. 98.

^[55] “The Instance of the Letter,” Ecrits, p. 435

^[56] “The Instance of the Letter,” Ecrits, p. 435 What Lacan insists on as the price for that goal is that we do not “ignore the self’s radical eccentricity with respect to itself that many is faced with – the very truth Freud discovered,” since then we “renege on both the orders and pathways of psychoanalytic meditation. . .make of it the compromise operation that it has, in effect, become – precisely what both the spirit and the letter of Freud’s work most repudiate.” In terms no genealogist could use except in an ironic manner (and here Lacan seems decidedly unironic, rather dogmatic), he cautions: “resorting to compromise, whether explicit or implicit, disorients all psychoanalytic action and plunges it into darkness.” “Instance,” p. 435, emphases mine.

^[57] Sem 7, p. 2

^[58] Sem 7, p. 8

^[59] Sem 7, p. 203

^[60] Sem 7, p. 311

^[61] WJ, p. 357

^[62] TRV, p. 68

^[63] TRV, p. 205

^[64] TRV, p. 203

^[65] TRV, p. 61

^[66] AV, p. 190

^[67] MacIntyre does criticize psychoanalytic theories on this point precisely, cf. Pref, p. 34, 37.

^[68] AV, p 191

^[69] TRV, p. 63

^[70] TRV, p. 62

^[71] TRV, p. 62

^[72] Although MacIntyre does not discuss this type of psychotherapy, one which shares many similar assumptions about the relationship between desires, emotions, habits, imagination, and rationality, and deserves further study on this count, is Cognitive Behavior Therapy.

^[73] TRV, p. 62

^[74] Sem 7, p. 10

^[75] Sem 7, p. 293

^[76] AV, p. 191 He argues a further need for these virtues: “to enter into a practice is to enter into a relationship not only with its contemporary practitioners, but also with those who have preceded us in the practice, particularly those whose achievements extended the reach of the practice to the present point. It is thus the achievement, and a fortiori the authority, of a tradition which I confront and from which I have to learn. And for this learning and the relationship to the past which it embodies the virtues of justice, courage, and truthfulness are prerequisite in precisely the same way, and for precisely the same reasons as they are in sustaining present relationships within practices” AV, p. 194.

^[77] Psychoanalysis’ beginnings only imperfectly match MacIntyre’s descriptions of the starting points of traditions of inquiry, which “begin in and from some condition of pure historical contingency, from the beliefs, institutions, and practices of some particular community which will constitute a given,” in which “authority will have been conferred on certain texts and certain voices.” WJ, p. 354. While some of the initial students surrounding Freud might have answered to the first stage of development of tradition, where “relevant beliefs, texts, and authorities have not yet been put in question,” WJ, p. 355 and while many uses of Freudian theory reflect such naive trust in the theory Freud arguably initiates the tradition of psychoanalysis already past this stage. Then again, other traditions MacIntyre discusses, e.g. the Thomist, and tat of liberalism, do not fit the description of this start completely either

^[78] TRV, p. 116

^[79] MacIntyre’s narratives of this sort of interaction between traditions are not all entirely resolved: consider his prescriptive discussions in TRV 146-7 about how the Thomist must address the genealogist’s.

^[80] Cf. on this “Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, and the Philosophy of Science” and “First Principles, Final Ends, and Contemporary Philosophical Issues, Selected Essays, v. 1. Cf.also his account in WJ p. 362-65.

^[81] TRV, p. 116

^[82] Lacan repeatedly calls attention to this aspect of Freud’s practice, and seems to regard it as a necessity for successful reinterpretation of psychoanalytic theory

^[83] WJ,p. 326

^[84] AV, p. 222

^[85] I am aware of the irony of this expression “service of good(s),” given Lacan’s use of it in Sem 7. Lacan and his ethics can escape from it only on one level, not entirely as he seemed to think

^[86] TRV, p. 121. As Lacan observes, “Psychoanalytic experience consists in nothing other than establishing that the unconscious leaves none of our actions outside its field.” “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious,” Ecrits, p. 428

^[87] TRV, p. 181

^[88] TRV, p. 114

^[89] DRA, p. 85

^[90]– one last point: not just childhood, but appropriate transitions from one life-stage to the next – school-time, career, parenthood, middle-age, retirement, etc. also dealing with death and other losses or frustrations, dealing with traumas – all require us to be independent practical reasoners in new ways, require previous stages not to be too messed up.

^[91] DRA, p. 87

^[92] DRA, p. 90

^[93] DRA, p. 90

^[94] Pref, p. 26

^[95] Pref, p. 27

^[96] Pref, p. 27

^[97] Pref, p. 27

^[98] Pref, p. 30

^[99] Pref, p. 32

^[100] Pref, p. 31

^[101] Pref, p.31

^[102] Pref, p. 31

^[103] Pref, p. 31

^[104] Sem 7, p. 76

^[105] “Kant with Sade,” Ecrits, p. 648

^[106] Sem 7, p. 79

^[107] Sem 7, p. 79

^[108] The End of Dissatisfaction? Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment (New York: SUNY Press. 2004), p. 2

^[109] Sem 7, p. 229

^[110] Sem 7, p. 187

^[111] Sem 7, p 186

^[112] cf. Alexandre Leupin’s judicious criticisms of this aspect of Lacan’s thought in Lacan Today: Psychoanalysis, Science, Religion (New York: Other Press. 2004), p. xvi-xvii, 15.

^[113] “The Freudian Thing,” Ecrits, p. 346

^[114] The Direction of the Treatment,” Ecrits, p. 495

^[115] “Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis,” Ecrits, p. 84

^[116] The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” Ecrits, p. 79

^[117] Sem 1, p

^[118] Sem 2, p. 29

^[119] Sem 2, p29

^[120] Sem 3, p81

^[121] Sem 2, p47

^[122] Sem 2, p. 61

^[123] Sem 3, p 177-8. Lacan also later points out another way the symbolic order is needed to give full structure to the imaginary. “Think about it a second – if there is something that is clearly unsuited to introducing articulation and differentiation into the world, it’s the genital function.” On the other hand, “bodily, excremental, pregenital exchanges are quire adequate for structuring a world of objects, a world of complete human reality, that is, one in which there are subjectivities.” Sem 3, p. 189

^[124] Pref, p. 34

^[125] Pref. p. 38