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Book Review: Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Revolutions in Subjectivity

Pollard, R., 2011. Book Review: Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Revolutions in Subjectivity. Reformulation, Summer, pp.23-28.

“You are living in reality, I left years ago it quite nearly killed me. In the long run it will make you cry, make you crazy and old before your time” (Crosby, Stills and Nash circa 1970)

Taking care of the self by talking to others, writing journals or letters, meditation and confession all predate Freud by many centuries. What has changed is the extent to which this is now theorized and professionalized and the groups in societies that benefit from this process and those that are disadvantaged. Contemporary beneficiaries are the ‘psy’ professions who make a living out of other peoples’ mental distress and enjoy varying degrees of ‘expert’ status. However the main beneficiary is liberal capitalism, a political and economic system that is now a globalised phenomenon, touching nearly all if not all of the world’s population. The power and usefulness of psychoanalytic and psychological theories lies in what they produce, that is forms of subjectivity that lend themselves to the individualized self-responsibility necessary to meet the labour and consumption requirements of capitalism. From this Foucauldian perspective all of us in the ‘psy’ professions are complicit in the perpetuation of a global economic system that benefits a minority whilst condemning the majority to exploitation and poverty.

This is the premise on which Ian Parker bases his book, which is a critical appreciation of Lacanian psychoanalysis from a Marxist perspective. It is a way into Lacanian thinking as well as a robust critique of contemporary psychology and psychotherapy. It advances controversial views about what is wrong with current practice, views that the reader may strongly disagree with, but in the process they are also invited to think about the ethics they aspire to in their own practice.

Lacan

Within psychoanalysis, Lacan argued for a ‘return to Freud’ in response to what he considered to be deviations in psychoanalysis, in particular ego psychology and to a lesser extent object relations theory. Consequently there was a re-emphasis on the role of the father1, the Oedipus complex and the drive. For dialogically oriented CAT therapists, the constitution of subjectivity in discourse in Lacan’s thought invites an obvious comparison with Bakhtin2. Bakhtin and Lacan could be seen as two dialectically related discursive traditions that inform contemporary psychotherapy, respectively the dialogical and the structural. For Lacan, language is both the condition for subjectivity but also the source of the subject’s alienation: language is a structure of differing signifiers3 and the human subject’s identity is given even before birth by the signifier. The subject’s identity and position in the symbolic order is thus determined, beyond the control and often the awareness of the subject. For Bakhtin, language is similarly the condition for subjectivity but also the condition for creativity. Language is both a source of constraint and a potential source of liberation. The relationship between language and the individual is reciprocal and interactive. Whilst for Bakhtin consciousness is not an individual but a social phenomenon, for Lacan the unconscious is also social, beyond the individual, as it is both structured like a language and the discourse of the Other. And just as ethics are central to creative activity for Bakhtin, they are central to being a desiring subject for Lacan. Both would agree that we should not cede responsibility to externally imposed rules and laws. There is nothing ontologically prior to human action and no one who is supposed to know for us.

In Lacanian practice, one of the major points of departure from other psychoanalytic traditions is the way the relationship between patient and therapist is conceived. In non-Lacanian practice, including CAT, transference is understood as significant, usually early, relationships from the patient’s past that are transferred onto the therapist. Since Paula Heimann’s (1950) seminal paper on countertransference, the therapist’s transference to the patient has, for many, also been regarded as a potential source of information about the patient’s unconscious. This leads to a shift of focus away from the patient’s discourse towards the interpretation of the transference and the relationship between the patient and the analyst/therapist. Some accounts of therapist competency derived from CAT have focused on the here and now of the interactions between patient and therapist and how in session ‘re-enactments’ of reciprocal role procedures are recognized and resolved (e.g. Bennett and Parry, 2004). In these cases therapy revolves around the interplay of transference and countertransference and the interpretation or description of this process. The patient’s progress in learning to relate appropriately to the therapist and reflect on this process becomes one of the benchmarks for assessing therapeutic outcomes and the measure of the therapist’s skill. CAT assumes the possibility of mutually creative and enhancing intersubjectivity that can lead to change. From a Lacanian perspective, this attempt at the ‘emotional re-education’ of the patient is deeply flawed because of the way transference is interpreted and the significance attributed to countertransference. Lacan’s attack directed primarily against the ‘ego psychology’ of Hartman, Loewnstein and Kris is scathing:

“…the facile excitement of their gesture in dumping feelings, which they class under the heading of countertransference, onto one side of the scales – the situation balancing out due to the weight of those feelings - that to me is evidence of a troubled conscience corresponding to a failure to conceptualise the true nature of transference” (Lacan, 1958, p.492)

For Lacanians this conception of the relation between patient and analyst is based on an imaginary shared reality between them and the belief that the patient’s symptoms would be reduced if they could be better adapted to that reality. This requires interpretation of the transference in order to make the patient aware of the gap between her/his transferential projections onto the analyst and reality. However this begs the question as to what ‘reality’ is and who defines it? It also raises the problem of how the transference can be interpreted from the position the analyst is placed in the transference:

!…the analyst’s speech is still heard as coming from the transferential Other, and the subject’s exit from the transference is thus postponed ad infinitum” (Lacan, 1958, p 494)

This description seems to apply to one of the frequently encountered ‘snags’ in CAT when the therapist attempts to describe, for example, a demanding or critical reciprocal role procedure and in so doing is heard by the patient as a demanding and/or critical other who expects them to change the procedure or judges them for their failure to do so.

For Lacanians, the idea of the therapeutic alliance and the empathic responsiveness of the therapist are regarded as ‘ego to ego’ relating in the ‘imaginary’ register4 that encourages the identification of the patient with the analyst/therapist. Lacanians claim that they do not work with the countertransference, which is seen merely as the biases and prejudices of the analyst’s ego. The analyst’s version of reality is no more valid that that of the analysand and to assert otherwise is ideological manipulation (Fink, 1997). To focus on the therapeutic relationship rather than the patient’s speech5 also positions the therapist as an imaginary undivided subject who is beyond alienation and able to interact with the other in a way that reflects this. Lacan would have agreed with Bakhtin that the only position we can be in to be useful for someone else is one of outsideness and that we cannot assume a shared reality.

The encounter between a patient and therapist is not a dual relation6 as both are subject to language and the symbolic order sometimes referred to by Lacanians as the Other. This is comparable to Bakhtin’s concept of the superaddressee, the presumption of whose existence can be inferred in discourse. Rather than focusing on the ‘imaginary’ relations between the analyst and patient in the present, Lacanians focus on the reconstruction of the psychosexual history of the patient. Interpretation is made not in relation to some shared ‘reality’ but in relation to the patient’s speech. The Lacanian analyst endeavours to occupy a symbolic position as the ‘subject supposed to know’ that allows the patient to explore their experience of themselves as an alienated subject in the symbolic order, rather than as the object of the mother’s or the analyst’s desire. Lacanians generally regard the projection of feelings from other significant relationships onto the analyst as a form of resistance and see the interpretation of this form of transference as unhelpful, hence the dictum that resistance is on the side of the analyst who is misusing the power of the transference, not the analysand.

Nevertheless Lacanian psychoanalytic practice appears similar to traditional psychoanalysis: there appears to be the usual circularity in which many analysands end up becoming analysts themselves. It is the experience of being an analysand7 and the subjective transformation that this supposedly brings about, that is the required ‘qualification’ to become an analyst oneself. The analysis ends when the analyst ceases to be for the analysand the ‘subject supposed to know’ and the transference is dissolved. By this stage the analysand will be reconciled to the illusory nature of ideal or wholesome object relations and the divided nature of subjectivity. Nevertheless, this awareness of the self’s fragmentation, discontinuities and contradictions does not lead to any escape from them (Turkle, 1992).

Parker’s position

For Parker, only Lacanians have the potential to conduct an ethical clinical practice i.e. one that does not give priority to understanding the patient, making them happy or adapting them to societal expectations (Lacan, 1958) but first they have to disentangle themselves from the feudal practices of psychiatry and the bourgeois practices of psychology and psychotherapy. The thrust of his argument is that all ‘psy’ practices, with the exception of Lacanian analysis practiced in the correct manner, are inherently reactionary as they operate in the imaginary realm of the ego and in doing so serve to adapt patients to the demands of liberal capitalism. He asserts that the reductionist scientific assumptions about human subjectivity in psychology and the adaptive and normative assumptions about ‘healthy’ psychological functioning in psychotherapy have contaminated psychoanalysis. Parker’s book is a both an analysis of this process and an attempt to reinstate the radical potential of Lacanian psychoanalysis.

The compromise with psychology and the conflation of psychoanalysis with psychology in mainstream culture is associated with the need for ‘psychological’ subjects able to exercise ‘free will’ and self - responsibility both as workers and consumers for economies based on commodity exchange to work. The training of analysts has consequently degenerated into a process of acquiring knowledge about the self according to the demands of liberal capitalism. Lacanian psychoanalysis proper is not about gaining knowledge of the self but changing the subject’s relation to knowledge by dismantling the relations between the signifiers that constitute ‘knowledge’ or beliefs about the self so that these signifiers are understood for what they are: ‘nonsense’. Lacanian psychoanalysis has, however, also become complicit with psychologisation insofar as it colludes with notions of accountability and reductive models of pathology but, according to Parker, it has the theoretical resources to do otherwise.

Lacanians ideally refuse psychology’s ideal of the good as a field of utilitarian ethical calculation (p 84) in which individuals have rights according to a rational distribution of obligations and benefits under bourgeois - democratic ideological systems, without accounting for the self interest of those individuals and institutions who allocate these ‘rights’ and decide what is good for everyone else. Parker describes how the clinical categories discovered by Freud and elaborated by Lacan, map onto different forms of subjectivity or alienation under capitalism; alienation that is reinforced by individualisation and psychologisation. The quintessential clinical structure under capitalism is the obsessional neurotic whose real alienation as a result of being constrained to sell their labour and consume to justify their existence, whilst also feeling obliged to exercise rational ‘choice’ leads to uncertainty, powerlessness and resentment. It is associated with masculinity under patriarchy and reinforced by identification with power and guilt over its failure to achieve it alongside complicity with its own exploitation. A typically feminine8 structure is that of the hysterical neurotic who is both subjugated and revolts. Resistance to the identity forced on her is necessarily a hysterical response and one that analysts encourage because only when the discourse of the analysand is hystericised can their place in the symbolic order be questioned. The aim of Lacanian analysis is thus not to adapt people to social norms, but to expose the fiction of psychiatric and psychological categories of pathology and through judicious interpretation encourage the analysand to speak their own truth, which is absolutely not the acquisition of knowledge about themselves and the origins of their symptoms according to psychology’s account.

According to Parker, psychology is therefore part of the imaginary reality of capitalism that “fits seamlessly into the ethics presupposed by capitalist social relations… to adapt each individual to adapt to relations with others that are based on contractual relations” (p 106). Psychotherapy under this critique fares even worse; whilst psychology has no illusions about being other than a scientific instrumentalist discipline which keeps the people it studies at a distance, psychotherapy has radical pretensions to do otherwise, believing that in creating a certain form of relationship combined with a certain form of knowledge it may actually be able to help people. Whilst psychoanalysis may result in therapeutic effects and even enable people to adapt to dysfunctional societies, it does not aim to do so. Psychotherapy is at fault for actually aiming to produce such outcomes and so colludes with neo - liberal capitalism,

“Psychotherapy is now hegemonic as a form of commonsense about the nature of the self and it operates as a form of ideology – as banalised psychiatry, ‘pop psychology’ – even of an everyday psychoanalysis” (p 108).

Psychotherapy is a very broad church that encompasses a wide range of heterogeneous theories and practices but Parker, taking a lead from Lacan9, treats it as a monolithic monological discourse, which he then caricatures as a form of psycho-education designed to adapt people to societal demands. One accusation is that psychotherapy mistakes empathy for knowledge of other people and from that believes it knows what is good for other people rather than ‘opening up a space’ (as only Lacanian analysts know how to do!) for people to work out their own ethics. Another is that psychotherapists do not enable patients to confront and question the signifiers that define who they are, but instead inject their own meanings into the patient’s account. Yet another is that psychotherapy concerns itself with slotting people into categories of normal and abnormal. Furthermore psychotherapy has a completely misguided notion of the unconscious as some mysterious realm beneath language that can be discovered during the process of psychotherapy, a point Ryle (1994) made in relation to traditional psychoanalysis and as one of the reasons to break away from it. Some psychotherapists may do some or all of these things, but I suspect that others neither think nor work in this way.

According to Parker, psychotherapy has insinuated its misguided ‘knowledge’ of the self and the unconscious into psychoanalysis and in doing so accommodates psychoanalysis to the smooth running of contemporary capitalism; one of the consequences of the many failures of Stalinism was to engender a deep suspicion of instrumental scientific knowledge on the left and to replace it with a highly relativistic moral stance in which uncertainty and flexibility are paramount in a way that leads to new versions of the self adaptable to the demands of late capitalism. While psychotherapy pays lip service to an open method of inquiry, it is really only a means in which the patient by sleight of hand acquires ‘self knowledge’ according to the symbolic capital of the psychotherapist, under the illusion that they have discovered this knowledge for themselves of their own free will. Of course, under capitalism, free will is, to a large extent, an illusion, but only Lacanians are smart enough to realize this. Psychotherapy has sold out completely to the neo-liberal capitalist project and has profited from its ‘smug satisfaction’ at the defeat of Marxism by Stalinism. Resistance to knowledge, which the psychotherapist already has but the patient has to discover for themselves, is then the fault of the patient in psychotherapy and so psychotherapy as well as furthering the interests of capitalism is also replicating the command structures of Stalinism whilst believing it is helping its patients, as many Marxist cadres under Stalinism felt that they were genuinely advancing the cause of working class liberation. Whichever way it turns psychotherapy puts itself in the line of fire; if it is not complicit in perpetuating the individualized forms of subjectivity required by capitalism, then it is guilty of promoting forms of interrelatedness and social conceptions of the self that perpetuate illusions of wholesomeness, whilst failing to recognize as Lacanians do that there is always an unbridgeable gap between what we want to be and what we can be. It is either tricking patients into reframing their subjectivity according to the therapist’s beliefs and prejudices or offering a transparent relationship in which the processes of therapy are made clear to the patient and in so doing encouraging forms of imaginary identification. From an ethical perspective, psychotherapy has not moved beyond a simple injunction to do good and the naïve assumption that what is good for oneself is good for everyone else.

Parker’s formidable critique directed against psychotherapy (and psychotherapeutic psychoanalysis) overstates the case against to an extent that it is hard to see the wood for the trees, which is a pity because I think there is a substantial kernel of truth in what he says. An inference I drew from Parker’s arguments is that there is a strong anti-intellectual current in psychotherapy that at its best oversimplifies and at its worst overlaps with the fluffy feel good placebo effects of the so called ‘alternative therapies’. This leads to a lot of well-meaning but misguided woolly thinking, particularly when therapists step outside their remit and try to inject therapeutic ideas into other domains. The self-referential world view of psychotherapy (and psychoanalysis) can lose sight of how marginal it is to the concerns of most people in the world. As I write, there are a series of popular uprisings in Arab countries that do not appear to owe anything to psychoanalysis or psychotherapy. As Parker implies, politics can and should inform psychotherapy, but caution needs to be exercised when the influence is in the other direction.

As Brown (2010) highlights, individualised psychotherapy interventions often fail as they assume wrongly that individuals, on their own, have the power to change themselves and their circumstances. Like other forms of psychodynamic and humanistic psychotherapy, CAT can overstress what is going on ‘in the room’ whilst neglecting the significance of the patient’s history and speech as well as the impact of politics in the origins of reciprocal roles. However I do not think that any good practitioner of any persuasion can afford not to move into what the Lacanians refer to the imaginary realm of counter-transference at times, whether this takes the form of empathy, an awareness of projective identification or merely trying to understand how the patient feels. But this also entails an ethical obligation for the therapist to confront the highly ambiguous nature of their own position in relation to their patient, a discomfort the Lacanians neatly sidestep by claiming to occupy a depersonalized symbolic position or ‘non relation’ in which counter-transference is discounted.

CAT originated in a left wing revolt against the elitism, conservatism and complacency of psychoanalysis and its abject failure to meet the mental health needs of many people. As a relatively short-term therapy, its radicalism resides in its accessibility alongside its explicit recognition of how the social and political is pervasive in individual subjective experience. However, it is this radical departure from the practices of traditional psychoanalysis that is paradoxically its appeal to professions and institutions whose agenda is to contain and manage suffering rather than uncover its sources. CAT, whilst being more accessible to more people, can become a means of closing down a dialogue rather than opening it up. A particular concern, therefore, is how to stop the drift to the centre and oppose the centripetal forces that seem to operate when a model of psychotherapy becomes successful and embedded in institutional settings with conservative agendas. Recent articles in Reformulation by Ryle (2010) and Brown (2010) present powerful arguments for reinstating a radical agenda and perspective in CAT.

In the last chapter, Parker outlines the key features of a radical ethical psychoanalysis – a clinic in the real10 - as opposed to a ‘relational psychoanalysis’ which despites the good intentions of its practitioners is not as radical as it would appear to be. If it is based on an attachment – infant to caregiver – model, relational psychoanalysis implies an imbalance of power in the relationship that prevents exploration of how this could be otherwise and, even if based on an intersubjective model, it stays stuck in the realm of imaginary communication in which the parties think they understand each other. The latter assumes a condition of common humanity and the possibility of ‘fullness’ and ‘universality’, which can be reached through the ‘empty signifiers’ of liberation emancipation or even revolution. Both fall down because of their failure to recognize the impossibility of an end point in psychoanalysis when there is a synthesis of differing perspectives. If there is an end point in Lacanian psychoanalysis, it is a dismantling or deconstruction of knowledge about the self in which identity and the relation between different others around which identity is shaped are relinquished. Parker notes that Lacanians have explored the ethics of recognising indeterminacy and uncertainty in human action and that any supposed end point closes down these possibilities. However in psychotherapy this is by no means unique to Lacanians – Bakhtin said much the same in his insistence on irreducibility of each human individual and their resistance to finalisation by the other and goes further than Lacan as he makes no theoretical presuppositions about the nature of subjectivity. And psychotherapists of varied persuasions invoke Keats’ ‘negative capability’ to stress the importance of not knowing, uncertainty, mystery and doubt11 in the presence of another. For Parker only the ‘clinic in the real’ can allow analysands to not give up on their desire or the part of themselves that they do not know and ‘carve out a space for the subject to differentiate itself from an apparatus of control, prediction and anxious obedience’ (p 198). I suspect that while some psychotherapists may have agendas of compliance and adaptation, many others would not quibble with this and that the Lacanian clinic is not the only context where this might be aspired to.

Lacan, like Bakhtin, said that there is no meta position from which we can observe everything; there is no position outside language or outside neo liberal capitalism for that matter, however much we might be opposed to it. We can only speak from where we are situated and our perceptions will be constrained by that situation. In that sense this book stumbles by its own criteria. Where Parker seems to lose the plot is in his assertion that alone of all the ‘psy’ practices, only the Lacanian clinic can offer a space ‘extimate’ to capitalism where subjects can realize the full extent of their alienation and experience a true revolution in subjectivity. This, I think, is pie in the sky. It is questionable whether any ‘psy’ practice can claim to be outside the context in which it operates and even more questionable that only one mode of therapy / analysis has a monopoly on truth and ethics. Different schools articulate partial accounts of the human psyche that could be complementary, but often prefer to see each other rivals. As Molina (2009) quoting Bollas argues this can lead to

“...every school, confident in its vision, ends up promoting an ideology that somehow becomes a myth of its own origins” (Molina, 2009, p 17).

a myth that is not subject to the rigorous analysis that would be required in a personal analysis. Or as Derrida said

“Lacan thus made clinical treatment, institutionalized in a certain mode, and the rules governing the analytic situation into criteria of absolute competence for speaking – about all this” (i.e. suffering) (1998, p 67).

Historically, Lacanians have been given a hard time by the psychoanalytic establishment but are now a rapidly growing school of psychoanalysis internationally and have acquired splits and internal conflicts of their own. In terms of how they are organized and what they try to do I am not convinced that Lacanian psychoanalysis is as far away from other forms of psychodynamic psychotherapy as Parker’s determination to differentiate it would suggest, and, rather than distancing itself from other schools, I think Lacanians could have a radical influence by finding areas of common purpose with other progressive tendencies, something that Parker rejects. Obviously mutual recognition and an openness to learn from other schools of thought is a two-way process and, whilst Lacanian thought has penetrated the humanities and social sciences, psychotherapy in the UK has remained largely impervious.

In Lacanian analysis an interpretation is effective not because it is correct or the patient agrees with it, but if it leads to more dialogue. This eloquent and provocative book, if widely read, could be a powerful catalyst for further debate. Whilst I think the case Parker makes for Lacanian psychoanalysis as the only radical solution to the contemporary crisis of subjectivity is flawed, and the accusations he levels against psychotherapy border on the hysterical, many of his arguments are highly relevant to the current political climate both nationally and internationally and deserve serious consideration.

Rachel Pollard

As an example of dialogue in practice, Jason Hepple writes:

I would like to thank Rachel for another thought-provoking contribution to the nature of therapy and the therapy relationship. For me it brought to mind a bit of Voloshinov: ‘Not a single instance of verbal utterance can be reckoned exclusively to its utterer’s account. Every utterance is the product of the interaction between speakers and the product of the broader context of the whole complex social situation in which the utterances emerge’ (Voloshinov, Freudianism a critical sketch. In: Morris, P. (ed.) (1994) The Bakhtin Reader: Selected writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, Voloshinov. London: Arnold.)

I wonder if a Bakhtian / Voloshinovian understanding of the therapy relationship can partly dissolve the notion of the two ‘selfs’ in the room to some extent and so reduce the oppression of the therapists’ ‘values’. I think an enactment can be brought into dialogue with the client as a genuinely ‘in-between’ event born out of the chronotope of the therapy relationship. It is clearly ‘two-sided’, but all human dialogue has at least two sides, and draws on all the influences on the ‘individuals’ concerned. In CAT, I hope, we can supervise therapists to be open-minded about the temporal and spatial uniqueness of every enactment. The context of the client and therapist going back through unknown generations and across civilisations of human development. It cannot be fully known or fully neutralised. It can only be talked about, which transforms it in something else!

Rachel Pollard Replies:

I really like the way you have expressed this as it both encompasses the potential depth and complexity of any encounter between two people and the possibility that despite this, with all the potential for misunderstanding and alienation that it implies, that their interactions can also lead to greater understanding of themselves and each other. That resentment, fear, suspicion, hostility, hatred even can be acknowledged and talked about and in the process become something else.

However I do fear, that as CAT, or some sections of CAT, become more closely associated with the cognitive therapies and institutionalised reactionary political agendas, that working with ‘re-enactments’ can sometimes become another means of bringing pressure to bear on people to adapt their behaviour to societal expectations. At a time when public services and welfare benefits are being severely cut, the most socially and economically oppressed people in society are being subject to a double bind that both tells them to get well, get off benefits and find work at a time when jobs are scarce and the support structures such as decent housing and childcare that enable people to work are being taken away. Whatever setting we work in I wonder whether we can as therapists resist the pressures to conform to a pervasive and perverse ethos of individualism and compliance, regardless of our personal beliefs? I think the successful legal challenge that has saved psychotherapy from the clutches of the HPC was one small victory against authoritarian agendas of controlling how we work but there are I fear many more obstacles to be overcome both at the political / institutional level and within ourselves.

Julie Lloyd writes

I agree with most of the points made except that I wonder if psychotherapy as a profession, by refusing to place itself along side other health professions who are regulated by HPC, positions the profession as individualistic and controlling?
In true Bakhtinian style, this is not the last word and readers are invited to continue developing this conversation.

Author

Rachel recently had an article published in the American Journal of Psychotherapy, Vol 65, 1, 2011, p1-25 which might of interest and is available on-line:

Ethics in Practice: A Critical Appreciation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s Concept of “Outsideness” in Relation to Responsibility and the Creation of Meaning in Psychotherapy.

References

Bennett, D. & Parry, G. (2004), ‘A measure of therapist competency derived from CAT’, Psychotherapy Research, 14, (2) 176-192.

Brown, R. (2010), ‘Situating Social Inequality and Collective Action in Cognitive Analytic Therapy’, Reformulation, Winter, 28-34.

Derrida, J. (1998), Resistances of Psychoanalysis, trans P. Kamuf, P. A. Brault & M. Naas, Stanford, Stanford University Press.

Evans, D. (1996), An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, London, Routledge.

Georgaca, E. (2001), ‘Voices of the self in psychotherapy: A Qualitative Analysis’, British Journal of Medical Psychology, 74: 223-236.

Georgaca, E. (2003), ‘Exploring Signs and Voices in the Therapeutic Space’, Theory and Psychology, 4 (13), 541-560.

Heimann, P. (1950), ‘On Countertransference’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 31, 81-84

Lacan, J. (1958), ‘The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power,’ in J.Lacan, Ecrits, (2002) trans. Fink. B. London, Norton.

Molina, A. (2009), ‘East and West on the Couch: Of Culture and Psychoanalysis’, Anthony Molina interviewed by Domenico Agresta and Alessandra Giannandrea, Journal of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research, (19), 11-39.

Roudinesco, E. (1997), Jaques Lacan, London, Polity Press.

Ryle, A. (1994), ‘Consciousness and Psychotherapy’, British Journal of Medical Psychology, 67, 115-123.

Ryle, A. (2010), ‘The Political Sources of Reciprocal Role Procedures’, Reformulation, Summer, 6-7

Turkle, S. (1992). Psychoanalytic politics, Jaques Lacan and Freud’s French Revolution, London, Free Association Books.

Full Reference

Pollard, R., 2011. Book Review: Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Revolutions in Subjectivity. Reformulation, Summer, pp.23-28.

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