Repression

Repression In The Society

Repression In The Society

Perhaps the most obdurate question in contemporary psychoanalytic cultural theory concerns the relationship between psychoanalytic thought and politics. Historically, psychoanalytic thinkers have either conceived psychoanalysis as politically neutral (like both the later Freud and Jacques Lacan), or they have seen it as part of the struggle against repression (like the early Freud and Wilhelm Reich). But as the last few decades have shown, lifting repression does not necessarily lead to political liberation. It can even, as the main thesis of the Frankfurt School has it, become the vehicle for further decreasing the freedom of the subject in the face of ideological control. As societies eliminate varieties of repression, some fundamental deadlock remains recalcitrant and stands as a political stumbling block. (Watts, 1989) If the attempt to fight repression inevitably fails or even backfires, the engagement of psychoanalytic thought with politics today requires a new attitude (Slater, 1976).

My ultimate contention is one must re-envision the deadlock that limits the political project of lifting repression. Rather than seeing the deadlock that projects for emancipation encounter as purely a stumbling block to be negotiated, one might embrace the deadlock as itself a political position. A properly psychoanalytic politics would transform it from an obstacle into a point of identification. By identifying with the symbolic deadlock that impedes liberation, one can transform the cause of past political failures into a source of success. But the cost of this transformation is a redefinition of success as clarifying and embracing a limit rather than transcending it. (Watts, 1989)

According to Lacan's theory of the signifier, the fundamental symbolic deadlock involves the binary signifier S2. The absence of one such signifier prevents the operations of the social order from running smoothly. For example, in a patriarchal society, the missing signifier is the signifier of femininity. One can envisage a different structure with a different binary signifier, but we cannot conceive of a successfully completed signifying structure or a structure without a missing S2.3. There will always be a missing signifier, though it would not always be the signifier of the feminine. (Slater, 1976) The subtraction of this signifier marks the founding moment of the social order as such and thus is impossible for us to experience. It is, instead, a condition for the possibility of experience. One cannot restore this missing signifier through analysis or political activity. It marks a point ...