From Lacan to Darwin, by Dylan Evans

When finishing An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (Chinese translation: 拉岡精神分析詞彙), Dylan Evans was about halfway through the transition from Lacanian Psychoanalysis to Evolutionary Psychology. The process of writing the dictionary revealed to him the "internal contradictions and lack of external confirmation" in Lacanian theory, and the obfuscatory language of Lacan "did not hide a deeper meaning, but was in fact a direct manifestation of the confusion inherent in Lacan's own thought." In an article, From Lacan to Darwin, he laid out the story of his intellectual journey and explained why he rejected Lacanian theory.

1. Frustration from clinical works

Many Lacanian theorists today in the English world are literary critics and have nothing to do with practicing psycotherapy, but Dylan Evans was a practicing therapist (Lacan himself, after all, was a psychoanalyst rather than a literary critic). He had training in Argentina and Britan and had experiences of psychoanalysis in London, Paris, and Buenos Aires. From a practician's point of view, he had wanted to put the method into practice but gradually found that

Whenever I did succeed in helping someone, it was always because I had put my Lacanian theory to one side for the moment, and simply responded out of intuition, empathy, or common sense. Conversely, whenever I did what was I supposed to do according to my Lacanian training, it rarely helped. In fact, it often left people confused and upset. (p.5)

Whether used in the clinic or the seminar room, Lacan's ideas are hopelessly inadequate because they are predicated on a false theory of human nature. I came to realise this when I started to treat patients – the clinical reality did not fit with Lacan's theory. Literary scholars are less likely to notice the discrepancy, since textual interpretation is much more malleable than phobias, panic attacks and other symptoms experienced by real, live human beings. (p.1)

This then led to a deep doubt about the truthfulness of Lacanian theory:

2. A false theory of human nature: Lacan against ethology and cognitive science

The truthfulness of Lacanian theory that Dylan Evans questioned about refers to the relationship between Lacanian theory and a set of modern psychological or linguistic theories, and the relationship with evidence.

Dylan Evans had never heard of Lacan before he graduated from Linguistics and went to Argentina for work. In Argentina, He found that, in sharp contrast to Britan, psychoanalysis dominated the field of psychology, and much of that was specifically Lacanian. He joined a group of Argentinian psychoanalysts to study the works of Lacan, and thought he might be able to input his linguistics knowledge into the discussion. He soon realized that Lacan hardly ever mentioned the kind of linguistics he learned, like Chomsky, but referred most frequently to Ferdinand de Saussure, whom he had studied only in literary theory rather than linguistics.

In 1997, Dylan Evans became a PhD student in the Philosophy department at LSE and exposed to the series of seminars on evolutionary psychology, which then became his new worldview replacing Lacanian theory. In contrast to evolutionary psychology, Lacan rejected two bases of evolutionary psychology: ethology and cognitive science.

Traditionally, psychologists clung to the idea of an 'unbridgeable gap' between humans and animals, and resist the possibility that the study of animal behaviors may provide some insights for the study of human minds. In 1936, however, Lacan presented his 'mirror stage' theory by invoking Henri Wallon's experiment in which Wallon compared the reactions of human infants and chimpanzees to seeing their reflection in a mirror. Despite using this comparative method which is common in evolutionary studies,

Rather than taking concept of the mirror stage into the uncharted territory of evolutionary psychology, as others were to do decades later, he tried to bring it into the fold of Freudianism. During the course of the next decades, Lacan's early remarks about the mirror stage as a phase of biological maturation became increasingly overlayed by less developmental interpretations. By the early 1950s, the mirror stage was no longer simply a moment in the life of the infant, but 'a permanent structure of subjectivity' (Evans, 1996: 115), an 'essential libidinal relationship with the body image' (Lacan, 1953b: 14). (p.9)

His much-vaunted ‘return to Freud’, announced in 1953, led Lacan to explore those aspects of Freud’s work that did not fit so easily with modern biology. When he came to examine Freud’s concept of the ‘death instinct’, for example, Lacan quickly realised the impossibility of giving it a biological meaning. But instead of concluding that the Freudian concept was therefore redundant, Lacan tried to rescue it by insisting that Freud had not meant it as a biological concept; the death instinct was 'not a question of biology', Lacan now claimed (Lacan, 1953a: 102). But Freud’s writings were not so pliable; his theory of instincts was couched in an explicitly biological framework. Lacan was therefore forced to invoke tortuous paradoxes to rescue his non-biological interpretation of Freud; 'Freudian biology has nothing to do with biology', he claimed (Lacan, 1954-55: 75). (p.10)

By the mid-1950s Lacan was becoming increasingly influenced by the French anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, who argued that 'nature' and 'culture' were separated by a massive ontological chasm. This spurred Lacan to pursue his culturalist reading of Freud even further. Every biological term in Freud's work was reinterpreted as a metaphor for some cultural phenomenon. Freud's remarks on the phallus, Lacan claimed, had nothing to do with something so banal as a mere biological organ; they referred to a cultural symbol. Freud's false theory about the 'vaginal orgasm' could be rescued by arguing that it was not about biology but about psychological satisfaction (Lacan, 1972-73: 145). (p.10)

This strategy was doomed, however. It appeared to save Freud's work from refutation by modern biology, but at the price of removing all empirical import. The biological Freud was wrong, but at least he advanced clear, testable claims. The cultural-linguistic Freud that Lacan invented, on the other hand, was completely untestable. He was not merely impervious to contradictory evidence in biology; he was impervious to any evidence at all. Lacan rescued Freud from a fatal encounter with modern biology by removing him from the world of science altogether.

To the other pillar of evolutionary psychology, the trajectory of Lacan's thoughts is similar: starts at discussing and invoking but ends at completely detaching.

The cognitive revolution swept through psychology in the 1960s, displacing the behaviourist paradigm that had held sway since the 1920s. Its origins, however, lie in the 1950s. If one day had to be singled out as the birthday of cognitive science, it is surely September 11, 1956. It was on that day that three seminal papers were presented at a historic meeting at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Allen Newell and Herbert Simon spoke about a 'logic theory machine', inaugurating the modern discipline of Artificial Intelligence (Newell and Simon, 1956). Noam Chomsky described 'three models for the description of language' in a paper that has been described as marking the birth of modern linguistics (Dennett, 1995: 384; Chomsky, 1956). And George Miller presented a paper about short-term memory that is now recognised as one of the foundational papers of cognitive psychology (Miller, 1956). (p.12)

Lacan's own interest in the computational model of the mind dates from even earlier. In 1955, a year before the birth of cognitive science, and a decade before the cognitive revolution was in full swing, Lacan gave a lecture to the French Psychoanalytic Society on the subject of 'Psychoanalysis and Cybernetics' (Lacan, 1954-55: 294-308). In this lecture, he explored some basic concepts of computational theory, including binary code and the use of AND and OR gates to compute logical functions. Borrowing from Norbert Wiener, the mathematician who, along with Arturo Rosenbleuth, coined the term 'cybernetics' in 1947, Lacan urged his audience to think of the mind in information-processing terms, and stressed the importance of linguistics in this enterprise. (p.13)

Yet, as with his early hunches about the importance of ethology, Lacan soon abandoned his interest in cybernetics and computational theory. (p.13)

The turnaround is evident in Lacan’s later work, where he increasingly turns away from his 1950s emphasis on Saussurian and Jakobsonian linguistics, back towards a hydraulic model of the mind. By the 1970s, Freud’s mythical ‘mental fluid’, the libido, has regained centre stage in Lacan's thought in the guise of the term 'jouissance' (Evans, 1998: 11). But nowhere is Lacan’s change of heart more evident than in his remarks after meeting Chomsky at MIT in 1975. According to one account, Lacan was horrified by Chomsky’s approach to the study of language. 'If that is science', he commented after his conversation with the great American linguist, 'then I prefer to be a poet!' (p.14)

Some support for this view can be found, paradoxically, in Lacan's attempts to develop a mathematical notation for psychoanalytic theory. His formulae and his diagrams give an initial impression of scientific rigour, at least to a non-scientifically trained eye, but on closer examination it becomes evident that they break even the most elementary rules of mathematics (Sokal & Bricmont, 1998). These equations are supposedly there to give substance to Lacan’s avowed desire to formalise psychoanalysis. The fact that they are mathematically meaningless gives the lie to that claim. If Lacan was really concerned with formalising his discipline, he would surely have taken more care to get his maths right. The fact that he didn't suggests that he was more interested in the rhetoric of formalisation than the reality. For Lacan, 'formalisation' and 'mathematisation' were just metaphors, mere sound-bites for his neo-Surrealist techno-poetry. No wonder, then, that when he saw Chomsky engaged in a truly rigorous attempt at genuine formalisation, Lacan backed away in horror. (p.14)