This was an intriguing observation by Bruce Fink concerning the “certain lackadaisicalness … built into the very reference format” which assumes in the lack of specificity of the reference that “what they are saying about that author’s work is self-evident or widely agreed upon, and that there is no need to point to any particular passage or comment on it” (pg 273). This co-exists with a tendency to build one’s own ideas into the interpretation of the author in question, effectively a form of counter-plagiarism in which we attribute our own ideas to someone else rather than taking credit for theirs:
When, for example, Winnicott (1967/2005) referred to Lacan’s (2006, pp. 93–100) article on the mirror stage, he retained little if anything of Lacan’s original concept, and instead used the term “mirroring” to talk about something entirely different. Indeed, we might say that he borrowed nothing but the word mirror itself. Similarly, when Heimann, Racker, and Bion encountered the term projective identification in Klein’s work, they clearly read a meaning into it that was their own, not Klein’s. The most one could say, it seems, is that when a certain analyst was reading an article by another analyst, an idea struck him or her and he or she then attributed it to the author of the article (Lacan, too, occasionally seems to do this with Freud). This is quite a curious process, to say the least, for we might have expected analysts to try to claim originality for their own notions, whereas, in these cases at least, we perhaps see them seeking cover behind a “big-name” analyst, sneaking their own ideas in through the back door, as it were, using the same terms to mean something entirely different.
Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique: A Lacanian Approach for Practitioners, Pg 274
I’m sure he’s correct this is not a conscious process. There are incentives to position oneself in terms of a prestigious intellectual genealogy (best example of this I saw was a stunning lecture by Hartmut Rosa which provided a gripping exposition of the history of critical theory, culminating in Rosa’s own theory of resonance). But I’m not sure positioning theory, at least in the sense I’m familiar with it, can adequately cope with the point Fink is making here. I’d be curious to know what someone like Patrick Baert makes of this empirical observation. How common is counter-plagiarism within social theory?
Mark Carrigan 