The emphasis placed in Lacanian psychoanalysis on symbolisation isn’t an open-ended matter of putting everything into words. It rests on an account of libidinal economy in which some inarticulate matters are stumbling blocks for the subject, whereas others are not. This is how Bruce Fink describes it in the Lacanian subject:
One of the faces of the real that we deal with in psychoanalysis is trauma. If we think of the real as everything that has yet to be symbolized, language no doubt never completely transforms the real, never drains all of the real into the symbolic order; a residuum is always left. In analysis, we are not interested in just any old residuum, but in that residual experience that has become a stumbling block to the patient. The goal of analysis is not to exhaustively symbolize every last drop of the real, for that would make of analysis a truly infinite process, but rather to focus on those scraps of the real which can be considered to have been traumatic. By getting an analysand to dream, daydream, and talk, however incoherently, about a traumatic “event,” we make him or her connect it up with words, bring it into relation with ever more signifiers.
Contrast this with what Roy Bhaskar once characterised as the ‘free-wheeling’ conception of freedom found in someone like Richard Rorty, for whom self-articulation is a perpetual project without centre or foundation. Or the articulation of Taylor’s subject for whom, as Margaret Archer once (critically) put it, the emotions act as a ‘moral direction finder’.
Mark Carrigan 