This is fascinating from Sherry Turkle about what she terms Lacan’s psychoanalytical protestantism:
But for me, there was more to Lacan’s popularity than the idea that the French had found a Catholic and French Freud. My working hypothesis: In the aftermath of the failed student uprising of May 1968, Lacan’s notions about the centrality of what he called the symbolic order became a way to think through the political ideas of May. May ideology insisted that there was no line between the political and the personal. Lacan insisted that people and society are constituted through language. There is no “natural man” prior to life through language. Lacan’s idea of the symbolic became a way for people to keep politics alive. For a generation that was abandoning the barricades, thinking of yourself as Lacanian did not feel like giving up on the political world.
From the point of view of psychoanalytic Protestantism, the psychoanalytic institution sells its indulgences for the price of a medical degree, a psychiatric residency, a training analysis, and promises of obedience to dogma. Lacan, like Luther, was trying to draw attention to the moment when each must stand alone and make a personal commitment, not to an institution, but to a belief or a vocation (Turkle 2022, p. 236).
It’s from this special issue, which I want to explore more.
Mark Carrigan 