Francois Roustang

For me, François Roustang is one of the best readers of Lacan. Roustang was directly involved in the École freudienne de Paris that Lacan founded, and his earlier book [b:Dire Mastery: Discipleship from Freud to Lacan|3461252|Dire Mastery Discipleship from Freud to Lacan|François Roustang|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1266546046s/3461252.jpg|254580] is a scathing but fair critique of the paradoxical relationship between psychoanalysis and authority. In the ten years since that book, Roustang's attitude toward Lacanian psychoanalysis has clearly deteriorated - the original French title of The Lacanian Delusion translates roughly as "Lacan, from ambivalence to impasse."

The opening chapter of Roustang's book is called "Why Did We Follow Him For So Long?" and explores the paradoxes of Lacan's character. Roustang shows how Lacan was charismatic and seductive, cruel and tyrannical, and wonders how it is that so few of his disciples were able to see past the man's obvious brilliance and understand the authoritarian aspects of his nature. In short, Lacan betrayed his principles by maintaining the transference of his followers rather than resolving, thus turning himself into the very "subject who is supposed to know" that he criticizes.

Rather than continuing in this bitter direction, however, the long second chapter examines Lacan's paradoxical dream of turning psychoanalysis into a science. Roustang brilliantly traces the evolution of the notion of the "real" in Lacan's work, showing how it was always framed with an eye on formalize his ideas along mathematical and scientific lines. The earliest forms of the real in Lacan are, Roustang claims, influenced by Meyerson and Lévi-Strauss, in which science, mathematics, and psychoanalysis are aligned by the subjective assumption that everything in the universe has a rational order. This changes with Seminar III, in which the collapse of the real in the universe of the psychotic reveals the symbolic order by isolating its function. It is not until Seminar XI that Lacan then begins to formulate his notion of the real as the "impossible."

Roustang's purpose in walking the reader through this very complex evolution of the real is to show the way in which Lacan's notion of the real, in trying to be logical, winds up reverting to a kind of mysticism. "It is an odd logic [...] that manages to exclude from its field the very entity that constituted its object, and which, as a result, cannot be developed as a logic," he writes (p.95).

The full consequences of this logic that ultimately refuses to submit itself to logic is explored in the book's third and final chapter. Roustang quotes Lacan's repeated insistence on psychoanalysis as a "scientific delirium," rigorous in much the same way that a mad scientist can be said to be.

The most devastating critique, however, comes in the form of Roustang's attack on Lacan's formula "the unconscious is structured like a language." Just like the notion of the real, "this one proposition simultaneously excludes the object of research and includes the possibility of a logic founded on linguistics," claims Roustang (p.111). To focus only on the linguistic aspects of the unconscious "is tantamount to saying: Since we can only know certain objects by looking at them, these objects are structured like eyes" (p.112). Roustang goes on to demonstrate how this selectiveness in Lacan's logic allows him to focus on the aspects of things that fit his theory - the unconscious is like a language, for instance, or how he ignores the aspects of the imaginary that are not specular.

Roustang concludes that Lacan's strategy ultimately boils down to two basic tactics: "equivocation" (p.116), in which similarities between ideas and philosophies are used to link concepts together, and "unilaterality" (116), whereby Lacan reinforces this fusion by ignoring the *dissimilarities* inherent in the discourses he is seeking to join together.

In making these arguments, Roustang is not really too far from Shoshana Felman's observation that Lacan is undertaking the impossible task of trying to create a "grammar of rhetoric," or Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe's critique of Lacan's strategies of "diverting" texts to his own ends while leaving the parts that don't fit in the margins of his thought.

I willingly admit that Roustang's book is not for everyone. It took me a long time to appreciate what he was trying to do, especially in the long middle section on the "real." Nonetheless, the latter parts of that chapter, together with the devastating blows delivered in Chapter 3, are a revelation. It is truly a pity that Roustang didn't present his ideas with the more elegance and clarity, because the substance of what he has to say here is certainly worth considering.… (mere)

Since this book is marginal to my project, I'm only going to give it a cursory review. I'm a fan of Roustang's, a psychoanalyst who trained with Lacan but who has always maintained a position of healthy skepticism toward both his mentor and psychoanalysis as a whole.

Roustang is best known for his books [b:Dire Mastery: Discipleship from Freud to Lacan|3461252|Dire Mastery Discipleship from Freud to Lacan|François Roustang|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1266546046s/3461252.jpg|254580], a critique of the way that psychoanalysis uses transference to propagate (rather than eliminate) itself, and [b:The Lacanian Delusion|646788|The Lacanian Delusion|François Roustang|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1266606745s/646788.jpg|632935], his most vehement statement about the shortcomings of Lacanian theory. I have read and reviewed both books which, despite some minor shortcomings, remain some of the best critical works about Lacanian theory ever written. In Psychoanalysis Never Lets Go, however, Lacan is mostly a marginal figure, discussed at length only in Chapter 5.

The book's concern is similar to the main thesis of Dire Mastery, arguing that there is a distinct overlap between transference and Freud's interest in things like hypnosis, suggestion, and telepathy. The dilemma that this overlap highlights is the tension between psychoanalysis as a positive system for providing the patient with a path to independence and mental stability, and the danger that it can become a technique for tyranny and mind-control.

For Roustang, this dilemma is something that Freud - and indeed, Lacan - never really resolved. Psychoanalysis may aspire to act ethically, but it is simply impossible to abolish the dark side of transference. Roustang thus borrows a famous remark from Ludwig Binswanger for his title: "He whom psychoanalysis has once seized, it never lets go." The book explores this idea from a number of different angles, beginning with Freud's style, such as examining the way his system allows and encourages others to become entangled in its jargon and logic.

On the whole, the central point of Psychoanalysis Never Lets Go is worthy, but unlike Roustang's other books this one seems both more technical (the audience at which it aims, despite Roustang's claims to a more general readership in the preface, is clearly other practicing psychoanalysts) and bound by the context of France circa 1980. As such, the core trunk of Roustang's conceptual tree is strong, but its branches and leaves seem somewhat outdated when visited by today's reader.… (mere)

François Roustang was a member of the École freudienne de Paris, the psychoanalytic association founded by Jacques Lacan, from 1965 until its dissolution in 1981. Later in his career he broke with both Lacanism and psychoanalysis, as boldly announced in [b:The Lacanian Delusion|646788|The Lacanian Delusion|François Roustang|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1266606745s/646788.jpg|632935] (1986), but the seeds of his dissatisfaction with this field are already evident in Dire Mastery (1976), his fourth book.

Roustang is concerned with a problem that historically has haunted the structures of authority in psychoanalysis: the relationship between master and disciple. As such, he engages in a detailed analysis of several cases that are drawn from the life of Freud. Opening the book, for instance, is a detailed examination of the complicated relationship between Freud and Jung. In this scenario, Jung plays the part of the false disciple, the one that Freud desperately wants to adopt as his son, but who secretly has a mind and agenda of his own. Another crucial example is the case of Victor Tausk, whose ideas were apparently as brilliant and original as Freud's, but wanted to subordinate himself as a disciple to the "master." Freud nonetheless regarded Tausk as a potential rival and engineered the circumstances that led to the latter's suicide. Finally, there is an in-depth examination of Georg Groddeck, who did set himself up as a direct rival to Freud and, outmaneuvered by the master, eventually succumbed to paranoia and mental illness. Together, these three cases show the major permutations of the master-disciple relationship.

As interesting as these case studies are, the really brilliant - and universally applicable - aspect of Dire Mastery comes in chapters 2 and 4. In these parts of the book, Roustang examines the problem of authority as it relates to the perpetuation of psychoanalytical discourse itself. Psychoanalysis, he points out, is grounded in the working through of transference. The function of the analyst is to help the patient to overcome the problems caused by the transference, to the point where analysis is no longer necessary. In this sense, the ultimate logic of psychoanalysis is one that points toward its own dissolution.

The master relationship that Freud (and later Lacan) would set up with their disciples in order to continue the transmission of psychoanalysis as a discipline is thus implicitly at odds with their own logic. For the master-disciple relationship is one that is designed precisely to prolong the transference, to instill a love for the master and his ideas. What I find particularly brilliant about this analysis is that it makes psychoanalysis serve as a poignant meta-language for subversive politics. Freud and Lacan are clearly revolutionaries who understand how to deal with the transference, but where they fail, in practice, is to deal with the counter-transference that, like Actaeon's hounds, turns on them.

Roustang's book is not for everyone, especially as it requires a degree of theoretical knowledge and some familiarity with the history of psychoanalysis. The historical examples he uses provide varying degrees of interest - Jung's case is interesting simply because it is so famous, Tausk's because of its air of professional scandal, but the extended examination of Groddeck is informative but less compelling. There is also a final chapter on psychosis that Roustang insists relates to the larger book, but I was unconvinced of its value here.

Overall, Roustang's examination of the master-disciple dynamic is rich in examples of the pitfalls of authority, and effectively shows how psychoanalysis, when it is freed from such problems, can be a powerful tool for the liberation of the subject.… (mere)