The local structure in psychoanalysis ¹

Abstract

This article investigates the efficacy of formal thought in Lacan’s psychoanalysis in the form of local structures. In the same way that the structures of structuralism are not met in a single system, the Lacanian mathemes will not be part of a larger structure that organizes it. The creation of mathemes that refer to local structures allows the discussion of contemporary clinic diagnostic questions about, for instance, the universalism of psychoanalysis axioms from the Oedipus complex.

Keywords:
structure; psychoanalysis; mathematics; diagnosis

Resumo

Este artigo investiga a eficácia do pensamento formal na psicanálise de Lacan na forma de estruturas locais. Assim como as estruturas do estruturalismo não se encontraram num único sistema, os matemas lacanianos não serão partes de uma estrutura maior que as organiza. A criação de matemas que se referem a estruturas locais permite a discussão de questões diagnósticas da clínica contemporânea, como o universalismo dos axiomas da psicanálise e do complexo de Édipo.

Palavras-chave:
estrutura; psicanálise; matemática; diagnóstico

Résumé

Cet article examine l’efficacité de la pensée formelle dans la psychanalyse de Lacan sous la forme de structures locales. Tout comme les structures du structuralisme ne se sont pas reduites à un système unique, les formalisations lacaniennes ne feront pas partie d’une structure plus vaste qui les organise. La création des mathèmes qui se réfèrent à des structures locales permet la discussion des questions sur le diagnostic dans la clinique contemporaine comme l’universalisme des axiomes de la psychanalyse et le complexe d’Œdipe.

Mots-clés:
structure; psychanalyse; mathématiques; diagnostic

Resumen

En este artículo se investiga la eficacia del pensamiento formal en el psicoanálisis de Lacan en la forma de estructuras locales. Así como las estructuras del estructuralismo no se encuentran en un solo sistema, las formalizaciones lacanianas no serán partes de una estructura mayor que las organiza. La creación de matemas que se refieren a las estructuras locales permite la discusión de cuestiones acerca del diagnóstico en la clínica contemporánea así como sobre el universalismo de los axiomas del psicoanálisis y el complejo de Edipo.

Palabras clave:
estructura; psicoanálisis; matemática; diagnóstico

From structure to structures

Although structuralism has promoted important and unprecedented approximations between psychoanalysis, ethnology, and linguistics, it could not completely compare the structures of unconscious, the resemblance and the language, so as to reduce to the same system or common basis. According to Foucault (1966/2007, p. 525), linguistics, which would serve as a common basis to psychoanalysis and ethnology, did not allow these two disciplines to create a kind of “psychoanalytic anthropology” (p. 525) from something “irreducible, uniformly valid” (p. 525) regarding man. The hypothesis of a single common structure to the three different fields had to be discarded and each field would thus be free to approach their objects using their own means, i.e., through their own concept of structure.

Contributing to the issue regarding the relationship between structures of different orders, Dufour (2000) takes from Deleuze (1972/2005) the concept of “empty house”. According to Deleuze (1972/2005, p. 247) the empty house

must keep the perfection of its emptiness by displacing itself in relation to itself, and by circulating through the elements and varieties of relations. Being symbolic, it must be its own symbol for itself, and eternally lacking to its own half that would be likely to occupy it. (Deleuze, 1972/2005, p. 247)

Also called by (Deleuze, 1972/2005) an object = x, the empty house would be the element that moves through the structure and provides change, not being identified as a place, gender, or species. Object = x, however, even if resisting any identity or fixed place, “is the last genre of the structure” (p. 241), as if its displacement function would determine the structure in which it is found. Therefore, it is more evident its character of decision and determination of the structure than indetermination of its own identity.

Dufour (2000, p. 31), in turn, emphasizes that in the structuralist context, despite many names given by authors to the empty house and its many forms, there is a function that persists: the resistance to the inscription on binarity. That is because the author (2000, p. 29) considers the structure as an operator that gathers studied objects in binary orders. However, this operator intended to address symbolic human discourses and systems and would omit a peculiarity inherent to them: its trinitarian basis, for “there is always an imaginary value in the attempt to capture (and managing) the real by symbolic systems” (Dufour, 2000, p. 32, emphasis added). The empty house would appear in structuralism, therefore, as the insistent return of what the reduction to binary suppresses. The relationship between operator (structure) and raw material on which it acts (axioms) is central to the reasoning of Dufour, having an epistemological value. The structure operator is taken as an instrument or “device that contains a decision-making process” playing on structuralism, “the role of inference and deduction in mathematics, or still the role of the syllogism in Aristotelian logic . . ., or even the role of analogy in the prescientific thought” (Dufour, 2000, p. 34). The raw material upon which it acts is the axiom - simple and fundamental propositions about the object that do not need to be demonstrated (Dufour, 2000, p. 34). An axiom of the structuralism context, as in Lacan, for whom the signifier is what represents a subject to another signifier, would enclose “unintelligible fragments within the framework of binarity and even in the general framework of reason: the content of the empty house is not structured according to the general order of duality” (Dufour, 2000, p. 35). The symbolic, bidimensional, and binary has an unidentified obstacle.

In the Lacanian work, we can identify many cases of return of the empty house as the third element that insists and ”ex-sists” on the binary field. The phallus, the “a” object, and the Real are some examples of this return as concepts seeking to understand that which resists the inscription on the symbolic binarity, since axioms on which the “structure” operator acts are enunciations of trinitarian quality. Not by chance, there are a number of empty houses in Lacan’s work, as if there would be in each area of his theorization the need for one of them. In Lacanian terms, affirming that binarism is insufficient is equal to the aphorism there is not Another of the Other, i.e., the Other is incomplete.

Deleuze (1972/2005) understands that the question about a structure that would determine all the others, such as the primacy of the value of the phallus or the economical fetish on sexual fetish (and vice versa), would not make sense, because “they’re all infrastructures” (p. 246). Different orders of structures (linguistic, family, economic, sexual etc.) would be characterized in their different singularities by “the form of its symbolic elements, the variety of their distinguishing relationships” and, in particular, as the author highlights (Deleuze, 1972/2005, p. 246), and above all “by the nature of the object = x that presides its operation” (p. 246). The philosopher still rejects the order of linear causality from one structure to another, for the particularity of the object = x prevents it - highlighting the character more or less independent of each structure. The object = x will be thus not only what guarantees the own identity of the structure from the impossibility of identity, but also the moving object through which the structures may interact with one another. As an example, Deleuze cites a well-known passage from Foucault in The order of things:

. . . the significant chain by which the unique experience of the individual is constituted is perpendicular to the formal system from which the meanings of a culture are constituted; every moment, the very structure of individual experience finds a certain number of possible choices (and excluded possibilities) in the systems of the society; conversely, social structures are, in each of their choice options, a certain number of possible individuals (and others there are not). (Foucault, 1966/2007, p. 526)

The structures meet and traverse each other at right angles on a two-dimensional plane, but there is not one that superimposes itself so as to determine the other. The empty house would be, for each structure, both its singular lack point, the structural abnormality whose displacements cause rearrangements, and the place for meeting other structures. The object = x, paradoxically, represents thus the impossibility of overdetermination of structures and the possibility of an encounter.

. . . we will not demand a privilege for ethnographic social structures, referring psychoanalytical sexual structures to the empirical determination of a more or less desocialized individual. Not even the structures of linguistics can undergo recent significant or symbolic elements: precisely because the other structures are not satisfied in applying, by analogy, methods borrowed from linguistics, but rather they discover true languages by themselves. (Deleuze, 1972/2005, p. 246)

This discussion, in addition to situating, in part, the intellectual context of which Lacan participated, demonstrates how the idea of a larger or higher structure has been rejected. Not only the possibility of a plurality of structures was established, but also a variety of notions of structure. This allowed different disciplines to develop their own structural methods, without the need for these to be articulated or come from a structuralist concept that would give them validity. Next, we will investigate how Lacan will continue using a notion of context-independent structure of structuralism and, for their own purposes and discoveries, without the need to correspond to the others.

Lacanian matheme

In L’oeuvre claire (1996) and Le périple structural (2008), Milner proposes a reading of Lacan’s work that highlights its relationship with science traversing structuralism. From two moments from which the author understands this, namely the first and second classicisms, we might recognize and deepen the problem of identified structures and of matheme in Lacan.

For the first classicism, found in the first years of Lacanian teaching, it is fundamental Lacan’s relationship with structural linguistics, on which he bases his theory of the signifier and the structure. A principle from modern science, which Milner calls Galileanism, will be the basis of this relationship: depurating objects, tongue, and language of all the imaginary that obscures its structure (Milner, 2008).

Granger (1960/1975a), commenting on depuration, also claims that the knowledge of an object from the mathematics, characteristic of modern physics, does not refer to its qualities, but rather to the “formal properties of a system” (p. 10). The set of natural languages is considered apprehensible by scientific methods, which would make structural linguistics, a central part of structuralism, a Galilean science (Milner, 1996). Therefore, the first classicism is considered an expanded Galileanism, for being extended to objects that are not “natural” to it, since they are aliento their original purposes. If the unconscious is structured as a language, as proposed by the Lacanian axiom, the structural methods may be understood and applied to it. Therefore, in the first classicism Lacan would be using scientific means of structural linguistics to create a theory of the structured unconscious. This approach, however, is based on what Milner calls “hyperstructural conjecture or theory of any structure” (1996, p. 91), which implies the minimum properties structure, it can be mathematized, therefore supposedly common to mathematics and linguistics. The expanded Galileanism would give Lacan the scientificity of structural methods, but it would depend on the hypothesis of correspondence between linguistic and mathematical structures. Finally, this correspondence could not be established, which would determine the decline of the first classicism (Milner, 2008, p. 256). This is a turning point to Lacan, for it presented the possibility of his own concept of structure. According to Milner (2008, p. 205): “Language will remain as an object of language sciences because of its properties, but not for the minimum structural properties that it would share with the any structure”. Although he continued to use structural methods, it would no longer constrain psychoanalysis or any other field of knowledge to find a guaranteed epistemological in structural linguistics. This separates Lacan from the structuralist movement - the movement itself was already fragmented - since psychoanalysis will use the methods of structural linguistics to address the any structure and it will only depend on its own means, the homogeneity between the formalization of disciplines of the first classicism was broken after all - the same conclusion made by Deleuze and Foucault.

There is a passage in Lacan’s works that illustrates and enlightens the moment when the first classicism disappeared and the second started: “Structuralism will last as long as roses last, as simbolisms and the Parnassus last: a literary period. … On the other hand, the structure is not even close of fading because it is inscribed in the real” (Lacan, 1966/2003, pp. 230-231). The relationship between Lacan and the structure traverses structuralism but does not depend on it. The structure as a method of approach and selection of the Real will remain in the second classicism. The Lacanian meeting with modern science will remain in the any structure, not necessarily linguistic. Within the second classicism perspective, still marked by maintenance of the hyperstructural conjecture, remains the hypothesis that the any structure is mathemisible and, therefore, is in contact with the Real. The interpretation of the axiom “the unconscious is structured like a language” becomes: “once admitting that a language has structure properties - and this is demonstrated by linguistics -, the unconscious has the same properties. Procedures by which these properties are established are of little importance” (Milner, 2008, p. 197).

At this point, it is necessary to overcome a possible contradiction the reader might have noticed. Well, Milner states that language and the unconscious have the same structural properties, whereas previously, according to Foucault and Deleuze, we saw that structures of language, resemblance, and the unconscious could not be reduced to the same structural basis. Having structural properties means, according to Milner, having the minimum properties of any structure, that is, the unconscious is structured as a language; which does not necessarily imply that the unconscious structure is reducible to the language one, not as proposed by linguistics. Two objects being apprehended by their structures does not mean they share the same structural properties. Considering the motives of the end of the first classicism one would be able to affirm that there are many structural methods, each field of knowledge own procedures, and elaborated to determined ends. That is why Lacan will have to invent new concepts and dialogue with other fields, such as topology and mathematical logic, since linguistic methods will cease to be unique or even privileged means of access to structure.

The hyperstructural conjecture (or theory of the any structure) will remain in the second classicism and literalization will be still more important in his work. Literalization, or reduction to letters, apprehends objects and makes their qualities “systematically eliminated and replaced by mathematized formulas” written by letters, within the perspective of Galileanism, in which “everything that is mathematized is a potential object for science” (Milner, 2008, pp. 288-9). Mathemes, formulas resulting from literalization, in turn, will not constitute chains of reason, but rather “strictly circumscribed zones of literality” (Milner, 1996, p. 108). For each region of the Real a matheme not necessarily connected to the others. The consequence, Milner concludes (1996, p. 108), is that every matheme is “fragmented” and, finally, local. The local character of Lacanian mathemes, and therefore their non-articulation is not necessarily a loss or deficiency for psychoanalytical theory. On the contrary, and this is the point of view of this article, localization of the matheme is what gives its theoretical variety and strength.

The Lacanian matheme is not a rational chain, on the contrary, it apprehends parts of the Real and of the structure of the unconscious in what it allows symbolize. On this subject, Lacan affirms that “it is through large pieces of writing that we enter the Real, knowingly, we cease to imagine; […] writing small letters, small mathematical letters is what sustains the real” (1975-76, 13/1/76). Hence, the Real opposes to any idea of totality, because according to Lacan (1975-76, 16/3/76), “the real is always a chunk [bout]”. The apprehension of only local structures as mathemes is not associated with an insufficiency of literalization, but with a conformity of method and object, or else, an epistemological particularity of Lacan: if the Real is heterogeneously made of “chunks”, the structure can only be local.

It depends on the understanding of the concept of the Real as “ex-sistence” to sense (Lacan, 1974-75/2002), i.e., it not only does not compose a rational chain, but it is precisely its limit. Clinically speaking, we might cite as an example the slip that interrupts and dislodges linear and organized narrative of a patient. Back to the theoretical sphere, as Deleuze’s empty house, the Real arises as an impossible thing that binarity finds in its formalization procedure. It is in this sense that the letter determines the interruption in the chain of reasons and only serves as a local calculation (Milner, 1996, p. 107). One consequence of this reasoning is that mathemes of psychoanalysis do not even promote a single chaining between them. They create heterogeneous zones, but they do not compose a totality, as they also have different types of writing (Milner, 1996, p. 106). Rona also contributes to this debate:

the formalization possibility exists, except for the need to delimit psychoanalytic phenomena, to treat them locally. Dreams, fantasy, speech under analysis, for instance, could present distinct logics, which would not stop their formalization, in each case. (Rona, 2012, pp. 238-39).

Rona presents the thesis of correspondence between the logic of the signifier and the set theory, therefore, the author agrees with the passage from qualitative thought to mathematized thought, as asserted by Granger (1960/1975b, p. 14), in which a universe of objects is deprived of its qualities and reduced to its essence of differences within a set. According to Rona (2012, p. 92), if more than one set can be considered consistent, there would be a “plurality of truths” (p. 92), so that “more than one way of organizing the significant system” and, therefore, different topologies may be considered true (Rona, 2012, p. 346). There is no reason for “all practical, ethical, clinical, and theoretical notions to be reestablished to the same core of statements for us to postulate a degree of scientific theories for psychoanalysis”, because “there must be coherence in localities and commensurability between elements” (Rona, 2012, p. 93). The truth of each matheme would not be thus granted by its accordance with a wider principle, but by its internal and local coherence. Literalization in Lacan would be thus free from “totalitarian aspiration” and “triumphal rationality”, which seek a final, unique and elucidative rationality regarding “relativistic aspiration” and “obscurantist irrationality”, which in turn renounce coherence in their theoretical formulations (Rona, 2012, p. 348).

If the Lacanian mathemes are non-deductible from each other and do not even create a cohesive theoretical set, they would be in accordance with science and its search for fundamental laws underlying the phenomena? Although Einstein and Infeld (1938/2008) recognize a huge distance between theoretical physics and its ideal, they explain that this “would be the explanation of all natural events by structural laws that are always valid everywhere” (p. 202). Contemporary physicists, such as Hawking and Mlodinow (2011) admit that “the original hope of physicists to produce a single theory, explaining the apparent laws of our universe as the only possible consequence of a few simple assumptions, may need to be abandoned” (p. 89). In another study, the same authors (Hawking & Mlodinow, 2005) still believe that, under the requirements of mathematical coherence, the study of the primitive universe produces a single theory even in this century.

Even so, according to them in the present circumstances “there is not a mathematical model or single theory that describes all its aspects [of the universe]”, but only a network of theories in which each one “describes phenomena very well within a given domain.” (Hawking & Mlodinow, 2011, pp. 43-44). This statement objects to Granger (1960/1975b, p. 109), for whom in natural sciences it is possible to find global structures, while in human sciences only local investigations would be effective.

Even if it is not necessarily representative of the entire scientific field, the situation of the physical sciences demonstrates that the meeting of a set of enunciations under a single principle, of which they would be deductible, is not a condition to the practice of scientific disciplines. According to Milner (1996), “even if mathematized physics were unified (which is not), the mathematics of its mathematization would not have to be this, because math in itself is not” (p. 112). If psychoanalysis mathemes are not ordered according to a single principle, this does not make them any less effective when literalizing the Real, after all, there is no reason for a totalizing chaining in psychoanalytic theory.

It is not also about discrediting mathemization in psychoanalysis from the comparison with science, as if the latter would be the guarantee of the former. Psychoanalytic epistemology, we may say, does not need an external validation. There is no reason, in fact, even for psychoanalysis to be aligned in its methods - literalizing or not - with science. Psychoanalysis, guided or not by scientific methods, deals with a forclusion domain according to science - the unconscious subject. In addition, the Lacanian literalization is dedicated to a Real that is not the natural real of science. In that sense, it is not about the use of a method that is already constructed and only applied to a different object. Literalization in psychoanalysis is not, therefore, only an extended Galileanism, because the Lacanian appropriation of scientific methods in the end modifies and make them psychoanalytical.

Granger contributes again to this debate, affirming that science “cannot be reduced to a set of permanently established and rationally chained dogma” and, therefore, definitive systematization would not guarantee “the safe road of science” (Granger, 1960/1975a, p. 22). The author (1960/1975a) proposes that epistemology should be in the paradoxical position of making good use of science without replacing it by a hypostasized image, for “the scientific building is necessarily unbalanced and in constant progress” (p. 22). According to these arguments, psychoanalysis can depend on its own theoretical means, without having to adapt to an existing and supposedly valid epistemology. Lacan’s dialogue with scienceaims at seeking seeking well-established pathways, after all, the own scientific movement acts by ruptures and reformulations, in a kind of productive instability. If Granger (1960/1975b, p. 18), when researching formal thought in humanities, concludes that they should suggest new problems to mathematicians, we could say that the same applies to psychoanalysis. And that is why Lacan (1965) sets the question that composes his “radical project”: the one that goes from “is psychoanalysis a science?” to: “what is a science that includes psychoanalysis?” (p. 249). Granger, referring now specifically to psychoanalysis, says:

If [psychoanalysis] contributes by effectively triggering a review of science, it is, undoubtedly, to the extent that the objectification of the clinical situation demands greater flexibility of models used in other disciplines and a perspectivation, within a practice, on the notion of structure. (Granger, 1960/1975b, p. 155)

Therefore, stating that formal thought cannot only be reduced to well-known mathematical instruments, Granger (1960/1975a) concludes that the “action of formal thought in humanities” does not operate only as a reduction from phenomena to calculations, “but also as the invention of new structures, and even an original mathematics.” (p. 40). Well, and would not it be a kind of “original mathematics” that which we may recognize in Lacan?

Local structure and universalism in the clinic

François Jullien (2009) brings a question about the universal that will be pertinent for the debate: the universal would serve “only to recognize a totality verified on experience” or else, he would point to a “must-be designed a priori and establishing an absolute standard for the whole of humanity?” (p. 14). The interest of psychoanalysis in this question is justified in many ways. One is to discuss the nature of Lacanian axiomatic aphorisms, such as “the unconscious is structured as a language”. Another is concerned with mathemes such as the phantom formula ($ <> a) and its epistemological basis. If until now we are recognizing a notion of local structures in Lacan, it is necessary to understand now its probable relationship with the universal. Would Lacanian aphorisms and mathemes be descriptions from something observed in experience, or would they be though theoretical enunciations a priori? In both cases, again we could question whether they are of universal order or restricted to a particular domain such as Western culture, in which psychoanalysis is created. We went through the distinction between universal, uniform, and common as proposed by François Jullien to deepen this discussion.

The common, from the political order, is a place of sharing and “points to the bottomless pit in which our experience traces roots and contributes to developing itself” (Jullien, 2009, p. 15); it is, therefore, extensive, and this extension is established according to the sharing of experience itself. The uniform, in turn, relates to the globalization of goods and meets the interests of the production, “indefinitely spreading the similar”, states Jullien (2009, p. 14). The universal, finally, unlike the common and the uniform, arises from a need for reason, a priori, and is prior to all experiences (Jullien, 2009, p. 19). The uniform is opposed to the different, but the universal is opposed to the singular (Jullien, 2009, p. 31). From this triad, two kinds of universal unflods. One of them, the weaker, would be sustained by experience: “we note, to the extent that we have observed so far, that this thing always occurs in such a way” or “all cases (of the same class) are effectively related” (Jullien, 2009, p. 19). The second universal, stronger and stricter, arises from reason as a logical necessity:

At first, we assume, before any confirmation by experience, that a particular thing must happen like this. With no possible exception: we state not only that this thing is in such a way until the present time, but it cannot be different. (Jullien, 2009, p. 19)

The last unfolding of Jullien’s schematization will be crucial to the issue of the local structure understood by Lacan’s matheme, namely, the opposition between the universalizable and the universalizing statement. The former may have the extension of its validity questioned, i.e., until the part of sampling the statement is applied. The later, , on the contrary, cannot be put to the test by experience, because it is “what arises . . . the universal” and its value is only measured “by the power and intensity of this effect” (Jullien, 2009, p. 152). The universalizing would not be disconnected from experience, for it is a kind of statement that produces effects on a given reality. Now, given that science can apprehend objects, creating syntactically coherent systems and through universalizing enunciations, without sensitive data from reality, Granger (1960/1975a) questions: “how is the effectiveness of its impact on the perception of the world guaranteed?” (p. 30). In a way even more pertinent to the discussion, Jullien asks a similar question, but in the context of humanities:

. . . a universality of this kind, which has a mathematical demonstration as a model and lies exclusively on formal, necessary connection, operating a priori in the spirit, regardless of what we can learn by observation or experience, but whose validation is certainly undeniable regarding science . . . will it be so relevant when, leaving aside the knowledge with which we build things, we return to the human? (Jullien, 2009, p. 21)

Put in another way, why would the universalizible statement, mathematically valid and coherent, be as efficient in other spheres as it is in nature? The question may be used for the Lacanian matheme of local structure; what is responsible for its effectiveness after all? We shall see that Lacan will propose a third alternative to the opposition between structure as a theoretical model, a priori, distant from experience, and structure as a simple description of a given reality:

. . . this antinomy is unaware of a form of the structure that, for being the third one, should not be deleted, that is, effects that the pure and simple combinatorics of the signifier determine in the reality in which it is produced. As, is it or is it not structuralism that allows our experience as the field to be situated in which it speaks? If so, “the distance from the experience” of the structure disappears, since it operates on it not as a theoretical model, but as the original machine that focuses on the subject. (Lacan, 1960/1998, p. 655)

This makes clear that Lacan’s interest in the notion of structure is how the subject of the signifier is determined by it. Mathematization of the Real enables Lacan to apprehend, in terms of structure, that this “original machine” puts the subject in of the stage, in experience. Not the a priori theory, nor the description of a given reality - the structure in Lacan has a creative character.

To answer Jullien’s question and understand Lacan’s previously addressed statements, we mention Granger again. Scientific thought would aim to create a language whose syntax can describe the objective relationships between phenomena and, therefore, a study must be performed “about the perceived world.” (Granger, 1960/1975a, p. 71). Granger separates the purpose of formal thought from reason a priori - which builds perfect schemes that only pertain to a world of ideal images -, as well as from other types of scheme that seek to gradually improve in order to better describe the structure of a reality. Abolishing the opposition between ideal abstraction and experience, the author defends that without a scheme “there is not, strictly speaking, a structure”, as an objective structure is “the world plus language” (Granger, 1960/1975a, p. 71, emphasis added). We cannot say that the author refers to the same concept of structure as used by Lacan, but this is not relevant here, because we only consider the way Granger establishes the relationship of a theory with his field of experience abolishing the opposition between a priori theory and that which describes a given reality. Though Granger (1960/1975a, p. 90) affirms that the success of a scientific language will always depend on its connection with experience, it does not mean that the success of such language is subject to experience, i.e., to the confirmation or refutation of that experience.

It is not a question of hypotheses about a given reality that can be tested in the immediate experience. Therefore, how is the apprehension of the structure in formal terms related with the experience, that is, how can it be “the world plus language”? Granger (1960/1975a, p. 106) proposes that formal thought works as a system of “observation and intervention” that the theoretician attempts to reduce an axiomatic, which assumes that the recognition of the existence of a reality depends on its schematization. On relation to formal thought with sciences of man, there is no immediate or pure experience of reality, either a syntactically organized language only regarding transcendent objects. The solution to the question of the relationship between schematization and experience will be finally the provisional character of the scheme (Granger, 1960/1975a, p. 135). The scheme, even if prepared a priori, creates an order of phenomena and enables a controlled experience over them that, in turn, allows schematization to be reviewed. Axiomatization works more for the provisional balance of concepts that organizes a practice than for a search for immovable structures and, therefore, operates as a work (Granger, 1960/1975b, p. 131), which gives it the value of method.

The discussion about kinds of universality and particularities of Lacan’s psychoanalytical theory is important to create a critical perspective about issues of the contemporary psychoanalytic clinic. The universality of the Oedipus complex, for instance, a matter for debates among anthropologists and psychoanalysts throughout the last century (in the more well known case, between Malinowski and Jones), is one of them. This issue also has particular relevance in contemporary times, since several psychoanalytic studies are dedicated to investigate new clinical forms as they are related to new bonds or cultural organizations, which allows the Oedipus myth to be questioned in theory and in psychoanalytic clinic today. If the Oedipus complex is considered extensively universal, the universalizable, it would be enough to present non Oedipus-like clinical cases to challenge the universality of the complex. If, on the other hand, we consider Oedipus as universalizing, as a set of concepts that organize a practice, we can consider it as one of the real concepts or one among the possible structures. Although it originated from a need for reason a priori, we will consider the universalizing as effective only to the extent that it operates as the scheme mentioned by Granger does, as if ordering a set of phenomena on which a practice, previously nonexistent, is allowed. A logical necessity is that it is not only referred to transcendental objects and indifferent to the practice, neither a descriptive theory of a given reality, but that there is a method of symbolization of regions of the Real. We believe this construction serves to elucidate the epistemological pathways chosen by Lacan, as the following excerpt demonstrates:

We have to perceive that we do not dissect with a knife, but with concepts. Concepts have their order of original reality. They do not arise from human experience - otherwise, they would be well established. The first denominations arise from their own words, they are tools for delineating things. All science has remained, therefore, for a long time in darkness, hampered in language (Lacan, 1975/1986, p. 10)

Suggesting that the universalistic ambition reveals more of the researcher than the investigated domain, Granger (1960/1975b) states that clinical types considered representative of a society can depend “very closely on the cultural traits of the group to which the author of the investigation belongs” (p. 153). Jullien (2009, pp. 57, 86), on the other hand, bases his interest in the universal issue, from the Greeks, in the West, which would make it a singular concern of a certain culture. This brings the following questions: what is the purpose of psychoanalysis and are their clinical types or structures to be understood only from a single complex? To what extent would it not only be the reproduction of the Western tendency towards universalism? Oedipus universality can also be questioned from its historical range, not only its geographical one and that gives more relevance to issues produced by the contemporary psychoanalytic clinic, in which the discussion about new clinical symptoms and types can be broached again from the matheme of the local structure.

A Brazilian author that contributes to deepen the discussion is Dunker (2015). He criticizes the neurotic-centered psychoanalytic, a correlative of the exclusively totemic understanding of culture, that is, as being universally organized by the paternal function. By understanding that discourses about an object can modify it, the author performs a kind of genealogy of diagnostic rationality that culminates in contemporary psychopathology, while identifying the different diagnostic strategies that are idiosyncratic to him. Diagnosis is an appointment that produces effects on the individual and on the social, reestablishing normative criteria through history. Dunker (2015) concludes “it is not possible to separate suffering and symptoms, typical of a historical and cultural context from the diagnostic rationality, where they are found” (p. 265). If we accept this hypothesis, we must consider that psychoanalysis itself would contribute to the new symptoms, or even social symptoms, which were that which attracted his interest. Thus, Dunker (2015) states that, if “we now have new pathologies based on a narrative deficit, on the inability to tell a story of suffering, on reducing malaise to sensory pain” (p. 33), this should not be thought of as independent of the “condensation of language forms that Postmodernity saves for suffering”. Would psychoanalysis be implied there?

If narratives offered by diagnoses of psychopathology participate in the determination of suffering, we can discuss Dunker’s proposition from the uniform and universal described by Jullien. For him “the contemporary, globalized world seems to confuse them” (Jullien, 2009, p. 29). The One that founds the universal as “uni-versus”, in contrast to the dispersion of “di-versus”, would start working as the One of the “uni-form”, repeating it. We ask: would the assumption of the Oedipus myth as a universally experienced complex not promote a similar uniformization? Unlike the universal, the uniform does not have “any concern for its foundation” (Jullien, 2009, p. 29), it just refutes the regular. The globalization of diagnoses, combined with the lack of criticism that contribute to their reformulations, would be the privileged model that subdues the possibility of new diagnostic rationalities theoretically based on universalizing hypotheses (in the creator sense that we highlight in this article).

In the psychoanalytic diagnostic logic is divided into neurosis, perversion, and psychosis, different cases of neurosis are recognized only through a paternal deficit (forclusion in psychosis and contradicted in perversion). Dunker (2015) suggests a need to reformulate the psychoanalytic diagnostic, since the uncritically considered tripartite diagnosis, does not consider the diversity of clinical cases in contemporary times either. Thus, proposing the animistic prescriptivism as one of the possible alternatives to totemism, Dunker (2015) criticizes ideas of cultural and clinical structures organized by singular principles, namely, the totemic and the paternal. If the Real of psychoanalysis is not ordered according to a single reason, i.e., it is varied and non-uniform, we see that this Real is compatible with the set of propositions about the local structure according to Rona and Milner, as the variety of topologies and coherent sets are opposed to a structure based ona single order. In addition, generalizations through induction, including the uniform and the universalizable of Jullien, in which regularity in some cases may be extended to all others, are based on the assumption of a real uniform, as nature investigated by science. If the Lacanian Real is by definition an irreducible impossibility of symbolization, a universalism in psychoanalysis should be restricted to logical sense, i.e., as a hypothesis that founds a class, that cuts and orders pieces of Real, but not as a universally applicable and truth statement. Here is the importance of a critical understanding of the mode of universality that the Lacanian matheme accredits to psychoanalytic theory.

This reasoning, when approaching what we previously mentioned about the local structure matheme, can be taken forward to question the relevance of structural diagnosis. According to Dunker (2015) “a lot have been lost in psychoanalysis by reducing diagnosis to the definition of structures” (p. 275), after all, the listening guided by diagnostic rationality is present at all stages of the treatment. From this point of view, structural diagnosis appears as an alternative within the treatment, not as an imperative to identify the position of the subject to a clinical structure. Psychoanalytical diagnostic rationality would not be reduced to the assignment of a structural diagnosis. What outstands, again, is the importance of local solutions that are not only parts of a previously known chain and reffering toa single principle, after all, unlike other clinical practices, psychoanalysis does not start with diagnostics.

The understanding that Oedipus is not an extensively observed complex, but rather a theory that guides a practice, requires an epistemological discussion. The same is true regarding structural diagnostics, in which the three established clinical structures cannot be considered as the only possibilities known from the practice of psychoanalysts, but as the only theoretical possibilities created. Thus, Lacan’s statement that concepts are the instruments with which the psychoanalyst dissects and creates an “original reality” acquires its full sense and reinforces the need to critically understand the status of its theoretical tools. Universality in the global or universalizing sense, as it offers a diagnostic rationality guided by a single principle, would not only not correspond to aspirations of modern science (fundamental influence on the study of Lacan, we can say), but it would also prevent the recognition of various clinical types. The notion of local structure, therefore, as it organizes itself within the perspective of plurality of topologies and coherent sets, emerges as a theoretical alternative for the recognition and systematization of clinical cases that address psychoanalytic diagnostic rationality in contemporary times.

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• 1
  This article is derived from the first author PhD thesis “Culture and structure in psychoanalysis” under the guidance of the co-author carried out in the Graduate Program in Social and Institutional Psychology at the Institute of Psychology of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. Its text has been considerably revised and altered by the authors for this publication.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  May-Aug 2017

History

• Received
  10 Sept 2015
• Reviewed
  08 Jan 2016
• Accepted
  18 Aug 2016