AT Psychoanalysis K - Michigan 7 2023 KLAB

AFF
2AC --- Psychoanalysis
there is zero empirical basis for psychoanalysis and it’s non-falsifiable – their authors either grossly misrepresent empirical data or hubristically extrapolate single events into broad theories
Paris 17 [Dr Paris is Professor, Department of Psychiatry, McGill University, and Research Associate, Department of Psychiatry, Jewish General Hospital. "Is Psychoanalysis Still Relevant to Psychiatry?" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5459228/]
In an era in which psychiatry is dominated by neuroscience-based models, psychological constructs tend to be neglected and may be taken seriously only when they have neural correlates.37 Some psychoanalysts have sought to link their model with neurobiological research and to claim that newer methods of studying the brain can validate their theories.5,6¶ Mark Solms, a South African neuropsychologist, is the founder of “neuropsychoanalysis.” This new field, with its own society and its own journal, proposes to use neuroimaging to confirm analytic theories. Its key idea is that subjective experience and the unconscious mind can be observed through neuroimaging.5 It is known that brain processes can be seen on brain imaging even before they have entered consciousness.38 However, claims that neuroimaging validate Freud’s model of the unconscious can be based only on “cherry-picking” the literature. The observed correspondences are superficial and hardly support the complex edifice of psychoanalytic theory.¶ Solms39 has also suggested that Freud’s ideas about dreams are consistent with neuroscience research based on rapid eye movement (REM) activity. This attempt to rescue a century-old theory met with opposition from dream researchers who consider Freud’s clinical speculations to be incompatible with empirical data.40,41¶ The proposal to establish a discipline of neuropsychoanalysis also met with a mixed reception from traditional psychoanalysts, who did not want to dilute Freud’s wine with neuroscientific water.42 Neuroscientists, who are more likely to see links to psychology as lying in cognitive science,43 have ignored this idea. In summary, neuropsychoanalysis is being used a way to justify long-standing models, without attempting to find something new or to develop an integration of perspectives on psychology.¶ However, Eric Kandel,44 influential in the light of his Nobel Prize for the study of the neurochemistry of memory, has taken a sympathetic view of the use of biological methods to study psychoanalytic theory. Kandel had wanted to be an analyst before becoming a neuroscientist.45 But Kandel, who does not actively practice psychiatry, may be caught in a time warp, unaware that psychoanalysis has been overtaken by competitors in the field of psychotherapy.¶ Another attempt to reconcile psychoanalysis with science has come from the literature on neuroplasticity.46 It is now known that neurogenesis occurs in some brain regions (particularly the hippocampus) during adulthood and that neural connections undergo modification in all parts of the brain. There is also evidence that CBT can produce brain changes that are visible using imaging.47 These findings have not been confirmed in psychoanalytic therapies. However, Norman Doidge, a Canadian psychoanalyst, has argued that psychoanalysis can change the brain.48 This may be the case for all psychotherapies. However, more recently, Doidge49 has claimed that mental exercises can reverse the course of severe neurological and psychiatric problems, including chronic pain, stroke, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, and autism. While these books have been best-sellers, most of their ideas in the second volume,49 based on anecdotes rather than on clinical trials, have had little impact in medicine. This story underscores the difficulty of reconciling the perspectives and methods of psychoanalysis with scientific methods based on empirical testing.¶ Psychoanalysis and the Humanities¶ Psychoanalysis claimed to be a science but did not function like one. It failed to operationalize its hypotheses, to test them with empirical methods, or to remove constructs that failed to gain scientific support.1 In this way, the intellectual world of psychoanalysis more closely resembles the humanities. Today, with few psychiatrists or clinical psychologists entering psychoanalytic training, the door has been opened to practitioners with backgrounds in other disciplines, including the humanities.¶ This trend is related to a hermeneutic mode of thought,50 which focuses on meaningful interpretations of phenomena, rather than on empirical testing of hypotheses and observations. Since the time of Freud, the typical psychoanalytic paper has consisted of speculations backed up with illustrations, similar to the methods of literary theory and criticism.¶ One model currently popular in the humanities is “critical theory.”51 This postmodernist approach uses Marxist concepts to explain phenomena ranging from literature to politics. It proposes that truth is entirely relative and often governed by hidden social forces. In its most radical form, in the work of Michel Foucault,52 critical theory and postmodernism take an antiscience position, denying the existence of objective truth and viewing scientific findings as ways of defending the “hegemony” of those in power
Alt fails – there’s no ultimate solution to the lack, and the best we can do is develop a more active relationship to it – try or die for perm do both: pass the plan, and remain open to the anxiety that what comes next is unpredictable.
Ruti 2017 [Mari Ruti is Distinguished Professor of Critical Theory and of Gender and Sexuality Studies; Graduate Faculty; Undergraduate Instructor, University of Toronto Mississauga. The Ethics of Opting Out, Columbia University Press 2017. Pp. 111-4 ghs-rodz]
This dispute will gain prominence in the next chapter. But first I want to illustrate that though the reading of death-dealing negativity that Edelman extracts from Lacan is available in Lacan’s work, so is a very different reading of negativity. More specifically, though it is true that Lacan connects the death drive to the suicidal act, presenting Antigone as a heroine who is unwilling to cede on her desire even when she knows that this desire will lead to her demise, he also explicitly links the death drive to a “will to make a fresh start,” “a will to create from zero, a will to begin again” (1959–1960, 212). He in fact suggests that insofar as the death drive “challenges every- thing that exists” (212), it can make visible what is invisible from the point of view of the social order, thereby inviting a fundamental reconfiguration (rather than simply a destruction) of that order. The same logic can arguably be applied to the subject, so that the death drive’s “will to make a fresh start” might productively be taken to gesture toward the kind of psychic rebirth that clinical practice, in Kristeva’s opinion, can bring about (see chapter 2). In other words, although Lacan certainly does not imply that acts of subjective destitution invariably result in collective or personal revitalization, the possibility of such revitalization—a possibility that Edelman studiously ignores—is nevertheless present in his account. This possibility of revitalization is what Badiou has explored through his notion of the truth event as a sudden revelation that erases the individual’s status quo—her “business as usual”—and brings into being the so-called subject of truth, a subject who, through its fidelity to the unanticipated insight offered by the event, engenders a new (collective or personal) order of things. Žižek, whose reading of Lacan is closer to that of Edelman, routinely takes issue with Badiou’s interpretation, accusing Badiou of not fully grasping the destructive power of the death drive. Yet Žižek himself at times also views subjective destitution as a spur for a new order of things, as when, for instance, he observes that “the act differs from an active intervention (action) in that it radically transforms its bearer (agent). . . . in it, the subject is annihilated and subsequently reborn (or not)” (2001, 44). Unlike Edelman, Žižek here seems to recognize that even though the act may not consciously aim at rebirth, and even though it may not inevitably lead to such rebirth, it can under certain circumstances have this effect. I suspect that the ambivalence regarding the matter arises precisely from the fact that both readings are available in Lacan, so that where one ends up—at destruction or rebirth—depends on what one chooses to highlight. Even Lacan’s statement about the death drive functioning as “a will to begin again” is wrought with ambiguity. One can argue—as Philip Sayers (2014) skillfully does—that the “will to begin again,” the “will to make a fresh start,” refers to the will to return to the beginning of the repetition compulsion, to start “afresh” the process of pursuing the thread of this compulsion, the thread of one’s fundamental psychic destiny. Read in this way, the will to begin again suggests that the subject defends against rebirth—understood as a reconfiguration of life—by opting for the familiar trajectory of the repetition compulsion. Sayers’s reading is also compatible with McGowan’s analysis of the drive as what enjoys by enjoying “nothing,” by never attaining its goal. Translated into my vocabulary, it implies that the death drive causes the subject to repeatedly recommence its circling around the traumatic kernel of the lost Thing. Yet even within this interpretation, there is room for a degree of “rebirth” in the sense that each new cycle of the repetition compulsion repeats slightly differently—draws new elements, new debris of life, into the groove of the compulsion—so that even when the repetition is largely predictable, it is always also somewhat unpredictable; to the extent that something new is added to the repetition compulsion with every new enactment, one can still speak of a “fresh start” of sorts. This interpretation agrees with the conclusion regarding the repetition compulsion that I arrived at in the last chapter, namely, that the compulsion is usually impossible to break in any definitive sense, that the best the subject can do is to develop a more active—and ideally more satisfying— relationship to it. This is one reason that one cannot, in the Lacanian con- text, speak about an analytic “cure,” about an ultimate solution (what Lacan mockingly calls “the Sovereign Good”) that would, once and for all, release the subject from its suffering; the best clinical practice can accomplish is to facilitate the subject’s capacity to enter into the cycle of the repetition compulsion in less injurious ways. This may, for instance, entail developing a greater degree of critical distance from the compulsion so that moments of intervention—moments when the subject decides against its “usual” manner of going about the process of living—become possible. Starting “afresh” in this sense is merely a matter of starting from a slightly different perspective. Although I find this interpretation persuasive, I am also inclined to read Lacan’s statement about the “will to create from zero, a will to begin again” alongside his famous musings about a potter who creates a vase around a void, “creates it, just like the mythical creator, ex nihilo, starting with a hole” (1959–1960, 120). In both cases, Lacan suggests that absence (zero, a hole) is a source of creativity. The zero of the death drive and the hole of the vase are far from being inert spaces of lack. Rather, they give rise to the desire to play with lack; they—to return to my wording in chapter 1— generate the impulse to work with negativity. Essentially, Lacan stresses that emptiness and creativity—the zero of the death drive and the will to begin again; the void of the vase and the fashioning of the vase that comes to enclose it—arise simultaneously. This is Lacan’s figurative means of conveying one of his most fundamental insights about human subjectivity, namely, that our sense of lack and our capacity to signify come into being in tandem: the signifier causes our lack but our lack, in turn, causes the urge to signify. Or to state the matter con- versely, it is because we lack that we are prompted to signify (create) yet it is our significatory (creative) activity that allows us to (sort of) handle our lack. This is arguably what we do when we write books (yes?). In this sense, there is a direct connection between our alienation on the one hand and our capacity to envision imaginative ways of coping with this alien- ation on the other. In addition, because our alienation can never be definitively redeemed, because we have no way of turning our negativity into a definitive form of positivity, our significatory endeavors are transient at best, giving us access to no permanent meaning, no solid identity, no unitary narrative of self- actualization. Any fleeting state of positivity that we may be able to attain must always in the end dissolve back into negativity; any attempt to erase lack produces new instances of lack. This means that the process of working with negativity must be continually renewed, which is why we start writing a new book the minute the old one is finished. Or at least I do. The hope is that if I work through the same ideas one more time, maybe I will finally be able to put them to rest. But they do not rest. Some of them insist on remaining wide awake, asking for yet another articulation: thus the endless recycling of thoughts, the endless “will to begin again.” In the same way that no object of desire can ever fully gratify, our every attempt to fill our lack unavoidably falls short of its goal: there will, quite simply, never be a perfect book, the book of books that extinguishes the desire for a better book. However, as I have observed, the lack of complete satisfaction does not mean that there is no satisfaction to be had. If any- thing, the intrinsic impossibility of complete satisfaction is what sustains us as creatures of becoming and what allows us, over and again, to take up the inexhaustible process of producing meaning, including the process of signifying beauty. As Kaja Silverman states, “Our capacity to signify beauty has no limits. It is born of a loss which can never be adequately named, and whose consequence is, quite simply, the human imperative to engage in a ceaseless signification. It is finally this never-ending symbolization that the world wants from us” (2000, 146).
The death drive doesn’t exist, but their continued use of it to mimetically explain all violence means they link more
Jonathan Dollimore 13, Professor in the School of English and American Studies at the University of Sussex, Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture, googlebooks
The death-drive theory has not found wide acceptance among Freud's followers. With significant exceptions like Melanie Klein, it has been explicitly denounced as misconceived biology, unsubstantiated speculation, logically incoherent and/or without evidence. It has also been attributed to Freud's own painful personal circumstances: the death of his daughter, the death of a grandson, his own illness (cancer), and his lifelong preoccupation with death. Of those who have been sympathetic to the idea, most have tended to tame it - as indeed did Freud himself. One move was to rewrite the instinct as largely an instinct of aggression. But for Freud the aggressive aspect of the death drive had been secondary; the instinct was primarily self-destructive. Sadism derives from a more primordial masochism, which means in effect that human aggression is, originally, self destructiveness. Of all subsequent theorists of psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan takes the death drive most seriously, and most contemporary psychoanalytic attention to it comes via him. To his credit, Lacan does not underplay or tame the death drive, and he locates Freud firmly within the Western tradition when he remarks that Freud questioned life as to its meaning and his answer was not that it had none 'which is a convenient way of washing one's hands of the whole business' - but that life has 'only one meaning, that in which desire is borne by death' (Ecrits, p. 277). According to Lacan, the Freudian world is one not of things, nor even of being, but rather of desire. More so even than Freud, Lacan finds in desire 'the paradoxical, deviant, erratic, eccentric, even scandalous character by which it is distinguished from need'. Although this distinction has been 'always obvious to moralists worthy of the name', psychoanalysis nevertheless misses the point by pursuing an obscurantist reduction of desire to need (p. 286). And that, for Lacan, is a cardinal error. This distinction belween desire and need leads him to dwell on something else in both Freud and earlier writers, moralists and otherwise: the relation between desire and lack. In modern psychoanalysis we find a secularized, intensified version of an existential perception that goes back a long way, even though the immediate influences here are Heidegger and Kojeve: Desire is a relation of being to lack. This lack is the lack of being properly speaking. It isn't the lack of this or that, but lack of being whereby the being exists. (Lacan, Seminar, 11.222-3) For Lacan, death is the name for a primordial absence intrinsic to presence; as John Forrester puts it, 'presence includes as its very condition the limit beyond which is its absence' (p. 176).16 To bind desire so resolutely into lack and absence means that it inevitably becomes a kind of essential negativity (Lacan, Seminar, 1.146)*' - something premised on an initial failure of satisfaction and which, as such, comes to exist only by virtue of its own alienation; as Juliet Mitchell puts it, 'Desire persists as an effect of a primordial absence and it therefore indicates that, in this area, there is something fundamentally impossible about satisfaction itself (Lacan. Feminine Sexuality, p. 6). One consequence of this is a radical fragmentation of the human subject.18 In one respect Lacan recasts the familiar metaphysical idea that life is rooted in death: 'it is death that sustains existence' (Ecrits, p. 300). In his development of this idea he combines diverse elements of the Western tradition of desire's impossibility: a theology of desire as death, crossed with something more romantic if no less severe - desire as annihilating excess, a primordial discord. The two elements are fused in those places where, for example, he speaks of 'that desperate affirmation of life that is the purest form in which we recognize the death instinct' (p. 104). These ideas then get reworked according to structuralist and linguistic preoccupations, as when he speaks of the 'frenzy' of desire 'mocking Ihe abyss of Ihe infinite', and of how this amounts to 'no other derangement of instinct than that of being caught in the rails - eternally stretching forth towards the desire for something else - of metonymy. Hence its "perverse" fixation at the very suspension-point of the signifying chain where the memory-screen is immobilized and the fascinating image of the fetish is petrified' (p. 167). In the same vein Lacan suggests that it is from death that existence takes on all the meaning it has; the lack which is at the heart of desire is also the price that human beings pay for their admission to language and culture. Death makes life possible in that it makes meaning and representation possible; it is not only before speech but 'primordial to the birth of symbols' (pp. 104-5, 300). Hence Lacan's most well-known formulation, that the unconscious is structured like a language, and his claim to have demonstrated 'the profound relationship uniting the notion of the death instinct to the problems of speech' (Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 20; Merits, p. 101). Richard Boothby regards thi

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