Frederik Willem van Eeden (03 April 1860, Haarlem to 16 June 1932, Bussum) was a late 19th-century and early 20th-century Dutch writer and psychiatrist.
He was a leading member of the Tachtigers and the Significs Group, and had top billing among the editors of De Nieuwe Gids (The New Guide) during its celebrated first few years of publication, starting in 1885.
Thomas Stephen Szasz (15 April 1920 to 08 September 2012) was a Hungarian-American academic and psychiatrist.
He served for most of his career as professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York. A distinguished lifetime fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and a life member of the American Psychoanalytic Association, he was best known as a social critic of the moral and scientific foundations of psychiatry, as what he saw as the social control aims of medicine in modern society, as well as scientism. His books The Myth of Mental Illness (1961) and The Manufacture of Madness (1970) set out some of the arguments most associated with him.
Szasz argued throughout his career that mental illness is a metaphor for human problems in living, and that mental illnesses are not “illnesses” in the sense that physical illnesses are, and that except for a few identifiable brain diseases, there are “neither biological or chemical tests nor biopsy or necropsy findings for verifying DSM diagnoses.”
Szasz maintained throughout his career that he was not anti-psychiatry but rather that he opposed coercive psychiatry. He was a staunch opponent of civil commitment and involuntary psychiatric treatment, but he believed in and practiced psychiatry and psychotherapy between consenting adults.
Szasz was born to Jewish parents Gyula and Lily Szász on 15 April 1920, in Budapest, Hungary. In 1938, Szasz moved to the United States, where he attended the University of Cincinnati for his Bachelor of Science in physics, and received his M.D. from the same university in 1944. Szasz completed his residency requirement at the Cincinnati General Hospital, then worked at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis from 1951-1956, and then for the next five years was a member of its staff – taking 24 months out for duty with the US Naval Reserve.
In 1962 Szasz received a tenured position in medicine at the State University of New York. Szasz had first joined SUNY in 1956.
Szasz had two daughters. His wife, Rosine, died in 1971. Szasz’s colleague Jeff Schaler described her death as a suicide.
Szasz’s views of psychiatry were influenced by the writings of Frigyes Karinthy.
Thomas Szasz ended his own life on 08 September 2012. He had previously suffered a fall and would have had to live in chronic pain otherwise. Szasz argued for the right to suicide in his writings.
Szasz first presented his attack on “mental illness” as a legal term in 1958 in the Columbia Law Review. In his article he argued that mental illness was no more a fact bearing on a suspect’s guilt than is possession by the devil.
In 1961 Szasz testified before a United States Senate Committee, arguing that using mental hospitals to incarcerate people defined as insane violated the general assumptions of the patient-doctor relationship, and turned the doctor into a warden and keeper of a prison.
Szasz was convinced there was a metaphorical character to mental disorders, and its uses in psychiatry were frequently injurious. He set himself a task to delegitimise legitimating agencies and authorities, and what he saw as their vast powers, enforced by psychiatrists and other mental health professionals, mental health laws, mental health courts, and mental health sentences.
Szasz was a critic of the influence of modern medicine on society, which he considered to be the secularization of religion’s hold on humankind. Criticising scientism, he targeted psychiatry in particular, underscoring its campaigns against masturbation at the end of the 19th century, its use of medical imagery and language to describe misbehaviour, its reliance on involuntary mental hospitalisation to protect society, and the use of lobotomy and other interventions to treat psychosis. To sum up his description of the political influence of medicine in modern societies imbued by faith in science, he declared:
Since theocracy is the rule of God or its priests, and democracy the rule of the people or of the majority, pharmacracy is therefore the rule of medicine or of doctors.
Szasz consistently paid attention to the power of language in the establishment and maintenance of the social order, both in small interpersonal and in wider social, economic, and/or political spheres:
The struggle for definition is veritably the struggle for life itself. In the typical Western two men fight desperately for the possession of a gun that has been thrown to the ground: whoever reaches the weapon first shoots and lives; his adversary is shot and dies. In ordinary life, the struggle is not for guns but for words; whoever first defines the situation is the victor; his adversary, the victim. For example, in the family, husband and wife, mother and child do not get along; who defines whom as troublesome or mentally sick?… [the one] who first seizes the word imposes reality on the other; [the one] who defines thus dominates and lives; and [the one] who is defined is subjugated and may be killed.
His main arguments can be summarised as follows:
“Mental illness” is an expression, a metaphor that describes an offending, disturbing, shocking, or vexing conduct, action, or pattern of behavior, such as packaged under the wide-ranging term schizophrenia, as an “illness” or “disease”. Szasz wrote: “If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist; If you talk to the dead, you are a schizophrenic.”[13]: 85 He maintained that, while people behave and think in disturbing ways, and those ways may resemble a disease process (pain, deterioration, response to various interventions), this does not mean they actually have a disease. To Szasz, disease can only mean something people “have”, while behaviour is what people “do”. Diseases are “malfunctions of the human body, of the heart, the liver, the kidney, the brain” while “no behavior or misbehavior is a disease or can be a disease. That’s not what diseases are.” Szasz cited drapetomania as an example of a behaviour that many in society did not approve of, being labelled and widely cited as a disease. Likewise, women who did not bend to a man’s will were said to have hysteria. He thought that psychiatry actively obscures the difference between behaviour and disease in its quest to help or harm parties in conflicts. He maintained that, by calling people diseased, psychiatry attempts to deny them responsibility as moral agents in order to better control them.
In Szasz’s view, people who are said by themselves or others to have a mental illness can only have, at best, “problems in living”. Diagnoses of “mental illness” or “mental disorder” (the latter expression called by Szasz a “weasel term” for mental illness) are passed off as “scientific categories” but they remain merely judgments (judgements of disdain) to support certain uses of power by psychiatric authorities. In that line of thinking, schizophrenia becomes not the name of a disease entity but a judgement of extreme psychiatric and social disapprobation. Szasz called schizophrenia “the sacred symbol of psychiatry” because those so labelled have long provided and continue to provide justification for psychiatric theories, treatments, abuses, and reforms.
The figure of the psychotic or schizophrenic person to psychiatric experts and authorities, according to Szasz, is analogous with the figure of the heretic or blasphemer to theological experts and authorities. According to Szasz, to understand the metaphorical nature of the term “disease” in psychiatry, one must first understand its literal meaning in the rest of medicine. To be a true disease, the entity must first somehow be capable of being approached, measured, or tested in scientific fashion. Second, to be confirmed as a disease, a condition must demonstrate pathology at the cellular or molecular level.
A genuine disease must also be found on the autopsy table (not merely in the living person) and meet pathological definition instead of being voted into existence by members of the American Psychiatric Association. “Mental illnesses” are really problems in living. They are often “like a” disease, argued Szasz, which makes the medical metaphor understandable, but in no way validates it as an accurate description or explanation. Psychiatry is a pseudoscience that parodies medicine by using medical-sounding words invented especially over the last one hundred years. To be clear, heart break and heart attack, or spring fever and typhoid fever belong to two completely different logical categories, and treating one as the other constitutes a category error. Psychiatrists are the successors of “soul doctors”, priests who dealt and deal with the spiritual conundrums, dilemmas, and vexations – the “problems in living” – that have troubled people forever.
Psychiatry’s main methods are assessment, medication, conversation or rhetoric and incarceration. To the extent that psychiatry presents these problems as “medical diseases”, its methods as “medical treatments”, and its clients – especially involuntary – as medically ill patients, it embodies a lie and therefore constitutes a fundamental threat to freedom and dignity. Psychiatry, supported by the state through various Mental Health Acts, has become a modern secular state religion according to Szasz. It is a vastly elaborate social control system, using both brute force and subtle indoctrination, which disguises itself under the claims of being rational, systematic and therefore scientific.
According to Szasz, many people fake their presentation of mental illness, i.e., they are malingering. They do so for gain, for example, in order to escape a burden like evading the draft, or to gain access to drugs or financial support, or for some other personally meaningful reason. By definition, the malingerer is knowingly deceitful (although malingering itself has also been called a mental illness or disorder). Szasz mentions malingering in many of his works, but it is not what he has in mind to explain many other manifestations of so-called “mental illness”. In those cases, so-called “patients” have something personally significant to communicate – their “problems in living” – but unable to express this via conventional means they resort to illness-imitation behaviour, a somatic protolanguage or “body language”, which psychiatrists and psychologists have misguidedly interpreted as the signs/symptoms of real illness. So, for example:
“analyzing the origin of the hysterical protolanguage Szasz states that it has a double origin: – the first root is in the somatic structure of human being. The human body is subject to illnesses and disabilities expressed through somatic signs (like paralysis, convulsions, etc.) and somatic sensations (like pain, tiredness, etc.); – the second root can be found into cultural factors.”
Szasz believed that if we accept that “mental illness” is a euphemism for behaviours that are disapproved of, then the state has no right to force psychiatric “treatment” on these individuals. Similarly, the state should not be able to interfere in mental health practices between consenting adults (for example, by legally controlling the supply of psychotropic drugs or psychiatric medication). The medicalisation of government produces a “therapeutic state”, designating someone as, for example, “insane” or as a “drug addict”.
In Ceremonial Chemistry (1973), he argued that the same persecution that targeted witches, Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals now targets “drug addicts” and “insane” people. Szasz argued that all these categories of people were taken as scapegoats of the community in ritual ceremonies. To underscore this continuation of religion through medicine, he even takes as an example obesity: instead of concentrating on junk food (ill-nutrition), physicians denounced hypernutrition. According to Szasz, despite their scientific appearance, the diets imposed were a moral substitute to the former fasts, and the social injunction not to be overweight is to be considered as a moral order, not as a scientific advice as it claims to be. As with those thought bad (insane people), and those who took the wrong drugs (drug addicts), medicine created a category for those who had the wrong weight (obesity).
Szasz argued that psychiatrics were created in the 17th century to study and control those who erred from the medical norms of social behaviour; a new specialisation, drogophobia, was created in the 20th century to study and control those who erred from the medical norms of drug consumption; and then, in the 1960s, another specialisation, bariatrics (from the Greek βάρος baros, for “weight”), was created to deal with those who erred from the medical norms concerning the weight the body should have. Thus, he underscores that in 1970, the American Society of Bariatric Physicians had 30 members, and already 450 two years later.
Just as legal systems work on the presumption that a person is innocent until proven guilty, individuals accused of crimes should not be presumed incompetent simply because a doctor or psychiatrist labels them as such. Mental incompetence should be assessed like any other form of incompetence, i.e. by purely legal and judicial means with the right of representation and appeal by the accused.
In an analogy to birth control, Szasz argued that individuals should be able to choose when to die without interference from medicine or the state, just as they are able to choose when to conceive without outside interference. He considered suicide to be among the most fundamental rights, but he opposed state-sanctioned euthanasia.
In his 2006 book about Virginia Woolf he stated that she put an end to her life by a conscious and deliberate act, her suicide being an expression of her freedom of choice.
Szasz believed that testimony about the mental competence of a defendant should not be admissible in trials. Psychiatrists testifying about the mental state of an accused person’s mind have about as much business as a priest testifying about the religious state of a person’s soul in our courts. Insanity (defence) was a legal tactic invented to circumvent the punishments of the Church, which at the time included confiscation of the property of those who committed suicide, often leaving widows and orphans destitute. Only an insane person would do such a thing to his widow and children, it was successfully argued. This is legal mercy masquerading as medicine, according to Szasz.
No one should be deprived of liberty unless he is found guilty of a criminal offense. Depriving a person of liberty for what is said to be his own good is immoral. Just as a person suffering from terminal cancer may refuse treatment, so should a person be able to refuse psychiatric treatment.
Drug addiction is not a “disease” to be cured through legal drugs but a social habit. Szasz also argues in favour of a free market for drugs. He criticised the war on drugs, arguing that using drugs is in fact a victimless crime. Prohibition itself constituted the crime. He argued that the war on drugs leads states to do things that would have never been considered half a century before, such as prohibiting a person from ingesting certain substances or interfering in other countries to impede the production of certain plants, e.g. coca eradication plans, or the campaigns against opium; both are traditional plants opposed by the Western world. Although Szasz was sceptical about the merits of psychotropic medications, he favoured the repeal of drug prohibition.
Szasz also drew analogies between the persecution of the drug-using minority and the persecution of Jewish and homosexual minorities.
The Nazis spoke of having a “Jewish problem”. We now speak of having a drug-abuse problem. Actually, “Jewish problem” was the name the Germans gave to their persecution of the Jews; “drug-abuse problem” is the name we give to the persecution of people who use certain drugs.
Szasz cites former US Representative James M. Hanley’s reference to drug users as “vermin”, using:
“the same metaphor for condemning persons who use or sell illegal drugs that the Nazis used to justify murdering Jews by poison gas – namely, that the persecuted persons are not human beings, but ‘vermin.'”
The “Therapeutic State” is a phrase coined by Szasz in 1963. The collaboration between psychiatry and government leads to what Szasz calls the therapeutic state, a system in which disapproved actions, thoughts, and emotions are repressed (“cured”) through pseudomedical interventions. Thus suicide, unconventional religious beliefs, racial bigotry, unhappiness, anxiety, shyness, sexual promiscuity, shoplifting, gambling, overeating, smoking, and illegal drug use are all considered symptoms or illnesses that need to be cured. When faced with demands for measures to curtail smoking in public, binge-drinking, gambling or obesity, ministers say that “we must guard against charges of nanny statism.” The “nanny state” has turned into the “therapeutic state” where nanny has given way to counsellor. Nanny just told people what to do; counsellors also tell them what to think and what to feel. The “nanny state” was punitive, austere, and authoritarian, the therapeutic state is touchy-feely, supportive – and even more authoritarian.
According to Szasz:
“the therapeutic state swallows up everything human on the seemingly rational ground that nothing falls outside the province of health and medicine, just as the theological state had swallowed up everything human on the perfectly rational ground that nothing falls outside the province of God and religion.”
Faced with the problem of “madness”, Western individualism proved to be ill-prepared to defend the rights of the individual: modern man has no more right to be a madman than medieval man had a right to be a heretic because if once people agree that they have identified the one true God, or Good, it brings about that they have to guard members and non-members of the group from the temptation to worship false gods or goods. A secularization of God and the medicalization of good resulted in the post-Enlightenment version of this view: once people agree that they have identified the one true reason, it brings about that they have to guard against the temptation to worship unreason – that is, madness.
Civil libertarians warn that the marriage of the state with psychiatry could have catastrophic consequences for civilisation. In the same vein as the separation of church and state, Szasz believes that a solid wall must exist between psychiatry and the state.
Believing that psychiatric hospitals are like prisons not hospitals and that psychiatrists who subject others to coercion function as judges and jailers not physicians, Szasz made efforts to abolish involuntary psychiatric hospitalisation for over two decades, and in 1970 took a part in founding the American Association for the Abolition of Involuntary Mental Hospitalisation (AAAIMH). Its founding was announced by Szasz in 1971 in the American Journal of Psychiatry and American Journal of Public Health. The association provided legal help to psychiatric patients and published a journal, The Abolitionist.
In 1969, Szasz and the Church of Scientology co-founded the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) to oppose involuntary psychiatric treatments. Szasz served on CCHR’s Board of Advisors as Founding Commissioner. In the keynote address at the 25th anniversary of CCHR, Szasz stated:
“We should all honor CCHR because it is really the organization that for the first time in human history has organized a politically, socially, internationally significant voice to combat psychiatry. This has never been done in human history before.”
In a 2009 interview aired by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Szasz explained his reason for collaborating with CCHR and lack of involvement with Scientology:
Well I got affiliated with an organisation long after I was established as a critic of psychiatry, called Citizens Commission for Human Rights, because they were then the only organisation and they still are the only organisation who had money and had some access to lawyers and were active in trying to free mental patients who were incarcerated in mental hospitals with whom there was nothing wrong, who had committed no crimes, who wanted to get out of the hospital. And that to me was a very worthwhile cause; it’s still a very worthwhile cause. I no more believe in their religion or their beliefs than I believe in the beliefs of any other religion. I am an atheist, I don’t believe in Christianity, in Judaism, in Islam, in Buddhism and I don’t believe in Scientology. I have nothing to do with Scientology.
Szasz was a strong critic of institutional psychiatry and his publications were very widely read. He argued that so-called mental illnesses had no underlying physiological basis, but were unwanted and unpleasant behaviours. Mental illness, he said, was only a metaphor that described problems that people faced in their daily lives, labelled as if they were medical diseases. Szasz’s ideas had little influence on mainstream psychiatry, but were supported by some behavioural and social scientists. Sociologist Erving Goffman, who wrote Asylums: Essays on the Condition of the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates, was sceptical about psychiatric practices. He was concerned that the stigma and social rejection associated with psychiatric treatment might harm people. Thomas Scheff, also a sociologist, had similar reservations.
In the summer of 2001, Szasz took a part in a Russell Tribunal on Human rights in Psychiatry held in Berlin between 30 June and 02 July 2001. The tribunal brought in the two following verdicts: the majority verdict claimed that there was “serious abuse of human rights in psychiatry” and that psychiatry was “guilty of the combination of force and unaccountability”; the minority verdict, signed by the Israeli Law Professor Alon Harel and Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho, called for “public critical examination of the role of psychiatry”.
Szasz was honoured with over fifty awards including:
Robert Evan Kendell presents (in Schaler, 2005[39]) a critique of Szasz’s conception of disease and the contention that mental illness is “mythical” as presented in The Myth of Mental Illness. Kendell’s arguments include the following:
Shorter replied to Szasz’s essay “The myth of mental illness: 50 years later”, which was published in the journal The Psychiatrist (and delivered as a plenary address at the International Congress of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in Edinburgh on 24 June 2010) – in recognition of the 50th anniversary of The Myth of Mental Illness – with the following principal criticisms:
Tomas Gösta Tranströmer (15 April 1931 to 26 March 2015) was a Swedish poet, psychologist and translator.
His poems captured the long Swedish winters, the rhythm of the seasons and the palpable, atmospheric beauty of nature. Tranströmer’s work is also characterised by a sense of mystery and wonder underlying the routine of everyday life, a quality which often gives his poems a religious dimension. He has been described as a Christian poet.
Tranströmer is acclaimed as one of the most important Scandinavian writers since the Second World War. Critics praised his poetry for its accessibility, even in translation. His poetry has been translated into over 60 languages. He was the recipient of the 1990 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the 2004 International Nonino Prize, and the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Tranströmer was born in Stockholm in 1931 and raised by his mother Helmy, a schoolteacher, following her divorce from his father, Gösta Tranströmer, an editor. He received his secondary education at the Södra Latin Gymnasium in Stockholm, where he began writing poetry. In addition to selected journal publications, his first collection of poems, 17 Poems, was published in 1954. He continued his education at Stockholm University, graduating as a psychologist in 1956 with additional studies in history, religion and literature. Between 1960 and 1966, Tranströmer split his time between working as a psychologist at the Roxtuna centre for juvenile delinquents and writing poetry. He also worked as a psychologist at the Labour Market Institute in Västerås from 1965 to 1990.
Tranströmer is considered to be one of the “most influential Scandinavian poet[s] of recent decades”. Tranströmer published 15 collected works over his extensive career, which have been translated into over 60 languages. An English translation by Robin Fulton of his entire body of work, New Collected Poems, was published in the UK in 1987 and expanded in 1997. Following the publication of The Great Enigma, Fulton’s edition was further expanded into The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems, published in the US in 2006 and as an updated edition of New Collected Poems in the UK in 2011. He published a short autobiography, Minnena ser mig (The Memories see me), in 1993.
By the mid-1960s, Tranströmer became close friends with poet Robert Bly. The two corresponded frequently, and Bly would translate Tranströmer’s poems into English. In 2001 Bonniers, Tranströmer’s publisher, released Air Mail, a work consisting of Tranströmer’s and Bly’s day-to-day correspondence on personal, contemporary and literary matters c. 1965-1991 – in a style that vividly conveyed how close friends the two had soon become. Bly also helped arrange readings for his fellow poet in America. The Syrian poet Adunis helped spread Tranströmer’s fame in the Arab world, accompanying him on reading tours.
In the 1970s, other poets accused Tranströmer of being detached from his own age, since he did not deal overtly with social and political issues in his poems and novels. His work, though, lies within and further develops the Modernist and Expressionist/Surrealist language of 20th-century poetry; his clear, seemingly simple pictures from everyday life and nature in particular reveals a mystic insight to the universal aspects of the human mind. A poem of his was read at Anna Lindh’s memorial service in 2003.
Tranströmer went to Bhopal immediately after the gas tragedy in 1984, and alongside Indian poets such as K. Satchidanandan, took part in a poetry reading session outside the plant.
Tranströmer suffered a stroke in 1990 that left him partially paralyzed and unable to speak; however, he continued to write and publish poetry through the early 2000s. One of his final original volumes of poetry, Den stora gåtan, was published in 2004, translated into English in 2006 as The Great Enigma.
Tranströmer played the piano throughout his life; after his stroke, which paralysed the right side of his body, he taught himself to play only with his left hand. He often said that the playing was a way for him to continue living after the stroke.
Tranströmer’s daughter Emma is a concert singer. In 2011 she released the album Dagsmeja, containing songs based on Tranströmer’s poems.
Many composers and musicians have worked with his poems. Among these are Jan Garbarek, Ulf Grahn, Madeleine Isaksson, Margareta Hallin, Lars Edlund, Sven-David Sandström, Jan Sandström and Anders Eliasson.
Tranströmer died in Stockholm on 26 March 2015 at 83, less than 3 weeks before his 84th birthday.
Tranströmer was announced as the recipient of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was the 108th winner of the award and the first Swede to win since 1974. Tranströmer had been considered a perennial frontrunner for the award in years past, with reporters waiting near his residence on the day of the announcement in prior years. The Swedish Academy revealed that he had been nominated every single year since 1993.
Tranströmer’s wife, Monica, said he had been notified by telephone four minutes before the announcement was made. The Nobel Committee stated that Tranströmer’s work received the prize “because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality.”
Permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy Peter Englund said, “He’s been writing poetry since 1951 when he made his debut. And has quite a small production, really. He’s writing about big questions. He’s writing about death, he’s writing about history and memory, and nature.” Prime Minister of Sweden Fredrik Reinfeldt said he was “happy and proud” at the news of Tranströmer’s achievement. Meanwhile, international response to the award has been mixed. The prize announcement led to the immediate reissuing of at least two volumes of Tranströmer’s poetry.
Alice Miller, born as Alicija Englard (12 January 1923 to 14 April 2010), was a Polish-Swiss psychologist, psychoanalyst and philosopher of Jewish origin, who is noted for her books on parental child abuse, translated into several languages. She was also a noted public intellectual.
Her book The Drama of the Gifted Child caused a sensation and became an international bestseller upon the English publication in 1981. Her views on the consequences of child abuse became highly influential. In her books she departed from psychoanalysis, charging it with being similar to the poisonous pedagogies.
Miller was born in Piotrków Trybunalski, Poland into a Jewish family. She was the oldest daughter of Gutta and Meylech Englard and had a sister, Irena, who was five years younger. From 1931 to 1933 the family lived in Berlin, where nine-year-old Alicija learned the German language. Due to the National Socialists’ seizure of power in Germany in 1933 the family turned back to Piotrków Trybunalski. As a young woman, Miller managed to escape the Jewish Ghetto in Piotrków Trybunalski, where all Jewish inhabitants were interned since October 1939, and survived World War II in Warsaw under the assumed name of Alicja Rostowska. While she was able to smuggle her mother and sister out, in 1941, her father died in the ghetto.
She retained her assumed name Alice Rostovska when she moved to Switzerland in 1946, where she had won a scholarship to the University of Basel.
In 1949 she married Swiss sociologist Andreas Miller, originally a Polish Catholic, with whom she had moved from Poland to Switzerland as students. They divorced in 1973. They had two children, Martin (born 1950) and Julika (born 1956). Shortly after his mother’s death Martin Miller stated in an interview with Der Spiegel that he had been beaten by his authoritarian father during his childhood – in the presence of his mother. Miller first stated that his mother did not intervene and was emotionally abusive. These events happened decades before Alice Miller’s awakening about the dangers of such childrearing methods. Martin also mentioned that his mother was unable to talk with him, despite numerous lengthy conversations, about her wartime experiences, as she was severely burdened by them.
In 1953 Miller gained her doctorate in philosophy, psychology and sociology. Between 1953 and 1960, Miller studied psychoanalysis and practiced it between 1960 and 1980 in Zürich.
In 1980, after having worked as a psychoanalyst and an analyst trainer for 20 years, Miller “stopped practicing and teaching psychoanalysis in order to explore childhood systematically.” She became critical of both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Her first three books originated from research she took upon herself as a response to what she felt were major blind spots in her field. However, by the time her fourth book was published, she no longer believed that psychoanalysis was viable in any respect.[11]
In 1985 Miller wrote about the research from her time as a psychoanalyst: “For twenty years I observed people denying their childhood traumas, idealising their parents and resisting the truth about their childhood by any means.” In 1985 she left Switzerland and moved to Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in Southern France.
In 1986, she was awarded the Janusz Korczak Literary Award for her book Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society’s Betrayal of the Child.
In April 1987 Miller announced in an interview with the German magazine Psychologie Heute (Psychology Today) her rejection of psychoanalysis. The following year she cancelled her memberships in both the Swiss Psychoanalytic Society and the International Psychoanalytic Association, because she felt that psychoanalytic theory and practice made it impossible for former victims of child abuse to recognise the violations inflicted on them and to resolve the consequences of the abuse, as they “remained in the old tradition of blaming the child and protecting the parents”.
One of Miller’s last books, Bilder meines Lebens (“Pictures of My Life”), was published in 2006. It is an informal autobiography in which the writer explores her emotional process from painful childhood, through the development of her theories and later insights, told via the display and discussion of 66 of her original paintings, painted in the years 1973-2005.
Between 2005 and her death in 2010, she answered hundreds of readers’ letters on her website, where there are also published articles, flyers and interviews in three languages. Days before her death Alice Miller wrote: “These letters will stay as an important witness also after my death under my copyright”.
Miller died on 14 April 2010, at the age of 87, at her home in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence by suicide after severe illness and diagnosis of advanced-stage pancreatic cancer.
Miller extended the trauma model to include all forms of child abuse, including those that were commonly accepted (such as spanking), which she called poisonous pedagogy, a non-literal translation of Katharina Rutschky’s Schwarze Pädagogik (black or dark pedagogy/imprinting).
Drawing upon the work of psychohistory, Miller analyzed writers Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka and others to find links between their childhood traumas and the course and outcome of their lives.
The introduction of Miller’s first book, The Drama of the Gifted Child, first published in 1979, contains a line that summarises her core views. In it, she writes:
Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery and emotional acceptance of the truth in the individual and unique history of our childhood.
In the 1990s, Miller strongly supported a new method developed by Konrad Stettbacher, who himself was later charged with incidents of sexual abuse. Miller came to know about Stettbacher and his method from a book by Mariella Mehr titled Steinzeit (Stone Age). Having been strongly impressed by the book, Miller contacted Mehr in order to get the name of the therapist. From that time forward, Miller refused to make therapist or method recommendations. In open letters, Miller explained her decision and how she originally became Stettbacher’s disciple, but in the end she distanced herself from him and his regressive therapies.
In her writings, Miller is careful to clarify that by “abuse” she does not only mean physical violence or sexual abuse, she is also concerned with psychological abuse perpetrated by one or both parents on their child; this is difficult to identify and deal with because the abused person is likely to conceal it from themselves and may not be aware of it until some event, or the onset of depression, requires it to be treated. Miller blamed psychologically abusive parents for the majority of neuroses and psychoses. She maintained that all instances of mental illness, addiction, crime and cultism were ultimately caused by suppressed rage and pain as a result of subconscious childhood trauma that was not resolved emotionally, assisted by a helper, which she came to term an “enlightened witness.” In all cultures, “sparing the parents is our supreme law,” wrote Miller. Even psychiatrists, psychoanalysts and clinical psychologists were unconsciously afraid to blame parents for the mental disorders of their clients, she contended. According to Miller, mental health professionals were also creatures of the poisonous pedagogy internalised in their own childhood. This explained why the Commandment “Honour thy parents” was one of the main targets in Miller’s school of psychology.
Miller called electroconvulsive therapy “a campaign against the act of remembering”. In her book Abbruch der Schweigemauer (The Demolition of Silence), she also criticised psychotherapists’ advice to clients to forgive their abusive parents, arguing that this could only hinder recovery through remembering and feeling childhood pain. It was her contention that the majority of therapists fear this truth and that they work under the influence of interpretations culled from both Western and Oriental religions, which preach forgiveness by the once-mistreated child. She believed that forgiveness did not resolve hatred, but covered it in a dangerous way in the grown adult: displacement on scapegoats, as she discussed in her psycho-biographies of Adolf Hitler and Jürgen Bartsch, both of whom she described as having suffered severe parental abuse.
A common denominator in Miller’s writings is her explanation of why human beings prefer not to know about their own victimisation during childhood: to avoid unbearable pain. She believed that the unconscious command of the individual, not to be aware of how he or she was treated in childhood, led to displacement: the irresistible drive to repeat abusive parenting in the next generation of children or direct unconsciously the unresolved trauma against others (war, terrorism, delinquency), or against him or herself (eating disorders, drug addiction, depression).
According to Alice Miller, worldwide violence has its roots in the fact that children are beaten all over the world, especially during their first years of life, when their brains become structured. She said that the damage caused by this practice is devastating, but unfortunately hardly noticed by society. She argued that as children are forbidden to defend themselves against the violence inflicted on them, they must suppress the natural reactions like rage and fear, and they discharge these strong emotions later as adults against their own children or whole peoples: “child abuse like beating and humiliating not only produces unhappy and confused children, not only destructive teenagers and abusive parents, but thus also a confused, irrationally functioning society”. Miller stated that only through becoming aware of this dynamic can we break the chain of violence.
Jacques Marie Émile Lacan (13 April 1901 to 09 September 1981) was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who has been called “the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud“. Giving yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, Lacan’s work has marked the French and international intellectual landscape, having made a significant impact on continental philosophy and cultural theory in areas such as post-structuralism, critical theory, feminist theory and film theory as well as on psychoanalysis itself.
Lacan took up and discussed the whole range of Freudian concepts emphasising the philosophical dimension of Freud’s thought and applying concepts derived from structuralism in linguistics and anthropology to its development in his own work which he would further augment by employing formulae from predicate logic and topology. Taking this new direction, and introducing controversial innovations in clinical practice, led to expulsion for Lacan and his followers from the International Psychoanalytic Association. In consequence Lacan went on to establish new psychoanalytic institutions to promote and develop his work which he declared to be a “return to Freud” in opposition to prevalent trends in psychoanalysis collusive of adaptation to social norms.
Lacan was born in Paris, the eldest of Émilie and Alfred Lacan’s three children. His father was a successful soap and oils salesman. His mother was ardently Catholic – his younger brother entered a monastery in 1929. Lacan attended the Collège Stanislas between 1907 and 1918. An interest in philosophy led him to a preoccupation with the work of Spinoza, one outcome of which was his abandonment of religious faith for atheism. There were tensions in the family around this issue, and he regretted not persuading his brother to take a different path, but by 1924 his parents had moved to Boulogne and he was living in rooms in Montmartre.
During the early 1920s, Lacan actively engaged with the Parisian literary and artistic avant-garde. Having met James Joyce, he was present at the Parisian bookshop where the first readings of passages from Ulysses in French and English took place, shortly before it was published in 1922. He also had meetings with Charles Maurras, whom he admired as a literary stylist, and he occasionally attended meetings of Action Française (of which Maurras was a leading ideologue), of which he would later be highly critical.
In 1920, after being rejected for military service on the grounds that he was too thin, Lacan entered medical school. Between 1927 and 1931, after completing his studies at the faculty of medicine of the University of Paris, he specialised in psychiatry under the direction of Henri Claude at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, the major psychiatric hospital serving central Paris, at the Infirmary for the Insane of the Police Prefecture under Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault and also at the Hospital Henri-Rousselle.
Lacan was involved with the Parisian surrealist movement of the 1930s, associating with André Breton, Georges Bataille, Salvador Dalí, and Pablo Picasso. For a time, he served as Picasso’s personal therapist. He attended the mouvement Psyché that Maryse Choisy founded and published in the Surrealist journal Minotaure. “[Lacan’s] interest in surrealism predated his interest in psychoanalysis,” former Lacanian analyst and biographer Dylan Evans explains, speculating that “perhaps Lacan never really abandoned his early surrealist sympathies, its neo-Romantic view of madness as ‘convulsive beauty’, its celebration of irrationality.” Translator and historian David Macey writes that “the importance of surrealism can hardly be over-stated… to the young Lacan… [who] also shared the surrealists’ taste for scandal and provocation, and viewed provocation as an important element in psycho-analysis itself”.
In 1931, after a second year at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, Lacan was awarded his Diplôme de médecin légiste (a medical examiner’s qualification) and became a licensed forensic psychiatrist. The following year he was awarded his Diplôme d’État de docteur en médecine (roughly equivalent to an M.D. degree) for his thesis “On Paranoiac Psychosis in its Relations to the Personality” (“De la Psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité”. Its publication had little immediate impact on French psychoanalysis but it did meet with acclaim amongst Lacan’s circle of surrealist writers and artists. In their only recorded instance of direct communication, Lacan sent a copy of his thesis to Sigmund Freud who acknowledged its receipt with a postcard.
Lacan’s thesis was based on observations of several patients with a primary focus on one female patient whom he called Aimée. Its exhaustive reconstruction of her family history and social relations, on which he based his analysis of her paranoid state of mind, demonstrated his dissatisfaction with traditional psychiatry and the growing influence of Freud on his ideas. Also in 1932, Lacan published a translation of Freud’s 1922 text, “Über einige neurotische Mechanismen bei Eifersucht, Paranoia und Homosexualität” (“Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality”) as “De quelques mécanismes névrotiques dans la jalousie, la paranoïa et l’homosexualité” in the Revue française de psychanalyse. In Autumn 1932, Lacan began his training analysis with Rudolph Loewenstein, which was to last until 1938.
In 1934 Lacan became a candidate member of the Société psychanalytique de Paris (SPP). He began his private psychoanalytic practice in 1936 whilst still seeing patients at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, and the same year presented his first analytic report at the Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) in Marienbad on the “Mirror Phase”. The congress chairman, Ernest Jones, terminated the lecture before its conclusion, since he was unwilling to extend Lacan’s stated presentation time. Insulted, Lacan left the congress to witness the Berlin Olympic Games. No copy of the original lecture remains, Lacan having decided not to hand in his text for publication in the conference proceedings.
Lacan’s attendance at Kojève’s lectures on Hegel, given between 1933 and 1939, and which focused on the Phenomenology and the master-slave dialectic in particular, was formative for his subsequent work, initially in his formulation of his theory of the mirror phase, for which he was also indebted to the experimental work on child development of Henri Wallon.
It was Wallon who commissioned from Lacan the last major text of his pre-war period, a contribution to the 1938 Encyclopédie française entitled “La Famille” (reprinted in 1984 as “Les Complexes familiaux dans la formation de l’individu”, Paris: Navarin). 1938 was also the year of Lacan’s accession to full membership (membre titulaire) of the SPP, notwithstanding considerable opposition from many of its senior members who were unimpressed by his recasting of Freudian theory in philosophical terms.
Lacan married Marie-Louise Blondin in January 1934 and in January 1937 they had the first of their three children, a daughter named Caroline. A son, Thibaut, was born in August 1939 and a daughter, Sybille, in November 1940.
The SPP was disbanded due to Nazi Germany’s occupation of France in 1940. Lacan was called up for military service which he undertook in periods of duty at the Val-de-Grâce military hospital in Paris, whilst at the same time continuing his private psychoanalytic practice. In 1942 he moved into apartments at 5 rue de Lille, which he would occupy until his death. During the war he did not publish any work, turning instead to a study of Chinese for which he obtained a degree from the École spéciale des langues orientales.
In a relationship they formed before the war, Sylvia Bataille (née Maklès), the estranged wife of his friend Georges Bataille, became Lacan’s mistress and, in 1953, his second wife. During the war their relationship was complicated by the threat of deportation for Sylvia, who was Jewish, since this required her to live in the unoccupied territories. Lacan intervened personally with the authorities to obtain papers detailing her family origins, which he destroyed. In 1941 they had a child, Judith. She kept the name Bataille because Lacan wished to delay the announcement of his planned separation and divorce until after the war.
After the war, the SPP recommenced their meetings. In 1945 Lacan visited England for a five-week study trip, where he met the British analysts Ernest Jones, Wilfred Bion and John Rickman. Bion’s analytic work with groups influenced Lacan, contributing to his own subsequent emphasis on study groups as a structure within which to advance theoretical work in psychoanalysis. He published a report of his visit as ‘La Psychiatrique anglaise et la guerre’ (Evolution psychiatrique 1, 1947, pp.293-318).
In 1949, Lacan presented a new paper on the mirror stage, ‘The Mirror-Stage, as Formative of the I, as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’, to the sixteenth IPA congress in Zurich. The same year he set out in the Doctrine de la Commission de l’Enseignement, produced for the Training Commission of the SPP, the protocols for the training of candidates.
With the purchase in 1951 of a country mansion at Guitrancourt, Lacan established a base for weekend retreats for work, leisure – including extravagant social occasions – and for the accommodation of his vast library. His art collection included Courbet’s L’Origine du monde, which he had concealed in his study by a removable wooden screen on which an abstract representation of the Courbet by the artist André Masson was portrayed.
In 1951, Lacan started to hold a private weekly seminar in Paris in which he inaugurated what he described as “a return to Freud,” whose doctrines were to be re-articulated through a reading of Saussure’s linguistics and Levi-Strauss’s structuralist anthropology. Becoming public in 1953, Lacan’s 27-year-long seminar was highly influential in Parisian cultural life, as well as in psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice.
In January 1953 Lacan was elected president of the SPP. When, at a meeting the following June, a formal motion was passed against him criticising his abandonment of the standard analytic training session for the variable-length session, he immediately resigned his presidency. He and a number of colleagues then resigned from the SPP to form the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP). One consequence of this was to eventually deprive the new group of membership of the International Psychoanalytical Association.
Encouraged by the reception of “the return to Freud” and of his report “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” Lacan began to re-read Freud’s works in relation to contemporary philosophy, linguistics, ethnology, biology, and topology. From 1953 to 1964 at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, he held his Seminars and presented case histories of patients. During this period he wrote the texts that are found in the collection Écrits, which was first published in 1966. In his seventh seminar “The Ethics of Psychoanalysis” (1959-1960), which according to Lewis A. Kirshner “arguably represents the most far-reaching attempt to derive a comprehensive ethical position from psychoanalysis,” Lacan defined the ethical foundations of psychoanalysis and presented his “ethics for our time” – one that would, in the words of Freud, prove to be equal to the tragedy of modern man and to the “discontent of civilization.” At the roots of the ethics is desire: the only promise of analysis is austere, it is the entrance-into-the-I (in French a play on words between l’entrée en je and l’entrée en jeu). “I must come to the place where the id was,” where the analysand discovers, in its absolute nakedness, the truth of his desire. The end of psychoanalysis entails “the purification of desire.” He defended three assertions: that psychoanalysis must have a scientific status; that Freudian ideas have radically changed the concepts of subject, of knowledge, and of desire; and that the analytic field is the only place from which it is possible to question the insufficiencies of science and philosophy.
Starting in 1962, a complex negotiation took place to determine the status of the SFP within the IPA. Lacan’s practice (with its controversial indeterminate-length sessions) and his critical stance towards psychoanalytic orthodoxy led, in August 1963, to the IPA setting the condition that registration of the SFP was dependent upon the removal of Lacan from the list of SFP analysts. With the SFP’s decision to honour this request in November 1963, Lacan had effectively been stripped of the right to conduct training analyses and thus was constrained to form his own institution in order to accommodate the many candidates who desired to continue their analyses with him. This he did, on 21 June 1964, in the “Founding Act”[20] of what became known as the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP), taking “many representatives of the third generation with him: among them were Maud and Octave Mannoni, Serge Leclaire … and Jean Clavreul”.
With the support of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Louis Althusser, Lacan was appointed lecturer at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. He started with a seminar on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis in January 1964 in the Dussane room at the École Normale Supérieure. Lacan began to set forth his own approach to psychoanalysis to an audience of colleagues that had joined him from the SFP. His lectures also attracted many of the École Normale’s students. He divided the École Freudienne de Paris into three sections: the section of pure psychoanalysis (training and elaboration of the theory, where members who have been analysed but have not become analysts can participate); the section for applied psychoanalysis (therapeutic and clinical, physicians who either have not started or have not yet completed analysis are welcome); and the section for taking inventory of the Freudian field (concerning the critique of psychoanalytic literature and the analysis of the theoretical relations with related or affiliated sciences). In 1967 he invented the procedure of the Pass, which was added to the statutes after being voted in by the members of the EFP the following year.
1966 saw the publication of Lacan’s collected writings, the Écrits, compiled with an index of concepts by Jacques-Alain Miller. Printed by the prestigious publishing house Éditions du Seuil, the Écrits did much to establish Lacan’s reputation to a wider public. The success of the publication led to a subsequent two-volume edition in 1969.
By the 1960s, Lacan was associated, at least in the public mind, with the far left in France. In May 1968, Lacan voiced his sympathy for the student protests and as a corollary his followers set up a Department of Psychology at the University of Vincennes (Paris VIII). However, Lacan’s unequivocal comments in 1971 on revolutionary ideals in politics draw a sharp line between the actions of some of his followers and his own style of “revolt.”
In 1969, Lacan moved his public seminars to the Faculté de Droit (Panthéon), where he continued to deliver his expositions of analytic theory and practice until the dissolution of his school in 1980.
Throughout the final decade of his life, Lacan continued his widely followed seminars. During this period, he developed his concepts of masculine and feminine jouissance and placed an increased emphasis on the concept of “the Real” as a point of impossible contradiction in the “symbolic order”. Lacan continued to draw widely on various disciplines, working closely on classical Chinese literature with François Cheng and on the life and work of James Joyce with Jacques Aubert. The growing success of the Écrits, which was translated (in abridged form) into German and English, led to invitations to lecture in Italy, Japan and the United States. He gave lectures in 1975 at Yale, Columbia and MIT.
Lacan’s failing health made it difficult for him to meet the demands of the year-long Seminars he had been delivering since the fifties, but his teaching continued into the first year of the eighties. After dissolving his School, the EFP, in January 1980, Lacan travelled to Caracas to found the Freudian Field Institute on 12 July.
The Overture to the Caracas Encounter was to be Lacan’s final public address. His last texts from the spring of 1981 are brief institutional documents pertaining to the newly formed Freudian Field Institute.
Lacan died on 09 September 1981.
Lacan’s “return to Freud” emphasizes a renewed attention to the original texts of Freud, and included a radical critique of ego psychology, whereas “Lacan’s quarrel with Object Relations psychoanalysis” was a more muted affair. Here he attempted “to restore to the notion of the Object Relation… the capital of experience that legitimately belongs to it”, building upon what he termed “the hesitant, but controlled work of Melanie Klein… Through her we know the function of the imaginary primordial enclosure formed by the imago of the mother’s body”, as well as upon “the notion of the transitional object, introduced by D.W. Winnicott… a key-point for the explanation of the genesis of fetishism”. Nevertheless, “Lacan systematically questioned those psychoanalytic developments from the 1930s to the 1970s, which were increasingly and almost exclusively focused on the child’s early relations with the mother… the pre-Oedipal or Kleinian mother”; and Lacan’s rereading of Freud – “characteristically, Lacan insists that his return to Freud supplies the only valid model” – formed a basic conceptual starting-point in that oppositional strategy.
Lacan thought that Freud’s ideas of “slips of the tongue”, jokes, and the interpretation of dreams all emphasized the agency of language in subjects’ own constitution of themselves. In “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud,” he proposes that “the unconscious is structured like a language.” The unconscious is not a primitive or archetypal part of the mind separate from the conscious, linguistic ego, he explained, but rather a formation as complex and structurally sophisticated as consciousness itself. One consequence of his idea that the unconscious is structured like a language is that the self is denied any point of reference to which to be “restored” following trauma or a crisis of identity.
André Green objected that “when you read Freud, it is obvious that this proposition doesn’t work for a minute. Freud very clearly opposes the unconscious (which he says is constituted by thing-presentations and nothing else) to the pre-conscious. What is related to language can only belong to the pre-conscious”. Freud certainly contrasted “the presentation of the word and the presentation of the thing… the unconscious presentation is the presentation of the thing alone” in his metapsychology. Dylan Evans, however, in his Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, “… takes issue with those who, like André Green, question the linguistic aspect of the unconscious, emphasizing Lacan’s distinction between das Ding and die Sache in Freud’s account of thing-presentation”. Green’s criticism of Lacan also included accusations of intellectual dishonesty, he said, “[He] cheated everybody… the return to Freud was an excuse, it just meant going to Lacan.”
Lacan’s first official contribution to psychoanalysis was the mirror stage, which he described as “formative of the function of the ‘I’ as revealed in psychoanalytic experience.” By the early 1950s, he came to regard the mirror stage as more than a moment in the life of the infant; instead, it formed part of the permanent structure of subjectivity. In the “imaginary order”, the subject’s own image permanently catches and captivates the subject. Lacan explains that “the mirror stage is a phenomenon to which I assign a twofold value. In the first place, it has historical value as it marks a decisive turning-point in the mental development of the child. In the second place, it typifies an essential libidinal relationship with the body-image”.
As this concept developed further, the stress fell less on its historical value and more on its structural value. In his fourth seminar, “La relation d’objet”, Lacan states that “the mirror stage is far from a mere phenomenon which occurs in the development of the child. It illustrates the conflictual nature of the dual relationship. “
The mirror stage describes the formation of the ego via the process of objectification, the ego being the result of a conflict between one’s perceived visual appearance and one’s emotional experience. This identification is what Lacan called “alienation”. At six months, the baby still lacks physical co-ordination. The child is able to recognize themselves in a mirror prior to the attainment of control over their bodily movements. The child sees their image as a whole and the synthesis of this image produces a sense of contrast with the lack of co-ordination of the body, which is perceived as a fragmented body. The child experiences this contrast initially as a rivalry with their image, because the wholeness of the image threatens the child with fragmentation – thus the mirror stage gives rise to an aggressive tension between the subject and the image. To resolve this aggressive tension, the child identifies with the image: this primary identification with the counterpart forms the ego. Lacan understood this moment of identification as a moment of jubilation, since it leads to an imaginary sense of mastery; yet when the child compares their own precarious sense of mastery with the omnipotence of the mother, a depressive reaction may accompany the jubilation.
Lacan calls the specular image “orthopaedic”, since it leads the child to anticipate the overcoming of its “real specific prematurity of birth”. The vision of the body as integrated and contained, in opposition to the child’s actual experience of motor incapacity and the sense of his or her body as fragmented, induces a movement from “insufficiency to anticipation”. In other words, the mirror image initiates and then aids, like a crutch, the process of the formation of an integrated sense of self.
In the mirror stage a “misunderstanding” (méconnaissance) constitutes the ego – the “me” (moi) becomes alienated from itself through the introduction of an imaginary dimension to the subject. The mirror stage also has a significant symbolic dimension, due to the presence of the figure of the adult who carries the infant. Having jubilantly assumed the image as their own, the child turns their head towards this adult, who represents the big other, as if to call on the adult to ratify this image.
While Freud uses the term “other”, referring to der Andere (the other person) and das Andere (otherness), Lacan (influenced by the seminar of Alexandre Kojève) theorizes alterity in a manner more closely resembling Hegel’s philosophy.
Lacan often used an algebraic symbology for his concepts: the big other (l’Autre) is designated A, and the little other (l’autre) is designated a. He asserts that an awareness of this distinction is fundamental to analytic practice: “the analyst must be imbued with the difference between A and a, so he can situate himself in the place of Other, and not the other”. Dylan Evans explains that:
For Lacan “the Other must first of all be considered a locus in which speech is constituted,” so that the other as another subject is secondary to the other as symbolic order.[48] We can speak of the other as a subject in a secondary sense only when a subject occupies this position and thereby embodies the other for another subject.
In arguing that speech originates in neither the ego nor in the subject but rather in the other, Lacan stresses that speech and language are beyond the subject’s conscious control. They come from another place, outside of consciousness – “the unconscious is the discourse of the Other”. When conceiving the other as a place, Lacan refers to Freud’s concept of psychical locality, in which the unconscious is described as “the other scene”.
“It is the mother who first occupies the position of the big Other for the child”, Dylan Evans explains, “it is she who receives the child’s primitive cries and retroactively sanctions them as a particular message”. The castration complex is formed when the child discovers that this other is not complete because there is a “lack (manque)” in the other. This means that there is always a signifier missing from the trove of signifiers constituted by the other. Lacan illustrates this incomplete other graphically by striking a bar through the symbol A; hence another name for the castrated, incomplete other is the “barred other”.
Feminist thinkers have both utilised and criticised Lacan’s concepts of castration and the phallus. Feminists such as Avital Ronell, Jane Gallop, and Elizabeth Grosz, have interpreted Lacan’s work as opening up new possibilities for feminist theory.
Some feminists have argued that Lacan’s phallocentric analysis provides a useful means of understanding gender biases and imposed roles, while others, most notably Luce Irigaray, accuse Lacan of maintaining the sexist tradition in psychoanalysis. For Irigaray, the phallus does not define a single axis of gender by its presence or absence; instead, gender has two positive poles. Like Irigaray, French philosopher Jacques Derrida, in criticising Lacan’s concept of castration, discusses the phallus in a chiasmus with the hymen, as both one and other.
Lacan considered psychic functions to occur within a universal matrix. The Real, Imaginary and Symbolic are properties of this matrix, which make up part of every psychic function. This is not analogous to Freud’s concept of id, ego and superego since in Freud’s model certain functions takes place within components of the psyche while Lacan thought that all three orders were part of every function. Lacan refined the concept of the orders over decades, resulting in inconsistencies in his writings. He eventually added a fourth component, the sinthome.
The Imaginary is the field of images and imagination. The main illusions of this order are synthesis, autonomy, duality, and resemblance. Lacan thought that the relationship created within the mirror stage between the ego and the reflected image means that the ego and the Imaginary order itself are places of radical alienation: “alienation is constitutive of the Imaginary order”. This relationship is also narcissistic.
In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan argues that the Symbolic order structures the visual field of the Imaginary, which means that it involves a linguistic dimension. If the signifier is the foundation of the symbolic, the signified and signification are part of the Imaginary order. Language has symbolic and Imaginary connotations – in its Imaginary aspect, language is the “wall of language” that inverts and distorts the discourse of the Other. The Imaginary, however, is rooted in the subject’s relationship with his or her own body (the image of the body). In Fetishism: the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real, Lacan argues that in the sexual plane the Imaginary appears as sexual display and courtship love.
Insofar as identification with the analyst is the objective of analysis, Lacan accused major psychoanalytic schools of reducing the practice of psychoanalysis to the Imaginary order. Instead, Lacan proposes the use of the symbolic to dislodge the disabling fixations of the Imaginary – the analyst transforms the images into words. “The use of the Symbolic”, he argued, “is the only way for the analytic process to cross the plane of identification.”
In his Seminar IV, “La relation d’objet”, Lacan argues that the concepts of “Law” and “Structure” are unthinkable without language – thus the Symbolic is a linguistic dimension. This order is not equivalent to language, however, since language involves the Imaginary and the Real as well. The dimension proper to language in the Symbolic is that of the signifier – that is, a dimension in which elements have no positive existence, but which are constituted by virtue of their mutual differences.
The Symbolic is also the field of radical alterity – that is, the Other; the unconscious is the discourse of this Other. It is the realm of the Law that regulates desire in the Oedipus complex. The Symbolic is the domain of culture as opposed to the Imaginary order of nature. As important elements in the Symbolic, the concepts of death and lack (manque) connive to make of the pleasure principle the regulator of the distance from the Thing (in German, “das Ding an sich”) and the death drive that goes “beyond the pleasure principle by means of repetition” – “the death drive is only a mask of the Symbolic order”.
By working in the Symbolic order, the analyst is able to produce changes in the subjective position of the person undergoing psychoanalysis. These changes will produce imaginary effects because the Imaginary is structured by the Symbolic.
Lacan’s concept of the Real dates back to 1936 and his doctoral thesis on psychosis. It was a term that was popular at the time, particularly with Émile Meyerson, who referred to it as “an ontological absolute, a true being-in-itself”. Lacan returned to the theme of the Real in 1953 and continued to develop it until his death. The Real, for Lacan, is not synonymous with reality. Not only opposed to the Imaginary, the Real is also exterior to the Symbolic. Unlike the latter, which is constituted in terms of oppositions (i.e. presence/absence), “there is no absence in the Real”. Whereas the Symbolic opposition “presence/absence” implies the possibility that something may be missing from the Symbolic, “the Real is always in its place”. If the Symbolic is a set of differentiated elements (signifiers), the Real in itself is undifferentiated – it bears no fissure. The Symbolic introduces “a cut in the real” in the process of signification: “it is the world of words that creates the world of things – things originally confused in the ‘here and now’ of the all in the process of coming into being”. The Real is that which is outside language and that resists symbolization absolutely. In Seminar XI Lacan defines the Real as “the impossible” because it is impossible to imagine, impossible to integrate into the Symbolic, and impossible to attain. It is this resistance to symbolization that lends the Real its traumatic quality. Finally, the Real is the object of anxiety, insofar as it lacks any possible mediation and is “the essential object which is not an object any longer, but this something faced with which all words cease and all categories fail, the object of anxiety par excellence.”
The term “sinthome” (French: [sɛ̃tom]) was introduced by Jacques Lacan in his seminar Le sinthome (1975-1976). According to Lacan, sinthome is the Latin way (1495 Rabelais, IV,63) of spelling the Greek origin of the French word symptôme, meaning symptom. The seminar is a continuing elaboration of his topology, extending the previous seminar’s focus (RSI) on the Borromean Knot and an exploration of the writings of James Joyce. Lacan redefines the psychoanalytic symptom in terms of his topology of the subject.
In “Psychoanalysis and its Teachings” (Écrits) Lacan views the symptom as inscribed in a writing process, not as ciphered message which was the traditional notion. In his seminar “L’angoisse” (1962-1963) he states that the symptom does not call for interpretation: in itself it is not a call to the Other but a pure jouissance addressed to no-one. This is a shift from the linguistic definition of the symptom – as a signifier – to his assertion that “the symptom can only be defined as the way in which each subject enjoys (jouit) the unconscious in so far as the unconscious determines the subject”. He goes from conceiving the symptom as a message which can be deciphered by reference to the unconscious structured like a language to seeing it as the trace of the particular modality of the subject’s jouissance.
Lacan’s concept of desire is related to Hegel’s Begierde, a term that implies a continuous force, and therefore somehow differs from Freud’s concept of Wunsch. Lacan’s desire refers always to unconscious desire because it is unconscious desire that forms the central concern of psychoanalysis.
The aim of psychoanalysis is to lead the analysand to recognize his/her desire and by doing so to uncover the truth about his/her desire. However this is possible only if desire is articulated in speech: “It is only once it is formulated, named in the presence of the other, that desire appears in the full sense of the term.” And again in The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis: “what is important is to teach the subject to name, to articulate, to bring desire into existence. The subject should come to recognize and to name her/his desire. But it isn’t a question of recognizing something that could be entirely given. In naming it, the subject creates, brings forth, a new presence in the world.” The truth about desire is somehow present in discourse, although discourse is never able to articulate the entire truth about desire; whenever discourse attempts to articulate desire, there is always a leftover or surplus.
Lacan distinguishes desire from need and from demand. Need is a biological instinct where the subject depends on the Other to satisfy its own needs: in order to get the Other’s help, “need” must be articulated in “demand”. But the presence of the Other not only ensures the satisfaction of the “need”, it also represents the Other’s love. Consequently, “demand” acquires a double function: on the one hand, it articulates “need”, and on the other, acts as a “demand for love”. Even after the “need” articulated in demand is satisfied, the “demand for love” remains unsatisfied since the Other cannot provide the unconditional love that the subject seeks. “Desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second.” Desire is a surplus, a leftover, produced by the articulation of need in demand: “desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand becomes separated from need”. Unlike need, which can be satisfied, desire can never be satisfied: it is constant in its pressure and eternal. The attainment of desire does not consist in being fulfilled but in its reproduction as such. As Slavoj Žižek puts it, “desire’s raison d’être is not to realize its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire”.
Lacan also distinguishes between desire and the drives: desire is one and drives are many. The drives are the partial manifestations of a single force called desire. Lacan’s concept of “objet petit a” is the object of desire, although this object is not that towards which desire tends, but rather the cause of desire. Desire is not a relation to an object but a relation to a lack (manque).
In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis Lacan argues that “man’s desire is the desire of the Other.” This entails the following:
Last but not least for Lacan, the first person who occupies the place of the Other is the mother and at first the child is at her mercy. Only when the father articulates desire with the Law by castrating the mother is the subject liberated from desire for the mother.
Lacan maintains Freud’s distinction between drive (Trieb) and instinct (Instinkt). Drives differ from biological needs because they can never be satisfied and do not aim at an object but rather circle perpetually around it. He argues that the purpose of the drive (Triebziel) is not to reach a goal but to follow its aim, meaning “the way itself” instead of “the final destination” – that is, to circle around the object. The purpose of the drive is to return to its circular path and the true source of jouissance is the repetitive movement of this closed circuit. Lacan posits drives as both cultural and symbolic constructs: to him, “the drive is not a given, something archaic, primordial”. He incorporates the four elements of drives as defined by Freud (pressure, end, object and source) to his theory of the drive’s circuit: the drive originates in the erogenous zone, circles round the object, and returns to the erogenous zone. Three grammatical voices structure this circuit:
The active and reflexive voices are autoerotic – they lack a subject. It is only when the drive completes its circuit with the passive voice that a new subject appears, implying that, prior to that instance, there was no subject. Despite being the “passive” voice, the drive is essentially active: “to make oneself be seen” rather than “to be seen”. The circuit of the drive is the only way for the subject to transgress the pleasure principle.
To Freud sexuality is composed of partial drives (i.e. the oral or the anal drives) each specified by a different erotogenic zone. At first these partial drives function independently (i.e. the polymorphous perversity of children), it is only in puberty that they become organised under the aegis of the genital organs. Lacan accepts the partial nature of drives, but:
Lacan identifies four partial drives: the oral drive (the erogenous zones are the lips (the partial object the breast – the verb is “to suck”), the anal drive (the anus and the faeces, “to shit”), the scopic drive (the eyes and the gaze, “to see”) and the invocatory drive (the ears and the voice, “to hear”). The first two drives relate to demand and the last two to desire.
The notion of dualism is maintained throughout Freud’s various reformulations of the drive-theory. From the initial opposition between sexual drives and ego-drives (self-preservation) to the final opposition between the life drives (Lebenstriebe) and the death drives (Todestriebe). Lacan retains Freud’s dualism, but in terms of an opposition between the symbolic and the imaginary and not referred to different kinds of drives. For Lacan all drives are sexual drives, and every drive is a death drive (pulsion de mort) since every drive is excessive, repetitive and destructive.
The drives are closely related to desire, since both originate in the field of the subject. But they are not to be confused: drives are the partial aspects in which desire is realised – desire is one and undivided, whereas the drives are its partial manifestations. A drive is a demand that is not caught up in the dialectical mediation of desire; drive is a “mechanical” insistence that is not ensnared in demand’s dialectical mediation.
Building on Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Lacan long argued that “every unsuccessful act is a successful, not to say ‘well-turned’, discourse”, highlighting as well “sudden transformations of errors into truths, which seemed to be due to nothing more than perseverance”. In a late seminar, he generalised more fully the psychoanalytic discovery of “truth—arising from misunderstanding”, so as to maintain that “the subject is naturally erring… discourse structures alone give him his moorings and reference points, signs identify and orient him; if he neglects, forgets, or loses them, he is condemned to err anew”.
Because of “the alienation to which speaking beings are subjected due to their being in language”, to survive “one must let oneself be taken in by signs and become the dupe of a discourse… [of] fictions organized in to a discourse”. For Lacan, with “masculine knowledge irredeemably an erring”, the individual “must thus allow himself to be fooled by these signs to have a chance of getting his bearings amidst them; he must place and maintain himself in the wake of a discourse… become the dupe of a discourse… les non-dupes errent”.
Lacan comes close here to one of the points where “very occasionally he sounds like Thomas Kuhn (whom he never mentions)”, with Lacan’s “discourse” resembling Kuhn’s “paradigm” seen as “the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on shared by the members of a given community”.
The “variable-length psychoanalytic session” was one of Lacan’s crucial clinical innovations,[88] and a key element in his conflicts with the IPA, to whom his “innovation of reducing the fifty-minute analytic hour to a Delphic seven or eight minutes (or sometimes even to a single oracular parole murmured in the waiting-room)” was unacceptable. Lacan’s variable-length sessions lasted anywhere from a few minutes (or even, if deemed appropriate by the analyst, a few seconds) to several hours.[citation needed] This practice replaced the classical Freudian “fifty minute hour”.
With respect to what he called “the cutting up of the ‘timing'”, Lacan asked the question: “Why make an intervention impossible at this point, which is consequently privileged in this way?” By allowing the analyst’s intervention on timing, the variable-length session removed the patient’s—or, technically, “the analysand’s”—former certainty as to the length of time that they would be on the couch. When Lacan adopted the practice, “the psychoanalytic establishment were scandalized” – and, given that “between 1979 and 1980 he saw an average of ten patients an hour”, it is perhaps not hard to see why: “psychoanalysis reduced to zero”, if no less lucrative.
At the time of his original innovation, Lacan described the issue as concerning “the systematic use of shorter sessions in certain analyses, and in particular in training analyses”; and in practice it was certainly a shortening of the session around the so-called “critical moment” which took place, so that critics wrote that ‘everyone is well aware what is meant by the deceptive phrase “variable length”… sessions systematically reduced to just a few minutes’. Irrespective of the theoretical merits of breaking up patients’ expectations, it was clear that “the Lacanian analyst never wants to ‘shake up’ the routine by keeping them for more rather than less time”. Lacan’s shorter sessions enabled him to take many more clients than therapists using orthodox Freudian methods, and this growth continued as Lacan’s students and followers adopted the same practice.
Accepting the importance of “the critical moment when insight arises”, object relations theory would nonetheless quietly suggest that “if the analyst does not provide the patient with space in which nothing needs to happen there is no space in which something can happen”. Julia Kristeva, if in very different language, would concur that “Lacan, alert to the scandal of the timeless intrinsic to the analytic experience, was mistaken in wanting to ritualize it as a technique of scansion (short sessions)”.
Most of Lacan’s psychoanalytic writings from the 1940s through to the early 1960s were compiled with an index of concepts by Jacques-Alain Miller in the 1966 collection, titled simply Écrits. Published in French by Éditions du Seuil, they were later issued as a two-volume set (1970/1) with a new “Preface”. A selection of the writings (chosen by Lacan himself) were translated by Alan Sheridan and published by Tavistock Press in 1977. The full 35-text volume appeared for the first time in English in Bruce Fink’s translation published by Norton & Co. (2006). The Écrits were included on the list of 100 most influential books of the 20th century compiled and polled by the broadsheet Le Monde.
Lacan’s writings from the late sixties and seventies (thus subsequent to the 1966 collection) were collected posthumously, along with some early texts from the nineteen thirties, in the Éditions du Seuil volume Autres écrits (2001).
Although most of the texts in Écrits and Autres écrits are closely related to Lacan’s lectures or lessons from his Seminar, more often than not the style is denser than Lacan’s oral delivery, and a clear distinction between the writings and the transcriptions of the oral teaching is evident to the reader.
Jacques-Alain Miller is the sole editor of Lacan’s seminars, which contain the majority of his life’s work. “There has been considerable controversy over the accuracy or otherwise of the transcription and editing”, as well as over “Miller’s refusal to allow any critical or annotated edition to be published”. Despite Lacan’s status as a major figure in the history of psychoanalysis, some of his seminars remain unpublished. Since 1984, Miller has been regularly conducting a series of lectures, “L’orientation lacanienne.” Miller’s teachings have been published in the US by the journal Lacanian Ink.
Lacan’s writing is notoriously difficult, due in part to the repeated Hegelian/Kojèvean allusions, wide theoretical divergences from other psychoanalytic and philosophical theory, and an obscure prose style. For some, “the impenetrability of Lacan’s prose… [is] too often regarded as profundity precisely because it cannot be understood”. Arguably at least, “the imitation of his style by other ‘Lacanian’ commentators” has resulted in “an obscurantist antisystematic tradition in Lacanian literature”.
Although Lacan is a major influence on psychoanalysis in France and parts of Latin America, in the English-speaking world his influence on clinical psychology has been far less and his ideas are best known in the arts and humanities. However, there are Lacanian psychoanalytic societies in both North America and the United Kingdom that carry on his work.
One example of Lacan’s work being practiced in the United States is found in the works of Annie G. Rogers (A Shining Affliction; The Unsayable: The Hidden Language of Trauma), which credit Lacanian theory for many therapeutic insights in successfully treating sexually abused young women. Lacan’s work has also reached Quebec, where The Interdisciplinary Freudian Group for Research and Clinical and Cultural Interventions (GIFRIC) claims that it has used a modified form of Lacanian psychoanalysis in successfully treating psychosis in many of its patients, a task once thought to be unsuited for psychoanalysis, even by psychoanalysts themselves.
In his introduction to the 1994 Penguin edition of Lacan’s The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, translator and historian David Macey describes Lacan as “the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud”. His ideas had a significant impact on post-structuralism, critical theory, 20th-century French philosophy, film theory, and clinical psychoanalysis.
In Fashionable Nonsense (1997), Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont criticize Lacan’s use of terms from mathematical fields such as topology, accusing him of “superficial erudition” and of abusing scientific concepts that he does not understand, accusing him of producing statements that are not even wrong. However, they note that they do not want to enter into the debate over the purely psychoanalytic part of Lacan’s work.
Other critics have dismissed Lacan’s work wholesale. François Roustang called it an “incoherent system of pseudo-scientific gibberish”, and quoted linguist Noam Chomsky’s opinion that Lacan was an “amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatan”. The former Lacanian analyst Dylan Evans (who published a dictionary of Lacanian terms in 1996) eventually dismissed Lacanianism as lacking a sound scientific basis and as harming rather than helping patients, and has criticized Lacan’s followers for treating his writings as “holy writ”. Richard Webster has decried what he sees as Lacan’s obscurity, arrogance, and the resultant “Cult of Lacan”. Others have been more forceful still, describing him as “The Shrink from Hell” and listing the many associates – from lovers and family to colleagues, patients, and editors – left damaged in his wake. Roger Scruton included Lacan in his book Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left, and named him as the only ‘fool’ included in the book – his other targets merely being misguided or frauds.
His type of charismatic authority has been linked to the many conflicts among his followers and in the analytic schools he was involved with. His intellectual style has also come in for much criticism. Eclectic in his use of sources, Lacan has been seen as concealing his own thought behind the apparent explication of that of others. Thus his “return to Freud” was called by Malcolm Bowie “a complete pattern of dissenting assent to the ideas of Freud . . . Lacan’s argument is conducted on Freud’s behalf and, at the same time, against him”. Bowie has also suggested that Lacan suffered from both a love of system and a deep-seated opposition to all forms of system.
Many feminist thinkers have criticised Lacan’s thought. Philosopher and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray accuses Lacan of perpetuating phallocentric mastery in philosophical and psychoanalytic discourse. Others have echoed this accusation, seeing Lacan as trapped in the very phallocentric mastery his language ostensibly sought to undermine. The result – Castoriadis would maintain – was to make all thought depend upon himself, and thus to stifle the capacity for independent thought among all those around him.
Their difficulties were only reinforced by what Didier Anzieu described as a kind of teasing lure in Lacan’s discourse; “fundamental truths to be revealed . . . but always at some further point”. This was perhaps an aspect of the sadistic narcissism that feminists especially accused Lacan of. Claims surrounding misogynistic tendencies were further fuelled when his wife Sylvia Lacan referred to her late husband as a “domestic tyrant” during a series of interviews conducted by anthropologist Jamer Hunt.
In a 2012 interview with Veterans Unplugged, Noam Chomsky said: “quite frankly I thought he was a total charlatan. He was just posturing for the television cameras in the way many Paris intellectuals do. Why this is influential, I haven’t the slightest idea. I don’t see anything there that should be influential.”
Selected works published in English listed below. More complete listings can be found at Lacan.com.
Benjamin Libet (12 April 1916 to 23 July 2007) was an American neuroscientist who was a pioneer in the field of human consciousness.
Libet was a researcher in the physiology department of the University of California, San Francisco. In 2003, he was the first recipient of the Virtual Nobel Prize in Psychology from the University of Klagenfurt, “for his pioneering achievements in the experimental investigation of consciousness, initiation of action, and free will”.
He was the son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants. Gamer Libitsky, his paternal grandfather, came to America in 1865 from a town called Brusilov in Ukraine. His mother, Anna Charovsky, emigrated from Kiev in 1913. His parents first met in Chicago. They were married in 1915, and somewhat over nine months later Benjamin was born. He had a brother Meyer, and a sister Dorothy. Libet attended a public elementary school and John Marshall High School. Libet graduated from the University of Chicago, where he studied with Ralph Gerard.
In the 1970s, Libet was involved in research into neural activity and sensation thresholds. His initial investigations involved determining how much activation at specific sites in the brain was required to trigger artificial somatic sensations, relying on routine psychophysical procedures. This work soon crossed into an investigation into human consciousness; his most famous experiment was meant to demonstrate that the unconscious electrical processes in the brain called Bereitschaftspotential (or readiness potential) discovered by Lüder Deecke and Hans Helmut Kornhuber in 1964 precede conscious decisions to perform volitional, spontaneous acts, implying that unconscious neuronal processes precede and potentially cause volitional acts which are retrospectively felt to be consciously motivated by the subject. The experiment has caused controversy not only because it challenges the belief in free will, but also due to a criticism of its implicit assumptions. It has also inspired further study of the neuroscience of free will.
To gauge the relation between unconscious readiness potential and subjective feelings of volition and action, Libet required an objective method of marking the subject’s conscious experience of the will to perform an action in time, and afterward comparing this information with data recording the brain’s electrical activity during the same interval. For this, Libet required specialised pieces of equipment.
The first of these was the cathode ray oscilloscope, an instrument typically used to graph the amplitude and frequency of electrical signals. With a few adjustments, however, the oscilloscope could be made to act as a timer: instead of displaying a series of waves, the output was a single dot that could be made to travel in a circular motion, similar to the movements of a second hand around a clock face. This timer was set so that the time it took for the dot to travel between intervals marked on the oscilloscope was approximately forty-three milliseconds. As the angular velocity of the dot remained constant, any change in distance could easily be converted into the time it took to travel that distance.
To monitor brain activity during the same period, Libet used an electroencephalogram (EEG). The EEG uses small electrodes placed at various points on the scalp that measure neuronal activity in the cortex, the outermost portion of the brain, which is associated with higher cognition. The transmission of electrical signals across regions of the cortex causes differences in measured voltage across EEG electrodes. These differences in voltage reflect changes in neuronal activity in specific areas of the cortex.
To measure the actual time of the voluntary motor act, an electromyograph (EMG) recorded the muscle movement using electrodes on the skin over the activated muscle of the forearm. The EMG time was taken as the zero time relative to which all other times were calculated.
Researchers carrying out Libet’s procedure would ask each participant to sit at a desk in front of the oscilloscope timer. They would affix the EEG electrodes to the participant’s scalp, and would then instruct the subject to carry out some small, simple motor activity, such as pressing a button, or flexing a finger or wrist, within a certain time frame. No limits were placed on the number of times the subject could perform the action within this period.
During the experiment, the subject would be asked to note the position of the dot on the oscilloscope timer when “he/she was first aware of the wish or urge to act” (control tests with Libet’s equipment demonstrated a comfortable margin of error of only -50 milliseconds). Pressing the button also recorded the position of the dot on the oscillator, this time electronically. By comparing the marked time of the button’s pushing and the subject’s conscious decision to act, researchers were able to calculate the total time of the trial from the subject’s initial volition through to the resultant action. On average, approximately two hundred milliseconds elapsed between the first appearance of conscious will to press the button and the act of pressing it.
Researchers also analysed EEG recordings for each trial with respect to the timing of the action. It was noted that brain activity involved in the initiation of the action, primarily centred in the secondary motor cortex, occurred, on average, approximately five hundred milliseconds before the trial ended with the pushing of the button. That is to say, researchers recorded mounting brain activity related to the resultant action as many as three hundred milliseconds before subjects reported the first awareness of conscious will to act. In other words, apparently conscious decisions to act were preceded by an unconscious buildup of electrical activity within the brain – the change in EEG signals reflecting this buildup came to be called Bereitschaftspotential or readiness potential. As of 2008, the upcoming outcome of a decision could be found in study of the brain activity in the prefrontal and parietal cortex up to 7 seconds before the subject was aware of their decision.
There is no majority agreement about the interpretation or the significance of Libet’s experiments. However, Libet’s experiments suggest to some that unconscious processes in the brain are the true initiator of volitional acts, and free will therefore plays no part in their initiation. If unconscious brain processes have already taken steps to initiate an action before consciousness is aware of any desire to perform it, the causal role of consciousness in volition is all but eliminated, according to this interpretation. For instance, Susan Blackmore’s interpretation is “that conscious experience takes some time to build up and is much too slow to be responsible for making things happen.”
Such a conclusion would be overdrawn as in a subsequent run of experiments, Libet found that even after the awareness of the decision to push the button had happened, people still had the capability to veto the decision and not to push the button. So they still had the capability to refrain from the decision that had earlier been made. Some therefore take this brain impulse to push the button to suggest just a readiness potential which the subject may either then go along with or may veto. So the person still has power over his or her decision.
For this reason, Libet himself regards his experimental results to be entirely compatible with the notion of free will. He finds that conscious volition is exercised in the form of ‘the power of veto’ (sometimes called “free won’t”); the idea that conscious acquiescence is required to allow the unconscious buildup of the readiness potential to be actualized as a movement. While consciousness plays no part in the instigation of volitional acts, Libet suggested that it may still have a part to play in suppressing or withholding certain acts instigated by the unconscious. Libet noted that everyone has experienced the withholding from performing an unconscious urge. Since the subjective experience of the conscious will to act preceded the action by only 200 milliseconds, this leaves consciousness only 100-150 milliseconds to veto an action (this is because the final 20 milliseconds prior to an act are occupied by the activation of the spinal motor neurones by the primary motor cortex, and the margin of error indicated by tests utilising the oscillator must also be considered). However, Max Velmans has argued: “Libet has shown that the experienced intention to perform an act is preceded by cerebral initiation. Why should the experienced decision to veto that intention, or to actively or passively promote its completion, be any different?”
In a study published in 2012, Aaron Schurger, Jacobo D. Sitt, and Stanislas Dehaene proposed that the occurrence of the readiness potentials observed in Libet-type experiments is stochastically occasioned by ongoing spontaneous subthreshold fluctuations in neural activity, rather than an unconscious goal-directed operation.
Libet’s experiments have received support from other research related to the Neuroscience of free will.
The German philosopher Uwe Meixner commented:
“For making an informed decision, the self needs to be conscious of the facts relevant to the decision prior to making the decision; but…the self certainly does not need to be conscious of making the decision at the very same time it makes it…the consciousness of a state of affairs P being (presently) the case is always somewhat later than the actual fact of P’s being the case…”
When one is speaking to another individual, as a result of the limited velocity of light signals and the limited velocity of sound waves and the limited velocity of nerve signals, what one is experiencing as now is always slightly in the past. No person ever has a definite present awareness of what is occurring around them. There is a small time delay due to the limited velocity of these many different signals that is indiscernible to people because it is extremely short. Meixner also says, “it is hardly surprising that the consciousness of making a decision is no exception to this general rule, which is due to the dependence of consciousness on neurophysiology.”
Just as nothing that is actually presently there can be observed because of the limited velocity of light but events as they are just a little in the past can be observed, in the same way people do not have a consciousness of their own decisions simultaneously with their making them but they have it undetectedly afterwards.
If the mind has the power to think without being causally determined, then all it requires to do in order to make accountable, knowledgeable, free decisions is consciousness of the pertinent facts before its decision making. However, the mind does not require to be aware or conscious of the decision itself at the same it makes that decision.
It has been suggested that consciousness is merely a side-effect of neuronal functions, an epiphenomenon of brain states. Libet’s experiments are proffered in support of this theory; our reports of conscious instigation of our own acts are, in this view, a mistake of retrospection. However, some dualist philosophers have disputed this conclusion:
In short, the [neuronal] causes and correlates of conscious experience should not be confused with their ontology … the only evidence about what conscious experiences are like comes from first-person sources, which consistently suggest consciousness to be something other than or additional to neuronal activity.
A more general criticism from a dualist-interactionist perspective has been raised by Alexander Batthyany who points out that Libet asked his subjects to merely “let the urge [to move] appear on its own at any time without any pre-planning or concentration on when to act”. According to Batthyany, neither reductionist nor non-reductionist agency theories claim that urges which appear on their own are suitable examples of (allegedly) consciously caused events because one cannot passively wait for an urge to occur while at the same time being the one who is consciously bringing it about. Libet’s results thus cannot be interpreted to provide empirical evidence in favour of agency reductionism, since non-reductionist theories, even including dualist interactionism, would predict the very same experimental results.
Daniel Dennett argues that no clear conclusion about volition can be derived from Libet’s experiment because of ambiguities in the timings of the different events involved. Libet tells when the readiness potential occurs objectively, using electrodes, but relies on the subject reporting the position of the hand of a clock to determine when the conscious decision was made. As Dennett points out, this is only a report of where it seems to the subject that various things come together, not of the objective time at which they actually occur.
Suppose Libet knows that your readiness potential peaked at millisecond 6,810 of the experimental trial, and the clock dot was straight down (which is what you reported you saw) at millisecond 7,005. How many milliseconds should he have to add to this number to get the time you were conscious of it? The light gets from your clock face to your eyeball almost instantaneously, but the path of the signals from retina through lateral geniculate nucleus to striate cortex takes 5 to 10 milliseconds – a paltry fraction of the 300 milliseconds offset, but how much longer does it take them to get to you (Or are you located in the striate cortex?). The visual signals have to be processed before they arrive at wherever they need to arrive for you to make a conscious decision of simultaneity. Libet’s method presupposes, in short, that we can locate the intersection of two trajectories:
So that these events occur side-by-side as it were in place where their simultaneity can be noted.
Libet’s early theory, resting on study of stimuli and sensation, was found bizarre by some commentators, including Patricia Churchland, due to the apparent idea of backward causation. Libet argued that data suggested that we retrospectively “antedate” the beginning of a sensation to the moment of the primary neuronal response. People interpreted Libet’s work on stimulus and sensation in a number of different ways. John Eccles presented Libet’s work as suggesting a backward step in time made by a non-physical mind. Edoardo Bisiach (1988) described Eccles as tendentious, but commented:
This is indeed the conclusion that the authors (Libet, et al.) themselves seem to be willing to force upon the reader. … They dispute an alternative explanation, suggested by Mackay in a discussion with Libet (1979, p. 219) to the effect that ‘the subjective referral backwards in time may be due to an illusory judgment made by the subject when he reports the timings’, and more significant, Libet, et al. (1979, p. 220) hint at ‘serious though not insurmountable difficulties’ for the identity theory (of mind and matter) caused by their data.
Libet later concluded that there appeared to be no neural mechanism that could be viewed as directly mediating or accounting for the subjective sensory referrals backward in time [emphasis Libet’s]. Libet postulated that the primary evoked potential (EP) serves as a “time marker”. The EP is a sharp positive potential appearing in the appropriate sensory region of the brain about 25 milliseconds after a skin stimulus. Libet’s experiments demonstrated that there is an automatic subjective referral of the conscious experience backwards in time to this time marker. The skin sensation does not enter our conscious awareness until about 500 milliseconds after the skin stimulus, but we subjectively feel that the sensation occurred at the time of the stimulus.
For Libet, these subjective referrals would appear to be purely a mental function with no corresponding neural basis in the brain. Indeed, this suggestion can be more broadly generalized:
The transformation from neuronal patterns to a subjective representation would appear to develop in a mental sphere that has emerged from that neuronal pattern. … My view of mental subjective function is that it is an emergent property of appropriate brain functions. The conscious mental cannot exist without the brain processes that give rise to it. However, having emerged from brain activities as a unique ‘property’ of that physical system, the mental can exhibit phenomena not evident in the neural brain that produced it.
In the later part of his career, Libet proposed a theory of the conscious mental field (CMF) to explain how the mental arises from the physical brain. The two main motivations prompting this proposal were:
Regarding the unity of conscious experience, it was increasingly evident to Libet that many functions of the cortex are localised, even to a microscopic level in a region of the brain, and yet the conscious experiences related to these areas are integrated and unified. We do not experience an infinite array of individual events but rather a unitary integrated consciousness, for example, with no gaps in spatial and coloured images. For Libet, some unifying process or phenomenon likely mediates the transformation of localised, particularised neuronal representations into our unified conscious experience. This process seemed to be best accountable in a mental sphere that appears to emerge from the neural events, namely, the conscious mental field.
The CMF is the mediator between the physical activities of nerve cells and the emergence of subjective experience. Thus the CMF is the entity in which unified subjective experience is present and provides the causal ability to affect or alter some neuronal functions. Libet proposed the CMF as a “property” of an emergent phenomenon of the brain; it does not exist without the brain but emerges from the appropriate system of neural activity. This proposal is related to electromagnetic theories of consciousness.
To test the proposed causal ability of the CMF to affect or alter neuronal functions, Libet proposed an experimental design, which would surgically isolate a slab of cerebral cortex (in a patient for whom such a procedure was therapeutically required). If electrical stimulation of the isolated cortex can elicit an introspective report by the subject, the CMF must be able to activate appropriate cerebral areas in order to produce the verbal report. This result would demonstrate directly that a conscious mental field could affect neuronal functions in a way that would account for the activity of the conscious will. Detailed description of the proposed experimental test is as follows:
A small slab of sensory cortex (subserving any modality) is neuronally isolated but kept viable by making all the cortical cuts subpially. This allows the blood vessels in the pia to project into the isolated slab and provide blood flow from the arterial branches that dip vertically into the cortex. The prediction is that electrical stimulation of the sensory slab will produce a subjective response reportable by the subject. That is, activity in the isolated slab can contribute by producing its own portion of the CMF.
Libet further elaborated on CMF:
The CMF is not a Cartesian dualistic phenomenon; it is not separable from the brain. Rather, it is proposed to be a localizable system property produced by appropriate neuronal activities, and it cannot exist without them. Again, it is not a ghost in the machine. But, as a system produced by billions of nerve cell actions, it can have properties not directly predictable from these neuronal activities. It is a non-physical phenomenon, like the subjective experience that it represents. The process by which the CMF arises from its contributing elements is not describable. It must simply be regarded as a new fundamental given phenomenon in nature, which is different from other fundamental givens, like gravity or electromagnetism.
Dr. Robert W. Doty, professor of Neurobiology and Anatomy at the University of Rochester:
Benjamin Libet’s discoveries are of extraordinary interest. His is almost the only approach yet to yield any credible evidence of how conscious awareness is produced by the brain. Libet’s work is unique, and speaks to questions asked by all humankind.
Dr. Susan J. Blackmore, visiting lecturer at the University of the West of England, Bristol:
Many philosophers and scientists have argued that free will is an illusion. Unlike all of them, Benjamin Libet found a way to test it.
Libet and his research into the delay is referenced several times in song titles by musical artist the Caretaker, who was influenced by some of his work. The 2011 album An Empty Bliss Beyond This World contains a song called “Libet’s Delay”, which went on to be one of the more popular tracks from it. The Caretaker’s final release, Everywhere at the End of Time, contains the songs “Back There Benjamin,” (Referring to his first name) “Libet’s All Joyful Camaraderie” and “Libet Delay”, with the latter being a far more twisted, distorted version of the original “Libet’s Delay”. Also, the 2019 extra album Everywhere, an Empty Bliss includes a track named “Benjamin Beyond Bliss”.
David Ian Perrett FBA FRSE (born 11 April 1954) is a professor of psychology at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, where he leads the Perception Lab.
The main focus in his team’s research is on face perception, including facial cues to health, effects of physiological conditions on facial appearance, and facial preferences in social settings such as trust games and mate choice. He has published over 400 peer-reviewed articles, many of which appearing in leading scientific journals such as the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Series B – Biological Sciences, Psychological Science, and Nature.
Perrett received the British Psychological Society President’s Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychological Knowledge in 2000, the Golden Brain Award of Minerva Foundation in 2002,[9] the Experimental Psychology Society Mid-Career prize (2008), and a British Academy Wolfson Research Professorship (2009-2012).
Yehuda Nir (31 March 1930 to 19 July 2014) was a Polish-born American Holocaust survivor, psychiatrist and author of The Lost Childhood.
Nir posed as a Roman Catholic and learned Latin to escape Nazi persecution in Poland during World War II. Nir’s ordeal led him to a career as a psychiatrist, specialising in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder and severely ill children. He immigrated to the United States in 1959 to complete medical residencies in New York City and Philadelphia. He served as the chief of child psychiatry of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre from 1979 until 1986.
Paul Watzlawick (25 July 1921 to 31 March 2007) was an Austrian-American family therapist, psychologist, communication theorist, and philosopher.
A theoretician in communication theory and radical constructivism, he commented in the fields of family therapy and general psychotherapy. Watzlawick believed that people create their own suffering in the very act of trying to fix their emotional problems. He was one of the most influential figures at the Mental Research Institute and lived and worked in Palo Alto, California.
Jaqueline Gomes de Jesus (born 07 March 1978) is a Brazilian psychologist, writer, and LGBT activist.
Jesus is the daughter of a computer operator and a mining science teacher. She has a sibling, a younger brother. Jesus lived most of her life in Ceilândia.
A good student, she studied chemistry, for a year before switching majors. She holds an M.Sc. in Psychology from the University of Brasília, and a PhD in Social Psychology, Work and Organisations from the same institution.
She worked at the University of Brasília from 2003-2008 as a diversity adviser and also coordinated a centre for black students. She was one of the organisers of Brasilia’s Pride parade, and participated in the development of Brazil’s goals for the UN’s Millennium Dome. Jesus has proactively addressed discriminatory actions, refusing to accept passive prejudice. She began her human rights activism in 1997, with “Estructuración”, a Brasilia homosexual group, serving first as secretary and in 1999, became president. In that period, she worked alongside government and educational institutions, in fighting prejudice and valuing differences, speaking at the opening of the 5th National Conference on Human Rights.
Jesus participated in various social movements. In 2000, with Luiz Mott, she co-founded the Academic Association of Gays, Lesbians and Sympathizers of Brazil, serving as general secretary. She was appointed to the editorial board of the Grupo Gay Negro de Bahia; and founded the NGO Acciones Ciudades en Orientación sexual.
Morton Bard (born 07 March 1924 in Brooklyn, New York and died 04 December 1997) was an American psychologist, known for the research he undertook on the psychology of crime victims. He was a one-time member of the New York Police Department, a psychologist, and a professor who studied the reactions of crime victims.
Bard, in partnership with the police, conducted studies of crime victims (e.g. hostages, rape victims, and the families of murder victims). He published two volumes on domestic violence and crisis intervention. He also is recognised for having laid the foundation of victim-focused training into many law enforcement academies and the FBI National Academy.
In 1979, Bard co-authored The Crime Victim’s Book. This volume provides practical information on how best to identify and support the needs of crime victims. The Crime Victim’s Book was considered a “bible” for not only advocates but also crime victims. He is considered to have been a pivotal critical thinker in the development of the modern discipline of crisis intervention. He also wrote scholarly articles on the training of police officers in the application of different forms of crisis intervention out in the field.
Bard received a bachelor’s degree in 1947 from St. John’s University. He later went on to receive a master’s degree in 1948 and a doctorate in 1953, both in psychology from New York University.
Bard started off his career in health psychology. From 1951 to 1961, he was a member of a clinical and research group at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre. There, he analysed the psychological effects of cancer and cancer surgery. During this time, Bard shifted the psychological focus from the role of personality in predisposing one to illnesses to the psychological consequences of living with illnesses like cancer.
From 1965 to 1970, Bard taught at the City College of New York and was the director of its Psychology Centre. In 1971, Bard joined CUNY’s graduate school and university centre. He was a professor in the graduate school’s doctoral programs in social psychology and criminal justice. At the CUNY Graduate School, Bard studied hostage situations, third-party interventions in disputes, and the effects of personal crimes. Bard was a psychology professor at the City University of New York until his retirement in 1986.
In 1982, Bard was named chairman of the American Psychological Association’s task force on victims of crime and violence. In 1982, he was awarded the New York State Psychological Association ’s Kurt Lewin Award.
In 1985, he was appointed to a committee to advise the New York Mayor, Edward I. Koch, on the police department. The panel went on to make recommendations that included comprehensive changes in the training of police officers. Bard laid down the groundwork for training police as specialists in family crisis intervention. This included training for police officers on innovative crime prevention and mental health techniques so they were better able to provide immediate crisis intervention when emergencies arose and other professionals (e.g. social workers, psychologists) were not available.
In the 1980s, Bard was a consultant in psychology to the departments of medicine and neurology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, which in 1987 awarded him the Arthur M. Sutherland Award for “pioneering research in psycho-oncology.”
He was also the American Cancer Society’s national vice president for service and rehabilitation from 1986 to 1991.
Bard married Arlene Cohen in 1948 and had two daughters (Erica Riley and Pamela Richlin).
Bard died of cancer in his home in Atlanta, Georgia at the age of 73 on 04 December 1997.
Bard, M., & Sutherland, A. M. (1955). Psychological impact of cancer and its treatment IV. Adaptation to radical mastectomy. Cancer, 8(4), 656-672.
Bard, M., & Berkowitz, B. (1967). Training police as specialists in family crisis intervention: A community psychology action program. Community Mental Health Journal, 3, 315–317.
Bard, M. (1969). Family intervention police teams as a community mental health resource. Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology and Police Science, 60, 247–250.
Bard, M., & Sangrey. D. (1986). The Crime Victim’s Book. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press.
Zacker, J., & Bard, M. (1973). Effects of conflict management training on police performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 58(2), 202.
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