Psychoanalysis and cultural change: Perspectives based on Lacan's rereading of Freud

Rajaa Stitou (1)

1 LPCLS - Laboratoire de Psychopathologie Clinique, Langage et Subjectivité

Abstract Psychoanalysis cannot distance itself from culture and its transformations. It cannot ignore cultural ideals, which each individual uniquely appropriates to produce identifications, find his place within the human community, express his desires, and manifest the suffering occasioned by each difficult experience. This article will try to demonstrate this necessity of taking culture into account by drawing on Lacan's approach, which is based on the lessons of Freud. The author emphasizes the fact that every culture has its “discontents,” which stem from the incompleteness at the very heart of human experience, and that our cultural constructions are therefore constantly being reworked. By doing so, she aims to cast a different perspective on the relationship between the psyche and culture, and bring out the inherent complexity of the now fashionable notion of the “decline of the father,” which is systematically used to explain the new symptoms and ills of modern society. By detecting this decline, by searching for the visible signs of this deficit, do we not instead end up creating them ourselves?

Mots clés: psychoanalysis; the social bond; language; cultural transformation; new symptoms

Domaines: Sciences de l'Homme et Société

Rajaa Stitou. Psychoanalysis and cultural change: Perspectives based on Lacan's rereading of Freud. International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 2016, 25 (1), pp.3 - 11. ⟨10.1080/0803706X.2015.1103383⟩. ⟨hal-01432372⟩