FROM STRUCTURALIST TO POSTSTRUCTURALIST PSYCHOANALYSIS

Abstract

"In structuralist times, Levi-Strauss forwarded the notion of a structural (obviously) unconscious, functioning according to simple, formal laws of organisation and being akin to what Paul Ricoeur called a “Kantian unconscious”, to a “compartmentalised system without any reference to a thinking subject”. In the wake of structuralism, psychoanalysis seems to fall back, yet again, on the biological input which constituted, for that matter, its primordial inspiration (Freudism has often been indicted for biologizing excesses (Laplanche) or even dismissed as a (crypto)biologism (Sulloway). If the structuralist psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan shoved the unconscious into the abstract tiers of language, enouncing the principle according to which the unconscious is “structured as a language,” poststructuralist representatives of psychoanalysis, such as Didier Anzieu, for example, make a decisive swerve back to corporeality and, implicitly, to Freud. I argue that the instruments provided by the poststructuralist psychoanalysis allow for a more permissive analysis, which no longer remains steeped in the rigid confines of a “system” and does no longer have to pay its dues to structure, considered by structuralists to have been inherent in things."