Imperfect Cognitions

Maarten Boudry This post has been published on behalf of Maarten Boudry (University of Ghent). In my previous post I introduced the psychological mechanisms responsible for people stopping the search for meaning in obscure texts. Here I shall show how these are used by Lacan. Lacan’s pronouncements are couched in a number of highly abstract and complex concepts – the Other, the Symbolic, the objet petit a, jouissance, the Phallus, etc. – which are notoriously difficult to understand. The central tenets of Lacanian theory are that the unconscious is structured like a language and that human beings are trapped in a web of signifiers. By means of language, we try to comprehend reality and each other, but that hope is often frustrated. In Lacan's linguistic re-interpretation of the Oedipus complex, subjects are symbolically castrated upon introduction in the Symbolic order. By means of obscure pseudo-mathematical formulas, Lacan has tried to show that the Real can never be fu...

Maarten Boudry This post has been published on behalf of Maarten Boudry (Ghent University) . In some circles, the writings of Jacques Lacan are revered as a source of deep insight into the human psyche and the nature or language and reality. In saner quarters, however, the French psychiatrist is denounced as an intellectual impostor, a purveyor of obscure and impenetrable nonsense. Many people who read Lacan, or see him at work in some of the available YouTube clips, find it hard to believe that anyone can take him seriously. In a new paper with philosopher of language Filip Buekens , published in the journal Theoria , we explored Lacanian psychoanalysis as a case study in the psychological and epistemic mechanisms of obscurantism. On the one hand, we develop cognitive explanations for the allure of obscure prose. On the other hand, we explain how the particular structure and content of Lacan's theory facilitates the overextension of the cognitive heuristics that make us vu...