The vogue of Lacan, which in my country is largely restricted to feminist academics harboring a radical agenda, is instructive on grounds that I will set forth after some necessary general exposition.
Whereas Freud went through an elaborate charade of having derived his gindings from sober clincial work, Lacan made no such hypocritical bow toward empiricism. His doctrine was manifestly a recasting of Frued's own to achieve ideological consistency. He wanted to excise the socially conformist, "bourgeois" component of psychoanalysis, leving only a drastic picture of how children's personalities are warped by pressures that force them into predestined complexes. Lacan's conceptual innovation - an unconscious that is "structured like a language," the intimidating "Name-of-the-Father," the progression from a "mirror stage" to "the symbolic" to "the real," and so forth - were all dogmas bearing no connection with independent research. In this sense Lacan was indeed more Freudian than Freud: he dispensed with the pretense of scientific accountability.
The stages of childhood transformaton were no less fixed in Lacan's system than in Freud's. Moreover, Lacan actually outdid Freud's notorious male-centeredness, devoting nearly all of his attention to the psychologically bombarded little boy. The latter allegedly suffers a "linguistic" version of the Freudian castration complex, and he is permanently haunted by a loss of oneness with his mother and by the specter of female "lack" in general.
Ironically, however, it is just this gender asymmetry that explains Lacan's attractiveness to some feminists. He is embraced as a theorist of patriarchal oppression, a phenomenon that is thought to result from men's panic over separation from an undifferentiated female matrix. Lacan knew so little about women that he could think of them only as a principle in the mental economy of the other sex. As such, however, they were sympathetically reconceived as voiceless, helpless objects of persecution. And that image has suited the purposes of radical feminists who are themselves far from voiceless or helpless. If they really sought gender equality, they would be mortified by Lacan's deection of female incapacity. Instead, they seek a total expose of the fearfully aggressive male psyche, and Lacan provides an avenue, however chimerical, to that end. So strong is his doctrinal charm in this regard that the egregious sexism of his personal behaviour is left entirely out of account.
Few of Lacan's disciples have cared that he himself was at best a pseudo-egalitarian who had no revolutionary prescriptions in mind. He thrived within a conservative dispensation that allowed him to behave like a little emperor or pope, surrounding himself with flatterers, excommunicating doubters, and issuing edicts with an air of sublime infallibility. One must wonder, inevitably, whether this side of Lacan goes unrebuked because it speaks to a comparable strain of authoritarianism in his admirers.
You have asked whether there is anything truely Freudian about Lacan's version of a psyche wholly "determined by social conditions and expectations." But Freud's more biologistic conception, so different in appearance from Lacan's obscurantist recourse to the once fashionable linguistics of Saussure, already contained that potentiality. To be sure, Freud emphasized allegedly universal as opposed to culturally unique features of social control over impulse. In doing so, he engaged in "armchair anthropology" of an aprioristic kind that everyone now considers unacceptable. Yet Freud and Lacan, who was himself no student of diverse practices of socialization, occupy a continuum of emphasis on the forcible, often pathogenic thwarting of the wishes that children bring into the world.
All that Lacan did, one might say, was to highlight a half-hidden strain of rebellion in Freud's thoughts that was already seductive to Freudo-Marxists in the 1930s and that still speaks to their remnant (such as Eli Zaretsky) today. The root idea is this. If we conceive of humans, in their essential being, as presocial creatures who learn to "behave themselves" only through traumatic crises in childhood, then the prospect arises of improving "human nature" by overturning or at least modifying the adult value system.
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