Who Needs Yalom When We Have Žižek?
WILLIAM J. URBAN
NOTES
1 The rationale for the use of this example is not arbitrary. The author of these lines participated as a member in a psychotherapeutic group for three years, modeled on the ‘existentialist’ approach of Irvin Yalom. In discussing the structural framework of the therapeutic group using Žižekian categories, I draw not only on Yalom’s The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy, but on my personal experience as well. However, it is stated from the onset that the primary concern of this paper is to show the logical compatibility and even homology across Žižek’s major sets of core theoretical concepts and secondarily to demonstrate the suitability of applying his dialectical thinking on social experience by using group psychotherapy as an illustrative example. Thus I do not seek to draw any specific conclusions regarding the efficacy of group psychotherapy as such, nor to Yalom’s approach specifically.
2 For the purposes of this paper, we can physically define ‘The Group’ along the ideal norms as given by Yalom (Chapter 10): seven or eight members seated in a circle facing one another, with a therapist-leader (or pair, either student interns or established professionals) meeting weekly in a room that allows for privacy, freedom from distractions and allowing for outside observation, ideally through a one-way mirror.
3 It is also stated upfront that the Lacanian approach of Žižek’s understanding of social phenomena and Yalom’s approach to group therapy could not be more at odds. A perusal of Yalom’s 600+ page book shows that only a fraction of the work is devoted to what he calls ‘groupness’ (55). For instance, less than twenty-five pages are devoted to ‘Group Cohesiveness’ (53–76) while just seven pages are devoted to the ‘Group-as-a-Whole process’ (192–9) And even then the discussion in these sections is couched in the same terms as the remainder of the book: how the individual subject (distortedly) conceives of and responds to an external, foreign environment, with the task of group therapy being one of ego-adjustment in an attempt to achieve congruency with one’s social experience. This is, of course, consistent with the approach of ego-psychology which denies Lacanian split subjectivity and ignores the lesson of German Idealist philosophy which holds that our very ‘objective’ experience is always-already subjectively constituted.
4 For Žižek’s discussions of the Lacanian ‘formulae of sexuation,’ see, for instance, (For They, 121–6), (Tarrying, 53–8), (Metastases 153–61) and Lacan’s Seminar XX. An excellent paper by Žižek will also be found in lacanian ink 10 – 1995, entitled ‘Woman is one of the Names-of-the-Father, or how Not to misread Lacan’s formulas of Sexuation.’
5 Again, positing reflection is a simple reflection whereby some appearance merely ‘reflects’ the essence. Determinate reflection is a redoubling of this reflection, or in Žižek’s formula: ‘ “Reflection-into-itself” of the reflection of the value of A into B.’ (For They 27)
In determinate reflection, essence is revealed to be ‘nothing but the appearance of essence, the appearance that there is something behind which is the Essence.’ (Universal 122) Any individual or group subject that attempts to reach for some positive entity believed to exist beyond the negative movement of the appearance’s self-sublation is under the illusion of what Hegel calls Understanding, as opposed to Reason. (For They 157, 214) Žižek quotes Hegel’s ‘essence is appearance qua appearance’ in many of his works to illustrate that essence reflects itself in appearance since it is nothing but the reflection-into-itself of the appearance: ‘appearance is never “merely” appearance, but is, precisely as appearance, essential.’ (Universal 120) The therapist is never merely another group member but is one who is essential to its consistency and its very constitution; he is an entity whose very appearance coincides with the group’s (dis)integration.
6 (Sublime 228, italics in original) If the very reflective relationship between the subject and the substance did not reflect itself in the substance, if the essence did not redouble and reflect itself into itself, there would be no space opened up within which the hidden essence-Thing could reflect itself. This means that in order to attain the truth (of determinate reflection), one must first err (be fooled by an external reflection of the Thing). Thus, when a group becomes bogged down with questions of itself, with what it is attempting to accomplish, etc, this pursuit of the Group-Thing is not to be viewed as an ultimate failure: if it were not for this erring, the very positing activity of the group would not be possible. Lacan condenses this logic in his aphoristic phrase les non-dupes errant, similar to Hegel’s ‘the fear of error is… the error itself.’ (quoted in Sublime, 190)
7 This self-relating aspect of the Notion is what Yalom can be seen struggling with when attempting to give a scientific meaning to what he calls the ‘groupness’ or ‘we-ness’ or ‘esprit de corp’ of the group: ‘Nonetheless it is difficult to formulate a precise definition. A recent comprehensive and thoughtful review concluded that cohesiveness “is like dignity: everyone can recognize it but apparently no one can describe it, much less measure it.” ’ (55) Any definition given will ultimately reveal itself to be nothing but a kind of ‘positivization’ of the (failed) efforts to adequately arrive at it.
8 This logic is behind the fundamental Žižekian anti-ideological gesture. As he writes in the Sublime Object of Ideology, the ‘crucial step in the analysis of an ideological edifice is thus to detect... this self-referential, tautological, performative operation.’ (99) So to dissolve an ideological structure, one need only to expose that ‘point de capiton: the “rigid designator,” which totalizes an ideology by bringing to a halt the metonymic sliding of its signified’ as being nothing but that ‘element which only holds the place of a certain lack, which is in its bodily presence nothing but an embodiment of a certain lack.’ ( 99)
9 (Yalom, 195) One form this ‘catastrophe’ took, Yalom tells us, was in a new questioning of the therapist’s trustworthiness, which also raised concerns that the formerly ‘deeply human encounter’ of the group was in truth a ‘sterile, contrived, laboratory specimen.’ This potential, group-fatal energy the therapist is seen here embodying goes beyond the situational. It is structural in nature and is found across all such groups, as we shall see in the next section.
10 This also illustrates one of Žižek’s running themes regarding the ideological ‘big Other.’ Even if group members believe the big Other does not exist, in this age of cynicism towards institutions, they usually do so for the wrong reasons. That is, they engage in a false distance toward the social substance by their belief in an ‘Other of the Other.’ If the Other can be defined as the symbolic order, members of psychotherapeutic groups can certainly exercise a cynical attitude toward it and not feel in the least anxious, as long as they, say, entertain the existence of some beneficent Other of the Other behind the mirror pulling the strings of the group process they themselves lack faith in. (Or alternatively they can be cynical about the group process in an ‘outward’ gesture, while ‘inwardly’ supposing that at least someone in the group believes it works: the therapist). This positing of a big Other that actually exists in the Real ceased once the group members in our example learned of the laughing observers and they thereby became traumatized through their confrontation with the fact that there is ‘no Other of the Other.’ This ‘no Other of the Other’ is another Lacanian definition of anxiety. For a reading of the logic of ‘the Other of the Other,’ see for example, Žižek, ‘The Big Other Doesn’t Exist.’
11 In other words, the void is to be conceived as ontological (as it is for Hegel) rather than as purely epistemological (as it is for Kant). (Tarrying, 246)
12 (Fragile, 20–1) This could be contrasted to the fetishist, for whom the cause of desire is directly made into the object of desire. A group member with such a tendency may presumably care nothing for the group other than the therapist.
13 This would still be the case even if, in the course of therapy, one’s personal agenda in the group is revealed to him as being a primordial ‘need for belonging’ which is ‘innate in us all’ as Yalom would have it. (56) Perhaps more so, for the self-deception would be even greater in this case through its very appearance of being ‘less self-centered’ and ‘closer to the external reality’ of the group. Žižek’s point would be, of course, that a group that is just out there waiting for its members to recognize that they are a part of it is a reification of the member’s own perception of their very relationship to that group (whether that perception is hostile or loving, opposing or accepting...).
14 This logic is exactly the ‘masculine’ logic of sexuation: ‘All members are submitted to the function of the group’ would imply the existence ‘of at least one member who is exempted’ from that function.
15 Yalom here unexpectedly becomes Žižekian, provided that we read him more literally than he probably intends. Speaking of the therapist’s arrival at the start of a session as often silencing the animated pre-group conversation, he writes that ‘[s]omeone once said that the group therapy meeting officially begins when suddenly nothing happens!’ (206) The Group is precisely a form of that ‘nothing.’
16 (Tarrying, 245) This is, for instance, Bruce Fink’s understanding of objet petit a and he has accordingly named it ‘a kind of “rem(a)inder” of that lost jouissance.’ (Fink 1997, 66)
17 This, as is well known, is Lacan’s definition of sublimation, given in his seminar, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: ‘it raises an object... to the dignity of the Thing.’ (112)
18 ‘This is why Lacan designates the spectre of the Father-Enjoyment as the neurotic’s fantasy-construction; as his attempt to fill out the impasse of his relationship towards the symbolic father.’ (For They, 140) The presence of the therapist, as the remainder of the group, provides the group members the illusion of full enjoyment to be had were it not for the therapist himself who has appropriated it all to himself, homologous to Freud’s myth of the primordial father to whom uninhibited enjoyment was accessible. (Tarrying, 245)
Another ‘solution’ to the debilitating deadlock of desire, its inherent impossibility (and one that can ease the resentment that can build toward the therapist), is to create an explicit prohibition, such as ‘Group members shall not interact together outside of group sessions.’ The writer of this paper was a member of a group with such a prohibition. The obvious contradiction – that of a group, which is purportedly formed to foster socialization between its members, coming face to face with the overt prohibition against forming such friendships amongst themselves outside of sessions – is exactly what disgruntled group members can point to as the cause of all their troubles when they are faced with the Void of Lacan’s ‘il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel.’ The paradox (and even very function) of prohibition is that as soon as the real-impossible is prohibited, it changes into something ‘possible.’ (Tarrying, 116)
19 Particularly critical is Richard Stamp’s ‘ “Another Exemplary Case”: Žižek’s Logic of Examples’ in the aforementioned The Truth of Žižek. (161–76)
20 With notable exceptions, of course, of thinkers such as Laclau and Butler. See their collaboration with Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, for instance. Here, we find an engaged and sustained philosophical debate.
Lacanian-themed puzzles
