The psychoanalysis of Freud and Lacan

A prominent geneticist was interviewed on national radio about his book, wherein he reported that DNA decides most of personal characteristics. He was rather sniffy about the work of Freud from a scientific point of view. He joked that these days, Freud is mainly studied in English departments. In Lacan’s model of psychoanalysis, there is a cost attached to conceptions of psychology that process and understand the human through prescribed registers. In these models, people would be judged through an idealised and restrictive account of what they should be, as though a broader truth could be captured in those local circumstances. Psychology as a discipline has commonly worked in the name of the supposed normality of the status quo. There is a crucial distinction to be made between the Freudian notions of desire and drive. Fukuyama’s notion of The End of History caused a theoretical stir on its publication and is as an example of such a tendency.