Biology

biology (biologie) Freud's work is full of references to biology. Freud

regarded biology as a model of scientific rigour on which to base the new

science of psychoanalysis. Lacan, however, is strongly opposed to any attempt

to construct psychoanalysis upon a biological model, arguing that the direct

application of biological (or ethological/psychological) concepts (such as

ADAPTATION) to psychoanalysis will inevitably be misleading and will obliter-

ate the essential distinction between NATURE and culture. Such biologising

explanations of human behaviour ignore, according to Lacan, the primacy of

the symbolic order in human existence. Lacan sees this 'biologism' in the work

of those psychoanalysts who have confused desire with need, and drives with

instincts, concepts which he insists on distinguishing.

    These arguments    are evident from the very earliest of Lacan's psycho-

analytic writings. In his 1938 work on the family, for example, he rejects

any attempt to explain family structures on the basis of purely biological data,

and argues that human psychology is regulated by complexes rather than by

instincts (Lacan, 1938: 23-4).

    Lacan argues that his refusal of biological reductionism is not a contra-

diction of Freud but a return to the essence of Freud's work. When Freud used

biological models, he did so simply because biology was at that time a model

of scientific rigour in general, and because the conjectural sciences had not

then achieved the same degree of rigour. Freud certainly did not confuse

psychoanalysis with biology or any other exact science, and when he bor-

rowed concepts from biology (such as the concept of the drive) he reworked

them in such a radical way that they become totally new concepts. For

example, the concept of the death instinct 'is not a question of biology' (E,

  102). Lacan expresses his point with a paradox: 'Freudian biology has nothing

  to do with biology' (S2, 75).

      Lacan, like Freud,       uses concepts borrowed from biology (e.g. imago,

dehiscence), and then reworks them in an entirely symbolic framework.

Perhaps the most significant example of this is Lacan's concept of the

  PHALLUS, which he conceives as a signifier and not as a bodily organ. Thus

   while Freud conceives of the castration complex and sexual difference in terms

  of the presence and absence of the penis, Lacan theorises them in                 non-

biological, non-anatomical terms (the presence and absence of the phallus).

  This has been     one of the main attractions of Lacanian theory for certain

  feminist writers who have seen it as a way of constructing a non-essentialist

  account of gendered subjectivity.

      However, while Lacan consistently rejects all forms of biological reduction-

ism, he also rejects the culturalist position which completely ignores the

  relevance of biology (Ec, 723). If 'biologising' is understood correctly (that

is, not as the reduction of psychic phenomena to crude biological determi-

nation, but as discerning the precise way in which biological data impact on

  the psychical field), then Lacan is all in favour of biologising thought (Ec,

723). The clearest examples of this are Lacan's appeals to examples from

  animal ethology to demonstrate the power of images to act              as releasing

mechanisms; hence Lacan's references to pigeons and locusts in his account

  of the mirror stage (E, 3), and to crustaceans in his account of mimicry (Sll,

99) (see GESTALT).

      Thus in his account of sexual difference, Lacan follows Freud's rejection of

  the false dichotomy between 'anatomy or convention' (Freud, 1933a: SE XXII,

114). Lacan's concern is not to privilege either term but to show how both

interact in complex ways in the process of assuming a sexual position.