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Writings on Psychoanalysis

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The long-lasting controversy over "form" and "content" passes down from Plato. Then, it emerged in the French academics. Writings on Psychoanalys is a text, attempting to fusing the two diverse viewpoints into a wholeness. Initiating from the Freudian and Lacanian, Althusser justifies that the methodology of psychoanalysis is scientific. It's the same of Roland Barthes's The Structuralist Activity in which he takes off the verbal attack from the social Marxists, such as Satre. In the second stance, he appropriates and readapts Lacanian theory to the socail "symptoms" as a psychoanalyst to an analysand. On the one hand, he regulates and justifies for Lacan that psychoanalysis is aculturalistic and not scientific. On the other, it strengthens and expands the scope of Lacanian theory from an individual to an whole society even thouth there are some unjustificabilities within Althusser's appropriation.

Writings on Psychoanalysis is a text that first of all deals with Freudian and Lacanian theories. Louis Althusser, as his later books exhibit, elaborates his transformation of Lacanian theories, probing through the social "symptoms" as a psychoanalyst does to a patient. On the one hand, he justifies for Lacan who is often attacked upon his ignorance of the dimension of curlure and society. For the latter puts too much emphasis on the "parole" and the "languge"--structure or form. Althusser, at once a social Marxist and psychoanalyst, sucessfully, readapts Lacan's theories to the society and takes off the verbal attack upon Lacan. On the other, as to Althusser, there seemingly exists no contradictions in a socialist and psychoanalyst even though some critics hold the opposite opinions. Apart from the monumental landmark of this book, Althusser "sublimes" us into another scope of meditation and the applicability of psychoanalysis.