The return to Freud: is ego psychology a development of analysis or a betrayal of it?

Jacques Lacan, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

An analysis that sets out to strengthen the ego strengthens the agency of misrecognition. Freud decentred the subject; ego psychology recentred it and called that a development.12345

Sources

  1. Any other place for the analyst leads him back to the dyadic relation, which has no other outcome than the dialectic of misrecognition, negation, and narcissistic alienation that Freud repeatedly indicates throughout his work to be the ego's doing.
    Psychoanalysis and Its Teaching, p. 380
  2. This aspect has certainly not been ignored up until now - I am not aware of Freud. nor those who might specifically qualify themselves as Freudians, ever neglecting it. The question is to know whether this element should be given pre-eminent importance in the constitution of the subject. Let us leave to one side for a moment the theoretical discussion which this may raise, and let us see what it leads to.
    Seminar II, The Ego in Freud's Theory, p. 148
  3. So this particular ignorance is not ignorance pure and simple. It is what is concretely expressed in the process of Verneinung, and which, in the subject's static totality, is called misrecognition [méconnaissance]. Misrecognition is not ignorance. Misrecognition represents a certain organisation of affirmations and negations, to which the subject is attached.
    Seminar I, Freud's Papers on Technique, pp. 167–168
  4. In other words, will a part of the subject still remain on the level of this sticking-point which we call his ego? Does the analysis only deal with what we consider to be a given, namely the subject's ego, the internal structure which could be improved by exercise? That is how someone like Balint and one whole trend of analysis have come tothink that, either the ego is strong, or else itis weak.
    Seminar I, Freud's Papers on Technique, pp. 193–194
  5. This will be our programme for next year - what does paranoia mean? What does schizophrenia mean? Paranoia, as compared with schizophrenia, always has a relation to the imaginary alienation of the ego. 25 May 7 '::.' 9.5'5 - Objectified analysis A C R I T I Q U E OF F A I R B A I R N I N A N A 1.YSIS (. WHY D O E S O N E S P E A K?
    Seminar II, The Ego in Freud's Theory, p. 248

Where the argument is made

  • The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis (the Rome discourse, 1953)
  • The Freudian Thing (1955)
  • The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956
  • Seminars I and II

How the argument was received

The founding polemic of his teaching, and still the dividing line between the Lacanian field and most of the anglophone profession.