Adrian Dannatt

Coupling is what Freudian analysis attempts to do, coupling together words, images, decoupling is what Lacanian analysis hopes for, like the decoupling of a railway train, disconnecting the logic of a set order of carriages. (The train, the carriage, the railway are as much a part of Freudian mythology as the cafes of Vienna, the very same trains that were later to become inexorably coupled with all Central European Jewry.) Lacan manages to decouple even the notion of coupling, so that instead of a banana being a penis the two of them go on their own separate ways, one remaining a fruit, the other a human organ, though the question of which is which becomes Lacan's contribution. Freud wanted to make the couple work, not just the literal couple of, say, husband and wife but the crucial couple of individual and society, that marriage bond between a citizen and his sovereign reality. Lacan instead introduced an even more bourgeois concept, that neither individual nor society existed except as subordinate clauses in Lacan's own grammar of being. The only couple that really prevailed was Lacan and his patient, which was in fact just a couple of one, him.

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