Aspects of Agency and their Uses in Psychoanalysis

Abstract

In recent years, the concept of agency has become a reoccurring theme in psychoanalysis—easily identifiable in English and American literature, and now beginning to surface in European psychoanalytic writing. We believe that the use of this term is the implicit marker of resurgence of culturalist orientation within the psychoanalytic field, positing a social determinism of the individual’s formation, his psyche and his unconscious. The present paper examines the culturalist weight of agency. Therefore, it is important to point out the origins of this term in Judith Butler’s work, in order to understand its uses in psychoanalysis. This leads to the study of Lynn Layton’s work, where agency plays an important role. Likewise, Layton’s use of social psychoanalysis reproduces old culturalist premises in the transferential relation. Joseph Caston, on the other hand, offers a different conception of agency, outside of its culturalist heritage. This leads to Jacques Lacan’s theory, offering an unprecedented and structuralist way of situating agency through what he calls “the agent.”