Lacanianism (psychology)

 From Lacanism, it is criticized that the Analysis of Applied Behavior (ABA) conceives the subject as a manipulable object, reducing it to a set of predictable responses to external stimulus, ignoring the symbolic dimension that structures desire, the importance in the identical structure of fantasy and the negativity of the Real — what is ultimately a defensive reduction in the face of the impossible to name.

For Lacan, the behavior not only obeys reinforcements, but is penetrated by the structure of the language and the relationship with the Other: the paradoxical dimension of joy unfolded in the symptom that is the source of all kinds of subjective and social contradictions, exceeds in its complexity to the frame theoretical of stimulus-response psychology.

The emphasis on controlling environmental variables disconnects therapeutic practice from the richness of subjective experience. The Lacanian discovery is that subjectivity is forged in the game of meanings, that the unconscious is not a pedagogical institution, but a speech that is articulated with the pulsional and that any therapeutic intervention that does not know this dimension will not generate significant changes in the meanings master.

The standardization of ABA turns the therapist into a “head of tasks,” who directs the subject towards predefined goals without addressing the urgency of transfer and the singularity of desire that can only be understood from the structure of the Other and not from an experimental logic.

Furthermore, there is a capacitism inherent to behavioral practice as a level of "improvement" is established to achieve: the symptom is then a failure of blameable mastery to the patient who is always a person not capable enough who must be "trained", instead of recognizing in the symptom an attempt at subjective liberation, a spontaneous response that draws the subject closer to the authenticity and uniqueness of his desire.

Attending only the external manifestation of the symptom through a normatizing logic leads to a moralistic thought that considers the subject as an unfinished being who must adjust to the norm, which is unacceptable from the perspective of not giving in on the desire, making reinforcement programs a "deceive" the body and the symbolic alter of the subject.

R. Kings