Q & A with
René Rasmussen
27.2.2026
1)You take up the discussion with Butler in your essay, especially regarding the question of norms. Butler is concerned with secondary repression, whereas you are more interested in primary repression. Lacan says in Television that it is primary repression that produces secondary repression and the family.[i] You conclude your essay by stating: “The law does not prohibit homosexuality or transsexuality, as Butler assumes, but excludes an ‘original’ and supposedly unlimited enjoyment.” Could you say a few more words about this exclusion and its effects?
The law at issue is the symbolic law that exists in and through language. It is not a law that commands or forbids, but rests on the simple fact that speech or language as such excludes any direct access to the body and its immediate enjoyment. Enjoyment is an affect, but the more it takes over, the more language recedes. Is there an unlimited enjoyment outside language? Perhaps — but within language we know nothing of it. The late Lacan uses the word castration to designate language’s exclusion of an “original” enjoyment.
When we talk about transsexuality and so on, such phenomena do not, as such, rest on this castration, but predominantly on identities that originate in language — including given discourses — and that come after castration, and that may or may not correspond to a given sexual enjoyment. It is therefore quite possible to understand oneself as heterosexual, yet only enter into sexual relations with people who understand themselves as homosexual, and who have the same sex as oneself. Identity and forms of enjoyment do not necessarily coincide.
A major problem with Butler is that the whole problematic is largely reduced to norms, and Butler is not attentive to the fact that identities are not only grounded in norms but to a greater extent in the ways in which the subject orients itself in relation to language as such (cf. Lacan’s understanding of the Other as the treasure-trove of language). For strange reasons, Butler also assumes that homosexuality comes before everything else — that heterosexuality is based on a repressed homosexuality. Butler thus operates with an idea of originary priority, whereas Lacan’s idea is that identities are linguistic and rest on an alienation in language. Any given identity is always determined by the fact that language (an identity) and being (the body outside language) do not coincide.
2) we often hear proposals today both for the expanded tolerance and rights of various sexual identities and for the intolerance of such identities. In your essay, however, sexuality is not treated as an identity. Why, then, is there such a strong contemporary demand for “sexual identity”?
As is clear from my answer to the previous question, sexuality and identity are closely connected, even though there is no convergence between them. In the past, however, the codes contained by the Other (understood here as the subject supposed to know) ensured an idea of correspondence between the two. When the Other, so to speak, has stepped out of the dance, discourses emerge instead that want to secure what the Other previously “secured.” This is the case with many identities within LGBT+, or within groups that believe identities are grounded in biological phenomena — for example, that I am a woman because my biology is female.
3)You draw a certain parallel between Butler’s project of performativity and the resurgence of various forms of hermeneutics of the self-determination. These are especially evident in contemporary forms of “marketplace” Stoicism—the call for a more “robust” self in times of crisis. Many people oppose performativity and such self-authorisation, but you see a surprising link between them. Could you elaborate on this connection?
I think it is necessary to distinguish between the hermeneutic idea of self-determination (a term Butler also uses, by the way) and the ideas of self-determination that prevail in a range of discourses — probably especially right-wing ones — that oppose, for example, the idea of performance within LGBT+. Although such discourses rely on the notion of self-determination, they absolutely do not believe that Although such discourses invoke self-determination, they emphatically reject the idea that you can simply pick and choose—as if every option were available off the shelf (which they take to be what applies within LGBT+). Rather, they claim that identities are grounded in nature — in human nature. This is very much an attempt to anchor gender in a time when the Other no longer exists. What significantly distinguishes Butler’s idea of self-determination from such discourses is that Butler thinks sexuality and identity are grounded in norms, whereas these discourses ground them in biology.
4) You have written extensively on how medical discourse and the university’s discourse of evaluation threaten or endanger psychoanalysis. Freud famously claimed that “psychoanalysis is an impossible profession.”[ii] Has it become more impossible today, or is there less room for this impossibility? Could you say a bit more about the current status of psychoanalysis as a clinical practice? Why is it so difficult to attract “clients” today?
I don’t know whether fewer people go into analysis today than before, since, as far as I know, no statistics exist on this. But it is clear that in those parts of the university where there used to be ample room for psychoanalytic ideas, a biologization has taken place. Psychology has been embedded in a biological understanding — an ideology — just as psychiatric treatment has. This means that medication and diagnoses have become an ever larger part of everyone’s everyday life. Who doesn’t have one or more diagnoses today? And who doesn’t receive medication for it? And who doesn’t speak far and wide about it?
At the moment there is a fairly strong debate in France about this, since a number of political forces are trying to discredit psychoanalysis on the basis of such biological premises. I am convinced, however, that French psychoanalysis will come out of this debate reasonably well.
When Freud speaks of psychoanalysis as an impossible practice, it is because the analyst does not know what will emerge in a session, and does not know what effects what emerges may have. The unconscious is not a substance that can be mapped. Therefore every analysis is a kind of work that contains a certain unpredictability. And therefore every analysis differs from other analyses. There are no standards in psychoanalysis.
5)You have worked as a university lecturer alongside your practice as an analyst. Lacan often problematized the development of the university, especially the influence of the market and the way students are “credited” with recognizable and transparent qualities—what he called “university discourse.” Can you say something about how the university has changed during your time as a lecturer? Do you find Lacan’s concept of university discourse helpful or precise in describing what is happening today?
When I began studying at university, it was desire (in Lacan’s sense) that was the driving force. Even though there were exams that had to be passed, what mattered was not the syllabus or what I was supposed to know for a given exam. I would probably never have completed a degree if it had functioned as it does today, where the syllabus, exams, and the constant emphasis on evaluation and metrics (including staff publication rates) have become all that matters.
Over the many years I taught, I experienced a slow — but unfortunately substantial — decline in interest in what was being taught, in favour of the syllabus and the like. Whereas students in the past not only read what was on the course plan but also, out of interest, read other texts connected to it, in the final years I experienced that this was no longer the case. Several students did not even read what was on the course plan. And words such as university and students were replaced with school and pupils — a substitution that clearly, but also tragically, underlines the devaluation that has taken place in the universities. They have been turned into schools meant to transfer “pupils” as quickly and efficiently as possible towards employment.
If I am to use one of Lacan’s terms, I would say that universities are not so much about knowledge anymore, which is central in university discourse, but more so about capitalist discourse, which devours the subject and its desire. They have become marketplaces — and if there are overly prominent critical voices on the university against this, or against the way sexuality and discourses are connected in our time, those voices risk being silenced or dismissed. What we are seeing today is the death-throes of the universities.
6) You are also a poet and have written on poetry as a literary scholar. Lacan frequently speaks about poetry, and in Seminar XV he compares psychoanalytic practice to poetry on the grounds that both “do something.” Yet he also insists that they are not the same.[iii] Could you speak about the similarities—and differences—you see between poetry and psychoanalysis?
In both contexts there is the possibility of speaking about that which cannot be spoken about in other contexts — because it is too shameful, anxiety-ridden, or because it concerns something that cannot be fully grasped in language. Or because no one is listening.
In analysis, listening presupposes that the analyst is in a state in which they do not immediately think about what to respond to this or that element that appears in the analysand’s speech — since that would lead to a dialogue concerned with exchanging thoughts, as in ordinary conversation. This does not mean that the analyst does not think at all, but that what matters most is that the analysand is allowed to speak without the interruptions typical of ordinary talk, where one often does not listen to what is being said because one is too busy with one’s own thoughts. It is not a matter of the analyst’s thought-associations, but of the associations the analysand has in relation to their own speech.
What cannot be fully grasped in language concerns, among other things, sexual enjoyment, or the basic fantasies that govern our understanding of reality as such (which Lacan calls fantasms). When Lacan says somewhere that the analysand is not a poet, but that their speech constitutes a poem, he is pointing out that speech in analysis is not held or delimited in the same way as a written poem, which is often worked through many times. The “poem” that arises in an analysis is not a finished product, but something that continues to open onto the unconscious and its continuing movement. This is not meant as a disparagement of poems as such — they are a necessary part of our culture — but as a way of marking differences. Yet in both cases we are dealing with an engagement with what falls outside language, outside normal speech, even though speech in analysis is precisely about this.
[i] Jacques Lacan, Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, ed. Joan Copjec, trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1990), 28
[ii] Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James and Alix Strachey. vol. 23 (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953-1974), 248
[iii] Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre XV: L’acte psychanalytique, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Éditions du Seuil / Le Champ freudien, 2024), 12.
René Rasmussen is a practicing psychoanalyst and Professor Emeritus, working primarily within the Freudian and Lacanian traditions. His research focuses on psychoanalytic theory, language, sexuality, anxiety, and the relationship between psychoanalysis, philosophy, and contemporary diagnostic culture. He has played a significant role in introducing and critically interpreting Jacques Lacan’s work in a Scandinavian context. His publications include Lacan, sprog og seksualitet (Lacan, Language, and Sexuality) and Lacans fire grundbegreber (Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts) (2009), Psykoanalyse. Et videnskabsteoretisk perspektiv (Psychoanalysis: A Philosophy of Science Perspective) (2010), as well as several books on anxiety, psychiatry, and diagnosis. More recent works include Had din næste som dig selv (Hate Your Neighbor as Yourself) (2024), Judith Butlers nye klæder – Butler og psykoanalysen (Freud og Lacan) (Judith Butler’s New Clothes—Butler and Psychoanalysis (Freud and Lacan)) (2024), and Angst – en læsning af Jacques Lacan: L’Angoisse (Anxiety—A Reading of Jacques Lacan: L’Angoisse) (2025). In addition to his academic work, he is also a poet and literary translator.
