La « machine électronique » de Lacan : Alan Turing chez les psychanalystes

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AimsThis paper is an epistemological analysis of the texts by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. It aims to show the role of the research of English mathematician Alan Turing in the history of psychoanalysis. MethodFor this purpose, we compared the texts of these two authors. After a brief presentation of Lacan's approach to cybernetics, we analysed Turing's writings so as to highlight what Lacan drew from them. ResultsFrom the analysis of the conceptualization of his notion of the “cybernetic machine” in his Writings and the Seminar, it can be seen that Lacan did not merely take over the concepts of cybernetics. He developed a history of cybernetics and its technical objects, which he named “cybernetic machines”, and gave Turing place in this history. The “cybernetic machine” is a Turing “universal machine”, an idea conceptualized in his article of 1936, “On computer numbers, with an application to the decision problem”, which signalled the birth of computing. DiscussionThis study shows that Lacan returned to the concept of the “universal machine” to apprehend the psyche as a machine. This has given rise to a body of research since the fifties in the area of psychoanalysis. However the question remains to what extent Lacan directly confronted Turing's texts, or how far he read Turing through the writings of T. Guilbaud and Jacques Riguet. ConclusionThe use he made of Turing's ideas was to lead on to the conceptualization of the notion of cybernetic feedback developed by the American mathematician Norbert Wiener, considered to be the founder of cybernetics.