THE
SEMINAR OF BARCELONA on Die
Wege der Symptombildung
with Roser Casalprim, Lucia D’Angelo, Vicente Palomera and
Joan Salinas.
Part One
The
choice of a theme
V. Palomera:
We are going to introduce in our Journées
a new way of working consistent with the working of a Seminar. One may
call it new because it was customary for our invited speaker to give a
concluding lecture. In these third Journées,
this is Jacques-Alain Miller. First of all, I would like to thank him for
having agreed to come. Needless to say, the whole section always greatly
enjoys his visits to Barcelona. I would add that he had expressed his
preference for working in the way of a seminar, as opposed to a lecture.
This requires some of us to accompany him, that is to say, that we be his
companions in work, and that we assist him in this path.
When I spoke to
Jacques-Alain in La Coruna, I told him the title we had selected for our Journées
- The Forms and Uses of the Symptom. He asked what theme I thought
appropriate to work with the seminar. Unexpectedly, I answered why don’t
we take The Paths to the Formation
of Symptoms, Lecture XXIII of the Vorlesung?
At this point, I would like to apologise for not specifying in the
programme that the title The Paths
to Formation of Symptoms is a reference to Freud’s lectures. This
resulted in many of you not bringing the
text. I judged - mistakenly - that the title would echo like a reflex in
the ear.
I would also like to
recall having said to Jacques-Alain why don’t we produce something
similar to what you have done twice with our colleagues in Milan? I was
referring, as you all know, to the famous Marginalia
of Milan published in Uno por
Uno. Let’s recall that these Marginalia
were made upon two of Freud’s texts - Analysis
Terminable and Interminable and Constructions
in Analysis - to introduce and prepare for the last two International
Congresses of the Freudian Field (How
do Analyses End? in 1994 and The
Power of Words in 1996). Why not try and produce a Marginalia of Barcelona if we have in mind the International
Encounter of Barcelona in ’98?
Here I recall the paths
which led me to propose this title for a seminar on the symptom. I was
convinced that Lacan somewhere had referred to Freud’s text in a precise
way. Finally, I remembered where. In fact, in 1975 Lacan gave a lecture on
the symptom in Geneva where he said the following: “Read a little of the
Introductory Lectures on
Psychoanalysis, Freud’s Vorlesungen.
There are two chapters on the symptom. One is called Wege
der Symptombildung, the paths to the fomation of symptoms, which is
chapter XXIII, then you will see that there is a chapter XVII which is
called Der Sinn, The Sense of
Symptoms. If there is any contribution Freud has made, this is it.
It’s that symptoms have a meaning, and a meaning that can only be
interpreted correctly - ‘correctly’ meaning that the subject lets some
parts of it drop - as a function of his early experiences, namely in so
far as he encounters what today I am going to call, through lack of being
able to say anything more or anything better, sexual reality”.
When I went back to these
lines, I discovered something even more interesting, a disagreement
between Lacan and Freud: “Freud placed a lot of emphasis on this. He
thought that the term ‘auto-erotism’ needed to be accentuated, in the
sense that the child initially discovers this sexual reality on his own
body. I permit myself, and this doesn’t happen every day, to disagree -
and to disagree in the name of Freud’s work itself.” Lacan proceeds to
the case of Little Hans, about which, curiously, J.-A. Miller gave a
seminar in Barcelona a year ago, published in
Freudiana No. 17 under the title The
Unconscious = Interpreter. J.-A. Miller referred to the role of the
‘subversive phallus’, to the strange jouissance
which irrupts in the auto-erotic economy of Little Hans, an economy
governed by the polymorphous sexuality which is - up to this point of
irruption of jouissance - safeguarded by Little Hans’ position as ideal ego for
the mother. Lacan explains the introduction of what Little Hans used to
call his Wiwimacher, his
‘widdler’ - because he did not know how to call it in any other way -
in his circuit.
Then, in Geneva, Lacan
takes Little Hans’ symptom as a counterpoint: “It is only necessary to
know that in certain beings, the encounter with one’s own erection is
not the least auto-erotic, it is the most ‘hetero’ that exists.
However, they ask what is this? and they say so nicely that poor Little
Hans only thinks about this, about this something, incarnates it in
objects which are frankly external objects, as is known in this case by
the horse which paws, kicks, plunges and falls to the ground. This horse
that comes and goes, that has a certain way of sliding along, knocking
over the cart, is exemplary for him of what he has to confront and of what
he does not understand, without doubt, thanks to the fact that he has a
certain kind of mother and father. His symptom is the expression, the
signification, of this rejection.” As you see, Lacan refers to the
phobic symptom because it exemplifies jouissance
as being always ‘hetero’.
On the other hand, the
examples of symptoms which Freud gives in these lectures refer to
hysterical and obssessive neurosis. In The
Sense of Symptoms we have
two examples. The first is what we could call ‘the lady of the table
cloth’, in which the symptom appears in the place of the subject’s
name. The symptom is a metaphor of the subject - it is in this sense that
Freud speaks of Sinn. This is precisely something which we cannot say about Little
Hans, where the phobic symptom - the fear of horses - more than the
subject’s name, a metaphor of the subject, is a metaphor of the Other
and not of the subject. (Note what we have just read in Lacan: the symptom
is the signification of this rejection.) The heterogeneity is, on another
level, the variety of symptoms, where the symptom of Little Hans objects
to the concept of auto-erotism in the formation of symptoms. Another way
of introducing this ‘hetero-erotism’ would be to refer to the drive.
On this point, Lacan’s thesis is that there is no genital drive, there
are only partial drives. The problem for Freud was also to understand how
one can maintain a sexual relation with one’s partner deriving only from
the partial drives, where the phallic phase always manifests itself as a
discontinuity in the development of the auto-erotic libido.
Now, after this
justification of the title, I will give the floor to Jacques-Alain Miller.
A
turntable
J.-A. Miller:
In this seminar, we will construct a turntable of multiple uses. A
turntable which will firstly distribute and communicate every part of
Freud’s work; secondly it will distribute and communicate all the
constructions elaborated in the teaching of Lacan; and, thirdly, it will
distribute and communicate the work of Freud and Lacan with each other.
This turntable is
indispensable for the orientation of our work in the Freudian Field this
year about the symptom - to orient ourselves, but also to disorient
ourselves a little bit. In order to be well oriented in an analytic theme
it is necessary also to disorient ourselves a little; that is, not to
think about the
theme in a too familiar way - getting a little bit lost has all its value.
Before starting, I would
like to thank the invitation of José Monseny, president of the Catalonia
Section, to participate in these Journées,
the third of the ESP-Catalonia. As Vicente Palomera recalled, instead of a
lecture he proposed a seminar, which presupposes a common theme, a certain
dialogue, a mutual verification of what is being said. The objective is to
dilute a little bit the dimension of the big Other, which there is in a
lecture, something that not only irritates me, but also, given that my
theme this year in Paris is The
Other does not Exist, is not the way I want to work. In Paris, I no
longer give a course but a seminar in the company of Eric Laurent, and I
would like to do something similar here.
Vicente has already
pointed out that the programme did not specify that we were going to work
with Lecture XXIII. So, we start from the fact that almost nobody
recognises in the phrase The Paths
to the Formation of Symptoms the title of a lecture by Freud. This is
remarkable and perhaps it will make us see that a certain return to Freud
is necessary, as Lacan used to say. I would like to thank Vicente
Palomera, the person in charge of the organisation of this event, for
enabling me to give this seminar. As I wanted to give a seminar rather
than a lecture, I would like to praise him for his Witz,
in proposing a seminar ‘about’ a lecture. I would also like to
celebrate the pertinence of the chosen text. He chose it on the basis of
an indication of Lacan’s, which also needed to be recalled. He has told
us about the
mysterious way in which this punctuation had been inscribed for him.
I would like to add that
the effects of this seminar have started even before the seminar itself.
The introductory comments made by Vicente seem to me very pertinent, as do
what I have read of the first comments by Lucia. I feel that we find
ourselves in a collective space with shared references and with a similar
perspective on analytical problems. I will give the floor to Lucia.
Presentation
Lucia D’Angelo:
The privilege I had of knowing that the title of J.-A. Miller’s seminar
concerned Freud’s two lectures on the symptom allowed me quickly to
reread them. It has to be said that the indication of these Freudian
references by Lacan in the Geneva
Lecture on the Symptom, provokes in the reader a certain surprise,
especially when, in the course of his own lecture in Geneva, Lacan
explains that he had carefully read these references for his own
elucidations on the symptom.
The question I asked
myself was: why not examine these problems from other, later texts of
Freud, in which things are not so complicated? In 1930, Freud himself
states, in the preface to the Hebrew translation of these lectures, the
following: “[T]hey gave a fairly accurate account of the position of the
young science at that period and they contained more than their title
indicated. They provided not only an introduction to psychoanalysis but
covered the greater part of its subject-matter. This is naturally no
longer true. Advances have in the meantime taken place in its theory and
important additions have been made to it, such as the division of the
personality into an ego, a super-ego and an id, a radical alteration to
the theory of the instincts, and discoveries concerning the origin of
conscience and the sense of guilt. These lectures have thus become to a
large extent incomplete; it is in fact only now that they have become
truly ‘introductory’. But in another sense, even today they have not
been superseded or become obsolete. What they contain”, says Freud in
1930, “is still believed and taught, apart from a few modifications, in
psychoanalytic training schools” (SE XVI: 11).
As can be verified, these
lectures come from an especially involved, intricate, moment in Freudian
theory; neither before, nor after the well-known turning of the ’20s,
but on the turn itself. Freud tries to make all the pieces of the puzzle
fit, at the price of having to force more than one of the pieces.
Metapsychology and the concept of narcissism had recently brought new
elements to the theory, but proved insufficient to resolve all the
difficulties which Freud encountered in pursuing the work of elaboration.
Strachey’s comment, in
which he says that nowhere in Freud’s work can one find so many
different definitions, for example, of the unconscious, as in the lectures
of 1915 and 1917, is intriguing. This is a detail which Lacan himself
retains in the Geneva Lecture. I believe that all these questions make the
reading of these lectures all the more interesting and their incontestable
theoretical and clinical richness derives from this.
Let us look at the
theoretical antecedents which Freud relies on at the time of writing these
articles on the symptom: he has the unconscious, the psychic apparatus and
a first theory of the drive - ego-drive and sexual drive. From the theory
of the drive established in 1905, the operative distinction between object
and sexual aim means that the Freudian schema is based entirely upon the
deviations, and not upon the supposed norms, of sexuality. The
pathological character of the symptom can only be revealed - and one has
to maintain the expressions that Freud uses in these lectures - in the
case of the exclusivity of the object and libidinal fixation. Around 1910,
the great clinical contributions of Freud are produced. His famous cases
had already been published, and at that time the history of the Wolf
Man was already written and ready for publication. A new aetiological
proposition emerges from the isolation of the new conceptual operator of
infantile sexuality and the castration complex. The pathological aspects derive
from sexual development, and this is also a term to retain from these
lectures.
The symptom then appears
integrated in a combination which involves both the sexual drive and the
ego-drive, and the deviation of the libido is a defence against woman’s
castration. Freud reconsiders the pathological symptom in neurosis and
tests the clinical distinction in the light of perversions. The conceptual
triad is then: libidinal fixation, regression to auto-erotism, and
narcissistic object choice in the framework of the theory of libidinal
development, which allows him to establish at this point a relation with
psychosis. In both neurosis and psychosis, libidinal fixation and
regression to auto-erotism put him on the pathway of an important
conceptual ordering which is produced from the concept of narcissism.
In On Narcissism of 1914, Freud establishes the triad: auto-erotism,
narcissism, object-choice; and, in the framework of libido theory: ego-
libido, object-libido, and narcissistic libido. There then emerges another
clinical distinction: transference neurosis and narcissistic neurosis.
This is why we have to take these references from the context of the
Freudian theory to try to solve the questions posed to us, given that the
whole problem of the symptoms can be explained from the point of view of
the libido theory and its relation to the unconscious, with the multiple
meanings which the unconscious acquires here, which are preparing the way
for the future structural account of the ’20s.
One should bear in mind
that we do not yet have Beyond the
Pleasure Principle nor The Ego
and the Id nor Group Psychology
and the Analysis of the Ego. What we do have, and I believe Lacan
takes this very much into account, is The
Interpretation of Dreams.
If we compare the two
lectures to which Lacan refers us, namely The
Sense of Symptoms and The Paths
to the Formation of Symptoms, we can see that the underlying tendency
in each of them is different, starting with the type of cases presented.
The first is about the two cases of obsessional symptoms in two women -
clearly hysterics, I think - and the second concerns exclusively the
hysterical symptom as stated several times by Freud. In The
Sense of Symptoms, Freud emphasises the aspect of sense and hardly
mentions the libidinal problem, while in The
Paths to the Formation of Symptoms,
he stresses the libidinal fixation, that is to say, the fixation to jouissance.
In both articles, Freud emphasises interpretation, with an unequivocal
equivalence between symptom and dream, as well as parapraxes. This seems
to me an essential equivalence.
The
binary sense-jouissance
J.-A. Miller:
Despite what appears to be accidental in the choice of this text for
today, we are in a fundamental place in the work of Freud and in the
teaching of Lacan. Lucia has pointed out at the end, and in a single
stroke, the value of the binary stressed by Lacan between Lectures XVII
and XXIII of the Introductory
Lectures on Psychoanalysis.
In chapter XVII, which
carries the title The Sense of
Symptoms, sense is at stake. This seems easy to see, given that Freud
himself spoke of Der Sinn der
Symptome, but to see how is
not so evident: it has the effect of a purloined letter. In chapter XXIII,
The Paths to the Formation of Symptoms, libido is at stake - Befriedigung,
satisfaction, jouissance. This
is the path taken by Freud in his second cycle of lectures: it goes from
sense to jouissance in the
symptom. One could say that this path - as it can be read in Freud’s
popular lectures, given to an audience of non-analysts - is the same path
as the formation of Lacan’s teaching. The ordered, oriented, vectorised
binary goes from sense to jouissance.
The first thing that
caught my attention while entering this room was that it has two sides. It
struck me as a happy place: it invites us all the time to look from one
side to the other and back again. This is exactly what Lectures XVII and
XXIII tackle between them, sense and jouissance
in the symptom. It functions as a basis for our lucubrations, a simple,
firm and evident basis. Despite the almost negligent way in which Lacan
points it out in Geneva - in a lecture which was unknown until someone
brought it to me years later to be published - there is something
essential of Lacan at this point. This ordered binary concentrates the
central thematic of the teaching of Lacan - a central thematic which I
have approached in my previous course From
the Symptom to the Fantasy.
The
five Lacanian operations: to separate...
How
are sense and jouissance
articulated in psychoanalysis? This is why I wanted to talk about Lacan
first, because we thought - before we verified it in such an extraordinary
way - that amongst us Lacan is more read than Freud... More seriously,
given that we deal with Lacan’s concepts and mathemes for the strength
they give, for the precision they contribute, I thought it best to tackle
the Freudian problematic from Lacan. In this way I have prepared a short
structural path to open here the following steps.
Lacan’s point of
departure, the Function and Field of
Speech and Language, points out, stresses, constructs, emphasises
sense in the practice of psychoanalysis,
sense in the unconscious, sense in the symptom. It highlights:
·
that sense,
if one could say so, has no sense except in language and that it is
explained by the signifier,
·
that sense
supposes the function of speech, that it is speech which gives sense, full
speech, and when speech does not produce sense, ‘true’ sense, it is
empty speech; but the difference between the empty and the full is given
by the criterion of sense,
·
that the
determining axis of Freudian analytic phenomena is the symbolic axis,
·
that the
imaginary is subordinated to it,
·
that the
real is - to use a word found in these lectures - a precondition for the
insertion of the symbolic in the life of human beings and in psychical
reality, and
·
that the
real presents holes, pores, in the action of the symbol and at the same
time finds itself for that reason negated by the action of the symbol.
This first Lacanian
elaboration results in a schema which Lacan calls L, the first letter of
his name, but the basis of which is an X, opposing the symbolic and the
imaginary.
Sense, to be put in its
place of birth, is located in the symbolic axis. Sense needs the symbol,
the signifier, and furthermore needs the Other, be it as an interlocutor
or as the place itself of the structure of language. In this perspective,
the intention of signification, the wanting-to-say, finds this structure,
A, which modifies the message that results from it.
In opposition to this
axis we find the imaginary couple a-a’, which comes from the mirror
stage. It takes as a reference On
Narcissism, a text prior to this lecture. Lacan considers that the
Freudian libido circulates in the imaginary axis, in as much as it is
fundamentally narcissistic. The libido is situated in narcissism. Between
a and a’, there is libido, Befriedigung,
what we call jouissance,
in such a way that the imaginary axis is also the axis of the drive in
Lacan.
Lacan has entered
psychoanalyis with a binarism opposing sense and jouissance. I will characterise thus the first Lacanian operation
which we still practice: it is to separate, to divide, to cut. Here comes
the imaginary, there the symbolic. The orientation is always from the
imaginary to the symbolic, with a certain disdain for the imaginary, and,
for this reason, for the drive. Throughout the first Lacanian orientation
there is a devaluation of the drive, which we do not recognise when we
speak of the imaginary, but it is there. Furthermore, there is the
principle that it is always dangerous in practice to confuse the two of
them, the symbolic and imaginary.
This first Lacanian
operation is a wonderful tool. Lacan takes Freud’s cases and reorders
them as if by a miracle, separating the waters like a Freudian Moses. In
Freud’s cases, in present day cases, in theorisation, nothing resists
this.
What are the paths to the
formation of symptoms in this perspective? I will put it in the singular:
it is essentially the symbolic path. In the inaugural text of Lacan, the
symptom appears as a sense, a repressed sense. Of course, we have to take
into account the signifier of this repressed sense, so I will say, rather,
that the symptom appears as an enigma. It manifests itself supported by a
signifier whose signified is repressed, that is to say, it has not been
communicated to, or accepted by, the Other. The symptomatic is constituted
by a signifier with repressed signified. The signifying material of the
symptom can be taken in a part of the body, parasitized by the repressed
signified, or in thought.
The path to the formation
of symptoms, in this perspective, follows the axis subject-Other.
...
to articulate
This
is found in the second Lacanian operation. He takes the symbolic axis in a
more complex way, with the inclusion of the effect of retroaction. I will
not develop this in detail. You know Lacan’s graph. What is a graph? It
is a set of pathways. Lacan’s graph, made of vectors, is the equivalent
of the Freudian Wege:
The graph leaves no doubt
that, for Lacan, the symptom is located in s(A), as an effect of the
signified of the Other. This is translated, let us say, in what Freud
himself calls der Sinn der Symptom:
the symptom is a special effect
of the signified of the Other.
Special in which way?
Here, things get complicated.
When one arrives at this
second operation, it is not enough to divide, to cut and to separate. The
second operation is to articulate sense and jouissance.
Lacan realises this in a graphic form, in which he places the fantasy as
touching upon the formation of the symptom.
The symptom is not a
normal sense, it is not an effect of the usual Sinn in the way it is connected with the fantasy.
At this point one does
not know whether Lacan is Freudian or Freud Lacanian. In Lecture XXIII,
this appears as an open book. Furthermore, the fantasy, ($àa), is the result of a long circuit which is a
libidinal circuit, in which the drive appears as a signifying chain, and
desire as signified of this signifying chain. Lacan also invents a
quilting point (point de capiton)
of the drive with desire. He also locates the connection between jouissance and castration. In
sum, the circuit of the drive is articulated with the semantic circuit.
...
to deduce, to produce and to knot
There
is a third Lacanian operation after separation and articulation:
deduction.
The schema of alienation
and separation is the new representation of the symbolic axis
subject-Other, which is the reason why these two circles are called the
subject and the Other. It results in the deduction of jouissance
from
sense. It shows that jouissance
under the form of (a)
necessarily complements the effect of sense. First there is signifier and
sense, this is what Lacan calls alienation; in a second moment, there is a
plus-de-jouir, this is what
Lacan calls separation.
The fourth operation is
the production.
The production of a plus-de-jouir
from the signifying apparatus is demonstrable in this system.
The fifth operation is to
knot. It gives the foundation of the whole perspective. In this zone, not
so articulated, not so differentiated as the others, the equation, the
identification, of sense and jouissance
is at stake. It is what Lacan calls the enjoyed sense. However, sometimes
this means to oppose radically sense and jouissance.
This is a zone where Lacan has begun to question as such the relation
between sense and jouissance,
trying out many versions of it.
This is the path of
Lacan’s teaching. Let’s return to Freud.
An
anecdote of the Introductory Lectures
Mr.
Whitehead, collaborator with Bertrand Russell in the creation of the first
effective symbolism of mathematical logic, a philosopher in the full
exercise of his profession, used to say - it is a phrase which enchants me
- that all philosophy was nothing more than commentary on the work of
Plato. He reduced all philosophy to this. Under this inspiration, I would
say that all Lacan’s teaching is a commentary on Freud’s Lectures XVII
and XXIII. There is a little exaggeration in this but, who knows, no more
than in Whitehead’s phrase.
You may think this is to
give too much honour to these lectures, given to a lay audience of
non-analysts, lectures presented to a relatively ‘naïve’ public, as
Freud remarks, a public of good will, but not an erudite public like the
two parts of this one here today. It is a work of exposition, it is not a
work of investigation. These lectures have something of smoothness, of
continuity. One should not forget the conditions in which they were
delivered by Freud, during the First World War, when he was, one has to
say, quite nationalistic. This would be forgotten later when he writes to
Arnold Zweig saying that one does not have to identify too much with
German culture, and one of them goes to Jerusalem, the other to London as
an immigrant. There is little indication of the moment in these lectures,
but there is a funny anecdote. To make a scansion, I will read it, it is
the only indication in these lectures of that time.
It concerns the way in
which the Oedipus complex was received by the German troops in the First
World War.
“Listen to this episode
which occurred in the course of the present war. One of the stout
disciples of psychoanalysis was stationed as a medical officer” - it
must surely be Abraham - “on the German front somewhere in Poland. He
attracted his colleagues’ attention by the fact that he occasionally
exercised an unexpected influence on a patient. When he was questioned, he
acknowledged that he was employing the methods of psychoanalysis and
declared his readiness to convey his knowledge to his colleagues. Every
evening thereafter the medical officers of the corps, his colleagues and
his superiors, came together in order to learn the secret doctrines of
analysis. All went well for a while; but when he spoke to his audience
about the Oedipus Complex, one of his superiors rose, declared he did not
believe it, that it was a vile act on the part of the lecturer to speak of
such things to them, honest men who were fighting for their country, and
fathers of a family, and that he forbade the continuance of the lectures.
That was the end of the matter. The analyst got himself transferred to
another part of the front. It seems to me a bad thing, however, if a
German victory requires that science shall be ‘organised’ in this way,
and German science will not respond well to the organisation of such a
kind” (SE XVI: 300).
In a certain way, Freud
already prefers psychoanalysis to a German triumph, if the German triumph
would not need to talk about Oedipus. This is to illustrate the atmosphere
of these lectures.
This could lead us to
underestimate these lectures, but we won’t! I have reflected upon this
and have concluded that the simplification to which Freud obliges himself
- a simplification is also necessary in a seminar, in the acceleration of
a theoretical exposition - finally shows the fundamentals and lineaments
of his theory, its framework. Not only is there an obligation of
condensation, but also an obligation of continuity, and Freud, in giving
ten or fifteen lectures in a series, makes appear as a problem the
articulation between the themes, a problem which does not appear at the
time at which they are elaborated thoroughly but separately. The
simplification has its own advantage: it must articulate themes that are
otherwise investigated in a dispersed way.
Freud’s
pathway
What
is Freud’s pathway? As he recalls in Lecture XVI, the first of this
cycle, this was the second year of lectures. In the first year, he had
spoken about dreams and parapraxes in relation to their interpretation. He
would make these communications to a public which had the experience of
dreaming and of making slips of the tongue. The source for this first
cycle was the works of discovery - The
Interpretation of Dreams, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life - while
Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious remains a little to one
side. In the second cycle of lectures - ours - he takes neurotic symptoms,
transference neurosis, as he calls it at the time, anxiety hysteria,
conversion hysteria and obssessional neurosis. As he himself says, it is
no longer an introduction to the theme but rather psychoanalysis itself.
The non-analysts in the audience supposedly do not have the experience of
these serious neurotic symptoms.
Lecture XVII, The
Sense of Symptoms, the real introduction to the new cycle, is based on
what was brought out in the previous cycle. It is an application to
symptoms of what had been said in relation to dreams and slips of the
tongue. It can be verified that symptoms are like dreams and slips of the
tongue, that they have a sense which can be interpreted. Once this is well
known it deserves to be questioned, as Lacan finally does. From this point
of departure he goes to Lecture XXIII, The
Paths to the Formation of Symptoms. What is there between these two
lectures?
I will give the titles:
Lecture XVIII, Fixation to Traumas
- The Unconscious; XIX, Resistance
and Repression; XX, The Sexual
Life of Human Beings; XXI, The
Development of the Libido and the Sexual Organizations; XXII, Some
Thoughts on Development and Regression - Aetiology; and Lecture XXIII.
Lecture XXI, Strachey puts it very well, is a summary of the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.
What takes place in these
lectures that makes a bridge between Lectures XVII and XXIII? Freud
introduces the drive, the libido, the sexual, and also the perversity of
the sexual - given that, as Lucia has said, the sexual does not refer so
much to the norm as to perversions. What takes place, what is it about? In
this extraordinary part of the work, which goes from
Lectures XVII to XXIII, Freud attempts to link the two aspects of his
work:
·
the
discovery of the unconscious, the interpretable phenomena, the discovery
that phenomena dismissed as being without sense can be interpreted, the
unconscious defined by interpretation, and
·
the discovery of infantile sexuality and of the perverse
traits in sexuality in 1905.
These are the two axes of
Freud’s work and one can read here, as in an open book, his effort to
make this articulation. It seems - it is debatable - that there is more
juxtaposition than articulation, deduction or production.
Regression
and repression
All
the Lacanian operations derive from this gap that arises from the Freudian
effort to link these two aspects. This is my interpretation. It does not
seem to me to be forced, when one can read in Lecture XXII (SE XVI: 341):
“But above all I think I ought to warn you now not to confuse regression
with repression” - in German, repression (Verdrängung)
and regression are not homophonic, as indicated in a footnote by Strachey.
Freud says: “Repression has no link with sexuality, please keep this in
mind.” This means that Freud clearly separates repression - which refers
to a semantic mechanism (something cannot be said, one does not succeed in
saying it because there is repression) - from the register of sexuality. I
do not know if my reading seems to you a bit forced; to me it seems
miraculous to find such proof in this text.
Lecture XXII offers an
auto-conceptualization of the path. He himself explains his clinical point
of departure: it is hysteria, in which the factor of libidinal regression
is not so evident. There is in hysteria a regression to the primary
libidinal objects - we think of a libido attached to the father, etc.,
which also appears in the example of the supposed obsession which we will
see later - but there is nothing like what is manifested in obsessional
neurosis, that is to say, a regression to an earlier stage of the sexual
organization, the attachment to a previous jouissance,
for example, especially the anal-sadistic. The principal role in the
mechanism of hysteria falls to repression, not to regression.
This supposes the
distinction of two types of regression: the regression to primary objects,
and regression to previous stages of development. He says that, as it is
absent in hysteria, libidinal regression to an earlier stage of
development was clarified much later than the mechanism of repression. He
distinguishes it from obsessional neurosis where regression to earlier
stages could be observed, especially regression to the anal-sadistic, etc.
The advantage of obsessional neurosis is that there is regression and also
repression, in such a way that it is a much more rich and complex
neurosis than hysteria. A
little tribute for obsessional neurosis once in a while.
An
internal obstacle
This
period is a key moment in the work of Freud, as Lucia has pointed out.
Afterwards, in the ’20s, the division of the personality into three
agencies, the ego, the super-ego and the id, will be made. To what does
this division of the second topography correspond?
We can perceive this very
well in the lectures. Repression is what is opposed to speaking, or - to
formulate it in a more Freudian way - it opposes the emergence of
representations in consciousness. Freud’s permanent question in these
lectures is: what is it that is opposed to the sexual? What is it that is
opposed to the full development of sexuality? What is it that obliges the
libido to regress to earlier stages of its development? What is this
force? What makes a barrier there? In these lectures there is an answer.
The obstacle, the barrier, is in part external reality, which does not
lend itself to the development of the drive. This is what Freud calls Versagung.
The opposition between the pleasure principle and the reality principle
can account for the phenomenon if ‘reality’ is taken in the sense of
external reality.
However, in this text
Freud finds an internal obstacle to full sexual development: parallel to
repression are the ego drives, which will say yes or no to the sexual
drives. In this way Freud presents an ego with laws, Gesetzen. It is from this point that Freud will invent the
super-ego.
In these lectures we have
the kitchen of the super-ego. Freud’s problem is one of parallelism. At
the level of sense, we have repression as a barrier. What, at the level of
libido, corresponds to this? The problem is the dualism unconscious -
libido: what is valid at the level of the unconscious is not
valid at the level of libido. From this the second topography will be
derived.
At this point Lacan comes
to say that yes, repression does have to do with libido. What is opposed
to saying it all is the same as what is opposed to the full realisation of
the sexual. In this way Lacan breaks the barrier which Freud had
established and which conditions, for instance, the opposition between
repression and regression. This can be seen in the third moment of his
elaboration: Lacan deduces the partial character of the drives from
language. From the capture of the human being in language, he tries to
deduce the partialization of the drive. Freud never articulated it in this
way, but encountered it as an autonomous phenomenon in relation to the
repressive logic of the unconscious.
Sinn
and Bedeutung
Let’s
return to Lecture XVII, Der Sinn der
Symptom, the one to which Lacan refers in Geneva. He points out that Sinn
is not Bedeutung. You know
these two words from a famous article by Frege, Sinn
und Bedeutung. Lacan points this out very well - Sinn is the effect of sense, what is determined by the signified,
and Bedeutung concerns the
relation to the real. The difficulty in translating the second word into
Latin languages derives from the fact that it is at the same time
‘signification’ and ‘reference’.
I will use this
observation to offer you my reading of the difference between the two
lectures. The first is explicitly entitled Der
Sinn. The second, which is called The
Paths to the Formation of Symptoms, unfolds Der
Bedeutung der Symptom. Freud demonstrates there that the reference of
the symptom is the fantasy, that the real at stake in the symptom has got
to do with the fantasy. He does not identify the real with the fantasy:
Lecture XXIII says that the fantasy is more like a fundamental veil in
front of what is truly real, that is to say, fixation.
The
cases
Here
we have to follow the path of Freud, which deals with the two cases of
women in chapter XVII, which he classifies as obsessional, and chapter
XXIII which supposedly refers only to hysterical symptoms, to regression
in hysterical symptoms because, he says, in obsessional neurosis there is
also counter-investment. I would have liked to develop this now but
because of the time, we will continue tomorrow.
In Lecture XVII, he
presents two obsessional symptoms, but we agree that they are fragments of
cases of hysteria. The first concerns a woman with a compulsive behaviour
to protect her impotent husband. The second a ceremonial before going to
bed that finally points towards the staging of the sexual non-rapport,
sustained by a libidinal bond to the father. As in the first case, the
husband is a substitute for the love of the father. Freud characterises
them as obsessional symptoms because of the character of Zwang,
the compulsion of the acts. His choice of cases is remarkable; I think it
is because he is addressing himself to a non-practising audience and they
are very clear symptoms...
L. D’Angelo: Freud said ‘odd’.
J.-A. Miller: Odd. He had chosen them because they have a sense,
evidently sexual, and furthermore they are explained by their Bedeutung,
by a reference to a previous experience. The first woman stages her
scene as a repetition and a correction of an earlier event that has been
traumatic for her. Through these examples, Freud links meaning and the
libidinal. The Bedeutung is a
previous experience.
From this point, he
introduces the lecture about the trauma, the unconscious. He takes it as a
principle that under each neurotic symptom there
is always a trauma - every neurosis contains, he says, a fixation of this
kind.
Furthermore, he
introduces the principle that the meaning of symptoms is always unknown to
the patient, which leads Freud to a stronger statement: “In order for
the symptom to be produced, it is necessary that it be unconscious”. In
other words, symptoms are not formed from conscious processes. This will
lead Lacan to consider the sense that is repressed in the symptom (from
his first point of view).
What
is intercepted in the symptom
In
this text something of the interpretative optimism of Freud remains. As a
deduction from the principle, he says: “The symptom disappears when one
succeeds in making its meaning conscious. Symptoms disappear as soon as
their meaning is known.” In a certain way the economic factor of libido
has not yet been imposed for Freud. It would be interesting to study how
Freud formulates this principle, and then says ‘it is not exactly like
this...’ The principle is excellent, but the symptoms don’t know it...
He searches for the
economy, and finally introduces the symptom dynamically; that is to say,
something is opposed to the arrival of sense in consciousness. From this
point on in chapter XIX, he studies unconscious resistance - the paradox
that patients suffer from their symptoms but do not appear to want that
much to get rid of them. In this direction, he can point out the condition
of the unconscious, the Unbewusstheit
of the symptom, which can only emerge from the unconscious. That is,
there is a sense which wants to be expressed; if it does not succeed in
expressing itself, the symptom appears. This allows Freud to say that
‘the formation of symptoms is a substitute for something else that is
intercepted’.
The word
‘intercepted’ is fundamental. It seems to inspire the first schema of
Lacan: the interception of a wanting-to-say by something else. Freud is so
thrilled that he repeats it, ‘a substitute for what is intercepted’.
This allows him to
understand in one unit the formation of the dream and the formation of the
neurotic symptom. But while there is something in common between the
symptom and the dream, the basis for the inclusion of the symptom in
psychoanalytic practice, at the same time he repeats in these lectures
that a symptom is not a dream. Repression, the essential motor of the
dream, is nothing more than the precondition for the formation of
symptoms. It is only the symptom which introduces us to the most intimate
of sexual life. This is the bonus of which one has to become aware in the
formation of symptoms in contrast to the dream. In this work the reference
is always to the Traumbildung or
Traumarbeit, the dream-formation
or the dream-work. At the same time, the existence of a supplementary
element in the symptom is imposed for him: dreams do not remain as a
permanent subjective opacity, one which eventually modifies the body, if
one admits the extended auto-erotism of which he speaks. The difference
between dreams and symptoms, which Freud highlights, is that ‘symptoms
always serve the same purpose, that is, sexual satisfaction’. Freud does
not question what the use of the symptom is. It is always the same -
sexual satisfaction. It serves as a substitute for a sexual satisfaction
that is lacking in life. Here he is introducing frustration. I have
underlined the element of ‘no saying’: the Versagung
is already a statement.
In Freud, the definition
of the symptom as a mode of jouissance
is patent. Taking into account, of course, the character of
compromise-formation, that is to say, the link between jouissance and defence.
Libido
as signified
Freud’s
observation is that what is at stake in the symptom is to obtain
satisfaction, and to defend against it. This connection between jouissance
and defence is what Lacan will deduce: that there is something excessive
in jouissance which always
obliges the subject to defend himself against the jouissance
he is searching for. Lacan will give an account of this by opposing jouissance
to language, the signifier in as much as it negates jouissance:
the repressive power is in language itself. The Name of the Father is
language. A plus-de-jouir remains,
the gain of pleasure, the Lustgewin.
Everything that Freud
says between Lectures XVII and XXIII is preparatory for the question of
how someone falls ill. He approaches this problem in Lecture XXII where he
says: it is not only reality that functions as a barrier. When there is a
frustration, the libido regresses and searches for a new mode of
satisfaction, but at this moment there is an internal veto, an internal
‘no saying’. He poses the question on p.350: “What are the powers
from which the objection to the libidinal trend arises?” This is the
point of entry for Freud’s developments of the 1920s.
We see the Freudian
libido encountering in reality the Versagung,
a certain saying ‘no’, encountering in the ego a veto. It always
finds a signifier. There are several things in these lectures that lead us
to see the libido as equivalent to a signified. One sees that the
libidinal opposition is equivalent to the semantic repression. When Freud
speaks, for example, of the plasticity of the sexual drives, which can
replace one another, as a net of communicating vessels, when he stresses
the detours of the libido in encountering a ‘no’, he shows that the
libido is capable of substitution and displacement, that is, of metaphor
and metonomy. This is the inspiration of Lacan’s graph. He succeeded in
presenting in his graph the circuit of language and the circuit of libido
in the same conceptual form.
All Lacan’s effort of
articulation, deduction and production is founded upon this double aspect,
and upon the path that goes from sense to something beyond sense. The
doctrine of the pass itself has an aspect of a pathway. First, there is
the subject supposed to know; that is to say, an effect of signification -
the subject supposed to know is on the side of the Sinn.
From here the subject goes towards the Bedeutung,
towards the fantasy and supposedly crosses it.
The fifth operation is an
effort to think in terms other than pathways. It makes visible - as Lacan
said in Seminar XVII - the
kinship between truth and jouissance.
Sense and jouissance have the
same root in impotence. If he introduces enjoyed sense it is because he
himself puts into question the object a.
He does it explicitly in Seminar XX,
Encore. The object a is only the elaborated part of jouissance, it is the fantasmatic or semantic part of jouissance,
the part of jouissance already
drawn into the fantasy.
Object a
is a false real.
Discussion
Can
we discuss for a while? I would like the opinion of Mrs. Casalprim.
R. Casalprim: With respect to
your general approach, I had made the same journey, keeping to Lecture
XXII to point out the difference between regression and repression.
J.-A. Miller: I wonder if there is something forced in reading this
concern of Freud’s in distinguishing repression from regression as the
testimony itself that he does not manage to articulate the phenomena which
he establishes in parallel, and for this same reason that he has to
construct his own topography.
R. Casalprim: I had a question
which arose while I was reading these texts. In Lecture XXIII you have
mentioned the question of hysterical neurosis, and at the end the question
of counter-investments. It seems to me that Freud had established that the
fantasy determines the symptom in hysterical neurosis, but I asked myself:
where does the fantasy lie in obsessional neurosis? On the other hand,
with The Wolf Man and the
question of infantile neurosis, this question occurred to me: there is
something, let’s say, resolved in the hysterical neurosis in relation to
bisexuality, the question is, what happens with the obsessional fantasy?
J.-A. Miller: Freud leaves aside the obsessional symptom. Why? Chapter
XXIII already appears to suit all neurotics. This shows Freud’s
acuteness concerning what is for him an obsessional neurosis. We have the
answer in Inhibitions, Symptoms and
Anxiety. The hysterical subject has an honest symptom which makes him
suffer honestly. He comes with a paralysed arm which does not function and
which makes life difficult for him. It may have a meaning, a relation with
the fantasy, or it may eventually allow the subject to see an earlier
fixation - this is more questionable. I say it is an honest symptom
because it causes suffering. The obsessional comes like this
(Jacques-Alain Miller makes a gesture with a twisted arm) and says: ‘I
am the most beautiful in the world’.
Exactly as Freud
describes, he does not perceive the suffering of his symptom: he has
incorporated it so well into his personality that it is a motive for
pleasure. Obsessional symptoms are pleasurable. In this there is something
desperate, that the subject experiences his symptom as the most admirable
thing of his personality. This is a limit point that takes away the very
meaning of cure. We will see this tomorrow, when Joan Salinas speaks about
the varieté of the symptom, an expression that refers at the same time
to ‘truth’ and ‘variety’. There is always a link for Lacan between
symptom and truth. When he talks about the symptom as the very being of
the subject it is most applicable to the obsessional subject. To the point
where the idea of cure itself disappears. The only thing that can be said
is that if this obsessional remains with something which makes him suffer,
he must make with this part the same as with the rest, that is, that he
should also recognise himself in it, that he should adopt it as well. This
is what Lacan calls the identification with the symptom, the re-absorption
of the symptom in pleasure - which is another way out. It is not only that
the symptom is a mode of jouissance,
it is to enjoy one’s symptom more than one’s fantasy. The invisible jouissance
of the obsessional is the enjoyment of the symptom.
H. Tizio: I would like to contribute with a precise remark about why the
obsessional symptom is left apart. In the text of the Rat Man, Freud talks about this point as a possibility of discerning
a new type of symptom-formation. This new type is the obsessional symptom,
starting from the two moments in which he puts in relation repression and
the cancellation of the obsessional act.
J.-A. Miller: Yes. Freud also points this out in Lecture XXII, in the
link between jouissance and
defence. Hysteria succeeds in giving a simultaneous expression of the two
contradictory things, while in obsession, there is a time to set something
up and a time to cancel it. What in hysteria is grouped together, in the
classic obsessional symptom happens in two moments, opposed to one
another. In hysteria there is a special twist to express at the same time
the pro and con; more
rigorously, in obsession, first there is the pro
and afterwards the con.
L. D’ Angelo: There is also the
reference to the body. He says that the obsessional “renounces almost
completely the manifestation of his symptoms at the level of the body, and
creates all his symptoms in the ambit of the soul”.
E. Paskvan: A confirmation
regarding the symptom in the obsessional neurosis - from Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety. There Freud says clearly - I
remember because it caught my attention, a homage to the obsessional
neurosis - the neurosis to which he is most grateful, since it has taught
him the most, and he says it continues to be an enigma for him. It is
afterwards when he analyses the problem
of the division between the two moments, etc.
V. Palomera: All these
interesting observations have been prompted by your allusion to the
‘honest symptom’ in relation to hysteria and I wanted precisely to
stress that in respect to the same Freudian definition of the symptom as a
‘compromise-formation’, there are always two things implicated. On the
one hand, the symptom as a ‘disfigured jouissance’
- it is the term used by Freud - a jouissance
which is presented as a disguised jouissance.
This is the level of what we call, after Lacan, ‘the formal envelope of
the symptom’. Freud writes: “The symptom repeats somehow that modality
of satisfaction of one’s early infancy... disfigured by the censorship
which is born in the conflict..”. It is therefore the dimension of the
symptom as a jouissance
presented ‘in another way’. But in the second place - and this seems
to me central in the dialogue which is taking place - the symptom is also
a ‘jouissance experienced in
another way’. And in dealing in this chapter XXIII with the symptoms in
hysteria, Freud makes explicit that what is at stake is a satisfaction
already modified, because it has passed from pleasure to unpleasure. There
are therefore these two values in the symptom: a disguised jouissance
and a jouissance experienced in another way, given that what was once
pleasurable is now unpleasurable.
J.-A. Miller: It is for this
reason that he said “I am talking about the hysterical symptoms only
because they are the ones which cause displeasure”. The problem of the
obsessional symptoms is that they cause pleasure. All of Lacan’s
constructions can be understood as the effort to make of the libido
something that can be situated in the set signifier-signified. Freud
himself says in chapter XXIII, which for the time being I have not
broached, everything that has been said so far is preliminary: there is
the barrier, Versagung, the
veto; the libido escapes, it should return, but in this circuit it links
itself with representations belonging to the system unconscious. The
libido is directed to an object in the exterior world, there is frustation
- ‘the lady says no’ - the libido escapes, but not towards another
lady, but towards fantasies, it escapes to the system unconscious. Then,
Freud says, when the libido regresses to representations of the
unconscious, it acquires the properties of this system; that is, it shows
itself capable of condensation and displacement, metaphor and metonomy.
One can see that there is a destiny of the libido which is like that of
the signified. This allows Lacan to translate all of this in terms of
desire.
Freud does not exploit
this. He does not have the idea that it is possible to deduce things which
happen in sexuality from the linguistic phenomena of the unconscious. I
believe that it is for this reason that Lacan says in the same lecture
that Freud is a weak man. To be weak means to float between two poles. He
has the elements to recognise that only one operator is at stake, but he
does not do so. Besides being a sexual obsessional, as Lacan says, Freud
is a weak man because there he floats. Take this cum
grano salis.
This does not mean that
Lacan is perfect. We should never think this, much less say it. As my
friend Horacio Echegoyen has said to me, to have a cult of personality is
not appropriate. I did not answer him on this point because I did not know
what he was talking about. Lacan has a serious symptom in his teaching. He
said that Freud has weakness as a symptom, but Lacan also has a symptom.
Perhaps we will talk about this tomorrow.
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