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From Psychoanalytical Notebooks 2, 1999 — The Unconscious DISCRETION OF THE
ANALYST IN Pierre-Gilles Gueguen I
borrow the term ‘post-interpretative era’ from Jacques-Alain Miller,
who uses it to describe the situation of psychoanalysis today. He stated a
thesis, ‘the unconscious interprets’, which is a response to what
psychoanalysis is as it can be deduced from the work of Lacan.1
I propose to grasp some of the consequences of this thesis for
psychoanalytical practice, those which I can perceive at present. Others
will no doubt appear, as the
time to understand is necessary. If,
today, a practice which takes account of the thesis ‘the unconscious
interprets’, can be said to be discretionary for various reasons, it is
not for all that any less determined. Lacan is no more, nor is the time
when his stature, so dominant in the intellectual world and in the world
of psychoanalysis, constituted for many either a scandal or a motif of
hypnotic admiration, especially, where the question of short sessions
provoked condemnation. The contemporary figure of the analyst is
different, although his practice is still often congested with a hardly
discrete mimetism of the dead master rather than with a fidelity to his
work and his concepts. But
if I speak of discretion, it is rather in order to evoke three
consequences that the thesis ‘the unconscious interprets’ has for
analytical practice. —
The analyst is discrete because he is effaced in his interpretative action
behind the one of the unconscious. He leaves it up to the
unconscious…only to take over ‘in the interloan’ [l’entreprêt’’].2 This does not mean, quite the
contrary, that he should abstain from all intervention or find refuge in
the convenience of a textbook neutrality. —
The analyst acts with discretion: his discernment (the sense given by the Littré
dictionary to discrétion)
is required in his action, his judgement is called for, and this just as
much if he leaves its place to the work of the unconscious. —
Lastly, analytical practice is a practice of the discrete, of the
discontinued. If analytical practice is based on the interpretation of the
unconscious, then it has to be homogeneous with its pulsating structure,
its structure of opening and closing. This statement has precise
consequences, especially for seizing that which separates the Lacanian
orientation of psychoanalysis from other ‘post-modern’ practices and
other conceptions of the unconscious. It is in every case a condition
required for situating psychoanalysis, as Freud and Lacan defined it, in
its articulation in parallel to science, and not against it as it often
seems to be the case today.3 I)
The discrete analyst: The action of the analyst
has to be subordinated to the interpretation emanating from the
unconscious. Freud’s practice was not like this at the start. In the
beginning, he often translated an object-language, that of the dream
amongst others, into a metalanguage of symbols. Testifying to this in a
number of places, Traumdeutung
was nevertheless corrected by the theory of double inscription which
became so pleasing to Lacan’s students to the point of irritating him.4 The
break with Jung allowed, on this topic, a radical recentering, that of Metapsychology.
The theory of the unconscious developed by the inventor of psychoanalysis
then shows that the decisive step did not concern the distinction between
the manifest and latent contents of the dream, but rather putting free
associations into play. The
move to put on the same plane the associations of the dreamer and the
contents of the dream (an apparently innocent move but profoundly
iconoclastic) in effect gave the psychoanalytical practice a footing on
which Lacan in his turn will make his famous formulae which today have
become aphorisms: ‘There is no metalanguage’ or ‘ There is no Other
of the Other’. From the side of the analyst, the method of ‘floating
attention’ and the free associations of the analysand to which it
responds, are indissociably linked. They denote the little interest Freud
shows toward the signification of the patient’s statements [dires],
toward his intentionality; Freud does not subscribe to the tradition of
Dilthey.5 What interests him, and it is there that the method
is homogeneous with his theory of the unconscious, is a deciphering of the
unconscious enunciation from the statements, the means of seizing the
inscription of the repressed movements of the drive budding in the
statements [les dits] (that
which is read from the repressed drive in that which is said). Elaboration
of the significations of the dream, in its relation to the reality or
history of the patient, is only a means to this aim. The Freudian texts of
the 20s on the dream are in this respect quite revelatory of his position6:
the dream is presented there as an activity in the service of jouissance
(‘chunks of the fantasmatic activity in the service of protecting
sleep’), and the deciphering of its rebus is far from becoming for Freud
an obligatory task; it is to be done if the analyst deems it necessary but
is not an absolute requirement. As
early as 1912, and in the same sense, Freud already posed that the text of
the dream is as such inexhaustible, and the analyst is recommended to
communicate his point of view only with reserve.7 Further, he
does not deem it necessary to come back from one session to the next to
the analysis of the same dream. It is clear that a break in the pursuit of
the conscious discourse is not damaging, and is even advisable for the
effectuation of the analytical task. The analyst follows three objectives:
to situate the fulfilment of desire in the dream, to evaluate the
‘pressure of resistance’ (that which conditions the possibility of an
intervention), and, above all, to search for the ‘cause of
distortion’, that which seems to him a central point. Lacan
spent a long period of time before refinding this Freudian liberty. (He
will evoke in this respect ‘ten years of concubinage with Jaspers’).
Lacan refinds it with brilliance by bringing forth the function of speech
and the field of language in his Rome Report. Nevertheless, this escape of
psychoanalysis from the trodden path into which it had fallen will also
have its own unpredictable consequences. The passion for the formations of
the unconscious and the identification of the concept of the unconscious
to the laws of language (metaphor and metonymy), led some of Lacan’s
students to an erratic use of homophony, transforming in the worst cases
the psychoanalytical treatment into an exchange of formations of the
unconscious, those of the analyst coming into rivalry with those of the
analysand. In L’Etourdit, in a
paragraph which sounds like setting the record straight for the benefit of
his students, Lacan makes it precise that homophony is indeed one of the
chosen modes of interpretation (in the sense of the analyst’s
intervention) on the condition ‘that the analyst makes use of it where
it is fitting’,8 and he reminds us that the point is to get
hold of it to effect the Spaltung
of the subject, which we can understand as a means of provoking the split
in the analysand, the division which is the mark and the consequence of
interpretation by the unconscious. But
the thesis ‘the unconscious interprets’ also aims to make the analyst
revert to a certain discretion as regards the appreciation of the efficacy
of his action. Freud laid foundations which today have been perhaps a
little forgotten. If, in effect, the unconscious interprets (interweaving jouissance
and sense in its formations), it also decides the outcome of any
intervention which the analyst could make. It is the unconscious which
indicates whether or not the analyst knew how to touch the cause of
desire. Freud noted this in particular in relation to dreams: it is of
little importance whether they lie or tell the truth, whether the
analysand lies, whether he accepts or refuses the analyst’s
intervention. The result of an interpretation can only be assessed by the
production of new material: another formation of the unconscious, a
production of symptom (even the negative therapeutic reaction)9
or a simple negation (‘I hadn’t thought about it’). Therefore the
question is not to know which of the two, the analyst or the analysand, is
right, as “there is no confrontation at this level. When there is a
confrontation, one is on the imaginary axis”.10 What,
therefore, crowns the success of intervention, is a new manifestation of
the drive which calls for a new lifting of repression. For
Lacan, the true interpretation was for a long time the one which revived
desire, which carried the mark of desire as a lack-of-being. In effect, it
is doubtless a facet of the unconscious: to renew the division of the
subject, to make S1 come out again — “the signifier —
irreducible, traumatic non-sense [to which] it is subjected as subject”.11
However S1, as a rule, calls for a S2, and the
effect of producing the lack-of-being is never equivalent to some pure
desire. There are two kinds of valency in the concept of desire. If desire
revives signification through the produced void, it also goes in circles.
One is keen to praise the celestial bird but there is also the ungraspable
ferret which rages endlessly in the cage of dissatisfaction, of
impossibility or avoidance.12 And what remains unperceived in
the excitement of desire is that it is also, just like sense, a vehicle of
jouissance. “The true consent, the consent of being which is the
one toward which the analytical work has to lead, is a consent to the
unconscious as repressed, that is to say as vehicle of jouissance”.13 Interpretation today, the one which
allows for the pass, has to lead therefore in this direction, and at the
same time bear on - j
and a, the phallus of castration
and the remainder of jouissance:
It is there that the thesis ‘interpretation in reverse’ fulfils the
thesis ‘the unconscious interprets’. II)
The Discretion Of The Analyst: The use of the term interpretation
has spread and it now designates in a generic fashion all aspects of the
analyst’s action. It has numerous denotations in language [langue]
such as translation, falsification, performance, acting,
declaring the will of higher forces, explaining the sense, etc. ‘Death
of interpretation’14 does not mean that the analyst no longer
intervenes in the treatment; what is aimed at is the interpretation where
the analyst injects sense following his caprice without indexing himself
on the unconscious of the patient, an interpretation in the weak sense of
the word. On the contrary, the ‘duty to interpret’15
underlined by Lacan in his time, acquires all the more depth. The analyst
is bound to this duty, he ‘pays with words, with his person and with
what is the most intimate in his judgment’.16 The modalities
of exercising this duty remain nevertheless within his discretion, and he
uses it when he deems it necessary, against the backdrop of silence, with
parsimony and with good reason. He is the sole judge of his timing,
of his tactfulness. Lacan reminded us of it in a solemn tone: “as alone
as I have always been in my relation to the analytical cause”.17 If
the thesis ‘the unconscious interprets’ in no way exonerates the
analyst from having to intervene — since, just as well, as Lacan
indicated it, he “is part of the concept of the unconscious as he
constitutes its address”18 — it nevertheless forces us to
question anew what it is that the analyst does. To interpret (in the
narrow sense), to construct, to communicate, to support the transference
— such are the sides between which his task is divided. To
interpret What does the thesis
‘the unconscious interprets’ bring out at this point? Let’s note, to
begin with, that it is a novel formulation. Neither Lacan nor Freud posed
it before.19 The formulation does, however, evoke the famous
formula ‘desire, it is its interpretation’. And yet, the two formulae
are not equivalent. ‘The unconscious interprets’ adds that
interpretation, understood in the broad sense of the analyst’s
intervention in the treatment, can certainly provoke desire, the
lack-of-being, but frequently also the jouissance
which is incarcerated in lalangue.
And indeed, one can enjoy [jouir]
one’s unconscious or, more precisely, the formations of one’s
unconscious or the interpretations of one’s analyst. But one can no
longer enjoy [jouir] the
interpretation by the unconscious in the strict sense as used by J.-A.
Miller. That is why the thesis ‘the unconscious interprets’ calls for
the complementary thesis ‘interpretation in reverse’. In
effect, what does the Freudian interpretation do? It certainly goes
against signification, against the discourse of the subject’s ego, but
it aims at a sexual sense; the drive remains subjected to the Oedipal
myth, to the function of the imaginary father. In this frame,
consequently, the end of analysis stumbles against the rock of castration:
impossible for women to be detached from the father, impossible for a man
to accept treatment from another man. According
to Lacan, interpretation aims elsewhere, it aims at the enunciation not
the statement. It certainly goes against signification but also against
sexual sense, it aims for the cause of desire, this cause of distortion
which Freud was able to isolate. This means equally that interpretation
attempts to take its effect beyond the Oedipus or the family saga, beyond
Freud’s primal scene in which the woman remains always contaminated by
the mother. In the final analysis, for Lacan, it is therefore a question
of bringing to light by means of interpretation the last signifier, the
signifier of the primarily repressed. It is the attempt of metaphorical
interpretation, the one which favours highlighting of the phallus as the
signifier of desire. One is, however, hindered by the fact that desire
itself is enclosed within the limits of fantasy.20 In his later
work, and through the elaboration of object a
and, above all, the tables of sexuation, Lacan proposes, as the aim of
interpretation, the place of the drives, that of the absence of the sexual
relation. It is a place ‘inhabited by silence’,21 for it
corresponds to that which cannot be said (no more than desire could be
said directly), and also to what is enjoyed [se
jouit] beyond that which is said
(surplus-enjoyment). It is thus necessary to resort to interpretation
through metonymy. It brings the subject back to its division, finding its
formula in the interpretative scansion which does not decide the sense in
the place of the subject but forces the latter to decide upon it. The
‘surplus’ added by the analyst to the formation of the unconscious, or
to the analysis made by the patient himself, is an almost-nothing, even
maybe a simple temporal break. It signifies in any case: ‘I agree with
you but you said it first!.’ Let’s
approach now what J.-A. Miller proposes with his ‘interpretation in
reverse’. I will stress in it two aspects. This thesis accounts for the
fact that interpretation has to be homogeneous with the task of analysing,
and therefore aims, in the final analysis, for the drive. This is to say
that interpretation has to lead to a convergence of the analysand’s
statements [dits] (Lacan was in
this respect much interested in Fibonacci’s series and the reference to
the golden number). Although it would not be precise to state that Freud
already grasped it, one can nevertheless take the view that he had a
certain intuition in relation to this.22 Nevertheless, what the
thesis ‘interpretation in reverse’ proposes is something else. It
concerns reaching a crossing of the limit, not only the convergence toward
the silent saying but the subversion of this silence. J.-A. Miller
described this as that which does not enter the semantic flow, although he
notes that the scansion of punctuating brings it back to it again. That is
why he opposes this interpretation to scansion and calls it the cut,
thereby giving again its precision and weight to Lacan’s term. The step
made here consists in isolating a novel modality of interpretation. ‘It
does not interpret in the service of the pleasure principle’,23
that is to say for jouissance.
It brings us back, not to the division of the subject, but to that which
he calls, by referring to psychosis, ‘perplexity’. It is the beyond of
defence of the subject which is then aimed at, not desire which itself
‘is of defence’. The practice of the cut, in relation to the practice
of punctuation, is asemantic, and it touches directly the enjoyed in
saying [le joui dans le dire]. It corresponds to the moment of conclusion of
the pass. To
construct On this point, Freud and
Lacan take a similar view of the task of the analyst: there is no doubt
that it is up to him to construct. In this respect, Constructions
in Analysis remains exemplary. Construction, unlike interpretation,
draws scattered and heterogeneous elements together in a linear causality,
and is a discretionary practice of sense (but not of signification). It
aims for the internal coherence of the analytic experience. Freud reserved
the task of construction for himself and left that of remembering to the
analysand; for him, to construct meant to assure oneself of the truth of
the analysis. Indeed, this operation
aims for at least one aspect of truth, that of internal coherence. To
construct is indeed to assure oneself of consistency, of rules of
deduction. This is why, in analysis, construction and the elaboration of
the axiom of the fundamental fantasy are homogeneous with one another.
Together they contribute to situating the place of object
a, which, in psychoanalysis, has the status of logical consistency.
This operation is necessary due to the fact that, on the side of the
unconscious (as Freud highlighted through the interpretation of dreams and
as Lacan remarks in the Introduction
to the German Edition of Ecrits), meaning escapes. But, while Freud
did not really distinguish construction from interpretation, Lacan
separates them very clearly. Construction aims for the internal
consistency of analytical work, namely a truth of fixion, while interpretation finds its efficiency in the allusive
virtues of language in order to create a point of emptiness in the
response of the Other and thus produce a half-saying (mi-dire)
of truth. In a commentary Constructions
in Analysis, Jacques-Alain Miller affirms that “the Lacanian analyst
must construct, that goes without saying”,24 and he adds that
if Lacan is not interested in construction as such, it is because for him
it designates structure (in the sense of clinical structure). Thus
interpretation in reverse takes its bearings only in reference to
construction. To
Communicate It is in this respect
that the judgement of the analyst is mostly solicited. When to produce an
interpretation, when to communicate a construction but also in what form,
and with what content? Freud
never shied away from stating his opinion. He never worried about a
potential effect of suggestion and measured the value of his intervention
with the indirect confirmation of the unconscious. The problem is
otherwise situated for Lacan. As for Freud in the case of the Wolf Man, it
is still a question of obtaining certainty in the patient, but this in a
way regulated by the crossing of the fantasy and subjective destitution,
both being limit-operations. And yet the end must win the conviction of
the patient, it is even required. Here again, and maybe one should even
say particularly here, confirmation is to be sought more in the indirect
ratification by the unconscious than in the agreement of the patient.25
As to knowing whether the
analyst must be silent or communicate, there is a lot of suspicion on that
point: the suspicion that silence, recommended by Lacan as the background
against which interpretation could unfold and then also as minimal
principle of interpretation-scansion, the one which avoids suggestion, may
often translate as faintheartedness on the analyst’s part. a silence of
commodity, a lesser evil in a way. It is true in many a case, but it is
important to give its right place to this silence and to the scansion
which leaves the analysand the possibility of receiving from the Other in
an inverted form the message that is his. Nevertheless, it is Lacan
himself who was able to measure how much the systematic practice of
silence, punctuation without a way out of the semantic system, contributed
to make of analysis an infinite task, as infinite as the productions of
the unconscious. This is why, in the later years of his teaching, he
incites analysts to speak up, in his own terms to open their mouths [l’ouvrir],
but also not to feed the symptom with sense.26 These
indications may seem contradictory. And indeed, the
interventions of analysts can be shared out between two polarities, those
which make the - j
appear on the one hand, and a
on the other. What is at stake is to restart through interpretation the
flow of desire, when threatened by the premature attack of the signifying
chain, by evoking the unconscious knowledge yet to be explored (metaphoric
interpretation), and, on the other hand, to appease the signifying
efflorescence, to jam the jouissance of empty speech, and there rather through interpreting
with the structure (metonymic mode of interpretation). Most frequently,
the scansion punctuates the session to signal a partial point of possible
conclusion But
the interpretation of the unconscious, correlated to the interpretation in
reverse of the analyst, namely interpretation in a restrained sense, that
which indicates a true act of the analyst, has another weight: it
must radically separate jouissance
from the signifying chain which carries it. It is not only the formula
‘the word is the murder of the thing’ which applies here — a formula
which has taken on a weakened meaning, thus allowing one to think that all
the virtues of psychoanalysis can be reduced to a mode of expression; of
‘verbalisation’. The reference is taken from the Lacan of a little
later, that which equivocates between jouissance
and enjoyed-sense (sens-joui).
Thus it suited him to reserve the term analytic act (which produces a new
subject) for this type of interpretation, which makes an S1
emerge all alone by making it jump in some way out of the signifying chain
and its implacable starting again. One inevitably sees that such an
interpretation must precipitate the moment to conclude for the analysand
because it calls for certitude and consent. To
Support the transference According to Lacan’s
formula the analyst supports the transference. He localises the semblants.
This does not depend upon his judgement but upon what he offers through
the position that he occupies. He thus does not cause the transference,
which anybody can do, as much as he causes the work of the analysand’s
unconscious, through transference. There on the other hand his judgement
is required. Opposed
to the conception of transference conceived as a phenomenal repetition,
opposed to the pedagogical role of the analyst (deviations which have
permitted the practice in the IPA), Lacan defined transference as a pure
dialectic, that is to say that he challenged all psychologisation of the
cure in order to put the accent radically upon the fact that “the
concept of the exposition is identical to the progress of the subject;
which is to say the reality of the treatment”.27
Nevertheless, he will later on be led to correct what in this
definition could be excessively nominalistic (albeit a realist nominalism)
in order to account for jouissance.
Transference is thus presented as the permanent mode of constituting
objects. Then, from Seminar XI onwards, transference and interpretation
are indissociably linked. Transference,
in so far as it is mobilised by analysis, it not pure repetition of past
loves [énamorations], it is
linked to moments of opening and closing of the unconscious. Once we admit
that the unconscious is interpretation, transference presents itself as
the supposition of a knowledge in the unconscious (cf. the algorithm of
transference). In
explaining the sort of interpretation which goes with the thesis that
‘the unconscious interprets’, that is to say the cut which dries up
the Zuyderzee of the unconscious and isolates the S1 without S2,
J.-A. Miller illuminates the question of the fall of the subject supposed
to know at the end of an analysis and its corollary: the cancelling of the
subscription to the unconscious. This takes up a proposition which he had already put forward
for the couple transference and interpretation: to ground transference on
the subject supposed to know, as Lacan did at first, means that the
transference is first of all interpretandum,
to be interpreted. Not to interpret by aiming at the repetition of
infantile experiences, but interpreting the cause of desire; in other
words by bringing interpretation to bear upon the signifying interval
(thus through the half-saying [mi-dire],
through equivocation). “The
desire of the analyst, in so far as it is implicated in his
interpretation, goes against identification, which is to say that it goes
towards being. And that one will not recognise as a Lacanian the analyst
who only makes interpretations which are metaphors, that is to say who
delivers, already worked out, the master signifier into the hands of his
analysand”.28 Interpretation as cut thus aims at indirectly
isolating the repressed master signifier, and, in that, it opposes the
proliferation of added meanings, particularly those that could stem from
the intervention of the analyst. Equivocation, yes, if it is metonymic,
between enigma and citation, metaphor no. III)
Discretion In The Analytic Act There is no doubt that
this thesis that ‘the unconscious interprets’ emphasises discretion,
discontinuity in the mathematical sense (quantities that only vary as the
whole values). It brings to light the fact that the unconscious is only
inscribed though ruptures, ruptures in sense and ruptures in the enjoyed [joui]. Unconscious, unborn [in-né],
unconscious of revelation, apophantic. This is how the unconscious has
appeared since Freud; but it took Lacan to remind us: through surprise.
And let’s face it, mostly unpleasant surprise, as a rupture in meaning
and signification, as unknown jouissance,
repressed and quite frankly bad. Thus the unconscious is not the unknown
accommodated by all psychologies, it is first of all encounter and
revelation,29 it is not the expression of feeling. These are
the thoughts which carry it, but it is first of all explosion, perplexity.30
It is even through this that it has an ethical status. Freud showed it
clearly, for example in 1925: “It is oneself that one must hold
responsible for malign feelings and dreams. What can one do otherwise? If
the content of the dream — properly speaking — is not the fact of
inspiration of another; but part of my being”.31 A rupture in
ideals at the same time as a rupture in the thread of conscious thought:
the ego gets it. It is to this place that Lacan assigns the subject $,
this place where the id was and where I must come to be. The unconscious
is therefore this rupture which makes this gap appear, but an act is
necessary for it to inscribe itself, as such ‘firmly distinguished from
the status of the doing’,32 an act of speech from the
analyst. To
speak of interpretation as being deployed on the other side of sense and
to interpret, as Jacques-Alain Miller has done, is to emphasise that, for
it to be equivalent to the act of the analyst, it must not only be
secondary to the action of the unconscious but also act like it, that is
to say through subtraction of sense, to produce what Lacan calls nonsense
(insensé) in Seminar XI, and
which cannot be attained, no matter how, for it aims at the cause of
desire. Yet
the unconscious is not given a priori in psychoanalysis; what is there from the beginning is the
symptom and its trail of complaints; what is there as given is malaise,
suffering, unhappy consciousness which seeks to pour out in the other, at
the same time as it produces the other as the
source of its troubles — paradoxes of reflexive consciousness linked to
retaliatory aggressivity commonplaces of psychology and psychotherapies. For
a psychoanalysis to begin, there must be a rupture in this register: we
need interpretation in the strong sense. No doubt, this interpretation is
not the one of the end, but it is the one which opens the unconscious.
This is to say that it brings to light a principle of rupture. Lacan says
as much in Science and Truth33:
the subject of psychoanalysis, that of the Spaltung,
cannot be approached through the empirical fact, the practice of analysis
supposes an epoché, a
reduction. This reduction always rests on the absence of a relation,
absence of a relation between jouissance
and the formalism of science, absence of a relation between the symbolic
and the real in psychoanalysis. In 1965, Lacan thinks that truth as cause
allows in psychoanalysis to drill the place of the subject, the place
which restitutes the subject foreclosed by science.
The thesis ‘the unconscious interprets’ emphasises once more
the rupture between the enjoyed [joui]
in the real and the symbolised. But it adds to the Lacan of that time,
whose peak in formalisation is to be found in Position
of the Unconscious, the Lacan of the Other
Side of Psychoanalysis, and for whom truth is the sister of jouissance.
The interpretation in reverse aims at the cause in the real and at
the cut which produces the subject having cancelled his subscription to
the unconscious,34 not the truth of the subject
but a véri-fixé subject,35
that is to say with a certainty as to his jouissance,
his mode of enjoyment [mode de jouir].
Translated
by Philip Dravers, Véronique Voruz and Bogdan Wolf 1.
J.-A. Miller, Interpretation
in Reverse, see above pp. 9-16. 2.
J. Lacan, Television, Norton,
transl. J. Mehlman, 1990, p.46. 3.
On this point read the conversation between J.-A. Miller and
François Ewald in Magazine littéraire
devoted to Freud. 4.
J. Lacan, Le Seminaire
XVIII, D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant (1970/71). 5.
W. Dilthey, Selected
Writings, Cambridge University Press, ed., transl. and intr. by H.P.
Rickman. 6.
S. Freud, Remarks on
the Theory and Practice of Dream-Interpretation (1923) SE XIX; Josef
Popper-Lynkeus and the Theory of the Dreams (1923) SE XIX; Some
Additional Notes upon Dream-Interpretation as a Whole (1925) SE XIX.
Especially the last text begins with the paragraph called The
Limits of the Interpretable. 7.
S. Freud, Recommendations
to Physicians Practising Psychoanalysis, SE XII. 8.
J. Lacan, L’Etourdit
(1972), Scilicet No 4, Paris, Seuil,
1973, p.48. 9.
J.-A. Miller insists on this point in Marginalia de Constructions dans l’analyse, Cahier No 3. 10.
J.-A. Miller, Marginalia de
Constructions en analyse, op.
cit., p.24. 11.
J. Lacan, The Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, transl. A. Sheridan, Penguin,
1977. 12.
See on this point J.-A. Miller’s Seminar Donc
(seminar 12 January 1994). 13.
J.-A. Miller, Marginalia de
Constructions en analyse, op.
cit., p.27. 14.
J.-A. Miller’s formula used in Interpretation
in Reverse. 15.
J. Lacan, Le Seminaire XI,
Postface, p.252. 16.
J. Lacan, The Direction of
Treatment and the Principles of its Power in Ecrits
Selection, Transl. A. Sheridan, Tavistock/Routledge, 1977. 17.
J. Lacan, Founding Act in
Television, transl. J. Mehlman, Norton, 1990. 18.
J. Lacan, Le Seminaire XI,
Postface, op. cit. 19.
In Seminar XI, Lacan
gives a following indication: “The analyst’s interpretation only
reflects the fact that the unconscious, if it is what I say it is, namely
a play of the signifier, already has in its formations — dreams, slips
of the tongue, witticisms or symptoms — proceeded by interpretation”
(Seminar XI, p.130), however ‘the unconscious interprets’ radicalises
the weight of this thesis; it always reminds the analyst today of it, and
combines it with the thesis of interpretation which removes sense. It
concerns rereading of Seminar XI with, and starting from, Seminar XX and L’Etourdit. 20.
J.-A. Miller reminds us of this point with an insistence in his
seminar Donc an in developing it
starting with Lacan’s indication (e.g. Seminaire
XI, p.32). 21.
C. Soler, Silences in La Cause freudienne, No 32, p.30. It is Colette Soler to whom we owe
this beautiful expression. 22.
In 1925 he stipulates, for example, that in the conditions where
the subject’s resistance does not avoid the work of the unconscious, the
associations concerning dreams are from the start. 23.
J.-A. Miller, Interpretation
in Reverse, op. cit. 24.
J.-A. Miller, Marginalia de
Constructions en analyse, op.
cit. 25.
J.-A. Miller, To Interpret
Cause from Freud to Lacan in Newsletter
of the Freudian Field No 3, ½ Spring/Fall, 1989, pp.30-50. In this
article in particular, the link between the cause in psychoanalysis and
the principle of the discrete is developed. 26.
J. Lacan, Conférence à Genève
sur le symptôme (1975) in Le
Bloc-notes de la psychanalyse No 5. Lacan defines there a symptom as a
voracious fish which does not admit to feeding on sense. 27.
J. Lacan, Intervention
on Transference (1951) in Feminine
Sexuality. 28.
J.-A. Miller, Interpretatation
et transfert in Actes des Journées
de l’ECF No 6. 29.
In Seminar XI, Lacan uses the terms ‘not-born’, ‘not-realised’. 30.
It is purposefully that Jacques-Alain Miller uses this term,
traditionally used in the field of psychosis, with reference to his thesis
known as ‘generalised foreclosure’. 31.
S. Freud, Some Additional
Notes upon Dream-Interpretation as a Whole (1925) SE XIX, p.125. 32.
J. Lacan, De la psychanalyse
dans ses rapports avec la réalité (1967) in Scilicet
No 1, Paris, Seuil, 1968, p.56. 33.
As well as in Seminar XI. 34.
This theorisation ‘the unconscious interprets’ is essential to
operate the right cut between the operation of psychoanalysis and, on the
one hand, a logical formalism which will never be able to deal with jouissance, and, on the other hand, a nauseating hermeneutics which,
for example, allows a Paul Ricoeur to say: ‘One does not sufficiently
underline the role of conscience-witness, that of the analyst, in the
constitution of the unconscious as reality.’ (Paul Ricoeur, Le
conflit des interprétations, Paris, Seuil, p.107). 35.
In this perspective, the reduction carried out by psychoanalysis is
not to identify cause and truth of the subject. It is something else to
say, as Jacques-Alain Miller does, that the subject re-elects the
unconscious and assumes responsibility of this place with a consent.
Lacan’s famous formula ‘burned ring in the jungle of the drives’
seems adequate to evoke at the same time one’s cancelling of one’s
subscription to the unconscious, subjective destitution, consent to
primarily repressed jouissance,
and the effect of being that it poses. It is thus possible to serialise
proximate terms which concern the end of analysis. It is no longer a
subjective division referring back to lack-of-being that is the point
here, but no doubt the constitutive division of the speaking being [parlêtre] which re-elects the defect in the Other correlative to
the subject, defect from which the Oedipal delusion has constructed itself
for the neurotic. This
text was originally published in La
Cause freudienne, No 34, 1996. Copyright © Pierre-Gilles Gueguen 2003. This text from the website of the London Society of the NLS, at http://www.londonsociety-nls.org.uk. Permission to use material from this site must be sought from the LS-NLS. All rights reserved. Please include this portion of the text in any printed version of this paper. |
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