177270495 Zafiropoulos Markos Lacan and Levi Strauss or the Return to Freud 1951 1957

LACAN AND LÉVI-STRAUSS OR THE RETURN TO FREUD (1951–1957)

LACAN AND LÉVI-STRAUSS OR THE RETURN TO FREUD (1951–1957)

Markos Zafiropoulos Translated by John Holland

Published in 2010 by Karnac Books Ltd 118 Finchley Road London NW3 5HT Copyright © 2010 by Markos Zafiropoulos Originally published as Lacan et Lévi-Strauss ou le retour à Freud, 1951–1957 Presses Universitaires de France 2003

This book is supported by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as part of the Burgess programme run by the Cultural Department of the French Embassy in London. www.frenchbooknews.com CFAR Library Series Editors Anouchka Grose Darian Leader Alan Rowan The Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research CFAR was founded in 1985 with the aim of developing Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis in the UK. Lacan’s rereading and rethinking of Freud had been neglected in the Anglophone world, despite its important implications for the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. Today, this situation is changing, with a lively culture of training groups, seminars, conferences and publications. CFAR offers both introductory and advanced courses in psychoanalysis, as well as a clinical training programme in Lacanian psychoanalysis. It can provide access to Lacanian psychoanalysts working in the UK, and has links with Lacanian groups across the world. The CFAR Library aims to make classic Lacanian texts available in English for the first time, as well as publishing original research in the Lacanian field. www.cfar.org.uk ISBN-13: 978-1-85575-726-4 Typeset by Vikatan Publishing Solutions (P) Ltd., Chennai, India Printed in TK

CONTENTS

NOTE TO THE READER AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS INTRODUCTION • The young Lacan

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CHAPTER ONE The transcendence of the imaginary by the symbolic or the mirror stage and the symbolic function • Freud’s technique, transference from Lacan to Freud, and the post-Freudians’ resistance to Freud • The effectiveness of symbols: From Anna Freud to Claude Lévi-Strauss • From the mirror stage to the inverted bouquet CHAPTER TWO The subject receives from the Other his own message in an inverted form: An investigation • Presentation on Transference (1951) • “The Freudian Thing or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis” v

17 20 45 57

93 97 107

• 1953 • The Rome Report: “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” or testifying to a pass (September 1953)

117

129

CHAPTER THREE The name of the father, psychosis and phobia • From the Rat Man to little Hans: The question of the Name-of-the-Father • The institutional forms of the zero value • Object Relations: Book IV of the Seminar, 1956–1957

158 165 174

CONCLUSION • The doxa: Its ideals and the repression of Lévi-Strauss • Louis Althusser’s point of view • The essential: Lacan’s point of view • Thanks to Lévi-Strauss

193 199 205 206

POSTLUDE • Making the world incomplete • The lack in the other • Lacan as a critic of Lévi-Strauss • The sublime excommunicant

211 212 214 216

BIBLIOGRAPHY

219

INDEX

225

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NOTE TO THE READER AND ACKNOWL EDGEMENTS

To Claude Lévi-Strauss First, I would like to express my gratitude to Claude Lévi-Strauss, who gave generously of his time to read this manuscript, the very publication of which was in question. Lacan and Lévi-Strauss is not only an attempt to make a new contribution to the archaeology of Lacan’s thought. It is also an analysis of his return to Freud and seeks to show what the movement that has changed the history of psychoanalysis owes to Lévi-Strauss. I wanted to lead people to see the importance of this debt, which has, to a large extent, been repressed in psychoanalysis, although it has played a significant role in the metamorphosis of our field. Accepting that a large element of what we have inherited from Lacan comes to us from Lévi-Strauss leads us not so much to honour a debt, but simply to recognize it; in doing so, we can progress in our analysis of a filiation that a number of psychoanalysts depend on in their analysis of the symptom, whether in its individual or collective forms. The “imaginary filiations”, as Louis Althusser called them, have little to recommend them from this point of view. Yet what

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really conditions the symbolic effectiveness of recognizing this debt is surely that it has been welcomed by the one to whom we owe it; and this is all the more striking since he had not even been aware of how much we owe him. When he had finished reading the manuscript of this book, Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote to me that “Thanks to your numerous quotations, I have read more of Lacan than I had ever done before.” He also wrote that “I do think that I influenced him, since he himself said so several times, in texts that I had been unaware of and which you made available to me.” If we cite these lines of a private correspondence, it is not to abuse a confidence and to make coercive interpretations of works that can speak for themselves; on the contrary, it is to reduce and clarify the field of interpretations. Lévi-Strauss’ words do not testify he has finally seen that there is an agreement between his work and Lacan’s thought, since Lacan, in his own words, “remains hermetic” to him; rather, he is notifying us that he has received the message, which has made him aware, for the first time, of the place that his work occupies in Lacan’s thought and psychoanalysis. Yet once more, we need to be precise: to recognize this is neither to approve nor to disapprove of it. Although there needs to be a distinction between recognition and scientific evaluation, these words illustrate rather well the formula that, as we shall see, links the two men’s work in a counterpoint that is familiar to Lacan and is not foreign to the ear of Lévi-Strauss: “The sender receives his own message from the receiver in an inverted form.” I thank Alain Delrieu for the very attentive reading that he gave to this manuscript. Any reader of this book will profit from keeping in mind his own work, Lévi-Strauss, lecteur de Freud ( 1999). I also thank Claudine Guitton and René Sarfati, as well as everyone who helped me in the final editing of this manuscript.

INTRODUCTION

So, what’s the use of commentary? Yes, what’s the use of it. However, this “what’s the use” is already superfluous; whether we judge it barren or dangerous, the necessity of repeating can in no way escape us. Maurice Blanchot, De Kafka à Kafka Commenting on a text is like doing an analysis Jacques Lacan, Seminar I

The young Lacan In my previous work (2001), Lacan et les sciences sociales: le déclin du père 1938–19531, I showed that: 1.

Very early, Lacan elaborates an anthropology that is distinct from Freud’s.

1 This text, Lacan and the Social Sciences: The Decline of the Father, has not been translated into English.

1

2 2. 3.

LACAN AND LÉVI-STRAUSS OR THE RETURN TO FREUD (1951–1957)

His early anthropological references are to Durkheim. The state of the family group, its composition, its social integration, and the social value of its head, the father, determine, according to the Lacan of this period, the symptomatic avatars, and even the structural catastrophes of a subjective maturation that would develop under the primacy of three complexes: the weaning complex, the intrusion complex and the Oedipus complex.

Let us develop certain points quickly: 1.

2.

3.

In this perspective, the weaning complex dominates the first six months of the subject’s life; it is organized by the “maternal imago”, and is required for the survival of the child, whose motor skills are still uncoordinated. Its body is a jumble of bits and pieces, and it experiences anxiety because of this state. The intrusion complex—from six to 18 months—which is dominated by the imago of the counterpart (the brother), offers the subject the unifying image of his own body. This image comes from the other, can be seen in the mirror, and becomes the basis of an ideal image of himself: his ideal ego. This is the solution to the weaning complex. This intrusion complex is characterized both by a jubilation experienced by the subject when, in the mirror, he finally perceives himself as a unity, and also by a morbid aspect: the danger of narcissistic fascination, from which the Oedipus complex would allow him to escape. The Oedipus complex is dominated by the paternal imago—by this image of the “stranger” in the family—which is supposed finally to introduce the subject to alterity, the ego ideal, and social exchange.

Lacan wrote in 1938 that when the subject is brought up in a family that is incomplete—that has no father—s/he is likely to stagnate in the imaginary on the level of “libidinal structure”, that is, in terms of the libidinal investment of the body, but also on the level of “mental structure”, in the sense that this has in the myth of Narcissus, as an indication of death. The latter is

INTRODUCTION

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an insufficiency of life from which the world derived either the specular reflection, to which the image of the double is central, or the illusion of the image. We shall see that this world contains no Others (pp. 44–45). The world without a father is a world without Others. “The clinic shows that a group that is incomplete in this way can easily produce psychoses, and it is here that we find most of the folies à deux” (p. 49). Psychoses proliferate in the morbid atmosphere of a fatherless world, as do numerous pathologies that can be categorized in terms of the moment of fixation; fixation prevents the normative development mentioned above, which would lead the subject from the weaning to the intrusion complex, with a culmination in the Oedipal solution. Hence: 1.

2.

When there is a fixation on the weaning complex, which is dominated by the maternal imago and her mortifying seduction, what is dominant is the “death instinct” (or abandonment in the mother), which threatens to appear as: —

the mental anorexic’s hunger strike

—

certain drug addicts’ slow oral poisoning of themselves

—

the gastric neurotics’ “famine diet”

—

non-violent suicides.

When there is a fixation on the intrusion complex, which is dominated by the imago of the counterpart, there is a proliferation of psychoses, folies à deux, homosexual object choices, varieties of sexual fetishism, or hypochondriacal neuroses.

Lacan presents several versions of the Oedipus complex. a)

The Oedipus complex “in a good condition”, which was dominant before the “Viennese crisis”: the idealizing of the father is supposed to be sufficient to remove the subject from the morbid attachment to the mother. b) The Oedipus complex that was contemporary with the psychological crisis of children in fin de siècle Vienna: according to Lacan, they inherited a paternal imago that was in decline; this decline involved a first degradation of the complex and

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LACAN AND LÉVI-STRAUSS OR THE RETURN TO FREUD (1951–1957)

led to an excessive attachment to the mother, which was not compensated for by an idealization of the paternal figure; hence the emergence of the “fin de siècle neuroses” (obsessional neurosis, hysteria, etc.) and the discovery of the complex by Sigmund Freud, “a son of the Jewish patriarchy”, as well as the invention of psychoanalysis (Lacan, 1938). c) The 1938 version of the Oedipus complex, which was characterized by an aggravation of the father’s deficiency and sense of humiliation, and the correlative emergence of the “great contemporary neurosis”, as diagnosed by Lacan: its kernel was a character neurosis and it expressed itself in the neuroses of failure and destiny and in certain suicides. d) This 1938 version anticipates Lacan’s formulations of 19502, which are even more sombre. Since the decline of the paternal imago is even more pronounced—and thus further degrades the Oedipus complex—the families’ capacities to produce identifications are weakened. The latter leaves the sons in the grip of the “character kernel” of their neuroses, and—in an even more painful way—of the social and clinical morbidness of the psychopathies. According to the theory that Lacan held between 1938 and 1950, the symptom depends on what he would finally call “the social conditions of Oedipalism” (1950, p. 111). These conditions constitute the axis of a theory of subjective maturation that turns mainly around the paternal imago, an imago whose structuring value is directly correlated to the social value of the actual father and the social integration of the family itself.

Lacan’s distance from Freud This theoretical position is not Freudian, since for Freud, the value of the unconscious father is not open to debate and the Oedipus complex is universal. Yet Lacan, throughout this period—and even when

2

Jacques Lacan and Marcel Cénac, A Theoretical Introduction to the Functions of Psychoanalysis in Criminology. In: B. Fink (Trans.), Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English New York: Norton, 2006, pp. 102–122.

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he was already a skilled psychoanalyst—disagreed with Freud on a series of crucial doctrinal points: the universality of the Oedipus complex, the primacy of the father in the castration complex and thus in the formation of the law, the Freudian theory of primary narcissism, the formation of the super-ego and the ego ideal, etc. On the other hand, by borrowing from the sociology of Durkheim3 and Marcel Mauss, from American ethnologists (Malinowski4, Benedict5, Mead6) and also from several post-Freudians, most notably Melanie Klein7, as well as the work of Henri Wallon8 and Louis Bolk, Lacan sought solutions to what did not satisfy him in Freud’s work. During this period, he rethought the mirror stage9 and invented both

3

Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) was one of the founders of French sociology and the head of a school of thought. Starting in 1897, his disciples published their work in L année sociologique, the journal of his school, whose influence on French sociology was, and to some extent remains, considerable. In 1906, Durkheim was named the chair of the Sciences of Education at the Sorbonne, and his nephew, Marcel Mauss, taught at the École pratique des hautes études. 4 Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942) was an ethnologist and one of the founders of functionalism. His research on sexual behaviour was highly innovative. He worked especially on the Melanesians of the Trobriand Islands. See especially Sex and Repression in Savage Society (2001). 5 Ruth Fulton Benedict (1887–1948) came to ethnology after studying English literature and was an assistant to Franz Boas. Her originality was to consider cultures to have a specific and large-scale personality. 6 Margaret Mead (1901–1978). A student of Boas and Benedict, she convinced Boas to allow her to work with adolescents in Samoa. She made several journeys to Polynesia, which provided her with the material for several works that were very critical of the ideals of her country, the United States. 7 Melanie Klein (1882–1960) was an English psychoanalyst who was born in Vienna to a Polish Jewish father and Slovak Jewish mother. The family set itself up in Budapest, where she became a member of the Psychoanalytic Society in 1919. Analysed first by Sandor Ferenczi, she moved to Berlin and undertook a second analysis with Karl Abraham. Later she moved to London. Her work constitutes a major contribution to child analysis and produced the Klein school of object relations theory. 8 Henri Wallon (1879–1962). Henri Wallon entered the École normale supérieure, where he prepared for the aggregation in philosophy. Becoming a doctor of medicine in 1908, he served as a military physician during the war and acquired neurological experience, which enabled him to interpret his observations of children. He became director of studies at the École pratique des hautes études, then a professor at the Collège de France, where he held the chair in child psychology and education. 9 Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function” (Écrits, 1950, pp. 75–81).

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a theory of the social conditions of Oedipalism10 and a completely new conception of the super-ego. All these inventions enabled him to analyse the clinical avatars of the human being’s subjection to the law; also, more fundamentally, they helped him resolve the anthropological enigma of the transition from nature to culture.11 If, from 1938 to 1950, Lacan kept his distance from certain significant aspects of Freudian theory, that does not mean that he was not Freudian. His research aimed at resolving what seemed to him to be the “crucial problems of psychoanalysis”12: problems not only of the individual clinic but also of the clinic of the social. In undertaking research that sought to throw light on both social formations—and even the emergence of history—and the individual subject’s unconscious formations, Lacan’s epistemology was perfectly Freudian. In order to be completely clear, let me repeat that from 1938 to 1950, Lacan was thoroughly Freudian in terms of the origin and sources of his method, even if he was not always so in his relation to a series of concepts, about which he had the honesty to say that he disagreed with Freud. It is a fact that Lacan, during his “Durkheimian period”, promoted a socio-historical relativism concerning subjective structuring, which went against Freud’s universalism; it is also the case that he worked—against a background of general indifference to his thought on the part of both psychoanalysts and ethnologists—to throw light on the most crucial anthropological enigma: that of the transition from nature to culture. Certain commentators on my previous work have claimed that I was promoting a “sociological” reading of Lacan, while others were disturbed by the discussion of the intellectual gap that separated Lacan, during his Durkheimian period, from Freud. Others, finally, were shocked by the idea that the diagnosis of the humiliated father had sources not only in sociology but in the works of Charles Maurras and Paul Claudel; they were disturbed by the idea that Lacan did not object to calling on a political and religious father who was incompatible with the Freudian ethic. The project of analysing

10 See “A Theoretical Introduction to the Functions of Psychoanalysis in Criminology”. 11 See Lacan et les sciences sociales, pp. 18 ff. 12 This was the title of book XII of the seminar (1965, unpublished).

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these theoretical sources involves the development of a critical archaeology of Lacan’s work; it involves showing what both his anthropology and his clinical research owed to the social scientists of his time and evaluating and then rejecting the elements of his research that are now obsolete. I must therefore repeat: •

•

•

Yes, Durkheim’s theory of the contraction of the family and its clinical corollary, the decline of the paternal imago, are scientifically obsolete. Yes, it is necessary to understand the law of the contraction of the family—which Durkheim invented in 1892 at the age of 34—if one is to understand the theory that Lacan developed, at the age of 37, concerning the decline of the paternal imago, the degradation of the Oedipus complex and the consequent discovery of psychoanalysis, and the structuring of the neurosis. Durkheim’s work is also crucial for comprehending Lacan’s development between 1938 and 1950. Yes, it is necessary to understand the research of the Cambridge School, as well as the research that confirmed it both historically and ethnologically, in order to detach ourselves from what must be called the infantile theory of the decline of the father, a theory that has handicapped the analysis of everything it was supposed to account for.13

13 A modernized version of this obsolete theory is expressed in a series of very different, but equally catastrophic, diagnoses made by certain clinicians who have followed certain essayists in almost compulsively mapping out a general “desymbolization” that supposedly characterizes post-modernity. What these authors have not seen is that the societies in question have been producing modern mythologies, which have been analysed by the specialists in these mythologies. See for example, the work of Bertrand Méheust and Denis Duclos on the particularly rich production of myths in the United States, the homeland of post-modernity. It would also be profitable to consult the multidisciplinary analyses of myths first produced at a conference of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in November 2002 and collected in Zafiropoulos, M., et Assoun, P.-L., L’Anthropologie psychanalytique, 2002. If it is really understood that the theory of the decline of the father is itself a myth—one not reserved to Western societies—we would not be surprised that it is precisely those who experience it most intensely—or those who believe it most sincerely—who are the least able to take stock of it as a myth. Enclosed within their myth, they are blind to the vigour and the power of the endless number of forms

8 • • •

LACAN AND LÉVI-STRAUSS OR THE RETURN TO FREUD (1951–1957)

Yes, in 1950, Lacan abandons the reference to Durkheim and his own theory of the paternal imago and its decline. No, we can no longer use this theory to account for the discovery of psychoanalysis or modern malaise. Yes, until 1950, Lacan diverged significantly from Freud on a series of concepts; yes, not to want—or to be able—to see this gap is to prohibit oneself from understanding what constitutes the source of his research and what distinguishes his texts from Freud’s and his desire as a psychoanalyst from Freud’s own.

taken by the symbolic function in Western societies. This function is changeable and polymorphous, but that does not mean that it has deserted our world, except for the neighbourhoods of post-modernists, who are in a good location for perceiving what is missing for everyone else. As for the idea that this desymbolization of the world can be observed from analysts’ offices, we cannot go along with it, since our own analytic practice has endlessly shown us the currency of the Freudian discovery. See Markos Zafiropoulos, in Assoun, P.-L., & Zafiropoulos, M. (Eds.) (2001). Les solutions sociales de l’inconscient,. Indeed, we find it difficult to see how psychoanalysts could make precise diagnoses of subjects whose psychic economy would prohibit any analysis. It seems more heuristic to work on the social evolution of symbolic forms and on the effects of the differential subjectivizing of these forms—forms of the Other. In our opinion, it is better to do this than to repeat endlessly that, not content with having deserted heaven, the Other is now deserting the world. What is in question here is a sort of ritual for reinforcing the belief in the underlying disappearance of something that can take various forms: the paternal function, rituals, myths. Indeed, we would say nothing against this myth if it had not led too often to an erroneous socio-clinical orientation. Finally, we shall see at the end of this work that what ensures the success of this myth—or of this obsolete sociological thesis—in the Lacanian psychoanalytic field is nothing other than Lacan’s choice to deprive this community of the 1964 seminar on the Names-of-the-Father, in which he had intended to analyse what “in Freud, was never analysed”. He continues by saying that “I had reached precisely this point when, by a strange coincidence, I was put into the position of having to give up my seminar.” “What I had to say on the Names-of-the-Father had no other purpose, in fact, than to put in question the origin, to discover by what privilege Freud’s desire was able to find the entrance into the field of experience he designates as the unconscious. “It is absolutely essential that we should go back to this origin if we wish to put analysis on its feet” (Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 12). At the moment of his excommunication, Lacan voluntarily left a hole in the (Freudian) analysis of the origin of psychoanalysis, and consequently, he left the door open to the eternal return of the myth of the decline of the father, which he had himself used in 1938 in order to account for the origin of psychoanalysis. Since he did not put psychoanalysis “on its feet” in 1964, it is not surprising that we still sometimes find it standing on its head.

INTRODUCTION

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Finally, it is to forbid oneself from seeing the most powerful mainsprings of his return to the texts of the dead father of psychoanalysis. If, out of transferential piety, we imagine that Lacan was always Freudian, how can we account for the epistemological constraints that led to his return to Freud?

The return to Freud I have mentioned the gaps between Lacan’s and Freud’s texts precisely in order to throw light on the paths by which he returned to Freud and to avoid any direct use of the notion that Lacan, in rejecting some of Freud’s ideas, repressed them. I am avoiding the latter notion, even if the analytic register requires us to think of the return (of the repressed) as the repressed itself. Was Lacan’s return to Freud determined by the elements of the father’s speech that had, until then, been repressed by his heirs? This is what we shall see. To make of this return a simple institutional issue would be to show a sociological blindness that is best avoided; I do not advise anyone to read Lacan in ignorance of his anthropological guides, whether they are Durkheim from 1938 to 1950 or Lévi-Strauss, whose influence on the return to Freud first became central in 1951. Concerning the notion of the father, the central idea of psychoanalysis, I showed briefly in my earlier work what Lacan’s invention of the Name-of-the-Father owed to Lévi-Strauss. Now I shall re-examine, not every element of Lacan’s work that is influenced by Lévi-Strauss, but the aspects of the return to Freud that cannot be understood without seeing the transference of knowledge from anthropology to psychoanalysis. Can I refer to transference in this context? Yes, for this return to Freud is, first, a subjective rectification of Lacan’s relation to knowledge, and especially to Freud’s knowledge. My research will investigate the period of Lacan’s return to Freud, after his Durkheimian period. I have already shown how, until that time, he had disagreed with Freud about various issues, and especially about the father. Now, I shall examine the rectification of Lacan’s transferential relation to Freud, a rectification that I shall consider as the most

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important cause of this return; I shall also examine the element of transference to Lévi-Strauss. The thesis of this work is simple: Lacan returns to Freud by means of Lévi-Strauss. My intention is not to examine whether this return was well-founded, but simply—and this is already a lot—to retrace his itinerary and to draw up a theoretical map of it.

Method I have chosen to structure the analysis of Lacan’s return to Freud by recalling, first of all, how, from the beginning of his seminar, he placed himself at the heart of the analytic experience; in his first seminar, he examined Freud’s technical papers14, thus demonstrating a strong concern for the clinic. Since my readers are not necessarily familiar with psychoanalytic thought, whenever I discuss Lacan’s disagreement with the post-Freudians about the direction of the treatment, I shall present the passages from Freud that Lacan commented upon before giving my own reading of the seminar. In this way, the reader will be able to make his/her own judgement immediately. This is an important point, for if Lacan’s return to Freud is, first of all, his own, it was also undertaken by the French analysts who had followed his critical reading of both Freud and the works of various Anglo-American analysts. Among the latter were Otto Fenichel15, Anna Freud16, and Annie Reich17, whose work was concerned with the crucial

14 I shall retain the numbering of Lacan’s seminars used in their published versions, despite an awareness that he gave seminars before 1953–1954. In 1975, Lacan himself chose to publish the seminar on Freud’s technical papers, as edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, as Book I of the seminar. 15 Otto Fenichel (1897–1948). Born in Vienna, he became involved in psychoanalysis in 1918, undertaking a first analysis with Paul Federn and then a second with Sandor Rado in Berlin. Participating in the Freudian left, he tried, despite the arrival of Nazism, to maintain his Marxist and psychoanalytic activities. He finally left for the United States, where his work became a crucial reference for American psychoanalysts. 16 Anna Freud (1895–1982). Born in Vienna, Anna Freud was Freud’s sixth child. Analysed by her own father, she devoted herself, first of all, to child analysis, but also published Freud’s works, directed the new Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute and finally set herself up, especially in opposition to Melanie Klein, as the guardian of Freudian orthodoxy. She moved to London in 1938 with the rest of the Freud family. 17 Annie Reich (1902–1971). Born in Vienna to a Jewish family, Annie Reich was the daughter of a feminist activist. After studying medicine, she became interested in

INTRODUCTION

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question of resistance and whose theoretical conception of the ego determined how they treated this agency in transference. Should the analystally him/herself with the ego or should it be considered, instead, as the seat of illusion and repression? What is resistance to analysis? What resists? What technique and what authority should be marshalled in order to ensure the progress of the treatment? Freud had discussed all these questions in his own work, but they were re-thought by the postFreudians and Lacan examined their deviations in his seminar. From this point of view, Lacan’s position in relation to Freud must be seen clearly; his understanding of his own distance from Freud—which is a sign of his honesty—enables him to analyse how far the other post-Freudians had moved away from Freud and how heterodox they had become. As a consequence, his commentary and his analysis of Freud’s texts became unbearable, as we shall see, to many of his peers; for this reason, after 1953, he was no longer welcome in the International Psychoanalytic Association, which finally expelled him in 1964. Lacan’s research is thus related to certain institutional conditions and group effects, but it is also necessary to understand how Lacan understood his own responses to the institutional situation during the period that began in 1953. In that year, Lacan was separated from the IPA and took part in forming the Société française de psychanalyse (French Psychoanalytic Society). What led to his theoretical inventions was not a quest for power and a wish to dominate the French analytic scene, its institutions, and its sources of income. Lacan always interpreted his relations to institutions—here, his exclusion by the IPA—in terms of the logic of the same “toolbox” that had allowed him to locate himself in analytic experience. This is the case for both 1953 and 1964. Therefore I shall examine how the events of 1964 can retroactively shed light on those of 1953.

The excommunication Let us jump ahead ten years. At the end of his seminar on anxiety (Seminar X, 1962–1963), Lacan distinguishes between the gaze and

psychoanalysis and married Wilhelm Reich. She lived in Prague until 1938, then emigrated to the United States and became a member of the New York Psychoanalytical Society.

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the father’s voice, and then announces that the seminar of 1964 will be devoted to the theme of the Names-of-the-Father. Then, in 1964, he was excluded from the IPA. What did he do? Did he simply continue and affirm his legitimacy as a psychoanalyst and the value of his teaching for the training of analysts? No, he publicly raised the question of whether he is authorized to transmit psychoanalysis and decides to discuss the “fundamentals of psychoanalysis” rather than the Names-of-the-Father (Seminar XI, p. 1). He does so because he has to assume responsibility for his “excommunication” and goes back to the fundamental concepts— the unconscious, repetition, transference, the drive—in order to ask a question that is unavoidable for him: How can a psychoanalyst, whose teaching has been proscribed by Freud’s own association, be authorized to teach the foundations of psychoanalysis and to train analysts? Deprived of the group’s guarantee and forbidden to transmit his teaching, Lacan cannot continue without going back to what the group, in giving its guarantee, had assumed that it had resolved: the delicate question of the conditions that enable the analyst to practise. In this situation, Lacan does not avoid the problem and asks the only good questions, those that could not escape a serious person in this situation: What is the analyst’s desire? What must there be in the analyst’s desire for it to operate in a correct way? (Seminar XI, p. 9).

In 1964, this return to the fundamental concepts concerns the principles—the texts and Freud’s founding desire. It confirms that Lacan’s way of responding to the separation from the analytic institution is to turn to the “monuments” of the founder’s speech—the fundamental concepts—and to question less his own institutional position than his relation to Freud’s speech and desire. Instead of denying that he has been excommunicated, he takes what has happened to him into account and responds by working publicly on Freudian concepts and the analyst’s desire. Let me be even more explicit: in 1964, Lacan occupies the place of the person who has been excluded (he says “excommunicated”, “proscribed”). He thus incarnates for the group the object that is not in the right place: the object (a), the object that he has just been theorizing.

INTRODUCTION

13

The splitting of 1953 Let us return now to 1953, where we begin the second part of our research; this moment has the same epistemological logic as the crisis of 1964. In 1953, Lacan locates himself both clinically and in relation to the group by means of a new version of the mirror stage: the experiment of the inverted bouquet. In this optical montage, the subject can only see his image if he is suitably placed or named by the Other of the symbolic function. Let us say that this Other is the father. The 1953 separation from the IPA did not trigger the same kind of response as the excommunication of 1964, since Lacan had actually started his return to Freud in 1951; furthermore, he had himself indicated that it was because of this return that he had become unbearable to the Société psychanalytique de Paris (Paris Psychoanalytic Society, SPP). No longer seeing his image in the mirror of the IPA, he maintains his analysis of and with the speech of the founding father in order to understand his distance from it, to rectify his position, and to guide both his own generation and his students in a return to Freud. This was his position within the Société française de psychanalyse (French Psychoanalytic Society, SFP), which he wanted to bring back into the IPA. In analysing his distance from Freud, he also analyses the deviations of Freud’s Anglo-American heirs, in all the diversity of their practice and theories, a fragmentation of their professional body that hardly conformed to Freud’s desire. If we apply the theory of the inverted vase, which I shall present later, we can say that this fragmentation, which has been recognized by the heirs themselves, testifies to their own distance from—or repression of—Freud’s speech; according to Lacan’s perspective and the optical model, this explains the lack of clarity of their clinical work. What would distinguish the French situation from what prevailed in the English-speaking countries is that no one who lived in the latter tried to reveal what motivated the variability and lack of clarity of their analytic practices; these are the marks of the catastrophic repression that characterize their relation to the speech and desire of the founder of psychoanalysis. What distinguishes 1953 from 1964—apart from the stylistic differences of these returns, which indicate different theoretical presuppositions—is that in 1953, Lacan had not given up trying to

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be a part of the IPA, just as he had not yet ceased to believe that the image of the (professional) body of Freud’s heirs could achieve a new wholeness. Therefore, from 1953 to 1963, at the hospital of SainteAnne, he gave a seminar that was “addressed to psycho-analysts” (Seminar XI, p. 1). Starting in 1964, the École normale supérieure (ENS) and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) provided the framework for the seminar, which he no longer addressed only to psychoanalysts, since he had given up believing in the unified image of an analytic group in the IPA.

Lacan and Lévi-Strauss On 15 January 1964, Lacan began his seminar, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, in the position of someone who has been excommunicated, but also at a point of intersection between the teaching of philosophy (ENS) and the social sciences (EHESS). Claude Lévi-Strauss was present at this inaugural session. Can we see his presence as a confirmation that Lacan is speaking to a wider audience and of the persistence of the bond between the two men that had been forged in 1949? Perhaps. In any case, and despite the fact that Lévi-Strauss attended Lacan’s seminar only once, his research had held a crucial place for Lacan since 1949, and Lacan’s first return to Freud—during the 1950s—cannot be understood without relating it to the texts of Lévi-Strauss. They provided Lacan with a style for reading Freud’s work—the style of the return to Freud and the return to Freud’s desire—at a point of acute crisis, both theoretical and institutional, for psychoanalysis. Lacan was hoping to effect a metamorphosis of psychoanalysis. In the second part of this book, we shall see how, in the series of texts that accompanied the first seminar of 1953–1954—Presentation on Transference (Écrits, pp. 176–185), The Neurotic’s Individual Myth (1953), the Rome Report (Écrits, pp. 197–268), etc.—Lévi-Strauss’ work infiltrates Lacan’s research, especially when the latter concerns the theory of the unconscious subject, as well as his readings of Freud’s case histories: Dora, the Rat Man, etc. Then, in the third part, I shall examine Lacan’s final readings of the case histories and his structuralist accounts of the psychoses (Seminar III) and phobia (Seminar IV). Such advances would have been unthinkable without both his interest in Lévi-Strauss’ texts and the invention of the theory of the

INTRODUCTION

15

Name-of-the-Father; in my opinion, his formulations concerning the latter also owe a great debt to Lévi-Strauss. I shall examine the clinical scope of this theory. At the end of the third part, I shall have finished this instalment of my continuing research on Lacan and the social sciences. This research seeks to provide the reader with a way to understand Lacan’s work and the sources of his thought, which he often does not make explicit. In order to make my conclusions clear, I shall proceed by commenting on the movement of Lacan’s research and what is at stake in it for psychoanalysis; I shall also show what this movement owes to the social sciences.

Situating THIS research By failing to recognize Lacan’s Durkheimian stage, readers have not been able to see the logic that made his return to Freud necessary in 1951, especially in relation to the crucial question of the father. Thus many commentaries on Lacan’s return to Freud begin by considering only the texts written after 1950, all of which date from the return itself. Likewise, readers who are unaware of Durkheim’s influence on Lacan will not see what is behind the abandonment of all references to the father of French sociology, in favour of Lévi-Strauss. These two insufficiencies are connected and, even today, the influence of the social sciences on psychoanalysis is largely neglected, as is the fact that both Freud and Lacan treated psychoanalysis precisely as a social science. If my work seeks to lift this epistemological repression, it is in order to bring to light both the “forgotten” part of the symbolic network of the texts that precede Lacan’s return—a part without which this return cannot be understood—and the cause of the return. To do so will enable us to get our bearings in the “Freudian thing”. If we really want to understand the return to Freud, we must follow what Lacan said in 1957, the final year of the period that we are analysing in this book (1951–1957): [It] would be absurd to isolate our field completely and to refuse to see what, in it, is not analogous but directly connected, in gear, with a reality that is accessible to us in other disciplines, other human sciences. Establishing these connections seems to

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me to be indispensable if we are to situate our field and even simply to re-find ourselves in it (Seminar IV).

In the conclusion of this work, by following Althusser, I shall interpret the repression of Lévi-Strauss’ importance by readers of Lacan. These readers proffer to us a doxa that idealizes Lacan’s philosophical references excessively; one of the effects of the latter is to “set aside”—in the sense of a Verdrängung the contribution of the social sciences to Lacan’s teaching, his speech and his desire.

CHAPTER ONE

The transcendence of the imaginary by the symbolic or the mirror stage and the symbolic function

A

s we shall see later, we can agree with Lacan that his return to Freud was publicly inaugurated by his Presentation on Transference, which was given at the congress of Romancespeaking psychoanalysts in 1951, while he was still a member of the SPP and the IPA. This presentation is the first of the readings that Lacan will give of Freud’s case histories between 1951 and 1957. Here he examines the case of Dora, the young Viennese woman of 18, who was divided between her perception of herself—which was on the male side—and her place as a woman, which she owed to the automatism of the symbolic function that determined the group to which she belonged. In discussing this case, Lacan immediately stresses the epistemological axis that orients his return to Freud. He does so in order to account for the way in which the subject is divided between the imaginary register, which founds her first identifications—those of the mirror stage—and the symbolic. In the latter register, Lacan locates the Oedipus complex and, more generally, the symbolic function, which he borrows from French anthropology and which includes this complex. This epistemological axis, imaginary-symbolic, is to a large extent co-extensive with the one that had oriented his research 17

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during his Durkheimian period, when he raised the father to the level of a familial operator, one who was able to extract the child from the imaginary capture; through his intervention, the child ceases to be grasped by the maternal imago (the weaning complex) and then by the brother (the intrusion complex). During the return to Freud, what goes beyond and organizes the imaginary register are the rules of the symbolic function, rather than the actual father. In discussing the structuring of the unconscious subject— and thus of its symptoms—Lacan now rejects Durkheim’s laws and adopts, instead, the laws of speech and language, where the symbolic organization of societies, and thus of the family, is located; he adopts them in a structural form that had been completely recast by Claude Lévi-Strauss who, since his return to France from the United States, and since his 1947 thesis, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, had thoroughly turned the social sciences upside down. We can consider the return to Freud as a moment of mutation or of metaphor, one that, in terms of Lacan’s clinic, made Lévi-Strauss’ version of the rules of the symbolic function prevail over Durkheim’s version of family life. This is precisely the subject of our research: Lacan’s theoretical presuppositions, the consequences that they had on his return to Freud, and the metamorphosis of Lacan’s work. As we shall see, it is in his return to Freud that Lacan situates the cause—in the strong sense of the term—of the painful experiences that led him, on 16 June 1953, to resign from his position as president of the SPP. As early as 1951, Lacan claims that something in Freud’s speech, by returning in his own mouth, aroused the fear of the other practitioners: Whereas Freud assumed responsibility for showing us that there are illnesses that speak (unlike Hesiod, for whom the illnesses sent by Zeus come over men in silence) and for making us hear the truth of what they say, it seems that this truth inspires more fear in the practitioners who perpetuate this technique as its relation to a historical moment and an institutional crisis becomes clearer (Presentation on Transference, p. 177).

Despite this sense of isolation, which would soon make his very existence itself unbearable to the group, Lacan continued his reading of Freud’s text within the framework of the SPP until his resignation in 1953.

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Next, at Sainte-Anne, in the department of his friend Jean Delay18, Lacan would continue “in opposition to everyone” his return to Freud by analysing Freud’s technical papers. It is with this seminar that we shall begin to analyse Lacan’s work, since the sessions of 1953–1954 were published in 1975 as Book I of the seminar, under a title that has been translated into English as Freud’s Technical Papers. We shall respect Lacan’s wish to count this as the first of his 24 seminars, even if, as we have said, his return to Freud dates from 1951. We are going to begin the first part of our project by reading Seminar I, which Lacan began in autumn 1953, after his resignation from the SPP: after the test that made him, in his own words, a psychoanalyst who was endowed with a “kind of faith”. This faith was based particularly on the fact that “I know better and better what it is mine to say about an experience which I have only these last years been able to recognize and solely thereby to master.” Because of this, he has become “a man more convinced of his duties and his destiny”19. It is in a state of certainty that Lacan begins his new readings of Freud’s texts. Thus Lacan, whose technique had led him to be thrown out of Freud’s association, chose to continue his work by giving a commentary on Freud’s papers on technique, a commentary that led him to the heart of the psychoanalytic clinic, and which had provided the “coordinates” of his offence and the motives for the accusations brought against him. We are now going to see what this reading of Freud’s technical papers owes to a renewal of the questioning that had begun with his “discovery” of the mirror stage (1936). He will now examine how the structuring of the unconscious subject takes place at the conjunction between the imaginary and the symbolic. What is new for Lacan is not such questioning itself, but rather his response to the radical changes brought about by the use of the symbolic function, which he had just encountered in the recent work of Lévi-Strauss. Returning to Freud’s 18

Jean Delay (1907–1987), a French psychiatrist and student of Pierre Janet. He was analysed by Edouard Pichon, a friend of Jacques Lacan’s. He became a member of the Académie française in 1959 and was the pre-eminent representative of the postwar school of biological psychiatry. He was the author of The Youth of André Gide. Lacan commented on this work in Écrits, pp. 623–644. 19 In Letter to Rudolph Loewenstein.I In: Television/A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, pp. 64, 65. We shall examine this letter in the second part of this book.

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technical papers, Lacan will show what both Freud’s technique and the unconscious formations—dreams, parapraxes, symptoms—owe to the use of the rules of language and speech. He will also show what had been abandoned by Freud’s heirs, whose technique had tended to stagnate in the dual register of the imaginary; this stagnation hindered the analysis and the resolution of resistance, at a time when resistance was an important theme of debate among psychoanalysts. In examining his treatment of resistance in the 1953 seminar, we must consult Freud’s own texts, in order to see his own point of view on the subject and point out what is decisive in his papers on technique. The first year of Lacan’s seminar20 went from November 1953 to July 1954 and it is very much the contemporary of the questions and the intellectual activity—as well as the publishing activity—of its time.

I. Freud’s technique, transference from Lacan to Freud, and the post-Freudians’ resistance to Freud Freud’s technique Freud and resistance In the lecture given to the College of Physicians in Vienna on 12 December 1904 and entitled On Psychotherapy, Freud dissolves the common confusion between psychoanalytic technique and hypnotic suggestion by distinguishing their relation to resistance. Suggestion conceals from us all insight into the play of mental forces; it does not permit us, for example, to recognize the resistance with which the patient clings to his disease and thus even fights against his own recovery; yet it is this phenomenon of resistance which alone (my emphasis) makes it possible to understand his behaviour in daily life.21

Freud’s abandonment of hypnotic suggestion, far from being the product of a “liberal or libertarian affect” as Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen suggests in The Freudian Subject, was actually motivated by the fact

20 21

Jacques Lacan, Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954. Sigmund Freud, On Psychotherapy, 1904, p. 261.

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that hypnotic suggestion prevented him from seeing resistance, “which alone makes it possible to understand [the patient’s] behaviour in daily life”. Freud did not refuse suggestion (only) because of ethical objections to the hypnotic method; he rejected it on scientific grounds because it was technically incompatible with the exploration of resistance. The second lecture, The Future Prospects of Psycho-analytic Therapy, dates from 1910 and was intended for a different public: those who attended the second psychoanalytic congress in Nuremberg. In this lecture, Freud says that analysts have made considerable progress in understanding their patients’ unconscious and are therefore better able now to confront resistance. Analysts are no longer content simply to urge the patient to pursue his free associations, since they now provide “the intellectual help which makes it easier for him to overcome the resistances between conscious and unconscious”22. The knowledge acquired in the course of analytic experience makes treating patients easier. Freud now seeks to bring out the “structure of the neuroses”, since such knowledge will make it easier to foil the patients’ resistance. Lifting this resistance is not only a part of Freud’s strategy in treating each individual patient; it is also connected with a knowledge of the structural organization of the neuroses, which, when taken into account in transference, will enable what is opposed to the progress of the analysis to be weakened, even if it is precisely by having defeated the resistance appearing in each individual treatment that the common structure of the neuroses—and their modalities—can appear. In other words, the case-by-case approach allows us to reach the general character of the psychic structures—or complexes—and this systematic knowledge, in turn, helps the analyst in treating each individual case. “… Our work is aimed directly at finding out and overcoming the ‘resistances’, and we can justifiably rely on the complexes coming to light without difficulty as soon as the resistances have been recognized and removed” (Future Prospects, p. 144). Once the screen of resistance has been removed, the kernel of the experience should be isolated. Yet not all the resistances have the

22

Sigmund Freud, The Future Prospects of Psycho-analytic Therapy, 1910, p. 142.

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same character; in noting this, Freud asks his colleagues to classify them and to see the way in which, for men, “the most important resistances in the treatment seem to be derived from the fathercomplex and to express themselves in fear of the father [and] in defiance of the father” (Future Prospects, p. 144). Thus Freud goes back to the question of how to treat the father-complex.

The father-complex: The motor of resistance Situating the father-complex as one of the specific motors of resistance to analysis, Freud asks what authority is necessary to defeat this obstacle. In other words, Freud wonders what kind of authority the analyst should have in order to vanquish the resistances linked to the father-complex, especially if this authority is not that of suggestion. Before answering this question, Freud defines the scope of what must be defeated: “Only very few civilized people are capable of existing without reliance on others or are even capable of coming to an independent opinion. You cannot exaggerate the intensity of people’s inner lack of resolution and craving for authority” (Future Prospects, p. 146). There are no illusions in this diagnosis. The need for authority always seeks a way to be satisfied, and it motivates the resistances— just as it does repression—that are required by the father’s heirs: the social authorities whose power of suggestion hobbles analytic efforts. According to these lines, the father-complex and the need for authority are the main motors of resistance; they thus foreshadow the later texts of Freudian anthropology, such as The Future of an Illusion and Civilisation and its Discontents23; particularly in the latter work, Freud shows that the nostalgia for the father is a source of dependency and is the decisive mainspring of illusions, which are always more or less religious and which impede the progress of truth.

The need for authority, the power of truth, the analyst’s choice In 1910, in relation to the father-complex, which feeds the resistance to psychoanalysis on the levels of both the individual case and the social, Freud says that the analyst must increase his authority.

23

Both texts are found in Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol XXI.

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What is to be expected in this situation? First, there will be a long wait, for from the perspective of the social authorities, psychoanalysts are subject to two charges: • •

They are accused of damaging ideals by destroying illusions By showing how the social order is responsible for neuroses, they are protesting against it.

It is not obvious that there can be an alliance with the social authorities. Nevertheless, Freud assures us that “The harshest truths are heard and recognized at last, after the interests they have injured and the emotions they have roused have exhausted their fury” (Future Prospects, p. 147). “We must be able to wait” (Future Prospects, p. 148), and it would be easier to treat patients if analysts’ authority were less contested socially; the resistances would not be backed up by collective illusions, and truth could emerge more easily. Freud’s prophecy aims far beyond the clinic of the individual case, since it suggests that such treatment would be facilitated if the social authorities gave up their virulent attitude towards psychoanalysis; the social progress of truth, in turn, would weaken both the causes and the morbid mainsprings of the neuroses. Freud sketches out for his companions the scope of his analytic project and what could be expected if unconscious truth were brought to light collectively: “The success which the treatment can have with the individual must occur equally with the community. Sick people will not be able to let their various neuroses become known—their anxious over-tenderness which is meant to conceal their hatred, their agoraphobia which tells of disappointed ambition, their obsessive actions which represent self-reproaches for evil intentions and precautions against them—if all their relatives and every stranger from whom they wish to conceal their mental processes know the general meaning of such symptoms, and if they themselves know that in the manifestations of their illness they are producing nothing that other people cannot instantly interpret. The effect, however, will not be limited to the concealment of the symptoms which, incidentally, it is often impossible to carry out; for this necessity for concealment destroys the use of being ill. Disclosure of the secret will have attacked, at its most sensitive point, the ‘aetiological equation’ from which neuroses arise” (Future Prospects, p. 148–9).

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We see once again that Freud’s ambition does not lie in a clinic of the individual case, but aims instead at the masses; Lacan reaffirms this to his disciples, in order that, in the days before their second congress, they will not forget this part of their collective adventure. What should we retain from this? First, that to reach the goal—the “aetiological equation” of the neuroses—Freud is not really counting on reinforcing the institutional authority of psychoanalysis or on obtaining more social recognition; instead, he is betting that the secret that motivates neuroses will come out into the open and that illusions will be weakened. He is also wagering that the resistances that, especially in men, come from the father-complex, will be weakened. The power that Freud counts on to reach the heart of the neuroses is less that of an institution than of truth. The question of the collective, once again, is not so much an extension of his clinical practice, but is instead active in the very aetiology of the neuroses; therefore, illusions, the suggestions made by the powers that be, and the chronic need for authority are met with in the analyst’s office as well as in the rest of the social field. The year in which Freud made these statements, 1910, was crucial in the history of the analytic movement. On 30 March of that year, Freud, along with Sandor Ferenczi24 had founded the first international Freudian association (the Internationale psychoanalytische Vereinigung). This group would keep this name until 1936, when it became the IPA. If it is necessary to choose between the authority of truth and that of the analytic institution, the Freudian perspective would choose the symbolic power of unconscious truth, which alone is able to reduce both neuroses and the collective sense of discontent. In these texts, the psychoanalytic institution is a secondary base of analytic power. The true master of the Freudian orientation is the unconscious text and the truth that lies in the symptom: “We must not forget that the analytic relationship is based on a love of truth—that is, on a recognition of reality—and that it precludes any kind of sham or deceit.”25

24

Sandor Ferenczi (1873–1933). He was born in Hungary into a family of emigrant Polish Jews. Analysed by Freud, he devoted himself to the psychoanalytic cause. With Freud, he founded the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1910 and created the Budapest Psychoanalytic Society in 1912. A member of the secret committee beginning in 1913, he participated in directing the Freudian movement. In 1919, he started to try to reform psychoanalytic technique and invented the “active technique” before returning to the theory of trauma. He was Freud’s favourite disciple. 25 Sigmund Freud, Analysis Terminable and Interminable, 1937, p. 248.

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At this point, I have said enough to make it possible to see why Lacan, in his return to Freud, and particularly in his seminar that addressed Freud’s papers on technique in 1953–4 (Seminar I), struggles with the outcome of resistance, the resistance that, if progress is to occur, forces the analyst to choose which authority to rely on; it must be the authority of the ego or of truth. Two paths, two lines: according to Lacan, the practitioner who seeks to use the register of the ego to go beyond the resistances is departing from Freud’s desire; s/he leads the analysis into an impasse by ensuring that it will stagnate in the imaginary. Now, it is precisely by deciphering the symbolic envelope of the symptom that Freud’s desire can operate. Yet for Lacan in 1953, who is Freud?

Lacan’s transference to Freud The inauguration of the return to Freud coincides with the beginning of the institutional splitting that would lead Lacan—as we shall see later—to leave the analytic association that Freud founded in 1910. We need to examine what he says about his relation to Freud during this period and what makes Freud’s speech authoritative for him, while also asking: What, for him, gives its authority to the Freudian discovery? In the Freudian field, one of the names for authority is the superego. In the first session of the seminar (that of 18 November 1953, which ended on 7 July 1954), Lacan mentions the super-ego in order to rethink it by linking it, not—as he had done from 1938 to 1950—to the first imaginary identifications of the mirror stage26, but to language: The super-ego is a law deprived of meaning, but one which nevertheless only sustains itself by language. If I say you turn to the right, it’s to allow the other to bring his language into line with mine. I think of what goes through his head when I speak to him. This attempt to find an agreement constitutes the communication specific to language. This you is so fundamental that it arises before consciousness. Censorship, for example, which is intentional, nevertheless comes into action before con-

26

See discussion in Lacan et les sciences sociales of the root image, good form and the Lacanian super-ego.

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sciousness, functioning with vigilance. You is not a signal, but a reference to the other—it is order and love27 (Seminar I, p. 3).

This recasting of the super-ego makes it an operator of order and love that is prior to consciousness; it situates its efficacy in the register of language. We shall not be surprised to read, in the second session of the seminar, that Lacan admires Freud’s texts. This declaration indicates that he is ready to harmonize his language with Freud’s: “If we are under the impression that we are here to stand back in admiration of the Freudian texts and marvel at them, we will certainly be well satisfied” (Seminar I, p. 9). Admiring and marvelling at the father’s speech, he says in The Neurotic’s Individual Myth, that “one must have confidence in him” (p. 407). Lacan thus situates Freud’s authority in a problematic zone that goes from the super-ego to the ego ideal. To be both more general and more precise, at the same time that he is commenting on Freud’s texts, Lacan is also questioning and discreetly analysing his transference to Freud. He examines his transference from the start, not only by indicating for his students what the Freudian theory of authority is—the super-ego—but also by discussing his own relation to Freudian authority. Admiration, marvel, trust, order, love. Next, and by beginning to analyse the other post-Freudians’ technical options, he is also starting to lay bare their relations to Freud. In this first year of the seminar, Lacan clarifies the place of his return to Freud in the analytic field and also situates himself in relation to his psychoanalytic “brothers”. His return to Freud is thus characterized by a double concern: • •

27

With Freud’s foundational texts, which he comments on. With the texts of his contemporaries, the post-Freudians, whose work he measures in terms of both Freud’s doctrine and his desire.

Here we find the same logic of the paternal function that Lacan developed in his lecture, The Neurotic’s Individual Myth, where he says “Freudian theory stressed in the existence of the father a function which is at once a function of speech and a function of love,” before adding, “And one must have confidence in” Freud, that is, must reintroduce death and the dead father as the crucial operators in analytic experience, for want of which it would stagnate in the dual register (pp. 423, 407).

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Although Lacan shows his admiration for Freud the author, he has more reservations about Freud’s institutional use of his authority in the analytic movement: It is the long-suffering side of his personality, the feeling he has of the necessity of authority, which in his case is not without a certain fundamental depreciation of what anyone who has something to communicate or teach can expect from those who listen to and follow him. In many a place we come across a measure of profound contempt for the manner in which these things are made use of and understood. As you will see, I even believe that one finds in him a very specific disparagement of the human raw material made available to him by the society in which he lived. Undoubtedly this is what allows us to catch a glimpse of why Freud, in contrast to what happens in his writings (my emphasis), mobilised the full weight of his authority so as to assure, so he believed, the future of analysis. He both excluded all manner of doctrinal dissensions—quite real dissensions—which emerged, and at the same time was quite imperious as to what could be organised around him as the means for the transmission of his teaching (Seminar I, p. 10).

Whereas his writing was weighted down less by his authority, Freud, within the institution, was exclusive and imperative, and he depreciated those who surrounded him; he was suspicious about how his texts were read and applied and about how his disciples were using his teaching. Lacan does not confuse Freud’s research with the effects of transmission; on this second point, Freud had recourse to his own authority. Lacan returns to Freud by reading his texts and authorizes himself to do so by means of Freud’s distrust of his disciples, who were not able to handle Freud’s doctrine. Lacan’s diagnosis is in harmony with the distrust imputed to Freud and he claims that this gives him the authority to return to Freud’s texts—which he does. To be even more precise, Lacan inaugurates his seminar on and by Freud’s technical writings by seeking to throw light on both Freud’s relation to authority and other analysts’ relations to his work, just as

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he indicates discreetly the character of his own relation to Freud’s authority. He reads Freud in the context of a transference to him, which he then analyses obliquely, throughout the seminar. If we wish to understand the progression of the seminar and, first of all, Lacan’s reading of Freud’s papers on technique, we must try to see the transferential relation with Freud that underlies this work. Freud’s epistemology requires that we reveal Lacan’s transference in order to understand his work better; it can seem unreasonable, however, to consider that Lacan, in his return to Freud, occupies a sort of position as Freud’s analysand and that his seminar is nothing more than the text of his analysis with Freud. Yet it is Lacan himself who designates the proximity between commenting on a text and the analytic experience, which aims at rendering intelligible what is not immediately so: That is why the method of textual commentary proves itself fruitful. Commenting on a text is like doing an analysis. How many times have I said to those under my supervision, when they say to me—I had the impression he meant this or that—that one of the things we must guard most against is to understand too much, to understand more than what is in the discourse of the subject. To interpret and to imagine one understands are not at all the same things. It is precisely the opposite. I would go as far as to say that it is on the basis of a kind of refusal of understanding that we push open the door to analytic understanding (Seminar I, p. 73).

Here, Lacan gives us one of the keys for interpreting his seminar and with it, we can try to read his seminar as the text of his analysis with Freud, even if this can seem bizarre. In doing so, we need to be careful to remain within Lacan’s own epistemological logic and not to use this approach as the basis for some sort of novelistic history or psychological account of Lacan’s relation to Freud. “Commenting on a text is like doing an analysis.” Our research project is to read what connects Lacan’s research to the social sciences of his time and to show how his research includes the truths of these disciplines;

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this can be done by situating the seminar as a kind of analysis with Freud. If his seminar and its accompanying texts show the major effects of his analysis with Freud, and thus his “conversion” into a Freudian analyst, then they are the equivalents of the work that he would later expect of those who had finished their analyses and were in a position to teach analytic theory: the Analysts of his School (AE, analyste de l’école). In other words, Lacan’s seminar is the text of his pass.28 If we remember that his 1967 text on analytic training recommends “extracting” the analyst’s authority “from fiction” (p. 13)—in my opinion, the hypnotic or fantasmatic type that is to be found in “A Child is Being Beaten”—we shall not be surprised that Lacan approaches the question of the analyst’s authority and resistance in 1953. Lacan does so because, in pursuing something like an analysis with Freud, he has to situate himself in relation to the latter’s institutional and textual authority. To summarize our subject and our position as reader, we can say that Lacan’s reading of Freud—as made explicit in the seminar— needs to be re-examined by emphasizing what he says about his own transference to Freud and what the text shows about his desire as analyst. The text also indicates something about his judgement—or interpretation—of his colleagues’ theoretical and technical choices and their own—transferential—relations to Freud and his teaching. By testifying publicly about his return to Freud in his seminar, Lacan is evaluating his desire as analyst, just as he judges the desires of the other post-Freudians, by measuring them against Freud. 28

On the sensitive point of the pass, see Jacques Lacan, “Proposition of 9 October 1967 on the Psychoanalyst of the School,” Analysis 6 (1995): 1–13. If “commenting on a text is like doing an analysis” we cannot be blind to the fact that by commenting on Lacan’s text, we are, in turn, placed in the position of being a sort of analysand of Lacan’s. What “sort” this is needs to be clarified, but there seems to be a community of readers who share this view. See, for example, Erik Porge, Les noms du père chez Jacques Lacan: ponctuations et problématiques (Erès, 1997). Porge says that “In trying to follow Lacan’s journey, it seems to us that we are writing a narrative in such a way that the narrative itself is the place of the encounter that is in question in the narrative, and this is what defines a psychoanalysis” (p. 22). Porge notes next that, with this statement, he is approaching a definition of analysis that Lacan gave in the session of 1 July, 1959 of his seminar, ”Le désir et son interprétation [Seminar VI, Desire and Its Interpretation]” (unpublished).

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The Post-Freudians’ resistance to Freud Defence of the ego and resistance In the 1950s, a consensus seemed to exist in the analytic field: if resistance in analytic experience is not equivalent to the system of ego defence, there is a sort of elective affinity between the notions of ego defence—including repression—and of the resistance to psychoanalysis, since this resistance supposedly uses the same mechanisms as the ego’s defence.29 For this reason, everyone understood the importance of the notion of resistance in Freud’s work as well as in Freudian technique. This question is also present in Lacan’s seminar and according to several participants—including a certain Monsieur Z. (we do not know why he has lost his identity in the published version of the seminar); according to him, it was Freud’s authoritarian personality that motivated the discovery of the notion of resistance, because Freud could not bear it when his patients resisted his treatment. Unlike Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, who argued that Freud’s liberal feelings led to the discovery of resistances, M. Z. thinks that it can be explained by Freud’s authoritarianism. Lacan disagrees with M. Z. and argues that Freud was much less authoritarian than his teachers—such as Charcot, for example—and that it is precisely because he gave up suggestion and hypnosis that he discovered resistance, both as an obstacle to the analytic work and as a way to gain access to the process of repression. In other words, according to Lacan, resistance appeared to Freud when it no longer quite functioned; when it had already become degraded, as we would say in order to remain within the logic of Lacan’s epistemology30. Yet what must be understood is that according to Lacan, Freud did not situate the drama of resistance between the analyst’s and the analysand’s egos in the hic et nunc of the session, as some of his inheritors seem to have been willing to do. Lacan comments in these terms on Margaret Little’s article on counter-transference.

29

See the articles “Resistance” and “Defence Mechanisms” in Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, pp. 394–397, 109–111. 30 On the Lacanian epistemology of discovery through degradation, see Lacan et les sciences sociales.

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How does [the analyst] act? What are the implications of what he does? For the authors in question, for Margaret Little, nothing else matters but the recognition by the subject, hic et nunc, of the intentions of his discourse. And his intentions only ever have value in their implications hic et nunc, in the immediate exchange. The subject may well describe himself taking on the grocer or the hairdresser—in fact, he is bawling out the person he’s talking to, that is to say the analyst. There is some truth in that (Seminar I, p. 30). The analyst here believes himself authorised to offer what I will call an interpretation from ego to ego, or from equal to equal—allow me the play on words—in other words, an interpretation whose foundation and mechanism cannot in any way be distinguished from that of projection (Seminar I, p. 32). It is best to abstain from offering this interpretation of the defence, which I will call from ego to ego, whatever value it may eventually have. In the interpretation of defences, there should always be at least a third term (Seminar I, p. 33).

Thus the analysis of resistances organizes—but in a way that misses the point—the activity of Anglo-American analysts, who interpret the speech of their analysands in terms of what is happening in the session and of the dual relation between analysand and analyst. Annie Reich, Anna Freud, Fenichel and the others consider the ego as the individual operator that would be both the analyst’s only interlocutor and also as what defends itself against interpretations; it slows down the process of awakening to consciousness. This is the source of Anna Freud’s interest in the defence mechanisms and the title of her book, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (1936). The Freudian imperative to weaken resistance led Anglo-American analysts to put too much of an accent on the place of the ego in the treatment and therefore on the influence of their own person, thus making the experience an imaginary enclosure, where two egos would battle each other.31 Apart from the “fortunate” case in which 31

The resistance of the ego, like the logical necessity of analysing this obstacle, is indicated in these terms by Anna Freud: “The patient transgresses the fundamental rule

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the ego makes common cause with the analyst, Anna Freud distinguishes two attitudes of the ego in regard to the analyst: The ego is antagonistic to the analysis, in that it is unreliable and biased in its self-observation .… Finally, the ego is itself the object of analysis, in that the defensive operations in which it is perpetually engaged are carried on unconsciously .… Since it is the aim of the analytic method to enable ideational representatives of repressed instincts to enter consciousness … the ego’s defensive operations against such representatives automatically assume the character of active resistance to analysis. And since, further, the analyst uses his personal influence (my emphasis) to secure the observance of the fundamental rule which enables such ideas to emerge in the patient’s free associations, the defense set up by the ego against the instincts takes the form of direct opposition to the analyst himself (pp. 22–31).

The bond with the practitioner therefore leads back into this logic; the defence against the drive and what is at stake in the treatment play their roles within a transferential duality in which the analyst must use the influence of his person. Now, as Lacan reminds us, Freud—as early as in his Studies on Hysteria (which Didier Anzieu32 outlined in the sessions of Lacan’s seminar on 20 and 27 January 1954), and then in his metapsychological essays—indicates “that the strength of the resistance is inversely of analysis, or, as we say, he puts up ‘resistances.’ This means that the inroad of the id into the ego has given place to a counterattack by the ego upon the id. The observer’s attention is now diverted from the associations to the resistance, i.e. from the content of the id to the activity of the ego” (p. 14). 32 Didier Anzieu (1923–1999) received his agrégation in philosophy in 1948, moved toward psychology and became a teacher (assistant) at the Sorbonne in 1951. The son of Marguerite Anzieu, who was the original of “Aimée”, whose case Lacan presented in his medical thesis “De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité” (“On paranoiac psychosis in its relation to personality”). He undertook a first analysis with Lacan which he ended in 1953. He joined the Société française de psychanalyse in which he worked until 1963, the date at which he helped set up the Association de psychanalyse de France (APF) and separated from Lacan. A specialist in the psychoanalytic theory of groups, he published numerous works on literary creation (Pascal, Beckett) and on artistic creation (Bacon).

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proportional to one’s distance from the repressed centre” (Seminar I, p. 22). Resistance would therefore grow “the closer the subject comes to a discourse which would be the ultimate one, the right one, but one which he absolutely refuses” (Seminar I, p. 22). It is finally a “succession of phonemes” (Seminar I, p. 22) that is refused because it threatens to reveal the “mystery”, that is, the unconscious truth of which the analysand wants to know nothing. Resistance, more than being the fact of opposition in the dual relation of transference, would find a place in the field of language, and it is when the patient’s discourse begins to speak in a genuine way that resistance manifests itself. This is almost a paraphrase of the Freud of Studies on Hysteria, who presented the psychic material of this neurosis as an edifice structured according to the logic of a kernel of traumatic memories enveloped by other memories or memory strata; all of these are classified according to the set of themes constituting the kernel, which both structures and is structured by symptomatic formations. Let us listen to Freud: It was as though we were examining a dossier that had been kept in good order .… I have described such groupings of similar memories into collections arranged in linear sequences (like a file of documents, a packet, etc.) as constituting ‘themes’. These themes exhibit a second kind of arrangement. Each of them is—I can not express it in any other way—stratified concentrically round the pathogenic nucleus. It is not hard to say what produces this stratification, what diminishing or increasing magnitude is the basis of this arrangement. The contents of each particular stratum are characterized by an equal degree of resistance, and that degree increases in proportion as the strata are nearer to the nucleus .… The deeper we go the more difficult it becomes for the emerging memories to be recognized, till near the nucleus we come upon memories which the patient disavows even in reproducing them.33

Here, Lacan is certainly following directly in Freud’s path. 33

Joseph Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria, pp 288–289.

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Resistance and discourse In order to know where it is happening [où ça se passe], what the material, biological foundation is, Freud quite straightforwardly takes the discourse to be a reality in its own right, a reality which is there, a sheaf, a bundle of proofs .… The notion of a material support of speech, singled out as such, was not yet available to Freud. Today, he would have taken the succession of phonemes which make up a part of the subject’s discourse as the basis of his metaphor. He would say that one encounters greater and greater resistance the closer the subject comes to a discourse which would be the ultimate one, the right one, but which he absolutely refuses (Seminar I, p. 22).

Lacan’s reading of Freud thus radicalizes the way in which discourse as such is taken into account.34 Lacan is led by the object— the unconscious and translation as a mistranslation, according to the Freud of 1896—to use the metaphor of linguistics. And it is by approaching the pathogenic kernel of signification that resistance is experienced. From that point on, the analysis of discourse has had to find its place in analytic experience; it must obviously go beyond analyses in biological terms, but also go beyond Anglo-American ego analysis. For Lacan, what resists is not the ego of the patient, which the person of the analyst must influence, but the statement [énoncé] of a discourse that is in close proximity with unconscious truth. The unconscious or its formations are thus conceived as the set of phonemes that must be sought through the analysand’s speech. It is precisely because the talking cure is homogeneous with the repressed material (phonemes) that it can be effective. According to Lacan, the subject of the repressed—the subject of the unconscious—is therefore to be brought forth through speech and this

34

Whereas as early as the letter to Fliess of 6 December 1896, Freud, in detaching himself (at least in part) from the language of the physiology of nerves—as the translator of this letter notes—defines a superstructure of language that responds to the infrastructure of the organic foundations of neurosis. In this letter, Freud defines repression as a mistranslation: “A failure of translation—this is what is known clinically as ‘repression’” See Sigmund Freud, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904, p. 208.

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requires that the unconscious be “thought” as a set of signifiers; the intersections of these signifiers must be followed, for they lead— beyond the ego that is present in the here and now—to the heart of the repressed signifiers. Analytic experience that follows this path goes beyond the fascinations of the ego and mobilizes the history of the subject and of his/her group. Therefore, what is in question here is the unconscious position of the subject who is located in a symbolic situation and not the individual reduced to the limits of his/her ego. Thus, at the same level in the logic of analysis, we find symbolic systems of language, discourse, and social exchange in which the subject has always been situated, and to which his/her symptoms testify; these symptoms supply us with the ultimate discourse of his unconscious truth and of the historic situations that have engendered it. Consider [the subject] in its singularity, what does that mean? That means essentially that, for him, the interest, the essence, the basis, the dimension proper to analysis is the reintegration by the subject of his history right up to the furthermost perceptible limits, that is to say into a dimension that goes well beyond the limits of the individual (my emphasis) …. What reveals this dimension is the accent that Freud puts in each case on those points that it is essential to overcome by means of the technique and which are what I will call the bearings [situations] of the history (Seminar I, p. 12).

What is to be worked on in analysis is not the hic et nunc of transference, but “past time”, not as an historian’s investigation would understand it, but in the sense that it requires an analysis of the labour of historical reconstruction made by the subject in relation to his/her historical bearings. When we return to the origin of the Freudian experience—when I say origin, I do not mean historical origin but point-source .… What matters is what he reconstructs of it. Can you see where this is all leading to? It leads, within Freud’s own conception, to an idea that what is involved is a reading, a qualified and skilled translation of the cryptogram representing what the subject is conscious of at the moment … of himself

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and of everything else, that is to say of the whole of his system (Seminar I, pp. 13–14).

Analysis progresses by following the threads of speech, by reading and translating the cryptogram (“something written in secret characters”, according to Littré) represented by what the subject possesses of his system—his archives. Lacan, as a reader of Freud, therefore describes the (unconscious) subject as resembling a cryptogram that must be read and translated. The closer the reading of this cryptogram approaches to the “unconscious treasure,” the stronger the resistance becomes. Let me emphasize that reading and translation are terms connected with work on the letter and come from Freud himself. We can also see that the “unconscious” is situated in terms of an historical reconstruction of the past and of a system of rewriting the subject: a rewriting of her/himself and of the situations in which s/he is placed (see Fliess Letters, pp. 207–215). In opposition to the Anglo-American versions of analysis, which give the ego a key position, Lacan highlights both the discovery of the systems of rewriting historical situations and the deciphering of the phonemic groups that has led to them. Likewise, in reading Freud, he “reinvents” the status of the analyst as both translator and reader of the linguistic intersections from which unconscious subjectivity and its troubles can be deduced: Can one claim that, in our discourse, right now, the ego is the master of everything that these words harbour? The symbolic system is extraordinarily intricate, marked as it is by this Verschlungenheit, property of criss-crossing, which the translation of the papers on technique has rendered as complexity, which is, and how, much too weak. Verschlungenheit designates linguistic criss-crossing (Seminar I, pp. 53–54).

For Lacan, the source of authority in analytic experience is therefore not the analyst’s influence, which would aim at diminishing the patient’s hostility, but rather the linguistic capacities of a practitioner who is able to read the signifiers—the phonemes—of the symptom. Let us recall that as early as the Rome Report—which we shall analyse in detail—Lacan stated clearly that the symptom is organized in terms of signifiers and that Freud reads it in these terms:

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A symptom here is the signifier of a signified that has been repressed from the subject’s consciousness .… It was by deciphering this speech that Freud rediscovered the first language of symbols, still alive in the sufferings of civilized man (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur [Civilization and Its Discontents]). Hieroglyphics of hysteria, blazons of phobia, and labyrinths of Zwangsneurose [obsessional neurosis] (Écrits, p. 232).

What the analyst must therefore know is not how to reduce resistance by intimidating or seducing the analysand, or by pushing him/ her to an ego identification; instead, s/he must translate and read what the subject says, for the solution to the unconscious rebus of the cryptogram is not to be found in the goodwill of the patient’s ego, which is always overwhelmed by the meaning of the words that lead to the heart of this cryptogram. For the Freudian orientation, as Lacan recalls, the subject is that of a symbolic system that must be reconstructed; it is also the subject of historic situations that are to be deciphered in the cryptogram, which encloses the set of phonemes that forms the kernel of the truth of repressed desire, which is what most resists unveiling. Resistance to analysis emanates from this kernel of phonemes and if one lets it speak, it has some chance of emerging into consciousness. In the present case, the analyst’s authoritarian use of suggestion to make the ego pass from the patient’s into the analyst’s camp cannot bring this phonemic set to light.

Second stage Lacan also recalls Freud’s refusal of suggestion on another occasion in his seminar: on 10 February 1954, after he had asked Jean Hyppolite35 to give a commentary on Freud’s 1925 article, Die Verneinung [translated under the title “Negation”], a text that opened up the myth of the genesis of language for the subject. Before the analysis of this text, which Hyppolite translates into French as “dénégation”, rather than the more customary term, “négation”, Lacan reminds the

35

Jean Hyppolite (1907–1968), a philosopher and Hegel specialist, the French translator of The Phenomenology of Spirit. He was the professor of, among others, Jean Laplanche and Michel Foucault.

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audience of the help that Hyppolite had given, for a brief moment, several sessions earlier to another participant (Monsieur Z.), who had explained the discovery of resistance by referring to Freud’s authoritarian character. Lacan remembers that what was at issue, if you remember, was to find out what was Freud’s basic, intentional attitude with respect to the patient, when he claimed to have substituted the analysis of resistances by speech for the subjugation that operates through suggestion or through hypnosis. I showed myself to be extremely guarded on the question of knowing if there were at this point signs of combativeness in Freud, indeed of domination, vestiges of an ambitious style which we might see betrayed in his youth (Seminar I, p. 56).

By returning to this point a second time, Lacan shows how important it is for him. Hyppolite then distances himself from Monsieur Z. What follows is the philosopher’s exposition of the subjective genesis of language, a development that is judiciously entitled, in the published version of the seminar, “Discourse analysis and ego analysis”. Lacan reminds his listeners that one must choose between the rigorous deciphering of signifiers and the analysis of the ego. This choice has essential implications on the level of the relation with the other both in groups and the treatment. And this is what interests Lacan.

Anna Freud’s fault Thus it is rather curious to notice that the seminar progresses through a critical analysis of a text by Anna Freud, a text that recounts a part of a treatment in which she placed herself in an impasse by “approach[ing] the material from the perspective of the dual relation between the patient and herself” (Seminar I, p. 64). For Lacan, “She should have distinguished between the dual interpretation, in which the analyst enters into an ego to ego rivalry with the analysand, and the interpretation which moves forward in the direction of the symbolic structuring of the subject, which is to be located beyond the present structure of this ego” (Seminar I, p. 65). Actually, Anna Freud “confesses” in her text that she had permitted herself

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to become entangled with the analytic situation to the point that it allows the emergence in the patient of the memory of “her [dead] father, whom she had loved dearly” (Mechanisms of Defense, p. 37; quoted in Seminar I, p. 64), in Anna Freud’s own words. The situation was unblocked, if we are to believe Anna Freud, by reintroducing the father in the narrative of the analysand’s history, but also—let us add—in the transference: in the analytic situation between the two rival daughters, Anna Freud and her patient. This reintroduction of the dead father into Freudian experience is—let me repeat this—Lacan’s very project—the return to and of Freud—and, from this perspective, he even emphasizes the limitations of Freud’s own daughter’s practice. To focus our attention on a fault concerning the dead father in the daughter’s practice may seem to the reader to be a mere detail in relation to the importance of the theoretical continents that have been approached, but in this case, we are following Freudian epistemology for this example places the analyst on the trail of the “thing itself”. If we follow the paths of the transference from Freud to Lacan, Lacan’s critical reminder of the fault that leads the daughter astray becomes part of the way that he expresses his own transference to Freud. This, at least, is my hypothesis: reintroducing the dead father involves reintroducing not the father’s person, but rather his symbolic value, his speech, and his desire: those of Freud the analyst.

The reminder of the dead father In the seminar, Lacan reads and listens to Anna Freud. Anna Freud writes that “Historically this mode of defense by means of ridicule and scorn was explained by her identification of herself with her dead father, who used to try to train the little girl in self-control by making mocking remarks when she gave way to some emotional outburst. The method had become stereotyped through her memory of her father, whom she had loved dearly” (Mechanisms of Defense, p. 37; quoted in Seminar I, p. 64).36 Lacan adds that Anna Freud interpreted the patient’s aggressiveness toward her as a reproduction, in transference, of the situation that the patient had experienced earlier. 36

Anna Freud’s analysis of this case can be found in The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, pp. 35–38.

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He judges that while this is not false, it leaves out what has structured the situation historically and has passed into the unconscious. According to Lacan, reintroducing the identification with the dead father allows the treatment to progress because it opens up a point of view on the subject’s unconscious structure and its symbolic organization; this reintroduction constitutes ipso facto the way out of this stagnation in the dual register of the imaginary.37 What is at stake, then, Lacan says, is knowing what kind of consent opens the pact and allows the analysis to progress. From the first encounter, the analyst is responsible for resistance, for if he engages the patient in a dual relation, he ensures the renewal of repression. In such a case, the pact would not be Freudian. If, on the other hand, the analyst takes Freud’s desire upon himself, he will commit himself to a reading of the unconscious material of which he himself knows nothing, since “we are ignorant of the symbolic constellation dwelling in the subject’s unconscious” (Seminar I, p. 65). It is this symbolic constellation, Lacan concludes, that forms what is at stake in these “structured, organised, complex situations. Freud gave us the first model of it, its standard, in the Oedipus complex” (Seminar I, p. 65). Anna Freud, in forgetting the place of the dead father when she directs the treatment, appears, from this perspective, to have made a double mistake (which is really only one): • •

37

A mistake against the progress of her patient’s analysis because it does not provide the key to her Oedipal organization A mistake against her own father, for as analyst and as daughter, she is forgetting, on this occasion, to “harmonize her language with his own”, according to the logic required by the super-ego, which Lacan had mentioned earlier and according to which the “you”—coming from the father’s mouth—“is not a signal, but a reference to the other—it is order and love” (Seminar I, p. 3).

Anna Freud writes, “As the analysis went deeper, however, we found that these affects [contempt and ridicule] did not represent a transference reaction in the true sense of the term and were not connected with the analytic situation at all” (Mechanisms of Defense, p. 36; quoted in Seminar I, p. 64). Thus she indicates herself the limit of a dual conception of transference, which she knew how to go beyond in practice, leaving Lacan to take the trouble to bring out its technical “lesson”.

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Anna Freud forgets the reference to Freud’s desire, which indicates for all analysts the path to the unconscious symbolic structures. Lacan picks up on the forgetting of the dead father in Anna’s technique less to criticize her for a lack of daughterly piety (she has forgotten the patient’s dead father and her own) than for her offence against the father of psychoanalysis himself and his speech, in which we “must have confidence”, as he had stated some months previously (Myth, p. 407). Freud should be trusted because he was the one who placed death and the father’s symbolic function—which is “a function of speech and … love”—at the heart of analytic experience (Myth, p. 423). In forgetting both the analysand’s father and her own, Anna Freud reduces the treatment to a dual rivalry, thus prohibiting her patient any access to the symbolic forms that organize the unconscious, among the most important of which is the Oedipus complex. By this criticism of Freud’s daughter’s clinical practice, Lacan brings us back to the dead father, his desire as analyst, his texts, his technique, his discovery, and in this sense, he presents himself as the most faithful “son”; the one who forgets neither the dead father nor the Oedipus complex. He is the one who does not forget Freud’s desire, even if—as we have seen—Lacan does not share Freud’s universalist point of view concerning the Oedipus complex. Indeed, in 1953, the Oedipus complex remains “the model, the standard”, according to Lacan, of a symbolic schema that had not yet been developed sufficiently, even if it is fundamental for any “symbolic realisation by the subject, of the id, of the unconscious—which is a self [soi-même] and not a set of unorganised drives” (Seminar I, p. 67). In other words, Lacan reaffirms, the unconscious is organized symbolically and the Oedipal myth’s capacity for structuring is considerable—as is shown by his commentary on a clinical case presentation by Melanie Klein38—but what is important for him is the symbolic function incarnated by the Oedipal myth, more than its realization in this myth. From this point of view, Lacan maintains his reservations about Freud’s conception of the Oedipus complex as universal.

38

Seminar I, pp. 67–68. In this session of 17 February 1954, Mlle Gélinier gives an exposition of the case of Little Dick, which Melanie Klein analyses in “The Importance of Symbol-Formation in the Development of the Ego” (In Love, Guilt, and Reparation, and Other Works, 1921–1945, pp. 219–232).

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From the Oedipus complex to the triad of the imaginary, symbolic and real For Lacan, what counts is the symbolic integration of the subject and the Oedipus complex is only a key to this. It really is the key—a very elementary key. I have already pointed out to you that there most probably was a whole bunch of keys. One day perhaps I will give you a lecture on what we gain in this respect from the myths of primitive peoples—I wouldn’t say inferior, because they aren’t inferior, then know much more than we do. When we study a mythology, for example one that might perhaps appear with respect to a Sudanese population, we discover that for them the Oedipus complex is just a rather thin joke. It is a very tiny detail within an immense myth. The myth allows the cataloguing of a set of relations between subjects of a wealth and complexity besides which the Oedipus complex seems only to be so abridged an edition that in the end it cannot always be used. But no matter. Us analysts have been satisfied with it up to now. Certainly, one does try to elaborate it a bit, but it is all rather timid. One always feels terribly tangled up because one doesn’t distinguish easily between the imaginary, symbolic and real (Seminar I, p. 86).

If Lacan, in Book I of the seminar, reminds us of the speech of the dead father and the requirements of the symbolic, he indicates that the Oedipus complex, as Freud describes it, is only one means of organization within a much vaster system, and that it is necessary to look less for the universality of the complex than for its form: that of the symbolic function and of its order. We note that Lacan speaks here of symbolic situations and indicates clearly the passage to the three orders of the imaginary, symbolic, and real. If Lacan thus recognizes the dead father, his speech and his place as the key to the Freudian orientation, it is to do even better and to go beyond the crucial but not universal figure of Oedipus, by means of the symbolic function, which he promotes in the field of psychoanalysis, and which is universal. For Lacan, the Oedipus complex is a symbolic situation. From the subject’s family situation, as Lacan defined it from 1938 to 1950, and the “social conditions of Oedipalism” to the

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new imperative of recognizing—if analysis is to progress—the situation that the subject occupies in the symbolic order, there is a rupture that should be emphasized once again: “Nothing other than this is at stake in analysis—recognising what function the subject takes on in the order of the symbolic relations which covers the entire field of human relations, and whose initial cell is the Oedipus complex, where the assumption of sex is decided” (Seminar I, p. 67).

The Oedipus complex: A symbolic remainder To speak in anthropological terms, according to which the change in the constitution of the subject is a function of social changes, I would say that, for Lacan, the subject of the Oedipus complex or the modern subject is, in 1953–1954, less the effect of a family core (the Lacanian and Durkheimian theory of 1938), than the effect of a mythic core. This core, indeed, is rather pale in relation to other symbolic systems, such as those of the Sudan, which Lacan mentions.39 39

This unspecified ethnological reference is probably to the research of Marcel Griaule, who a year later, on the evening of 15 March 1955, would give a lecture to which Lacan listened, and which he commented on the next day in the following way: “What did you get out of M. Griaule’s lecture yesterday evening? “M. Griaule made a rapid allusion to the Islamisation of an important segment of the populations of the Sudan, to the fact that the latter continue to function with a symbolic register while belonging to a style of religious credo clearly dissonant with this system. Their demand on this level is manifested in a very precise manner, for instance, when they ask to be taught Arabic, because Arabic is the language of the Koran. That’s a tradition which goes a long way back, is very much alive …. You mustn’t get the impression that Sudanese civilisation doesn’t deserve its name …. The conditions in which these people live may at first sight seem rather harsh, rather precarious from the point of view of comfort and of civilisation, but they seem nonetheless to receive very powerful support in the symbolic function, isolated as such. It has taken a long time for us to be capable of entering into communication with them. There’s an analogy here with our position vis-à-vis the subject” (Seminar II, p. 161). Lacan indicates that the ethnologist’s research emphasizes the power of the symbolic function that is the focus of the researcher’s work, but this function also seems to isolate the population of the Sudan from other social formations, such as those that produce ethnologists. It is as if, from the point of view of the masses, a civilization awaiting its analyst rejoiced at the foreignness of the cryptogram. An ethnological analyst should put aside Western identifications in order to recognize the work of the symbolic function at the heart of Sudanese civilization, just as an analyst must set aside an adherence to his ego in order to decipher the symbolic intersection that introduces us to the analysand’s subjective structures of intelligibility. Marcel Griaule (1898–1956) was the precursor in France of a new method of investigation founded on observing ethnological systems and analysing the “indigenous”

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At this moment, the function of the Oedipus complex is, for him, a “simple” symbolic situation that is present in modernity. It is neither universal nor mythically rich. The subject of the unconscious is therefore less a subject of the Oedipus complex than of mythic systems. The unconscious subject is the subject of the symbolic system as a whole, and this is why he returns to Freud with the help of the social sciences and the works of Lévi-Strauss. If the seminar is the public inauguration of his return to Freud and if Lacan calls upon psychoanalysts to identify their desire with that of the founder—a desire that he deciphers in Freud’s writings and not through what he knows about his biography— Lacan also gauges, as we have seen, the distance that separates Freud’s doctrine from the formulations of other analysts. Yet we can see that Lacan himself, in 1953–1954, on the crucial point of the Oedipus complex, does not always take the same position that Freud does, since he continues to reject universalism in favour of the symbolic function, upon which the structuring of the subject of the unconscious depends. Lacan borrows this notion of symbolic function from French ethnology, and especially from the work of Marcel Mauss, to whom Lacan begins to refer in 1950—as I have shown40. In this text, Lacan re-examined the clinic of psychopaths with the notions of fragmented symbolism and complete symbolism suggested by Marcel Mauss. Yet as far as the more general symbolic function is concerned, it is, instead, the reading of Lévi-Strauss’ introduction to the posthumous edition of Mauss’ Sociologie et anthropologie41 that is crucial for Lacan. This text is crucial, first, because, as I shall argue, Lacan discovers in it the theoretical operator that he will transform into the Name-of-the-Father; it is also important because it is here that Lévi-Strauss effects a dazzling reversal of the problematic of Marcel Mauss, who had sought in vain to provide a sociological theory of symbolism. Lévi-Strauss, on the other hand, concludes that “It is

representations that account for them. His chosen ground was mainly that of the Dogons of the Niger bend. The holder of the first chair in ethnology at the Sorbonne, he was also an adviser to the French Union from its foundation in 1946. 40 In Lacan et les sciences sociales, pp. 95–146, I discussed the article by Lacan and Cénac, “A Theoretical Introduction to the Functions of Psychoanalysis in Criminology”. 41 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss 1950.

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obvious that what is needed is a symbolic origin of society” (Mauss Introduction, p. 21). By recognizing the primacy of the symbolic function over societies, Lévi-Strauss opens the way to a new anthropology, one that is “a system of interpretation accounting for the aspects of all modes of behaviour simultaneously, physical, physiological, psychical, and sociological” (Mauss Introduction, p. 26). On this point, it should be noted that according to Lévi-Strauss, interpretation can only be proven by the mind: So it really is true that, in one sense, any psychological phenomenon is a sociological phenomenon; that the mental is identified with the social. But on the other hand, in a different sense, it is all quite the reverse: the proof of the social cannot be other than mental; to put it another way, we can never be sure of having reached the meaning and the function of an institution, if we are not in a position to relive its impact on an individual consciousness (Mauss Introduction, p. 28).

What makes “the mental and the social … one and the same”? (Mauss Introduction, p. 21). Nothing other than the symbolic origin of both of them, or rather the power of induction of the “effectiveness of symbols”42, as developed by Lévi-Strauss in his article of 1949, the importance of which Lacan saw immediately. It is this article that we are now going to examine, for in it is to be found a theory of resistance, , and the treatment; in short, it is a “paper on technique”, which we need to know in order to be able to understand Lacan’s reading of Freud’s technical writings.

II. The effectiveness of symbols: From Anna Freud to Claude Lévi-Strauss The Effectiveness of Symbols is the first of Lévi-Strauss’ texts to which Lacan refers; Lacan cites his work for the first time by referring to it in his presentation at the Sixteenth International Congress of Psychoanalysis in Zurich on 17 July 1949, a presentation entitled “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in

42 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “L’efficacité symbolique,” 1950, Revue d’histoire des religions, pp. 5–27. Available in English in Structural Anthropology, 1977, pp. 186–205.

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Psychoanalytic Experience (Écrits, pp. 75–81). Claude Lévi-Strauss had introduced the notion of the effectiveness of symbols several months before Lacan’s lecture on the mirror stage. Lacan uses this notion by reading the experience of the mirror in a somewhat mysterious way: “Indeed, for imagos—whose veiled faces we analysts see emerge in our daily experience and in the penumbra of symbolic effectiveness (my emphasis)—the specular image seems to be the threshold of the visible world, if we take into account the mirrored disposition of the imago of one’s own body in hallucinations and dreams, whether it involves one’s individual features, or even one’s infirmities or object projections; or if we take note of the role of the mirror apparatus in the appearance of doubles, in which psychical realities manifest themselves that are, moreover, heterogeneous” (Écrits, p. 77). In the seminar of 1953–1954, Lacan will throw light on this new use of “The Effectiveness of Symbols”, or rather of its “penumbra”, which envelops the imagos at the threshold of the world; this seminar proposes a new version of the mirror stage that harmonizes it—as we shall see—with the optical device that Freud developed in The Interpretation of Dreams43 but also with Lévi-Strauss’ account of the symbolic function. First, before coming to Freud, let us see how, in this article, Lévi-Strauss develops a theory of the treatment that pivots entirely on the symbolic axis; according to him, this distinguishes the shaman’s treatment from medical treatment, but also allies the former with Freudian experience.

The treatment according to Lévi-Strauss Lévi-Strauss notes that medical treatment in the West separates the objective cause of the illness—bacteria, for example—from the patient’s subjective world, while the shaman does not make this opposition. This is what, according to him, allows this treatment to succeed, since the cause of the illness—the monster—remains, according to this paradigm, a part of the same symbolic material as the sick person’s subjective representations. In this way, symbolic practice gains a grip on the cause.

43

Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. IV and V, tran. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953).

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Illness: A relation between signifier and signified Lévi-Strauss argues that The relationship between monster and disease is internal to his mind, whether conscious or unconscious; it is a relation between symbol and thing symbolized, or, to use the terminology of linguists, between signifier and signified (my emphasis). The shaman provides the sick woman with a language, by means of which unexpressed, and otherwise inexpressible, psychic states can be immediately expressed. And it is the transition to this verbal expression … which induces the release of the physiological process, that is, the reorganization, in a favourable direction, of the process to which the sick woman is subjected.44

He thus makes it explicit that the shaman’s interpretation is a recasting of the subject’s symbolic universe, and he already refers, at the beginning of 1949 (as Lacan will do, but much later) to the work of linguists in order to situate this interpretation within the register of the signifier.45 Yet if Lévi-Strauss distinguishes the shaman’s interpretation from Western medical treatment, he also likens it to analytic experience: In both cases, the purpose is to bring to a conscious level conflicts and resistances which have remained unconscious, owing either to their repression by other psychological forces or—in case of childbirth—to their own specific nature, which is not psychic but organic or even simply mechanical. In both cases also, the conflicts and resistances are resolved, not because of the knowledge, real or alleged, which the sick woman progressively acquires of them, but because this knowledge makes possible a specific experience, in the course of which conflicts materialize in an order and on a level permitting their free development

44

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 1958, Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (Trans.). Translation altered. Lévi-Strauss’ translators rendered the words “signifiant” and ”signifié”, which are usually translated as “signifier” and “signified”, as “sign” and “meaning” (Translator’s note.) 45 Lacan, indeed, states in 1953 in the Rome Report that “A symptom … the signifier of a signified that has been repressed” (Écrits, p. 232).

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and leading to their resolution. This vital experience is called abreaction in psychoanalysis. We know that its precondition is the unprovoked intervention of the analyst, who appears in the conflicts of the patient through a double transference (my emphasis) mechanism, as a flesh-and-blood protagonist and in relation to whom the patient can restore and clarify an initial situation which has remained unexpressed or unformulated. All these characteristics can be found in the shamanistic cure (Structural Anthropology, p. 198).

Thus, according to Lévi-Strauss, resistance is lifted in transference by an interpretation whose signifiers will reorganize the patient’s symbolic universe. How can we give a more general definition of Lacan’s conception of analysis in his return to Freud, a conception based on his reading of both Freud and Lévi-Strauss? The importance of the notions of language, resistance, and interpreting through signifiers is explicit in Lévi-Strauss’ text, which must be taken as crucial to Lacan’s research. Lévi-Strauss does not, however, confuse the shaman’s treatment with psychoanalysis. Let us continue reading Lévi-Strauss’ article: All of these characteristics can be found in the shamanistic cure. Here, too, it is a matter of provoking an experience; as this experience becomes structured, regulatory mechanisms beyond the subject’s control are spontaneously set in motion and lead to an orderly functioning. The shaman plays the same dual role as the psychoanalyst. A prerequisite role—that of listener for the psychoanalyst and of orator for the shaman—establishes a direct relationship with the patient’s conscious and an indirect relationship with his unconscious …. The patient suffering from neurosis eliminates an individual myth (my emphasis) by facing a “real” psychoanalyst; the native woman in childbed overcomes a true organic disorder by identifying with a ‘mythically transmuted’ shaman. The parallelism does not exclude certain differences .... Actually the shamanistic cure seems to be the exact counterpart to the psychoanalytic cure, but with an inversion of all the elements. Both cures aim at inducing an experience, and both succeed by

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recreating a myth which the patient has to relive. But in one case, the patient constructs an individual myth with elements drawn from his past; in the other case, the patient receives from the outside a social myth which does not correspond to a former personal state (Structural Anthropology, pp. 198–199).

The notion of the neurotic’s individual myth, which Lacan will begin to use in 1953, appears in Lévi-Strauss in 1949 as a symbolic formation whose position in analytic experience is the reverse of that of the social myth, which the sick person receives in the shaman’s treatment. Yet because interpretation in the two types of treatment is cut from the same symbolic cloth as the symptom, it is effective in both cases. Next, Lévi-Strauss reads Marguerite Séchehaye’s account of her treatment of a schizophrenic.46 He claims that “It is the effectiveness of symbols which guarantees the harmonious parallel development of myth and action …. In the schizophrenic cure, the healer performs the actions and the patient produces his myth; in the shamanistic cure the healer supplies the myth and the patient performs the actions” (p. 201). Operations—interpretations, manipulations—and mythic formations thus function together in both shamanism and analysis, according to Lévi-Strauss, but they are distributed in a reversed fashion between doctor and patient according to the type of practice. According to Lévi-Strauss, in the analytic treatment of schizophrenia, it is up to the patient to produce this myth, and therefore this production becomes a crucial type of subjective progress. This formulation also anticipates, as we shall see in the third part, Lacan’s later discussions of symbolic constructions that stand in for the failed paternal function, constructions that motivate the organization of phobias or the production of delusions. Lévi-Strauss adds that manipulating symbols can also modify the organism. What is specific about symbolic effectiveness is that its inductive property allows interrelations between the different

46

Marguerite Séchehaye (1887–1964), a Swiss psychoanalyst who specialized in schizophrenia and based her method on “symbolic realization”. She published Journal d’une schizophrène; auto-observation d’une schizophrène pendant le traitement psychothérapique (1950).

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materials and stages of the living being. With both shamanism and analysis, It would be a matter … of stimulating an organic transformation which would consist essentially in a structural reorganization, by inducing the patient intensively to live out a myth—either perceived or created by him—whose structure would be, at the unconscious level, analogous to the structure whose genesis is sought precisely in this “inductive property”, by which formally homologous structures, built out of different materials at different levels of life—organic processes, unconscious mind, rational thought—are related to one another (Structural Anthropology, p. 201).

Symbolic effectiveness can be deduced from the homology between structures that organize the living being and this principle of induction connects them with each other. This is the source not only of the power of symbolic interpretation of every symbolic manipulation and symbolic invention, but also of the scientific weight that, surprisingly, he gives to Rimbaud’s ideal. “Poetic metaphor provides a familiar example of this inductive process, but as a rule it does not transcend the unconscious level. Thus we note the significance of Rimbaud’s intuition that metaphor can change the world” (Structural Anthropology, pp. 201–202). This inductive value gives power and status to symbolic effectiveness and enables psychoanalytic interpretation to be rethought; it revises the symbolic organization from which the subject and its symptoms are deduced, and also gives us a model for thinking the organic modifications that can be deduced from a symbolic event. It can also help us rethink the opposite movement, from the organism to the symbolic. Lévi-Strauss confirms the heuristic value of bringing the organic and the symbolic closer together and the specificity of the shamanistic and analytic interpretation and calls for a new reversal in psychoanalysis. This reversal is dialectical and aims at a decisive point: the fundamental concept of the “unconscious”: The comparison with psychoanalysis has allowed us to shed light on some aspects of shamanistic curing. Conversely,

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it is not improbable that the study of shamanism may one day serve to elucidate obscure points of Freudian theory. We are thinking specifically of the concepts of myth and the unconscious. We saw that the only difference between the two methods that would outlive the discovery of a physiological substratum of neurosis concerns the origin of the myth, which in the one case is recovered as an individual treasury (my emphasis) and in the other case is received from collective tradition (Structural Anthropology, p. 202).47

Lévi-Strauss is therefore aiming at a genuine theory of the unconscious and its formations, a theory that will clarify the status of the myth and the symptom as a treasury. What does this treasury consist of? Situated in the Other of structure, and therefore to be found in the neurotic, it is the treasury of the signifier48 as Lacan will later call it. Whom, then, is Lévi-Strauss addressing in this text? He is addressing both ethnologists and psychoanalysts, since with his next step, he pushes aside the resistance of analysts who would object to his theory by arguing for the real history of the traumas encountered by their patients. But we should ask ourselves whether the therapeutic value of the cure depends on the actual character of remembered situations, or whether the traumatizing power of those situations stems from the fact that at the moment when they appear, the subject experiences them immediately as living myth. By this we mean that the traumatizing power of any situation cannot result from its intrinsic features but must, rather, result from the capacity of certain events, appearing within an appropriate psychological, historical, and social context, to induce an emotional crystallization which is

47

Translation altered. I have rendered Lévi-Strauss’ word, ”trésor” as “treasury,” instead of as “possession”, which was Jacobson’s and Grundfest Schoepf’s original translation. 48 “This other is essentially a symbolic place. The Other is precisely a place of the treasury, let us say of the phrases, even of the received ideas without which the joke cannot take on its value and its scope.” Lacan, Le séminaire livre V: les formations de l’inconscient, pp. 116–117.

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moulded by a pre-existing structure. In relation to the event or anecdote, these structures—or, more accurately, these structural laws—are truly atemporal .… These structures as an aggregate form what we call the unconscious (Structural Anthropology, p. 202).

Lacan was obviously convinced by this argument, since on 24 May 1961—more than ten years later—he repeated very precisely LéviStrauss’ distinction between myth and trauma, which the theory of the unconscious depends on. What does Lacan say in 1961? Myths are developed figures that can be brought back, not to language, but to the implication of a subject caught up in language—and to complicate the matter, in the play of speech. From the subject’s relations with any signifier whatsoever, figures develop with points of intersection, which are, for example, those that I tried to depict in the graph …. This figure, this graph, these reference points, and also attention to the facts allow us to reconcile the (my emphasis) true function of what trauma is with our experience of development. Isn’t trauma simply something that erupts at a moment, and breaks up a structure that has been imagined to be total, since this is what certain people have used the notion of narcissism for? Trauma is that certain events come to be situated at a certain place in this structure. And in occupying it, they take on the signifying value that is attached to it in a particular subject. This is what gives an event a traumatic value. This is the reason for our interest in returning to the experience of myth.49

This return will allow Lacan in 1961 to put into a new perspective a series of historically interlocked myths that have, he thinks, presided over the unconscious fates of people in the West and have provided symbolic coordinates for their symptoms: Oedipus, Hamlet, then Claudel’s Coûfontaine trilogy, a work that is dominated by the humiliated father. In Lacan et les sciences sociales, I presented the humiliated father as a degraded figure of the paternal function, 49

Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire livre VIII : le transfert, p. 380.

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a figure of the paternal function, a figure that gives rise to the “great contemporary neurosis,” that Lacan had diagnosed in 1938. With The Effectiveness of Symbols, Lévi-Strauss produces a structuralist definition of the unconscious, one that for both him and Lacan goes beyond anything related to a psychological definition of the unconscious and of what is ineffable in it. In relation to this definition, Lévi-Strauss examines what he has learned from Freud and gives a radical critique of it.50 Let us now move to the end of the article in order to see how Lacan will reread Freud by means of Lévi-Strauss’ own criticisms. These passages will help us understand what methodological tools the latter’s work has provided him with on a crucial point: the theory of the unconscious.

Lévi-Strauss’ unconscious and Freud’s: The social and the individual To get a sense of how Lévi-Strauss’ theory of the unconscious served Lacan as a tool for reading Freud, we must grasp how the former rejects what he sees as ineffable in Freud’s theory, in order to substitute for it the rules of the symbolic function as an operator for producing the unconscious. First, let us listen to Lévi-Strauss as he defines the unconscious in 1949: The unconscious ceases to be the ultimate haven of individual peculiarities—the repository of a unique history which makes each of us an irreplaceable being. It is reducible to a function— the symbolic function, which no doubt is specifically human, and which is carried out according to the same laws among all men, and actually corresponds to the aggregate of these laws (pp. 202–203).

Lacan, four years later, confirms that Nothing other than this is at stake in analysis—recognising what function the subject takes on in the order of the symbolic

50

On this point, see Alain Delrieu, Lévi-Strauss, lecteur de Freud: le droit, l’inceste, le père et l’échange des femmes (1999).

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relations which covers the entire field of human relations (Seminar I, p. 67),

and Consider [the subject] in its singularity, what does that mean? That means essentially that, for him, the interest, the essence, the basis, the dimension proper to analysis is the reintegration by the subject of his history right up to the furthermost perceptible limits, that is to say into a dimension that goes well beyond the limits of the individual .... What reveals this dimension is the accent that Freud puts in each case on those points that it is essential to overcome by means of the technique and which are what I will call the bearings [situations] of the history (Seminar I, p. 12).

In the Lacan of 1953–1954 and the Lévi-Strauss of 1949, the unconscious goes beyond the history of the individual. It is the symbolic structures that organize the unconscious formations and provide a traumatic character, if necessary, to the situations that the individual encounters. Lévi-Strauss then indicates that, in approaching the inscription and the deciphering of each life, one must be able to distinguish the place where events have been deposited in a sort of dictionary, a dictionary which is not the unconscious, but which maintains with the latter the same sort of relation that vocabulary has with the laws of discourse. [I]t will probably be necessary to re-establish a more marked distinction between the unconscious and the preconscious than has been customary in psychology. For the unconscious, as a reservoir of recollections and images amassed in the course of a lifetime, is merely an aspect of memory. While perennial in character, the preconscious also has limitations, since the term refers to the fact that even though memories are preserved they are not always available to the individual. The unconscious, on the other hand, is always empty—or more accurately, it is as alien to mental images as is the stomach to the foods which pass through it. As the organ of a specific function, the unconscious

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merely imposes structural laws upon inarticulated elements which originate elsewhere—impulses, emotions, representations, and memories. We might say, therefore, that the preconscious is the individual lexicon where each of us accumulates the vocabulary of his personal history, but that this vocabulary becomes significant, for us and for others, only to the extent that the unconscious structures it according to its laws and thus transforms it into language (discourse) (Structural Anthropology, p. 203).

On this point, Lévi-Strauss is very clear and asks that the subject’s symptomatic particularities be analysed according to unconscious laws, which have shaped the events of his/her life into the form of a discourse or has made them into symptoms. Since these laws are the same for all individuals and in all instances where the unconscious pursued its activity, the problem which arose in the preceding paragraph can easily be resolved. The vocabulary matters less than the structure. Whether the myth is re-created by the individual or borrowed from tradition, it derives its sources—individual or collective (between which interpenetrations and exchanges constantly occur)—only from the stock of representations with which it operates. But the structure remains the same, and through it the symbolic function is fulfilled. If we add that these structures are not only the same for everyone and for all areas to which the function applies, but that they are few in number, we shall understand why the world of symbolism is infinitely varied in content, but always limited in its laws. There are many languages, but very few structural laws which are valid for all languages. A compilation of known tales and myths would fill an imposing number of volumes. But they can be reduced to a small number of simple types if we abstract, from among the diversity of characters, a few elementary functions. As for the complexes—those individual myths— they also correspond to a few simple types, which mould the fluid multiplicity of cases. Since the shaman does not psychoanalyse his patient, we may conclude that the remembrance of things past, considered

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by some the key to psychoanalytic therapy, is only one expression (whose value and results are hardly negligible) of a more fundamental method, which must be defined without considering the individual or collective genesis of the myth. For the myth form takes precedence over the content of the narrative. This is, at any rate, what the analysis of a native text seems to have taught us. But also, from another perspective, we know that any myth represents a quest for the remembrance of things past. The modern version of shamanistic technique called psychoanalysis thus derives its specific characteristics from the fact that in industrial civilization there is no longer any room for mythical time, except within man himself. From this observation, psychoanalysis can draw confirmation of its validity, as well as hope of strengthening its theoretical foundations and understanding better the reasons of its effectiveness, by comparing its methods and goals with those of its precursors, the shamans and sorcerers (pp. 203–204).

According to this logic, neurosis is to be interpreted as a mythical formation. Because of the prevalence of socially shared symbolic organizations, and in order to respond to the difficulties encountered in the particularities of his history and in his mythical, symbolic inscription, the subject produces symptoms and complexes. A neurosis has a mythical structure for it is nothing other than an individual version of the difficulties that the subject encounters in his own symbolic situation. Therefore Lévi-Strauss sees the neuroses as so many individual myths, which are strictly complementary to the socially shared mythic organizations. In 1953, Lacan endorses this perspective by describing obsessional neurosis as “The Neurotic’s Individual Myth”. Is it really necessary to emphasize everything that, in Lévi-Strauss’ essential text of 1949, will reappear in Lacan’s rereading of Freud? In his return to Freud, Lacan takes up various aspects of Lévi-Strauss’ theory of the symbolic function in order to resolve a question that he found very difficult during that period: How are the imaginary, symbolic, and real related to each other? What concerns us in this question is the turn from the imaginary to the symbolic registers. If the 1949 lecture on the “Mirror Stage” had already mentioned the mysterious presence of the “penumbra of symbolic

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effectiveness” that envelops the specular image at the threshold of the visible world, it is precisely this penumbra that Lacan is now seeking to lift. He wants to throw light on the ways in which the subject is structured by the quilting between the imaginary of the mirror stage—the visible—and the effectiveness of the symbolic function, which Lévi-Strauss has emphasized. In 1953, Lacan is no longer satisfied that his theory of the mirror stage can account for the subject’s primal identifications, and he undertakes a theoretical revision founded on Lévi-Strauss’ concept of symbolic effectiveness. If his return to Freud is a transferential rectification concerning Freud’s desire, his theoretical revision involves the introduction of a new version of the mirror stage, one that excludes neither the dead father of psychoanalysis nor his speech: neither the totem nor the symbolic father towards whom he is now returning. This new emphasis requires—and enables—the mirror experience to be transformed into the inverted bouquet, which he will now explain. It is necessary to understand that this transformation is a theoretical revision that is based on Lévi-Strauss’ The Effectiveness of Symbols; this text infiltrates Lacan’s transferential rectification, even if it is precisely by adopting the notion of the symbolic function that he can maintain the distance between his handling of the Oedipus complex and Freud’s. The experiment of the inverted vase is a new version of the mirror stage and we have seen what is at stake in the latter in my earlier work: nothing less than a rethinking of the origin of subjective structuring and of the movement from nature to culture. This shows that Lacan continues his dialogue with Lévi-Strauss as well as with anthropology, at the point where it deals with the enigma of enigmas.

III. From the mirror stage to the inverted bouquet From the mirror stage to the bouquet: Lacan, Freud and Lévi-Strauss From the start, Lacan returns to Freud by examining both what is beyond and what falls short of the Oedipus complex, and reads the structuring function of the Oedipal myth in terms of the knotting of the imaginary, symbolic and real. In other words, subjective

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maturation is not only to be perceived in fine in attaining the Oedipal operation, but more generally in the knotting of which the Oedipus complex actualizes one possibility. Without these three systems to guide ourselves by, it would be impossible to understand anything of the Freudian technique and experience (Seminar I, p. 73). [T]he whole problem is that of the juncture of the symbolic and of the imaginary in the constitution of the real (Seminar I, p. 74).

Lacan explains that he has “concocted a little model for you, a substitute for the mirror-stage” (Seminar I, p. 74), and which his readers now know as the inverted bouquet. This new model aims to clarify the solution that Lacan had been providing, since 1936, with the mirror stage, to what he saw as a shortcoming in Freud’s theory of the earliest identifications (see Lacan et les sciences sociales). In doing so, he was seeking to clarify the “root identification”—the Lacanian super-ego, which is formed before the ego—and thus to throw more light on the mirror stage; this is also the moment when the anthropological enigma of the transition from nature to culture becomes real. The constitution of the subject of the unconscious is thus no longer to be grasped, for Lacan, by means of the mirror stage or the Oedipus complex; instead, it is to be approached in terms of both the mirror stage as “reread” with Lévi-Strauss’ symbolic function and a new optical device that Lacan borrows from the Freud of The Interpretation of Dreams. Now that we have read Lévi-Strauss’ The Effectiveness of Symbols, we are going to study the way in which Lacan returns to the psychoanalytic clinic and uses the insights gained there and from The Interpretation of Dreams to reformulate his mirror stage in terms of the optical schema. Let us remember first that in The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud compares the instrument used in psychic productions to a sort of complicated manuscript or camera. In the session of 24 February 1954, Lacan says: To clarify things a little for you, I’ve concocted a little model for you, a substitute for the mirror-stage …. Optics could also have its say. At this point I find I’m not in disagreement with the tradition established by the master—more than one of you must have

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noticed in the Traumdeutung, in the chapter “The psychology of the dream-process”, the famous schema into which Freud inserts the entire proceedings of the unconscious …. I will read it to you as it is to be found in the Traumdeutung (Seminar I, pp. 74–75).

After beginning to quote Freud’s text, Lacan adds his own comments and then continues his citation: What is presented to us in these words is the idea of psychical locality—what is at issue here is precisely the field of psychical reality, that is to say of everything which takes place between perception and the motor consciousness of the ego. I shall entirely disregard the fact that the mental apparatus with which we are here concerned is also known to us in the form of an anatomical preparation, and I shall carefully avoid the temptation to determine psychical locality in any anatomical fashion. I shall remain upon psychological ground, and I propose simply to follow the suggestion that we should picture the instrument which carries out our mental functions as resembling a compound microscope or a photographic apparatus, or something of the kind. On that basis, psychical locality will correspond to a point inside the apparatus at which one of the preliminary stages of an image comes into being (Seminar I, p. 75).

He seeks a better way of representing his understanding of how unconscious subjectivity is constituted, while also continuing to criticize the universalism of the Oedipus complex; with the optical schema, he is able to achieve both these objectives in a way that includes the power of the Oedipus complex to structure the subject by knotting the three orders together. He thus uses the authority of The Interpretation of Dreams to construct the new schema of the inverted vase (Seminar I, pp. 76, 77, 78). He mentions optics: For there to be an optics, for each given point in real space, there must be one point and one corresponding point only in another space, which is the imaginary space. This is the fundamental structural hypothesis …. without it one cannot write even one equation, nor symbolise anything (Seminar I, p. 76).

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The real, imaginary and symbolic are articulated. “For there to be an optics”—certainly, but what must be there in order for there to be a subject? Let us look at the schema:

The experiment of the inverted bouquet The image of the vase in the inverted bouquet51 is equivalent to the image of the body in the mirror in the mirror stage. By distinguishing the image of the vase, from the real of the flowers, the optical model depicts the advent of the ego in the imaginary register, while the real of the objects of desire is distinguished from the imaginary, even if in the mirror, the object and the body image are joined. In other words, this device allows us to situate what pertains to the ego and what does not. Well then, let us say that the image of the body, if we locate it in our schema, is like the imaginary vase which contains the bouquet of real flowers. That’s how we can portray for ourselves the subject of the time before the birth of the ego (my emphasis) and the appearance of the latter (Seminar I, p. 79).

Lacan, while resolutely dismissing any developmental psychology, claims that the subject is prior to the ego; through this new device, he can take up not only the question of the primal identification, the “root identification”—which I studied in my earlier work—or the question 51

On the optical model of the person’s ideals, see Jacques-Alain Miller, “Commentary on the Graphs”, Ecrits, pp. 859–861.

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of the appearance of the envelope of the ego, which dialectically includes the real; he also indicates that this dialectic operates on condition that the eye, which looks, is situated in the right place. The imaginary and the real symbolize each other through an inside-outside relation that calls for the symbolic’s discriminating function to be maintained. In this device, the eye symbolizes the subject and in order for the knotting to be done correctly, the eye must be well situated. The position of eye, and thus of the subject, “is essentially characterised by its place in the symbolic world, in other words in the world of speech” (Seminar I, p. 80). According to this logic, a fortunate “Development only takes place in so far as the subject integrates himself into the symbolic system, acts within it, asserts himself in it through the use of genuine speech” (Seminar I, p. 86). In this schema, Lacan, following Freud, uses the laws of optics to suggest a new model of psychic structuring, and the knotting of the three registers depends on the way that the eye is positioned in it. In the same way, whether or not the subject finds himself in the dialectic of inside/outside, which knots the imaginary to the real—the image of the body to the real of desires or the drive—depends on the position that the subject is given in the symbolic. If Lacan inherits the reference to the laws of optics from Freud, the power of the symbolic function comes from Lévi-Strauss; this, in clinical terms, is not unimportant, for when the dialectic fails, the subject does not distinguish what is his own from what is not. We could say, then, that there is no correct way for the ego to arise, and this is because of a failure of the subject’s position in the symbolic. Because of this, all one’s clinical attention should be directed to this subjective position, even, and perhaps especially, when a subject articulates only a few words, as is the case of little Robert, which was presented in Lacan’s seminar by one of his students, Rosine Lefort. Robert seems knotted to speech only in what he does not “know how to say”: “Madame! The wolf!” Before seeing how Rosine Lefort uses the optical model, let us note that Lacan is careful to apply it, in the first place, to an analysis of the position that he and his students occupy in the analytic movement.

The right distance from the mirror and from Freud We need to remember that Lacan has just profited from Freud’s authorization to move from Wallon’s experiment on the mirror stage

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to that of the inverted bouquet52, indicating in particular that the root image can arise only if the eye is the right distance from the mirror. The eye is the metaphor for the subject. Lacan makes the aim of his commentary explicit to his listeners: In the course of our dialogue, you have been able to get acquainted with the ambition which rules our commentary [i.e., our analysis] namely that of reconsidering the fundamental texts of the analytic experience. The moving spirit of our excavation is the following idea—whatever in an experience is always best seen is at some remove. So it is not surprising that it should be here and now (my emphasis) that we are led, in order to understand the analytic experience, to begin again with what is implied by its most immediate given, namely the symbolic function, or what in our vocabulary is exactly the same thing— the function of speech. We rediscover this, the central domain of analytic experience, signalled throughout Freud’s oeuvre, never named, but signalled at every step. I don’t think I am pushing it when I say that that is what can be immediately translated, almost algebraically, from any Freudian text. And this translation yields the solution of a number of antinomies which become apparent in Freud with that honesty which ensures that any given one of his texts is never closed, as if the whole of the system were in it” (Seminar I, p. 89).

It is one thing to authorize himself, through Freud, to develop an optical experiment as a “metaphor” of subjective structuring, and then to transmit it to his students for a clinical presentation. Lacan goes further, however, since he clarifies for his listeners where they are, and even where he himself is; he does so by applying the experiment of the inverted bouquet to the analytic movement. Lacan argues that he is situated at the right distance from Freud, at the exact point where– unlike the Anglo-American disciples—he can translate Freud’s text and give the solution to the contradictions that Freud, in his honesty, did not cover up. His transferential position is at the right distance 52 On the experiment by Henri Bouasse, see Joël Dor, Introduction to the Reading of Lacan: The Unconscious Structured Like a Language (1997).

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from Freud, and he can therefore do the work of an analyst on them— translate them—in order to bring out Freud’s contradictions, which are symptoms that he transmitted within psychoanalysis and which remain active even within analysts’ clinical activity. The analysis is thus itself turned inside-out: Lacan’s commentary becomes Freud’s analysis with Lacan. Yet the question of the desire that is to be imputed to Freud as an individual is of little importance here; what is in question, instead, is the desire of the analyst, who was incarnated by Freud and to which Lacan seeks to return. More than Freud’s or Lacan’s own particular desires, what Lacan is elucidating is the desire of the analyst. If Lacan must, as a preliminary, be in the right place in his relation to Freud in order to be able to translate Freud’s symptomatic contradictions, a second condition for making progress in this project is Freud’s own honesty, which must be complete if the system that explains the symptom is adequate. And the completeness of the system is nothing other than that of the symbolic system itself. Thus, the key to Freud’s contradictions is, according to Lacan, the symbolic function: the function of speech and its laws. Lacan is both Freudian and Lévi-Straussian.

The wrong distance and stagnation in the imaginary Why is Lacan located at the right distance from Freud? Because he is not located at the wrong distance; for example, he is not in the place of Anna Freud, who “forgets”: 1. 2.

The dead father or her own father, and Freud’s desire as analyst and the Freudian discovery, which demonstrate that the dead father is the key for understanding the symbolic function as such.

To forget this is to forget Freud and the symbolic function in analytic experience. By reintroducing the function of death and the dead father in analytic experience, Lacan shows that he is located at the right distance from Freud, the distance where he can decipher the contradictions of Freud’s speech, and both find the key—the symbolic function—and remind analysts of their duty to handle the function of speech appropriately in analytic experience. He is calling upon analysts to remember the dead father’s desire and the right

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“Freudian” use of Freud’s speech and of speech in general, as the analytic ideal and the rule of the super-ego. Yet in order to be able to make this good use, there must be a suitable conception of the function of speech, which “is exactly the same thing” as the symbolic function, as Lacan indicates (Seminar I, p. 89). If he can give its true value to this function, which is directly in Freud’s orientation, it is thanks to the work of Lévi-Strauss and French anthropology. This enables Lacan, as we shall see, even in the most clinical moments, to mobilize the place of speech in a symbolic system rather than to flatten the interpretation onto the register of the family, as he had once done, before the change in his approach. It is necessary, Lacan insists, to go back to the drawing board with the Freudian experience in order to understand it; he must start again with the symbolic function and with speech. Let us see how this pays off: 1. 2.

In clinical experience with Robert On the level of the change from the mirror stage to the inverted vase; this is a radical theoretical change, since the mirror stage of 1936–1949 was the theory of an imaginary capture without speech; the inverted vase, on the other hand, combines the mirror stage with Lévi-Strauss’ theory of the symbolic function in order to establish a link between the imaginary and the symbolic in the very first moments of subjective maturation.

Let us start with Robert, whose case shows us what happens when this symbolic function does not place the subject in a position in which he can see his own image: when this function is exercised in a degraded way.

The wolf: The mother or the totem? After clarifying his transferential relation to Freud, Lacan gives the floor to Rosine Lefort to discuss the Robert case, a case that articulates the deficiency of the ego from which the child suffers, in terms of the logic of the inverted vase. Then there is a short dialogue between Lacan and Jean Hyppolite concerning the scope of the word “wolf”. Rosine Lefort seems to understand the figure of the wolf as the heir of the devouring maternal imago. Far from giving credit to this

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idea, Lacan re-situates the wolf’s place in the symbolic system and reorganizes the reading of the case on this basis: “Naturally the wolf raises all the problems of symbolism: it isn’t a function with a limit, since we are forced to search out its origin in a general symbolisation” (Seminar I, p. 101). Lacan turns away from a reading that places too much focus on the “family complexes” and makes the wolf into the imago of the “devouring mother”. Instead, he emphasizes its place in the general symbolic system: its anthropological place as a totem. Let us listen to Lacan: Why the wolf? We are not particularly familiar, in this part of the world, with this character. The fact that it is the wolf who is chosen to produce these effects ties us straight away to a broader function on the mythical, folkloric, religious, primitive plane. The world is part of a complete filiation, which connects up with secret societies, with everything that implies in the way of initiation, either in the adoption of a totem (my emphasis) or in the identification with a character (Seminar I, p. 101).

From the “devouring mother” to the question of the totem: we see how Lacan opens the situation up to an analytic interpretation of the wolf, the concern with the dead father, the social bond and the symbolic function as such. Lacan’s rectification moves the interpretation of the “wolf” from the maternal imago to the dead father; he claims that the subject identifies with it, in a sort of “sacred” ritual over which this anthropological figure of the wolf looms. The wolf, then, is nothing other than a version of the ideal or of the Freudian super-ego. Lacan indicates that he still has to clarify and distinguish between these two instances of subjective structuring.

Totem, super-ego and ego ideal in transference The super-ego is constraining and the ego-ideal exalting. These are things that one tends to gloss over, because we move from one term to the other as if the two were synonymous. It is a question which is worth pursuing in relation to the transference relationship. When one looks for the basis of therapeutic action, one says that the subject identifies the analyst with his ego-ideal or on the contrary with his super-ego, and, in the same text one

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substitutes one for the other in accordance with the unfolding of the demonstration, without really explaining what the difference is. Certainly I will be led to examine the question of the superego. I should say from the start that, if we don’t limit ourselves to a blind, mythical usage of this term, this key-word, this idol, the super-ego is essentially located within the symbolic plane of speech, in contrast to the ego-ideal. The super-ego is an imperative. As is indicated by common sense and by the uses to which it is put, it is consonant with the register and the idea of the law, that is to say with the totality of the system of language, in so far [as] it defines the situation of man as such, that is to say in so far as he is not just a biological individual” (Seminar I, p. 102).

In this clinical fragment, the wolf as a core of speech incarnates the function of language, which “ties [the child] to the community of mankind” (Seminar I, p. 103). This “summary of a law”, according to Lacan, allows, in treating a child, an “extraordinary elaboration, brought to a close by this touching self-baptism, when he utters his own Christian name. At that point we come to the fundamental relation, in its most reduced form, of man to language. It is extraordinarily moving” (Seminar I, p. 103). Lacan’s emotion highlights the enormous scope that he gives to the child’s only speech. This speech is the totemic expression of a law of the super-ego that enable the child to christen himself. By doing so, the subject experiences the surface of his body and makes his ego appear in a way that may be unstable, but which is nevertheless effective. It is the most reduced, and therefore the most valuable, fragment of the treasury of signifiers that allows the subject to be bound—in the quasi-religious sense of the term—to the human community. Lacan thus turns away from interpreting the animal in terms of the devouring mother in order to remind his student of the almost sacred wealth of the totemic core of speech that animates the subject. What must be understood is the fruitfulness of the totem: the way in which the father functions in the analytic practice with the “Wolf Child”, as well as in the analyst’s transferential relation with Freud himself. We can now see the direction in which Lacan is moving in this seminar. Solidly anchored by the symbolic function, which he

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owes to the anthropologists, Lacan begins a double movement of analysing 1. 2.

Analytic technique, and The transference to Freud, or rather, the way in which Freud’s flaws explain how analytic practice has gone astray.

Along with Lacan—and with the paternal function clearly in mind— we must find the right distance from Freud if we are to produce analysts who will be able to let themselves be guided by the dead father’s desire; such analysts will need to be capable of undoing his symptoms and his contradictions, and to admit the crucial position of the symbolic function and of speech in constituting the subject in transference. Not to find this right distance in relation to Freud is to have a blurred vision and to go astray in the register of the imaginary—the register of duality and its impasses—which governs Anglo-American practice. Not to take the right distance is to be unable to see the Freudian heritage, its rules from the super-ego, its ideals, its totem: Freud. It is, consequently, to stagnate in the imaginary. Analysis progresses through the fullness of the Freudian lesson, but it progresses thanks to the anthropological depth of the symbolic function, which Lacan takes from Lévi-Strauss and which enables him to use the paternal function to analyse cases. It enables him to displace the interpretation of the wolf from an emphasis on its maternal voraciousness to an analysis of totemic paternity and what the latter can produce. He returns to Freud.

From the bouquet to the thing or the invention of the ego In the treatment, the child’s handling of the totem of the dead father—the wolf—makes his ego, the surface of his body and his body’s psychic image appear. And disappear. His particular position in the symbolic does not make him absent to the totem, but he entertains an alternative relation to it, one that is badly situated, and which impedes his development and that of his ego, which appears to him at the time of his self-christening. This is why the symbolic function is interesting, as are optics and the return to the dead father of psychoanalysis. This return can also be seen as a sort of self-christening, not only for Lacan but for his followers, who no

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longer derive their authority as analysts from the group that they had just left. Lacan returns thus to his Freudian heritage. “Freud had already constructed something similar, and quite specifically pointed out to us in the Traumdeutung and the Abriss53 that the psychic agencies should (my emphasis) be conceived of on the basis of imaginary phenomena” (Seminar I, p. 144). It is necessary to trust Freud, he repeats, accentuating the register of theoretical “duty”. Before continuing the analysis of Lacan’s reading of Freud, let us stop for a moment to emphasize how the analysis of the child’s self-christening shows Lacan’s extraordinary clinical precision; here he is rethinking his theory of both the super-ego and the ego ideal, since defects in both these agencies seriously affect the way that the subject can—or cannot—perceive his ego, from which he projects himself imaginarily. Six years later, brought by clinical experience to the very origin of humanization, Lacan will point out that the ego ideal and the super-ego are born in the same primal moment of subjective structuring. “How can we conceive of the concrete origins of the ego ideal? ... these origins cannot be separated from those of the super-ego, for while they are distinct from the latter’s, they are coupled to it,” as Lacan says on 7 June 1961 (Seminar VIII, pp. 406, 409). In order to see oneself in the right position in the mirror, the relation to the totem—the dead father, the super-ego, and the ego ideal— must be internalized. How can we understand the stability of the psychic function that allows us to perceive the ego if we do not see what transfers the symbolic function from the outside to the inside? In 1961, in his seminar, Transference, Lacan examines this question of the movement from outside to inside by using the Freudian notion of the introjection of the super-ego—and even of the ego ideal, since Freud does not make a strong distinction between the two terms. He does so through the solution of the totem meal, which fixes the totem in the body of the brothers (Totem and Taboo) after the murder of the father, or in that of the sons (after each Oedipus complex). Then he will advance a second Freudian solution. Let us follow its sequence: “The notion of an interior is a crucial topological function in analytic thought, since even introjection refers to it” (Seminar VIII, p. 408), Lacan first assures us, and then

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Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis, 1964, 141–208.

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he indicates the first Freudian solution: “the introjection—after the murder—of an imperative, interdictive, essentially conflictual object” (Seminar VIII, p. 410), which is modified, by narcissistic investment, into the internalized ego ideal. By being introjected, it enters—this is a first Freudian theme— the sphere which would only be interior; it is thereby made sufficiently narcissistic, and perhaps becomes the object of libidinal investment for the subject. And it is easier to make oneself loved by the ego ideal than by the object that was, at one moment, its original” (Seminar VIII, p. 411).

Thus Lacan indicates Freud’s first solution. The second solution is also Freudian: Prior to even a first step toward the Oedipal situation, there is a first identification with the father as such. Did the father trot around in his head? Freud allows the subject to take a first step in identifying with the father, and he develops a terminological refinement here by calling it exquisit männlich, “exquisitely manly” (Seminar VIII, p. 416).

Disappointed by the mother, the subject returns to this primal identification through a regression. These two identifications—primordial and regressive—with the father, derive from a process that is prior to the Oedipus complex and which makes one of the object’s traits into a sign (not into a signifier) that comes from the Other; it occurs on the optic plane and comes from the one whom the subject turns to in the mirror in order to be sure of who he is. And of what he is for the Other. It is necessary to look at oneself from the viewpoint of the Other in order to be able to recognize oneself after having been recognized. This point is the I of the ego ideal, as Lacan explains. It is what the child misses when he wishes to be recognized. We must conceive of gaze of the Other as being interiorised by a sign. That is enough. Ein einziger Zug. There is no need for a whole field of organization and a massive introjection. This point I of the single trait, this sign of an assent to the Other, of the choice of love, on which the subject can work, is there somewhere, and is dealt with in the sequence of the mirror-play. It is

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enough for the subject to coincide with it in his relation with the Other for this little sign, this einziger Zug to be at his disposal. One has to make a radical distinction between the ego ideal and the ideal ego. The first is a symbolic introjection, whereas the second is an imaginary projection (Seminar VIII, p. 418).

The instability of the projection of the image of his own ego—the ideal ego—for the Wolf Child results from a defect in symbolic introjection— the ego ideal—since for some reason, his subjectivity did not coincide with the Other of symbolic recognition. As a consequence, the child’s christening can only be self-proclaimed, a self-christening: unstable, subject to the super-ego, and without a fixed connection with his own image. We shall note both the enormous clinical scope of the case and also its effects on the seminar, for if it is fruitful to refer to Seminar VIII in order to understand this fragment of Seminar I, it is in Seminar I that Lacan indicates that the question of the super-ego is worth being asked in connection with the transferential relation. Six years later, in the seminar on transference, he will examine this question by referring once again to the theory of the inverted vase. What can be said about the seminar of 1953–1954? According to Lacan in this seminar, the clinical analysis shows that: 1.

2.

3.

A theory of the register of the image—or of the imaginary—is necessary in Freudian experience, for what this child suffers from is the lack of an image of himself, the lack of an ego54 The image of the ego can emerge and be stabilized only if the subject has at his disposal a position from which he can project a lovable—complete—image This defect in his position results from a defective symbolic situation—a totemic function that fails for the subject—even if it is universally present and insistent.

These conclusions enable us to understand an important aspect of the laws that govern the subject’s psychic functioning: these laws, which define the place that s/he takes in the symbolic and

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Here, Lacan follows Freud’s own logic; he recalls in his seminar that Freud “… den[ies] the psychotic access to the imaginary. And since in general Freud knows what he is saying, we will have to find a means of filling in what he meant on this topic” (Seminar I, p. 116).

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the imaginary and condition her/his link to the real, derive from optics—the image—and from the symbolic (totem, super-ego, ego ideal). For this reason, we need a new version of the mirror stage— the inverted vase—which is authorized by Freud and which is in consonance with Lévi-Strauss’ theory of the symbolic function.

From nature to culture: From the mirror stage to the inverted bouquet What has changed between the period of 1938–1950 and the first year of the seminar? What has changed is that the Wolf Child brings us, in 1954, to the origins of humanization—the juncture of nature and culture— which, previously, had been explained by the mirror stage without any reference to the symbolic function. In the text of 1938, Lacan had promoted the Father as absolute Other who introduces the alterity that is necessary to resolve the intrusion complex, which itself had provided the solution to the weaning complex. For want of the “Father”, the child remained trapped, according to these formulations, in the image of his own brother, and even of the terrible imago of the mother. According to Lacan, this imaginary capture provided the basis of the super-ego, where the mother plays a role that was stronger than the father’s, who had had this function for a longer time. The imaginary, but unconscious power of the super-ego was counterbalanced by that of the ego ideal, where the father was more powerful than the mother. By maturing in this way, the subject could reach a sexually and socially adjusted subjective position. Despite this, we remember that on the collective level, the father’s social decline was reputed to impede the good functioning of the Oedipus complex, and therefore the happy development of the sons of modernity, who were left in the grip of the “character” neuroses. In 1950, Lacan used this theory again by making the decline of the father and, more generally, family circumstances, the conditions for the degrading of the Oedipus complex and of the super-ego. This final degradation allowed Lacan, as he said, to invent the “Lacanian” super-ego, which he distinguished from the Freudian super-ego in the following ways: 1.

It was quite precocious and appeared well before the Oedipus complex, since it found its coordinates in the biological disarray of prematuration.

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It depended on the social conditions of the family. — hence his clinic of character neuroses and of the neurotic character, which Lacan developed in 1950 (“The Functions of Psychoanalysis in Criminology”), but also — that of the super-ego, whether bearable or not, and — that of the passage to the act as the psychopath’s attempt at a solution. It put the clinician on the trail of acts that expressed, according to Mauss’ terminology, a fragmented symbolism, which was opposed to the complete symbolism of the ordinary structuring of subjectivity.

In 1950, Lacan had already grasped the notion of a symbolism divided—particularly in Mauss—into the categories of complete and fragmentary, and had used this notion to account for the clinic of psychopaths and the super-ego; we remember that what was necessary for a successful symbolization or for the exit from the imaginary prison was a metamorphosis of the brother into the father, which would be brought about by the Oedipal drama. What changes in Lacan’s return to Freud is that he now uses the symbolic function in relation to a very early stage of subjective structuring and he gives the super-ego a symbolic status that has its roots in the symbolic exchanges that preceded even the birth of the subject. Now, the super-ego becomes a symbolic function that comes from the Other of culture; it is a symbolic formation, and indeed, a linguistic formation that determines the child’s situation in relation to the symbolic system as it had existed before his birth. The difficulties that the subject inherits no longer derive from his “worth” or his faults; they depend on what was played out in his social group before he came into the world: the father’s unsettled debt, etc. The subject’s symptoms are thus decided even before his birth. As for the relation between the super-ego and the ego ideal, let us recall that, according to Lacan, the dialectic of introjection enables the subject to turn from the super-ego to the ego ideal. From this idealized point, the subject can see himself: he can project an image of his body—the typical ideal ego. When this point does not exist, the subject does not see himself, and this is the case of the Wolf Child; this boy, who has not achieved symbolic stability and whose egoimage has failed, discovers in his self-christening the presence of a totemic figure—the wolf—which is still active and which binds him

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to the human community. The wolf can do so despite the fact that the ego ideal has not come into existence and the (projective) image of the ego has not been stabilized. It is very moving to see this happen. This case history not only enables us to understand the subjective position of a being who can see himself solely by the movements of alternative projections; it also shows us how this being, who is stagnating pathetically at the threshold of culture, discovers, through his self-christening, what ordinary subjective maturation is. The child’s deed is poignant because it is doomed to vanish repeatedly. It is therefore through a child who has no image of himself, a child without an ego, that Lacan intends to provide a new solution to the anthropological enigma; he knots the faceless son to the totemic father at the conjunction of nature and culture and of the human and language. This knotting is valid for everyone, whether the subject knows it or not, and analysts must be able to recognize it in the primal figure of the super-ego, which Lacan now situates in the symbolic register of speech. If we remember how Lacan had sought, in “The Mirror Stage” and “The Function of Psychoanalysis in Criminology” to resolve the enigma of how a human animal becomes a human being, we can understand that to encounter this transformation in the selfchristening of an egoless child touches him deeply. Does he turn this lost and blind little boy into an Oedipus, the appropriate hero for analysts? Let us say that the Wolf Child testifies to the persistence of the symbolic effectiveness that subjects him to language, even if only its “most reduced” form is available to him. Yet does this child’s response provide an answer for Lacan? On 30 March 1955, during the second year of the seminar, Lacan states specifically that the question that has motivated his research in these two seminars is: “‘What is the subject?’, in so far as it is, technically speaking, in the Freudian sense of the word, the unconscious subject, and by way of that, essentially the subject who speaks” (Seminar II, p. 175). Can we not see then that although the child may not be the brother of Oedipus, he is perfectly emblematic of the subject who has fallen short of the ego. Without an ego, without an image of himself, the Wolf Child, the son of the totem leads us toward the subject in its pure state: a simple function of the symbolic system. What is in question in such a case is very much the subject of the unconscious, the singular subject of a history that he must

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integrate into analytic experience up to a dimension that goes far beyond individual limits, for it is a matter of “the aggregate of his symptom” which is archived in the symbolic tangles of his symptomatic cryptograms.55 Incarnating the Freudian figure of subjectivity, the egoless child demonstrates—to his own misfortune—that the weaker the imaginary projection is, the more isolated is the symbolic function from which the unconscious subject proceeds. Thus, it is striking to see that, while returning to the texts of the dead father of psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan encounters the son of the totem in terms of the pathetic case of a child who has no image of himself. This empty-eyed child is a function of the symbolic system that has engendered him and he shows, at best, that the truth of his being is to be the son of the symbolic function itself. Freud’s desire incarnates the figure of the dead father for the analytic field; it can be returned to only through the desire of his sons, if they are able to maintain a distance from the projections of the ego, projections that handicap the ability to incarnate the founder’s desire. By not allowing himself to be dazzled by the imaginary and thus diverted from his course, Lacan returns to the speech of the dead father; he sees himself as being subjected to all the symbolic that has preceded him, just as he precedes all the other analysts and, on the level of the treatment, the sons’ being in the world. Yet even Lacan cannot understand this laying bare of Freudian subjectivity as the effect of the symbolic function without also understanding what the symbolic function is, and understanding its effectiveness and that of speech, which are “exactly the same thing” (Seminar I, p. 89). This is the reason for his theoretical alliance with French anthropology and the very early reference to the effectiveness of symbols in 1949 (“The Mirror Stage”). This alliance differs from the mirror stage because it recognizes that the very origin of being in the world depends not on an imaginarized super-ego, but a symbolic super-ego that is prior to the ego and gives a “symbolic circumstance” to the subject’s being; this circumstance decides by a formative introjection of the ego ideal whether or not the being will be able to see the image of his body: his ego. This primal subject of the primal subjection is the subject of language; it is the “strangers”

55

See Seminar II, pp. 175–187.

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who—whether he wants it or not and knows it or not—engender his unconscious desire. These strangers include the father, his speech, his voice, but also all the symbolic exchanges that precede the subject’s coming into the world; in short, the symbolic organization from which his life comes and to which he remains indebted.56 This symbolic organization is the Other, which has finally been designated as the place of the symbolic effectiveness that was mysteriously mentioned in 1949. The subject’s desire proceeds from this symbolic Other and yet, by perceiving his ego projectively, it is, first, in the mirror of his ego—or in the image of his brother—that he believes that he can locate his own wishes. This is why the specular image casts a shadow over the symbolic function, at the threshold of the visible world, and why there is a sort of penumbra that is then inhabited by symbolic effectiveness. This is the major metamorphosis effected by Lacan’s return to Freud: shining a light into this primal penumbra, he makes a radical separation between the ego and the subject of the unconscious. Lacan could not have begun this return without Lévi-Strauss. The transition from the mirror stage to the experiment of the inverted vase can now be shown as what it really is: an illustration of this metamorphosis. In this experiment, Lacan now knots the imaginary register of an optical machinery—used this time by Freud rather than Wallon—to the symbolic function, whose effectiveness was brought out by Lévi-Strauss. What is in question in Lacan’s research? He is seeking to become better acquainted with the desire of the analyst, which tries to throw light on an analysand’s desire. This is, indeed, the desire of the analyst, but is it Lacan’s desire or Freud’s? It is Lacan’s desire in that—as we have seen—he is on the track of Freud’s own desire, and Lévi-Strauss’ research has led him to decipher this desire in terms of the symbolic. Yet, at this moment of the seminar, it is not clear to whom one can attribute the desire that comes from the Other. Is it the desire of the subject? The desire of the Other? Lacan’s desire? Freud’s desire? The best way to learn how to attribute desire will be to read Freud’s texts; in them, we can locate the symbolic mark—the accent of truth—that allows him to

56 On the anthropology of debt, see Marcel Mauss (1922), The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies.

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attribute desire in his interpretations of the dream image. To do so is to address the traces and formations of the unconscious. This is the analyst’s task.

The return to Freud with Lévi-Strauss Freud’s dream or attributing desire By means of Freud’s optical model, Lacan has authorized himself to construct the model of the inverted vase: “Freud had already constructed something similar, and quite specifically pointed out to us in the Traumdeutung and the Abriss that the psychic agencies should be conceived of on the basis of imaginary phenomena” (Seminar I, p. 144). Here, Freud’s schema is no longer taken up only in terms of a logic of anticipation, which would authorize Lacan’s recourse to the optical model; it now designates for Lacan the imaginary order on the basis of which the psychic agencies must be conceived. What was merely the example of Freud becomes the thing itself. Psychoanalytic epistemology is respected. In relying on Freud’s text, Lacan encounters an imperative in it: the psychic agencies are to be conceived in terms of the imaginary. Lacan thus rereads the experiment of the bouquet alongside that of the mirror, but he also rereads Hegel’s theme of the imaginary register of desire along with Freud’s self-analysis; what these rereadings show us is how the image in the dream, in being made opaque, indicates the place of the libidinal investment of the imaginary, where the ego comes to represent itself through the other. On 7 April 1954, after a remark by Hyppolite, Lacan states: I shouldn’t begin by reminding you of the fundamental Hegelian theme—man’s desire is the desire of the other. That is exactly what is made plain in the model by the plane mirror. That is also where we again come upon Jacques Lacan’s classical mirror phase (Seminar I, p. 146).

Lacan explains: Desire is first grasped in the other, and in the most confused form …. The subject originally locates and recognises desire through the intermediary, not only of his own image, but of the

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body of his fellow being. It’s exactly at that moment that the human being’s consciousness, in the form of consciousness of self, distinguishes itself. It is in so far as he recognises his desire in the body of the other that the exchange takes place. It is in so far as his desire has gone over to the other side that he assimilates himself to the body of the other and recognises himself as body (Seminar I, p. 147).

When the body of the other is perceived as complete—another child at the breast, for example—the subject feels that he has been made incomplete and experiences a push of desire to reach the total body form that he sees. This leads both to the fundamental register of aggressiveness, which was presented in 1938 as the fraternal intrusion complex, and to the Hegelian formula; the latter emphasizes the confusion in “identities” in specular desire and the mortal impasse of this alienation in the brother. Yet does this imaginary capturing of desire constitute all of desire? The libido always goes through an imaginary stage, as Lacan indicates, and here we find the projective logic of desire at work in dreams. In order to establish the certainty of the alienation that leads the subject’s desire to appear in the other, Lacan turns to Freud’s text, “A Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams.”57 François Perrier58 presents this text and says that he is perplexed by Freud’s judgement that “the principal protagonist is always the sleeper” (Seminar I, p. 152). Why not, indeed, simply endorse the dream’s manifest presentation, which attributes to those who are close to the sleeper a set of roles that, according to Freud, should always be referred to the dreamer’s desire? Lacan answers by saying that “The further we get the more we see how inspired these initial approaches towards the meaning of the dream and its scenario actually were” (Seminar I, p. 152). In one of his dreams, Freud recognizes his own ambition, which he projects onto a colleague. Lacan 57

Sigmund Freud, A Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams, 1957, pp. 217–235. 58 François Perrier (1922–1990), a French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. Analysed by Lacan, he participated in the SFP, and then in the Freudian School of Paris (EFP), which he left in 1969 because of a dispute over the pass. He helped create the French Language Psychoanalytic Organization (Organisation psychanalytique de langue française, OPLF), which is also called the Fourth Group.

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reaffirms Freud’s genius, thus reconfirming his own transferential position. In analysing Freud’s sense of certainty, Lacan makes a remark about a term that Freud uses to situate the person who plays the main role in the dream: the Viennese word, “agnosieren”. This could seem to be an uninteresting detail, but it is not, for we must always follow the epistemology of the detail. Lacan moves forward in his commentary by selecting a word—a signifier—precisely because it throws light on how desire, in its imaginary aspect, is attributed; it is as if this word gave both the text and Freud’s own self-analysis not only its Viennese accent, but also its accent of unconscious truth. According to Lacan, an expression from the language of Freud’s childhood imposes itself on his pen at the very moment when he must leave no doubt about whom to attribute the dreamer’s desire to. And let us repeat, this is not just any term, since it refers to the recognition of the person: “agnosieren”, in the Viennese dialect, means “recognized”. At the moment when the subject of the dream’s desire must be recognized, what imposes itself on Freud is Viennese speech. Indeed, it is interesting, the significance of the Viennese milieu. In this connection, Freud gives us a very deep sense of his relation with the fraternal character, with this friend-enemy, who he says is a character absolutely fundamental to his existence— there must always be someone masked by this sort of Gegenbild. But, at the same time, it is with this character as go-between, embodied by his colleague from the laboratory … through the intermediary of … his acts, of his feelings, that Freud projects, brings to life in this dream what is its latent desire, namely the claims of his own aggression, of his own ambition …. It is right at the heart of the dream’s consciousness, more exactly at the heart of the mirage of the dream that we have to search, in the person who plays the leading role, for the sleeper’s own person. But the point is that, it is not the sleeper, it is the other (Seminar I, pp. 152–153).

To comment on a text is like doing an analysis. The past history, the lived history, of the subject, which we try to get at in our practice … [w]e can only get at it … through the

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adult’s childish language …. In magisterial fashion, Ferenczi saw the importance of this question—what is it in an analysis which makes the child within the adult participate? There is no doubt about the answer—whatever is verbalised in an irruptive fashion (Seminar I, p. 219).

Lacan analyses Freud’s text by picking up on the accent of truth that breaks into the German text through the language of Freud’s childhood. Why does this word provide us with the accent of truth? Why does this symptom of Freud’s make him certain that he is recognizing his own desire in the dream? The dream, according to Freud, is an unconscious formation that is always to be taken as a realization of an infantile desire; it is not surprising, therefore, that the symbolic universe of Freud’s childhood breaks into his text in order to account for and to formulate the desire of that period of his life—which motivated the dream—in the language of that period. And this goes beyond Freud, since this linguistic symptom shows his unconscious activity, even while he is analysing the dream. It is as if Freud’s self-analysis were adjusted so well to its object—the unconscious—that it placed an element of the unconscious right under our noses. Following the trail of Freud’s desire, Lacan isolates the symptomatic trait and situates its symbolic place in order to show how Freud’s self-analysis allowed him to attribute all the roles in the dream to the dreamer’s desire, to Freud’s desire. Lacan also shows that what is in question in this particular case is the Freudian paradigm of the way in which unconscious desire is attributed. Thus, in order to be able to situate the dialectic of desire, one should neither doubt Freud’s suggestions, as François Perrier did, nor allow oneself to be blinded by the invasion of the other’s image. Lacan continues: I talked to you about the exchange that takes place between the subject’s image and the image of the other in so far as it is libidinalised, narcissised, in the imaginary situation. By the same token, in the same way as in animals, certain parts of the world are rendered opaque and become fascinating, it too is rendered thus. We have the capacity to agnosieren in the dream the sleeper’s own person in a pure state. The power of understanding of the subject is expanded in proportion. On the contrary, in

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the waking state, at least if he hasn’t read the Traumdeutung, he won’t be able to perceive in its sufficiency those bodily sensations capable of telling him, while he is sleeping, about something internal, something coenaesthetic. It is precisely in so far as the libidinal obscuring in the dream is on the other side of the mirror, that his body is, not felt any the less, but perceived better, understood by the subject. Do you grasp the mechanism here? In the waking state, the body of the other is reflected back to the subject, he thus fails to recognise lots of things about himself. That the ego is a capacity to fail to recognise [méconnaissance] is the very foundation of the technique of analysis. This goes a very long way. As far as structuring, organisation and by the same token scotomisation—here, I am happy enough to use the term—and all manner of things, which are so many pieces of information which can be passed from ourselves to ourselves—a special game which reflects back to us our corporeality, that corporeality which also has an alien origin. Even as far as—They have eyes in order not to see (Seminar I, pp. 153–154).

The optical experiment is no longer being used as a metaphor for the way in which the subject is structured; what is in question, instead, is to grasp how desire is structured, first of all, in the imaginary register. This analysis of Freud’s own analysis of dreams allows Lacan to show his listeners the mechanism of the mirror that leads the dreamer—through the other—to discover what motivates his own person, which has been projected into the other. In other words, with his eyes closed, the dreamer has access to the image of his body through the other who has been recognized (agnosieren). In the dream—on the scene of the unconscious—the dreamer’s body is represented very purely in the image of the other; once awake, however, we are dazzled or distracted by the other’s image and are therefore less able to perceive what is happening to us. Let us summarize. For Lacan: 1. 2.

The psychic agencies must now be conceived in the imaginary register Freud says this and must be trusted

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He must be followed word for word—and the word, in this case, is Viennese; we must follow the trail of his symbolic universe in order to follow his desire as analyst The place of his colleague, which Freud analyses in his dream is the same thing: it is the place of the other in the dream. This other is only a mask for the internal process of the dreamer’s unconscious desire.

Thus, the desire of the dream uses the other’s body. There is a sort of dialectic between the ego and the other, but this dialectic pertains to the register of language and of the symbolic: the operations of displacement or of condensation in the dream. Lacan then offers a punctuation: “[W]hat makes up the dream is something which we must look for, and which truly belongs to the unconscious” (Seminar I, p. 155). The register of the imaginary dialectic of desire—between the ego and the other—must not be confused with the composition of the unconscious, whose rules come from the symbolic because the human being, very early on, is subjected to language and the symbolic relation. The subject becomes aware of his desire in the other, through the intermediary of the image of the other which offers him the semblance of his own mastery …. But there’s no escaping the fact that he’s a human being, born in a state of impotence, and, very early on, words, language were what he used to call with, and a most miserable call it was, when his food depended on his screams. This primitive mothering has already been related to his states of dependency. But really that is no reason to hide the fact that, no less early, this relation to the other is named, and is so by the subject. That a name, however confused it may be, designates a specific person, is exactly what makes up the transition to the human state. If one has to define the moment at which man becomes human, we can say that it is the moment when, however little it be, he enters into the symbolic relation. As I’ve already emphasised, the symbolic relation is eternal. And not simply because effectively there must always be three people—it is eternal because the symbol introduces a third party, an element of mediation, which brings the two actors

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into each other’s presence, leads them on to another plane, and changes them (Seminar I, p. 155).

Lacan insists on the way that language goes beyond the imaginary dialectic and he indicates the way in which the symbolic is connected to the imaginary; these ideas allow him, next, to formulate a way of directing the treatment by using these reference points. So, the dialectic of the ego and the other is transcended, is placed on a higher plane, in relation to the other, solely through the function of language, in so far as it is more or less identical, and at all events is fundamentally linked up with what we should call the rule, or better still, the law. At each instant of its intervention, this law creates something new. Every situation is transformed by its intervention, whatever it is, except when we talk to no purpose (Seminar I, pp. 156–157).

Language can transcend the dialectic of the ego if speech is full. “Here we are, introduced to this elementary level where language immediately adheres to our first experiences. Because it is a vital necessity which makes of man’s environment a symbolic one” (Seminar I, p. 157). The human environment depends on the prematuration of the species, and no longer on the family group and the mother’s care, as it had in his earlier work. Lacan has gone beyond the epistemology of his formulations of 1938 or of the mirror stage. The symbolic function is now situated at the very origin of subjective structuring.

The transcendence of the ego and the symbolic system of the symptom Let us return to the optical experiment: In my little model, in order to conceive of the incidence of the symbolic relation, all you have to do is assume that it is the introduction of linguistic relations which produces the swings of the mirror, which will offer the subject, in the other, in the absolute other, the various aspects of his desire. There is a connection between the imaginary dimension and the symbolic system, so long as the history of the subject is inscribed in it ….

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All human beings share in the universe of symbols. They are included in it and submit to it, much more than they constitute it. They are much more its supports than its agents. It is as a function of the symbols, of the symbolic constitution of his history, that those variations are produced in which the subject is open to taking on the variable, broken, fragmented, sometimes even unconstituted and regressive, images of himself (Seminar I, pp. 157–158).

The subject thus sees himself in a series of images that depend on the symbolic circumstances of his history. The absence of the selfimage characterizes certain subjective positions, as shown by the Wolf Child, who also demonstrates by his self-christening that, even in that situation, the image could make a transitory appearance. If there is a diachronic determination of the self-image, there is also a synchronic determination, through which the subject can perceive himself in a place where he had not seen himself earlier, and where he will no longer see himself later. Conversely, the stability of the image of the ego depends on the stability of the symbolic relations that regulate it, and the first of these relations is language. The result of this is that a deregulated use of language—Freud’s idea of free association—sets aside the ordinary standards that regulate his speech; free association allows the subject to perceive, in his transference, all the images of his ego, which he had not known previously. For the subject, the uncoupling of his relation to the other causes the image of the ego to fluctuate, to shimmer, to oscillate, renders it complete and incomplete. So that he can recognise all the stages of his desire, all the objects which have given consistency, nourishment and body to this image, he has to receive it in its completeness, to which he has never had access. Through the successive identifications and revivals, the subject must constitute the history of his ego (Seminar I, pp. 181–182).

If this maximal narcissistic projection of the subject—which leads to transference love—results from the lifting of the ordinary rules to which speech is bound and confirms the subordination of the image to language, we will be right to connect certain absences of the images of the ego with certain “holes in memory” that characterize the subject’s narrative. For example, an early traumatic scene

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that breaches the subject’s imaginary register will be repressed some time later, when the subject has been introduced sufficiently into the register of language and can read its sexual signification. Rather than integrate this scene, he prefers to give up the fragments of discourse that would give meaning to it. At this specific moment, something of the subject’s becomes detached in the very symbolic world that he is engaged in integrating. From then on, it will no longer be something belonging to the subject. The subject will no longer speak it, will no longer integrate it. Nevertheless, it will remain there, somewhere, spoken, if one can put it this way, by something the subject does not control. In other words, there is no essential difference between this moment in the analysis which I have described to you, and the intermediary moment, between the stamp and the symbolic repression. There is just one difference, which is that at that particular moment, there is no one there to give him his cue. Repression begins, having constituted its original nucleus. Now there is a central point around which symptoms, successive repressions, and by the same token—since repression and the return of the repressed are the same thing—the return of the repressed will later be organised (Seminar I, p. 191).

This trauma is in the register of sight: what corresponds to the imaginary breech in the symbolic is repression, and what is repressed returns in the symptom. Since this is the case, it is the symbolic register that inherits the mark of the specular trauma. The symptom incarnates the insistence of a speech that has been “muzzled” and is “latent in the subject’s symptoms” and which the analyst must “release” (Seminar I, p. 185). The pain of the eyes—a specular trauma—is inscribed in the symbolic register of the symptom, and there is thus a movement from imaginary to symbolic. Lacan also demonstrates that the opposite movement can occur: an injury in the symbolic can have a mysterious correspondence on the level of the image of the body, which breaks down. In this connection, he mentions an Islamic analysand, whose symptoms are related to “the use of the hand” (Seminar I, p. 196).

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The symptom’s grasp over this body part has nothing to do with any guilty activity of childhood, as Lacan indicates; instead, it points, through the bodily image, to the fault of the father, who was suspected of theft. We know that the Koran prescribes the sacrifice of the body part that has sinned. Although the son clearly misunderstands this law, as Lacan explains, the problems with the hand point to a failure of imaginary integration, which can be explained by the cultural coordinates of the drama of the father. “One should not fail to recognise the symbolic appertinances of a subject” (Seminar I, p. 197). Something concerning the image of the body has not been integrated. In the course of analysis, as I have pointed out to you, it is when the traumatic elements—grounded in an image which has never been integrated—draw near that holes, points of fracture appear in the unification, the synthesis, of the subject’s history. I have pointed out how it is in starting from these holes that the subject can realign himself with the different symbolic determinations which make him a subject with a history. Well, in the same way, for every human being, everything personal which can happen to him is located in the relation to the law to which he is bound. His history is unified by the law, by his symbolic universe, which is not the same for everyone. Tradition and language diversify the reference to the subject (Seminar I, pp. 197–198).

If the son’s hand indicates the father’s wrongdoing, this means that the traumatic symbolic event has left a trace in the imaginary register of the suffering body. The body image and the symbolic register are linked for better and for worse in subjective maturation. The trace of the fault can thus move from one register to the other through the logic of an inversion of the place of trauma, whether imaginary or symbolic. The symptom—inasmuch as it is a part of analytic experience—must always be read in the domain of the symbolic. Repression takes place after the imaginary breach: after an inscription of the symbolic fault in the body image. We also see that in the clinic of individual cases, the subject that is in question in analysis is not the individual, since, however much integrity the son may have, he must nevertheless pay with his body for the father’s

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unsettled debt from the preceding generation.59 Whether the effect of the trauma manifests itself in the body image or in symbolic repression, it is useless to deal with the image in order to make the analysis progress; this is the case because the symptom, even when it finds a mark in the body image, results from a symbolic formation, either directly—through a fault in the symbolic—or indirectly—through repression and the return of the repressed following the trauma. Thus it is necessary, if the analysis is to progress, to deal less with the dialectic between the register of the image and the other—the imaginary—than with the symbolic system of the symptom, which in every case, is the location of the return of the repressed. The functioning of language in structuring the subject “transcends” the dialectic of the ego and enables the sorrows that are encountered in the scopic register to “speak” symptomatically. Such sorrows are troumatiques60, as Lacan will say later. The sufferings of the ego result from a connection with the symbolic, as Lacan assures his listeners. What, indeed, is the ego if not a sort of object, about which it would be too much to say that the subject maintains a relation with it. Instead, since the subject is “always already” caught up in language, it is through this inter-subjective relation with the other of language that the sufferings of the ego are to be interpreted. Such sufferings include the pain of not existing, as is the case of the Wolf Child. The regulation of the imaginary depends on something which is located in a transcendent fashion, as M. Hyppolite would put it—the transcendent on this occasion being nothing other than the symbolic connection between human beings. What is the symbolic connection? Dotting our i’s and crossing our t’s, it is the fact that socially we define ourselves with the law as go-between. It is through the exchange of symbols that we locate our different selves [mois] in relation to one

59

Having isolated the paternal function from the father’s person, Lacan, ten years later, states this distinction in both a general and a precise way. “The father, the Name-of-the-father, sustains the structure of desire with the structure of the law—but the inheritance of the father is what Kierkegaard designates for us, namely, his sin (Seminar XI, p. 34). 60 “We invent a ‘thingie’ (truc) to fill up a hole (trou) in the real. Where there is no sexual relation, there is a ‘troumatisme’.” Jacques Lacan, Les non-dupes errent, unpublished seminar, 19 February 1974. (This untranslatable pun combines the idea of the traumatic with that of the hole. Translator’s note.)

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another—you, you are Mannoni, and me Jacques Lacan, and we have a certain symbolic relation, which is complex, according to the different planes on which we are placed, according to whether we’re together in the police station or together in this hall, or together travelling. In other words, it’s the symbolic relation which defines the position of the subject as seeing (Seminar I, pp. 140–141).

Robert does not see himself because of a defect of the symbolic relation with the totemic other. Can we imagine a greater pain for the ego? The child, always confronted too early with a traumatic scene, gives up on the memory, which always returns again through the symbolic. The symbolic relation defines whether the subject sees, does not see, or sees incompletely; by being burdened with a father’s unpaid debt, a son must give up a part of the image of his own body. None of this is to be found in the register of the son as an individual, and therefore it is necessary in the treatment to follow the whole of the symbolic system, which accounts for the troubles of the ego.

The ego’s sufferings and the father’s fault Treating the ego as an object leads Lacan to undertake a critique of Michael Balint’s61 analysis of object relations in transference. Balint indicates what this owes to the mother/child relation, which becomes the ideal type of the primary love relation, by which an object can satisfy the subject’s needs fully. Lacan criticizes this imaginary theory of a maternal object that can complete the subject because Balint also argues that analysis aims at supporting the subject in a genital love. Such genital love is supposed to be the acme of object relations, and is characterized by the subject’s ability to get off on his partner as on an object, while also satisfying the partner’s subjectivity: by respecting his/her desire. As a consequence, Lacan says, the object loses its status as object and becomes a subject, and nothing in Balint’s theory explains how the object in primary love 61

Michael Balint (1896–1970). Born in Budapest, he studied medicine, then worked in Berlin while undergoing his psychoanalytic training with Karl Abraham and Hans Sachs, and later with Ferenczi. After the war, Balint set himself up in London, where, from 1948–1961, he worked at the Tavistock Clinic. A specialist in “narcissistic” cases, he was interested in psychosomatic medicine and sought to apply psychoanalysis to medical training.

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could metamorphose into a subject in genital love. If the ego is an object that is passed off, in the register of the image, as a subject, it must be detached from the imaginary capture that it produces in order to bring analysis to the heart of the symbolic relation; it is this relation that determines the ego image, and even its absence, as the Wolf Child teaches us. If the ego is an imaginary function, it is not to be confused with the subject (Seminar I, p. 193). The ego acquires the status of a mirage, as the residue, it is only one element in the objectal relations of the subject …. Are we to understand that there where the id was, in A, the ego must be? That the ego must move to A [the plane mirror] and, at the end of the most refined of ideal analyses, no longer be there at all? That is quite conceivable, since everything pertaining to the ego must be realised in what the subject recognises as himself (Seminar I, p. 195).

If the first phase of analysis involves the maximal projection of the subject, this should not let the analysand stagnate in an imaginary mirage or in the transference love that can be inferred from it; instead, it should lead him to perceive everything in the history of his imaginary fixations that results from the subject’s symbolic circumstances. Only symbolization, the reconstructed history of these circumstances and these relations, allows what the subject is to be recognized. The historical reconstruction of these circumstances allows the subject to detach himself from his fascination with his ego and to recognize what he is—and what his ego depends on—as a son or a function of the symbolic universe of language and the law, which greeted him when he came into the world. For Lacan during this period, the end of an analysis implies the destitution of the ego in favour of the recognition of the subject. This is what he envisages in a case in which the ego is missing, a case in which the imaginary breach is inscribed in the unconscious by deferred action and determines the formation of the symptom; the latter expresses symbolically the right of the repressed to return. This is also what he envisages when the image has been cut from the body, the condition that affects the son of the man who had not settled his debt. This entire clinical perspective demonstrates that the subject of

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the symptom results from something that develops in the imaginary register. This can happen by deferred action, in the case of an imaginary breach. This is also what occurs when the image of a body has been wilfully misrepresented and has lost its unity; this is a morbid consequence of the obstruction of the rules of social exchange that govern the world of the subject before his birth. We can admit that a father’s unpaid debt can be incarnated in what disrupts a son’s image only if we detach ourselves from an individualist conception of being, which is the ego’s own conception; we must substitute for it a conception of a subject that must be approached in its singularity. Analysis goes “right up to the furthermost perceptible limits, that is to say into a dimension that goes well beyond the limits of the individual” (Seminar I, p. 12). How can we better show the disjunction between the sufferings of the ego and their symbolic cause than by analysing how a problem in the use of a hand arises from a suspicion concerning the father? Does what has been stolen have a hold over the body? Lacan borrows here from the conception of the symbolic function that Marcel Mauss elaborates in his essay on The Gift (2002). In listening to Maori law, Mauss concludes that: What imposes obligation in the present received and exchanged, is the fact that the thing received is not inactive. Even when it has been abandoned by the giver, it still possesses something of him. Through it the giver has a hold over the beneficiary just as, being its owner, through it he has a hold over the thief. This is because the taonga is animated by the hau of its forest, its native heath and soil. It is truly “native”: the hau follows after anyone possessing the thing .… In this system of ideas one clearly and logically realizes that one must give back to another person what is really part and parcel of his nature and substance, because to accept something from somebody is to accept some part of his spiritual essence, of his soul. To retain that thing would be dangerous and mortal, not only because it would be against law and mortality, but also because that thing coming from the person not only morally, but also physically and spiritually, that essence, that food, those goods, whether movable or immovable, those women or those descendants, those rituals or those acts of communion—all exert a magical or religious hold over you (pp. 11–12).

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Whether what is in question is Maori law or a religious rule, it is always in the name of the spirit of things—the “hau” and the “mana”—or in the name of the dead father of monotheism that the sacred regulation of social exchanges takes place; it is also in this name that sentences are pronounced on an offence or a crime. And nothing can depart from this. The logic of the symbolic includes the members of the family or clan in the list of debtors as well as those who have caused the anger of the spirits that are incarnated in what has been stolen. In the mirror of his hand, the son perceives the suspicion that dishonours his father. The spirit of things—the hau or the mana, or its monotheistic version, such as the dead father of Islam62—requires that a pound of flesh be taken from the father’s or the family’s body in order to find peace. For some reason, the law of the Koran has broken down here. The son’s ignorance of it does not prevent him from being led unconsciously to settle his father’s debt. The symptom results from a sort of sacrifice to the dead father of Islam, even if the subject of the sacrifice continues to misunderstand the law. He pays, although no punishment has been pronounced and without knowing what the Koran says. All of this is unconscious. The symptom, if it is deciphered, is the only trace of the unconscious sacrifice called for in the subject’s symbolic universe. The son’s symptom should not be treated as his own sin, or even as an organic malfunction; the subject of the symptom must be conceived of as the subject of a symbolic universe whose rules he does not necessarily know, but which weigh upon him, and do so even more ferociously when he does not know what they are. What claims its due here is the symbolic order, to which Lacan devotes the session of 25 June 1954, where he says that “In every analysis of the inter-subjective relation, what is essential is not what is there, what is seen. What structures it is what is not there” (Seminar I, p. 224). What can not be there and yet structure the

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We know that the Koran separates the divine figure from paternity. In referring to the dead father of Islam, we are referring to the way in which Freud evokes the “recuperation” of the primal father by Islam and, more structurally—as we shall see later— to the theoretical operator that supports any symbolic network, whatever the name that receives “the spirit of things”—to use Lévi-Strauss’ words—may be.

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subject’s sufferings, if not the symbolic universe, which calls for the son’s sacrifice? The subject who is sacrificed receives his condemnation from the other of the Koran, a text that he does not know. There is thus a sharp distinction between the subject of the unconscious—which receives its message from the symbolic Other— and the dialectic of the ego, which is not eliminated, but which is modified and transcended by the symbolic function, which requires its due. From that perspective, it is impossible to confuse the structuring, the determination, the investment of the ego in the imaginary register, with that of the subject of the unconscious, which is entirely constituted by the symbolic order, even if there is a connection that subordinates the first to the second. If the schema of the son’s body has been blocked, it is because he has been condemned instead of the father. We must understand how incredibly cruel the unconscious tribunal63 is if we are to make sense of how the son’s symptom is to be related to the father’s fault. This can be done only by separating the son’s ego from his subjectivity, and by remembering, with the ethnologists, the weight of the symbolic function and of debt on the lineage of someone who has not honoured the—always sacred— obligations of social exchange. If the experiment of the inverted bouquet allows Lacan to illustrate how the imaginary is connected to the symbolic register, he maintains clearly, in this first seminar, that the subject of the unconscious comes from the symbolic; this subject is a product of language and the social structures that include the system of laws and of mythic or religious social exchange that regulate his/her cultural universe. Lacan, following Hyppolite, takes as his point of departure the Hegelian formula that throws light on the imaginary dialectic of desire—“desire is the desire of the other”—in order to complete the experiment of the inverted bouquet. We must now end this compact commentary on it by accounting for subjective structuring, since we have seen that the subject’s unconscious desire results from this very symbolic universe. The axis of the imaginary dialectic that links the ego to the other will be complicated the following year by an axis that links the subject to the Other of the symbolic. The following 63

See Markos Zafiropoulos, Tristesse dans la modernité : de l’idéal pharmacologique à la clinique freudienne de la mélancolie (1996).

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graph, the L Schema, represents the relation between the imaginary and the unconscious.64

L Schema If this unconscious message comes from the Other of the symbolic to the subject, in what state does it arrive? “In an inverted form,” Lacan answers in the Rome Report, which he wrote even before the seminar that we have just studied in order to throw light on the penumbra of symbolic effectiveness at the first moments of the primal identification. “The subject receives from the Other his own message in an inverted form”: Lacan’s readers have often commented on this formula, frequently highlighting its Hegelian underpinnings. For those who would like a fuller development of the experiment of the inverted vase, we can refer them to the work of Joël Dor65, which gives a clear exposition of it. Dor reads Lacan’s return to Freud by giving a short introduction to the work of Ferdinand de Saussure and Hegel, who, in his opinion, inspired Lacan. This is all very well, but does this theory of the unconscious as an inverted message that comes from the Other of the symbolic really derive from these sources? We must now examine this crucial point.

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Lacan, Seminar II, p. 243. For further commentary on the L Schema, see JacquesAlain Miller, “Commentary on the Graphs,” Ecrits, p. 859. 65 Joël Dor, Introduction to the Reading of Lacan: The Unconscious Structured Like a Language (1997).

CHAPTER TWO

The subject receives from the Other his own message in an inverted form: An investigation

S

everal months before inaugurating his seminar at Sainte-Anne, Lacan writes in the Rome Report:

The form in which language expresses itself in and of itself defines subjectivity. Language says: “You will go here, and when you see this, you will turn off there.” In other words, it refers to discourse about the other [discours de l’autre]. It is enveloped as such in the highest function of speech, inasmuch as speech commits its author by investing its addressee with a new reality, as for example, when a subject seals his fate as a married man by saying “You are my wife.” Indeed, this is the essential form from which all human speech derives more than the form at which it arrives. Hence the paradox that one of my most acute auditors believed to be an objection to my position when I first began to make my views known on analysis as dialectic; he formulated it as follows: “Human language would then constitute a kind of communication in which the sender receives his own message back from the receiver in inverted form.” I could but adopt this

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objector’s formulation, recognizing in it the stamp of my own thinking (Écrits, p. 247).

At the very moment when he states the formula for communication that would fix, for a long time, the analysis of subjectivity as an effect of the relation to the other, Lacan indicates in a remark whose epistemology is impeccable that his own statement obeys this rule of production, since it was first made by “one of my most acute listeners”, who was objecting to what he was saying. In other words, “the sender receives his own message back from the receiver in an inverted form” is not a formula that Lacan created himself. Instead, he took it from a listener; it is a response from the Other. It will be interesting, for this archaeology of Lacan’s thought, to discover who this exceptional objector was: “one of my most acute listeners”, a figure of the Other who spoke to Lacan with the voice of his own unconscious. It is also necessary to understand this formula, why it was coined, and the circumstances in which it was written for the first time (spring 1953). Yet is this formula so important? Yes, for—as we have seen—in what would become the first book of the seminar, Lacan was seeking to define a theory of the subject that would be compatible with what Freudian experience had taught him. Lacan’s first public seminar deals with Freud’s papers on technique, and it is important not to lose the thread of his analysis, since the subject that he is seeking to define is the subject of analytic experience. By reading Freud’s most technical texts, he made progress in answering the question of what a subject is for, and in, analytic experience. Lacan responds to this question in the Rome Report: subjectivity is what is defined by a form, a simple form. Yet this time, and unlike the answer that is elaborated in the texts of 1936–1948 on the mirror stage, it is a form in which language expresses itself. In 1953, Lacan changes his conception of subjectivity, which is still, however, defined as a simple term. It is a form, but not just any form; it is not the “primordial form” of the root identification of the mirror stage, which “situates the agency known as the ego, prior to its social determination”, not this sort of “ideal-I” or this “total form of his body, by which the subject anticipates the maturation of his power in a mirage” which “is given to him only as a gestalt …. [The] power [prégnance] should be considered linked to the species” (Écrits, p. 76).

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Far from being a gestalt of the body, it is a form “in which language expresses itself”, and is “essential” since “all human speech derives” from it and “defines subjectivity” (Écrits, p. 246). In 1953, Lacan, still seeking the answer, encounters something. What can be deduced from this encounter is that subjectivity receives its definition from an operation that is now situated in the register of language—the symbolic—rather than from the body image. It took Lacan 17 years—from 1936 to 1953—to alter the form that defines subjectivity; it changed from the imaginary to the symbolic, from the body image to a paradoxical expression of language. Although this simple displacement could appear uninteresting to our readers, we should note the family resemblance between the two formulations. Let us reread the first formula (that of 1936–1949): For the total form of his body, by which the subject anticipates the maturation of his power in a mirage, is given to him only as a gestalt, that is, in an exteriority in which, to be sure, this form is more constitutive than constituted, but in which, above all, it appears to him as the contour of his stature that freezes it and in a symmetry that reverses it (Écrits, p. 76).

For this first moment of the elaboration, the form given to the subject is: 1. 2. 3.

In an exteriority More constitutive than constituted In a symmetry that reverses it.

The formal identity that defines the subject certainly does not allow the two forms to be confused with each other: one concerns what comes to the subject from the symbolic, while the other derives from the imaginary. One reveals what will give him the ideal image of his body. The other gives him the signifiers of his fate, or in anthropological terms, what is imposed symbolically, when his place in the network is taken into account. Yet this formal kinship must not escape us for it shows us the stamp of Lacan’s thought66: in both cases, the 66

For an overview of Lacan’s thought, see Paul-Laurent Assoun, Lacan (2003).

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human being receives, from what is outside himself, both his body image and the symbolic coordinates of his fate. These coordinates will or will not allow him—as we have seen with the Wolf Child—to perceive his image and to develop with a greater or lesser number of symptoms in his subjective life, as well as in his network of social exchanges. Recognizing the stamp of Lacan’s “thought”—a thought that my archaeology is seeking to read—in this handful of traits supposes that I am authorized, first, to use this term, which some colleagues, who rely on Lacan’s later teaching, disparage; they object that my research gives too large a place to the register of thought in the analyst. Yet without discounting this objection, I am going to remain faithful to a more or less chronological method. Yes, there is a recognizable thought behind the various moments of his teaching, and the fragments of the Rome Report, whose presuppositions we are examining, make it clear that the Lacan of 1953 believed that his thought had a sort of “stamp”. In order to understand Lacan’s quest for a theory of the subject that would be congruent with analytic experience, one should read “The Mirror Stage” with the Rome Report; we should consider the passage that has been cited from the latter text less as a new response to what motivates Lacan’s analysis than as a new version of the answer that he supplied from 1936 to 1938. This answer had aimed, through the mirror stage, to “make up” for what is missing in Freud’s doctrine of the first identifications.67 Lacan’s new answer combines several versions of the mirror stage with what can be deduced from the objection to his method; it is necessary, however, to emphasize that it is not at just any moment that Lacan can see that “Human language would … constitute a kind of communication in which the sender receives his own message back from the receiver in inverted form.” This formula arises from the Other precisely “when I first began to make my views known on analysis as dialectic”; it has the value of an interpretation that can produce a change because it had been made at the right time. How long had Lacan been making his views on analysis as dialectical known? What does this new formula mean? What is the relation between the mirror stage, the dialectic of analysis and the progress

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On this point, see Lacan et les sciences sociales, pp. 44 ff.

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in symbolization? Is all of this not too intellectualized and does it not move too far from Freud’s text, and even from the experience of the treatment? Not at all, since it is precisely in his 1951 text, Presentation on Transference that Lacan offers his colleagues a reading of a paradigmatic text from Freud’s clinic, the Dora case, in which he described the treatment of the patient as a dialectical experience. If Lacan conceives of analysis as a dialectical progression, his goal is not to “intellectualize” it to the detriment of clinical truths, because Freud‘s treatment of Dora was itself dialectical. The treatment, when directed dialectically, leads us the closest to subjective truth and Lacan recalls the salutary value of Freud’s orientation, which allows the message that comes from the Other to be unknotted in an inverted form.

I. Presentation on Transference (1951) The Dora case or Freud’s dialectic Firmly ruling out any psychologizing orientation for psychoanalysis, since he criticizes its danger of objectifying the individual, Lacan suggests, in his presentation to a conference of Romance-language psychoanalysts in 1951, a conception of the Freudian experience that is characterized by a sort of dialogue; in this dialogue, the subject is constituted by a discourse whose only law is that of truth, which introduces a change into reality. “[P]sychoanalysis is a dialectical experience, and this notion should prevail when raising the question of the nature of transference” (Écrits, p. 177); this statement is crucial for analytic technique. Shortly afterwards, he makes it clear what his dialectical conception of analysis means by discussing some models from Freud’s own work. [T]he case of Dora68 is laid out by Freud in the form of a series of dialectical reversals …. What is involved is a scansion of structures in which truth is transmuted for the subject, structures

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Ida Bauer (1882–1945). Freud’s first great psychoanalytic case, Dora and her history remain a classic of analytic literature. Born in Vienna into a well-off Jewish bourgeois family, she was the sister of Otto Bauer (1881–1938), one of the great figures of the Austrian intelligentsia between the two world wars. Her case is one of the most commented upon in the psychoanalytic literature.

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that affect not only her comprehension of things, but her very position as a subject, her “objects” being a function of that position. This means that the conception of the case history is identical to the progress of the subject, that is, to the reality of the treatment (Écrits, p. 178).

According to Lacan, Freud’s dialectic, far from screening out the reality of the treatment and the emergence of subjective truth, is guided by its concern with them; it is precisely when analysts recoil from this dialectic, out of a fear of Freud’s discovery, that they objectify the subject, forever forbidding her access to true speech and to subjective progress. In this connection, what can be said about Dora?69 When Freud first meets her, she is 18 years old. According to him, Low spirits and an alteration in her character had … become the main features of her illness. She was clearly satisfied neither with herself nor with her family; her attitude towards her father was unfriendly, and she was on very bad terms with her mother, who was bent upon drawing her into taking a share in the work of the house” (Dora, p. 23).

She had frightened her parents by writing a farewell letter in which she warned them that she wanted to die. When, one day, she fainted in front of her father, he took her to Freud. Freud diagnoses her as a case of “‘petite hystérie’ with the commonest of all somatic and mental symptoms: dyspnoia, tussis nervosa, aphonia, and possibly migraines together with depression, hysterical unsociability, and a taedium vitae which was probably not entirely genuine” (Dora, p. 23–4). Nothing, then, was extraordinary about Dora’s case, which Freud, however, made famous. He argues that “What is wanted is precisely an elucidation of the commonest cases and of their most frequent and typical symptoms” (Dora, p. 24), and his disciples have never stopped commenting on this case, for better or worse. In 1951, Lacan’s commentary locates itself within this psychoanalytic tradition, which it will revolutionize. Let us take a look at this case. Dora complains to Freud that her father has abandoned

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The reader will profit from referring to Freud’s text, Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, 1953, pp 1–122.

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her by leaving her in the hands of his mistress, Frau K., and that he has done so in order to facilitate his adulterous affair. According to Lacan, far from disabusing the young woman of her belief, Freud takes cognizance of the circuit of exchange, but his response is free of the compassion that she had been seeking; instead, he makes “[a] first dialectical reversal”, which requires that she recognize her own part in continuing the “disorder” about which she is complaining. What follows is a “development of truth”, as Lacan says: Namely, that it was not on the basis of Dora’s mere silence, but of her complicity and even vigilant protection, that the fiction had been able to last which allowed the relationship between the two lovers to continue. What can be seen here is not simply Dora’s participation in Herr K.’s courtship of which she is the object; new light is shed on her relationship with the other partners of the quadrille by the fact that it is caught up in a subtle circulation of precious gifts, which serves to make up for a deficiency in sexual services. This circulation starts with her father in relation to Frau K., and then comes back to the patient through Herr K.’s consequent availability, in no way diminishing the lavish generosity which comes to her directly from the first source, by way of parallel gifts—this being the classic manner of making amends by which the bourgeois male manages to combine reparation due his lawful wedded wife with his concern for passing on an inheritance (note that the presence of the figure of the wife is reduced here to this lateral link in the chain of exchanges) (Écrits, p. 179).

Let us note the procedure. Freud, as Lacan argues, begins Dora’s analysis with a first dialectical reversal—a subjective rectification— which leads to the birth of a truth. We shall emphasize that this truth is ethnological, since it is incarnated, according to Lacan, in the circuit of social exchange that governs Dora’s world and assigns her a place—as object of exchange—that she refuses, but which remains, nevertheless, her own. This case illustrates Lacan’s subject perfectly, since it shows how Dora aids, without knowing it and thus unconsciously, the message of the social Other, which assigns her a precise place in the chains of social exchange.

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Freud’s first dialectical reversal makes Dora see how she accomplishes unconsciously the “mission statement” that comes to her from the other and which, once deciphered and placed in the father’s mouth, would be something like the following: “You are the woman whom I exchange with Herr K., as quid pro quo for the woman whom he is giving to me (Frau K.).” This circuit of the exchange of women, which provides Dora with the coordinates of her unconscious activity, could have continued without a snag if the young woman had consented to participate in it as an object—that is, as a woman. Yet Dora objects precisely to this and rebels, under the cover of a jealousy of Frau K., against her own role. This is the second dialectical reversal, in which Freud unmasks, beneath this jealousy, an unconscious interest in her, an interest that, if it is to be brought to light, requires Dora’s complaint to be reversed once again. This is a new development of truth, but now the truth is sullied by Freud’s own prejudices, since, according to Lacan, what motivates Dora’s jealousy are not her own Oedipal wishes, which would see Frau K. as a rival, since she is the father’s mistress, and an object for men who stand in for him: Herr K. and Freud. Instead, a correct development of truth would have led Freud to recognize, in Dora’s attachment to Frau K., not a jealousy that derives from identification, but a homosexual object investment that is decidedly pre-Oedipal. This root identification comes to her from the mirror stage and results from a primal masculinity; this masculinity constitutes her own femininity as a mystery, and even as a symptom—and works against fate, which has assigned her a woman’s place in social exchanges. What fascinates Dora about Frau K. is, as Freud recognizes, “her ‘adorable white body’” (Dora, p. 61) and as Lacan says, “the mystery of Dora’s own … bodily femininity” (Écrits, p. 180). In other words, for Lacan, she has not been able to recognize her own femininity. To do this, “she would have to assume [assumer] her own body, failing which she remains open to the functional fragmentation (to refer to the theoretical contribution of the mirror stage) that constitutes conversion symptoms”. Now, her only means for gaining this access was via her earliest imago, which shows us that the only path open to her to the object was via the masculine partner, with whom, because of their difference in age, she was able to identify, in that

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primordial identification through which the subject recognizes herself as I … (Écrits, p. 181).

In writing these ellipses, Lacan invites the reader to switch to the 1949 text on the mirror stage, which provides the theoretical foundation of his 1951 analysis of Dora’s identifications. Because she has identified, from the first moment of her life in front of the mirror, with the primal image of a male partner who is older than she is, Dora, according to Lacan: 1. 2. 3. 4.

5.

Cannot accept her own female body Falls prey to the fragmentation that motivates her conversion symptoms Sees Frau K.’s body as a fascinating mystery Identifies with her father and thus makes Frau K. the object of her desire, since she identifies with the inheritors of the paternal gestalt (Herr K., Freud) Objects to the message that she receives from the social other, a message that assigns her a place among the women who are to be exchanged.

In other words, Dora’s malaise can be explained entirely by the fundamental disharmony that exists between the imaginary and its identifications—that of the mirror stage, which places her on the masculine side—and the unconscious message, which she receives from the social Other, her network, which orders her to take her place as woman in the circuit of exchange.

Dora or the emblem of the feminine condition Beyond rectifying the problems of the case, Lacan, in order to give a paradigmatic explanation of the Freudian clinic of hysteria, also connects, on the epistemological level, two elements: 1.

2.

What he borrows from ethnologists concerning the analysis of the gift and exchange, and especially from Lévi-Strauss’ analysis of the exchange of women What he had been formulating since 1936, concerning how the mirror stage makes up for what is missing in Freud’s theory of primal identifications.

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What is in question here is not simply a secondary clinical problem. Let me emphasize that with this text: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Lacan criticizes Freud’s assumptions about the prevalence of the father in the Oedipus complex He treats these assumptions as Freud’s resistance to the analysis He makes the analyst’s biases the place of the resistance to analysis, and He shows us finally what is not only Dora’s fate, but that of all the “petites hystéries”, all of whom object to the symbolic system that assigns women their place as ethnologically determined exchange objects.

Is the feminine condition not profoundly divided—and its symptoms motivated—by what may be a structural disharmony: on the one hand, there is a primal identification with a gestalt, which is less outside sex than generic—the root or paternal identification70— and on the other, a social fate that ordains that they take the place of the object of exchange? Lacan answers: As is true for all women, and for reasons that are at the very crux of the most elementary social exchanges (the very conditions Dora names as the grounds of her revolt), the problem of her condition is fundamentally that of accepting herself as a man’s object of desire, and this is the mystery that motivates Dora’s idolization of Frau K. (Écrits, p. 181).

Lacan reads Freud with Lévi-Strauss and makes the exchange of women the place where Dora’s unconscious mission is expressed. Her primal identifications make her see herself as a man and she is guided towards a homosexual object choice that Freud cannot understand, since he remains fixed to his theory of the Oedipus complex.

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See Lacan et les sciences sociales, where I re-examined the question of the root identification in Lacan in relation to Freud’s theory of the dead father. Lacan’s reading of the Dora case does not contradict my thesis that the root identification is a gestalt of the father, and we shall see further that that with the seminar of 1956–1957, Object Relations (Seminar IV), Lacan reconfirms my interpretation by indicating more generally what in the hysteric’s homosexual object “choice” goes back to this primal identification with the father.

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I would say that this has to be ascribed to a bias, the very same bias that falsifies the conception of the Oedipus complex right from the outset, making him consider the predominance of the paternal figure to be natural, rather than normative—the same bias that is expressed simply in the well-known refrain, “Thread is to needle as girl is to boy” (Écrits, p. 182).

Because of his Oedipal bias, Freud misses the third dialectical reversal, which would have allowed him to bring out the “imaginary mold in which all the situations orchestrated by Dora during her life came to be cast—a perfect illustration of the theory, yet to appear in Freud’s work, of repetition automatisms. We can gauge in it what woman and man signify to her now” (Écrits, p. 180). Next Lacan says that In order for her to gain access to this recognition of her femininity, she would have had to assume [assumer] her own body …. Now, her only means for gaining this access was via her earliest imago, which shows us that the only path open to her to the object was via the masculine partner, with whom, because of their difference in age, she was able to identify, in that primordial identification through which the subject recognizes herself as I … (Écrits, pp. 180–181).

According to the Lacan of 1951, what Freud lacked in order to situate himself better in Dora’s analysis was the theory of the mirror stage. This theory would have allowed him not to expect Dora to be dominated by late Oedipal identifications; such an expectation only shows the weight of Freud’s prejudices about the father’s prevalence—as object—in structuring the daughter’s desire.71 Lacan’s 1951 Presentation thus seeks both to demonstrate Freud’s dialectical genius and to illustrate the clinical wealth of the Lacanian replacement, the mirror stage, which is knotted here to Lévi-Strauss’ theory of the exchange of women, thus making Dora’s unconscious

71

We can see that Lacan’s epistemological charges against Freud on the question of the father is still very much present in 1951, like his concern with demonstrating the clinical richness of what had been, since 1936, his contribution to the theory of narcissism, as well as his theoretical replacement of what does not suit him in Freud’s theory of the first identifications.

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mission understandable. On the level of directing the treatment, Lacan indicates that what psychoanalysis is concerned with—the unconscious message and the mode by which it is structured— requires a dialectical reversal so that the symptomatic cryptogram can finally yield its truth. For him, the dialectical conception of the treatment is not a philosophical affectation, but a response that has been adjusted to the way by which the unconscious message is produced: it is a message from which the truth can be extracted after its structure has been reversed. In this case, there is therefore no choice. Because the unconscious message arrives from the Other in an inverted form, the transferential manoeuvre inverts the terms of the symptomatic complaint and requires subjective rectifications; these rectifications lead the analysand to see what she is creating or maintaining unconsciously in her complaints. We can understand better now how this text throws light on the historical circumstances in which the formula of subjectivity was produced. We can see why, in Lacan’s own words, “when I first began to make my views known on analysis as dialectic”, he received from his exceptional listener the formula, “Human language would then constitute a kind of communication in which the sender receives his own message back from the receiver in inverted form” (Écrits, p. 247). Lacan says in the Rome Report that this form is that “in which language expresses itself”, the form that “in and of itself defines subjectivity. Language … refers to discourse about/from the other [discours de l’autre]. It is enveloped as such in the highest function of speech, inasmuch as speech commits its author by investing its addressee with a new reality, as for example, when a subject seals his fate as a married man by saying ‘You are my wife’” (Écrits, p. 246). Only the dialectical production of an antithesis can then allow the unconscious message to be re-established. This can easily be understood in the analysis of individual cases; on the level of the analysis of the masses, precisely because it is, in Freud’s words, a paradigmatic case of “petite hystérie” and thus one of the “simplest” and most frequent cases, it can be considered as a general analysis of the feminine condition. Presentation on Transference can thus be read as both a text on Freudian technique and a work that throws light on the experience of the treatment, but it is also—on the crucial point of femininity—a contribution to psychoanalytic anthropology: the clinic of the masses. This

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double virtue is eminently Freudian; it shows that Lacan is an orthodox Freudian and that he has produced a clinic of the individual case that is ipso facto a clinic of the social. Yet although it is difficult to dispute that Lacan, in his return to Freud, follows the Freudian ethic, this should not prevent us from observing that he begins this return by commenting on Freud and uses theoretical foundations that are not entirely those of Freud’s own work: his own research on narcissism—the mirror stage—as well as what he has learned about the symbolic order from French ethnology. That he treats the exchange of women as the governing principle of Dora’s unconscious mission shows how crucial Lévi-Strauss’ research is for him; it is crucial not only in terms of his psychoanalytic anthropology, but also as a way of throwing light on Freud’s paradigmatic cases. This is true of Dora in 1951 but it is also true, as we saw in our earlier work, of her masculine counterpart among Freud’s cases: the Rat Man. Lacan re-examined this case at Jean Wahl’s72 Collège philosophique under the title of The Neurotic’s Individual Myth. Lévi-Strauss’ influence is clear here, since, as mentioned earlier, he used the term “individual myth” in 1949. Lacan returns to Freud by commenting on his cases, and does so because he wants to remain close to the latter’s clinical experience. To understand this return, one must do more than fix its date or simply to repeat, once again, that Lacan returned to Freud in the 1950s. We must see that this return involves a commentary that has a specific style: that of a profound respect for Freud’s ethics but also of a critical testing. Through this testing, Lacan verifies the foundation of Freud’s theses, which he does not hesitate to develop, when he thinks that it is useful to do so, by relying on sources that are external to Freud’s theory. If this return allows him to decipher Freud’s method as analyst and to locate and use what is hidden within Freud’s texts concerning every analyst’s subjective mission, Lacan does not develop the elements of Freud’s work that seem to impede the development of truth. Lacan’s project is not religious; his “return” can insist on the letter of Freud’s text but it can also set aside Freud’s “biases”, which 72 Jean Wahl (1888–1974), philosopher and poet. He had an agrégation in philosophy and began to teach at the Sorbonne in 1936. The president of the French Philosophical Society, he also headed the Collège philosophique.

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functioned as a resistance to analysis. In other words, when Lacan encounters elements of psychoanalytic theory that he judges to be obsolete, he does not insist dogmatically on maintaining them; he never hesitates to highlight, in opposition to Freud’s own resistance, the perspective of the Freudian ethic, which aimed at bringing out the truth. In rereading the Dora case, what Lacan judges to be biased is nothing less than Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex; Freud’s own biases created a resistance to Dora’s analysis and provoked the final transferential rupture. As a consequence, what he proposes to substitute for Freud’s inadequate conception is the antagonism between a series of identifications, the model of which is both Dora’s “root identification”—the theoretical contribution of the mirror stage— and the symbolic function. He believed that the latter includes but goes beyond—both generically and clinically—the Oedipus complex in both the process that constitutes the subject and the unconscious messages that organize his symptoms. Lacan thus reads Freud with Freud, since he refuses to compromise whatever helps move us towards the truth; the price for this is to “sacrifice” Freud—or his guilty blindness—in order to find a substitute in the work of the French ethnologists, who allow him to decipher the message hidden in Dora’s symptoms. If Lacan can argue that Dora’s symptoms can be deduced not from the Oedipal wishes for her father, but from the message of the father, who offers his daughter up to the network of exchange of goods—a network to which he owes a woman—it is because he has learned this not only from Lévi-Strauss, but also from older ethnologists, such as Marcel Mauss. What they taught him was that a debt contracted symbolically in social exchanges must be honoured, and that if it is not, misfortune will strike whoever has not repaid it or his allies.73 He can therefore argue that Dora’s misfortunes result not from unconscious Oedipal guilt, but from something that is very different: a symbolic debt that, unconsciously, is unpaid. Confronted with the range of these ethnological theses, and his own theory of the mirror stage, Lacan believes that his return to 73

We have also seen that it is the logic of this unpaid debt that informs Lacan’s analysis, in the first year of his seminar, of the symptom that impeded the use of a hand by the son whose father was suspected of theft.

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Freud must go beyond the Oedipus complex. Does Lacan make this critical commentary on Freud’s text in the same spirit in which he returns to Freud? To answer this question, we must: 1. 2.

Ask Lacan Read his text of 7 November 1955, “The Freudian Thing or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis” (Écrits, pp. 334–363).

II. “The Freudian Thing or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis” From the introduction to this lecture, which was given at the Vienna Neuropsychiatric Clinic, Lacan uses the expression “return to Freud”, several times. He says, first, that he is its “herald” (Écrits, p. 401) and indicates that he has devoted “the past four years” to a seminar on Freud’s texts that is held “every Wednesday from November to July” (Écrits, p. 336). This lecture was given in November 1955, and thus Lacan is letting it be known that his own return to the study of Freud’s texts in a seminar dates from 1951, the year of the Presentation on Transference. This reading of Dora thus inaugurates this return. Is this a homage to hysteria? A homage to the position of truth? A respect for the diachrony of Freud’s discovery, which was first motivated by the hysteric’s experience? Certainly, but according to this clarification of 1955, it could also be said that the theoretical underpinnings of the 1951 text—both the mirror stage and the ethnological contributions to the study of the symbolic function—are the scientific bases of Lacan’s return to Freud, bases that are external to Freud’s texts. Yet if Lacan dates his “public” return—his return in the seminar— to 1951, why does he only herald it in 1955? Because what is in question is not only his own return to Freud but,in his own terms,the act of “calling for” a return (see Écrits, p. 401) and of making a slogan whose political resonance—in the sense of the politics of psychoanalysis—he has now truly accepted and which he is now trying to bring to bear both collectively and internationally in the psychoanalytic field. Where better to announce his return to Freud than Vienna, where psychoanalysis was invented? Yet if Lacan makes his “return to Freud” into a slogan at this moment, he still

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has to formulate what its character is and what it requires. From this double point of view, Lacan sheds light on things from the beginning of his lecture. What makes his return to Freud necessary, in his opinion, is that psychoanalysts themselves have “denied” Freud’s work.

The denial of Freud or the rejection of history and myths Why this denial? Because, according to Lacan, the very people whom Freud had asked to safeguard his discovery have had to sacrifice it through the forced choice of emigration; his disciples fled Nazi persecution to the United States, which is characterized by its “cultural ahistoricism” (Écrits, p. 335). Now the function of the psychoanalyst, as Lacan explains, “presuppose[s] history as its very principle”. The analytic discipline is “the one that had reconstructed the bridge between modern man and ancient myths” (Écrits, p. 335).74 In Lacan’s work, there are many ways of defining Freud’s discovery and its denial. Yet we shall note that this denial, whose causes are seen as socio-historical, is related to the rejection of history and the rupture of the bridge that psychoanalysis has “reconstructed” between modern man and the universe of ancient myths. On the epistemological level, the two obviously go together, but what Lacan is referring to, in particular, is the Oedipal myth and its prevalence in Freud’s work, as opposed to what he now calls the “preoedipal mess to which the analytic relationship can be reduced, according to our modern analysts” (Écrits, p. 339). What characterizes Lacan’s return most surely is his rereading of the Oedipal path in analytic experience and, more generally, as we have seen with the Dora case, of the symbolic—where the directives of the unconscious arise. Yet what Lacan also tells us is that this return, on the collective plane, is determined by the history of psychoanalysis and the denial of Freud’s texts. This return also requires the community of psychoanalysts to make use of “the antithesis constituted by the phase that has passed in the psychoanalytic movement since Freud’s death” (Écrits, p. 336).

74

This is Lacan’s complete sentence: “Whence stems this contradiction between the preoedipal mess, to which the analytic relationship can be reduced, according to our modern analysts, and the fact that Freud wasn’t satisfied until he had reduced it to the Oedipal position?” (p. 339).

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The return to Freud is thus not, in Lacan’s terms, “a return of the repressed” but rather: 1. 2.

A “reversal” of what analysts have done since Freud’s death (Écrits, p. 127) A rectification of the psychoanalysts’ position, which would be the antithesis of their denial and its presuppositions: the rejection of history and mythologies.

More generally, the return to Freud becomes a return to “Freud’s meaning” (Écrits, p. 126), as “it is attested to in a body of written work of the most lucid and organic kind” (Écrits, p. 336). All of this aims at restoring truth to the heart of the analytic community and its clinical practice. The meaning of a return to Freud is a return to Freud’s meaning. And the meaning of what Freud said may be conveyed to anyone because, while addressed to everyone, it concerns each person. One word suffices to make this point: Freud’s discovery calls truth into question, and there is no one who is not personally concerned by truth. It must seem rather odd that I should be flinging this word in your faces—a word of almost ill repute, a word banished from polite society. But isn’t it inscribed in the very heart of analytic practice, since this practice is constantly rediscovering the power of truth in ourselves and our very flesh? Why, indeed, would the unconscious be more worthy of being recognized than the defenses that oppose it in the subject, so successfully that the defenses seem no less real than it? … But I am asking where the peace that ensues in recognizing an unconscious tendency comes from if the latter is not truer than what restrained it in the conflict (Écrits, pp. 337–338).

Analytic experience aims at recognizing unconscious truth and Presentation on Transference shows us that directing the treatment to obtain this result involves a dialectical movement that must precede it; first, there is a subjective rectification and then there is a development of the truth. The return to Freud on the level of the analytic group, which Lacan heralds in Vienna, involves the same steps as an analysis: a promotion

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of the antithesis, a reversal of resistances on the analysts’ side and subjective rectifications, and the development of truth—that of Freud’s speech or of his lucid writings—which demonstrates the omnipresence of the symbolic function in relation to the unconscious. Once the symptom’s signifying structure is “deciphered, it is plain to see and shows the omnipresence for human beings of the symbolic function stamped on the flesh” (Écrits, p. 346). Thus, Lacan’s return, on the level of the analytic group, is strictly equivalent to the dialectical method that he advocates in directing the treatment. In both cases, the dialectical reversal of positions must lead to the recognition of truth, which is deduced from symbolic effectiveness. The subject, its symptoms and its malaise are deduced from such a function; this is done both in individual analytic treatments and in a group: in society, whether or not it is an analytic society. In bringing his arguments about the group to Vienna, Lacan relies on ethnological knowledge and highlights subjective truth as the cause of the discontents within societies.

The subjective causality of group discontents What distinguishes a society grounded in language from an animal society, which even the ethnological standpoint allows us to see—namely, the fact that the exchange that characterizes such a society has other foundations than needs (even if it satisfies them), specifically, what has been called the gift ‘as total social fact’—can then be taken much further, so far as to constitute an objection to defining this society as a collection of individuals, since the in-mixing of subjects makes it a group with a very different structure. This reintroduces the impact of a truth as cause from a totally different angle and requires a reappraisal of the process of causality” (Écrits, p. 346.)

Further on, he says that “If all causality evinces the subject’s involvement, it will come as no surprise that every order conflict is attributed to him” (Écrits, p. 346). Lacan applies to the analytic group what he does in the clinic, because he has learned from Mauss and Lévi-Strauss to recognize the symbolic function as the foundation of societies. This function:

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Governs subjectivities that have been gathered into a collective Treats subjectivity as the cause of conflict in the group, and Designates the subjective truth which causes the sense of discontent that, whether against his will or not, Lacan incarnated in French analysis and in the 1953 split.

Thus, it is necessary for both political and epistemological reasons, to remind his listeners that analytic intervention in the individual treatment or in the group must rule out any individualist perspective. He states that “The terms in which I am posing the problem of psychoanalytic intervention make it sufficiently clear, I think, that its ethics are not individualistic” (Écrits, p. 346). Whether or not it has been brought together into a collective, the subject is never the ego; if analysts want to reach the cause embodied in the symptoms, they must pay attention to the subject and its truths in both the individual treatment and the group. If Lacan and his return to Freud are symptoms in the psychoanalytic group, it is because, as he says, his speech incarnates the Freudian truths denied by the other post-Freudians. For this reason, he offers his incredible formula, “I, truth, speak” (Écrits, p. 340). This entire lecture on the return to Freud is developed in terms of the essential theoretical bases that Lacan promotes in the readings of Freud’s texts that mark his return.

The theoretical bases of 1955 What are they? 1.

The disjunction between the ego and the subject: For the subject of whom I was just speaking as the legatee of recognized truth is definitely not the ego perceptible in the more or less immediate data of conscious jouissance or the alienation of labour (Écrits, pp. 346–347).

2.

The reminder that subjectivity is constituted by the form of inverted language, a form that is specific to the symbolic function: It is not about [the subject] that you must speak to him, for he can do this well enough himself, and in doing so, it is not even to you that he speaks. While it is to him that you must speak, it is literally about

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something else—that is, that about some-thing other than what is at stake when he speaks of himself—which is that thing that speaks to you. Regardless of what he says, this thing will remain forever inaccessible to him if, being speech addressed to you, it cannot elicit its response in you, and if, having heard its message in this inverted form, you cannot, in re-turning it to him, give him the twofold satisfaction of having recognized it and of making him recognize its truth (Écrits, p. 348).

3.

The reminder of his theory of narcissism and the mirror stage (Écrits, p. 355) and of imaginary alienation: This passion brings to every relation with this image, constantly represented by my counterpart, a signification which interests me so greatly—that is, which makes me so dependent on this image—that it links all the objects of my desires to the other’s desire, more closely than to the desire they arouse in me (Écrits, p. 355).

4.

The reminders that the symbolic is the basis both of how the treatment is to be conducted and of the discoveries made by Freud and Lévi-Strauss: This is why I teach that there are not only two subjects present in the analytic situation, but two subjects each of whom is provided with two objects, the ego and the other (Écrits, p. 357).

And also: Freud’s discovery went right to the heart of this determination by the symbolic law, for in the unconscious—which, he insisted, was quite different from everything that had previously been designated by that name—he recognized the instance of the laws on which marriage and kinship (my emphasis) are based, establishing the Oedipus complex as its central motivation already in the Traumdeutung. This is what allows me to tell you why the motives of the unconscious are limited to sexual desire, a point on which Freud was quite clear from the outset and from which he never deviated. Indeed, it is essentially on sexual relations [liaison]—by regulating them according to the law of preferential marriage alliances and forbidden relations—that the first combinatory for exchanges of women between family lines

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relies, developing the fundamental commerce and concrete discourse on which human societies are based in an exchange of gratuitous goods and magic words (Écrits, p. 359).75

Once again, Lacan connects Freud’s work with Lévi-Strauss’ at the precise point of the question of sexual desire in the Oedipus complex and of how it is regulated socially. This leads to the text’s conclusion, where Lacan suggests that future analysts should be introduced to the methods of “the linguist, the historian, and … the mathematician”; this is part of an institutional reform, in which the analyst would maintain a “constant communication with disciplines that would define themselves as sciences of intersubjectivity or by the term ‘conjectural sciences’” (Écrits, p. 362). In short, psychoanalysis would communicate with the appropriate social sciences, a communication whose outcome Lacan would still be seeking several years later. What is especially important about this text is that it clarifies what the “return to Freud” means for Lacan, at the moment when he is heralding it to the international psychoanalytic community. He takes a very strong attitude towards the psychoanalysts of the IPA, blaming them for a blatant “denial” and for choosing what was obviously a political option. Yet we need to recall that what Lacan was aiming at in this return was a return to Freud’s meaning, a return to the founding texts, which had to be evaluated in terms of their capacity to stand up to the test of commentary. What this test reveals is that His texts prove to be comparable to those that, in other times, human veneration has invested with the highest qualities, in that they withstand the test of the discipline of commentary, whose virtue one rediscovers in making use of it in the traditional way—not simply to situate what someone says in the context of his time, but to gauge whether the answer he gives to the questions he raises has or has not been superseded by the answer one finds in his work to current questions (Écrits, p. 336).

75

On the exchange of women, see Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1947).

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If this reference to the texts of the father of psychoanalysis does not lack religious connotations, we shall note that the discussion of the function of commentary emphasizes that it allows 1.

2.

A text to be re-contextualized by restoring its historical presuppositions, and in order for this to be done, one must be freed from the “cultural a historicism” that can only impede an understanding of both Freud’s texts and analytic practice A verification that Freud’s theses are not obsolete.

These reflections will prove useful for my own commentary. Inscribed at the heart of Lacan’s work is a definition of commentary whose analytic references are perhaps less direct than the ones that characterize his formula of 1953, a formula that, from my perspective, is crucial: “Commenting on a text is like doing an analysis.” We must not, however, be mistaken about what Lacan was trying to do: to bring out the Freudian “truth effect”, as he makes clear from what he says in this lecture about his own practice as commentator: Who, among the experts in disciplines other than psychoanalysis whom I have guided in reading these texts, has not been moved by this research in action—whether it is the research he has us following the Traumdeutung … the case study of the Wolf Man, or Beyond the Pleasure Principle? What an exercise in the training of minds, and what a message to lend one’s voice to! And what better confirmation could there be of the methodical value of this training and the truth effect this message produces than the fact that the students to whom you transmit them bring you evidence of a transformation, occurring sometimes overnight, in their practice, which becomes simpler or more effective even before it becomes more transparent to them (Écrits, p. 337).

The emotion, the truth effect, the encounter that changes us: do not all of these participate in analytic experience? Certainly, and if in 1955, as in 1953, the return to Freud involves a commentary on Freud’s texts, it is because a psychoanalyst must know how to find his/her own place in the history of psychoanalytic thought. Further, it is because it is not only necessary to know whether a text is obsolescent, but also because “Commenting on a text is like

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doing an analysis”. This is especially the case with Freud’s text, which produces messages that link analysts symbolically, and thus unconsciously, with Freud’s voice.

The tidings brought to the group If in 1955, Lacan can make himself the herald of this style of a return to Freud, it is because he has himself had the experience of commenting on Freud’s work and this commentary has functioned like a psychoanalysis. It is also because he bears the responsibility, as he says in 1955, for what divides the psychoanalytic field in the “order conflict” (Écrits, p. 346), a conflict that derives from Freudian truth as a cause; this indicates his own subjective implication, which he has perceived since 1953 as a “fate”. Indeed, if Lacan can become the herald of the group’s return, it is because he has been undergoing this experience since 1951 and it has changed him; he is, as it were, going through the pass, which leads him to reopen Freud’s work as the solution to the crucial problems of psychoanalysis at that time. In returning to the desire of the father of psychoanalysis, Lacan had allowed the deluge of Freudian truths to engulf him, thus modifying irreversibly his being as an analyst who had become truly Freudian for the first time. This subjective change can be seen as the cause of the conflict that brought about the institutional division in Paris in 1953, and which led him to be frozen out of the International Association of Psychoanalysis. Thus, although he may not have intended to move away from the IPA, it was in relation to his conversion to Freud’s work—which became ever stronger, and to the crystallizing of Freudian truths—which he incarnated every more clearly, that Lacan experienced the splitting of 1953. For him, this rupture, far from being the triumphant achievement of an institutional calculation that had arisen from some sort of will to power, was a nightmarish test. If this analysis is correct, Lacan formulated this rupture in terms not of his opposition to a group but of his heroic recognition that his fate was to decipher Freud’s work; this task of deciphering led him away from the father’s house, although he had intended only to make Freud’s own voice heard there once again. The importance that Lacan’s teaching took on in the analytic movement indicates

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that the members of the IPA were perfectly correct in rejecting him; in doing so, they were designating, without knowing it, the man who would become the most influential analyst of his generation, and of several succeeding generations. Those who were on Lacan’s “side” were more willing to see—and still see—that this charge was a pretext for rejecting him, out of a will to power that left analysis to stagnate in the register of the ego. In making this judgement, Lacan’s followers are, nevertheless, neglecting the lesson on group conflicts that he gave them in 1955 and are making an unconvincing argument. Whether in 1951, 1953 or 1955, Lacan’s return to Freud was both rejected and fruitful, even if it took him several years to recognize his own fate in the history of the psychoanalytic movement and the mission that had been returned to him by Freud’s texts; this recognition was not painless for him. In order to understand this, and in following his own formulations about his return, we must apply Lacan to Lacan; we must grasp the disjunction, in Lacan, between “his majesty the ego”, and his own subjective position in 1953, which had come into being through suffering, according to the symbolic logic of Freud’s work. In 1955, Lacan’s “metamorphosis”76 and the recognition of the truths of Freud’s message that constitute his desire as analyst, lead him to designate that Freud’s own speech is the place of truth and to pronounce, in the latter’s name, a formula that has a troubling polysemy: “I, truth, speak” (Écrits, p. 340). This indicates that 1. 2. 3.

By incarnating Freudian truth, Lacan can state the secret that he recognizes Freudian truth can be deciphered in Freud’s text This truth concerns Freud’s desire—to decipher the truth of unconscious desire—and is the solution to both the burdens of the symptom and the question of what Freudian analysts desire; this was Lacan’s desire when he formulated it in 1955, just as in 1953, he had been through the ordeal of its painful recognition.

Now, let us move back to 1953.

76

I am using the term “metamorphosis” in the sense in which—as we have seen in an earlier work—Lacan mentions the identification with the father as a solution to the subjective impasses of identifying with the brothers.

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III. 1953 This was the year that Lacan gave his lecture on the Rat Man, The Neurotic’s Individual Myth, a lecture that showed his determination to review the Freudian clinic by using both the mirror stage and the symbolic order’s rules—which derived from his interpretation of French ethnology and especially of Lévi-Strauss. It was also the year of the first rupture of the French analytic community: the exact moment when Lacan had to pay the political price for his return to Freud. I am going to remind readers of the main reasons for this split, but we shall also read Lacan’s own descriptions of it, in order to analyse the turbulent situation in which he found himself.

The split77 How can we make a quick evaluation of the association of French psychoanalysts before the split? At the end of the Second World War, during which its analytic activities were suspended, the Paris Psychoanalytic Society (SPP) went back to work. Depending on the International Psychoanalytic Association, it was dominated by the influence of the Anglo-American analysts who, according to Lacan in 1955, had deviated from Freud’s work. At the time, it brought together about 20 titular members, most of whom were physicians, and 70 students who were in training. Beginning in 1947, Dr. Sacha Nacht78 was the president of this society and he hoped to provide it with an institute that would teach psychoanalysis. For a short time in 1953, Lacan succeeded him as president. In this context, Nacht had the SPP adopt, in June 1952, a plan for the institute according to which he would direct it for five years, and it would grant a diploma for psychoanalysts, a diploma that would be reserved for physicians. 77

On this point, the reader will profit by referring to La scission de 1953 (1976). In this work, Jacques-Alain Miller has collected the texts that are essential for understanding this rupture and its context. 78 Sacha Nacht (1901–1977), a Romanian immigrant. He was especially concerned with obtaining the recognition of the International Psychoanalytic Association for his Paris Psychoanalytic Institute, which he had founded and of which he was the first director. After an analysis with Rudolph Loewenstein, Lacan’s analyst, he undertook a second analysis with Heinz Hartmann and promoted the latter’s notion of the “autonomous Ego”.

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This plan violently divided the members, and led to an opposition between the supporters of Nacht’s medical and authoritarian “line” and the more “liberal” position of Professor Daniel Lagache, with which Lacan was affiliated. The year 1953 began with Lacan’s election as president of the SPP and then, in March, the opening of the Institute under Nacht’s direction. The students felt a sense of discontent, when confronted with Nacht’s bureaucratic power, the excessive cost of the teaching, the unpleasant inequality of their assignments to the Institute’s courses, and finally the new requirements for qualification imposed on them, despite the fact that many of them were already recognized psychiatrists or therapists. The convergence of the students’ revolt and the teachers’ internal divisions led to the resignation, on 16 June 1953, of Lagache79, Françoise Dolto80, and Juliette Favez-Boutonnier81. These three, having rejected for one last time the opinion that the malaise in the group was “entirely connected with the personal actions of the current president of the Society, Dr. Lacan” (La scission, p. 87) resigned and announced the creation of the French Psychoanalytic Society (SFP). On that same day, Lacan left his functions as president of the SPP in order to join the new society. Together with the students who had followed them, they sought to have their group recognized as quickly as possible by the IPA; they also tried to rejoin this association, from which they had separated without really being aware that they had done so. In order to do this, during the following month—July 1953—Lagache, the president of the SFP, sent the decision-making bodies of the International Association a memorandum dealing with

79

Daniel Lagache (1903–1972). An alumnus of the École normale supérieure, he was analysed by Rudolph Loewenstein and was a psychiatrist and a member of the second generation of French analysts. He founded the SFP in 1953 and was the co-founder of the APF in 1964. He also founded the psychoanalytic series published by the Presses universitaires de France. 80 Françoise Dolto (1908–1988). A physician and psychoanalyst who took her inspiration from Christianity, she specialized in child analysis. She always, except in 1980, took the side of Lacan, especially during the period of the Freudian School of Paris. One of her important theoretical contributions was an elaboration of the unconscious body image. 81 Juliette Favez-Boutonnier (1903–1994). A French psychoanalyst, she had an agrégation in philosophy, studied medicine and was analysed by René Laforgue. Along with Lagache, she founded the SFP in 1953 and the APF in 1964.

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the divisions among the French analysts and asked that the SFP be granted an affiliation with the IPA. The memorandum begins by stating that “There was no questioning of either the fundamental principles of psychoanalysis or its practice, which have been consolidated in the forms that have commonly been described as ‘classical’ or ‘orthodox’; in particular, there has been no divergence in principle concerning the duration of psychoanalytic treatment or the frequency and duration of the sessions” (La scission, p. 102). Lagache tried to account for the rupture by contrasting the SPP’s authoritarian and scientifically unconvincing theories with the “liberal and democratic spirit” of the founders of the SFP. The first paragraph of the memorandum explains that there is no divergence concerning the duration of sessions, and Lagache returns to this issue four pages later, where he describes what had happened: Since 1951, objections had been made to the Teaching Commission concerning Lacan’s introduction, in his training analyses, of a procedure that shortens the sessions; in 1951, he could not normalize this situation … and in 1952, Lacan’s technique had stopped being discussed. Then at the beginning of 1953, three of his students went before the Teaching Commission, in order to be admitted to supervisory analyses. Everyone agreed in rejecting Lacan’s technique …. The discussion finally ended with the adoption of general measures that were intended to settle these questions once and for all: no candidate would be allowed to practice supervised analyses without having undergone, for at least 12 months, a training analysis that could consist of three sessions of at least 45 minutes each week. Starting in January, Lacan, by professional discipline, had normalized his training analyses (La scission, p. 107).

Certainly by discipline he had; but history will show that his theoretical discipline led Lacan to enlarge his practice of variablelength sessions and that the struggle over the 45 minute sessions concealed a much more general theoretical opposition to Lacan’s return to Freud.

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Once seen in this perspective, the “authoritarian faction”, as Lagache calls it, by focusing the “order conflict” on Lacan, took a political position that, in retrospect, is rather precise. These circumstances obliged Lagache to mention that the conflict had been organized around Lacan’s name, despite the fact that he supported him and was seeking, instead, to highlight a conflict of sensibility between liberalism and authoritarianism. According to his analysis, it was this difference that could account for the division of French analysts, a division that, according to him, had not been brought about by theoretical divergences. The blindness and the “denial”, which may not be disinterested, on this point is obvious. Here is how Lagache returns half-heartedly to the Lacan case: Lacan’s technique and personality have been mentioned so often by the authoritarian fraction that it is impossible not to say a word about them. For years, the Paris Psychoanalytic Society owed a large part of its life and activities to him; his seminars on Freud’s texts have won Lacan the admiration and recognition of a number of students (La scission, p. 107).

Lagache thus repeats that Lacan was at the centre of the conflict, since so many students admired his reading of Freud’s works, and his return to Freud. Readers, who by now have a good understanding of the theoretical scope of this return, should conclude from the weakness of the testimony of Lagache, who seemed not to see (or not to want to see, or not to want to make others see) that what was at stake in the return to Freud was profoundly analytic—both theoretical and clinical—and that this was what motivated Lacan’s students’ transference to him and his rejection by his peers. Perhaps Lacan’s earlier intellectual proximity to Marcel Cénac, when they were writing their article, “A Theoretical Introduction to the Functions of Psychoanalysis in Criminology” (1950)82 had made him a better judge of what Lacan had come to incarnate; it may also have enabled him to see what had proved to be unbearable for some members of the “authoritarian fraction”.

82

See Lacan et les sciences sociales, chapter 3.

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We can read the following in the memorandum: At the session of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society for 2 June, Lacan was the object of a rather serious indictment made by Dr. Cénac, in which various grievances were articulated; the main one was that Lacan was the cause (my emphasis) of the students’ revolt … [O]ne of the partisans of authority went so far as to say that, even if Lacan had not inspired the conflict, he was responsible for it, by the very fact of his existence (La scission, p. 110).

Lagache finally, and in spite of himself, indicates that Lacan’s existence is the subjective cause of the French analysts’ social malaise. Let us apply Lacan to Lacan and ask who is this being who had become unbearable to the other members of the group? Who is he, if not the incarnation of the Freudian truths that filled the analysts with fear? Let us remember these statements by Lacan: Whereas Freud assumed responsibility for showing us that there are illnesses that speak (unlike Hesiod, for whom the illnesses sent by Zeus come over men in silence) and for making us hear the truth of what they say, it seems that this truth inspires more fear (my emphasis) in the practitioners who perpetuate this technique as its relation to a historical moment and an institutional crisis becomes clearer (Écrits, p. 177).

Later, Lacan will add that the psychoanalyst has a horror of his act, just as he claims here that his analytic peers feel a growing fear of the Freudian truth and will state in 1964 that he should only re-examine the dimension of the unconscious with great care (Seminar XI, p. 23). Thus, perhaps, during these years of crisis, the psychoanalysts who were the most sensitive to what Lacan had come to embody were the ones who condemned him the most violently; in their horror and fear, his being had become unbearable to them. We can understand how, in this painful position, Lacan could discover and claim that the burden of the social “order conflict” always returns to the subject. It returned to him to give flesh and consistency to this subjective cause of the conflict. There is no doubt that it is also because of this

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experience that he could argue in Vienna in 1955 that something in subjectivity helps cause social crises. If Lacan encountered the teaching of French ethnology concerning this point, it is not only because he had read Lévi-Strauss; it is also because he constructed a sort of clinic of the social on the basis of his own subjective position, which he deciphered not as a free individual choice, but as a subjective fate that came to him from the Other—here, Freud’s work. Athough, in his opinion, this fate frightened other analysts, the painful ordeal that he was going through was, for him, a moment of theoretical maturation. It provided him with his theory of subjectivity, and more precisely, with the theory of subjectivity in history, which he formulated at that time, and which his letter to Loewenstein confirms.83

Lacan’s letter to Loewenstein On 14 July 1953, Lacan wrote a letter to his analyst, Rudolph Loewenstein, letting him know that Lagache was going to visit him in order to discuss the file on the split. Lacan makes it clear that These pages were not written in order to add to that file—but in order to transmit to you, in the frank tone that our particular relationship allows us, the kind of living testimony without which a history cannot be written. No objectivity can be achieved in human matters without that subjective basis.84

These lines, located at the conclusion of the letter, are crucial, since they reaffirm the necessity of reaching the subjective foundation of what motivates human history. The only person who could take upon himself the responsibility for the students’ revolt and for the sense of discontent and division in the group recounts his ordeal to his analyst.

83

Rudolph Loewenstein (1898–1976). A psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, he was born to a Jewish family in Lodz, emigrated to Zurich and arrived in Paris in 1925, where he helped found the Groupe de l’ évolution psychiatrique and the SPP. He was the analyst of Sacha Nacht, Daniel Lagache and Jacques Lacan. He later emigrated to the United States, where he held several important positions in the American Psychoanalytic Association. 84 Jacques Lacan, “A Letter to Loewenstein”, Television/A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment.

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Nothing was spared by [Nacht] in his attacks on me. An old discussion engaged on the terrain of theory and practice—and which bore on a technique that (be it justified or not) I had defended publicly, to wit: the systematic use of shorter sessions in certain analyses, and in particular in training analyses, in which the specific nature of the resistances seemed to me to justify the technique …. The number of my students was turned into an objection against me by claiming that that was the sole motivation for the reduction in the time devoted to each one. And further on: Everything was set up so that my students might leave me (Letter, p. 63)

Lacan was not averse to recalling the theoretical suppositions that separated him from the other analysts, even, as we shall see, in the case of the short sessions, a technique that he assures Loewenstein that he had given up. Yet everything in this letter indicates that by aiming at his activities of transmission, his critics were really targeting both the conceptions underlying his commentaries on Freud and the direction of the treatment as implied by this commentary. What motivated their indictment of him was the entire return to Freud, and with it, and through his students, the proliferation of Freud’s desire, which according to Lacan, aroused a sacred horror in his colleagues. The result was the manoeuvres that aimed at rejecting him and his followers and at disqualifying the analysts whom he had trained and taught. In these circumstances, what support could he find other than that of Freud’s speech, which, as he says, had given him a kind of warning? “I have seen what can happen in a society of ‘analysed’ individuals, and I knew from Freud himself that it goes beyond anything one might imagine: and indeed I would never have imagined that” (Letter, p. 64).85 The reference to Freud is troubling by its 85 We can find the following, rather pessimistic remark in Freud’s letters: “That analysis has not made the analysts themselves better, nobler or of stronger character remains a disappointment for me. Perhaps I was wrong to expect it.” In James Jackson Putnam and Psychoanalysis; Letters Between Putnam and Sigmund Freud, Ernest Jones, William James, Sandor Ferenczi, and Morton Prince, 1877–1917, pp. 163–4. On Freud’s conception of the qualities of a psychoanalyst, see the heading “Psychanalyse/Qualités personnelles du…” in Alain Delrieu, Sigmund Freud: index thématique (2001).

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presence. In it, there is a sense that something in the imaginary has been torn: “I would never have imagined that”. His mobilization of Freud’s speech is striking, for only it seems to be able to absorb the traumatic effect of the breach in the imaginary, a breach that is accompanied by “melancholic pains”: nightmares, a wish to die, frightful emotions. Let us read the text again: I have seen what can happen in a society of “analysed” individuals, and I knew from Freud himself that it goes beyond anything one might imagine: and indeed I would never have imagined that: I now see, having brought a few of its features back to life for you, what these nightmarish months may have been for me, and that, in truth, I have been able to survive them only by virtue of continuing, through all the frightful emotions these months afforded me, my seminars of reading and supervision, without having either missed them a single time or, I believe, having allowed their inspiration and quality to wane. Quite to the contrary, this year has been particularly fruitful, and I believe I have brought genuine progress to the theory and techniques specific to obsessional neurosis. Yes, I have managed to live thanks to that labour, which was at times executed in true despair” (Letter, p. 64)

Faced with despair, nightmares, betrayal, abandonment, the imaginary breach that characterizes his position as a banished object, Lacan “survives” by relying on what he finds in his marriage, but also by using Freud’s speech: “I knew by Freud himself ….” He survives through his commentary on Freud’s work and, in short, his analysis with Freud. We can understand why this is a true fate, since what has precipitated his fall—his return to Freud—is also what now guarantees his survival. The ordeal is dreadful and Lacan feels that he is being trapped within something that resembles a Stalinist show trial: What is most wrenching for me is perhaps the attitude of a certain number of titular and adhering members. Thank God, the youngest of them showed themselves to be of a different stamp, as I told you. But among those who knew the Occupation and

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the years preceding it, I observed with terror a conception of human relations revealed in the style and forms that can be seen flourishing in the people’s democracies. The analogy was striking, and the group effects resulting from it have taught me more about the problem, which has always fascinated me, of the so-called Prague-type trial than all my reflections—which had advanced rather far, all the same—on the subject (Letter, p. 64).

Beyond the authoritarian group’s manoeuvres to preserve the power to name analysts, Lacan shows us, in the suppositions governing the split of which he was himself the cause, both the horror of the truths that he was returning to his colleagues and the terror that inhabited him at the most difficult moments of the crisis.86

The Prague trials The “conception of human relations revealed in the style and forms that can be seen flourishing in the people’s democracies” reminds Lacan, on the one hand, of “those who knew the Occupation and the years preceding it”, and on the other of the fascinating problem, the Prague-type trial, which has led Lacan to “reflections—which had advanced rather far … —on the subject” (Letter, p. 64). We know nothing of Lacan’s reflections, but I can provide some essential historical coordinates in order to give readers a good idea of the political and judicial world to which he was referring. Let us remember that in 1948, Tito separated from the rest of the Soviet “bloc” and was condemned by Cominform for a “nationalist deviation”; described as an “agent of imperialism” and excommunicated by the Communist International, he had to answer his Stalinist “prosecutors” in the language of communism. Yet he did not give in. Terrorized by the possibility that the Yugoslav example would contaminate other countries, Stalin activated a new wave of purges, which aimed at leaving the levers of the empire in the hands only of those who were allied unconditionally with the USSR. This

86

“Such is the fright that seizes man when he discovers the true face of his power that he turns away from it in the very act … of laying it bare …. One can trace over the years a growing aversion regarding the functions of speech and the field of language.” Lacan makes this suggestion in the Rome Report (Écrits, p. 201).

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rule was applied by all the communist leaders. “Tito was the major exception …. Everywhere else, the golden rule of unconditional solidarity with the USSR continued to be applied to militants who had become heads of government, the majority of whom had spent the war years in Moscow. ‘Applied’ is an understatement,” as François Furet (1999) noted.87 Furet examines this period in a work that draws its title from Freud’s work on religion, The Future of an Illusion, but in an inverted form, The Passing of an Illusion. In 1952, Rudolph Slansky—the secretary of the Czech communist party—was accused of opposition to Stalin and Titoism as well as of being the head of an international Zionist plot; 14 people were indicted with him, ten of whom were Jews, who were designated as such in the accusation. Slansky was condemned to death and hanged along with ten of the other people who had been on trial. This trial can be placed in a series of “show” trials that sought to intimidate the populations of the people’s democracies, which were divided between their nationalist feelings and their attachment to the communist movement. It is also a repetition of the Moscow trials, which from 1936 to 1939, purged the directing circles of figures who were accused of “Trotskyism”, as they would later be of “Titoism”, because of the postwar preoccupation with the national question. Lacan, writing to Loewenstein on Bastille Day, was not insensitive to this occurrence, just as he was not unaware of the fact that the man to whom he was writing was a Jew, like those exterminated in the Shoah and put on trial in Prague. Yet it can be hypothesized that what fascinates Lacan about the Stalinist trials is what has fascinated everyone who has commented upon them. What was new in this procedure was “the use of confessions, by which the accused simultaneously demonstrated their guilt and the clairvoyance of their interrogators, spelling their own death …. The absurdity of what was said in front of these rigged tribunals, which tried only broken men, did not change believers’ minds” (Furet, p. 298). It would be interesting to know Lacan’s feelings about this sort of seduction, which seems to call upon the spectator to aid

87

François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century.

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the executioner, by offering up to the shadowy God—here, the Communist International—the broken but consenting bodies of its finest activists. Yet Lacan says no more here, and we must content ourselves simply with noting that the best minds do not always resist this sort of seduction, as Furet also testifies: I remember reading, around 1947, Koestler’s Darkness at Noon with great excitement, although it did not dissuade me from eventually joining the Communist Party. I admired the idea that the judge and the accused could agree to serve the same cause, the first as executioner and the second as victim. What I liked about this philosophical version of the Moscow trials was the march of historical reason, whose barbarous cult Koestler sought to denounce (1999, p. 418).

We must remember, of course, the radical distance between the Communist International and the psychoanalytic International from which Lacan found himself separated. This reminder of the international situation of that period allows us to understand better what he was asking about the cause of the purge, and especially what leads or does not lead a subject to be guided by a morbid attraction to servitude. Finally, there is a melancholy that is common to Lacan’s letter and the historical circumstances that he mentioned, and Furet, far from disputing it, observes a historical analogy. This was the “background of all the political or judicial ‘affairs’ that, secretly or openly, brought the popular democracies into conflict with their Soviet ‘protector’. Those sad events revealed the inequality of the adversaries, one of which was virtually beaten in advance; Tito was the major exception” (Furet, p. 411). In a note, the historian adds that “Another exception was Kostov, an old Comintern militant from Bulgaria who was tried for ‘treason’ in Sofia in December 1949 and who retracted his confessions and protested the charges” (Furet, p. 550, note 21). Lacan, defeated politically, ended up the victor of the 1953 duel, since he writes in 1976, as the epigraph of the collection, La scission de 1953: Doubtless I won. Since I made it understood what I thought of the unconscious, the principle of practice.

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I am not going to say it here. Because everything that is published here, especially when it comes from my pen, inspires me with horror. To the point that I thought I had forgotten what the person who publishes me testifies to. No longer wanting to think about it is not, alas, to forget it. The weak-minded person who is subject to psychoanalysis always becomes a scoundrel. Let this be known.

The crossing Lacan testifies here to a moment in which he has crossed a subjective threshold; after he has done so, things would never be the same for him: “I can also tell you that what this ordeal has taught me of the manoeuvres and the weaknesses of men is such that a page of my life has now been turned” (p. 64). Faced with Stalinist terror, Lacan relies, in his own terms, on a “sort of faith”, to which he will testify in Rome. Does this mean that he chooses Catholic exaltation over Stalinist horror? I think of the kind of faith which carries me now beyond all that, which almost makes me forget it; yes, it is composed of a capacity for forgetting which is a function of that precious audience of those who followed me—who would never have forgotten me, even if I had been alone in walking out—of what I am going to write for Rome, my report on the function of language in psychoanalysis, of the fact that I know better and better what it is mine to say about an experience which I have only these last years been able to recognize and solely thereby truly to answer. I hope to see you in London. Whatever happens, rest assured that you will encounter there a man more convinced of his duties and his destiny (pp. 64–65).

With this letter, Lacan has said what is important. Lacan has recognized his destiny and can now be sure that group conflicts derive from subjective causality. Yet can we be mistaken about what he is the bearer of? The faith that he experiences is not the same one that Claudel brought to rescue the Father of the Catholic Church, who had been humiliated by the “resistance” of Israel; instead, it is what he has received from the speech of the father of psychoanalysis, and

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it allows him to recognize with certainty not only his own destiny, but also what seals each person’s fate: the rules of speech and language, the “form in which language expresses itself …. Language says: ‘You will go here, and when you see this, you will turn off there.’”88 We shall now follow Lacan on the path to Rome, where those who had decided to join the new French Society of Psychoanalysis and accompany his return to Freud were awaiting the speech that would give psychoanalysis a new foundation.

IV. The Rome Report: “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” or testifying to a pass (September 1953) What, according to Lacan himself, is the Rome Report? It is a “revamp[ing]” of the foundations of psychoanalysis inasmuch as “our discipline derives from language” (Écrits, p. 198). Because of its historical position, this report can be thought of as a work that gives a theoretical foundation to the new French Society of Psychoanalysis. For Lacan, this text derives from the ordeal of the separation and deals, in his own words, with the “current problems of psychoanalysis” (Écrits, p. 201). If what these problems have in common is the abandonment of speech as the foundation for psychoanalysis, they can be located: 1.

2. 3.

In the imaginary register, where Lacan places fantasies and the constitution of objects at the different stages of psychic development Around libidinal object relations and conducting the treatment, which call for a return to “the pivotal technique of symbolization” Around the theory of counter-transference, of training analysts and ending the treatment.

These crucial questions for analysis—including the end of analysis and the movement to the analytic position—are the themes of this speech which he gave at the conclusion of this ordeal; they could be

88

Écrits, p. 247. As I showed in my previous work, Lacan owed all his ideas about the humiliation of the father, which he located in 1938 as the cause of the “great contemporary neurosis”, to Paul Claudel. I also showed how he sacrificed this diagnosis in the theoretical upheaval that led him, in 1953, to substitute the father’s symbolic value for his social value in analytic experience.

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considered, after the fact, as examples of what Lacan would later expect from those who have become analysts at the end of their analyses, and who would now be in a position to resolve the crucial problems of psychoanalysis and even to develop a way of teaching these questions. The Lacan who produced this work has been metamorphosed by his return to Freud, his commentary on Freud’s work and his “analysis”, which led him unswervingly towards both the 1953 split and the refounding in Rome; in this text, he commits himself to resolving the crucial problems encountered by psychoanalysis, as he would do throughout the 25 years of his seminar. In short, it is a work that testifies that he has become a Freudian analyst. If, according to him, analysts’ resistance culminates in their abandoning of speech as the foundation of psychoanalysis, Lacan, faithful to his dialectical strategy, can only develop an antithesis in Rome by relying on this movement: “[P]sychoanalysis has but one medium: the patient’s speech. The obviousness of this fact is no excuse for ignoring it. Now all speech calls for a response” (Écrits, p. 206). Hence the title of the report, and I shall now quote its subtitle.

Empty speech and full speech in the psychoanalytic realization of the subject With this title, Lacan announces a first development, which distinguishes between empty speech—the most arid element of speech, the model of which is the obsessional’s speech, which foregrounds the ego—and true speech. In empty speech: “[T]he subject seems to speak in vain about someone who—even if he were such a dead ringer for him that you might confuse them—will never join him in the assumption of his desire” (Écrits, p. 211). Analysis, on the other hand, encourages a verbalization in which the subject “learns to read the symbols of a destiny on the march” (Écrits, p. 212). Let’s be categorical: in psychoanalytic anamnesis, what is at stake is not reality, but truth, because the effect of full speech is to reorder past contingencies by conferring on them the sense of necessities to come, such as they are constituted by the scant freedom through which the subject makes them present (Écrits, p. 213).

Lacan can now give a condensed definition of psychoanalysis: “This assumption by the subject of his history, insofar as it is constituted by

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speech addressed to another, is clearly the basis of the new method Freud called psychoanalysis” (Écrits, p. 213). Thus Lacan redefines the concept of the unconscious, its symptomatic formations and the transformation that the subject undergoes when s/he embarks upon the Freudian method. [W]hen a subject begins an analysis, he accepts a position that is more constitutive in itself than all the orders by which he allows himself to be more or less taken in …. For I shall take this opportunity to stress that the subject’s act of addressing [allocution] brings with it an addressee [allocutaire]—in other words, that the speaker [locuteur] is constituted in it as inter-subjectivity. Second, it is on the basis of this interlocution, insofar as it includes the interlocutor’s response, that it becomes clear to us why Freud requires restoration of continuity in the subject’s motivations …. The true basis of the Freudian discovery of the unconscious becomes clear in its position as a third term. This may be simply formulated in the following terms: The unconscious is that part of concrete discourse qua transindividual, which is not at the subject’s disposal in re-establishing the continuity of his conscious discourse …. The unconscious is the chapter of my history that is marked by a blank or occupied by a lie: it is the censored chapter. But the truth can be refound; most often it has already been written elsewhere. Namely,

•

•

In monuments: this is my body, in other words, the hysterical core of neurosis in which the hysterical symptom manifests the structure of language, and is deciphered like an inscription which, once recovered, can be destroyed without serious loss In archival documents too: these are my childhood memories, just as impenetrable as such documents are when I don’t know their provenance (Écrits, pp. 214, 215).

The subject of analysis is thus constituted by her/his entry into the method, in which s/he is completed by a psychoanalyst, who occupies the place of the Other, and who punctuates her/his discourse—ending the sessions, for example—and giving sense to it. This is the theoretical basis of the technique of the sessions which,

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rather than simply being “short”, are of variable length, because the analyst ends them on the basis of a logic of interpretation. The unconscious is to be located in the discontinuities of discourse or the missing chapters of history, chapters that are crystallized in symptoms, which await a retrospective deciphering, not in order for an element of reality to be restored, but according to a logic of the symbolizing of inter-subjective truths that is made current in and by the analytic method. Is this then a simple artefact of analysis? No, since, for example, as Lacan indicates humorously: “The anal stage is no less purely historical when it is actually experienced than when it is reconceptualized, nor is it less grounded in inter-subjectivity” (Écrits, p. 217). This indicates, more harshly, that the analytic method is structurally homologous— inter-subjectively—with moments that have been experienced historically. Thus it is proper to help bring them to light, in the form of substituting one discourse for another (inter-subjective) one; the ways in which this can be done include the response of the analyst, who provides the unconscious—which has been deciphered—with its status: the discourse of the other. “The fact that the subject’s unconscious is the other’s discourse appears more clearly than anywhere else in the studies Freud devoted to what he called telepathy, as it is manifested in the context of an analytic experience” (Écrits, pp. 219–220). Having thus situated what is at stake in speech in analysis, Lacan goes back to Freud’s word, to see the hold that symbolic structures have over the constitution of unconscious formations; he opens up this perspective in order to connect psychoanalysis with the other human sciences, among the most important of which is anthropology.

“Symbol and Language as Structure and Limit of the Psychoanalytic Field”89 We need to remember that in the preface to the report, Lacan announces that, in returning to Freud’s concepts, he is seeking a sort of equivalence with anthropology:

89

This second subtitle has been borrowed from “The Function and Field”, Écrits, p. 220.

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In a discipline that owes its scientific value solely to the theoretical concepts Freud hammered out as his experience progressed—concepts which, because they continue to be poorly examined and nevertheless retain the ambiguity of everyday language, benefit from the latter’s resonances while incurring misunderstanding—it would seem to me to be premature to break with the traditional terminology. But it seems to me that these terms can only be made clearer if we establish their equivalence to the current language of anthropology (my emphasis) (Écrits, p. 199).

By establishing the equivalence between Freudian and anthropological concepts, Lacan is trying to return Freud’s work to its scientific rigour, which had been blunted since his death by crude and uncritical use. To rediscover, within the unconscious, the realm of symbolic structures and language will involve a scientific restoration of Freudian concepts, whose equivalence with anthropological concepts must be shown. How are they equivalent? We must thus take up Freud’s work again starting with the Traumdeutung … to remind ourselves that a dream has the structure of a sentence or, rather, to keep to the letter of the work, of a rebus—that is, of a form of writing, of which children’s dreams are supposed to represent the primordial ideography, and which reproduces, in adults’ dreams, the simultaneously phonetic and symbolic use of signifying elements found in the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt and in the characters still used in China (Écrits, p. 221).

In order to make itself heard, unconscious desire borrows the voice of the dream, which was forged in the universal heritage of an ideographic writing; the presence of such a writing can be found on the pediments of Egyptian monuments. This heritage is the basis of an equivalence between Egyptology and the psychoanalytic interpretation of dreams. What dreams and hieroglyphs have in common is a primal ideography that reappears at night, in all its alterity, to modern people; this primal writing can also be found on the hysteric’s body and, in a petrified form, in the stereotypes of madness. For the latter, “the subject … is spoken instead of speaking; we

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recognize here the symbols of the unconscious in petrified forms that find their place in a natural history of these symbols alongside the embalmed forms in which myths are presented in our collections of them” (Écrits, p. 232). According to Lacan, madness demonstrates what must be heard in the discourse of the other, and it is incarnated, unfortunately and excessively, in the paranoiac subject. It is a mark of Lacan’s greatness that he sees the value in this subject, who incarnates to the point of martyrdom, the petrified forms of unconscious symbols; this is not a humanist greatness, which would itself be very respectable, but rather the greatness of a profound certainty that what founds all our subjective existences lies in a symbolic community, whose forms are variable but universal.90 Lacan posits the existence of a universal human community, which could be deciphered in archaeological digs as well as in dreams, delusions, and symptoms. What is common to everyone is the primal language of symbols, and this is precisely what Freud brought to light in analysing the sense of discontent in culture: A symptom here is the signifier of a signified that has been repressed from the subject’s consciousness. A symbol written in the sand of the flesh and on the veil of Maia, it partakes of language by the semantic ambiguity that I have already highlighted in its constitution. But it is fully functioning speech, for it includes the other’s discourse in the secret of its cipher [chiffre]. It was by deciphering this speech that Freud rediscovered the first language of symbols, still alive in the sufferings of civilized man (my emphasis) (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur) (Civilization and Its Discontents). Hieroglyphics of hysteria, blazons of phobia, and labyrinths of Zwangsneurose [obsessional neurosis] … these are the hermetic elements that our exegesis resolves, the equivocations that our invocation dissolves, and the artifices that our dialectic absolves, by delivering the imprisoned meaning in ways

90 The third chapter of Lacan et les sciences sociales shows that Lacan’s clinic of psychopaths is based on a group of anthropological suppositions that owes much to Marcel Mauss’ notion of the degraded forms of the symbolic.

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that run the gamut from revealing the palimpsest to providing the solution [mot] of the mystery and to pardoning speech (Écrits, p. 232).

Why, we may wonder, does unconscious desire include the other’s discourse? Lacan answers that “Man’s desire finds its meaning in the other’s desire, not so much because the other holds the keys to the desired object, as because his first object(ive) is to be recognized by the other” (Écrits, p. 222). In other words, unconscious desire wants to be recognized, since what characterizes its formations—dreams, symptoms … —is the insistence of a sort of “right of return”. Its best chance of being recognized lies in taking the symbolic paths of primal forms of organization. The symptom, then, would include, in its signifying organization, a sort of universal figure for culture. What Freud realized very quickly is that once the dreamer enters into transference, the analyst comes to occupy the place that is addressed. The analysand will have dreams that should be interpreted in terms of the transferential situation: in relation to his or her conception, for example, of the analyst’s desire. The common resources of the universe of culture—the discourse of the other— become the instruments used by unconscious desire to create messages and make itself recognized by the other. In other words, when the other has a precise incarnation, unconscious desire speaks to it in the other’s own language. The unconscious adjusts its productions inter-subjectively to the other’s codes: the codes of his desire and language. For this reason, Lacan reminds us, Freud can save his theory of dreams by interpreting, “as the reason for a dream that seems to run counter to his thesis … the very desire to contradict him” (Écrits, p. 222). For the Lacan of the Rome Report, unconscious desire is inscribed as an engram, by means of a symbolic system whose universal resources can be understood by anthropological discoveries, such as those of Egyptologists; these discoveries can throw light on situations in which the figure who is addressed is not incarnated. When this figure is present, on the contrary, the interpretation must be made in terms of what the dreamer calculates about what s/he wants or says. Yet varying the manner of the interpretation according to the influence of transferential circumstances—up to the point of telepathy—must not obscure the facts that

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The unconscious formations are structured “like” and by languages and symbolic systems and that They draw upon the place of the other by using what may or may not be primal symbols, which may or may not be universally shared.91 This suggests that the logic of symbolic systems and the symbolic combinatory is “imported” into these formations; this logic is always a part of what the other wants.

Thus, as Lacan indicates: It is already quite clear that symptoms can be entirely resolved in an analysis of language, because a symptom is itself structured like a language: a symptom is language from which speech must be delivered. To those who have not studied the nature of language in any depth, the experience of numerical association will immediately show what must be grasped here—namely, the combinatory

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In his article, “The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words” (1910), Freud indicates that “the behaviour of the dream-work … is identical with a peculiarity in the oldest languages known to us.” According to the philologist, Karl Abel, the Egyptian language was the “sole relic of a primitive world, [where] there are a fair number of words with two meanings, one of which is the exact opposite of the other” (1957, p. 156). Emile Benveniste, in “Remarks on the Function of Language in the Freudian Discovery”, in Problèmes de linguistiques générales, mentions, in 1956, Lacan’s “brilliant text on the function and field of language in psychoanalysis” but also goes back to Freud’s 1910 article to invalidate the idea that “an analogy could be discovered between the dream process and the ‘semantics of primitive languages’”. Later, he adds that “everything seems to separate us from any experience of a correlation between dream logic and the logic of a real language.” According to Benveniste, the symbolic property of language cannot be confused with that of the dream, since the first is local and learned, whereas the second has nothing to do with learning and is thus ipso facto universal. For him, the symbolic of the unconscious is infralinguistic, since its source “in a deeper region than the one in which education installs the linguistic and mechanism …. [It is] supralinguistic because it uses extremely condensed signs, which, in organized language, would correspond to larger units of discourse …. Following this comparison would lead to fruitful comparisons between the symbolic of the unconscious and certain typical procedures of subjectivity manifested in discourse. At the level of language, we could specify stylistic discursive procedures” such as euphemisms, antiphrasis, litotes, allusion, metonymy, metaphor, as they appear in myths, proverbs, or dreams. Benveniste accentuates characteristics of style rather than of meaning. See Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique générale (1966).

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power that orders its equivocations—and they will recognize in this the very mainspring of the unconscious (Écrits, p. 223).

In referring to numerical association, Lacan is not trying to show, for example, how whatever had grasped the subject in her childhood has undergone various transformations since then; instead, he is seeking to indicate what the necessary—or impossible—figures of an arithmetical combinatory keep hidden from her. Unconscious determination is not to be sought, in this perspective, in terms of such and such a symbol that is crystallized at the heart of such and such an unconscious formation; instead, it can be found in the power of the rules of symbolic organization, which govern this symbol, and with it, the fate of the subject. This is the case not only for arithmetical combinatories, but also for other combinatories, such as those that govern ethnological systems. “We shall see that philologists and ethnographers (my emphasis) reveal enough to us about the combinatory sureness found in the completely unconscious systems with which they deal for them to find nothing surprising in the proposition I am putting forward here” (Écrits, p. 223). If the scientific rigour of Freudian language is to be recovered, then its equivalence with the conceptual series used by anthropologists needs to be established. It is possible to do so because, according to Lacan, what philologists and ethnographers share with psychoanalysts is the analysis of “completely unconscious systems”. He is thus seeking not only to open up psychoanalysis by restoring it to its place among the human sciences, but also to make it the contemporary of these disciplines, by relying on their conceptual advances; he does so not because he has a taste for being up to date, but 1.

2.

Because symbolic structures organize all these fields and thereby place psychoanalysis and these disciplines in a close relation with each other It is precisely this common resource that has been rejected since Freud’s death; those who deny his discovery have ceaselessly refused to take the patients’ speech into account.

For these reasons, there is a dialectical imperative both to return to Freud and to learn from anthropological discoveries. What do these “completely unconscious systems”, such as psychoanalysis, share

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with ethnology? Referring once again to these ethnological works, Lacan shows his listeners the origin of these systems and the very birth of the symbolic: No one is supposed to be ignorant of the law; this formulation, provided by the humour in our Code of Laws, nevertheless expresses the truth in which our experience is grounded, and which our experience confirms. No man is actually ignorant of it, because the law of man has been the law of language since the first words of recognition presided over the first gifts—it having taken the detestable Danai, who came and fled by sea, for men to learn to fear deceptive words accompanying faithless gifts. Up until then, these gifts, the act of giving them and the objects given, their transmutation into signs, and even their fabrication, were so closely intertwined with speech for the pacific Argonauts—uniting the islets of their community with the bonds [noeuds] of a symbolic commerce—that they were designated by its name. Is it with these gifts, or with the passwords that give them their salutary non-meaning, that language begins along with law? For these gifts are already symbols, in the sense that symbol means pact, and they are first and foremost signifiers of the pact they constitute as the signified; this is plainly seen in the fact that the objects of symbolic exchange—vases made to remain empty, shields too heavy to be carried, sheaves that will dry out, lances that are thrust into the ground—are all destined to be useless, if not superfluous by their very abundance. Is this neutralization by means of the signifier the whole of the nature of language? (Écrits, p. 225).

In this passage, Lacan relies on the work of Maurice Leenhardt92 along with that of Marcel Mauss, which had already shown that the

92

Maurice Leenhardt (1878–1954). A protestant missionary, Maurice Leenhardt used his ethnological research to evangelize the populations that he studied. He spent 25 years in New Caledonia before returning to France, where Lévy-Bruhl and Marcel Mauss introduced him into the academic world. First occupying the chair in the History of Primitive Religions, he next became the director of the Institut français

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symbolic order lies behind social exchange (Mauss, The Gift, 1922). Through these references, Lacan can remind us of how this exchange, which escapes from the rules of a superficial utilitarianism, can transform both something that is given and the act of giving—and of reciprocating—into symbols of the symbolic pact. A useless gift can take on value in the exchange, since it can be raised more easily to the rank of a pure symbol if it is unable to serve a useful purpose. Thus ethnology enables us to see that what imposes a circulation of goods upon a civilization is not need, but rather the rules of the system, in which everyone has a place and a name; people have these just as they have a series of rights and obligations, from which they cannot

d’Océanie, the director of the overseas department of the Musée de l’homme and a member of the Académie des sciences d’outre-mer. Chapters IX and X of his work, Do Kamo: Person and Myth in the Melanesian World, which Lacan mentions, are devoted to the study of speech, which the Caledonians incorporate into their symbolic practices in an exemplary manner. “Consider, for example, the sending of messages. In this example, it is a matter of making sure the next war ceremony will have an audience. The messenger carries a bouquet of plants knotted separately and tied together in a bunch. Each strand removed makes the whole smaller but increases the messenger’s success by an equal amount. He returns to the chief acting as if he were hauling a catch of fish strung on a line. This is a sign of the number of participants to be counted on, the ‘string of words’, no tu” (p. 129). Removing its grass without destroying the bundle—this is the opposite of a situation in which the removal of a single one frees all the others. Yet also, a mute man who carries out vengeance for his brother is revealed as “his brother’s speech”. One must choose between being and having. Tradition dictates behaviour and maintains the generations’ cultural unity and these generations give no reason for this other than that “it is the speech of the elders” or of “the gods”. In other words, it is the speech of the dead Name-of-the-Father. A young woman may have the fantasy of meeting a young chief on the basis of his reputation, and it may be discovered that a journey had been foreseen in one direction or another between members of two fraternal groups that can intermarry. The young woman is welcomed with these words: “You are our granddaughter. We have been waiting for you.” What happens is “the life of speech”. The young woman’s amorous “paroxysms” bring about the marriage about which she knew nothing; she is the exact opposite of Dora. We can see the extent to which, for Lacan, Caledonian society, as analysed by Leenhardt, could show in an exemplary way how the rules of speech can determine everyone’s fate. Here, the circulation of both goods and beings cannot be dissociated from that of speech, whose name it bears and which can also mean “not to know”.

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deviate without losing symbolic face.93 These laws of the system of exchange cannot be stated explicitly; they are the operators that write what we have called each person’s “unconscious mission”, including that of the young Viennese woman whose symptoms paid for her objection to the rules of exchange. Whatever her mirror image may claim, Dora is symbolically a young woman and, as such, is called upon to participate in the exchange of women. “It is the world of words that creates the world of things” (Écrits, p. 229) he asserts in 1953 and this is the case for what ethnology has uncovered: the marriage/alliance rules that govern the circulation of bodies and of sexual relations [relations sexuelles]. Man thus speaks, but it is because the symbol has made him man. Even if, in fact, over-abundant gifts welcome a stranger who has made himself known to a group, the life of natural groups that constitute a community is subject to the rules of matrimonial alliance—determining the direction in which the exchange of women takes place—and to the mutual services determined by marriage: as the ŠiRonga proverb says, “A relative by marriage is an elephant’s hip”. Marriage ties are governed by an order of preference whose law concerning kinship names is, like language, imperative for the group in its forms, but unconscious in its structure. Now, in this structure, whose harmony or conflicts govern the restricted or generalized exchange discerned in it by ethnologists, the startled theoretician refinds the whole logic of combinations; thus the laws of number—that is, of the most highly purified of all symbols—prove to be immanent in the original symbolism. At least, it is the richness of the forms—in which what are known as the elementary structures of kinship develop—that makes those laws legible in the original symbolism (Écrits, p. 229).

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“Each Kwakiutl and Haïda noble has exactly the same idea of ‘face’ as has the Chinese man of letters or officer. It is said of one of the great mythical chiefs who gave no potlatch that he had a ‘rotten face’. Here the expression is even more exact than in China. For in the American Northwest, to lose one’s prestige is indeed to lose one’s soul. It is in fact the ‘face’, the dancing mask, the right to incarnate a spirit, to wear a coat of arms, a totem .… The obligation to accept is no less constraining. One has no right to refuse a gift, or to refuse to attend the potlatch. To act in this way is ... to ‘lose the weight’ attached to one’s name” (Mauss, Gift, pp. 39, 41).

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Being named as a girl or boy—but also as someone’s daughter or son—implies that even before people are present in the world, their bodies are inscribed in the network that regulates the exchange of goods between the groups in a social system of exchange; this is what Lévi-Strauss’ work on the structures of kinship shows. The very necessity of exchange requires that a series of prohibitions or encouragements—which indicate the group’s preference—limit the choice of whom to marry; this choice then becomes dependent on the group’s law. From this perspective, the prohibition of incest is a minimum requirement, without which exchange cannot take place. This is why, according to Lévi-Strauss, it is a universal operator; it is a part of both nature and culture, and indeed, constitutes the passageway between the two orders. As Lacan says: This primordial Law is therefore the Law which, in regulating marriage ties, superimposes the reign of culture over the reign of nature, the latter being subject to the law of mating …. This law, then, reveals itself clearly enough as identical to a language order. For without names for kinship relations, no power can institute the order of preferences and taboos that knot and braid the thread of lineage through the generations (Écrits, p. 231).

Naming governs the lineage, introduces some language to the rules of the system and derives from the paternal function, which must exist if symbolic structuring is to take place; it allows everyone to find his/her place in the generations and the law of marriage and kinship to operate. The degrading of this function, on the other hand, introduces disorientation, confusion, guilt, and suffering: “And it is the confusion of generations which, in the Bible as in all traditional laws, is cursed as being the abomination of the Word and the desolation of the sinner” (Écrits, p. 161). He now leads us to understand how the discoveries of ethnology can throw light on the disturbances of the modern Western family. The clinical approach to this family still culminates in the “pathogenic effects” of the Oedipus complex, which derive from the “discordances of the paternal relation”. Yet these discordances are no longer determined—as Lacan’s students could have thought at the time that they heard him, at a point when he was still breaking with what he had argued for a long time—by the decline of the father’s social value in the Western family.

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When Lacan was influenced by Durkheim, he had relied on the latter’s thesis of the decline of the Western family and of its leader in order to account for the degrading of the Oedipus complex and the development of the various forms of neuroses. With the Rome Report, we can see the metamorphosis of Lacan’s theory of the father, a metamorphosis that has resulted from combining the mirror stage with The Elementary Structures of Kinship in particular, and with anthropological studies of the symbolic function, in general (see Lacan and the Human Sciences). He now indicates that there are clinical discordances of the symbolic function in the family, discordances that can blur the generations and the kinship systems: the age gap between the generations, the death of the father, etc. What he argues, however, is the opposite of what he had taught until then: these problems do not derive from the degradation of the paternal function and domestic harmony cannot be produced by the right form of pater familias. Instead, he claims that this discordance is structural and is inherent in the paternal function, because that latter is carried out 1. 2. 3.

In the real In the narcissistic register: at the threshold of the visible world, where Dora perceived a masculine image of herself, and finally In the “penumbra of symbolic effectiveness”: in the symbolic register of naming that assigns each person a place in a particular kinship system. This system contains the marriage law and the more general structures that determine the functioning of the subject’s social universe, just as it determines his/her own fate. Indeed, even when it is represented by a single person, the paternal function concentrates in itself both imaginary and real relations that always more or less fail to correspond to the symbolic relation that essentially constitutes it. It is in the name of the father that we must recognize the basis of the symbolic function which, since the dawn of historical time, has identified his person with the figure of the law (Écrits, p. 230).

Is it not—as noted in my earlier work—at the threshold of historical time that Freud indicates the birth of the symbolic father, which resulted from the parricide that introduced social regulation, in the form of the exchange of women and the history of societies? The distribution of the paternal function over the three registers that now provide the basis for the Lacanian episteme—imaginary,

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symbolic, real—breaks with Lacan’s previous theory of the father, which had been based on the work of Durkheim, the father of French sociology. I devoted my last work to a critical examination of the Durkheimian Lacan and refer readers to that book. For the present investigation, it is important to note what Lacan did in the universal city, Rome, for his reaction to it was very different from that of the dazzled Claudel. In Rome, while following up French anthropology’s discoveries on the symbolic function, Lacan recognized, and got his readers to recognize, the name of the father as the “support” of the symbolic function. It is thus to be distinguished rigorously from the person who incarnates this function, with whom the analysand has maintained various kinds of real or narcissistic relations.94 Let us continue our reading of Lacan: “It is in the name of the father that we must recognize the basis of the symbolic function which, since the dawn of historical time, has identified his person with the figure of the law” (Écrits, p. 230). What follows this statement is a clinical discussion that allows us to attribute the paternal function’s unconscious effects to the symbolic law of marriage and kinship. It is this register to which the law of naming gives the subject access. There are unconscious effects on the fate of the child, effects that must be separated from what appears 1. 2.

In the reality of the family group And comes back to the person of the father in the narcissistic structuring of the subject: This conception allows us to clearly distinguish, in the analysis of a case, the unconscious effects of this function from the narcissistic relations, or even real relations, that the subject has with the image and actions of the person who embodies this function;

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This distinction between the father’s symbolic function and person has become even more certain today, for the works of ethnologists and historians have described social formations in which the father’s symbolic function is supported by beings other than the social father or even by a man; a woman can do so. There are also numerous societies in which the father is not considered as playing any biological role in procreation. To repeat the Lacan of 1950, it would be judicious to ask ourselves what effects the social conditions of the Oedipus complex have on the subjective structuring of children born into types of family organization that are very different from the modern family. Concerning these different social configurations, see Alain Delrieu, Lévi-Strauss, lecteur de Freud.

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this results in a mode of comprehension that has repercussions on the very way in which interventions are made by the analyst. Practice has confirmed the fecundity of this conception to me, as well as to the students whom I have introduced to this method. And, both in supervision and case discussions, I have often had occasion to stress the harmful confusion produced by neglecting it (Écrits, p. 230).

From 1938 to 1951, Lacan had taught a social and clinical theory of the father that was very different from both this conception, and from Freud’s and Lévi-Strauss’ formulations. If in the Rome Report, Lacan highlights the emergence, at the dawn of historical time, of the name of the father as the “support of the symbolic function”, this shows us something of the power and the potential of this return. It led him, in the capital of Roman Catholicism, to change his relation to the Freudian theory of the father; the latter, in order to be reduced to the elegance of a name, had to be killed. Now what Freud located at the dawn of historical time is precisely the murder of the father, and with it, the founding of taboos and the prohibition of incest. He saw the erecting of the Totem and the promotion of the father’s Name as the very principle of the rules that, after the inaugural parricide, ensured the functioning of the society of brothers.95 Here we see Lacan returning, in Rome, to Freud’s theory of the primal parricide and of the dead father’s presence in the founding of social rules. We can understand why such a gesture made some of his faithful listeners roll their eyes and turn their gaze toward Saint Peter’s basilica. Yet by stating that it is our duty (“we must recognize” [my emphasis]) to acknowledge a name, a single name— the father’s—as the basis of the symbolic function, Lacan is not calling for some fraudulent alliance with the papacy; rather, he is calling for the temporal sacrifice required by the clinical imperative of separating the name of the father from the father’s person. If we want to “elucidate” not only the “human mystery” but its “substantific divination”, we must know how to decipher—like Rabelais,who anticipated the “ethnographic discoveries”—the “virtue of the Word”; this virtue is the principle behind the “Great

95

See Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, 1953, pp 1–161.

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Debt” that sets off the movement of reciprocities, which stabilize, at their point of equilibrium, the perpetual cycles by which men give and receive women and goods in the kinship networks, networks where they find their place as well as their name (Écrits). What makes the letter inviolate and guarantees exchange is the “virtue of the Word”, the “power of Speech”, the “sacred hau” or the “omnipresent mana” whose power Mauss had taught him; he had also learned to recognize in the name of the father “what Lévi-Strauss calls a ‘zero-symbol’, thus reducing the power of Speech to the form of an algebraic sign” (Écrits, p. 231). In this founding speech, Lacan recognizes that the signifier of the name of the father is in the place of the exception; it is a signifier that, in Lévi-Strauss’ words, allows “symbolic thought to operate”. It would be a mistake, however, to confuse this symptomatic expression with the religious uses of the term and thus to see a sort of morbidness in it. Instead, Lacan places it in a position that is close to that of the “sacred hau” and the “omnipresent mana” in the ethnological lexicon in the “names of the spirit of things”. He is trying, in Rome, the capital of the Catholic symptom, to reduce this symptom, which has had such a stranglehold over us that it has prevented Freud’s theory of the dead father from being understood. It has also kept us from understanding the theoretical and clinical disjunction between the name of the father—a symbolic function—and the father’s person; Lacan now requires his students to separate the two. It is not because he enjoys being misunderstood that Lacan introduces his listeners to the name of the father; he does so because: 1. 2. 3. 4.

5.

Rome’s formal envelope requires him to make a statement about the monotheistic symptom His Rome Report is a founding speech and a major moment of his return to Freud His return to Freud requires a critical and dialectical statement of the theory of the dead or symbolic father His introduction into psychoanalysis of the ethnological discoveries about the symbolic function has enabled him to recognize the father’s symbolic function and its unconscious effects Thanks to Lévi-Strauss, he can isolate the existence of a signifier that is in the place of an exception and whose semantic function is required if symbolic thought is to operate

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In bringing together Freud’s theory of the symbolic father—the totem—and Lévi-Strauss’ theory of the zero symbol, he can see that the totem is the foundation of the “completely unconscious systems” that constitute the subjective fates of individuals and make them part of a group.

It is by recognizing the laws that govern these fates that psychoanalytic experience introduces the subject: Symbols in fact envelop the life of man with a network so total that they join together those who are going to engender him “by bone and flesh” before he comes into the world; so total that they bring to his birth, along with the gifts of the stars, if not with the gifts of the fairies, the shape of his destiny; so total that they provide the words that will make him faithful or renegade, the law of the acts that will follow him right to the very place where he is not yet and beyond his very death; and so total that through them his end finds its meaning in the last judgment, where the Word absolves his being or condemns it—unless he reaches the subjective realization of his being-toward-death. Servitude and grandeur in which the living being would be annihilated, if desire did not preserve his part in the interferences and pulsations that the cycles of language cause to converge on him …. But for this desire itself to be satisfied in man requires that it be recognized, through the accord of speech or the struggle for prestige, in the symbol or the imaginary. What is at stake in an analysis is the advent in the subject of the scant reality that this desire sustains in him, with respect to symbolic conflicts and imaginary fixations, as the means of their accord, and our path is the inter-subjective experience by which this desire gains recognition. Thus we see that the problem is that of the relations between speech and language in the subject (Écrits, p. 231).

How can we not see Lacan’s recasting of his conception of the father as the outcome of his return to the speech of the father of psychoanalysis? It is the effect of his return toward the truth, to which he gained access through the subjective rectification of his transference

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toward Freud. How can we also not recognize how Lacan takes Lévi-Strauss’ work as a foundation, one that functions as the antithesis of the rejection of the symbolic—of language and history—that had characterized the post-Freudians’ work? The return to Freud rediscovers the logic of the unconscious in the combinatory systems of symbolic structures; from this perspective, the Oedipus complex can take its place as a crucial symbolic structure for the Freudian field, because it looms over all analytic experience. It provides the subject with an epistemic window that will give her a point of view on the marriage structures through which her fate is motivated unconsciously. This is precisely where the Oedipus complex—insofar as we still acknowledge that it covers the whole field of our experience with its signification—will be said, in my remarks here, to mark the limits our discipline assigns to subjectivity; namely, what the subject can know of his unconscious participation in the movement of the complex structures of marriage ties, by verifying the symbolic effects in his individual existence of the tangential movement toward incest that has manifested itself ever since the advent of a universal community (Écrits, p. 229).

From this perspective, the psychoanalyst becomes a practitioner of the symbolic function; he opens up, for the subject of modernity, an experience that allows him to clarify what, in his sense of discontent, derives from a push toward incest, a push that has been hampered by a system of prohibition, whose scope, according to Lacan, is being reduced by the advent of this modernity. There is “a modern tendency to reduce the objects the subject is forbidden to choose to the mother and sisters”, a tendency that degrades the prohibition, but which has also allowed us to lay bare the “prohibition of incest” as the “subjective pivot” of marriage alliances and of the primal law that “superimposes the reign of culture over the reign of nature” (Écrits, p. 229). Here, we find the essential epistemic figures of Lacan’s research, a research in which the degrading of a structure becomes the condition that allows it to manifest itself in the clinic and thus to be discovered. The prohibition of incest no longer impedes the incestuous tendency, which is reduced to the protagonists of the Oedipal drama. We find

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once again here the idea that social conditions cast doubt on the supposed universality of the Oedipus complex, a complex that Lacan had refused for a long time; now, however, he is no longer trying to bring out, as he said in 1950, “the social conditions of Oedipalism”— first among which was the state of the Western family. Instead, what he emphasizes is the way in which social conditions have reduced the prohibition of incest to the modest dimensions of the Oedipal drama. Given the scope of the choices and prohibitions that regulate marriage for societies studied by ethnologists, the Oedipus complex appears as an impoverished and regional structure, but the very fact that it is degraded has allowed it to emerge in relation to the discontents of civilization in such a way that Freud could discover it. It could thus be seen, in analytic experience, by those who suffer from it, as the form that, in the place of the structures of kinship—and thus in the place of the other—shapes their troubles in modern life. From this point of view, we can say that the importance of analytic knowledge about what symbolic structures—as the discourse of the other—do to the subject, would be in proportion to the restricted character of these structures. It remains the case, however, that the Oedipal structure, which is comparable, despite its weaknesses, to the structures that organize marriage and kinship in the societies studied by ethnologists, is to be included in this series in order to be evaluated. According to Lacan, analysts, in examining the subjective effects of the Oedipus complex, should be able to throw light on what motivates a particular subjective figure of the networks that ethnologists have analysed. Likewise, and whatever may be the scope of the subjective structures or groups that are being considered, we need to see that this perspective makes the combinatories of the symbolic structures of language—such as marriage alliances—the unconscious determinations that constitute the subject. Ethnology has brought out the laws that organize the unconscious formation of institutions, just as it has shown what is marshalled by the invention of symbolism. Yet beyond the group effect, these symbolic structures also organize the network that Freud’s grandson calls upon when he plays with the bobbin. In the absence of the mother, this little boy is being swallowed up in the laws of speech and language.

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By reminding us of the important place that the symbolic holds in the foundations of psychoanalysis, Lacan has decided to pin his hopes on giving it a place among the reorganized sciences. As practitioners of the symbolic function, it is not surprising that we shy away from delving deeper into it, going so far as to neglect the fact that this function situates us at the heart of the movement that is establishing a new order of the sciences, with a rethinking of anthropology …. Linguistics can serve us as a guide here, since that is the vanguard role it is given by contemporary anthropology, and we cannot remain indifferent to it (Écrits, p. 235).

According to Lacan, psychoanalysis, through its practice of the symbolic function, has a place at the heart of a new organization of the sciences; yet in order to be able to assume this position, it must take linguistics as its guide, because of its inscription in contemporary anthropology and also because of the discoveries that constitute a quilting point between, for example, Freud’s analysis of the fort/da96 and linguistics. The form of mathematicization in which the discovery of the phoneme is inscribed, as a function of pairs of oppositions formed

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For our readers who are unfamiliar with Freud’s work, “The fort/da is a symbolic couple of elementary exclamations, which Sigmund Freud noticed while observing the play of an 18-month-old child, and which has been used to throw light not only on what is beyond the pleasure principle but also on the child’s access to language and the dimension of loss that this implies …. Freud’s observation itself is succinct: an 18-month-old child … had the habit of throwing objects away from him by making the prolonged sound, o-o-o-o, which was an early attempt to pronounce the word ‘fort’ (‘far’ in German). One day, Freud observed the same child playing a game that seemed more complete. Picking up a thread attached to a bobbin, he throws it into his crib, while making the same sound, o-o-o-o, and then pulls it back while exclaiming ‘da’ (‘here’ in German). Freud easily connects this game with the child’s situation at the time. Although his mother was absent for long hours and he suffered from this, he never complained about it, despite the fact that he was very attached to her and she had brought him up by herself. The game reproduced the mother’s disappearances and reappearances” (see the article “Fort-da” in the Dictionnaire de la psychanalyse, edited by Roland Chemama and Bernard Vandermersch, 1995, p. 113). In this playful activity, the child decided on the appearances and disappearances of an object that represented his mother. He enjoyed mastering them through his game, but by pronouncing an opposed pair of sounds, he testified to the fact that this mastery was bringing him into the field of language.

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by the smallest graspable discriminative semantic elements, leads us to the very foundations that Freud’s final doctrine designates as the subjective sources of the symbolic function in a vocalic connotation of presence and absence. And the reduction of any language [langue] to a group comprised of a very small number of such phonemic oppositions, initiating an equally rigorous formalization of its highest-level morphemes, puts within our reach a strict approach to our own field. It is up to us to adopt this approach to discover how it intersects with our own field, just as ethnography, which follows a course parallel to our own, is already doing by deciphering myths according to the synchrony of mythemes …. It is thus impossible not to make a general theory of the symbol the axis of a new classification of the sciences where the sciences of man will reassume their central position as sciences of subjectivity (Écrits, p. 236).

Lacan’s analysis of the situation of psychoanalysis in the Rome Report is both broad and precise. It is broad because it embraces a large part of the field of the human sciences and discerns perfectly the movement that is reorganizing them around the theory of symbolism. It is precise because it draws up a programme of research for psychoanalysis, a programme focused on a Freudian updating of the subjective sources of the symbolic function and on advances in linguistics and ethnography. The work of Lévi-Strauss had already helped Lacan lay the foundations of what, in 1955, he would call the Freudian thing. In order to throw light on this thing, Lacan asks, “Isn’t it striking that Lévi-Strauss—in suggesting the involvement in myths of language structures and of those social laws that regulate marriage ties and kinship—is already conquering the very terrain in which Freud situates the unconscious? (Écrits, p. 236). He does not consider Lévi-Strauss’ research as an ideal work in a neighbouring field, one that, at best, would share only a few vague connections with psychoanalysis; instead, this research lays bare the essential structures of the Freudian unconscious. Lévi-Strauss became an importance influence for Lacan neither because his work was fashionable nor because they were friends. Instead, Lévi-Strauss’ ideas lie at the heart of Lacan’s return to Freud because both their structures and those of

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the Freudian unconscious are those of speech and language. In other words, in a way that is completely opposed to the impasses in which the psychoanalytic movement had found itself since Freud’s death, Lacan, in Rome, shows how Lévi-Strauss’ work has advanced the deciphering of the unconscious. At Rome, in 1953, Lacan states how the royal road indicated by Lévi-Strauss leads back dialectically to Freud’s clinic, where the subject of the unconscious finally receives its baptism of being. This subject, rather than being the son of God, is much more like the child with the bobbin, a child who is nourished by the symbolic and receives from it the keys of speech and language; in the latter, what renews itself endlessly is the combinatory of structures that cement his destiny as the obscure effect of the discourse of the other.

The resonances of interpretation and the time of the subject in psychoanalytic technique This subtitle is taken from the concluding part of the Rome Report, which introduces us to a theory of language and subjectivity. What is language? “[T]he function of language in speech is not to inform but to evoke. What I seek in speech is a response from the other. What constitutes me as a subject is my question. In order to be recognized by the other, I proffer what was only in view of what will be (Écrits, p. 247).

Here, we find once again the theory that recognition is the object of unconscious desire, which speaks the Other’s own language to it. Analysis no longer aims, as we remember, at what really happened during childhood, but at the truth of the subject, which is deduced from the symbolic constellation that had produced his/her destiny even before birth. Lacan illustrates his approach by returning to the case of the Rat Man.97

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Ernst Lanzer (1878-1914). Freud’s second great psychoanalytic case, his analysis lasted about nine months (from October 1907 to July 1908). Freud presented his case several times at the meetings of the Wednesday Psychological Society. Born to a Viennese Jewish family, Ernst Lanzer was the fourth of seven children. Like his father,

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Analysis can have as its goal only the advent of true speech and the subject’s realization of his history in its relation to a future …. I shall illustrate my point here by once again returning to Freud … to the case of the Rat Man. Freud goes so far as to take liberties with the exactness of the facts when it is a question of getting at the subject’s truth …. But Freud’s apperception of the dialectical relationship is so apt that the interpretation he makes at that moment triggers the decisive destruction of the lethal symbols that narcissistically bind the subject both to his dead father and to his idealized lady, their two images being sustained, in an equivalence characteristic of the obsessive, one by the fantasmatic aggressiveness that perpetuates it, the other by the mortifying cult that transforms it into an idol. Similarly, it is by recognizing the forced subjectivization of the obsessive debt—in the scenario of futile attempts at restitution, a scenario that too perfectly expresses its imaginary terms for the subject to even try to enact it, the pressure to repay the debt being exploited by the subject to the point of delusion— that Freud achieves his goal. This is the goal of bringing the subject to discover—in the story of his father’s lack of delicacy, his marriage to the subject’s mother, the “pretty but penniless girl”, his wounded love-life, and his ungrateful forgetting of his beneficent friend—to rediscover in this story, along with the fateful constellation that presided over the subject’s very birth, the unfillable gap constituted by the symbolic debt against which his neurosis is a protest (Écrits, p. 249).

The Rat Man reaches true speech not by reconstructing his story98 but by bringing to light what Lacan, several months earlier, in borrowing once again from Lévi-Strauss’ vocabulary, had called

he joined the imperial army, before falling prey to obsessions that led him to consult Freud in October 1907. His case, known as that of the Rat Man, is considered to be the only one with which Freud truly succeeded. 98 It is from this point of view that one should examine the “historical” objections to psychoanalysis made by modern investigators who search to contest Freud’s clinic with details from the biographies of his patients.

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“the neurotic’s individual myth”. This myth structures the subject’s symptoms by referring to a matrix of terms that had been decided by the previous generation. What was crucial was less the patient’s birth than his father’s sense of division: he had to choose whether to marry a poor, pretty young woman or a “young woman of good family”—a wealthy and socially prestigious family—and it was the latter who became his wife. In playing out the confusion over this marriage in his transference with Freud, this patient shows what is really in question: by considering an imaginary daughter of Freud’s as a possible wife with “golden eyes”, he discovers that every man marries his narcissistic destiny; in this case, he marries the image of death that appears in the form of a woman (see “The Neurotic’s Individual Myth”). What he does with Freud is to transfer this alienating imaginary version into its symbolic mediations. For this is how the Rat Man is able to insert into his subjectivity its true mediation in a transferential form: the imaginary daughter he gives Freud in order to receive her hand in marriage from him, and who unveils her true face to him in a key dream: that of death gazing at him with its bituminous eyes. And although it was with this symbolic pact that the ruses of the subject’s servitude came to an end, reality did not fail him, it seems, in granting him these nuptial wishes (Écrits, p. 250).

This young man ended up buried in the soil of the battlefields of the First World War; before this happened, however, he seems to have recognized that death was the true mediation that would undo his ruinous narcissistic identification with the father’s person. Here we have the very model of what Lacan indicated in the Rome Report concerning the disjunction that must be made between, on the one hand, the father’s symbolic function, and on the other the narcissistic identification generated by the relation with him and his real activity. What the Rat Man tells Freud is not that the father really intervened in regulating the young man’s love life, but rather the existence of “a prohibition by his dead father”—since the father had already died—“against his liaison with his lady-love” (Écrits, p. 249). Lacan indicates that this occurred at the very moment when his mother, who had become a widow, suggested that he marry his

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rich cousin. It was this remark, according to Freud, that brought about the patient’s neurosis. “What I seek in speech is a response from the other” (Écrits, p. 247). By including the father’s response, the son brings in the problems of the preceding generation, that fill his symptoms and feed this neurosis, which is structured like a myth. According to Lacan, Freud cuts the knot of servitude by making the Rat Man realize that what he brings unconsciously upon himself can be recognized through his dreams: in the profile of the young woman with dung in the place of her eyes, or in other symptoms. It is up to the analytic dialectic to decipher these unconscious formations and to dissolve their hold over the patient. Thus we can see that by incarnating the place of the other, Freud finds himself at the heart of the intrigue that knots the son unconsciously to the father’s sins. It is not a matter, however, of repeating this situation in transference; if the place of the other is indeed the place where a message that responds to the son has been addressed, it is now occupied by an operator—the analyst—who is able to invert this message. Doing so can finally make the son see that he is responsible for the poisonousness of the message that had “come” from the father’s mouth; this is precisely the place where the son had gone to look for it. This theory of desire as desire of the Other does not therefore involve the sorts of genuflections by which voluntary servitude would come to replace—at the end of what could not even be called an analytic experience—the unconscious servitude that motivated his symptomatic suffering. Instead, recognizing that the unconscious subject can be deduced from the other’s discourse leads to a rectification that leaves the subject entirely responsible for what he complains about. This rectification brings him to take a stand in relation to his symptoms and to gain some freedom by giving up what he sees, in his experience, as the morbid part of the other’s will. This does not make the theory of the unconscious subject—as Lacan stated and illustrated it in Rome—into a theory that would motivate some sort of return to a divine figure. It is a question, instead, of seeing the foundations of Lacan’s return to Freud and what they owe to LéviStrauss; these are Lacan’s answers to what motivated his research on the theory of the unconscious subject. What he owes to LéviStrauss is nothing less than the ability to see the effects of everything that he includes in the notion of the Other: all the structures that

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form the field of speech and language, of which the subject of the unconscious—whether placed in a group or not—is a simple function, a subject that receives her own message in an inverted form. At the end of this journey, we can now better understand the formula that defines, in new terms, what Lacan called the subject of the unconscious. Let us listen once again to this formula: The form in which language expresses itself in and of itself defines subjectivity. Language says: “You will go here, and when you see this, you will turn off there.” In other words, it refers to discourse about the other [discours de l’autre]. It is enveloped as such in the highest function of speech, inasmuch as speech commits its author by investing its addressee with a new reality, as for example, when a subject seals his fate as a married man by saying “You are my wife”. Indeed, this is the essential form from which all human speech derives more than the form at which it arrives. Hence the paradox that one of my most acute auditors believed to be an objection to my position when I first began to make my views known on analysis as dialectic; he formulated it as follows: “Human language would then constitute a kind of communication in which the sender receives his own message back from the receiver in inverted form.” I could not but adopt this objector’s formulation, recognizing in it the stamp of my own thinking; for I maintain that speech always subjectively includes its own reply, that “Thou wouldst not seek Me, if thou hadst not found Me” simply validates the same truth (Écrits, p. 246).

This investigation of this formula has become an inquiry into Lacan’s return to Freud. What does this inquiry show us, if not the profile of Claude Lévi-Strauss hanging over this return? It is now time to ask ourselves who was the exceptional interlocutor whom Lacan mentions, the one in whom he recognized the stamp of his own thinking in 1953. Thirteen years later, in 1966, on the first page of the overture to the Écrits, he recognizes this formulation as the interlocutor’s own thinking: “In language our message comes to us from the Other, and—to state the rest of the principle—in an inverted form. (Let me remind you that this principle applied to

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its own enunciation since, although I proposed it, it received its finest formulation from another, an eminent interlocutor)” (Écrits, p. 4). The Other in 1966—the date of the publication of the Écrits—was written with a capital letter, and the “stamp” received by the definition of the unconscious subject that Lacan formulated in 1953—and repeated ceaselessly throughout the heart of his research—has now been reversed and has become the thought of the eminent interlocutor, whose anonymity Lacan still protects 13 years later. Was it one of his brilliant students? Was it a specialist in philosophy, such as Hippolyte? Was it one of the philosophers from whom he borrowed other turns of phrase? It was necessary to wait for the answer for a long time—precisely 21 years—until Lacan returned to Rome and finally lifted the veil over the fabulous gestalt that has guided our return to Freud: This is the story of the message that everyone receives in an inverted form. I have been saying this for a very long time and it has made people laugh. In truth, I owe it to Claude Lévi-Strauss (my emphasis). He leaned over to one of my good friends—his wife, Monique, to call her by her name—and said, about what I was expressing, that that was it: everyone received his message in an inverted form. Monique repeated it to me. I could not find a better formula for what I wanted to say at that time. He is the one who foisted it off on us. You see, I take what is good wherever I find it.99

In 1974, at the conference of the Freudian School of Paris, Lacan returned for a third time to Rome and ended the anonymity of the person who, in 1953, had allowed him to define the unconscious subject and had given him the key to what the Other is: the Other of the symbolic function that structures language and all the other networks of social exchange. In this way, he finally pays the symbolic debt that he had contracted to his friend, the master of French ethnology, and without whom the return to Freud would not have been what it was, any more than Lacan’s work and the radical changes that followed from it in France and elsewhere would have been what they were.

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Jacques Lacan, “La troisième”, Lettres de l’Ecole freudienne 16, pp. 177–203.

CHAPTER THREE

The name of the father, psychosis and phobia

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e have seen the importance of the symbolic function, which Lacan borrowed from French anthropology and which enabled him to articulate his definition of subjectivity in Book I of the seminar and in the constellation of texts surrounding it. I have also analysed the importance of Lacan’s formula—“the subject receives his message from the other in an inverted form”—which was coined by Lévi-Strauss. In particular, I have shown how Lacan’s research up to his L schema can—mutatis mutandis—be read as a form of theoretical “bricolage” in which this formula serves to punctuate the mirror stage. Without reading the seminars line by line, I shall now show how Lacan’s connection with Lévi-Strauss will continue to mark his research profoundly between 1953 and 1957; we shall follow the itinerary that leads him to analyse first the psychoses and then phobia: two clinical continents whose maps are redrawn by means of a structural analysis. One of their central operators is precisely the notion of the Name-of-the-Father, to which we must return.

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I. From the Rat Man to little Hans: The question of the Name-of-the-Father Lacan wrote “The Neurotic’s Individual Myth” in 1953, at the very moment when he “invented” the notion of the Name-of-the-Father. Ie have already shown100 what this owed to a reading of Lévi-Strauss’ introduction to Marcel Mauss, since it is in this text of 1950 that LéviStrauss isolates “a semantic function, whose role is to enable symbolic thinking to operate despite the contradiction inherent in it” (LéviStrauss, Introduction, p. 63). The ethnological lexicon of conscious expressions of this function includes mana, wakan or orenda, which are all names for the spirit of things, a spirit that has “characteristics of a secret power, a mysterious force”; such terms perplexed both Mauss and Emile Durkheim, because their foundational yet preliminary methods did not enable them, according to Lévi-Strauss, to avoid reducing “social reality to the conception that man—savage man, even—has of it” (Lévi-Strauss, Introduction, p. 57). Lévi-Strauss examines the work of these founders of French ethnology in order to restore the unconscious value of the notion that he presents as a “floating signifier”, one that is necessary in order for the signifier and signified to remain in a “relationship of complementarity”, without which there can be no symbolic thought (Lévi-Strauss, Introduction, p. 63). Between the signifier and the signified, there is always, for Lévi-Strauss, an “inadequation” that “divine understanding alone can soak up” (Lévi-Strauss, Introduction, p. 62). As the indigenous people indicate, only the power of the dead father or of mana can soak up this inadequation. Yet by separating itself from the object, Lévi-Strauss’ structuralist analysis brings out—in the list of terms mentioned above—the decisive activity of a “simple form”, a “symbol in its pure state”, or a semantic function that guarantees the connection between the signifier and the signified (Lévi-Strauss, Introduction, p. 64). In the system of symbols which makes up any cosmology, it would just be a zero symbolic value, that is, a sign marking the necessity of a supplementary symbolic content over and above

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See Lacan et les sciences sociales, pp. 217–222.

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that which the signified already contains, which can be any value at all, provided it is still part of the available reserve, and is not already, as the phonologists say, a term in a set (Lévi-Strauss, Introduction, p. 64).

Locating the linguistic and unconscious value of the “floating signifier” that allows symbolic thought to operate is what Lacan does with the notion of the Name-of-the-Father, the equivocation of which can lead those who do not know Lévi-Strauss and Lacan to imagine that Lacan was trying to combine Freud’s work with Roman Catholicism. We have already emphasized that, precisely to the contrary, at the very moment when he takes up the structuralist theory of the exceptional signifier, Lacan rejects all the Claudelian and Durkheimian suppositions that had previously underlain his theory of the father. Lévi-Strauss says in 1952 that “Field-workers must learn to consider their research from two different perspectives. They are always in danger of confusing the natives’ theories about their social organization … with the actual functioning of the society” Lévi-Strauss, (Social Anthropology, p. 130). For Lacan, as a reader of Lévi-Strauss, it is also necessary not to confuse the value of “the Name-of-theFather”—a theoretical operator that ensures the quilting between signifiers and signifieds—with the Church’s Name-of-the-Father; the latter is a monotheist christening name, one that calls to mind the “spirit of things” that enables neurotic thought to function consciously. From this point of view, we must understand that the theoretical value of Lacan’s notion of the Name-of-the-Father comes from LéviStrauss; in my opinion, Lacan borrowed a term from his own society—and more precisely from the symptom of the obsessionals who make up the Church—and then associated it with the mana or the orenda. In doing so, he made an interpretation that has had a crucial clinical impact for psychoanalytic research. This was, quite precisely, an interpretation rather than a discovery. In conformity with the epistemology that is the basis of his work, Lacan, precisely when he was researching the psychoses in 1956, analysed what can be deduced from the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father as operator. He was then able to perceive, by its absence, what this version of the operator supports unconsciously in neurosis. It is thus necessary for

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the operator to be degraded—foreclosed, in this case— in order for Lacan to grasp its clinical importance; in this way, he rediscovers it. How did Lacan take advantage of his own culture to illustrate the structural and semantic function of the Name-of-the-Father? Addressing himself to his listeners on 6 June 1956, he mentions, first of all, what he considers to be Saussure’s lack of success in “defin[ing] a correspondence” between the waves of the signifier and the signified; nevertheless, such a correspondence seems to function in the neurotic, even if “The relationship between the signified and the signifier always appears fluid, always ready to come undone.”101 Lacan then speaks somewhat theatrically about his difficulty in transmitting his ideas to his listeners. He does so by submitting to Freud’s rule of free association. Well then, I think to myself—What does one start with? And I go about looking for a sentence, a bit like this pseudo-Shakespeare stuck for inspiration, who paces up and down, repeating—To be or not … to be or not …, stuck until he discovers that he can continue by starting at the beginning again—To be or not … to be. I start with a Yes. And since French, not English, is my language, what comes to me next is—Yes, I come into his temple to worship the Eternal Lord. This means that no signifier is isolable (Seminar III, p. 262).

Lacan concludes by stating that “The sentence only exists ascompleted and its sense comes to it retroactively. We need to have got right to the end, that is to say, to this famous Eternal Lord” (Seminar III, pp. 262–263). By engaging in free association, Lacan seems to come, as if by chance, upon the omnipresent figure of the Eternal Lord, which allows the loop of the signifier to be closed and situates the different elements that resonate in this unforgettable sentence. Continuing his reading of Racine’s tragedy, Athaliah102 he shows how Joad, by using

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Jacques Lacan, The Psychoses, pp. 261–262. Racine’s tragedy opens at the threshold of the temple with an improbable faceto-face meeting between the high priest, Joad, and Abner, one of the main officers of the king of Judah, who has become an idolater under the influence of his wife, the bloody Athaliah. 102

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the signifier, “the fear of God” in such a way as to place it in the mouth of his interlocutor, Abner, rallies him to his cause. Then he continues: The power of the signifier, the effectiveness of this word fear, has been to transform the zeal at the beginning, with everything that is ambiguous, doubtful, always liable to be reversed, that this word conveys, into the faithfulness of the end. This transmutation is of the order of the signifier as such. No accumulation, no superimposition, no summation of meanings, is sufficient to justify it. The entire progress of this scene … resides in the transmutation of the situation through the intervention of the signifier. Whether it be a sacred text, a novel, a play, a monologue, or any conversation whatsoever, allow me to represent the function of the signifier by a spatializing device, which we have no reason to deprive ourselves of. This point around which all concrete analysis of discourse must operate I shall call a quilting point (Seminar III, p. 267).

Lacan announces this term, “quilting point”, which will have a fine future. Let us note, however, that while Lévi-Strauss refers to a sort of “complementarity” between signifier and signified, Lacan draws upon the vocabulary of upholstery to formulate what connects the two waves. When the upholsterer’s needle, which has entered at the moment of God found faithful in all his threats, reappears, it’s all over, the chap says, I’m going to join the faithful troops. Were we to analyse this scene as a musical score, we should see that this is the point at which the signified and the signifier are knotted together, between the still floating mass of meanings

“Yes, I come into his temple to worship the Eternal Lord” is the first line of the play, and it is spoken by Abner, who is still uncertain, but who has come to warn Jehoiada of Athaliah’s plot against him. “I fear God, dear Abner, and have no other fear,” retorts the high priest, before continuing and reversing the terms: “I fear God, you say … his truth touches me. “Here is how the Lord answers you out of my mouth” (Seminar III, pp. 263, 265). The fear of God has passed from one character’s mouth to the other.

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that are actually circulating between these two characters and the text …. The quilting point is the word fear, with all these transsignificant connotations” (Seminar III, p. 268).

Lévi-Strauss had situated a structural gap between signifier and signified that “divine understanding alone can soak up”. More generally, where he had located the semantic function of an exceptional signifier that—despite the division between signifier and signified—allows symbolic thought to operate, Lacan mentions a quilting, which can be deduced from this inaugural example, the “fear of God”. Yet here again, the example is the thing itself. Lacan’s needle, which had begun as the “spirit of things”—which indicated, in ethnological terms, the place of the dead father—and as the zero symbol of an exceptional signifier, begins to work its way through Freud’s texts; as it does so, the example of the fear of God will be raised to the level of the exceptional signifier, the status of which had first been isolated by Lévi-Strauss. In the same session of 6 June 1956, Lacan says that “The schema of the quilting point is essential in human experience,” moving quickly from the specific vocabulary of the artisan to the universal human condition, in order to reach Freud (Seminar III, p. 268). He continues: Why does this minimal schema of human experience which Freud gave us in the Oedipus complex retain its irreducible and yet enigmatic value for us? And why privilege the Oedipus complex? Why does Freud always want to find it everywhere, with such insistence? Why do we have here a knot that seems so essential to him that he is unable to abandon it in the slightest particular observation—unless it’s because the notion of father, closely related to that of the fear of God, gives him the most palpable element in experience of what I’ve called the quilting point between the signifier and the signified? Perhaps I’ve spent a long time explaining this to you, but I nevertheless believe that this creates an image and enables you to grasp how it can happen, in psychotic experience, that the signifier and the signified present themselves in a completely divided form (Seminar III, p. 268).

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Lacan’s needle thus reappears at a crucial point of Freud’s thought, the Oedipus complex, which Freud had claimed to be universal. The knot between psychoanalysis and Lévi-Strauss is fastened precisely at the point of the notion of the father, a notion that is decisive for Freud; Lacan’s stitching now transmutes this into the exceptional signifier “whose absence—or better, foreclosure” gives rise to the differential clinical traits of psychosis, among which is mental automatism. Rereading the case of Judge Schreber103, Lacan argues that “To all appearances President Schreber lacks this fundamental signifier called being a father” (Seminar III, p. 293). Yet it is not only this judge’s psychosis that derives from the absence of this signifier, since Lacan, in a move that has never been refuted, places this foreclosure at the heart of the psychotic clinic. Thus, in June 1956, in the space of one or two sessions of his seminar, Lacan renews the theory of the psychoses, whose structure depends on the foreclosure of the Nameof-the-Father: the absence of the zero symbol, without which the signifier and the signified cannot be knotted together. By isolating the failure of the symbolic in the psychoses, Lacan, in an inverted and complementary way, brings out the value of the signifier whose availability allows the neurotic’s symbolic thought to operate. Without even stating this explicitly, Lacan borrows from Lévi-Strauss the notion of a zero symbol as an operator that is indispensable for symbolization. What he then does with this notion is to 1. 2. 3.

Reveal the name that this operator receives in the “Roman” neurotic symptom (“In the Name-of-the-Father) Rethink the Freudian Oedipus complex as the quilting point of neurosis Reorganize the psychotic clinic in terms of the failure of this operator.

103 Daniel Paul Schreber (1842–1911). Born into a bourgeois German protestant family, Schreber became a renowned judge. In 1884, while he was presiding judge of the court of appeal in Saxony, he began to exhibit serious signs of mental problems. He wrote Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, which he published in 1903, and died in the asylum of Leipzig. Freud analysed his writings in order to demonstrate the validity of his own theory of psychosis. See Sigmund Freud, Psycho-Analytic Notes upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides), 1961, pp. 1–82.

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Yet when he rethinks the Oedipus complex as the quilting point of neurosis, does a sort of logical necessity not lead Lacan to join Freud in proclaiming the universality of this complex? The answer to this question is no. Nobody dwells on this—it’s because at the heart of the religious thought that has formed us there is the idea of making us live in fear and trembling, that the colouration of guilt is so fundamental in our psychological experience of the neuroses, without its being possible for all that to prejudge what they are in another cultural sphere. This colouration is so fundamental that it was by its means that we explored the neuroses and noticed that they were structured in a subjective and intersubjective mode (Seminar III, p. 288).

Lacan leaves open the hypothesis that, in other cultures, the neuroses could be structured otherwise than by the “fear of God” and could have different quilting points from those located, both in individual cases and in the social sphere, by the Freudian clinic.104 Yet in order for a person not to be psychotic, there must be a semantic function, a “symbol in its pure state” that has “zero symbolic value” and which allows symbolic thought to take place—whatever its terms may be or whatever colouration it may give to neurosis. Thus, for Lacan, the universality of the operator does not involve its Oedipal form, but this is what we must look for in order to differentiate psychosis and neurosis. Concerning the latter point, the striking proximity of Lacan and Lévi-Strauss should be emphasized, since during this period, the

104 From this point of view, because of the proximity between Lacan and Lévi-Strauss at that time, we can mention the Bororo’s “easy-going” attitude towards the supernatural, which astonished the ethnologist. We can recall that the “temple” of Bororo society is, at the same time, a workshop, a club, a dormitory, and finally, a brothel. There is an offhandedness that is all the more striking since Lévi-Strauss willingly says to his reader that “My only contact with religion dated back to childhood when, already a non-believer, I lived during the First World War with my grandfather, who was Rabbi of Versailles. The house was attached to the synagogue by a long inner passage, along which it was difficult to venture without a feeling of anguish.” See Tristes Tropiques, 1974, p. 230. This proves, by the way, that there is no need to be a believer in order to experience “the fear of God” in our societies, even if this fear really seems not to be universal.

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latter devoted particular attention to the problematic of what he calls “zero institutional forms”. These forms, which constitute a class of mysterious symbolic objects, always aroused Lévi-Strauss’ curiosity, even if he did not devote a specific article to them and always seems to approach them in an aside. It was left to Lacan to perceive this discovery by Lévi-Strauss and to introduce it silently but immediately into the heart of his work. Where, when, and how did Lévi-Strauss re-examine these institutional forms of the exception?

II. The institutional forms of the zero value In 1956, the year of Lacan’s seminar on the psychoses, Lévi-Strauss published “Do Dual Organizations Exist?” an article in which he confirms, in an aside, his findings of 1950 on the forms of the zerovalue institution. Analysing the marriage rules of the Bororo people of Brazil, he isolates the division of this population into north and south, one that is, in his own words, “obscure”, for it “has no function except that of permitting Bororo society to exist” (Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, p. 159). Then he adds: But it would not be the first time that research would lead us to institutional forms which one might characterize by a zero value. These institutions have no intrinsic property other than that of establishing the necessary preconditions for the existence of the social system to which they belong; their presence—in itself devoid of significance—enables the social system to exist as a whole. Sociology105 here encounters an essential problem, one which it shares with linguistics, but with which it does not seem to have come to grips in its own field. This is the problem posed by the existence of institutions having no function other than that of giving meaning to the society in which they are found (Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, p. 159).

In a note, Lévi-Strauss reminds the reader of his discovery of 1950 concerning zero-value institutions: “This is the way in which I defined the concept of mana some time ago” (Lévi-Strauss, Structural

105 I have altered the original translation here, since it substitutes “anthropology” for “sociology”. (Translator’s note.)

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Anthropology, p. 163). Lévi-Strauss thus does not fail to remind us of his discovery about social institutions, which, let us remember, he considers to be like languages; it should also be noted that, in this text of 1956, he mentions a community of research that brings together sociologists and linguists, without ever mentioning psychoanalysts in general or, in particular, Lacan’s attempts since 1953 to sketch out the theory of the Name-of-the-Father; nothing would have prevented him from including this in the class of zerovalue institutions. In order for him to do so, it would at least have been necessary for Lacan to inform him of how his own research was developing. We cannot rule out completely the hypothesis that Lacan was, in fact, doing so, since 12 days before this crucial session of the seminar on the quilting point, 26 May 1956, he had been invited by Jean Wahl to give a commentary, at the French Philosophical Society, on Lévi-Strauss’ presentation, “The Relations between Mythology and Ritual”.106 In this commentary, Lacan mentions that Lévi-Strauss was acquainted with his work. After Lévi-Strauss’ “fine presentation”, Lacan gives a valuable commentary that confirms what he owes to the anthropologist’s work, and especially to the notion of the dominance of the signifier over the signified: If I wanted to characterize the way in which Claude LéviStrauss’ work has supported and carried me forward, I would say that it was in his emphasis on … what I would call the function of the “signifier”, in the linguistic sense of this term, inasmuch as I shall not only say that this signifier is distinguished by its laws, but that it also prevails over the signified, on which it imposes them (Lacan, Bulletin, p. 114).

Thus Lacan recognizes clearly that it was Lévi-Strauss who reversed the Saussurian algorithm that links the signifier with the signified (S/s instead of s/S), a reversal that Lacan did not effect himself, as is sometimes thought, but rather, borrowed from Lévi-Strauss. This reversal is crucial for the history of ideas—and was a real scientific revelation for Lacan—and it was Lévi-Strauss who brought it about in 1950 in his Introduction to the work of Marcel Mauss: “[S]ymbols are 106

In Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie, XVIII, 1956.

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more real than what they symbolise, the signifier precedes and determines the signified. We will encounter this problem again in connection with mana” (Lévi-Strauss, Introduction, p. 37). Now Lacan takes a first step: Claude Lévi-Strauss shows us everywhere that symbolic structure dominates perceptible relations …. What makes a structure possible are reasons internal to the signifier. What makes a certain form of exchange conceivable or inconceivable are reasons that are specifically arithmetical; I don’t think that he would back away from this term.

The zero value has an algebraic place, whose anthropological and psychoanalytic importance has already been emphasized, but also, more generally, gives a structuralist legitimacy to Lacan’s use of his “little letters” or of algebraic series. Lacan continues: “The second step that, thanks to him, I had already crossed before arriving here today is the one that we owe to his developments on the mytheme, which I take as an extension of the emphasis on the signifier to the notion of myth” (Lacan, Bulletin, p. 114). Lacan mentions an article of 1955 by Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myths”, to which he refers precisely a bit further on. This crucial text offers an analysis of myths based on the notion of the mytheme, which provides a new way of grouping together the various components of a myth, whose structure appears then as necessary and as lacking any arbitrariness. In this essay, Lévi-Strauss states that “Although it is not possible at the present stage to come closer than an approximate” structural formulation for myths, “which will certainly need to be refined in the future, it seems that every myth (considered as the aggregate of all its variants) corresponds to a formula of the following type: 107

Fx(a) : Fy( b) ≅ Fx( b) : Fa − I( y).

He then goes on to apply this formula to the Oedipal myth itself: “This formula becomes highly significant when we recall that Freud considered that two traumas (and not one, as is so commonly said)

107

Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, p. 228.

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are necessary in order to generate the individual myth (my emphasis) in which a neurosis consists” (Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, p. 228). This article, which Lacan read very closely, is strikingly ambitious, since Lévi-Strauss offers us nothing less than the formula, not of a single myth, but of all myths—which, he argues, must be grasped as an aggregate organized according to the law of a group of transformations. He does so while arguing that myth is culture’s unique matrix108 and he is careful to refer to the Oedipal myth and “the individual myth in which a neurosis consists”. In this article, Lévi-Strauss makes no reference to Lacan’s lecture of 1953, The Neurotic’s Individual Myth, which he had given at the invitation—once again—of Jean Wahl. Was he unaware of it? Was he unaware that Lacan had read neurosis in terms of the individual myth, just as he was now doing? Was he unaware of Lacan’s research on the Name-of-the-Father, which began with this lecture? Did he know nothing about this lecture? This was not the opinion of Lacan, who on 26 May 1956, after having situated very precisely the two theoretical steps that he owes to Lévi-Strauss, continues: Here is where I am with all of this now. I appreciate the outline of the thing very much, and as Claude Lévi-Strauss is not unaware (my emphasis), I tried almost immediately, and I dare to say, with complete success, to apply this grid to the symptom in obsessional neurosis and to Freud’s admirable analysis of the Rat Man; this was in a lecture entitled precisely (my emphasis) ‘The Neurotic’s Individual Myth’. I was able to formalize the case strictly, according to a formula by Lévi-Strauss, in which an a—which is first associated with a b, while a c is associated with

108 Lévi-Strauss’ epistemological ambition was impressive for the intellectuals of the time, as Tzvetan Todorov testifies: “Lévi-Strauss impressed us … for example in the ‘structural analysis of myth’ … he presented a famous formula … which was supposed to represent the irreducible structure of every myth! I admired it very much (Devoirs et délices: une vie de passeur, 2002, p. 84). Lucien Scubla has studied the history of this formula in his doctoral thesis, at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, 1996. See Lire Lévi-Strauss: le déploiement d’une intuition (1998). Emmanuel Désvaux has provided a fine description of this formula in Quadratura Americana, Geneva, Georg, 2001. On Lévi-Strauss’ application of his structuralism to Greek myth, and particularly to the Oedipal myth, Jean-Pierre Vernant’s Myth and Society in Ancient Greece may be consulted with profit.

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a d—finds its partner change in the second generation, while an irreducible residue remains in the negativation of one of the four terms, and intrudes as the correlative of the transformation of the group. What can be read here is what I could call the sign of a kind of impossibility of resolving the problem of the myth completely. In this way, the myth would be there to show us that an equation is set up, in the signifying form of a problematic that must necessarily leave something open. In doing so, this equation responds to what cannot be solved by signifying its insolubility and its looming presence is recovered in its equivalences, which provide—this would be the myth’s function—the signifier of the impossible. Do I still have today, as I had earlier, the feeling of having been a bit in advance of myself? (Lacan, Bulletin, p. 116).

In a style in which respect is as great as precision, Lacan confirms that Lévi-Strauss was not unaware that in 1953 he had applied his method to the case of the Rat Man, just as he remembers that he had rethought Ernst Lanzer’s neurotic organization—Freud’s paradigm for obsessional neurosis—as an individual myth. Such a formulation could not have escaped Lévi-Strauss’ attention, even if we can understand what he had not been able to see: what Lacan’s notion of the Name-of-the-Father owed to his own analysis of the zero symbolic value of an exceptional signifier. The lecture on the neurotic’s individual myth did not apply this concept to psychosis, which would have thrown light on this point; indeed, Lacan would not approach this issue until 12 days after the dialogue of 26 May. These remarks show that, at this moment, Lacan and Lévi-Strauss share an epistemological perspective that considers neurosis as an individual myth. Indeed, it was Lévi-Strauss—as we have seen— who coined the expression, “individual myth” in The Effectiveness of Symbols. As for Lacan’s 1953 elaboration of the neurotic’s individual myth, we shall note that he confirms in 1956 that he was “completely successful” in reinterpreting obsessional neurosis in the light of Lévi-Strauss’ work. This is also what his letter of 14 July 1953 to Loewenstein testifies; in that letter, he confided to his analyst that he had relied on Lévi-Strauss’ research to temper the despair, and even the disgust, that he felt in being discarded by the analytic group.

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If the historical interest of the lecture of 26 May 1956 lies in Lacan’s statement of what he owes, including “subjectively”, to Lévi-Strauss’ theories, it also clarifies how they had helped him reinterpret the case of the Rat Man. As we have seen, Lacan mentions the formula in which Lévi-Strauss articulates the little letters, a, b, c, d. These letters seem to direct us less to The Elementary Structures of Kinship than to the 1952 article, “Social Structures of Central and Eastern Brazil”. In this work, Lévi-Strauss re-examines the Bororo in order to bring out the homologies between the structures that regulate marriage, associations, and the mythical genesis of associations. Here Lévi-Strauss analyses “Patrilateral marriage … [which] is associated with an “alternating” terminology, which expresses the opposition of consecutive generations and the identification of alternating generations. A son marries in the direction opposite from his father” (Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, p. 122). Like his father, the Rat Man was forced to choose between marrying the poor girl or the rich girl. Was Ernst Lanzer divided between a neurotic imposition that was homologous to what regulates Bororo marriage? Perhaps, but it is in analysing the correspondences between sociological rules and the mythic universe that Lévi-Strauss uses the algebraic letters. Further on, the article shows that anthropological analysis of the “mythical analysis of associations”—the analysis of the order that regulates the ritual passages and transferrals from one association to another—takes the form of a schema that articulates the little letters that Lacan mentions on 26 May 1956. The homology between this schema109 and Lacan’s schema L110 is striking, as we can see in the following diagrams:

System of Generalized Exchange

Schema L

109 Lévi-Strauss’ diagram of the system of generalized exchange depicted below can be found on page 125 of Structural Anthropology. 110 Lacan’s Schema L can also be found in Seminar II, p. 243.

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Did the 1952 article, and more broadly the structural analysis of the Bororo’s exchange rules directly influence The Neurotic’s Individual Myth? We cannot discount this hypothesis, just as we cannot dismiss the idea that the symbolic organization of the Bororo and its mysteries caught Lacan’s attention through both Lévi-Strauss’ interest in them and his own interest in Lévi-Strauss. The Bororo’s society is located at the heart of Lévi-Strauss’ work and we have seen that the division between north and south had been a kind of enigma for him since the 1940s; he suddenly exhumed this enigma in 1956 and resolved it decisively by making it an archetype of the zero-value institution. In my opinion, the latter had inspired Lacan’s own reflections from the time that he had first read Lévi-Strauss’ preface to the work of Marcel Mauss. Lévi-Strauss and Lacan share certain preoccupations here and this leads us to hypothesize that Lévi-Strauss’ “attachment” to the Bororo infiltrates Lacan’s dialogue with him. Through the intermediary of Lacan’s transference to Lévi-Strauss, the psychic formations of Freud’s paradigmatic cases—Dora, the Rat Man, Schreber, and, as we shall soon see, little Hans—think themselves with the symbolic formations of the Bororo, just as, according to Lévi-Strauss’ striking formulation, “myths think themselves in relation to each other by the intermediary of men”.111 More briefly, this transferential logic shows us that both Lacan and Lévi-Strauss considered 1. 2.

Neurosis as an individual myth and The existence of institutions as a condition for neurotic symbolic thought.

As the reader has noticed, we have classified the Name-of-the-Father, through which Lacan reorganizes the clinic of the psychoses in 1956, among the zero-value institutions mentioned by Levi-Strauss. Is this not arbitrary? No, for in the 1955 article, “The Structural Study of Myth”, which Lacan mentions at the College of Philosophy in 111

We can confirm this attachment by the “arbitrary” selection of the myth of reference that runs throughout The Raw and the Cooked, the first volume of the Mythologiques. This is the myth of the man who searches for birds, a Bororo myth in which we encounter both mother/son incest and the death of the father; this myth could be called the “Bororo Oedipus”, which through this work, becomes, for Lévi-Strauss, the myth through which all myths can be analysed. See The Raw and the Cooked, 1969.

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May 1956, Lévi-Strauss wonders in passing whether there are other linguistic facts that tend toward a zero value: “A remark can be introduced at this point which will help to show the originality of myth in relation to other linguistic phenomena. Myth is the part of language where the formula traduttore, traditore reaches its lowest truth value” (Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, p. 210). Setting up an opposition between translating myth and the extremely difficult task of translating poetry112, Lévi-Strauss claims that “the mythical value of the myth is preserved even through the worst translation. Whatever our ignorance of the language and the culture of the people where it originated, a myth is still felt as a myth by any reader anywhere in the world. Its substance does not lie in its style, its original music, or its syntax, but in the story which it tells. Myth is language, functioning on an especially high level where meaning succeeds practically at ‘taking off’ from the linguistic ground on which it keeps on rolling” (Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, p. 210). Lévi-Strauss brings out two consequences of his analysis of myth: 1. 2.

Myth, like the rest of language, is made up of constituent units These constituent units presuppose the constituent units present in language when analysed on other levels—namely, phonemes, morphemes, and sememes—but they, nevertheless, differ from the latter in the same way as the latter differ among themselves; they belong to a higher and more complex order. For this reason, we shall call them gross constituent units. How shall we proceed in order to identify and isolate these gross constituent units or mythemes? … [W]e should look for them on the sentence level (Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, pp. 210–211).

“We should look for them on the sentence level,” Lévi-Strauss indicates at the end of 1955. Is this not precisely what Lacan repeats in his session of 6 June 1956, where he produces the quilting point and comes, as if by chance upon the Eternal Lord and the fear of God?

112

Here, Lévi-Strauss shows how close he is to Roman Jakobson, who also claimed that “Poetry by definition is untranslatable. Only creative transposition is possible .… If we were to translate into English the traditional formula, ‘Traduttore, traditore’ as ‘the translator is a betrayer’, we would deprive the Italian rhyming epigram of all its paronomastic value” (p. 238). In Roman Jakobson, “On linguistic aspects of translation”, in On Translation, 1959, pp. 232–239.

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On 6 June 1956, Lacan could not have failed to have “The Structural Study of Myths” in his mind, for he had mentioned it 12 days earlier in the presence of Lévi-Strauss. In this article, Lévi-Strauss tries once again to move beyond Freud’s clinic of the neuroses by including the Freudian Oedipus complex as one version of the myth of Oedipus; he argues that all the versions must be interpreted as a whole in order to bring out the structure that can account for them. On this point, Lévi-Strauss writes that “Although the Freudian problem has ceased to be that of autochthony versus bisexual reproduction, it is still the problem of understanding how one can be born from two: How is it that we do not have only one procreator, but a mother plus a father?” (Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, p. 217). According to this logic, myth is a kind of tool that, as Jean-Pierre Vernant will comment later, mediate[s] between exclusive terms of contradictory situations. Thus, in the example of the Oedipus myth, we have on the one hand a belief in the autochthony of man (attested in the myths concerning his emergence from Mother Earth), and, on the other, his birth from the union of a man and a woman (necessary to the entire sociological code of filiation).113

What is important here is to see the bracketing that indicates that under “plus a father”, what is being alluded to is the whole code of filiation. In other words, the “plus a father” is the father who has a zero value for the neurotic, and whose absence or foreclosure, according to Lacan, governs the psychoses. From this perspective, we could say that the delusions of filiation can be read clinically as an attempt to make up for the absence of the Name-of-the-Father as an operator. According to Lévi-Strauss, with this addition of the father, it is very much the whole question of filiation that is brought up by the myth. The second crucial element is that in the 1955 article, Lévi-Strauss emphasizes the zero value in relation to the translation of mythic language; in the latter, language works at such a level that its “mythical value … is preserved even through the worst translation”. Myth itself could, as a consequence, play the role of these exceptional signifiers that permit thought to operate. We have placed Lacan’s “invention” of the Name-of-the-Father in the class of terms that have 113

Jean Pierre Vernant, Myth and Society in Ancient Greece, 1990, p. 248–249.

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a zero symbolic value, and thus we can now grasp the “Lévi-Straussian” coherence of envisaging myth as a symbolic formation that can fill up the absence—or can fill up the place of a degraded Name-ofthe-Father. To follow Lévi-Strauss, we could say that the stability of myth, which is indicated by the ease with which it can be translated, is in proximity to that of the proper name, which ensures the durability of identification in the set of all possible worlds.114 Lacan trusted Lévi-Strauss just as he trusted Freud and in the next year, he moved away from psychosis in order to reopen the question of object relations, which gave its title to Book IV of the seminar. In this seminar, he undertakes a structural rethinking of phobia, and especially of little Hans. His “clinical presentation” of the latter will complete the rereading of Freud’s paradigmatic cases that he carried out in the light of Lévi-Strauss’ research: Dora’s hysteria, the Rat Man’s obsessional neurosis, Schreber’s psychosis, and finally, little Hans’ phobia.

III. Object Relations: Book IV of the Seminar, 1956–1957 In the first session of the seminar, Lacan reminds his listeners where he is “at the end of these years of criticism” and alludes to his LéviStraussian sources. Our elaboration culminates in a schema, which we can call the schema, and which is the following:

Schema L

114 In Naming and Necessity (1980), Saul Kripke shows that the proper name is a “rigid designator” that designates the same object in all possible worlds.

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First of all, this schema inscribes the subject’s relation with the Other. As it is constituted at the beginning of analysis, it is a relation of virtual speech by which the subject receives his own message from the Other, in the form of unconscious speech (Seminar IV, p. 12).

At the beginning of the seminar, we find once again the schema L and the formula in which the inverted form that comes from the Other is transformed into “unconscious speech”. Readers know why. In this seminar, Lacan embarks next on a critical review of the notion of object, as it is used in the psychoanalytic field, whether by Melanie Klein, by D. W. Winnicott115 with the transitional object or by Françoise Dolto with the body image. Lacan wants to show that the object that organizes psychoanalytic experience is precisely the one that immediately captures the subject’s desire: the phallus. In the first stage, the phallus is an object that captivates the gaze: a form or an image that achieves an imaginary presence at the moment of the subject’s narcissistic maturation. At this stage, the subject experiences the impasses of his position, from which he can exit through the Oedipus complex. The latter leads him to accept the prohibition of incest, his place in the family line and the symbolic network of social exchange. The Oedipus complex is what allows subjective maturation to shift gears into social legislation. From that perspective, the imaginary status of the (phallic) object is articulated or “quilted” by the symbolic register of the laws that regulate its circulation. It is the symbolic register that “gives the law” to the imaginary form of the object of circulation. We have seen that, according to Lévi-Strauss, this law ordains that men must give or receive women and makes women into the objects that are circulated. This gives us a Lacanian algebra of sexual difference in which women have the status of the imaginary phallus, which circulates

115

D. W. Winnicott (1896–1961). English physician and psychoanalyst. After pursuing studies in paediatrics and psychoanalysis, he was given a position at the Paddington Green Children’s Hospital, where he worked for forty years. Analysed by James Strachey, he is considered to be one of the founders of child psychoanalysis in Great Britain. The importance that he attributes to the mother locates him within the logic of the Freudianism of the period between the two world wars, a period in which the interest in the father had been sharply reduced. His psychoanalytic technique was always incompatible with the standards of the IPA.

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between the crowds of men, whose organization derives from the sovereignty of the symbolic register. For Freud, this register is founded on the death of the father and is always a bit androcentric. This analysis accounts for both the Oedipal clinic of the individual case and the clinic of the social; it does not, however, function without a residue, since Lacan has shown how Dora objects to her position as an object to be exchanged, a position that is not in harmony with her imaginary structuring. The latter, which derives from the mirror stage, leads her to identify with a man, her father, and to make her femininity into an enigma that triggers her fascination with Frau K. Five years after the Presentation on Transference, Lacan returns to Dora and emphasizes her love for her father, which is strictly correlated with his impotence. According to this logic, the absence of the father’s phallus triggers love; in more structural terms, the phallus takes on value if it is seen as lacking. This is the paradigmatic form of the object of desire in Freud’s clinic. Lacan gives two formulas for this: 1. 2.

The lack of object … [is] the mainspring of the subject’s relation to the world (Seminar IV, p. 36) There is no greater love than the gift of what one does not have (Seminar IV, p. 140).

Lacan reminds us in this seminar of the absolute necessity of distinguishing between the phallus and the penis, even if the imaginary figure of the phallus is confirmed by the erection of a penis that has been deprived of any other attribute. If, in love, we give something that we do not have and if the phallic object is never more present in psychoanalysis than when it is lacking, this means that when there is a penis, there is not necessarily a phallus, and vice versa.

A question for Lévi-Strauss Why not then imagine a society in which women would exchange men? This question gives Lacan the idea of asking Lévi-Strauss about the value of his thesis, since, as he reflects, the ethnologist analyses the logic of exchange from the perspective of an androcentric postulate that does not explain the origin of its androcentrism:

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And what would happen if you went through the circle of exchange and reversed things, by saying that female lines produce men and exchange them? For we already know that this lack that we have been speaking about in women is not a real lack. Everyone knows that they can have the phallus, and what’s more, they produce it; they make boys, phallophoria. Consequently, we can reverse the way that we describe exchange throughout the generations. We can imagine a matriarchy whose law would be, “I’ve given a boy and I want to receive the man” (Seminar IV, p. 191).116

Lévi-Strauss’ response is to go to the very condition of the kinship system’s existence, a condition that is outside the system, where he places the paternal institution with which the reader is already familiar in the form of the zero symbol. Lévi-Strauss’ answer is the following. There is no doubt that from the point of view of formalization, one can describe things in exactly the same way by using a symmetrical axis of reference, a system of coordinates founded on women, but then, a number of things would be inexplicable, particularly the following. In every case, even in matriarchal societies, political power is androcentric. It is represented by men and by masculine lines. Very bizarre anomalies in exchange, modifications, exceptions, paradoxes that appear in the laws of exchange at the level of the elementary structures of kinship can only be explained by referring to something that is outside kinship, and which is precisely of the order of the signifier, where the sceptre and the phallus become confused. It is for reasons inscribed in the symbolic order, transcending individual development, that the fact of having or not having the imaginary and the symbolized phallus takes on the economic importance that it has in the Oedipus complex. This is what motivates both the importance of the castration complex and the pre-eminence of the famous fantasies of the phallic mother. (Seminar IV, pp. 191–192).

116

In The View from Afar, Lévi-Strauss, taking the perspective of an imaginary female reader, asks the same question.

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The rules of anthropology extend beyond those of the Oedipus complex, as he states and then confirms shortly afterwards: What is in question with the end of the pre-Oedipal phase and at the dawn of the Oedipus complex? The child must take upon himself the phallus as signifier, and in such a way as to make it the instrument of the symbolic order of exchange, inasmuch as it presides over the constitution of family lines. In sum, he is confronted with this order, which makes the father’s function pivotal in the drama (Seminar IV, p. 200).

In other words, on the level of the social, political power is androcentric and is the condition that allows kinship structures and the exchange of women—between men—to function. This organization, however, implies that at the level of the individual case, there is a paternal function that works well: it has a zero symbolic value. This function will allow the child to take up both the value of the phallus as signifier and his/her own place in the family line and social exchanges, as well as, more generally, the social institutions that, as anthropology shows, are structured like a language. When the paternal function has been degraded, the child can remain frozen in the imaginary—pre-Oedipal—level, where it is offered up to the voraciousness and omnipotence of the mother. In the case of the foreclosure or a total absence of the Name-of-theFather, as we have seen, the subject can “try” to solve the problem through a delusion. Now in Seminar IV, Lacan adds a new solution.

Phobia as a solution [Phobia] is another way of solving the difficult problem introduced by the child’s and the mother’s relations …. [I]n order for there to be three terms in the triangle, there must be a closed space, as a way of organizing the symbolic world, that is called the father. Well, phobia is more or less of this order. It concerns the bond that encloses [the world]. At a particularly critical moment, when no other way is open for solving the problem, phobia constitutes a call for rescue, a call for a singular symbolic element. What does this call consist in?

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Let’s say that it is always by appearing as extremely symbolic, that is, as extremely distant from the imaginary. At the moment when it is called upon to help maintain the essential solidarity threatened by the gap brought about by the appearance of the phallus between the mother and the child, the element that intervenes in phobia has a truly mythic (my emphasis) character (Seminar IV, p. 58).

The hole, or the open jaws of the mother, appears in the seminar in the form of a dog that frightens the phobic child, and then takes the form of the anxiety of little Hans,117 which is associated with the recurring idea of being bitten by a horse. Freud interprets the horse as a sort of totem, set up by the child on the basis of a rivalry with the father, one that follows an Oedipal logic that more or less duplicates the parricidal situation of Totem and Taboo. Lacan does not really follow Freud in connecting little Hans’ phobia with the father; instead, he emphasizes the anxiety of being devoured that marks the entry into phobia. In his opinion, it should be interpreted in terms of the pre-Oedipal period in which the child was then situated. At that moment, the child’s investigation of who possesses or does not possess the phallus is located in the specular register. His anxiety is triggered when he perceives that his mother lacks the phallus and he imagines that she is frustrated and has constituted him as “the object of [her] imaginary appetite” (Seminar IV, p. 82). “At what moment does the phobia become necessary? The moment when the mother lacks the phallus” (Seminar IV, p. 73). According to Lacan, the triggering of the phobia must not therefore be interpreted in terms of Oedipal parricide; far from being in a rivalry with the father, it is precisely because the father does not respond that the child faces the imaginary threat of being swallowed up by the mother. When the paternal function is not working well and is unable to legislate, the imaginary phallus is not really transmuted by a symbolic register that would fix the laws by which it 117

Herbert Graf (1903-1973), son of Max Graf (1873–1958), an Austrian critic and musicologist who, after meeting Freud in 1900, participated for several years in the weekly meetings of his first disciples. Herbert Graf was observed by his father at the age of three. These observations, which were presented to Freud, are the basis of part of the analysis of little Hans, whom Freud spoke to directly on 30 March 1908. This case remains the paradigm for the Freudian analysis of phobias.

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would circulate; therefore the child continues to incarnate, in anxiety, the imaginary version of the object that can be engulfed by the mother. According to this logic of interpretation, the horse is the mother. Nevertheless, if the objective of phobia is to reorganize the subject’s psyche, the horse cannot simply be made into a substitute for the mother; instead, it is a signifier that must be interpreted in terms of the way in which the construction of the phobia progresses. The structure of this constitution is nothing other than that of a “mythical inciting” (my emphasis) that makes up for the failure of the Nameof-the-Father as a zero-value symbol. Referring explicitly now to Lévi-Strauss’ 1955 article, “The Structural Study of Myth”, Lacan applies the method of analysing myths to little Hans’ phobia. Readers interested in Lacan’s final extended analysis of Freud’s case histories should examine Seminar IV, especially its fourth part, “The Structure of Myths in the Observation of Little Hans’ Phobia”. Since the purpose of our investigation is to show what Lacan’s return to Freud owes to Lévi-Strauss, it will be enough to recall the series of scansions that, as is obvious from its concluding commentary118, mark an exemplary moment of this return.

The horse as signifier “As Freud says to us explicitly, we could be tempted to characterise phobia by its object—the horse in this case—if we did not perceive that the horse goes beyond being what the horse is in itself. It is much more of an heraldic figure, which is prevalent, which centres the entire field, and which has all sorts of implications—implications, above all, in terms of the signifier.” Further on, he adds that “What I am trying to accentuate, and which is always and everywhere omitted, is different—what I’m emphasising is that at a certain critical moment in little Hans’ development, a certain signifier is brought in and it plays an organizing and recrystallizing role. It may do so in a pathological way, but that doesn’t make it less constitutive. The horse

118

“The observation of little Hans is completely exaggerated. If, among the five case histories, it is the one that I have left to comment upon last, there’s a reason for it” (Seminar IV, p. 205).

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starts to punctuate the external world of signals. I shall remind you that Freud later, when speaking of little Hans’ phobia, will speak of the horse’s function as a signal. For Hans, these signals restructure the world, by marking its limits very profoundly, limits whose property and function we now have to grasp …. All this is done with this element that is a signifier, the horse (Seminar IV, pp. 305–307).

If we recall that Lévi-Strauss qualified the zero institutions as obscure, we can see why, at this point of his development, Lacan says, “To understand the horse’s function, the path isn’t to seek the horse’s equivalent …. The function of the horse, when it is introduced as the central point of the phobia, is to be a term that, first of all, has precisely the property of being an obscure signifier [signifiant obscur] (my emphasis). You can also take the pun that I have just made, you can almost take it in a complete way—it is, seen from certain sides, meaningless [insignifiant]. It is here that it has its deepest function—it plays the role of a kind of wedge, whose function is to plough through the real again” (Seminar IV, p. 307).

Little Hans’ phobia as an individual myth What have we been trying to detect up to now in this mythical inciting that is the essential characteristic of the observation of Hans? (Seminar IV, p. 304). Although the individual myth can in no way be considered to be identical with mythology as such, the two have one characteristic in common: they provide a solution to a situation that is closed and in an impasse, as is the case of little Hans in relation to his father and his mother. The individual myth reproduces, in a miniature form, the fundamental characteristic of the development of myths, wherever we can grasp it. It consists, in sum, of facing an impossible situation by articulating, in succession, all the forms that can be taken by the impossibility of solving it. It is in this way that mythical creation answers a question. The individual myth travels through the complete circle of what is presented both as a possible opening and as an opening that is impossible to take. Once the circle has been closed, something

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is accomplished, which means that the subject places himself at the level of the question (Seminar IV, p. 330).

Hans or the mind of the tribe [L]ittle Hans … is a metaphysician. He bears the question where it is, at the point where something is missing. And there, he asks, where is the explanation, in the sense in which we might say “mathematical explanation”, for this lack of being. And he behaves, like any collective mind of a primitive tribe [my emphasis] with the rigour of which we are aware, and goes through the possible solutions, with a battery of chosen signifiers (Seminar IV, p. 330).

Three fathers and a stand-in What does analytic theory teach us about the Oedipus complex? …. This is a fact: in order for the situation to develop in normal conditions … it is necessary, on the one hand, for the true penis, the real penis, the valid penis, the penis of the father to function. On the other hand, it is necessary for the child’s penis, which is comparatively situated at first, in a Vergleichung119, to reach this function. And in order to do this, it must undergo the annulment [annulation] that is called the castration complex. In other words, it is to the extent that his own penis is momentarily annihilated [annihilé] that the child is promised that he will be able to reach a full paternal function later, that is, that he will be able to feel that he is in legitimate possession of his virility. And it seems that this “legitimate” is essential to the felicitous working of the sexual function in the human subject (Seminar IV, pp. 363–364). The symbolic father is the name of the father. This is the essential mediating element of the symbolic world and its functioning …. The name of the father is essential to any articulation of human language ….

119

A German term for “comparison”.

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There is the symbolic father. There is the real father …. In order for the subject truly to experience the castration complex, the real father must come on board. He must assume his function as a castrating father …. It is only to the extent that the father, as he exists, fulfils what is empirically intolerable and even revolting in his imaginary function, when he makes his impact as castrator felt—that that castration complex is truly experienced …. Here is the whole problem. Little Hans must find a stand-in for the father who stubbornly does not want to castrate him. This is the key of the observation (Seminar IV, pp. 364–365).

Lacan distributes the paternal function over the three registers and situates the stand-in on the level of the castrating imaginary father. He locates the anxiety about the bite by giving the same analysis of the mother’s place in castration that he had already done in 1938, an analysis that disagrees with Freud.120 If there is castration, it is to the extent that the Oedipus complex is castration. Yet castration, and it is no accident that people have seen, rather dimly, that castration has as much to do with the mother as with the father. Maternal castration—we see it in the description of the primal situation—implies for the child the possibility of being devoured and being bitten. What is previous is maternal castration, and paternal castration is a substitute for it. Paternal castration may be no less terrible, but it is certainly more positive than the other, because it can be developed, which is not the case with the sense of being swallowed up or devoured by the mother. With the father, a dialectical development is possible. A rivalry with the father is possible; a murder of the father is possible; an emasculation of the father is possible. On this side, the castration complex bears fruit in the Oedipus complex, in a way that it does not on the mother’s side. This is for the simple reason that it is impossible to emasculate the mother, because there is nothing there to emasculate (Seminar IV, p. 367).

120

See Lacan et les sciences sociales.

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In his article of 1938 on the family complexes, Lacan had already claimed that the mother precedes the father in the castration complex and that she has a role in promoting the law—on the basis of the anxiety of fragmentation. Lacan takes up this model again, but now highlights the choice of the “horse as biter” as a first substitute for the mother in symbolizing Hans’ anxiety. This anxiety is triggered when the child perceives himself as what the mother is missing. Anxiety is thus prior to the choice of the horse and even of the bite. In locating the sense of threat in the horse’s bite, 1. 2.

The child displaces the impact of the dreaded wound and The signifier of the horse allows him to symbolize, one after the other, the mother and the father (or his absence); this figure is full of “metaphorical mediation”.

The horse: Mother, then Father If we call capital I the signifier around which phobia enacts [ordonne] its function, let us say that something is symbolized by it, which we can call small sigma, , and which is the absence of the father, . Thus we have— I ()s This is not to say that this is everything that is contained in the signifier of the horse—far from it” (Seminar IV, p. 346).

As we have seen in particular, at the dawn of the phobia, the horse symbolizes the mother.

The bite as derived from the threat [T]he maternal bite, which is taken as an instrumental element, as the substitute for the intervention of castration, is diverted from its direction, since it does not bear upon the penis, but on something else that, in the last fantasy, leads to a change. We should believe that this change already has a certain degree of sufficiency, in any case, enough sufficiency to reduce the phobia. By the end, Hans has been changed. This is what has been obtained (Seminar IV, p. 368).

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We can see what is at stake: the danger has been displaced through the choice of a signifier that will be a metaphor for the mother’s voraciousness. Does this task not ordinarily fall to the Name-of-theFather or the paternal metaphor?

The phobia as equivalent to the paternal metaphor First, Lacan writes the equation that expresses the impasse of little Hans, who has been confronted with his little sister, Hanna. The terms of this impasse can be written as follows: (Mother  Phallus  Hanna) M ⵑ bite  penis (his own) Lacan writes: (M    H) M ⵑ m  .121 Then he adds that “As soon as the problem is presented to him in this way, it is necessary to introduce a metaphoric element of mediation: the horse, since there is no other. It will be noted as ‘I, with the spiritus asper” (Seminar IV, p. 380). Lacan then combines the impasse and its “solution” by writing the formula for phobia as the following: ⎛ ⎞ 'I 122 ⎜ ⎟M∼ m+Π. ⎝ M +ϕ +α ⎠ Phobia is a mythic formation and Lévi-Strauss has formalized myths, but Lacan does not stop here; instead, he comments on what he has done in a crucial concluding remark: “This formula … is the equivalent of the paternal metaphor (my emphasis) (Seminar IV, p. 380). For Lacan, the phobic object—here the horse—must be interpreted as a signifier that organizes the entire mythic architecture of phobia; it is clinically fruitful because it serves as a stand-in for the failed paternal function. In other words, it stands in for the failure of the semantic function that enables symbolic thought to operate. Why have I examined Lacan’s reading of little Hans? I have not done so in order to duplicate Lacan’s dazzling structural 121 122

Seminar IV, p. 380. Seminar IV, p. 380.

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interpretation of the small boy’s phobia, and beyond that, of all phobia. Instead, I have done so to confirm how Lacan emphasizes the quasi-mythic value of phobia as an operator that is able to make up for a degraded paternal function. He does this in the same way that Lévi-Strauss had highlighted how myth—at least in certain of its aspects—can be ranked in the class of zero-value institutions, along with the spirit of things and the signifiers of exceptions, where I myself have placed the Name-of-the-Father. The latter conditions the quilting of the signifier and signified and the very functioning of symbolic systems, just like the other forms of the zero symbolic value. From this point of view, the phobic myth allows the subject to participate—in his own particular style—in an everyday (neurotic) way of using language and the social bonds. According to Lacan, the phobic myth sets up a stand-in at the very place where, in psychosis, the delusion appears as an attempt at a cure. For this reason, indeed, Lacan, in referring to little Hans’ phobia, also mentions delusion and myth. What is striking is the articulated way in which this delirium develops. I say “delusion”—it is almost like a parapraxis, since it has nothing to do with psychosis here, but the term is not inappropriate …. We have … the impression that the construction of the ideas … in the case of little Hans, has its own motivation, its own plane, its own jurisdiction. Perhaps it responds to such and such a function, but assuredly not to whatever could be justified by such a drive, such an impulse, such a specific emotional movement that would transpose it, even that would express it purely and simply. What is in question is an entirely different mechanism, one that necessitates the structural study of myth (Seminar IV, pp. 290–291).

If this reading of little Hans, the last of Lacan’s major commentaries on Freud’s case histories, culminates in a reference to Lévi-Strauss, how can we not see that the use of Lévi-Strauss has been essential to the return to Freud? We need to ask what Lévi-Strauss’ structural analysis of myths allowed Lacan to see about Freud’s clinical handling of myths. To do so will show us whether or not the use of Lévi-Strauss has reduced the gap between Freud and Lacan on the

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essential question of myth: the question of origin, and for Freudianism, the question of the father.

The myth of the dead father and what makes up for it Totem and Taboo or the super-ego On 6 March 1957, Lacan situates what he considers to be Freud’s crucial question: “All of Freud’s questioning boils down to this: What is a father?” (Seminar IV, p. 204). With the troubles of the phobic child, Lacan, once again, gives a decisive place to the paternal function in subjective structuring; if this functioning has been degraded, it can be replaced by a mythical and symptomatic elaboration that links the signifier to the signified. In 1957, while examining Freud’s texts, Lacan indicates that the work “that was his favourite, and which seemed to him to be his greatest triumph, is Totem and Taboo, which is nothing other than a modern myth, a myth constructed to explain what remained as a gap in his doctrine, namely, ‘Where is the father?’” (Seminar IV, p. 210). Lacan suggests that Freud, in order to elucidate the question of the origin, produces a myth that transforms the question, “What is a father?” into the question, “Where is the Father?” He adds that “[I]f fathers are to continue to exist, there must be the true father, the only father, the unique father, before the entry into history, and this is the dead father. Even more: it is the father who has been killed” (Seminar IV, p. 210). Lacan shows that there is a separation between fathers and the father, who incarnates the answer to Freud’s fundamental question, which thus becomes, “What is the Father?” The father is the one who was killed before the beginning of the history of the sons’ societies; Freud tells this story in Totem and Taboo, and this inaugural parricide founds social rules, which are activated in the Name of the dead father; this parricide is also the origin of the super-ego, which is nothing other, according to Lacan, than the signifier whose pre-eminent function is to cement our relation to the signified. The primal father “will have been killed. And why, if not to preserve him?” (Seminar IV, p. 211). This preservation takes the form of a tyrannical super-ego, which “alone, even among non-neurotics, represents, imprints, leaves on human beings the seal of their relation to the signifier” (Seminar IV,

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p. 212). Thus, according to Lacan, the spirit of the paternal “thing” takes the form of an exceptional signifier called the super-ego. He then introduces a new idea: its symptoms can be equivalent to it. “In the human being, there is a signifier that marks his/her relation to the signifier, and this is called the super-ego. There is even more than one; these are called symptoms” (Seminar IV, p. 212). The loop has thus been closed. Freud’s myth of parricide answers the question, “What is the father?” His response is that the father is not only the dead father, but is also what can be deduced from him: the super-ego, a signifier that quilts the sons to the aggregate of signifiers, just as symptoms also do. The reader should not be surprised by this new equivalence if s/he remembers that in the Rome Report, Lacan says that in the psychoses, myths make up for the degraded function; this degradation was given a mythical form in Totem and Taboo. Through the super-ego, this paternal function knots the human being’s relation to the law and quilts the signifier to the signified.

Symptoms as mythical stand-ins The myth of Totem and Taboo should be read as the founding myth of both the paternal function and of the ordinary relation to the signifier. When the paternal function has been degraded, the clinic lets us see symptoms that stand in as substitutes for it: phobias, delusions and other symptomatic forms. What it is important to see is that symptomatic stand-ins respond to the degrading of the totemic function; their structural aspect indicates that only mythical formations—phobias, delusions, etc.—can fill in for the myth. Whatever his/her subjective structure may be, the human being remains a mythic animal and the symptoms in question should therefore be interpreted as different versions of the founding myth; the essential function of this myth is to knot desire to the law or, in Lacanian terms, to enable the signifier to be quilted to the signified. From this perspective, all symptoms or mythic formations are different forms of the paternal function, forms that naturally give rise to structurally different modes of existence: neurosis, psychosis, perversion. It should be noted that all members of the human species have this in common.

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This is also the first time that Lacan presents the symptom as the equivalent of the quilting introduced by the super-ego and the dead father. Much later, in Book XXIII of the seminar, which he entitled “le sinthome”, he returns to this problematic of the symptom as the equivalent of the Name-of-the-Father. Yet already in 1957, according to Lacan, phobias, delusions, and more generally, symptoms also have the value of quilting points, as does the super-ego, which analysts have much more readily understood to be the result both of the marriage of desire to the law and of the primal parricide. Lacan, in treating the series of symptoms as myths that should be accounted for with Lévi-Strauss’ structural logic, is doing something that is also situated at the heart of Freud’s logic; this logic had already indicated what phobia, for example, owes to the currency of the child’s desire for parricide.123 Without contradicting Freud, Lacan systematizes the mythic organization of symptoms, and includes Totem and Taboo in his differential archaeology of the paternal function as a modern myth that accounts for the production of the exceptional signifier as an operator; this operator allows symbolic thought to function by means of a symptom that is social and totemic rather than individual. We could therefore say that for Lacan, as for Lévi-Strauss, social myth has always guaranteed the bond between the human being and the law; for both men, symptoms are also individual myths, but Lacan specifies how these stand-ins enable signifier and signified to be quilted. This quilting not only allows symbolic thought to operate; but these operators also enable phobic thought, obsessional thought, and psychotic thought—each of which has a different mythic formation—to function. If the return to Freud has indeed been, as Lacan announced in 1951, the means of re-establishing, in the analytic field, the “bridge” that connects “modern man and ancient myths”, we can see that he is now making a more precise analysis, since he reminds us of the mythic genealogy of the paternal function in Freud’s work. Thanks to Lévi-Strauss, he has brought to light the Name-of-the-Father, the operator that is necessary if symbolic thought is to take place.

123 See Sigmund Freud, Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy(1961, pp. 1–145), and Paul-Laurent Assoun, Leçons psychanalytiques sur les phobies (2000).

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In treating the series of symptoms as mythic formations that stand in for the Name-of-the-Father, he finally offers us a differential clinic of the various ways in which symbolic thought is expressed in analytic experience: neuroses, psychoses, perversions. From this point of view, myth appears as the operator that dominates all human life as such, and the Oedipus complex—when it exists for a subject or a group—no longer seems to be anything more than a “purifying bath that renews the rebirth of the law” (Seminar VI).124 We can see that, at this moment, the function of the myth is of foremost importance for Lacan; he continues to restrict the span of the Oedipus complex, which he, as always, considers to be limited and non-universal. Throughout his differential clinic, he is much closer to Lévi-Strauss than to Freud, since he is seeking to show the plurality of mythical formations on both the ethnological and clinical levels; Freud, on the other hand, had affirmed the historical and foundational character of Totem and Taboo for all humanity, just as he affirms the correlative universality of the Oedipus complex. In 1961, Lacan will enumerate, in this same line of research, a series of myths that shows the historical development of the Western subject. This series is articulated in terms of the knowledge that the father has been put to death: Totem and Taboo, Hamlet, and the Coûfontaine Trilogy. Where Freud claims that there are universals—Totem and Taboo, the Oedipus complex—Lacan, like Lévi-Strauss, sees mythological modalities and rituals, which are historically and geographically differentiated. His return to Freud brings him back to the symbolic function that is the heart of Freud’s work, but by following Lévi-Strauss, he shows the various ways in which the Freudian myth takes hold over living beings. His return is therefore not dogmatic, 124 This is the context in which Lacan makes this statement: “It is too obvious that this crime—the primal murder of the father—which, for [Freud], is required and must always reappear, which forms the horizon, the final bar of the problem of origins .… The primal murder of the father, which is the origin of the horde and the origin of the Judaic tradition obviously has the character of a mythical requirement …. Quite another thing is the relation between the primal law and the primal crime, and what happens when Oedipus—the tragic hero, who is also, in essence, each of us in some point of his being—reproduces the Oedipal tragedy, when by killing the father, he sleeps with the mother. In doing this, he renews, as it were, on the tragic plane, in a sort of purifying bath, the rebirth of the law.” In Le désir et son interprétation [Desire and Its Interpretation] (1958–1959), Book VI of the seminar (unpublished).

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any more than is his alliance with Lévi-Strauss, since as I shall indicate in a postlude, certain differences of opinion would soon separate the two figures. This would occur when Lacan discovers the object (a), a discovery that would lead him to make the universe of objects incomplete, like the world itself. Yet before beginning to analyse this new period of Lacan’s research, it is necessary to take the time to show everything that Lacan’s return to Freud owed to Lévi-Strauss, as well as the radical changes that resulted from it in the psychoanalytic field.

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The doxa: Its ideals and the repression of Lévi-Strauss To conclude, we need to situate our analysis of Lacan’s return to Freud in relation to other readings of it, for these readings constitute a doxa that accounts for this Lacanian moment by the influence of the philosophical or linguistic works that he mentioned during this period: essentially Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1915). First of all, let us confirm that Lacan did indeed listen attentively to the seminar that Kojève125 devoted to Hegel for three years at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, just as it is easy to show that Jean Hyppolite was present at the first year of Lacan’s seminar (1953–1954). It should also be noted that Hyppolite was the French

125 Alexandre Kojève (1902–1968). Born Alexandre Kojevnikov in Moscow, he emigrated to Germany and then to France. In 1933, while he was a student at the Sorbonne, Alexandre Koyré chose him as a substitute lecturer for his courses at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. In Paris, his commentary on the Phenomenology of Spirit produced a powerful renewal of the reading of Hegel. Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, Jean Hyppolite, Raymond Queneau and Jacques Lacan were among his listeners.

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translator of the Phenomenology of Spirit. Lacan refers frequently to Hegel during his return to Freud, especially in relation to the theory of “desire as the desire of the other”, which immediately puts the seeker of sources on the track of Hegel. Thus in Lacan, La formation du concept du sujet, Bertrand Ogilvie writes: To desire is not to desire the other, but to desire the other’s desire: Kojève and his reading of Hegel gave Lacan the means to formulate the idea that the subject’s reactive structure is connected to the situation that has created him, not in an accidental but in an essential way, since the situation already contains the structure in itself. The subject is not prior to the world of forms that fascinates him: he is constituted, first of all, by them and in them.126

This remark is apposite, and there is no reason to cast doubt on this Hegelian influence, but the point at which it had an impact and its function need to be clarified: Lacan had taken up the impasse of desire as the other’s desire in 1938, in the clinical form of the intrusion complex, which goes along with the mirror stage and the imaginary register of subjective structuring. It is true that at this date, Lacan had constructed “the solution by means of the father”: the son’s metamorphosis into the father allows the Oedipal subject to go beyond the impasse and to extract his subjective maturation from the paranoiac stage in order to be able to produce cultural goods. If Lacan’s formulation of the impasse of the mirror stage does not lack Hegelian inspiration, the way out of this impasse, as formulated in 1938 or 1950 is less so, since Hegel would have situated death as the “solution” in the master/slave dialectic, which according to him, constitutes the moment of subjective impasse. Is there a solution, then, by means of the father or by death? Let us go forward with Lacan: starting with his return to Freud,which Bertrand Ogilvie does not study,Lacan changes the conceptual galaxy that surrounds the question of the father and exchanges the actual father—who had constituted the solution in 1938—for the symbolic version of the father, whose value is all the more convincing since he is dead. This “epistemological” murder of the actual father is 126

Bertrand Ogilvie, Lacan, la formation du concept de sujet: 1932–1949, (1987, pp. 105–106.

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certainly the act by which Lacan, without quite disclaiming Hegel, reconciles himself with Freud; with his theory of the forgotten parricide, Freud had understood that the operator that regulates jouissance is the aggregate of the social rules formulated in the name of the dead father. Taking as his basis both Hegel’s meditation on death and Freud’s theory of the dead father, Lacan can, in 1953, in The Neurotic’s Individual Myth, introduce both death and the dead father as analytic operators that are indispensable for the progress of the treatment. It is not by chance that the expression, “Name-of-theFather” appears for one of the first times in this lecture. Yet if, at this date, he allied himself with the desire of Freud,the desire of the dead father of psychoanalysis—in whom, as he said, we must trust, it is also the moment when he can see beyond the profile of the dead father,which can be found everywhere in the clinic of the paternal function—the place of the symbolic function as such, as the place where the unconscious desire of the subject,which comes from the other,is produced. If desire is still, at that time, the other’s desire, we must not fail to notice that the forms that produce the subject have changed. The texts on the mirror stage situate this form in the imaginary, while the return to Freud allows Lacan—after reading Freud’s texts, such as the case history of Dora—to see that the unconsciousness of desire is motivated by a form of language through which the subject receives his own message from the other in an inverted form, according to the formula coined by Lévi-Strauss. This displacement of the Lacanian and Durkheimian laws of the family in favour of the rules of speech and language—borrowed from Lévi-Strauss—disrupted Lacan’s point of view on the Freudian theory of the symptom and produced a real mutation of his theory of the unconscious subject. Yet at this very moment, there is a sort of condensation in the theoretical architecture that is being constructed, since both the subjective impasse and the subjective solution can be formulated in the same way: “man’s desire is the other’s desire”. In his return, Lacan doubles and even triples the register of the analysis of subjective structuring; in this double form, the impasse—“man’s desire is the other’s desire”—remains imaginary, while the solution— “man’s desire is the other’s desire”—is symbolic. Thus, we need to be clear, whenever we use this formula, whether it is located in the imaginary—the intrusive other—or the symbolic—the other of

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language. A failure to perceive this structural separation will prevent us from understanding what Lacan’s return to Freud implies and will lead us to read it in terms of the simple Hegelian formulations of the preceding period. This is not all. An examination of the doxa of Lacan’s readers shows a recurrent reference to the influence of Saussure, who supposedly enabled Lacan to undertake a return to Freud that emphasized the symbolic. For this style of reading, the alliance of Hegel and Saussure would be sufficient as the theoretical sources of the theory of the subject that Lacan put together at this moment of his analysis. This is why the work of Joël Dor—which must be read if one wants to follow the development of the schema L in Lacan’s work—quickly introduces the reader to what s/he must know about the Phenomenology of Mind and the Course in General Linguistics in order to make sense of Lacan’s return to Freud. That Dor does so does not detract from the quality or the usefulness of his work, but, from my point of view, the absence of the reference to Lévi-Strauss is a symptom of the theoretical repression of Lacan’s use of French ethnology, especially of Lévi-Strauss. For the best readers of Lacan, this presence seems to have been ruined by the shadow of philosophers and linguists. Two supplementary references can confirm this: Philippe Julien’s Jacques Lacan’s Return to Freud, which was first published in French in 1985,127 never mentions the name of Lévi-Strauss, any more than does Erik Porge’s study, Les noms du père chez Jacques Lacan (The Names of the Father in Jacques Lacan).128 In these works, the deafening Hegelian and Saussurian references function as a theoretical ideal that is mentioned ceaselessly; Lévi-Strauss’ influence, in turn, is repressed. Why is there such a deafening reference to these other figures? Let us remain measured about this question, since Alain Juranville has, since 1986, been approaching Lacan’s references to Hegel and Saussure in a nuanced way; his nuances set him apart from the consensus, which he regularly introduces in his text, Lacan et la philosophie (Lacan and Philosophy) with the excellent expression, “It is well known that ….”

127 128

Philippe Julien, Jacques Lacan’s Return to Freud: The Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary. Erik Porge, Les noms du père chez Jacques Lacan: ponctuations et problématiques (1997).

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It is well known that Lacan founded much of his presentation of psychoanalytic theory on Hegel’s thought. People have not hesitated to reproach him for it. In fact, Lacan’s relations to Hegel do not seem very simple: if there is indeed a “dialectic of desire” in Lacan’s conception, it still needs to be made clear that because desire is the “ontological” translation of the phenomenon of the signifier, this dialectic cannot unfold in quite the same way that it does in Hegel—it is inseparable from a “subversion of the subject”, which creates an initial difference between Lacan’s and Hegel’s subjects.129

Precisely. Juranville highlights the logic of the signifier, and therefore desire as the desire of the other of the symbolic, which is situated at the point of separation between Lacan’s and Hegel’s theories. Here again, Juranville warns us against the doxa: It is well known that Lacan justified his foundational work on the basis of Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic theories. It is also known that linguists have often cried out that he misunderstood them. And Lacan himself ended up speaking of his “linguistricks”, as if he had had to recognize that he had performed a theoretical diversion of Saussure’s formulations. What did he do to them? (1984, p. 41).

This is Juranville’s answer: “In Lacan, it is not the case, as it is in Saussure, that the signified precedes the signifier, it is the signifier that is first. The pure signifier” (1984, p. 47). “[T]he signified is produced by the signifier” (p. 48). “This is what must be accepted, if one wants to follow Lacan” (p. 47). Juranville takes the critical distance from common sense that is necessary for all research. His formula, “It is well known that ...” stresses the resistances and prejudices that are the marks of ignorance, and even repression. It remains true, however, that Juranville leaves aside Lévi-Strauss’ contribution to Lacan’s work, especially in terms of its relation to Lacan’s formulations about the logic of the signifier; as we have seen, it was not Lacan who made the elegant reversal of Saussure’s algorithm and asserted that the signifier dominates the signified. Instead, it was 129

Alain Juranville, Lacan et la philosophie (1984).

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Lévi-Strauss who did so, as Lacan himself indicated in his 1956 dialogue with the former, at Jean Wahl’s Collège de philosophie. Here again, the repression of Lévi-Strauss continues, in favour of Saussure, whose work was supposedly rethought directly by Lacan, who would thus have been responsible for the crucial epistemological act—crucial for both psychoanalysis and anthropology— of inverting the Saussurian algorithm in order to symbolize the dominance of the signifier over the signified. This act was a true theoretical revolution, which gave the signifier its imperial sovereignty and enabled Lacan to “return” to Freud, his theory and his great clinical cases. On this point, we should note that, to our knowledge, among Lacan’s readers, Guy Gaufey is one of the very few who does not attempt to bury Lévi-Strauss, an attempt that is influenced by the idealization of Lacan’s philosophical and linguistic references, particularly in terms of the genealogy of the notion of the symbolic. This Course was not what triggered Lacan’s work. Much more decisive was the intermediary of Claude Lévi-Strauss and his notion of a symbolic system where only pure differences were articulated, a system that, according to him, derived from Troubetskoy, the model, if it was so, of the structural constructions that would follow.130

This is true. Guy le Gaufey says no more about this, since his study, Le lasso imaginaire (The Imaginary Lasso) is, in its own terms, “not the place to examine the delicate Lacanian genealogy of the symbolic” (1997, pp. 225–226). It is up to us, then, in our analysis, to examine this repression of the social sciences, a repression that extends to the influence of Durkheim as well as of Lévi-Strauss. From the moment we diagnosed this repression in the doxa of the reading of Lacan, we have been trying to see how deep it is, to show its impact and to designate its presuppositions. We shall not go back to Durkheim, who was set aside by Lacan himself—after 15 years—in favour of Lévi-Strauss.131

130 Guy Le Gaufey, Le lasso spéculaire: Une étude traversière de l’unité imaginaire (1997, pp. 225–226). 131 See my Lacan et les sciences sociales.

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What could account for the “fall” of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ research in favour of the philosophical ideal in accounts of the genesis of Lacan’s work, and especially of his return to Freud, which was a crucial modification of the field of psychoanalysis in France and the world? Is the importance of Lacan’s philosophical references so great that it justifies the neglect of the social sciences? How can we decide, if not by turning to a philosophical master, whose qualifications will allow a reasonable evaluation of whether the doxa concerning Lacan’s philosophical sources is well-founded? Why not Louis Althusser?132 This is not a bad idea, since he was welldisposed to Lacan and took the trouble to examine the philosophical references that Lacan had made during his return to Freud.

Louis Althusser’s point of view In 1964, Althusser vigorously took a position on this return in an article in La Nouvelle Critique, the journal of the communist intellectuals whose importance for all of French intellectual life was crucial at the time. Althusser wrote: So a return to Freud today demands: 1. Not only that we reject the ideological layers of the reactionary exploitation of Freud as a crude mystification 2. [B]ut also that we avoid the more subtle ambiguities of psycho-analytic revisionism, sustained as they are by the prestige of certain more or less scientific disciplines 3. [A]nd finally that we commit ourselves to a serious effort of historico-theoretical criticism in order to identify and define, in the concepts Freud had to use, the true epistemological relation between these concepts and their thought content.

132 Louis Althusser (1918–1990). A major philosophical and political reference, the writings of Louis Althusser had a strong hold on communist intellectuals in France and beyond during the 1960s and 1970s. His research was concerned essentially with rereading Marx’s texts and inaugurated a return to Marx, whose correspondence with Lacan’s return to Freud is obvious. A professor of philosophy at the École normale supérieure, he was the teacher of the young students who next became involved with Lacan, particularly Jacques-Alain Miller, who has played an important role in the development of the Lacanian field both nationally and internationally. Following the dismissal of the charges of murdering his wife, Althusser wrote his autobiography, The Future Lasts Forever: A Memoir.

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Without this triple labour of ideological criticism (1, 2) and epistemological elucidation (3), which, in France, has been initiated in practice by Lacan, Freud’s discovery in its specificity will remain beyond our reach.133

Althusser uses the expression, “return to Freud”, which Lacan had been using as a slogan since 1951 and recognizes that Lacan had opened the path back to Freud’s work. From this point of view, Louis Althusser is in harmony with Lacan about what is essential. Yet what, here, is essential for Althusser? It is the return begun by Lacan to a Freudian “maturity”: a return to a moment when, freed from any disciplinary “attachment”, psychoanalysis takes its position as “A new science which was the science of a new object: the unconscious” (1964, p. 150). Althusser explains that “If psycho-analysis is a science because it is the science of a distinct object, it is also a science with the structure of all sciences: it has a theory and a technique (method) that make possible the knowledge and transformation of its object in a specific practice” (p. 150). Allying himself in his style with Lacan’s struggle, Althusser borrows an expression from Lenin’s Left-wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder134 in order to attack the International Psychoanalytic Association; he speaks of “the theoretical infantilism, the relapse into childhood in which all or a part of contemporary psycho-analysis, particularly in America, savours the advantages of surrender”(1964, pp. 152–153).135 According to Althusser, the mark of this infantilism lies in the fact that, in the IPA, psychoanalysis is not sustained by its “own object”, the unconscious, but by doubtful alliances with “psychology, whether behaviourist (Dalbiez), phenomenological (Merleau-Ponty) or existentialist (Sartre); to a more or less Jacksonian bio-neurology (Ey); to ‘sociology’ of the ‘culturalist’ or ‘anthropological’ type (dominant in the USA: Kardiner, Margaret Mead, etc.) and to philosophy (cf. Sartre’s ‘existentialist psychoanalysis’, Binswanger’s ‘Daseinanalyse’, etc.” (p. 153).

133

Louis Althusser, Freud and Lacan, in Essays on Ideology (1964). Lenin, Vladimir Il’ich. Left-wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder. 135 The original translation, which used “childishness” rather than “infantilism”, has been altered in order to bring the passage into line with the author’s reading of it. (Translator’s note.) 134

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Althusser claims that, in contrast, “Lacan’s first word is to say: in principle, Freud founded a science. A new science which was the science of a new object: the unconscious” (1964, p. 150). As opposed to the “compromise alliances sealed with imaginary ties of adoption but very real powers”, Lacan “defends the irreducibility of analysis against these ‘reductions’ and deviations, which dominate most contemporary theoretical interpretations; he defends its irreducibility, which means the irreducibility of its object” (pp. 153, 155). Althusser is particularly precise on the point of alliances and we must be very attentive to this, since for him, defending the irreducibility of the object of psychoanalysis, the unconscious, does not imply the necessity of a splendid isolation. “Lacan would be the first to admit that his attempted theorization would have been impossible were it not for the emergence of a new science: linguistics” (p. 159). Then Althusser continues his reading—which has been repeated and has now become the orthodox one—of the genesis of the Lacanian theory of the unconscious subject, a theory that derives from a reading of Freud through a Saussurian lens: Herein no doubt lies the most original aspect of Lacan’s work, his discovery. Lacan has shown that this transition from (ultimately purely) biological existence to human existence (the human child) is achieved within the Law of Order, the law I shall call the Law of Culture, and that this Law of Order is confounded in its formal essence with the order of language (1964, p. 150).

Here again, we find Saussure in the place where Lévi-Strauss has been repressed, despite the fact that his work is mentioned soon afterwards when Althusser asks: How can we rigorously formulate the relation between the formal structure of language, the absolute precondition for the existence and intelligibility of the unconscious, on the one hand, the concrete kinship structures on the other, and finally the concrete ideological formations in which the specific functions implied by the kinship structures (paternity, maternity, childhood) are lived? Is it conceivable that the historical variation of these latter structures (kinship, ideology) might materially affect some or other aspect of the instances isolated by Freud? (1964, p. 169).

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Althusser does not seem to see everything that Lacan, in listening to Lévi-Strauss, had already formulated about this point. We shall also note that he mentions the Oedipus complex as the dramatic structure, the “theatrical machine” imposed by the Law of Culture on every involuntary, conscripted candidate to humanity, a structure containing in itself not only the possibility of, but the necessity for the concrete variants in which it exists, for every individual who reaches its threshold, lives through it and survives it …. These variants can be thought and known in their essence itself on the basis of the structure of the Oedipal invariant (1964, p. 168).

Here Althusser is more Freudian than Lacan, who, in agreeing with Lévi-Strauss, does not treat the Oedipus complex as an invariant. On what is essential, however, Althusser does agree with the Lacan of the return to Freud, whom he had started to support publicly in the summer of 1963. One year before “Freud and Lacan”, he had written the following: Marx based his theory on the rejection of the myth of the “homo oeconomicus”, Freud based his theory on the rejection of the myth of the “homo psychologicus”. Lacan has seen and understood Freud’s liberating rupture. He has understood it in the fullest sense of the term, taking it rigorously at its word and forcing it to produce its own consequences, without concessions or quarter. It may be that, like everyone else, he errs in the detail or even the choice of his philosophical bearings; but we owe him the essential (1964, p. 147).136

The homage is quite strong: “We owe him the essential.” On the other hand, Althusser makes several incidental statements that are central to us, because, in them, he does nothing less than evaluate what determines Lacan’s choice of his philosophical guides, a choice that, he suggests, involved a certain wandering and groping. We want to be understood here: what is essential 136

This statement, which appears in a note to “Freud and Lacan”, is a citation from a text that Althusser had published in the Revue de l’enseignement philosophique, June/July 1963.

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is that Althusser was generous in his support for Lacan. Yet we would like to highlight that even in June and July 1963, a moment of acute political struggle—the moment that Lacan would call his excommunication—Althusser judged that it was useful to express some discreet reservations about these philosophical guides. These reservations are all the more striking since they contrast with the automaton of the doxa of Lacan’s readers, who almost compulsively refer to these philosophical masters as his sources. Such readers would be tempted to neglect Althusser’s small reservation, which appears in a tactful note at the bottom of the page. Indeed they could, but it happens that during the next year, 1964, precisely when Lacan was struggling against the analysts of the IPA, which was regressing to infantile psychoanalytic positions and relying on very heterogeneous scientific authorities, Althusser confirmed his reservations about reducing all of psychoanalysis to “the primitive experience of the Hegelian struggle, of the phenomenological for-others, or of the Heideggerian ‘gulf’ of being” (1964, p. 154). Shortly afterwards, Althusser is even more explicit, since he describes Lacan as “a man of the besieged vanguard, condemned by the crushing strength of the threatened structures and corporations to forestall their blows”. He then goes on to link this situation to “the often paradoxical resort to the security provided by philosophies completely foreign to his scientific undertaking (Hegel, Heidegger) (my emphasis), as so many intimidating witnesses thrown in the faces of part of his audience to retain their respect; and as so many witnesses to a possible objectivity, the natural ally of his thought, to reassure or educate the rest” (p. 155). The endorsement has now ended and Althusser makes an evaluation without nuance: for Lacan, Hegel and Heidegger are learned guarantees that are utterly foreign to his scientific enterprise. According to him, Lacan only refers to them in order to gain respect from his adversaries. Then he adds: As this resort was almost indispensable to sustain a discourse addressed from within to the medical profession alone, one would have to ignore both the conceptual weakness of medical studies in general and the profound need for theory felt by the best medical men, to condemn it out of hand (1964, pp. 155–156).

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Perhaps, but if we agree with Althusser that Lacan’s use of his philosophical guides is opportunistic, it is necessary, with him, to avoid “condemn[ing] it out of hand”; this is especially true since, at the time, Lacan could very well have been constrained to adopt this strategy, which aimed at impressing, not philosophers, but physicians, whose theoretical knowledge Althusser considers to be rather modest. Yet do we not also find—without any criticism—a similar idealization of these same philosophical guides in the current doxa of Lacan’s readers? Are those who have formed current opinion and have produced this doxa better educated theoretically than Althusser? Are they better able to evaluate Lacan’s reference to these emblematic figures? Lacanian psychoanalysts are often physicians or psychologists and they usually seem less theoretically competent than Althusser to evaluate Lacan’s heuristic use of philosophical references. If my thesis about the repression of Lacan’s anthropological influences is correct—especially in relation to the work of Lévi-Strauss— we could find in Althusser an acceptable analysis of what led to this repression: the idealizing of the philosophical guides mentioned in Lacan’s texts. According to this analysis, Lacan referred to them less for what they enabled him to produce than for what Althusser called, in order to condemn them, “compromise alliances sealed with imaginary ties of adoption but very real powers” (1964, p. 152). The repression of Lévi-Strauss in the name of idealizing the philosophical references—a repression that occurs not in Lacan’s own texts but in the minds of his readers—appears then as an effect of retroaction that Lacan himself could not have controlled; this effect has occurred because, since 1951, he had chosen to refer to philosophical authorities in order to maintain the respect of the physicians of the IPA. It would have been difficult for Lacan to foresee that these philosophical guides—which he had used to build a rampart of respect that was indispensable for his return to Freud—would later fascinate the physicians in his own camp and lead them astray in their readings of his texts. We need to be clear here, for it would be reductive to deny that various philosophers contributed to Lacan’s research; both luminaries such as Hegel and the much less glorious figure of Heidegger made their contributions. Nevertheless, it should be noted that Althusser’s suggestion that Lacan used his philosophical guides as political instruments has never really gained the attention of Lacan’s

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readers. Althusser’s judgement is quite good, since Lévi-Strauss’ influence on Lacan has disappeared from histories of both the latter’s thought and of psychoanalysis. If my thesis is correct, what is at stake is not trivial. I therefore need to be even more precise and to return to the situation in which Althusser took a stand on Lacan’s work, and see whether the Lacan of 1964 really coincides with Althusser’s formulations concerning him.

The essential: Lacan’s point of view On the essential, first of all, we have seen that Althusser highlighted the scientific requirement of Lacan’s return to Freud—which does not refute my own analysis—but it is necessary to remember that in January 1964, when he wrote “Freud and Lacan”, Lacan was being “excommunicated” by the IPA. At that moment, he exchanged the intended theme of the 11th year of his seminar—the Names-of-theFather—for an examination of the foundations of psychoanalysis; this examination was supposed to make the scientific character of psychoanalysis less into a certainty than a question. Leaving aside the religious version of psychoanalysis, Lacan does not quite dismiss the idea that psychoanalysis has an object and a specific experience. It is nevertheless true, as he remarks, that no one questions the desire of the physicist in order to characterize physics as a science; on the other hand, the impact of the desire of the analyst is so strong that it must be analysed in order to see what follows from it in both analytic experience and the elaboration of the object of this experience. In this way, a properly scientific object could be produced. Concerning this point, he states, in the first sessions of the seminar, that “something, in Freud, was never analysed” (Seminar XI, p. 12). It was precisely in order to bring out what, in Freud’s desire, had enabled him to open up the experience of the unconscious that Lacan had hoped to give a seminar on the Names-of-the-Father. In suspending his analysis of the origin of psychoanalysis, Lacan leaves in the shadows what analytic experience and its object owe to Freud’s desire.137 The effect of the absence of this analysis is to leave

137 The result of this, as I have already said, is the eternal return of the thesis of the decline of the father as a mythic formation. This formation makes up for the hole that Lacan maintained in the analysis of the origin of psychoanalysis.

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the scientific character of psychoanalysis as a question that must be resolved, since Lacan does not throw light on the founder’s desire, as he had announced that he would; only such an analysis could have separated psychoanalysis from its founder’s desire in order to give a scientific theory of it. There is thus a gap between Althusser and Lacan, a gap that should have been noted, since, in 1964, Lacan seems less enthusiastic about a scientific ideal for psychoanalysis than Althusser, who had thought that this ideal was being realized in the return to Freud. Was this moment, however, still a part of Lacan’s return to Freud? Perhaps, but no longer in the sense in which he had done so from 1951 to 1957, the years that we have been studying. In 1964, Lacan, having been excommunicated by the IPA, has been constrained to take up the question of the status of psychoanalysis in the simplest terms; he must ask not only “what is psychoanalysis?” but also “what has changed” in his own position, since “it is not wholly inside, but whether it is outside is not known” (Seminar XI, p. 3). Let me emphasize again that in this very difficult situation, Lacan does not deny his position, and undertakes a new analysis of psychoanalysis; we cannot say yet whether this new analysis is really a second return to Freud. Althusser, in January 1964, also could not say this, but everything suggests that as far as the “essential” is concerned—the characterization of Lacanian psychoanalysis as a science—it is precisely at the very moment when Althusser becomes its “herald” that Lacan himself starts to question it. This does not make Althusser’s judgement of Lacan’s work before January 1964 less well-founded, but it does suggest that when he mentions the scientific value of the return to Freud, he is examining the earlier years of Lacan’s work and that Lacan was beginning to question what seemed to be a given for Althusser.

Thanks to Lévi-Strauss From this point of view, we could say that the Lacan of 1964 is more Althusserian than Althusser and that he has much more rigorous requirements for making psychoanalysis into a science than Althusser had. On the scientific value of his return to Freud or on what is “essential”, we could say that while Althusser speaks

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for a past Lacan, Lacan himself is looking towards the future and reintroducing a heuristic doubt about this scientific ideal. In other words, Lacan was not the dupe of the philosopher who had entered into the fray at his side, and who was trying to strike a blow against all those who were impeding Lacan’s research and his transmission of psychoanalysis. We do not think that Althusser, in these conditions, could himself have been the dupe of his role as “bodyguard”, a role that he shared with Hegel and Heidegger, since he analysed it himself; instead, he consented to it lucidly. What kind of political support did Lacan receive from Louis Althusser? Elisabeth Roudinesco’s account of this moment shows that when the rupture with the IPA occurred in October 1963, Lacan asked Althusser to “find a solution to his problem”: to ensure the “transplantation” of his seminar into the École normale supérieure.138 She also reminds us that Althusser had put Lacan’s work on the syllabus of his course, thus introducing his work to students who would later help expand Lacan’s renown. Concerning this new beginning, which would enable Lacan to found the École freudienne de Paris and achieve cultural success, Roudinesco concludes that “Lacan owed everything to Althusser” (Roudinesco, p. 380). What returns here is precisely Althusser’s formulation concerning Lacan: “It may be that, like everyone else, he errs in the detail or even the choice of his philosophical bearings; but we owe him the essential.” And from the perspective of the analysis of this debt, Lacan does not contradict Althusser, for in the first session of his seminar of 1964, he thanks everyone who had helped him since his excommunication, but says nothing about Althusser.139 On 15 January 1964, at the beginning of a new period for Lacan, he thanks Fernand Braudel, the chair of the section of the École pratique des hautes études that had provided an institutional framework

138 Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925–1985, (1990, p. 378). 139 Guy Le Gaufey claims that it was Lucien Febvre who, at Althusser’s request, enabled him to obtain a room at the École normale supérieure. Along with Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre was the co-founder of the Annales and was the director of the encyclopaedia for which Lacan wrote his text of 1938, “Les complexes familiaux” which was commented upon at length in Lacan et les sciences sociales.

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for the seminar. He speaks of Braudel’s “nobility in providing me with a means of continuing my teaching” (Seminar XI, pp. 1–2). He also thanks Robert Flacelière, the director of the École normale supérieure for putting a room at the disposal of the Hautes Études so that Lacan could give his seminar there. Finally, he also gives special thanks to someone who has been present everywhere in the return to Freud, and who was also present on this occasion: Claude LéviStrauss. I shall emphasize this: Lacan stresses Braudel’s nobility, since “Nobility is surely the right word for his welcome to someone in my position—that of a refugee.” Lacan also says that “M. Braudel extended this welcome to me as soon as he had been alerted by the vigilance of my friend Claude Lévi-Strauss, whom I am delighted to see here today and who knows how precious for me this evidence of his interest in my work is—in work that has developed in parallel with his own” (Seminar XI, p. 2). These expressions of thanks say everything. Yet none of this indicates that Lacan thought that what he owed to Althusser was negligible—or more precisely, what he owed to Althusser’s aura, which enveloped his research with a respect that was helping it to progress. Yet everything happens as if, at the very moment when Lacan is beginning to teach once again, what he chooses to emphasize is the debt that he had owed to Lévi-Strauss for 15 years. We can see that, as far as the bond between Lacan and Althusser was concerned, nothing indicates that either of them was the dupe of the debt that brought them together in 1963 and 1964. If Lacan, at the crucial moment when the problem of his excommunication was being resolved, chose not to mention the political support that Althusser had given him in order to highlight the parallels between his work and that of Lévi-Strauss, this says nothing about what the future of these parallels would be. The fate of these parallels has not yet been discussed, but all of this confirms: • • •

The strength of the bond between Lacan and Lévi-Strauss throughout these long years The power of the repression of this bond in readings of Lacan’s work, and The urgency of the need to lift this repression, which even today handicaps.

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This reading, the analysis of the symbolic filiation of Lacan’s work, and also the analysis of Lacan’s return to Freud, which was one of the most radical changes that both French and international psychoanalysis have experienced, in terms of both the theoretical and clinical dimensions of its activity and the organization of its institutions. Beyond the history of Lacan’s thought, which needs to be written without any repression of the parallels between the social sciences and his texts, it is clear that this suppression has prevented the elaboration of a true psychoanalytic anthropology. The goal of the latter would be to throw light on both the clinic of the individual case and on societies. Only this elaboration will finally enable us to take up not—or not only—the whole of Lacan’s project, but also the whole of the Freudian project at this crucial moment for the clinic. It will also enable us to analyse the social symptom, at a time when it is necessary to elaborate a knowledge of it. Yet in order to lay the foundations for this psychoanalytic anthropology, it is necessary, first, to analyse its archaeology and more precisely, to analyse what Lacan owes to the social sciences, to Durkheim—as we have already seen in my earlier work—and to Lévi-Strauss.

POSTLUDE

Making the world incomplete As soon as we show how the Name-of-the-Father helps stabilize subjective identity through the fruitfulness of the unary trait—for example, in the experience of the mirror—we can say that the subject is a function of the Other of the unary trait; or, in other words, the son of the dead father. We can see clinical evidence for this stabilizing function in the responses to the degrading of the Name-of-theFather in psychosis, where a stand-in—the delusion—.is elaborated, and in phobia, where there may be a mythic stand-in, such as little Hans’ horse. Myth and delusion emerge when the trait’s unary function fails and the body is not unified. This is why, in the seminar on identification, Lacan returns to little Hans to emphasize that the horse is produced as a signifier that is not only a defence against being captured in the mother’s world but also “a mooring point where the subject is constituted”; this is the role of the exceptional signifier or of a concatenation of substitute signifiers, such as myth or delusion. Freud theorizes this exceptional signifier as the dead father. In Lévi-Strauss, this signifier is what allows symbolic thought to 211

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operate and is given the value of zero. In Lacan, as we have seen, this signifier is the Name-of-the-Father. When we read Freud with Lévi-Strauss, it becomes easy to suggest that the dead father is the zero-value institution that allows neurotics’ symbolic thought to take place and their societies to function. Lévi-Strauss places the names of the Father—the names of the spirits of things—of these societies into a series: the mana, the orenda, etc. Lacan—and this is our thesis— adds the Name-of-the-Father of monotheistic neurotics to this list. We can see immediately that if the Name-of-the-Father is an operator that provides a mooring for the subject and for which there must always be a stand-in if it is degraded or absent, it has always had to be conceived in the plural. Yet we do not wish to leave our readers with the illusion that Lacan produced a theory of the unconscious subject where what would be found at the place of the Other—or at the place of the Names-of-the-Father—would be a solid mooring, from which the subject would derive a stable identity. This type of identity defines the sons of the dead father, those who are faithful to the divine Other, faithful to the mana or the orenda, or more generally to the spirit of things.

The lack in the other Yet Lacan is not a dupe and soon begins to emphasize the idealized value of this Other, which does not exist, as well as the fact that there is a lack in the place of the Other. In his algebra, this lack is written in 1960 as S( ) and is read as the “signifier of a lack in the Other”,140 and he says, as if with regret, “It is already significant that I had to situate here … the dead Father in the Freudian myth” (Écrits. p. 693). Lacan must therefore begin again: For my part, I will begin with what the abbreviation S( ) articulates, being first of all a signifier. My definition of the signifier (there is no other) is as follows: a signifier is what represents the subject to another signifier. This latter signifier is therefore the signifier to which all the other signifiers represent the subject—which

140 In “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious”, in Écrits, pp. 671–702.

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means that if this signifier is missing, all the other signifiers represent nothing. For something is only represented to. Now insofar as the battery of signifiers is, it is complete, and this signifier can only be a line that is drawn from its circle without being able to be counted in it” (Écrits, p. 695).

The exceptional signifier in Lacan is therefore less the signifier of the Other—and of the list of Names-of-the-Father—than that of the lack in the Other, S( ), and even that of the lack of the Other. Because of this change, Lacan—in his theoretical development—must now return to his Lévi-Straussian filiation in order to distinguish himself from it in terms that the reader can now evaluate correctly: Let us observe carefully, therefore, what it is that objects to conferring on my signifier S( ) the meaning of mana or of any such term. It is the fact that we cannot be satisfied to explain it on the basis of the poverty of the social fact, even if the latter were traced back to some supposedly total fact. Claude Lévi-Strauss, commenting on Mauss’ work, no doubt wished to see in mana the effect of a zero symbol. But it seems that what we are dealing with in our case is rather the signifier of the lack of this zero symbol. This is why, at the risk of incurring a certain amount of opprobrium, I have indicated how far I have gone in distorting mathematical algorithms with my own use of them: for example, my use of the symbol, −1, also written i in the theory of complex numbers, can obviously be justified only if I give up any claim to its being able to be used automatically in subsequent operations” (Écrits, pp. 695–696).

Lacan’s logic is relentless. At the moment when he distinguishes himself from his filiation, he also exhibits it. Yes, he states in 1960, there is an exceptional signifier: “It is … unpronounceable, but its operation is not, for the latter is what occurs whenever a proper name is pronounced. Its statement is equal to its signification” (Écrits, p. 694), like the name of the Hebrew God. Yes, there is a signifier without which “all the other signifiers represent nothing”— as in psychosis, where the Name-of-the-Father is foreclosed. Yes, there is a “trait”: the unary trait, without which subjectivity would drift and the unity of the body would be fragmented. Yes, there is

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an exceptional signifier that allows symbolic thought to operate, as Lévi-Strauss had already written in 1950. Yet Lacan, unlike Lévi-Strauss, does not give a zero value to the signifier that has been uncovered by structural analysis, for what is in question is not the dead father any more than the mana or the terms that are similar to it; instead, it is their absence, which is covered up by the “false window” of the ego ideal, whose consistency nonetheless engenders certain subjective truths. From now on, this exceptional signifier is to be given not a zero value but the imaginary value brought by the theory of complex numbers: i  −1. Lacan borrows this theory from the 16th-century Italian theorists of algebra, such as Gerolamo Cardano who, in inventing imaginary numbers, provided methods of calculation that obtained results that were true, even if they remained “mysterious”. Thus Lacan can indicate the way in which the truths of the unconscious subject—its identifications—turn out to be, at least in part, so many functions of an ego ideal that is incomplete or of a signifier of the incompleteness of the Other, S( )  −1, without which the ordinary neurotic cannot function.

Lacan as a critic of Lévi-Strauss Thus, at the same time that he believes that he is going beyond LéviStrauss—at the risk of “disgrace”—Lacan confirms that there is, for him, a risk whose religious nuance is obvious, but he also and especially confirms that Lévi-Strauss’ work had functioned for him, at least until then, as a sort of quilting point. Without it, neither his return to Freud nor the Name-of-the-Father could be understood; the latter, indeed, was nothing other than a regional, monotheistic version of Lévi-Strauss’ exceptional signifier. In 1960, Lacan maintains the notion of an exceptional signifier, but by writing it in a new way, as the signifier of the lack in the Other, he separates himself from the thinker who has influenced him so deeply; in doing so, he does not fail to note the element of anxiety involved not only in telling the Other of this separation, but also in signifying that the Other is lacking. What is included in this anxiety is, in more general terms, the irreducibility of the lack in the Other. The risk of disgrace may give this subjective rectification a religious aura, thus demonstrating the power of the transference that had bound him to Lévi-Strauss. Yet in an act that designates

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that “Moses’ tomb is as empty for Freud as Christ’s was for Hegel” (Écrits, p. 693), he opts for excluding the “sham[s]” or lures, an exclusion that, according to the Freud of 1937, places the love of truth at the very heart of the analytic relation.141 The critical rereading of Lévi-Strauss’ texts can begin. A new period opens up in the less complete universe that contains the S( ). Lacan will even go to the point of criticizing a naïve materialism that makes Lévi-Strauss see a “doublet” between the structures of thought, the brain, and even of the world (in Seminar X, L’angoisse (Anxiety), 1962–1963).142 He shows his students how social exchange

141

Sigmund Freud, Analysis Terminable and Interminable, (1964, p. 247). “If we have approached what is in question in Lévi-Strauss’ The Savage Mind, it is to mark the sort of progress constituted by the use of psychoanalytic reason, inasmuch as it responds precisely to the gap where more than one of you are, for the moment, stuck: the one shown by Claude Lévi-Strauss throughout his development, when he creates an opposition between what he calls analytic reason and dialectical reason[.] The first stage is that there is the world. Analytic reason, to which Lévi-Strauss tends to give the primacy, concerns the world as it is. With this primacy, he, gives it a homogeneity that is quite curious, when all is said and done; this homogeneity is what scandalizes and troubles the most lucid among you. You cannot fail to discern that this allows for the return of what could be called a primary materialism (my emphasis). When this discourse is pushed to its limits, the very play of structure, of the combinatory, which Lévi-Strauss articulates so powerfully, links up with the structure of the brain itself and even of matter, and would represent, in the terms of 18th-century ‘materialism’, only its doublet, not even its lining [doublure] .… Now the dimension of the stage—its division or lack of division from the mundane world, cosmic or not, where the spectator is—is there to give us an image of the radical dimension of the place where things—the things of the world—come to be said. All the things of the world come to be staged, according to the laws of the signifier, which we cannot in any way hold to be homogeneous with the laws of the world” (Lacan, 2004, pp. 42–44). Lacan’s criticism of Lévi-Strauss’ “primary materialism” marshals: 142

1. The Freudian discovery of the unconscious because—according to him—it brings out the rules of the “Other scene”, which prevents us from envisioning the world and “the stage on which we make the world arise” (28 November 1962) in the perspective of a simple doublet, and 2. His own version of the object of desire, the object (a), which, beginning with the seminar on identification, leads him—from the point of view of the subject—to see the world as (a)cosmic. At this moment, he therefore aggravates the gap between the world and its Freudian staging by means of another gap, one that results from the effectiveness of a real object that structures, from the “outside-world [hors-monde]” the (fantasmatic) relation between the unconscious subject and the world. Consequently, Lacan also indicates—particularly in terms of how analytic interpretation operates—the insufficiency of the theory of intra-structural induction that Lévi-Strauss had posited since 1949 as the very principle of symbolic effectiveness.

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should be reread in terms of the circulation of the phallus, which can be incarnated by women.143 This is the end of the transferential honeymoon.

The sublime excommunicant In 1964, when he was threatened with being “bartered” by his students for an affiliation with the IPA, Lacan—warned by Freud— angrily refuses to be the totemic sacrifice that they—many of whom Excommunicated the following year into the “outside-world” of analysts, he undertakes, in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, a critique of the body of work that, according to what he says in the session of 20 June 1962 of his seminar on identification, constitutes “the soul of 1962”: the work of Lévi-Strauss, who had published Totemism and The Savage Mind that year. 143 The staging of the world is carried out under the primacy of the laws of the signifier, which, as we have seen, impose their system on the imaginary register of specular identification. “This investment of the specular image is a fundamental stage of the imaginary relation, fundamental in that it has a limit. Not all libidinal investment goes through the specular image. There is a remainder … the phallus. “This means that … for anything that is located in the imaginary, the phallus appears in the form of a lack, [ ]. [T]he phallus [is] … cut off from the specular image .... “Anxiety arises when a mechanism makes something—what I will call the — appear … at the place occupied by the object a of desire” (L’angoisse, pp. 50, 51, 53). There is thus a system of social exchange whose conditions for functioning mask the circulation of the object of desire, −ϕ, by a specular equivalent: women. The phallus “incarnates the most alienating function of the subject in exchange, in social exchange[.] The male subject runs around there, reduced to being the bearer of the phallus. This is what makes castration necessary for a socialized sexuality where there are doubtless prohibitions, but also, and above all, preferences, as Lévi-Strauss has remarked. The true secret, the truth of what he makes revolve around the exchange of women, is that under this exchange, the phallus is going to fill them up. It must not be seen that the phallus is what is in question. If we see that, then there is anxiety …. In [this] field, there are two kinds of objects: those that can be shared and those that can’t …. The phallus … its equivalents … the scybala, the nipple … when they enter freely into the field where they only have to be shared, when appear in it and become recognizable … anxiety signals the particularity of their status. They are, indeed, objects that are prior to the constitution of the common, communicable, socialized object. They are what is in question in the object a” (L’angoisse, pp. 105–6, 107–8). Lacan’s invention of the object (a)—his “discovery”—separates him radically from Lévi-Strauss, for he now sees the latter as the analyst of a universal staging in which nothing is lacking; what Lacan confronts, on the other hand, is the incompleteness of the universe as the real part (of the body) which ordinarily does not enter the theatre of the world, unless it is imported into it as the cause of anxiety.

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were Catholic physicians—wanted to make of him. He found refuge at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales with the help of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who did not fail him when he needed help. At that moment, he fulminated against those who, because they were doctors and Catholics, had been ready to get rid of him: But I’m not surprised at your attitude, all of you. Nearly all of you are doctors, and there’s nothing to be done with doctors. What’s more you’re not Jews, and there’s nothing to be done with non-Jews. You all have problems with your fathers, and that’s why you join together against me. But in the future, let me tell you, I shan’t fight against Lagache and the two Favezes but against all who’ve profited by my teaching and then betrayed me. And when you get hit you can be sure who dealt the blow. And now we have nothing more to say to one another.144

What this seems to show us is that, warned by Freud, Lacan could locate the band of sons as they advanced, armed with the totemic threat. He flew into a rage and decided not to give the seminar on the Names-of-the-Father—not in reaction, fundamentally, to the Jewish analysts of the IPA, whose “fault” would have been not to have died in the Nazi extermination camps. He was reacting, instead, to the Catholic psychoanalysts who, in his opinion, had betrayed him because of their relation to the father, and to whom he indicated drily that that he had nothing more to say to them.145 Nothing, and especially not what he wanted to tell them in his seminar on the Names-of-theFather, which would never be given by the man who saw himself as a sort of sublime excommunicant or as a Jew among Jews.

144

Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, p. 256. This is the argument of Erik Porge, who concludes that “the ‘people’ whom Lacan designates as having prevented him from speaking about the Name-of-the-Father are the Jewish analysts of the IPA, who had escaped from the concentration camps”. Les noms du père chez Jacques Lacan, p. 130. 145

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Malinowski, B. (1927). Sex and Repression in Savage Society. London: Routledge, 2001. Miller, J.-A. (Ed.). (1976–1977). La communauté psychanalytique en France. Supplément à: Ornicar? no 7 & 8. Paris: Navarin. Miller, J.-A. (1976). La scission de 1953. Paris: Navarin. Mauss, M. (1922). The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. W.D. Halls (Trans.). London: Routledge, 2002. Ogilvie, B. (1987). Lacan, la formation du concept de sujet: 1932–1949. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Porge, E. (1997). Les noms du père chez Jacques Lacan: ponctuations et problématiques. Ramonville Saint-Agne, France: Erès. Reich, A. (1951). On Counter-Transference. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 32: 25–31. Roudinesco, E. Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925–1985. J. Mehlman (Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Roudinesco, E. Jacques Lacan. B. Bray (Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Saussure, F. de. (1915). Course in General Linguistics. C. Bally, A. Sechehaye, & A. Riedlinger (Eds.), R. Harris (Trans.). LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1986. Scubla, L. (1998). Lire Lévi-Strauss: le déploiement d’une intuition. Paris: Jacob. Séchehaye, M.A. (1950). Journal d’une schizophrène; auto-observation d’une schizophrène pendant le traitement psychothérapeutique. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Todorov, T. (2002). Devoirs et délices: une vie de passeur. Paris: Seuil. Vanier, A. (1998). Lacan. S. Fairfield (Trans.). New York: Other Press, 2000. Vernant, J.P. (1974). Myth and Society in Ancient Greece. J. Lloyd (Trans.). New York: Zone, 1990. Zafiropoulos, M. (1996). Tristesse dans la modernité: de l’idéal pharmacologique a la clinique freudienne de la mélancolie. Paris: Anthropos. Zafiropoulos, M. (2001). Lacan et les sciences sociales: le déclin du père, 1938–1953. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Zafiropoulos, M., et Assoun, P.-L., L’Anthropologie psychanalytique, Ed. Anthropos/Economica, Paris, 2002. Zafiropoulos, M. (2003). Lacan et Lévi-Strauss, ou, Le retour à Freud, 1951– 1957. Paris: Presses universitaires de France.

INDEX

Abraham, Karl 5, 87 Aetiological equation 23–24 Althusser, Louis 199–205 formulations 205 judgement 205 suggestion 204 American ethnologists 5 American Psychoanalytic Association 122 Androcentrism 176 Anglo-American analysts 10, 117 activity of 31 Anglo-American disciples 62 Anglo-American ego analysis 34, 36 Anzieu, Didier 32 Anzieu, Marguerite 32 Association de psychanalyse de France (APF) 32 Balint, Michael, object relations in transference 87

Bauer, Otto 97 Benedict 5 Boas, Franz 5 Bolk, Louis 5 Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel 20, 30 Bororo’s society 171 Braudel, Fernand 207 nobility 208 Budapest Psychoanalytic Society 24 Caledonian society 139 Cardano, Gerolamo 214 Catholic physicians 217 Character kernel 4 Chemama, Roland 149 Civilisation and its Discontents 22 Claudel, Paul 6, 129 Coûfontaine trilogy 52 Comintern militant 127 Communist International 125, 127

225

226

INDEX

Contemporary neurosis 4 Counter-transference, theory of 129 Cryptogram 36–37 Czech communist party 126 Das Unbehagen in der Kultur 37 Delay, Jean 19 Delrieu, Alain 53, 123 Developmental psychology 60 Diachronic determination 83 Dolto, Françoise 118, 175 Dora analysis 99 attachment to Frau, K. 100 case 97–101 emblem of the feminine condition 101–107 fate 102 identifications 101 idolization of Frau, K. 102 malaise 101 root identification 106 symptoms 106 theory of the mirror stage 103 unconscious mission 105 unconscious 103 Dor, Joël 92, 196 Doxa, ideals and repression of Lévi-Strauss 193–199 Duclos, Denis 7 Durkheim, Emile 158 influence on Lacan 15 sociology of 5 theory of 1938 43 theory of the contraction 7 understand the theory of Lacan 7 work 7 Durkheimian period 6, 9, 18 École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) 14

École normale supérieure (ENS) 14 Effectiveness of symbols 45–46 Ego and resistance, defence of 30 defence 30 ideal in transference 65–67 identification 37 sufferings 87 transcendence 82 Egyptian monuments 133 Egyptologists 135 Egyptology 133 Empty-eyed child 74 Epistemological murder 194 Epistemology 6, 30, 94 Ethnographers 137 Ethnology 148 False window 214 Father-complex, motor of resistance 22 Favez-Boutonnier, Juliette 118 Febvre, Lucien 207 Federn, Paul 10 Fenichel, Otto 10 Ferenczi, Sandor 5, 24 First World War 153 Flacelière, Robert 208 Floating signifier 158 Foucault, Michel 37 French analytic community 117 French analytic scene 11 French anthropology 17, 64, 157 French ethnology 105, 156, 196 French Language Psychoanalytic Organization 77 French Philosophical Society 105 French Psychoanalytic Society (SFP) 11, 13, 118 liberal and democratic spirit 119 Freud, Anna 10, 31 analysis 39–40

INDEX

effectiveness of symbols to Claude Lévi-Strauss 45–46 fault 38–41 Oedipus complex 41 reminder of the dead father 39–41 symptomatic contradictions 63 Freudian analyst 29 analysts desire 116 clinic of hysteria 101 clinic 176 discovery of the unconscious 131, 215 figure of subjectivity 74 heritage 68 language 137 maturity 200 Oedipus complex 163, 173 of primary narcissism 5 orientation 24 sense of the word 73 solution 69 super-ego 65, 71 theory 6 truth effect 114 truths 111, 116 unconscious 150–151 Freudian School of Paris 156 Freudianism 187 Freud, Sigmund 4 abandonment of hypnotic suggestion 20 admirable analysis 168 ambition 24 and resistance 20–22 Anglo-American heirs 13 assumptions 102 attributing desire 76 authoritarian personality 30 authority 26 “biases” 105

227

concept of equivalence with anthropology 132 concepts and analyst’s desire 12 crucial question 187 death 108 dialectic 97–101 dialectical reversal 100 discovery 98, 107, 112 distance from Lacan 4–9 doctrine 26–27, 96 dream 76 ethic 6, 105–106 founding desire 12 genius 78 ideas 9 in psychoanalysis 107 inadequate conception 106 institutional use 27 liberating rupture 202 method as analyst 105 mirror stage to bouquet 56–57 myth of parricide answers 188 observation 149 optical model 76 paradigmatic cases 174 Rat Man case 105 relation to authority 27–28 resistance and discourse 34–37 right distance from 61–64 self-analysis 76 sense of discontent in culture 134 socio-historical relativism 6 strategy in treating 21 symptomatic contradictions 63 Technical Papers 19 technique 20–30 theory of dead father 102 theory of primal identifications 101, 144 two traumas 167 universalism 6

228

INDEX

Furet, François 126 Future Prospects 23 Gaufey, Guy 198 Graf, Herbert 179 Graf, Max 179 Griaule, Marcel 43 Hans, Little phobia as an individual myth 181 the mind of the tribe 182 Hartmann, Heinz 117 Hegel Phenomenology of Spirit 193 return to Freud 194 Hegelian formula 77, 91 struggle 203 Heideggerian ‘gulf’ of being” 203 Homo oeconomicus 202 Homo psychologicus 202 Horse, signifier 180 mother, then father 184 Hypochondriacal neuroses 3 Hyppolite, Jean 37, 64, 156 Ideography 133 Individual myth 169 International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) 11, 24, 115, 117–118, 200, 207, 216–217 Intrusion complex 2 Inverted bouquet, mirror stage 57 Jewish patriarchy 4 Judge Schreber 163 Juranville, Alain 196–197 Klein, Melanie 5, 175 case of Little Dick 41

Kojève, Alexandre 193 Koran 90–97 Kripke, Saul, Naming and Necessity 174 Lacanian algebra of sexual difference 175 moment 193 psychoanalysis 206 psychoanalysts 204 psychoanalytic field 8 super ego 71 theory of 1938 43 Lacan, Jacques 1951 Presentation 103, 117 anthropological influences 204 as a critic of Lévi-Strauss 214–216 authoritarian fraction 120 clinic of psychopaths 134 completely unconscious systems 137 conjectural sciences 113 connection with Lévi-Straus 157 Course in General Linguistics 196 devouring mother 65 diagnosis 27 distance from Freud 4–9 double movement of analysing 67 Durkheimian stage 15 election 118 epistemological charges against Freud 103 epistemology 6, 30, 94 exceptional signifier 213 excommunication 11–12 extraordinary clinical precision 68 formulations 4

INDEX

Freud’s dialectic 98 Freudian theory (Lacan’s point of view) 195 greatness 134 Hegelian formula 91 heuristic use of philosophical references 204 letter to Loewenstein 122–125 madness 134 metamorphosis 116 mirror stage to bouquet 56–57 needle 163 own descriptions 117 own epistemological logic 28 paternal function 183 Phenomenology of Mind 196 philosophical and linguistic references 198 philosophical references 16 philosophical sources 199 phobic object 185 position in relation to Freud 11, 28 psychoanalytic theory 106 psychoses 173 relation to knowledge 9 research 204 return to Freud 9–10, 76–82, 120, 150, 154, 193, 196, 199, 209 Rome Report 94, 104, 135 schema L 170 small boy’s phobia 186 stitching 163 subject 99 subjectivity 94 symbolic register 91 teaching 16 The Neurotic’s Individual Myth 195 the structural study of myths 173 the young 1–4

229

thought 95, 209 transference to Freud 25–30 transferential rectification 57 Lacan’s work, critical archaeology of 7 Lagache, Daniel 118, 122 Language 93 Lanzer, Ernst 151 neurotic organization 169 Leenhardt, Maurice 138 Lefort, Rosine 61, 64 Robert case 64 Lenin’s Left-wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder 200 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 10, 18, 45–49 concept of symbolic effectiveness 57 “Do Dual Organizations Exist?” 165 epistemological ambition 168 exceptional signifier 214 filiation 213 formalized myths 185 formulations 144 ideals and repression of 193–199 ideas 150 Lacan as a critic 214–216 Lacan’s transference to 171 mirror stage to bouquet 56–57 name-of-the-father 189–190 question for 176–178 research 199 sources 174 striking formulation 171 structural analysis of myths 186 Structural Anthropology 165, 168, 170, 172 structural study of myths 167 thanks to 206–209 theory of symbolic function 56, 64, 71

230

INDEX

theory of the zero symbol 146 theory of unconscious 53 treatment according to 46 unconscious and Freud’s 53 vocabulary 152 work 141 work as a foundation 147 Little Hans’ phobia as an individual myth 181–182 Little, Margaret, countertransference 30–31 Loewenstein, Rudolph letter from Lacan 122–125 on Bastille Day 126 Lord, Eternal 160 Malinowski, Bronislaw 5 Masculinity 100 Maternal castration 183 Maurras, Charles 6 Mauss, Marcel 5, 44, 106, 138–139, 158, 171 Mead, Margaret 5 Méheust, Bertrand 7 Memoirs of My Nervous Illness 164 Mental structure 2 A Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams 77 Miller, Jacques-Alain 10, 199 Mirror Stage 56 imaginary alienation 112 right distance from 61–64 Rome Report 96 to bouquet 57 to inverted bouquet 71–76 Mirror stage and symbolic function 17 Mistranslation 34 Morbidness, social and clinical 4 Moscow trials 126

Nacht, Sacha 117, 122 bureaucratic power 118 medical and authoritarian 118 Name-of-the-father 158–166, 168–169, 171, 174, 186, 189–190, 195, 205, 211 as operator 159, 173 church’s 159 in Freudian myth 212 in psychosis 211 of monotheistic neurotics 212 signifier 212 solid mooring 212 Narcissism notion of 5 theory of 112 Nazi extermination camps 217 New York Psychoanalytical Society 11 Nobility 208 Oedipal drama 72, 147 formula 167 guilt 106 myth 108, 167 organization 40 parricide 179 solution 3 structure 148 subject 194 Oedipalism 4, 6, 42, 148 Oedipus complex 2–3, 5, 7, 17, 41, 57–59, 71, 102–103, 106, 112, 141–143, 148, 164, 175, 178, 183, 190, 202 super ego 71 symbolic remainder 43–46 to triad of imaginary 42 Ogilvie, Bertrand 194 On Psychotherapy 20

INDEX

Paris Psychoanalytic Society (SPP) 13, 18, 117, 121 authoritarian 119 Paternal castration 183 Phenomenology of Spirit 194 Phobia as a solution 178–180 equivalent to paternal metaphor 185–187 formula for 185 mythic formation 185 name of the father 157 Poetic metaphor 50 Post-Freudians 111 resistance to Freud 30 Prague trials 125–128 Pre-oedipal phase 178 Presentation on Transference 17, 97–101, 104, 109, 176 Psychoanalysis completely unconscious systems 137 crucial problems of 6 current problems of 129 dead father of 195 definition of 130 foundation for 129 foundations of 149 origin of 205 psychologizing orientation for 97 resistance to 22, 30 scientific character of 206 speech and language in 129 Psychoanalytic anthropology 104 interpretation of dreams 133 notes 163 realization of subject 130–132 society 5 resonances and time 151–156

231

Psychoanalytic field symbol and language as structure and limit 132 Psychosis and phobia, name of the father 157 Psychopathies 4 Quasi-religious sense 66 Racine’s tragedy 160 Rat Man case 105, 151 to Little Hans 158–165 Reich, Annie 10, 31 Reich, Wilhelm 11 Repression 85 Resistance and discourse 34–37 Resonances of interpretation 151–156 Rigid designator 174 Rimbaud’s ideal 50 intuition 50 Roman Catholicism, capital 144 Romance-language psychoanalysts 97 Rome Report 36, 92–93, 96, 126, 129, 142, 150, 153, 188 Root identification 60 Roudinesco, Elisabeth 207 Sachs, Hans 87 Saussure, Ferdinand de, Course in General Linguistics 193 Saussurian algorithm 198 Schizophrenia treatment 49 Schreber, Daniel Paul 163 Scubla, Lucien 168 Séchehaye, Marguerite 49 Second World War 117 Sexual fetishism 3 signification 84

232

INDEX

Shamanism 50 Sixteenth International Congress of Psychoanalysis 45 Slansky, Rudolph 126 Social Structures of Central and Eastern Brazil 170 Speech, empty and full 130–132 Stalinist “prosecutors” 125 Structural Anthropology 165 Structuralist theory 159 Subjective causality of group discontents 110–111 Subjectivity 94, 110–111 empty speech and full speech in 130–132 psychoanalytic realization of 130–132 theoretical bases of 1955 111–115 tidings brought to group 115–116 time of 151–156 Subject message, inverted form 93 Super-ego 5, 25, 65–68, 187–188 exceptional signifier 188 Lacanian 25 new conception 6 rule of 64 Supplementary symbolic content 158 Symbol and language as structure and limit 132 Symbolic effectiveness 50, 75 function 17 interpretation 50 manipulation 50 organization 75 super-ego 74 Symbolic system of symptom 82 Synchronic determination 83

The Effectiveness of Symbols 58, 169 The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense 31 The Elementary Structures of Kinship 18, 142, 170 The Freudian Subject 20 The Future of an Illusion 22, 126 The Future Prospects of Psychoanalytic Therapy 21 The Gift 89 The Interpretation of Dreams 46, 58–59 The Neurotic’s Individual Myth 26, 56, 117, 153, 168, 171 in 1953 158 The Passing of an Illusion 126 Titoism 126 Todorov, Tzvetan 168 Totem 65–67 Totem and Taboo 179, 187–188 Transcendence of imaginary 17 Transference 68 nature of 97 Trotskyism 126 Unconscious message 104 Unconscious subjectivity 36, 59 real mutation 195 Unconscious systems, completely 137 Unconscious treasure 36 Utilitarianism, superficial 139 Vandermersch, Bernard 149 Vernant, Jean-Pierre 168, 173 Vienna Neuropsychiatric Clinic 107 Viennese crisis 3 Jewish family 151

INDEX

Wahl, Jean 105, 166, 168 Collège de philosophie 198 Wallon, Henri 5 experiment 61 Weaning complex 2–3 Winnicott, D. W. 175 Wolf child 66, 70–71, 73, 86, 88, 96

Zafiropoulos, Markos 8, 91 Zero institutional forms 165 Zero-symbol 145, 177 theory 146 Zero symbolic value 164, 174 Zero value, institutional forms of 165–174 Zionist plot 126

233