🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

Hello, my good friends, so here we are again!

I believe there is no reason to artificially interrupt our remarks or our dialogues, even within the different series in which they are continued. To put it simply, I consider that we can, without any artifice, aim to understand together what was introduced last evening, not only regarding the problems of dialogue but also regarding a problem—undoubtedly not without reason—addressed in Platonic dialogues that we can regard as part of the chain of what continues here as teaching.

This can be done without artifice because, as some of you mentioned last evening, who wished for this type of lecture and particularly for these clarifications on the function of Platonic dialogue, it would not have been possible to exhaust all questions, reverberations, and reflections last night, given the late hour we had reached.

I believe, precisely, that the purpose of such lectures, aptly called “extraordinary,” is to serve as a sort of crystallization point for everyone, opening up all sorts of avenues, raising unresolved questions that linger at the edges and limits of what we pursue here as a central thread concerning what fundamentally is, what should be, and what becomes of our technique.

That is why, before beginning our discussion this year, titled The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in Psychoanalytic Technique, and addressing the question of what the ego is, what it means to speak of the ego—which could take us very far—we will begin from that distance, so to speak, and then proceed toward what is central.

And this will also bring us back to that distance, for it is not only in Freud’s theory and psychoanalytic technique that the ego holds significance. Indeed—and you will see—it is precisely this complexity that makes the problem intriguing. Over the centuries, the concept of the ego has been shaped in a specific way, both by those we call “philosophers”—with whom we are not afraid to engage and whom we are not reluctant to entangle ourselves with—and, as you will increasingly see, by how defensible this position is. It has also been shaped within common consciousness. In short, there are certain notions and functions of the ego, I would say, that predate Freud’s discovery and revolution, and these must be taken into account.

We must take them into account insofar as they are not negligible and exert influence on something—I hope to show you this—that has introduced something radically new regarding this function, this operation of the ego in Freud’s theory.

If we have spoken of a Copernican revolution concerning Freud’s theory, it must carry a meaning—a meaning we glimpsed during last year’s discussions, which, of course, form the foundation and starting point for what we will continue this year. This foundation will naturally be reexamined and almost entirely reintegrated into the new phase of work that we are undertaking this year.

This theory serves as our guiding thread in these presentations. Let us not forget that this is a “seminar of texts,” and as such, it is entirely legitimate for the texts concerning the theory to serve as our central thread. Nonetheless, what we will observe is precisely a sort of conflict, a kind of attraction exerted by this pre-analytic notion—let’s call it that for convenience, shall we?—as we need to orient ourselves. I am today outlining the broad strokes of the plan for our work.

This pre-analytic notion of the ego, as opposed to the concept of the ego as it appears in Freud’s theory, is surprising in that it exerts such an attraction, even a subduction, subversion, of the notion, precisely because Freud’s concept of the ego is both revolutionary and striking, which it undoubtedly is.

These new perspectives should abolish the previous ones. If that is the case, how can it be that something emerges—something whose reality and effectiveness we will demonstrate in the second part of our discussions—that reveals itself in the course of theoretical exposition, through the handling of terms, and simultaneously in practice, since theory and practice are inseparable? This emergence marks a shift in the direction of psychoanalytic practice.

This peculiar phenomenon leads to a dual result: on the one hand, the reemergence of a theoretical notion of the ego that is in no way aligned with the equilibrium of Freud’s theory, which introduces something new to our understanding of humanity; on the other hand, an attempt—openly acknowledged, as it is said—to absorb psychoanalytic knowledge into what is called “general psychology,” which, in this case, simply means pre-analytic psychology.

This remains, as I have already said, both enigmatic and, after all, not overly alarming if we simultaneously grasp that it pertains to a backdrop far beyond a mere conflict of notions between, let us say, retrograde or progressive schools—between Ptolemaics and Copernicans. It extends much further and resonates with a deeper layer that interests us greatly, insofar as the question is whether or not there exists a tangible and effective complicity between a specific handling of human relations—liberating, demystifying, as in analysis—and something entirely concrete, which we might call, if you wish, a fundamental illusion of human experience. Let us at least confine ourselves to a specific realm of modern human experience, the contemporary individual, as they conceive themselves at a semi-naïve, semi-elaborated level, shaped by a medium of culturally accepted, diffuse notions.

It is indeed about a certain belief of man that he is constituted in such and such a way, in this ambiguous state between something he may believe to stem from a natural inclination and something else that is taught to him from all sides within a certain state of civilization. The question is whether a technique which, quite clearly—at its inception, in its origins, in its source, in its discovery, as it emerged from FREUD—transcends this kind of, I repeat, illusion, this belief that concretely operates in the subjectivity of individuals. The question is whether it will allow itself to quietly slip away, abandoning what was momentarily revealed to it as a means of surpassing this kind of common illusion, or whether, on the contrary, it will manifest anew—and in a way that renews it—its distinctiveness.

And it is here that we can see the usefulness, the function, of referring to certain works of a particular style. I highlighted last evening, in the few words I spoke following Mr. KOYRÉ’s lecture, what could be drawn especially from the example he took from Platonic dialogue, namely what is emphasized in the Meno. And, transforming the equations of Meno, I pointed out that we could express this as something we might call the function of truth in its nascent state—that is, at the precise point where it is tied and bound into knowledge. This knowledge itself, for some reason, must possess a certain inertia of its own, which causes it to lose some of the virtue from which it initially began to crystallize as knowledge, since this knowledge displays an evident propensity for that kind of degradation called a misunderstanding of its meaning.

Nowhere is this more evident than in psychoanalysis…
and that it is in psychoanalysis where this is most evident to us contemporaries should, in itself, already serve as an indication of the truly elective and privileged position psychoanalysis occupies in a certain progression of human subjectivity as such.
This sort of peculiar ambiguity, which, if you will, we see at the origin…
although one is never entirely at the origin, let us take PLATO as the origin, in the same way one speaks of the origin of coordinates.
This peculiar ambiguity, which we saw yesterday expressed in the Meno…
which we could just as well have observed in the Protagoras, which was not discussed—I do not know if some of you read it alongside the Meno, but I emphasize that this is something worth doing; you will find it enjoyable.
This sort of ambiguity reveals that at the precise moment when Socrates inaugurates—let us say within human subjectivity—this sort of style from which the notion of knowledge emerged…
of knowledge as tied to certain requirements of coherence, which I cannot stress enough as being a prerequisite for any subsequent progress of science as experimental. We will ultimately need to define what this transition signifies, this kind of autonomy science has taken with the experimental domain. But you will see, we will arrive at rather peculiar conclusions.

Thus, whether it is at the very moment when Socrates inaugurates this sort of new being, so to speak, in the human world—what I define here, and we will increasingly clarify what I mean by it, as a subjectivity, which could also, in a certain sense, be expressed within our [analytic] perspective. Naturally, at that time, it was not yet possible, but I simply want to indicate the equivalence of certain terms—that at this very moment, SOCRATES perceives something:

• that what is, in sum, most precious, the ἀρετή (areté), the excellence of human being and the ways to attain it, cannot be transmitted by science;
• that already there arises a sort of decentering between a certain path toward which human understanding is directed and something that is deeply related, since it is from this virtue that this path opens, is inaugurated;
• but that this very virtue remains, as for its transmission, its tradition, its formation, outside the field opened by knowledge.

This is something—admit it—that merits pausing a little longer than simply thinking that in the end, everything will work out. Because ultimately, if one is clever, one should realize that Socrates speaks ironically, and still, one must believe that, sooner or later, science will catch up with this by some sort of retroactive action. But it is not settled, it is not judged: until now, nothing in the course of history has proven it to us.

What has happened since SOCRATES? We should realize that many things have occurred, particularly the emergence of the notion of the ego. When something comes to light, when something emerges, as we say, one of the most peculiar properties offered by our experience is that we can notice this: when something new arrives, another order in the structure…
which, in certain cases, even our imagination, at least as it is currently constituted, forces us to admit as having, at one point, been new, arisen from nothing…
we can simultaneously observe:

• that from that moment, it has existed for all eternity;
• that from the moment it emerges, it creates its own perspective into a past as though it could never not have been there.

If you think about the origin of language, it is clear that we must imagine there was a moment when people on this earth first began to speak, and we thus admit that there was an emergence. But from the moment this emergence is grasped in its proper structure, it becomes absolutely impossible for us, within language, to speculate otherwise than with symbols that could always have been applied to what preceded this emergence of language.

What appears as new always seems to extend perpetually, indefinitely, beyond what precedes or follows. We cannot abolish a new order through thought. This applies to anything you wish, including the origin of the world. Why would we not equally apply this observation to the fact that we can no longer, of course, avoid thinking with this register of the ego that we have acquired throughout history, to all that is given to us as a trace, as a sign of the expression of man’s speculation about himself in far earlier times when the notion of the ego, as such, was neither promoted nor highlighted in dialectics?

It seems, to put it plainly, that SOCRATES or his interlocutors must, like us, have implicitly held this kind of central function, which the ego must have exercised among them—a function analogous to what it occupies in not only these reflections but also this kind of “spontaneous apprehension” that we possess:

• of our thoughts,
• of our inclinations,
• of our desires,
• of what belongs to us and what does not,
• of what we accept as expressing our personality or what we reject as somehow parasitic.

All this psychology, after all, is very difficult for us to think of as anything other than an eternal psychology. But are we so sure it is so? The question is at least worth asking. And in truth, once it is posed, it encourages us to take a closer look at whether, indeed, there are certain moments when we can capture the emergence of this notion of the ego in its nascent state. And then, we will see:

• that we do not need to go very far,
• that the documents are still quite fresh,
• and that, after all, it does not date back much further than this still recent era in which so many advances have occurred in our lives.

When we read the Protagoras, we are immensely amused when someone arrives in the morning at SOCRATES’ place:

• Hey!
• Come in! What’s going on?
• Protagoras has arrived!

This is a story. And what amuses us is that here, as if by chance, PLATO tells us that all of this takes place in pitch darkness. This detail has never been emphasized by anyone; it can only interest people like us, who, for the past 75 years—less, even—are accustomed to turning an electric switch. Someone arriving in the morning does not do so in the dark. But it’s of the same kind.

If you look at literature, of course, you will say: “This is typical of people who think,” but people who do not think must have always, more or less spontaneously, had a notion of their ego, to some degree, and assigned it the function we now attribute to it.

I would say: “What do you know about that?” Because you are precisely on the side of those who think—or at least you come after those who have thought about it. So, let us try to look more closely and open the question instead of settling it so easily. Moreover, this question has been the subject of quite serious concerns.

There is a man named DESCARTES, the one who provides such solid “peace of mind” to the type of people we might define, conventionally, as “dentists.” Let’s say dentists are very confident in the order of the world because they think that Mr. DESCARTES, in his Discourse on the Method, addressed the laws and processes of clear reasoning. It suffices to read it—nothing simpler. Once you have read Discourse on the Method, you have understood everything.

It is curious that just by taking a slightly closer look, one sees that among those who have interpreted Cartesian thought, no one agrees. The mystery remains intact. Well, the dentist doesn’t notice this…
Anyway, this man said, “I think, therefore I am.” A curious thing, this step, which was absolutely fundamental for the entire path of thought, for a new subjectivity, turns out, upon closer examination, to pose a problem that might appear to some as needing resolution through the simple acknowledgment of a kind of sleight of hand. Because, in truth, even though it is true that consciousness is transparent to itself and apprehends itself as such, even after thorough examination of the issue, it becomes clear that this “I,” which is given in consciousness, is hardly presented differently from an object. That is to say, if consciousness is transparent to itself, the “I” is not, for all that, more transparent to it.

In other words, consciousness provides no more information about this “I” than it does about any object when an object is presented to consciousness. This apprehension or grasp of consciousness does not reveal to us, any more than for any other object, the properties of what is at issue. Indeed, if this “I” is delivered to us as a sort of immediate datum in the act of reflection that reveals consciousness’s transparency to itself, nothing at all indicates to us that, for all that, the entirety of this reality—and it is already saying a lot to conclude with a judgment of existence—is thereby exhausted. This has led, as you know, philosophers to arrive at an increasingly purely formal notion of this ego as given in consciousness, and ultimately to a critique of this function of the ego as exercising a kind of “propriety” or “instance,” if you will, which is precisely the sign that this ego, as a reality, as a “substance,” appears.

This is something that thought, the progress of thought, temporarily turned away from, at least provisionally, as a myth to be subjected to strict scientific critique, and engaged in an attempt to consider it as a pure mirage. Whether this was legitimate or not matters little; this is where thought embarked—with LOCKE, with KANT, and later with the entire path of psychophysicists, who, after all, merely took up the baton—for other reasons, of course, with other starting points and premises. In truth, they tended to cast the greatest suspicion on this function of the “I,” which, moreover, appeared, in light of a certain critique of myth as such, to warrant our utmost scientific caution regarding anything referred to as the ego. This was because it implicitly perpetuated, more or less, that kind of substantialism involved in the religious notion of the soul as substance, at least imbued with the properties of immortality.

Is it not striking to observe that, by an extraordinary sleight of hand in history, having for a moment entirely abandoned this progress…
let us call it “progress,” without any other connotation than this process viewed, in a certain tradition of thought’s elaboration, as progress…
having abandoned it momentarily in the entirely subversive perspective brought forth at a certain point by FREUD, which essentially consists of this…
I think I can state it briefly, as it results and emerges from all we developed last year…
if we can rightly use the term “Copernican revolution” for what FREUD discovered, it is indeed in this sense: that, at a certain moment—which, I repeat, is not itself eternal.

Just as, after all, what is not Copernican is not entirely univocal—men did not always believe the earth was a kind of infinite plateau. This is because they had always seen it as a plateau with forms and limits, possibly resembling a lady’s hat or anything else you like; there were various shapes. But they had the idea that there were things down there, below—let’s say at the center—and the rest of the world was built above.

Well, it is the same thing. We do not know exactly what a contemporary of SOCRATES might have thought of his ego, but there must have been something central there. It does not seem that SOCRATES doubted this. However, it was probably not shaped—as I will explain why—as an ego like ours, since a date we can place around the mid-16th to early 17th century. But it was there, central and foundational.

The Freudian discovery has exactly the same decentering significance as COPERNIC’s discovery. The Freudian discovery is essentially this: the assertion, in its most striking form, already inscribed—because poets, who do not know what they are saying (it is well known, and it is true), still always state things before anyone else—expressed in the famous formula by RIMBAUD in the Letter of a Seer: “I is another.”

Naturally, don’t let yourself be dazzled by this, don’t start spreading in the streets that “I is another”; it will have no effect, believe me. Furthermore, as I’ve told you, it doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean anything because, first, we need to understand what it means to say “another,” but still, it has an impressionistic value, and it does say something nonetheless. Regarding the subject of “the other,” you understand, here as well, don’t imagine that merely throwing this term around will get you anywhere.

One of our colleagues—an old colleague of ours—brought this to us as a truth:
for someone to undergo analysis…
this former colleague was someone who had dabbled a bit in Les Temps Modernes, the journal, and in what we call “existentialism,” and he brought to us, as a bold claim—one of those you bring into analytic circles—that the foundational basis of the analytic relationship was this: the subject had to be capable of apprehending the other as such.

Quite a clever one, that fellow! But one might have asked him:

• “What is this other?”
• “What do you mean by that: the other?”
• “In what capacity: as their likeness, their neighbor, their ‘ideal ego,’ a basin—aren’t all these others?”

So, it would be necessary to clarify which “other” we are talking about.

For now, I am speaking to you about RIMBAUD’s formula, as a way of pursuing, through Freud’s work, Freud’s theory, what it brings in an extremely elaborate and coherent manner. And the unconscious is strictly something that does not mean anything other than this, namely:

• that it is something that completely escapes a certain circle of certainties, which is precisely that within which man, as far as he can go, recognizes himself as ego,
• that outside of this field, there exists something that literally has every right to express itself as “I,” and that it demonstrates this right in the very act of coming to light, of expressing itself as “I.”

This is precisely what is least recognized within this field called “the field of the ego.” It is precisely this that has the utmost right—and demonstrates it in fact, through analysis—to formulate itself as properly being the “I.” It is in this register, expressed in this way, that what Freud teaches us, what he reveals to us about the unconscious, takes on its significance and distinctiveness.

And if he expressed this by calling it “the unconscious,” it led him to genuine contradictiones in adjecto, that is, to speak of “thoughts”—he himself says it: “sit venia verbo” [pardon the expression]—and he constantly apologizes for it—of “unconscious thoughts.” All of this is so cumbersome because he was compelled—by the perspective of language, dialogue, and communication, in the era when he began to express himself—he was compelled to start from the idea that what is fundamentally of the order of the ego is also of the order of consciousness. But this is not certain!

This is due to a certain… a certain progress in philosophical elaboration at that time, which specifically equated ego = consciousness. Everything that can be read through Freud’s work, as progress in his experience and elaboration of what he describes, increasingly converges on the notion that, ultimately, consciousness must be something entirely specific in its register. But he doesn’t reach it: the more he advances in his work, the less he manages to locate consciousness; the more he admits that it is unlocatable. Everything increasingly organizes itself into a certain dialectic where the “I”—distinct from the ego, implicitly—structures the theory, as we shall also see, but less and less can consciousness be located anywhere. Ultimately, Freud concedes defeat and says there must be conditions there that escape us, and the future will tell us what they are.

This year, we will try to glimpse how we can, within Freud’s functional framework, ultimately situate consciousness. You will see that this will pass, will descend, into aspects that, I believe, for some, will be clarifying, and for many of you, rather unexpected.

But in the end, what happened in this sort of eruption with Freud, of revolutionary new perspectives in the study of subjectivity—let’s call it individual subjectivity—was precisely the demonstration that the subject is not conflated with the individual. And I emphasize and return to this: this distinction, which I first presented to you on the subjective level, is also…
and perhaps this, ultimately, is the most decisive step from the scientific perspective of Freud’s experience…
graspable on the objective level.

What Freud brings us—which is not sufficiently emphasized—is this: if we consider what, in the human animal, in the individual as organism, is presented to us objectively, we will detect:

• a certain number of properties (I refer here to behaviorists),
• a certain number of displacements,
• certain maneuvers, relations.

It is from behavior, from the organization of conduct, that we will infer the greater or lesser extent of detours of which the object we propose to ourselves—namely, this individual—is capable, in order to achieve certain objectives we define as their goals. We will imagine, therefore, the extent, if one may say, of their relations with the external world. In short, we will measure, more or less, the degree of their intelligence; we will, in sum, evaluate the level, the standard, or emphasis, measuring the refinement or ἀρετή [areté] of their species.

This is what Freud brings us. It is precisely this: the subject in question—thus, we are speaking of a human being—does not situate itself anywhere on an axis where, from a certain point, we might see, as an isolated point, the entirety, the function of the subject, as intersected by something pivotal, axial, that would mean all the subject’s elaborations, as they become more elevated, would align with what we indeed call their intelligence, their ἀρετή, their excellence, their perfection, their individuality.

Freud tells us: this is not the case! Intelligence and the subject as it functions are two different things; they are not on the same axis—they are eccentric. The subject as such, functioning as a subject, is something other than an organism that adapts, other than something that can be grasped as an individual organism with individual purposes; it is something else. It is something else, and we see it in this: for anyone who knows how to listen, all their behavior speaks—and it speaks precisely of something other than that axis we might grasp when we consider it as a function within an individual, that is, with a certain number of interests conceived in terms of individual ἀρετή. It speaks of “elsewhere”; the subject is elsewhere, and this is what “I is another” means.

For now, we will adhere to this topical metaphor: the subject is decentered relative to the individual.
Do not believe:

• that this has not, in some way, been foreshadowed by others than poets like RIMBAUD,
• that it was not already, in some way, on the margins of the fundamental Cartesian intuition of “I think, therefore I am.”

If you set aside—when reading DESCARTES—the perspective of the dentist’s lens, this will allow you to delve a little deeper into the enigmas he presents, and you will realize that it involves, somewhere, a certain deceptive God. There is clearly something here that was ectopic, the rejection of precisely what needs to be reintegrated. Ultimately, from the moment one approaches this notion of the ego, one cannot help but question whether there is some misrepresentation involved.

At the same time, certain frivolous minds began to engage in salon exercises—sometimes it is in such settings that surprising things emerge. It is also through small diversions that entire orders of phenomena occasionally appear. There was a gentleman, quite an eccentric figure, who hardly fits the classical image one might have of a person of his stature, named LA ROCHEFOUCAULD. Suddenly, he decided to teach us something peculiar, something we haven’t reflected upon enough—something he called amour-propre (self-love). It is strange that this seemed so revolutionary—not exactly revolutionary, but it was not in keeping with the spirit of the time, and even scandalous. For what, ultimately, did he say?

He emphasized that even our seemingly most disinterested activities are driven by the pursuit of glory: for instance, passionate love, or even the most secret exercise of virtue. This was something! What exactly did he say? Let us pause for a moment to understand it better. Did he literally say that we act out of self-pleasure?

This notion is very important because, as you will see, everything in FREUD pivots around it. If LA ROCHEFOUCAULD had said that, he would merely have repeated what had been taught in the schools for ages, especially… not for ages, for nothing exists for all eternity, but then again, you can see how the notion of “for all eternity” functions in this context… what seemed to have been said forever, or at least since SOCRATES: that if we define pleasure as the pursuit of our “good,” and if we remain within this abstraction, we simply bind the two notions together as being homogeneous and mutually reinforcing. It is certain that whatever one does, it is always in pursuit of one’s pleasure. The only question is: at what level do we apprehend it?

As with the human animal we just observed in its behavior?

It is a question of degree, of height, of the intelligence involved. The individual understands where their true “good” lies, and once they comprehend it, they pursue the pleasure that always results from seeking their true good.

Did LA ROCHEFOUCAULD say this? If he had, he would have said nothing different from what the school philosophers had always said. And indeed, this idea continued to be expressed thereafter. Mr. BENTHAM pushed this theory to its ultimate consequences under the title of utilitarianism, or “utilitarianism.” But that is not at all what LA ROCHEFOUCAULD emphasized. What he highlighted was that in engaging in certain disinterested actions, we imagine ourselves free from a so-called lower level of pleasure, immediate pleasure. We imagine we are going beyond it and indeed seeking a pleasure or good of a higher order or quality. But we are mistaken.

And this is what is new. It is not that LA ROCHEFOUCAULD brings us some general theory of egoism encompassing all human functions. Saint THOMAS said as much. Saint THOMAS had a notion—what one might call, technically speaking—a so-called “physical” theory of love. In modern language, this could just as well be translated as an egoistic notion. It means nothing other than this: that the subject, in love, seeks their own good. In his time, Saint THOMAS was contradicted by a certain Guillaume DE SAINT AMOUR, who pointed out that love must be something other than the pursuit of one’s own good. But in the end, he was reiterating what had been said for centuries, and as it was then elaborated, there was nothing scandalous about it.

What is scandalous is not at all that everything is subject to amour-propre. What is new, with this register of the ego as it appears from a certain historical era onward, is not that amour-propre underpins all human behavior. It is that it is deceptive, inauthentic. This is what introduces, for the first time, the distinctiveness and separation of planes that begin to open up, through a kind of diplopia, to what will appear as a real separation of planes in this ego as such—a kind of hedonism peculiar to it, which is precisely what deceives us. That is, it simultaneously deprives us of both our immediate pleasure and the satisfaction of our superiority over that pleasure.

This development continues within a certain tradition parallel to that of the philosophers—a tradition referred to as the moralists. This does not mean people specializing in morality but those introducing a certain so-called perspective of truth into the observation of precisely moral behaviors, or mores. This culminates in NIETZSCHE’s Genealogy of Morality, but it remains within this somewhat negative perspective that is strictly speaking the moralist’s perspective, namely that human behavior, as such, is behavior that is deceived, misled.

It is into this void, this bowl, that the truth FREUD reveals to us is poured. What does this mean? You are deceived, no doubt, but the truth lies elsewhere. FREUD tells us where it is. For now, it does not matter what exactly this “something” is that appears at that moment, bursts in with a thunderous noise—it is the sexual instinct, libido. What does the sexual instinct mean? What is libido, the primary process? All of this, of course, you believe you know, and so do I. But that does not mean we are as certain as we think. It must be revisited closely. That is what we will attempt to do this year.

But there is a moment, a turning point in the experience that follows this discovery, which is that this new “I” with which one must dialogue is not so easy to reach. To put it plainly, after a certain time, it refuses to respond. Literally, something emerged that came to be called a real, concrete crisis in the psychoanalytic experience.

This was glimpsed; for a time, it worked, and then it no longer worked. This is expressed by the historical witnesses of the period between 1910 and 1920, when the response to the first analytic revelations became increasingly muted. I am speaking of concrete subjects, those one dealt with. They were healed, more or less miraculously. And now, as we examine FREUD’s observations, with his striking interpretations and endless explanations, we see that it worked less and less well! It is curious. This suggests there was some reality to what I am explaining to you, namely in the existence of subjectivity as such, with the modifications it undergoes over time, due to its own causality—causality that may escape all forms of individual conditioning as such.

This relates to a dialectic specific to subjectivity, moving from one subjectivity to another. However, if we consider these conventional units—what we call subjectivity due to what occurs, due to individual peculiarities—then we begin to focus on what happens, what closes off, what resists.

How did we become interested in this? How did we approach it well? And how did we approach it poorly? That is what we hope to explore this year. What is interesting is to see where we stand.

So, where we stand…
– through a sort of curious revolution of positioning, which is truly something striking,
– through a kind of progressive cacophony that has emerged on the theoretical level,
…derives primarily from something we will try to foreground in our concerns this year, namely:
all of FREUD’s metapsychological work after 1920 has been, quite literally, misinterpreted, read in a delusional way by, let us say, the inadequate group consisting of the first and second generations after FREUD. And these individuals…
I believe I will make you sense this, show it to you clearly…
did not grasp at all what this metapsychology meant, that is, why FREUD, precisely in 1920…
just after the turning point I have just mentioned, the crisis in analytic technique…
…believed it necessary to introduce these new metapsychological notions called the Ego, the Superego, and the Id.

If we read carefully—and, of course, that is key—what he wrote, we realize there is a close link between this crisis in technique, the challenge it was meant to address, the new way in which problems presented themselves, and the invention or creation of these new so-called topical notions he introduced then. But to understand this, one must read! One must read in order; that’s preferable. When we notice that Beyond the Pleasure Principle was written before Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego and before The Ego and the Id, this should raise some questions. These questions were never asked! What was happening in 1920 was this:

Far from FREUD’s reintroductions being understood as we shall see they must be—additional notions necessary at the time to maintain the principle of the subject’s decentering, which I have been discussing as the essence of the Freudian discovery—there was a kind of rush, a stampede, a general liberation of schoolchildren:
“Oh! There it is again, the good old ego, the dear ego, the sweet little ego!”
People found themselves in familiar territory again. We reentered the realm of general psychology—and how could one not do so joyfully when general psychology is not merely a matter of academic convenience or mental habit, but precisely the psychology of everyone.

That is to say, people were delighted to once again believe that the ego was something central, and we see the latest manifestations of this in the ingenious ramblings that, for now, are coming to us from across the water…
from a certain Mr. HARTMANN, the cherub of psychoanalysis, who brings us the grand news that will allow us to sleep peacefully: the existence of the autonomous ego.

This implies that something which, since the beginning of Freudian discoveries and their implementation, was always regarded within a conflictual framework—even when the ego was considered a function in a certain relationship with reality—could never, at any point in Freudian elaboration, be conceived as anything other than something, like reality itself, achieved through struggle. Suddenly, it is returned to us as a given, to be taken for granted at the center of it all.

One wonders why something that should have become essential from that moment on becomes completely incomprehensible. What internal necessity responds to the need to say: there must be, somewhere, this autonomous ego? What does this mean?

We will attempt to examine this as well. Naturally, it must be connected to something beyond this sort of individual naivety of the subject who believes in himself, who believes he is himself—in short, a fairly common folly, though not entirely a folly, for if you examine it closely, it is part of the realm of beliefs. Of course, we all tend to believe that we are ourselves. But we are not as sure of this as we might think. Look closely:
in many circumstances, we doubt it, and without experiencing any form of depersonalization, we doubt it in very precise and particular domains.

Thus, it is not merely this naïve belief that we must revisit. This concerns a phenomenon that is, strictly speaking, sociological; that is, it involves something tied to a certain function of analysis existing:
– as a technique, more or less isolated,
– or, if you will, as a ritual,
– or, if you will, as a form of priesthood defined within a particular social context.

The question is why we are reintroducing this “transcendent reality” of the autonomous ego, which, of course, when examined closely, does not concern the reintroduction of autonomous egos:
just as in certain factories beyond the Iron Curtain, the entrance bore the inscription “Here we are more equal than elsewhere,” so too, believe me, the autonomous ego amounts to saying that, depending on the individual, this ego is more or less equal as well—with a different spelling—depending on the individuals in question. We are returning to this reification, this myth of a kind of property that implies not only that these individuals exist as such but also that, as such, some individuals exist more than others.

This implicitly contaminates, more or less, the notions of the “strong ego” and the “weak ego,” which are merely ways of evading problems—not only in terms of understanding neuroses but also in managing technique.

All of this we will examine in due course. It explains why, in parallel and correlation, we must continue to investigate and critique this notion of the ego in Freud’s theory. We will see through experience that it must have a meaning in relation to Freud’s discovery and, on the other hand, in psychoanalytic technique, where it also has certain implications tied to a particular way of conceiving, within analysis, the relationship between individual and individual. I believe I have, for today, opened the question.

I would like someone of good will, Mr. LEFÈBVRE-PONTALIS, to provide an initial reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the first work of this period (1920).

I will attempt to outline the key points of what is properly metapsychological in FREUD’s work. This does not begin in 1920 but rather at the very beginning:
– the collection on the origins of FREUD’s thought,
– letters to FLIESS,
– and the early metapsychological writings,
…and it continues in the latter part of The Interpretation of Dreams.

Between 1910 and 1920, it is sufficiently present for you to have noticed it last year, and it culminates in what can be called the final metapsychological period starting from 1920. Beyond the Pleasure Principle is the pivotal work; it is the most difficult. We will not solve all its enigmas at once, but that is how it goes.

FREUD introduces it first, before any kind of elaboration of his topography. If we wait to approach this work until we have more or less delved into or believe we have delved into the writings of the elaboration period, we can only make the gravest errors. It is striking that FREUD brought this out first. When it is set aside to be read last, the result is that, since nothing is understood, it is read even less.

This is why most analysts, when they speak of the famous “death instinct,” give up entirely. The aim is to reverse this tendency and at least begin to pose the questions about Beyond the Pleasure Principle, to at least initiate them, frame them, and make progress in various directions within FREUD’s metapsychological work.

We will return, when we conclude our cycle this year, to Beyond the Pleasure Principle.