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(All parts in English)

ANZIEU

LACAN

I do not believe at all that it is such an error for Perrier, at the end of his presentation, to have emphasized issues concerning psychosomatic disorders and object relations. The concept of the object relation has become a catchphrase by which many problems are avoided. It is not, strictly speaking, about the object in the precise, technical sense we can attribute to it, considering the level of elaboration we have reached regarding the various registers in which the subject’s relation is established.

For there to be an object relation, there must first exist this narcissistic relation of the self to the other, which, I can say, is the primordial condition for any type of objectification, properly speaking, of the external world. This is correlative, therefore, not only to naive and spontaneous objectification but also to all scientific objectification.

In other words, the approximation Perrier made—the distinction between organic functions, with some representing the relational element and others something he could not express clearly, which he contrasted with the former as interior versus exterior, falling back— or believing he could fall back—on something constantly emphasized in Freud’s theory of psychic economy—is a valid approach.

I believe he presented something accurate there but failed to express it adequately. However, the distinction in question, concerning psychosomatic reactions of the organs, operates on a completely different level. In other words, it is a matter of determining which organs can come into play in the narcissistic relation, that is, in this imaginary relation to the other, which I continually highlight as the point where the self is formed, “bilden.”

Let me provide examples. The function of looking and being looked at: here is a relation that involves an organ, the eye, to name it directly, which has an elective object and plays a structuring role in this function, which is the specular image. This is the image of the other in its special, elective relation—the image of the body proper—around which the entire imaginary structuration of the self is organized.

Now, astonishing things can happen here. I did not want to address this yesterday evening; the greatest confusion reigns over all these themes of psychosomatics. And this is why it is crucial to undertake the conceptual elaboration we are doing here, as Professor Lagache has noted very well and in a manner that raises a signal of caution: this wish for empiricism is strictly correlated with the absolutely essential requirement, without which empiricism is impossible, for an incredibly advanced conceptualization.

Indeed, no better qualification can be given to Freud’s work. Freud’s work perpetuates this linked movement, ensuring that one can progress and advance in the empirical domain only to the extent that conceptualization is constantly supported, revisited, and enriched. There are texts—open the article Drives and Their Vicissitudes, which we will begin to read. I regret not having read the text to you earlier. Today, I will read a passage:

“It is often said that a science should be based on clear and well-defined fundamental concepts. In reality, no science, even among the most exact, begins with such definitions. Scientific activity, at its true beginning, consists rather in describing phenomena, which are then grouped, classified, and organized into certain sets. But already, even in the stage of description, it is impossible to avoid applying to the material certain abstract ideas borrowed from elsewhere, certainly not derived solely from the new experience. These ideas, the fundamental concepts of science, prove even more indispensable as work on the same subject continues. At the outset, they must necessarily carry a certain degree of vagueness, and it cannot be a question of sharply delineating their content. As long as they remain in this state, their meaning can only be clarified through repeated reference to the experimental material from which they seem derived, though in reality, this material is subjected to them. Thus, they strictly possess the character of conventions, where everything depends on the fact that their selection is not arbitrary but determined by significant relations to the empirical material whose existence can be postulated even before it is recognized and demonstrated. Only through deeper study of the phenomena in question can these scientific fundamental concepts be better understood and gradually modified to make them usable on a larger scale, thereby completely ridding them of contradictions.” [Beginning of the article]

[Wir haben oftmals die Forderung vertreten gehört, daß eine Wissenschaft über klaren und scharf definierten Grundbegriffen aufgebaut sein soll. In Wirklichkeit beginnt keine Wissenschaft mit solchen Definitionen, auch die exaktesten nicht. Der richtige Anfang der wissenschaftlichen Tätigkeit besteht vielmehr in der Beschreibung von Erscheinungen, die dann weiterhin gruppiert, angeordnet und in Zusammenhänge eingetragen werden. Schon bei der Beschreibung kann man es nicht vermeiden, gewisse abstrakte Ideen auf das Material anzuwenden, die man irgendwoher, gewiß nicht aus der neuen Erfahrung allein, herbeiholt. Noch unentbehrlicher sind solche Ideen – die späteren Grundbegriffe der Wissenschaft – bei der weiteren Verarbeitung des Stoffes. Sie müssen zunächst ein gewisses Maß von Unbestimmtheit an sich tragen; von einer klaren Umzeichnung ihres Inhaltes kann keine Rede sein. Solange sie sich in diesem Zustande befinden, verständigt man sich über ihre Bedeutung durch den wiederholten Hinweis auf das Erfahrungsmaterial, dem sie entnommen scheinen, das aber in Wirklichkeit ihnen unterworfen wird. Sie haben also strenge genommen den Charakter von Konventionen, wobei aber alles darauf ankommt, daß sie doch nicht willkürlich gewählt werden, sondern durch bedeutsame Beziehungen zum empirischen Stoffe bestimmt sind, die man zu erraten vermeint, noch ehe man sie erkennen und nachweisen kann. Erst nach gründlicherer Erforschung des betreffenden Erscheinungsgebietes kann man auch dessen wissenschaftliche Grundbegriffe schärfer erfassen und sie fortschreitend so abändern, daß sie in großem Umfange brauchbar und dabei durchaus widerspruchsfrei werden.]

You see the necessity of coherent discourse. Freud is said not to be a philosopher. I am willing to accept this, but I do not know of a text on scientific elaboration that is more profoundly philosophical.

“Only then will it be time to encapsulate them in definitions. However, the progress of knowledge admits no rigidity in these definitions either. As brilliantly demonstrated by the example of physics…” [Dann mag es auch an der Zeit sein, sie in Definitionen zu bannen. Der Fortschritt der Erkenntnis duldet aber auch keine Starrheit der Definitionen. Wie das Beispiel der Physik in glänzender Weise lehrt…]

This was written in 1915.

Octave MANONNI – After GALILEO, nonetheless.

LACAN

But before EINSTEIN.

So, still with this sense of the scientific spirit, as, for example, the elaboration of Pascal’s very fine book shows us, with its perpetual reworking of concepts within experience, bearing its own intrinsic value, to the extent that it can even momentarily shatter what are called “rational frameworks.” All of this is already present.

“…the example of physics shows brilliantly that the content of fundamental concepts fixed in definitions also undergoes continuous modification. It is of a similar fundamental and conventional concept, for the moment still quite obscure, yet one we cannot do without in psychology—that of instinct, or in other words, drive—that we are going to speak.”

[Wie das Beispiel der Physik in glänzender Weise lehrt, erfahren auch die in Definitionen festgelegten « Grundbegriffe » einen stetigen Inhaltswandel. Ein solcher konventioneller, vorläufig noch ziemlich dunkler Grundbegriff, den wir aber in der Psychologie nicht entbehren können, ist der des Triebes.]

So, Perrier, you were in the hot seat. I was just saying that we missed a fundamental distinction, one that would probably have shielded your presentation from some of Valabrega’s criticisms if you had referred to it, if you had pinpointed it. In this passage from Freud, “instinct” is strictly an invention of Mme. Anne Berman. In Freud’s text, there is only mention of drive. What you missed, Perrier, is this, and I was in the middle of saying it.

When you sought a distinction, a boundary, regarding the organs involved in the psychosomatic process as you tried to define it—which, by the way, is far from encompassing everything we are presented with (if you place an epileptic in a better-regulated environment, it might happen that they have fewer seizures, etc., but that has nothing to do with psychosomatics)—you did indeed look for a criterion within those organs. You spoke of relational organs, relating to the outside, and of others. You thought they were closer to what could be considered the immense reservoir of internal excitations, of which Freud gives us the schema and the image when he speaks precisely about internal drives.

Well, I do not believe that was a good distinction. The important point is that certain organs are involved in the narcissistic relation, inasmuch as it simultaneously structures:

• The relationship of the self to the other, as I just said, the constitution of the world properly speaking, of objects,
• And then this other domain, which is the backdrop of economic considerations on libido, in that entire intermediate period of Freud’s work where libido constitutes— as I indicated sufficiently last year regarding Introduction to Narcissism—it is precisely when he introduces the essential function of narcissism and realizes that narcissism is directly involved in this economy of sexual libido that a thoroughly developed period of his libido theory begins.

I point out in passing that in Three Essays on Sexuality, the passage on libido was added later. If I recall correctly, it was around the 1920s. You might believe that the theory of libido was elaborated simultaneously with the instinctual phases. This is an illusion resulting from the later re-editions of the Three Essays.

Behind narcissism, you have, very precisely, auto-eroticism—that is to say, this mass invested with libido inside the organism, whose internal relations are, I would say, just as bordering and elusive for us. I am going to make a comparison that might not immediately deliver all its weight and meaning to you, but it aligns with what I began addressing last time, regarding what one might call entropy. I must return to this to help you grasp its full scope, analysis, and understanding.

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, it is clear that we are dealing with entropy— that is to say, the energy equivalences we can grasp concerning a living organism. In the end, we only ever truly know the metabolism, the ledger, what goes in and what comes out. What the organism assimilates through all its pathways as quantities of energy and, ultimately, when all is accounted for—muscular expenditures, efforts, excretions—what exits the mechanism. Naturally, the laws of thermodynamics are respected here. There is a degradation of energy, but only at the input and output.

Everything that happens internally—we know absolutely nothing about it, for the simple reason that we cannot measure its interaction, step by step, in the way things are measured in the physical world. The very nature of an organism is such that everything happening at one point resonates throughout all the others. Now, this places us in such conditions that we cannot possibly know what happens on the thermodynamic level.

Something not equivalent but analogous arises concerning the economy of libido— that is to say, the investments that are theoretically referred to in analysis as auto-erotic investments. This refers to the specifically intra-organic investments that undoubtedly play such a significant role in psychosomatic phenomena. The term erotization of this or that organ is precisely the metaphor most often invoked, stemming from our sense of the order of phenomena at stake, to express what is meant when one speaks of a psychosomatic phenomenon. And your distinction between neurosis and the psychosomatic phenomenon is precisely marked by this dividing line constituted by narcissism.

There are always, of course, in neurosis, defense mechanisms, inasmuch as they are tied to the properly narcissistic relation of the self to the other. This is a fundamental structure of neurosis. From there, neurosis begins. The defense mechanisms you speak of must not be discussed vaguely, as though they were homogeneous with defense mechanisms employed in a certain economic notion of illness, as reactions, for example. These defense mechanisms can be introduced in this way, but we still know a bit more about them.

Here, those in question are always more or less linked to the narcissistic relation of the self, insofar as it is strictly structured on the relationship with the other, the possible identification with the other, the strict reciprocity of the self and the other, to the extent that, in every narcissistic relationship, the self is the other, and the other is the self. And for this reason, the defense mechanisms we speak of, those that are somewhat more significant in analysis, enumerated—originally constituting the defenses of the self—in the work of Anna Freud, are important to us.

Neurosis, beyond these narcissistic structures, is always framed by the narcissistic structure.

But there are also things that happen beforehand or on another plane. Now, this other plane is not, as you said, the plane of the object relation, or as Mr. Pasche says, with a regrettable abandonment of all conceptual rigor…I say this even more confidently because he was once someone who showed more promise…if we are talking about something, it is not at all about object relation. If something is suggested by psychosomatic reactions as such, they lie outside the register of neurotic constructions.

It is not a relation to the object but something always on the limit of our conceptual elaborations, something we always think about, sometimes talk about, and which, properly speaking, we cannot grasp. Yet, it is still there, do not forget it, because I speak to you of the symbolic, of the imaginary, but there is the real. And it is not at the level of the object but at the level of the real.

François PERRIER – That is precisely what I intended to say.

LACAN

But you did not say it. Because you cited Pasche, who spoke of object relation. Now, in the libidinal economy of the tubercular patient, it is absolutely not a matter of object relation. If you place things on the plane of the object relation, you will lose yourself in relations with the maternal, primitive object—that is to say, you arrive at a kind of stalemate—as they say in chess—clinically. You will not escape it, and nothing will come of it. On the other hand, reference to the term real can, on this occasion, demonstrate its fecundity. I cannot tell you more today. It is a very important point.

François PERRIER

After citing Pasche, I believe I insisted on the fact that the psychosomatic patient had a direct relation with the real, the world, and not with the object, and that the therapeutic relation he established with a doctor—as undifferentiated as it may be—reintroduced the register of narcissism into him. And to that extent, it is this that cured him of his psychosomatic cycle, insofar as this buffer allowed him to return to a more human dimension.

LACAN

I am not saying that you said foolish things. I am saying that, from the point of view of the rigor of vocabulary, you would not have lent yourself to Valabrega’s criticisms if you had introduced the term real instead of object.

Jean-Paul VALABREGA

The reference to narcissism is fundamental; however, narcissism leads to an object relation, which is the proper body.

LACAN – I did not say that.

Jean-Paul VALABREGA

The reference to the object relation is present in an important text. In Introduction to Narcissism, Freud studied psychosomatic problems and considered the case of physical illness in that text. And in others later, he returns to it in Inhibition, Symptom, Anxiety. He does not consider only venereal diseases but even tuberculosis. He says that in physical illness, there is a narcissistic investment of an organ, of a system. In this text, it is clear that Freud, in short, does not at all fall under the criticism I directed at Perrier. It is clear that in his thought, there is no postulate regarding the dualism of interiority and exteriority. He speaks a lot about the interior and the exterior, but in his thought, there is no postulate.

LACAN

I am going to make a simple remark that will allow you to distinguish. I spoke earlier about voyeurism-exhibitionism and a drive that, ultimately, has its source in an organ, and I pointed out that it was the eye. But the object is not the eye. Similarly, in what concerns the register of sadism-masochism, there is also a source in an organic ensemble—the musculature—but everything indicates that its object, although not unrelated to this skeletal, muscular structure, is something else.

On the contrary, when it comes to these investments we can more properly call auto-erotic, we do not have the notion of this intra-organic distinction, no doubt, where source and object are opposed, where source and object are distinguished. We know nothing about it, if I may say so, but it seems that what we can conceive is precisely an investment on the organ itself. You see the difference. This is the plane of cleavage between auto-eroticism, with all the mystery it retains, almost impenetrable. This does not mean we will not make a few steps forward in the future. We will stop here, pointing out the importance of this distinction. And I will even say more: if Perrier, after the effort he has made, would kindly not immediately fall into that reaction of drowsiness and rest, which is naturally what the pleasure principle desires, but instead sustains his effort this week, he will prepare for next time this little chapter: “Drives and Their Vicissitudes.”

François PERRIER

I want to ask a question regarding these notions of interiority and exteriority. It seemed to him [Valabrega] that I had used them. I will try to make myself understood. On the one hand, I envisioned the subject as somehow enclosed within his narcissism. I used the word narcissism only at the end, and that was a mistake. I should have used it much earlier. And it is this that makes the real as real, that is, a certain form of exteriority which is the real, but which is not all forms of exteriority for the subject. In the sense that the real only appears to him through the refraction of his narcissism, and I opposed this to the neurotic’s contact with the real, which is an indirect contact. The psychosomatic patient’s contact with this exterior, this real, is not that of the neurotic. It is the real in its pure state.

I spoke of a disturbing gap in relation to the real in the psychosomatic patient, without, however, claiming to make everything concerning the neurotic something purely internal, because the neurotic has both an interiority and an exteriority, but through a third dimension or a third medium, which is narcissism. Meanwhile, I had the impression that for the psychosomatic patient, there was no dimension of narcissism and that it was a true exteriority in relation to a true interiority, due to a lack of narcissism, therefore a lack of auto-erotization, a lack of an auto-erotic use of their libido. This, fundamentally, is what I believe I meant to say. And I would like to know if [he addresses Valabrega] what you said still holds, because in that case, I did not understand it well.

Jean-Paul VALABREGA

I understand what you mean. The distinction seems difficult to maintain if one considers the progression in neuroses, from traumatic neurosis, then actual neurosis, and finally psychoneuroses. Freud himself is very embarrassed about this. On this subject, he says that traumatic neurosis remains a mystery to him. He says:

“It is very unfortunate that it has not been analyzed, that we do not have analyses available.”

In traumatic neurosis, the notion of external danger becomes imperative, predicting all hypotheses in a definite way. In traumatic neurosis, one would find characteristics quite analogous to actual neurosis. And that is where Freud left it.

This association of traumatic neurosis with the notion of external danger, which served an explanatory purpose, is not debatable. What Freud discovered about actual neurosis, which he was able to discuss with us, brought greater certainty and shows that the distinction is difficult to maintain.

LACAN – Which distinction?

Jean-Paul VALABREGA – Between exteriority and interiority.

LACAN

But at the level of the real, it cannot be maintained. The real is seamless, my dear. What I am teaching you here, where Freud converges with what we can call the philosophy of science, is that this real cannot be apprehended in any way on all levels—not only at the level of knowledge—except through the symbolic.

The real itself is absolutely seamless. Let us not hide the biases, and quite rightly, the flaws, for example, in more or less vitalist biology…in things that are momentarily appealing, even fertile, such as theories like those of von Frisch, all sorts of reciprocal holism, of correspondences in principle between an Umwelt and an Innenwelt… this is truly placing petitions of principle at the very beginning of biological investigation. Petitions of principle that may have value as moments of discussion, as experiments, as hypotheses, but are absolutely colossal in themselves.

Nothing obliges us to think such a thing, not even something as simple as these reflected relationships of living beings with their environment. This notion, in a way, this pre-established hypothesis of adaptation, even granting it all its fertility on the level of totality—I mean giving it the broadest acceptance—is a premise for which nothing indicates it is valid.

In fact, after all, we can see much more clearly that another path exists. This is what makes fertile other lines of research to which we can make all sorts of criticisms: anatomism, associationism, etc. If they are more fertile, it is because they are not that, because they move away from this hypothesis:

• They place symbolism at the forefront of human investigation, without knowing it,
• They project it into the real,
• They imagine that it is the elements of the real that come into play.

It is simply symbolism they make function in this real, which they bring into play, not as a projection, nor as a framework of thought, but as an instrument of investigation. On this level, there is no need to panic about interiority and exteriority: the real is seamless. And it is accurate to say that at the outset, in this hypothetical state of self-closure, which is assumed in Freudian theory, quite at the beginning, to be that of the subject—what does it mean to say that at that moment, the subject is everything? Do you understand?

Jean-Paul VALABREGA

It is not concerning the real that the problem arises, but concerning the distinction between:

• The apparatuses of relation with the real,
• And the non-relational apparatuses.

LACAN

The distinction lies not in terms of apparatuses but in terms of whether they are included in the narcissistic relationship or not. It is at the joint between the imaginary and the real that the differentiation takes place. In what I have said, overall, there is a reaction that consists precisely—more than it has appeared to some of you—in referring to the texts. My dear friend Jean Hyppolite—who is not here today because he is in Germany—after what I told you last time, said he had reread Beyond the Pleasure Principle. And I think he is at least as busy as most of you.

Now, it is time to think about reading it, and I believe you will all have read it by next time. It will do you good to set such a goal. In fifteen days, we will discuss it with the text in hand.

I wanted to give you a first glimpse:

• In what sense the question is framed,
• What does it mean?
• What happens beyond the pleasure principle?

What I told you last time is this: a symbolism is constituted, which is essential to all the most fundamental manifestations of the analytical field and specifically to this one: repetition. The repetition in question, as I said, is something we must conceive as being linked:

• To a circular process of the exchange of speech,
• To a symbolic circuit exterior to the subject,

which must literally be thought of as being linked to a certain group—let’s say a support group, a human agent, a support for its discourses. It is the small circle implied in what is called the subject’s destiny and which continues this circuit of discourse, in which the subject is indefinitely included until, finally, the subject understands. I curve my thought here. Naturally, you sense that it is not quite to be understood this way. But you can see that I am illustrating my thought.

A certain circuit of relationships, a certain exchange of relationships—I am concretizing this—continues, which, because it concerns both exterior and interior while being… one must represent it as a discourse that we recite as if we were everywhere with a recording device. We could isolate and capture it—something from which a considerable part, for very good reasons, escapes the subject because he does not have the said recording devices. This something that continues, returns, finds its way back, insists, comes back, always declares itself ready to re-enter the dance of interior discourse.

Now, if you like, this is also a metaphor for the subject, until it passes. Naturally, the subject can go their entire life without hearing what it is about. This is even what happens most commonly. Analysis is precisely made for this, so that he may hear, that is to say, understand in which circle of discourse he is caught, and at the same time in which other circle he is invited to enter. Are you with me?

We are going to go far back, start again from the beginning, and talk about the Project. It is a manuscript by Freud—rediscovered, unpublished by him—dated September 1895, which puts us face to face with the way Freud, before writing The Interpretation of Dreams and while he was pursuing not his self-analysis but analysis proper—in other words, while he was on the path of his discovery—already represented the psychic apparatus to himself. It is important to see this: at that time, it is inseparable from the history of Freud’s thought. And you will see that from there, illuminated by this punctuation we will make, the entire significance of his later elaborations will become clear. In other words, in light of what he initially posited, before constructing the theory of Traumdeutung, the dream machine, as far as it converges with this other machine whose schema I evoked earlier in connection with the discourse of the other—or, more precisely, the discourse of many others—you will see how he was forced to revise his primitive conceptions. This will become significant at a later stage.

Today, we are doing preparatory work: Anzieu will bring us an analysis of what is important to highlight in this Project that Freud made of psychology.

Didier ANZIEU: The Project

The Project: this concerns a manuscript included with the Letters to Fliess, which was, moreover, triggered by an encounter with the latter. Freud began drafting it on the train returning him to Vienna. He wrote it in three stages. This manuscript, of course, bears no title and had never been published before the publication of the Letters to Fliess.

It comprises three parts:

• I will speak only of the first, the general schema.
• The second is the application to psychological phenomena, particularly hysterical ones.
• The third is a return to normal psychological processes and an attempt to deepen them.

As I mentioned, the manuscript has no title. In the German edition, it was called Psychological Project for Neurologists; in the English edition, Project for a Scientific Psychology. I believe I must expand a little on the circumstances surrounding the drafting of this text to better explain it.

It is known that the works of Bernfeld, The Physiology of the German Soul by Müller, and Brück, who was Freud’s physiology professor in Vienna—all these physiologists agreed on one postulate, which they spent their lives defending, which was:

“To reduce all physiological and psychological phenomena to physical forces, or at least to something physically measurable.”

Freud’s work can thus be situated within Brück’s school, and in this general perspective, as an effort—and he himself states this from the outset—to explain everything through physical forces and reduce everything to something measurable.

A second, more specific circumstance is that in the Studies on Hysteria, which precede this manuscript, Breuer wrote the general theoretical chapter, where he specifically attempted to explain phenomena through physically measurable terms, relying essentially—as I recall well—on electrical and magnetic metaphors. He considered the nervous system as an electromagnetic field and, consequently, as subject to stimulations leading to modifications of this field, which in turn lead to reactions.

Breuer formulated a theory of intracerebral excitations, and I find Bernfeld’s hypothesis somewhat extravagant, claiming that it was Freud who wrote this article signed by Breuer. This leads to the question of why Freud would have rewritten something entirely different three months later. I rather believe that Freud was dissatisfied with Breuer’s conceptual effort, precisely at a time when their agreement was beginning to falter.

LACAN – Does Bernfeld even realize that it is entirely different?

Didier ANZIEU – He doesn’t seem to! In his article, he systematically equates one with the other.

LACAN – Of course! That’s why he attributes it to Freud.

Didier ANZIEU

It took me a long time to rid myself of this view. Freud thus wanted to rewrite a general theory of the phenomena he and Breuer had just discovered, a general theory that would conform to the physicalist and quantitative inspiration I have just described. To properly introduce this text, a second task would have been necessary. I lacked the time, the competence, and the inclination to undertake it: it would have involved situating the state of neuron theory in 1895.

LACAN

It wasn’t far along. It was nowhere. Freud was at the forefront of neuron theory. The ideas Freud had about the synapse were entirely novel. He took a stance on something that was far from being settled.

Didier ANZIEU

I agree. But the entire theory of the neuron was being developed in that German school of physiology. Freud worked on it particularly in his research on the nervous system of fish, crayfish… He was the first to demonstrate the existence of the neuron where no one had previously seen it. And he concluded his article with the hypothesis that there was conduction of nerve impulses, analogous to electrical conduction.

LACAN – He took a stance on the synapse as such, that is, the break in continuity from one nerve cell to the next.

Didier ANZIEU

This discovery of Freud would be interesting. It is only now, in 1950, that we realize Freud made it—the discovery of the neuron. Freud, having discovered psychoanalysis, is now seen as someone who had a knack for making discoveries. At the time, this went unnoticed. But there were other people working everywhere. Besides, a discovery is always made at multiple points simultaneously. There would have been a need to review the state of the question on the neuron. As noted in a translator’s footnote, the theory of the synapse was only presented by Sherrington in 1897, two years after this text by Freud.

Let us now turn to the text itself. The subdivision introduced by the editor, different from that of the German edition, is debatable, and I propose the following subdivision:

• In the first part, Freud describes the structure of the neuronal apparatus. It is curious to revisit the German text, which does not speak of the nervous apparatus but of the neuronal apparatus. Once the structure and principles are described, he explains how it functions. There is something, if not a history, then at least a genesis that he produces, namely that by observing the functioning of the neuronal apparatus, we will see successively emerge what are commonly called psychological functions. I could not help, while reading this text, but recall Condillac’s statue, where once the structure of the statue was defined, the presentation of a series of perfumes led sensations, percepts, images, memories, judgments, and reasoning to follow one another in an admirably logical manner. One has the impression with Freud that there is a desire to reconstruct psychological phenomena from a certain model rooted in the finest atomistic tradition.
• Next, in this genesis, it is simply the functioning of the neuronal apparatus as such, but this functioning will, in turn, have repercussions on itself. The fact of having functioned once leaves, as in the said statue, a certain number, if not of traces, at least of consequences. And although Freud never uses the word experience, from these experiences, a certain knowledge will be constituted. The psychological functions, which do not directly result from the functioning of the neuronal apparatus, will indirectly result from the experiences made by this system. It is a kind of learning that emerges from this.
• In turn, this learning will result in the creation of something entirely special, which is the ego. In turn, this ego, which we always see appearing in conformity with the empirical tradition, will finally react upon the entire preceding system and perform a certain number of functions on it.
• After describing these functions, Freud will then return to the fundamental distinction between primary and secondary processes. And since the entire course of this manuscript is, in essence, the transition from the primary process to the secondary process, and especially the detailing of the secondary processes, he devotes a final chapter to the primary process, giving sleep and dreaming as examples.

Thus, this is the general outline.

Neuronal Apparatus

“Psychology is conceived as a natural science. Psychic processes are”—I quote Freud—“quantitatively determined states of specific material particles.”*

[Es ist die Absicht, eine naturwissenschaftliche Psychologie zu liefern, d. h. psychische Vorgänge darzustellen als quantitativ bestimmte Zustände aufzeigbarer materieller Teile…]

And in this case, the particles are neurons, hence the processes. I point out the reflections that came to me at this point and that other remarks by Freud helped to emphasize. Consequently, Freud breaks with the traditional conception of psychic phenomena as phenomena of consciousness, and he will later state this explicitly in the text, showing that there are psychic phenomena that are not conscious at all.

I therefore believe that Freud’s discovery of the unconscious, which obviously has a different meaning in psychoanalysis than it does from the perspective of physiological materialism, was nonetheless greatly facilitated by Freud’s habit, in the environment where he worked, of a denial of the reality of consciousness.

Let us return to this neuron, from which everything will emerge. The fundamental principle of the neuron is the principle of all material particles; it is the principle of inertia applied to the neuron: how neurons tend to rid themselves of quantity. They tend to rid themselves of quantity, and it is precisely by conducting this quantity to the muscular system.

Consequently, the hypothesis of a nerve current—although Freud does not explicitly clarify it, he alludes to it—which circulates through the neurons, is logically deduced from the principle of inertia. He specifies that this tendency toward inertia is the tendency to reduce the level of tension to zero. This will later be found under the name the Nirvana principle. This is the primary function of the neuron: the function of discharge.

But a secondary function appears, which is that rather than discharging the quantity, when the neuron undergoes it, it could escape it by avoiding it, and how can it do this? Well, the neuronal system can set in motion a certain number of actions aimed at reducing external stimuli, which precisely cause an increase in the quantity within the neuronal system.

Consequently, if primary processes involve the discharge of quantity, secondary processes escape quantity by reducing external or internal stimuli. Here, the principle of inertia is therefore, at the level of the secondary function, modified into a new principle: the principle of constancy. Instead of seeking to reduce the level of tension to zero, the goal is to maintain it constant, that is, as low as possible. This will later be expressed not in the Nirvana principle but in the pleasure principle.

The principle of constancy assumes that energy can be accumulated in the neurological system because if it discharged continuously, there would be nothing, no psyche. It is precisely because there is not just one neuron, but several, and because the connection between neurons explains the accumulation of energy within the neuronal system, that Freud hypothesizes that the contact between two neurons constitutes a barrier to the passage of quantity.

More precisely, according to Freud, there are two types of neurons:

• Those that are permeable and allow excitation to pass through, returning to their primitive state. He calls this the ϕ system.
• And impermeable neurons, which allow only partial passage of quantity, whose contact barrier prevents complete flow. These neurons are therefore modified by the passage of quantity.

We can see here the basis of phenomena related to memory and a foundation for all psychological phenomena. For this reason, Freud calls these other neurons the Ψ neurons, in opposition to the ϕ neurons.

Is there a difference in nature between these neurons, which would imply that histologically one could find a different nerve fiber?

No, Freud thinks not. This difference simply depends on the magnitude of the quantities passing through the neurons. As long as a large quantity passes through a neuron, the resistance offered by the contact barriers is negligible. But if a small quantity passes through, this small quantity, being of the same order of magnitude as the resistance of the synaptic contact barriers, then we are dealing with the second order of phenomena.

Thus, the ϕ neurons are specialized in the discharge of large quantities, and the Ψ neurons in the passage of small quantities, with the residual phenomenon of accumulation of quantity and the possibility of memory that results from it. The ϕ neurons are therefore, in essence, those in contact with the external world.

Regarding Ψ neurons, they are probably more internal. They must likely be located on the side of the cortex, on the one hand, and on the other hand, in contact with the ϕ neurons, thus indirectly in contact with the external world through the first system and, secondly, in contact with the internal cells of the body and the quantities of internal origin. These correspond to the experience of need—hunger, respiration, sexuality—and are in direct contact with quantities of internal origin. This explains why these neurons are rather specialized in secondary function.

LACAN

From the topical perspective, in this initial schema, the reality principle—which is presented to us as a vitalist, arc-reflex system, according to the simplest stimulus-response model—appears to obey only the law of discharge.

We cannot even speak of elaboration; it is purely and simply general inertia.

The circuit must close along the shortest path. On this, Freud connects his system, which turns out to be both related to internal needs and introduces the source and origin of the ego system, as a buffer—a buffering function—meaning something internal, a system within the system. There is an intertwining of what he will later propose in a differentiated way. The reality principle is introduced by reference to the Ψ system, the system directed inward.

Didier ANZIEU

Here, then, is the general schema. How does this general schema function? What are the first psychic functions we will encounter?

Pain, first of all. When the neuronal system functions, if there are quantities that are too large, the ϕ system is insufficient to discharge them. Since it is connected to the Ψ system, a certain quantity—a certain excess of quantity—passes into the Ψ system. This irruption into the Ψ system of a quantity larger than usual is pain. Freud conforms here to one of the most classical views on the problem of pain: that any sensation, when it becomes intense, loses its specificity and becomes painful.

Similarly, I think it is curious that Freud undertakes a comparable task but in the reverse direction. In Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, starting from the same sensation of pain, Bergson endeavors to show that nothing sensible can be reduced to the quantitative because it is fundamentally qualitative. Freud does the same work, starting from the same experience of pain, to demonstrate that everything appearing to us as qualitative is, at its foundation, fundamentally quantitative.

Thus, all sensible qualities appear at this moment, and the structure of the neuronal system allows the transformation of quantity into quality. He alludes, though not explicitly, to Fechner’s laws, which show that the differential threshold is closely related to a mathematically structured variation in the intensity of the stimulus.

But these sensible qualities will bring about a differentiation in the neuronal system. Freud finds himself obliged to propose a third system of neurons, which, with a sense of mischief, he calls ω and designates as W, because it resembles ω. Ultimately, it becomes unclear, and commentators have wracked their brains over it.

This third system of neurons is the perceptual neurons, those that, within Ψ, will specialize in quality. But how are they different from Ψ? Because what characterizes Ψ is that it is traversed by small quantities. Here, it is no longer a question of quantity but of periods. For neuronal influx is periodic. The periods can differ even if the quantities are equivalent, and the W system is the one to which Ψ transmits the periodicity of stimulus intensities coming solely from ϕ.

LACAN

Make sure to grasp what necessitates this invention of a system at this level, which already prefigures the Id system. Because, ultimately, with all these misunderstandings of consciousness, everything works quite well up to this point. Not the slightest consciousness! Yet it must be reintroduced, and Freud reintroduces it in this paradoxical form of a system—a system that he must admit has entirely exceptional laws. Namely, its defining characteristic is that everything that happens there must occur with minimal energy expenditure—that is, almost no energy. He cannot quite say “none at all.”

Didier ANZIEU

He hesitates; he does not decide. But he says there is no quantity, only just enough quantity to serve as the support for a period. And this explains why it leaves no traces; it cannot be reproduced. The transmission of quality is essentially qualitative.

LACAN

Well! In essence, we encounter here, for the first time, something that will recur throughout Freud’s work: the observation that this conscious system is, overall, unmanageable.

Special laws must be attributed to it, placing it outside the laws of energy equivalence that govern all these quantitative regulations. This renders it entirely exceptional, making it a constant problem—something he does not know how to handle. And yet, of course, he cannot avoid introducing the “I.”

This is what I am asking you:

• What will he do with it?
• What is it for?

Didier ANZIEU

I think what partially answers your question, something Freud warned us about in advance, is that the primary function might suffice in a unicellular organism, but it cannot suffice in an organism with a complex neuronal system. Therefore, recourse to the secondary function becomes necessary. Why do these sensible qualities exist?

Because they are useful. Freud clearly states that it is a somewhat simplistic Darwinian-sounding argument, that what must exist for the survival of an organism ends up existing, or else the organism would no longer exist. It is therefore a purely pragmatic, utilitarian perspective that accounts for the appearance of consciousness through sensations and sensible qualities. In other words, sensations inform us about the external world and thereby enable us to guard against excessive infiltration of quantity into the organism, which might destroy the system.

But after pain, consciousness can be introduced into psychology in a purely quantitative form. Freud explicitly specifies that consciousness is the subjective aspect of a part of the physical processes within the neuronal system. And he specifies which part it concerns here: it is W, the perceptual processes.

This is, therefore, the beginning of this perception-consciousness system that will be found throughout Freud’s subsequent work. But Freud pushes the conception of consciousness as a pure epiphenomenon, a mere reflection without any importance. Freud assigns the same quantitative origin to consciousness as in epiphenomenalism. But additionally, he attributes a function to it: it will react upon the system.

With all this, we have not yet spoken about pleasure, which Freud finally addresses, out of a need for symmetry with pain. The sensation accompanying simple discharge is the primary principle. But it is precisely to avoid pain that all secondary processes, sensible qualities, and consciousness are constituted.
I will skip the detailed analysis of the sensation of pleasure.

LACAN

There is something very important, and you have certainly noted it, that needs to be highlighted: the necessity of rediscovering the object. This is what is most original.

Didier ANZIEU

Thirdly, after observing, based on its very structure, how the apparatus functions, reconstructing elementary psychic processes, its very functioning will leave traces—what Freud calls “experience.” And, as a consequence, these experiences will lead us to the notion of the ego.

The two fundamental experiences that the neuronal system is called to have, since it is conscious, are the experience of satisfaction and the experience of pain. These two experiences—except that they are inverse—obey the same mechanism. The experience of satisfaction brings forth this term that I have always found difficult to translate: the word καθεξής (cathexis), linkage, or investment—although “investment” will only fully fit into a later theory. It is the notion of bound energy as opposed to free energy.

Thus, the experience of satisfaction leads to two investments, two connections, at the level of the central, nuclear neurons—what Freud refers to as “nuclear neurons,” located near the cortex. They are thus linked:

• On the one hand, to the perception of the desired object,
• And on the other hand, to the image of the reflex movement that allowed the discharge and produced the sensation of pleasure.

Consequently, the very act of experiencing pleasure, the functioning of the neuronal apparatus as such—its primary function—even if it leaves no trace quantitatively, at least leaves traces associatively, since we have consciousness. These neurons are therefore connected:

• On the one hand, to the object that enabled satisfaction,
• And to the image of the act in which satisfaction was found.

This is the conceptual model that assigns the memory trace a seat in a specific modified nerve cell: the engram. Freud specifies that this is an associative perspective, and he recalls the famous law of association by simultaneity, which he takes for granted.

This means that when the state of need once again crosses the neuronal system—whether sexual need, hunger, the need to breathe, or thirst—it once again activates the central neuronal system.

The activation of this system is accompanied by the activation of:

• The object, the image of the object that will satisfy or has already satisfied,
• And the act through which satisfaction was achieved.

If nothing intervenes, this activation leads to a hallucination, which can be fatal to the organism. If the organism begins to act based on this hallucination—if it does not verify that, in external reality, the desired object it imagines as capable of satisfying it is indeed there—then the experience ends in hallucination.

The experience of pain creates the same two connections but with inverse polarity:

• The connection with the threatening object,
• And the connection with the painful act.

Fortunately, this experience of pain will teach us to take external reality into account.

Thus, the residues, in a way, of the very experience of the functioning of the neuronal system lead to the awareness of the existence of affects and states of desire. Affects are a sudden increase in quantitative tension within the psyche. States of desire are the slow increases of the same neuronal quantity.

LACAN

What I believe is interesting in our discussion is to highlight that, concerning these states of desire, what comes into play is a certain correspondence between the object that presents itself and the structures already constituted within the ego—that is, a partial overlap between what is presented and what is expected. He emphasizes this: two scenarios can occur:

• What presents itself is precisely what was expected; this is not particularly interesting, everything falls neatly into place.
• Or, what is interesting is when things do not align.

In other words, every construction of the objectal world is always an effort towards what I wrote on the board: Wiederzufinden, to rediscover the object. I would say, through a kind of curious, mechanistic game, it is an attempt at building a machine to apprehend the external world.

The dimension on which Freud builds his construction—his little machine, his model, his statue—follows the direction of what I pointed out to you last time, namely the distinction between two entirely different structurations of human experience:

• The structuration that I called—following Kierkegaard—“antique”, or as he says, pagan, which actually means Platonic. This is the structuration of reminiscence. In other words, it implies a harmony, an agreement between man and the world of his objects, such that he recognizes them because, in some sense, he has always known them.
• And, on the contrary, the conquest of the structuration of this world through a laborious effort, which consists of structuring it through a pathway of sequences, of repetition—the initial sketch of the meaning of this repetition.

The subject, precisely because what presents itself to him only partially coincides with what previously provided satisfaction, will embark on an endless search to rediscover this object. The object is encountered and structured through repetition: to rediscover the object, to repeat the object. Yet, in this effort, it is never the same object that he encounters. In other words, he continuously generates substitute objects.

If you will, this is merely a preliminary sketch—but a sketch of something fertile—which will ultimately form the foundation of this psychology of conflict. It builds an impressive bridge between libidinal experience as such and the world of human knowledge, specifically in the sense that:

• It is characterized by the fact that, to a large extent, it escapes this field of forces of desire.
• The human world cannot be structured as a simple Umwelt, nested with an Innenwelt of needs.
• It is not closed; it is open to access a multitude of extraordinarily varied neutral objects and, ultimately, even objects that no longer have anything to do with objects in their radical function as symbols.

The important point is that we already find here, in essence—in this theory, which appears to remain at the level of the materialism of the process—the introduction of the absolutely fundamental function of repetition, as something that structures the world of objects in and of itself.

Didier ANZIEU

I will conclude with this point: the state of desire.

The experience of satisfaction thus leads to the emergence of new psychological mechanisms, specifically the full abstraction of this desire, which is the source of tension.

And the experience of pain brings about the first defense, which in the English text is called “repression.” I would like to know if it is the same word in the German text: a repression. And later, Freud makes a distinction between defense and repression.

Finally, the fourth point of the presentation: the appearance of the ego. The ego is the totality of the cathexes of Ψ neurons.

We have seen that there are Ψ neurons with investments based on experiences of pain. The investment of Ψ neurons at a given moment constitutes the ego.

Depending on what they present—contact barrier, accumulation—a certain group of neurons retains a καθεξής (cathexis), a constant investment, and constitutes precisely the support that is the accumulation of quantity required for the exercise of the secondary function. If the organism did not have a reserve of a certain quantity of energy, it could not use the secondary function, which serves to ward off dangerous stimuli and seek satisfying objects.

Thus, for the first time, the idea is asserted that the ego possesses a quantity of energy and is constituted by a constant quantity of energy.

Secondly, the essential function of the ego is an inhibitory function. Once constituted, the ego intervenes in the overall system, particularly in repetition.

For the first time, the ego appears in Freud’s manuscript. This repetition had already shown the nature of the experiences of pain and satisfaction. By modifying the distribution of resistances at contact barriers, the ego will introduce a kind of derivation in the flow of quantity. In other words, by increasing or decreasing the resistance at a certain contact barrier, the ego will prevent the quantity from flowing along the path of least resistance, which would align with the principle of inertia.

Thus, through the action of a καθεξής (cathexis) that is lateral, from a neuron specifically invested by the ego, the current will be diverted from its path of least resistance. This is precisely what inhibition consists of and constitutes the fundamental intervention of the ego on the system. It is this that enables the secondary function of knowledge and adaptation to reality.

The second function of the ego: the reality-testing function.

The ego will, in turn, be able to use the totality of the secondary processes we have just described to derive accurate indications about external reality and to take them into account during discharge: instead of muscular discharge being a mere release of motor energy, this discharge will become oriented and useful. It is the inhibition brought about by the ego that makes it possible to establish a criterion for distinguishing between perception and memory. Consequently, this initial perspective of a sufficient hallucination is here surpassed; the function of the ego is to test reality.

LACAN

That is to say, to test it not only inasmuch as it experiences reality but also inasmuch as it neutralizes it as much as possible. It is to the extent that the diversion system operates. You have not emphasized enough the fact that it is in the branching of neurons that Freud situates the diversion process, through which the energy influx, by being scattered and individualized, does not pass entirely. And it is because it does not pass entirely that a comparison becomes possible with the information provided periodically by the system—namely, that energy is reduced, perhaps not in its potential but certainly in its intensity.

Didier ANZIEU

That is to say, when there is satisfaction or pain, there is an excess of quantity each time—discharged in one case and endured in the other. But there is sensible quality, the foundation of knowledge, only when there is no such excess. Yet these phenomena still exist. In sensible quality, there is little quantity, but there is the apprehension of a certain period.

The ego will be able to establish cognitive and recognitive processes. If primary processes are primarily linked to the experience of satisfaction and pain, where neurons are invested, cognitive processes will be primarily linked to acts of neutrality, to neutralized sensible qualities. This neutrality exists exceptionally at first, but becomes habitual thanks to the intervention of the ego, which protects the system from excess quantities.

Freud describes in detail the construction of memory and judgment in purely associative terms: the association of neuronal investments. He demonstrates how an analysis, at the neuronal level, of the various investments properly constitutes the first judgment. From that moment on, all comparisons become impossible with the memory of lived experiences, perceptions of reality, and how an action also becomes possible.

LACAN

I believe that, in fact, what you are presenting here, which in a sense constructs—or even deduces—in a way very close to what you alluded to regarding Condillac’s statue, follows the same lack of awareness of differences in levels. In the end, perception is not tied to anything that actually represents itself.

This dialectic of the ego and the other, into which we must now necessarily insert ourselves—and in which, as you will see, lies the interest of this reference—shows that in this first draft of the ego, there is already the germ of what will later reveal itself as the structural conditions for the constitution of the objectal world in humans. This is something very original, as I pointed out earlier.

Conversely, the ego, functioning within this reference to the other, which is also essential for the structuration of the object, is completely overlooked. In other words, as with Condillac’s statue, when speaking about sensation, the objectified organization of the world seems to be taken for granted. The absolutely unrecognized problem—but a striking one—is through what pathway Freud ultimately formulates concepts that materialize and concretize this. That is to say, the discovery of narcissism in itself only gains its full value because it was absolutely not perceived at this moment.

Everything will occur in the interval, namely the elaboration of what he calls “the primary psychological process of dreaming.” What is interesting is that the entire exposition will culminate—curiously, because Freud reconstructed everything—like everyone else of his time. He follows the indication of 18th-century philosophers, reconstructing memory and judgment starting from sensation, only briefly stopping at the search for the object in itself.

But he does not stop there. We can see that he is led—by something not explicit in the text—to return to the primary process, particularly regarding sleep and dreams. The culmination of this Project—which was not published, but was for Freud a need to organize his thoughts—results, nonetheless, in the dream.

Didier ANZIEU

From the secondary function, Freud returns to these primary processes to account for psychic phenomena that are generally overlooked but which he—through the observation of hysterics and the analysis of his own dreams, which he had just begun (since the “Dream of Irma’s Injection” was written three months before this manuscript)—perceives, I believe, with a reflex of alarm. Discovering these new phenomena, he felt the need to integrate them into his familiar theoretical framework to ensure everything fit together.

In dreams, Freud demonstrates that it is a primary process, because in dreams, purely motor discharge externally is impossible, which gives it a hallucinatory character. The subject’s entire biological experience, their learning, is suspended. Thoughts acquire a hallucinatory nature, which awakens consciousness and belief. This is the truly new contribution revealed by the analysis of his own dreams and those of his patients: the dream has the function of fulfilling desires.

He says it is a primary process that follows from expectations of satisfaction. The first desire investments are hallucinatory in nature. Thus, we return to the notion that the experience of satisfaction establishes the first purely hallucinatory associative system, without any reference to reality.

If it stopped there, it would lead the organism to destruction. In the dream, we are brought back to this system, which explains why there is almost no memory of the dream. The dream is characterized by the ease with which quantity is displaced. The satisfied desire in the dream is generally not conscious. Freud cites the example of his own dream—the “Dream of Irma”—and shows that two elements were conscious: the fact that an injection of propyl was ordered and the formula.

And analysis allowed him to recover the two links that had remained unconscious and explains the association of those famous neuronal investments, namely the idea of a sexual chemistry, which he had precisely discussed with Fliess during their last meeting, the meeting preceding the one that led to the drafting of the manuscript:

• The first meeting triggered the dream of Irma and its analysis,
• The second led to the writing of the manuscript.

The second idea: the sexual nature of Irma’s illness.

LACAN

We will stop here for today. This implies that we must now move forward from this point, starting with the processes of the Traumdeutung. Someone needs to take charge of this. Valabrega, for example? Could you establish the connection between this last chapter on the consciousness of the dream and the theory of the Traumdeutung, where Freud provides the complete theory of primary and secondary processes—could you prepare this for us in fifteen days?