🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

VALABREGA

LACAN

In the Traumdeutung, not simply taken as a particular theory of the dream, but as a work of labor, or proof within a second elaboration of the schema of the psychic apparatus—the first corresponding, if you will, to a point of conclusion of his neurological work—as he begins to enter, more and more closely, into this particular field of neuroses.

This second stage corresponds to something where he becomes more intimately involved in what will become the proper field of analysis. It is the dream—and as you know—in the background, it is also the neurotic symptom as such, as it approaches discovering the same structuring as in the dream.

And this is what, for us, in the language that serves here to revisit, to re-understand Freud’s work—and thus, in essence, the testimony that my commentary must bring you—to see to what extent this language is adequate, included in Freud’s own work, insofar as the phenomenon of the dream, as much as the symptom, is revealed to have some relation not only with the structure of language in general but with this relationship of man to language. That is where we stand.

We will arrive at much more precise things: this relationship of man to language, which is called speech. What is speech for him? What is this speech situated in that zone which analysis has accustomed us to understand as including the unconscious? It is undoubtedly here that we will take a decisive step in understanding what the unconscious is. That is where we are.

And today, therefore, as a stage, a necessary moment in the elaboration of Freud’s thought, to which we will apply precisely this same mode of understanding and interpretation of what happens in the psychic order, which is Freudian interpretation, we want to see what is there, what is revealed, what manifests itself, in the modifications, in the progress, in the hesitation, in the construction that happens before our eyes of this second stage of the psychic apparatus, as it is sketched out in Chapter VII of The Interpretation of Dreams, titled “Psychology of the Dream Processes.”

You will see that, in relation to these systems ϕ, Ψ, and ω, whose characteristics and also their dead ends, paradoxes, were very clearly perceived and emphasized by Freud in his first schema—we, Valabrega and myself, have underlined this together—we will see what they become in the other schema, which—regardless of the kind of rough similarity—reveals, in its functioning, in its interior, something that gradually introduces itself, ultimately representing something that will already show itself to be noticeably displaced, shifted, in relation to Freud’s initial conception of the psychic apparatus, or apparatuses.

[To J.P. Valabrega] Go ahead, my friend, we are entering the Traumdeutung today. I remind you that last time, it was about Irma dream—both in the Letters to Fliess, of course, since he shares it with him immediately after Irma dream—it is the first dream considered to have been analyzed by him. It is not exhausted. Perhaps we will end today’s session on that note. I invite you to re-read Irma dream. Already last year, I had you read and explain certain stages to illustrate the psychology of transference, since that was the topic last year. You will re-read it in relation to what we are currently doing, because we are still trying to understand:

– what “beyond the pleasure principle” means,
– what “repetition compulsion” means,
– and to what duplicity of the relations between the symbolic and the imaginary we are led there, to give it meaning.

If already some of the starting points, indications, insights seen in the schemas from last time:

The one with the triode lamp, insofar as there is something in the interposition, the function of the switch [grid], which essentially regulates another current, which determines whether or not a certain message passes through, whether or not it is communicated—you can already re-read Irma dream and see it appear in a completely different light.

Last time, we indicated the very singular fact that in what Freud highlights in his manuscript, he summarizes the themes and tensions into four elements: two conscious, two unconscious. And we already indicated last time how these two unconscious elements must be understood:

– one being what is essential for him, the communication, formation, revelation of creative speech, which occurs in dialogue with Fliess,
– and the other, the transversal element [grid or a’→a], in some way, which is truly illuminated by this current that passes: namely, what we noticed last time and which is displayed almost unconsciously in the dream, namely, ultimately, the question of his relationships with a series of feminine sexual images, all of which are combined with something tensional in his marital relations, which is sufficiently indicated in the dream to interest us.

But what goes further and is more striking—and if you carefully read the dream, you will see it in a way that could not, at that moment, appear to him—is the essentially narcissistic character of all these feminine images. That is to say, they are both captivating images and all connoted, denoted, in some way, as being placed in a certain narcissistic or reflective relationship with Freud.

I need only to allude to the fact that Irma’s pain, when the doctor percusses her, is in her shoulder, and Freud points out that he has rheumatism in his shoulder. All of this is always stated in a way that amazes us. I never cease to highlight the sense of wonder in Freud’s texts.

One can always find in them, beyond what Freud himself saw or was capable of seeing at that moment. Freud is an exceptional observer, truly brilliant. It is that we always have more of what one might quickly call “material” to guide us in what he gave us than what he himself extracted from it at the moment he presented it as a conceptual analysis, which makes him an exceptional case in the history of scientific literature.

Jean-Paul VALABREGA

We are taking “The Psychology of Dream Processes,” Chapter VII of the Traumdeutung. It consists of six parts:

1. The forgetting of dreams.
2. Regression.
3. The fulfillment of wishes.
4. Awakening through the dream. The function of the dream. The nightmare.
5. Primary process and secondary process. Repression.
6. The unconscious and consciousness. Reality.

All these sections do not have the same importance. It will be difficult to go through all of them in detail. I will outline a few key points from the most important ones and extract the essential ideas from the others.

For the subject from which we started, the two paragraphs that seem the most important are, first, the first and the last, because it is clear, from the considerations on The forgetting of dreams (first) and the concluding problems regarding the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious (last), how the connection was made between the 1895 text we have already discussed (Entwurf) and the theory elaborated in the Traumdeutung.

Next, the two most important paragraphs in order are:
– Regression, because in this chapter, the theory of the psychic apparatus is introduced for the first time in a clear schematic manner.
– The study of the primary and secondary processes, because here we see the changes that occurred in the study of primary and secondary processes from the 1895 text (Entwurf) to the Traumdeutung.

I said earlier that the considerations, on the one hand, about the forgetting of dreams and, on the other hand, the concluding considerations on the relationship between the unconscious and consciousness, and the ideas about reality, form a very clear transition between the conclusion of the 1895 text: Project for a Scientific Psychology (Entwurf) and the Traumdeutung.

Indeed, Mr. Lacan has insisted on this several times and has clearly stated that one sees, in the elaboration of Freud’s thought, the problem of consciousness arising. At the end of the 1895 text, there are considerations on dream consciousness, and it is evident that he is already speaking at that moment about forgetting. It is through the forgetting of the dream that he is led to speak about the consciousness of the dream: the dream oscillates, in short—it can be grasped, or it cannot be grasped. Thereby, the problem of consciousness is posed. We will return to this in the examination of this first paragraph. Finally, at the end of the Traumdeutung, in the final paragraph: The unconscious and consciousness, he raises again this problem of consciousness.

Thus, in the first paragraph on The forgetting of dreams, Freud says that we do not know the dream we want to interpret, or rather, we are exposed to the danger of seeing the object of our research disappear. This is an objection that can arise. He presents it as such, as one of the serious objections that could be made to all the work he has done in the preceding parts of the Traumdeutung.

LACAN – Repeat what you just said.

Jean-Paul VALABREGA

We do not know the dream we want to interpret. We have forgotten it, or else, in our analysis of dreams, we are exposed to the danger of seeing the object of our research vanish.

LACAN – Explain clearly in what sense he means this.

Jean-Paul VALABREGA – He alludes to the works of authors he has refuted.

LACAN – Say it! It’s interesting.

Jean-Paul VALABREGA

What remains for us when we try to interpret it could, according to these authors, be due to elaborations made in waking thought, elaborations that would have nothing in common with the dream itself. In that case, the interpretation of dreams, whose technique and method for uncovering unconscious sources he has described, would essentially be rendered invalid because one would not be working on the process of the dream itself but on a series of elaborations intervening afterward, which would consequently make the dream itself vanish. It would not be the dream that we are working on but secondary elaborations that belong to waking thoughts.

Well, Freud refutes this idea by providing examples. He revisits Irma dream in this context and says that this objection that could be raised against him does not hold because it is not a matter of admitting arbitrariness—there is none. He takes up the example, which will play an even more important role in his later work on The Psychopathology of Everyday Life: “the choice of a random number,” which Mr. Lacan has already spoken about so extensively that I think it is unnecessary to revisit it here. He even says:

“If I wanted, in my waking state, to randomly choose to say something, to find a number by chance, analysis would show that it is not random, that therefore chance does not exist.”

But there is something else: he will substitute the classical psychological theories of forgetting with a new theory, the psychoanalytic theory of forgetting, fundamentally new in psychology.

Freud employs here, to study forgetting, a method that is familiar to him and which he will continue to use, and which takes him so far that it becomes—I believe we can go this far—a cornerstone of the psychoanalytic method. That is to say, instead of directly studying the object he intends to study here, the dream, he will study the obstacle.

He will study the obstacle that opposes this study. Here, he finds that the obstacle to interpreting a dream comes from psychic resistance. And he will express that the obstacles encountered, even in the form of objections that he refutes here, are exactly of the same nature as the forgetting of the dream.

It is the same thing, and it plays a considerable role in his thinking—it is at the source of the analysis of resistance.

For example, the force that represses is the same, the one found in his interpretative work is identically the same as that which manifests in the unfolding, the elaboration of a process. Consequently, it is through a detour of study, directed at the obstacle encountered, that he can most profoundly, it seems, refute the objections presented to him.

LACAN

There are two points, two brief sentences which, from the perspective we are developing here, deserve to be highlighted. At the moment when he questions all the constructions he made in the previous chapters, for example concerning the elaboration of the dream, all that constitutes the main structure of the Traumdeutung, he suddenly says:

“But after all, we have carried out this entire elaboration—an interpretative structure properly speaking, since it is the Traumdeutung we are discussing—about dreams, that is, about things regarding which any objection can be raised, including that this dream, after all, might only be the dream of a dream, that we dream we have dreamed: this is what some authors say. In short, we would have treated as a sacred text what, according to these cited authors, would be an arbitrary improvisation, hastily constructed in a moment of embarrassment. That’s what they say.”

Let us pause to note this metaphor because in Freud, metaphors are precious. Indeed, he treated the dream as “a sacred text.” A sacred text is interpreted according to very particular laws and forms. And everyone knows that sometimes these interpretations are surprising.

Not only did he treat it as a sacred text, but we must also fully acknowledge the importance of the word “text” that he uses. We are truly brought closer here to what our dear Valabrega is trying to show you, this very particular dialectic present in this introductory chapter: at the moment when he is about to speak about the dream process, he addresses the question of forgetting.

What matters is how far we can see this forgetting, this degradation, extend into the text of the dream.

“This—Freud tells us—matters so little that even if only one element remains, an element about which there is doubt, a tiny scrap, a shadow of a shadow of a dream, we can still continue to attribute meaning to it.”

What he means is demonstrated in the example he gives: the meaning in question is precisely what we would today call “a message,” meaning that we find ourselves facing the theme and notion of what must remain of a message for it to still carry weight.

No matter how degraded the message may be, in some cases—and sometimes precisely in its degradation, in the traits and marks left by censorship, by a deliberate, intentional interruption, because it is not random, it is not linked to a kind of fading, erasure of the message, and, as one might say today, to the drowning of the message in background noise. No, the message is not forgotten in just any way, and that is what Valabrega wants to tell us.

But the use he makes here, in this context, of terms like “resistance” already carries other connotations for you; it has already entered into a thousand other contexts, diluting its impact. Let us set aside resistance. Instead, let us return to this famous censorship, which is too often forgotten, especially when restoring it to its original freshness, its novelty—that is, the character implied by censorship: censorship is an intention. Freud’s essential argument in the face of every objection is this: to reverse, so to speak, the burden of proof and say:

“It is precisely in the concrete signs, in the new elements brought forth by your objection, namely in these degradations of the dream, that I continue to see meaning, and even more meaning. What interests me even more in a dream is precisely the intervention of these forgetting phenomena, because I find in them also a part of the message.”

“Forgetting and the somewhat negative phenomena of degradation, I add them to the reading of meaning. I also recognize in them the nature and function of a message, which is precisely the dimension given to me by the dream.”

And I will say more: one can—through other chapters, other passages in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams—see that this dimension is not only something he discovers, but also, by a certain deliberate choice, something he isolates.

I will say more: he does more than settle for it; he only wants to know this dimension. We will see whether this method is more or less adequate. There are certain objections. For example, this one:

“You speak of wish-fulfilling dreams, but there are dreams of anxiety, dreams of self-punishment.”

One of the sentences in his response is to say:

“Yes, there are dreams of anxiety, but what must operate for anxiety to exist is nothing other than what would provoke anxiety in waking life.”

That is to say, it is not what is in the dream that interests him, but solely this semantic element, the transmission of a meaning, an articulated speech.

It is perhaps nowhere more palpable, more evident than what he calls the thoughts—Gedanken— of the dream. We cannot revisit it here, as it also pertains to the unconscious, to the entire text of the Traumdeutung, but nowhere more obviously than in this first part of Chapter VII do we see that what he aims at is precisely this organized discourse, a message which, at that moment, is taken as such, in itself. As I was saying, it is a message, and we can go further—it is a message that insists, and this is also what brings us close, what keeps us very near to this problem we are currently addressing:
– What is this beyond the pleasure principle?
– What is the repetition compulsion?

Ultimately, it is a modulation, an interrupted discourse that insists. Nowhere is this more palpable than here, because at this point you cannot assign a psychological meaning to the word “gedanken” in this text.

He tells us so explicitly. He repeats it in three or four passages:

“Everything we are speaking about at the moment—let us not imagine that we are explaining it from a psychological point of view. All the explanations we give—let us not imagine that we are reducing them to something already known in the psychic domain. These are phenomena of a different order than anything previously addressed from a psychological perspective. Let us stop here for now. Let us momentarily suspend our thought.”

He himself acknowledges that he is moving within a different dimension, distinct from everything known thus far as the psychological construction of the individual. He moves into the domain of communication and a message, and into what I occasionally call “interrupted discourse.” It is in relation to this interrupted discourse, against a broader and more extensive discourse, that he finds his position reinforced concerning the interpretation of dreams, especially in this chapter, where he specifically shows us this: that the story of the dream—he situates it in this chapter—of the lady who dreams of something that is a channel. That is all that remains of her dream.

Well, Freud demonstrates to us in this context—and this is where we stand—how he understands the interpretation of dreams. Here is an example that, because it is extreme, is all the more significant, in that he does not hesitate to search despite the fact that nothing remains in the lady’s memory, in what, from Freud’s point of view, is ultimately the least important aspect: the notion.

What could the memory of something be when it is so faded that, after all, it is nothing more than a memory of a memory? And one may ask, when we remember a dream, are we truly remembering something that we can discuss as a thought, since, after all, we do not know whether it is not the very type of an illusion of memory?

This does not trouble Freud. It does not matter to him: it is not within this order of psychological phenomena. Do we remember a dream as an event that existed, that can be situated somewhere? This is something literally insoluble. Of course, it has always interested philosophers. If we approach things this way, why is the experience of sleep not just as important, just as authentic? And why, if one dreams every night that one is a butterfly (cf. Zhuangzi), is it legitimate to say that one dreams one is a butterfly?

This does not interest Freud. It is not within this dimension of psychological realism, of essential subjectivity—that is not what interests him. For him, what matters is not that one dreams of being a butterfly, but what the dream means. And when we say “what it means,” it refers to a certain direction, in the direction of saying something to someone in the dream. Who is this someone? That is precisely the question.

But when it comes to a dream of a person with whom he has already had a discourse that began, the dream is merely the continuation of this interrupted discourse, and he does not hesitate to interpret the entire dream of this lady in this way. It is with this lady that he specifically posed certain questions about the nature of dreams, and this lady seemingly accepted much of Freud and his elaborations. What she wants to tell him in the dream is demonstrated by her associations: “Push, push, madam,” she pushes, she recounts a little humorous story about Pas-de-Calais, a kind of tale where one stumbles upon the English in this clever way of saying that “between the sublime and the ridiculous, there is but one step,” yes, the Pas-de-Calais. And like this “channel”, it turns out to be the Pas-de-Calais, and that is indeed what she means:

“All your stories are somewhat ridiculous; they are sublime, but somewhat ridiculous. It takes very little, and all of this becomes laughable.”

There it is. We are not here to say whether it is legitimate or illegitimate. We are here to comment on Freud and to understand what the function of the dream as an unconscious function means, what Freud’s theory of desire means, the desire in question, where we always find, more or less, this as one of its dimensions.

There are others, as you will see. It is much clearer in more developed dreams, but what Freud admits, by which he never hesitates to confirm that his theory is validated, means that the dream has conveyed a certain speech.

We do not need to go as far as childhood memories, nor to think about regression.

What will lead you there? That is what the following chapter will demonstrate to you, and you will see that it is not without reason that this chapter, important in the background, is also significant in the foreground because we must return to the beginning.

What necessitated this theory of regression for Freud? What we take away from the first stage, from the first chapter, is precisely this—there is no doubt about it—Freud is not satisfied, content, does not find his way, is not at ease, and does not claim to have demonstrated what he wanted to demonstrate until he shows us that the primary desire in the dream was to convey a message.

VALABREGA – Therefore, the forgetting of the dream is the obstacle.

LACAN – It’s not even the obstacle; it’s part of the text.

VALABREGA – But he says, there’s an important sentence…

LACAN

Doubt, for example, is almost an ἔμϕασις (emphasis), in his perspective, at that level. There is no equivalent word in French, a highlighting. He says that doubt does not interest him as a psychological phenomenon, but in the dream, or regarding the dream, should we interpret it as a psychological phenomenon? Is that what’s interesting? And besides, after all, we constantly trust our memory for things no more certain than a dream. What makes a memory more established and more certain when it has crossed its correlate?

He says we must interpret the phenomenon of doubt as something that is part of the message—he always brings it back to that.

If the subject doubts, you say—you, because we are taking this in a perspective already concluded, or which claims to be concluded—that we are talking about resistance. But let us not speak about resistance for the moment. The word might be in the chapter, but perhaps not in this part. Doubt is part of the message. You must think that by the fact that the subject tells you that he doubts, in doing so, he draws your attention to the fact that this is a particularly significant element of the dream, that it is in this way that it designates, that it is a privileged connotation in this famous “sacred text.”

This is what interests him at this level of Chapter VII—to tell us, and this is what he tells us as something new, this remark full of relief: doubt itself has its value in the message. Agreed?

Jean-Paul VALABREGA

Yes… Yet, still, I have retained—it is difficult to change perspectives automatically—that Freud emphasizes the word resistance when he says: “Every obstacle to interpretation arises from psychic resistance (Widerstand).” It is in this passage. It is indeed named.

LACAN

Not entirely.
Have you also read the little note where he mentions that the patient’s father dies during the analysis, for example? We must still consider this: we are not going to think that he caused his father’s death solely to interrupt his analysis. But he says:

“It matters little. We classify everything that opposes interpretation as resistance. It is a matter of definition—that is to say, we will interpret this too in relation to whether it facilitates or hinders our progress, meaning the transmission of the message.”

Admit that here, this generalization of the theme of resistance also allows us to think that he does not include it in the psychological process. It is only in relation to the work that, at this level, resistance takes its value. It is not considered at all as something examined from the angle of the subject’s psychic properties.

It exists, of course—we know this—this resistance. We know, if you will, that there are imaginary frictions. This is how we can give some idea of resistance to interpretative work.

And, of course, we will attach the greatest importance to this character of imaginary or psychological frictions, to what resists what he himself calls “the flow of unconscious thoughts,” meaning the discourse situated in the unconscious.

But you see that, at this level, even this little note supports what I am telling you: that resistance is not considered in itself, on its psychological plane—that is, as something internal to the subject—but only in relation to interpretative work, meaning here the interpretative work of dreams or analysis.

Jean-Paul VALABREGA

It is also censorship, the widerstand.

LACAN – But precisely, it is not censorship, no!

Jean-Paul VALABREGA – But yes, sir.

LACAN

No, it is not censorship. We will see this at the end of this chapter. Censorship is not located at the same level as resistance. It is part of—what I called “interrupted discourse”—the interrupted nature of discourse.

I sense here that we are at an essential disagreement, and I will have to provide something visual as an example. The resistance of the subject is something linked to, if you will, this whole order, this register, which we call “imaginary fixation,” and even more, “insertion,” “narcissistic anchoring.” In short, resistance is linked to the register of the ego.

I will try to illustrate where and how censorship should be situated as it emerges from the reading of the texts of the Traumdeutung and from the perspective where we must place a very significant part of our experience—precisely, for example, which carries the whole question of what we call the superego.

This will lead us very far because I have immediately brought forth, in a pressing way, what I claim to be a certain misunderstanding.

But since they [Lacan gestures to the audience] do not know it and cannot decide between us, I must illustrate what I mean when I say that censorship in this chapter has nothing to do with resistance, in the strict technical sense, as an effect of the ego, nor even with resistance—but much more, as I claim, as it is established in this chapter, namely solely a way of signifying, of placing an x, or a function of x at the level of everything that interrupts, whether it is psychological or not, whether it comes from reality or chance, which intervenes in analytic work.

What is censorship in relation to all this? We must form a certain idea of the superego or censorship. What is it about?

I often speak to you about “interrupted discourse”—we were only there—but there is a much more essential correlative at this level, where the fundamental human discourse is situated: it is the law. One of the most striking forms of interrupted discourse is the law, inasmuch as it is misunderstood.

By definition, no one is supposed to be ignorant of the law, but it is always misunderstood because no one grasps it in its entirety.

The primitive, who is caught up in the laws of kinship, alliance, the rhythm of circulation, and the exchange of women, even if he is very knowledgeable, does not, in any case, have a complete view of what captures him within this structure of the law. What constitutes censorship is always something that relates to something in discourse, referring to the law inasmuch as it is misunderstood. This may seem a little abstract to you. I will attempt to illustrate it.

There is a little eminently pornographic book written by a prominent name in literature, currently a member of the Académie Goncourt. It’s Raymond Queneau. I no longer remember under what borrowed title he published this charming little book. In this book, one of the most delightful one can read, there is a very witty phrase.

A young typist, who gets caught up in the Irish revolution, to whom all sorts of very risqué misadventures will happen, while she is locked in the lavatories, makes a discovery quite similar to that of Ivan Karamazov.

As you know, the father of Ivan Karamazov, when Ivan Karamazov makes him appear in the audacious avenues into which the thought of a cultivated man ventures, and in particular: “If God does not exist…” And then:

“If God does not exist,” says the father, “then everything is permitted.”

This is obviously a naive notion, because we analysts know very well that if God does not exist, then nothing is permitted at all. Neurotics demonstrate this to us every day. But the typist, locked in the lavatories, makes a discovery far more disturbing for a subject of Her Majesty. A disruptive event has just occurred in maintaining order in Dublin. This gives her some doubt. And this kind of doubt leads to the following formula:

“If the King of England is an idiot, then everything is permitted.”

And the entire adventure of the typist, from that moment on—she is aided by events—shows that she denies herself nothing. The title must be “One is Always Too Kind to Women.”

Jean-Paul VALABREGA – The title is “Pity for Women.”

LACAN

With this preamble, let us continue. It is quite clear that indeed, for subjects of Her British Majesty… this is the hypothesis, do not think that I am speaking ill of our English allies… it is very important that the King of England should not be said to “be an idiot.” This can be expressed in the following law:

“Any man who says that the King of England is an idiot shall have his head cut off,” for example. Follow me carefully.

What will result from this? Such a sanction is nonetheless very important. Of course, it will never have to be enacted. Of course, this might assume that no one believes it. But I want you to hypothetically admit this: from the moment there is, in the law, as in all primordial laws, the indication of the death penalty, this is not at all improbable.

This is what I want to illustrate for you—the paradoxical character that the sanction of the law can take under certain circumstances. In other words, it seems very amusing, but what I want to say is that it should appear tragic to you, absurd, that such a law could exist. And I want to show you that every such law always has, due to its partial nature, this potential to be fundamentally misunderstood.

In other words, in relation to the law, man is always in a position of never completely understanding it, precisely because of this: no man can fully master the totality of the law of discourse, which is enacted through this enigmatic support, on this text, this fabric, as misunderstood in this play of the law.

If, therefore, it is forbidden to say that the King of England is an idiot, and one risks thereby having one’s head cut off, one will obviously not say it. And by this very fact, one will be led to be unable to say a multitude of other things—that is to say, everything that demonstrates this reality, absolutely certain and, moreover, glaring, that the King of England is an idiot, because it is quite certain—everything demonstrates it—that the King of England is an idiot.

We have had examples of this. And a King of England who was not an idiot was immediately placed in a position to abdicate, to resign, to relinquish his power. And he distinguished himself from the others in this respect, which obviously indicated that he was not an idiot: he fell off a horse, and he had the pretension of marrying the woman he loved.

This King of England, who suddenly demonstrated that he was something other than an idiot, was obliged to take his intimate considerations elsewhere. What does this mean? Am I trying to tell you that it is enough not to be an idiot to achieve salvation? That is a mistake—it is not enough either. I am not saying here that the King of England was right to submit to abdication because he was not an idiot. But that is a parenthesis.

The result, therefore, is this: that an entire other part of discourse, the one that is coherent with this reality—that the King of England must not be said to be an idiot, but that he is an idiot—carries within itself a sort of suspension of an entire part of discourse, which is precisely the part coherent with this real fact that the King of England is an idiot. What happens?

Each time the discourse must be re-established, when the subject is caught in this necessity of having to eliminate, remove, extract from the discourse everything related to what the law prohibits from being said—prohibited in a way that is totally misunderstood—something occurs.

Because at the level of reality, no one can understand why one would have their head cut off for saying and recognizing this truth. If, at the same time, no one grasps the very location of this prohibition, one forgets what was our fundamental hypothesis: that someone who says it might simultaneously have the idea that everything is permitted—that is to say, simply and purely, to annul the law as such.

What I am aiming at, behind this little amusing hypothesis, and trying to make you feel, is this kind of ultimate recourse upon which the existence of the law clings—this something completely unexplained, inexplicable, and yet something we are confronted with, the hard thing we encounter in the analytical experience, namely, that there is one, a law, and this is what can never be completely finalized in this discourse of the law—it is this ultimate term that explains that there is one.

What happens in this hypothesis about our subject, the King of England? The subject of the King of England has many reasons to express—because this is also an extremely important element of his discourse—things that are most directly related to the fact that the King of England is an idiot. This, in particular, at the level and at the point we have reached, passes through and expresses itself in dreams.

What will this subject dream about when it comes to something that is difficult to express, since what is at stake is not the fact itself that the King of England is an idiot, but everything that pertains to it, and everything that ensures he cannot be anything other than an idiot?

That is to say, the entire structure of the regime in which, each time the subject crosses boundaries where he must not go—through the universal complicity of the idiocy of the Kingdom of England—well, he dreams that he has been beheaded. At this level, there is no need to ask questions about some primordial masochism; there is no problem of self-punishment or the desire for punishment in this case. The fact that he is beheaded means that the King of England is an idiot.

Censorship, that’s it! It is the law insofar as it is misunderstood. Of course, at the level of the dream, this only poses a little problem, a completely childish one: why do we dream that we are beheaded? Why does this amuse you so much? But at the level of the symptom, it has a very great importance, for none of the subjects of the kingdom where idiocy reigns ever has their head firmly on their shoulders. At this level, it expresses itself through a symptom.

I am here telling you things that might seem like a little fable. I knew a subject whose writer’s cramp was tied to this—and only this—as revealed by his analysis: in Islamic law, in which he was raised, a thief was supposed to have his hand cut off. And this, he could never accept. Why?

Because his father had been accused of being a thief. He spent his childhood in a kind of profound suspension, which marked his entire relationship with Sharia law. And at the same time, his essential, fundamental relationship with his original environment—that which was for him the pillar, the foundation, and the fundamental coordinates of the world, Islamic law—was struck by a kind of fundamental barrier for him because there was one thing he refused to understand: why someone who was a thief had to have their hand cut off.

Because of this, and precisely because he did not understand it, he had his hand cut off. Censorship, that’s it. At the origin, it happens at the level of the dream. It is this, as we see its implications in unconscious discourse.

The superego, that’s it, insofar as it effectively terrorizes the subject, insofar as it constructs within the subject symptoms that are effective, experienced, pursued, built, elaborated, and which are charged with representing that point where the law is misunderstood, where they give it its mysterious appearance, where they are tasked with embodying it as such, where what in the law is not understood, not grasped, is played out by the subject.

And that is the superego. It is something completely different—you see it—from the narcissistic relationship with one’s fellow man. It is the subject’s relationship with the law as a whole and precisely to the extent that he can never have a relationship with the law as a whole, precisely to the extent that the law is never fully assumed, and where it can be assumed so little that he can be in conflict with this law.

That is what it means: “censorship” and “superego” are in the same order, in the same register as in the fundamental communication of the law as such.

It is concrete discourse insofar as, not only do we see it in all sorts of images, but it dominates man and causes all sorts of sudden flashes to emerge at his level—that is to say, anything, everything that happens, everything that is discourse—but much more in its entirety, in its existence as such, as concrete discourse, but discourse dominating all human life, giving man his unique world, which we more or less properly call “cultural.”

It is in this dimension that what is properly “censorship” is situated.

You see that it is something different from resistance. Let us call it resistance as well, but resistance situated at this internal level, properly speaking, of the world of discourse. It is not at the level of the subject nor of the individual but of the discourse, insofar as, as such, precisely, it is at once whole, already forming a complete universe on its own, and at the same time having something irreducibly discordant in all its parts.

Whether you grasp one part of it or not, it takes just the smallest thing, the tiniest detail—whether you had a father falsely accused of some crime, anything at all, whether or not you saw him locked in the lavatory at the right moment—for the law suddenly to appear to you in an absolutely heartbreaking form. That’s it. Do you follow?

This is in Freud’s text, for he never confuses Widerstand and censorship.

Jean-Paul VALABREGA

At the end of this paragraph, he finally establishes that the forgetting of the dream is intentional. This is where the psychoanalytic theory of forgetting is found. He replaced the explanation of dream formation through tension discharge, as he still referred to it in the text of the Entwurf, with the idea that sleep reduces censorship and, moreover, allows resistance to be circumvented. I apologize if there may be some confusion between these two concepts. But at the time I worked on this…

LACAN

But here, it’s true, because he is led to introduce the psychology of sleep. He must indeed say that sleep has its original dimension. Until that moment, he had not been concerned with sleep, but he must introduce it.

It’s about knowing what sleep is, in relation to what? What is its meaning?

He has not exhausted the question of this issue. But he essentially situates it in relation to what can indeed be situated, and in any case, this holds up—it is legitimate. Other people, in registers different from Freud’s, have tackled it and reached approximately similar solutions.

There is an essential relationship with what we call the ego, whether or not we know what that means, and sleep. There is a certain relationship. Broadly speaking, the first approximation is that the ego in sleep adopts a certain attitude which we express. It is not yet said here because it is not elaborated, due to the withdrawal of libido.

But all the problems it poses, we have at least some light on what must be distinguished from the question raised by libido theory, which reinvests itself entirely into the ego, for example. It would be a hypothesis.

In any case, the ego is no longer in the same state as it is in the waking state.

At this level of Freudian theory, implied and, to that extent, contradicted, resistances can be bypassed, traversed, or filtered. And the relationship of the resistance of the ego, as such—as a small part of resistance, the resistance linked to the ego—is no longer the same. And this modifies the conditions in which the phenomenon we assume to be permanent occurred, namely the continuation of discourse, what the human being has communicated.

Because what these two chapters signify is that the discourse of the dream, in any case, is absolutely tied, coherent, with waking discourse—that it is in this way that Freud constantly connects it. The connection is pursued in this question: what does the subject say in their dream, given what they are saying in their waking state at that moment?

It is only at this level that the entire dialectic of this chapter holds between what was said during wakefulness and what is to be said during sleep. It is here that both the relationships and differences are established, the entire range of these processes, which until then had been unseen, unknown, unexplained. Freud emphasizes it a hundred thousand times—they are precisely what constitutes the proper subject of the Traumdeutung.

Jean-Paul VALABREGA

He dynamically links resistance and disguise. He writes, for example, that under the pressure of censorship—he also uses the term resistance of censorship…

LACAN

Which proves to you that they are not the same; otherwise, he would not need to say resistance of censorship. You should not be surprised by this. You are all familiar with the problems posed by the questions of resistance and transference. This shows you that censorship is on the same level as transference. You find the same formulas, with the same ambiguities, in everything that intervenes in resistance in opposition to analytical work.

Of course, there is resistance of censorship just as there is resistance of transference. It is censorship and transference insofar as we consider them opposed to analytical work. This confirms what I just told you. Because if they were the same, as equivalent to each other as the word color is equivalent to the word color, there would be no need to say a color of color.

Jean-Paul VALABREGA

So, this resistance of censorship produces a shift from deep association to superficial association, seemingly absurd, as in the example of the channel given earlier.

Thus, at the end of this study on The Forgetting of Dreams, he dynamically linked the two notions of censorship and disguise: sleep being simultaneously conceived as a quantitative reduction of censorship and a means—he insists on this, it’s noted—of bypassing this censorship. He will return to this later. He means that the idea of a simple reduction of censorship is insufficient to explain the elaboration of the dream. One must add to it the notion of disguise, that is, the shift from deep association to superficial association.

We must now move on to regression.

LACAN – Yes. Go ahead.

Jean-Paul VALABREGA

There are several key characteristics in the processes of dream elaboration:

1. First, the dream places thought in the present. This present, he says, is a very important datum, and he will return to it later. Thus, in Irma dream, he admits that he wanted the basis of the dream to be: “I would like O. to be guilty.” And in the dream, O. is guilty in the present.
2. The dream transforms thought into images and discourse.

LACAN

There is the present and also the notion of the disappearance of vielleicht (“perhaps”).

Jean-Paul VALABREGA

Perhaps, yes… It’s in the actualization. He indeed says that there is no more hesitation. One could draw a parallel with what he said about doubt: there is doubt somewhere, but it’s not here; there is no vielleicht. Here, there is the present, the time of the dream is the present, and it is no coincidence that it is also the time of the immediate future—the present of “I’m coming right away,” which is the desire so close to being realized that it already is. This passage in the text of the dream is set in the present tense.

3. Next, he focuses on an idea that comes from Fechner: the notion of a psychic place. This will be important later; it will play a role in constructing the schemas of the psychic apparatus. Fechner observed, in psychophysics, that perhaps the place of the dream is not the same as the place of waking thoughts. Freud finds this observation valuable. He carefully states:

“We do not conceive of a place as locality, yet this will still allow us to construct.”

And from there, he immediately moves to the construction of his psychic apparatus based on these three remarks, the last being: the notion of a psychic place. He transitions to constructing his apparatus through a double analogy: the psychic apparatus will be constructed through a reflex analogy—a reflex process—and, on the other hand, an optical analogy, familiar to all those who have followed Mr. Lacan’s lectures, as he has often spoken about it.

In this text on regression, the psychic place will be considered—through an optical analogy of a microscope, a telescope, a camera—as the place where the image is formed, let’s say, for example, the focal plane. It doesn’t exist; it has no real existence, but it is still a quality, a spot, a place.

LACAN

Pay attention to this, as I cannot develop it further right now. You must realize, at this level of the text, the true grasp that Freud had of the notion brought forward by Fechner in his psychophysics. Did Anzieu share any insights about Fechner the other day?

Didier ANZIEU – No, no. I’ve only read summaries.

LACAN

I indicated to you that Fechner’s psychophysics does not belong at all to the entirely elementary psychological dimension that emerges from its popularization. The rigor of the position that Fechner was led to adopt drove him to suppose that, since there is a parallelism between consciousness and a measurable domain in the physical realm, this also implies that one must possibly, virtually, at least theoretically, in the abstract, extend the possibility of phenomena of consciousness perhaps far beyond living beings. This shows you that, when ideas are introduced with the character of valid hypotheses, they carry their authors much farther away from routine.

Fechner said in his psychophysics something entirely different, through which he removes the domain of the dream from this similarity or parallelism. And he indicates, in a very emphatic way, which should not be considered merely a stylistic turn of phrase, the felicitous analogies that Freud permits himself to associate and bring into his text at that moment. Freud never does such things—Freud is not Jung—he does not amuse himself by finding every possible echo, as long as they are loud enough. When Freud introduces something into his text, we know that it always has extreme importance. In a letter, he indicates to Fliess the true shock, the revelation that this passage from Fechner was for him, as it says that the dream can only be conceived as existing in another psychic place. It must, therefore, be given its full meaning.

And if there is precisely one place where you can recognize it in a way that gives it even more sense, it is here. Because, in reality, there is no other meaning that allows us to understand the particular emphasis that Fechner, and especially Freud, places on this remark highlighted in Fechner’s text. What I am telling you is precisely this: the psychic place in question is not just a psychic place but rather the symbolic dimension, quite simply.

This is what makes the dream occupy another psychic place and not merely that it takes place in the parenthesis of sleep. It situates and defines itself in another psychic place, also governed by other local laws: it belongs to another order. There is a pun in Angelus Silesius between Ort (place) and Wort (word); we will return to it.

The psychic place in question is precisely this, what I have just tried to explain to you, insofar as the dream is a phenomenon that—through the part Freud discovered and which interests him—inscribes itself in this other place, which is the place of symbolic exchange as such, inasmuch as it is not confused—although it incarnates itself there—with the spatiotemporal dimension where we can situate all human behaviors.

But these structural laws of the dream, as with language, inscribe themselves in another place, whether we call it psychic or not—that is what it means: it is situated elsewhere.

Jean-Paul VALABREGA

Let’s move on to the schema.

This psychic apparatus is conceived based on a double analogy. Its essential characteristic is that, in the schema of Chapter VII of The Interpretation of Dreams [p. 457, PUF edition, 1967], P, S1, S2, S3,…, M is oriented and has a direction, like the reflex apparatus. Freud states that this orientation, very important from the outset, comes from a well-known requirement: to explain psychic processes on the model of reflex processes. The reflex would be the model for all psychic production.

LACAN

Hold on a moment… This apparatus is to be placed within the Ψ system. It follows a certain temporal sequence that must be followed by excitation. Of course, it retroactively connects itself to its reflex apparatus, so to speak. He justifies the introduction of this by saying:

“And after all, let us not forget, this is a property of the reflex apparatus: things only go in one direction.”

But the essential point he introduces here—which, we might notice, has never been highlighted before in this balance of the three apparatuses ϕ, Ψ, and ω—is that, until now, we have been dealing primarily with phenomena of equilibrium, which could be considered reversible, since even if we never explicitly speak of equilibrium, we always return to it, whether forward or backward.

But suddenly, he introduces for us—pay attention and mark it as you pass—the notion that things occur in a determined sequence. Something is going to happen here, which we are first defining precisely as irreversible. The word irreversible is not there, but it is sufficiently indicated, in my opinion—and I hope in yours too—by the terms Zeitlichfolge (temporal sequence) and Richtung (direction). I point you to two places: page 542 of the German edition, but there are many others throughout this chapter. He returns to it—it is essential to the demonstration.

This is where, if you like, I will begin—and perhaps leave suspended for today—our discussion.

After having established this, what we see him being drawn into is precisely to consider something that he himself has just said never happens in one direction…

At least in this schema, if we consider it as fundamental to the reflex arc, he will be led to consider it as producing effects in the opposite direction.

This is why we are in the chapter on regression, at the very moment—and indeed, for reasons of internal coherence of the concepts—at the very moment when he introduces the notion of temporal succession, he will be led to speak to us about exactly the opposite: about this paradoxical thing called regression, which will subsequently exert such a dominant influence on the entire development of psychoanalytic thought.

This is what you might have already noticed last night regarding Schweich’s lecture—how much we are currently striving for precision as we advance into still-unknown domains, such as that of psychoses, and the way we must consider, envisage, and understand this notion of regression.

You have undoubtedly felt it; this was the central issue all along: what meaning should be given to the fact that a subject has regressed to the oral stage?

Throughout the rest of these chapters, we will encounter a true series of antinomies, of contradictions, and it is not the least of these to observe that the entire theory of desire, which is presented as being desire most closely tied to its biological root, suggests that the closer we get to this biological impulse, the more desire would tend to manifest itself in a hallucinatory form.

Admit that this is a paradox—a formula that we find, as in the continuation of the text, where the dream reveals to us a sort of primitive state of humanity. Therefore, if the primitive man had fewer means of subsistence than we do, he would have been someone who survived in the world by dreaming.

Admit that these things, which we take at face value—as if they were unquestionable—belong to a long line of other things we have been made to swallow. We were told, for example, that primitives had pre-logical thought, and all sorts of other claims that do not retain their full credibility.

In short, this notion, and the contradictions into which Freud is drawn by the necessity of explaining the phenomenon of the dream through regression, will—you will see—encounter on all levels as many fundamental objections as there are forms he will give to this regression, which he calls topical regression.

As for explaining how the process unfolded during this traversal of the psychic apparatus, through the stimuli, to the point where they reappear in expression or motor discharge, there arises this necessity of rediscovering a kind of primitive perceptual plane, hence a topical regression, and therefore the supposed hallucinatory form that desire must take under certain conditions.

All of this will face a multitude of difficulties, not least among them being the fundamental hypotheses, such as the fact that the circuit can only go in one direction and—what we know from experience—that the neural circuit is not retrograde and never is: the propagation of nervous excitation only occurs in one direction. The topical regression alone raises all kinds of difficulties within this schema.

Temporal regression, formal regression—you will see that this is precisely at the level where we will observe the greatest antinomies arising at this stage in Freud’s thought. This will also allow us to understand why and in what sense his thinking had to make certain advances later on and how, for example, the theory of the ego, as it was already established in 1915 at the level of the theory of narcissistic libido, allows us to approach the problems posed by the various forms of regression at this level of the schema in a decisive, essential, and resolutive manner.

I am merely indicating here what will be the subject of our next seminar in two weeks.

You can see how important this might be, since it raises fundamental questions—just as I am trying to limit the use of terms like resistance or censorship—and also the limited conditions under which we must use this term regression, understand what it means, and grasp the extent to which we must—as I said last night—for a certain time, renounce all sorts of abusive uses that have been made of it.