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VALABREGA
LACAN
We will begin by reading a few small excerpts from FREUD’s text, which are always read too quickly.
Today, we are resuming our commentary on the seventh part of The Interpretation of Dreams, The Psychology of Dream Processes, with the aim of integrating it into the general line we are pursuing: trying to understand what the progression of FREUD’s thought means in relation to what can be called the fundamental foundations of the human being, as they are revealed in the analytic relationship. This is done with the goal of explaining the final state of FREUD’s thought, the one expressed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
Last time, we had reached the point of taking, from the text of The Psychology of Dream Processes, the first paragraph concerning The Forgetting of Dreams and explaining it. This led us, concerning a divergence that emerged from certain corrections I had made to VALABREGA’s remarks on the nature of resistance, to clarify in an apologetic manner the meaning embodied in a short parable about the difference between censorship and resistance:
– Resistance being everything that generally opposes analytic work,
– And censorship, a special qualification of this resistance.
The line in which our work is situated, no need to remind you once again, is still about knowing where what we might call the subject of the analytic relationship is located. On this level, on this question of who is the subject of the analytic relationship, one must avoid a naive attitude: “The subject, well, it’s him, right?” As if the patient were something unequivocal, as if we analysts were something that, without any doubt, could be reduced to a certain sum of individual characteristics.
This notion of the cleavage introduced into the notion of “Who is he?” or “Who am I?” is the very question we are manipulating here in all its manifestations, attempting, precisely through the antinomies, the problems that emerge in the concrete encounter at every moment with this question—“Who is the subject?”—to follow it through all these points where it reflects, refracts, and bursts forth in a manifest way, in the difficulties we encounter in answering it.
It is in this way that we hope to convey a sense of where it is exactly situated, which, of course, cannot be approached directly, since approaching it also means addressing the very roots of language.
What does this mean? In this line: looking at things we usually overlook, because they are little notes embedded in the whole masonry, in the Freudian edifice [p. 493 ed. PUF 1967, p. 636 ed. PUF 2003].
We might not manage to catch up with VALABREGA, not because he goes fast, but because he proceeds in such a precise manner that we are not forced to stop him. This note is in the fourth part, The Awakening through the Dream, The Relations Between the Unconscious and the Preconscious.
“Another complication—besides knowing why the preconscious rejected and suppressed the desire belonging to the unconscious—much more important and profound, which the layperson does not consider, is the following. The fulfillment of a desire should certainly be a cause of pleasure. But for whom?” [p. 493]
You see that this question of “For whom?” is not being brought up for the first time in our society. It was not my student LECLAIRE who invented it: “Who is the subject?”
“For the one, naturally, who has this desire. Yet, we know that the dreamer’s attitude towards his desires is a very particular one. He repels them, censors them, in short, wants nothing to do with them. Their fulfillment, therefore, cannot bring him pleasure, quite the contrary. And experience shows that this contrary, which still remains to be explained, manifests itself in the form of anxiety. In his attitude towards the desires of his dreams, the dreamer thus appears as composed of two persons, yet united by an intimate community.”
Here is a short text I offer as a prelude to your meditation, as it expresses quite clearly the very idea of the decentering of the subject, which I always emphasize, expressed here in an entirely clear manner. It is, of course, a step in thought, not the solution.
That a verbalization might allow us to give this something like a reification of the problem, namely: there is another personality. One didn’t wait for FREUD to say this.
It was a man named JANET…
who, by the way, was not without merit in his work, even though completely eclipsed by the Freudian discovery…
who had indeed noticed that, in certain cases, there was a phenomenon of double personality in the subject. And he stopped there because he was a psychologist. In short, it was a psychological curiosity, or whatever you want to call it, a fact of psychological observation—it’s the same thing—historiolé, said Mr. SPINOZA, of little stories.
While for us, it is precisely:
– because FREUD does not present things to us in the form of a little story,
– because FREUD poses the problem at its most essential point, namely:
what is it that we can call meaning?
But also, when he says “thoughts,” that is precisely what he means and nothing else: the meaning of the behavior of our fellow human being, insofar as we are in relation to them in this very special relationship inaugurated by FREUD in the approach to a certain type of illnesses, the neuroses. What is this meaning? He poses this question.
He does not seek it simply in a certain number of traits to highlight in our exceptional, abnormal, pathological behavior, but he speaks first of himself, namely that to bring forth this truth of the meaning of the subject, he begins to pose it only where the subject can pose it, at the level of himself.
And it is because FREUD analyzes his own dreams that he brings forth something which is precisely what we have just stated, namely that someone else—apparently—other than himself speaks in his dreams, and this is what he confides to us in a note like this one, someone else: apparently this second character.
What does this mean?
What is its relationship with the being of the subject?
This is the entire question at stake from beginning to end, from the little draft we have seen, to what extent, at every moment, while remaining within atomistic language, it slides into something else because it poses the entire problem of the relations between the subject and the object in remarkably original terms.
It has not escaped your notice that I have reconnected today with the line of our work.
The originality of this first sketch that FREUD gives us…
this attempt at outlining the human psychic apparatus, which is important, striking, distinct from all the authors who have written on the same subject, including even the great FECHNER, to whom he constantly refers…
is the idea that the object of human research is never an object of rediscovery, that it is a new object each time…
rediscovery in the sense of reminiscence, where the subject finds the preformed tracks of his natural relationship with the external world…
but if the human object is constituted, it is always through an initial loss; nothing fruitful for humanity happens except through the intermediary of a loss of the object, that it is always a reconstruction of the object that is at stake.
This is a trait we noted in passing; I think it has not escaped your notice amidst the many things we have seen in this first paragraph. But this may have seemed to you like just a detail. I highlight it again in passing because we will encounter it later on.
The entire dialectic, ultimately, of the decomposition of the object, the fact that the human object is always something the subject will attempt to recover in its entirety, starting from some unknown unity lost at the origin, is something very striking, which already emerges within this kind of symbolic theoretical construction that FREUD seeks, that is suggested to him by the first discoveries about the structure of the nervous system, to the extent that they can be applied to his clinical experience.
Already, he arrives at this profound reality on the level of what must be called the “metaphysical scope” of his work, at the level of The Interpretation of Dreams, at a point that may seem accidental or even obsolete. We can let it pass, or we can see in it a statement that allows us to perceive that we are indeed in line with FREUD’s question, posed always at this level, namely: “What is the subject?”
“What is the subject?” in the sense that what he does has meaning, that in the end he speaks through his behavior, through his symptoms, as well as through all this marginal function of what we know about his psychic activity, at that moment referred to as “consciousness”…
the term being, for the psychology of the time, maintained as equivalent…
and which FREUD shows at every moment to be precisely the source of the problem:
– that the most incomprehensible thing is certainly not what is readable in the subject’s behavior,
– but rather: why is this appearance, this presentation in consciousness, something that is, in a way, so irregular?
This is something constantly present in this little sketch of the psychic apparatus, with which we have now nearly finished. And at the moment when he tackles a psychological notion of dream processes, namely:
“One must not confuse,” he says, “primary process and unconscious.”
In the primary process, all kinds of things appear at the level of consciousness. The question is precisely to know why it is those particular things that appear, namely something that manifests to us as the idea, the thought of the dream.
Of course, we are aware of it, because otherwise, we would know nothing about what exists in the dream.
What is unconscious is something where necessarily, he tells us, by a theoretical necessity, a certain quantity, a certain quantitative factor of interest must have been invested.
And yet, what motivates this quantity, what determines it, lies elsewhere, in an elsewhere of which we are not conscious. We must also reconstruct this object.
This is what we have already seen emerge at the level of the first little diagram given in the dream of Irma’s injection, the one that FREUD presents in his graph, in his sketch of the psychic apparatus: he shows us that what appears in the dream is evidently, when one studies the structure, the determination of associations, what is most heavily loaded in quantity, what draws, on the level of the expressive relationship between the signified and the signifier, the greatest number of signifying elements.
But this indeed emerges because it seems to be the crossroads, the point of convergence of the greatest psychic interest. It is also something that completely leaves in shadow the elements that manifest there, namely the motives themselves. We have already indicated these motives at the level of the graph. They are twofold:
– it is the continued discourse, the ongoing dialogue with Fliess, on the one hand,
– and on the other hand, in a dual form, the sexual foundation that provides the other determination to all the appearances of the dream.
The sexual foundation is twofold:
– both involved in this discourse, since it is the notion that it exists as such, which comes there to determine the dream, showing that it is the dream of someone trying to seek what is even an object of the dream,
– and the fact that FREUD himself is effectively, not only with his patient but with the entire feminine series that emerges behind her, a complex and contrasted series, which remains precisely to be determined, which is in the unconscious and can only be reconstructed as an object.
This is the meaning of what FREUD, at the point where we are in the development of his thought, brings us.
This is what we are going to address today, with the second part on regression, on the notion of how one must conceive the coalescence, its characteristic fundamental necessity in every symptomatic formation, of at least two series of motivations, one of which must be sexual, and the other is precisely what is questioned here, because it is questioned everywhere in FREUD’s work, without ever being explicitly named in the way we name it here, which is precisely the factor of speech, of the symbolic function as assumed by the subject.
But always with the same question: by whom, by what subject?
Jean-Paul VALABREGA
It is important to keep in mind that he introduces, for the first time, the concept of the psychic apparatus in relation to the study of regression. Therefore, it is necessary to return to The Interpretation of Dreams to find the first explanation of regression, which will later take on considerable importance in the entire subsequent theory.
Next, to follow FREUD’s argumentation in this passage, he begins by recalling the three most important characteristics derived from the study of dreams. In other words, he summarizes, condenses everything that precedes this part—practically the entire volume—before arriving at this study of the processes, which are three:
- The dream places thought in the present through the fulfillment of desire. Therefore, it is an actualization. The desire or the thought of desire, most frequently in the dream, is objectified, staged, and finally experienced.
- This is an almost independent characteristic, says FREUD, of the previous one and no less important: the transformation of dream thought into visual images and into speech—Bilder und Rede.
LACAN
“Rede” means discourse. The unconscious is the discourse of the Other; it is not I who invented this.
“Bilder” means imaginary, particularly adapted to a term that means image in German.
Jean-Paul VALABREGA
- The third notion, which has already been emphasized, is derived from FECHNER: the psychic location of the dream is different from the representational location of waking life.
These are the three most important results he highlights at the beginning of his argumentation, the attempt at constructing the psychic apparatus to which he is about to dedicate himself. This will be the first schema for a possible model of the apparatus. And this reconstruction directly follows the reference to FECHNER’s Psychophysics.
However, one important thing is already indicated and will be revisited later: the psychic apparatus is composed of various systems ϕ, Ψ, ω, and one is not obligated—he says—to imagine a certain spatial order between these different systems, but rather an order of temporal succession. Therefore, one must imagine this apparatus as a spatial schema:
– but without believing in its spatiality,
– but rather believing that it is an order of temporal succession of excitation that traverses the different systems involved.
Consequently, it is a temporal topology.
Further on, after presenting the diagrams, he will return to this idea and state that the dream is a return…
in a synthesis he makes following his conception of the apparatus…
a return to the most distant past, and this past, beyond childhood, extends back to a phylogenetic past,
that is, understood in an even broader sense than the historical past of the subject.
Leaving aside this synthesis, here is Diagram No. 1 of the apparatus. [p.456, ed. PUF 1967; p.590, ed. PUF 2003]
It is endowed with a direction: this is fundamental—the direction of the arrows.
The psychic process always proceeds from the perceptual end, P, to the motor end, M; however, there is an initial differentiation that occurs immediately afterward: the perceptual excitations reaching the subject leave a trace there, which is a memory trace. Memory must be explained. Yet the P system, perception, has no memory, so it is necessary to differentiate a S system from the P system.
Because, first of all, perceptions are united in memory according to their order of appearance. When perceptions occur simultaneously, there will be a connection in the same simultaneous order of the traces: this is the important phenomenon of association. On the other hand, since there are other connections in the connections occurring in the S system besides associative connection, it will therefore be necessary to admit several S systems: S1, S2, S3… There will be a large number of them. It would be futile, says FREUD, to attempt to fix their number or even to try.
LACAN
This is almost amusing. You have the text in mind, Mr. HYPPOLITE, it is truly striking:
“The first of these S systems will fix the association by simultaneity. In the more distant systems, this same material of excitation will be arranged according to different modes of encounter, so that, for example, these successive systems represent relationships of resemblance, or others…”
That is to say, of course, that we are entering here into the dialectical register of the establishment of the same, the other, the one, the multiple, everything you could imagine. You could insert all of PARMENIDES here.
And he says:
“It would obviously be futile to attempt to indicate in words the psychic significance of such a system.”
What does “attempt to indicate in words” mean?
It means, in the words of our demonstration, in a diagram, to make a diagram of the different ways in which the more or less atomistically conceived elements of reality are organized and regrouped, at the various levels where we must consider them, to recreate all the categories of language.
Here, FREUD realizes, under this “It would be futile,” the vanity of such an excess. And yet, it is required on the other hand that a diagram allows us to spatially unfold—since it is a diagram of a spatial apparatus—everything we must rediscover as connections at the level of concepts and categories.
From then on, of course, it would indeed be futile to do so. Because our spatial diagram would then only be a duplicate of the requirements at this point in the play of thought, in the deepest and most general sense.
Here, we see that he abandons it, that his diagram no longer serves any purpose except to indicate to us that wherever there is a relationship of language, there must be a connection: from the moment we seek to establish these relationships of language in their connections, their supports, a substrate that would be given within a determined neuronal apparatus.
He realizes that there is nothing else to do but to indicate that there must be a series of systems, but that it would be futile to attempt to specify them one after another, because then we abandon the entire category of the neurological diagram: we include in it, we assume within it, the totality of what we might call the noological diagram, quite simply. And the kind of tranquility with which he abandons this task, to which we see more naive minds devoting themselves, is entirely characteristic.
On the other hand, the following sentence:
“Its characteristic would be the narrowness of its relations with the raw materials of memory, that is to say, if we want to evoke a deeper theory, the degradations of resistance in the direction of these elements.”
“Degradations of resistance” is not an exact translation. Here, something concrete stops us.
What does the notion of resistance mean at this level?
Where will it situate itself within this diagram?
Jean-Paul VALABREGA
As we can see, in the passage Mr. LACAN has just commented on, there is a critique of associationism. Because doctrinal associationism is the law of association that connects memories, regardless of their relationships—whether by contiguity, resemblance, or difference.
Whereas here, association is specified; it is one connection among others. There are others, and that is why there are several systems. There is a critique formulated here, one that is in disagreement with the associationist doctrine.
LACAN
That’s correct. It is in this sense that he implicitly acknowledges—since he must assume, at the level of the different systems, all these layers—that at the precise level where it concerns relationships of resemblance, he transitions from associationism to what is irreducible to associationism, the entire dialectic, resemblance being the first dialectical category.
Jean-Paul VALABREGA
So these memories, S1, S2, S3… are by nature unconscious. They can become conscious. But in this case, it must be noted that they have no quality comparable—no sensory quality, and it is on this sensory quality that we must insist—comparable to that of perceptions.
And if we now introduce…
because he says that, so far, we have not considered, in our schema, the dream and its psychology…
the dream into the schema, we recall that it can only be explained in its formation by two fundamental agencies: the criticizing agency and the criticized agency, the one that criticizes and the one that is criticized. The criticizing agency is the one that prevents access to consciousness and, for this reason, finds itself in the closest relationship with this consciousness.
It is by placing these two agencies—criticizing and criticized—into his schema that he arrives at the following diagram, where we still have the perceptual end and the motor end: he situates the preconscious near the M end. The preconscious must be considered as the last of the systems located at the motor end. Preconscious phenomena can reach consciousness.
In a moment, we will see, in the linear development of the schema, that we will be led to assimilate—since certain preconscious phenomena can become conscious. I may be mistaken, but it seems that one would understand the schema more clearly if, instead of making it a parallelepipedic schema, one made it a circular schema, in order to also be able to move from M to P, with preconscious phenomena becoming conscious.
In the other case, it will be another process on which we will focus. Preconscious phenomena are defined by their capacity to become conscious, following a process normally directed opposite to the lower arrow.
LACAN
You highlight here what—I imagine—any sincere reader of FREUD must have long considered a problem. This system, which, of course, from this moment on, is recognized as presupposing a unity, namely the perception-consciousness system (Wahrnehmung-Bewusstsein), the one we find in the final topography…
as in certain moments of FREUD’s exposition…
as forming the core of the ego.
But this does not mean that, because this is expressed in this way, one must stop there. Precisely when we arrive at this final state of FREUD’s thought, it is to say that it is commonly accepted. I mention this in passing to point out that it is commonly accepted and that we will not content ourselves with it!
Let us go back. The perception-consciousness system is already affirmed at the level of The Interpretation of Dreams. What is striking is that it must necessarily imply, admit, in an absolutely essential way, due to internal annexation, this connection called representation.
VALABREGA’s remark is valuable on its own, independently of the solution he proposes, because, on the other hand, he presents to us as a single system the topical element…
in a schema that, I remind you, is not purely spatial but successive…
as a topical unity, something that is precisely decomposed at both ends, at the two extremities of the system.
This difficulty must certainly represent something.
I would say that, for now, it suffices for us to leave the question open. Ultimately, for the explanation of the very functioning of his schema, he must remind us, at a given moment, that consciousness lies at the outcome of elaborative processes that go from the unconscious to the preconscious, which must normally culminate—since the very naming of these systems implies this orientation—toward consciousness:
what is in the unconscious is separated from consciousness but can reach it through the preliminary stage of the preconscious.
Now, this system of consciousness, by the necessity of his schema, must be situated just before the possibility of action, before the motor outcome, thus there, on the right, at M. And this is indeed where he places it. Yet, according to all the premises that determined the construction of his neurological schema, he had to admit that it was, on the contrary, well before any kind of unconscious, that is, at the level of acquisition, at the point of contact with the external world, with the Umwelt, that perception occurs—that is, at the other end of the schema, where we have the Wahrnehmung W system or Perception P.
Therefore, the schema, the way it is constructed, at this stage of FREUD’s thought, has the consequence, the property, and the peculiarity of posing a problem: it represents as dissociated, at the two terminal points of the series of what constitutes the direction of the circulation of psychic elaboration, at its two extremities, what appears to be the reverse and the obverse of the same function, namely perception and consciousness.
This cannot in any way be attributed to some contingent characteristic that might arise from the illusion we suffer in the spatialization of the entire schema. It is entirely conceivable that, since these are ultimately phenomena that are far from being purely spatial, on a certain level, it might simply be a difficulty of graphical representation that leads to this apparent problem. This difficulty is inherently tied to the construction itself, to the very movement, to the dialectical elaboration of the schema. Perception must be aided so that it possesses this characteristic of being a kind of sensitive layer, in the sense that the word sensitive has in photosensitive.
But in another text, FREUD returned to this point and insisted on the small apparatus that involves taking notes on a kind of slate board, which has special adhesive properties and on which a transparent sheet of paper rests (“magic slate”). The pencil is a simple point that, each time it traces lines or signs on the transparent paper, creates a momentary and localized adhesion to the slate underneath. Consequently, the word traced appears on the surface, dark on light, or light on dark, and remains inscribed on this surface as long as you do not make the gesture of detaching the sheet again from the base, which causes the word to disappear, and the paper returns to a blank state every time the adhesion is lifted.
It is something like this that FREUD demands of his first perceptive layer. We must assume that the perceptive neuron, being a sensitive material, can always intercept some perception. But there will always remain some trace on the slate, even if it is no longer visible, of what was momentarily written. It is the upper layers that are responsible for preserving what has once been perceived, but what is on the surface must become blank. Such is the coherent and logical schema, and nothing indicates to us that it is not grounded in the concrete functioning of the psychic apparatus, which makes it necessary for the perceptive system to be given from the start.
Thus, we arrive at this peculiar dissociation, namely that perception and memory exclude each other in terms of their systematic location. From the perspective of the nervous apparatus, it is necessary to distinguish:
– the level of accumulation of the mnemonic apparatus,
– from the level of perceptual acquisition.
From the perspective of imagination, this is perfectly correct as a “machine,” but we encounter this second difficulty, which constitutes the paradox to which VALABREGA and I draw your attention.
If we approach things in this way, everything in experience indicates that the system of consciousness must be located at the extreme opposite point of this succession of layers of elaboration, of systematic interconnections, which we must admit in order to think about the concrete, effective functioning of the psychic apparatus in experience.
We must suppose this level of consciousness exactly at the opposite point of this said succession of layers. This presents a difficulty. Once again, we suspect that there is something here that does not align correctly, the same something that, in the first schema, will express itself in the assumption of two different planes:
– the functioning of the ϕ system, on the one hand, as a complement to the stimulus-response circuit,
– and the Ψ system, representing the energetic functioning of psychic activity.
Here we have a peculiar paradox: the necessity of admitting, as something functioning according to different energetic principles, the system that we called ω, which represented the perception system, inasmuch as, in this first schema, it was the function of awareness, linked to its particular mode of functioning, on the level of the quality of everything that ensured the autonomy of the ω system in the first schema. Through this, the subject primarily had qualitative information, which was something else entirely, isolated by this schema because it could in no way represent it within the energetic equilibrium system constituted by the Ψ system, as the regulator of investments in the nervous apparatus.
Therefore, we are faced with this:
– The first schema gives us a representation where, at one single end of the apparatus, perception and consciousness are united, as they are experimentally.
– But the second schema multiplies the difficulties of the first with an additional difficulty, namely the dissociation of the place of the perceptive system and the place of consciousness.
You see where all this is leading us. For now, I will simply suspend the question.
Jean-Paul VALABREGA
It would therefore seem necessary to establish some sort of connection—how, I don’t know. FREUD does not insist on this point.
LACAN
You have proposed a solution.
Jean-Paul VALABREGA
No, it’s not a solution. I will explain why. If one could have imagined this circular schema, I don’t see why FREUD wouldn’t have done it. He knows how to draw circles, like all of us. He imagines in this way and speaks…
in a very short note [Cf. note 1 p.460, ed. PUF 1967; p.594 ed. PUF 2003] only, where he assimilates P and C…
of the linear unfolding of his schema. If he had wanted to develop it circularly, he would have done so. And he does not.
It would therefore be necessary to find a hypothetical path. And this is not the point that FREUD will study. I am thinking of one last hypothesis. We must wait for another topography—this is another point we will emphasize shortly—to clarify this. Let us abandon this problem to move on to the unconscious, which is a system located further back. It cannot access consciousness “except by passing through the preconscious.” Thus, the motive of the dream must be located in the unconscious system.
Consciousness—a small note on page 444 of the latest French edition [ed. PUF 1950. Cf. note 1 p.460, ed. PUF 1967; p.594 ed. PUF 2003]—is a “system succeeding the preconscious.” It is an order of succession to the preconscious, but in another sense: it is the most superficial system, the P-C system.
Here we encounter the same paradox: the conscious system is open simultaneously:
– on the side of perception, on the left side of the diagram, where excitation arrives,
– and on the motor end, on the right, where the closest system is the preconscious system.
In this note, we encounter the same paradox. Internal excitation, in the case of the dream, tends to pass through the relay of the preconscious to become conscious, but it cannot, because censorship forbids this path during the day, during wakefulness.
How can we explain hallucination, the hallucinatory dream? FREUD says that there is only one way out: admitting that excitation, instead of transmitting normally toward the motor end, follows a retrograde path. This is regression.
LACAN
I notice that today attention, on matters that are entirely simple, seems somewhat wavering.
In other words, we find ourselves facing this peculiar contradiction—I don’t know whether to call it dialectical or not—that you listen all the more intently the less you understand. Because I am telling you very difficult things, and I see you hanging on my words, and then I learn that some have not understood! On the other hand, when one says very simple things, almost too well-known, it is certain that you are less captivated.
This is an observation I make in passing because it is of interest, like every concrete observation, and it raises a question about its origin. I leave this to your meditation. Nevertheless, despite our slow pace, this is very important to examine closely. I point out to you what this means: the first time the notion of regression appears, it is strictly linked to a peculiarity of the schema, whose paradox I showed you earlier.
In other words, if we could simply devise, in a coherent way, a schema such that the perception-consciousness system would not occupy this paradoxical position in relation to the apparatus and to the unidirectional functioning that represents this stage of the representation of the psyche in FREUD, if the schema were different, there would be no need at this level for the notion of regression. It is solely because the schema is constructed in this way that it becomes necessary to explain the hallucinatory quality of the dream experience.
At this level, it is necessary to admit not so much a regression, but a regredient direction of quantitative circulation, expressed through the excitation-discharge process. What is then referred to as “regredient” is opposed to the “progredient” direction of the normal, waking functioning of the psychic apparatus. This is something entirely dependent on this specific characteristic of the schema, which must nevertheless seem somewhat suspect to us, as perhaps being something outdated, since in itself, it already presents a paradoxical character.
I simply ask you to highlight this point in passing because it will perhaps allow us to shed some light on the way in which the term regression is subsequently employed, with a multiplicity of meanings that does not fail to present some ambiguity.
The first sense in which it appears—what might be called topical regression—is the fact that the current, what takes place in the nervous apparatus, can and must, in certain cases, flow in the opposite direction, that is, not towards discharge, but rather in relation to the mobilization of the system of memories, which constitutes the unconscious system.
In a certain schema, we must explain why the hallucinatory character of the dream, the figurative nature of the dream, why this something that takes on certain aspects—which are, moreover, sensory aspects only in a metaphorical sense—the qualitative side of dream representation, the particularly visual character of dream imagery, is what needs to be explained at this level.
And the first introduction of the term regression into the Freudian system therefore appears, due to this very fact, as singularly problematic, essentially tied to one of the most inexplicable peculiarities of his first schema. That is what must be noted at this level. We will see whether something infinitely more valid might allow us to explain things in such a way that the term regression would become entirely unnecessary at this level.
Jean HYPPOLITE
Could we not hypothesize that regression, the schema, the idea of regression in FREUD, comes before the schema? It is not the schema that generates regression, but rather the underlying Freudian thought of regression that generates the schema—it’s a hypothesis…—the peculiarity of the schema?
LACAN
That is precisely, if you will, the importance of how we proceed, by studying successively, in the form of the four stages, which, I believe, schematically correspond quite well to something of the representative schema of the psychic apparatus in FREUD. This schema is preceded by another, which is also something constructed at the level of his particular experience, namely the experience of neuroses. That is what has animated his entire theoretical effort from the beginning.
At that level, there is no trace of an introduction of a notion like regression. It is precisely, if you will, this schema that continues from the other, or more accurately, in this schema, which appears as primary, which is in continuity with the previous one, that this schema takes this form because the first had that other form, which I have already illustrated on the board several times.
And it is to the extent that this schema takes this form that it must admit, on the topical level, that there is a return backward, an upstream flow of the nervous current. At this level, nothing else implies the term regression to explain the hallucinatory quality of the dream. It is not about the character of desire, for example:
– which sustains the dream,
– which can operate on other planes,
– introducing, in another form, another necessity,
– which can also fall under the same schema of regression.
This is what we will now examine. But, at this level, on the topical plane, the fact that memory returns to the living quality of the primitive image at the moment when it is formed in perception, is something that has a character, and is even qualified as regressive, only through all kinds of difficulties.
FREUD is forced to create additional constructions to admit that something regredient can occur through what always normally happens in a progredient manner. This is stated in a thousand places in the text: that he must, precisely, admit that what occurs in the dream is precisely a suspension of the progredient current.
Because if the progredient current always flowed at the same speed, no regression could occur.
The notion of regression presents enough difficulties for acceptance, given the way the schema is constructed, that one can see that if he is forced to admit it, it is because, within this schema, he must explain how things can actually occur in the direction of regression relative to the schema.
And it is not at all from regression that he starts. It cannot be conceived as a regression except because he is forced to construct his schema—not only his schema but also because he is forced, by the way he conceives, in its entirety, the function of perception in the overall psychic economy, as something primary, uncomposed, elementary. The organism represents, above all, an organism that is primarily impressionable, and this impressionable element is represented at this level in its elementary function. It is in its elementary function that he is compelled to bring it into play in his economy of what happens at the symptomatic level.
That is precisely the problem, of course: whether what happens at the level of conscious phenomena can, in fact, in any way, be assimilated purely and simply to the elementary phenomena of perception.
But what can be said in favor of FREUD is that, at this somewhat naïve level—because we must not forget that this was constructed fifty years ago—of an attempt to represent what occurs in the nervous system, FREUD does not evade a difficulty, which is the very existence of consciousness.
Let us not forget that, for us, all these matters, with the distance of time, take on a kind of diminished interest, which is precisely due to this: the diffusion of behaviorist thought. I would like to point out, in passing, that behaviorist thought is, in comparison to what FREUD attempts to do, a pure and simple sleight of hand.
Behaviorist thought says this:
“Of course, consciousness is something that poses problems. We, behaviorists, resolve the issue by describing phenomena and operating on them without ever taking into account its existence as such. Where it is manifestly operative, it is just a stage, a mere step, and we do not speak of it!”
It is indeed quite a remarkable way to evade the difficulties we face, thanks to the fact that FREUD, for his part, does not think of eliminating the difficulty of integrating consciousness as a special instance into the entire process. This leads him to something whose caution in handling is itself surprising. Because, in the end, he manages to handle it without reifying it, without turning it into a thing. You will see this even more clearly in the continuation of the development.
Jean-Paul VALABREGA
Moreover, one might raise, regarding regression, the question of whether FREUD did not have other examples in mind. But in the 1895 Project (Entwurf)—this remark might respond to Mr. HYPPOLITE—FREUD provides a purely quantitative explanation of hallucination. He says that it is the quantity of investment alone at stake that explains how a representation can become hallucinatory. Therefore, he does not intend to justify any other idea. At this point, a formal process intervenes, that is, another current, another circulation of the psychic current. In the first case, only economic data are involved…
LACAN
If you will, in other words, the first schema in the initial conception he gave us: this kind of network is the Ψ apparatus, the ensemble that, in neurosis, represents everything we might call “association fibers.” These “association fibers,” in FREUD’s first schema, are only of interest to him in terms of what circulates within them—the neuronal quantity, an energetic notion regulated by this: that the system as a whole must remain at a certain level for things to settle into a circulation that indeed represents the sum of its experiences. The change in this level of investment will determine whether something passes or does not pass—whether it crosses the synaptic barrier.
In fact, this is what is given to him: a nervous system constructed in a certain way, made up of interconnected neurons.
It concerns understanding:
– what passes and what does not pass,
– how pathways are established,
– how these pathways change,
– how they function above certain thresholds and cease to circulate below them.
Everything is regulated at a general level, with all that he introduces concerning homeostasis and the variations that occur due to the existence of several possible thresholds: wakefulness, sleep, each representing different rules of homeostasis, centered on a common idea, a common theme of homeostatic regulation.
Well, what happens, and what he calls hallucination at that moment, simply corresponds to certain internal incitations coming from the entire organism, that is, what the nervous system receives from internal excitations within the organism—namely, needs. Under these conditions, a certain number of experiences occur, and it is the first ones that determine the subsequent ones. The notion is strictly within the domain of learning; the initial experiences determine the following ones and result in the recording, the structuring within this system, of certain circuits corresponding to certain instinctual drives, each time the drive reoccurs.
This is also a consequence of the structure of the schema. What will awaken is what was associated with the initial experiences, meaning it is the neurons that will again—let’s call it this—light up.
It is a kind of internal signal, which will be exactly the same as those that were activated during the first experience, driven by the need, by the initial movement of the organism under the pressure of that need.
What results from this?
A strictly hallucinatory conception of the activation of needs emerges from this, and this is where the idea of the primary process originates.
In other words, it is normal, within this conception of an organism defined as a psychic organism, that because it was satisfied in a certain way in its initial confused experiences, linked to its first need, it is normal that it hallucinates its second satisfaction. In other words, the same signals light up.
At what level? You can clearly see: at something that implies an identification between the physical phenomenon of what occurs in a neuron and something that is truly its epiphenomenal reverse, which strictly belongs to the domain of psycho-physical parallelism, namely, what the subject perceives.
We must call things by their names. The fact that he calls it hallucination is tied to the necessity of situating authentic, valid, real perception elsewhere. This hallucination is simply a false perception, just as, at the same time, perception could be defined as a true hallucination.
In other words: any form of return to a need, once satisfied, leads to the hallucination of its satisfaction. And the entire construction of the first schema rests upon this: How is it possible that the living being, who, as a living being, is assumed to be equipped with nervous apparatus and constructed in this way, nevertheless manages not to fall into biologically grave traps? Because it is clear that if every kind of satisfaction for a living being begins to present itself to it as hallucination, it has little chance of ever…
It would therefore be a matter of understanding the regulation of what happens within this process. And this regulation is carried out by something that, at that moment, is situated within the Ψ systems by FREUD, namely by something he already calls an ego.
What is it at that moment? It is something—it is stated in FREUD—that represents the secondary organization that we must necessarily suppose in relation to this primary functioning of the Ψ system.
In the same system, something must have happened that allows the organism, at every moment, to reference this hallucination, which arises spontaneously, to something else occurring at the level of these perceptual apparatuses—that is, to make the comparison, the confrontation that is called adapting to reality.
This implies, as a consequence of experience, that something develops that reduces the quantitative investment at the sensitive point of incidence of need in this apparatus—a reduction that FREUD explains in his first elaboration through the process of derivation: what is quantitative is always capable, in such a constructed apparatus, of being diverted, diffused—there is an already established path.
But if something intervenes to make the stimulus, the excitation, the neuronal quantity, the energetic representation, pass along three, four, or five pathways simultaneously instead of one, FREUD finds in this schema a satisfying explanation that allows him to think that, at the quantitative level, what passed through the first pathway—the cleared pathway—will be sufficiently lowered in level to successfully undergo a comparative examination with what happens simultaneously at the strictly perceptual level.
You see the assumptions this requires—on certain points, yes, on others, no. So many hypotheses are needed, and many are beyond the reach of confirmation. These constructions always have a somewhat disappointing character.
We are not here to judge the quality of FREUD’s constructions. They are valuable for the developments to which they have led FREUD. The important point is to say that, at this moment, this is how it is structured.
I would like to point out, in passing, that the ego, in this Ψ system itself, is situated at this level and not at the level of the perceptual apparatus, conceived as a reference system in relation to hallucination and true perception. The ego is the regulatory apparatus for all these comparative experiences between:
– what happens in a hallucinatory way at the level of the Ψ system,
– and what happens in an adapted way to reality at the level of the ω system.
The important thing is to explain, at the energetic level, how such things are possible because, at the ω level, the energetic charges are very low. The ego must always reduce the ignition of already-cleared neurons to an extremely low energetic level so that something possible can occur—on the level of switches, of distinctions that will be made via the ω system.
In other words, in this schema—and this follows the line of what we are trying to demonstrate—the ego is found at the very heart of this psychic apparatus. The primary and secondary processes pass through the same places, topically. In the first schema, the ego and the Ψ apparatus are the same thing. The ego is the nucleus—that’s how he expresses it—the core of this apparatus. That’s what’s interesting: noting this evolution and this difference.
And this contradicts your earlier remark and hypothesis. It is far less due to some kind of preformed idea that would impose on him this dissociation of the ego system into these two parts—perception and consciousness—so paradoxically situated in his schema. It was far more convenient in the first schema.
The question I am posing is this: Why does it seem necessary for it to be this way in the second schema?
The fact is that the second schema does not at all, absolutely, overlap with the first. What dominates in the second schema is that it is a temporal schema. It concerns understanding in what order and in what succession things occur. And what is remarkable is that he encounters precisely this difficulty when he introduces the temporal dimension. It is here that he encounters a paradox he did not encounter in his first schematic formulation.
This is the question I leave open.
[To J.P. Valabrega] Conclude with what you have to say.
Jean-Paul VALABREGA
We must distinguish the three forms of regression. In any case, what is important to say is that regression remains, for him, an inexplicable phenomenon. He emphasizes this and seeks its elucidation in the revival of an infantile scene. But from a topical point of view, he will not explain it. That is where we could conclude.
LACAN
If you like. Today, we will have done only this: shown you, through FREUD’s own writing—because not only do we highlight it, but it is in his text—that, in the end, regression is something with which he is truly as uncomfortable as a fish with an apple. It is something genuinely problematic.
It is something whose appearance at the level of the schema remains both paradoxical and, to a certain extent, unnecessary. Because even at this level, there was not the slightest necessity in the world to introduce it to explain the fundamentally hallucinatory character of that which he had already identified at that point as the primary process.
Because already, at the level of the first schema, the primary and secondary processes are distinguished as fundamental and essential. And it is not a matter of introducing the notion of regression there. He introduces it from the moment he emphasizes temporal factors.
However, as a first consequence, he is also forced to admit, on the topical—that is, spatial—level, this famous regression, which appears in an unbalanced way. Do you follow? It is the paradoxical character, and to a certain extent, the antinomical, inexplicable character of regression that must be emphasized in this progression.
You will later see how things present themselves and how we must introduce this notion of regression when he highlights it under other registers, particularly under the genetic register, the progression of the organism considered in the dimension of its genesis, its successive epochs, its development.
That will be for next time.
Žižekian Analysis 
[…] 2 March 1955 […]
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