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(All parts in English)

VALABREGA

LACAN

It is a fundamental principle: to apply to any sound critique—when critiquing a work, and thus understanding it—the very principles that the work itself explicitly provides for its construction and structure. For instance, endeavoring to understand SPINOZA by taking from SPINOZA the very lines of thought that he himself applies as the most valid for the conduct of thought, for the reform of understanding, and for a new apprehension of the world. This approach is fruitful and keeps us within the principles that the author has established as valid and effective.
I mention this to clarify that this is a very general principle.

Another example, MAIMONIDES, is a figure who also provides us with certain keys to the world. Within his work, there are very explicit warnings about how one should conduct their inquiry. If these are applied to MAIMONIDES’ work itself, it leads somewhere; it allows us to understand what he intended to convey.

It is therefore a principle of entirely general application, one that compels us to read FREUD with the aim of understanding, to carefully read his thought, to identify his explicit, clarified thought, and to apply his very rules of understanding and comprehension, clarified in his work, to the work itself—that is, to comprehend what guided his thinking.

I feel it is important to bring this up—as a reminder, an introduction, an inauguration, or a re-establishment of our discourse today—because, for instance, when, during three seminars ago, I began to present to you certain insights regarding the understanding one might have of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, regarding that x we call in different contexts “repetition compulsion,” “Nirvana principle,” or simply “death instinct,” you heard me, for instance, speak about entropy at certain moments in my discourse.

This is not arbitrary. FREUD himself indicates that it must be something along these lines. It is understood, of course, that this should not be taken literally; that would be utterly ridiculous. It is, in fact, a kind of absurdity that analysts—including some of the best—have not shied away from indulging.

As the discussion revolved around giving meaning to this death instinct, one noteworthy analyst, BERNFELD, rediscovered FREUD’s childhood memory under the veil of anonymity with which FREUD had shared it as a “screen memory.” He presented all of this in a completely disguised manner, attributing it to a patient. However, the very structure of the text allowed BERNFELD—not through biographical cross-referencing, as FREUD’s life remains heavily veiled, but through the structure of the text itself—to demonstrate that it could not have been a genuine dialogue with a real patient. The very account FREUD gave of it indicated that it was a transposition, something drawn from FREUD’s own life.

He connected it with two or three dreams from The Interpretation of Dreams. Those who attended my commentary on The Rat Man know this passage, and it is well-known now. Its accuracy is indisputable.

In 1931, BERNFELD, along with FEITELBERG, investigated some phenomena that have no name in any language—a type of research undertaken when psychoanalysts delve into experimentation. Let me assure you, this is not a bad thing. They explored the intra-organic paradoxes of entropy—specifically, the paradoxical pulsation of entropy—within a living being, or more precisely, at the level of the human nervous system.

As in entropy, this involved the degradation of energy and a drop in temperature—a potential thermal quality provided by experimental observation: by comparing cerebral temperature with rectal temperature, they claimed to detect evidence of paradoxical variations. These variations, they argued, deviated from the principle of entropy as it functions in physics, as one might expect in an inanimate system.

To properly consider what a physicist might contribute regarding the isolation of the system, and to seriously compare what occurs in the relationship between brain temperature and the so-called body temperature—I will skip over all the caveats one might raise regarding how this is measured—during various phases of life and death, including immediately after the transition from a living state to a cadaveric state.

This is highly curious reading, if only as a demonstration of the aberrations that can arise when one takes a theoretical metaphor literally, or from an inquiry that is far more concerned with symbolic structures, properly speaking, with categories as they have necessarily been introduced in physics—even if we necessarily find an analogous category in dealing with this order of relations, which cannot simply be classified as purely psychological. Rather, it pertains to a psychological state, as FREUD described it: the apprehension of human behavior not only in its meaning, by introducing the dimension of the psyche as such, but also in its significance as it is realized in an original act of communication—the analytic situation.

All these dimensions must be preserved for the observations FREUD may be led to make regarding the reproduction of a certain temporal modulation, a certain meaning in the subject’s behavior:

• out, outside the treatment,
• in, within the analytic treatment.

This order of questioning is fundamentally posed to FREUD, as you have seen, by the very fact of the reproduction of life as something in itself. If we forget for a single moment that this implies all the dimensions I have just mentioned—namely, not only the living being that can be objectified on a psychic level, but also the dimension of the recognized meaning of its behavior as such, and, moreover, that this meaning comes into play, into action, in a particular relationship, which is the analytic relationship, which can only be assumed and understood as a form of communication of whatever nature it may be—then it is within this framework that we must understand the question FREUD is going to pose.

He is led to use an analogy, a comparison with entropy, concerning his death instinct. Taking it literally and translating it into the precise terms it has in physics presupposes something.

For example, essentially, the relationship is expressed by a formula and a ratio between:

• a caloric quantity determined by what can move within a certain drop of caloric potential under specific conditions,
• this being divided by the temperature itself,

…a relationship at the level of which the phenomenon occurs, and through the manipulation of this formula alone, it will indeed show that this result, this ratio, can—during the irreversible evolution of a system, in a certain sense—only increase. For example, this is what is referred to as the constant increase of entropy. This results from very precise definitions, and it is impossible to depart from their mathematical formulation without completely leaving not only the metaphor but also falling into absurdity.

Therefore, any direct use or comparison—one cannot even call it forced—belongs purely and simply to the realm of misinterpretation, as absurd as the famous imaginary operations in BOREL’s metaphor of typing monkeys. This is something—of course, the first step we must take here—that is a matter of public health to denounce every time we encounter its existence.

This operation of typing monkeys is something we will have to identify far too often in the persistent misinterpretation that exists within analysis on so many concepts—this one more than any other.

What we seek to understand is the progress of FREUD’s thought, through these four stages I have mentioned:

• from the unpublished manuscript whose commentary we are about to complete (Entwurf, Draft),
• then at the level of The Interpretation of Dreams,
• then at the moment of establishing the theory of narcissism,
• and finally: Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

What does it mean, what we find there, what interests us: the sequence of difficulties, contradictions, antinomies, and impasses into which FREUD’s thought is driven at each of these stages? What does this mean, through its very existence, and also through its movement, its progress, this kind of negative dialectic implied in the persistence of certain antinomies, their maintenance, their duration, in transformed forms?

Because across these four stages, you see the difficulties, the impasses, the antinomies reproducing themselves in a disposition that is transformed each time. This is what we are going to follow and which, by itself, can give us a new indication, perhaps reveal the autonomy, the specific order of what FREUD confronts and what he seeks to formalize.

This very effort of formalization, in its progress, in its relative failure, designates and simultaneously exposes both the order being targeted, the order being somehow isolated, and the progress—the steps taken in defining this order—as the progress of analytic theory and technique advances. This order…

You already know it broadly; you cannot not know what I am talking about after a year and a half of seminars here. It is the symbolic order in its own structures, in its autonomous dynamism, in the particular way it intervenes to impose its coherence, its own dynamism, its autonomous economy on the human being in their lived experience.

That is to say, something which is precisely what designates for you the originality of FREUD’s discovery: that everything that determines man…

Let’s put it roughly, even though language here will represent a certain drop in level, to provide an image for those who understand nothing…

That what is highest in man is precisely something that is not simply within man, but elsewhere, which is precisely this symbolic order.

And that FREUD is always, as his synthesis progresses, forced to restore, to restitute this exterior, eccentric point—this is the significance of the progress through these differences and these four schemas, whose steps we will now attempt to trace in the text.

Here is, first, what I pointed out to you the other day…

Of course, if you do not read the text, you will not see the entire schema…

The other day I pointed out the system ϕ as it roughly represents the reflex arc, that is, something based solely on the notion of quantity and discharge, with a minimum of content.

The fact that someone like FREUD, at that time—both trained in neurological, anatomo-physiological, and clinical disciplines—had to construct a schema, could not be satisfied with that alone, and could even less be satisfied with the schema provided at that moment by positivist physiology, namely an architecture of reflexes, higher reflexes, reflexes of reflexes, etc., culminating in a unity reflex located at the level of higher functions, originating from a highly elaborate stimulus.

And at the highest level, something still had to be placed there, something our friend LECLAIRE would call the subject, on his better days. I hope one day he will rid himself of that too. It must never be represented anywhere. FREUD had to do something else. He had to produce something, indeed highly elaborate, but which happens to be not an architecture, but a “buffer.” And in this, he was already far ahead of neuronal theory, two years before FOSTER and SHERRINGTON.

This text is interesting from many angles. The brilliance of FREUD lies, in a way, in his ability to perceive, with remarkable precision down to the details, certain properties of conduction. He roughly guessed what we know today. From this perspective, we haven’t made much progress. Of course, progress has been made in terms of experimentation, with effective confirmation of the functioning of synapses as contact barriers, but even then, he already expressed it in these terms.

This deserves reflection: how can one guess? The results must register on the output board. This implies that certain conditions must be found inside. Nevertheless, he could have made errors. But he did not make any significant ones. Therefore, he remains purely within the realm of hypothesis.

The important thing is that, in the schema, he had to introduce something interposed, if one can say, within this act of discharge, which can be called—it’s in the text—a buffer system. Above all, this system serves as a buffer system of equilibrium, filtration, and damping.

What does he compare it to? To something already visible on this schema. You can see, within a spinal arc, something forming a ball—it’s a ganglion. The schema of the psyche is a ganglion. The idea he forms at this level of the brain is that of a differentiated ganglion, like a sympathetic ganglion or a nerve chain in insects.

But here’s the striking part, and this is what I emphasized last time: we witnessed a kind of slight wavering in our dialogue. [Addressing J.P. Valabrega] I wanted you not to rush too much. You said things that weren’t wrong about the ω system, which absolutely must be noted here, and which reveal the initial difficulties of FREUD—namely, someone arriving at a schema already particularly adapted, particularly unschematic.

He cannot resolve this without the intervention of this ω system, or the system of consciousness as a reference to a reality from which, no matter what one does, one will never be able to pull a rabbit out of a hat without the intervention of something that, it must be said, enters the schema as an addition.

Here, the aim is not to strip things bare and make it seem as though simply piling enough elements together would make the upper layers somehow more beautiful than the lower ones. Here, it must indeed be isolated. He is led to establish the conditions of functioning for something that, subsequently, reveals itself, in its development, as being approached through another path, offering a particularly striking grasp of the necessity to reforge—after and within the Freudian experience—the structure of the human subject in a way that not only decenters it from the ego but literally relegates consciousness to a position undoubtedly very essential in the dialectic of this structure of human being, itself utterly paradoxical and problematic.

I would say that deepening the elusive, irreducible nature of consciousness, in relation to the functioning of the living being, is, in FREUD’s work, something as important to grasp as what he brought us regarding the unconscious itself.

Here, you see the embarrassments, the antinomies revealed by handling this reference to the system of consciousness as such, which reappear and react at each level of Freudian theorization in a manner that, by itself, poses a problem. It is not in reference to the existence of the unconscious; it is in the very constitution, if you will, of a model, a pattern, or even a coherent conception of consciousness as such.

It becomes apparent that, within the register, within the set of concepts in which Freudian experience is inscribed, while he manages to provide a coherent and balanced conception of most other parts of the psychic apparatus, he always encounters, when it comes to consciousness, incompatible conditions.

Let me give you an example right away. In one of his texts titled Metapsychology: Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams, published in the French collection Metapsychology, FREUD manages to explain almost everything that occurs in dementia praecox, paranoia, and dreams by discussing notions of cathexis or decathexis. These are notions we will have to engage with and whose significance we will see in FREUD’s theory.

Curiously, it might seem that there is something arbitrary—that, after all, when one reads the theoretical construction in order, one should always be able to arrange things so that they work, so that they fit together. But no, it appears that when it becomes necessary to introduce the apparatus of consciousness as such—that is, the conception of a clear reflection—it would possess entirely unique properties compared to the others.

The very coherence of his system makes him stumble upon a difficulty. He states that there is something he does not understand: that this apparatus, unlike the others, would have the property of functioning even when it is decathected. The necessity of deduction leads him to such a proposition. You only need to read the text I’ve just referred you to in order to notice this. And indeed, he remains quite embarrassed. He could not theorize things otherwise.

For the other systems, everything works fine: when they are decathected, they stop functioning. The play of cathexis and decathexis operates correctly. But when the conscious system is brought into play, we enter into paradox. Why? This certainly reflects something. Not merely because FREUD, who constructs hypotheses, didn’t know how to proceed—he had all the time he needed. If he didn’t manage it, it was because of something fundamental.

Here, for the first time, we see the paradox of the ω system appear, in the system of consciousness, in the sense that, as we said the other day, it must both be there and not be there. If you incorporate it into the energetic system as it is constituted at the level of Ψ, it will no longer be anything but a part of it, and it will no longer be able to play its role as a reference to reality.

On the other hand, it must somehow be imagined that a certain amount of energy passes—however minimal it may be—but, on the other hand, it cannot possibly be something that directly connects to that particularly massive influx from the external world, as it is already assumed in the initial system, referred to as the discharge system, that is, the elementary stimulus-response reflex.

On the contrary, it must be entirely separate from that; it must be capable of receiving only slight investments of energy, which allow it to enter into vibration so that circulation always takes place from ϕ to Ψ. And it is only from Ψ that this minimal energy will reach ω, enabling it to vibrate.

Furthermore, based on what occurs at the level of ω, the Ψ system—which, as VALABREGA said the other day, in a way I found a bit rushed but not incorrect in itself—requires information. It can only acquire this information through what happens in the discharge of this perceptual system as such. This means that, in FREUD’s conception at this moment, for the reality test to function, the psychic process operates in this way.

For example, let us consider the motor element, which engages in a motor discharge that is specifically perceptual—the movements that occur in the eye simply as a result of visual accommodation, of fixation on an object. It is theoretically at this point that an effect can be conceived as contributing to the perception of something taking shape in the psyche—namely, the hallucination of desire—something that, as we say, “sets things right”:

“Do I believe my eyes?
Is this really what I am looking at?”

This is what it ultimately means. But it is quite curious to think that this precise moment of motor discharge—that is, the part which, in the functioning of the perceptual organs, is specifically motor—is precisely the one that is entirely unconscious, namely that unconsciousness is realized here only at the afferent level, as everyone knows.

We are indeed conscious of seeing a certain number of things. Nothing seems more homologous to the transparency of consciousness than the fact that we see what we see, and the very act of seeing establishes its own transparency. However, we have no awareness—except in a very marginal, very liminal way—of what we effectively, actively, motorically do in this act of orientation, this centering, this distant palpation performed by the eyes as they engage in seeing.

This sequence of paradoxes, therefore, which begins to take shape here, this entirely original position of the ω system, this aspect that is so difficult to pin down and integrate with the ω system, begins to emerge at the level of the famous manuscript we are studying. It is something I wanted to highlight because it is already visible, it can be detected in the text, and it derives its interest from what it will later become.

Of course, this is not simply from the perspective of historical curiosity, to observe the difficulties of a theoretician who was more or less a philosopher. FREUD, at that moment, was not doing this for himself, to organize his ideas. What interests us are not the personal difficulties of this man.

But here we have the beginning of something that we will encounter at every level, and of which I can give you—to indicate the general movement so that you will not become lost in the continuation of these seminars, which will proceed, perhaps somewhat haltingly—a sense of what it concerns.

After this, there will be the schema we will examine today in The Interpretation of Dreams, a schema which also struck me…

Refer to Chapter VII, The Processes of the Dream, at the end of The Interpretation of Dreams, in the French edition.

What you have there is something else, something that will be expressed as follows:…

– Here, an input, and also here, something that will be supported by something you will see here, which we will call the P system, perception, W in German.
– Here, the various layers he is forced to assume, which constitute the level of the unconscious.
– Then the preconscious,
– Then consciousness, whose paradoxical distribution you can already see: here it is now on both sides.

What has changed in this schema? That’s what we will try to understand today.

I will immediately point something out to you. Here, we genuinely had the structure of an apparatus, something that attempted to represent itself as an apparatus, an apparatus that one then tries to make function, which one describes, speaks about, and refers to something spatially located in consciousness.

It is an apparatus located somewhere. These are the organs of perception, the psyche, the brain, and the sub-brain, therefore functioning as a sort of autonomous ganglion, regulating the pulsation between instincts, internal drives of the organism, and external manifestations of seeking. Because this is what it’s about: the instinctual economy.

It will begin to place the living being in search of what it needs, the relationship of need with activity that is more or less disordered or ordered.

Here, these are the apparatuses:

And here, it is no longer the apparatus. It’s not me saying this; it’s in the text:

Here, the schema begins to relate to something much more immaterial. FREUD himself emphasizes this from the very beginning: the things we are about to discuss should not be localized somewhere. In the text, he tells us there is something it must resemble. Remember what I indicated to you last year during the lessons on transference: these are images which, in an optical apparatus, cannot—especially when they are virtual—be said to exist in one specific location in the apparatus. They are seen in that place when one is elsewhere to observe them. This is what it’s about.

Thus, reinforcement, the introduction, for example, of an imaginary dimension, which is there in the schema. The very necessity of placing it there is already an indication that the schema has changed in meaning. What is indicated to us in the text is that it is essential for this schema to signify, to inscribe on the blackboard the temporal dimension as such. This is also emphasized in the text.

The schema, which you can see retains the same general arrangement, proves that FREUD is already compelled to introduce into the schema—and consequently into the categories he logically arranges—dimensions that are different dimensions. These are no longer the construction of a psychic apparatus but already the introduction of a certain logical dimension as such.

We have moved from a mechanical model to a logical model. It’s not quite the same, even though it might still be embodied in a mechanical model. I hinted earlier that we would also speak about cybernetics because it will allow us to clarify what we mean when we talk about cybernetics and how these mechanical machines have something original about them compared to the older ones.

Perhaps we will progress along both paths simultaneously, that is, by observing the difficulties FREUD encountered—essentially, what we are trying to demonstrate and grasp concerning the presence, the actualization of human language—we may also understand why we are, in the end, so astonished.

For cybernetics also arises from a kind of astonishment at rediscovering—this human language—because, ultimately, this is what it’s about, functioning suddenly almost by itself, seeming slightly to outmaneuver us, to surpass us, in machines where it indeed came from somewhere.

I believe the only mistake is this: when one critiques this and says it came from somewhere, one believes they have resolved everything by stating that it was a person who put it there. This is what LÉVI-STRAUSS reminds us of, always full of wisdom in the face of new things, and always seeming to bring them back to older things.

We have here the book by Mr. RUYER, about whom someone recently said, “it’s not bad,” but I generally find what he writes not bad, whereas what he writes about cybernetics…

The entire question lies in realizing that, indeed, in these machines, language is certainly present in some form. It is there, vibrating; it has arrived there, and it is not without reason that, all of a sudden, we recognize it in a little tune, whose pleasure I will undoubtedly share with you.

I discovered this the other day at the Society of Philosophy. They weren’t discussing cybernetics. Madame FAVEZ-BOUTONIER had just delivered a very good presentation on psychoanalysis—what she hoped could be understood by the philosophical assembly present. She was too modest in her expectations; they could have understood a little more. Nevertheless, what she said was far above the level of what many had managed to grasp up until then.

There were very good points made. It’s not philosophers, specifically, that I’m targeting here.

At this point, someone—let’s call him by his name: Mr. MINKOWSKI—stood up and said about psychoanalysis exactly the same things I’ve heard him say for thirty years, regardless of the speech to which he’s responding on the same subject, namely psychoanalysis. Yet what Madame FAVEZ-BOUTONIER had just presented was genuinely something very different from what he might have heard thirty years ago on the same subject, for example, from Mr. DALBIEZ. There was a world of difference between the two! And yet, Mr. MINKOWSKI gave exactly the same response, and that’s when I understood! In any case, I am not attacking him personally.

But simply, what happens on average in a scientific society… why has the paradoxical expression “thinking machine” emerged? I, who already say that humans rarely think, am not going to talk about “thinking machines.” Still, what happens in a “thinking machine” is, on average, of an infinitely higher level than what happens in a “scientific society.”

When given different elements, the “thinking machine” produces a different response! And there is a world of difference between that and people who—regardless of what you tell them—always repeat the same thing. I am talking about a response.

This allows us to think that, from the point of view of language, something must have happened, and indeed, these little machines hum something to us—perhaps an echo, an approximation, let’s say—it’s a matter of understanding what that is. And I believe that, in fact, the mystery precisely lies in the fact that we cannot simply resolve the question by saying that the constructor put it there. It’s not the constructor.

From there, you begin to understand that language certainly came from where it resides. It is certainly not in the machine. Therefore, it came from the outside; that much is clear.

But it is not enough to say that it was the person who put it there. And if anyone can add something about this, it is us, psychoanalysts, who know at every moment, who can touch with our fingers, that this matter is not resolved by thinking that it was the person, the little genius, who did everything.

There is a relationship, a certain relationship, between humans and language. And that’s what this is about. It is the great current question of the human sciences, of anthropology—this discovery. What is language? Where does it come from? It is not enough to know where it comes from in a superficial way. But what happened in geological ages? How did they begin to wail? Did they start by crying out during lovemaking, as some suggest? Is that where they found language? No, it’s about seeing how it functions now. Everything is always here.

And our relationship with language—that’s what this is about—grasping it at the most concrete, the most everyday level, at least what is everyday for us, in our analytic experience.

That’s what it’s about, and you will see it reproduced at the level of this schema, which develops the system in a way that strikingly introduces the imaginary as such. Because I think I have shown you how convenient it is: it’s a metaphor for the representation of the imaginary as such, which functions psychologically as such. The optical apparatus, which I demonstrated to you last year…

With that little schema that LANG more or less effectively evoked alongside the mirror stage…

I showed you the use we could make of it.

And it is indeed this schema that we will rediscover in the third stage of the schema that we will build at the level of the theory of narcissism. We will rediscover our schema from last year:

reversed by 180°:

The two mirrors—plane and concave—to which LANG alluded, which we will revisit, with the plane mirror inside, which, at this level, positions the Ψ system of perception-consciousness with its dynamic function where it must be.

That is to say, it is not where we will see it today, with VALABREGA, separated at the two ends of the O system, with the impasses that we must grasp, but at the heart of the reception of this ego in the other, which is the essential imaginary reference, centering all the imaginary reference of the human being on the image of the fellow human.

It is there that we will rediscover our schema from last year, with the image of the ideal ego and the ego ideal facing one another within the imaginary system.

And then, the final schema we will encounter in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which will allow us to make sense of what made it necessary for FREUD—at the moment when the analytic technique twists and turns, and where one might believe—this is the essential point—that, in the end, resistance and unconscious meaning correspond to each other like front and back, that what operates according to the pleasure principle in one of the systems, the so-called primary system, appears as reality in the other, and conversely, that we would simply rediscover, in the form of a negative, what is being sought: namely, unconscious meaning.

The classical study of the ego, simply enriched a little with the notion of everything it can encompass in its syntheses, necessitates for FREUD to say, to maintain, to assert:

– that it is not that,
– that it is not reducible,
– that the entire system of meanings is not contained within the individual,
– that its structure is not built as a synthesis of these meanings, but quite the opposite.

I am giving you this final schema to guide you toward what we will find, what FREUD can offer with Beyond the Pleasure Principle. For the schema, I will use something closely related to our recent modes of intercommunication or transmission in machines—what is called an electronic tube, in other words, something familiar to anyone who has handled radios: a triode bulb.

There are three poles: an anode, a cathode. When it heats up here [filament] in the cathode, little electrons bombard the anode. The anode is positive, the cathode negative. If there is something in the interval, the electric current passes. Depending on whether it becomes positive or negative, one can either achieve modulation in the passage of the current or, more simply, a binary system where it either passes or it does not. Both functions are utilized.

What we are arriving at—and I present this to you as an image, a reference point for what resistance and the imaginary function of the ego mean as such—is this: it is the ego that determines the passage or non-passage of something that, in the analytic action, must be transmitted as such, measured in its communicative power.

You can see here that this schema has the advantage of maintaining and highlighting—still, of course, nothing appears that is not linked to a kind of friction at the level of the ego, or an effect of illumination, of heating, of whatever you prefer, at the level of this interposition of the ego. And of course, if we did not have this interposition—and, consequently, this resistance—these effects of communication at the level of the unconscious would neither be graspable nor measurable in their effect on the individual, on the ego as such.

But you can also see, this schema expresses it: there is no kind of relationship, neither negative nor positive, between this ego and this discourse of the unconscious, as I call it at other times, this concrete discourse in which the ego bathes and plays its role as an obstacle, an interposition, a filter, or whatever else you wish to name it.

But the essence, the quantity, the movement, the weight, the interposition of what is at stake at the level of the unconscious is something that is in no way its parallel. It has its own dynamism, its own influxes, its own pathways—something that can be explored in its rhythm, its modulation, its message, entirely independently of what serves to interrupt it, filter it, or record its own dynamic.

This is what FREUD wanted to convey in Beyond the Pleasure Principle: to situate the imaginary function of the ego. Today, I am giving you only a general outline of the progress we will need to pursue in detail, to understand theoretically and clinically what he means.

It is within these four stages that the second is situated, which I am asking VALABREGA to address today.

Freely, tell us the points in this analysis of dream processes as such—the seventh part of The Interpretation of Dreams—that seemed notable to you, worthy of being highlighted. And, since you have a general sense of the guidance I have provided for this presentation, point out what seems to align with it or what might appear contrary to this general movement I have indicated today.

Jean-Paul VALABREGA

It will not be easy for me to immediately establish a connection between what Mr. LACAN has just said and what I thought I had to say today. Let us return to the primary and secondary processes. I have drawn infinitely less from these texts than what Mr. LACAN has expressed in such profound terms.

It is indeed a matter of studying the progression of the elaboration of the theory of the psychic apparatus, starting from the text we have already discussed, from 1895, up to The Interpretation of Dreams. To do this, we must revisit the primary processes. I must now be brief; I cannot follow this text line by line but must instead focus on the essentials, skipping over considerations related to sleep.

There is one point, however, that must be retained. It seems to me that in his explanation of sleep, FREUD remains, in the 1895 text, with the explanation based on the withdrawal of attention. This is simply what I will retain from the considerations on sleep. Then, we return to the 1895 text before proceeding to what could be called its evolution. The end of the text will serve as a transition, and I will soon explain how I perceived it. We return to it because, first, this text addresses the analysis of dreams and, subsequently, considerations on dream consciousness. These considerations contain the first analysis of the first dream, “Irma’s Injection.”

And we will see how, schematized in the 1895 text, the principal characteristics of sleep are presented:

1. Motor paralysis, which occurs because motor excitation cannot cross the barrier. FREUD states that this characteristic, although important, is not essential in dream formation. However, it is worth noting that in The Interpretation of Dreams, he will reconsider this question of motor inhibition and make it a nonspecific but fundamental condition (p. 251).
2. The absurd and nonsensical nature of the connections between dream elements. This would be a consequence of the compulsion to associate. The compulsion to associate dominates. However, he already observes in this text that the discharge of the ego is not complete; there could be sleep without dreams.
3. The hallucinatory nature of dream ideas. This third characteristic would be the most important specific feature FREUD seeks.

And here we remember—it was said last week—that this hallucinatory characteristic is also that of the primary process. This is why FREUD noted that the primary recollection of a certain perception (primary recollection in the English text) is always a hallucination. He also tells us that the vividness and intensity of the hallucination are proportional to the amount of cathexis invested in the idea in question. In other words, it is quantity that conditions hallucination. This is the opposite of perception because, in perception, which comes from the ϕ system, attention makes perception either more or less distinct.

LACAN: Which comes from the ω system.

Jean-Paul VALABREGA: No, from the ϕ system.

LACAN: One must distinguish the quantitative contributions from the external world, which come from the ϕ system. The balance of the text indicates that everything that constitutes perception happens as such, as long as it is perception and not excitation within the ω system.

Jean-Paul VALABREGA: But it originates from ϕ.

LACAN: Because it comes from the external world. I will show you in another passage—it comes from ϕ only through the mediation of Ψ.

Jean-Paul VALABREGA: Of course. This is, in any case, just a parenthesis. Because what is central to his current research is the distinction between hallucination and perception. What he wants to establish, and has established, is that there is no quantitative modification in perception, whereas it is quantity that drives hallucination.

4. Dreams are wish-fulfillments. They are not recognized by consciousness as wish-fulfillments, but FREUD immediately afterward refers to Irma dream. FREUD then proposes the hypothesis that the primary cathexes of desire are also hallucinatory.
5. Memory is poor in dreams. This will gain considerable importance in The Interpretation of Dreams, in the chapter dedicated to “The Forgetting of Dreams”, which acts as a hinge between the two. This is what I believe I observed. This fifth characteristic would explain why, following motor paralysis, which was one of the previous characteristics, dreams leave no traces of discharge. I will quickly pass over the fifth characteristic because it takes on decisive importance, and we will return to it after the considerations on the forgetting of dreams.
6. The role of consciousness. It provides quality in these processes, both in dreams and in waking processes. Consciousness can therefore accompany any Ψ process. On the other hand, this consciousness is not reducible to the ego, and later, it will not be possible to equate primary processes with unconscious processes.

FREUD emphasizes these two remarks as essential:
– Consciousness is not reducible to the ego.
– Primary processes cannot be equated with unconscious processes.

It is worth noting that, at this point in his exposition, FREUD highlights a parallel on which he insists twice in the text, between the meaning of the dream—wish-fulfillment—and the neurotic symptom. This is already indicated in this text.

One could briefly note in passing that the commentary on his notes advances the hypothesis that this analogy, which almost reaches an identity, and already in 1895—it must be remembered that this is the date of Studies on Hysteria—this idea was not yet fully ready, because FREUD’s analysis was not sufficiently advanced.

I do not think so. From this text, one cannot draw that conclusion. They state that they know FREUD’s analysis was not sufficiently advanced. He conducted a rather formal analysis of the dream of Irma’s Injection, but he nevertheless says that it is this analogy between the neurotic symptom and the meaning of the dream that is fundamental, and he will return to it later. He already knows it is important; he reserves it, saying, “This is the most important thing”:

“The most momentous conclusions flowed from this comparison…”
“Les conclusions les plus importantes découlent de cette comparaison…”

which he made twice, in the English text, on pages 398 and 402. He did not insist on it; that is a fact. But since he will return to it later, we can think that, from this date, he already attached the greatest importance to it. This comparison will be deepened in The Interpretation of Dreams and later in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life in 1901, and in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious in 1905. There is a synthesis forming here that will clearly appear in The Interpretation of Dreams.

LACAN:

The dates regarding the progress of his self-analysis are quite striking when one reads the Letters. In 1897, he was not yet far along in his self-analysis, and there are some remarks I’ve noted—for ANZIEU’s use—about the limits of self-analysis, which are very interesting.

Jean-Paul VALABREGA:

Dream consciousness must be revisited at this level. In these final considerations on the Project for a Scientific Psychology, we encounter Irma dream again, and here is the schema—the four key elements retained in the first analysis.

LACAN (addressing Anzieu):

Are you familiar with the preface to…?

“I can only analyze myself on the basis of objective knowledge, as I would for a stranger. Self-analysis is strictly speaking impossible. Without this, there would be no illness. This is in Letter 75— It is to the extent that I encounter enigmas in my cases that analysis must stop.”

It was in 1897 that he defined the limits of his own analysis. He would understand strictly only what he had identified in those cases. It is an extraordinary testimony. At the very moment when he was brilliantly discovering a path, it bears the extraordinary value of being an exceptionally precise testimony because of its precocity. It is not an intuitive process, if one may say so. It is not a divinatory mapping within oneself. It has nothing to do with introspection. Self-analysis, in the strict sense, he only performed it insofar as he identified it in other cases.

Didier ANZIEU:

FREUD knew, even before having Irma dream, that dreams had meaning. And it was because his patients brought dreams that carried a wish-fulfillment meaning that he wanted to apply it to himself. This was his criterion of verification.

LACAN: Exactly.

Jean-Paul VALABREGA:

It is not the meaning of the dream that is at stake. Naturally, he knows it; he had already analyzed dreams. It’s the theory of the identity of the dream and the neurotic need (symptom). He had an intuition of it. He says it in The Interpretation of Dreams:

“I started from the psychology of neuroses, and now I want to do the opposite: start from the dream to explain psychology.”

There is a movement here. He always says he experiences great difficulties. He even says:

“I could analyze my patients’ dreams and draw on everything I discovered about the hysterical symptom, but I do not want to do that because I have the opposite goal in mind.”

There are always two movements in him. Having found something, and having discovered its meaning in the neurotic symptom, he wants to rediscover it in the symptom of the dream.

There is an extreme caution, a desire to create a normal psychology, to analyze the dreams of normal people, which resurfaces in the final chapter of The Dream Processes. It seems that he wants to do this, that he does it intentionally.

LACAN:

Moreover, in The Interpretation of Dreams, he will emphasize the kinship of the dream with the neurotic symptom. But also—to clearly emphasize where the difference lies—that the dream process is an exemplary process for understanding the neurotic symptom precisely because it provides a certain…

Jean-Paul VALABREGA: He does not want to identify them immediately.

LACAN:

He never identifies them. And ultimately, he maintains the fundamentally economic difference between the symptom and the dream. They are similar only because they share a common grammar. But this is a metaphor.

Do not take this literally. They are as different as an epic poem is from a treatise on thermodynamics. The only thing they share is a grammar.

The importance of the dream is that it allows us to grasp the symbolic function as such. And in this respect, it is crucial for understanding the symptom. But a symptom is always a symptom embedded in an overall economic state of the subject.

This is something different from this state localized in time, under extremely particular conditions, which is the dream. The dream is a fragment of the subject’s activity. The symptom spans across multiple fields.

Jean-Paul VALABREGA:

That is to say, he never establishes an identity of nature, but there is indeed an identity of process, of mechanism.

LACAN:

You will see, in several points of The Interpretation of Dreams, he enforces this distinction very strictly.

Jean-Paul VALABREGA: From the perspective of process, it seemed doubtful to me.

LACAN:

He finds common processes. But even these are much more analogous than identical, modeled upon each other.

Jean-Paul VALABREGA

Let us return to Irma dream. FREUD identifies four elements: A, B, C, D.

• A: The dream idea that has become conscious. The black points represent the conscious or newly conscious points, and the white points represent the unconscious ones. Connections will be established. This dream idea that becomes conscious leads to B, but instead of B, it is C that appears in consciousness. At the point of transition from B, another simultaneous cathexis occurs, and there is a displacement; C takes its place.

Here is what we can say based on the ideas of the dream:

• A: The dream idea.
• C: An injection of propylene administered to Irma.
• C: The formula of trimethylamine, which is hallucinated in the dream, seen in bold characters.
• D: Irma’s illness, which is of a sexual nature.
• B: The thought simultaneously present. B is what remains in the background, the conversation with FLIESS about the sexual glands, where FLIESS discusses trimethylamine with FREUD.

Consequently, C is pushed into consciousness by a double cathexis, originating from both B and D. As for B and D, they remain unconscious links. The formula of trimethylamine appears here as a derivative of D and A, which are equally intense. It is a hallucination.

LACAN

The parallelism between what you have extracted from the text and the small schema you left intact—schema 4—reflects what is unconscious and ongoing in FREUD’s thought at that moment. That is to say, for him, the organizing, polarizing word of his entire existence is the conversation with FLIESS.

This conversation runs in the background throughout his entire existence as the fundamental conversation because, ultimately, it is here that this self-analysis is realized: in this dialogue where FREUD concentrates the maximum of his interest, because it is through this that FREUD becomes FREUD, and we are still here today discussing it. Everything else is illuminated in passing: all scholarly discourse, daily discourse, the formula of trimethylamine, what is known, what is unknown, the whole jumble that is truly printed there, ready to be decathected. In itself, it does not have enormous significance.

Everything present at the level of the ego…
…which can just as easily obstruct or signal the passage—that is to say, illuminate at the moment of passage (Cf. triode)—of what is being constituted, namely this vast discourse to FLIESS, which will later become FREUD’s entire work.

What becomes illuminated at the level of the ego—in its relations with the unconscious, even before The Interpretation of Dreams, which will explain this in such a much clearer way—we already see in this first small schema. What is unconscious is what is most fundamental: the ongoing conversation with FLIESS.

This is entirely independent of what we might schematically imagine—as one often does out of ignorance of FREUD’s movement—as something in the unconscious that would be reduced to some incidental impulse, which one could reconnect with through regression. You will see how much more subtle regression is when you see it being constituted, and how much more difficult it is to handle.

In The Interpretation of Dreams, when regression is introduced, it is not what one thinks, nor is it how it is used nowadays.

In any case, the unconscious nature of the conversation with FLIESS, of this fundamental speech ongoing at that moment, is the true dynamic—not of everything in this dream—but specifically of the appearance of certain highlighted, contingent elements, of this modification of the signified, which causes trimethylamine in bold characters to become one of the dream’s elements.

That is to say, consciousness, here, at the heart of our last schema of the triode bulb—the fourth. I will leave it here for today. It is very important that it remains. Next time, I will show you how we introduce it into this dialectic. There must be four elements.

Jean-Paul VALABREGA

In The Interpretation of Dreams, page 80 and following, in the second analysis of Irma dream, he writes:

“I sense why the formula of trimethylamine has taken on such importance. It not only recalls the dominant role of sexuality but also the friend to whom I think with happiness when I feel alone in my opinion. This friend, who plays such a major role in my life—will I encounter him again in the subsequent associations of the dream?”

Well, yes, he does encounter him again. And he explains in what order of associations of ideas he will encounter him because, in fact, the dream never presents a complete interpretation. In his second analysis, he limits himself to extracting the fact that it is a wish-fulfillment. And, as he establishes from this foundational dream, FLIESS remains in the background because, as he only aims not to go further, for personal reasons…

LACAN: As we saw last year, these personal reasons are marital difficulties.

Jean-Paul VALABREGA:

Perhaps in the dream of the Botanical Monograph, which is analyzed more deeply. Here, the interest of his interpretation focuses on the character O. He aims to establish, ultimately, that he bears no responsibility for Irma’s illness, that it is O who is responsible. And he limits himself to that. Another, deeper analysis of this dream would probably focus on what he indicates here—that it reminds him of his relationship with FLIESS, and that he finds it again in other chains of associations.

This extends to questioning FLIESS’s work. What he observes in the patient aligns with what FLIESS wrote about the relationship between the nasal cavities and the sexual organs of women. A curious passage.

LACAN

At the level of the dream and in the symptomatology of the dream, FREUD demonstrates that the fundamental dynamic element at the level of the unconscious is something through which, ultimately, he introduces into the scientific discourse of his time—into what is conventionally considered the highest level if we place ourselves at the level of the individual—and it is he who does all of this. It is precisely to this extent that we are at the level of the fundamental unconscious fabric as such.

What constitutes the structure of the unconscious is this: the conversation with FLIESS. At that moment, it is unconscious. Why? Because, as you can clearly see, it vastly and infinitely exceeds what both of them, as individuals, can grasp or apprehend consciously at that moment. Because, after all, at that time, they are just two small fragments of scientists like any other, exchanging rather eccentric ideas.

The discovery of the unconscious, as such, already shows us this… and this is important because, at the moment of its historical emergence, it presents itself with its full dimension… it is because meaning infinitely surpasses the scope of the signs manipulated at the individual level, the signs that one pushes forward. It is in this sense that one always produces far more signs than one believes, simply because one surpasses them. This has been demonstrated subsequently.

Here, at the origin, we find a phenomenon of the sensational emergence of speech—namely, a new dimension, the one FREUD would introduce, the Freudian discovery, a new feeling of man. That is what it is about. Humanity after FREUD is this. This is what the unconscious is about, meaning at a level strictly opposed to where one usually seeks it.