🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

I realized that you seemed to have had a slight difficulty, it seems, in bridging the potential difference between my speech in particular and the otherwise fascinating reading of President SCHREBER’s writings.
A technical difficulty that suggested to me that—perhaps in the future—I should rely less on some sort of running commentary on the text. I thought it could be read from start to finish, picking up along the way the structural and organizational elements that I want you to progress on. Experience proves that I will probably have to arrange things differently, meaning that I will have to make the choice myself about what is articulated in the whole text.

The question remains whether it would somehow be necessary to provide you with some selective communications, but you see the amount of work this represents for me. This methodological consideration, combined with the fact that I was not absolutely determined to conduct today’s seminar—that I did so only out of my great affection for you, as well as out of the tradition that, on the eve of vacations, it happens that in secondary education institutions roughly corresponding to your level, a short reading is given in the last lesson.

I thought that today it might not be inappropriate, nor useless upon careful reflection, for me to give you a selected reading—and one chosen from something recent, in any case unpublished, something of mine, but which remains aligned with our subject. At least a part of you who have not attended my seminars in previous years will be able to gain some reference points. It concerns the speech I gave in Vienna—or that I am supposed to have given—at Dr. HOFF’s psychiatric clinic, which corresponds exactly to the psychiatric clinic here [Sainte-Anne].

I delivered this speech on the following theme: “The Meaning of a Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis”, with the intention of sharing with them a bit of the Parisian movement and the style, if not the general orientation, of our teaching. I delivered this speech, I must tell you, under the same improvisational conditions—if not even more accentuated—as those under which I speak here, in the sense that the ones I give here are prepared: there was nothing of the sort for a subject that seemed general enough for me to rely on adapting to my audience. Therefore, I will communicate to you a kind of written reconstruction, as faithful as I could make it, to the improvisational spirit and modulation of this speech.

As a result, I was probably led to elaborate on certain passages, giving it a greater length than it will probably occupy here. Perhaps I also added certain developments that I was led to include during a second, smaller session that took place afterward, where I was faced with the limited circle of analyst technicians who had attended the first lecture, and where I spoke more about technical questions: the meaning of interpretation in general. Nevertheless, this became, at least at first glance, a subject of some astonishment for them, which proves that it is always worthwhile to attempt to establish dialogue.

You are about to witness this adventure, a reading that I will attempt to deliver with as much of the “spoken” tone as my text strives to reproduce, and which, I hope, will this time better sustain your attention than last time’s reading. I am already warning you—if only to pique your curiosity—that something rather curious happened to me in the middle of this speech.

It cannot happen again here, except in a somewhat simulated manner, inscribed in the text, since I would almost say that I lack the material. Over there, I had in front of me a sort of lectern with mechanisms for moving it—it was more sophisticated than this one, a human-sized lectern. It was probably at a moment when, if not the audience’s interest, at least my own was waning slightly, because the connection is not always as good as the one I feel here with you.

It so happened that this lectern came to my aid—since it must be believed that I certainly had a tendency to take advantage of this aid, even to abuse it. Eventually, something extraordinary happened, and all things considered, if we compare it to some recent words we heard from one of my former friends at the Sorbonne, who told us astonishing things last Saturday…
namely, the metamorphosis of The Lacemaker into rhinoceros horns, and finally into cauliflower…
well, this lectern started talking, and I had the greatest difficulty in taking the floor back from it.

This might introduce a slight imbalance in the composition of my speech. I began by speaking about Vienna, and I took advantage of the moment to sketch with a brief pencil stroke the pulsation pattern that presided over the extension of analysis in the wake of the two wars, the anti-analytic persecution that raged in German-speaking countries, and what happened when it struck at the boundaries of our world.

That is to say, over there somewhere, in the Americas specifically, where I would like to highlight in passing—I do not want to dwell too long on this—the absolutely essential role played by the element of these foreigners, even emigrants, in the new [theories] emerging in America, with a specifically American dimension: fundamental ahistoricism.

Because in all endeavors of its style, this is absolutely essential for understanding the adaptation taken by analytic technique to requirements of another kind, which are certainly, like all environmental demands, legitimate—but which, nonetheless, tended to sever the group from the deeply historicizing significance of analysis, which certainly exerted a deviating influence. I would not say that we feel the repercussions, because after all, the American presence is characterized in Europe mostly in a negative way, and until further notice by weak degrees of return—perhaps, in a certain way, thank God

And I come to indicate, after briefly recalling what we do here: the schedule and scope of our work,
to question myself on how I will approach this issue of the authentic meaning of a return to FREUD,
insofar as it is necessitated by this starting point and the American deviation, and by a certain trust,
a certain central depression that has hollowed out here, and I point out to them that nonetheless,
something small is indeed happening here, something that is beginning to resurface.

[Reading from the text “The Freudian Thing,” in Écrits, pp. 401-436]