🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

We have approached the problem of psychoses through the lens of “Freudian structures of psychoses.”
This title, if I may say so, is modest—I mean it does not even extend to where our investigation actually points. What we are constantly seeking, which will undoubtedly be the object of our research, is the economy of psychoses.
We seek this economy through an analysis of the structure. The structure appears in what can properly be called the phenomenon, in the way that delirium, for instance, in psychosis, presents itself.
It is entirely conceivable—even surprising—that something of the structure does not appear there.

The trust we place in this analysis of the phenomenon is entirely distinct from the phenomenological perspective, which seeks to see—broadly speaking—in the phenomenon what adheres to it, what subsists, so to speak, in the phenomenon of reality itself. The phenomenon as such must be taken and respected in its existence. It is quite clear that this is not the perspective guiding us. We do not place this a priori trust in the phenomenon for a simple reason: our approach is scientific. It is the very foundation of modern science not to trust phenomena but to search behind them for something more substantive that explains them.

We must not shy away from the word. If we have for some time in psychiatry taken a kind of retrograde step, saying that we distrust explanation and prefer to first understand, it is undoubtedly because the explanatory approach had ventured down false paths, into dead ends.
Nevertheless, we have the evidence of the explanatory effectiveness of analytic investigation on our side, and it is in this sense that we advance in the domain of psychoses, with the presumption that here too a proper analysis of the phenomenon will lead us to the structure and the economy.

I remind you once again that our aim in tackling the distinction between neuroses and psychoses is not for the mere satisfaction of nosography—as if it were necessary to revisit it when the distinction is already all too evident. Rather, it is, on the contrary, by bringing them closer together to the extent that, from the structural perspective of analyzing symmetries, oppositions, and structural relationships, essential connections may appear that allow us to construct what may seem an acceptable structure in psychosis.

The starting point is this: the unconscious presents itself in psychosis. Psychoanalysts accept this—rightly or wrongly, we accept with them that this is at least a possible starting point. The unconscious is there, and yet it does not function. That is to say, its mere presence does not in itself bring resolution; on the contrary, it introduces a peculiar inertia.
This alone, and for a long time now, has raised the question of whether there is in analysis something other than a drive that must be brought into consciousness. This, of course, has been suspected for some time. It is something other than even an ego whose defenses must be made less paradoxical—that is, achieving what is recklessly called “ego reinforcement.”

These two points—these two rejections of the two paths psychoanalysis initially took, and later deviated into—are almost self-evident when we approach psychoses. This suggests that with regard to psychosis, a more complex formulation, more in line with what the phenomenon presents, must be sought elsewhere.

You will soon receive the announced review and the issue on Language and Speech, where you will find somewhere this opening formula: “If psychoanalysis resides in language, it cannot, without altering itself, fail to recognize it in its discourse.” This encapsulates the essence of what I have been teaching you for several years.
It is in this context that we address psychoses: the promotion and emphasis on language phenomena in psychosis cannot fail to be the most fruitful source of insight for us.

You know that at the center of this lies the question of the ego, which is manifestly paramount in psychoses, since the ego, in its function of relating to the external world, is paradoxically what fails in psychosis. To the extent that the ego is attributed, so to speak, the power to handle this relationship to reality and to transform it—defined as “defensive” purposes—it is also the defense, in the general and summary form in which it is currently apprehended, that would be at the origin of paranoia.

Here, this strange ego—gaining more and more power in modern analytic conception—would have the ability to manipulate the external world in diverse ways, particularly in psychosis, to bring forth from the external world, in the form of hallucination, a signal intended to warn. Here we rediscover the archaic conception of the emergence of a drive, which the ego also perceives as dangerous. Thus, we become omnipotent.

I remind you—since certain points in my last lecture seemed too wandering to some and too enigmatic to others—of the meaning of what I say regarding the ego. I will explain it again in another way.

Regardless of the role attributed to the ego in the economy, an ego is never alone.
What does this mean? It means that the ego always involves with it a twin.
This strange twin—the ideal ego, which I discussed in my seminars two years ago—is not yet exhausted.

This ideal ego reveals to us, in the most apparent phenomenology of psychosis, that it speaks, that it is identical to that part of fantasy—though it must still be distinguished from the fantasy or phantasm that we highlight in a more or less implicit manner in the phenomena of neurosis—that it is a fantasy that speaks.
Or, more precisely, that this spoken fantasy of this figure:
– echoes the subject’s thoughts,
– intervenes,
– monitors,
– names, step by step, the sequence of their actions,
– comments on them,
…is something deserving attention and whose elements are not simply explained by the theory of the imaginary or by the rejection of the subject from the specular ego.

This is precisely why we can make its dynamics and general relevance felt, and why, last time, I attempted to show you that the ego, whatever we may think of its function—and I will go no further than attributing to it the function of a discourse of reality—always includes a correlative, namely, a discourse that has nothing to do with reality.

And with the impertinence for which I am well known, I did not seek this correlative elsewhere than in what I called last time “the discourse of freedom,” insofar as it is fundamental for the so-called “autonomous” individual, for “modern man,” insofar as they are structured by a particular conception of their autonomy.
This “discourse of freedom,” as I briefly indicated without elaboration, is fundamentally partial and biased, inexplicable, piecemeal, fragmented, differentiated—each element simultaneously presumed fundamental for all—the profoundly delusional nature of the “discourse of freedom.”

From this starting point, I offered you a sort of general catalog of what could be, in relation to the ego, the locus where, in a subject grappling with psychosis, delirium may proliferate. I know this takes us far.
Of course, I am not saying it is the same thing:
– I am saying it occupies the same place,
– I am saying it is the correlative of the ego,
– I am saying there is no ego without this twin, let us call it pregnant with delirium,
– I am saying, along with our patient, who occasionally provides us with such precious imagery—that this kind of advance, this exploration, this penetration of the forbidden zone by the psychotic, is revealed at the beginning of one of the chapters of his book where he describes himself as “a leprous corpse dragging another leprous corpse behind him”: a striking image for the ego. There is something fundamentally dead within the ego, and it is always accompanied by this twin that is discourse.

The question we pose is this: does this double, this correlative of the ego, this image, respond within this shadow that ensures the ego is never more than half of the subject? How does this fantasy, which manifests in psychosis, come to speak? Who speaks?
Is it really this other, in the sense of the reflection, as I explained its function in the dialectic of narcissism, the other of that imaginary part of the master-slave dialectic, which we traced back to infantile transitivism, to the posture play exercised in an initial stage of what is called the integration of the socius, of the similar, this other so well conceived here by the captivating action of the total image in the similar?

Is it indeed this other, this reflected other, this imaginary other, this other which is for us every similar being, in that:
– it provides us with our own image,
– it captures us through this appearance,
– it projects our totality back to us,
…is it this that speaks?

This is a question worth asking because, in fact, it is always more or less implicitly resolved whenever one speaks—more or less cautiously—about the mechanism of projection. This is where the difference lies. The mechanisms at play in psychosis are not confined to the imaginary register.

I strive to highlight for you that this projection does not always have the same meaning. Projection may or may not be confined to a specific meaning, but that is of little consequence—it is a matter of convention. One must decide whether by projection we mean the imaginary transitivism whereby, at the moment a child strikes their peer, they say truthfully, “He hit me,” because for the child, it is exactly the same thing.
This defines an order of relations, which is the imaginary relation. We encounter it constantly and grasp it in various mechanisms: there is jealousy by projection in this sense, where tendencies toward infidelity or accusations of infidelity the subject harbors against themselves are projected onto the other. This is an example of a projection mechanism.

Who does not know that this is the “ABCs” of the analysis of delusional jealousy: to realize, at the very least, that the mechanism of delusional projection…
…and perhaps it can also be called a “projection mechanism” in the sense that something appears externally that has its origin within the subject.
…But beyond that, delusional jealousy is certainly not the same as what we might provisionally call common or normal jealousy, which is much closer to projection as I initially defined it: to transitivism, one might say, to malevolent intent.

It is not the same thing, because simply examining the phenomena reveals it, and this distinction is clearly and perfectly made in FREUD’s own writings on jealousy. Therefore, it is a matter of understanding what occurs when it is not projection in the primary sense. Let us limit projection to imaginary transitivism and attempt to determine what truly operates in the other case.

In psychosis, distinguishing mechanisms from the imaginary realm, where do we locate them since these mechanisms elude us, evade libidinal investment, which assuredly signifies something?
Is it sufficient for us, in this reinvestment of libido in the body, which is commonly accepted as the mechanism of narcissism explicitly invoked by FREUD himself to explain the phenomenon of psychosis? Here, we have something that, from a certain perspective, explains and encompasses a number of the phenomena involved. In essence, for the delusional relationship to be mobilized, nothing more would be needed than to allow it, as one might easily say, to “become objectal” once more, which is, of course, what is presumed by everyone when employing the vocabulary of narcissism.

I point out that this is precisely the issue that—even if we accept it—does not resolve the problem, since, in essence, it has long been known (provided one is a psychiatrist, and this is almost universally accepted as self-evident) that, in a well-constituted paranoid individual, there will precisely be no question of mobilizing this investment, whatever it may be, while in schizophrenics, this tends to go much further into the properly psychotic disorder than in the paranoid.
Why is this? Could we not see something in this very fact, that within the order of the imaginary, there is no other way to assign a precise meaning to the term “narcissism”? Just as earlier, it was only in relation to the imaginary that we could give a precise meaning to projection. And in the order of the imaginary, alienation is, so to speak, a beginning, for the simple reason that it is constitutive: alienation is the imaginary as such.

Ultimately, it is precisely to the extent that, on the plane of the imaginary, we might attempt to resolve psychosis, that this mode alone shows us there is nothing to expect from it, since the imaginary mechanism gives form to psychotic alienation but not its dynamic or its location.

This is where we arrive together, yet again. If we are not left defenseless, if we do not surrender, it is precisely because, in our premises and our exploration, starting from last year’s The Technique of Analysis and Beyond the Pleasure Principle, along with all it implies in terms of the ego’s definition and structure, we have precisely the notion that behind this “little other” of the imaginary, we must admit the existence of another “Other,” which, of course, does not satisfy us merely because we capitalize it, but because we situate it as the necessary correlate of something that is speech.

We do not identify it. We locate it somewhere beyond the “little other.”

That is why we give it a capital A: to distinguish it.

I leave aside—though it remains a lateral aim—the fact that these premises alone suffice to challenge the theory of psychoanalytic treatment, which increasingly insists on reducing itself to the analysis of a two-person relationship.

The entire voice will be captured in the relation between the ego and another, which may vary in quality, no doubt, but:
– it will, as such, always be the sole and unique other,
– it will, as such, always be captured, as experience proves, in the imaginary relationship, in the relation of the subject’s ego to the ideal ego, in something which, as such—concerning the supposed object relation to be restored—remains within the imaginary,
– it will, as such, return to a curious experience of what might be called the Kleinian underpinnings of the imaginary, namely the oral complex and an object of devoration, which, of course, cannot be sustained by a subject who is not, strictly speaking, self-alienating, except on the basis of a misunderstanding.

The misunderstanding is indeed constituted by a sort of imaginary incorporation or devoration, which can only be this, alongside what is at stake in the analysis: a relationship of speech, an incorporation of the analyst’s discourse. Analysis, as it deviates into the analysis of a two-person relationship, ultimately cannot be anything more than the incorporation of the suggested—or even presumed—discourse of the analyst, which is, precisely, the exact opposite of analysis.

Let me shed some light: I say to you that I aim today to bring clarity, so you are not left in vagueness, about what is at issue. I will, therefore, state my thesis. I will begin at the wrong end, on this genetic plane that seems so necessary for your comfort, and afterward, I will tell you that this is not it. But let us first state: if it were, it would be as follows.

It is an extremely important thesis for the entire psychic economy. It is an extremely important thesis:
– for understanding various highly confused debates that continue around what I earlier referred to as Kleinian phantasmatic,
– for refuting certain objections made to it, but also,
– for better situating what it might offer that is true or fruitful for understanding the precocity of the repressions that this theory first implies, even though FREUD told us that repression, strictly speaking, does not occur before the decline of the Oedipus complex.

What does it mean for repression to be implied in the way the early pre-Oedipal stages are conceived within Kleinian theory? This thesis is very important for distinguishing what can be called “auto-eroticism” or “primitive object,” and you know that, regarding this, there are indeed two sides. There is genuine contradiction between what it posits when it speaks to us of the “primitive object” of the first child-mother relationship, and the notion of primordial auto-eroticism—an opposition that it formulates explicitly. This refers to a stage, however brief and transient we suppose it to be, in which there is no external world for the child.

In short, what seems insoluble under these opposing conditions can, I believe, be illuminated by what I now call my thesis. I am repeating things, but I realize it is always better to repeat them.

This thesis consists of the question of the nature of what might be called the primordial access of the human being to their reality as something correlational to them. By this, I mean that we suppose there is a reality correlational to them. This is an assumption that, I would say, is implied in every starting point concerning the subject. It is also an assumption we know we will always, at some point, have to abandon, because there would be no question about this reality if it were not a reality perpetually in question.

Does this primordial access exist at any moment as a biological correlate, an Umwelt, in the sense that we suppose it in the articulation of the animal to its environment? Is there something of such an enveloping, co-adapted nature that we invent the notion of the Umwelt for animals?

I would like to point out in passing that this is a hypothesis we use for animals, to the extent that the animal is an object for us, and there are indeed rigorously essential conditions for an animal’s existence. We enjoy investigating how the animal functions to always be in accord with these primordial conditions. This is what we call an instinct, a behavior, an instinctual cycle. If there are things outside this scope, we must believe we do not see them; and since we do not see them, we are at ease—and, indeed, why not be? What is certain is that for humans, this is evidently not sufficient. Everyone agrees on this. The open, proliferating nature of the human world is something that reveals itself to us through the notion of the plurality of its accesses.

This is what I attempt to distinguish for you because it seems coherent enough and practical enough within the three orders: the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real.

Everything indicates that what our analytical experience shows us fits into these three orders of relations. The entire question lies in determining when each of these relations is established. My thesis is characterized by this, and this might provide some with a solution to the enigma that last time seemed to them to be my feat of bravado about “the evening peace.” Reality is marked from the outset by symbolic annihilation. I believe that here the term has a meaning sufficiently demonstrated, sufficiently exercised by all our work last year, so that you understand what it means. I will still illustrate it once more, if only to revisit that evening peace, which was received so diversely.

First of all, it is not an excursion that, as PLATO says, introduces discordance or breaks the analytical tone. I do not believe I am innovating at all. If you read President Schreber carefully, you will find FREUD at one point approaching, as a clinical argument for understanding President Schreber, the role played in another of his patients by the prosopopoeia of NIETZSCHE, when he makes ZARATHUSTRA speak in Before the Sunrise.

You may refer to that passage. It is precisely to avoid reading it to you that I myself indulged the other day in some invocation of the evening peace. If you read Before the Sunrise, you will see fundamentally represented the same thing I sought to convey to you the other day, and the same thing I will now simply try to propose to you: this reflection that, for example, the day is established very early—undoubtedly—posited as a being, since I was speaking of being the other day. But why not stop there?

I mean:
– that this day is distinct from all the objects it contains, manifests, and occasionally presents,
– that it is probably even heavier and more present than any of them, and it is entirely within human experience—even the most primitive—that it is impossible to think of as simply the return of an experience.

If we were even to delve into the details—and that is certainly not my aim, as this concerns an a priori position—but merely referring to details, it would suffice to evoke the prevalence in the human life of the first months of a rhythm of sleep, retaining this initial apprehension of the day, to have every reason to believe that it is not an empirical apprehension that leads to the recognition that, at a certain moment…
I say, we suppose it—this is my thesis—I say, this is how I illustrate what I call the apprehension of “the first symbolic annihilations.”

…that the day is something from which the human being detaches, in which the human is not simply immersed, as all evidence suggests the animal is in a phenomenon such as the alternation of day and night. Instead, the human posits the day as such.

That the day comes into the presence of the day on a backdrop that is not a backdrop of concrete night, but of the possible absence of day, where the night resides—and vice versa, for that matter. Day and night are present very early as signifiers, not as the alternation of experience. They emerge very early as connotations, and the empirical and concrete day appears only as an imaginary correlate at the origin, very early. This is my supposition. Since I am speaking from a genetic point of view, I do not have to justify it through experience.

I state that the experience of our patients and what we must think of these relations, in what they signify, implies a primitive stage of the emergence of signifiers as such in the world, which is what is at issue. As I tell you, this is a structural necessity. This leaves you in some disarray…

I will illustrate these points and state that, before the child learns to articulate language, we assume—because we simply must assume—that signifiers already appear, which are already within the symbolic order. In other words, in response to the hesitation of some of your minds, let me shed light on my lantern, so to speak.

Today, I will propose in a dogmatic way—
something I precisely dislike proposing as such since it seems more fruitful to introduce it dialectically, though we will come back to this shortly.
For now, I want to tell you that when I speak of a certain primitive appearance of the signifier, it is something that already implies language. This merely aligns with the emergence of a being that exists nowhere: the day. The day, as day, is not a phenomenon:
– it is already something that carries a symbolic connotation in itself,
– it is already something that presupposes this fundamental alternation of the vocal, as it connotes presence and absence, on which FREUD pivots his entire notion of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. This is precisely the same zone, the same field of symbolic articulation, that I now aim to address in my discourse.

It is in this zone that the term I use, rightly or wrongly, Verwerfung, comes into play. I am pleased that some of you, for now, are grappling with the question of what this Verwerfung entails—this concept that FREUD mentions only sparingly, which I have unearthed in two or three corners where it pokes its head, or sometimes where it does not but must be assumed for the comprehension of the text. Without it, certain passages of FREUD would remain incomprehensible.

Regarding Verwerfung, FREUD states that the subject wanted nothing to do with castration, even in the sense of repression. I give this striking phrase its meaning: in the sense of repression, one still knows something about that which one ostensibly wants nothing to know, but precisely, the entirety of analysis has shown us that one knows it very well. However, since there are things the patient may want—so to speak—nothing to know, even in the sense of repression, this perhaps suggests yet another mechanism at play. And since the term Verwerfung appears twice—
once a few pages earlier and then again directly connected to this phrase—
I seize upon this Verwerfung, not out of particular attachment to the term, but because of what it signifies.

I believe FREUD intended this for the simple reason that those who most pertinently object to my approach point out that, in a close textual critique, the closer you scrutinize the text, the harder it becomes to understand. Naturally, a text must be brought to life by what precedes and follows it. This is precisely the question: a text must always be understood through what follows it.

Those who object most to my interpretation suggest looking elsewhere in FREUD’s writings for another term, such as Verleugnung. It is curious to see how many “Ver-” terms proliferate in FREUD’s work. I have never given you a purely semantic lecture on FREUD, but I assure you, I could readily provide a dozen examples. Nonetheless, in an initial stage, FREUD saw nothing less in this distinction than the key to differentiating hysteria, obsessive neurosis, and paranoia.

Hysteria is a kind of metamorphosis, a conversion—a curious coincidence that these terms, when juxtaposed, carry strikingly similar financial connotations: conversion, turning. These terms seem deliberately chosen for their connotative resonance.

This would take us far afield, and there is much to glean from the initial implications of FREUD’s direct approach to the phenomena of neurosis. However, we cannot dwell endlessly on these preliminaries. Trust me in this interpretive effort, and if I bring you Verwerfung to make my point, it is precisely because the fruit of this maturation and effort leads me there. Take, at least temporarily, the “honey” I offer you, and try to make something of it.

This Verwerfung, as implied in the text on Verneinung, is absolutely critical. It was commented on here two years ago by Jean HIPPOLYTE, whose commentary, I believe, offers the best understanding of it. That is why I chose to publish it in the first issue of the forthcoming review, where you can see, with the text in hand, whether HIPPOLYTE and I were right to pursue this path of Verneinung.

In my opinion, this text is undoubtedly brilliant. But I believe it is far from satisfactory. It conflates everything because it has nothing to do with Verdrängung. Instead, it directly involves Verwerfung, the rejection of a part of a primordial signifier—undoubtedly essential for the subject, for each particular subject—into external darkness. This results in a void at that level, which must later be reconstituted through an extraordinary path, characterizing the fundamental mechanism I propose as the basis of paranoia.

A primordial process of exclusion of an original interiority—not the interiority of the body—but an initial body of signifiers, a first system of signifiers considered primordial and indispensable. This is what I refer to when I speak of Verwerfung.

Within this initial choice of signifier, according to FREUD’s text on Verneinung, the world of reality is supposed to be constituted. It is within an already punctuated and structured world of signifiers that the interplay between representation and objects unfolds—that is, objects already constituted. FREUD describes the subject’s first apprehension of reality within this framework as the “judgment of existence” (Bejahung), in other words.

Let us clarify: this is not simply my dream, my hallucination, or my representation, but an object—something in which FREUD perceives (and here FREUD is speaking, not me) a testing of the external by the internal. It is this constitution of the subject’s reality within a rediscovery of the object, which FREUD terms “object desire,” as always being the rediscovered object in a quest—an object which, moreover, is never the same object rediscovered.
This dialectic, this reconstruction of reality so essential to explaining all mechanisms of repetition, is inscribed on the foundation of an initial bi-repartition that curiously overlaps with certain primitive myths of the signifier. This concerns the signifier that has been apprehended and the signifier that has been radically rejected—introducing, therefore, something primordial and inherently flawed into the subject’s access to reality as a human being.

This is the hypothesis underlying the peculiar priority FREUD gives in Verneinung to what he analogously explains as a judgment of attribution relative to a judgment of existence. There is an initial division of the good and the bad, which can only be conceived within FREUD’s dialectic if we interpret it as the rejection of a part of a primordial signifier.
What does “primordial signifier” mean? In this context, it is, of course, clear that it does not mean anything very specific. Everything I am explaining here has all the hallmarks of myth—a notion I was tempted to interject here, akin to the story Marcel GRIAULE shared last year: the division of the primitive placenta into four parts.

The first case involves the fox tearing off its portion of the placenta, introducing an original and fundamental imbalance into the system. This initiates an entire cycle involving the division of fields, kinship ties, and so forth.

We are indeed in the realm of myth, and what I am recounting to you is also a myth, of course, for I do not believe there is any specific moment or stage in which the subject:
– first acquires the signifier, this “primordial signifier” in the sense I am indicating,
– then introduces the play of significations,
– and then, with this signifier and signification joining hands, enters the domain of discourse.

This necessity for representation is so essential that I feel quite comfortable addressing it—not merely to satisfy your expectations but because FREUD himself aligns with this approach. Yet, it is essential to examine how he does so.

There is a letter to FLIESS—letter 52. In letter 52, FREUD revisits the structure of what might be called the psychic apparatus—not just any psychic apparatus:
not the psychic apparatus as conceived by a professor behind a desk and in front of a blackboard, modestly presenting a model, something that might or might not “work.” Whether it works is irrelevant; the important thing is to present something that superficially resembles what we call reality.
Rather, FREUD addresses the psychic apparatus of his patients.

This is why the letter introduces an extraordinary fertility, unmatched in any of FREUD’s other works. This brilliance shines through in this famous letter to FLIESS, delivered to us through the hands of a faithful intermediary. This letter—testamentary, perhaps even testimonial—reached me with a series of omissions and redactions that, justified or not, strike any reader as utterly scandalous. In letter 52, the text is cut at moments where a complement—even if deemed outdated or weak—would shed light on FREUD’s thoughts and research.

What does FREUD say in letter 52? First, it is clear that the matter he seeks to explain is not just any psychic state. What interests him—
– because it is his starting point,
– because it is the only accessible and fertile aspect of the analytic experience—
…is phenomena of memory. That is what he seeks to explain. The schema of the psychic apparatus in FREUD’s work is constructed to explain memory phenomena—specifically, what is “not working.”

This is not a simple matter. Theories of memory, even taken on their own, are rarely particularly satisfying.

Psychologists have addressed this, offering meaningful insights and uncovering intriguing discrepancies in experiments. Being a psychoanalyst does not exempt you from reading their work. For instance, consider the challenges psychologists face in explaining the phenomenon of reminiscence. These, too, are memory phenomena.

Yet, something distinct emerges from FREUD’s entire body of work: the memory that interests us as psychoanalysts is entirely separate from what psychologists describe when they analyze memory mechanisms in an organism engaged in experience.

Let me illustrate. Imagine an octopus—one of the most fascinating animals, fundamental in Mediterranean civilizations and still easily caught today. Place it at the bottom of a small jar, insert electrodes, and observe its behavior. The octopus extends its limbs, and the result is a sudden, striking reaction: it retracts them rapidly. We soon notice that the octopus becomes cautious. Upon dissecting the octopus, we discover within its brain a remarkable nerve—not just visually striking but significant in the diameter of its neurons, observable under a microscope.

We observe that this is what serves as memory for the octopus. In other words, if this pathway is severed, the capacity to process experience is significantly diminished. This means that the memory of the experience, the fact that severing a communication pathway alters memory recordings, suggests that the octopus’s memory might function like a small machine. That is to say, it is something that operates in cycles. I am not drawing a stark distinction between humans and animals here, because what I teach you is that human memory also operates in cycles. However, in humans, it is structured in messages. [See the forthcoming “Graph of Desire,” seminar 1957–58.]

What I call “structured in messages” means that it consists of a sequence of small signs, + or –, which are imprinted “one after the other” and circulate like the electric lights at the Place de l’Opéra, turning on and off in an endless loop. Human memory functions in this way. However, it is a truth entirely inaccessible to experience. The nature of memory as FREUD apprehends it lies in the primary process, the pleasure principle. This psychoanalytic memory, as described by FREUD, is not just any memory—it is something entirely inaccessible to direct experience.

Let me ask you another way: what does it mean, for example, that desires in the unconscious never extinguish themselves? By definition, those that extinguish are no longer discussed. This means there are desires that never extinguish, that is, there are elements that continue to circulate in memory. These elements cause the human being—under the principle of pleasure—to indefinitely repeat the same experiences, painful in some cases, specifically those experiences encoded in memory in such a way that they appear as persistent elements in the unconscious. If what I am describing here is not simply the articulation of what you theoretically already know—though it is something you “know without knowing”—I wonder what else it could be. My aim is not only to ensure you know this but to recognize that you know it.

Another point that is quite clear from this text is that the process of defense is not the central focus of analytic thought—it is something entirely different. It involves the transition of something from a memory process, as we have defined within a specific register, into another register. After all, once memory is no longer understood as part of a continuous reaction to reality as a source of excitation but as something else entirely, we must become fully aware of this shift. What is striking is how much effort we expend when FREUD explicitly addresses this disorder, restriction, and recording—not just as terms but as the very subject matter of this letter.

What is fundamentally new in FREUD’s theory is the assertion that memory is not simple; it is recorded in different ways. What, then, are these different registers? This is where letter 52 supports my argument. I regret this somewhat because you might rush to this letter and conclude: “Yes, this is how it is in this letter, but not in the neighboring letters.” You might fail to see that this concept permeates all of FREUD’s letters and the very soul of his intellectual development. Without it as a foundation, many ideas would become inexplicable—FREUD might as well have become a Jungian, for instance.

What is the sequence of these registers? You will see something you have never noticed before. Until now, for you, there has been: the unconscious, the preconscious, and the conscious. It has long been understood how these systems operate. FREUD’s framework for consciousness includes the essential observation that consciousness and memory are mutually exclusive phenomena. This observation is not only present in this letter but also articulated in FREUD’s description of the psychic apparatus at the end of The Interpretation of Dreams. He treats this idea both as a truth—not entirely experimental—and as a necessity that emerges from handling the entire system. At the same time, it clearly represents a foundational assumption of his thought. I will not delve into fully elucidating the extent of this assertion, but it is undoubtedly fundamental.

First, if we consider the circuit of psychic apprehension, there is perception. This perception, which implies consciousness because we label it as such, involves—as FREUD demonstrates in his famous “magic writing pad” metaphor—a sort of slate-like surface overlaid with a sheet of transparent paper. You write on the sheet, and when you lift it, nothing remains; the surface is blank again. However, everything you wrote reappears on the slightly adhesive surface beneath, momentarily blackened by the pressure of your pencil marking the transparent sheet.

This metaphor is the foundation of FREUD’s explanation of how he conceives the mechanism linking perception and memory. But which memory? The memory that interests him. Within this memory of interest, two zones emerge: the unconscious and the preconscious. Beyond the preconscious, a completed consciousness appears, which can only be an articulated consciousness.

What I want to highlight is how FREUD’s conceptual framework reveals its own necessities. Between:
– the Verneinung (negation), which is essentially fleeting, disappearing as soon as it appears,
– and the construction of what he calls the “system of consciousness,” or even “the ego,” which he already terms “the official ego”—and in German, “official” retains the same meaning as in French,
…between these two points lies what FREUD terms the Niederschrift (recording).

There are three of these, and this is what makes the testimony of this letter particularly interesting. FREUD elaborates in this letter a preliminary understanding of how memory functions analytically:
– At the center lies the system of the Unbewusst (unconscious), which is even described as an Unbewusstsein.
– The system of the Vorbewusst (preconscious) is separate from perception. It connects to the Unbewusst and the Vorbewusstsein.

You see, something is missing! What does this text aim to convey?

At the very least, we must begin properly, meaning we first assign meaning to all of this. It is important to understand that, contrary to the order of what I explained earlier, and even though FREUD provides us with chronological overlaps, suggesting that we must admit the existence of systems formed, for instance:

– between 0 and 1.5 years,
– then 1.5 to 4 years,
– then 4 to 8 years,
– and beyond 15 years,

…even though he provides these connotations and tells us we must seek in these periods the material for the registers, etc., we should not think—any more than I suggested earlier—that these registers are formed successively. Why, then, do we distinguish them, and how do they appear to us?

They appear in the psychoanalytic, if not pathological, phenomenon, and through the fact that the system of defense ensures that certain things, which do not please us, do not reappear in the memory system. Thus, we remain in the realm of official economy, where the point is to avoid recalling things we dislike. This simply means avoiding the recollection of unpleasant things, which is entirely normal. Let us call this defense.

It is not pathological for me not to remember something! In fact, it is essentially what one ought to do: forget unpleasant things, as we can only benefit from doing so. A concept of defense that does not start from this point already distorts the question of interest. What gives the concept of defense its pathological character is its manifestation through affective regression, topical regression—a pathological defense. This occurs when something that has been normally repressed or excluded in one of these registration systems, in one of the discourses of the subject (it can mean nothing else), translates into an unregulated form. When something appropriately censored at the correct level of discourse passes into another register, it manifests phenomena that no longer hold the right to the title of defense. This happens because such phenomena have unjustifiable repercussions on the entire system. What applies in one system does not apply in another, and from this confusion of mechanisms arises disorder. This is the foundation of what we call the system of pathological defense.

But what does this mean?
To understand it, let us begin with the most well-known phenomenon—the one FREUD always began with—the one that explains the existence of the Unbewusstsein system.

For the Unbewusstsein system, the mechanism of topical regression is entirely clear. At the level of a completed discourse—what FREUD terms the “official ego” discourse—there exists a general superimposition of agreement and coherence between the discourse, the signifier, and the signified. This includes the intentions, the groans, the confusion, and the obscurities in which we all live, which are familiar to us and through which we always experience a sense of discord when expressing something, never fully matching what we want to convey.

This is the reality of discourse: it consists of this interplay. Ultimately, though, we know that the signified is sufficiently captured in our discourse for daily use. When we aim for something better—seeking truth—we justifiably encounter disagreement. This is why, most of the time, we abandon the effort. Yet, the relationship between signification and the signifier is precisely the one provided by the structure of discourse.

As for what occurs at the level of the unconscious, it is that everything happening within the neuroses that led us to discover:
– the domain of the Freudian unconscious as a register of memory, which consists, at the level of discourse, in what you hear when you listen to me. This exists even more than what I can explicitly say, given that there are times you fail to understand. Thus, it exists.
– This discourse, as a temporal chain of signifiers, operates such that in neurosis, instead of using words, the individual uses whatever is at their disposal. They empty their pockets, turn out their trousers, include their functions and inhibitions—they put everything into it, covering themselves with it in the case of the signifier. They become the signifier; their reality or imagination enters the discourse.

If neuroses are not this, if this is not what FREUD taught, then I renounce it. Thus, this is entirely clear and perfectly defines the hysterical field and obsessive neuroses.

What occurs elsewhere, in a field:
– that surprises us,
– that is problematic,
– that is where phenomena of Verneinung (negation) primarily appear,

…is something that FREUD traditionally situated on another level.

Here, these phenomena translate elements that must also come from somewhere, from a fall in level, from a transition between registers. Curiously and uniquely, they manifest with the quality of being denied, disavowed, passed off as non-existent.

At the very least, we have the notion that something entirely different is at play—properties of language, properties that undoubtedly appear primordial since language is, as such, the symbol and a connotation of presence and absence, acting as material signifier. However, this does not exhaust the question of the function of negation within language. It is here that their duplicity lies:
– at the moment when someone tells you it is far away, precisely because it is present,
– and at the moment you recall it, precisely because it has departed.

Here, of course, we have this fundamental relation to the negation of what is present. Yet, its coherent articulation within negation introduces a problem in itself, and the entire issue perhaps lies in this kind of illusion of deprivation born from the common and widespread usage of negation, which is the initial way negation is employed. All languages contain a broad range of possible negations, certainly significant and worthy of a specialized study: negation in French, negation in Chinese, and so forth.

The important point is that what appears to simplify discourse conceals a dynamic, but this dynamic escapes us; it is secret. The degree of illusion inherent in the idea that a Verneinung merely emphasizes something that appears, for instance, in a dream—”It is not my father”—is well known. When a subject says this, the statement itself suggests its opposite: the father is implicated. We are accustomed to taking it as such and are content to go no further.

Yet, it is striking that this blindness, this interpretive difficulty, emerges when the subject says, for instance: “I do not wish to tell you something unpleasant.” This is entirely different. The subject says it quite gently, of course. Everyone recognizes that there is an immediate dynamic present: the subject is, in fact, saying something unpleasant.

It is because we feel this dynamic that we awaken to the mystery of what this illusion of deprivation represents. There is what KANT called a negative magnitude in its function—not merely as deprivation but as a true positivity of subtraction.

The question of Verneinung remains entirely unresolved. What matters is realizing that FREUD could conceive of it—and this is the importance of the text on Verneinung—only by connecting it to something more primitive than Verdrängung (repression), as I explained earlier. FREUD formally admits this in the letter, asserting the existence of these initial nodes of meaning. These nodes will later serve as points of reference for repression in its significatory function. FREUD posits that primordial Verneinung involves a preliminary inscription into signs, Wahrnehmungszeichen (perceptual signs). In doing so, he acknowledges the existence of the field I call the domain of the primordial signifier.

Everything FREUD subsequently says in this letter regarding the dynamics of the three major neuropsychoses he examines—hysteria, obsessive neurosis, and paranoia—presupposes and necessitates the existence of this state, this primordial stage, which I call the domain of Verwerfung (foreclosure). FREUD explicitly acknowledges this in letter 52.

To understand it, one need only recall FREUD’s consistent assertion that all forms of historization, however primitive—that is, all organization into mnemonic systems—must presuppose a prior organization. This organization must already exist, at least partially, in the form of language for language itself to function.

Everything that occurs within the order of memory is, in the phenomena of memory that interest FREUD, always phenomena of language. In other words, to signify anything, one must already possess the signifying material. For example, in the case of the Wolf Man, FREUD demonstrates that:
– the primitive impression remained dormant for years, serving no purpose, and yet it was already signifying.
– When it comes into play in the subject’s reconstructed history—no longer functioning as repression—it intervenes in the difficult reconstruction of the subject’s experiences between 1.5 and 4 years of age.

Just before this period, as FREUD meticulously documents, the child witnesses the famous primal scene. The signifier is primitively given but remains insignificant until the subject integrates it into their history—a history that gains significance between the ages of 1.5 and 4.5. This is not because sexual desire is absent but because sexual desire is what enables a person to historicize themselves. It is through sexual desire that the law, in all its forms, is introduced for the first time.

Thus, we see the entire economy of FREUD’s contribution summarized in this brief letter. This is corroborated by countless other texts. For example, one of you—whose contradictions I welcomed during the elaboration of these ideas—pointed out that at the end of the text on fetishism, FREUD makes an observation closely aligned with what I have just explained. FREUD introduces a significant revision to the distinction between neuroses and psychoses, stating that in psychosis, reality is restructured, and part of reality is eliminated.

FREUD then makes particularly striking statements: he asserts that reality is never truly scotomized. He distinguishes two aspects directly relevant to our discussion: the functions remain present, ready to express themselves, ready to emerge from manifest desire related to that reality. Far from reality being perforated, FREUD asserts that what is missing in psychosis is the true idea itself.

Ultimately, it relates to a deficiency in the symbolic, even if in the German text I am referring to, the term “reality” remains—the term used to denote what is forgotten in psychosis. By this, I mean what is missing in psychosis, because, as you will see from the context, it is explicitly revealed to mean nothing other than a lack, a gap, a deficiency in the symbolic.

Have you not noticed that the primordial phenomenon, when I show you concrete cases, patients, people beginning to wade into psychosis—what is it? I showed you one such individual who believed they had received an invitation from a figure who had become the friend and essential anchor point of their existence. This figure withdraws, they say, and they demonstrate it in their narrative, simply through the perplexity connected to a correlate of certainty. This is precisely how the onset and approach of what I earlier called the “forbidden field” announces itself, the approach to which constitutes, in itself, the entry into psychosis. How does one enter it?

How is the subject brought not to alienate themselves within the petit autre (the little other), within their counterpart, but to become something that, from within the field where nothing can be articulated, calls out to everything else, to the field of everything that can be articulated?

In other words, it evokes all that you see manifested in the case of President SCHREBER—those phenomena I referred to as “marginal phenomena,” situated at the level of a reality that organizes itself in a clearly discernible manner within the imaginary order. This, in turn, aids the subject greatly and becomes significant for them. It is the relationship to the signifier of the erotic relation, to the fundamental desire of psychosis, that defines the subject’s attachment to their delusions. Psychotics love their delusions, just as they love themselves.

At that point, the subject has not engaged in “narcissism” but rather touches upon something. They quickly add that this is where the mystery lies—the very one we are concerned with. The question is this: what is this relationship into which the subject enters—
…a relationship always signaled, in some way, by the phenomena themselves within psychosis—
…this relationship between the subject and the signifier, this kind of connection between the living subject and the domain of the signifier?

What are the boundaries of the experience that cause the entire subject to fall into this problematic?

This is the question we are asking ourselves this year, and it is also the question where I hope to lead you a few steps further before the summer holidays.