🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

My introduction to the first of what I have called the four fundamental Freudian concepts…
my introduction last time of the unconscious through the structure of a gap…
this introduction provided an opportunity for one of my listeners, Jacques-Alain MILLER, to present an excellent outline of what—in my previous writings—he took care to recognize as the structuring function of a lack and to connect it, in essence, through an audacious and elegant arc, to what I have been able to designate in speaking of the function of desire as the lack of being.

Having presented this kind of synopsis to you, which surely was not, at least for those who already had some notions of my teaching, of any unifying utility, and having therefore traced this outline, he questioned me about my ontology.
Of course, I could not answer him within the time limits imposed by the schedule on such a question, a question which would have required, first of all, that I obtain from him a clear and precise definition of what he meant by the term “ontology.” Nevertheless, he should not believe that I found the question inappropriate in any way.

I would even say more—it was particularly well-timed in the sense that it is indeed a properly ontological function that is at stake in this gap, in this fundamental structure, through which I felt it necessary to introduce the function of the unconscious as the most essential, as the one most essential to it. For in introducing it in this way, you have seen it distinguish two forms, certainly in what is shown through this gap—we might call it pre-ontological.

I insisted on this aspect, which is too often forgotten—and forgotten in a way that is not without significance—the too-often-forgotten aspect of the first discovery of the emergence of the unconscious: that it does not lend itself to ontology. What first presented itself to FREUD, to the discoverers, to those who took the first steps, and what still presents itself to anyone interested in analysis, anyone who accommodates themselves for a time, perhaps compelled to take certain detours, adjusts their gaze to what properly belongs to the order of the unconscious, is that it is neither being nor non-being; it is the unrealized.

I mentioned the function of limbo; I could also have referred to what, in the mythical register, in the constructions of Gnosis, is called intermediate beings: sylphs, gnomes, or even more elevated forms of these ambiguous mediators. Similarly, let us not forget that FREUD, when he began to stir this world, articulated this term—which seemed fraught with more ominous apprehensions when he pronounced it—remarkably, a term whose threat has been completely forgotten after sixty years of experience:

“Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo.”

It is indeed remarkable to note that what was announced as an infernal opening subsequently became, I would say, so remarkably aseptic. It is curious, and also indicative, that what was deliberately announced as an opening onto a “lower world” ultimately—except in very rare exceptions—found no conjunction, made no serious alliance anywhere with all that nevertheless—still now, but especially at the time of the Freudian discovery—existed throughout the world of so-called “metaphysical research,” or practices such as spiritualist, spiritist, evocative, necromantic activities, the gothic psychology of MYERS, which endeavored to trace the fact of telepathy.

Of course, in passing, FREUD touched on these facts, on what might have come to him through his experience. It is very clear that his theoretical engagement [Begriff], his conceptual grasp, immediately exercised itself in the direction of a rationalist—and moreover elegant—reduction. And one might ultimately consider exceptional, even aberrant, what, in today’s analytic circle, attaches itself to what has been called—and quite significantly, precisely in the sense of sterilization—the “psy phenomena,” referring to the research of someone like SERVADIO, for example. Assuredly, it is not in this direction that our research and experience have led us.

If our research into the unconscious has yielded a result, it is in the sense of a certain drying up, a reduction:
– to a herbarium with a rather limited sampling,
– to a register that has become a reasonably expected catalog,
– to a classification that would readily aspire to be “natural.”

And if indeed something marks itself as an effect in the register of a traditional psychology that willingly emphasizes the character of the unmasterable, powerful, infinite tradition of human desire, seeing in it the imprint of some divine hoof, it is not in this direction that analytic experience proceeds. If there is something it allows us to state, it is rather the limited function of desire. Desire, more than any other function, any other point within the scope of human reach, encounters its limit somewhere. We shall return to all this.

I point out that I did not say “pleasure”:
– that pleasure limits the scope of human reach is what we will need to grasp,
– that the pleasure principle is a principle of homeostasis is indeed the foundational hypothesis, which would not fail to leave room for all that one might imagine of aspirations, tensions, to exceed or transcend its limits.

But that is precisely the issue: that desire itself finds its boundary, its fixed relation, its limit, and that it is even in relation to this limit that it sustains itself as desire, that it can sustain itself as crossing the threshold imposed by the pleasure principle.
It is certainly not unique to FREUD, this repudiation—in a certain field where he is invoked, namely the field of religious sentimentality—this repudiation by FREUD of what he designated as “oceanic aspiration.”

Our experience is precisely there—to reduce this “aspiration” to a fantasy, to secure firm foundations elsewhere, and to reassign it to the place of what FREUD referred to, in relation to religion, as “illusion.”

What is ontic—since it is ontology that is at issue in what I introduced last time for you—within the function of the unconscious is this split through which something—whose adventure, in our field, seems so brief—is momentarily brought to light, but whose characteristic includes this second moment of closure, which lends this grasp its vanishing aspect. To refer to a register to which I shall return, which perhaps I can take a step further here, though previously avoided for contextual reasons. A burning context, as you know! [The I.P.A. and the question of session duration].

Our technical habits—becoming, for reasons we must truly analyze, so hypersensitive regarding the functions of time—make it seem that, even in trying to introduce here distinctions so essential that they take shape everywhere else than in our discipline, I would have to engage in a more or less argumentative discussion.

This sensitivity is noticeable at the very level of the definition of the unconscious, and even, when referring to what FREUD says about it—necessarily approximate, as he could initially only address it through touches and attempts regarding the primary process—that what occurs there is inaccessible to contradiction, to spatiotemporal localization, and even to the function of time.

The “indestructible desire” merely carries toward a perpetually brief and limited future what it sustains as an image of the past. But the term “indestructible” is precisely affirmed concerning a reality—the most inconsistent of all—which escapes this function, the most structuring one in the world insofar as we seek things there. What is a thing, if not something that endures, identical, for a certain time? [cf. Heidegger: “What is a Thing?” Gallimard, Tel, 1988].

If “indestructible desire” escapes time, to what domain does it belong in this order? Is there not reason here to distinguish, alongside this time, this duration—the substance of things—another mode of time, a logical time? You know that I have addressed this theme elsewhere.

We find again the structured rhythm of that pulsation of the gap whose function I evoked for you last time. This evanescent appearance lies between the two times, initial and terminal, of this logical time, between: – the instant of seeing where something is always elided, even lost from intuition itself, – and the elusive moment where, precisely, the grasp of the unconscious does not conclude, where it is always a matter of a deceived retrieval.

Ontically, therefore, it is evasive, but we manage to pinpoint it within a structure—a temporal structure which, until now, has never truly been identified as such. However, for what appears within it, as we have seen, the entirety of our subsequent experience has been shaped by a different analysis, rather one of disdain. And the larvae that emerge through this gap—we have not, as in the comparison FREUD employs at a turning point in The Interpretation of Dreams, “nourished them with blood.”

We have been interested in something else, and what I am here to show you this year is by what paths these shifts in interest have increasingly leaned toward freeing us from structures: structures which, in my view, were poorly discussed—in analysis at least to my ears—and structures that are spoken of almost as if by prophets.

I mean that too often, even when discussing the best theoretical testimonies analysts provide from their experience, one gets the impression that they must be interpreted. And I will show this to you in due course when addressing what is the most vivid, the most burning aspect of our experience—namely, transference—where we see the coexistence of the most fragmentary and the most enlightening testimonies, in total confusion.

This is why I approach it step by step, for what I have to talk to you about—the unconscious, repetition—all of this will be addressed at the level of transference, where it is commonly said, “This is what it’s about.” It is often heard that transference is repetition. – I do not say that this is false, that there is no repetition in transference, – I do not say that it was not through the experience of transference that FREUD approached repetition. – What I say is that the concept of repetition has nothing to do with that of transference.

Yet, for this reason, I am compelled to address it first in our explanation, to give it logical precedence. For to include it in its historical development would only favor ambiguities arising from the fact that its discovery occurred amidst the trial-and-error process required by the experience of transference. Thus, I return to the unconscious.

Here, I must introduce and delineate the perspective by which the possibility emerges for us to address the question of what grants this status of being—however evasive, however inconsistent it appears. This status is given to it—no matter how astonishing this formulation may seem—by the approach of its discoverer. This status, so fragile ontically as I indicate to you, is ethical. It is FREUD’s pursuit of truth that declares: “Whatever the case, we must proceed.”

Because somewhere, it [this status of being] manifests, and this within his experience of what, until then, had been the most rejected, the most concealed, the most denied reality for the physician: that of the hysteric, who is, in some sense, marked by the sign of deception from the outset. Of course, this has led us elsewhere.

For a long time, what occurred in the handling of this field—where we were led by the initial approach, by the discontinuity represented by the fact that one man, the discoverer, FREUD, declared: “This is the land where I lead my people”—for a long time, what was situated in this field, in this gap, seemed marked by the characteristics of its original discovery, namely the desire of the hysteric.

But soon, something entirely different imposed itself, which, as it became more uncovered, was always, so to speak, articulated belatedly. Lagging behind was the fact that the theory had only been forged for earlier discoveries, so that everything had to be redone, including what concerns the desire of the hysteric. Thus, here, by a kind of retroactive leap, we must highlight what is essential in FREUD’s position concerning what occurs in this field of the unconscious.

It is not in an impressionistic mode that I assert his approach here is ethical—not in the sense of the famed “courage of the scientist who retreats before nothing,” an image that, like all others, must be tempered! If I say that the status of the unconscious is ethical—not ontic—it is insofar as what FREUD debates when giving it its status is not, precisely, what I first mentioned when speaking of “thirst for truth.” That was merely a pointer to the traces of approaches and approximations that will allow us to ask where FREUD’s passion lay. But when he debates this, it is not what he emphasizes. He fully knows the fragility of the Fates of the unconscious in this register when he concludes in his final book—or chapter, as you prefer—Chapter VII of The Interpretation of Dreams, concerning The Psychological Process of the Dream.

What he discusses, after introducing it through one of those miracles of consummate artistry, is a dream that—among all those analyzed in the Traumdeutung—occupies a unique place. This is precisely a suspended dream, circling around the most distressing mystery: the one uniting a father to the corpse of his nearby son—his dead son—this father succumbing to sleep and seeing the image of his son arise, saying to him: “Do you not see, Father, that I am burning?” Meanwhile, he [the son] is burning—in reality—in the adjacent room.

How can the theory of the dream as an “image of a desire” hold together around this example, where, in a sort of blazing reflection, it is precisely a reality—almost perfectly mirrored here—that seems to wrench the dreamer from sleep? How, except to indicate to us that it is on this very path where the mystery is most evocative:

• the mystery of a secret that requires no more sensitivity to resonances than is common,
• the mystery that evokes nothing other than the realm of the beyond, and some shared secret between this child who comes to say to the father: “Do you not see, father, that I am burning?”

What is he burning from, if not from what we see outlined at other points designated by Freudian topology: that FREUD has doubled the myth of HAMLET, where what the ghost bears is—the ghost himself accuses us—the weight of his sins. [cf. Seminar 1958-59: Desire and Its Interpretation, March 4 to April 29 and May 27]. The Father, the Name-of-the-Father, supports the structure of desire alongside that of the Law.

But the inheritance of the father is what KIERKEGAARD designates for us: it is his sin. And from where does HAMLET’s ghost emerge, if not from the place where it accuses us:

• that it was “in the blossom of his sin” that he was caught, mowed down,
• that, far from giving HAMLET the prohibitions of the Law that could sustain his desire, it is at every moment a profound questioning of this overly ideal father.

Everything is within reach, emerging in this example that FREUD places here, in a sense, to show us that he does not exploit it but instead evaluates, weighs, and savors it, and that it is from this point, the most fascinating one, that he diverts us. To enter into what? Into a discussion about the forgetting of the dream, the value of its communication, its transmission, and its contribution by the subject. This debate revolves entirely around certain terms that deserve emphasis, highlighting that the primary term is not “truth” but Gewissheit, “certainty.”

FREUD’s approach, I would say—and I will illustrate it—is Cartesian in the sense that it begins with the foundation of the subject of certainty: it is about what one can be certain of. And to that end, the first thing to do is to overcome what connotes everything about the content of the unconscious, especially when it is a matter of making it emerge from the experience of the dream—namely, what floats everywhere, punctuating, staining, and marking the text of every dream communication, specifically here:

“I am not sure, I doubt.”

And who would not doubt the transmission of the dream when, indeed, the abyss between what was experienced and what is reported is evident?

This is where FREUD places the full force of his emphasis. Doubt is the foundation of his certainty. There is no need, for now, to press—though I will later examine more closely the differences—the immediate connection with the Cartesian approach.

Of course, this “doubt” deserves pause to differentiate it. I mean, the doubt upon which the subject’s certainty is founded in DESCARTES and the doubt FREUD points to as constituting a sign of positive connotation concerning what must be attended to. He motivates it: “It is precisely there where there is something to preserve,” he says. And doubt becomes a sign of resistance. Yet the function he assigns to doubt remains ambiguous because what is to be preserved could also be what needs to be revealed, for in any case, whatever shows itself does so only under a Verkleidung, a disguise, and sometimes a poorly fitted one at that.

What I emphasize, however, is where the two approaches converge more strikingly. DESCARTES tells us: “I am assured of what I doubt about thinking,” and I would phrase it—sticking to a formula not more cautious than his but one that avoids debating “I think”—as: “In thinking, I am,” DESCARTES tells us. You see here that by eliding “I think,” I sidestep the discussion stemming from the fact that this “I think,” for us, cannot be sustained, cannot assuredly be detached from the fact that it can only be formulated by being told to us implicitly, something he overlooks. But for now, we set this aside.

FREUD, in a precisely analogous manner, doubts—after all, these are his dreams, and it is he who doubts at the outset—but he is assured that a thought exists there that is unconscious, meaning that it reveals itself as absent and that, in this place, he calls upon the “I think,” wherever he encounters doubt, to reveal the subject. In sum, he is sure of this thought with all his “I am,” as if the thought exists on its own, provided—and here is the leap—that someone thinks in his place. This is where the asymmetry becomes evident:

• not from the initial approach of the subject’s founded certainty,
• but rather, as I tell you, from the fact that everything that interests FREUD is that the subject is at home in the field of the unconscious. And because he asserts its certainty, all progress becomes possible through which he transforms our world.

For DESCARTES, in the initial cogito—Cartesian thinkers may challenge this point, but I submit it for discussion—the “I think,” as it transitions into “I am,” aims at a real, yet the “true” remains so external that DESCARTES must afterward ensure what? None other than an Other who is not deceptive and who, furthermore, through his mere existence, assures the foundations of this truth, guaranteeing us that in his own objective reason are the bases of that very real whose truth cannot find its dimension elsewhere.

Certainly, this is not the place for me to elaborate—though I can only indicate—the truly prodigious consequences of this entrusting of truth into the hands of the Other, the perfect God for whom, after all, it is henceforth his affair, since—whatever he may have said, it would always be the truth. Even if he had said that 2 plus 2 equals 5, it would have been true! What does this mean, except that we are now free to play with the little letters of algebra, transforming geometry into analysis, and the door is open to set theory, meaning we can permit ourselves any hypotheses to disentangle facts.

But let us leave this aside, as it is not our concern, except to note that what begins at the level of the subject is never without consequences, provided we understand what this term “subject” means. Now, DESCARTES did not know this, except that it was the subject of certainty and the rejection of all prior knowledge. But we, thanks to FREUD, know that this subject manifests itself, that it thinks before it enters certainty. This, we have on our hands, and it is indeed our burden. But, in any case, it is now a field we cannot refuse regarding the questions it poses.

What I wish to stress here, in passing, is that henceforth, the correlate of the Other is no longer the deceptive Other but the deceived Other. And this, we touch concretely the moment we enter the experience of analysis: it is the subject’s greatest fear—that they might deceive us, lead us astray, or simply that we might be mistaken, for it is clear, looking at our faces, that we are people who can err like everyone else.

Yet this does not trouble FREUD because it is precisely what we must understand, especially when reading the first paragraph of this chapter on the forgetting of dreams. These are the signs—which overlap—that he accounts for everything:

• that, as he says, we must free ourselves (sich frei machen) from the entire scale of evaluation sought there, Preisschätzung, the evaluation of what is certain and what is uncertain,
• that the slightest indication that something enters the field must be held as enjoyment, for us, of equal value as a trace concerning the subject.

Later, regarding the famous observation of a homosexual woman, FREUD mocks those who, in connection with the dreams of said patient, might say to him:

“So this famous unconscious, which was supposed to bring us closer to the truth, to a—ironically speaking—divine truth, well, here is this patient, and in her dreams, she mocks you. She deliberately concocts dreams during analysis to convince you that she is clearly returning to what is expected of her, namely, a taste for men!”

FREUD sees no objection to this whatsoever: “The unconscious,” he says, “is not the dream.” What he means by this is that the unconscious can operate in the direction of deception, and for him, this is in no way a contradiction. Why would there not be this truth of lying that makes it perfectly possible—contrary to the so-called paradox of Epimenides the liar—to state, “I lie?”

Simply, FREUD, on this occasion, failed to correctly formulate what was the object of the desire of both the hysteric and the homosexual woman. And it is precisely this failure, whether with Dora or with the famous homosexual woman, that caused him to be overtaken and the treatment to break down. Regarding his interpretation, he himself remains hesitant: “a bit too early,” “a bit too late.”

FREUD was not yet able—lacking the structural references that I hope to clarify for you regarding the conduct of the analytic experience—to see that the desire of the hysteric, as becomes glaringly apparent in the observation, is to sustain the father’s desire, to support it by proxy, as in the case of Dora.

Dora’s evident indulgence toward her father’s affair with the woman married to Mr. K, to the point that she allows Mr. K to court her, is precisely the mechanism by which she seeks to uphold the man’s desire. And so, the passage to the act—the slap signaling the rupture—occurs the moment one of them, Mr. K, says not, “I am not interested in you,” but rather, “I am not interested in my wife.”

What Dora needs is for this bond to be maintained with this third element, which allows her to preserve a desire, even though she must remain unfulfilled. This applies both to the father’s desire, which she facilitates as impotent, and to her own desire, which can only be realized as the desire of the other.

Similarly, it is in relation to the father’s desire… confirming once again the formula—which, of course, originates in this hysterical experience, situating it at its proper level—the formula I have given: “the desire of man is the desire of the other.”

…The homosexual woman finds another solution to this desire of the father: defying it.

Reread the observation, and you will see the evident provocation in the behavior of this young woman, who, by attaching herself to a well-known demi-mondaine in the city, continuously displays the chivalrous attentions she bestows upon her. Until, one day, encountering her father, she finds in his gaze evasion, disdain, the nullification of what she enacts before him. Immediately, she throws herself over the railing of a small railway bridge.

Literally, she can no longer conceive of her function except by annihilating herself, the function of demonstrating to her father how one can be, oneself, an abstract, heroic phallus, unique and dedicated to the service of a lady. What the homosexual woman does in her dream, by deceiving FREUD, is once again a challenge concerning the father’s desire: “You want me to love men? You shall have all the dreams of love for men you could want.” This is defiance in the form of mockery.

I have pursued this line of discussion to this extent to help you distinguish what is at stake in FREUD’s approach regarding the subject, insofar as it is the subject that is engaged in the field of the unconscious: the distinction between the function of the subject of certainty and the search for truth.

Next time, we will address the concept of repetition, asking how to conceive of it, and how, within this experience—an experience of disappointment—it is precisely through repetition as the repetition of disappointment that FREUD aligns his experience with a real that will henceforth, in this field of science, be situated as essentially what the subject is condemned to miss, but which this very missing reveals.