🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

— “Tell me, what is the first thing you remember?”
— “What do you mean,” the other replies, “the first thing that comes to mind?”
— “No, the very first memory you ever had.” Long pause…
— “I must have forgotten it.”
— “Precisely, the first one you haven’t forgotten.” Long pause…
— “I forgot the question.”

[Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Paris, Seuil, 1968, p. 15]

These few lines, which I have extracted for you—you will have my sources—come from a small yet highly skillful and even penetrating play that initially caught my attention with its title. It contains two characters who, to me, hold significant meaning: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—both of whom, as the title tells us, are dead.

Would to heaven that it were true! But it is not: ROSENCRANTZ and GUILDENSTERN will always be there. However, these lines, it seems to me, are well-crafted to evoke the gap, the distance that exists between three levels of mathésis, I would say, of learned apprehension.

The first, exemplified by the theory of reminiscence—which I re-presentified for you last time through the evocation of Meno—I would center around an “I read” as a revelatory test.

The second, different, is presentified in the tone—this is the precise word—of the progress of our science; it is an “I write.”
I write, even when it is to follow the trace of a writing already inscribed.

The extraction of the signifying incidence as such marks our progress in this apprehension of what knowledge is. This is what I wanted to remind you of—not through an anecdote, but through these very well-forged lines which, in a way, designate their own place: to situate themselves within a new handling of those essential puppets of the tragedy that is truly our own—the tragedy of Hamlet, the one upon which I have long labored to map out the very place of desire. This designates something that, until now, may have seemed quite strange: that each person could, in the most precise sense, read their own within it.

These three lines thus designate that particular mode of knowing apprehension which is that of analysis, and which begins with “I lose, I lose the thread.” This is where what interests us begins—namely…
Whoever is surprised by this, or would widen their eyes in astonishment at this moment, would only reveal that they forget what constituted the entry into the world, the first steps of analysis…
The field of the slip, the stumbling, the failed act.

I reminded you of its presence from the very first words of this year. You will see that we shall have to return to it, and that this reference point is essential to always keep at the center of our focus—if we do not wish, ourselves, to lose the rope when it comes, in its most essential form, to what I am calling this year the psychoanalytic act.

But also, you have seen me—almost at every turn, and from the outset—demonstrate a certain embarrassment, for which, I apologize, the occasion was none other than your gracious attendance. I have posed for myself—in a way that now takes shape—the problematic of my teaching. What does it mean, this thing I have been producing here for over four years now?

It is well worth asking the question: is it the psychoanalytic act? This teaching takes place before you, that is, the public; as such, it cannot be a psychoanalytic act. What, then, does it mean that I am now approaching its thematic? Does this imply that I intend to subject it here to a critical instance? This would, after all, be a position one could assume—and one that, indeed, has been assumed many times, even if, strictly speaking, it was not the term act that was used.

It is quite striking that each time an attempt was made from the outside, it yielded only rather meager results.

Now, I am a psychoanalyst, and in the psychoanalytic act, I myself am caught. Can there be in me any other aim than to grasp the psychoanalytic act from the outside? Yes, and here is how this aim takes shape.

A teaching is not an act, never has been. A teaching is a thesis—as was always very clearly formulated in the time when people knew what it was. A university teaching, in the good old days when that word had meaning, meant thesis.
Thesis implies antithesis; in the antithesis, an act may begin. Does this mean that I expect it from psychoanalysts? The matter is not so simple.

Within the psychoanalytic act, my theses sometimes carry consequences. It is striking that these consequences encounter—inside the act, I say—objections that belong neither to the thesis nor to any other formulable antithesis, but rather to the customs and practices prevailing among those who make a profession of the psychoanalytic act. It is thus remarkable that a discourse which, within those engaged in the psychoanalytic act, is not so easy to contradict, in some cases meets with an obstacle that is not one of contradiction.

The hypothesis guiding my continuation of this discourse is as follows: not, of course, that there is any indication to criticize the psychoanalytic act—and I will explain why—but, on the contrary, to demonstrate, within the instance of this act, that what it fails to recognize is that, by not stepping outside it, one would go much further. It must therefore be believed that there is something in this act that is quite unbearable, untenable for those who engage in it, for those who fear approaching—should we say—its limits, since what I am about to introduce is this particularity of its structure, after all well known enough to be graspable by all, yet almost never formulated.

If we begin with the reference I provided just now—namely, that the first form of the act that analysis inaugurated for us is that symptomatic act, which can be said to succeed best when it is a failed act—when the failed act is assumed and examined, it reveals what is at stake. Let us pin it down with the word I have already insisted on enough for it to emerge reinvigorated—truth.

Observe that it is from this basis that we analysts proceed in order to advance. Without this, there would be no possible analysis at all, in that any act, even one that does not bear this small mark of failure—in other words, one that grants itself a merit based on intention—nevertheless falls exactly under the same principle: namely, that the question can always be raised of another truth beyond that of this intention.

From this follows the outline of a topology that can be expressed as follows: merely tracing the path of its exit leads one back inside, even without thinking about it, and ultimately, the surest way to re-enter is to exit for good. The psychoanalytic act designates a form, an envelope, a structure such that, in a way, it suspends everything that has been established, formulated, produced up until now as the status of the act, subjecting it to its own law.

This is also what, from the position of one who engages in this act in any capacity—a position where it is difficult to introduce any angle of evasion—suggests that some mode of discernment must be introduced.

It is easy to pinpoint things by returning to the beginning: if nothing succeeds so well as failure in an act, this does not mean, however, that a reciprocity is established, nor that every failure—in itself—is the sign of some kind of success. I mean, the success of an act.

Not all stumbling blocks are interpretable stumblings, which is self-evident. This follows from a simple observation, which is, moreover, the only real objection ever raised in practice.

It suffices to begin—when speaking to someone with what is commonly called good sense—to introduce…
if they are new, if they have not yet been immunized, if they have retained some freshness…
the dimension of analytical cogitations, for them to respond:

— “But why are you telling me so many things about these foolish notions we know all too well, which are simply empty of any graspable support, which are nothing but negation!”

It is certain that, at this level, discernment has no clear rule, and thus, one observes that by remaining precisely at the level of these exemplary phenomena, the debate remains suspended. It is not inconceivable that where the psychoanalytic act carries its weight—namely, where, for the first time in the world, there are subjects whose act it is to be psychoanalysts—that is, subjects who, on this basis, organize, group, and pursue an experience, taking responsibility for something that belongs to a different order than that of the act—namely, a doing—careful, though: this doing is not their own.

The function of psychoanalysis is clearly characterized by the fact that, in instituting a doing through which the analysand attains a certain end—an end no one has yet been able to clearly define. This can be stated if one trusts the truly erratic oscillation of the needle that occurs whenever one questions the authors on this matter. This is not the moment to provide you with a range of this oscillation, but you can take my word for it, and you may just as well verify it in the literature.

The law, the rule, as it is called, that delineates the operation known as psychoanalysis, structures and defines a doing.

The patient, as is still commonly said—the psychanalysant, as I have recently introduced the term… which has quickly gained traction, proving that it is not so inopportune and that, moreover, it is obvious that saying the psychoanalyzed leaves all sorts of ambiguities regarding the completion of the process. While one is in psychoanalysis, the word psychoanalyzed only makes sense inasmuch as it implies a passivity that is far from self-evident. Quite the opposite, in fact, since, after all, the one who speaks all the time is indeed the psychanalysant—already a telling sign… this psychanalysant, whose analysis is carried out to a conclusion whose endpoint— as I have just said—has yet to be strictly defined in all the meanings of the word end. And yet, it is assumed that this might constitute a successfully accomplished doing—so why not designate it with a word like being?

This term remains quite blank for us, yet at the same time full enough that it can serve as a reference point here. What would be the end of an operation that undoubtedly involves—at least at its outset—truth, if the word being were not conceivable on its horizon?

Is it conceivable for the analyst? That is, for the one who is supposed—let us recall—to have traversed such a path through the principles that underlie and are carried by the act of the psychoanalyst. There is no need to question whether the psychoanalyst has the right, in the name of some objectivity, to interpret the meaning of a given figure within this poetic operation performed by the subject. There is no need to ask whether it is legitimate or not to interpret this doing as confirming the fact of transference—interpretation and transference are implicated in the act by which the analyst provides this doing with both support and authorization. That is precisely what it is meant to do.

This, nevertheless, lends some weight to the presence of the act, even if the analyst does nothing. Therefore, this division between doing and act is essential to the status of the act itself. Where, then, can the psychoanalytic act be grasped as manifesting some stumbling block? Let us not forget that the psychoanalyst is supposed to have reached the point where—however minimal it may be—this termination implied in the evocation of truth has occurred for them.

From this point of being, the analyst is supposed to be the ARCHIMEDES capable of setting in motion everything that unfolds within this initially evoked structure, whose framework—outlined by a “I lose” with which I began—provides the key. Could it not be of interest to see this effect of loss reappear beyond the operation centered on the analytic act?

I think that, in framing the question in these terms, it will immediately become clear to you that there is no doubt that it is in the shortcomings of what I might call analytical production that something must be read—something that corresponds to this dimension of stumbling beyond an act assumed to bring closure. And we must necessarily assume this decisive point if we are to speak meaningfully about anything concerning it.

Nor is there anything excessive in evoking it when analysts themselves…
and who, more than anyone, may fall under this designation of stumbling—precisely where I propose we look for the occurrence that might complete, or even establish, the foundation of our critique…
there is nothing excessive in speaking of this turning point in the transition from psychanalysant to psychoanalyst, since analysts themselves constantly refer to it and present it as a prerequisite for any analytic competence.

It could be an infinite task to put this analytic literature to the test. Still, I have already pointed to some examples on the horizon. In my first lecture of this year, I cited RAPPAPORT’s article, which appeared in the International Journal and could be roughly translated into French as Le statut analytique du penser. Thinking is a present participle in English. In such a large assembly, it would be as tedious as it would be ineffective, I believe, to take such an article and attempt to demonstrate—if I may say so—an extreme good intention, a sort of flattening out of everything that, from Freud’s own formulation, might be structured into an enunciation concerning the function of thought in what is called the analytic economy.

The striking thing would be that the ruptures that appear at every moment, the impossibility of not making this assembly of thinking—or disassembly, as one prefers—originate from the primary process itself, at the level of what FREUD designates as primitive hallucination…
the one linked to the first pathetic search, the one presupposed by the mere existence of a motor system which, as soon as it fails to encounter the object of its satisfaction, would—this being the principle of the explanation of the primary process—be responsible for this regressive process that causes the phantasmatic image of what is sought to appear…
the complete incompatibility of this register—which nonetheless must be placed within the scope of thought—with that of the secondary process, which establishes a thought…
that is a kind of reduced action, a miniature action that forces a shift to a completely different register than the one first evoked, namely the introduction of the dimension of the test of reality…
is, of course, noted along the way by the author, who, proceeding unperturbed, eventually comes to realize that not only are there not just two modes and two registers of thought, but rather an infinity of them…
which are more or less to be ranked according to what psychologists previously noted as the “levels of consciousness”…
and consequently to completely flatten out the significance of what FREUD contributed to what is called “general psychology,” that is to say, to its abolition.

This is only a minor example, and you can confirm it as you wish. If others saw an interest in holding a seminar where something like this would be followed in detail, why not? The important thing, it seems to me, is that, in this perspective of reduction, what is striking, salient, enormous—what is implicated in the dimension of the primary process—is completely elided, and this results in failure. This something can be more or less expressed as follows: not “in the beginning was dissatisfaction,” which is nothing. It is not important that the living individual runs after their satisfaction; what matters is that there is a status of jouissance that is dissatisfaction.

To elide this as originary, as something implicated in the theory of the one who introduced it—this theory—whether or not he explicitly formulated it in that way is irrelevant. But if he constructed it in this way—that is, if he formulated the principle of pleasure as no one before him ever had…
for pleasure had always served to define the “Good”; it was, in itself, satisfaction, except, of course, for the fact that no one could truly believe it, because everyone has always known that being in the “Good” is not always satisfying…
if FREUD introduces this other thing, the question is to see what coherence this point has with the one that first emerges in the dimension of truth.

By chance, I opened a journal—a weekly or a triannual publication—in which I saw distinguished signatures. One from a side of the horizon where the divine battle still rages—precisely the battle for the “Good.” I saw an article that began with a sort of incantation about the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real, to which the person I am referring to attributed the illumination that this tripartition had brought into the world—you see what I am responsible for—and concluded quite valiantly: “To us, it says what it says: the Real is God.” And thus, one could say that I serve as an adjunct to theological faith.

Nevertheless, it led me to something I attempted—for those who are here, perhaps many of whom see all of this blending together—to show that what one can still indicate, if one considers these terms other than in absolute terms, is this:

— The Symbolic, let’s place it, if you like, up here,
— The Imaginary, let’s place it over there,
— And the Real, to the right.

This, as it is, is completely idiotic. Nothing could be done with it, least of all a right-angled triangle…
Well! Perhaps, at least, to help us pose the questions. You are not going to walk around with what I am about to add around it, scribbled on a small piece of paper, constantly searching for which square we are in!

But still, if we recall what I teach concerning the subject as determined by the signifier—always by two signifiers, or more precisely: by one signifier representing the subject for another signifier—why not place this S₁ as a projection on the other side? This might allow us to question what the relations of the subject between the Imaginary and the Real actually are.

On the other hand, this famous great I of the unary trait—the one from which we begin in order to see how, in development, the mechanism of the incidence of the signifier unfolds, how identification first occurs—we will also place it as a projection on the other side.

And the third function will be given to me by (a), which is quite literally something like a fall of the real onto the stretched vector from the symbolic to the imaginary.

That is, how the signifier may very well take its material—who would see an obstacle to that?—from imaginary functions, meaning from the most fragile, the most elusive aspect of what pertains to man. Not, of course, that he does not possess those primitive images meant to provide us with a guide to nature, but rather that, precisely because the signifier seizes upon them, it always becomes quite difficult to locate them in their raw form.

So, you see that the question may arise regarding what the vectors linking each of these identified points represent. What is going to be of interest—and this is why I am preparing you for this little game—is that ever since we have been discussing the analytic act, we have inevitably been led to revisit the dimensions within which our reference points regarding the function of the symptom have been laid out. For example:
— when we identified it as a failure of what is knowable, of knowledge,
— which has always stood for a certain truth,
— and we would place here what constitutes the third pole: jouissance.

This still introduces—given a certain fundamental attachment of the human mind to the imaginary—something that may serve as a kind of cardinal reference. In a sense, perhaps, they may serve as supports for the circle, each time I evoke one of these poles, just as today I pose the question of what the analyst’s act entails in relation to truth.

At the outset, the question can and must be asked: does the psychoanalytic act take charge of truth? It certainly seems so, but who would dare to take charge of truth without exposing themselves to ridicule? In certain cases, I feel like Pontius PILATE. There is a lovely image from CLAUDEL: Pontius PILATE, who was guilty of nothing more than asking that question. He had bad timing—he was the only one who asked it, and standing before truth itself, he missed the mark.

From this follows—here I am in CLAUDEL’s register, it is CLAUDEL who invented this—that as he wandered about thereafter, all the idols—again, this is CLAUDEL speaking—split open at the belly in a tumbling cascade, with a great racket like a slot machine. I do not pose the question in such a context, nor with such force as to produce that result, but still, sometimes it comes close.

The psychoanalyst does not take charge of truth. He does not take charge of truth precisely because none of these poles can be judged except in relation to what it represents within our three initial summits:

That is to say, truth is, instead of the Other, the inscription of the signifier.

Which is to say that truth is not simply there as such—any more than jouissance, which undoubtedly relates to the real but whose very principle is to be separated from us by the pleasure principle.

As for knowledge, it is an imaginary function, an idealization, unquestionably.

This is what makes the analyst’s position delicate, as he in reality stands in the middle, where there is emptiness, the gap, the place of desire [in gray].

However, this entails a certain number of taboos, a kind of discipline. That is to say, since we certainly have to respond to something…
I mean those who come to consult the analyst in search of greater assurance…
well—my God—it happens that one constructs a theory of the conditions for the increasing assurance that ought to develop in someone growing normally.

It is a very fine myth. There is an article by Erik ERIKSON on “Irma’s Injection Dream” which is put together in just such a way. He lays out, step by step, how the assurance of the little fellow is supposed to be built—he who first had an adequate mummy, one who, of course, had properly learned her lesson from the books of the psychoanalysts.

The sequence leads, at its very peak, to give us…
I have already mentioned this before, I apologize—it is a cliché…
a perfectly assured G.I. It is constructible—everything is constructible in terms of psychology.

The question is to know in what way the psychoanalytic act is compatible with such waste products—it must be believed that it has something to do with waste—and the word waste is not to be taken here as merely incidental.

Perhaps by pinning down certain theoretical productions as they should be, we could immediately identify, on this map—since there is indeed a map—however Socratic it may be, my God, that it has no more scope than the one I evoked the other day in reference to Meno. It holds no greater significance: an exercise in scope.

But in considering the relation that a production may have…
which in no way functions in relation to practice…
which even the most fervent analysts, in these generally optimistic constructions, nevertheless respect: no psychoanalyst, if I may say so, goes so far—except in cases of excess or exception—as to believe in it when intervening.

The relationship of these productions to the natural point here of waste, namely the object (a) [diagram], may perhaps serve to advance our understanding of the relations between analytic production and one term or another. For example, the idealization of its social position, which we would place somewhere [diagram] on the side of the I.

In short, the inauguration of a method of discernment regarding analytic act productions, concerning the part of loss—perhaps a necessary one—that it entails, may serve not only to illuminate with great clarity what the psychoanalytic act is, the status it assumes, and the ambiguity it sustains, but also to unfold…
and why stop at any given point?…
the full extent of this ambiguity, until—if I may say so—we have returned to our starting point.

If it is true that there is no way out, we might as well make the full circuit. This is precisely what we will attempt this year: to provide an initial trial image of this. And for this, I will not, of course, take the worst possible examples.

There is waste and waste, if I may say so—there are uninterpretable wastes. But be careful: this designation of uninterpretable is not taken here in its literal sense. Let us take an excellent author named WINNICOTT, to whom we owe one of the most refined discoveries. I recall—and I will never fail to return to it in tribute—that the transitional object, as he named it, provided me with a great deal of assistance when I was questioning how to demystify the function of the so-called partial object, as we see it being upheld in support of the most abstruse, the most mythifying, and the least clinical theory concerning the so-called “developmental relations” of the pregenital in relation to the genital.

The mere introduction of this small object that WINNICOTT calls the transitional object—this tiny scrap of cloth that the baby uses even before that drama around which so many confused clouds have been amassed, even before the drama of weaning…
which, when we observe it, is not necessarily a drama at all, as someone with keen insight once pointed out to me: it may be that the one who experiences weaning most intensely is the mother…
that it is simply presence, mere presence in this case, which seems to be, in a way, the support, the fundamental arch through which everything henceforth will develop solely in terms of a dual relationship, a relationship between the child and the mother.

This is immediately interfered with by the function of this small object, whose status WINNICOTT articulates for us. I will revisit these points next year, as they constitute a truly exemplary description. To read WINNICOTT is, in a way, to translate him. It is clear that this little scrap of cloth, this piece of sheet, this soiled bit of fabric to which the child clings—it is no small thing to see its relation to that first object of jouissance, which is not at all the mother’s breast, never permanently present, but rather that which is always within reach: the child’s own thumb.

How is it that analysts can so completely dismiss from their experience what is first and foremost brought to them by the function of the hand? It is to the point that, for them, human should practically be written with a hyphen in the middle. But this reading that I recommend to you—it is easy to find—it is in issue number 5 of that journal, the one long considered mine, called La Psychanalyse, where there is a translation of WINNICOTT’s work on the transitional object.

Read it—there is nothing more exhausting than reading, nor less conducive to holding one’s attention—but if someone would be willing to do it for next time? Who would fail to hear the effort WINNICOTT puts into articulating what this object (a) is? It is neither outside nor inside, neither real nor illusory, neither this nor that. It does not fit into any of that artificial construction that mainstream psychoanalysis builds around narcissism, seeing in it anything but what it is made for: not to create two moral facets—on one side self-love, and on the other, love of the object, as they say.

It is very clear—I have already done so here—that in reading what FREUD wrote about the Real-Ich and the Lust-Ich, it is meant to demonstrate to us that the first object is the Lust-Ich, namely myself, the rule of my pleasure, and that it remains so.

So this entire description—one that I must say is as precious as it is subtle—of the object (a), lacks only one thing: that one sees that everything said here means nothing other than the bud, the tip, the first emergence from the ground—of what?—of what the object (a) commands, namely, quite simply, the subject. The subject, as such, functions first at the level of this transitional object. This is certainly not an argument against what may be produced around the analytic act.

But you will see what happens when WINNICOTT takes things further—that is, when he is not merely an observer of the infant, as he is more capable of being than most, but when he identifies his own technique concerning what he himself seeks, something he openly pursues—and as I pointed out last time at the outset of my lecture—namely, truth.

For this self that he speaks of is something that has been there forever, behind everything that happens, even before the subject has, in any way, situated themselves. “Something is capable of freezing the situation of lack,” he writes. When the environment is inadequate in the first days, the first months of the baby, something may operate that causes this freezing, this gelation. Certainly, this is something that only experience can determine, and here again, regarding its psychotic consequences, there is something that WINNICOTT has grasped quite well. But behind this freezing, WINNICOTT tells us, there is a self that waits, a self that, by having frozen itself, constitutes the false self, to which Mr. WINNICOTT must lead back—through a process of regression, which will be the subject of my next lecture, where I will show you its relation to the analyst’s action.

Behind this false self, what awaits? The true self, ready to resume.

Who does not see…
when we already have in analytic theory the Real-Ich, the Lust-Ich, the ego, the id, all these references already articulated well enough to define our field…
that the addition of this self represents nothing other than—just as the text itself admits with false and true—truth?

And who does not also see that there is no other true self behind this situation than Mr. WINNICOTT himself, who here positions himself as the presence of truth? This is in no way meant to devalue where this position leads him.

As you will see next time, drawn from his own text, it is a position that openly acknowledges…
as such, and explicitly…
that it must step outside the analytic act, that it must take up the position of doing, by which he assumes…
as another analyst puts it…
the responsibility of meeting all the patient’s needs. We are not here to go into detail about where this leads. We are here to indicate how even the slightest misrecognition…
and how could it not exist, since what the analytic act consists of has not yet been defined?…
immediately leads the one who assumes it—and all the more so the more certain, the more capable they are…
I cite this author because I consider that, in the English language, there is no one who comes closer…
to being carried, black on white, toward the negation of the analytic position.

This alone seems to me to confirm—to provide at least the beginnings, if not yet the foundation—for what I am introducing as a method of critique through theoretical expressions of what the status of the psychoanalytic act is.