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(All parts in English)

What does it mean to be a psychoanalyst?
It is toward this aim that what I am trying to communicate to you this year under the title The Psychoanalytic Act is directed.

It is strange that in some of the messages that have been sent to me…
and for which, since I requested them, I thank those who kindly took the initiative
…it is strange that this sometimes emerges: that I would be doing here something close to a philosophical reflection. Perhaps, nonetheless, a certain session like the last one, of course, if it did not fail to have an impact
on those among you who follow my discourse most attentively, still warns you sufficiently that something else is at stake.

Experience…
an experience is always something of which one has recent echoes
…proves that the state of mind produced within a certain order of so-called philosophical studies, is poorly compatible
with any precise articulation belonging to that science called logic.

I have even, within that echo, noted and retained this humorous remark, that such a project of properly integrating what has been constructed as logic into courses, into what is imposed for the philosophical curriculum or degree, would be something akin to the ambition of the technocrat, whose latest motto
in all auditory resistance is to accuse those who, in general, try to bring forth this more precise discourse—of which mine would form a part under the label of structuralism—and which, all in all, distinguishes itself by this common trait: to take as its proper object not what usually constitutes the object of a science…
that is to say, something from which one is, once and for all, at a sufficient distance
to isolate it within the real as constituting a special kind of entity
…but rather to properly concern itself with that which is constituted as an effect of language.

To take the effect of language as an object is indeed what can be considered the common factor of structuralism, and it is certainly in this context that thought finds its detour, its slope, its means of escaping, in the form of a reverie,
from that something which—precisely around there—strives to take form, to restore what?

Ancient themes that, for various reasons, have always proliferated around any discourse insofar as it is properly the cutting edge of philosophy, that is, as it stands at the forefront of what, in the use of discourse, yields certain effects where precisely lies that through which this discourse inevitably reaches that kind of mediocrity, that ineffectiveness which results in
the one thing that is left outside, that is eliminated, being precisely that very effect.
Now, it is difficult not to notice that psychoanalysis offers such a reflection a privileged terrain.

What is psychoanalysis, indeed?
I happened to write incidentally in an article—the one found in my Écrits under the title “Variations on the Standard Treatment”—the following, which I took care to extract again this morning, that in questioning what psychoanalysis is…
since it was precisely a matter of showing how these variations can be defined, instituted, which presupposes that there would be something “standard,” and it was indeed specifically to correct a certain way of associating the word “standard” with that of the efficacy of psychoanalysis that I wrote that article
…so I said incidentally:

— “This rarely stated criterion of being taken as tautological—it was well before… more than ten years ago—we write it: a psychoanalysis, standard or not, is the treatment expected of a psychoanalyst” [p.329].

“…Rarely stated…” because, in truth, indeed, one recoils before something that would not only be, as I wrote, tautological, but either would be, or would evoke, that unknown, opaque, irreducible something that consists precisely in the qualification of the psychoanalyst.

Observe nonetheless that this is indeed what it comes down to when you want to verify whether someone—rightfully—claims to have undergone a psychoanalysis:
— To whom did they address themselves?
— Is that someone a psychoanalyst or not?

This is what will settle the question. If for some reason…
and the reasons are precisely what must be opened here with a big question mark
…the person is not qualified to call themselves a psychoanalyst, at the very least, a skepticism will arise concerning whether
what the subject authorizes themselves through is indeed or not a psychoanalysis.

Indeed, there is no other criterion. But it is precisely this criterion that must be defined, particularly when it is a matter of distinguishing a psychoanalysis from that broader something with uncertain boundaries, which is called “a psychotherapy.” Let us break apart this word “psychotherapy”: we will see it defined by something that is “psycho,” psychological, that is to say, a field whose definition, to say the least, is always subject to some contestation.

I mean that nothing is less evident than what has been referred to as the unity of psychology, since indeed it finds its status only through a series of references, some of which claim to be the most foreign to it—namely, that which is opposed to it, for example, as being the organic—or, conversely, through the establishment of a series of strict limitations which will, in practice, render what has been obtained, for instance, under certain experimental conditions, within a laboratory setting, more or less insufficient, even inapplicable when it comes to that other thing, which is even more confused, that we will call “therapy.”

“Therapy”—everyone knows the diversity of modes and resonances this evokes. At its center is the term “suggestion,” which is, at the very least, that which refers to action: the action of one being upon another exerted through channels which, to be sure, cannot claim to have received a full definition.

On the horizon, at the limit of such practices, we have the general notion of what is commonly referred to and has been fairly well situated as “techniques of the body.” By this I mean what, in many civilizations, manifests itself as that which here spreads in the erratic form of what is commonly pinned down in our era as Indian techniques, or again as what is called the various forms of yoga.

At the other extreme, Samaritan aid, that which, confused, gets lost in fields, in avenues that belong to the elevation of the soul, even…
it is strange to see it reappear in the announcement of what would occur at the end of the practice of psychoanalysis
…that singular effusion which would be called the exercise of a certain goodness.

Psychoanalysis, then, let us begin from what is for now our only firm point: that it is practiced with a psychoanalyst.
“One must understand here ‘with’ in the instrumental sense,” or at least, I propose that you understand it as such.
How is it that there exists something which can only be situated “with” a psychoanalyst?

As ARISTOTLE says: not that we should say—he assures us—“the soul thinks,” but “man thinks with his soul,” explicitly indicating that this is the meaning to be given to the word “with,” namely, the same instrumental sense.
Strangely, I have alluded somewhere to this Aristotelian reference; things seem to have rather led to confusion among readers, likely due to their failure to recognize the Aristotelian reference.

It is “with” a psychoanalyst that psychoanalysis penetrates into that something in question. If the unconscious exists,
and if we define it as it seems to be, at least after the long journey we have taken over years in this field,
to go into the field of the unconscious is precisely to find oneself at the level of what can best be defined as an effect of language,
in the sense that for the first time it is articulated that this effect can be, in some way, isolated from the subject, that there is knowledge to the extent
that this is what constitutes the typical effect of language, of embodied knowledge, without the subject who holds the discourse being aware of it in the sense
that to be conscious of one’s knowledge here is to be co-dimensional with what the knowledge entails, to be complicit with that knowledge.

Surely, here is the opening to something through which the effect of language is proposed to us as an object,
in a way that is distinct because it excludes it from that dialectic as it was constructed at the end of traditional philosophical inquiry,
which is the one that would have us proceed along the path of a possible, exhaustive, and total reduction
of what pertains to the subject insofar as he is the one who enunciates this truth that would claim to offer, upon discourse, the final word, in these formulas:
—that “the in-itself” would by nature be destined to reduce itself to a “for-itself,”
—that a “for-itself” would encompass, in the end, through an absolute knowledge, all that the “in-itself” is.

That it is otherwise—this is precisely what psychoanalysis teaches us: that the subject, by virtue of what is the very effect of the signifier, is constituted only as divided, and in an irreducible way. This is what calls upon us to study what the subject is as an effect of language,
and to understand how this is accessible and the role the psychoanalyst plays in it—this is surely essential to establish.

Indeed, if what pertains to knowledge always leaves a residue, a residue that in a way constitutes its status, the first question that arises is it not about the partner, the one who is there—not “aid” but “instrument”—for something to occur, which is the psychoanalytic task?

At the end of which the subject—let us say—is made aware of this constitutive division, after which, for him, something opens up that can be called in no other way nor by any other name than “passage to the act”: a passage to the act, let us say, illuminated. It is precisely this:
to know that in every act, there is something that escapes him as subject, that will come to bear upon it, and that at the end of this act, the realization is, for the time being, at the very least veiled in what he has to accomplish of the act as being his own realization.

This, which is the endpoint of the psychoanalytic task, leaves completely aside what becomes of the psychoanalyst in this task once it has been accomplished. It might seem, in a kind of naïve questioning, that we could say that, by setting aside the full and simple realization of the “for-itself” in this task taken as an ascetic practice, its endpoint could be conceived as a knowledge that, at the very least, would be realized for the other—that is, for the one who happens to be the partner in the operation, by virtue of having instituted the framework and authorized the process.

Is it so? It is true that, in presiding—if I may say so—over this task, the psychoanalyst learns a great deal. Does this mean that in no way could he, within the operation, in some sense claim to be the authentic subject of a realized knowledge?
What precisely opposes this idea is the following: that psychoanalysis sets itself in direct opposition to any exhaustion of knowledge, and this at the level of the subject himself, insofar as he is engaged in the psychoanalytic task.

It is not—in psychoanalysis—a matter of gnôthi seauton [gnôthi seauton: know thyself], but precisely of grasping the limit of this gnôthi seauton, because this limit belongs properly to the nature of logic itself, and it is inscribed in the effect of language that it always leaves outside of itself…
and therefore, insofar as it allows the subject to constitute himself as such…
that excluded part which means that the subject, by his very nature:
—either only recognizes himself by forgetting what originally determined him to this operation of recognition,
—or even in grasping himself in this determination, denies it—I mean, only sees it emerge in an essential Verneinung when he misrecognizes it.

In other words, we find ourselves at the basic schema of the two forms, namely the hysterical and the obsessional, from which the analytic experience begins…
which are there only as example, illustration, unfolding, and this to the extent
that neurosis is essentially made of the reference of desire to demand…
in the face of the very logical schema which is the one I presented to you last time, by showing you the edge of what quantification is, that which links the elaborated approach we can take of subject and predicate, that which would be inscribed
in the form of the repressed signifier, insofar as it is the representative of the subject before another signifier SA, this signifier bearing the coefficient A, insofar as it is the one in which the subject must both recognize himself and misrecognize himself, where he inscribes himself as fixing the subject somewhere in the field of the Other. The formula is the following:

for every subject insofar as he is by nature divided. Exactly in the same way as we may formulate that “every man is wise,” we have the disjunctive choice between “not man” and “being wise”:

We have, fundamentally, this: that—as the first analytic experience teaches us—the hysteric, in her final articulation, in her essential nature, is indeed authentically—if authentic means “finding in oneself alone one’s own law”—sustained in a signifying affirmation which, for us, becomes theater, becomes comedy, and in truth, it is for us that it presents itself as such.

No one can grasp what the true structure of the hysteric is unless he takes, on the contrary, as being the firmest and most autonomous status of the subject, the one expressed in this signifier, on the condition that the first one—the one that determines it—not only remains forgotten, but remains unknown as forgotten.

Whereas it is quite sincerely that, at the level of the so-called “obsessional” structure, the subject brings forth the signifier in question, insofar as it is his truth, but provides it with the fundamental Verneinung through which he announces himself as not being that which he precisely articulates, confesses, formulates; consequently, he only establishes himself at the level of the maintained predicate of his claim to be something else, he only formulates himself within a misrecognition in some way indicated by the very denial with which he supports it, by the denegatory form that accompanies this misrecognition.

It is therefore a matter of a homology, of a parallelism, of what comes to be inscribed in the writing where more and more is instituted what is imposed by the very progress that the enrichment of discourse forces, an enrichment that comes from having to match what comes to us from the varieties, the conceptual variations imposed on us by the progress of mathematics—it is a homology of inscriptional forms.
I am alluding here, for example, to FREGE’s Begriffsschrift, as the writing of the concept, and insofar as we try, with FREGE, to begin inscribing within it the predicative forms which—not only historically, but because they persist through history—have become inscribed in what is called logic and predicate, first-order logic, that is to say, logic that does not bring any quantification to the level of the predicate.

Let us say, to return to our example, that the use I made last time of the universally affirmative—entirely humorous—“Every man is wise,” the way in which, in his Begriffsschrift, FREGE inscribes it, will be in a form:

– that sets, in the horizontal strokes, the purely propositional content, that is to say, the way in which the signifiers are simply joined together, without requiring anything more than syntactic correctness.
– By the stroke he places on the left, he marks what is called implication, the presence of judgment: it is from the inscription of this stroke that what is contained in the proposition is affirmed or passes to the level called assertoric.

This is what is translated as “it is true, assuredly.” “It is true” for us, at the level where it concerns a logic…
which in no way deserves to be technically named primary logic, since the term is already used at the level of logical constructions; it precisely designates what will only function to combine truth values. It is for this reason that what might rightly be called primary logic—if the term were not already taken—we will call sublogic, which does not mean lower logic but logic insofar as it constitutes the subject…
this “it is true,” it is indeed for us at the level where we are going to place something other than this assertoric position, it is indeed here that truth becomes a question.

This little hollow, this concavity, this recessed space in a way…
that FREGE reserves here to indicate what we are going to see, that in which it appears to him indispensable to ensure for his Begriffsschrift a correct status—this is where something will be placed which plays, in the proposition inscribed here as content:
“Every man is wise,” which we are going to inscribe, for example, by placing “wise” as the function, here “man” as what he calls, in the function, the argument.

For all his later handling of this Begriffsschrift, writing of the concept, there is for him no correct method other than to inscribe here, in the hollow, and under a form expressly indicative of the function in question, the same h of the man in question, thereby indicating that “for every h,” the formula “man is wise” is true.

The necessity of such a procedure, I do not need to elaborate here because it would require developing the entire series, that is to say, its richness and complexity. Let it suffice for you to know here that in the connection we would make between such a proposition and another that would in a way be its condition—a thing which in the Begriffsschrift is inscribed thus:

Namely, that a proposition F has a certain relation with a proposition P and that this relation, once defined…
I say this for those for whom these words have meaning… according to the model of what is called philonian implication, namely that: if this is true, then that cannot be false. In other words, to give order, coherence to a discourse, one only needs to exclude—and only to exclude—that the false could be conditioned by the true.

All other combinations, including “the false determines the true,” are admitted. I simply point out to you in passing that by inscribing things in this way, we have the advantage of being able to distinguish two different forms of implication:

— depending on whether it is at the level of this part of the Begriffsschrift:

that is to say, at the level where the proposition is set as assertoric, that the conditional incidence will come to be joined, or, on the contrary, here at the level of the proposition itself.

That is to say, it is not the same to say that if something is true, we state that man is wise, or that if another thing is true, it is true that every man is wise. There is a world of difference between the two.

This, moreover, is only to indicate to you in passing, and to show you what corresponds to the necessity of this hollow, of this place where the term which logically…
at the sufficiently advanced point of logic where we find ourselves…
deserves to be isolated, the term “every” as the principle, the base from which, by the sole operation of diversified negation, all the primary propositions defined and introduced by ARISTOTLE can be formulated. Namely, for example:

— it is a matter of placing here, under the form of this vertical stroke, the negation, that “it will be true for every man that man is not wise,” that is to say, we will instantiate the universal negative,

— on the contrary, to say thus, we state that “it is not true that for every man… we may enunciate that… man is not wise.” We will obtain through these two negations the expression of the particular affirmative, because if it is not true that for every man it is true to say that man is not wise, it means that there is a small one, somewhere, lost, who is.

— conversely, if we remove this negation and leave the other, we say: “it is not true that for every man man is wise,” that is to say, there are some who are not—particular negative.

In articulating things this way, you sense some artifice—namely, the fact that at this level, you feel as artifice, for example, the appearance of the last so-called negative particular proposition.

This highlights:

— that, in original logic, that of ARISTOTLE, something is concealed from us, specifically the implication of subjects as a collection, whatever they may be, whether one seeks to grasp them in extension or in comprehension,

— that what pertains to the nature of the subject is not to be sought in something ontological, the subject functioning, in a way, itself as a kind of primary predicate, which it is not.

What constitutes the essence of the subject as it appears in logical functioning stems entirely from the first formulation, the one that posits the subject as, by nature, affirming itself as: for every man, the formula “man is wise” is true.

It is from there, through a kind of inverse deduction from the one I emphasized before you last time, that existence comes to light—and specifically the only existence that matters to us, the one upheld by the particular affirmative: “There exists a man who is wise,” which is suspended, and by means of a double negation, upon the affirmation of the universal.

Just as last time, in presenting the same thing to you—for it always concerns the quantifiers—it was by the double negation applied to existence that I showed you how the function Fx could be translated, inverted: there exists no x such that the function Fx is false.

This presence of double negation is what, for us, raises a problem since, in truth, the connection is made only in an enigmatic way with what pertains to the function of “all,” although of course the linguistic nuance, the opposing function of πᾶν (pan) or πᾶντες (pantes) in Greek contrasts with the function of ὅλος (holos) as omnis contrasts with totus.

It is not for nothing, however, that ARISTOTLE himself, in what concerns the universal affirmative, says it is posited καθ᾽ὅλον (kath’holon), with respect to the total, and that the ambiguity in French remains complete due to the confusion of the two signifiers involving something fundamentally related—namely, this function of “all.”

It is clear that the subject…
if we arrive, through the refinement of logic,
to reduce it to that “not… which does not…” of which I spoke last time…
that this subject nonetheless, in its, so to speak, native claim, posits itself as being by nature capable of apprehending something as “all,” and what constitutes its status and also its illusion is that it can think itself as subject of knowledge, that is, as a possible support by itself of something that is “all.”

Now this is where I want to lead you, to this indication, through this discourse I am making today as brief as I can…
as I always do, after having very seriously prepared the levels of it for you,
depending on the attention of the assembly or my own condition…
I am indeed forced, as in any articulated discourse…
and more particularly when it concerns discourse on discourse, of logical operation…
to take a side path at the moment it becomes necessary. That is to say, in the way I already indicated to you that the first division of the subject is instituted in the repetitive function, what is essentially at stake is this:
that the subject [S] is instituted only as represented by one signifier for another signifier, S1→S2, and that it is between the two, at the level of primitive repetition, that this loss is produced: (S1→S2) → (a↓), this function of the lost object, around which precisely revolves the first operative attempt of the signifier, the one that is instituted in fundamental repetition.

This is what comes here to occupy the place assigned in the institution of the universal affirmative to that factor called “argument” in FREGE’s formulation, the reason why the predicative function is always admissible, and in any case, the function of “all” finds its basis, its original pivot point, and—if I may say so—the very principle from which its illusion is instituted, in the locating of the lost object, in the intermediary function of the object (a), between:
— the original signifier insofar as it is the repressed signifier,
— and the signifier that represents it in the substitution instituted by repetition itself as primary.

This is illustrated for us in psychoanalysis itself, and through something essential, in that it embodies, in a way, most vividly what the function of “all” is in the economy—I will not say “unconscious”—in the economy of analytic knowledge, precisely insofar as this knowledge attempts to totalize its own experience.

It is precisely the bias, the slope, the trap into which analytic thought itself falls when, failing to grasp itself in its essentially divisive operation at its endpoint, with regard to the subject, it institutes as primary the idea of an ideal fusion that it projects as original and which plays around that universal affirmative which is precisely the one it would be meant to problematize, and which is expressed more or less as follows:
— no unconscious without the mother,
— no economy, no affective dynamic without that which would somehow be at the origin: that man knows the “all” because he was in an original fusion with the mother.

This parasitic myth, in a way—because it is not Freudian—was introduced under an enigmatic bias, that of the trauma of birth, as you know, by Otto Rank. To introduce birth under the bias of trauma is to assign it a signifying function, and so the thing in itself was not made to bring a fundamental corruption to the exercise of a thought which, insofar as it is analytic thought, can only leave intact what is at stake—namely, that on the final level where the identificatory articulation stumbles, the gap remains open between man and woman, and that consequently,
in the very constitution of the subject, we cannot in any way introduce, let us say, the worldly existence of male and female complementarity.

So what purpose did the introduction by Otto Rank of this reference to birth through the bias of trauma serve?
To the fact that the matter is deeply corrupted in the continuation of analytic thought, in that it is said that at the very least
this “all,” this fusion that makes it so that for the subject there was a primitive possibility—and therefore a possibility to be reconquered—of a union with what constitutes the “all,” is the relation of the mother to the child, of the child to the mother at the uterine stage, the stage before birth, and here we directly touch where the bias and the error lie.

But this error will be exemplary because it reveals to us where this function of the “all” originates in the subject insofar as he falls under the bias of unconscious fate, that is to say:
— either he authentically recognizes himself only by forgetting himself,
— or he sincerely recognizes himself only by misrecognizing himself.

And here is, in fact, very simply where the spring lies: from the moment we approach things at the level of the function of language, there is no demand that is not addressed to the mother. This we can observe manifesting in the development of the child, insofar as he is first an infans, and that it is in the field of the mother that he will first have to articulate his demand.

What do we see emerge at the level of this demand?

It is only this that is at stake and which analysis designates for us: it is the function of the breast.

All that analysis revolves around, as if it were a process of knowledge, is the fact that the reality of the mother is first approached, designated, only through the function of what is called the partial object.

But this partial object—I’m willing to call it so indeed—with the sole exception that we must recognize that it is this very object that lies at the origin of the imagination of the “all,” that if something is conceived as a totality from the child to the mother, it is insofar as, within demand—that is, in the gap between what is not articulated and what is finally articulated as demand—the object around which the first demand emerges is the only object that brings to the little newborn being
this complement, this irreducible loss that is its sole support, namely this breast, so singularly placed here for this usage which is logical in its nature, the object (a), and what FREGE would call the variable—I mean in the institution
of a given function Fx, that if a variable is quantified, it moves to another status by being quantified as universal.

This means not simply any variable, but that fundamentally, in its consistency, it is a constant,
and this is why, for the child, who begins to articulate through his demand what will form the status of his desire,
if an object has this privilege of being able, for a moment, to fulfill this constant function, it is the breast.

And indeed, it is strange that it did not immediately appear—when speculating on biological terms, those to which psychoanalysis tends to refer—that one does not notice this thing that seems to be said as self-evident:
that every child has a mother, and where it is even emphasized, as if to point us toward the idea, that for the father,
we are assuredly in the realm of belief.

But would it be so certain that he has a mother if, instead of being a human—that is to say, a mammal—he were an insect?
What are an insect’s relations with its mother?

If we continually allow ourselves to play—and this is made present in psychoanalyses—between the reference of conception and that of birth, we see the distance between the two and that the fact that the mother is the mother holds only by a purely organic necessity: I mean that, up until now, she is the only one to lay in her own uterus her own eggs, but after all, since artificial insemination is now practiced, perhaps ovular insertion will also one day be possible.

The mother is not, at the level at which we take her in the analytic experience, something that refers to sexual terms. We always speak of the so-called sexual relation; let us also speak of the sexual as “relation.” The sexual said as “relation” is entirely masked because human beings—of whom we can say that if they did not have language, how would they even know that they are mortal?

We might also say that if they were not mammals, they would not imagine that they were born, for the emergence of being—as we operate within this constructed knowledge, which also becomes corrupting for the entire operative dialectic of analysis that we revolve around birth—is it anything other than this which, at the level of PLATO, was presented in a way that I personally find more reasonable? Look at the myth of ER.

What is this wandering of souls once they have left the bodies?
They are there in a hyperspace before entering and taking up residence somewhere, according to their taste or to chance—what does it matter to us?

What is it, if not something that has much more meaning for us analysts…
What is this wandering soul if not precisely what I am speaking of: the residue of the division of the subject?

This metempsychosis seems to me logically less faulty than the one that constitutes the beginning of everything that takes place in the psychoanalytic dynamic of the stay in the mother’s womb. If we imagined that stay as it is, after all, at the beginning of the mammalian lineage—namely, the stay in a marsupial pouch—it would strike us less.

What deceives us is the function of the placenta.

Well, the function of the placenta is something that does not exist at the level of the earliest mammals.

The placenta indeed seems to belong exactly at the level of that overlaid object, of that something which, at a certain stage of biological evolution…
we do not have to consider whether it is an improvement or not…
presents itself as this attachment at the level of the other that is the breast laid upon the chest, and it is this breast around which revolves what is at stake in the exemplary appearance of object (a).

That object (a) is the indicator around which the function of the all is forged insofar as it is mythical, insofar as it is precisely that which is opposed and contradicted by all the inquiry into the status of the subject as it is instituted in the experience of psychoanalysis—this is what must be identified, and what alone can give its function as pivot, as turning point, to that object (a), from which other forms are derived, but always, indeed, with the reference that it is object (a) which lies at the principle of the mirage of the “all.”

Try, before I see you next time, and before I try to bring it to life for you around those other supports which are waste, which are gaze, which are voice—you will see that in grasping the relation of this (a), insofar as it is precisely what allows us to depose from its function the relation to the term “all,” it is within this inquiry that I will be able to take up again what an act is.

I have said nothing of it until now, but of course, this act implies function, status, and qualification.

If the psychoanalyst is not the one who situates his status around that something we may inquire into—namely, a subject—can he in any way be pinned down, qualified by the term (a)?

Can (a) be a predicate?

This is the question on which I leave you today, and of which I already indicate to you what the answer is:
it cannot in any way be instituted in a predicative fashion, and very precisely for this reason:
that upon (a) itself, negation can in no way be applied.