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(All parts in English)

GREEN

LACAN

I wish to devote all the time usually reserved for our discussion to Doctor GREEN, whom you see to my right. So I will begin just a little bit earlier in order to quickly tell you the few introductory words I had thought of for this occasion, without even knowing in advance, as he has just told me, that he had many things to tell us, that is to say, that he will very likely fill the hour and a half. There you have it. Good.

By virtue of the secret and—as always—very reliable threads of my superego, I had implicitly, so to speak, given myself a day off today, and yet I managed to find myself having to speak yesterday evening at five o’clock—five o’clock in the evening—to the young psychiatric generation at Sainte-Anne. That means—my God—to the generation of candidate analysts.

No… what was I doing there? In truth, not much, considering that those who had preceded me there—specifically, among my students, and those best suited to teach them what may enlighten them about my teaching: Mme AULAGNIER, for example, Piera—upon which we shall found—Serge LECLAIRE, even Charles MELMAN, to name them in alphabetical order, and even others… Yeah…

Well, apart from that touch of absent-mindedness that sometimes makes me say “yes” when I’m asked something, I still had some reasons to be there. Namely, all this took place within the framework of a course that is that of my old friend, my old comrade, Henri EY. There you go…

The generation that is ours—Henri EY’s and mine, since it’s the same one—will have had, then, some role to play. That old comrade, in particular, is the one to whom I give the prize for a function that is nothing other than what I would call that of a civilizer. You can hardly imagine what the Sainte-Anne intern quarters were like when we both arrived there, along with others who also had somewhat the same vocation, but in the end, remained halfway!

The underdevelopment, if I may say so, in terms of logical disposition—since logic is what’s at stake here—was truly, at that level—around 1925, mind you! not exactly yesterday—something extraordinary. Well, since that time, Henri EY has introduced his great machine: organodynamism. It’s a doctrine… It’s a false doctrine, but unquestionably a civilizing one.

In that respect, it has fulfilled its role. One can say that there isn’t a single mind in the field of psychiatric hospitals that has not been touched by the questions this doctrine puts at the forefront, and these questions are of the utmost importance. That the doctrine is false is almost secondary in view of this effect.

First, because it can’t be otherwise. It can’t be otherwise because it’s a medical doctrine. It is necessary, it is essential to the medical status, that it be dominated by a doctrine. This has always been the case. The day there is no longer a doctrine, there will no longer be medicine either. On the other hand, it is just as necessary—as experience shows—that this doctrine be false; otherwise, it could not support the medical status.

When the sciences… with which medicine now surrounds and assists itself, opens itself to them on all sides… when they converge at the center, well, there will no longer be medicine! There may still be psychoanalysis, which at that point will constitute medicine. But that would be most unfortunate, because it would be a definitive obstacle to psychoanalysis becoming a science. That is why I do not wish for it.

Well, last night, I found myself before this specially selected audience, speaking about the operation of alienation, which I believe, for the most part—given that one does not go out of one’s way so easily—from Sainte-Anne all the way to the École Normale [E.N.S. rue d’Ulm] It is a long way!—I thought I ought to… for them… for them, who in sum make up the zone of appeal to psychoanalytic responsibility, in other words: those who will form the psychoanalysts… I thought I ought to pin down for them, because that was truly the place, to pin down how it is posed, so to speak, this so-called inaugural choice which is—you know it—a false choice, since it is a forced choice.

What are the appropriate names for this choice in that zone—central—to that of future leaders? So, as a way to catch their ears, I gave them the names that fit, the appropriate names.

I am indeed forced to allude to it, because it is rare that conversations, even limited ones like these, remain secret, especially when it concerns an “interns’ room,” and from these names, perhaps a few echoes will reach your ears in the form of mocking whispers.

These are not necessarily flattering names, obviously. But between “I do not think” and “I am not,” it is not exactly… as far as a broader zone is concerned, proposed as the fundamental constituents of this initial alienation… it is not very flattering either for the whole of that zone that I distinguish within the human field in the form of the field of the subject: either he does not think, or he is not.

Moreover, this changes if you put it in the third person. It really is a matter of “I do not think” or “I am not.” Then, this significantly moderates the value of the terms I used last night, especially if one considers that by virtue of the operation of alienation, one of these two terms is always excluded.

Then I showed that the one which remains takes on a completely different value, in a certain way a positive one, by presenting itself—even imposing itself—as a term of scale precisely offered for the critique I was invoking at that moment, that I was invoking in order to consider that the proper stance for the candidate is critique. This was very urgent.

Because if the former situation was that of being underdeveloped in logic, the current situation within this generation… through a kind of paradox and through an effect that is precisely that of analysis… the incidence—casus—of the best optimism can, in many cases, be pessimus, the worst.

The others were underdeveloped in logic, but these have a tendency to be its monks. I mean that, in the manner that monks withdraw from the world, they also withdraw from logic, they wait to think about it until their analysis is over. I strongly urged them to abandon this point of view. I am not the only one, by the way, and it happens that there are others, that there is one beside me, for instance, who is among those who, in this respect, try to awaken—while there is still time… I mean not necessarily at the end of didactic analysis, but even during, and perhaps that is better—the critical vigilance of those he may, on occasion, have to indoctrinate.

Nevertheless, I must say that it is as a psychoanalyst, as a representative of that field… which is the problematic one where, for the time being, the whole future of psychoanalysis is still at stake… that Mr. GREEN is today receiving the floor from me, and this due to the quite important fact, my God, that he proposed himself for it, I mean that it is not—not at all—as one of my students but as one of my followers, that he is going to present to you today the reflections inspired in him by the latest terms I have introduced concerning the logic of fantasy.

I now give him the floor, exactly for as long as he wishes, reserving the right to make use, for your benefit and mine, of what he will have put forward today.

The floor is yours, GREEN.

André GREEN

LACAN, following a seminar that had made me think a great deal, and which led me to express to him my regret that closed seminars had been discontinued, gave me the opportunity once again to address you today, for which I thank him. However, it is necessary that things be made perfectly clear from the start: the legislative elections are over, and it is not a confrontation like those you may have heard on the airwaves that I am going to engage in today. I will above all try—following the reading of the seminars that LACAN passed on to me last week—to identify a number of points about which I will conduct an examination of Lacanian theory in relation to Freudian theory, and the problems this poses.

LACAN, in the course of one of his seminars, said: “What interests us is not Freud’s thought, it is the object he discovered.” Indeed, this position is very important, it guards against a pseudo-Freudian orthodoxy, but nevertheless, there are problems that arise just as much in the comparison of the spirit and the letter, and it is not here that I will teach you that LACAN values the letter more than the spirit…

But it is precisely a matter of constituting FREUD’s letter and attempting its formalization. Already last year—in a closed seminar on the question of the object (a)—I spoke, shall I say, before the small seminar; today I speak before the large seminar, and I believe this is not without posing a particular problem for me, because before the audience selected by LACAN himself for the small seminar, I at least knew to whom I was speaking, whereas today, I must tell you that I do not know to whom I am speaking, and that this poses problems for me insofar as I am addressing analysts above all.

I will identify the problems I will deal with before you, and they can be grouped under five chapters:

— I will speak first about the “Id” and its grammatical truth in relation to the unconscious.
— I will then address the question of repetition in its relation to diachrony.
— I will then discuss the drive in relation to language.
— I will continue with an examination of what I will call “drive classes,” namely the questions of so-called “aim-inhibited” drives in relation to non-inhibited drives insofar as they might tell us something about the relations between the Big Other and the (a).
— And finally, I will conclude with a few remarks concerning subjective unity, that is to say, the relation of the unifying One to the counting 1, in the relation of structure to the Subject.

LACAN, in the seminar of February 1, 1967, said: “It is not easy to think the Id.”
It is especially in the seminar of January 11 that LACAN gave the most complete formulations concerning the Id.
What is it? It is. It just disappeared. A bit more, and it would have been.

Something that points toward being, says LACAN. In the Écrits, page 517, LACAN specifies: “It is a matter of a place of being.”
This position connects to the proposition that LACAN himself qualified as pre-Socratic: “Wo es war, soll ich werden.”
LACAN gave several translations of this:

– in The Freudian Thing: “Where it was, there must I come to be.”
– then in The Instance of the Letter: “Where it was, I must come into being.”
– and finally—a missing entry I point out in his index, which is signed by himself, p.864, that is to say the last definition is not noted, and since it is the latest, it seems important to me to give it:

“Where it was, there as subject must I come to be.”

Thus, regarding the Id, a relation of thought to being: “It is not a being, but a de-being” (seminar of January 11)
[“…the Id, it is a thought bitten by something which is not the return of being, but as of a ‘de-being.’”]

Finally, the point—the definition, we could say—which is pivotal…
to use a word that has been much used in recent years…
“The Id is properly speaking that which, in discourse, as logical structure, is very exactly ‘everything that is not “I”,’ that is to say, everything else in the structure. And when I say logical structure, understand grammatical structure.” (seminar of January 11)

Here is centered the problem we have to delineate regarding the question of the Id:
– the unconscious is structured like a language,
– the Id, therefore in relation to the unconscious, is “everything that is not I,” all the rest of the logical and grammatical structure that is the essence of the Id. (seminar of January 11)

In this regard, we are witnessing in part, if not a refutation, at least a repositioning of LACAN’s earlier positions concerning the Id speaks, “It speaks” is a short-circuit of the Id–unconscious relation but on the condition—as LACAN specifies—that one clearly perceives that it concerns no being whatsoever. So this is the Lacanian position regarding the Id.

I will now turn to FREUD to consider three major texts. I believe we are facing very difficult problems here, and which certainly imply further reflection in order to examine the compatibility or incompatibility of Lacanian theory with the Freudian position, at least in its letter.

In The Ego and the Id FREUD gives the definition of the Id: to do this, he first proposes a line of reasoning which is the following: he says that there are verbal representations—auditory—and visual representations, the verbal representations being auditory, the visual representations being obviously non-auditory.

And he says that the passage of these unconscious representations to the conscious must obligatorily go through the stage of the preconscious, whereas there will exist another category of phenomena which will never pass through the preconscious state and which will pass directly from the unconscious state to the conscious state. These are affects. What is the point of this reminder?

It is precisely to specify that the unconscious will include at least two sectors: that of representation and that of affects, and that the representations will be the support for the combinatorics—representation of words or representation of things—whereas affect, for its part, cannot enter into any combinatorics. If, however, we maintain the position I have defended here concerning affect insofar as it is a signifier, we see that here we encounter problems of suture as far as affects are concerned.

What then is the status of this in regard to language?

With regard to language, in the discourse of the analysand we encounter elements that will come into play and which will not be those of combinatorics, but rather those of the punctuation of the discourse, its pauses, its cuts, its prosody, its accentuation, and it is certainly not the same thing for an analyst to say two things that are practically the same when reporting a session. He then says to me in a strangled voice:

“But then it would be my dead father to whom I was speaking in the dream.”
The same, in the obsessive:
“But then it would be my dead father to whom I was speaking in the dream.”

In 1932, in the 32nd Lecture, FREUD provides the most extensive definition of the Id, which is certainly the one that brings the greatest clarity, and I believe it is especially regarding this definition or this description that the problem of the grammatical truth of the Id will arise. It is the obscure, inaccessible part of our personality.

We approach the Id by analogies; we call it “a cauldron full of seething excitations,” which we imagine open at one end to somatic influences, and taking into itself instinctual needs that find their psychic expression within it, but we cannot say on what substratum. It is filled with energy reaching it from the drives, but it has no organization, produces no unified will, only an effort to bring about the satisfaction of instinctual needs according to the pleasure principle.

The logical laws of thought do not apply to the Id; this is above all true of the law of non-contradiction. Here FREUD will restate exactly in the same terms as those used to describe the primary processes and the unconscious, that is, the various characteristics you know, namely:
– the coexistence of opposites,
– the absence of negation,
– the inexistence of temporal and spatial references, and FREUD insists greatly on this timelessness.

He ends approximately with this: the economic factor, or if you prefer, the quantitative one, is intimately tied to the pleasure principle, dominates all these processes, the drive investments seeking discharge—that is, in our view, everything there is in time.

FREUD nevertheless insists on the fact that these discharge characteristics completely ignore the quality of what is invested, what in the ego we would call an idea. Well, I refer you to these pages, but I would also like to recall that concerning this 31st (?) lecture, FREUD says: we will no longer use the term unconscious in the systematic sense, and we will give what we have described until now a better name, one less prone to misunderstanding; following a verbal usage from NIETZSCHE and adopting a suggestion from GRODDECK, we will henceforth call it: the Id.

This, then, is the Freudian position. All that can be said is that, a few years before his death, when FREUD wrote the Outline, he resumed these same formulations in a direction that I would call even more radicalized. FREUD even gives details regarding what the Id contains; he says: the inherited, what is present at birth, fixed in the constitution, and above all the drives that originate in somatic organization and find their psychic expression in a form unknown to us.

What, then, is the meaning of this operation undertaken by FREUD? Since we find there terms that are completely identical to those used by FREUD for the primary process and for the unconscious, we can say that the Id includes three polarities:
– one that I will call constitutive of the symbolic, condensation and displacement.
– a polarity that I will call, for lack of a better term, categorical, that is to say, the definition of the Id in relation to the concept of negation, in relation to time or space.
– finally, a third polarity that I will call energetic—about which I don’t need to elaborate—that is to say, the essential tendency toward discharge and the quantitative process.

What has not been sufficiently noted is the solidarity, I would say almost the consubstantiality, of this reworking of the second topography with the introduction of the death drive. In fact, if we wish to speak of symbolization, we are obliged to speak of structure, and this is the central point that I will develop throughout this presentation, insofar as structure is born from an action tied to the antagonism between Eros and the death drive.

Grammatical truth, concatenation, suture, is the result of a work that includes the counter-work of the death drive. Suture, signifying chain, the counting 1 identifies with the 0 in that it is indispensable to the process. But—and this is above all what I would like to draw your attention to—the 0 can dissolve the operation, prevent it from reproducing, and everything can remain at that 0 without taking a single step further.

It is certainly not out of facetiousness that I return to the metaphor of the cauldron, and I will associate this metaphor further by proposing to you two other instances in FREUD where the cauldron is mentioned. The first will be from Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious: A—it is FREUD who says this—borrowed from B a copper cauldron; when he returns it, B complains that the cauldron has a large hole that renders it unusable. Here is A’s defense:

1. I never borrowed a cauldron from B,
2. the cauldron already had a hole when I borrowed it from B,
3. I returned the cauldron intact.

I believe that this statement of A’s defense is particularly apt to make us reflect, indeed, on the question of logic, the logic of the unconscious, and precisely on the sub-logic that LACAN defends. Is this example not worth the “green ideas”?
Not so much the ideas of GREEN, but the green ideas, or the ideas green.

Second example: Macbeth. FREUD, in Analysis Terminable and Interminable, speaks of the witch Metapsychology without which it is not possible to take one more step when seeking to understand.

Let us then question these witches of MACBETH, those analyzed by FREUD in his article on exceptions: the witches are bent over the cauldron and they make a prophecy, that is, it is exactly the reverse of the OEDIPUS situation—here it is not OEDIPUS, not MACBETH who answers a riddle, but an answer that is given to him as a fallacious one. We shall see how.

For they say: “for/…/.of woman born shall harm Macbeth.” “For none of woman born shall harm Macbeth.” That, as you know, is what MACBETH will rely on. If we examine this witches’ discourse, we find ourselves dealing with two distinct categories or styles:

– a first style of enigma and prophecy,
– a second style that is purely incantatory.

The first style appears to me to be that of the locus of grammatical truth; the second appears to me to be something I would call precisely a style proper to the Id. One without the other does not exist.

Final example: let us consider FREUD before MICHELANGELO’s Moses. Again, two parts: an enigma, an affect. An affect which is that FREUD feels himself looked at by the statue of MOSES; he cannot take his eyes off it, he enters the church of St. Peter like one of those little Jews who made up the tribe of Israel, like that rabble, says FREUD, catching the gaze of MOSES.

The Jew looks at the Jew, and the elucidation will precisely be the elucidation of the combinatorics—that is, of the meaning of the finger, the index in the beard. But again I insist: FREUD could not have carried out the analysis if he had not first felt affected by the affect, by the evidence of the affect, or more exactly, by the compulsion of the affect.

What am I, asks FREUD? He receives a response exactly as MOSES received one: “I am that I am.”

I do not defend affect against combinatorics. I simply defend the signifying status of affect, which combinatorics does not seem to me able to account for. Here we shall have another perspective: that of timelessness and the concept of repetition. Before moving on to repetition, I will read you a short dialogue of my own invention:

– “What is it?”
– “It is nothing. It is everything.”
– “Where is it?”
– “Where it was.”
– “How so?”
– “Like this.”
– “What does it mean?”
– “It desires.”
– “How so?”
– “It repeats itself.”
– “Repeats?”
– “Repeats.”
– “Until when?”
– “Until it.”

Let us now look at the question of repetition. Repetition is therefore an essential qualification of the drive. It is the guiding principle of a field insofar as it is properly subjective, says LACAN, and he advances here the relation between the countable 1 and the signifying One. The 1 of recurrence is established only through repetition, which occurs when, through the effect of the repeating, what was to be repeated becomes the repeated.

What is the relation of repetition to the Big Other, alienation as signifier of the Other, insofar as it marks the Other with the same finitude as the subject himself? This is the well-known algorithm to you: S(A).

LACAN observes that the god of the philosophers is not present in analytic theory as a theory of the subject subjected to the laws of language in the place of the Other, as the place of speech. This radical otherness, present in FREUD, we must of course seek it in castration, which is precisely the sign of finitude. But according to FREUD, the primal fantasies are innate; they are, as LACAN says, in the position of key signifiers—seduction, castration, primal scene—organizers of human desire.

But here I must highlight another factor that seems to me neglected in the entire French psychoanalytic movement, whatever its orientation. It is a dreadful name, it is: phylogenesis. I believe that phylogenesis, the death drive, and the second topography are absolutely inseparable data for understanding everything concerning Freudian theory after 1920.

This phylogenesis does not have a seriological function since it orders desire, but in fact, its function is to account for what one could call the hiatus between individual experience and causes and consequences, namely: that for a certain number of experiences, the minimum of facts, of causes, brings about the maximum of effects. That is precisely where a so-called “genetic” conception of development cannot provide an answer, since quantitatively, what would it be?

It would be, as the patient I just left was saying, speaking about her infantile sexual curiosity, about games in which she placed a pillow on her stomach to look pregnant: “It’s hardly anything.” It is hardly anything indeed, if there were not key signifiers there to give the whole organizing weight in the structure. But this does not solve the problem of what we must think of phylogenesis. This would then mean, according to FREUD, that something else exists in the time of the subject that is not the time of the individual.

Repetition as the essence of drive functioning is the resumption, at the level of the subject, of a time I will call impersonal. One that belongs to the progenitor. Everything would therefore occur as if, in the synchronic moment, we rediscovered the same division as for the subject, namely: that FREUD introduces, into the time of the subject, another time that is not the same—I call it, connecting to Lacanian vocabulary, the time of the Other.

To do Oedipus, as my friend ROSOLATO says, three generations of men are needed, because Oedipus is the double difference:
– the difference between the progenitors,
– the difference between progenitors and offspring.

In which it is both structure and history.

[…] mark things from the death drive onto phylogenesis; we will see this in the relation: repetition–memory.

Here, in Freudian theory, a change must be introduced—not by me, but by FREUD. This change will be precisely the one by which, according to the three agencies, three categories of phenomena are distinguished, each of which differs for each of the three agencies. This is what he says: what drive is to the Id, perception will be to the ego. But we now arrive at the point where we must ask whether something equivalent does not function for the superego, or in terms of correspondence. Indeed, we find this, and it is described by FREUD in an extremely specific manner—and in a way that, in my opinion, has been very neglected: he calls this the function of the ideal. What is at stake in the function of the ideal?

It concerns essentially the function of the dead father, which is constituted around the totem. The funeral ritual re-establishes the links with the departed, links that the dead person abolished and that memory venerates. Death is the necessary condition for signs to operate effectively through their poverty. Economically, the operation has effects comparable to what FREUD attributes to the functioning of thought, which, relative to sensory or libidinal investment, has the advantage of considerable economy.

Thus, the fragility of the links uniting the subject to the departed, through memory and the maintenance of their preservation via ritual, also requires a considerable elevation of the level of investment in order to combat the perpetual threat of their dissolution. In other words, it is the question of small quantities of energy which characterizes the functioning of thought, as LACAN reminded us—but these small quantities of energy are sustainable only insofar as the general level of investment in the system is globally distorted.

The totem ceases to be a thing, is not satisfied with being a witness—it is absence consecrated by the process it underpins, by the power of illusion, that is, of desire—the magnification of the departed… lerguhätgung[?!] is a Freudian term… fills the entire scene, like the father of HAMLET or the father of ORESTES. But by the same token, he is also bound by his place—the dead father—by the alliance sealed between the infinite prolongation of his presence and the protection, the benevolence, or rather the benevolent neutrality he must grant. This function of the ideal as the generator of the field of illusion is thus what could precisely refer to the Lacanian big Other—naturally through death, the death of the father and the castration of the mother. What is repeated in the drive is both the compulsion of the life drive and the compulsion of the death drive.

LACAN specifies this relation of language to death in one of his seminars: language, he says, does not dominate that foundation of sex insofar as it is perhaps more deeply tied to the essence of death in what concerns sexual reality.

In conclusion to this chapter: repetition is thus indeed foundational for the distinction between the unifying One and the counting 1. I would attribute this unifying One to individual experience, and the counting 1—which identifies with the 0 of the subject—to the trace of the function of the ideal that surrounds each operation. But the 0 has a dual use.

It is the 0 of the subject’s structure; it is the 0 to which the subject risks actually being reduced, that is to say, the 0 of silence which opens onto no operation. The rocket launch countdown: 5–4–3–2–1–0, it’s gone, it’s over.

“…when FREUD wants to articulate the drive, he cannot do otherwise than to pass through grammatical structure…” (Seminar 18-01-1967)

LACAN, drawing under his reference Drives and Their Vicissitudes, and from the example of Ein Kind wird geschlagen, arrives at the reflection:
– “It is only in a world of language that the function ‘I want to see’ can assume its dominant role, leaving open the question of from where and why I am being looked at.
– It is only in a world of language, as I said last time just to point it out in passing, that ‘A child is being beaten’ has its pivotal value.
– It is only in a world of language that the subject of the action brings forth the question that supports him, namely: for whom does he act?” (18-01-1967)

The first remark is that when one is tempted to connect the function to language, one is always led to reserve it for works prior to the death drive (1915–1919 for the texts in question here). The world of language is tied to the combinatorics of representations. Yet in Drives and Their Vicissitudes, the Vorstellung Repräsentanz is never mentioned by FREUD; it only appears with repression (text on repression). All the drives and their destinies rest on the analysis of partial drives: scopophilia and sadomasochism. The destinies of drives are four:

– turning against the self,
– reversal into its opposite,
– repression,
– sublimation (a chapter FREUD was never able to write)…

[…] which leaves aside the question of representatives. If you carry out this little amusing exercise, as LACAN did several times before you, by taking a strip of paper and directing it outward, then turning it back toward yourself, and then turning it into its opposite—that is, turning it inside out—you obtain the Möbius strip that you have heard spoken of so often.

The double reversal is thus the condition of structure; suture is the precondition of the combinatorics of representatives. The question then becomes: what is being put into circuit together?

Let us now question what is at stake in the torus of language. I will refer here to the General Linguistics of Ch. BALLY, to read the following propositions, paragraph 214:

“Uncommunicated thought,” he says, “is synthetic, that is to say, global and non-articulated. Synthesis is the totality of linguistic facts constrained in discourse by linearity, and in memory by monosceny.”

So retain well this fact: that linearity and monosceny go together. A form is all the more analytic the more it satisfies the requirements of linearity and monosceny. BALLY says: we hope to show that in reality dystaxy, that is to say, non-linearity, is the usual state, and that it is the correlative of polysceny, and that consequently, the discordance between signifier and signified is the rule. Unfortunately, I believe that the reading of BALLY shows that he is not up to the task of supporting his project.

Nevertheless, let us highlight here the relation between linearity and the signifying chain, and non-linearity, condensation. If we turn back to more recent currents, how can one adhere to a generative conception of grammar, when it claims to want to eliminate ambiguity or misunderstanding by rejecting in the name of semantic anomaly facts and situations that, on the contrary, are for us the firmest ground upon which rests not analysis, but psychoanalysis. The aim of this linguistics is the absolute transparency of discourse—that is to say, of the subject’s structure.

When FREUD defines the drive in 1915, the demand for work is imposed on the psyche due to its link with the bodily. We can then isolate three terms: bodily, psychic, psychic work—that is: source, object, aim.

Subsequently, in Civilization and Its Discontents, FREUD will offer another proposition, infinitely more important—perhaps not more important, but to be taken into consideration—namely, that between the path from source to aim, the drive becomes psychically operative. Whether one likes it or not, we are witnessing here the suture of source and object, which starts from the body and returns to the body through befriedigung (satisfaction); in this interval the drive is constituted psychically through the operation of suture.

What someone in a recent article called the “biological hypostasis” as an inconsistency in Freudian thought—on the part of its author, being outdated, a physician’s prejudice—it is, for me, for us, a necessity. It is not enough to denounce it; FREUD returns to it again and again, up to the Outline, to the great dismay of those who would like to rid themselves of this inconvenient witness. I read:

“But conversely, considering biology as the model of scientificity inaccessible to an essentially provisional analytic theory, FREUD arrives at pure speculation, which suffices to indicate that this biology is an ideological myth, the eschatology of psychoanalysis.”

FREUD said: “That doesn’t stop it from existing,” after CHARCOT. The philosopher does not love his body, he has devoted his love to wisdom, and if he mistreats it, it must be for a noble cause. On the contrary, what must be accounted for is the persistent tendency of a philosophical trend to exclude the biological. We are witnessing again a foreclosure, a rejection of the Other—and why should this not be a foreclosure whose consequences would be at least equally disastrous?

How I regret that this author did not share my experience when, fifteen years ago, as a resident in a psychiatric hospital on the outskirts, I was dealing with hebephrenic-catatonic patients at a time when miracle drugs did not exist. I recall a young man whose life had been normal up until around the age of 17, who, in the psychiatric hospital where he was, was forced to remain completely naked on a wooden board, eating with his fingers, muttering a few unintelligible words, because he destroyed everything that came into his hands and had returned to a condition that evokes many things for us.

But in any case, when FREUD speaks of psychosis, of the wall of biology, he knows what he is talking about, all the more so since I think this author would not contradict me if I said that exegesis of texts is all well and good, but practice confronted with the demands of those texts certainly has an illuminating value.

This is what LACAN said regarding that monastic retreat. I think that if, as LACAN reminds us, we have contributed nothing to the progress of biology as analysts, we are nonetheless obliged to think about it, and perhaps we cannot say anything about it, but we must articulate the relations of the body to thought through the effects of language.

This language that FREUD calls the progress in intellectuality—this progress in intellectuality was established at the price of an illusion, and that must be recalled. Citation from Moses and Monotheism:

“Omnipotence of thought was, we suppose, an expression of the pride of humanity in the development of language, which resulted in such extraordinary progress in intellectual activity.”

How does biology remind us of its presence? Through the origin myth? Not only that—at every stage, and above all the essential one: the end of latency, which institutes a break within the subject, a rupture of the latency phase, a renewal and emergence of adolescence. It is enough to have seen even once the somatic sexual transformation of a boy or a girl at that age to realize that if they blush, it is not only because they have troubling thoughts, but because these thoughts are incarnated in a body, in a structure—a structure of the body that is highly structured, and a structure of thought in between: the Id.

What kind of body is this? Is it the body rejected by the signifier? Yes, undoubtedly, but not entirely—not the body submitted to the structure of the signifier. Is it the body of biology? Yes, undoubtedly, but not entirely—not the body subjected to the structure of vital organization.

So then? Half flesh, half fish? Here I will use an analogy that LACAN himself employed, concerning the in-between of death. I could call this: the in-between bodies. It is not quite in one, not yet fully in the other; it is traversed by the signifier in its circuit, but inasmuch as that circuit is still to be constituted, and its constitution is constantly under threat. Suture, concatenation, metonymy, linearity are the chains in which the subject becomes entangled, but they are also those that he periodically breaks if he takes the step of meaning; he is also constantly under threat from non-sense.

Let us conclude: force and meaning must be united.

Not opposed, and their consubstantiality must be shown—they are joined in law. Force must remain with law; a law that is not supported by any executive is not a law. They are united in power. The father has the real power to castrate, and every father is an infanticide.

One need only reread The Economic Problem of Masochism to understand the interpenetration of the force of meaning, which is at the same time the interpenetration of nature and culture. This is what makes the concept of work necessary; it is the condition for transformation into meaning and the return of meaning as strong meaning.

Work—the word is in FREUD: dream work, mourning work, the work of the cure—and where there is work, there is value. The value of which SAUSSURE speaks: he observes that it is not present across the entire field of the sciences; only a few sciences have the privilege of it: linguistics, economics, and let us add psychoanalysis.

Insofar as it concerns applying the Saussurean definition, all values are constituted:

1. by a dissimilar thing, likely to be exchanged for the one whose value is indeterminate.
2. or by similar things that can be compared with the one whose value is in question.

If you take the time to reflect on these definitions, you will see that they concern very directly the object (a) and the relation to the A.

What is work? It’s this! [He unfolds a large sheet of paper on which a diagram is drawn.] You don’t understand it? That doesn’t matter—I myself didn’t understand anything about it. It’s from a patient who is in her seventh year of analysis, and she insisted on showing it to me because it was her work. She insisted on showing it to me, and in the Marxist sense one might say that she is alienated, as she herself says. It turns out to be a boiler: yet another cauldron… She always told me: “How sad it is, I will never see this boiler, I only ever draw it, I will never know what it really looks like.”

But insofar as this is a psychoanalytic alienation, I would say that she does not know that it is her body she is showing me, that it is her sex she is showing me insofar as she has neither man nor child, nor penis, and that she is one of those patients—if I say she is in her seventh year, it is because there was in her a foreclosure of the body that made her practically stupid, and that manifested itself in her as an inhibition to work, which must be related, as FREUD always taught us, to the result of inhibition linked to infantile masturbation.

The hour is quite advanced, I now arrive at the fifth chapter, that of drive classes in their relation to the A and to the (a).

This is the most perilous point of my presentation, and I fear I may not find LACAN’s agreement—I will bear it—but I wonder whether he will be able to follow me that far in agreement. By drive class I distinguish, with FREUD, on the one hand the partial drives, and on the other, the aim-inhibited drives. I do not challenge the status of the partial drive, which has been perfectly articulated and with which I am in full agreement.

What I especially want to address is the problem of the so-called aim-inhibited drive. I can only touch on it briefly, and I refer you to the text published in L’inconscient, where I devote a paragraph to it. I would like to show that aim-inhibited drives, far from being just another destiny of the drive, are in fact a drive class to be opposed from the outset to aim-uninhibited drives. I could give you a very precise demonstration. I will simply say that from 1912 to 1932 FREUD gave them a place. What is the definition of aim-inhibited drives in 1932?

“Moreover, we have reasons to distinguish drives that are inhibited as to their aim—drive movements originating from sources well known to us, having an unambiguous aim, but which undergo a halt in their path toward satisfaction, so that the result is lasting object investments and a permanent inclination. Such are, for example, relations of tenderness which undoubtedly originate from the sources of sexual needs and invariably renounce their satisfaction.” (New Introductory Lectures)

If we try to articulate the situation regarding these two drive categories, what can we say? We may recall another citation from FREUD in which the child, it is at the moment when he loses the breast, that he becomes capable of seeing in its entirety the person to whom the organ that brings satisfaction belongs. And FREUD says: “At that moment, the drive becomes auto-erotic.”

That is to say, we have here, in what concerns the object (a), the partial object, this loss as definitive—and it is at the moment when this loss occurs that the child is able to see the mother as a whole. In short, either the breast or the mother—never both at once. I would like to show that in what concerns the mother, in the same way that the lost object is at the origin of the recovery, starting from the partial drives and from the exchange that will become possible between objects—the permutation of objects and aims, the possibility of replacing the breast with something else, another part: a handkerchief, anything at all.

In the other sector, what we are dealing with at the moment of separation between mother and child is precisely the activation, at that point, of the aim-inhibited drive, which allows, I would say, the folding back of the subject upon himself. But this operation is itself underpinned by what I have tried to articulate in the object (a), on the concept of the negative hallucination of the mother.

In short, to what corresponds the recovery or the search for recovery of the lost breast in the body of the subject, in the sphere of the big Other we would have the negative hallucination of the mother. This hallucination is rare to encounter in clinical material—we are here confronted with the clinic-theory hiatus, which is absolutely irreducible. I would have liked to develop this more precisely.

In short, what is internalized at the moment of the loss of the “breast” object is precisely the breast as lost object—a loss that is internalized—and what is internalized at the moment when the possibility of seeing the mother in her entirety arises is that which mythically preceded this moment: the silent framing of pleasure activity tied to the drive, insofar as it did not concern that pleasure itself.

That is to say, the silent framing of the mother as the structure of the subject comes to create the identificatory mold of primary identification, supported by the negative hallucination of the mother. This is important because FREUD opposes the relation to the mother, as a relation to the senses, to the relation to the father, as a relation to meaning.

Sensory perception, signification.

Everything happens as if the dialectical stage—the negative hallucination of the mother—were constitutive of the symbolic insofar as this stage is interposed between the senses and meaning, and insofar as it constitutes the identificatory mold of the subject.

If we link this to the operation of inversion that presides over the formation of the Möbius strip as the structure of the subject, we see that speaking of the negative hallucination of the mother and of the effect of this double inversion is the same thing—something that may correspond, in LACAN’s thinking, to what he calls the double loop.

But this closure of the subject, this suture, is only possible insofar as the aim-inhibited drive has operated—that is to say, that the current of investment, rather than seeking its object outside of the subject, turns back against the subject through a turning-against-oneself and the reversal into its opposite, from activity into passivity—the subject becomes passivized, and he remains so from that moment onward. It is therefore in the union of these two drive categories that we find the relation between the big Other and the (a): the (a) as the support of the partial drives, and the big Other as the result of the aim-inhibited drives.

This is important because we are opposing two categories:
– the category of loss,
– the category of lack,

The category of loss insofar as it relates to the object (a), the category of lack insofar as it relates to the big Other, in that this big Other is always already breached in this way—it is therefore always barred. But here too I thought that LACAN might object, for we are faced with a situation that has provoked his sharpest critiques: the so-called genital drive.

Why?

What I am led to defend concerning the big Other is perhaps not the genital drive, but rather that insofar as the result of the operation is auto-erotism—the formation of durable and permanent investments—there is a link between auto-erotism and tenderness. It is not for nothing that FREUD defines the essence of auto-erotism as lips that kiss each other, and manifestations we know well: the child who twists a lock of hair, caresses the earlobe, and the connection of these phenomena with tenderness is absolutely important.

It invites me, then, to postulate, if not a defense of the so-called genital drive, at least a genital vocation of the object from the outset. This genital vocation of the object would be an investment current that would correspond to the investment current with the so-called aim-inhibited drive, and which will remain dormant until puberty. It will remain there.

The field will remain open to the partial drives, and we will have two currents: the tender current and the sensual current. The sensual current being the support for the subject’s combinatorics, with the possibility of a permutation of aims and objects, whereas what characterizes the aim-inhibited drive is that it does not change its object—it does not need to lose it; it only needs to amputate it.

To amputate it and to lose it are two different things—this is where two categories originate: that of lack and that of loss, insofar as they lead to different outcomes and, at the moment of adolescence, reverse their relations. That is to say, the partial drives that occupied center stage are brought to an introductory position to pleasure—here, of course, everyone’s experience speaks—while the final term at that moment is the field linked to the genital drive, which evidently no longer inhibits its aim at that point, but literally discovers it as if it were the first time.

This is what I have tried to articulate on the relation between the big Other and the (a); this would require further elaboration.

I will therefore conclude on the problem of subjective unity insofar as it concerns the question of primary narcissism. LACAN has criticized the position of contemporary authors on fusion—I share this critique with him, and I believe that the distinction he introduces between the unifying One and the counting 1 is essential. The closure of the circuit shows us this, as the support of a chain where counting becomes possible, in all senses of the term. The 0 of the child in primary narcissism is linked to the One of the mother.

This One of the mother is marked insofar as it is amputated of the (a) that the child is for her; the child is at once: 0 and (a) for the mother, insofar as he has fallen from her through an effect of cutting, which bears a lovely name: “delivery” in gynecology. The mother no more knows than the child that he is the (a) of her desire for a child from her father. The paternal metaphor is therefore truly original. The passage to the act: crucial, is that of the cut of the subject, who moves from 0 to 1.

From the name, and where in the maternal encounter the circuit closes through the double inversion, this double inversion results, by the closure of this circuit, in the reversal of drive polarities between mother and child, and in a phenomenon I call primary decussation, which is the correlate of this double inversion—this crossing of drive polarities between mother and child. What is thereby established is the originary difference of the subject, the difference between progenitor and offspring. “I’m the one who counts,” says the child. The result is that of the unifying One as lure, obviously, since the object is lost—but if the object is lost, desire will remain, and desire becomes object, becomes made into object.

Here I was interested to read in BENVENISTE the relation of being or having, where BENVENISTE shows that in fact there are not two auxiliaries—there is only one, which is the verb “to be,” “to have” being: “to be to someone.” This evoked in me a reading of FREUD: having and being in the child, the child as evaluating an object relation through an identification. “I am the object”; having is the later of the two—after the loss of the object, he falls back into being. Example: the breast—the breast is a part of me: I am the breast; only later do I have it, that is to say, I am no longer it.

What is the unifying One? I would propose a definition in terms borrowed from Lacanian vocabulary: I would say that the unifying One, as it belongs to the primary narcissism of the subject insofar as it constitutes itself as the unity of the unifying One, is the erasure of the trace of the other in the desire of the One. The desire of the One being taken, of course, in its broadest sense. We know this is a process doomed to failure, to psychotic alienation.

But what of the relation between structure and the subject?

I would say that the Subject as structure is constantly caught between the 0 and the 1, and the One as unifier as lure; the 0 as counting 1—but also that this 0 must have a dual status, that is to say, it can be: – either the passage from 0 to 1 as production of the chain, the necessity of 0 for combinatorics,
– or 0 as radical desubjectivation.

When I spoke of that schizophrenic, I would say that that young man had nothing to learn regarding the primary masochism of the heroines of M. de SADE. This radical desubjectivation means that the 0 in question reduces the subject to the 0 of the body or the 0 of death.

The conception of the subject as structure is compatible only with a conflictual view, which is to take 0 literally, what FREUD called the antagonism of Eros and the death drive. If all the noise of life comes from Eros, the death drive has the last word.

To please everyone, I will conclude with a Japanese quote: (TCHI NUAN, died in 740)

“Before studying Zen for thirty years, mountains appeared to me as mountains and waters as waters; when I reached a deeper knowledge, I no longer saw the mountains as mountains nor the waters as waters; but now that I have penetrated the true substance, I have found recourse, for it is just that I now see the mountains again as mountains and the waters again as waters.”

CH’ING Yuan (660–740), Anthology of the Transmission of the Lamp, in “Carrément Zen,” Moundaren, 1997, p. 54.

Transcription (French and Chinese):

French: “Il y a trente ans, quand je ne pratiquais pas encore le zen, les montagnes étaient des montagnes et les rivières étaient des rivières. Quand j’arrivai quelque temps plus tard à entrevoir la vérité du zen, j’en vins au point où les montagnes n’étaient plus des montagnes et les rivières n’étaient plus des rivières. Aujourd’hui que, vieux moine, je réside dans la quiétude, les montagnes sont à nouveau des montagnes et les rivières sont à nouveau des rivières.”

Chinese: 「老僧三十年前未參禪時，見山是山，見水是水，及至後來親見知識，有個入處，見山不是山，見水不是水，而今得個休歇處，依然見山是山，見水是水。」

English Translation:

French text (translated to English):
“Thirty years ago, when I had not yet practiced Zen, the mountains were mountains and the rivers were rivers. When, some time later, I began to glimpse the truth of Zen, I came to the point where the mountains were no longer mountains and the rivers were no longer rivers. Today, as an old monk residing in serenity, the mountains are once again mountains and the rivers are once again rivers.”

Chinese text (translated to English):
“Thirty years ago, before I studied Zen, I saw mountains as mountains and waters as waters. Later, when I got closer to a teacher and gained understanding, I reached a place where I saw that mountains were not mountains, and waters were not waters. Now that I have found a place of rest, I again see mountains as mountains and waters as waters.”

This well-known Zen saying is attributed to Qingyuan Weixin (Ch’ing-yüan Wei-hsin), an 8th-century Chinese Zen master, illustrating the progression of insight in Zen practice: from naïve realism, through deconstruction and confusion, to enlightened simplicity.

LACAN

I thank GREEN most sincerely for the contribution he has brought us today. I do not think I need, for discerning ears, to underline everything in his presentation that could have profoundly satisfied me.

If he has brought up many questions on various levels concerning my agreement or distance from FREUD, or concerning the elucidation, the questioning of this or that point of what is here work in progress…
of something that is being built and developed before you and for your benefit
…it is one more reason to thank him, since, thanks to the stage constituted by his intervention, the level of these questions is now posed, which should allow us going forward—not only, as I will certainly do, always indicating the point at which I connect—to respond to him, but even to continue the construction, I would say, by taking orientation from the level brought by the study, truly so deep, so substantial, that he has presented today before you, in reference—as I can say, and I believe he will feel the tribute—in reference to my discourse.

I can only add my compliments for the longanimity he displayed during this little ordeal, to which we have all been subjected, and for which I must in some way apologize to him, since, assuredly, it was not his person that was being targeted on this occasion.

So I will see you… next session on Wednesday… four plus seven, which makes: April 11.

There will be no seminar on April 4, as some might expect.

In the room: twelve!… twelve!

LACAN – Twelve! April 12.