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FUNCTION AND FIELD OF SPEECH AND LANGUAGE IN PSYCHOANALYSIS
by Jacques Lacan

Report of the Rome Congress
held at the Istituto di Psicologia of the University of Rome

on September 26 and 27, 1953

PREFACE

“In particular, it must not be forgotten that the separation into embryology, anatomy, physiology, psychology, sociology, clinical practice does not exist in nature and that there is only one discipline: neurobiology, to which observation obliges us to add the epithet ‘human’ in what concerns us.”
(Quotation chosen as the epigraph of a Psychoanalysis Institute in 1952).

The discourse to be found here deserves to be introduced by its circumstances. For it bears their mark.

Its theme was proposed to the author as the theoretical report traditionally delivered at the annual meeting held by the society that at the time represented psychoanalysis in France, which had been pursuing for eighteen years the venerable tradition established under the title “Congress of French-speaking Psychoanalysts”, extended for the past two years to Romance-language psychoanalysts (including the Netherlands, allowed by a tolerance of language). This Congress was to take place in Rome in September 1953.

In the meantime, serious dissensions led to a secession within the French group. These had become apparent on the occasion of the founding of an “institute of psychoanalysis”. One could then hear the team that had succeeded in imposing its statutes and its program there, proclaim that it would prevent from speaking in Rome the one who, along with others, had tried to introduce a different conception, and it used all means in its power to this end.

It did not seem, however, to those who had from then on founded the new French Society of Psychoanalysis that they should deprive the announced event of the majority of students who rallied to their teaching, nor even that they should relinquish the eminent venue where it had been planned.

The generous sympathies extended to them by the Italian group did not put them in the position of unwelcome guests in the universal City.

For the author of this discourse, he thought he would be supported, however unequal he might prove to the task of speaking about speech, by a certain connivance inscribed in that very place.

He remembered, indeed, that well before the glory of the highest chair in the world was revealed there, Aulus Gellius, in his Attic Nights, gave the etymology of vagire at the site known as Mons Vaticanus, the word denoting the first babblings of speech.

So if his discourse were to be nothing more than a wail, at least it would there take the auspice of renewing in his discipline the foundations it draws from language.

This renewal, moreover, took on too much historical meaning for him not to break with the traditional style that places the “report” somewhere between compilation and synthesis, and instead to give it the ironic style of a questioning of the foundations of this discipline.

Since his audience was made up of those students who expect speech from us, it is primarily to them that he addressed his discourse, and in doing so, he renounced the conventions observed among augurs of mimicking rigor through meticulousness and of confusing rule with certainty.

In the conflict, in fact, that had led them to the present situation, there had been such an exorbitant misrecognition of their autonomy as subjects that the primary demand emerging from it was a reaction against the persistent tone that had allowed such excess.

For beyond the local circumstances that had motivated this conflict, a defect had come to light that far surpassed them. That one could even claim to regulate so authoritatively the training of the psychoanalyst raised the question of whether the established modes of this training did not lead to the paradoxical outcome of a perpetuated minority.

Certainly, the initiatory and powerfully organized forms in which Freud saw the guarantee of the transmission of his doctrine are justified in the stance of a discipline that can only survive by remaining at the level of an integral experience.

But have they not led to a disappointing formalism that discourages initiative by penalizing risk, and that makes the rule of the learned opinion the principle of a docile prudence where the authenticity of research dulls before it dries up?

The extreme complexity of the notions involved in our field means that nowhere else does a mind, in exposing its judgment, run a greater risk of revealing its measure.

But this should entail the consequence of making our primary, if not sole, objective the emancipation of theses through the elucidation of principles.

The strict selection that is required, in fact, cannot be entrusted to the indefinite postponements of a fastidious cooptation, but must rest on the fecundity of concrete production and the dialectical trial of contradictory defenses.

This implies on our part no valorization of divergence. On the contrary, it was not without surprise that we heard, at the International Congress in London where, having failed to observe the forms, we came as petitioners, a well-meaning personality towards us lament that we could not justify our secession by some doctrinal disagreement. Does this mean that an association which claims to be international has any other aim than to uphold the principle of the community of our experience?

No doubt it is an open secret that it has long ceased to be so, and it is without any scandal that the impenetrable Mr. Zilboorg, who, setting aside our case, insisted that no secession be admitted except under the title of a scientific debate, was countered by the penetrating Mr. Wälder, who replied that if we were to compare the principles on which each of us believes his experience is based, our walls would quickly dissolve in the confusion of Babel.

We believe, for our part, that if we are innovating, it is not for us to make a claim of it, and it is not to our taste to make it a point of pride.

In a discipline whose scientific value rests solely on the theoretical concepts forged by Freud in the progress of his experience, but which, being still poorly critiqued and retaining the ambiguity of vernacular language, benefit from these resonances not without inviting misunderstandings, it would seem premature to us to break with the tradition of their terminology.

But it seems to us that these terms can only be clarified by establishing their equivalence with the current language of anthropology, even with the most recent problems of philosophy, where psychoanalysis often need only reclaim what is rightfully its own.

Urgent in any case seems the task of extracting, from notions that are dulled through routine use, the meaning they recover both from a return to their history and from a reflection on their subjective foundations.

This is no doubt the function of the teacher, upon which all others depend, and in which the value of experience is best inscribed.

Neglect it, and the meaning of an action that derives its effects only from meaning is obliterated, and technical rules, reduced to recipes, strip experience of any cognitive value and even any criterion of reality.

For no one is less demanding than a psychoanalyst about what might give status to an action he is not far from considering himself as magical, for lack of knowing where to situate it within a conception of his field that he hardly considers aligning with his practice.

The epigraph whose ornament we have transferred to this preface is quite a pretty example.

Indeed, it corresponds to a conception of analytic training as that of a self-driving school that, not content with claiming the singular privilege of issuing a driving license, would imagine itself in a position to control automobile construction?

This comparison is worth what it’s worth, but it is worth at least as much as those in use in our most solemn assemblies, which, having originated in our discourse to the idiots [wordplay on “discours aux idiots”, mimicking “discours aux auditeurs”], do not even have the flavor of an insider’s joke, yet still seem to derive currency from their character of pompous inanity.

It starts with the well-known comparison of the candidate who is prematurely drawn into practice with a surgeon who would operate without asepsis, and goes on to the one that urges us to weep over those unfortunate students whom the conflict of their teachers tears apart like children in the divorce of their parents.

No doubt this latter one seems to us to be inspired by the respect owed to those who have indeed undergone what we shall call, moderating our thoughts, a pressure to learn that has severely tested them, but one might also wonder, hearing the tremolo in the mouths of the teachers, whether the limits of childishness have not without warning been pushed back to the point of silliness.

The truths these clichés conceal nonetheless deserve to be subjected to more serious examination.

As a method of truth and of demystification of subjective disguises, would psychoanalysis be showing excessive ambition in applying its principles to its own community: that is, to the conception psychoanalysts have of their role with patients, their place in the society of minds, their relationships with their peers, and their teaching mission?

Perhaps to reopen a few windows to the clear daylight of Freud’s thought, this presentation may relieve for some the anxiety engendered by a symbolic action when it gets lost in its own opacity.

Be that as it may, in evoking the circumstances of this discourse, we are not thinking of excusing its too evident shortcomings by the haste it received from them, since it is from this same haste that it takes both its meaning and its form.

Indeed, we have demonstrated, in a sophism exemplary of intersubjective time¹, the function of haste in the logical precipitation in which truth finds its unsurpassable condition.

Nothing is created that does not appear in urgency, nothing in urgency that does not give rise to its own transcendence in speech.

But neither is there anything that does not become contingent there when the moment comes for man to identify in a single reason both the position he chooses and the disorder he denounces, in order to understand their coherence in reality and to anticipate, by his certainty, the action that weighs them against each other.

INTRODUCTION

We shall determine this while we are still in the aphelion of our subject, for when we reach the perihelion, the heat will be enough to make us forget it. (Lichtenberg)

“Flesh composed of suns. How can such be?” exclaim the simple ones.

(R. Browning,
Parleying with certain people)

Such is the dread that seizes man upon discovering the figure of his power that he turns away from it in the very action that is his own when this action lays it bare. Such is the case with psychoanalysis. Freud’s discovery—Promethean—was such an action; his work attests to it; but it is no less present in each experience humbly conducted by one of the workers trained in his school.

One can trace, year by year, this aversion of interest concerning the functions of speech and the field of language. It motivates the “changes in aim and technique” that are acknowledged within the movement and whose relation to the waning of therapeutic effectiveness remains ambiguous. The promotion, indeed, of the resistance of the object in theory and technique must itself be submitted to the dialectic of analysis, which can only recognize in it an alibi of the subject.

Let us try to outline the topography of this movement. Considering the literature we call our scientific activity, the current problems of psychoanalysis stand out clearly under three headings:

A) Function of the imaginary, we shall say, or more directly of fantasies in the technique of the experience and in the constitution of the object at different stages of psychic development. The impulse here came from child psychoanalysis and from the favorable ground offered to both attempts and temptations of researchers by the approach to preverbal structurations. It is also here that its culmination now provokes a return by raising the problem of the symbolic sanction to be given to fantasies in their interpretation.

B) The notion of libidinal object relations which, by renewing the idea of the progress of the cure, silently modifies its conduct. The new perspective took its departure here from the extension of the method to psychoses and from the temporary opening of the technique to principles of a different order. Psychoanalysis there leads to an existential phenomenology, even to an activism animated by charity. Here again a clear reaction is taking place in favor of a return to the technical pivot of symbolization.

C) The importance of countertransference and, correlatively, of the training of the psychoanalyst. Here the emphasis has come from the difficulties surrounding the termination of the cure, which coincide with those of the moment when didactic psychoanalysis concludes in the candidate’s introduction to practice. And the same oscillation is noticeable here: on the one hand, and not without courage, the being of the analyst is indicated as a non-negligible element in the effects of the analysis and even to be exposed in his conduct at the end of the game; on the other hand, it is no less forcefully proclaimed that no solution can come but from an ever deeper exploration of the unconscious spring.

These three problems share a common feature beyond the pioneering activity they manifest on three different frontiers, along with the vitality of the experience that supports them. It is the temptation confronting the analyst to abandon the foundation of speech, and this precisely in domains where its use, bordering on the ineffable, would more than ever require examination: namely, maternal pedagogy, Samaritan aid, and dialectical mastery. The danger becomes great if, in addition, he abandons his language to the benefit of already-instituted languages whose compensations for ignorance he poorly understands.

In truth, one would like to know more about the effects of symbolization in the child, and the officiating mothers in psychoanalysis, even those who lend to our highest councils an air of matriarchy, are not immune to this confusion of tongues in which Ferenczi identifies the law of the child–adult relationship².

The ideas that our elders form of the completed object relation are of rather uncertain conception and, when exposed, reveal a mediocrity that does no honor to the profession.

There is no doubt that these effects—in which the psychoanalyst joins the type of the modern hero illustrated by derisory exploits in a state of bewilderment—could be corrected by a proper return to the study in which the psychoanalyst should have become a master, of the functions of speech.

But it seems that, since Freud, this central field of our domain has fallen into neglect. Let us observe how he himself refrained from overly great excursions into its periphery: having discovered the libidinal stages of the child through the analysis of adults and intervening in the case of little Hans only through his parents, decoding an entire section of the language of the unconscious in paranoiac delirium but doing so only with the key text left by Schreber in the lava of his spiritual catastrophe. On the other hand, he fully assumed, for the dialectic of the work and for the tradition of its meaning, and in all its loftiness, the position of mastery.

Does this mean that if the place of the master remains vacant, it is less due to his disappearance than to an increasing obliteration of the meaning of his work? Is it not enough to be convinced of this simply by observing what is taking place in that position?

A technique is transmitted there, in a sullen style, even reluctant in its opacity, and which any critical ventilation seems to unsettle. In truth, taking on the character of a formalism pushed to the level of ceremonial, to the point that one might wonder whether it does not fall under the same analogy with obsessive neurosis, through which Freud so convincingly targeted the use, if not the genesis, of religious rites.

The analogy becomes more pronounced when we consider the literature that this activity produces to nourish itself: one often has the impression of a strange closed circuit, where ignorance of the origin of the terms generates the problem of aligning them, and where the effort to resolve this problem only reinforces that ignorance.

To trace the causes of this deterioration of analytic discourse, it is legitimate to apply the psychoanalytic method to the collective that sustains it.

Indeed, to speak of the loss of the meaning of analytic action is as true and as vain as explaining the symptom by its meaning, as long as that meaning is not recognized. But it is known that in the absence of such recognition, the action can only be felt as aggressive at the level where it is situated, and that in the absence of the “social resistances” through which the analytic group found reassurance, the limits of its tolerance for its own activity, now “received” if not accepted, depend solely on the numerical rate by which its presence is measured on the social scale.

These principles suffice to distribute the symbolic, imaginary, and real conditions that will determine the defenses— isolation, annulment, disavowal, and generally misrecognition—that we can recognize within the doctrine.

From this point, if one measures by its mass the importance that the American group holds for the analytic movement, one will appreciate, by their weight, the conditions to be found there.

In the symbolic order first, one cannot neglect the importance of that factor c which we noted at the 1950 Congress of Psychiatry, as a constant characteristic of a given cultural milieu: a condition here of the ahistoricism in which everyone agrees to recognize the major feature of “communication” in the U.S.A., and which in our view is at the antipodes of the analytic experience. Added to this is a very indigenous mental form which, under the name of behaviorism, so dominates the psychological notion in America that it is clear that it has now entirely overshadowed in psychoanalysis the Freudian inspiration.

As for the two other orders, we leave it to those concerned to evaluate what the mechanisms manifested in the life of psychoanalytic societies respectively owe to prestige relations within the group, and to the effects felt from their free enterprise upon the whole of the social body, as well as to the credibility one must give to the notion, highlighted by one of their most lucid representatives, of the convergence exercised between the foreignness of a group dominated by immigrants and the distancing to which it is drawn by the function demanded by the aforementioned cultural conditions.

In any case, it appears indisputably that the conception of psychoanalysis there has shifted toward the adaptation of the individual to the social environment, the search for behavioral patterns, and all the objectification implied in the notion of human relations, and it is indeed a position of privileged exclusion from the human object that is indicated in the term, coined locally, of human engineering.

It is therefore to the distance required to sustain such a position that one can attribute the eclipse, in psychoanalysis, of the most vital terms of its experience: the unconscious, sexuality, whose very mention seems soon destined to vanish.

We have no stake in the formalism and shopkeeper’s spirit, which the official documents of the group themselves report in order to denounce them. The Pharisee and the shopkeeper interest us only for their shared essence, the source of the difficulties they both have with speech, and especially when it comes to the talking shop, of speaking the trade.

For the incommunicability of motives, though it may sustain a magisterium, does not go hand in hand with mastery—at least the kind demanded by teaching. This has, moreover, been noticed, since the same causes have the same effects.

This is why the steadfast attachment repeatedly reaffirmed by many authors to traditional technique, after assessments of the trials conducted at the frontier zones listed above, does not come without ambiguity; it is reflected in the substitution of the term classical for that of orthodoxy to qualify this technique. One clings to the form, for lack of knowing to which meaning to devote oneself.

We affirm, for our part, that the technique cannot be understood, and therefore cannot be correctly applied, if the concepts that ground it are misrecognized. Our task will be to demonstrate that these concepts only take on their full meaning by orienting themselves within a field of language, by being ordered to the function of speech.

Point at which we note that, to handle any Freudian concept, reading Freud cannot be considered superfluous, even for those that are homonymous with common notions. As demonstrated by the mishap that the season recalls to our memory—a theory of the instincts, a revisiting of Freud by an author little alert to the part, expressly called mythical by Freud, that it contains. Clearly, he cannot be so, since he approaches it through a second-hand account, constantly taken as equivalent to the Freudian text and cited without anything to alert the reader, relying—perhaps not without reason—on the reader’s good taste to distinguish it, but thereby proving that nothing justifies this preference except the difference in style by which a work remains or does not remain part of the œuvre. Hence, through reductions into deductions, and inductions into hypotheses, the author concludes with the strict tautology of his false premises: namely, that the instincts in question are reducible to the reflex arc. Like the stack of plates whose collapse is slowly distilled in the classic performance, leaving only two mismatched shards in the artist’s hands, shattered by the crash, the complex construction that goes from the discovery of libido migrations in erogenous zones to the metapsychological passage from a generalized pleasure principle to the death drive, becomes the binomial of a passive erotic instinct modeled on the activity of lice-pickers, beloved of the poet, and a destructive instinct simply identified with motricity. A result that deserves honorable mention for the art—intentional or not—of rigorously drawing the consequences of a misunderstanding.

I

EMPTY SPEECH AND FULL SPEECH

IN THE PSYCHOANALYTIC REALIZATION OF THE SUBJECT

“Grant in my mouth true and stable speech and make of me a hidden tongue.” (The Inner Consolation, Chapter XLV: on how one should not believe everyone and on the easy stumbling of words).

“Keep on talking.” (Motto of causalist thinking).

Whether it aims to be a healing process, a formative one, or an exploratory one, psychoanalysis has only one medium: the patient’s speech. The obviousness of the fact does not excuse its neglect. Yet every speech calls for a response.

We will show that there is no speech without a response, even if it encounters only silence, provided there is a listener, and that this is the heart of its function in analysis.

But if the psychoanalyst ignores that this is how speech functions, he will only feel its call more strongly, and if what is heard at first is emptiness, it is within himself that he will experience it, and beyond speech that he will seek a reality to fill this void.

Thus he comes to analyze the subject’s behavior in order to find what he does not say. But to elicit the confession, he must speak to him about it. He then rediscovers speech—but made suspect of having responded only to the failure of his silence, in the echo perceived of his own nothingness.

But what, then, was this appeal from the subject beyond the void of his speech? A call to truth in its principle, through which the calls of more humble needs will waver. But first and immediately, a proper call of the void, in the ambiguous gaping of a seduction attempted on the other by means in which the subject indulges himself and where he will engage the monument of his narcissism.

“There it is, introspection!” exclaims the man well aware of its dangers. He is certainly not the last to have tasted its charms before exhausting its profit. Too bad he no longer has time to waste on it. For you would hear beautiful and profound things, if he came to lie on your couch.

It is strange that an analyst, for whom this character is one of the first encounters of his experience, should still bring up introspection in psychoanalysis. For if this man holds to his wager, those beautiful things he had in store will vanish, and if he forces himself to retrieve them, they prove rather short, while others appear, unexpected enough to seem like foolishness and to leave him speechless for a good while, like anyone else.

He then grasps the difference between the mirage of monologue, whose accommodating fancies animated his boastfulness, and the forced labor of that discourse with no escape, which the psychologist—not without humor—and the therapist—not without cunning—have adorned with the name “free association.”

For it is indeed a labor, and so much a labor that it has been said it requires an apprenticeship, even to the point of seeing in that apprenticeship the formative value of this work. But taken this way, what would it form other than a skilled worker?

From there, what of this labor? Let us examine its conditions, its fruit, in the hope of better discerning its aim and its benefit.

One recognizes along the way the relevance of the term durcharbeiten, which the English working through translates, and which has driven our translators to despair, even though they had at their disposal the exercise in exhaustion forever stamped in our language by the blow of a master stylist: “A hundred times on the loom, begin again…”—but how does the work progress here?

Theory reminds us of the triad: frustration, aggressiveness, regression. It is an explanation with such an understandable appearance that it might well exempt us from understanding. Intuition is quick, but a self-evident truth should be all the more suspect to us as it becomes a received idea. Should analysis happen to reveal its weakness, one ought not to make do with a recourse to affectivity. A taboo word signaling dialectical incapacity, which, along with the verb “to intellectualize,” whose pejorative sense turns that incapacity into merit, will remain in the history of language as the stigmas of our obtuseness regarding psychology…

Let us ask instead: where does this frustration come from? Is it from the silence of the analyst? A response, even and especially an approving one, to empty speech often proves by its effects to be far more frustrating than silence. Is it not rather a frustration inherent to the subject’s very discourse? Does this discourse not engage him in a dispossession ever greater of that being of himself, which, through sincere portrayals that let his image fade, through denials that fail to extract its essence, through crutches and defenses that do not prevent his statue from wavering, through narcissistic embraces exhausted in animating it with his breath, he ends up recognizing has never been anything but an imaginary work—and that this work disappoints in him all certainty? For in this labor to reconstruct it for another, he rediscovers the fundamental alienation that had led him to construct it as another, and which always destined it to be stolen from him by another.

This ego, whose strength our theorists now define by the capacity to withstand frustration, is frustration in its essence³. It is frustration not of a desire of the subject, but of an object where his desire is alienated, and the more it is elaborated, the more deeply the subject’s alienation from his jouissance is entrenched. Frustration of the second degree, then, and such that, even if the subject brings its form in his discourse back to the passive image whereby he makes himself object in the mirror parade, he could not be satisfied by it, since even in attaining in this image his most perfect resemblance, it would still be the other’s jouissance that he would make recognizable there. That is why there is no adequate response to this discourse, for the subject will take as contempt any word that engages in his misrecognition.

The aggressiveness the subject experiences here has nothing to do with the animal aggressiveness of frustrated desire. This reference, so often settled for, masks another one, less pleasant for all and each: the aggressiveness of the slave who responds to the frustration of his labor with a desire for death.

One then understands how this aggressiveness may respond to any intervention that, by denouncing the imaginary intentions of the discourse, dismantles the object the subject constructed to satisfy them. This is indeed what is called the analysis of resistances, whose dangerous side immediately becomes apparent. It is already indicated by the existence of the naïve one who has never seen anything manifest except the aggressive meaning of his subjects’ fantasies⁴.

It is the same one who, hesitating not at all to argue for a “causalist” analysis aimed at transforming the subject in his present through learned explanations of his past, betrays quite clearly, even in his tone, the anxiety he wishes to spare himself—of having to think that the freedom of his patient might be suspended on that of his intervention. That the detour he chooses could at some point be beneficial for the subject has no greater significance than a stimulating joke and will not detain us any longer.

Let us rather target this hic et nunc in which some believe they must enclose the operation of analysis. It may indeed be useful, provided that the imaginary intention the analyst discovers there is not detached by him from the symbolic relation in which it is expressed. Nothing should be read there concerning the subject’s ego that cannot be reassumed by him in the form of “I,” that is, in the first person.

“I was only this in order to become what I can be”: if such were not the permanent point of the assumption the subject makes of his mirages, how could one grasp any progress here?

The analyst therefore cannot without risk hunt down the subject in the intimacy of his gesture, or even of his statics, unless to reintegrate them as mute parts in his narcissistic discourse—and this has been noted with great sensitivity, even by young practitioners.

The danger does not lie in the subject’s negative reaction, but rather in his being captured by an objectification, no less imaginary than before, of his statics, or even of his statue, in a renewed status of his alienation.

On the contrary, the art of the analyst must be to suspend the subject’s certainties until the last mirages are consumed. And it is in discourse that their resolution must be marked.

However empty this discourse may appear, it is only so if one takes it at face value: that which justifies Mallarmé’s sentence when he compares common use of language to the exchange of a currency whose obverse and reverse show only effaced figures, and which is passed from hand to hand “in silence.” This metaphor is enough to remind us that speech, even at the extreme of its wear, retains its value as a tessera.

Even if it communicates nothing, discourse represents the existence of communication; even if it denies what is evident, it affirms that speech constitutes truth; even if it is intended to deceive, it speculates on faith in testimony.

Moreover, the psychoanalyst knows better than anyone that the question is to hear to which “part” of the discourse the significant term is entrusted, and this is precisely how he operates in the best case: taking the account of a daily story as an apologue that, to the discerning listener, delivers its greeting; a long prosopopoeia as a direct interjection; or conversely, a mere slip as a very complex declaration, even the sigh of a silence as the full lyrical development it supplants.

Thus it is a felicitous punctuation that gives meaning to the subject’s discourse. This is why the suspension of the session, which current technique treats as a purely time-based pause and as such indifferent to the fabric of the discourse, plays the role of a scansion that has all the value of an intervention to precipitate conclusive moments. And this suggests that this element should be freed from its routine framework to be subjected to all technically relevant purposes.

It is thus that regression may take place, which is nothing other than the actualization in discourse of the fantasmatic relations reconstituted by an ego at each stage of the decomposition of its structure. For in the end, this regression is not real; it manifests itself in language only through inflections, turns of phrase, “such light stumblings” that they could never at the extreme go beyond the artifice of baby talk in the adult. To impute to it the reality of an actual relationship to the object amounts to projecting the subject into an alienating illusion that only reflects an alibi of the psychoanalyst.

This is why nothing could more mislead the psychoanalyst than seeking to guide himself by a supposed felt contact with the subject’s reality. This old chestnut of intuitionist, or even phenomenological, psychology has in contemporary usage taken on a very symptomatic extension, reflecting the rarefaction of the effects of speech in the present social context. But its obsessive value becomes blatant when promoted within a relationship that, by its very rules, excludes any real contact.

Young analysts who might still be overawed by what this recourse implies of impenetrable gifts will find no better way to temper it than to refer to the success of the supervisions they themselves undergo. From the point of view of contact with the real, the very possibility of these supervisions would become a problem. Quite the contrary, the supervisor displays there a second sight, as the saying goes, which renders the experience at least as instructive for him as for the supervisee. And this is all the more so insofar as the latter displays fewer of those gifts which some deem all the more incommunicable the more embarrassed they are by their own technical secrets.

The reason for this enigma is that the supervisee plays the role of a filter, or even of a refractor, of the subject’s discourse, and thus presents to the supervisor a ready-made stereography already outlining the three or four registers in which he can read the score formed by that discourse.

If the supervisee could be placed by the supervisor in a subjective position different from that implied by the sinister term “control” (advantageously replaced, though only in English, by “supervision”), the best benefit he would draw from this exercise would be to learn to place himself in the secondary subjective position into which the situation immediately places the supervisor.

There he would find the authentic path to attain what the classical formula of the analyst’s diffuse, even distracted, attention only very approximately expresses. For the essential thing is to know what this attention targets: assuredly not, as all our work aims to demonstrate, an object beyond the subject’s speech, as some force themselves never to lose sight of. If that were the path of analysis, it would undoubtedly have to resort to other means, or it would be the only example of a method that forbids itself the means to its own end.

The only object accessible to the analyst is the imaginary relation that binds him to the subject as ego, and for lack of being able to eliminate it, he can make use of it to regulate the flow of his ears, in the way that physiology, in accord with the Gospel, shows it is normal to do: ears for not hearing, in other words, for detecting what must be heard. For he has no others—no third ear, nor fourth—for a transaudition one might wish to be a direct hearing of the unconscious by the unconscious. We will say what must be thought of this supposed communication.

We approached the function of speech in analysis through its most ungrateful angle, that of empty speech, where the subject seems to speak in vain of someone who, though they might bear an uncanny resemblance, will never join in the assumption of his desire. There we showed the source of the increasing devaluation to which speech has been subjected in theory and technique, and we had to raise gradually, like a heavy millstone overturned upon it, what can serve only as a flywheel for the movement of analysis: namely, the individual psychophysiological factors which, in reality, remain excluded from its dialectic. To give analysis the goal of modifying their inherent inertia is to condemn oneself to the fiction of movement, in which a certain tendency of technique seems indeed to find satisfaction.

If we now turn our gaze to the other extreme of the psychoanalytic experience—in its history, in its casework, in the process of the cure—we will find, opposed to the analysis of the hic et nunc, the value of anamnesis as index and as lever of therapeutic progress; opposed to obsessive intrasubjectivity hysterical intersubjectivity; and opposed to the analysis of resistance, symbolic interpretation. Here begins the realization of full speech.

Let us examine the relation it constitutes.

Let us recall that the method instituted by Breuer and Freud was, shortly after its birth, named by one of Breuer’s patients, Anna O., the “talking cure.” Let us recall that it was the experience initiated with this hysteric that led them to the discovery of the so-called traumatic pathogenic event.

If this event was recognized as the cause of the symptom, it was because the putting of one into words (in the patient’s “stories”) determined the lifting of the other. Here the term “becoming conscious,” borrowed from the psychological theory immediately provided to explain the fact, retains a prestige that deserves the mistrust we hold as a sound rule toward explanations that serve as self-evident truths. The psychological prejudices of the time opposed any recognition in verbalization as such of another reality than its flatus vocis. Yet it remains that in the hypnotic state it is dissociated from becoming conscious, and that this alone would suffice to call for a revision of this conception of its effects.

But how is it that the stalwarts of behaviorist Aufhebung do not offer here an example, claiming that they need not know whether the subject recalled anything at all? He has only recounted the event. We will say, for our part, that he verbalized it—or, to develop this term whose resonances in French evoke a different Pandora than the one of the box in which perhaps it should be confined—he passed it into the verb, or more precisely, into the epos wherein he relates to the present hour the origins of his person. This in a language that allows his discourse to be heard by his contemporaries, and still more that presupposes their present discourse. Thus, the recitation of the epos may include a discourse of former times in its archaic or even foreign language, and may even continue into the present tense with the full animation of the actor, but it is in the manner of indirect discourse, set off in quotation marks within the thread of the narrative and, if it is performed, it is on a stage implying the presence not only of the chorus but of the spectators.

Hypnotic recollection is undoubtedly a reproduction of the past, but above all a spoken representation and, as such, one that implies all sorts of presences. It relates to waking recollection—curiously referred to in analysis as “the material”—as the drama producing before the assembly of citizens the origin myths of the City relates to history, which is certainly made of materials, but in which a nation today learns to read the symbols of a destiny in progress. One may say, in Heideggerian language, that both constitute the subject as gewesend, that is, as one who has thus been. But within the internal unity of this temporalization, the being marks the convergence of the having-beens. That is to say, other encounters being assumed from any one of these past moments, there would have emerged another being which would have made that moment to have been otherwise.

The ambiguity of the hysterical revelation of the past does not lie so much in the wavering of its content between the imaginary and the real, for it situates itself in both. Nor is it because it is deceitful. It is because it presents us with the birth of truth in speech, and in that it confronts us with the reality of that which is neither true nor false. At least, this is the most troubling aspect of its problem.

For the truth of this revelation is the present speech that testifies to it in actual reality and which grounds it in the name of that reality. Now, in this reality, only speech bears witness to that portion of the powers of the past which was set aside at each crossroads where the event made its choice.

This is why the condition of continuity in anamnesis, by which Freud measures the integrity of healing, has nothing to do with the Bergsonian myth of a restoration of duration in which the authenticity of each moment would be destroyed if it failed to summarize the modulation of all preceding moments. For Freud, it is neither a matter of biological memory, nor of its intuitionist mystification, nor of the paramnesia of the symptom, but of recollection, that is to say, of history, resting on the sole edge of the certainties of date, the scale on which conjectures about the past make the promises of the future oscillate. Let us be categorical: psychoanalytic anamnesis is not about reality, but about truth, because it is the effect of full speech to reorder past contingencies by giving them the meaning of necessities to come, such as are constituted by the narrow margin of freedom through which the subject makes them present.

The meanderings of the investigation that Freud conducts in the case presentation of “the Wolf Man” confirm these remarks by taking on their full meaning.

Freud demands total objectification of the evidence so long as it is a question of dating the primal scene, but he assumes without further ado all the resubjectivations of the event that seem to him necessary to explain its effects at each turning point where the subject restructures himself—that is, as many restructurings of the event that are carried out, as he expresses it, nachträglich, after the fact⁵. Moreover, with a boldness that borders on nonchalance, he declares it legitimate to elide in the analysis of the processes the time intervals during which the event remains latent in the subject⁶. That is to say, he cancels the times for understanding in favor of the moments of concluding, which precipitate the subject’s reflection toward the meaning to be decided regarding the original event.

Let us note that time for understanding and moment of concluding are functions that we have defined in a purely logical theorem and which are familiar to our students, having proven highly useful in the dialectical analysis by which we guide them through the process of psychoanalysis.

It is indeed this assumption by the subject of his history, insofar as it is constituted by speech addressed to the other, that forms the foundation of the new method to which Freud gave the name psychoanalysis—not in 1904, as was once taught by an authority who, having cast off the cloak of prudent silence, revealed that day that he knew of Freud only the titles of his works, but indeed in 1896⁷.

No more than Freud do we deny, in this analysis of the meaning of his method, the psychophysiological discontinuity manifested by the states in which the hysterical symptom occurs, nor that it can be treated by methods—hypnosis, even narcosis—that reproduce the discontinuity of these states. Simply, and as expressly as he forbade himself from a certain point on to resort to them, we exclude any reliance on these states, both to explain the symptom and to cure it.

For if the originality of the method lies in the means it renounces, it is because the means it reserves for itself suffice to constitute a domain whose boundaries define the relativity of its operations.

Its means are those of speech insofar as it confers meaning on the functions of the individual; its domain is that of concrete discourse insofar as it is the field of the subject’s trans-individual reality; its operations are those of history insofar as it constitutes the emergence of truth in the real.

Firstly, indeed, when the subject enters into analysis, he accepts a position more constitutive in itself than all the directives by which he may more or less allow himself to be misled: that of interlocution, and we see no inconvenience in this remark leaving the listener nonplussed. For it gives us the opportunity to insist that the subject’s allocution involves an addressee⁸—in other words, that the speaker⁹ constitutes himself therein as intersubjectivity.

Secondly, it is on the foundation of this interlocution, insofar as it includes the interlocutor’s response, that meaning is delivered for us from what Freud requires as the restitution of continuity in the subject’s motivations. The operational examination of this objective indeed shows us that it is fulfilled only in the intersubjective continuity of the discourse in which the subject’s history is constituted.

Thus the subject may rant about his history under the effect of any one of those drugs that numb consciousness and that have in our time received the name “truth serums,” where the certainty of misinterpretation betrays the inherent irony of language. But even the retransmission of his recorded speech, even if performed by the mouth of his doctor, cannot, delivered to him in that alienated form, produce the same effects as psychoanalytic interlocution.

Thus, it is in the position of a third term that Freud’s discovery of the unconscious becomes clear in its true foundation and can be simply formulated in these terms:

The unconscious is that part of concrete discourse, insofar as it is trans-individual, which is lacking to the subject’s disposal in order to reestablish the continuity of his conscious discourse.

Thus disappears the paradox presented by the notion of the unconscious if one relates it to an individual reality. For reducing it to unconscious tendency only resolves the paradox by eluding the experience which clearly shows that the unconscious participates in the functions of the idea, indeed of thought. As Freud clearly insists, when, unable to avoid in unconscious thought the conjunction of contradictory terms, he provides it the viaticum of this invocation: sit venia verbo [may the word be pardoned – a Latin phrase invoking license for linguistic impropriety]. And rightly do we follow him in indeed placing the blame on the verb—but on that verb realized in discourse, which, like a ferret, runs from mouth to mouth, to give the act of the subject who receives its message the meaning that makes this act an act of his history and gives it its truth.

From then on, the objection of contradictio in terminis raised against unconscious thought by a psychology poorly separated from logic, collapses with the very distinction of the psychoanalytic domain insofar as it reveals the reality of discourse in its autonomy—and the eppur si muove! of the psychoanalyst joins Galileo’s in its impact, which is not that of the experience of fact, but that of the experimentum mentis.

The unconscious is that chapter of my history which is marked by a blank or occupied by a lie: it is the censored chapter. But truth can be recovered; most often it is already written elsewhere. Namely:

– in monuments: and this is my body, that is to say, the hysterical core of the neurosis where the hysterical symptom displays the structure of a language and is deciphered as an inscription which, once recovered, can without serious loss be destroyed;

– in archival documents as well: and these are the memories of my childhood, just as impenetrable when I do not know their origin;

– in semantic evolution: and this corresponds to the stock and meanings of the vocabulary particular to me, as well as to the style of my life and my character;

– in traditions too, even in legends which, in a heroized form, carry my story;

– in the traces, finally, inevitably left by the distortions required to stitch the adulterated chapter into the chapters that frame it, and whose sense my exegesis will reestablish.

The student who should have the idea—rare enough, to be sure, that our teaching makes it a point to spread it—that to understand Freud, reading Freud is preferable to reading Mr. Fenichel, will come to realize upon undertaking it, that what we have just expressed is so little original, even in tone, that not a single metaphor appears here which Freud’s work does not repeat with the regularity of a motif through which its very weave shines forth.

He will more easily grasp, at every moment in his practice, that, like the negation which its repetition cancels, these metaphors lose their metaphorical dimension, and he will recognize that this is so because he operates within the proper domain of metaphor, which is none other than the synonym of symbolic displacement at play in the symptom.

He will then better judge the imaginary displacement that motivates the work of Mr. Fenichel by measuring the difference in consistency and technical effectiveness between referring to so-called organic stages of individual development and the search for particular events in a subject’s history. It is exactly the difference that separates authentic historical research from the supposed laws of history, of which it may be said that each era finds its philosopher to propagate them according to the prevailing values.

This is not to say that there is nothing to retain from the various meanings uncovered in the general course of history along that path that leads from Bossuet (Jacques-Bénigne) to Toynbee (Arnold), and is punctuated by the constructions of Auguste Comte and Karl Marx. It is well known that they are as little suited to orienting research into the recent past as they are to reasonably anticipating the events of tomorrow. Besides, they are modest enough to defer their certainties to the day after tomorrow , and not too prudish either to admit the revisions that allow them to predict what happened yesterday.

If their role is thus minimal for scientific progress, their interest lies elsewhere: in their considerable role as ideals. For it leads us to distinguish what might be called the primary and secondary functions of historicization.

To affirm of psychoanalysis as of history that as sciences they are sciences of the particular does not mean that the facts with which they deal are purely accidental, if not fictitious, and that their ultimate value is reduced to the raw aspect of trauma.

Events are generated within a primary historicization, in other words, history is already being made on the stage where it will one day be played once written, both in the internal forum and in the external one.

At a given time, a riot in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine is experienced by its actors as a victory or defeat of Parliament or the Court; at another time, as a victory or defeat of the proletariat or the bourgeoisie. And although it is always “the people,” to speak as Retz, who pay the price, it is not at all the same historical event—we mean that they do not leave the same kind of memory in the minds of men.

Namely, with the disappearance of the reality of Parliament and the Court, the first event will revert to its traumatic value, susceptible to a progressive and genuine erasure, if its meaning is not expressly revived. Whereas the memory of the second will remain vivid even under censorship—just as the amnesia of repression is one of the liveliest forms of memory—as long as there are people who submit their revolt to the order of the struggle for the political advent of the proletariat, that is, people for whom the key words of dialectical materialism carry meaning.

It would thus be saying too much to claim that we are now transferring these remarks to the field of psychoanalysis, since they are already there, and the disentangling they produce between the technique of deciphering the unconscious and the theory of instincts, even of drives, goes without saying.

What we help the subject to recognize as his unconscious is his history—that is to say, we assist him in perfecting the current historicization of the facts that have already determined, in his existence, a certain number of historical “turning points.” But if they played that role, it is already as historical facts, that is, as recognized in a certain meaning or censored within a certain order.

Thus, any fixation on a so-called instinctual stage is above all a historical stigma: a page of shame to be forgotten or erased, or a page of glory that obligates. But what is forgotten returns in actions, and erasure contradicts what is spoken elsewhere, just as obligation perpetuates in the symbol the very mirage in which the subject was caught.

To put it briefly, instinctual stages are already, when they are lived, organized in subjectivity. And to be clear, the subjectivity of the child who records as victories and defeats the saga of sphincter training, deriving jouissance from the imaginary sexualization of his cloacal orifices, turning excremental expulsions into aggression, retentions into seduction, and relaxations into symbols—that subjectivity is not fundamentally different from the subjectivity of the psychoanalyst who tries to reconstruct, in order to understand them, the forms of love he calls pregenital.

In other words, the anal stage is no less purely historical when it is lived than when it is rethought, nor is it less purely founded in intersubjectivity. On the contrary, its homologation as a stage of so-called instinctual maturation leads even the best minds directly into error, to the point of seeing in it the reproduction in ontogenesis of a stage of the animal phylum that must be sought among ascarids, or even jellyfish—a speculation which, though clever under the pen of a Balint, leads elsewhere to the most inconsistent fantasies, even to the madness that seeks in the protist the imaginary schema of bodily intrusion whose fear would govern female sexuality. Why then not look for the image of the ego in the shrimp, on the pretext that both recover their shell after each molt?

A man named Jaworski, in the years 1910–1920, constructed a rather impressive system in which “the biological plan” extended to the very limits of culture, and which precisely assigned to the order of crustaceans its historical counterpart, if memory serves, in some belated Middle Ages, under the banner of a common flowering of armor—leaving no form of animal unpaired with its human equivalent, not excluding mollusks and bedbugs.

Analogy is not metaphor, and the use philosophers of nature have made of it requires the genius of a Goethe, whose very example is not encouraging. None is more repugnant to the spirit of our discipline, and it is in expressly distancing himself from it that Freud opened the path proper to dream interpretation, and with it, to the notion of analytic symbolism. This notion, we say, strictly contradicts analogical thinking, which a dubious tradition leads some, even among us, to still regard as compatible.

That is why excess in the ridiculous should be used for its eye-opening value, because in exposing the absurdity of a theory, it will bring attention back to dangers that are anything but theoretical.

This mythology of instinctual maturation, built from selected pieces of Freud’s work, indeed gives rise to subjective problems whose vapor, condensed into ideals of the clouds, in turn irrigates the original myth with its showers. The finest pens distill their ink into equations intended to satisfy the demands of mysterious genital love [bracketed for first occurrence of wordplay/foreign idiom], and they sign their attempt with an admission of non liquet. No one, however, seems shaken by the unease it causes, and rather one finds in it an opportunity to encourage all the Münchhausens of psychoanalytic normalization to pull themselves up by the hair in the hope of reaching the heaven of full realization of the genital object—or indeed of the object, full stop.

If we, psychoanalysts, are well placed to know the power of words, that is no reason to channel it toward the insoluble, nor to “bind heavy and unbearable burdens to lay them on men’s shoulders,” as Christ’s curse on the Pharisees puts it in the Gospel according to Matthew.

Thus the poverty of the terms by which we attempt to encompass a spiritual problem may well disappoint discerning minds, should they refer back to those that, even in their confusion, structured the ancient quarrels around Nature and Grace. It may well also leave them concerned about the quality of the psychological and sociological effects to be expected from their use. And one will wish that a better understanding of the functions of the logos may dispel the mysteries of our fantastical charismas.

To hold to a clearer tradition, perhaps we might hear the famous maxim where La Rochefoucauld tells us that “there are people who would never have been in love, had they never heard of love,” not in the romantic sense of an entirely imaginary “realization” of love that would turn it into a bitter objection, but as an authentic recognition of what love owes to the symbol and of what speech conveys of love.

In any case, one need only turn to the work of Freud to measure the secondary and hypothetical rank in which he places the theory of instincts. In his eyes, it could not for a moment stand up to the smallest particular fact of a story, he insists, and the genital narcissism he invokes when summarizing the case of the Wolf Man shows clearly the contempt in which he holds the constructed order of libidinal stages. What’s more, he only mentions instinctual conflict to immediately turn away from it, and to recognize in the symbolic isolation of the “I am not castrated,” where the subject asserts himself, the compulsive form in which his heterosexual choice remains fixed, against the homosexualizing capture endured by the ego, reduced to the imaginary matrix of the primal scene. Such is, in truth, the subjective conflict, where it is only a matter of the vicissitudes of subjectivity, such that the “I” wins and loses against the “me” depending on the religious catechism or the indoctrinating Enlightenment, and whose effects Freud had the subject realize before enabling us to understand them through the dialectic of the Oedipus complex.

It is in the analysis of such a case that one sees clearly that the realization of perfect love is not a fruit of nature but of grace—that is, of an intersubjective agreement imposing its harmony on the torn nature that sustains it.

But what then is this subject of which you endlessly speak? exclaims at last an exasperated listener. Have we not already learned from Monsieur de La Palice the lesson that all that is experienced by the individual is subjective?

—Naive mouth, whose praise shall occupy my final days, open once more to hear me. No need to close your eyes. The subject extends far beyond what the individual experiences “subjectively,” precisely as far as the truth he can reach—and which may perhaps emerge from the very mouth you have just closed again. Yes, this truth of his history is not entirely in his journal, and yet its place is marked there, in the painful jolts he feels at knowing only its repetitions, even in pages whose disorder provides him little relief.

That the unconscious of the subject is the discourse of the other is what appears more clearly here than anywhere in the studies Freud devoted to what he calls telepathy, insofar as it manifests within the context of the analytic experience. Coincidence of the subject’s remarks with facts of which he cannot be informed, but which always move within the connections of another experience in which the psychoanalyst is the interlocutor—coincidence also most often consisting in a purely verbal convergence, even a homonymy, or which, if it includes an act, involves the acting-out of an analysand’s patient or a child undergoing analysis by the analysand. Cases of resonance within communicating networks of discourse, whose exhaustive study would illuminate analogous facts presented by everyday life.

The omnipresence of human discourse may perhaps one day be embraced under the open sky of a total communication of its text. This is not to say that there will be greater agreement. But this is the field that our experience polarizes within a relationship that is only apparently dyadic, for any attempt to structure it in merely dual terms is as theoretically inadequate as it is technically disastrous.

II

SYMBOL AND LANGUAGE AS STRUCTURE AND LIMIT

OF THE PSYCHOANALYTIC FIELD

Τὴν ἀρχὴν ὅτι καὶ λαλῶ ὑμῖν.
(Gospel according to Saint John,
viii, 25.)

“Do crosswords.”

(Advice to a young psychoanalyst.)

To resume the thread of our discourse, let us repeat that it is by reducing the history of the particular subject that analysis touches on relational Gestalten, which it extrapolates into a regular development; but that neither genetic psychology nor differential psychology—which may be enlightened by it—falls within its domain, as they require observational and experimental conditions that share with those of analysis only homonymy.

Let us go even further: what detaches itself as raw psychology from common experience (which only the professional of ideas confuses with sensory experience)—namely, in some suspension of everyday concern, the astonishment that arises from what pairs beings in a disparity exceeding that of the grotesques of a Leonardo or a Goya—or the surprise provoked by the sheer density of a skin against the caress of a palm animated by discovery, not yet dulled by desire—this, one may say, is abolished in an experience resistant to such whims, unyielding to such mysteries.

A psychoanalysis normally proceeds to its end without revealing much of what the patient holds as specific to his sensitivity to blows and colors, to the swiftness of his reflexes or the weaknesses of his flesh, to his power of retention or invention, or even to the liveliness of his tastes.

This paradox is only apparent and is due to no personal shortcoming, and if it can be explained by the negative conditions of our experience, it merely urges us all the more to question what is positive in that experience.

For it cannot be resolved by the efforts of those who—like those philosophers Plato mocked for letting their appetite for the real lead them to embrace trees—take every episode where reality flickers and slips away as a lived reaction for which they show such a taste. These are the same people who, aiming for what lies beyond language, respond to the “prohibition on touching” written into our rule with a sort of obsession. No doubt, in this approach, sniffing one another will become the pinnacle of transferential reaction. We are not exaggerating: a young psychoanalyst, in the course of his candidacy, may today salute in such olfactory discernment of his subject—obtained after two or three years of futile psychoanalysis—the long-awaited emergence of the object relation, and may receive the dignus est intrare of our votes as a guarantee of his capabilities.

If psychoanalysis can become a science—for it is not yet one—and if it is not to degenerate in its technique—and perhaps that has already happened—we must recover the meaning of its experience.

We could do no better for that purpose than to return to the work of Freud. It is not enough to call oneself a technician to feel authorized, from the fact that one does not understand Freud III, to reject him in the name of a Freud II one believes one understands; nor does one’s ignorance of Freud I excuse considering the five great case histories as a series of examples as poorly chosen as poorly presented, even if one marvels that the grain of truth they held managed to survive.

Let us then go back to Freud’s work starting from the Traumdeutung, to recall that the dream has the structure of a sentence—or rather, to stick to its literal expression, of a rebus, that is to say, of a writing, of which the dream of the child would represent the primordial ideography, and which in the adult reproduces both the phonetic and symbolic use of significant elements, found as much in the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt as in the characters still used in China.

Yet that is only the deciphering of the instrument. It is in the version of the text that the essential begins—the essential that Freud tells us is given in the elaboration of the dream, that is, in its rhetoric. Ellipsis and pleonasm, hyperbaton or syllepsis, regression, repetition, apposition: these are the syntactic displacements; metaphor, catachresis, antonomasia, allegory, metonymy and synecdoche: the semantic condensations—where Freud teaches us to read the ostentatious or demonstrative, dissimulative or persuasive, retaliatory or seductive intentions with which the subject modulates his dream discourse.

Undoubtedly, he laid down as a rule that one must always seek therein the expression of a desire. But let us understand him well. If Freud admits as the motive of a dream that seems to contradict his thesis the very desire to contradict it in the subject whom he tried to convince of it¹⁰, how could he not admit the same motive for himself, since in reaching it, it is from the other that his law returns to him?

In short, nowhere does it appear more clearly that man’s desire finds its meaning in the desire of the other—not so much because the other holds the keys to the desired object, but because the first object of desire is to be recognized by the other.

Who among us, moreover, does not know from experience that as soon as analysis enters the path of transference—and this for us is the sign that it truly has—each of the patient’s dreams is interpreted as provocation, veiled confession, or diversion, in relation to the analytic discourse, and that as the analysis progresses, these dreams are ever more reduced to the function of an element in the dialogue it realizes?

As for the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, another field consecrated by another of Freud’s works, it is clear that every slip is a successful discourse, even quite elegantly formed, and that in the lapsus, it is the gag that spins around the word—just the right quarter turn for the attentive listener to find therein his cue.

Let us go straight to the point where the book opens onto chance and the beliefs it engenders, and specifically to the facts where it aims to demonstrate the subjective effectiveness of associations with numbers left to the randomness of an unmotivated choice, or even to the drawing of lots. Nowhere are the dominant structures of the psychoanalytic field more clearly revealed than in such a success. And the passing reference to unknown intellectual mechanisms here becomes nothing more than a distressed excuse for the total confidence placed in symbols, which begins to waver when satisfied beyond all bounds.

For if Freud, in order to admit a symptom into psychoanalytic psychopathology—whether it is neurotic or not—requires at the very least a minimal overdetermination consisting of a double meaning, a symbol of a bygone conflict beyond its function in a present conflict no less symbolic, and if he taught us to follow in the text of free associations the upward branching of this symbolic lineage, to locate, at the points where verbal forms intersect again, the knots of its structure—then it is already entirely clear that the symptom is resolved wholly in a language analysis, because it is itself structured like a language, it is a language from which speech must be delivered.

It is to the one who has not delved into the nature of language that the experience of number association may immediately reveal what is essential to grasp here: namely, the combinatory power that arranges its ambiguities—and thereby the true mechanism of the unconscious.

Indeed, if numbers obtained by segmenting the digits of a chosen number, by marrying them through all operations of arithmetic, or even by the repeated division of the original number by one of its split components, prove to be symbolizing above all in the subject’s own history, it is because they were already latent in the choice from which they originated—and if, therefore, the idea that these are the very digits that determined the subject’s destiny is rejected as superstitious, one is compelled to admit that it is in the order of existence of their combinations, that is, in the concrete language they represent, that resides all that analysis reveals to the subject as his unconscious.

We shall see that philologists and ethnographers reveal enough about the combinatory precision shown in entirely unconscious systems that constitute language, for the proposition advanced here to be in no way surprising to them.

But if anyone among us still wished to doubt its validity, we would once again appeal to the testimony of the one who, having discovered the unconscious, is not without claim to be believed as to its place: he will not let us down.

For as neglected as it may be by our interest—and with good reason—Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious remains the most indisputable work, because the most transparent, in which the effect of the unconscious is demonstrated to us down to the finest detail; and the face it reveals is that of wit itself, in the ambiguity conferred on it by language, where the other face of its regal power is the punchline, by which its entire order is instantly annihilated—a punchline, indeed, where its creative activity reveals its absolute gratuity, where its dominion over the real is expressed in the defiance of nonsense, where humor, in the mischievous grace of free spirit, symbolizes a truth that does not speak its last word.

One must follow in the admirably pressing turns of the lines of this book the stroll Freud takes us on through this garden chosen from the most bitter love.

Here, everything is substance, everything is pearl. The spirit that lives in exile within the creation of which it is the invisible support knows that at any moment it is master of its annihilation. Lofty or treacherous forms, dandyish or gentle figures of this hidden royalty—there is not one, even among the most despised, whose secret brilliance Freud does not know how to make shine. Tales of the matchmaker running through the ghettos of Moravia, the disreputable figure of Eros, like him the son of lack and sorrow, discreetly serving the appetite of the boor, and suddenly mocking him with a dazzling, nonsensical retort: “He who lets truth escape like that,” comments Freud, “is in truth happy to throw off the mask.”

It is truth indeed that, in his mouth, there casts off the mask—but so that spirit may take on one more deceptive: sophistry that is nothing but stratagem, logic that is only a decoy, comedy that serves only to dazzle. Spirit is always elsewhere. “Spirit indeed bears such subjective conditionality…: only that which I accept as such is spirit,” continues Freud, who knows whereof he speaks.

Nowhere is the individual’s intention more clearly surpassed by the subject’s discovery—nowhere is the distinction we make between the two more clearly understood—since not only must there have been something alien to me in my discovery for me to take pleasure in it, but it must remain so if it is to strike. This is deeply related to the necessity, so well denounced by Freud, of the third listener at least supposed, and to the fact that the joke does not lose its power when relayed in indirect speech. In short, this manifests the intimate conjunction of intersubjectivity and the unconscious in the resources of language, and their explosion in the play of supreme liveliness.

A single cause for the downfall of spirit: the flatness of truth once it is explained.

Now this concerns our problem directly. The current disdain for research on the language of symbols—as can be read from merely the tables of contents of our publications before and after the 1920s—corresponds in our discipline to nothing less than a change of object, whose tendency to align itself with the flattest level of communication, in order to fit the new objectives proposed for technique, may very well account for the rather gloomy assessment of its results drawn by the most lucid among us¹¹.

How could speech, indeed, exhaust the meaning of speech, or better said, following the Oxford-style logical positivism, the meaning of meaning—except in the act that generates it? Thus Goethe’s reversal of presence at the origin—“In the beginning was the action”—reverses again: it was truly the Word that was at the beginning, and we live in its creation, but it is the action of our spirit that continues this creation by renewing it constantly. And we cannot turn back to this action except by letting ourselves be pushed always further by it.

We will only attempt it ourselves in knowing that this is its path…

No one is supposed to be ignorant of the law—this formula, transcribed from the humor of a Code of Justice, nevertheless expresses the truth on which our experience is founded and which it confirms. Indeed, no man is ignorant of it, since the law of man is the law of language from the moment the first words of recognition presided over the first gifts, and the detestable Danaans, who come and go by sea, were needed for men to learn to fear treacherous words alongside gifts given in bad faith. Until then, for the peaceful Argonauts binding together the islands of community by the ties of symbolic exchange, these gifts—their act and their objects, their elevation into signs and their very manufacture—are so intertwined with speech that they are referred to by its name¹².

Is it through these gifts or through the passwords that accord with them in their salutary nonsense that language begins with the law? For these gifts are already symbols, in that symbol means pact, and they are first and foremost signifiers of the pact they constitute as signified: as is clearly seen in the fact that the objects of symbolic exchange—vessels meant to be empty, shields too heavy to carry, sheaves that will wither, spears planted in the ground—are by their very purpose useless, if not superfluous by their abundance.

Is this neutralization of the signifier the whole nature of language? Taken at that level, one might find the beginning of it among sea swallows, for example, during courtship, materialized in the fish they pass from beak to beak, and in which the ethologists—if we must indeed follow them in recognizing in it an instrument for initiating group cohesion, something akin to a celebration—would be fully justified in seeing a symbol.

You see we do not hesitate to search outside the human domain for the origins of symbolic behavior. But it is certainly not along the path of an elaboration of the sign, the one taken after so many others by Mr. Jules H. Massermann¹³, to which we shall pause briefly, not only because of the glib tone with which he traces his path, but because of the welcome it received from the editors of our official journal, who, in accordance with a tradition borrowed from employment agencies, never neglect anything that might provide our discipline with “good references.”

Just imagine: a man who reproduced neurosis ex-per-i-men-tal-ly in a dog strapped to a table—and by what ingenious means: a bell, the meat dish it announces, and the fruit dish that arrives out of turn—I spare you the rest. At least it is not he, so he assures us, who will be taken in by the “ample ruminations,” as he puts it, to which philosophers have consecrated the problem of language. He will take you by the throat.

Picture this: through clever conditioning of its reflexes, a raccoon can be trained to head toward its pantry when presented with a card that displays its menu. We are not told whether prices are listed, but it is added, quite convincingly, that if the service disappoints him, he will come back and tear up the overly promising card, like a scorned lover shredding the letters of an unfaithful partner (sic).

Such is one of the arches under which the author makes the road pass that leads from signal to symbol. It’s a two-way route, and the return path shows no lesser works of art.

For if in man you associate the projection of a bright light before his eyes with the sound of a bell, then link that bell with the command: contract (in English: contract), you will manage to bring the subject, by modulating that command himself, by murmuring it, soon merely by producing it in thought, to obtain the contraction of his pupil—that is, a reaction of the system called autonomic because ordinarily inaccessible to intentional effects. Thus Mr. Hudgins, if we are to believe our author, “created in a group of subjects a highly individualized configuration of ideationally-affined and visceral responses to the idea-symbol ‘contract’—a response that could be traced back through their particular experiences to a seemingly distant but actually fundamentally physiological source: in this example, simply the protection of the retina from excessive light.” And the author concludes: “The significance of such experiments for psychosomatic and linguistic research needs no further elaboration.”

Yet we ourselves would have been curious to learn whether the subjects thus trained would also react to the utterance of the same word articulated in such expressions as: marriage contract, bridge contract, breach of contract, or even gradually reduced to the emission of its first syllable: contract, contrac, contra, contr… The counterproof, required by strict method, offers itself here in the murmuring between the teeth of that syllable by the French reader who would have undergone no other conditioning than the intense light projected upon the problem by Mr. Jules H. Massermann. We would then ask him whether the effects thus observed in the conditioned subjects would still seem to him able to dispense so easily with elaboration. For either they would no longer occur, thereby showing that they do not depend even conditionally on the semanteme, or they would continue to occur, raising the question of the limits of that semanteme.

In other words, they would bring to light, in the very instrument of the word, the distinction between the signifier and the signified, so blithely conflated by the author in the term idea-symbol. And without needing to question the reactions of conditioned subjects to the command don’t contract, or even to the full conjugation of the verb to contract, we could point out to the author that what defines any given element of a language as belonging to language is that it is distinguished as such for all users of that language within the assumed whole of homologous elements.

It follows that the particular effects of that language element are tied to the existence of that whole, prior to its possible linkage with any particular experience of the subject. And to consider that latter linkage apart from any reference to the former is simply to deny the proper function of language in that element.

A reminder of principles that might spare our author the discovery, in utter naivety, of the textual correspondence of childhood grammar categories with relations in reality.

This monument of naivety—admittedly a rather common species in such matters—would not warrant such attention were it not the work of a psychoanalyst, or rather of someone who, seemingly by chance, connects everything that occurs in a certain trend of psychoanalysis to it, under the heading of ego theory or defense analysis technique, most opposed to Freudian experience, thereby manifesting by contrast the coherence of a sound conception of language with the maintenance of that experience. For Freud’s discovery is that of the field of incidences, in human nature, of his relations to the symbolic order, and the ascent of their meaning to the most radical instances of symbolization in being. To ignore it is to doom the discovery to oblivion, the experience to ruin.

And we assert, as a statement that cannot be removed from the seriousness of our present purpose, that the presence of the raccoon mentioned earlier in the armchair where Freud’s timidity, according to our author, would have confined the analyst by placing him behind the couch, seems to us preferable to that of the scientist who holds such a discourse on language and speech.

For the raccoon, at least, by the grace of Jacques Prévert (“a stone, two houses, three ruins, four gravediggers, a garden, flowers, a raccoon”) has entered forever into the poetic bestiary and as such, in its essence, participates in the eminent function of the symbol; whereas the being in our likeness who professes such systematic ignorance of that function banishes himself forever from all that may by it be called into being. From then on, the question of the place that said semblable holds in natural classification would seem to us to fall only under an out-of-place humanism—if his discourse, intersecting with a technique of speech under our care, were not all too fertile, even in giving rise to sterile monsters. Let it be known, then—since after all he prides himself on braving the charge of anthropomorphism—that this is the last term we would use to say he makes his being the measure of all things.

Let’s return to our symbolic object, which in itself is quite substantial in its material, even if it has lost the weight of its use, but whose imponderable meaning will cause displacements of some weight. Is this then the law and language? Perhaps not yet.

For even if some top bird in the colony of swallows were to appear who, by gobbling up the symbolic fish from the wide-open beaks of the other swallows, inaugurated this exploitation of swallow by swallow—an idea we once delighted in spinning out as a fancy—this would not suffice to reproduce among them that fabulous story, image of our own, whose winged epic held us captive on the Isle of Penguins, and something more would be needed to create a “swallowized” universe.

This “something” completes the symbol to make it language. For the symbolic object, freed from its use, to become the word, freed from the hic et nunc, the difference is not in the quality, the sound, of its substance, but in its evanescent being where the symbol finds the permanence of the concept.

Through the word, which is already a presence made of absence, absence itself comes to be named in an original moment whose perpetual recreation Freud’s genius grasped in the child’s game. And from this modulated pair of presence and absence—which is equally constituted by the trace in the sand of the simple line and the broken line of the Chinese koua mantic figures—arises the universe of meaning of a language in which the universe of things will come to be arranged.

Through what takes form only by being the trace of a nothingness, and whose support therefore cannot be altered, the concept, saving the duration of what passes, engenders the thing.

For it is not enough to say that the concept is the thing itself—something a child could prove against the school. It is the world of words that creates the world of things, initially confused in the hic et nunc of the all-in-becoming, by giving their essence its concrete being, and its place everywhere to what is of all time: ktēma eis aei.

Man speaks, then, but it is because the symbol made him man. For if indeed abundant gifts welcome the stranger who has made himself known, the life of the natural groups constituting the community is subject to the rules of alliance, which order the direction in which the exchange of women takes place, and to the reciprocal prestations determined by that alliance: as the Sironga proverb says, an in-law is a thigh of elephant. Alliance is presided over by a preferential order whose law, involving the names of kinship, is, like language, imperative in its forms but unconscious in its structure. Now, in this structure whose harmony or deadlocks govern the restricted or generalized exchange discerned by the ethnologist, the astonished theorist rediscovers the whole logic of combinations: thus, the laws of number—that is, of the most purified symbol—prove to be immanent in the original symbolism. At least it is the richness of the forms in which the so-called elementary structures of kinship develop that makes them legible there. And this leads one to think that it is perhaps only our unconsciousness of their permanence that allows us to believe in the freedom of choices in the so-called complex structures of alliance under whose law we live. If statistics already hint that this freedom does not operate at random, it is because a subjective logic would orient it in its effects.

This is precisely why the Oedipus complex, insofar as we continue to recognize that its meaning covers the entire field of our experience, will be said, in our discourse, to mark the limits our discipline assigns to subjectivity: namely, what the subject can know of his unconscious participation in the movement of the complex structures of alliance, by verifying the symbolic effects in his particular existence of the tangential movement toward incest manifest since the advent of a universal community.

The primordial Law is therefore the one that, by regulating alliance, superimposes the reign of culture upon the reign of nature left to the law of mating. The incest taboo is only its subjective pivot, laid bare by the modern tendency to reduce to the mother and the sister the objects forbidden to the subject’s choices, although all license has not yet been opened beyond.

This law therefore reveals itself clearly enough as identical to an order of language. For no power without the nominations of kinship is capable of instituting the order of preferences and taboos that tie and braid through generations the thread of lineages. And it is indeed the confusion of generations which, in the Bible as in all traditional laws, is cursed as the abomination of speech and the desolation of the sinner.

We know indeed what devastation, even going as far as dissociation of the subject’s personality, can be wrought by a falsified filiation, when the pressure of the surroundings is used to sustain its lie. The effects may be no less grave when a man, marrying the mother of the woman with whom he has had a son, causes that son to have as brother a child who is the brother of his mother. But if he is then— and this case is not invented—adopted by the compassionate household of a daughter from a previous marriage of the father, he will once again find himself half-brother to his new mother, and one can imagine the complex feelings in which he awaits the birth of a child who will be both his brother and his nephew in this repeated situation.

That slight shift in generations that occurs through a late-born child from a second marriage, whose young mother is a contemporary of an older brother, can produce similar effects, and it is known that this was Freud’s own case.

This same function of symbolic identification by which the primitive believes himself to be the reincarnation of his namesake ancestor, and which even in the modern man determines an alternating recurrence of traits, thus introduces in subjects subject to such discordances in the paternal relation a dissociation of the Oedipus complex, in which one must see the constant spring of its pathogenic effects. Even when represented by a single person, the paternal function concentrates within itself imaginary and real relations, always more or less inadequate to the symbolic relation that essentially constitutes it.

It is in the name of the father that we must recognize the support of the symbolic function which, since the dawn of historical time, identifies his person with the figure of the law. This conception allows us to clearly distinguish in the analysis of a case the unconscious effects of this function from narcissistic relations, or even from the real relations that the subject maintains with the image and the action of the person who embodies it, and from this arises a mode of understanding that echoes into the very conduct of interventions. Practice has confirmed its fruitfulness for us, as well as for the students we have guided into this method. And we have often had the opportunity, in supervisions or in reported cases, to point out the harmful confusions engendered by ignorance of this approach.

Thus, it is the virtue of the word that perpetuates the movement of the Great Debt which Rabelais, in a famous metaphor, extends to the stars in its economy. And we will not be surprised that the chapter in which he presents to us, with the macaronic inversion of kinship names, a foretaste of ethnographic discoveries, reveals in him the substantive divination of the human mystery that we attempt to elucidate here.

Identified with the sacred hau or the omnipresent mana, the inviolable Debt is the guarantee that the voyage on which women and goods are sent returns in an unbroken cycle to their point of origin with other women and other goods, bearers of an identical entity: symbol zero, says Lévi-Strauss, reducing to the form of an algebraic sign the power of the Word.

Indeed, symbols envelop human life in so total a network that they join together before he comes into the world those who will engender him “by bone and by flesh,” that they bring to his birth, with the gifts of the stars, if not with the gifts of the fairies, the design of his destiny, that they provide the words that will make him faithful or renegade, the law of acts that will follow him even to where he is not yet and beyond his very death, and that through them his end finds its meaning in the Last Judgment where the word absolves or condemns his being—unless it reaches the subjective realization of being-for-death.

Servitude and greatness in which the living would be annihilated, if desire did not preserve its share in the interferences and the pulsations that converge upon him from the cycles of language, when the confusion of tongues enters the mix and orders contradict each other in the rending of the universal work.

But this desire itself, in order to be satisfied in man, requires to be recognized, either through the agreement of speech or the struggle for prestige, in the symbolic or in the imaginary.

The stake of a psychoanalysis is the advent in the subject of the little reality that this desire sustains therein in the face of symbolic conflicts and imaginary fixations as a means of their reconciliation, and our path is the intersubjective experience in which this desire comes to be recognized.

From there it becomes clear that the problem is that of the relations, within the subject, between speech and language.

Three paradoxes in these relations present themselves in our field.

In madness, whatever its nature, we must recognize, on the one hand, the negative freedom of a speech that has renounced recognition—what we call the obstacle to transference—and, on the other hand, the singular formation of a delusion which—fabulatory, fantastic, cosmological, interpretive, litigious or idealistic—objectifies the subject in a language without dialectic.

The absence of speech is manifested there in the stereotypies of a discourse in which the subject, one might say, is spoken rather than speaks: we recognize there the symbols of the unconscious in petrified forms which, alongside the embalmed forms in which myths are presented in our collections, find their place in a natural history of these symbols. But it is an error to say that the subject assumes them: the resistance to their recognition being no less than in neuroses, when the subject is led into them through a therapeutic attempt.

Let us note in passing that it would be worth identifying in social space the positions that culture has assigned to such subjects, especially regarding their assignment to social functions related to language, for it is not implausible that one of the factors demonstrating these subjects’ designation by the effects of rupture caused by the symbolic discordances characteristic of the complex structures of civilization may be revealed there.

The second case is represented by the privileged field of psychoanalytic discovery: namely, symptoms, inhibition and anxiety, in the constitutive economy of the different neuroses.

Speech is here driven out of the concrete discourse that orders consciousness, but it finds its support either in the natural functions of the subject—provided that an organic thorn initiates that breach from his individual being to his essence, which makes illness the introduction of the living being to the existence of the subject¹⁵—or in the images that organize at the boundary of the Umwelt and the Innenwelt their relational structuring.

The symptom here is the signifier of a signified repressed from the subject’s consciousness. A symbol written on the sand of the flesh and on the veil of Maia, it partakes of language through the semantic ambiguity that we have already highlighted in its constitution.

But it is a fully operative speech, for it includes the discourse of the Other in the secrecy of its cipher.

It is by deciphering this speech that Freud rediscovered the primal language of symbols¹⁶, still alive in the suffering of civilized man (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur).

Hieroglyphs of hysteria, emblems of phobia, labyrinths of Zwangsneurose—charms of impotence, enigmas of inhibition, oracles of anxiety—speaking arms of character¹⁷, seals of self-punishment, disguises of perversion—such are the hermetic forms that our exegesis resolves, the ambiguities that our invocation dissolves, the artifices that our dialectic absolves, in a release of the imprisoned meaning that leads from the revelation of the palimpsest to the word given of the mystery and to the forgiveness of speech.

The third paradox in the relationship of language to speech is that of the subject who loses his meaning in the objectifications of discourse. However metaphysical the definition may seem, we cannot ignore its presence at the forefront of our experience. For this is the most profound alienation of the subject of scientific civilization, and it is what we first encounter when the subject begins to speak to us about himself: likewise, in order to resolve it entirely, analysis would have to be carried through to the end of wisdom.

To offer an exemplary formulation of this, we could find no more pertinent ground than the usage of everyday discourse, by noting that the “ce suis-je” of Villon’s time has been reversed into the “c’est moi” of modern man.

The ego of modern man has taken shape, as we have indicated elsewhere, in the dialectical impasse of the beautiful soul who does not recognize the very reason for its being in the disorder it denounces in the world.

But an outlet is offered to the subject for the resolution of this impasse where his discourse goes awry. Communication can validly establish itself for him in the common work of science and in the roles it dictates in universal civilization; this communication will be effective within the enormous objectification constituted by that science, and it will allow him to forget his subjectivity. He will collaborate efficiently in the common endeavor through his daily work and fill his leisure with all the pleasures of a profuse culture which, from detective novels to historical memoirs, from educational lectures to the orthopedics of group relations, will provide him with matter to forget his existence and his death, while simultaneously misrecognizing in a false communication the particular meaning of his life.

If the subject did not rediscover in a regression—often pushed to the mirror stage—the enclosure of a stage in which his ego contains his imaginary exploits, there would be hardly any limits assignable to the credulity to which he must succumb in this situation. And this is what makes our responsibility so fearsome when we bring him, along with the mythical manipulations of our doctrine, yet another opportunity to alienate himself in the decomposed trinity of ego, superego, and id, for example.

Here, it is a wall of language that opposes speech, and the precautions against verbalism that are a theme in the discourse of the “normal” man of our culture only serve to increase its thickness.

It would not be futile to measure this thickness against the statistically determined total of kilograms of printed paper, kilometers of phonographic grooves, and hours of radio broadcast, which said culture produces per capita in zones A, B, and C of its territory. This would be a fine research topic for our cultural institutions, and one would see that the question of language does not reside solely in the area of convolutions where its usage reflects itself in the individual.

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

and the rest.

The resemblance of this situation to the alienation of madness—inasmuch as the formula given above is authentic, namely, that the subject is spoken rather than speaking—is clearly linked to the requirement, presumed by psychoanalysis, of a true speech. If this consequence, which brings to its limits the constitutive paradoxes of our current discussion, were to be turned against the very common sense of the psychoanalytic perspective, we would grant full relevance to such an objection, but only to find ourselves thereby confirmed: and this through a dialectical reversal in which we would not lack for authorized sponsors, starting with Hegel’s denunciation of the “philosophy of the skull,” and stopping only at Pascal’s warning, resounding from the dawn of the historical era of the “self,” in these terms: “Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would be another form of madness.”

This is not to say, however, that our culture continues in darkness foreign to creative subjectivity. On the contrary, this subjectivity has never ceased to be active within it, renewing the never-exhausted power of symbols in the human exchange that brings them to light.

To emphasize the small number of subjects who sustain this creation would be to yield to a romantic perspective by confronting that which is not equivalent. The fact is that this subjectivity, in whatever field it appears—mathematics, politics, religion, even advertising—continues to animate the human movement as a whole. And a no less illusory perspective would be to stress the opposite point: that its symbolic character has never been more manifest. It is the irony of revolutions that they generate a power all the more absolute in its operation, not, as is said, because it is more anonymous, but because it is more reduced to the words that signify it. And more than ever, on the other hand, the strength of churches resides in the language they have managed to maintain: an instance, it must be said, that Freud left in the shadows in the article where he outlines what we may call the collective subjectivities of the Church and the Army.

Psychoanalysis has played a role in the direction of modern subjectivity and cannot continue to do so without ordering itself according to the movement that, in science, elucidates it.

This is the question of the foundations that must secure for our discipline its place among the sciences: a question of formalization, one that is, to be honest, very poorly underway.

For it seems that, seized again by a bias of the medical mindset against which psychoanalysis had to constitute itself, we seek to affiliate ourselves to science by its example with a half-century delay in the movement of the sciences.

An abstract objectification of our experience based on fictitious principles, even simulated ones, of the experimental method: this is the effect of prejudices from which our field must first be cleansed if we are to cultivate it according to its authentic structure.

As practitioners of the symbolic function, it is astonishing that we shy away from deepening it, to the point of ignoring that it is this function that situates us at the heart of the movement that is establishing a new order of the sciences, with the advent of an authentic anthropology.

This new order means nothing other than a return to a notion of true science that already bears its credentials within a tradition going back to the Theaetetus. This notion has been degraded, as we know, in the positivist reversal that, by placing the human sciences at the apex of the edifice of the experimental sciences, in fact subordinates them. This notion stems from an erroneous view of the history of science, based on the prestige of a specialized development of experience.

But today the human sciences, by rediscovering the enduring notion of science, compel us to revise the classification of the sciences inherited from the nineteenth century, in a direction clearly indicated by the most lucid thinkers.

It suffices to follow the concrete evolution of disciplines to become aware of this.

Linguistics can serve us here as a guide, since it plays the leading role in contemporary anthropology, and we cannot remain indifferent to it.

The form of mathematization in which the discovery of the phoneme is inscribed—as a function of opposing pairs formed by the smallest discriminative semantic elements—leads us to the very foundations where Freud’s later theory locates, in a vocalic connotation of presence and absence, the subjective sources of the symbolic function.

And the reduction of any language to the group of a very small number of these phonemic oppositions, initiating just as rigorous a formalization of its highest morphèmes, gives us a glimpse of a most precise approach to the phenomena of language.

This progress comes close enough to our grasp to offer an immediate access, thanks to the convergence of lines polarized by ethnography, with a formalization of myths into mythemes that most directly concerns us.

Let us add that the research of Lévi-Strauss, by demonstrating the structural relationships between language and social laws¹⁸, provides nothing less than the objective foundations for the theory of the unconscious.

From that point on, it becomes impossible not to center a new classification of the sciences on a general theory of the symbol, in which the human sciences reclaim their central place as sciences of subjectivity. Of course, we will only be able to indicate the principle here, but its consequences are decisive for the field it defines.

The symbolic function is characterized, in fact, by a double movement within the subject: man makes an object of his action, but in due time, he returns to it its founding function. In this operative equivocation at every moment lies all the progress of a function where action and knowledge are intertwined.

Examples, one borrowed from school benches, the other from the heart of our present era:

– the first, mathematical: first moment, man objectifies in two cardinal numbers two collections he has counted; second moment, he performs with these numbers the act of adding them (cf. the example cited by Kant in the introduction to the Transcendental Aesthetic, § IV in the 2nd edition of the Critique of Pure Reason);

– the second, historical: first moment, the man working in production within our society counts himself among the proletariat; second moment, in the name of this belonging, he calls a general strike.

It is not by chance that we chose these two domains, nor that our examples are situated at the two extremes of concrete history.

For the effects of these domains are far from negligible and reach us from afar, but they intersect through time in a unique way: the most subjective science having created a new reality, and the most opaque reality becoming an acting symbol.

Certainly, the juxtaposition of the science considered most exact with that shown to be most conjectural is initially surprising, but this contrast is not contradictory.

For exactness is distinct from truth, and conjecture does not exclude rigor. And if experimental science derives its exactness from mathematics, its relationship to nature remains nonetheless problematic.

If our connection to nature, in fact, leads us to ask poetically whether it is not its own movement that we rediscover in our science, in

… that voice
That knows itself when it sounds
To no longer be anyone’s voice
So long as waves and woods,

it is clear that our physics is only a mental fabrication, of which the mathematical symbol is the instrument.

For experimental science is not so much defined by quantity—which indeed dominates it—as by measurement.

As is evident with time, which defines it, and whose instrument of precision, without which it would be impossible—the clock—is merely the realized organism of Galileo’s hypothesis on the equigravity of bodies, in other words, on the uniform acceleration of their fall. And this is so true that the instrument was completed in its assembly before the hypothesis could be verified by observation, which it made unnecessary anyway¹⁹.

But mathematics can symbolize another time, notably intersubjective time, which structures human action, of which game theory, still called strategy but better named stochastic theory, has begun to deliver the formulas.

The author of these lines has attempted to demonstrate in the logic of a sophism the springs of time by which human action, insofar as it is ordered in response to the action of the other, finds in the scansion of its hesitations the emergence of its certainty, and in the decision that concludes it, gives to the other’s action—now included within it—both its sanction in the past and its meaning for the future.

It is shown there that it is the certainty anticipated by the subject in the time to understand that, through the haste precipitating the moment to conclude, determines in the other the decision that renders the subject’s own movement error or truth.

This example shows how the mathematical axiomatization that inspired Boolean logic, even set theory, can bring to the science of human action this formalization of intersubjective time that psychoanalytic conjecture needs to ground its rigor.

If, moreover, the history of historiographic technique shows that its progress is defined in the ideal of an identification of the historian’s subjectivity with the constitutive subjectivity of primary historization wherein the event is humanized, it is clear that psychoanalysis finds therein its exact scope: in knowledge, by realizing this ideal; and in efficacy, by finding therein its rationale. The example of history also dispels, like a mirage, the recourse to lived reaction that obsesses both our technique and our theory, for the fundamental historicity of the event we retain suffices to conceive of the possibility of a subjective reproduction of the past in the present.

More than that, this example allows us to grasp how psychoanalytic regression implies this progressive dimension of the subject’s history, which Freud highlights as lacking in the Jungian concept of neurotic regression, and we understand how the experience itself renews this progression by ensuring its continuation.

Reference to linguistics, finally, will introduce us to that method which, by distinguishing synchronic from diachronic structurations in language, may allow us to better understand the different value our speech assumes in the interpretation of resistances and of transference, or again to differentiate the proper effects of repression from the structure of the individual myth in obsessional neurosis.

We know the list of disciplines that Freud designated as forming the ancillary sciences of an ideal faculty of psychoanalysis. Alongside psychiatry and sexology, we find: “the history of civilization, mythology, the psychology of religions, literary history and criticism.”

The entirety of these subjects, forming the curriculum of a technical education, is normally situated within the epistemological triangle we have described, and which would provide its method to a higher teaching of its theory and technique.

To this we will gladly add, for our part: rhetoric, dialectic in the technical sense given to this term in Aristotle’s Topics, grammar, and, as the pinnacle of the aesthetics of language: poetics, which would include the technique—left in the shadows—of the witticism.

And if these headings evoke somewhat outdated resonances for some, we would not hesitate to adopt them, as a return to our sources.

For psychoanalysis in its first development, linked to the discovery and study of symbols, tended to partake in the structure of what in the Middle Ages was called the “liberal arts.” Deprived like them of true formalization, it was organized like them around a body of privileged problems, each promoted by some felicitous relation of man to his own measure, and taking from this particularity a charm and a humanity that may compensate in our eyes for the slightly recreational appearance of their presentation. Let us not disdain this aspect in the early developments of psychoanalysis; for it expresses nothing less, in fact, than the recreation of human meaning in the arid times of scientism.

Let us disdain it all the less in that psychoanalysis has not raised its level by embarking on the false paths of a theorization contrary to its dialectical structure.

It will only provide scientific foundations for its theory and its technique by adequately formalizing those essential dimensions of its experience which are, alongside the historical theory of the symbol: intersubjective logic and the temporality of the subject.

III

THE RESONANCES OF INTERPRETATION
AND THE TIME OF THE SUBJECT
IN PSYCHOANALYTIC TECHNIQUE

Between man and love,
There is woman.
Between man and woman,
There is a world.
Between man and the world,
There is a wall.
(Antoine Tudal, in Paris in the Year 2000)

Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis
ego ipse oculis meis vidi in
ampulla pendere, et cum illi
pueri dicerent: Sibylla
ti theleis, respondebat illa:
apothanein thelo.
(Satyricon, xlviii)

To bring psychoanalytic experience back to speech and language as its foundations cannot help but reverberate onto its technique. In restoring the principles to their foundation, the path already traveled becomes visible, as does the one-way direction in which analytic interpretation has displaced itself, further and further away. One is then justified in suspecting that this evolution in practice motivates the new aims with which theory adorns itself.

Looking more closely, the problems of symbolic interpretation began by intimidating our little world before becoming embarrassing. The successes obtained by Freud now astonish by the brazenness of the indoctrination from which they appear to proceed, and the ostentation noted in the cases of Dora, the Rat Man, and the Wolf Man cannot help but scandalize us. It is true that our clever ones do not hesitate to question whether that was ever a good technique.

This disaffection, in truth, derives in the psychoanalytic movement from a confusion of tongues which, in a casual conversation from a recent era, the most representative figure of its current hierarchy did not conceal from us.

It is quite remarkable that this confusion increases with the pretension each person believes themselves mandated to discover within our experience the conditions for a fully realized objectification, and with the fervor that seems to greet these theoretical attempts in direct proportion to their increasing derealization.

It is certain that the principles of the analysis of resistances, however well-founded they may be, have in practice given rise to an ever-growing misunderstanding of the subject, due to their failure to be understood in their relation to the intersubjectivity of speech.

In following, for example, the process of the first seven sessions which are entirely reported from the case of the Rat Man, it seems unlikely that Freud did not recognize the resistances in their proper place, that is, precisely where our modern technicians claim he missed their occurrence—since it is his very text that allows them to pinpoint them—once again manifesting that exhaustion of the subject in the Freudian texts that never ceases to amaze us, and which no interpretation has yet fully mined.

We mean to say that Freud not only allowed himself to encourage his subject to move beyond his initial reticence, but that he fully understood the seductive scope of this play in the imaginary. One need only refer to the description he gives us of the patient’s expression during the painful account of the imaginary torture that forms the theme of his obsession—the rat forced into the anus of the tortured victim: “His face,” Freud tells us, “reflected the horror of an unknown pleasure.” The current meaning of the repetition of this narrative therefore did not escape him, nor did the identification of the psychoanalyst with the “cruel captain” who forcibly inserted this tale into the subject’s memory, nor indeed the significance of the theoretical clarifications the subject demanded as a pledge to continue his discourse.

Far from interpreting the resistance at this point, Freud surprises us by acceding to the request, and seems to enter deeply into the subject’s game.

But the extremely approximate, even vulgar to our ears, nature of the explanations he grants him teaches us enough: it is not so much a matter of doctrine here, nor even of indoctrination, but of a symbolic gift of speech, laden with a secret pact, within the context of the imaginary participation that encompasses it, and whose significance will later be revealed in the symbolic equivalence the subject establishes in his thought between the rats and the florins with which he remunerates the analyst.

We thus see that Freud, far from failing to recognize the resistance, uses it as a favorable condition for setting in motion the resonances of speech, and he conforms, as much as possible, to the original definition he gave of resistance, using it to implicate the subject in his message. And indeed, he will suddenly break the engagement as soon as he sees that, if indulged, the resistance turns into a way of maintaining the dialogue at the level of a conversation in which the subject would then perpetuate his seduction through evasion.

But we learn that analysis consists in playing upon the multiple resonances of the score that speech constitutes within the registers of language: from which derives the overdetermination of the order targeted by analysis.

And we simultaneously grasp the mechanism behind Freud’s success. For the analyst’s message to respond to the subject’s profound questioning, the subject must in fact hear it as the response uniquely addressed to him, and the privilege Freud’s patients had in receiving the good word from the mouth of its very herald satisfied this demand within them.

Let us note in passing that here the subject had already had a foretaste of it through his initial reading of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, a work then freshly published.

This is not to say that the book is much more widely known now, even among analysts, but the vulgarization of Freudian concepts in common consciousness, their absorption into what we call the wall of language, would dull the impact of our speech were we to adopt the tone of Freud’s conversations with the Rat Man.

But the issue here is not imitation. To recapture the effect of Freud’s speech, it is not to his terms that we shall return, but to the principles that govern them.

These principles are none other than the dialectic of self-consciousness, as realized from Socrates to Hegel, beginning from the ironic supposition that all that is rational is real, and culminating in the scientific judgment that all that is real is rational. But Freud’s discovery was to demonstrate that this verifying process authentically reaches the subject only once decentered from self-consciousness, along the axis in which the Hegelian reconstruction of the Phenomenology of Spirit maintained it: that is to say, Freud renders even more obsolete any attribution of effectiveness to “conscious awareness,” which, when reduced to the objectification of a psychological phenomenon, causes the Selbstbewusstsein to fall from its universal meaning and, simultaneously, from its particularity by reducing it to its general form.

These remarks define the limits within which our technique cannot ignore the structuring moments of Hegelian phenomenology: foremost the dialectic of Master and Slave, or that of the Beautiful Soul and the Law of the Heart, and in general all that allows us to understand how the constitution of the object is subordinated to the realization of the subject.

But if there remained something unfulfilled in Hegel’s recognition—wherein his genius lies—of the fundamental identity between the particular and the universal, it is psychoanalysis that brings it a concrete foundation each time it opens the way through its obstacles to the point where they converge for a subject in the present. And if on this path nothing properly individual and thereby collective can appear that does not belong to the order of illusion, it is what can no longer be forgotten, thanks to psychoanalysis—except by psychoanalysts themselves, who in the so-called “new trends” of their technique are forging a discipline renegade to its own inspiration.

That if only Hegel allows us to authentically assume the position of our neutrality, it is not because we have nothing to learn from the maieutics of Socrates, nor even from the technical usage that Plato presents to us, if only to situate in relation to the idea what we put into operation in the subject, and which is as distinct and distant from it as the repetition analyzed by Kierkegaard is from the reminiscence supposed by Plato.

But there is also a historical difference worth measuring between Socrates’ interlocutor and our own. When Socrates relies on a craftsman’s reason which he can extract just as well from the discourse of a slave, it is to lead true masters toward the necessity of an order that would render justice to their power and truth to the master-words of the city. But we are dealing with slaves who believe themselves to be masters and who find in a language of universal mission the support of their servitude, with the ties of its ambiguity. So much so that one might say with humor that our goal is to restore in them the sovereign freedom displayed by Humpty Dumpty when he reminds Alice that, after all, he is the master of the signifier, if not of the signified in which his being has taken shape.

Thus we again find our double reference to speech and language. To liberate the subject’s speech, we introduce him to the language of his desire, that is, to the primary language in which, beyond what he tells us about himself, he is already speaking to us unknowingly, and in the symbols of the symptom first and foremost.

It is indeed a language that is at issue in the symbolism brought to light in analysis. This language, echoing the playful wish found in an aphorism by Lichtenberg, has the universal character of a tongue that would make itself heard in all other tongues, but at the same time, being the language that grasps desire at the very point where it becomes human by seeking recognition, it is absolutely particular to the subject.

Primary language, we also say, by which we do not mean primitive language, since Freud—who may be compared to Champollion for the merit of having made the complete discovery—fully deciphered it in the dreams of our contemporaries. And indeed, its essential field has been defined with some authority by one of the earliest collaborators associated with this work, and one of the few who brought something new to it: namely, Ernest Jones, the last survivor of those to whom were given the seven rings of the master, and who attests, through his presence in honorary positions of an international association, that they are not reserved only for relic-bearers.

In a fundamental article on symbolism, Dr. Jones, around page 15, makes the remark that although there are thousands of symbols in the analytic sense, all of them refer to the body itself, to kinship relations, to birth, to life, and to death.

This truth, here implicitly acknowledged, allows us to understand that although the symbol, psychoanalytically speaking, is repressed into the unconscious, it carries within itself no indication of regression, nor even of immaturity. It suffices, for it to exert its effects in the subject, that it be heard, for these effects operate unbeknownst to him, as we admit in our daily experience, when we explain many reactions of both normal and neurotic subjects by their response to the symbolic meaning of an act, a relationship, or an object.

There is thus no doubt that the analyst can play on the power of the symbol by evoking it in a calculated manner through the semantic resonances of his words.

This may well be the object of a renewed use of symbolic effects, in a reformed technique of interpretation.

We might here take reference from what Hindu tradition teaches about dhvani [resonance/suggestion in poetic speech], inasmuch as it distinguishes in it this property of speech: to make heard what it does not say. It is illustrated by a little tale whose naivety, seemingly the rule in such examples, displays enough humor to guide us toward the truth it contains.

A young girl, it is said, awaits her lover on the riverbank, when she sees a brahmin walking toward it. She goes to him and exclaims in the tone of the warmest welcome: “What happiness today! The dog that used to scare you with its barking on this shore is no longer here, for it has just been devoured by a lion who roams the area…”

The absence of the lion can therefore have as much effect as the leap it would make in presence, which it only makes once, according to the proverb.

The fundamental nature of symbols brings them close, in fact, to those numbers from which all others are composed, and if they thus underlie all the semantemes of language, we may, through a discreet investigation of their interferences along the thread of a metaphor whose symbolic displacement neutralizes the secondary meanings of the terms it associates, restore to speech its full evocative value.

This technique would require, both for teaching and for learning it, a profound assimilation of the resources of a language, and particularly of those concretely realized in its poetic texts. It is known that this was the case for Freud with regard to German letters, including the theater of Shakespeare by virtue of a translation without equal. His entire work attests to this, as well as to the recourse he continually found in it, no less in his technique than in his discovery. This is without prejudice to the support of a classical knowledge of the Ancients, a modern initiation into folklore, and an engaged participation in the contemporary humanist achievements in the ethnographic field.

One might ask the analyst not to consider vain any attempt to follow him on this path.

But there is a current to go against. One can measure it by the condescending attention given, as to a novelty, to wording: English morphology here provides a sufficiently subtle support to a notion still difficult to define, so that it is taken seriously.

What it covers, however, is hardly encouraging, and the wonder that an author expresses over the opposite success he encountered with a patient, from his successive and, as he says, unpremeditated use of the words need and demand to analyze the same resistance, leaves one puzzled. We believe we show neither a great need for purism nor excessive rigor in measuring here the degree of fumbling that this amazement reveals as commonplace in practice.

For need and demand have for the subject diametrically opposed meanings, and to claim that their usage can even momentarily be confused amounts to radically misunderstanding the imperative nature of speech.

For in its symbolizing function, speech goes no less than to transform the subject to whom it is addressed by the bond it establishes with the one who emits it, namely: by the virtue of the gift it constitutes.

This is why we must once again return to the structure of interhuman communication and definitively dispel the misunderstanding of language-as-sign, which in this domain is the source of discourse confusions and of the malformations of speech.

If language communication is indeed conceived as a signal by which the emitter informs the receiver of something through the means of a certain code, then there is no reason why we should not place just as much and even more credence in any other sign when the “something” in question is the subject himself: there is even every reason for us to prefer any mode of expression that comes closest to the natural sign.

Thus discredit has come upon us regarding the technique of speech, and we find ourselves in search of a gesture, a grimace, an attitude, a mimicry, a movement, a shiver—what am I saying—even of a halt in the habitual movement, for we are refined and nothing will now stop in its stride our unleashed hounds.

We will demonstrate the insufficiency of the notion of language-as-sign by the very phenomenon that illustrates it best in the animal kingdom, and which it seems, had it not recently been the object of an authentic discovery, would have had to be invented for this very purpose.

It is now widely accepted that the bee returning from foraging to the hive transmits to its companions, through two types of dance, the indication of the existence of nearby or distant forage. The second is the more remarkable, for the plane in which it traces the figure-eight curve that has earned it the name wagging dance, and the frequency of the trips the bee makes in a given time, indicate precisely the direction determined in relation to the solar inclination (which bees can perceive in any weather thanks to their sensitivity to polarized light), on the one hand, and the distance up to several kilometers where the forage is located, on the other. And the other bees respond to this message by heading immediately toward the indicated location.

A dozen years of patient observation sufficed for Karl von Frisch to decode this mode of messaging, for it is indeed a code, or a signaling system whose generic character alone prevents us from calling it conventional.

Is it therefore a language? We can say that it is distinguished from language precisely by the fixed correlation of its signs to the reality they signify. For in a language, signs derive their value from their relation to one another, both in the lexical distribution of semantemes and in the positional, or even inflectional, usage of morphèmes—contrasting with the fixed coding deployed here. And the diversity of human languages takes, in this light, its full value.

Moreover, if the message of the described mode determines the action of the socius, it is never retransmitted by him. And this means that it remains fixed in its function as a relay of action, from which no subject detaches it as a symbol of communication itself.

The form in which language expresses itself defines subjectivity in itself. It says: “You will go this way, and when you see this, you will turn there.” In other words, it refers to the discourse of the other. It is enveloped as such in the highest function of speech, insofar as it engages its author by investing its addressee with a new reality, for example when a man says: “You are my wife,” to signify his own gift.

Such is indeed the essential form from which all human speech derives, rather than arrives.

Hence the paradox pointed out by one of our sharpest listeners, who thought he could object when we began to present our views on analysis as dialectic, and who formulated it as follows: human language would thus constitute a communication in which the emitter receives from the receiver his own message in an inverted form—a formulation we had only to take back from the mouth of the objector to recognize it as the stamp of our own thought, namely, that speech always subjectively includes its response, that the phrase “You would not be seeking me if you had not already found me” merely homologates this truth, and that this is why in the paranoiac refusal of recognition, it is in the form of a negative verbalization that the unavowable feeling emerges in the persecutory “interpretation.”

Likewise, when you congratulate yourself on having met someone who speaks the same language as you, do you not mean that you meet them in the discourse of all, but are united to them by a particular speech?

Thus we see the immanent antinomy in the relationship between speech and language. As language becomes more general, it becomes unsuitable for speech, and as it becomes too particular to us, it loses its function as language.

It is well known how, in primitive traditions, secret names are used through which the subject identifies himself or his gods, to such an extent that revealing them means losing or betraying them—and the confidences of our subjects, if not our own memories, tell us that it is not uncommon for the child to spontaneously rediscover the virtue of such usage.

Ultimately, it is to the intersubjectivity of the “we” that he assumes that the value of speech in language is measured.

Through an inverse antinomy, it is observed that the more the function of language is neutralized by approaching mere information, the more it appears burdened with redundancies. This notion of redundancy originated from research that was all the more precise because it was interested—driven by an economic problem concerning long-distance communication, specifically, the possibility of transmitting several conversations over a single telephone wire; it was found that a significant part of the medium of language is superfluous for achieving the communication actually sought.

This is highly instructive for us, because what is redundancy for information is precisely what, in speech, functions as resonance.

For the function of language there is not to inform, but to evoke.

What I seek in speech is the response of the other. What constitutes me as a subject is my question. To be recognized by the other, I only utter what has been in view of what will be. To find him, I call him by a name he must assume or refuse in order to respond to me.

I identify myself in language, but not as an object. What is realized in my history is not the defined past of what was since it no longer is, nor even the perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I will have been for what I am in the process of becoming.

If I now place myself before the other to question him, no cybernetic apparatus, however rich you may imagine it, can make a reaction out of what is a response. Its definition as the second term in the stimulus-response circuit is only a metaphor, sustained by the subjectivity imputed to the animal in order to then elide it in the physical scheme where it is reduced. This is what we have called putting the rabbit in the hat to then pull it out. But a reaction is not a response.

If I press an electric button and the light comes on, there is only a response in regard to my desire. If, to achieve the same result, I must try an entire system of relays whose position I do not know, there is only a question in regard to my expectation, and there will be none once I have obtained from the system sufficient knowledge to operate it with certainty.

But if I call out to the one I am speaking to, by whatever name I give him, I summon the subjective function he will take up to respond to me, even if it is only to repudiate it.

Hence appears the decisive function of my own response, which is not merely, as it is said, to be received by the subject as approval or rejection of his discourse, but truly to recognize or abolish him as subject. Such is the responsibility of the analyst every time he intervenes with speech.

Indeed, the problem of the therapeutic effects of inexact interpretation, posed by Mr. Edward Glover in a remarkable article, has led him to conclusions where the question of accuracy takes second place. Namely, not only is every spoken intervention received by the subject according to his structure, but it takes on a structuring function because of its form, and this is precisely the scope of non-analytic psychotherapies, even of the most commonplace medical “prescriptions,” to be interventions that may be qualified as obsessive systems of suggestion, hysterical suggestions of a phobic order, even persecutory supports—each taking its character from the sanction it gives to the subject’s misrecognition of his own reality.

Speech, indeed, is a gift of language, and language is not immaterial. It is a subtle body, but it is a body. Words are caught up in all the corporeal images that captivate the subject; they can impregnate the hysteric, identify with the object of penis envy, represent the stream of urine of urethral ambition, or the retained feces of miserly jouissance.

Moreover, words themselves can undergo symbolic lesions, perform the imaginary acts of which the patient is the subject. One recalls the Wespe (wasp) castrated of its initial W to become the S.P. of the Wolf Man’s initials, at the moment when he realizes the symbolic punishment inflicted upon him by Grouscha, the wasp.

One also remembers the S that remains from the hermetic formula in which the conjuring invocations of the Rat Man were condensed after Freud extracted from its number the anagram of his beloved’s name, and which, joined to the terminal amen of his ejaculation, eternally floods the name of the lady with the symbolic ejection of his impotent desire.

Similarly, an article by Robert Fliess, inspired by Abraham’s initial remarks, shows us that discourse as a whole can become the object of an eroticization following the shifts of erogeneity in the body image, momentarily determined by the analytic relationship.

Discourse then assumes a phallic-urethral, erotic-anal, even sadistic-oral function. It is also remarkable that the author perceives its effect especially in the silences that mark the inhibition of the satisfaction the subject derives from it.

Thus, speech can become an imaginary, even real, object within the subject, and as such, in more than one aspect, reduce the function of language. We shall place it then in the parenthesis of the resistance it manifests.

But this will not be to banish it from the analytic relationship, for that would strip the latter of its very reason for being.

Analysis can have no other goal than the advent of true speech and the subject’s realization of his history in its relation to a future.

The maintenance of this dialectic stands in opposition to any objectivizing orientation of analysis, and emphasizing this necessity is crucial to understanding the aberration of the new tendencies manifesting in analysis.

It is through a return to Freud that we will again illustrate our point here, and specifically through the observation of the Rat Man since we have begun to use his case.

Freud goes so far as to take liberties with the factual accuracy when it is a matter of reaching the subject’s truth. At one point, he perceives the determining role played by the marriage proposal brought to the subject by his mother at the origin of the current phase of his neurosis. He had, in fact, a flash of insight about it, as we showed in our seminar, due to his own personal experience. Nevertheless, he does not hesitate to interpret its effect to the subject as if it were a prohibition laid down by his deceased father against his liaison with the lady of his thoughts.

This is not only materially inaccurate. It is also psychologically so, for the castrating action of the father, which Freud asserts here with an insistence that might be taken as systematic, played only a secondary role in this case. But the apprehension of the dialectical relation is so accurate that Freud’s interpretation at that moment triggers the decisive lifting of the deathly symbols that narcissistically bind the subject both to his dead father and to the idealized lady, their two images supporting each other, in an equivalence characteristic of the obsessional, one of the fantasized aggression that perpetuates it, the other of the mortifying cult that turns her into an idol.

Likewise, it is in recognizing the forced subjectivation of the obsessional debt which his patient plays out to the point of delirium, in the scenario too perfect in expressing its imaginary terms for the subject even to attempt its realization—of the vain restitution—that Freud reaches his goal: namely, to have him rediscover in the history of his father’s indiscretion, of his marriage to his mother, of the “poor but pretty” girl, of his wounded loves, of the ungrateful memory toward the helpful friend, along with the fateful constellation that presided at his very birth, the impossible-to-fill gap of the symbolic debt of which his neurosis is the protest.

There is no trace here of an appeal to the ignoble specter of some so-called “original fear,” nor even to a masochism which would be all too easy to invoke, still less to that obsessional counter-forcing that some propagate under the name of analysis of defenses. The resistances themselves, as I have shown elsewhere, are used as long as possible in the direction of the discourse’s progress. And when they must be ended, it is by yielding to them that one brings them to a close.

It is in this way, nevertheless, that the patient succeeds in introducing into his subjectivity his true mediation under the transferential form of the imaginary daughter he gives to Freud in order to receive from him the alliance, and who in a key dream reveals her true face: that of death staring at him with eyes of pitch.

If it is with this symbolic pact that the subject’s stratagems of servitude have fallen, then reality will not have failed him in fulfilling those nuptials, and the note, in the form of an epitaph, that Freud dedicated in 1923 to that young man who, in the risk of war, met “the end of so many young men of worth in whom so many hopes had been placed,” concluding the case with the rigor of destiny, raises it to the beauty of tragedy.

To know how to respond to the subject in analysis, the method is first to recognize the place where his ego is situated, that ego which Freud himself defined as an ego formed from a verbal nucleus, in other words, to know by whom and for whom the subject poses his question. As long as this is not known, one risks a misinterpretation of the desire to be recognized there and of the object to which this desire is addressed.

The hysteric captures this object in a refined intrigue, and his ego is in the third party through the medium of whom the subject enjoys the object in which his question is embodied. The obsessional pulls into the cage of his narcissism the objects where his question reverberates in the multiplied alibi of deathly figures and, taming their lofty acrobatics, directs the ambiguous homage toward the box where he himself is seated, that of the master who cannot be seen.

Trahit sua quemque voluptas; one identifies with the spectacle, the other puts it on display.

For the first subject, you must bring him to recognize where his action is located, for whom the term acting-out takes its literal meaning, since he acts outside himself. For the other, you must make yourself recognized in the spectator, invisible from the stage, with whom he is united by the mediation of death.

Thus, it is always in the relation of the subject’s ego to the “I” of his discourse that you must understand the meaning of the discourse in order to disalienate the subject.

But you will not succeed if you hold to the idea that the subject’s ego is identical to the presence that speaks to you.

This error is encouraged by the terminology of the topography, which all too easily tempts objectivizing thought, allowing it to slip from the ego defined as the perception-consciousness system—i.e., as the system of the subject’s objectivations—to the ego conceived as the correlate of an absolute reality, and thus to rediscover, in a singular return of the repressed of psychological thought, the “function of the real” to which a Pierre Janet aligns his conceptions.

Such a slippage has occurred only because of the failure to recognize that in Freud’s work the topography of the ego, id, and superego is subordinated to the metapsychology whose terms he developed at the same time, and without which it loses its meaning. Thus one has become engaged in a psychological orthopedics whose fruits have yet to cease.

Michael Balint has analyzed with remarkable insight the intertwined effects of theory and technique in the genesis of a new conception of analysis, and he finds no better way to indicate its outcome than in the slogan he borrows from Rickman: the advent of a Two-body psychology.

Indeed, one could not put it better. Analysis becomes the relation of two bodies between which a fantasmatic communication is established in which the analyst teaches the subject to grasp himself as object; subjectivity is admitted only in the parenthesis of illusion, and speech is banished in favor of a pursuit of lived experience that becomes the supreme goal—but the dialectically necessary result appears in the fact that the subjectivity of the psychoanalyst, being released from any restraint, leaves the subject at the mercy of all the injunctions of his speech.

Once intra-subjective topography is reified, it is realized in the division of labor between the subjects present. And this diverted usage of Freud’s formula that everything of the id must become of the ego appears in a demystified form; the subject transformed into an “it” must conform to an ego in which the analyst will have no trouble recognizing his ally, since it is, in truth, his own ego.

It is this very process that is expressed in many theoretical formulations of the splitting of the ego in analysis. Half of the subject’s ego passes to the other side of the wall separating analysand and analyst, then half of the half, and so on, in an asymptotic procession that, no matter how far it proceeds in the belief the subject himself will have formed, will never succeed in eliminating every margin that might alert him to the aberration of the analysis.

But how could the subject of an analysis based on the principle that all his formulations are defense systems be protected against the total disorientation into which this principle throws the analyst’s dialectic?

Freud’s interpretation, whose dialectical procedure is so clearly displayed in the observation of Dora, presents none of these dangers, for when the analyst’s prejudices (that is, his countertransference—a term whose correct usage in our view should not extend beyond the dialectical grounds of error) lead him astray in his intervention, he pays the price immediately in the form of a negative transference. For this manifests all the more strongly as such an analysis has already engaged the subject further into an authentic recognition, and a rupture usually follows.

That is precisely what happened in the case of Dora, due to Freud’s insistence on making her acknowledge the hidden object of her desire in the person of Mr. K., where the constitutive prejudices of his countertransference led him to see the promise of her happiness.

No doubt Dora herself was misled in that relationship, but she nevertheless keenly felt that Freud was being misled with her. But when she returns to see him, after the fifteen-month interval that bears the fateful number of her “time for understanding,” one senses her entering the path of feigning to have feigned, and the convergence of this second-degree feint with the aggressive intention that Freud imputes to her—not without accuracy, to be sure, but without recognizing its true motivation—presents us with the sketch of the intersubjective complicity that a “resistance analysis” confident in its rights could have perpetuated between them. There is no doubt that, with the tools our technical progress now offers, human error could have been prolonged beyond the limit where it becomes diabolical.

All this is not of our own invention, for Freud himself later recognized the prejudicial source of his failure in his ignorance at the time of the homosexual position of the object targeted by the hysteric’s desire.

Certainly, the whole process that led to this current tendency in psychoanalysis stems, first and foremost, from the bad conscience the analyst developed regarding the miracle worked by his speech. He interprets the symbol, and behold, the symptom, inscribed in letters of suffering in the subject’s flesh, vanishes. This thaumaturgy offends our customs. After all, we are scientists, and magic is not a defensible practice. We displace the discomfort by imputing magical thinking to the patient. Soon we will be preaching to our patients the Gospel according to Lévy-Bruhl. In the meantime, we have become thinkers again, and here are restored those proper distances one must know how to maintain with patients, whose tradition had perhaps too hastily been abandoned—so nobly expressed in these lines by Pierre Janet on the modest capacities of the hysteric compared to our lofty heights: “She understands nothing of science,” he confides to us, speaking of the poor thing, “and cannot imagine that one might be interested in it… If one considers the lack of control that characterizes their thinking, instead of being scandalized by their lies, which are moreover quite naïve, one will rather be surprised that there are still so many honest ones, etc.”

These lines, which represent the sentiment to which many analysts of our day have returned—who condescend to speak to the patient “in their own language”—can help us to understand what has happened in the meantime. For if Freud had been capable of signing them, how could he have heard, as he did, the truth embedded in the anecdotes of his first patients, or even deciphered a dark delusion like Schreber’s and broadened it to the scale of man eternally bound to his symbols?

Is our reason so feeble that it cannot recognize itself equally in the mediation of scholarly discourse and in the original exchange of the symbolic object, and fail to rediscover there the identical measure of its primordial cunning?

Must we be reminded what is the worth of “thought” to practitioners of an experience whose preoccupation is drawn closer to an intestinal eroticism than to any equivalent of action?

Must the one who speaks to you testify that he, for his part, has no need to resort to thought in order to understand that if he is speaking to you now about speech, it is because we have in common a technique of speech that renders you able to hear him when he speaks of it to you, and that disposes him to address, through you, those who hear nothing of it?

For if we perceive in speech only a reflection of thought hidden behind the wall of language, we will soon want to hear only the knocks struck behind the wall, to seek them not in punctuation but in the holes of discourse.

From then on, we will be occupied solely with decoding this mode of communication and, as we must admit that we have not placed ourselves in the best conditions to receive its message, we will have to make it repeat itself a few times to be sure we understand it—perhaps even to make the subject understand that we understand—and it may happen that after a sufficient number of such back-and-forths the subject will have simply learned from us how to strike his beats in rhythm, a form of “marching in step” that is as good as any other.

Halfway to this extreme, the question arises: does psychoanalysis remain a dialectical relationship in which the non-action of the analyst guides the subject’s discourse toward the realization of his truth, or will it be reduced to a fantasmatic relation where “two abysses brush past each other” without touching, until the gamut of imaginary regressions is exhausted—a kind of bundling [a reference to a puritanical courting custom involving non-sexual bed-sharing], pushed to its furthest limits as a psychological trial?

In fact, this illusion that drives us to seek the subject’s reality beyond the wall of language is the same one by which the subject believes that his truth is already known to us, that we know it in advance—and it is by this very illusion that he is wide open to our objectivating intervention.

No doubt he himself is not accountable for this subjective error which, whether acknowledged or not in his discourse, is immanent in the fact that he has entered into analysis and concluded its fundamental pact. And all the less can we neglect the subjectivity of that moment, since it is there that we find the reason for what may be called the constitutive effects of the transference, inasmuch as they are distinguished, by a mark of reality, from the constituted effects that follow them.

Let us recall that Freud, when speaking of the feelings associated with transference, insisted on the necessity of distinguishing a factor of reality in them, and he concluded that it would be an abuse of the subject’s docility to want to persuade him in all cases that these feelings are a simple transferred repetition of the neurosis. From then on, since these real feelings manifest themselves as primary and the particular charm of our persons remains a random factor, it may seem that some mystery is involved.

But this mystery becomes clearer when viewed within the phenomenology of the subject, insofar as the subject constitutes himself in the pursuit of truth. One need only turn to traditional data—which Buddhists are not the only ones to provide—to recognize in this form of transference the proper error of existence, under three headings which they enumerate as follows: love, hate, and ignorance. It is therefore as a counter-effect of the analytic movement that we understand their equivalence in what is called an initially positive transference—each becoming clarified by the other two under this existential aspect, especially when we do not exclude the third, generally omitted due to its proximity to the subject.

We refer here to the invective whereby someone—whose debt to us is recognizable by the proper use made of the term “real”—took us as witnesses to the lack of restraint shown by a certain work (already too often cited by us) in its senseless objectivation of the play of drives in analysis. It was in these words that he “unburdened,” as they say, “his heart”: “It is high time this swindle ends, which tries to make people believe that anything real happens in treatment.” Let us set aside what became of it, for alas! if analysis did not cure the oral vice of the dog of Scripture, its condition is worse than before: it is now the vomit of others that it laps up.

But if the question posed in this jest—better inspired than well-intentioned—does indeed have meaning, we believe it must be considered through the fundamental distinction between the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real.

Indeed, reality in analytic experience often remains veiled in negative forms, but it is not too difficult to locate it.

It appears, for example, in what we usually disapprove of as active interventions; but it would be an error to define its limit thereby.

For it is clear, on the other hand, that the analyst’s abstention, his refusal to respond, is an element of reality in the analysis. More precisely, it is in this negativity, insofar as it is pure—that is, detached from any particular motive—that the junction between the symbolic and the real resides. This is understood in that this non-action is grounded in our affirmed knowledge of the principle that all that is real is rational, and in the motive that follows: that it is up to the subject to rediscover his own measure.

It remains that this abstention is not indefinitely sustained; when the subject’s question has taken the form of true speech, we sanction it with our response—but we have also shown that true speech already contains its own response and that we merely echo its refrain with our lay. What does this mean? Nothing other than that we do nothing but provide the subject’s speech with its dialectical punctuation.

From there, we see the other moment where the symbolic and the real converge, and we had already theoretically marked it: in the function of time, and this is worth pausing over for its technical effects.

Time plays its role in technique under several aspects.

It first appears in the total duration of analysis, and implies the meaning to be given to the termination of the analysis, which is the preliminary question to that of the signs of its end. We shall touch upon the problem of fixing its endpoint. But already it is clear that this duration can only be anticipated by the subject as indefinite.

This for two reasons, which can only be distinguished from a dialectical perspective:

– the first pertains to the limits of our field and confirms our proposition on the definition of its boundaries: we cannot foresee for the subject what his time for understanding will be, insofar as it includes a psychological factor that eludes us as such;

– the second is properly that of the subject himself, and through it, the fixing of a term amounts to a spatializing projection, whereby he finds himself already alienated from himself: from the moment the conclusion of his truth can be foreseen—whatever might occur in the intervallic intersubjectivity—it means the truth is already there, that is, we reestablish in the subject his original mirage in that he places his truth in us and, by sanctioning it with our authority, we install his analysis in an aberration, which will be impossible to rectify in its outcomes.

This is precisely what happened in the famous case of the Wolf Man, whose exemplary importance was so well understood by Freud that he returned to it in his article on finite or infinite analysis[28].

The anticipatory setting of a termination point, the first form of active intervention, inaugurated (proh pudor!) by Freud himself—no matter the divinatory assurance (in the proper sense of the word[29]) the analyst may demonstrate in following his example—will always leave the subject in the alienation of his truth.

And we find confirmation of this in two facts from Freud’s case:

Firstly, the Wolf Man—despite the whole body of evidence demonstrating the historicity of the primal scene, despite the conviction he expresses about it, undisturbed by the methodical doubts that Freud imposes as a test—never manages to integrate its recollection into his history.

Secondly, the Wolf Man later demonstrates his alienation in the most categorical way, in a paranoiac form.

It is true that another factor enters in here, by which reality intervenes in analysis: the gift of money, whose symbolic value we reserve to treat elsewhere, though its significance is already indicated in what we have previously evoked about the link between speech and the constitutive gift of the primordial exchange. Here, the monetary gift is reversed by an initiative of Freud, in which we may recognize—no less than in his insistence on returning to this case—the unresolved subjectivation in him of the problems the case leaves suspended. And no one doubts that this was a triggering factor of the psychosis, even if one cannot quite say why.

Can one not understand, however, that to admit a subject to be fed in the prytaneum of psychoanalysis (for it was in fact from a group collection that he received his stipend), as a reward for the service rendered to psychoanalysis by the observation of his case, is to precipitate definitively in him the alienation of his truth?

A dream of the subject during the supplementary analysis conducted by Mrs. Ruth Mac Brunswick demonstrates beyond all desirable rigor what we are asserting—its images symbolizing even the very wall of our metaphor, behind which the wolves of the primal scene press in vain until they manage to turn it with the help of the analyst, who here intervenes only in a secondary function. Nothing would be more instructive for our discussion than to show how Mrs. Mac Brunswick fulfilled this secondary role. The identification of the entire discourse of the first analysis with that very wall to be turned would be the most beautiful illustration of the reciprocal roles of speech and language in analytic mediation—but we lack the space here to elaborate.

Those who follow our teaching already know this, and those who have followed us thus far may surely rediscover it by their own means.

Indeed, we wish to address another aspect, particularly burning in current times, of the function of time in technique. We wish to speak of the duration of the session.

Here again we are dealing with an element that clearly belongs to reality, since it represents our working time and, from this angle, falls under a professional regulation that may be considered prevalent.

But its subjective incidences are no less important. And first of all for the analyst. The taboo character under which it has been raised in recent debates proves well enough that the group’s subjectivity is far from being liberated in this regard, and the scrupulous, not to say obsessive, character that adherence to a standard takes on for certain, if not most—whose historical and geographical variations, moreover, seem to concern no one—is indeed the sign of the existence of a problem that one is all the less inclined to confront insofar as one senses that it would lead very far in questioning the analyst’s function.

As for the subject in analysis, its importance is no less undeniable. “The unconscious,” one proclaims with greater conviction the less one is capable of justifying the claim, “the unconscious takes time to reveal itself.” We quite agree. But we ask: what is its measure? Is it that of the universe of precision, to use the expression of Mr. Alexandre Koyré? Certainly, we live in this universe, but its advent for man is recent, dating precisely to the clock of Huyghens, that is to the year 1659, and the malaise of modern man does not indicate exactly that this precision is in itself a factor of liberation for him. Is this time of the fall of heavy bodies sacred in that it corresponds to the time of the stars, as posited in eternity by God, who—as Lichtenberg told us—winds our sundials? Perhaps we will form a better idea of it by comparing the time of creation of a symbolic object with the moment of inattention in which we let it fall?

Be that as it may, if the work of our function during this time remains problematic, we believe we have sufficiently highlighted the working function of what the patient accomplishes during it.

But the reality, whatever it may be, of this time then assumes a particular value: that of a sanction of the quality within this work.

Undoubtedly, on our side we also play a role of recording, assuming the function—fundamental in every symbolic exchange—of collecting what do kamo, man in his authenticity, calls “the speech that endures.”

Witness called to account for the sincerity of the subject, depository of the minutes of his discourse, reference for its accuracy, guarantor of its rectitude, guardian of his testament, notary of his codicils—the analyst participates as a scribe.

But he remains above all the master of the truth of which this discourse is the unfolding. He is, above all, the one who punctuates its dialectic, as we have said. And here he is apprehended as the judge of the value of this discourse. This has two consequences.

The suspension of the session cannot fail to be experienced by the subject as a punctuation in his progress. We know how he calculates its timing in order to articulate it with his own delays, or even his evasions; how he anticipates it, weighing it like a weapon, watching for it like a shelter.

The indifference with which the cut of timing interrupts moments of urgency in the subject may be fatal to the conclusion toward which his discourse was rushing—if not fixing a misunderstanding, at least providing a pretext for a retaliatory ruse.

It is remarkable that beginners seem more struck than we are by the effects of this factor.

It is a fact well known in the practice of texts of symbolic writing, whether biblical or Chinese canonical: the absence of punctuation is a source of ambiguity, punctuation once imposed fixes meaning, its change renews or overturns it, and, when faulty, it amounts to altering it.

Certainly, the neutrality we show by strictly applying this rule maintains the path of our non-action.

But this non-action itself has its limit—otherwise we would never intervene. And pushing it to the extreme on this single point does not maintain that path.

The danger announced at the mere mention of an obsessive formation on this subject is that of encountering the subject’s complicity. And this will find occasion to operate in types other than the obsessive himself. Nowhere, however, is it more clearly demonstrated than in understanding the meaning that “work” takes on for the obsessive. A meaning of forced labor that imposes itself even on his leisure. This meaning is supported by his subjective relation to the master, in that it is the master’s death he awaits.

The obsessive manifests, in effect, one of the attitudes that Hegel did not develop in his dialectic of the master and the slave. The slave shrank from the risk of death, where the opportunity for mastery was offered him in a contest of pure prestige. But since he knows he is mortal, he also knows that the master can die. From then on, he can accept to work for the master and to renounce enjoyment in the meantime—and, in the uncertainty of when the master will die, he waits.

Such is the intersubjective reason for the doubt and procrastination that are character traits in the obsessive.

However, all his work is carried out under the heading of this intention, and is thereby doubly alienating. For not only is the subject’s labor seized by another—which is the constitutive relation of all labor—but the subject’s recognition of his own essence in his work, in which this labor finds its reason, escapes him no less, for he himself “is not there”; he is in the anticipated moment of the master’s death, from which he will live, but pending which he identifies with the master as dead, and thus he is himself already dead.

Nevertheless, he strives to deceive the master by demonstrating the good intentions shown in his work. This is what the good children of the analytic catechism express in their blunt language when they say that the subject’s ego seeks to seduce his superego.

This intra-subjective formulation is immediately demystified when understood in the analytic relationship, where the subject’s working-through is in fact used to seduce the analyst.

It is no accident either that as soon as the dialectical progress approaches the questioning of the ego’s intentions in our subjects, the fantasy of the analyst’s death—often felt as fear, even anguish—never fails to arise.

And the subject then sets out again into an even more demonstrative elaboration of his “good will.”

How, then, could one doubt the effect of a marked disdain by the master for the product of such labor? The subject’s resistance may be utterly disconcerted by it.

From that moment, the alibi which had hitherto remained unconscious begins to be revealed to him, and he is seen passionately seeking the reason for so much effort.

We would not speak so boldly if we were not convinced that by experimenting—at a moment now brought to conclusion in our experience—with what have been called our short sessions, we have been able to bring to light in a particular male subject fantasies of anal pregnancy, with the dream of its resolution by cesarean section, within a timeframe where otherwise we would still be listening to his speculations on the art of Dostoevsky.

In any case, we are not here to defend this procedure, but to show that it has a precise dialectical meaning in its technical application.

And we are not alone in having noted that it ultimately converges with the technique designated under the name of Zen, which is applied as a means of revelation of the subject in the traditional asceticism of certain Far Eastern schools.

Without going to the extremes to which this technique leads—for they would contradict certain limitations that ours imposes on itself—a discreet application of its principle in analysis seems to us far more acceptable than some methods known as resistance analysis, insofar as it carries within itself no danger of alienating the subject.

For it breaks discourse only to deliver speech.

We are thus at the foot of the wall, the wall of language. We are in our place here—that is, on the same side as the patient—and it is on this wall, which is the same for both him and us, that we will try to respond to the echo of his speech.

Beyond this wall, there is nothing for us but outer darkness. Does this mean we are entirely masters of the situation? Certainly not, and on this point Freud has left us his testament concerning the negative therapeutic reaction.

The key to this mystery, it is said, lies in the instance of a primordial masochism—in other words, in a pure manifestation of that death instinct of which Freud proposed the enigma at the peak of his experience.

We cannot dismiss it, nor can we here postpone its examination.

For we may observe that a shared refusal of this doctrinal completion is found both in those who conduct analysis around a conception of the ego whose error we have denounced, and in those like Reich who go so far in the principle of seeking beyond speech the ineffable organic expression that, in order to free it from its armor as he does, might like him symbolize in the superposition of two wormlike forms—the astonishing diagram of which may be seen in his Character Analysis—the orgasmic induction he expects, as he does, from analysis.

A conjunction that may well allow us to augur favorably about the rigor of mental formations, once we have shown the profound connection between the notion of the death instinct and the problems of speech.

The notion of the death instinct, as soon as one considers it, presents itself as ironic, its meaning to be sought in the conjunction of two contradictory terms: instinct, in its most comprehensive sense, is the law that regulates in succession a cycle of behavior for the accomplishment of a vital function, and death appears first as the destruction of life.

Yet the definition given by Bichat, at the dawn of biology, of life as the set of forces resisting death, no less than the most modern conception found in Cannon’s notion of homeostasis as a function of a system maintaining its own equilibrium, are there to remind us that life and death are composed in a polar relation within the very phenomena attributed to life.

Hence, the congruence of the contrasting terms in “death instinct” with the phenomena of repetition to which Freud connects them under the label of automatism should not pose difficulty if this were a biological notion.

Everyone senses that this is not the case, and this is what makes many of us stumble over its problem. The fact that many stop at the apparent incompatibility of these terms might even hold our attention, in that it manifests a dialectical innocence that would surely be disconcerted by the classically posed semantic problem in the determinative expression: a hamlet on the Ganges, by which Hindu aesthetics illustrates the second form of the resonances of language[30].

We must approach this notion through its resonances in what we will call the poetics of the Freudian work—the first avenue for penetrating its meaning, and an essential dimension for understanding the dialectical reverberation from the origins of the work to the apex it marks. We must recall, for example, that Freud testifies to having found his medical vocation in the call he heard during a public reading of Goethe’s famous Hymn to Nature, that is, in this text rediscovered by a friend, where the poet, at the decline of his life, accepted recognition of a putative child from the earliest effusions of his pen.

At the other end of Freud’s life, we find in the article on analysis as finite or infinite, the explicit reference of his new conception to the conflict of the two principles to which Empedocles of Agrigento, in the 5th century B.C.—within the Presocratic indistinction of nature and spirit—subjected the alternations of universal life.

These two facts are sufficient indication to us that this is a myth of the dyad, the promotion of which in Plato is in fact evoked in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, a myth that cannot be understood in the subjectivity of modern man except by elevating it to the negativity of the judgment in which it is inscribed.

That is to say, just as the automatism of repetition—which is equally misrecognized when one attempts to divide its terms—aims at nothing other than the temporalizing historicity of the transference experience, so too the death instinct essentially expresses the limit of the subject’s historical function. This limit is death—not as the eventual termination of an individual’s life, nor as an empirical certainty for the subject, but, in the formulation given by Heidegger, as “the possibility most proper, unconditional, unsurpassable, certain, and as such indeterminate of the subject,” understood as the subject defined by its historicity.

Indeed, this limit is present at every moment in the accomplished aspect of that history. It represents the past in its absolutely real form—that is, not the physical past whose existence is abolished, nor the epic past perfected in the work of memory, nor the historical past where man finds the guarantor of his future, but the past that is always present in the eternal return.

Such is the dead, whom subjectivity makes its partner in the triad instituted by its mediation within the universal conflict of Philia, love, and Neikos, discord.

There is then no longer any need to resort to the outdated notion of primordial masochism to understand the reason for the repetitive games in which subjectivity simultaneously forges the mastery of its dereliction and the birth of the symbol.

These are the games of concealment that Freud, in a moment of genius, brought into view so that we might recognize in them that the moment desire becomes human is also the moment the child is born into language.

We may now grasp that the subject not only masters its deprivation by assuming it, but also elevates its desire to a secondary power. For its action destroys the object that it makes appear and disappear in the anticipatory provocation of its absence and presence. It thus negates the field of forces of desire in order to become its own object. And this object, taking shape immediately in the symbolic pair of two elementary ejaculations, announces in the subject the diachronic integration of the dichotomy of phonemes, whose synchronic structure is offered by existing language for its assimilation; and so the child begins to engage in the concrete discourse system of its environment, by more or less approximately reproducing in its Fort! and Da! the words it receives.

Fort! Da!—Already in his solitude, the desire of the little human has become the desire of another, of an alter ego who dominates him and whose object of desire is now his own suffering.

Whether the child addresses an imaginary or real partner, he will see him equally obey the negativity of his discourse, and his call, having the effect of making the partner withdraw, will lead him to seek in a banishing injunction the provocation of a return that brings him back to his desire.

Thus the symbol first manifests itself as the murder of the thing, and this death constitutes, within the subject, the eternalization of his desire.

The first symbol in which we recognize humanity in its remnants is the tomb, and the mediation of death is recognizable in every relationship where man comes to the life of his history.

The only life that endures and is true, since it is transmitted without being lost in the perpetuated tradition from subject to subject. How can one not see the height by which it transcends that life inherited by the animal, in which the individual vanishes into the species, since no memorial distinguishes its ephemeral appearance from that which will reproduce it in the invariability of the type. Excepting, indeed, those hypothetical mutations of the phylum that would require a subjectivity which man has not yet approached from within—nothing, except the experiences in which man includes it, distinguishes one rat from the rat, one horse from the horse, nothing except this inconsistent passage from life to death—while Empedocles, throwing himself into Mount Etna, leaves forever present in the memory of men that symbolic act of his being-for-death.

Man’s freedom is entirely inscribed within the constitutive triangle of the renunciation he imposes on the desire of the other by the threat of death for the enjoyment of the fruits of his servitude—the willing sacrifice of his life for the reasons that give human life its measure—and the suicidal renunciation of the vanquished who, by frustrating the master of his victory, abandons him to his inhuman solitude.

Of these figures of death, the third is the supreme detour by which the immediate particularity of desire, reclaiming its ineffable form, finds in negation a final triumph. And we must recognize its meaning, for we are dealing with it. It is not, in fact, a perversion of instinct, but that desperate affirmation of life which is the purest form in which we recognize the death instinct.

The subject says: “No!” to this game of intersubjective tag in which desire is recognized for a moment only to be lost in a will that is the will of the other. Patiently, he withdraws his precarious life from the sheep-like aggregations of the Eros of the symbol to affirm it finally in a wordless curse.

Thus, when we aim to reach within the subject that which precedes the serial play of speech, and that which is primordial to the birth of symbols, we find it in death, from which his existence derives all its meaning. It is indeed as desire for death that the subject asserts himself for others; if he identifies with the other, it is by freezing him in the metamorphosis of his essential image, and any being for him is never evoked except among the shadows of death.

To say that this mortal sense reveals in speech a center external to language is more than a metaphor—it manifests a structure. This structure differs from the spatialization of a circumference or a sphere, within which one likes to schematize the limits of the living and its environment: it instead corresponds to that relational group which symbolic logic topologically designates as a ring.

To provide an intuitive representation of it, it seems that rather than referring to the flatness of a zone, one must resort to the three-dimensional form of a torus, insofar as its peripheral exteriority and its central exteriority constitute but one and the same region.

This schema satisfies the endless circularity of the dialectical process that occurs when the subject realizes his solitude, whether in the vital ambiguity of immediate desire, or in the full assumption of his being-for-death.

But at the same time, we can grasp that the dialectic is not individual, and that the question of the end of analysis is that of the moment when the subject’s satisfaction finds its realization in the satisfaction of each, that is, of all those he joins in a human endeavor. Of all those proposed in our century, the work of the psychoanalyst is perhaps the highest because it functions as a mediator between the man of concern and the subject of absolute knowledge. This is also why it demands a long subjective asceticism, one that will never be interrupted—the end of didactic analysis itself not being separable from the subject’s engagement in his practice.

Let the one who cannot reach the subjectivity of his time on the horizon rather renounce it. For how could one make his being the axis of so many lives if he knows nothing of the dialectic that binds him with these lives in a symbolic movement? Let him know well the spiral in which his era carries him within the ongoing work of Babel, and let him know his function as interpreter in the discord of languages. For the darkness of the mundus around which the immense tower coils, let him leave it to mystical vision to see there rising on an eternal wood the rotting serpent of life.

Let them laugh, if they accuse these remarks of diverting the meaning of Freud’s work from the biological foundations he might have wished for it, toward the cultural references that pervade it. We are not here to preach to you the doctrine of factor b, by which one would designate the former, nor of factor c, where one would recognize the latter. We have only wished to remind you of the a, b, c—forgotten—of the structure of language, and to have you spell out once more the b-a, ba, of speech.

For what recipe would guide you in a technique that is composed of one and draws its effects from the other, if you did not recognize in both their domain and their function?

The psychoanalytic experience has rediscovered in man the imperative of the verb as the law that shaped him in its image. It wields the poetic function of language to provide symbolic mediation for his desire. Let it finally make you understand that it is in the gift of speech that all the reality of its effects resides; for it is by the path of this gift that all reality has come to man and through its continued act that he maintains it.

If the domain defined by this gift of speech is sufficient for your action as for your knowledge, it will also suffice for your devotion. For it offers it a privileged field.

When the Devas, the men, and the Asuras, we read in the first Brâhmana of the fifth lesson of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, completed their novitiate with Prajāpati, they offered him this prayer: “Speak to us.”

“Da,” said Prajāpati, the god of thunder. “Have you heard me?” And the Devas replied: “You said to us: Damyata, restrain yourselves,”—the sacred text meaning that the higher powers submit to the law of speech.

“Da,” said Prajāpati, the god of thunder. “Have you heard me?” And the men replied: “You said to us: Datta, give,”—the sacred text meaning that men recognize themselves through the gift of speech.

“Da,” said Prajāpati, the god of thunder. “Have you heard me?” And the Asuras replied: “You said to us: Dayadhvam, have compassion,”—the sacred text meaning that the lower powers resonate with the invocation of speech.

This, the text continues, is what the divine voice makes heard in thunder: Restraint, giving, compassion. Da da da.

For Prajāpati replies to all: “You have heard me.”

[1]. See Logical time and the assertion of anticipated certainty, in Cahiers d’art, 1945.

[2]. Ferenczi, Confusion of tongues between the adult and the child, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 1949, XXX, IV, pp. 225–230.

[3]. This is the cross of a deviation as much practical as theoretical. For to identify the ego with the subject’s discipline is to confuse imaginary isolation with mastery over instincts. It is thereby to expose oneself to errors of judgment in conducting treatment: for instance, aiming to strengthen the ego in many neuroses motivated by its overly strong structure, which is a dead-end path. Have we not read, under the pen of our friend Michael Balint, that an ego strengthening should be favorable to the subject suffering from ejaculatio praecox, because it would allow a longer suspension of his desire? But how could this be thought, if it is precisely the fact that his desire is suspended in the imaginary function of the ego that causes the short-circuiting of the act, which psychoanalytic clinic clearly shows is linked to narcissistic identification with the partner?

[4]. This, in the very work that receives our accolade at the end of our introduction.

[5]. G. W., XII, p. 71, Five Psychoanalyses, p. 356, weak translation “of the term”.

[6]. G. W., XII, p. 72, n. 1, last lines. In this note, the notion of Nachträglichkeit is underlined. Five Psychoanalyses, p. 356, n. 1.

[7]. In an article accessible to even the least demanding French reader, since it appeared in Revue neurologique, the collection of which is usually found in hospital libraries.

[8]. We borrow these terms from the late Edouard Pichon who, both in the guidance he gave for the emergence of our discipline and in the insights that led him through the darkness of individuals, showed a kind of divination we can attribute only to his practice of semantics.

[9]. Same as the previous note.

[10]. Cf. Gegenwunschträume, in Die Traumdeutung, G. W., II, pp. 156–157 and pp. 163–164. English trans., Standard Edition, IV, p. 151 and pp. 157–158. French trans., Alcan ed., p. 110 and p. 146.

[11]. Cf. among others: Oberndorf (C. I.), Unsatisfactory results of psychoanalytic therapy, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 19, pp. 393–407.

[12]. Cf. Do Kamo, by Maurice Leenhardt, chap. IX and X.

[13]. Jules H. Massermann, Language, behavior and dynamic psychiatry, in International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 1944, 1 and 2, pp. 1–8.

[14]. Aphorism by Lichtenberg: “A madman who imagines himself a prince differs from a prince who truly is one only in that the latter is a negative prince, while the former is a negative madman. Considered without their signs, they are alike.”

[15]. To obtain immediate subjective confirmation of this remark by Hegel, it suffices to have seen, in the recent epidemic, a blind rabbit in the middle of the road, raising toward the setting sun the emptiness of his changed vision turned into a gaze: he is human unto the tragic.

[16]. The lines above and below show the meaning we give to this term.

[17]. Reich’s error, to which we shall return, made him take a coat of arms for an armor.

[18]. Cf. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Language and the analysis of social laws, in American Anthropologist, vol. 53, no. 2, April–June 1951, pp. 155–163.

[19]. Cf. on the Galilean hypothesis and on Huygens’ clock: An experiment in measurement, by Alexandre Koyré, in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 97, April 1953.

[20]. This refers to the teaching of Abhinavagupta in the 10th century. Cf. the work of Dr. Kanti Chandra Pandey: Indian Aesthetics, in Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series, Studies, vol. II, Benares, 1950.

[21]. Ernst Kris, Ego psychology and interpretation, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, XX, no. 1, January 1951, pp. 15–29, cf. passage cited pp. 27–28.

[22]. This is for those who can still hear, after having sought in Littré the justification of a theory that makes of speech a “side action,” by the translation it gives of the Greek parabolê (but why not “action toward”?) without having at the same time noticed that if this word indeed designates what it means, it is due to the sermonic usage that reserves the word verbe, since the 10th century, for the incarnate Logos.

[23]. Each language has its mode of transmission, and the legitimacy of such inquiries being founded on their success, it is not forbidden to put them to moralizing use. Consider, for example, the sentence we pinned as an epigraph to our preface. Its style, burdened with redundancies, may strike you as flat. But lighten it, and its boldness will offer itself to the enthusiasm it deserves.

Hear now:

“Parfaupe ouclaspa nannanbryle anaphi ologi psysoscline ixispad anlana – égniakune n’rbiol’ ô blijouter têtumaine ennouconç’…”

Here at last is the purity of its message revealed. Meaning lifts its head, the confession of being takes shape, and our triumphant spirit bequeaths its immortal imprint to the future.

[24]. Edward Glover, The therapeutic effect of inexact interpretation: a contribution to the theory of suggestion, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, XII, p. 4.

[25]. Robert Fliess, Silence and verbalization: A supplement to the theory of the “analytic rule”, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, XXX, p. 1.

[26]. Equivalent here for us to the term Zwangsbefürchtung, which must be broken down without losing any of the semantic richness of the German language.

[27]. This term refers to a Celtic custom, still in practice among certain biblical sects in America, which allows engaged couples—and even a passing guest together with the daughter of the household—to sleep in the same bed, on the condition that they keep their clothes on. The word derives its meaning from the fact that the girl is usually wrapped up in sheets.

(De Quincey mentions it. See also the book by Aurand the Younger on this practice in the Amish sect.)

Thus the myth of Tristan and Isolde, or even the complex it represents, would henceforth sponsor the psychoanalyst in his quest for the soul promised to mystifying nuptials through the exhaustion of its instinctual fantasies.

[28]. For this is the correct translation of the two terms which have been translated, with that infallibility in mistranslation we have already pointed out, as “terminated analysis and interminable analysis”.

[29]. Cf. Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights, II, 4: “In a trial, when it is necessary to determine who shall be in charge of the prosecution, and two or more individuals request to be registered for that office, the judgment by which the court appoints the accuser is called divination… This word comes from the fact that the accuser and the accused are two correlative things, which cannot exist one without the other, and since the type of judgment in question presents an accused without an accuser, one must resort to divination to find what the case does not supply, what remains unknown—namely, the accuser.”

[30]. This is the form called Laksanalaksana.

[31]. It is understood here that this is not about those “gifts” which novices are always supposedly lacking, but rather of a gift which, indeed, they more often than not truly lack.