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(All parts in English)

I announced for this year that I would address transference, its subjective disparity. It is not a term I chose easily. It essentially underlines something that goes further than the simple notion of dissymmetry between subjects. It asserts in the very title, it protests, if I may say so, from the outset, against the idea that intersubjectivity alone could provide the framework in which the phenomenon is inscribed.

There are words more or less convenient depending on the language. It is indeed the term ‘impair’, odd, oddity, the subjective imparity of transference, what it essentially contains of imparity, that I am looking for some equivalent. There is no term, apart from the very word ‘imparity’, which is not in use in French, to designate it.

‘In its alleged situation’ my title goes on to say, indicating thereby some reference to this effort in recent years in analysis to organize, around the notion of ‘situation’, what takes place in the analytic cure. The very word ‘alleged’ is there to say once more that I take a contrary position, at least a corrective one, in relation to this effort.

I do not believe one can say of analysis purely and simply that there is a situation there. If there is one, it is one of which it can also be said: it is not a situation, or again: it is a false situation. Everything that presents itself as technique must be inscribed as referred to these principles, to this search for principles which is already evoked in the indication of these differences, and, to say it all, in a just topology, in a rectification of what is at stake which is commonly implied in the usage we make every day, theoretically, of the notion of transference. That is to say, of something, ultimately, which must be referred to an experience, which we know very well, at least to the extent that we have, in some way, practiced the analytic experience.

I point out that it took me a long time to come to this core of our experience. Depending on the point from which one dates this seminar, which is the one in which I have been guiding a certain number of you for a few years, depending on the date at which one has it begin, it is in the eighth or in the tenth year that I address transference. I think you will see that this long delay was not without reason. Let us begin, then…at the beginning: everyone attributes to me some paraphrase of the formula:

– ‘In the beginning was the Word’, [Gospel according to John],

– ‘Im Anfang war die Tat’ says another, [‘In the beginning was the deed’ : Goethe, Faust, I, 3]

– and for a third: ‘first—that is, at the beginning of the human world—first was praxis’ [Marx: Theses on Feuerbach].

Here are three statements that are apparently incompatible.

In truth, what matters from the place where we stand to decide—from the analytic experience—is not their value as statements, but, if I may say so: their value as enunciation, or even as announcement, I mean, in what way they bring forth the ex nihilo proper to every creation and show its intimate link with the evocation of speech. At this level, all of them clearly manifest that they fall within the first statement: ‘In the beginning was the Word’.

If I evoke this, it is to distinguish from it what I am saying, this point from which I will depart to confront this more opaque term, this core of our experience which is transference. I intend to start, I want to start, I will try, beginning with all the necessary clumsiness, to begin today around this: that the term ‘In the beginning’ certainly has another meaning:

at the beginning of the analytic experience, let us recall, there was love.

This beginning is something other than that transparency to itself of the enunciation which gave meaning to the formulas just mentioned. Here it is a thick, confused beginning. It is a beginning not of creation but of formation—and I will come to this in a moment—at the historical point where what is already psychoanalysis is born, and which Anna O. herself baptized, in the inaugural observation of the Studien Über Hysterie, with the term ‘talking cure’ or again ‘chimney sweeping’, ‘chimney sweeping’.

But before coming to this, I want to recall for a moment, for those who were not here last year, some of the terms around which our exploration of what I called the Ethics of psychoanalysis revolved. What I wanted to explain to you last year was—if one can say so, to refer to the term ‘creation’ I just used—the creationist structure of the human ἦθος [êthos] as such, the ex nihilo that persists at its core, which makes—for using a term of FREUD—the kernel of our being, Kern unseres Wesen.

I wanted to show that this ἦθος [êthos] wraps itself around this ex nihilo as persisting in an impenetrable void. To approach it, to designate this impenetrable character, I began—you remember—by a critique which ended in expressly rejecting what you will allow me to call—at least those who have heard me will forgive me—Plato’s Schwärmerei [German for rapture, enthusiasm, or reverie—here, dreamlike fantasy towards something, with a critical connotation, especially religious or fanatical, as Kant uses it]. Schwärmerei in German, for those who do not know, means reverie, fantasy directed toward some enthusiasm, and more specifically toward something situated in, or directed towards, superstition, fanaticism, in short the critical connotation in the register of religious orientation added by history. In the texts of KANT, the term Schwärmerei clearly has this inflection.

What I call Plato’s Schwärmerei is his projecting onto what I call the impenetrable void the idea of the ‘sovereign good’. Let us say it is simply a matter of indicating the path traversed, which, with more or less success surely, I have tried to pursue in a formal intention. I have tried to pursue what results from rejecting the Platonic notion of the ‘sovereign good’ occupying the center of our being.

No doubt to reconnect with our experience, but in a critical approach, I proceeded in part from what can be called the Aristotelian conversion, in relation to Plato, who, without a doubt, is for us surpassed on the ethical level. But at the point we have reached—of having to show the historical fate of ethical notions beginning with Plato—certainly the Aristotelian reference: the Nicomachean Ethics is essential.

I have shown that it is difficult to follow what it contains, with a decisive step in the construction of ethical reflection, not to see that insofar as it maintains the notion of ‘sovereign good’, it profoundly changes its meaning. It makes it, through an inverse movement of reflection, consist in the contemplation of the stars, this outermost sphere of the existing world, absolute, uncreated, incorruptible.

It is precisely because for us, this sphere is decisively volatilized in the dusting of galaxies—which is the latest term of our cosmological investigation—that we can take the Aristotelian reference as a critical point of what, in the ancient tradition, at the point we have now reached, is the notion of ‘sovereign good’.

We have been led by this step to the foot of the wall, of the wall—always the same since an ethical reflection has tried to be elaborated. It is that we must or must not assume that from which ethical reflection, ethical thought has never been able to disentangle itself, namely that there is no ‘good’ (good, gut), no pleasure, except from that point.

We are left to seek what is the principle of the ‘Whol tat’, the principle of good action. What it infers allows one to say that perhaps it is not simply the ‘b.a.’, the good action, even if it is brought to the Kantian power of the universal maxim. If we must take seriously the Freudian denunciation of the fallacy of these so-called moral satisfactions, insofar as an aggressiveness is concealed there which achieves this performance of robbing the one who exercises it of his enjoyment, while endlessly reverberating on his social partners his wrongdoing, what these long ‘circumstantial conditionals’ indicate is exactly the equivalent of Civilization and Its Discontents in FREUD’s work.

Then one must ask by what means to operate honestly with desire, that is, how to preserve desire with this act, where it ordinarily finds its collapse rather than its realization, and which at best presents to desire only its exploit, its heroic deed, how to preserve desire, to preserve what one can call a simple or wholesome relation of desire to this act. Let us not mince words as to what wholesome means in the sense of Freudian experience: it means cleared, as cleared as possible, of this infection which in our eyes—but not only in our eyes, in the eyes of all since they first open to ethical reflection—this infection which is the seething background of all social establishment as such.

This of course supposes that psychoanalysis, in its very operational manual, does not respect what I would call this ‘film’, this newly invented ‘cataract’, this moral wound, this form of blindness constituted by a certain practice from the so-called sociological point of view. I will not dwell on this.

And even, to recall what a certain recent encounter presented to me about the vain, and at the same time scandalous, outcome of that sort of research which claims to reduce an experience such as that of the unconscious to the reference of two, three, or even four so-called sociological models, my irritation—which was great, I must say—subsided, but I will leave the authors of such exercises to the bridge of asses [pont aux ânes—idiom for a basic test, or something only the naïve would be concerned with] who wish to collect them.

It is also quite clear that, in speaking in these terms of sociology, I am not referring to that kind of meditation where the reflection of a LÉVI-STRAUSS is situated, insofar as—consult his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France—it expressly refers, regarding societies, to an ethical meditation on social practice. The double reference to a cultural norm more or less mythically situated in the Neolithic, and to the political meditation of ROUSSEAU on the other hand, is sufficiently indicative here. But let us leave this aside, for it does not concern us.

I will recall only that it is by way of the strictly ethical reference constituted by the wild reflection of SADE, that it is on the insulting paths of Sadian enjoyment that I showed you one possible access to that properly tragic frontier where the Freudian highlands [oberland—wordplay: a borderland or high country of Freud] are located, that it is within what some of you have called ‘between two deaths’—a very exact term to designate the field where everything that happens in the universe mapped out by SOPHOCLES is expressly articulated as such, and not only in the adventure of Oedipus the King—that this phenomenon is situated, of which I think I can say that we have introduced a way of marking it out in the ethical tradition, in the reflection on the motives and motivations of the ‘good’.

This marking out, insofar as I have properly designated it as being that of ‘beauty’ in so far as it adorns, functions to constitute the last barrier before access to the final Thing, to the deadly Thing, to that point where Freudian meditation has come to make its last confession under the term of the death drive.

I beg your pardon for thinking I ought to sketch—though in an abbreviated way, but making up a long detour—this brief summary of what we said last year. This detour was necessary to recall, at the origin of what we are about to say, that the term at which we stopped regarding the function of beauty… for I do not need, I think, for most of you, to evoke what is constituted by this term of the beautiful and of beauty at this point of inflection of what I have called Platonic Schwärmerei… that for the moment, I ask you, as a hypothesis, to regard it as bringing us to the level of an adventure if not psychological, at least individual, to regard it as the effect of the mourning that one may well call immortal—since it is at the very source of everything that has since been articulated in our tradition on the idea of immortality—the immortal mourning of the one who incarnated that wager of sustaining his question, which is only the question of anyone who speaks, at the point where he, that one, received it from his own demon—according to our formula: ‘in an inverted form’—I have named him: SOCRATES. Socrates thus set at the origin, let us say it right away, of the longest transference—which would give all its weight to that formula—that the history of thought has known.

For I tell you right away, and I intend to make it felt, the secret of SOCRATES will be behind everything we say this year about transference. This secret, SOCRATES confessed it. But it is not because one confesses it that a secret ceases to be a secret. SOCRATES claims to know nothing, except knowing how to recognize what love is and, he tells us—I refer to the testimony of PLATO, specifically in the Lysis—to know infallibly, wherever he encounters them, who is the lover and who is the beloved. I believe this is at paragraph 204c. There are many references to this in SOCRATES’ references to love.

[‘O Hippothales, son of Hieronymus! I said, there is no longer any need to tell me whether you love or not. I see well that not only do you love, but that this love has already carried you far. I am not, if you will, good for much,[204c] nor very clever; but a gift that heaven has given me, no doubt, is to know at the first moment, who is the lover and who is the beloved.’
‘ὦ παῖ Ἱερωνύμου Ἱππόθαλες, τοῦτο μὲν μηκέτι εἴπῃς, εἴτε ἐρᾷς του εἴτε μή· οἶδα γὰρ ὅτι οὐ μόνον ἐρᾷς, ἀλλὰ καὶ πόρρω ἤδη εἶ πορευόμενος τοῦ ἔρωτος. Εἰμὶ δ’ ἐγὼ τὰ μὲν ἄλλα φαῦλος [204c] καὶ ἄχρηστος, τοῦτο δέ μοί πως ἐκ θεοῦ δέδοται, ταχὺ οἵῳ τ’ εἶναι γνῶναι ἐρῶντά τε καὶ ἐρώμενον.’]

And now we find ourselves brought back to our starting point insofar as I intend to emphasize it today.

However modest or indecent may be the veil that is kept half-drawn over this ‘inaugural accident’ that turned the eminent BREUER away from giving to the first, nonetheless sensational, experience of the ‘talking cure’ all its consequences, it remains very evident that this ‘accident’ was a love story. That this love story did not exist only on the side of the patient is also absolutely not in doubt.

It is not enough to say, in the exquisitely restrained terms that are ours—as M. JONES does on such and such a page of his first volume of FREUD’s biography—that certainly BREUER must have been the victim of what we call, says JONES, a somewhat pronounced counter-transference. It is perfectly clear that BREUER loved his patient. The most obvious proof of this is only what is, in such a case, the very bourgeois outcome: the return to a conjugal fervor revived on this occasion, the urgent trip to Venice, with even as a result—what JONES tells us—namely the fruit of a new little girl added to the family, whose end, rather sadly in this connection, JONES tells us was to coincide, many years later, with the catastrophic irruption of the Nazis into Vienna.

There is no need to be ironic about these sorts of accidents. Unless, of course, for what they may present as typical in relation to a certain particular style of so-called ‘bourgeois’ relations with love, with this need, this necessity of an awakening concerning this neglect of the heart which harmonizes so well with the type of abnegation where bourgeois duty is inscribed. That is not the important thing.

But it matters little whether he resisted or not! What we should rather bless in this moment is the divorce already inscribed more than ten years in advance… since it was in 1882 that this took place and it would only be ten, then fifteen years later for FREUD’s experience to lead to the work of the Studien Über Hysterie written with BREUER… to bless the divorce between BREUER and FREUD.

For it is all there: the little Eros—whose mischief first struck BREUER, at the most sudden of his surprise and forced him to flee—the little Eros finds his master in the second: FREUD. And why? I could say, let me amuse myself for a moment, that it is because for FREUD the retreat was cut off: element of the same context in which he was the follower of intransigent loves—as we know since we have his correspondence with his fiancée.

FREUD meets ideal women who respond to him in the physical manner of the hedgehog. “Sie sträuben sich”—as FREUD writes in the dream of Irma, where the allusions to his own wife are neither obvious nor admitted—“they are always against the grain”. She appears in any case as an element of the permanent intention that FREUD reveals to us of his thirst, the Frau Professor herself, at times the object of JONES’s wonder, who nevertheless, if I am to believe my information, knew what it meant to behave oneself.

That would be a curious common denominator with SOCRATES, whom you know also had, at home, a difficult shrew [Xanthippe]. The difference between the two, to be sure, would be that of this “show otter” whose profile ARISTOPHANES showed us, a profile of a Lysistrata-like weasel whose bite we must feel in the replies of ARISTOPHANES. Simple difference of scent. That is enough on this subject. And all the same I will say that I think there is only an incidental reference here and that, to say it all, this fact regarding conjugal existence is by no means indispensable—rest assured, each of you—to your good conduct. We must seek further for the mystery at stake.

Unlike BREUER—whatever the cause—FREUD chooses as his approach that which makes him the master of the formidable little god [Eros]. He chooses, like SOCRATES, to serve him in order to use him. This is precisely the point where all our problems will begin. Yet it was necessary to underline this using Eros. And to use him for what? That is indeed why I had to remind you of the points of reference from our articulation last year: to use him for the ‘good’. We know that the domain of Eros goes infinitely further than any field that this ‘good’ can cover, at least we take this as established.

You see that the problems posed for us by transference are only beginning here. And this is, moreover, something perpetually present in your mind—it is everyday language, common discourse regarding analysis, regarding transference—you must have in no way, neither preconceived nor permanent, as the first term of the aim of your action, the ‘good’, alleged or not, of your patient, but precisely his eros. I do not think I should fail to recall—once more here—what unites to the maximum of the scandalous the Socratic initiative with the Freudian initiative, by bringing together their outcome in the duplicity of those terms where it is expressed in a condensed way as more or less this: SOCRATES chooses to ‘serve eros in order to use him’ or by using him.

This led him very far—note it—to a “very far” that one strives to mask by making it a pure and simple “accident” of what I just now called “the seething background of social infection”. But is it not doing him an injustice, not giving him his due, to believe it: to believe that he did not know perfectly well that he was indeed going against the whole social order in the midst of which he inscribed his daily practice, this truly insane, scandalous behavior, whatever merit the devotion of his disciples may have subsequently attributed to it, by highlighting the heroic sides of SOCRATES’ behavior.

It is clear that they could do nothing but record what is the major characteristic and which PLATO himself qualified with a word that has remained famous among those who have approached the problem of SOCRATES, it is his ἀτοπία [atopia, unclassifiable, strange place]… in the order of the city, no healthy beliefs if they are not verified… in everything that assures the equilibrium of the city, not only does SOCRATES have no place, but he is nowhere.

And what wonder is there if such a vigorous action, in its unclassifiable character—so vigorous that it still vibrates even to us—has taken its place. What wonder is there if it led to this death sentence, that is to say to death in the most real way, as clearly as possible, as inflicted at an hour chosen in advance with the consent of all and for the good of all, and after all, centuries have never since been able to decide whether the sanction was just or unjust.

From where does destiny go—a destiny that it seems to me is not an exaggeration to consider as necessary, and not extraordinary—for SOCRATES? FREUD on the other hand: is it not in the rigor of his path that he discovered the death drive, that is, something also very scandalous, without doubt less costly for the individual? Is that really a true difference?

SOCRATES—as formal logic has repeated for centuries, not without reason in its insistence—SOCRATES is mortal, so he had to die one day. It is not that FREUD died peacefully in his bed that matters to us here. I have tried to show you the convergence of what is outlined here with the Sadian aspiration.

What is distinguished here is this idea of eternal death—of death inasmuch as it makes being itself its detour, without our being able to know if this is sense or nonsense—and equally the other, that of bodies. The second is that of those who uncompromisingly follow eros, eros by which bodies join together: with PLATO in a single soul, with FREUD without a soul at all, but in any case in a single Eros inasmuch as it unites unitarily.

Of course, you could interrupt me here. Where am I taking you? This Eros, of course, you grant me, is the same in both cases, even if it disturbs us.
– But these two deaths, what have you to do bringing them back to us, this boat from last year?
– Are you still thinking of making us cross what, the river that separates them?
– Are we in the death drive or in dialectic?

I answer you: Yes! Yes, if one as much as the other brings us to astonishment. For of course, I am willing to admit that I am getting lost, that after all I do not have to bring you to the ultimate impasses, that I will make you astonished—if you are not already—if not by SOCRATES, then at least by FREUD at the starting point.

For even these impasses, it can be shown that they are easy to resolve if you will simply not be astonished at anything. It suffices that you take as a starting point something as simple as hello, as clear as rock: intersubjectivity for example. I intersubject you, you intersubject me by the chin, the first who laughs gets a slap, and well deserved! For, as they say, who does not see that FREUD failed to recognize that there is nothing else in the constant sado-masochistic relation? Narcissism explains everything. And people address me: “Were you not about to say it?”

It must be said that even then I was already resistant to the function of his wound, to narcissism, but so what! And people will also say that my untimely SOCRATES should have gone back to this intersubjectivity too. For SOCRATES, all in all, had only one fault:
– it was to violate the pace by which we must always regulate ourselves, to not return to the law of the masses, which everyone knows one must wait for before lifting a finger on the terrain of justice, for the masses will necessarily arrive there tomorrow [misfortunes of the agora].

So this is how astonishment is settled, debited to the account of fault, mistakes will never be anything but judicial errors, this without prejudice to personal motivations. Whatever need I may have to add to it, as I always do and which, of course, is to be found in my taste for making things beautiful—we fall back on our feet—it is my perverse inclination, therefore my sophistry may be superfluous. So we will start again from A and I will resume—touching ground—the force of litotes to aim so that you will be only slightly surprised.

Is it intersubjectivity—indeed that which is most foreign to the analytic encounter—which would show, for its part, that we evade it, sure that it must be avoided? Freudian experience freezes as soon as it appears, it flourishes only from its absence. The ‘doctor’ and the ‘patient’—as we say: a famous relationship about which much fuss is made—are they going to intersubject each other as much as they can? Perhaps! But it can be said in this sense that neither of them is at ease:

– “Is he saying this for my comfort or to please me?” thinks one.
– “Does he want to trick me?” thinks the other.

Even the ‘shepherd-shepherdess’ relation, if it begins thus, starts off badly. It is condemned, if it stays there, to end up in nothing. That is exactly why these two relationships ‘doctor-patient, shepherd-shepherdess’ must at all costs differ from diplomatic negotiation and from the ambush.

What is called ‘poker’, this poker whose theory—no offense to Mr. Henri LEFEBVRE—is not to be found in the work of Mr. Von NEUMANN, as he nevertheless recently claimed, so that—given my benevolence!—I can only conclude one thing: that he knows of VON NEUMANN’s theory only the title that is in the HERMANN catalog.

It is true that at the same time Mr. Henri LEFEBVRE places on the same level of poker philosophical discussion itself, to which we were subject. Obviously, if it is not his right, after all I can only leave him to the return of his merit.

To return to the idea of our ‘intersubjective couple’, my first concern as an analyst will be not to put myself in the situation where my patient would even have to share such reflections with me, and the simplest way to spare him that is precisely to avoid any attitude that could be seen as offering comfort, and even more so, seduction. I will also absolutely avoid, if it should happen that such an attitude escapes me as such, and if I see him doing it, at the very least I can only do so to the extent that I emphasize that it is without his knowing that I suppose he does it. Yet I will still have to take precautions to avoid any misunderstanding, that is, to avoid seeming to ascribe to him a scheming that is however little calculated.

So it is not even to say that intersubjectivity would in analysis be taken up only in a movement that would raise it to a second power, as if the analyst were waiting for the analysand to get caught up so that he—the analyst—could then outwit him. This intersubjectivity is properly reserved, or better yet, postponed sine die, to let another engagement appear whose characteristic is precisely to be, essentially, transference. The patient himself knows it, calls for it, wants to be surprised elsewhere.

You will say that this is another aspect of intersubjectivity, even—a curious thing—in the fact that it is I myself who would have opened the way here. But wherever this initiative is placed, it can only be imputed to me there in reverse. And indeed, if I had not formalized in the position of bridge players the subjective alterities at play in the analytic position, no one could have pretended to see me taking a convergent step with the scheme of false boldness that RICKMAN once devised under the name of two-body psychology.

Such theories always enjoy a certain success in the amphibious breathing-space where analytic thought sustains itself. For them to succeed, only two conditions are needed. First, that they are supposed to come from zones of respectable scientific activity, from which a little shine may return, albeit easily faded, to psychoanalysis. This was the case here: RICKMAN was a man who, shortly after the war, had that sort of beneficial aura of having been involved in the Russian revolution, which was supposed to put him in the full experience of interpsychology.

The second reason for this success was that it in no way disturbed the routine of analysis. And so, of course, it creates a path for mental switches that bring us back to the garage. But at least the label of two-body psychology could still have had a meaning: to wake us up—it is precisely the meaning that is completely elided, notice, in the use of the formula—it should have evoked what the attraction of bodies might have to do with the so-called analytic situation.

It is curious that we have to pass through the Socratic reference to see its scope. In SOCRATES—I mean where he is made to speak—this reference to ‘the beauty of bodies’ is permanent. It is, so to speak, the driving force in this movement of questioning in which—notice—we have not even yet entered, where we do not yet even know how the roles of lover and beloved are distributed.

Still—there, at least—things are called by their name, and around them we can make useful remarks. If indeed something in the passionate, dialectical questioning that animates this beginning is related to the body, it must be said that in analysis, this is emphasized by traits whose accent takes its weight from their particularly negative effect. That analysts themselves—I hope no one here will feel targeted—are not recommended for their bodily attractiveness, is what Socratic ugliness gives its most noble precedent, while at the same time reminding us that this is not at all an obstacle to love.

But it is still necessary to highlight something, that the physical ideal of the psychoanalyst—at least as it is modeled in the imagination of the masses—entails an addition of obtuse thickness and limited boorishness that truly carries with it the whole question of prestige. The movie screen—if I may say so—is here the most sensitive revealer. To use just the latest HITCHCOCK film, see in what form the puzzle-solver appears, the one who is there to make the final decision at the end of all appeals, frankly, he bears all the marks of what we will call an element stigmatized as the untouchable!

Besides, we are here touching on an essential element of the convention since it is a matter of the analytic situation, and for it to be violated—let us always take the same reference point: the cinema—in a way that is not revolting, it is necessary that the one who plays the role of the analyst… Take Suddenly, Last Summer, there we see a therapist character who pushes charitas to the point of nobly returning the kiss that an unfortunate woman presses upon his lips, he is handsome, there he absolutely must be. It is true that he is also a neurosurgeon, and that he is promptly sent back to his trepans.

It is not a situation that could last. In sum, analysis is the only praxis where charm is a drawback: it would break the spell. Who has ever heard of a charming analyst? These are not entirely useless remarks. They may seem here to be meant to amuse us. It is important that they are evoked at this stage.

In any case, it is no less noteworthy that in the “direction” of the patient, this very access to the body, which medical examination seems to require, is usually sacrificed as a rule. And this is worth noting. It is not enough to say: “It is to avoid excessive effects of transference.”

And why should these effects be more excessive at this level? Of course, it is not the result of a kind of anachronistic prudishness either, as one sees traces of persisting in rural areas, in Islamic women’s quarters, in that incredible Portugal where the doctor examines the beautiful foreigner only through her clothes. We go even further than that, and an examination, however necessary it may appear at the beginning of treatment or during its course, is regarded as a kind of breach of the rule.

Let us look at things from another angle. Nothing is less erotic than this reading—if one can call it that—of the instantaneous states of the body in which certain psychoanalysts excel. For all the features of this reading, it is in terms of signifiers, one may say, that these states of the body are translated. The focus of the distance with which this reading is accommodated requires just as much interest from the analyst. All of this—let us not settle its meaning too quickly. One may say that this neutralization of the body, which after all seems to be the primary end of civilization, here deals with a greater urgency, and so many precautions suppose the possibility of abandoning it. I am not sure of that. I am only introducing here the question of what the body is. Let us limit ourselves to this remark for now.

In any case, it would be a mistake from the outset not to recognize that psychoanalysis requires at the beginning a high degree of libidinal sublimation at the level of collective relation. The extreme decency—which can well be said to be maintained in the most ordinary way—in the analytic relation suggests that if the regular confinement of the two parties involved in analytic treatment in an enclosure, sheltered from all indiscretion, results only very rarely in any constraint of one’s body upon the other, it is because the temptation that such confinement would bring in any other activity is less here than elsewhere. Let us stop at this for now.

The analytic cell, however cozy, however much you like, is nothing at all like a bed of love, and this—I believe—holds because—despite all the efforts to reduce it to the common denominator of “the situation,” with all the resonance we can give this familiar term—it is not a “situation” to come there: as I said just now, it is the falsest situation there is.

What allows us to understand this is precisely the reference we will try to take next time to what, in the social context, is the situation of love itself. To the extent that we can get a firm grasp of, determine what FREUD touched upon more than once, what is the position of love in society—a precarious position, a threatened position, let us say right away: a clandestine position—it is in this very measure that we will be able to appreciate why and how, in this most protected position of all, that of the analytic office, this position of love there becomes even more paradoxical.

I will arbitrarily suspend this process here. It should suffice for you to see in what sense I intend that we take the question. Breaking with the tradition that consists in abstracting, neutralizing, in emptying of all meaning what may be at stake in the background of the analytic relation, I mean to start from the extreme of what I suppose: to isolate oneself with another to teach him what? What he lacks! An even more daunting situation, if we consider that, by the very nature of transference, this “what he lacks” he will learn as a lover.

If I am there “for his good,” it is certainly not in the restful sense where the Thomist tradition articulates it: “amare est velle bonum alicui”—since this “good” is already a more than problematic term and—if you were willing to follow me last year—outdated. I am not there in the end for his good, but so that he may love. Does this mean that I must teach him to love? Certainly, it seems difficult to omit the necessity that
—for what it is to love and what love is, it must be said that the two things do not coincide.
—For what it is to love and to know what it is to love, I must at least, like SOCRATES, be able to give myself the testimony that I know something about it.
Now, it is precisely, if we turn to the analytic literature, what is least said. It seems that love, in its primordial ambivalent pairing with hate, is a term that goes without saying.

See nothing else, in my humorous notes today, but something intended to tickle your ear. Yet love, a long tradition speaks to us of it, which comes to its final term in that enormous speculation of an Anders NYGREN, who radically splits it into those two terms, incredibly opposed in his discourse, of eros and agape.

But behind that, for centuries all that has been done is to discuss, to debate about love. Is it not yet another cause for astonishment that we, analysts, who make use of it, who have only this word on our lips, could say that in relation to this tradition we truly present ourselves as the most deprived, lacking any attempt, even partial—I do not say of revision—of addition to what has been pursued for centuries on this term, but even of something that is simply not unworthy of that tradition.

Is there not something surprising in this? To show you, to make you feel it, I have chosen as the subject of my next seminar the reminder of this term of truly monumental interest, original with respect to all this tradition that is ours, in the subject of the structure of love, which is The Symposium.

If someone, who would feel sufficiently addressed, wanted to engage in dialogue with me about The Symposium, I would see only advantages in it. Certainly, a rereading of this monumental text, full of enigmas, where everything is done to show at the same time:

– how much, if one can say so, the very mass of a religious speculation, which penetrates us through all our fibers, which is present in all our experiences, owes to this sort of extraordinary testament: Plato’s Schwärmerei [wordplay: religious enthusiasm, dreamlike speculation],

– and what we can find in it, deduce from it as essential points of reference—and I will show you: even in the history of this debate—of what took place in the first analytic transference.

That we may find there all the possible keys, I think that, once we have put it to the test, you will have no doubt of it. Certainly, these are not terms that I would easily leave so prominent in any published report. Nor are they formulas whose echoes I would like to see nourish the usual harlequinades elsewhere.

I intend that, this year, we shall know between whom and whom we stand.