🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

Last time, I finished—apparently to your satisfaction—at the very tip of what constitutes one of the elements, perhaps the fundamental element, of the subject’s position in analysis. It was this question, which for us overlaps with the definition of desire as the desire of the Other, this question that is in sum marginal, but by that very fact signals itself as fundamental in the position of the analysand in relation to the analyst, even if he does not formulate it for himself: “what does he want?”

Today we are going to take a step back after having pushed this point and propose to focus, on the one hand, on what we announced at the start in our remarks last time, to advance in the examination of the ways in which other theorists than ourselves, by the evidence of their praxis, in sum demonstrate the same topology as the one I am deploying, trying to establish before you, topology inasmuch as it makes transference possible.

Indeed, it is not necessary for them to formulate it as we do in order to attest to it—in their own way, this seems obvious to me. As I wrote somewhere, you do not need to have the floor plan of an apartment to bump your head against the walls. I would even say more: for this operation, you can quite well do without the plan, normally. On the other hand, the reverse is not true in the sense that, contrary to a primitive schema of the reality test, it is not enough to bump your head against the walls to reconstruct the plan of an apartment, especially if you are having this experience in the dark.

The example I cherish of “Théodore is looking for matches” is there to illustrate it for you in COURTELINE. That said, it is perhaps a somewhat forced metaphor, perhaps not as forced as it might seem to you, and that is what we are going to see in practice, in the test of what is currently happening, these days, when analysts talk about what?

We are, I think, getting right to the heart of this question as it arises for them, and there precisely, as you sense well, where I am centering it this year: on the side of the analyst. And to put it plainly, this is, strictly speaking, what they articulate best when they address—theorists, and the most advanced, the most lucid theorists—the so-called question of “countertransference.”

I would like to remind you of the basic truths on this subject. It is not because they are basic that they are always expressed, and if “they go without saying,” they go even better by being said. Regarding the question of “countertransference,” there is first the common opinion, that of anyone who has approached the problem a little, where he initially situates it, that is to say, the first idea one forms of it, I would also say the first, the most common that has been given but also the oldest approach to this question.

There has always been this notion of “countertransference” present in analysis—I mean very early on, at the beginning of the development of this notion of transference—everything in the analyst that represents his unconscious as unanalyzed, so to speak, is harmful to his function, to his operation as analyst, in that from there we have the source of uncontrolled responses and above all, in the common opinion of it, of blind responses of which, to the extent that something has remained in the shadows, and this is why emphasis is placed on the need for a complete, far-reaching didactic analysis—we begin with vague terms to start—it is because, as it is written somewhere, from this negligence of such and such a corner of the analyst’s unconscious will result genuine blind spots, from which “would result”—I put it in the conditional, it is a discourse actually held, which I put in quotation marks, with reservations, which I do not immediately subscribe to but which is accepted—potentially such and such an event, more or less serious, more or less unfortunate in the practice of analysis, of nonrecognition, missed intervention, inopportunity of such or such another intervention, or even error.

But on the other hand, one cannot fail to relate to this remark the fact that it is said that it is to the communication of the unconscious that, ultimately, one must best rely so that decisive perceptions, the best insights, occur in the analyst. It is not so much from long experience, from extensive knowledge of what he may encounter in the structure, that we should expect the greatest pertinence—this “leap of the lion” of which FREUD speaks somewhere and which occurs only once in his best achievements. We are told that it is to the communication of the unconscious that belongs what, in concrete, existing analysis, goes the farthest, the deepest, with the greatest effect, and that there is no analysis that should lack one or another of these moments.

It is, in sum, directly that the analyst is informed of what is happening in the patient’s unconscious, by a means of transmission that remains rather problematic in tradition. How are we to conceive this communication of the unconscious?

I am not here—even from an eristic, or even critical, point of view—to sharpen antinomies and create impasses that would be artificial. I am not saying that there is something unthinkable here, namely that it would be both to the extent that, at the limit, nothing of the unconscious would remain in the analyst, and at the same time to the extent that he would still retain a good part of it, that he would be, that he should be, the ideal analyst. That would really be making oppositions—which I repeat—would not be well-founded.

Even if we push things to the extreme, one can glimpse, conceive, a “reserve” unconscious—and this must indeed be conceived: there is no exhaustive elucidation, in anyone, of the unconscious, however far an analysis may be pushed—we can very well conceive, with this “reserve of unconscious” admitted, that the subject whom we know to be made aware precisely by the experience of didactic analysis can, in a sense, play it as an instrument, like the body of a violin of which, moreover, he possesses the strings. Still, it is not a raw unconscious, it is a softened unconscious, an unconscious plus the experience of that unconscious.

With these reservations, it will still remain legitimate for us to feel the necessity of elucidating the point of passage where this qualification is acquired. What is fundamentally affirmed by doctrine as being inaccessible to consciousness, for it is as such that we must always posit the foundation, the nature of the unconscious, is not that it is accessible to “men of good will”: it is not, it remains under strictly limited conditions, it is under strictly limited conditions that it can be reached, by a detour and by this detour of the Other that makes analysis necessary, which limits, reduces in an unbreakable way the possibilities of self-analysis. And the definition of the point of passage where what is thus defined can nevertheless be used as a source of information, included in a directive praxis, it is not making a vain antinomy to raise the question of it.

What tells us that this is how the problem is posed in a valid way, I mean that it is soluble, is that it is natural for things to present themselves thus. In any case, for you who have the keys, there is something that makes its access immediately recognizable to you, it is this that is implied in the discourse you are hearing, that logically—there is a logical priority to this—it is first as the unconscious of the other that the whole experience of the unconscious takes place, it is first in his patients that FREUD encountered the unconscious.

And for each of us, even if it is elided, it is first as the unconscious of the other that the idea can open up for us that such a thing might exist. Every discovery of one’s own unconscious presents itself as a stage in this ongoing translation of an unconscious, first the unconscious of the other. So that there is not so much to be surprised at in admitting that, even for the analyst who has pushed very far this stage of translation, the translation can always resume at the level of the Other. Which obviously removes much of the weight from the antinomy I evoked earlier as something that might be made, by immediately indicating that it could only be made in an abusive way.

Only then, if we start from there, something appears right away. It is that, in sum, in this relation to the other, which, as you can see, will remove a part, will exorcise to some extent, that fear we may feel of not knowing enough about ourselves. We will come back to this, I do not claim to urge you to be free from all concern in this regard, my thinking is very far from that. Once this is admitted, it remains that we will encounter here the same obstacle we encounter with ourselves in our own analysis when it comes to the unconscious, namely what: the positive power of misrecognition—an essential feature, not to say a historically original one, of my teaching—that exists in the prestige of the ego or, in the broadest sense, in the capture of the imaginary.

What is important to note here is precisely that this domain, which in our experience of personal analysis is all mixed in with the deciphering of the unconscious, this domain, when it is a matter of our relation as psychoanalyst to the other, has a position that must indeed be called different. In other words, here appears what I would call the “Stoic ideal” one makes of the analyst’s apathy.

You know, at first, the feelings, let’s say broadly negative or positive, that the analyst may have towards his patient have been identified with the effects in himself of an incomplete reduction of the thematic of his own unconscious. But if this is true for himself, in his relationship of self-esteem, in his relation to the little other within himself[(a)] [“petit autre”—wordplay: both the imaginary double and the ‘other’ within], within himself, I mean that by which he sees himself as other than he is, which was discovered, glimpsed, well before analysis, this consideration does not at all exhaust the question of what legitimately happens when he deals with this little other, the other of the imaginary, outside.

Let’s dot the i’s: the path of Stoic apathy, the fact that he remains insensitive to the possible seductions as to the possible abuses of this little other outside inasmuch as this little other outside always has some power over him, small or great, even if only the power to encumber him by its presence, does this mean that it is solely imputable to some insufficiency in the analyst’s preparation as such? Absolutely not in principle. Accept this stage of my argument. I am not saying I reach it. But I simply propose this remark: from the recognition of the unconscious, we have no reason to say, to assert, that it by itself places the analyst out of reach of passions. That would be to imply that it is always and essentially from the unconscious that comes the total, global effect, all the efficacy of a sexual object or any other object capable of producing any physical aversion. In what would this be necessary, I ask, unless for those who make the crude confusion of identifying the unconscious as such with the sum of the vital drives?

This is precisely what radically differentiates the scope of the doctrine I am trying to articulate before you. Of course, there is a connection between the two. This connection, it is even a matter of clarifying why it can occur, why it is the tendencies of the life instinct that are thus presented, but not just any, especially among those that FREUD always and persistently circled as the sexual tendencies. There is a reason why these are specially privileged, captivated, captured by the spring of the signifying chain inasmuch as it is what constitutes the subject of the unconscious.

But that being said, why—at this stage of our inquiry, the question must be raised—why would an analyst, on the pretext that he is well analyzed, be insensitive to the fact that this or that person provokes in him reactions of hostile thought, that he sees in this presence—it must of course be endured for something of this order to happen—as a presence that is obviously not as the presence of a patient, but the presence of a being who takes up space. And the more, precisely, we suppose him imposing, full, normal, the more legitimately all possible kinds of reactions may occur in his presence. And likewise, on the intrasexual level for example, why in itself would the movement of love or hate be excluded, would it disqualify the analyst in his function?

At this stage, posed in this way, there is no other answer than this: indeed, why not! I would even say more, the better he is analyzed, the more it will be possible for him to be frankly in love or frankly in a state of aversion, of repulsion in the most elementary modes of relations between bodies, in relation to his partner. If we consider nevertheless that what I am saying here goes a little too far, in the sense that it troubles us, that it is not satisfactory, still there must be something well-founded in this demand for analytic apathy, it is that it must indeed be rooted elsewhere.

But then, it must be said, and we are, we, in a position to say it. If I could tell you immediately and so easily, I mean if I could immediately make you hear it with the path already covered, of course I would tell you. It is precisely because I still have a path to make you traverse that I cannot formulate it in a completely strict way.

But already there is something that can be said about it, up to a certain point, that could satisfy us—the only thing I ask of you is precisely not to be too satisfied with it before giving it the formula and the precise formula—it is that if the analyst realizes, like the popular image, or just as much as the deontological image that is made of him, this apathy, it is precisely to the extent that he is possessed by a desire stronger than those involved, namely: to get down to it with his patient, to take him in his arms, or to throw him out the window—this happens—I would even have a poor opinion of someone who had never felt this, I dare say.

But after all, it is a fact that, at that very edge of the possibility of the thing, it should not happen in an ambient way. It should not happen, not in the negative sense of some kind of total imaginary discharge of the analyst, which we need not pursue the hypothesis of further, although that hypothesis would be interesting, but because of something that is what I am raising here this year, that the analyst says: “I am possessed by a stronger desire.” He is grounded as analyst, inasmuch as, to put it plainly, a mutation has occurred in the economy of his desire. This is where the texts of PLATO can be evoked.

Something encouraging happens to me from time to time. I gave you this year this long discourse, this commentary on the Symposium, with which I must say I am not dissatisfied. I was surprised, someone around me surprised me—understand this “surprise” in the sense the term has in analysis, it is something that more or less concerns the unconscious—by pointing out to me somewhere, in a footnote at the bottom of a page, FREUD’s citation of a part of the speech by ALCIBIADES to SOCRATES, when, all the same, one must say that FREUD could have sought a thousand other examples to illustrate what he seeks to illustrate at that moment, namely this “death wish” mixed with love.

There is nothing easier, if I may say, than to gather them by the handful. And here I give you an example, it is the case of someone who, like a cry from the heart, once shouted this ejaculation to me: “Oh! how I wish you were dead for two years.” There is no need to look for this in the Symposium. But I consider it is not insignificant that at the level of the “Rat Man,” that is to say, a crucial moment in the discovery of ambivalent love, it is to Plato’s Symposium that FREUD referred.

That is still not a bad sign, it is not a sign that we are wrong in looking there ourselves for our references. Well, in PLATO, in the Philebus, somewhere SOCRATES puts forth this thought that desire, of all desires the strongest, must indeed be “the desire for death,” since the souls that are in Erebus remain there.

It is an argument whose value is what it is, but here it takes on illustrative value for the direction in which I have already indicated to you this reorganization, this restructuring of desire in the analyst could be conceived.

It is at least one of the mooring points, of the points of fixation, of attachment for the question with which we are surely not content.

Nevertheless, we can go further and say that in this detachment from the automatism of repetition that would constitute a good personal analysis in the analyst, there is something that must surpass what I would call the particularity of its detour, go a little beyond, cut into the detour, which I will call specific, into what FREUD is aiming at, what he articulates when he posits the fundamental repetition of the development of life as conceivable as being nothing but the detour, the deviation of a compact, abyssal drive, which is the one he calls at this level the “death drive,” where there remains nothing but this ananké, this necessity of returning to the zero of the inanimate.

No doubt a metaphor, and a metaphor that is expressed only by this sort of extrapolation before which some recoil, of what is brought from our experience, namely from the action of the unconscious signifying chain inasmuch as it imposes its mark on all manifestations of life in the speaking subject.

But after all, an extrapolation, a metaphor that in FREUD is nonetheless not made for nothing, in any case one that allows us to conceive that something may be possible and that indeed there may be some relation of the analyst—as one of my students wrote in our first issue, with the greatest dignity of tone—with HADES, with death.

Whether or not he plays with death, in any case—I have written elsewhere that, in this part that is analysis, which surely cannot be analyzed solely in terms of a two-person game—the analyst plays with a dead person, and here, we find again this feature of the common requirement that there must be something capable of playing “the dead” in that little other who is in him.

In the position of the hand in bridge, the S who is there [I], has before him his own little other [i(a) in II], that in which he is with himself in this specular relationship inasmuch as he is, himself, constituted as “ego.” If we place here [in III] the designated position of this Other who speaks [A], the one he will hear, the patient, we see that this patient as he is represented by the barred subject [S in I]—by the subject as unknown to himself—will find himself here [IV] with the image position of his own (a)—let us call the whole “the image of (a2)” [i(a2)]—he will have here [IV] the image of the big Other, the position, the place of the big Other, insofar as it is the analyst who occupies it. That is to say, the patient—the analysand—has, himself, a partner.

And you should not be surprised to find joined in the same place his own “ego” [i(a2)] as analysand, and this “other,” but he must find his truth, which is the big Other of the analyst. The paradox of the analytic bridge game is this abnegation which means that, contrary to what happens in a normal bridge game, the analyst must help the subject find what is in the hand of his partner.

And to play this “who loses wins” game at bridge, the analyst, for his part, does not—should not, in principle—have to complicate things with a partner, and that is why it is said that the i(a) of the analyst must behave like a dead person. That means the analyst must always know what is there, in the deal.

Only, this kind of solution to the problem, whose relative simplicity I think you will appreciate, at the level of the common, exoteric explanation, for the outside, for it is simply a way of speaking about what everyone believes: someone who landed here for the first time could find all sorts of reasons for satisfaction, namely ultimately to sleep soundly, namely, on what he has always heard, for example, that the analyst is a superior being—unfortunately, it does not fit! It does not fit and the testimony of it is given to us by the analysts themselves. Not simply in the form of a lament with a tear in the eye: “We are never equal to our function.” Thank God, this sort of declamation, although it exists, has for some time been spared us, that is a fact, a fact for which I am not here responsible, which I merely record.

It is that for some time now, what is actually admitted in analytic practice—I am speaking of the best circles, I am referring precisely for example to the Kleinian circle, I mean what Mélanie KLEIN has written on this subject, what Paula HEIMANN has written in an article on countertransference: On counter-transference, which you will easily find, you do not have to look for it in just any article, nowadays everyone considers as established, as accepted, what I am about to say, it is articulated more or less frankly and above all more or less well understood by those who articulate it, that is the only thing, but it is admitted, it is that the analyst must take into account, in his information and his maneuvering, not the feelings he inspires but those he experiences in the analysis.

Countertransference is no longer considered today as being in its essence an imperfection, which does not mean that it cannot be, of course, but if it does not remain as an imperfection, there nonetheless remains something that makes it deserve the name of countertransference.

You will see again, inasmuch as apparently it is exactly of the same nature as that other face of transference which last time I opposed to transference conceived as automatism of repetition, namely what I intended to center the question on, transference as it is called positive or negative, as everyone understands it, as the feelings experienced by the analysand toward the analyst.

Well, the countertransference in question, which it is admitted we must take into account even if it remains debated what we must do with it, and you will see at what level, the countertransference is indeed precisely that: namely the feelings experienced by the analyst in the analysis, determined at every moment by his relationship to the analysand.

We are told… I choose a reference almost at random, but it is still a good article, it is never entirely by chance that one chooses something, among all those I have read, there is probably a reason why I want to communicate the title of this one to you. It is called precisely—it is in sum the subject we are dealing with today—Normal Counter-transference and some of its Deviations, Countertransference normal and some of its deviations, by Roger MONEY-KYRLE, clearly belonging to the Kleinian circle and connected to Mélanie KLEIN through Paula HEIMANN. You will see there that the state of dissatisfaction, the state of preoccupation under Paula HEIMANN’s pen, is even foreboding.

In her article, she mentions that she found herself facing something that one does not need to be an old analyst to have experienced, in a situation that is all too frequent, namely that the analyst may be confronted at the beginning of an analysis by a patient who rushes—manifestly determined by the analysis itself, even if he does not realize it—into premature decisions, into a long-term relationship, even marriage.

– She knows this is something to analyze, to interpret, to counter to some extent.
– She mentions at this point a completely disturbing feeling that she experiences in this particular case.
– She mentions it as something that, by itself, is a sign to her that she is right to be particularly concerned about it.
– She shows in what way it is precisely what allows her to better understand, to go further.

But there are many other feelings that can arise, and the article by MONEY-KYRLE, for example, which I mentioned to you, really mentions feelings of depression, a general drop in interest in things, disaffection, even a kind of emotional detachment that the analyst may feel in relation to everything that concerns him.

The article is nice to read because the analyst does not just describe what results from the aftermath of such a session where it seems to him that he was not able to respond sufficiently to what he himself calls “a demanding patient.”

It is not because you see in it the echo of the demand that you should stop there to understand the English accent: “demanding” is more, it is an insistent requirement.

And he mentions in this respect the role of the analytic super-ego in a way that surely, if you read the article, will seem to present quite a gap, I mean that it will really find its import only if you refer to what you are given in the graph and insofar as the graph—insofar as you introduce the dotted lines—appears like this: that in the bottom line, it is beyond the place of the Other that the dotted line represents the super-ego for you.

I include the rest of the graph for you to see in this respect how it can serve you: to understand that it is not always to be attributed to that ultimately opaque element, with that severity of the super-ego, that such or such demand can produce these depressive effects or even more in the analyst, it is precisely insofar as there is continuity between the demand of the Other and the so-called structure of the super-ego.

Understand that it is when the subject’s demand comes to be introjected, to pass as an articulated demand in the one who receives it, in such a way that it represents his own demand in an inverted form—for example, when a demand for love coming from the mother encounters in the one who is to respond his own demand for love directed at the mother—that we find the strongest effects, which are called effects of super-ego hyper-severity.

I am only pointing this out to you here because it is not the path we are taking, it is a lateral remark. What matters is that an analyst who appears to be someone particularly agile and gifted at recognizing his own experience even goes so far as to present as an example something that worked, and in a way he considers worthy of being communicated, not as a blunder or as an accidental effect more or less well corrected, but as a procedure that can be integrated into the doctrine of analytic operations.

He says that he himself noted the feeling he identified as being related to the difficulties presented to him by the analysis of one of his patients. He says that he himself, during a period marked by the picturesque rhythm of English life, himself over the weekend, after a rather stimulating period, was able to note what had been left problematic, unsatisfying, in what he had done during the week with his patient.

He underwent himself—without at first seeing the connection—a sort of slump—let’s call things by their name—which, during the second half of his weekend, left him in a state he could only recognize by formulating it in the same terms as his patient: a state of disgust bordering on depersonalization, from which the entire dialectic of the week had started, and to which—moreover he was accompanied by a dream through which the analyst had found some enlightenment to respond to him—he had the feeling of not having given the right answer, rightly or wrongly, but in any case based on this: that his answer had made the patient complain bitterly, and that from there he had become excessively nasty toward him.

And then the analyst finds himself recognizing that what he feels, in the end, is exactly what at the outset the patient described to him as one of his states. This was not—for the patient—very new, nor was it new for the analyst, to notice that the patient could be subject to these phases on the edge of depression and minor paranoid effects.

This is what is reported to us and what the analyst in question—here again with a whole circle, his own, what I call on this occasion a Kleinian circle—immediately conceives as representing the effect of the bad object projected into the analyst, insofar as the subject, in analysis or not, is liable to project it into the other.

It does not seem to be a problem in a certain analytic field—which we must after all admit, at this level of almost magical belief that it may suppose, there must be some reason that one slips so easily into it—that this projected bad object is to be understood as naturally having its effectiveness—at least when it concerns the one paired with the subject—in a relation as close, as coherent as that created by an analysis that has already been going on for some time.

“As naturally having its effectiveness”—to what extent? The article tells you as well: to the extent that this effect results from a lack of understanding, on the part of the analyst, of the patient. The effect in question is presented to us as the possible use of deviations from normal countertransference. Because as the beginning of the article articulates, this normal countertransference already occurs by the to-and-fro rhythm of the introjection of the analysand’s discourse and of something that admits, in its normality, the possible projection—see how far it goes!—onto the analysand of something that occurs as an imaginary effect in response to this introjection of his discourse.

This effect of countertransference is said to be normal as long as the introjected demand is perfectly understood. The analyst has no difficulty in orienting himself in what then happens so clearly in his own introjection, he sees only the consequence and does not even have to use it. What occurs is really there at the level of i(a), and is completely mastered. And what happens on the patient’s side, the analyst does not have to be surprised that it happens: what the patient projects onto him, he is not affected by. It is to the extent that he does not understand that he is affected by it, that it is a deviation from normal countertransference, and that things can come to the point where he actually becomes the patient of this bad object projected into him by his partner.

I mean that he feels in himself the effect of something completely unexpected, in which only a reflection made separately allows, and perhaps only because the opportunity is favorable… to recognize, the very state that his patient had described to him. I repeat, I do not take responsibility for the explanation in question, nor do I reject it. I am temporarily suspending it in order to go step by step, to lead you to the precise point where I have to take you in order to articulate something.

I am simply saying that if the analyst does not himself understand it, he nonetheless, according to the experienced analyst, effectively becomes the receptacle of the projection in question, and feels these projections in himself as a foreign object. This of course puts the analyst in a peculiar position as a dumping ground. Because, if this happens with many patients in this way, you see where this can lead us, when one is not able to focus on about whom this occurs, these facts which, in the description given by MONEY-KYRLE, appear disconnected, it can present some problems.

In any case, I take the next step. I do so with the author who tells us, if we go in this direction, which is not new: already FERENCZI had questioned how far the analyst should share with his patient what he himself, the analyst, was experiencing in reality, in certain cases as a means of giving the patient access to that reality.

Currently, no one dares to go that far, and certainly not in the school to which I am alluding. I mean, for example, Paula HEIMANN will say that the analyst must be very strict—in his own diary—in his daily hygiene, always keeping up with analyzing what he himself may experience of that order, but that it is “a matter of himself to himself,” and with the aim of trying to race against time, that is, to catch up with the delay he may have thus incurred in the understanding, the “understanding” of his patient.

MONEY-KYRLE, without being FERENCZI, nor as reserved [as Paula Heimann], goes further on this particular point of the identity of the state he experiences with the one brought to him at the start of the week by his patient. On this local point, he even communicates it to the patient and notes—it is the object of his article, or more precisely of the communication he gave in 1955 at the Geneva Congress, of which his article is the reproduction—to note the effect, he does not tell us about the distant effect but about the immediate effect, on his patient, which is an evident jubilation, namely that the patient deduces nothing other than:

“Ah! you tell me this, well, I am glad because when you gave me the other day that interpretation about this state—and indeed he had given him one, a bit hazy, murky, he can recognize it—I,” says the patient, “thought that what you were saying there was about you, and not at all about me.”

We are thus here, if you will, in the midst of misunderstanding, and I would say that we content ourselves with it. In the end, the author is satisfied, because he leaves things there, then—he tells us—from there the analysis resumes and offers him—we have only to believe him—all the possibilities of further interpretations.

The fact that what is presented to us as a “deviation of countertransference” is here posited as an instrumental means that can be codified, that in similar cases, the effort is made to recover the situation as quickly as possible, at least by recognizing its effects on the analyst and by means of mitigated communications offering the patient something which, certainly on that occasion, has the character of a certain unveiling of the analytic situation as a whole, of expecting from it something that is a restart which unties what has apparently presented itself as an impasse in the analytic situation.

I am not endorsing the appropriateness of this procedure, I simply note that it is certainly not linked to a privileged point, and that something of this kind can in this way be produced. What I can say is that insofar as there is any legitimacy to this way of proceeding, in any case it is our categories that allow us to understand it.

In my opinion:
– it is not possible to understand it outside the register of what I have pointed out as the place of (a), the partial object, the agalma in the relation of desire insofar as it is itself determined within a broader relation, that of the demand for love,
– that it is only there, only in this topology, that we can understand such a way of proceeding, in a topology which allows us to say that, even if the subject does not know it, by the sole objective supposition of the analytic situation, it is already in the Other that (a), the agalma, functions,
– and that what is presented to us on this occasion as countertransference, normal or not, really has no special reason to be called “countertransference”; I mean that it is only an irreducible effect of the situation of transference simply by itself.

The fact that there is transference is enough for us to be implicated in this position, of being the one who contains the agalma, the fundamental object at issue in the subject’s analysis, as linked, conditioned, by this vacillation of the subject which we characterize
– as constituting the fundamental fantasy, as establishing the place where the subject can be fixed as desire. It is a legitimate effect
– of transference. There is therefore no need to invoke countertransference as if it were something that would be the analyst’s own share, much less his guilty share. Only, I believe that to recognize this, the analyst must know certain things. He must know in particular that the criterion of his correct position is not whether or not he understands.

It is not absolutely essential that he does not understand, but I would say that up to a certain point it may be preferable to too much confidence in his understanding. In other words, he must always doubt what he understands and tell himself that what he is seeking to attain is precisely what, in principle, he does not understand.

It is certainly insofar as he knows what desire is, but as he does not know what this subject, with whom he is embarked in the analytic adventure, desires, that he is in the position of having within him—of this desire—the object. For only this explains such effects that are still so singularly frightening, it seems.

I read an article that I will specify for you more precisely next time, in which a gentleman, nonetheless full of experience, wonders what should be done when, from the very first dreams, sometimes even before the analysis begins, the analysand presents himself—to the analyst—as a characterized object of love. The author’s answer is a little more reserved than that of another author who, for his part, takes the stance of saying: when it begins like this, it is useless to go any further, there are too many real relationships.

Thus, is it even in this way that we should put things when for us, if we let ourselves be guided by the categories we have produced, we can say that in the principle of the situation the subject is introduced as worthy of interest, worthy of love, as erômenos. It is for him that one is there, but that is the “manifest” effect, so to speak. If we admit that the “latent” effect is tied to his non-knowledge, to his ignorance, his ignorance is ignorance of what?

Of that something which is precisely the object of his desire in a latent, that is to say objective, structural way. This object is already in the Other, and it is insofar as this is the case that—whether he knows it or not—virtually, he is constituted as erastès: lover, fulfilling by this fact alone, this condition of metaphor, of substitution of the erastès for the erômenos which we have said constitutes, in itself, the phenomenon of love, and of which it is not surprising that we see the flaming effects in transference love from the very beginning of the analysis. There is therefore no reason to see in this a counterindication.

And it is there that the question arises: of the desire of the analyst, and up to a certain point of his responsibility. For, to tell the truth, it is enough to suppose one thing for the situation to be—as notaries say about contracts—perfect. It is enough that the analyst—without knowing it, even for an instant—places his own partial object, his agalma, in the patient with whom he is dealing, that is indeed where one can speak of a counterindication.

But, as you see, it is anything but easily identifiable, anything but identifiable to the extent that the situation of the analyst’s desire is not specified. And it will suffice for you to read the author I am pointing out [Money-Kyrle] to see that, of course, the question of what interests the analyst, he is indeed forced to ask himself by the necessity of his discourse. And what does he tell us? That two things are interesting in the analyst when he does an analysis, two basic drives, and you will see how strange it is to see as “passive drives” the two I am about to mention:
– the reparative, he says literally, which goes against the latent destructiveness in each of us,
– and on the other hand, the parental drive.
This is how an analyst from a school certainly as advanced, as elaborate as the Kleinian school, comes to formulate the position the analyst must take as such.

After all, I am not going to bury my head in the sand nor cry scandal. I think that for those familiar with my seminar, you see enough the scandal. But after all, it is a scandal in which we more or less participate because we speak constantly as if that is what is at stake, even though we know very well that we, as analysts, must not be the parents of the analysand, we will say in a thought about “the field of psychoses.”

And the reparative drive, what does it mean? It means a great many things, it has wildly many implications of course in all our experience. But after all, is it not worth articulating at this point how this reparative drive must be distinguished from the abuses of therapeutic ambition, for example? In short, it is not a matter of denying the absurdity of such a theme, but on the contrary what justifies it. For of course I credit the author and the whole school he represents with aiming at something that indeed has its place in the topology. But it must be articulated, said, located where it is, explained differently.

That is why next time I will quickly summarize what it so happens that, in an apologetic way, I did in the interval of these two seminars before a group of philosophy: a presentation on the “Position of desire.” It must at last be located why an experienced author can speak of parental drive, of parental and reparative drive concerning the analyst, and say at the same time something that on the one hand must have its justification, but on the other hand, imperiously requires it.