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Interview given by Jacques Lacan to Emilia Granzotto published in Panorama, Rome, 21 November 1974.

The malaise of modern civilization. The fatigue of living. Fear and sex. The word as a cure for neurosis. The anguish of scientists. The most paradoxical living psychoanalyst sets out his doctrine and the reasons for his loyalty to the master.

Jacques Lacan, age 73, Parisian, psychoanalyst. Apostle of Sigmund Freud. He defines himself as a ‘pure Freudian’, he founded in Paris a Freudian school, and for twenty years he has tirelessly re-proposed the return to the master’s doctrines and their rereading ‘in a literal sense’. Considered heretical by official psychoanalysis, which accuses him of histrionics (Emilio Servadio, president of the Psychoanalytic Center of Rome, called him an ‘operetta prophet’) and has expelled him from all its institutes and societies.

Venerated like a deity by his followers, for whom he is ‘a genius who communicates through flashes of insight’. Politically on the left, close to the Marx–Maoist group centered on the journal Tel quel. Spiritual father, it has been said, of all the French gauchistes. A legendary figure also for the oracular tone in which he sets down his writings, incomprehensible to anyone not more than well-versed in the mysteries of psychoanalysis, defined, in one of his essays, as ‘nothing other than an artifice of which Freud provided the constituents, positing that their ensemble encompasses the notion of those constituents’.

His lectures and his Wednesday lessons at the Faculty of Law of the Sorbonne are followed by multitudes of listeners, despite a spoken language just as obscure and nebulous as the written. He himself says: ‘I express myself by means of words, as is notorious. And in the end people haven’t understood a thing.’

He mixes highly learned words (homeostasis, anamorphosis, aphanisis) with neologisms invented on the spot (the most famous is parlantêtre, that is, parlantessere, that is, the speaking being, that is, man). He uses jargon terms indifferently or even homely euphemisms verging on the ridiculous; the phallus, protagonist and fierce god of the psychoanalytic religion, in Lacan’s language simply and ironically becomes quéquette.

Short, with gray hair cut in a crew and always carefully combed, with a vague resemblance, which he does not mind, to Jean Gabin, this sacred monster of high French culture always dresses like a dandy: a white shirt in embroidered fabric closed at the neck by a small band buttoned in the clerical fashion, velvet jackets in plum or apricot with inlays playing between glossy and matte. In the office at 5 rue de Lille, with Empire canapé, where Lacan receives clients, all of Paris that counts has passed through.

Lacan proclaims himself a structuralist; he is convinced that linguistics and psychoanalysis are sisters, and that analysts ‘ought to have a sociological, linguistic, and metaphysical culture’. His essays have been collected in a volume entitled Écrits, writings, sold in tens of thousands of copies.

Panorama asked Lacan to speak about psychoanalysis, its methods, in technique and doctrine.

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Question – Professor Lacan, one hears more and more often of a crisis of psychoanalysis: Sigmund Freud, it is said, is passé, modern society has discovered that his doctrine is not enough to understand man, nor to interpret in depth his relationship with the environment, with the world…

Answer – Nonsense. First: the crisis. There isn’t one; there cannot be one. Psychoanalysis has by no means reached its limits, on the contrary. There is still so much to discover, in practice and in doctrine. In psychoanalysis there are no immediate solutions, but only the long, patient search for the reasons why.

Second: Freud. How can one judge him outdated if we have not yet entirely understood him? Certainly we know that he made known utterly new things, never even imagined before him. From the problems of the Unconscious to the importance of sexuality, from access to the symbolic to subjection to the laws of language.

His doctrine has called truth into question, a matter that concerns everyone and each one, personally. Crisis, my foot. I repeat: we are far from Freud’s goals. Also because his name has been used to cover many things; there have been deviations, the epigones have not always faithfully followed the model, confusion has been created.

After his death, in ’39, even certain of his pupils claimed to practice psychoanalysis differently, reducing his teaching to a few banal little formulas: technique as rite, practice confined to the treatment of behavior, and, as a goal, the readjustment of the individual to his social environment. That is the negation of Freud, a convenient, drawing-room psychoanalysis.

He had foreseen it. He used to say: there are three untenable positions, three impossible commitments—governing, educating, and doing psychoanalysis. Today, it does not matter who has responsibility for government, and everyone claims to be an educator. As for psychoanalysts, alas, they prosper. Like magicians and healers. To propose to people that one will help them means guaranteed success and clients out the door. Psychoanalysis is something else.

Q. – What, exactly?

A. – I define it as a symptom. A revealer of the malaise of the civilization in which we live. It is certainly not a philosophy; I abhor philosophy—it’s been a long time since it has said anything interesting. Nor is it a faith, and I do not care to call it a science. Let us say it is a practice and that it deals with what does not work. Damnably difficult, because it purports to introduce into everyday life the impossible, the imaginary. So far it has obtained certain results, but it does not yet have rules and lends itself to every sort of equivocation.

One must not forget that it is something absolutely new both in relation to medicine and to psychology and the like. And also very young. Freud died just 35 years ago. His first book, The Interpretation of Dreams, was published in 1900. With very little success. I believe 300 copies were sold in a few years. He also had few pupils, taken for madmen and not even they in agreement on how to implement and interpret what they had learned.

Q. – What is not working, today, in man?

A. – There is this great fatigue of living, as a result of the rush to progress. From psychoanalysis one expects it to discover how far one can go dragging along this fatigue, this malaise of life.

Q. – What impels people to undergo psychoanalysis?

A. – Fear. When things happen to him—even things he himself has willed—that he does not understand, man is afraid. He suffers from not understanding, and little by little he enters a state of panic. That is neurosis. In hysterical neurosis the body falls ill from the fear of being ill, without in reality being so. In obsessive neurosis fear puts bizarre things into the head, thoughts one cannot control, phobias in which forms and objects acquire different and frightening meanings.

Q. – For example?

A. – It happens to the neurotic to feel forced by a terrifying need to go and check dozens of times whether a faucet is really closed or whether a given thing is in the given place, while knowing with certainty that the faucet is as it should be and the thing is where it ought to be. There are no pills that cure this. You have to discover why it happens to you, and know what it means.

Q. – And the cure?

A. – The neurotic is a patient who is cured with the word, first of all with his own. He must speak, recount, explain himself. Freud defines it as ‘the assumption by the subject of his own history, insofar as it is constituted by the word addressed to another’. Psychoanalysis is the realm of the word; there are no other remedies. Freud explained that the Unconscious is not so much deep as rather inaccessible to conscious deepening. And he said that in this Unconscious ‘there is someone speaking’: a subject within the subject, transcending the subject. The word is the great force of psychoanalysis.

Q. – Whose words? The patient’s or the psychoanalyst’s?

A. – In psychoanalysis the terms patient, doctor, medicine are not exact; they are not used. Nor are the passive formulas commonly used correct. People say ‘to get oneself psychoanalyzed.’ That is wrong. The one who does the real work in analysis is the one who speaks, the analyzing subject. Even if he does it in the way suggested by the analyst, who indicates to him how to proceed and helps him with interventions. An interpretation is also supplied to him, which at first blush seems to give a meaning to what the analyzing subject says. In reality the interpretation is more subtle, aimed at erasing the meaning of the things from which the subject suffers. The goal is to show him, through his own account, that his symptom, the illness, let us say, has no relation to anything, is devoid of any meaning. Therefore, even if in appearance it is real, it does not exist.

The paths along which this action of the word proceeds require much practice and infinite patience. Patience and measure are the instruments of psychoanalysis. The technique consists in knowing how to measure the help one gives to the analyzing subject. That is why psychoanalysis is difficult.

Q. – When one speaks of Jacques Lacan one inevitably associates this name with a formula: ‘Return to Freud.’ What does it mean?

A. – Exactly what it says. Psychoanalysis is Freud; if one wants to do psychoanalysis one must refer back to Freud, to his terms and to his definitions. Read and interpreted in a literal sense. I have founded in Paris a Freudian school precisely for this. For twenty years and more I have been explaining my point of view: to return to Freud simply means to clear the field of deviations and equivocations—of existential phenomenologies, for example, as of the institutional formalism of psychoanalytic societies—resuming the reading of his teaching according to the principles defined and catalogued by his work. To reread Freud means only to reread Freud. Whoever does not do this, in psychoanalysis, uses abusive forms.

Q. – Freud, however, is difficult. And Lacan, people say, makes him downright incomprehensible. Lacan is reproached for speaking, and above all for writing, in a way that only very few insiders can hope to understand.

A. – I know, I am taken to be an obscure fellow who hides his thought behind smoke screens. I wonder why. Apropos of analysis I repeat with Freud that it is ‘the intersubjective game through which truth enters the real.’ Is that not clear? But psychoanalysis is not stuff for children. My books are called incomprehensible. But by whom? I did not write them for everyone, to be understood by everyone. Indeed, I did not concern myself in the least with pleasing some reader. I had things to say, and I said them. It is enough for me to have a public that reads. If it does not understand, so be it. As to the number of readers, I have had more luck than Freud. My books are even too much read; I am astonished by it. I am also convinced that in ten years at most whoever reads me will find me downright transparent, like a fine glass of beer. Perhaps then people will say: this Lacan—how banal.

Q. – What are the characteristics of Lacanism?

A. – It is a bit early to say, since Lacanism does not yet exist. One barely senses its odor, like a premonition. Lacan, at any rate, is a gentleman who has practiced psychoanalysis for at least forty years and who has studied it for just as many. I believe in structuralism and in the science of language. I wrote in one of my books that ‘what Freud’s discovery leads us back to is the enormity of the order into which we have entered, into which we are, so to speak, born a second time, emerging from the state rightly called infans, without speech.’ The symbolic order on which Freud founded his discovery is constituted by language, as the moment of concrete universal discourse. It is the world of words that creates the world of things, initially confused in the all in becoming. Only words give the completed sense to the essence of things. Without words nothing would exist. What would pleasure be, without the intermediary of the word?

My idea is that Freud, setting out in his earliest works (The Interpretation of Dreams, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Totem and Taboo) the laws of the Unconscious, formulated, ahead of his time, the theories with which a few years later Ferdinand de Saussure would open the way to modern linguistics.

Q. – And pure thought?

A. – Subject, like everything else, to the laws of language. Only words can introduce it and give it consistency. Without language, humanity would not take a step forward in the investigations of thought. So it is with psychoanalysis. Whatever function one may wish to attribute to it—agent of healing, of formation, or of sounding—there is only one medium it uses: the patient’s word. And every word calls for a response.

Q. – Analysis as dialogue, then. There are people who interpret it rather as a secular substitute for confession…

A. – What confession. To the psychoanalyst one confesses nothing at all. One goes to tell him, simply, everything that passes through one’s head. Words, precisely. The discovery of psychoanalysis is man as a speaking animal. It is up to the analyst to line up the words he hears and give them a sense, a meaning. To do a good analysis there must be accord, attunement between analyzing subject and analyst. Through the words of the one, the other seeks to form an idea of what is at issue, and to find beyond the apparent symptom the difficult knot of truth. Another function of the analyst is to explain the meaning of words, to make the patient understand what he can expect from analysis.

Q. – It is a relationship of extreme trust..

A. – Rather an exchange. In which what matters is that one speaks and the other listens. Even in silence. The analyst asks no questions and has no ideas. He gives only the answers he feels like giving, to the questions that arouse that desire. But in the end the analyzing subject always goes where the analyst leads him.

Q. – That is the cure. And the possibilities of recovery? Does one get out of neurosis?

A. – Psychoanalysis succeeds when it clears the field both of the symptom and of the real. That is, it arrives at truth.

Q. – Can you explain the same concept in a less Lacanian way?

A. – I call a symptom everything that comes from the real. And the real is everything that does not go right, that does not function, that hampers man’s life and the affirmation of his personality. The real always returns to the same place; you always find it there, with the same semblances. Scientists are fond of saying that nothing is impossible in the real. It takes a lot of nerve for statements of that kind. Or else, as I suspect, total ignorance of what one is doing and saying. Real and impossible are antithetical; they cannot go together. Analysis pushes the subject toward the impossible, suggests to him that he consider the world as it really is, that is, imaginary, senseless. Whereas the real, like a voracious bird, does nothing but feed on meaningful things, on actions that have a sense.

One is always told that one must give a meaning to this and that, to one’s own thoughts, one’s aspirations, desires, sex, life. But of life we know nothing at all, as the scientists go to such pains to explain to us. My fear is that, because of them, the real, a monstrous thing that does not exist, will end up getting the upper hand. Science is taking the place of religion, just as despotic, obtuse, and obscurantist. There is a god Atom, a god Space, and so on. If science, or religion, wins, psychoanalysis is finished.

Q. – Today, what relation is there between science and psychoanalysis?

A. – For me the only true, serious science to follow is science fiction. The other, the official one, which has its altars in laboratories, gropes along without a goal. And it is even beginning to be afraid of its own shadow. It seems that for scientists too the moment of anguish is arriving. In their aseptic laboratories, wrapped in their starched coats, these old children who play with unknown things, handling ever more complicated apparatuses and inventing ever more abstruse formulas, are beginning to ask themselves what may happen tomorrow, where these ever new researches will end up leading. At last, I say. And if it were too late? They call them biologists, or physicists, chemists. To me they are demented. Only now, when they are already on the verge of smashing the universe, it occurs to them to ask whether by chance it might not be dangerous. And if everything blows up? If the bacteria so lovingly reared in the white laboratories were to turn into mortal enemies? If the world were swept away by a horde of these bacteria, along with all the shitty stuff that inhabits it, starting with the laboratory scientists?

To Freud’s three impossible positions—government, education, psychoanalysis—I would add, as a fourth, science. Only that they, the scientists, do not know they are in an untenable position.

Q. – A fairly pessimistic vision of what is commonly called progress.

A. – No, quite the opposite. I am not a pessimist. Nothing will happen. For the simple fact that man is a good-for-nothing, not even capable of destroying himself. Personally, a total scourge promoted by man I would find marvelous—the proof that he has finally managed to contrive something, with his hands, his head, without divine, natural, or other interventions. All those fine over-nourished bacteria roaming the world like the biblical locusts would signify man’s triumph. But it will not happen. Science has its proper crisis of responsibility. Everything will fall back into the order of things, as they say. I have said it: the real will get the upper hand, as always. And we shall be, as always, screwed.

Q. – Another of Jacques Lacan’s paradoxes. In addition to the difficulty of the language and the obscurity of the concepts, you are reproached for wordplay, linguistic jokes, calembours à la française, and, indeed, paradoxes. Whoever listens or reads is entitled to feel disoriented.

A. – I am not joking at all; I say very serious things. I only use words as the above-mentioned scientists use their alembics and electronic gadgets. I try always to refer back to the experience of psychoanalysis.

Q. – You say: the real does not exist. But the average man knows that the real is the world, everything that surrounds him, that is seen with the naked eye, touched, that is there…

A. – To begin with, let us toss out this average man who, for his part, does not exist. He is only a statistical fiction. Individuals exist, and that is all. When I hear talk of the man in the street, of Doxa surveys, of mass phenomena and the like, I think of all the patients I have seen pass over the couch in my office in forty years of listening. Not one in any way similar to another, not one with the same phobias, the same anguishes, the same way of recounting, the same fear of not understanding. The average man—who is that: me, you, my concierge, the president of the Republic?

Q. – We were talking about the real, about the world that we all see…

A. – Precisely. The difference between the real, that is, what does not go right, and the symbolic, the imaginary, that is, truth, is that the real is the world. To note that the world does not exist, is not there, it suffices to think of all the banal things that an infinity of fools believe to be the world. And I invite the friends of Panorama, before accusing me of paradox, to reflect well on what they have just read.

Q. – Ever more pessimistic, one would say…

A. – Not true. I place myself neither among the alarmists nor among the anguished. Woe betide if a psychoanalyst has not overcome his own stage of anguish. It is true, there are around us horrifying and devouring things, like television, by which a large part of us is regularly swallowed up. But only because these are people who let themselves be swallowed up; they even fabricate an interest in what they see. Then there are other monstrous gadgets just as devouring: the rockets that go to the moon, the research at the bottom of the sea, and so on. All things that devour. But there is no need to make dramas. I am sure that when we have had enough of the rockets, of television, and of all their damned fruitless researches, we shall find something else to busy ourselves with. There is a revival of religion, is there not? And what better devouring monster than religion—a perpetual fair, fun for centuries, as has already been demonstrated?

My answer to all this is that man has always known how to adapt to evil. The only conceivable real to which we have access is precisely this; we shall have to resign ourselves to it. To give things a meaning, as was said. Otherwise man would have no anxieties, Freud would not have become famous, and I would be a middle-school teacher.

Q. –Anxieties: are they always of the same type, or are there anxieties tied to certain social conditions, certain historical epochs, certain latitudes?

A. –The anguish of the scientist who is afraid of his discoveries may seem recent. But what do we know about what happened in other times? About the dramas of other researchers? The anguish of the worker forced to the assembly line as to a galley oar is an anguish of today. Or more simply is it tied to today’s definitions and words?

Q. –But what is anguish, for psychoanalysis?

A. –Something that is situated outside our body, a fear, but of nothing that the body, mind included, can motivate. In short, the fear of fear. Many of these fears, many of these anguishes, at the level at which we perceive them, have to do with sex.
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INTERVIEW GIVEN TO PANORAMA ON 21 NOVEMBER 1974 11
Freud said that sexuality, for the speaking animal called man, is without remedy and without hope. One of the analyst’s tasks is to find, in the patient’s words, the link between anguish and sex, this great unknown.

Q. –Now that sex is handed out on every corner—sex at the cinema, sex in the theater, on television, in newspapers, in songs, on the beaches—one hears it said that people are less anguished by problems related to the sexual sphere. The taboos have fallen, they say; sex is no longer frightening…

A. –The rampant sex-mania is only an advertising phenomenon. Psychoanalysis is a serious matter, which concerns, I repeat, a strictly personal relationship between two individuals: the subject and the analyst. Collective psychoanalysis does not exist, just as mass anxieties and neuroses do not exist.
That sex should be put on the agenda and displayed at street corners, treated on a par with any detergent in TV commercials, does not at all constitute a promise of any benefit. I am not saying it is bad. It certainly does not serve to cure individual anxieties and problems. It is part of fashion, of this fake liberalization that is provided to us, as a good granted from on high, by the so-called permissive society. But it is of no use, at the level of psychoanalysis.