[No stenotype record available for the sessions of November and December 1953]

Meaning of the study of texts and of its teaching

The search for meaning has already been practiced, for example by certain Buddhist masters, with the Zen technique.
The master interrupts the silence with anything at all, a sarcasm, a kick. It is up to the pupils themselves to seek the answer to their own questions in the study of texts; the master does not teach ex cathedra a ready-made science, but he brings this answer when the pupils are on the verge of finding it. This teaching is a refusal of every system; it discovers a thought in the course of movement, but nonetheless ready for a system, because it is obliged to present a certain dogmatic face.

FREUD’s thought is the most perpetually open to revision. It is a mistake to reduce it to worn-out words: unconscious, super-ego… Each notion there possesses its own life, what one calls precisely dialectic: it has an opposite, etc. Now certain of these notions were, for FREUD, at a given moment, necessary: they brought an answer to a question formulated in earlier terms.

It is not enough to do history in the sense of history of thought and to say that FREUD appeared in a scientistic century. With The Interpretation of Dreams, something of a different essence, of a concrete psychological density, is reintroduced, namely meaning. From the scientistic point of view, FREUD seemed there to rejoin the most archaic thought: to read something in dreams. Then FREUD returns to causal explanation. But when one interprets a dream, one is right in the midst of meaning, in something fundamental of the subject, in his subjectivity, his desires, his relation to his milieu, to others, to life itself.

Our task is the reintroduction into the register of meaning, a register that must itself be reintegrated at its own proper level.
BRÜCKE, LUDWIG, HELMHOLTZ, DU BOIS-REYMOND had constituted a sort of sworn faith:

‘Everything comes down to physical forces, those of attraction and repulsion.’

When one gives oneself these premises, there is no reason to depart from them. If FREUD departed from them, it is because he gave himself others: he dared to attach importance to what happened to him, for example to the antinomies of his childhood, to his neurotic troubles, to his own dreams. That is where FREUD is—and is for all of us—a man placed in the midst of all the most human contingencies: death, woman, the father.

This constitutes a return to the sources and hardly deserves the title of science. It is as with the good cook, who knows how to cut up the animal well, detach the joint with the least resistance [Plato: Phaedrus, 265e]. For each structure, one admits a mode of conceptualization that is proper to it. One enters, however, by that route into the path of complications, and one prefers to return to the simpler monist notion of deducing the world. Nevertheless, one must indeed realize that it is not with the knife that we dissect but with concepts: the concept has its own original order of reality. Concepts do not arise from human experience; otherwise they would be well made. The first designations are made from words; they are instruments for delineating things. Thus every science remains for a long time in the dark, bogged down in language.

LAVOISIER, for example, at the same time as his ‘phlogiston’, brings the right concept: ‘oxygen’.
There is first a fully formed human language for us, which we use like a very bad instrument.
From time to time reversals occur: from ‘phlogiston’ to ‘oxygen’.

One must always introduce symbols, mathematical or others, with ordinary language; one must explain what one is going to do.
One is then at the level of a certain human exchange, at that of the therapist, where FREUD finds himself despite his denial.
As JONES showed, FREUD imposed on himself at the outset the ascesis of not pouring himself out in the speculative domain to which his nature strongly inclined him; he subjected himself to the discipline of facts, of the laboratory: he moved away from bad language.
But let us consider the notion of the subject: when one introduces it, one introduces oneself; the man who speaks to you is a man like the others; he uses bad language.

From the outset, FREUD knows that he will make progress in the analysis of neuroses only if he analyses himself.
The increasing importance attributed to countertransference signifies the recognition of the fact that there are two in the analysis, not merely two phenomenologically; it is a structure: only through it are certain phenomena isolable, separable.
It is the structure of subjectivity that gives men this idea that they are comprehensible to themselves.

Being neurotic can serve to become a good psychoanalyst: at the start that served FREUD.
Like Monsieur JOURDAIN with his prose, we make meaning, mismeaning, nonmeaning. Still, one had to find lines of structure there.

JUNG too rediscovers with wonder, in dream symbols and religious symbols, certain archetypes proper to the human species: that too is a structure.
FREUD introduced something else: the determinism proper to that level of structure.
Hence the ambiguity one finds everywhere in his work, for example: is the dream desire or recognition of desire?

Or again: the ego is at once like an empty egg, differentiated at its surface in contact with the world of perception and also, each time we encounter it, the one who says ‘no’, or ‘me, I’; it is the same one who says ‘one’, who speaks of others, who expresses himself under these different registers.

We are going to follow the techniques of an art of dialogue: like the good cook, we know what joints, what resistances we encounter.
The super-ego is also a law devoid of meaning, but in relation to problems of language.
If I speak, I say: ‘you will take the right’ to enable him to bring his language into accord with mine; I think about what goes on in his head at the moment when I speak to him: this effort of accord is the communication proper to language.

This ‘you’ is so fundamental that it intervenes before consciousness.
Censorship, for example, is intentional; it plays before consciousness; it functions with vigilance.
‘You’ is not a signal but a reference to the other; it is order and love.
Likewise the ego-ideal is an organism of defense perpetuated by the ego in order to prolong the subject’s satisfaction.
It is also the most depressing function, in the psychiatric sense of the term.

The id is not reducible to a pure objective given, to the subject’s drives: no analysis has ever arrived at such a rate of aggressiveness or eroticism.
It is a certain point in the dialectic of the progress of analysis, the extreme point of existential recognition:
‘you are this’, an ideal never attained of the end of analysis.

Nor is it complete self-mastery, the absence of passion: the ideal is to make the subject capable of sustaining the analytic dialogue, of speaking neither too early nor too late; that is what a didactic analysis aims at.
The introduction of an order of determinations into human existence, into the domain of meaning, is called reason.

FREUD’s discovery is the rediscovery, on fallow ground, of reason.