To begin the new year, for which I extend to you my best wishes, I would willingly introduce it with a theme that I would express roughly like this: ‘no more laughing!’. During the last quarter, you have had little else to do here than to listen to me. I solemnly announce to you that in this quarter that is beginning, I intend, I hope, I dare to hope that I too will hear you a little. This seems to me absolutely indispensable. First, because it is the very law and the tradition of the seminar that those who participate bring to it more than a personal effort. They bring a collaboration through effective communications.

And this, of course, can come only from those who are interested in the most direct way in these seminars, those for whom these text seminars have their full meaning, that is, are engaged, in varying degrees, in various capacities, in our practice.
This will not exclude, of course, that you obtain from me the answers that I will be in a position to give you, and it would be particularly welcome to me if in this quarter, all and each, according to the measure of your means, you gave to the establishment of what I could call a ‘new step’, a ‘new stage of functioning’ of this seminar, what I will call your maximum.

Your maximum consists in this: that when I call on this person or that to entrust him with a precise section of our common task, one does not reply, with a bored air, that precisely this week one has particularly heavy burdens, one or another of these replies that you know well. I speak at least for those who are part of the group that we represent here, and about which I would like you to realize clearly that if it is constituted as such, as an autonomous group, having isolated itself as such, it is precisely for a task that interests us all, those who are part of this group, and that involves nothing less for each of us than the future, the meaning of everything we do and will have to do in the continuation of our existence.

If you do not come to this group with this full meaning, in the sense of truly calling into question all your activity, I do not see why we would have constituted ourselves in this form. To put it plainly, those who would not feel in themselves the meaning of this task, I do not see why they would remain attached to our group, why they would not go and join any other kind of bureaucracy.

These reflections are particularly pertinent, in my view, at the moment when we are going to take up what is commonly called Freud’s Technical Papers. It is a term that is already fixed by a certain tradition. During FREUD’s lifetime, in the way things are presented, in edition form, one saw appear, in the form of the Sammlung kleiner neurosen Schriften, the collection of the little writings on the neuroses—or neuroses, I no longer remember exactly—a small octavo volume, which isolated a certain number of FREUD’s writings that go from 1904 to 1919, and which are writings whose title, presentation, content, indicate overall what the psychoanalytic method is.

And what motivates and justifies this form, what there is cause to warn this or that inexperienced practitioner who would like to launch into it, is that it must be considered indispensable to avoid a certain number of confusions as to the practice and also the essence of the method. And one also saw appear, in a gradually elaborated form, a certain number of fundamental notions for understanding the mode of action of analytic therapeutics, and in particular in these writings, a certain number of extremely important passages for understanding the progress that the elaboration underwent, in the course of these years 1904–1919, in practice and also in FREUD’s theory:
– the notion of resistance,
– the function of transference,
– the mode of action and intervention in the transference,
– and finally even, at a certain point, the notion of the function essential to the transference neurosis.

Needless to tell you that this small group of writings has a very particular importance. This grouping, however, is not completely or entirely satisfactory, at first sight at least. Perhaps the term ‘Technical Papers’ is not what effectively gives it its unity. For it does indeed represent a unity in FREUD’s work and FREUD’s thought, a unity by a sort of stage in his thought, if one can say so. It is from this angle that we will study it.

A stage effectively intermediate between what we could call the first development of what someone…
an analyst whose pen is not always of the best vein,
but who on this occasion had a fairly happy, even fine,
…find
…called ‘germinal experience’ in FREUD.

Indeed, we can distinguish up to about, let us say 1904 or even 1906—1904 representing the appearance of the article on the psychoanalytic method, about which some say that it is there for the first time that one saw the word psychoanalysis appear—which is entirely false, because the word psychoanalysis had been used well before by FREUD—but in any case there the word psychoanalysis is used in a formal way, and in the very title of the article, so let us say 1904 or 1906.

1909: these are the lectures at CLARK University, FREUD’s trip to America accompanied by his ‘son’.

And it is there, at the reference point between 1904 and 1906, that we can choose as representing the first development of this germinal experience. If we take things up at the other end, at the year 1920, we see the elaboration of the theory of the agencies, of the structural theory, or again metapsychological, as FREUD called it, of the Freudian experience. That is the other end: it is another development that he bequeathed to us from his experience and his discovery.

You see it: the Technical Papers are ranged and situated exactly between the two. That is what gives them their meaning, because otherwise, if we wanted to say that the Technical Papers are a unity in the case where FREUD speaks of technique, that would be an entirely erroneous conception.

One can say that in a certain sense FREUD never ceased to speak of technique. I have no need to evoke before you the Studien über Hysterie, which are absolutely nothing but a long exposition of the discovery of analytic technique. We see it there in formation, and that is what gives the value of these studies, and I will say that if one wanted indeed to make a complete, systematic exposition of the way technique developed in FREUD, that is how one would have to begin: we could only refer to it and evoke it without ceasing.

The reason why I did not take Studien über Hysterie is quite simply that they are not easily accessible: you do not all read German, nor even English. There is an edition of it in the Nervous and Mental Disease Monograph series, which one can obtain. It was not extremely easy to ask you all to make that effort. On the other hand, there are other reasons than these reasons of expediency, for which I have chosen these Technical Papers.

But to continue, we will say that, even in The Interpretation of Dreams, it is a matter of technique all the time and perpetually. One can say that there is no…
that he spoke, wrote, on themes, let us say, of mythological elaboration, ethnographic, properly cultural themes
…there is hardly any work of FREUD that does not bring us something on technique.

But, to stress still further what I mean, it is unnecessary to underline that an article such as Analysis Terminable and Interminable, published in volume V of the Collected Papers, around the years 1934, is one of the most important articles as regards technique.

In fact, the question of the spirit in which it would seem desirable to me that this year, this quarter, we pursue the commentaries on these Technical Papers is something quite important to set from today. And that is why I consider the few words that I am introducing to you as important. I have called them ‘Introduction to the commentaries on Freud’s Technical Papers’.

Indeed, there are several ways of seeing things. If we consider that we are here to lean with admiration over FREUD’s texts and to marvel at them, obviously we will have complete satisfaction. These writings have a freshness, a liveliness that never fail to produce the same effect as all the other writings of FREUD. The personality is revealed there in a way sometimes so direct that one cannot fail to find it there, as in this or that of the best moments that we have already encountered in the texts we have commented on. The simplicity, the reasons, the motivation of the dreams that he gives us, the frankness of tone, in short, is already by itself a kind of lesson. The ease with which all the questions of the practical rules to be observed are treated is something to which it would never be bad for us to refer, to make us see how much for FREUD it was a matter there of an instrument, in the sense in which one says one has a hammer well in hand. He says:

‘Well in hand for me, but what I tell you there is because it is—me—who is accustomed to holding it like that.
But others perhaps would prefer an instrument a tiny bit different, more suited to their hand.’

You will see passages that are quite clear, even more clearly than I tell you it in this metaphorical form. The whole question of the formalization of technical rules is treated there with a freedom that is certainly by itself a teaching that could suffice and that already gives a first reading of the Technical Papers its fruit and its reward. There is nothing more salutary, more liberating, than the direct reading of these writings where for the first time a certain number of practical rules are given, of a quite instrumental character, and nothing is more significant for clearly showing that the question is elsewhere.

That is not all, in the way of transmitting to us what one could call the paths of this truth of Freudian thought. One could add another face that shows itself in a certain number of passages, which perhaps come in the background, but which are very noticeable:
– it is the suffering character of this personality, the feeling he has of the necessity of authority, which certainly does not go without a certain fundamental depreciation of what the one who has something to transmit or to teach can expect from those who follow him and listen to him.
– a certain profound mistrust of the way things are applied and understood appears in many places, and you will even see: I believe that it is not very difficult to find a quite particular depreciation of the human material offered to him in the contemporary world.

It is indeed surely what allows us to glimpse also why FREUD, quite outside the circle of the style of what he writes, concretely and practically put into operation this weight of his authority, and how at once he was exclusive with respect to all sorts of deviations—very effectively, deviations that manifested themselves—and at the same time imperative in the way he let the transmission of this teaching organize itself around him.

That is only a glimpse of what may be revealed to us by this reading. The question is to know whether it is only that, this historical aspect of the action, of the presence of FREUD, on the subject of technical transmission—whether that is what we are going to limit ourselves to. Well then, no! I do not believe that this can be possible. If only because, despite all the interest and the stimulating, pleasant, relaxing side that that can have, it would still be only rather inoperative.

You know that it is always as a function of what is current, as a function of the meaning that can have[…] namely:

‘What are we doing when we are doing analysis?’

This commentary of FREUD has up to now been brought by me, and I do not see why we would not pursue this examination in relation to this small writing in the same style and in the same spirit.

Now, to start from the current state of technique, from what is said, written, and practiced as to analytic technique, I do not know whether the majority of you—at least a part, I hope—has fully become aware of this: that, as to the way analyst practitioners throughout the world, for the moment—I am speaking of now, 1954, this very fresh, very new year—these various analysts think, express, conceive their technique, to the point that it is not exaggerated to call it ‘the most radical confusion’.

I submit in fact that currently among analysts—and who think, which already narrows the circle—there is perhaps not a single one, deep down, who forms the same idea as any one of his contemporaries, or of his neighbors on the subject—do you not agree, Michèle CAHEN?—on the subject of what one does, what one aims at, what one obtains, what it is about.

It is even to the point that we could amuse ourselves with this little game of bringing together the most extreme formulated conceptions, and we will see that they lead to rigorously contradictory formulations, and this without looking very far. We will not look for lovers of paradoxes. Besides, they are not so abundant, in general. The matter is grave enough, and serious enough, for various theoreticians to approach it without a desire for fantasy.

And in general humor is absent from these kinds of elaborations on therapeutic results, on their forms, on their procedures and the ways by which one obtains them. One clings to the balustrade, to the ‘guardrail’, of some part of theoretical elaboration made by FREUD himself. And that is what gives each person the guarantee that he is still in communication with those who are his confrères and colleagues. It is through this intermediary, through the intermediary of Freudian language, that communication is maintained between practitioners who very evidently form rather different conceptions of their therapeutic action, and what is more, of the general form of this interhuman relation that is called psychoanalysis.

When I say ‘interhuman relation’, you already see that I put things at the point where they have come currently. For it is evident that the notion of the relation between the analyst and the analysed is the path into which the elaboration of modern doctrines has engaged, to try to find a footing, a plane of elaboration that corresponds to the concrete of experience. That is certainly a direction, the most fertile direction into which things have been engaged since FREUD’s death.

That is what Mr. BALINT calls, for example, the creation of what he calls a ‘two bodies psychology’, a term moreover that is not his, that he borrowed from the late RICKMAN, who was one of the rare persons who had a little theoretical originality in the analytic milieu since FREUD’s death.

This way of formulating things, around which, as you see, one can easily group all the studies that have been done on the object relation, the importance of countertransference, and a certain number of connected terms among which, in the foreground, the role of fantasy, namely the imaginary interreaction between the analysand and the analyst, is something that we will have to take into account.

Does that mean that by this we are on a path that is effectively the path that allows us to situate the problems well? On one side, yes. On one side, no. There is a major interest in promoting a research of this kind, insofar as it clearly marks the originality of what is at issue in relation to a ‘one-body psychology’, the usual constructive psychology.

It is necessary to mark, from the outset, that it is elsewhere that everything we can elaborate in analytic expression is constituted, namely in a certain determined relation. Is it enough to say that it is a relation between two individuals? That is where, I believe, part of the insufficiently deepened problem lies. There one can glimpse the dead ends into which the theoretical formulation of technique is currently being carried.

I cannot tell you more about it for the moment. Yet, for those who are present here, familiar with this seminar, you must clearly understand this, namely that there is no ‘two-bodies psychology’ if we do not make intervene this third element, one of whose phases I have already presented to you in the form of the symbolic relation of speech taken as such, and taken as the central point of perspectives, points of view, apprehensions of analytic experience. That is to say that it is in a relation of three—and not in a relation of two—that analytic experience can be fully formulated in its completeness.

That does not mean that one cannot express fragments of it, pieces of it, important aspects of it in another register, and in a register that indicates particularly[…]. But what I want to set as a premise for the development of our discussion is this: that there lies one of the most important points to elucidate in order to understand, to situate, what sort of difficulties a certain number of formulations of interanalytic relations lead to, formulations which are moreover different, and that is easy to understand.

If the foundation of the interanalytic relation is effectively something that we can represent like that, triadic, there will be several ways of choosing within the three elements of this triad. There will be a way of placing the emphasis on each of the three triadic relations that are established within a triad. And that will be, you will see, a quite practical way of classifying a certain number of theoretical elaborations that are given of technique. All that may seem at present a bit abstract. I cannot do more or better today.

Be that as it may, what I want to try to say in a more concrete way, closer to the ground, to introduce you to this discussion, I spoke earlier of the ‘germinal experience’ in FREUD. This germinal experience, I am going to evoke it quickly here, since in sum it is that which has been the object in part of our last lessons, those of the last quarter, entirely attached, centered, around the notion that it is the complete reconstitution of the history of the subject that is the essential, constitutive, structural element of analytic progress.

I believe I have shown you that FREUD started from it, that each time it is for him a matter of apprehending a singular case… and that is what has made the value of analysis, of each of these five great psychoanalyses, the three that we have already seen, elaborated, worked through together, demonstrate it to you… it is that there is truly the essential, his progress, his discovery, in the way of taking a case in its singularity.

Well then, taking it in its singularity, what does that mean? It means essentially that for him the interest, the essence, the foundation, the proper dimension of analysis, is the reintegration by the subject of his history up to its last sensitive limits, that is to say up to something that far exceeds individual limits. This being said, [something] that can be founded, deduced, demonstrated from a thousand textual points in FREUD, and that is what we have done together over the course of these last years. This presents itself, if you like, in the fact, in the emphasis placed by FREUD on this or that point, essential to be conquered by technique, in the form of a certain number of characteristics, what I will call ‘situation of history’ in its first appearance, but that would appear as emphasis placed on the past. Of course, I showed you that it was not simple: history is not the past; history is the past insofar as it is historized in the present, and it is historized in the present because it was lived in the past.

I want to indicate that in technique, the paths and the means to gain access to this reintegration, restitution of the subject’s history, will take the form of a search for restitution of the past. This being considered as a point of aim, as a material result, as an emphasis of the research, pursued by a certain number of technical routes, it is very important to see, and you will see it… you will see it marked, I must say, throughout this work of FREUD of which I told you the technical indications, especially the Technical Papers of which I was speaking to you earlier… you will see that for FREUD, this always remained, and up to the end, in the foreground of his concerns.

That is precisely why, around this emphasis placed on this ‘restitution of the past’, a certain number of questions arise which are, properly speaking, the questions opened by the Freudian discovery, and which are nothing less than the questions that have up to now been avoided, that have not been approached—in analysis, I mean—namely the functions of time in the realization of the human subject.

The more one returns to the origin of the Freudian experience—when I say ‘to the origin’, I do not mean to the historical origin, I mean at the source point—the more one realizes that it is that which always keeps analysis alive, despite profoundly different dressings that are given to it, the more one sees at the same time that we must pose the question of what this restitution of the past means for the human subject—there I emphasize the past in the pastist sense of experience—this restitution of the past on which FREUD always places and replaces the emphasis.

Even when, with the notions of the three agencies—and you will see that one can even say four—he gave a considerable development to the structural point of view, when thereby he favored a certain orientation of analysis that goes more and more to detect within technique the current relation in the present, within the analytic session itself as a unique session, and as a repeated session, the sequence of treatment experiences within the four walls of analysis.

I need only, to support what I am telling you about the emphasis always maintained by FREUD, about the orientation of this analytic experience, to evoke an article that he published, I believe, in 1937, which is called ‘Constructions in analysis’, where it is still and always a matter of the reconstruction of the subject’s history.

One cannot see a more characteristic example of the persistence, from one end to the other of FREUD’s work, of this central, pivotal point of view. And there is almost something like a last re-insistence on this theme, in the fact that FREUD insists on this article. One can consider it as the extract, the point, the last word of what is constantly at stake in a work as central as The Wolf Man, namely: ‘What is the value of what is reconstructed from the subject’s past?’. At that moment, one can say that FREUD arrives—one senses it very well at many other points of his work—arrives at a notion which, you saw, was emerging in the course of the last discussions we had last quarter, and which is roughly this: that in the end, FREUD tells us, in the end the fact that the subject relives, remembers, in the intuitive sense of the word, the formative events of his existence, is not in itself so important. There are quite striking formulations:

‘After all—writes FREUD—Träume, dreams, ist auch erinnern, dreams are still a way of remembering.’
[Träumen ist ja auch ein Erinnern, wenn auch unter den Bedingungen der Nachtzeit und der Traumbildung. Wolfmann, 6]

But dreams as such. And he writes many others on this subject. He even goes so far as to say: and after all, screen memories themselves are a quite satisfactory representative of what is at issue. That does not mean that they are—as such and in their manifest form as memories—a satisfactory representative, but sufficiently elaborated, they give us absolutely the equivalence of what we are seeking.

Do you see, at this degree, the point we arrive at? We arrive, in FREUD’s thought, in FREUD’s own conception, in sum, at the idea that the reading, the qualified, experienced reading, of the cryptogram that what the subject currently possesses in his consciousness represents—what am I going to say: of himself!—no, not only of himself, of himself and of everything, that is to say the whole of his system suitably translated, that is what is at stake.

And that is what we read in this restitution of the subject’s integrality, of which I told you earlier that at the start it presented itself as a ‘restoration of the past’, and of which one realizes that, without his ever having lost this ideal of reconstruction, since it is the very term he uses up to the end, the emphasis bears even more on the reconstruction face than on the relived face, on reviviscence, in the sense that one is commonly accustomed to call ‘affective’ in order to designate it in what one can consider as an ideal of reintegration, that the subject remembers as truly his, as having been truly lived, that he communicates with it, that he adopts it.

We have in any case in FREUD’s texts the most formal admission that this is not what is essential. You see how much there is there something that is quite remarkable, and that would be paradoxical if we did not have, in order to understand it, in order to reach it, to give it its meaning, if we did not have at least the perception of the meaning that that can take in this register, the one that I am trying here to make you understand, to promote, as being essential to the understanding of our experience, and which is that of speech as such. In the end, what is at stake is even less remembering than re-writing history.

I am speaking to you at this moment of what there is in FREUD; it is very important, if only to distinguish things. That does not mean that he is right, but it is certain that this thread is permanent, underlying, continuously, the development of his thought. He never abandoned something that can be formulated only in the way in which I have just told you: it is a formula: re-writing history, a formula that allows one to judge, to situate, the various formulas he gives of what seems to him to be the little details of analysis. You know that I could confront with that completely different conceptions of analytic experience. There is no need, for that, to look for extremists.

And those who make analysis into this sort of discharge, if one can say, homeopathic, within current experience, in the analytic field, that is to say in the office, the living room of the analyst, the consulting room, a homeopathic discharge of a certain way of apprehending the world on a phantasmatic plane, and which must little by little, within this ‘current’, ‘real’ experience, diminish, transform, balance itself, in a certain relation to the real, you can clearly see that there the emphasis is placed quite elsewhere.

The emphasis is placed on a phantasmatic relation to a relation that one calls, without looking further, in single quotation marks, ‘real’. I can give you a thousand written examples of it at length and breadth, formulated by a person whom I have already named here, who wrote on technique and formulated things about it in a way that is certainly not only rigid and without openness, that is certainly nuanced, and does everything to welcome multiplicity, plurality of expression, and that in the end comes down to that.

There result from it moreover singular incidences that we can evoke on the occasion of these texts. And not only those. In fact, what is at issue, what we will encounter ceaselessly as a fundamental question in the course of the apprehension that we are going to attempt to make, by reason of the bias, the inclination by which a certain fundamental institution of practice, the one that was given to us by FREUD, has come to transform itself into a technique, into a certain handling of the analyst–analysand relation, in the sense of what I have just told you.

We will see that a notion is absolutely central in this transformation: it is the way in which the notions that FREUD introduced in the period immediately subsequent to that of the Technical Papers have been taken up, received, adopted, handled. Namely precisely the three agencies, and of the three, the one that from that moment took the first importance, nothing less than the ego. And it is around the conception of the ego that in fact both the whole development of analytic technique since then pivots, and that all the difficulties that the theoretical elaboration of this practical development poses are situated.

It is certain that there is a world between what we do effectively, in this kind of lair where a patient speaks to us, and where we speak to him from time to time, there is a world between that and the theoretical elaboration we give of it. Even in FREUD, we have the impression, where the gap is infinitely more reduced, that there is still a distance.

I am certainly not the only one to have asked myself the question: what did FREUD effectively do? Not only did others ask themselves this question, it is hardly worth saying, but they wrote that they asked themselves it. Someone like BERGLER asks the question in black and white and says that in the end we do not know very much about it, apart from what FREUD himself let us see when he too put in black and white the fruit of certain of his experiences, namely his five great psychoanalyses. There we have the best glimpse, the best opening, onto the way FREUD behaved.

Effectively, it seems that the traits of FREUD’s experience cannot, properly speaking, be reproduced in their concrete reality. For a very simple reason, on which I have already insisted, namely the singularity that the experience with FREUD had, from the fact that FREUD—and this is an absolutely essential point in the situation—was the one—and this is an essential dimension of the experience—that FREUD was really, had really been the one who opened this path of experience. This by itself gives an absolutely particular optic. It can be demonstrated in the dialogue between the patient and FREUD: FREUD for the patient on the one hand, and above all the way FREUD himself behaves vis-à-vis the patient who in the end—one senses it all the time—for him is only a kind of support, of question, of occasional control, on the path where he, FREUD, advances solitary.

It is something that by itself gives this absolutely dramatic aspect, in the proper sense of the word, and as far as you can push the term dramatic, since it always goes as far as what issues from the human drama, that is to say failure, in each of the cases that FREUD brought us.

The question is quite different for those who find themselves in a position to follow these paths, namely the paths that FREUD opened in the course of this experience pursued throughout his life, and up to something one could call the entry into a kind of ‘promised land’. But one cannot say that he entered it. It is enough to read what one can truly consider as his testament, namely ‘Analysis terminable and interminable’, to see that if there was something of which FREUD was aware, it is that he had not entered it, into this ‘promised land’. This article, I would say, is not a reading to propose to just anyone who knows how to read—fortunately there are not so many people who know how to read—but for those who know how to read, it is an article difficult to assimilate, provided one is an analyst. If one is not an analyst, one does not care!

The situation therefore, I say, is quite different for those who find themselves following FREUD’s paths. It is indeed, very precisely, on this question of the way these paths are taken up, adopted, re-understood, re-thought—and we cannot do otherwise than center everything we can bring as a critique of analytic technique. In other words, the smallest part of technique, or even its whole, is worth, can be worth, only as a function of and insofar as we understand where the fundamental question lies, for this or that analyst who adopts it.

In other words, when we hear talk of the ego both as what it is the ‘ally’ of the analyst, not only the ally, but the sole source. We know only the ego, people commonly write…
– it is written by Miss Anna FREUD, where it has a sense that is not the same as in the neighbor,
– it is written by Mr. FENICHEL and Mrs.[…]
…like almost everything that has been written on analysis since 1920:
– we address ourselves only to the ego,
– we have communication only with the ego,
– everything must pass through the ego.

On the other hand, everything that has been brought as a development on the subject of this ego psychology can be summed up roughly in this term: the ego is structured exactly like a symptom. Namely that within the subject, it is only a privileged symptom, it is the human symptom par excellence, it is man’s mental illness. I believe that to translate the analytic ego in this rapid, abbreviated way is to give something that best sums up what results, deep down, from the pure and simple reading of Anna FREUD’s The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence.

You cannot fail to be struck by the fact that the ego is constructed, situated within the whole of the subject like a symptom, exactly. Nothing differentiates it from it. There is no objection to be made to this demonstration, which is particularly fulgurant, and no less fulgurant the fact that things are at such a point of confusion that the sequence of the catalogues of defense mechanisms that constitute the ego in this singular position. This catalogue, which is one of the most heterogeneous lists, one of the most heterogeneous catalogues one can conceive, Anna FREUD herself underlines it, says it very well:

‘To bring repression close to notions like the turning of the instinct against its object, or the inversion of its aims, is to place side by side elements that are absolutely not homogeneous.’

It must be said that at the point we are at, we cannot perhaps do better, and this is a parenthesis. What is important is to see this profound ambiguity that the analyst forms of the ego:
– the ego that is everything to which one gains access,
– the ego that is a kind of stumbling block, a failed act, a slip.

Right at the beginning of his chapters on analytic interpretation, FENICHEL speaks of the ego, like everyone, and feels the need to say that the ego has this essential function of being a function by which the subject learns the meaning of words, that is to say that from the first line it is at the heart of the subject. Everything is there! It is a matter of knowing whether the meaning of the ego overflows the ego, or is indeed a function of the ego. If it is a function of the ego, the whole development that FENICHEL gives thereafter is absolutely incomprehensible. Besides, he does not insist.

I say that it is a slip, because it is not developed, and everything he develops consists in saying the contrary, and leads to a development where he tells us that in the end the id and the ego are exactly the same thing. Which is not made to clarify the whole problem. But, I repeat it, either the subsequent development is unthinkable, or else it is not true.

And one must know: what is the ego? In what is the subject caught? Which includes, beyond the meaning of words, much else: the fundamental formative role of language in his history? This brings us to say that with regard to FREUD’s Technical Papers we will have to ask ourselves a certain number of questions that will go far, on this sole condition, of course, that it is first as a function of each of our experience, and also of that by which we will try to communicate among ourselves from the current state of theory and technique, that we ask ourselves the question of knowing: what was there, already, contained, implied, in what FREUD was bringing at that moment?

What was orienting itself toward the formulas to which we are brought in our practice? And what is there perhaps of narrowing in the way we are brought to see things, or on the contrary: what is there, what has been realized since, that goes in the direction of a more rigorous systematization, more adequate to reality, of a widening? It is in this register, and nothing less than in this register, that our commentary can take on its meaning.

To give you the idea, the still more precise way in which I envisage this examination, I will tell you this: you saw, at the end of the last lessons that I gave you, the beginning that I indicated, of a certain readability of something one can call ‘the psychoanalytic myth’. This readability being in the sense of, not so much of a critique, as of a measure of the extent of the reality with which it confronts itself insofar as it can give an answer to it only mythical.

That is to say in a broader apprehension, as broad as possible, on the positive side of the theoretical conquest that it realizes in relation to this x, which is not at all given to be an x[…] nor a closed x; this x can be a quite open x that is called man. The problem is much more limited, different perhaps, much more urgent for us when it is a matter of technique, for I would say there that it is under the blow of our own analytic discipline that the examination we can make, and that we have to make, of everything that is of the order of our technique falls, I mean that:
– as distant as the acts and behaviors of the subject are from what he comes on that score to bring us in the session,
– as distant are our concrete behaviors in the analytic session and the theoretical elaboration we give of them.

But what I have just said about the distance that is a first truth has its meaning and its interest and its scope only insofar as it is reversed, and that it also means: just as close. That is to say that

– just as the subject’s concrete acts are not precisely even concrete, sensible, let us grant things with their emphasis: the fundamental absurdity of interhuman behavior is comprehensible only as a function of this ‘system’—as it was named, fortunately moreover, without knowing what she was saying, as usual, by Mrs. Melanie KLEIN—of this ‘system’ that is called the human ego, namely this series of defenses, negations, blockages, inhibitions, fundamental fantasies, in the end, that orient and direct it,

– in exactly the same way, our theoretical conception of our technique, even if it does not coincide exactly with what we do with our patients, is nonetheless something that structures, profoundly motivates the slightest of our interventions with said patients.

And that is precisely what is serious about it. Of course, it is not enough to ‘know’: it is not enough that we have a certain conception of the ego for our ego to come into play like the rhinoceros in the china shop of our relation with the patient: that is not enough. But there is nevertheless a certain relation and a certain way of conceiving the function of the patient’s ego in analysis—I am only opening the question; it is for our work and our examination to resolve it—such that the inverse mode under which we in fact allow ourselves to make our ego intervene…
naturally we allow ourselves, as analysis has revealed that we allow ourselves things: without knowing it,
…but we in fact allow ourselves to make our ego intervene in analysis. And that nevertheless has its interest, because in the end one must all the same know, since in analysis it is so much a matter of readaptation to the real, whether it is the measure of the analyst’s ego that gives the measure of the real?

The question of the theory of technique is also interesting. The analyst’s action, whatever he makes of the whole of our world system, to each…
I am speaking of the concrete one, of which it is not necessary that we have already formulated it for it to be there, which is not of the order of the unconscious, which acts in the slightest way we express ourselves daily, in the slightest spontaneity of our discourse,
…this is something that indeed—yes or no—will serve as a measure in analysis.

I think that for today I have opened the question enough for you now to see the interest of what we can do together.

I would like a certain number of you—MANNONI do not leave—Would you like to join with one of your neighbors—ANZIEU, for example—to study the notion of ‘resistance’ in FREUD’s writings that are within your reach?

The Technical Papers grouped under the title ‘Psychoanalytic Technique’ at the PUF.
Do not neglect the continuation of the lessons published under the title: ‘Introduction to Psychoanalysis’.

If two others—PERRIER and GRANOFF—would like to join on the same subject?
We will see how to proceed; we will let ourselves be guided by experience itself.