MANNONI ANZIEU

LACAN

The people who have taken an interest in the notion of resistance, insofar as it is involved in the group of Freud’s Technical Papers and the later writings: who is going to speak?

Octave MANNONI

I think it is me. I was able to collaborate with ANZIEU only by telephone. The question arose whether he would speak first, because he would begin at the beginning: Studies on Hysteria, or whether it was not better that I begin, because I do rather the geography.

I presented the matter as the study of the country of resistance. Consequently, in this way, we would first have a geographical aspect and then a historical development. I studied above all the texts that extend from 1904 to 1918, and include the articles brought together in ‘Psycho-analytic Technique’ and also Chapter XIX of the Introduction to Psycho-analysis. This one is explicitly devoted to resistance. The articles are not devoted to it specifically, but it is discussed all the time; there are some sixty significant citations.

FREUD encountered resistance as an obstacle to treatment as he had previously conceived it as founded on the fundamental rule. This aspect of resistance presents itself as an interpersonal phenomenon in the analytic relationship, and this point of view will never be abandoned.

LACAN

Come on, GRANOFF, come here, take notes, and if there are things you do not agree with, you will speak afterwards.

 

Octave MANNONI

The first aspect that FREUD mentions is the interpersonal aspect: resistance appears between two people, as an obstacle to communication. And immediately afterwards, there are other particular aspects. He discovers that resistance is not an obstacle; it is also the object of analytic study, which can be studied in itself: there lies the secret of the neurosis. From 1904 to 1918, the analysis of resistances will constitute the center of technical preoccupations. One can say that a development of very great interest begins there because this analysis of resistances will become, twenty years later, the ‘analysis of the ego’.

I will stop in 1910, but I will note that there is an important contribution in 1920 because of Karl ABRAHAM’s contribution, and of the contribution, at the end of FREUD’s writings in 1935: Analysis Terminable and Interminable, and of the penultimate of the Collected Papers on the Splitting of the Ego, unfinished. At that moment, FREUD did not state the decisive conclusions, but is on the point of drawing them.

I call this a development, because everything that will be found in 1938, and even in the legacy that FREUD will leave after 1938, all that is perfectly indicated, in germ, presented as early as 1904 and perhaps even before. From the clinical point of view, resistance is conceived as an obstacle between two people. FREUD recognizes as resistance everything that hinders the treatment.

(One will find this on page 119).
I warn that there are 140 pages in Psycho-analytic Technique. Chapter 19 of the Introduction to Psycho-analysis begins on page 310. The numbers above relate to this chapter 19: resistance seen in its clinical aspect as an obstacle between the subject and the analyst.

‘The subject takes advantage of every opportunity to escape the analyst.
They reveal an unrecognized intention of the subject. The analyst is above all occupied with fighting against it.’

ANZIEU has, I believe, something to tell you about that. Originally FREUD’s attitude is a struggle between the subject and resistance. FREUD knows that it is the analyst who provokes resistance: ‘The first effect of the fundamental rule is to render the subject mute…’ Moreover, he insists on the fact that this only makes manifest the resistances that were latent. And thus it will be possible to conceive resistances as a structure.

LACAN – You are right. To which precise text are you referring?

Octave MANNONI

Page 46 and page 314. One has the impression that FREUD must have had a rather provocative attitude vis-à-vis resistances and that he sought them cheerfully. I believe that our attitude, although it is apparently different, is obviously the same. The essential has not changed. The presence of the analyst, even discreet and mute, has as an immediate result to bring about, perhaps not immediately the same muteness, but to make the resistances manifest.

Even in this case resistance must be overcome for the work to be possible, and it must be analyzed for two reasons: it is the best way to overcome it, and it contains the secret of the neurosis. As early as 1904 (p.15), he writes:

‘It is the phenomenon of resistance alone that makes it possible to understand the behavior of the subject.’

I propose to present things a little differently after this introduction, but I do so with reserve: I will provisionally set aside an important aspect: transference. Transference is already implicated in the clinical aspect, but I will treat it separately. Without transference, this gives the following: at first glance, the idea of resistance is confused with the idea of repression. As early as page 4:

‘Repression belongs fundamentally to the topographical register. The aim of therapy is to transport the repressed from one place into another – from the unconscious into the conscious – resistances hinder this transport. One might believe that it is advantageous to avoid this obstacle. That is what I did; this method fails because the repressing-resisting forces are temporarily turned away, but persist, and one must take them as obstacles.’

One then leaves the topographical register; one finds oneself in the dynamic register, at the same time that FREUD (p.111) exhorts his patient to consider his illness no longer as something contemptible but as an adversary worthy of him, the source where he will be able to find precious data for his later life.

‘He recognizes resistance as worthy of attention and a source of precious information.’

To see things thus, he has no need of a new theory:

‘Repression is the result of antagonistic forces; the analysis of resistances informs us about the state of these forces, therefore about the subject.’

I would like to initiate something. I would like to note that transference traits are present in a concealed way in this esteem for the adversary that illness is, that is resistance. It is even a matter of counter-transference. But in this form, the transferential aspect remains external to theory, remains clinical. And we will see what happens when one tries to indicate them.

If I dared to leave my subject and launch into that, there is an entire development on an effort, a temptation to which one cannot resist, to reintroduce the personal into the impersonal. That is what was done:
– ABRAHAM with introjected ideas,
– JUNG with imagos,
– what Mélanie KLEIN will do, but I continue…

This dynamic stage leads to a structural stage. During a period where the structural state will remain in the state of sketch and in the latent state, in 1894 FREUD understood the symptoms, which he called neuro-psychoses of defense, as brought about by cuts in the subject’s consciousness, which he explained by the hypothesis of unrecognized intentions on the part of the subject.

At that time, hypnosis served to repress these unrecognized intentions, that is to say, to repress these resistances. ANZIEU, I believe, will speak to you about that aspect.

What I have just said is found in volume I of the Collected Papers, the first article on the neuro-psychoses of defense, the penultimate article by FREUD, on the splitting of the Ego. FREUD remained faithful to these separations.

‘But analysis, without analysis of resistances, contributed to repressing resistances.’

But there is a continuity (p.13):

‘to analyze a resistance always remains to eliminate it, to remove it from the path. Even when one takes them as objects…’

Resistance would always remain marked by the undesirable character. I believe that on this point there would also be remarks that one could make. Let us return to what can point toward structural conceptions. In 1918, he writes:

‘The neurotic brings us a psyche torn to pieces and fissured by resistances.’

It is difficult to imagine tearings and fissures between the psychic agencies and the levels of the ego. He continues (p.134):

‘When we eliminate resistances, we see this psyche become coordinated,
and the great unity that we call the Ego aggregate all instinctual stirrings.’

The words instinctual stirrings indicate a work of recovery on the id, the work of the ‘Zuiderzee’. [Cf. ‘Wo Es war, soll Ich werden’]
We are obliged to consider this work and these fissures, if not from the point of view of the actual ego, at least from the point of view of the virtual ego that will come about by aggregating these future egos that are the pieces of the id. There is in germ there what will later be called (BALINT) ‘the nuclei of the ego’, the notion of resistance that FREUD proposes without, so to speak, justifying, the place that the structural conception will come to occupy afterwards. In Anna FREUD’s book, the defenses of the ego are indeed always against the id.

If one reads the passage that relates to these questions, in Analysis Terminable and Interminable, one begins with:

‘They are not obstacles that isolate parts of the Ego from other parts of the Ego.’

But long before one could say – what I myself do not dare to say: ‘resistance is the ego’, of which I do not know what our master will think – before one could have said that, FREUD said:

‘Resistance is transference.’

By reintroducing the notion of transference, it seems to me that I reintroduce it into the china shop of metapsychology. One must go back, onto the interpersonal ground of clinical considerations. The question can be posed thus:
if it is the patient as a ‘natural person’, as one used to say, who resists the analyst, in the name of his own intentions, and in a sense with all his means…
in the manner of PROTEUS before MENELAUS, through simulations of cure or the simulation of complete imbecility
…it seems that the analyst has no choice but between two tactics:

– either act like MENELAUS, apply the nymph’s advice, that is to say: hold fast! And FREUD (p.97) recommends this means: accept the challenge, stand up to it, affirm without relaxation that it is a resistance, encourage himself.
– the other means is to have this resistance be replaced in the subject by goodwill, that is to say – one might believe – take advantage of positive transference.

Such goodwill is something so useful that FREUD advises never to touch transference as long as it has not changed into resistance (p.99):

‘This change of transference into resistance cannot fail to occur, and it is transference that provides the most formidable of resistances’

But one must not believe that transference becomes resistance by becoming negative: one knows that a positive transference can delay the end of the analysis. FREUD’s genius seems to have developed above all in the clinical domain.

It is a domain that he could not explore directly. He had to forge the instruments of theory as he went along:

‘Without the speculations of metapsychology, we would not go one step further – and he adds –
I would almost have said without the fantasy of metapsychology, we would not go one step further.’

That is what he does: he makes a theory to explain how transference is resistance. I do not want to go into all the details. I will set aside the economic aspect where libido divides into two conflicts, compromises, and then appears at the transferential end, as in a childbirth: it is adopted by the subject because it satisfies resistance. I will take the essential: repetition transference that plays in conduct, whereas the aim of analysis is the evocation of memory, ‘without going outside psychic limits’. I believe he means: without going outside that part of the ego that is opposed to the part that is perhaps not a part of the ego, which is behavior and action. That is how it must be understood.

I am not sure that FREUD did not renounce the first aim of analysis: to overcome resistances, to overcome hysteria. Transference is one of those resistances. So that transference in a theory of this kind would be, in a way, a secondary effect – transference as resistance – a secondary effect of primary resistances. This transference is a reminiscence that is not the memory as one expects it from the patient, because memories cure the symptom:

‘It would be like resistance if it were not transformed into memory.
It is because it is stopped on the path that goes from the unconscious to the conscious.’

And FREUD rejoins his blissful metapsychology. The obstacle is again between the less conscious and the more conscious. And he can install there the ‘little Ampère man’, the one who opens or does not open the door to repressed representations, of whom FREUD adds:

‘It is only a fiction – to add immediately – that gives a very approximate idea of the state of real things.’

I do not know whether I have explained myself well, or whether I must return to the way one passes:

– from a clinical fact: transference between two people,

– to a metapsychological transference, where there are no longer persons, but the ‘Ampère man’, and that explains interpersonal events and facts; resistance has become a kind of valve of this mechanism that is repression.

But it seems to me that metapsychology, the great discovery that commands the developments to come, is that transference is resistance – not negative transference – that is the capital discovery.

If one examines what happened, one sees that there is a kind of pressure that is exerted and invites him to consider persons and not Ampère little men. In the end, that is what I alluded to with ABRAHAM, JUNG, Mélanie KLEIN: the personal reintroduced.

But it is already in germ in FREUD: in pages 27 to 314, FREUD interrupts a development to say all at once: ‘Resistance, but it is the father!’, and that comes into this metapsychology as something from another planet, another piece of the clinic. You see, there was a very real metapsychological continuity between the topology and the dynamics of resistances: the structural – defense…

But as soon as one reintroduces persons or allows oneself to be influenced by ABRAHAM, Mélanie KLEIN, or even FREUD, in the midst of these impersonal notions, one is tempted to speak[…] which accords rather poorly. That is a point[…], I believe.

This presentation is not chronological…
– the same notions are found again in the various periods,
– the clinical aspect does not come before the analysis of the ego; it is in germ from the beginning
but there is a chronology…
– it is not that of FREUD’s discoveries,
– it is rather that of his teaching,
…it is the chronology of the different ways in which FREUD was understood by his commentators and his disciples, and FREUD knew it.

The penultimate article of the Collected Papers, entitled Splitting of the Ego (volume V), begins with a remarkable sentence.

LACAN – Article published after FREUD’s death.

Octave MANNONI

‘Here I find myself today in the interesting situation of not knowing whether what I have to say should be considered as self-evident, and long familiar, or whether on the contrary it is not something entirely new and embarrassing.’

[I find myself for a moment in the interesting position of not knowing whether what I have to say should be regarded as something long familiar and obvious
or as something entirely new and puzzling. (Collected Papers, Hogarth Press, 1957, p.372]

And I believe indeed that ‘Splitting of the ego’ is in germ in the conceptions of 1894, as absence of inner freedom, as inner resistance in the subject’s consciousness. And yet, in 1938, the expression could still seem entirely new.

I would like to take the liberty of stating my personal impression:
– that resistance remains, despite everything, whatever one does, an obstacle to communication in an interpersonal context,
– and that it is ultimately in this same context, at the end, that it is understood, that is to say communicated, which, as one says, limits it.

But the passage from the first situation – where it is an obstacle – to the second – where it is known, where it becomes communication –
requires a dialectical detour that makes resistance a dialectical mechanism of repetition of the structure of the ego. It is then a nonsense,
because we understand well that the subject does not want to, or cannot, obey the rule, but we do not understand that he wants to and that he cannot. It is into the void that all the metapsychological work comes to lodge, in order to elaborate this nonsense.

In other words, what bothers me a little is the effort that FREUD constantly provides to envelop personal relations in an interpersonal theory, whereas I see the interpersonal theory itself enveloped in an interpersonal dialectic that is the phenomenology that FREUD opened to us. FREUD died in the middle of the penultimate article where precisely one has the impression that he was going to say it. Phenomenology seems to me like a clinical proposition rather than like a proposition of metapsychology.
 

LACAN

Your tendency is clearly phenomenological. I believe one can truly thank very warmly MANONNI for making the happiest opening to the resumption of the seminar’s dialogue. There are enormously many things in what he said, overall very well situated. And I believe that in the end he posed at the end the question that is the one we will have to face in this commentary on the Technical Papers.

I must say right away that I do not think the solution is entirely of the form he lets us glimpse. He himself sensed it rather well. In any case, I do not think so. I believe I will give you a more complex formulation and one that will put us more at the heart of the current question of the orientation of technique and of the significance of analysis.

But it is good to have posed the question as he posed it, that is to say within the whole of an intrapersonal mechanism to an interpersonal mechanism. But there the interpersonal mechanism, although the word mechanism is not approximate on this occasion, that is not all; it takes its meaning from where we are. But if we get into it, we must see how that can be formulated.

I do not want – since you have collaborated, both of you – to interrupt the development that can result from your coupling, however relative it may be. I would like ANZIEU also to say what his research this week has led him to.

 

Didier ANZIEU

I searched for the notion of resistance at its source, at what I believe to be its source, the Studies on Hysteria.
It would have been necessary to read carefully everything that had appeared before. This problem remains pending.

Plan:
– Introduction: before the Studies on Hysteria
– Body of the presentation: the Studies on Hysteria

Introduction

What did hypnosis teach at the end of the 19th century? And the positive aspect of hypnosis, which is the only one up to now and at that time to which one attached oneself?

1. Amnesias can be filled in under hypnosis. This is CHARCOT’s discovery.
2. By doing this work, the symptoms disappeared; this is BREUER’s discovery.
3. Why do the symptoms disappear when the amnesia is filled in? Because the subject becomes aware of his tendencies, or he had intensely struggled against his own sexual impulses. This is properly FREUD’s discovery, which is not limited to completing the series that begins with CHARCOT and continues with BREUER; FREUD’s essential discovery is that of a negative aspect of hypnosis.

There is a kind of dialectical reversal that will allow the passage from hypnosis to psychoanalysis. This discovery is that hypnosis is very beautiful, but there are people who are not hypnotizable. One returns to the most concrete reality.

‘In the case[…] it worked very well, but I never encountered a single case where it worked in that way,’ says FREUD.

And he devotes articles to the question of whether one must differentiate a hypnotic hysteria of retention and a hysteria of defense.
Some patients cannot be hypnotized. And FREUD brings this fact, which is known but which one has dropped until now, closer to another fact also known, and also judged without importance: other patients who could be hypnotized and who do not want to be. I read FREUD’s text:

‘The idea then occurred to me that the two cases could be identical, and that in both cases this could only signify simply a counter-will. Whoever has doubts about hypnotism is not hypnotizable, and it makes no difference whether he expresses his opposition or not.
Whether I can firmly adhere to this conception is not yet completely clarified.’

Thus, in its extremely vivid aspect, is FREUD’s first intuition, according to which not being able and not wanting are exactly the same thing, whether one knows or does not know why one does not want, it is exactly the same thing. But knowing why it is the same thing is still very confused.

On the model, and as a consequence of this 1st intuition, FREUD will discover a 2nd. But for that what will he do?
He will draw the consequence of his first intuition, by renouncing the application of hypnosis. And he will proceed with his patients by the cathartic method, that is to say by asking them for the memories that come to their mind when they think about their symptoms and about the first origin of their symptoms, without hypnotizing them. Here then is the discovery:

‘One obtains exactly the same results with or without hypnosis.’

Consequently, it was not hypnosis as such that had favored the effectiveness that CHARCOT and BREUER had brought to light; it was the way one used it. I return to FREUD’s text where he will set out his second intuition:

‘Through such experiments, I acquired the impression that through insistence alone…

it suffices to insist, he says, with the subjects, and they always end up finding the memories in question

…and without hypnosis, it was really possible to bring to light the series of pathogenic ideas. But since this insistence demanded much effort on my part, it showed me that I had overcome a resistance. I came to formulate the whole thing in the following theoretical statement:
through my psychic work, I was able to overcome a psychic force which, in the patient, prevented the pathogenic idea from becoming conscious,
that is to say from being remembered.’

Thus, FREUD’s second intuition:
– if I am obliged to insist with the patient so that he gives me this memory which is nevertheless there, very near,
– if I am obliged to insist, if I get tired,
– if it is truly a painful work for me,
…then it is that he is resisting me. And, the chain being opened: 3rd intuition, which arrives immediately at the same moment:

‘Without having revealed itself to me, it occurred to me that it must be exactly the same psychic force that had acted against the hysterical symptom at the beginning, and that at that moment prevented the pathogenic idea from becoming conscious.’

Thus likewise, that people who cannot and people who do not want to be hypnotized are the same, likewise this force that was at the origin of the symptom was exactly the same that in the hic et nunc of this relation, prevents the pathogenic idea from being remembered. We are finished with the intuitions; let us move to the explanations.

What is this force, FREUD asks himself, that acted, continues to act, and that I revive? Well, one can judge the nature of this force from the nature of the forgotten and repressed pathogenic ideas, which precisely thanks to my method I was able to bring to light. The nature of these ideas will inform me about the nature of the force. These ideas are always ideas of a painful nature, linked to affects of reproach, of moral suffering, of personal injury. They are of such a nature that one would rather not have experienced them, and that one would prefer to forget them.

‘All that,’ says FREUD, ‘leads to the notion of ‘defense’, as if it came spontaneously to my mind…’

And he explains afterwards that it did not come spontaneously to him, for with what he knew of psychology, it was a well-known notion. But he finds it again, he reinvents it, to account for this experience in which he found himself. So, at the origin the subject had a painful experience. The painful character of this experience brought about a reaction on the part of the ego – for at that moment, only at that moment, the word ego appears in the text – a reaction on the part of the ego that defends itself against the painful impression.

‘We continue the explanation,’ says FREUD, ‘defending oneself against the painful impression is not sufficient to protect oneself against its return’

To protect oneself against the return of this impression, he will build a system, and this is the formation of the symptom: defense takes a new form that is called repression. FREUD hesitates at first to use the word ‘repression’. He uses the word rejection, expulsion: rejection, expulsion, or repression. It is only in the continuation of the text that the word repression is definitively accepted.

And now, when the physician strives to make the subject remember that painful idea which provoked the ego’s defense, then provoked its repression, and was erected into a symptom, once again this same force is at work, but which appears to me, the experimenter, as resistance. Consequently, these are three names that one can give to one and the same reality: – this force, when it reacts and fights against the instinctual impulse, is defense, – when it abolishes its memory, it is repression, – when it opposes recollection, it is resistance.

We find inscribed there, in that germinal cell of which BERGMAN spoke, what my comrade MANNONI indicated in advance, the three planes: – structural, – in the background the dynamic plane, – and the actualized, striking plane, that of the topography, the resistance that appears to me.

So here is the first point: discovery of resistance. Second point: handling of resistance. Well, it is very curious that there are two ways of handling resistance in this passage from the Studies on Hysteria: an explicit way, recommended, and a half-admitted way.

The explicit way of handling resistance is to insist that the subject overcome it. And one can insist in two ways: either by giving the subject reassurances; the subject says: – I do not know what the origin of my symptom is. – But yes, you do know it; say it then! or again, in a conciliatory mode: – You know it; it will come to your mind, wait.

And FREUD employs a metaphor that one encounters in the English term struggle. Unfortunately, I have not been able to resort often to the German text, but one would have to revise, I believe, all these citations.

LACAN

What is annoying is that for Anna O. we do not have the German text. It is an absurdity without name that we have this Anna O. text only in the American edition!

ANZIEU

If the reassurances given to the subject in this metaphor of combat, of struggle, if these reassurances are not sufficient, FREUD resorts to a technique which is the imposition of the hands on the subject’s forehead. What is the meaning?

LACAN – Exactly! That is the intermediate stage between hypnosis and dialogue, is it not?

ANZIEU

Historically, it would be quite important to know whether it is the intermediate phase or whether he first used the reassurances, and only if they do not work…

LACAN

He explains it in the case of Lucie R. It is in the case where he obtained only an incomplete hypnosis that he stopped worrying about it, wondering whether yes or no… And even obtaining from the subject, according to the classical method, the answer to the question ‘are you asleep?’, to which he had the unpleasantness of hearing himself answered ‘But no, I am absolutely not asleep’.

Which brought him himself into a very embarrassing situation, which he explains to the subject in a naive and charming way, which shows the ambiguities of practice, in which he is led to persuade the subject:

– that it is not the same sleep as that about which the subject gives his answer,

– that he must nevertheless be a little asleep.

And on the borders of the most perfect ambiguity, he says very clearly that all this puts him in very great embarrassment, and that he only got through it from the day he no longer worried about it. But he maintained this pressure of the hands, either on the forehead, or on each side of the patient’s head. And he explained to them to fix themselves on the idea, on the cause of the symptom. The symptoms were treated one by one at that time, in themselves, confronted directly as proposed problems.

Under FREUD’s hands, the patient was assured that without any doubt the thoughts, the memories of elements of the subject’s situation that were going to present themselves, were those that were at issue: he only had to trust them. And FREUD added this technical detail that it would be at the moment when he would lift his hands, by a sort of mimicry of lifting the barrier, that the patient would be perfectly conscious, and would only have to take what presented itself to his mind in order to be sure of holding the right end of the thread.

It is nevertheless quite remarkable that this method proved, for the cases that FREUD reports to us, perfectly effective. For the case of Lucie R., which is so pretty – Perhaps he had the opportunity, why not? to report it to us in an abridged way – was entirely resolved, and with an ease that has the beauty of the works of the primitives.

In every new case that one discovers, there is a happy chance, a happy conjunction of the gods that allows a happy solution, a privileged case. In a case like that of Anna O. we are in the presence of this long work of working through, of working of the case, of coming upon the themes that have made of the case of Anna O. that, on certain sides, we have already[…] all the animation, the thickness of the most modern analytic cases, despite the method employed: several times the whole series of events, the whole history is relived, reworked. We see that it is a work of long range, which moreover lasts nearly a year.

In the case of Lucie R. things go much more quickly. It is with a kind of elegance that makes of this case something essential, striking. And even the things are too tightened, do not allow us to really see where the springs are, but it is nevertheless entirely usable.

This woman who had olfactory hallucinations, which one can call olfactory hallucinations, hysterical symptoms whose meaning is detected, places and dates, in an entirely happy way by FREUD. On this subject, he gives us all the details on his way of proceeding.

[To Anzieu] Continue.

 

Didier ANZIEU

I think that the first technique, that of reassurances, is a technique of force, whereas the technique of the pressure of the hands is a technique of ruse. FREUD himself explains it:

‘By putting my hands on the subject’s forehead, I draw his attention to this gesture,
and thereby resistance is displaced from that against which it was resisting to this gesture,
and thereby the memory that was underneath can come to light.’

That is why I find it very important that he begins with reassurance, before coming to the pressure on the forehead, because his reaction to the subject’s resistance is first to force him, to be the stronger, whereas the second…

LACAN – On which text do you base yourself?

Didier ANZIEU

It is an interpretation; in the Studies on Hysteria, in the chapter on psychotherapy, he says:

‘First give reassurances, and if that does not work: the pressure of the hands’

LACAN – It is a method of presentation; we will have to review that.

Didier ANZIEU

Even if it is not chronological, it is important that his first reaction is to be the stronger, to force the resistance, and his second, to be cunning, to divert it, to be cunning with it. His third reaction, he indicates it only after several pages of description of various forms of resistances, and the best means, finally, to overcome resistance, in certain cases, is to find the patient’s secret, to tell it to him, so that he is obliged to abandon resistance.

Consequently, we arrive, this time, here, at something typically analytic: interpretation. That is not the interpretation of resistance, but of content. It is the most radical means of lifting resistance. From force to ruse, and from ruse to interpretation, there is a considerable progress there. He also explains that what is important is to have the subject share the knowledge of the wonderful world of the psychological process:

‘We obtain his collaboration and lead him to consider his own case himself with the objective interest of the scientific observer…’

And there too we push back resistance. I will relate this to what FREUD was discovering at the same time as his theory…

LACAN

When I insisted on that – I beg your pardon for interrupting – I indicated in the presentations that I made to you, I sometimes emphasized the altogether privileged character that the cases treated by FREUD had. It is because of the special character of FREUD’s technique. I indicated it to you. We can only presume, from a certain number of rules that he gave us, which were faithfully applied, then by the admission of the best authors and those who were at the source, who knew FREUD, even those – I will give you texts on that occasion – tell us that one nevertheless cannot fully form an idea.

We do not have enough current documents to form an idea of the way FREUD applied the technique, what his technique was. If I insist on the character that the fact presents that FREUD was advancing in a research that is not a research marked by just any style, and also that is not a research like other scientific researches, this domain of the truth of the subject, this dimension of truth that is put on a plane of accent, of presence, which makes of this research something that is not entirely reducible to the objective research, and even objectivizing, of the common scientific method, this something that is the realization of the subject’s truth, as of a proper dimension that can be, that must be detached in its originality in relation to the very notion of reality, which is what I emphasized in all these lessons, which, after having been summary lessons of the work of the past years, are introductory lessons of this year’s work.

FREUD was at that moment on the same path of research of a truth that interested him himself also totally right into his person, therefore in his presence also to the sick person, to his activity, let us say, as a therapist, although that is something altogether insufficient to qualify FREUD’s attitude. And, by FREUD’s own account, this something can only have given his relations with his sick persons an absolutely singular character.

If you like, it is singularity raised to the second power, the singularity maxima of analytic treatment, that of the treatment done by the very one who discovered analysis. I have already told you, we must consider analysis as always resting on this character of singularity of the realization of the experience. Analysis as a science is a science of the particular. The realization of an analysis is always a singular case, among these singular cases that nevertheless lend themselves to some generality since there is more than one analyst.

The experience with FREUD presents, for its part, singularity carried to its extreme, by the very fact that FREUD was in the process of constructing and verifying analysis itself. In other words, the notion of the singularity of this experience cannot absolutely be eliminated from the situation, from the position that we must give to the Freudian experiences – I mean: to FREUD himself – as such. We cannot erase this true fact that it was the first time one did an analysis.

I would not say that one applied this method; the method is deduced from it, it is method for others. But the absolutely unique, inaugural character of FREUD’s démarche, we would make a serious mistake, which would entail all kinds of obscurities, we will see it later, it is not for nothing.

I insist on that, not only to make the subject count, but because in order to understand even everything that we will have to say later, how the questions of analytic technique are posed – currently we will not be able – and I note that I make some efforts to put it well into your head for the moment, because one must indeed have a moment when one suspends one’s attention on something in order to give it its full value.

I insist that you propose to yourselves, as a problem, whether this is something essential to sustain in your attention: it is; I assure you! Especially from the moment when you have learned to consider analysis as I taught it to you as the kind of experience that it is: that is, an experience of the particular, in this singular particular of the original, something that takes still more value, still more particular value.

And if one does not underscore the difference there is between that and everything that followed afterwards…
for those who were interested not so much in this truth as in the constitution of the paths of access to this truth
…you will never be able to see well the difference, of accent and of sense that must be given to certain phrases, certain texts, in FREUD’s work, and which then take in other contexts a quite different value, even though one could consider them as traced one on the other.

That is the interest of these commentaries on FREUD’s texts that allow us to see in detail, on each of the points, the questions which – you will see, you already see today – are of considerable importance and are numerous, insidious. Properly speaking, the very type of question whose concern is truly that of each and everyone, the natural tendency of the human mind being to avoid them and to rely on a little refrain, a formula that gives them I know not what of schematic, abbreviated, imaged, on which one can rest. It is easier to rest than to put them back into question.

Didier ANZIEU

…another necessity, to act as explicator, as professor and as confessor who imposes absolution after confession.

Finally, fourth element, influence of the affective aspect, personal influence therefore, beginning of transference and countertransference.
That was therefore the second point. There was also a third point, but which I am going to skip: the sketch of the various forms of resistances.

LACAN – That is very important.

Didier ANZIEU

The various forms of resistances, there are four or five indicated by FREUD:
– the patient says: ‘I thought an idea would come to me, I had confidence in you, but I am only anxious, and nothing comes to me…’
– or again, the failure of the fundamental rule: something would have come to his mind, but he does not say it, because he judges it without importance or unpleasant,
– or again he uses a subterfuge that hides resistance: ‘I am distracted by the piano that is playing in the next room; I can think only of that.
– or again he begins to speak at length, but to speak without emotion, and he speaks in an artificial way. So the most subtle resistance, or again, the most difficult of resistances, the patient does indeed remember well the famous pathogenic memory, but he disavows it: ‘It is not I who remember it; it is as if it were you, Doctor, who were saying it…’
– or again ‘You expected me to say it, and I say it because you expected it. You had surely thought that I was going to think of it’
– or again, a last resistance, then the ultimate, which he indicates in another passage, is that this memory is not at all recognized as a memory. It is a vague, diffuse, imprecise impression, which does not allow being attached to a scene; it is the maximum of a resistance.
One understands that FREUD always sought to reconstruct this resistance in what it had of most subtle.

The last point of my presentation, still following the text of the Studies on Hysteria, is the theoretical explanation of resistance.
To give a theoretical explanation of resistance, FREUD applies to it the conceptual model in which he had been trained in the school of dynamic neurology of the time. He proposes to represent a triple stratification around a central core which is the pathogenic nucleus in which the pathogenic, traumatic experience is recorded. Three arrangements:
– a linear arrangement,
– a concentric,
– and a dynamic arrangement, in zigzag.

I will speak only of the second arrangement: similar memories are grouped in stratifications that he compares to bundles of documents in archives.

LACAN

What is striking is that we entirely detach from the pseudo-anatomical metaphor which is precisely the one evoked at the time, of verbal images more or less wandering along nerve conductors, whereas there the images evoke exactly what you say: that of a bundle of documents.

Didier ANZIEU- It is in the English text: Table of contents, well-ordered archives…

LACAN

Partitions with several registers… All metaphors which themselves tend invincibly toward the materialization of speech, and not the mythical materialization of the neurologists, but the concrete materializations where speech begins to flow into manuscript sheet, printed sheet. There is something there that cannot fail to strike. Even the metaphor with the blank page, the palimpsest, also comes in its turn, and has come to the pen of more than one analyst.

And in that case, in the passage you evoke, the notion of several longitudinal strata, that is to say in sum several threads of discourse, which one truly imagines in the text that materializes them in the form of a bundle, and one speaks of this bundle as of something literally concrete. A bundle, a current of parallel words which, at a certain moment, widen to surround that famous pathogenic nucleus, which itself is a history, move away from it to include it and join again a little farther on.

The phenomenon of resistance being literally constituted by something that is said in the text, as being this that there are two directions: the longitudinal direction, and a radial direction. And that it is in the radial direction that resistance is exercised, when one wants to get closer to the threads that are at the center of the bundle; resistance is the consequence, when one attempts to pass from the external registers toward the center: there is a positive repulsive force that is exercised from the repressed nucleus, and resistance is felt in the effort of penetration toward the threads of discourse that are the closest.

And he even goes so far as to write – it is not in the Studien, it is in a later text, in the writings grouped under the title ‘Metapsychology’, he says:

‘The force of resistance is inversely proportional to the distance where one finds oneself from the repressed nucleus…’

I do not believe that it is the exact sentence; I will find the citation, it is very striking, it is entirely this materialization of resistance in its first apprehension in experience, at once something entirely clinical, as MANNONI was saying a moment ago, as – to use MANNONI’s terms – to designate the subject’s discourse at the level of this clinical experience, there is a way of imaging the problem that goes as far as possible, and employs the least satisfying metaphor for the neurophysiologist.

To know where it happens, where the material, biological support of all that is, he straightforwardly takes discourse as reality as such, as a reality that is there, which he expresses in a way that evokes the bundle, the sheaf of proofs, as one also says, in another form of metaphor. The sheaf of proofs, that is nevertheless also that: juxtaposed discourses, which one over the other cover each other, follow each other, form a certain dimension, a certain thickness, the mass of a file.

As he does not yet have the notion of the material support of isolated speech… Nowadays, there would be there succession of phonemes that compose a part of the subject’s discourse; he would have taken it as an element of his metaphor, that one encounters a resistance all the greater as the subject’s discourse comes closer to a certain form of discourse that would be the last and the right one, but that one he absolutely refuses.

I also believe that what is perhaps not brought out in the effort of synthesis that you all make, and you do well to do it, are notions. This notion that has not been put in the foreground is in sum that of the relations of the unconscious and the conscious.

And it is in the foreground of the questions that we must ask ourselves on the subject of resistance. For the question is not to know more exactly… Before knowing what this resistance represents, either within the subject, or in the subject’s relations with the analyst, what does that mean, in the end? It means a question:

– Is resistance a phenomenon that takes place in analysis?
– Is resistance only in analysis?
– Or is it something of which we can speak plainly and at all times when the subject goes about outside analysis, even when the subject has nothing to do with analysis, before he comes to it, and after he has left it?
– What is resistance?
– Does resistance continue to have its meaning in the subject outside analysis?

Another way of posing – another way that brings many problems – of posing this problem that MANNONI began just now in a happy way. The general idea of his theme is the way in which he took the question, but there are other questions that arise. Is it that, since we have only little time today, is it indeed everything that opposes this reconquest of this unconscious, of which the word has not been pronounced.

Didier ANZIEU – It is not yet pronounced…

LACAN

Yes. But MANNONI took other texts. And in particular there is a text on resistance that is in the Interpretation of Dreams extremely important, to which neither one nor the other of you referred. The one that gives the assumption to certain of the problems that you posed, each of you.

It is precisely a matter of knowing whether the character of inaccessibility of the unconscious is something that, in a perspective that, you see, is not simply the current perspective of analysis, the metapsychological perspective that we have seen today with MANNONI’s and ANZIEU’s presentation.

I think that it is perhaps not a discovery, but something that fixes ideas, to realize that these notions of resistances are extremely old, from the very origin, from birth, the first researches of FREUD, this notion of resistance is also linked very early to the notion of the ego.

But when we read, in the text of the Studien, certain entirely striking phrases, when he speaks not only of the ego as you remarked, the ego comes there as such in the text, but he speaks of the ego as representing a certain ideational mass, the ideational mass, the content, the mass, I no longer have in mind what is in the German text. The ego is thus already something which at that moment is sensed as something that approaches, that leaves sensed all the problems that the notion of ego now poses us.

I would almost say that these are notions with retroactive effect. To read these first things in the light of everything that has for us developed in the problem around the ego, perhaps even the most recent formulations mask them rather than bring them out.

You cannot not see there for example, in this formula: ‘ideational mass’, something that approaches, neighbors singularly with a certain formula that I was able to give you of one of the elements of counter-transference which is precisely nothing other than the function of the functions of the analyst’s ego, what I called the sum of the analyst’s prejudices. The ego is something that represents also in the patient all this organization of certainties, of beliefs, of coordinates, of references that constitute properly speaking what FREUD called from the origin an ‘ideational system’, what we can, in an abbreviated way, call here ‘the system’.

Does resistance come only from there? Or is it still something else?
Is what I called in one of my last lessons that I gave here…
I represented to you properly speaking as at the limit of a certain domain of speech which is precisely this ideational mass of which we speak, that of the subject’s ego
…is there or is there not that structuring that I called, in this same turn of my discourse, this sum of silence after which another speech reappears, which is precisely that which it is a matter of reconquering in this domain of the unconscious, this part of the subject which is this part of his history separated by something that separates him from his history?

Is it, yes or no, only this something that is the organization of the ego? Is it purely and simply the organization of the ego which, as such, constitutes resistance and makes the difficulty of access in the radial direction – to use the very term used by FREUD – that is at issue when we approach the phenomena of consciousness, the content of consciousness?

Here is a very simple question, too simple, as such insoluble. Fortunately, the progress of analytic theory in FREUD, on his pupils, of which, we will see on this occasion, it is entirely linked to the vicissitudes during the first thirty years of this century, where analytic technique approached enough experimental phases to differentiate its questions in a way that allows, according to the good schema which is the very one that analysis showed us, which allows us to show it by turning it, exactly as analysis is a detour to access this unconscious.

But, you see, this brings us back to this of which I told you that it would be the model of our research: it is to be sought in the vicissitudes, metaphors, the phases of the evolution of analytic experience itself, something that informs us about its own nature, the nature of this experience insofar as itself, analytic experience, is also a human experience, masked to itself.

It is to carry to the second degree the problem posed to us by neurosis, which matters because it imposes itself: I do here only affirm it, you will see it demonstrated at the same time as our examination. I emerge evidently from this true mental and practical impasse to which analysis currently arrives. You see that I go far in the formulation of what I say.

It matters exactly to submit to analysis this operational schema. I can say that analysis itself taught us to try to read, in the different phases of the theorico-technical elaboration of analysis, something that allows us to read further in the authentic reality at issue, namely the reconquest of the unconscious by the subject.

You will see that this method will lead us to bring precisions that will go much further than the simple formal domain of a catalogue of procedures or of conceptual categories. This resumption of analysis in an examination itself analytic, you will see, is an approach that will reveal itself in our work, as it has already revealed itself in our first access to FREUD’s clinical texts, which will reveal its fecundity, and especially with regard to the problems of technique.

On that, I am going to leave you today. I congratulate MANNONI and ANZIEU for what they have done.
I will try next time, by approaching in a new way, a new slant, another entry door into the problem.
I do not believe that it is exactly from their work that we will be able to give the most fecund presentation.

I will not fail in passing to underscore what has been brought in each of their presentations that is fecund, and what we will already be able to respond to next time. The title [of the next seminar session] has been communicated and published:

Resistance and defenses – its meaning and their functions – in analytic experience.

I will give you a first overview: the notion of resistance in its relations with the notions of defense, which were from the origin the neuro-psychoses of defense (1894), and at the end, of symptoms. FREUD says that one must return to the notion of defense.

We will see certain things that will allow us to take one step further.