LACAN- We are going to give the floor back to ANZIEU, whom I somewhat seemed to minimize last time…

Didier ANZIEU

I was approaching the last paragraph which, in the Studies on Hysteria, deals with resistance, an effort at a theoretical explanation of resistance,
described and discovered in the preceding pages. I had begun to explain—and Doctor LACAN continued in this direction—
the triple stratification of the psychical material that FREUD describes around a central core of memories, a pathogenic core to which
one must gain access.

There is a linear, chronological arrangement, on the one hand, of kinds of stratifications of similar memories that are linked together,
and on the other hand a kind of dynamic procedure, in zigzag, which follows the content of thought, and by which one arrives from the surface
at the center. It is the description of the stratifications of similar memories that is interesting here, from the point of view of resistance.

He represents them as concentrically stratified around the pathogenic core. And what determines these concentric layers?
It is their degree of distance from the core. It is that they are, he says, layers of equal resistance. I would be quite tempted—this is
a completely personal idea of mine—to see in this formulation of FREUD the influence of a mode of thought which at the time
is beginning to become important, namely thinking in terms of field: the electric field, magnetic field, a certain dynamic field.
And just as when one approaches the center of a field, the focus of a field, the lines of force become stronger and stronger,
very likely on the same model FREUD conceives the superposition of memories.

And consequently I believe it is not by chance, as MANNONI pointed out, that one speaks of Ampère’s little man.
FREUD speaks of Ampère’s little man as that little man who bars the path between the unconscious and the conscious.
It is not by chance that we are dealing with a metaphor of an electrical order. It is that relations of electrical and magnetic orders
intervene here in the theorization of the notion of resistance.

Octave MANNONI – He should have taken Maxwell’s demon, because Ampère’s little man, he does absolutely nothing.

LACAN

Yes, I did not want to go into the theory of electricity, but Ampère’s little man does not have the power to make it open or close…

Octave MANNONI – That role is Maxwell’s demon.

Jean HYPPOLITE

But Maxwell’s demon cannot be notified of the passage of a molecule. The possibility of signaling is impossible.
Maxwell’s demon cannot be informed when a molecule passes.

LACAN

We are entering into a quite thorny ambiguity, for ‘resistance’ is indeed the formula. All these questions are all the more timely to raise
because psychoanalytic texts obviously teem with these methodical improprieties.
It is true that these are difficult subjects to handle, to verbalize, without giving the verb a subject.

Obviously, all the time we hear that ‘the ego sends out the signal of anxiety’, handles ‘the life instinct’, ‘the death instinct’.
One no longer knows where the control center is, the switchman, the needle. Since all this is difficult to realize in a cautious and rigorous way,
in the end we see little Maxwell demons appear all the time in the analytic text, who have such
foresight, such intelligence! The annoying thing is that we do not have a precise enough idea of the nature of demons in analysis.

Didier ANZIEU

I believe moreover that on this point one should obviously return to the history of electricity, of magnetism. I do not quite know
whether the notion of nervous influx, its electrical nature, had already been discovered. In one of FREUD’s earliest youthful works
where, applying precisely the psychological method of[…], while adding a certain number of improvements, FREUD had
managed to discover a certain continuity of cells that constituted a nerve. People were debating: what is the nerve?

LACAN – FREUD’s work in neurology is at the origin of the theory of the neuron.

Didier ANZIEU

Precisely… the conclusion of one of his works is right on the verge of the discovery of this theory. It is rather curious
moreover that FREUD remained on the verge of discovering theories, and that it was into psychoanalysis that he poured himself.

Jean HYPPOLITE – Did he not consider that he had failed in the matter of electricity? I seem to have read that somewhere.

Didier ANZIEU- In the matter of zoology.

Octave MANNONI

Yes. In the clinical matter of electricity, he gave up applying electrical apparatus to neurotics after a painful ordeal.

Jean HYPPOLITE – Exactly. It is the compensation for what he considered to be a failure.

Didier ANZIEU- Yes, indeed. He had tried electrotherapy in private practice.

LACAN

HYPPOLITE is alluding to the fact that precisely, in FREUD’s works prior to the psychoanalytic period,
his anatomical works can be considered successes, and were sanctioned as such. When he set about
operating on the physiological plane, he seems to have manifested a certain lack of interest, and in fact this is one of the reasons why
moreover he seems not to have pushed through to the end the scope of the discovery of cocaine. Even there his physiological investigation
was limp. It was very close to the therapeutic use as an analgesic, and he left aside
the completely rigorous thing, the anesthetic value of cocaine, from insufficient physiologist’s curiosity, that is very certain!

But in any case we are there in a trait of FREUD’s personality. One can raise the question of knowing whether, no doubt,
as ANZIEU said, he was reserving it for a better destiny. One can ask oneself that question. He made certain returns
to domains where he seemed to have some inclination, at least somewhat!

But to go so far as to say that it is a compensation, I believe that is a bit excessive, for in the end, if we read the works
published under the title ‘Birth of Psychoanalysis’, the first recovered manuscript, theory of the psychical apparatus,
it is indeed—and moreover everyone has recognized and underscored it—in the line of the theoretical elaboration of his time,
on the mechanistic functioning of the nervous apparatus.

All the less should one be surprised that electrical metaphors are mixed into it. One must also not forget that electricity
in itself, at the outset, started from a physiological experimentation, in order to be returned to nervous influx. It is in the domain
of nervous conduction that for the first time electric current was experimented with. One does not know what its scope would be.

Didier ANZIEU

I believe that it is above all from the conceptual point of view that there is something important there. Indeed, FREUD was trained
in neurology by a certain number of physiologists who brought a completely new conception into this domain,
of which one has found the kind of oath.

LACAN – The three great conspirators of psychophysiology.

Didier ANZIEU

What did this oath consist of: that no other forces exist than those which are analogous to physico-chemical forces.
There are no great occult, mysterious forces, all forces reduce to attraction and repulsion.
It is interesting to return to this text of the oath, from 1840, in which this school was formed. It is thus on the model of astronomy.

I even thought, hearing you speak of the ego as a mass of ideas, that you were alluding to it. BRENTANO, for his part, provided
the volume of the complete works of Stuart MILL where these data of empiricist psychology are found.
What is it that JUNG endeavored to do when he stated the law of the association of ideas: ideas attract one another?
He was taking up the great law of NEWTON discovered in physics, that bodies attract one another. The great law of the psychical world
was analogous to the law of the physical world. The notion of force emerged there, and electricity is one of the privileged ones.

This is doubtless going to replace the ‘lever’, model of ancient mechanics. Now there is this notion of attraction
and repulsion to explain fundamental phenomena. This thing experienced counter-transferentially
as resistance, FREUD is going to theorize by resorting to these notions of force. And force presupposes something that opposes
this force. Force is force in relation to a certain resistance: fundamental notions in electricity.

I believe that it is above all as a conceptual model that FREUD was led to place the emphasis. It is properly counter-transferential:
‘He resists, and that makes me furious’. I believe that there, from the clinical point of view, the notion of resistance does indeed represent an experience
that we are all led to have at one time or another with almost all patients in our practice.

LACAN – What? What is it?

Didier ANZIEU

This extremely unpleasant experience where one says to oneself: ‘He was on the point, he could find it himself, he knows it without knowing that he knows it,
he only has to take the trouble to look at it, and this damned imbecile, this idiot—all the aggressive and hostile terms that come to our mind—
he does not do it’. And the temptation one has to force him, to constrain him…’

LACAN – Don’t tickle that too much on that[sic]…

Jean HYPPOLITE

It is the only thing that allows the analyst to be intelligent: when this resistance makes the analysand pass for an idiot.
That gives a high self-consciousness.

LACAN

The trap moreover of countertransference, since one must call it that, is nonetheless more insidious than this first level.

Didier ANZIEU

I believe that it is the close-up par excellence. That is what struck FREUD. And when he subsequently endeavored to account for it,
it is not much later that he elaborated it, in the form of ‘countertransference’, according to the conceptions he had present
in mind and the works done previously.

We arrive at this representation that you yourself have sketched, which is that the pathogenic core is not a passive core,
but an eminently active core, and that, from this pathogenic core, there is a whole infiltration that directs itself by ramifications
toward the entire psychical apparatus. And resistance is on the contrary something—another symmetrical infiltration—which proceeds from the ego
of the subject, and which endeavors precisely to stop these ramifications of the pathogenic infiltration where it endeavors to pass
into layers that are more and more superficial.

LACAN – To what text are you referring there?

Didier ANZIEU – Always in the Studies on Hysteria.

LACAN

What you have just said, that resistance is characterized as—well, you did not say the word, I do not know how
you managed not to say it…—but as the defense, in sum, of the ego against the infiltrations of the pathogenic core.
What is your text?

Didier ANZIEU

The Studies on Hysteria, after the presentation of the three schemas, the three arrangements, linear, concentric and dynamic.
Do you want me to find the page?

‘The pathogenic organization does not behave like a foreign body but rather like an infiltration…’

Here is a word whose meaning escapes me: ‘infiltrate’

LACAN – Well, what is infiltrated: the infiltrate.

Didier ANZIEU – ‘…the infiltrate must, in this comparison, be taken to be the resistance.’

LACAN – Well, that does not mean that it is the reaction of the ego; there is no idea of reactive formation of resistance there.

Didier ANZIEU- That is correct.

LACAN

That is to say that, despite yourself, you are already drawing on later texts in the sense of identifying resistance at the expense of something
that is already named in the Studien, but this ego, of which one speaks in the Studien, this ideational mass,
this content of ideations that constitutes the ego in the Studien, that remains to be seen…

Let us say… I will help you, tell you what I think of it. That is what we are here for, to see what the evocation
of the notion of the ego signifies from one end to the other of FREUD’s work. It is quite impossible to understand what
the notion of the ego represents in psychology, as it began to emerge with the works of 1920, work on group psychology,
on ‘Das Ich und das Es’, it is impossible to understand it if one drowns everything in a kind of general sum of apprehension
of a certain side of the psyche.

That is not at all the case in FREUD’s work. It has a functional role, linked to certain technical necessities.
To say at once what I mean, for example to take things: the triumvirate functioning in New York:
HARTMANN, LŒWENSTEIN and KRIS, in their elaboration or their attempt, their present effort of elaboration
of an ego psychology, they are all the time—and one sees it, it suffices to refer to their text—they are around this problem:
‘What did FREUD’s last theory of the ego mean?’, ‘Have we until now really drawn out the technical implications of it?’.

And it is written like that, I am not translating! I am only repeating what is in the last two or three articles of HARTMANN,
which are within your reach there, in this book: Psychoanalytic Quarterly 1951, for example three articles by LŒWENSTEIN, KRIS
and HARTMAN on this subject, grouped there and worth reading. One cannot absolutely say that they arrive
at a fully satisfactory formulation, but manifestly they are searching in this direction, posing principles and theoretical
precisions that certainly involve very important technical applications.

And they come to formulate that they have not been fully drawn out. That does not mean that none have been drawn out at all.
HARTMANN says it: the question is there. It is very curious to see how the question truly of this work is elaborated through
the sequence of an article that has followed one another for a few years, especially since the end of the war. I believe that this gives
all the very manifest appearance of a failure that is significant and must be instructive for us. In any case, there is obviously
a whole distance, a world traveled between:
– the starting point, the ego as it is spoken of in the Studien,
– and this last theory of the ego still problematic for us as it was forged by FREUD himself from 1920.
– Between the two, there is something: this central field that we are in the process of studying.

In sum, how did this theory of the ego come to light, which currently presents itself under this completely
problematic aspect of being the last point of FREUD’s theoretical elaboration, a FREUDian theory never seen, or else never
seen, an extraordinarily original and new theory. And at the same time, under HARTMANN’s pen, something presents itself
which with all its strength tends to rejoin the current of classical psychology.

Both things are true. KRIS writes it as well: ‘entry of psychoanalysis into general psychology’. Now, there appears at the same time
something completely new, fresh, original in the theory of the ego, and it is even inconceivable, all the elaboration
of the years between 1910 and 1920. And there is there something paradoxical, which we will be led to emphasize here, whatever happens:
– either we are led up to the holidays with these Technical Writings,
– or, another way of approaching the same problem with SCHREBER’s writings.
It is therefore important to be entirely prudent, and despite yourself, you slipped in there something that is not in the text.

[To Anzieu] Continue.

Didier ANZIEU

I still had to present in conclusion a certain number of remarks on everything I had indicated. First of all, it is that
—as I was just saying—this notion of resistance appears in FREUD, is discovered, in the course of a lived experience,
this lived experience is—as he says in the Studies on Hysteria—the great surprise is to see that when one asks
the subject to let himself go to associate freely, one realizes that the subject has everything in him, in good order: the memories are arranged
in good order, everything is in good order in him.

And if one succeeds in gaining access to this sum, one finds it. In other words, the etiology of the symptom and of hysteria is in the subject himself.
It is arranged in good order and is waiting for one to come and fetch it. And the subject therefore should see it, find it all by himself,
since it is in him and in good order. But then resistance intervenes. The subject therefore can know it, and he does not want to,
exactly like subjects who could be hypnotized, which would do them the greatest good, and who do not want to.

Consequently, resistance is born from this reaction of the psychotherapist, since we are not yet speaking of psychoanalysis, a kind
of reaction, of counter-reaction, of reaction of rage[sic] against this refusal of the subject to yield to the evidences that are in him and to heal,
finally to heal, whereas he has all the possibilities of healing in him, and consequently the first reaction of the psychotherapist
which is to force, either openly, or in an insidious form, by insisting, to force the subject.

Consequently, FREUD will therefore be led to see that there is in resistance a phenomenon—and I join MANNONI’s conclusions—
a phenomenon of a two-person relation, inter-individual.

LACAN

In 1896, one already spoke of psychoanalysis. The term psychoanalysis already exists in an article in the Revue neurologique. Everyone
can find it, written in French. It may even be in French that the word ‘psychoanalyse’ appeared for the first time.

Didier ANZIEU

Instead of seeing that resistance is transference, and that the analyst’s resistance is countertransference, FREUD refers resistance
back to the subject and says that if the subject resists the analyst, it is because the patient resists himself, that he has defended himself against
the drives that were revived in him by a certain experience, at a certain moment of his history. By that very fact resistance
is referred back to the subject, that is to say the three forms of resistance: resistance, repression and defense, which FREUD endeavors to classify.

LACAN – FREUD endeavors to classify where?

Didier ANZIEU

He endeavors to classify them in time, since:
– the defense of the ego is that he reacted against the sexual impulse,
– repression is that he abolished the memory,
– and resistance is what he opposes to current recollection where he exposes himself to the discovery of this notion.

LACAN

That is how we summarize, we, notions that are not… that slip imperceptibly in the course of the development
of thought toward increasingly differentiated acceptions, which then certainly come together. That is indeed what is at stake,
but this harmonious classification—resistance, defense, repression—is nowhere, under his pen, presented in that way.

Didier ANZIEU

More or less, yes, in the Studies on Hysteria. There would be, for this element of reaction to the subject’s reaction, there would be reason to make
FREUD’s personal factors intervene. That would take us very far. One knows nonetheless, from what FREUD said
in The Interpretation of Dreams—whose uniqueness BERNFELD rediscovered—that there was an extremely strong tendency to domination,
since he identified himself with MASSÉNA, with HANNIBAL. He had then envisaged doing law and politics, thus exercising
a power over persons, and his vocation, his orientation toward medical studies, he attributes it following this hearing
of lectures on GŒTHE, a text by GŒTHE on nature. This seems to be explained in the following way: in place of direct power
over human beings, FREUD substitutes this much more indirect and acceptable exercise of the power that science
gives over nature. And this power, reduced in its final form, one sees again here the mechanism of intellectualization, to understand
nature and thereby submit it to oneself, a classic formula of determinism itself, by allusion with this authoritarian character
in FREUD which punctuates his whole history, and particularly his relations with heretics as well as with his disciples.

LACAN – But I must say that if I speak in this sense, I have not gone so far as to make it the key to the Freudian discovery.

Didier ANZIEU

I do not think of making it the key either, but an interesting element to bring to light. In this resistance, FREUD’s hypersensitivity
to the subject’s resistance is not without relation to his own character.

LACAN – What allows you to speak of FREUD’s ‘hypersensitivity’?

Didier ANZIEU

The fact that he discovered it, and not BREUER nor CHARCOT, nor the others, that it nevertheless happened to him,
because he felt it more vividly, and he elucidated what he had felt.

LACAN

Yes, but you believe… not only that one can bring to light a function such that resistance is something
that signifies in the subject a particular sensitivity to what resists him? Or on the contrary is it not having known how to master it,
to go well elsewhere and well beyond, that allowed him precisely to make it a factor that one can objectify, maneuver, name,
handle, and make one of the springs of therapeutics?

And you believe that FREUD is more authoritarian than CHARCOT, whereas FREUD renounces as much as he can suggestion
in order to leave precisely to the subject the integration of that something from which he is separated by resistances? In other words, is it on the part
of those who disregard resistance that there is more or less authoritarianism in the apprehension of the subject?

I would rather tend to believe that someone who seeks by all means to make the subject his object, his thing,
in hypnotism, or who will seek a subject who becomes supple like a glove, to give him the shape one wants, or draw from him
what one can draw, is nonetheless someone who is more driven by a need for domination, for exercising his power,
than FREUD who on this occasion appears finely respectful of what one commonly calls also from this angle:
the resistance of the object or of the material.

Didier ANZIEU- Assuredly.

LACAN

I believe that, as for what you have just said, one must be extremely prudent in these matters. We cannot handle
our whole technique so easily. When I speak to you of the analysis of FREUD’s work, it is precisely to proceed with it
with all analytic prudence and not to make of a character trait something that is a constant of personality,
still more a characteristic of the subject. I even believe that on that point there are very imprudent things under JONES’s pen,
but I believe nonetheless more nuanced than what you have said.

To think that FREUD’s career was a compensation for his desire for power, even for his frank megalomania, of which traces remain
moreover in his remarks, which still remain to be interpreted, I believe that it is… I believe that the question of FREUD’s drama
at the beginning where he discovers his path, is something that cannot be summed up in such a way that we
characterize everything he brought in contact with the subject as being the continuation of the desire for power!

We have nonetheless learned enough in analysis, the revolution, even the conversion in personality, not to feel
obliged to make an equivalence between FREUD dreaming of dominating the world by means of the will to power, of command,
and FREUD initiator of a new truth. That does not seem to me to fall under the same cupido, if not under the same libido.

Jean HYPPOLITE

Do you allow? It nevertheless seems to me that in CHARCOT’s domination, without fully accepting ANZIEU’s formulations and the conclusions he draws from them, in CHARCOT’s domination by hypnotism, it is a matter of domination over a being reduced to an object…

LACAN – We may be going a bit far, in any case, in reducing…

Jean HYPPOLITE

It is the possession of a being who is no longer master of himself. Whereas, conversely, Freudian domination is to vanquish a subject, a being who still has a self-awareness. There is therefore, in a way, a stronger domination in the domination of the resistance to be vanquished than in the pure and simple suppression of this resistance… without wishing to draw the conclusion that FREUD wanted to dominate the world.

LACAN – Yes, there would be that, if there were what…

Jean HYPPOLITE- It is an easy domination, CHARCOT’s.

LACAN

It is a matter of knowing whether FREUD’s was domination pure and simple. It seems that after what we have seen of his way of proceeding in the clinical cases he reports—and I am still reserving many things that are not indicated in his way of proceeding—in the whole, of course, we have seen things that surprise us, but that surprise us in relation to certain technical principles to which we accord importance, things that surprise us in his interventionism.

They are perhaps in a certain sense much less that sort of victory over the subject’s consciousness of which HYPPOLITE spoke than the modern techniques that always put all the emphasis on resistance. Far from it: in FREUD we see an attitude—one cannot say more complex, perhaps more undifferentiated, that is to say human.

He does not always define what one now calls ‘interpretation of the defense’ or of the content, which is perhaps not always the best… In the end, it is more subtle; we realize that it is the same thing. But one has to be a bit subtle for that. And we see that in the end, in FREUD, the interpretation of content plays the role of interpretation of defense.

It is certainly not that sort of technique, whose shadow you are right to evoke, since that is in sum what is…
I will try to show you by what slant precisely the danger of such a forcing of the subject by the analyst’s interventions presents itself.
They are much more current in the so-called ‘modern’ techniques—as one speaks of analysis as one speaks of chess—they are much more current than they have ever been manifested in FREUD.

And I do not believe that the theoretical outcome of the notion of resistance can serve us as a pretext to formulate, with regard to FREUD, that sort of accusation which goes radically in the contrary direction to the manifestly liberating effect of his whole work and of his therapeutic action. This is not a trial of intent that I am bringing against you. It is a tendency that you manifest at the conclusion of your work, and which can, I believe, serve only to see things in a critical form. One must have a spirit of examination, of critique, even vis-à-vis the original work, but in this form it can serve only to thicken the mystery, and not at all to bring it to light.

Didier ANZIEU

One last thing, which is of the psychoanalytic movement in this same privileged experience whose explanation he endeavored to discover. FREUD discovers the three notions: defense, resistance, repression. After a moment of wavering, in the same year, he tries to synthesize, to extend beyond hysteria, to obsessional neurosis, to paranoia, the notion of defense, and to look for the specific type of defense that was at work in these other neuroses.

FREUD will subsequently center psychoanalytic psychology on the notion of repression, then later on the notion of resistance. And in 1920 he will return to this notion of defense that is sketched here. In this sense, I believe that one is indeed dealing with this germinal cell of Freudian thought, of which in the course of history he will successively develop the aspects that chronologically are the most essential.

LACAN – When you say ‘germinal cell’, to whom are you referring?

Didier ANZIEU-To BERGMAN: ‘germinal cell’.

LACAN

In any case, in that article that I remember well, the name had escaped me, what is at issue throughout the article, which is given as the germinal cell of analytic observation—this is all the more important to underscore because it touches precisely on this question of the sense of the Freudian discovery—is the notion of ‘finding again’ and of ‘restitution of the past’, of which he shows that it is from there that our experience began.

He refers to the work with BREUER, Studien über Hysterie, and he shows that up to the end of FREUD’s work, and up to the last expressions of his thought, the notion of ‘restitution of the past’, under a thousand forms and finally under the form of reconstruction, is always maintained for him in the foreground. That is what is at issue, in this article; the emphasis is not at all placed on the grouping, for example, around this fundamental experience of resistance. It is above all…

Didier ANZIEU

I had not spoken of the germinal cell; I endeavored to connect the development of resistance to all this development.

LACAN

I would nevertheless like to say a few words to you. I believe that the presentations that MANNONI and ANZIEU gave have the interest
of showing you the burning sides of this whole affair. There was in their presentations…
as befits minds doubtless formed, but relatively recently introduced, if not to the application to analysis, at least to its practice, to its technique
…something rather sharp, even polemical, which always has its interest as an introduction to the liveliness of the problem.

I believe that there is indeed a very delicate question there, all the more delicate because, as I indicated in my interruptive remarks,
it is entirely current among some of us. The reproach just now implicitly formulated as being something entirely inaugural to FREUD’s method, which is quite paradoxical, for if something makes the originality of analytic treatment, it is precisely to have perceived at the very origin, and at once, that something original in the subject that places him in this truly problematic relation with himself, that thing that makes it not at all simple to cure him, to have put that in conjunction with what is the very find, the discovery, in the sense in which I explained it to you at the beginning of this year, namely the sense of symptoms.

The refusal of this sense is something that poses a problem. The necessity that this sense be more than revealed, be accepted by the subject,
is something that places among the foremost techniques for which the human person, in the sense in which we understand it today, where we have realized that it has its price, which psychoanalysis is part of, is a technique that not only respects it, but functions in this dimension, and cannot function otherwise.

And it would nevertheless be paradoxical to put in the foreground that the notion of the subject’s resistance is something that
in principle is forced by the technique. That seems evident to me. Which does not mean that the problem does not arise.
The style of intervention of our analytic technique: it is entirely clear that nowadays this or that analyst literally does not take
a step in the treatment without teaching his pupils to pose the question: ‘what could he have invented yet as a defense?’.
This notion truly, not police-like in the sense that it is a matter of finding something hidden, that is rather the term to apply
to the doubtful phases of analysis in its archaic periods, but the inquisitorial phase, which is quite different:
it is a matter of knowing what posture the subject could well have taken, what attitude, what find has he made to put himself
in such a position that everything we will tell him will be inoperative?

To put it plainly, the kind… it is not fair to say bad faith for this style which is that of a certain analytic technique,
bad faith is too tied to implications of the order of knowledge, which are entirely foreign to this state of mind, that would be too
subtle still. There is nonetheless still the idea of a kind of fundamental ill will, a truly voluntarist implication:
the subject not only does not want to know anything, but is capable…//…

[Page 22 of the stenotyping is missing]

…//…half the time, even the time of a human life. One should not be too surprised that you find it again at the end with attitudes
or thoughts, a content entirely different, in the same word that he used. Between the two, they may have married,
had children, and this is enough to give an exactly opposite sense to a dialogue which, at the end of the journey, could be considered
as reproducing word for word the dialogue that was sketched at the start.

The words will have a new sense because the persons will be totally different. I would simply like…
I will take an example before entering my subject. An article by Annie REICH, which appeared in no.1 of 1951
on countertransference. This article takes its value, its coordinates, with a certain way of orienting the technique that goes very far
in a certain school, let us say in a certain part of the English school.

One comes to assert, as you know, that all analysis must take place in the hic et nunc, that is to say that in the end everything
would take place in a kind of always present embrace of the subject’s intentions, here and there, in the session, no doubt through
which we glimpse shreds, fragments, sketches, more or less well related of his past, but where in the end,
it is this kind of ordeal, I was almost going to say an ordeal of psychological force, within the treatment where
all the activity of analysis would reside.

After all, that is indeed the question: the activity of analysis. How does it act? What carries? For those at issue
—for Annie REICH—nothing is important except this kind of recognition by the subject hic et nunc, of the intentions of his
discourse. And his intentions are intentions that never have value except in their hic et nunc scope, in the present interlocution.

When he is with his grocer, or his hairdresser, in reality, implicitly, he chews out the person he is addressing. In part,
everyone knows it; it suffices to have the slightest practice of conjugal life, it gives you a sensitivity to these things, one always knows
that there is a share of implicit claim in the slightest fact that one of the spouses reports to the other precisely
rather what bothered him in the day than the opposite. But there is nonetheless also sometimes something else:
the care to inform him of some important event to know. Both are true. It is a matter of knowing on what point one casts
the light and what one considers important.

Things sometimes go further. Annie REICH reports this of an analyst who finds himself in the following situation of having had
—one senses well that she blurs certain traits. Everything leads one to think that after all it must indeed be something like
a didactic analysis—namely in any case an analysis with someone very close, whose field of activity is very close
to the field of psychoanalysis. This subject—I speak of the analysand—was led to make on the radio a communication on a subject
that greatly interests the analyst himself; these things happen, that!

It happens that this radio communication, he made it at a moment when he has just—he, the analysand—
lost his mother. Everything indicates that the mother in question plays an entirely important role in what are called fixations,
even the subjectivities of the patient. It is a few days before the broadcast that bereavement strikes him. He is certainly very affected by it.
Nevertheless, he does not any the less keep his commitments in a particularly brilliant way. At the following session, the subject arrives
in a kind of stupor, bordering on confusion: there is nothing to get out of it, not only, but one gets something surprising out of it
in its incoordination. The analyst interprets boldly by saying:

‘You are in this state because you think that I greatly resent you for the success you just had the other day on the radio,
on this subject which, as you know, interests me myself in the foremost degree.’

Well… and I will spare you the rest. The continuation of the observation shows that it takes no less than a year for the subject
to recover his senses with regard to this shock-interpretation, which had not failed to have a certain effect, since he had recovered his senses instantaneously.
The fact that the subject emerges from a state of muddlement, of fog, following an intervention by the analyst, as direct as that,
absolutely does not prove that the intervention was effective, in the properly therapeutic, structuring sense of the word,
namely that in the analysis it would have been true. No! It brought the subject back to the sense of the unity of his ego. He was in confusion.
He came out of it abruptly by saying to himself: ‘I have here someone who reminds me that indeed it is every man for himself. We are in life.’

And he goes back, he restarts, the effect is instantaneous. But it has never been considered in analysis as proof of the correctness
of the interpretation that the subject changes style. I consider, rightly, that when he brings confirmatory material, that proves
the correctness of the interpretation, and even then, that deserves to be nuanced. Here, after a year, the subject realizes that what was at stake
in his confused state was linked to a repercussion of his reactions of mourning, reactions that he had been able to overcome only by literally reversing them.

This obviously presupposes that we enter into the psychology of mourning. Some of you know it enough,
with its depressive aspect, to be able to conceive that indeed this communication made in a very particular mode of relation to the subject
in speech on the radio, addressed:
– to a crowd of invisible listeners,
– and at the same time this invisibility has, one can even say, a character that does not necessarily address itself implicitly,
for the imagination of the subject, to those who listen to him, but equally to all: to the living as to the dead.

The subject was obviously in an extremely conflictual relation with the fact that he could at once regret that his mother
could not be witness to his success, but something in his discourse was perhaps addressed to her, in this discourse
that was addressed to his invisible listeners.

Be that as it may, the clearly inverted pseudomaniac character of the subject’s attitude, and its close relation with the recent loss
of this mother which represented for him the loss of a privileged object in his ties of love, is manifestly the driving spring of this critical state
in which he had arrived at the following session, immediately after his exploit: the fact that he had carried out,
despite the adverse circumstances, in a brilliant way, what he had committed himself to do. The important thing is not this.

The important thing is what is entirely manifest under the pen of someone who is far from having a critical attitude vis-à-vis a certain
style of intervention, namely that the mode of interpretations on the basis of the intentional meaning of the act of discourse in the present moment
of the session, is something that is subject to all the relativities implied by the possible engagement of the analyst’s ego in the situation.

To put it plainly, what is important is not that the analyst himself was mistaken. Nothing even indicates that one can say
that it is countertransference in itself that is to blame for this interpretation manifestly refuted by the continuation of the treatment.
That the subject himself experienced the feelings that the analyst imputed to his analysand of giving to him, the analyst, not only
can we admit it, but it is exceedingly probable.

That he was guided by that in the interpretation he gave is something that is not at all to be considered even
as dangerous. The only analyzing subject, the analyst, that he experienced these feelings, it is precisely his business to know
how to take account of them in an opportune way in order to enlighten himself by them as by one more indicator needle in his technique.
One has never said that the analyst must never experience feelings toward his patient. One must say that he must know
not only how to put them in their place, not to yield to them, but to use them in a technically well-situated way.

It is because he believed he had first to seek in the hic et nunc the reason for a certain attitude of the patient, that he believed he had to find it
in something that indeed existed there, in the intersubjective field of the two characters. He was well placed to know it,
because he indeed experienced that that is how he experienced the feeling of hostility, or at least irritation, toward his patient’s success.

What is grave is that he believed himself authorized by a certain technique to make use of it in a direct way, at once.
What do I mean by that? What do I oppose? I will try to indicate it to you now. I say that he believes himself authorized
to do what I will call an ego-to-ego interpretation, or an interpretation on an equal footing, allow me the pun, that is what is at issue.
In other words, an interpretation whose foundation and mechanism cannot in any way be distinguished from the mechanism
of projection. When I say projection, I do not mean erroneous projection.

Understand well what I am telling you. There is a formula that, before being an analyst, I had, with my weak
psychological gifts, put at the base of the little compass I used to evaluate certain situations. I would readily say to myself:
‘Feelings are always reciprocal’. It is absolutely true, despite appearances.

As soon as you put two subjects in a field—I say two, not three—feelings are always reciprocal. Thus the analyst
was entitled to think that since he had those feelings, virtually the corresponding feelings could be evoked
in the other. And the proof is that precisely he accepted them perfectly. When one said to him: ‘You are hostile, because you think
that I am irritated with you.’ it was enough to tell him so for that feeling to be established. The feeling was therefore validly already there,
since it was enough to put the little spark there for it to exist.

So what is important is that if the subject accepted this interpretation, it was in an entirely founded way, for this simple
reason that, by all appearance, in a relation as intimate as that which exists between analysand and analyst, he was sufficiently warned
of the analyst’s feelings to be induced to something symmetrical. The question is to know whether a certain way
of understanding the analysis of defenses does not lead us to a technique I would say almost obligatorily generative of a certain
sort of errors, an error that is not one. I mean something that is before the true and the false, something that is
so obligatorily correct and true that one cannot say whether it answers or does not answer to a truth: in any case it will be verified.

It is therefore a matter of knowing why such a danger exists. I believe I can tell you why. It is that in this sort of interpretation
of defense, which I call ego-to-ego, it is appropriate—whatever its possible value—to abstain from it. There must even in these sorts
of interpretations of defense always be at least—and that means that it is not enough—a third term.
And in reality there must be more, as I hope to be able to demonstrate to you. But I am in the process—for today—only of opening
the problem with a few words that are important, namely precisely these reciprocal functions of the ego of the subjects.

It is late. That does not allow us to enter as far as I would have wished into the problem of the relations of resistance
and defenses. I would nonetheless like to give you some indications in this direction. After having shown you the problems
and the dangers that a certain technique of the analysis of defenses entails, I believe it necessary, after MANNONI’s
and ANZIEU’s presentations, to lay down certain principles.

There is one thing entirely clear, which deserves to be referred to as the starting point for a fully coordinated definition, as a function
of analysis, of the notion of resistance. FREUD gave the first definition, I believe, in The Interpretation of Dreams.
Those who can read German and who have texts of the Imago edition, English edition, will find this on page 521.
I point out to you that it is in chapter VII, ‘Psychology of the Dream-Processes’, first section concerning ‘The Forgetting of Dreams’.
We have a decisive sentence, which is this:

Was immer die Fortsetzung der Arbeit stört, ist ein Widerstand [Traumdeutung: 7, A]

Which means:

‘Everything that can destroy, suspend, alter the continuation—Fortsetzung—of the work…’

And it is a matter of analytic work. It is a matter, where we are, in the analysis of dreams; it is not a matter of symptoms,
it is a matter of treatment, of Behandlung, when one says that one treats an object, that one treats something that passes through certain processes.

‘Everything that suspends, destroys—stört—the continuation of the work is a resistance.’

Which unfortunately was translated into French as: ‘Every obstacle to interpretation comes from psychical resistance.’
I point out this point to you, because obviously it does not make life easy for those who have only the very sympathetic translation
of the courageous Mr. MEYERSON. This must inspire in you a salutary mistrust toward a certain number of translations
of FREUD. And the whole preceding paragraph is translated in this style.

The note at the bottom of the page, in the German edition, and which immediately after discusses: ‘Are we going to say that if the patient’s father
dies, is it a resistance?’—I will not tell you how he concludes, but you see to what extent the question of resistance is posed—
this note is suppressed in the French edition.

[Fußnote] ‘The sentence put forward here so peremptorily: “Was immer die Fortsetzung der Arbeit stört, ist ein Widerstand”, could easily be misunderstood. It of course has only the meaning of a technical rule, an admonition for the analyst. It should not be denied that during an analysis various events can occur which one cannot lay to the intention of the analysand. The patient’s father may die without the latter having killed him, a war may also break out that puts an end to the analysis. But behind the obvious exaggeration of that sentence there nevertheless lies a new and good sense. Even if the disturbing event is real and independent of the patient, it nonetheless often depends only on him how much disturbing effect is granted to it, and the resistance shows itself unmistakably in the willing and excessive exploitation of such an opportunity.’

Indeed, that is what it is about:

‘Everything that suspends, destroys, the continuity of the treatment is a resistance.’

I believe we must start from texts like those, and suspend them a little in our mind, sift them, and see what they yield.
What is at stake, in sum? It is the continuation of the treatment, of the work. To dot the i’s, he did not put Behandlung,
which could make one say ‘the cure’; no, it is the ‘work’, Arbeit. It consists of a certain number of things:
it can be defined by its form, by what takes place in it, the verbal association determined by a rule, the one he has just spoken of,
that fundamental rule of free association.

All this brings us to the famous question: there is nevertheless this work; it is not even a matter of anything else, since we are in
the analysis of dreams; it is obviously the revelation of the unconscious, and nothing other than that is at stake at the level of the elaboration
of the dream. That is where we are: at the revelation of the unconscious.

This already will allow us to evoke a certain number of problems, in particular this one, for just now ANZIEU
evoked it, namely: this resistance precisely, where does it come from? There is a great deal to say about that. Where does it come from?
We have seen that there is no text in the Studien über Hysterie that allows us to consider that it comes as such
from the ego. That, on the other hand, nothing indicates either, in the elaboration that is made in The Interpretation of Dreams, that it comes
in any way, nor in an exclusive way still less, from what is called the secondary process, which is such an important stage
of FREUD’s thought.

Even when we arrive in the year 1916, when FREUD publishes his first properly metapsychological article:
die Entfernung. Repression that we see emerging—first indication—exists: Der Widerstand[…]. That is to say that at that moment,
resistance is conceived as something that indeed occurs on the side of the conscious, but whose identity
is essentially regulated by its distance Entfernung, from what was originally repressed. The link therefore of resistance with
the content of the unconscious itself is still there extremely sensitive. This, at a quite late period, I believe; I will find
the exact date again. It is the first study that was subsequently grouped in the metapsychological writings. This article is part
of the intermediate, middle period of the evolution.

In the end, what was originally repressed, what is it? At this stage and up to this period that I qualify
as intermediate, it is still and always the past. A past that must be restituted and with regard to which we cannot do otherwise
than to evoke once more the problems and the ambiguity, the problems it raises as to its definition, its nature,
its function, if we want to start from something solid in order to conceive, evoke, define what FREUD calls
a ‘resistance’.

Let us say that everything that takes place during this period—which is the period of ‘The Wolf Man’, to characterize it—
a period where FREUD poses the question of what trauma is and where the whole problem for him is linked to this, that he realizes:

– that trauma is an extremely ambiguous notion,
– that the event-like notion of trauma is something that in any case cannot be called into question, since it appears according to all clinical evidence that the fantasmatic face of trauma is infinitely more important, and that from then on the event passes into the background in the order of subjective references.
– But that, on the contrary, the dating of trauma is something that it is appropriate to keep, if I may say so, tooth and nail, and that is also it.

Those who have followed my teaching on the subject of ‘The Wolf Man’ must know it: it is only that in
‘The Wolf Man’. After all, who will ever know what he saw? But it is certain that what we do not know, whether he saw it or
whether he did not see it, he can only have seen it on such a date, and he cannot have seen it even a year later. And it is only that.
I do not believe I betray FREUD’s thought. It suffices to know how to read him; it is written in black and white, to show that what is important
can only be defined in the perspective of history and of recognition.

I would still like, for those who are not familiar with all this dialectic that I have developed abundantly, to try
to give you a certain number of notions. One must always be at the level of the alphabet; I apologize to those to whom this will seem
repetitions. I am going to give you an example to make you understand well:
– what the problem of recognition poses, the questions it poses,
– how much you cannot drown that in notions as confused as those of memory, of recollection: if in German that can still have a sense, Erlebnis, the French notion of recollection, lived or not lived, lends itself to all ambiguities.

I am going to tell you a little story: I wake up in the morning in my curtain, like SEMIRAMIS. I open my eye…
it is a curtain that I do not see every day, because it is the curtain of my country house; I see it
only every eight or fifteen days
…and I notice in the traits that the fringe of the curtain foments once again—I say once again, I have never seen it
only once in the past like that—the profile, let us say, of a sort of face, at once sharp, caricatural and old-fashioned, of what for me
vaguely represents the style of a figure of an eighteenth-century marquis, to give the quite silly fabulations to which
the mind gives itself at waking.

Well, it is because of that, of that gestaltist crystallization as one would say nowadays, of that recognition of a figure
that one has known for a long time—it would have been a stain on the wall, it would have been the same thing—it is because of that that I can say
that the curtain has not moved by a line, because exactly eight days before, on waking, I had seen the same thing. I had, of course,
completely forgotten it. But it is because of that that I know that the curtain has not moved. It is still there, exactly in the same place.
This is an apologue; it takes place on the imaginary plane, although it would not be difficult… and all the symbolic coordinates
that represent around that silliness: eighteenth-century marquis, etc., play a very important role, because if I did not have
a certain number of fantasies on the subject of what the profile represents, I would not have recognized it either in the fringe
of my curtain. But let us leave that…

What that includes on the plane of recognition, namely that it was indeed like that eight days earlier,
is linked to a phenomenon of recognition in the present. That is exactly what FREUD, in the Studien über Hysterie, uses.
I say uses, when he says that there were some studies on memory at that time, and referred to them on evoked memories
and on recognition, the current and present force that gives it not necessarily its weight and its density, but quite simply
its possibility. FREUD proceeds thus: when he no longer knows which saint to turn to in order to obtain the subject’s reconstruction,
he always takes it there with the pressure of the hands on the forehead, and he enumerates for him all the years, all the months, all the weeks,
even all the days, naming them one by one, ‘Tuesday the 17th, Wednesday the 18th, etc.’.

That is to say that he has enough confidence in what since then has been defined in analyses that have been made on the subject of:
– what memory is,
– what one calls ‘socialized time’,
– on the implicit structuring of the subject by this socialized time,
…to think that when he is going to arrive at the point where the clock-hand will indeed cross, through this symbolization
that he makes of it, the subject’s critical moment, the subject will say: ‘Ah yes, precisely that day, I remember something.’

I am not in the process of confirming whether it succeeded or not. FREUD tells us that it succeeded. Do you grasp well
the scope of what I am telling you? In other words, the subject’s center of gravity is supposed by the analytic technique
at its origin. And from then on there is no place to demonstrate that this is refuted at its end, because in truth, if it is not
like that, one absolutely does not see what analysis has brought that is new, the subject’s center of gravity being this present synthesis
of the past that one calls history.

And it is in that that we place our confidence when it is a matter of making the work progress. This is a first phase of things.
Does that suffice? No, of course. That does not suffice. The subject’s resistance operates on this plane. But this resistance,
you will see, manifests itself in a curious way that deserves to be defined, explored, by absolutely particular cases.
I am going to evoke one for you. A case where FREUD had the whole story; the mother had told it to him. So he communicated it to the subject.
He tells her: ‘Here is what happened. Here is what was done to you.’ Each time the patient, the hysteric, responded with a little attack
of hysteria, reproduction of the attack as characterized. She listened and responded by her form of response, which was to respond
by symptom. Which poses a few small problems if we call that ‘resistance’.
It is a question of knowing; I am opening it for today.

What I would simply like, the question on which I would like to end is this: when FREUD, at the end of the Studien über Hysterie,
defines resistance for us as that inflection that discourse takes as it approaches the pathogenic core, namely
that something that brings what is sought and that repels discourse, that something from which discourse flees—what is it?

It is quite certain that we can resolve these problems only by deepening what the sense of this discourse is.
We have already said it: it is a historical discourse. But what we have not resolved is what the link is.
For let us not forget what the starting point of this technique is: it is a hypnotic technique. In hypnotism, the subject holds
all this discourse. He even holds it in a particularly striking way, in a kind of dramatized way, which implies the presence
of the listener; it is essential. And this discourse—he has come out of his hypnotism—he no longer remembers it.

Nevertheless, that is the entry into the technique, insofar as what one had realized is that the reviviscence of the trauma was
in itself and immediately, if not permanently, therapeutic. So this concerns this subject, that this discourse was held
like that, without thinking further, by someone who can say ‘I’. The least one can say, and which absolutely does not escape you,
is that the lived, apparently relived character of the traumatism in the phase of the hysterical second state, is a way
of speaking that is absolutely ambiguous, because it is not because it is dramatized, because it presents itself under a pathetic aspect,
that the word ‘relived’ can in itself satisfy us.

What does it mean, the assumption by the subject of his own lived experience? If I put the problem at the point where it is the most ambiguous,
namely in the subject’s hypnotic second state, it is because there it is evident that the question arises. And it is exactly the same
thing at all levels of analytic experience, exactly insofar as the question arises: what does a discourse mean?

That we force the subject to establish within a certain parenthesis, that of the fundamental rule, the one that tells him in the end:
‘Your discourse is of no importance’, and even much more, which implies that from the moment he gives himself over to this exercise,
already he no longer believes this discourse except halfway, because he knows that at every moment he is under the crossed fire of our interpretation.

He therefore expects it. The question is precisely: Who is the subject of discourse? It is on that that we will take up next time
and try to discuss, in relation to these fundamental problems, what the meaning and the scope of resistance are.