We arrived last time at a point where, in sum, we were asking ourselves: what is the nature of resistance?
Today I would like to make a few remarks, to lead you into a certain mode of apprehending a phenomenon
taken at the level of experience, at the moment when something, as you will see, with respect to a certain way of handling
our vocabulary, which has several facets, which does not mean that there is ambiguity, I would like to show you in a certain
way how we can recognize at the source what appears, in experience oriented toward analysis, to be resistance.

You have clearly sensed the ambiguity, and not only the complexity, of our approach with respect to this phenomenon
that one can call resistance. It seems to us, through several testimonies, through several formulations of FREUD,
that resistance emanates from what is to be revealed, from what is called in other terms the repressed, the verdrängt, or again the unterdrückt.

The first translators translated unterdrückt as ‘stifled’, which is very weak. Is it the same thing, one and the other,
verdrängt or unterdrückt? We are not going to go into these details. We will see that only when we have begun
to grasp, to see the perspectives become established, the distinctions between these phenomena.

Today I would like to bring you to something that seems to me, in the very texts that we have commented on,
those small Technical Papers, to be one of those points where the perspective is established. Before handling the vocabulary,
as always, the point is to try to understand, to be in a place where things are ordered.

At the Friday presentation of patients, I announced something to you and I am going to try to keep my promise.
You see, there is something which, right in the middle of this collection, is called ‘The Dynamics of Transference’.
Like all the articles translated in this collection, one cannot say that we have reason to be entirely satisfied
with this translation. There are peculiar inaccuracies that go as far as the limits of impropriety. There are astonishing ones,
and they all go in the same direction, which is to erase the edges of the text. To those who know German, I cannot recommend too strongly
that they refer back to the German text. They will see many things in this article on the dynamics of transference.

There is much to be said on the level of translation, and in particular a cut, a period placed on the penultimate line,
which isolates a very small phrase that looks as though it appears there for no one knows why:

‘Finally, let us remember that no one can be killed ‘in absentia’ or ‘in effigie’.’

whereas in the German text, it is:

‘…for one must remember that no one can be killed in absentia or in effigie.’

[It is undeniable that the overcoming of the transference phenomena presents the psychoanalyst with the greatest difficulties, but one must not forget that precisely they render us the inestimable service of making the patients’ hidden and forgotten impulses of love current and manifest, for in the end no one can be struck down in absentia or in effigie.]

It is articulated to the last sentence. Whereas isolated, this sentence seems incomprehensible; FREUD’s sentence is perfectly articulated.
This passage, which I announced to you as being particularly significant, I want to read to you. It seems to be articulated
directly with what I tried to introduce you to by reminding you of that important passage from the Studien in the article
on psychotherapy, where it is a matter of that resistance encountered by approximation in the radial sense, as FREUD says,
of the subject’s discourse when he approaches the deep core, what FREUD calls the pathogenic core.

It is annoying to have to read it in French.

‘Let us study a pathogenic complex in its manifestation sometimes very apparent and sometimes almost imperceptible…
[If one now follows a pathogenic complex from its (either conspicuous as a symptom or also quite inconspicuous).]

If one knows the German text, one can translate, at a pinch, as ‘its manifestation’, but ‘sometimes very apparent and sometimes…’
in German, that is in parentheses.

…either apparent as a symptom, or else entirely impossible to apprehend, entirely non-manifest.’

It is a matter of the way the complex is translated, and it is this translation of the complex that is at issue when one says that it is apparent
or that it is imperceptible. It is not the same thing as saying that the complex, itself… There is a displacement that is enough to give
a kind of floating.

‘From its representation in consciousness down to its roots in the unconscious, we soon reach a region where resistance makes itself
so clearly felt that the association that then emerges bears the mark of it—of this resistance—and appears to us as a compromise
between the demands of this resistance and those of the work of investigation.’

[From its representation in consciousness toward its root in the unconscious, one will soon come into a region where resistance asserts itself so clearly that the next idea must take it into account and must appear as a compromise between its demands and those of the work of research.]

It is not quite ‘the association that then emerges’; it is nächste Einfall, the nearest, the next association. In any case, the sense is preserved.

‘Experience—this is the crucial point—shows that it is here that transference arises, when something among the elements of the complex,
in the content of it, is liable to be transferred onto the person of the physician; transference takes place, provides the next idea and manifests itself
in the form of a resistance, a stoppage of associations for example. Such experiences teach us that the transference idea
has, in preference to all other possible associations, managed to slip through to consciousness, precisely because it satisfies the resistance.’

[Here, according to the testimony of experience, transference now occurs. If anything from the complex material (the content of the complex) is suitable to be transferred to the person of the physician, then this transference is established, yields prevent further associations, and announces itself by the signs of a resistance, for instance by a stoppage. We conclude from this experience that this transference idea has, before all other possible ideas, penetrated to consciousness because it also satisfies the resistance.]

This is put by FREUD in italics.

‘A fact of this kind is reproduced an incalculable number of times in the course of an analysis; every time one approaches a pathogenic complex,
it is first the part of the complex that can come as transference that is pushed toward consciousness, and which the patient stubbornly defends
with the greatest tenacity.’

[Such a process repeats itself countless times in the course of an analysis. Again and again, when one approaches a pathogenic complex, the portion of the complex capable of transference is first pushed forward into consciousness and defended with the greatest obstinacy.]

So the two elements of this paragraph to highlight are these:

– ‘We soon arrive in a region where resistance is clearly felt.’

We are therefore in the register where this proper resistance emanates from the process itself, the approximation, if I may say so, of discourse.

– Second: ‘Experience shows that it is here that transference arises.’

– And third, transference occurs: ‘precisely because it satisfies the resistance.’

– Fourth: ‘A fact of this kind is reproduced an incalculable number of times in the course of a psychoanalysis.’

It is indeed an observable, palpable phenomenon in analysis. And this part of the complex that has manifested itself in the form
of transference is found: ‘pushed toward consciousness’ at that moment, and ‘the patient stubbornly defends it with the greatest tenacity.’

Here a note is attached that will highlight the phenomenon at issue, this phenomenon that is indeed observable, sometimes
with a truly extraordinary purity, and which undoubtedly marks for us the order of interventions suggested by practice,
the indication, the recipes that may have been transmitted to us, those directly emanating from another text by FREUD [PUF, p.52]

‘When the patient falls silent, there is every chance that this drying up of his discourse is due to some thought that relates to the analyst.’

To which, in a technical handling that is not rare, but nonetheless we have learned from our students to measure,
to restrain, this frequently translates into the following question:

‘No doubt you have some idea that more or less relates to me, or something not far from that?’

[[Footnote] From this, however, one must not in general conclude a particularly pathogenic significance of the element chosen for the transference resistance. When in a battle for the possession of some small church tower or a single farmhouse one fights with particular bitterness, one need not assume that the church is a national sanctuary or that the house harbors the army’s treasure. The value of the objects can be purely tactical, perhaps only coming into effect in this one battle.]

This solicitation will indeed, in certain cases, crystallize the patient’s discourse into a few remarks concerning
either the turn of phrase, or the figure, or the furniture, or the way the analyst welcomed the patient that day, and so on.
But of course this is not without foundation. Indeed, something may at that moment inhabit the patient’s mind
that is of this order. And there is a great variety of relations established in what one can thus extract by prompting the patient to direct
the course of his associations, by focusing them on a certain orientation. There is already there a great diversity.

But one observes, among this ‘incalculable number of times’, sometimes something that is infinitely purer, namely that at the moment
when he seems ready to manifest, to formulate something that is nearer, more authentic, more burning than has ever been
reached in the course of the subject’s truth, the subject interrupts himself and is capable in certain cases of manifesting, of formulating in words,
as something that can be this:

‘I realize,’ he says suddenly, at that moment, ‘the fact of your presence.’

This is something that has happened to me more than once in my experience, and to which, I think, analysts can easily bring
their testimony of a similar phenomenon. There is here something that becomes established in connection with the palpable, concrete manifestation
of resistance which, among all these facts, intervenes as a function of transference, at the very level of the fabric of our experience.

There is here something that takes on a value, in a sense, entirely elective, because the subject himself feels it as
a kind of sudden turn of discourse. He is not capable, by reason of the very aspect that is characteristic for him subjectively
of the phenomenon, of giving any testimony of it, but at the same time, this testimony, he manifests as the expression
of something else, of a sudden turning that makes him pass from one slope to the other of discourse, and one could almost say
from one accent to another of the function of speech.

I will take up again. I simply wanted, right away, to place before you the well-centered, focused phenomenon, as I consider it
to illuminate our purpose today, and the point that will allow us to set out again to pose certain questions.
Before continuing this march, I want to stop again at FREUD’s text, to show you clearly how much,
at the very moment when FREUD himself signals it to us, what I am speaking to you about is the same thing as what he is speaking about.
I want to show you clearly that you must free yourselves for an instant from the idea that resistance is something
that is coherent with this whole construction that makes the unconscious— in a given subject, at a given moment—contained,
and as one says: ‘repressed’.

It is a phenomenon that FREUD localizes, focuses in analytic experience, whatever extension we may later
give to the term ‘resistance’ in its relations, its connection with the whole of defenses, and it is for this reason
that the small note [PUF p.55] that I am going to add to the reading is important. There, FREUD dots the i’s:

‘One should not conclude, however, to a pathogenic importance…

That is exactly what I am in the process of telling you; it is not a matter of what is important in the subject insofar as we afterwards form
the notion of what motivated, in the deep sense of the term, motivated the stages of his development.

…to a particularly great pathogenic importance of the element chosen in view of transference resistance. When in the course of a battle the combatants dispute with ferocity the possession of some small church tower, or some farm, we do not deduce from this that the church is a national sanctuary or that the farm shelters the army’s treasures. There the interest of the places can be tactical and exist only for that one combat.’

[[Footnote] From this, however, one must not in general conclude a particular pathogenic significance of the element chosen for transference resistance. When in a battle for the possession of some small church tower or a single farmhouse one fights with particular bitterness, one need not assume that the church is a national sanctuary, or that the house harbors the army’s treasure. The value of the objects can be purely tactical, perhaps only coming into effect in this one battle.]

You see well the phenomenon at issue: it is something in relation to this movement by which the subject confesses.
In this movement FREUD tells us that something appears that is resistance. When this resistance becomes too strong,
it is at that moment that transference arises. It is a fact; he does not say ‘phenomenon’; FREUD’s text is precise. If he had said ‘a transference phenomenon
appears’, he would have put it, but here he did not put it. And the proof that he would have put it is that at the end of this text,
in the last sentence, the one that begins in French with:

‘Let us admit that nothing is more difficult in analysis—one has translated into French: than to overcome resistances’
whereas the text says:
‘die Bezwingung der Übertragungsphänomene: the forcing of the transference phenomena’.

[It is undeniable that the overcoming of the transference phenomena presents the psychoanalyst with the greatest difficulties, but one must not forget that precisely they render us the inestimable service of making the patients’ hidden and forgotten impulses of love current and manifest, for in the end no one can be struck down in absentia or in effigie.]

I do not know why they translated ‘transference phenomena’ as ‘resistance’. I use this passage to show you that
Übertragungsphänomene belongs to FREUD’s vocabulary. Why was it translated as resistance? It is not a sign of great
culture, still less of great understanding.

What FREUD wrote is that it is precisely there that there arises, not the transference phenomenon—he must after all
know what he is saying—namely that there is there something essentially related to transference. As for the rest, throughout
this article it is a matter of the dynamics of transference. And that is indeed the central point of all the questions he poses in this article,
which I do not take as a whole, for the questions he poses are all the questions that fall under the specificity
of the function of transference in analysis, which makes that transference is there, not as it is everywhere else, but that it plays
a quite particular function in analysis; that is the heart, the pivot point of this article that I advise you to read.

I bring it in support of a certain central question bearing on the question of resistance. Nevertheless—you will see it—
in this article it is the pivot point of what is at issue, namely the dynamics of transference. What can this teach
on the subject of the nature of this resistance? Something that can also determine our last meeting.

From a certain moment on: who is speaking? What does this reconquest, this rediscovery of the unconscious mean?
We posed the question of what memory, recollection, the technique of this recollection mean, of what free association means
insofar as it allows us to access, by a certain path, a certain formulation of something that is the subject’s history.
But what becomes of the subject? Is it always the same subject that is at issue in the course of this progress? Here we are before a phenomenon
where we grasp something, a knot, a connection, pressure, if one may say, original, or rather properly speaking
a resistance in this progress.

And we see, at a certain point of this resistance, something occur that is what FREUD calls ‘transference’,
that is to say, at that moment the actualization in a certain sense of the person of the analyst, and of that something of which I told you
a moment ago, by extracting it from my experience, that at the most sensitive point, it seems to me, and the most significant of the phenomenon,
when it turns out there that the subject feels it as the sudden perception of that something which is not so easy to define,
the lived phenomenon, the feeling of presence.

It is something we do not have all the time, it must be said. We are influenced by all sorts of presences;
our world truly has its consistency, its density, its lived stability only because in a certain way we take account of these presences.
But to realize them as such, you feel well that it is something of which I will say that we constantly tend to erase the life.
It would not even be easy to carry on if at every instant we felt presence in everything it entails, and at the very bottom of the bottom
what it entails of mystery; it is a mystery that we rather tend to set aside, and to which, to tell the truth, we have become accustomed.

Well, I believe that this is something on which we could not linger too long, and we will try
to take it, to recognize it from other angles. What FREUD teaches us, precisely: the good analytic method
which consists always in finding again the same relation, the same connection, the same schema, if one may say, in lived forms,
behaviors on occasion, and likewise in everything that takes place inside the analytic relation, in other words,
what is called ‘at different levels’.

It is, in a sense, holding on to this point, a matter for us of trying to establish what is called a perspective,
a sort of perception of a depth of separation of several planes, and to see that what we are accustomed,
through certain manipulations, certain notions: our ‘labels’, to posit in a massive and rigorous way, like the Id and the Ego,
to say it plainly, for example, well, perhaps that is perhaps not simply linked to a sort of contrasted pair?

On that side, there is something; we see a somewhat more complex stereoscopy being layered. For those who attended
my commentary on ‘The Wolf Man’, already so far away now, a year and a half ago, I would like to remind you
of certain very striking things from this text.

When we arrive at the moment when FREUD addresses the question of the castration complex in this subject, which is something
that arises, emerges, in different places of the observation, but which is obviously in an extremely particular functional relation
in the structuring of this subject, FREUD comes to pose, and to pose to us, certain questions.

Notably the following: at a certain moment when the fear of castration comes into question in this subject, we see appear:
– a whole series of symptoms, symptoms that are situated on the plane that we commonly call anal,
– all sorts of intestinal manifestations,
…and in the end the question he comes to pose is this: we interpret all these symptoms in the register
of what is called the anal conception of sexual relations, a certain stage of the infantile theory of sexuality.

How does that happen? Since by the very fact that castration has come into play, at that moment, the subject has risen to a level
of genital structure. It is his theory of sexuality. And he explains to us at that moment something that is obviously very singular.

He explains this to us: when the subject has attained, by way of different elements, foremost among which is maturation,
a first infantile maturation or infantile prematuration such that the subject, with certain stages,
is mature enough to realize at least partially a more specifically genital structuring of the interpersonal relation of his parents,
he tells us this: the mechanisms—that is the observation—that come into play so that this subject refuses the homosexual position
that is his in this relation, this realization of the Oedipal situation, the subject refuses, rejects—the German word is verwirft—
everything that is of this plane, precisely of the plane of genital realization.

He returns to his earlier verification of this affective relation; he falls back on the positions of the anal theory of sexuality.
In other words, what is at issue is something that is not even a repression in the sense of something that would have
been realized on a certain plane, then pushed back.

Repression, he says, is something else:

‘Eine Verdrängung ist etwas anderes als eine Verwerfung.’

And in the French translation that we have…
due to persons whose intimacy with FREUD ought perhaps to have enlightened them a bit more, but no doubt
it is not enough to have carried a relic of an eminent personality to be authorized to make oneself the guardian
…they translate:
‘A repression is something other than a judgment that rejects and chooses.’

Why translate Verwerfung as ‘judgment’? I agree that it is difficult to translate, but all the same the French language…

HYPPOLITE—Rejection

LACAN

Yes: rejection, or sometimes: refusal. Why does a judgment suddenly get introduced into all that? Is that it, the theory of judgment?
As for the question of truth, roughly where we are playing here, namely that the sudden introduction of judgment at a level where nowhere
is there a trace of Urteil. Nothing of the sort at all in this paragraph! Nothing in this paragraph of FREUD! There is Verwerfung.

And then, further on still, we have here at line 11, three pages later, after elaborating the consequences of this structure,
he sets things out to conclude, and tells us: ‘kein Urteil über’; it is the first time that Urteil comes; it is to close the loop.
But here there is none, of course! No judgment was rendered on the existence of this problem of castration.

‘Aber es war so: but things stand as they do, als ob sie nicht existierte’: as if they did not exist.
[With that, actually no judgment about their existence had been made, but it was as good as if it did not exist.]

I believe that in the order of the question we are posing, of what resistance is, of what repression is,
this important articulation shows us at the origin of that something ultimate which must indeed exist for repression itself
to be possible, namely something else, a beyond even of this history in which already, at the very origin, something
—I only know what FREUD says—something has already been constituted primitively, not only that does not confess itself,
but which, by not being formulated, is literally ‘as if it did not exist’, and yet is in a certain sense somewhere.

Since what FREUD tells us everywhere is that it is this first nucleus of the repressed that is the center of attraction,
that calls to itself all subsequent repressions. If it is not said with respect to resistance, it is put in every form.
I will say that it is the very essence of his discovery, namely that in the end there is no need to resort to a kind
of innate predisposition, even though he admits it on occasion as a great general framework, but simply he never uses it
in principle to explain how a repression of such-and-such a type comes about, whether hysterical or obsessional.

Read Bemerkungen über Neurosen, the second article, in 1898, on defense neuroses. If repression sometimes takes
certain forms, it is because of the attraction of the first nucleus of the repressed which is due, at that moment,
to a certain experience that he calls: ‘the original traumatic experience’.

Question to take up later: what does ‘trauma’ mean?
We had to relativize it in a particular way and the question of the imaginary… All that is interesting.

But this primitive nucleus is something that is situated elsewhere, in the stages, the avatars of repression. It is in a sense
its ground and its support. I suspend for a moment this theme of The Wolf Man—We will return to it in a moment—for in
the structure of what happens to The Wolf Man, that quite singular moment of Verwerfung, of the realization of the experience
as genital, is something that has a quite particular fate, and which FREUD himself, in the continuation of the text,
differentiates from all the others.

Now, a singular thing: that something which is in a sense excluded from everything that belongs to the subject’s history, from everything the subject
is capable of saying, for in the end it is a spring of this observation on this subject, it took FREUD’s forcing,
it truly took the technique employed for it to be overcome, namely for the repeated experience of the infantile dream
to take on its sense, and to permit not the reliving, but the reconstruction of this subject’s history in a direct way.
We will see whether something—and what—appeared in the subject’s history. I suspend it for the moment.

Let us take things from another end, from what FREUD taught us to see; let us take the Traumdeutung. And let us take it at the beginning
of the part that is on the processes of the dream, Traumvorgänge [Ch. VII], the first part where he gives us, where he agrees to relate
everything that emerges from everything he has elaborated in the course of this book which is fundamental, this chapter that begins with this
magnificent sentence:

‘It is very difficult to render, by the description of a succession—for once again he takes up, he reworks everything he has already explained about the dream—
the simultaneity of a complicated process and at the same time to appear to approach each new exposition without preconceived idea.’
[See ch. VII, beginning of the 5th part: PUF 1950 p. 480, PUF 1967 p. 500, PUF 2003 p. 643]

[To reproduce the simultaneity of so complicated a set of connections by a sequence in description and at the same time to appear unprejudiced at each exposition will be too difficult for my powers.]

And this sentence represents the very difficulties that I also have, here, in constantly taking up again this problem that is always present
to our experience, and it is necessary, under various forms, to manage to create it each time from a new angle, and which appears isolated.
What does he tell us in the first part of the study of dream processes, that is to say at the level of this chapter where he speaks of the phenomenon
of forgetting? One must read these texts; one must become innocent again each time: there is truly something there in this chapter,
a progress where we feel, where we touch, as it were with a finger, something truly very singular.

Concerning the forgetting of the dream and its meaning, he approaches this phenomenon, with respect to all the objections one can raise
about the validity of the memory of the dream:

‘What is this dream? Is the reconstruction the subject makes of it exact? We have no guarantee that something other than what can be called subsequent verbalization is not mixed into it. Is every dream not a kind of instantaneous thing,
to which the subject’s speech restores an entire history?’

He sets all that aside, and more: he sets aside all the objections by showing that they are not well founded and by showing that it is not that
which is the subject; and he shows it by showing more and more this altogether singular thing that, in sum, the more uncertain the text the subject gives us is, the more significant it is. That it is in the very doubt the subject casts on certain parts of the dream that he, who awaits it and listens to it, who is there to reveal its meaning, will see that precisely there is the important part, because the subject
doubts it; one must be sure of that. But as the chapter advances, the procedure dwindles to such a point that, at the limit, almost,
the dream that would be the most significant would be the dream completely forgotten and of which the subject could say nothing. It goes as far as that,
for in the end it is more or less what he says:

‘One can often recover by analysis everything that forgetting has lost. In a whole series of cases a few scraps allow one to recover
not the dream, which would be accessory, but the thoughts that are at its base.’

‘A few scraps’: that is exactly what I am telling you—there is nothing left. But what interests him is what?
There, obviously, we come up against these ‘thoughts that are at its base’. And each time we speak of the term ‘thought’,
there is nothing more difficult to handle for people who have learned psychology, and as we have learned psychology,
these thoughts are going to become something like what we keep rolling around endlessly as people accustomed to thinking.

But perhaps these thoughts that are at its base: we are sufficiently illuminated by the whole Traumdeutung to realize
that it is not quite what one thinks when one does studies on the phenomenology of thought: thought without images or with images, etc.,
those things we commonly call thought, since what is at issue all the time is a desire.

And God knows that this desire: we have learned to realize that it is, in the course of this research, like a singular ferret
that we see disappear and reappear through a whole sort of sleight-of-hand, and in the end, we do not always know
whether it is on the side of the unconscious or on the side of the conscious, as will be at issue in the chapter on regression.

This desire must still conceal some questions, and after all some mystery, for in the end, when one looks very closely
at the desire at issue, it raises nothing less than the question we posed at the end of our last session: whose desire?
And of what lack, above all? But what matters is what we see there. And what we see there is immediately illustrated by
an example. I take only this one, within our reach, in a small note he extracts from the Vorlesungen, the Introduction to Psychoanalysis.

He speaks to us of a female patient at once skeptical and very interested in him—FREUD—who, after a rather long dream in the course of which,
he says, certain persons speak to her of my book on the Witz, the joke, and tell her good things about it. And all that—you see
how manifest it is there—does not seem to bring things of very great richness. Then there is question of something,
and all that remains of the dream is this: ‘channel’. Perhaps another book where there is this word ‘channel’, something where there is question
of a channel—she does not know; it is completely obscure. He takes that as an example of a dream analysis. ‘Channel’ remains,
and one does not know what it relates to, nor where it comes from, nor where it goes; perhaps from a book or something else,
but one does not know what.

Well, ‘that is what is most interesting,’ he says, when one is dealing not only with some little scrap, but a very small
scrap with around it an aura of uncertainty. And what does it yield? What I am going to tell you is not the most interesting,
but it yields the whole story.

It is that the next day—not the same day—she recounts that she has an idea that connects to that: it is precisely a joke:
a crossing from Dover to Calais, an Englishman and a Frenchman; in the course of the conversation the Englishman cites a word that is the famous phrase:

‘From the sublime to the ridiculous, there is only a step.’ and the Frenchman, gallant, replies: ‘Yes, the step of Calais.’

Which is particularly nice for the interlocutor. Now, the Pas de Calais is the English Channel. One finds the channel again,
and at the same time, what? It must be seen: it has exactly the same function as that emergence at the moment of resistances.

It is obviously a matter of this: the skeptical patient had argued at length beforehand the merit of FREUD on the joke.
It is a matter of the fact that after her discussion and at the moment when her conviction, her discourse hesitates, so she no longer knows where to go,
exactly the same phenomenon at that moment appears—as what the other day MANNONI said, and which seemed to me very apt:
he spoke as a midwife: ‘resistance presents itself by its transference end’.

‘From the sublime to the ridiculous, there is only a step’: it is the point where the dream clings to the listener; that is, for FREUD.
Obviously, ‘channel’ is not much, but after the associations, it is there, in a sense, indisputable.

After this small example I would like to take others, and I must say that if we extended our investigation, we would see in it
very singular things, in particular the tight connection manifested by this whole chapter, for God knows how sensitive FREUD is
in his grouping of facts.

It is not by chance that things come to group themselves in certain chapters. How, for example, at that moment when the dream
takes a certain orientation, there occur in the dream phenomena that are especially of the linguistic order:
a slip of the tongue made by the subject, in full consciousness by the subject; the subject knows in the dream that it is a slip of the tongue,
where a character intervenes to correct him and to point it out to him. Bringing that well into accord, into harmony with that moment,
this phenomenon of adaptation to something of discourse, and an adaptation at a critical point, an adaptation that is realized
not only badly, but that doubles before our eyes.

Let us leave that aside for the moment. Let us take again—I took it this morning somewhat at random—something famous that FREUD
published as early as 1898. In his first chapter of the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, FREUD refers, concerning the forgetting of names,
to the trouble he had one day, in a relation with an interlocutor on a journey, in recalling the name of the author of the famous fresco
of Orvieto Cathedral, which is, as you know, a vast composition manifesting the phenomena expected
for the end of the world, and everything that revolves around the appearance of the Antichrist.

What is at issue, and what he wants to recover, the author of this fresco, is SIGNORELLI, and he cannot manage it; others come to him:
it is that, it is not that; he finds BOTTICELLI, BOLTRAFFIO; he cannot recover SIGNORELLI.

He manages to recover it thanks to an analytic procedure. He then does it when he takes it as an example for his research,
and here is what it yields: it does not spring up like that, out of nothing, this little phenomenon; it is inserted in a text, in this:
– that he is in relation with a gentleman,
– that he is in the process of speaking,
…and what one sees in the antecedents is very interesting.

At that moment they are going from Ragusa toward the interior of Dalmatia. They are more or less at the level, at the border of the Austrian Empire,
in Bosnia-Herzegovina. And this word Bosnia arises in connection with a certain number of anecdotes, and Herzegovina as well.

Then come a few remarks on the particularly sympathetic disposition of a certain Muslim clientele with respect
to a certain primitive perspective, this extraordinarily decent way, in these people entirely integrated into the style of Islamic culture,
how, upon the physician’s announcement of very bad news, that the illness is incurable, FREUD’s interlocutor indeed seems to be a physician
who practices in this region, the people let some feeling of hostility toward the physician manifest itself, and address him right away, saying:

‘Herr! If there were something to be done, you would surely have been capable of doing it.’

And in the presence then of something that must be accepted, the very courteous, measured, respectful attitude toward the physician
called ‘Herr’, in German. All that forms the background on which first it already seems that the rest of the conversation is established,
with the significant forgetting that is going to punctuate it and propose its problem to FREUD.

FREUD shows us that he himself began to take part in a part of this conversation, and the fact is that, he says,
from a certain moment on, his attention—FREUD’s—was directed entirely elsewhere; even while he was telling the story,
he was thinking of something else. And this other thing was brought to him by this medical story, by this attitude of these clients
so sympathetic, and by something that had come back to his mind on two themes:

– on the one hand, on the fact that he knew the value these patients, especially Islamic ones, attached to everything that was of the order of sexual functions, namely that literally he had heard someone say: ‘if one no longer has that, life is no longer worth living’, a patient who had consulted him for disturbances of sexual potency.

– And on the other hand, in one of the places where he had stayed, he had learned of the death of one of his patients, whom he had treated for a very long time, that is, always something one does not learn without some shock, he tells us.

He had not wanted to express these things because he was not very sure of his interlocutor concerning the valorization of sexual processes.
On the other hand, he had not readily let his thought dwell on the subject of the death of this patient. He says that he withdrew all
his attention from what he was in the process of saying. And FREUD makes a little table; you will be able to refer to this text;
there is a very nice little table in the Imago edition.

He writes all the names BOTTICELLI, BOLTRAFFIO, Herzegovina, SIGNORELLI, and at the bottom the repressed thoughts, the sound ‘Herr’,
the question. And the result is, in a sense, what remained:
– the word ‘Signor’ was called up by the ‘Herr’, these people who expressed themselves so well,
– ‘Traffio’ was called up by the fact that he had received there the shock of the bad news concerning his patient.

And in a sense, if he was able to recover, at the moment when his discourse came in order to try to recover the person who had painted
the Orvieto fresco, it is what remained available, given that a certain number of radical elements had been called up
by what he calls the repressed:
– the ideas concerning the sexual stories of the Muslims
– and on the other hand the theme of death.

What is one to say? The repressed was not so repressed as that, since he gives it right away, the repressed, in his discourse,
of which he did not speak to his traveling companion. But in the end everything indeed happens as if these words—one can certainly speak of words,
even if they are parts of words; these vocables constitute words because they have a life of individual words—these words are
the part of the discourse that FREUD truly had to hold. And he tells us clearly from that moment on: ‘That is what I did not say.’

But what he did not say was nevertheless what he himself was beginning to say, deep down; that is what interested him,
that is what he was ready to say to his interlocutor. And for not having said it to him, what remained, for the continuation of his connection
with that same interlocutor? Only debris, pieces, the scraps, so to speak, of this speech.

Do you see there how complementary the phenomenon that takes place at the level of reality is with respect
to what takes place at the level of the dream? Namely, how what we are witnessing is with respect to a truthful speech,
and God knows how far this truthful speech can resound. For in the end, what is at issue with it, if not the absolute
of which it speaks, namely death, which is present there, and which is exactly that before which FREUD tells us that it is not
simply because of his interlocutor: before which he himself preferred not to confront too much.

And God knows too how the problem of death for the physician is also lived as a problem of mastery: he nonetheless
in this affair lost; it is still always thus that we feel the loss of the patient, especially when we have treated him for a long time.
Well then, what exactly beheads the ‘SIGNORELLI’, for everything concentrates around the first part
of this name, around all its semantic resonance:
– it is insofar as the speech is not said that speech can reveal the deepest secret of FREUD’s being,
– it is insofar as it is not said that he can no longer cling to the other except with the scraps of this speech. There was something of which there are only the debris left.

The forgetting phenomenon is there, manifested in this something that is literally a degradation of speech in its relation with the other.
And that is where I want to come to through all these examples: it is this ambiguous significance—you will see that the word is valid—
this ambiguous significance, and this: that it is precisely insofar as the confession of being in the subject does not reach its end
that something occurs by which speech literally carries itself entirely onto the side where it clings to the other.

I say that it is ambiguous because, of course, it is not foreign to its essence as speech, if I may say so, to cling to the other.
Speech is precisely exactly that: it is mediation, and that is above all what I have taught you up to now:
it is mediation between the subject and the other. And of course this mediation implies this realization of the other in the mediation itself,
namely that it is an essential element of this realization of the other that speech can unite us with him. It is the face
on which I have always insisted, because it is within that that we constantly move.

But on the other side, this speech…
and I underscore it: in FREUD’s perspective, we cannot say ‘expression’. I did everything that I wrote
this summer concerning ‘Function and Field of Speech’ without putting—and intentionally—the term ‘expression’;
it is impossible not to see that FREUD’s whole work unfolds in the direction of revelation, and not of expression.
The unconscious is not ‘expressed’, except by deformation, by Entstellung, by distortion, by transposition.
In the whole sense of the Freudian discovery, there is something there to ‘reveal’.
…this other face of speech which is revelation and which is the ‘last resort’ of what we seek in analytic experience,
precisely this occurs: that at the moment when something that we call resistance, and which is precisely what today
we are seeking the very meaning of, it is insofar as speech is not said…

Or as is written very curiously at the end of an article that is one of the worst things there are, but so innocent and candid,
STERBA’s article called ‘Destiny, das Schicksal’, which centers the whole analytic experience
around this splitting of the ego, of which one half will come to our aid, against the other which is in the contrary sense.
At the end, he can no longer get out of it. Everything is there of what comes to speech, what is pushed toward speech.

This coming of speech, insofar as something perhaps renders it fundamentally impossible, is there the spring-point,
the essential pivot-point where, in analysis, speech, if I may say so, tips entirely onto its function of relation to the other,
and everything is at the level where this clinging of the other occurs.

For after all, one must be as stupidly beguiled as one can be by certain ways of theorizing, dogmatizing, regimenting oneself in analytic technique—
as if someone, by all his prior formation, could be more open than another to valorizing this existential relation of the subject to the analyst—
for someone to have told us one day that one of the prerequisites of analytic treatment
was that the subject have a certain realization of the other as such. Of course, clever fellow! But it is simply a matter of knowing
at what level this other is realized, and how, in what function, in what circle of his subjectivity, at what distance this other is.
And we know that in the course of analytic experience this distance varies constantly, and to claim to consider it as a certain stage,
a certain step of the subject…

It is this same spirit that makes Mr. PIAGET speak of the supposedly egocentric notion of the child’s world, as if adults
on this subject had to show the kids a thing or two! And I would very much like to know: what weighs in the balances of the Eternal
as a better apprehension of the other:
– the one that Mr. PIAGET, in his position as professor, and at his age, can have of the other,
– or the one a child has?
This child whom we see so prodigiously open to everything that the adult brings him of the meaning of the world.

This child, when one never reflects on what it means—with respect to this perspective—this feeling of the other, this prodigious
permeability of the child to everything that is myths, legends, fairy tales, stories, this way of letting oneself literally be invaded.
Does one believe that this is compatible with these little cube games, thanks to which Mr. PIAGET shows us what he attains,
to a quite Copernican knowledge of the world? That is what is at issue.

It is a matter of knowing how, at that moment, toward this other there points what can be summed up as this most mysterious and essential feeling
of presence, which can also be integrated into what FREUD speaks to us about throughout this text, namely all the structurations
already preliminary not only of love life, but of the organization of the subject’s world. And obviously, the first inflection
of this speech, as soon as the whole realization of the subject’s truth inflects in its curve, the first re-inflection,
if I had to make a certain number of stages, of levels, this captation of the other which then holds its function, I would take it in a formula
that was given to me by one of those who are here and whom I supervise.

I said to him:
‘In sum, where is your subject, with respect to you, during this week?’

And he gave me the expression that I find exactly coincides with the expression I had tried to situate in this inflection:

‘He took me as witness.’

And it is indeed one of the functions at once the highest, but already deflected, of this speech: the taking as witness.

A little further on, it will be seduction. A little further still, the attempt to capture the other in a game where speech even passes,
analytic experience has shown us well, into another function where it is more symbolic, a deeper instinctual satisfaction.
Not to mention this last term: complete disorganization of the function of speech in the transference phenomena, which is that
on which FREUD dwells as on something where the subject frees himself entirely and manages to do exactly what pleases him.

In the end, what we are brought back to by this consideration: is it not that something from which I began in this ‘Report’
of which I spoke to you a moment ago on the ‘Functions of Speech…’, namely what is the opposition
and the whole range of realizations that exist between ‘full speech’ and ‘empty speech’:
– speech insofar as it realizes the subject’s truth,
– speech insofar as, on the contrary, the subject will lose himself in everything we could call the machinations of the system of language,
and of all the systems of references that the cultural state gives him, in which he is more or less a party, with respect to what he has to do
hic et nunc with his analyst.

So that the question directly introduced by the stopping point where I placed you today on this phenomenon
leads us exactly to this: this ‘resistance’ at issue projects, of course—in its fruits, in its results—projects
indeed onto the system of whom, of what, onto this system that we call the system of the ego, insofar as precisely the system of the ego
is not even conceivable without the system, so to speak, of the other. This ego is exactly referential to the other; this ego is constituted
in relation to the other. It is exactly correlative, and the level at which the other is lived situates exactly the level at which
the ego, literally, for the subject exists.

Resistance indeed becomes embodied in this system of ego and other. It is realized there at such-and-such a moment of the analysis,
but it is, in a sense, from elsewhere that it starts. Namely, from the subject’s impotence to reach an outcome in this domain
of the realization of his truth; it is at every instant, and in a way no doubt more or less already defined for a given subject,
by reason of the fixations of his character and of his structure, it is at a certain level that this act of speech comes to be projected,
in a certain relation of the ego to the other, at a certain level, in a certain style of the relation to the other.

What is one to say? You see it: it is that from that moment on, what is the paradox? See the paradox of the analyst’s position:
it is, in sum, at the moment when the subject’s speech is fullest that I, analyst, could intervene. But I would intervene on what?
On his discourse! And the more it is his, the more I center myself on his discourse. But the inverse is also true:
the emptier his discourse is, the more I am led, I too, to latch onto it, that is, to do what one does all the time in this famous
‘analysis of resistances’, to seek:
– that beyond the subject’s discourse,
– that beyond—reflect well—which is nowhere,
– that beyond which is not there,
– that beyond which the subject has to realize, but which he has precisely not realized,
—that is, that beyond which is in sum made of my projections, at the same level where the subject is realized.

What I showed you last time as the dangers, in making these sorts of interpretations or intentional imputations
which, verified or not, or susceptible or not of verification, I would say are no more verifiable than any
system of projections that always participates in them more or less.

And that is indeed the difficulty of analysis: when we say that we make the interpretation of resistances, we are faced
very precisely with this difficulty:
– how to operate at a certain level of lesser density of the relation of speech?
– How to operate in this inter-psychology, ego and alter ego, where we are placed by the very degradation
of the process of speech?

In other words, how, what are the possible relations between a certain function of intervention of speech,
of interpretation to call it by its name, and the level of the ego insofar as this level is always, always implies correlatively
the analysand and the analyst?

The question is indeed this. It is that from a certain moment, from a certain level even, where the function of speech has tipped
so uniquely in the direction of the other that it is no longer mediation but only:
– implicit violence,
– reduction of the other to his function with respect to the subject’s ego,
…what can we still do in order to handle speech validly in analytic experience?

You sense the absolutely oscillating character of the problem, and how much it brings us back to questions that are in the end these:

– what does this support taken in the other mean for man?

– And why does the other become all the less truly other when he takes this support more exclusively?

It is from this vicious circle that it is a matter of getting out in analysis. And why is it that we are, in a sense,
so much the more caught in it that the history of the technique shows an ever greater accent placed on this problem
insofar as one accentuates the ego side of resistances?

It is the same problem that is expressed again in another way under this form:

– why does the subject alienate himself all the more insofar as he affirms himself more as ego?

And we return to the question of the previous session:

– who, then, beyond the ego, seeks to be recognized?