HYPPOLITE

LACAN

Those who were here last time were able to hear the continuation of a development on the central passage of FREUD’s writing on The dynamics of transference. I remind those who perhaps were not here last time that my whole development consisted in showing you, as the major phenomenon of transference, something that stems from what I could call the bedrock of the movement of resistance.

That is to say, that moment when this something that remains masked in analytic theory by all its forms and its routes—namely resistance in its most essential depth—manifests itself through the kind of movement I called the ‘tilt of speech toward the presence’ of the listener and witness that the analyst is. And how we grasp it, as it were, in a pure state, at the moment when the subject breaks off, and we know it: at a moment that most often is the most significant of his approach toward truth, in a kind of feeling, frequently tinged with anxiety, of the analyst’s presence.

I also showed you, or indicated, that the analyst’s question, which, because it was indicated to you by FREUD, has become for some almost automatic: ‘Are you thinking of something that concerns me, me, the analyst?’, is there only as a kind of ready-made activism, indeed, to crystallize a discourse more oriented toward the analyst, but in which there only manifests this fact that, in effect, insofar as the discourse does not reach that full speech in which this unconscious ground of the subject must be revealed, already the discourse in itself addresses the analyst, concerns him, is made to interest the analyst, and, to put it plainly, manifests itself in that alienated form of being that is identical with what one calls his ego.

In other words, that the ego’s relation to the other, the subject’s relation to that other himself, to that similar one in relation to whom, first, he formed himself, and which constitutes an essential structure of human constitution, and which is certainly the imaginary function from which we can understand, conceive, explain, what the ego is in analysis.

I do not say ‘what the ego is’ insofar as what it is in psychology, a function of synthesis, as in all the forms in which we can certainly follow it and see it manifest itself, but in its dynamic function in analysis: the ego insofar as it then manifests itself as defense, refusal, insofar as it inscribes, as it were, the whole history of the successive oppositions the subject has manifested to the integration of what one later calls only—what later manifests itself as being there in theory—‘his tendencies’, ‘his drives’, the deepest and most unrecognized.

In other words, that we grasp, in these moments so well indicated by FREUD, that by which the very movement of analytic experience joins the ego’s fundamental function of misrecognition. We are therefore brought, at the end of this progress, of this demonstration, whose spring, whose sensitive point of FREUD’s investigation I showed you on all sorts of other planes.

I showed it to you with regard to what, for FREUD, manifests itself as the very essence of dream analysis, and I showed it to you there, graspable in an almost paradoxical form, how much, for FREUD, dream analysis is literally the analysis of something that in his investigation has a function of speech. And how much this is demonstrated by the fact that what he grasps as the last trace of an evanescent dream is very precisely at the moment when it turns entirely toward him, toward FREUD, that it is at that point that it is no longer than a trace, a scrap of dream, that there we find that transferential point by which the dream is modeled in an identical movement, that significant interruption manifested elsewhere as the turning point of a moment of the analytic session.

I also showed you the significance of the relation between the unspoken word, because refused, because verworfen, properly speaking rejected by the subject, the proper weight of speech in an act of parapraxis, more exactly of forgetting a word, an example taken from The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and how there too the mechanism is palpable of what the subject’s speech should have formulated and of what remains to address the other, that is, in the present case, of what is missing, the subtraction of a word, ‘Herr’, from the vocable SIGNORELLI, which he will no longer be able to evoke an instant later, precisely with the interlocutor before whom, potentially, this word ‘Herr’ was called with its full significance.

We are thus brought, around this revealing moment of the fundamental relation of resistance and the dynamics of the movement of analytic experience, we are thus brought around a question that can be polarized between these two terms: the ego and speech.

Something that seems so little deepened in this relation that nevertheless should be for us the object of essential investigation, that somewhere, under the pen of Mr. FENICHEL, we find for example that:

‘It is through the ego that incontestably— it is held, as it were, for acquired, given— the sense of words comes to the subject.’

Yet is it necessary to be an analyst to find that such a statement can be—at the very least—open to dispute? Can one even say that, at present, our discourse, admitting that indeed the ego is that which, as one says, directs our motor manifestations, consequently the issuing, indeed, of those vocables that are called words, can one even say that in this act the ego is master of everything words contain?

Is the symbolic system, formidable in its entanglement, interlaced, marked by that Verschlungenheit indeed, by that something that is impossible to translate otherwise than as a property of interlacings, and that the translator of the ‘Technical Papers’… where the word [Verschlungenheit] is in this article that I was presenting before you [Die außerordentliche Verschlungenheit des in dieser Arbeit behandelten Themas legt die Versuchung nahe, auf eine Anzahl von anstoßenden Problemen einzugehen, deren Klärung eigentlich erforderlich wäre, ehe man von den hier zu beschreibenden psychischen Vorgängen in unzweideutigen Worten reden könnte.]
…translated as ‘complexity’, which is so weak.

Whereas Verschlungenheit is to designate linguistic interlacing: every linguistic symbol easily isolated is bound up, not only with the whole, but intersects and is constituted by a whole series of convergences, of oppositional overdeterminations that situate it at once in several registers. In short, that precisely this system of language, within which our discourse moves, is it not something that infinitely exceeds any momentary intention we can put into it?

And how much it is precisely on this function of resonance, of ambiguity, of communications, of riches already implied in the symbolic system as it has been constituted by the tradition into which we insert ourselves as individuals, far more than we spell it out and learn it. How much this language is precisely what analytic experience plays on, since, at every instant, what this experience does is to show him that he says more than he believes he is saying, to take this question only from this angle. If we took it from the genetic angle, we would be led to the whole question of knowing how the child learns language, and we would then be drawn into a question of psychological investigation about which one can say that it would take us so far in matters of method that we cannot even approach it.

But it seems incontestable that we cannot judge precisely of the child’s acquisition of language by the motor mastery he shows of it, by the appearance of the first words. And that these markings, without any doubt very interesting, these catalogs of words, that observers take pleasure in recording in order to know, in this or that child, what the first words are that appear, and to draw rigorous meanings from them, leave intact the problem of knowing to what extent what emerges in fact in motor representation must not be considered as precisely emerging from a first apprehension of the whole symbolic system as such, which gives to these first appearances, as moreover the clinic shows, an entirely contingent signification.

For everyone knows with what diversity these first fragments of language appear that are revealed in the child’s elocution, how striking it is to hear the child express, for example, adverbs, particles, words like ‘perhaps’ or ‘not yet’, before having expressed a substantive word, the slightest name of an object. There is manifestly here a question of pre-posing the problem that seems indispensable to situate any valid observation. In other words, if we do not manage to grasp well and understand the essential function, the autonomy of this symbolic function in human realization, it is quite impossible to start brutally from the facts without immediately making the grossest errors of understanding.

This is not a course in general psychology, and no doubt I will not have the occasion to take up again the problem raised by the child’s acquisition of language. Today, I think I can only introduce the essential problem of the ego and of speech, and doing so, of course, starting from the way it is revealed in our experience, this problem that we can pose only at the point where the formulation of the problem stands. That is to say, that we cannot proceed as if the theory of the ego, in all the questions it poses for us, the theory of the ego as FREUD formulated it in this opposition with the Id, once uttered by FREUD, and which permeates a whole part of our theoretical and thereby technical conceptions[…]

And that is why today I would like to draw your attention to a text called the Verneinung. The Verneinung, in other words—as Mr. HYPPOLITE was pointing out to me just now—denial, and not negation, as it has been quite insufficiently translated in French. It is indeed always thus that I myself have evoked it whenever I had occasion, in my explanations or seminars, or lectures. This text is from 1925, and posterior to the publication of these articles that one may say are boundary articles with respect to the period we are studying of the Technical Papers, those that concern the psychology of the ego and its relation[…] the article Das Ich und das Es. It thus takes up this relation always present and living for FREUD, this relation of the ego with the spoken manifestation of the subject in the session. It is therefore, in this respect, extremely significant.

It seemed to me, for reasons you are going to see manifest themselves, that Mr. HYPPOLITE, who does us the great honor of coming to participate here in our work by his presence, indeed by his interventions, it seemed to me that he could bring me great help in establishing this dialogue—during which one cannot say that I am resting, but during which at least I no longer manifest myself in a motor way—of bringing us the testimony of a critique elaborated by the very reflection of all that we know of his earlier works, of bringing us the elaboration of a problem that, as you will see, concerns nothing less than the whole theory, if not of knowledge, at least of judgment.

That is why I asked him, no doubt with a bit of insistence, to be willing not only to relieve me, but to bring what he alone can bring in his rigor to a text of the nature of the one you are going to see, precisely, on denial. I believe there are difficulties there,[…] and certainly that it would take a mind other than a mind formed in the philosophical disciplines without which we cannot do in the function we occupy. Our function is not that of a vague affective rub-a-dub in which we would have to provoke in the subject, in the course of a confused experience, those returns of experiences more or less evanescent in which all the magic of psychoanalysis would consist.

We do not do what we do in an experience that proceeds at the most sensitive point of human activity, that is to say that of reasoning intelligence: the sole fact is that it is a discourse; we do nothing other than something approximate, which has no claim to psychoanalysis. We are therefore fully within our duty in listening, on a text like the one you are going to see, to the qualified opinions of someone practiced in this critique of language, in this apprehension of theory.

As you are going to see this text of FREUD manifest, once again in its author, this kind of fundamental value that makes the slightest moment of a text by FREUD allow us a rigorous technical apprehension, that each word deserves to be measured for its precise incidence, its accent, its particular turn, deserves to be inserted into the most rigorous logical analysis. It is in this that he differs from the same terms grouped more or less vaguely by disciples for whom the apprehension of problems has been secondhand, so to speak, and in any case never fully elaborated, from which results this kind of degradation where we see constantly manifested, by its hesitations, the development of analytic theory.

Before yielding the floor to Mr. HYPPOLITE, I would simply like to draw your attention to an intervention he once made, conjointly with a kind of, let us say, debate, that had been provoked by a certain way of presenting things on the subject of FREUD and on the intention toward the patient. Mr. HYPPOLITE had brought ANZIEU some help…

Jean HYPPOLITE – Temporary.

LACAN

Yes, temporary help to ANZIEU. It was a matter of seeing what was FREUD’s fundamental, intentional attitude toward the patient at the moment when he claimed to substitute the analysis of resistances—we are fully in our subject—the analysis of resistances by speech, for that kind of subjugation, of capture, of substitution for the subject’s due speech, which operates by suggestion or by hypnosis. I had shown myself very reserved on the question of knowing whether there was in FREUD a manifestation of combativeness, even domination, characteristic of remnants of an ambitious style that we could see betraying itself in his youth. I believe this text is quite decisive: it speaks of suggestion, and that is why I am bringing it today, because it is also at the heart of our problem.

It is in the text on Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego. Thus it is with regard to group psychology, that is to say relations to the other, that for the first time the ego as an autonomous function is brought into FREUD’s work. A simple remark that I point out today, because it is quite evident and justifies the angle under which I am bringing it to you by its relations with the other. It is in chapter IV of this article called ‘Suggestion and libido’ that we have the following text:

‘One is thus prepared to admit that suggestion is a phenomenon, a fundamental fact…//… and in the opinion of Bernheim, whose extraordinary feats I myself was able to see in 1889. But I recall that already then I experienced a kind of muffled revolt against this tyranny of suggestion. When one said to a patient who showed himself recalcitrant: “Well then, what are you doing? You are counter-suggesting yourself!” I could not help thinking that one was committing a violence. The man certainly had the right…//…My opinion later took the form of a revolt against the manner…//…And I quoted the old joke: “If Saint Christopher bore Christ, and Christ bore the world, where then could Saint Christopher have put his feet?”’

[Man wird so für die Aussage vorbereitet, die Suggestion (richtiger die Suggerierbarkeit) sei eben ein weiter nicht reduzierbares Urphänomen, eine Grundtatsache des menschlichen Seelenlebens. So hielt es auch Bernheim, von dessen erstaunlichen Künsten ich im Jahre 1889 Zeuge war. Ich weiß mich aber auch damals an eine dumpfe Gegnerschaft gegen diese Tyrannei der Suggestion zu erinnern. Wenn ein Kranker, der sich nicht gefügig zeigte, angeschrieen wurde: »Was tun Sie denn? Vous vous contre–suggestionnez!« so sagte ich mir, das sei offenbares Unrecht und Gewalttat. Der Mann habe zu Gegensuggestionen gewiß ein Recht, wenn man ihn mit Suggestionen zu unterwerfen versuche. Mein Widerstand nahm dann später die Richtung einer Auflehnung dagegen, daß die Suggestion, die alles erklärte, selbst der Erklärung entzogen sein sollte. Ich wiederholte mit Bezug auf sie die alte Scherzfrage :Christoph trug Christum,Christus trug die ganze Welt,Sag’,
wo hat ChristophDamals hin den Fuß gestellt ?]

[One is thus prepared to admit that suggestion (or, more exactly, suggestibility) is a primitive and irreducible phenomenon, a fundamental fact of man’s psychic life. Such was the opinion of Bernheim, whose extraordinary feats I myself was able to see in 1889. But I recall that already then I experienced a kind of muffled revolt against this tyranny of suggestion. When, at a patient who showed himself recalcitrant, one shouted: ‘What are you doing? You are counter-suggesting yourself!’, I could not help thinking that one was committing an injustice and a violence against him. The man certainly had the right to counter-suggest himself when one was trying to subject him by suggestion. My opposition later took the form of a revolt against the manner of thinking according to which suggestion, which explained everything, would itself have no need of any explanation. And more than once I cited in this regard the old joke:
‘If Saint Christopher bore Christ, and if Christ bore the world, tell me: where then could Saint Christopher have put his feet?’
(Christophorus Christum, sed Christus sustulit orbem. Constiterit pedibus die ubi Christophorus? » Konrad Richter : Der deutsche
St. Christoph, Berlin, 1896. Acta Germanica, V, 1)]

A genuine revolt that FREUD experienced before, properly speaking, this violence that can be included in speech, not to see precisely this potential inclination of the analysis of resistances in the sense ANZIEU indicated the other day, and which is precisely what we are here to show you is precisely what must be avoided in practice.

If you like, it is the misconstrual to be avoided in the practice of what is called ‘analysis of resistances’. It is indeed within this statement that this moment is inserted, and you will see that the progress that will result from our elucidation will be inserted in this commentary. I believe this text has its value and deserves to be cited.

In thanking again for the collaboration he is willing to bring us, I ask Mr. HYPPOLITE…
who, according to what I have heard, has been willing to devote prolonged attention to this text
…to be willing to bring us simply his feeling about it.
 

Jean HYPPOLITE: Die Verneinung

Jean HYPPOLITE

First, I must thank Doctor LACAN for the insistence he has shown, because it has afforded me the occasion for a night of work, and to bring the child of that night before you. I do not know what it will be worth. Doctor LACAN was willing to send me not only the French text, but also the German text. He did well, for I believe I would have understood absolutely nothing in the French text if I had not had the German text.

I did not know this text, and it had an absolutely extraordinary structure, and at bottom extraordinarily enigmatic. The construction is not at all a professor’s construction; it is a construction—I do not want to say ‘dialectical’, the word is abused—but an extremely subtle construction of the text. And I had to undertake, with the German text and the French text…
whose translation is not very…well, compared to others, it is honest
…a genuine interpretation. And it is that interpretation I am going to give you. I believe it is valid, but it is not the only one and it certainly deserves to be discussed.

FREUD begins by presenting the title ‘Die Verneinung’. And I noticed—discovering it after Doctor LACAN—that it would be better to translate it as denial rather than negation. Likewise you will see employed Urteil verneinen, which is not the negation of judgment, but a kind of un-judging. I think one will have to make a difference between:
– the negation internal to a judgment,
– and the attitude of negation,
…for otherwise the article does not seem comprehensible to me, if one does not make that difference.

The French text does not bring out:
– neither how FREUD’s analysis has something extremely concrete, and almost amusing,
– nor how, by examples that moreover contain a projection that one could situate in the analyses done here, the one where the sick person says—or the analysand says to his analyst:

‘You have no doubt thought that I am going to tell you something offensive, but it is nothing of the kind.’

‘We understand,’ says FREUD, ‘that the fact of refusing such an incidence by projection, that is to say by spontaneously attributing this thought to the psychoanalyst, is precisely its admission.’

I noticed that in everyday life it was very frequent to say ‘I certainly do not want to offend you in what I am going to tell you.’ One must translate: ‘I want to offend you.’ It is a will that is not lacking. FREUD continues up to a generalization full of audacity, and that will lead him to pose the problem of negation as the origin even, perhaps, of intelligence. That is how I understand the article, which has a certain philosophical density. He recounts another example, of someone who says:

‘I saw in my dream a person, but it was certainly not my mother.’

One must translate: ‘it was surely her.’ Now, he cites a procedure that the psychoanalyst can employ and that anyone else can also employ:

‘Tell me what, in your situation, is the most unbelievable, in your opinion, what is the most impossible.’

And the patient, the neighbor, the interlocutor will find something that is the most unbelievable. But it is precisely that which must be believed. Here is an analysis of concrete cases generalized into a way of presenting what one is on the mode of not being it. That is exactly what is fundamental:

‘I am going to tell you what I am not; pay attention: that is precisely what I am.’

Only, FREUD notes here what is, as it were, the function that belongs to this denial. And he uses a word that I felt familiar; he uses the word Aufhebung, a word that, as you know, has had diverse fortunes; it is not for me to say.

LACAN – But yes, it is precisely for you.

Jean HYPPOLITE

It is HEGEL’s ‘dialectical’ word, which means at once to negate, to suppress, to preserve, and, all in all, to lift up. It can be the Aufhebung of a stone, or also the cancellation of my subscription to a newspaper.

‘Denial,’ FREUD tells us, ‘is an Aufhebung of repression, and not an acceptance.’

And here is something that is truly extraordinary in FREUD’s analysis, by which there emerges from these concrete examples, which we could have taken as such, a prodigious philosophical scope that I will try to summarize in a moment. To present one’s being on the mode of not being it is really that: it is an Aufhebung of repression, but not an acceptance. In other words, the one who says ‘here is what I am not’, there is no longer repression there, since repression means unconsciousness, since it is conscious. Denial is a way of bringing into consciousness what was in the unconscious; everything becomes conscious, but repression still persists in the form of nonacceptance.

There continues this kind of philosophical subtlety that FREUD makes. He says ‘Here the intellectual separates from the affective.’ And there is truly there a kind of profound discovery. To make an analysis of ‘the intellectual’ we see, and, pushing my hypothesis, I would say: not how ‘the intellectual separates from the affective’, but how it is—the intellectual—this kind of suspension to a certain extent; one would say, in a somewhat barbarous language, ‘a sublimation’. It is not quite that; in any case, ‘the intellectual separates from the affective’. And perhaps thought is born as such: it is the affected content of a denial.

To recall a philosophical text—once again I apologize for it, but Doctor LACAN too…—at the end of a chapter of HEGEL, it is a matter of substituting real negativity for this appetite for destruction that seizes desire, and that has something deeply mystical more than psychological, this appetite for destruction that seizes desire and that makes it so that when the two combatants confront each other, soon there will be no one left to note their victory or their defeat: an ideal negation.

Here the denial of which FREUD speaks is exactly—and that is why it introduces into ‘the intellectual’ an ideal negation—an ideal negativity, for we are going to see precisely a kind of genesis, where FREUD will employ the word ‘negativity’ of certain—how can one say—psychoses?

LACAN – Psychotic.

Jean HYPPOLITE

He will show how this negativity is at bottom different, mythically speaking. In his genesis of denial properly speaking, of which he speaks here, in my view one must, to understand this article, admit what is not immediately visible. In the same way one will have to admit an asymmetry…
translated by two moments in FREUD’s text, and translated the same way in French
…an asymmetry between the passage to affirmation and the passage to love. The true role in the genesis of intelligence belongs to denial; denial is the very position of thought.

But let us proceed more slowly. We have seen that FREUD said:

‘the intellectual separates from the affective…’
[‘Man sieht, wie sich hier die intellektuelle Funktion vom affektiven Vorgang scheidet.’]

And he adds the other modification of analysis: ‘the acceptance of the repressed’. [Die Verneinung ist eine Art, das Verdrängte zur Kenntnis zu nehmen,
eigentlich schon eine Aufhebung der Verdrängung, aber freilich keine Annahme des Verdrängten.]

Yet repression is not suppressed. Let us try to represent the situation:
– first situation: here is what I am not; one concludes: what I am. Repression still exists in the ideal form of denial.
– Secondly, the psychoanalyst forces me to accept what I denied a moment ago.

And FREUD adds, with little dots in the text, he gives us no explanation about it,

‘…and yet, repression as such has not disappeared.’

What seems very profound to me: if the analysand accepts, he goes back on his denial, and yet repression is still there! I conclude that one must give a philosophical name to that, which is a name FREUD did not give: it is a negation of the negation. Literally, what appears here is intellectual affirmation, but only intellectual, as a negation of the negation. The word is not found in FREUD but, all in all, I believe we can extend him in this form; that is indeed what it means.

Then FREUD, at that moment—the difficulty of the text—tells us:

‘We are therefore in a position, since we have separated the intellectual from the affective, to formulate a kind of genesis of judgment, that is to say, in sum, a genesis of thought.’

[Da es die Aufgabe der intellektuellen Urteilsfunktion ist, Gedankeninhalte zu bejahen oder zu verneinen, haben uns die vorstehenden Bemerkungen zum psychologischen Ursprung dieser Funktion geführt.]

I apologize to the psychologists who are here, but I do not like positive psychology very much in itself. This genesis could be taken for a positive psychology; it seems deeper to me, like a kind of history at once genetic and mythical. And I think that, just as this primordial affective will engender intelligence in a certain way, in FREUD, as Doctor LACAN was saying, the primary form that psychologically we call affective is itself a human form which, if it engenders intelligence, is because it already includes, at its outset, a fundamental historicity: it is not the pure affective on one side, and on the other side there would be the pure intellectual.

In this genesis I see a kind of great myth; behind an appearance of positivity in FREUD there is like a great myth. And what? Behind affirmation, what is there? There is the Vereinigung[union] which is Eros. And behind denial[Verneinung]—
attention, intellectual denial will be something more—the appearance of a fundamental asymmetric symbol. Primordial affirmation is nothing other than affirming, but to deny is more than wanting to destroy. This process that is badly translated as rejection is Verwerfung that one should have used, whereas there is Ausstossung which means expulsion. One has, as it were, the two first forms: the force of expulsion and the force of attraction, both, it seems to me, under the domination of pleasure, both in the text, which is striking.

Judgment therefore has a history. And here FREUD shows us that there are two types, as everyone knows, even the most elementary philosophy: there is an attributive judgment and an existence judgment. There is saying of a thing that it is or is not this, and saying of a thing that it is or that it is not.’ [Die Urteilsfunktion hat im wesentlichen zwei Entscheidungen zu treffen. Sie soll einem Ding eine Eigenschaft zu -oder absprechen, und sie soll einer Vorstellung dieExistenz in der Realität zugestehen oder bestreiten.]

And then FREUD shows what lies behind the attributive judgment and behind the existence judgment. And it seems to me that, in order to understand his article, one must consider the negation of the attributive judgment and the negation of the existence judgment as not yet being the negation of which it appears as the symbol. Basically, there is not yet judgment in this genesis; there is a first myth of the formation of the ‘outside’ and the ‘inside’: that is the whole question. You see what importance this myth of the formation of the outside and the inside has, of the alienation between the two words that is translated by the opposition of the two; it is, all the same, the alienation and a hostility of the two.

What makes these three pages so dense is, as you see, how it calls everything into question, and how one passes from these concrete remarks, so tiny in appearance and so profound in their generality, to something that calls into question an entire philosophy and a structure of thought.

Behind the attributive judgment, what is there? There is the ‘I want to appropriate, to introject,’ or ‘I want to expel.’ [das will ich in mich einführen und das aus mir ausschließen.] At the beginning, FREUD seems to say… but at the beginning means nothing; it is like a myth: ‘once upon a time’ …in this story ‘once upon a time there was an ego,’ a subject, for whom there was not yet anything foreign. That—the foreign and himself—is an operation, an expulsion; that makes intelligible a text that suddenly arises and seems a little contradictory: [Das Schlechte, das dem Ich Fremde, das Außenbefindliche, ist ihm zunächst identisch.]

– Das Schlechte: what is bad,
– das dem Ich Fremde: what is foreign to the ego,
– das Außenbefindliche: what is located outside,
– ist ihm zunächst identisch: is to him initially identical.

Now, just before, FREUD had just said that one expels, that there is therefore an operation that is the operation of expulsion, and another that is the operation of introjection. This form is the primordial form of what will be the judgment of attribution. But what is at the origin of the existence judgment is the relation between representation—and here it is very difficult—FREUD deepens the relation between representation and perception.

What is important is that, at the beginning, it is likewise neutral to know ‘whether there is’ or ‘whether there is not.’ There is. But the subject relates his representation of things to the primitive perception he had of them. And the question is to know, when he says that this exists, whether this reproduction still preserves its being in reality, which he will be able to find again or not find again; that is the relation between representation and the possibility of finding again its object. It will have to be found again. Which always proves that FREUD moves in a deeper dimension than that of JUNG, in a sort of dimension of memory, and thereby not losing the thread of his analysis. But I am afraid of making you lose it, so difficult and minute is it.

What was at stake in the judgment of attribution was to expel or to introject. In the existence judgment, it is a matter of attributing to the ego—or rather to the subject, it is more general—a representation, thus of defining an inside by a representation to which there no longer corresponds—but did correspond in a going back—its object.

What is called into question here is the genesis ‘of the inside and of the outside’. And, FREUD tells us,

‘One thus sees the birth of judgment from the primary drives.’ [Das Studium des Urteils eröffnet uns vielleicht zum erstenmal die Einsicht in die Entstehung einer intellektuellen Funktion ausdem Spiel der primären Triebregungen.]

There is therefore a kind of purposive evolution of this introjection and of this expulsion that are regulated by the pleasure principle.

‘Die Bejahung—the affirmation,’ FREUD tells us, ‘is simply—als Ersatz der Vereinigung, gehört dem Eros an…’

What lies at the source of what we call affirmation ‘is Eros’, that is to say, in the judgment of attribution, for example, the fact of introjecting, of appropriating to ourselves instead of expelling outside. For negation, he does not use the word Ersatz; he uses the word Nachfolge, but the translator renders it in French in the same way as Ersatz.

The German text was:

‘Die Bejahung – als Ersatz der Vereinigung – gehört dem Eros an,
die Verneinung -Nachfolge der Ausstoßung – dem Destruktionstrieb.’

Affirmation is the Ersatz of Vereinigung, and negation the Nachfolge of expulsion, or more exactly of the instinct of destruction. This thus becomes entirely mythical: two instincts that are, so to speak, intermingled in this myth that bears the subject:
– one is that of union,
– and the other is that of destruction.

You see a great myth, and one that repeats other myths. But the slight nuance:
– that affirmation, as it were, only purely and simply substitutes itself for unification,
– whereas negation, which results much later, seems to me alone capable of explaining the following sentence, when it is simply a matter of negativity, that is to say of the instinct of destruction.

Then there can indeed be a pleasure in denying, a negativism that results simply from the suppression of libidinal components, that is to say that what has disappeared in this pleasure of denying—disappeared = repressed—are the libidinal components. Consequently, the instinct of destruction also depends on pleasure. I consider this very important, crucial, in technique.

Only, FREUD tells us, and it is here that the asymmetry between affirmation and negation appears:

‘The functioning of judgment…

and this time the word is Urteil; before we were within the primary limits that prelude judgment

is made possible only by the creation of the symbol of negation.…’

[Die Leistung der Urteilsfunktion wird aber erst dadurch ermöglicht, daß die Schöpfung des Verneinungssymbols dem Denken einenersten Grad von Unabhängigkeit von den Erfolgen der Verdrängung und somit auch vom Zwang des Lustprinzips gestattet hat.]

Why does FREUD not tell us: ‘the functioning of judgment is made possible by affirmation’? And why is negation going to play a role not as a destructive tendency or within a form of judgment, but as a fundamental attitude of symbolicity and explicitness?

‘…Creation of the symbol of negation that makes thought independent of the results of repression and consequently of the pleasure principle.’

A sentence of FREUD’s that would make no sense to me if I had not already linked the tendency to destruction to the pleasure principle.

There is a kind of difficulty here. What therefore does this asymmetry between affirmation and negation mean? It means that everything repressed can, as it were, once again be taken up and reused in a kind of suspension, and that, as it were, instead of being under the domination of the instincts of attraction and expulsion, there can come about a margin of thought, of being, in the form of not-being, which appears with denial, the very symbol of denial connected to the concrete attitude of negation.

For the text must indeed be understood thus, if one accepts the conclusion that seemed a little strange to me:

‘To this interpretation of negation, it coincides very well that one finds in analysis no “no” proceeding from the unconscious.’ [Zu dieser Auffassung stimmt es sehr gut, daß man in der Analyse kein “Nein” aus dem Unbewußten auffindet…]

But one does indeed find destruction there. So one must absolutely separate ‘the instinct of destruction’ from ‘the form of destruction’, for otherwise one would not understand what FREUD means. One must see in denial a concrete attitude at the origin of the explicit symbol of negation, which explicit symbol alone makes possible something that is like the utilization of the unconscious, while maintaining repression. That seems to me to be the sense of the text:

‘…and that recognition on the side of the ego is expressed in a negative formula.’ […und daß die Anerkennung des Unbewußten von seiten des Ichs sich in einer negativen Form ausdrückt.]

That is the summary: one finds in analysis no “no” proceeding from the unconscious, but recognition of the unconscious on the side of the ego, which is always misrecognition, even within knowledge; one always finds on the side of the ego, in a negative formula, the possibility of holding the unconscious while refusing it.

‘No stronger proof of the discovery that has succeeded in bringing the unconscious to light than if the analysand reacts with this proposition: I did not think that, or even I never thought that.’

[Kein stärkerer Beweis für die gelungene Aufdeckung des Unbewußten, als wenn der Analysierte mit dem Satze :
Das habe ich nicht gedacht, oder : Daran habe ich nicht(nie) gedacht, darauf reagiert.]

There is therefore, in this three-page text of FREUD, in which, I apologize, I myself arrived laboriously at finding what I believe is its thread:
– on the one hand, this kind of concrete attitude that results from the very observation of denial, on the other hand the possibility thereby of dissociating the intellectual from the affective.
– on the other hand, a genesis of everything that precedes in the primary, and consequently the very origin of judgment and of thought itself—under the form of thought as such, for thought is indeed beforehand, in the primary, but it is not there as thought—through the intermediary of denial.

 

LACAN

We cannot be too grateful to Mr. HYPPOLITE for having given us the occasion, by a kind of movement coextensive with FREUD’s thought, to immediately reach that something that Mr. HYPPOLITE has—I believe—situated very remarkably as truly beyond positive psychology.

I point out to you in passing that, by insisting as we always do in these seminars on the transpsychological character of the psychoanalytic field, I believe that we are only rediscovering what is evident in our practice, but what the very thought of the one who opened its doors to us manifests ceaselessly in the least of his texts.

I believe there is much to be drawn from reflection on this text. I think it would not be bad, since Miss GUÉNINCHAULT has the kindness to take notes of it, that it benefit from a turn of favor and that it be quickly mimeographed to be distributed to you.

This all-too-short lesson that Mr. HYPPOLITE has just given us deserves at least a special treatment, at least immediately. I believe that the extreme condensation and the contribution of wholly precise markers is certainly… perhaps in a sense much more didactic than what I express to you myself in my style, and in certain intentions. I will have it mimeographed for the use of those who come here.

I believe that there cannot be a better preface to a whole distinction of levels, a whole critique of concepts, which is that into which I strive to introduce you, with the aim of avoiding certain confusions.

I believe, for example, that what has just emerged from Mr. HYPPOLITE’s elaboration of this text of FREUD, showing us the difference of levels of Bejahung, of affirmation and of negativity insofar as it establishes, in sum, at a level—it is deliberately that I take much more clumsy expressions—prior to the constitution of the subject-object relation.

I believe that this is what this apparently so minimal text of FREUD introduces us to from the outset, no doubt thereby joining certain of the most current elaborations of philosophical meditation.

And I believe that, at the same time, this allows us to criticize in the foreground this kind of ambiguity always maintained around the famous intellectual-affective opposition, as if, as it were, affectivity were a kind of coloration, of ineffable quality, so to speak, that would be what must be sought in itself, and as it were independently of that kind of ‘emptied skin’ that would be the purely intellectual realization of a relation of the subject.

I believe that this notion [the affective] which pushes analysis into paradoxical, singular paths is, properly speaking, childish, a sort of connotation of sensational success; the slightest feeling asserted by the subject with a character of singularity, even of strangeness, in the text of the session properly speaking, is what follows from this fundamental misunderstanding.

The affective is not something like a special density that would be lacking in intellectual elaboration, and another level of the production of the symbol; the opening, so to speak, of the subject to symbolic creation is something that is in the register where we said at the beginning that […] which is mythical, in this register, and prior to discursive formulation. You understand, don’t you? And this alone can allow us, I do not say immediately to situate, but to discuss, to apprehend what consists in what I call this full realization of speech.

We have a little time left. I would like right away to try to embody this in examples, more exactly to try to point out by examples how the question is posed. I will show it to you from two sides. First, from the side of a phenomenon that is called psychopathological, […] a phenomenon to which one can say that the elaboration of psychopathological thought has brought an absolutely first-rate novelty, a total renewal of perspective: it is the phenomenon of hallucination.

Up to a certain date, hallucination was properly speaking considered as a kind of critical phenomenon around which the question of the discriminative value of consciousness was posed. It could not be consciousness that was hallucinated; it was something else. In fact, it is enough to introduce ourselves to the new Phenomenology of Perception, as it emerges in Mr. MERLEAU-PONTY’s book, to see that hallucination, on the contrary, is integrated as essential to the subject’s intentionality.

This hallucination, we content ourselves with a certain number of themes, of registers, such as that of the pleasure principle, to explain its production, considered as, as it were, fundamental, as the first movement in the order of the subject’s satisfaction. We cannot content ourselves with something so simple. In fact, recall the example that I cited for you last time, in The Wolf Man. It is indicated by the progress of the analysis of this subject, by the contradictions presented by the traces through which we follow the elaboration he made for himself of his situation in the human world: this Verwerfung,
– that something that makes it so that the genital plane, properly speaking, has for him literally always been as if it did not exist,
– that something that we were led to situate very precisely at the level, I would say, of the ‘non-Bejahung’,
– that something that, you see, we cannot place, absolutely not, on the same level as a denial.

Now, what is quite striking is the sequel—I told you that I would indicate it to you, and I take it up today—it is the, as it were, immediate relation that already emerges, that is so much more understandable in the light, in the explanations that were given to you today around this text of FREUD.

It is—again—that nothing has been manifested—on the symbolic plane, for it seems that this is precisely the condition for something to exist: that there be this Bejahung, this Bejahung which is not a Bejahung, as it were, of negation of the negation, which is something else. What happens when this Bejahung does not occur?

It is that the only trace we have of this [symbolic] plane on which it has not been realized for the subject, the genital plane, is like a kind of emergence, not at all in his history, but really in the external world, of a small hallucination. It is the external world that is manifested to the subject, castration, which is very precisely what, for him, did not exist, under the form of what he imagines: having cut off his little finger. Having cut off his little finger so deeply that it is held only by a little bit of skin.

And he is overwhelmed by the feeling of such an inexpressible catastrophe that he does not even dare speak of it to the person beside him. What he does not dare speak of is that precisely this person beside him, to whom he at once refers all his emotions, it is literally as if she, at that moment, were annulled. There is no longer any other.

There is a kind of immediate external world of manifestations perceived in a kind of primitive real, of non-symbolized real, despite the symbolic form in the usual sense of the word that the phenomenon takes, where one can see, as it were, this: that what is not recognized is seen.

I believe that, for the elucidation, not of psychosis, understand me, for he is not at all psychotic at the moment when he has this hallucination; he may be psychotic later, but not at the moment when he has this absolutely limited, nodal experience, foreign to the experience of his childhood, wholly disintegrated; nothing allows one to classify him, at the moment of his childhood, as a schizophrenic.

So it is a ‘phenomenon’ of psychosis that is at issue; I ask you to hear it, to understand this kind of correlation, of rocking, that makes it so that, at the level of an experience that is quite primitive at the origin, at the source, that opens the subject to a certain relation to the world by the possibility of the symbol: what is not recognized bursts into consciousness under the form of what is seen.

If you deepen sufficiently this particular polarization, it will appear much easier to you to approach that ambiguous phenomenon called the ‘already seen’, which is very exactly between these two modes of relation of the recognized and the seen.

And insofar as something that is in the communicable, thinkable external world, in the terms of integrated discourse, like everyday life, for certain reasons nevertheless finds itself brought to the limit level, or recognized as nevertheless at the limit of what arises with a kind of special pre-signification, it shifts, with retrospective illusion, into the domain of the already seen, that is to say of that perceived with an original quality that in the end is nothing other than what FREUD speaks to us about when, concerning this testing of the external world, he tells us that every testing of the external world implicitly refers to something that has already been perceived in the past.

But this applies infinitely: in a certain way, every kind of perceived necessitates this reference to this perspective. That is why we are brought back there to the level of the plane of the imaginary as such, to the level of the image, model of the original form, of what makes it so that, in another sense than the sense of the recognized, symbolized, verbalized, we find ourselves there in the problems evoked by Platonic theory, not of recollection, but of reminiscence.

I announced to you another example, proposed to your reflection on this subject. I take an example that is precisely of the order of what one calls more or less properly ‘the modern way of analyzing’. One imagines that the ‘moderns’…
but you will see that these principles are already set out in 1925 in this text of FREUD
…make a great point of the fact that we analyze, as one says, ‘first the surface’, and that it is the ultimate refinement to allow the subject to progress in a way that is, let us say, not delivered over to that kind of chance represented by the intellectualized sterilization of the content, as one says, that is re-evoked by analysis. I take an example that KRIS gives in one of his articles, one of his subjects whom he takes into analysis and who moreover has already been analyzed once. One has certainly gone quite far in the use of the material.

This subject has serious hindrances in his profession, and it is an intellectual profession, which seems indeed, in what one glimpses in his observation, something very close to the preoccupations that may be ours. The subject experiences all sorts of difficulties in producing, as one says. It is indeed that his life is, as it were, hindered by the very fact of the efforts necessary to bring out something publishable, as well as something, a hindrance, which is nothing other than the feeling he has, in sum, let us say to abbreviate, of being a plagiarist of someone who is very close to himself in his entourage, a brilliant scholar, let us say a little more than a student who is with him, and with whom he constantly exchanges ideas; he always feels tempted to take these ideas that he provides to his interlocutor, and that is for him a perpetual hindrance to everything he wants to bring out.

KRIS explains these problems of the analysis. All the same, at a certain moment, he managed to set up a certain text: one day, he arrives declaring in a quasi triumphant way that everything he has just set up as a thesis is already found in a book, in the library, in a published article, and which already presents its essential manifestations. Here he is then, this time, a plagiarist in spite of himself.

What will the alleged ‘interpretation by the surface’ that KRIS proposes to us consist in?

Probably in this: KRIS, showing something that indeed a certain way of taking analysis might perhaps mislead beginners, takes an effective interest in what happened, in what there is in this book. And by looking at it more closely, I suppose by referring to the text itself, one realizes that there is indeed absolutely nothing in this book that represents the essential theses brought by the subject.

Things, of course, are broached that pose the question, but nothing of the new theses brought by the subject that is therefore already there in some way; it is indicated, in other words, that the thesis is indeed fully, effectively original. It is therefore from there—says KRIS, and this is what he calls, I do not know why, a ‘taking of things by the surface’—if one wishes, insofar as one considers the significance of what is brought by the subject, it is from there that KRIS is introduced, by completely reversing the position approached by the subject, to show him that all his needs are manifested in his hindered, paradoxical conduct, and fall under a certain relation to his father, and that it consists in this: that precisely the father never managed to bring anything out, and that because he was crushed by a grandfather, in every sense of the word, who, he, was a very constructive and very fruitful person.

And that, in sum, what the subject’s conduct represents—says KRIS—is nothing other than a need to impute to his father, to find in his father, a grandfather—this time—in the other sense of the word ‘great’—who, he, would be capable of doing something. And that, this need thus being satisfied, by forging for himself kinds of tutors or people greater than he, in dependence on whom he finds himself through the intermediary of a plagiarism that he then reproaches himself for and with the help of which he destroys himself, he does nothing other than manifest there a need that is in reality the one that tormented his childhood, and consequently dominated his history.

Incontestably, the interpretation is valid, and it is important to see how the subject reacts to it. He reacts to it by what? What will KRIS consider as being the confirmation of the scope of what he introduces, and which leads very far? Then the whole story develops, the whole properly phallic symbolization of this need for the real father, creative and powerful, has passed through all sorts of games in childhood, fishing games: that the father fishes a more or less big fish, etc. …but the subject’s immediate reaction is this: the subject keeps silent. And it is at the following session that he says:

‘The other day, when leaving, I went into such-and-such a street—it takes place in New York—the street where there are foreign restaurants, where one eats somewhat spicy things; I looked for a place where I could find that meal of which I am particularly fond: fresh brains.’

I believe you have there the representation of what the response signifies, namely the level, as it were, at once paradoxical and full in its significance, of speech, insofar as it is evoked by a correct interpretation. That this interpretation here is correct, to what is it due? Is it to say that it is something more or less on the surface? What does that mean?

It means nothing other than that KRIS, no doubt by an applied detour, but whose end he could after all very well have foreseen, perceived precisely this: that in such a matter, the subject’s manifestation in this special form that is intellectual manifestation, the production of an organized discourse, being essentially subject to this process that is called denial, that is to say that it is exactly under an inverse form that his fundamental relation… to something that we will be led to pose again as a question in the continuation of our development …his relation to something that is called, on this occasion, his ideal ego, could be reflected in his discourse, in the integration of his ego, only under a very precisely inverted form.

In other words, the relation to the other, insofar as the subject’s primitive desire tends to manifest itself in it, always contains within itself, insofar as it is in the relation to the other that it has to manifest it, that fundamental original element of denial which here takes the form of inversion.

This, you see, only introduces us to new problems, that is to say, in sum, serves as an opening, as a point, to the question that is perpetually open for us of the relation of level, which is in sum the discursive level, the level of discourse insofar as negation is introduced there, with the relation to the other.

But in order to pose it well, it was fitting that their fundamental relations be situated, established, the difference of levels between the symbolic as such, symbolic possibility, man’s opening to symbols, and on the other hand its crystallization in this organized discourse insofar as it essentially and fundamentally contains contradiction.

This, I believe, Mr. HYPPOLITE’s commentary has shown you masterfully today. I wish that you keep its apparatus and its handling in your hands, as markers to which you can always refer at a certain number of points, of springs, of difficult crossroads, in the continuation of our exposition. It is in this respect that I thank Mr. HYPPOLITE for having brought it with his high competence.