GRANOFF

LACAN

…we will orient ourselves in the form I have already announced to you for two seminars, announced and even carried out: to try to understand, within the theoretical understanding that this or that analyst has formulated of his experience, certain points of view that can give us an idea of the way in which he conducts this experience.

For, after all, it is very fine to say that theory and technique are the same thing, but then let us take advantage of it! Let us try to understand each person’s technique, when his theoretical ideas are sufficiently well articulated to allow us at least to presume something. In fact! Of course this is perhaps not applicable to everyone: in many cases the theoretical ideas that are pushed forward by a certain number of minds, even by our ‘fine minds,’ are not for that matter usable in this sense, because people who handle theoretical concepts do not always know very well what they are saying. But in certain cases, on the contrary, one has a vivid feeling that this expresses something quite direct in experience.

I believe this is the case of our friend BALINT. I preferred to choose the support of someone who in many respects is close to us, indeed sympathetic, and indisputably manifests orientations that converge with certain of the requirements that we have arrived at formulating here, on what the intersubjective relationship in analysis must be, you will see. But, at the same time, the way he expresses it gives us, I believe—you will also see—the feeling that he undergoes[…]. And that is what is interesting about it. It is not among people who are too easy to choose as an example to manifest what I would call a certain deviationism with respect to the fundamental analytic experience to which I refer ceaselessly, whose deviationism I point to on the horizon.

It is not where they are crude, apparent, or even clearly delirious that it is of interest for us to press on them. It is where they are subtle, and where they mask, less a radical aberration, than a certain way of missing the target. On this I wanted to test what must be the scope of a teaching, namely that one follow it. And I will say that it is in this that I trust GRANOFF, who seems to be one of those who—in any case I have testimony of it—are most interested, oriented, by the path on which I am trying to lead you. And I told him, insofar as what he learns here, as well as his own feeling of his experience, to communicate to us today what he may have gathered from reading BALINT’s book, which is called ‘Primary love and psychoanalytic technique,’ and which comprises a collection of articles that extend roughly… BALINT began his career around 1920, by his own testimony… the articles in question begin in the year 1930 and end in these last years, 1950.

It is a very interesting book, extraordinarily pleasant to read, because it is, as you know, a clear, lucid book, often audacious, full of humor, and certainly one that you will all have an interest in handling when you have the time.

It is a vacation book, like a prize one is going to distribute, the end-of-year prizes. Give it to yourselves, for the Society is not rich enough to distribute it to you this year.

Wladimir GRANOFF

This book is indeed so interesting that I believed myself on vacation with it, and I remained in that vacation atmosphere. Besides, it will be at the library, for it is truly very interesting.

The question that arises is to know ‘are we going to summarize the book?’ which seems to me impossible, because it is rather a collection of the different articles, communications, made by BALINT, or rather by the first BALINT couple—BALINT and his first wife Alice—on the occasion of the different congresses. These articles go from 1930 to 1952. It is not always easy to find a guiding thread, or rather there is no community, properly speaking, even in the orientation of these articles. To summarize it is impossible.

Which makes me think that one must simply confine oneself to drawing general impressions from it. As for articulating these impressions with the current point at which our seminar stands, I believe that I will leave that to Doctor LACAN, because one risks quite easily making misunderstandings there.

Still, to extend this preliminary remark a little, this book is extremely amusing, because one has the impression, not properly speaking that our work as pioneers loses its value and its acuity there, but one draws from it the impression that we are far, very far from being alone in a certain tendency.

BALINT, in this book, sets out a thought… it is difficult to say; I think rather that he manifests a certain mood there, in the end. One wonders—I wondered—about the reasons that pushed you to entrust its examination to me. Is it intended to be the illustration of what must be done in analysis, or of what must not be done? And the whole book finally turns around that. For up to a certain point, which must not be closed, from a certain kilometer marker, one must absolutely not[…]. Between us, ‘correct’ will mean ‘in conformity with what we want.’

The first line of what is extremely correct, which makes it open out onto a kind of road, which normally must lead it very far, is a wide, clear road, which is outlined, so to speak, at very little distance from the place where it arrives. And at the moment when it arrives, it gives a sudden turn of the wheel and goes into the ditch. And then it seems to ask itself: ‘Why am I there?’ That is the pathetic side.

How BALINT conceives psychoanalysis and his profession, and what also forms the basis of this book, a certain ego psychology. In two words, he tells us this: a certain number of terms and approaches were put into circulation by FREUD, for certain reasons up to a certain year:
– at a certain period, between 1920 and 1926 roughly, the approach was essentially dynamic and functional,
– from that moment, it became structural, topical more exactly.
A whole set of terms comes to us from the first period. In usage they have become worn down. And at the present hour we find ourselves facing a situation that is dramatic in this, he says:

‘We can be proud of possessing an extremely effective technique, perfectly well suited, extremely refined…’ He will come back to this, moreover, to treat a certain number of mental affections… ‘Our theory is absolutely no longer in relation to this technique. A theory is what we need most. The one we have, which we have been forced to fabricate, is…’ He says it in English terms, which are really a bit strong, given that it is a book intended for colleagues… ‘left-handed, clumsy, twisted. There is only one psychoanalysis, it is the one whose method Freud established. That said, to carry out this operation there are means that are finally innumerable, as many means as there are practitioners and patients.’

In pursuing this démarche, he seems to be exactly faithful to the spirit in which, at one moment, we ourselves placed ourselves. For by adhering very strictly to the analytic method itself, he calls into question all our daily practice. That is what makes one of his particular sides, his disappointing side in a way, that he asks, at one point, to suspend all certainties. It is one of the essential sentences of this book. He says indeed that probably he forms his little opinion on what we will find at the end of the reasoning. But in the meantime we must suspend our certainties; he even says that we leave certain things.

LACAN – Which reference?

Wladimir GRANOFF

‘Why do we find ourselves in these situations? Because—he says it very deliberately—Freud chose a biological imagery, anatomical even, for reasons of convenience, which led us, by weighing down this set of terms, to find ourselves in a situation where this anatomical schema paralyzes the impetus of our exercise, and leads us toward the constitution of a theoretical basis for a body, or for a ‘one body’s psy-chology,’ whereas what is most obvious in our exercise is that we are not alone, but that we are two…’

LACAN

He does not say ‘we are two.’ He says ‘We must construct a ‘two bodie’s psychology’,’ a term he borrows from RICKMAN.

Wladimir GRANOFF

In a somewhat anxious postscript, where he also places, he returns attention to countertransference, group psychotherapies, collective psychoanalyses, etc., a contemporary movement.

LACAN

It is in the appendix Changing[Therapeutic Aims and techniques in Psychoanalysis], Change of therapeutic aims and techniques.

Wladimir GRANOFF

Before extracting a few particularly characteristic sentences from these articles, one can try to make a kind of glide over BALINT’s position at the present hour. He says, in an extremely pathetic manner:

‘We are in the process of embarking into a dead end; we must do something else, understand things differently. And differently, that is to say how? What the subject tells you, if you take these remarks, according to your expression, at face value, you miss the essential of the experience.’

It is there that for him the switch is posed where he chooses to go into the ditch, because, at that moment, having been sensitive to what we have decided to call the register of the imaginary, and incapable, it seems, limited in something in his development to pass to the symbolic register, he then plunges at a vertiginous pace into a misrecognition of what the imaginary register is.

And while saying that one must accord the greatest importance to language, to the language spoken by the psychoanalyst in parentheses, a whole page is devoted to this thing, he says:

‘Since it is not this face value, one must then track the patient as far as possible. And one arrives at this mutual scenting: one must sniff him out, watch him in his slightest gestures, in his attitudes, his thoughts, his sighs, for it is evident that one must find behind what he says, the symbol.’

The only thing is that this symbol, he does not seek it in the register where alone this symbol is findable, that is to say in the patient’s discourse. And that is what carries him into his dead end, and which leads him very far, further than his conception of the ego, especially the one he elaborated together with his wife and which should have—were it not for this dramatic error—led him, it seems, in a straight path to aims fairly conforming to ours.

For indeed, what does he say about the ego? He does not pronounce. And that is what leads him to get entangled in a rather inextricable way with character. He comes very close to the idea of the ego as a function of misrecognition, but he remains far short of that notion, in the end. How does he come to conceive the ego? In a passage by Alice BALINT there is mention of autoerotism. I believe it is a rather important passage. I believe one must set it in parallel with what you wrote about the mirror stage (p.123). Alice BALINT, in an article—at the beginning of which one will note that it is called ‘Love for the mother, and the mother’s love,’ that is to say the love that the mother directs toward the child—says the following thing, after a somewhat limp introduction:

‘As is well known, various autoerotisms can supplant one another, when the other methods of discharge have become impossible, and the dissolution of the instinctual interdependence of the mother and the child also influences the autoerotic function. One could say that that is the psychological role of autoerotism in the period of childhood. In the following period, rich in love frustrations, autoerotism takes on the significance of a substitutive gratification. And then—there, a sentence which is the decline of the mirror stage, I think—in this way, it becomes the biological foundation of secondary narcissism, whose psychological precondition is identification with the object that has betrayed.’

‘The object that has betrayed,’ that is to say the mother. I believe it is in this sentence that Alice BALINT comes closest to our views on the constitution of the ego.

BARGUS – Would you repeat that sentence?

Wladimir GRANOFF

‘Autoerotism, in this way, becomes the biological foundation of secondary narcissism, whose psychological precondition is identification with the object that has betrayed.’

It is naturally the last clause that is the most important: ‘the object that has betrayed.’ This somewhat abrupt sentence seems to be a bit surprising in her. But she arrives at it through the presentation of a few clinical cases. There is no question of repeating them, but she gives, from a clinical case, an outline which is, to my knowledge, of a depth and a penetration, of a boldness, that one finds rather rarely in the literature, except when one returns to FREUD’s example, to the ‘Fort!’ and the ‘Da!’ [child’s ‘gone!’/‘there!’ game], which belongs to the child and not to the adult in the context in FREUD.

She speaks of a woman whom she analyzes. It is a first year of analysis, which unfolded essentially in analyzing, she says, ‘her feelings of masculinity.’ The treatment obviously made progress (p.110): she developed orgasmic capacities superior to those she had at the outset. All of that was going very well. But nevertheless nothing was moving, because she had, with regard to her mother, a very strong hatred.

LACAN – Apparently a very strong attachment.

Wladimir GRANOFF

By deepening things, one discovered quite naturally that this young woman directed toward her mother death wishes. Now, she says:
‘Hatred was not at all the primum movens of her death wishes; it served only as a secondary rationalization of a much more primitive attitude…’ There, she says things one does not read very often… ‘a more primitive attitude according to which the patient simply asked her mother to be there, or not to be there, according to her wishes. The thought of her mother’s death filled this patient with the warmest feelings whose sense was not repentance, but something like “how kind of you to die, and how I love you for having been willing to disappear”. The deep layer of her attitude with regard to her mother was that of a little girl in whose opinion the mother should quickly die so that she, the daughter, could marry the father. And that in no way means that she hates the mother. She only finds it entirely natural that the nice mommy should disappear at the right moment. The ideal mother has no interest of her own. True hatred and true ambivalence can develop more easily in relation to the father, whom the child learns from the beginning to know as having interests of his own.’

The entrance onto the scene of this third character, who is the father, corresponds, for Alice BALINT, with the learning of reality, where the role of the father, and the subject’s position in an Oedipal situation, brings the beginning of his structure and of his adherence to reality. That is to say that nothing is formative outside of this Oedipal notion. After this article one resists with difficulty the temptation, because it is very promotional, to speak of the pretty picture that…

LACAN

Perhaps you could, there, right away, better articulate with regard to what you have just said. It is the notion that BALINT and his wife bring, and a third character, they were the three together in Budapest. I will say right away the pleasure there is in your calling what you called earlier a thought, and not simply a mood, although of course this thought calls for explanation, it is the idea of ‘primary love,’ the primary form of love. And I introduce it here—I beg your pardon for interrupting you—precisely insofar as you are going to approach genital love.

For in the thought of these authors, the authors of this volume, the opposition is made between two modes of love. There is a mode of love that is the pregenital mode. There is a whole article, which is called the ‘pregenital love,’ centered, defined, organized around the fundamental notion that it is a love for which the object has absolutely no interest of its own: absolute unselfishness. The subject recognizes in it no demand, no need that is its own: ‘Everything that is good for me…’ such is the formula he gives for it, which is the implicit formula where the subject expresses itself, by its conduct, its latent demands… ‘everything that is good for me, that is what is right for you.

That is quite naturally what you must do.’ It is on this notion of a love relation that is entirely bound to an object that is there only to satisfy him that the BALINTs base the essential difference there is between ‘primary love,’ which naturally structures itself a bit as it advances, but which is always characterized as being the refusal of all reality, of not recognizing the partner’s demands, and genital love. I am not in the process of defining for the moment the limits of this conception. You will see that I will bring to it, today, or next time, objections so massive that I think a certain number of you are already capable of seeing that this way of composing things literally dissipates everything that analysis has brought, quite simply. Apart from that, it is nothing! It is nevertheless articulated like that; that is what it is about.

Wladimir GRANOFF

And that is moreover what, in the development of their theory, is connected to the optical schema O and O’ that you were making on the board.

LACAN – But precisely, it is not.

Wladimir GRANOFF – Chronologically, in the construction…

LACAN – It is the center, yes, that is it… Go on!

Wladimir GRANOFF – Which moreover leads them to their shipwreck…

LACAN – You wanted to speak of genital love, why not?

Wladimir GRANOFF – Genital love, that is to say genital love.

LACAN

We call it, we, commonly: ‘genital maturation,’ achievement of genitality, the goal, at least theoretical, of analysis.

Wladimir GRANOFF

This article seems to be—it certainly is not—more or less intended to respond to schemas like those that FLIESS composed, extremely schematic—it is natural that they are—where finally everything resolves very happily and leads to what is the goal of analysis and the touchstone of normality. That is to say that the subject be capable—and it is on that that one will decide more or less, in the end, to suspend the analysis—of giving proof of his capacity to love genitally, that is to say:
– to love a partner by satisfying her, who satisfies him,
– to love her durably, that is to say to the exclusion of any other,
– to love her in such a way that her interests are respected, while not veiling the partner’s interests, that is to say in a certain climate of tenderness, of idealization, and in a certain form of identification.
Such then are the characteristics of this genital love, of which I hasten to tell you that BALINT writes this article in order to demolish it.

LACAN

He wrote it in a way full of humor. One cannot say that he demolishes it. He poses the problems with a relief that simply shows that he does not conceal from himself the difficulties of realizing this ideal. The article is from 1947.

Wladimir GRANOFF

He takes the different characteristics of this love and says that, to avoid any misunderstanding, he imagines an ideal case where this post-ambivalence of genital love is realized, where no trace of pregenital ambivalence in the object relation is any longer found:

– There would have to be neither greed, nor gluttony, nor insatiability, nor desire to devour the object, nor to devour its existence, thus no oral characteristics—he will return in another article to the use he makes of oral terms.
– Next, there would have to be no desire to hurt, to humiliate, to dominate; thus there would have to be no sadistic characteristics, no desire to despise the partner, his sexual desires and his pleasures; thus there would be no danger of being disgusted by this partner, or of being attracted by this or that of his pleasant or unpleasant characteristics, thus no anal traits.
– One should also not be tempted to put forward, to boast of the possession of the penis, nor be afraid of the partner’s sexual organs, thus no trace of the phallic phase, thus of the castration complex.

‘We know,’ he says, ‘that cases of this order do not exist in practice. But it is necessary to eliminate all the negative material (negative staff) in order to begin a more correct examination.’

Already, for the elimination of this ‘negative staff,’ he does not go about it with the back of the spoon, for it is the first time that we read, officially like that, that it is not that. That is not already so common!

‘What then is genital love apart from the absence of these listed pregenital traits? We must love our partner because she can satisfy us; we must satisfy him or her; and we can experience an orgasm at the same moment, or at about the same moment…

The English sentence is quite amusing:

‘It seems to be a quite calm navigation: very plain sailing…

which one could translate as ‘it seems like playing on a billiard table,’ but unfortunately that is not the case.

‘Let us take the first condition, that our partner can satisfy us, this condition can be found but it is completely narcissistic..

Here, he uses the word ‘egoist’. It should moreover be noted that one of the pitfalls to which their conception leads them is that when they speak of primary love—having not used the vocabulary we are taught to use, which sometimes seems to us not very simple—they arrive at a vocabulary that is even more disconcerting. It is that they are, willingly or unwillingly, forced to use a term into which they bring in the term ego, and they call it naive egoism, which is at the very least cumbersome and not very operational. And they seem led toward the introduction of this term by a sort of fatality from which they cannot escape.

[To Jean Hyppolite] Besides, to please you, on the subject of ‘successful repression’, there is a place where BALINT says:

‘Repression cannot be successful. There is nothing more botched than successful repression.’

He goes over all these conditions, and he says that in scandalous chronicle, or in literature, one finds a quantity of relationships where, precisely, all these conditions are satisfied: mutual satisfaction, simultaneous orgasm, and yet one cannot speak of love. ‘These people find in one another’s arms a certain security and a certain pleasure.’ He cites a sonnet by SHAKESPEARE, in passing.

LACAN

That matters precisely, because soon someone from our Society will speak to you about SHAKESPEARE’s Sonnets in a thorough way; it is Mme REVERCHON-JOUVE.

Wladimir GRANOFF

‘On top of that, it very often happens that even after the fulfillment of all these conditions the two partners, for a certain time at least, have no desire to see one another again, and even are not quite disgusted with one another, though they may come back to it afterward.’

So, he says that there must still be ‘something more’. What is this ‘more’?

‘In a true love relationship, one finds an idealization of tenderness, and a special form of identification—there, there is a kind of sleight-of-hand—As Freud spoke of the problem of idealization, as much of the object as of the instinct, I need only repeat his findings.’

He then shows in a convincing manner that this idealization is not absolutely necessary, and that even without this idealization a good love relationship is possible. The least one can say is that, in this little digest he makes of FREUD’s thought, at that moment[…] this has been dealt with abundantly here. The second phenomenon, that is to say tenderness, can perhaps be interpreted differently:

‘It is an inhibition as to the aim: the original desire is directed toward a certain object. But, for one reason or another, it had to content itself with a partial satisfaction, and—the word is in French—‘faute de mieux’ leads to an entire satisfaction. According to other views, in another article by Freud, tenderness is an archaic quality, which appears in conjunction with the old tendency toward self-preservation, and has no other aim than this tranquil and non-passionate gratification. Consequently, love–passion is a secondary phenomenon superimposed on archaic tender love.’

This idea, he thinks to support, by subjective data, with anthropology. And he makes a brief tableau of the courts of love of the Middle Ages, and even certain things one finds in Hindu literature[…] complicated, which one cut with a sexual poetry, a love poetry, prolific, an appreciation of tenderness. This tenderness is presented as an artificial product of civilization, a systematic result of the frustrations endured during education. And it is rather funny; he says: ‘Etymology seems to support that idea.’ He cites a whole slew of English and German terms, with an extreme pertinence, where he discovers that this tenderness is found appended to words which mean, as to the root from which they come: ‘silly, dotty, amusing, not very serious, fragile, rather inhibited…’.

And then there, he stops:

‘There is something that does not add up. How could genital love, this mature form of love, have come to be mixed in with so dubious a company of illnesses, weaknesses, immaturities, etc.?’

And at that moment he plugs in, as it were, his conclusion:

‘Man resembles the embryo of the monkey. Normally, the monkey embryo develops and does not acquire its genital maturity until the end of a certain development. Whereas man acquires this development while still at a fetal stage. Besides, there are certain beings whose embryo acquires bisexual genital functions, which are called neotenic embryos. Genital love is a form exactly parallel to these structures. Man is a neotenic embryo, not only anatomically, but psychologically. Anatomists moreover discovered it before us.’

So what we present as true love, genital love, is not yet defined; it is quite simply this kind of return to an absolutely primitive form of love in which the subject and the object of his love find themselves confused by an absolute instinctual reciprocity.

What then is genital love? It is an art… It is the happy case in which the convergence is achieved between certain instinctual data and cultural data. According to him, one can say that true love is ultimately original homosexual love, the one that united the brothers of the horde, whereas heterosexual love was limited to its simplest expression, to a pure and simple copulation. And it is from the transposition into a heterosexual frame of the climate of this homosexual love that what we currently consider as the successful case was born.

LACAN – It is very interesting to see that he comes to that!

Octave MANNONI – He cannot avoid the word ‘successful’, which poses all the problems.

Wladimir GRANOFF – That is what I say. He does not say it like that. According to him, it can, so to speak, never be successful.

LACAN

Echoing this theory, you are quite right to center there fundamentally, on a theory of love that is more than normative and moralizing…

Jean HYPPOLITE– Normal, and not normative…

LACAN

…moralizing—isn’t it?—of love. It nevertheless remains what you have just highlighted, that he opens out onto this question: in the end, what we consider as this ‘normal’, is it:
– a natural state,
– or an artificial or cultural result,
– or even what he calls a happy chance, a fortunate chance?

This, he carries over and transfers to a question that bears on the whole question for us, namely: what is this normal that he occasionally calls ‘health’, with regard to the termination of analysis?

And on this subject, is the analytic cure a natural or an artificial process? In other words, he raises the question of its ends, and asks whether health is a natural state, of balance, that is to say, are there in the mind processes which, if they are not stopped or disturbed, must normally lead development toward this balance, or on the contrary is health this fortunate chance, and even improbable event, the reason being that its conditions are so rigorous, stringent, demanding, and so numerous that the chances are very doubtful?

This leads him to suppose nothing less than this question, which is obviously significant of the point of departure, since the point of departure arrives at a question about which he says that, on that, the ambiguity, in the analytic chorus, is total. Namely that there will be as many to formulate the answer in a yes sense as in a no sense. The question must give rise to the doubt that perhaps it is at the outset that the question is not well posed. So, let’s go!

Wladimir GRANOFF

This leads, toward the end of his message, both to a change in the aims of treatment and in the technique, and to the termination of treatment, by including the article, simply to arrive at this:

‘The evolution of the treatment leads to a rebirth, that is to say it in no way constitutes a repair or a restitution…

Here again, it is difficult to say.

LACAN – Specify clearly.

Wladimir GRANOFF

Is it a restitutio in integrum or not? It is the unblocking of capacities, of the possibility for the subject to return without shame, without modesty and without fear, toward primary love, that is to say ‘naive egoism’, that is to say precisely the stage where identity, the reciprocity of the instinctual aims of the subject and of his object are found to be confounded. That is what leads him to conceive the end of analysis as more or less a brutal dissolution, in the middle of a honeymoon, of this state. I do not know whether that is in conformity with the views you have of it?

LACAN – That is correct.

Wladimir GRANOFF – And then, there, he gets muddled in ‘character’…

LACAN – Go on, speak of the way he speaks of ‘character’.

Wladimir GRANOFF

‘Character inherits a part of what we are accustomed more or less to seeing devolved to the Ego. Character is what prevents the individual from finally experiencing the most anxiety-provoking demands of reality, what prevents him from sinking into a love in which he could lose himself, even in which he could annihilate himself. It is a fortunate limitation of the subject’s capacities.’

Then he poses the situation:

‘Is it grounded, or not, to modify the subject’s character?’

He comes to the ‘boat’ on analytic amputation…

LACAN – The passage on character, where he even comes to pose the question…

Wladimir GRANOFF

‘Is it licit or not to change the subject’s character; is it licit or not to restrict or to increase, that is to say to strengthen or to weaken?’

The schema is, roughly, the following:

‘Strong character makes of an individual someone rather boring, who is capable neither of loving very strongly, nor of hating very strongly. Weak character subscribes him to a very unhappy existence, but rich in diverse possibilities; it is more amusing, more poetic, but less interesting for the subject. Fortunately, he says, the subjects who come into analysis ultimately do not have that kind of scruple about knowing what, in this respect, will become of them. Which is why in the end—he comes to the conclusion—character being only the result of accidental limitations imposed by the errors of education, one is quite justified in rendering him the service of repairing it in this respect.’

LACAN

Perhaps you are going a bit fast. I must say that you want probably to move forward, to finish, and that you do not bring out something that is very interesting, the definition of character:

‘Character controls man’s relations to his objects. Character always signifies a more or less great limitation, a more or less extensive limitation of the possibilities of love and hate. Therefore—I translate everything that is in italics—character signifies limitation of the capacity for love and enjoyment: to love and for joy.’

The word does not seem to me excluded. It is introduced there, I believe, in a way that would have to be noted, this dimension of joy that goes very far, surpasses the category of ‘jouissance’. The subjective fullness that joy entails would merit a development for itself. There, it is called into question! One cannot fail to be struck by it!

If the article were not from 1932, I would say that one almost owes it a kind of influence of a certain moral ideal, I will say ‘puritan’. For even in Hungary there are historical Protestant traditions, which moreover have entirely precise historical ramifications with the history of Protestantism in England. There is a singular convergence of the thought of this pupil of FERENCZI, carried by FERENCZI on the traces that I have you follow today, with his destiny which, in the end, integrated him so well into the English community. And one cannot fail to see that the conception of character as being all the same ‘preferable’ in its strong form, the one that implies all these limitations, to what he calls a weak character, that is to say someone who is for him fundamentally someone who lets himself be overwhelmed.

Wladimir GRANOFF – He says ‘it is preferable’, but with regret.

LACAN

The category of the formation of individuals according to a very specialized education is implied in the very text of the most fundamental directives of progress. And it is quite striking, what he says about character. Needless to add that there results from it a total ambiguity between what he calls ‘character analysis’ and what he does not hesitate to venture in the same context: logical character. He does not seem to see that these are quite different characters: character as reaction to the subject’s libidinal development, as the weave in which this development is caught, limited, and its innate elements, to express the difference I point out here, which for characterologists divides individuals into classes which are constitutional. He thinks that analytic experience on that will give us more, because it is closer to experience.

That is without any doubt true. And even I am rather inclined, for my part, to think so, but on condition that experience see from what point, in its limits, we reach this radical and final sum. In the play in question, namely where analysis profoundly modifies, or can modify, character, it is obviously something else that is at issue, this something being the construction of the ego. It is on this plane that he meets it here, in the most lively way. Do you have something to add?

Wladimir GRANOFF

How he comes to article 14. Consequently, to do what, according to him, is a good analysis, one must place oneself in the perspectives, in the sole perspective in which one can understand the child’s development:

‘For if one has tried to analyze his primary love in the terms in which we are led to do it, one does not go very far. And besides, entangled in this anatomical schema, we are indeed forced to realize that in contemporary publications terms such as source of an instinct, instinctual aim, are in the process of giving way, of disappearing from our theoretical considerations. Even the term ‘inhibited as to the aim’ is heard, but more and more rarely. In relation to the instinctual object, one finds more and more rarely the formula ‘relation to an instinctual object’ and secondarily the well-known terms ‘anal’, ‘oral’, ‘genital’, are used less and less to denote the source of an instinct. But more and more—it is there that he attempts to give a structural approach to it, but he does not succeed—more and more specific object relations—and it is there that his great shipwreck takes place—oral greed, anal desire for domination, genital love… all the sadistic terms are more and more outmoded, out fashion, according to me because their applications are too libidinal, and they are related too tightly to instinctual aims, to gratifications. In place of these terms, one finds, in the aggressive, destructive style, terms which have affinities with object relations on which one cannot be mistaken.’

LACAN

Yes… Perhaps you did not get over the hurdle. It is very accurate, what you say. You bring out the remark that is made about the bogging down of the terms in use in the works, the articles that appear from a certain period (1938-1940), which orient the analytic situation toward object relations. He denotes it, he points out a certain number of signs of it. And he sees in particular—I do not say that it is valid as a fact; we will see what his interpretation is worth—in the disappearance of the whole vocabulary of the order of the register, whether of the source, of the direction, of the satisfaction of the instinct, and he denotes it in a thousand ways, one of whose most salient faces is that the term ‘sadistic’ is almost no longer employed. And he adds that ‘its connotation was too libidinal’. I will say that on that the avowal is significant, for indeed that is what is at issue, a sort of puritanization of the analytic atmosphere, which is indeed quite striking and would be worth bringing out, if only for the use I will make of it as a convergent sign of a certain evolution. It is quite significant, that sentence.

Wladimir GRANOFF – If one wants to say it a bit insolently, what he suffers from is a disturbance of the imaginary function.

LACAN – Not him, his theory.

Wladimir GRANOFF

He finds himself taken in a kind of captation. It is not surprising that he highlights these propositions, for in the following paragraph, in a somewhat staggering manner, if one places oneself in what for him is an object relation, he tells us:

‘Now, attention, we must stop for an instant, and not forget what the analyst’s behavior consists in in the psychoanalytic situation.’

And first of all he does justice to what is taught to us in well-thinking seminars, that is to say that the analyst is there, totally outside the matter, not as he must really be, but as he still thinks he is. He shows him entangled in a dual relation, and denying it, denying that he is in it.

And, he says:

‘All these questions of friendly detachment, of understanding, well-timed interpretations, all that must not make us forget that if the patient’s relation to his analyst is libidinal, the analyst’s relation to the patient is libidinal in the same way.’

This, however, does not stop him, in the sense that it does not even seem to give the temptation to speak of a subject-to-subject relation, even toward the end of his presentation. That is one of the feats he accomplishes, always incidentally, in misrecognition.

LACAN

In truth, he does not succeed in avoiding it. He does not gain access to it. And there we return to our point of departure by the remark that there must indeed be something that exists between two subjects, since it is two subjects who are there. As he completely lacks the conceptual apparatus… even though it has been largely elaborated elsewhere and opened more broadly to our knowledge of what mediates it, and most particularly on the true function of language… to introduce the intersubjective relation, he is led—it is not simply a kind of slip-type drifting of language—to speak of two bodies’ psychology. That is because it truly corresponds to the idea he has of it. He thinks he is getting out of the one body’s psychology by saying: we are going to make a two bodies’ psychology.

But it is evident that the two bodies’ psychology is still an opposition, that is to say still an object-to-object relation. And that is the ambiguity of the term object relation, it is because it signifies. Theoretically, it would not be serious if this did not have technical consequences in the concrete therapeutic exchange with the subject. It is that it is not an object-to-object relation. You expressed it very well just now by saying: ‘…entangled in a dual relation, and denying it…’. One cannot find a happier formula, and I congratulate you on it, for saying how one usually expresses oneself in order to explain to us what the analytic relation must be.

Wladimir GRANOFF

There, an extremely promising sentence:

‘We do not realize what we are missing by describing two-body, two-character experiences, analytic technique, in a language belonging to one-character situations.’

LACAN – That is exactly what I have just said. And, from then on, he does not notice that he continues…

Wladimir GRANOFF

Not only does he continue, but he reinforces it: ‘So what must be done?’ And since he has not found the key that would allow him to escape the dead end into which he himself threw himself at a phenomenal speed, he says, and then it becomes a forced objectification of his patient:

‘First, one must create an atmosphere, not close oneself off, and not forget—and then, there, he shoots off—oral greed is related only to the mouth, but that is not true. It is a matter of the skin, of the epidermis, of heat, of frictions…’

It becomes an enumeration. He literally goes around the individual in order to try to broaden, within the frame of object relations, his position. And contrary to what he said, he finally says:

‘And if it does not work, as we do, then we give a double dose, and perhaps it will end up working.’

That is what he comes to!

LACAN – I would not qualify in the same sense as you, that is to say in the objectifying sense, this sort of aspect…

Wladimir GRANOFF – He does not qualify it like that.

LACAN

Nor would I qualify it like that. I would consider—I think I will show it to you next time—as something that is obviously shifting, namely a kind of appeal as a last resort, properly speaking, not at all to what I defend and tell you here as the objectifying register. Every advance of knowledge and every technique have an interest in objectifying the parts that are objectifiable.

But what is at issue is an objectifying tendency in the relation to the subject, that is to say to push, by interventions, by the technique itself, the subject to objectify himself, to take himself for an object, and to believe that progress—he believes it because it is indeed like that that analysis progresses—is made by an objectification of what he is.

That is not what is at issue. This appeal as a last resort, as I would call it, is an appeal as a last resort to the real, in the very measure where it is a matter of an erasure by misrecognition, as you said a moment ago, of this symbolic register, insofar as it disappears completely in the object relation, for it is nowhere, and that is why objects take on this absolute value, in the very measure where it no longer has as a third term the imaginary function.

He says what is now the sense of our operative function in analysis. He says ‘create an atmosphere’, ‘a proper atmosphere’, a suitable atmosphere. That is all he has to say, which nevertheless becomes extraordinarily uncertain; it hesitates in the unsayable, and it then brings in all reality, what he calls the event, because analysis is precisely not made so that we throw ourselves around our patient’s neck, and he around ours.

The limitation of the means he has is precisely what poses the problem of knowing on what plane it takes place. But for lack of conceiving, in relation to these means as well, where his experience is defined and limited, he is led to make this great appeal to the awakening of all the registers of the real. This plane of the real, which it is not for nothing that it is there, always in the background, and which I never designate for you directly in everything we comment on here. It is not for nothing that it is precisely excluded, properly speaking. And he will not bring it in any more than anyone else.

But that is where his appeal as a last resort is directed, and that is the failure of the theory that corresponds to this inclination of technique, to this deviation of technique. Next time, I will try to enable you to point out exactly what its direction and its precise sense are.

Finish!

Wladimir GRANOFF

Now there are only two words left. This appeal to the real, he is so engaged in it that at another moment in his career, as if he had for a moment been sensitive to certain pitfalls of his thought, he wants at least to say what, according to him, is not part of it, and he gives a unique example in the literature of description: the only time when express mention is made of the little paper handkerchiefs, the cushions, the couches, etc. That, at a very earlier moment.

LACAN – Yes, in the article ‘Transference and countertransference’.

Wladimir GRANOFF

But perhaps it is not for nothing that he thought of it. He ends on pessimistic considerations about the termination of analysis. It is on that that one must end, after having made in passing, with quite a lot of pertinence, the case against our societies at the present hour, by moreover bringing in, as an element of appraisal, the fact that at a historical moment (around 1930) a certain number of analysts came into play whose analyses had not, obviously, been terminated.

One thus arrived at two standards, which he calls ‘standard A’ and ‘standard B’, that is to say the uncertainty one finds oneself in as to the judicious moment to launch an analyst into practice. A consideration all the more pessimistic in that a treatment, according to him, ends, in one or two cases out of ten. Since there are a few thousand treatments that end in the year, that still makes a few hundred that really end. One could still take the trouble to look more closely, and know what happened there.

But what, for me, seems more pessimistic is not that, but rather his theory. It is that, he says:

‘I finish treatments rather rarely, in one or two cases out of ten.’

That does not seem so pessimistic to me, in itself. But what seems to me truly very distressing in what he says is that:

‘In the other cases, afterward, I understood quite well where the error was.’

But perhaps it is not yet there that the most afflicting part lies, but it is that:

‘When I understood, even though I had understood, there is nothing more to be done. It is ruined, once and for all.’

That seems to me the outcome of his perspective, this inevitability of failure, once a certain type of error has been made.

LACAN

Listen… It is late, now. I do not want to go beyond a quarter to two. I do not know to what extent, for each of you who have not been able to read this text…

I believe one can give GRANOFF a good mark. He has quite realized my call, and what I expected of him. I believe he presented to you very well the whole set of problems posed by this book by BALINT, which is, in sum, his only book, I am sure even, and which results from his meditations at the same time as from his career. If a certain number of questions can be drawn from it for you, that is all there is to be expected from it. And I will take them up again next time, and by completing them, in the order in which GRANOFF introduced them.

I already told you at the outset what I want to bring out here; it is something that is in an article you did not speak of, which is ‘Transference of emotions’. It is already our whole problem: are emotions what are transferred? A title like that does not seem to scandalize anyone. It is an article he wrote in 1933. And you will see very remarkable things there, including in the way he introduces transference for us.

For the readers of the time… and it was not an article especially intended for analysts; it is also addressed in part to those who are not, to make grasp the phenomenon of transference which, he says, brings much misrecognition, is less well recognized by the whole scientific world at that moment than the phenomenon of resistance… he gives a few examples. You will see, it is very amusing.

I will start from there. It is the article that GRANOFF used. We will start from this hole left at the center of the presentation on BALINT in order to relight the rest, to make feel to unprepared readers what the phenomenon of transference is; you will see to what point precisely, because a correct definition of the symbol is lacking, it is necessarily everywhere.

An analyst cannot make use of it, because it is lacking. You will see what he is led to: to give, when he wants to express himself, outwardly, in an exoteric way, he goes further than he believes, that is to say he gives it a definition that has nothing to do with transference. To introduce us to transference, he speaks to us of displacement. All the examples he gives are examples of displacement.

In this same article, he tells us that the result of the work which is precisely that by which analysts most often interpret their experience and their action is naturally ‘a psychology, or a characterology of the psychoanalyst himself’. So it is not I who say it; it is he himself who notes it. The author himself gives us the avowal, the testimony, of analyzing under this angle, making the psychoanalysis of the analyst as theorist, in order to situate in a rigorous way certain current tendencies of theory as of technique.

This implies knowing where we can anchor a theory of technique that allows us to escape this kind of relativization of object relations, to have a system of references that comes out of this strictly individual interpsychology of the analyst and of the analysand.

It is not new, and you can feel well that it is exactly the sense of what we have been doing here since exactly October and before. That will perhaps give me the occasion—and even surely—to do here what I have already done elsewhere, the last two Wednesdays, before another audience, to re-specify the fundamental points, the fundamental bases of the theory we give here of analysis, and to show how it allows one to escape this kind of relativization without issue.

See you next Wednesday!