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(All parts in English)

GRANOFF

LACAN

Our friend GRANOFF has a communication to make to us, which seems in line with our last and current remarks.
And I find it very fortunate that similar initiatives should manifest themselves, entirely in keeping with the spirit of dialogue that I desire
in what—let us not forget—is above all a seminar. I do not know what he is going to bring us this morning. I give him the floor
at once, and we shall see to what extent we shall be able either to branch onto something new,
or to return to the line of what we were developing last time.

Wladimir GRANOFF

There are perhaps no good reasons at all for what I wanted to submit to you today. There are a certain number
of bad ones, and they are to be sought in a certain tendency toward cooptations, which is perhaps my defect.
But I sometimes feel a need to find out whether, in being alone, we are also isolated.
Now, I have the feeling that we are not so isolated.

BALINT was—still a few days ago—on the agenda, and on that occasion Dr LACAN said that he had had the feeling
as of a little wind that was shifting. And it is simply one of these small manifestations of this shifting wind that I want to submit to you.
Indeed, certain notions are at present being called into question for certain reasons. Among these, there are two
that were cited by Dr LACAN:
– on the one hand, the fact that a certain number of terms have seen their meaning become dulled in usage,
– and on the other hand that the obscurity that has resulted from this has engendered the secondary problem of the need to be retuned.

A few days ago, the term ‘transference of emotions’ was uttered here, in connection with an article by BALINT. It seemed to us
that he would have been spared this extreme position if he had studied the analysis of the clinical case he recounts, if not exactly, then at least
in a way that would allow him to interpret it on the three registers at the basis of our conceptions. Now, chance would have it that in this same
spring 1954, a few somewhat obscure authors, in a journal with a glorious past but by now quite fallen into decline, ask themselves
a few questions that are not unrelated, not to the point we are at in the elaboration, but to its point of departure.

A certain obscuring orientation of analysis has in the end brought the authors back into a bygone cycle, as everything indicates,
to ask themselves again the fundamental questions. The history of the movement has in this merely obeyed the laws of the other sectors
of human activity which[…] the radius of a curve proportionally to the[…] and brings the traveler back to the point from which he had departed.
To get out of the impasse, the authors attempt means different—like BALINT—from those that are familiar to us here.

This is what I would like to let you glimpse, precisely after the last seminar, in two articles entitled
– ‘Emotion, Instinct and Pain-pleasure’ by a certain CHAPMAN ISHAM,
– and ‘A study of the dreams in depth, its corollary and consequences’ by BENNITT in Psychoanalytic Review, April 1954.

On this subject, a brief remark: it did not seem to me indifferent that both authors had recourse to the fundamental study
of the dream in order to set out their argumentation.

ISHAM’s article starts from the confusion that reigns as to the confusion of the terms Need: need, Trend: drive, instinct.
He asks the question: what is to be understood by the word ‘emotion’? And he tries to approach it by the two classical routes,
the one he calls ‘experiential’ and the one he calls ‘expressive’.

Neither of these two routes has taken sufficient account of the dreams that illustrate the aspect he calls ‘ideational’ or signifying
of emotion. And, engaging in a debate that is not without recalling the discussion of BENASSY’s report on instincts,
he denounces as pre-scientific the avoidance of meaning—I translate Meaning in different ways—in favor of the stimulus.
Personally, he would prefer to introduce the notion of object.

FREUD discovered that emotions cannot be displaced, although on this point he was contradictory, but that
objects could be displaced, substituted for one another, inverted, etc. This was a great progress for our understanding,
the application of which was scarcely brilliant. He alludes to the symposium Feelings and emotions, 1950.

And he considers that FREUD’s ‘decision’, apparently innocuous, to consider the existence of a neutral, displaceable energy,
instead of the transformation of an affect, seems to him singularly important. Indeed, so long as proof is not given
of the possibility of an affect, or that an affect can directly invert itself, one could say spontaneously, he prefers to adhere
to his conception: affects are symptoms or expressions, and are not autonomously convertible.

I see in this statement a merit, that of allowing us to assess the pressure that goes in the opposite direction. One can judge a pressure
by the counter-pressure exerted. Ideas having a strong propensity for their opposite, and drives having a similar tendency,
but not an analogous one, psychoanalysis has never demonstrated that the inversion of an affect could be a process independent
of the satisfaction of a need or of an aberration of object. Emotion takes its source in needs and objects.
And it is at the moment when obscurity has thickened in his argumentation that he plants the pivot around which his conception will turn.

FREUD, he says, passes without transition from real objects to instinct as internal motivation. He alludes to the hilarious dream that
FREUD borrowed from FERENCZI in which a man laughs for paradoxical reasons. He says that in this dream he leaps without transition
from real objects to instinct, as internal motivation, and this omission—one must understand the omission of the objects he calls mental—
has obscured the discussion and has had instinct assigned a separate origin, in the Id, which is open to question.

Now instinct can rise from a biological matrix but also from a real object, mental, from within, from without.
But a fact is to be noted, says ISHAM, and it is the following: a cat purrs under a caress. Show it a mouse.
There it is, become a carnivorous animal. Second fact: show an aerodynamic truck to a child, he will want it
even if he already has a dozen. This second example, whose ingenuity is not indifferent, leads him to demonstrate
that emotion is not a measure of instinct or of need. Psychological pleasure cannot be separated from mental objects.
Emotion felt without conscious mental representation leaves a psychological void.

Here then are his final propositions: emotion takes what he calls ‘its emotional nature’ in an instinctual discharge.
This discharge is provoked, rather initiated, by conscious or unconscious objects, real or mental, by needs, the needs.
Needs can be classified as objects, although their position is still obscure. He has thus washed his hands of the problem
instincts-drives, only to find it again at the first bend.

Last proposition: emotion cannot be understood directly, because of its integrative and synthetic nature.
The participation of mental objects opens the door to associative processes. To speak of the expression of emotions makes no sense.
To say that one emotion produces another is a point of view that requires a better knowledge of pleasure-displeasure.
And the following usages must be called into question: emotions as displaceable are better expressed, in his view,
in terms of object motivations. Emotions, sensory perceptions of never-demonstrated needs, unconscious emotions
or emotional equivalents, although he is more indulgent…

LACAN – Speak less fast…

Wladimir GRANOFF …Unconscious emotions or emotional equivalents.

LACAN – You said ‘emotions as displaceable…’

Wladimir GRANOFF – Better expressed in terms of object motivations, emotions as never-demonstrated needs.

LACAN

That is endopsychic perception, that, which one talks about all the time, and which is the thing, the last resort one has
in all sorts of impasses.

Wladimir GRANOFF

Unconscious emotions or emotional equivalents, this is a term that must be submitted to questioning, although he is
more indulgent in favor of the second, that is to say, emotional equivalents. And finally—a term whose use is not justified—
emotions as responses to stimuli.

The second article is BENNITT’s. He addresses problems that are not foreign to our concerns, in a manner
totally different. For his part he was struck by the hiatus that separates the two fundamental ways of considering the dream:
– either as anachronistic processes, indifferent to their meaning,
– or as the expression of a meaning to be discovered in another register of reality, which once again volatilizes the dream’s proper dimensions.

Would there not in some sense be two realities?
Thus, he proposes what he calls ‘the neglected keys’, and a direct investigation of the dream and the symbol. What is that to say?

I have arranged things like this:
– The dream is an unconscious experience. The purest unconscious experience, and at the same time the domain of the pure symbol.
– The symbol is different from what it is in consciousness.

The diminution of the dream’s reality is due to the fact that, in analyzing it, we leave its proper domain.
And even if there are not two faces of reality, what matters to us above all to discover is: what is a symbol, really?
What is a fact, really? There already, it begins to take on a more familiar resonance with what we see here.

The further one progresses, the more one becomes convinced that certain criteria must be eliminated when one speaks of the symbol.
For example, its nature is not necessarily subjective or objective. The proposition of subjectivity or objectivity does not change with the depth
of the plane of investigation. The symbol does not become more or less material. What do we see according to BENNITT?
It is that, in evolving, the symbol is refined and literally becomes charged with more and more meaning. He calls it more and more meaning form.

I introduce a small comment to indicate that meaning, in English, can have several senses:
– meaning is sense, signification,
– and also opinion, what is said,
– it is almost the German Meinung ‘Was meinen Sie?’: What do you say about it?
I use this term for lack of being able to settle on a definitive translation.

The symbol is thus a basal face of reality, it is even the first basal face of reality, his first proposition.
It is, in itself, the meaning, a reality. The symbolic—he says—is the experience of the different forms of meaning,
with our own apparatus, our own apparatus.

Now, he says, what we do to actualize it is a wholly different matter. This is BENNITT’s second proposition.
I must say that the term I am going to use is the translation of the English term actualization.

LACAN – Which means realization.

Wladimir GRANOFF

Now in English, actual means real. I nevertheless keep this vocabulary, because I do not know whether it figures
in what I am saying here, but there are moments when the term realization also appears. Actuality—he says—is the counter-basal face,
the other dynamic face of existence. I cite the text:

‘The symbol is transdimensional; it is the unifying container of meaning; this is what makes its reality. What makes its reality is being a distinct focus of actuality—distinct or distinctive from actuality. The fact is dimensional, separating, differentiated and inversely—or rather, conversely—a pure fact would be devoid of meaning, of meaning, of signification.’

BENNITT sums himself up in what he calls an epilogue. I cite its beginning for you; this epilogue is to be related not only
to the context, the rest of his article, but to the entire position of the analytic movement in the world at this moment.

‘But alas, it stops there! There where the applications ought to be seen, in our theory and our practice, and mark, with respect to the present day,
all its difference, where a psychology ought to appear that recognizes as the last, ultimate process in existence, the symbolization
of the fact, and the factualization of the symbol!’

And he returns in a concluding paragraph:

‘Behind the manifest dream, what it reveals—do we not fail to appreciate the expression of the dream in itself? Do we not “foreclose”—
he uses a curious term—a correct point of view on its interpretation? For, fundamentally, if the dream is factually regressive,
it is symbolically progressive.’

I believe that is where one must stop the report on these articles.

LACAN

Who are those who have a question to ask?
For, after all, our friend GRANOFF told us all that a bit quickly. These are articles that are ample and of a high theoretical level,
and it is entirely understandable that you ask him for clarifications.

Serge LECLAIRE – He went too fast. At least for the first part.

LACAN

Yes, that is true, you were a bit fast. You are wrong: since you are bringing interesting things,
they must indeed be explained. Take it up again now, without following your notes, on what seems to you the important point of the first article.

They are both convergent with respect to what we are doing. They both bear, they both center attention on different points.
The first article obviously places the emphasis on this return, this reference, this informing of emotion,
as having to be the last reality with which we have to deal, as the beyond of our experience properly speaking,
the object of our experience. The need to grasp the object somewhere, for something that resembles as much as possible the objects
we have in other registers. The remarks he makes are particularly centered on what?

Wladimir GRANOFF

On the fact that emotion cannot be—in the conception we have of it—manipulated in some way on the biological level,
and on the other hand as an autonomous process, spontaneously understandable, expressive in itself, and liable
to obey the laws commonly described in the analysis of inversion, of displacement; that it cannot be interpreted by the administration
of a stimulus. That the only way to approach it is to understand emotion within what he calls a biological matrix, and covered for the moment
by the term instinct, but drawing its modulation, its existence, its initiation, from mental objects. These mental objects
are what he calls the need, and can, as FREUD showed, be understood in the register of meaning, that is to say, condensed,
displaced, substituted, modified in various ways, disguised.

Octave MANNONI – It is the word need that is awkward, in that.

LACAN

Because he does not find a better one, of course. GRANOFF immediately highlighted in his analysis that the word need
seems to him almost what we shall call an impropriety of the text, a word whose use, on occasion, can only be grasped
by the text as a whole itself. It is only valid in its context.

Wladimir GRANOFF

Besides, he introduces it by a series of pirouettes around the word; everything he says is motivational; he gets out of it very badly
in this affair.

LACAN

Isn’t that so! ALEXANDER wrote a great article—we may perhaps one day talk about it—which is called ‘Logic of emotions’,
Logic of emotions. It is certain that with that he is at the heart of analytic theory. But that the very term, and the entire development
of the article, carries within itself the same interrogation that is brought by this recent article, namely that it is the introduction
into what we usually consider as the affective register, the pure and simple introduction of a dialectic.
And indeed, moreover, in the article by ALEXANDER in question, it is nothing less than starting from there,
the logico-symbolic schema that is well known, where FREUD deduces the various forms of delusions, the various ways of denying
‘I love you’, that is to say:
– it is not I who loves him,
– it is not him that I love,
– I do not love him,
– he hates me,
– and even it is he who loves me!

Which finally yields the genesis among the other forms of delusions: jealous, passionate, persecutory, erotomaniac, etc.
It is certain that there we see with the greatest evidence that it is already in a structuring not only symbolic,
but very elevatedly symbolic, since it already introduces all the developments of the most grammatically elaborated form,
that it is only within this register that we grasp the different transformations, the very metabolism of what takes place
in the order of the preconscious.

It is certain that this first article indeed has the interest of being countercurrent with respect to a whole theoretical tendency
currently in analysis. The second seems to me even more interesting, insofar as it tries—and I underscore that GRANOFF
made extremely interesting remarks on usage; this is the second time I refer to the word ‘usage’.

For in the end, what shall we see here? What we must always think about to construct a correct theory of the symbol,
that is to say what is at issue there, of signification, the tendency, where the register in which a certain slope of thought engages.
What is at issue exactly in this article is to seek to what beyond, to what reality, to what fact—as one expresses it
in this article—signification refers.

Well, you will never understand anything at all, you will always engage in paths that are, in some sense, without exit.
What is very clearly seen, given the impasses at which analytic theory currently arrives, is that signification
refers only to itself, that is to say to another signification. That is why the term usage is very important.

We start there:
– from the very examples of what we are working on; that is how we usually do it: what happened,
– and that we cannot correctly interpret these articles except by referring this need to the way it is used in a certain number of passages of the text.

Likewise, the word meaning also has a certain set of references in the context, which makes it possible to see to what degree of[…]
etymological it is used. But each time we have in the analysis of language to seek a signification,
there is no other correct method than to sum up its usages.

Or if you want to take in the French language the signification of ‘main’, for example, you will have to make the catalog
of the usages of the word ‘main’, and not only as main, as a word representing the organ of the hand, but also
the workforce, the takeover, the mortmain… That is what constitutes the set of significations of the word ‘main’, or more exactly
that is what constitutes that signification, the signification given by the sum of these usages. The important thing is to realize
that that is what we have to deal with in analysis, and that we have no need at all to exhaust ourselves with additional references
to speak, for example, as of a reality that would have to explain to us usages said to be metaphorical.

Any kind of usage, in a certain sense, always is. Metaphor in this sense is not something—as JONES believes,
at the beginning of his article on the Theory of symbolism—that is in some way to be distinguished from the use of the symbol.
So that if I address any being whatsoever, created or uncreated, of the world, by calling him ‘sun of my heart’, it is quite an error
to say that, in calling him so, I suppose—as Mr JONES believes at the beginning of his article on the Theory of symbolism—
a comparison: ‘What you are for my heart and what the sun is’ etc. It is quite an error.

Comparison is a development of that something which itself, at the moment when it arises, contains not only
a sum of significations, but an emergence into being of a certain relation that is infinitely richer than everything I can,
at the very instant, elucidate. This implies everything that can even come into it afterward, and what I believe I did not say there,
first by the very fact of having formulated it, it is I, my being, my avowal, my invocation, that enters into this domain of the symbol,
and that implies just as much as the fact that this ‘sun’ warms me, makes me live, and is also the center of my gravitation.
And likewise, moreover, everything that this includes of that ‘dull half of shadow’ of which Mr VALÉRY speaks, namely that this sun
is also what blinds you, and what gives to all things that sort of false evidence, of deceptive brilliance.
One can say that the maximum of light is also the source of all obscuring.

All of this is already implied in this symbolic invocation, which, literally, makes arise in the relations between human beings an order of being
which is literally created by the emergence of the symbol itself. You will tell me: ‘there are all the same irreducible expressions’ and that beyond that
we can try to reduce to the factual domain this creative emission of the symbolic call on this occasion, and one could
find formulas that are simpler, closer, more organic, more animal. Try it yourself: you will see
that you will never leave the world of the symbol.

And even if you were to have recourse to the appeal to the organic index, to the ‘put your hand on my heart’ that the Infanta says to Léonor at the beginning of The Cid,
to express to her, to communicate to her the feelings of love she feels for this young cavalier. It is evident that here again
the very organic index is invoked within the avowal as a testimony, and a testimony that takes its accent
and its value only insofar as:

‘I remember it so well that I will spill my blood before I abase myself to deny my rank!’[Corneille, The Cid, I, 2]

That is to say that it is precisely insofar as she forbids herself this feeling in which she finds it scarcely believable that one believes her,
that she refers to it, and that she then invokes a factual element, but which literally takes its utility, its function, its meaning,
only within the whole symbolic world traced out in this dialectic of the feeling that refuses itself, or to which recognition
is implicitly refused.

We are—you see—brought back to the point that was that of our discourse, on which our discourse
last time ended. Each time we are in the order of speech, everything that is situated, ordered around this order
which is precisely the domain that we encounter at the limit of speech, takes its meaning and its accent as a function of the register
of speech. That is why it is so important to deepen it, to realize everything that this order of speech contains,
everything it institutes, all this other reality within reality.

For it is in relation to it, already, that a whole series of problems are resolved, and in particular this problem, this dialectic
of emotion—as it can invert, be inhibited—is already resolved by the fact that the order of the symbol already introduces
all this order that is at the limits, at the border of the limits of this symbolic order, from which the other orders—imaginary and real—
take their place and are ordered.

I will therefore try once again to make you feel it. Let us make a little fable: One day, the companions of ULYSSES…
as you know, a thousand misadventures happened to them, I believe that almost none finished the stroll
…were transformed, because of their unfortunate inclinations, into swine. Of course, the theme of metamorphosis
always interests us because, after all, it is there that precisely the question of the limit of the human and of the animal is posed.

So, they are transformed into swine, and the story continues. And one must indeed believe that they nonetheless keep some ties with
the human world, amid these grunts of the pigsty—but the pigsty is a society—by which they communicate
the different needs: hunger, thirst, even voluptuousness, even the group spirit. What can one say, after all,
of these grunts: a few messages addressed to the other world? To put it plainly, the companions of ULYSSES say:

‘We regret Ulysses, we regret that he is not among us,
we regret his teaching, what he was for us through existence.’

What is the grunt that reaches us from the companions of ULYSSES? What is it that will, in sum, make something
reach us amid the silky volume accumulated in the enclosed space of the pigsty? Is it speech? Why will you say
that it is speech? Is it because there is expressed there some essentially ambivalent feeling? For it is quite clear otherwise
that ULYSSES is a rather bothersome guide. And assuredly, at the point the companions of ULYSSES have reached, what is it that makes it
that, without any doubt, such a form of communication will appear to you as speech?

It is first of all exactly in this sense, which first leaps to the eyes, that there is a doubt and that, to tell the truth, from the moment they are transformed
into swine, the swine regret the presence of ULYSSES. Already you have there the value, the apprehension of what speech is.
In other words, the companions of ULYSSES transformed into swine want to make it believed that they still have something human,
speech and the nostalgia for ULYSSES expressed on this occasion is exactly the claim to the recognition of themselves,
the swine, as still being the companions of ULYSSES. And that is in fact what speech is above all, in this dimension
in which it is situated: speech is essentially a means of being recognized. It is there, before anything else that is behind and absolutely unfathomable:
– Is it true?
– Is it not true?

It is, in some sense, a first mirage. A mirage which, indeed, assures you that you are in the domain of speech.
But if you look at what is at issue, it is not in relation to a reality itself shapeless, unconstituted by essence,
on this occasion, which is what we call, when we enter into the order of emotions and feelings, ambivalence.

What is important in this speech, what makes it speech even if it is a grunt, is to know what the swine who speaks in the name
of the herd wants to make believed. And this speech is speech exactly insofar as a listener believes it. Without that, a communication
is something that transmits, roughly of the same order as a mechanical movement.

I was evoking a moment ago their silky rustling, the communication of their rustling within the pigsty. That is nothing else
in the end. The grunt is entirely analyzable in terms of mechanics. But from the moment it passes
to this other register of being essentially something that wants to make believed in an assimilation, it demands recognition.
It is first in that register that speech exists. And that is why indeed, up to a certain point, one can speak of the language
of animals. There is a language of animals, exactly in the sense that there is someone to understand it.

Let us take an example that I will borrow from NUNBERG, who wrote an article, published in 1951, Transference and reality.
It is the same problem that he poses: the question of knowing what transference is. It is obviously very amusing to see, at once,
how far he goes quite far, and how embarrassed he is. The whole question is for him precisely situated at the level of the imaginary:
in the foundation of transference, there is the projection of something that is not there, in reality.
The subject demands that his partner be a form, a model, for example of his father.

He will first evoke for us the case of a patient, who spends her time violently grabbing the analyst, even bawling him out, reproaching him
for not being this, not that, for never being good enough, for never intervening as he should, for being mistaken, for being in bad taste.
There is never any satisfaction. Is it a case of transference, NUNBERG tells us? Quite curiously, but moreover
not without foundation, he says: ‘But no, it is not quite that, because there there is rather readiness, aptitude for transference.’ And the demand
for real presence according to a determined form, with regard to which the subject insists on the discordance of the real world, that is to say
of the person of the analyst, to realize this primitive demand, that is something that is the first condition of transference.

From when and from what is there transference? It is when, in a way juxtaposed for the subject, not distinct,
there is apprehension of all the ‘mirage’, unity by the image whose reappearance is demanded: there is confusion of the image with the reality
in which the subject is situated, not absolute, but knowledge neither of the one nor of the other, but confusion. And it will be all the progress
of analysis to show the subject the distinction of these two planes. It is the classical theory of the analysis of the so-called
illusory behavior of the subject, to which one shows the subject how little it is adapted to the present situation, and it is by the separation
of these two planes of the imaginary and of the real.

But we ourselves find all sorts of contradictions, for we spend our time noticing that transference
is not at all something illusory. It is not at all a way of analyzing it to tell the subject ‘But, my poor friend,
the feeling you feel for me is only transference!’ It is never that that has put something right. One must indeed see that
it is not from that simplistic point of view that the situation is truly clarified.

There, as always, when the authors are well oriented, they have a certain sense of the truth, which their examples contradict
on the theoretical plane. That is the case of NUNBERG. The example that he gives as typical of this experience of transference
is really particularly instructive. Here is what he brings us:

‘I had a patient who brought truly the maximum of material, who spoke and expressed with authenticity, a care for detail, of being complete, the avowal, the abandonment of tone…//…And everything he could bring was truly without limits. And yet, nothing was moving! Until we had noticed this: that the analytic situation came to reproduce for him a situation that had been that of his childhood, where he gave himself over to confidences, likewise extremely advanced, as entire as possible, founded on total trust with respect to his interlocutress, who was none other than his mother, who came every evening to sit at the foot of his bed. And the patient took pleasure, like Scheherazade of the famous tale, in giving her an account as extended as possible not only of his days, but of his acts, of his desires, of his tendencies,
of his scruples, of his remorse. Without ever hiding anything. Except that this whole game was keenly appreciated by the fact that the warm presence
of his mother, in night clothes, was for him the source and the occasion of a perfectly sustained pleasure as such, and which made the structure
of the situation then lived. Namely, to guess beneath her nightshirt the contour of her breasts, the presence of her body, and to give himself over to the first investigations then specially sexual upon his beloved partner.’

How are we going to analyze that and understand it? Let us try to be just a very little coherent. What does that mean?
There are two things. The first situation where the subject lives a certain mode of satisfaction by means of this spoken exchange,
and where we can indeed distinguish two planes of subordinate symbolic relations, assuredly subverted by the relation
that we can call on this occasion imaginary, insofar as this subject has the grasp, the revelation of something
that is also attached to his reference to himself, insofar as the objects of his desire are thoroughly impregnated with this fundamental narcissism,
of which I showed you how essential it is in the very constitution of the object of desire.

Yes… But what happens? How are we going to understand the situation in analysis, at the moment when it occurs,
namely when the subject currently behaves in analysis with this sort of complete abandonment, this sort of total good will,
of submission to the rule carried out even to its last terms?

Are we going to say that something that resembles in any way the satisfaction primitively experienced is there, present?
I know well that for many the step is easily taken. One will say: ‘But yes, that is indeed it, behind this speech the subject seeks
a similar satisfaction.’ One will speak without hesitation of repetition compulsion, and anything you like. And the analyst will have shown proof
of I do not know what that would be a detection of I do not know what feeling or emotion—as one was saying earlier—present behind
this speech, which would be there the mark of a psychological beyond constituted and conceived as present. And one will speak on this occasion
of analysis of transference, as having been a reality beyond this speech.

But come now! Let us think! Can we in any way admit that in this position which is exactly
the inverse position to the primitive position, namely that the analyst is not at the foot of the bed but behind, and that he is far from presenting,
at least in the most common cases, the charms of the primitive object, nor from being able to lend himself to the same concupiscences,
is there in any way something that allows us to take such a step?

All that is, moreover, silly things. But after all it is precisely by spelling out a little the structure of things and by saying
simple things that we must ourselves learn simply to count on our fingers the elements amid which
we act, we intervene.

You will tell me: ‘If one does not give this explanation, the whole outcome is unthinkable!’ Why is it that suddenly, having given it
and revealed it, entails a complete transformation of the analytic situation, namely that at that moment the same words
will become effective, will mark a true progress in the subject’s general situation, in his existence?

Let us try a little to understand… By the very nature of what speech is, of what the bringing to light of a group,
of a world of significations is, we know that we are in language and in the operation of speech. That is to say:

– that as such, speech itself—because it is speech—institutes itself in the structure of this semantic world which is that of language, and which, as I reminded you earlier, never has more than one sense at a time among all these senses, all these usages,
– that this speech always has a beyond, and that behind what it says—as earlier behind what the suddenly inspired swine, the companions of ULYSSES, were saying—speech has several functions, several senses, and that behind what a discourse says there is what it wants to say, and behind what it wants to say, there is still another wanting-to-say, and that never will anything of it be exhausted, except to arrive at that last point which is precisely the creative function of speech.

Namely the fact that it makes arise
– something that is its essence,
– which is that something called the concept,
– which is this evocation from always of the concept, of something that is the thing itself, present there, as HEGEL teaches us and tells us.

It is there that we must make a leap, and which is not easy to make, in HEGEL. But simply remember
what HEGEL says of the concept in relation to the thing: ‘The concept is the time of the thing.’ He arrives at it by this rigorous route that,
if the concept, contrary to classical theory, is the thing itself, what must the thing be?

It is quite certain that it is not the thing—if one can put it that way—in what it is, for a simple reason, that the concept is always there
where the thing is not. And that where it arrives to replace the thing…
like the elephant that I brought in the other day, by means of the word ‘elephant’, which so struck some
of you. For it was quite evident that the elephant was there, from the sole moment when we named it,
much more present, at least as to its consequences for the destiny of elephant, than if the elephant had entered the room
…what can be there, of the thing?

It is certain that it is neither its form nor its reality for, in the actual, all the places are taken.
HEGEL says it with great rigor: it is what makes the thing be there, while not being there.

This identity in difference, which characterizes the relation of the concept to the thing is obviously the same thing that makes that precisely the thing
is thing, that the fact is symbolized, as was being said to us earlier. That is to say what also makes us speak of a thing,
and not of that I know not what, always in the end unidentifiable, which makes each instant succeeding each instant,
in a kind of way impossible to reproduce, never twice does the current of the world pass through the same situation.

HERACLITUS reports it to us: if we institute the existence of things in this absolutely infinite flux, and which never reproduces itself,
of the ever-changing world, it is precisely because already in the thing this identity in difference is saturated.
[ποταμῷ γὰρ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐμϐῆναι δὶς τῷ αὐτῷ καθ΄ Ἡράκλειτον οὐδὲ θνητῆςοὐσίαςδὶς ἅφασθαικατὰ ἕξιν· ἀλλ΄ ὀξύτητικαὶ τάχει
μεταϐολῆςσκίδνησικαὶ πάλινσυνάγει καὶ πρόσεισικαὶ ἄπεισι.On does not go down twice into the same river…]

It is from there that HEGEL deduces that the concept is the time of the thing. This is nonetheless very important to promote, because we
find ourselves thereby placed at the heart of the problems that FREUD advances, always, when he says that what is important lies outside time.
It is true, and it is not true! It lies outside time, exactly like the concept. But it is precisely because it is time itself
of the thing, that it can lie outside time, because it is the pure time of the thing and that as such this time
can reproduce the thing in a certain modulation, whose material support can be exactly anything whatsoever.

What is at issue therefore in repetition compulsion, insofar as it intervenes there and that it intervenes in speech itself,
is exactly nothing other than that!

And that must lead us very far, up to and including the problems of time that our analytic practice precisely involves.
We can literally conceive the transformation that occurs, from the moment when the transferential situation is analyzed
by the evocation of that old situation, where the subject found himself in the presence, in effect, of a quite different object,
and with which there is no assimilation at all with the present object.

It is only this: that this current speech, exactly like the old speech, is in sum placed in a parenthesis
of time, in a form of time, if I may express myself thus.

It is what I called ‘modulation of time’, which makes this speech currently have the same value as the old speech. But this value
is nothing other than a value of speech. There is there currently no feeling, no kind of imaginary projection,
as Mr NUNBERG strives, exhausts himself to construct on this occasion, thus finding himself in an inextricable situation.
LŒWENSTEIN will say: ‘It is not a projection, it is a displacement’ speaking of a mythology that has all the aspects
of a labyrinth. Whereas what is at issue is exactly this: that the element is a dimension essential but primordial
of everything that is of the order of speech.

And precisely this ‘modulation of time’ is that the last word, we could say, of this speech that the subject is in the process of uttering
before the analyst—I say exactly ‘the last word’, the last meaning—is nothing else, cannot be identified with anything else,
than with this temporal form of which I am speaking to you and which is already, by itself alone, a speech.

If indeed, as HEGEL says, the concept is time, that is to say that the last meaning of this speech that we can analyze
by levels, is to find all sorts of things between the lines of what the subject says, but what we find in the end
is indeed something, but something that is also a speech [You are the one who…].

And this something that is also a speech is exactly this existential, fundamental relation, of man suspended before the object
of his desire as such, in this narcissistic mirage, which has no need, on this occasion, to take any particular form,
which is nothing other than this sweating out of this relation that is there, at once in what we call ‘preliminary pleasure’,
in short which finds itself suspended in this isolation of man in relation to the object of his desire, in this specular relation
essentially, which here puts all speech in a kind of suspension in relation to this situation, in effect purely imaginary.

But it has nothing present, it has nothing emotional, it has nothing real, nothing sentimental. It is comprehensible only insofar
as, once it is reached, it changes the entire meaning of this speech, and that it shows the subject that his speech is what I called in this Report,
introduction of the term ‘empty speech’, and that it is as such and as empty speech, that it is indeed in a certain time
without any effect.

All this is not easy. Are you there? If you are there even a little, you must understand that the beyond to which we are
referred, it is always, so to speak, to a deeper speech, and which goes as far as that limit that makes that there is obviously
in speech an ineffable limit which is precisely this, that speech creates, in sum, all the resonance of all its meanings,
and that in the end we are referred to the very act of speech as such, and that it is of the value of this current act,
namely whether speech is empty or full, that is to say to what point of its presence it is full, it is that which is at issue in the analysis of transference.

If you find this even a little speculative, even unorthodox, I will nonetheless bring you, in conclusion for today…
since we are thus led, in strolling, to crossroads that deserve
that you stop there and sustain a little your meditation
…a reference.

Because I am here to comment on FREUD’s texts, and it is nonetheless not inopportune to remark
that this interpretation is strictly orthodox. If you look throughout FREUD’s whole work for the moment when
the word Übertragung, transference, appears:

– it is not in the Technical Papers, and in relation to real relations, no matter, imaginary, even symbolic with the subject,
– it is not in relation to Dora nor in relation to all the miseries she made for him since, supposedly, he did not know how to tell her in time that she was beginning to engage on the slope of a tender feeling toward him,
– it is in the 7th part of the Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams): ‘Psychology of the dream processes’, in connection with wish-fulfillment in the dream.

FREUD…
after a whole book—which I will perhaps comment on before you one day soon—where it is literally
only a matter of demonstrating, in the function of the dream, essentially this plurality, this superposition of semantic ordinances,
which go, so to speak, from a signifying material up to all the depth and the superposition of significations
…shows us how speech, namely the transmission of desire, which can make itself recognized for that, exactly by anything whatsoever,
provided that it is organized into a symbolic system, and that it is there precisely that the source lies of the dream’s character for a long time
undecipherable.

It is that for a certain time, just as one did not know how to understand hieroglyphs for a certain time,
because one did not compose them in their own symbolic system and one only realized that when one saw in the hieroglyphs
a small human silhouette, it could mean a man, but that it could also represent the sound ‘man’,
and as such be composed as a syllable in a word, it is like that that the dream is made.
And what does FREUD call Übertragung? It is, he says:

‘The phenomenon constituted by this, that a certain desire repressed by the subject, for which there is no direct translation possible…’

That is to say that it is forbidden to its mode of discourse…
GRANOFF points out to me the comparison with the Rosetta Stone, which is there, in BENNITT’s article. Of course!
Also, FREUD cited the stone on which CHAMPOLLION made his discovery.
…This desire cannot make itself recognized. Why? Among the elements of repression, I must indeed tell you that there is
something which also participates in this ineffable, in the sense that there are essential relations that no discourse can express
sufficiently, except precisely in what I called earlier ‘between the lines’.

We shall come to it next time. I will make for you the comparison between the way in which, for example, any esoteric author
[…] I chose this theme, since I intended to speak to you about it today […] The Guide for the Perplexed which is an esoteric work.
The way in which he presents his way of writing, namely how deliberately he organizes his discourse in such a way
that what he wants to say—it is he who speaks—which is not sayable, should be comprehensible, should nonetheless be revealed, to whom? […]
These lines are not only what he says, but those of a disorder, certain breaks, certain intentional discordances.
It is by that that he wants to say what either cannot, or must not, be said.

I will show you that the very way in which he expresses himself, if you like, is the reverse of what we, we call the reading
of unconscious tendencies in slips, gaps, retentions, repetitions. What we read is also something
which in the subject expresses, but there quite spontaneously and innocently, as deliberately he organizes his discourse.
We shall return to it; these texts are worth being brought close together.

What does FREUD tell us, when he speaks to us, in the first definition of Übertragung? What are the Tagesreste for?
They are the signifying material. That is not exactly how he expresses himself. He says that they are disinvested from the point of view
of desire, that they are for the dream, and in the state of the dream, kinds of wandering forms which, for the subject, have become of lesser
importance, have, so to speak, emptied themselves of their meaning. That is indeed, in effect, what happens each time we have to deal
with a signifying material.

The signifying material, whether phonematic, hieroglyphic, or something else, are forms, which have fallen from their proper meaning,
and as such taken up again in an organization which is precisely that through which a new meaning finds a way to be expressed.
It is exactly that that FREUD calls Übertragung. It is insofar as unconscious desire, that is to say impossible to express,
finds the means to express itself through, so to speak, the alphabet, the phonematics of these day residues, themselves disinvested of desire.
It is therefore a phenomenon of language as such. The signification of the sign is neutralized by the signification realizing.
It is to that that he gives, for the first time, the name, the term Übertragung. One cannot not see, if one is a little enlightened
to this dimension in a more sensitive way, that in this term what is essentially at issue, in Übertragung,
is a phenomenon of language.

Here, it occurs in the dream, but of course, in everything that occurs in analysis, there is this additional dimension
that the other is there, present, up to a certain point. And he brings an essential dimension into the realization of this transference of meaning,
which takes place in the dimension of language insofar as it addresses the interlocutor. But observe also this: that from the point of view
of Freudian analysis, dreams are all the clearer and analyzable the more advanced the analysis is, namely that the dream speaks
more to the analyst, and that the best dreams, the richest, the most beautiful, the most complicated, that FREUD brings us,
the most significant, are the dreams that are within an analysis, and literally tending to speak to the analyst.

That is also moreover what must enlighten you on the proper signification of the term acting-out. If earlier, I spoke of repetition compulsion,
and if I spoke of it essentially in relation to language and to language as such, it is indeed insofar as action,
whatever it may be—acting-out or acting-in—in the session, is included in a context of speech. If you analyze things well,
on the concrete facts, whatever it is that happens in the treatment is qualified as acting-out.

If so many subjects rush, during their analysis, to perform a crowd of erotic actions, like getting married, for example,
to show what nowadays one calls curiously ‘oblative’ love, it is obviously an acting-out addressed to their analyst
to show to what point analysis bears upon them. And that is indeed why one must make an analysis of acting-out, and make an analysis
of transference. That is to say, to find in an act its meaning of speech, its meaning of an act in order to be recognized.

That is where I will leave you for today.