🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

LACAN – Who has questions to ask?

Mme AUBRY

I understand that at the junction of the imaginary and the real one finds hatred, provided one takes junction in the sense of rupture.
What I understand less is that at the junction of the symbolic and the imaginary one finds love?

LACAN

I am delighted that you ask me a question like that! This may perhaps allow me to give to this last meeting of this year that atmosphere I prefer, familiar rather than magisterial. There is an excellent question!
[To Leclaire] You too, you surely have things to ask. The last time you told me, after the session, something that looked very much like a question: ‘I would really have liked you to talk to me about transference, all the same!’
They are tough, all the same! I speak to them only about that! And they are still not satisfied!

There are deep reasons why you will always remain unsated on the subject of transference. But it is still what we are going to try to do today. Only, to do it, I would like your question to be a bit more precise, not simply ‘I would like you to talk to me about transference’. All the same, the relation of this structuring of speech in the search for truth in these three times, if I wanted to express them in the manner of one of those allegorical paintings that flourished in the Romantic era, ‘virtue pursuing crime, aided by remorse’, I would tell you: ‘error fleeing into deceit, and caught up by the mistake’.

I believe that the relation of that with transference, insofar as it is what I am trying to make you grasp—transference in a certain number of possible moments, moments of suspension in the avowal of speech—must still always seem to you to lie along the same line.

Serge LECLAIRE- Yes.

LACAN

On what, in sum, do you remain unsated? On the articulation of that, perhaps, with the common conception of transference, at the point where it differs, where I am trying to lead you? I show you a certain way of conceiving, and at the same time of handling, as leading to results with respect to which we are not in agreement?

Serge LECLAIRE

Is it not that, when one looks at what is written on transference, one always has the impression that to account for the phenomenon of transference, or transference in general, it falls within the category of manifestations of an affective order, of emotional stirrings, as opposed to other manifestations of an intellectual order, or the approaches that aim at understanding. Now one always finds oneself embarrassed when one tries to account, precisely in ordinary and common terms, for the perspective that is yours, and that it is difficult to make fit within the framework of ‘emotional stirrings’, because in the end everything that one generally sees as a definition of transference—one says it is a transference stirring, a feeling, an affective phenomenon—is flatly opposed to everything that in an analysis can be called intellectual.

LACAN

Is it not? There are two modes of application of a discipline that is structured into a teaching: there is what you hear, and then what you make of it. The two things could come together on a certain number of second signs, if I may say so. And after all, it is indeed from this angle that I would see what there can be that is fruitful in any truly didactic action.

This is not so much a matter of transmitting concepts, except by explaining them and consequently by leaving the relay of filling them in and bearing the burden. But there is something that would, properly speaking, be more imperative, and that perhaps would have a value just as important: it would be to indicate to you the concepts that one must never use.

I believe that if there is something of that order in what I teach you here, it would be to renounce it radically, even if only provisionally—for each of you taken within your own search for truth, provisionally, to see whether one does not gain by doing without it. In any case, it is too clear that by using it one arrives perpetually at a series of dead ends for it not to be tempting, for a certain time, to follow this instruction.

And particularly it would be, I believe, one of the things most contrary to analytic experience, most obscuring in its understanding, most confused—it is too obvious, and I would say that it is obvious through all sorts of things, through the date at which this opposition was established—this opposition of which I speak is that of the affective and the intellectual.

You ask me to account for what I teach, and for the objections it can encounter. Everything I have explained to you about the sense of the action of speech in its function—ordering if you like, law in its function, resonance that carries with it all the echoes of the symbol insofar as it is there that we displace, in our interpretive action and in its function of pact, a meaning other than the symbol, insofar as in the triad that it constitutes in the confrontation of two subjects, it is the founding medium of the intersubjective relation, modifying by itself the two subjects retroactively, mythically taking up a first pre-speech relation.

Of course, one sees its limit. One can imagine them thus, and it is speech that literally creates something that precisely establishes them in a dimension that is the one I make you glimpse at the end of this year’s exposition, and as having to be indispensably introduced: namely the dimension of being. That there is literally a realization of the human being as such, and that it is with it that we are dealing in analysis, in the dimension of speech. It is clear that this is not something intellectual. If the intellectual is situated somewhere, it is in the ‘imaginary’ projection and I would say—pseudo, in the sense of lying—‘pseudo-neutralized’ of the ego.

It is at the level of the phenomena of the ego that we encounter the intellectual, and we know very well—precisely analysis has denounced it as the phenomenon called defenses, resistances, whatever you like—but that it is precisely around the question of this situation of the ego, of this function of the ego, that for the moment the great debate can turn, the crucial point that, if you are willing to hear me, defines, in what we are trying here to restore, the foundation of psychoanalysis. Insofar as you follow me, for we can go very far. The question is not to know how far one can go; the question is to know whether one will be followed. That is indeed an element quite discriminating of what one can call reality.

Over the ages, we witness through human history progress that it would be quite wrong to believe are progresses of convolutions. The progress in question is a progress of the symbolic order. Observe the history of a science like that of mathematics: one realizes that one stagnated for centuries around problems that are now clear to ten-year-old children. And yet powerful minds were at it!

They stopped before the resolution of the second-degree equation for ten centuries too many! The Greeks could have found it; they found things more advanced in problems of maxima and minima. And it is simply from the day when one invented a certain number of things that are much more symbolic on the mathematical plane that one could solve these problems. Mathematical progress is not a progress of the power of thought of the human being: it is from the moment when a gentleman thinks of inventing a sign like this: √, or like this: ∫, that a gentleman does something good. Mathematics is that!

We are in a position—fortunately!—of a different nature, more difficult. It concerns the symbol and a symbol extremely polyvalent. It is precisely insofar as we will manage to formulate in a certain way the symbols of our action and to understand them in an adequate way that we will take a step forward.

We will take this step forward, which, like every step forward, is also a retroactive step. That is why I would say that what we are in the process of elaborating thus, insofar as you follow me, is precisely a psychoanalysis A. I will call it so insofar as I call it the first time, in its principles as in its applications. It is at the same time a return to the aspiration of its origin. What is it, then, about? It is indeed about something that claims to be a more authentic understanding of the phenomenon of transference.

Serge LECLAIRE

I had not quite finished. In the sense that I wanted to say precisely that if I ask this question, it is because it always remains a little bit behind. It is quite evident that, in the group, the terms affective and intellectual no longer held sway. But it still remained a little bit…

LACAN – It is in our interest that they no longer hold sway. What can one do with them?

Serge LECLAIRE – But precisely, it is something that had always remained a bit suspended since Rome.
LACAN – I believe I do not use it a single time, except for the term ‘intellectualized’ in that famous Discourse of Rome.

Serge LECLAIRE

But precisely it had jolted, both that absence and those attacks that were direct against the term affective; I believe you were attacking this problem directly.

LACAN – I believe it is a term that must absolutely be struck from our papers.

Serge LECLAIRE

It was to liquidate something that had remained in suspense, because it was something that had not been said clearly. But the last time, speaking of transference, you introduced into the question that we were taking up just now: three fundamental passions—is it not?—among which you included ignorance. So that is where I wanted to come to.

LACAN

Precisely, the sense of this discourse and the fact that it is the last time that I bring into play the three fundamental passions: you must note that what was at issue was to introduce as a third essential dimension the space—if one can express oneself thus, or the volume more exactly—of human relations, precisely in the symbolic relation. In other words, it meant this: love as a human passion, as we distinguish it from desire, considered in the limiting, radical relation established of the human being to its object, of every organism to its instinctual aim—if love is something else, precisely insofar as human reality is a reality of speech, there is no establishing of love, one cannot speak of love, except from the moment when the symbolic relation exists as such, where the aim is not satisfaction, but being.

Let us be clear. Since this is what you bring, I take love, and you will see that I could take any one of the three. It is quite intentionally that it is only the last time that I have spoken of these passionate edges; as Mme AUBRY very rightly underlined by her question, they are points of junction, points of rupture between these different domains over which the interhuman relation extends: real, symbolic, imaginary.

They are indeed ridges that are situated between each of these domains. And I think implicitly, since it is of love that I am going to speak, to answer your question at the same time. We have here underlined that the question of the love relation in its phenomenon is situated, if there is something of which we have spoken with regard to the Einführung des Narzissmus, which I commented to you, around which we made a whole development, it is to see how, in its phenomenon, passion-love… Verliebtheit is something other than Liebe; if one gives two different words it is not without reason… is captivated, if one may say so, essentially captured in the human being by a narcissistic relation.

It is around this phenomenon manifested by our experience, and precisely at the limit of the symbolic significance of this experience, that we can most surely see there the foundation, the reason for this kind of profound ambiguity that the human being has with respect to this essential passion, illuminating for him, and at the same time so profoundly disorienting, disturbing, that all the problematic acuity of the phenomenon of love lies precisely there around, on which I insisted.

So as not to redo the whole dialectic of narcissistic investment on this matter, for I think you have nonetheless retained something of it, I simply want to speak of this function of the relation to the other, which is implied in what I will call the mirage of Verliebtheit. Analytic experience, and FREUD’s teaching… and I must say the most lucid view among those analysts who best understood what was there FREUD’s teaching and that of our experience… make of love as passion something that is essentially on the imaginary plane, and that, even in its passion, the subject deliberately assumes by a kind of choice, in the sense of what one can call a temptation, essentially, as the loss of the freedom of the one whose love one wants; love in the sense of the desire to be loved is essentially an attempt to capture the other within oneself, the object taken as object. I insisted on that insofar as, if I spoke of it at length for the first time, of this phenomenon of narcissistic love, it is in the very prolongation of the dialectic of perversion.

What there is in the desire to be loved is essentially this fact that the loving object is in some way taken as such, glued, enslaved, in the absolute particularity of oneself as object. And in this kind of aspiration that there is in the desire to be loved, there is something that—as is well known—is very little satisfied with being loved for one’s good. The demand of love is to be loved as far as the complete subversion of the subject can go in a particularity in what it can have that is most opaque, most unthinkable. One wants to be loved for everything, not only for one’s ego, as DESCARTES says: for the color of one’s hair, for one’s manias, for one’s weaknesses, for everything.

But inversely, what is no less entirely evident is that to love—and I would say correlatively, and because of that very thing—is precisely to love a being beyond what he appears to be. The active gift of love aims not at being without its specificity, but at being in its being.

Octave MANNONI – It was PASCAL who said that, not DESCARTES…

LACAN

You know, there is a passage in DESCARTES about that, on this progressive purification of the ego beyond all particular qualities. Let us leave PASCAL aside, because that would carry us away… Precisely, PASCAL now is PASCAL from this precise moment of my discourse, for it is evident that it is PASCAL insofar as PASCAL tries to lead us beyond the creature.

Octave MANNONI- He said it outright.

LACAN

Yes. But it is precisely in a movement of rejection. Love, in its active gift, aims, beyond this imaginary captivation, always at being, at this particularity of the loved subject. It can accept very far what we could call weaknesses and detours, and it can even admit errors. There is a point that precisely is situated, and signified, only in the category of being. There is a point where love stops; it cannot follow him.

And there is a point that is situated somewhere, precisely on the side of what I would call a certain perseverance in deceit: it is insofar as the loved being, at a certain point, goes too far in betraying himself that love no longer follows. This, which is a phenomenology quite traceable in experience, I will not push further, and I will not give you the whole development, the whole dialectic.

I simply want to make you notice that it is in the dimension of the being of the other, that is to say of a certain beyond the other, of a certain development of the other in his being, that love is directed, not as something undergone, but very precisely insofar as it is one of these three essential dividing lines in which the subject becomes engaged when he realizes himself symbolically in speech. Without this dimension of speech… insofar as it affirms being… there is everything you like: Verliebtheit, imaginary fascination, but there is not the dimension of love.

Are you with me? You agree, MANNONI? Well then, hatred is the same thing. Hatred is not simply this kind of triggering short-circuit of destruction as it is posed, for example, in an absolutely structuring way in the imaginary relation, in the sense of this impasse of coexistence between two consciousnesses, of which HEGEL shows us the pivotal, crucial moment, in the establishment of the intersubjective relation, starting from the struggle to the death of pure prestige.

There too—insofar as it develops, it too, in the direction of the symbolic relation—it is a passion that is not satisfied with the disappearance of the adversary. What it wants is very precisely the opposite of this development of his being of which I spoke to you a moment ago with regard to love: what it wants is his abasement, his disorientation, his deviation, his delirium, his subversion. And it is in that that hatred, like love, is a career without limit, in that it pursues what it[…] very properly, it is the developed, detailed negation of being that he hates.

This is perhaps much more difficult to make you understand, for a reason: it is that perhaps, for reasons that are perhaps not as gratifying as we can believe, we know less, I believe, the feeling of hatred than one could in eras when man was more open to his destiny. Although one must not exaggerate: we have seen some nevertheless, not very long ago, certain kinds of manifestations that, in the genre, were not bad! Nevertheless, it is precisely there perhaps that which can allow us to glimpse why such a description is, for us, less easy of access to our assent.

It is that I would say that the exercise of this kind of race to the destruction of being as such is really, among us, very well trodden. In other words, it clothes itself, as we have seen, in all sorts of pretexts. And it meets all sorts of extraordinarily easy rationalizations. It is perhaps insofar as we are in a certain state of diffuse flocculation of this something that saturates in us sufficiently this destruction of being. In other words, it is perhaps precisely because of a certain form of common discourse, of certain correspondences between a certain structure of the ego and a certain way of objectifying the human being, that already we are sufficiently a civilization of hatred for the particularities of the development of subjects to know less, if I may express myself thus, the assumption and the lived experience of it in all that it can have that is burning.

Octave MANNONI- Western moralism.

LACAN

Exactly! Where hatred finds a sort of consumption of ordinary everyday objects, in the wars that mark what it can have of fully realized in privileged subjects. One would be wrong to believe insofar as the problem is absent! But understand well that in saying all that, what I indicate are effectively the paths of the realization of being. For of course, they are not the realization of being, since they are only paths of it. But they are paths nonetheless, insofar. The path that is called ignorance is also a path. And it is indeed there that it will perhaps be most difficult for me to make myself understood. But it is so vital for us to understand what we are doing and what analysis is! I must still try to explain myself about that.

That the subject commits himself to the search for truth as such is essentially because he situates himself in the dimension of ignorance, whether he knows it or does not know it is exactly the same thing. That is one of the elements of what analysts call readiness to the transference, the fundamental openness, from the mere fact of putting oneself in the position, by avowing oneself in speech, and by that very fact, of finding one’s truth at the end, at the end that is there in analysis.

That is an essential dimension, but it is not on that side that it is appropriate to consider it. It is on the other side, on the analyst’s side:
– if the analyst misrecognizes what I will call the power of accession to being of this dimension of ignorance,
– if he does not know that he has to respond to the one who, through all his discourse, questions him, in this dimension of ignorance,
– if he does not conceive at each instant that precisely that on which he has to leave the subject is not on a Wissen, knowledge, but on the paths of access to that knowledge,
– if he does not know that what he has to do with him is essentially a dialectical operation, not to show him that he is mistaken, in the sense of error, since he is necessarily in error, but that he has to show him how he speaks badly, so to speak, how he speaks without knowing, how he speaks like an ignorant person. It is the paths of his error that are important.

Psychoanalysis is a dialectic, and what Mr MONTAIGNE, in his Book III, chapter VIII, whose reading I cannot recommend to you too strongly—there is a person here who knows it well—calls an art of conferring. The art of conferring is the same thing as what exists between PLATO, SOCRATES, the slave—it is the same thing as what exists in HEGEL—it is to teach him to give his own speech its true sense. In other words, the position of the analyst must be that of an ignorantia docta, a learned ignorance, which means not learned but formal, and it is through that that it can be, for the subject, formative.

The temptation is obviously great, because it is in the air of the times, and perhaps not absolutely without relation to the way in which I situated it a moment ago in relation to hatred, that the ignorantia docta easily becomes what I called—this is not from yesterday—an ignorantia docens. If the psychoanalyst believes he knows something in psychology, for example, that is for him already the beginning of his loss, for the good reason that everyone knows that in psychology nobody knows very much, except exactly insofar as psychology itself is, concerning the human being, an error of perspective.

This is what the introduction of this triad [love, hatred, ignorance] means at the level of the realization of being in the function of speech, and very properly in the dialectic in which we engage the analysand in analysis. It would be necessary to rework that in every form, and in forms of absolutely crucial examples, and intended precisely to change the qualifications you give at every moment to what occurs in this dimension of being, because you place it, despite yourselves, in a false perspective, in the perspective of a false knowledge.

One must take completely banal, common examples. You must still clearly realize that when man says ‘I am’, or ‘I will be’, even ‘I will have been’, or ‘I want to be’, there is always a leap, an element of radical gaping. It is just as extravagant, with respect to reality, to say ‘I am a psychoanalyst’ as to say ‘I am a king’. Both are nevertheless entirely valid affirmations, and nothing ever justifies them, in the order of what one can call ‘the measure of capacities’, the fact that a man assumes what moreover is conferred on him by others, as a function of a whole series of symbolic legitimations that entirely escape the order of capacity-based authorizations, if I may say so.

When a man refuses to be king, it is something that does not at all have the same value as when he accepts it. It is not at all symmetrical. By the very fact that he refuses, he is not one. He is a petit bourgeois, for example; see for example the Duke of WINDSOR, the man who, on the verge of being invested with the dignification of the crown, says ‘I want to live with the woman I love’, and by that very fact remains on this side of the domain of being king.

But when the man says to himself—and being so, being so as a function of a certain system of symbolic relations—says ‘I am king’, it is not something that is simply of the order of accepting a function. It is not in the order of captation that this is judged: from one minute to the next it changes the sense of everything he is, if you like, precisely in the order of psychological qualifications.

That gives a completely different sense to his passions, to his designs, to his very stupidity. Everything becomes, from the sole fact that from that moment he is king, other functions, royal functions. His intelligence becomes quite something else, in the register of royalty; his incapacities as well, they become foundations of another order, they become by themselves polarizations, structurings, of a whole series of destinies around him that are profoundly modified in their sense, for the reason that royal authority is exercised in this or that mode by the personage who is invested with it.

This is encountered on a small scale every day: the fact that a gentleman who has very mediocre qualities, and who would show all sorts of drawbacks in this or that inferior employment, is raised to what is—more or less camouflaged but always present—an investiture in some way sovereign within a domain however limited it may be, changes completely—you only have to observe it every day, ordinarily—the scope as much of his strengths as of his weaknesses, and can curiously invert their relation.

That is also why… I do not know whether you notice: this is seen in an effaced way, unavowed, in the very world that constitutes authorizations, examinations.

– Why, from the time we have become such strong psychologists, have we not reduced the various crossings that formerly had an initiatory value of barriers: licenses, agrégations?

– Why, from the moment when all at once we would have abolished entirely this quality of investiture, would we not reduce it to a kind of totalization of the acquired work, of the marks or points recorded during the year, or even to a pure and simple set of tests or trials, where one would measure what one could call the capacity of this or that person?

– Why does one keep for these examinations I do not know what character that, in this perspective, examination or competitive exam, keeps this archaic character in the end, with all these elements around which we rebel, in the manner of people who pound on the walls of the prison they themselves have built, all these elements of chance, even of favor, and everything that follows?

It is simply because a competitive exam, insofar as it clothes the subject with a certain qualification that is symbolic, cannot have the entirely rationalized structure of what I will call in a moment the totalization of a certain number of things that are measured in the register purely of the addition of quantity.

So when we encounter that, we make discoveries, because naturally we are clever, we say: ‘But yes, we are going to write a great psychoanalytic article to show the initiatory character of the examination.’ Obviously! It is obvious!

It is fortunate that one notices it; it is unfortunate that, in noticing it, the psychoanalyst does not always explain it very well. He makes a partial discovery. He is obliged to explain it in terms of ‘omnipotence of thought’, of ‘magical thinking’ and other things. Whereas it is simply the dimension of the symbol as fundamental.

Have I sufficiently answered Mme AUBRY? Perhaps a bit quickly? Who has other questions to ask me? BEJARANO, fertile and astute mind?

Angelo BEJARANO

I am thinking of a concrete example, the Dora case, in which one would see the figuration… In the Dora case, at a crucial moment, one would have to try to show us how the different registers are followed, gone through…

LACAN

In the Dora case, since you propose the Dora case, one remains a bit at the doorstep of that, but one can still explain things to you a bit. I would still like—since I have arrived, thanks to the questions posed, at pushing today this discourse rather far—to be able perhaps, within that, to situate the Dora case for you.

Let us take up the schema… schema or rather symbol. To take up again the question of transference as a whole and to bring a kind of conclusive formula, which is another way of presenting the question, we will say this: within the experience established by FREUD’s first discoveries on the tripod: dream, psychopathology of everyday life, witticism, which is always—as I explained to you—speech that proves itself beyond this discourse, which is included in this something that is essentially analogous to what forms its fourth element, of this tripod: dream, slip, witticism, which is the symptom, which it too is a mode of relation on the basis of the organism insofar as it can serve not as verbum itself—since it is not made of phonemes—but as signum, if you remember the different included spheres of AUGUSTINE’s text.

Within that, and with a delay, FREUD himself said he had been frightened when one isolates the phenomenon of transference—and one isolates it insofar as one has not recognized it—that by that fact it operated as an obstacle to treatment, and in recognizing it it is the same thing: one realizes that it is the best support of treatment. That is to say that it is FREUD who realizes it; that does not mean that he had not already designated it.

In The Interpretation of Dreams, there is already a definition of the Übertragung, and precisely as a function of this double level of speech. You remember that passage of The Interpretation of Dreams that I told you: it is precisely insofar as there are parts of discourse disinvested of meanings that another meaning comes and takes them from behind, which is unconscious meaning. It is with regard to the dream that he shows it; it is even clearer. I showed it to you by utterly striking examples in slips. Unfortunately I spoke of it only a little this year. It is something entirely special, since it is the face, if one may say so, the radical face of nonsense that is precisely behind all sense, for there is a point where necessarily sense emerges and is created. But at its point where it is created, man can very well feel that he is at the same time annihilated, that it is even because he is annihilated that he is created. The function of the witticism is exactly the irruption of nonsense into a discourse that seems to have sense, and the calculated irruption.

Octave MANNONI- The umbilical point of speech.

LACAN

Exactly! Just as there is an umbilicus of the dream, which is itself extremely confused, inversely in the witticism there is an umbilicus perfectly acute in the end: the Witz. And what expresses its most radical essence is nonsense. Well then, this transference, we realize that it is first of all our support.

I gave you, not in a chronological and historical development, but I showed you three directions in which it is understood by the different authors. And in giving you this tripartition, which has a certain didactic, arbitrary character, it must allow you to find your bearings and to find your bearings in the current tendencies of what is called analysis, namely that it is not brilliant! In sum, we can take our division: the imaginary, the real, the symbolic.

There is a certain way of understanding the phenomenon of transference with respect to the real, that is to say as an actual phenomenon. People thought they were smashing a great pane of glass by speaking of the hic et nunc, and that all analysis must bear on the hic et nunc. They think they have found something dazzling, that they have taken a bold step. But we find people like EZRIEL who write touching things, who batter down open doors. Of course, transference is there.

It is simply a matter of knowing what it is. If we take it on the plane of the real, this is what it yields: it means that it is a real that is not real. It is what one calls an illusory: it is entirely real that the subject is there, talking to me about his quarrels with his grocer. And by speaking to me about it, and by grumbling against his grocer, it is me he is bawling out. It is an example of EZRIEL; it is not me who invents it. Good, that is all very well; it is understood! What is at issue is precisely to demonstrate to him that there is really no reason at all for him to bawl me out about his grocer. I showed him the distinction there is between this real behavior, insofar as it is illusory, and the real situation from which it detaches itself in the real.

This great discovery that has been made recently is simply linked to a total inability to deepen what FREUD has designated for us for a long time in the phenomenon of transference. And this leads to something that—as you see, and whatever one may say—has some reference to emotions, to the affective, to abreaction and other terms that indeed designate a certain number of fragmentary phenomena that occur during analysis, nonetheless leads, I point out to you, to something essentially intellectual. For in the end, proceeding thus leads quite directly, in a form that does not appear to us as such because it can vaguely appear new, to something entirely equivalent to the first forms of indoctrination that scandalize us so much in FREUD’s first way of proceeding with his first cases. We teach the subject to behave in the real. We show him that he is not up to date. If that is not education and indoctrination, I wonder what it is.

Of course, that does not touch the core of the phenomenon, this way of taking things in an essentially superficial way, which FREUD can authorize as being a source of transference, namely the re-edition, he said it: abridged, but modified, corrected. And that is where the problem begins.

Wladimir GRANOFF – Is it about DE SAUSSURE’s position, that you are speaking of?

LACAN

Let us leave DE SAUSSURE alone. He is not a personage who, even in the order of stupidity, is so representative. There is another way of approaching this problem of transference. It is quite evident that it is this floor, this absolutely essential level, it is precisely that whose importance one does not fail to underline here, which is that of the imaginary, and in which the relatively recent development of the whole experience of behaviors—of animals namely—allows us to approach certainly a clearer structuring than everything FREUD could do. Although this dimension is even named as such: ‘imaginare’, exists in FREUD’s text because it cannot be avoided.

It is exactly for that that I had you study this year the ‘Introduction to narcissism’. The relation of the living being as such to the objects it desires is precisely linked, as relation, to imaginary conditions, to Gestalt conditions, which situate as such, in the relation between living beings, the function of the imaginary. This, of course, not only is absolutely not misrecognized in analytic theory, but it is so universally present that, to limit oneself to notions as narrow as what happens in transference, one must pull two shutters over each ear in order suddenly no longer to think nor hear what is at issue when one speaks of this something absolutely fundamental in analytic expression: identification, which belongs to this register.

Only, it is a matter of not employing it indiscriminately, and of seeing that it is this imaginary through which, in a behavior such as that of any animal couple, in the sexual display, with respect to which each of the individuals finds himself captivated in a situation precisely essentially dual, for which the simple examination of the phenomena shows us that there is established, through the intermediary, through the function of this imaginary relation, a certain kind of identification—momentary no doubt in the animal, linked to the instinctual cycle—which truly makes us realize, in all the actions linked to the moment of the pariade, of the pairing of individuals taken in the cycle of sexual behavior, that always makes appear to us—at least in the species observable on this point and that served as foundation for this elaboration of instinctual behavior—a register of parade.

Parade and pariade are not the same thing, in which we see precisely the subject come into accord in a kind of imaginary struggle all the more striking in that it is always on the slope of combat and creation, but that this imaginary regulation allows most of the time, and in the most striking cases, between adversaries, a kind of regulation at a distance that transforms the struggle into a kind of time attuned.

And that even in what happens at the moment of the pariade, in the actions of struggle between the males, there is, at a given moment, a kind of choice of roles, a recognition of the domination of the adversary, without coming, I will not say to hands, but to claws and teeth or quills, and which makes one of the partners submit, take the passive attitude, submit to the domination of the adversary, withdraw before him, adopt one of the roles, manifestly as a function of the other, as a function of what the other has put forward on the plane of the Gestalt, has taken on the dominant character, and without one being forced to come—of course, it happens—to a struggle leading to the destruction of an adversary; it is already imaginary regulation that ensures a certain choice within a total situation, and that is dyadic, essential, in a relation of being to the image of the other as such.

This is essential to understand something of the imaginary function in man. Because it is from there that one can see that in man it is at once so reduced, so specialized, so centered on what I would call the specular image, and what at once makes the impasses and the function of this imaginary relation. I think I have nonetheless insisted on it sufficiently to be able to recall it to you simply in a few terms. Namely that, if you like, this image of the ego, which by the sole fact that it is an image is an ideal ego that is formed somewhere and that sums up the whole imaginary relation in man, which occurs at a moment and at an epoch when, the functions being unfinished, it presents at once this salutary value, sufficiently expressed in the jubilant assumption of the mirror phenomenon, but which is in relation with a certain deficit of relation to the object, with a certain vital prematuration, with a certain mortifying gap, entirely originary, and that it remains linked to it in its structure.

This function, he will continually find it again as the frame for all his categories, for all his apprehension of the object-world, only through the intermediary of the other. It is in the other that he will always find again this ideal ego, this image of self, and it is from there that the whole dialectic of his relations to the other develops, and that according as the other saturates this image, that is to say fills it, he becomes positively the object of a narcissistic investment, which is that of Verliebtheit.

Recall the example of Werther that I gave you, the encounter with Charlotte at the moment when she has that child in her arms: he falls, in a way, exactly into the narcissistic imago of the young hero of the novel. Or on the contrary, which is exactly the same slope, as frustrating the subject of his ideal and of his own image, and engendering the maximal destructive tension.

It is around this something that, by a hair’s breadth, turns in one direction or the other, that moreover gives the key to the questions FREUD asks himself about the possible and sudden transformation, precisely in Verliebtheit, between love and hatred. It takes only a hair for it to be one or the other. It is around that that the phenomenon of imaginary investment turns, insofar as we see it play a role in transference. What are we going to call this role? It is a pivotal role.

Transference, if it is true that it is established as I tell you: in and through the dimension of speech, includes the revelation of this imaginary relation only once it has reached certain crucial points of the spoken encounter with the other, that is to say with the analyst.

It is insofar as discourse, undone of a certain number of its conventions by the law called that of the fundamental rule, begins to play more or less freely—I mean ‘freely’ with respect to the conventions of ordinary discourse—in a way that precisely allows the subject to be maximally open to this fertile mistake by which the truer speech rejoins the discourse of error.

But it is also insofar as this speech flees this revelation, this fertile mistake, and develops in deceit. I have always underlined it: it is the essential dimension that does not allow us to eliminate the subject as such from the experience, that does not allow us in any case to reduce in objectal terms, that we see manifested—according as the mistake succeeds or does not succeed—the revelation of the points that have not been integrated, have been refused, or to put it better, repressed in the assumption by the subject, and of his history.

It is insofar as the subject comes to terms there and develops in analytic discourse something that is his truth, his integration, his history and his tendencies, that there are holes in this history, that we encounter what? Precisely the points where there occurred the something that was not assumed, that was refused, verworfen or verdrängt:
– verdrängt means that it came at a moment into discourse and that it was rejected,
– verworfen can be quite essential as rejection, originary.
The distinction I indicated to you a little in the allusion to The Wolf Man; I do not want to dwell on it for the moment.

But the phenomenon of transference, insofar as it encounters imaginary crystallization, is insofar, in a way, as it turns around it, as it must reach it, as it is about that, that the subject finds again here [O’] and in the other the totalization of the various accidents that happened here [O] in his history on the imaginary plane, captivations or fixations—as we say—imaginary, which have been unassimilable to the action of speech, to the law of discourse, to the symbolic development of his history.

That is why transference, as FREUD tells us, becomes essentially an obstacle when it is excessive. In the erotic sense, what does it express? Or in the aggressive sense, what does that mean? It means that, if you like, the echoes of discourse—which are distributed in this zone between O and the mirror B—have approached too quickly, in an anticipated way, have too quickly been too near the point O’, for there not to occur at that moment, between O’ and the mirror B, something quite critical, which, as he says, evokes resistance to the maximum, and resistance in the most acute form under which one can see it manifest, that is to say, what is one of the correlatives of too intense transference, namely: silence.

One must also say that if this moment arrives in due time, in opportune time, at the right time, this silence is also a silence that takes on all its value as silence, that is to say not simply negative but from a beyond speech. For I have sufficiently underlined for you what also certain moments of silence in transference represent positively, namely literally the most acute apprehension of the presence of the other as such. I ask you, in the light of these reflections, or considerations, developments, to reread now, when you will have left me for a holiday that I wish you good, those precious little texts of FREUD’s Technical Papers. Reread them,
– and you will see to what extent these texts will take on for you a new, more living sense,
– and you will see these apparent contradictions of the text concerning transference which is at once resistance of transference and motor of analysis,
– you will see how this is understood only in the relation of this dialectic of the imaginary and of the symbolic.

What is to be said? It is quite evident that everything that is uttered is there, mirror A, on the side of the subject. But that what is uttered is heard there in B, on the side of the analyst, and makes itself heard not only for the analyst, but for the subject.

The echo relation of discourse [subject→ analyst→subject] is the same symmetric as the relation of the image with respect to the mirror, that what is at issue and that then takes place on the imaginary plane is something, which I explained to you how one could conceive it, is founded thanks to this model, with respect to small displacements of the mirror, which precisely allow one to complete there, in the other, projected onto the other [O’], what the subject, by definition essentially misrecognizes of his structuring image or image of the ego which is there [O].

No need to redo for you the whole optical apparatus. Those who were not there at the moment when I explained it as the disposition of the optical apparatus, too bad! I believe you were more or less all there… What happens? Something that can be schematized thus: the passage from O to O’, the realization by the subject, the complementation by the subject of the imaginary elements insofar as they have fixed, pointed, I would say ‘capitonné’ his imaginary development, and ‘capitonné’ relates to its expression in the symbolic order, that is to say that at certain points the symbol has not been able to assimilate these imaginary elements insofar as that means that it was traumatic.

This is what happens: what comes there from C to O is that something that the subject assumes in his discourse insofar as he makes it heard by the other. But you see what I did: a curved line from B to O, I brought it there to O: it is an error, for it is always from a point that is there between A and O, whether he knows it or does not know it, and of course much closer to O—that is to say to the unconscious notion of his ego—than any point whatsoever. But precisely that is what is at issue: to know where the spoken assumption of this ego is going to take place. In O’: as he realizes himself in his imaginary O’. If you like, it is there that this little schema can take on for you its full significance, essentially with respect to this register, I hope you are hearing me well, and which will be the conclusion of what I am explaining to you today.

Analysts, not without merit, have set out that the most modern technique of analysis, the one that decks itself out with the title of analysis of resistances, consists in bringing out in the subject’s ego, to single-out: to isolate… the term is BERGLER’s, and cited in an article by BERGLER on the first stage of earliest infancy, to which I had to allude with regard to BALINT, and at that time I gave you the reference… in the subject’s ego a certain number of patterns insofar as they present themselves as defense mechanisms.

Understand clearly that what is involved here is a perversion, properly speaking a radical one, of the notion of defense, as it was introduced in FREUD’s early writings and reintroduced by him at the time of ‘Inhibition, symptom, anxiety’, which is one of FREUD’s most difficult articles, and which have lent themselves to the most misunderstandings. With the help of this operation, what is currently at issue in analysis, under the name of analysis of resistances, or analysis of the ego, is very properly, with regard to this operation—intellectual this time for once—the isolating of a certain number of patterns considered as such, as defense mechanisms of the subject.

And of the subject with respect to what? With respect to the analyst who is there to demonstrate for him their character not as symbolic, but as an obstacle to the revelation of a kind of beyond which moreover is not there only as beyond, for—read FENICHEL—you will see in this regard that everything is equally, can equally be taken under this angle of defense, that if the subject produces for you at a given moment, in the most elaborated form, the expression of tendencies or drives whose sexual or aggressive character is quite avowed, from the sole fact that he tells them to you, one is very capable of seeking as beyond something much more neutral than what the dialectic is there, completely inverted, like Mr Jean COCTEAU’s famous joke: it is just as intelligible to tell someone that if he dreams of an umbrella it is for the sexual reason, as to say that if he saw an eagle armed with the most manifest aggressive intentions rush upon him, or her, it is because he, or she, forgot his umbrella.

In this perspective indeed, since it is a matter of defense for everything that will first be presented, everything can always and legitimately be considered as something that must be elsewhere, something that masks. But by centering analytic intervention under this register of the lifting of patterns, insofar as they hide this beyond, what do we come to?

To this: that in this kind of action there is no other guide, as a normalizing conception of the subject’s behavior, than that of the analyst, that is to say coherent with the analyst’s ego. It will always be the molding of an ego by an ego, without any doubt, by a superior ego as everyone knows; the analyst’s ego is no small thing!

But this is so much not a small thing that it is absolutely avowed. Namely that more than one author—read NUNBERG—this is nothing other than that: the whole conception that NUNBERG has of the function of the[…] as being the essential spring of treatment, that is to say coherent with a good will of the subject’s ego that must become the analyst’s ally.

What does that mean? Simply that the subject’s new ego is the analyst’s ego. And Mr HOFFER is there to tell us that the normal end of treatment is identification with the analyst’s ego. Do you not see that it is insofar as precisely everything has been centered on this realization of the imaginary, and simply that we arrive at this end of which moreover BALINT gives us a moving description, within the subject’s intimate lived experience, between this reintegration not to the ideal ego but of the ego ideal, insofar as it is precisely this spoken assumption of the ego as such that is the end of analysis.

That the subject enters into this semi-maniac state that BALINT depicts for us, in this kind of sublime letting-go, freedom of a narcissistic image through this world, for which one really must leave him a little time to recover, so that he may find by himself again the paths of common sense. Do you not see that everything is precisely in this?

And moreover this is what FREUD explains to us, precisely in a well-tempered maintenance, linked to essentially temporary functions, in a maintenance of this turning dialectic, which makes what is in O pass into O’, and what is between O’ and B there into O, which must not bring it in a concentrated way to this point O, that is to say coherent without progress of the subject in his being, but into a series of O1, O2, O3, etc., anything you like, which are distributed in a certain way between O and A.

For the subject, in the symbolic domain, and which is organized properly speaking in histories and in avowals in the first person and in a certain reference with something that is here, and which can only be a progress in the very order of fundamental symbolic relations, where man finds his place, that is to say in a resolution of the stoppages or inhibitions that constitute the superego, in a fuller reintegration of the law of the whole of symbolic systems, within which the subject is situated.

It is, in other words, in what moreover has always been said in a more or less confused way, but that one senses well because every analyst can only see it in his experience, it is in a certain spreading of the time to understand… those who attended my seminar on The Wolf Man see there to what reference I allude. I cannot linger on it too much today, but I reintroduce it here, this ‘time to understand’… this ‘time to understand’ that you find again in FREUD’s Technical Papers with regard to the Durcharbeiten.

Does that mean that it is something of the order of a kind of psychological wearing-down? Is it something, as I also said in what I wrote on empty speech and full speech, that is of the order of discourse, insofar as work? Yes, without any doubt, since it is insofar as this discourse continues long enough to appear entirely caught in the parenthesis of an ego construction that it can suddenly come to be resolved in the one for whom it came, that is to say indeed for the master. That is to say at the same time to fall into its own internal value, and to appear only as a work. But what is there further and behind that? Essentially this that I have only to approach, to broach, to make glimpsed this year. That is to say this fundamental perspective that the concept is time. And in this sense that is why one can say that transference is the very concept of analysis, because it is also the time of analysis. Are you with me?

Octave MANNONI- Not quite, at the end.

LACAN

It is exactly the measure of the time necessary for what the so-called analysis of resistances gives to the subject in an anticipated, premature way, always too hurried, by unveiling for him what we were calling earlier, referring to a good author, the ego patterns, the defenses, the concealments.

Insofar as experience shows us that such an analysis, as FREUD reports it, in a precise passage of the Technical Papers, does not for all that make the subject take one step further—FREUD says: in that case, one must wait—if one must wait, it is extremely the measure of the time necessary for the subject to realize the dimension at issue on the plane of the symbol, that is to say to make of the thing lived in analysis, in this kind of pursuit, of scuffle, or of embrace, that the analysis of resistances carries out, to bring out from that the proper duration of certain of these repetition automatisms, what gives them in a way symbolic value, that they take on the temporal dimension, because it is[…] to the conceptual dimension.

Octave MANNONI

I think it is a concrete problem. For example, there are obsessives whose life is a waiting. They make analysis another waiting. And it is precisely that that I would like to see: why this waiting of analysis reproduces in a certain way the waiting in life and changes it?

LACAN

Yes, perfectly. But that is the same thing as what I was being asked; I was being asked about the Dora case. On that point, if you were there last year at what I developed on the subject of The Rat Man, you were able to realize that precisely I developed its dialectic for you around the relation of the master and the slave.

What does the obsessive wait for, precisely? The death of the master. And what use is this waiting to him? It is the interposition that there is between him and death. It is, this waiting, what—for him always presents itself like that—will go beyond the death of the master.

You find this structure in all its forms: when the master is dead, everything will begin. He is right: the slave can quite rightly play on this waiting. And if I may say so, that is indeed why, to take up a word that is attributed to Tristan BERNARD, on the day they arrested him to go to the camp of Dantzig: ‘Up to now in anguish, now we are going to live in hope.’

The master, let us say it clearly, is in a much more[…] with respect to death. The master, in the pure state, can be in a desperate position. He has nothing else to wait for but death, since he has nothing to wait for from the death of his slave, except a few inconveniences. But on the other hand, the slave has much to wait for from the death of the master, which he believes, because it has not yet arrived… for beyond the death of the master he will indeed have to confront—like every fully realized being in the Heideggerian sense—he will have to confront death and assume his ‘being-toward-death’. But precisely the obsessive does not assume his being-toward-death; he is reprieved. And that is what one must show him. It is very precisely that, this function of the image of the master as such.

Octave MANNONI- Who is the analyst.

LACAN

Of course, who is incarnated in the analyst. It is the proper structure of the analysis of the obsessional world. There is an excellent example. It is precisely in the outlines of movement that must develop in a temporal dimension, the outlines of movement toward the exit, insofar as certain scansions, a certain timing in the imaginary outlines toward the exit, out of this prison of the master, has been realized a certain number of times, that the obsessive can realize the concept of his obsessions, that is to say what they signify.

We find there, for example, the strict necessity of a certain number of scansions of this kind that could be, if we knew how to study these cases in a correct way, that there are numerical signs in each case of obsession. It is exactly the same as[…] the famous example of the three discs, and insofar as ‘the subject, in thinking the thought of the other, sees in the other the image and the outline of the same movements as himself’, it is that which allows him to reduce the obstacle to the unity of a same movement, the signification of what is at issue each time that the other is exactly the same as him, namely that there is no master other than precisely the absolute master, death.

But he needs a certain time to see that. Because he is far too happy to be a slave, like everyone.

[Distribution of elephant figurines]

End of the seminar 1953-54