Lacan and Levi-Strauss or Freud's Return 1951-1957

LACAN AND LEVI-STRAUSS OR THE RETURN TO FRE UD (195 1- 1957)

LACAN AND LEVI-STRAUSS OR THE RETURN TO FREUD (1951-1957)

Markos Zafiropoulos Translated by j ohn Holl and

Published in 2010 by Karnac Books Ltd 118 Finchley Road london NW3 SHT Copyright© 2010 by Markos Zafiropoulos Originally published as Lacau et Levi-S/muss o11le reto11r i1 Freud, 1951-1957 Presses Universitaires de France 2003

Liberti • £galiti • Fraterniti

REPUBLIQUE FRAN

me to be indispensable if we are to situate our field and even simply to re-find ourselves in it (Seminar IV). In the conclusion of this work, by following Althusser, I shall interpret the repression of Levi-Strauss' importance by readers of Lacan. These readers proffer to us a doxn that idealizes Lacan's philosophical references excessively; one of the effects of the latter is to "set aside"-in the sense of a Verdriingung the contribution of the social sciences to Lacan's teaching, his speech and his desire.

CHAPTER ON E

The transcendence of the imaginary by the symbolic or the mirror stage and the symboli c function

s we shall see later, we can agree with Lacan that his return to Freud was publicly inaugurated by his Presentation on Transference, which was given at the congress of Romancespeaking psychoanalysts in 1951, while he was s till a member of the SPP and the IPA. This presentation is the first of the readings that Lacan will give of Freud's case histories between 1951 and 1957. Here he examines the case of Dora, the young Viennese woman of 18, who was divided between her perception of herself- which was on the male side- and her place as a woman, which she owed to the automatism of the symbolic fw1ction that determined the group to which she belonged. In d iscussing this case, Lacan immediately stresses the epistemological axis that orients his return to Freud. He does so in order to account for the way in which the subject is d ivided between the imaginary register, which fotmds her first identifications-those of the mirror stage-and the symbolic. In the latter register, Lacan locates the Oedipus complex and, more generally, the symbolic hmction, which he borrows from Frencl1 anthropology and which includes this complex. This epistemological axis, in1aginary-symbolic, is to a large extent co-extensive with the one that had oriented his research 17

A

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LACAN AN D l~V1·STRAUSS O R THE RETU RN TO FREUD ( 195 1- 1957>

during his Durkheimian period, when he raised the father to the level of a familial operator, one who was able to extract the child from the imaginary captu re; through his intervention, the child ceases to be grasped by the matemal imago (the weaning complex) and then by the brother (the intmsion complex). During the retum to Freud, w hat goes beyond and organizes the in1aginary register are the mles of the symbolic function, rather than the actual father. In discussing the structuring of the tmconscious subjectand th us of its symptoms-Lacan now rejects Durkheim's laws and adopts, instead, the laws of speech and language, w here the symbolic organization of societies, and thus of the family, is located; he adopts them in a structural form that had been completely recast by Claude Levi-Strauss who, since his return to France from the United States, and since his 1947 thesis, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, had thoroughly tumed the social sciences upside do\Vll. We can consider the return to Freud as a moment of mutation or of metaphor, one that, in terms of Lacan's clinic, made Levi-Strauss' version of the mles of the symbolic ftmction prevail over Durkheim's version of family life. This is precisely the subject of our research: Lacan's theoretical presuppositions, the consequences that they had on his return to Freud, and the metamorphosis of Lacan's work. As we shall see, it is in his return to Freud that Lacan situates the cause- in the strong sense of the term-of the painful experiences that led him, on 16 June 1953, to resign from his position as president of the SPP. As early as 1951, Lacan claims that something in Freud's speech, by returning in his own mouth, aroused the fear of the other practitioners: Whereas Freud assumed responsibility for showing us that there are illnesses that speak (tuilike Hesiod, for whom the illnesses sent by Zeus come over men in silence) and for making us hear the truth of what they say, it seems that this truth inspires more fear in the practitioners who perpetuate this technique as its relation to a historical moment and an institutional crisis becomes clearer (Presen/aliOif 0 11 Transference, p. 177).

Despite this sense of isolation, which would soon make his very existence itself w1bearable to the group, Lacan continued his reading of Freud's text w ithin the framework of the SPP w1til his resignation in 1953.

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Next, at Sa inte-Anne, in the department of his friend Jean Delay••, Lacan would contin ue " in o p position to everyone" his return to Freud by a nalysing Freud's technical papers. It is w ith this seminar that we shall begin to analyse Lacan's work, since the sessions of 1953-1954 were published in 1975 as Book I of the seminar, under a title that has been translated into English as Freud's Technical Papers. We shall respect Lacan's wish to count this as the first of his 24 seminars, even if, as we have said, his return to Freud dates from 1951. We are going to begin the first part of o ur project by reading Seminar I, which Lacan began in a utumn 1953, after his resignatio n from the SPP: after the test that made him, in his own words, a psychoanalyst who was endowed w ith a "kind of faith" . This faith was based particularly on the fact that "I know better and better what it is mine to say about an experience w hich I have only these last years been able to recognize and solely thereby to master." Because of this, he has become "a man more convinced of his duties and his d estiny" ,.. It is in a state of certainty that Lacan begins his new read ings of Freud's texts. Thus Lacan, w hose technique had led him to be thrown out of Freud's association, chose to continue his work by giving a commentary on Freud's papers on technique, a commentary that led him to the heart of the psychoanalytic clinic, and which had provided the "coord inates" of his offence and the motives for the accusations brought aga inst him. We are now going to see what this reading of Freud's technical papers owes to a renewal of the questioning that had begtm with his "d iscovery" of the mirror stage (1936). He will now examine how the structuring of the tmconscious subject takes place at the conjtmction between the imaginary and the symbolic. What is new for La can is not such q uestioning itself, but rather his response to the radical changes brought abo ut by the use of the symbolic function, which he had just encountered in the recent work of Levi-Strauss. Returning to Freud's " Jean Delay (1907-1987), a French psychian·ist and student of Pierre Janet. He was

ana.lysed by Edouard Pichon, a friend ot Jacques Lacan's. He became a member of

the Acndrmie frnnrnise in 1959 .1nd was the pre-eminent representative of the postwar school of biological psychiatry. He was the author of Tile Youth of A11rlr

The Post-Freudians' resistance to Freud Defence of the ego and resistance

In the 1950s, a consensus seemed to exist in the analytic field: if resistance in analytic experience is not equivalent to the system of ego defence, there is a sort of elective affinity between the notions of ego defence-including repression- and of the resistance to psychoanalysis, since this resistance supposedly uses the same mecl1anisms as the ego's defence.29 For this reason, everyone understood the importance of the notion of resistance in Freud's work as well as in Freudian technique. This question is also present in La can's seminar and according to several participants-including a certain Monsieur Z. (we do not know why he has lost his identity in the published version of the seminar); according to him, it was Freud's authoritarian personality that motivated the d iscovery of the notion of resistance, because Freud could not bear it when his patients resisted his treatment. Unlike Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, who argued that Freud's liberal feelings led to the d iscovery of resistances, M. Z. thinks that it can be explained by Freud's authoritarianism. Lacan disagrees with M. Z. and argues that Freud was much less authoritarian than his teachers-such as Charcot, for example--and that it is precisely because he gave up suggestion and hypnosis that he discovered resis tance, both as an obstacle to the analytic work and as a way to gain access to the process of repression. In other words, according to Lacan, resistance appeared to Freud when it no longer quite functioned; when it had already become degraded, as we would say in order to rem ain within the logic of Lacan's epistemology"'. Yet what must be w1derstood is that according to Lacan, Freud did not sit uate the d rama of resistance between the analyst's and the analysand's egos in the hie et 111mc of the session, as some of his inheritors seem to have been willing to do. Lacan comments in these terms on Margaret Little's article on cow1ter-transference.

See the articles UResistance" and uoetence .Mechanisms" in Jean Laplanche and ). B. Pon talis, The Language of Psyclroanalysis, pp. 394-397, 109-111. "' On the Lacanian epistemology ot discovery throug h degradation, see Lacnn et les sciences sodnles. ::0.

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How does [the analyst] act? What are the implications of what he does? For the authors in question, for Margaret Little, nothing else matters but the recognition by the subject, hie et mmc, of the intentions of his discourse. And his intentions only ever have value in their implications hie et nunc, in the immediate exchange. The subject may well describe himself taking on the grocer or the hairdresser-in fact, he is bawling out the person he's talking to, that is to say the analyst. There is some truth in that (Seminar /, p. 30). The analyst here believes himself authorised to offer what l will call an interpretation from ego to ego, or from equa l to equa l-allow me the play on words-in other words, an interpretation whose foundation and mechanism cannot in any way be distinguished from that of projection (Seminar I, p. 32). It is best to abstain from offering this interpretation of the defence, which I will call from ego to ego, whatever value it may eventually have. In the interpretation of defences, there should always be at least a third term (Seminar/, p. 33). Thus the analysis of resis tances organizes-but in a way that misses the point- the activity of Anglo-American analysts, who interpret the s peech of their analysands in terms of what is happening in the session and of the dual relation between ana lysand and analyst. Aimie Reich, Arma Freud, Fenichel and the others consider the ego as the individual operator that would be both the ana lyst's only interlocutor and also as wha t defends itself aga inst interpreta tions; it slows down the p rocess of awakening to consciousness. This is the source of Anna Freud's interest in the defence mechanisms and the title of her book, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (1936). The Freud ian imperative to weaken resistance led Anglo-American analysts to put too m uch of an accent on the place of the ego in the treatment and therefore on the influence of their own person, thus ma king the experience an imaginary enclosure, where two egos

would battle each other.' 1 Apart from the "fort\mate" case in which "'The resistance of the ego, like the logical necessity of analysing this obstacle, is indicated in these terms by Anna Freud: ''111e patient transgresses the fundamental rule

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LACAN AND l~V1·STRAUSS OR THE RETURN TO FREUD ( 19 5 1- 19 57>

the ego makes common cause with the analyst, Aru;a Freud distinguishes two attitudes of the ego in regard to the analyst: The ego is antagonistic to the ru;alysis, in that it is unreliable and biased in its self-observation .... Finally, the ego is itself the object of analysis, in that the defensive operations in which it is perpetually engaged are carried on w;consciously .... Since it is the aim of the ru;alytic method to enable ideational representatives of repressed instincts to enter consciousness ... the ego's defensive operations against such representatives automatically assume the character of active resistance to analysis. And since, further, the analyst uses his perso11nl influence (my emphasis) to secure the observance of the fundamental rule which enables such ideas to emerge in the patient's free associations, the defense set up by the ego against the instincts takes the form of direct opposition to the analyst himself (pp. 22-31). The bond wi th the practitioner therefore leads back into this logic; the defence against the drive and w hat is at stake in the treatment play their roles within a transferential duality in which the analyst must use. the influence of his person . Now, as La can reminds us,Freud-asearly as in his Studieso11 Hysteria (which Didier Anzieu" outlined in the sessions of Lacan's seminar on 20 and 27 January 1954), and then in his metapsychological essays--indicates "that the strength of the resistance is inversely of analysis, or, as we say, he puts up 'resistances.' l11is means that the inroad o f the id into the ego has g iven place to a counterattack by the ego upon the id. Theobsenrer's attention is now diverted from the associations to the resistance, i.e. from the content of the id to the activity of the ego" (p. 14). ~ Didier Anzieu (1923-1999) received his agregatiou in philosophy in 1948, moved towa rd psychology and became a teacher (assistant) at ~1e Sorbonne in 1951. The son of Marguerite Anzieu, who was the original ot "Aimee", whose case Lacan presented in his medical thesis "De In psyclwse paranotnque dnus ses rapports avec In persomwlitf' ("On paranoiac psychosis in its relation to personality"). He undertook a first analysis with Lacan which he ended in 1953. He joined the Societi frauraise de psycltmralyse in which he worked until1963, the date ,;t which he helped set up the As:;ocinlio/1 de 1»y· clranalyse de France (APF) and separated from Lacan. A specialist in the psychoanalytic theory of groups, he published numerous works on literary creation (Pascal, Beckett) and on artistic creation (B..1con).

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proportional to one's d istance from the repressed centre" (Seminar I, p. 22). Resistance would therefore grow "the closer the subject comes to a discourse which would be the ultimate one, the right one, but one which he absolutely refuses" (Seminar /, p. 22). It is finally a "succession of phonemes" (Seminar/, p. 22) tha t is refused because it threa tens to reveal the "mystery", tha t is, the unconscious truth of which the ana lysa nd wants to know nothing. Resista nce, more than being the fact of opposition in the dual relationoftransference, would find a place in the field of language, and it is when the patient's d iscourse begins to speak in a genuine way that resistance manifests itself. This is almost a paraphrase of the Freud of Studies on Hysteria, who presented the psychic material of this neurosis as an edi fice s tructured accord ing to the logic of a kernel of traumatic memories enveloped by other memories or memory s trata; all of these are classified according to the set of themes constituting the kernel, w hich both s tructures and is s tructured by symptomatic formations. Let us listen to Freud: It was as though we were examining a dossier that had been kept in good order .... I have described such groupings of simi-

lar memories into collections arranged in linear sequences (like a file of documents, a packet, etc.) as constituting 'themes'. These themes exhibit a second kind of arrangement. Each of them is-1 can not express it in any other way- stratified concentrically round the pathogenic nucleus. It is not hard to say what produces this stratification, what diminishing or increasing magnitude is the basis of this arrangement. The contents of each particular stratum are characterized by an equal degree of resistance, and that degree increases in proportion as the strata are nearer to the nucleus .... The deeper we go the more difficult it becomes for the emerging memories to be recognized, till near the nucleus we come upon memories which the patient disavows even in reproducing them." Here, Lacan is certainly following d irectly in Freud's path. ~ Joseph

Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies ou Hysteria, pp 288-289.

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Resistance and d iscourse

order to know where it is happening loti rase passe), what the material, biological foundation is, Freud quite straightforwardly takes the discourse to be a reality in its own right, a reality which is there, a sheaf, a bundle of proofs .... The notion of a material support of speech, singled out as such, was not yet available to Freud. Today, he would have taken the succession of phonemes which make up a part of the subject's discourse as the basis of his metaphor. He would say that one encounters greater and greater resistance the closer the subject comes to a discourse which would be the ultimate one, the right one, but which he absolutely refuses (Seminar /, p. 22). [n

Lacan's reading of Freud th us radicalizes the way in which d iscourse as such is taken into account." Lacan is led by the objectthe unconscious and translation as a mistmnslation, according to the Freud of 1896--to use the metaphor of linguistics. And it is by approaching the pathogenic kemel of signification that resistance is experienced. From that point on, the analysis of d iscourse has had to find its place in analytic experience; it must obv iously go beyond analyses in biological tenns, but also go beyond Anglo-American ego analysis. For Lacan, w hat resists is not the ego of the patient, which the person of the analyst must influence, but the statement [e11once) of a d iscourse that is in close proximity w ith unconscious truth. The tmconscious or its formations are thus conceived as the set of phonemes that must be sought through the analysand's s peech. It is precisely because the talking cure is homogeneous with the repressed material (phonemes) that it can be effective. According to Lacan, the subject of the repressed- the subject of the unconscious- is therefore to be brought forth through speech and this

~

Whereas as early as the Jetter to Fliess of 6 December 1896, Freud, in d etaching himself (at least in part) from the language of the physiology of nerves- as tl1e trans-

lator of this letter notes-

and of everything else, that is to say of the whole of his system (Seminar/, pp. 13-14). Analysis progresses by following the threads of speech, by reading and translating the cryptogram ("something written in secret characters", according to U ttn') represented by w hat the subject possesses of his system- his archives. Lacan, as a reader of Freud, therefore describes the (unconscious) subject as resembling a cryptogram that must be read and translated. The closer the reading of this cryptogram approaches to the "unconscious treasure," the stronger the resistance becomes. Let me emphasize that reading and translation are terms connected with work on the letter and come from Freud himself. 1/Ve can also see that the "unconscious" is situated in tenns of an historical reconstruction of the past and of a system of rewriting the subject: a rewriting of her / himself and of the situations in which s/ he is placed (see Fliess Letters, pp. 207- 215). In opposition to the Anglo-American versions of analysis, which give the ego a key position, Lacan highlights both the discovery of the systems of rewriting historical situations and the deciphering of the phonemic groups that has led to them. Likewise, in reading Freud, he "reinvents" the status of the analyst as both translator and reader of the linguistic intersections from which unconscious subjectivity and its troubles can be deduced: Can one claim that, in our discourse, right now, the ego is the master of everything that these words harbour? The symbolic system is extraordinarily intricate, marked as it is by this Verscii/ungeniieit, property of criss-crossing, which the translation of the papers on teclmique has rendered as complexity, which is, and how, much too weak. Verscii/rmgeniieit designates linguistic criss-crossing (Seminar/, pp. 53-54). For Lacan, the source of authority in analytic experience is therefore not the analyst's influence, which would aim at diminishing the patient's hostility, but rather the linguistic capacities of a practitioner

who is able to read the signifiers-the phonemes-of the symptom. Let us recall that as early as the Rome Report- which we shall ana lyse in detaii- Lacan stated clearly that the symptom is organized in terms of signifiers and that Freud reads it in these terms:

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A symptom here is the signifier of a signified that has been repressed from the subject's consciousness .... It was by deciphering this speech that Freud rediscovered the first language of symbols, still alive in the sufferings of civilized man (Das Unbehngen in der Kultur (Civilization nud Its Discontents]). Hieroglyphics of hysteria, blazons of phobia, and labyrinths of Zwangsneurose (obsessional neurosis] (Ecrits, p. 232). What the analyst must therefore know is not how to red uce resistance by intimidating or seducing the analysand, or by pushing him/ her to an ego identification; instead, s/ he must translate and read what the subject says, for the solution to the unconscious rebus of the cryptogram is not to be fotmd in the goodwill of the patient's ego, which is always overwhelmed by the meaning of the words that lead to the heart of this cryptogram. For the Freudian orientation, as Lacan recalls, the subject is that of a symbolic system that must be reconstmcted; it is also the subject of historic situations that are to be deciphered in the cryptogram, which encloses the set of phonemes that forms the kernel of the truth of repressed d esire, which is what most resists unveiling. Resistance to analysis emanates from this kernel of phonemes and if one lets it speak, it has some chance of emerging into consciousness. In the present case, the analyst's authoritarian use of suggestion to make the ego pass from the patient's into the analyst's camp carmot bring this phonemic set to light.

Second stage Lacan also recalls Freud's refusal of suggestion on another occasion in his seminar: on 10 February 1954, after he had asked Jean Hyppolite" to give a commentary on Freud's 1925 article, Die Vemeinung [translated under the title "Negation"], a text that opened up the myth of the genesis of language for the subject. Before the analysis of this text, which Hyppolite translates into French as "dtilufgntion", rather than the more customary term, "negation", Lacan reminds the

~ jean Hyppolite (1907- 1968), a philosophe r and Hegel specialist, the French translator of Tht, Phenomenology of Spirit. He was the professor o f, among others, Jean l.aplanche and Michel Foucault.

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audience of the help that Hyppolite had given, for a brief moment, several sessions earlier to another participant (Monsieur Z.), w ho had explained the discovery of resistance by referring to Freud's authoritarian character. Lacan remembers that what was at issue, if you remember, was to find out what was Freud's basic, intentional attitude with respect to the patient, when he claimed to have substituted the analysis of resistances by speech for the subjugation that operates through suggestion or through hypnosis. I showed myself to be extremely guarded on the question of knowing if there were at this point signs of combativeness in Freud, indeed of domil1ation, vestiges of an ambitious style which we might see betrayed in his youth (Semi11nr l, p. 56). By returning to this point a second time, Lacan shows how important it is for him. Hyppolite then d istances himself from Monsieur Z. What foUows is the philosopher's exp osition of the subjective genesis of language, a development that is judiciously entitled, il1 the published version of the seminar, "Discourse analysis and ego analysis". Lacan reminds his listeners that one must choose between the rigorous deciphering of signifiers and the analysis of the ego. This choice has essential implications on the level of the relation with the other both in groups and the treatment. And this is w hat il1terests Lacan. A nna Freud's fault

Thus it is rather curious to notice that the seminar progresses through a critica l analysis of a text by Alma Freud, a text that recounts a part of a treatment in w hich she placed herself il1 an impasse by "approach [ing] the material from the perspective of the d ual relation between the patient and herself" (Seminar I, p. 64). For Lacan, "She should have d istinguished between the d ual il1terpretation, in which the analyst enters il1to an ego to ego rivalry with the analysand, and the interpretation w hich moves forward in the direction of the symbolic structuril1g of the s ubject, w hich is to be located beyond the present structure of this ego" (Semina.r I, p . 65). Actu aUy, A1m a Freud "confesses" il1 her text that she had permitted herself

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to become entangled with the analytic situation to the point that it allows the emergence in the patient of the memory of "her [dead] father, whom she had loved dearly" (Mechanisms of Defense, p. 37; quoted in Seminar I, p. 64), in Anna Freud's own words. The s ituation was unblocked, if we are to believe Am1a Freud, by reintroducing the father in the narrative of the analysand's history, but also-let us add- in the transference: in the analytic situation between the two rival daughters, Arma Freud and her patient. This reintroduction of the dead father into Freudian experience is--let me repeat this- Lacan's very project- the return to and of Freud-and, from this perspective, he even emphasizes the limitations of Freud's own daughter's practice. To focus our attention on a fault concerning the dead father in the daughter's practice may seem to the reader to be a mere detail in relation to the importance of the theoretical continents that have been approached, but in this case, we are following Freudian epistemology for this example places the analyst on the trail of the "thing itself". If we follow the paths of the transference from Freud to Lacan, lacan's critical reminder of the fault that leads the daughter astray becomes part of the way that he expresses his own transference to Freud. This, at least, is my hypothesis: reintroducing the dead father involves reintroducing not the father's person, but rather his symbolic value, his speech, and his desire: those of Freud the analyst. The reminder of the dead father

In the seminar, lacan reads and listens to Atma Freud. Arma Freud writes that "Historically this mode of defense by means of ridicule and scorn was explained by her identification of herself with her dead father, who used to try to train the little girl in self-control by making mocking remarks w hen she gave way to some emotional outburst. The method had become stereotyped through her memory of her father, w hom she had loved dearly" (Mechanisms of Defense, p. 37; quoted in Seminar I, p. 64}. 36 lacan adds that Am1a Freud interpreted the patient's aggressiveness toward her as a reproduction, in transference, of the s ituation that the patient had experienced earlier. Anna Freud's analysis of this case can be found in Tlte Ego nnd tlu.' Meclmnisms of Defense, pp. 35-38.

!0>

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LACAN AND l~V1·STRAUSS OR THE RETURN TO FREUD ( 195 1- 19 57>

He judges that while this is not false, it leaves out what has stntctured the situation historically and has passed into the tmconscious. According to Lacan, reintroducing the identification with the dead father allows the treatment to progress because it opens up a point of view on the subject's tmconscious structure and its symbolic organization; this reintroduction constitutes ipso facto the way out of this stagnation in the dual register of the imaginary." What is at stake, then, Lacan says, is know ing what kind of consent opens the pact and allows the analysis to progress. From the first encounter, the analyst is responsible for resistance, for if he engages the patient in a dual relation, he ensures the renewal of repression. In such a case, the pact would not be Freudian. If, on the other hand, the analyst takes Freud's desire upon himself, he will commit himself to a read ing of the unconscious material of which he himself knows nothing, since "we are ignorant of the symbolic constellation dwelling in the subject's unconscious" (Seminar /, p. 65). It is this symbolic cons tellation, Lacan concludes, that forms what is at stake in these "s tructured, organised, complex situ ations. Freud gave us the first model of it, its standard, in the Oedipus complex" (Seminar/, p. 65). Alm a Freud, in forgetting the place of the dead father when she directs the treatment, appears, from this perspective, to have made a double mistake (which is really only one): • •

s:

A mistake against the progress of her patient's analysis because it does not provide the key to her Oedipal organization A mistake against her own father, for as analyst and as daughter, she is forgetting, on this occasion, to "harmonize her language with his own ", according to the logic required by the super-ego, which Lacan had mentioned earlier and according to which the "you"-

materials and stages of the living being. With both shamanism and anaJysis..

It would be a matter ... of stimulating an organic transformation which would consist essentially in a structural reorganization, by inducing the patient intensively to live out a myth~ither perceived or created by him-whose structure would be, at the unconscious level, analogous to the structure whose genesis is sought precisely in this "inductive property", by which formally homologous structures, built out of different materials at different levels of life-organic processes, unconscious mind, rational thought-are related to one another (Structurnl Arrthropology, p. 201). Symbolic effectiveness can be deduced from the homology between structures that organize the living being and this principle of induction cormects them with each other. This is the source not only of the power of symbolic interp retation of every symbolic manipulation and symbolic invention, but also of the scientific weight that, surprisingly, he gives to Rimbaud's ideal. "Poetic metaphor provides a familiar example of this inductive process, but as a rule it does not transcend the LUKonscious level. Thus we note the significance of Rimbaud's intu ition that metaphor can change the world" (Structurnl Anthropology, pp. 201-202). This inductive value gives power and s tat us to symbolic effectiveness and enables psychoanalytic interpreta tion to be rethought; it revises the symbolic organiza tion from which the subject and its symptoms are deduced, and also gives us a model for thinking the organic modifica tions that can be d educed from a symbolic event. It can also help us rethink the opposi te movement, from the organism to the symbolic. U.vi-Strauss confirms the heuristic value of bringing the organic and the symbolic closer together and the speci ficity of the shamanistic and analytic interpreta tion and calls for a new reversa l in psychoana lysis. This reversal is d ialectical and aims a t a decisive point: the fundamental concept of the

"unconscious": The comparison with psychoanalysis has allowed us to shed ligh t on some aspects of shamanistic curing. Conversely,

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it is not improbable that the stud y of shamanism may one day serve to elucidate obscure points of Freudian theory. We are thinking specifically of the concepts of myth and the unconscious.

We saw that the only difference between the two methods that would outlive the discovery of a physiological substratum of neurosis concerns the origin of the myth, which in the one case is recovered as an individual tmrsury (my emplrnsis) and in the other case is received from collective tradition (Structuml Arrthropology, p. 202)." Levi-Strauss is the refore aiming a t a genuine theory o f the un conscious and its fo rmations, a theory that w ill cla rify th e sta tus of the myth and the symptom as a tre asury. What d oes this treasury consist o f? Situated in the Other of structure, and the re fo re to be fo und in the n e urotic, it is the treasury of the signifier" as Lacan w ill la ter ca ll it. Whom, then, is U .v i-Stra uss addressing in this text? He is addressing both e tlmologists and ps ychoanalysts, since with his next ste p, he push es aside the resistance o f analysts who would object to his theory by a rguing fo r the real histo ry o f the traumas e ncounte red by their patients. But we should ask ourselves whether the therapeutic value of the cure depends on the actual character of remembered si tuations, o r whether the trauma tizi ng power of those situa tions stems from the fact tha t a t the moment when they appear, the subject experiences them immed ia tely as living myth. By this we mean tha t the traumatizing power of any si tuation can not result from its intrinsic features b ut must, rather, result from the capacity of certain events, appearing within an appropria te psychological, historical, and socia l context, to induce an e motiona l crysta llization which is

Translation altered. I have rendered Levi-Strauss' word, ''tresor'' as "h·easury," instead o f as "possession", whidl was Jacobson's and Grundfest Schoepf's original ~

translation. "' "This other is essentially a symbolic place. The Other is precisely a p lace of the treasury/ let us say of the phrases, even of the received ideas without which the joke cannot take on its value and its scope." Lacan, l.J! semiuaire livrr V: les formations de l'inconscient, pp. 116-117.

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mou lded by a pre-existing structure. In rela tion to the event or anecdote, these structures- or, more accurately, these structural laws-are truly atemporal .... These structures as an aggrega te form what we call the unconscious (Structurnl Anthropology, p. 202). Lacan was obviously convinced by this argument, s ince on 24 May I961-more than ten years later- he repeated very precisely LeviStrauss' distinction between myth and trauma, w hich the theory of the unconscious depends on. What does Lacan say in 1961? Myths are developed figures that can be brought back, not to language, but to the implication of a subject caught up in language-and to complicate the matter, in the play of speech. From the subject's relations with any signifier whatsoever, ligures develop with points of intersection, which are, for example, those that I tried to depict in the graph .... This figure, this graph, these reference points, and also attention to the facts allow us to reconcile the (my emphasis) true function of what trauma is with our experience of development. Isn't trauma simply something that erupts at a moment, and breaks up a structure that has been imagined to be total, since this is what certain people have used the notion of narcissism for? Trauma is that certain events come to be situated at a certain place in this structure. And in occupying it, they take on the signifying value that is attached to it in a particular subject. This is what gives an event a traumatic value. This is the reason for our interest in returning to the experience of myth." This return will allow Lacan in 1961 to put into a new perspective a series of historically interlocked myths that have, he thinks, presided over the unconscious fates of people in the West and have provided symbolic coordinates for their symptoms: Oedipus, Hamlet, then CJaudel's Co(afontaine trilogy, a work that is dominated by the h umiliated father. In Lncan et les sciences sociales, I presented the humiliated father as a d egraded figure of the paternal hmction, "" Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire livre VJJJ : le transfert. p. 380.

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a figure of the paternal fw1ction, a figure that gives rise to the "great contemporary neurosis," that Lacan had diagnosed in 1938. With The Effectiveness of Symbols, Levi-Strauss produces a stmcturalist definition of the unconscious, one that for both him and Lacan goes beyond anything related to a psychological definition of the unconscious and of what is ineffable in it. In relation to this definition, Levi-Strauss examines what he has learned from Freud and gives a radical critique of it."' Let us now move to the end of the ar ticle in order to see how Lacan will reread Freud by means of Levi-Strauss' own criticisms. These passages w ill help us understand w hat methodological tools the latter 's work has provided him with on a crucial point: the theory of the unconscious. Levi-Strauss' unconscious and Freud's: The social and the individual

To get a sense of how Levi-Strauss' theory of the unconscious served Lacan as a tool for reading Freud, we must grasp how the former rejects what he sees as ineffable in Freud's theory, in order to substitute for it the rules of the symbolic function as an operator for producing the w1eonscious. First, let us listen to Lev i-Strauss as he defines the unconscious in 1949: The unconscious ceases to be the ultimate haven of individual peculiarities-the repository of a unique history which makes each of us an irreplaceable being. It is reducible to a functionthe symbolic function, which no doubt is specifically human, and which is carried out according to the same laws among aU men, and actually corresponds to the aggregate of these laws (pp. 202- 203). Lacan, four years later, confirms that Nothing other than this is at stake in analysis- recognising what function the subject takes on in the order of the symbolic

On this point, see Alain Delrieu, U vi-Slrauss, leeleur de Freud: le droit, l'inceste, le pt!re ef /'eclrange des femmes (1999).

:u

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relations which covers the entire field of human relations (Seminar I, p. 67), and

Consider [tile snbject] in its singuU!rity, what does that mean? That means essentially that, for him, the interest, the essence, the basis, the dimension proper to analysis is the reintegration by the subject of his history right up to the furthermost perceptible limits, that is to say into a dimension that goes well beyond the limits of the individual .... What reveals this dimension is the accent that Freud puts in each case on those points that it is essential to overcome by means of the technique and which are wha t I will call the bearings [situations] of the history (Seminar /, p. 12). In the Lacan of 1953-1954 and the Levi-Strauss of 1949, th e unconscious goes beyond the history of the indiv idual. It is the symbolic structures that organize the un conscious formations an d provide a traumatic character, if necessary, to the situations that the individual en cow1ters. Levi-Strauss then indicates tha t, in approachin g the inscriptio n and the deciph ering of each life, one must be able to distinguish the place wh ere events have been deposited in a sort of dictionary, a d ictionary wh ich is n o t the unconscious, but w hich maintains w ith the latte r the same sort of relation that vocabulary has with the laws o f d iscourse. [I]t will probably be necessary to re-establish a more marked distinction between the unconscious and the preconscious than has been customary in psychology. For the unconscious, as a reservoir of recollections and in1ages amassed in the course of a lifetime, is merely an aspect of memory. While pereru1ial in character, the preconscious a lso has limitations, since the term refers to the fact that even thoug h memories are preserved they are not always available to the individual. The unconscious, on the other hand, is a lways empty-or more accurately, it is as alien to mental images as is the stomach to the foods which pass through it. As the organ of a specific function, the unconscious

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merely imposes structural Jaws upon inarticulated elements which originate elsewhere-impulses, emotions, representations, and memories. We might say, therefore, that the preconscious is the individual lexicon where each of us accumulates the vocabulary of his personal history, but that this vocabulary becomes significant, for us and for others, only to the extent that the unconscious structures it according to its laws and thus transforms it into language (discourse) (Structural Arrthropologtj, p. 203).

On this point, Levi-Strauss is very clear and asks that the subject's symptomatic particularities be analysed according to unconscious laws, w hich have shaped the even ts of his/her life into the form of a discourse o r has made them into symptoms. Since these Jaws are the same for all individuals and in all instances where the unconscious p ursued its activity, the problem which arose in the preceding paragraph can easily be resolved. The vocabulary matters less than the structure. Whether the myth is re-created by the individual or borrowed from tradition, it derives its sources-individual or collective (between which interpenetrations and exchanges constantly occur)-only from the stock of representations with which it operates. But the structure remains the same, and through it the symbolic function is fulfilled. If we add that these structures are not only the same for everyone and for all areas to which the function applies, but that they are few in number, we shall tmderstand why the world of symbolism is infinitely varied in content, but always limited in its laws. There are many languages, but very few structural laws which are valid for all languages. A compilation of known tales and myths would fill an imposing number of volumes. But they can be reduced to a small number of simple types if we abstract, from among the diversity of characters, a few elementary fwlctions. As for the complexes-those individual mythsthey also correspond to a few simple types, which mould the fluid multiplicity of cases. Since the shaman does not psychoanalyse his pa tient, we may conclude that the remembrance of things past, considered

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by some the key to psychoanalytic therapy, is only one expression (whose value and results are hardly negligible) of a more fundamental method, which must be defined without considering the individual or collective genesis of the myth. For the myth form takes precedence over the content of the narrative. This is, at any rate, what the analysis of a native text seems to have taught us. But also, from another perspective, we know that any myth represents a quest for the remembrance of things past. The modern version of shamanistic technique called psychoanalysis thus derives its specific characteristics from the fact that in industrial civilization there is no longer any room for mythical time, except within man himself. From this observation, psychoanalysis can d raw confirmation of its validity, as well as hope of strengthening its theoretical foundations and understanding better the reasons of its effectiveness, by comparing its methods and goals with those of its precursors, the shamans and sorcerers (pp. 203-204). Accord ing to this logic, neurosis is to be interpreted as a mythical formation. Because of the prevalence of socially shared symbolic organizations, and in order to respond to the d ifficulties encountered in the particularities of his history and in his mythical, symbolic inscription, the s ubject produces symptoms and complexes. A neurosis has a mythica l s tructure for it is nothing other than an individual version of the difficulties that the s ubject encounters in his own symbolic situatio n. Therefore Levi-Strauss sees the neuroses as so many individual myths, w hich are strictly complementary to the socially shared mytl1ic organizatio ns. In 1953, Lacan endorses tl'lis perspective by describing obsessional neurosis as "The Neuro tic's Individ ual Myth".Is it really necessary to emphasize everything that, in Levi-Strauss' essential text of 1949, will reappear in Lacan's rereading of Freud? In Ius return to Freud, Lacan takes up various aspects of Levi-Strauss' theory of the symbolic fw1ction in order to resolve a question that he found very difficult during that period: How are the imaginary, symbolic, and real related to each other? What concerns us in tl'lis questio n is the turn from the imaginary to the symbolic registers. If the 1949 lecture on the "Mirror Stage" had already mentioned the mysterious presence of the " penumbra of symbolic

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effectiveness" that envelops the specular image at the threshold of the visible world, it is precisely this penumbra that Lacan is now seeking to lift. He wants to throw light on the ways in which the subject is structured by the quilting beh'/een the imaginary of the mirror s tage- the visible- and the effectiveness of the symbolic ftmction, which Levi-Strauss has emphasized. In 1953, Lacan is no longer satisfied that his theory of the mirror s tage can account for the subject's primal identifications, and he undertakes a theoretical revision fow1ded on Levi-Strauss' concept of symbolic effectiveness. If his return to Freud is a transferential rectification concerning Freud's desire, his theoretical revision involves the introduction of a ne.w version of the mirror stage, one that excludes neither the dead father of psychoanalysis nor his speech: neither the totem nor the symbolic father towards whom he is now returning. This new emphasis requires-and enables-the m irror experience to be transformed into the inverted bouquet, which he will now explain. It is necessary to understand that this transformation is a theoretical revision that is based on Levi-Strauss' Tl1e Effectiveness of Symbols; this text infiltrates Lacan's transferential rectification, even if it is precisely by adopting the notion of the symbolic ftmction tha t he can maintain the distance between his handling of the Oedipus complex and Freud's. The experiment of the inverted vase is a new version of the mirror stage and we have seen w hat is at s take in the latter in my earlier work: nothing less than a rethinking of the origin of subjective structuring and of the movement from nature to culture. This shows that Lacan continues his dialogue w ith Levi-Strauss as weU as w ith anthropology, at the point where it deals wi th the enigma of enigmas.

Ill. From the mirror stage to the inverted bouquet From the mirror stage to the bouquet: Lacan, Freud and Levi-Strauss

From the s tart, Lacan retums to Freud by examining both what is beyond and what falls short of the Oed ipus complex, and reads the structuring fw1ction of the Oedipal myth in terms of the knotting of the imaginary, symbolic and real. In other words, subjective

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maturation is no t only to be perceived in fine in a ttaining the Oedipal operation, but more generally in the kno tting of which the Oedipus complex actualizes o ne possibility. Without these three systems to guide ourselves by, it would be impossible to understand anything of the Freudian technique and experience (Seminar /, p. 73). [T)he whole problem is that of the juncture of the symbolic and of the imaginary in the constitution of the real (Seminar I, p. 74). Lacan explains that he has "concocted a little model for you, a substitute for the mirror-s tage" (Seminar I, p. 74), and which his readers now know as the inverted bouquet. This new model aims to cla rify tl1e solution that Lacan had been providing, since 1936, with the mirror s tage, to what he saw as a shortcoming in Freud's theory o f the earliest identifications (see Lncan et les sciences wciales). 1n doing so, he was seeking to clarify the "root identification"-the Lacanian super-ego, which is formed before the ego-and thus to throw more light o n the mirror s tage; this is also the moment when the anthropological e nigma o f the transition from nature to culture becomes real. The constitution o f the subject of the unconscious is thus no longer to be grasped, for Lacan, by means o f the mirror stage or the Oedipus complex; instead, it is to be a pproached in tenns o f both tl1e mirror s tage as "reread" with Levi-Strauss' symbolic functio n and a new optical device that Lacan borrows from the Freud of The

Interpretation of Drmms. Now that we have read Levi-Strauss' The Effectiveness of Symbols, we a re going to study the way in which Lacan returns to the psychoanalytic clinic and uses the insights gained there and from The Interpretation of Drmms to refo rmulate his mirror stage in terms o f the o ptical schema. Let us remember first that in The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud compares the instrume nt used in psychic productions to a sort of complicated manuscript or camera. In the session o f 24 February 1954, Lacan says: To clarify things a little for you, I've concocted a little model for you, a substitute for the mirror-stage .... Optics could also have its say. At this point l find I'm not in disagreement witl1 the tradition established by the master- more than one of you must have

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noticed in the Trnunuleutung, in the chapter "The psychology of the dream-process", the famous schema into which Freud inserts the entire proceedings of the unconscious .... I will read it to you as it is to be found in the Trnunufeutung (Seminar l, pp. 74-75). After begiiming to quote Freud's text, Lacan adds his own comments and then continues his citation:

What is presented to us in these words is the idea of psychiml locality-what is at issue here is precisely the field of psychical reality, that is to say of everything which takes place between perception and the motor consciousness of the ego. l shall entirely disregard the fact that the mmtal apparntns with which we are here concemed is also known to us in the form of an anatomical preparation, and I shall carefully avoid the temptation to determine psychical locJtlity in any anatomical fashion. I shall remain upon psychologiml ground, and I propose simply to follow the suggestion tlrat we should picture tire instrument which carries out our mental functions as resembling a compound microscope or a photographic apparatus, or something of the kind. On that basis, psychicallomlity will correspond to a point inside the apparatus at which one of the preliminary stages of an image comes into being (Seminar/, p. 75). He seeks a better way of representing his understanding of how unconscious s ubjectivity is constituted, while also continuing to criticize the tmiversalism of the Oed ipus complex; with the optical schema, he is able to achieve both these o bjectives ii1 a way that includes the power of the Oedipus complex to stntcture the subject by knot ting the three orders together. He thus uses the authority of The lnterpre/atiou of Dreams to construct the new schema of the inverted vase (Seminar/, pp. 76, 77, 78). He mentions optics: For there to be an optics, for each given point in real space, there must be one point and one corresponding point only in another space, which is the imaginary space. This is the fundamental structural hypothesis .... without it one cannot write even one equation, nor symbolise anything (Seminar l, p. 76).

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The real, imaginary and symbolic are articula ted. "For there to be an optics" -certainly, but what must be there in order for there to be a subject? Let us look at the schema:

The experiment of the inverted bouquet TI1e image of the vase in the inverted bouquet51 is equivalent to the image of the body in the mi rror in the mirror s tage. By distinguishing the image of the vase, from the real of the flowers, the optical model depicts the advent of the ego in the imaginary register, while the real of the objects of d esire is distinguished from the imaginary, even if in the mirror, the object and the body image are joined. In other words, this device allows us to situate what pertains to the ego and what does not. Well then, Jet us say that the image of the body, if we locate it in our schema, is like the imaginary vase which contains the bouquet of real flowers. That's how we can portray for ourselves the subject of the time before the birth of tire ego (my emphasis) and the appearance of the latter (Seminar /, p. 79). Lacan, while resolutely dismissing any d evelopmental psychology, claims that the subject is prior to the ego; through this new device, he can take up not only the question of the primal identification, the "root identification"-which I studied in my earlier work-or the question "'' On the optical mcxlel of the person's ideals.. see Jacques-AJain Miller, "Commentary on tl1e Graphs", Ecrits, pp. 859-861.

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of the appearance of the envelope of the ego, which dialectically includes the real; he also indicates that this dialectic operates on condition that the eye, which looks, is sit uated in the right place. The imaginary and the real symbolize each other through an inside-outside relation that calls for the symbolic's discriminating function to be maintained. In this device, the eye symbolizes the subject and in order for the knotting to be done correctly, the eye must be well situated. The position of eye, and thus of the subject, "is essentially characterised by its place in the symbolic world, in other words in the world of speech" (Seminar /, p. 80). According to this logic, a fortunate "Development only takes place in so far as the subject integrates himself into the symbolic system, acts within it, asserts himself in it through the use of genuine speech" (Seminar /, p. 86). In this schema, Lacan, following Freud, uses the laws of optics to suggest a new model of psychic structuring, and the knotting of the three registers depends on the way that the eye is positioned in it. In the same way, whether or not the subject finds himself in the dialectic of inside/outside, which knots the imaginary to the real-the image of the body to the real of desires or the drive-depends on the position that the subject is given in the symbolic. If Lacan inherits the reference to the laws of optics from Freud, the power of the symbolic ftmction comes from Levi-Strauss; this, in clinical terms, is not unimportant, for when the dialectic fails, the subject does not distinguish what is his own from what is not. We could say, then, that there is no correct way for the ego to arise, and this is because of a failure of the subject's position in the symbolic. Because of this, all one's clinical attention should be directed to this subjective position, even, and perhaps especially, when a subject articulates only a few words, as is the case of little Robert, which was presented in Lacan's seminar by one of his students, Rosine Lefort. Robert seems knotted to speech only in w hat he does not " know how to say": "Madame! TI1e wolf!" Before seeing how Rosine Lefort uses the optical model, let us note that Lacan is careful to apply it, in the first place, to an analysis of the position that he and his students occupy in the analytic movement. The right d istance from the m irror and from Freud

We need to remember that Lacan has just profited from Freud's authorization to move from Wallon's experiment on the mirror stage

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to that of the inverted bouquet'', indicating in particular that the root image can arise only if the eye is the right d istance from the mirror. The eye is the metaphor for the subject. Lacan makes the aim of his commentary explicit to his listeners: the course of our dialogue, you have been able to get acquainted with the ambition which rules our commentary [i.e., 011r analysis] namely that of reconsidering the fundamental texts of the analytic experience. The moving spirit of our excavation is the following idea- whatever in an experience is always best seen is at some remove. So it is not surprising that it should be here aud now (my emphasis) that we are led, in order to understand the analytic experience, to begin again with what is implied by its most immediate given, namely the symbolic function, or what in our vocabulary is exactly the same thingthe function of speech. We rediscover this, the central domain of analytic experience, signalled throughout Freud's oeuvre, never named, but signalled at every step. l don' t think I am pushing it when l say that that is what can be immediately translated, almost algebraically, from any Freudian text. And this translation yields the solution of a number of antinomies which become apparent in Freud with that honesty which ensures that any given one of his texts is never closed, as if the whole of the system were in it" (Seminar I, p. 89). [n

It is one thing to authorize himself, through Freud, to develop an opti-

cal experiment as a "metaphor" of subjective structuring, and then to transmit it to his s tudents for a clinical presentation. Lacan goes further, however, since he clarifies for his listeners where they are, and even where he himself is; he does so by applying the experiment of the inverted bouquet to the analytic movement. Lacan argues that he is situ ated at the right d istance from Freud, at the exact point wheretuuike the Anglo-American disciples-he can translate Freud's text and give the solution to the contradictions that Freud, in his honesty, did not cover up. His transferential position is at the right distance On the experiment by Henri Bouasse, see joel Dor, IutroductioH to the RmdiHg of Lncan: Tile Uncon scious Struc/urerl Uke a Language (1997).

le

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from Freud, and he can therefore do the work of an analyst on themtranslate them-in order to bring out Freud's contrad ictions, which are symptoms that he transmitted within psychoanalysis and which remain active even within analysts' clinical activity. The analysis is thus itself turned inside-out: Lacan's commentary becomes Freud's analysis with Lacan. Yet the question of the desire that is to be imputed to Freud as an individual is of little importance here; what is in question, instead, is the desire of the analyst, who was incarnated by Freud and to which Lacan seeks to return. More than Freud's or Lacan's own particular desires, w hat Lacan is elucidating is the desire of the analyst. If Lacan must, as a preliminary, be in the right place in his relation to Freud in order to be able to translate Freud's symptomatic contrad ictions, a second condition for making progress in this project is Freud's own honesty, which must be complete if the system that explains the symptom is adequate. And the completeness of the system is nothing other than that of the symbolic system itself. Thus, the key to Freud's contradictions is, accord ing to Lacan, the symbolic function: the hmction of speech and its laws. Lacan is both Freudian and Uvi-Straussian. The w rong distance and stagnation in the imaginary

Why is Lacan located at the right distance from Freud? Because he is not located at the wrong distance; for example, he is not in the place of A1ma Freud, w ho "forgets": 1. 2.

The dead father or her own father, and Freud's desire as analyst and the Freudian d iscovery, which demonstrate that the dead father is the key for w1derstanding the symbolic fw1ction as sucl1.

To forget this is to forget Freud and the symbolic hmction in analytic exp erience. By reintroducing the function of death and the dead father in analytic experience, Lacan shows that he is located at the right distance from Freud, the d istance where he can decipher the

contradictions of Freud's speech, and both find the key- the symbolic fw1ction- and remind analysts of their duty to handle the function of speech appropriately in analytic exp erience. He is calling upon analysts to remember the dead father 's desire and the right

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"Freudian" use of Freud's s peech and of speech in general, as the analytic ideal and the rule of the super-ego. Yet in order to be able to make this good use, there must be a suitable conception of the function of speech, w hich "is exactly the same thing" as the symbolic function, as Lacan in dicates (Semi11nr I, p. 89). If he can give its true value to this function, w hich is d irectly in Freud's orientation, it is thanks to the work of Levi-Strauss and French anthropology. This enables Lacan, as we shall see, even in the most clinical moments, to mobilize the place of speech in a symbolic system rather than to flatten the interpretation onto the regis ter of the family, as he had once done, before the change in his approach. It is necessary, Lacan insists, to go back to the drawing board with the Freudian experience in order to understand it; he must start again with the symbolic function and with speech. Let us see how this pays off: 1. 2.

In clinical experience with Robert On the level of the change from the mirror stage to the inverted vase; this is a radical theoretical change, since the mirror stage of 1936-1949 was the theory of an imaginary capture without speech; the inverted vase, on the other hand, combines the mirror stage wi th Levi-Strauss' theory of the symbolic function in order to establish a link between the imaginary and the symbolic in the very first moments of subjective matu ration .

Let us start with Robert, whose case shows us what happens w hen this symbolic function does not place the subject in a position in which he can see his own image: when this function is exercised in a degraded way. The wolf: The mother or the totem?

After clarifying his transferential relation to Freud, Lacan gives the floor to Rosine Lefort to discuss the Robert case, a case that ar ticulates the deficiency of the ego from which the child suffers, in terms of the

logic of the inverted vase. Then there is a short dialogue between Lacan and Jean Hyppolite concerning the scope of the word "wolf". Rosine Lefort seems to understand the figure of the wolf as the heir of the devouring maternal imago. Far from giving credit to this

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idea, Lacan re-situates the wolf's place in the symbolic system and reorganizes the reading of the case on this basis: "Nat mally the wolf raises all the problems of symbolism: it isn't a hmction wi th a limit, since we are forced to search out its origin in a general symbolisation" (Serninar I, p. 101). Lacan tums away from a reading that places too much focus on the "family complexes" and makes the wolf into the imago of the "devouring mother". Instead, he emphasizes its place in the general symbolic system: its anthropological place as a totem. Let us listen to Lacan: Why the wolf? We are not particularly familiar, in this part of the world, with this character. The fact that it is the wolf who is chosen to produce these effects ties us straight away to a broader function on the mythical, folkloric, religious, primitive plane. The world is part of a complete filiation, which connects up with secret societies, with everything that implies in the way of initiation, either in the adoption of a totem (my emphasis) or in the identification with a character (Semiunr I, p. 101). From the "devouring mother" to the question of the totem: we see how Lacan opens the s ituation up to an analytic interpretation of the wolf, the concern with the dead father, the social bond and the symbolic function as such. Lacan's rectification moves the interpretation of the "wolf" from the matemal imago to the dead father; he claims that the subject identifies with it, in a sort of "sacred" ritual over w hich this anthropological figure of the wolf looms. The wolf, then, is nothing other than a version of the ideal or of the Freudian super-ego. Lacan indicates that he still has to clarify and d istinguish between these two instances of subjective stmcturing. Totem, super-ego and ego ideal in transference

The super-ego is constraining and the ego-ideal exalting. These are things that one tends to gloss over, because we move from one term to the other as if the two were synonymous. It is a

question which is worth pursuing in relation to the transference relationship. When one looks for the basis of therapeutic action, one says that the subject identifies the analyst with his ego-ideal or on the contrary with his super-ego, and, in the same text one

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substitutes one for the other in accordance with the unfolding of the demonstration, without really explaining what the difference is. Certainly I will be led to examine the question of the superego. l should say from the start that, if we don' t limit ourselves to a blind, mythical usage of this term, this key-word, this idol, the super-ego is essentially located within the symbolic plane of speech, in contrast to the ego-ideal. The s uper-ego is an imperative. As is indicated by common sense and by the uses to which it is put, it is consonant with the register and the idea of the law, that is to say with the totality of the system of language, in so far [as) it defines the situation of man as such, that is to say in so far as he is not just a biological individual" (Seminar/, p. 102). In this clinical fragment, the wolf as a core of speech incarnates the function of language, which " ties [the child) to th e commun ity o f mankind" (Seminar/, p. 103). This "summary o f a law", according to Lacan, aUov.rs, in treating a child, an "extraordinary elaboration, brought to a close by this touching self-baptism, w hen he utters his own Christian name. At that point we come to the fw1damental relation, in its most reduced form, o f man to language. It is extraordin arily moving" (Semiruzr /, p. 103). Lacan's emotion highlights the en ormous scope that he g ives to th e child's only speech . This speech is the totemic expressio n of a law of the s uper-ego that enable the child to christen hin1self. By doing so, the s ubject experiences the surface o f his body and makes his ego appear in a wa y that may be unstable, but which is n evertheless effective. It is the most reduced, and th erefore the most va luable, fragment of the treasury o f signifiers that allows the subject to be bound- in the quasi-religious sense o f the term- to the human corrunw1ity. Lacan thus turns away from interpreting the anim a l in terms of the devouring mother in order to remind his studen t of the a lmost sacred wealth of the to temic core o f speech that animates the subject. What must be understood is the fruitfulness of the totem: the wa y in which the fath er functions in the analytic practice with the "Wolf Child", as well as in the analyst's transferential relation w ith Fre ud himself. 1Ne can n ow see the direction in which Lacan is moving in this seminar. Solidly anch ored by the symbolic function, which h e

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owes to the anthropologists, Lacan begins a double movement of analysing 1. 2.

Analytic teclmique, and The transference to Freud, or rather, the way in which Freud's flaws explain how analytic practice has gone astray.

Along with Lacan-and with the. paternal function clearly in mindwe must find the right d istance from Freud if we are to produce analysts who w ill be able to let themselves be guided by the dead father's desire; such analysts will need to be capable of undoing his symptoms and his contradictions, and to admit the crucial position of the symbolic function and of speech in constituting the subject in transference. Not to find this right distance in relation to Freud is to have a blurred vision and to go astray in the register of the imaginary- the register of d uality and its impasses-w hich governs Anglo-American practice. Not to take the. right d istance is to be unable to see the Freudian heritage, its rules from the super-ego, its ideals, its totem: Freud. It is, consequently, to stagnate in the imaginary. Analysis progresses through the fullness of the Freudian lesson, but it progresses thanks to the anthropological depth of the symbolic function, w hich Lacan takes from Levi-Strauss and w hich enables him to use the paternal hmction to analyse cases. It enables him to displace the interpretation of the wolf from an emphasis on its maternal voraciousness to an analysis of totemic paternity and what the latter can produce. He returns to Freud. From the bouquet to the thing or the invention of the ego

In the treahnent, the child's handling of the totem of the dead father-the wolf- makes his ego, the s urface of his body and his body's psychic image appear. And d isappear. His pa rticular position in the symbolic does not make him absent to the totem, but he entertains an alternative relation to it, one that is badly situated, and w hich impedes his development and that of his ego, which

appears to him at the time of his self-christening. This is why the symbolic hmction is interesting, as are optics and the return to the dead father of psychoanalysis. This return can also be seen as a sort of self-christening, not only for Lacan but for his followers, who no

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longer derive their authori ty as analysts from the group that they had just left. Lacan ret urns thus to his Freudian heritage. " Freud had already constructed something similar, and quite speci fically pointed out to us in the Traumdeutrmg and the Abriss53 that the psychic agencies should (my emphasis) be conceived of on the basis of imaginary phenomena" (Seminar I, p. 144). It is necessary to tntst Freud, he repeats, accentuating the register of theoretical "duty". Before contin uing the analysis of Lacan's reading of Freud, let us stop for a moment to emphasize how the analysis of the child's self-christening shows Lacan's extraordinary clinical precision; here he is rethinking his theory of both the super-ego and the ego ideal, since defects in both these agencies seriously affect the way that the subject can-r cmmot- perceive his ego, from w hich he projects himself imaginarily. Six years later, brought by clinical experience to the very origin of humanization, Lacan will point out that the ego ideal and the super-ego are born in the same primal moment of subjective structuring. " How can we conceive of the concrete origins of the ego ideal? ... these origins cmmot be separated from those of the super-ego, for while they are distinct from the latter's, they are coup led to it," as Lacan says on 7 June 1961 (Seminar Vlll, pp. 406, 409). In order to see oneself in the right position in the mirror, the relation to the totem- the dead father, the super-ego, and the ego idealm ust be internalized. How CaJl we understand the s tability of the psychic function that allows us to perceive the ego if we do not see what transfers the symbolic function from the outside to the inside? In 1961, in his seminar, Transference, Lacan examines this question of the movement from outside to inside by using the Freudian notion of the introjection of the super-ego-and even of the ego ideal, s ince Freud does not make a s trong distinction between the two terms. He does so through the solution of the totem meal, w hich fixes the totem in the body of the brothers (Totem and Taboo) after the m urder of the father, or in that of the sons (after each Oedipus complex). Then he will advance a second Freudian solution . Let tts follow its sequence: "The notion of an interior is a crucial topological function in analytic thought, since even introjection refers to it" (Seminar Vlll, p. 408), Lacan first assures us, and then

~ Sigmund Freud, An Outlin e of Psycho-Analysis, 1964, 141-208.

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he indicates the first Freud ian solution: "the introjection--after the murder-of an imperative, interdictive, essentially conflictual object" (Seminar VIII, p. 410), which is modified , by narcissistic investment, into the internalized ego ideal. By being introjected, it enters- this is a first Freudian themethe sphere which would only be interior; it is thereby made sufficiently narcissistic, and perhaps becomes the object of libidinal investment for the subject. And it is easier to make oneself loved by the ego ideal than by the object that was, at one moment, its original" (Seminar Vlll, p. 411). Th us Lacan indicates Freud's first solution. The second solution is also Freudian: Prior to even a first step toward the Oedipal situation, there is a first identification with the father as such. Did the father trot around in his head? Freud allows the subject to take a first step in identifying with the father, and he develops a terminological refinement here by calling it exquisit Jtulrrnlich, "exquisitely manly" (Semirrar V/ll, p. 416). Disappointed by the mother, the s ubject returns to this primal identification through a regression. These two identifications-primordial and regressive- w ith the father, derive from a process that is prior to the Oedipus complex and which makes one of the object's traits into a sign (not into a signifier) that comes from the O ther; it occurs on the optic plane and comes from the one whom the subject turns to in the mirror in order to be sure of who he is. And of what he is for the O ther. It is necessary to look at oneself from the viewpoint of the O ther in order to be able to recognize oneself after having been recognized. This point is tl1e I of the ego ideal, as Lacan explains. It is w hat tl1e chi ld misses when he w ishes to be recognized. We must conceive of gaze of the Other as being interiorised by a sign. That is enough. £in einziger lug. There is no need for a whole field of organization and a massive introjection. This point I of the single trait, this sign of ru1 assent to the Other, of the choice of love, on which the subject can work, is there somewhere, and is dealt with in the sequence of the mirror-play. It is

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enough for the subject to coincide with it in his relation with the Other for this little sign, this einziger Zug to be a t his disposal. One has to make a radical distinction between the ego ideal and the ideal ego. The first is a symbolic introjection, whereas the second is an imaginary projection (Semiunr V111, p. 418). TI1e instability o f the projection o f the image of his own ego-the ideal ego-for the Wolf Child results from a defect in symbolic introjectionthe ego ideal~ince for some reason, his s ubjectivity d id no t coincide with the O ther of symbolic recognition. As a consequence, the child's christening can only be self-proclaimed , a self-dtristening: unstab le, s ubject to th e s uper-ego, and w ithout a fixed cmm ection with his own in1age. We shall n ote both the enormo us clinical scope of th e case an d also its effects on the seminar, for if it is fntitful to refer to Seminar vm in order to un derstand this fragment of Seminar I, it is in Seminar I that Lacan indicates that the q uestion of th e super-ego is worth being asked in cmmection with the transferential relation. Six years later, in the seminar on transference, he will examine th is question by referring once again to th e theory of the inverted vase. Wh a t can be sa id about the seminar of 1953-1954? Accord ing to Lacan in this seminar, the c linical analysis shows that: 1.

2.

3.

A theory o f the regis te r o f the image---or o f the imaginary-is necessary in Freudian exp e rie nce, for what this ch ild suffers from is the lac k of an im age of himself, the lack o f an ego" The image of the ego can emerge and be stabilized o nly if the s ubject has a t his d isposal a positio n from which he can project a lovable-

integrate into analytic experience up to a d imension that goes far beyond individual limits, for it is a matter of " the aggregate of his symptom" which is archived in the symbolic tangles of his symptomatic cryptograms.;; Incarnating the Freudian figure of subjectivity, the egoless child demonstrates-to his own misfortw1e-that the weaker the imaginary projection is, the more isolated is the symbolic function from which the unconscious subject proceeds. Thus, it is s triking to see that, while returning to the texts of the dead father of psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan encounters the son of the totem in terms of the pathetic case of a child who has no in1age of himself. This empty-eyed child is a function of the symbolic system that has engendered him and he shows, at best, that the truth of his being is to be the son of the symbolic function itself. Freud's desire incarnates the figure of the dead father for the analytic field; it can be returned to only through the desire of his sons, if they are able to maintain a distance from the projections of the ego, projections that handicap the ability to incarnate the founder's desire. By not allowing hin1self to be dazzled by the imaginary and thus diverted from his course, Lacan returns to the speech of the dead father; he sees himself as being subjected to all the symbolic that has preceded hin1, just as he precedes all the other analysts and, on the level of the treatment, the sons' being in the world. Yet even Lacan cmmot understand this laying bare of Freudim1 subjectivity as the effect of the symbolic fw1ction without also understm1ding what the symbolic function is, m1d understm1ding its effectiveness and that of speech, which are "exactly the same thing" (Seminar l, p. 89). This is the reason for his theoretical alliance w ith French anthropology and the very early reference to the effectiveness of symbols in 1949 ("The Mirror Stage"). This alliance differs from the mirror stage because it recognizes that the very origin of being in the world depends not on an in1aginarized super-ego, but a symbolic super-ego that is prior to the ego and gives a "symbolic circumstance" to the s ubject's being; this circumstm1ce decides by a formative introjection of the ego ideal whether or not the being wilt be able to see the image of his body: his ego. This primal subject of

the primal subjection is the subject of language; it is the "strangers"

~ See

Seminar II, pp. 175-187.

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who- whether he wants it or not and knows it or not-engender his unconscious desire. These strangers include the father, his speech, his voice, but also all the symbolic exchanges that preced e the subject's coming into the world; in short, the symbolic organization from which his life comes and to which he remains indebted.56 This symbolic organization is the O ther, w hich has finally been designated as the place of the symbolic effectiveness that was mysteriously mentioned in 1949. The subject's desire proceeds from this symbolic O ther and yet, by perceiving his ego projectively, it is, first, in the mirror of his ego--or in the unage of his brother-that he believes that he can locate his own wishes. This is why the specular unage casts a shadow over the symbolic hmction, at the threshold of the visible world, and why there is a sort of penumbra that is then ii1habited by symbolic effectiveness. This is the major metamorphosis effected by Lacan's return to Freud: shining a light into this primal penumbra, he makes a rad ical separation between the ego and the subject of the unconscious. Lacan could not have begun this return without Levi-Strauss. The transition from the mirror stage to the experiment of the inverted vase. can now be shown as what it really is: an illustration of this metamorphosis. In this experiment, Lacan now knots the in'lagu1ary register of an optical machii1ery- used this time by Freud rather than Wallon-to the symbolic function, whose effectiveness was brought out by Levi-Strauss. What is u'\ question u'\ Lacan's research? He is seeking to become better acquainted with the desire of the analyst, which tries to throw light on an analysand's desire. This is, indeed, the desire of the analyst, but is it Lacan's desire or Freud's? It is Lacan's desire in that- as we have seen- he is on the track of Freud's own desire, and Levi-Strauss' research has led him to decipher this desire in tenns of the symbolic. Yet, at this moment of the seminar, it is not d ear to w hom one can attribute the desire that comes from the Other. Is it the desire of the subject? The desire of the Other? Lacan's desire? Freud's d esire? The best way to learn how to attribute desire will be to read Freud's texts; in them, we can locate the symbolic mark- the accent of tmth-that allows hun to

~ On the

anthropology o f d ebt, see Ma rcel Ma uss (1922), The Gift: Tire Form and Reason

for Excllnnge in Archnic Societies.

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attribute d esire in his interpretations of the d ream image. To do so is to address the traces and formations of the unconscious. This is the analyst's task.

The return to Freud with Levi-Strauss Freud's dream or attributing desire

By means of Freud's optical mod el, lacan has authorized himself to construct the model of the inverted vase: "Freud had already constructed something similar, and quite specifically pointed out to us in the Traumdeutung and the Abriss that the psychic agencies should be conceived of on the basis of imaginary phenomena" (Seminar I, p. 144). Here, Freud's schema is no longer taken up only in terms of a logic of anticipation, w hich would authorize lacan's recourse to the optical model; it now designates for Lacan the imaginary order on the basis of which the psychic agencies must be conceived. What was merely the example of Freud becomes the thing itself. Psychoanalytic epistemology is respected. In relying on Freud's text, lacan encounters an imperative in it: the psychic agencies are to be conceived in terms of the imaginary. Lacan thus rereads the experiment of the bouquet alongside that of the mirror, but he also rereads Hegel's theme of the imaginary register of desire along with Freud's self-analysis; w hat these rereadings show us is how the image in the d ream, in being made opaque, indicates the place of the libidinal investment of the imaginary, w here the ego comes to represent itself through the other. On 7 Aprill954, after a remark by Hyppolite, lacan s tates: l shouldn't begin by reminding you of the fundamental Hegelian theme-man's desire is the desire of the other. That is exactly what is made plain in the model by the plane mirror. That is also where we again come upon jacques Lacan's classical mirror phase (Semin11r /, p. 146). Lacan explains: Desire is first grasped in the other, and in the most confused form .... The subject originally locates and recognises desire through the intermediary, not only of his own image, but of the

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body of his fellow being. It's exactly at that moment that the human being's consciousness, in the form of consciousness of self, distinguishes itself. It is in so far as he recognises his desire in the body of the other that the exchange takes place. It is in so far as his desire has gone over to the other side that he assimilates himself to the body of the other and recognises himself as body (Seminar l, p. 147). When the body of the other is perceived as complete- another child at the breast, for example-the subject feels that he has been made incomplete and experiences a push of desire to reach the total body form that he sees. This leads both to the fundamental register of aggressiveness, which was presented in 1938 as the fraternal intrusion complex, and to the Hegelian formula; the latter emphasizes the conhtsion in "identities" in specular desire and the mortal impasse of this alienation in the brother. Yet does this imaginary capturing of desi re constitute all of desire? The libido always goes through an imaginary stage, as Lacan indicates, and here we find the projective logic of desire at work in dreams. In order to establish the certainty of the alienation that leads the subject's desire to appear in the other, Lacan tums to Freud's text, "A Meta psychological Supplement to the Theory of Drearns." 57 Fran~ois Perrier" presents this text and says that he is perp lexed by Freud's judgement that "the principal protagonist is always the sleeper'' (Serninar l, p. 152). Why not, indeed, simply endorse the d ream's manifest presentation, which attributes to those who are close to the sleeper a set of roles that, according to Freud, should always be referred to the d reamer 's desire? Lacan answers by saying that "The h trther we get the more we see how inspired these initial approaches towards the meaning of the dream and its scenario actually were" (Seminar I, p. 152). In one of his dreams, Freud recognizes his own ambition, which he projects onto a colleague. Lacan ~ Sigmund

Freud, A Meta psychological Sup plemen t to the Theory of Dreams, 1957, pp. 217- 235. ~ Fran~ois Perrier (1922-1990), a French psychiatrist a nd psychoanalyst. An alysed by laca n, he participated in the SFP, and then in the Freudian School of Paris (EFP), which he left in 1969 beca use of a dispute ove r the pass. He helped crea te the French Language Psycho.."'lnalytic Organization (Organisation psyclumnlytique de langue frm rraise, OPLF), which is also called the Fo urth Group.

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reaffirms Freud's genius, thus reconfirming his own transferential position. In analysing Freud's sense of certainty, Lacan makes a remark about a term that Freud uses to situate the person w ho plays the main role in the dream: the Viermese word, "agnosieren". This could seem to be an tminteresting detail, but it is not, for we must always follow the epistemology of the detail. Lacan moves forward in his commentary by selecting a word-a signifier-precisely because it throws light on how desire, in its imaginary aspect, is attributed; it is as if this word gave both the text and Freud's own self-analysis not only its Viem1ese accent, but also its accent of w1eonscious truth. According to Lacan, an expression from the language of Freud's childhood imposes itself on his pen at the very moment w hen he must leave no d oubt about whom to at tribute the dreamer's desire to. And let us repeat, this is not just any term, since it refers to the recognition of the person : "agnosieren", in the Viennese dialect, means "recognized". At the moment when the subject of the dream's d esire must be recognized, what imposes itself on Freud is Vie1m ese speech. Indeed, it is interesting, the significance of the Viennese milieu. In this connection, Freud gives us a very deep sense of his relation with the fraternalcharacter, with this friend-enemy, who he says is a character absolutely fundamental to his existencethere must always be someone masked by this sort of Gegenbild. But, at the same time, it is with this character as go-between, embodied by his colleague from the laboratory ... through the intermediary of ... his acts, of his feelings, that Freud projects, brings to life in this dream what is its latent desire, namely the claims of his own aggression, of his own ambition .... It is right at the heart of the dream's consciousness, more exactly at the heart of the mirage of the dream that we have to search, in the person who plays the leading role, for the sleeper's own person. But the point is that, it is not the sleeper, it is the other (Seminar I, pp. 152-153). To comment on a text is like doing an analysis. The past history, the lived history, of the subject, which we try to get at in our practice ... [w ]e can only get at it ... through the

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adult's childish language .... In magisterial fashion, Ferenczi saw the importance of this question-what is it in an analysis which makes the child within the adult participate? There is no doubt about the answer-whatever is verbalised in an irruptive fashion (Semi11nr I, p. 219). Lacan analyses Freud's text by picking up on the accent of tmth that breaks into the German text through the language of Freud's childhood. Why does this word provide us with the accent of truth? Why does this symptom of Freud's make him certain that he is recognizing his own des ire in the dream? The dream, according to Freud, is an unconscious formation that is always to be taken as a realization of an infantile desire; it is not surprising, therefore, that the symbolic universe of Freud's childhood breaks into his text in order to account for and to fonnulate the desire of that period of his life-which motivated the dream- in the language of that period. And this goes beyond Freud, since this linguistic symptom shows his unconscious activity, even while he is analysing the dream. It is as if Freud's self-analysis were adjusted so well to its object-the unconscious- that it placed an element of the unconscious right under our noses. Following the trail of Freud's desire, Lacan isolates the symptomatic trait and situates its symbolic place in order to show how Freud's self-analysis allowed him to attribute all the roles in the dream to the dreamer's des ire, to Freud's desire. Lacan also shows that what is in question in this particular case is the Freudian paradigm of the way in w hich unconscious desire is attributed. Thus, in order to be able to situate the dialectic of d esire, one should neither doubt Freud's suggestions, as Fran~ois Perrier did, nor allow oneself to be blinded by the invasion of the other's image. lacan contin ues: l talked to you about the exchange that takes place between the

subject's image and the image of the other in so far as it is libidinalised, narcissised, in the imaginary situation. By the same token, in the same way as in animals, certain parts of the world are rendered opaque and become fascinating, it too is rendered thus. We have the capacity to ngrwsieren in the dream the sleeper's own person in a pure state. The power of understanding of the subject is expanded in proportion. On the contrary, in

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the waking state, a t least if he hasn't read the Trmmrdeuturrg, he won't be able to perceive in its sufficiency those bodily sensations capable of telling him, while he is sleeping, about something intemal, something coenaesthetic. It is precisely in so far as the libidinal obscuring in the dream is on the other side of the mirror, that his body is, not felt any the less, but perceived better, understood by the subject. Do you grasp the mechanism here? In the waking state, the body of the other is reflected back to the subject, he thus fails to recognise lots of things about himself. That the ego is a capacity to fail to recognise [mecorrnaissance] is the very foundation of the technique of analysis. This goes a very long way. As far as structuring, organisation and by the same token scotomisation-here, I am happy enough to use the term~1nd all manner of things, which are so ma ny pieces of information which can be passed from ourselves to ourselves-a special game which reflects back to us our corporeality, tha t corporeality which also has an alien origin. Even as far as- Tireylrave eyes ilr order rrol to see (Seminar I, pp. 153-154). The o ptical experiment is no lo nger being used as a metaphor for the way in w hich the s ubject is s tructured; what is in question, instead, is to grasp how desire is stntctured, first of all, in the imaginary register. This analysis of Freud's own analysis of d reams allows Lacan to show his liste ners the mechanism of the mirror that leads the dreamer- through the other- to discover what mo tivates his own pe rson, which has been projected into the other. In other words, with his eyes closed, the d reame r has access to the image o f his body through the other who has been recognized (agnosieren). In the dream-on the scene of the w1conscious-the d rea me r 's body is represented very purely in the in1age of the other; once awake, however, we are dazzled or distracted by the o ther's in1age and are therefore less able to perceive w hat is happening to us. Let us summarize. For Lacan: 1.

2.

The psychic agencies must now be conceived in the imaginary register Freud says this and must be trusted

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3.

4.

81

He must be followed word fo r word- and the word, in this case, is Viennese; we must follow the trail o f his symbolic universe in order to follow his d esire as analyst The place o f his colleague, which Freud analyses in his d rea m is the same thing: it is the place o f the other in the d ream. This other is o n! y a mask fo r the internal process of the dreamer's w1conscious desire.

Th us, the d esire of the d ream uses the o ther's body. There is a sort o f d ialectic be tween the ego and the other, but this d ialectic pertains to the register o f language and of the symbolic: the ope rations o f d isplacement or of condensation in the d rea m. Lacan then offers a punctuatio n: " [W ]hat makes up the d ream is something which we must look fo r, and which truly belongs to the unconscious" (Seminar I, p. 155). The register of the in1aginary d ialectic of d esire-between the ego and the o ther- must not be confused with the compositio n o f the unconscio us, whose rules come from the symbolic because the human being, very early o n, is subjected to langu age and the symbolic relation. The subject becomes aware of his desire in the other, through the intermediary of the image of the other which offers him the semblance of his own mastery .... But there's no escaping the fact that he's a human being, born in a state of impotence, and, very early on, words, language were what he used to call with, ru1d a most miserable call it was, when his food depended on his screams. This primitive mothering has already been related to his states of dependency. But really that is no reason to hide the fact that, no less early, this relation to the other is named, and is so by the subject. That a nrune, however confused it may be, designates a specific person, is exactly what makes up the transition to the human state. If one has to define the moment at which man becomes human, we can say that it is the moment when, however little it be, he enters in to the symbolic relation. As I've already e mphasised, the symbolic relation is eternal. And not simply because effectively there must always be three people- it is eternal because the symbol introduces a third party, an element of mediation, which brings the two actors

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into each other's presence, leads them on to another plane, and changes them (Seminar I, p. 155). Lacan insists on the way that language goes beyond the imaginary dialectic and he indicates the way in which the symbolic is cmmected to the imaginary; these ideas allow him, next, to formulate a way of directing the treatment by using these reference points. So, the dialectic of the ego and the other is transcended, is placed on a higher plane, in relation to the other, solely through the function of language, in so far as it is more or less identical, and at all events is fundamentally linked up with what we should call the rule, or better still, the law. At each instant of its in tervention, this law creates something new. Every situation is transformed by its intervention, whatever it is, except when we talk to no purpose (Seminar I, pp. 156-157). Language can transcend the d ialectic of the ego if speech is full. "Here we are, introduced to this elementary level where language immediately adheres to our first experiences. Because it is a vi tal necessity which makes of man's environment a symbolic one" (Semil'lnr I, p. 157). The h uman environment depends on the prematuration of the species, and no longer on the family group and the mother 's care, as it had in his ea rlier work. Lacan has gone beyond the epistemology of his formulations of 1938 or of the mirror stage. The symbolic function is now situated at the very origin of subjective s tructuring. The transcendence of the ego and the symbolic system of the symptom

Let us ret urn to the optical experiment: my little model, in order to conceive of the incidence of the symbolic relation, all you have to do is assume that it is the introduction of linguistic relations which produces the swings of the mirror, which will offer the subject, in the other, in the absolute other, the various aspects of his desire. There is a cotmection between the imaginary dimension and the symbolic system, so long as the history of the subject is inscribed in it .... [n

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All human beings share in the universe of symbols. They are included in it and submit to it, much more than they constitute it. They are much more its supports than its agents. It is as a function of the symbols, of the symbolic constitution of his history, that those variations are produced in which the subject is open to taking on the variable, broken, fragmented, sometimes even unconstituted and regressive, images of himself (Seminar I, pp. 157-158). The subject thus sees himself in a series of images that depend on the symbolic circumstances of his history. The absence of the selfimage characterizes certain subjective positions, as shown by the Wolf Child, who also demonstrates by his self-christening that, even in that situation, the image could make a transitory appearance. If there is a diachronic determination of the self-im age, there is also a synchronic determination, through which the s ubject can perceive himself in a p lace w here he had not seen himself earlier, and w here he will no longer see himself later. Conversely, the stability of the image of the ego depends on the stability of the symbolic relations that regulate it, and the first of these relations is language. The result of this is that a d eregulated use. of language-Freud's idea of free association-sets aside the ordinary s tanda rds that regulate his speech; free association allows the subject to perceive, in his transference, all the in1ages of his ego, w hich he had not known previously. For the subject, the uncoupling of his relation to the other causes the image of the ego to fluctuate, to shimmer, to oscillate, renders it complete and incomplete. So that he can recognise all the stages of his desire, all the objects which have given consistency, nourishment and body to this image, he has to receive it in its completeness, to which he has never had access. Through the successive identifications and revivals, the subject must constitute the history of his ego (Semit~ar I, pp. 181-182). If this maximal narcissistic projection of the s ubject- w hich leads to transference love- results from the lifting of the ordinary rules

to which speech is bound and confirms the subordination of the image to language, we will be right to cmmect certain absences of the images of the ego with certain "holes in mem ory" that characterize the subject's narrative. For example, an ea rly traumatic scene

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that breaches the subject's imaginary register will be repressed some time later, when the subject has been introd uced sufficiently into the register of language and can read its sexual significatio n. Rather than integrate this scene, he prefers to give up the fragments of discourse that would give meaning to it. At this specific moment, something of the subject's becomes detached in the very symbolic world that he is engaged in integrating. From then on, it will no longer be something belonging to the subject. The subject will no longer speak it, will no longer integrate it. Nevertheless, it will remain there, somewhere, spoken, if one can put it this way, by something the subject does not control. In other words, there is no essential difference between this moment in the analysis which l have described to you, and the intermediary moment, between the stamp and the symbolic repression. There is just one difference, which is that at that particular moment, there is no one there to give him his cue. Repression begins, having constituted its original nucleus. Now there is a central point around which symptoms, successive repressions, and by the same token-since repression and the return of the repressed are the same thing-the return of the repressed will later be organised (Seminar l, p. 191). This trauma is in the register of sight: what corresponds to the imaginary breech in the symbolic is repression, and w hat is repressed returns in the symptom. Since this is the case, it is the symbolic register that inherits the mark of the s pecular trauma. The symptom incarnates the insistence of a speech that has been "muzzled " and is " latent in the subject's symptoms" and which the analyst must " release" (Serninar /, p. 185). The pain of the eyes--a s pecular trauma-is inscribed in the symbolic register of the symptom, and there is thus a movement from imaginary to symbolic. Lacan also demonstrates that the o pposite movement can occur: an injury in the

symbolic can have a mysterious correspondence on the level of the image of the bod y, which breaks down . In this cmmection, he mentions an Islamic analysand, whose symptoms are related to "the use of the hand" (Seminar /, p. 196).

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The symptom 's grasp over this body part has nothing to do with any guilty activity of childhood, as lacan indicates; instead, it points, through the bod ily image, to the fault of the father, who was suspected of theft. We know that the Koran prescribes the sacrifice of the body part that has slimed. Al though the son clearly misunderstands this law, as Lacan explau1S, the problems with the hand poil1t to a failure of inlagu1ary i11tegration, w hich can be explained by the cultural coordinates of the drama of the father. "One should not fail to recognise the symbolic appertil1ances of a subject" (Seminar I, p. 197). Somethil1g concernil1g the inlage of the body has not been integrated. In the course of analysis, as I have pointed out to you, it is when

the traumatic elements-grounded in an image which has never been integrated~raw near that holes, points of fracture appear in the unification, the synthesis, of the subject's history. l have pointed out how it is in starting from these holes that the subject can realign himself with the different symbolic determinations which make hinl a subject with a history. Well, in the same way, for every human being, everything personal which can happen to him is located in the relation to the law to which he is bound. His history is unified by the law, by his symbolic universe, which is not the same for everyone. Tradition and language diversify the reference to the subject (Semirrar l, pp. 197-198). If the son's hand i11dicates the father's wrongdoi11g, this means that the traumatic symbolic event has left a trace in the in1agi11ary register of the sufferil1g bod y. The body linage and the symbolic register are linked for better and for worse in s ubjective maturation. The trace of the fault can th us move from one register to the other through the logic of an ilwersion of the place of trauma, w hether inlagi11ary or symbolic. The symptom- u1asmuch as it is a part of analytic experience-must always be read in the domai11 of the symbolic. Repression takes place after the ilnagi11ary breach: after an inscription of the symbolic fault in the body image, We also see that ill the clinic of i11dividual cases, the subject that is in question in analysis is not the i11dividual, si11ce, however much integrity the son may have, he must nevertheless pay with his body for the father's

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unsettled debt from the preceding generation.'" Whether the effect of the trauma manifests itself in the body im age or in symbolic repression, it is useless to deal with the image in order to make the analysis progress; this is the case because the symptom, even when it finds a mark in the body image, results from a symbolic formation, either directly- through a fault in the symbolic--or ind irectly- through repression and the return of the repressed following the trauma. Thus it is necessary, if the analysis is to progress, to deal less with the dialectic between the register of the iinage and the other- the imagii1ary- than with the symbolic system of the symptom, which in every case, is the location of the return of the repressed. The hmctioning of language in structuring the subject "transcends" the dialectic of the ego and enables the sorrows that are encotmtered ii1 the scopic register to "speak" symptomatically. Such sorrows are troumatiques60, as Lacan w ill say later. The sufferings of the ego result from a cmmection with the symbolic, as Lacan assures his listeners. What, indeed, is the ego if not a sort of object, about w hich it would be too much to say that the subject maintains a relation with it. Instead, since the subject is "always already" caught up in language, it is through this inter-subjective relation with the other of language that the sufferings of the ego are to be interpreted. Such sufferings include the pain of not existing, as is the case of the Wolf Child. The regulation of the imaginary depends on something which is located in a transcendent fashion, as M. Hyppolite would put it- the transcendent on this occasion being nothing other than the symbolic connection between human beings. 1·\~\at is the symbolic connection? Dotting our i's and crossing our t's, it is the fact that socially we define ourselves with the law as go-between. It is through the exchange of symbols that we locate our different selves [mois) in relation to one

Having isolated the patemal function from the father$s person, Lac-an, ten years later, states this distinction in both a general and a precise way. "The father, the Name-of-the-father, sustains the structure ot desire with the structure ot the law-but ~

the inheritance of the father is what Kierkegaard designates for us, namel)>his sin (Seminnr XI, p. 34). "' "\'\'e invent a 'thingie' (true) to fill up a hole (lrou) in the real. Where there is no sexual relation, there is a 'troumntisme'." Jacques Lacan, Us JIOH·rlupes errenl, unpublished seminar, 19 February 1974. (fhis untranslatable pun combines the idea of the traumatic with that of the hole. Trmrslaior's uot.e.)

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another-you, you are Mannoni, and me Jacques Lacan, and we have a certain symbolic relation, which is complex, according to the different planes on which we are placed, according to whether we're together in the police station or together in this hall, or together travelling. In other words, it's the symbolic relation which defines the position of the subject as seeing (Seminar I, pp. 140-141). Robert does not see himself because of a defect of the symbolic relation with the totemic other. Can we imagine a greater pain for the ego? The child, always confronted too early w ith a traumatic scene, gives up on the memory, which always returns again through the symbolic. The symbolic relation d efines w hether the subject sees, does not see, or sees incompletely; by being burdened with a father's unpaid debt, a son must give up a part of the image of his own body. None of this is to be found in the register of the son as an individ ual, and therefore it is necessary in the treatment to follow the w hole of the symbolic system, which accounts for the troubles of the ego. The ego's sufferings and the father's fault

Treating the ego as an object leads Lacan to undertake a critique of Michael Balint's6 1 analysis of object relations in transference. Bal int indicates what this owes to the mother/ child relation, which becomes the ideal type of the primary love relation, by which an object can satisfy the subject's needs htlly. Lacan criticizes this imaginary theory of a maternal object that can complete the subject because Balint also argues that analysis aims at supporting the subject in a genital love. Such genital love is supposed to be the acme of object relations, and is characterized by the subject's ability to get off on his partner as on an object, while also satisfying the partner's subjectivity: by respecting his/ her desire. As a consequence, Lacan says, the object loses its status as object and becomes a s ubject, and nothing in Balint's theory explains how the object in primary Jove ., Michael Balint (1896-1970). Bom in Budapest, he studied medicine, then worked in Berlin while undergoing his psychoanalytic training with Karl Abraham and Hans Sad1S, and later with Ferenczi. After the \var, B.."llint set himself up in London, where, from 1948- 1961, he worked a t the Tavis tock Clinic. A s pecialis t in "narcissis tic" cases, he was interested in psychosomatic medicine a nd soug ht to apply psychoanalysis to

medical training.

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could metamorphose into a subject in geni tal love. If the ego is an object that is passed off, in the register of the image, as a subject, it must be detached from the imaginary capture that it produces in order to bring ana lysis to the heart of the symbolic relation; it is this relation that detennines the ego image, and even its absence, as the Wolf Child teaches us. [f the ego is an

imaginary function, it is not to be confused with the subject (Seminar /, p. 193). The ego acquires the status of a mirage, as the residue, it is only one element in the objectal relations of the subject .... Are we to understand that there where the id was, in A, the ego must be? That the ego must move to A [tire pla11e mirror) and, at the end of the most refined of ideal analyses, no longer be there at all? That is quite conceivable, since everything pertaining to the ego must be realised in what the subject recognises as himself (Semi11nr /, p. 195). If the first phase of analysis involves the maxin1al projection of the subject, this should not let the analysand stagnate in an im aginary mirage or in the transference love that can be inferred from it; instead, it should lead him to perceive everything in the history of his im aginary fixations that results from the s ubject's symbolic circtnnstances. Only symbolization, the reconstructed history of these circumstances and these relations, allows w hat the subject is to be recognized. The historical reconstruction of these circumstances allows the s ubject to detach himself from his fascination with his ego and to recognize what he is-and what his ego depends on-as a son or a function of the symbolic universe of language and the law, which greeted him when he came into the world. For Lacan d uring this period, the end of an analysis implies the destitution of the ego in favour of the recognition of the subject. This is what he envisages in a case in w hich the ego is missing, a case in w hich the imaginary breach is inscribed in the unconscious by deferred action and determines the formation of the symptom; the latter expresses symbolically the right of the repressed to return. This is also what he envisages when the image has been cut from the body, the condition that affects the son of the man who had not settled his debt. TI1is entire clinical perspective d emonstrates that the s ubject of

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the sympto m results from somethin g that develops in the imaginary register. This can happen by defe rred actio n, in the case of an im agina ry breach. This is a lso w hat occ urs when the iinage o f a body has been wilhtlly m isrepresented and has lost its unity; this is a morbid consequence of th e obstruction of th e rules of social exchange that govern the world o f the subject before his birth . We can admit that a fathe r's unpaid debt can be incarna ted ii1 what disrup ts a son's iinage only if we d etach o u rselves from an mdividualist conceptio n o f beii1g, which is the ego's own conception; we must s ubstitute for it a conceptio n of a s ubject that must be a pproached m its sin gularity. Analysis goes "right up to the furthermost perceptib le limits, th at is to sa y in to a d iine nsion that goes weU beyon d the !units of the ii1d ividual" (Seminar /, p. 12). How can we better show the disjunction beh,•een the s uffe rmgs o f the ego and their symbolic cause than by analysing h ow a p roblem in the use o f a hand arises from a s us p icion con cernmg the father? Does what has been sto le n h ave a hold over the body? lacan borrows here from the conception o f the symbolic h mction that Marcel Mauss elaborates m his essay o n The Gift (2002). ln listenmg to Maori law, Mauss concludes that: What imposes obligation in the present received a nd exchanged, is the fact that the thii1g received is not inactive. Even when it has been abandoned by the giver, it still possesses something of him. Through it the giver has a hold over the beneficiary just as, being its owner, through it he has a hold over the thief. This is because the tao11ga is a nimated by the hau of its forest, its native heath a nd soil. It is truly "native": the IIau follows after anyone possessing the thii1g .... In this system of ideas one clearly and logically realizes that one must give back to another person what is really part and parcel of his nature and substance, because to accept something from somebod y is to accept some part of his spiritual essence, of his soul. To retain that thing would be dangerous and mortal, not only because it would be against law and mortali ty, but also because that thing coming from the person not only mora lly, but also physically and s piritually, that essence, that food, those goods, whether movable or immovable, those women or those descendants, those rituals or those acts of communion- all exert a magical or religious hold over you (pp. 11-12).

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Whether what is in question is Maori law or a religious ntle, it is always in the name of the spirit of things-the "!tau" and the "mann" -or in the name of the dead fa ther of monotheism that the sacred regulation of social exchanges ta kes place; it is also in this name that sentences are pronounced on an offence or a crime. And nothing can depart from this. The logic of the symbolic includes the members of the family or dan in the list of debtors as weU as those who have caused the anger of the spirits that are incarnated in w hat has been stolen. In the mirror of his hand, the son perceives the s uspicion that dishonours his father. The spirit of things- the luw or the mana, or its monotheistic version, such as the dead father of Islam62- requires that a pound of flesh be taken from the father's or the family's body in order to find peace. For some reason, the law of the Koran has broken down here. The son's ign orance of it does not prevent him from being led unconsciously to settle his father's debt. The symptom resul ts from a sort of sacrifice to the dead father of Islam, even if the subject of the sacrifice continues to mis understand the law. He pays, although no punishment has been pronotmced and w ithout knowing wha t the Koran says. AU of this is unconscious. The symptom, if it is deciphered, is the only trace of the unconscious sacrifice caUed for in the subject's symbolic tmiverse. The son's symp tom should not be treated as his own sin, or even as an organic malfunction; the subject of the symptom must be conceived of as the subject of a symbolic universe whose ntles he does not necessarily know, but which weigh upon him, and do so even more ferociously when he does not know what they are. What claims its due here is the symbolic order, to which Lacan devotes the session of 25 June 1954, where he says that "In every analysis of the inter-subjective relation, w hat is essential is not what is there, what is seen. What stntctures it is what is not there" (Seminar/, p. 224). What can not be there and yet stmcture the

t.:

We knO\v that the Koran separates the divine figure from paternity. In refen ing to

the dead father of Islam, we are referring to the way in which Freud evokes the "recuperation" of the primal father by Islam and, more structurally-as we shall see laterto the theoretical operator that supports any symbolic network, whatever the name that receives "the spirit of things" -to use Levi-Strauss' words-may be.

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subject's sufferings, if not the symbolic universe, which calls for the son's sacrifice? The subject w ho is sacri ficed receives his condemnation from the other of the Koran, a text that he does not know. There is thus a sharp distinction between the subject of the unconscious- which receives its message from the symbolic Otherand the dialectic of the ego, which is not eliminated, but which is modified and transcended by the symbolic hmction, which requires its d ue. From that perspective, it is impossible to conhtse the stmcturing, the determination, the inveshnent of the ego in the imaginary register, with that of the s ubject of the unconscious, w hich is entirely constituted by the symbolic order, even if there is a cormection that subordinates the first to the second. If the schema of the son's body has been blocked, it is because he has been condenmed instead of the father. 1Ne must understand how incredibly cruel the unconscious tribunal"' is if we are to make sense of how the son's symptom is to be related to the father's fault. This can be done only by separating the son's ego from his subjectivity, and by remembering, w ith the etlm ologists, the weight of the symbolic h mction and of debt on the lineage of someone who has not honoured the-always sacredobligations of social exchange. If the experiment of the inverted bouquet allows Lacan to illustrate how tl1e imaginary is cormected to the symbolic register, he maintains clearly, in this first seminar, that the subject of the w1conscious comes from the symbolic; this s ubject is a product of language and the social structures that include the system of laws and of mythic or religious social exmange tl1at regulate his/ her cultural universe. Lacan, following H yppolite, takes as his point of departure the Hegelian fonnula that throws light on the imaginary dialectic of desire- " desire is the desire of the other"- in order to complete the experiment of the inverted bouquet. We must now end tllis compact commentary on it by accounting for subjective structuring, since we have seen that the subject's unconscious desire results from this very symbolic wliverse. The axis of the imagina ry dialectic that links the ego to the other will be complicated the following year by an axis that links the subject to the Other of the symbolic. The following "' See Markos Zatiropoulos, Tristesse dans In modem it.e : de !'ideal plmrmacologique ii Ia

clinique freudiemre de In me/nnco/ie (1996).

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graph, the L Schema, represents the relation between the imagina ry and the tmconscious.64

L Schema

If this unconscious message comes from the Other of the symbolic to the subject, in what s tate does it arrive? "In an inverted form," Lacan answers in the Rome Report, which he wrote even before the seminar that we have just studied in order to throw light on the penumbra of symbolic effectiveness a t the first moments of the primal identification. "The s ubject receives from the Other his own message in an inverted form": Lacan's readers have often commented on this formula, frequently highlighting its Hegelian tmderpimlings. For those who wou ld li ke a fuller development of the experiment of the inverted vase, we can refer tl1em to tl1e work of joel Dor65, which gives a clear exposition of it. Dor reads Lacan's return to Freud by giving a short introduction to the work of Ferdinand de Saussure and Hegel, who, in his opinion, inspired Lacan. This is all very well, but does tl'lis theory of the unconscious as an inverted message tl1at comes from tl1e Other of tl1e symbolic really derive from these sources? We mus t now examine this crucial point.

,.. Lacan, Seminar JJ, p. 243. For further commentary on the LSchema, see JacquesAlain Miller, "Commentary on U1e Graphs," Ecrifs, p. 859.

"' Joel Dor, Introduction to the Rending of Lnam: Tlte Unconscious Struclured Like n Ln11g11age (1997).

C HAPTER T WO

The subject receives from the Other his own message in an inverted form: An investigation

everal mo nths before inaugurating his seminar at Sainte-Atme, Lacan w rites in the Rome Report:

S

The form in which language expresses itself in and of itself defines subjectivity. Language says: "You will go here, and when you see this, you will tum off there." In other words, it refers to discourse about the other (discours de l'autre]. It is enveloped as such in the highest function of speech, inasmuch as speech commits its a uthor by investing its addressee with a new reality, as for example, when a subject seals his fate as a married man by saying "You are my wife." Indeed, this is the essential form from which all human speech derives more than the form at which it arrives. Hence the paradox that one of my most acute auditors believed to be an objection to my position when I first began to make my views known on analysis as dialectic; he formulated it as follows: "Huma n language would then constitute a kind of communication in which the sender receives his own message back from the receiver in inverted form." I could but adopt this

93

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objector's formulation, recognizing in it the stamp of my own thinking (Ecrits, p. 247). At the very moment when he states the formula for commwucation that would fix, for a long time, the analysis of subjectivity as an effect of the relation to the other, Lacan indicates in a remark whose epis temology is im peccable that his own statement obeys this ntle of production, since it was first made by "one of my most acute listeners", who was objecting to what he was saying. In other words, "the sender receives Ius own message back from the receiver in an inverted form" is not a formula that Lacan created himself. Instead, he took it from a listener; it is a response from the Other. It will be interesting, for this archaeology of Lacan 's thought, to d iscover who tlus exceptional objector was: "one of my most acute listeners", a figure of the Other who spoke to Lacan with the voice of his own unconscious. It is also necessary to understand tlus formula, why it was coined, and the circumstances in which it was written for the first time (spring 1953). Yet is this formula so important? Yes, for-as we have seen-in what would become tl1e first book of the seminar, Lacan was seeking to d efine a theory of the s ubject that would be compatible w ith what Freudian experience had taught hin1. Lacan's first public seminar deals w ith Freud's papers on teclmique, and it is important not to lose tl1e thread of his analysis, since the subject that he is seeking to define is tl1e subject of analytic experience. By reading Freud's most teclulical texts, he made progress in answering the question of what a subject is for, and in, analytic experience. Lacan responds to tlus question in the Rome Report: subjectivity is what is d efined by a form, a simple form. Yet this time, and unlike the answer that is elaborated in the texts of 1936-1948 on the mirror s tage, it is a form in w hich language expresses itself. In 1953, Lacan changes Ius conception of subjectivity, which is s till, however, defined as a s imple term. It is a form, but not just an y form; it is not the "prinlordial form" of the root identification of the nlirror stage, which "sit uates the agency kn own as the ego, prior to its social

determination", not this sort of "ideal-1" or this "total form of his body, by w hich the s ubject anticipates the maturation of his power in a mirage" which "is given to hinl only as a gestalt .... [The] power [pnignnnce]should be considered linked to the species" (Ecrits, p. 76).

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Far from being a gesta lt of the bod y, it is a form "in which language expresses itself", and is "essential" since "all htmlan speech derives" from it and "d efines subjectivity" (Ecrits, p. 246). In 1953, Lacan, still seeking the answer, encounters something. What can be deduced from this encounter is that subjectivity receives its definition from an operation that is now situated in the register of language- the symbolic- rather than from the bod y im age. It took Lacan 17 years- from 1936 to 1953- to alter the form that defines subjectivity; it changed from the imaginary to the symbolic, from the body image to a parad oxical expression of langu age. Although this s im ple d is placement could appear w1interesting to o ur readers, we should note the family resemblance between the two formulations. Let us reread the first formula (that of 1936-1949): For the total form of his body, by which the subject anticipates the maturation of his power in a mirage, is given to him only as a gestalt, that is, in an exteriority in which, to be sure, this form is more constitutive than constituted, but in which, above all, it appears to him as the contour of his stature that freezes it and in a symmetry that reverses it (Ecrits, p. 76). For this first moment of the elaboration, the fonn given to the subject is: 1. 2. 3.

In an exteriority More constit utive than constituted In a symmetry that reverses it.

The formal identity that defines the subject certainly does not allow the two forms to be confused with each other: one concerns what comes to the s ubject from the symbolic, while the other derives from the imaginary. One reveals what w ill give him the ideal image of his body. The other gives him the signifiers of his fate, or in anthropological terms, what is imposed symbolically, w hen his place in the network is taken into account. Yet this formal kinship must not escape us for it shows us the stamp of Lacan 's thought'6: in both cases, the "'for an overview o f Lacan's thought, see Paul-Laurent Assoun, I.Acfw (2003).

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human being receives, from what is outside himself, both his body image and the symbolic coordinates of his fate. These coordinates will or will not allow him-as we have seen with the Wolf Child-to perceive his image and to develop with a greater or lesser number of symptoms in his subjective life, as well as in his network of social exchanges. Recognizing the stamp of lacan's "thought"-a thought that my archaeology is seeking to read- in this handful of traits s upposes that I am authorized, first, to use this tenn, w hich some colleagues, who rely on lacan's later teaching, d isparage; they object that my research gives too large a place to the register of thought in the analyst. Yet without discow1ting this objection, I am going to remain faithful to a more or less chronological method. Yes, there is a recognizable thought behind the various moments of his teaching, and the fragments of the Rome Report, whose presuppositions we are examining, make it clear that the lacan of 1953 believed that his thought had a sort of "stamp". In order to understand lacan's quest for a theory of the subject that would be congruent with analytic experience, one should read "The Mirror Stage" with the Rome Report; we should consider the passage that has been cited from the latter text less as a new response to vvhat motivates Lacan's analysis than as a nevv version of the answer that he s upplied from 1936 to 1938. This answer had aimed, through the mirror stage, to "make up" for w hat is missing in Freud's doctrine of the first identifications.67 La can's new answer combines se.v eral versions of the mirror stage with what can be deduced from the objection to his method; it is necessary, however, to emphasize that it is not at just any moment that lacan can see that "Human language would ... constitute a kind of communication in w hich the sender receives his own message back from the receiver in inverted form." This formula arises from the O ther precisely "when I first began to make my views known on analysis as dialectic"; it has the value of an interpretation that can produce a change because it had been made at the right time. How long had lacan been making his views on analysis as dialectical known? What does this new formula mean? What is the relation between the mirror stage, the dialectic of ana lysis and the progress

t-7

On this point, see Lacmz et les sdmces sociales, pp. 44 tf.

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in symbolization? Is all of this not too intellectualized and does it not move too far from Freud's text, and even from the experience of the treatment? Not at all, since it is precisely in his 1951 text, Presentation on Transference that Lacan offers his colleagues a reading of a paradigmatic text from Freud's clinic, the Dora case, in which he described the treatment of the patient as a d ialectical experience. If Lacan conceives of analysis as a dialectical progression, his goal is not to " intellectualize" it to the detriment of clinical truths, because Freud's treatment of Dora was itself d ialectical. The treatment, when directed dialectically, leads us the closest to subjective truth and Lacan recalls the salutary value of Freud's orientation, which allows the message that comes from the O ther to be W1knotted in an inverted form. I. Presentation on Transference (1951) The Dora case or Freud's dialectic

Finnly ruling out any psychologizing orientation for psychoanalysis, since he criticizes its danger of objectifying the individual, Lacan suggests, in his presentation to a conference of Romance-language psychoanalysts in 1951, a conception of the Freudian experience that is characterized by a sort of dialogue; in this d ialogue, the subject is constituted by a discourse whose only law is that of tntth, which introduces a change into reality. "(P ]sychoanalysis is a dialectical experience, and this notion should prevail w hen raising the question of the nat ure of transference" (Ecrits, p. 177}; this statement is crucial for analytic tedmique. Shortly afterwards, he makes it clear what his dialectical conception of analysis means by discussing some models from Freud's ov.rn \•v ork.

[T]he case of Dora., is laid out by Freud in the form of a series of dialectical reversals .... What is involved is a scansion of structures in which truth is transmuted for the subject, structures

"' Ida Bauer (1882-1945). Freud's first great psychoanalytic case, Dora and her history remain a classic ot analytic literature. Born in Vienna into a \veil-off Jewish bourgeois famil)> she was the sister of Otto Ba uer (1881- 1938), one of the great figures o f the Aush·ian intelligentsia between the two \\'Orld wars. Her case is one of the most commented upon in the psychoanalytic literature.

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that affect not only her comprehension of things, but her very position as a subject, her "objects" being a function of that position. This means that the conception of the case history is idmtiarl to the progress of the subject, that is, to the reality of the treatment (Ecrits, p. 178). According to Lacan, Freud 's dialectic, far from screening out the reality of the treatment and the emergence of subjective truth, is guided by its concern with them; it is precisely when analysts recoil from this dialectic, out o f a fear of Freud's discovery, that they objectify the subject, forever forbidd ing her access to tme speech and to subjective progress. In this connectio n, what can be said about Dora?"' When Freud first meets her, she is 18 yea rs old. According to him, Low spirits and an alteration in her character had ... become the main features of her illness. She was clearly satisfied neither with herself nor with her family; her attitude towards her father was unfriendly, and she was on very bad terms with her mother, who was bent upon d rawing her into taking a share in the work of the house" (Dora, p. 23). She had frightened her parents by writing a farewell letter in which she warned them that she wanted to d ie. When, one day, she fainted in front o f her father, he took her to Freud. Freud d iagnoses her as a case of '"petite hysterie' with the conunonest of all soma tic and mental symptoms: dyspnoia, tussis 11ervosa, aphonia, and possibly migraines together with depression, hysterical WlSociability, and a taedium vitae which was probably no t entirely gen uine" (Dora, p. 23-4). Nothing, then, was extraordinary abou t Dora's case, which Freud, however, made famous. He a rgues that "What is wanted is precisely an elucida tion o f the commonest cases and of their most frequent and typical symptoms" (Dora, p. 24), and his disciples have never stopped commenting o n this case, for better or worse. In 1951, Lacan's commentary locates itself within this psychoanalytic traditio n, which it will revolutionize. Let us ta ke a look a t this case. Dora complains to Freud that her father has abandoned

"' The reader will profit from referring to Freud's text, Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, 1953, pp 1-122.

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her by leaving her in the hands of his mistress, Frau K., and that he has done so in order to facilitate his adulterous affair. According to Lacan, far from d isabusing the young woman of her belief, Freud takes cognizance of the circuit of exchange, but his response is free of the compassion that she had been seeking; instead, he makes "(a] first d ialectical reversal", which requires that she recognize her own part in contin uing the "disorder" about w hich she is complaining. What follows is a "development of truth", as Lacan says: Namely, that it was not on the basis of Dora's mere silence, but of her complicity and even vigilant protection, that the fiction had been able to last which allowed the relationship between the two lovers to continue. What can be seen here is not simply Dora's participation in Herr K.'s courtship of which she is the object; new light is shed on her relationship with the other partners of the quadrille by the fact tha t it is caught up in a subtle circulation of precious gifts, which serves to make up for a deficiency in sexual services. This circulation starts with her father in relation to Frau K., and then comes back to the patient through Herr K.'s consequent availability, in no way diminishing the lavish generosity which comes to her directly from the first source, by way of parallel gifts-this being the classic manner of making amends by which the bourgeois male manages to combine reparation due his lawful wedded wife with his concern for passing on an inheritance (note tha t the presence of the figure of the wife is reduced here to this lateral link in the chain of exchanges) (Ecrits, p. 179). Let us note the procedure. Freud, as Lacan argues, begins Dora's analysis w ith a first dialectical reversal-a subjective rectificationwhich leads to the birth of a tmth. We shall emphasize that this tmth is etlmological, since it is incarnated, according to Lacan, in the circuit of social exchange that governs Dora's world and assigns her a plac~as object of exchange- that she rehtses, but which remains,

nevertheless, her own. This case illustrates Lacan's subject perfectly, since it shows how Dora aids, without knowing it and thus unconsciously, the message. of the social O ther, w hich assigns her a precise place in the d1ains of social exchange.

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Freud's first d ialectical reversal makes Dora see how she accomplishes unconsciously the " mission statement" that comes to her from the other and which, once deciphered and placed in the father's mouth, would be something like the following: "You are the woman whom I exchange w ith Herr K., as quid pro quo for the woman whom he is giving to me (Frau K )." This circuit of the exchange of women, which provides Dora w ith the coord inates of her unconscious activity, could have contin ued without a snag if the yow1g woman had consented to participate in it as an object- that is, as a woman. Yet Dora objects precisely to this and rebels, Lmder the cover of a jealousy of Frau K, against her own role. This is the second d ialectical reversa l, in which Freud unmasks, beneath this jealousy, an tmconscious interest in her, an interest that, if it is to be brought to light, requires Dora's complaint to be reversed once again . This is a new development of truth, but now the truth is sullied by Freud's own prejudices, since, accord ing to Lacan, wha t motivates Dora's jealousy are not her own Oed ipal wishes, which would see Frau K as a rival, since she is the father's mistress, and an object for men who sta nd in for him: Herr K. and Freud. Instead, a correct d evelopment of tmth would have led Freud to recognize, in Dora's attaclunent to Frau K., not a jealousy that derives from identi fication, but a homosexual object investment that is decid edly pre-Oedipal. This root identification comes to her from the mirror stage and results from a primal masculinity; th is masculinity constitutes her own femininity as a mystery, and even as a symptom-and works against fate, which has assigned her a woman's place in social exchanges. What fascinates Dora about Frau K is, as Freud recognizes, "her 'adorable white body"' (Dora, p. 61) and as Lacan says, "the mystery of Dora's own ... bodily feminini ty" (Ecrits, p. 180). In other words, for Lacan, she has not been able to recognize her own femininity. To do this, "she would have to asstm1e [asswner) her own body, fa iling which she remains open to the functional fragmentation (to refer to the theoretical contribution of the mirror stage) that constitutes conversion symptoms". Now, her only means for gaining this access was via her earliest imago, which shows us that the only path open to her to the object was via the masculine partner, with whom, because of their difference in age, she was able to identify, in that

TH E SU Bj ECT RECE IVES F ROM TH E OTH ER H IS OWN MESSAG E

10 1

primordial identification through which the subject recognizes herself as I ... (Ecrits, p. 181). In writing these ellipses, Lacan invites the reader to switch to the 1949 text on the mirror stage, w hich provides the theoretical foundation of his 1951 analysis of Dora's identifications. Because she has identified, from the first moment of her life in front of the mirror, with the primal image of a male partner who is older than she is, Dora, according to Lacan: 1.

2. 3. 4.

5.

Cmmot accept her own female bod y Falls prey to the fragmentation that motivates her conversion symptoms Sees Frau K.'s body as a fascinating mystery Identifies w ith her father and th us makes Frau K. the object of her desire, since she identifies w ith the inheritors of the paternal gestalt (Herr K., Freud) Objects to the message that she receives from the social other, a message that assigns her a place a mong the women w ho are to be exchanged.

In other words, Dora's malaise can be explained entirely by the fundamental disharmony that exists between the imaginary and its identifications- that of the mirror s tage, which places her on the masculine side- and the unconscious message, which she receives from the social Other, her network, which orders her to take her place as woman in the circuit of exchange. Dora or the emblem of the feminine condition

Beyond rectifying the problems of the case, Lacan, in order to give a paradigmatic explanation of the Freudian clinic of hysteria, also connects, on the epistem ological level, two elements: 1.

2.

What he borrows from etlmologists concerning the m1alysis of the gift and exchange, and especially from Levi-Strauss' analysis of the exchange of women What he had been formulating since 1936, concerning how the mirror stage makes up for what is missing in Freud's theory of primal identifications.

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LACAN AND LEVI -STRAU SS OR T HE RETUR N TO FREU D (1 95 1- 195 7)

What is in question here is not simply a secondary clinical problem. Let me emphasize that with this text: L 2. 3. 4.

Lacan criticizes Freud's assumptions about the prevalence of the father in the Oedipus complex He treats these assumptions as Freud's resistance to the analysis He makes the analyst's biases the place of the resistance to analysis, and He shows us finally what is not only Dora's fate, but that of all the "petites hysteries", all of w hom object to the symbolic system that assigns women their place as ethnologically determined exchange objects.

Is the feminine cond ition not profound ly d ivided-and its symptoms motivated-by w hat may be a structural disharmony: on the one hand, there is a primal identi fication w ith a gestalt, which is less outside sex than generic- the root or paternal identification"'and on the other, a social fate that ordains that they take the place of the object of exchange? Lacan answers: As is true for all women, and for reasons that are at the very crux of the most elementary social exchanges (the very conditions Dora names as the grounds of her revolt), the problem of her condition is fundamentally that of accepting herself as a man's object of desire, and this is the mystery that motivates Dora's idolization of Frau K. (Ecrils, p. 181). Lacan reads Freud w ith Levi-Strauss and makes the exchange of women the place w here Dora's unconscious mission is expressed. Her primal identifications make her see herself as a man and she is guided towards a homosexual object choice that Freud cmmot understand, since he remains fixed to his theory of the Oedip us com plex.

;uSee Lncau et les sdeHces socialt.'S, where I re-examined the question of the root iden-

tification in Lacan in relation to Freud's theory of the dead father. Lacan's reading of

the Dora case does not contradict my U1esis that the root identification is a gestalt of the fatl>er, and we shall see fu rther that that with the seminar of 1956-1957, Object Relnlions (Semillllr IV), Lacan reconfirms my interpretation by indicating more generally what in the hysteric's homosexual object "choice" goes back to this primal identification with the father.

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l would say that this has to be ascribed to a bias, the very same bias that falsifies the conception of the Oedipus complex right from the outset, making him consider the predominance of the paternal figure to be natural, rather than normative-the same bias that is expressed simply in the well-known refrain, "Thread is to needle as girl is to boy" (Ecrits, p. 182). Because of his Oedipal bias, Freud misses the third d ialectical reversal, w hich would have allowed him to bring out the " imaginary mold in which all the situations orchestrated by Dora d uring her life came to be cast- a perfect illustration of the theory, yet to appear in Freud's work, of repetition automatisms. We can gauge in it w hat woman and man signify to her now" (Ecrils, p. 180). Next Lacan says that In order for her to gain access to this recognition of her feminin-

ity, she would have had to assume [assumer) her own body .... Now, her only means for gaining this access was via her earliest imago, which shows us that the only path open to her to the object was via the masculine partner, with whom, because of their difference in age, she was able to identify, in that primordial identification through which the subject recognizes herself as I ... (Ecrits, pp. 180-181). According to the Lacan of 1951, w hat Freud lacked in order to situate himself better in Dora's analysis was the theory of the mirror stage. This theory would have allowed him not to expect Dora to be dominated by late Oedipal identifications; such an expectation only shows the weight of Freud's prejudices about the father's prevalence--as object-in structuring the daughter's desire." Lacan's 1951 Presentation thus seeks both to demonstrate Freud's dialectical genius and to illustrate the clinical wealth of the Lacanian replacement, the mirror stage, which is knotted here to Levi-Strauss' theory of the exchange of women, th us making Dora's unconscious

" We can see that l.acan's epistemological charges against Freud on the question of the father is still very much present in 1951, like his concem with demonstrating the clinical richness of what had been, since 1936, his contribution to the theory of narcissism, as well as his theoretical replacement of what does not suit him in Freud's theory of the fi rst identifications.

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LACAN AND LEVI ·STRAU S.S OR THE RETURN TO FREU D (195 1- 1957)

mission understandable. On the level of directing the treatment, Lacan indicates that what psychoanalysis is concerned with-the unconscious message and the mode by w hich it is stmcturedrequires a dialectical reversal so that the symptomatic cryptogram can finally yield its tru th . For him, the dialectical conception of the treatment is not a philosophical affectation, but a response that has been adjusted to the way by which the unconscious message is produced: it is a message from which the truth can be extracted after its structure has been reversed. In this case, there is therefore no choice. Because the unconscious message arrives from the Other in an inverted form, the transferential manoeuvre inverts the terms of the symptomatic complaint and requires s ubjective rectifications; these rectifications lead the ana lysand to see what she is creating or maintaining unconsciously in her complaints. We can understand better now how this text throws light on the historical circumstances in w hich the fonnula of s ubjectivity was produced. We can see w hy, in Lacan's own words, "when I first began to make my views known on analysis as dialectic", he received from his exceptional listener the formula, "Human language would then constitute a kind of communication in which the sender receives his own message back from the receiver in inverted form" (Ecrits, p. 247). Lacan says in the Rome Report that this form is that "in which language expresses itself", the form that "in and of itself defines subjectivity. Language ... refers to d iscourse about/ from the other [discours de /'autre ]. It is enveloped as such in the highest function of speech, inasmuch as speech conunits its author by inves ting its addressee with a new reality, as for example, w hen a subject seals his fate as a married man by saying 'You are my wife"' (Ecrits, p. 246). Only the dialectical production of an antithesis can then allow the unconscious message to be re-established. This can easily be understood in the analysis of individual cases; on the level of the analysis of the masses, precisely because it is, in Freud's words, a paradigmatic case of "petite hystt!rie" and thus one of the "simplest'' and most frequent cases, it can be considered as a general analysis of the feminine condition . Presentation em Transference can thus be read as both a text on Freudian technique and a work that throws light on the experience of the treatment, but it is also--on the crucial point of femininity- a contribution to psychoanalytic anthropology: the clinic of the masses. This

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double virtue is eminently Freudian; it shows that Lacan is an orthodox Freudian and that he has produced a clinic of the individ ual case that is ipso facto a clinic of the social. Yet although it is di fficult to dispute that Lacan, in his return to Freud, follows the Freudian ethic, this should not prevent us from observing that he begins this return by commenting on Freud and uses theoretical fotmdations that are not entirely those of Freud's own work: his own research on narcissism- the mirror stage- as well as w hat he has learned about the symbolic order from French etlmology. That he treats the exchange of women as the governing principle of Dora's unconscious mission shows how crucial Levi-Strauss' research is for him; it is crucial not only in terms of his psychoanalytic anthropology, but also as a way of throwing light on Freud's paradigmatic cases. This is true of Dora in 1951 but it is also true, as we saw in our earlier work, of her masculine counterpart among Freud's cases: the Rat Man. Lacan re-examined this case at Jean Wahl's" College philosopl1ique under the title of The Neurotic's Individual Mytlt. Levi-Strauss' influence is clear here, since, as mentioned earlier, he used the term " individual myth" in 1949. Lacan returns to Freud by commenting on his cases, and does so because he wants to remain dose to the latter's clinical experience. To understand tl1is return, one must do more than fix its date or sinlply to repeat, once again, tllat Lacan returned to Freud in the 1950s. We must see tllat this return involves a commentary tllat has a specific style: tllat of a profow1d respect for Freud's ethics but also of a critical testing. Through this testing, Lacan verifies the fotmdation of Freud's theses, which he does not hesitate to develop, w hen he thinks that it is useful to do so, by relying on sources that are external to Freud's theory. If this return allows him to decipher Freud's method as analyst and to locate and use what is hidden within Freud's texts concerning every analyst's subjective mission, Lacan does not develop the elements of Freud's work tl1at seem to impede the development of truth. Lacan's project is not religious; his "return" can insist on the letter of Freud's text but it can also set aside Freud's "biases", which ~jean Wahl (1888-1974), philosopher an d poet. He had an ngrignfiou in philosophy and began to teach a t the Sorbonne in 1936. The president o f the French Philosophical Sociel)\ he also headed the College pfli/osopflique.

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LACAN AN D LEVI-STRA USS O R T HE RETUR N TO FREUD (1951- 1957)

functioned as a resistance to analysis. In other words, when Lacan encounters elements of psychoanalytic theory that he judges to be obsolete, he does not insist dogmatically on maintaining them; he never hesitates to highlight, in opposition to Freud's own resistance, the perspective of the Freudian ethic, which aimed at bringing out the truth . In rereading the Dora case, what Lacan judges to be biased is nothing less than Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex; Freud's own biases created a resistance to Dora's analysis and provoked the final transferential rupture. As a consequence, what he proposes to substitute for Freud's inadequate conception is the antagonism between a series of identifications, the model of w hich is both Dora's " root identification"- the theoretical contribution of the mirror stageand the symbolic function . He believed that the latter includes but goes beyond- both generically and clinically- the Oedipus complex in both the process that constitutes the subj ect and the unconscious messages that organize his symptoms. Lacan th us reads Freud with Freud, since he rehtses to compromise whatever helps move us towards the truth; the price for this is to "sacrifice" Freud- or his guilty blin dness-in order to find a substitu te in the work of the French etlmologists, w ho allow him to decipher the message hidden in Dora's symptoms. If Lacan can argue that Dora's symptoms can be ded uced not from the Oedipal wishes for her father, but from the message of the father, who offers his da ughter up to the network of exchange of goods- a network to which he owes a woman- it is because he has learned this not only from Levi-Strauss, but also from older etlmologists, such as Marcel Mauss. What they taught him was that a debt contracted symbolically in social excl1anges must be honoured, and that if it is not, misfortune will strike whoever has not repaid it or his allies."' He can therefore argue that Dora's misfortunes result not from unconscious Oedipal guilt, but from something that is very different: a symbolic debt that, w1consciously, is unpaid. Confronted w ith the range of these etlmological theses, and his own theory of the mirror stage, Lacan believes tl1at his return to "' We have also seen that it is the logic of this unpaid debt that informs l.acan's analysis, in the first year of his seminar, of the symptom that impeded the use of a hand by the son whose father was s us pected of theft.

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Freud must go beyond the Oedipus complex. Does Lacan make this critical commentary on Freud's text in the sa me spirit in which he retum s to Freud? To answer this question, we must: 1.

2.

Ask Lacan Read his text of 7 November 1955, "The Freudian Thing or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis" (Ecrits, pp. 334-363).

II. "The Freudian Thing or the M eaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis" From the introduction to this lecture, which was given at the Vie1ma Neuropsychiatric C linic, Lacan uses the expression " return to Freud", several times. He says, first, that he is its "herald" (Ecrits, p. 401) and indicates that he has d evoted "the past four years" to a seminar on Freud's texts that is held "every Wednesday from November to July" (Ecrits, p. 336). This lecture was given in November 1955, and thus Lacan is letting it be known that his own return to the study of Freud's texts in a seminar d ates from 1951, the year of the Presentation on Transference. This reading of Dora thus inaugurates this return. Is this a homage to hysteria? A homage to the position of truth? A respect for the diachrony of Freud's d iscovery, which was first motivated by the hysteric's experience? Certainly, but according to this clarification of 1955, it could also be said that the theoretical tmder piimings of the 1951 text-both the mirror stage and the ethnological contributions to the st udy of the symbolic fw1ction- are the scientific bases of Lacan's return to Freud, bases that are external to Freud's texts. Yet if La can d ates his "public" return-his return in the sernii1arto 1951, w hy d oes he only herald it in 1955? Because what is in question is not only his own return to Freud but,in his own terms,the act of "callii1g for" a return (see Ecrits, p. 401) and of making a slogan whose political resonance-in the sense of the politics of psychoanalysis- he has now truly accepted and w hich he is now

trying to bring to bear both collectively and internationally in the psychoanalytic field. Where better to mmounce his retu rn to Freud than Vierma, where psychoanalysis was invented? Yet if Lacan makes his " return to Freud" ii1to a slogan at this moment, he s till

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LACAN AND LEVI-STRAU SS OR T HE RETURN TO FREU D (195 1- 1957)

has to formulate what its character is and what it requires. From this double point of view, Lacan sheds light on things from the beginning of his lecture. What makes his return to Freud necessary, in his opinion, is that psychoanalysts themselves have "denied " Freud's work. The denial of Freud or the rejection of history and myths

Why this denial? Because, according to Lacan, the very people whom Freud had asked to safeguard his discovery have had to sacrifice it through the forced choice of emigration; his disciples fled Nazi persecution to the United States, which is characterized by its "cultural ahistoricism" (Ecrits, p. 335). Now the function of the psychoanalyst, as Lacan explains, "presuppose[s) history as its very principle". The analytic discipline is " the one that had reconstructed the bridge between modem man and ancient myths" (Ecrits, p. 335).u In Lacan's work, there are many ways of defining Freud's discovery and its denial. Yet we shall note that this denial, whose causes are seen as socio-historical, is related to the rejection of history and the rupture of the bridge that psychoanalysis has " reconstructed" between modern man and the universe of ancient myths. On the epistemological level, the two obviously go together, but w hat Lacan is referring to, in particular, is the Oedipal myth and its prevalence in Freud's work, as opposed to what he now calls the "preoedipal mess to w hich the analytic relationship can be reduced, according to our mod em analysts" (Ecrits, p. 339). What characterizes Lacan's return most surely is his rereading of the Oedipal path in analytic experience and, more generally, as we have seen with the Dora case, of the symbolic- where the directives of the w1conscious arise. Yet what Lacan also tells us is that this reh tm, on the collective plane, is determined by the history of psychoanalysis and the denial of Freud's texts. This return also requires the community of psychoanalysts to make use of "the antithesis constituted by the phase that has passed in the psychoanalytic movement since Freud's death" (Ecrits, p. 336).

' This is Lacan's complete sentence: "Whence stems this contradiction between the preoedipal mess, to which the analytic relationship can be reduced, according to our modern analysts, and the fact that Freud wasn't satisfied until he had reduced it to

7

the Oedipal position?" (p. 339).

THE SU Bj ECT RECE IVES FRO M TH E OTH ER H IS OWN MESSAG E

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The retu rn to Freud is thus no t, in Lacan's tenn s, "a return of the repressed" b u t rathe r: 1.

2.

A " reversal" o f w hat analysts have done since Freud's dea th (Ecrits, p. 127) A rectificatio n of the psychoanalysts' position, which would be the antithesis of their denial and its p resuppositio ns: the rejectio n o f history and mythologies.

More generally, the retum to Freud becomes a return to "Freud's meaning" (Ecrifs, p. 126), as "it is a ttested to in a body of written work of the most lucid and organic kind" (Ecrits, p. 336). All of this aims at restoring tmth to the heart of the analytic commmtity and its cllitical practice. The meaning of a return to Freud is a retum to Freud's meaning. And the meaning of what Freud said may be conveyed to anyone because, while addressed to everyone, it concerns each person. One word suffices to make this point: Freud's discovery calls truth into question, and there is no one who is not personally concerned by truth. It must seem rather odd that I should be flinging this word in your faces-a word of almost ill repute, a word banished from polite society. But isn't it inscribed in the very heart of analytic practice, since this practice is constantly rediscovering the power of truth in ourselves and our very flesh? Why, indeed, would the unconscious be more worthy of being recognized than the defenses that oppose it in the subject, so successfully that the defenses seem no less real than it? ... But I am asking where the peace that ensues in recognizing an unconscious tendency comes from if the latter is not truer than what restrained it in the conflict (Ecrits, pp. 337- 338). Analytic experie nce aims at recognizing unconscious truth and Presentation on Transference shows us that d irecting the treatment to obtain this result involves a dialectical moveme n t that must precede it; first, there is a subjective rectificatio n and then there is a d evelopme nt of the truth. The retu rn to Freud on the level o f the analytic group, wltich Lacan heralds in Vie1ma, in volves the same s teps as an analysis: a promotion

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LACAN AN D LEVI -STRAU SS O R T H E RETUR N TO FREUD (1951- 1957)

of the antithesis, a reversal of resistances on the analysts' side and subjective rectifications, and the development of tm th- that of Freud's speech or of his lucid writings-which demonstrates the onmipresence of the symbolic ftmction in relation to the tmconscious. Once the symptom's signifying structure is "deciphered, it is plain to see and shows the onmipresence for human beings of the symbolic ftmction stamped on the flesh" (Ecrits, p. 346). Th us, Lacan's return, on the level of the analytic group, is strictly equivalent to the dialectical method that he advocates in d irecting the treatment. In both cases, the d ialectical reversal of positions must lead to the recognition of truth, which is deduced from symbolic effecti veness. The subject, its symptoms and its malaise are d educed from such a function; this is done both in individual analytic treatments and in a group: in society, w hether or not it is an analyt ic society. In bringing his arguments about the group to Vie1ma, Lacan relies on ethnological knowledge and highlights subjective truth as the cause of the discontents within societies. The subjective causality of group discontents

What distinguishes a society grounded in language from an animal society, which even the ethnological standpoint allows us to see-namely, the fact that the exchange that characterizes such a society has other foundations than needs (even if it satisfies them), specifically, what has been called the gift 'as total social fact'-can then be taken much further, so far as to constitute an objection to defining this society as a collection of individuals, since the in-mixing of subjects makes it a group with a very different stntcture. This reintroduces the impact of a truth as cause from a totally different angle and requires a reappraisal of the process of causality" (Ecrils, p. 346.) Further on, he says that "If all causality evinces the subject's involvement, it will come as no surprise that every order conflict is attributed to him " (Ecrits, p. 346). Lacan applies to the analytic group what he d oes in the clinic, because he has learned from Mauss and Levi-Strauss to recognize the symbolic fw1ction as the fow1dation of societies. This ftmction:

TH E SU Bj ECT R EC EIVES FRO M TH E O TH ER H IS O W N ME SS AG E

1. 2. 3.

1 11

Governs subjectivities that have been gathered into a collective Treats subjectivi ty as the cause of conflict in the g ro up, and Design ates the subjective tmth which causes the sense o f d isconte nt that, w hether against his will or not, La can incarnated in French analysis and in the 1953 split.

Thus, it is necessary for both political and episte mological reasons, to re mind his listeners that a na ly tic intervention in the ind ividual treatme n t o r in the g ro up must ru le out a ny individualist perspective. He states tha t "The terms in which I a m posing the p roblem o f psychoanaly tic intervention make it s ufficien tly clea r, I think, that its e thics are not individualistic" (Ecrits, p . 346). Whether o r not it has been brough t together into a collective, the subject is never the ego; if a nalysts want to reach the ca use embodied in the symptoms, they m ust pay a ttention to the s ubject and its truths in both the individual t rea hnent a nd the group . If Lacan and his return to Freud a re symptoms in the psychoanalytic group, it is because, as he says, his speech incarnates the Freud ia n truths d enied by the other post-Freud ia ns. For this reason, he o ffe rs his incred ible fo rmula, "1, truth, spea k" (Ecrits, p. 340). This e n tire lecture on the re turn to Fre ud is d eveloped in terms o f the essentia l theoretical bases tha t Lacan p romotes in the readings o f Freud 's texts that ma rk his retu rn. The theoretical bases of 7955

What a re they? 1.

The d isjunction between the ego and the subject: For the subject of whom I was just speaking as the legatee of recognized truth is definitely not the ego perceptible in the more or Jess immediate data of conscious jouissnnce or the alienation of labour (Ecrits, pp. 346-347).

2.

The reminder that subjectivity is constituted by the form of inverted language, a form that is specific to the symbolic ftmction: It is not about [the subject) that you must speak to him, for he can do

this well enough himself, and in doing so, it is not even to you that he speaks. While it is to him that you must speak, it is literally about

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LACAN AN D LEVI -STRAU SS O R T H E RETUR N TO FREUD (1951- 1957)

something else-tha t is, that about some-thing other than what is at stake when he speaks of himself- which is that thing that speaks to you. Regardless of what he says, this thing will remain forever inaccessible to him if, being speech addressed to you, it cannot elicit its response in you, and if, having heard its message in this inverted form, you cannot, in re-tu rning it to him, give him the twofold satisfaction of having recognized it and of making him recognize its truth

(Ecrils, p. 348). 3.

The re minder of his theory o f narcissism and the mirror stage (Ecrits, p. 355) and of im aginary alienatio n: This passion brings to every relation with this image, constantly represented by my counterpart, a signification which in terests me so greatly-that is, which ma kes me so dependent on this image-that it links all the objects of my desires to the other's desire, more closely tha n to the desire they arouse in me (Ecrits, p. 355).

4.

The reminders that the symbolic is the basis both of how the treatment is to be conducted and of the d iscoveries made by Freud and Levi-Strauss: This is why I teach that there are not only h"o subjects present in the analytic situation, but two subjects each of whom is provided with hvo objects, the ego and the other (Ecrils, p. 357).

And also: Freud's discovery went right to the heart of this determination by the symbolic law, for in the unconscious-which, he insisted, was quite different from everything that had previously been designated by that name-he recognized the instance of the laws on which mnrringe nud kiuship (my emphasis) are based, establishing the Oedipus complex as its central motivation already in the Trnumdeutlmg. This is what allows me to tell you why the motives of the unconscious are limited to sexual desire, a point on which Freud was quite clear from the outset and from which he never deviated. Indeed, it is essen tially on sexual rela tions [liaison]-by regulating them according to the law of preferential marriage alliances and forbidden relations-tha t the first combinatory for exchanges of women between family lines

TH E SU Bj ECT R EC EIVES FRO M TH E O TH ER H IS O W N ME SS AG E

1 13

relies, developing the ftmdamental commerce and concrete discourse on which human societies are based in an exchange of gratuitous goods and magic words (Ecrits, p. 359).75 Once again, Lacan c01mects Freud's work with Levi-Strauss' a t the precise point of the question of sexual desire in the Oedipus complex and of how it is regulated socially. This leads to the text's conclusion, where Lacan suggests that fuhtre analysts should be introduced to the methods of " the linguist, the historian, and ... the mathematician"; this is part of an institutional reform, in w hich the analyst would maintain a "constant conunw1ication with disciplines that would define themselves as sciences of intersubjectivity or by the term 'conjechtral sciences"' (Ecrits, p. 362). In short, psychoanalysis would communicate with the appropriate social sciences, a communication whose outcome Lacan would still be seeking several years later. What is especially important about this text is that it clarifies what the "return to Freud" means for Lacan, at the moment when he is heralding it to the international psychoanalytic conununity. He takes a very strong attitude towards the psychoanalysts of the IPA, blaming them for a blatant "denial" and for choosing what was obviously a political option. Yet we need to recall that what Lacan was aiming at in this rehtnl was a return to Freud's meaning, a return to the founding texts, w hich had to be evaluated in terms of their capacity to stand up to the test of conunentary. What this test reveals is that His texts prove to be comparable to those that, in other times, human venera tion has invested with the highest qualities, in that they withstand the test of the discipline of commentary, whose virtue one rediscovers in making use of it in the traditional way-not simply to situate what someone says in the context of his time, but to gauge whether the answer he gives to the questions he raises has or has not been superseded by the answer one finds in his work to current questions (Ecrils, p. 336).

" On the exchange of women.. see Claude Levi-Strauss, T!Je Eltmumlnry Structures of Ki11s!Jip (1947).

1 14

LACAN AN D LEVI-STRAUSS O R T H E RETUR N TO FREUD (1951- 1957)

If this reference to the texts of the father of psychoanalysis d oes not lack religious connotations, we shall note that the discussion of the function of commentary emphasizes that it allows L

2.

A text to be re-contextualized by restoring its historical presuppositions, and in order for this to be done, one must be freed from the "cultural a historicism" that can only imped e an w1derstanding of both Freud's texts and analytic practice A verification that Freud's theses are not obsolete.

These reflections will prove useful for my own commentary. Inscribed at the heart of Lacan's work is a definition of commentary whose analytic references are perhaps less direct than the ones that characterize his formula of 1953, a formula that, from my perspective, is crucial: "Conunenting on a text is like d oing an analysis." We must not, however, be mistaken about what Lacan was trying to do: to bring out the Freudian "truth effect", as he makes d ear from what he says in this lecture about his own practice as commentator : Who, among the experts in disciplines other than psychoanalysis whom I have guided in reading these texts, has not been moved by this research in action-whether it is the research he has us following the Traunufeutung ... the case study of the Wolf Man, or Beyond the Pleasure Principle? What an exercise in the training of minds, and what a message to lend one's voice to! And what better confirmation could there be of the methodical value of this training and the truth effect this message produces than the fact that the students to whom you transmit them bring you evidence of a transformation, occurring sometimes overnight, in their practice, which becomes simpler or more effective even before it becomes more transparent to them (Ecrits, p. 337). The em otion, the tntth effect, the encounter that changes us: do not all of these participate in analytic experience? Certainly, and if in 1955, as in 1953, the reh.m1 to Freud involves a commentary on Freud's texts, it is because a psychoanalyst must know how to find his/her own place in the history of psychoanalytic thought. Further, it is because it is not only necessary to know whether a text is obsolescent, but also because "Conunenting on a text is like

TH E SU Bj ECT RECE IVES F ROM TH E OTH ER H IS OWN MESSAG E

1 15

doing an ana lysis". This is especially the case with Freud's text, which prod uces messages that link analysts symbolically, and thus unconsciously, with Freud's voice.

The tidings brought to the group If in 1955, Lacan can make h imself the hera ld of this style of a return to Freud, it is because he has himself had the experience of commenting on Freud's work and this commentary has functioned like a psychoanalysis. It is also because he bea rs the responsibility, as he says in 1955, for what d ivides the psychoanalytic field in the " order conflict" (Ecrils, p. 346), a conflict that derives from Freudian truth as a cause; this indicates his own subjective implication, w hich he has perceived since 1953 as a "fate". Indeed, if Lacan can become the herald of the group's retum, it is because he has been tmdergoing this experience s ince 1951 and it has changed him; he is, as it were, going through the pass, which leads him to reopen Freud 's work as the solution to the cr ucial problems of psychoana lysis a t that time. In returning to the desire of the father of psychoanalysis, Lacan had allowed the deluge of Freudian truths to engulf him, thus modifying irreversibly his being as an analyst who had become truly Freudian for the first time. This subjective change can be seen as the cause of the conflict that brought about the institutional division in Paris in 1953, and which led him to be frozen out of the International Association of Psychoanalysis. Thus, although he may not have intended to move away from the IPA, it was in relation to his conversion to Freud's work- which became ever stronger, and to the crystallizing of Freudian truths-which he incarnated every more clearly, that Lacan experienced the splitting of 1953. For him, this rupt ure, far from being the trimnphant achievement of an institutional calculation that had arisen from some sort of will to power, was a nightmarish test. If this analysis is correct, Lacan formulated this rupture in terms not of his opposition to a group but of his heroic recognition that his fate was to decipher Freud's work; this task of deciphering led hi m away from the father's house, although he had intended only to make Freud's own voice heard there once again. The importance that Lacan's teaching took on in the analytic movement indicates

1 16

LACAN AN D LEVI -STRAU SS O R T H E RETUR N TO FREUD (1951- 1957)

that the members of the IPA were perfectly correct in rejecting him; in doing so, they were designating, witl1out knowing it, the man who would become the most influential analyst of his generation, and of several succeeding generations. Those who were on Lacan's "side" were more willing to see- and still see-that this charge was a pretext for rejecting him, out of a will to power that left analysis to stagnate in the register of the ego. In making this judgement, Lacan's followers are, nevertheless, neglecting the lesson on group conflicts tl1at he gave them in 1955 and are making an unconvincing argument. Whether in 1951, 1953 or 1955, Lacan 's ret urn to Freud was both rejected and fruitful, even if it took him several years to recognize his own fate in the history of the psychoanalytic movement and the m ission that had been returned to him by Freud's texts; this recognition was not painless for him. In order to understand this, and in following his own formulations about his return, we must apply Lacan to Lacan; we must grasp the disjunction, in Lacan, between "his majesty the ego", and his own subjective position in 1953, which had come into being tluough suffering, according to the symbolic logic of Freud's work. In 1955, Lacan's "metamorphosis"'• and the recognition of the truths of Freud's message that constit ute his desire as analyst, lead him to designate that Freud's own speech is the place of tmth and to pronow1ce, in the latter's name, a fonnula that has a t roubling polysemy: "1, truili, speak" (Ecrits, p. 340). This indicates that 1.

2. 3.

By incarnating Freudian tmth, Lacan can state the secret that he recognizes Freudian truth can be d eciphered in Freud's text This truth concerns Freud's desire-to decipher the truth of w1conscious desire- and is the sol ution to both the burdens of the symptom and the question of what Freudian analysts d esire; this was Lacan's desire when he formulated it in 1955, just as in 1953, he had been through the ordeal of its painful recognition.

Now, let us move back to 1953.

Jam using the term "metamorphosis" in the sense in which- as we have seen in an earlier work-Lacan mentions the identification with the father as a solution to the )'I>

subjective impasses of identifying with tl1e brothers.

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1 17

Ill. 1953

This was the yea r that Lacan gave his lect ure on the Rat Man, The Neurotic's Individual Myth, a lecture tha t showed his determina tion to review the Freud ian clinic by using both the mi rror stage and the symbolic ord er 's ntles-which d erived from his interpreta tion of French ethnology and especially of Lev i-St rauss. It was also the year of the first rupture of the. French analy tic community: the exact moment when Lacan had to pay the. political price for h is return to Freud. I am going to remind readers of the main reasons for this spli t, but we shall a lso read Lacan's own descriptions of it, in ord er to analyse the. turbulent situ ation in which he found himself.

The split" How can we. make a quick evaluation of the association of French psychoanalysts before the split? At the end of the Second World War, d uring which its analytic activities were s uspended, the Paris Psychoanalytic Society (SPP) went back to work. Depending on the International Psychoanalytic Association, it was dominated by the influence of the Anglo-American analysts who, according to Lacan in 1955, had deviated from Freud's work. At the time, it brought together about 20 titular members, most of whom were physicians, and 70 students who were. in training. Begirming in 1947, Dr. Sacha Nacht'-. was the president of this society and he hoped to provide. it with an institute that would teach psychoanalysis. For a short time in 1953, Lacan succeeded him as president. In this context, Nacht had the SPP adopt, in June 1952, a plan for the institu te according to which he would direct it for five years, and it would grant a d iploma for psychoanalysts, a d iploma that would be reserved for physicians. ~On

this point, the reader will profit by referring to La scission de 1953 (1976). In this work, Jacques-Alain Miller has collected the texts that are essential for understanding this rupture and its context ~ Sacha Nacht (1901-1977), a Romanian immigrant. He was especially concerned

with obtaining tl1e recognition of tl1e International Psychoanalytic Association for his Paris Psyd1oanalytic [nstitute, which he had foLmded and o f which he was the first director. After an analysis with Rudolph Loewenstein, Lacan's analyst, he undertook a second analysis with Heinz Hartmann and promoted the latter's notion of the "autonomous Ego".

1 18

LACAN AND LEVI-STRAUSS OR T HE RETURN TO FREU D (1 95 1- 195 7)

This plan violently d ivided the members, and led to an opposition between tlt e supporters of Nacht's medical and authoritarian "line" and tlte more "liberal" position of Professor Daniel Lagache, w ith which Lacan was affiliated. The year 1953 began with Lacan's election as president of tlte SPP and then, in March, the opening of tlte Institute under Nacht's direction. The students felt a sense of discontent, w hen confronted w ith Nacht's bureaucratic power, the excessive cost of the teaching, the unpleasant inequality of their assignments to tile Institute's courses, and finally the new requirements for qualification inlposed on them, despite the fact tl1at many of them were already recognized psychiatrists or tllerapists. The convergence of tile students' revolt and the teachers' internal d ivisions led to the resignation, on 16 Jtme 1953, of Lagache"', Fran~oise Dolto"", and Juliette Favez-BoutOJmier'". These three, having rejected for one last tinle tlte opinion that the malaise in the group was "entirely cormected witlt tlte personal actions of the current president of the Society, Dr. Lacan" (LA scission, p. 87) resigned and announced the creation of the French Psychoanalyt ic Society (SFP). On that same day, Lacan left his ftmctions as president of tile SPP in order to join the new society. Togetller witlt the students who had followed !Item, they sought to have tlteir group recognized as quickly as possible by the IPA; they also tried to rejoin this association, from w hich they had separated witltout really being aware that they had done so. In order to do this, during tlte following month-July 1953---Lagache, the president of tlte SFP, sent the decision-making bodies of the International Association a memorandum dealing w ith

Daniel Lagache (1903- 1972). An alunmus of the &ole uormnle supirieure, he was analysed by Rudolph Loewenstein and was a psydliatrist and a member of the second generation of French analysts. He founded the SFP in 1953 and was tl1e co-founder o f the APF in 1964. He also founded the psychoanalytic series published by the Presses uuiversilaires de France. ~ Frane Freudian School of Paris. N

One of her important theoretical contributions was an elaboration of the unconscious body image. " juliette Favez·Boutonnier (1903-1994). A French psychoana lyst, she had an agrega· lion in philosophy, studied medicine and was analysed by Rene Laforgue. Along with Lagache, she foun ded the SFP in 1953 and tl1e APF in 1964.

THE SU Bj ECT RECE IVES FRO M TH E OTH ER H IS OWN MESSAG E

1 19

the divisions among the French analysts and asked that the SFP be granted an affiliation with the IPA. The memorandum begins by stating that "There was no questioning of either the fundamental principles of psychoanalysis or its practice, w hich have been consolidated in the forms that have commonly been described as 'classical' or 'orthodox'; in particular, there has been no divergence in principle concerning the duration of psychoanalytic treatment or the frequency and duration of thesessions" (La scission, p . 102). Lagache tried to account for the rupture by contrasting the SPP's authoritarian and scientifically unconvincing theories with the "liberal and democratic s pirit" of the founders of theSFP. The first paragraph of the memorandtml explains that there is no divergence concerning the duration of sessions, and Lagache returns to this issue four pages later, where he describes what had happened : Since 1951, objections had been made to the Teaching Commission concerning Lacan's introduction, in his tra ining analyses, of a procedure that shortens the sessions; in 1951, he could not normalize this situation ... and in 1952, Lacan's technique had stopped being discussed. Then at the beginning of 1953, three of his students went before the Teaching Commission, in order to be admitted to supervisory analyses. Everyone agreed in rejecting Lacan's technique .... The discussion finally ended with the adoption of general measures that were intended to settle these questions once and for all: no candidate would be allowed to practice superv ised analyses without having undergone, for at least 12 months, a tra ining analysis that could consist of three sessions of at least 45 minutes each week. Starting in January, Lacan, by professional discipline, had normalized his trai ning analyses (La scission, p. 107). Certa inly by discipline he had; but history w ill show that his

theoretical discipline led Lacan to enlarge his practice of variablelength sessions and tha t the s truggle over the 45 minute sessions concealed a much more general theoretical opposition to La can's return to Freud.

1 20

LACAN AN D LEVI -STRAU SS O R T H E RETUR N TO FREUD (1951- 1957)

Once seen in this perspective, the "authorita rian faction", as Lagache calls it, by focusing the "order conflict" on lacan, took a political position that, in retrospect, is rather precise. These circumstances obliged Lagache to mention that the conflict had been organized arow1d La can's name, despite the fact that he supported him and was seeking, instead, to highlight a conflict of sensibility between liberalism and authoritarianism . According to his analysis, it was this d ifference that could accoLmt for the division of French analysts, a d ivision that, according to him, had not been brought about by theoretical divergences. The blindness and the "d enial", which may not be disinterested, on this point is o bvious. Here is how Lagache rettm1s half-heartedly to the lacan case: Lacan's technique and personality have been mentioned so often by the authoritarian fraction that it is impossible not to say a word about them. For years, the Paris Psychoanalytic Society owed a large part of its life and activities to him; his seminars on Freud's texts have won Lacan the admiration and recognition of a number of students (Ln scission, p. 107). Lagache thus repeats that Lacan was at the centre of the conflict, since so many s!ttdents admired his reading of Freud's works, and his return to Freud. Readers, w ho by now have a good understanding of the theoretical scope of this return, should conclude from the weakness of the testimony of Lagache, who seemed not to see (or not to want to see, or not to want to make others see) that w hat was at stake in the return to Freud was profoundly analytic-both theoretical and clinical- and that this was what motivated lacan's s tudents' transference to him and his rejection by his peers. Perhaps lacan's earlier intellec!ttal proximity to Ma rcel Cenac, when they were w riting their article, "A Theoretical Introduction to the Functions of Psychoanalysis in Criminology" (1950)82 had made him a better judge of what Lacan had come to incarnate; it may also have enabled hin1 to see what had proved to be unbearable for some

members of the "authoritarian fraction",

~.: See

Lacan etles scitntces socinles, chapter 3.

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121

vVe can read the following in the memorandum: At the session of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society for 2 June, Lacan was the object of a rather serious indictment made by Dr. Cenac, in which various grievances were articulated; the main one was that Lacan was the muse (my emphasis) of the students' revolt ... (O)ne of the partisans of authority went so far as to say that, even if Lacan had not inspired the conflict, he was responsible for it, by the very fact of his existence (Lil scission, p. 110). Lagache fin a lly, and in s pite o f himself, indica tes th at Lacan's existence is the s u bjective cause of the Fre nc h a n a lysts' social n1alaise. Let us apply Lacan to Lacan and ask who is this bein g who had become unbearable to the other members of the group? Who is he, if n ot the incarnation of the Freudian truths that filled the analysts with fear? Let us remember these stateme nts by Lacan: Whereas Freud assumed responsibility for showing us that there are illnesses that speak (unlike Hesiod, for whom the illnesses sent by Zeus come over men in silence) and for making us hear the truth of what they say, it seems that this truth inspires more fmr (my emphasis) in the p ractitioners who perpetua te this technique as its relation to a historical moment and an institutional crisis becomes clearer (Ecrits, p. 177). Later, Lacan will add th at the psychoanalyst has a horror of his act, just as he cla ims he re th at his analytic peers feel a growing fear o f the Freudian truth and will state in 1964 that he sho uld o nly re-examine the d imension o f the unconscious w ith great care (Seminar XI, p. 23). Thus, perhaps, during these years of crisis, the psychoanalysts wh o were the most sensitive to w hat Lacan had come to embody we re the on es wh o condemned him the most v iolently; in their horror and fear, his being had become w1bearable to th e m. We can understan d how, in this painful position, Lacan could discover and claim that the bu rden of the socia l "order conflict" alwa ys returns to the subject. It retu rned to him to g ive flesh an d consistency to this s ubjective cause o f the conflict. There is n o doubt that it is a lso because o f this

1 22

LACAN AND LEVI-STRAUSS OR T HE RETUR N TO FREUD (1951- 1957)

experience that he could argue in Vielma in 1955 that something in subjectivity helps cause social crises. If Lacan encow;tered the teaching of French etlmology concerning this point, it is not only because he had read Levi-Strauss; it is also because he constmcted a sort of clinic of the social on the basis of his own subjective position, which he deciphered not as a free individual choice, but as a subjective fate that came to hin1 from the Other- here, Freud's work. Athough, in his opinion, this fate frightened other analysts, the painful ordeal that he was going through was, for him, a moment of theoretical maturation. It provided him with his theory of subjectivi ty, and more precisely, with the theory of subjectivity in history, which he formulated at that time, and which his letter to Loewenstein confirms." Lacan's letter to Loewenstein

On 14 July 1953, Lacan wrote a letter to his analyst, Rudolph Loewenstein, letting him know that Lagache was going to visit him in order to discuss the file on the split. Lacan makes it clea r that These pages were not written in order to add to that file-but in order to transmit to you, in the frank tone that our particular relationship allows us, the kind of living testimony without which a history cannot be written. No objectivity can be achieved in human matters without that subjective basis." These lines, located at the conclusion of the letter, are crucial, since they reaffirm the necessity of reaching the subjective fow;dation of what motivates human history. The only person who could take upon himself the responsibility for the students' revolt and for the sense of discontent and division in the group recounts his ordeal to his analyst.

~ Rudolph Loewens tein (1898-1976). A psychiatris t and psychoanalys t, he was born to

a jewish family in Lodz, emigrated to Zurich and arrived in Paris in 1925, where he

helped found the Gro111>e rle /' fe fa ther, which he loca ted in 1938 as the cause of the "great contemporary neurosis", to Paul ClaudeI. I also showed how he sacrificed this diagnosis

in the theoretical upheaval that led him, in 1953, to substitute the father's symbolic value for his social value in analytic experience.

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LACAN AN D LEVI-STRAUSS O R T H E RETUR N TO FREUD (1951- 1957)

considered, after the fact, as examples of w hat Lacan would later expect from those who have become analysts at the end of their analyses, and w ho would now be in a position to resolve the crucial problems of psychoanalysis and even to develop a way of teaching these questio ns. The Lacan who produced this work has been metamorphosed by his ret urn to Freud, his commentary on Freud's work and his "analysis", which led hi m unswervingly towards both the 1953 split and the refounding in Rome; in this text, he commits himself to resolving the cmcial problems encountered by psychoanalysis, as he would do througho ut the 25 years of his seminar. In short, it is a work that testifies that he has become a Freudian analyst. If, according to him, analysts' resistance culminates in their abando ning of speech as the fow1dation of psychoanalysis, La can, faithful to his dialectical strategy, can only develop an antithesis in Rome by relying on this movement: "[P)sychoanalysis has but o ne med ium: the patient's speech. The o bviousness of this fact is no excuse fo r ignoring it. Now aU speech calls for a response" (Ecrits, p. 206). Hence the title of the report, and I shall now quote its subtitle. Empty speech and full speech in the psychoanalytic realization of the subject

With iliis title, Lacan mm ounces a first d evelopment, which d istinguishes between empty speech- the most arid element of speech, tl1e model of which is the o bsessional's speech, w hich foregrounds the ego- and tme speech. In empty speech: "[T)he subject seems to speak in vain about someone w ho-even if he were such a dead ringer for him ilia! you might confuse. them- w ill never join him in the assumption of his desire" (Ecrits, p. 2 11). Analysis, on the other hand, encourages a verbalization in w hich the subject "learns to read tl1e symbols of a destiny on tl1e mard1" (Ecrits, p. 212). let's be categorical: in psychoanalytic anamnesis, what is at stake is not reality, but truth, because the effect of full speech is to reorder past contingencies by conferring on them the sense of necessities to come, such as they are constituted by the scant freedom through which the subject makes them present (Ecrits, p. 213). Lacan can now give a condensed definitio n of psychoanalysis: "This assumption by the subject of his history, insofar as it is cons titu ted by

TH E SU Bj ECT R EC EIVES FRO M TH E O TH ER H IS O W N ME SS AG E

13 1

speech addressed to another, is clearly the basis of the n ew method Freud called psychoanalysis" (Ecrits, p. 213). Thus Lacan redefines the concept o f the unconscious, its symptomatic formations and th e transformation that the s ubject undergoes when s/he e mbarks upo n the Freudian method. [W)hen a subject begins an analysis, he accepts a position that is more constitutive in itself than all the orders by which he allows himself to be more or less taken in .... For I shall take this opportunity to stress tha t the subject's act of addressing [nllocutionJ brings w ith it an addressee [allocutaire)- in other words, that the speake r [locuteurJ is constituted in it as inter-subjectivity. Second, it is on the basis of this interlocution, insofar as it includes the interlocutor's response, that it becomes clear to us w hy Freud requires restoration of continuity in the subject's motivations .... The true basis of the Freudian discovery of the unconscious becomes clear in its position as a third term. This may be simply formulated in the following terms: The unconscious is that part of concrete discourse qun transindividual, which is not at the s ubject's dis posal in re-establishing the continuity of his conscious discourse .... The unconscious is the chapter of my history that is marked by a blank or occupied by a tie: it is the censored chapter. But the truth can be refound; most often it has already been written elsewhere. Namely, •

•

In monuments: this is my b ody, in o ther words, the hyste rical core o f neurosis in which the hysterical symptom manifests the structure of language, an d is d eciphered like an inscriptio n w hich, o nce recovered, can be d estroyed witho ut serious loss In archival docume nts too: these are m y childh ood memories, just as impenetrable as sucl1 documents are w h en I d o n't know their provenance (Ecrits, pp. 214, 215).

Th e subject of analysis is thus con s tituted by her/ his entry into the method , in which s/he is completed by a psychoanalyst, w h o occupies the p lace of th e O ther, and w ho punctuates her/ his d iscourse--ending the session s, for example-and g iving sense to it. This is the theoretical bas is of the teclmique of the sessions which,

1 32

LACAN AN D LEVI-STRAUSS O R T H E RETUR N TO FREUD (1951- 1957)

rather than simply being "short", are of variable length, because the analyst ends them on the basis of a logic of interpretation. The unconscious is to be loca ted in the d iscontinuities of d iscourse or the m issing chapters o f history, chapters that are crystallized in symptoms, which awa it a retrospective deciphering, not in order for an element of reality to be restored, but according to a logic of the symbolizing of inter-s ubjective truths that is made current i11 and by the ana lytic method. Is this then a s im ple artefact of analysis? No, since, for exa mple, as Lacan indicates h umorously: "The anal stage is no less purely historical when it is actually experienced than when it is reconceptualized, nor is it less grounded in inter-subjectivity" (Ecrits, p. 217). This indicates, more harshly, that the analytic method is structurally homologousinter-subjectively- with moments that have been experienced historically. Thus it is proper to help bring them to light, in the form of substituting one discourse for another (inter-subjective) one; the ways in which this can be done include the response of the analyst, who prov ides the unconscious- w hich has been deciphered- w ith its status: the discourse of the other. "The fact tha t the subject's unconscious is the other's d iscourse appea rs more d early than anywhere else in the stud ies Freud devoted to w hat he called telepathy, as it is manifested in the context o f an analytic experience" (Ecrits, pp. 219-220). Having thus situated w hat is at stake in speech in analysis, Lacan goes back to Freud's word, to see. the hold that symbolic structures have over the constit ution of unconscious formations; he opens up this perspective in order to cormect psychoanalysis w ith the other human sciences, among the most important of which is anthropology. "Symbol and Language as Structure and Limit of the Psychoanalytic Field"'"

We need to remember that in the preface to the report, Lacan atm ounces that, in returning to Freud's concepts, he is seeking a sort of equiva lence with anthropology:

""' This second subtitle has been borrowed from "TI1e Function and Field", Ecrits, p. 220.

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133

In a discipline that owes its scientific value solely to the

theoretical concepts Freud hammered out as his experience progressed-concepts which, because they continue to be poorly examined and nevertheless retain the ambiguity of everyday language, benefit from the latter's resonances while incurring miswtderstanding-it would seem to me to be premature to break with the traditional terminology. But it seems to me that these terms can only be made d earer if we establish their equivalence to the current language of mrtJ~ropology (my emphasis) (Ecrits, p. 199). By establishing the equivalence between Freudian and anthropological concepts, Lacan is trying to return Freud's work to its scientific rigour, which had been blunted since his death by cmde and uncritical use. To rediscover, within the unconscious, the realnl of symbolic stmctures and language w ill involve a scientific restoration of Freudian concepts, w hose equivalence w ith anthropological concepts must be shown. How are they equivalent? We must thus take up Freud's work again starting with the Trnumdeuluug ... to remind ourselves that a dream has the structure of a sentence or, rather, to keep to the letter of the work, of a rebus- that is, of a form of writing, of which children's dreams are supposed to represent the primordial ideography, and which reproduces, in adults' dreams, the simultaneously phonetic and symbolic use of signifying elements found in the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt and in the characters still used in China (Ecrils, p. 221). In order to make itself heard, unconscious desire borrows the voice of the dream, which was forged in the universal heritage of an ideographic writing; the presence of such a writing can be found on the pediments of Egyptian monuments. This heritage is the basis of an equivalence between Egyptology and the psychoanalytic interpretation of dreams. What dreams and hieroglyphs have in common is a primal ideography that reappears at night, in all its alterity, to modern people; this prim al writing can also be found on the hysteric's body and, in a petrified form, in the stereotypes of madness. For the latter, "the subject ... is spoken instead of speaking; we

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recognize here the symbols of the unconscious in petrified forms that find their place in a natural history of these symbols alongside the embalmed forms in which myths are presented in our collections of them" (Ecrits, p . 232). According to Lacan, madness d emonstrates what must be heard in the discourse of the other, and it is incarnated, unfortunately and excessively, in the paranoiac subject. It is a mark of Lacan's greatness that he sees the value in this subject, who incarnates to the point of martyrdom, the petrified fonns of unconscious symbols; this is not a humanist greab1ess, which would itself be very respectable, but rather the greamess of a profow1d certainty that what fotmds all our subjective existences lies in a symbolic community, whose forms are variable but w1iversal."" Lacan posits the existence of a universal human community, which could be deciphered in archaeological d igs as well as in dreams, delusions, and symptoms. What is comm on to everyone is the primal language of symbols, and this is precisely what Freud brought to light in analysing the sense of discontent in cult ure: A symptom here is the signifier of a signified that has been repressed from the subject's consciousness. A symbol written in the sand of the flesh and on the veil of Maia, it partakes of language by the semantic ambiguity that l have already highlighted in its constitution. But it is fully functioning speech, for it includes the other's discourse in the secret of its cipher [ch(ffi-e]. It was by deciphering this speech that Freud rediscovered the first language of symbols, still alive in the sufferings of civilized man (my emphasis) (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur) (Civilization and Its Discontents). Hieroglyphics of hysteria, blazons of phobia, and labyrinths of Zwangsneurose [obsessional neurosis) ... these are the hermetic elements that our exegesis resolves, the equivocations that our invocation dissolves, and the artifices that our dialectic absolves, by delivering the imprisoned meaning in ways

•• l11e third chapter of Lnaw etles sciences socinles shows that Lacan~s clinic of psychopaths is based on a g roup of an~wopological suppositions tha t owes much to Marcel Mauss' notion of the degraded forms of the symbolic.

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that run the gamut from revealing the palimpsest to providing the solution [mot[ of the mystery and to pardoning speech (Ecrits, p. 232). Why, we may wonder, does unconscious desire include the other's discourse? Lacan answers that "Man's desire finds its meaning in the other 's desire, not so much because the other holds the keys to the desired object, as beca use his first object(ive) is to be recognized by the other" (Ecrits, p . 222). In other words, w1conscious desire w ants to be recognized, since w hat characterizes its formations-dreams, symptoms ... - is the insistence of a sort of" right of return" . Its best rnance of being recognized lies in taking the symbolic paths of primal forms of organization . The symptom, then, would include, in its signifying organization, a sort of universal figure for culture. What Freud realized very quickly is that once the d reamer enters into transference, the analyst comes to occupy the place that is addressed. The analysand w ill have d reams that should be interpreted in terms of the transferential situation: in relation to his or her conception, for example, of the analyst's desire. T he comm on resources of the universe of cultu re-the discourse of the other become the instrwnents used by LUKonscious desire to create messages and make itself recognized by the other. In other words, w hen the other has a precise incarnation, w1conscious desire speaks to it in the other's own language. The unconscious adjusts its productions inter-subjectively to the other 's codes: the codes of his desire and language. For this reason, Lacan reminds us, Freud can save his theory of dreams by interpreting, "as the reason for a dream that seems to rw1 cotmter to his thesis ... the very d esire to contradict him" (Ecrits, p. 222). For the Lacan of the Rome Report, w1conscious desire is inscribed as an engram, by means of a symbolic system w hose universal resources can be understood by anthropological d iscoveries, such as those of Egyptologists; these d iscoveries can throw light on situations in which the figure who is addressed is not incarnated. When this figure is present, on the contrary, the interpretation must be made in terms of w hat the d reamer calculates about what s/he wants or says. Yet varying the mrumer of the interpretation according to the influence of transferential circumstances-up to the point of telepathy-must not obscure the facts that

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The unconscious fonnations are structured "like" and by languages and symbolic systems and that They draw upon the place of the other by using what may or may not be primal symbols, which may or may not be universally shared." This suggests that the logic of symbolic systems and the symbolic combinatory is "imported" into these formations; this logic is always a part of what the other wants.

Thus, as Lacan indicates: It is already quite clear that symptoms can be entirely resolved in an analysis of language, because a symptom is itself structured like a language: a symptom is language from which speech must be delivered. To those who have not studied the nature of language in any depth, the experience of numerical association will immediately show what must be grasped here-namely, the combinatory

•• In his article, "The Antithetical Meanin g of Primal Words" (1910), Freud indicates that "the behaviour of the dream-work ... is identical w ith a peculiarity in the oldest languages known to us." According to the philologist, Ka rl Abel, the Egyptia n language was the "sole relic of a primit ive world, (where) there are a fair number of \·vords with two meanings, one of which is the exact opposite of the other" (1957, p. 156). Emile Benveniste, in "Remarks on the Function of Language in the Freudian Discovery", in Probli'mes de lingJristiquesg.?tzirnles1 mentions, in 1956, Lacan's ''brilliant text on the function and field of language in psychoanalysis" but also goes back to Freud's 1910 a rticle to invalidate the idea that "an analogy could be discovered between the dream process and the 'semantics of primitive languages"'. Later, he adds that "everything seems to separate us from any experience of a con-elation between dream logic and the logic of a real language." According to Benveniste, the symbolic property of language cannot be confused with that of the dream, since the first is local ~"'lnd learned, whereas the second has nothing to do with learning and is thus ipso facto universal For him, the symbolic of the unconscious is infra1inguistic, since its source "in a deeper region than the one in which educ~"'ltion instaiJs the linguistic and mechanism .... fit is] supraling uistic because it uses extremely condensed signs, which, in organized language, would correspond to larger units o f discourse .. .. Following this comparison would lead to fruitful comparisons bet\.veen the symbolic of the unconscious and certain typical procedures of subjectivity manifested in discourse. At the level of language, \Ve could specify stylistic discursive procedures'' such as euphemisms, antiphrasis, Jitotes, allusion, metonymy, metaphor, as they appear in myths, proverbs, or dreams. Benveniste accentuates characteristics of style rather than o f meaning. See Benveniste, Probli'mes de linguistique gfnirale (1966).

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power that orders its equivocations- and they will recognize in this the very mainspring of the unconscious (Ecrits, p. 223). In referring to numerical association, Lacan is not trying to show, for example, how whatever had grasped the subject in her childhood has undergone various transformations s ince then; instead, he is seeking to indicate what the necessary-r impossible- figures of an arithmetical combinatory keep hidden from her. Unconscious determination is not to be sought, in this perspective, in terms of such and such a symbol that is crystallized at the heart of such and such an unconscious fonnation; instead, it can be found in the power of the rules of symbolic organization, which govern this symbol, and w ith it, the fate of the subject. This is the case not only for arithmetical combinatories, but also for other combinatories, such as those that govern etlm ological systems. "We shall see that philologists and ethnographers (my emphasis) reveal enough to us about the combinatory sureness found in the completely unconscious systems witl1 which they deal for them to find notl1ing surprising in the proposition I am putting forward here" (Ecrits, p. 223). If the scientific rigour of Freudian language is to be recovered, tl1en its equ ivalence with tl1e conceptual series used by antluopologists needs to be established. It is possible to do so because, according to Lacan, what philologists and etlmographers share with psychoanalysts is the analysis of "com pletely unconscious systems". He is thus seeking not only to open up psychoanalysis by restoring it to its place among the h uman sciences, but also to make it the contemporary of these disciplines, by relying on their conceptua l advances; he does so not because he has a taste for being up to d ate, but 1.

2.

Because symbolic structures organize all these fields and tl1ereby place psychoanalysis and these d isciplines in a close relation with each other It is precisely this common resource that has been rejected s ince Freud's death; those who deny his d iscovery have ceaselessly refused to take the patients' speech into account.

For these reasons, there is a d ialectical im perative both to ret urn to Freud and to learn from anthropological d iscoveries. What do these "completely unconscious systems", such as psychoanalysis, share

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with etlm o logy? Referring once again to these ethnological works, Lacan shows his listene rs the o rigin o f these systems and the very birth o f the symbolic: No one is supposed to be ignorant of the law; this formula tion, provided by the humour in our Code of Laws, nevertheless expresses the truth in which our experience is grounded, and which our experience confirms. No man is actually ignorant of it, because the law of man has been the law of language since the first words of recognition presided over the first gifts-it having taken the detestable Danai, who came and fled by sea, for men to learn to fear deceptive words accompanying faithless gifts. Up u ntil then, these gifts, the act of giving them and the objects given, their transmutation into signs, and even their fabrication, were so closely in tertwined with speech for the pacific Argonauts-uniting the islets of their community with the bonds (uoeruls) of a symbolic commerce-that they were designated by its name. Is it with these gifts, or with the passwords that give them their salu tary non-meaning, that la nguage begins along with law? For these gifts are alread y symbo ls, in the sense that symbol means pact, and they are first and foremost signifiers of the pact they constitute as the signified; this is plainly seen in the fact that the objects of symbolic exchange-vases mad e to remain empty, shields too heavy to be carried, sheaves that wi ll dry out, lances that are thrust into the ground-are all d estined to be useless, if not superfl uo us by their very abundance. Is this neutralization by means of the signifier the whole of the nature of language? (Ecrits, p. 225). In this passage, Lacan relies on the work of Maurice Leenhardt92 along with that o f Ma rcel Mauss, w hich had alread y shown that the

c

Maurice l eenhardt (1878-1954). A p rotestant missional')\ Maurice leenha rdt used

his ethnological research to evangelize the populations that he studied. He spent 25 years in New Caledonia before retuming to France, where Uvy-Bruhl and Marcel .Mauss inh·oduced him into the academic \Vorld. First occupying the chair in the History of Primitive Religions, he next became the director of the lnstitut franrnis

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symbolic order lies behind social exchange (Mauss, The Gift, 1922). Through these references, Lacan can remind us of how this exchange, which escapes from the mles of a superficial utilitarianism, can transform both something that is given and the act of giving- and of reciprocating-into symbols of the symbolic pact. A useless gift can take on value in the exchange, since it can be raised more easily to the rank of a pure symbol if it is unable to serve a useful purp ose. Thus etlmology enables us to see that what imposes a circulation of goods upon a civilization is not need, but rather the mles of the system, in which everyone has a place and a name; people have these just as the.y have a series of rights and obligations, from w hich they cannot rl'Ocixmie, the d irector of the overseas department of the Mus.?e de 1'/wmmt, and a membe r of the Acadbnie des sciences d'outre-mer. Cha pters IX a nd X of his work, Do Knmo: Person and Myth in tire Melanesimz World, ·w hich Lacan mentions.. are devoted to the s tudy o f speech, which the Ca ledonians incorpora te into their symbolic practices in an exemplary manner. "Consider, for example, the sending of messages. In th is example, it is a matter of making s ure the next war ceremony will have an audience. The messenger carries a bouquet of plants knotted separately and tied together in a bunch. Each stran d removed makes the whole smaller but increases the messenger$s success by an equal amount. He retums to the chief a cting as if he were hauling a catd l of fish s h·ung on a line. l11is is a sign of the number of participan ts to be counted on, the 'string of wonds', 110 111" (p. 129). Removing its grass with out destroying the bundle-this is the opposite of a situation in which the removaJ of a sing Je one frees aiJ the others. Yet a lso, a mute man who carries out vengeance for his brother is revea]ed as "his brother's s peech ". One mus t choose between being an d having. Tradition d icta tes behaviour an d mainta ins the generations' cultura l unity an d these generations give no reason for this other than that "it is the speech of the elders" or of uthe gods". In otl1er wonds, it is the speech of the dead Name-of-the-Father. A young woman may have the fantasy of meeting a young d1ief on the basis of his re puta tion, and it may be discovered that a journey had been foreseen in one direction or anoth er between members of two fra ternal groups that can in termarry. l11e young woman is welcomed \\rith these words: "You are our granddaughter. \•Ve have been waiting for you." What happens is "the life of speech". l11e young woman's amorous uparoxysms" bring about the marriage about which she knew nothing; she is the exact opposite of Dora. \'\'e can see the extent to which/ for La can, Caledonian society, as analysed by Leenhardt, could show in an exemplary way how the rules of speech can determin e everyone's fa te. Here, th e circu]ation o f both goods and beings cannot be dissociated from that of s peech, whose name it bears a nd which can a lso mean "not to know".

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d eviate without losing symbolic face.93 These laws of the system o f exchange crumot be stated explicitly; they are the operators that write what we have called each pe rson's " Lmconscious mission", including that o f the yow1g Viennese woman whose symptoms paid for her objection to the mles o f exchange. Whatever her mirror image may claim, Do ra is symbolically a young woman and, as such, is called u pon to participate in the exchange o f women. "It is the world of words that crea tes the world o f things" (Ecrits, p. 229) he asser ts in 1953 and this is the case for what etlmology has uncovered: the marriage/ alliance rules that govem the circulatio n o f bod ies and o f sexual relatio ns [re/atio11s sexuel/es). Man thus speaks, but it is because the symbol has made him man. Even if, in fact, over-abundant gifts welcome a stranger who has made himself known to a group, the life of natural groups that constitute a community is subject to the rules of matrimonial alliance-determining the direction in which llie exchange of women takes place-and to the mutual services determined by marriage: as the SiRonga proverb says, "A relative by marriage is an elephant's hip". Marriage ties are governed by an order of preference whose law concerning kinship names is, like language, imperative for the group in its forms, but unconscious in its structure. Now, in this structure, whose harmony or conflicts govern the restricted or generalized exchange discerned in it by ethnologists, the startled theoretician refinds the whole logic of combinations; thus the laws of number- that is, of the most highly purified of all symbols- prove to be immanent in llie original symbolism. At least, it is the richness of the forms-in which what are known as the elementary structures of kinship develop- that ma kes those laws legible in the original symbolism (Ecrits, p. 229).

"Each Kwakiu tJ and Hatda noble has exactly the same idea of 'face' as has the Chinese man of letters or officer. It is said of one of the great mythical chiefs who gave

«
- 0 1 and then pulls it back while exclaiming 'da' r here' in German). Freud easily connects this game with the child's situation at the time. Although his mother was absent for long hours and he suffered from this, he never compJained about it, despite the tact that he was very attached to her and she had brought him up by herself. The game reproduced the mother's d isappearances and reappearances" (see the article "Fort-da'' in the DictioHnnirt, de In psycltmrnlyse, edited by Rolan d Chemama and Bernard Vandermersch, 1995, p. 113). In this playful activity, the child decided on tl1e appearances a nd d isappearances of an object that represented his mother. He e njoyed mastering them through his game, but by pronouncing an opposed pair of sounds, he testified to the tact that this mastery was bringing him into the field of language. ~ For

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by the smallest graspable discriminative semantic elements, leads us to the very foundations that Freud's final doctrine designates as the subjective sources of the symbolic function in a vocalic connotation of presence and absence. And the red uction of any language [laugueJ to a group comprised of a very small number of such phonemic oppositions, initiating an equally rigorous formalization of its highest-level morphemes, puts within our reach a strict approach to our own field. It is up to us to adopt this approach to discover how it intersects with our own field, just as ethnography, which follows a course parallel to our own, is already doing by deciphering myths according to the synchrony of mythemes .... It is thus impossible not to make a general theory of the symbol the axis of a new classification of the sciences where the sciences of man will reassume their central position as sciences of subjectivity (Ecrils, p. 236). Lacan's analysis of the situation of psychoanalysis in the Rome Report is both broad and precise. It is broad because it embraces a large part of the field of the human sciences and discerns perfectly the movement that is reorganizing them around the theory of symbolism. It is precise because it draws up a programme of research fo r psychoanalysis, a programme focused on a Freudian updating of the subjective sources of the symbolic function and on advances in linguistics and etlmography. The work of Levi-Strauss had already helped Lacan lay the fow1dations of what, in 1955, he would call the Freudian thing. In order to throw light o n this thing, Lacan asks, "Isn't it striking that Levi-Strauss-in suggesting the involvement in myths of language stntctures and of those social laws that regulate marriage ties and kinship-is already conquering the very terrain in which Freud situates the w1conscious? (Ecrits, p . 236). He does not consider Levi-Strauss' research as an ideal work in a neighbouring field, one that, at best, would share only a few vague connections with psychoanalysis; instead, this research lays bare the essential structures of the Freudian unconscious. Levi-Strauss became an impo rtance influence for Lacan neither because his work was fashionable no r because they were friends. Instead, Levi-Strauss' ideas lie at the heart of Lacan's ret urn to Freud because both their structures and those of

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the Freudian unconscious are those of speech and language. In other words, in a way that is completely o pposed to the impasses in which the psychoanalytic movement had found itself since Freud's death, Lacan, in Rome, shows how Levi-Stra uss' work has advanced the deciphering of the w1conscious. At Rome, in 1953, Lacan states how the royal road indicated by Levi-Strauss leads back dialectically to Freud's clinic, w here the subject of the unconscious finally receives its baptism of being. This subject, rather than being the son of God, is m uch more like the child with the bobbin, a child who is nourished by the symbolic and receives from it the keys of speech and language; in the latter, what renews itself endlessly is the combinatory of structures that cement his destiny as the o bscure effect of the d iscourse of the other. The resonances of interpretation and the time of the subject in psychoanalytic technique

This s ubtitle is taken from the concluding part of the Rome Report, which introduces us to a theory of language and subjectivity. What is langu age? "[T]he function of language in speech is not to inform but to evoke. What I seek in speech is a response from the other. What constitutes me as a subject is my question. In order to be recognized by the other, I proffer what was only in view of what will be (Ecrils, p. 247). Here, we find once again the theory that recognition is the object of unconscious desire, w hich speaks the Other's own language to it. Ana lysis no longer aims, as we remember, at what really happened during cl1ildhood, but at the tmth of the subject, w hich is d educed from the symbolic constellation that had prod uced his/her destiny even before birth. Lacan illustrates his approach by returning to the case of the Rat Man.97

Emst Lanzer (1878-1914). Freud's second great psychoanalytic case, his analysis lasted about nine months (from October 1907 to July 1908). Freud presented his case several times at the meetings of the Wednesday Psychological Society. Born to a Viennese Jewish family, Emst Lanzer was the fourth ot seven d1i1dren. like his father,

w

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Analysis can have as its goal only the advent of true sprech and the subject's realization of his history in its relation to a future .... l shall illustrate my point here by once again returning to Freud ... to the case of the Rat Man. Freud goes so far as to take liberties w ith the exactness of the facts w hen it is a question of getting at the subject's truth .... But Freud's apperception of the dialectical relationship is so apt that the in terpretation he makes at that moment triggers the decisive destruction of the lethal symbols that narcissistically bind the subject both to his dead father and to his idealized lady, their two images being sustained, in an equivalence characteristic of the obsessive, one by the fantasmatic aggressiveness that perpetuates it, the other by the mortifying cult that transforms it into an idol. Similarly, it is by recognizing the forced subjectivization of the obsessive debt-in the scenario of futile attemp ts at restitution, a scenario that too perfectly expresses its imaginary terms for the subject to even try to enact it, the pressure to repay the debt being exploited by the s ubject to the point of delusiontha t Freud achieves his goal. This is the goal of bringing the subject to discover- in the story of his father's lack of delicacy, his marriage to the subject's mother, the "pretty but permiless girl", his wounded love-life, and his ungrateful forgetting of his beneficent friend-to rediscover in this story, a long w ith the fateful constellation that presided over the s ubject's very birth, the unfillable gap constituted by the symbolic debt against w hich his neurosis is a protest (Ecrits, p. 249). The Rat Man re aches true speech not by reconstructing his s tory'" but by brin gin g to light w h a t Lacan , several mon ths e a rlier, in borrowing once aga in from Levi-Stra uss' vocab u lary, had called

he joined the imperial arn1)\ before falling prey to obsessions tha t led him to consult Freud in Oclober 1907. His case, known as that of the Rat Man, is considered to be the only o ne with which Freud truly succeeded. • It is from this point o f view that one should examine the ''historical" objections to psychoanalysis made by modern investigators who search to contest Freud's clinic with details from the biographies of his patients.

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"the neurotic's individ ual myth". T his myth structures the s ubject's symptoms by referring to a matrix of terms that had been decid ed by the previous generation. What w as crucial was Jess the patient's birth than his father 's sense o f d ivision: he had to choose whether to ma rry a poor, pretty yotmg woman or a "young woman of good family"- a wea lthy and socia lly prestigious family- and it was the latter w ho became his wife. In playing out the confusion over this marriage in his tra nsference w ith Freud, this pa tient shows what is really in question: by considering an imaginary da ughter of Fre ud's as a possible wi fe with "gold en eyes", he discovers that every man ma rries his na rcissistic destiny; in this case, he marries the image of dea th that appea rs in the form of a woman (see "The Neurotic's Ind ividual Myth"). What he d oes with Freud is to transfer this alienating imaginary version into its symbolic mediations. For this is how the Rat Man is able to insert into his subjectivity its true mediation in a transferential form: the imaginary daughter he gives Freud in order to receive her hand in marriage from him, and who unveils her true face to him in a key dream: that of death gazing at him with its bitwninous eyes. And although it was with this symbolic pact that the ruses of the subject's servitude came to an end, reality did not fail him, it seems, in granting him these nuptial wishes (Ecrits, p. 250). This young man ended up buried in the soil of the battlefields of the First World Wa r; before this happened, however, he seems to have recognized that death was the tme mediation that would w1do his ruinous narcissistic identification with the father's person. Here we have the very model of what Lacan ind icated in the Rome Report conceming the d isjunction that must be made between, on the one hand, the father's symbolic hmction, and on the other the narcissistic identification generated by the relation with him and his real activity. What the Rat Man tells Freud is not that the father really intervened in regulating the young man's love life, but rather the

existence of "a prohibition by his dead father"- since the father had alread y died- "against his liaison with his lady-love" (faits, p. 249). Lacan indicates that this occurred at the very moment w hen his mother, who had become a w idow, suggested that he marry his

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rich cousin . It was this remark, accord ing to Freud, that brought about the patient's neurosis. "What I seek in speech is a response from the other" (Ecrits, p. 247). By includ ing the father's response, the son brings in the problems of the preceding generation, that fill his symptoms and feed this neurosis, w hich is s tructured like a myth. According to lacan, Freud cuts the knot of servitude by making the Rat Man realize that what he brings unconsciously upon himself can be recognized through his dreams: in the profile of the young woman with dung in the place of her eyes, or in other symptoms. It is up to the analytic d ialectic to decipher these unconscious formations and to dissolve their hold over the patient. Thus we can see that by incarnating the place of the other, Freud finds himself at the heart of the intrigue that knots the son unconsciously to the father's sins. It is not a matter, however, of repeating this situation in transference; if the place of the other is indeed the place where a message that responds to the son has been addressed, it is now occupied by an operator-the analyst- who is able to invert this message. Doing so can finally make the son see that he is responsible for the poisonousness of the message that had "come" from the father's mouth; this is precisely the p lace w here the son had gone to look for it. This theory of desire as desire of the O ther does not therefore involve the sorts of genuflections by which volunta ry servitude wou ld come to replace- at the end of what could not even be called an analytic experience-the unconscious servitude that motivated his symptomatic s uffering. Instead, recognizing that the tmconscious subject can be deduced from the other's d iscourse leads to a rectification that leaves the subject entirely responsible for w hat he complains about. This rectification brings him to take a stand in relation to his symptoms and to gain some freedom by giving up what he sees, in his experience, as the morbid part of the other's will. This does not make the theory of the unconscious subject-as Lacan stated and illustrated it in Rome- into a theory that would motivate some sort of return to a divine figure. It is a question, instead, of seeing the foundations of Lacan's return to Freud and w hat they owe to Levi-

Strauss; these are Lacan's answers to what motivated his research on the theory of the unconscious subject. What he owes to LeviStrauss is nothing less than the ability to see the effects of everything that he includes in the notion of the O ther: all the structures that

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form the field of speech and language, of w hich the subject of the unconscious- whether placed in a group or not- is a simple function, a subject that receives her own message in an inverted fonn. At the end of this joumey, we can now better understand the formula that defines, in new terms, w hat Lacan called the subject of the unconscious. Let us listen once again to this formula: The form in which language expresses itself in and of itself defines subjectivity. Language says: "You will go here, and when you see this, you will tum off there." In other words, it refers to discourse about the other (discours de l'autre]. It is enveloped as such in the highest function of speech, inasmuch as speech commits its author by investing its addressee with a new reality, as for example, when a subject seals his fate as a married man by saying "You are my wife". Indeed, this is the essential form from which all human speech derives more than the form at which it arrives. Hence the paradox that one of my most acute auditors believed to be an objection to my position when I first began to make my views known on analysis as dialectic; he formulated it as follows: "H uman language wou ld then constitute a kind of communication in which the sender receives his own message back from the receiver in inverted form." I could not but adopt this objector's formulation, recognizing in it the stamp of my own thinking; for I maintain that speech always subjectively includes its own reply, that "Thou wouldst not seek Me, if thou hadst not found Me" simply validates the same truth (Ecrits, p. 246). This investigation of this formula has become an inquiry into Lacan's return to Freud. What does this inquiry show us, if not the profile of Claude Levi-Strauss hanging over this return? It is now time to ask ourselves who was the exceptional interlocutor whom Lacan mentions, the one in w hom he recognized the stamp of his own thinking in 1953. Thirteen years later, in 1966, on

the first page of the overture to the Ee~·its, he recognizes this formulation as the interlocutor's own thinking: "In language our message comes to us from the Other, and- to state the rest of the principle--in an inverted form. (Let me remind you that this principle applied to

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its own enunciation since, although I proposed it, it received its finest formulation from another, an eminent interlocutor)" (Ecrits, p. 4). The Other in 1966-the date of the publication of the Ecri/s- was written with a capital letter, and the "stamp" received by the definition of the unconscious subject that Lacan formulated in 1953-and repeated ceaselessly throughout the heart of his research-has now been reversed and has become the thought of the eminent interlocutor, whose anonymity Lacan s till protects 13 years later. Was it one of his brilliant students? Was it a s pecialist in philosophy, such as Hippolyte? Was it one of the philosophers from whom he borrowed other turns of phrase? It was necessary to wait for the answer for a long time- precisely 21 years-w1til Lacan returned to Rome and finally lifted the veil over the fabulous gestnlt that has guided our return to Freud: This is the story of the message that everyone receives in an inverted form. l have been saying this for a very long time and it has made people laugh. [n truth, I owe it to Claude Uvi-Strauss (my emphasis). He leaned over to one of my good friends-his wife, Monique, to call her by her name-and said, about what l was expressing, that that was it: everyone received his message in an inverted form. Monique repeated it to me. I could not find a better formula for what I wanted to say at that time. He is the one who foisted it off on us. You see, l take what is good wherever l find it.99 In 1974, at the conference of the Freudian School of Paris, Lacan returned for a third time to Rome and ended the anonymity of the person who, in 1953, had allowed him to define the w1conscious subject and had given hin1 the key to what the O ther is: the Other of the symbolic fw1ction that structures language and all the other networks of social exchange. In this way, he finally pays the symbolic debt that he had contracted to his friend, the master of French ethnology, and without whom the return to Freud would not have been what it was, any more than Lacan's work and the radical changes that followed from it in France and elsewhere would have been what they were.

w

jacques Lacan, " La troisieme", Lettres de /'£cole freudimue 16, pp. 177-203.

CHAPTER THREE

The name of the father, psychosis and phobia

e have seen the importance of the symbolic h mction, which Lacan borrowed from French anthropology and which enabled him to articulate his definition of subjectivity in Book I of the seminar and in the cons tellation of texts surrottnd ing it. I have a lso analysed the importance of Lacan's formula-"the subject receives his message from the other in an inverted fonn"- which was coined by Levi-Strauss. In particular, I have shown how Lacan's research up to his L schema can-mutatis mutandis-be read as a form of theoretical "bricolage" in which this formula serves to p w1ctuate the mirror stage. Without reading the seminars line by line, I shall now show how Lacan's cmmection w ith Levi-Strauss will continue to mark his research profow1dly between 1953 and 1957; we shall follow the itinerary that leads him to analyse first the psychoses and then phobia: two clinical contineJlts whose maps are redrawn by means of a structural an alysis. One of thei r central operators is precisely the notion of the Name-of-the-Father, to w hich we must return,

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I. From the Rat Man to little Hans: The question of the Name-of-the-Father

Lacan wrote "The Neurotic's Individual Myth" in 1953, at the very moment when he "invented " the notion of the Name-of-the-Father. Ie have already shown'"" what this owed to a reading of Levi-Strauss' introduction to Marcel Mauss, since it is in this text of 1950 that LeviStrauss isolates "a semantic function, whose role is to enable symbolic thinking to operate despite the contradiction inherent in it" (LeviStrauss, Introduction, p. 63). The etlm ological lexicon of conscious expressions of this function includes mana, Wllknn or orenda, which are all names for the spirit of things, a spirit that has "characteristics of a secret power, a mysterious force"; such terms perplexed both Mauss and Emile Durkhein1, because their foundational yet preliminary methods d id not enable them, according to Levi-Strauss, to avoid reducing "social reality to the conception that man- savage man, even- has of it" (Levi-Strauss, Introduction, p. 57). Levi-Strauss examines the work of these. fotmders of French etlmology in order to restore the unconscious value of the notion tl1at he presents as a "floating signifier", one tl1at is necessary in order for the s ignifier and signified to remain in a "relationship of complementarity", without which tl1ere can be no symbolic thought (Levi-Strauss, Introduction, p . 63). Between the signifier and the signified , there is always, for Levi-Strauss, an "inadequation" that "divine understand ing alone can soak up" (Levi-Strauss, lnt1'0duction, p. 62). As the indigenous people indicate, only the power of the dead father or of mann can soak up this inadeq uation. Yet by separating itself from tl1e object, Levi-Strauss' structuralist analysis brings out-in the list of terms mentioned above- the decisive activity of a "simple form", a "symbol in its pure state", or a sem antic function that guarantees the cmmection between the signifier and the signified (Levi-Strauss, Introduction, p. 64). the system of symbols which makes up any cosmology, it would just be a zero symbolic value, that is, a sign marking the necessity of a supplementary symbolic content over and above [n

tl>.lSee Lncmr et lt,s sciences socialt!S1

pp. 217- 222.

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that which the signified already contains, which can be any value at all, provided it is still part of the available reserve, and is not already, as the phonologists say, a term in a set (Levi-Strauss, lrrtroductiorr, p. 64). Locating the linguistic and unconscious value of the "floating signifier" that allows symbolic thought to operate is what Lacan does with the notion of the Name-of-the-Father, the equivocation of which can lead those who do not know Levi-Strauss and Lacan to imagine that Lacan was trying to combine Freud's work with Roman Catholicism. We have already emphasized that, precisely to the contrary, at the very moment when he takes up the structuralist theory of the exceptional signifier, Lacan rejects all the Claudelian and Durkheimian suppositions that had previously underlain his theory of the father. Levi-Strauss says in 1952 that "Field-workers must leam to consider their research from two different perspectives. TI1ey are always in danger of confusing the natives' theories about their social organization ... w ith the actual functioning of the society" Levi-Strauss, (Social Anthropology, p. 130). For Lacan, as a reader of Levi-Strauss, it is also necessary not to confuse the value of "the Name-of-theFather" -a theoretical operator that ensures the quilting between signifiers and signifieds-with the Church's Name-of-the.-Father; the latter is a monotheist christening name, one that calls to mind the "spirit of things" that enables neurotic thought to function consciously. From this point of view, we must understand that the theoretical value of Lacan's notion of the Name-of-the-Father comes from LeviStrauss; in my opinion, Lacan borrowed a term from his own society- and more precisely from the symptom of the obsessionals who make up the Church- and then associated it with the mana or the orenda. In doing so, he made an interpre tation that has had a crucial clinical impact for psychoanalytic research. This was, quite precisely, an interpretation rather than a discovery. ln conformity w ith the epistemology that is the basis of his work, Lacan, precisely w hen

he was researching the psychoses in 1956, analysed what can be deduced from the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father as operator. He was then able to perceive, by its absence, what this version of the operator supports unconsciously in neurosis. It is thus necessary for

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the o perator to be d egraded- fo reclosed, in this case- in order for Lacan to grasp its clinical importance; in this way, he rediscovers it. How d id Lacan take advantage of his own culture to illustrate the structural and sem antic function of the Name-of-the-Father? Addressing himself to his listeners o n 6 ]w1e 1956, he mentio ns, first of all, what he considers to be Saussure's lack of success in " defin[ing] a correspo ndence" between the waves of the signifier and the signified; nevertheless, such a correspondence seems to function in the neurotic, even if "The relationship between the signified and the signifier always appears fluid, always ready to come undone." 101 Lacan then speaks somewhat theatrically about his difficulty in transmitting his ideas to his lis teners. He does so by s ubmitting to Freud's mle of free association. Well then, I think to myself-What does one start with? And I go about looking for a sentence, a bit like this pseudo-Shakespeare stuck for inspiration, who paces up and down, repeating- To be or not ... to be or not ..., stuck until he discovers that he can continue by starting at the beginning again-To beor not ... to be. l start with a Yes. And since French, not English, is my language, what comes to me next is-Yes, I come into his temple to worship

tire Etemal Lord. This means that no signifier is isolable (Seminar lll, p. 262). La can concludes by stating that "The sentence only existsascompleted and its sense comes to it retroactively. We need to have got right to the end, that is to say, to this famous Eternal Lord" (Serninar Ill, pp. 262-263). By engaging in free association, Lacan seems to come, as if by cl1ance, upo n the onmipresent figure of the Eternal Lord, which allows the loop of the signifier to be closed and situates the d ifferent elements that resonate in this unforgettable sentence. Continuing his reading of Racine's tragedy, Atha/iah102 he shows how Joad, by using

'"' jacques Lilcan, Tile Psychoses, pp. 261-262. '"' Racine's tragedy opens at the tl1reshold of the temple with an improbable faceto-face meeting between the high priest, Joad, and Abner/ one of the main officers of the king of Judah, who has become an idolater under the influence of his wife, the

bloody Athaliah.

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the signifier, "the fear of God" in such a way as to place it in the mouth of his interlocutor, Abner, rallies him to his cause. Then he continues: The power of the signifier, the effectiveness of this word fear, has been to transform the zeal at the beginning, with everything that is ambig uous, doubtful, always liable to be reversed, that this word conveys, into the faitiifull!ess of the end. This transmuta tion is of the order of the signifier as such. No accumulation, no superimposition, no summation of meanings, is sufficient to justify it. The entire progress of this scene ... resides in the transmuta tion of the situation through the intervention of the signifier. Whether it be a sacred text, a novel, a play, a monologue, or any conversation whatsoever, allow me to represent the function of the signifier by a spatializing device, which we have no reason to deprive ourselves of. This point around which all concrete analysis of discourse must operate I shall call a quilting point (Semirrar l/1, p. 267). Lacan mmounces this te rm, "quiltin g point", wh ich will have a fine future. Let us note, however, tha t while Levi-Strauss refers to a sort o f "complementarity" between s ignifier and signified, Lacan draws upo n the vocabulary of upholstery to formulate w hat cmmects the tvvo \Vaves.

When the upholsterer's needle, which has entered at the moment of God fourrd faitiiful irr all his tlumts, reappears, it's all over, the chap says, I'm goi11g to joi11 tile faithful troops. Were we to analyse this scene as a musical score, we should see that this is the point at which the signified and the signifier are knotted together, between the still floating mass of meanings

"Yes, I come into his temple to worship the Eternal Lord'' is the first line of the play, and it is spoken by Abner, who is still uncertain, but who has come to warn

)ehoiada of Athaliah's plot against him. "I fear God, dear Abner, a nd have no o ther fea r," retorts the hig h priest, before continuing and reversing the terms: "I fear God, you say ... his truth touches me. "Here is how the l ord answers you out of my mouth" (Seminar Ill, pp. 263, 265). l11e fear of God has passed from one character$s mouth to the other.

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that are actually circulating between these two characters and the text .... The quilting point is the word fear, with all these transsignificant cormotations" (Seminar Ill, p. 268). Levi-Strauss had situated a structural gap between signifier and signified that "divine understand ing alone can soak up". More generally, where he had located the semantic function of an exceptional signi fier that--

ln 'The Subversion of the Subject and the Dia]ectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious''.. in l crits, pp. 671-702.

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means that if tllis signifier is missing, all tlle other signifiers represent nothing. For something is only represented to. Now insofar as the battery of signifiers is, it is complete, and this signifier can only be a line that is drawn from its circle without being able to be counted in it" (Ecrits, p. 695). The exceptional s ignifier in Lacan is therefore less the signifier of the Other- and of the list of Names-of-the-Father- than that of the lack in the Other, S(A), and even that of the lack of the Other. Because of this change, Lacan-in his theoretical development-mus t now return to his Lev i-Straussian filiation in order to d istinguish him self from it in terms that the reader can now evalua te correctly: let us observe carefully, therefore, what it is that objects to conferring on my signifier S(A) the meaning of mana or of any such term. It is the fact that we cannot be satisfied to explain it on the basis of the poverty of the social fact, even if the latter were traced back to some supposedly total fact. Claude levi-Strauss, commenting on Mauss' work, no doubt wished to see in mana the e.ffect of a zero symbol. But it seems that what we are dealing with in our case is rather the signifier of the lack of this zero symbol. This is why, at the risk of incurring a certain amount of opprobrium, I have indicated how far I have gone in distorting mathematical algorithms with my own use of them: for example, my use of the symbol, ~' also written i in the theory of complex numbers, can obviously be justified only if l give up any claim to its being able to be used automatically in subsequent operations" (Ecrits, pp. 695-696). lacan's logic is relentless. At the moment when he distinguishes himself from his filiation, he also exhibits it. Yes, he states in 1960, there is an exceptio nal signifier: "It is ... unprono unceable, but its o peratio n is not, for the latter is what occurs whenever a proper name is pronounced. Its statement is equal to its s ignification" (Ecrits, p . 694), like the name of the Hebrew God. Yes, there is a sig-

nifier without which "all the other signifiers represent nothing"as in psychosis, where the Na me-of-the-Father is foreclosed. Yes, there is a "trait": the unary tra it, without which subjectivity would drift and the unity of the body would be fragmented. Yes, there is

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an exceptional s ignifier that allows symbolic thought to operate, as Levi-Strauss had already written in 1950. Yet Lacan, w1like Levi-Strauss, does not give a zero value to the signifier that has been uncovered by structural analysis, for what is in question is not the dead father any more than the ma1111 or the terms that are similar to it; instead, it is their absence, which is covered up by the "false window" of the ego ideal, whose consistency nonetheless engenders certain subjective truths. From now on, this exceptional signifier is to be given not a zero value but the imaginary value brought by the theory of complex mm1bers: i = ~. Lacan borrows this theory from the 16th-century Italian theorists of algebra, such as Gerolamo Cardano who, in inventing imaginary numbers, provided methods of calculation that obtained results that were true, even if they remained "mysterious". Thus Lacan can indicate the way in which the truths of the unconscious subject- its identifications-tum out to be, at least in part, so many functions of an ego ideal that is incomplete or of a signifier of the incompleteness of the Other, S(A) =~'without w hich the ordinary neurotic caru1ot function. Lacan as a critic of Levi-Strauss

Thus, at the same time that he believes that he is going beyond LeviStrauss-at the risk of "disgrace"-Lacan confirms that there is, for him, a risk whose religious n uance is obvious, but he also and especially confirms that Levi-Strauss' work had hmctioned for him, at least until then, as a sort of quilting point. Without it, neither his return to Freud nor the Name-of-the-Father could be understood; the latter, indeed, was nothing other than a regional, monotheistic version of Levi-Strauss' exceptional signifier. In 1960, Lacan maintains the notion of an exceptional signifier, but by writing it in a new way, as the signifier of the lack in the O ther, he separates himself from the thinker who has infl uenced him so deeply; in doing so, he does not fail to note the element of anxiety involved not only in telling the Other of this separation, but also in signifying that the O ther is lacking. What is included in this anxiety is, in more general terms, the irreducibility of the lack in the Other. The risk of disgrace may give this subjective rectification a religious aura, thus demonstrating the power of the transference that had bound him to Levi-Strauss. Yet in an act that designates

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that "Moses' tomb is as empty for Freud as Christ's was for Hegel" (Ecrits, p . 693), he opts for excl uding the "sham[s]" or lures, an excl usion that, according to the Freud of 1937, places the love of truth at the very heart of the analytic relation."' The critical rereading of Levi-Strauss' texts can begin. A new period o pens up in the less complete universe that contains the S(A). Lacan will even go to the point of criticizing a naive materialism that makes Levi-Strauss see a "doublet" between the s tructures of thought, the brain, and even of the world (in Seminar X, L'nngoisse (Anxiety), 1962-1963).'" He shows his s tudents how social exchange

"' Sigmund Freud, Ana lysis Te rminable and In te rminable, (1964, p. 247). ·~~ ult we have approached what is in question in Levi-Strauss' The Savage Mimi, it is to mark the sort of progress cons tituted by the use of psychoanalytic reason, inasmuch as it responds p recisely to the gap where more than one o f you a re, for the moment, s tuck: the one shown by C laude Levi-Strauss throughout his development, when he creates an opposition between what he calls analytic reason and d ialectical reason(.) l11e fi rst s tage is that there is the world . Analytic reason, to which Levi-Strauss tends to give the primacy, concems the world as it is. \'\lith this primacy, he, gives it a homogeneity that is quite curious, when aU is said and done; this homogeneity is what sca nd alizes a nd troubles th e most lucid among you. You cannot fail to d iscem that this allows for the return of what could be called a primary materialism (my emphasis). When this d iscourse is pushed to its limits, the very play of s tructu re, of the combinatory, which Levi-Strauss articulates so pm.verfully, links up with the s tructure o f the brain itself and even of matter, and would re present, in th e terms of 18*h-century ' materialism', only its doublet, not even its lining !doublure ) .... Now the dimension of the s tage-its d ivision or lack of d ivision from the m undane world, cosmic or not, where the specta tor is-is there to give us an image of the radical d imension of the place whe re things-the things o f the world-come to be S