In the seminar The Psychoanalytic Act, Lacan brings psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic practice back to their foundations, as he regularly did. This time, he does so starting from this signifier: the act, the psychoanalytic act. As usual, he tries to wake up his colleagues, and us as well: my dear friends, what are you doing? As usual, he refreshes for us our main issues or questions.
Psychoanalysis, he says, does something—that is certain (does or makes or realises, I’m not sure which of these verbs says this best in English). But what does it do? What is produced there? On this point, he emphasises, psychoanalytic reflection had elaborated virtually nothing until the moment he raised the question. That the analysand does something is beyond doubt. As for the analyst, they let what is happening unfold: but clearly this letting happen is insufficient to clarify the analyst’s position, nor what they achieve from or through that position. Yet the position of the analyst must be clarified, defined in its fundamental coordinates, so that we can account for what happens in analysis.
On this, psychoanalytic reflection shows more of a deficit than the beginnings of a formulation. Even though we have the term transference, articulated first by Freud and later by Lacan, which offers here an essential foundation. Transference puts us on the path, it participates in the function of the psychoanalytic act. Transference: the term suggests a shift, a change of place, and to be more precise we might say: a passage from the place of representations, of what is recognised by us as reality or as worthy of recognition, to that place Freud called the Other Scene—a place the analysand, in addressing an analyst, may gain access to. As Lacan put it in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, transference is “the enactment of the reality of the unconscious”.
Lacan asks strongly the question: what allows us to identify the analyst on the side of what makes this access possible for the analysand? This access, so to speak, articulated within the discourse of the Other? On this point, he notes, regarding what qualifies the analyst as such, there is little to be found: the didactic dimension, for instance, remains barely articulated, if at all. It gives more the sense of a lack.
Now I am not going to delve here into any particular aspect of the seminar The Psychoanalytic Act or the specific articulations Lacan presents there. That work is important, but I believe it is not quite the purpose of our Study Day. Today, rather, we aim to approach some of the questions raised in this seminar, to prepare for a more precise engagement in the summer seminar, and to do so in a language that allows us to begin working together—coming, as we do, from a range of Anglophone backgrounds. I would like to thank Omar Guerrero, by the way, for making this gathering possible.
I would therefore like to propose a few remarks on this notion of act, in relation to what is done, what is accomplished, in psychoanalysis.
Clearly, the act is distinct from action. Action, however we conceive or imagine it, tends to be thought of as relatively homogeneous in its causes, its means, and its ends (we are inclined to imagine it in this homogeneity, though that does not mean it truly is). It is conceived within the field of recognition, or what we also call reality (as opposed to what we call the real, let us say).
The act does not belong, or not solely, to the field of recognition. Psychoanalysis has isolated a paradigmatic modality of this in the failed act. A failed act, such as a slip of the tongue, achieves something, but not within the field of recognition. In fact, the subject spontaneously fails to recognise it — in both senses of reconnaître in French: on the one hand, they do not locate it within the coordinates or framework of reality; on the other, they do not spontaneously own it as their own, at least not within the coordinates of consciousness. To be able to assume it, the subject needs an address, a possible adress, on the side of the Other Scene — or the place of the Other, to use Lacan’s terms. It is this address that the analyst, by their presence, makes possible and enacts. And it is through this address that the failed act can gain its status as success and truth. Yet it does not succeed in the field of recognition or reality, where it occurs. It succeeds through a possible consideration at the level of the discourse of the Other. Here, we might illustrate this with the Möbius strip structure of the act: what is accomplished on one side of the strip finds its truth at the corresponding point on the other side, yet it is through the continuity of a single edge that one side can serve as the interpretation of the other. And this of course implies an articulated address, so that the continuity enabling interpretation can be enacted.
This leads us to the specific status of the act: the subject is engaged in it but will only know afterwards in what capacity—that is, through which object a they are taken into the Other and the discourse of the Other. In other words, the act always arises from a gap in recognition. (This gap in recognition, we might add, is precisely the one of which the subject is the effect, inasmuch as recognition cannot encompass the real: the symbolic cannot cover the real, and it is precisely the gaps between signifiers where this gap resides — the gap that is also the trait to which the speaking subject is articulated.)
The analysand can speak from this gap and of this gap, insofar as the real and repeated presence of the analyst allows it. This presence, in a way, attests to the reception of the message by the Other. This is also where the subject supposed to know takes on function, and as Lacan notes, this is not necessarily the analyst.
The analyst’s presence is thus a condition of the psychoanalytic act, as it establishes the address to the Other within the setup, in the very structure of the act (this is also what distinguishes the act from what we call in French passage à l’acte — eventhough every real act has to some extent an aspect of passage à l’acte: a blind point).
In this way, the psychoanalytic act can legitimately shed light on any act. And this also allows us to see why the sexual « act » holds a particular value as a reference here: the sexual act compels the subject to leave the field of recognition or narcissism and accept being taken into the Other as an object whose coordinates are unknown to them — coordinates they will only become aware of, to a greater or lesser degree, afterwards.
Thank you for attention.
