Is the birth of psychoanalysis, as a founding act, is it this mythical situation where a woman tells Freud to be silent so that he will listen to what she says?[1]
Myth and Reality, Culture, or pluralism of Cultures, and the Real, what guides the ethics of psychoanalysis today and the way we can respond to this act, psychoanalytic act, in which Lacan insists.
Lacan started to discuss the psychoanalytic act with the seminar The Logic of Fantasy in 1966-1967. The year after, the seminar named The Psychoanalytic Act, is delivered at the same time as he creates The Pass, La passe, to acknowledge the psychoanalytic act. Three more texts of Lacan’s own references are important preparing this matter: Proposition of October 9th 1967 on the psychoanalyst of the School, in Other Writings, Autres écrits.[2] Lacan refers here in introduction to: Situation of psychoanalysis and formation of the psychoanalyst in 1956 in Writings, Écrits[3], and The Psychoanalytic Act, report of the 1967-1968 seminar[4] is also important.
The psychoanalytic act is the birth of a new, each time repeated new, in a world that already exists. A new foundation that carries, in an instant, all the aspects of what constitutes a possible foundation of the subject.
The subject defined by Freud, and by Lacan, is the subject divided between desire and reality known as the opposition discussed since the Greeks, as the world of senses and the world of intelligence. The subject occurs, Lacan says in the seminar The psychoanalytic act in the Lesson of 21st of February 1968, the subject occurs between transference and castration. Castration, or frustration, as Freud calls it on several occasions, Versagung, frustration or renouncement facing the Reel.
What matters to Lacan is the way to acknowledge the psychoanalytic act as the passage from psychoanalysant, term invented by Lacan that year to name the patient committing the analysis, the passage from psychoanalysant becoming a psychoanalyst. It is this passage, or switch, that Lacan investigate. What happens when a person in psychoanalysis is at the point to become a psychoanalyst? Is this passage announcing an impossibility, a Real, as always, as in all relationships or statements from the one to the Other? The Pass was impossible, that is a fact, which is, in itself, a success. I refer here to the statement Claude Landman made recently, among other works on The Passe.
These clear statements confer on what we know as the supposed knowledge of the psychoanalyst, le supposé savoir du psychanalyste, what the psychoanalysant suppose the psychoanalyst knows when he begins a treatment or a cure. This supposed knowledge, le supposé savoir, have evolved over time since Lacan’s invitation to The Pass. The associative rule can lead to pure mystery of any matter and seems then to have no foundation, no guiding answer or a loss of useful argument. When the patient doesn’t know, it’s the psychoanalyst who is supposed to know. Therefore, this mystery is not to be directly explored by the simple fact that mystery reveals thoughts of endless infinity. Infinity as thought, as unfounded, or even the missing part, is what it is: endless. This is the second place in Lacan’s discourses, from S1 to S2, the S2 being endless as there is no definite upcoming statement possible. Addressing a demand, or to ask, confers to the idea of what it could or should be. It is the fantasy of the idea of things. This could be a matter of belief throughout the treatment, or cure, that guides what is possible knowledge into the real-world defining identity. The authority of the Real guides an ethical path for the psychoanalyst’s discourse.
When receiving the patient’s demand, or the request, the psychanalysant’s request, the psychoanalyst is entitled to receive this demand as not going into the exchange by qualifying anything from his own point of view, but to orientate what this demand is about. The request presupposes that the psychoanalyst has the ability to answer, or at least that he acknowledges the way to abstain from responding unequivocally. This is where psychoanalysis is situated as a master point in between all four, or five, Lacanian discourses. In the demand, the object little a, petit a, occurs and then guide the demand toward the beyond of the request.
We can talk theoretically very clearly about this, but the act is what exists as an experience, it is the practice of the psychoanalytic act which states a possible absence needed for a subject to become.
This is where in English there is no need to name the term of psychoanalysis as definite or indefinite, while in French it is necessary to determine psychoanalysis as “the” psychoanalysis, la psychanalyse, which creates confusion in the question of psychoanalysis as an act and not as an object, at least in French, Lacan specifically notes.
This means the psychoanalytic act is the experience in the psychoanalytic field of practice where the demand of the psychanalysant is taken into the reality of this moment of psychoanalytic act. This is here where the wit shows up as an impossibility at first. Then, it is the way the subject divides itself into, at least, two occurrences between the demand inside the transference and the moment of lack of answer from the psychoanalyst, experienced as castration. Not that the psychoanalyst castrates, but because what is demanded is the object little a, petit a, projected into the psychoanalyst and the supposed knowledge, le supposé savoir, where he is supposed to known how to show the way out of the frustration of what this object causes. Then the mystery is here, or here is the way beyond conscious knowledge into the wit acknowledging there is no answer other than what comes from this place, from where the object is supposed to be. The object little a, petit a, or the Other are not capable of answer. The psychoanalyst is entitled to make this happen so the expression of this open moment is where it takes place. Here is an opportunity for the subject to acknowledge a saying for an instant. The frustration is very informative. It tells about limits and how to deal with them. Limits designate Lacan’s Real. Our idea of the other is projection. The difference through frustration is vital here. Lacan gives us many ways to settle this out from other authors and philosophers. It is to be said that Lacan in high school first were interested in philosophy and mathematics before studying medicine and psychiatry.
To define the psychoanalytic act, it is important to first define psychoanalysis. The birth certificate, the marriage certificate, in French called act’s, experimental acts like Pavlov’s Dogs Experiment on conditioning, are examples of something other than the subject’s speech act, where speech is not only language, in the grammatical sense, but also the whole mechanism of thoughts and representations. The psychoanalytic act has to do with psychoanalysis, it’s an act according to what is psychoanalytic. This act is a specific psychanalytic act, not comparable to no other act, but only as psychanalytic. Act in theatre could in some way though be near the experience of the psychoanalytic act, as Lacan let us know, related to the other scene of Freud, on the beyond, l’au-delà, from Jenseits des Lustprinzips.
The proverbial is as much a language as speaking. We know this from philosophical statements expressing metaphysics and ontology. Nietzsche’s works were known to Freud. Friedrich Nietzsche, philologist and philosopher, said: “it speaks” in Beyond Good and Evil, 1886. In The thing of Freud, in Writings, Écrits, Lacan says: The thing speaks by itself. La chose parle d’elle-même. Here in excerpt: “Psychoanalysis, what it teaches us … 1. In the unconscious, which is less profound than inaccessible to deepening consciousness, it speaks: a subject within the subject, transcendent to the subject, poses to the philosopher his question from the science of dreams.”[5]
In other words, it speaks, is revealed through the idea of identity, trough the self, le moi, by becoming aware of own thoughts put into language as It speaks, according to Nietzsche. This is also Freuds Wo Es war, where it was … Wo Es war, Soll Ich verden, where IT was, I should be, in the way it’s a possible future out from the knowledge of a past where IT was. Where it was, is where the object has left a space giving opportunity to the self, the me, le moi, speaking, to let the I become. This place, where it was, is also the Lacanian lack, le manque.
If we are Lacanian, the fact of being Lacanian resides in the fact of reading Freud and drawing the consequences for our practice, of a practice of today. Lacan teach us that psychoanalysis does not only consist in interpreting Freud’s texts, but it is also through the practice there is something to grasp. All Lacan’s seminars are based on reading not only Freud but many others. These others are also important, just as they were important to Freud. All who have contributed, who contributes to human thoughts, contribute to psychoanalysis. This is how Descartes’ work remains at the heart of the work on the psychoanalytic act, among others. To express human thinking, or doubt, into what is possible, beyond, or grounding the doubt, to obtain that something can be sure. This is the work of Descartes who tries to be sure of at least something. This is how we can read the schema used by Lacan in this seminar on The psychoanalytic act. Thought and language is at the heart of the psychoanalytic act. And yet it is an act. It’s not a conditioned reflex; it’s not an automatism which leads. It’s a moment of lack, un manque manifeste, a lack, a hiatus, calling the inexplainable, and this inexplainable leads to the return of the possible demand as a manifestation of the subject of the unconscious.
These two major propositions of Lacan, the signifier and the subject, le signifiant et le sujet, Lacan articulates them into: a subject is represented by a signifier for another signifier, un sujet est représenté par un signifiant pour un autre signifiant. The subject appears in the lack, in the absence, between one representation to another. This, placed in the transference by the psychoanalyst, acknowledges that possible statements can take place in the presence of a pure absence contributing to the constitution of the subject as act.
What was initial? What were the beginning, is so difficult to grasp and to define. For one reason, also, it repeats itself, it insists. The difference between the sexual act and the psychoanalytic act are two situations that concern the psychoanalysis act in practice. It is a fact that there was already something there before, before the person crosses the threshold when entering the psychoanalyst working space. There is a before where the person decides to make a request, a request not having the possibility to mention what is of real importance since there is no simplicity in the demand, except doubt. This crossing, or crossing this threshold, is crossing a line of psychic boundaries of control in front of the psychoanalyst, he who, the psychoanalyst, embodies the supposed knowledge essentially stated by absence. It’s not only difficult to establish what was before or at a beginning, but also a part of what cannot be said as it is. What is at stake, is it what results from entering the office with one’s feet getting tangled up in the carpet, se prendre les pieds dans le tapis, saved by a burst of laughter. This is the Freudian slip, lapsus, which points the way of desire when unable to achieve the sexual act. From the specific nature of getting tangled up in the carpet to the general, or universal, burst of laughter, we have here, at this moment, all the parameters and the stages covered. The unconscious is aware of what we have in common.
The birth of psychoanalysis can be read in Freud’s letters to Fliess. Especially the sexuality diagram, schéma de sexualité, Sexualshema, locates very clearly the sexual object in the external world, an object that enters the somatic-psychic domain and becomes an object in a favourable position, a sensation that makes its way into the end organ, creating a voluptuous sensation that returns into the psychic group. It is the obstruction of this path of voluptuousness, that will then generate, towards the sexual object in the external world, a long internal journey towards trying to reach the end organ but without voluptuousness. Freud tries to resolve this problem related here to melancholia. Freud’s early discussions of the various problems associated with hysteria, obsession, hallucinatory confusion, paranoia, and hysterical psychosis are here in these letters in an early stage of psychoanalysis, but though important to follow as its birth. Freud would later write Civilization and Its Discontents or also translated The Uneasiness in Civilization (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur). Freud understands that this is cultural. Psychosomatic problems are inherent in every culture; the differences are cultural; which means it’s not the difficulty that is resolved or displaced, but the culture itself that displaces problems of desire. The sexuality diagram could into some point refer to Lacan’s discourses.
Then, the question that Lacan asks through The pass, la passe, is how, or from what, the subsistence of the subject is convinced of what? Descartes found his formula of the Cogito. He arranges his thinking and doubts into the fact that thinking is this something reliable, ergo sum, as an existing. Lacan says the psychoanalyst does not think and does not exist, except in the intermediate process where the transference occurs. The unconscious means the unconscious desire as a statement never being pronounced but constitutes the main drive giving birth to a new way to settle the subject, if possible. So, what is the main purpose, or the most consistent purpose, of the subject, of the psychoanalysant becoming a psychoanalyst? What is the transition between psychoanalysant psychoanalysing and the psychoanalyst? From the lack of the unspeakable, the absence, what is the psychoanalyst, about this passing, able to say?
[1] Anna O. as Freud call her, Bertha Pappenheim born in 1859 and at first a patient of Joseph Breueur.
[2] [Proposition of October 9th, 1967 on the psychoanalyst of the School] Proposition du 9 octobre 1967 sur le psychanalyste de l’École, in Autres écrits, Éditions du Seuil 2001, page 243
[3] [Situation of psychoanalysis and formation of the psychoanalyst in 1956] Situation de la psychanalyse et formation du psychanalyste en 1956, in Écrits, Éditions du Seuil 1966, page 459
[4] [The Psychoanalytic Act, report of the 1967-1968 seminar] L’acte psychanalytique, rapport sur le séminaire 1967-1968, in Autres Écrits, 2001, page 375
[5] Extrait : « La psychanalyse, ce qu’elle nous enseigne … 1. Dans l’inconscient qui est moins profonde qu’inaccessible à l’approfondissement conscient, ça parle: un sujet dans le sujet, transcendant au sujet, pose au philosophe depuis la science des rêves sa question”, in La psychanalyse et son enseignement, Communication présentée à la société française de philosophie en la séance du 23 février 1957, in Écrits, Éditions du Seuil 1966, page 437
