In this School debate, which has opened up and taken a new turn, I note what Jacques-Alain Miller emphasises, namely that “it could be that psychoanalysis will eventually be eradicated from the land of France, and [that] we have only just learned this”. This came to us from outside: psychoanalysis was once again under attack.
It became clear that while the defence of psychoanalysis is necessary [s’impose], given what is being said about it, this in itself does not suffice to answer the questions posed by Jacques-Alain Miller: “What does the School want? And above all: What School does the School want to be?”
To answer the second question, we must return to what the object of the School is, namely psychoanalysis, and thus to the object of psychoanalysis. The forthcoming publication of Lacan’s Seminar, which has just been announced, is very timely. The opening lesson of this seminar was published in Écrits under the title “Science and Truth,” and the first lines concern the status of the subject that Lacan established in his seminar the previous year.
Dès ses premiers séminaires, dans son retour à Freud, disons que c’est déjà le sujet qui fait l’objet de son élaboration. From his earliest seminars, in his return to Freud, we can say that it is already the subject that is the object of his elaboration. In 1955, he stated that “The subject is no one » [1] , and called out one of his students as a “little idolater” after the latter had objectified the subject in his presentation to the point of idolising it, by representing it in image laden formulations.
This is a persistent tendency, and one that we must guard against. It is particularly striking when reading clinical texts or other texts aimed at a wider audience.
But the texts in this debate, notably that of Hervé Castanet, remind us, among other things, that “a subject is not an individual”, which Lacan stated in his speech at the opening of a meeting at the PLM Saint-Jacques on Saturday 15 March 1980, after his letter of dissolution on 5 January. This speech was published in the newspaper Le Matin.
The subject of Lacan’s elaboration is not the subject of philosophy, and if Lacan says, in “Science and Truth”, that it is that of science, it is because the subject is foreclosed there. L’objet de la psychanalyse, c’est alors la fonction de l’objet a « à insérer, […], dans la division du sujet par où se structure très spécialement, […] le champ psychanalytique. » [2]
Lacan never abandoned his definition of the subject as an effect of the signifier. He formulated that the aim of his teaching “would be to train psychoanalysts to be up to the task of this function called the subject” [1] and that this function was already present in Freud.
But there are also other signifiers of psychoanalysis that are fading, diminishing and losing their virulence. For example, the use of the concept of drive. I note that at one time the terms instinct, excitation or impulse were used, including in translations of Freud’s texts. Freud clearly established the difference between drive and excitation, which relates to physiology. Similarly, he distinguished instinct from what constitutes a response to signs in animals. However, the term drive has entered everyday language without the distinction that has emerged since Freud’s discovery of repression and the unconscious being established.
Thus, drives are not a measurable quantity, namely, too much or too little drive jouissance, that is, sexual jouissance, but a four-term montage. They cannot be equated with an individual’s behaviour. It is not society and its modes of suppression, ranging from education to medical chemistry, that act on them, but repression, and the difference is significant. The subject’s drives are knotted to the signifiers of its demand and can thus be exercised on the rims of the body. Can we believe in a world where drives would be reduced, tidied up, calmed down, simply because psychoanalysis gives space to speech? That would not be enough, because if there is a rectification in the deployment of the drive, i.e. its outward and backward movement, there must also be the anticipated interpretation and cut. For one of the terms of the drive will never be symbolisable, namely its constant thrust.
As Freud put it, the drive “never operates as a force giving a momentary impact but always as a constant one » [4] . This is what Lacan will highlight, specifying that it has no rhythm as a biological function might have, “that it has no day or night, no spring or autumn, no rise and fall” [5] , because it is a constant force, and this constancy is “an element of the real” [6] .
Will recalling the rigour of Freudian and Lacanian concepts, forged from analytical experience, be enough to ensure that psychoanalysis is not doomed to disappear? If its concepts circulate and are swallowed up in common discourse, is that a reason to lose interest in them and believe that they should be replaced by signifiers that are in vogue, circulating in contemporary society? The latter certainly require the psychoanalyst’s interest, but this does not mean that he should use them to adapt his discourse.
Yet, despite the criticism and rhetoric levelled at it, there is something in psychoanalysis that resists. Should psychoanalysts be content with this, or rather, as Lacan invites them to do, seek to understand what it is?
Psychoanalysis is a symptom that society and other discourses would like to get rid of, but it has within it a real, a real that is the irreducible part of this symptom. It is this real that resists and maintains its cutting edge. However, psychoanalysis, unlike other discourses, does not want to get rid of either the real or the symptom, and this is the condition for its survival. It is also what one can expect from a psychoanalyst.
Published on 21 December on L’ ÉCOLE DÉBAT 14
Translated from French NLS
[1] Lacan J., Le Séminaire, livre II, Le moi dans la théorie de Freud et dans la technique de la psychanalyse, texte établi par J.-A. Miller, Paris, Seuil, 1978, p. 72.
[2] Lacan J., « La science et la vérité », Écrits, Paris, Seuil, 1966, p. 863.
[3] Lacan J., « Place, origine et fin de mon enseignement », Mon enseignement, Paris, Seuil, octobre 2005, p. 58.
[4] Freud S., « Pulsions et destins des pulsions », Métapsychologie, Paris, Gallimard, folio/ essais, 1968, p. 14.
[5] Lacan J., Le Séminaire, livre XIV, Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, texte établi par J.-A. Miller, Paris, Seuil, 1973, p. 150.
[6] Lacan J., Ouverture des Journées de l’EFP, avril 1975, Les lettres de l’école freudienne, n°18. p. 7.
