The Hysterical and the Obsessive Pantomime
The obsessive subject, unlike the hysteric, does not need his or her utterances and behaviors to be guaranteed. Whereas the hysterical subject will demand that you be the guarantor for his or her fake money, the obsessive subject, by contrast, will try to provide his or her own guarantee. The obsessive places him or herself as the analyst’s guarantee. The obsessive’s problem is that he or she will stand as guarantee for the big Other and for you, if the you are confused with the big Other. That is the obsessive way of having nothing to do with you, for the obsessive wants to do what is necessary, do what must be done, and nothing more.
The hysterical subject places him or herself as master, something that was written like this in Lacan’s corresponding formula for the hysterical discourse. By contrast, the obsessive subject willingly places him or herself as slave, and even if he or she is a rebel, it will always be on behalf of a law. The obsessive subject doubtlessly wants to have a relationship with the Other, but only insofar as that relationship follows certain rules—the same rules that the hysteric cannot stand because for all things to follow rules is a way of killing desire. Most of mankind wants everything to be rules, to follow rules, to be in order. There is a very good example of this in Molière’s comedies, in the character of the doctor. Here we find a desire which can be said to be not only the desire to live but also die following the rules. What mattered about Molière’s doctor was not his being able to heal people. For 17th-century medicine, healing someone was quite hard. What mattered was letting the patient die, but according to the rules, following the rules. The obsessive is obedient and makes no fuss in this respect, but he or she is outraged by whim, by the whimsical Other. The obsessive can be said to take the boot but not whim. This is his or her way of establishing the permanence and consistency of his or her ego, a tendency that correlatively determines the intermittencies in his or her desire, his or her desire’s vanishing in the face of the object.
Thus we can see the function of vigilance in the obsessive. Not only the function determined by the trouble he or she typically has sleeping, but also daytime vigilance, which is equally exhausting. Here we have the difficulty proper to the obsessive, for vigilance is an effort made by his or her entire being. The obsessive takes a lot of effort to ensure its permanence. This question can be seen in the direction of the cure.
An analyst can obtain the hysterization or the obsessionalization of the patient, something which can depend strictly on his or her position.
Psychoanalysis can obsessionalize a patient and lead him or her to believe in the rules as Molière’s doctor did, blindly. This often happens with regard to the analytic framework, in which case we will be facing a case of “whatever happens, the framework must be preserved”. You know, in this respect, that Lacan didn’t accept the standards, the rules established by those new Molière doctors that were the IPA analysts, and the reason was not that he was a hysteric. Talking about himself, Lacan claimed at different times that he was hysterical, obsessive, psychotic, a woman, etc. Nor is it true that Lacanians do whatever they like with those rules. But when the analysis takes an obsessive turn, the truth of the analyst’s behavior, as well as what can be heard of his or her desire in all of his or her utterances, is: “I don’t care if you die”. This is the truth of that Molièresque behavior, the truth of those analysts who obsessionalize the patient.
I don’t know a lot about goings-on within the IPA. In Paris, I know anecdotes from the Lacanian side. But there is a book by an American journalist, Janet Malcolm, which was published last year, and which includes many anecdotes about the New York IPA. She is in no way a Lacanian, but through her book one can get an idea about those New York little things, such as this story, which perfectly illustrates the “I don’t care if you die” style.
A patient in New York goes to her “orthodox” analyst—as they are called. She arrives with her head completely bandaged because she has had a serious accident. The anecdote is just that: the analyst says nothing about this, and does not refer to it. That would be going beyond his duty. Of course, she never returns. For me, this anecdote bears the mark of truth, and I’m sure that it happened because it follows a logic: in these cases, the analyst must do what must be done according to the rules, strictly, and uttering not one word too many.
In analytic practice, Lacan’s tendency is the complete opposite. For example, he would visit his patients when they were seriously ill in hospital. And for all of them his presence wasn’t reduced to short sessions—something which has been the subject of lies for years. It is true that his sessions were of variable duration, and they were regularly shorter than is required by IPA standards, but at the same time his holding, if I may say so, was much larger than that obsessively reduced holding. He truly took on greater responsibility for his patients.
When talking about the way in which patients show up for their sessions, or when depicted, there is a satirical side to it, as proved by the laughter aroused by a lecture like this. This aspect is always present when describing human behavior. That’s why it’s difficult to do, and that’s why we must provide a structural status for that description.
I found something in Lacan which might provide a basis for such a description. All those human behaviors are responses—which are made concrete in their own specific ways—to the question of the desire of the Other. They respond like that when they are faced with barred A, the barred Other. Therefore, every clinical structure has what can be called, and what Lacan calls once, its own “pantomime,” that is to say, its own strategy when faced with the question of the desire of the Other. It is different for the hysteric and the obsessive, that specific response is their fantasm in the broader sense of the word. Not in the sense of the fundamental fantasm as a remainder of the analytic operation, but rather its fantasm as its “character” [manera de ser, literally, “way of being”].
On this matter, Lacan left us some very precise clinical indications. There are few of them, in Écrits, but they are key to leading the cure. One of them: what is essential to the hysterical fantasm, every time, is the function of the other woman. We must be prudent when it comes to clinical generalizations, but we can say that every time we come across a hysterical subject, cherchez la femme. We must seek… the other woman. Because the way in which the question of the desire of the Other arises in hysteria is always through a question about sex, about the subject’s sex. It is not the same for the obsessive, for whom the question of the desire of the Other is that of his or her own existence in the world. I was recently talking about this with two analysts who came together to discuss cases. It was like a classical presentation, because one of them brought a case in which the insistence of the question about sex was obvious, where in the other case what predominated was the problem of the individual’s existence and origin. Sometimes we can diagnose cases in such a simple way.
In the hysterical subject, the other woman has such a prevailing function because the question about sex is always a question about the Other sex. It is not the case that there is reciprocity here, because the Other sex as such, for both sexes, is the female sex. It is the Other sex both for men and women. Hence the fact that the hysterical subject, for whom that fundamental human question has its full intensity, always expects to reach an answer through a woman.
Freud saw this, in his own way, a way which was somewhat bent, curved, because of his relationship with Fliess and his concept of bisexuality. It was his own way of saying that the hysterical subject identified with man, takes his place, in order to make his or her question about femininity.
As for the concept of bisexuality, a slightly delusional concept (we now know that Fliess was delusional)… Didn’t you know that Fliess was delusional? Aren’t you familiar with his book on the nose? Ah! It’s a fundamental text for the history of psychoanalysis. It was translated in France, in Dr. Lacan’s book series, in order to show who took the analyst’s place for Freud. You know that there was no self-analysis by Freud, but rather he was analyzed. He was analyzed in his relationship with Fliess, and throughout the entire period of the invention of analysis, Fliess, with his theories about the nose, was for Freud precisely a subject supposed to know. Thus his word had huge value for Freud. In this way, we can say that Freud had a transferential relationship with Fliess, and it doesn’t matter that the subject supposed to know was delusional. That’s why one can be analyzed by people who are more or less like Fliess! The notion of the subject supposed to know indicates precisely that it’s not a subject who knows. We don’t have to guarantee that, a supposition of knowing is enough…
After this small detour about Fliess, let us go back to his concept of bisexuality. Lacan’s concept, which replaces it, is il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel, there is no sexual relation. Thus we are not dealing with bisexuality, but with nullisexuality, because the object a, as such, has no sexuality. We will take this up some other time, for we are now concerned with is with highlighting the importance of locating the other woman within the hysterical fantasm. It is that other woman that the hysterical subject, in a way, offers to man. It is offered to an homme de paille, a straw man, as Lacan put it, that is to say, to someone who serves as a “nameholder.”
A hysterical woman rents her body to another woman, which can be seen not only in the classic cases, but every time that the hysterical fantasm is constructed. In this sense, I found a feminine fantasm that is much more complex than the apparently correlative masculine fantasm. A masculine fantasm that is seen as classic is the fantasizing with another woman while fucking. Well, this feminine fantasm that I found, which is more complex and harder to understand, is not the fantasy that it is some other man that is doing the fucking, but rather fantasizing that the man in question is fucking some other woman who isn’t her. For the patient in question, this fantasm was necessary to reach orgasm. And when she told about it—she kept it hidden for years in her previous analysis—and when she decided not to use it any more in that way, the current result of the analysis is that she’s having difficulties reaching orgasm. There is a well-articulated symptom taking the place of the fantasm. We can see, in this example, the position of the other woman, which is what is most concealed about the hysterical fantasm, and which is presented in a specific modality in every case. It is something that is very deeply hidden, because the man, her man, her husband, knows nothing about it. He doesn’t know that he’s fucking another woman every night… Such is the hysterical pantomime that Lacan refers to. Its fantasm, which at the same time is what is most concealed about it, as can be seen in the subject’s most commonplace attitudes and behaviors, is not easy to locate.
I will not develop this further, but you can read its description, as well as that corresponding to the obsessive pantomime, in Lacan’sÉcrits. The latter consists, precisely, in the fact that the obsessive, in his or her problem regarding life and death, takes risks; he or she takes risks, large risks, but at the same time stand somewhat aside with respect to the situation in which they arise. There are two pages on this in “Psychoanalysis and Its Teaching” which are really useful from the clinical point of view.
I would now like to locate the question of resistance, which is also difficult for me this year, because we all have our ears full of Lacan’s saying by which the only resistance is the analyst’s resistance. This was his way of erasing the “analysis of resistances,” where it’s always the patient who’s guilty of not doing his or her job well.
One of Lacan’s first and polemical theses was that the unconscious does not resist but rather only repeats, and that the only resistance is an imaginary resistance, in which the analyst has some responsibility. The analyst is part of resistance because resistance, qua imaginary, requires the analyst’s collaboration. But, as I said yesterday, there is a more fundamental resistance than that. This is a fundamental resistance which we can say is the very consistency of the neurotic structure. There is inertia, a fixation in this structural consistency whose analysis is the crossing of the fantasm; it is the analysis of that ultimate and fundamental inertia of the subject.
In one of Lacan’s seminars, I think it is one from the seventies, we can find a sentence which entails a change in his view of resistance, following the development of his teaching. He talks about a resistance which has nothing to do with the resistance of “the analysis of resistances.” “Resistances,” says Lacan after twenty years’ teaching, “are the forms of the very coherence of the neurotic construction.” Here we find already what we are talking about when we talk about the fundamental fantasm, for we might say that this is somewhat like the matrix of the forms of coherence of a neurotic construction.
I think we should think about this kind of thing before taking up such a topic as the end of analysis and the crossing of the fantasm. If a formula like this seems something difficult, it is because we must elaborate what fantasm we are dealing with, what kind, of what status.
The very coherence of the neurotic structure can remain, and surely remains, even if symptoms disappear, which can be seen, for instance, among analysts. There are no purer hysterics, in a way, than those who have been analyzed. Through analysis, a neurotic structure is obtained which has a purer coherence, even if the symptoms, of course, have vanished.
As a first approach to the problem, I will now provide a couple of references to Freud on this issue, which I think is central, of the relation between symptom and fantasm. We must always refer to Freud, because in that way the audience is left happy as to the orthodoxy of the thing. At the same time, I must say that any text of Freud’s read through Lacan’s lens takes on a new quality. “Hysterical Fantasms and Their Relation to Bisexuality,” a 1908 text, (that is to say, one year later than “The Poet and Fantasy”) is a text in which Freud brings together, in the most obvious way, hysterical symptoms and fantasms. What is more, he assumes that the fantasm determines the symptom. He says that, according to his analytical experience, given a symptom, the determining fantasm can be found. In this way, he regards the latter, it might be said so, as the name of the repressed.
Thus we have a very simple theory which provided the basis for later Kleinian articulations. Why? Because if the fantasm is taken as the basis for the symptom and conceived of as a derivation of daydreams, the result is that the fantasmatic images appear to be the very content of the unconscious. And so, for Freud, in the text I am referring to, the psychoanalytic method of research leads from the obvious, visible symptom to the unconscious, hidden fantasms. It goes from the symptom to the fantasm in a path which makes the latter appears as an immediate, direct forerunner of the former in a causal sense.
Now, this seems to me to be fundamental to understand why Lacan first found himself faced with a theoretical problem with regard to that question from the very start. It was a properly theoretical problem because that theory of Freud’s does not distinguish between imaginary and symbolic, whereas distinguishing them clearly was Lacan’s starting point. In all his early texts, Lacan locates the symptom as a symbolic formation, whereas the fantasm appears to be located in the imaginary dimension. Thus it’s obvious that this distinction contradicts that text of Freud’s. But not other texts, because, as everyone knows, Freud’s discourse was not the same throughout his life and his work is not a uniform system throughout. The same happens with Lacan, albeit not in the same way.
Topology of the Fantasm
Initially, then, for Lacan what matters is upholding the primacy of the symbolic over the imaginary. As this is his starting point, a problem arises when it comes to locating something that can be found in experience, namely, the prevalence that can image can have for a subject. If the structural corresponds to the symbolic, how can that prevalence be accounted for? Lacan provided several indications in this regard, prior to the theory which he later upheld.
Firstly, as we already said, his first formula for the fantasm indicates that it is located in a strictly imaginary dimension: a ← a’
Secondly, Lacan points out that the prevalence of an image for a subject corresponds to a lack in the symbolic system. Even though I have no time to develop this now, the idea can already be found in Lacan’s work that this when a lack arises in the signifying chain, which can be written as barred A, that an image, an imaginary-level element can become prevalent.
Thirdly, and as an example of what I just said, let us take a look at the first way in which Lacan accounts for the figure of the superego. At that time, he said, exactly, that when there is a lack in the symbolic chain that arises from the imaginary level, the obscene figure of the superego appears.
All this configures his first way of locating the fantasm. But we know that it wasn’t the last one. What is important is that it is in relation to that first formulation, a ← a’, that the second one, $ ◊ a makes sense. What is new about it?
What is new, what can first be seen as new, is not that the second formula involves the object a, because in a way that is already present in the first one. It is true that in this sense there is a transformation that leads from the consideration of the object as imaginary to the question of its real status. But what is new, what is scandalous about that formula which everyone now knows, is that the subject qua subject of the signifier is involved in the fantasm: that is to say, an element that comes from the symbolic level, that is an effect of the symbolic dimension, is involved in the fantasm. Thus two heterogeneous elements are articulated.
There is a veiled allusion to all this in Freud’s text when he says that two things are required to make a fantasm: first, jouissancet, pleasure arising from an erogenous zone; and second, what he calls the representation of desire. In a way, both things can be found in the $ ◊ a formula. In a, that jouissance, which is linked to barred A, the subject of desire.
But in Lacan’s theory such a link is paradoxical, because it is a link between two elements that are fundamentally different as regards their respective structures. That’s why, in his topology, he located the fantasm in a topological figure known as cross-cap. For years, nobody was able to understand anything whatsoever about Lacan’s topology, and maybe that amused him. But this is not something that justifies itself on the basis of pleasure alone. In this issue of the fantasm that occupies us, we must understand something that is truly difficult. How can two elements with different structures be linked? What’s more, that link is strong, very resistant, the most resistant link in the direction of the analytic cure. A link between signifiers is not such a difficult question because the elements at play are homogeneous. This is not the case of the fantasm, and hence the importance of a figure such as the cross-cap. Indeed, the cross-cap is a topological figure composed of two elements with different structures. It can be obtained by linking (a) what is known as the Moebius band, and (2) something as stupid as this, a common piece of paper, a part of a plane, of a sphere, in which in no way has the structure of a Moebius band.
The second thing is something everybody has known for centuries, whereas the first one, even though it is also a very simple object, was unknown before 1860, when Moebius created it by means of a very complicated theory of polygons.
Now, the cross-cap was used by Lacan because it makes it possible to show, and even demonstrate, that there is a possible link between two elements with different structures. Which is something implied by his formula of the fantasm, where the Moebius band corresponds to the subject and that part whatsoever of the plane to the object. By the way, I will only refer to this construction and not elaborate on it here, but it enables me to point out that reflecting on analytic practice from the field of the signifier is not enough. No doubt that’s where the analysts means lie, but if the subject is, on the one hand, an effect of the signifying chain, we must not forget that, on the other, the subject appears in the analytic experience with an inertia, a resistance that comes from the subject’s close link, through the fantasm, to the object. Hence the fact that the end of analysis requires, it might be said, a hesitancy in that link between the subject and the object that is proper to the fantasm. All these various considerations can be located in Lacan’s graph, which is built to that end.
Let us first observe, on the upper left, the point barred A in S(barred A), the point of the desire of the Other. Immediately below we have $ ◊ a, the fantasm, located there like a plug with respect to that lack in the Other, as illustrated by the examples which I previously gave.
Secondly, let us see what is immediately below the fantasm: something that Lacan writes as s(A), and which is one of his ways of writing the symptom. Thus, the graph articulates the symptom as determined by the fantasm, and the fantasm as a plug for the desire of the Other. It is true then that the fantasm is a sort of summary of the entire unconscious production, which in a way makes Melanie Klein right, and also explains her mistake: to consider the fantasm only in its imaginary dimension and assume that it is the content of the unconscious.
Lastly, let us point out that, in the graph, the fantasm appears as the last possible forking point for the trajectory that starts at $ ◊ D and goes through d. That is to say that it is the last place when it is still possible to go back, to return to what may be possible for the patient. And it is true that the fantasm is sometimes conscious.
However, if for Freud there is a relation between symptom and fantasm, we can see that this relation is not only inscribed in Lacan’s graph, but it is also articulated with the relation that between the fantasm and the lack in the Other. In addition, and in order to provide a reference to Écrits, page 636 in the French edition, we can see there that, when talking about symptom formation, Lacan straightaway mentions its relation to the fantasm. Only that the question amounts to how to account for that relation. And here we must introduce his definition of the fantasm as an axiom. The fantasm is a sort of axiom not only for the subject, but it also appears as such in analytic practice.
I have already mentioned that, even though the fantasm can be reduced to a signifying formula—as can be seen in Freud’s “A Child Is Being Beaten”—it does not thereby follow the retroactive structure, movement, or dynamics of the signifier. I read out loud that quote from Freud in which he points out that the fantasm remains apart from the rest of the content of a neurosis.
How should we then understand what Freud says about the fantasm’s not having a place in the neurotic structure but being nonetheless linked to it? A way of understanding this is by way of Lacan’s idea of seeing the fantasm as linked to the neurotic structure in the same way as the axiom is linked to the deductive remainder of a logical system.
In this sense, Lacan writes as S(barred A) that signifier instead of the fantasm as a symbolic axiom. It is something like the value of what remains when the symbolic order vanishes together with what we can say and know. That’s why, when faced that very point of the fantasm, we are not facing a mere reluctance on the subject’s part, but rather a lack in words and knowledge. “A Child is Being Beaten” is the title of Freud’s paper, but when he introduces the complete sentence as uttered by the patient, we can see that this is the case: “I don’t know anything else. A child is being beaten.” That “I don’t know anything else” is also very important and corresponds to what is written as S(barred A). “I don’t know anything else;” it is in a lack in knowledge that that symbolic remainder fully resistant that is the fantasmatic axiom is lodged.
What is an axiom in logic? It is something that is placed at the beginning. In any treatise of logic, there are definitions of term and then axioms. They are sentences, a first one, a second, a third, which are placed there, once, posited. They cannot be argued against from any position because it is on the basis of those sentences that truths and falsities, verifications, will be produced. But before them there is nothing. They are the starting point and the limit point.
Such is the importance and the value of claiming that there is a fantasmatic axiom. Only in this way can an essential clinical indication of Freud’s be valued. This is also shown by the precision, the accuracy of Lacan’s reading of Freud.
Let us delve a bit deeper into the question: what does an axiom entail? Let us first make it clear that a mathematician, for instance, does not make his or her discoveries through formalization. A mathematician discovers things by performing operations. It is only at a second stage that the question of axiomatizing arises, that is to say, that certain sentences must be found which are as short and as least numerous as possible, and then must be posited as those few axioms thanks to which the rest of operations can be performed. That’s why we can say that they are one-sentence, absolute positions which do not fall under the jurisdiction of what follows: theorems and their demonstrations.
What does the fantasmatic axiom entail then? It entails that it is a pure signifying creation. Because there is a creationism of the signifier, something that Lacan already posited in his seminar on psychoses. Before one is able to say “night and day,” Lacan explains, there is no night and day. There only variations in the light. Something absolutely, completely new arises when the signifiers “night and day” are introduced into the world. The very experience is structured on the basis of the signifier engendered by the opposition as an absolute beginning. Thus we can understand what it means for the signifier to arise ex nihilo, from nothing. The signifier is a fiat, and nothing proves it better than the logical axiom. In this way, it’s amusing to read mathematical logic, and in general all axiomatizations, when they can be reads as the same that takes place in the creation of the world. It is in logic that the world is constantly created. This agrees with what Lacan says about the letters in his formula $ ◊ a, somewhere in Écrits – that they are the indices of an absolute signification. “A notion,” he adds, “that will seem adequate to the condition of fantasm.”
The fundamental fantasm, for Lacan, is linked to an absolute signification, a signification that is detached, apart from it all. The signification in “A Child Is Being Beaten” has no prior motivation and is in itself an absolute beginning: “Let there be light; and there was light” is what one repeats to himself every time an axiom is posited.
Towards the end of his seminar on the logic of the fantasm, Lacan also positions the fantasm as a signification of truth. This is something that is hard to understand when one knows that the same thing could be said about the symptom, for this is a sort of irruption of truth into the subject’s life. It can even be said that the symptom is truth. How can it then be said at the same time that the fantasm has a signification of truth? Lacan does say this. He says it in his last conference in this seminar which doesn’t deal with definition of the fantasm as much as with its crossing: “The fantasm has a signification of truth.”
How should be understand this? In my opinion, “truth” cannot be understood here as the truth of symptomatic suffering. It must be understood as a signification of logical truth. In a logical system, “truth” amounts to placing a letter T next to a sentence, as well as “falsity” amounts to nothing more than placing a letter F next to it. Saying that the fantasm has an absolute signification of truth means nothing more. It means that for the subject a single phrase—or so the hypothesis has it—has absolute signification in his or her fantasm, the signification of an absolute beginning. It is not the signification in the formula, “There is no signification that does not refer to another signification,” that is to say, the formula concerning the sense of the symptom. It is a signification that is detached from every context.
Thus, the problem of the crossing of the fantasm and the end of analysis is the problem of how to transform, if possible, the subject’s relation to that absolute axiomatic signification.
Answers to Questions
1. (Question on the question of truth and falsity). It is true that bivalent logic does not agree with the analytic discourse. But at the same time we must take into account what the properly Saussurean value of the introduction of the very concept of signifier is. That value is the following: a signifier is only something by opposition to another signifier or to a set of other signifiers. This is the principle of the logic of the signifier, summed up in a way that couldn’t be simpler in Lacan’s writing: S1//S2. This is the simplest formulation imaginable of Saussure’s diacritical principle, where the term “diacritical” means only that something has a value only by way of an opposition. And this might be said to be bivalent. Examples of Lacan’s such as “night and day” correspond to this level of introduction of the signifier and its diacritical value.
At the same time, it is true that for us having only a truth value and a falsity value is not enough to conceptualize what we find in experience. It is also true that the semblant—to use that translation of le semblant—is an element that is neither true nor false exactly. Semblant is a term coined by Lacan, on the basis of a French expression, precisely so as not to use the term “appearance.” When one says “appearance” people think that there is some substance behind. Whereas when one says semblant, it can well be an appearance, but which has no corresponding substance. Lacan faced a problem with regard to expression in the conceptualization, for instance, of the “phallus,” due to his distinction between symbolic, imaginary, and real. Because it’s true that the phallus is an image taken from the body, but at the same time it’s an image that is placed in a series in the signifying chains. Hence the difficulty of formulating both the imaginary origin of the phallus and its function in the symbolic order. In his text on psychosis in Écrits, Lacan mentions it as an imaginary signifier. But it must be acknowledged that it is a somewhat contradictory expression, and that the word “semblant” is more suitable.
In this sense, it can be said that all signifiers are also semblants and it is precisely logical formalizations that gives us an experience of that. Just by establishing the suitable definitions and axioms, a system is developed, a system of logical semblants. Now, what is extraordinary about this is that certain impossibilities arise from those signifying semblants. At first, there is complete freedom, and in this sense logic is a school of freedom as opposed to the signifier. But after the definitions and axioms are established, that initial freedom is progressively reduced until certain impossibilities arise from it. When we come across those impossibilities generated by a system of semblants we can say that we have found the real. This teaching of Lacan’s on the connection between the real and the impossible is hugely valuable.
I will now add this, for I also think that this fourth talk can consist in the answers to your question. I think it’s important to highlight, in Lacan’s teaching, that shift in the stress with regard to truth. In his teaching, the best-known figure of truth is that of speaking truth. In his paper “The Freudian Thing,” truth itself is exposed at one point, saying “I, Truth, speak,” And truth speaks, for example, about Diana and Actaeon and about other things. But in this case truth is a comedic figure, which can also be tragic when it is, for example, to the truth speaking through the symptom. But this is not all about the figure of truth in Lacan’s work. Years later, in the seventies, he made a statement which makes a lot of sense if one thinks about his previous teaching. He says: “In the analytic experience, we must reduce truth to the same status as in mathematical logic.” That is to say, we must think of truth as a letter. I think that he says this in “Radiophonie,” and it is very easily applied, precisely, to the question of the fantasm. The fact that the fantasm has a signification of truth means only that the sentence (for example, Freud’s sentence, “a child is being beaten”) bears the letter T. The subject cannot deduce it from anything else, and in itself it has an absolute position.
2. (Question on the relation between axiom and unary trait). I agree that there is a relation between the axiom and the unary trait. As entailed by the formula of what is known as the master’s discourse, which is also the formula of the discourse of the unconscious as such. Lacan said didn’t say this last thing many times, he only said it once. Lacan invented the matheme S1 after his consideration of the unary trait. It is a more general matheme than the latter, but there is no doubt that one of its value is the unary trait. Indeed, I believe that there is a relation between the subject’s link to that prominent function of the signifier that is the unary trait and its link to object a in the fantasm. Both things are perfectly spelt out in this discourse:
But many problems arise when both formulas are compared. Let us point out that the novelty introduced by psychoanalytic discourse is a change in position between both functions:
We can see that now for the subject a stands where S1 used to be, and vice versa.
However, that change of positions seems to me to be fundamental to the structure of the very analytic cure. No doubt, it is not natural for the object to take the place that would usually be that of the master. This has many implications for the cure. For example, it is not the same thing to maintain the so-called analytic framework as a master, as a master-analyst, that to maintain it as an object. To maintain it, because it must be maintained, upholding a semblant of object.
It is hard to get this across to such a large audience. It is hard because in the direction of the cure the distinction can be seen in very small things. Asking the patient to do something, such as to return the following day, can be something done in the master’s way or in the way that befits the analyst. There is a big difference. Surely the point is to take on the function through which a demand is made on the patient. But the entire imagery of the master must be erased, and the request must be made by being, if I may say so, something real. The request must be made being oneself, as an instance of impossibility. With a certain inflexibility, as an instance of what is impossible to change, for example, not listening to the excellent reasons that the patient has not to come because he or she is unable, has other commitments, etc.
Lacan incarnated such inflexibility in his very life in his institution and elsewhere. When he had an idea in mind, he incarnated that impossibility of change, despite the excellent reasons which disciples or patients might have, to the very end. I think that is incarnating the real, which is something very different from incarnating the master, even if it takes the same place in discourse.
3. (Question on jouissance in the obsessive symptom). What can be called phenomenic in the pervert, for example, both on a theoretical and on an empirical level—that will to jouir is something that is not found in the neurotic. It is certain that in the pervert desire takes the form of a will to jouir, which is the expression used by Lacan with regard to Sade.
This, which may appear, in a way, for the pervert on the conscious level of his or her behavior, does not appear in this way in neurosis. On the contrary, what appears in the obsessive is the complaint over a lack of jouissance, a desert of jouissance.
Now, what we know from some of its manifestations is that the obsessive enjoys, but in a place which he or she does not know. It is a place which the obsessive occupies as a subject, but he or she is unaware of it, and that is what analysts teach us. We come across the problem which consists in locating where it is, for every case, and whether the expression “the subject of jouissance” is valid. This is something very mysterious. The location of the subject of the signifier is something shown by the formulations of the unconscious. Every time there is a Freudian slip, the slip shows the location of the subject of the unconscious, for it amounts to its very emergence. But where the “subject of jouissance” is, in which location, is something that is much more mysterious.
The expression “subject of jouissance” must be used with caution. As far as I know, Lacan only uses it once, and the question is precisely whether there is something such as a subject of jouissance—for the time being, all that we know is that very problematic location of the subject in the fantasm. Very problematic because, where is, for example, the subject in “A Child Is Being Beaten?”
4. (Question on substance). It is true that what is most substantial in analytic experience is jouissance. And the fundamental fantasm is what captures jouissance. But it is true that when in analytic experience we talk about inertia, about a fundamental resistance, about the real in this sense, jouissance is the only substance that we can know. Moreover, there is no need to insist on this point, because the substantial point of view is not our guideline in the direction of the cure. Lacan said this once, at the beginning of his seminarEncore, when he pointed out that jouissance is what is most similar, for us, to a substance. It is a different point of view from that concerning the signifier, because in the field of the signifier no substances can ever be found, but a chain of semblants. That’s why the subject is defined on the basis of the signifying chain—there is no substance, but rather infinite mobility. This was a Lacanian topic that was much appreciated by philosophers, because it enabled them to imagine some kind of infinity freedom of signifiers where every signifier could be translated by another one all the time, and where the entire culture could be articulated in that endless movement of infinite signifying chains. But Lacan didn’t introduce the function of the signifying chain to thrill the masses with that infinite freedom. On the contrary, he introduced it because, as analytic experience shows, it’s about the subject’s lack of substance. The bar across S, $, is the lack of substance of the subject of the signifier. That function of lack takes place in analytic experience and becomes deeper by the fact that that experience also brings into play the function of presence. Please note that that lack will arise by way of the signifier, but above all, through analytic experience—the presence of the analysand and the analyst is necessary. It is an appointment, every time. In the last term, an analytic session is an appointment, an appointment with a presence. Certainly for Lacan sometimes the session was reduced to an appointment, that is to say, to that presence.
The fantasm in analytic experience is the moment, the instant, when a presence is experienced. This is what Lacan says in a somewhat roundabout way, but which must be highlighted when he talks about Sade. We are going to study, he says, the function of presence in Sade’s fantasm. Such a function certainly does not apply only to Sade’s fantasm, but to the fantasm as such. In order to talk about this, he took Heidegger as his philosophical reference, in the sense that the experience of presence is like a Dasein experience, the experience of a “being-there.” From the point of view of the signifier in analytic experience, there is never a “being-there.” The being of the subject of the signifier, so to speak, moves in its chain and is never “there.” When Lacan analyzed the formations of the unconscious, for example, a Freudian slip shows that its emergence always takes place before or after, but has no present. Words are thus necessary to know afterwards, retroactively, that the subject “was there.” I think these are Lacan’s best-known theoretical articulations, by which the subject is never present because it is constituted before or after. This is its destiny in the signifier. But the question of the fantasm is different. In the fantasm the subject is there, the question is where, but it is there. That’s why in analytic experience, in addition to the subject’s relation to the signifier, there is the question of the subject’s link to that which gives it permanence. In this sense, there isn’t only an imaginary aspect of the ego, which is such a well-known Lacanian topic, but there is also something unknown, which is its link to that sort of permanence.
5. (Question on substance and its relation to the logical proposition). The subject of a logical proposition is I no way a substance. It is true that confusions arise over this and other questions due to the Latin translation of Aristotle. This was something that Heidegger also pointed out, saying that Greek philosophy couldn’t be understood at all in its Latin translation. There remain things to develop on this matter, but what it important is to clarify that Aristotle’s ousía and the Latin substantia are not the same thing. In order to make the difference clear, let us think not about the Greeks’ logical proposition but about our modern way of considering it.
In very simple terms: the first break in the history of the logical consideration of language happened when Aristotle started to replace letters for sentences. There is something extraordinary about this idea of using letters instead of sentences. But another break took place with Frege, when he considered than any sentence in a language can be reduced, articulated in terms of “function” and “variable.” That is to say, any sentence can be taken and reduced to something like that: β (x), where beta is a function and x the variable.
Let us take the sentence, “a child is being beaten.” It can be analyzed as follows: “is being beaten beaten” is reduced to beta, to a function. And “a child” can be replaced by x, the variable. Thus, what remains of the alleged individual substance? – for that is what the question is about, about the alleged individual substance. A variable and no substance. Thus, everything that refers to individuals, to alleged substances in our language, is reduced by articulation with the place of the variable. A variable which, moreover, is the flimsiest thing on earth.
We can also extract something important about Lacan from all this. Especially in his seminars, while improvising, Lacan used to employ the term “function” a lot, for instance, in the expression “function of the subject”. Some people in Paris thought that saying the “subject function” instead of the “function of the subject” was very clever and modern. But this is a mistake, because if one wants to perform that reduction, what must be said is the “subject variable”. The barred subject, $, is nothing but the place of a variable that is here articulated with a signifying chain. I can only barely sketch out here all these issues, but I hope this will be enough to make it clear that the subject is not a substance but a variable. A well-theorized logical proposition won’t introduce any substance of any sort, but only in their reduction to variables.
6. (Question about whether the sentence, “a child is being beaten” contains any signification). That sentence has a signification. We must say this, because if I say “They are beating a child,” or “A child is being beaten,” everyone here, despite my Spanish, will understand that sentence. On the other hand, it has a correct grammatical structure; so, if we follow Chomsky, we must admit, with no discussion, that the sentence has a signification. But at the same time we must take into account the fact that the whole utterance made by the subject who said the sentence to Freud was: “I don’t know anything else. A child is being beaten.” Thus the sentence has a signification which is absolute in the etymological sense of the term. It is a separate signification, which cannot be dissolved into a context. It is mysterious for the very subject, for whom it arises tied to “I don’t know anything else.”
When an analyst is attentive to the emergence of this kind of phenomena, he or she may obtain a long list of them, even though, of course, not from the same subject. In a way one must desire to find them. When reading Freud’s text, we can see the demanding nature of his research, the request he makes to the patient to say more about that. I’m not saying that this is the way it must be done, and we know that there are clinical effects to be taken into account.
As an example, however, I can tell you that some time ago I saw a lady who was trembling and in a terrible state of panic. She had previously been in analysis for seven years. She had left treatment one year before, and now she couldn’t bear anything or herself any more. I learnt this after two very difficult interviews, because she spoke very little. She just sat in the office with her panic. If she was there it was because there was a demand, albeit a mute one, for she only spoke to say that everything was impossible. After two or three long interviews—not brief sessions—which made other patients wait, she revealed that in the midst of her panic an idea would arise. That idea was a fantasm that she had been unable to communicate in the seven years of her previous analysis, and which is not as amusing as the one we saw yesterday. It consisted of the idea of placing a child between her legs and urinating. After saying that, her panicked state at least receded.
7. (Question on the relation between the fantasies described by the patient and the fundamental fantasm). I think that there was an ambiguity in my talk yesterday which gave rise to a misconception. In no way do I think that my patient’s fantasm—“being a laundress”—is a fundamental fantasm. I think I said, but obviously didn’t stress it enough, that for me that fantasm is only an emblematic example of this question. As Freud would have pointed out, this is a familiar daydream for the patient, with which, when she was young, she derived pleasure through masturbation. She herself says that, at certain point, she would masturbate to that story two, three, or ten times, but that she no longer found pleasure in it, that it stopped being a resource. However, the fantasm remained as a simplified daydream, with a certain precise articulation which befitted this patient’s talented nature. It is indicative, precisely, of the transition from daytime fantasmatization and its jungle to the fundamental fantasm. But that’s all.
By the way, I won’t be taking up the Wolf Man case, but I am sure that Freud’s reconstruction of the primal scene takes the place of the construction of a fundamental fantasm. I also believe that some great texts of analytic literature could be reread from the perspective of the opposition between symptom and fantasm and the distinction between fantasmatization and fundamental fantasm. It’s possible. The Schreber case could be reread taking into account that it opens with a daydream: “How beautiful it would be to be a woman…” The word “beautiful” (= schön) there indicates something that is also proper to the fantasm, for the function of beauty, of what is beautiful, is an essential fantasmatic function. Lacan didn’t talk much about it, but in his seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis he tells us that the function of beauty is like the last barrier when the subject approaches, ultimately, the horror of his or her jouissance. That’s why that function of beauty of the fantasm is also what makes it impossible to cross it, a topic which might also be eventually developed with regard to the Schreber case. Likewise, we also see in Sade that the victims are always extremely beautiful, and in his perverse fantasm what matters is precisely crossing that barrier of beauty to obtain a piece of refuse.
8. (Question on Freud’s searching position). It is true that Freud is no example for us, and that we cannot search for things in his same style. I believe that the analyst must have a desire, but a desire is not a search. However, the analyst must know what he or she desires to obtain from the patient. At the end of the seminar XI, The Four Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan says this when he points out that the analyst desires to obtain absolute differentiation in the patient. That is what is at stake in every case, but it is true that it is important not to confuse the analyst’s desire and his or her demand. The only demand, as such, that the analyst makes of the patient is that the patient return. But the analyst’s desire is something else, and depends on his or her own analysis. Saying that the end of analysis is located on the level of the fantasm is also saying that the analyst is expected to slide a bit behind his or her own. Not to have it more, but to have a point of view regarding his or her own behavior in the world and his or her own way of responding to the desire of the Other. It’s like going behind the stage in a theater to see what’s going on and what it is that sustains its functioning. For example, at this point there is a man with many machines behind the stage. All of you know this because we know that our own voice depends on something that nobody can see on that side and which lies behind. The crossing of the fantasm amounts to going behind the stage to find out how things work.
9. (Question on the ritualization of the short session). First point: the short session was never a selling point for Lacan. Nor did he ever encourage his disciples to do as he did with regard to session duration. Let us make things clear. This was an issue which led some colleagues at first and the IPA later on to wage war on him. But it was never a selling point for Lacanians.
Second point: we must take into account the fact that the hidden face of the short session is what I said this morning: a much greater and broader responsibility on the analyst’s part. When Lacan went on vacation it wasn’t to forget about his patients for a while. If necessary, he would leave them his personal address and phone number. The short session wasn’t in the service of his own comfort, and he accepted being bothered by his patients once the work day was over. He was there and, for example, he eventually could also be found on the phone on Saturdays and Sundays, for he didn’t have the religion of weekends.
Third point: I think that that some things were possible for Lacan which are not possible for just any other person. His practice was not only that of someone who can act as the subject supposed to know. Performing the necessary pantomime to present oneself as a subject supposed to know is something that many can teach and a few can even learn. You don’t even have to imitate an old Austrian analyst to do that any more. But the difference with Lacan is that he knew. And knowing or inventing knowledge makes a difference, and explains things about his practice that others cannot allow themselves. Therefore, the fact must be taken into account that the short session was something that was very personal and unique to Lacan. In the same way as the use of the couch was initially a method that suited Freud in strictly personal terms.
Fourth point: it is true that if one makes the session time variable in such a way that the patient cannot know beforehand how long he or she will stay, what the patient says will truly count. This makes it possible to obtain certain clinical effects, something that Lacan said in Écrits by means of the example of an obsessive.
Fifth point: as you can see, there are more points by now than in the cauldron reasoning. It must be acknowledged that nowadays, for French Lacanians at least, cutting the session short and making it briefer has become a sort of habit. So Lacan was very widely imitated in this. He had a multitude of patients, and the issue of timing is not unrelated to it. What is certain is that Lacanians imitated him on this point. Let us also remember that the unconscious knows no time, and that time only brings up the issue of the link between analytic practice and general social practices. That is to say, the link between time and the master’s discourse, from which arises the demand that the analyst must exchange his or her time for money. It was only when, thanks to Lacan, a certain degree of autonomy of the analytic discourse with respect to that link was achieved that it was possible to stop following the regulation of time dictated by the market. There is also a market of transference, but that is a market proper to analysis.
10. (Question on the bivalence and trivalence of the logics useful to think about analytic practice). It would be useful for analysts to learn more about mathematical logic, and it is a well-known fact that such was Lacan’s point of view. Analytic logic is not bivalent, but I’m not sure that a trivalent logic would suit us better. In this perspective we would probably require a logic with a very high number of values. It might also be useful to employ what are known as paraconsistent logics. I will soon travel to Brazil, where I will meet with the Pope of paraconsistent logics, a Brazilian called Newton d’Acosta. Apparently, we are meeting to discuss psychoanalysis and logic, and maybe, after that, I will be able to give a better answer to your question.
11. (Question on the status of the fundamental fantasm). What does the crossing of the fantasm mean, should it be something that can be said quickly? Lacan gives us an idea about it precisely with regard to Sade. Sade, according to Lacan, wasn’t deceived by his own fantasm. His literary work proves that he knew something about the workings of his fantasms. Therefore what is at stake is not the disappearance of the fantasm, but not being deceived by it. It is true that this is essential for the analyst. It is essential that the analyst have the possibility of distancing him or herself from his or her own fantasm.
Jacques Alain Miller - Lacan.com
