THE PLAY AT THE END OF ANALYSIS. Cristina Marrone


Lacanoamericano. Tucumán, Argentina. 2003.



If we maintain our intention to raise the play to the status of concept, we should remember statements both from Freud and Lacan regarding the artist. Put it in this way, we underline the close relation between play and sublimation.

Although Freud excluded it from its Metapsychology, sublimation reappears in a specific place: the place of the resistance to neurosis (1), a way in which fantasies go back to reality, the opposite way of the symptom that screws the subject into the libidinal introversion with the consequent retreat from reality.

The difference in gain of pleasure leaves a favorable balance to sublimation, that other satisfaction that Freud saves for the artist, the chosen one that found a way to veil his fantasies and make them compatible and sharable with others in sublime ways.

Late in his teaching, Lacan seems to question Freud’s artist when he says that "sublimation is a feature of that who knows how to make a turn by which the subject supposed to know is reduced" (2). Thus, sublimation as destiny remains for consideration at the end of analysis, a crucial moment of the passage from analysand to analyst.

Therefore, according to my proposal, from the end of analysis, play would constitute the blueprint for the analyst’s position in the transmission of his act. To promote play to the status of concept is not without reconsidering its effects on clinical psychoanalysis at both of its edges, children and the one concerning adults.
Yet, why play? A fable -that Victor Hugo allows me to borrow from his novel- approaches perhaps a framework to start with our subject.

This is the story of three children: "It was hard to tell who was watching them, they had no mother ... they lived as they could ... they were all masters but neither was his father ...”

With a look of hopeful tone, Victor Hugo says that children have the future while the birds don’t. The effect we obtain is almost paradoxical, since the first scene was a closed one.

Georgina, the little one, and her two brothers, Alan and Renato, sleep and stay in the library where only one cockroach, a fly and a bee get in.

Suddenly guns, drums, strings crashes, shouts and horses indicate that war was around the corner. In a low voice, though, the three children exclaim three times -each in their turn- the call that won’t be heard, "Mom! Mom! Mom! ". The Other does not respond. Nevertheless, after a while, the children begin to dance under the empty gaze of marble busts in the library.

Between rounds and rounds, a dusty doll-wagon turns up by the shelves. An ancient carriage that Alan discovers for him and his siblings; because "Toys and books make good neighbors!", Victor Hugo explains. Thus, the storytellers own the scene and while Georgina climbs the wagon, Renato would be the horse and Alan the inexperienced driver whose maneuver would make the princess fall down. This not only won’t stop the laughter but will boost it moments later, when their faces wind up all tinted while cutting the blackberries from the branch sticking out the window.

Until then, the famous book of Saint Bartholomew remained intact and solemn in the central podium in the library. It is then, when Renato begins the creation that has his signature: although the image of the Holy was carefully removed, the crossover leaves Saint Bartholomew with one eye on each side of the page!

From there, with a firm gesture, Renato distributes the remaining images one by one to his brothers, not keeping any for himself. In this way, the book, flying like sublime, falls downs and its pages are thrown to fly like butterflies through the fields of Britain. It was sunset and cannons rumbled with intensity between hill and hill.

Walter Benjamin states that repetition is the soul of playing and the child will seek to find it again and again, a hundred thousand times. In his words: "the essence of playing is not just 'let’s pretend that ...', but 'let’s do it over and over again '" (4).

Should we choose one form or both constitute the core of playing? The trace of Walter Benjamin is accurate and defines the field of the play if we care to clarify from the clinic a small nuance, stating that playing would be a "let’s pretend that…" -as a display of illusion, matrix of the “as if” or wrapping of the real- but also a “let’s do it over and over again” in an attempt to find what has been lost forever.

The children in Victor Hugo’s story show us just that. The play cannot be defined in the exclusivity of deceit. Isn’t that dumped in the most brutal neglect, that these children are, in another angle, as the analyst since they find their position at the level of the scene in those costumes made up to wear exactly there, when the Other does not respond?
With his carriage Alan opens up the “as if” of the play, and from there, from lalangue, emerge those costumes in the form of the coachman, the horse and the princess, to dress up those children affected by a war that wasn’t theirs. Alan plays the scene and Renato shows us the way to close it. Playing is at both ends. It is the dimension of the act in which the analyst participates and at both ends it’s a question of playing.

Let’s remember that the carriage and the princess fall down, the blackberries are extracted from the branch and the magnanimous figure of Saint Bartholomew is degraded to the condition of fun in compliance with Renato’s radical final fall.
Elsewhere, Walter Benjamin reflects on children and their experience with books: "it’s not that things emerge from the pages, but the child himself goes into them ...before his illuminated book, he practices the art of the Taoists".(5) What is the import of this reference to the Taoist’s aesthetic, that we not only care about because of the child but also as points us to the analyst, particularly when we say that play concerns the analyst’s position?

1) To answer to this question it will be necessary to set some considerations based on the seminar of 1965, when Lacan claims that analysis is play, and as such has all the features of the play. I wonder: Is it possible that in those years, by reintroducing the issue of the play, Lacan responds to Winnicott, who ten years earlier had noted that "psychoanalysis is one of the forms of playing" (6)?. Yet, "if playing is the exemplary way of the isolation of the object a" (7), what is the originality of the lacanian statement in those years?

2) The most interesting moment is when Lacan wonders about the attributes of the analyst's position, since he is the one that should know how to lead the play, considering that "the analysis is a play that is being pursued within rules, and at the same time is a gamble because nobody knows what will come of it "(8).

3) I understand that in defining the key of the play on the analyst's position, Lacan raises two terms, Subject and Knowledge, along with two big moments of the cure. Thus, the endless time in analysis where it seem to be two players is characterized by the conjunction of the Subject to Knowledge, that is to say, due to the existence of the Subject Supposed to Know. The thing is that this conjunction constitutes a fallacy since the analyst is not the subject who knows. Nonetheless, "subject and knowledge are made to get along" (9) in something like a pact of love that could read "let’s fool each other!" (10) This deceit, from which the cure depends most part of the treatment, is similar to the play as in the effects of illusion.

4) Lacan does not reduce the play to deceit, even as a valuable illusion that protects from the Real. We understand that in those years he reintroduces the issue of the play since its structure provides the key to make the end of the analysis different from the identification to the deceit of the Subject Supposed to Know. Thus, in analysis there are not two players but three, and the third one is precisely the “object a, the object of the play... which is apprehended as fallen from the sexual reality "(11).

5) What is the import of this "a”, object of the play? What is its truth? I believe that Lacan suggests that it’s a question of the object “a” and its fall, the object “a” in its articulation at the interval. It is another status of the object: not the lure of desire-that castration reveals as such by setting the lack from the symbolic of the signifier- but as I understand, the object “a”, that does the work, defined in the real of the interval and as an effect of sublimation.

6) Therefore, it is a question of “savoir-faire the work", know-how-to-do the work. The term “work” is taken in relation to sublimation but not always in the same way, since in the early days of his teaching “work” would be rated with certain accent on the signifier in the sense of circumscribing it to the field of the thing, beyond the signifier (12). Several years after that, sublimation and its object would take the meaning of vacuole in the real, evacuation of jouissance in the field of the Other (13).

7) In short: psychoanalytic cure is one version of the play, since the object “a”, the key that defines the analyst’s position, is the vacuole that perforates reality, reducing the adhesion between the Subject and Knowledge.

In this way, by defining the object “a” as a vacuole in the interval of the real, we get to the question of why the analyst with his act enhances a Taoist Aesthetic, in which the void is underlined (14). The analyst, with his naïve position, is like Renato and his siblings: he plays while producing the void required for the letter to play its song. Butterflies can restore its lightness to the language when the play does its work, establishing a void that allows flying.

Cristina Marrone.

Translated by Pablo Xavier Benavides.