Coffee with Freud

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This is the second volume in Brett Kahr’s ‘Interviews with Icons’ series, following on from Tea with Winnicott. Professor Kahr, himself a highly regarded psychoanalyst, turns his attention to the work of the father of psychoanalysis. The book is lavishly illustrated by Alison Bechdel, winner of the MacArthur Foundation ‘Genius’ Award.

Sigmund Freud pays another visit to Vienna’s renowned Café Landtmann, where he had often enjoyed reading newspapers and sipping coffee. Freud explains how he came to invent psychoanalysis, speaks bluntly about his feelings of betrayal by Carl Gustav Jung, recounts his flight from the Nazis, and so much more, all the while explaining his theories of symptom formation and psychosexuality.

Framed as a ‘posthumous interview’, the book serves as the perfect introduction to the work of Freud while examining the context in which he lived and worked. Kahr examines his legacy and considers what Freud has to teach us. In a world where manifestations of sexuality and issues of the mind are ever more widely discussed, the work of Sigmund Freud is more relevant than ever. This book is an ideal primer on Freud’s work for anyone from the psychoanalytic professional to the interested layperson.

New York: A city psycho-analyzed

by Jean-Baptiste Mauvais

2016 has confirmed the trend of the past two years: New York’s architectural dynamism is back. The One World Trade Center, 0ne57, 432 Park Avenue, the Steinway and the Nordstrom Towers; between now and 2020 a whole band of skyscrapers will have redrawn the Big Apple’s skyline. And at a height and a speed that challenges, that poses questions.

Behind these skyscrapers is there an Unconscious?

Freud and Jung in A Dangerous Method (2011)

New York at the psychoanalyst: it’s an incongruous hypothesis. An uncomfortable horizontality for such a vertical city? An enervating pause for such a driven personality? An intolerable solitude for this habitué of crowds? An impossible introspection for this city so demonstrative, so exuberant, even exhibitionist?

A truthful interview (well, nearly) with Dr Sigmund Freud.

Doctor Freud, New York was the capital of the 20th century. Despite the decline that many, wrongly, forecast following 9/ 11, and despite the shift in the world’s centre of gravity to India and China, New York rides high in the firmament: rents, salaries, and skyscrapers. 

New York has kicked off well to retain its position as the capital of the 21st Century. But why New York?

New York, it’s instinctive. True, an acceptable instinct, one that’s transfigured. You might even say the instinct is universal . . .

Instinctive ? Universal ?

New York is the libido that torments us. All of us. Without exception. But it is reshaped and expressed in socially and culturally acceptable forms. More accurately, valued forms. In other words, ones that are sublimated . . .

Sublimated ?

Professional success is brandished like a trophy - admire my suit, be jealous of my dinner party. There’s the permanent innovation, the creativity, from the latest Cupcake of the day to the exhibitions at the MOMA or the Guggenheim. And don’t forget those supersonic joggers in Central Park! Laughing. OK, I’ll try to stay calm!

And where’s architecture in all of that?

The skyscrapers, those phallic contrivances, virile and conquering, hard, solid and rectilinear, are a commonplace. But New York is also feminine, its generous breasts rising with desire. The financial flux of Wall Street, gushing and liquid, in a permanent and perpetual merry-go-round. Without us being fully conscious of it, all that expresses the imperious power of our libido, be it pedestrian or creative.

Take the most celebrated of those skyscrapers, or just the most celebrated of them all, the Chrysler Building. What is it but a meticulously ornamented phallus? Or, better, the voyeurist transparency of the glass buildings of the Bank of America and One57, inspired by the dress of Adele Bloch-Bauer painted by my illustrious compatriot Klimt. A see-through dress for an erect construction, what an intriguing mingling of the sexes!

Mingling of the sexes?

New York is the duel between the masculine and the feminine, the solid and the liquid - aquatic and life sustaining - sexual, amniotic, and milky. Nestling between the East and Hudson Rivers, Manhattan, a hyper-sexed island, oblong, is as much a gigantic, swelling phallus amidst the feminine curves of the other boroughs, as it is a woman’s sexual organ. If not a woman’s body enveloping in her belly that original uterus, Central Park.

The successive waves of immigrants who forged New York, say that for them, well ahead of economic considerations, was the clash of cultures and the hope of a better world. That’s the primacy of the life instinct over the death drive. Eros sooner than Thanatos. The preservation of the self and of the species. Relationships, creation, persistence and extension rather than destruction.

New York, where we penetrate America, fertilized and creative, replays without us consciously noticing – though we are actually well aware – every sexual encounter, real or dreamt, possible or fantasized. As well as the primal scene of the exciting and terrifying sexual union of the father and the mother, always out of sight, there are those from the past, or the future, with one, or several, possible partners, all the sexes intermingled.

The libido in all its forms. New York, a city in rude health?

Yes and No. The New York that leads in the global rankings of world cities on the most serious of issues but also on the most trivial – what is the most expensive avenue in the world, and so forth – this New York, is the capital of America and, who would say otherwise, of the planet. The obsession with performance, with coming first, with permanent innovation, with height and with speed, emulation and competition, there is in New York something in the order of an oedipal conflict that has never been resolved.

An unresolved oedipal conflict?

The persistent desire to become the father in place of the father (or of the mother), the capital of offices in place of that which has the office of capital, to be above, to push to the front, to elbow past, to replace the predecessor and suppress the rival or the brother in the fraternity (the Duke of York to whom the city owes its name did not go on to become king) or, much more obviously, the father. Washington, is the actual capital and the symbolic father, but is too feeble in face of a city in the fast lane.

Paradoxically, the father, Washington, and the mother, America, even while guarding their own power, need that economic, financial, media and cultural weight that is New York. Otherwise the symbolic castration, the emergence of a superego and the incorporation of those laws and limits on the practices others judge deviant - such as the Wall Street salaries and bonuses - could never have been imposed. The mother, the America incarnated in the Statue of Liberty, is a spectator to this scene, desired but out of reach. The father, a rival who is out of the race and out of play, is elsewhere, absent, so restraints are wanting. Defiant, New York declares: Stop me if you can.

Hence a race toward performance without limits?

Quite so. There is a malaise or at the very least an unsettling vertigo: Who am I? If I am forever New, forever condemned to be new, even more so than before or than others, who can I be? More the capital than all other cities; bigger, more Big Apple, more everything than all other cities, yet not the Capital. Denied the role of capital city, it becomes the city of capital. Blocked from being the head (caput, capitis in Latin), it becomes the body.

Cash and the skyscrapers, the recent resumption of the hustle to the heights (One57, 432 Park Avenue), the ever-present sky-high salaries and rents, consequently blend into one unconscious function: the foster mother’s inexhaustible breast that suckles until there is no thirst, yet does so in vain; or above all, that denial of a symbolic castration and that fantasy of omnipotence. Such a public display provokes an insecurity, a doubt, the feeling of an effort made in vain: Was it all just for this?

Creativity and sublimation are not sufficient?

The theatrical staging, with its frenetic rhythm, the neon strip and XXL exhibitionism, ought to alert us like an alarm bell. The skyscraper does not only express (preponderant) power. In a moment that is at once the same and contrary – though not in contradiction - it represents the looming, totemic figure of the father, as I evoked in my book Totem and Taboo (1913). The father, an object of love and hatred, a source of ambivalence, whose murder by the primitive horde led to the emergence of the sentiment of guilt, to a Superego: self-observation, self-criticism, repression, prohibition . . .

Prohibition, that’s another epoch, one that’s long gone!

Severely. You are deceiving yourself, dear friend. The conflict between the seething Id, the reservoir of the instincts, and the rigid Superego (think of Puritanism and Prohibition) leads to recurrent neurotic episodes, one minute hysterical, the next obsessive. The multitude of sky ‘scrapers’ represents the irruption of an urgent and shameful desire like a maddening skin rash.

Moreover these self-same constructions represent, unconsciously, the accumulation of stools given to the parental figure, not as a treasure but as an aggressive, recurring anality: the obsession with hygiene, with smooth and aseptic surfaces, with a paradoxical propriety, clean to the point of killing. The obsessive neurosis of the perfectly quadrilinear grid of Manhattan, still being built up in a constantly compulsive manner, tells us everything in vainly channeling the compulsion which repetitively bursts out in a conjoined movement of blockages (as with Wall Street, the walls and the ramparts) and of discharges (look at Broadway and those great thoroughfares of orgasmic joy).

These are very dismal observations …

Absolutely not! In 2016, New York still fascinates. Like no other city on the planet, it expresses and transposes our psychic life, whether intimate or universal, into reality. In its protean density, its complexity, its contradictions, none more than skin deep, it incarnates a perfect space for the projection of our desires and our fears. It offers to each of us a possibility of identification, partial or total, all the more powerfully so because it is proffered unconsciously.

I even see in New York a hope for the years to come. Contrary to all expectations, this city is shaping the interrogation of the relationship between life and death through an answer that is not strictly speaking materialist but, on the contrary, spiritual, albeit non-religious. The skyscraper, so emblematic of New York, restricts neither the city, nor those who live there or visit, nor indeed who dream of it, to a phallic or an anal dimension. It’s only a short step from the stool to the stick - well a few steps on a staircase. As a particularly lively and animated cemetery, peopled with tombstones reaching skyward, New York leaves behind life’s banality, however intense that may be, envisaging death: the city’s crowding forefingers signaling toward the infinite.

Originally published at internationalpsychoanalysis.net


See also:

• Freud in America - Freud's first and only visit to the United States 

• After Freud Left: A Century of Psychoanalysis in America

Adam Phillips: Psychoanalysis: Is it Worth It? (RSA Interview)

Adam Phillips, one of Britain’s most renowned psychoanalysts and literary figures, joined RSA Chief Executive Matthew Taylor for a conversation about life, the universe, and everything (and maybe a little Freud as well).

Adam Phillips on one of Winnicott’s most radical idea

HOLDENGRÄBER: It seems natural that an interest in literature and in Winnicott should go hand in hand. In Winnicott’s essay “On the Capacity to Be Alone,” he writes that the goal for the child is to be alone in the presence of the mother. For a long time this has seemed to me the single best definition of reading.

PHILLIPS: That idea was one of Winnicott’s most radical, because what he was saying was that solitude was prior to the wish to transgress. That there’s something deeply important about the early experience of being in the presence of somebody without being impinged upon by their demands, and without them needing you to make a demand on them. And that this creates a space internally into which one can be absorbed. In order to be absorbed one has to feel sufficiently safe, as though there is some shield, or somebody guarding you against dangers such that you can “forget yourself ” and absorb yourself, in a book, say. Or, for the child, in a game. It must be one of the precursors of reading, I suppose. I think for Winnicott it would be the definition of a good relationship if, in the relationship, you would be free to be absorbed in something else.

― The Paris Review, Adam Phillips, The Art of Nonfiction No. 7

Darian Leader on the Marketing of Depression

The New Black is Darian Leader's compassionate and illuminating exploration of melancholy

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What happens when we lose someone we love? A death, a separation or the break-up of a relationship are some of the hardest times we have to live through. We may fall into a nightmare of depression, lose the will to live and see no hope for the future. What matters at this crucial point is whether or not we are able to mourn.

In this important and groundbreaking book, acclaimed psychoanalyst and writer Darian Leader urges us to look beyond the catch-all concept of depression to explore the deeper, unconscious ways in which we respond to the experience of loss. In so doing, we can loosen the grip it may have upon our lives.

The psychoanalyst Darian Leader has established himself as an elegant and erudite voice of Lacanian theory in academic yet popular books commenting on love, the sexes, the history of psychoanalysis, the mind and the body.

Buy The New Black here. - Free delivery worldwide

His most recent books include: What is Madness?; The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression; Why Do Women Write More Letters Than They Post?; Promises Lovers Make When It Gets Late; Stealing the Mona Lisa: What Art Stops us from Seeing; Why Do People Get Ill?: Exploring the Mind-body Connection (with David Corfield); Strictly Bipolar; and Introducing Lacan: A Graphic Guide (with Judy Groves)

Tea with Winnicott

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Donald Winnicott is currently the most popular author in contemporary psychoanalysis. His writings are cited in bibliographies even more frequently than those of Sigmund Freud. And yet how many mental health professionals have actually managed to read and digest the nearly twenty published volumes of Winnicott’s books, chapters, essays, reviews, and letters?

Professor Brett Kahr, an award-winning biographer and scholar of long-standing, has resurrected Donald Woods Winnicott from the dead and has invited him for a memorable cup of tea at 87 Chester Square – Winnicott’s London residence – in which the two men discuss Winnicott’s life and work in compelling detail.

After digesting Kahr’s highly accessible “posthumous interview” with Winnicott, readers will have come to acquire a thorough overview of Winnicott’s corpus of writings, and will appreciate the historical context in which he scripted his pioneering psychoanalytical contributions.

A highly creative exercise in “imaginative non-fiction”, this book – the first in a new series entitled Interviews with Icons – will delight novices and experienced professionals alike.

Lavishly illustrated by Alison Bechdel, winner of the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” award, with original drawings of Winnicott based on unpublished photographs of Winnicott from Kahr’s own archive, this book will be the perfect guide for both Winnicott students and scholars, and the ideal gift for colleagues with an interest in the man and his work.

See also: 

Winnicot, Klein, Bowlby, Anna & Sigmund Freud: 5 Psychoanalytic Theorists Introduced in Animated “School of Life” Videos

Élisabeth Roudinesco interviewed on the 30th anniversary of Jacques Lacan’s death

Élisabeth Roudinesco, author of Lacan: In Spite of Everything, sat down with Laurent Etre on the 9th of September 2011 to discuss the founder of the Paris Freudian school, Jacques Lacan, who, thirty years prior, on 9 September 1981, had passed away—leaving in his wake a generation of followers and dissenters. Élisabeth Roudinesco, a recognised authority on his thought, helps us to grasp his relevance for the present day.

Laurent Etre:Your last book, published for the thirtieth anniversary of Lacan's death, is called Lacan, envers et contre tout ['Lacan, toward and against everything', published in English as Lacan: In Spite of Everything]. Why did you choose this title, which might suggest that there is something subversive or politically incorrect about invoking this intellectual figure



Élisabeth Roudinesco: It was firstly a means that I used to characterise my own fidelity to Lacan as persisting 'despite all his faults'. And I very much like the implicit idea of fidelity within infidelity. Moreover, Lacan was himself always a paradoxical and conflicted thinker, both an enlightened conservative and a subversive agent. This formula, 'toward and against everything', dating back to the Middle Ages, allows us to bring out this very particular aspect of Lacan's personality. This, too, was something that I wanted to do with this new book. How, having devoted so many texts to this man, could I do something really significant to mark the thirtieth anniversary of his death? I wanted a new angle, so I chose a nocturnal Lacan, the collector and reader of Sade... In my History of Perversion I showed that Sade himself was 'toward and against everything'. Not that I am drawing an equals sign between Lacan and the Marquis de Sade, of course.

But they do have points in common. Sade was beyond authority, escaping the understanding of all authority. He was locked up by the royalist regime and liberated during the Revolution, only to be jailed again by the revolutionaries themselves. Lacan was not Sade, he did not spend thirty years of his life in prison. But his fascination for Sade, for the transgression that he incarnated, bore witness to an interesting character trait of his, the fact that he had many faces, the spark for love and submission, which does not leave a simple legacy.



Let us now talk about the progress of psychoanalysis, from Freud to Lacan. Does it (with its idea that conscious discourse is incomplete, that it is necessary to go beyond what is signified) help us understand our society, over-saturated as it is with communication? Or are psychoanalysis's reflections on language reserved for the intimacy of therapy?



Yes, of course, in societies that are over-saturated with communication – which are in fact just a semblance, an appearance based on a narcissistic individualism, and not the true word – the idea that the unconscious expresses itself, that it is language, is a very powerful and politically subversive notion. This is one of the fundamental reasons for the hatred that Freud, Lacan and psychoanalysis in general constantly provoke. The idea that the subject is traversed by her or his unconscious and that language is of capital significance is opposed to all those theories that reduce man to his behaviour, to the sum of his bodily attitudes. This is a truly political debate. If we dwell on behaviouralism, then we abolish the freedom of the subject. Behaviouralism knows only machine-men. Conversely, Freud initiated a theory of freedom determined by the unconscious. It is, moreover, this disposition that allows for his rapprochement with Marx. Man is free to make his own history, but there are psychic and social determinations that act unbeknownst to him. This idea is still today a subversive one. That said, we ought to note a contradiction. Very often it comes to pass that psychoanalysts are unable to grasp this conception, this ethics of freedom inherent to their discipline. In our contemporary, ultra-mediatised world, which adores perverts and shams, there are many people prepared to make the most wild interpretations of anything and everything. We saw this with the Strauss-Kahn affair. We saw pop-pschology – relayed by politicians and certain feminists – declaring that this man was a pervert, a rapist (and thus a criminal), mentally ill, psychotic. All these cookie-cutter diagnoses were delirious. The people who churned out this stuff were guilty of a collective madness, a disgrace to psychoanalysis and psychiatry that damaged all the protagonists of this tragic affair: Strauss-Kahn and his family as well as the unfortunate hotel maid.



You consider psychoanalysis to be opposed in principle to narcissistic individualism. Yet we often tend to see a narcissistic practice within psychoanalysis itself, as the subject hears herself speak.... Is this completely without foundation?



The interest in narcissistic pathologies dates back to the 1960s, when clinical developments led practitioners to focus on the self more than the conflicts of the ego. Freud was a theorist of conflict (hysterical and intra-family conflicts). This was the beginning of what came to be called 'personal development'. It was in these circumstances that psychoanalytic therapy evolved toward analysis of narcissism. But at the same time, its principle in so doing was to critique narcissism. Lacan situated himself mid-way between these two currents. He returned to Freud, at the same time as concerning himself with the ideology of his own epoch. The other face of the cult of the self is the medication of everything. Cerebralists would have us believe that molecules alone can get rid of all mental pathologies. I think, on the contrary, that we should do everything to put a stop to this worrying development, and return to the balance: medication plus face-to-face therapy. Of course, this latter must not collapse into either adapting the subject to society as it is or collaborating with cerebralists, who have a lot to tell us about the functioning of the brain but not much about mental and social malaise. The goal of those who want to medicate everything is to get the mentally ill out of the psychiatrical hospital as quickly as possible. In certain ways, they are realising the dream that we had in the 1960s: get people out of the asylum. But in what state are these people leaving? With more than ten medications a day, dazing them with a serious, psychosis-free depression.



Can we identify, in this constant recourse to chemicals that you denounce, the consequences of the general commodification of human activities? Indeed, one might think that the more or less consciously sought goal of this short-termist cerebralist medicine is to get the patients back to the market as soon as possible...



It's more complicated than that. Doctors are not in the service of big capital. In reality, the concern of this ideology that has a chemical answer for everything, the reduction of man to his brain and his physiological circuits, is, still, the patient's well-being, the idea being that medicine alone is effective in this regard. So it is not narrowly a matter of making subjects active on the market again as soon as possible. Indeed, this misunderstood materialism and cognitivism traverses the main currents of politics, and the Left also must learn to distrust it. Having a chemical answer for everything may seduce those who want to free themselves of any form of spirituality. The risk, though, is falling into a reductionist hedonism, prioritising the body at the cost of negating subjectivity, in the manner of certain biological ideologies of the far Right.

In your book, you advance the idea that Lacan's thinking allows us to critique the hedonism of present-day society, centred as it is on the egocentric quest for short-term pleasure... At the same time, you explain that Lacan's ethics can be summed up in the formula 'don't give up on your desire'. Is there not a contradiction, here? Doesn't desire always refer to pleasure, the promise that a tension will be relieved?



This formula that Lacan took from his interpretation of Antigone is not without its ambiguities. Many psychoanalysts have interpreted it as an appeal for apoliticism, absolute detachment from society. Now, at root this injunction not to give up on one's desire means that it is necessary to go beyond both moralism and an excessive deployment of affects. Desire is not reducible to the pleasure that is promised by today's hedonism. This latter – as Lacan's great text 'Kant avec Sade' suggests – is based on the idea that we no longer have any need for symbolic functions, that there is no law, and that the subject's body is all-powerful. This is the omnipotence of the ego, which is considered the 'king of the world', as they say. At heart, hedonism proclaims a pure imperative, enjoyment. There is something mortifying about this. To wish to enjoy everything all the time means death, guaranteed self-destruction. Faced with this, psychoanalysis is a sort of school of reason. Of course, in order to live we do need pleasure, desire, enjoyment. Psychoanalysis is not a theory of the frustration of pleasures. But it invites reflection on the fact that the untrammeled reign of passions produces the same result as absolute control over them: the death of the subject. In this sense, psychoanalysis renews a whole philosophical tradition concerning the mastery of passions by reason.



You characterise Lacan and Freud as 'thinkers of the sombre Enlightenment'. What do you mean by that?



Lacan takes from Freud – who was part of that lineage – a certain pessimism with regard to progress, a critique of any ideology of unlimited progress. Lacan thought that man is fundamentally occupied by the tension toward death, and that this latter is the basis of the real. He thought that it would never be possible to overcome this part of the real, the obscure, mad part of man. Politically, Lacan was an enlightened conservative who nonetheless adoped a social-democratic, pro-Mendés-France perspective. He was very close to the magazine L'Express, a friend of Françoise Giroud and Madeleine Chapsal...



But this critique of unlimited process would have us believe that man is finished, that his essence is now complete... Does such a conception not necessarily lead to a rejection of change, always defending the established order?



It is a very complicated question... Lacan was not a total pessimist, and thought that the subject's action in life does have some margin of freedom. It is in relation to the symbolic order, language, that the subject is conscious of herself. She can shake off the illusions in her imaginary, rise above her feelings and emotions. But what is certain is that Lacan was not in favour of revolution. He believed that it neecessarily led to terror and new forms of slavery worse than the preceding ones. It is also in this sense that we can see a Sadeian side to Lacan. He considered himself beyond all authority. But each time that he was driven to take a position on a political subject, it was for good causes. He showed himself to be an anti-colonialist and anti-racist who was in favour of the emancipation of the subject. From 1953 to 1960 he turned toward what he saw as the two great political forces: the Church, which at that time was truly interested in psychoanalysis (notably the Jesuits) and the French Communist Party, which was on the way to abandoning its condemnations of Freud. These two forces, each in their own way, were refurbishing their intellectual tools in order to resist the narcissistic and individualist wave of American society: Lacan was a materialist who believed in the force of ideas and of the human spirit. He here made a choice for France that was all the more judicious if we consider that he remained attached to a very 'English' democratic tradition: he loved the British constitutional monarchy and admired Churchill.



Was Lacan not, above all, a thinker in the republican tradition, developing a conception of law as a fundamental tool for constructing free subjects, as opposed to the liberal-libertarian ideology that tends to consider all limitations on desire as an obstacle to individual freedom?

Exactly – a paradoxical republican. Like Lévi-Strauss, Lacan believed that the symbolic function – not to be confused with repressive law – is capital for allowing man to exist as a subject. The symbolic function is an order: not a patriarchal one, but an order of meaning. It is for this reason that we can use Lacan to help get a handle on an authentic progressive thought, a thought open to contemporary developments, to changes in the family form like same-sex parenthood, but without falling victim to the dangers posed to democracy and co-existence by a certain degree of inflation of communitarian and identitarian (sexual, ethnic, etc.) claims. It is, in any case, in the sense of this critical outlook that I am still today committed to developing Lacan's legacy.



See the original French interview here.

Source: Verso blog

See also

Jacques Lacan, Past and Present: A Dialogue

Interview with Jacques Lacan, 1957

Published in L’Express in May 1957.

Interviewer: A psychoanalyst is very intimidating. One has the feeling that he could manipulate you as he wishes, that he knows more than you about the motives of your actions.

Dr. Lacan: Don’t exaggerate. Do you think that this effect is exclusive to the psycho-analyst? An economist, for many, is as mysterious as an analyst. In our time, it is the expert who intimidates. With psychology, even when seen as a science, everyone thought they had the insider’s track. Now, with psychoanalysis, we have the feeling of having lost that privilege; that the analyst could be capable of seeing something quite secret in what appears to you to be quite clear. There you lie naked, uncovered, under a well-informed eye, and without knowing what you are showing him.

THE OTHER SUBJECT

Interviewer: This is a sort of terrorism. One feels violently torn out from oneself.

Dr. Lacan: Psychoanalysis, in the order of man, has, in fact, all the subversive and scandalous features that the Copernican de-centering had in the cosmic order: the earth, that place inhabited by man, is no longer the center of the universe! Well! Psychoanalysis announces that you are no longer the center of yourself, since there is another subject within you, the Unconscious. It was, at first, not well-accepted news. The so-called irrationalism which has been used to define Freud! When it is exactly the contrary: not only did he rationalize all that had resisted rationalization until he came along, but he even showed that in action there is a process of reasoning going on; I mean, something that is reasoning and functioning logically, without the knowledge of the subject. All of this, viewed classically, as being in the field of the irrational; let’s call it the field of passion.

This is precisely what he was not forgiven for. His introduction of the notion of sexual forces that take over the subject without warning, nor logic, was still admitted; but that sexuality is a place of speech, that neurosis is an illness that speaks, here is something strange, and even his disciples prefer that we speak of something else.

An analyst must not be seen as a “soul engineer”; he’s not a physician, he does not proceed by establishing cause-effect relations; his science is a reading, it’s a reading of sense.
This is why, undoubtedly, without knowing exactly what is hidden behind his office’s door, he is commonly considered as a sorcerer, an even greater one than the others.

Interviewer: And who has discovered these terrible secrets?

Dr. Lacan: It is better to specify the nature of these secrets. They are not the secrets of nature, those discovered by biological and physical sciences. If psychoanalysis clarifies some facts of sexuality, it is not by aiming at them in their own reality, not in biological experience.


ARTICULATED AND DECIPHERABLE

Interviewer: But, Freud, he did discover, in the same way one discovers an unknown continent, a new dimension of psychic life, that is called “unconscious” or something else? Freud is Christopher Columbus!

Dr. Lacan: The knowledge that there is a part of the psychic functions that are out of conscious reach, we did not need to wait for Freud to know this!

If you want a comparison, Freud is instead Champollion! The Freudian experience is not at the level of the organization of instincts and vital forces. The Freudian experience discovers them only by exerting itself, if I may say so, on a secondary force. It is not the instinctual effects in their primary force that Freud deals with. That which is analyzable is so, because it is already articulated in what makes up the singularity of the subject’s history. The subject can recognize himself in it, insofar as psychoanalysis allows the transference of this articulation.

In other words, when the subject “represses”, this does not mean that the subject refuses to gain consciousness of something like an instinct, like, for example, a sexual instinct that would manifest itself in a homosexual form — no, the subject does not refuse his homosexuality, he represses the speech where this homosexuality has the role of a signifier. You see, it is not a vague, dubious thing which is repressed; it is not a sort of need, or tendency, that could have been articulated (and then can’t be articulated because it is repressed); it is a discourse that is already articulated, already formulated in a language. It’s all there.

Interviewer: You say that the subject represses a discourse articulated in a language. Yet, we do not feel ourselves to be there when we’re face to face with a person with psychological difficulties, a timid person, for example, or an obsessional. Their conduct seems absurd, incoherent; and if we guess that it might mean something, this would be imprecise, a faltering tone, sensed at a level lower than the level of language. And oneself, when one feels ridden by obscure forces that we call neurotic, these forces manifest themselves precisely by irrational actions , accompanied by confusion and angst!

Dr. Lacan: Symptoms, those you believe you recognize, seem to you irrational because you take them in an isolated manner, and you want to interpret them directly. For example, take the Egyptian hieroglyphics. As long as we look for the direct meaning of vultures, chickens, the standing, sitting, or moving men, the writing remains indecipherable. When taken by itself, the sign “vulture” means nothing; it only finds its signifying value when taken within the context of the set of the system to which it belongs. Well, analysis deals with this order of phenomena. They belong to the order of language (“langagier” in French).

A psychoanalyst is not an explorer of an unknown continent, or of great depths; he is a linguist. He learns to decipher the writing which is under his eyes, present to the sight of all; however, that writing remains indecipherable if we lack its laws, its key.


REPRESSION OF TRUTH

Interviewer: You say that this writing is “present to the sight of all”. Yet, if Freud has said something new, it was that in psychic life we are ill because we conceal, we hide a part of oneself, we repress. But the hieroglyphics themselves were not repressed, they were written on stone. So your comparison cannot be complete ?

Dr. Lacan: On the contrary, it must be taken literally. What is to be deciphered in psychic analysis is all the time there, present since the beginning. You speak about repression, forgetting something. As Freud formulated it, repression is inseparable from the phenomenon of “the return of the repressed”. Something continues to function, something continues to speak in the place where it was repressed. Thanks to this we can locate the place of repression and of the illness, saying “it is there”.

This notion is difficult to understand because when we speak of repression we imagine immediately a pressure, a vesicular pressure, for example. That is, a vague mass, undefined, exerting all its weight against a door that we refuse to open. Now, in psychoanalysis, repression is not the repression of a thing, it is a repression of a truth. What happens then, when we want to repress a truth? The whole history of tyranny is there to give the answer: It is expressed elsewhere, in another register, in a ciphered, clandestine language. Well, this is exactly what is produced with consciousness.

Truth, the repressed, will persist, though transposed to another language, the neurotic language.

Except that we are no longer capable of saying at that moment who is the subject speaking; but, that “it” speaks, that it continues to speak. It happens that it is entirely decipherable in the manner that we are decipherable, which means, not without difficulty, it’s a lost writing.

Truth has not been annihilated, it has not fallen into an abyss. It is still there, given, present, but turned into unconscious. The subject who has repressed truth is not the master anymore, he is not at the center of his discourse; things continue to function alone and discourse continues to articulate itself, but “outside the subject.” And this place, this “outside the subject,” is exactly what we call the unconscious.

You can clearly see that what we have lost is not the truth; it is the key to the new language in which it is expressed from then on .


THE HAMMOCK

Interviewer: Isn’t this your own interpretation? It seems that it is not Freud’s?

Dr. Lacan: Read “The Interpretation of Dreams”, read “The Psychopathology of Everyday Life”, read “Jokes and their relation to the Unconscious”. It is enough to open these works, whatever the page, to find clearly what I’m speaking about.

The term “censorship”, for example. Why did Freud choose it straightaway, even at the level of the interpretation of dreams, to designate this restraining insistence, the repressing force? Censorship, as we know, is this anasthasia, this constraint that works using a pair of scissors. And on what? Not on whatever passes by in the air, but rather on what is susceptible of being printed, in a discourse, a discourse expressed in a language.

Yes, the linguistic method is present in every page of Freud’s work; all the time he gives references, analogies, linguistic parallels. And then, in the end, in psychoanalysis, you only ask one thing of the patient, only one thing, that is, to speak. If psychoanalysis exists, and if it has its effects, it is only within the domain of confession and of speech.

Yet, for Freud, as for me, human language does not spring up for human beings like a fountain . Look at the way that, ordinarily, how a child gains experience is represented for us: he sticks his finger on a burning pan, he burns himself. Starting from that moment that he encounters hot and cold, danger, it is maintained that all that remains for him to do is to deduce, to reconstruct all of civilization.

That is absurd. Starting with the fact that he burns himself, he is placed face to face with something which is much more important than the discovery of hot and cold. In fact, he burns himself and then there is always someone who gives him a whole speech about it. Indeed, the child will have a much harder time entering into this linguistic discourse that we have submerged him into, than to learn to avoid the hot pan.

In other words, the man who is born into existence deals first with language; this is a given. He is even caught in it before his birth. Doesn’t he have a civil status? Yes, the child who is to be born is already, from head to toe, caught in this language hammock that receives him and at the same time imprisons him.


CLEARLY, IN EACH CASE

Interviewer: What renders the acceptance of relating neurotic symptoms to a perfectly articulated language difficult is the fact that we don’t see to whom they are addressed. They are not made for anyone, since the ill person, in particular, the ill person, himself, does not understand them, and a specialist is needed to decipher them! Maybe, the hieroglyphics have become incomprehensible, but, at the time they were used, they were made to communicate certain things to certain people. So what is this neurotic language?

It is not only a dead language, it’s not only a private language, since it is incomprehensible to oneself?

And then, a language is something that we use. This one, on the contrary is infringed upon. Take the obsessional. He would certainly like to get rid of his fixed idea, get out of the trap.

Dr. Lacan: These are precisely the paradoxes that are the object of discovery. And yet, if language were not addressed to an Other, it could not be understood thanks to an other in psychoanalysis. The rest is a matter of recognizing what it is, and to do this, it is necessary to situate it in a case; this requires a long time to develop; otherwise it’s a jumble of incomprehension. Nevertheless, it is there, where what I’m talking about can appear clearly: the way the repressed discourse of the unconscious is translated in the register of the symptom. And you can see to what point this is precise. You mentioned the obsessional. Follow Freud’s observation which we find in “The Five Psychoanalyses”, entitled “The Ratman”. The Ratman was a great obsessional. A young man of higher education who finds Freud in Vienna to tell him that he suffers from obsessions. They are sometimes intense worries in relation to his beloved, and sometimes the desire to commit impulsive acts, like cutting his throat, or he constructs for himself interdictions concerning insignificant things.


THE RATMAN

Interviewer: And what about sexuality?

Dr. Lacan: There we find an error of the term! Obsessional does not necessarily mean sexual obsession, not even obsession for this, or for that in particular; to be an obsessional means to find oneself caught in a mechanism, in a trap increasingly demanding and endless. He has to accomplish an act, a duty; a special anxiety takes over the obsessional. Will he be able to accomplish it? Once he has done it, he suffers the torturing need to verify it, but he doesn’t dare because he fears he will appear as a crazy man, because at the same time he knows well he did accomplish it; this commits him to greater and greater cycles of verification, precaution, justification. Taken in this way by an inner whirlwind, it is impossible for him to find a state of tranquillity, of satisfaction. Nevertheless, the great obsessional is far from being delirious. He has no conviction whatsoever, only a kind a necessity, totally ambiguous, that renders him incredibly unhappy, suffering, hopeless, left to an unexplainable insistence that comes from within himself, and that he does not understand.

The obsessional neurotic is common and can go unnoticed, if we are not attentive to the little signs that betray him. The people suffering from this illness occupy their social positions well, even if their life is ravaged, eroded by suffering and by the development of this neurosis. I’ve known people who held important positions, and not only honorary, but positions of leadership, people with great and extended responsibilities, that they assumed completely, but they were not in anyway less caught, all day long, as the prey of their obsessions.

This was the case of the Ratman, distressed, trapped by the return of his symptoms, that lead him to consult Freud in Vienna, where the Ratman was participating in important military exercises as an army reserve official. He asked Freud for advice with regard to a very boring story of a debt he owed to the mail office where he had sent a pair of glasses, a story that he loses track of. If we follow him, literally, right to his doubts, we find in the scenario created by his symptom, a scenario that concerns four persons, the very events that led to the marriage of which the subject was the fruit, trait by trait, transposed into a vast set of mannerisms, without the subject suspecting anything .

Interviewer: What stories?

Dr. Lacan: A fraudulent debt of his father, a military man, grew. The father lost his military rank due to having committed a crime; there was a loan that allowed him to pay his debt, and the unclear aspect of the restitution of the money to the friend who came to his aid, and finally a betrayed love due to a marriage that gave him status.

During his childhood, the Ratman had heard these stories, some light-hearted, others covert.. What is striking is the fact that what returns from the repressed is not a particular event or trauma; it is the dramatic constellation that ruled over his birth, his prehistory.. He is descended from a legendary past. This prehistory reappears via the symptoms that represent that pre-history in an unrecognizable form, that weave it into myth, represented by the subject without awareness. Since it is transposed like a language or a writing, maybe transposed into another language, with other signs; it is rewritten without the modification of the liaisons; like a figure in geometry is transformed from a sphere to a plane, which does not necessarily mean that any figure can transform itself into any other figure.

Interviewer: So, when this story is updated, what comes next?

Dr. Lacan: Listen well…I have not said that the cure of a neurosis is accomplished with this. You know very well that in the cure of the Ratman there is something else that I cannot talk about here. If a prehistory sufficed for the origin of consciousness, everyone would be a neurotic. It is linked to the way the subject assumes things, accepts them or represses them. And why do certain people repress certain things?

Anyway, take the time to read the Ratman using this key that traverses it , part by part; the transposition into another figurative language, totally unperceived by the subject, of something that can only be understood as a discourse.


TO KNOW MORE AND BETTER

Interviewer: It could be that repressed truth is articulated, as you say, in a discourse with ravaging effects. But in the case of someone who comes to you, it is not because he searches for the truth. He is someone who suffers horribly, and wants to be relieved from his pain. If I remember correctly the story of the Ratman, there was also a fantasy of rats.

Dr. Lacan: In other words, while you worry about truth, there’s a man who suffers. In any case, before using an instrument, it’s important to know what it is, how it is manufactured! Psychoanalysis is a terribly efficient instrument, and because it is more and more a prestigious instrument, we run the risk of using it with a purpose for which it was not made for, and in this way we may degrade it.

Therefore it is necessary to depart from the essential: what is it, this technique, what’s its purpose, what are its effects, the effects that it has by its simple and pure application?

Well! The phenomena proper to psychoanalysis are of the order of language. That is, the spoken recognition of the major elements of the subject’s history, a history that has been cut, interrupted, that has fallen onto the underside of discourse. In relation to the effects that we define as belonging to analysis, the analytical effects, as we say — mechanical or electrical effects — the analytical effects are of the nature of the return of the repressed discourse. I can assure you that at the very moment you have put the subject on the couch and you have explained to him the analytical rule as briefly as possible, the subject is already introduced into the dimension of the search for his truth.

Dr. Lacan-And I can assure you, that at the very moment you have put the subject on the couch and even if you have explained to him the analytical rule as briefly as possible, the subject is already introduced into the dimension of the search for his truth.

Yes, just from the fact of having to speak, as he must in front of another, the silence of another – a silence which is neither approving nor disapproving, but rather attentive- he feels it as an expectation, and this expectation is that of the truth.

And also , he feels driven by the prejudice that we had mentioned before:
that of believing that this other, the expert, the analyst, knows something about him that he himself is unaware of; the presence of the truth is fortified, it is there in an implicit state.

The ill person suffers but he realizes that the path to take in order to go beyond, to ameliorate his suffering, is of the order of the truth: to know more and to know better.

–Then, man is a being of language? This would be the new representation of man that we owe to Freud; man is someone who speaks?

Dr. Lacan- Is language the essence of man? This is question which is not of disinterest to me, and I do not detest that people who are interested in what I say are, in fact, interested in this, but it is an interest of a different order, and as I sometimes say, it’s the side event.

I don’t ask myself “who speaks?”; I try to pose the question in a different way, in a more precisely formulated way. I ask “From where does it speak?”

In other words, if I have tried to elaborate something, it is not a metaphysical theory but a theory of intersubjectivity. Since Freud, the center of man is not where we thought it was; one has to go on from there.

–If what counts is to speak, to find one’s own truth through words and confession, would not analysis become a substitute for religious confession?

Dr. Lacan-I am not authorized to talk to you about religious matters, but I must say that confession is a sacrament which is not there to satisfy a certain need for confiding… The response, even if consoling, encouraging, even if directive, of a priest does not pretend to render confession efficient.

–From the point of view of dogma, you are certainly right. However, confession is related, at least for a time which does not cover the entire Christian era, to what is called the direction of conscience.

Would this not be related to the field of psychoanalysis? That is, to make someone confess his actions and intentions, to guide a spirit who searches for his truth?

Dr. Lacan- The direction of conscience has been judged in different manners by spiritual individuals themselves. We have even seen in certain cases, that this can be a source of a variety of abusive practices.

In other terms, it is up to the members of religious orders to determine the place and significance they give to conscience.

But it seems to me that no director of conscience would be alarmed by a technique whose objective is to reveal the truth. I’ve seen how worthy members of religious communities have taken a stand in very delicate affairs, where something that we call family honor was at stake. I have always seen them decide that to keep truth hidden has ravaging consequences.

And, all directors of conscience will tell you that the bane of their existences are obsessional and overly scrupulous persons; they don’t really know how to deal with them: the more they try to calm them down, the worse it gets; the more they try to explain and give them reasons, the more people come to them with absurd questions…

Yet, analytical truth is not as mysterious, or as secret, so as to not allow us to see that people with a talent for directing consciences see truth rise spontaneously.

I’ve known among members of religious orders people who had understood that a penitent who complained about her needs for impurity, needed to be taken to another level: did she behave justly with her children and her maid? And through this brutal reminder, they obtained incredibly surprising effects.

In my opinion, the directors of conscience cannot find fault with psychoanalysis; they can even find in it some useful ideas.


DISTURBING REVERSAL

—Perhaps, but is psychoanalysis well perceived? In the religious domain it would be considered rather a devil’s science.

Dr. Lacan- I think times have changed. Undoubtedly, after Freud invented psychoanalysis, it was considered for a long time as a subversive and scandalous science. It was not about believing in it or not. People were violently opposed to it with the excuse that analyzed persons would be at the mercy of all their raging desires, would do whatever.

As of today, recognized as a science or not, psychoanalysis has entered our habits, and positions have been reversed: when someone does not behave normally, when he is considered as scnadalous in his social circle, we speak of sending him to a psychoanalyst!

All this does not lie in the order of what is called with the too technical term “resistance to psychoanalysis”, but rather “mass objection”.

The fear to lose one’s originality, of being reduced to a common level, is also frequent. One has to say that with the notion of “adaptation” a doctrine of nature has been produced to engender confusion and from there on anxiety.

There has been written that psychoanalysis has as its objective the adaptation of the subject, not precisely to his external environment, his life or his real needs; this means the ratification of an analysis would be to become the perfect father, the model husband, the ideal citizen, in sum, someone who has nothing left to discuss.

All this is completely false. Just as false as the first prejudice that conceives psychoanalysis as a means to total liberation.

—Don’t you think that that which people fear most, that which makes them oppose psychoanalysis even before they consider it a science or not, is the fact that they risk losing a part of themselves, of being modified?

Dr. Lacan- This worry is totally legitimate as it appears. To say that there is no change in the personality after a psychoanalysis would be aé joke. It is difficult to claim at the same time that we can obtain results through psychoanalysis and that we may not obtain them, that is to say, that personality can remain unchanged. In any case, the notion of personality needs to be clarified, or even re-interpreted.


SETTLING (REINSTALLATION) OF THE SUBJECT

–Basically, the difference between psychoanalysis and various psychological techniques is that psychoanalysis is not contented with only guiding, or intervening blindly, psychoanalysis cures…

Dr. Lacan- It cures that which is curable. It will not cure daltonism or idiocy, even if in the end daltonism and idiocy have something to do with the psyche.

Do you know Freud’s formula, “there where it was, I must be” ? The subject must be able to settle in this place, this place where he was no longer, replaced by this anonymous word that we call the “it”.

–In the Freudian perspective, is there an interest in aiming at curing the large number of people who are not ill? In other words, is there an interest in psychoanalyzing everyone ?

Dr. Lacan- To possess an unconscious is not a privilege of neurotics. There are people who are manifestly not overwhelmed by an excessive weight of parasitic suffering, who are not blocked by the presence of another subject-but who would not lose anything if they knew more about him.

Since to be analyzed is nothing different than knowing one’s own history.

–Is this true in the case of creators?

Dr. Lacan- It is an interesting question to know if there is an interest for them to run with or to veil this speech that attacks them from the outside (it’s the same thing as that which blocks the subject in neurosis and in creative inspiration).

Is there an interest in running on the path of psychoanalysis towards the truth of the subject’s history, or to give away, like Goethe, to a great way which is nothing different than an enormous psychoanalysis?

Because in Goethe this is evident: his work is entirely the revelation of the other subject’s speech.

He pushed the thing as far as a genius can do it.

Would he have written something different if he had been analyzed? In my opinion, his work would have been another, but I don’t think it would have been lost.

–And for those men who are not creators but who have enormous responsibilities, who deal with power, do you think that psychoanalysis should be obligatory ?

Dr. Lacan- In fact, we should not doubt that if a man is the President of the council, it is because he was analyzed at a normal age, this means young, but sometimes youth is very long lasting.


SIGNS OF ALARM

–Watch out ! What could one object to Mr. Guy Mollet if he had been analyzed?

If he could have the right to immunization when his contradictors do not?

Dr. Lacan- I wouldn’t take a stand on whether Mr. Guy Mollet would make the politics he makes if he were analyzed! I don’t want to be heard saying that a psychoanalysis applied universally would be the source of the resolution of all antinomies; that if we analyze all human beings, there will not be any more wars, no more class conflicts; formally, I say the opposite. All that we could expect is that human dramas might be less confusing.

Do you see the error in what you were saying awhile ago : wanting to use an instrument without knowing how it is made. Among the activities that are being developed all over the world under the name of psychoanalysis, there is a growing tendency to cover, to fail to recognize, to mask the first order in which Freud brought his spark.

The effort of the great majority of the psychoanalytic schools has been what I call an attempt at reduction: to put in one’s pocket the most disturbing aspect of Freud’s theory. Year after year, we witness the accentuation of this degradation, reaching at times, like in the United States, formulations which are in total contradiction with the Freudian inspiration.

It is not because psychoanalysis is highly contested that analysts should make their observations more acceptable, covering them with multiple colors, and borrowing analogies from neighboring scientific domains.

—This is very discouraging if we think in terms of potential analysands?

Dr. Lacan– If my words disturb you, so much the better. From the point of view of the public, my wish is to emit a sign of alarm, so that there will be, in a scientific field, a very precise requirement concerning the training of analysts.


A TRAINED ANALYST

—Isn’t it already a very long and serious training?

Dr. Lacan- The psychoanalytic teaching, as it is today– medical studies and then a psychoanalysis, a training analysis with a qualified analyst– is lacking something essential, without which I doubt one could consider oneself a well trained analyst: the study of linguistic and historic disciplines, history of religion, etc.

Freud, so as to clarify his thought on training, revives the old term, which I enjoy mentioning, of “universitas literarum”.

Medical studies are evidently insufficient to understand what psychoanalysis says, that is to say, for example, to differentiate in a discourse the meaning of symbols, the presence of myths, or simply to grasp the meaning of what the patient says, just like we grasp the meaning of a text.

At the minimum, for the time being, a serious study of the texts of the Freudian doctrine is rendered possible by the safe haven that is given them by Professor Jean Delay of the faculty of the Clinic of Mental Illness and Encephalitis.

–Do you think that there’s a risk of losing psychoanalysis, as invented by Freud, in the hands of incompetent people?

Dr. Lacan- At present, psychoanalysis is turning more and more to a confusing mythology. We can cite certain signs: erasure of the Oedipus complex, accentuation of pre-oedipal mechanisms, of frustration, substitution of the term anxiety by fear. But this doesn’t mean that Freudism, the first Freudian glow, is not developing all over. We find very clear manifestations of it in all sorts of human sciences.

I’m thinking in particular of what my friend Claude Levi-Strauss told me recently of the tribute paid to the Oedipus complex by ethnographers, by who the Oedipus complex is seen as a profound mythical creation born in our epoch.

It is something very striking and surprising that Sigmund Freud, a man alone, managed to bring out a certain number of effects that had never been isolated before, introducing them into a coordinated network, inventing at the same time a science and a field for its application.

But, in relation to this great work of Freud, which traverses the century like a stroke of fire, our work is lagging behind. I say it with all my conviction. And we will not move ahead until we have enough well trained people to do all that a scientific or technical task requires: after the stroke of genius, an army of workers to harvest the results.

Notes:

Jean François Champollion, 1790-1832, French Egyptologist: deciphered the Rosetta Stone. (Random House Dictionary)

See also

The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I by Jacques Lacan

The idea of the "mirror stage" is an important early component in Lacan’s critical reinterpretation of the work of Freud. Drawing on work in physiology and animal psychology, Lacan proposes that human infants pass through a stage in which an external image of the body (reflected in a mirror, or represented to the infant through the mother or primary caregiver) produces a psychic response that gives rise to the mental representation of an "I".

Lacanian Graph of Desire

or Introducing Lacan: A Graphic Guide

~ Lacan For Beginners
~ Free Ebook - The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis 

‘There can be no crisis of psychoanalysis’ Jacques Lacan interviewed in 1974

In this interview given in 1974, Jacques Lacan prophetically warned of the dangers of the return of religion and of scientism. For him, psychoanalysis is the only conceivable rampart against contemporary anxieties. These are arguments of surprising present-day relevance.

As if by magic, Lacan lives again with full force in this interview given to the Italian magazine Panorama in 1974. The Italian interviewer Emilio Granzotto noted that ‘we hear more and talk more of the crisis of psychoanalysis’. Fortunately in Jacques Lacan we can find real frankness, good sense, lucidness and precision – far from the ‘comforting’ psychoanalysis established by some of Freud’s students, who ritualised techniques of therapy that gently re-adapt the patient to his social environment. ‘This is the very negation of Freud’, Lacan tells us. What were his fears, at that time? Showing his talent for prophesy, Lacan feared already in 1974 both the return of religion and the triumph of science. Sex in evidence everywhere? No. Rather, a fake liberalisation, without importance. But scientific meddling – well, that’s a different matter…

Emilio Granzotto: We hear more and more talk of a crisis of psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud has been left behind, they say, as modern society has discovered that his work is insufficient for understanding man or for deeply investigating his relationship with the world.

Jacques Lacan: This is tittle-tattle. In the first place, this so-called crisis. It does not exist, it could not. Psychoanalysis has not come close to finding its own limits, yet. There is still so much to discover in practice and in consciousness. In psychoanalysis, there are no immediate answers, but only the long and patient search for reasons.

Secondly, Freud. How can it be said that he has been left behind, when we have still not yet entirely understood him? What we do know for sure is that he made us aware of things that are entirely novel, that would not even have been imagined before him, from the problems of the unconscious to the importance of sexuality, from access to the symbolic sphere to subjection to the laws of language.

His doctrine put truth itself in question, and this concerns everyone, each individual personally. It is hardly in crisis. I will repeat: we are far from Freud. His name has also been used to cover for a lot of things, there have been deviations and epigones who did not always loyally follow his model, creating confusion about what he meant. After his death in 1939, some of his students also claimed to be exercising a different kind of psychoanalysis by reducing his teachings to a few banal formulas: technique as a ritual, practice restricted to treating people’s behaviour, as a means of re-adapting the individual to his social environment. This is the negation of Freud: a comforting salon psychoanalysis.

He had predicted it himself. He said that there were three untenable positions, three impossible tasks: governing, educating, and exercising psychoanalysis. These days it doesn’t much matter who takes the responsibility for governing, and everyone claims to be an educator. As for psychoanalysts, thank God, they are prospering as experts and as quacks. To offer to help people means guaranteeing success, and the customers are banging down the door. Psychoanalysis is something quite different to this.

What exactly?

I define it as a symptom – something that reveals the malaise of the society in which we live. Of course, it is not a philosophy. I abhor philosophy, for an awful long time it’s had nothing new of interest to say. Nor is psychoanalysis a faith, and I am not keen on calling it a science. Let’s say that it’s a practice, and it is concerned with whatever is not going right. Which is a terrible difficulty because it claims to introduce the impossible, the imaginary, into everyday life. Thus far it has obtained certain results, but it still has no rules and is prone to all sorts of ambiguities.

We must not forget that it is something entirely new, with regard to both medicine and psychology and its outliers. It is also very young. Freud died barely thirty-five years ago. His first book, The Interpretation of Dreams, was published in 1900, and met with very little success. I think they sold only three hundred copies across the first few years. He had a handful of students, who were considered mad, and they did not even agree amongst themselves on how to put into practice and to interpret what they had learned.

What isn’t going right with people today?

This great listlessness in life, a consequence of the rush for progress. Through psychoanalysis people expect to discover how far it is possible to draw out this listlessness.

What is it that drives people to have themselves analysed?

Fear. When something happens to someone and they do not understand it, even if they wanted it to happen, they are afraid. They suffer from not understanding, and little by little they fall into a panic. This is neurosis. With hysterical neurosis, the body becomes ill from the fear of being ill, and without really being so. With obsessive neurosis, the fear brings bizarre things to mind, thoughts that cannot be controlled, phobias in which forms and objects acquire different meanings that make people afraid.

For example…

The neurotic person may feel constrained by a terrifying need to go dozens of times to check if a tap is really turned off, or if something is in the place that it should be, even though they already know for certain that the tap is off and the thing is in the right place. There are no pills to cure that. It is necessary to find out why that happens and what it means.

And the cure?

The neurotic is an ill person who is treated by speech, above all his own. He must speak, recount, explain himself. Freud defined psychoanalysis as the subject’s assumption of his own history, insofar as this history is constituted by the words addressed to another person. Psychoanalysis is the realm of speech, there is no other remedy. Freud explained that the unconscious is not deep as much as it is inaccessible to conscious examination. And that in this unconscious, the speaker is a subject within the subject, transcending the subject. The great strength of psychoanalysis is speech.

Whose speech? The ill person’s or the psychoanalyst’s?

In psychoanalysis the terms ‘ill person’, ‘doctor’ and ‘remedy’ are no more appropriate than the passive formulas that are so commonly used. We say: ‘have yourself psychoanalysed’. This is wrong. The person doing the real work in the analysis is the speaker, the subject analysing himself. That is the case even if he does so in the manner suggested by the analyst who indicates how he ought to proceed and who makes helpful interventions.

The subject is also provided with an interpretation, which at first sight seems to give meaning to what he himself says. In reality, the interpretation is rather subtler, tending to efface the meaning of the things from which the subject is suffering. The goal is to show him, by way of his own narrative, that the symptom – or let’s call it the illness – has no relationship to anything, and lacks any kind of meaning. Even if it is apparently real, it does not exist.

The routes by which this act of speech proceeds demand a great deal of practice and infinite patience. Psychoanalysis’s tools are patience and moderation. The technique consists of moderating the degree of help that you give to the subject analysing himself. Psychoanalysis is thus no simple matter.

When we speak of Jacques Lacan, we inevitably associate his name to a formula, the ‘return to Freud’. What does this phrase mean?

Exactly what it says. Psychoanalysis is Freud. If you want to do psychoanalysis, you have to go back to Freud, his terms and definitions, read and interpreted literally. I founded a Freudian school in Paris with precisely this goal in mind. For more than twenty years I have been expounding my viewpoint: to return to Freud simply means to sweep the ground of the deviations and ambiguities of existential phenomenology, for example, as well as of the institutional formalism of psychoanalytical societies, and to resume a reading of Freud’s teachings that follows definite, enumerated principles based on his own work. Re-reading Freud just means re-reading Freud. Whoever does not do so is abusing words if they speak of psychoanalysis.

But Freud is difficult. And Lacan, they say, makes him utterly incomprehensible. Lacan is charged with speaking and, above all, writing in such a way that only very few adept scholars can hope to understand…

I know, I know, I am taken for an obscurantist who hides his thinking behind smokescreens. I ask myself why. I repeat, with Freud, that analysis is the ‘inter-subjective game by which truth enters into the real’. Isn’t it clear enough? Psychoanalysis isn’t child’s play.

My books are called incomprehensible. But for whom? I did not write them for everyone, thinking that just anyone could understand them. On the contrary, I have never made the least effort to cater to my readers’ tastes, no matter who they are. I had things to say, and I said them. For me, it is enough to have an audience who reads my work. If they do not understand, well, let’s be patient. As for the number of readers, I have had more luck than Freud. Maybe my books are even too widely read – I find it astonishing.

I am also convinced that within ten years at the utmost, people reading my work will find it entirely transparent, like a good glass of beer. Perhaps then they’ll say ‘This Lacan, he’s so banal!’

What are the characteristics of Lacanianism?

It’s a little early to say, since Lacanianism does not yet exist. We can just about get a whiff of it, a premonition.

In any case, Lacan is a gentleman who has been practicing psychoanalysis for at least forty years, and has been studying it for just as long. I believe in structuralism and the science of language. I wrote in my book that ‘what the discovery of Freud drives us to is the enormity of the order in which we are inserted, into which we are – so to say – born for the second time, emerging from the aptly termed stage of infancy, in which we are without speech’.

It is language – as a moment of universal, concrete discourse – that constitutes the symbolic order on which Freud based his discovery. It is the world of speech that creates the world of things, which initially blur into everything that is in-becoming. Only words give a finished meaning to the essence of things. Without words, nothing would exist. What would pleasure be, without the intermediary of speech?

My thinking is that in outlining the laws of the unconscious in his early works – The interpretation of dreams, Beyond the pleasure principle, Totem and taboo – Freud’s formulations were a precursor to the theories with which Ferdinand de Saussure some years later opened the way to modern linguistics.

And pure thought?

Like everything else, it is subject to the laws of language. Only words can engender thought and give it substance. Without language, humanity would never make any forward step in its efforts to understand thought. This is true for psychoanalysis also. Whatever the function you attribute to it – a form of cure, of training or of making soundings – there is just one medium that you can employ, the patient’s speech. And all speech deserves a response.

Analysis as dialogue, then. There are those who interpret it more as a substitute for confession…

But what confession? You confess precisely zero to the psychoanalyst. You give yourself over to telling him simply whatever comes into your head. Words, that is. Psychoanalysis’s discovery is man-as-speaking-animal. It is up to the analyst to order the words he hears, giving them sense and meaning. For a good analysis to be possible there needs to be an agreement, an understanding between the analyst and the subject analysing himself.

Through the latter’s discourse, the analyst seeks to get an idea of what is at issue, and going beyond the apparent symptom locate the tangled knot of truth at the heart of the matter. The analyst’s other function is to explain the meaning of the words used in order to allow the patient to understand what he can expect from the analysis.

A relationship that demands a great deal of trust…

Or rather, an exchange, in which the important thing is that one person speaks and the other listens. As well as silence. The analyst poses no questions and adds no ideas of his own. He only gives the answers that he wants to, to the questions that he wants to. But ultimately the subject analysing himself always goes where the analyst leads him.

You just mentioned therapy. Is there a possibility of being cured? Can one emerge out of neurosis?

Psychoanalysis is successful when it clears the ground, goes beyond symptoms, goes beyond the real. That is to say, when it touches the truth.

Could you put the same concept in less Lacanian terms?

I call a ‘symptom’ everything that comes from the real. And the real is everything that isn’t right, does not work, and is opposed to man’s life and his engagement with his personality. The real always returns to the same place. And it is there that you will always find it, in the same trappings. There are scientists who make out that nothing is impossible, in the real – and it takes some nerve to say things like that, or, as I suspect, total ignorance of what one is doing and saying.

The real and the impossible are antithetical and cannot go together. Analysis pushes the subject toward the impossible, suggesting to him that he ought to consider the world as it truly is – that is, an imaginary world without meaning. Whereas the real is like a gluttonous seagull, and only feeds on meaningful things, actions that have some meaning.

We often hear it said that we have to give meaning to this or that, to one’s own thoughts, aspirations, sex, life. But we know absolutely nothing about life. Experts run out of breath trying to explain it to us.

My fear is that through their failings, the real – this monstrous thing that does not exist – ends up winning. Science substitutes itself for religion and is all the more despotic, obtuse and obscurantist. There is an atom-god, a space-god, etc. If science or religion wins, psychoanalysis is finished.

What relationship is there today between science and psychoanalysis?

For me the only true, serious science worth following is science fiction. The other, official science with its altars in the laboratories gropes its way forward without reaching any happy medium. And it has even begun to fear its own shadow.

It seems that the experts will soon be facing anxious moments. Donning their starched shirts in their aseptic laboratories, these rather elderly toddlers playing with unknown things, making ever more complex devices, inventing ever more obscure formulas, begin to ask themselves what might happen tomorrow, what these ever-novel research projects might bring to bear. Enough, I say! And what if it’s too late, biologists and physicists and chemists now ask themselves. I think they are mad. They are already changing the face of the universe, and it only now occurs to them that perhaps this might be dangerous. And if everything blew up in their faces? If the bacteria so lovingly raised in their shiny laboratories transformed into our mortal enemies? If hordes of these bacteria overran the world as well as all the crap that lives there, starting with these laboratory experts themselves?

In addition to Freud’s three impossible positions – government, education, and psychoanalysis – I would add a fourth, science. But the experts are not expert enough to know that their position is untenable.

So you have a rather pessimistic view of what they call progress…

No, it’s something else entirely. I am not pessimistic. Nothing is going to happen. For the simple reason that man is a good-for-nothing, not even capable of destroying himself. Personally, I would find the idea of an all-encompassing plague, produced by man, rather marvellous. It would be the proof that he had managed to do something with his own hands and head, without divine or natural intervention.

All these bacteria overfed for amusement’s sake, spreading out across the world like the locusts in the Bible, would mark the triumph of mankind. But this isn’t going to happen. Science happily saunters through its crisis of responsibility: everything will return to its natural place, as they say. And as I said, the real will win out, as always. And we’ll be as fucked as we ever were.

Another paradox of Jacques Lacan. As well as the difficulty of your language and the obscurity of your concepts, you are reproached for your jokes, word games, puns, and, rightly, for your paradoxes. Your reader or listener has the right to feel a bit disoriented.

I am not joking, the things that I say are very serious. I merely make use of words in the same way that the experts of which I speak make use of their alembics and their electronic circuitry. I always try to refer to the experience of psychoanalysis.

You say: the real does not exist. But the average Joe knows that the real is the world, everything around him that he can touch and see with the naked eye.

First off, let’s get rid of this average Joe, who does not exist. He is a statistical fiction. There are individuals, and that is all. When I hear people talking about the guy in the street, studies of public opinion, mass phenomena, and so on, I think of all the patients that I’ve seen on the couch in forty years of listening. None of them in any measure resembled the others, none of them had the same phobias and anxieties, the same way of talking, the same fear of not understanding. Who is the average Joe: me, you, my concierge, the president of the Republic?

We were talking about the real, about the world that all of us see.

OK. The difference between the real – what is not going right – and the symbolic, the imaginary – that is, truth – is that the real is the world. To see that the world does not exist, that there is no world, it is enough to think of the great mass of banalities that an infinite number of imbeciles believe the world to be. And I invite my friends at Panorama, before they accuse me of paradoxes, to reflect carefully on what they have just read.

People will say that you’re becoming ever more pessimistic.

That isn’t true. I am not among the ranks of the alarmist or the anxious. Woe betide the psychoanalyst who hasn’t gone beyond the stage of anxiety. It’s true: everywhere around us there are troubling, all-consuming things, like the TV that eats up so many of us. But that is only because there are people who allow themselves to be eaten up, who even invent an interest for themselves in what they are seeing.

And then there are other monstrous things that are just as voracious: rockets that go to the moon, research at the bottom of the oceans, etc. All sorts of things that consume people. But there’s no point in making a big deal out of them. I am sure that when we have enough of rockets, TVs and these wretched quests into the void, we will find something else with which to busy ourselves. It’s a reincarnation of religion, isn’t it? And what monster is more voracious than religion? It is a continual feast, to be enjoyed for centuries, as we have already seen.

My response to all this is to note that man has always been able to adapt himself to the bad. The only real that we can conceive, that we can have access to, is precisely that, the need for a reason: to give some meaning to things, as we said earlier. Otherwise, man would not have anxiety, Freud would not have become famous, and I would be teaching in some grammar school.

Are anxieties always of this nature, or are there anxieties linked to certain social conditions, historical eras or geographical climbs?

The anxiety of the expert afraid of his discoveries may seem a latter-day phenomenon. But what do we know about what happened in other times? The dramas of other researchers? The anxiety of the worker enslaved to the assembly line like the rowers on a galley – that is today’s anxiety. Or, more simply, this anxiety is linked to today’s words and definitions.

But what is anxiety, in psychoanalysis?

Something that is situated outside our body, a fear, but a fear of nothing, that can be driven by the body, including the mind. The fear of fear, in sum. Many of these fears and anxieties, at the level that we perceive them, have to do with sex. Freud said that for the speaking animal called man, sexuality has no remedy and has no hope. One of the analyst’s tasks is to find the relation between anxiety and sex, this great unknown, in the patient’s speech.

Now that sex is promoted everywhere you look – sex at the cinema, at the theatre, on TV and in newspapers, in songs and on beaches – you hear it said that people are less anxious about problems linked to the sexual sphere. The taboos have fallen, they say, and people are no longer afraid of sex.

The invading sex-mania is just an advertising phenomenon. Psychoanalysis is a serious matter that concerns, I repeat, a strictly personal relation between two individuals, the subject and the analyst. There is no collective psychoanalysis, just as there are no mass anxieties or neuroses.

The fact of sex being spoken about, shown off on street corners, treated like some detergent on the TV merry-go-round, does not bring any promise of joy. I do not say that this is a bad thing. Certainly it is insufficient for treating particular problems and anxieties. It is part of fashion, of this fake liberalisation that so-called permissive society gives us, like some gift from on high. But it is of no use at the level of psychoanalysis.

Translated by David Broder

To read the original interview in French at Le Magazine Littéraire click here.

To read Élisabeth Roudinesco's interview on the 30th anniversary of Jacques Lacan's death click here.

Source: ‘There can be no crisis of psychoanalysis’ Jacques Lacan interviewed in 1974

See also

The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I by Jacques Lacan

The idea of the "mirror stage" is an important early component in Lacan’s critical reinterpretation of the work of Freud. Drawing on work in physiology and animal psychology, Lacan proposes that human infants pass through a stage in which an external image of the body (reflected in a mirror, or represented to the infant through the mother or primary caregiver) produces a psychic response that gives rise to the mental representation of an "I".

Lacanian Graph of Desire

or Introducing Lacan: A Graphic Guide

~ Lacan For Beginners
~ Free Ebook - The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis