Lecture: Lacan’s Seminar on Transference, By Dr. Luis Izcovich

Lacan introduces his Seminar on transference thus: At the beginning of psychoanalysis there is love.

What is transference love for? For the subject to love his unconscious. A condition for the emergence of the unconscious. Love addresses itself to the one you think knows your true truth.

There is what Freud called Liebesbedingung, the condition of love. It is a particular trait — or a set of traits — that has, in someone, a determining function in the amorous choice. This entirely escapes the neurosciences, because it is proper to each person; it pertains to one’s singular and intimate history. Traits that are sometimes minuscule are at stake. Freud, for example, had identified as the cause of desire in one of his patients a glint of light on a woman’s nose!

This partakes of transference love and of the choice of the analyst.

In transference there is a presence in act of the past upon the present. This is what leads Lacan to say that there is something creative. In transference, the subject fabricates, constructs something. This is why Lacan adds the term fiction. He offers this as an objection to Lagache’s proposition, which posits transference as the repetition of a need.

The phenomenon of transference manifests itself with respect to someone to whom one speaks. This phenomenon is constitutive of transference. So it is not just a repetition.

In the book the Symposium (the Banquet), Lacan found in Socrates the idea of an object hidden inside the human being, one that is radical for the mainspring of love. The agalma is thus a hidden object that provokes love. In other words, the Other — in this case Socrates — harbours a hidden object inside, one that provokes love. And this precious object, this agalma, also reveals the fundamental structure of desire. It is the encounter of the other as image in the mirror, as another myself, with this object that is the agalma, which constitutes another Other, a different other. i(a) + agalma = A.

An object can thus take on, in relation to the subject, this essential value that constitutes the fundamental fantasy. The subject himself recognises himself in it as […] fixed. In this privileged function we call it a: $ ◊ a. The formula of the fantasy is the matrix of the subject’s relation to the other.

“And it is insofar as the subject identifies with the fundamental fantasy that desire as such takes on consistency, and can be designated […], that is to say […] that it is posited in the subject as desire of the Other, capital A.”

This elaboration is essential to the conception of transference in psychoanalysis.

In transference there is an artificial dimension and at the same time a dimension that pertains to all love. Love addresses itself to knowledge. This is Lacan’s thesis: the one to whom I suppose knowledge, I love. In other words, love addresses itself to the one whom the subject thinks is capable of revealing his truth to him.

Now, what psychoanalysis teaches us is that at the horizon of desire there is the Thing, the unnameable, das Ding. This is the deception of love.

The analyst does not have to respond, does not have to make us his object, but “he has the function of saving our dignity as subject, that is, of making us something other than a subject subjected to the infinite sliding of the signifier” (pp. 202–203, Seminar Transference).

By the mere fact that there is transference, we are implicated in the position of being the one who contains the agalma (I will speak of this in more detail further on), the fundamental object that is at stake in the analysis of the subject, as bound, conditioned by this relation of vacillation of the subject that we characterise as constituting the fundamental fantasy. So analytic logic is a logic essentially correlated to the place of the object and to its becoming in the cure.

The analyst is thus heard only from the point at which he bears the transference.

When we say that the agalma is an object, we are saying that it has no signifying consistency.

It must be noted that when one says “to desire the Other,” what one says is never anything other than to desire (a).

Now what becomes of the love object in transference? Not only does the analyst not have to identify with the Other of love, he must fall away from it; but above all the fundamental mainspring of his operation is to maintain the distance between I and a, the separating element.

Love in neurosis entails an obstacle concerning desire, for love can veil a.

Let us take up again how Lacan introduces his Seminar Transference: “At the beginning of psychoanalysis there is love.” This indicates that without transference love there is no analysis, but it also indicates that love is the motor of what is produced in an analysis.

What is transference love for? For the subject to love his unconscious. So love is the condition for the emergence of the unconscious.

Now, transference love entails a dimension of deception, for it aims to mask the sexual reality that emerges in the cure. The desire of the analyst as a forewarned desire means at least this: that he must not let himself be taken in by this deception of love, for another dimension is at work, more hidden but necessary to bring to emergence — the drive dimension. It is not without relation to the symptoms the patient complains of, and there is every reason to try to delimit this drive dimension.

The analyst is the object of transference not only through the supposition of knowledge but insofar as he incarnates the object a that the analysand situates on the side of the analyst.

Then, considering the drive current, Lacan argues that beyond the demand for love there exists another aspect of demand that concerns no longer the field of narcissism but that of jouissance. This time it is a matter of the dimension of a far more radical demand, putting the drive into play — a drive that goes “questing” silently, on the side of the Other, for an object to enjoy [un objet à jouir]. One can grasp this movement of the drive, for example, in the attempt made to obtain from the Other a gaze or a voice.

There is the idea that surreptitiously the drive comes to steal, to wrest from the Other an object to enjoy. This silent quest manifests itself as covered over and at the same time conveyed by the speech of love, says Lacan. Behind the “I love you” of the speech of love, there is set to work, far more fundamentally, an “I consume you.” Lacan formulates it thus in Seminar XI:

“I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you — the objet petit a — I mutilate you” (p. 241, Seminar XI).

The “I mutilate you” is to take aim at the being of someone; it is to go seeking the most intimate point of the other.

One sees, then, that love is not dissociated from jouissance. This is what Lacan says already on the basis of the speech of love. To speak of love is a jouissance.

One sees it in erotomania. Very well described by psychiatry, it can remain at the platonic stage. Through love, the erotomaniac makes himself the love object of an eminent personage. But in certain cases there is a demand for jouissance. The “I love you, but because I love in you something more than you” can go as far as an imperative of jouissance which, in case of refusal, can go as far as a passage to the act.

There is therefore a differential clinic to be made of love under transference in psychosis.

There exists, on the other hand, the drive dimension of the analytic adventure. The analyst lends his body, not for satisfaction, but so that the subject may make the circuit, the detour, around the object of satisfaction without the satisfaction.

The analyst is not only the subject supposed to know but also object, object-cause; he lodges himself in the subject’s fantasy and operates by causing desire.

This is not the analyst as decipherer of the unconscious enigma.

One realises, from this development, that the logic is not only the logic of the signifier but the logic of the object.

Lacan formulated it differently, but the logic is convergent, for he advanced the analyst as complement of the unconscious, also as complement of the symptom, and finally as partner qua object.

Thus a link is established, analysand–analyst. This concerns the want-to-be [manque à être] on the side of the analysand, being on the side of the analyst.

There is no analytic adventure without there being, at the start, the manifestation of one of the objects that Lacan extracts from Plato’s “Symposium,” the agalmata, to use them in his conception of transference.

The agalmatic object can hide behind an image sometimes at the antipodes of the beautiful form. Love, then, at the beginning of analysis, does not bear on an image that is an index of the beautiful, the good, or of happiness. In this sense, the agalma is a subversion. Thus ugliness, coarseness, rusticity can equally disclose an agalmatic object. For an object to come about as agalmatic, it requires an essential condition, designated by Lacan as a trap for God [un piège à Dieu]. The agalma thus functions as that which allows one to believe in a big Other who hides a precious knowledge. One perceives that a demand weighs upon the analyst. Is he capable of incarnating this object for another?

From this moment a logic for analysis is posited. It supposes that a ternary structure be put in place: the subject who addresses his demand, the analyst in the position of object, and a third, the subject supposed to know. This logic is made precise when Lacan posits the subject as hypothesis — that is, as what is to come about — the analyst incarnating the enigma of the experience, and a third, between the two, the subject supposed to know. Obviously, the subject supposed to know in most cases preexists the analysis. The analyst actualises it in the transferential conjuncture.

Several reasons have led me to place the agalma at the centre of the logic.

First of all, with respect to entry into analysis. The agalma derives its status from being the desirable object that makes the object of the analysand’s desire glimmer. The agalma is thus what elevates a fellow being [un semblable] to the category of Other and also constitutes a compass, for it is the other face of a coin which, when turned over, makes the want-to-be appear. The hysterical subject constitutes the paradigmatic example: he devotes himself to the want-to-be, but while covering it over with phallic brilliance. This is the hysterical strategy by way of the agalma. It is to make of the lack an agalma.

For there to be entry into analysis there is thus the necessity of a double perspective: at once to take support on the Other for the constitution of a subject supposed to know, and on the other hand to lodge the agalmatic object in the Other.

It seems to me that this double perspective has not been sufficiently explored in the clinic. Here intervenes the second reason for underscoring the value of the agalma.

Indeed, there is no necessary conjunction between the analyst incarnating the agalma and producing the emergence of the subject supposed to know. This explains, notably, what grounds transference in psychosis, where one sometimes finds that the absence of the supposition of knowledge does not exclude the transferential dimension. In other words, one finds cases where the agalma placed in the analyst is sufficient to provide support for the analytic experience. This gives a fundamental clinical compass to the aim of an analysis in the psychoses.

In the case where there is a conjunction between knowledge and agalma — which is what I am going to centre on — the knotting of the analysand to the analyst is made through a love that bears on knowledge but also through a desire in the transference around this agalmatic object.

What the analyst knows is that he must occupy the place of the agalmatic object according to a temporal logic that goes beyond the one ordered by the subject supposed to know.

The temporal logic around the supposition of knowledge is presided over by the becoming of the subject supposed to know. It takes its beginning when the analyst is lodged in this place and finds its place at the moment of the un-supposing of knowledge [désupposition de savoir].

But Lacan’s proposition in “L’Étourdit” makes it possible to order a temporal logic that goes beyond the one bound to unconscious knowledge.

It is a logic around the agalmatic object. Lacan formulates it apropos of mourning for the object in transference:

“The analysand terminates only by making of object a the representative of the representation of his analyst. It is therefore for as long as his mourning lasts for object a — to which he has at last reduced him — that the psychoanalyst persists in causing his desire […]. Then the mourning is completed. What remains is the stable.”

Let us note, then, that this temporal logic is conditioned by the constitution of the agalma of the start, which the analyst will know how to use according to the proposal of the analyst as semblance of object a, then by the necessary operation that leads to the reduction of the analyst to a pure object of waste [objet de déchet] for which, nevertheless, before separating from it, the transferential mourning must be done.

The void experienced in existence by the one who will become an analyst is occupied, for the time of the transference, by an object that concentrates in itself what justifies the time of the analytic adventure. To let this object drop at the end of analysis leaves its place to a void — but a void that will no longer be enigmatic, an epistemic void. Such is the implicit promise of the analytic adventure.

Lacan, before evoking the agalma in his seminar, already broaches its becoming. This is what one notices when he makes use of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting showing the raised finger of Saint John toward what Lacan designates as “the uninhabited horizon of being.” There, already, are the three of transference evoked earlier: the analysand, the analyst with the raised finger, then the horizon. Whereas Lacan extracts from the “Symposium” the finger of Socrates indicating that it is toward Agathon that Alcibiades ought to turn in order to find the agalma.

I take up again the logical moment of the mourning for the agalma, which concerns the end of analysis, and I posit that it is there that what makes for the true ordeal of an analysis is situated. If I speak of the true ordeal, it is to distinguish it from other ordeals of transference. Indeed, there are several crucial moments in an analysis, sometimes …calling into question the subject’s belief in the continuation of the experience.

Sometimes the analysand calls the analyst into question, sometimes he calls into question his own capacity to attain a logical end to his analysis.

Yet the logic is the same: object a is not in its proper place. Now, the one I designate as the true ordeal concerns the moment when object a is in its proper place and the moment to mourn it comes about. What makes every ordeal of transference bearable is the belief in the agalma. This is what explains why one can sometimes continue the experience with another analyst. One un-supposes knowledge in one analyst, but one maintains the belief in the existence of the agalma. In this case, one recovers from the phallic lack by covering it over with another garb. It is an agalmatic metonymy.

Sometimes one abandons the analytic cause without the belief in the agalma being touched; one simply situates it elsewhere.

Now, something radically different intervenes when a subject traverses the mourning for the agalma.

And I believe it is thus that I understand Lacan’s proposition that the analyst is produced from object a. This can be interpreted by the fact that analysis is a transferential experience sustained by a partner incarnating the cause of desire.

But Lacan’s idea in “L’Étourdit” imposes an additional interpretation.

It would be this: there is a psychoanalyst only if the subject undergoes the ordeal of the agalmatic void — in other words, that the agalma was only an object that masked the void. It is thus that I understand Lacan to have evoked elsewhere: “such is the void so awkward to approach.” The void without the agalma is the uninhabited horizon of being, another name for the real.

To take up again the formula of “L’Étourdit,” on mourning:

“Then the mourning is completed. What remains is the stable.”

The stable in question, I believe, is meant to indicate the case of a subject who no longer lets himself be taken in by the agalmatic entanglements. It is the stable of a void concerning the place of the object. It is uniquely from there that a desire responsible for the propagation of psychoanalysis can arise. The term propagation is Lacan’s; he added, addressing the psychoanalysts, “if they are capable of it.”

From there, one can perceive a disjunction — namely, that the Other thus constituted by the agalmatic object that it harbours provokes two different effects. It provokes love (or, more exactly, the demand for love) and it provokes desire.

The agalma thus functions as that which allows one to believe in a big Other who hides a precious knowledge. So the analyst, like Socrates, knows that at the level of the petit a, the question is not that of the ideal, and he can only think that any object whatsoever can fill this void. There is no object that has more worth than another, and it is on this that the desire of the analyst is centred.

Lacan brings the non-knowledge of Socrates — constituted as a call to the void at the centre of knowledge — close to the place of the analyst.

This is a very sensitive point in the analysis of neurotics: at the moment when they elaborate a point in relation to their castration, one can detect that there is sometimes a tendency to recover the phallic lack in the subsequent elaboration, and it is there that the analyst has to maintain the void so as to leave room for castration and for the vacillation of the subject.

In the hysteric, for example, one can say that the agalma would concern the want-to-be: how to devote oneself to the want-to-be, how to make it shine with a phallic envelope. This is, ultimately, the void beyond the fullness of the agalma of transference.

Transference, whose major manifestation is love, is the mark of the presence of the past and is handleable through interpretation. In other words, transference actualises the conditions of the subject’s first loves.

If we take it up again from the point of view of the agalma, we must remark its effects: love and desire. The analyst, by keeping the gap between the demand for love and desire, allows the emergence of desire; he makes himself the cause of desire and is at the service of sustaining it.

One thus discovers the reasons why, if speech carries weight [porte] in analysis, it is because there is transference. That speech carries weight means that it produces consequences.

One must say that there is in transference an artificial dimension — that of the actualisation of a love for a figure of the past — and at the same time a dimension that pertains to all love; this is why Freud evoked that transference love is an authentic love.

When one says authentic love, this means that it is not a substitution love. What it has of the authentic is that it does not require the traits that participate in the conditions allowing the surging-up of a subject’s love. This is very clear in the analytic clinic. One can reconstitute, beyond the very different choices of love-partners, what is the common trait that allowed the constitution of an amorous series.

The question arises: someone who knows how to elicit the love of the other — is this someone capable of loving?

To know how to produce the love of the other is something other than to love. For to love is to give what one does not have. Thus, to give one’s lack, which presupposes consenting to the risks of love. The one who knows how to produce having does not experience lack.

“Love is giving what one does not have to someone who does not want it.”

Lacan, J., The Seminar, Book XII, “Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis,” lesson of 17 March 1965, unpublished.

One sees clearly, following this conception, that it is not a matter of symmetry, nor of reciprocity, nor of demand, but of an unconscious desire that produces love.

This is, moreover, the principle of transference love. When Lacan posits that the one to whom I suppose knowledge, I love, this demonstrates the conception of love as response.

This gives the idea that transference love is not a spontaneous emergence but a response to the analyst. Now, here the thesis “love is reciprocal” does not apply. For love is always the love of a subject, whereas the analyst, when he operates, is in the position of object.

To be in the position of object does not mean waiting patiently for the surging-up of the transference. If we admit that love is a response, the analyst must know how to provoke this response.

How? By giving signs that he has a savoir-faire with unconscious knowledge — not in general but in each case in its singularity. In this sense, it is as I was saying with regard to the serial lover.

How is it that the same analyst is liable to trigger love in subjects radically different from one another?

The answer does not lie in the fact that transference love is automatic — the analyst presses a button and love emerges. It lies in the fact that the analyst is not the same for all subjects. Indeed, he lodges himself in the place of the object of the subject’s fundamental fantasy, which means that the analyst takes his place in the analysand’s love as a function of the fundamental fantasy, which is always singular.

I will here broach the question of the affects, starting from the effects of transference. This implies that we examine a twofold questioning: on the one hand, what are the affects aroused by transference, and on the other hand, what changes for a subject at the level of the affects on the basis of the experience of an analysis.

One could be content to say that the subject’s relation to the affects is always singular. This relation is the effect of a discourse that leaves its mark in the unconscious, producing a being affected by the unconscious. One could also say, following Lacan’s formula, that the becoming of this relation after analysis is unforeseeable, and thus conclude that the effects of transference on the affects are to be considered case by case. This is true.

It nonetheless remains that constants at the level of the affects are detectable at the entry into an analysis, and that other constants serve as a compass for the direction of the cure. Finally, there exist affects that are not only the index of the end of an analysis but also the condition of its end.

A thesis thus emerges with this proposition: Lacan, far from neglecting the affects, makes use of them to delimit the effects of the analytic experience. And one could go further and posit that the effect of being of an analysis is not subjective destitution but its counterpart, which is associated with it. That is to say, it is an effect that is translated into a surplus of being [un plus d’être] and that is verified at the level of the affects.

Of course, what makes this proposition legitimate is that it finds its condition in the indissociable character of the affects and the unconscious. This is, moreover, Lacan’s response — condensed, a single sentence sufficed him — to those who, already in his time, criticised him on his position with respect to the unconscious. What justifies his condensed response is that, moreover, his entire teaching bears witness to, validates, this affirmation.

Indeed, in the Seminar The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, almost twenty years after positing that the unconscious is structured like a language, he returns to this formulation to maintain that this proposition, far from excluding the affects, makes it possible to verify them more seriously. The affects are thus the compass of analysis, but contrary to the other analytic currents — for which they are also a compass — the affects guide us on condition that we orient ourselves from the unconscious. One observes once again that, in matters of affect, Lacan orients himself from the path traced by Freud. In the other analytic currents, one also orients oneself with the affects, but in the wrong direction: whether when one interprets them as defence or as covering over another affect that would be the unconscious affect.

Now, if the articulation between the Freudian unconscious and the affects is always the mark of a style, can one nonetheless deduce an affect that would be common to every non-analysed subject? Perhaps what would be common to all would be a relation between the unconscious and the affects, whose common effect would be that of unconcern [insouciance]. The question indeed arises why, if what constitutes the common lot of the human being concerning the affects is the pain of existing, Lacan was able to evoke the term unconcern.

The question arises all the more in that he evokes it in a text where he broaches the question of what is required in order to conclude an analysis. This is the “Proposition on the Psychoanalyst of the School” of October 1967. I believe Lacan does so in order to indicate the other pole of the experience, the opposite of its conclusion — namely, the subject before analysis. And I also believe that there is no contradiction in considering that the pain of existing coexists with unconcern. The term unconcern is situated in the same vein as the formula according to which the subject is always happy. What makes the pain of existing and the happy subject compatible is that the subject is marked by the circuit of the drive, which always satisfies itself. There thus exists a satisfaction that is an effect of the structure. And even the symptom is satisfaction. It is a substitutive satisfaction, but one that can be sufficient for a subject. He can be satisfied with his substitutive satisfactions.

In the same sense, what the term unconcern introduces and designates is the subject before analysis, as a subject not concerned. This is what makes unconcern compatible with the pain of existing. For experiencing the pain of existing, which is translated into suffering, can lead the subject to conclude that this is part of the human condition. When it relates to quite precise facts, he may conclude that it is the Other’s fault. He may even decline the figures of the Other, but all of this leaves him in unconcern insofar as he does not see how he participates in his own misfortune. One can very well be in misfortune yet continue to dream about our position in existence and our future. Everything becomes complicated from the moment one questions oneself about our participation in the facts we deplore. There, that is the end of unconcern.

This leads us to situate a first change at the level of the affects, on the basis of transference. Careful: I am not referring to the first transferential affect, which is love, but to the first change. For transference love, notably in its first manifestations, can prolong unconcern — namely, to believe that one is protected from misfortunes because one has begun an analysis. One can believe, for example, that analysis protects us from illnesses. You can see how [this] can have an effect of unconcern. Love, then, favours unconcern. But the transference effect to which I refer as the first change is the fact of being concerned by one’s own unconscious.

One must nonetheless remark that transference love, which is a love that calls for deciphering, is already a change in love, since it finds its condition in the fact that the subject passes from generalised misfortune to a question about his own being. The love that addresses itself to deciphering is not solely a positive feeling about the analyst. It is a love that knots the analysand’s unconscious to a supposition of knowledge on the side of the partner. Let us note, then, two changes that are the sign of a modification of the affects through entry into the experience of analysis. The first is a modification concerning unconcern: the subject becomes more and more concerned. The second is a change at the level of love: the subject does not stop at the image of love. He loves the analyst because he supposes him to have a knowledge, but it is not a fixed love. He loves the analyst above all in the way the latter knows how to do with the unconscious. This love is verified on occasion in the inexhaustible way in which, sometimes, analysands speak to others about the analyst’s interpretation, notably at the beginning of the experience.

To evoke now the changes induced by entry into analysis is coherent with Lacan’s conception of the affects. If the affects are bound to discourse, every change of discourse will necessarily be translated into a change at the level of the affects. Entry into analysis, which requires a change of discourse — the passage to the hysteric’s discourse — is translated into affect-effects. It thus becomes logical that, if transference love, which is the effect of a love addressed to the unconscious, is the motor of the cure, it is anxiety that constitutes its compass — precisely because it is the index of the concerned subject. Concerned by what? By the enigma of the desire of the Other.

We are here within a perspective that gives a specificity to Lacan’s teaching. It is ordered from Freud but goes beyond him. This perspective takes its essence from Freud’s proposition — namely, as he says in Inhibition, Symptom and Anxiety: anxiety causes repression. It thus becomes evident that the analytic apparatus, which goes against repression, leaves the door open to the expression of anxiety. Here is situated another constant that is an effect of transference. It is certain that analysis is inductive of anxiety, and if its intensity is variable across subjects, it is relative to its link to repression, which is an index of the advancement of the analysis. It thus becomes coherent that anxiety should become the central affect of an analysis, and that Lacan should have set as the essential perspective the handling of transference in terms of the handling of object a. And it is worth remarking that, in positing that the handling of transference is bound to time, he traces a perspective that implies knowing what a subject can tolerate by way of anxiety, as well as the conditions of its overcoming.

It is a fact that an analysis entails the dimension of the ordeal of anxiety. This is what makes it possible to grasp how transference is an ordeal. It is not transference love that constitutes the ordeal. Love is, rather, a libidinal satisfaction that the analysand finds in the apparatus. Freud noticed this, and let us note that he is the first to use the notion of the handling of transference, apropos of a case where he misses the moment of interpretation. For lack of having interpreted, the transference becomes excessively positive.

For if anxiety is inherent to the structure of the subject, it is also inherent to the structure of the analytic discourse. This is verified in the writing of this discourse, where the analyst in the position of agent addresses an other in the position of division: a → $ (barred S). It thus becomes logical that Lacan applies the term handling to transference, to anxiety, and to object a alike. And when he formulates that the handling of transference is bound to time, this refers to anxiety and also to object a. It is, at bottom, the same thing. One could reformulate things in the following way: if the analyst extracts the subject from his unconcern, it is because he introduces the subject into a relation to time, which is a mark of the effects of object a.

These effects, which are necessarily of anxiety, do not constitute the finality of analysis, which is the emergence of a new desire. But the whole question is there. One could formulate it thus: how does the subject affected by the unconscious become also affected by object a? The lifting of repression, Freud’s aim, allows access to an unrepressed desire. In a sense it is a new desire, for what the subject has experienced throughout his life is a desire marked by repression. One can therefore say that there is something new concerning desire for a subject. This is what Lacan designates as the effect of being, which is the true efficacy of the analytic experience.

But when Lacan refers to an unprecedented desire, an effect of analysis, he refers to a desire that is not solely bound to the desire of the subject. It is connected to the production of a desiring subject but finds its specificity, rather, in the destitution of the subject. And just as he was able to identify the affect before analysis as unconcern, he correlates the end of the experience with the affects that are the effect of transference.

What are the affects that connect with the unprecedented desire? I have evoked anxiety. And it must be remarked that Lacan returns to anxiety in his text “Proposition on the Psychoanalyst of the School,” indicating a legitimate anxiety bound to subjective destitution. Why introduce the notion of legitimate when, according to the definition he had advanced, anxiety does not deceive and would therefore always be legitimate? Two answers impose themselves; they are convergent.

The first answer is the following: if anxiety is the index of the real, anxiety would be legitimate insofar as it would be the index of an authentic desire. If one defines desire as necessarily bound to the desire of the Other, authentic desire — the effect of an analysis — implies a separation from the desire of the Other. At the same time, the desire of the end of analysis necessarily includes the question of the legitimate, in the sense that Lacan always maintained the idea of a legitimate jouissance. Legitimate anxiety is the index of the imminence of a legitimate desire. Legitimate anxiety is the index of a juncture, the one that points to the emergence of an unprecedented desire knotted to an ethics.

The second answer is that if anxiety is always bound to the enigma of the desire of the Other, legitimate anxiety is bound to the end of the enigma. That the subject has arrived at a conclusion concerning the enigma of the desire of the Other does not mean that he is done with anxiety. Legitimate anxiety is thus the index of subjective destitution — that is, an anxiety that is not the fact of becoming object for an Other, which is what is proper to anxiety. I therefore advance that legitimate anxiety would be a signal-affect of a moment of conversion in which the passage to an unprecedented desire operates for a subject.

I now come to another affect, an effect of transference, of which Lacan also speaks in relation to the desire of the analyst in the “Letter to the Italians” — namely, the horror of knowing. He posits that the analysand must have delimited the cause of his horror of knowing, his own, detached from that of all. This indicates a quite precise moment, to be distinguished from each of the moments where the subject in the cure confronts the: wanting to know nothing.

One must not confuse the horror of knowing with the avoidance of knowing. The horror of knowing is an affect, but one must delimit what causes it.

There is, then, an epistemic benefit. The fact of delimiting the cause of the horror implies the production of a knowledge and of new effects with respect to what Lacan had designated as the passion for ignorance. So, to delimit the cause is not only a gain of knowledge but has an effect on the passion for ignorance. That said, the capital point seems to me the following: if the fact of delimiting a cause implies an elaboration, and if the result of this is a singular production, distinct from every model, it is at the same time a quite precise production — that of being the refuse of humanity. Lacan adds that the analysand who has become an analyst knows how to be refuse. Then Lacan adds that this is what the analyst must have at least made him feel.

This calls for a remark. First, that one finds there a fundamental answer to those who pose the question of Lacanian analysis as an intellectual experience. To make [someone] feel is not of the order of knowledge [connaissance], but rather traces a frontier. If the analyst has not made him feel that, then there has been no analysis. The proposition that consists in “at least” means that there is a minimum that is required. On the other hand, there is the knowing how to be refuse. This indicates that henceforth the one who has traversed the experience is no longer in a condition to undergo, but knows how to be object for an other. To know how to be refuse is also to know how to do with one’s affects in such a way as to welcome, once again, the symptom of an other. But there is another dimension to the candidate for the place of analyst — namely, that he will be carried toward enthusiasm, without which, as Lacan says, there may well have been an analysis, but no production of an analyst. There are thus three dimensions: to be refuse, to know how to be refuse, and to pass to enthusiasm — of an unstable essence.

In the same perspective — that of what the analyst must make [the subject] feel — it is fitting to include another affect: depression. Depression, the subject knows it; he speaks only of that. For even when he experiences a desire, he knows he cannot count too much on it.

The subject’s desire, outside analysis but also for the duration of an analysis — the subject constantly has the experience of this. For although an analysis produces effects on desire, one observes that, always, on the horizon, the emergence of negative affects points: sadness, solitude, want-to-be. This is what lies in wait for him and makes him doubt the assurance of his desire, constituting in its essence the subject in the alternation between depression and desire, when it is not between euphoria and dejection. This is what allows one to propose that the subject in his structure is bipolar.

This reverberates in transference, which for a time gives hope to the subject, who believes it is possible to catch hold of a meaning and thus that he will find a way out of the vanity of existence. At the same time, analysis also programs a renewed disappointment that bears on the absence of an object of satisfaction. But it is not this depression — unavoidable as it is — that justifies including it among the affects that the analyst must have made his analysand feel.

Lacan refers more specifically to a depressive moment bound to the end of the experience, of which one cannot give oneself the airs if one is not there. What does that mean? It means that one cannot pretend. One can therefore deduce that there are affects that pertain to semblance and others that are the proof of a real encountered. So there is no way to account for this depression if one has not experienced it in the transference, in the final moment of analysis — and, in my view, different from the mourning for the object incarnated by the analyst. Rather, it is the experience of the real, of a void, which is nonetheless the centre that henceforth organises the subject’s life.

It is worth remarking that psychoanalysis is above all a question of the body. Freud began from the body, and Lacan always maintained this perspective.

The birth of psychoanalysis is bound to a suffering body that does not find its answer in medicine. This is verified with the hysterics and in the first place with Anna O. The symptom was an enigma in the body that addressed itself to the Other of science, and that remained without an answer. This, then, is what constitutes the point of departure that will give rise to the birth certificate of psychoanalysis.

Yet for this there was needed a paradigm shift on the part of a man of science such as Freud. This paradigm shift is relative to the observation that the hysterical symptom does not find its root in an anatomical localisation. This is what made it possible to found psychoanalysis.

Whereas for medicine the paradigm is to posit a correlate between anatomy and illness, Freud realises that for hysteria there is a dissociation. The paradigm shift, then, is not that the method for treating illness changed beginning with Freud. It is certain that Freud made use of speech otherwise than the science of his time, but the fundamental change starts from the fact that he realised that there exist afflictions that do not follow the laws of anatomy.

You will already remark that to posit the affliction — that is, the illness — in terms of a dissociation with respect to anatomy is already to say something other than when one says: there is no affliction because the body is anatomically normal.

In the text “Television,” he takes up again the Freudian thesis of the dissociation between anatomy and illness apropos of the symptom in psychoanalysis, in order to indicate that a structure — that of language — cuts up the body, determining a body other than the one that finds its condition in anatomy.

One sees there a fundamental difference with the medical conception. The demand that addresses itself to psychoanalysis always concerns a suffering body, but this does not constitute, as one says, “imaginary invalids.” If the body suffers, it is by reason of the insertion of language into the body. In this sense, psychoanalysis takes charge not only of the cases where the suffering of the body has no known cause, but also when the cause is known — for the body is always suffering by the fact that language never succeeds in symbolising it in a complete manner.

This conception takes up again the hypothesis of the unconscious posited by Freud. It was extremely audacious on his part to posit that if the body suffers it is because the unconscious is implicated.

Now, when Lacan posits in “Television” that a structure — that of language — cuts up the body, he goes further than when he advances that “the unconscious is structured like a language.” To posit that language cuts up the body is to say that the condition of the body is found in language. In other words, it is to say that language determines the body. This is, moreover, the thesis he sustains in his text “Radiophonie,” where he evokes the symbolic body. The thesis was, however, already there in “Function and Field of Speech and Language,” since Lacan refers to language, designating it as “subtle body.”

This means that one cannot consider, on the one hand, the symbolic — bound to what comes to us from the Other as signifier — and, on the other hand, the body.

There is deduced from this a major stake for the analytic clinic, whether with neuroses, perverts, or psychotics: the central question is how a practice of speech can have an incidence on the jouissance of the body. And what is proper to psychoanalysis is to affect the body by way of an effect on the unconscious. It is strange to think that because one touches the unconscious one touches the body. But it is a fact one observes in the analytic clinic. One need only think of the subjects who say, with the advancement of analysis, that they feel less tired, that they have recovered strength in the body, and even — it is a clinical fact — that they are less ill.

This question is already broached by Lacan in the text evoked earlier, “Television,” when he posits that psychoanalysis came in the place of medicine, which has from time immemorial hit the mark [fait mouche] on the body. This means that the aim of a psychoanalysis is to affect the modality of a subject’s jouissance. And how does a subject enjoy? He enjoys with his body.

If psychoanalysis has taken over from medicine, it is not only because in psychoanalysis one says what one does not say to the doctor. To be sure, our era, marked by the effects of science, determines that medical practice reserves little time for speech. But the essential reason for having taken over is that medicine leaves aside the manifestations of the body that it does not identify. Now, Lacan, in “Television,” gives to understand that if psychoanalysis has taken over, it is because it detected the existence of the unconscious.

This is, moreover, what would make it possible to specify an analytic effect. It is when there is a modification of the jouissance of the body on the basis of an effect on the unconscious.

The question is posed by Lacan: “How is one to situate what the place of the analyst in transference must be?” (p. 385). The question is twofold: where the analysand situates the analyst, where the analyst must be in order to respond.

Lacan uses the expression “the true position.” It is not theory that puts him in this place.

“It is a matter, for him [the analyst], of extracting from himself a just apperception of his relation to the ego-ideal. Without this, a sliding occurs that implicates him subjectively.”

A passage is required from the very beginning of the cure — namely, that the symptom of the unconscious become an analytic symptom. This presupposes shedding light on what falls to the analyst in this passage. It also presupposes delimiting the responsibility of the analyst in the analysand’s savoir-y-faire [know-how] with the symptom at the end of analysis.

One could make a correlation between love and desire, even if there are differences, notably this one: Lacan never said that desire is reciprocal. But he posited that desire is the desire of the Other. This means that one can desire a partner because he or she incarnates what the Other desires.

In other words, each context of discourse prescribes what is desirable. I take the last example that comes to me. I have just come from a trip to India where, during a conversation with a man, he asks me the question: how is it that I do not find the women here pretty — that is, desirable?

The answer is bound to what I was saying before: desire is above all the desire of the Other, and when one changes context one changes Other. What the Other prescribes as desirable is above all within a precise context. Love, in a way, partakes of this phenomenon. What is the common point between love and desire? It concerns the functioning. Just as there is no desire without there being, beforehand, the desire of the Other, there is no love without there being some signs on the part of the one who is the object of love.

I therefore summarise: love and desire are not phenomena that surge up independently of the other. They are, rather, responses.