HOW DOES ANALYSIS BEGIN?
How does one become a psychoanalysand?
PART 1
Ever since Freud’s invention of psychoanalysis at the end of the 19th century—as both an experience and a theory—embarking on psychoanalysis constitutes an adventure that leads those who take the risk on a journey to discover what they do not know about themselves but which signals its presence in various ways: most often through thoughts or behaviors that elude their understanding, frequently through incomprehensible suffering that calls for knowledge that might soothe it, and sometimes also through dreams and other mysteries that inhabit their body and thoughts.
How does this adventure begin?
A French singer of my generation (Jacques Brel) sang: “The adventure begins at dawn, at the dawn of every morning”… The adventure begins at the very start; entering analysis—prompted by a disturbing non-sense that eventually becomes an obsession—is a leap into the unknown: it’s a gamble, and you have to take it! It’s a leap; it takes courage, even if that leap seems to be supported by an Other who knows. There is a before and an after this crucial moment of entry.
The adventure begins at the beginning, then, and in fact, also and always at the beginning of each session. Each session begins with a pause, a sigh, a silence: one could almost note how, each time, the Saying catches its breath and embarks on the procession of the said.
Let’s take a moment to grasp this distinction between the “said” and the “Say,” which Lacan had to articulate in the 1970s, when his daily encounter with the real of clinical practice—that which eludes the symbolic and the imaginary that condition each person’s humanity—required the clarification of this third dimension of the human being: the real.
Lacan writes in French dit-mension—meaning both “dimension” and “mansion”—dit-mansion, the human’s habitat; the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary are the various loci of the human being, by virtue of their submission to the symbolic of language. Lacan eventually came to call the human being a “parlêtre,” and during the final years of his teaching, he focused on their articulation and their knotting.
Thus, by the very fact that the humans being speak and submit to the laws of language that subjectify them, there is something of their singularity that remains unsubjugated, unsubjectified—“a nothing that sustains itself through its own advent [3]”—and which, from the very moment of its existence, can produce this act of enunciation, which has no content, no utterance, but determines its subordination to the law of language, the law of signifiers.
So, one more reminder: Freud spoke of “representations” and the ways they articulate with one another to produce “meanings” that he found in dreams, symptoms, and associations: condensation and displacement, which made it possible to understand the networked architecture of the “formations of the unconscious.”
Lacan, reading Freud through the lens of linguistics (de Saussure, Jakobson, Benveniste), reinterprets the manifestations of the unconscious as signifiers related to a signified that is always particular and uncertain. Signifiers are “what is heard” in speech; the signified is “what is said.” Following in Jakobson’s footsteps, he very quickly distinguished between utterances (what is said through the system of signifiers) and enunciation: what someone “means to say.” This enunciation is always linked to the unconscious and unconscious desire.
The “Saying” can be described as the act of enunciation, that decisive, eventful, existential moment that Lacan very early on called “the unfathomable decision of being [4].” It is a point that has no content, no meaning—it is beyond meaning—just as zero and the empty set are the condition for naming the One and the sequence of numbers. “Dire,” the Saying, is the condition for utterances, for what the subject says, which can never be grasped but must be deduced from the infinite sequence of a subject’s utterances and its limit.
“It has to be say,” the Saying has to exist, then—which is beyond language—so that this being, who exists only because he speaks, the speaking-being, “parlêtre,” commits him-herself with language and the utterances that his speech addresses.
It must therefore begins with the Saying, so that the experience of speech arising from someone’s suffering sets the Freudian process in motion by calling the subject into question and involving it in this forced labor of free association.
So let’s take the story from the beginning:
At the beginning, someone is suffering: from whom, from what? From too much, from not enough, from not as it should be, not as I want it to be—suffering from a sense of unease, what Lacan once called “the pain of ex-sist[1],” but often they say they suffer from the Other, who is, or was the one who abandoned or the one who abused them, or both at once.
The “pain of ex-sister” refers to that aspect of the subject’s being that remains beyond all reason yet ceaselessly manifests itself and reverberates against the walls of the bonds with others and with the world, and from the “mystery of the speaking body[2].”
So someone may summon his courage and knock on a therapist’s door to find the key to this unknown that exiles and torments him. This “subject” does not yet know that the reason for this torment is what causes it: the object that has no name.
The journey of psychoanalysis can begin when, by chance, while looking for a “therapist,” one find a psychoanalyst who will be able to implicate this exile.
Thus, there is no analysis without a psychoanalyst. This is why, in general, Schools of Psychoanalysis are primarily concerned with what can guarantee psychoanalysis as a whole—its temporal and geographical expansion—and each individual’s psychoanalysis in particular; that is to say, the presence and operation of a psychoanalyst.
For an analysis to begin, therefore, a psychoanalyst is required. This question obviously leads back to the training of psychoanalysts and to the Schools that are concerned with this training.
My presence in Brazil during the first 20 years of the EPFCL’s founding and development allowed me to reflect on the conditions of this specific training—which I have termed “de-formation”—and it was from this reflection that I wrote this book, now translated into Portuguese, Spanish, and French.
But for an analysis to come to an end and eventually produce an analyst, it must first begin.
A shift in discourse determines this beginning, that can be produced within what Lacan called “preliminary interviews,” which is a special time for someone becomes a psychoanalysand?
“Preliminary interviews” are this period of transformation, transition, and passage from ordinary speech to strictly analytical speech. It marks the beginning of the “talking cure,” as Anna O. (Bertha Pappenheim)—one of the first female analysands at the dawn of Freud’s invention of the psychoanalytic method—put it:
Analysis does not simply begin: no analysis is possible without these preliminary interviews and the subversion they produce in the subject’s speech—so that this speech incorporates the unconscious and calls the subject into question. Lacan referred to this as “subjective rectification,” which is necessary for the work of analysis to begin:
Talking cures? Psychoanalysis has only one medium: the speech of someone who is suffering and addresses a “psychoanalyst,” with the abstention—the abstinence—from any other recourse.
How can this practice of “blah-blah-blah” avoid the risk of quackery???
How can this practice of “blah-blah-blah” be transformed into a treatment that profoundly alters a person’s relationship with the world, others, their destiny, and their own body? How can we distinguish between “analytic” speech—and the transformative process it entails—and any other form of blather: confidences, complaints, narratives, confessions, grievances, gossip, conversation, small talk, counseling, guidance, coaching, etc.?
Let’s then discuss this practice and the principles that govern and distinguish the onset of its effectiveness. The practice of chatter that engages and unleashes a practice of meaning until it reduces this practice of meaning to a practice of the letter and of saying. The practice of chatter, the practice of meaning, the practice of the letter, and the practice of Saying are all terms used by Lacan to designate this “praxis” and its principle of modifying reality—the world of each individual.
The timing of these interviews and the decision regarding the eventual transition to the diva phase depend on an “assessment” by the analyst of the first logical and ethical shift in the “quasi”-analysand’s engagement in the adventure of free association—the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis. There is a measure of commitment, a stake, and a consent on the part of the “almost” analysand to the Freudian procedure: when someone finally agrees to this strange dialogue in which one commits to speaking and the other to remaining silent (silencing their subjectivity), the psychoanalyst can then propose the couch as the setting for entering treatment.
The future quasi-analyst’s commitment—the entry into analysis—will depend on the “psychoanalyst” function entering into their chatter. There is no entry into analysis without the analyst entering into the patient’s flow and play of words.
The beginning of an analysis is an event, renewed with each entry into analysis.
[TRANSLATION HANDOVER]
I have chosen to unfold this “crucial problem for psychoanalysis” in five stages. These five markers are not chronological, since they all refer to the unique logic of this passage, which inaugurates that tipping point in the structure where the operator of a new link—which Lacan called the Discourse of the Psychoanalyst—takes hold.
- Act 1: The Place of the Unconscious in Discourse: The Analyst’s Entry
- At the beginning of an Analysis, there is free association
- At the beginning of an analysis, there is the demand
- At the beginning of an Analysis, there is transference
- At the beginning of the end: identification of the symptom
We immediately notice an interdependence among these five markers; each one implies the other. However, we will now distinguish the temporal logic of each one and how they are intertwined.
- Act 1: The Place of the Unconscious in Discourse: The Analyst’s Entry
An analysis does not begin without an offer, an invitation, an incitement to say. This is what the statement of the “fundamental rule” consists of—or rather, its enunciation and the act that carries it. Lacan notes, moreover, in “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power” that the direction of the analysis (its finality) depends on this, for the manner in which this rule is proposed at the entry into analysis conveys “the doctrine that the analyst forms of it at the point of consequence where it has come to him.”
Indeed: “The direction of the Treatment … consists first and foremost in getting the subject to apply the analytic rule—that is, the directives whose presence at the very foundation of what is called ‘the analytic situation’ cannot be overlooked, under the pretext that the subject would apply them as best as possible without thinking about them.
These directives are set forth in an initial communication in the form of instructions which—even if the analyst comments on them only briefly—can be taken to convey, even in the inflections of their wording, the doctrine that the analyst holds regarding them at the point of consequence where it has emerged for him. [12]”
If the person in the “psi” role has come to understand through their own “analysis” that this involves being a good listener—someone who comprehends, understands, accepts, explains, and translate—then this psi will not make room for or accommodate what is not comprehended or understood, what remains outside the realm of meaning but is signaled by anxiety and symptoms and has effects: the unconscious.
What, then, is the doctrine that underpins the persistence and renewal of our psychoanalytic “reception” of the analysand’s speech at each “entry into analysis”?
Regardless of the utterance of the rule by the analyst, the analyst commits him/herself betting the unconscious knowledge. Here, the gamble is that speech, freed from its ties to the Other, might allow itself to say nonsenses, silly things that would grant access to—and value for—that which has no place anywhere else: the blunders of idle chatter, the splinters and other splashes, the blunders, the debris, the remnants, and the refuse—all of which are inappropriate and incongruous with common sense and propriety in any other social bond. This is the hypothesis that underpins the fundamental rule: it will result to something: “well, say all the nonsense you want, and something will come of it.[13]”
This nonsense and other blunders could provide access to that Other—“dit-mansion,” of the speaking being that Lacan ultimately termed “parlêtre”—an other dimension that eludes modeling by the symbolic of language and imaginary forms, a dimension that neither submits nor conforms: neither thinkable nor imaginable: the real of the unconscious.
At the beginning then, there is the psychoanalyst’s Saying, his bet which—beyond its specific and varied utterances—proposes and posits the unconscious: “the position of the unconscious.” The analyst brings it into play, establishes it within the analytic setting; this is the “analyst’s” opening move, a skate of a saying from which “an” analysis may eventually emerge.
The analyst bets on the displacement facilitated by the fundamental rule to engage the subject in “a certain mobility with respect to this universe of language,” as Lacan notes in his very first Seminar: “by launching the subject into a certain way of moving within the universe (of language), as much as possible, and, in a certain way having severed this mooring—that is, the relationship of courtesy, respect, and obedience toward the other—all that which we call ‘free association’—a term that is exceedingly poorly defined, insofar as it is the moorings of conversation with the other that we are trying to sever at certain points—the subject finds itself in a certain mobility in relation to this universe of language, where we engage it[15]”
An analysis does not begin without this incitement to the utterances of free association and their Saying imperative: “Speak!” “Let’s say!” To suppose utterances free from the yoke of the Other is a fiction, but it nonetheless brings into play, suggests, signals, and even summons the idea that there is Saying that escapes the rules of utterances shaped by the Other—that is, that goes beyond utterances modeled by the Other’s laws of language and conveys what is unique—awkward causing suffering—until one’s own distinct style emerges and stands out, defining each person’s individual style.
This suspicion of a singular “saying” is usually audible from the beginning on the part of the future analysand; indeed, from the very first utterances of the preliminary interviews—which recount failures, devastation, loneliness, boredom, or other losses of meaning in life—this point of singularity, unlike any other, is already discernible: a point where a “saying” emerges that ex-sists, something that exceeds what is said, while at the same time determining its sequence, its meaning, its address, and its chaining.
“… The first thing we must do,” Lacan tells us in Encore, “is to start from the fact that we are faced with a Saying—the saying of another—who tells us about his nonsense, his embarrassments, his obstacles, his emotions, and that this is where we must read—what?—nothing other than the effects of these Sayings. We can clearly see how these effects agitate, stir up, and trouble speaking beings[16].”
The effects of this Saying are the effects of what cannot be said—an impossibility to which the “formations of the unconscious” bear witness.
It is the analyst’s interventions that will, from the start, give value to what does not fit into a chain, what clashes, what does not align with the meanings the prospective analysand is trying to convey in order to be understood: “Do you understand?”, “you know,” “isn’t that right?” (common punctuation in the patient’s speech).
These are interventions that produce a pause, a moment of astonishment, a discontinuity in the attempt to settle on a meaning: a silence, an irrelevant question, an answer that doesn’t fit, a change of subject, a smile, a lack of complicity where agreement was expected, etc. These are interventions that do not add to, complement, or explain, but rather introduce this “something” that is not being said; what matters is not what they say, but the way they signal a silence, an enigma where there used to be the common sense and the “neurotic common sense” of the subject in question.
These interventions introduce interpretation and its Saying, its “point of origin,” that is to say: “There is the unknown, there is the unconscious”—it ex-sists.
This call, this invitation, this offer specific of the “fundamental rule” entails the Saying of interpretation—that is, the hypothesis of the unconscious—from the very first words spoken by the person who goes to a therapist’s office to speak up.
This is what constitutes the possible starting point for an analysis in which an analysand touched by this “psychoanalytic welcome” at the ineffable point of the Saying of his demand and engage him all the way to the final point where the taking into account of this act of speech, its naming, will also be his point of partition, “separation” of the end: “Because of what comes to the said as a consequence…[18]”
Lacan Tehran ~ لاکان تهران 