HOW DOES ANALYSIS BEGIN?
How does one become a psychoanalysand?
PART 2 (Read Part I)
- At the beginning of an analysis, there is free association
At the beginning of an analysis, there is a shift in “discourse”—a transition from speech to free association.
Free from what? From the constraints of phantasmal meaning, from the way it saturates the common speech of everybody?
But then, is it only at the end of all these twists and turns that one would attain something like a “freedom” of association, after having allowed oneself to be “sufficiently bewildered by the twists and turns of speech revolving around the unspeakable”?
Free association is thus the type of speech that follows the enunciation of the fundamental rule and the invitation for Saying that it entails; it is both a response to the interpretation and an occasion for its effect.
It is, in fact, a form of speech that proceeds from the a priori interpretation contained in the fundamental rule, as Lacan states in his question: “How is discourse—the free discourse recommended to the subject—conditioned by the fact that it is, in a sense, in the process of being interpreted?”
But it also constitutes the appropriate field where the analyst must not miss the opportunity to intrude upon it by interpreting the silence or the cut that will make it resonate differently, as something else.
Its paradoxical formulation, which articulates both the rule and freedom, immediately signals the acceptance of the structure it invites to unfold within the dispositif. Indeed, in the utterances, in “what is heard” of the spoken word as it falls—“einfall” (Freud)—is gathered that which proceeds from the subject’s dual causation: alienation and separation—the signifiers of its alienation from the Other of language, and that which escapes it and causes its subjectivity in its struggle to be.
But how can one distinguish between any given speech and that speech which would mark the transition to an analyzing discourse?
The floating attention he or she finds on the analyst’s part will very quickly alert to the qualities of this partner, for, as Lacan emphasizes very early on: “His or her voice alone will be heard for a period whose duration remains at the analyst’s discretion. It will quickly become evident to him/her—and indeed confirmed—that the analyst refrains from responding to him/her on any level of advice or planning[2].”
This shift in the discourse, this passage to the analyzing speech marks the inclusion in the address of this partner who, by chance, can respond to nonsense, to the discontinuity of meaning, can respond with silence, with the suspension of meaning. It’s not always—nor immediately—that the prospective analysand perceives this silence as welcoming, as something that makes no noise and allows them to hear another tune, another melody in their own rambling.
The condition of free association is the inclusion of a partner who does not “understand” by closing off a meaning, as Lacan has indicated so many times; on the contrary, the partner suspends it and inserts into this breach—this suspension—the silent interpretation: there is a knowledge that eludes common sense; there is the unconscious.
The rule—“say nonsense”—purports to unleash speech free from the chains of common sense, that is, to welcome a meaning “unique,” something that would signify the One, and not the Other. A wager that runs counter to common sense, since we know that, structurally, the signifier is articulated with another and presupposes a knowledge within the Other signifier that would make it a subject, supposed to the articulation between signifiers.
[TRANSLATION HANDOVER]
This is, in fact, how the dynamic/dialectic of transference is initiated—a transference that will thus unfold in the course of speech, involving the analyst in the “enactment of the sexual reality of the unconscious” specific to the analysand, that is to say, the peculiarity of the pulsional objects that attempt to complete the lack of signifiers to say the very identity.
While transference holds out a promise and offers hope to those who venture into analysis, the fundamental rule commits them to it as a form of work. Consenting to this “practice of chatter” at the beginning of an analysis is therefore no trivial matter; it is a to do task, a form of work, and even forced labor, for it involves engaging in a quasi-bureaucratic task, as Lacan emphasizes.
What, then, happens in this work that distinguishes it from ordinary conversation?
“This signifier is the task, the subject’s action of letting it play out.”[3]
What guides the chains of signifiers that link together and break loose in response to the invitation “Speak!” is, first and foremost, a supposition about this enigmatic knowledge that subjugates and constrains the one who speaks, in this extraordinary space offered to them by the analyst.
As early as his “Studies on Hysteria,” at the time of the invention of the “talking cure,” Freud described in detail how associations—through displacements and condensations—wove a complex network around what he would later identify as the navel of dreams, the unerkannt[4]. In his text “The Instance of the Letter,” Lacan highlights how chains of signifiers weave their way from metaphor to metonymy in search of the lost, exiled identity of this subject subjected to the laws of language.
However, if consenting to the fundamental rule—“to let the signifier play out”—entails a “losing oneself” that destitutes the subject, this also logically implies taking seriously what arises from this very loss.
Indeed, once past the Cape of Good Hope at the beginning of analysis, it is boredom and repetition that might characterize this singular experience of speech—unless the analyst’s response, through his cuts and interruptions in the signifiers chain, extracts from this “profound logical insufficiency [7]” of the associative chain the value of its limit, which Lacan designates as the object a.
The beginning of the end of the speaking experience will reduce the dispersion of the signifier left to its own—the free association—to the series of the signifier elevated to the dignity of the One—“Ya d’l’un”—and the evidence of the “object” value a assigned to the loss that “the signifier left to its own devices” perpetuates and channels.
But anyway in principle, according to the logic of language itself, the supposedly free association articulates—in order to seek meaning, to produce a significance on which to rely—since speech has no endpoint; speech articulates one element of language to another, one signifier to another, to evoke a meaning. Because each element of language has no meaning of its own, it DEMANDS another to link with it and produce a meaning.
- At the beginning of an analysis, there is the demand
The demand at the outset seems obvious: someone goes to a “psy’s” office to ask for help, understanding, and a listening ear, support, compassion, empathy. Understanding what cannot be understood: unease, discomfort. One hopes to find there a welcoming space for what is incomprehensible—discomfort, anxiety—in short, that which has no place anywhere else.
The demand does not need to be explicitly stated to reveal its structure. Any address to another person presents the structure of language, where one signifier calls upon another to give it meaning, and S1→S2 can be read as the articulation of a demand. This unfolds the logic of the signifier, which “in and of itself” has no meaning and requires a second signifier to open the path to signification.
This “demand” has the peculiarity of conveying something of a vital need to an address that is supposed to receive, and respond to this need. The demand encompasses and conveys the most singular aspect of a unique being (its life needs) to a foreign Other whose response may satisfy and fill the void created by the need. The demand is something structural, which shapes the transference and the analyst’s handling of it.
At the outset, there is no demand for analysis; there is a hope that another will acknowledge its mystery, its inadequacy, and the nonsense that haunts it, acknowledge receipt of the pending letter.
But through the demand, the infinite developments of free association will engage and include the analyst-partner so that the analyst’s desire may give form and a limit to this demand for meaning.
Demand is an extension of the logic of the signifier, which means nothing on its own and requires articulation with a second signifier to reveal the path to meaning.
The subject’s demands marked the beginning of their subjection to language, his entry into human reality since their needs had to be read and interpreted by the Other and the otherness of its language. Needs thus transformed into drives imprint a failure and condemn the demand to dissatisfaction and repetition. Indeed, the object sought—and already lost—cannot be attained. Demands, therefore, convey the drama of the structure—the impossible harmony between the singular and the universal in language open up the dimension of castration and desire.
But through the demand, the infinite developments of free association will engage and include the analyst-partner so that the “analyst’s desire” may give form and a limit to this.
The beginning of an analysis initiates the twists and turns of the demand; the repetition of its course will not exhaust its twists and turns, since its object will be logically deduced and topologically located as inaccessible. The course of an analysis will not exhaust the twists and turns of the demand that transference reverberates, unless its limit—its ineffable point of origin—is demonstrated therein: the Saying of the demand, irreconcilable with the signifier that could allow access to that which names the Parlêtre, the being who speaks demand for meaning.
But let’s go back to the beginning of this transference dynamic.
- At the beginning of an analysis, there is transference
“At the beginning of psychoanalysis is transference. It is so by the grace of the one we will call, at the outset of this discussion, the analysand[8].”
Übertragung: to carry beyond. Freud first uses this word to speak of language and its structure: each “representation” carries the thing (by definition unrepresented) beyond (über), toward, for another representation, he says. Condensations and displacements—which Lacan draws from linguistics, such as metaphors and metonymies—ultimately articulate and weave a networked structure: crossings, knots, and shifts are woven around and because of the ineffable Thing (das Ding), which is irreconcilable with the signifier.
Through the “grace of the analysand”—and this in response to the analyst’s offer and position—the speech of free association will thus convey from one to the other that which causes it: the lack of identity that the mark of the signifier (which means nothing on its own) carves, furrows; the object a is a name for this lack of identity, lost whithin the drive objects (oral, anal, gaze, voice).
Through the grace of the analysand from the very beginning, “transference appears to be already sufficiently motivated by the signifying primacy of the unary trait [9],” from the very beginning “transference appears to be already sufficiently motivated by the fact one only signifier does mean anything and is therefore destined to demand more and more (re-petitio) of a signifying response that would complete its incompleteness: (S1(S1(S1(S1(…S2)))))
At the beginning of psychoanalysis, the speech of transference unfolds its particular relationship to the signifiers that chain the subject to the address of the one who places himself in a position to receive them, occupying his position within the structure of the signifying Other.
Lacan articulates the logic of the transference link in the mathem of transference[10], which has the advantage of reducing transference phenomena to a logic—the logic of the signifier with its metonymic and metaphorical mechanisms substitution and displacement.
The logic of the signifier, that this writing records, marks the infinitization of this petition (re-petition) and the lack that is inevitably inscribed from the outset, despite the hope that underpins the appeal made to the second signifier—which will therefore not save the subject from distress and condemns the subject to being nothing more than a “supposed” being.
Through the grace of the analysand, however, the demand carries the cause of desire, and if the object that causes it has a “consistency sustained by pure logic [11],” in the transference it takes on its drive-based trappings to demand, that complement of being called love.
However, it is up to the analyst to “weigh this request” from the very first preliminary interviews, in this “confrontation of bodies[14]” where the analyst gauges the object whose place he will have to occupy as a semblant.
By the grace of the analysand, the analyst occupies this place of the weighed-out object within the transference demand: not to correspond to it, but to reveal the void that constitutes its logical consistency.
It is through the writing of the analyst’s discourse—which serves to welcome this object, but “in the place of the semblance” without truly responding—that Lacan will inscribe the other “discourses,” the other assemblages of the bond-modality between one and the other.
It is through this writing of discourses—which makes it possible to conceive of psychoanalysis as an operation of transformation and displacement rather than as an infinite narrative—that Lacan will develop themathem of transference and demonstrate how the analyst’s handling of transference through his or her position within the structure can eventually bring about this modification in the one who occupies the place of the analysand.
The “handling” of transference is not a manipulation by someone who would intervene from the outside and make—always improper and abusive—use of the drive object that transference delivers; but rather, the handling of transference is an operation that depends on the position the analyst’s function will occupy, on how the analyst will respond with the silence of his subjectivity and his jouissance so that the subject’s structure and its singular, unspeakable limit become evident.
- At the beginning of the end: identification of the symptom
The words of the one who suffers and seeks out a psychoanalyst inevitably set the subject in motion toward another who is supposed to hear his complaint arising from his pain of existence. The utterance of this suffering can only give rise to an analysis if, by chance, it encounters the silence that makes it resonate as an enigma and transforms it into a question. The beginning of an analysis depends on this questioning of the subject supposed of this suffering, and it points the way toward its conclusion.
Relying on the analyst’s silence[17] initiates the inquiry into this fissure in being that persists in manifesting itself on the reverse side of the ego and its pantomimes. The analyst’s silence interprets the pain as the “specific opacity [18]” of the symptom.
The emergence of the symptom as an enigma of the subject directs free association beyond idle chatter (bla bla), toward the subject being called into question, its division, and the lack that causes it. The lack of being can then take on the value of a symptom. The analyst’s entry, and his “intervention on transference,” can from the outset set in motion the shift in the letter of the symptom, which will ultimately move from the worst to saying (du pire au dire).
This intervention will function as an act, insofar as his saying is able to confer the value of ex-sistence upon the inaugural point of the demand. The analyst’s interpretation takes into account the demand arising from the malaise and its symptomatic mark, reducing it in the end to a value of ex-sistence.
The analysand’s entry into the analytic apparatus involves a passage facilitated by the experience of speech, provided that the subject encounters the function “of the analyst.” This potential encounter elevates free association, the demand, transference, and the symptom to their role as marker for the entry into analysis, where the beginning of the end may already be foreshadowed.
Lacan Tehran ~ لاکان تهران 