The Course of the Symptoms.
To Speak is to Suffer, or the Three
Temporal Moments of the Fundamental Symptom in a Psychoanalysis
Hourik Zakarian
To speak is to suffer, because it is not pure speech.
One
cannot say everything.
Something is always lost, and that is
a risk that I am taking today.
That is also what analysands who
come to see us for the talking cure do:
they come with their
suffering and their symptoms.
They come to speak so as to get
rid of their symptons.
There is also an easy kind of talk, that of blah blah:
« HOw
are you »;
« it’s a nice day today »; « looks like it’s gonna rain »,
etc.
But there is also what you hear on the couch in the well-
meaning and well thought out discourses of « good analysands » who
blither at a 1055, so to speak, in other words to purely
mask
what they don’t want to know.
There are simple silences with the
same aim as well.
As soon as speech is easy (and silence is but
one of its forms), everything is comfortable, and the feeling of comfort, like all feelings, is misleading.
As soon as speech (in
whatever form) is difficult, we are not far from anxiety,
the
only true affect, as , everyone knows –
true in the sense of the
subject’s truth.
But let us come back to our analysand who comes to us to speak so that his symptom will disappear.
What will be the fate
in store for his symptom?
That is the question I would like to
address today.
In the very demand to begin an analysis, which
thus consists in coming « to speak so that the symptom disappear », we see the whole paradox of the subject in question. For how can speaking make symptoms disappear,
when the fundamental symptom
is, if you will, speaking itself, in the sense of being in the field of speech?
In this vein, one might say that the psychotic
is the normal subject who is not affected by this fundamental symptom.
Nevertheless, there are psychotie subjects who request
analysis.
Michel Sylvestre proposed that we take as the
psychotic’s symptom the surplus and threatening signification which cannot come into being because of the lack of a privileged signifier, namely the Name-of-the-Father.
This signification he
lacks is produced by the construction of a metaphor which takes the place of the paternal metaphor.
One can thus perhaps speak,
in any case, of a substitutional symptom as well. For those who don’t have any symptoms are in big trouble!
One cannot do
without symptoms.
One of our colleagues spoke of the necessity
of symptoms in reporting that one of his analysands, though
relieved of his symptoms through psychoanalysis, found himself
led into even worse straights.
Even normality is a symptom, and
it is probably the most uncurable.
Thus if the symptom cannot
disappear, what happens to it in the course of an analysis?
and
at the end of an analysis?
Let us recall for the record a definition of the symptom which Lacan provides in his Seminar R.S. I. (Real, Symbolic, Imaginary).
« I define the symptom by the way in which each
person derives jouissance from the unconscious, insofar as unconscious determines that person. » This definition of
the
symptom by forms of jouissance contains within it the fact that there is always something which remains incurable, as there is always one form or another of jouissance, even if not all use-values of jouissance are equivalent.
If something changes in a
subject’s symptom during treatment, that clearly has something to do with his form of jouissance.
In what way does this form of
jouissance change in the course of analysis? This is another way of posing the question of the symptom, about which the subject
complains when he requests to start an analysis and with which he contents himself at the end of the treatment, for a change in its jouissance value has taken place in the interim, allowing the symptom to change forms, the jouissance it provides no longer having the same value, unburdened, as it is, of its surplus
joui ssance.
How does treatment operate on the symptom’s jouissance, if
not by transference and interpretation, the two mainsprings of psychoanalysis, which do not, however, bounce all by themselves.
1311
turn now more directly to the theme of this workshop
concerning transference and interpretation.
A psychoanalysis consists in the interpretation of desire
insofar, as Jacques-Alain Miller has said, as « The unconscious is itself its interpretation. »
Interpretation is what operates in an analysis, and everyone
knows that interpretation is of no value without transference.
There is thus no such thing as
interpretation without
transference.
It is transference which gives the analyst his
specific status from which he can interpret, when the time comes,
even if the status of his interpretation, insofar as such,
becomes clear only after the fact.
Let me take this oppurtunity
to say that interpretation can only be recognized in its effects,
i.e.
after the fact.
An analyst who, concerning a particular analysand, would say to himself one fine morning when in a particularly good state of mind,
« Okay;
today I think I’ll give
him an interpretation, » would be getting off to a bad start.
An
interpretation cannot be programed because of its very nature.
And even if one can speak of the calculation or calculus of interpretation, the question here is more one of an uncalculated calculation, in that it is not conspired, forseen or programed by the analyst (as opposed to the explanation of sense or meaning).
The effects of his act will determine whether or not it
constitutes an interpretation.
This leads us to wonder what the effects of interpretation
are.
They are not the kinds of effects the analysand expects
when he requests analysis. What, in fact, does the analysand ask for? For his symptoms to disappear and for his suffering to
stop. In other words, he demands that the prosthesis he found in the form of his symptom, which fended off what certain people
call the foreclosure of
sex;
or otherwise stated, which
supplemented the empty relationship, the void of that place where the partner lacks, i.e. the fact that there is no sexual relation
-_ he demands to longer need that prosthesis, but not to get rid
of it any old which way.
What he demands is to no longer have
his prosthesis (his symptom) — and here let us take the example of a one-legged man’s wooden leg — not because he will be
satisfied to walk with one single leg, but because his second leg
will have grown back.
In other words, what the analysand wants
is to find the knowledge which would erase the « fault » (in the
geological sense of the word) which constitutes the fundamental trauma of existence.
This knowledge which would erase the fault, this knowledge which he takes to be the only worthwile knowledge, that which concerns sex, he attributes this knowledge to the psychoanalyst
aS the subject-supposed-to-know.
He asks the
psychoanalyst to give him this knowledge which would remedy the
fact that there is no such thing as a sexual relation (i.e.
that
the difference between the sexes is nowhere inscribed in the unconscious). In situating worthwhile knowledge in the analyst’s chair, he says at the same time thereby to what extent he is terrified by (and hates) his own knowledge (in the place of truth), about which he obviously does not want to know anything, and which he carefully hides behind his symptom.
This fault or
division
— whose subject he refuses to be, for which he feels
guilty, which he tries to avoid, mask and disavow, paying the price of suffering, however great it may be — it is this very fault or division which makes him give up on his desire, or sell out (on) his own desire (as Stuart Schneiderman has said in his seminar), to take refuge in the jouissance of the symptom in the real.
« One is more or less guilty of the real », according to
Lacan.
The analysand, at the beginning of the treatment, does
not see things in exactly that way.
For him, guilt is born from
division.
The superego, which makes him feel guilty, imposes the
imperative of jouissanc upon him.
The love one directs at one’s
analyst in transference-love is thus love for the subject-supposed-to-know, in other words, as Lacan says, « It is love, not
desire, which is directed at knowledge. »
One sees thus how, on
the basis of a request to begin analysis, addressed to a supposed knowledge, correlated with a relation to knowledge, in other words to signifiers, the analysand enters into transference love, a necessary but insufficient condition for analysis to take place (insufficient in that there is always plenty of transference to psychoanalytic knowledge, one might even say that it is always on our hands, but that we are not for all that in an analytic position to do something with it which would permit us to interpret.
We can only try to keep from sinking beneath. these
muddy waters, from which institutions — including psychoanalytic ones — are not immune).
The transference love which comes into being and becomes the analysand’s new symptom, or rather the symptom’s second temporal moment, always has the function of masking his division, though this time taking advantage of the analytic situation, and the relation to knowledge it brings with it.
Transference love is also the new link between the subject’s
lies and resitances concerning his truth.
If the anal ysand
attributes knowledge to the analyst because of love, we know that the analyst is not the depository of the subject’s knowledge
about his symptom, for he too is barred from this knowledge.
Which is not to be forgotten, for he could direct the analysand’s treatment such that the question of desire would be isolated in
the quagmire of love, or any other affect — it is not to be
forgotten, as I mentioned, for if the analyst forgets this, what
happens?
In other words, if the analyst thinks he holds in his
hands knowledge about his analysand’s symptom, he thus places
himself as the one who knows and not in the position of pretence
or semblance (implied by the term « subject-supposed-to-know »),
which is to say that he functions as a mirror with his nalysand, in relation to the question of knowledge, consenting thereby to the belief that there is knowledge which can palliate the lack of a sexual relation.
Otherwise stated, he would be in
the same position in relation to the symptom as the analysand, in the same « I don’t want to know anything about it », except that he would be seated in the armchair instead of lying on
the couch.
This is what happens when the analyst involves himself
in
making scholarly interventions about the analysand’s existence and the reasons for his functioning — interventions he
calls
interpretations but which are of the following type:
« you are
taking me for your mother »,
« you desire your mother without
letting on to your father »,
« your Oedipal complex is making you
feel guilty »
— or even in the interrogatory form:
« wasn’t it
your right eye you glued to the keyhole to watch your sister when she was naked? », this question being addressed to an analysand blind in the right eye.
Such statements could turn out to be
correct, but not true, in the sense that the correctness of a
statement doesn’t stop it from masking all the more the truth of
the lacking sexual relation.
This question of the analyst’s
relation to knowledge has, as we see, many repercussions on the direction of the treatment, and thus of the handling of the
transference and the practice of interpretation.
Here I would like to recount two clinical vignettes related
to the questions of knowledge and interpretation.
The first consists in a sentence one of our colleagues
quoted from one of his analysands, which runs as follows:
former shrink, he told me my life story really well! »
The second was an intention manifested by one of my analysands who had come to me to do a second stage of
analysis,
an intention which she declared to me during a session in
which
She quickly told a couple of dreams and then politely lapsed into
silence for a while, leaving me the time to provide
explanation.
Seeing that no explanation was forthcoming,
she
then said, « my unconscious is not answering », complaining thereby that her analysis wasn’t working as she had hoped, that it
was
useless to dream as the gods invoked weren’t taking their cue by
casting light on the dark night of her symptoms.
If the first analysand is to be believed, the interpretation which concerns meaning, in wanting to restore the meaning of his life and fantasies to the subject, doesn’t change anything related to the question with which the subject came into
analysis.
In other words it has hardly any cutting effect as to
the subject’s jouissance.
If the second analysand is to be
believed, the unconscious — as that which escapes the analysand in question — can be measured as well in terms of the analyst’s silence regarding what she desperatedly tried to obtain: that her
analyst interpret her unconscious, interpreting here, of course, to be understood as saying to her what it is, as making her understand through explanations providing meaning – much as she
does herself, for, so as to fallstall any faults, she spends her
sessions, as this vignette shows, interpreting her
OWn
unconscious in the register of meaning:
« she said this because
her father did that… she does that because of her mother…;
she believed this because of her fantasy…; » and so on.
clearly see here that this style, brought to bear on all this
material by analysands who have been through this before coming to us, is that of a type of psychoanalysis which falls into the
register of meaning.
We know that meaning equals narrative equals imaginary.
Let us notice then that, in this sense,
as concerns the
with all that it brings
transference, analysands’ jouissance, was not at all
relieved,
with it which is impossible to bear,
despite the call for that implied in their request to start analysis.
We thus see that, if the analyst’s symptom jives with the analysand’s symptom — in the sense of a symptom whose function is to close off the question of lack — the main operation which should take place in treatment cannot, this operation being displacement of the Other’s knowledge to the subject, displacement which requires the time allotted to the
transference, a time which is necessary so that the analysand can
strip the Other of its false consistency
= as the supposed
possessor of knowledge — reducing it at the end of the treatment to the cause of his division.
In this displacement of knowledge,
a
transformation takes place simultaneously in the relation to
knowledge and in knowledge itself as well.
In effect,
knowledge, like the symptom, does not have the same consistency
at the beginning and at the end of treatment.
As we have seen,
at the beginning we are dealing with imaginary knowledge, and
that in relishing in it the subject avoids symbolic castration,
giving himself over to the jouissance of the real as impossible
to bear, namely the symptom.
Real, symbolic and imaginary can
thus be found there in a certain configuration. Now, if there is
knowledge at the end of the treatment, it is obviously of another
sort, the correlate of this being that the symptom at the end is also of another sort than at the beginning and during the transference. The knowledge at the end is not a surplus-knowledge, it is not knowledge like one might conceive of it in
academia, i.e. a knowledge of facts and reasons.
It is rather
knowledge which translates in terms of processes of loss.
It is
a
knowledge of production but unlike industrial processes it has to do withproducing loss!
Loss of what?
Loss of jouissance, jouissance whose
calculation in an analysand’s dictums — dictums and not words, words, words, « parole, parole, parole » as the Italian song goes)
— produces knowledge in terms of loss of jouissance. So how can
as it is there that the results
one move from words to dictums, of treatment are played out?
Blithering speech turns around in
circles in the imaginary, and that can last a dog’s age! For the analysand to produce a dictum, in other words, a truth about his jouissance, in traversing his fantasm which masks the Other’s castration, he must not expect it.
There again, it is not
planable ahead of time, as if one were to make good resolutions
for the next session of the emeritus analysand who decides to
show his hand in a well-thought-out strategy.
It is even
usually the contrary, being through surprise and the unexpected that he acceeds to the truth of his dictum as « an intrusion of a
signifier » (as Jacques-Alain Miller has said.
Interpretation
operates in this same way.
In order to open things up towards a
new dictum, interpretation must surprise, cut, astonish, not be exactly understood, be equivolcal, enigmatic and splitting.
It
does not even have to be understood by the analyst himself at the
very moment at which he poses his act, « understood » in the sense
that he would not know in advance all the ins and outs
of the
analysand.
This is what I Called earlier the uncalculated
calulation of interpretation, which is to say that interpretation itself is a dictum of the analyst, sustained by his
desire as
analyst.
His desire as analyst is not based on fantasy,
nor is
it willing to collaborate with the subject’s jouissance.
This
uncalculated interpretation is thus not transmittable through solely technical rules.
We see that this conception of treatment
hAG
major
consequences on its direction, for interpretation has nothing to do with empathy, but rather goes at times against the grain, striking in a place where the analysand does not expect it.
It
is thus that equivocal or surprising interpretation,
which
produces an effect that looks like an enigma, traversing the imaginary so as to isolate the place of the object, hidden behind
This isolation of the object leads to the
the symptom.
displacement of its aim at the beginning of the treatment to a position of cause, the cause of the subject’s split or division.
The object of jouissance is the same and it is because of that
that there is always a symptom, an incurable one. The object has
simply changed places, as has the symptom.
One could say that
the symptom is like the fifth wheel of a cart which follows the
other four: R, S, I and – 1. It has to adapt to the situation,
its function changing as the other elements change in the course
of analysis.
The symptom moves from having
a
function of
filling in and masking lack, to that of being a product or fruit of lack, as interpretation of the metaphor of the symptom brings
the subject towards the minus
earlier the fundamental symptom.
of castration, which I called
That is why we can say
that
there is an identification with one’s symptom at the
end of
analysis.
In 1975, Lacan situates the end of treatment in this way.
This identification with the symptom is such that the subject
becomes
satisfied with this new symptom, or rather this symptom
dressed in new clothes.
This is another type of symptomatic
supplementation, very different from that of transference
love
which must be transitory.
The third version of the symptom has
thus the particularity of being satisfying.
Which is not exactly
banal for a symptom!
That it be satisfying is even a condition
of the third type of symptom, and it is a condition of the end of analysis as well.
Lacan says that there is an end-satisfaction
which must be urgently provided, and it is on this very point that I will urgently end my talk today, in commenting that this
statement by Lacan emphasizes that the end of analysis is not situated at a point of dissatisfaction or of being completely fed
up and listless, which would imply that the analysand was still wrapped up in transference love — the hate version or aspect and as such any attempt to break off the analysis would simply amount to an acting out, similar to identification with one’s
analyst.
But on the contrary, this tipping of the scales which signals the end of analysis takes place under duresse (just like the beginning of analysis) and is accompanied by the satisfaction of having dug up a bearable symptom.
Le couple, art et avatars
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Coaching ou psychothérapie
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« Faites attention à ce que vous voulez car vous l’aurez ». Confucius
« De notre position de sujet, nous sommes toujours responsable ». Dr. J. Lacan
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