Lacan - The Unconscious Reinvented

The Unconscious Reinvented

Colette Soler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429915475
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book focuses on Lacan's revisions and renewals of psychoanalytic concepts, and shows the ways in which Lacan succeeded in the reinvention of psychoanalysis. It explores those steps that led him to assert an unprecedented formula that says against all expectation that the unconscious is real.

PART I

THE UNCONSCIOUS, REAL

CHAPTER ONE

Trajectory

Lacan himself did not fail to question his own trajectory and to reappraise each one of his steps. The new formulas as well as the theses of this reappraisal are striking theoretical rectifications (Soler, 2008a). Ultimately, we have a Symbolic which is no longer language but langue, to be written lalangue (I will come back to this); an Imaginary which is not signification subordinated to the Symbolic but is essentially form and representation; finally, a Real outside of the Symbolic whereas its previous definition located it at the limit points of linguistic formalisation.

Why? The question is not intended to mark out a periodisation, to chart a first, second, and third Lacan. Chronology is in itself inert and presents a drawback that is not entirely innocent: indeed it elides the One that links all the textual variations. This One is not at the level of theses but at the level of what I call the choice that grounds a unique saying [un dire unique], beyond the variations of statements [les dits]. With chronological sequence, whether one knows it or not, One-saying [l’Un-dire] is surreptitiously divided up into successive textualities, and in the name of a methodical reading it becomes so multiple that in the end it is simply resorbed.

In fact, it is this One whose value Michel Foucault, to his credit, highlighted in 1969 in his lecture “What is an author?”, at which Lacan was present. In it he emphasised how much this dimension of the One of the author was ineradicable. I say to his credit, for the moment belonged to a certain structuralism that announced the death of the author and its reduction within the supposed laws of textuality. Today, of course, this notion has misfired and we are instead in an era where there are more authors than real texts.

The trouble with chronology is, as we say, that the enunciation driven out through the door returns through the window and no less so than in the authorised argument. The oft-repeated “Lacan said that”, followed by random quotations, then obscures times that were initially distinguished and ushers in the most confusing indistinctness. In this way, the splitting of the name from the saying that carried it takes place. From then on, this teaching is transformed into a vast pantry from which each one takes a sample as he pleases. The result is that the more that readers multiply, the more the coherence that animates the movement from one step to the next evaporates.

Lacan was in fact by no means adept at chronology, but the contrary is not the case either. In order to characterise what he was doing, he liked to use the notion of clearing a path, clearing a path by breaking through the barriers in a field resistant to thought or movement. Clearing can proceed in a discontinuous way, with its fertile moments and its times of stasis and assimilation, but the notion suggests the continuity of an effort which constitutes an oriented whole, creating furrows in the field in question.

I will therefore approach the logic of changes with the one enunciation that produces them together. They do not have the same status, for the enunciation is contingent and thus unpredictable. In this sense, despite the logic of the passages, a second time cannot be purely and simply deduced from a first, even if the former is not without deriving from the latter and—as is well-known—will shed light on it retroactively.

It will thus be a matter of grasping what of the analytic experience exceeded each thesis and hence what grounds each advance. This means that the mainspring of this work in progress, to which only death gave the word “end”, owes nothing either to linguistics—even if revisited through poetry as Jakobson did—or to structural anthropology.

Structuralist?

Yet, effectively, the name of Lacan remains associated with the structuralist trend of the 1970s. It is true that he explored the structuralist path methodically, seeking to establish that the unconscious belongs to a rational order that has its own laws. But is it enough to acknowledge that a symbolic order simultaneously govens the social groups studied by anthropology, the language structures of linguistics, and the discourse of the unconscious, for the—ism of structuralism to be warranted in psychoanalysis? I do not believe that Lacan was ever a structuralist, even at the time of metaphor and metonymy. The subject of psychoanalysis is not structural man, if I may use this expression, and has never really been so at any moment in Lacan’s elaboration.

This is seen at the level of the premise—as it is for the object of every discipline—a premise not necessarily made explicit.

By hypothesis, linguistics and structural anthropology, which take as their object the compositional laws of the structures that concern them, posit a subject who is no more than the pure subject of a combinatory. The analytic hypothesis is different. The fact that Lacan had strongly emphasised that psychoanalysis knows no other subject than that of science, and made of “this special mode of subject” what he calls “the crucially important mark of structuralism” (Lacan, [1966] 2006, p. 731), must not mislead us on this point. Psychoanalysis certainly knows no other subject than this non-incarnated subject, the subject that is only “the navel” in the pure combinatory of the mathematics of the signifier, a navel that even logic cannot manage to eliminate. But this subject is not the object of psychoanalysis. The subject that psychoanalysis receives and deals with is the one who suffers. And not from just anything, but from a suffering tied to truth, the truth that involves the object of his phantasy and even a bit more: the living being marked by language. Lacan found a word to designate it: “analysand”. Without him, there is no psychoanalysis, whereas the study of myths can take place quite happily without the “mythand”, as Lacan calls him by analogy with analysand. Likewise, the splitting of a mask is nothing other than symbolic and elides the bearer, just as the ritual assumed to be homologous with the economy of mythemes rejects “from the field of structure the agent of the ritual” (Lacan, [1966] 2006, p. 732). The difference is immediately recognisable.

One could certainly speak of a structuralist moment in Lacan to designate the time when his elaborations borrow from the linguistics of Saussure and Jakobson, or from the structural anthropology of Lévi-Strauss: the time when he emphasises what psychoanalysis may share with these disciplines—namely, the laws of composition of the unconscious that Freud taught us to decipher, which have the subject of science as a correlate and which, like the elementary structures of kinship, operate without the knowledge of the psychological

However, considering the matter more closely, it is not difficult to confirm the constancy, from this moment, of what I call the objection to the structuralist reduction, the objection inherent to psychoanalysis as conceptualised by Lacan. Let us acknowledge this objection from the first step. The laws of speech, Lacan said, and a big deal was made of this. Yes, but Lacan could say at the same time that speech is an act, and this act is unthinkable with just the subject of science. And yet we have “The Purloined Letter”, which in spite of its chronology Lacan wanted to place at the start of his Écrits, precisely to accentuate the structural element of our experience. “The programme traced out for us is hence to figure out how a formal language determines the subject” (Lacan, [1956a] 2006, p. 31). What apparently could be more structuralist than this expression? But the objection follows: the programme cannot be fulfilled, he says, other than by a subject “contributing willingly”, and this implies “a subjective conversion” (Lacan, [1956a] 2006, p. 31) often connected to a dimension of drama. So we say farewell to structuralism. I will not multiply the examples here: they are to be found throughout Lacan’s seminars and writings, consistent with the idea of a subject who, unlike the pure subject of science, is credited with a position and with a responsibility toward that position—in other words, a subject more ethical than “pathematic”.

The structuralist moment

From the structural moment, we can extract a very precise definition of the Symbolic.

I won’t dwell on the time needed by Lacan to disinvest the term “symbol”, so popular then, and to substitute “signifier” for it, thus clarifying from the outset that the signifier in psychoanalytic usage is not necessarily verbal, and that it is only homologous with the linguistic signifier through its differential character and its laws of composition.

The Symbolic is thus not reducible to the signifier even though it presupposes it. That is why, at the start, there is a whole vocabulary of access to the Symbolic, more or less realised or not, achieved or not. And Lacan evokes, for example, access to a genuine symbolic relation, as if the Symbolic had its chosen ones and that if all speaking beings shared language, they didn’t all share the Symbolic. This vocabulary of access is obviously suspect. It had initiatory implications which many people became mired in but which are unsatisfactory in terms of the requirements of rationality and the ideal of transmission. Over a whole decade, Lacan worked to reduce this idea and to provide a conceptually rigorous definition of the Symbolic.

This definition makes of the Symbolic a specific mode of organisation of the signifier via metaphor, the signifying chain’s synchronicity. The thesis is well known but it requires precision. In fact, Lacan defines the Symbolic through the conjunction of three metaphors, which he introduced in the seminar The Psychoses: the metaphor of the subject and the metaphor of the symptom formalised in “The agency of the letter in the unconscious”, and then the metaphor of the Father in “On a question prior to any possible treatment of psychosis”. The first question to ask is if there is an interdependence between these three metaphors, or even an order of determination.

The metaphor of the symptom is the metaphor of the trauma of the first encounter with jouissance. It is one of the forms of the unconscious as signifying chain, and thus of the unconscious as language, which Lacan reformulates thanks to this linguistic tool, and that Freud called repression and the return of the repressed. This is a shorthand way of saying it, because it is necessary to distinguish, as Lacan did, the use of metaphor in repression and its poetic or rhetorical usage, but the basic thesis remains the same. With his two expressions, “repression” and “return of the repressed”, Freud left in suspense the question of knowing where the repressed element subsists. How did it remain active in readiness to make a return in spite of its disappearance? Freud, who did not publish his “Project for a scientific psychology”, knew there was a problem here. The metaphor of the symptom responds to this question: the signifier remains metonymically latent in the signified of current discourse and remains accessible, decipherable from the excess of signification it produces.

The metaphor of the symptom, identical to repression-return of the repressed, is not for everyone, and in particular, Lacan specifies, not for those subjects for whom the signifier returns in the real, outside the chain (the unconscious revealed, as Freud said), those very same ones for whom, we can hypothesise, the metaphor of the father has failed. The metaphor of the symptom must thus be seen as subordinate to that of the father and excluded in psychosis.

This metaphor of the father also formalises the synchrony of a chain of signifiers, but once these are taken as those of the Oedipus—father, mother—and thus inseparable from the significations of relationships, love, and procreation—beyond the relation to jouissance, it will engage and order the social link between the sexes (man/woman) and the generations (parents/children).

But what is to be said about the supposed subject of the unconscious chain who, if I may say, is in some way its real signified, irreducible as much to the signifiers of the chain as to the significations it engenders? Would it be elusive? Elusive, unless it is a specific metaphor that allows it to be pinned down and which Lacan clearly calls the metaphor of the subject, thanks to which “his ineffable and stupid existence” and the x of his being are inscribed, but not without a cost. Lacan illustrated it in his commentary on Victor Hugo’s poem, “Boaz Asleep”, where the fertility of his “sheaf” does not go without the sickle.

So we have three linked metaphors that allow the metonymic drift of discourse to be anchored, and thus the whole imaginary of signification to be shaped by “induction” from the signifier. From the Sym-bolic to the Imaginary an order of determination is thus established, from which another cliché is born, to be added to the one about access to the Symbolic. The same old cliché of the possible, even necessary, surpassing of the imaginary passions of the analysed subject. A cliché that is maintained in spite of the whole of analytic experience, as well as Lacan’s explicit objections and in total disregard of his later elaborations.

I will leave aside the steps that follow so I can refer to the trajectory’s endpoint, to the moment when Lacan uses the formalism of the Borromean knot. This knot where three rings of string, representing the three di(said)mensions [dit-mensions] of the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real, are knotted as three in such a way that if any one of them is cut the knot is undone.

Re-evaluations

I’m noting the opposition between the new and the old formulas without justifying them for the time being. Knotting is substituted for the metaphoric function. What Lacan first of all divided up with the binary of the metaphor of the father functioning or foreclosed, with its corresponding signifiers—the signifier in the chain of the symptom versus the signifier in the real, and hence outside the chain—is then replaced in the Borromean knot with the opposition: knotted or not knotted in a Borromean way. This is so true that in 1975 he said that the Name-of-the-Father is the Borromean knot. With the addition of the operation of knotting, the symptom—which as a “sexual substitute” in Freud’s terms knots together Symbolic and Real, signifier and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Introduction
• Part I: The Unconscious, Real
• Part II: Analysis Oriented towards the Real
• Part III: A Renewed Clinic
• Part IV: Political Perspectives
• References
• Index