18 november 1953

 

The study of sense of the texts and on our teaching

 

The search for meaning was practiced, for example by certain buddhist masters with the Zen technique. The master interrupts the silence by anything, a joke, a kick. It belongs to the pupils to themselves to find an appropriate response to the study of  the texts, the master doesn’t teach ex cathedra a readymade science but gives the solution when the students are on the moment of finding it. This teaching is a refusal of a whole system, it discovers a thought through the progress of its movement, but nethertheless readies a system, because it is obliged to present a certain dogmatic face.

 

The thought of Freud is perpetually open to revision. Its an error to reduce it to a words usage : unconscious, super ego… Each notion posses itself its own life; that which is called precisely the dielectic : it has a contradiction, etc. Yet certain notions are for Freud, in a given moment, essential : they provide a response to a question formulated in prior expression. 

 

It doesn’t suffice to make the history of meaning the history of thought and say that Freud has emerged in a scientific century. With the science of dreams, something of a different essence, of a density concretely psychological, is reintroduced, namely meaning. From the scientific point of view, Freud seems to join a thought that is very archaic : to read something in dreams. In response to this, Freud returns a causal argument. But when we interpret a dream, we are filled with meaning, with something that is fundamental to the subject, something in subjectivity, its desires, its relationship to its environment, and life itself.

 

Our task is the reintroduction of the register of meaning, a register that must be restored at its proper level. Brücke, Ludwig, Helmholts, Du Bois-Reymond have already constructed a type of professed faith :

 

“Everything returns to the the physical forces. Those of attraction and of repulsion”

 

When we give ourselves this premise, there is no reason to leave. If Freud has departed it, its because he has found other data: He had dared to attach importance to that which arrived with him, for example the antinomies of his childhood, to his neurotic disorders, to his personal dreams. It’s that which Freud is, and is for us too, a man placed in the centre of the most human contingencies : death, the woman, the father. 

 

This contitues a return to the basics and hardly merits the title of science. It is like a good chef, which knows well how to cut the animal, to remove joints with the least resistance (Plato : Phadrus, 265e). For each structure, we grant a type of conceptualisation which is appropriate to it.  We are nonetheless on the path of a complication and one has a preference to return the simpler monist deduction of the world. Nevertheless, it must be discerned that it isn’t with the knife that we dissect but with concepts : concept that order an original reality. The concepts don’t arise without the human experience, otherwise they will be “well done”. The first denominations are made by setting out with words, these are the instruments to delineate things. Thus all science rests with forever in the night, tangled in language.

 

Lavoisier, for example, at the same time that he was a phylogistician, contributed the concept of oxygen. There is first a human language completely formed for us, which we treat like a a bad instrument. From time to time it performs a reversal : from phylogistry to oxygen.

 

Language must always introduce symbols, mathmatical or otherwise, alongside the contemporary language, it must explain that which we want to do. We are therefore at the level of a certain human exhange, the theraputic one, which Freud found despite his constitution. Like Jones has demonstrated, Freud imposed on himself an asceticism that didn’t pour out on the speculative domain from his strong nature, he submitted to a discipline that was made inside the laboratory : It pulled away from mauvaise langue. But consider the notion of the subject : when one introduces it, one introduces at the same time, the man who you speak and man like the others, it takes from mauvaise langue.

 

From the outset, Freud knew that he will make no progress with analysis of the neuroses unless he analyses himself. The growing importance attributed to the counter transference signifies the reconnaissance of the fact there are two of us in analysis, not just two phenonemonologically, it’s a structure : because of that certain phenomena are isolable, seperable. It’s the structure of subjectivity which has given to man this idea that they are comprehensible to themselves.

 

Being neurotic can help to become a good psychoanalyst : from the start it offered a service to Freud. Like Mr. Jourdain with his writing, we make sense, we make a contra-sense, we make nonsense. Again there we find the lines of structure.

 

Jung too discovered there with a sense of wonder, in the symbols of dreams and religious symbols, certain archetypes specific to the human species. Freud introduces another thing, determinisim specific to this levelicity of structure. Of the ambiguity which one one finds again and again everywhere in his oeuve, for example : the dream is – his desire or the reconnaissance of his desire?

 

Or again, the ego is at one time like a hollow ego, differentiated at its surface at the contact of world of the perception and also, each time that we come across it, that which says “no”, or “I am”, it’s the same that says “we”, which speaks to the others, which expresses itself underneath these different registers.

 

We have followed the techniques of an art of dialogue : like a good chef, we know the joints, the resistances we come across. The super ego is also a law deprived of sense, but in rapport with the problemes of language. If I speak, I say : “you take a right” to allow him to reach an agreement of  his language with mine, I think of that which passes through his head at the moment in which I speak to him : this effort agrees with the communication proper to language.

 

This “you” is so much fundamental to that which intervenes before consciousness. The censure, for example, is intentional, it plays before consciousness, it functions with vigilance. “You” is not a signal, but a reference to the autre, it is order and love. Of the same Ideal-ego is an organism of defence perpetuated by the ego to prolong the satisfaction of the subject. It is also the function the most depressing, in the psychaitric sense of the term.

 

The Id is not reducible to a pure given objective, but to the pulsion of the subject : never an analysis hasn’t succeeded without heights of aggresivity or eroticism. It’s a certain point in the dielectic of progress of analysis, the extreme point of existential recognition : “you are this”, an ideal reached before the end of analysis.

 

This is not  the command of an authentic self, the absence of passion. The ideal analysis is a rendering of the subject capable of remembering the analytic dialogue, of speaking not too early, or not too late, its that which is to aim at a didactic analysis. The introduction of an order of purpose to the human existence, in the domain of sense, which is called the reason. 

 

The discovery of Freud, it’s the rediscovery, on a wasteland, of reason.