From Gallagher’s notes on Lacan’s Seminar XI 4 Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
The unconscious is an effect of language
It is only in the interaction between the living being, the inchoate subject, and the symbolic that the unconscious is constituted.
Much of the current Seminar is taken up with the role of the Vorstellungsrepresentanz, the representative of a representation
But what Lacan chooses to emphasise in his summary is the notion of the unconscious as a temporal pulsation which appears to be more primary than its linguistic structuring.
Now, in practice, what does that mean? In practice that means that the unconscious opens and closes, there is a temporal pulsation and you can see this concretely anytime you listen to somebody speaking, especially in an analytic session.
Somebody said to me no later than yesterday – he is complaining about the fact that he is being dominated by his female partner that ‘the terms of the relationship are always dictated to by Mary’. The intrusion of the little word ‘to’ is a manifestation of another discourse intervening here.
For a moment something opens and then closes to produce a disturbance of the preconscious organisation that governs his speech and it is there that as an analyst you are called on to intervene by revealing to the subject in his own speech something about his position of which he knew nothing – his own dictatorial stance with regard to his female partners. The intervention has to be a punctual one.
The unconscious, as Lacan says, is never going to be a tourist attraction because it is always just closing when you get there.
It is a commonplace in analysis to say that traumatic experiences are repeated, but trauma is precisely defined as what could not be mastered or assimilated or understood. In other words it is around what has failed to achieve a representation, a Vorstellung, that your history revolves.
… let me rather take a simple example from Freud’s Irma dream to which we already referred. Freud is told by a colleague that he is not doing a good job with Irma and he has the sort of reaction of annoyanace that any one of us might have but as he says ‘my disagreeable impression was not clear to me’.
Now that, I believe, is the missed encounter. It is what you cannot put your finger on in a particular situation that evokes one of the missed encounters that have structured your existence, a repetition that puts you in touch with the reality of that lack and gives rise to a desire that in Freud’s case gave rise to the dream that inaugurated psychoanalysis.
Transference, Lacan describes in this Seminar, as something that begins once there is a subject who is supposed to know. As such it is not limited to the analytic situation. If you think that your mother knows everything about your life then there is transference in this sense.
Analysis begins when the person enters into a transference with the analyst and if that does not occur, if the person does not assume, does not presume that you know then they do not come to talk to you and if they do come, they do not stay.
But the crucial moment in the development of the transference is when the presumption of knowledge is transformed into a love, a deceptive love which results in the closure of the unconscious.
Lacan spent a dozen or more sessions in the Seminar on Transference talking about the way, for example, in which Socrates was first approached by his disciples as the one who knew and then became an object of their love.
This transference love was seen by Freud from the beginning as the main agent of change in analysis. This love is deceptive because like all love it is esssentially narcissistic.
It is the assumption that what I am lacking you have and that you as my beloved can make up for what I am lacking. Tn persuading the other that he has what can complement us we assure ourselves of being able to continue to misunderstand what precisely we lack’.
In this Seminar Lacan modifies both the notion of repetition and the notion of transference and distinguishes them from one another. He would say that that notion of transference as simply repetition of a previous situation is a way for the analyst of disavowing his place in the transference and laying the whole responsibility for transference reactions on the shoulders of the analysand.
On the contrary Lacan emphasises that the desire of the analyst is much more a factor in the way the transference develops than the predispositions that the patient brings to the analysis.
For Lacan, Descartes anticipated Freud in his search not for knowledge but for certainty. Descartes subverted all knowledge by his methodical doubt and was left with only the certainty of a subject of thinking from whom all other qualities had been stripped.
Psychoanalysis gives this denuded subject at least the quality of being a desirer transforming the Cartesian Cogito into a Freudian Desidero.
But Freud is a true successor to Descartes when he writes to the Hegelian Putnam: ‘I have never been concerned with any comprehensive synthesis but with certainty alone’ and Lacan states quite categorically that it is certainty rather than hypotheses that should guide the interventions of the psychoanalyst.
The analyst is not the possessor of a general knowledge which is then applied to particular cases. The dictum of Picasso: ‘I do not search, I find’ is quoted approvingly by Lacan.
The analyst is not to construct theories about the subject who is speaking to him, he is there to hear and to reveal to that subject the incontrovertible signifiers which appear concretely in his spoken discourse.
[…]
Mathematics and logic will in fact come to counterbalance linguistics as the second major reference point for Lacan in his continuing attempts to give a scientific status to psychoanalysis and only those of the old guard who were willing to advance into this new territory continued to play an active role in his School.
His analysis of alienation and separation, which curiously is not mentioned here – goes well beyond the popular understanding which applied the concept to almost every social situation in which the individual could not do his or her own thing.
For Lacan the living being is necessarily faced with an alienating choice once they begin to use language. Your money or your life, your alienation in language or your autistic isolation – to become a human being a price must always be paid.
The only way in which we can conquer the little freedom that is open to us is by coming to the realisation that even in the discourse of the Big Other there are gaps which bear witness to a lack and to a desire.