Knotting Seminar, London Society of the NLS

Knotting Seminar, London Society of the NLS, 11
January 2014

Report by Janet Haney

The new-format knotting seminar in London welcomed
Nathalie Laceur, secretary in the NLS Executive and member of the Kring Society
(Belgium), and Susana Huler, from the GIEP society (Israel). Unfortunately, Mikhaël Strakhov, who was due to
come from the group in Russia was unable to join us for the event due to last
minute problems with visas. From our own London Society, Veronique Voruz also
agreed to present a case for the seminar.

In the opening presentation, Nathalie took up a point
from J.-A. Miller’s commentary in Athens[1]
and followed the path back to The Dream of the Dead Father, which, she said,
“is a dream that Lacan uses to bring us something about the question of the
relationship of the subject to desire”. Freud had first used this dream to
illustrate a point at the end of his work on Two Principles of Mental
Functioning[2].
This ‘absurd’ dream later entered an updated version of The Interpretation of
Dreams[3].
Lacan takes up Freud’s discussion at the end of the lesson of 26 November 1958[4].

Nathalie led us through the steps that Lacan took in his
commentary on Freud’s approach. First, he noted that this man did not dream of
his father in order to satisfy the wish to see him. This was not a dream of
wishful thinking. Secondly, he noted that Freud tried to resolve the absurdity
of the dream by assuming that there were signifiers that must be added back
into it, and that this presupposed that there had been signifiers that had
first been subtracted from it. But Lacan had gone on to say “this gives us
strictly nothing from the point of view of what Freud himself designates to us
as the final aim of interpretation, namely the re-establishment of unconscious
desire.” So, if restoring the missing clauses brings nothing new, reasoned
Lacan, then it is their removal that has assumed a positive value, and it was
this that brought new meaning. What was new was the idea of “an elision”, a
process of merging abstract ideas together, which could produce new
signification according to the structure in which it occurs. “The dream, far
from making an allusion to what came before, namely the relationship of the
father with the son (during the father’s lifetime), introduced something that sounded
absurd, and that had a range of completely original meanings on the manifest
level.” In raising the question of structure, Lacan opened the possibility of
considering the question not only via repression but also by rejection, or
foreclosure, and arrived at the idea that there could be a feeling of living
alongside a death.

This gave the seminar a jolt of life, and as Nathalie
paused to question the translation of her words, the mood in the room shifted a
gear. “What would happen here, if we were all fully alive?” she asked us,
paraphrasing Lacan: “you may imagine what you want, but perhaps you do not dare
to even think about it. Though, probably, it doesn’t have the slightest chance
of happening, let alone of being desirable.”

Caring for the other, she underlined, is how Lacan
coined the heart of the neurotic strategy, for to care for the half-dead in the
other ensures that you do not wake the half dead in yourself. 

In her style and presentation of these ideas, Nathalie
created a buzz in the seminar, and proceeded to the conclusion of this section
of the meeting by summarising the difference between Freud’s and Lacan’s
relation to the holes in this dream. “Unlike Freud, Lacan no longer treats the
text on the basis of its holes, but as a text in itself. It says something that
usually goes unnoticed. Lacan reads the text of the dream, together with the
elision of clauses, he takes the absurdity of the dream literally and does not
rush to plug the gaps. Rather, he considers the elision as a means of producing
a new sense, certainly absurd, but new, and in doing so he makes accessible
something that most of the time must remain hidden.”

Then it was Susana Huler’s turn to take the floor, and
to give us another chance to appreciate how this novel tack away from Oedipus
can work out in practice. She spoke about a case in her clinic – a successful
woman who knows a lot about therapy. Susana’s analytic interventions refused to
allow her analysand to find refuge in the sleep of complacent
self-interpretations, and she showed us the vivacity of her own style and her
use of the variable-length sessions to keep her patient alert to life:
standing, to end the session she replied to her patient’s self-interpretation
with “it is not because you love him that he will die [like your father], but because, like everything that exists, he
can cease to exist”. The analysand said (although not in reply to this, but
at another time) “what happens to me here is absurd. But empathy holds us back.
Empathy makes life easy and comfortable, but not effective. I think it helps
that you are not empathetic.”

Finally, Veronique Voruz invited us to consider the way
that three different supervisors kept her alert to the real at stake for her
young patient who in turn responded to one of these reorientations (‘faut pas
rêver’ – get real) by saying something of her intimate truth. The analyst was
so struck by how real this declaration was that she thanked the girl for
telling her something so true about herself, and thus welcomed and validated
it. This then made it possible for the girl to begin to bring further ‘vital’
disclosures, which in turn made it possible for her to talk about her
experience with the real and her body. Later, the girl asked her analyst to
apologise to her previous therapist on her behalf for not having told her these
vital things. Both presentations showed us the parts that can be reached by
this particular orientation of our analytic tradition, the roots of which can
be traced to Seminar 6.

Each case presentation, in its own style, showed the
inventiveness and verve of each analyst (more examples: one went to visit a
school to change their decision about removing the child to a school for
‘rejects’, the other welcomed the analysand’s partner into the session to hear
her accusations against the analyst). And after this invigorating seminar, the
members of the London Society gathered round the table to discuss the results
of the work of the ‘flash cartel’ (or ‘fulgurant’ which also translates as ‘lightning’), which had given a careful
reading to Chapters 20 and 21 of Seminar 6. More energy pulsed through the
group and in writing this now, I am reminded of the exchange in the afternoon
seminar, between analyst and her young analysand: the girl expressed a wish to
get a job where she could bring inanimate objects to life with electricity, the
analyst replied that electricity was to objects what speech was to humans.