CLINICAL STUDY DAYS 4
« INTERPRETATION IN PSYCHOANALYSIS«
New York, New YorkOctober 16-18, 2009
PRESENTATION: The selection of the subject for our yearly Clinical Study Days goes along with the subject chosen for the World Association of Psychoanalysis as the theme of its next Congress, to be held in Paris, in 2010, with the title “Semblants and Sinthomes.” This title gives us two main reference points for today’s clinic, based in the last teachings of Lacan. It refers to the clinic of the Real, the Real of the Symptom, as opposed to the “Semblant” of language, which was formerly developed in Lacan’s teachings from the perspective of a clinic of the Symbolic. This clinical shift requires a review of the subject of interpretation in psychoanalysis, as the passage from a clinic of the Symbolic to a clinic of the Real, necessarily implying many questions about the objective of the analyst’s interventions. Does this new perspective modify the place of the analyst? Can we say that we still work with language and words? Can we say that “Interpretation” is the same as saying the “act of the analyst”? Do we really interpret anything? Which is the relationship of Interpretation today with the notions of repression, resistance, or defense? Do we point out the cause of desire? Is there a new perspective about the drive satisfaction? In L’Etourdit, Lacan differentiates the “saying” from the “said,” establishing that the analyst’s interpretation is usually not a “said,” but a “saying,” which has solidarity with the linguistic notions of statement and enunciation. The “saying” is at the level of the enunciation, as the possible deciphering of the truth, the repressed truth; and, the statement is at the level of the signified, the “said.” It is a way to establish that the analyst’s intervention don’t have a specific meaning, but they add or subtract meaning by using the elements of the analysand’s discourse.
With the time, Lacan realized that even though he worked with the “sayings” to open the closed meanings of the subject’s convictions, the “crossing over” of the Fundamental Fantasy had a final result that was nothing more than a story made of language, a reinterpretation of the old history, but still a story. For the Lacan of the 70’s, already confronted with a new form of the Real, meaningless and raw, it had to be called a “lying truth,” no longer simply the repressed truth. In Seminar XX, (1973), he clearly states that analytical knowledge, the one produced by the analyst’s interventions with language, is nothing but a “lucubration of knowledge” in relation with what he calls lalangue, signifiers outside of the laws of language, the signifying chain and the Symbolic, signifiers which have complicated effects on the body. Interpretation works in the analytical experience in more that one register. There is the interpretation of the unconscious itself as a machine of interpretation, the Symbolic unconscious, where one more possible meaning always remains. But there is also the field of the Real – Lacan mentioned a Real Unconscious at least once – where the speaking being is left alone with the repetition of his autistic jouissance. That is why the new clinic he proposes relates to what he discovered in Joyce’s way, which gave him the orientation of a solution which was not based on truth, meaning, or deciphering, nor even based in transference, but rather a solution where the Sinthome is the way to name the perspective of a cure that deals with unchained signifiers, holes of knowledge and erogenous body zones. Nevertheless, it will be extreme to say that this very last teachings completely negates the former uses of interpretation, it only forces us to redefine them in order not to be hypnotized by the production of meaning. Miller alerts us to carefully treat this “devaluation of knowledge,” as it is necessary to fully appreciate its scope.
FURTHER DETAILS REGARDING CSD4 WILL BE DISTRIBUTED OVER THE WEEKS AHEAD.
