ARGUMENT
By Gabriela Basz and Mónica Gurevicz
Directors of the Study-Days
Translated by Roger Litten
From THE LACANIAN REVIEW ONLINE
30th November & 1st December 2019 – Hotel Panamericano, CABA, Argentina
« The supposition of the unconscious is necessary and legitimate, we possess numerous proofs of its existence … parapraxes, dreams and psychic symptoms » (Freud, « The Unconscious », 1915, SE 14, p. 159, translation modified)
The title of our XXVIII Annual Study-Days is an invitation to practitioners of psychoanalysis: « Let us talk about the unconscious, encore… ».[1] This is a title that seeks to articulate the epistemic, the clinical and the political, both inside and outside the School. We consider that the unconscious, in its different manifestations, is the foundation of our practice and what differentiates it from any (other) therapy. A wager: let us talk about the unconscious, since « it is up to us to trace a path that takes into account the powers of the signifier and, at the same time, the contingency of the real ».[2] A real that, for Lacan, is « the mystery of the speaking body, is the mystery of the unconscious ».[3] In the Lacanian orientation we oppose both the « delirium of an unconscious without symptom » and the « delirium of a symptom without unconscious ».[4]
Of which unconscious must one speak, still?
How do we situate the supposition of the unconscious today? In the register of language or in that of lalangue? How to approach its formation and its laws going from the last teaching to the transferential unconscious?
How do we situate the supposition of the unconscious today? In the register of language or in that of lalangue? How to approach its formation and its laws going from the last teaching to the transferential unconscious?
We know that in a first moment of his teaching, the unconscious for Lacan is structured as a language. This is how he reformulates the Freudian clinical structures, the fundamental compass of our orientation. He renews the validity of the hypothesis of the unconscious, stating that its status is ethical: « Starting with Freud, the unconscious becomes a chain of signifiers that repeats and insists somewhere (on another stage or in a different scene, as he wrote), interfering in the cuts offered it by actual discourse and the cogitation it informs. »[5] Evanescence, stumbling, fissure… at the center of the structure of the unconscious, the causal fault. We are at the level of the sexual reality of the unconscious as a pulsation that opens and closes.
The unconscious also manifests itself at the level of the master’s discourse: it is a question of the unconscious grasped as that which orders, manages, works, weaves, and interpellates us.
Regarding the unconscious at the level of lalangue, Lacan states: « Language is no doubt made up of lalangue. It is knowledge’s hare-brained lucubration about lalangue. But the unconscious is knowledge, a knowing how to do things with lalangue. (…) Lalangue affects us first of all by everything it brings with it by way of effects that are affects. If we can say that the unconscious is structured like a language, it is in the sense that the effects of lalangue, already there qua knowledge, go well beyond anything the being who speaks is capable of enunciating. »[6] Consequently, « the unconscious, if extended to the enigmatic affects, includes the events of the body, which do not have the same structure as the formations of the unconscious ».[7]
Martyr or Unsubscribed?
« The psychotic is a martyr of the unconscious, giving this term martyr its meaning, which is to be a witness. It’s an open testimony. The neurotic is also a witness to the existence of the unconscious, he gives a closed testimony that has to be deciphered. The psychotic, in the sense in which he is in a first approximation an open witness, seems arrested, immobilized, in a position that leaves him incapable of authentically restoring the sense of what he witnesses and sharing it in the discourse of others.[8] This is Lacan’s position in his seminar on the psychoses. Now, we know that many years later, in his elaborations on Joyce, he will propose the expression « unsubscribed from the unconscious ». What are the differences and similarities between martyr and unsubscribed in the field of the psychoses? How do these positions play out in relation to the unconscious in the neuroses? And finally, which unconscious are we speaking about at the end of analysis?
The analyst’s relationship to his unconscious
In his course Analytical Subtleties, Miller says that what should not be forgotten is the relationship of the analyst with his unconscious. « The analyst – whether nominated, self-instituted, experienced or debutant – is in no way exempt from trying, as exemplified by Freud, to clarify his relationship with the unconscious. I do not say to love it… « [9]
On the other hand, unconscious and sinthome are two nonhomogeneous orders. This is what Lacan explores with the knot, for example when in « Joyce the Symptom », he says that « The unconscious is knotted to the sinthome » [10].
The big question is to know how these two orders are present in our practice of analysis, in our conception of the unconscious. The testimonies of the AEs at our Study Days will give an account of the fact that where it speaks is the singular of the jouissance where it does not speak to anyone.
« We are spoken, and, because of this, from the happenstances that drive us, we form something textured. » [11]
Being non-dupe of the unconscious as Freud was, allowing himself to be led by the discourse of his times in relation to the occult, he discovered the unconscious and reached the navel of the dream.[12] What Lacan reveals is that it is not a question of something hidden, but rather that the unconscious is on the surface, causing us to stumble again and again when speaking, making present the absence of sexual relationship.
A psychoanalysis is an experience that consists in weaving a fiction, but at the same time or subsequently, it is an experience that consists in undoing this fiction. It is not a question of the triumph of the fiction, since this lying truth is put to the test in its impotence to resolve the opacity and the weight of the real.
Dear colleagues, we are called on, as we proposed at the beginning of these lines, to trace a path that takes into account the powers of the signifier and, at the same time, the contingency of the real. The unconscious speaks still!
AXES
Transferential unconscious – Real unconscious
• Unconscious and drive
• Unconscious and symptom
• The mystery of the speaking body
• The irreducibility of the unconscious
Subscribers and unsubscribers of the unconscious
• The neurotic’s relationship with his unconscious
• The psychotic’s relationship with his unconscious
• Scientific discourse vs. analytical discourse: delirium of a symptom without unconscious
The analyst and his relationship to the unconscious
• The unconscious at the beginning of the analysis
• The unconscious and the end of analysis
• Love, belief, rejection?
• The unconscious knotted with the sinthome
The unconscious in the 21st century
• Rejection of the unconscious?
• The unconscious at the time of the decline of the Father
• New symptoms in childhood: trans children, depression, panic
• How do we analyse today?
