Review of The Language of the Self
- 1. 1 BOOK REVIEW Jacques Lacan (1968, 1976). The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis, translated with notes and commentary by Anthony Wilden (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press). INTRODUCTION Jacques Lacan’s address on the ‘function of language in psychoanalysis’ was delivered in 1953; it is commonly referred to as the Rome Report or the Discours de Rome. This paper was an attempt to reorient psychoanalysis in the direction of the theoretical insights that were made possible by the advent of structural linguistics. Wilden’s translation of Lacan’s paper is accompanied by a translator’s introduction, a prefatory note, exhaustive notes, and a paper titled ‘Lacan and the Discourse of the Other’ that provides an in-depth theoretical background to French psychoanalysis. Jacques Lacan’s main paper is itself in three parts. This is one of the most difficult papers to summarize in the Lacanian canon. So what I will do in this review is to highlight some of the main points raised by both Jacques Lacan and Anthony Wilden as a way of giving readers a feel for what the linguistic interpretation of Freudian psychoanalysis amounts to. The first part of Lacan’s paper differentiates between the ‘empty word’ and the ‘full word’ in analytic discourse; the second part is about the relationship between the symbol and structure of language; and the third part is about the role of temporality in analytic interpretation. The significance of this paper is related to the fact that a great deal of Lacanian theory is available here in an embryonic form. It would not be an exaggeration to say that readers who engage repeatedly with this paper will be able to unpack the main precepts of the Lacanian doctrine by thinking through the implications of what Lacan means by ‘language’ and the ‘discourse of the Other.’ Or, to put it simply, what is really at stake for Jacques Lacan is the definition of the subject and the duration of the analytic hour since these concepts had a polemical aspect when Lacan formulated
- 2. 2 them in 1953. Lacan’s main contention at the level of method was that the duration of the analytic session should vary in order to precipitate the disclosures of the unconscious. If the analytic hour is always of the same duration, it will have the effect of making the patient respond to the treatment from the locus of the obsessional. Another important Lacanian preoccupation is with the pedagogical method that is appropriate for training the next generation of analysts and the role that the founding texts of Sigmund Freud will play in their ‘formation.’ For Lacan, the founding texts of analysis cannot be done away with; they have the status of the scriptural or the literary. In other words, reading Freud is not something optional; it is essential to the definition of what it means to train as an analyst; hence Lacan’s emphasis on the ‘poetics of the Freudian corpus.’ THE LACANIAN ORIENTATION Lacan’s attempt at a theoretical reorientation in his ‘return to Freud’ involves three important phenomena that constitute the ‘scientific activity’ of analysis; they include ‘the function of the imaginary,’ the libidinal structure of object relations, and the function of the counter-transference in clinical analysis. The main insights about the order of the imaginary are related to the analysis of children and the theory of the mirror phase; the model of object relations is related to existential phenomenology; and the role played by the counter-transference is explored in the context of the ‘formation of the analyst.’ The need for the theoretical reorientation stems from the fact that psychoanalytic technique had become increasingly obsessional in form. Lacanian psychoanalysis is an attempt to forge the kind of clinical interventions that can break through obsessional defences and hystericize the patient. The meta- psychological implication of this obsessional approach to treatment is that the relationship between the unconscious and sexuality will not be adequately understood or explored in the treatment of the neuroses. In order to appreciate the insights of psychoanalysis in these areas, it is important for analysts in training to read Sigmund Freud; that is why Lacan is keen to point out ‘that in order to handle any Freudian concept, reading Freud cannot be considered superfluous.’ EMPTY SPEECH AND FULL SPEECH An important goal of the Lacanian orientation then is to teach readers how to approach the founding texts of psychoanalysis and understand the difference between the ‘empty speech’ of the patient who subtly resists analysis and the ‘full word’ of the patient that constitutes a moment of revelation in the treatment. A good example of that is the instance when Lacan was being subject to a lecture by a patient on the poetics of Dostoevsky. Lacan’s intervention brought out the fact that underneath the lecture the patient was really suffering the fantasy of an anal pregnancy. This revelation would not have become possible if Lacan had let the
- 3. 3 patient hold forth endlessly from the locus of the obsessional. It was Lacanian punctuation which is referred to below as a ‘metric break’ that made this clinical revelation possible; hence the Lacanian preoccupation with the variable analytic session whose duration cannot be predicted by the patient at the beginning of the analytic hour. The basic misunderstanding of Lacan’s experiments with the duration of the session was a consequence of dubbing them ‘short sessions’ since they were shorter than the conventional analytic hour, but that was not always the case since they could be longer as well. There is a precedent for this model of clinical interpretation in the case histories of Sigmund Freud himself: Freud understood only too well that each patient and neurosis makes its own demands on the clinician. That is why Freud not only attempted his own version of the variable session but also used deadlines to hystericize obsessional patients during their treatment. LACANIAN PUNCTUATION The analyst’s response to the patient’s discourse can be distinguished between that which is constituted as a ‘chronometric break’ and that which can be structured as a ‘metric break.’ It is the latter that serves the role of punctuating the discourse of the patient prompting him to wonder why the analyst chose to break the session at a given point in time. So the insights generated by the Lacanian method are not necessarily specific to an analytic session; they often emerge in the gap between the sessions; and in a form of analytic hindsight that is known as ‘deferred action.’ This process of ‘retroactive causality’ makes it possible to reorder contingent events in the patient’s life and give it a sense of existential necessity. This narrative reordering of events in time is necessary in order to get the patient to work-through his free- associations on the couch. So even when the patient thinks back to the memories associated with the instinctual stages of his development, they are mediated by the signifier (i.e. the symbolic function of language). What is meant by the term ‘instinctual’ in human beings however is different from the function of the instinctual in animals. The main difference then is that it is not possible to take a reductive approach to the instinctual given that human beings have an unconscious and animals do not. REPRESSION AND THE UNCONSCIOUS The analytic orientation must not be conflated with the ‘ethological’ since human beings are subject to the discourse (and the desire) of the symbolic Other. What Lacan locates then in the locus of the Other is the symbolic function of language itself. This is the main takeaway from his invocation of the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the structural anthropology of Claude-Lévi Strauss
- 4. 4 repeatedly in his theory of the subject.1 In other words, it is important to understand why the differential function of language becomes a crucial insight in delineating the structure of the unconscious and why the universality of the incest taboo within kinship systems in structural anthropology becomes the crucial insight in delineating the function of repression. Furthermore, Freud’s attempts to relate the the terms ‘repression’ and ‘unconscious’ in his meta-psychology finds a linguistic translation in the theory of the Lacanian subject. Freud’s main insight was that everything that is repressed is unconscious, but not everything that is unconscious is repressed.2 Nonetheless the repressed constitutes the ‘prototype’ of the unconscious since failures in repression constitute the main source of a neurosis; symptoms in analysis themselves are derivatives of the repressed; they relate to failures at the level of primary or secondary repression.3 Lacanian punctuation then is an attempt to mark the significance of a particular revelation by cutting the session in a way that prompts the patient to reflect on its significance since the patient knows that punctuation takes the form of a metric break and does not represent merely the completion of the analytic hour that he has paid for. THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER The analytic transaction however is not reducible to the analyst and the patient but is mediated by the discourse of the symbolic Other. The unconscious and its formations then are to be understood as akin to the structure of a language; hence the Lacanian preoccupation with crossword puzzles as a way of learning to interpret the disclosures of the unconscious. Lacan also invokes terms like ‘rebus, ideography and hieroglyphs’ – all of which constitute forms of writing to which the formations of the unconscious are compared. One of the difficulties in reading this early text is that it is not clear which of these linguistic comparisons will carry the day in identifying the structure of the unconscious. So, for instance, is the term ‘language’ to be associated with spoken or written language? And, furthermore, what is the exact difference between ‘langue’ and ‘parole’ in the context of a patient’s free- associations? This is a distinction that Jacques Lacan takes up again in his seminars; the main difficulty in reading Lacan is to know when he is at the level of langue and 1 See, for instance, Patrick Wilcken (2011). ClaudeLévi-Strauss: Poet in the Laboratory (London: Bloomsbury) for an exposition of these themes. 2 Sigmund Freud (1915). ‘Unconscious,’ translated by James Strachey and edited by Angela Richards, On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 11 (London: Penguin Books, 1991), pp. 167-222. 3 Sigmund Freud (1915). ‘Repression,’ translated by James Strachey and edited by Angela Richards, On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 11 (London: Penguin Books, 1991), pp. 139-158.
- 5. 5 when at the level of parole and what the implications are for a theory of the subject that is constituted in terms of the signifier and the desire of the Other.4 Likewise, it is important to be attentive to the topological difference between the ‘desire of the subject’ and the ‘desire of the Other;’ the obsessional desires mainly from the locus of the subject and the hysteric mainly from the locus of the Other. These distinctions are important not only in analytic theory but also to situate the patient’s discourse in the Lacanian clinic. This follows from the fact that the analytic symptom is resolved at the level of linguistic analysis; the proof of this contention relates to the fact that the symptom is subject to not only semantic ‘over-determination,’ but the meaning of a symptom is related to the clinical structures to which it belongs. An obsessional and a hysteric may share the same symptom, but the meaning of the symptom will vary depending on the clinical structure, the underlying fantasy, and the forms of jouissance that coagulate around the symptom. That is why neither the meaning of a symptom nor the meaning of a mnemic symbol in dreams can be looked up in a lexicon. The meaning, if any, of these psychic formations is subject to the specific contexts in which they appear and the existential question that the patient is posing to or in the symbolic Other. So, for instance, the classic obsessional question is: ‘Am I alive or dead?’ whereas the classic hysterical question is: ‘Am I a man or a woman? That is why as Jacques-Alain Miller is fond of putting it, the symptom must always be related to the underlying fantasy; only then will the analyst be able to identify the specific context in which it appears and the libidinal function that it serves in the patient’s neurosis. LACANIAN INNOVATIONS Lacan introduces a number of innovations in psychoanalysis; they include the model of communication in play in psychoanalysis which is not reducible to sharing information. Lacan argues that the main point of communication is to ‘evoke’ a response in the interlocutor and not merely to inform the listener. In other words, what the subject really seeks is a response of the Other. Likewise, the structure of communication or even a discourse is subject to a libidinal economy and not just a symbolic economy. So, for instance, an entire discourse can take ‘on a phallic- urethral, anal erotic, or even an oral-sadistic function.’ These are some of the ways in which a discourse can become subject to erotization. Furthermore, Lacan introduces the distinction between ‘the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic’ as the fundamental orders of cognition. Lacan argues that such a distinction has not been made before; and, furthermore, the onus on the reader is to re-read Sigmund Freud keeping these distinctions in mind. That is why it is important to distinguish between reality and the real; the former arises at the confluence of the imaginary and 4 Jacques Lacan (1973, 1977). The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, translated by Alan Sheridan, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller (London: Penguin Books), pp. 17-52.
- 6. 6 the symbolic whereas the latter is that which resists complete incorporation in the symbolic. Another definition of the real is that it is what is real to the subject and therefore cannot be symbolized in its entirety; the association of trauma with the concept of the real relates to the fact that there is always something residual which has to be worked through; the symptom therefore partakes of the real; it cannot be wished away. And, finally, Lacan explains the role played by temporality in the act of interpretation. TIME IN PSYCHOANALYSIS The crucial dimensions of temporality pertain to the duration of the total analysis, the duration of particular sessions, the question of whether all sessions should be of the same length, or whether the analyst is seeking recourse to the model of variable sessions. Lacan also differentiates between the ‘period of understanding’ in analysis and the ‘time to conclude’ a given session or the analysis itself. The main difference between the obsessional and hysterical approaches to time is that the obsessional takes too long to decide and the hysteric takes too little time to decide. A well trained analyst will take just as much time as is required without exhibiting symptoms of delays and postponements like the obsessional or act too soon like the hysteric. The termination of the treatment can either follow as a natural course of events or it can be predetermined as Freud used to do every now and then to give his patients a sense of urgency to get on with it. Using the deadline method even before or shortly after the analysis begins can be an effective way to hystericize the discourse of the patient and precipitate the disclosures of his unconscious. Freud’s experiments with analytic technique, the timing of interpretations, and the duration of analysis are taken even further by Lacan to avoid the obsessional pattern in which the patient is able to predict what will happen in a given session or in the course of treatment. It is important to remember that Lacan took analysis quite seriously because the analyst is located ‘as a mediator between the man of care and the subject of absolute knowledge.’ Lacan concludes his Discourse of Rome with an invocation of the Word as serving essentially the function of a Gift, since it is the Word which makes us both human and divine. He does this by invoking the message of Prajapati, the god of thunder from the Upanishads; Prajapati teaches the Devas the importance of Damyata, Datta, and Dayadhvam which translate as ‘submission, gift, and grace.’ SHIVA KUMAR SRINIVASAN