Prelude 10: THE NOT-ALL RESPONSE OF THE ANALYST
Susy Roizin
What does the psychoanalyst respond? "Hello?…" "Good afternoon" …. "Good morning"…, it depends on time, it depends on place… the analyst responds to cell phones, text messages, emails and social networking websites…well, he is not a stranger to the vicissitudes of his time. Our practice does not remain indifferent to the present era of communications and dizzing technological innovations, and it adopts forms that neither Freud nor Lacan could have ever imagines. An analyst, like everyone else, is immersed in the current discourse, a living treasure of signifiers: words, phrases, myths, beliefs and jokes, are born and die, like (the) cells of every living body. The analyst shares the Code of the Language but not without a particular sensitivity to the phenomena of language, one that developed during his training and his own analysis. After verifying that an analysis is possible, the use that the analyst will make of language, will be very different. The relationship of the beginning, forged in service of communication, to make an agreement about the setting and appointments will be transformed into an asymmetrical relation, in which there is only a single subject. Lacan said [1] that the analyst pays with his person to achieve the goals of analysis. Later on he places the analyst in a position of object, cause of desire and condition for the emergence of the unconscious which, strictly speaking, is called on to be created, invented, during the analysis. Lacan evokes the "anterior future" to indicate the advent of the subject of the unconscious at a future time, but it will be located in the structure as having been there from the beginning. This retroactive logical time indicates in the Graph of Desire that a subject is the outcome of a complex journey that represents the encounter between the living being and the symbolic. [2] This movement re-occurs in any moment in which a “subject- effect” is produced in analysis and it is along the repeated twists and turns of the “said” (E-tour-dit). The chronology is not the common sense one and the movement goes against intuition.
Verb tenses, mathematics, logic, topology … Lacan uses many different resources to illustrate what, at first sight, seems to be an impossible encounter: How can the analyst respond to a subject who does not come to consultation, but only comes to advent later on? How to respond to a subject who is just an "effect", who is not the agent of verbalization, but a mere deduction?
And how can an object respond? How is it possible to respond from a position of an object?
In his position as object a, agent of the analytic discourse, the analyst is a custodian of the void in the Other and he places himself as a vascular “stent” that prevents the obstruction of the lack and guarantees the circulation of desire on the side of the analysand. His answer will always be guided by the function called the Analyst's Desire which goes against identification and toward the object of the drive and the desire of the subject.
The analyst can do many things with associative material the analysand brigs. A punctuation, a quote, a question, an enigmatic allusion, a cut, a silence. They are all different modes of interpretation, which is his very response as an analyst, apophantic, namely, a response that goes beyond the sense. The analyst’s interpretation is not hermeneutics, but an act that allows the unknotting of the signifiers that are trapped in the symptom. It’s a “not-all-response” that does not obstruct the possibility that the analysand will be the one who says something really new and that the dimension of “saying would not be forgotten behind what he says”. [3] For that, the lack in the Other should be maintained and the analyst should ensure that his response would never be complete or intended to complete that lack. Once this condition is guaranteed, despite the apparent comedy of miss-encounters, an encounter may be produced. This is not really an encounter of two, but a Moebian continuity, topologically represented by the bottle of Klein.
The analyst "not-all-response” leaves a space outside what is linked in this particular social bond and thus, makes the empty set ex-sist, the Cantorian transinfinite, Godel’s incompleteness, Rusell’s paradoxical element[4] etc., since they are all different means that Lacan used to represent a framed void, which is the location of the object, the drive and jouissance. It is not a boundless infinite, the hole that is drawn in each round of the chain of what is said will join the place of the lack that the analyst so devotedly guards, and will allow the experience of the Real in analysis. We could coin a matheme “ “(Barred Response), as a currency for internal circulation in the VII Encounter in Brazil, which accounts for the “not-all response”, namely that which makes possible an analysis.
After the “de-alienating” and “de-identificantig” Separation takes place, the more valuable answer in the analysis will appear: the one that the parletre himself will give to the lack in the Other, from the singularity of his jouissance.[5]
The analyst and the analysand, are "partners who play like two panels of a rotating screen and how the transference is the pivot of this alternation itself"[6]
Here I send you a link, to view in a tri-dimensional space, with movement, the topology of the Klein bottle shows us the turns of the words around a void and its location without any limit between inside and outside.
…”one can get into its interior as into a mill. Its inside communicates completely, integrally with its outside… the microcosm is not made up of a part of the world that is turned inside-out in the way one turns a rabbit’s skin , the inside which is outside for the microcosm it is well and truly also an outside which is confronted with the inside of the cosmos” [7]
Here it goes: http://www.anfrix.com/2007/01/una-botella-sin-interior-ni-exterior/
Ethics and Clinics. There are not Clinics without Ethics and there is no relevant Ethics for psychoanalysis if not connected with the Clinical work. Lacan never ceased emphasizing the importance of both, in his case presentations in St. Anne, in his seminars, his writings and in his ironies and criticism of analysts and practices that moved away from them. However, there may be some tension between Clinic and Ethics, not only a matter of different gravitation. The challenge to face this question confronts us with the necessity to clarify the differences.
KLINICOS in Greek designated the one who visited the bedridden sick (it is from KLINE, bed). For long periods of history doctors had to help the sick according to the guidelines established in each culture as the main function. In the beginning the physician's role was not necessarily to cure. Rites stipulated the way to ward off the sickness and sometimes the Clinics consisted only of helping them to die. In the Peloponnese, in the ruins of Epidaurus and the Sanctuary of Asclepius an ancient treatment center, including a theater, exercises room and a lounge called Enkoimeterion were discovered, in which the sick used to lie for several days, sleeping. During sleep, so they believed, they received guidance from the gods that gave them the keys for the treatment. Curiously when closing their eyes they came into an inner world that actually connected them with a supposed knowledge, located in the exteriority of Olympus. The term Terapon designated in ancient times, the warrior's companion, the one who carried his weapons and helped him to put on his armor. The word first meant the Muses or a god server. It also meant slave. Later it was used to designate the one that accompanies and provides services and takes care of someone important, and finally the one who treats a sick person. “Therapeutic” has today become a strictly curative treatment of adapting the patient to ideal health, based on an objective and universal constituted knowledge. The clinics of psychoanalysis is not a clinical of observation but rather of listening and reading. This is not a patient lying on a Klyne, a bed, but of a subject lying on a couch, which serves to limit and reduce the imaginary that experience inevitably carries. The imaginary often covers what is the actual guide in psychoanalysis, that is, what remain beyond the images, gestures and the Ego clothing. [8] An Ethics, is generally associated with doing good, doing things well or doing The Good … idea that confuses ethics with morality. Lacan refers to ethics from its etymology Ethos that connects with the idea of action, a way to conduct oneself, to move through life. There are several movements to consider, but the main one is that which indicates the orientation of the cure. Lacan follows Freud in the position that excludes the intention to heal at all costs (furor curandis). He recommended not to be too quick to calm the patient and also to avoid what he called the patient's emotional reeducation. Lacan questioned the push to adaptation and to identification with the master signifiers that rule in a given discourse and constitute a model of health and welfare. When Lacan said that Ethics was “acting according to desire"[9] he placed us in front of an apparent paradox. The desire of the analyst, is not a desire for something, is not something to wish for his patient. Desire, unarticulated, is intransitive by definition, because a desire for something, is actually a Demand. The precise indication of Lacan is "not to respond to demand”, what should not be confused with "to frustrate demand”, which leaves the analyst trapped, out of step, making rounds in the “infernal circle”. The ethical act is the one that does not lose its compass, it is well-oriented, constantly aiming at something that is not yet petrified by phantasm but the analysand is not fully aware about. The constantly enhanced psychotropic drugs, relaxing treatments, behaviorist solutions, suggestion, all of these saturate the market with instant offers that are a fatal temptation for the neurotic’s passion. It would be much better for him to take a walk across some archeological sites.
The next VII meeting is an opportunity to review our responses, with colleagues who come to Río to talk and keep the analytic discourse alive, nourishing it with our clinical experience and making it beat as a heart when we think together about our Ethics.
April 2012
[1] The Direction of the Cure (1958) J. Lacan
[2] The subversion of the subject (1960) J. Lacan
[3] L’etourdit (1972) J. Lacan
[4] ibid
[5] The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis. Sem 11, (1964) J. Lacan
[6] The proposition of October (1967) J. Lacan
[7] Crucial problems for psychoanalysis (1964-5) J. Lacan
[8] The Ego and the id, S. Freud
[9] Ethics, Sem 7 (1960)
