The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Freud's Papers on Technique (Seminar I)

312 Pages·1991·23.09 MB·English

by  Jacques Lacan

THE SEMINAR OF
JACQUES LACAN
Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller
BOOK I
Freud's Papers on Technique 1953-1954
TRANSLATED WITH NOTES BY
John Forrester
S"
WWNORTON & COMPANY
NEW YORK LONDON
Originally published in French as Le Séminaire I
by Les Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1975 and
© Les Editions du Seuil 1975
English translation © Cambridge University Press 1988
First American edition 1988
First published as a Norton paperback 1991
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Catahging4n-Publication Data
Lacan, Jacques, 1901-
Freud's papers on technique, 1953-1954.
(The Seminar of Jacques Lacan; bk. 1)
Translation of: Les écrits techniques de Freud.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Psychoanalysis. 2. Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939.
I. Title. II. Series: Lacan, Jacques, 1901- .
Séminaire de Jacques Lacan. English; bk. 1.
BF173.L14613 bk. 1 150.19'5 s 87-23972
[15019'2]
ISBN 0-393-30697-6
WW Norton & Company Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y 10110
WW Norton & Company Ltd., 10 Coptic Street ,London WCIA IFU
Printed in the United States of America
4 5 6 7 8 9 0
CONTENTS
page
Translators' note vii
Abbreviations ix
Overture to the Seminar 1
THE MOMENT OF RESISTANCE
I Introduction to the commentaries on Freud's Papers on
Technique 7
II Preliminary comments on the problem of resistance 19
HI Resistance and the defences 29
IV The ego and the other 38
V Introduction and reply to Jean Hyppolite's presentation of
Freud's Verneinung 52
VI Discourse analysis and ego analysis 62
THE TOPIC OF THE IMAGINARY
VII The topic of the imaginary 73
VIII The wolf! The wolf! 89
IX On narcissism 107
X The two narcissisms 118
XI Ego-ideal and ideal ego 129
XII Zeitlich-Entwicklungsgeschichte 143
BEYOND PSYCHOLOGY
XIII The see-saw of desire 163
XIV The fluctuations of the libido 176
XV The nucleus of repression 187
v
vi Contents
MICHAEL BALINT'S BLIND ALLEYS
XVI Preliminary interventions on Balint 203
XVII The object relation and the intersubjective relation 2*^
XVia The symbolic order 220
SPEECH IN THE TRANSFERENCE
XIX The creative function of speech 23'
XX De locutionis significatione 2^'
XXI Truth emerges from the mistake 261
XXII The concept of analysis 273
Appendix: A spoken commentary on Freud's Verneinung,
by Jean Hyppolite 289
Bibliography 299
Index 303
TRANSLATORS' NOTE
1. What follows is a complete translation of the seminar that Jacques Lacan
gave in the course of a year's teaching within the training programme of the
Société Française de Psychanalyse. The French text was prepared by Jacques-
Alain Miller in consultation with Jacques Lacan, from the transcriptions of the
seminar. Certain minor errors in the text have been corrected in the
translation, and will be incorporated in later editions of the French text. All
notes are supplied by John Forrester (who also compiled the index), in order to
clarify questions of translation and supply limited bibliographical information.
2. We have aimed at an exact translation. This involves, however, finding
appropriate colloquial English to correspond to a text which is both informal
and complex - a rendition of Lacan's spoken French. The translation aims at
being both informal and literary, corresponding as faithfully as possible with
the original text.
3. As we needed to pay additional attention to the German background of
many psychoanalytic concepts, in many passages the requirements of three
languages had to be taken into account. There has been considerable debate in
French analytic circles about the translation of Freud's works, in large part
stimulated by these seminars of Lacan's, which, until the early 1960's, were
advertised as 'Commentaries on the texts of Freud'. In recent years the
admirable English edition of Freud prepared by James Strachey has also been
the subject of discussion and criticism in the English-language world.
Anticipating the decision of the next Freud translators, we have made one
decision which follows the French translations of Freud at the expense of
Strachey's: where 'investir, investi investissement' appears in the French text,
corresponding to the German 'besetzen, besetzt, Besetzung', we have translated
this by Invest, invested, investment', instead of 'cathect, cathected, cathexis'.
We have also translated 'pulsion', corresponding to 'TrieV, by 'drive' and
'instinct', corresponding to 'Instinkt', by Instinct'; this decision is hardly
vii
viii Translators' note
controversial. Both of these decisions accord with Schneiderman's practice.1
Other decisions are pointed out in the notes.
4. We have paid considerable attention to the practices of previous translators
of Lacan, in particular Anthony Wilden,2 Alan Sheridan,3 Stuart
Schneiderman and Jacqueline Rose,4 in the hope that some consistency in the
English rendition of Lacan can be achieved. This Seminar, together with
Seminar II, which is being published simultaneously, was worked on by both
translators so as to produce uniformity in both terminology and style. In
attempting to follow our predecessors, we came to the conclusion that it was
often more accurate to render one single French term by a variety of English
terms. This was made all the more necessary in view of the fact that Lacan's
'technical' vocabulary was, throughout his life, always tentative and decidedly
in flux. Nonetheless, the translations of the following terms have, or have
acquired, such importance in discussion of Lacan's work that it may be useful
to point them out, together with certain differences between our translation
and that of other Lacan translators.
FRENCH TERM PREVIOUS TRANSLATORS THIS TRANSLATION
parole Word (Wilden) speech
signification signification (Sheridan)
> signification or significance
meaning (Schneiderman)
sens sense (Schneiderman)
> meaning
meaning (Sheridan)
signifier to mean or to signify
travail labour or work
5. In the original text, words in a language other than French were printed in
italics. We have followed this practice, indicating in notes which words in the
original appeared in English. An exception to this rule is made for the terms 'ego'
and *moi\ Both these terms are translated in this text by 'ego'; when italicized, it
is 'ego' in the French; when it is in roman face, the original word is *moi\
JOHN FORRESTER
SYLVANA TOMASELLI
Cambridge, June 1986
1 In Returning to Freud: Clinical Psychoanalysis in the School of Lacan, New Haven and London:
Yale University Press. 1980. pp. vii-viii.
2 Anthony Wilden, trans, and éd.. The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in
Psychoanalysis, by J. Lacan. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968.
5 Jacques Lacan. Écrits: a Selection, London: Tavistock Publications, 1977; Jacques Lacan, The
Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho­
analysis. 1977.
4 Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, eds., Feminine Sexuality. Jacques Lacan and the École
Freudienne, translated by Jacqueline Rose, London: Macmillan, 1982.
ABBREVIATIONS
E Lacan, Écrits, Paris: Seuil, 1966. Where there are two numbers,
separated by /, the first number refers to the page number in the
French edition, the second to the page number in Écrits; a Selection,
translated by Alan Sheridan, London: Tavistock, 1977.
Sem Lacan, Le Séminaire, Paris: Seuil, 1973- (26 volumes).
SB Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud (24 volumes), edited by James Strachey in collaboration
with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, London:
The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1953-74.
GW Freud, Gesammelte Werke (18 volumes), London: The Hogarth Press,
1940-68.
Stud Freud, Studienausgabe (10 volumes with an unnumbered
Ergânzungsband, abbreviated as Erg), Frankfurt am Main: Fischer
Verlag, 1969-75.
Origins Sigmund Freud, The Origins of Psychoanalysis. Letters to Wilhelm Fliess,
Drafts and Notes 1887-1902, ed. Marie Bonaparte, Anna Freud, Ernst
Kris, authorised translation by Eric Mosbacher and James Strachey,
introduction by Ernst Kris, London: Imago, 1954.
Robert Paul Robert, Dictionnaire Alphabétique & Analogique de la Langue
Française, Paris: S.N.L., 1977.
The interventions of participants in the Seminar have on occasion been
abbreviated by Jacques-Alain Miller; these omissions are indicated by dotted
lines.
ix
OVERTURE TO THE SEMINAR
The master breaks the silence with anything - with a sarcastic remark, with a
kick-start.
That is how a buddhist master conducts his search for meaning, according to
the technique of zen. It behoves the students to find out for themselves the
answer to their own questions. The master does not teach ex cathedra a ready
made science; he supplies an answer when the students are on the verge of
finding it.
This kind of teaching is a refusal of any system. It uncovers a thought in
motion - nonetheless vulnerable to systématisation, since it necessarily
possesses a dogmatic aspect. Freud's thought is the most perennially open to
revision. It is a mistake to reduce it to a collection of hackneyed phrases. Bach of
his ideas possesses a vitality of its own. That is precisely what one calls the
dialectic.
Certain of these ideas were, at a given moment, indispensable to Freud,
because they supplied an answer to a question that he had formulated
previously, in other terms. Hence one only gains a sense of their value by
relocating them in their context.
But it is not enough to do some history, the history of thought, and to say that
Freud lived in a scientistic century. Rather, with The Interpretation of Dreams,
something of a different essence, of a concrete psychological density, is
reintroduced, namely, meaning.
From the scientistic point of view, Freud appeared at this point to revert to the
most archaic thinking - reading something in dreams. He later returns to
causal explanations. But when one interprets a dream, one is always up to
one's neck in meaning. What is at issue is the subjectivity of the subject, in his
desires, in his relation to his environment, to others, to life itself.
Our task, here, is to reintroduce the register of meaning, a register that must
itself be reintegrated on its own level.
Briicke, Ludwig, Helmholtz, Du Bois-Reymond had instituted a kind of
1
2 Overture to the Seminar
pledged faith - everything reduces down to physical forces, those of attraction
and repulsion. Once one takes these as premises, there's no reason to go beyond
them. If Freud did go beyond them, it is because he also took on others. He dared
to attach importance to what was happening to him, to the antinomies of his
childhood, to his neurotic problems, to his dreams. That is why Freud is for us
all a man beset, like anyone else is, by all the contingencies - death, woman,
father.
This represents a return to origins, and barely warrants being called science.
What holds good in the art of the expert cook, who knows how to joint a bird, to
disjoint it with as little resistance as possible, is also true for psychoanalysis. We
know that there is a method of conceptualisation proper to each structure. But
since this leads to complications, one prefers to cling to a monistic notion of a
deduction of the world. That's how one goes astray.
One has to realise that we do our dissecting with concepts, not with a knife.
Concepts have their specific order in reality. They do not emerge out of human
experience - if they did, they would be well made. The first appelations arise out
of words themselves, they are instruments for delineating things. Hence every
science remains in darkness for a long time, entangled in language.
At first there is language, already formed, which we use as we would a very
poor instrument. From time to time, reversals occur - from phlogiston to
oxygen, for instance. Lavoisier introduces the right concept, oxygen, at the
same time as his phlogistic. The root of the difficulty is that you can only
introduce symbols, mathematical or otherwise, by using everyday language,
since you have, after all, to explain what you are going to do with them. You are
then at a certain level of human exchange, the level of healer in this instance.
So is Freud, despite his denial. But, as Jones has demonstrated, he imposed upon
himself right from the beginning the discipline of not dabbling in the
speculation to which his nature inclined him. He submitted himself to the
discipline of the facts, of the laboratory. He distanced himself from the wrong
language.
Let us now turn to the notion of the subject. When one brings it in, one brings
in oneself. The man speaking to you is a man like any other - he makes use of
the wrong language. Oneself is then at issue.
Thus, Freud knew, from the beginning, that he would only make progress in
the analysis of the neuroses if he analysed himself.
The growing importance attributed today to counter-transference means
that it is a recognised fact that in analysis the patient is not alone. There are two
of us - and not only two.
Phenomenologically, the analytic situation is a structure, that is to say that it
is only through that that certain phenomena are isolable, separable. It is
another structure, that of subjectivity, which gives human beings the idea that
they are comprehensible to themselves.
Overture to the Seminar 3
Hence being neurotic can help one become a good psychoanalyst, and at the
beginning, it helped Freud. Like Monsieur Jordain with his prose,1 we make
sense, nonsense, we misunderstand. But the lines of structure still had to be
found there. Jung as well, to his own amazement, rediscovers, in the symbols of
dreams and religions, certain archetypes, proper to the human race. This is also
a structure - but differing from the analytic structure.
Freud introduced the determinism proper to this structure. Hence the
ambiguity that is to be found throughout his corpus. For example, is a dream
desire or the recognition of desire? Or, again, the ego is on the one hand like an
empty egg, differentiated at its surface through contact with the world of
perception, but it is also, each time we encounter it, that which says no or me, I,
which says one, which speaks about others, which expresses itself in different
registers.
We are going to employ the techniques of an art of dialogue. Like the good
cook, we have to know what joints, what resistances, we will encounter.
The super-ego is a law deprived of meaning, but one which nevertheless only
sustains itself by language. If I say you turn to the right, it's to allow the other to
bring his language into line with mine. I think of what goes through his head
when I speak to him. This attempt to find an agreement constitutes the
communication specific to language. This you is so fundamental that it arises
before consciousness. Censorship, for example, which is intentional, neverthe­
less comes into action before consciousness, functioning with vigilance. You is
not a signal, but a reference to the other - it is order and love.
In the same way, the ego-ideal is an organism of defence established by the
ego in order to extend the subject's satisfaction. But it is also the function that
depresses most, in the psychiatric meaning of the term.
The id is not reducible to a pure and objective given, to the drives of the
subject. An analysis never leads to specifying a given quantity of aggressivity or
erotism. The point to which analysis leads, the end point of the dialectic of
existential recognition, is - You are this. In practice this ideal is never reached.
The ideal of analysis is not complete self mastery, the absence of passion. It is
to render the subject capable of sustaining the analytic dialogue, to speak
neither too early, nor too late. Such is the aim of a training analysis.
The introduction of an order of determinations into human existence, into
the domain of meaning, is what we call reason. Freud's discovery is the
rediscovery, on fallow ground, of reason.
18 November 1953
The rest of this session is missing, as are all those sessions from the end of 1953.
1 7/ y a plus de quarante ans que je dis de la prose sans que j'en susse rien* ('I have been speaking prose
for more than forty years without knowing it') - Molière, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, M. Jourdain,
Act II, Scene IV.