The lamb and the lightning bug

And I would like to begin advancing that my exposition will be divided in two parts: in the first I will give you news of the analytic formation in the part of my country that I know, and in the second part I will highlight an aspect of the analytic formation that I consider a important one, exactly the aspect of the one.

First of all, however, I would like to say thank you for the possibility of being here with you in this round table. The psychoanalyst’s role includes to give an account of the knowledge that the practice conferes in the presence of the community, but as the appropriate opportunites not always are created, I would like to thank and congratulate Aprés-Coup for this happy, opportune and courageous iniciative; in a special way I want to thank Paola Mieli for all her work in the sense of bringing Lacan to United States of America.

To be an analyst it is necessary to be courageous. During all my life I have beem listening to speak of the edulcoration suffered by the psychoanalysis, due to its passage for the EEUU. The adaptation to the american way of live was devastating. And to see somebody to face all the difficulties of a reconstruction work it deserves our greeting, and our company.

In my country, we are exactly heirs of this psychoanalysis sugared by the psychiatry that never got to take it as an another field. For the psychiatry, the psychoanalysis was and it continues being pure and simple an instrument plus, alternative among the so many resources at its disposal. And this carts countless damages to the whole ones, even to the psychiatry, so that is our duty to become clear its differences the more as possible.

The mistake goes from the unconscious concept, which it seems as a substance, to the even concept of analytic formation. It is not rare that a psychoanlyst, mainly among the tied up ones to IPA, exercise in the morning as psychiatrist in a hospital and in the afternoon as psycanalyst in its clinic. – Do you remember when Freud says that the psychoanalysis is not a pair of glasses that is used to read and is removed to go for a walk? And in its business card it will be read, coherently, “Medical-psychoanalyst”. Lately thes anlysts that belong to IPA have also been accepting for formation, people comming from the psychologys’area, and these people after a time are called “Psychologist-psychoanlyst”, epithet also adopted by some lacanian analyst, which began its formation with the psychiatrists, thinking the psychoanalysis as a specialization, some times from the medicine, other times from the psychology. I do not need to tell you that the privilege is the market.

It is clear that the criticism does not search to determinate how each one should collect for its work, if is necessary go to work at labor villas, or to send the chauffeur with the Rols to take the pacients. I don’t want not even to enter in the wel-known lack concept. But what I want to denounce, is the use of these clinics, by the psychoanalitical institutions, in a very specific concept: which them are useful to the analytic formation.

And this mistake does not come just from the analysts linked to IPA . Analysts [self]called lacanians, in accordance with a text that I received some days ago from one institution situated in my country for abouth 2º below the Tropic of Capricorn, they also propose the same practice. My proposition is that the present mistake is consequence of involvement of psychoanalysis among the medical specializations.

All of us know the tradition of the apprenticeship in the body of the other. But to want to transpose this method to the learning of the psychoanalysis is a terrible mistake. Which? To confuse the other, lower-case, of the fellow man, of the specular image, of the real (that doesn’t appear in the image), with the Other, upper-case, of the mother [desirous], of the treasure of the significant, of the symbolic.

In medicine, at least after the coming of the study of the anatomy, the teaching happen on the dead body of the other, on the corpse of the another. But in the psychoanalysis, who should occupy the place of the dead it is the analyst, not the ‘analisant’. And we can ask: won’t it be for this reason that many analysts confuse the place of the dead with the one of the corpse? Believing, for example, that the analyst should not never speak? – The specificity of the learning of the psychoanalysis is that this it is learned on the own body, while body of the Other (upper-case).

When Lacan proposes its four concepts, saying that they form the pudendum of the psychoanalysis, what I understand is that these four concepts are tied to eacht other, forming a structure. It means, if one of the terms is removed, none of them will already be the same before. In this way, if we remove the concept of ‘transfer’, for example, the ‘unconscious’ no longer it will be the same! But which psychoanalyst will not to consider the transfer? – you could ask me. Because Freud said that would be fundamental to consider it to be in the psychoanalysis! O.K.! Now, when one of this “clinics” are proposed, with who the transfer is? With the ‘clinic’ or with the analyst? The distinction between imaginary transfer and symbolic transfer will be taken in consideration? In the measure in what the analyst does make an effort to ‘carry’ the psychoanalysis to the ‘poor communities’, won’t the concept of ‘pulsion’ be confused? Best to give them the cake, since they cannot have bread? And I must tell you that this alusion to the Maria Antonieta's words it's a way to remember that: in portuguese, "give de cake" have de sens to decive.

What I want to mean to you, finally, is that I recognize that is really very difficult to incorporate these concepts. It is possible that we can attribute this to the passage of the psychoanalysis for EEUU , but we cannot pass the rest our lifes projecting this excuse. We need to face this difficulty as being of our responsability and to accept, once and for all that our criticism doesn’t mean to kill the other, and vice-versa.

To give you an example of the mistake type that hapens at my contry, I remembered to show you something much closer: in the first article publishied last year, here in New York, for the magazine Clinical Studies, a teacher, although very interested in the work of Lacan, he seems already in the first line of its article to confuse ‘psychoanalysis’ with ‘psychotherapy’; and when he begins to describe the clinical part of its paper, the distinction among ‘[psychoanalytical] session’ and ‘interview’ seems not to concern him.

Do you remind when Freud says that if you want to include the psychoanalysis among the psychotherapies – worried in get sympathy for his new theory – does he say that it is well, but he asks for not forgetting that it is primum inter pares? Lacan, more enphatic, says that the psychotherapy would be great if it didn’t take to the worst. Why? Because, fundamentally, while the psychotherapist, for ignorance (I want to suppose), he embodies the supposition of knowing of ‘his’ patient, the psychoanalyst that knows about this supposition, considers it as SSS from there to drop. How to reconcile a previous knowledge, a priori, with the senseless, with the a posteriori, with the après-coup of the psychoanalysis it self? Doesn’t this conciliation approach the subject to the field of the religion? Is the indifference between ‘interview’ and ‘session’, also so common in our area, it is not indicative of the lack of recognition of the own characteristics of the transfer? The case in what the analyst becomes accomplice – for identification – with ‘his’ patient’s ‘repetition’?

The analyst’s personal analysis makes herself necessary, among other things so that he can be able to differentiate what it is yours from that belongs to the “analisant”, for more similar than it can be. I belive that the recognition of these differences is fundamental for the recognition of the conceptual differences.

We all know that the psychoanalysis is transmitted by de couch. Now, when Lacan says that in the end of the analysis we have, in the place of the production, an analyst, he is not sayng another thing. If there is a difference between Freud and Lacan, at this time, I would say that is the one of the formalization: Lacan mathematizes the an analyst’s production, but both of them are in accord about the formation of one has on his basis the act of the other.
In the Seminar XVII, of the years 69-70, he writes the mathema of the analyst’s speech

When Lacan compares an analyst’s production with the one of S index 1, with the significant unar, he is proposing the paranoia as starting point . He already makes this in its doctorate thesis when he says that the personality – whose concept highlights the unit – it is the paranoia. In the Seminar II, he specifies that is a post-analytical paranoia, which doesn’t characterize the end but an initial moment of the analysis. In the Proposition du 9 octobre 1967, Lacan says that “The passage from psychoanalysant to the psychoanalyst has a door in which the rest that makes its division is the hinge, because this division is not another that of the subject, whose rest is the cause”. And it continues: “In this turning where the subject sees the safety that lent of this fantasm where is constituted for each one its window on the real, which if perceive, is that the taking of the desire is not except the one of a désêtre” . Without this passage the subject can be fixed in this paranoiac state that there is in megalomania its main characteristic, as well reminds Harari in Discorrer a psicanálise.

To speak of this ‘1’, I wanted to appeal now also to another support erystic.

In the Seminar XI, in the chapter dedicated to the ‘presence of the analyst’, instigated to speak about the essence, Lacan mentions a movement of the subject, of the order of a temporal pulsation that only opens up to turn closing, because “the subject is at no time than punctual and evanescent” . Lacan is treating about a ontological subject of the unconscious and suggests that this matter should connect it self to the theory of Plotino, to the One of Plotino I suppose.

The main contribution of Plotino was a recapitulation of the history of the Greek philosophy, done of triple form, with the speculation on de “One”; with the meditation about the participation and about the “intelligible natures” and its relations with the “sensitive natures”; and still with the exam of the ‘emanation’ idea. In its Novenas one can see the treatment that gives to the Unit: before anything else a principle of perfection and superior reality, because de One should not be conceived exclusively as a numeric expression, but as an existent supreme essence. Different from the One of Plato, conceived as the apex of a hierarchy, but always a measure data, the One of Plotino is limit absence and infinite.

The supremacy of the significant is due to an imperative principle and if the One of Plotino is principle, it is not the only one reality, exactly for being foundation of the diversity. While the One of Plotino is condition of the two; the S1 of Lacan represents the $ for S2. In Lacan we only know about the 1 when it appears in the 2; it means: the 2 is condition of the 1.

On one side, the One lives in absolute and complet tension, picked up on himself and picking up with him the remaining reality, and for other, the distention of this primitive and originary tension produces an emanation. We have two movements then basically: the procession promoter of the emanation and the subsequent withdrawal, called conversion. Opening and closing of the unconscious?

What seems detachable in this alusion of Lacan to Plotino is that this movement of the One seems to much with the analyst activity, with to have an efficacy, it needs to concern the charactheristics of the unconsious. In order that to have only one subject in the analysis, the analyst needs to concern this characteristics, because it is through these movements that it happens the relations among the One and the emanated realities of him; it is like an irradiation, an perilamyiV (Lacan will remember the lucioles, he remembers, as sound better in english, the lightning bugs): the superior irradiates on the inferior without losing anything of its own substance. And it is not like this that Freud refers to the unconscious when he is talking about the substitutes’formation? What its charge, that the besetzung doesn’t get lost?

Arrived the moment of conclude, the moment of epistrojh that it characterizes the closing of the time of understanding reduced to the instant of seeing, to the instant of the qeoria. And this epistrojh also takes the mark of the One, because the time for Plotino should have an own reality respect to the movement, it can’t be only number or measure of the movement, it is pulse, pulsation, opening and closing, different from the importance that has for the Christianism where the time is esential, not as a pulse but as drama, the drama of the eternity wit all its surprising turn of events.

And I end with an epistrophe of The Raven, by Poe, that became classic. Classic, who knows, exactly for this opening of a possibility of reading always renewed of the infinite: