A faithless faithfulness?

It is easily verifiable that what is expected of the psychoanalyst is a faithfulness to his discipline despite the fact that it doesn’t put forward any agency able to maintain it. Not even a practical result, moreover, since either cure or failure may remain independent remainders of this agency. Indeed the usual thing is to take support from he who was one’s own analyst, his way of doing things or his writings. However it is just as easily their repudiation, going over to one of the enemies of the ex-loved one, or even to an entirely different practice. To say it thus is to summarise the history of the movement around Freud, and closer to home, Lacan.

Thus, as for me, I have see it all, like a flock of sparrows dispersing, looking for a more secure perch, afraid of experiencing solitude and the responsibility of uncertainty. I have in mind that eminent man, a Jesuit by education, in other words well-armed, rigorous in treatment as well as in his learning, only then to go over to haptonomy. An individual problem one can say without being wrong, except its multiplication in various forms makes one think of disappointment in love, perhaps more alienating in its effects than the original neurosis.

Lacan lui-même après tout ne semble-t-il pas passer ses derniers séminaires à maugréer contre une affaire dont il n’arrive pas à se démêler, outre que les résultats pratiques semblent manquer au rendez-vous ? « Ce qui a été mis en place par la parole, doit pouvoir se démolir par la parole » dit-il. Est-ce si sûr, ou bien aurions-nous affaire à une fixation dont la malformation est devenue gardienne de la vie même ? Maltordue peut-être mais tordue tout de même, c’est-à-dire sauve.

After all, didn’t Lacan himself seem to spend his last seminars grumbling about a matter from which he could extricate himself, in addition to the lack of practical results? “What was put into place through speech must be able to be destroyed through speech”, he said. Is that really so, or is it a question of a matter whose malformation has become the guardian of life itself? Badly twisted perhaps, but twisted all the same, in other words intact.

I say all that in the intellectual comfort of our association, without fear of disturbing it.