Guy Le Gaufey

The analyst as an effect of the fundamental rule

I want to talk about the analyst as an effect to discourage anybody who might be
interested in the direction of the treatment from thinking that the analyst would have to take over
everything to be the man in the driving seat.
Nevertheless, on this matter, everybody agrees : he has to direct. But what ?
Has he to direct his patient through the numerous difculties of life ? It's wellknown how
Freud himself would have taken his decision on this matter : the analyst is not supposed to be
directing his patient's life, even when everything seems to be going rather wrong. But,
whenever Freud's authority is summoned, we'd better come back to his text. For instance, in
The new therapeutic paths (an article dated 1918), he noted that, contrary to the swiss
school (listen : jungiens), the freudian analyst should not be a guide to his patient. But he
immediately added that, from time to time, the analyst, in fact, is impelled to associate holding
and analytic work. Moreover, in the same text, Freud pointed out that phobic people, for
instance, are almost impossible to cure if the analyst just expects that the treatment will work
out by itself. In such a case, he wrote, we must do otherwise, that is to say not to let the
patient go on with such satisfactions linked with all his avoiding behaviours. The analyst has
therefore to intervene to look after the treatment, to protect it from a squandering of energy
dissipated in these kinds of symptoms which stay away from analysis ; because the main part
of the libido must then be cut off to be used only in the treatment, especially in transference,
known to be both the dickens of a job, and hope's only spring.
So, let's keep the idea going that the question is not quite clear about how to manage
with the eventuality of the direction of the patient. The analyst must not take care of it... except
for some good reason which is always to be looked for in the analyst's care to carry off the
treatment against anything which would be able to break it down. And of course, danger to the
treatment can come from the patient, as well as from families, or other private worries, society
itself, etc...
But what about the analyst ? Shouldn't he be able to perfectly direct himself if he is
pretending to direct this kind of treatment which requires it to be protected from its own
players ? Here too, the answer can't be a simple yes. Indeed the analyst is not supposed to
take upon himself the role of being a master, i.e. one who would be able to keep always under
control whatever trouble comes up, outside as well as inside. If anyone was tempted to go this
way (i.e. to stand in front of his patient for such a master), he would have to know (especially
with a hysteric patient) that he is leading to a showdown ; and never mind if he turns out to be
the winner or the loser. In every case, it would be clear that the treatment itself would have
collapsed.
So, since l'm describing the treatment as a game, let's pay attention to its so-called
fundamental rule. This adjective (the same in french) translates the german word Haupt
(litteraly : head). It's true that in spite of all the differencies encountered among the little world of
freudian analysts, this rule continues to be considered as perfectly valid to day, and so it can be
entitled to the name of our single House rule. Lacan himself, who is wellknown for his technical
boldnesses, was never against it, either in his practice or in his teaching. On the contrary, he
was leaned more and more to give importance to such a rule which is sufcient to ground the
treatment on the mere fact of speech.
The rule brings the patient into telling whatever comes into his mind, without keeping
back anything out of decency, good manners, and so on. By chance, an exact pattern of this
rule has never been codied by Freud or, as far as I know, by any of his successors ; and every
analyst, in front of every patient, has to articulate this rule or smething like this rule. If l'm
refering to my practice, it has never been the same thing twice. Once, for exemple, I said
nothing at all to somebody absolutely uninformed of what psychoanalysis can be until he told
me, on the couch, after a lot of sessions, that he no longer knew what to say. At the opposite
end, it happened to me to enumerate this rule just at the end of our preliminary sessions to a
patient who had been alreedy working as an analyst for a few years. 0f course, he was
informed ; but the enunciation of the rule was useless in giving him more information about
what to do on the couch. So : what was I doing at this moment ?
Lacan once asserted that it would be enough to hear the manner in which an analyst has
given voice to the rule to know perfectly well the point where he stands with regard to his own
treatment. We can make sense of that : if someone was led, for instance, to say to his patient :
You have to tell me everything which comes into your mind, he would take another way that
the other who would say : Anything which comes into your mind no matter what say it.
We can feel here that anything is quite different from everything ; the latter is closer from
confession than the former. But anyway : I don't want to list the inummerable stances an
analyst takes trying to articulate the rule ; it would be a gigantic task.
I only want to dene what this rule implies for the analyst himself because implications for
the patient only have already given way to a lot of valuable arguments : how resistances and
transference come into play, how insights take place in the patient's discourse, etc... But once
again, what about the analyst ? Is he really set apart by this rule, paying only attention to
listening carefully this anything which he has asked for ?
What in fact is the analyst asking for by way of this innocent word anything ? I suggest
you consider that he is asking his patient to give up any enunciation. At this point, of course, I
need to make this word clear : if enunciation means that a speaker is recognized as the true
agent of what he says, if this one is to beheld responsible for every sentence or the words he
utters, then the fundemental rule is truly an invitation to leave such a charge which is from now
on, on the analyst himself.
Let's look over the shadowy side of the rule because by putting it in this way, we are
coming into some remarks which were not Freud's on this matter . The usual way of speaking is
to be responsible for each of our utterances, sometimes more than we can imagine. Such a
responsibility can't work without the strongest attention to the censorship, and the formal aim of
the rule (to go on speeking in freudian terms) is to lift as far as possible the pressure of this
censorship. And so, the rst proposal is to speak, free of this control. O.K.
But what about this control (or at least a part of this control be not too exacting) when
it turns out to be lost, as little as it might be ? A french proverb says : That is lost for someone
is not lost for everybody. And so, to answer this question, we have to go further into the
problem of what enunciation is.
The french linguist Emile Benveniste wrote, in a very famous article of his : Language is
thus constituted that it allows any speaker to appropriate the whole speech by pointing himself
out as I. The ability to say I (which is not at all the rst step in the apprenticeship of language)
is the crucial point to become something like the owner of the articulated speech. I say now
that our rule is brought in, rst of all, to remove this ownership.
One is used to saying that psychoanalysis is valuable to give back speech to those who
are runing out of this power, to improve their liberty. That isn't wrong, but the way to get it is
more convoluted. In fact, we rst invite them to leave their I in the cloakroom. An example may
now illustrate what I mean : suppose that your patient is talking about a P.E. lesson, that is to
say in the context a Physical Education lesson. That's undoubtedly what he means, you know
that, but you prefer to hear : a pee lesson, how to urinate. What exactly are you doing then ?
Is the word to interpret enough to describe accurately what is going on ?
Are you thus brought to hypothesize that in his (her) own unconscious the question is
about urinating only, and that this thought has been transformed, through censorship, into this
perfect homonym ? Because it was a dream, you can believe that you have a right to think this
way, but you can also feel that, at the very moment when you make this new meaning out, the
true question is : Who is really speaking ?
Was she actually speaking about urinating and compelled to screen this meaning until
you bring it up ? Who is speeking here ? You or her ? Are you putting forward the idea that each
time you intervene you are only giving voice to her own unconscious thoughts, so that the true
enunciation has to be located in her ? In such a way, you silently build up a subject linked with
latent thoughts. You then put down to her enunciation the fact to have meant a former hidden
meaning : you supply her with a secret intention. In fact, you impute a subject to the
unconscious thoughts. And that is too much for psychoanalysis.
There is not any subject in the unconscious. Unconscious is nothing more than thoughts
which have lost their subject, and if you manage as if you had to bring back such a subject in
the unconscious itself, you would be led to consider that inside any speaker, there must be
another subject which would then try to get its word in in the articulated speech. A subject
behind (or inside) a subject. And of course, the one supposed to be behind (or inside) is
usualy considered as the best and the truest, while the former is set up as the bogus, the false
one. In my own opinion, the british notion of self (and especially of false self) comes from this
single viewpoint which doesn't t in at all with the freudian concept of unconscious : i.e.
thoughts (Denken) without any thinker (Denker). There is not any false self because there is not
any true self.
A last word about the hidden thing. When I was a child, on the way to school, at a
certain level crossing, there was a sign which said : Be careful, one train may hide another !
And no question about it : the hidden train was perfectly understood as the real one, because it
was supposed to carry death in person. Are we today, in psychoanalysis, still on the same
crossing ? Are we still looking for another subject which would be screened by this one which
assumes the articulated speech ? At this point, our path is very narrow, and the precipice in
which patient and analyst can fall into has a right to be called : paranoa.
Paranoa is not at all something that analyste must yield to psychiatrists. It is located at
the very heart of psychoanalysis from its own beginnings : read again, for exemple, the
manuscript H (in the complete Ietters from Freud to Fliess), and you will immediately
understand that Freud's theory of psychical apparatus necessarily included the fact of paranoa.
Don't forget too that the clash between Freud and Fliess has been reported by Freud to a
paranoac stance of Fliess (he explained that further to Ferenczi). Once again, when Jung and
Abraham brought him President Schreber's text, he put forward his own theory of paranoa,
recognizing in Schreber a colleague. How does paranoa work in psychoanalytical treatment,
independent of considering your patient as a paranoac in a psychiatric meaning ?
This question cropped up again with Lacan who wrote : lt's not me who has introduced
the question of a successful paranoa in the treatment itself. ( in La science et la vrit).
That's really a denial because he was the one who actually brought in this notion of a
successful paranoa, Freud having only spoken of this in a letter to Ferenczi where he told him
of the Fliess affair in his own words. He then wrote : I have succeeded exactly there where
the paranoac fails.
I don't want to go back now to the Fliess affair and to the theory of paranoa with which
Freud has tried to settle this matter. I prefer to lead into the question about paranoa through the
other one we have just asked : who is speaking ?
How would a theory like psychoanalysis be able to disregard this question when it both
gives way to such a ood of speech (cf. our home rule) and, furthermore, that in spite of all
this words, something goes on to stay out of reach, always waiting for the light of day, like a
princess in a fairy tale ?
As a clinical entity, paranoa can present many different aspects, and it is always a little
bit rude to reduce a many faceted being to a single feature, however important it might be. But
the persecution usualy takes the way to locate precisely the source of a lot of unpleasant
meanings ; notice that these meanings needn't be known by the persecuted person to be there.
A paranoac can say : I don't know why this guy is interested in me, but l'm quite sure he is,
and that's enough to make me anxious. I propose to consider that paranoa is based upon the
attempt to locate the "other" enunciation, this kind of enunciation which would be hidden and,
therefore, the true one, true in the meaning of my hidden train, the one which carries the real
because it possibly conveys death.
This kind of localisation is inscribed in this psychoanalytical game we call treatment,
and that is with regard to our fundamental rule. If anything can be, here and there, the right
thing, that means that someone else (or something else, at this point, we don't know) is
speaking through this anything.
At this point, we must recall that, if Freud went into psychoanalysis by way of studying
hysteria, Lacan did it through his attention to paranoa. And that's obviously why he
rearticulated (in the sixties) the freudian concept of transference around the notion of a sujet-
suppos savoir, where Freud only noticed an interest in the person of the doctor.
This sujet-suppos-savoir poses a problem for translation because it develops in french
two different meanings which are both very suited to what transference can be. On the one
hand, it means that a person here called a subject is supposed to know... of course
exactly what you can't reach. This meaning is like an insurance policy against the horror to
ignore what would be of the utmost importance to you, for instance the signication which
keeps your painful symptom in place. But, on the other hand, Lacan also tried by this naming to
point to another meaning which is more interesting for us now (even if it stays strongly linked to
the former one) : no longer to suppose that a certain person is knowing, but that a supposed
knowledge precisely the unconscious knowledge, i.e. the different thoughts in the
unconscious develops by itself a certain kind of subject which is not necessarily a human
being. God is of course a better candidate for this post, but He is not the only one. And not to
confuse it with the godness, Lacan has called it : the great 0ther. And our question now is : is
this other a subject, or not ?
All l would like to mean about the direction of the treatment can here take the way of this
simple remark : the answer to such a question has to be suspended for the analyst himself
throughout the treatment and that isn't so easy. Because if one answers yes, this 0ther
deserves to be considered as a subject, he is then plainly agreeing with the paranoa ; and if,
on the contrary, he prefers to say no, l'm not one of those who believe in these kinds of
fantasies, everyone can ask him what is he doing in this place.
I want to stay a while on these two kinds of answers because they point out two extreme
stances on the question of paranoa inside the treatment, and in this way they give shape to two
impasses between which the analyst has to direct the treatment, at least in my own opinion
and, as for as I can see, in Lacan's too.
We have already approached a little the former one ; the best exemple of the 0ther put in
as a real subject is undoubtedly Schreber's God. The neurotic version is less turbulent but more
insidious, and the freudien unconscious can work pretty well in this job. It is occupied by
thoughts, it gives place to a desire that Freud himself qualied as indestructible and, last but
not least, it is able to act in spite of all the inhibitions coming from the ego. Doesn't it possess
everything needed to be called a subject ? That's in fact the usual way by which transference
takes place in the treatment : the unknown knowledge is transfered to such a subject, in many
different ways, by neurotic patients. But we are now talking of the analyst himself. Has he to
adopt such a belief ? That's in fact the turning-point where he is expected.
Because if he supports that such a subject doesn't exist, he will be inevitably led to
consider transference as a mere illusion, if not a delusion. If transference, as Lacan suggested
it, is really based upon the belief that a certain kind of subject has to be related to the
unconscious knowledge and, furthermore, that the analyst can be, more or less, considered as
this subject, you won't be able to cope with transference by only ghting against this
supposition.
May I use my hidden train again ? Who dares to say that it doesn't exist ? As far as I
can recall, l've never seen it ; and if l'd done, I obviously wouldn't be here today. But the
question about its existence proper is still paramount for me.
So, let's conclude this point about our fundamental rule and especially about what it
implies for the analyst himself in front of transference he has set off by offering to play this
game. By wagering on the ability of this anything to carry a knowledge uncatchable by any
other means, he will have been the one who has introduced the treatment to the possibility of a
successful paranoa ; I mean to say that he then gives place to this 0ther with wich he is, more
or less, supposed to have same special dealings.
I now came to the third part of my talk in trying to articulate some differencies Lacan put
in between the I and the ego, differencies which are high-lighted by our rule, if we pay enough
attention to it.
lt's wellknown to run up against the pretensions of the ego to control everything of the
articulated speech. It seeks to unchain the signiers independent of the game of signications
upon which the ego always tries to have the upper hand (and l'm not speaking of the false self
but of the very ego which is, in Lacan's views, constituted from its very beginnings as a
paranoac entity). Through this understandirig of the functionning of the speech in the treatment,
Lacan was led slowly to his famous denition of the subject as represented by a signier to
another.
But I may now specify the moment when such a denition occured : in his seminar on
Identication (1961-62), Lacan established a strong difference between a sign and a signier. A
sign is something which stands for something else to somebody. This somebody doesn't
mean at all a subject, but a place where signications nd to bind together. That's truly
according to Freud's viewpoint about what a memory is : a memory is not always a mere
recollection of a single impression, but it can be built from a differed action in which separated
impressions, up to then isolated from each other, are gathered together by way of what Freud
then called a secret motif (you can nd more about that in reading Freud on Leonardo).
To come back to Lacan immediately, notice that he later made use of his former denition
of a sign to make a new sense of the word somebody : somebody is nothing more than that
for which a sign stands for something else (and once again, pay attention to this else which
is refered to something no longer supposed to be a sign, but which refers to reality). You see,
Lacan liked to complete the circuit.
On this level, we have now three terms which are co-dened : the order of signs carries
signications as far as it stands as a screen between a somebody (where we'll have to locate
the ego), and something like the external reality, this reality which is always supposed to be
independent of signs.
Immediately, such a denition (unavailable before) makes room for a strong denition a
what a signier is : suppose for an instant that any sign no longer refers to anything out of its
own order. Break for a moment the link we are used to putting in between signs and what they
refer to. May I remind you here that this was exactly the decision of Descartes when he made
up his mind, through his rst and second Meditation, no longer to trust in this kind of human
knowledge built on the supposition that signs are always refering to some external reality,
because in this way nothing is able to discriminate between the right and the wrong. Let us
behave as if this external reality has suddenly vanished. What's left then ?
Signs which no longer can work as before because each of them can only be refered to
another one, without anybody able to attribute any reference to this sign-connection. And then
in comes the subject : the subject can be now what is represented by a signier to another one,
being understood that a signier is a sign which has been obliterated in its capacity to refer to
something out of its order.
This is especially suitable for this kind of subject because the rule doesn't pretend to act
with the reality that words signify ; it asks for words only, careless of what these words can bring
with them.
A nal return to a little part of Freud's main text : at the very end of his Interpretation of
dreams, he asked himself if the Roman Emperor who executed one of his subjects because this
one had dreamed of murdering the emperor was in the wrong. He continued : Wether we
are to attribute reality to unconscious wishes, I cannot say. And he went on writing : It must be
denied, of course, to any transitional and intermediate thoughts. But the rule he promoted was
really a call for this kind of transitional and intermediate thoughts through which the
indestructible desire runs, without any respect for decency, good manners and so on ...
And so, every analyst, as well as Freud, is split by the rule with wich he has framed all
the game ; split between the meaningfullness of all the signications through which the ego is
constituted, and the meaninglessness through which the subject is connected to its desire.
Paranoa is then a naming for the attempt to drown this meaninglessness in the fullness of a
meaning which would be plainly cathected with narcissistic libido. The main effect of the
fundamental rule is to bring into the open that the circuit of the symbolic order can't ever be
completed to give an ensemble on the pattern of the mirror image. The latter is closed and
unied ; but the former knows by itself neither true beginning nor true end.
The analyst can be considered as an effect of the fundamental rule as far as, in spite of
his own consistancy, he is able to recognize himself as made of symbolic order, this symbolic
order unchained by the rule. Doing so, indeed, he consents to be involved in transference up to
the point where he has to face the fact of being something which may very well not t with his
narcissistic image. And that is for what he will be left standing when all will have been said and
done. That's also why the last sentence of Lacan's seminar on transference is : About anybody
you may question a being, risking yourself to disappear in doing it. (A propos de n'importe qui,
vous pouvez questionner un tre au risque d'y vous-mme disparatre.)