The Letter No49 Inner Pages

i
Copyright belongs to the School of Psychotherapy, St. Vincents University

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The Editorial Board is grateful to the Board of Trinity College Dublin for its
permission to use the extract from The Book of Kells on the cover.
ii
THE LETTER
Irish Journal for Lacanian Psychoanalysis
Editorial Board
Jean Kilcullen (Chair) Muiris FitzGerald
Tony Hughes (Editor) Patricia McCarthy
Marion Deane
Corresponding Editors
Christian Fierens (Brussels) Charles Melman (Paris)
Cormac Gallagher (Dublin) Helen Sheehan (Dublin)
Guy Le Gaufey (Paris) William J. Richardson (Boston)
Kevin Malone (Dublin) Josette Zouen (Paris)
Alain Vanier (Paris)
The Letter. Irish Journal for Lacanian Psychoanalysis is owned by the
School of Psychotherapy at St. Vincents University Hospital, Dublin. It
publishes the cartel work of members of the Irish School for Lacanian
Psychoanalysis, founded by Cormac Gallagher in 2007. It also welcomes
contributions from others in Ireland and abroad who are committed to Freud
and Lacan. First launched in 1994 with the sub-title Lacanian Perspectives
on Psychoanalysis, The Letter was re-launched in 2008. It appears in print
three times per year and the online archive at www.theletter.ie contains all of
its articles since 1994.
Manuscript Submission
Please submit manuscripts in Microsoft Word format to:
anthony.j.hughes@gmail.com

iii
Issue 49 (2011)
Jacques Lacan Ltourdit: A bilingual presentation of
the Second Turn. Chapter 3: Sense and
Structure
1
Christian Fierens Reading Ltourdit. Second Turn.
Chapter 3: Sense and Structure
23
Barry ODonnell Questions arising from reading
Darian Leaders What is Madness?
51
Tom Dalzell What Freud Learned in
Theodor Meynerts Clinic
65
Malachi McCoy You Have A Very Good Future
Behind You
73
Oscar Zentner HateLoving in the transference 81
Archive of The Letter 1994 - 2011 95
iv
v
Editorial
This issue contains the Second Turn of LEtourdit, Chapter Three: Sense and
Structure, consisting of the four sections, (i) Sense and Teaching (ii) Structure
(iii) the Modifcation of the Structure and (iv) the End of Analysis. This again
is a bilingual publication as translated by Cormac Gallagher. Lacan deals with
the difference between sense and meaning leading onto the saying and the said
as re-presented in the Moebius strip and the cross-cap of topology. Topology
is structure and the closed cut is the said. Structure is modifed by the number
of cuts made on the cross-cap. The fall of desire is the o-object resulting from
the double-turned cut, which summons the double turn of LEtourdit itself.
The fnal section the end of analysis links the impossible of sex, sense and
meaning, as enigma.
Fierens text Reading LEtourdit serves as an expository for some of the
obscure references in Lacans work. His meticulous reading of the original
enables us to gain some further access to the convoluted approach of Lacan. It
should not however be read as either an interpretation or a said, but used in a
way that allows further nuances to be continually discovered in the work that
is the last major writing by Lacan, and which has been called his testament.
Barry ODonnell raises a number of questions which arise from Darian
Leaders recent book What is Madness? He points out that his questioning
is not done in a spirit of wanting to create division, but out of a desire to
pursue matters of importance for him as analyst. Does Leaders work
represent a modality of treatment which is in line with ODonnells approach
to the clinic? The similarity between Miller and Leader is brought out and
this contrasts with Fierenss belief that it is necessary to engage in a practice
which sustains an openness to strangeness.
Tom Dalzell shows how psychoanalysis was infuenced by the work of
Meynert, which also suffered from Meynerts later criticism of Freud,
particularly in relation to his work on hypnosis and hysteria. The benefts
gained by moving away from philosophical Romanticism in the direction of
the rationalism of the Enlightenment are still being debated to-day. One is
struck by Freuds unwavering character to undergo professional isolation in
pursuit of his ethic.
Malachi McCoy deals with the formation of the analyst and the working of
the cartel. He refers to the Founding Act and the discussion that took place
vi
on the Inter-cartel Study Day of the Ecole Freudienne de Paris on 12/13
April 1975, which explored the working of the cartels at that time. McCoys
reading of this text and his linkages to Freud and Lacan are vigorous and raise
essential questions.
Oscar Zentner delves into one of the highly controversial topics of
psychoanalysis the death drive. He shows how both Freud and Jung forgot
the fact that Sabina Spielrein had frst raised the opposition of the drives of
life and death at the Viennese Society of Psychoanalysis on 19 November
1911, despite the fact that Freud had condemned her work. Zentner suggests
that this may have occurred for reasons other than difference of view on this
matter. In addition to the act of forgetting, Zentner also suggests that because
of Spielreins closeness to Jung and his approach to psychosis, Freuds interest
in psychosis waned with consequent adverse effects for psychoanalysis,
hence underlining the implications of transference both within and outside
of analysis.
Tony Hughes
J.LACAN Ltourdit THE LETTER 49 (2012) 1-21
1
LTOURDIT
by
Jacques Lacan
A Bilingual Presentation of the Second Turn.
Chapter 3. Sense and Structure
Translated by Cormac Gallagher
We published the First Turn chapters 1, 2, 3, and 4 in Issue 41, Summer 2009.
This was followed by the Second Turn - Chapter 1, in Issue 43, Spring 2010,
and by Chapter 2, in Issue 45 Autumn 2010.
The facing French text is from:
Larchive de LEcole Lacanienne
2
LETOURDIT. THE SECOND TURN.
Jacques Lacan
CHAPTER 3: SENSE AND STRUCTURE
1. Sense and teaching
Let us get moving here on the business of sense, promised earlier because of
its difference to meaning.
What allows us to grapple with it is the enormity of the condensation between
that which thinks of our day (with the feet that we just mentioned) and the
inept topology Kant reinforced in his own argumentation, that of the bourgeois
who can only imagine transcendence, aesthetic as well as dialectical.
We might say that this condensation is in effect to be understood in the
analytic sense, as the received formula has it. What is this sense, if precisely
the elements condensed in it are univocally qualifed by a similar imbecility,
indeed are capable of taking pride in it from the side of that which thinks,
Kants mask on the contrary appearing stony before insult, except for his
refection on Swedenborg: in other words, is there a sense of imbecility?
Here we touch on the fact that sense is never produced except by the translation
of one discourse into another.
Equipped as we now are with this little light, the antinomy adduced between
sense and meaning stirs to life: that some faint sense may have emerged by
tangential illumination from the aforementioned critiques of pure reason,
and of judgement (as regards practical reason, I have said how playful it is
by putting it on the side of Sade, (37) who is not any funnier, but logical),
therefore once their sense dawns, Kants maxims no longer have any meaning.
They only hold onto their meaning as long as they have no sense, not even
common sense.
This lightens for us the darkness that reduces us to feeling our way. There is
no lack of sense in the so-called pre-Socratic vaticinations: impossible to say
which, but asysent.
3
Mettons en train ici laffaire du sens, plus haut promise de sa diffrence
davec la signifcation.
Nous permet de laccrocher lnormit de la condensation entre ce qui pense
de notre temps (avec les pieds que nous venons de dire) et la topologie inepte
quoi Kant a donn corps de son propre tablissement, celui du bourgeois qui
ne peut imaginer que de la transcendance, lesthtique comme la dialectique.
Cette condensation en effet, nous devons la dire entendre au sens
analytique , selon la formule reue. Quel est ce sens, si justement les lments
qui sy condensent, se qualifent univoquement dune imbcillit semblable,
voire sont capables de sen targuer du ct de ce qui pense , le masque
de Kant par contre paraissant de bois devant linsulte, sa rfexion prs de
Swedenborg : autrement dit, y a-t-il un sens de limbcillit ?
ceci se touche que le sens ne se produit jamais que de la traduction dun
discours en un autre.
Pourvus que nous voil de cette petite lumire, lantinomie tressaille qui
se produit de sens signifcation : quun faible sens vienne surgir jour
rasant des dites critiques de la raison pure, et du jugement (pour la raison
pratique, jen ai dit le foltre
(37)
en le mettant du ct de Sade, lui pas plus
drle, mais logique), ds que leur sens donc se lve, les dits de Kant nont
plus de signifcation.
La signifcation, ils ne la tiennent donc que du moment o ils navaient pas de
sens, pas mme le sens commun.
Ceci nous claire les tnbres qui nous rduisent aux ttons. Le sens ne
manque pas aux vaticinations dites prsocratiques : impossible de dire lequel,
mais asysent
4
And that Freud licks his chops over one, not the best of them moreover since it
is from Empedocles, does not matter, he, for his part, had a sense of direction;
that is enough for us to see that interpretation is of sense and goes against
meaning. Oracular, which is not surprising since we know how to link sexual
displacement from the oral to the voice.
It is the misery of historians: to be only able to read sense, where they have
no other principle than to refer it back to meaning-documents. Therefore they
too arrive at transcendence, that of materialism, for example, which, being
historical is alas so, to the point of becoming irremediably so.
Luckily analysis is there to breathe life into the little stories: but being only
able to do so from what is captured by its discourse, its de facto discourse,
it leaves us with our tongues hanging out as regards what is not of our own
time, thus not changing anything in what honesty forces the historian to
recognise once he has to situate the slightest saysent. That he is charged
with the science of embarrassment, is indeed what is embarrassing about his
contribution to science.
Therefore it is important for many, for the latter as for many others?, that the
impossibility of speaking truly about the real should be justifed by a matheme
(you know how I defne it), by a matheme from which the relationship of
saying to said is situated.
The matheme is uttered from the only real recognized from the outset
in language: namely number. Nevertheless the history of mathematics
demonstrates (saying it makes the case) that it can be extended to intuition,
on condition that this term is as castrated as can be of its metaphorical use.
Here therefore is a feld in which what is most striking is that its development,
over against the terms from which it is absorbed, does not procede from
generalization but from topological re-shaping, from a retroaction onto the
beginning such that its history is effaced. (38) No surer experience to resolve
its embarrassment. Hence its attraction for thought: which fnds in it the
nonsense proper to being, or to the desire for a speech with no beyond.
Nothing nevertheless to take account of the being which, by the fact that we
might thus state it, is not dependent on our goodwill.
5
Et que Freud sen pourlche, pas des meilleures au reste puisque cest
dEmpdocle, nimporte, il avait, lui, le sens de lorientation ; a nous sufft
voir que linterprtation est du sens et va contre la signifcation. Oraculaire, ce
qui ne surprend pas de ce que nous savons lier doral la voix, du dplacement
sexuel.
Cest la misre des historiens : de ne pouvoir lire que le sens, l o ils nont
dautre principe que de sen remettre aux documents de la signifcation. Eux
aussi donc en viennent la transcendance, celle du matrialisme par exemple,
qui, historique , lest hlas ! lest au point de le devenir irrmdiablement.
Heureusement que lanalyse est l pour regonfer lhistoriole : mais ny
parvenant que de ce qui est pris dans son discours, dans son discours de fait,
elle nous laisse le bec dans leau pour ce qui nest pas de notre temps, ne
changeant par l rien de ce que lhonntet force lhistorien reconnatre
ds quil a situer le moindre sacysent. Quil ait charge de la science de
lembarras, cest bien lembarrassant de son apport la science.
Il importe donc beaucoup, ceux-ci comme beaucoup dautres ?, que
limpossibilit de dire vrai du rel se motive dun mathme (lon sait comment
je le dfnis), dun mathme dont se situe le rapport du dire au dit.
Le mathme se profre du seul rel dabord reconnu dans le langage : savoir
le nombre. Nanmoins lhistoire de la mathmatique dmontre (cest le cas de
le dire) quil peut stendre lintuition, condition que ce terme soit aussi
chtr quil se peut de son usage mtaphorique.
Il y a donc l un champ dont le plus frappant est que son dveloppement,
lencontre des termes dont on labsorbe, ne procde pas de gnralisation,
mais de remaniement topologique, dune rtroaction sur le commencement
telle quelle en efface lhistoire.
(38)
Pas dexprience plus sre en rsoudre lembarras. Do son attrait pour
la pense : qui y trouve le nonsense propre ltre, soit au dsir dune parole
sans au-del.
Rien pourtant faire tat de ltre qui, ce que nous lnoncions ainsi, ne
relve de notre bienveillance.
6
Quite different is the achievement of the undecideable, to take the leading
example by which the matheme commends itself to us: it is the real of
saying number that is at stake, when it is demonstrated from this saying is
not verifable, this at this second degree that one cannot even assure it, as is
done with others already worthy of our attention, by a demonstration of its
undemonstrability from the very premises that it supposes, let us clearly
understand, from a contradiction inherent in supposing it to be demonstrable.
It cannot be denied that there is here progress on what remained to be
questioned in the Meno about what constitutes the teachable. It is to be sure
the last thing to say that between the two there is a world: what is at stake
being that to this place comes the real, of which the world is only the derisory
fall.
It is nevertheless a progress that must be restrained there, since I do not lose
sight of the regret that responds to it, namely, that the true opinion of which
Plato makes sense in the Meno, is for us nothing but an ab-sense of meaning,
which is confrmed by referring it to that of our right-thinking lot.
Might a matheme, that our topology furnishes us with, have carried it? Let
us try it.
That brings us to the astonishment at the fact that we should avoid supporting
our Moebius strip by the image, this imagining rendering vain the remarks
that would have necessitated another said by fnding itself articulated in it: my
reader only became other because saying goes beyond the said, this saying to
be taken as ex-sisting the said, by which its real exist(ed) me without anyone,
from the fact that it was verifable, being able to make it become a matheme.
Is true opinion the truth in the real, in as much as it is what bars its saying? I
would test it by the correction (redire) I am going to make in it.
Line without points, I have said about the cut, in so far as it is, for its part, the
Moebius strip in that one of its edges, after the turn by which it is closed, is
pursued onto the other edge.(39) Nevertheless this can only be produced from
a surface already pricked by a point that I have called out-of-line because at
it is such a way that it is from a sphere that it is cut out, but by its double that
looping it makes of the sphere an asphere or a cross-cap.
7
Tout autre est le fait de lindcidable, pour en prendre lexemple de pointe
dont se recommande pour nous le mathme : cest le rel du dire du nombre
qui est en jeu, quand de ce dire est dmontr quil nest pas vrifable, ceci
ce degr second quon ne puisse mme lassurer, comme il se fait dautres
dj dignes de nous retenir, dune dmonstration de son indmontrabilit
des prmisses mmes quil suppose, entendons bien dune contradiction
inhrente le supposer dmontrable.
On ne peut nier quil y ait l progrs sur ce qui du Mnon en reste questionner
de ce qui fait lenseignable. Cest certes la dernire chose dire quentre les
deux il y a un monde : ce dont il sagit tant qu cette place vient le rel, dont
le monde nest que chute drisoire.
Cest pourtant le progrs quil faut restreindre l, puisque je ne perds pas de
vue le regret qui y rpond, savoir que lopinion vraie dont au Mnon fait
sens Platon, na plus pour nous quab-sens de signifcation, ce qui se confrme
de la rfrer celle de nos bien-pensants.
Un mathme leut-elle port, que notre topologie nous fournit ? Tentons-la.
a nous conduit ltonnement de ce que nous vitions soutenir de limage
notre bande de Moebius, cette imagination rendant vaines les remarques
quet ncessites un dit autre sy trouver articul : mon lecteur ne devenait
autre que de ce que le dire passe le dit, ce dire tant prendre dau dit ex-
sister, par quoi le rel men ex-sist(ait) sans que quiconque, de ce quil ft
vrifable, le pt faire passer au mathme. Lopinion vraie, est-ce la vrit
dans le rel en tant que cest lui qui en barre le dire ?
Je lprouverai du redire que je vais en faire.
Ligne sans points, ai-je dit de la coupure, en tant quelle est, elle, la bande de
Moebius ce quun de ses bords, aprs le tour dont elle se ferme, se poursuit
dans lautre bord.
(39) Ceci pourtant ne peut se produire que dune surface dj pique dun point
que jai dit hors ligne de se spcifer dune double boucle pourtant talable sur
une sphre : de sorte que ce soit dune sphre quil se dcoupe, mais de son
double bouclage quil fasse de la sphre une asphre ou cross-cap.
8
What it nevertheless makes happen in the cross-cap through being borrowed
from the sphere, is that a cut that it makes Moebian in the surface that it
determines by making it possible there, restores this surface, to the spherical
mode: for it is by the fact that the cut is equivalent to it, that what it
supplemented itself by as cross-cap is projected into it, as I have said.
But since, in order for it to permit this cut, one can say of this surface that it is
made up of lines without points whereby its front face is everywhere stitched
to its back face, the supplementary point, by being sphericised, can be fxed
everywhere in a cross-cap.
But this fxion must be chosen as the unique out-of-line point, so that a cut, by
making one and only one turn of it, should there have the effect of resolving
it into a spherically spreadable point.
The point therefore is the opinion that can be said to be true from the fact that
the saying that turns around it in effect verifes it, but only because saying is
what modifes it by introducing into it the as real.
Thus, it is by ex-sisting the said that a saying like mine permits the matheme,
but for me it does not constitute a matheme and is thus posed as un-teachable
before saying is produced from it, as teachable only after I have mathematised
it according to the Menonian criteria which nevertheless had not certifed it
for me.
The un-teachable I made into a matheme by assuring it from the fxion of true
opinion, fxion written with an x, but not without the resources of equivocation.
Thus an object as easy to fabricate as the Moebius strip, in so far as it is
imagined, puts within hands reach for everyone what is unimaginable, once
its saying by being forgotten, makes the said endure.
Whence proceeded my fxion of this point, which I have not said, I do
not know it and therefore I cannot any more than Freud give an account of
what I teach except by following its effects in the (40) analytic discourse, an
effect of its mathematizing that does not come from a machine, but proves to
be something of a yoke (machin) once it has produced it.
9
Ce quil fait passer pourtant dans le cross-cap semprunter de la sphre,
cest quune coupure quil fait moebienne dans la surface quil dtermine
ly rendre possible, la rend, cette surface, au mode sphrique : car cest de ce
que la coupure lui quivaille, que ce dont elle se supplmentait en cross-cap
sy projette , ai-je dit.
Mais comme de cette surface, pour quelle permette cette coupure, on peut
dire quelle est faite de lignes sans points par o partout sa face endroit se
coud sa face envers, cest partout que le point supplmentaire pouvoir se
sphriser, peut tre fx dans un cross-cap.
Mais cette fxion doit tre choisie comme unique point hors ligne, pour quune
coupure, den faire un tour et un unique, y ait effet de la rsoudre en un point
sphriquement talable.
Le point donc est lopinion qui peut tre dite vraie de ce que le dire qui en
fait le tour la vrife en effet, mais seulement de ce que le dire soit ce qui la
modife dy introduire la comme rel.
Ainsi un dire tel que le mien, cest dex-sister au dit quil en permet le
mathme, mais il ne fait pas pour moi mathme et se pose ainsi comme non-
enseignable avant que le dire sen soit produit, comme enseignable seulement
aprs que je lai mathmatis selon les critres mnoniens qui pourtant ne me
lavaient pas certif.
Le non-enseignable, je lai fait mathme de lassurer de la fxion de lopinion
vraie, fxion crite avec un x, mais non sans ressource dquivoque.
Ainsi un objet aussi facile fabriquer que la bande de Moebius en tant quelle
simagine, met porte de toutes mains ce qui est inimaginable ds que son
dire soublier, fait le dit sendurer.
Do a procd ma fxion de ce point que je nai pas dit, je ne le
sais pas et ne peux donc pas plus que Freud en rendre compte de ce que
jenseigne , sinon suivre ses effets dans le (40) discours analytique, effet
de sa mathmatisation qui ne vient pas dune machine, mais qui savre tenir
du machin une fois quil la produite.
10
It is notable that Cicero was already able to use this term: Ad usum autem
orationis, incredibile est, nisi diligenter attenderis, quanta opera machinata
natura sit (Cicero, De natura deorum, II, 59, 149), but still more so that I
made it into the exergue to my fumbling saying ever since 11 April 1956.
2. Structure (40-41)
Topology is not designed to guide us in structure. It is this structure -- as
retroaction of the chain-like order in which language consists.
Structure, is the aspherical concealed in the language-like articulation
inasmuch as a subject-effect is grasped in it (sen saisit).
It is clear that, as regards meaning, this is grasped in it of the pseudo-modal
sub-sentence, reverberates from the very object that as verb it envelopes in
its grammatical subject, and that there is a false sense-effect, a resonance of
the imaginary induced from topology, according as the subject-effect makes
an asphere-like whirlpool or the subjective of this effect is refected from it.
Here there should be distinguished the ambiguity which is registered from
meaning, in other words from the loop of the cut, and the suggestion of hole,
namely of structure, which makes sense of this ambiguity.
1
Thus the cut, the cut established from topology (by making it here, as of right,
closed, let it be noted once and for all, in my usage at least) is the said of
language, but by no longer forgetting its saying.
Naturally there are saids that form the object of predicative logic and whose
universalizing supposition belongs simply to the sphere, I say: the, I say:
sphere, in other words: that precisely structure fnds in it only a supplement
which is that of the fction of the true.
1
It will appear, I hope here, that the imputation of structuralism, to be understood as world-view,
one more for the Punch and Judy show under which literary history (which is what is at stake) is
represented to us, is not despite the infated publicity that it has brought me and in the most pleasant
form because I was embarked there in the best of company, is perhaps not something I should be
satisfed with.
And less and less so, I would say, in the measure that an acceptation is growing in it whose vulgate
might be stated rather well as, roads can be explained by driving from one Michelin signpost to
another: And that is why your map is mute.
11
Il est notable que Cicron ait su dj employer ce terme Ad usum autem
orationis, incredibile est, nisi diligenter attenderis, quanta opera machinata
natura sit (Cicron, De natura deorum, II, 59, 149.), mais plus encore que
jen aie fait exergue aux ttonnements de mon dire ds le 11 avril 1956.
La topologie nest pas faite pour nous guider dans la structure. Cette
structure, elle lest comme rtroaction de lordre de chane dont consiste le
langage.
La structure, cest lasphrique recel dans larticulation langagire en tant
quun effet de sujet sen saisit.
Il est clair que, quant la signifcation, ce sen saisit de la sous-phrase,
pseudo-modale, se rpercute de lobjet mme que comme verbe il enveloppe
dans son sujet grammatical, et quil y a faux effet de sens, rsonance de
limaginaire induit de la topologie, selon que leffet de sujet fait tourbillon
dasphre ou que le subjectif de cet effet sen rfchit .
Il y a ici distinguer lambigut qui sinscrit de la signifcation, soit de la
boucle de la coupure, et la suggestion de trou, cest--dire de structure qui de
cette ambigut fait sens
2
.
Ainsi la coupure, la coupure instaure de la topologie ( ly faire, de droit,
ferme, quon le note une bonne fois, dans mon usage au moins), cest le dit
du langage, mais ne plus le dire en oublier.
Bien sr y a-t-il les dits qui font lobjet de la logique prdicative et dont la
supposition universalisante ressortit seulement la sphre, je dis : la, je dis :
sphre, soit : que justement la structure ny trouve quun supplment qui est
celui de la fction du vrai.
1
Il paratra, jespre ici, que de limputation de structuralisme, entendre comme comprhension
du monde, une de plus au guignol sous lequel nous est reprsente l histoire littraire (cest de
cela quil sagit), nest malgr la gonfe de publicit quelle ma apporte et sous la forme la plus
plaisante puisque jy tais embarqu dans la meilleure compagnie, nest peut-tre pas ce dont jaie
lieu dtre satisfait.
Et de moins en moins dirais-je, mesure quy fait monte une acception dont la vulgate
snoncerait assez bien de ce que les routes sexpliquent de conduire dun panneau Michelin un
autre : Et voil pourquoi votre carte est muette .
12
(41) One could say that the sphere is what does without topology. The cut,
to be sure, here cuts out (by closing on itself) the concept on which there
is based the language-fair, the principle of exchange, of value, of universal
concession. (Let us say that it is only matter for the dialectic, the business
of the master discourse.) It is very diffcult to support this pure dit-mension,
from the fact that being everywhere, it is never pure, but what is important is
that it is not the structure. It is the surface-fction with which the structure is
clothed.
That sense is foreign to it, that man is good, and moreover the contrary
maxim, says strictly nothing that makes sense, we may quite rightly be
astonished that no one has made of this remark (whose evidence once again
refers back to being as emptying) a structural reference. Will we risk saying
that the cut, when all is said and done, does not ex-sist from the sphere? --
For the reason that nothing obliges it to close on itself, since by remaining
open it produces on it the same effect, qualifed as hole, but from the fact that
here this term can only be taken in the imaginary acceptation of rupturing a
surface: evident to be sure, but by reducing what it can encircle to the void of
some possible or other whose substance is only a correlate (co-possible yes
or no: issuing from the predicate in the propositional with all the faux pas we
amuse ourselves with).
Without Greek, then Arab, homosexuality and the relay of the Eucharist all
of this would have necessitated an Other recourse much earlier. But it can be
understood that in the great epochs that we have just evoked, religion alone
when all is said and done, by constituting true opinion, the , was
able to give to this matheme the funds with which it found itself de facto
invested. Something of it will always remain even if we believe the contrary,
and that is why nothing will prevail against the Church until the end of time.
Since biblical studies have never yet saved anyone from it.
Only those for whom this stopper is of no interest, theologians for example,
will work on structureif that is their hearts desire, but beware of nausea.
13
(41) On pourrait dire que la sphre, cest ce qui se passe de topologie. La
coupure certes y dcoupe ( se fermer) le concept sur quoi repose la foire du
langage, le principe de lchange, de la valeur, de la concession universelle.
(Disons quelle nest que matire pour la dialectique, affaire de discours du
matre). Il est trs diffcile de soutenir cette dit-mension pure, de ce qutant
partout, pure elle ne lest jamais, mais limportant est quelle nest pas la
structure. Elle est la fction de surface dont la structure shabille.
Que le sens y soit tranger, que lhomme est bon , et aussi bien le dit
contraire, a ne veuille dire strictement rien qui ait un sens, on peut juste
titre stonner que personne nait de cette remarque (dont une fois de plus
lvidence renvoie ltre comme videment) fait rfrence structurale. Nous
risquerons-nous au dire que la coupure en fn de compte nex-siste pas de
la sphre ? Pour la raison que rien ne loblige se fermer, puisqu rester
ouverte elle y produit le mme effet, qualifable du trou, mais de ce quici
ce terme ne puisse tre pris que dans lacception imaginaire de rupture de
surface : vident certes, mais de rduire ce quil peut cerner au vide dun
quelconque possible dont la substance nest que corrlat (compossible oui ou
non : issue du prdicat dans le propositionnel avec tous les faux pas dont on
samuse).
Sans lhomosexualit grecque, puis arabe, et le relais de leucharistie tout cela
et ncessit un Autre recours bien avant. Mais on comprend quaux grandes
poques que nous venons dvoquer, la religion seule en fn de compte, de
constituer lopinion vraie, l , pt ce mathme donner le fonds
dont il se trouvait de fait investi. Il en restera toujours quelque chose mme
si lon croit le contraire, et cest pourquoi rien ne prvaudra contre lglise
jusqu la fn des temps. Puisque les tudes bibliques nen ont encore sauv
personne.
Seuls ceux pour qui ce bouchon na aucun intrt, les thologiens par exemple,
travailleront dans la structure si le cur leur en dit, mais gare la nause.
14
3. The modifcation of the structure (41e-43e)
What topology teaches, is the necessary bond that is established between the
cut and the number of turns that it comprises for there to be obtained from it
a modifcation of the structure or of the (42) asphere (l, apostrophe), the only
conceivable access to the real, and conceivable from the impossible in that it
demonstrates it.
Thus from the single turn that makes a spherically stable fap in the asphere
by introducing into it the supplement-effect that it takes on from the out-of-
line point, the . Double looping, this turn, obtains something quite
different: the fall of the cause of desire whence there is produced the Moebian
strip of the subject, this fall demonstrating it to be only ex-sistence to the
double-looped cut from which it results.
This ex-sistence is saying and it proves it from the fact that the subject remains
at the mercy of his said if it is repeated, in other words: like the Moebian strip
by fnding its fading (fainting) in it.
Nodal point (a case for saying,) it is the turn from which the hole is made, but
only in this sense that from the turn, this hole is imagined, or is machinated
in it, as you wish.
The imagination of the hole has consequences to be sure: do we need to
evoke its drive-like function or, to say better, what derives from it (Trieb)?
It is the conquest of analysis to have made a matheme of it, when mysticism
previously only bore witness to its testing by making of it the unsayable. But
by remaining at that very hole, it is fascination that is reproduced, by which
universal discourse maintains its privilege, what is more it gives it body, from
the analytic discourse.
With the image, nothing will ever be made of it. The semblable even
soupireras from what is sown there.
The hole is not justifed (ne se motive pas) by a wink, nor by a mnemonic
syncope, nor by a cry. It should be approached by perceiving that the word
(mot) is borrowed from motus, and is not appropriate from where topology is
set up.
15
Ce que la topologie enseigne, cest le lien ncessaire qui stablit de la
coupure au nombre de tours quelle comporte pour quen soit obtenue une
modifcation de la structure ou de lasphre (42) (l, apostrophe), seul accs
concevable au rel, et concevable de limpossible en ce quelle le dmontre.
Ainsi du tour unique qui dans lasphre fait lambeau sphriquement stable
y introduire leffet du supplment quelle prend du point hors ligne, l
. Le boucler double, ce tour, obtient tout autre chose : chute de la cause du
dsir do se produit la bande moebienne du sujet, cette chute le dmontrant
ntre quex-sistence la coupure double boucle dont il rsulte.
Cette ex-sistence est dire et elle le prouve de ce que le sujet reste la merci de
son dit sil se rpte, soit : comme la bande moebienne dy trouver son fading
(vanouissement).
Point-nud (cas de le dire), cest le tour dont se fait le trou, mais seulement en
ce sens que du tour, ce trou simagine, ou sy machine, comme on voudra.
Limagination du trou a des consquences certes : est-il besoin dvoquer sa
fonction pulsionnelle ou, pour mieux dire, ce qui en drive (Trieb) ? Cest
la conqute de lanalyse que den avoir fait mathme, quand la mystique
auparavant ne tmoignait de son preuve qu en faire lindicible. Mais
den rester ce trou-l, cest la fascination qui se reproduit, dont le discours
universel maintient son privilge, bien plus elle lui rend corps, du discours
analytique.
Avec limage rien jamais ny fera. Le semblable soupirera mme de ce qui
sy emblave.
Le trou ne se motive pas du clin dil, ni de la syncope mnsique, ni du cri.
Quon lapproche de sapercevoir que le mot semprunte du motus, nest pas
de mise l do la topologie sinstaure.
16
A torus has a, central or circular, hole only for someone who looks at it as
an object, not for someone who is its subject, in other words from a cut that
does not imply any hole, but which obligates it to a precise number of turns of
saying for this torus to be made (be made if he demands it, for after all a torus
is better than a cross-section), to be made, as we have prudently contented
ourselves with imaging it, a Moebius strip, or a contraband if you prefer the
word.
A torus, as I demonstrated ten years ago to people who badly wanted to silt
me up with their own contraband, is the structure of neurosis, in as much as
desire can, from the indefnitely enumerable re-petition of demand, be looped
in two turns. It is on this condition at (43) least that the contrabanding of the
subject is decided - in this saying that is called interpretation.
I would simply like to get rid of the sort of incitement that our structural
topology can inspire.
I said the demand is numerable in its turns. It is clear that if the hole is not to
be imagined, the turn only ex-sists from the number by which it is registered
in the cut whose closing alone counts.
I insist: the turn in itself is not countable; repetitive, it closes nothing, it is
neither said nor to say, namely no proposition. Hence it would be too much
to say that it does not depend on a logic, which remains to be constructed
starting from the modal.
But if as is assured by our frst depiction of the cut by which from the torus
the Moebius strip is made, one demand is enough for it, but which can be
re-peated because it is enumerable, we may as well say that it is only paired
to the double turn from which the strip is founded by being posed from the
(Cantorian) transfnite.
It remains that the strip could only be constituted by the fact that the turns of
demand are odd in number.
The transfnite while remaining a requisite, from the fact that nothing, as we
have said, is counted in it unless the cut closes on it, the aforesaid transfnite,
just as God himself whom we know congratulates himself on it, is there
summoned to be odd.
17
Un tore na de trou, central ou circulaire, que pour qui le regarde en objet,
non pour qui en est le sujet, soit dune coupure qui nimplique nul trou, mais
qui loblige un nombre prcis de tours de dire pour que ce tore se fasse (se
fasse sil le demande, car aprs tout un tore vaut mieux quun travers), se
fasse, comme nous nous sommes prudemment content de limager, bande de
Moebius, ou contrebande si le mot vous plat mieux.
Un tore, comme je lai dmontr il y a dix ans des gens en mal de menvaser
de leur contrebande eux, cest la structure de la nvrose en tant que le dsir
peut, de la r-ptition indfniment numrable de la demande, se boucler
en deux tours. Cest (43) cette condition du moins que sen dcide la
contrebande du sujet, dans ce dire qui sappelle linterprtation.
Je voudrais seulement faire un sort la sorte dincitation que peut imposer
notre topologie structurale.
Jai dit la demande numrable dans ses tours. Il est clair que si le trou nest pas
imaginer, le tour nex-siste que du nombre dont il sinscrit dans la coupure
dont seule la fermeture compte.
Jinsiste : le tour en soi nest pas comptable ; rptitif, il ne ferme rien, il nest
ni dit ni dire, cest--dire nulle proposition. Do ce serait trop dire quil ne
relve pas dune logique, qui reste faire partir de la modale.
Mais si comme lassure notre fguration premire de la coupure dont du tore
se fait la bande de Moebius, une demande y sufft, mais qui peut se r-pter
dtre numrable, autant dire quelle ne sapparie au double tour dont se
fonde la bande qu se poser du transfni (cantorien).
Reste que la bande ne saurait se constituer qu ce que les tours de la demande
soient de nombre impair.
Le transfni en restant exigible, de ce que rien, nous lavons dit, ne sy compte
qu ce que la coupure sen ferme, le dit transfni, tel Dieu lui-mme dont on
sait quil sen flicite, y est somm dtre impair.
18
That adds a dit-mension to the topology of our practice of saying.
Should it not come under the concept of repetition inasmuch as it is not left
to itself, but that this practice conditions it, as we have also pointed out about
the unconscious?
It is striking, even though dj vu for what I say, let it be remembered ,
that the order (understand: the ordinal) for which I effectively cleared the way
in my defnition of repetition and starting from the practice, went completely
unnoticed in its necessity by my audience.
I mark here its reference for a later reprise.
4. The end of analysis (43e-44d)
Let us nevertheless talk about the end of the analysis of the neurotic torus.
The o-object by falling from the hole of the strip is projected from it after the
event into what we will call, by an imaginary misuse, (44) the central hole
of the torus, in other words around which the odd transfnite of demand is
resolved by the double turn of interpretation.
That is what the psychoanalyst took on the function of by situating it from his
semblance.
The analyser only ends by making of the o-object the representative of the
representation of his analyst. Therefore it is inasmuch as his mourning lasts
of this o-object to which he has fnally reduced him, that the psychoanalyst
persists in causing his desire: rather manic-depressively.
This is the state of exultation that Balint, while grasping it inaccurately,
nonetheless describes rather well: more than one therapeutic success fnds
its reason here, and on occasion a substantial one. Then the mourning is over.
19
Voil qui ajoute une dit-mension la topologie de notre pratique du dire.
Ne doit-elle pas rentrer dans le concept de la rptition en tant quelle nest
pas laisse elle-mme, mais que cette pratique la conditionne, comme nous
lavons aussi fait observer de linconscient ?
Il est saisissant, encore que dj vu pour ce que je dis, quon sen souvienne
, que lordre (entendons : lordinal) dont jai effectivement fray la voie dans
ma dfnition de la rptition et partir de la pratique, est pass tout fait
dans sa ncessit inaperu de mon audience.
Jen marque ici le repre pour une reprise venir.
Disons pourtant la fn de lanalyse du tore nvrotique.
Lobjet (a) choir du trou de la bande sen projette aprs coup dans ce que nous
appellerons, dabus imaginaire, le trou central (44) du tore, soit autour de quoi
le transfni impair de la demande se rsout du double tour de linterprtation.
Cela, cest ce dont le psychanalyste a pris fonction le situer de son semblant.
Lanalysant ne termine qu faire de lobjet (a) le reprsentant de la
reprsentation de son analyste. Cest donc autant que son deuil dure de lobjet
(a) auquel il la enfn rduit, que le psychanalyste persiste causer son dsir :
plutt maniaco-dpressivement.
Cest ltat dexultation que Balint, le prendre ct, nen dcrit pas moins
bien : plus dun succs thrapeutique , trouve l sa raison, et substantielle
ventuellement. Puis le deuil sachve.
20
There remains the stability of the fattening of the phallus, in other words of
the strip, where analysis fnds its end, the one that its supposed subject of
knowledge assures:
that, dialogue from one sex to the other being forbidden by the fact that
a discourse, whichever it may be, is founded by excluding what language
contributes to it in terms of impossible, namely, the sexual relationship, there
results from this some inconvenience for dialogue within each (sex),
...that we can say nothing seriously (in other words to form a limited series)
except by taking sense from the comical order - to which nothing sublime (see
Dante here again) fails to pay reverence,
...and then that insult, since it proves through the epos to be the frst as well
as the last word of dialogue (confromre), judgement likewise, up to the
Last, remains a phantasy, and to say it, only touches on the real by losing
all meaning.
Of all that he will know how to make himself a conduit. There is more than
one of them, even a lot, to suit the three dit-mensions of the impossible: as
they are deployed in sex, in sense, and in meaning.
If he is sensitive to the beautiful, to which nothing obligates him, he will
situate it from the between-two-deaths, and if any one of these truths parest
to him worthy of being understood, it is only in the half-saying of the single
turn that he will put his trust.
21
Reste le stable de la mise plat du phallus, soit de la bande, o lanalyse
trouve sa fn, celle qui assure son sujet suppos du savoir :
que, le dialogue dun sexe lautre tant interdit de ce quun discours,
quel quil soit, se fonde dexclure ce que le langage y apporte dimpossible,
savoir le rapport sexuel, il en rsulte pour le dialogue lintrieur de chaque
(sexe) quelque inconvnient,
que rien ne saurait se dire srieusement (soit pour former de srie
limite) qu prendre sens de lordre comique, quoi pas de sublime (voire
Dante l encore) qui ne fasse rvrence,
et puis que linsulte, si elle savre par l epos tre du dialogue le premier
mot comme le dernier (confromre), le jugement de mme, jusquau
dernier , reste fantasme, et pour le dire, ne touche au rel qu perdre toute
signifcation.
De tout cela il saura se faire une conduite. Il y en a plus dune, mme des tas,
convenir aux trois dit-mensions de limpossible : telles quelles se dploient
dans le sexe, dans le sens, et dans la signifcation.
Sil est sensible au beau, quoi rien ne loblige, il le situera de lentre-deux-
morts, et si quelquune de ces vrits lui parest bonne faire entendre, ce
nest quau midire du tour simple quil se fera.
22
23
C.FIERENS Reading Ltourdit THE LETTER 49 (2012) 23-50
READING LETOURDIT. SECOND TURN.
CHAPTER 3:
SENSE AND STRUCTURE
1
Christian Fierens
We forsake meaning in order to advance into sense. Castration no longer has
the Freudian meaning but the sense which aims at the cut. The teachable starts
not just from number but from the saying of number. Structure is topology
and Kants transcendental dialectic corresponds to spherical topology.
Interpretation is the cut that makes the structure evident, and love must end
up as hate for there to be a saying. The process of treatment results in the
certainty of the supposed subject which is situated in the three dimensions of
impossibility: sex, sense, and meaning.
Keywords: sense, teaching, saying, said, structure, topology, modifcation of
structure, the end of analysis
(233) Psychoanalytic discourse puts meaning in parenthesis and puts
movement into sense. How does sense teach us? The frst section will
respond: by translation. What does it teach us? The second section will
respond: structure. Far from being congealed, this structure is modifcation
(third section). The last section will show how structure allows for the end
of analysis.
1
Translation by Cormac Gallagher of C. Fierens, Lecture de Ltourdit. Lacan 1972. Paris.
LHarmattan, 2002, pp 233-266.
24
1. Sense and teaching (36c-40a)
Let us get moving here on the business of sense, promised earlier because of
its difference to meaning. (36c; 479)
The noumenon has led us in the preceding paragraph to the o-object; again it
is philosophy that traces out a path for us towards sense. What is sense? To
tackle it with Heideggers leaden-footed method means giving its weight to
each word: What is called thinking? gives weight to some words of Parmenides:
It is necessary to say and to think that the individual being (ltant) is; this
sentence condenses, for Heidegger, the whole history of philosophy. We
already glimpse that Lacans sense with its winged feet will take fight far from
Heideggers leaden-footed sense. With the latter, we are brought down to
earth, to the matter-of-fact-ness of ltant, which translates at once two Latin
forms: ens, present participle of esse, and sens, present participle of sum. The
leaden-footed sense is therefore quite simply tant, being (as essence). This
frst condensation is reduplicated by another which, for its part, is attributed to
Kant (36cd; 480). Let us examine frst of all the composition of The critique
of pure reason (1781-1787), and more precisely of its frst section (the
transcendental theory of elements): 1
0
the transcendental aesthetic poses
the (234) spatio-temporal frame of every phenomenon (sensibility), 2
0
the
transcendental analytic articulates the categories of every object conceived
(understanding), 3
0
the transcendental dialectic analyses the reasonings that
extend judgments beyond their competence, towards the transcendental (and
illusory) ideas of a soul, a world and a transcendent God (reason). For Kant,
The critique of pure reason is purely transcendental; logically frst, it is the
condition of possible experience: for an object of knowledge to exist, it must
appear in the aesthetic of space-time, in the analytic of judgment and in the
deceptive dialectic or reasoning. According to Lacan, this topology of pure
reason is reckoned to be inept because it only re-enforced the bourgeois
Kants own argumentation. The bourgeois claims to be treated as a Master
while refusing to risk his life (this is the defnition of the bourgeois according
to Lacans master, Kojve; c.f. his Kant, p.97); thus, Kant fnds himself out
of his depth in dealing with sense from an outside, transcendent point of view.
Hence there results his inaptitude to grasp his ineptness. Lacans judgment
is due only to an error of Lacan: he imputes transcendence to Kant where
the latter specifes clearly that it is a matter of the transcendental. Kant very
clearly distinguishes transcendental and transcendent: the transcendental
is the condition of experience (prelimi-nary and inherent in every experience,
25
this condition is for all), the transcendent is on the contrary what is situated
outside all experience (the unsayable, the bourgeois takes advantage of).
Lacan is wrong here about Kants transcendental approach and understands it
as transcendence (Kant had already responded in his life-time to a similar lack
of comprehension formulated by Schulze); Kantian aesthetics and dialectic
are supposed to remain transcendent, namely outside Kant. In opposition to
this transcendence erroneously attributed to Kant, Lacan situates the aesthetic
and the dialectic in the immanence of the discourse of the analyst, namely in
a transcendental approach (in the Kantian sense): the topological aesthetic
operates in the (235) articulation of saying and the dialectic presupposes
the structure (41e), endorsed in the phantasy (35a). After the Heideggerian
condensation of the whole history of thought into a few words of Parmenides,
after the so-called Kantian condensation of thought into transcendence, there
comes a third enormous condensation: the one by which Heidegger condenses
his own project with that of Kant (Kant and the problem of metaphysics):
Heideggers thesis, which he is going to try to justify by the texts, is that the
imbrication of sensibility and understanding, of intuition and of thought, of
time and the categories is so perfect that their unity (namely that of knowing)
is not posterior to their existence as elements, but anterior and original; to the
point that it is only starting from this very unifcation that the elements are
susceptible to being distinguished and defned separately (Introduction by A.
de Waelhens and W. Biemel, p.24). These condensations are supposed to go
to the ultimate meaning of thought insofar as it is supposed to unite in itself
all the elements of the latter. Riveted to the earth by such considerations,
Heidegger and Kant could only think with leaden feet and have congealed
the movement of thought and the reversals of discourse.
We have to say this enormous condensation, return it to the movement of
saying. This saying is to be understood in the analytic sense (36d; 480). Not
only in the sense of the categories of the Kantian transcendental analytic;
this saying, to be understood does not imply only transcenden-tal logic
but again good logic, that of the psychoanalytic discourse, which touches
on the real by encountering it as impossible. Starting from grammar, one
can measure the weakness or the strength of the elements which can be either
condensed in the all of a completed meaning, or again and again come up
against the impossible and follow the sense of the roundabout of discourses.
In the frst case the real is imagined as transcendent and the elements are
univocally qualifed by a similar imbecility; they are imbecilic [from the
26
Latin Imbecillus, from im and bacillum, a diminutive of baculum: without
a stick, without a crutch] because they are deprived of the stanchion of (236)
proper logic. In the second case, these same elements serve as material
for saying the roundabout of discourses, which, forgotten behind the said,
receives its strength from proper logic to be understood: the real then is
transcendental, it does not consist of experiential material, but in a condition
present in every experience of saying, in every discourse.
What is the sense of the enormous condensation of philosophy? Where is
sense if, for Heidegger, the elements that composed the history of philosophy
are imbecilic with respect to Parmenides? And where is sense, if the Kant of
The critique of practical reason sets his face unfinchingly against any subjective
particularity that might upset the universality of the moral law? What sense would
there be in remaining insensitive to the pathetic element, proper to sensibility,
which might trouble the purity of the moral law
2
? Has this transcendence unjustly
attributed to Kant, this imbecility, has it a sense, has it the sense of structure? Kant
perceived this sense in his study of Swedenborg (Dreams of a visionary explained
by metaphysical dreams, 1766); in effect, the sense of the life of Swedenborg
(1688-1772) who, from being the brilliant empirical scientist that he was, went
beyond the limits of reason in order to become a theosophist and the founder
of a sect - , prefgures the composition of The critique of pure reason (1781-
1787); the frst (aesthetic and analytic) part of the Critique: how is knowledge
possible? (frst scientifc part of Swendenborgs life). The second (dialectical)
part of the Critique: toward what illusions is reason necessarily drawn? (second
theosophical part of the same life).
Sense is never produced except by the translation of one discourse into
another (36e), which the two condensations already indicated to us: thought
is the translation of Parmenides (for Heidegger), the topology (of thought)
translates the life of Swedenborg (for Kant). This fact can be touched in the
movement of translation which, by changing (237) discourse, leads to sense.
Here we are then equipped with this little light which consists in the
translation of one discourse into another. A much more modest start than the
great Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. By this change of lighting, the
multiple Kantian antinomies (the multiple contradictions theoretical and practical
2
The insult is the prime example of the pathetic element that may subjectively justify an action
(vengeance, for example): it is a matter of a purely subjective maxim and not of a universal moral
law (Critique of Practical Reason, p. 628).
27
reasons come up against by taking phenomenal objects as things in themselves)
are replaced by the unique antimony which is produced between sense to
meaning (36e; 470): sense disappears where a meaning is established and sense
arises again where meaning vacillates. This is clearly apparent in The critique
of pure reason (1781-87) and in The critique of judgment (1790): not alone is
the system of cosmological ideas formed from four antinomical conficts (which
correspond to the four categories), but again every meaning from whatever part
of The critique of pure reason only takes on its sense in its articulation with the
other parts by allowing its own meaning to be lost. The same dialectic applies to
the Critique of judgment. Kant insists on many occasions on the systematic and
complete character of his critique. That some faint sense may have emerged by
a tangential illumination from these Critiques, their meanings are effaced and
transformed into punctuations in the journey of sense. It is like the way analytic
discourse illuminates the other discourses by a tangential light (9c). The very term
Critique is put in question by Lacan: not having known either the phenomena
of the unconscious and its reversals, nor the developments of mathematical logic
(which introduced the marvelous efforescence of the impossible and subvert
classical logic), Kant seems to have failed in his critical project: despite the well-
known title of his works, () he only bears witness to being the plaything of his
unconscious, which because of not thinking could neither judge nor calculate in
the work that it blindly produces (Television, p.59, c.f. Freud The interpretation
of dreams, p. XXX).
(238) Kant avec Sade, which Lacan wrote in 1963 (E 765), had shown the
playfulness of the Critique of natural reason (1788): the universality of
the Kantian moral law (implying the sacrifce of sensibility or the Kantian
pathetic) is translated into the universality of a Sadian right to enjoyment
(implying anothers sacrifce): the subject of (pathetic) pleasure barred by
the moral law in the Kantian discourse becomes victim, subject barred ($) by
the tormentors right to enjoyment (o-object) in Sadian discourse. Illuminated
in this way by Sade, the Critique of practical reason seems to reveal itself as
playful in accordance with the structure of the phantasy
($ o). Unveiling the logic of the phantasy, Sade is indeed logical (37a), but
not any funnier than Kant for all that: in effect he lacks the operation of the
phallic function which would go beyond this masculine logic of universality
3
.
3
Kant for a nothing, would make us lose our seriousness, except that he has not the slightest
sense of the comic...But someone who, for his part, absolutely lacks it...is Sade (E 783). Let us
not forget that Kant, for his part, has the sense of the particular judgement, not reducible to the
universal (Critique of pure reason, p.881-882).
28
Kants maxims only have meaning as long as they have no sense, not even
common sense; thus the three great Kantian questions: What can I know?
What should I do? What can I hope for? only develops meanings from their
mutual separation and their distance from common sense.
By advancing into sense, we are therefore reduced to losing meaning. The
only thing that enlightens us is the little light of sense. There is no lack
of sense in the so-called pre-Socratic vaticinations (37a; 480): Heideggers
return to Parmenides is valid as a way of getting sense to move on; for us it
opens out onto Platos Parmenides and the logic of the Heteros or of the notall
(23ce). As vaticinations, the pre-Socratics maxims foretell the future and
open up sense; impossible to say which, since sense is developed precisely
from the impossible which alone can encircle saying. Let us therefore write
asysent as a (239) holophrase not yet articulating the logic of sense, since
this sense does not have the recourse of meaning. Freud licks his chops at
these vaticinations not only when he equals the pre-Socratics (E 585) in
the sentence Wo Es war, soll Ich werden, but again when he borrows the true
originating drives (Eros and Thanatos) from Empedocles two fundamental
principles: love and hate (Analysis terminable and interminable, 1937). This
reference is not the best of them since love and hate are ambivalence, in
other words the single face of the Moebius strip (32d). It does not matter
moreover since Freud knows how to keep his sense of direction (S 37b),
to make use of the death drive to orientate himself towards sense. That is
enough to see that interpretation is of sense and goes against meaning:
interpretation, as oracle, as will of the Other, is not the pinning down of a
meaning; it neither hides nor reveals but opens up the sense which disqualifes
meanings in favour of sexual displacement. The sexual in effect is not
riveted to the genitality of a sexual relationship, but to the extra-genital
journey of what supplies for the absence of the sexual relationship, to the
o-object which again takes up into itself the imperative sense of the four
o-objects inscribed in oraculaire: oral, ass, ocular and oracular (oral, cul,
oculaire et oraculaire). Here it is not a matter here of taking up again the
common meaning-traits of objects, but of outlining the required passage of
sense from the one to the other.
It is the misery of historians to have to rely on meaning-documents; the
historian does not go beyond the meaning of his sources, a meaning that he
actively seeks without ever hoping to arrive at the indubitable truth which
only serves him as an illusory motive. In translating these meanings, the
29
historian does indeed read a sense: the past is read in perspective. But
anyone who wants to hang the enormity of the condensation on a theory
and on an added sense, utilizes history and goes beyond his competence; for
example, the historical materialism of Marxists reduces the sense of history
to the a-temporal meaning of (240) the class-struggle and to the materiality
of production. Alas! The sense of history disappears in the meaning
of materialism. Marxs doctrine is historical: as a theory of history it is
inscribed in history to the point of becoming irremediably (37c) historical,
dated.
Luckily analysis is there to breathe life into the little stories (37c):
psychoanalysis taking up again the question of sense mistreated by the theories
of history, can only do so in the framework of analytic treatment, where its
discourse is effective and it leaves us with our tongues hanging out as regards
what is not of our own time. It changes nothing in the embarrassment of the
honest historian who refuses to have recourse to transcendence to explain
history by some all-encompassing meaning. From his meaning-documents,
the historian can only have the presentiment of an un-articulatable, even
though already articulated sense: asysent. But how recognize this sense,
this asysent? By translating the meaning-documents. The scenting of
asysent is developed then into a search for sense through translation, into
sacysent. The homophonic equivocation asysent/sacysent illuminates
the way of writing by the grammatical equivocation which displaces a word-
sentence (asysent) towards translation, notably that of the Jansenist of Port-
Royal, Lemaistre de Sacy. His translation of the Bible from the vulgate of St
Jerome is a translation of a translation and is thus inscribed within the drift
of a sense (Sacy-sens) escaping from any transcendent sense. Here indeed is
the embarrassment: being caught up in a sense that escapes, without being
able to get out of it by some transcendent meaning (as historical materialism
had tried to do). The historian is charged with the science of embarrassment
(36cd). This science of embarrassment which history is, contributes something
to science; if the expert knows what he is doing in his own particular domain,
he does not know what, in the effects of science interests everybody (E 794).
If history enumerates the meanings of different scientifc discoveries, it poses
at the same time the question of the sense of science (for humanity). This
question has no defnitive response and this just by itself would merit us
speaking about (241) a subject of science (E 794). This subject of science is
defned by his embarrassment.
30
Therefore it is important (37d; 481) for all those who have to deal with sense
(historians, analysts and many others) for this presentiment, this sacysent
to be articulated otherwise than by the simple holophrase. This sense is the
impossibility to speak truly about the real, it is justifed, it is moved by
the very stuff of language which articulates a saying and the said in a logic
(That one might be saying ), by the matheme from which the relationship
of saying to the said is situated.
The matheme which situates the relationship of saying to said is uttered
from the only real recognized from the outset in language: namely, number.
Number (one, two, three) in effect only exists starting from the contradictory
concept which determines the primordial zero (Frege): it presupposes a frst
impossible (the contradictory concept) which begins to circle the real; all
numeration fows from this frst impossible. Nevertheless beyond or on
this hither side of number (and of the numerable of demand), the real at stake
in saying (saying cannot be expressed, 10e, it is demonstrated, 9b) can be
extended to intuition (to the power of the continuity of desire, which is no
longer articulateable because already articulated). Which presupposes that
this term [of intuition] is as castrated as can be of its metaphorical use (37e):
castration no longer has the Freudian meaning, but the sense which aims at
the cut and its topology.
Here therefore is a feld which is not developed from meanings which can
be added up, condensed and generalized (in a numeration obeying the frst
two formulae). The feld of speech and of language in psychoanalysis is
developed by a topological reshaping, explicitated in the evidentemptying
operation and in the cut of topological subversion. These operations retroact
on their own foundation: the numerable (of demand) is now situated with
respect to the continuous of desire, the spherical is situated with respect to
the a-spherical. Thus every closed cut can be made equal, by a topological
transformation, to the (242) supplementary disc. Mathematical discourse
functions following a similar retroaction: 1
0
at the level of a particular
reasoning, it effaces a frst saying which has led to a said being absurd, but
also 2
0
a new mathematical theory encompasses and effaces those which
historically preceded it: the matheme wipes history clean of the meanings
which had carried it in favour of sense and saying.
No surer experience for resolving the embarrassment of history (38a; 481):
its search for an ungraspable sense starting from meanings can fnd no way
31
out except by saying, by the reversals, by the reshapings that bring about a
passage from one discourse to another. Hence the attraction of history for
thought which resolves its embarrassment by transforming it into nonsense
proper to being, into surplus-nonsense, into the o-object proper to desire,
into speech with no beyond, without transcendence.
Being, in its nonsense dimension, does not allow us to make a state of
it (38a). This state, this static establishment, stabilizing the movement of
being in a stabitat, in an essence (where saying is lost along with the act
of being or existence) does not have our goodwill. Even if speakersby
being des, believe themselves to be beings, saying and being appear in the
nonsense which discourse comes up against and turn into another discourse.
It is important that being leads us (36b) in the reversals of discourse, rather
than being a static point escaping speech.
The achievement of the undecidable (38a) is something quite different than
making being a state congealed in essence. The matheme is formulated
through the impasses of the impossible which circle the real (35d), in other
words, starting from the marvellous efforescence of the impossible. Starting
from the only real recognized from the outset in language: namely number,
we are confronted from the outset with number depending on the zero, on
the contradictory concept (frst form of the impossible: the contradiction
which concerns the said by number); but this said of number depends on
the real of saying number (38ab) which is not constructed from objects to
be counted (like fngers or the balls of an (243) abacus), but from saying
which poses the contradictory concept. This saying is not verifable: it is
not based on a reality. Saying number is not demonstrated (second form
of the impossible the undemonstrable). But the impossible of saying goes
still further: its own undemonstrability is itself undemonstrable (third form
of the impossible: the undecidable), notably from the premises that number
presupposes (the contradictory concept, the zero and the ordinal): there is
an inherent contradiction in presupposing that saying is demonstrable (38d).
Saying escapes from the logic of the demonstrable and the contradictory: one
can scarcely follow it on its own journey described above (9bc). Which is not
without a teaching effect.
How question what constitutes the teachable (38b; 481)? Lacans answer is
clear: the teachable or the matheme (that which alone can be taught, 28d),
is the journey of the different forms of the impossible (the roundabout of
32
discourses). This presupposes that one can teach not simply starting from
number (as in science and physics in particular), but starting from the saying
of number and even from the always particular undecidable saying. Platos
Meno gives a frst trace of this teachable starting from the particular:
virtue is not transmitted like universal science, but like true opinion (orth
doxa), always particular. The great statesmen, the divines, prophets and
others inspired by the gods only tell the truth (as opinion and not as science)
through a particular divine favour. In this way true opinion opens in this
way a teachable which goes beyond the universal. The Meno prefgures the
question of the matheme constructed not on the universal alone (frst formula
of sexuation) but on the impasses of what can be mathematized or teachable,
in other words on the four formulae of sexuation (35cd). Nevertheless it
cannot be denied that there is progress from Meno to Lacan. In what way is
the Lacanian matheme a progress as compared to Meno? It is to be (244)
sure the last thing to say that between the two there is a world (38bc): far
from circling a world, an imaginary, these two discourses come up against the
impossible and thus share in the same symbolic logic which circles the real.
For Lacan as Plato, to teach is to come up against a real, of which the world
is only the derisory fall(38c); inscribed in meaning (an illusory condition of
everything that is conditioned for the Kant of the Critique of pure reason),
the world is an (imaginary) product of (symbolic) fction (c.f. the world of
Alexander, 25e); it is only the imaginary-symbolic myth that supplies for and
supplants the matheme (35ce).
The progress accomplished between the discourse of the Meno and Lacans
(matheme) discourse is limited to indicating the derisory fall, namely the
o-object, at stake in the teachable. In the Meno, Plato makes sense of true
opinion (it traces the transmission of virtue); for Lacan, true opinion no
longer makes sense, it is ab-sense of meaning (38c). This loss of meaning
in favour of sense can engender a regret which responds to the progress
accomplished by the Lacanian matheme. This regret is confrmed if one
refers the ab-sense of meaning (and non-metaphorical topology) to the
opinion of our right-thinking lot (38c), of our psychoanalysts clinging to
meaning to the detriment of sense and the reversals of discourse.
Is it possible that the opinion of right-thinking psychoanalysts might have
carried, despite themselves, a matheme in the sense of topology (38cd;
482)? Let us try to show how to arrive at such a matheme starting from true
opinion.
33
Such a matheme is not an addition to true opinion; the Moebius strip ought not
to be constructed by the ideal cross-section around which a strip is twisted
by a half-turn. This is why Lacan carefully avoids supporting our Moebius
strip by the image (38d). On the contrary, the matheme is there in the journey
of true opinion and it is along its whole length that the Moebius strip manages
to make only one of its front and its back (27b). To imagine the matheme as
a simple supplement to opinion or to imagine the Moebius strip by its ideal
(245) cross-section does not articulate the said with the Heteros; the said does
not become other and the notall is reduced to a purely local particularity. The
reader of Ltourdit is not questioned by such a presentation. By the two
turns of Ltourdit, corresponding to the double-turned cut of the cross-cap,
the reader becomes other: in the re-presentation, he is an effect of the double-
turned cut as a putting into question of the subject in phantasy. For masculine
logic which stops at the second formula, saying is to be taken as ex-sisting
the said and the real ex-sists as what is outside saying; by the said, the real is
verifable (true or false). Such a real plunged in meanings does not lead to the
matheme, since it forgets the notall, phallic functioning, a-spherical topology.
Is the true opinion of our right-thinking people who wish to remain in
meaning the truth, from which saying will remain barred by a verifable real?
Do they simply lack the saying forgotten behind the said and hidden in what
could be understood? Or, on the contrary, can it be shown how the matheme
carries true opinion right along its length, without it knowing so?
I would test it by the correction that I am going to make in it (38e). This
reprise topology is at the same time the eternal reprise of desire which does
not cease to stitch the front and the back at every point. Such is the proof or
the test of the structure.
Line without points or median cut, the Moebius strip, right along its length,
makes it be that its front and its back are only one (27b). This median cut is
redoubled by the fact that one of its edges, after the turn by which it is closed,
is pursued in the other edge and makes the Moebius strip appear as surface
contained between the two edges.
The line without points, namely the Moebius strip (which is not imagined,
but constructed, 26-28) can only be produced from a surface already pricked
by a point (39a; 482), by the out-of-line point (27e) specifed by a double
loop (the double loop of the edge of the Moebius strip). This point is
spreadable on a sphere, it has two faces. By its double (246) looping, this
34
point as spherical surface gives the stuff necessary for the constitution of an
a-spherical surface (the cross-cap). If the Moebius strip is a cut, it needs this
material to begin a (surface) asphere.
This out-of-line point (27e-39a), this supplementary disc (30c) is not a
spherical addition to an aspherical surface, but the structure is made by a
transformation: the asphere is a surface which makes possible the Moebian
cut and which is restored to the spherical mode when this cut is realized
(see fg.13, p.199). This cut is at the same time edge of a Moebius strip and
edge of the supplementary disc. The supplement of the Moebius strip which
transforms it into a cross-cap is projected (39b) in that way to the heart of
the cut.
But sinceone can say that this Moebian surface is made up of lines without
points all along which the front is stitched to the back, in the same way the
supplementary point (the out-of-line point)can be fxed everywhere in a
cross-cap (39b). In other words, every fragment of the sphere can be seen as
o-object inasmuch as its cut is redoubled to make the edge of the Moebius strip
appear. Thus, for example, the noumenon is developed into an o-object, into
surplus-nonsense which leads us further than spherical topology (36ab).
Every point of the surface of the cross-cap can be chosen as out-of-line
point, for example the opinion of our right-thinking people, the analysts
of meaning. But it must be fxed: this fxion must be chosen as the unique
out-of-line point so that a cut, by making one and one only turn of it (39c)
transforms this unique point representing the whole cross-cap into a spherical
surface (a and b of fg.13, p.199, except the a) the Moebius strip is then
reduced to the simple cut.
This spherically spreadable point is the opinion that can be said to be true
(39c). What are we to make of this true opinion? The saying which makes
the double turn around (247) it fxes the opinion; this cut modifes the opinion,
namely articulates it with the modes of saying, the opinion has become an
out-of-line point. This modifcation is a verifcation of the opinion not in the
sense of fxing it in a univocal truth value, but of modifying it topologically.
The real is therefore the movement of modifcation, proper to topology.
So a saying like mine (39cd; 482) permits the matheme of saying, by the fact
that it ex-sists the said. A saying remains unteachable so long as it does not
become a matheme, so long as it is not mathematized, so long as it does not
35
go through the impasses of logic. This journey of the impossible corresponds
to Menonian criteria: impossibility for those who have virtue (Pericles) to
teach it, impossibility for those who claim to teach virtue (the Sophists) to be
virtuous. Or again the impossibility of learning a truth, when one knows it
already or when one does not have any notion of it.
The unteachable becomes a matheme by the fxion of true opinion (39d;
463): teaching fxes the o-object around which there can be played out the
movement of the modifying saying, which circles the real and fxes it by the
impossible (35d). This fxion of the o-object is not without the resources
of equivocation: it opens up the world of fction. The equivocation fxion/
fction is the equivocation proper to the matheme which, basing itself on the
fxion of the real by coming up against the impossible, at the same time makes
the symbolic work in order that it should also produce fctions, meanings,
whose equivocation refers to sense.
Thus an object as easy to fabricate as the Moebius strip, imagined in the
fction of a strip of paper re-sealed after a half-twist, puts within hands reach
for everyone the fxed real, the o-object, saying. Without it, there remains
nothing except to endure, to painfully tolerate the said.
My fxion of this doxa-point (39e) is not of the dit-mension of the said.
It belongs to saying, which one cannot account for otherwise than by
following its effects in analytic discourse (39e-40a). The effects of this
saying (which is desire) in analytic discourse are (248) identically effects of
its mathematizing (40a: 483): effect of ab-sense, of the absence of sexual
relationship, of the asphere, of interpretation inasmuch as it produces sense
and goes against meaning. Mathematizing is not the product of a symbolic
machine, but proves to be something of a yoke (machin) once it has
produced this symbolic machinery. This yoke, is the asphere, desire, the
cross-cap producer of (symbolic-imaginary) fctions starting from the fxion,
itself a fxation of sense by the o-object.
This term machin from the Latin machina, invention, contrivance) is found
already, in Cicero: Ad usum(see p.116-117). The quotation introduced
earlier the asemantic signifer (15c), in other words the sense that is
produced by homophony, grammar and logic, beyond meaning. It is notable
that this quotation already served as an exergue for the seminar of 11 April
1956, at the moment when Lacan was centring his theoretical contributions
36
on the symbolic and the imaginary, on fction: fction already announced the
fxion of the real point, of the o-object, of the yoke which alone assures the
possibility of the imaginary and symbolic machinery.
2. Structure (40-41; 483-485)
Sense opens out onto topology or onto the matheme. Might the goal of topology
be to guide us into structure? No, structure is topology, inasmuch as topology
is the retroaction of the chain-like order in which language consists (40b;
483). What is this chain-like order? Language is articulated in tongue and
speech. To speak is to use words, it is to dip into a possible, into the reservoir
of signifers that the tongue constitutes; the tongue itself survives on words
previously spoken. Language consists in the concatenation of speech/tongue/
speech/ etc.: from speech the tongue is born, from which speech is born, from
which the tongue is re-born, etc. This chain-like order is also the order of
the discourses: if a frst discourse can give way to a new tongue, the discourse
that will be elaborated from this (249) new tongue will be irreducible to the
frst discourse; and so on. As a result the analyst must frst of all be analysed,
since, as we know, this is indeed the order on which his career is traced out
(19c): he must in effect pass through the discourses of the hysteric, the master
and the academic, before ending at the discourse of the analyst. All repetition
is repetition organized from a displacement of discourse. This chain-like
order is given in the discourse of the analyst; structure is thus the retroaction
of the discourse of the analyst onto each of the elements of the chain that
have preceded it: for example we can only speak about the structure of the
discourse of the hysteric inasmuch as it has been illuminated by the discourse
of the analyst.
Structure, is the aspherical concealed in the language-like articulation
inasmuch as this aspherical is the locus of the phantasy; a closed cut comes to
modify it and allows two fundamentally heterogeneous fragments to appear:
an aspherical Moebius strip ($) and the spherical supplementary disc (the
o-object), which comes to stabilize the subject-effect ($). The vanishing/
reviving subject-effect is not directly graspable. The grasp on the subject
only operates by means of the supplementary disc (o-object).
The sub-sentence (40bc) inasmuch as a subject-effect grasps it, articulates
a subordinate conjunction (inasmuch as), a subject group (a subject-effect)
37
and a verbal group (grasps it): the subject group refers back directly to the
ungraspable barred subject, the verbal group represents the o-object or the
means of grasping the subject, the conjunction marries aspherical topology
(the principal proposition) to the phantasy, $ o (the subordinate proposition).
Verb and grammatical subject are articulated in the structure; a false sense-
effect is produced when one attempts to give priority to one of the two: to a
subject effect (to its asphere-like whirlpool, $) or to grasps it (the object
supposed to refect the subject in an imaginary fashion, the o-object). By
taking either the spherical fragment or the Moebian part of the cross-cap, one
is precipitated into the imaginary resonance of topology.
(250) Here there should be distinguished the ambiguity that is registered from
meaning and the ambiguity that makes sense (41c). The double loop of the
cut separates two fragments: in the frst ambiguity, the subject and the object
can be congealed in a stable (and imaginary) meaning. The second ambiguity
(relative to sense) suggests the hole, suggests the journey which always comes
up against the impossible; thus, it indicates the order of discourses and the
retroaction of the discourse of the analyst onto each discourse; in other words,
through saying (which makes a hole), the ambiguity which makes sense
suggests structure. The structure thus suggested ought not to be understood in
the sense of structuralism as world view (note 40e). Structuralism, world
view, claims to be explanatory: That is why your daughter is mute/that is why
your map is mute (your topological map is imaginary and metaphorical); this
world view will not manage to make it speak, because speech only functions
from the reversals of discourse and saying.
Thus the cut established from topology (40d; 484), - the closed cut on the
cross-cap (fg.13, p.199) - is the said of language, but a said which does not
forget saying. This said, inasmuch as it is inscribed in the aspherical structure
is already in the right logic, in what is heard; which makes the saying appear.
Naturally there are saids that predicative logic attempts to classify under
an always greater universal major; this universalizing supposition is the
necessary and illusory work described in Kants transcendental dialectic;
it corresponds to spherical topology where it is the word that decides; it
corresponds to the sphere where the article (the) is defned and where the
noun (sphere) is all-encompassing (one is inside or outside of it). Now the
sphere is only a supplement to the structure: it is in a sphere-fragment that the
Moebius strip fnds what allows it to become a cross-cap. This supplement is
38
fction. It feigns the true to plug the hole of the real, a fxion point around
which the roundabout of discourses can turn.
(251) One could say (41a) that the sphere does without topology, since it
seems to exist before and independently of aspherical topology. The closed
cut cuts out a sphere-fragment that has a delimited extension: the cutcuts
out ... the concept, a concept that can be defned in its comprehension or
its extension. The language-fair, the principle of exchange, of value (41a)
develop a logic of classes, of overlappings by genera and species on which
the discourse of the capitalist depends. This capitalist fair presupposes that
one concedes that everything is constructed from the universal (x.x). This
universal concession of a piece of the cemetery for what is already dead can
be nothing but matter. Thus matter is to be conceded for dialectic: even
though what is at stake is only dead matter (subordinated by concession), we
necessarily pursue our illusory search for the universal and ultimate principle
(according to Kants Transcendental dialectic). It is very diffcult to support
in its purity the spherical dit-mension where the concept is cut out in a logic
of the universal constructed on the said: it is no doubt everywherebut, for
whoever wants to see it, it always blends in with the structure as retroaction
(40b) of the discourse of the analyst onto the other discourses or again as
retroaction of the notall onto the other formulae of sexuation. In other words,
spherical logic also implies the discourse of the analyst and the unconscious at
stake in the roundabout of discourses. The sphere is the surface-fction with
which the structure is clothed: the aspherical surface is dressed up from a
spherical fragment, from the supplementary disc. The line without points (the
Moebius strip of saying) is flled out by the out-of-line point (the o-object).
(Aspherical) sense is foreign (41b) to the reduced logic of the sphere. Thus
man is good and man is bad respond to the same spherical logic, and thus say
strictly nothing that has a sense. We may quite rightly be astonished that no
one has taken advantage of this (252) remark to make a structural reference,
namely to say that this spherical logic is only a dressing-up of structure and
of sense. The evident refers back to being as emptying: what is evident in
the structure, which articulates the spherical fragment with the cut constituted
by the Moebius strip, refers to being inasmuch as it is not an essence, but the
emptying of essence, the emptying of the concept, the emptying of being,
no more nonsense. There is no cut that modifes the structure of the sphere:
whether a cut is closed or open, it makes a hole on the sphere and the bilateral
surface remains bilateral: the cut when all is said and done does not ex-sist
39
from the sphere (41bc). The hole in the sphere is evident to be sure, but
it reduces what it circles to a universal which is only possible. This some
possible or other universal is therefore empty. The framework of this logic
based on the universal is the proposition. This proposition can be analysed
in terms of subject, copula and predicate, or better in terms of propositional
function and argument: substance is only a correlate of the (universal)
propositional function; it has issued from the predicate of the proposition (like
Socrates who might be defned by the universality of man: Socrates is a man);
a priori, it is co-possible or not with the universal on which it depends. The
articulation of the proposition into function and arguments allows the question
of sense in the four formulae which conjugate the phallic function to be set in
motion. In opposition to this articulation, the overlapping in the predicate of
essences or co-possible substances (yes or no) with the predicate allows all
the faux-pas that we amuse ourselves with at the level of a spherical logic.
The hole in spherical logic starts from the possible, even though the evident-
emptying of the aspherical topological operation starts from the impossible
which animates the modifcation, the subversion of meanings and makes the
sense plainly appear.
Homosexuality (41cd) depends on this masculine logic, articulated according
to the frst two formulae in a spherical topology. Without the expansion of this
logic to two (253) homosexual or masculine formulae (Greek antiquity, the
Arab expansion from the VIIth century on, the Christian Middle Ages and the
Eucharist as actualization of universal salvation by the Church), the structure
would have much earlier necessitated an Other recourse, the recourse of
the notall or the Other, a recourse which was kept waiting on account of
the great epochs evoked. At the heart of these great epochs, religion alone
when all was said and done was able to constitute true opinion relaying
Platos orth doxa; now this true opinion flls out the aspherical, gives to
the matheme the funds with which found itself invested, and keeps the door
open for the two heterosexual or feminine formulae. There will always
remain something of this fund which is true opinion, famously at stake in
the Church. Biblical studies (AE 485) are content to aim at the meaning of
the Bible; they have never yet saved anybody, because they do not dispense
something of the search for sense, for true opinion and for faith.
To work in structure (41e) presupposes the retroaction of the order of
discourses on each one of them; to work in structure presupposes the sense
which never happens except in the translation from one discourse into
40
another (36e); for such a sense, the plug of meaning, which plugs the gap
of the sexual relationship, source of sense a plug operating especially in
Biblical studies is of no interest. The translation of the Bible (sacysent,
37cd) only makes sense from the moment when meaning-documents give
way to the search for sense, notably to theology considered in its logical
dimension
4
.
3. The modifcation of the structure
Topology teaches (41e; 485) the link between the number of turns of the cut
and the modifcation of the structure. This modi-fcation puts the structure
into mode (hysterical, master, academic, analytic modes): by revealing the
modality of each discourse, the analytic discourse leads each discourse to
its stopping point, to its powerlessness, to its specifc real in order to make
it switch towards another discourse also marked by the impossible (42a);
the putting into mode of different discourses by the discourse of the analyst
allows the real to be touched on by encountering it as impossible. For
topology, these modes are the sphere (universalizing logic) and the a-sphere
(proper to analysis). The passage from one mode to another is carried out by
a cut. But the modifcation will depend on number of turns that the cut will
have comprized.
Thus (42a), the cut passing one single time through the line of intersection
of the cross-cap (see fg.13 b, p.199) transforms the whole asphere into a
stable spherical fap, into a supplementary disc, into an o-object, into an
out-of-line point, into orth doxa. On the contrary, the cut passing twice
through the line of intersection of the cross-cap (aof fg.13), the double
looping, obtains the fall of the cause of desire. The cause of desire is also
a spherical fap, but it is torn from another fragment of the surface, from a
Moebius strip (which is not reduced to the cut). This latter (unilateral) surface
is the barred subject: it is only demonstrated as ex-sistence by the fall
of the supplementary disc, of the cause of desire. This strip is ex-sistence
4
Theology begins with Aristotle, with whom logic is extraordinarily enjoyable (ou pire, 15
December 1971). This theo-logy is the part of philosophy which studies necessary, eternal and
unchangeable causes (very far from Biblical studies). The -logy (already the good logic of
the impossible) here dominates the theo- which (nevertheless) always remains quite solid, in its
stupidity (ibid.).
41
(x. x) with respect to the o-object, to the spherical fap (which, in the case
of the single cut, takes the form of being all:x.x).
This ex-sistence which is saying is demonstrated by the said. But this proof
presupposes the difference between the single turn and the double looping
cut, cuts which respectively engender either a spherically stable fap with
the disappearance of the subject, (255) or a fall of the cause of desire with
the apparition of the subject: the disappearing/appearing subject, remains at
the mercy of its said if it is repeated: if the said is not repeated, the subject
disappears; if the said is repeated, it appears only as ex-sistence to the double
looped cut. Qua Moebius strip, the subject is defned by its disappearance,
in other words by the median cut (or the single turn cut on the cross-cap)
which makes every trace of the unilateral surface disappear: x.x (fading
of the subject). Interpretation must go through a double turn to go beyond
this fading and to articulate in two turns the o-object to the subject.
The vanishing of the subject (or of the Moebius strip) is a nodal-point (42b),
circumscribed by a single turn. As knot (trivial knot or simple round), the
single turn transforms the asphere into a stable spherical fap which has the
same structure as the out-of-line point. This nodal-point is a case in the
sense of the fall of the said in spherical logic. But it can be taken up again in
interpretation (and its double turn) and opens the case for saying namely, the
ex-sistence outside the universal, saying as opposed to said. In this double
turn of interpretation, the Moebius strip only survives as pure cut or as hole
(fading of the subject). With the vanishing of the unilateral surface, sense
vanishes and is reduced to the (imagined or machinated) meaning of the hole:
the hole is machinated in it as imaginary and symbolic fction.
The imagination of the hole has consequences, to be sure (42bc; 485). The
hole the hole of the lips, of the anus, of the slit in the eyelids, of the ear
contributes in effect to the erogenous zone, the source by which the Freudian
drive is alimented. According to its etymology, the drive (Trieb from
treiben, to foat with the wind, the waves, to go with the drift) derives from
the impossible to fll hole. By producing the phallic function (or topology),
the discourse of the analyst has made a (teachable) matheme of it, where
mysticism previously only testifed to its trials by making them unsayable.
Thus, the (256) unsayable of the mystics is replaced by the journey of the
different forms of the impossible, which, by the double turn of the said, is
going to constitute saying. Whoever remains at that very hole, at the hole
42
only imagined without the Moebius strip, remains fascinated by the stable
spherical fap, by purely spherical topology, from which universal discourse
maintains its privilege. This fascination by the sphere gives body to the
discourse of the academic which has precisely the (scopic and theoretical)
o-object as Other. The privilege of the academic is to be installed in spherical
topology by the fap of the sphere which results from the simple cut of the
cross-cap.
With the image nothing will ever be made of it (42c): the image will never
give the articulation of the o-object and the subject. From what is sown,
from what is seeded starting from the image or the semblable, the semblable
can only soupirer, thrust itself into the worst (Seminar XIX, ou pire,
summarized in Scilicet 5; AE 547). The worst is the said of the object which
forgets the subjects saying. To sink into the worst with a sigh presupposes
that instead of the matheme of the Moebian cut, we imagine a stable spherical
fap which forgets the Moebius strip of the subject (42a).
The hole is not justifed by a wink, nor by a mnemic syncope, nor by a cry.
The slit in the eyelids, the hole in the memory or the glottis are not justifed
by a Quiet! (motus), by a movement of the soul, of the memory or of the
spirit supposedly expressed by the hole. All these images depend on a
spherical topology where the word Quiet! and a buttoned lip decides and
closes.
A torus has a hole only for someone who looks at it as an object (42d;
485-486): the torus as bilateral surface, belongs to spherical topology. The
imaginary, as such, has no hole. The circular hole of the torus, that of
demand, and the central hole, that of desire, are only holes for whoever
looks at them from the outside. The little ant travelling along the torus
would never encounter a hole. There is only a subject of the torus starting
the topological modifcation which transforms the torus into a Moebius strip
(evident-emptying operation, 26). A precise number of turns of saying is
necessary for this torus to be madeMoebius (257) strip (42de). The frst
stage of the transformation of the torus into Moebius strip implies that the
single cut of the torus turns twice around the central hole of desire and once
around the circular hole of demand. This frst stage of the transformation
ends up with the bipartite strip which has two edges and is twisted twice.
This double twist is the necessary condition for it to be made ... Moebius
strip by suturing one of its edges to itself (26-27). If desire is looped in two
43
turns, the turns of demand on the contrary should be an odd number (43c)
to transform the torus into a Moebius strip: it is right along its length that the
front of demand is sewn to its back (a torus is better than a cross sectionNB).
The neurotic walks on the torus, going along both the turns of demand and
the turns of desire in it; the topological modifcation into a bipartite strip then
into a contraband (Moebius strip, bande) can only be established from an
odd demand articulated on the two turns of desire. Thus Lacans analyser
(The direction of the treatment.. E 631) makes a demand one his mistress:
that she should sleep with another man; and the mistress responds to him by a
dream in which his desire is implicated twice: she has a phallus and a vagina
and the desire that this phallus should enter it. The response of the mistress
manifestly brings about a topological modifcation: the neurotic torus to
which the analyser was chained as much with respect to his mistress as to
Lacan is modi-fed into a phallic function (topologically: into a cross-cap).
As Lacan has attempted to demonstrate to the IPA traffckers who badly want
to silt him up with their own contraband, importing analysis in a fraudulent
fashion into the academic discourse, a torus is the structure of neurosis
(42e). This structure is the entwining of two tori: turning around the axis of
the one involves turning around the core of the other and reciprocally. Turning
around the desire of the one involves turning around the demand of the other
and reciprocally (Seminar IX, Identifcation, 1961-62, in connection (258)
with the torus). The contra-banding of the subject (43a), the modifcation of
the torus into a Moebius strip, appears from the indefnitely enumerable re-
petition of demand inasmuch as two turns of desire are looped at the same
time as an odd number of demands. Thanks to this reading of desire, there may
appear in a second phase the structure of saying, explained in the cross-cap;
transference should be understood as the activation of this structure. Finally,
the double looping on the cross-cap articulates the matheme or interpretation.
Interpretation can only be carried out in the correct sequence: desire taken to
the letter, transference, then interpretation; this is the very articulation of The
direction of the treatment (E 585).
I would simply like to get rid of the sort of incitement to an imagined
topology that our structural topology might inspire (43a; 486).
If demand is numerable in its turns (43a), this only ever concerns the one
who counts the turns from outside; for an imagined topology, the surface
cannot become the barred subject (the Moebius strip) and the topology is at
44
the very most a metaphor of the subject. The hole is not to be imagined. For
the one who is in the structure, the turn will be completed when it comes back
to its starting point: there is only a single turn (even if the outside observer
can count the turns of demand and of desire). The turn, which transforms
the torus, only ex-sists outside the plural number of turns: the cut alone
counts, it counts one, x.x.
I insist: the turn in itself namely the turn of the whorl seen from outside
is not countable (43ab) by the one who is plunged into topology. The
demands which are repeated for topology imagined from the outside, do not
close, for the closing can only be established in the act of cutting, in the
surface. A turn of itself, a demand, is neither said nor to say: it is not the
said for it is not in the cut, and not belonging to the domain of the said,
but of the imagined, it does not open up the question of saying. It is not a
proposition. Nevertheless (259) demand always presupposes the modal of a
saying which sustains it. A turn of itself depends therefore on a logic, which
remains to be constructed from modal logic. This logic is currently being
constructed in Ltourdit: starting from the imagined topology of the neurotic
torus (where we count desire and demands from an outside point of view), it
is a matter at frst of making the modal logic of the Moebius strip appear; then
the spherical fap (o-object) demonstrates the aspherical structure (the barred
subject) in the double-turned cut which makes the o-object fall. Interpretation
is neither the explanation of a more or less obscure declarative proposition,
nor the commentary of the modal demand: interpretation is necessarily the
cut as making the structure evident.
Our frst depiction of the cut transforming the torus into a Moebius strip
(43b, see 26-27) shows that one single demand (a single transversal turn)
suffces for this transformation, as long as it is paired with the double
longitudinal turn of desire. Nevertheless, demand, since it is enumerable,
can be repeated: the repetition compulsion is made up of demands which are
repeated, which go on re-demanding. But if the demands are enumerable
(repeatable), desire, for its part, goes beyond numeration and depends on the
power of the continuous; desire presupposes the transfnite: demand can only
be counted on the basis of desire. The demand-turn is therefore singular
inasmuch as it is closed by being paired with two desire-turns in order to
permit the topological operation. This turn closes in the singular, even if,
seen from outside, the turns are plural.
45
It remains that this (inaccessible) number of turns (in the plural) has to be
odd for the evident-emptying operation to effectively transform the bi-lateral
surface of the torus into a unilateral surface, into a Moebius strip, completed
in a cross-cap.
The demand-turns are countable only by whoever fnds himself in the surface
and its cut: because of this, the transfnite of desire on the basis of which
the demands are counted (260) is a requisite (43c). The number of turns
goes beyond the countable, the enumerable and touches on the power of the
continuous. Nevertheless, the number of demand-turns must be odd for the
cut to be closed in an adequate manner. Yes, no, yes, no,,no: demand can
pass through all the reversals, it must end up at its back (envers) before being
looped in the double desire-turn, at the level of saying; thus love must end up
at hate, whatever the number of oscillations of ambivalence, for there to be
a saying. God congratulates himself on this transfnite in which the neurotic
articulation of demand and of desire on the torus is modifed by the structure,
since God is the structure: trinity, three persons in one single God (as the
transfnite number of demands is in one single cut).
This dit-mension of demand is added to the topology of our practice of
saying (43cd). The topology of the cross-cap and of saying only become
a practice on condition of grasping the said at the moment when it is odd
or reversed. It is necessary in effect that the demand should cease to be
paired with the Other in a specifc toric entwining of neurosis. Thus, the only
guarantee of this odd is topological subversion.
Repetitionis not left to itself, but is conditioned by our practice of saying,
namely, by the discourse of the analyst, which produced it as phallic function
(S
1
); and this function inspires the reversal of the meanings of demand.
The same remark was already valid for the unconscious: the unconscious is
nothing other than the dynamic of switching from one discourse into another
and this dynamic of switching depends on the discourse of the analyst.
Repetition (43de; 487) is founded on the transfnite, it is the transfnite
transformed into a sum (24a); it is in function of desire that all demands
can be organized as the sequence of whole numbers (to every demand there
succeeds only one demand and each demand is preceded by only a single
demand). The direction of the treatment is already (261) integrally articulated
by putting the practice in order: when it ceases to acknowledge reality (whose
46
torus, tore, is it? whose fault, tort, is it?), the analyser can follow desire to the
letter of the demand, inasmuch as the being of the analyst receives it in the
structure; from this will fow transference and interpretation. Thus repetition
is conditioned by the direction of the treatment which orders it in terms of
the double turn of desire (or the equivocation of the letter). This conditioning
implies the injunction to be odd in order to articulate desire and get to the end
of the analysis of the neurotic torus.
I mark here its reference for a later reprise (43e).
4. The end of analysis (43e-44d)
The analysis of the neurotic torus (43e; 487) is the modifcation described
in the preceding paragraph: the neurotic torus is frst modifed into a
Moebius strip (the operation of evidence-emptying) whose hole can then
be supplemented by the supplementary disc in order to make the structure
in general (the cross-cap) appear. By this interpretation, by this topology,
the neurotic torus is dismantled in the structure of the phantasy. It becomes
the disjunction/conjunction or the cut/suture of a Moebius strip (the barred
subject) and the disc (o-object). This phantastical structure only appears
through the necessary link of the repetition of the (odd) demand to the double
turn of desire.
The o-object ought therefore fall from the hole of the strip (43e): the cross-
cap is not transformed into a bilateral surface by a single-turn cut, which
would make the Moebian part disappear defnitively. The neurotic torus is
frst modifed into a Moebius strip; the o-object, absent from the neurotic torus
as well as from the strip, is introduced after the event into the Moebius strip
in the form of the analyst (35b). One cannot therefore situate the o-object in
the neurosis properly speaking by an imaginary misuse (43e): it is projected
into the central hole of the torus (43-44) and this central hole only exists for
someone who looks at the torus (262) as an object: the projection of the
o-object onto this central hole is imaged from an extrinsic point of view,
which excludes modifcation.
The odd transfnite of demand is only resolved, is only dissolved, is only
analysed by the double turn of interpretation, by the double loop of desire
(43a). The psychoanalyst took on the function (44a) of situating this saying,
47
which is interpretation in a double loop: the analyst acts as the semblance of
the o-object; he provides the object of interpretation, the supplementary disc
with which the Moebius strip is closed (30c).
The analyser only ends his analysis if the representation of his analyst
is modifed. This representation of the analyst is not simple because it is
in the changeability of the signifer: the subject is what is represented by a
signifer for another signifer. But who is going to be the representative of
this movement of representation? In a frst phase of the analytic treatment, the
representative of the representation the subject can be the analyst, the analyser
or both. The representative of representation
5
is thus, in Lacanian theory,
the barred subject of desire (E 554, note of 1966). The interpretation or the
modifcation of the structure (by aspherical topology) brings about a change of
representative of representation. In effect, with the double cut carried out on
the cross-cap, it is the fall of the spherical disc (or of the o-object) that makes
the structure appear: this fall becomes the representative of representation.
Representation (namely the movement of the signifer or free association) is
no longer represented by the subject, but by the o-object (as indicated in E
814). The subjective process of the torus in which are entwined the demand
and the desire (of the neurotic and of his Other) is modifed by topology into a
Moebius strip which only supports (263) its own reversals if the o-object falls
from the cross-cap through the double- turned cut of interpretation. Since one
does not fnd an o-object in the torus, except by an imaginary misuse which
would situate it in the central hole of the torus, analysis cannot begin its last
topological operation, its end-work, in which the analyst will become the
o-object for the analyser. A work of mourning since what is at stake is the fall
of the o-object, this operation loses its depressive colouring when the fall of
the o-object is compensated by maniacal reactions according to the Freudian
theorization of Mourning and melancholy.
The end of the analysis thus appears a state of exultation (44b), as
identifcation to the analyst, according to Balint (c.f. E 681); but this would be
to take the state of exultation amiss. To identify the demand of the analyser
to the desire of the analyst is to withdraw oneself into the topology of the
neurotic torus where the demand of the one is entwined with the desire of
5
The representative of representation (Vorstellungsreprsentanz) is diverted by Lacan from its
Freudian sense. For Freud, the drive, mythical and unknowable as such, can only be represented
(reprsentiert) in the psychical and that in two different modes: the representation (Vorstellung)
which is of the topical order of thoughts and the affect which is of the economic order of
discharges.
48
the other. The work of modifcation of the structure is forgotten there and
the o-object as central hole of the torus is only examined from an outside
and imaginary point of view. Therapeutic success may fnd a motive in
this imaginary misuse that pins down identifcation to the o-object (including
the form of a passe or a hierarchical promotion). This motive will only
be called substantial from the moment it gives a (metaphorical, sensual)
substance to a (topological, non-metaphorical, sensed) structure. Beyond this
manic state, the mourning must be completed.
After the end of analysis, there remains the stability of the fattening out
of the phallus, or of the strip (44c); the identifcation to the analyst and the
o-object have collapsed. This collapse has only stabilized the fattening out
of the strip: the Moebius strip can no longer disappear in the cut. Thus, the
end of analysis establishes the supposed subject, the subject of the always
appearing/disappearing signifer. How assure such an ephemeral subject?
By knowledge. The subject-supposed-to-know implied in the transference
is explained by this: it is no longer the analyst, but the journey of the four
phallic formulae (264) which are twisted into a Moebius strip. The subject,
supposed to be what the signifer represents for another signifer, is assured
in the structure by the knowledge of the phallic function. Thanks to the
process of the treatment, the subject-supposed-to- know now makes way for
knowledge which gives the certainty of the supposed subject, which is situated
in the three dit-mensions of impossibility: in sex, in sense and in meaning
(44d). The triple s of the subject-supposed-to-know (Sujet-Suppos-Savoir,
SSS) of the transference and of the treatment is analysed as triple S of the
dit-mensions of the impossible: sex, sense, signifcation. The explanations
of these three dit-mensions
6
are introduced respectively by the three triple
points:
1) The dimension of impossibility in sex (that, dialogue from one sex 44bc).
Each discourse is founded on the impossibility of the sexual relationship; the
absence of sexual relationship is played out at frst between the semblance and
the Other of each discourse, but is extended into the powerlessness of each
discourse to reach its truth. The absence of sexual relationship provokes the
switching of each discourse. For each discourse, the dialogue between one
sex and another is impossible; there results from this some inconvenience
6
The three dit-mensions of the impossible take up respectively the three Hegelian fgures of the
spiritual work of art, tragedy (sex), comedy (meaning), the epic (sense).
49
(44c), to be heard frst etymologically as impossibility of coming together,
of agreeing: the semblance and the Other are always disparate. Starting
from this in-con-venience, the subject will come, with the roundabout of the
discourses, to sense.
2) The dimension of impossibility in sense (that we can say nothing 44c).
Sense presupposes a series, a determined and limited sequence of things
of the same nature forming a set. This sense only takes its sense through
the impossible, only through the limit of the series, which escapes from the
possible of sense. In that way the sequence which corresponds to x.x
must be limited by x.x in order that its sense and its seriousness might
appear (15c-16a). Thus the sense of demands only appears when it is looped
in a (265) double turn of desire. Thus the series of three mourning tragedies
in Greek theatre only takes on its sense with the comedy of the afternoon
which closes the day. Thus the discourses only take on a sense from their
completion by the analytic discourse. The comic is precisely the completion
of the phallic function which is pursued beyond the tragedy of the frst phallic
formulae. The sublime of sublimation appears in the replacing of a sexual
object by a non-sexual object and in the exchange of a sexual goal for another
goal. It does not genufect to the on-high or to the transcendent, but to the
comical order (44c) which is carried out in the displacement from the oral
to the vocal: sublimation is defned by the movement of the o-object. Thus
Dantes poem (32c), Vita Nuova, only fnds its sense after the death of Beatrice
from the next to nothing of the futtering of the eyelashes, starting from
Beatrices look as o-object drifting already towards the voice (Tlvision,
p.40).
3) The dit-mension of impossibility in meaning (and then that insult,
44cd). The insult the attack is the frst and last word of the dialogue which
the epic tale of the Iliad (c.f. Homer: confromre), as well as individual epics
(the Ratman insulting his father at the age of three: you towel, you lamp,
you plate) show us. All dialogue is in fact an agglomeration of fragments
of insults (confromre from the Latin conferre, to carry together, and from
the Greek meros, part, fragment). From the frst propositional judgement
that might be inscribed in dialogue up to the Last Judgement, judgement
proves to be of the order of insult, of condemnation or of damnation. The
meanings, which are of the order of judgement, can be brought back to
the structure of the phantasy by topological operations. For the saids by
meaning or by judgement are for saying: they do not touch the real except
50
by losing all meaning. In order for the structure to be unveiled, the saids
must accept impossibility, They must not have any more meaning (37a).
(266) Of all that, of the three dimensions of the impossible (in sex, sense,
meaning), the analyser having terminated his analysis, will know how to
make himself a conduit. (44d) He will have the power no doubt, but a power
founded on the knowledge articulated by the logic of the impossible which
assures his supposed subject.
If he is sensitive to the beautiful (44de; 488), which stabilizes things just
before saying, desire or the horror of castration, he will situate this beautiful
in the between-two-deaths, in this feld situated between physical death and
the putting to death of all parasitical ideas, in the ethics of Antigone (Seminar
VII). The ethic of the beautiful (or of Antigone) remains midway in the work
of the riddle proposed by the Sphynx just as much as at mid-course in the
double--looped journey proposed by Ltourdit. Antigone does indeed hold
out the hand of topology to Oedipusbut it must still follow this trajectory of
topology in a double turn and not remain with the single turn proper to doxa
(42a). One of these truths (one of the three dimension of the impossible)
can partre to the analyser at the end of analysis, can appear inasmuch as it
turns around being which is the o-object according to proper logic which
consists in understanding the impossible (6cd): it parest to him worthy of
being understood. If he is sensitive to beauty, if he stops halfway, he will
only entrust himself to the half-saying of the single turn. But this half-saying
does not loop the double turn of interpretation; nothing obliges the analyser
to terminate his analysis with the beautiful (based on the single turn); he can
again be supported by a second saying or by the double turn of interpretation.
Let us therefore now come to interpretation.
E-mail: Christian.Fierens@telenet.be
51
B.ODONNELL Reading What is Madness THE LETTER 49 (2012) 51-63
QUESTIONS ARISING FROM READING DARIAN
LEADERS WHAT IS MADNESS?
IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE, SCHOOL AND
TEACHING
1
Barry ODonnell
This paper examines the representation of a psychoanalytic response to
madness in the recent publication What is Madness? by Darian Leader.
Drawing from the comments of Christian Fierens and Guy Le Gaufey and
guided by the treatment of Freuds position on paranoia in Tom Dalzells
Freuds Schreber Between Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis the paper fnds
that the representation of a psychoanalytic response raises crucial questions
for our practice and teaching as well as the constitution of our schools.
Keywords: diagnosis and practice, quiet madness, ordinary psychosis, the
use of vignettes as a representative device

2011 saw the publication of two books on the question of madness which
came to my attention. Tom Dalzells Freuds Schreber between Psychiatry and
Psychoanalysis has been recognised as a very readable, thoroughly scholarly,
theoretically rigorous book. It articulates Freuds specifcally psychoanalytic
account of psychosis and situates it in the context of the psychiatric theories
and treatments of psychosis of Freuds time. Furthermore, it studies the
infuence of Freuds account on subsequent psychoanalytic responses to
madness. Dalzell argues that Freud explains the psychosis of President Daniel
Paul Schrebers as caused by a fxation at narcissism. What distinguishes this
theory from all others is that Freud invokes a theory of subjectivity which
posits the individual subjects involvement in the origin of his or her illness,
and its cure.
2
There was, in that era, the late nineteenth, early twentieth
century, vigorous debate and heated exchange between very different
1
Dalzell, T., Freuds Schreber between Psychiatry and Psychoanlaysis. London, Karnac, 2011, p.
xviii.
2
ibid., p334.
52
positions on the question: what is madness? Dalzell describes Freuds long
and diffcult engagement with the views of leading psychiatrists, who, for all
their own differences, rejected this Freudian thesis of a subjective aetiology
of madness. Even in the psychoanalytic community Freuds approach
was not entirely followed leading Dalzell to conclude that Jacques Lacan
has received Freuds Schreber text and its aetiology more fully than other
infuential fgures in the psychoanalytic community.
3
Why in this technologically and ideologically sophisticated age of scans and
neuroscientifc discovery should we pay attention to an old case such as
Schreber? I hold that our attention to the Schreber text and Freuds writing on
it is an essential guide to working with the complexity of mental life which
has not been superceded or even advanced by developments in our knowledge
of brain physiology. For those of us working in the psychoanalytic discourse
this case history sheds light upon terms which continue to lie at the centre
of that discourse, terms such as narcissism, castration, the father and libido.
The task is to allow such close study, informed by our own psychoanalytic
experience, to direct our work. There is the danger that close attention to texts
without this check might have adverse, or wild, effects. Dalzell comments:
It remains a challenge for psychoanalysts today to balance the perspective
gained from Freuds Schreber with an approach to clinical work that refuses
to think: here is another Schreber. Dalzell explicitly rejects taking Schreber
as a representative of a set, or an all underlining the psychoanalytic
position which takes each subject as singular in the face of the challenges to
the practitioner to maintain this position. Underlying my paper today is the
question of our relation to texts, arguably the primary material of work in the
cartel arrangement. It is a question of articulating a position on the textual
material of psychoanalytic discourse and touches on the question of what we
3
I am reminded of Lacans remark at the beginning of his three seminars on the paternal metaphor
in January 1958: Nevertheless, this is really what I intend to talk to you about this year in
connection with the formations of the unconscious, questions of structure, namely, to give things
a simple name, questions that try to put things in their place, the things you talk about every day
and in which you also get mixed up every day in a fashion that in the end does not embarrass you.
The paternal metaphor, then, is something that will concern the examination of the function of
the father, if you like, as it might be put in terms of inter-human relationships, and precisely that
complications that you encounter, I mean every day, in the way you may have to use it. It is really
a question of knowing whether you are talking about it in terms of a discourse that is suffciently
coherent.. (The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book V, The Formations of the Unconscious,
1957-58,translated by Cormac Gallagher, www.lacaninireland.com, week of 15
th
January 1958,
p.1).
53
can agree with, whom we choose to follow, to attend to, to work with. Whom
not, and why?
It is the same era, the late nineteenth, early twentieth century, which Darian
Leader invokes in his book whose title asks What is Madness? , the second book
that came to my attention and one I am taking as the focus of this question of our
position in relation to the representation of psychoanalysis, and Lacans work
in particular.
4
This focus is not intended to indulge the narcissism of minor
differences
5
amongst the group (or set) that is psychoanalytic practitioners
who describe themselves as Lacanian. My purpose here is to ask whether a
particular representation of psychoanalytic practice successfully represents
my position and can thereby be one I can endorse. If not, because there are
differences, it is crucial to articulate these and make important distinctions so
that each may become clearer about the work he or she is doing in light of
robust and respectful debate.
6

Immediately we note a difference in approach between Leader and Dalzell:
where Dalzell distinguishes the fundamentally different theoretical
formulations of clinical experience articulated in those decades Leader
confates them. Leaders history creates the impression of a general tendency
on the part of psychiatrists and psychotherapy practitioners to listen to their
patients words. In this vein, Leader at times gathers very different names
together. For example, Freud, Bleuler, Jung, Lacan, Winnicott are grouped
in so far as they all took delusions and hallucinations to be responses to
madness, and not the madness itself. While this is arguable in a very general
way it is surprising to see such diversity listed together. Strikingly he joins
Freud with adversaries such as Emil Kraepelin in terms of them practising by
listening. This is a questionable claim and smoothes over the fundamentally
opposing theoretical bases guiding their different practices.
7
There is here a
4
A third book has now come to my attention: The Subject of Psychosis: a Lacanian Perspective,
Stijn Vanheule, Palgrave, 2011. In time I will consider its representation of a Lacanian position on
psychosis.
5
Freuds very apt phrase from Civilisation and its Discontents, SE XXI, p. 114 which Cormac
Gallagher mentioned to me in the course of my writing this paper.
6
Leader, a regular contributor to the pages of The Guardian, is a very fuent and engaging writer and
while this book is pitched primarily at the educated layman it may catch the attention of students
and practitioners of psychoanalysis. With this readership it constitutes a signifcant representation of
psychoanalysis with potential to infuence understanding.
7
It is well documented that Emil Kraepelin was strongly infuenced by his teacher and the father of
experimental psychology, Wilhelm Wundt and also that he held his frst chair of psychiatry, albeit
only for four years (1886 1890), in Dorpat, Estonia, where language diffculties would have
54
tendency to play down authorship, the moments of insight which, following
much labour, launch a radically new discourse. In other words there is a
tendency to elide unique contributions to practice by pioneers such as Freud
and Lacan.
8
Leaders account gives the impression of there having been in
those years an approach to psychopathology which pervaded the work of
many in which each played their part without any one of them requiring
particular distinction.
9
This tendency may be egalitarian in spirit and counter
tendencies to excessive idealisation. However, is it not the case that both these
reactions the liberal and the idealising - are effective alibis in place of the
task of following the work which discovered and founded psychoanalysis?
10

I raise this question with a strong acknowledgment of the complexity and
problems involved in a position of following.
What is Leaders purpose with this reference to this so-called movement in
late nineteenth century, early twentieth century psychiatry and psychology?
He enlists its support primarily to mount an attack on the dominant tendency
in mental health practice today, which, we know, is primarily concerned to
assess, stabilise and manage mental disturbance through pharmacological or
normalising brief therapeutic interventions. Leader calls for a return to a
practice that listens, perhaps over a very long period of time. To current mental
health practice that he opposes, he advocates a form of psychological work
which is investigative and seeks to articulate the dynamic factors causing
mental disturbance.
11
Leader is critical of forms of practice whose aim is to
establish in a patient behaviour ftting a norm of mental health. He advocates
psychotherapy based on principles drawn from the psychoanalytic tradition
rather than therapy based on mental health principles.
prevented his basing his practice too much on his patients speech.
8
Recall Freuds remarkable summation of his lifes work in his last Preface to The Interpretation of
Dreams (Preface to the Third (Revised) English Edition, Vienna, March 15, 1931: Insight such as
this falls to ones lot but once in a lifetime. (SE IV, p. XXX).
9
Contrast Freuds striking and painfully arrived at announcement in his 1914 paper On the History of
the psychoanalytic movement that, for all his theretofore deferral to the work of Breuer, nonetheless,
at this juncture, he found it necessary to say: ..psycho-analysis is my creation (SE XIV, p.7).
10
Cormac Gallagher refers to a distinction which Lacan may have had in mind when penning the
opening words of his Founding Act: Je fonde may indeed point to [Lacans] belief in the
proposition of a Belgian analyst that, while Freud had invented psychoanalysis, Lacan had founded
it. Gallagher, C., The Founding Act, The Cartel and the Riddle of the Plus One, The Letter, Irish
Journal for Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Issue 44, Summer 2010, p. 3.
11

55
Hearing a position couched in these general terms, psychoanalytic practitioners
may fnd themselves nodding. Arguments advocating a place for talk therapies
which require time are always welcome. It would be diffcult not to nod in
agreement at stirring moments in this book, carried along by moments of
polemic against the forces which subdue the speech of the subject. However,
it is these very effects produced through seductive mastery of language that
prompt the question about this representation of psychoanalytic work: does
this book promote psychoanalytic practice or represent a variation of it, a
distortion?
12
There is, then, the crucial task of discerning what form of talk
therapy is being proposed and for practitioners to assess if that form coincides
with their own experience of psychoanalysis and formulation of its practice.
Central to Leaders book is a theory of what he terms quiet madness. This
phrase cannot but remind us of the innovation of another infuential fgure in
the feld of Lacanian psychoanalysis. In 1998 Jacques-Alain Miller introduced
the term ordinary psychosis into his and his followers vocabulary. I bring
these two writers together, one, because I believe these two terms introduced
by these infuential writers end up describing the same phenomena; but, two,
I think it is important, indeed necessary for us, to try to understand their
innovations, to discern a message and a position. It is necessary for workers
in the feld of psychoanalysis to assess the value of these innovations for that
feld.
With these terms quiet madness and ordinary psychosis Miller and Leader
seem, at one level, to be re-stating the view that there are people who are
psychotic in structure but that this does not necessarily manifest itself in illness
in the course of their lives. Miller writes perhaps what we call ordinary
psychosis is a psychosis which is not evident until triggered.
13
Leader, using
the same dramatic image of the trigger as the title of one of his chapters,
puts it as follows: Most people who are psychotic will never experience a
triggering of their psychosis.
14
Support for this view could be sought from
Lacans intimation in Seminar XXIII that James Joyce was psychotic in terms
of structure even if he never fell ill from it.
15

12
To promote is to favour, to move forward, to support or advance a movement.
13
Miller, J-A., Ordinary psychosis revisited Psychoanalytic Notebooks, 19, 2009, p. 28.
14
Leader, D., What is Madness?, Hamish Hamilton, 2011, p.170
15
Cf: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII, Joyce and the Sinthome, 1975 1976, translated
by Cormac Gallagher, www.lacaninireland.com. For all the distraction today (16
th
June 2012) in
the direction of Ulysses and the drama of Bloomsday, it is to the unreadable masterpiece Finnegans
Wake that Lacan refers when describing how this Irish writer made his name as James Joyce,
56
Returning to Miller we fnd he emphasises that ordinary psychosis is
reducible to a classical form of psychosis or an original form of psychosis.
16

If ordinary psychosis or quiet madness identify psychosis before it becomes
apparent either in psychotic illness or after long work it is diffcult to see what
the innovation is here. In the end of the day these authors are saying it is still
psychosis. In terms of technique Miller makes the following recommendation
to practitioners: If you dont recognise a neurosis, if you dont see evident
signs of psychosis, look for invisible signs, look for the small clues. Its a
clinic of small clues of foreclosure Its tonality. Its a clinic of tonality
17
This last word seems to suggest a clinic of the practitioners feeling or
intuition rather than a practice based on speech and nonsense.
So, it is unclear if introducing adjectives such as quiet or ordinary add
anything. What do they distinguish? Between a period of being well and a
period of being unwell? Between a psychotic break and a return to a more
stabilised living? Do these distinctions require these new terms? Why would
we not then require quiet neurosis, ordinary perversion?
The question here is fundamental to psychoanalytic practice and the
practitioners relation to psychoanalysis.
18
It is the question of the function of
diagnosis in psychoanalysis. Lacanians tend to favour a parsimony, Leader
announces they recognize just three mutually exclusive mental structures
neurosis, psychosis and perversion and within the psychoses, a further three
paranoia, schizophrenia and melancholia, with debates about how to situate
autism and manic depression.
19
Into this system he proposes the introduction
of his diagnosis of quiet madness with examples vignettes - from his own
and others (published) material from practice to support it. A chapter each is
given to three well-known cases which Leader brings in under his term: frstly,
that of Lacans patient Aime quiet, that is, up to the occasion of her public
stabbing of the actress Hugette Dufos; then, Freuds patient, Sergei Pankejeff,
the Wolfman dismissing the position of his psychoanalyst, Freud, and the
produced a sinthome for publication. This prompts a question for further work: Can we say Joyce
wrote lalangue?
16
Miller, J-A., Ordinary psychosis revisited Psychoanalytic Notebooks, 19, 2009, p. 37
17
ibid. p. 37
18
Lacan proposed that the relationship of importance in psychoanalysis was not that between analysts
and analysers but between the analyst and psychoanalysis. Arguably his later formulation of the four
discourses addresses this same question. This may prompt the question: of which discourse is the
diagnostic act primarily an instance?
19
Leader, D., What is Madness?, Hamish Hamilton, 2011, p. 74.
57
equivocation of Lacan as two failures to formulate a defnitive and correct
diagnosis
20
; and fnally the story of Harold Shipman, the English GP found
guilty of ending the lives of at least 250 people in the course of his fatally
quieting general practice. Leader extracts and presents material from these
sources to support, nay, prove the diagnosis. Is this not the same approach,
albeit with the preferred parsimony of terms, that is the practice prescribed by
the much criticised DSM?
21
There is, of course, the valid observation that acts
of madness can masquerade as versions of acceptably sane behaviour. What
remains uncertain is whether this is due to the cunning reason of madness or
some madness lying beneath our seemingly sane practices, our furor sanandi,
the passion for curing people, as Strachey renders this Latin phrase?
22

There is, therefore, in the work of Leader and Miller, a strong emphasis on
diagnosis with the introduction of terms such as quiet madness and ordinary
psychosis. Pierre-Gilles Gugen, who follows Miller in the advocacy of this
latter term, opened a recent address in Dublin with the statement: there
cannot be a sound practice of psychoanalysis without a thorough diagnosis.
23

Such emphasis on defnitive diagnosis begs the question: How does this
position, one involving a relation to a knowledge, differ from other practices
in psychiatry and psychology which gather signs under a single term, the
reference of which has been supposed to be clearly established? In a review of
the effect of the introduction of the term ordinary psychosis in 2009 carried
out by Millers School itself concern was expressed that it had the analyst ..
refrain from taking his/her part in the treatment and to instead listen passively
20
Miller also describes the Wolfman as a case of ordinary psychosis the Wolfman was a psychotic,
and it was an ordinary psychosis because he had a lot of neurotic traits. [Ordinary psychosis
revisited Psychoanalytic Notebooks, 19, 2009, p. 40.]
21
A further question could be asked about the reliability of some source material. Leader makes use
of the investigation carried out by the journalist, Karen Obholzer, The Wolf-man, Sixty Years Later,
Converstaions with Freuds patient, Routledge, Kegan & Paul, 1982. Curiously these interviews
with Sergie Pankejeff in his late eighties are taken as of greater evidential value than the texts written
by Freud and others who knew him such as the psychoanalyst, Muriel Gardiner. From Leaders
point of view Freud and Gardiner were mistaken in their diagnosis of this patient. Leader is clear
on the Wolfmans diagnosis: generation after generation of the Wolfmans interlocutors missed
his psychosis. They looked for the noisy, attention-grabbing symptoms rather than the signs of a
psychosis that was, for most of the time, stable. (Leader, ibid., p. 267)
22
Freud, S., Observations on Transference-Love (Further Recommendations on the Technique of
Psych-Analysis III) SE XII, Hogarth / Vintage, p. 171.
23
Gugen, P-G., Who is mad and who is not? On differential diagnosis in psychoanalysis, presenta-
tion on September 18th 2010 in Dublin at the ICLO-NLS Clinical Conversation, p. 1, downloaded
from www.iclo-nls.org.
58
to the patient.
24
The other effect identifed was the tendency to fnd ordinary
psychosis everywhere.
25

As chance would have it in the last issue of this journal Christian Fierens
addresses the question of diagnosis in psychoanalytic practice.
26
He writes:
Diagnostikos in Greek means one who is capable of discerning, of
recognising. He must frst know the thing, the sickness of the living
being or of the machine, in order to subsequently recognise it in one or
other particular individual, in the clinic or in the garage In order to
diagnose, I must have a clear, obvious (vidente) idea of the thing to be
recognised, for example, neurosis, psychosis, perversion. And then be
able to discern, make the distinction: I recognise neurosis in such an
individual, psychosis in another, perversion in a third.
27

Fierens describes this evidence based approach as Cartesian, the very
model of medical science
28
and asks: Where does this knowledge come
from, from where do these supposedly clear ideas come which are supposed
in principle to distinguish my patient?
29
Clear ideas, objective knowledge,
Fierens argues, can provide a reliable basis for an agreed treatment plan and
for clear communication both to the diagnosed and to co-workers on a multi-
disciplinary team. The question is whether this constitutes the distinctive
contribution psychoanalysis can make to the treatment of mental disturbance?
While anyone of us may uphold the ideological principle which advocates
allowing patients to speak without prejudice to what extent do we also require
the security of there being a defnitive, identifable structure even if it does not
manifest itself in illness? Leader is very aware of Lacans position whereby
psychosis is a presentation that cannot be predicted in advance: The advent
of psychosis could never be predicted in advance, and it would only be later
on that one could work backwards, exploring that persons unique history
24
ibid., p. 16.
25
Are these not the same effects as followed the introduction of the term borderline into psychodynamic
psychiatrys terminology? For a while everyone was borderline just as currently there is a tendency
to fnd ADHD / ADD everywhere.
26
Fierens, C., The tool of diagnosis and operation of the matheme in The Letter, Irish Journal for
Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Issue 47, Summer 2011, pp. 85 94.
27
ibid., , pp. 85-86.
28
ibid., , pp. 85-86.
29
ibid., , pp. 87.
59
to fnd the clues that would show how the psychosis became established.
30

However, at the same time he names the rigid positioning of one single causal
factor as a hallmark of psychotic functioning. (p. 139) This announcement,
with its use of the metaphor of the hallmark, runs the risk of setting up a
single diagnostic criterion as well as being remarkably certain itself. There
is, hopefully, an alternative to neurotic doubt and procrastination which is not
necessarily psychotic certainty. Decisiveness may come at a price, namely of
being wrong or hurtful to some extent bloody-minded, even, but it does
not necessarily require a psychotic basis.
For all his dismissal of the term mental health Leader advocates work which
brings stabilisation.
31
What is required here is a clearer distinction between
the terms mental health and stabilisation, given that many in the feld of
mental health would see them as synonymous, particularly when referring
to psychotic illness. There is a difference of opinion in multi-disciplinary
clinical settings as to whether an intervention should only aim to achieve a
kind of stabilisation that is described by the term mental health ; or that the
intervention invite the articulation of the patients mental life, which runs the
risk, perhaps faces the inevitability, that this will be accompanied by a certain
disturbance. Here there can be broad support for Leaders recommendation
of a form of work which stabilises through having in place an arrangement
for speaking over an indefnite length of time. The crux here is how a
psychoanalytic practitioner of Freuds technique of unsettlement can work
within the culture of mental health. More detail is required on the objective
and technique of any such arrangement its ethics - in order to ensure that it
is not simply to provide the practitioner with attention-grabbing case material
for publication.
Let us return now to Fierens who makes the point that the directly observable
is never without a basis that escapes us. He refers to the strangeness of
the oddities of the unconscious and proposes a practice which sustains
an openness to strangeness.
32
Fierens is questioning our presumption of a
30
Leader, D., What is Madness?, Hamish Hamilton, 2011, p. 140.
31
there is simply no such thing as mental health ibid. p. 7.
32
Throughout his work Freud emphasised the importance of the practitioner being able to be surprised,
eliminating his pre-existing convictions.. In lines just prior to this phrase in his Introductory
Remarks to the case history of the Wolfman Freud writes: On the whole [the analysis] results
have coincided in the most satisfactory manner with our previous knowledge, or have been easily
embodied into it. Many details, however, seemed to me myself to be so extraordinary and incredible
that I felt some hesitation in asking other people to believe them. [From the History of an Infantile
60
structure behind observable symptoms, our blind adherence to a theory of
a universalised structure. Diagnostic theory is perhaps no more than an
enriching of our vocabulary and may in effect stife questioning and close off
listening: The approach through knowledge will never touch the real of the
Thing evidence is nothing other than resistance to any questioning. Here
Fierens is following Lacans: I ask you to refuse what is offered because it
is not that.
33
His statement that symptoms disturb reasonableness good Cartesian
reasonableness is a very useful reminder for practitioners who may be
afficted with the demand to understand.
34
The judgement that is a diagnosis
delivered in the name of a reason that is expected to be reasonable is, Fierens
argues, fnal and condemnatory and has a sense of insult. He proposes
opening up what he calls the matheme to the patient rather than enclosing
him in a diagnosis.. It is the case that psychiatrists change their diagnoses
the outcome, at times, of a psychiatric case conference. Fierens discussion
might have psychiatry less uneasy about doing so. Diagnosis would then be
useful on condition of introducing some fexibility into it, of bringing it into
play moreover as well as putting more variation into it. To what extent is this
the practice of psychoanalytic practitioners especially if they are following the
injunction such as that of Gugen above? Fierens is rejecting a practice based
on evidence and proposes one based on strangeness. The patient becomes an
inventor (of a matheme), an analyser.
Neurosis, SE XVII, p. 12) As mentioned, this case is one which Leader believes Freud missed the
diagnosis of psychosis. Perhaps it was more that Freud succeeded in keeping the question open and
thereby left a text to unsettle the analysts.
33
Fierens, C., The tool of diagnosis and operation of the matheme in The Letter, Irish Journal for
Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Issue 47, Summer 2011, pp. 85 94. I thank my cartel colleague, Patricia
McCarthy, for providing the references where Lacan uses this sentence in 1972 - 1973 to introduce
the link between I ask you to refuse what I am offering you because thats not it and the Borromean
knot: The Psychoanalysts Knowledge, seminar on 3
rd
March 1972; ...ou pire: 9
th
February 1972;
Encore: 8
th
May 1973. Fierens continues in his characterisation of this approach as one leading to the
practitioners intervention being the application of directives given from on high his deontology
and ethics would consist in obeying. A counter argument to this could be in terms of the practitioner
being left in a paralysed state of non-intervention, a practice of diagnostic indecision and passivity.
This is interesting in light of Gugens remarks that among the many side-effects of the over
expansion of the category of ordinary psychosis, there has been a tendency for the analyst to refrain
from taking his/her part in the treatment and to instead listen passively to the patient. [Gugen, P-G.,
Who is mad and who is not? On differential diagnosis in psychoanalysis, www.iclo-nls.org, p.16].
So, this danger is not removed by having or not having clear diagnostic practice.
34
Fierens, C., ibid., p. 93
61
Jacques-Alain Millers speaks to these questions in his seminar from 2008:
he also seems to be warning against a practice which aims to classify and
diagnose.
35
There Miller announces that the clinic is not psychoanalysis
where he defnes the clinic as an art of classifying phenomena based on signs
and clues that have already been listed.
36
His topic is the sinthome which
he says Lacan introduced to designate the singular.
37
He distinguishes the
particular and universal relation from that of the singular with its remoteness
from any community.
38
Encountering this material seemed to bring together
in agreement two authors whose positions are usually understood to differ.
Apart from Fierens fragmenting style on this occasion arguably more
representative of psychoanalytic work - the seeming agreement prompts the
question whether what really counts in these learned presentations is not so
much the content since the sophists we know that positions can always be
aped but the question of its basis in practice. Lacan spoke of the requirement
for anyone taking on the practice of psychoanalysis to be able to have
confdence in the work of Freud. Who we attend to, whose work we follow
requires that same confdence, a confdence based on our sense of the writers
relation to psychoanalysis, including their own.
Returning to the reading of Leaders book, the vignette-style summaries of
case material call for comment. Apart from furthering the impression that
psychoanalytic work operates on the basis of picking up signs which point
to a defnitive diagnosis this approach to transmitting the psychoanalytic
position raises questions. Guy le Gaufey provides a strident critique of the
use of vignettes in his careful discussion of Lacans logic in Lacans Notall:
Logical Consistency, Clinical consequences. This rejection of the validity of
vignettes follows from the uncovering of Lacans approach to the universals
of logical propositions and any implicit claim to universality. The vignette
approach requires such a claim:
35
I am grateful to my colleague in the Department of Psychotherapy in Dublin Business School, Rik
Loose, for providing copies of these works of Millers seminar from 2008.
36
Miller, J-A., We are haphazardly driven from pillar to post, translation by Adrian Price, Hurly
Burly, the International Lacanian Journal of Psychoanalysis, Issue 5, March 2011, p. 27 49, from
transcripts of seminars delivered in 2008. The quote here is from p. 28. Millers recommendation
here is hard to square with that made in the quotation which recommends a clinic of tonality. (See
footnote 19 above)
37
Miller, ibid., p. 35.
38
Miller, ibid., p. 34.
62
we have to say goodbye to clinical vignettes and other little accounts
that the psychological world of today dotes upon, where cases come
to be placed in an exemplary way under the auspices of a theory more
obsessed by its own transmission than by its uncertain and clashing
relationship with practice. Contrary to appearances, these vignettes
bear very little witness to the aforesaid practice in the measure that
they pretend above all to illustrate a theoretical point of view that
is judged to be too abstract. .this vignette style cheerfully shares
in a relationship to the universality of the concept which transforms
analytic knowledge into a psychology that is all the more unwelcome
because it has far too much elbow room. Inversely, however conceptual
it may be, the teaching of Lacan almost constantly leaves in the lurch
this nave functioning of universality in which the cases are only there
to be put under concepts that unfinchingly await them. The universality
of the concept which there is no question of doing without is
regularly led by him to the point where it fnds itself damaged, ruined
even, not by accident, by the fact of language with which all thought,
including the most formal, is exercised. The subject which is deduced
from language and from its hold on a body in no way falls under the
concept, not even that of the subject. Here is something that escapes all
psychopathologists, even indeed when they might think they are putting
Lacanian concepts to work.
39
Is it not the case that psychoanalysis offers a radically different approach to
one where formulating a defnitive diagnosis in terms an insurance company
might welcome - is at odds with the very specifc terms of the invitation to
speak which lies at the core of psychoanalytic practice? Does a defnitive
account of psychosis (or neurosis) not set up a norm which will work against
the practitioner attending to the speaking and remaining able to be surprised?
Does having such an account not encourage seeking examples, particular
instances, in the people we work with?
If reading Darian Leaders book has prompted questions it is not my
intention to encourage or indulge division for its own sake, the narcissism
of minor differences invoked above; this phrase from Freud making a
crucial distinction by identifying the direction in which I do not wish the
discussion to head. The challenge is to each ones position and practice.
39
Le Gaufey, G., Lacans Not All: Prologue and Logic of the Sexual Fault Line, The Letter, Irish
Journal for Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Issue 45, Autumn 2010, p. 41
63
This has fundamental consequences for both the practice and the teaching of
psychoanalysis. A practitioners position on this question may decide whether
he or she practices more within the discourse of the master or more within the
discourse of analysis. In other words is there not a problematic contradiction
between, on the one hand, decrying the approach taken which seeks to return
a patient to a norm of functioning
40
and, on the other hand, conducting a
practice guided by the norms implicit in a Cartesian act of diagnosis?
Invoking a norm under any guise arguably precludes psychoanalytic practice.
The challenge for each of us is to question our use of terms such as structure
and the triad which rolls off our teaching tongues: neurosis, psychosis,
perversion.
41

To conclude, remembering Lacan when he remarks in the Introduction to
The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis:
Such is the fright that grabs the man when he uncovers the face of
his power that he turns from it in the same action which is his action
when this action of bares it. This is the case with psychoanalysis. The
discovery - Promethean of Freud has been such an action; his work
(oeuvre) bears witness for us; but this action is no less present in each)]
experience (experience) humbly conducted by any one of the workers
formed in his school.
42

E-mail: jbarryodonnell@eircom.net
40
Leader strikingly uses the image of the mental health services as a kind of garage, where people are
rehabilitated and sent back to their jobs and perhaps to their families as soon as possible. Leader,
D., What is Madness?, Hamish Hamilton, 2011, p. 4. Interestingly Fierens uses this same metaphor
as quoted above (See footnote 29).
41
From an Irish point of view Carlo Gebler , the writer, has written an insightful review
of What is Madness?. He situates Leader as an old-style psychoanalyst .. a classical
psychoanalyst and did not fnd that the book progressed his own endeavour to understand
Lacanian psychoanalysis. He fnds a strong therapeutic aim in Leaders argument. He reads
What is Madness? as an attempt to make an original exposition of [Leaders] practice that
demonstrates how superior it is to its competitors. He welcomes the treatment strategy
which would have the practitioner help the patient incorporate those psychic materials
into the patients recovery programme rather than ignore or attempt to suppress them
given that fantasies, hallucinations and delusions are also wonderful strategies devised
by the damaged psyche: they have purpose, meaning and function. (The Irish Times, 22
nd

October 2011)
42
Lacan, J., Fonction et Champ de la Parole et du Langage in crits, Editions du Seuil, 1966, p. 242
(my translation).
64
65
T.DALZELL What Freud Learned THE LETTER 49 (2012) 65-72
WHAT FREUD LEARNED IN
THEODOR MEYNERTS CLINIC
Tom Dalzell
This paper examines what Freud learned from the famous Viennese
psychiatrist, Theodor Meynert, during his time at Viennas second psychiatric
clinic in 1883. It argues that psychoanalysis refusal to accept unscientifc
theories of mental illness and uncritical emphases on heredity is due in no
small part to the infuence on Freud of Meynert. It also contends that Freuds
subsequent parting from institutional psychiatry, because of Meynerts
rejection of his use of hypnosis and belief in male hysteria, was unfortunate
since Freud later gave up hypnosis and Meynert admitted to being a male
hysteric.
Keywords: Freud; Meynert; Subjectivity; Heredity; Second Viennese Medical
School
Introduction
In Seminar Seven, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan encourages
his listeners to read Freuds text in a different way to the historian. He
suggests that psychoanalysts should read Freud without wondering whether
he was infuenced by Herbart or Helmholtz, as the historians do.
1
But then
he proceeds to speak like a historian himself and to consider the infuence
on Freud of Aristotle. This paper will say something about the infuence on
Freud of Theodor Meynert, the famous psychiatrist in Vienna when Freud
was studying medicine.
2
Freud reversed the order of late 19
th
Century conceptions of psychosis,
objective and subjective, biological and biographical. But he did so without
1
Lacan, J The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VII. Ed.
J.-A. Miller. Trans. D. Porter (London: Routledge, 1992) p. 29.
2
This article is based on a paper read at the Psychoanalysis Today conference in University College
Dublin on 10th December 2011.
66
returning to the subjective theories of early 19
th
Century psychiatry. Nor did
he do away with the legitimate claims of biological psychiatry in relation
to heredity, even though he thought heredity insuffcient to cause an illness.
His rejection of subjective approaches to psychiatry and his caution about a
dogmatic belief in heredity,were learnt from Meynert.
Subjective Theories
In 1926, Eugen Bleuler was able to state that Freud was no Romantic poet.
What he meant was that psychoanalysis did not represent a return to early
19
th
Century psychiatry. In the frst half of the 19
th
Century, the thinking of
Johann Christian August Heinroth and Karl Wilhelm Ideler, two of the so-
called psychics
3
, was known for being subjective in the negative sense.
It was known for: its links to philosophical Romanticism, Schelling for
example, which in turn was a reaction to the rationality of the Enlightenment;
its mystical and pantheistic understandings of force; a tendency to neglect
empirical clinical experience in favour of a priori theories; and its
associating mental illness with the individuals inner psychological and
moral development. Heinroth had put mental illness down to sin and Ideler
to the non-gratifcation of the individuals passions. These subjective theories
moved Wilhelm Griesinger, the famous German neurologist, in the middle of
the 19
th
Century to put an end to the poetic and philosophical ideas that had
made their way into psychiatry and to argue for a psychiatry based on science
rather than philosophy.
When Freud was developing his psychoanalytic theories at the end of the
19
th
Century, the subjective theories of Heinroth and Ideler had been replaced
by scientifc objectivity.Hence Griesingers famous dictum: mental illnesses
are brain illnesses
4
Freud was aware that his dream-theory was alarming
his psychiatrist contemporaries, as if it was bringing back the bad old days
of Romantic psychiatry. But, as Bleuler put it, Freud was not a starry-eyed
idealist but an exact scientist. In fact, when Freud criticised philosophy,
it wasnt all of philosophy he was rejecting. It was the anti-Enlightment
philosophy behind Romantic psychiatry.
3
Decker, H. S. Freud in Germany. Revolution and Reaction in science, (New York: International
Universities Press, 1977), pp. 28-31
4
Griesinger, W. Mental Pathology and Therapeutics. Trans. C. Lockhart Robertson and J. Rutherford
(London: New Sydenham Society, 1867) pp. 1-7.
67
Freud himself prioritised subjectivity, but he was very different to Heinroth
and Ideler. If we investigate Freuds medical training, we fnd that he was
educated in the scientifc methods of the Second Viennese medical school,
not the subjective paradigms of the frst. The Second Viennese medical school
was founded by Carl Rokitansky in 1830. He wanted to move medicine away
from Romantic philosophy towards objective science.
5
The frst Viennese
medical school was founded in the 18
th
Century. But in the early days of the
19th century, the originator of modern psychiatry in that school, Philipp Carl
Hartmann, tried to reconcile Romantic speculation with empirically-based
medicine. His student, Feuchtersleben, who frst used the term psychosis,
tried to develop a synthesis between Romantic psychiatry and science in a
psychosomatic approach. Rokitansky, however, wanted to wake medicine
from its Romantic dream and place it on the frm ground of scientifc facts.
It was in the positivist paradigms of this second Viennese medical school that
Freud was trained. It was represented by Rokitansky himself, Joseph Skoda,
Joseph Dietl, Ernst Brcke, who joined the school in 1848, and Rokitanskys
protg, Theodor Meynert. It was the second medical school that had a
great infuence on Freud, especially through Brcke and Meynert, not the
frst school. That is why Freud never cites Feuchtersleben, even though
Feuchtersleben attained international recognition for his thinking on dreams
and on doctor-patient rapport.
6

During Freuds early medical studies, Brcke was an example of scientifc
discipline for him, combining, as he did, Helmholtzs dynamic approach to
force and evolutionary thought. But of all his teachers, Freud was particularly
impressed by Meynert. According to Jones, Meynerts lectures had been the
only medical ones which interested him as a student
7
.
In 1883, Freud became an assistant in Meynerts psychiatric clinic. There
were two psychiatric clinics in Vienna at the time. Back in 1784, an asylum,
with its famous round tower, was founded along with the General Hospital.
When a new asylum was opened in 1853, the medical faculty in the university
wanted two psychiatric clinics, one in the asylum, and one in the General
Hospital. When Freud worked in the second clinic in 1883, Meynert was
5
Lesky, E. Die Wiener Medizinische Schule im 19. Jahrhundert (Graz: Bhlau, 1978) pp. 119-141.
6
Pappenheim, E. Hlderlin, Feuchtersleben, Freud. Beitrge zur Geschichte der Psychoanalyse, der
Psychiatrie und Neurologie (Vienna: Nauser & Nauser, 2004) pp. 334-336.
7
Jones, E. Sigmund Freud: Life and Work.I. The Young Freud (1856-1900) [London,Hogarth, 1956],
p. 72
68
the director. The clinic could accommodate 110 patients. It received 5 or 6
admissions a day. But most of these stayed only a short time before being
transferred elsewhere. This obviously didnt facilitate much rapport with
the patients. Much of Freuds time was taken up with administration mainly
admitting and discharging patients.
Over 90 patient fles from Freuds time there have been published by Albrecht
Hirschmller and half of them bear Freuds handwriting.
8
Hirschmller has
argued that the brief and imprecise description of clinical pictures compared
to fles in the other clinic, the lack of differential diagnoses, and the emphasis
on further measures to be taken, such as a transfer to a regional clinic, dont
suggest much engagement on Freuds part. He also says this of Meynert and
the other doctors. But this has to be understood in terms of the transitional
nature of the clinic. Patients stayed only a short time before being transferred
elsewhere. In fact, in the case histories recorded by Freud, the numerous
instances of what Kraepelin called Wahnsinn, a diagnostic category which
appeared in the second, third and fourth editions of Kraepelins psychiatric
text-book
9
, are very thoroughly written up. Some of Freuds most detailed
notes are for cases of chronic paranoia. So, it would be a mistake to think that
Freud wasnt interested in psychotic patients in 1883. Cases of brain illness
in the narrower sense, as well as cases of progressive paralysis, also indicate
a clear engagement on Freuds part. The latter were the very things in which
Meynert was interested.
Gabriel Anton, a later assistant in the clinic, didnt think Meynert a gifted
teacher. But Freud found him a very good teacher, a teacher in whose
footsteps he followed with veneration, as he put it in The Interpretation
of Dreams
10
. He regarded Meynert as only an average psychiatrist. But he
thought Meynert was the greatest brain-anatomist of his time. By the time
Freud started to work in the clinic in 1883, Meynert had made a signifcant
contribution to localization theory, the infographical differentiation of areas
of the cortex. He had developed a major affect theory based on blood-supply
to the brain. Under Rokitansky, he had studied illnesses of the brain and the
spinal cord, and he had written widely on them. And he was also regarded as
an expert on dementia paralytica or general paralysis of the insane.
8
Hirschmller, A. Freuds Begegnung mit der Psychiatrie. Von der Hirnmythlogie zur Neurosenlehre
(Tbingen: diskord, 1991) pp. 231-483.
9
See Kolle, K. Kraepelin und Freud. Beitrag zur Neuren Geschichte der Psychiatrie (Stuttgart:
Thieme, 1957) pp. 32-33.
10
Freud, S. The Interpretation of Dreams, SEV (London:Hogar, 2001) p. 437
69
Given that Freuds patient fles on cases of brain illness and dementia paralytica
indicate a keen interest on Freuds part, it can be argued that Meynerts
neuropathology interests had a signifcant infuence on Freud. But Meynert
the psychiatrist had an important infuence on him as well. Although Meynert
was a brain-anatomist, his famous textbook was a text-book of psychiatry.
11

Many of Meynerts psychiatric concepts found their way into psychoanalytic
theory: amentia; the psychical apparatus; repression, a concept he learned
from Herbart, and mediated to Freud; the association of ideas; the division of
the ego; the relation of affect to associations; defence; and even the pleasure
principle.
On the other hand, Freud didnt uncritically receive what has been called
Meynerts brain-mythology. Furthermore, where Meynert understood
amentia in terms of a loss of associations because of a lack of blood-supply,
for Freud, amentia, or hallucinatory confusion, is a loss of external reality
due to a radical defence. And Freuds psychical apparatus is not merely brain-
anatomical. He does recognise the anatomical basis of the psyche, but he
does not understand the functioning of the mind on an anatomical basis but a
dynamic psychological one.
Heredity
If Freuds new theories didnt represent a return to pantheistic psychiatry,
nor did they do away with the claims of biological psychiatry on heredity.
Freud did put biography before biology, but he did not do away with biology.
Here too, Freud learned much from Meynert. Meynert distanced himself from
hypotheses of hereditary disposition which were not borne out by anatomical
facts. To his mind, hereditary disposition had become a mystical concept. He
was critical of a dogmatic over-emphasis on dispositions handed down from
previous generations. In other words, he wanted to put heredity in its proper
place. Freud would do that too.
Meynert accepted the existence of predispositions handed down. But he
preferred to stress disposing anatomical facts so as to provide heredity with a
better scientifc foundation. He thought that the Darwinians had exaggerated
hereditary transmission to the neglect of the individuals own associations.
And he thought that Lombrosos theory of criminality, that it was due to
11
Meynert, T. Psychiatrie. Klinik der Erkrankung des Vorderhirns, begrndet auf dessen Bau,
Leistungen und Ernhrung, Vienna, Braumller, 1884.
70
degeneration, was the greatest rubbish ever. Freud, for his part, was
critical, in his earlier work, of an overemphasis on heredity in psychiatry and
neurology, especially in Charcot and his disciples. But heredity does play
a signifcant role in Freuds own causal chain. He even stresses it at times
himself. Nevertheless, Freud only ever thinks heredity a remote predisposition
to illness. To his mind, heredity itself is unable to produce an illness without
an additional cause, a specifc cause, which is more subjective. This caution
about heredity he learned from Meynert.
Meynert was impressed by Freuds brain-anatomical work and he even offered
Freud his own teaching duties. But brain-anatomy was not to be Freuds
future. He fnished his medical training at the General Hospital in August
1885. His time immediately after that was spent with the famous French
neurologist, Charcot. He learned a lot from Charcot, but what he gained had
a negative effect on Meynerts relationship with him. It is often thought that
it was Bleulers distancing himself from the psychoanalytic movement that
led psychoanalysis and psychiatry to go their own ways. But, in fact, it can be
traced back to Meynerts reaction when Freud returned from Charcot.
When Freud arrived back in Vienna in 1886, he received a negative reception
from the medical community in general. But, it was Meynerts response
in particular that made Freud go his own way. At the end of 1886, Freud
could write to Koller about the slowness of his new practice, and about his
perseverance with brain-anatomy and the clinic of hysteria, all without the
support of those higher up (hohen Herren).
12
He was referring mainly
to Meynert. The confict began when he gave a lecture on hypnosis to the
Physiological Club on 11th May, 1886, and repeated it to the Psychiatric
Society on 27
th
May. On 15th October, he gave a lecture to the Medical Society
about male hysteria, following Charcot. The common view was that hysteria
was a female illness. Meynert challenged him to produce a case of male
hysteria, which he was able to do on the 26th of November. Nevertheless,
the greats in Vienna, especially Meynert and Bamberger, couldnt accept his
enthusiasm for Charcot, his understanding of hysteria and his use of hypnosis.
The disagreement worsened in June 1888 when Meynert declared, after a
lecture on hypnotic phenomena, that hypnosis was a beastly subjugation of
human beings by other human beings. In his lecture, he argued that psychical
12
Freud, S. Sigmund Freud. Briefe 1873-1939. Eds. E Freud , L. Freud (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1960) p.
230.
71
healings were due to blood-supply and suggestion from the doctor. He
concluded that hypnosis had nothing to do with science, but was more the
territory of charlatans, an expression of vulgarity, an art that could be carried
out just as well by a shepherd as a doctor. In a subsequent letter to Fliess,
Freud said that Meynert didnt know what he was talking about
13
. However,
what really discredited hypnosis, and damaged Freud himself, was Meynerts
lecture to the Medical Society the following year. In 1889, he not only
disagreed with Charcot, but openly attacked Freud. He criticised Freud for
positing hysteria in men, and for Freuds response to his lecture on hypnosis.
He referred to Freud as a skilled practitioner of hypnosis back from Paris.
But he found Freuds support for suggestion curious, since he had left Vienna
as a physiologically exact and skilled doctor.
All of this was most unfortunate. The disagreement isolated Freud from
institutional psychiatry, his natural dialogue partner, rather than psychology.
It is all the more unfortunate since Freud gave up what Meynert had criticized
hypnosis and, secondly, since Meynert not only came to accept the
existence of male hysteria, but fnally admitted that he was a fne specimen
of it himself.
The Relevance for Psychoanalysis Today
Freud reversed the priorities in late 19
th
Century thinking on the causes of mental
illness, objectivebiological and subjectivebiographical. Psychoanalysis
today accepts the impact of biological heredity, but it subordinates biology
to subjectivity, not the subjective theories which abound in counselling and
psychotherapy. The subjectivity which psychoanalysis is interested in is the
speech of the patient as a speaking being, the patient who wants to be listened
to as a subject, not observed as an object, not categorised as another instance
of an illness listed in a diagnostic manual. Objectivity for Kraepelin meant
a detachment in the doctor. The doctor was there to discover illness-entities
which existed independently of who suffered them and who discovered them.
The philosophy behind that understanding of objectivity is a kind of realism.
14

Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, is primarily interested in the subject who
is ill, not the illness as such. Unlike Kraepelin, Meynerts epistemology was
closer to Kants. Rather than being detached, Kant believed that the knower is
13
Masson, J. M. The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887-1904 (Cambridge,
NA:Belknap, 1985), p.24.
14
Kraepelin, E. Lebenserinnerungen. Eds. H. Hippius, G. Peters, D. Ploog, P. Hoff, A. Kreuter (Berlin:
Springer, 1983) p. 49.
72
involved in constructing the phenomenon, not simply uncovering it. This was
something that Kraepelin did not receive from his master, Willhelm Wundt,
who believed in a creative synthesis between a physical impression and the
mind. Meynert, while he is often accused of materialism, was actually closer
to Kant, although he replaced Kants Thing in itself with dynamic power.
Freuds own approach was poles apart from Kraepelins realism and detached
observation of illness-entities. Hence his encouraging a transference to the
analyst.
Nor is psychoanalysis content to put illnesses down to genetics alone; for
example, that so-called ADHD is due to a malfunctioning of particular
genes. Psychoanalysis doesnt put anyones troubles down to genetics alone.
It asks: what other factors are involved? By this it means dynamic factors,
subjective factors, subjective in the sense of involving the subject, factors
which can supplement and activate a genetic predisposition and bring an
illness about. That psychoanalysis today is not subjective in the negative
sense of Heinroth and Ideler, and that it is critical of heredity being posited as
the sole cause of an illness, is due in no small way to the infuence on Freud
of Theodor Meynert.
E-mail: tdalzell@eircom.net
73
M.McCOY You Have a Very Good Future THE LETTER 49 (2012) 73-79
YOU HAVE A VERY GOOD FUTURE BEHIND YOU
1
Malachi McCoy
2
Freud reminds us of the indispensable and ethical requirement, of ones own
reputable analysis, in the formation of becoming an analyst. The science of
psychoanalysis is fundamental in demystifying what is involved in, and what
is at stake for psychoanalysis. This paper recalls some of those fundamentals.
Keywords: Freud, formation, science, Melman, Lacan, Gallagher, cartel,
plus one, Oedipus complex, ethics.
How can one become an analyst? Freud asks in Recommendations On
Analytic Technique He writes I count it as one of the many merits of
the Zurich school of analysis that they have laid increased emphasis on this
requirement, and have embodied it in the demand that everyone who wishes
to carry out analyses on other people shall frst himself undergo an analysis
by someone with expert knowledge.
3
He continues:
Anyone who has scorned to take the precaution of being analysed himself
will not merely be punished by being incapable of learning more than
a certain amount from his patients, he will risk a more serious danger
and one which may become a danger to others. He will easily fall into
the temptation of projecting outwards some of the peculiarities of his
own personality, which he has dimly perceived, into the feld of science,
as a theory having universal validity; he will bring the psycho-analytic
method into discredit, and lead the inexperienced astray.
4
1
The title of this paper has been borrowed from a quote from Cormac Gallagher which is
contextualised in the paper.
2
This slightly modifed paper was presented to an Inter-Cartel Study Day of the Irish School for
Lacanian Psychoanalysis (I.S.L.P.), with a different title, on June 16
th
, 2012.
3
Freud, S. Recommendations to Physicians Practising Psycho-Analysis. (1912). Standard
Edition XII, London, Hogarth Press. p. 116.
4
ibid. p. 117.
74
In 1964 Dr. Charles Melman attended Lacans seminar on the Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis the frst seminar opened to a
wider audience than psychoanalysts. Addressing an Irish audience 31 years
later Dr. Melman said: It is because psychoanalysis is a science and since
it is scientifc its object is of interest to everyone Since its procedures
are scientifc and not magical, anyone who is interested in science or in
epistemology is also concerned by psychoanalysis.
5
Dr. Melman goes on to point out how Lacan emphasises that our scientifc
concepts are signifers which are at the root of our science. What is involved
in psychoanalysis, Lacan says, is to make someone speakprovoking the
lifting of a mutism, a dumbness.
6
Is speaking about psychoanalysis, then, a
beginning, an attempt to address the essence of what is involved in what Anna
O referred to as The talking cure?
This inter-cartel study day, gives us the opportunity to discuss our work, to
discuss our science, in the sense of how, and why, this specifc psychoanalytic
science has been discovered by Freud, and, returned to by Lacan. This is
the frst year that we worked as a cartel of the Irish School for Lacanian
Psychoanalysis. However, we had worked together, along with others, in a
reading group the previous year. The work of our cartel centres around Freuds
case-history of the Wolf Man. In this important text, Freud teaches us that his
patients story proves beyond doubt the existence of infantile sexuality. Also,
we are reminded of how this primeval period in the infants life is the genesis
of the young Russians illness. Consequently, and this is important for us to
acknowledge, Freud categorizes that it is only when the treatment reaches this
level of detail can it be called a psychoanalysis.
Those attending the study days of the cartels of the Ecole Freudienne de Paris
in 1975 were reminded of the function of the cartels; their function, being of
more interest than anything else to Lacan on that day.
7
The defnition of the
cartel, comprising three characteristics as outlined in the founding act, was
summarised as follows:
5
Melman, C. The Letter, Lacanian Perspectives on Psychonalysis. Autumn 1995 Vol. V
p. 19.
6
Ibid. p. 25.
7
Cartel Study Days 1975.Trans.. Gallagher. C. www.lacaninireland.com. p. 13.
75
1. The cartel is the locus for engaging in the Freudian school.
2. The cartel should support a work of elaboration, a production, that
as a critical work concerns the knowledge of the analyst on the one
hand and analytic experience itself.
3. Finally, the cartel has a well-defned structure.
8
Our cartel struggled to produce the work the reading group had achieved
the previous year. We found that our work was interrupted, wondering if
were ftting in with the I.S.L.P. structure. Asking if there was, or is, a clearly
defned structure? This hesitation causes us to question what we, as a cartel,
are doing.
Our work ensures that the frst characteristic of the cartel, within its defned
function la the Founding Act, is in keeping with the defnition just outlined.
We are engaging in the school through our work on Freud, or are we?
With regard to the second two points concerning the knowledge of the analyst,
and analytic experience itself, it might be helpful for us to remember what
Lacan said to the cartel-members on those study days:
When mathematicians get together, there is incontestably this plus one.
Namely that it is quite striking that the mathematicians, I could say,
they dont know what theyre talking about, but they know who they
are talking about, they are talking about mathematics as if it were a
person. One might say up to a certain point what I might call my wish
was the functioning of groups that would function like any group of
mathematicians function.
9
A question then could be asked; if, in the work of our cartel, Freuds text
From The History of An Infantile Neurosis functions as a plus one? If this is
so, then, is the presence of, in this case, Freuds text, a plus one that always
carries a structuring presence? In the Journes, Lacan tells us that there is
no trace of a signal by absence of a plus one.
10
Lacan refers us back to the
analytic experience itself in trying to give some sort of import to this absence
in analysis. He tells us that it is never in vain that someone is absent. Is Lacan
8
Ibid. p. 13.
9
ibid. p. 7.
10
ibid. p. 5.
76
referring here, to the supporting presence of, as he puts it: my plus one of
the text?
Paradoxically, it would appear, and as Lacan himself affrms, the plus one is
always present, but as he says, is always unrecognised. Again, in the Journes
Lacan asserts that:
This plus one is always present in some forms or other that can be absolutely
incarnated, the case of the leader is manifest but analysts can notice that in a
group there is always a plus one and adjust their attention to that.
11
It is not just anyone who can hold this place. As in the members of the cartel
itself, and in keeping with the defnitions of the cartels, it needs to be someone
who will allow the elaboration of psychoanalytic discourse, which is of course
what is at stake!
12
So, who then, is given the ears to hear the plus one? What course, (college
course!) can be taken to unveil this presence? As Cormac Gallagher has said,
and I paraphrase, you can read as many seminars as you want, but that doesnt
make you an analyst.
So, where does this leave us these days? Are our cartels then, a support, simply
a venue a locus, for discussing and producing interesting psychoanalytic
writings? Are they circular entities swivelling around a post-Freudian,
intellectual gathering? Or, do we have scope to develop the work, to develop
the formation of analysts within this Irish School of Psychoanalysis? As Lacan
himself asked during those study days of the cartels why has the school not
really begun to function yet?
13
In June of that same year again 1964 the year of the Four Fundamental
Concepts, Lacan, when founding Lcole Franaise de Psychanalyse
stated:
I intend this title to represent the body where a work is to be
accomplished - which, in the feld Freud has opened up, restores the
cutting ploughshare of its truth which brings the original praxis that
11
ibid. p. 9.
12
ibid. p. 16.
13
ibid. p. 3.
77
he instituted under the name of psychoanalysis back to the duty that is
incumbent on it in our world.
14
What does this mean for us, in our school for psychoanalysis? What original
praxis is Lacan referring to in this Founding Act? Let us return to Freud, who,
in June of 1913, presented the fourth essay of Totem And Taboo to the Vienna
Society. Towards the end of that fourth chapter, which he called The Return of
Totemism In Childhood, Freud tells us that his inquiry lead him to assert that:
the beginnings of religion, morals, society and art converge in the Oedipus
complex. This is in complete agreement with the psycho-analytic fnding that
the same complex constitutes the nucleus of all neuroses.
15
At the beginning of that anthropological and historical research, Freud tells
us in The Horror of Incest that the original people of that youngest continent
- Australia, present something archaic, which in a certain sense, is still our
contemporary.
16

Our work needs to be infuenced to safeguard against the refusal of those
same Freudian discoveries. Is it an obligation of our school to provide the
necessary structures of formation, to supervise, and crucially, ensure that its
course could be deemed worthy of the same acknowledgement, as that given
to the Zurich School of analysis praised by Freud when forming analysts?
The question of desire!
Among Sophocles chief merits in developing and perfecting the dramatic
form of tragedy was that he raised the number of actors simultaneously
presented on the stage, from two to three [and] by treating each of his plays as
a separate artistic unit, and above all by subordinating the role of the chorus to
that of the actors proper.
17
Wouldnt it be an even greater tragedy if we were
to relegate the oracular signifcance of this old familiar myth as pass?
In an addendum to the third of his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
Freud reminds us that: With the progress of psycho-analytic studies the
importance of the Oedipus complex has become more and more clearly
evident; its recognition has become the shibboleth that distinguishes the
14
Lacan, L. The Founding Act, 21 June 1964. Trans. Gallagher, C. May 2010. P. 1.
15
Freud, S. Totem and Taboo. (1913 [1912-1913]). Standard Edition XIII, London, Hogarth Press. pp.
156-7.
16
See Freud, Ibid. p. 1.
17
Robinson, Cyril E. A History of Greece. (1929). New York, Methuen Educational. 1983. p. 168.
78
adherents of psycho-analysis from its opponents.
18
Is it just as important for
us today, to ensure that the clinical relevance of this story, does not become
faded, considered unfashionable and obsolete? Over two thousand years
after it was written, Freud and Lacan, considered the Oedipus complex as
pivotal for the speaking subject. The English language dictionary gives the
meaning of pivot as the end of a shaftthat terminates in a bearing. So too,
the subject can fnd his bearing, his own subjective desire supported by that
Symbolic function.
Cormac Gallagher, in 1998, dared my classmates in The School of
Psychotherapy to take up what Freud calls the on-going struggle, with his
pronouncement: You have a very good future behind you! The future
of psychoanalysis, however, brings us back, once again, to these four
fundamental concepts: the unconscious, repetition, transference, and the
drives. Fundamental, that is, for the psychoanalyst. They are also important for
grounding the necessary support of those who are interested in psychoanalysis,
and even those sympathetic to, or, if I may say - impartial, to the speaking
subject!
As we know, Lacan made a return to Freud. Why did he feel it necessary, in
1980, before launching La Cause Freudienne, to declare himself a Freudian?
Was Lacan too, in awe of Freud? If this respect is not taken on board; if there
is a refusal to hear what Freud has to say, where, then, will it lead us?
One year on from Patricia McCarthys conference On Treatment Challenges
in Bi-polar Affective Disorder: Voices of Difference Psychiatry and
Psychoanalysis in Dialogue in 2011, the Irish Times carried a report by one of
the speakers headed: More Than 20% of Children in Ireland Report Hearing
Voices. Prof Mary Cannon of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and
Beaumont Hospital, who led the research team, said the study suggested
hearing voices was more common than previously thought.
19
In my work, I meet people on a daily basis who have been convinced that their
voices are the product of a brain malfunction. Also, that they will be cured
only if the necessary medication can be found to treat their abnormality.
Medication without doubt has a place. However, those pushing, for example,
the open dialogue approach to treating what they refer to as, frst episode
18
Freud, S. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905). Standard Edition VII, Hogarth Press.
p. 226. n1.
19
The Irish Times. Thursday 12
th
April, 2012. p. 1.
79
psychosis, could very well fnd support in, and beneft from, an appreciation
of the Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.
Dont all of us hear voices? There is a lovely Chinese proverb that goes:
To forget ones ancestors, is to be a brook without a source, a tree without
a root.
20
One century ago Freud wrote about Australias old ancestors - the
aborigines in Totem and Taboo. We would do very well to remember!
In that paper, Freud shows us how this mechanism develops. We learn
that projection of internal perceptions is very primitive. Those primaeval,
emotional perceptions and thought processes were employed by the ancients
in building up their external world. Freud writes; It was not until a language
of abstract thought had been developed, that is to say, not until the sensory
residues of verbal presentations had been linked to internal processes, that the
latter themselves gradually became capable of being perceived.
21
Is this not
also true with the earliest experiences of the child; that his or her entry into
the Symbolic is carried out through speech alone?
It remains an ethical obligation, therefore, to continue ploughing and sowing
in this feld of language. As we know, in his discovery of the unconscious,
Freud found that each of us has a primitive text; a text which structures our
lives. A text we know nothing about, unless it is uncovered through the work
we achieve in our own analysis.
This brings us back to the question posed at the beginning of this paper, the
question of how an analyst is formed. As we know, it is, frst and foremost,
with the daily grind of ones own analysis. It is crucial too, to remember, that
it is not just a matter of the analyst authorizing himself; but in contextualizing
it, to remember, that there needs to be the necessary addition of some others!
Is it, therefore, incumbent upon this Irish school to listen to, and as Lacan
said return to Freud?
e-mail: malachi.mccoy@gmail.com
20
Christy, R. Proverbs, Maxims and Phrases of All Ages. 1898. New York, T. Fisher Unwin: G.P.
Putnams
Sons. Vol 1, p. 25.
21
Freud, S. Totem and Taboo. op. cit. p. 64.
80
81
O.ZENTNER Hateloving in the Transference THE LETTER 49 (2012) 81-94
HATELOVING
1
IN THE TRANSFERENCE
1
Oscar Zentner
No ashes, no coal can burn with such glow as a secretive love of which no one must know
Sabina Spielrein
2
. To be slandered and scorched by the love with which we operate - such are the perils of
our trade, which we are certainly not going to abandon in their account. Navigare necesse
est, vivere non necesse.
Sigmund Freud
3

Borges: Yes, a lover is like a god
Uchida: Yet there must be a recipient to contain that god. The centre is always empty and that
is where God is present.
Borges: Yes, empty. That is what is important Empty. That is exactly what the gushi in the
sanctuary of Meiji said.
4
Mic Uchida
Arguably the disavowal of Sabina Spielrein is perhaps one of the most tragic
events involving the very problematic reciprocal hateloving structure in the
transference. This paper highlights the rather questionable concept of the
saintly sterilised transference-love. The hateloving in the transference was
a triangle that engaged Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Sabina Spielrein.
It entailed repression and in a way disavowal of the discovery of Sabina
1
This paper is part of the article From the Verneinung of Freud to the Verwerfung of Lacan, Papers of
the Freudian School of Melbourne, 1983/84, p 9-30. Laqcans hainamoration.
2
Sabina Spielrein. Diary, 22 February, 1912.
3
Plutarch. Pompey, The epigram is the motto of the Hanseatic cities Hamburg and Bremen, quoted by
Freud in The Freud/ Jung Letters 9 March 1909, Edited by William McGuire, Bollingen Series, 1979.
4
Mie Uchida, The siesta of the Aleph, Journal Yu (homo ludens), in Borges in Japan Japan in
Borges, Compilation by Guillermo Gasi, Eudeba, Buenos Aires, 1988. (my translation)
82
Spielrein. Although Spielreins propositions were at the foreground of a
momentous theoretical psychoanalytical innovation, the personal enmities
between Freud and Jung endangered their potential discovery, thus
running the risk of being disregarded in the history of ideas within the
psychoanalytic movement.

This paper attempts to clarify the scope of this situation as well as to
underscore how much Freud and Freudian psychoanalysis owe to the
by and large almost forgotten importance of Sabina Spielrein. This is
particularly so, concerning her new formulations proposed for the sexual and
destructive drives - none of which were ever acknowledged either by Freud
or by other psychoanalysts. However by introducing Lacans innovations,
regarding the unconscious the paper goes much further with new propositions.
Keywords: hateloving, death drive, Freud, Jung, Spielrein.
Foreword
In 1969, when I was in the USA for the frst time, I came out of the underground
one day in mid-winter. As I was about to take the stairs I saw a man lying on
the ground. People walked around him as if he were a structural part of the
landing, that needed to be avoided, as one avoids going through a wall or
into an abyss. I went to the top of the landing and prepared my camera to
capture this essence of indifference. However, to my surprise, at the moment
I focussed my camera to shoot the photo, people stopped to ask me if that
person, who seconds ago was anything but a person lying on the ground, was
dead or alive.
Today, having retrieved this writing from a larger work of mine published in
1983, I wonder (and I would like to think that after reading this, you, reader,
will wonder too), why such a majority of psychoanalysts need another camera,
this time that of Cronenberg in his flm A Dangerous Method, to learn that
there was an analyst who preceded Freuds theory of the death drive with her
own original and independent theory of the drives.
Clearly this paper is not about the flm. This is so, mainly for two reasons:
the obvious one being that I wrote it in 1983, that is, long before the flm; the
other less obvious reason is that we cannot ignore the flms shortcomings,
which consist in not being based on the available primary sources. The flm,
83
therefore, is an interpretation of another interpretation of the relationship
involving Freud, Jung and Spielrein. However, the seduction of the image is
so powerful that the flm may succeed in being a substitute for the reading of
the original sources that is, the correspondence between Freud and Jung,
and Spielrein to Freud.
It should be emphasised that to rely on secondary sources is not only to give
priority to interpretation,
5
but, worse still, to miss the most glaring fact that
an interpretation is always the result of reciprocal transferences and not of
countertransference. Therefore, reading and studying the original sources
allow you, reader, the possibility of establishing your own transference to the
writing. Above and beyond all else, it is better to err out of your own counsel
than to err by following someone elses.
Prior to the birth of psychoanalysis, private thoughts were identifed with the
so-called psyche and, as a remnant of this view, there is a popular perspective
that regards the unconscious as synonymous with what remains unuttered.
As you know, this approach has a long history - a history that was broken
when Freud was directed not by the understanding procured by his medical
knowledge, but rather by his Socratic ignorance. This Docta Ignorantia,
this learned ignorance, led him to take the desire of the hysteric, not with
understanding, but with reason.
Yet it was only with the emphasis put forward by Lacan that we were are able
to grasp the originality of Freuds discovery; to know that what is unconscious
is not in the psychology of the depths, but rather in the discourse of the
analysand, being this discourse with or without words.
When the Field became Freudian
From the viewpoint of clinical work, Freud was confronted with phenomena
that had as yet no name, since he found himself in a new realm, unlocking or
- more precisely - fnding the limits of, medical knowledge in the symptoms
of neurotics. It was at this juncture, and confronted with the symptoms of
his patients, that Freud elaborated a new method that would lead him on a
collision course with his colleagues, and with the sexual mores of his time
5
The downside of interpretation is the unwitting side effect of adding yet more sense to what is
already overfowing with it: the symptom.
84
On the subject of sexuality, however, quoting Pascal Quignard in his book
Le sexe et leffroi,
6
Freud had at least one predecessor, Epicurus, who long
before, in the third century BC, had put forward a similar thesis regarding
sexuality: a man who cannot enjoy fabricates the illness that consumes him.
This is what frst attuned Freud to the realm of the neuroses, where the confict
between sexuality (or unconscious erotogenicity) and the drives of the I (or
self-preservation) was established. However, our intention here is more to
raise points for later development in this paper than to present a review of
the history of the ideas proposed by Freud. These points will therefore be,
by design, incomplete. But we must emphasise this crucial moment for the
determination of the drives of the I (ego) in Freuds The Psycho-Analytic View
of Psychogenic Disturbance of Vision, where the confict takes place between
sexuality (or the unconscious) and the drives of the I (or self-preservation).
Freud was able to maintain without apparent diffculty this pair of opposites
- sexual drives and self-preservation - until, as we will see immediately, the
study of Schreber forced him to recognise the limitation, and indeed the
impossibility, of explaining such phenomena without frst modifying the
opposition between sexuality exclusively identifed with the unconscious,
versus the drives of self-preservation identifed with the I. This modifcation
was to take place in 1914 in his work On Narcissism: an Introduction, in which
the libido, so to speak, takes an unthinkable theoretical place by investing the
I a structure that until that moment was free of sexuality.
The theoretical consequences unleashed by On Narcissism that could be
seen in Freuds shift in his theory of the drives has, for the most part, been
neglected. What was also overlooked was that this shift was the main factor
that allowed him to avoid Jungs identifcation of libido with a Dionysian
mythical life force where sexuality was diffused, if not eliminated.
Therefore the opposition between investments of the I and object investments
was Freuds step towards the unknown, moving further away both from Jung,
and from his own established premises. In this connection, it is only necessary
to recall that Freud formulated the death drive
7
(Todestrieb) much later, in 1919,
6
Quoted by Jean Allouch in Hommage rendu par Jacques Lacan la femme castratrice, published in
Lvolution psychiatrique, Paris 1999 (my translation).
7
German has two very different words (as English), one is Instinkt and the other Trieb. Freud
expressly used the word Trieb that has a perfect English translation in the word drive. The
magnifcent English translation of Freud done by Strachey, pitifully, translated Trieb as instinct. The
difference is essential - a drive has neither predetermined nor fxed object whereas an instinct does.
85
when without ambiguity he wrote Beyond the Pleasure Principle. It is in this
work that he proposed an almost unthinkable beyond, a beyond composed of
a pleasure that did not respond to the limits demanded by self-preservation.
This pleasure that goes beyond is what today the English language has
accepted, without translation, as jouissance, a term incorporated from Lacans
formulations. To characterise jouissance as a pleasure beyond a pleasure is odd,
lets face it, and it is odd because it is not pleasure! To be clear, jouissance is not
on the side of life (Eros and self preservation), but on the side of death.
Freuds reformulation of the duality of drives formerly seen as opposite,
sexuality and self-preservation, saw both falling under the general
denomination of Eros, or life, as opposed to death. This paradigmatic shift
was to generate important dissensions among future generations of analysts.
Not all were able to accept the new paradigm and some of those who accepted
it either proved unable to understand it, or took it in a very different way to
the way intended by Freud.
There was, however, long before Freud, one analyst, Sabina Spielrein, who
independently and against all odds, proposed death as a seminal composition not
of the drives, but of the instincts. However, she merited only a footnote in Jones
biography of Freud and, as a result, her work fell almost into oblivion. Let us
remember, in her defence, that at the time, Instinkt and Triebe (instinct and drive)
were still used indiscriminately, not by Freud, but certainly by his followers.
Regretfully, this lack of discrimination between the two terms still persists in the
majority of English speaking psychoanalysts; paradoxically, it is not their fault.
This mistake is due to the otherwise magnifcent translation done by Strachey
for The Standard Edition of Freuds works. The German text of the Gesammelte
Werke, contains at most four or fve occasions in which Freud uses instinct, and
always referring to animals; otherwise, the word used is drive (Trieb).
This differentiation between drive and instinct is substantial and can be
clearly read in Freuds letter to Jung below, where he states that that he was
not prepared to subordinate his discovery to biology, philosophy and so on:
a letter in which he clarifed, among many other things, frstly, the difference
between instinct and drive, and, secondly, that the feld opened up by him also
needed independent concepts from already established felds of knowledge.
But in order to further understand the forgetting of Spielreins work, let us
go frst to the question that Freud used as the basis for his (apparently) new
opposition of the drives:
86
It is not my wish, however, to put before you the origin of this novelty
in the theory of the drives; it too is based essentially on biological
considerations ... Our hypothesis is that there are two essentially
different classes of drives: the sexual drive, understood in the widest
sense - Eros, if you prefer that name - and the aggressive drive, whose
aim is destruction ... But it is a remarkable thing that this hypothesis
is nevertheless felt by many people as an innovation and, indeed, as a
most undesirable one which should be got rid of as quickly as possible.
I presume that a strong affective factor is coming into effect in this
rejection. Why have we ourselves needed such a long time before we
decided to recognize an aggressive drive (Trieb)?
8

If we uphold the idea, as the Mayeutics of the Socratic method teaches us, that
whoever formulates a question has the answer, what better way to respond
to his question than to answer Freud with his own proposition? The above
question, formulated by him in 1932, was in fact answered many years earlier
and forgotten by Freud himself, when he wrote to Jung the following:
One should honour an old woman, but not marry her; really, love is for
the young. Fraulein Spielrein read a chapter from her paper yesterday
(in the Society of Vienna), - I almost wrote the Ihrer (here, Freud
himself pointed out to Jung that he almost made an illuminating lapsus
calami while writing this letter; in other words, that his listening to
Spielreins exposition was already prejudiced by his thinking of Jungs
tenets: Ihrer with the capital I, means your, - that is, Jungs - and with
an i in lower case means her Spielreins
9
) and was followed by an
illuminating discussion. I have hit on a few objections to your (Ihrer)
(this time I mean it) (here Freud underscores the previous paragraphs,
alluding to the quasi lapsus calami) method of dealing with mythology,
and I brought them up in the discussion with the little girl. I must
say she is rather nice and that I am beginning to understand.
10
What
troubles me most is that Fraulein Spielrein wants to subordinate the
psychological material to biological considerations; this dependency
is no more acceptable than a dependency on philosophy, physiology, or
brain anatomy. Psychoanalysis fara da se.
11
8
Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, St Ed, Vol XXII, p 103 (my
translation).
9
The Freud/Jung Letters, Freud to Jung, 30 November 1911, Princeton University Press, 1979.
10
Idem.
11
Idem.
87
In the contradictory content of these two statements, Freud reveals the crisis
in which psychoanalysis was enveloped around the theory of the drives
before (until) the clarifcation given in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which
remained current within Freudian thought. It was, however, on 19 November
1911, at the meeting of the Viennese Society of Psychoanalysis, that for the
frst time the opposition of the drives of life and death (or destruction, in
this case) was introduced by Sabina Spielrein, who presented her work On
Transformation, only one segment of her article Destruction as Primal Cause
of Coming into Being (Destruktion als Ursache des Werdens).
The letter from Freud to Jung clearly indicates his position regarding both
Spielreins work and Jungs propositions. But neither the letter nor the minutes
of the meeting of the Psychoanalytic Society of Vienna are suffcient to explain
why what was unacceptable in 1911 became accepted in 1919, and why in
1932 it was accepted in almost the same terms that in 1911 had produced the
condemnation of her work by Freud, thereby pushing it nearly to oblivion.
That explanation lies, I contend, in reading the work of Spielrein and the
position she takes in regard to dementia praecox, in favour of Jung and against
Freud. It is here that this forgetfulness of Freud and lack of acknowledgement
of the psychoanalytic community is perhaps made intelligible.
The return of Sabina Naftulovna Spielrein
In 1980 a book
12
which aired an overdue debt and rescued from oblivion
these events, Sabina Spielrein between Freud and Jung, we fnd the following
quote from Spielrein:
The only consequence of the restricted activity of the I which
characterises this illness (dementia praecox), is that the mind only
works in its archaic, analogical modes. Freud holds that dementia
praecox covers a phenomenon of withdrawal of libido, then of its return
and fnally, of a confict between investment and withdrawal of libido.
I believe on the contrary that we are dealing with a confict between
the two opposite currents of the psyche of the I and of the psyche of the
species.
12
Carotenuto, Aldo, Diario di una segreta simmetria- Sabina Spielrein tra Jung e Freud. Astrolabio,
Rome,1980.
88
This view, in particular the reference to the psyche of the species, as you might
realise, was the forerunner of Jungs collective unconscious. One can see at
once the similarity with Jungs collective unconscious, but there is a startling
difference, with Spielrein upholding a duality against Jungs monism. In
other words, not only did she infuence theoretically her former analyst, Jung,
without becoming Jungian, but she also infuenced Freud while remaining
independent of him. Her original contribution to the theory of the duality of
the instincts was a problem that Freud would only think ft to confront several
years later.
With her work, Spielrein not only marks the difference between herself and
Freud, but with extreme clarity she also marks the insurmountable difference
between both Freudian and Jungian theories regarding psychosis. This issue
is echoed by Freud in his letter to Jung on 30 November 1911 - a letter written
the day following the meeting of the Psychoanalytic Society of Vienna where
Spielrein presented her paper differentiating libido as erotogenicity from
libido as a psychic force (in the Jungian sense). In the letter, Freud wrote: I
should be very much interested in knowing what you mean by an extension of
the concept of the libido to make it applicable to dementia praecox ... I hold
very simply that there are two basic drives and that only the power behind the
sexual drive can be termed libido.
Freud, contrary to Jung, postulates the hypothesis that the drives of the I
(not sexual) are part of the drives of self-preservation that are irreducible in
themselves. Thus, at that moment he maintains that the libido is outside the I
and confned to the unconscious; that is, for Freud, there is a certain equation
between libido, sexuality and unconscious on the one hand and the I (self-
preservation) and repression on the other. Or, in other words, Freuds duality
of the drives is indeed very different from Jungs monism. The lapse of time
from 1911 to 1919 allows Freud, from both the clinical and theoretical points
of view, to arrive at his fnal classifcation of the drives. In this fnal move,
duality of the drives is conserved and at the same time the I is libidinised.
Freuds dictum, the mythical forces at work - our witch metapsychology - is
life in opposition to death. But Freud, differently from Spielrein, considers
this death drive as mute; therefore, one cannot trace its stages (because by
defnition the death drive does not have development), as one can trace the
libido in the so-called phases of development. It is only by the investment
immixing - of libido with the death drive, that the death drive, according to
89
Freud, is neutralized into destruction and, as such, appears in the Freudian
text as sadism, or masochism.
Indeed, for Freud the passage from the general principle of life to the libido
is carried out by substitution (Ersatz), or metaphor, whilst the passage from
the side of death to destruction is carried out by metonymic succession
(Nachfolge). Substitution is metaphor and implies a degree of transformation,
similar to the work imposed on the psychic by the somatic. Succession,
instead, does not carry with it the notion of work or of transformation.
The reason for Freuds fat rejection of Spielreins position indicates that,
however hesitantly, he had to choose between the biologism of the hermeneutic
Weltanschauung of the a priori knowledge of Jung, and psychoanalysis. The
position of Spielrein, strongly infuenced by Jung, breaks down the meaning
that sexuality and the unconscious have in Freud. For her, destruction, or the
death instinct is The Primal Cause of Coming into Being.
13
As is known, this
ghost of Avis Phoenix is indeed the identifcation between myth and fantasy
as the basis for the formulation of Jungs theory. This stands in contrast to
the position of Freud, who in a letter to Jung wrote, I hold that the surface
versions of myths cannot be used uncritically for comparison with our psycho-
analytical fndings.
14

Let us emphasise that, for Sabina Spielrein, there is no differentiation between
death and destruction,
15
whilst for Freud, despite certain ambiguity, as shown
in the text of 1932 mentioned above, the death drive is beyond the principle
of reality. This beyond reality is not to impose the principle of pleasure but
rather to impose jouissance which, in contradistinction to the equilibrium of
the pleasure principle, provokes rupture, supersedes desire and impels life
towards that fnal assault in which the debacle is the trophy of death.
As we said, Spielrein instead equates death with destruction, taking it as the
clinical proof for the manifestation of anxiety. Hence for her, Angst appears
as the symptom of death. She will neither be the frst nor the last to propose
it, distancing herself in this way from Freuds conceptualization of anxiety as
the symptom of castration, which by defnition is symbolic, and not of death
13
Sabina Spielrein, Die destruction als Ursache des Weredn, in Jahrbuch fr psychoanalytische
und psychopathologische Forschungen, V 4, p 465, 1912, Editor Carl Jung. Also published
in The International Review of Psychoanalysis, 1992, Vol XIX, p 339-414.
14
The Freud/Jung Letters, p 473.
15
In Melanie Klein we have as a matter of fact the same non-differentiation.
90
which, as such, is real. Let us remember that, for Lacan, the real is what
escapes symbolization.
We cannot fail to recognize in her steps the silhouette of Spielreins genius
directing the errors with the biological weight given in her work. It was also
Sabina Spielrein who, without doubt, motivated Freud in 1913, just seven
months after hearing her Destruction as Cause of Coming into Being, to write
The Theme of the Three Caskets. In this text, Freud classes the woman as
death: this does not seem to be independent of Sabina Spielreins work.
We fnd support for this proposition in, among other things, a short comment
in Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, where Jones tells us that: it would
be interesting to know the motive which led Freud to write that work, in
reference to: The Theme of the Three Caskets. In answer to Jones question,
and following what we have been proposing, the motive which led Freud
to The Theme of the Three Caskets could well have been Sabina Spielreins
thesis of destruction - death - as the cause of becoming. Furthermore, what
Freud heard in Spielreins paper were the theoretical tenets of Jung.
16
Thus in
rejecting Spielrein, Freud was also rejecting Jung.
In conclusion, I would like to refect on two of the consequences that followed
on from the theoretical difference between Freud and Jung: frstly the unjust
and unjustifable quasi-erasing of the pioneering works and memory of Sabina
Spielrein, effectuated by both of them; and. secondly, Freuds own distancing
from the study of the psychoses, which dwindled steadily after his work on
Schreber, with dire consequences for Freudian psychoanalysis. In fact, one
would need to wait for Franz Alexander and Melanie Klein and, later still,
Jacques Lacan, for the psychoses to be, once more, within legitimate reach
and interest in psychoanalysis.
As indicative of this distancing of Freud from the feld of the psychoses,
I refer to the destiny of Lacans doctoral thesis, Paranoia and its Relation
to Personality. This thesis, besides promoting a new nomenclature, that of
Paranoia of autopunishment, implicitly makes clear, among many other
things, that - contrary to Freuds tenets - not only is transference not absent
in the psychoses, but that there is indeed transference with a twist- from the
analyst towards the psychotic patient.
16
Freud listened to the work of Sabina Spielrein as if it were Jungs - that is not with good
predisposition.
91
The Thesis was defended and approved in November 1932 and, shortly
afterwards, Lacan sent it to Freud, from whom he received in an envelope
with the lapsus calami of a wrong address crossed out and corrected, by Freud
himself, a curt reply in January 1933: Thank you.
That Thanks was quite likely a thanks, but no thanks, or in the vernacular,
Dont you know? Since that thesis could only have awoken in Freud a memory
of another doctoral thesis: that is, the doctoral thesis of Sabina Spielrein
On Paraphrenia. And the backdrop to this was the painful event of Freuds
repetition
17
, two decades earlier, of the loss of his idealised relationship
with his son and heir (Freuds own words) Jung; and in 1932 he was losing
Sandor Ferenczi, another of his heirs.
18

After the break with Jung (but only then, and not before), Freud paid some
attention to gaining Spielrein for the psychoanalytic cause. In a way he was
partly successful: she fnished within Freudian psychoanalysis, but never
broke her relationship, even if sublimated, with Jung, to whom she remained
attached till the end in spite of the many and different failed attempts by
Freud
19
.
The becoming of the unconscious of Lacan
As I am drawing this writing to a close, I might add that this forgotten history
shows exceptionally well, among others things, why - contrary to commonly
held ideas (paraphrasing Lacan) transference is the condition of the analysis,
rather than an effect of it.
The way that Lacan approaches transference, as no longer being a saintly
sterilized notion of a special and artifcial love, has far reaching effects,
because love - or better said, hateloving (haineamoration)
20
- wherever it
exists in or out of analysis, is always of the same kind. Once it is no longer
considered as product of the analysis, love being here, there and anywhere,
21

it becomes pedestrianly high or low, dwelling in saloons, market places, or
17
Freud denominated that kind of repetitions: Destiny neurosis.
18
Sandor Ferenczi, The confusion of tongues between the adult and the child, read in 1932 at the
International Congress of Psychoanalysis in Wiesbaden, Germany.
19
Oscar Zentner, Lacan, estacin Caracas, Me Cay el Veinte, Revista de Psicoanlisis, Lecole
lacanienne de psychanalyse, No24,Mexico 2012.
20
This neologism of Lacan refers to the three passions: Love, Hate and Indifference , in which the
opposition is between Love-Hate and Indifference.
21
The Beatles, lyrics by Paul McCartney, April 1966.
92
on the couch. One cannot help evoking Tony Richardsons adaptation of the
novel Tom Jones
22
and the hilarious and gargantuan scene in the flm version,
in which eating and (suggested) sexual intercourse are so enmeshed that the
spectator can hardly separate them. In the face of this given, it is impossible
not to recognise the quasi-ridiculous pice de rsistance with which the
analyst invests himself with the armour of countertransference, blurring at
once both the resistance of the psychoanalyst, and the reciprocity no, the
identity - of transference.
The only, and certainly not minor, difference in the analysis is what one does
with this hateloving (haineamoration) within the analytic treatment. After
what I have developed so far, I think that I have suffcient grounds to name the
attachment between Jung and Spielrein as reciprocal hateloving transference,
which differs from that which is obscured by Bleulers proposition of
ambivalence.
23
Here, the puritanical and debilitating attitude prevalent among psychoanalysts
does not help. Have they so thoroughly forgotten that Freud pointed out that
what is repressed under the guise of a certain morality will most certainly
return, and usually does so in the form of acting-out? Here you have, reader,
why - Lacan dixit - acting out is transference without analysis. This is not to
be confused with analysing the transference. What happened between Jung
and Spielrein is a powerful proof of this.
Jung operated from the knowledge given by the Docta Ignorancia, ascribing
meaning to everything, and his failing was not to fall. By identifying himself,
to this object a, by not leaving anything other than himself in lieu, he was
conducted to no other possibility than to reciprocate Spielreins hateloving
with hateloving. And this hateloving, of course, was not necessarily carnal
love.
24

The analytic work involves danger, as much for the analyst as for the analysand.
As that generous and magnifcent teacher of mine, Enrique Pichn-Rivire,
22
Fielding, Henry. The history of Tom Jones, a Foundling, Penguin, London, 1997.
23
The dual notion of ambivalence considers the opposition of affects as being those of love and hate
and does not take into account that the opposition of affects is Trinitarian and consists of love and
hate as opposed to indifference.
24
Jacques Le Brun, Le pur amour de Platon Lacan, La Librairie du XXI Sicle, Seuil, septembre
2002, Paris.
93
once said to us as we were ushering him from his house to a very heated
debate on psychoanalysis
25
at the University
26
:
Do una Veronica: as the bullfghter does, leave your body fearlessly up to
almost the end; just before, quickly move it away, as the bullfghter does and
have in lieu of it the red piece of cloth.
This red piece of cloth in lieu is what Lacan called the imaginary semblance
of the real of the object petit a. It is thanks to this real object a that many
possibilities unfold. We will briefy name a few (not necessarily all relevant).
This object o is what, among other things, puts a stop to the blahblah of
the perennial interpretation. Here is where an analysis no longer becomes a
barrage of Talmudic hermeneutic of endless interpretations.
The limit, the stop to the continuing sliding in the Symbolic by the signifer,
implicit in the interpretation, is effectuated when the analyst - by being in the
place of the semblance of the object a - cuts into the symbolic through his
imaginary. But for this to take place, the question no longer Hamlets to be
or not to be? - is how to afford to become at the end no more than a fallen red
cloth, residue, litter?
Here we are marking the insurmountable gap that exists between the Symbolic
as the main register of the Freudian unconscious -das Unbevusste- and the
registers Real, Symbolic, Imaginary, the heresy, of the Lacanian unconscious,
- Lunebevue, and although, (RSI), sounds in French as heresy, my proposition
goes far beyond the analogy of sound, because to convert the Symbolic
Unconscious of Freud, through a transliteration into a gaffe that lUnevebue
is for Lacan, was heresy!
27

25
For a detailed account of this event, which marked the entrance of Lacanian psychoanalysis frst in
Argentina then Spain and Australia, see : Oscar Zentner, Prsentation of The School, Homage to
Freud, Papers of The Freudian School of Melbourne, 1979.
26
Round Table, Georges Politzers Concrete Psychology, with the participation of the
psychoanalysts: Enrique Pichn-Rivire, Fernando Ulloa, Jos Bleger and others, organised by
Movimiento Argentino de Psicologia (MAP) in the National University of Buenos Aires 1965.
27
Zentner, O. Lacan, estacin Caracas, Me Cay el Veinte, Revista de Psicoanlisis,( Lecole
lacanienne de psychanalyse, No24,Mexico 2012), pp 27.
94
To conclude, do we grasp the scope of Lacans heresy? In Freud, a gaffe is
an effect caused by the Unconscious, the heresy of Lacan is to transform the
effect into cause! Let us see the abyss opened by his Unebevue in Lacans
own words on 8 July 1953:
Follow me, and I will take you to the farthest corner of the earth.
28
28
Allouch, J. Hola Lacan?-Claro que no, ( cole lacanienne de psychanalyse, translated by Marcelo
and Nora Pasternac,Mexico, 1998), pp 340. (my translation)
95
Archive 1994-2011 THE LETTER 49 (2012) 95-115
THE LETTER ARCHIVE 1994-2011
1 Summer 1994
Cormac Gallagher Tir gan teanga, tir gan anam: An Irish Stew?
Guy le Gaufey The Analyst confronted with State Legitimacy.
Malcolm Bowie Psychoanalysis and the Future of Theory
John Forrester What are the Consequences of Drawing an
Analogy between Speech and Money?
Olga Cox Becketts Unnamable: Not I, not Mad.
Rik Loose Analytical Discourse and Scientifc Discourse:
A Difference in Responsibility.
Patricia McCarthy The Economies of the Subject serve both
Repression and the Signifer.
Helen Sheehan The Jouissance of the Mystic.
William J. Richardson The Third Generation of Desire.
Charles Melman Paranoia.
2 Autumn 1994
Julien Quackelbeen Lacanian Comments on What can I Know?,
What ought I to do?, What may I Hope for?
Paul Verhaeghe Psychotherapy, Psychoanalysis, and Hysteria.
Aisling Campbell Narrative and Desire in The Hundred and
Twenty Days of Sodom
Cormac Gallagher Mary
Darby
Optical Schema. The Historical Development
and Clinical Implications of Jacques Lacans
Mirror-Stage
Edward Robins The Man who Sold Words.
Helena Comiskey-Texier Little Hans Real Father.
96
Issue 3 Spring 1995
Rik Loose,
Gerry Sullivan
A Case of Hysteria?
Maeve Nolan Beauty and the Butcher. The Desire of the Hysteric
and its Interpretation
Aisling Campbell Hysteria and Litigation: Coping with the Real of
Trauma.
Rob Weatherill Culture and Hysteria.
Gerry Sullivan Modernity as an Hysterical Experience.
Nellie Curtin,
Mary Cullen
Is Hysteria a Feminist Response or is Feminism an
Expression of Hysteria?
Paul Verhaeghe From Impossibility to Inability: Lacans Theory on
the Four Discourses.
Patricia McCarthy The Trace of lobjet petit o through
the Case of Anna 0.
Cormac Gallagher Hysteria: Does it Exist?
Issue 4 Summer 1995
Guy Le Gaufey The Object a.
Helena Texier Through the Looking Glass.
Aisling Campbell Is the Concept of the Death drive essential when
speaking of Trauma?
Claus-Dieter Rath The Purloined Tongue.
Ann Hanrahan The Signifer and Shakespeare.
Gerry Sullivan Obsessionality, Capitalism, Transgression.
Liberato Santoro Eating Desire.
Martin Stanton Psychic Contusion: Remarks on Ferenczi and
Trauma.
Claude Dumezil The Question of Orthodoxy: Clinical Refections on
the Direction of the Cure.
Aisling Campbell Ghent Report.
Maeve Nolan,
Rik Loose
UAPS Report.
97
Issue 5 Autumn 1995
Cormac Gallagher Lacans Summary of Seminar XI.
Charles Melman The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis.
Rik Loose Some Short Odds on Gambling: A Psychoanalytic
Approach
Andre Michels Some Remarks on Oedipus and Writing.
Helen Sheehan The Pre-versions of Dubliners.
Paul Verhaeghe Jacques Lacans Return to Freud: Woman does not
exist.
Sandra Carroll Dali: Psychoanalysis Visualised.
Filip Geerardyn On Psychotherapy: a Freudo-Lacanian Point of
View.
Issue 6 Spring 1996
Cormac Gallagher High Anxiety: A Theoretical and Clinical
Challenge to Psychoanalysis
Helen Sheehan The Concept of Anxiety within an Object
Relations Perspective.
Rik Loose Libido and Toxic Substance.
Paul Verhaeghe The Riddle of Castration Anxiety: Lacan Beyond
Freud.
Helena Texier Anxiety and Phobia: Sign and Symptom?
Gerry Sullivan Psychic Structure and Manifestations of Anxiety
within the Clinic.
Brendan Staunton Anxiety, Art and Aufhebung: Sublation, Manet
and Anxiety.
Tom McGrath The Illusion of a Future: Freuds Anxiety and
Religion.
Aisling Campbell The Absence of Anxiety: A Case of Transvestism.
Patricia McCarthy In Schrebers Case: An Exploration of Psychotic
Anxiety.
Dany Nobus Closing Remarks: Not Enough and Never Too
Much.
98
Issue 7 Summer 1996
Paul Verhaeghe Teaching Psychoanalysis: A Double Impossiblity.
Aisling Campbell How can Lacanian Theory be represented in the
Media?
Filip Geerardyn,
Julien Quackelbeen
Psychoanalysis and Neurosciences: Interview with
Mark LeonardLeonard De Gier Solms.
Nessa Breen Lacan in Barthes.
Olga Cox Narrative, Anxiety and the Temporal Factor.
Alan Rowan Lacanian Approach to Problems of Affect and
Anxiety in Psychoanalysis.
Sean Homer Psychoanalysis, Representation, Politics: On the
(Im)possibility of a Psychoanalytic Theory of
Ideology?
Josette Zouein,
Brendan Staunton
Conference Report: Analyse Freudienne London
Conference April 1995.
Aisling Campbell Conference Report: Trauma in Charlton.
Olga Cox Book Review: Female Fetishism. A New Look.
Issue 8 Autumn 1996
Andr Michels Oscar Wilde: Aesthete and Homosexual.
Andr Michels The Hatred of the Father in Perversion.
Stephen J. Costello Lacan and the Lure of the Look.
K. Temmerman, Julien
Quackelbeen
Autoerotic Asphyxia from Phenomenology to
Psychoanalysis.
Cormac Gallagher Religion and Obsessional Neurosis.
Robert Levy Theory, Clinic...A Question of Ethics?
Helen Sheehan Anxiety: Preserving the objet a.
Barry ODonnell Ella Freeman Sharpe. A Review of her
Contribution.
99
Issue 9 Spring 1997
Cormac Gallagher Being, Knowing and Sexual Difference.
Maeve Nolan The Problem of the Crucial Object in
Psychoanalysis.
Tony Hughes The Rapture of Lol. V. Stein.
Patricia McCarthy Of Klein Bottles, Cuts and Sex.
Barry ODonnell The Sophist and the Psychoanalyst.
Guy Le Gaufey A Portrait of the Analyst as a Crucial Problem.
Dany Nobus Rumpelstiltskins Revenge: On the Importance of
Proper Names in Psychoanalysis.
Stephen J. Costello What Type of Knowledge?: The Fideist Position in
Psychoanalytic Praxis.
Paul Verhaeghe The Crucial Problems: The End of the Treatment,
Transmission and Institutionalisation.
Issue 10 Summer 1997
Tom McGrath The Institutionalisation of Psychoanalysis.
William Fried An Overture and its Vicissitudes: Therapy, Analysis
or...?
Andr Michels Some Remarks on William Frieds Presentation:
An Overture and its Vicissitudes: Therapy, Analysis
or...?
Barry ODonnell Reading Platos Symposium.
Phil McAree Bryan Charnley. Biographical note.
Katrien Libbrecht Pandoras Box: On the Function of Secrecy in
Psychoanalysis.
Eithne Lannon The Remains of the Day.
Yannis Stavrakakis On the Political Implications of Lacanian Theory: A
Reply to Homer.
100
Issue 11 Autumn 1997
William J. Richardson Like Straw: Religion and Psychoanalysis.
Colman Duggan Seduction - the Universal Enigma - A Clinical
Consideration of the Subject(ed).
Stephen J. Costello The Pale Criminal and the Need for Punishment: a
Freudian Perspective.
Antoinette Wills Putting the Family in the Picture.
Josette Zouein An Ex-eyety: A Lacanian Signifer?
Aisling Campbell Affect: Its the Real Thing.
Rob Weatherill Affects: the Absolute Subject.
Cormac Gallagher Despair, Despair, Despair...Spare!- Affect in
Lacanian Theory and Practice.
Issue 12 Spring 1998
Cormac Gallagher Ireland, Mother Ireland: An Essay in
Psychoanalytic Symbolism.
Patricia McCarthy The Heart of the Matter. More Topological
Considerations on the Subject.
Brendan Staunton Lacan on Las Meninas. The Visual Structure of the
Human Subject.
Patricia Stewart Psychoanalysis - who needs it?
Sarah McAuley Psychoanalysis - who needs it?
Barry ODonnell Platos Good for Lacan.
Andr Michels Institutions and Law. A Contribution to a Theory of
Transmission.
Clare Daly Menstruation - the Ultimate Taboo?
Orla Salmon The Impossibility of Desire within Romantic Love
as Revealed in A. S. Byatts Novel Possession: A
Romance
John Hughes A Couch up a Public Health Psychiatrists Sleeve.
Tom McGrath Ethics and the Objects of Psychoanalysis A
Response.
101
Lieven Jonckheere Latent Freudian Thoughts towards a Theory of
Neurotic Depression: Part One - The Anxiety-
Neurotic Depression.
Lieven Jonckheere Latent Freudian Thoughts towards a Theory of
Neurotic Depression: Part Two - A Purely Hysterical
Depression?
Olga Cox-Cameron In Pursuit of the Fading Subject across the Field of
Fantasy.
Andr Michels Hysteria and Femininity
Stephen J. Costello The Real of Religion and its Relation to Truth as Cause.
Hugh Cummins Robert Louis Stevenson and the Theme of the
Double.
Helena Texier Wo steht Lacan heute? Lacanian Psychoanalysis in
Ireland
Yves-Pierre
Baumstimler
Identity and Inter-religious Dialogue: Dialogue or
Identity-hate.
Cormac Gallagher Lacan for Beginners
Rik Loose Book Review: Hills Lacan for Beginners
Sarah McAuley Book Review: Leaders Lacan for Beginners
William J. Richardson Lacan for Beginners
William J. Richardson The Subject of Ethics
Marcel Czermak Peut-on parler de psychose sociale?
Helen Sheehan The Follower.
Claude Dumzil Symptome, thique et dsir danalyste.
Rik Loose Review of Freuds early Remarks on Addiction:
from an Ideal to Masturbation.
Paul Verhaeghe Trauma and Hysteria within Freud and Lacan.
Tom McGrath Psychology and Psychoanalysis - a Scientifc
Paradigm.
Charles Melman Lecture raisonne et critique des oeuvres de
Freud et de Lacan.
Olga Cox Cameron Lacan and Dali - An Anamorphic Encounter?
Christiane Lacote Une torpeur ordinaire.
Helena Texier We can Remember it for you Wholesale.
Guy Le Gaufey The Tight-rope Walkers.
102
Lieven Jonckheere According to M. Duchamp. La marie mise a nu
par ses clibataires, mme and the Ready- made.
Patricia McCarthy The Impossibility of the Sexual Act (Some
Thoughts on Perversion and Obsessional Neurosis).
Helena Texier Elizabeth - The Virgin Queen and the Maid
Patricia Stewart Berglers Basic Neurosis
Tony Hughes Exchange-value and Use-value in Psychoanalysis.
Cormac Gallagher Jacques Lacans summary of the Seminar of 1966-
1967 (Yearbook of the cole Pratique des Hautes
tudes).
Anthony McCarthy False Memory Debate: Introduction.
Maeve Nolan Psychoanalysis, Seduction and False Memories.
Peter Byrne Recovered Memories/ False memories: A
Psychiatric Perspective.
Barry ODonnell Memory and Phantasy.
Charles Melman Addiction
Franziska Huber Gambling: Pain, Pleasure and Play.
Andr Michels,
Jacques Laberge
On the Crisis on Legitimation in the Institution. Of
the Real, Paradoxes and Contradictions.
Ros McCarthy Suicide. A Family Narrative on the Edge of
Consciousness.
Pauline OCallaghan Lacan and Seminar XX.
Adrian Johnston The Object of its Affection. Reconsidering
Temporality and Object-choice in Lacans Theory
103
Cormac Gallagher Sexual Difference in The Logic of Phantasy.
Jason Glynos Metalanguage, Formal Structures, and the
Dissolution of Transference.
Olga Cox-Cameron The Way we talk: Psychotic Language and The
Butcher Boy.
Rik Loose A Gross Episode.
Pauline OCallaghan Note on Kristeva.
Paul Verhaeghe Subject and Body. Lacans Struggle with the Real.
Cormac Gallagher A Reading of The Psychoanalytic Act (1967-68)
Patricia McCarthy To Speak about whats involved in the
Psychoanalytic Act, one has to speak about Logic.
Patricia Stewart Act and Behaviour: Pavlovian Fallacies.
Michael T. Murphy Phantasy and the Psychoanalytic Act. Freud, Klein
and Lacan. What is involved in the Psychoanlaytic
Act.
Liberato Santoro-
Brienza
Whose Decline and Fall? Eysencks version of
psychoanalysis.
Anthony McCarthy Psychoanalysis and the Formation of the
Psychiatrist.
Megan Williams Hyp-knot-ism of the Obsessional Symptom in
Analysis.
Cormac Gallagher Overview of The Psychoanalytic Act.
104
Andr Michels Anxiety, Time and Psychical Structure.
Jean-Pierre Lebrun The 21st Century will be Lacanian or it will be
Barbarian!
Olga Cox-Cameron Narrative Impasse: the Act as passage lacte.
Adrian Johnston Just say no to cogito.
Katharine Swarbrick Lacan reads Rousseau: A Narrative Instance of the
Body-in-pieces.
Dirk Bryssinck Psychosis, Toxicomania and the homeless.
Frdric Declercq Signifer and Signifcation in the Practice of Lacanian
Psychoanalysis.
Peter Kelly Poles apart? A Question of Identity: from a Unifed self
to a Divided Subject.
Philip Dodd Learning Disability: Two Writers and a Question.
Cormac Gallagher On First Looking into Foucaults History.
Frdric Gros Note on Sexuality in the Work of Michel Foucault.
Aisling Campbell Conference Report: 1st Annual Conference on
Neuroscientifc and Psychoanalytic Perspectives on
Emotion.
Cormac Gallagher From an Other to the other: An Overview.
Rob Weatherill The Proximity of the other: Psychoanalysis and
Lvinas.
Patricia McCarthy This is my Body: the Clinic of the o-objects or of the
Body of Enjoyment.
Lieven Jonckheere The Symptom between Marxism and
Psychoanalysis.
Tom De Belie A Structural Diagnosis of Toxicomania
105
Hugh Arthurs The Question of the Drive in Psychoanalysis
Aisling Campbell
From Neuroscience to Neuropsychoanalysis:
Mission Impossible?
Claude Landeman Le pari de Pascal - Pascals Wager.
Cormac Gallagher 2001 International Symposium on Psychoanalytic
Research
Dany Nobus Beyond the Rebus Principle? Psychoanalysis and
Chinese Dream Interpretation
Gerard Pommier Psychoanalysis in China? The Importance of
psychoanalysing the Desire to heal, in particular the
Desire to heal Children
Erik Porge The Place and Contribution of Handwriting in
Clinical Psychoanalysis
Paul Verhaeghe Perversion I: Perverse Traits
Olga Cox-Cameron Enduring Love: From Urbane Objectivity to
Panicked Object
Andre Michels The Meaning of Psychoses in Lacans Reading of
Freud
Hubert Van Hoorde Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis: The Hedgehogs
Franck Chaumon The Drives and the Stakes involved
Dominique Simonney A Few Observations concerning a Psychoanalytical
Cure of an Adolescent
Cormac Gallagher What does Jacques Lacan see in Blaise Pascal?
Carol Owens The mOther of all Anxiety.
Paul Verhaeghe Perversion II: the Perverse Structure.
Olga Cox-Cameron To think differently: Michel Foucault and the Status
of Psychoanalytic Theory.
Stijn Vanheule Inhibition: I am because I dont act.
106
Cormac Gallagher The New Tyranny of Knowledge: Seminar XVII
(1969-70) - Background and Overview
Mary Darby The envers of Psychiatry: Psychoanalysis and
Psychiatry should be Friends
Aisling Campbell Some Short Cuts to Desire
Frdric Declercq The Other Side of the Symptom
Katrien Libbrecht The Emergence of Psychoanalysis in the
Changing of Discourses
Andr Michels The Unconscious and the Real
Grard Pommier How can one speak of a Subject of the
Unconscious?
Claude-Nole Pickmann La femme donne a la jouissance doser le
masque de la repetition
Patricia Stewart Beyond Lacan
Rob Weatherill Psychoanalysis and the Night
Patricia McCarthy The Reverse of Psychoanalysis - how far? A
Commentary on Discourse, Knowledge and
Enjoyment
Charles Melman Returning to Schreber: 5 December 1994
Paul Verhaeghe Remarks on the Teory and Treatment
of(Pathological) Administrations of Enjoyment
Rik Loose Te Subject of Addiction
Adrian Johnston In Language more than Language Itself: Reconsid-
ering the Signifcance of Structuralism in Lacans
Tought
Colm Massey Indirect Speech and Communication
Alan Rowan Te Problematic Shadow of Super-Vision in Ana-
lytic Supervision
107
Issue 26 - Autumn 2002
Frdric Declercq Full and Empty Speech within Psychoanalytic
Practice
Ann De Rick Freuds Clinical Category of Actual Neuroses:
The Return of the Repressed
Carol Owens The Case of the Falling Man. An Examination
of the Function of Demand in Analytic Practice
Eugenie Georgaca On Being the Others Object: A Case of the
Sexual Masochism
Ray ONeill The Lies, the Wise and the Wardrobe.
Homophobia, Homosexuality and the Closet on
the Couch
Els Van Compernolle Depression, Sign of the Times
Issue 27 - Spring 2003
Cormac Gallagher On A Discourse that might not be a Semblance:
Book XVIII (1971): A Collage.
Frdric Declercq Freuds Scientism and its Impact on the Analysis of
the Wolf-Man.
Marion Deane Lebar Na H-Uidre: Book Of The Dun Cow. A
Translation.
Marion Deane The Birth of the Hero and the Origin of Society:
Reciprocity and Incest in Compert Conculainn.
Patricia McCarthy Writing and Enjoyment: A Gommentary.
Brendan Staunton Lacan and Matisse: Overlapping discourses?
David C luxton The Super-Ego and Enjoyment.
Helen Sheehan Of course Im not a Racist... but.
Maryrose Kiernan Truth or Make-believe: Psychoanalytic Discourse.
Whose Truth is it anyway?
108
Veroniek Knockaert,
Gertrudis Van De Vijver,
Filip Geerardyn
The Intergenerational Transmission of the
Holocaust Trauma: The Legacy of an Impossible
Memory.
Rob Weatherill The Universe is Therapeutic: Life in-sists before it
ex-ists in Signs
Eve Watson Why not war? Dialectics of the Will to Aggression
in the Recent U.S. led War on Iraq.
Caroline Noone Autism and Psychoanalysis: Uneasy Bedfellows.
Ray ONeill Naming the Love that dares not speak its Name:
Politics and Perils of Language and Sexuality.
An Lievrouw Psychoanalysis and Research: A Matter of Ethics.
Liveen Jonckheere Im Burnt: a Psychotic Neologism in Melancholia
Katrien Steenhoudt Forgotten Voids in the Gaze on Melancholia
Olga Cox Cameron Signifying Nothing: Lacanian Theory and Tragic Form
Helena Texier My Possible Impossibility: Death in the Life of the
Obsessional
Cormac Gallagher Where was Jacques Lacan in 1971-72? ... Ou pire
and The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst
Claude-Nole Pickman Examining a Clinic of the Not-all
Barry ODonnell The Parmenides and the One
Patricia McCarthy The Formulae of Sexuation. From Inexistence to
Possibility and from Impossibility to Contingency
Dolores Tunnecliffe Children in Distress: Approaches and Challenges to
Psychoanalysis with Children in the School Setting
Helena Texier Desire unto Death: Childsplay
Rob Weatherill Kleins bottle: Getting Real
Marcus Pound Indirect Analysis: Lacan, Kierkegaard and Humour
Carol Owens The Birth of the Mother
Martin Daly The Nightmare
109
Eve Watson Crime and Punishment.
Miquel Bassols Law and Desire beyond Oedipus.
Ros Woods The Real in India or the real India? The One
and the other
Pauline OCallaghan Stendhals Syndrome.
Marie Walshe Enjoying the Symptom: A Faithful Suffering
Barry ODonnell Symptom and Anxiety.
Andrew Lewis Models of Temporality in Psychoanalysis.
Donna Redmond Aspergers Syndrome: Some Psychoanalytic
Comments.
Colette Sepel Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Psychosis.
Joane Fortune Now that I am forever With Child.
Joanne Conway Melancholia - a Perverse Act? The Case of the Frog
and the Eel.
Oscar Zentner The Exile of James Joyce: Apres le mot le deluge.
Cormac Gallagher Re-Englishing Encore.
Pauline OCallaghan Courtly Love to Courtney Love - Still no such Thing
as a Sexual Relationship?
Patricia McCarthy A Commentary on Lacans hainamoration and an
Introduction to the Affair of Love between James
Joyce and Nora Barnacle.
Aisling Campbell A Twist in the Tale. .
Eve Watson An-Other Jouissance: Unmasking the Vamp-ire
and Marilyn Monroe
Carol Owens To Work perchance to Love.
Florencia Shanahan What Kind of Love is this?
Bernard Kennedy St. Teresa, Mysticism and thats not it: The agalma
of Homosexual and Heterosexual Desire
Michael Murphy Jean Genets Inquiry into Language.
110
Calum Neill An Idiotic Act: On the Non-example of Antigone.
Helena Texier Antigone goes beyond-the-beyond: From the my
lady of the Ideal to the Malady of the Ideal.
Kazushige Shingu Freud, Lacan and Japan.
Kazushige Shingu A History of the Self-containing Structure of the
Mind.
Lieven Jonckheere On the Franchissement of Anxiety in Lacans
Seminar X.
Jongju Kim Depression and Neo-Confucian Ethics.
Masaaki Hoshina On Sublimation.
Geoff Boucher The Logical Status of Lacans Formulae of
Sexuation.
Cormac Gallagher Nets to knots: The odyssey to a beyond of
barbarism
Olga Cox Cameron Calling a spate a spate: Riverrun writing in the
Anna Livia section of Finnegans Wake
Patricia McCarthy Home comes everybody. Questions about the
familiar in the Ithaca episode of Ulysses
Terry Ball Epiphanies and the clinic
Florencia .C. Shanahan Buenos Irish
Bernard Kennedy Joyce, the castration complex, and the nom du pre
Ray ODonnchadha Portrait of the artist as a Jung man: a cock and bull
story
Medb Ruane Who chose this face for me? Some commodius
vicuses of recirculation in Lacan and Joyce
Denise Brett The lost subject
Kay Murphy Elijah, skiff, light throwaway thing: why has the
name of Elijah appeared so often in Ulysses?
Pauline OCallaghan Gabriels (o)bo-gender, sinthome and courtly love
in The Dead
Helen Sheehan A disturbance of memory at Dublin Castle
Sandra Carroll The art of the epiphany
111
Cormac Gallagher Lacans Viator and The Time Travellers Wife
Barry ODonnell Lacans invention
Florencia F.C.
Shanahan
Erring Fathers
Patricia McCarthy Psychoanalysis is the knowledge of the rules of
the game of love. A commentary on the logical and
topological structure of unconscious knowledge
Denise Brett A ring errors
Charles Melman George Best and the names of the father
Peter Kelly Getting cl(o)ser a real intoxication
Carol Owens Addicts in recovery: re-covery in analysis?
Oliver Murphy Psychical structures and Alcoholics Anonymous
Marie Walshe Desertion and disintegration in an adolescent dream odyssey
Eve Watson Oedipus dup(e)licated: Artifcial intelligence and the
matr(e)ices of desire and the symbolic
Ray ONeill Oedipus dup(e)licated: (Re)produing children in the
postmodern world of hyperreality
Rolando Karothy The Writing of Joyce
Oscar Zentner From the Lacan-Joyce Correspondence
Colette Soler Joyces Nora
Andrew Lewis The Psychoanalytici Case History
Stephen J. Costello Freuds Political Philosophy
Aisling Campbell A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Borderline
Personality Disorder
Ian Parker Losing Psychoanalysis in Translation
Kazushige Shingu Japanese Myth, Buddhist Legend, and the Structural Analysis of
Clinical Dreams in relation to the Mourning Process
Christian Ingo
Lenz Dunker
Comments on the Presentations given by Ian Parker
and Kazushige Shingu
Christian Ingo
Lenz Dunker
Style is the Man Himself
Cathal Morgan Book Review of On Being Normal and Other Disorders: a
Manual for Clinical Psychodiagnostics by Paul Verhaeghe
112
Cormac Gallagher From Freuds mythology of sexuality to Lacans
formulae of sexuation
Helen Sheehan Sigmund Freud: the time for understanding
Gerry Sullivan Freud in the twenty-frst century: a Chinese puzzle
Angela Noonan Where there is no couch: the possibilities for
psychoanalysis in the public mental health service
Emer Rutledge The possibilities of psychoanalysis in psychiatry
Claire Hawkes Psychoanalysis and schizophrenia
Malachi McCoy A childs textbook
Bernard Kennedy The Freudian understanding of the symptom
Mary Cullen Drugs + thugs + da + loves
Patricia McCarthy A question of research for psychoanalysis, the health
service and the university
Aisling Campbell Psychoanalysis and psychiatry
Barry ODonnell Discovering transference
Cormac Gallagher Introduction to Guy Le Gaufeys Article on
Sexuation.
Guy Le Gaufey An Introduction to a Critical Reading of the
Formulae of Sexuation.
Guy Le Gaufey Towards a Critical Reading of the Formulae of
Sexuation.
Patricia McCarthy In Praise of Incompleteness.
Irene M. Sweeney to a Consideration of the Object described as
Partial.
Tom Dalzell Kants Nothings and Lacans Empty Object.
Christian Fierens The Act of Saying Notall with reference to
Le Gaufeys Work: Lacans Notall, Logical
Consistency, Clinical Consequences
Guy Le Gaufey Reply to Christian Fierens
113
Charles Melman Schrebers Lack of Lack
Bernhard
Kchenhoff
Bleuler, Freud and Jung On Demntia Praecox
(Schizophrenia) in 1908
Christian Fierens Foreclosure and Discordance: Is Schizophrenia
Thinkable?
Barry ODonnell Towards the Difference between Neurosis and Psychosis
Eadbhard OCallaghan
Nicolas Ramperti
Was Bleuler Right? Or the Perils of Procrastination
Helen Sheehan From Gleann Na Ngealt to Schizophrenia: A Structure
of Refusal?
Tom Dalzell Schizophrenia in Freud and Lacan: No Return to Pre-
Kraepelinian Bewilderment
Kevin Malone Schizophrenia and Psychoanalysis: Brief Observations
from Contemporary American Psychiatric Literature
Charles Melman What Thrilled Me in Fierens Book
Christian Fierens Response to Tom Dalzell
Tom Dalzell Schreber in Ltourdit
Tony Hughes The Two Morsels of Ltourdit
Patricia McCarthy The Vas Difference: On Traversing the Firt Loop
of Ltourdit
Jacques Lacan Ltourdit
Christian Fierens Reading Ltourdit
Cormac Gallagher Laytour, Latetour, Ltourdit
Cormac Gallagher The Patient as Actor: Notall in the Case
Presentation
Jacque Lacan Kant with Sade
Tony Hughes Kant with Sade: A Scholion
Daragh Howard Saint Paul and Freud: The Denial of the Sovereign
Good in Lacans Seminar VII
114
Jacques Lacan Ltourdit A Bilingual Presentation of The
Second Turn (First Part)
Christian Fierens Reading Ltourdit: The Scond Turn
Jean-Pierre Georgin
Erik Porge
Above The Horizon there is No Sky
Tony Hughes The Torus An Introduction
Jacques Lacan Preface to the Awakening of Spring
Helen Sheehan Youre Not going Out Like That, Are You?
Cormac Gallagher The Founding Act, The Cartel and The Riddle of
the Plus One
Mary Cheyrou-Lagrze Through the Lenses of the Cartel
Patricia McCarthy What is an Author A Question for the Cartels?
Barry ODonnell What Might Schol Be?
Jacques Lacan Ltourdit: Second Turn Second Part
Christian Fierens Reading Ltourdit: The Second Turn Chapter
Two
Guy Le Gaufey Logic of the Sexual Fault line Prologue
Guy Le Gaufey Logic of the Sexual Fault line
Tony Hughes Freuds Group, Lacans Cartel and the Toric
Organisation
Noel Walsh Opening Address
Daniel Burston Psychoanalysis, Psychiatry and Bipolar Disorder in
the Twenty First Century
Brendan Kelly Balance and Connection
Cormac Gallagher Psychological Object or Speaking Subject
115
Mary Cannon
Ian Kelleher
Jack Jenner
Psychotic Symptoms Time for a New Approach
Lionel Bailly Pediatric BiPolar?
Patricia McCarthy Evidence-Based Practice and Psychoanalysis
Discussants Round Table Discussion
Jacques Lacan Psychoanalysis and the Formation of the Psychiatrist
Cormac Gallagher What can we Learn From Freuds Critique of Religion
Terry Ball Love in Platos Symposium and Lacans Transference
Seminar
Guy Le Gaufey Scholion, A Misuse of Metaphor (in Lacans Notall)
Christian Fierens The Tool of Diagnosis and Operation of the Matheme
Marion Deane Book Review Elyn R. Saks: The Centre Cannot Hold
Charles Melman Inside and Outside in the Case of President
Schreber
William J. Richardson Philosophy and Psychoanalysis: The Spelling of
Marilyn Monroe
Helen Sheehan Psychoanalysis Without Tears
Daragh Howard Lacans Concept of the Unconscious in Seminar
XI: On the Subject as Indeterminate
Lionel Bailly Psychoanalysis in the work of a Psychiatrist in the
State Sector
Lionel Bailly Book Review Thomas G. Dalzell: Freuds
Schreber Between Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis
116
Style Sheet THE LETTER 49 (2012) 116-119
Style Sheet for The Letter
Typing Layout: Single spacing, Times New Roman, Font size: 12, 13cm,
justifed.
Title: In upper case, centred, bold, font size 14.
Line Spacing: single spacing.
Authors name: To appear below title and centred, bold, font size 14.
Paragraphs: One line between paragraphs, no indentation
Quotations:
1. of less than 5 lines of type within text
(a) enclosed in single inverted commas.
(b) reproduced exactly as found in original text (style, spelling, etc)
(c) quotation within quotation, enclosed in double inverted commas.
(d) quotation in foreign language should be given in italics.
Translation in English should be given in footnote if included
2. of more than 5 lines of type within text
(a) italics and not enclosed in inverted commas
(b) indented 5mm on either side (left and right justifed)
(c) quotations within them are enclosed in single inverted commas.
Footnotes:
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117
(c) should be numbered within the text: this number should be placed
after the punctuation mark.
(d) At the end of the page, the footnote number should be followed by
a single space; it should not be enclosed within brackets, either in
the text or in the footnote.
Citations/References (see examples at end):
(A) Where the title of a work is given in the main text this should be
italicised and should not be enclosed in inverted commas
(B) Where the title of a work is given in a footnote, references should
be full and given in the following format:
(i) Surname of author, comma, initial of authors frst
name, full-stop, space.
(ii) Title of work: in italics.
(iii) If in English, the frst and last words of all titles and
subtitles as well as all other nouns, adjectives, adverbs
and verbs have a capital letter.
(iv) If in French, Italian, Spanish only the frst word of the
title (and subtitle) has a capital letter. German follows
the rules peculiar to the language.
(v) Title followed by full-stop and space.
(vi) Date of original publication in brackets (if applicable),
full-stop, space.
(vii) Place of publication, comma, space.
(viii) Publisher, comma, space.
(ix) Date of publication, full-stop.
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(x) Where a translators name is given it should appear
before the place of publication and should follow the
rules for authors names.
(xi) Where an editors name is given it should appear after
the title of the work and should follow the rules for
authors names.
(xii) Page numbers, where given, should appear at the end
of the completed reference.
(C) References to Freuds works should be from the Standard Edition
and should follow the format in the example given below:
(D) References to works appearing in collections / joumals / periodicals
should follow the same rules as given for books, with the following
addition:
(E) The title of the paper should be given in italics within single inverted
commas, followed by the word in (not in italics), followed by the
title, in italics, of the collection / journal / periodical. The volume
number should be given at the end of the completed reference.
(F) Expressions such as ibid, op.cit, sic, may be used where applicable.
Examples:
(a) Freud, S. On Narcissism: An Introduction. (1914). Standard
Edition XIV, London, Hogarth Press. p. 91.
(b) Lacan, J. Ecrits. Paris, Seuil, 1966. pp. 63-100.
(c) Lacan, J. Ecrits, The First Complete Edition In English. Translated
by B. Fink, Norton, New York and London, 2006. p.279
(d) Lacan, J. The Formations of the Unconscious: Book V. (1957-
1958). Unpublished translation by Cormac Gallagher, c.f. www.
lacaninireland.com. Seminar 8.1.58, p.110.
119
(e) Melman, C. Le Noeud phobique in La phobie. Paris, lassociation
freudienne, 1989.
Other rules:
(1) Where-numbers appear in text these should be spelled out, unless they
are used mathematically
e.g. three sisters not 3 sisters
nineteenth century not 19th century
the one who is one not the 1 who is 1.
(2) All non-English words in the text should be italicised, e.g. jouissance,
objet-a, Weltanschauung, das Heimlich.
(3) Each article for publication should be accompanied bv a contact e-mail
address, given at the end of the article as address for correspondence.
(4) Any further queries regarding the style sheet should be addressed to
The Editor: anthony.j.hughes@gmail.com.
120
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