Talk:Seminar I
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This volume is the transcript of the first year of Lacan's world-famous seminar.
Taking as its theme the technique of psychoanalysis, within the framework of Lacan's "return to Freud", it includes elaboration of Lacan's notions of the symbolic, the imaginary and the real, the importance of speech and language in psychoanalysis and the interpretation to be put on the mirror stage.
It also includes lengthy discussions of the clinical and theoretical work of contemporary psychoanalysts such as Michael Balint and Melanie Klein, as well as St Augustine and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Together with Seminar II. The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-1955, being published simultaneously, it undoubtedly forms the best point of departure for the English-speaking reader wishing to gain some acquaintance with the disturbing and profound thought of Jacques Lacan.
Introduction
In keeping with this heterogeneous approach, Lacan will further appeal to the science of optics to systematize his analyses of the specular relation.
After his schema of the inverted bouquet the mirror stage becomes part of the topography of the Imaginary.
As to the méconnaissance that characterizes the ego, it is associated with Verneinung (dénégation): "...everyday speech runs against failure of recognition, méconnaissance, which is the source of Verneinung."
He closes the seminar pondering on the role of the analyst: "...if the subject commits himself to searching after truth as such, it is because he places himself in the dimension of ignorance, what analysts call readiness to the transference.
The analyst's ignorance is also worth of consideration. He doesn't have to guide the subject to knowledge, but on to the paths by which access to this knowledge is gained. Psychoanalysis is a dialectics, an art of conversation."
In a spoken intervention (Appendix), Jean Hyppolite comments on Freud's ‘’Verneinung’’ and suggests its translation as ‘’dénégation’’ instead of ‘’négation’’.
The question here deals with how the return of the repressed operates.
According to Freud the repressed is intellectually accepted by the subject, since it is named, and at the same time is negated because the subject refuses to recognize it as his, refuses to recognize him in it.
‘’Dénégation’’ includes an assertion whose status is difficult to define.
The frontier between neurosis and psychosis is drawn here, between repression, ‘’Verdrägung’’, and repudiation, ‘’Verwerfung’’, a term that Lacan will replace by withdrawal, and finally by "foreclosure" (‘’forclusion’’), the former being related to neurosis, the latter to psychosis.
When answering Hyppolite in ‘’La Psychanalyse’’ that same year, Lacan establishes two poles of analytic experience: the imaginary ego and the symbolic speech.
Lacan gives precedence to the Symbolic over the Imaginary.
The subject who must come to be is "the subject of the unconscious" and "the unconscious is the discourse of the Other."
In analysis, he says, "the subject first talks about himself without talking to you, then he talks to you without talking about himself. When he is able to talk to you about himself, the analysis is over."
To this reshaping of the Imaginary by the Symbolic, he opposes the intersection of the Symbolic and the Real without mediation of the Imaginary, which would be the characteristic of psychosis.
Bibliography
- Le séminaire, Livre I: Les écrits techniques de Freud. (1953-1954) Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1973.
- The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud's Papers on Technique, 1953-1954. Ed. J.-A. Miller. Trans. J. Forrester. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
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See Also
Lacan's Metaphor of the Mirror Stage. {From Volume 1 of the Seminar: Freud's Papers on Technique) <http://personal.bgsu.edu/~dcallen/mirror.html>
References
French: (texte établi par Jacques-Alain Miller), Paris: Seuil, 1975. English: ‘’’Book I: Freud's Papers on Technique’’’ (edited by Jacques-Alain Miller), New York: Norton, 1988.
See also
‘’méconnaissance’’
