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==Editor==
''This [[exchange]] of letters begins at a crucial [[moment]] in the [[life]] of [[Jacques Lacan]]: he had just been stricken from the [[list]] of [[training]] [[analysts]] of the Société Française de [[Psychanalyse]] (SFP) on October 13, 1963, after two years of negotiations with representatives of the International [[Psychoanalytical]] [[Association]] (IPA). Stripped of the [[right]] to train students, Lacan was then obliged to break with the [[official]] institution,<ref>Cf. Elisabeth Roudinesco, ''La [[Bataille]] de cent ans: Histoire de la psychanalyse en [[France]]'', 2 vols. ([[Paris]]: Seuil, 1986), vol. 2 ([[English]] [[translation]] by Jeffrey Mehlman, [[Jacques lacan|Jacques Lacan ]] & Co. [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990]).
</ref> which plunged him into great turmoil, evidence of which can be seen in his first letters.
''These letters of Lacan and Althusser were discovered in the archives of Louis Althusser. Those of Lacan, eight in [[number]], are all handwritten and composed on stationery measuring 13.5 cm by 20.5 cm, with a heading on the right mentioning the address of 5 rue de Lille and a telephone number, with the exception of a postcard (no. 8) sent from [[Greece]] and the last letter (no. 12) written on a blank sheet of standard size. Since it was [[impossible]] to have access to the originals of Althusser's letters and thus to possible handwritten marginal additions, the [[text]] of his letters has been established following typed duplicates that Althusser kept in a folder marked "Lacan," along with the latter's letters.''
''It has seemed useful to us to add to this exchange the text of a long letter (no. 5) that Althusser had also typed but finally [[chose]] not to send—as he himself confirms in [[The Letter|the letter ]] to Franca of January 21, 1964, cited in the introduction to this volume. It will be noted in this [[regard]] that the Althusser archives contain numerous unsent letters to numerous correspondents and that they turn out in almost every [[case]] to be extremely interesting. The one we are publishing in this volume will thus arrive at its destination, but posthumously…''
O. C.
You are not alone. I am [[speaking]] not only of the analysts who owe you everything: their number is great, and they are often the best. I am speaking also of those who, in contesting you, nevertheless follow you willingly or not, constrained by the [[truth]] you have brought to light. I am speaking also of those who, from the [[outside]], have discovered and recognized you.
I have already spoken (and have had [[others]] [[speak]]) [[about]] you in this house for six years.<ref>See the introduction to this volume.</ref> I [[know]] you came here a very long time ago. I was at the time a prisoner returning from [[Germany]], a convalescent kept far from the Ecole, and concerning your lecture all I heard was the stir it made and the repercussions it had. This year the [[discourse]] I am conducting about you is at the heart of a collective labor to whose rigor I subject (with their agreement) all those whom [[The Subject|the subject ]] affects. We have had a very [[good]] beginning.<ref>Louis Althusser is referring to his seminar on psychoanalysis of 1963–64. See the introduction to this volume.</ref>
I regard you as [[being]], in the field one is provisionally obliged to call the "[[human]] sciences," the first thinker who has assumed the [[theoretical]] [[responsibility]] of giving to Freud veritable concepts worthy of him—and to that extent the first to have accorded that "[[domain]]" the path of access, the only one, that might be expected of Freud: a ''[[forbidden]]'' path. That interdiction, insofar as it is forbidden, is the path of access itself. I have been thinking this for several years. I am now in a [[position]], at least I believe so, to give proof of it with reasons precise and rigorous enough for me to run the risk of publishing them.
I was extremely struck by your response: "What I say to them says something to them, codifies, transforms their attitude, their [[recognition]] of [[reality]], their way of approaching analytic reality." You were saying it at once about the analysts who listened to you and the analysands (in analysis) who listened to you. They threw back at you that, in sum, this was an analyst's intervention about his [[patients]], that the [[public]] and apparently impersonal—and thus objective—forms of the intervention (which was entirely theoretical, all theory) might serve as an alibi or a mask, etc., for an intervention experienced as [[real]] by members of your audience then in analysis. I am collecting phenomena even from the odious arguments with which you are countered, without those phenomena ever being able, in my eyes, to serve as an argument against you. From all this I retain the following (which at first [[sight]] seems to be rather disparate): that it is you who uttered the words, the [[master]] words of the situation. Those who listened to you, from the very depth of their "experience"—whether analysts, practitioners, or analysands, the "practitioned," each in his [[place]] as subject-object of practice, of a common experienced but ''unthought'' practice, since the ''[[thoughts]]'' of the analyst practitioners were in fact as little ''thoughts'' as those of the analyzed—all those auditors of the ''concept'' you were giving them, of the concept of the practice they lived, all those auditors had no right to the ''concept'' of break implied in your enterprise.
If I am saying something scandalous here, you will correct me. I shall explain. Their ''general'' theoretical ignorance, that is, their ignorance of the existence and the imperative of ''theory überhaupt'' (without any consideration of [[content]]) was such, that is, their lack of ''theoretical'' training in general was such (and the culprit must be, if not current university teaching, then the empiricist pedagogy of [[medicine]], etc.), that the enterprise of having them make a transition from their "[[living]] experience" to its own theory was a quasi-hopeless enterprise, ''pedagogically speaking'' (according to the essence of all pedagogy), that the undertaking of taking them by the hand from their own experience and their own practical situation, of showing them the [[outline]] of the very theory of that practice, was an objectively quasi-hopeless undertaking. One does not pass without a break from a practice to its concept, from experience to its concept. This illusion has been thematized by well-known philosophies, such as Hegel's formerly and more recently [[Husserl]]'s and Merleau's. I say thematized, that is, accepted and expressed in concepts, in the very concepts produced by that illusion, thus in [[illusory]] concepts. That, fundamentally, was Merleau's path. That is why it never crossed your own, in theory, I mean. That is why Merleau, who needed (and no doubt for vital reasons, which appear well in [[Sartre]]'s admirable article on him in ''Les [[Temps]] modernes'', where you were alone [''seul'']<ref>Althusser had originally typed "the only ones" (les seuls) and then eliminated the plural.</ref> in treating that great deceased [[figure]] in a manner worthy of him, that is, by speaking of him as though he were still alive)<ref>Cf. ''Temps modernes'' (1961): 184–85, a special issue devoted to Maurice [[Merleau-Ponty]], with articles by [[Jean Hyppolite]], Jacques Lacan, Claude [[Lefort]], Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, Jean-[[Paul]] Sartre, Alphonse de Waelhens, and Jean Wahl.</ref> that security of continuity, never succeeded in achieving that beginning of understanding what is at stake in psychoanalysis; his theory of it is aberrant and aberrantly disarming in its theoretical infantilism (I take the term in its almost technical sense: there was at the bottom of it all a certain unresolved relation with his [[mother]]). Merleau thought that from "experience" to its concept there was a path traced, ''emerging from experience itself'', like Ruth's tree from the entrails of Boaz or like the [[child]] from his mother's womb (the image of Boaz: it's something else—the placenta, the cord, it's something else). This [[myth]] of a path that in the very night is inscribed by essence to lead to the daylight, which is already the outline and the imminence of the day, its promise, its ripening [[future]], this myth of deaf and tender spring keeping vigil and growing in the [[dead]] of winter until May comes, this myth of the sun keeping watch in the night itself, simply hidden by the other side of the earth, its other opaque with its very [[presence]], and appearing at dawn as what it was in the shadows, those shadows that are only light (Feuerbach, who had taken the idea I don't know where—do you?—said that opaque bodies are only light, but in the form of infinitesimal light, that finally, essence never has an opposite, since its opposite is only itself in [[alienated]] form)—so here I am no doubt far from Merleau but very close to the illusion of those who, not reflecting on the break they should be able to know, or of those who don't reflect on it because they are not yet at the point of suspecting it, that spontaneous myth in which men commonly [[represent]] their relation to their knowledge in the form of their nonrelation to its real conditions, that myth that represents to them their [[wish]] for a future without history, without break, without the [[imaginary]] of a [[past]] that has led them to where they are and that is ''not cut off from them'', that imaginary myth in which men, every day, embody their umbilical theoretical security (philosophers and their mothers, a good subject for a [[thesis]], the idealist philosophers, I mean), that myth defines [[The Real|the real ]] condition of most of those who teach a [[body]] of knowledge to those who listen to them.
That both groups might be analysts to boot no doubt adds something essential to the mix.
The analyst's desire. You sought it in ''The [[Symposium]]''.<ref>Cf. Jacques Lacan, ''Séminaire VIII: Le [[Transfert]]'' (Paris: Seuil, 1991).</ref> In fact, you were searching in ''[[The Symposium]]'' for the illusion of the analyst's desire about itself, Plato having given voice, in the form of a formally irreproachable discourse (if one insists on it, and one can legitimately insist on it), solely to those illusions he wanted to make men recognize as the opposite of illusion. I don't know what you derived from ''The Symposium''; I would have to reread it to come up with your possible discourse. I'll go to what's essential, ''The Symposium'' serving you, like all the philosophical [[objects]] you have used in your work, only as a [[transcendental]] [[guide]] (I mean transcendental not in the sense of the illusion about itself that every transcendental philosophy develops when it describes itself as such but in the sense in which it happens that it misconstrues'' what it is when it acknowledges that it [[needs]] a guide—the Newtonian [[physical]] object, or the Husserlian "percept," or the [[Heideggerian]] ''[[Umwelt]] of [[Sein]] und Zeit''—when it happens, in the specific form of philosophical misperception, the ideological, that it misconstrues what it is actually in the process of doing, to the extent that it takes its philosophical imaginary for the philosophical [[symbolic]] itself, and in that recognition-miscognition it masks its own condition to itself, which is to be [[structured]] by entirely other structures than the ones it tranquilly develops, as though it were a matter of those of a transcendental subject—a subject!! You know these confusions from experience, and concerning another object, you have elaborated, in a [[stage]] whisper, their theory.) I will thus go to the essential. And in two words.
The [[Desire of the Analyst|desire of the analyst]]. It sends us to the desire of the [[analyzed]]. Desire of a desire. [[Dual]] [[structure]] of [[fascination]], whence so many interminable-unterminated [[analyses]].
Dual structure of fascination, which, like all dual structures of fascination, produces [[the imaginary]] it needs to support that fate, that is, not to emerge from it—fear is always a precious adviser, isn't it? That imaginary can itself be treated like a [[signifier]]. And one can also make a discourse out of it, which will have the [[formal]] structure of a discourse instead of being a simple rehash of phantasms—a discourse, with the small [[difference]] that it will be, in ''[[La Psychanalyse]] d'aujourd'hui'' [''Contemporary Psychoanalysis''] in two volumes at the Presses Universitaires de France, a discourse of the imaginary and not a discourse on the imaginary (that too is conducted at the press, the admirable house! but, note well, in a different collection). You know, you have said it so well: there are, in this order, [[discourses]] that are only rehashes and discourses that offer themselves as such, on the condition of fabricating for themselves (an operation that is not at all imaginary but quite an object of reflection, of conscious reflection, the imaginary having [[total]] and entire right to the [[category]] ''consciousness'', which is the philosophical category no. 1 of the philosophical imaginary, an imaginary that is perfectly ''conscious'', by which I mean deliberate), in a purely artificial manner (a very objective technique, not at all imaginary, any more than the fabrication technique of the imaginary of ''Paris Match'', since it is purely and cynically a deliberate production of the imaginary, is imaginary), on the condition then of fabricating for themselves, in a purely (and consciously) artificial manner, the small technical supplements necessary for a discourse to hold up, the small extensions necessary for it not to be too short: a few concepts, such as [[object relations]], concerning which you have said for all time what needs to be said, that is, very little. But one had to know a devilish lot to say that little, which is unfortunately more dangerous in real life and analytic practice than one might be allowed to hope if one is unaware of the ravages of the ideological ''nil'', socially indispensable to its authors, from the objective observation that one was dealing with a void: theoretical nothingness, I mean. But nature has less [[horror]] of a vacuum than does ideology, which is no more than the fullness of that void, that fullness overflowing to the point of today submerging our world, no more overflowing than in former times; between those times and today, however, there is this difference, which is that we are, as witnesses and contemporaries of that overflow, the only ones to be committed (or requested or begged) (that is, who are ''not'' committed or requested or begged, history not having among its official employments either theoretical censors, auctioneers, or public criers [the cry!] [the public cry!] to commit, [[request]], or beg us)— thus by the very necessity that is our law, by virtue of that condition of human historical postmaturation that we can never be our own grandfathers and of the human historical nonprematuration that unfortunately forbids us from being our own grandsons, we are then the only ones obliged, if the fancy takes us, yes, to ''have to" make of our bodies a dike for that overflow.
The desire of the analyst is ''marked'', like every [[desire,]] as is ''marked'' (sealed) the [[dual relation]] of Imaginary fascination (I propose a capital I), which renders the circle desire-of-desire specific to the analytic relation, in which the analyst ''lives'' the very truth of his analyst's desire.
I do not speak, any more than you do, then, of that other [[Dual Relation|dual relation ]] in which the fate of analytic practice is played out; that other dual relation is the dual relation that the [[patient]]'s desire, marked by the imaginary, attempts to establish between himself and the analyst, a dual relation into which the analyst, precisely, who "isn't playing the [[game]]," refuses to enter, because that's why he's an analyst, that is, in order to get his [[neurotic]] to move from the imaginary to [[The Symbolic|the symbolic ]] through the vicissitudes of a this time well-scanned Oedipus [[complex]]. I am speaking of another dual relation, of the one established by the analyst's desire, of the one that is established by the desire of the analyst: an entirely different situation, one quite strange to the analyst in the street, who, working all week but never on Sunday (pardon), is and always remains more or less in this respect a Sunday analyst. That situation establishes another Imaginary (capital I) at the heart of which the analysis of the patient's imaginary (small i) is developed, that is, most of the time, an analysis that fails, that is interrupted, that one starts afresh with a [[third]] party, who in turn starts afresh with the business of the imaginary, and things continue like that until one is fed up or says, "that's enough like that," as of a certain age, or one has been sufficiently "improved [''amelioré'']" (the word reeks of chicory [''chicorée'']!) to be able to say hello to daddy mommy or to get [[married]] according to the rules, since, after all, gotta make them happy and make children for France! In brief—I say brief because it's not brief, it's very long, it's even interminable, can it even end? analysis terminable-interminable—don't you think that the difficulty of translating Freud's words has to do with something completely different from a pure matter of [[signifiers]], I mean of the signifiers officially registered as such and inventoried in that admirable [[system]] with neither jolts, self-regulator, nor revolutions for which a Genevan (what daring for a Swiss! but a [[love]] of [[social]] [[stability]] can supply illumination concerning the stability of a system in general) one day elaborated the theory, I mean in a [[dictionary]]. (And the translators' dictionaries, and the etymological ones that give so many peasant joys to [[Heidegger]], who never would have taken the ''Holzwege'' for paths if he had only been a woodcutter—and he is a philologist a bit in the way he is a woodcutter, treating himself to the sylvan joys of a city-dweller, that is, of a Sunday woodcutter, just as he treats himself to the philological joys of a [[philosopher]], that is, of a Sunday philologist.) (Prévert, who abounds in slyness, rightly says that "Sunday it's the only thing that's true," that is, false). In brief (once again, I repeat my offense), things continue like that for a long time, and at bottom there's no reason for them to stop. A Sunday analyst never truly finishes his analysis. ''His'' analysis. Of course! The one he's conducting: that of the patient … no; ''his'' analysis, ''his own'', even while officially, social-securitily, Delay-psychiatracademically "finishing" his analysis, that of his patient (patience), even when he "finishes'' the analysis of his patient.
For concerning that dual relation that he establishes, he himself, through [[the Imaginary]] of his analyst's desire, I am not sure that it is ever involved in the analysis of the other imaginary, the one that the desire of the analyzed attempts in vain to establish. And for good reason, since to my knowledge (but it could nevertheless happen, for a priori there is no radical obstacle) the patient in analysis is not charged by the society—I mean the [[Société Psychanalytique de Paris]], France, or the International of London—to lead to the threshold of the symbolic the imaginary within which the analyst's desire ''lives'' the ''objective imaginary'' of the dual situation that is quite simply his p''rofessional condition'', since one cannot decently ask an analyst who occasionally has enough trouble dealing with the imaginary of the patient to self-analyze himself as an analyst (all the same, did not Freud do something that, at a distance, resembled that?), that is, to deal with his own Imaginary, well, things continue.
I am in the process of reading the volume you were good enough to send to me, with delectation.<ref>Reference is to ''Pour Marx'', which had just been published by Maspero. Instead of treating it as he had Lacan's other letters, Althusser had placed this one in a folder containing letters from eminent [[figures]] or friends, most of them admiring (among whom were Jean-Toussaint Desanti, Jean-François Revel, Georges Canguilhem, François Châtelet, Gilles [[Deleuze]], Pierre Bourdieu, Michel [[Foucault]], Roland [[Barthes]], and Jean-Pierre Vernant), after the book's publication.</ref>
[[You May|You may ]] have gotten wind of the visit I paid to the director of the Ecole. An annual visit I had not been able to make at the end of the [[school]] year.
I did not have time that day to knock on your door.
