Beyond the 'Reality Principle'

• Au-delà du 'principe de réalité'

The five pages analyzing the "revolution of the Freudian method" and "the phenomenological description of analytic experience" are enlightening."

Lacan's thinking here is as close as possible to analytic experience.

"Language, before signifying something, signifies for someone": this expression as well as others announce the famous 1953 dcclarations in Rome (24). Finally, Lacan attributes Freud's innovative exploration to "the dcsire to curc"; he even adopts the expression as his maxim.

Thc rest of the text is a series of long didactic and polemical theorctical elaborations, related as always to the ambition to create a "new psychological science" that would integrate "the phenomenological achievements of Freudism."

Written at the time of the setback in Marienbad, this composite text promises a second installment that never came to light. In 1966. Lacan made "gestaltism and phenomenology" responsible for the fact that it was never writtcn. In fact, he had not yet found his own way to answer two qucstions that wcre already clearly raised here: How is reality constituted for thc subject'? How is the I, in which the subject recognizcs himself, constituted?