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Interview with Jacques [[Lacan]], 1957

Dr. Lacan: Don't exaggerate. Do you [[think ]] that this effect is exclusive to the [[psycho]]-[[analyst]]? An economist, for many, is as mysterious as an analyst. In our [[time]], it is the expert who intimidates. With [[psychology]], even when seen as a [[science]], everyone [[thought ]] they had the insider's track. Now, with [[psychoanalysis]], we have the [[feeling ]] of having lost that privilege; that the analyst could be capable of [[seeing ]] something quite [[secret ]] in what appears to you to be quite clear. There you lie naked, uncovered, under a well-informed eye, and without [[knowing ]] what you are showing him.

Interviewer: This is a sort of [[terrorism]]. One feels violently torn out from oneself.

Dr. Lacan: Psychoanalysis, in the [[order ]] of man, has, in fact, all the subversive and scandalous features that the Copernican de-centering had in the cosmic order: the earth, that [[place ]] inhabited by man, is no longer the center of the [[universe]]! Well! Psychoanalysis announces that you are no longer the center of yourself, since there is [[another ]] [[subject ]] within you, the [[Unconscious]]. It was, at first, not well-accepted news. The so-called irrationalism which has been used to define [[Freud]]! When it is exactly the contrary: not only did he rationalize all that had resisted [[rationalization ]] until he came along, but he even showed that in [[action ]] there is a [[process ]] of reasoning going on; I mean, something that is reasoning and functioning logically, without the [[knowledge ]] of the subject. All of this, viewed classically, as [[being ]] in the field of the [[irrational]]; let's call it the field of [[passion]].

This is precisely what he was not forgiven for. His introduction of the [[notion ]] of [[sexual ]] forces that take over the subject without warning, nor [[logic]], was still admitted; but that [[sexuality ]] is a place of [[speech]], that [[neurosis ]] is an [[illness ]] that speaks, here is something strange, and even his disciples prefer that we [[speak ]] of something else.

An analyst must not be seen as a "soul engineer"; he's not a physician, he does not proceed by establishing [[cause]]-effect relations; his science is a [[reading]], it's a reading of [[sense]].This is why, undoubtedly, without knowing exactly what is hidden behind his office's door, he is commonly considered as a sorcerer, an even greater one than the [[others]].

Dr. Lacan: It is better to specify the [[nature ]] of these secrets. They are not the secrets of nature, those discovered by [[biological ]] and [[physical ]] [[sciences]]. If psychoanalysis clarifies some facts of sexuality, it is not by aiming at [[them ]] in their own [[reality]], not in biological [[experience]].

Interviewer: But, Freud, he did discover, in the same way one discovers an unknown continent, a new [[dimension ]] of [[psychic ]] [[life]], that is called "unconscious" or something else? Freud is Christopher Columbus!

Dr. Lacan: The knowledge that there is a part of the psychic functions that are out of [[conscious ]] reach, we did not [[need ]] to wait for Freud to [[know ]] this!

If you [[want ]] a comparison, Freud is instead Champollion! The [[Freudian ]] experience is not at the level of the organization of [[instincts ]] and vital forces. The Freudian experience discovers them only by exerting itself, if I may say so, on a secondary force. It is not the [[instinctual ]] effects in their primary force that Freud deals with. That which is analyzable is so, because it is already articulated in what makes up the singularity of the subject's [[history]]. The subject can recognize himself in it, insofar as psychoanalysis allows the [[transference ]] of this articulation.

In [[other ]] [[words]], when the subject "represses", this does not mean that the subject refuses to gain [[consciousness ]] of something like an [[instinct]], like, for example, a [[sexual instinct ]] that would [[manifest ]] itself in a [[homosexual ]] [[form ]] -- no, the subject does not refuse his [[homosexuality]], he represses the speech where this homosexuality has the [[role ]] of a [[signifier]]. You see, it is not a vague, dubious [[thing ]] which is [[repressed]]; it is not a sort of need, or tendency, that could have been articulated (and then can't be articulated because it is repressed); it is a [[discourse ]] that is already articulated, already formulated in a [[language]]. It's all there.

Interviewer: You say that the subject represses a discourse articulated in a language. Yet, we do not feel ourselves to be there when we're face to face with a person with [[psychological ]] difficulties, a timid person, for example, or an [[obsessional]]. Their conduct seems absurd, incoherent; and if we guess that it might mean something, this would be imprecise, a faltering tone, sensed at a level lower than the level of language. And oneself, when one feels ridden by obscure forces that we call [[neurotic]], these forces manifest themselves precisely by irrational actions , accompanied by confusion and [[angst]]!

Dr. Lacan: [[Symptoms]], those you believe you recognize, seem to you irrational because you take them in an isolated manner, and you want to [[interpret ]] them directly. For example, take the Egyptian [[hieroglyphics]]. As long as we look for the direct [[meaning ]] of vultures, chickens, the standing, sitting, or moving men, the [[writing ]] remains indecipherable. When taken by itself, the [[sign ]] "vulture" means [[nothing]]; it only finds its signifying [[value ]] when taken within the context of the set of the [[system ]] to which it belongs. Well, [[analysis ]] deals with this order of phenomena. They belong to the order of language ("[[langagier]]" in [[French]]).

A [[psychoanalyst ]] is not an explorer of an unknown continent, or of great depths; he is a [[linguist]]. He learns to decipher the writing which is under his eyes, [[present ]] to the [[sight ]] of all; however, that writing remains indecipherable if we [[lack ]] its laws, its key.

Interviewer: You say that this writing is "present to the sight of all". Yet, if Freud has said something new, it was that in psychic life we are ill because we conceal, we hide a part of oneself, we [[repress]]. But the hieroglyphics themselves were not repressed, they were written on stone. So your comparison cannot be [[complete ]] ?

Dr. Lacan: On the contrary, it must be taken literally. What is to be deciphered in psychic analysis is all the time there, present since the beginning. You speak [[about ]] [[repression]], [[forgetting ]] something. As Freud formulated it, repression is inseparable from the phenomenon of "the [[return ]] of the repressed". Something continues to function, something continues to speak in the place where it was repressed. Thanks to this we can locate the place of repression and of the illness, saying "it is there".

This notion is difficult to [[understand ]] because when we speak of repression we imagine immediately a pressure, a vesicular pressure, for example. That is, a vague mass, undefined, exerting all its weight against a door that we refuse to open. Now, in psychoanalysis, repression is not the repression of a thing, it is a repression of a [[truth]]. What happens then, when we want to repress a truth? The [[whole ]] history of tyranny is there to give the answer: It is expressed elsewhere, in another [[register]], in a ciphered, clandestine language. Well, this is exactly what is produced with consciousness.

Except that we are no longer capable of saying at that [[moment ]] who is the subject [[speaking]]; but, that "it" speaks, that it continues to speak. It happens that it is entirely decipherable in the manner that we are decipherable, which means, not without difficulty, it's a lost writing.

Truth has not been annihilated, it has not fallen into an abyss. It is still there, given, present, but turned into unconscious. The subject who has repressed truth is not the [[master ]] anymore, he is not at the center of his discourse; things continue to function alone and discourse continues to articulate itself, but "[[outside ]] the subject." And this place, this "outside the subject," is exactly what we call the unconscious.

Interviewer: Isn't this your own [[interpretation]]? It seems that it is not Freud's?

Dr. Lacan: Read "The Interpretation of [[Dreams]]", read "The [[Psychopathology ]] of Everyday Life", read "[[Jokes ]] and their relation to the Unconscious". It is enough to open these works, whatever the page, to find clearly what I'm speaking about.

The term "[[censorship]]", for example. Why did Freud choose it straightaway, even at the level of the [[interpretation of dreams]], to designate this restraining [[insistence]], the repressing force? Censorship, as we know, is this anasthasia, this constraint that works using a pair of scissors. And on what? Not on whatever passes by in the air, but rather on what is susceptible of being printed, in a discourse, a discourse expressed in a language.

Yes, the [[linguistic ]] method is present in every page of Freud's [[work]]; all the time he gives references, analogies, linguistic parallels. And then, in the end, in psychoanalysis, you only ask one thing of the [[patient]], only one thing, that is, to speak. If psychoanalysis [[exists]], and if it has its effects, it is only within the [[domain ]] of [[confession ]] and of speech.

Yet, for Freud, as for me, [[human ]] language does not spring up for human beings like a fountain . Look at the way that, ordinarily, how a [[child ]] gains experience is represented for us: he sticks his finger on a burning pan, he burns himself. Starting from that moment that he encounters hot and cold, [[danger]], it is maintained that all that remains for him to do is to deduce, to reconstruct all of [[civilization]].

In other words, the man who is [[born ]] into [[existence ]] deals first with language; this is a given. He is even caught in it before his [[birth]]. Doesn't he have a civil status? Yes, the child who is to be born is already, from head to toe, caught in this language hammock that receives him and at the same time imprisons him.

Interviewer: What renders the acceptance of relating neurotic symptoms to a perfectly articulated language difficult is the fact that we don't see to whom they are addressed. They are not made for anyone, since the ill person, in [[particular]], the ill person, himself, does not understand them, and a specialist is needed to decipher them! Maybe, the hieroglyphics have become incomprehensible, but, at the time they were used, they were made to [[communicate ]] certain things to certain [[people]]. So what is this neurotic language?

It is not only a [[dead ]] language, it's not only a private language, since it is incomprehensible to oneself?

And then, a language is something that we use. This one, on the contrary is infringed upon. Take the obsessional. He would certainly like to get rid of his fixed [[idea]], get out of the trap.

Dr. Lacan: These are precisely the paradoxes that are the [[object ]] of discovery. And yet, if language were not addressed to an Other, it could not be [[understood ]] thanks to an other in psychoanalysis. The rest is a matter of recognizing what it is, and to do this, it is necessary to situate it in a [[case]]; this requires a long time to develop; otherwise it's a jumble of incomprehension. Nevertheless, it is there, where what I'm talking about can appear clearly: the way the repressed discourse of the unconscious is translated in the register of the [[symptom]]. And you can see to what point this is precise. You mentioned the obsessional. Follow Freud's observation which we find in "The Five Psychoanalyses", entitled "The [[Ratman]]". The Ratman was a great obsessional. A young man of higher education who finds Freud in [[Vienna ]] to tell him that he suffers from obsessions. They are sometimes intense worries in relation to his [[beloved]], and sometimes the [[desire ]] to commit impulsive [[acts]], like cutting his throat, or he constructs for himself interdictions concerning insignificant things.

Dr. Lacan: There we find an error of the term! Obsessional does not necessarily mean sexual [[obsession]], not even obsession for this, or for that in particular; to be an obsessional means to find oneself caught in a [[mechanism]], in a trap increasingly demanding and endless. He has to accomplish an act, a [[duty]]; a special [[anxiety ]] takes over the obsessional. Will he be able to accomplish it? Once he has done it, he suffers the torturing need to verify it, but he doesn't dare because he fears he will appear as a crazy man, because at the same time he [[knows ]] well he did accomplish it; this commits him to greater and greater cycles of verification, precaution, justification. Taken in this way by an inner whirlwind, it is [[impossible ]] for him to find a [[state ]] of tranquillity, of [[satisfaction]]. Nevertheless, the great obsessional is far from being delirious. He has no conviction whatsoever, only a kind a [[necessity]], totally ambiguous, that renders him incredibly unhappy, [[suffering]], hopeless, [[left ]] to an unexplainable insistence that comes from within himself, and that he does not understand.

The [[obsessional neurotic ]] is common and can go unnoticed, if we are not attentive to the little [[signs ]] that betray him. The people suffering from this illness occupy their [[social ]] positions well, even if their life is ravaged, eroded by suffering and by the [[development ]] of this neurosis. I've known people who held important positions, and not only honorary, but positions of leadership, people with great and extended responsibilities, that they assumed completely, but they were not in anyway less caught, all day long, as the prey of their obsessions.

This was the case of the Ratman, distressed, trapped by the return of his symptoms, that lead him to consult Freud in Vienna, where the Ratman was participating in important military exercises as an [[army ]] reserve [[official]]. He asked Freud for advice with [[regard ]] to a very boring story of a debt he owed to the mail office where he had sent a pair of glasses, a story that he loses track of. If we follow him, literally, [[right ]] to his doubts, we find in the scenario created by his symptom, a scenario that concerns four persons, the very events that led to the [[marriage ]] of which the subject was the fruit, [[trait ]] by trait, transposed into a vast set of mannerisms, without the subject suspecting anything .

Dr. Lacan: A fraudulent debt of his [[father]], a military man, grew. The father lost his military rank due to having committed a crime; there was a loan that allowed him to pay his debt, and the unclear aspect of the restitution of the [[money ]] to the friend who came to his aid, and finally a betrayed [[love ]] due to a marriage that gave him status.

During his [[childhood]], the Ratman had heard these stories, some light-hearted, others covert.. What is striking is the fact that what returns from the repressed is not a particular [[event ]] or [[trauma]]; it is the dramatic constellation that ruled over his birth, his [[prehistory]].. He is descended from a legendary [[past]]. This prehistory reappears via the symptoms that [[represent ]] that pre-history in an unrecognizable form, that weave it into [[myth]], represented by the subject without [[awareness]]. Since it is transposed like a language or a writing, maybe transposed into another language, with other signs; it is rewritten without the modification of the liaisons; like a [[figure ]] in geometry is transformed from a sphere to a plane, which does not necessarily mean that any figure can transform itself into any other figure.

Dr. Lacan: Listen well...I have not said that the [[cure ]] of a neurosis is accomplished with this. You know very well that in the cure of the Ratman there is something else that I cannot talk about here. If a prehistory sufficed for the origin of consciousness, everyone would be a neurotic. It is linked to the way the subject assumes things, accepts them or represses them. And why do certain people repress certain things?

Interviewer: It could be that repressed truth is articulated, as you say, in a discourse with ravaging effects. But in the case of someone who comes to you, it is not because he searches for the truth. He is someone who suffers horribly, and wants to be relieved from his [[pain]]. If I [[remember ]] correctly the story of the Ratman, there was also a [[fantasy ]] of rats.

Dr. Lacan: In other words, while you worry about truth, there's a man who suffers. In any case, before using an [[instrument]], it's important to know what it is, how it is manufactured! Psychoanalysis is a terribly efficient instrument, and because it is more and more a prestigious instrument, we run the risk of using it with a [[purpose ]] for which it was not made for, and in this way we may degrade it.

Therefore it is necessary to depart from the essential: what is it, this [[technique]], what's its purpose, what are its effects, the effects that it has by its simple and pure application?

Well! The phenomena proper to psychoanalysis are of the order of language. That is, the spoken [[recognition ]] of the major elements of the subject's history, a history that has been cut, interrupted, that has fallen onto the underside of discourse. In relation to the effects that we define as belonging to analysis, the analytical effects, as we say -- mechanical or electrical effects -- the analytical effects are of the nature of the [[return of the repressed ]] discourse. I can assure you that at the very moment you have put the subject on the couch and you have explained to him the analytical rule as briefly as possible, the subject is already introduced into the dimension of the [[search ]] for his truth.

Yes, just from the fact of having to speak, as he must in front of another, the [[silence ]] of another - a silence which is neither approving nor disapproving, but rather attentive- he feels it as an expectation, and this expectation is that of the truth.

that of believing that this [[other, the ]] expert, the analyst, knows something about him that he himself is unaware of; the [[presence ]] of the truth is fortified, it is there in an implicit state.

--Then, man is a being of language? This would be the new [[representation ]] of man that we owe to Freud; man is someone who speaks?

Dr. Lacan- Is language the [[essence ]] of man? This is question which is not of disinterest to me, and I do not detest that people who are interested in what I say are, in fact, interested in this, but it is an interest of a different order, and as I sometimes say, it's the side event.

In other words, if I have tried to elaborate something, it is not a metaphysical [[theory ]] but a theory of [[intersubjectivity]]. Since Freud, the center of man is not where we thought it was; one has to go on from there.

--If what counts is to speak, to find one's own truth through words and confession, would not analysis become a [[substitute ]] for [[religious ]] confession?

Dr. Lacan-I am not authorized to talk to you about religious matters, but I must say that confession is a sacrament which is not there to [[satisfy ]] a certain need for confiding... The response, even if consoling, encouraging, even if directive, of a priest does not pretend to render confession efficient.

--From the point of view of dogma, you are certainly right. However, confession is related, at least for a time which does not cover the entire [[Christian ]] era, to what is called the direction of [[conscience]].

Would this not be related to the field of psychoanalysis? That is, to make someone confess his actions and intentions, to [[guide ]] a spirit who searches for his truth?

In other [[terms]], it is up to the members of religious [[orders ]] to determine the place and [[significance ]] they give to conscience.

But it seems to me that no director of conscience would be alarmed by a technique whose [[objective ]] is to reveal the truth. I've seen how worthy members of religious communities have taken a stand in very delicate affairs, where something that we call [[family ]] honor was at stake. I have always seen them decide that to keep truth hidden has ravaging consequences.

I've known among members of religious orders people who had understood that a penitent who complained about her [[needs ]] for impurity, needed to be taken to another level: did she behave justly with her [[children ]] and her maid? And through this brutal reminder, they obtained incredibly surprising effects.

In my opinion, the directors of conscience cannot find fault with psychoanalysis; they can even find in it some useful [[ideas]].

Dr. Lacan- I think [[times ]] have changed. Undoubtedly, after Freud invented psychoanalysis, it was considered for a long time as a subversive and scandalous science. It was not about believing in it or not. People were violently opposed to it with the excuse that [[analyzed ]] persons would be at the mercy of all their raging desires, would do whatever.

All this does not lie in the order of what is called with the too technical term "[[resistance ]] to psychoanalysis", but rather "mass objection".

The [[fear ]] to lose one's originality, of being reduced to a common level, is also frequent. One has to say that with the notion of "[[adaptation]]" a [[doctrine ]] of nature has been produced to engender confusion and from there on anxiety.

There has been written that psychoanalysis has as its objective the adaptation of the subject, not precisely to his [[external ]] [[environment]], his life or his [[real ]] needs; this means the ratification of an analysis would be to become the perfect father, the [[model ]] husband, the [[ideal ]] [[citizen]], in sum, someone who has nothing left to discuss.

All this is completely [[false]]. Just as false as the first prejudice that conceives psychoanalysis as a means to [[total ]] liberation.

Dr. Lacan- This worry is totally legitimate as it appears. To say that there is no [[change ]] in the [[personality ]] after a psychoanalysis would be aé [[joke]]. It is difficult to [[claim ]] at the same time that we can obtain results through psychoanalysis and that we may not obtain them, that is to say, that personality can remain unchanged. In any case, the notion of personality needs to be clarified, or even re-[[interpreted]].

--Basically, the [[difference ]] between psychoanalysis and various psychological techniques is that psychoanalysis is not contented with only guiding, or intervening blindly, psychoanalysis cures...

Dr. Lacan- It cures that which is curable. It will not cure daltonism or idiocy, even if in the end daltonism and idiocy have something to do with the [[psyche]].

Do you know Freud's [[formula]], "there where it was, I must be" ? The subject must be able to settle in this place, this place where he was no longer, replaced by this anonymous [[word ]] that we call the "it".

--In the Freudian perspective, is there an interest in aiming at curing the large [[number ]] of people who are not ill? In other words, is there an interest in psychoanalyzing everyone ?

--Is this [[true ]] in the case of creators?

Dr. Lacan- It is an interesting question to know if there is an interest for them to run with or to [[veil ]] this speech that attacks them from the outside (it's the same thing as that which blocks the subject in neurosis and in creative inspiration).

Is there an interest in running on the path of psychoanalysis towards the truth of the subject's history, or to give away, like [[Goethe]], to a great way which is nothing different than an enormous psychoanalysis?

He pushed [[the thing ]] as far as a [[genius ]] can do it.

--And for those men who are not creators but who have enormous responsibilities, who deal with [[power]], do you think that psychoanalysis should be obligatory ?

Dr. Lacan- In fact, we should not [[doubt ]] that if a man is the President of the council, it is because he was analyzed at a normal age, this means young, but sometimes youth is very long lasting.

Dr. Lacan- I wouldn't take a stand on whether Mr. Guy Mollet would make the [[politics ]] he makes if he were analyzed! I don't want to be heard saying that a psychoanalysis applied universally would be the source of the [[resolution ]] of all antinomies; that if we analyze all human beings, there will not be any more wars, no more [[class ]] conflicts; formally, I say the opposite. All that we could expect is that human dramas might be less confusing.

Do you see the error in what you were saying awhile ago : wanting to use an instrument without knowing how it is made. Among the activities that are being developed all over the [[world ]] under the [[name ]] of psychoanalysis, there is a growing tendency to cover, to fail to recognize, to mask the first order in which Freud brought his spark.

The effort of the great majority of the [[psychoanalytic ]] [[schools ]] has been what I call an attempt at reduction: to put in one's pocket the most disturbing aspect of Freud's theory. Year after year, we [[witness ]] the accentuation of this degradation, reaching at times, like in the [[United States]], formulations which are in total [[contradiction ]] with the Freudian inspiration.

It is not because psychoanalysis is highly contested that [[analysts ]] should make their observations more acceptable, covering them with multiple colors, and borrowing analogies from neighboring [[scientific ]] domains.

Dr. Lacan-- If my words disturb you, so much the better. From the point of view of the [[public]], my [[wish ]] is to emit a sign of alarm, so that there will be, in a scientific field, a very precise requirement concerning the [[training ]] of analysts.

Dr. Lacan- The psychoanalytic teaching, as it is today-- medical studies and then a psychoanalysis, a [[training analysis ]] with a qualified analyst-- is [[lacking ]] something essential, without which I doubt one could consider oneself a well trained analyst: the study of linguistic and historic disciplines, history of [[religion]], etc.

Freud, so as to clarify his thought on training, revives the old term, which I [[enjoy ]] mentioning, of "universitas literarum".

Medical studies are evidently insufficient to understand what psychoanalysis says, that is to say, for example, to differentiate in a discourse the meaning of [[symbols]], the presence of [[myths]], or simply to grasp the meaning of what the patient says, just like we grasp the meaning of a [[text]].

At the minimum, for the time being, a serious study of the [[texts ]] of the Freudian doctrine is rendered possible by the safe haven that is given them by Professor [[Jean Delay ]] of the faculty of the [[Clinic ]] of [[Mental ]] Illness and Encephalitis.

Dr. Lacan- At present, psychoanalysis is turning more and more to a confusing mythology. We can cite certain signs: erasure of the [[Oedipus ]] [[complex]], accentuation of pre-[[oedipal ]] mechanisms, of [[frustration]], [[substitution ]] of the term anxiety by fear. But this doesn't mean that Freudism, the first Freudian glow, is not developing all over. We find very clear manifestations of it in all sorts of human sciences.

I'm [[thinking ]] in particular of what my friend Claude Levi-[[Strauss ]] told me recently of the tribute paid to the [[Oedipus complex ]] by ethnographers, by who the Oedipus complex is seen as a profound [[mythical ]] creation born in our epoch.

It is something very striking and surprising that [[Sigmund Freud]], a man alone, managed to bring out a certain number of effects that had never been isolated before, introducing them into a coordinated network, inventing at the same time a science and a field for its application.

But, in relation to this great work of Freud, which traverses the century like a stroke of fire, our work is lagging behind. I say it with all my conviction. And we will not move ahead until we have enough well trained people to do all that a scientific or technical task requires: after the stroke of genius, an army of [[workers ]] to harvest the results.

[[Notes]]:

Jean François Champollion, 1790-1832, French Egyptologist: deciphered the Rosetta Stone. (Random House [[Dictionary]])