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1967-1968 (267 pp.)-SEMINAIRE XV: L'ACTE PSYCHANALYTIQUE
(SEMINAR XV: THE PSYCHOANALYTIC ACT)-ANONYMOUS VERSION, 1981
Since La Logique dufantasme (65), where he stated that there is no "sexual act," Lacan questioned the difference between the act [/' acte] and a mere action [/'agir]. One of his students summarized this opposition in an enlight�ening, if not satisfactory, way: "to fuck" is an action [un agir], "to get mar�ried" is an act [un acte], because there is "a commitment and a recognition, which entail repetition" and "the inscription in the Big Other." Certainly, the significr would appear soon, which the Mastcr had already announced the
The Works of Jacquel Lacal 213
previous year. This was confirmed by the absence of contradiction between Saint John's sentence, "In the beginning was the Word [Ie Verbe]," and Goethe's, "In the beginning was the action" (as noted by Lacan, based on A. Koyre). However these statements were mild compared to the Lacanian assertion of the "irreducibility of the sexual act to any truthful relation." Since love is itself purely narcissistic, what remained of a possible relation between the sexes, other than a social pact?
To talk about the psychoanalytic act meant a lot, and a lot was expected from this seminar. It is disappointing. It is a chaotic set of previously stated things, and the transcription is not alone to blame for it. Lacan seemed to be uncomfortable, and, as often in such cases, he embarked on polemics, com�plained about the absence of so many analysts of his ecole, fulminated, threw incisive formulas, repeated over and over again formulas that had already been fully tested, spread banalities, got irritated whenever someone raised the slightest doubts .... The Proposition sur I' analyste a I' ecole (66) and the Conferences written for the trip to Italy (70) are more enlightening than this text concerning his elaborations about the subject-supposed-to-know and the end of the analysis.
What can be redeemed from this seminar? An overview of the different types of acts in psychoanalysis might be. There is the founding act of psycho�analysis: before, the effects of the unconscious existed, but nobody knew that they existed. There is the entrance into analysis and the fact of becoming an established psychoanalyst, which are decisions and commitments. On the side of the analysand, there are the slips and the failures, which led Lacan to give an Eloge de la connerie (Praise of Folly). In analysis one learns that it is impossible to respond simply to the injunction "render unto truth the things that are truth's and unto folly the things that are folly's," because the two overlap and one encounters "the folly of truth even more often than the truth of folly." Other acts are the passage a I' acte and the "acting out," activities that, although they fill a distressing hole, reproduce the past instead of re�membering it in words. On the side of the psychoanalyst, Lacan reminded the audience that "outside the manipulation of transference, there is no psycho�analytic act." He had been repeating it since 1948, but the perspective is very different here: in order for the analysand to move to the function of analyst, his analyst must accept-while pretending to be the upholder of the subject supposed to know-being "reduced to his function of cause of a pro�cess in which the subject supposed to know is undone" and he must accept in the end being "nothing more than the waste of the operation represented by the objet a," which will produce an effect of truth. The analyst's position is thus untenable, as Freud said, and this is why he opposes "the most violent misconstruction [meconnaissance] as regards the psychoanalytjc act itself. ", Besides, the analysand who has experienced des/Ire discovers, when he •• takes up the analyst's torch," that he is forced to restore for another the
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subject supposed to know. The transmission would thus be completed, very different from the passe itself. The psychoanalytic act, a "setting into act of the subject" and a "setting into act of the unconscious," is like a tragedy where the hero falls in the end as a piece of trash.
One of the sessions of the seminar-which ended with the events of May 1968-is fascinating: in Lacan's absence, some analysts discussed among themselves what they had, or had not, understood in his teaching and some expressed their fears concerning the effects of these new developments about the ohjet a and the desetre in therapies.
==Introduction==
