The Psychoanalytic Act and the Position of the Unconscious

 

Colette Soler

 

In "Radiophonie", when asked about "the notion of the unconscious", Lacan replies: the unconscious is not a notion; "the unconscious is". Let us add that, if it is, it is so for all speaking beings. A peculiar mode of being, however, given that the text from 1964, "Position of the Unconscious", imputes the responsibility for this being to the psychoanalyst : as if an intermediary were required for its presence to transform the subject, or rather, to make the subject's division manifest.

The psychoanalyst – or rather, his act – is therefore responsible for the presence of the unconscious, a fact that includes him within the very concept of the unconscious. This is the thesis that our 5th European Convention aims to unfold and examine.

 

Everything in this presence of the unconscious presupposes the structure of language and speech.

Of language, as its equivoques ensure precisely the incognito presence within speech of signifiers unknown to the subject, whose *extimate* dimension only the decipherer will enable him to grasp; and of speech, which always takes on consistence only in the Other – the listener who decides what will be said, or the "partner who has a chance of answering"1 to the saying.

Therefore, through the act of the analyst the division of the subject is revealed and verified in the Freudian procedure. It is a "fault", says Lacan.

It separates the subject from a part of himself – but which one?

 

This division is indeed solidary – beyond the structure of language – with the "effect of language", which is something else: it is the subtraction operated by any signifier, its name being the "lost object" in Freud and "objet petit a" in Lacan, or: "that which is missing"2.

In the relation between an analysand and their psychoanalyst, the place occupied by the latter on the horizon of the subject supposed to knowledge is precisely that which the transference imputes to him to be. This object, in the act "that does not think", is the one that is "active," just like in any genuine act. It operates throughout the analysis to make present the structural gap of the subject (represented by the chain of the subject’s associated words, their S1s—a gap which, conversely, the substantified object plugs within fantasy. What remains, then, on the other side of the fault, where the transference comes to an end, is the unreachable part of the unconscious "knowledge without a subject", S2, absolute Other – which does not "determine" the subject but ensures the coalescence of language and jouissance, a phenomenon clearly discernible, according to Lacan3 as early as the symptom of phobia.

 

 

1 « Introduction to the German edition of a first volume of Écrits ».

2 « Preface to the English edition of Séminaire XI ».

3 « Compte rendu sur L’acte psychanalytique ».

Forthcoming