Future Anterior of Psychoanalysis

Early in the course of his 1957-1958 seminar, ‘The Formations of the Unconscious’, Jacques Lacan determines that “a discourse is something which leads somewhere, has a fabric, a texture”(Lacan, 1958, p6). Discourse is what we have to work with, the stuff of psychoanalytic work, and “once you’ve got caught in the wheel of this word-mill, your discourse always says more than you are saying”(Ibid. p8). The practitioner, the one who is supposed to know, holds that “the more this discourse is coherent and consistent, the more it seems to lend itself to all kinds of absence with respect to what can be reasonably defined as a question posed by the subject regarding his existence as subject”(Ibid. p75).

The psychoanalytic position holds true to the unconscious, and Lacan approaches it, though it is not an object, by going out of his way, so to speak, via speech. After all, “the truth requires us to go out of our way”(Lacan, 1957, p521), so says Lacan. In The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, Lacan says that “The unconscious is the chapter of my history that is marked by a blank or occupied by a lie: it is the censored chapter. But the truth can be refound”(Lacan, 1953, p259). He follows Freud’s guidance as to where the unconscious lies hidden; “The list of disciplines Freud considered important sister sciences for an ideal Department of Psychoanalysis is well known. Alongside psychiatry and sexology we find ‘the history of civilization, mythology, the psychology of religions, literary history, and literary criticism”. He goes on; “For my part, I would be inclined to add; rhetoric, dialectic, grammer, and poetic – the supreme pinnacle of the aesthetics of language which would include the neglected technique of witticisms”(Ibid. p288).

Freudianism, for Lacan, “constitutes an intangible but radical revolution”(Lacan, 1957, p527) and we should be shocked, flabbergasted with surprise by what he says, by what Freud said. The word “surprise” stems from the old French word “sorprendre”, translating as over-take. The Latin “prendere”, from prehendere, is to grasp, prae indicating before and hendere to seize or to take. The etymology is instructive insofar as we brush past something in the nature of surprise that touches us profoundly with the faintest glance. Surprise is not anticipated before it takes us, psychically seizes us, stuns us, for a moment we are petrified. We are, in an instant and in parallel, operating on various planes, over and under, before and after, seizing some form of prehension but also losing our bearings. Where are we at this moment? In the unconscious?

Freud articulated in his elaborate case notes and applied examples what Lacan went on to formulate in his practice; presentations of ambivalence and equivocation, ambiguity and multiplicity in the mechanisms of the unconscious. For Freud, “The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind” (Freud, 1900, p608), condensation and displacement the fundamental mechanisms of the dream-work. According to Lacan in The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reasons Since Freud, “what is at stake on every page in The Interpretation of Dreams is what I call the letter of discourse”(Lacan, 1957, p509). So it is that Lacan selects the field of language and the function of speech as his entry point to the unconscious; “Verdichtung, ‘condensation’, is the superimposed structure of signifiers in which metaphor finds its field [] Verschiebung or ‘displacement’ – this transfer of signification that metonymy displays”(Ibid. p511). Before we address Lacan’s hypothesis relating, but not equating, metaphor to condensation and displacement to metonymy, we must understand something of the signifier and the signified in the laws of language derived from structural linguistics. Lacan announced that “the major theme of this science is thus based, in effect, on the primordial position of the signifier and the signified as distinct orders initially separated by a barrier resisting signification”(Ibid. p497). He asserted that “the decisive discovery of linguistics, are phonemes [] the synchronic system of differential couplings”(Ibid. p501). We are in the realm of acoustic traces, mnemonic images, primordial echoes, sounds that mean something quite unique to the subject based on his singular formation, his signifiers. We have heard as much before from Freud in speaking of the dream-work in chapter six of Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, whereby dream-thoughts, entirely rational and constructed with all the psychical energy we can muster, are reproduced exclusively or predominantly through visual or acoustic memory traces, which give rise to considerations of representability in the content of the dream-work. As such, what is signified, represented in language, in relation to the signifier, the audible content of speech, is far from universal; this may be that, or it may not, may be both, or “It’s that and it’s not that” as Christian Fierens writes in The Psychoanalytic Discourse (Fierens, 2012, p8).

“Freud shows us in every possible way that the image’s value as a signifier has nothing to do with its signification”(Lacan, 1957, p510), Lacan credits. The primacy of the signifier over the signified is pivotal. Lacan’s thinking was formed by, though at variance to, scholars of linguistics, especially Charles Sanders Peirce, Ferdinand De Saussure and Roman Jakobson. His invention was to place the signifier, the phoneme of speech, above the signified but permit the “sliding” dual-axis reciprocal relationship between sound and meaning in space and time; “This two-sided mystery can be seen to intersect the fact that truth is evoked in that dimension of ruse whereby all ‘realism’ in creation derives its virtue from metonomy, as well as this other fact that access to meaning is granted only to the double elbow of metaphor”(Ibid. p518). The technique of psychoanalysis lies, and it is a psychoanalytic act of being duped, in the evocation of truth momentarily transmitted in the act of saying, all the while barred by the wall of language into which we are born, notall free to mock our chains. Lacan corrects those who might abandon speech to speak of countertransference, resistance, or object relations for “it was the abyss, open to the thought that a thought might make itself heard in the abyss, that gave rise to resistance to psychoanalysis from the outset – not the emphasis on man’s sexuality, as is commonly said”(Ibid. p523).

Let us follow Lacan’s applied example of the French word for aghast or terrified. He tells us that “Atterré does not originally and in many of its uses, have the meaning of to be struck with terror, but rather of landing”(Lacan, 1958, p19) and further, “There is something that we cannot say as long as the words do not exist, and these words come from a metaphor, namely what happens when a tree is abuttu, or when a wrestler is grounded, atterré, second metaphor. [] The word atterré does not bring about meaning insofar as it has a signification, but qua signifier, namely that having the phoneme ter, it has the same phoneme which is in terror. It is by the signifying path, it by the path of equivocation, by the path of homonymy, namely by the most nonsensical thing possible, that it comes to engender this nuance of meaning”(Ibid. p20). We are introduced to something of the inherent complexity of meanings that a single word made up of three syllables, phonemes, can arouse, a “sliding of meaning in the metonymical chain”(Ibid. p54). Atterré is commonly understood to signify fear, to be all at sea and out of our depth but underlying the word is safe-harbour, an anchoring point from which to reach dry land. According to Lacan, “one of the clearest demonstrations that Freud ever gave of the mechanisms of the analysis of a phenomenon of formation or deformation, linked to the unconscious”(Ibid. p24) was of the case between Signorelli, Boltraffio and Botticelli in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, exhibiting the phenomena of the signifier par excellence. Through pain-staking analysis and the most tenuous of associative threads, the forgotten Signorelli emerges from the “elli” of Botticelli, “bo” from Boltraffio produced from something incomplete in Bosnia Herzogovina, Freud’s multiple psychical associations, to “trafoi” in relations to a patient’s suicide, but namely to “Her”, or Signor. For Lacan, “It means that all that we discover are metonymical ruins connected with a pure and simple combination of signifiers”(Ibid.) and that ultimately, but not univocally, the train of thought is thus; “Death is the absolute Herr. But when one speaks of Herr one does not speak of death because one cannot speak of death, because death is precisely both the limit and probably also the origin of all speech”(Ibid. p40).

The limitations of language are confounding and yet I speak in order to be heard, to be heard that I might be understood. Do you know what I mean when I say what I am saying? Do I? Lacan suggests that “what is here transmitted, is relaunched in a double operation [] in so far as the Other has received what is presented as a peu de sens, it transforms it into what we ourselves have called, in an ambivalent, equivocal, fashion the pas-de-sens”(Ibid. p72). What I am saying, though frantically followed up by secondary revision to tidy up my nonsense, is nonetheless registered by another, which returns a flicker of meaning to my speech. I wish to speak, I am a desiring subject of the unconscious, “splitting from myself, as if from a semblable”(Lacan, 1957, p524). A dialectical division is evoked; “If I have said that the unconscious is the Other’s discourse (with a capital O), it is in order to indicate the beyond in which the recognition of desire is tied to the desire for recognition”(Ibid.). What could be more terrifying, anxiety-provoking, than to place oneself at the Other’s mercy? But that is the price we pay for human existence, the pact we wager on living; either remain infans, speechless, a-dict, psychotic, or engage the Other in the laws of language, acquiesce to their demand, and desire beyond satiation that we do not know we desire, our object of desire, small other, peu de sens, grain of truth. As long as we are speaking, we desire the Other’s recognition. In return, we operate at the level of the signifier, the sounds of speech and yield to the Other’s demand, which “is originally de-mandare, it is to entrust oneself, it is on a common level of register and of language as a giving over of one’s whole self, of all one’s needs to another”(Lacan, 1958, p66).

Lacan determines that “I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it as an object. What is realized in my history is neither the past definite as what was, since it is no more, nor even the perfect as what has been in what I am, but the future anterior as what I will have been, given what I am in the process of becoming”(Lacan, 1953, p299). Becoming, as in saying, is not a state, it is a movement, a deficient movement towards death. I might rush headlong toward my terminal safe-harbour, to objectify what I am saying as said, to terminate the tortuous process of speaking while I know not what I say, fill the absence from myself and attempt meaning in the signified of death’s void, but as long as I am speaking, I am not dead, not signified….I am beyond representation. The meaning of life might indeed be death, and if psychoanalysis is dead, long live psychoanalysis, for it keeps me saying more.