ADDRESS TO THE FREUDIAN SCHOOL OF PARIS OF DECEMBER 6 1967

Presented October 9th 1967 to psychoanalysts appointed as AS and AMS of the Freudian School of Paris, the “Proposition on the Psychoanalyst of the School” was discussed by them and submitted to a consultative vote at a second meeting in November. In reply, J. Lacan drafted the following text for the third meeting on December 6; it was published with a supplementary commentary dated October 1, 1970 (2000).

(216) My intervention, from last year, on the function of the act in the network (whatever use of this term certain opinions may have in turn expressed), in the text, let’s say, of which my discourse is woven – the intervention on the act was the prerequisite for the publication of my aforesaid proposition of October 9th.

Is it an act? That depends on the consequences, from the first ones to arise.

The circle here, from having received not only the address but the authorisation, was chosen by me in the School to form two classes. It should mean that we feel more equal there than elsewhere, and at the same time remove a practical handicap.

I respected the approximation of the process by which the ASs and the AMSs, as they appear in the 1965 Directory, were selected, which raises the question of whether it should remain the major product of the School.

I respected, not without reason, what everyone’s experience merited as assessed by others. Once this sorting has taken place, any class response implies supposed equality, mutual equivalence, any response understood to be courteous.

It is therefore pointless for anyone, to believe himself a leader, to deafen us with rights acquired by virtue of his “listening,” the qualities of his “supervision” and his relish for the clinic, or to adopt the knowing air of one who knows a little more than anyone else in their class.

(262) Madam X. and Madam Y. are as worthy as these leaders as much as Messrs P. and V.

We can admit, however, given the mode by which the selection has always operated in psychoanalytic societies, even the one from which we ourselves were selected, that a more analytical structuring of the experience prevails in some.

But how is this structuring to be distributed about which nobody that I know of, apart from the person who represented French medicine on the board of the International Psychoanalytic Association, can claim that it’s a given (this one said that it’s a gift!), so that’s the first point to investigate. The second point becomes, then, to form classes that not only validate this distribution but that in serving to produce it, reproduce it.

These are times that deserve to subsist in this very production, failing which the question of the analytic qualification can be raised from wherever one wishes: and no more regarding our School as those who, wanting it to be conducive to their governance, having the model elsewhere, would persuade us.

As desirable as it is to have a surface (that we would do well to shake up from the inside), it has no scope but to intimidate, not to order.

What’s improper is not for anyone to claim superiority, even the sublime of listening, nor for the group to guarantee itself on its therapeutic gains [marges], it’s that infatuation and prudence serve as organization.

How can we hope to have a legal status recognised for an experience that we don’t even know how to respond to?

To honour the non licet [not allowed] that I have collected, I can do no better than to introduce the elusion from an amusing angle, starting from this “to be the only one” where one is given the gloves with which to salute the most common infatuation in medicine, not even to cover it with the “to be alone,” which is indeed the step the psychoanalyst takes on entering his office each morning, which would already be excessive, but from this to be the only one to justify the mirage of making it the chaperone of this solitude.

That’s how the i(a), with which the ego and its narcissism are imagined, functions, making a vestment for this object a that destitutes the subject. This is because the (a), cause of desire, in being at the mercy of the Other, (263) thus sometimes anguish, gets dressed counterphobically with the autonomy of the ego, as the hermit crab does with any odd shell.

We thus make a deliberate artifice out of a denounced organon, and I wonder what weakness may animate a homily so unworthy of what’s at stake. Is the ad hominem there to make me understand that I am being protected from others by showing them that they are the same as me, which makes it possible to argue that I am being protected from myself.

But if I were indeed alone, alone in founding the School, as, in announcing the act I said it without more ado: “alone [seul] as I have always been in my relation to the analytic cause...”, did I nevertheless think I was the only one [le seul]? I was no longer alone from the very moment that just one [un seul] followed me, not by chance the one whose present charms I question. With you all for what I do alone, am I going to lay claim to being isolated?

What does this step, to be taken alone [d’être fait seul], have to do with the one alone [le seul] you think you are in following? Am I not putting my trust in the analytic experience, namely on what comes to me from the one who managed it on his own? Were I to think myself the only one to have it, then for whom would I speak? It’s rather to have your mouth full of listening, the only one being yours, that would be a gag on occasion.

There is no homosemy between the only one [le seul] and alone [seul].

My solitude is precisely what I gave up in founding the School, but what does it have to do with the one that supports the psychoanalytic act, if not to be able to manage its relationship to this act?

For if having returned this week to give my seminar, without further delay I presented the psychoanalytic act, and the three terms to interrogate it on its end: ideal aim, closure, the aporia of its summarised account – isn’t it remarkable that of the distinguished people who refuse me its consequence, the very ones whose custom it is (the custom of others) to be seen here, not one has appeared? If after all my proposition impassions them to the point of reducing them to a whisper, could they not have expected that a clear articulation would offer them points to refute?

But it’s good that I’m not alone in being bothered by this act, which they shy away from, the one alone to take the risk of speaking about it.

What I obtained from a poll confirms that it’s a question of a symptom, as psychoanalytically determined as its context requires and that it’s a bungled act, if what constitutes it is to exclude its summarised account.

(264) We’ll see if this is a way where one wins by taking precautions [se parer], if only to turn the question over to me: if, by not showing up, it’s a no brainer. They don’t want to endorse the act. But the act doesn’t depend on the audience found for the thesis, but on the fact that its proposition remains visible for all to read, without anything against it being uttered.

Hence why you were here required to give an answer immediately. Were this haste to be considered by us as a technical flaw, would I have said what is forgotten in the logical function of haste?

It is due to the need for a certain number of calculations that have to do with the number of participants for a conclusion to be drawn, but not on account of this number, because this conclusion depends in its very truth on the failures which constitute these calculations as times.

Apply my story of the acquittals, to get out they are put to the test of having to explain which mark they are wearing (white or black): it's great because some of you know you won’t get out, no matter what they say they can make their exit a threat, no matter what you think.

What’s incredible, who would believe it unless they’d heard it on tape, is that my intervention is identified with the Sadian fantasy, which two people take as avowed in my proposition. “The posture is broken one of them said,” but it's a construction. The other one gets stuck into the clinic.

However, where’s the harm? When it goes no further than the suffering of the vaporous character in the story, who, having felt little by little along the bars of an iron railing and found the one marked at the start, concluded: “The bastards have locked me up.” It was the iron railing around the Obelisk, and he had the Place de la Concorde all to himself.

Where is the inside, where is the outside? Apparently, prisoners on the way out, not the ones of my moral fable, ask themselves this question.

I propose it to the one who, under the influence of such a philosophical fog (before my proposition) divulged to me (perhaps only dreamt in front of me) about the glory he would draw in our little world by making it known, in case his urge prevailed, that he was leaving me.

(265) Let him know that in this test I savour this desertion enough to think of him when I lament that I have so few to whom to communicate the joys that come to me.

Don’t believe that I too am letting myself go. I’m simply detached enough from my proposition for you to know it amuses me that its slightness escapes, which should relax things even if what’s at stake is not slight. I have with me obviously only would-be [à la manque] Sufficiencies, would-be in humour in any case.

[Who will then see that my proposition is modelled on the witticism, on the role of the third Party [dritte Person]?] For it’s clear that if every act is only a more-or-less complete figure of the psychoanalytic act, there is none that dominates this latter one. The proposition is not an act of the second degree, but nothing more than the psychoanalytic act, which hesitates, already being in progress.

I always tag what is to be encountered in my address. At this year’s opening, what shines through is homologous with the fact that there is no Other of the Other (de facto), nor the true of the true (de jure): nor is there the act of the act, unthinkable if truth be told.

My proposition stands at this place of the act, whereby it’s borne out that it never succeeds so well as when it fails, which does not imply that failure is its equivalent, in other words, can be considered successful.

My proposition is not unaware that the discernment that it calls for implies seizing hold of this non-reversibility as a dimension: [another scansion of logical time, the moment of failure only succeeding in the act if the moment of passing to it has not been a passage to the act, of seeming to follow the time for understanding.]

You can clearly see from its reception that at that time I was not thinking. I only thought about having to make a start.

That it tackles the psychoanalytic act by the way in which it is instituted in the agent, only fails for those who constitute the institution as the agent of the said act; that’s to say those who separate the instituting act of the psychoanalyst from the psychoanalytic act.

Which is a failure that is nowhere a success.

Whereas the one who is instituted [instituant] is abstracted from the analytic act only insofar as (266) there is a lack, precisely from having succeeded in bringing the subject into question. It is therefore in how it has failed that success comes to the path of the analysand, when it is from the après-coup of the desire of the psychoanalyst and from the aporias that it demonstrates.

These aporias are those I illustrated a moment ago with a banter that was more current than it seemed, since, if the vapourousness of the hero allows the listener to laugh, it’s by surprising him with the rigour of the topology constructed from his vapour.

Thus the desire of the psychoanalyst is this place which one is outside of without thinking, but one finds oneself again in being out of it for good, that is, having taken this exit only as an entrance, and not just any entrance, since it is the path of the analysand. Let's not pass over that to describe this place in a series of infinitives said to be the inarticulable of desire, desire nevertheless articulated from the sense-outcome of these infinitives, namely the impossible with which I satisfy myself at this detour.

It is there that supervision might seem to be not too much, even if it takes more for us to determine the proposition.

It’s another thing to supervise a "case": a subject (I underline it) whose act goes beyond him, which is nothing, but which, if he goes beyond his act, makes for the incapacity that we see thrive in the flowerbeds of psychoanalysts: [which will manifest itself when faced with the obsessional for example, by yielding to his demand for the phallus, interpreting it in terms of coprophagia, and thus, from fixing it to his shit, to fail his desire in the end.]

What does the psychoanalyst's desire have to respond to? To a necessity that we can only theorise, that of having to make the subject's desire the desire of the Other, that is, to make oneself the cause of this desire. But to satisfy this necessity, the psychoanalyst is to be taken such as he is in the demand, as we have just illustrated.

The correction of the analyst's desire, that which we say remains open, comes from taking up the psychoanalysand’s baton again. One knows that these are mere words. I am saying that they will remain so as long as needs are not considered on the basis of the psychoanalytic act.

This is why my proposition is interested in the Pass where the act might be grasped in the moment that it occurs.

(267) Certainly not to put anyone back into the hot seat, after the moment has passed: who could have been afraid of that? But the prestige of the badge was felt to be taking a hit. This is the measure of the power of the fantasy from which there suddenly appeared, fresh for you last time, the first big leaps that launched the so-called international institution, before becoming consolidated.

This, to be fair, shows our School not to be on such a bad path as to consent to what some people want to reduce to the gratuity of aphorisms when it comes to my own. If they weren’t effective, would I have been able to flush out bit by bit their position of going to ground, of making it a rule to respond to every appeal to opinion from within an analytic convent, even play-acting the scientific debate and being unable be cheered by any probation.

Hence, by contrast, this style of sortie that the interventions take on, that of bullying the other, and the targeting of those who risk contravention. Practices as detrimental for the work as they are reprehensible in terms of the idea, however simple it may be, of a School community.

If adhering to it means anything, is it not to add to the courtesy that I have said links the classes most closely, the confraternity in every activity in which they come together.

It was noticeable, that by soliciting the wise to give their opinion on it, the psychoanalytic act was transformed into acrimony, so that the tone rose in the same measure as the avoidance inevitably increased.

For if, on hearing them, it becomes clear that we go further into it before wanting to leave it, how can we not trust its structure, unless we are overwhelmed.

All it would take, I think, is a more serious network to tighten it up. You can see how I hold to these words, for which people want to make me look bad! I wager that they would be on my side if I were to keep favouring them.

I am not talking about the reversal that my aphorisms are promised. I thought this word was destined to carry further the genius of the one who does not hesitate to cut back their use.

In the meantime, regarding someone to whom we pay homage with respect to the place she knew how to take in the psychiatric milieu in the name of the School, it is well to acknowledge the guarantee that she believes she owes to her network, taken in the sense of her pupils with regard to training, someone (268) who, at the first throw and returning to it officially, declared it her duty to oppose whatever resulted from my proposition. The argument that followed was biased from that point: where it holds as settled that training could only be affected by it? Yes, but why in the worst sense? We know nothing about it yet.

I don't see any drawback in being brought to our attention what in the network is called the patronage of the training analyst over his coterie if the latter takes pleasure in it, as long as a hint of reason promises success; but have a look at her courageous denunciation in the International Journal, it will tell you a lot about what can follow from this courage.

Precisely it seemed to me that my proposition was not denouncing the network, but in its very thorough layout was getting in its way. So I am less surprised to see that people are alarmed at the temptation it offers to the virtuous of the counter-network. What was most likely blocking my view wasn’t it, probably, that I refused to be surprised that my network did not strangle me?

Am I going to linger over a phrase like 'full transference' in the hullabaloo [hourvari] of its usage? I laugh at it because everyone knows that it is the most common low blow to always be proving yourself in a field where interests are no better managed than elsewhere.

Even if you're not in the loop, you're struck on noticing that, in a document that is circulated in advance, my network would be more dangerous than the others in weaving its web – it's written in full: from the rue de Lille to the rue d'Ulm. And then?

I don't think it's in bad taste to make an allusion to my familial network. Let's talk about my bit of Oulm (that’s what Lewis Carroll would do with it) and its Cahiers pour l’analyse.

Do I propose to install my bit of Oulm within the AS? And why not, if by chance a bit of Oulm were to be analysed? But taken in this sense, my network, I can affirm it, has no-one that has attained that status, nor is any pending.

But the network in question is for me of another kind, representing the expansion of the psychoanalytic act.

My discourse, by having retained subjects who are not prepared by the experience from (269) which one authorises oneself, proves that it is capable of inducing these subjects to constitute themselves from its logical demands. This suggests that those who have the said experience would lose nothing by being trained according to the demands that emerge from it, to return them to it in their 'listening', in their clinical gaze, and – why not – in their supervision cases. This makes them no less worthy of being heard than they may be of use in other fields.

For both the experience of the clinician and the listening of the psychoanalyst do not have to be so assured of their axis as to not be able to use the structural markers that make a reading of this axis. They will not be superfluous for transmitting this reading, who knows: for modifying it, at any rate for interpreting it.

I won't insult you by arguing the benefits that the School derives from a success that I have long managed to keep away from my work and which, when it came to it, does not affect it.

This reminds me of a man named turkey (in English), whose unsavoury propositions I had to put up with in July '62, before a commission of enquiry, for which he was the intermediary, and who brought his henchman into play. On the day scheduled for the verdict, agreed to at the start of the negotiations, he settled his accounts with my teaching, by then more than ten years old, by bestowing on me the role of recruiting sergeant, the ears of those who collaborated with him seemingly deaf to what, in this way, fell to them of English history, of playing drunken recruits.

Some are more supercilious today when faced with the expansion of my discourse. In reassuring themselves that this influx of my audience merely reflects a fad, they still do not see that the right of priority they believe they have to hide this discourse under a bushel could be challenged.

This is what my proposition would guard against, by rekindling in the field of psychoanalysis its rightful consequences.

It would still be necessary that it not be from this field that the word "non-analyst" emerge for a function that I recognise in seeing it reappear: each time that my discourse acts with practical effects, this word pinpoints those who understand it as such.

It's not serious for them. Experience has shown that, in order to enter again into grace, the premium to be paid is small. Whoever separates himself from me will become a full-fledged analyst again, at least by investiture (270) of the IPA. A little vote to exclude me, what am I saying, not even that: an abstention, an apology given in good time, and one regains all one's rights in the International, even though trained from top to bottom by my intolerable practice. You can even use my terms, provided that you do not cite me, since from then on they will no longer have consequence, because of the noise covering them up. Let no one here forget, the door is not closed.

Nevertheless, there is another way to become an analyst again, which I will indicate later, because it applies to everyone, and not just to those who owe their miss-steps to me, such as a certain Moebius-band, a real bunch of non-analysts.

It's just that, when one goes so far as to write that my proposition would have the aim of handing over control of the School to non-analysts, I will not go unless to pick up the gauntlet.

And to play the game is to say that this is in fact the sense: I want to put non-analysts in control of the analytic act, if one is to understand by this that the present state of the analyst's status not only brings him to evade this act, but also degrades for science the production that would depend on it.

In another case, it would be from people caught outside the field and waiting that we would expect intervention. If this is not conceivable here, it is because of the experience in question, that of the unconscious, since it is from there that didactic analysis is very succinctly justified.

But if we take the term analyst in the sense that such and such a person can be deemed lacking by virtue of a preparation barely graspable, if not by a professional standard, the non-analyst does not imply the non-analysed, whom I obviously do not envisage allowing to accede, in view of the entrance door that I do give him, to the function of Analyst of the School.

Although admissible to that position, it is not even the case of the non-practitioner. Let’s say that I place there an aspiring non-analyst, the one who can be seized before he can rush to the (271) experience and undergo, apparently according to a rule, like an amnesia of his act.

Is it conceivable otherwise that I may have to bring out the pass (whose existence nobody disputes to me)? This, by means of a redoubling of the suspense that its questioning for the purpose of examination has introduced. It is from this precarious situation that I expect my analyst of the School to be sustained.

In short, it is to that analyst that I am handing over the School, that is to say, among other things, firstly the charge of detecting how the “analysts” have only a stagnant production – without any theoretical outcome outside of my attempt to reanimate it – where it would have to measure the conceptual regression, and even the imaginary involution, to be taken in the organic sense (menopause, why not? And why is it that we have never seen any invention by young people in psychoanalysis?).

I am only advancing this task so that it may provoke a reflection (I intend that it has repercussions) on what would be more abusive if entrusted to the psychosociologist, even to marketing studies, an enterprise that you have not otherwise noticed (or that, as a semblant it has succeeded) when a psychoanalyst professor provides it with its aegis.

But note that if someone demands a psychoanalysis to proceed without a doubt, that is your doctrine, in what his desire to be an analyst has of confusion, it is that very procession that, falling by right under the sway of the unity of psychology, is in fact going to fall there.

That is why it is from elsewhere, from the psychoanalytic act only, that one must locate what I articulate on the “desire of the psychoanalyst”, which has nothing to do with the desire to be a psychoanalyst.

And if one does not even know how to say, without sinking into the mud of the “personal” and the “training” [analysis], what it is that a psychoanalysis introduces to one’s own act, how can one hope that the handicap made to lengthen its circuit will be removed, due to the fact that nowhere is the psychoanalytic act distinguished from the professional condition that covers it up?

Do we have to wait for the effective use of my non-analyst in order to sustain that distinction, so that a psychoanalysis (a first, one day) demanded as training, without the establishment of a practice being at stake, something emerges of an order to lose its aim at each instant?

(272) But the demand of this use is already a retroaction of the psychoanalytic act, that is to say it starts from that act.

That a professional association may not satisfy it has the result of forcing the association to admit it. It is then a question of knowing whether it is possible to answer that demand from elsewhere – from a School, for example.

Perhaps that would be a reason for someone to demand an analysis from an analyst-member-of-the… School, without which in the name of what could she expect it? In the name of free enterprise? Let them set up another shop.

To tell the truth, the risk taken in the demand, which is only articulated with the advent of the analyst, must be objectively such that the one who responds to it only by taking it on himself, that is, by being the analyst, would no longer have the worry of having to frustrate that demand, having to labour enough in gratifying it with what comes out of it better than he does at the time.

Way of listening, clinical modality, type of supervision, perhaps bearing more in its present object of aiming at his desire rather than his demand.

The “desire of the psychoanalyst” is the absolute point from where the attention is triangulated on what, although expected, mustn’t be put off until tomorrow.

But posing it as I have done introduces the dimension in which the analyst depends on his act, located on the basis of what is fallacious in what satisfies him, by making sure that he is not what is made there.

It is in this sense that the attribute of the non-psychoanalyst is the guarantor of psychoanalysis, and I wish indeed for some non-analysts who are distinguished in any case from today’s psychoanalysts, that is, from those who pay for their status with the forgetting of the act upon which that status is founded.

To those who follow me along this path, but who would however regret not having a comfortable qualification, I give, as I promised, another path, an alternative to leaving me: let them advance beyond my discourse, so as to render it obsolete. I will finally know that it has not been in vain.

In the meantime, I have to put up with some odd music. There is a fable in circulation concerning a candidate who seals a contract with his psychoanalyst: “You make me feel comfortable, and I give you a leg up. As strong as clever, (who knows: one of those normaliens [students or former students of an École normale supérieure] who would denormalize a whole society with those clever tricks that they had plenty of time to concoct during their years of laziness), neither seen nor known, I confuse them, and you pass without any difficulty: analyst of the School according to the proposition.”

(273) Fabulous! Would my proposition have only engendered this mouse and become a rodent itself? I ask: those accomplices, what else will they be able to do starting from there, but a psychoanalysis in which not a word will be able to avoid the touch of the truthful, every deceit coming up short by being gratuitous? In short, a psychoanalysis without meanderings. Without the meanderings that constitute the course of every psychoanalysis, since no lie escapes from the slope of truth.

But what does that mean as far as the imagined contract is concerned, if it changes nothing? That it is futile, or that even when nobody gets wind of it, it is tacit.

For, isn’t the psychoanalyst always, at the end of the day, at the mercy of the psychoanalysand? And all the more so that the psychoanalysand can spare him nothing if he stumbles as psychoanalyst, and even less if he doesn’t stumble. At least that is what experience teaches us.

What he cannot spare him is the disbeing [désêtre] with which he is affected, as the term to assign to every psychoanalysis, and about which I am astonished to find it again in so many mouths since my proposition, as attributed to the one who bears the blow, of being in the pass only to connote a subjective destitution: the psychoanalysand.

In order to speak of subjective destitution, without spilling the beans about the spiel for the passer, that is, what the forms in use until now already make one dream of their yardstick – I will deal with it elsewhere.

What is in question is to understand that it is not subjective destitution that makes disbeing; it rather makes being, singularly and strong. To get an idea of it, let us suppose the mobilization of modern war as it would appear to a man of the Belle Époque. It is found in the futurist who reads his poetry, or in the publicist who rounds up the circulation figures. But as to what concerns the effect of being, the best is found in Jean Paulhan. Le guerrier appliqué [The Applied Warrior] is subjective destitution in its salubrity.

Better still, imagine me in 1961, knowing that I was helping my colleagues get back into the International, at the expense of my teaching, which will be proscribed by it. However, I pursue that teaching at the expense of occupying myself with it only, and without even opposing the work of detaching my audience from it.

Those seminars, about which someone, in re-reading them, blurted out recently in my presence, and it seemed to me without any intention, that I must have (274) loved those for whom I was holding the discourse: that is another example of subjective destitution. Well, I am a witness of it for you, one “being” strong enough in this case, to the point of seeming to love – do you see that?

This has nothing to do with disbeing, concerning which it is a question of knowing how the pass can confront it by dressing itself up in an ideal whose disbeing has been discovered, precisely because the analyst is no longer the support of the transference of the knowledge [savoir] that he is supposed to have.

That is no doubt what the Heil! of the Kapo to which I referred earlier was responding when in feeling himself riddled by his inquiry, he whispered: “We need marinated psychoanalysts”. In his juice?

I will not insist: someone has thought that it was his duty to tell us that evoking the camps is something serious. And not to evoke them?

I rather recall the statement of the theoretician opposite who is forever making an amulet of saying that one psychoanalyses with one’s being: his “being the psychoanalyst”, naturally. In certain cases, we have that within reach on the threshold of psychoanalysis, and it happens that one can keep it until the end.

I pass over the fact that someone who knows what he is about makes me into a fascist, and to put an end to the trifles I note with amusement that my proposition would have imposed the admission of Fliess to the International Psychoanalytic [Association], but I remind you that the ad absurdum requires some tact, and that he fails at this point because Freud could not have been his own passer, and that is precisely why he could not relieve Fliess of his disbeing.

If I believe the so precise memories that Madame Blanche Reverchon-Jouve sometimes does me the honour of confiding to me, I have the feeling that if the first disciples had submitted to a passer chosen from among themselves, let’s say, not their apprehension of the analyst’s desire – a notion that was not even perceivable at the time, if indeed anyone perceives it nowadays – but only their desire of being it, the analyst, the prototype given by Rank in his own person of “I do not think” might have been able to be situated earlier in its place in the logic of fantasy.

And the function of the analyst of the School might have come to light from the beginning.

For finally a door must be open or closed, and thus we are either (275) on the psychoanalysing pathway or in the psychoanalytic act. One can make them alternate like a swinging door, but the psychoanalysing pathway does not apply to the psychoanalytic act, whose logic is in its consequences.

I am in the process of demonstrating, in choosing for my seminar certain discrete propositions that the psychoanalytic literature drowns, that each time that a psychoanalyst capable of consistence highlights an object in the psychoanalytic act (cf. Winnicott’s article), he has to declare that the psychoanalysing pathway could only get around it: doesn’t this indicate the point from which only this is thinkable – the psychoanalyst himself in as much as he is the cause of desire?

I think I have said enough about it, so that it can be understood that in no way is it a question of analysing the psychoanalyst’s desire. We will not even dare speak of its precise place before having articulated what makes it necessary for the demand of the neurotic, which gives the point from which desire cannot be articulated.

Now, the neurotic’s demand is very precisely what conditions the professional bearing, the social play-acting with which the psychoanalyst’s figure is presently forged.

That it favours in this status the picking off of the identificatory complexes is not in doubt; but it has its limit, and this limit is not without producing opacity in return.

That is, written by the pen of Freud himself, the famous narcissism of small differences, which is nevertheless perfectly analysable by relating it to the function the object (a) occupies in the analyst’s desire.

The psychoanalyst, as one says, is happy to be shit, but not always the same. This can be interpreted, providing he notices that being shit is what he truly wants as soon as he makes himself into the straw man of the subject-supposed-to-know.

So what’s important is not this or that shit. And it doesn’t matter which one it is. It’s just that he has to grasp that (276) this shit is not his any more than it belongs to the tree that it covers in the blessed land of birds: Peru is made from it, even more than it is from gold.

Venus’s bird is a shitter. However, as we have seen, the truth comes to us on the feet of the dove. This is not a reason for the psychoanalyst to take himself for the statue of Marshall Ney. No says the tree; it says no in order to be less rigid, and so the bird can discover that it remains a little too subject to an economy led by the idea of Providence.

You see that I can adopt the tone we use when we are among ourselves. I have taken a little from each of those who have given their opinion, even I dare say to the point of aggression: you see it with the times from which it is decanted like the echo of “Mr Wolf, are you there?”.

And let’s conclude. My proposition would have changed only by a hair the demand for analysis for the purpose of training. This hair would have been enough, provided its practice were known.

It allowed for a supervision not unknown in its consequences. It did not contest any established position.

Those who would be called upon to practise it, oppose it. I cannot impose it on them. Thin as a hair, it won't have to measure up to the magnitude of the dawn. It would be enough that it announces it.

…………………………………………………………………………………………

I am stopping this piece here, the practical arrangements on which it ends no longer being of interest on October 1, 1970. However, you should know that because it was not read, as the recorded version makes evident, it was spoken in a different way. The remainder is to be followed line by line. Those who have requested it have received it and will be able to appreciate the spoken inflection from its syntax.

This one is more composed, especially given the point at stake is so alive.

The pass, the existence of which no one disputes, although yesterday, the rank I had just given it was unbeknown to the battalion, the pass is the point where someone (277), having come to the end of his analysis makes this step of taking the place that the psychoanalyst has held throughout its course. Understand: to operate there as the one who occupies it, while knowing nothing about this operation other than to what, in his experience, it has reduced the occupant.

Which reveals that by applauding what I mark as this turning point, some are no less opposed to the most proximate arrangement to be drawn from it: namely, that we offer it to whoever would like to be able to testify to it, at the price of giving him the task of shedding some light on it afterwards?

Obviously, there we touch on the distance, which takes its dimension from me, the distance from the world that separates the fellow [bonhomme] that we invest, who is invested, it doesn't matter which, but who fulfils the substance of a qualification: training, authorisation [habilitation], designation more or less controlled, it’s all one, it’s dress [habit], even habitus in that the fellow wears it – which, I say, separates the fellow from the subject who gets there only from the first division which results from the fact that a signifier represents him only for another signifier, and that he only experiences this division in recognizing that the other signifier – Ur, at the ourigin (at the logical starting point) – is repressed. Through which, if we bring it out of him (which couldn’t be the case, because as Freud tells us it is the navel of the unconscious), he would lose control of his representative. This would leave the representation which he imagines himself to be the darkroom while he is only its kaleidoscope, in a mess, where he finds the effects of symmetry which had ensured his right and his left, his rights and wrongs, very inadequate, putting him back in the bosom of the Eternal.

Such a subject is not given from an intuition that makes for happiness, as Lacan's definition maintains.

But the extremism of the latter is distinguished from the implications that the routine of traditional qualification assumes, the necessities that result from the division of the subject: from the subject as it is elaborated from the fact of the unconscious, that is from the hic, and must I remind you that it speaks better than he does, being structured like a language, etc.?

This subject only wakes up to the fact that for everyone in the world, the matter becomes other than that of being the fruit of the evolution which makes from life a knowledge [connaissance] for the said world: yes, a bullshit-meaning [connerie-sens] as a result of which this world can sleep soundly.

Such a subject is constructed from the whole analytic experience. Lacan tries with his algebra to preserve it from the mirage of being One: by the demand and the desire that he posits as instituted from the Other, and (278) by the bar that turns out to be the Other itself, in order to symbolise the division of the subject with the barred S, which, subject from then on to unpredictable affects, to an inarticulable desire for its place, is made a cause (as one would say: is made a reason), is made a cause of surplus-enjoyment which, however, by locating it in the object a, Lacan demonstrates the articulated desire very well, but from the place of the Other.

All this is not sustained by just a few words but by a discourse which, it should be noted, was initially confidential, and that its passing to the public in no way permitted the same for another beacon, Marxism, which is similarly under wraps, letting it be said that Lacan's Other is God placed as the third between man and woman. This set the tone for what Lacan finds as a support outside of his experience.

Nevertheless, it turns out that a movement called structuralism, patent in denouncing the delay taken with regard to its discourse, a crisis, I mean one which the University and Marxism are reduced to swimming in, makes it not inappropriate to consider that Lacan’s discourse is confirmed by it, and all the more so as the psychoanalytic profession is failing there [y faire défaut].

Due to which this piece takes its value, in pointing out from the start where a proposition was fomented: the time of the act, for which no delay was appropriate since this is the very source of its bunging up [tamponnement].

It would be amusing to punctuate this time by the obstacle it manifests. From consulting a "Board of Management" which takes the thing well enough in still feeling that it was considering it, and not without a certain discernible fervour in taking the arrow before testing the wind, but clearly already such chill being felt that can only extinguish its reputation [éteindre sa réclame].

But concerning the wider, although limited audience, whose opinion I prudently defer to, a trembling arises in those whose establishment it is, so that the point that I made, in being at their mercy, remains covered up. Didn’t I show with "The situation of psychoanalysis in 1956", my way of making a discreet exit, that I knew that satire changes nothing?

As those whose practice of the proposition would have to change with regard to the nominating of passers, the collection of their testimony, the sanction of its fruits, their what is non licet prevails over what is licet which makes whatever may be the quemadmodum [manner], a majority as vain as it is crushing.

This touches on what is obtained from not having (279) temporised, and it is not only that, spurred on by the turmoil of May which has even agitated psychoanalytic associations and the medical students as well, it must be said, who we know took their time in coming around to it, my proposition will pass easily a year and a half later.

Delivering only to the ear that can establish the difference, the themes, the tone whose motifs occasionally release the opinions that I sought without consultation [d’office], and due to the adversity that makes me exit, my response leaves a proper trace, I am not saying progress, I don’t claim anything like that as we know, but a necessary movement.

What I can denounce concerning the accession to the function of psychoanalyst, of the function of influence in its approach, of the social play-acting in its gradus, of the qualified ignorance of those who are answerable for it, is nothing compared with the refusal to recognise what is blocking the system.

You only have to open the official journal with which the Association gives an international scope to its acts, to find there, literally described, as much and more than I can say. Someone suggested that I reread the proof of my text to specify the issue of the International Journal that I am referring to. I won't bother: just open the last one. Even if a title announces this very aim, we find there the irreverence that makes a procession out of the training of the psychoanalyst: it is about making a shingle for him. It is in order not to take any proposition further into these dead ends that every conceivable courage is allowed, which is what I let be understood above.

So much to say, although only since May ‘68, about the mimeographed debates that reach me from the Paris Psychoanalytic Institute.

Unlike the School where my proposition was produced, there is no echo from these places that anybody has resigned, or even that there is any question of it.

As for me, I forced nothing. I had only not to take sides against my proposition for it come back to me from the floor, I must say, in formulas more or less well inspired, so that the safest is by far the preference of voters and that the School can come into the world relieved of those who impede it, without the latter having to complain about either the pay [solde] taken at the time of their service, or of keeping the aura of its classification.

I reread notes blaming me for this outcome, holding that the (280) loss I bear is a sign of a want of wisdom. Would it be greater than what my discourse demonstrates of its necessity?

I know from the curious hatred of those in the past who were precluded from knowing what I say, what one must recognise in the transference is that whatever they assume about me is beyond what is essential in my knowledge.

How would the ambivalence – to speak like those who believe that love and hate have a common support – not be more alive for a divided subject than what I have emphasised about the analytic act?

This is an opportunity to say why, for a long time, I could only put down to stories the astonishing fact, taking it from its national bias, that my discourse was rejected by those very people who should have been interested in the fact that without it, psychoanalysis in France would be what it is in Italy, even in Austria, where they might as well go fishing for what they know about Freud!

The anecdote – that’s the case to be made about love: but how then can each make his rule in the particular, then make a claim to this inflation in the universal? That love is only an encounter, that is to say, pure chance (comical, I said), which is what I misrecognized in those who were with me. And this leaves them with their chances as well, up and down and across. I wouldn't say the same for those who were warned against me; that they deserved to be, changes nothing.

But all the same, in the eyes of the wise I am cleared of any attraction for the series of which I am the pivot but not the pole.

Because the episode of those who some believed stayed with me not by chance, allows me to touch on the fact that my discourse in no way assuages the horror of the psychoanalytic act.

Why? Because it is the act, or rather it would be, that does not support the semblant.

This is why psychoanalysis in our time is the example of a (281) respect so paradoxical that it surpasses the imagination, in that it bears on a discipline that is only produced from the semblant. It is because psychoanalysis is so naked there that the semblants tremble, those from which religion, magic, piety, everything dissimulated from the economy of jouissance, subsists.

Only psychoanalysis opens up what founds this economy in the intolerable: it is jouissance that I am speaking of.

But in opening it, it closes it at the same time and rallies behind the semblant, but a semblant so impudent, that it intimidates everyone in the world who gives it form.

Am I going to say that we don't believe in what we do? This would be to misrecognize that belief is always semblance in act. One of my students once said some very good things about it: you think you don't believe in what you profess to feign, but it's a mistake, because all it takes is a trifle for something to happen, for example that you declare something and you realise that you believe in it, and that to believe in it is very frightening.

The psychoanalyst does not want to believe in the unconscious in order to be recruited. Where would he go if he realised that he believed in it to be recruited by semblants of believing in it?

The unconscious is not semblance. And the desire of the Other is not a would-be lack.

Translated by Esther Faye, Deborah McIntyre, Leonardo Rodríguez and Susan Schwartz