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CONVERGENCIA NEW YORK October 2011
Vannina Micheli-Rechtman, psychanalyste membre d’Espace Analytique, Paris
What is the role of psychoanalysis in modern civilization?
What psychoanalysis still produces resistance, how it is still subversive?
1Lacan’s psychoanalytic conception of the object challenges society.
The object “a” is basically being involved in the analytic experience.
In 1966, Lacan points out that the object would be his only "invention". What are the clinical
and technical implications of this assumption?
With this invention, Lacan had renewed the subversive Freudian discovery of the
unconscious, in the sense of an unveiling of what is involved in the structure of the speech.
But there is no knowledge on this subject, it is unthinkable. Recalling Kant definition of the
“nothingness” as an "empty object without concept" that does not lead itself to knowledge.
Lacan defines the subject, with its logical or topological status, as the missing object, which is
very different from other cultural products that don’t missed, because they are consumable
items, disposable, visible etc ...
The objects of civilization are thus respondents to the “objet a” as the Lack.
In radiophonie, when Lacan talks about the gadget, he doesn’t consider it as an object but as a
sign, a sign of boredom, the desire for something else, but he said "it says nothing about the
“petit a "
The object comes from the Lacanian conception of the subject, which as an effect of language
is to be one of lack (lack of being, loss of enjoyment).
It is in a very special tie between subject and object has a "condition of complementarity" (the
subject is "not without being articulated what is not language"), which is can ask the object
“a” in the civilization and social connections it establishes.
Basically, contrary to the position of some analysts, there is not any kind of a “new economy
psychic”, but still then classical one: the object, as what is lacking, generates libido of seeking
compensation, while it misses all compensations.
What has changed today is the nature of the objects that are available for this quest. Because
all objects, with capitalism, liberalism, are object than can be trade, even those produced for
culture, like art.
This point of view has already been demonstrated in Pop Art, in Andy Warrol’s duplication,
in the series to infinity of the object, and now in contemporary art, in performance or
ephemeral art.
So the crisis of values demonstrates - and today we see the global magnitude of this crisis –
that there is only one value: the goods.
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2What the psychoanalyst can offer has a paradoxical character, one might say it is opposed to
today current values: it offers the object “a” to its analysis, but this offer is in fact a
subtraction rather than an addition. This is the art of giving the missing object that comes
from refusal.
By inventing the object “a”, Lacan has not reinvented the analysis, but he reinvented the
analyst: analyst is the one that should deliver the object “a” to his analysis, failing that he
would maintain indefinitely the transfer.
The only object that can’t be lost is the missing object, which is still there, even if it is hidden.
But the offer as does the analyst is therefore to reveal the “tenant lieu ” for what they are, that
is to say nothing of the “tenant lieu” of ...
It's obviously very disturbing, or scary, in today world.
Hence very important clinical questions are about how the cure may use this object “a”;
The object “a”, that we don’t have any idea as Lacan says in “La troisième”, is not the object
of the drive, it has no image, it has a purely logical consistency: it can’t be reach because He
commands the time.
So why not take seriously Lacan's tenacity to refuse any definition of the object “a” and to
link it to the experience itself, rather than to theory.
The hysteric is the major example of that point. Someone who loves the lack like a passion,
refusing the inevitable castration, which emphasizes the sign of a lack in “l’Autre”.
The "it’s not that" in hysteria, remind the "it's not that" of the object “a”. But in hysteria, the
"it’s not that" is opposed to any answer and the “semblants” offered by the master. In clinic,
this lack in hysteria is a strong bulwark to the revelation of the object “a” as a lack.
My question is about the direction of the cure: how to elaborate the acceptance of the loss of
the object “a”. That is to say, how someone can mourn something that has no representation
and that he/she never had?
What could be a clinical practice guided by the experience of the object “a” ? It would be a
practice that is not concerned with the exhaustion of meaning, that is impossible, or the only
nonsense, it would be a practice that meets the analysis of what does not make sense but
“jouis-sens”, beyond meaning, beyond the fantasy. A practice of the cut, the interpretation
which aims to separate someone from the weight of enjoyment which he / she is the servant.