The analytic act and the analyst certainty.
by Lillian Ferrari
y la experiencia me ensena que el hombre que vive
suena lo que es hasta que despierta.
Calderon de la Barca
A fiction: A foreigner, a wizard perhaps, lands alone in a desolate landscape, and goes
toward the ruins of a circular dwelling, which had been long ago a temple consecrated to
the cult of the God of Fire, but it was abandoned later on after being consumed by a fire.
The purpose of this character –of whom we know nothing, neither his name, nor his place
of origin, or personal story, as it is characteristic in the Borgean universe- is to create a
man, by dreaming him, and thus “to impose him to reality”. This creation, that was to be
trained as his disciple, should posses all the attributes of a real man, and all the
knowledge that was to be imparted by his teacher; however, he should never know the he
was just an appearance, a mere shadow projected by the dream of other man.
Thus, day by day and night by night, our foreigner devoted himself completely to his
task, striving in his dreams to give his creature sensory-organs, fingers, hair, heart and
profound intelligence. At the beginning, his dreams are chaotic and their forms
undistinguishable, composed by images of the dreamer imparting lessons to some
disciples, among whom his creation should emerge. None of these creatures, however,
were deemed to him worthy of inhabiting the world. “He was searching for a soul that
deserved to participate in the universe.” Discouraged, and on the brink of capitulating,
the God of Fire appears in one of his dreams, promising him that he “ magically bring to
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life the phantasm the man had dream –so fully bring him to life that every creature, save
Fire itself and the man who dreamed him, would take him for a man of flesh and blood.”
(Borges, pag. 99) With renewed enthusiasm, the dreamer goes back to his tasks and after
some time he knows his son is ready to be born. Thus, he lets him enter the world, but
before that, he submerges him in the total forgetfulness of his training years, so that his
son would never know he was a ghost, and not a real man. Some time later, the same
event is repeated: a new fire devours the remainders of the ruins of the temple. The
wizard tries to protect himself from the fire, but soon realizes that is useless “with relief,
with humiliation, with terror, he realized that he, too, was but appearance, that another
man was dreaming him.”(Borges, pag 100)
It occurred to me that we can conceive this borgean fantasy as a reflection on the
cogito, but presenting its reverse, the other side of the Cartesian rationalism. Their points
of departure and arrival get twisted like in a Moebius Strip where the right ‘side’ meets
the left, with such a surprising turn in the case of the tale that we are momentarily
snatched away from our privileged position from where we believe to master our world
of representations. Indeed, the wizard of the tale embarks on its goal with the certainty of
being a man, and with the certainty that his representations could have material reality.
He is almost like God at the time of Creation. He does not interrogate himself –unlike
Descartes- about the possibility of being deceived. Although he is aware of the difference
between appearances and the real, he does not doubt that his dream representations have
the power to be projected into reality. In the end, at the top of his omnipotent belief, he
discovers that he is no more than just dream, that his will was mere illusion; thus,
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dethroned, he reminds us of the foundation of the subject of the unconscious, when the
subject discovers that he himself is not “master in his own house”; he is rather “spoken”
by an Other, an Other that inhabits him but that nonetheless, he experiences as not a part
of himself. Descartes, instead, departs from doubt, a doubt that questions all our previous
knowledge, all the contents of our representations, all the information gathered by our
senses, to the point of interrogating what distinguishes dream-thoughts from the
awakening thoughts, fantasy from reality. However, Descartes’ doubt is not existential,
but methodical; through the path of doubt he will find certainty, the certainty of his own
existence and of God’s existence, who will guarantee in the end, the effectiveness of
reason to advance in the search of scientific knowledge. Although in its first assertion the
‘I think’ is no more than an assertion of existence –according to Lacan equivalent to an
emergence of the signifier in the real that only marks the ‘punctual moment of the
evanescence of the subject’- it becomes later on, a signification, an object of thought. The
truth that pertains to the foundation of the cogito as an act of enunciation –and as such,
based in the subject’s desire- is consequently rejected to the place of God, who becomes
hence on responsible for the question of truth. Thus, Descartes inaugurates the basis of a
new science, but at the price of evacuating from it the question of the subject’ truth - a
rejected truth which in turn, Psychoanalysis will pick up. Perhaps, the wizard in our tale
sheds light on the truth that lies buried behind Cartesian rationalism.
Lacan establishes a parallel between the subject of the unconscious and the subject of
the cogito stating that the subject of the cogito is the ‘presupposition of the unconscious”
and that psychoanalysis could not really have emerged but after the step taken by
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Descartes. (Lacan, J. SXI) The subject in analysis, similarly as the subject of the cogito,
is also someone who doubts, who searches for a certainty about who she or he is, and
about his desire; we demand guaranties about our choices, but reluctantly agree to submit
to our subjective division. Analysis teaches us that the place where we believe to master
our intentional speech is not in reality the place where we can obtain some certainty
regarding the desire that inhabits us. And indeed, the establishment of the subject of the
unconscious implies a notion that is in complete rupture with the subject of the cogito.
Though psychoanalysis could not have emerged but in the scientific era, the notion of
subject in psychoanalytic discourse suffers a radical subversion. In our field, the subject
is represented by a signifier for another signifier, which provokes at the same time its
division; its representation is inevitably correlative to its disappearance, to its fading. The
subject of the unconscious supposed by analytic discourse is not the product of certain
ideas that have been repressed due to their content, but a presence manifested in acts of
speech such as interruptions, discontinuities in the intentional chain of the subject’s
sayings, gaps in memory, slips of a tongue, a stumbling in speech; in other words, a
subject that is instituted at the moment where it disappears, where no one can utter “I”.
But this manifestation of the unconscious as an actual production becomes only possible
if there is also a partner willing to listen, determined to welcome its effects, and attentive
to its beat-like functioning, to its opening and closing, a closing that, nonetheless, does
not imply any “inside”. The analyst, says Lacan, partakes ‘of the concept of the
unconscious, in so far as it constitutes that to which the unconscious is addressed’ ( Ecrits
pag. 811), which signifies that he is included in the functioning of the unconscious. This
inclusion makes the analyst responsible for its evocation, for eliciting its aperture from an
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interior place that is also the place of the Other. The inaugural act that initiates an
analysis is sustained by the analyst desire to call up “that beauty” –the unconscious-,
addressing it so as to produce its opening. Through this inaugural act of addressing the
unconscious the function of the desire of the analyst operates –a desire, in my view, that
is sustained by the certainty of the ex-sistence of the unconscious- causing in turn the
phenomenon of the transference, and thus allowing the analysand to embark in the
analytic task. The status of the unconscious is not ontological but ethical, says Lacan,
because the subject we address in an analysis is not the subject of epistemology, but
rather the subject of desire, a lacking subject. This real lack at the center of the subject’s
structure implies that at the core of the experience of the unconscious there is a real
acting as a “causal gap”, a real that is lost, impossible to represent yet producing actual
effects. Freud’s discovery of the unconscious had, according to Lacan, the status of an
act, the consequence of which –as in every act-surpasses the intentions of its author. He
established this discovery through the original notion of the “failed act’ –but otherwise an
accomplished act- conveying the truth –the partial true- that is revealed when our mastery
of knowledge trips.
Yet the act of posing the question of the unconscious, with all its novelty and
surprising effects is always at risk –as it happened historically – of becoming forgotten,
or worse, of becoming irrelevant and stifled by the increasing number of rules and
statutes that are designed today to regulate its practice.
An analyst aims at recreating this discovery, the discovery of the unconscious, in the
act that inaugurates every analysis, and it is only in this position that an analyst may
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sustain the cause of the unconscious; a lost cause, to be sure, but it is only because is lost
that we may have a chance of winning it.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Borges, J.L. “Las ruinas circulares” en Obras Completas. Ed. Emece. Buenos Aires,
1996
Descartes, R. “Meditations on the First Philosophy”. Double Day, NY, 1960.
Lacan, J. Escritos. Ed. Siglo XXI. Buenos Aires, 1987.
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