Lacan’s Logic of Subjectivity

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CONTENT

5 Preface 9 Introduction

29

CHAPTER 1

Psychotherapy and the mechanistic worldview

CHAPTER 2

The global perspective of

a Lacanian theory regarding subjectivity

73

CHAPTER 3

111

Graph I as a scheme of the intersection between mother tongue and body

CHAPTER 4

137

The Symbolic on Graph II

CHAPTER 5

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165

195

The Imaginary on Graph II CHAPTER 6

The Real on Graph II

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CHAPTER 7

233

The Symbolic on the upper half of Graph III

CHAPTER 8

277

The Imaginary on the upper half of Graph III

CHAPTER 9

301

The Real on the upper half of Graph III

CHAPTER 10

347

Psychoanalysis on the Graph

CHAPTER 11

403

Psychoanalytic technique on the Graph

447 Conclusion

475 Epilogue

479 References

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“At once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement… When a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” John Keats (1817).

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PREFACE While writing this book, I often imagined the Japanese swordsmith who forges the katana. The blacksmith hammers on the glowing bar of steel until it has the length of the intended blade.

He then folds it together to half the length. Then he forges it again to full length. He repeats this action seemingly endlessly, to the calm rhythm of the seasons that traverse the country. The cycle of forging cleans the steel of all impurities; gives it its character; gives it the sound that will resonate when it meets the resistances of life. It continues until the smith interrupts the cycle, gives the sword its definitive form and sends it out into the world.

It is not clear why my paternal family carries the name it does – Desmet (which in English means ‘the smith’). To the extent that history allows me to unravel the origins of my family, my paternal ancestors were carpenters, sometimes cartwrights. They also forged, the traces of which I have seen with my own eyes in my grandfather’s workshop. The metal rings he wrapped around wooden sledgehammers or wagon wheels, for example. However, this arguably was not a regular enough occurrence to justify carrying the name ‘the smith’.

A memory comes drifting by: My father is sitting at the kitchen table and I, about eight years old, am standing next to him. Using a pencil, he draws a circle on a little piece of paper lying on the table in front of him. As the pencil glides over the paper, my father tells me that the human mind moves like a point on a wheel. ‘It goes down and plunges into darkness and questions; it comes back up and bathes in light and answers. Then new questions arise, and new answers. An endless continuation of the same cycle.

Questions, answers, questions, answers, up and back down, up, down…’ Then, my father’s right index finger points up into the air, remains motionless for a while, as if he has, in the light of the

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little lamp which hangs in an enameled cap, just been transformed into pure mind. ‘… but in the meantime, the wheel rolls forward as well, and travels along a road.’ The eternal return that engenders something new. Perhaps.

Beyond that memory, other memories leading to a more personal, more intimate atmosphere, which are harder to share publicly, arise like shapes out of the darkness. Memories of the way in which my father’s philosophical explanations were welcomed and not welcomed by my mother. And, further still, memories of how my father welcomed and did not welcome the desires and questions of my mother. My mother lived more in the unspoken. She collided less with the world than my father did, and therefore also made less sound. Every journey through the gardens of memory eventually ends up in the dark woods of the desire of a woman, and in particular, of the desire of a mother. It is here that every thought loses itself. It is this remarkable continent, this past on the horizon, which is the concern of psychoanalysis. It is of this country that Lacan has drawn the map with the mathematical scheme he called the Graph of Desire. This is the country we will encroach upon in this book, with the Graph as a map in our hands.

My desire and interest in psychoanalysis were awakened at Ghent University by evocative figures such as Paul Verhaeghe, Filip Geerardyn, Julien Quackelbeen, and Gertrudis Van de Vijver. It is thanks to them that I discovered Freud and Lacan.

Once I arrived there, I quickly decided to limit myself mainly to the work of these founders. With the exception of the work of Paul Verhaeghe – who influenced every Lacanian in Ghent and far beyond – I have made little to no use of ‘secondary’ literature. I have always even had a certain fear of it. A fear that it would permanently deprive me of a fresh interpretation of the original writings. We could, of course, question this fear and the corresponding choice. Is literature not always secondary? Are the

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words not always echoes of words we have heard from others?

And just as well the other way around: Is literature not always primary? Does the rock not always add something of itself when it reverberates sound? In any case, the piece of literature I have now produced – as primary or secondary as it may be – carries the traces of a choice for solitude.

This does not alter the fact that, in another way, this work fully bears the traces of others. With this, I primarily mean: of the others to whom I address it. These are first and foremost the ever-changing group of students that follow the Psychoanalytical Therapy course in the first year of the Masters of Psychology program at Ghent University. Students still strongly appear under the sign of not-knowing; they exist – at least within a university context – as a lack of knowledge. It is precisely as such that they produce knowledge on the side of their professors. “I learned much from my teachers, more from my colleagues, most from my students.”

Moreover, students have become increasingly demanding.

They ask – demand – their lack to be filled. They do not settle for half-explanations. The explanation must be clear. One might see in this tendency an undesirable sign of the times, but one could also thrive on it. Each year again, the students’ demand reawakened the desire to formulate my thoughts as clearly as possible, to make my logic more logical. In this way, their demand was perfectly complementary to my desire to analyze more thoroughly, to understand better, and to formulate more clearly.

Eventually, I succeeded in going through the Graph without stumbling, according to an uninterrupted series of logical steps.

This book renders this series. Having said that, I concede that logical analysis has its downside. It is always a reduction of a whole into parts. In this way, the act of analyzing is by definition a manifestation of Thanatos; the death drive. While I was extracting the logic out of the Graph, in some sense, I also drained the life out P R E FA  CE

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of it. My discussion of Lacan’s Graph – it cannot be denied – is also Lacan’s Grave. At the same time – and this testifies to the remarkable indebtedness of life to death – it is only after I made the logic conclusive that it truly opened up to me. I could not present one logic of the Graph, but a thousand and one. All in contradiction to one another, all equally correct. Every knowing that carries some truth is paradoxical. I can, therefore, recommend it to everyone. One must kill Lacan to let him live.

Mattias Desmet, spring of 2018, Meigem.

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INTRODUCTION For more than a century, a remarkable profession exists in our western society. It is a profession that claims it has something to offer a suffering individual. It is not immediately clear, however, what exactly it is offering. Its practice more or less goes like this: The practitioner listens, and the suffering individual speaks. It may happen that once in a while the former also says something, but that does not occur very often; only when it is deemed necessary to keep the latter talking.

One assumes that this practice will produce specific effects; that symptoms will change and disappear, complaints will soften, and suffering will diminish. One even expects that this practice, which consists of nothing but speaking, will also be effective in treating corporal suffering, treating symptoms that are inscribed in flesh and blood.

This profession has received many names: psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, psychoanalytic therapy, and so forth. Whichever name one prefers, what it always puts into practice is the art of speech; the art of speaking about oneself, to another. This book is about this art, and more specifically about its logic.

The fact that this profession has entered the mainstream over the past century certainly does not mean that the mainstream understands how it works. This profession still makes an odd impression, an irrational impression even, and consequently, it still encounters a great deal of skepticism, distrust and even a certain disdain. We may raise two questions here. First: How do we define rationality and irrationality? Second (and perhaps more important): On what grounds did we start to presuppose that everything is and should be suitable for a rational explanation?

The tradition of the Enlightenment put its faith in logic and facts. Above all, it believed in a perfect, symbiotic relationship

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between them. Facts are logical, it says. Put unfounded opinions and blind belief aside and listen to what the things themselves have to say, let them speak for themselves; they speak the language of logic; write down what they say and in doing so, build a theory.

It is more or less according to this principle that this tradition tries to approach the truth.

However, even on this path to the truth, and perhaps even especially there, the lie seized its chance. Few realized that logic knows many faces and that there are countless ways to convert a phenomenon into a series of facts. Even fewer in number were those that could stand the hypothesis that eventually the facts might not be logical. In this way, most succumbed to the temptation of a discourse that promised the most for the least effort: the mechanistic ideology. The credo of this ideology is well-known: In the end, the facts of physics and the laws of mechanics suffice to comprehend everything; eventually, everything can be traced back to the attraction and repulsion of elementary particles.

In Chapter 1, we will ask ourselves how to justify a practice of speaking in an age that finds in a mechanistic view of man and the world its alpha and omega. In its most extreme form – which is also the most common one – this ideology claimed to explain the phenomenon of psychical experience and human suffering. The entire psychical domain was considered an effect of a mechanistically functioning material apparatus (at this moment conceived as a genetically determined, neurobiological brain organ). ‘Man is a machine; the suffering of mankind, mental and physical, is a consequence of a glitch in this machine.’ Within such a view of humanity and the world, a practice that only utilizes speech cannot appear otherwise than irrational.

In certain respects, however, the Enlightenment’s faith in reason turned out to be justified. We will illustrate how mechanistic science itself astonishingly showed that it could not offer the

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expected certainty. The experiments of quantum mechanics, to mention just one example, proved unambiguously that the heart of the physical world does not beat to the rhythm of logic and that in the end, the physical facts do not limit themselves to the language of ratio. Niels Bohr put it like this: “We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can only be used as poetry” (Bohr, 1920, cited in Giles, 1993, p. 28).

Following the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, the twentieth century brought us a third scientific revolution, which is less known but equally significant: the complex dynamical system theory and the more or less overlapping chaos theory.

While quantum mechanics demonstrated that elementary particles behave contrary to all logic, chaos theory revealed something similar for phenomena that manifest in dimensions that are more directly accessible to non-scientists.

A multitude of phenomena having the characteristics of complex dynamical systems – many examples may be found in domains as diverse as physics, climatology, economics, and psychology – can be described mathematically but are nonetheless fundamentally unpredictable. In mathematical terms, these phenomena are determined by systems of iterative, non-linear functions that under certain circumstances never lead to a stable solution. Sometimes one cannot even observe a single repetition within the series of solutions generated. This non-periodicity – which we also encounter in the irrational numbers – implies that the system itself behaves chaotically in every respect. Complex dynamical systems play the game according to the (mathematical) rules, but they do it in their own, unpredictable way. Chaos theory shows us something that can only appear paradoxical, which is referred to as ‘deterministic chaos.’

Furthermore, chaos theory calls for a radically different form of causal reasoning compared to the one that has been generally INTRODUCTION

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accepted since the Enlightenment. It shows us that we cannot consider phenomena as merely a result of a set of mechanistic agents, yet we cannot do otherwise than presuppose the influence of a form or idea in their coming into being. This way, it more or less forces us to reintroduce Aristotle’s formal cause into the discourse of the Enlightenment.

We will argue that the psychical system undoubtedly belongs to the category of the complex dynamical systems, and it thus places several typical demands on the scientific methods used to study it. Such systems, in any scientific domain, are only mea­ surable to a certain extent. They require a qualitative description of the totality of each separate system, and we must take their historical trajectory into account when studying their behavior.

The major scientific findings of the twentieth century, the most significant results of the tradition of the Enlightenment, thus take this tradition to its limit. It was assumed that the advancing scientific study of matter would lead to a greater and greater logical understanding of what we call ‘facts’. Instead, intrinsic chaos, irrationality, and a failure of every logical discourse revealed itself.

Against the boisterous voice of mechanistic ideology, the science of the twentieth century whispered that, in the end, the facts prefer the more light-footed language of poetry.

Additionally, quantum mechanics showed us something of direct importance for the subject of this book: The illogical behavior of matter is linked with human subjectivity. Psychical actions, such as the act of observation during an experiment, for instance, proved to have an influence on the localization of material particles in time and space. The psychical register can be the cause of material events and cannot be reduced to solely its effect. In the final analysis, Bertrand Russell (1921, p. 808) concluded, the psychical appears to be more real than the physical.

These findings redefine the boundaries of the rational and

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the irrational, the natural and the supernatural. In this respect, the highest merit of mechanistic science is that it solidly demonstrated that the explanatory power of mechanistic logic is limited and that the big questions of life seek their answer elsewhere.

To these observations in physics, I will add a series from other scientific disciplines that will also demonstrate how the psychical can be the cause of the physical. These include: Lévi-Strauss’s anthropological observations on symbolic efficacy (Lévi-Strauss, 1949); medical observations on the corporal effect of placebos and hypnosis; Mauss’s ethnographical descriptions of the effects of culture on the body (Mauss, 1934); and Harrison-Matthews’s and Chauvin’s experiments on the influence of the body image on the anatomy and physiology of animals (Chauvin, 1941; Harrison-Matthews, 1939). If twentieth-century science has shown us anything, it is that the psychical imposes its law and order everywhere.

This is why psychology, more confident than ever before, can claim the right to present its logic, a logic which starts with other facts. This is also where this science gets the opportunity to make a decisive contribution to the tradition of the Enlightenment.

Alternatively, in the words of Edmund Husserl: “Indeed, psychology is the truly decisive field.” (1937, p. 208).

From a wide variety of perspectives, attempts were made during the last century to write a psychological theory. This book starts from a psychoanalytic perspective. Despite accusations from all sides regarding its ‘unscientific’ nature, the theory of psychoanalysis and the practice from which it originated were unmistakably offshoots from the tree of the Enlightenment.

From the beginning, Freud subjected the development of his theory to the facts of his practice according to the scientific method. Those facts differed from the facts of physics. In his INTRODUCTION

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medical practice, he encountered a series of phenomena, all of which attested to psychical causality (e.g., hysterical paralysis), and he decided to focus his intellectual passion on that register.

He merely invited his patients to present all their psychical material – the entire stream of experiences which passed through the window of their consciousness – to him through speech (i.e., free association). He noticed that this material arranged itself as a historically layered fact, as a dramatized life story. This story initially escaped the patient herself. It fell prey to distortions and forgetting, it was told in fits and starts, through dreams and slips, through complaints and symptoms. He noted that, as the patient progressively mastered her story, as she could integrate the material and reconstruct the overall story, the symptoms and complaints became redundant and disappeared.

This labor of integration boiled down to restoring the continuity of the logic of the story. The symptoms that at first glance seemed to be completely illogical, which provoked thoughts and actions in the subject that seemed to oppose whatever the subject longed for, eventually proved to follow logically from its wishes and desires.

Even more, they eventually showed themselves as the ultimate realizations of these wishes and desires. The case studies of Freud – in particular The Wolfman (Freud, 1918a) – illustrate the great lengths to which he went in the attempt to make his patients’ stories logically coherent. He demanded of even the smallest morsel of the analysand’s story that it allowed itself to be integrated into the logical chain of conscious thoughts. In doing so, he always stumbled on an ultimate failure: No matter how far he pushed the analytical labor, there always remained bits of material that did not fit into the logical chain. Freud observed this phenomenon and even gave it a name (i.e., primal repression), but – more or less in line with Einstein’s inability to accept Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle – his theoretical frame of reference left him no option but to consider it undesirable.

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Even the shortest time spent reading the work of Freud shows that he indeed treated the story of the analysand as a series of facts. Freud worked on the literal statements of his patients. He studied how letters and syllables shifted into slips of the tongue, and he analyzed dreams as mechanical shifts of words and phrases, clauses and sentences. Freud observed and described every aspect of the spoken word and the way it behaved with scientific rigor and accuracy. After describing the facts, he put forward hypothe­ ses about them, confronted them with the facts, adapted his theory, reformulated the hypotheses, listened again to the facts with the new hypotheses in mind, and so on. One will rarely find a more precise and more explicit example of the so-called empirical cycle than in the works of Freud. Anyone who claims otherwise has not read Freud.

This book will not participate in the endless debates about the scientific status of psychoanalysis, which is not to deny that psychoanalysis, like all other approaches in psychology, should question itself on the point of being scientific. Every psychological theory has, in more than one respect, a reason to do so. The further development of a robust scientific methodology must indeed be considered a primary goal and will be decisive for the future of psychoanalysis.

Just like Freud, Lacan – the psychoanalytic author on whom we base this book in the first place – fully endorsed the principles of the Enlightenment. Lacan has the notorious reputation of being inaccessible, and rumor has it he is also devoid of logic. While one cannot deny the accuracy of the first sentiment, the inaccuracy of the second may become apparent over the course of this book. Like Freud, Lacan unmistakably departs from the facts of lived experience, and also returns to it; his theory is by no means a philosophical product, as is often claimed. Lacan was familiar INTRODUCTION

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with the work of numerous philosophers – among whom Hegel might deserve special mention – but his theory did not come about according to philosophical principles. In every aspect of his teachings, one feels how it circles and arises from clinical experience. Nowhere will one encounter the philosophical aspiration to ground the theory in itself.

In the footsteps of Freud, Lacan examined the facts of the analytic practice and studied them again. The progress of science had provided him with a series of tools that Freud lacked. At the initial stage of the development of his theory, those included, for example, the insights of developmental psychologists Bühler and Wallon, as well as a series of observations in experimental biology and ethnology. Later on, the anthropological theory of Lévi-Strauss, the linguistic theories of De Saussure and Jacobson and a series of developments in mathematical domains such as topology, game theory, and graph theory played a significant role.

Lacan too encountered, within the core of the analytic experience, the phenomenon of primal repression mentioned above; he too observed that something in the analytic cure resists logical comprehension. No matter how far the analysand carries through his analysis, there will always be something in his psychical experience that he or she cannot logically comprehend. The same can be said for the theory itself: However sophisticated psychoanalytic theory becomes, it always encounters a kernel in psychoanalytic clinical practice that it cannot theorize. In this way, psychoanalysis always heads towards what we would call with Nietzsche (1872, p. 20), the threshold of the communicable.

Unlike Freud, however, Lacan succeeded in reconciling himself with this fact. More so, he even made it the foundation of his theory. His linguistic theoretical approach enabled him to understand that it is the structure of language itself which makes total logical comprehension impossible and that, inevitably, an intrinsically

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illogical kernel – indicated by his concept of the object a – will always insist within the psychical experience. Moreover, on closer consideration, the most characteristic features of the human being – as a species as well as an individual – are the logical consequences of this intrinsically illogical core.

Lacan ultimately conceives of the human subject as a series of choices and positioning concerning this illogical kernel. He further turned this into the foundation of clinical practice: The analyst must radically carry through the analysis and reveal the logic of the subject to a maximum, but the goal of the cure lies beyond logical understanding. The goal of the psychoanalytic logical reduction is to let go – not too soon and not too late – of logic. We could say that an analysis, taken to great lengths, always succeeds somehow to replace the suffering from the apparent i­ -rationality of symptoms and complaints by a liberating a-rationality.

This shows how Lacanian logic assumes a special place in the Enlightenment tradition: Just like the logic of quantum mechanics and chaos theory, it pushes this tradition to its very limit. On closer inspection, it will become clear that this logic is, in fact, a logic to the second power: It is the logic of the effects that logic has on psychical experience. It is also the logic of the a-logical, of that which is inherently illogical. The lack of logical understanding is seen as a constituent for the phenomenon of humanity; man becomes what he is in the hollows, the cracks and the gaps of rationality. It is no coincidence that phenomena which are considered the ultimate manifestations of humanity, such as poetry and art, but also justice, are flowers that flourish only where one overcomes rationality.

Lacanian theory helps to understand the risks of a fanatic pursuit of the ideology of the Enlightenment: Whether at the level of the individual or society, this pursuit inevitably leads to a loss of humanity, and paradoxically, also to radical irrationality.

INTRODUCTION

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Rationality is a good thing, but it should know its place. Every totalitarian claim made by ratio is ethically unjustified, logically unfounded, and ultimately pragmatically pernicious.

This is the point where psychoanalytic theory offers its most precious fruit to Western culture: a reasonable ground for ethics.

A consistent mechanist-materialist ideology ultimately denies one all grounds on which one could stick to ethical principles.

This is the core of the problem that pushes Western society to its decline. Lacanian theory, however, shows that ethical awareness is not necessarily a sign of stupidity. We will see that psychoanalytic ethics is directly linked to the act of speaking; ethical is a subject which at every moment gives another subject the right to speak.

Lacan followed the trail just described for decades and succeeded in formulating a theory on psychical experience, psychopathology, and the psychoanalytical practice which, on several points, had greater explanatory power and greater overall coherence than that of Freud. In terms of method, he opted for narrative and a mathematical description of the chaos of subjective experience, which was completely in line with the path that would later be chosen by complex dynamical systems theory (for which he can rightly be considered a precursor). He was able to reduce the enormous complexity of subjective experience to a relatively simple logical, universally applicable structure which he represented in the most comprehensive and systematized way in his renowned mathematical scheme, the Graph of Desire (Le Graphe du Désir).

This scheme will be the central, integrating point of reference in this book, albeit in an augmented form (see Figure 1) which makes it easier to understand its logic in some respects.

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FIGURE 1

The three versions of the Graph of Desire, to the left Graph I, in the middle Graph II, to the right Graph III.

Actually, the Graph of Desire does not refer to one scheme, but to a series of three schemes (see Figure 1) that represent the successive transformations of the structure of subjectivity throughout the life of the human subject. It distinguishes three consecutive phases that are separated from one another by two major tipping points. In systemic terms, these tipping points form bifurcations, moments at which the psychical structure becomes more complex and tilts towards a new equilibrium. The first phase starts at birth and continues until the first major tipping point, the mirror stage; the second phase runs from the mirror stage until the second tipping point, the Oedipus complex; the third phase represents the structure of the subject after the Oedipus complex.

In his teachings, Lacan typically utilized schemes that I – after years and years of studying the Graph – cannot see as anything other than partial. They form a sort of excision from the schemes I will use in this book (see Figure 2 with Graph III as an example).

Furthermore, Lacan omitted the colors as well. He made these choices in part because they corresponded with his subjective didactic style, and in part for substantive reasons (e.g., like the object that they represent, theoretical models must show a lack).

INTRODUCTION

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Regarding the nomenclature, the French term ‘Graphe’ is translated into English as ‘Graph’ and refers to graph theory, a mathematical domain that deals with the abstract mapping of structural relations between entities. Lacan thereby indicates these relations with arrows or vectors; he situates the entities at the intersections – the nodes – of those vectors. In the case of the Graph of Desire, one sees that the entities are psychical entities, which means they are more or less autonomous, separate aspects of our psychical experience. We find at the intersections of the Graph, for example, the Ego (m), the discourse of the Other (A), the desire of the Other (d), the Ideals of the Other [I(A)] and the sexual phantasm (Sca). The Graph of Desire shows how all these aspects of psychical experience connect according to a fixed logical structure. As the name of the graph suggests, its center of gravity is located in desire: “Desire is the very essence of man.” (Spinoza, 1678).

FIGURE 2

The Graph of Desire, to the left the augmented version used in this book; to the right as Lacan usually draws it (c. 1966, p. 817).

What makes the Graph unique, is that it is situated at the convergence point of various logical lines. It represents – just like a fractal – a structure that repeats on many levels.

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Throughout the first nine chapters, we will use the Graph to conceive the structure of subjectivity more coherently from a variety of perspectives. We will illustrate how the Graph offers a schematic representation of the becoming of the subject; a scheme that outlines the developmental trajectory through which subjectivity and psychic structure manifest themselves progressively.

The different levels of the Graph in this way represent the various historical layers of the psyche. Freud had already noted that the psyche develops in layers, and although the later layers cover the former, they never erase them. At every moment, all the layers remain present and active in subjective experience. The human being testifies to its entire history at every moment of its existence.

This implies that the Graph also represents the structure of every immediate experience. The specific ordering and intersecting of the different layers constitute the uniqueness of a subject. Each subject follows typical trajectories on the Graph, and it is this singularity which is commonly referred to as the personality structure.

From this perspective, we thus may use the Graph to conceive the notion of personality more coherently.

Throughout Chapters 10 and 11, we will describe how the Graph can serve as a frame of reference for clinical practice on a diagnostic, technical, and ethical level. We will use the Graph to characterize various sorts of symptoms and complaints and at once indicate to which specific registers of subjectivity they are linked. This will also allow us to understand the logic of the psychically determined physical symptoms, and broader, to understand why the psychical can have the spectacular effects on the body that we sometimes observe, for example, with placebos and hypnosis. Once we understand how symptoms and complaints can be situated on the Graph, we will discuss how the Graph can be used to determine the global positioning of the analyst throughout an analytic cure. The psychoanalyst must assume a specific position for those who come to INTRODUCTION

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him for analysis. The Graph enables us to identify this position very precisely and additionally to determine which techniques are more or less appropriate for certain symptoms, complaints, and subject structures. Or in any case, it allows to formulate broad principles in this respect. In this way, the logic of the formation of the symptoms and complaints can be linked directly to the logic of the therapeutic technique. Finally, the Graph also allows us to formulate psychoanalytic ethics. The essence of the psychoanalytic practice does not rest in the techniques applied but in the consistent assumption of a position that attests of humanity with regard to someone that is suffering psychically. On the basis of the Graph, we can link this ethical position to the broader structure of the phenomenon of subjectivity, and thus to a certain extent ground it theoretically. Although in some sense the clinical work is the central focus throughout the whole book, we will mainly discuss the technical and ethical issues of the Graph in the later chapters (10 and 11).

To my knowledge, no other theory succeeds in comprehending in such a clear and specific way the coherence between psychical development, personality structure, the formation of symptoms and complaints, and the technical and ethical aspects of psychotherapeutic treatment. We add to this that the Graph also allows to theoretically situate within subjectivity a variety of more specific but essential themes of subjectivity, such as vulnerability and vanity, art and science, justice and power, passion and reason, pleasure and enjoyment, fantasy and reality, desire and logic, love and hate, life and death, and – speech and silence. In a fascinating way, the Graph allows to understand how all these different aspects of human experience are related to each other. As such, it reduces complexity to simplicity and honors the principle of parsimony. It is here we find its scientific added value (which we shall explain in the concluding chapter of this book).

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In this way, this book gravitates around a series of related questions: What is the logic of our psychical experience? What is the logic of the development of the psyche? According to which logic do psychical symptoms and complaints arise within the subjective experience? What are the primary themes in the life story of a subject? How can we logically understand that psychotherapeutic practice, a practice which is based solely on speaking, brings about a change in symptoms, even when they are physical in nature? What ethical position should we take in the practice of speaking? Each of these questions eventually leads to the same logical structure, the one presented by the Graph. The interweaving of these various logical lines within a single overarching scheme yields a more or less coherent logical framework for the ­practicing psychotherapist.

It is this fascinating coherence of the Lacanian logic I intend to highlight with this book. This aspect of Lacan’s work is hardly recognized. Intellectual adversaries of Lacan often accuse him of being devoid of logical coherence. Even the Lacanians themselves tend not to bother making Lacan ‘understandable’. They might argue – as I already mentioned above – that the subject is intrinsically illogical and ceases to exist when forced into a logical straightjacket. I would reply: The subject succumbs to logic because it does not carry it through to the end; because it eventually chooses to close its eyes prematurely and stop thinking. In this way, the veil of appearance blinds its eyes before it finds a way out of the mine shafts of logic.

Anyone who follows reason far enough automatically comes to a point where logic opens up and makes space for the a-logical.

In any case, this book chooses for this path, very explicitly. It explains. As well as it can. Step by step. Moreover, at every step, it illustrates through clinical examples and literal transcripts of ­analytical sessions.

INTRODUCTION

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This way, this book represents the phase of logical analysis in the cycle of subjectivity, the phase of the integration of heterogeneous material in a coherent, logical structure. After this phase, another one comes. Namely, the phase in which the logical clot comes backs to life. Whoever follows to the end the logical steps being set out in this book will automatically end up in this next phase. He will – to say it in terms of the Graph – automatically migrate from the circuit on the lower half to that of the upper half.

That is the ultimate aim of this book. No matter in which way one wants to go through the phase of logical analysis, it remains a strict necessity in every psychoanalytical process, both at the level of mastering the theory and at the level of the personal psychoanalytic cure. Skipping this phase means nothing less than one turning one’s back to reason, thereby orienting psychoanalysis in a radically different direction than Freud and Lacan did (see, for example, Lacan, 1953c, p. 12).

No matter how much I try to bring the logical coherence of Lacan’s Graph to the fore, I do not claim to deliver the logic of the Graph. If one follows this logic far enough, one reaches a point at which one sees that it can take on an endless number of permutations. I prefer to think of a good reader of Lacan as someone who follows the ray of light provided by reason, and who discovers that, as it penetrates deeper into the Graph, it breaks up like a ray of light in a diamond and spreads in all directions in a cascade of colors. This will perhaps be most evident where I present fragments of verbatim transcripts from analytical sessions. There we will see that the transcripts are consistent with the presented logic, but they also always force us to add something to it and formulate it differently. This way, every new encounter with the practice of speech renews logic and gives birth to a new theoretical story.

A new theoretical story, which nevertheless time and time again shows the same old structure of the Graph.

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The transcripts presented in this book thus operate as a sort of dialectical counterpart to the theory. They form a piece of empirical material that illustrates the theory, but which is also opposed to it. Science always walks on two legs: the logical-theoretical one and the empirical one. Science tries to discover logic in the phenomena under investigation, but it also maintains a certain distance, even distrust, towards logic. A logical explanation is not necessarily correct. And the other way around: An illogical explanation is not necessarily erroneous. For that reason, it always confronts theory with empirical data. I wholeheartedly endorse this method. On this point too, I break with what is common in the field of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Except for the traditional, non-systematic case study, those identifying with the Lacanian approach tend to turn their backs on empirical research. As we will further elaborate on in Chapter 2, I believe that traditional case studies are of tremendous importance, and in many respects, this method suits our object of investigation (i.e., subjective experience) very well. Its degree of systematization is indeed low, but systematization that is taken too far – as we see in many forms of psychological research – makes research powerless and alienates it from the objects it studies.

Nevertheless, in the field of Lacanian psychoanalysis, the pendulum often seems to have swung too far in the other direction. The refusal of every form of quantification, of every form of systematic registration employing audio- and videotapes, of every procedure, is also problematic. This book does not offer the fruits of a fully-fledged empirical line of research – for that it is still too early. However, confronting theory with fragments of verbatim transcripts from psychoanalytic sessions is the first step in that direction. It creates a field of tension between the theory and the raw facts to which it pertains. In this case, ‘the raw facts’ are the linguistic phenomena of psychotherapeutic INTRODUCTION

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practice. The transcripts give everyone the opportunity to judge how small or how significant the gap is between Lacanian theory and these facts.

The transcripts represent in a straightforward way what Lacanian theory is all about: the phenomenon of speech and its effects on the subject. Speaking makes a difference for humankind.

It touches us in our structure and our very being. Under certain conditions at least. Man can use words in many ways. This book aims to specify those conditions under which one can develop a kind of speech that generates humanity, and which allows the other to realize himself as a subject. It addresses those that are interested in the art of speaking because they wish to practice this art in the future, for example as a psychotherapist or a psychoanalyst. Or perhaps they are already practicing it and wish to be able to grasp and express more precisely what they do in their practice.

Or – why not – because they want to avail of this art because they are somehow suffering. It addresses, in the broadest sense, everyone that is in one way or another interested in the curious relationship of man with language and speech.

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