Conceptions of the Unconscious and Doctrines of Interpretation
Lieve Billet
A matter of technique – a metapsychological stake
Lacan’s teaching is not One. It extends over several decades and is deployed through changeable slippages, references and inspirations, through radical reversals, even. For many years now, Jacques-Alain Miller’s lecture course has served as a compass for reading and exploring this teaching. His 1995-1996 lecture course The Flight of Meaning [La fuite du sens] was devoted to the question of interpretation in psychoanalysis.
It was at the time when the theme oriented the work of the WAP [AMP] schools in preparation for the WAP Congress in Buenos Aires, which was devoted to the theme of interpretation.[1] The day before the course in question, Jacques-Alain Miller had given a lecture that attracted considerable attention at the XXVIth Journées of the ECF, where he had approached the question of interpretation in a novel way.
The text of this lecture, published under the title Interpretation in Reverse [L’envers de l’interpretation], is taken up again in the bibliography we are preparing for the NLS Congress.
Lacan’s teaching is not One and neither is his doctrine of interpretation. How could it be? This is because the question of interpretation can in no way be reduced to a technique, a matter of practical know-how [savoir-faire]. The question of interpretation has a metapsychological stake, insofar as it is linked to the definition of the unconscious, of language, of the Other itself. The doctrine of interpretation will differ depending on whether the unconscious is approached as intersubjectivity, structure or apparatus of jouissance. It will differ in the era of the complete Other, the barred Other or the Other that does not exist. Its principles will differ depending on whether they are oriented by the law of recognition, the laws of language, or the law of equivocation. I am referring, broadly, to the different periods that Jacques-Alain Miller named for us: Lacan’s inaugural teaching, his classical teaching, and Lacan’s last teaching.
Interpretation problematised
Jacques-Alain Miller emphasises that Lacan’s teaching presents itself as a sustained attempt to articulate the two aspects of the Freudian discovery, namely the discovery of the unconscious as decipherable and the discovery of the drive as a source of satisfaction. The inaugural step of Lacan was to disentangle the theory of deciphering the unconscious from the theory of the drives. Interpretability is what, above all, defines the Freudian unconscious for Lacan. The study of the dream, the royal road to the unconscious, is complemented by the study of the slip of the tongue and the witticism. Lacan groups them under the term “formations of the unconscious”. In order that a phenomenon may be relatable to the unconscious, you have to be able to detect in it an intention of signification, a ‘want-to-say’ [vouloir-dire]. This ‘want-to-say’ goes hand in hand with a certain not being able to say, relating to repression.
At the beginning, then, all the emphasis is on deciphering, on meaning, on the ‘want-to-say’. From this perspective, there is no problem with the interpretability of the unconscious. It rather goes without saying. But the more Lacan’s teaching develops, the more interpretation becomes problematic. The unconscious will no longer be defined uniquely from the ‘will-to-say’. Lacan goes on to take into account that other aspect of the Freudian discovery, that of satisfaction, through the concept of jouissance, which is presented in successive paradigms. Jouissance will occupy an ever more central and primordial place. The ‘want-to-say’ will yield its place to the ‘will-to-enjoy’ [vouloir-jouir]. In the era of the ‘will-to-enjoy’, interpretation no longer goes without saying.
I would like to take up with you today some important moments in Lacan’s teaching concerning interpretation. Its key terms will be punctuation, allusion and equivocation. I will draw on Jacques-Alain Miller’s 1995-1996 course in order to do so. At the end, I will come back to Jacques-Alain Miller’s lecture Interpretation in Reverse. In this lecture he opposes interpretation in the era of the unconscious as a ‘want-to-say’ to interpretation in the era of the unconscious as a ‘will-to-enjoy’. Miller specifies them as interpretation in the same mode as the unconscious versus interpretation as the unconscious in reverse, or even interpretation as punctuation versus interpretation as cut.
Punctuation, historicisation, enjoining [intimation]
The text Function and Field of Speech and Language constitutes the core of Lacan’s inaugural teaching. The third part of this text is entitled: The Resonances of Interpretation and the Time of the Subject in Psychoanalytic Technique. Lacan’s starting point is the interpretable unconscious. We know that Lacan’s reference to language is Saussure; it is from him that he borrows the distinction between signifier and signified. But, in addition to interest in language, there is interest in speech. Unlike Saussure who is purely interested in the word – which implies a purely static, synchronic approach – Lacan is also interested in speech. Speech adds the diachronic dimension. Lacan’s reference there is Hegel’s notion of intersubjectivity.
In this way, Lacan twists Saussure right away. He does this by shifting and uncoupling the signifier and the signified by temporalising their relation. He introduces a dynamic. It is quite striking that in Function and Field, Lacan’s starting point is not from the formations of the unconscious, but from the treatment itself, from the speech of the analysand and the speech of the analyst. The unconscious is structured as speech, speech addressed to the Other.
I am presenting the doctrine of interpretation in this text starting from three key terms: punctuation, historicisation, enjoining. We should note firstly that punctuation is a classical term concerning interpretation, in the sense that the absence of punctuation is a source of ambiguity, as Lacan notes in Function and Field itself: “It is a fact, which can be plainly seen in the study of manuscripts of symbolic writings, whether the Bible or the Chinese canonical texts, that the absence of punctuation in them is a source of ambiguity. Punctuation, once inserted, establishes the meaning; changing the punctuation renews or upsets it; and incorrect punctuation distorts it.” (E 313-314) (tr. Fink, 2006, 258). If, above all, Saussure puts the emphasis on the arbitrary in the relation between signifier and signified, Lacan puts the emphasis on the absence of any fixed relation. The signifier and the signified are not two sides of the same coin. Between the two there is a gap. This gap is the condition of interpretation. Interpretation is obligatory and necessary – it does not come as a surplus. It is the obligatory passage of the signifier into the signified. Lacan’s thesis is that the passage of the signifier into the signified is realised in speech. The central term is that of punctuation. “It is, therefore, a propitious punctuation that gives meaning to the subject’s discourse.” (E 252) (tr. Fink, 2006, 209). This is what the analyst does through interpretation. The analyst punctuates the subject’s speech: “(…) we do no more than give the subject’s speech its dialectical punctuation.” (E 310) (tr. Fink, 2006, 255). This punctuation is linked to the function of time. The major example of this is the time, the duration, of the session. The cut of the session is a punctuation. “That is why the ending of the session – which current technique makes into an interruption that is determined purely by the clock and, as such, takes no account of the thread of the subject’s discourse – plays the part of a scansion which has the full value of an intervention by the analyst that is designed to precipitate concluding moments [the moment to conclude][les moments concluants].” (E 252) (tr. Fink, 2006, 209). It is, therefore, starting from the function of punctuation that Lacan justifies the practice of the short or variable session.
I will turn to the second key term: historicisation. At the centre of the conception of speech, we find the opposition between empty speech and full speech. Full speech is speech that historicises. It reorders chronological events by giving them new meanings. The fact that meaning is retroactive achieves a restructuring of the subject, a resubjectification. The unconscious is history, or more precisely a certain opacity of history, an opacity that affects this resignification of the event, that inhibits the historicising operation of speech. “The unconscious is the chapter of my history that is marked by a blank or occupied by a lie: it is the censored chapter.” (E 259) (tr Fink, 2006, 215). Interpretation aims at reducing this opacity in order to re-establish historicisation. By bringing with it a new punctuation, interpretation enables this significatory conclusion to be achieved and frees the imprisoned meaning.
A word, finally, about the third term: enjoining. Enjoining refers to intersubjectivity. Interpretation is speech that is, properly speaking, intersubjective, passing from subject to subject. It aims to implicate the patient-subject in his own message, and supposes, also, that the analyst, as subject, commits himself to his own. That is why Freud, as the one who discovered psychoanalysis, is the major example for Lacan, not so much for the content of his interpretations than for his involvement in their enunciation. Full speech is speech that engages the subject. The reference for interpretation is the subject, the subject to be evoked, invoked even, in order to transform him. “For the function of language in speech is not to inform but to evoke. What I seek in speech is the response of the other.” (E 299) (tr. Fink, 2006, 246). Lacan’s starting point is that at the heart of interpretation, there is an enjoining. There is an imperative value to interpretation (as in the major example of full speech: ‘You are my wife’). Interpretation is the imposition of a signifier that makes of the subject a metaphor, which transforms him. This interpretation, this transformation of the subject, is what Lacan calls recognition. His point of departure is that interpretation is fundamentally recognition. This supposes a subject animated by the desire for recognition.
By way of a propitious punctuation, interpretation thus realises full speech, which recognises the subject by rehistoricising him.
Desire, allusion, lack-in-being
I will leave the inaugural moment of Lacan’s teaching there to turn to the so-called classical period. The bibliography of the Congress takes up two important texts from this period, namely Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud – in which Lacan gives a new definition to the laws of language and the unconscious – and the text The Direction of the Treatment [La direction de la cure], in which he updates the principles of the analytic treatment starting from that point. In this text, Lacan denounces the post-Freudian practice of psychoanalysis, such as he sees exemplified in the contemporary publication Psychoanalysis Today [La psychanalyse d’aujourd’hui]. Claiming to go beyond the Freudian discovery through the recognition of the counter-transference and the analysis of the resistances, this post-Freudian practice became an anti-Freudian practice. Aiming at an ‘emotional re-education of the patient’, the treatment was downgraded to an exercise in power, forgetting the subject of the unconscious to the advantage of the Ego. Misrecognising the source of impasses it creates by falling back on the imaginary axis, it can only reinforce those impasses. That is how, by a reinforcement of power in the guise of the analysis of resistances, it accords with the resistance of the analysand.
Lacan criticises and refounds psychoanlytic practice by way of a triptych that has become classical: the triptych of tactics, strategy and politics. It is at the level of tactics that he situates interpretation – the analyst pays for it with his words; at the level of strategy, he situates transference – the analyst pays for it with his person; and at the level of politics, he situates the aim [la finalité] of the analysis – the analyst pays for it with what is essential to his most intimate judgement.
First, a few words on Instance of the Letter. To the binary of speech and language is added the notion of the letter. Lacan calls the letter the signifier in its capacity as detachable from any value of signification and as localised in a materiality, as it is when it is printed. “By ‘letter’ I designate the material medium [support] that concrete discourse borrows from language.” (E 495) (tr. Fink, 2006, 413) If speech and language are not new in themselves, the way the two are conceived is quite different from the way they are conceived in Function and Field. It is no longer the law of intersubjectivity that is at the centre, but laws that determine the apparition of signification. The opposition between full speech and empty speech fades into the background to make space for the opposition between metaphor and metonymy. The emphasis is less on speech than on language as structure.
Lacan no longer approaches the unconscious from the treatment, but from the formations of the unconscious. He speaks of ‘canonical’ books on the matter of the unconscious. (E 522) In the mechanisms of the unconscious described by Freud, namely condensation and displacement, Lacan recognises the mechanisms of language, metaphor and metonymy. At the centre, essentially, is the relation of the signifiers between themselves, in the two forms of combination and substitution, with meaning appearing as an effect of this combination or substitution: an effect that is retained in metonymy and an effect that emerges in metaphor. The metonymical drift of signifiers in the chain is arrested by metaphor, which produces an effect of meaning.
This is what Lacan will formalise in the schema of the quilting point. A major example of the quilting point will be the Name-of-the-Father, which is, in effect, “a machine that generates meaning”. This quilting point forms the basis of what he goes on to develop as the graph of desire. Lacan identifies the symptom with metaphor, desire with metonymy. If the symptom is a metaphor, desire is a metonymy (E 528), writes Lacan at the end of the text. This desire, which is a pure effect of the metonymical structure of speech, has nothing to do any more with the desire for recognition in Function and Field. What does this imply for interpretation, which in that text aimed precisely at recognition?
Lacan presents his ‘classical’ doctrine on interpretation in his text The Direction of the Treatment. Let us remind ourselves of a few theses from this text: the aim of interpretation is not to convince the patient, but to get free association going again (E 595); the inexactitude of an interpretation does not prevent it from being true (E 597); interpretation does not have to wait for consolidation of the transference: the sequence of analytic effects goes from rectification of the relations of the subject to the real, to the development of the transference, and finally to interpretation (E 598) – theses that are inscribed in the considerable critique of the post-Freudians to oppose in them what Freud’s texts underline.
But the central thesis that Lacan develops in the last part of the text, is the one that desire must be taken literally/to the letter (à la lettre), the thesis that desire is its interpretation. This is a sentence that links desire and interpretation by putting them in a series, or even by rendering them identical. Interpretation, in its aim, points to the desire with which it is, in a certain sense, identical. Indeed, interpretation is not a meta-language, it does not consist in the translation of a text into another language, one that is supposed to say the ultimate word on desire. Desire and interpretation are the same thing, as are dreams and their associations, as Freud underlines it. But desire as such cannot be grasped. Desire is that which necessarily escapes, it is that which is beyond. Desire is the metonymy of lack-in-being, with which the subject is identified. Interpretation will have to aim at desire by way of allusion. Lacan evokes the figure of Saint John pointing his finger at the empty sky, a passage that Pierre-Gilles Guéguen takes up in his argument for the Congress.
In Function and Field, interpretation aims at recognition of the subject. But recognition is always, ultimately, a question of identification, of identification to a signifier, full speech. In The Direction of the Treatment, it is not a question of recognising the subject by identifying him with a signifier, it is about preserving the place of desire with which the subject is identified, but precisely not as a signifier but as a lack. Lacan evokes both the words with which the analyst must pay, as well as his silence. “What silence must the analyst now impose upon himself if he is to make out, rising above the bog, the raised finger of Leonardo’s ‘St John the Baptist’, if interpretation is to find anew the forsaken horizon of being in which its allusive virtue must be deployed?” (E 641) (tr. Fink, 2006, 536) It is not through their metaphorical effect (as quilting point, we could say) that the words of the analyst interpret, they operate in as much as they get the metonymy of the signifying chain going again and in so doing evoke the metonymy of desire. What counts is not so much the signified that they make emerge, but the meaning beyond. Allusion operates in the gap between what is said and what cannot be said, that which escapes words. It is the gap between the signified and the meaning beyond.
Taking its definition from the laws of language, the unconscious remains first and foremost a ‘want-to-say’. All that concerns satisfaction, all that is of the order of libido, is reduced to the category of desire and thus remains fundamentally submitted to the signifier. This changes with the new status Lacan gives to the unconscious in his Seminar XI and the text which takes it up again, Position of the Unconscious. The unconscious will no longer takes its definition purely from the signifier, from language, the object of the drive will be included in the very definition of the unconscious. In the constitution of the subject, the operation of separation is added to the operation of alienation. If the unconscious opens, it closes just as well. In the various guises of the object a, something of jouissance is integrated into the unconscious. This does not go without posing problems for interpretation. If interpretation is consistent with desire, it is not so with jouissance. What is interpretation if the unconscious does not take its definition starting from the effect of meaning, but if it has to make space in the status of the unconscious for the object a? Jacques-Alain Miller underlines that in Seminar XI the doctrine of interpretation lags behind the new definition of the unconscious. It is only later that Lacan draws the consequences of what he advances in Seminar XI, by accentuating that interpretation must bear on the object little a, cause of desire. (Not on desire as in The Direction of the Treatment, but on the object a, cause of desire.) It is there that the act of the analyst will come to the fore.
Lalangue, disarticulation, equivocation
I have said a few words about the status of the unconscious as intersubjectivity in the inaugural teaching of Lacan. I have said a few words about the status of the unconscious as a signifying structure, even if it is decompleted by that which is of another order, but whose definition all the same derives from a signifier, since the object a is defined as that which escapes the signifier – the classical teaching of Lacan. I have said a few words about the doctrine of interpretation that accords with it in each case. I now come to the last teaching of Lacan, which Jacques-Alain Miller situates from the 1970s, and more particularly from the new relation Lacan establishes between language and jouissance in Seminar XX, Encore, determining a new status of the unconscious. Lacan disconnects signifier and signified; he substitutes a so-called special effect of jouissance for the effect of signification, related to the signifier as its cause. “The signifier is the cause of jouissance.” (Seminar XX, 27) (tr. Fink, 1998, 24) He disconnects the signifier from the effect of meaning, he uncouples [désappareille] jouissance from the drive. “Reality is approached with apparatuses [les appareils] of jouissance. That is another formulation I am proposing to you, as long as we focus, of course, on the fact that there’s no other apparatus than language. That is how jouissance is fitted out [appareillée] in speaking beings.” (Seminar XX, 52) (tr. Fink, 1998, 55). There we have Lacan’s thesis: language does not serve communication as much as it serves jouissance.
Several new concepts will appear as this thesis unfolds, like a-speech [l’apparole] (spelt as one word with two “p’s”, so as to reverberate with apparatus [appareil]) and lalangue, contrasting with the concepts of the classical teaching.[2] Language appears as a reduction of lalangue, knowledge’s lucubration over the signifying material of sound. “Llanguage [Lalangue] serves purposes that are altogether different from that of communication. That is what the experience of the unconscious has shown us, insofar as it is made of llanguage, which, as you know, I write with two l’s to designate what each of us deals with, our so-called mother tongue [lalangue dite maternelle), which isn’t called that by accident.” (Seminar XX, 126) (tr. Fink, 1998, 138). Lalangue includes a dimension that is irreducibly diachronic, since it is, essentially, alluvial. It is made up of alluvium, which each of us accumulates from misunderstandings and linguistic creations. The essential phenomenon regarding what Lacan called lalangue is jouissance, not meaning. Its material is the isolated signifier, S1, extracted from the chain.
Inasmuch as it is made up of lalangue, the unconscious changes its status radically. The unconscious is less a ‘want-to-say’ than a ‘will-to-enjoy’. The whole problem consists in knowing what, from this perspective, becomes of interpretation, indeed of the analyst’s intervention. What is an analytic interpretation if the correlative to interpretation is not language but lalangue? An interpretation which restores language, which disarticulates, which restores the solitary status of the S1, that extracts it from the chain and cuts the effect of meaning, is an interpretation which attacks the very relation between what is understood/heard [s’entend] in what is said. The site and proper means for this interpretation is equivocation. Equivocation aims at disarticulating the signifier, at going beyond language as knowledge’s lucubration over lalangue, inasmuch as it determines the speaking being.
Interpretation as the unconscious in reverse
It is starting from Lacan’s late teaching that Jacques-Alain Miller presents what he names interpretation in reverse, understood as “the unconscious, structured like a language, in reverse”. As I indicated at the beginning, the text of this title is the text of a lecture given at the 1995 Journées of the ECF. He opposes interpretation that is in the same mode as the unconscious to interpretation as the unconscious in reverse. What is that about? The first is interpretation in the era of the unconscious structured as a language, the second is interpretation in the era of the unconscious made up of lalangue.
Taking its definition not starting from consciousness but from the function of speech in the field of language, the unconscious takes place in the gap. It is the gap between what the subject wants to say [veut dire] and what he says, between the subject’s intention of signification, proper to the subject, and the trajectory of the signifier. The intention of the subject is taken up again, interpreted, by the signifier itself, by the Other. In this sense, interpretation is none other than the unconscious itself as Other place, Andere Schauplatz. This implies that the interpretation of the analyst does not come first. When the analyst interprets, he merely takes over from the interpreter-unconscious that precedes him.
For me, this is an echo of what Lacan goes on to say in Seminar XXIII, The Sinthome, when he says, “The hypothesis of the unconscious, (…), can only hold by supposing the Name-of-the-Father.” (XXIII, 136). The Name of the Father, what else is it other than a principle of interpretation, a machine that generates meaning? That is why, moreover, we can call paranoia – which constructs a variant of the neurotic’s Oedipal delusion about the Name-of-the-Father – a malady of interpretation. This shows the affinity between delusion and the interpreter-unconscious. Interpretation is not of an other order than that of the unconscious. We have seen that in his later teaching, Lacan goes beyond the Name-of-the-Father, beyond the unconscious structured as a language, beyond the interpreter-unconscious. An analytic practice which aims for this beyond cannot interpret in the mode of the unconscious. It has to interpret contrary to the unconscious.
What does this mean? Jacques-Alain Miller invites us to start from the clinic of psychosis and to think neurosis from psychosis. There we find the elementary phenomenon, which brings to the fore the presence of a lone signifier, awaiting a second that would give it meaning, that would interpret it. This is the work of delusion. An interpretation in the mode of the unconscious in reverse does not proceed like delusion, even if it is Oedipal delusion. The S1 is retained, as nonsensical, as an element of lalangue.
Interpretation in the mode of the unconscious in reverse does not proceed by way of punctuation (a term we are acquainted with from Function and Field and which Miller takes up again to summarise the doctrine of interpretation in the era of the unconscious as a ‘want-to-say’), it does not operate on the signifier in the chain, but on the cut. The cut isolates the signifier in the chain.
Translated by Michele Julien
References:
Miller J-A., The Flight of Meaning [La fuite du sens], 1995-1996 course, published in La cause freudienne N˚.34, under the title “Le monologue de l’apparole”.
Miller J-A., Interpretation in Reverse [L’envers de l’interpretation] tr. Bulletin of the NLS 4, originally published in La cause freudienne N˚.32, 1996
Miller J-A., (ed.) Les pouvoirs de la parole, Collection AMP, 1996, Le Seuil
S. Nacht (ed.) La Psychanalyse d’aujourdhui, 1956. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Lacan J., The Seminar, Book XX, Encore (tr. B. Fink) 1998
The English translation here borrows from Bruce Fink.
Lacan J., Ecrits (tr. B. Fink) Norton, 2006
The English translation here borrows Bruce Fink’s translation of:
Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis
The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud
The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power
Position of the Unconscious
[1] The publication of the collection The Powers of Speech [Les pouvoirs de la parole] formed part of this preparation.
[2] Jacques-Alain Miller presents them in detail in his lecture course The Flight of Meaning [La fuite du sens], published in La cause freudienne N˚. 34, under the title The monologue of a-speech [Le monologue de l’apparole].