Conversations with Lacan

Full Video of Conversations with Lacan

Thank you, Fernando, for your presentation, better, for this obituary monument that you presented about myself… it is true that I am somewhat old. Of course, I thank the European Journal of Psychoanalysis and the Foundation of California Psychoanalysis for inviting me to present my latest book in English.

Anyway, I had the opportunity to read some of the presentations, and it is why I already know the questions which will be raised about my book and by certain illegitimate manoeuvres. I will try to answer before the questions will be raised. But, of course, we can come back to these questions. I will try now just a very rough answer.

I am impressed, not only in this case reading the presentations, but in general when I present my books, in Italy or in other countries, by the attention given at the title of my books. I think it is a very psychoanalytic interest. In fact, the title is something which always expresses the author’s unconscious. And I do not why, but the titles of my books intrigue many people. Of course, people ask what I meant with Conversations with Lacan, and why seven conversations, somebody also asked “but why seven and not six or eight?” The truth is that this English book was in a certain way a re-edition of a previous Italian book which was a real conversation with a young philosopher about Lacan, and even in this case there were seven conversations, maybe it is pure chance, who knows? But maybe this seven is quite a signifier. I have to say that for some of these signifiers, that is the title “Conversations with Lacan”, come from the big Other. You know that according to Lacan the big Other is the unconscious, but it does not mean, according to Lacan, that only big Other is the unconscious, unconscious certainly. Lacan said that unconscious is the discourse by the big Other, but big Other is not just all the unconscious, it can be also a publisher, in this case the publisher is Routledge, and I have to confess that the title was proposed by the publisher Routledge… Can a publisher be the unconscious of a writer?

My first naive idea was to write something completely non academic. A conversation for me is the contrary of the academic discourse, the Tractatus, I mean the lecture, where you talk to your colleagues. My idea was to converse with a non specialized audience, but conversation is not dialogue. Luis Rose will talk about his idea of my book, I am anticipating his thoughts… He fixed that… in a certain way my book deals essentially with dialogue, no? On the background of the idea that essentially psychoanalysis is a form of dialogue, but if the publisher would have proposed “Dialogue with Lacan” I would have absolutely refused this title. Why? Because dialogue is always, like the model of Socratic dialogue, a conversation between two real persons, one asks and the other responds, but I do not think that my aim was to talk, to dialogue with other people. I have a lot of other dialogues with friends, of course, but it wasn’t my aim with this book to have a dialogue. Even if Lacan in his Seminar VIII on transference said clearly that according to him Socrates was the first psychoanalyst, but certainly the Socratic dialogue is not at all what I would call the psychoanalytic conversation.

Why? In fact, my conversation is with whom? I said with the reader of course, but would say more frankly that essentially my conversation with the ghost of Lacan were in fact conversations with myself. The real conversation is not with another person but with myself. The point is “who is myself with whom I converse or I wanted to converse?”

In fact, this myself with whom I converse on Lacan, it is 50 years that I converse with myself about Lacan, never with Lacan because I met him in person, but I never had a dialogue with him. I conversed with myself, but this myself is essentially another. I was impressed by what Heidegger, the famous philosopher, said about his way of thinking. He said that “when we think philosophically, we converse always with our friend, our dear friend”, not in the sense that the friend is there, but on the contrary the friend is absent, and we converse with him anyway. We need the friend with whom to converse, but it is not important that the friend exists, he is there… And if I have to tell you a sort of very personal confession, personally, when I think about psychoanalysis, philosophy, everything, I converse with my father.

My father was also a philosopher, he died in 1973, long time ago, but in fact I can think only because I still talk with him. But not in the sense that it is a dialogue, because my father is dead and of course he never tells me anything. The real interlocutor of a conversation does not tell anything, no? But you need him or her, you need to talk to another, and it gives an idea of what Lacan means by the big Other. The big Other is not others with whom you have a dialogue, a conversation, but you need a dialogue with a big Other which by definition does not exist. It is the real point. For Lacan, psychoanalysis is not a dialogue between real persons like in Socratic dialogue, but it is a conversation with the big Other who does not exist.

We have some examples which come to my memory, I do not know if you saw this movie of the eighties, an old movie by Lars von Trier, Breaking the Waves. And the protagonist, a woman, often talks with god, and of course god is not there, she also acts the voice of god but for her it is essential to think only if she talks with god, why? Because god certainly is a metaphor of the unconscious, but not only unconscious, it is the big Other…

I was thinking in these days about the QAnon. You are all very competent about QAnon, this sect which organized essentially the attack on the Capitol in Washington, and you know that QAnon is convinced that America is ruled essentially by pedophiles from a pizza parlour, no? It is very easy to make an easy psychoanalysis and to interpret all this simply as paranoia, as projective identification, you know it is a little bit a very overused game…I would say that maybe for QAnon the pedophile organization is the big Other, it is the unconscious in the sense that maybe they consider themselves all as children harassed and abused by the powerful pedophiles. In a certain sense these crazy cults, I mean cults of fanatics, need a big Other in the form of an abusing big Other, and they are the children who have to react to these abuses.

Why seven conversations?

I do not know… Even this comes from the big Other, but not in the sense that it is the publisher, but maybe my own unconscious. Seven days is a week, maybe I think that essentially my book should be read in a week, each chapter every day… But a week in our culture has a very vast meaning, the week is the time, seven days which god used to build, to create the world, seven days in the week is the idea itself of creation… Maybe I thought unconsciously that I was god to create my book, but I do not think that at the seventh day I will rest, I mean, I do not think that I will rest like a god.

Another question … Castrillon said that my book, its aim, is not of popularizing Lacan, a vulgarization of Lacan’s thought, and I think he is completely right. My idea wasn’t at all a popularization, which means to transmit some basic signifiers to people, in order that common people can repeat the Lacanian signifiers (some do, and they look as very smart parrots). I do not like popularization, you know. Another of my masters is another dead person, Wittgenstein. Some can find strange to have as masters Wittgenstein and Lacan, who seem so opposite, two opposite sides of the Western thought. But in fact Lacan had a great admiration for Wittgenstein, and he dedicated one seminar to report his reading of the Tractatus by Wittgenstein. This is why I do not find it strange that I can be at once Wittgensteinian and Lacanian, they are not opposite. Then, Wittgenstein hated popular science writings, he thought that it was real bullshit, that vulgarization of modern physics, for example, was a cheat and he wrote: “Popular science writings does not reflect the hard work carried out by our scientists, but rather the resting on their laurels”. So, when I wrote this book I did want to rest on my laurels, like god in the Bible on the seventh day, I didn’t want to write my book on the seventh day, on Sunday. You have to explain to people who are not in the scientific game, people who don’t do psychoanalysis, who are curious about psychoanalysis, but they do not have experience of the real analysis. You know, a lot of divulgations, of reader’s digests, of books on psychoanalysis are not real psychoanalysis, it is just resting, it is just maybe sleeping in psychoanalysis.

I would also tell that, you know, this book has a lot of printing mistakes. I was surprised that a lot of things that I had corrected were not corrected by the publisher. It is a long list but I would like to concentrate especially on one mistake. It is why I warn you when you read especially banal sentences and maybe have some doubts, maybe it is a misprint. The most shocking for me it was a mistaken quotation from Saint Augustine. You read “Saint Augustine said that we must love”. This is a very banal sentence! That we must love. In fact, my real quotation was: “Saint Augustine said that we must love love”. Twice love, love as a verb and love as a substantive. But maybe the publisher’s computer interpreted a repetition of a word as a mistake, and it cut the second love. Of course, now it has completely different sense. One thing is to love, another thing is to love love. I do not know if there was a computer machine which erased the second love, but I think it is an important point in Lacan’s view of the language and of the signifier, because in a certain way the signifier appears rarely, and often when there is a repetition. We must love love, and at this point a signifier appears. It is just like when Tony Blair many years ago launched the slogan “Our solution is education, education, education”. I am told that some Brits did not understand this because it was too much signifier. Repetition is the mark of the signifier.

For example, in the famous film Matrix, the first of the series Matrix, the most interesting… You know the story. The hero, the protagonist, the One, at a certain point has the experience of the same scene… a cat which is going out from the door. This same scene repeats twice, and the hero concludes, “It’s not real, it’s the matrix, it’s a machine!”, it’s a signifier machine which is imposing this repetition of this stupid scene.

Because the repetition is the mark of the signifier and it’s why the banalization of even journalistic literature consists always in erasing everything which imposes on us the opacity of the signifier. It is why psychoanalysis in my view is not dialogue, because you have to deal with the opacity of the signifier, and I will say, finishing, that it is a very nice experience with translations. Many times, I ask translators to translate my text in different languages, sometimes they are very good translators, very careful, but often they make terrible mistakes not because they are not experts, but because unconsciously they try to erase, to kill the signifier, and the result of the translation is always banality.

Just to give an example… I published an article which had the title “I age therefore I am not” and the very good translator in English translated “I age therefore I am”. Why? Because in Descartes it is “I think therefore I am” and she was attracted by the banality of what she knows, because she heard it a hundred times. Like a magnet, banality attracts translators who find unconscious resistance to give room to the signifier, because in this case, like in “we must love love”, “therefore I am not” was strange, weird.

To conclude, what is the essential charm of a Lacanian thought? We can be against many of his ideas, but his merit, like in poetry, in literature, is to tell us to focus on signifiers, to focus on repetition, focus on what is completely new, I would say creative. And it is why he was, I think, the only psychoanalyst who gave great importance to an almost neglected text by Freud, The joke and its relationship with the unconscious. Here Freud shows that the joke, the humour, the sense of humour, verbal creativity, the capacity through the signifier to create new combinations, new sense, is linked to the unconscious. According to Lacan, unconscious is not just the repressed garbage according to many schools, but unconscious is the creation of the signifier, it is the source of creativity… but this creativity is quite hard for many to tolerate.

I would like to finish, I have started by a quotation by Wittgenstein, I would like to finish just by another quotation by Wittgenstein. He was talking about scientists, about the work of scientists but we can extend to all kinds of intellectual work. “What you succeeded in doing cannot signify anything more for others than it does for yourself, others will pay as much as it costs you”. If you want to understand Lacan, you have to pay, alas, the price he paid.

The questions and the provocations were so many, and I do not think that I will be able to answer all the questions, all the problems raised…

I am very grateful to all the presenters, because I realize that they read my book, not only read quickly, but they were able to understand the real important and questionable points. It seems obvious that when you present a book you have read the book, maybe in America it is absolutely obvious, but it is not true for example in Europe. In Italy many persons present a book that they do have not read, and I have a sort of sixth sense to understand if a presenter has read the book or not. A presentation is a sort of a ritual, and I realize with emotion that in this case, today, it wasn’t a ritual.

First of all, I would like to answer to a question which seems to me essential, maybe if I have time I will try to answer also to other questions or objections. I think that Emma’s question is essential: “if there is one thing I would like to hear from Sergio today, it centres on this question of the influence of his particular reading of Lacan on the clinic and of effect, expected, hoped, fantasized of Conversations with Lacan on practising analyst within their practice”. It raises the essential problem of the link between theory and practice in psychoanalysis.

I do not know in America, but I teach to many psychoanalytic or psychotherapy schools where we have a lot of young students who want to be initiated into the profession, and I think that most of these young persons are not at all interested in theory… They think that theory is something for theoreticians, they would just like to have some inputs, some basic tools, some concrete training in order to cure people, to be a successful psychotherapist or psychoanalyst, and to get a lot of money, they do not care at all about theory… And it is also true that in a certain sense, I do not know if it is also your experience in America, many colleagues, analysts or psychotherapists, are very successful without having any theoretical background, they are what I would call ‘Trump’s analysts’, I mean analysts who do not know anything about theory, they follow a very rough theory, but some of these are successful, they have a lot of clients and they… they work, they function with patients. I met people who spent years in psychotherapy with colleagues I despise as colleagues, but they had some good results and of course these colleagues do not have any kind of the theoretical worries we have here in this seminar.

The point is also that since Freud what is clear is that psychoanalysis is not a scientific psychology. The merit of Lacan was to push on this button that psychoanalysis is not an effective form of scientific psychology. Why? Because Freud said in a famous lecture that psychoanalysis is an impossible job, an impossible profession like governing, politics and educating. I would add also administering justice. To be a judge, to be an educator, to be a governor, and to be a psychoanalyst according to Freud were impossible jobs, and in fact their link with science, with the scientific knowledge, is not clear… Can we say that Biden defeated Trump because he was more scientific than Trump? No, we all think that if Biden defeated Trump, it is why he was a winner in order to get in touch with the unconscious of the American people. In fact, the (so) called impossible jobs are all works which deal with the unconscious.

The politician is not a scientist, he has to convince, to seduce people, I mean speaking to the unconscious of voters. The educator does the same thing, and the psychoanalyst does the same thing. It means that psychoanalysis is not based on an episteme. Episteme in Greek was a kind of knowledge, now it is a scientific knowledge. But psychoanalysis is based on phronesis… phronesis was translated by the Latin as prudentia, like in juris-prudence, the prudence. And I would say that psychoanalysis is not scientific psychology, it is not a technical application of a scientific theory, and that’s why we cannot talk about psychoanalytic technique but rather about a psychoanalytic ethical practice, which is not the same. Psychoanalysis is not scientific psychology but psycho-prudence. But what role does theory plays in this psycho-prudence? This idea that in a certain sense theory is not the master signifier of the practice was repeated by many analysts and Lacan was one of them. Many times, Lacan says that, when you meet a new analysand, you have to forget completely what you know. In a certain way it is a sort of Socratic recommendation, “I know that I don’t know”, if you deal with a new patient you have to forget completely your theory. Forget everything you know, but if you have to forget everything you know, what is the utility of theory? Is theory important in order to be forgotten when you deal with real cases? Of course, it is not something that just Lacan said, even Bion said that. Bion is a psychoanalyst very popular in Italy and one of his sentences is very famous among analysts. Bion recommended to erase all memory and desire when you meet an anlysand; you have to think that it is the first time you meet him or her, even if you meet him or her after years, you have to erase completely all your memory and all your desire. Bion was influenced by the Buddhist philosophy. Bion would say that in a certain sense analysis is the contrary of April, according to T.S. Eliot, which is the cruellest month because it mixes memory and desire…  Analysis is fall, not spring, is fall of memory and desire, something hic et nunc, here and now. Bion said, when you have to meet even a patient you follow for years, the session should be hic et nunc, like it was the first time you meet this person. This is in complete contrast with the Freudian idea of the Konstruktion, construction or reconstruction. The late Freud thought that analysis instead of being interpretation was a kind of a reconstruction.

In this horizon, what is the place of theory? Theory, episteme is useless. I have to say that it is also a matter of personal preference. People choose to become analysts for different reasons, for some it is a way to help people like nurses or doctors, why not? For others it is a way to cure people in a very sophisticated way, it is a successful cure, and for others it is also a way, especially for Freud and for Lacan, to understand something essential about human beings. It is why sometimes our colleagues do not do the same job essentially. Because I am also a philosopher, for me psychoanalysis is interesting, important, fascinating because it is the way to understand really, finally human beings, otherwise they are masks. But for others it is not important, they want to be Trump’s analysts…But in which sense Lacan or Bion are true when they say that we have to forget theory, memory and even desire? I think that erasing desire is impossible because I figure that what is important in any kind of transference is the fact that the analyst infects his or her client with his or her desire to analyze. The analyst has a very strong, terrible desire to analyze, he cannot live sometimes without analyzing, and this desire to analyze sooner or later infects like a coronavirus the analysand, and the transference is then possible. It is why I do not share Bion’s idea that the analyst has to give up desire. He should have a kind of super-desire… But what is true in Lacan’s idea – or for other analysts, because it is sort commonplace among important analysts that in practice you have always to forget your theory – and of course my students tell me “we are bored with bad theory, what to do with this specific patient?”, this is their claim… I think that theory is essential, but it is true Lacan’s idea that you have to forget it in order to make it work. The real theory is unconscious, it means that you who have to eat the theory in order that it becomes unconscious, you have to digest it, in a sort of theoretical cannibalism. And only when you have completely absorbed the theory as food, it becomes unconscious, then it can be useful for practice. It is true that Trump’s analysts can have some success, but when you deal with real problematic patients, when your patients push you to touch the real and it is the point that we have to consider real, you need theory, but you have to forget the theory. In a certain way theory is effective only when it is unconscious. It is as a capacity to produce good jokes.

It is why I find very naive a lot of clinical reconstructions not only by Lacanians but also by other schools, which try to demonstrate that in these cases their theory works. This is the function of the clinical vignette, which is typical of the psychoanalytic genre of papers. I find many analytic vignettes absolutely boring and superficial, they are artifacts, made up. You can talk about a case like Freud or like Klein did, writing a book about a case. But a clinical vignette is just propaganda, and I do not care about propaganda… If you reconstruct a clinical case you have to show in which way theory unconsciously inspired you to make the right interpretations or constructions. You need the theory in order to ignore theory, it is a paradox.

I would even say that in a certain sense psychoanalysis is an anti-theory, and it is what in a certain way Freud said in his most important and most enigmatic and dark paper he ever wrote, which is “Beyond  the lust principle” – I do not say “Beyond the pleasure principle”, I say “Beyond the lust principle”… There he said that in a certain way psychoanalysis had to construct an anti-theory. Why? Beyond psychoanalysis… The death drive, in fact, is what escapes all functional psychoanalytic interpretations, it is when you have to get in touch with something real in the unconscious, and you do not have any interpretation. Death drive is the non-interpretable and the non-constructable.

The difference finally between Lacanian approach, I mean the generations of Lacanian cults, and what Lacan tried to say in my view stands in that: that Lacan understood the self-critique of the late Freud of “Beyond of the pleasure principle” or “Beyond the lust principle”, in the sense that Freud acknowledges that in a certain way psychoanalysis is incomplete… Incompleteness, for people who know about mathematics, logic, philosophy, has a very important echo because the theory of incompleteness changed completely our world… Because of Gödel’s proof and a lot of other incompleteness’ theorems in quantum physics, we know that all mathematical logic, all physics’ theories are incomplete. And Freud with “Beyond the lust principle” reaches the same point: psychoanalysis is incomplete, and it is why as psychoanalysts we have to deal with something beyond psychoanalysis.

Lacan tried to show this ‘beyond’ psychoanalysis, this something which is not functional, because the previous psychoanalytic interpretations were interpretations based on the fact that even symptoms, even depression, all symptoms, dreams and everything, were functional to Lustprinzip, to the lust principle, they were functional. But at a certain point Freud recognizes that the unconscious, the human being, is essentially dysfunctional. And to be a psychoanalyst is not to interpret and to solve problems by interpretation and by explanation, some things in human beings are not at all explainable, and a real psychoanalyst has to deal with this inexplicable, unexplainable, which Freud called death drive. I think that Lacan called this death drive the real.

At the end, in psychoanalysis we have to deal with the real. And it is why I think the advantage of Lacan, in comparison to other theorists, who think that in a certain way everything in human being is functional, as in cognitive psychology. Cognitive psychologists bet on the fact that human beings look irrational but basically they are all rational, even if they behave in very strange and crazy ways, there is always a reason. “No”, Freud says that no, at the core of human beings there is something unreasonable, not explainable, and it is the real job of the analyst in a certain way, beyond any interpretation.

I think that each analyst has his or her own way to deal with his history, his theory, his practice… I do not think there is a general prescription, in a certain way each analyst should be able to create his own relationship to the unconscious. And of course if you are happy with your way, go ahead… The point which is more general, beyond what you do and what I do, is the general point of the trick of the theory. This point is a little bit more philosophical, in the sense that of course all philosophers of science tell that science is not based on facts but on theories, not all science is not based on experiences… You need first a theory, “Theory First!”, and you try to verify if this theory is supported by facts or falsified. [Maybe: Even in psychoanalysis you start from theory, because the analytic listening is based on theories, otherwise to listen to just noise… But I have also said that, instead than in sciences, in psychoanalysis you have to forget theory…] But forgetting is not something active, forgetting is to let go. I would say, if I forget my theory, I let go my theory, which sleeps (…). And the point is when the theory awakes again…

I think that the link between the theory and practice is a matter of art. I think one of the best books I read on science was this book by the chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi. In his book Personal Knowledge, he said that you do not have to believe what scientists publish, because they have to publish, and it is true also for psychoanalysis… If you read the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, you see that all authors reason and write in the same way, there is a pattern, which is the acceptable mainstream pattern. But Polanyi said that in fact a scientist does not respect that pattern at all in his real work. When he has to publish his results, he has to follow a certain philosophy of the academic scientific journal, but in fact each scientist knows something which is not demonstrated, but there is a sort of aesthetical practice, an untold insight, it is why Polanyi thinks that science is essentially an aesthetical experience. And I think that even psychoanalysis is an aesthetic experience, but it means that you have to be a good aesthetician, you know. Each of us tries to find the right combination between theory, practice, experience, but no model, no formalized model can tell you that you have to do like this, each of us has to find his own way to overcome its own dogmatic theory, the idea according to which in each case you have to apply a scheme. Even some Lacanian clinical cases are horrible because they are not true, they are just applications of a formal model, you do not see anything of the real subject…and so, each analyst has to find his or her own way. It dies not matter from which school she comes.

[Question from participant]

I remember that when Lacan spoke about hysterics, he said something important and paradoxical: “a woman is a woman who needs a master in order to dominate him”. The hysterics, if you know hysteric women, but even men sometimes are hysterical… The exemplary hysterical woman is Shakespeare’s Caterina of The Taming of the Shrew. Caterina is quite interesting because in this comedy she wants to be married, she does not say “I want to stay single, a spinster, I despise men”, she wants to be married, but she wants a marriage from a position of power. And the real hysterical demand “I need a master”, but an apparent master and husband because I have to dominate them. It is a paradox, if you have experience with hysterics is always this paradox.

[Question from participant]

Maybe, I do not know, I am not able to apply mechanically social events to psychoanalytic theory… Of course, I think that the real important text we have to deal with – and it is its centenary – is Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse, Psychology of crowds and analysis of the self. This is in a certain way a forgotten text by Freud, it has its limits but it is a very ambitious attempt by Freud to explain all kinds of social life from small groups or ephemeral groups to very structured ones like the church and the army… It is a cosmic theory about political life. We are performing in Italy a seminar for this centennial… But it is a little bit a forgotten Freudian text, why? Because, frankly speaking, most of Lacanians are Freudo-Marxists and this text by Freud is not at all Marxist, not at all, no Marxist can accept Freud’s ideas on Masse and it is why it is a repressed text in our field… It is a very complex text but, in the end, talking about social movements, in a certain sense Freud says that all politics is based on hypnosis. He had experience of hypnosis as a technique for many years, and he thought that social-political life is the hypnotic side of life. Why? Because in hypnosis you need a master, and in all political organizations you need a leader, a master… Freud was very skeptical about an egalitarian democracy. When Lacan said to young students at the University of Vincennes who contested him, “you need a master and you will have one”, in a certain way he repeated Freud’s idea that all crowds need a master, a leader, I would say a Führer. Frankly speaking, at the time – 1921 – fascism was not yet imposed, but Freud thought that the basic social link is fascist… I know that for Marxists it is very hard to tolerate this theory, but if you read carefully, without leftist filters and glasses this Freud’s beautiful text, what is clear is that fascism is the essence of all social crowds, and it is why it is a repressed text by the Freudian Academia. All political crowds are promised to fascism. Of course you can avoid fascism when you introduce into collectives something which Freud would call “the couple’s love”, because according to Freud, “the couple’s love” like Romeo and Juliet was antisocial. Freud was a romantic, he thought that Romeo and Juliet, Paolo and Francesca in Divine Comedy by Dante, they were the anti-social heroes and heroines, the real love between a man and a woman is the death of society and it is why, in a certain way, all kinds of communities try to repress sexuality, and it is the thesis of Civilization and its discontent. In a certain way civilization or culture, Kultur, hates couples, and it is why all civilizations try to recuperate sexuality into the form of family. Yes, if love gives birth to children, and if you have grandparents who help you to bring up these children, ok, love becomes completely socialized but, in a certain sense, Freud had this very romantic idea that, in a certain sense love is Romeo and Juliet, something socio-dystonic I would say, and it is also tragic because it is anti-social.

Just to say that I am sorry of not having answered to Patricia’s questions which were very important, you know, I did not have time, but I will do it maybe personally. I did not have time to answer to her very important notice.