An interpretation whose effects one understands is not a psychoanalytic interpretation. Jacques Lacan, in Fink, 1997, p.45 If there is one thing that has to be called into question, it is the simple function of intersubjectivity, as though it were a simple dual relationship between a sender and a receiver that worked all by itself. It’s not that at all. -Lacan, My Teaching, P. 85 You must not rack your brains to try and understand this by seeking to compare it with something similar that is already familiar to you; you must recognize in it a fundamentally new fact. --Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis How many times have I said to those under my supervision, when they said to me—I had the impression he meant this or that—that one of the things we must guard most against is to understand too much, to understand more than what is in the discourse of the subject. To interpret and to imagine one understands are not at all the same things. It is precisely the opposite. I would go so far as to say that it is on the basis of a kind of refusal of understanding that we push open the door to analytic understanding. -- Jacques Lacan. Seminar I, p.73 We must not forget that the analytic relationship is based on a love of truth—that it precludes any kind of sham or deceit. --Sigmund Freud, SE 23:248 It is because language exists that truth exists, as everyone can come to see. --Lacan, My Teaching, 29 Think about it in crude terms for a bit. The language apparatus is there somewhere in the brain, like a spider. It has a hold. That might shock you and you might ask ‘Oh come on really, what are you talking about, where does this language come from?’ I have no idea. I’m under no obligation to know everything. And besides, you don’t know anything about it either. --Lacan, My Teaching, 33 The real is what does not depend on my idea of it. --Lacan, Seminar XI We believe that in general we are free to choose what words we shall use for clothing our thoughts or what images for disguising them. Closer observation shows that other considerations determine this choice, and that behind the form in which the thought is expressed a glimpse may be had of a deeper meaning—often one that is not intended. The images and turns of phrase to which a person is particularly given are rarely without significance when one is forming a judgment of him; and others often turn out to be allusions to a theme which is being kept in the background at the time, but which has powerfully affected the speaker. In the course of some theoretical discussions I heard someone at a particular time repeatedly using the expression: ‘If something suddenly shoots through ones head’. I happened to know that he had recently received news that a Russian bullet had passed right through the cap that his son was wearing on his head. Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life It runs: ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.’ It is known throughout the world and is undoubtedly older than Christianity, which puts it forward as its proudest claim. Yet it is certainly not very old; even in historical times it was still strange to mankind. Let us adopt a naive attitude towards it, as though we were hearing it for the first time; we shall be unable then to suppress a feeling of surprise and bewilderment. Why should we do it? What good will it do us? But, above all, how shall we achieve it? How can it be possible? My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection. It imposes duties on me for whose fulfilment I must be ready to make sacrifices. If I love someone, he must deserve it in some way. … He deserves it if he is so like me in important ways that I can love myself in him; and he deserves it if he is so much more perfect than myself that I can love my ideal of my own self in him…... But if he is a stranger to me and if he cannot attract me by any worth of his own or any significance that he may already have acquired for my emotional life, it will be hard for me to love him. Indeed, I should be wrong to do so, for my love is valued by all my own people as a sign of my preferring them, and it is an injustice to them if I put a stranger on a par with them. But if I am to love him (with this universal love) merely because he, too, is an inhabitant of this earth, like an insect, an earth-worm or a grass-snake, then I fear that only a small modicum of my love will fall to his share.....On closer inspection, I find still further difficulties. Not merely is this stranger in general unworthy of my love; I must honestly confess that he has more claim to my hostility and even my hatred. He seems not to have the least trace of love for me and shows me not the slightest consideration. If it will do him any good he has no hesitation in injuring me, nor does he ask himself whether the amount of advantage he gains bears any proportion to the extent of the harm he does to me. Sigmund Freud , Civilization and its Discontents Thus they love their delusions as they love themselves. That is the secret. Sigmund Freud 1894 Freud calls it Hemmung, inhibition. It’s simply a matter of this sort of opposition that’s fundamentally basic to the dual relation—it shows up as whatever objection you can oppose to what I present as object. It’s quite natural—you get ready to withstand the shock, the approach, the pressure. What thus organizes itself is what’s usually called defense—the most elementary force. This is indeed what’s at stake in these preludes, that can be made in thousands of ways. Sometimes non-sens plays the introductory role here, as provocation, drawing mental attention in a certain direction. There’s a lure in a sort of corrida—sometimes it’s comic, sometimes it’s obscene. Jacques Lacan, Seminar V Now where does comedy come from? We’re told it comes from this banquet where ultimately man says yes to some sort of orgy—we’ll leave this word all its vagueness. The meal is constituted by an offering to the gods—that is to say, to the Immortals of language. Eventually the entire process of desire’s elaboration in language leads back to and gathers together the consummation of a banquet. The whole detour is made only to return to jouissance – the most elementary, at that Voila -- this is the way comedy makes its entrance into what one could. with Hegel, treat as the aesthetic face of religion. Jacques Lacan, Seminar V It is the nature of our waking thought to establish order in material of that kind, to set up relations in it and to make it conform to our expectations of an intelligible whole. In fact, we go too far in that direction. An adept in sleight of hand can trick us by relying upon this intellectual habit of ours. In our efforts at making an intelligible pattern of the sense-impressions that are offered to us, we often fall into the strangest errors or even falsify the truth about the material before us. The evidences of this are too universally known for there to be any need to insist upon them further. In our reading we pass over misprints which destroy the sense, and have the illusion that what we are reading is correct. …..There is no doubt, then, that it is our normal thinking that is the psychical agency which approaches the content of dreams with a demand that it must be intelligible, which subjects it to a first interpretation and which consequently produces a complete misunderstanding of it. For the purposes of our interpretation it remains an essential rule invariably to leave out of account the ostensible continuity of a dream as being of suspect origin, and to follow the same path back to the material of the dream-thoughts, no matter whether the dream itself is clear or confused. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams Evil is the moment when I lack the strength to be true to the Good that compels me. Alain Badiou
Posted on: Wed, 24 Dec 2014 23:42:10 +0000
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