VERS TEL AVIV 39 / TOWARDS TEL AVIV 39

Xe Congrès NLS 16-17 juin 2012 / 10th NLS Congress 16-17 June 2012

30 mars 2012
30 March 2012

VERS TEL AVIV 39 - Préparation en Israël – compte rendu

TOWARDS TEL AVIV 39 - Preparations in Israel - Report

"The Symptom: Substitute Formation"

Report on the Preparatory Seminar Towards the 10th NLS Congress "Reading a Symptom"
Tel Aviv, 27 January, 2012

On 27 January, 2012, we welcomed Anne Lysy (ECF, NLS, WAP, current President of the NLS), and Guy Briole (ECF, WAP), both of them currently AE's. Anne Lysy and Guy Briole joined members of the GIEP and guests for a preparatory seminar towards the10th NLS Congress, "Reading a Symptom," which is to take place in Tel Aviv on 16-17 June 2012. The title chosen for the preparatory seminar was "Symptom: Substitute Formation." The title was chosen by Claudia Iddan in accordance with the topic of the forthcoming Congress, with a Freudian emphasis in mind.

At the opening of the seminar, Gabriel Dahan, member of the GIEP and the NLS, made a few introductory remarks on the topic of the preparatory seminar. Referring to Freud's statements on infantile sexuality from 1938, Dahan pointed out that in these statements, Freud moves from reading in terms of impotence to reading in terms of the impossible, what he calls "the inherently unsatisfactory nature" of infantile masturbation. Towards the end of Freud's life, then, infantile sexuality becomes a model of the impossible. The logic of transition from symptom to sinthome, Dahan concluded, rests on the same transition from impotence to impossibility.

Anne Lysy introduced her talk by posing the question of what, in an analysis, changes and what does not change. She testified that this question had preoccupied her long before the end of her analysis, especially in relation to recurrent encounters with impediments. The topic of the forthcoming Congress, Anne Lysy said, was for her an echo of her own question, as in Jacques-Alain Miller's presentation of the topic, the question of the symptom and its destiny at the end of analysis was in fact the pivot. In that presentation, Miller approaches thequestion of the symptom starting from Lacan's late teaching, where the symptom is defined as a body event and no longer as a revelation of meaning; the symptom has a face of the real, beyond the defiles of the signifier and of desire, and manifest in the materiality of the letter, which is outside anysense. In this, Miller delineates not only our work towards the Congress butalso an orientation for the cure: to read a symptom is to reduce it to its primal formula, to the material encounter between the body and a signifier that marks it and produces an opaque jouissance. This is the very origin of the subject, which does not cease repeating itself. This brings us to the era of the ‘Ur’ – Freud’s Urverdrängung. Anne Lysy reiterated the connection Miller makes between this primal body event and what Freud calls fixation. For Freud, fixation is at the root of repression. It is a registration of a trauma – a moment of too much energy in the psychic apparatus - to which there is an exigency of the drive to return. It is because this primal trauma is a purely economic moment, devoid of any content, Anne Lysy said, that changes effected in an analysis are never full, always leaving symptomatic residues, which are of the order of the impossible. The current experience of the Pass too, Anne Lysy suggested, had led Miller to emphasize, in recent years, a post-interpretive analytic practice orienting the subject to elements of his own existence that are outside the signifying articulation S1-S2. Are theseelements primal words? Traces? Sentences that had been heard? Sounds, and nothing more? Anne Lysy proposed to answer these questions from her own experience as a subject. She pointed to her unexpected discovery, during the last years of analysis, of what defines and motivates her, starting from two interpretations concerning the same point, a difficult-to-name bodily sensation that may bedescribed as a kind of boiling. The first interpretation, "you are a runner" ("une coureuse"), Anne Lysy said, returned her to her recurrent complaint of ceaselessly running and exhausting herself, expending much energy. The second interpretation was "to expend much energy - this is your style, your solution...". Anne Lysy referred to these two interpretations as "shock interpretations", which touch the sinthome but whose resonances may be approached only by approximation, as there is no truth of jouissance. Nevertheless, Anne Lysy said, she could point out several characteristics of the sinthome that the two shock interpretations targeted: 1) It does not cease. 2) It was always there, even beyond screen memories. 3) It has no form and is not localized in the body perceived as image. 4) It is not a formation of the unconscious. 5) It is not precisely datable as a spoken word or as a scene.

She could point to this in-form, Anne Lysy added, as what moves the body as a result of the shock of lalangue, maybe to be paraphrased as what Lacan called “the unfathomable decision of being”. The shock interpretations preceding the end of her analysis by a few years, shetestified, did not void the sinthome. They led her to assent to it, to articulate the end of her analysis as what includes what is of the order of ‘what is’, in addition to what is of the order of what there is not: there is no signifier for the Woman, there is no last word, there is no subject supposed to love on whom to lean, but there is that push. It was that same push, Anne Lysy added, that had propelled her to the end of analysis, to the decision to wager upon it instead of complaining about it.

Anne Lysy concluded her presentation with two remarks. The first was that two conditions for what was for her the end of analysis were the work of analytic emptying and the presence of the analyst. The second was that the signifier for the clinamen of jouissance in the sinthome ("runner") is not a name that names the thing, nor does it exhaust being. The sinthome remains foreign to her, she testified, even if she had recognized herself in it. What is at stake in the sinthome for her is not the making of a name, but a knowledge about how to do with the symptom, which cannot be acquired and is not guaranteed in advance: a running that is continuous but in which one is always taking the first step.

Guy Briole began his presentation, which he entitled "Anxiety without a Safety Net," by reminding us that for Lacan, anxiety is an affect: one that does not deceive, and that is located in relation to the objet a. Anxiety is the signal of the presence of this object. Unlike phobia, which can be named, anxiety is intransitive. It is not a sentiment but a state. Guy Briole continued to elaborate the concept of anxiety via Freud's Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, in particular the appendices, where Freud, inspeaking of anxiety as a signal of danger, distinguishes external from internal, neurotic danger, maintaining that the subject does not identify an external danger except when it echoes a prior internal danger, which is of the order of the exigency of the drive, that is, of the real. Briole further pointed out the connection Freud makes between the emergence of anxiety andobject loss, while asking himself why anxiety occurs, rather than mourning or pain. Freud returns in this connection to a time when for the infant bodilypain and anxiety are intermixed. At this time there is a correlation betweenbodily and psychic pain. There is considerable psychic investment at the site where the body is damaged. For Freud this bodily site is the site for the repetition of the drive. Thus the conditions for the emergence of anxiety, once established, become unstoppable. Inhibition is a limit the ego imposes on itself in order not to arouse this anxiety. For Little Hans, for instance, it is his inability to leave the house that functions as an inhibition. The symptom, on whose distinction from inhibition Freud insists, is the fear ofhorses. Unlike inhibition, which is the limitation of an action that has nosense in itself, the symptom is directed to sense and is interpretable. What might have created a bodily event becomes a fixation point such as Anne Lysy elaborated in in her presentation. The subject charges this fixation point with sense intermingled with sense received from his environment, thus constructing his family romance. His symptoms become intermixed with this constructed romance and are interpretable in relation to its sense. What Miller suggests in his opening remarks for the Congress, Briole said, was a weaning from this sense-making, which would make possible a passage from listening to readingwhat is outsides sense.

Briole proceeded to illustrate his theoretical elaboration with examples from his Pass, which he entitled "yet another hy-story" ("encore une hystoire"). He returned to a scene which he said, held the keys with which he had constructed his history, a scene. At age six, six years after the end of the Second War, in which, in a school play put on in a ravaged French village, he was to play the Little Prince who was at the center of a reconciliation scene, he was unable to utter a word, his voice halted by inhibition, obeying what he later reads as his maternal grandmother's injunction to silence. He became, Briole said, the minus phi at the center of the scene, gazes fixed on him, his role being to camouflage the intolerablereal that had taken place in the course of the war. The analyst's intervention "you still have something of that" upon hearing him recount the scene, Briole said, tears the veil covering the void. It was only in his last analytic session, though, Briole said, that he realized the scene's connection with his family and with the war, as he had stated in his first testimony of the Pass: his father having organized tactical measures to divert attentionfrom his grandmother's passing of Jewish families to the free zone, and thefather's subsequent arrest by the Gestapo at the house of his maternal grandparents, which could not have taken place without the involvement of people close to him, the name "Eli" that he was given, and the circumcision that had been decided by a Jewish doctor and chosen by his mother for him, but not for his siblings. All these, Briole said, functioned as a line of demarcation which left its mark on the subject: the son of someone sentenced to death who localized himself in a world in which he himself was sentenced to death, plagued by shame and a sense of guilt; one who in the maternal phantasm was a little Jewish boy who had survived the war, carrying traces of this in his body and his hidden name.

At this point, Guy Briole said he was particularly sensible to this testimony having been translated into Hebrew and thanked Claudia Iddan for the translation and members of the GIEP for having accepted it.

Guy Briole went on to construct the subjective determinants of the inhibition of the voice in the scene to which he had testified and a related symptom of throat constriction, connecting those to a recurrent enunciation of his mother, which left an echo in his body: "you nearly died of diphtheria in your throat at the age of 18 months," which he had misheard as referring to his younger brother. It was a maternal enunciation encountered later in the analysis and precipitating its end, though, Briole said, that enabled him to retroactively grasp the first: "they will come to take you and I will not be able to keep you with me." Hearing this enunciation releases its potentiality of anxiety and retroactively gives body to the clasp of death on the subject'sthroat, especially since his discovery that in Spanish the word for diphtheria is "garrotillo," a somber, terrible word which made him think of the "garrote," a barbaric mode of execution by strangulation. This leads to the emergence of a traumatic childhood memory: a tonsil removal operation at the age of six, carried out without anesthesia while the subject was tied to a high wooden chair, experiencing the ordeal as torture and punishment. One of the symptoms that had made him return to analysis for the third time, Briole testified at this point, was a constriction in his throat that impeded his voice. It was then that he grasped the full sense of his difficulty to speak up, to hear his voice accentuated, especially because of a fault in pronouncing the letter "r". He had thus always preferred what he writes to what he speaks, Briole testified. Speaking was for him a crying out, something torn from within him, though he had learnt to control it, having become, after all, a Professor. Yet his voice remained high-pitched, as though separated from the rest of his body, an unnoticed violence against others, to such an extent that to speak became the conclusion of the struggle against the "to shut up" (se taire), to such an extent that he had, in an analytic session, surprised himself by substituting " I cry out" (Je crie") for "I write" (J'écrit"). He had cried out, Briole said, of his being impeded from speaking out, this being passed over, plunging him into an anxiety accompanied by a host of bodily symptoms of which the constriction in the throat was the most dominant. Briole nevertheless distinguished at this point between keeping quiet ("rester silencieux") and shutting up ("se taire") in his case, placing the second on the side of decision and the first on the side of the inhibition limiting jouissance at the same time that it carries the mark of a hidden jouissance menacing for the subject and for others, and the second on the side of a decision. It took the entirety of his second analysis in which speaking had the role of inflating sense, Briole said, to release the jouissance at the heart of this inhibition which was above all a mode of impotence and not-knowing. It was the Oedipal construction and its voiding by deciphering the symptom and inhibition that made possible the passage from speaking ("dire") which is always misleading, to the reading ("lire") of the "you are what you do": the incurable remainder that is the sinthome, starting from which one can act: what was there from the beginning, but so tightly ciphered that it could not but become a symptom. At the end of analysis, Briole concluded, it is from the most singular of the one by one that a knowledge to do ("savoir y faire") with the incurable remainder proper to each subject is extracted.

The ensuing discussion focused on points relating to the end of analysis and the sinthome, such as the sinthome as a taking action ("prendre act") starting from the object (a point made by Claudia Iddan), the end of analysis as an act of the analysand who decides to leave the scene without there being a continuity or necessity that this lead to the Pass (a point made by Guy Briole). In the discussion, Anne Lysy emphasized the discontinuity and separating gap inherent in the transition from symptom to sinthome which is thus always a surprise. In response to a question raised by Marco Mauas, regarding the relation between the end of analysis and separation from a community, Guy Briole responded that the Pass is a process of separation wherein a subject becomes a One without the Other. Yet this One rather than being alone, may knot himself to the analytic cause, to the solitude of the founder. The One thus becomes part of a School which is not a group but a dis-assortment of fragments united only in their relation to the analytic cause. Anne Lysyresponded that in her case, the decisive moment of exiting analysis, of separation, was the moment of deciding to do the Pass, which appeared as a moment of rupture, not of knotting, including a rupture in style.

Two clinical cases were then presented by members of the GIEP, Marcela Brusky-Toffler and Daphna Amit-Selbst. Both analysts presented treatments of psychotic subjects in which analytic interventions led to displacements in the status of the symptom and what the second patient presented described as a "change in the disposition of the passions”, that is, of jouissance. For instance, the patient presented by Marcela Brusky-Toffler was able, with analysis, to sketch a circuit from presenting herself as waste to a point where she constructs animaginary body for herself through various inventions including plastic surgery and visual artwork. In the case presented by Daphna Amit-Selbst it was possible to point to transpositions in the places of the object voice and the objectgaze in the subject's regime of jouissance, leading to a certain pacification. In his interventions with respect to the two cases presented, Guy Briole stressed the role of transference and the analyst's management of transference, in the work on symptoms in cases of psychosis, where delusion makes it difficult for the analyst to know how to localize his act. In the case presented by Daphna Amit-Selbst, for instance, it is the analyst's work with the analysand, under transference, Guy Briole said, that pacified the subject who upon turning to analysis had sensed a danger to her very life, protecting her from further menacing encounters in the sexual sphere. Nevertheless, Briole stressed that in the case of analytic work with psychotic subjects plagued by delusion, one does not follow the course of inflating sense in order to ultimately reduce it to the point of the incurable, but constantly works towards the reduction of sense, which can be infinite. Anne Lysy's clinicalcommentary too stressed the role of transference management in the sphere ofthe psychoses. Referring to Eric Laurent, she spoke of this as a persistence to translate. Such translation has nothing to do with the classical translation of a subject's speech in the direction of unconscious desire. It is, rather, supporting the connections the subject makes between jouissance and language, which are the names, the symptomatic solutions, albeit temporary, the psychotic subject constantly works towards.

We in the GIEP wish to thank our guests Anne Lysy and Guy Briole for the generosity and rigour of their interventions, and for what they have to teach us about what in the symptom is readable at the end of analysis and in what ways we can read it. We thank our colleagues Marcela Brusky-Toffler and Daphna Amit-Selbst for the richness of their clinical presentations and their courage, and Claudia Iddan for having organized such a productive event of work towards the 10th NLS Congress in Tel Aviv.