TIDBITS – Russell Grigg – Towards the NLSCongress 2019

The Urgency of the Urge

Russell Grigg

Some have an urge to see an analyst; some are urged to do so. But for an analysis to commence the urge has to become urgent; an analysis really only starts when an urgent urge emerges. Such an urge is a response to the recognition by the subject of a trauma at the place where they have encountered a hole or a gap: Lacan’s “troumatisme.” However, as Jacques-Alain Miller warns, the urgency of the urge must not be allowed to stop at that point, as if there were some mutually shared assumption that an analysis will take time and must be allowed to take its course – this is a seductive assumption that may serve as a pretext for becoming reconciled to the ongoing deferral of the act. To be Kantian about it, make this your maxim: sustain the urgency of the urge; sustain it as an ongoing emergency.

A second Kantian maxim follows as a corollary of the first: act in such a way as to acknowledge that the analysand is driven by an always urgent urge for a particular kind of satisfaction. But what kind, I hear you ask? A satisfaction that is the product of the analysis itself, one that is located behind and beyond each and every transference phenomenon.

This clarifies several things, but I will mention just one. That the transference is ambivalent, both an obstacle and an ally, was already recognized by Freud; an obstacle because the transference as repetition arose in the place of remembering, and an ally as the driver of the analytic work. But the limit of the transference, we can now see, is that, even as it is apparent that the “transferential unconscious” (J.-A. Miller’s term) is a lucubration of knowledge about the real, it will always ultimately reveal, as he says, its impotence to resolve the opacity of the real.