Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences

The excessive enterprise involved in the series of presentations we are undertaking here is to precisely define the theoretical conditions of the possibility of valid research in the domains of both psychoanalysis and the human sciences in general. To that end I shall raise the problem in a somewhat unusual way by telling you right away that it can be raised in two different ways. First, in a perfectly objective way, abstracting from the speaker’s personal experience; I could deal with the question without making any reference to my personal experience. However, I am going to proceed in another way, by recounting the story of my own encounter with this problem. This is not at all about me; I think everyone has had more or less the same experience, and that we encounter this problem through its practical manifestations, through a whole series of indexes. And, up to this point, the encounter has necessarily been a personal one. I emphasize its personal nature because there is no theory of this encounter, and because the definition of psychoanalysis, on the one hand, and that of the human sciences, on the other, as they currently exist has not given rise to a theoretical reflection that makes it possible to abstract from the concrete encounter with the problem experienced by each of us. It is solely for this reason—and thus for a historically provisional reason, which I hope will soon be transcended—that it is indispensable to show how this problem can be encountered by someone, given that currently the only way of encountering it is through a personal encounter, quite simply because it is not the subject of reflection. As a result, the problem is encountered in the experience of each person. Therefore I am going to tell you the story of my own encounter with this problem. Not a personal story, in the sense of individual, but personal in the intellectual sense of the term, including its problems.

Abstracting from all historical and autobiographical elements, I shall say simply this: for me, and I think for you as well, the encounter with psychoanalysis took place through the encounter with Freud’s work. Obviously, psychoanalysis is found everywhere: in the media, on the street, etc., but in fact, from a theoretical point of view, that’s not how it happens: at a certain point, we’re going to examine Freud’s texts. Then we are immediately confronted with a very serious, very profound obstacle of which Freud was perfectly well aware, which is represented by what Freud himself called the psychological resistance that is opposed to the admission of the very enterprise of psychoanalysis into the realm of public opinion. You know that Freud’s earliest works met with an absolutely extraordinary barrage of criticism. Though psychoanalysis is now a recognized part of our cultural world, when Freud wrote his first works he was condemned by everyone. You know that the first person in France who had the courage to talk about Freud was Hesnard,¹ who thereby deserves our historical gratitude. He is still alive. He has published a book for which Merleau-Ponty wrote a preface before his death, and in France it was actually he who, I should say, did not introduce but rather pointed out Freud’s existence, noting that a certain Freud from Vienna who had worked in France, and what’s more with Charcot, existed, and that he thought a certain number of things that might be of great importance. Freud was aware of this extraordinary resistance; he referred to it in his works, saying: what I say will not be well-received, and he offered an explanation for this. An explanation that, in my opinion, is historically false but was the only one he could give at that time. It’s a psychoanalytic explanation and it goes as follows: My works will not be accepted because they put in question the psychic equilibrium of each individual who reads them, that is, his system of defense against his own neuroses. In other words, the concept of neurosis that Freud used to explain the resistance with which his works necessarily met was an analytical concept, but one that could not be thought de jure (if I may say so) in terms of the analytical concept invoked. And that is why Freud, having clearly sensed the theoretical difficulty involved in his explanation, subsequently produced another concept: that of the neurotic character of our civilization. In other words, Freud moved on to a genuinely historical explanation, but in terms of his analytical theory, that is, in terms of a practice that in principle addressed individuals. By proposing this second notion—our civilization is neurotic—Freud was offering a historical explanation for the inevitable resistance with which his theory collided in its very diffusion. But in doing so he modified the historical status of the concept of neurosis. And he supposed that our culture, as such, was neurotic, that is, that a historical subject—no longer an individual, but a historical culture—could be the object, or rather the seat, of a pathological affection of the neurotic type. Thus he raised a problem that was no longer psychoanalytic in nature but rather historical. He formulated the consequent difficulty this way: the theory I propose meets with an extremely deep ideological resistance, which may have certain affinities with the structures of psychoanalytic resistance that I find in individuals, but in fact cannot be reduced to those structures because the object is not the same. This is not a matter of an individual, Freud, explaining his theory to a neurotic individual (the resistance being explained by the individual’s neurosis), but of Freud explaining to whole masses of people, including scientists, an enterprise that was scientific in spirit and collided with a resistance that he attributed to the general resistance of our civilization, that is, with a resistance that was no longer psychological, no longer psychoanalytic, but ideological and historical. Despite the current prejudice favorable to psychoanalysis, and even though our civilization’s general attitude to Freud has changed, we still encounter this difficulty when we read Freud’s texts—but for us it has taken a different form that I shall now proceed to define.

For us, this resistance took a very precise form: that of the inadequation between the concepts that Freud uses in his texts and the content that these concepts are intended to grasp. This inadequation can be expressed this way: the concepts Freud proposes are imported concepts, in the Kantian sense. You know that Kant contrasts the concepts a science has produced by itself in the course of its own development, which belong to it organically, to concepts he terms “imported,” namely concepts that a science uses, that it needs, that it necessarily needs to use, but that it has not itself produced in its organic development, that it has borrowed from scientific disciplines existing outside it. This is exactly Freud’s case. Freud set forth this analytical theory using imported concepts that were borrowed from biology, from the theory of energy in physics, and from political economy. That is, from three domains, three disciplines, that were then giving rise to a historically dated scientific elaboration: the then dominant biological theory, more or less inspired by Darwin; the theory of energy in physics, which was also dominant; and, finally, economic theory (an allusion to the possibility of a knowledge of the economic world and economic laws), all of which it was possible to think and could be used in their conceptual forms within another domain.

There we have the true difficulty that we encounter, even today, when we read Freud’s texts: we wonder what relation there can be between what Freud designates by his concepts and the theoretical status of concepts that are obviously borrowed, and which, in any event, needed, in order to become domestic concepts, to be profoundly transformed, that is, needed to undergo a theoretical transformation following a theoretical reflection. Now we have to note that until Lacan appeared this theoretical transformation following a theoretical reflection did not take place. Until Lacan appeared—that is, until an attempt to transform imported concepts into domestic concepts—every reader of Freud encountered a contradiction between Freud’s concepts and the concrete content of what he calls psychoanalysis.

The question I am now asking is the following: what does psychoanalysis designate by these concepts, which have, up to now, not been examined theoretically and have not been transformed from imported concepts into domestic concepts? Everyone agrees to the reality these imported concepts of Freud’s designate: it is the practice of analysis itself. That is why, when we encounter psychoanalysis, we all agree that something is going on in it. Not that it’s only a technique of readaptation, liberation, etc.: it’s a technique that is situated within a practice. I don’t want to use the term praxis, which would introduce us to a general theory—which I would gladly use; let us say that psychoanalysis is a praxis situated in the domain of praxis in general, etc.² Let’s leave that aside, because it’s a philosophical theorization that assumes the theoretical question of the precise status of the object concerned is already settled and perhaps reflected. This is not the case. But everyone will recognize that what Freud’s psychoanalytic concepts designate, not in their domestic but in their imported form, is a real practice, that is, the fact that Freud is dealing with patients whom he treats in a practice that is called therapy.

So at this point we are referred to therapy itself. When we encounter psychoanalysis, after having struggled with the theoretical difficulties I’ve mentioned, and after having noted, consequently, that the theoretical concept can’t provide us with access to the thing itself, we’re obliged to say that the thing itself is located in the actual practice of psychoanalytic technique, that is, in therapy. And this is where we find ourselves at a real dead end. Why? Because everyone—including especially psychoanalysts themselves, and first of all everyone who has been through analysis, will tell you that psychoanalytic treatment gives rise to an experience of therapy, to a specific and irreducible experience. Psychoanalysts and their patients can be, to some extent, compared to soldiers who explain that a civilian can’t understand anything about the army without having performed his military service. You have to have been through that. In the language of the psychoanalysts and their patients, this takes the following form: you have to do it live. That is, you have to go through the concrete experience of therapy and the institutional reality of the necessity of this direct, irreducible experience of therapy; that is didactic analysis. In other words, psychoanalysis has created an institution, without which no one can gain access to his own truth, and calls it didactic psychoanalysis: it requires every psychoanalyst to personally undergo the concrete experience of the analytic situation and posits as an absolute principle an effect that is not made an object of reflection de jure, but is affirmed de facto, gives rise to an institution, and in fact selects the psychoanalysts themselves. De facto, it went beyond this principle in the form of an institution that was called didactic psychoanalysis, which is itself subject to a whole body, that is, no one can become a psychoanalyst without being certified by the existing psychoanalytic societies, but no one can be certified without having undergone a didactic psychoanalysis, and no one can undergo a didactic psychoanalysis without having received authorization to undergo the didactic psychoanalysis in question with psychoanalysts who have been designated by the existing psychoanalytic society as suitable for undergoing a didactic psychoanalysis. Notice to what extent, in the facts themselves, in the practice itself and in the institutions—not of the world outside psychoanalysis but of psychoanalysis itself—what each of us can experience in his encounters or conversations with either an analyst or with an analysand is sanctioned in the following way: you have to have gone through that, you have to have done it live, because it’s an absolutely irreducible concrete experience. You can’t understand from outside what you have to have lived through in order to know what it’s about.

But here we find ourselves confronted by another difficulty: the analysts and the analysands, for their part, have met this requirement. They have actually gone through it, they’ve done it live, they’ve lived through the specifics of this situation and they’re trying to express it. You will find quite a few things in books and in texts with theoretical pretensions written by psychoanalysts in which they try to conceive what is specific to this situation. We will see later how they manage it—how they think they manage it. But the fact is that both anecdotal expression (we’re telling the psychoanalysts’ story) and attempts at theoretical expression of the necessity of passing through the concrete experience of this irreducible practice known as psychoanalytic therapy lead to the absolutely stupefying paradox that all that has never convinced anyone. This is because all the descriptions of therapy, all the reflections on therapy that currently exist, are absolutely incapable of taking the place of theoretical concepts that would actually make it possible to have access not only to what analytic practice is—which is only part of what is involved—but to that of which it is the concrete substance, namely its own theory. In other words, there is no satisfactory psychoanalytic theory that reflects on the reality of psychoanalysis, the status of the psychoanalyst, the scientific status of psychoanalytic practice; there is no satisfactory scientific theory that could be reduced to a theory of therapy. Nothing we’re told about therapy ever succeeds in reaching the point where a theory of therapy could be transformed into a theory of psychoanalysis itself. That means that everything we’re told about therapy never manages to transform a theorization of analytic practice into a theory of psychoanalysis itself.

On the other hand, this sheds light on another very important phenomenon, which is our third way of encountering psychoanalysis concretely. I remind you of the first two: Freud’s own texts, with the difficulties they contain, namely the inadequation between the concepts and their content and the psychoanalytic practice itself and its inability to produce a theory of psychoanalysis. We encounter psychoanalysis in a third way in contemporary philosophy. We have to talk about France, because this cultural universe is very deeply marked, not only so far as philosophy is concerned but also in all the cultural disciplines, by this absolutely extraordinary characteristic that is commonly found in Italy: provincialism. By that I mean that since the end of the eighteenth century one of the fundamental traits of French culture in all its domains has been an incredible ignorance of what is going on elsewhere, what is going on in other countries. When Italians call themselves provincialists, they mean: we are a country that has not succeeded in establishing its national unity, all our cities are only provincial capitals; our national unity is recent—Rome is our capital, but it is an arbitrary administrative capital; everything happens outside us, everything happens in Europe. And the great aspiration of Italian culture is to rise to the European level. But before Italian economic production reaches the European level, we can say that Italians truly experienced the nostalgia of not being at the European cultural level. And they experienced it in a concrete manner, as we can see: the country in the world that publishes the most translations of works written in foreign languages is Italy. And today the country in the world in which the fewest works are translated from foreign languages is France…. I simply want to say that I’m forced to speak about the French ideological situation, about the French cultural situation, so far as philosophy is concerned, and that’s why I’ve taken this personal example, because it has a historical meaning. Concretely, we encounter psychoanalysis in philosophy; we encounter it in a number of extremely precise, extremely concrete philosophies. I am going to say a word about them.

I’m not talking about Dalbiez. He’s interesting, of course, historically interesting. His enormous two-volume work on psychoanalysis has just been reprinted.³ I think it never taught anyone anything, that it was a behaviorist attempt to present psychoanalysis; it is a phenomenon that is theoretically obsolete. I’m not talking about Hesnard, who played the historical role of presenting psychoanalysis in France, and whose book had a preface written by Merleau-Ponty. But the fact that the man who presented psychoanalysis in France, the historical initiator of psychoanalysis in France, published a work for which Merleau-Ponty wrote a preface is extremely interesting because, so far as I’m concerned, philosophy’s encounter with psychoanalysis passed, in France, through Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. And this encounter that we make in Sartre and Merleau-Ponty—if we’re lucky enough to get our hands on this work, which has never been reprinted and practically disappeared from libraries—has its origin in Politzer.⁴ It was through Politzer that it began; it was through Politzer that psychoanalysis became an object of philosophical reflection. And it was through Politzer that psychoanalysis entered into French philosophical reflection, expressly and without any doubt, in the work of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty.

In a little while I’ll tell you how things looked in that respect—I’m still talking about my personal experience. I want to say that I also encountered psychoanalysis in the work of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty and I was lucky enough to get my hands on Politzer, and I read him. Obviously, there was somebody named Lacan, absolutely unintelligible…. But from now on I’m going to tell you what form my little personal synthesis took and what form it retained until, let’s say, about two or three years ago. The form taken by my little personal synthesis, that is, my personal attempt to respond to this problem, which is not solely a theoretical problem but a real problem (it is encountered in life, it raises concrete problems, etc., including even practical problems: when a guy is sick, can he work?).

There are currently two psychoanalytic societies in France. The society that Lacan founded in a schism that dates from 1953 and the old one, presided over by Nacht.⁵ There are violent conflicts that can have repercussions on the technique, that is, on the healing one can expect from one psychoanalyst or another. Apart from individual abilities, the two societies pursue very different general lines of argument. It might thus be thought (at least by those of us who believe that a theory never remains without consequences, always has practical effects) that it could also produce differences in the technique of therapy (that is also what Lacan says all the time) and even in the results that can be expected from it. Now I’m going to explain to you the little personal synthesis I arrived at. And in so doing we will encounter another reality—not only psychoanalysis but also the human sciences.

I’d arrived at the following little synthesis whose ultimate principles were Politzer’s theoretical bases, which were also found in Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. I was a little prejudiced, for different reasons, against Sartre’s and Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical syntheses, so I had a tendency to return to Politzer, telling myself: let’s go back to the sources; at least the water will be pure.

What was the result? Politzer was the man who had said psychology doesn’t exist, psychology is the theory of the soul. Why doesn’t psychology exist? Because, on the one hand, it’s a science that claims to have as its object the soul, that is, an object that doesn’t exist and, on the other hand, because it’s a discipline that uses concepts that are only abstractions. Neither its object nor its concepts exist. The abstractions of classical psychology are concepts of the faculties of the soul: they don’t exist, and that’s completely to be expected, since the object that classical psychology studies is the soul, and the soul doesn’t exist. So we’re going to create [a psychology without a soul], and that’s how Politzer heralded the advent of a new epoch. His text is a genuine manifesto: now it is beginning. That is the meaning of his Critique des fondements de la psychologie. You have to read it, because it’s fundamental for the culture of our time…. What is beginning is exactly the opposite of what existed earlier. Instead of dealing with a psychology whose object was the soul, we are dealing with a psychology without a soul; on the other hand, we’re going to create a psychology that instead of having abstract concepts like the faculties of the soul, sensation, memory, etc., will have concrete concepts. That’s the program. It’s defined by Politzer on the basis of an existing reality, namely classical and critical psychology: this program is defined in purely negative terms. We are going to create a psychology without soul, we’re agreed on that, but it has to have an object: that object will be the concrete; it will be drama. Classical psychology, Politzer said, is a psychology in the third person: we’re going to create a first-person psychology. That’s what concrete means. Classical psychology used abstract concepts, third-person concepts: we’re going to use concrete concepts, concepts in the first person. There you have Politzer’s mythical idea, which was the content of his program, which coincided with his program: psychology will never exist unless it is a concrete psychology. It became a fact, since Politzer tried to found a Revue de psychologie concrète that, I think… never came out.⁶ It was impossible, because what Politzer was in fact designating, in relation to classical psychology, was what we call the nonconcept of classical psychology, that is, a domain of reality that is defined negatively on the basis of existing concepts but is not defined conceptually. And the proof is that when Politzer tried to define the concrete object he was dealing with, he simply uttered, reuttered indefinitely ad nauseam, the words concrete, concrete, concrete, the words drama, drama, “drama, the words first person, first person, first person. These expressions might designate something, but in a negative way: it’s not abstract; it’s concrete; it’s not a phenomenon that takes place outside concrete psychological life or the subject; it takes place within and it’s dramatic, etc., but from a theoretical point of view, that is, from the conceptual point of view, it produced nothing; it could only indicate the domain that had to be explored and that didn’t indicate the theoretical concepts that defined the domain on the basis of which theoretical research was possible. In other words, if we try to examine the theoretical status of the concepts by means of which Politzer designated this new object, we don’t get anywhere. This is shown today in a few texts, a few articles, especially in the article by Laplanche that Tort cited last time.⁷ What Politzer said, which was essential, is that the concrete—concrete psychology—is in psychoanalysis. He said, in short: [concrete psychology] exists but it doesn’t know it,⁸ I’m telling it that it exists, that is, I’m telling it that it exists in psychoanalysis. And, at the same time, Politzer said: unfortunately psychoanalysis is itself contaminated by classical psychology. Politzer said: for psychoanalysis, which is really concrete psychology without psychology knowing it, to be able to play its role as a theoretical guide in the domain of psychology, psychoanalysis itself has to be relieved of its heritage from classical psychology, namely the abstractions, its theory of the unconscious, as the es, the “id,” as a reality interior to consciousness, as something irreducible, as another unconscious consciousness. In short, all of Freud’s concepts have to go, including the concept of the complex; in other words, Politzer rejected all Freud’s operative concepts on the pretext that they were abstract. From our point of view, that is an essential point: no reflection can take place without being able to use abstract concepts, and the problem is not played out between concepts that are abstract and others that are not, that is, nonconcepts, but between scientific abstract concepts and nonscientific abstract concepts. And the proof of this is that the concepts that Politzer proposed as concrete concepts to replace the concepts of classical psychology, which he declared to be abstract, or Freudian concepts that Freud had inherited from classical psychology, all those concrete concepts through which Politzer designated the concrete object of what was supposed to be psychoanalysis, on the one hand, and of what psychology was supposed to become through it, on the other hand, all these concepts are not theoretical concepts, that is, they have no valid scientific status that would make it possible to use them to work out a theory or undertake research. When Politzer said that the concepts had to be concrete, it’s clear we can contrast the first chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind with him. The concept of the first person claims to be concrete, but it’s an abstraction. Exactly as the “this” is an abstraction, a generality. The concept of drama, which claims to be concrete, is an abstract concept, a generality. And so far as we are concerned, we can say that we are simply at a theoretical dead-end: it’s a bad abstraction because it doesn’t go anywhere—anywhere other than to Merleau-Ponty and Sartre.

My personal synthesis took the following very precise form: psychology… which is in search of itself in the domain of human sciences, already exists, but psychology doesn’t know it. Psychology was founded, and nobody noticed. It was founded by Freud. Thus all that is required for it to constitute itself is that present-day psychology become aware that its essence was defined by Freud and that it draw the consequences of that fact…. Thus it suffices to become aware of the fact that just as Galileo defined the essence of physics as such by saying physics as such is the physical capable of being measured, that is, he defined the essence of a region of the existent; and in the same way psychology can develop only on the condition that it become aware of the essence of the object that it has to develop; and the essence of the object that it has to develop, the essence of the psychic, is the unconscious. In other words, it took this amusing form: the object of psychology is the unconscious. Psychology can develop only by defining, by means of this essence, the object of psychology as the unconscious. I more or less adopted Politzer’s criticism… which consisted in saying: basically, psychology up to now has drawn on the prejudice of the soul, and I said in another way: psychology has up to now drawn on the prejudice of the consciousness, it has not become aware of the fact that the essence of its object is the unconscious. In this way, in fact, I juxtaposed a certain encounter with psychology, with psychoanalysis itself, with another encounter that I was making, that we all make, which is the encounter of psychoanalysis with the social sciences themselves, that is, with an objective reality.

Let’s turn first to the scientific relation of between psychoanalysis and psychology. The paradox of the present situation can be put this way: after having been rejected by the culture of his time, Freud was accepted; now he is everywhere; he has invaded. That raises a problem, but we can’t reflect immediately on this problem. We can start from it to reflect on the question—which is what Lacan also does. In any case, the observation from which we have to start is that everywhere we see an absolutely profound symbiosis between psychoanalysis and psychology in the current state of the social sciences. And we see it on both sides; in other words, this encounter does not occur solely on the side of psychology: on the one hand, we see psychology reaching out to psychoanalysis and, on the other, we see psychoanalysis reaching out to psychology. These two things are happening at the same time, we can show that in a very precise way. On the side of psychoanalysis, what is approaching psychology?⁹ It’s what Tort mentioned last time: all the developments of psychoanalysis concerning the development of the psychoanalysis of children. In Freud you have a series of texts: Little Hans, Three Essays on Sexuality; all that underwent considerable development. With Freud, generally speaking, a whole series of psychoanalysts who specialize in children, specialists who did not exist earlier, has developed, producing an extremely abundant literature. Psychoanalysis also approached psychology through a whole series of disciplines on the borders of psychoanalysis—I’ll come back to this notion of borders later—in particular, psychiatry and psychosomatic medicine. In general, we can say that psychoanalysis revived psychiatry—that’s incontestable. Nosological descriptions, that is, descriptions of the visible structures of illnesses, which constituted most of what psychiatry did, were overthrown and revived by psychoanalysis’s intervention. The face of psychiatry has largely changed. Psychosomatic medicine, a discipline that did not exist before, was constituted as a kind of general medicine, treating, through psychotherapy, a certain number of ailments that can be identified only by using Freudian concepts, that is, a certain number of symptoms that do not fall into the domain of general or organic medicine, but rather of a psychotherapy. Similarly, we can also note that psychoanalysis approached social psychology insofar as it provided it with a whole series of concepts that are at work in all the most current developments in social psychology. Whether it’s a matter of investigations into motivation, studies on advertising, etc., you find psychoanalytic concepts, and it seems that psychoanalysis took the initiative. Very specific names are associated with this: names of psychoanalysts who’ve done studies that could be listed here. I’ll spare you the list.

One last, extremely important, point: psychoanalysis approached the general object of the human sciences by approaching anthropology. This is already found in Freud or at least apparently in Freud: Totem and Taboo, Civilization and Its Discontents, The Future of an Illusion. All these books deal with cultural phenomena, and thus anthropological phenomena, and they all present themselves as having the ambition to extend psychoanalytic concepts to the disciplines of anthropology and history that deal with cultural objects. You know that in America, in particular, this kind of research is currently undergoing considerable development. American anthropological studies, for example, the works of Margaret Mead, Kardiner,¹⁰ et al., are usually written by people who have either been analyzed themselves or who have had psychoanalytic training. And all that came directly from psychoanalysis itself.

On the other hand (I’m not going to describe this from the other side), all these disciplines—child psychology, psychology, social psychology, psychiatry, etc.—have approached psychoanalysis as well, that is, they have gone in search of concepts they needed to account for phenomena that had previously escaped them. That has given rise to attempts that are sometimes extremely interesting but relatively isolated. For example, the attempt made by Spitz. Spitz is French, I think, or is of French origin, and currently lives in America.¹¹ He has published several works—two or three—and he’s doing research aimed at constituting a psychoanalytic psychology of child development. He’s trying to create an experimental psychology that psychoanalysis needs in order to encounter its own concepts in concrete form. In other words, what Spitz is seeking in the observation of children, and not in an analytical relation with the child, is direct observation of the oral stage, the anal stage, etc. That is, he’s seeking in psychology the actual reality of psychoanalytic concepts themselves. I won’t go into Melanie Klein and Anna Freud: all that belongs to the domain of child psychology: we’re right in the middle of these border zones.

I’d like to mention another encounter between psychology and psychoanalysis that is extremely important and extremely typical,. In short, the encounter that has taken place up to now has been one between psychoanalysis and a psychology without any genuine biological or psychosocial foundation. But an extremely interesting encounter that we can call indirect is taking place on another terrain: that of psychophysiology and biology. This terrain is obviously the most interesting, for the following reason: biology exists as a science; in any case it is a scientific discipline that has scientific qualifications. So does psycho-physiology. The clearest example is Wallon. Wallon developed a psychology that is original with respect to classical psychology, and it is heavily used, especially by Marxists who take an interest in these problems. Wallon developed a psychology that can be considered, formally, in contrast to classical psychology, a dialectical psychology…. Everything that is dialectical being Marxist, or rather nothing that is dialectical being foreign to Marxism (according to an adage that ought to be written in Latin to give it all its power), everything that is dialectical is ours. Wallon being dialectical, he’s necessarily a Marxist. On what is this assimilation based? It’s based on the concept of stage. Wallon, drawing on the works of neurologists who have, in fact, identified biological, neurological, etc. stages of psychological maturation, has shown a kind of parallel between the existence of stages of biological, neurological, etc., maturation, on the one hand, and the existence of stages of psychological maturation, on the other hand. He has established a parallel and a correspondence between them, that is, he has observed, in fact, that the essential stages coincide. And among other things, an amusing detail: he is the first to have emphasized the fundamental importance of the “mirror stage,” a fact that Lacan—I wouldn’t say has never pardoned him, but in any case has always managed to avoid mentioning.¹² Because it also happens that psychoanalysts sometimes read texts that are not purely psychoanalytic or psychiatric. When it happened that someone said, to Lacan, but your mirror stage was already in Wallon, he flew into one of those historic rages that, if they had received the public notice they should have, would have shaken at least the Arc de Triomphe. What matters in all this is that, in actuality, another encounter between psychology and psychoanalysis becomes detectable. An encounter regarding the very structure of the type of development that appears in psychoanalysis, on the one hand, and in psychology, on the other. In psychoanalysis, as in psychology, it seems that we are dealing with a dialectical development in stages, and Wallon is the theoretician of this encounter. Even if he never talks about psychoanalysis, in fact, in his work there is—and this has been used by some theoreticians who claim to follow him, as soon as psychoanalytic concepts have been allowed to go into circulation—what is necessary to found a theoretical rapprochement between psychoanalysis and psychology….

The third encounter between psychology and psychoanalysis takes place on a third terrain: that of society itself. This is doubtless the most interesting point. Here I am only developing everything Tort said, and in particular when he described Lacan’s critique of existing psychoanalysis as the critique of the psychoanalyses of social adaptation. It takes place on the terrain of society. This presupposes two convergent conditions for the encounter: on the side of psychoanalysis and on that of sociology.¹³ Let’s look first at the side of psychoanalysis. This is based on a theoretical interpretation of what Freud calls the reality principle. I don’t want to give a detailed history of this subject—that could be done, and it’s very important—but here’s the gist of it: the reality principle has gradually come to be interpreted as representing the reality of society, that is, the object of psychoanalysis has been interpreted as the resultant of the interaction between the child as a biological being and the social milieu in which he lives, and in which he receives his life in the first moment, and at the same time as his life, the norms of his upbringing, that is, the social constraints society teaches him through the intermediary of his parents, and particularly his mother—constraints that take the form, first, of the regulation of nutrition, that is, the timing of the moments when the breast is offered to the child, second, toilet training, etc., and it goes on like that. The reality principle is society, not in its material reality, not in the fact of feeding the child, etc., but in the norms that the immediate familial entourage transmits to and imposes on the child, norms that are the necessary regulations of the society itself. Everything thus depends on the oedipal moment; this oedipal moment, which interests Sartre in particular, is supposed to be the moment when the child interiorizes the reality principle, that is, assumes the obligations that are imposed on him by society, that is, no longer wets his diaper, to take a symbolic example, simply because he knows that he must no longer do that. He knows it, and that is the “superego.” That’s a particular example. In short, the fundamental authority that is going to dominate the child’s life from this moment on explains his whole development: the superego that controls the setting up of all the other subordinate agencies is simply a specific moment that can, moreover, be considered the moment when neurological maturation, motor maturation, visual maturation, biological maturation, and psychological maturation converge, and it happens to be precisely the moment when the child interiorizes the social obligation that is imposed on him in exchange for life and the forms that that social obligation takes. Now, this is very important, first of all because it determines a whole interpretation of the meaning of psychoanalysis, and then of its practice, and also a whole, very amusing theoretical reflection on psychoanalysis itself. If, in fact, the object of psychoanalysis, in this case, is the product of the interaction of the individual and the social milieu, if the object of psychoanalysis has to be examined, first, on the basis of the individual’s biological drives and, second, on that of social constraints imposed on the individual through the mediation of the proximate environment (of the father and the mother, and particularly the mother, over whom looms, moreover, the superior authority of the father who gives her his name, food, orders, who organizes the house, who protects her from the outside, who is a legal person with a legal situation determined in society): if everything happens there, to know what psychoanalysis is as an object, we have to be able, first, to make use of biology and the science of society. But—and this is an extremely important consequence—this means that we can really find the object of psychoanalysis in society. If you read Sartre’s interpretations… you’ll see that this is the nodal point, because it’s where praxis, the individual project, is integrated into society. I would even say that it’s Sartre’s pineal gland, that is, the infinitesimal point of encounter, as small as possible, absolutely unassignable—but, after all, there has to be a meeting point somewhere. It’s simply here that we find it, exactly as for Descartes, near the pineal gland.¹⁴ It’s in this region—we define a region where there is a point of coincidence—that this takes place; it’s there that the individual project becomes social praxis, is accepted as such, etc.

This has significant practical consequences. They exist in broad daylight; they’re obvious in all of what Lacan calls “American psychoanalysis,” which is a veritable psychoanalysis of adaptation to the social milieu; that is, it’s the exact opposite of psychoanalysis. If, in fact, the reality principle is only an intervention made on the individual by social norms that operate through the mediation of the proximate family milieu and that are assumed by the individual himself in the form of the superego, then analytic therapy becomes simply a negotiation between the individual and society, a negotiation that, like all delicate negotiations, needs the good offices of the psychoanalyst who will fix things, and who will fix them, of course, by saying: this poor boy, society has been too much for him, he’s been crushed by it, that is, his ego has been crushed by his superego. The ego was too weak; we’re going to strengthen it: it’s the whole psychoanalysis of the ego’s defense systems, whose great theoretician is Anna Freud, who is one of Lacan’s personal enemies—well, not personal, but theoretically personal enemies—to whom he has never given the title that for him is the certification not of theoretical consciousness but of the presence of theory in her theoretical unconsciousness: the title of “brilliant tripe butcher” (tripière géniale). He gives that title to Melanie Klein.¹⁵ And he calls Françoise Dolto a tripe butcher. This qualification, which exists only in the feminine form, is interesting: she’s not brilliant yet, but she might become brilliant. In any case, Anna Freud is neither brilliant nor, a fortiori, a tripe butcher, because one can say brilliant only in connection with the title of tripe butcher: she’s not even a tripe butcher; she just sells meat covered with cellophane. And the meat sold by Anna Freud is quite simply what you can buy under the cellophane covers of the Presses Universitaires de France, namely the work entitled Mécanisme de défense du moi or another work entitled La Psychanalyse des enfants.¹⁶ In these works you see presented her little theory, in the form of analytical concepts strengthened—we’ll see why in a moment—by a strong dose of castrating obsessions; this official psychoanalyst, being Freud’s daughter, felt the need to become the archetypal psychoanalytic mother of a family, of the world of psychoanalysis… and she is received as such by the world of analytic culture. All this, obviously, without talking about society. But there are people who, dare I say, lack these scruples and speak openly about society: the whole current of American psychoanalysis, etc., and the techniques to which it gives rise. The representative of this trend, one of its representatives, even though he has a very strong Freudian culture, is Alexander.¹⁷… If someday you glance at one of Alexander’s books—there are worse; we can consider him a good witness, he’s a guy who has a good Freudian culture—you will often find these matters explained, popularized in concrete institutions; they don’t remain at the stage of speculations. I don’t know if you have ever read the fifth and sixth pages of Le Monde—I don’t know what Le Monde’s ulterior motive for publishing these things is (maybe it’s malicious—I hope so—and I have a hard time seeing how they could be published without malice), for publishing reviews of an institution that is currently undergoing a very extensive development, but I hasten to tell you that it is not the only such institution, because there are many of them, in France and even in Paris, but let’s say that it’s the most famous, and, in any case, the one that is established, to which Le Monde’s special correspondent can go and which has its offices at Jouy-en-Josas and provides training to the managers of big industrial firms to help them liquidate psychological problems that may arise among the managers themselves and thus between the managers of a firm and its employees. The problem then becomes that of the readaptation to the immediate social milieu, and all these analytical techniques are used….

Thus this has provided access to a whole series of techniques that actually exist, have been implemented, and represent the practical use of this theoretical conception of the reality principle, thus of the superego and thus of the object of psychoanalysis. Now, what interests us the most, after the theory, are the theoretical consequences of the thing. Starting from the moment people realized that the reality principle, that is, the fundamental object of psychoanalysis, is to be sought in the direction of society, we saw the rise of psychoanalytic theories that are anthropological in character and that tried to relativize psychoanalysis itself, and its concepts themselves, on the basis of the preceding theoretical observation. We found ourselves confronted by psychoanalytic attempts that explained the following to us: psychoanalytic concepts are connected with a psychoanalytic object whose origin is to be sought in the relations between a biological being (the little child) and a specific society, and the superego, the establishment of authorities, represents the interiorization of the norms of social constraint in that society and its structure. So if we’re dealing with Freud’s concepts, that is, because he was Viennese, because he lived in a Western society, which is a patriarchal society, with a family structured in a historically determined way, imposing on the individuals who compose it a certain number of legal rules that reflect the economic-political-social structure of the society, and that find their realization in the immediate entourage, to the point that the pineal gland takes the form of the family as we know it. But there are societies that do not know this kind of family because there’s a pineal gland different from our own: so let’s develop a theory of other pineal glands, that is, a general theory of the possibility as such of forms of concrete variations on the Western pineal gland. And that gives us Malinowski, it gives us a whole trend in the American psychoanalytic enterprise according to which each society has, I would say, the complexes it deserves, the psychoanalysts it deserves, etc. That can serve to introduce us to the understanding of what there is to be understood in theory of the shaman proposed by Lévi-Strauss, who is becoming a specialist in generalizing the pineal gland, because it is itself his object. He tells us that the shaman of a primitive society is the same thing as the psychoanalyst, that society gives the psychoanalyst the same mission as primitive society gives the shaman: liquidating symbolically the society’s conflicts with itself by administering therapy to an individual declared by society to be mad or sick. If you study—and please do that—the chapter of Lévi-Strauss’s Anthropologie structurale on the theory of the shaman, you will immediately see what space this reflection moves in.

There you have the domains in which psychoanalysis and psychology meet, those in which psychoanalysis and biology meet, [and finally] those in which psychoanalysis and society meet, with their theoretical consequences and practices. In the current situation there is obviously another domain of encounter, and it is where psychoanalysis and philosophy meet or, rather, where a certain number of themes borrowed from psychoanalysis are exploited by existing philosophies. I said enough a while ago, talking about Politzer, not to need to return to this at length. What I want to say is simply that the three preceding encounters I indicated can be juridically, theoretically authorized by the possibility of using psychoanalytic concepts in psychology, sociology, and anthropology or by the possibility of using psychological, biological, neurological, or sociological concepts in psychoanalysis. In other words, the three kinds of encounter that I’ve analyzed up to this point occur at the level of concepts, that is, they are favors of a conceptual order done to psychoanalysis by other disciplines. There is no encounter without an exchange. What is exchanged between psychoanalysis and the other disciplines we’ve mentioned up to now is concepts…

What I’m going to say now does not concern concepts. What is going to be exchanged between psychoanalysis and philosophy is not concepts. I would say that it’s the concrete sense. More exactly, the exchange will take place in the following manner: in general, psychoanalysis is going to give philosophy the concrete, and philosophy is going to give psychoanalysis concepts. This takes place in the following manner: philosophy is going to explain to psychoanalysis that, if it wants to conceive the concrete with which it deals in a therapeutic practice that is still theoretically blind, it has to borrow its concepts from philosophy. It’s very interesting: it’s a question of practice, whereas before it was a question of theoretical exchanges…. The exchange takes place like this: psychoanalysis gives philosophy the concrete, that is, practically, let’s call a spade a spade, the dual situation of the relation between doctor and patient: this is the object that psychoanalysis gives to philosophy. And philosophy, in turn, is going to give psychoanalysis concepts for thinking about this thing that philosophy then considers as constituting the true object and essence of psychoanalysis itself. Exchange—fair’s fair—means that in these two exchanges there is one partner who imposes his law: that is, philosophy, when it says [to psychoanalysis], “I’m going to define your status for you, and then it’s settled, we won’t talk about it any more.” That’s Sartre’s and Merleau-Ponty’s discourse, following Politzer’s discourse. This “it’s settled, we won’t talk about it any more” is the philosophical concept in which the realities of the psychoanalytic experience of therapy are developed. And this reality of the psychoanalytic experience is essentially the relation between the doctor and the patient. This is also a fundamental point in Lacan’s reflection. It’s a fundamental point for explaining, for saying: here’s what’s actually happening, that is, for demonstrating that the philosophical interpretation of the doctor-patient relationship is a theoretical imposture, for demonstrating that philosophy, in order to be able to digest this reality philosophically, has to falsify it. That’s Lacan’s basic demonstration regarding psychotherapy. Philosophy has to falsify the experience of reality, of the analytical practice itself, in order to be able to declare it to be philosophical. How is this theoretical imposture carried out? (It’s just an expression; I apologize for its violence, but it’s a purely theoretical violence.) Through the following postulate: what is at stake in the doctor-patient relationship, in the dual relationship of psychotherapy, is very simply the pour autrui (“for others”), it is very simply intersubjectivity, that is, the fundamental concept of what we might call the existentialist, personalist current that is one of the great trends of the present period and that flows through countless mouths from the springs of modern history. Obviously, Politzer’s role in this context was absolutely decisive, because it was he who provided these concepts. When Politzer contrasted third-person knowledge with first-person knowledge, when he explained that this took place between the patient and the doctor, and that it was a drama, one could only see that this was in fact intersubjectivity in a situation that reminds us of that of the master and the slave…. As an anecdote, I can give you a very concrete example of this, that is, of its real efficacy. A year and a half ago there was [a conference] at Bonneval,¹⁸ which is a small town, I think, in the department of Sarthe, remarkable in that it is dominated by an immense building that from a distance looks, for all the world, like a big château, because it sits on a flat plain; you see that from a distance: it’s the psychiatric hospital, and in this psychiatric hospital Henri Ey reigns supreme.¹⁹ He has occupied a place in the history of French psychiatry—I was going to say a place like that of Bergson in the history of French philosophy at the same period, but that would be to insult Ey because he played an extraordinarily positive role; he was, and I excuse myself for saying this, but it’s very true—he was precisely the first great professor of French psychiatry, insofar as he taught French psychiatry that there was something outside the borders of France. Henri Ey can be considered a hero of the battle against provincialism, French provincialism in the theoretical domain that concerns psychiatry. In particular, he taught French psychiatry that a fellow named Jackson had existed somewhere,²⁰ no one knew where, but anyway, that he’d existed, that he’d written things, that they were important things, that people ought to know them, that they might have consequences, etc.

For years, in the comfort of his château at Bonneval, Ey has been periodically organizing a psychiatric conference in the course of which he sets forth his doctrine, which is a dynamicopsycho-organic doctrine, a kind of psychiatric Bergsonism that has, in fact, shed light on things and, besides, is inspired by Jackson;… and he provides an opportunity for people to express themselves. Obviously, he is no longer completely the intellectual guide of the younger generation. He was a contemporary of Lacan, since they studied together at Sainte-Anne; their meeting dates from that time; similarly, when they were there at Sainte-Anne they were roommates, and on the wall of their room this little phrase was written: “N’est pas fou qui veut” (“Not everyone is mad who wants to be”)! For them, that was a whole program. In other words, madmen exist, but not everyone can be mad…. That was very important, because it meant: we have to take this seriously; it’s not only negative, it’s also positive—something positive is expressed in it. And Lacan has never denied this profound inspiration, all the less because he mentions Ey from time to time, to tell him: “Well, you remember, don’t you, our common program, how are you getting on with “is not mad who wants to be?” From time to time he notes that Ey is behind on his program—it’s not very difficult—and from time to time he also indulges in the malicious pleasure of allowing a public demonstration of this in front of Ey himself, in particular in the course of the last conference I’m talking about, which took place a year and a half ago, during which Laplanche gave his paper, written with Leclaire, on the unconscious and to which Ricoeur was invited.²¹

French psychiatry is defined in part by its need for philosophy, by an enormous consumption of philosophy. I’m not talking about medicine in general, but it is in any case certain that psychiatrists and psychoanalysts are among the biggest consumers on the French philosophical market. If philosophers did not exist in France, the publishers of philosophical works would survive them on the condition that psychiatry survived the philosophers. Ricoeur gave a talk that was, I think, very moving… anyway I heard so many people talking about it that I no longer dare say anything about it, because you’ve heard more about it than I have. But I want to say that what was at the heart of the encounter between Ricoeur and this world of psychiatry was in fact this encounter between the philosophical concepts of a philosophy of intersubjectivity and the analytical critique of therapy. What’s going on? The psychoanalysts wonder: they have nothing for thinking about what goes on in therapy, in practice. And when someone from outside, who is a cultivated, intelligent, conscientious, honest, rigorous fellow like Ricoeur, comes to tell them: “Look, I think I can contribute something modest,” in the hunger for theory that torments them they are moved, and all the more because Ricoeur is a man who lives these things, and because in the end perhaps the only collective misunderstanding that can characterize this historic encounter is that what was exchanged is not a concept traded for a practice—in other words, it was perhaps not theoretical concepts coming from philosophy that were exchanged against the analytic practice of therapy; I would say that one experience was traded for another. It’s at that level that the thing could be real, that it made a convincing mark: they exchanged their experiences. The psychiatrists and psychoanalysts gave their experience, and Ricoeur gave his experience of the world of intersubjectivity, that is, a certain experience of moral practice, political practice, etc.: he was himself his own experience; his discourse was his own experience. What was exchanged was experience; I’m afraid that the concepts remained outside. I tell you this to show you what the situation is. It’s not simply a ridiculous or polemical situation, it’s a very real, very profound situation, and it forces us to inquire into what takes place on the psychoanalytic side, and what is happening, obviously, on the side of the other domains involved. That is, on the side of all the people who meet one another, including the most honest and authentic philosophers, since in this case Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Ricoeur are all absolutely above suspicion so far as authenticity is concerned.

So there you see in what domain the meeting that I talked about at the outset took place, and what principle I personally lived for a certain time, namely that psychology was psychoanalysis, that psychology didn’t know it, but that, thank God, it was beginning to know it. The proof? It was spreading everywhere. And people thought that was just fine, that it sufficed to add a little theoretical consciousness to fix things and then it would be all right. From that moment on, a certain number of problems arise. The first one immediately strikes us: if in fact psychoanalysis is the essence of psychology—of psychology and of all the disciplines that depend on it; I’m taking psychology as an example, if you will—if psychoanalysis is the essence of psychology, what differentiates the domain of psychoanalysis from that of psychology? It’s not easy to see what theoretical difference can be defined between psychoanalysis and psychology, between psychoanalysis and psychotherapeutic medicine, between psychoanalysis and psychiatry, etc. My teacher, Jean Guitton, used to tell us,²² “if everything is pink, nothing is pink,” and I have to say that this concept is certainly a fundamental concept that I owe him—one always has to recognize one’s training; one has to be honest with regard to one’s teachers; I incontestably owe him that concept—and it’s the reflection on this concept that authorizes me to ask this question: if everything is psychoanalysis, nothing is psychoanalysis; if everything is psychology, nothing is psychology, so how can we ground the real differences? They’re not imaginary, they really correspond to a difference in practice, because analytic practice is one thing, but psychotherapeutic practice is another: everyone will tell you that. Psychoanalysts who do psychotherapy will tell you that it’s not the same thing at all, that quite different techniques are involved, etc.; the psychiatrist will tell you: “oh, so far as I’m concerned, the psychoanalysts… the concepts passed the border, but the techniques didn’t at all, etc.” There’s a real difference.

The second theoretical problem, still in relation to “if everything is pink, nothing is pink,” but this time applied to the agreement between psychoanalysis and philosophy. If the analytic situation is fundamentally identical to the situation of intersubjectivity, to the original situation of intersubjectivity, what difference is there between psychoanalysis and the philosophy of intersubjectivity? A real problem, not at all imaginary, because it is very precisely to this problem that Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis responds. Sartre has undergone, or has claimed to have undergone, a psychoanalysis, has claimed to found a psychoanalysis, and he’s not the only one. Binswanger,²³ in Germany, is not only a philosopher, but also a practitioner. They claimed to have created an existential psychoanalysis, that is, a psychoanalysis based theoretically on the identity of the doctor-patient relationship and the originary “for-others” (Mitsein), the originary intersubjectivity. That may very well be, but nonetheless it doesn’t seem that that’s quite how things are; Laplanche’s article, for example, is definite about it: that’s not what’s happening in psychoanalytic reality itself.

To be clear and schematic at once, I have summed up the core of the problem in these two difficulties to tell you that Lacan is the only one who has answered these two fundamental questions. Lacan, obviously, is a figure who has existed for a long time, at least he exists for the world of psychoanalysis, and he also existed for the world of philosophy: you know that the first issue of La Psychanalyse contained a dialogue between Lacan and Hyppolite.²⁴ For a long time, Hyppolite attended Lacan’s seminar, which is still going on, I point out—it’s an eternal institution, one that reproduces itself—Wednesdays at 12:15 P.M., at the Sainte-Anne Psychiatric Hospital, women’s ward. You should go once just to see, to realize on-site what goes on down there on Wednesdays at 12:15; it’s not a convenient time, but it’s the time for doctors, because they’ve finished their rounds.

Obviously Lacan existed a little in the world of philosophy. In his last lectures at the Collège de France, Merleau-Ponty cited him, but in the end he wasn’t mentioned in any of Merleau-Ponty’s fundamental works. Lacan is a historical phenomenon: we have to look into him. What is clear is that he’s unintelligible for us Latins; he’s enclosed behind a whole series of enigmas, hidden behind a whole series of coats of arms. In short, he presents himself in a form that is Gongoresque—since he has applied this adjective to himself—underneath a form theoretically and deliberately baroque, like a kind of wild beast: I believe that expression is not excessive; you have to have heard him scream to know that he is a man of an absolutely extraordinary aggressiveness, of a splendid maliciousness in which he certainly realizes himself as an individual who passed by way of surrealism. But the use of surrealism is not always exemplary; and that corresponds to something. To what? The hypothesis I present to you is that this aggressiveness is necessary because of the psychoanalytic milieu itself. I mean that the difficulties of psychoanalysis used to be between psychoanalysis, on the one hand, which was rejected by the cultural institutions, and the nonanalytic world, on the other. And when this takes place within the analytic world itself, that’s another difficulty, because there it is not a question of a lack of understanding of psychoanalysis on the part of people who don’t know Freud, but of a lack of understanding of psychoanalysis on the part of the very people who ought to know it. And in the current forms of the organization of the psychoanalytic world, that is, in the juridical, social, economic structures of the psychoanalytic world, I think there’s no other way out than nastiness, on the one hand, and, on the other, a behavior of theoretical imposture through which, by pretending to say something incomprehensible, he says something perfectly clear, but to make it pass he needs to protect himself through the form of incomprehensibility he imposes on us. I think that for him this is a way of making his interlocutors feel stupid and that it gives them immediate proof that they don’t understand anything they say; I think they need the immediacy of this proof in order to respect something that is hidden behind the very form of the inaccessibility of the discourse. If you go to Lacan’s seminar, you’ll see a whole series of people praying before a discourse that is unintelligible to them, unless they’ve frequented the master for a long time, or else—this is the very positive and absolutely inevitable aspect of his behavior—he uses the methods of intellectual terrorism, that is, he forces people to recognize that they don’t understand what they’re reading, that they don’t understand because even the people who have a theoretical culture can’t understand it, so all the more… In short, in these forms whose historical existence would have to be justified beyond Lacan’s autobiographical reasons, something extremely important and extremely serious is going on, which I want to formulate very briefly: we can say that the theoretical work undertaken by Lacan is characterized by a radical, conscious, resolute refusal in which the resolution and the consciousness match the theoretical content. I mean that he’s a guy who’s resolute, not at all out of a decision made by the will, but on the basis of the theoretical certainty that what he says is founded. This resolution is manifested negatively and positively. It is manifested negatively by an implacable struggle against what we can only call the two trends that are currently dominant: the scientistic or mechanistic trend, so to speak, which connects psychoanalysis either to biology or psycho-physiology or neurology or sociology, etc., that is, to objects into which it is absorbed, and, on the other hand, the trend of philosophical interpretation presently dominating the philosophical situation in France.

A radical rejection, but this radical rejection is not simply a rejection of revolt, as was the case with Politzer, that is, a rejection that simply sets something aside and then says: “we’ll have to deal with that” but isn’t up to thinking it through. Lacan doesn’t offer us only the example of the concept and of the designation of the nonconcept, Lacan doesn’t say we have to reject what exists from the theoretical point of view because reality is something else. He gives us two things: he gives us the nonconcept—excuse me, more exactly the concept and the non-concept at the same time; he’s not content to say, “we mustn’t think about that because it’s false,” but says instead, “here’s how we can think about reality”; and he gives it to us through a return to Freud and a theoretical interpretation of Freud’s texts. That’s what we are going to work on.

If Lacan’s attempt is well founded—I want to conclude with this point—it interests us to the greatest degree, from the theoretical point of view, for absolutely essential reasons. Because it’s the whole domain we have envisaged with regard to the relations between psychoanalysis and psychology, that is, the whole domain of the human sciences in which the problem of what psychoanalysis is is raised—it’s this whole domain that’s at stake. I wouldn’t say that everything depends on a reflection on psychoanalysis; I’d say, more precisely, that much depends on a reflection on psychoanalysis. Why? Because what exists for us, now, concretely, is not at all the problem of the relations between psychoanalysis and psychology or sociology, etc.: this problem is settled concretely by the actual relations that exist between psychoanalysis, psychology, etc. The world of the social sciences has no need at all for the work we are going to do this year—right here: it doesn’t care about it at all, because theory doesn’t interest it, it lives simply on things, consequences; it lives, and has long lived, in social psychology, anthropology, etc., not in the works that exist and in the people who write them. What interests us is the theoretical question that we are raising: what is the relation, not factual, concrete, actual, but theoretical, the relation de jure—I return now to what I said at the outset—between psychoanalysis and the human sciences? To answer that question we have to define the essence of psychoanalysis. In order to make our way into that world, we need the point that Archimedes asked for, in order to see further, that point of departure: we need an absolute point, a theoretical point; something, somewhere, has to be defined theoretically. The situation is such that this point is found in this world; in my opinion, there are two mooring points. The first… is the theoretical consequences of the problematic inaugurated by Marx, but that’s something else. And the other is the work of someone who has nothing directly to do with Marx and who says, today we have a theoretical mooring point, and it’s the only mooring point we have, not in the whole world, but very precisely in the world of psychology, in the world of the relation between psychology, psychiatry, etc., in the world that concerns the relation between psychology and psychoanalysis, and this mooring point is the possibility of a consistent, rigorous, valid, theoretical definition of psychoanalysis: that’s what Lacan gives us.