The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959

The report I gave two years ago at Royaumont on “The Direction of the Cure” is to appear in the next issue of our review. The text is somewhat thrown together because I wrote it between two seminars I was giving here. I shall keep its improvised form, although I will try to fill out and rectify certain things to be found there.

I said somewhere that an analyst has to pay something if he is to play his role.

He pays in words, in his interpretations. He pays with his person to the extent that through the transference he is literally dispossessed. The whole current development of analysis involves the misrecognition of the analyst, but whatever he thinks of that and whatever panic reaction the analyst engages in through “the countertransference,” he has no choice but to go through it. He’s not the only one there with the person to whom he has made a commitment.

Finally, he has to pay with a judgment on his action. That’s the minimum demanded. Analysis is a judgment. It’s required everywhere else, but if it seems scandalous to affirm it here, there is probably a reason. It is because, from a certain point of view, the analyst is fully aware that he cannot know what he is doing in psychoanalysis. Part of this action remains hidden even to him.

And it is this that justifies the direction I have been taking you in this year, the point to which I have suggested you follow me, namely, there where the question of exploring the general ethical consequences involved in Freud’s opening up of the relationship to the unconscious is raised.

I grant that there was the appearance of a detour, but it was necessary so as to bring you closer to our ethics as analysts. A few reminders were necessary before I could bring you closer to the practice of analysis and its technical problems. In the present state of affairs, they can hardly be resolved through such reminders.

In the first place, is it the end of analysis that is demanded of us? What is demanded can be expressed in a simple word, bonheur or “happiness,” as they say in English, Im not saying anything new in that; a demand for happiness is doubtless involved here.

In the report I referred to earlier – which, now that I see it in print, seems a little too aphoristic, which explains why I will attempt here to lubricate its hinges a little – I allude to the question without explaining it further. The business is not helped by the fact that happiness has become a political matter. I won’t go any further into this, but it is the reason why I ended the lecture called “Dialectical Psychoanalysis” – a lecture in which I brought to an end a certain period of activity in a group that we have broken with since – with the words, “There is no satisfaction for the individual outside of the satisfaction of all.”

To refocus analysis on the dialectic makes evident the fact that the goal is indefinitely postponed. It’s not the fault of analysis if the question of happiness cannot be articulated in any other way at the present time. I would say that it is because, as Saint-Just says, happiness has become a political matter. It is because happiness has entered the political realm that the question of happiness is not susceptible to an Aristotelian solution, that the prerequisite is situated at the level of the needs of all men. Whereas Aristotle chooses between the different forms of the good that he offers the master, and tells him that only certain of these are worthy of his devotion – namely, contemplation – the dialectic of the master has, I insist, been discredited in our eyes for historical reasons that have to do with the period of history in which we find ourselves. Those reasons are expressed in politics by the following formula: “There is no satisfaction for the individual outside of the satisfaction of all.”

It is in such a context that analysis appears to be – without our being able to explain why precisely it is the case in this context – and the analyst sets himself up to receive, a demand for happiness.

I have set out to show you this year the distance traveled since Aristotle, say, by choosing among some of the most crucial concepts. I wanted to make you feel the extent to which we approach these things differently, how far we are from any formulation of a discipline of happiness.

There is in Aristotle a discipline of happiness. He shows the paths along which he intends to lead anyone who is willing to follow him in his problematic, paths which in different spheres of potential human activity lead to the realization of one of the functions of virtue. Such virtue is achieved through μεσότης, something that is far from being a simple golden mean or a process linked to the avoidance of excess; instead it is supposed to enable man to choose that which might reasonably allow him to realize himself in his own good.

Please note that one finds nothing similar in psychoanalysis. Along paths that would appear surprising to someone straight out of high school, we claim to allow the subject to put himself in a position such that things mysteriously and almost miraculously work themselves out right, provided he grasp them at the right end. Goodness only knows how obscure such a pretension as the achievement of genital objecthood (l’objectalité genitale) remains, along with what is so imprudently linked to it, namely, adjustment to reality.

One thing only alludes to the possibility of the happy satisfaction of the instinct, and that is the notion of sublimation. But it is clear that if one looks at the most esoteric formulation of the concept in Freud, in the context of his representing it as realized preeminently in the activity of the artist, it literally means that man has the possibility of making his desires tradeable or salable in the form of products. The frankness and even cynicism of such a formulation has in my eyes a great merit, although it is far from exhausting the fundamental question, and that is, How is it possible?

The other formulation consists of informing us that sublimation is the satisfaction of the drive with a change of object, that is, without repression. This definition is a profounder one, but it would also open up an even knottier problematic, if it weren’t for the fact that my teaching allows you to spot where the rabbit is hidden.

In effect, the rabbit to be conjured from the hat is already to be found in the instinct. This rabbit is not a new object; it is a change of object in itself. If the drive allows the change of object, it is because it is already deeply marked by the articulation of the signifier. In the graph of desire that I gave you, the instinct is situated at the level of the unconscious articulation of a signifying series and is for this reason constituted as fundamental alienation. That is why, on the other hand, each of the signifiers composing this series is joined by a common element.

In the definition of sublimation as satisfaction without repression, whether implicitly or explicitly, there is a passage from not-knowing to knowing, a recognition of the fact that desire is nothing more than the metonymy of the discourse of demand. It is change as such. I emphasize the following: the properly metonymic relation between one signifier and another that we call desire is not a new object or a previous object, but the change of object in itself.

Let me cite as an example something that occurred to me when I was preparing these comments for you, so that I could give an image of what I mean by sublimation. Think of the shift from a verb to what in grammar is called its complement or, in a more philosophical grammar, its determinative. Think of the most radical of verbs in the development of the phases of the drive, the verb “to eat.” There is “eating.” That is how the verb, the action, appears head-first in many languages, before there is any determination as to who is involved. Thus one sees here the secondary character of the subject, since we don’t even have the subject, the something that is there to be eaten.

There is eating – the eating of what? Of the book.

When in the Apocalypse we read this powerful image, “eat the book,” what does it mean? – if it isn’t that the book itself acquires the value of an incorporation, the incorporation of the signifier itself, the support of the properly apocalyptic creation. The signifier in this instance becomes God, the object of the incorporation itself.

In daring to formulate a satisfaction that isn’t rewarded with a repression, the theme that is central or preeminent is, What is desire? And in this connection I can only remind you of what I have articulated in the past: realizing one’s desire is necessarily always raised from the point of view of an absolute condition. It is precisely to the extent that the demand always under- or overshoots itself that, because it articulates itself through the signifier, it always demands something else; that in every satisfaction of a need, it insists on something else; that the satisfaction formulated spreads out and conforms to this gap; that desire is formed as something supporting this metonymy, namely, as something the demand means beyond whatever it is able to formulate. And that is why the question of the realization of desire is necessarily formulated from the point of view of a Last Judgment.

Try to imagine what “to have realized one’s desire” might mean, if it is not to have realized it, so to speak, in the end. It is this trespassing of death on life that gives its dynamism to any question that attempts to find a formulation for the subject of the realization of desire. To illustrate what I am saying, if we pose directly the question of desire on the basis of that Parminedean absolutism, which eliminates everything that is not being, then we will say, nothing is from that which is not born, and all that exists lives only in the lack of being.

Does life have anything to do with death? Can one say that the relationship to death supports or subtends, as the string does the bow, the curve of the rise and fall of life? It is enough for us to take up again the question that Freud himself thought he could raise on the basis of his experience – everything points to the fact that it is effectively raised by our experience.

In what I was saying a moment ago, I wasn’t talking about that death. I am interested in the second death, the one that you can still set your sights on once death has occurred, as I showed you with concrete examples in Sade’s texts.

After all, the human tradition has never ceased to keep this second death in mind by locating the end of our sufferings there; in the same way it has never ceased to imagine a second form of suffering, a suffering beyond death that is indefinitely sustained by the impossibility of crossing the limit of the second death. And that is why the tradition of hell in different forms has always remained alive, and it is still present in Sade in the idea he has of making the sufferings inflicted on a victim go on indefinitely. This refinement is attributed to one of the heroes of his novels, a Sadist who tries to assure himself of the damnation of the person he sends out of life into death.

Whatever the significance of the metapsychological imagining of Freud’s that is the death instinct, whether or not he was justified in forging it, the question it raises is articulated in the following form by virtue of the mere fact that it has been raised: How can man, that is to say a living being, have access to knowledge of the death instinct, to his own relationship to death?

The answer is, by virtue of the signifier in its most radical form. It is in the signifier and insofar as the subject articulates a signifying chain that he comes up against the fact that he may disappear from the chain of what he is.

In truth, it’s as dumb as can be. Not to recognize it, not to promote it as the essential articulation of non-knowledge as a dynamic value, not to recognize that the discovery of the unconscious is literally there in the form of this last word, simply means that they don’t know what they are doing. Not remembering this fundamental principle causes the proliferation that one can observe in analytical theory, a whole jungle, a veritable downpour of references – “It’s coming down in handfuls,” as they say in Charente – and one cannot help noticing the note of disorientation with which it resonates.

I read no doubt a little hastily the translation of Bergler’s last work. He always has something scathing and interesting to say, except that one has the impression of a wild stream of unmastered notions.

I wanted to show you how the function of the signifier in permitting the subject’s access to his relationship to death might be made more concrete than is possible through a connotation. That is why I have tried to have you recognize it in our recent meetings in an aesthetic form, namely, that of the beautiful – it being precisely the function of the beautiful to reveal to us the site of man’s relationship to his own death, and to reveal it to us only in a blinding flash.

Since I asked Mr. Kaufmann to remind you last time of the terms according to which, right at the beginning of the period of man’s relation to happiness that we are still living in, Kant thought it necessary to define the relation to the beautiful, I have subsequently heard the complaint that the thing wasn’t made vivid enough for you by means of an example. Well, let me try to give you one.

Remember the four moments of the beautiful as they were articulated for you. I will try by means of a graduated process to illustrate that for you. For the first step I will draw on an element of my daily experience.

My experience is not that vast, and I have often said to myself that I haven’t had sufficient taste for it – things don’t always seem to me to be that much fun. Nevertheless, something always turns up to enable one to find an image for that path of the in-between where I am attempting to lead you.

Let us just say that, unlike Mr. Teste, if stupidity is not my strong point, I’m not particularly proud of the fact.¹

I’m just going to tell you a little incident.

I was in London once in what they call a kind of “Home,” where I was being welcomed as a guest of an institution which disseminates French culture. It was in one of those charming little areas of London at some distance from the center, toward the end of October when the weather is often delightful. I was the recipient of a form of hospitality that was marked by a kind of Victorian monasticism in a charming little building. The style of the establishment was marked by the delicious smell of toast and the menace of those inedible gelatine desserts that they are in the habit of consuming over there.

I wasn’t alone but was with someone who has agreed to accompany me through life, one of whose characteristics is an extreme sense of uniqueness. In the morning this person, that is to say my wife, suddenly says out of the blue: “Professor D … is here.” He is or was one of my mentors at the Ecoledes Longues Orientales. It was very early in the morning. “How do you know?” I asked her, since I assure you Professor D … is not a close friend of mine. I was told: “I’ve seen his shoes.”

I must say that I couldn’t help feeling startled by that answer; I was also skeptical. To read the highly personal traits of an individuality into a pair of clodhoppers sitting outside a door didn’t seem to me to be sufficiently convincing evidence, and there was nothing else that allowed me to believe that Professor D … might be in London. I found the thing quite funny and didn’t attach any importance to it.

I made my way at that early hour along the corridors without thinking anything more about it. And it was then that to my astonishment I saw Professor D … in person slipping out of his bedroom in his dressing gown, exposing as he went a pair of long and highly academic drawers.

I find that experience highly instructive, and it is on that basis that I intend to suggest to you the notion of the beautiful.

Nothing less was required than an experience in which the universality belonging to the shoes of an academic was intimately joined to whatever it was that was absolutely specific to Professor D …, for me to invite you quite simply to think of Van Gogh’s old shoes – on the basis of which Heidegger has given us a dazzling image of what a work of beauty is.

You must imagine Professor D …’s clodhoppers ohne Begriff, with no thought of the academic, without any connection to his endearing personality, if you are to begin to see Van Gogh’s own clodhoppers come alive with their own incommensurable quality of beauty.

They are simply there; they communicate a sign of understanding that is situated precisely at equal distance from the power of the imagination and that of the signifier. This signifier is not even a signifier of walking, of fatigue, or of anything else, such as passion or human warmth. It is just a signifier of that which is signified by a pair of abandoned clodhoppers, namely, both a presence and a pure absence – something that is, if one likes, inert, available to everyone, but something that seen from certain sides, in spite of its dumbness, speaks. It is an impression that appears as a function of the organic or, in a word, of waste, since it evokes the beginning of spontaneous generation.

That factor which magically transforms these clodhoppers into a kind of reverse side and analogue of two buds proves that it is not a question of imitation – something that has always taken in those who have written on the topic – but of the capture, by virtue of their situation in a certain temporal relationship, of that quality through which they are themselves the visible manifestation of beauty.

If you don’t find this example convincing, find others. What I am, in effect, attempting to show here is that the beautiful has nothing to do with what is called ideal beauty. It is only on the basis of the apprehension of the beautiful at the very point of the transition between life and death that we can try to reinstate ideal beauty or, in other words, the function of that which sometimes reveals itself to us as the ideal form of beauty, and in the first place the famous human form.

If you read that work of Lessing’s which is so rich in all kinds of insights, the Laocoon, you will find that he is absorbed from the beginning in the conception of the dignity of the object. Not that it is as the result of historical progress that the dignity of the object has finally been abandoned, thank God, since everything seems to indicate that it always was. Greek artists didn’t restrict themselves to producing images of the gods; as we learn from Aristophanes’s writings, paintings of onions cost a lot of money. It is thus not just with the Dutch painters that people began to realize that any object may be the signifier by means of which that reflection, mirage, or more or less unbearable brilliance we call the beautiful starts to vibrate.

But since I have just referred to the Dutch, take the example of the still life. You will find there moving in the opposite direction from that of the clodhoppers discussed above, as they began to bud, the same crossing of the line. As Claudel showed so admirably in his study of Dutch painting, it is to the extent that the still life both reveals and hides that within it which constitutes a threat, denouement, unfolding, or decomposition, that it manifests the beautiful for us as a function of a temporal relation.

Moreover, insofar as it engages the ideal, the question of the beautiful can only be found at this level as operating at the limit. Even in Kant’s time it is the form of the human body that is presented to us as the limit of the possibilities of the beautiful, as ideal Erscheinen. It once was, though it no longer is, a divine form. It is the cloak of all possible fantasms of human desire. The flowers of desire are contained in this vase whose contours we attempt to define.

And it is this that leads me to posit the form of the body, and especially its image, as I have previously articulated it in the function of narcissism, as that which from a certain point of view represents the relationship of man to his second death, the signifier of his desire, his visible desire.

The central mirage is to be found in Ἵμερος ἐναργής, which both indicates the site of desire insofar as it is desire of nothing, the relationship of man to his lack of being, and prevents that site from being seen.

Here we can take the question even further. Is it the same shadow that is represented by the human body; is it this same image that constitutes a barrier to the Other-thing that lies beyond?

That which lies beyond is not simply the relationship to the second death or, in other words, to man to the extent that language demands of him that he realize the following, namely, that he is not. There is also the libido, that is to say, that which at fleeting moments carries us beyond the encounter that makes us forget it. And Freud was the first to articulate boldly and powerfully the idea that the only moment of jouissance that man knows occurs at the site where fantasms are produced, fantasms that represent for us the same barrier as far as access to jouissance is concerned, the barrier where everything is forgotten.

I should like to introduce here, as a parallel to the function of the beautiful, another function. I have named it on a number of occasions without emphasizing it particularly, but it seems to me essential to refer to it here. It is with your permission what I shall call Aἰδως or, in other words, a sense of shame. The omission of this barrier, which prevents the direct experience of that which is to be found at the center of sexual union, seems to me to be at the origin of all kinds of questions that cannot be answered, including notably the matter of feminine sexuality, which is a subject that is on the agenda of our research activities – though I am not responsible for that.

The end of Antigone offers us the substitution of some bloody image of sacrifice that is realized in the mystical suicide. Clearly, beyond a certain point we do not know what goes on in Antigone’s tomb. Everything points to the fact that what occurs there takes place as a crisis of μαvíα – Antigone attains the same level as that at which both Ajax and Hercules perish. I won’t take up the question of Oedipus’s end.

In this connection I have found no better a source than the Heraclitean aphorisms that we owe to the denunciatory references of Saint Clement of Alexandria – he found in them the sign of pagan abominations. I have retained a small fragment that says, εἰ μὴ γὰρ Διονύσωι Πομπὴν ἐποιοῦντο καὶ ὕμvεον αἶσμα, “clearly, if they did not organize processions and feasts to Dionysos accompanied by the singing of hymns” – and it is here that the ambiguity begins—αἰδοίοισιν ἀναιδέστατα Εἰργασίάν – what would they perform? the most disrespectful of homages to something shameful.” That is in a sense one way of reading it. And, Heraclites goes on, Hades and Dionysos are the same thing to the extent that both of them μαίvοvται, they enter a state of delirium and start to perform like hyenas. The reference is to bacchic processions that are linked to the appearance of all manner of forms of trance.

You should realize that Heraclites didn’t at all like extreme religious ceremonies and had no sympathy for ecstacy – a lack of sympathy that is very different from that of a Christian or a rationalist. And he leads us up to the point where he says that if it weren’t a reference to Hades or a ceremony of ecstacy, it would be nothing more than an odious phallic ceremony, an object of disgust.

Yet it isn’t clear that one should rely on this translation. There is an obvious play on words between αἰδοίοισιν ἀναιδέστατα and Ἅιδης, which means invisible. Αἰδοῖα means the shameful parts, but it can also mean something respectable and venerable. The term song isn’t missing. In the end, in singing their praises with great pomp to Dionysos, the members of his sect do not really know what they are doing. Aren’t Hades and Dionysos one and the same thing?

It’s a question that is also raised for us. Do the fantasm of the phallus and the beauty of the human image find their legitimate place at the same level? Or is there, on the contrary, an imperceptible distinction, an irreducible difference, between them? The whole Freudian enterprise has come up against that issue. At the end of one of his final papers, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” Freud tells us that in the end the aspiration of the patient collapses into an ineradicable nostalgia for the fact that there is no way he can be the phallus, and that since he cannot be it, he can only have it in the condition of the Penisneid in a woman or of castration in a man.

That’s something to remember whenever the analyst finds himself in the position of responding to anyone who asks him for happiness. The question of the Sovereign Good is one that man has asked himself since time immemorial, but the analyst knows that it is a question that is closed. Not only doesn’t he have that Sovereign Good that is asked of him, but he also knows there isn’t any. To have carried an analysis through to its end is no more nor less than to have encountered that limit in which the problematic of desire is raised.

That this problematic is central for access to any realization of oneself whatsoever constitutes the novelty of the analysis. There is no doubt that in the course of this process the subject will encounter much that is good for him, all the good he can do for himself, in fact, but let us not forget what we know so well because we say it everyday of our lives in the clearest of terms: he will only encounter that good if at every moment he eliminates from his wishes the false goods, if he exhausts not only the vanity of his demands, given that they are all no more than regressive demands, but also the vanity of his gifts.

Psychoanalysis makes the whole achievement of happiness turn on the genital act. It is, therefore, necessary to draw the proper consequences from this. It is doubtless possible to achieve for a single moment in this act something which enables one human being to be for another in the place that is both living and dead of the Thing. In this act and only at this moment, he may simulate with his flesh the consummation of what he is not under any circumstances. But even if the possibility of this consummation is polarizing and central, it cannot be considered timely.

What the subject achieves in analysis is not just that access, even if it is repeated and always available, but something else that through the transference gives everything living its form – the subject, so to speak, counts the vote relative to his own law. This law is in the first place always the acceptance of something that began to be articulated before him in previous generations, and which is strictly speaking Atè. Although this Atè does not always reach the tragic level of Antigone’s Atè, it is nevertheless closely related to misfortune.

What the analyst has to give, unlike the partner in the act of love, is something that even the most beautiful bride in the world cannot outmatch, that is to say, what he has. And what he has is nothing other than his desire, like that of the analysand, with the difference that it is an experienced desire.

What can a desire of this kind, the desire of the analyst, be? We can say right away what it cannot be. It cannot desire the impossible.

I will give you an example of that in a compact definition, which an author managed to come up with before he disappeared, of a function that seemed to him to be essential in the dual relationship with the analyst, a relationship that exists to the extent that we respond to the demand of happiness, but that does not exhaust the analysis. This function, which is namely that of distance, is defined in the following terms: the gap between the way in which the subject expresses his instinctual “drives”² and the way in which he would be able to express them if the process of arranging and organizing them weren’t available.

In the light of my teaching, the truly aberrant and contradictory character of such a formulation is apparent. If the instinct is the effect of the mark of the signifier on needs, their transformation as an effect of the signifier into something fragmented and panic-stricken that we call the drive, what can such a definition of distance mean?

In the same way, if the analyst’s desire is an experienced desire, it is impossible for the analyst to agree to remain in the trap that is the desire to reduce such a distance to nothing. The function of the analyst would essentially be that of a “joiner” (un rappocher), as the same theoretician expresses it. The same fantasm is involved here, namely, that of the incorporation or ingestion of the phallic image to the extent that it is actualized in a relationship that is entirely governed by the imaginary. In that direction the subject can achieve nothing but some form of psychosis or perversion, however mild its character, for the term “joiner” that is placed by the author concerned at the center of the analytical dialectic does no more than reflect a desire of the analyst, whose nature the latter misperceives as a result of an inadequate theory of his position; it is the desire to draw closer to the point of being joined to the one who is in his charge.

One can only say of such an aspiration that it is pathetic in its naiveté. And one is only surprised that it could have been formulated other than as a dead-end to be dismissed.

That, then, is what I wanted to remind you of today, so as to indicate to you the direction taken by our research on the subject of the beautiful and, I would add, the sublime. We haven’t yet extracted from the Kantian definitions of the sublime all the substance we might. The conjunction of this term with that of sublimation is probably not simply an accident nor simply homonymic.

We will take up the question of this satisfaction next time for our profit; the promise of analysis grants no other.

June 22, 1960

¹ The reference is to Paul Valéry’s short work of fiction, Monsieur Teste.

2. In English in text.