The moral goals of psychoanalysis
At the point where I am about to bring to an end the risky topic that I chose to explore with you this year, I believe I cannot do enough to articulate the limit of the progress I wanted you to make.
I will spend next year outlining the ends and the means of analysis in relation to each other. Though that’s not necessarily the title I will give the Seminar. It seems to me to be indispensable that we stop for a moment to consider something that remains obscure in what might be called the moral goals of psychoanalysis.
To promote in the practice of analysis a form of psychological normalization implies what might be called rationalizing moralization. Furthermore, to aim for the fulfillment of what is known as the genital stage, that is, a maturation of the drive and object, which would set the standard for a right relationship to reality, definitely embodies a certain moral implication.
Should the theoretical and practical purpose of our action be limited to the ideal of psychological harmonization? In the hope of allowing our patients to achieve the possibility of an untroubled happiness should we assume that the reduction of the antimony that Freud himself so powerfully articulated may be complete? I am referring to what he expresses in Civilization and Its Discontents when he affirms that the form in which the moral agency is concretely inscribed in man – and that is nothing less than rational according to him – the form he called the superego, operates according to an economy such that the more one sacrifices to it, the more it demands.
Are we entitled to forget that threat, that cleavage in the moral being of man, in the doctrine and practice of psychoanalysis? In truth, that is what happens; we are only too inclined to forget it, both in the promises that we believe we can make, and in those that we believe we can make to ourselves in the matter of a given outcome of our therapy. It’s serious, and it’s even more serious when we are in a position to give to an analysis its full significance; I mean when we are faced by the conceivable end of an analysis in its training function in the fullest sense of the term.
If we are to consider an analysis completed for someone who is subsequently to find himself in a responsible position relative to an analysis, in the sense that he becomes an analyst himself, should it ideally or by right end with the position of comfort that I categorized just now as a moralizing rationalization of the kind in which it often tends to express itself?
When in conformity with Freudian experience one has articulated the dialectic of demand, need and desire, is it fitting to reduce the success of an analysis to a situation of individual comfort linked to that well-founded and legitimate function we might call the service of goods? Private goods, family goods, domestic goods, other goods that solicit us, the goods of our trade or our profession, the goods of the city, etc.
Can we, in fact, close off that city so easily nowadays? It doesn’t matter. However we regulate the situation of those who have recourse to us in our society, it is only too obvious that their aspiration to happiness will always imply a place where miracles happen, a promise, a mirage of original genius or an opening up of freedom, or if we caricature it, the possession of all women for a man and of an ideal man for a woman. To make oneself the guarantor of the possibility that a subject will in some way be able to find happiness even in analysis is a form of fraud.
There’s absolutely no reason why we should make ourselves the guarantors of the bourgeois dream. A little more rigor and firmness are required in our confrontation with the human condition. That is why I reminded you last time that the service of goods or the shift of the demand for happiness onto the political stage has its consequences. The movement that the world we live in is caught up in, of wanting to establish the universal spread of the service of goods as far as conceivably possible, implies an amputation, sacrifices, indeed a kind of puritanism in the relationship to desire that has occurred historically. The establishment of the service of goods at a universal level does not in itself resolve the problem of the present relationship of each individual man to his desire in the short period of time between his birth and his death. The happiness of future generations is not at issue here.
As I believe I have shown here in the sphere I have outlined for you this year, the function of desire must remain in a fundamental relationship to death. The question I ask is this: shouldn’t the true termination of an analysis – and by that I mean the kind that prepares you to become an analyst – in the end confront the one who undergoes it with the reality of the human condition? It is precisely this, that in connection with anguish, Freud designated as the level at which its signal is produced, namely, Hilflosigkeit or distress, the state in which man is in that relationship to himself which is his own death – in the sense I have taught you to isolate it this year – and can expect help from no one.
At the end of a training analysis the subject should reach and should know the domain and the level of the experience of absolute disarray. It is a level at which anguish is already a protection, not so much Abwarten as Erwartung.Anguish develops by letting a danger appear, whereas there is no danger at the level of the final experience of Hilflosigkeit.
I have already told you how the limit of this region is expressed for man; it touches the end of what he is and what he is not. That is why the myth of Oedipus acquires its full significance here.
Today I will once again bring you back to the passage through that intermediary region, and I remind you that in the Oedipus story one must not over-look the time that passes between the moment when Oedipus is blinded and the moment when he dies. And it is, moreover, a special, unique death that, as I have already said, constitutes a genuine enigma in Sophocles.
One shouldn’t forget that in a sense Oedipus did not suffer from the Oedipus complex, and he punished himself for a sin he did not commit. He simply killed a man whom he didn’t know was his father, a man whom, according to the realistically motivated form in which the myth is presented, he met on the road along which he was fleeing because he had got wind of something quite unpleasant concerning him with relation to his father. He flees those whom he thinks are his parents, and commits a crime in trying to avoid it.
He doesn’t know that in achieving happiness, both conjugal happiness and that of his job as king, of being the guide to the happiness of the state, he is sleeping with his mother. One might therefore ask what the treatment he inflicts on himself means. Which treatment? He gives up the very thing that captivated him. In fact, he has been duped, tricked by reason of the fact that he achieved happiness. Beyond the sphere of the service of goods and in spite of the complete success of this service, he enters into the zone in which he pursues his desire.
Note carefully the dispositions he makes; at the moment of death, he remains unmoved. The irony of the French expression for hale and hearty, bon pied bon oeil,1 should not mean too much in his case, since the man whose feet are swollen has also lost the sight of his eyes. But that doesn’t prevent him from demanding everything or, in other words, all the honors due his rank. The memory of the legend allows us to perceive something that is emphasized by modem ethnography, because after the sacrifice he was sent the victim’s thigh instead of its shoulder – it might be the other way round – and he sees in this lapse an intolerable insult and breaks with his sons to whom he had handed over power. Then in the end his curse on his sons bursts forth, and it is absolute.
It is important to explore what is contained in that moment when, although he has renounced the service of goods, nothing of the preeminence of his dignity in relation to these same goods is ever abandoned; it is the same moment when in his tragic liberty he has to deal with the consequence of that desire that led him to go beyond the limit, namely, the desire to know. He has learned and still wants to learn something more.
In order to make myself understood, I should perhaps evoke another tragic figure, one who is no doubt closer to us – King Lear.
I cannot give a detailed analysis of the significance of the play here. I just wanted to make you understand what Oedipus’s crossing over means on the basis of King Lear, where we find that crossing over in a derisory form.
King Lear, too, gives up the service of goods, gives up his royal duties; the old fool believes he is lovable and, therefore, hands over the service of goods to his daughters. But you must not assume that he gives up anything. It’s supposed to be the beginning of freedom, a life of festivities with his fifty knights, lots of fun, during which time he stays in turn with each of those two shrews whom he thought he could entrust with the duties of power.
In the meantime, there he is with no other warrant than that of loyalty, of an agreement founded on honor, since he conceded the power he had of his own free will. Shakespeare’s formidable irony mobilizes a whole swarm of destinies that devour each other, for it isn’t just Lear but all the good people in the play whom we see condemned to suffering without remission for having trusted to simple loyalty and to agreements founded on honor. I don’t have to emphasize the fact; just read the play again.
Lear as well as Oedipus shows us that he who enters that space, whether it be by the derisory path of Lear or the tragic one of Oedipus, finds himself alone and betrayed.
Oedipus’s last word is, as you know, that phrase μὴ φύvαι which I have repeated here any number of times, since it embodies a whole exegesis on negation. I indicated to you how the French language raises it in that little pleonastic “ne” which no one knows what to do with, since it dangles there in an expression such as “je crains qu’il ne vienne” (“I’m afraid he is coming”), which would be just as pleased if it weren’t there like a particle oscillating between a coming and fear of it.2 It has no raison d’être except for that of the subject itself. In French it is the remains of that which means μή in Greek, a word that does not signify a negation. I could show it to you in any text.
Other texts give expression to it, such as Antigone, for example, in the passage where the guard, in speaking about the person whom he does not yet know to be Antigone, says: “He left without leaving a trace.” And the guard adds in the lesson chosen by the editor: “ἒφενyε μη εἰδἑνοι.” In principle that means he avoided its being known that it was him – τó μη εἰδἑναι – as a variant suggests. But if one took the first version with its two negations literally, one would have to say he avoided its not being known that it was him. The μη is there to indicate the Spaltung between the enunciation and the enunciated that I have already explained. Mἡ φύναι means “rather not to be.”
That’s the choice with which a human existence such as Oedipus’s has to end. It ends so perfectly that he doesn’t die like everybody else, that is to say accidentally; he dies from a true death in which he erases his own being. The malediction is freely accepted on the basis of the true subsistence of a human being, the subsistence of the subtraction of himself from the order of the world. It’s a beautiful attitude, and as the madrigal says, it’s twice as beautiful on account of its beauty.
Oedipus shows us where the inner limit zone in the relationship to desire ends. In every human experience that zone is always relegated to a point beyond death, since the ordinary human being conducts himself in the light of what needs to be done so as not to risk the other death, the death that simply involves kicking the bucket. Primum vivere – questions relating to being are always postponed to later, which does not, of course, mean that they aren’t there on the horizon.
Here then are the topological notions without which it is our experience that it is impossible to find one’s way or to say anything that is not simply confusing and a going round in circles – and that’s true of even the most eminent of authors. Take, for example, the article by Jones that is remarkable in all kinds of ways, “Hatred, Culpability and Fear,” in which he shows the circularity of these terms, though it’s not an absolute one. I beg you to study it pen in hand, for we will be dealing with it next year. You will see how many things would be illuminated if the principles we are articulating were applied.
Let us take up those principles again in connection with the common man who concerns us here; let us try to see what they imply. Jones, for example, has perhaps expressed better than others the moral alibi that he called moralisches Entgegenkommen, that is, a kind of consent to the moral demand. In effect, he shows that very often there is nothing more in the duties man imposes on himself than the fear of the risks involved in failing to impose those duties. One should call things by their name, and it’s not because one hangs up a triple analytical veil that it doesn’t mean what it says: psychoanalysis teaches that in the end it is easier to accept interdiction than to run the risk of castration.
Let’s try to practice a little brain-washing on ourselves. Before going into the question further, which is often a way of avoiding it, what does it mean to say, as Freud does, that the superego appears at the moment of the decline of the Oedipus complex? Of course, we have in the meantime made a little progress by demonstrating that one was born before, in reaction to sadistic drives, according to Melanie Klein, although no one has been able to prove that the same superego is involved. But let’s limit ourselves to the Oedipal superego. The fact that it is born at the moment of the decline of the Oedipus complex means that the subject incorporates its authority into himself.
That ought to put you on the right track. In a famous article called “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud also says that the work of mourning is applied to an incorporated object, to an object which for one reason or another one is not particularly fond of. As far as the loved object that we make such a fuss about in our mourning is concerned, we do not, in fact, simply sing its praises, if only because of the lousy trick it played on us by leaving us. Thus, if we are sufficiently cruel to ourselves to incorporate the father, it is perhaps because we have a lot to reproach this father with.
It is here that the distinctions I presented to you last year may prove useful. Castration, frustration, and privation are not the same thing. If frustration properly belongs to the symbolic mother, he who is responsible for castration, according to Freud, is the real father, and as far as privation is concerned, it’s the imaginary father. Let us try to understand the function of each of these elements at the moment of decline of the Oedipus complex and of the formation of the superego. Perhaps that will shed a little light, and we won’t have the impression of reading two different lines at the same time when we take account of the castrating father, on the one hand, and the father as origin of the superego, on the other. This distinction is basic to everything Freud articulated, and in particular to the question of castration once he began to spell it out – the phenomenon is indeed a stupefying one since it is a notion that had never even been broached before him.
The real father, Freud tells us, is a castrating father. In what way? Through his presence as real father who effectively occupies that person with whom the child is in a state of rivalry, namely, the mother. Whether or not that is the case in experience, in theory there is no doubt about it: the real father is elevated to the rank of Great Fucker – though not, believe me, in the face of the Eternal, which isn’t even around to count the number of times. Yet doesn’t this real and mythical father fade at the moment of the decline of the Oedipus complex into the one whom the child may easily have already discovered at the relatively advanced age of five years old, namely, the imaginary father, the father who has fucked the kid up.
Isn’t that what the theoreticians of analytical experience say as they mumble away? And doesn’t one find the point of difference there? Isn’t it in connection with the experience of privation the small child undergoes – not because he is small but because he is human – in connection with what the child experiences as privation, that the mourning for the imaginary father is forged? – that is a mourning for someone who would really be someone. The perpetual reproach that is born at that moment, in a way that is more or less definitive and well-formed depending on the individual case, remains fundamental in the structure of the subject. It is this imaginary father and not the real one which is the basis of the providential image of God. And the function of the superego in the end, from its final point of view, is hatred for God, the reproach that God has handled things so badly.
I believe that that is the true structure of the articulation of the Oedipus complex. If you break it down in that way, you will find that the detours, hesitations, and gropings of different authors in their attempts to explain various difficulties and details will be much clearer. In particular, you will also be able to see, in a way that is otherwise impossible, what Jones really means when he speaks of the relationship between hate, fear, and guilt in connection with the genesis of the superego.
To pick up the thread, let us say, would to God that the drama took place at the bloody level of castration and that the poor little man flooded the whole world with his blood like Kronos Uranus!
Everyone knows that castration is there on the horizon and that it never, of course, occurs. What does happen relates to the fact that the little man is rather a paltry support for that organ, for that signifier, and that he seems rather to be deprived of it. And here one can see that his fate is common to that of the little girl, who also can be explained much more clearly from this angle of vision.
What is in question is the moment when the subject quite simply perceives that his father is an idiot or a thief, as the case may be, or quite simply a weakling or, routinely, an old fogey, as in Freud’s case. He was if you like an agreeable and kind old fogey, but he must, like all fathers, have communicated in spite of himself the series of shocks we call the contradictions of capitalism; he left Freiberg where there was nothing to do anymore in order to move to Vienna, and it is the kind of thing that doesn’t go unnoticed in the mind of a child, even if he is only three years old. And it was because Freud loved his father that he felt obliged to restore his stature to the point of attributing to him the gigantic proportions of the father of the primitive horde.
But that’s not what resolves the fundamental questions; that’s not the essential question, as the story of Oedipus tells us. If Oedipus is a whole man, if Oedipus doesn’t have an Oedipus complex, it is because in his case there is no father at all. The person who served as father was his adoptive father. And, my good friends, that’s the case with all of us, because as the Latin has it, pater is est quern justae nuptiae demonstrant, that is to say, the father is he who acknowledges us. We are at bottom in the same boat as Oedipus, even if we don’t know it. As far as the father that Oedipus knew is concerned, he only becomes the father, as Freud’s myth indicates, once he is dead.
It is thus there, as I’ve said a hundred times, that one finds the paternal function. In our theory the sole function of the father is to be a myth, to be always only the Name-of-the-Father, or in other words nothing more than the dead father, as Freud explains in Totem and Taboo. But for this to be developed fully, of course, the human adventure has to be carried through to its end, if only in outline; that zone Oedipus enters after having scratched out his eyes has to be explored.
It is always through some beneficial crossing of the limit that man experiences his desire. Others have expressed the idea before me. The whole meaning Jones discovers in connection with aphanisis is related to this; it is linked to the important risk, which is quite simply the loss of desire. Oedipus’s desire is the desire to know the last word on desire.
When I tell you that the desire of man is the desire of the Other, I am reminded of something in a poem by Paul Éluard that says “the difficult desire to endure” (le dur désir de durer). That is nothing more than the desire to desire.
For the ordinary man, given that Oedipus’s mourning is at the origin of the superego, the double limit – from the real death risked to the preferred or the assumed death, to the being-for-death – only appears as veiled. It is a veil that Jones calls hate. You can grasp in this the reason why any alert author locates the final term of the psychic reality we deal with in the ambivalence between love and hate.
The external limit that keeps man in the service of the good is the primum vivere. It is fear, we are told, but you can see how superficial its influence is.
Between the two for the ordinary man lies the exercise of his guilt, which is a reflection of his hatred for the creator, whoever he may be – for man is creationist – who made him such a weak and inadequate creature.
All this nonsense is meaningless for the hero, for the one who has entered that zone, for Oedipus who goes as far as the μἠφὐναι of true being-for-death, goes as far as a malediction he acquiesces in or an engagement with annihilation that is taken to be the realization of his wish. There is nothing else here except the true and indivisible disappearance that is his. Entry into that zone for him is constituted of a renunciation of goods and of power that is supposed to be a punishment, but is not, in fact, one. If he tears himself free from the world through the act of blinding himself, it is because only he who escapes from appearances can achieve truth. This was known in antiquity; the great Homer was blind and so was Tiresias.
For Oedipus the absolute reign of his desire is played out between the two, something that is sufficiently brought out by the fact that he is shown to be unyielding right to the end, demanding everything, giving up nothing, absolutely unreconciled.
I showed you the reverse and derisory side of this topology, which is the topology of tragedy, in connection with poor Lear, who doesn’t understand a thing and who makes the ocean and the earth echo because he tried to enter the same region in a salutary way with everyone agreeing. He appears in the end as still not having understood a thing and holding dead in his arms the object of his love, who is, of course, misrecognized by him.
Thus defined, that region enables us to posit the limits that illuminate a certain number of problems that are raised by our theory and our experience. We have never stopped repeating that the interiorization of the Law has nothing to do with the Law. Although we still need to know why. It is possible that the superego serves as a support for the moral conscience, but everyone knows that it has nothing to do with the moral conscience as far as its most obligatory demands are concerned. What the superego demands has nothing to do with that which we would be right in making the universal rule of our actions; such is the ABC of psychoanalytic truth. But it is not enough to affirm the fact; it must be justified.
I believe that the schema I have proposed to you is capable of doing that, and that if you stick with it you will find a way of not getting lost in that labyrinth.
Next time, I will start out on the path that all this has been leading to – a more precise grasp of catharsis and of the consequences of man’s relationship to desire.
June 29, 1960
1 It means literally “good foot good eye.”
2 See note 2 on p. 64 on the pleonastic “ne.”