Arnold Modell’s contribution calls for a general comment about what appears to be a fundamental difference between, on the one hand, the Freudian and Lacanian conception of transference dynamics and the general conduct of treatment, and, on the other, the pragmatic position implicit in Dr. Modell’s clinical approach and in the therapeutic strategies it entails.
When we listen to our patients, Dr. Modell says, “we select that which is meaningful because of the affects that are communicated to us.” This “technical” position1 seems to me to sum up what analysts who base their work on Freud and Lacan have in common with Dr. Modell and his American colleagues, and also what separates us. When Dr. Modell tells us that the analyst’s empathy is regarded as a perceptual instrument, this suggests that he is looking and listening for formations of the unconscious in the patient. This is certainly true of our own work as well. But when American analysts focus their clinical activity on affect—since this is the basic feature underlying “insight” in their approach—then we part company theoretically and technically. Our activity is directly based on representation2 and the signifier.
This difference becomes clear right away when Dr. Modell, in connection with the new kinds of symptoms that he calls psychic death and the inability to generate meaning, emphasizes that the analyst needs to give patients access to revised meanings through a technical approach basically governed by intuition and countertransference. As he says, “As we listen to our patients we are automatically attuned to what is meaningful…. [P]sychoanalysts search for private meanings…. [A]s psychoanalysts we are concerned with private meanings and private significance. Meaning in psychoanalysis always refers to what is significant for the analysand” (p. 186).
As far as the patient’s words are concerned, these assertions leave in abeyance the position of the analyst and the status of his interventions and interpretations—if this distinction is taken into account in the first place. In fact, from this point of view it is as though there were not even a distinction between signifier and signification/signified, so we can understand why it is that affect, more than desire, becomes the analyst’s sole guide. The question thus arises as to whether a listening stance essentially focused on the signifier apart from signification would not be better able to give these patients access to the truth of their desire and consequently to reverse the pathogenic mechanism of “psychic death” through analysis of the transference.
I want to be more precise about our understanding of such terms as meaning and signifier/signified when we use them in the context of ideas such as interpretation and transference analysis in contrast to insight and empathy.
Very early on in Freud’s work the concept of the royal road to the unconscious clearly sets forth the connection that is presumed to exist between meaning and interpretation. Indeed, the aim of dream interpretation is to reveal the hidden meaning of the unconscious material: “to interpret a dream” is to indicate its “meaning” (Freud 1900).
Just as interpretation is the primary modality of the therapeutic action, so, in this view, it is bound up in a causal subjection to the uncovering of a hidden meaning. Moreover, in connection with the distinction he makes between latent and manifest meaning, Freud does not hesitate to use metaphors such as the “analyst as detective,” “riddle,” “rebus,” “investigation,” and so forth. In short, Freud’s original concept of interpretation is strictly confined to the domain of meaning.
But obviously, the connection between meaning and interpretation leads to certain problems of which Freud, too, was well aware. Because of the rule of free association the patient has the last word on the truth of his desire, but it is nevertheless the case that while the interpretation offered to him reveals a meaning, at the same time it closes off the question of the truth of that desire. The difficulty becomes even greater if we consider construction, which Freud presents as a systematic elaboration designed to mobilize the lifting of repression:
Quite often we do not succeed in bringing the patient to recollect what has been repressed. Instead of that, if the analysis is carried out correctly, we produce in him an assured conviction of the truth of the construction which achieves the same therapeutic result as a recaptured memory. [1937, p. 265f.]
What is the truth Freud is speaking about here? He is referring to the truth of the construction taken as such, and thus the truth is part and parcel of its signifying structure. In this sense we can say that the truth of the construction places the interpretation in the context of a logic in which truth is presumed to be isomorphic with meaning. Now, is the truth of the subject’s desire, as expressed in his discourse via free association, actually isomorphic with the truth of the analyst’s interpretative utterance? There is nothing that would allow us to make this assumption a priori.
Let us take this questioning a little further by considering what Freud (1900) had to say about what he calls the secondary revision of unconscious material. With regard to dreams he indicates that secondary revision constitutes an initial interpretation on the part of the dreamer, designed to neutralize the dream’s original absurdity and incoherence:
Dreams occur which, at a superficial view, may seem faultlessly logical…. Dreams which are of such a kind have been subjected to a far-reaching revision by this psychical function that is akin to waking thought; they appear to have a meaning, but that meaning is as far removed as possible from their true significance. They are dreams which might be said to have been already interpreted once, before being submitted to waking interpretation. [p. 490, emphasis added]
Here the difficulty is compounded. What could be the truth of the meaning of this initial interpretation? More generally, what we have here is the problem of the meaning of meaning, something of which, once again, Freud (1900) showed some awareness when he spoke of the navel of the dream. This issue of meaning really forces us to confront important questions: ls the meaning of the interpretation true? Even if it is, is it consistent with the truth of the desire that it presumably reveals?
We cannot, of course, claim the empirical evidence of the resolving of the symptom by way of proof. The objective disappearance of the symptom has never established any specific connection between the truth of the subject’s desire and the truth of the meaning of its interpretation. At the very most we can say that there has been a displacement of the unconscious material.
Furthermore, the question of signification or of hidden meaning indirectly raises the issue of the boundary between interpretation and translation. To assume that the meaning uncovered by the interpretation is isomorphic with the truth of the desire is, in a certain sense, to assume that an interpretation corresponds to a translation. In that case the interpretation becomes a hermeneutic intervention. I will not dwell here on the numerous difficulties that arise in connection with the problem of hermeneutics, or on the interrogation of the meaning of meaning that it entails, or on the infinite regress of levels of truth.3
To consider desire and the possibility of “finding new meanings” from this perspective calls for a revision of the very concept of interpretation. Besides, Dr. Modell’s paper makes such a revision all the more necessary if only to clarify his statement that “[m]eaning in psychoanalysis always refers to what is significant for the analysand.” Nothing could be less certain. This is no doubt one of the reasons why Lacan, following Freud, distinguished between interpretation and intervention in analytic treatment and, consequently, between interpretation in the transference and interpretation of the transference.4 He thereby threw wide open the question—in the sense of calling for a critical interrogation—of the concept of countertransference and, a fortiori, of empathy.
Lacan points out an initial difference between intervention and interpretation as far as their respective aims are concerned. Intervention occurs in the context of fantasy, helping the patient to observe both how his fantasy is constructed and how it is gradually undone.5 Its function is to bring into relief, little by little, the entire infrastructure of the imaginary representations that accompany the patient’s discourse. In this sense intervention leads the patient to become aware of what Lacan calls his misrecognition (méconnaissance).6
For example, consider what we call scansion. This is an analytic intervention that punctuates certain sequences in a patient’s utterances in order to highlight something that escaped his notice when he said it.7 Scansion does not uncover meaning; it explains nothing. What it does is to isolate certain signifiers at the right moment. It does not undo the transference—on the contrary, it reinforces what underlies the transference, namely the patient’s asumption that the analyst knows the truth about her or him (see Dor 1994, Chapters 2 and 3).8 When all is said and done this type of intervention gradually enables the patient to define for himself, in his own discourse, the desire that is expressed in that discourse.
As opposed to intervention, interpretation is directed at the cause of desire. Therefore it can take place only at certain privileged moments during the analysis, in the domain of the transference. Yet it too does not contribute to the uncovering of a meaning. When interpreting, the analyst does not decipher a meaning that can be related to what the patient is saying. Interpretation is first and foremost citation (see Dor 1992, Chapter 11). The analyst in effect “cites” a sequence from the patient’s utterance at a moment when the patient is misrecognizing his own text. The interpretation does not bear on the content of the utterance and it invents nothing. It brings to light a signifying sequence that is already present in the patient’s discourse, that is to say an unknown piece of knowledge within what he knows. In this sense interpretation is above all a break. It brings apparently disconnected signifying components together in a single sequence, thereby actualizing an element of the truth of the desire that had escaped the subject’s notice. To the extent that it brings in no supplementary meaning that could be attributed to the analyst’s knowledge, it contrasts with intervention in that it selectively undoes the transference to the analyst as the one who is assumed to know: only the patient can know something about his own desire.
With these clarifications in mind, can we really make a clinical distinction isolating a subgroup of patients whose pathological uniqueness could be specified outside the framework of the psychic structures we normally encounter in our work? It is one thing to view the pathology of these patients as falling within the general category of “narcissistic disorders,” another to set apart the particular kinds of cases Dr. Modell describes under symptomatic headings like psychic death and the inability to generate meaning. I would tend to hypothesize that these patients do not really represent distinctive symptomatic typologies but at most peculiarly heightened pathological aspects of common clinical pictures. To confirm this hypothesis, perhaps we ought to examine such clinical findings from the perspective of other metapsychological and technical reference points than the ones suggested by Dr. Modell.
Dor, J. (1988). L’a-scientificité de la psychanalyse, vol I: L’aliénation de la psychanalyse. Paris: Editions Universitaires.
——— (1992). Introduction á la lecture de Lacan, vol. II. Paris: Denoël.
——— (1994). Clinique psychanalytique. Paris: Denoël.
Freud, S. (1900). The interpretation of dreams. Standard Edition 4/5:1–626.
——— (1937). Constructions in analysis. Standard Edition 23:257–269.
1. It is important to emphasize that Lacan did not set much store by the idea of “technique” in the sense in which Freud originated the use of the term. For him analysis was always a practice, and specifically a practice of truth. This truth, he says, speaks of itself and it is the analyst’s task to “punctuate” its dialectics in the patient’s discourse (see below on scansion).
Editor’s note: In other words, there are no “recipes” in psychoanalysis. Only the patient’s signifiers can serve as a guide to his truth, a truth that is always partly concealed by a discourse that obstructs it.
2. Editor’s note: “Representation” is used in the sense of the Freudian Vorstellung, a psychic inscription in the unconscious.
3. For a fuller discussion of this epistemological problem see Dor 1988, Chapter 4.
4. Editor’s note: Here we have a fundamental difference between Lacanian and American psychoanalysis. Lacanians do not interpret transference (or conceptualize countertransference) in terms of the role in which the patient has placed the analyst (e.g., father, mother).
5. Editor’s note: A fantasy is an imaginary scenario that brings a series of conscious and unconscious representations onstage. It is simultaneously the effect of unconscious archaic desire and the matrix of current unconscious and conscious desires.
6. Editor’s note: This concept expresses the tension between the subject’s alienated ego and a perception that fundamentally eludes it. To the extent that the ego’s perceptions are filtered through fantasy, it can never have access to objective reality. See the preface for further discussion of méconnaissance.
7. Editor’s note: This may be done, for example, by breaking off the session at a moment when the patient is capable of understanding something in his discourse other than what he thought he was saying.
8. Editor’s note: The transference is established because the patient attributes to the analyst knowledge about his own (the patient’s) desire, knowledge that he himself does not have. At the end of the analysis the patient is able to unseat the analyst from this position of the one who is presumed to know. It is through interpretation of the transference that the patient becomes aware of his unconscious knowledge.