The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt

The first of the three Freudian models of language can be found in On Aphasia (1891) and in “Project for a Scientific Psychology” (1895).¹ The second, a more directly psychoanalytical model, is essentially outlined in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).²

The first model originates in an observation that brings us back to the notions of prohibition and transgression and the dualism Freud repeatedly addresses under different names. Freud noted an inadequacy, an imbalance, between the sexual and the verbal. What the speaking being says does not subsume sexuality. Sexuality cannot be spoken or, in any case, cannot be entirely spoken. Lacan took up this idea when he asserted that “jouissance is not everything” (la jouissance n’est pas toute) and that “the truth cannot tell itself entirely” (la vérité ne peut pas se dire toute). Sexual desire is only apprehended by language and intellect to a very small degree, if at all: “I” develop my intellect, “I” develop my language, but a part of my subjectivity functions under a sexual regime represented neither by language nor intellect. Sexual desire is, in sum, asymptotic to language and intellect. This asymptote may be due to neurosis: the gap between the language of neurotics and their sexuality is blatant, one could say. But another more essential hypothesis could also be advanced: that this is a component traceable to the immaturity of infans.³

Human beings, who are speaking beings, are born without the power to speak and, in this way, are more immature than animals who quickly manage to assume the life of their species, including its code of communication. Humans require a long learning period to acquire language, and this immaturity of infans is reflected later in the gap between man’s biological aspect, whose maturation follows its own paths, and the symbolic aspect constituted by the acquisition and development of language. The particularity of our species, immature at birth, with an initial linguistic incapacity, carves out the asymptote between the sexual and the verbal and prevents the gap between them from one day being filled.

In the two hypotheses (neurosis or constituent immaturity), according to Freud, this asymptote induces if not an absence of translation then at least a flawed translation between unconscious representation and words. We may have unconscious representations, inscriptions in the deep layers of our psyches, of our activities—particularly sexual traumas we have undergone, other sexual experiences, or even our biology—but words bear witness to these experiences much later, if at all. Therefore, if the translation is flawed, or if it falters to the point of producing symptoms, an intermediary is required, in this case, psychoanalysis, in order to try to transmit unconscious representations across the gap of this asymptote, into words.

Freud was preoccupied by the observation of this hiatus in his earliest work and, of course, sought a means to fill it. This, we should recall, occurred between 1881 and 1895, when Freud was a neurologist, before psychoanalysis conceptualized this gap as a “repression,” “cut,” “splitting,” “split,” and so forth, based on a variety of structures. Freud’s work on aphasia essentially used the theories of Meynert and Wernicke but displaced them. What do these theories say and what does Freud’s displacement consist of? His predecessors supposed that peripheral sensorial data—what “I” hear, what “I” see—trigger a stimulation of the peripheral centers that is then conveyed to the brain, producing in it a univocal projection: hence the idea that nerve centers give commands to which “I” respond. The well-known form of the reflex arc typifies the articulation of this trajectory.

Freud replaced the idea of univocal projection with a series of levels of representations, in order to obtain what he called the psychological schema of word-presentation.⁴ This combines a “closed complex” called word-presentation (centered on sound-image and including a reading-image, a writing-image, and a motor-image) and an “open complex” called object- or thing-presentation (centered on the visual image and including tactile images, acoustic images, etc.). A single representation is not enough for “I” to speak; two are needed—word-presentation and thing-presentation—that will work together. In addition, each of these representations is a series composed of several levels in itself. For example, if I imagine the thing “train,” the sound level, visual level, tactile level, and so on of this representation constitute a complex, stratified set, which I will call a layered representation of the object or thing. Moreover, word-presentation, too, is composed of several elements of representation. The word “train” comprises not only its acoustic representation but also its reading-image, for “I” know how this word is spelled; the spelling of “train” is added to the sound “train.” “I” must also consider graphic representation, because “I” can write, and therefore the representation of my motivity comes into play. Thus, as far as words are concerned, Freud positioned complex representations in series or levels: this polyphony and heterogeneity constituted the essence of his conception of language, at least at this point in his work.

It is useless to point out that the preceding description is very different from that of the sign proposed by Saussure: the signifier and the signified. Though one could say that word-presentation recalls the signifier and that object- or thing-presentation evokes the signified, both elements in Freud are composed of multiple strata, and this is far from the Saussurian images of a sheet of paper with its recto and verso. Instead, what we see unfold is a truly layered model of the system of psychical representation or, as Freud says in his text on aphasia, a “speech apparatus” made up of series of representations.

I would like to emphasize the heterogeneity inherent in what I call the first Freudian model of language (thing-presentation/word-presentation). Not only is the energetic facilitation—what Freud would later call drive—considerable in this model, but the types of representability or representation in question here are unwedged from language. Freud uses at least two registers of representation: one involves words and in part resembles the signifier of Saussurian semiology (as would be the case of the sound-image, although this is also dependent on other sensorial images of the word and cannot be assimilated to a linguistic signifier pure and simple); the other involves objects and evokes something pictorial and invested with energy, for which we do not, strictly speaking, have a semiological term. Keep in mind, in any case, that starting with his work on aphasia, Freud formulated different levels of representation and, more profoundly still, a heterogeneity of these levels marked in this way: language is certainly the organizer, but one must also consider the representations of things, which, while linked to words, are not part of the same domain of representation. In this sense, the psychical apparatus is made up of a series of representations—in the plural—whose differences have yet to be fully explored.

Freud sorts out this complex arrangement in “Project” (which, I remind you, dates from 1895), emphasizing the energetic aspect of psychical representatives. (This aspect was dismissed during the linguistic period of French psychoanalysis, in particular by Lacan himself. It is making a comeback today, with cognitivism and the attention given to the biological, but it is unfortunately being taken up in a monistic conception of the operations of the mind.) Freud maintains the principle of heterogeneity and remains essentially dualist. There are two systems, he explains in substance: the external phi system and the internal psy system, which can be joined or separated according to the passage of the quantitative charge Q, which transforms into a qualitative or psychological charge. Light hits my eye, so “I” see; my skin is burnt, so “I” feel (touch); my eardrum vibrates, so “I” hear; and so on. The energetic quantity surging in the perceptual system is propagated along the nerves in order to arrive at the brain and, thanks to a system of filters, resistances, and protections, manages to inscribe a trace, the foundation of memory.

It is at this point that Freud assigns an intermediary role to language, which has not been sufficiently underscored or even noted. We think we have said it all when we repeat after Lacan that “the subconscious is structured like a language,” and we neglect the contribution of Freud, who, as a prudent man of science, sought to reconcile the “body” (energy) and the “mind” (representation) without eliminating any of these levels. He thus introduces a subsystem that serves as a junction between the quantitative (energetic) and the psychological (representation): verbal associations ([R.thing/R.word] + [R.thing/R.word] + etc.) allow thought to invest certain mnemic traces, assuring attention and making knowledge possible. Situated between thought and energy, language allows thought to reach and stabilize energy; it allows attention to be fixed and thought to be deployed; in sum, it balances the sensorial and/or the quantitative (the energetic, the libidinal) and abstraction. When I outline the second Freudian model of language, you will understand the essential role of language as a carrier wave of anamnesis and how it allows the passage of the abstract signified to unconscious and even corporal trauma, which permits psychoanalysis to use it as a laboratory for its investigations into the desired rebirth of the subject. But starting with “Project,” language constitutes the subsystem situated between phi and psy: language is at once phi and psy, physical and psychological. It is physical because I articulate, because my words are sensorial, visual, sonorous, and so on. It is rooted in the physical world and in the quantitative charge of excitation. And it is also rooted in the psychological imprint. This dual nature allows it to be at the crossroads of the body and mind. Here is how Freud describes the process in his own terminology: verbal associations “put thought-processes on a level with perceptual processes, lend them reality and make memory of them possible.”⁵

Those who have read Proust and my reflections on his work know that thought and perception become amalgamated in the writer’s sentences.⁶ It is true that everyday language and especially metalanguage (what I am using here, for example) do not make obvious Freud’s assertion that language puts thought and perception on the same level. Abstract thought exists, and it in fact dissociates and unwedges itself from the perceptive. But Freud did not study abstract or mathematical languages. He targeted language in the current sense of the term, not an automated code, as might too easily be imagined, but the language the child learns, that of passionate and amorous communication. What interested him as an analyst, and what he would base psychoanalysis on as a result of the particularity of the amorous language he observed in the clinic, were the thought processes and perceptual processes situated on the same level. What kind of speech affects both thought and perception? Not intellectual arguments and vague abstractions but stories. Thus Freud would ask his patients to say whatever came to mind, to free-associate, to tell him stories, silly trifles. It was there that he would find what he needed, and what the patient needed, investigating the equivalence between thought and perception and particularly their original tie, hallucination.

Let us return to the text: “[Speech associations] put thought-processes on a level with perceptual processes, lend them reality and make memory of them possible.” Not just any memory, of course, but precisely the perceptual memory that has escaped my thought, that “I” have repressed. Language, by making thought slip toward the perceptual, allows me to recapture a perceptual memory lost for reasons “I” am unaware of. Situated between energetic charge and perception (pain, for example), on the one hand, and logical activity (“ideas,” “thoughts”: these are Freud’s terms), on the other, language acts as an interface and favors knowledge and consciousness (the preconscious-conscious system) while being supported by a substratum of heterogeneous representations (neuronic excitations, perceptions, sensations).

You are discovering, I think, what you may have been unaware of, namely, the complexity of the Freudian conception of language, which the structuralist period certainly highlighted but also oversimplified. We are invited to go beyond simple linguistic structure—“subject/verb/object” or “signifier/signified”—because language is a much more complex practice than we can imagine within the confines of semiology, whether that of Saussure or of Peirce. The neuronic data are neither erased nor absorbed; they are subjacent, structured, coded in order to obtain value solely by virtue of their relations with other elements. This is where Freud does in fact shift neurology toward a sort of structuralism avant la lettre: language is composed of a neuronic or quantitative substratum, but it does not become language until these stimulations are linked with other elements in order to form a structure that makes sense for the other: the other-recipient, as well as the other that “I” become to myself in listening to myself. The neuronic is overdetermined by the organization that is provided by the already-there (the déjà-là) of language, by the socius, by those who speak before me and to me (think, for example, of the child raised by wolves who never spoke).

Freud thus sketches out a site of language in the brain itself, contingent on stimulation (system Q), distinct from it, doubly articulated (R.thing/R.word), and with no need for a transcendental subject. It has two levels: a horizontal one, with articulation in linguistic categories, representations of things and words, that takes on meaning in the hearing of language; and a vertical one, with the neuronic stimulation where the drive will subsequently secure itself. The function of the psychical apparatus is thus to assure the translation among the three registers that are neuronic excitation, thing-presentation, and word-presentation, with failures in this translatability provoking various symptoms and pathologies. As you may have noticed, Freud never mentions a subject; he does not need a subject to articulate this dynamic. This notion will appear much later, in Metapsychology, as “subject of the drive,” in the sense of agency and not the sense we use today. The study on aphasia develops a sort of non-centered combinatory that articulates the neuronic register, the R.thing/ R.word organization, the listening of the other, but not the transcendental subject. Nor is there, I must stress, an unconscious organizer.

Freud will set aside the heterogeneity of what I call his “layered” conception of language in his subsequent work, when he develops the model of the dream as the royal path of the unconscious.⁷ When Freud compares the unconscious to the dream, he asserts that the dream and/or the unconscious are not language but have to do instead with a drive reservoir that is articulated but based on another logic made up of displacements and condensations, like hieroglyphics and puzzles. It is as if Freud simplified his first model (neuronal, R.thing/R.word), which issued from the study of aphasias, in order to discover a logic proper to the functioning of the unconscious, perhaps to allow the deciphering of dreams without becoming mired in endless complications and to dissociate an autonomous psychoanalysis from neurobiology. But this “simplification” will not be without its consequences and will in turn require the development of a third model, introduced in 1910, which Freud will maintain until the end of his life, which will be the basis for a clinic and a theory of individuation, as well as the relationship to the other, and which will inscribe the murder of the father and the separation from the mother in transference. Far from being evacuated, language will then be integrated into Freudian thought with individuation as a condition of civilization. It will be understood as a stratum within a process that I propose calling signifiance, a term expressing the process, dynamic, and movement of meaning, not reduced to language but encompassing it.

To conclude, I underline once again the heterogeneity of Freud’s first model of language. Certain psychoanalytical theories of the seventies will take it up, as will analysts faced with the clinical necessity of thinking about infralinguistic psychological functioning, either in psychosis or in poetry⁸: in 1970 W. R. Bion outlined his theory of symbolizing alpha function and nonsymbolized beta elements; in 1973 I made a distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic to point out the heterogeneity of verbal and infraverbal representations; and in 1975 Piera Aulagnier proposed pictograms as places of meaning articulation in psychosis.⁹ Analysis was thus led to reengage and interpret this first Freudian model of language and to develop strategies to consider this truth: the psyche is not reduced to language, even if language is its organizer.

I have proposed a voyage through the Freudian models of language beginning with two of Freud’s preanalytical studies: On Aphasia of 1891 and “Project for a Scientific Psychology” of 1895. The truly psychoanalytical model of language appears later in Freud, when he tackles the analytical practice and establishes the device of treatment, founded on the fundamental rule of free association. This model is essentially worked out in The Interpretation of Dreams of 1900. One might define it as an optimistic model, close to the structural conception of language. It is on this second model that Lacan will later rely to construct his own theory. I have already mentioned the idea that Freud’s invitation to the patient to tell a story profoundly modified the traditional conception of language. And I would stress that it is indeed the story, and not signs or syntax, that allowed this modification to occur. I will come back to this in detail, but for now I would like to underscore another aspect of the second Freudian model as it appears in The Interpretation of Dreams.

What happened between 1892 (after the work on aphasia and the great neurological period) and 1900 (after the treatment of hysterical patients and the work on dreams)? Freud became convinced of the capacity of the associative story to translate unconscious traumatic contents, to illuminate them, and indeed to displace them. Listening to his patients confirmed his hypothesis, and this was what he would attempt to thematize.

Language is made up of “preconscious intermediate links” as Freud would point out later in The Ego and the Id (1923).¹⁰ But starting with The Interpretation of Dreams, he asserted that the unconscious is dominated by the preconscious in treatment, for this occurs through language, on which treatment is based. In other words, language constitutes an intermediate zone, an interface between the unconscious and the conscious, and allows the former to be dominated by the latter. Language is not in the unconscious; the unconscious is not language; however, they do not exist independently of each other. (Those tempted to believe in the so-called biological purity of the Freudian unconscious, please take note.)

An ambiguity remains, however, because Freud defined the unconscious as both a reservoir of drives and as an agency dominated by the conscious, which opens the door to a linguistic interpretation of the unconscious.¹¹ “The only course which psychotherapy can pursue,” Freud continued in The Interpretation of Dreams, “is to bring the Ucs. under the dominion of the Pcs.”¹² As a psychoanalyst or psychotherapist, I understand the unconscious—can theoretically imagine it—as the domain of drives, independent of language; but it is always already under the dominion of the preconscious and the conscious, and I can only understand it through the intermediary of language. Thus by respecting the “fundamental rule of free association,” the patient “reveals” not his biological surface or his libidinal surface (or rather depths) but, says Freud, “his mental surface, from instant to instant,”¹³ namely his traumas, his drives, everything that causes psychological symptoms, and this in the form of language. Domain of the preconscious, language has the power to go further than conscious language and as far as unconscious oblivion. This is its force and its power: to conjoin the “mental surface” and unconscious oblivion. And this is the effectiveness, in therapy, of the fundamental rule of free association where language serves as fertile soil and has the capacity to pick out the memory trace as well as the unconscious libidinal charge, precisely because of the thing-presentation/word-presentation heterogeneity in the first model, which here is no longer hypostatized. Indeed, if the end of The Interpretation of Dreams takes up the model of “Project” (unconscious/preconscious/conscious), it is not to accentuate the quantitative charge that circulates among neurons or other aspects of the first stratified model but to depart from these quantitative and biological aspects and instead chart the progressive passage (the progress) of the dream’s instinctual force, furnished by the unconscious in preconscious thought and thus linguistically formed and destined finally, and solely, to the conscious.

For the successful dominion of the conscious over the subconscious, the model of the unconscious must in turn be influenced by the linguistic conscious. Not only is language the intermediary between the unconscious and the conscious, but, so that the analyst can better understand it, so that “I” can see myself as a speaking and conscious subject, a structure must be conferred on it that resembles the linguistic conscious, that represents a certain audible, comprehensible linguistic form. Thus the dream, thought to be an exemplary actualization of the unconscious, its “royal path,” according to The Interpretation of Dreams, is certainly modeled as an other scene but also equipped from the start with a grammar and a rhetoric (displacement-condensation-overdetermination joining metonymy and metaphor) in the manner of conscious language. In other words, language is preconscious, it has a biological foundation and a mental surface, but it is articulated based on rules drawn from the language sciences. As for the dream, Freud would rid it of its mystery and hieroglyphic esotericism (which was nevertheless postulated) in order to compare it to language.

You see now why I qualify this second model as optimistic. Because the unconscious is articulated like a language, “I” can decipher it, “I” can discover its rules; in addition, because it is situated in an intermediary position between different agencies, it will give me access to the unknowable, that is, to trauma. The unconscious—a theoretical construction—will for these two reasons be the promised land of analysis.

“The Antithetical Meanings of Primal Words,” an article by Freud dating from 1910, which I situate in the same second, optimistic period of this model of language, is not very well known but was studied closely by several linguists, Emile Benveniste, in particular.¹⁴ Freud established, you will recall, the nonexistence of contradiction or the absence of negation in the language of the dream and the unconscious. The dream is not aware of contradiction, there is no “no” in dreams, “no” does not exist for the unconscious. If, however, a contradiction, a “no” appeared in a dream, it would not be read as such but as the affirmation of a desire. “I did not dream of my mother,” our patient tells us. “You did dream of your mother,” Freud corrects. And just as there is no negation in the unconscious, there is no duration, or time (I will return later, and at length, to this notion of the suspension of time in the unconscious). Freud was delighted to find the same logic of the absence of contradiction, a feature of the unconscious, in “primal words” as described in Karl Abel’s etymological speculations. (Though it has since been shown that this etymologist was wrong, at the time his propositions were not only accepted but well regarded.) In certain so-called primitive languages—including Latin—Abel explained, the same word might express two opposite ideas; the same word might signify “deep” and “high,” for example. This shows, Freud adds, that primitive languages function like the unconscious, without contradiction, that they demonstrate in a way the functioning of the unconscious. The dream state and primal languages thus share the absence of contradiction.

How can one interpret this comparison of unconscious logic to that of “primal language”? In two ways, I think. On the one hand, Freud tends to erase the irreducible alterity of the unconscious in relation to the conscious, which he has nevertheless postulated, by discovering in this other scene a functioning identical to that of eminently conscious language. The unconscious has nothing to do with the conscious, he asserted in The Interpretation of Dreams but not long afterward claimed in “Primal Words” that language exists—that of primitive languages—that shares the properties of the unconscious. This may appear to be a direct result of Freud’s intention, already mentioned, to place the unconscious under the dominion of the conscious. The unconscious is not an obscure, illogical, aberrant state of mind; the conscious is present in these secret and mysterious regions and dominates them.

On the other hand, and conversely, as a result of Freud’s comparison of primitive languages and the unconscious, language traditionally considered conscious finds itself invested with paradoxical logics, unconscious logics: words, even primitive ones, act as a dream does. This would allow one to infer that a social practice might exist where words act as in dreams, and there may be other situations—poetry, myths—where conscious discourse also acts as dreams. This considerably expands, I’m sure you would agree, the field of the unconscious. An interpretation of the two scenes (conscious and unconscious) results, which no doubt satisfies the Freudian intuition of the human mind’s permanent dualism (the unconscious is not the conscious) and for the moment (1910) does not call into question Freud’s confidence in language as a link between the conscious and the unconscious; it consequently raises amnesia to the status of instinctual trauma. In other words, starting with the conscious, “I” can have access to the other scene; moreover, in certain situations in his conscious life, man behaves as though he were unveiling his unconscious. Access to the unconscious is thus possible.

This, in my opinion, is the fascination that Abel’s proposition exerted over Freud. Thanks to this etymological “discovery,” Freud could express what I call his “linguistic optimism,” which consisted of positing that language is the control mechanism of unconscious traumas. I remind you nevertheless, that scholars such as Benveniste refuted Abel’s thesis, which did not consider the position of the subject of the enunciation in the act of discourse. Indeed, if the same word signifies “deep” and “high,” it is because the subject of the enunciation has moved; the subject is high atop a ladder when saying that a well is deep and at the bottom of the ladder when commenting on its height. In other words, it is the position of the subject of the enunciation that changes the perspective and adjusts the semantic differences, which are not therefore necessarily manifested in the words themselves. The interlocutor, on the other hand, is never led astray and does not confuse the meaning of identical words, for the context of the discursive act—with the help of adverbs, personal pronouns, innuendoes, and even gestures—removes any ambiguity. There is no oneiric functioning in the conscious, discursive act. Contrary to the dream, language is a system of differences and discriminations and not the confusion of opposites. As for Freud, he makes ideological use of Karl Abel’s mistakes to assert: I find the unconscious in words; thanks to words, I can reach the unconscious and thereby justify my optimistic model of language.

You will see that the third model is much less optimistic, but for now let us stay with the second, and The Interpretation of Dreams, and consider Lacan’s contribution. In my opinion, the Lacanian assertion that “the subconscious is structured like a language” constitutes a careful reading of this second Freud, whose essential aim Lacan elucidates. I am not one of those who feel Lacan indulges in an overly personal interpretation of Freud because he speaks of the signifier and not the drive and who are content to point out the outrageousness of the Lacanian reading. On the contrary, I think this reading applies all the rigor of the philosophy and linguistics of the sixties to the second Freud, and this Lacanian rigor was certainly new. Nevertheless, the idea that language and the unconscious are dominated by the conscious, that the unconscious is organized like a grammar or rhetoric, is a Freudian position that does, in effect, support the statement that “the subconscious is structured like a language.”

The mathematicization of the unconscious pursued by the Lacanian school and, in another way, the cognitivistic ascendancy over unconscious figures—the computational strategies applied today to conscious and unconscious processes—seem to me affiliated with this second Freudian program, formulated in The Interpretation of Dreams: Psychotherapy’s “task being to ensure that the unconscious processes are settled and forgotten. . . . The only course which psychotherapy can pursue is to bring the Ucs. under the dominion of the Pcs.”¹⁵ This attempt to capture the unconscious in the conscious is, I think, very clearly inscribed in the Freudian project at this moment. It is not possible because language, as Freud understands it, is itself the place of this domination of the unconscious by the conscious. (I would also like to point out here that the unconscious of cognitivists has nothing to do with the Freudian other scene and that it ignores the primary processes and the other logic that governs sexual traumas; the cognitivistic pseudounconscious refers essentially to automatic functionings and mechanical acts and concerns lack of attention rather than the unconscious.)

If we harden the Lacanian line as I have traced it, we end up getting rid of what still constituted Freudian dualism at the heart of this second model, a dualism that situates language between the conscious and unconscious while at the same time maintaining the dualist drive/conscious vision. We thus liquidate the instinctual domain as well as the primary processes. This is the tendency of a certain current in French Lacanian and post-Lacanian psychoanalysis that considers the notion of the drive useless. The drive is a myth, adherents of this point of view are basically telling us, because we do not have access to it except through language. It is therefore useless to talk about drives; we should be content to talk about language.

The Freudian point of view is entirely different: the drive and the primary processes are irreducible to the secondary processes, though subject to their domination. Certain modern analytical currents, and cognitivists too, are free not to see either the pertinence or the usefulness of the drive and primary processes, but from then on they are situated outside the camp of psychoanalysis and the radicalness that testifies to the division of the speaking subject. I will have occasion to return to the ambiguity of the Lacanian clinic in this regard, but before passing on to the third Freudian model of language, I will sum up the features of the second:

Most of those who greeted the advent of structuralism stick to the second model of language in Freud, which culminates in the texts from 1910 to 1912. Freudian thought is more complex, however, for he elaborates on his initial theories rather extensively, developing a conception of meaning that is no longer solely dependent on language, that becomes more complex, and that, because it poses problems, unveils the fertility of the analytical process, its irreducibility to what Lacan would criticize as “linguisterie.” I hope I have shown how “linguisterie” might, in effect, have been deduced from the second model of The Interpretation of Dreams, but Freud moved away from this model to construct the one I will call the model of signifiance.

A turning point in Freudian thought occurred around 1912–1914 and intensified with World War I and its effects on Freud’s personality and analytical theory. Freud would in fact be seriously shaken by the tragedy of the war and its effects on his family, his sons, and his method itself. Totem and Taboo (1912) already harbors the elements of the third model of language and emphasizes the difference between acts that are repeated without having psychological representatives (in particular, the murder of the father), on the one hand, and, on the other, an assimilation-identification with the agency of power represented by the father that is effected through the totemic meal, which generated the symbolic pact between the brothers.¹⁶

It may be useful to detail this process and to remember that in Totem and Taboo, Freud gives a (fictional?) account of the essential stage of hominization through which Homo sapiens becomes a social animal by identifying not with the tyranny of the father (which once crushed him) but with the function of authority (which henceforth elevates him to the rank of subject of a culture). Simultaneously, Freud highlights two psychological strategies: unrepresentable acts (coitus and murder will be two prototypes of this) versus structuring representations through identification with the father. In other words, the brothers revolt against the father who took women away from them and accumulated all power and kill him in the course of a violent act. This act is repeated at first without giving rise to a psychological representative and evokes what in our individual lives constitutes trauma: we have been affected by one or several acts, sexual seduction or violence, which come back to us (as do our passive or violent reactions) without our being able to represent them to ourselves in order to think about them, name them, master them, traverse them, forget them. These traumas incite somaticizations, nonpsychical abreactions, symptoms, maladies, behavioral disturbances, and acting out. Similarly, the killing of the father of the primitive horde by the sons may be repeated in an obsessive manner, Freud thinks, without being represented in the human psyche, until the devouring-assimilation, through the totemic meal, becomes a symbolic act of psychological identification with the function of the father.

There has been no lack of criticism of Freud on this subject: this is his own personal fantasy, his own delirium, a perfect example of the Freudian novel, of Freudian subjectivity, and so on. We need not dismiss these suspicions, but we must try to appreciate his theoretical contribution, to take his totemic fable seriously. Through this scenario, beyond the problematics of prehistory, Freud is trying to contemplate the traumatic acts his patients, and perhaps he himself, suffered during childhood. Why are these acts traumatic? Why do they incite other violent acts or somaticizations? Because they do not find representation. “I” have undergone such violent experiences, “I” have been so violently excluded, that “I” can only become a criminal or commit an act analogous to the one “I” underwent, even if “I” am unaware of it: taking drugs, for example, in order to obliterate my consciousness. In other words, the trauma causes a chain of acts that leave the suspense of the representation intact.

Now, Freud explains that the brothers who murdered the father of the primitive horde did not simply repeat the traumatic act endlessly but proceeded through the totemic meal to assimilate-identify with the power that traumatized them; that is, they ate the father and thereby assimilated him in both the concrete and metaphorical sense of the term: they became him, and he became them, and, in becoming power, they ceased to be excluded from it. Through this totemic meal, a trace of which is found in all religions, they contracted a symbolic pact and thus formed an ensemble, a culture. The subtlety is apparent, I hope: the brothers’ revolt does not remain a simple unrepresentable act; a qualitative leap occurs whereby the sacred act henceforth constitutes a symbolic link. The sons, the brothers, become fathers in turn. Totem and Taboo places in narrative form a very important stage in hominization whereby Homo sapiens becomes a social animal, identifying not with the tyranny of the father but with his function of authority: this is the act of hominization, the act of culture.

The absence of women is glaring here, as you have no doubt noticed. I will later address the question of the feminine and the symbolic pact specifically, but for now it must be noted that in this text Freud remains discreet as to the fate of the brothers’ femininity. How did they resolve their potentiality of being the wives of the father, that is, the submissive or passive victims of the paternal sexual drive, a potentiality suggested by the emphasis on the homosexual bond established among the brothers as they gathered around the dead father? Freud tells us even less about the fate of the women who, after the murder of the father and the creation of the pact, become objects of desire and exchange among the brothers. By saying nothing about the feminine, Freud remains faithful to the social pact—to the rule of the society that excludes women from the brothers’ religion—and perhaps faithful to his own tendencies as well. Nevertheless, we ought to recognize that the founder of psychoanalysis had the honesty to express the homosexual substratum of the sacred understanding, the split of this social destiny into homosexual destiny, which he does not, however, investigate further. The brothers band together by repressing their femininity and distancing the sexual exchange of women from the sacred and social space. This will constitute the sphere of the private, the erotic, and the repressed.

Now I return to two psychological strategies Freud outlines in Totem and Taboo: on the one hand, unrepresentable acts, the prototypes of which are the murder of the father and coitus (for this is why the brothers reproach the father: they desire the right to pleasure with women, and he has seized all the women); and, on the other hand, structuring representations through identification with the father. It is here that the notion of signifiance emerges, which has nothing linguistic about it, because Freud is investigating not the structure of language but the psychological dynamic and the dichotomy between act and representation, between the unrepresentable and the symbolic contract surrounding authority. These parameters, strictly speaking, have nothing to do with linguistics.

In the period following Totem and Taboo, Freud continues to refine his theory on variants of psychical representations, or formations, being careful not to put language at the forefront. In 1914 he defines narcissism as “a new psychical action,” new because distinct from autoeroticism but anterior to the object triangulations in Oedipus.¹⁷ Autoeroticism, narcissism, and the oedipal stage are thus gradually introduced in the life of the subject, and narcissism appears as a primary identity organization, a primary autonomization that is neither very strict nor very clear at this point, because we will have to wait for the oedipal triangulation for psychical autonomy to occur.¹⁸

As Freud underscores in his 1914 text, narcissism is characterized by instability. (Note in passing that the current use of the term “narcissism” is naive and erroneous, because it refers to a person who is full of himself, sure of himself, and triumphant, whereas the Freudian Narcissus does not know who he is at all and only invests in his image because he is not sure of his identity. In reality, then, narcissism is a borderline state between identity security and insecurity.) Why is this organization unstable, on the border? Because it is still too dependent on the other—in this case, the mother—from whom the subject is in the process of separating. It is a pseudoidentity on the way to constitution, not yet stabilized by the oedipal triangulation. Freud thus situates himself in a new perspective, quite different from the earlier linguistic optimism, in which he details the stages of what I call signifiance, which, instead of separating drives and words, is organized in intermediary structures.

In 1915 the term “subject,” as opposed to “object,” appeared in Freud’s writings on the drive.¹⁹ The subject, he says, is the subject of the drive, and not the subject of language. I must emphasize this point. Three polarities of psychical life are distinguished, which will articulate the Freudian metapsychology:

Let us explore the evolution of these elements of Freudian theory, which allow a definition of this third model of language that I call signifiance. In 1917 “Mourning and Melancholia” deepened the ambivalence between subject and object.²⁰ In melancholia, for example, the object is at once external and internal, at once loved and hated, and for this reason, it engenders depression: “I” was abandoned by my lover, a colleague at work hurt me, he/she is my enemy, and the like. But it does not stop there. It is impossible to change partners or plans, for the object that has caused me pain is not only hated but also loved and thus identified with me: “I” am this detestable other, “I” hate myself in his/her place, that is why he/she incites my depression, which sometimes goes as far as suicide, an impossible, disguised murder.

The fourth and last movement occurs in 1920, with the appearance of the extraordinary postulate of the death drive, which is the carrier wave of the life drive. Freud postulated the life drive as libido during the construction of the optimistic model in The Interpretation of Dreams, where he told us the dream is the realization of a desire acted on by a linking drive, a binding drive that founds desire, the sexual act, and love. But as the analysis of his patients gradually unfolded, Freud recognized that the binding drive is not the only thing that programs our physical life: there are also resistances to the optimal evolution of the subject and to analysis. He then posited the existence of another drive that goes against the life drive, which he called the death drive, the unbinding drive.²¹

We often fail to differentiate between the erotic drive and the death drive, between Eros and Thanatos. We should recall that Eros is linking, while Thanatos is unlinking: it cuts. Melancholia offers a striking representation of this: links with the other are cut, “I” isolate myself from the world, “I” withdraw into my sadness, “I” do not speak, “I” cry, “I” kill myself. And this unbinding that has cut me off from the world will end up cutting me off from myself, destroying my thought as it cuts off the continuity of representation. The most radical Freudian postulate, which has often been perceived as Freud’s pessimism but perhaps at bottom is merely evidence of his lucidity, consists in positing the death drive as the most instinctual. An enigmatic postulate, to be sure, but it affirms that the carrier wave is the unbinding drive and the life drive is only a sort of calming, or ordering, of it. In other words, beneath the life drive, beneath eroticism, we must expect to find the diabolical work of the death drive.

What becomes of language as a result of this construction? How does it allow us to understand language? A detour is necessary before answering these questions. In the meantime, the resistances to analysis manifest themselves, preventing recovery, interrupting treatment, and blocking its process. These resistances did not make Freud reject the fundamental rule of free association (this so-called pessimism never made him say there are too many problems, the tool is useless; he never abandoned the initial basis of his theory) but instead led him constantly to modify his optimism about the effectiveness of the rule and to reevaluate language and establish the second topic. The Ego and the Id (1923) and the article “Negation” (Die Verneinung, 1925) will help us to understand this evolution in its initial stages and most confident phase.

First of all, with regard to the place of language, Freud maintained his theory that unconscious representations are distinct from verbal representations but capable of being associated with them and, as a result, capable, through language, of reaching consciousness. There is no language in the unconscious, which is a reservoir of drives; verbal representations exist in the realm of the preconscious; what is instinctual is therefore unconscious but can reach the conscious: “The real difference between a Ucs. and a Pcs. idea (thought),” Freud writes, is

that the former is carried out on some material which remains unknown, whereas the latter (the Pcs.) is in addition brought into connection with word-presentations. This is the first attempt to indicate distinguishing marks for the two systems, the Pcs. and the Ucs., other than their relation to consciousness. . . . Only something which has once been a Cs. perception can become conscious, and . . . anything arising from within (apart from feelings) that seeks to become conscious must try to transform itself into external perceptions: this becomes possible by means of memory-traces. . . . A word is after all the mnemic residue of a word that has been heard.²²

The preconscious—which is verbal—has thus first been perceived; verbal stimulation has come from others through discourse that has been perceived and then forgotten; this forgotten perception has fallen into the unconscious where it has become a memory trace; and these words that are heard, welded to perceptions, their mnemic traces forgotten, are what preconscious words heard today will seek out. The psychical apparatus therefore engages in a double game with words: first, words have been sown in me like seeds, words “I” have perceived that have fallen into oblivion; they have formed mnemic traces onto which perceptions have been grafted, as well as drives emanating from within the body; finally, it is this unconscious conglomerate, ruled by the mnemic trace, that I recover through the intermediary of words as they presently function in my adult preconscious psyche.

In the second, optimistic model, what gave preconscious verbal representations their major role as the control lever of repression itself (and thus the power to transfer us from consciousness to the drive) were these verbal representations. Having once been perceptions²³—in contrast to abstract ideas, which are consequently useless in treatment aiming to lift repression—they could, like all memory traces, become conscious again. It is because there were perceptions in words that these word-perceptions—the Freudian sign is a heterogeneous doublet—can be linked to the drive and therefore to the corporal, physical, traumatic investment and to linguistic representation, to consciousness. The words-doublets remain a crossroads among perception, the ancient memory trace, and consciousness, and it is starting at this crossroads that words—as Freud understands them—are able to become the essential tool of psychoanalysis. This applies to the optimistic model that Freud maintained until the end of his life.

But skepticism moved in, and an important change appeared in Freudian thought, probably as a result of his more extensive confrontation with psychosis: words, he stated, are not simply the guarantors of our ability to recapture perceptions or real memory traces; this advantage has a flip side. Words not only allow internal things to become conscious but, conversely, may also be the source of errors and hallucinations; it is not as easy as it seems to travel from perception to consciousness and vice versa. Language can cease to be the solid terrain that leads to truth. Freud considered this problem again in later texts, “Constructions in Analysis” (1937) and An Outline of Psycho-Analysis (1938).²⁴ Language “brings material in the ego into a firm connection with the mnemic residues of visual, but more particularly of auditory, perceptions. Thenceforward the perceptual periphery of the cortical layer can be excited to a much greater extent from inside as well, internal events such as passages of ideas and thought-processes can become conscious. . . . The equation ‘perception = reality (external world)’ no longer holds. Errors, which can now easily arise and do so regularly in dreams, are called hallucinations.”²⁵

Given these two limits of the power of language (resistance-hallucination), the rest of The Ego and the Id, which situates language in the preconscious, does not explore the linguistic problematic. It takes another path, the first step toward the second topic. It is heir to the subject of drives as well as the “father complex”²⁶ as established by the oedipal and by Totem and Taboo, which seeks out “the higher side of man” revealed in religion, morality, and social feeling.²⁷ Freud did not hypostatize this “higher side,” thereby rendering it unknowable; on the contrary, he scrutinized it closely in the evolution of his patients, distinguishing in it identification, idealization, and sublimation. I call this the process of signifiance.

The goal Freud set for himself was not to define language but to open psychoanalysis to a vaster process of symbolization in which language had its place but was not the common denominator. In sum, verbal representations were maintained but temporarily put aside in favor of the more global process that Freud established in the second chapter of The Ego and the Id.

Before returning to the process of signifiance and approaching Freud’s second topic via The Ego and the Id, I want to make a small digression and respond to a question I was asked: does speaking of psychoanalysis as a discourse of revolt mean that the couch is expected to rise up and take power? The question has a certain freshness, and it offers me the chance to make two clarifications.

First of all, I have pointed out that the term “revolt” must be understood in an etymological and Proustian sense. Add to this two well-known statements by Freud: “Where it was, there I must come about” [Wo Es war, soll Ich werden = Where it (id) was, there I (ego) must come about.—Trans.] and “I succeed where the paranoiac fails.” The patient, the analysand, is thought to occupy the place of this “there.” And this “there” is an anamnesis, a memory buried in the unconscious (which the return of the repressed makes available) or deposited in the person’s history, including generational history and possibly phylogenesis (though this last perspective is debatable). In an even more untenable way, this place—where I must come about in my recollection—is a place where the namable and the unnamable, the instinctual and the symbolic, language and what is not language, are dissociated. It is a perilous place, a place of subjective incoherence, a difficult position for subjectivity.²⁸ Revolt here is not an advance toward “singing tomorrows” but, on the contrary, a return and a process.²⁹

Why, given this, can’t I stick to the term “recollection”? Why have I felt obliged to use the term “revolt,” even if it means emphasizing its etymological sense? Precisely so as not to give the impression that the analytical experience and the literary experience, in different ways, consist of simple recollection, simple repetition of that which has taken place, but instead represent, as Mallarmé says, “a prior future.” A modification, a displacement of the past, occurs and, by returning to painful places, especially if they are nerve centers, there is a reformulation of the psychological map (in the optimal hypothesis, of course). Lacan had a great line on the subject—“Psychoanalysis can make the imbecile cunning”—and this can also be seen: by repeating and appropriating his symptoms, the subject is fixed there; he repeats them and may even normalize himself with the entire universe manipulated by his symptoms, which are finally integrated, gratified, recognized. Certain analysts—such as Winnicott, in the pediatric perspective (with all the delicacy this presupposes)—see the end of an analysis as a rebirth. As for me, I prefer the term “revolt,” because I want to address not only the analytical experience but also the literary one. And I want to point up the angry, even enraged, sense of this rebirth in literary texts, as well as in patients’ free association. Those of you who have worked on such texts, particularly twentieth-century texts, know how much they are animated by a desire to overturn the world, oneself, the Other, love, and death. It is from this perspective that I associate the terms “repetition,” “recollection,” and “anamnesis” with that of “renewal” and propose to reflect on their condensation in the connotations of the word “revolt.”

My second clarification has to do with the history of psychoanalysis and allows me to defend my own position. Years ago, Catherine Clément published a book called Les Fils de Freud sont fatigués to warn against a certain reassessment of analytical theories.³⁰ Her diagnosis seemed a bit pessimistic to me, but it was not devoid of truth. Indeed, perhaps “Freud’s daughters,” for oedipal reasons that I will outline soon, are even more fatigued than his sons. I think, for example, of Helene Deutsch, a disciple of Freud who introduced notions that are still used concerning “as-if” personalities called “false selves.” She was interested in political movements, art, literature, and, above all, the states of the personality where we construct masks for ourselves, which she explored with her patients. These defensive procedures come in handy at times, although eventually we can no longer bear the weight of them, and their hazards then motivate the request for analysis.

Deutsch believed that one could not conduct analysis (and I think the same goes for interpreting literary texts) without maintaining a certain openness in one’s own psychical apparatus, a flexibility that ultimately represents an aptitude for revolt. There was no use maintaining a position of normative truth—although the position of the “subject thought to know,” as Lacan called it, is a necessary aspect of analysis—if the analyst was not also what Deutsch called “an eternal adolescent.” This may sound odd, because we know that the eternal adolescent is immature and capriciously fragile, moving from depression to hysteria, from amorous infatuation to disappointment. But eternal adolescence also indicates a certain suppleness of agencies, an adaptability, a capacity to modify oneself according to the environment and the other, as well as against them. It is this aspect that it is important to cultivate, not only when one listens to patients but also when one reads literary texts. Then, and only then, will texts appear not as fetishes or dead objects corresponding to definite states of history or rhetoric but as so many experiences of psychical survival on the part of those who have engaged in the struggle and on our part as well.

And now for one last digression, a few words about Guy Debord’s suicide, which was a cultural and literary event.³¹ He was a rebellious man, and it was as a rebellious man that he diagnosed this society as a “society of the spectacle,” whose cogs he revealed in the East as well as the West, whose evolution he analyzed in an ultraclassical manner, borrowing the tones of Cardinal de Retz, Bossuet, Saint-Simon, and finally Lautréamont when he was formulary and classically dense. It was certainly an act of revolt to adopt this style, and one may consider Debord’s suicide the ultimate gesture of revolt as well. Unless—as certain of his friends and associates fear and regret—it was an involuntary affirmation of the all-powerfulness of the spectacle that had managed to force its most violent detractor into a voluntary and dramatic annihilation that was immediately celebrated and nullified. Is all pathetic resistance to the spectacle destined to be reduced and remote-controlled? Does the spectacle feed on spectacular death? The question is worth asking, if only to try to step “outside the ranks” where the murderous align, to use Kafka’s phrase, to step to the side, into the invisible labyrinth of inquiry, into a clamorous struggle against morality, or simply to search for a style. Indeed, to denounce something in a classically bombastic way clearly required admirable courage. To seek, in the negative, to arrive “where it was” is another path I will try to illuminate in this book; it does not contrast with Debord’s but is connected to it, discreetly.

As you can see, even the most untenable revolt leads me to acts of language—and to their traps. Here I return to the third model of language that seems to me to be sketched out in Freudian theory and that I have begun to explain as a process of signifiance founded on the negative.

Without analyzing language, strictly speaking, Freud includes it in the signifying capacity of speaking beings, the signifiance that interests the semiotician and that Freud calls, in The Ego and the Id, the “higher side of man.” According to Freud, it is made accessible to the psychoanalytical experience through three modalities that I will detail here and then illustrate with a clinical example. These modalities are identification, idealization, and sublimation, found in the analytical as well as aesthetic experience.

The first variant of identification—which Freud called “primary”—occurs with an imaginary schema, with “the father of the individual’s own personal prehistory,” which is totally different from libidinal object–cathexis.³² This phenomenon recurs with amorous idealization in the lover’s discourse. This is a very archaic stage in the development of the future speaking being, brought into play with a schema that Freud refers to as an archaic occurrence of paternity. This has nothing to do with the subsequent father who forbids, the oedipal father, the father of the law. Direct and immediate, this primary identification—Freud speaks of an Einfühlung—is a sort of flash, not unlike the hypothesis of the irruption of language in human history (a hypothesis taken up by Lévi-Strauss according to which the evolution of language occurred all at once rather than slowly through the acquisition of rudiments leading progressively to total proficiency).³³

Although the primary identity occurs with the father in the individual’s “own personal prehistory” and seems at the outset connoted in the masculine, Freud points out that it also creates an ambivalence, for this archaic father comprises the characteristics of both parents. Is this an identification with the phallic mother? Not really. At this archaic stage of the psychical evolution, the subject already moves away from the mother/child dyad and toward a third pole, not yet a symbolic agency but already the beginning of the thirdness prefigured by the mother’s desire for someone other than the child (her father? the child’s father? an extrafamilial or symbolic agency?). In the uncertainty of this disengagement, however, an imaginary space is sketched out where this loving third party is found, the “father of the individual’s prehistory,” the keystone of our loves and imagination.

With this primary identification—degree zero of identity, according to Freud—I will try to put into perspective two more recent propositions concerning the archaisms of the subject: Lacan’s “mirror stage” and Didier Anzieu’s “ego-skin.”³⁴

The mirror stage is thought to constitute the primordial stage of an imaginary identification. Influenced by the maternal relationship, the image of the ego is already recognized as separate from the mother’s, though dependent on her presence.

The tactile contact with the maternal container is primordial in another way: the sensitivity of the skin furnishes a primary delimitation of the future ego vis-à-vis the rest of the world that the mother announces. It is on this skin surface that the numerous difficulties of individuation will be played out, from eczema to the most diverse eruptions, concerning the boundaries not only of the skin but also of psychical endurance. Skin as a surface of perception and projection of the ego is the substrata of the mirror, the first container able to reassure, to calm, to give the child a certain autonomy, on which the narcissistic image may be supported and without which the mirror will smash into pieces. The psychotic fragmentation of the subject suggests a damaged skin as well as a mirror without silvering. And although these “skin” and “mirror” stages are maternal in the identification of the subject, they are dependent on the “father of the individual’s prehistory.”

If it is true that the skin is the first container, the archaic limit of the ego, and that the mirror is the first vector of represented and representable identity on the other sensorial vector that is the gaze, what are the conditions for both of them occurring and becoming optimal containers? The answer is to be found in the “father of prehistory.” This primary thirdness allows a space between the mother and the child; perhaps it prevents osmosis as well as the merciless war where self-destruction alternates with destruction of the other. For this reason, the “father of the individual’s own personal prehistory”—well before the oedipal prohibition—is a barrier against infantile psychosis.

Later, in the aesthetic experience, it is this figure of the loving father—which so many religions celebrate, particularly the Christian religion, forgetting the war of Oedipus against Laius and denying the revolt of the son against the law—on which the artist relies when, in paintings or texts, he depicts the diabolical or abject figure of a woman-mother from whom it is vital that he separate. The idealization of the father, the beatific reparation of his image that supports these experiences, in effect constitutes a denial of the oedipal reality. It is indispensable to note, however, that this denial is in some way counterbalanced by the rehabilitation of the “father of the individual’s own personal prehistory,” thanks to which the subject is not mired in perversion but finds the resources (imaginary, strictly speaking) to continue the revolt integral to his autonomy and to his creative freedom. The artist’s debt to the maternal grandfather or uncle, and, of course, the religious allegiances that lead him to celebrate the sacred figures of paternity in the religion of his choice, function in this same vein.

After this initial phase of subjectification, two additional stages detail the signifiance Freud points out in the second topic. First, the ego primitively identified with the “father of prehistory” takes itself for the object or rather may become the object of the id: look, you can love me, “I” so resemble the object! Note what the sublimatory process consists of. Initially identified with the father of the “individual’s own personal prehistory,” the ego invests itself: that is, it loves itself insofar as it is identified with the imaginary loving father, and this love is not a sexual libido but a narcissistic one. “The transformation of object-libido into narcissistic libido . . . obviously implies an abandonment of sexual aims, a desexualization—a kind of sublimation, therefore.”³⁵ Such a transformation leads to the dissociation or defusion of different drives (particularly the two principal ones, of life and death) and liberates the death drive. Here we confront a strange capacity of the ego identified with the imaginary father of “the individual’s prehistory.” By disengaging from the drives to become hominized and gain access to the imaginary that will lead to linguistic representation, the ego deeroticizes itself and, in so doing, exposes itself to the death drive: “By thus getting hold of the libido from the object-cathexes, setting itself up as sole love-object, and desexualizing or sublimating the libido of the id, the ego is working in opposition to the purposes of Eros and placing itself at the service of the opposing instinctual impulses” (p. 45).

Isn’t this outrageous? Narcissus placing himself at the service of the death drive! Freud is telling us that the death drive is inscribed at the outset in the process of subjectification, or the constitution of the ego as the initial and indispensable stage in the transformation of the drive into signifiance. Put otherwise, even more paradoxically, it is the death drive that consolidates the narcissistic ego and allows the prospect of investing not an erotic object (a partner) but a pseudo-object, a production of the ego itself, that is quite simply its own aptitude to imagine, to signify, to speak, to think: the ego invests signifiance when it deeroticizes and utilizes the death drive internal to its narcissism. You must admit, at the very least, it’s dramatic! Language abandoned in favor of a vaster process that I have called signifiance and that Freud calls “the thought process” or “intellectualization” leads the founder of psychoanalysis to relate the idealization-sublimation-religion-culture series to . . . the death drive.

We know the superego’s tendency toward this: if it cannot repudiate its acoustic origins, if its verbal representations (notions and abstractions) make it accessible to consciousness, and if the cathectic energy of these contents come from the id, the superego embraces sadism and rages against the ego: “What is now holding sway in the super-ego is, as it were, a pure culture of the death instinct” (p. 54). Kleinians have moreover remarked that when language manifests itself in the child, the future speaking subject goes through a depressive phase: he experiences—and, through the affect of sadness, depicts—his separation from the mother. Only following this melancholic experience is he able to recapture the lost object (the mother) in the imagination: first by seeing her and then by naming her, transforming echolalia into veritable linguistic signs.³⁶

Once again I emphasize the ambiguity at the heart of sublimation, as well as in any access to the symbolic that sublimation illuminates. At the core of this narcissistic withdrawal, the death drive invests Narcissus and threatens his integrity. The thought process is set in motion at the price of this threat. The psychical apparatus uses the negative and assumes its risks in order to produce what André Green calls “the work of the negative,” which Freud developed in his text “Negation.”³⁷ The death drive, reflected on the ego, makes a qualitative leap to inscribe not relations with the other but representations with it in the excrescence of the ego that the psyche becomes. Although not limited to sublimation alone, the psyche is founded by it through and through, for it is the capacity of signifiance (representation-language-thought) based on sublimation that structures all the other psychical manifestations.

This, in sum, represents a profound integration of the Hegelian dialectic into Freudian thought. The libido detached from the object turns toward Narcissus and threatens him. What will act as a counterbalance and prevent Narcissus from being destroyed? It is a new object, which is not mommy or daddy, the breast or any other external erotic object, or the body itself, but an artificial, internal object that Narcissus is capable of producing: his own representations, speech, sounds, colors, and so forth. This alchemy of sublimation, which Freud placed at the heart of the ability to think, is of the greatest interest to us in understanding the work of writers.

“Negation” comes back to language, after temporarily abandoning it, and reconsiders it not in light of word-presentation/thing-presentation, the unconscious, preconscious verbal/conscious, but of the overall process of signifiance established in The Ego and the Id, this intricate connection among sublimation, idealization, and the death drive, as opposed to the erotic drive. In “Negation,” Freud postulates an instinctual rejection (Ausstossung-Verwerfung) that, by being repeated, transforms into a negation (Verneinung) and posits and thus affirms both the denial of the instinctual content and the symbolic representation of it: “I” do not love my mother = “I” admit (under the condition of negation) that “I” love her (the unconscious content itself). Language is intrinsically inscribed in a process of negativity that is strongly Hegelian and once again takes up the mechanism of identification-sublimation that Freud applied to the drive of the id to bring about the ego.³⁸ With the article on negation, the dynamic of the second topic was transported to the very heart of the linguistic sign and the capacity of symbolization.

I recommend reading The Ego and the Id alongside “Negation.” You will see that Freud is proposing something other than a model of language, namely, a model of signifiance that presupposes language and its instinctual substrata but grasps language and the drive through the work of the negative. This work leads from the presignifier to the sign and to the superior stages of a stratified subjectivity (the id, the ego, and the superego) that affect each other in a circular or spiral process. “Thus in the id, which is capable of being inherited, are harbored residues of the existences of countless egos; and, when the ego forms its super-ego out of the id, it may perhaps only be reviving shapes of former egos and be bringing them to resurrection.”³⁹

Lacanians have often asked me where “the object a” would be in, say, Barthes’s work. In other words, they have wanted to know how to locate the object of desire in a text or textual theory. Well, “the object a” in literature and literary theory is language; not this or that lover, fetish, or social code located on a thematic or psychological level but language. Extreme narcissism? Not solely, because language, and nothing else, leads to exteriority. If the moment of sublimation has failed, however, the signs of language will not be invested in any way, and thought processes will have no interest for the subject. Hallucination, or psychosis, is the result of this failure. And as for writers, they assume this alchemy of sublimation most intensely. I am not trying to suggest that sublimation is only an aesthetic activity. In aesthetic activity, however, this rather dangerous dynamic is hypostatized; its objects—sounds, colors, words, and so on—become a narcissistically invested production as well as a mode of life with others. Yet the mechanism of sublimation is indispensable and subjacent to the thought process in every speaking being.

The negativity of signifiance is not the only characteristic of this third model that we might deduce from Freudian thought. The most troubling aspect of the enigmatic fable of Totem and Taboo consists less in explaining ontogenesis with phylogenesis than in asserting the real (nonfantasmatic) character of acts attributed to Homo sapiens of the glacial period. The brothers did not have a fantasy of murdering or devouring the father, Freud maintains, though prudent friends and disciples encouraged him to abandon this hypothesis; they really killed and ate him.

We might be content to uphold that Freud needed this “reality” of phylogenesis in order to link individuals’ psychical destinies to earlier human history. I would go further. Given the incommensurable periods Freud evokes and the fact that they suppose monumental human mutations (in the Nietzschean sense) rather than real events that can be located in a historical progression, Freud’s main concern seems to be to open the subjective destiny to the historic and to the transsubjective appeal of a ray of light in what Heidegger calls Being. The problem is stated in paleontological or Darwinian terms, as befits a Viennese doctor suspicious of philosophy.

Thus Freud explains bisexuality either ontogenetically, through the impotence of neoteny and the evolution of the Oedipus complex, or phylogenetically: “According to one psycho-analytical hypothesis, . . . [it] is a heritage of the cultural development necessitated by the glacial epoch. We see, then, that the differentiation of the super-ego from the ego is no matter of chance; it represents the most important characteristics of the development both of the individual and of the species; indeed, by giving permanent expression to the influence of the parents it perpetuates the existence of factors to which it owes its origin” (p. 31). Moreover, the factors that organize the differentiation of the psychical apparatus into id and ego, or, more generally, the negativity that generates a stratified signifying functioning, are attributed not only to primitive man “but even to much simpler organisms, for it is the inevitable expression of the influence of the external world” (p. 35).

Freud’s phylogenesis was a response to the necessity that had emerged to contemplate the extrapsychical. Against panpsychology and the negativity of the signifiance whose layers he was refining, he called on (Nietzschean) “monumental history” or “an external reality” (to use his terminology) distinct from psychical activity and yet inseparable from signifiance. This historic outside that does not signify in the linguistic sense of the term (because Freud takes examples from primitive man, inferior organisms, or inorganic matter) nevertheless persists in the id and in its conflicts with the ego and continues in the heir to the id, the superego. “The struggle which once raged in the deepest strata of the mind, and was not brought to an end by rapid sublimation and identification, is now continued in a higher region, like the Battle of the Huns in Kaulbach’s painting” (p. 36). Freud multiplied the metaphors, constantly examining primitive history as an external reality resistant to psychical and more narrowly linguistic representation as well as a source of its signifying negativity. I remind you that Freud abandoned language, here, in the narrow sense of a grammatical or rhetorical system, in order to speak of it as an inter- and intrasubjective dynamic.

Freud’s heirs—André Green, in particular—tend to interpret this new phylogenetic fable as a rehabilitation of the archaic, or as an invitation to include generations anterior to the subject in the psychical destiny of the subject itself, or even as a project using Hegelian history to provide an optimal interpretation of the unconscious. Only Lacan took a path unforeseeable to Freud, a path suggested to him by contemporary philosophy, which was concerned with bypassing metaphysics and investigating the pre-Socratic being. In the wake of this later Freud, I will situate the Lacanian formulation of the speaking subject as parlêtre: a play on words echoing Heidegger’s Dasein that expresses the unavoidable insistence of being (outside-subject, outside-language) at the heart of human speech as it unfolds its negativity. Da, there, “I” speak, thrown out, cast out as “I” am, by being. My speech joins the historic meaning that exceeds the subjective signification of my discourse.

When Freud compares this to a delirium in “Constructions in Analysis” (1937), it is useful to recall what he wrote to Ferenczi on October 6, 1910: “I succeed where the paranoiac fails.” Delirium takes words for things and fails at symbolization, while at the same time repudiating the other and projecting drives onto it, the death drive, in particular. In other words, words do not take the place of symbolic protection, the paternal function is obsolete, the pact with the other is abolished, in the place of the other “I” put my death drive, which “I” henceforth believe I receive from outside. In this logic, which is that of the paranoiac, the outside, the other, and language are not preserved. Yet in its mad truth, psychosis unveils the heterogeneity of the psychical apparatus sustained and activated by an outside transmuted into other as well as language and constantly threatened by this same outside. Freud’s extreme daring, which is clear today, was not rejecting the delirious latency integral to the psychical apparatus given over to rebellious being. Freud was not content to protect himself from it through the reality testing that a certain psychoanalytical approach has retained from his work. If he succeeded where the paranoiac failed, it was because he constantly returned to the historic: being, the transpsychical; the transsubjective. To what end?

The field of discourse—and interpretation—can be understood as a narration nourished by sensations/mnemic traces transposed (métaphorein) into narrative signs that are invested themselves; the human being is a speaking being inhabited by Eros-Thanatos and by a third component that is neither language nor drive but overdetermines both: signifiance. The two scenes of the conscious and the unconscious adjoin a third: the extrapsychical. There is a horizon of being outside the psychical where human subjectivity is inscribed without being reduced, where psychical life is exceeded by signifiance. Freud defined the capacity to idealize and to sublimate by forming an ego from the id; Bion speaks of function K (knowing), added to L (love) and H (hate); André Green proposes an objectifying function that transforms activity (sublimation) into object-possession through the ego (“I” love, “I” desire my work, my thought, my language). Freud the analyst devoted his last years to the works of sublimation by deciphering art and religion; at the same time, in treatment, he tried to draw patients to narrative activity focused on being as both source and otherness.

Note the difference with regard to the initial discovery of the unconscious: the issue is no longer the structure of language as such but the fantasmatic narrative (fable, tale, myth) constructed with the material of this language. What else is this if not the full value, recaptured, of the so-called fundamental rule of free association? Tell me your fantasies, put the sadomasochism of your drives, your parents, your grandparents, transgenerational and primitive histories in narrative form; make yourself an animal, plant, amoeba, rock; make the unrepresentable enter representation. The Word can reveal your truths to you by reconciling you with . . . whom? Not merely with yourself but with the other of the psychical, indeed, the other of language. There is no modern word for this. It was logos for the pre-Socratics. The Greeks said “being.” Lacan did not hesitate to adopt this interpretation. Most analysts recoil from it, because they do not see how to integrate the notion of being into the clinic and they remain resistant, for good reason, to German phenomenologists—Binswanger, for example—who, by dint of investigating the extrapsychical and the extrasubjective, made inquiry into the human being so noble and abstract that sexuality was obliterated and human experience ended up dissolving. Freud, on the contrary, taught us to sexualize being, to alter it, to decipher the other in it, in the sense of an instinctual conflict, of “you” and the feminine-masculine.

The signifiance I am trying to elucidate in my reading of Freud is far vaster than the cognitivists’ “mind,” modeled on logic when not on computer science. A signifiance open to being and presented here and now in the structures of narration: something to revive your interest, as interpreters of sacred or literary texts, which I hope I have not numbed with this analytical detour.

At this point in the investigation of the “higher side” of man that Freud focused on, we must not forget the pitfall that the founder of psychoanalysis never underestimated: left to itself, sublimation disentangles the mixed drives, extricates the death drive, and exposes the ego to melancholia. Too often we emphasize the link between art and melancholia⁴⁰ instead of bluntly asking the question: how does one avoid succumbing to it? The answer is simple: by resexualizing the sublimatory activity, by sexualizing words, colors, and sounds. This is done either by introducing erotic fantasies into the narration or plastic representation (Sade, Diderot, Proust, Genet, Céline, Joyce, etc.) that real erotic activities may or may not accompany—artists thereby put the Freudian conception of a language underpinned by the dramaturgy of unconscious drives into action, whereas analysis, by contrast, tries to translate them or work them out. Or by concentrating rather exclusively on the sublimatory act itself and its product (a book, composing music, playing an instrument), which take the place of autoeroticism, especially when encouraged by social rewards or idealizing religious assurances (Bach).

Aside from great aesthetic performances, themselves often conflictual and threatened, sublimatory activity leaves the speaking subject exposed to this other aspect of signifiance that is the death drive. Freud brilliantly pointed out its power, not because he was the victim of a sorrow or a tendency to devalorize works of art—which, on the contrary, he esteemed highly—but because of an exemplary lucidity that linked the fate of meaning to the destiny of negativity.

The incomplete and open state of this third stage of Freudian thought on the subject of language seen in the light of vaster preoccupations is very beneficial: there is no Freudian dogma concerning language (as there is with “original fantasies,” “drives,” etc.). The complexity of the Freudian inquiry in this field offers contemporary psychoanalysis fertile areas of research. Here are a few:

1. The heterogeneity of the site of language (the first model) leads one to contemplate various types of representation (word-presentation/thing-presentation) and to refine them into sensations, which have given phenomenologists such a hard time and which cognitivists today believe they can subsume within logical categories.

2. The preponderance of verbalization (the “fundamental rule”) should lead us to examine not only the facility of the narrative in approaching fantasmatic contents but also its limits in this regard.

3. Serious consideration of the nonverbalizable psychical act allows diagnosis of operational psychosomatic functionings or operational fantasmatic constructions made of images and split from words.⁴¹

4. The opening of the psyche to the dimension of being as psychical exteriority can be approached by a broadening of the rhetorical or sublimatory capacities of the analyst and the analysand, without which the real is absent from the psyche in psychosis. English analysts’ interest in Beauty in the treatment of autism and other disturbances is a step in this direction.⁴²

Does the Lacanian conception of language respond to these avenues left unexplored by Freud? I said earlier that Lacan’s formulation “the subconscious is structured like a language” was an interpretation of the optimistic model of The Interpretation of Dreams. Later, Lacan’s warnings against “linguisterie” and his portmanteau word lalangue opened analysis to the translinguistic and the infantile. The “paternal function” according to Lacan resonates pertinently with the preoccupations of Totem and Taboo and The Ego and the Id. The major difference between Lacan and Freud resides in the postulate according to which the heterogeneity of the drive would be impossible to enunciate in the field of free association. Nevertheless, the practice of scansion and even the short session, which lead to psychodrama rather than psychoanalysis, indicate a consideration of the unrepresentable, the unverbalizable, that operates within the psychical apparatus and is plainly revealed in countertransference. The one who seemed to hypostatize language as a control lever of therapy ultimately gave language the least possibility to express itself there, as if the extralinguistic rebounded and sent transference and countertransference, patients and analysts, back to prelinguistic psychical representations or acting without representation. Others in England and France (W. R. Bion, Piera Aulagnier, myself) have tried to furnish concepts of this, to allow it within treatment, to interpret it.

The three models in the complex course of Freudian thought on language (or the signifying process specific to human beings) that I have schematically outlined here should be understood in resonance with each other and together, based on our means of transference and countertransference, allowed to expand our various registers of signifiance, listening, and interpretation.

I will end with a clinical vignette that will allow you to penetrate the complexity of the third model in the experience of a patient and that demonstrates two limits of the fundamental rule of free association: first, the difficulty of inscribing the symptom in language and, consequently, the recourse to the compromise of the sublimation (poetic writing); second, the psychical confusion (hallucination) that the verbal translation of the drive provokes and the subsequent necessity to go outside, to the cultural or historical, in order to modulate the translation of the drives into psychical representations.

A bulimic patient managed to rid herself of her symptoms after a year of face-to-face analytical psychotherapy. She began a sexual relationship with a man, which she said she found more satisfying than the rare relationships she had had before, until she realized during a visit that her partner resembled her mother. The vomiting started again, and on top of it, the patient could no longer curtail it in her usual manner: writing poetic texts, which previously had given expression to her violence while fragmenting the world, people, and language itself. The vomiting, which “emptied” her, was also evacuated, “emptied,” from the sessions; only a few allusions and a show of secret sorrow suggested an alternative to this jouissance as painful as it was private. I advanced that the vomiting was a speechless writing, severing and excising internal matter and the patient’s body itself. A rich associative discourse followed, as the patient tried to put into words specific olfactory, tactile, and auditory sensations internal to her attacks, with an obvious exhibitionistic pleasure in seduction but also with aggression toward me, to which the pleasure of mentalization, leading things to words and vice versa, was added. Note how the dramaturgy of this narrative of sensorial naming was at once pleasure and attack. Note also that language hovered between what Freud called thing-presentation and word-presentation; words were not dissociated but attached to things the patient experienced sensorially.

The putting into words of her perceptions was soon followed by the memory, in a dream, of her first episode of binging and purging, which occurred when she was a little girl, on vacation by the seaside with her parents and sharing a bedroom with them. The account of this episode revealed an erotic conflict (desire for the mother and the father) and led the patient to a grave difficulty, as if the words of the story had confronted her with an experience contemplated but still active, traumatic. After recounting the dream, the patient seemed almost paralyzed, plunged in verbal and mental confusion; she forgot words, even sentences, and then fell silent. For a few sessions, she was unable to pick up the thread of the story or even discuss her complaint, a performance that was usually economical but very logically constructed. The verbalization of the trauma had threatened verbal construction itself, as if the expulsion of matter (the symptom of vomiting) had affected her words, emptying not only her stomach but also her syntax and signs themselves of their meaning. When she managed to speak again, her speech resembled her poems: sparse, obscure. I made out the words “sea” (mer), “water,” “viscosity,” “death,” “mother” (mère), “stream,” “horror,” and “dejection.” The patient was a reader of Céline; she had even written a thesis on him. The first scene of vomiting in her childhood, which she had tried to recount to me, an attempt that had placed her in this state of mental and linguistic confusion, made me think of an analogous scene in Death on the Installment Plan in which the narrator and his mother are seized by violent and abject vomiting during a sea voyage to England. I told the patient about this association, which I thought might have been preconscious for her and which, for me, was a linguistic, rhetorical, and cultural reference point to set against her linguistic and mental confusion: “Your malaise calls to mind Mort à crédit [Death on the Installment Plan].” I noticed that the words “mort à crédit” could be applied to the analytical situation: giving the analyst credit for making the old subject die. My intervention could also have been taken as a narcissistic gratification, a sublimatory aid. The patient told me that she had always felt disgust and fascination for this text and its author. She associated on her master’s thesis, remastering her thoughts and words. In the following sessions, she made associations between Céline’s text, which she had just reread, and her own attempts to go further in putting her attacks into words. She abandoned poetry and began to write short stories. In them, she talked about her hatred for a man and a woman: for her boyfriend, for her mother, and, discreetly but rather clearly, for me and my “abstractions.” The symptoms—bulimia, vomiting—once again disappeared. A new narrative, of violent cruelty, had swallowed it.

I didn’t know if this was progress: the patient continued to have difficulties with her boyfriend, her mother, and her coworkers. But we were caught—the patient, myself, and words—in a construction where language again became narrative and, clearly supported by a sublimatory gratification (Céline’s text), took over the conflict that had previously played itself out in the autoeroticism of the stomach, the esophagus, and the mouth.

Is speech in an analytical situation a narrative that stages one’s own murder for the other (the analyst) and the other’s murder for oneself in order to defer death from the living body? The wordless symptom was deadly. The poetic writing, tangled in itself, phobic, and apparently protective, was a powerless mausoleum in the face of the destructive attacks. On the other hand, free association for someone—the analyst—to swallow and vomit had at first endangered my patient. Situated in the context of treatment and in the transsubjective context of cultural history, it then allowed speech to preserve the life of this woman, who had been annihilating herself in the symptom and through poetry.

After an extremely violent session that dealt with her boyfriend and myself, the patient concluded that analysis was the only place where she could allow herself to be tender. Tender with? Or tender toward? The paradox of her statement made me understand that the violence vomited in words allowed her to be tender with . . . her instinctual being (mute force, waste product, amoeba, or hominid of the glacial period: the Freudian fable is calling us), inasmuch as she was able to give words to this being.

Is language the tenderness of the parlêtre? Tender to the parlêtre through free association? Beyond hallucination and cruelty,⁴³ isn’t language (or better yet, narrative) within therapy a reconciliation between word-presentation and thing-presentation that makes us perceive—unconsciously—that meaning communicated to someone else shelters us (temporarily) from death?

Language, as Freud would have us understand it, is this sublimation that uses signs and syntax in a narration in order to allow passage from the being external to the subject to the other that makes me a subject. But is this solely a matter of language? Or is it what Freud the rationalist called in his third model, with a certain infelicity, the “higher side”? Analysts are left to listen indefinitely to the infinite folds that form language, the unknown. Moreover, where is this language? Does it exist outside the specific listening of the analyst who broadens it and narrows it, proposes models of it according to his own “higher side,” his own signifiance? What remains of language after Freud? An artifact dependent on the “higher side” of the subject of the interpretation?

In any case, the language of the analyst is not the language of the linguist. But what control, what tension, what tenderness! These are the paths of revolt, in the sense I give it in this book.