Читать книгу A Practical Way to Feel Better - Gerardo Arenas - Страница 5

It is a pleasure for me to be here and have the opportunity to enjoy a few hours of shared work with you. It is a good way to start getting to know each other. I propose to divide these three hours into two parts, pausing halfway to open the dialogue and rest a little, and then leave another period at the end of the tour to deepen the exchange. I also ask for leniency in my way of speaking English, which I have used very little since I quit my job as a nuclear physicist, almost thirty years ago, to devote myself full-time to psychoanalysis, which is my passion. At that time, I dreamt of coming to the United States because it was on the forefront of scientific research. Today, however, I come to talk about psychoanalysis, which is not a science, in a country where it is difficult to practice psychoanalysis and it is even more difficult to make a living from it.

How did I get here? Let me tell you a brief tragicomedy, but not as a detour, but as a way of getting into the subject, like the “metalogs” created by the famous and admired resident of San Francisco, Gregory Bateson1. The tragicomedy is the story of three unforgettable cupcakes.

Once upon a time, during a busy meeting at the Escuela de la Orientación Lacaniana (EOL) in Buenos Aires, where hundreds of people gathered for a seminar, a friend introduced me to Maria Liza Ahearne who, in the middle of the crowd, told me something about an interview. Unable to pay her much attention, I gave her my phone number and said goodbye. Then we coordinated a time to meet in my office.

Those who know her will agree that politeness and kindness stand out among the virtues that characterize her. One morning, at the appointed time, she arrived at my office and, upon entering, handed a delicate package containing three cupcakes. Surprised by this, I left the package on the desk, invited her to come in, and said, “I’m listening.” I guess she was also surprised, but she didn’t show it. With the greatest delicacy, she asked me if she would be allowed to record the interview. Even more bewildered, I firmly said no. And she, determined to overcome all the obstacles in the politest manner, took a notebook and a pen and prepared to write. I was totally baffled. I misunderstood everything: she didn’t expect to do an interview to begin an analysis, rather she thought that I agreed to be interviewed as part of her ethnographic research. And I noticed it only when she took out some papers and addressed me with a long list of questions.

It must not have been more than two minutes between when she arrived and when I discovered my enormous misinterpretation based on the polysemy of the term interview, but those two minutes suddenly became eternal and the desk, upon which I had left the delicious cupcakes so kindly brought by Maria Liza, felt light years away. I myself had metamorphosed into a rude and ungrateful man, unable to offer even a cup of coffee to the gentle interviewer. I felt so embarrassed, so ashamed, that I did not know how to reverse the situation and, since I had inevitably looked like a weirdo and a lout in her eyes, I decided to undo my initial discourtesy by redoubling my generosity during the time of the answers. I urgently needed to compensate for my involuntary rudeness, and I think I may have succeeded, at least to some extent, since I suppose that I have not been invited to San Francisco as a zoo specimen so that you can witness how impolite and unfriendly Argentine psychoanalysts can be (something that must not necessarily be ruled out), but because the conversation that followed the initial setback must not have been too uninteresting.

Be that as it may, when Maria Liza left, her three cupcakes looked at me with an expression of reproach probably similar to that of the sardine can that looked at Lacan…

I offer here, publicly, my apologies. But this introduction does not have this sole purpose. It so happens that, for better or worse, this and other kinds of interpretations weave all our social ties, including the analytic tie, and that is why misunderstanding is an essential, not contingent, part of human relationships. In fact, it is one of their most creative parts. Those who think that language is a mere sophistication, added to a system basically created for naming things, are wrong. In truth, words are not even meant to refer to things, as Michel Foucault explained.

To the despair and disgust of those who engage in logical empiricism or in formal ontology―two disciplines so important for Anglo-Saxon analytical philosophy―the reference of language is essentially empty, as demonstrated three decades ago by Jacques-Alain Miller during one of his visits to the United States, at a conference entitled: “Language: Much Ado About What?” Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges illustrated this essential emptiness by showing that the seemingly descriptive phrase “A cold wind blows from […] the river” is far from referring to any reality, contrary to what a famous Uruguayan writer (Horacio Quiroga) had suggested before him. How could Borges affirm that of such an objective phrase? Let’s say it like this: we feel that the air moves, and we give this the name wind, after which we compare its temperature with the memory of the temperature of other things we considered cold. But let’s recognize that the wind does not exist as such, and that it isn’t cold, and of course it cannot blow, either from the river or wherever it is, and finally notice that from the river indicates such an ambiguous and ill-defined direction that it could be from anywhere. In short, A cold wind blows from the river has as much ado about reality or whatever reference as any phrase in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake could have.

Words, then, are not made to name things. Are they made so that we can communicate? As a means of expression or transmission, they are of no use. For example, if I am with someone and I say Quiroga’s phrase A cold wind blows from the river, I am far from having transmitted meteorological information about the world or having expressed something about me. This is demonstrated by the wide variety of responses that my phrase could logically provoke. Here are several such possibilities:

–A cold wind blows from the river.

–If you want a coat, go get it yourself.

–A cold wind blows from the river.

–Yes, my dear, this place is very romantic.

–A cold wind blows from the river.

–Are you depressed again?

–A cold wind blows from the river.

–Don’t change the subject!

–A cold wind blows from the river.

–I’m tired of the wind too.

–A cold wind blows from the river.

–Yeah, I wonder where we can score some blow.

Look in any dictionary for the senses of the verb to communicate, and you will see how difficult it is to make these dialogues, perfectly possible and common, fit into one of those senses. These examples should be enough to dismantle the idea that words serve as a means of expression, since it is clear that the meaning of what we say will always depend on the way the Other reads it, and that is the ultimate reason why Lacan invented the matheme

s(A)

where s is the signified and A is the Other: meaning depends on the Other. The phrase A cold wind blows from the river does not state anything about the world and does not express anything about me, it does not refer to things or to the person who pronounces it.

In short, words are not made to name things or to communicate or to express, and yet they are here, in our universe and among us. Or, rather, we are there, in the universe of words. They were there, constituting our world, long before we entered the scene. Words, those strange things whose function is so hard to define, pre-exist us and even forge us as we are―those stranger things Lacan called speaking bodies.

But notice that, if we are outside the autistic world, from the beginning and long before we develop the slightest linguistic competence, we are spoken bodies, since words attract us irresistibly. They amuse and fascinate us, they calm and excite us, they scare and lull us to sleep, and in general they exert upon us the most varied effects. More suitable for something known as equivoque than for nomination, more favorable to misunderstanding than to communication or expression, words constitute a proper and autonomous order of reality; they alter those speaking and spoken bodies that we are, and so they weave all possible ties between us.

In a paper that may be the clearest watershed of his work, written in French as a neurologist but published five years later as a brand-new psychoanalyst, Freud compared the characteristics of organic and hysterical motor paralyses, and discovered that the latter were only possible due to the speaking nature of the body they affected. Indeed, the most striking thing is that this sort of paralyses does not obey the laws of the organism in general and the nervous system in particular, but the laws of speech. Hysterical motor paralyses affect the body as a function of the common names of the extremities: “the leg is the leg, until the insertion of the hip; the arm is the upper limb as it is drawn under the dresses.” The disturbance responsible for these paralyses does not affect bundles of neurons, but links between words. If the hysterical condition depends on the incidence of words onto the body, the most logical thing is to bet that words can cure those diseases of the speaking body. This is the way that psychoanalysis was born.

Hysteria is not the only disease of the speaking body. Depression, which is the great illness of the century, and addictions, which follow it closely, are endemic conditions of human beings—that is, of those bodies that speak and are affected by words. The same can be said of psychoses. No animal hears voices! Before discussing the problems of psychoanalytic interpretation, it is important to be clear about the fact that certain conditions depend essentially on the speaking nature of human beings, since no one should advance on that complex terrain if they do not understand why we interpret. Do we do it because we are hermeneuts eager for meaning, because we proclaim ourselves contemporary oracles, because we consider ourselves disciples and heirs of Champollion? Unlike what happens in Argentina, the precarious survival of psychoanalysis in the United States is based on the innumerable literary and cultural studies that use it as a kind of semantic-production machine. But what does that have to do with the analytical experience and the suffering of those who turn to it to live and feel better? A screwdriver can be used as a hammer, but…

The truth is that we do not interpret in order to produce meaning, but because words affect the body. One will never sufficiently appreciate this mysterious daily miracle. You attend a good stand-up show, and a handful of words will make you laugh until you cry and even may leave you breathless. A simple I love you can be enough to lift you through the air and pin a smile on your cheeks until they cramp. The fateful word metastasis can produce an effect equivalent to that of a fist that would like to break through your throat and tighten your neck from inside. In summary, words affect the body, and the way they do it depends on the words used and the way they are used. I mention this fact, which seems trivial but is enormous, because it is the key to what I will discuss afterwards about how the different ways of interpreting modify the economy of jouissances. At the same time, this opens a no-less important issue, an issue that I especially appreciate because it was the one that―twenty-five years ago and as a result of a bad experience as an analysand―motivated the writing of my first book, namely, the calculation of interpretation and the correlated responsibility of the analyst. Indeed, if different ways of interpreting have different effects, one can expect that it is possible to define interpretation according to the sought-after effect; and, as this calculation is necessary, the action of the analyst is an ethically responsible practice. Now, since I cannot deal with all these matters at the same time, I must leave this one for later.

What I cannot postpone is a terminological clarification required to avoid a new cupcake story. It is not another discussion related to the sense of interview, but a clarification on the meaning of to interpret. This verb comes from an ancient Indo-European root used to designate the action performed by the person who translates between two traders that speak different languages—i.e. what we still call an interpreter. Therefore, the fundamental, basic and primary sense of to interpret is to translate. What ancient dream-interpreters did was something of this nature. It was believed (and some people still believe) that dreams are messages from the gods, expressed in an encrypted and generally incomprehensible manner, and that the interpreter must decipher and translate them so that they could become intelligible to the dreamer. Freud deals extensively with this issue in his book on dreams, which also equates interpretation and translation.

Even if interpretation-as-translation is part of the arsenal that every analyst has in order to face the symptoms of their analysands, it is clear that such a way of interpreting did not wait for the advent of psychoanalysis to see the light of day. Therefore, there must be something that characterizes interpretation-as-translation better than what we have done so far and that, at the same time, shows what is innovative about psychoanalytic interpretation. On the other hand, I have translated many books and articles into Spanish, written by Lacan and other authors, and I can tell you that the translator’s job in translating and the analyst’s action in interpreting have almost no points of comparison.

To grasp the difference even better, the first thing to be understood is that interpreting is not understanding. In its usual sense, to interpret something is to understand it, but to interpret a dream is not to understand it. Freud noted that the content of dreams is the result of the transfer of certain thoughts to “another mode of expression,” not to another language—as if those thoughts had been moved to a stage where other modes of action were in style, a translation in the sense of movement, a shift from one place to another, and nothing guarantees that moving something makes it understandable, just as moving my pen doesn’t allow me to understand it. But this, which from a certain point of view may seem unfavorable, turns out to be a great advantage. Freud and Lacan didn’t strongly recommend not-understanding in vain. Why? Because analysis seeks that which makes each one of us unique, and that singularity is lost through understanding. Indeed, what is it to understand what someone tells us? It is to give their words the meaning that we would have given them if we ourselves had uttered them. Therefore, when I understand someone, I identify that person with me, and what is different about them, something radically unique, their irremediable otherness, is lost. Robert Frost is famous for presumably saying “Poetry is what gets lost in translation,” and we can paraphrase him by saying that singularity is what gets lost in comprehension.

Evidently, when we eliminate the need for understanding from the idea of interpretation, the act of interpreting distances itself from the notion of translation—even more than it already had when we said that such an act does not have a hermeneutical aim but instead seeks to cause an impact on the body. So why keep talking about interpretation? Balzac spoke ironically about someone called Jeannot who boasted that his knife lasted a long time because he had already changed the blade and the handle several times, and Lichtenberg joked about another knife from which the blade and the handle were removed. So, will interpretation become a knife belonging to that same strange family of cutting implements, if we now say that it points to the body and not to understanding? Wouldn’t it be better to invent a new concept, typical of the analytical operation, and set aside the term interpretation, so old and so loaded with history and so far from the meaning we give it today in psychoanalysis?

Lacan proposed doing just that more than half a century ago, when he dedicated an entire year of his seminar to define the psychoanalytic act. He did it during his 15^th seminar, which ended in the midst of the noise caused by the events of May 1968. But while many of us have adopted his proposal and, to some extent, tend to talk about the psychoanalytic act in a way that includes and exceeds what Freud and most analysts understand by the word interpretation, we still use this term, despite having largely changed and extended its meaning—so much so that, instead of entitling this seminar The Structure of the Analytic Acts, I chose the title, Structure of Interpretations.

Something similar occurs with the term surgery, whose Greek root χειρουργία (kheirourgía) defines that activity as an activity done by hand. At present there are medical procedures that when that term was coined were unthinkable―such as, for example, the gamma knife (again with the knives!) used for the treatment of certain brain tumors―and although these medical procedures are operations carried out using complex devices commanded by computer using no hand, they are nevertheless considered surgical interventions. Perhaps later I will pick up the comparison between analyst and surgeon introduced by Freud and used by Lacan as well. For the moment, I will persevere in misusing the bad term interpretation.

What I have told you may seem vague and general, but it makes no sense that I go on with detailed theoretical and clinical questions and tell you the latest developments about the ways of interpreting in psychoanalysis, if I do not first trace the line that separates what is an interpretation (in the analytical sense of the term) from what is not as accurately as possible. On the other hand, I have prepared this seminar in the same way most seminars in the Freudian Field are structured worldwide. Just as hadron accelerators take subatomic particles that are almost at rest and quickly push them at speeds close to that of light―some of my metaphors still betray my experience in nuclear physics―Freudian Field seminars are usually self-contained, they do not presuppose previous training, and in a short time push the attendees to the current state of the art in the issue at hand.

Well, what have we seen so far? We have not taken anything for granted. We started by discussing the consequences of a misunderstanding about the term interview as a way of grasping that such interpretations weave our social ties, including the analytical one, and that misunderstanding is an essential and creative part of human relationships. This led me to explain that words are not made to refer to things or to communicate or to express ourselves, since the meaning of what we say depends on the way in which the Other reads it. However, and despite their inclination to equivoque and misunderstanding, words create our ties and, most important to us, they alter our speaking body. Such a body has some illnesses that are only possible due to its speaking nature, since they do not obey anatomical laws, but laws of speech, and if Freud bet on curing those diseases through that use of speech we call interpretation, it was because he understood how words affect the bodies. That is why he invented and perfected a praxis that uses words.

As you might remember, the main sense of interpretation is translation, but psychoanalytic interpretation differs from translation because it does not consist in understanding, but rather in transferring something to another stage without understanding, in order to avoid singularity being lost in comprehension. Since analytic interpretation aims at the body and not at understanding, Lacan proposed replacing that notion with that of the psychoanalytic act, which includes and exceeds it, but this does not prevent us from talking about interpretation in a new sense, which is the one we will use here and can now define as follows: Interpretation is based on misunderstanding and on the equivoque of the words that constitute the analytical tie, so that some of these words, in search of the singular, touch the body in a homologous and inverse way to that of the symptoms, and so make it feel better. This simple definition is perfectly compatible with Lacan’s latest teachings, so you are already in the particle accelerator of the Freudian Field.

To advance in the precise determination of the structure of interpretations, we must improve our vocabulary a bit, stop talking about words, and start talking about signifiers.

A signifier is something heard as an articulated sound and has no other value than being different from any other signifier at any given time. This is what is usually called the diacritical principle of the signifier. Although it admits a few objections, for the moment we will adopt this Saussurean principle as a law. So, the only thing that matters is the logical dichotomy, a cut defined by the difference that separates each signifier S from all the other signifiers S’, a cut that I will hereafter represent by means of a double bar:

The problem Saussure failed to solve is the nature and functioning of equivoque, which is central to analytical experience and interpretation, since, as Lacan pointed out at the beginning of his 23^rd seminar, “the equivoque is all we have as a weapon against the symptom.” How does our diacritical principle fail in equivoque? Saussure studies the problem of the delimitation between two French signifiers which are indeed the same,

Si je la prends ― Si je l’apprends

which can be translated as

If I grab her ― If I learn it

respectively. The solution of the equivoque is ascribed by him to the meaning attached to the words. However, let us consider the following situation: two boys attend a class taught by a woman so beautiful that one of them has his jaw drop open, and the other asks him what he’s thinking. If the first one answers si-ž-la-prã,2 the other will still not know how to read that equivoque: Is he thinking about the teacher’s body (If I grab her) or about what she’s teaching (If I learn it)?

Lacan takes up the same problem when discussing the title of his 21^st seminar, lə-nɔ̃-dy-pɛʀ.3 Should we write it Les non-dupes errent or Les Noms-du-Père? The first option would mean something like The Non-Dupes Wander, while the second would mean The Names-of-the-Father. If a signifier is the articulated sound we hear, both writings (or readings) correspond to a single signifier, and therefore oppose a single battery of signifiers, in spite of which both meanings are different. This implies that the meaning of the speech depends on the reading of what we hear rather than on the signifier, and such a reading operation introduces a non-diacritical division into the chain of signifiers, since it does not occur at the level of the signifier, but at that of the letter (writing and reading). That is why I will designate it by a simple line, not a double one; it is not an abyss, but a bridge:

Therefore, there are three dimensions of the signifier. One is the diachronic dimension, which corresponds to the fact that the chain of signifiers unfolds in time and that at any moment the presence of a signifier excludes that of any other; in this dimension, anticipation of the meaning to come and retroaction of signification a posteriori (après-coup) take place. The second dimension is the diacritical synchronic one, where each signifier is what the others are not. And the last dimension is the synchronic non-diacritical one, which is that of equivoque. Although this would force us to represent the chain of signifiers three-dimensionally, for simplicity I will make it two-dimensional, with an implicit third dimension perpendicular to the plotted plane. For instance, consider the definition of subject given by Lacan in his seminar on identification: The signifier is what represents the subject for another signifier. This allows us to place the subject between two signifiers, that is, in reference to four places, since each signifier is defined by means of a difference―the barred S stands for the subject.

(I clarify, for those who are accustomed to using Lacanian algebra, that what I call here S₁ and S₂ does not have a necessary or rigid relationship with the mathemes of the four discourses, for example.) The third dimension (omitted here) corresponds to equivoque and must be imagined to be perpendicular to the plane of the graph.

Well, these signifiers are not necessarily those that interest the linguist, since they can be phonemes, syllables, word fragments, whole words, noises, silences, phrases, stories, scenarios, and in general they are a whole life for those who are caught between them. The challenge is to insert there (S₂) a new signifier that allows the subject to change their position. Therefore, we will focus on that new signifier and on what might be calculable in its finding.

The subjective position is a place that we only conjecture once the subject has left it, just like an electron that may have revolved around the atomic nucleus since the Big Bang emits a photon when changing its orbit, thereby allowing us to conjecture where it was… once it is no longer there. We only know where the subject is due to some effects correlated to a change of its position.

This change is the minimum effect to be found in any interpretation, to the extent that symptoms, on the contrary, fix that position. Consequently, if subject position is defined as a function of two signifier pairs, interpretation will be defined as a function of three: two of the first position and two of the second, with a pair common to both. A couple of decades ago, adapting a Freudian expression, I called that common pair the bridge-signifier, since the subject must cross it when changing position, and that’s why I chose, for the cover of the corresponding book, the image of one of the bridges that I like most: San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. (The second edition of the book, published two years ago, has a smaller but famous bridge in Buenos Aires: Puente de la Mujer.) Thus, the sketch of any interpretation must contain that of the change in subjective position:

In the horizontal diachronic dimension, I include arrows pointing to the right, to mark the anticipation of the meaning with which each signifier operates avant coup (beforehand) on those that follow them, and arrows pointing to the left, to indicate the signification that, from each signifier, relies après coup (afterwards) on the precedents.

When the meaning of S₂ anticipated by S₁ is a posteriori validated from S₃, there is no surprise, and that means that we are fully in the discourse of understanding, which, as it was already seen, we must avoid. When that is not the case,

the operation of S₃ alters us in a peculiar way: it baffles us, or makes us laugh, or distresses us, or saddens us, which puts us on the path of psychoanalytic interpretation.

Let’s look at an example where it irritates us. That is the usual case with dad jokes. Dialogue: –How do I look? –With your eyes. Here S₁ is How do I, which anticipates for look the meaning of appear to be (S₂), but instead of an S₃ that validates that sense (You look tired, for example), a surprising one appears (With your eyes), which makes the equivoque present in look resound, and extends the same operation to How, which passes from In what manner to By what means. The corresponding sketch has then this nature.

This is the structure of a joke. I could show you and explain to you similar sketches for the structure of puns, slips of the tongue, ellipses, etc., but this would force us to spend too much time discussing the linguistic aspects of the interpretation, which language scholars and hermeneutists can deal with, and it could make us forget the main thing we know about it, insofar as it concerns centrally the analytical experience: interpretation is based on misunderstanding and on equivoque of the signifiers that constitute the analytical tie, so that some of these signifiers, in search of the singular, touch the body in a homologous and inverse way to that of the symptoms, and so make it feel better.

Therefore, I propose to follow a different path, starting from what happens to the body in the symptom. Since hysteria illustrates this mechanism in the best way, I will take one of Freud’s oldest cases as reference, which he mentions in a fragment of his correspondence with Fliess published posthumously under the title of “Project for a Scientific Psychology” (Entwurf einer Psychologie). Freud discusses the case as a paradigm of the proton pseudos, which has nothing to do with a proton from atomic nucleus but instead with the previous (proton) falsehood (pseudos) required for such an illogical consequence to be derived from it as the hysterical symptom.

In fact, Freud introduces his commentary on this paradigmatic case by recalling that hysterical compulsion originates from a peculiar kind of symbolization which resembles the one at work in dreams, and you will notice that, if he talks about symbolization, premises and conclusions, it is because he emphasizes the signifying structure of symptoms. But then he adds that clinical observation tells us that all this happens only in the sexual sphere; in other words, a special psychical chain of representations is to be found in that sphere. This is what Freud intends to illustrate by an example: the way in which a concatenation of signifiers affects what he calls sexuality, which does not refer to sex or sexual relations, but―as you will see―to what in his 19^th seminar Lacan defines as jouissance, that is, that disturbed relation to our own body. Disturbed by what? By words! Let us see how.

Here is what Freud writes about miss Emma Eckstein, an almost 30-year-old woman whom he had been treating since age 27:

Emma is at the present time under a compulsion not to go into shops alone. She explained this by a memory dating from the age of twelve (shortly before her puberty). She went into a shop to buy something, saw the two shop-assistants (one of whom she remembers) laughing together, and rushed out in some kind of fright. In this connection it was possible to elicit the idea that the two men had been laughing at her clothes and that one of them had attracted her sexually.

Next, Freud outlines a sort of logical analysis of this sequence. He says:

Both the relation of these fragments to one another and the effect of the experience are incomprehensible. If she felt unpleasure at her clothes being laughed at, this should have been corrected long ago―ever since she began to dress as a lady. Nor does it make any difference to her clothes whether she goes into a shop alone or in company. It is not simply a question of being protected, as is shown by the fact that (as happens in cases of agoraphobia) the company of a small child is enough to make her feel safe. Then there is the totally disconnected fact that one of the men attracted her. Here again nothing would be changed if she had someone with her. Thus the memories aroused explain neither the compulsion nor the determination of the symptom.

For Freud, the unconscious is the way to fulfill the precepts of rationality. If this irrational symptom of Emma has a rational explanation, we must look for the wrong hidden premise (the proton pseudos) that allows us to deduce it. Then, he says that

Further investigation brought to light a second memory, which she denies having had in mind at the moment of Scene I. Nor is there any evidence to support its presence there. On two occasions, when she was a child of eight, she had gone into a shop to buy some sweets and the shopkeeper had grabbed at her genitals through her clothes. In spite of the first experience she had gone to the shop a second time, after which she had stopped away. Afterwards she reproached herself for having gone the second time, as though she had wanted to provoke the assault. And in fact a “bad conscience” by which she was oppressed could be traced back to this experience.

In this second scene―thinks Freud―we must find the equivalent of what is the falsity of a previous premise (proton pseudos) in order to reach an illogical conclusion. In other words, Scene II is what allows Emma’s senseless symptom to be logically deduced from Scene I. He says it this way: