inverted form: An investigation
objector’s formulation, recognizing in it the stamp of my own thinking (Écrits, p. 247).
At the very moment when he states the formula for communica-tion that would fix, for a long time, the analysis of subjectivity as an effect of the relation to the other, Lacan indicates in a remark whose epistemology is impeccable that his own statement obeys this rule of production, since it was first made by “one of my most acute lis-teners”, who was objecting to what he was saying. In other words,
“the sender receives his own message back from the receiver in an inverted form” is not a formula that Lacan created himself. Instead, he took it from a listener; it is a response from the Other. It will be interesting, for this archaeology of Lacan’s thought, to discover who this exceptional objector was: “one of my most acute listeners”, a figure of the Other who spoke to Lacan with the voice of his own unconscious. It is also necessary to understand this formula, why it was coined, and the circumstances in which it was written for the first time (spring 1953).
Yet is this formula so important? Yes, for—as we have seen—in what would become the first book of the seminar, Lacan was seeking to define a theory of the subject that would be compatible with what Freudian experience had taught him. Lacan’s first public seminar deals with Freud’s papers on technique, and it is important not to lose the thread of his analysis, since the subject that he is seeking to define is the subject of analytic experience. By reading Freud’s most technical texts, he made progress in answering the question of what a subject is for, and in, analytic experience.
Lacan responds to this question in the Rome Report: subjectivity is what is defined by a form, a simple form. Yet this time, and unlike the answer that is elaborated in the texts of 1936–1948 on the mir-ror stage, it is a form in which language expresses itself. In 1953, Lacan changes his conception of subjectivity, which is still, however, defined as a simple term. It is a form, but not just any form; it is not the “primordial form” of the root identification of the mirror stage, which “situates the agency known as the ego, prior to its social determination”, not this sort of “ideal-I” or this “total form of his body, by which the subject anticipates the maturation of his power in a mirage” which “is given to him only as a gestalt …. [The] power [prégnance] should be considered linked to the species” (Écrits, p. 76).
Far from being a gestalt of the body, it is a form “in which language expresses itself”, and is “essential” since “all human speech derives”
from it and “defines subjectivity” (Écrits, p. 246).
In 1953, Lacan, still seeking the answer, encounters something.
What can be deduced from this encounter is that subjectivity receives its definition from an operation that is now situated in the register of language—the symbolic—rather than from the body image. It took Lacan 17 years—from 1936 to 1953—to alter the form that defines subjectivity; it changed from the imaginary to the symbolic, from the body image to a paradoxical expression of language.
Although this simple displacement could appear uninteresting to our readers, we should note the family resemblance between the two formulations. Let us reread the first formula (that of 1936–1949):
For the total form of his body, by which the subject anticipates the maturation of his power in a mirage, is given to him only as a gestalt, that is, in an exteriority in which, to be sure, this form is more constitutive than constituted, but in which, above all, it appears to him as the contour of his stature that freezes it and in a symmetry that reverses it (Écrits, p. 76).
For this first moment of the elaboration, the form given to the subject is:
1. In an exteriority
2. More constitutive than constituted 3. In a symmetry that reverses it.
The formal identity that defines the subject certainly does not allow the two forms to be confused with each other: one concerns what comes to the subject from the symbolic, while the other derives from the imaginary. One reveals what will give him the ideal image of his body. The other gives him the signifiers of his fate, or in anthropolog-ical terms, what is imposed symbolanthropolog-ically, when his place in the net-work is taken into account. Yet this formal kinship must not escape us for it shows us the stamp of Lacan’s thought66: in both cases, the
66 For an overview of Lacan’s thought, see Paul-Laurent Assoun, Lacan (2003).
human being receives, from what is outside himself, both his body image and the symbolic coordinates of his fate. These coordinates will or will not allow him—as we have seen with the Wolf Child—to perceive his image and to develop with a greater or lesser number of symptoms in his subjective life, as well as in his network of social exchanges.
Recognizing the stamp of Lacan’s “thought”—a thought that my archaeology is seeking to read—in this handful of traits supposes that I am authorized, first, to use this term, which some colleagues, who rely on Lacan’s later teaching, disparage; they object that my research gives too large a place to the register of thought in the analyst. Yet without discounting this objection, I am going to remain faithful to a more or less chronological method. Yes, there is a rec-ognizable thought behind the various moments of his teaching, and the fragments of the Rome Report, whose presuppositions we are examining, make it clear that the Lacan of 1953 believed that his thought had a sort of “stamp”.
In order to understand Lacan’s quest for a theory of the sub-ject that would be congruent with analytic experience, one should read “The Mirror Stage” with the Rome Report; we should consider the passage that has been cited from the latter text less as a new response to what motivates Lacan’s analysis than as a new version of the answer that he supplied from 1936 to 1938. This answer had aimed, through the mirror stage, to “make up” for what is missing in Freud’s doctrine of the first identifications.67
Lacan’s new answer combines several versions of the mirror stage with what can be deduced from the objection to his method; it is nec-essary, however, to emphasize that it is not at just any moment that Lacan can see that “Human language would … constitute a kind of communication in which the sender receives his own message back from the receiver in inverted form.” This formula arises from the Other precisely “when I first began to make my views known on analysis as dialectic”; it has the value of an interpretation that can produce a change because it had been made at the right time.
How long had Lacan been making his views on analysis as dialec-tical known? What does this new formula mean? What is the relation between the mirror stage, the dialectic of analysis and the progress
67 On this point, see Lacan et les sciences sociales, pp. 44 ff.
in symbolization? Is all of this not too intellectualized and does it not move too far from Freud’s text, and even from the experience of the treatment? Not at all, since it is precisely in his 1951 text, Pres-entation on Transference that Lacan offers his colleagues a reading of a paradigmatic text from Freud’s clinic, the Dora case, in which he described the treatment of the patient as a dialectical experience.
If Lacan conceives of analysis as a dialectical progression, his goal is not to “intellectualize” it to the detriment of clinical truths, because Freud‘s treatment of Dora was itself dialectical. The treat-ment, when directed dialectically, leads us the closest to subjective truth and Lacan recalls the salutary value of Freud’s orientation, which allows the message that comes from the Other to be unknot-ted in an inverunknot-ted form.
I. Presentation on Transference (1951) The Dora case or Freud’s dialectic
Firmly ruling out any psychologizing orientation for psychoanaly-sis, since he criticizes its danger of objectifying the individual, Lacan suggests, in his presentation to a conference of Romance-language psychoanalysts in 1951, a conception of the Freudian experience that is characterized by a sort of dialogue; in this dialogue, the subject is constituted by a discourse whose only law is that of truth, which introduces a change into reality. “[P]sychoanalysis is a dialectical expe-rience, and this notion should prevail when raising the question of the nature of transference” (Écrits, p. 177); this statement is crucial for analytic technique.
Shortly afterwards, he makes it clear what his dialectical concep-tion of analysis means by discussing some models from Freud’s own work.
[T]he case of Dora68 is laid out by Freud in the form of a series of dialectical reversals …. What is involved is a scansion of struc-tures in which truth is transmuted for the subject, strucstruc-tures
68 Ida Bauer (1882–1945). Freud’s first great psychoanalytic case, Dora and her history remain a classic of analytic literature. Born in Vienna into a well-off Jewish bour-geois family, she was the sister of Otto Bauer (1881–1938), one of the great figures of the Austrian intelligentsia between the two world wars. Her case is one of the most commented upon in the psychoanalytic literature.
that affect not only her comprehension of things, but her very position as a subject, her “objects” being a function of that position. This means that the conception of the case history is identical to the progress of the subject, that is, to the reality of the treatment (Écrits, p. 178).
According to Lacan, Freud’s dialectic, far from screening out the reality of the treatment and the emergence of subjective truth, is guided by its concern with them; it is precisely when analysts recoil from this dialec-tic, out of a fear of Freud’s discovery, that they objectify the subject, for-ever forbidding her access to true speech and to subjective progress.
In this connection, what can be said about Dora?69 When Freud first meets her, she is 18 years old. According to him,
Low spirits and an alteration in her character had … become the main features of her illness. She was clearly satisfied nei-ther with herself nor with her family; her attitude towards her father was unfriendly, and she was on very bad terms with her mother, who was bent upon drawing her into taking a share in the work of the house” (Dora, p. 23).
She had frightened her parents by writing a farewell letter in which she warned them that she wanted to die. When, one day, she fainted in front of her father, he took her to Freud. Freud diagnoses her as a case of “‘petite hystérie’ with the commonest of all somatic and mental symptoms: dyspnoia, tussis nervosa, aphonia, and possibly migraines together with depression, hysterical unsociability, and a taedium vitae which was probably not entirely genuine” (Dora, p. 23–4). Nothing, then, was extraordinary about Dora’s case, which Freud, however, made famous. He argues that “What is wanted is precisely an elucidation of the commonest cases and of their most fre-quent and typical symptoms” (Dora, p. 24), and his disciples have never stopped commenting on this case, for better or worse.
In 1951, Lacan’s commentary locates itself within this psycho-analytic tradition, which it will revolutionize. Let us take a look at this case. Dora complains to Freud that her father has abandoned
69 The reader will profit from referring to Freud’s text, Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, 1953, pp 1–122.
her by leaving her in the hands of his mistress, Frau K., and that he has done so in order to facilitate his adulterous affair. According to Lacan, far from disabusing the young woman of her belief, Freud takes cognizance of the circuit of exchange, but his response is free of the compassion that she had been seeking; instead, he makes “[a]
first dialectical reversal”, which requires that she recognize her own part in continuing the “disorder” about which she is complaining.
What follows is a “development of truth”, as Lacan says:
Namely, that it was not on the basis of Dora’s mere silence, but of her complicity and even vigilant protection, that the fiction had been able to last which allowed the relationship between the two lovers to continue.
What can be seen here is not simply Dora’s participation in Herr K.’s courtship of which she is the object; new light is shed on her relationship with the other partners of the quadrille by the fact that it is caught up in a subtle circulation of precious gifts, which serves to make up for a deficiency in sexual serv-ices. This circulation starts with her father in relation to Frau K., and then comes back to the patient through Herr K.’s conse-quent availability, in no way diminishing the lavish generosity which comes to her directly from the first source, by way of parallel gifts—this being the classic manner of making amends by which the bourgeois male manages to combine reparation due his lawful wedded wife with his concern for passing on an inheritance (note that the presence of the figure of the wife is reduced here to this lateral link in the chain of exchanges) (Écrits, p. 179).
Let us note the procedure. Freud, as Lacan argues, begins Dora’s analysis with a first dialectical reversal—a subjective rectification—
which leads to the birth of a truth. We shall emphasize that this truth is ethnological, since it is incarnated, according to Lacan, in the cir-cuit of social exchange that governs Dora’s world and assigns her a place—as object of exchange—that she refuses, but which remains, nevertheless, her own. This case illustrates Lacan’s subject per-fectly, since it shows how Dora aids, without knowing it and thus unconsciously, the message of the social Other, which assigns her a precise place in the chains of social exchange.
Freud’s first dialectical reversal makes Dora see how she accom-plishes unconsciously the “mission statement” that comes to her from the other and which, once deciphered and placed in the father’s mouth, would be something like the following: “You are the woman whom I exchange with Herr K., as quid pro quo for the woman whom he is giving to me (Frau K.).” This circuit of the exchange of women, which provides Dora with the coordinates of her unconscious activ-ity, could have continued without a snag if the young woman had consented to participate in it as an object—that is, as a woman. Yet Dora objects precisely to this and rebels, under the cover of a jealousy of Frau K., against her own role.
This is the second dialectical reversal, in which Freud unmasks, beneath this jealousy, an unconscious interest in her, an interest that, if it is to be brought to light, requires Dora’s complaint to be reversed once again. This is a new development of truth, but now the truth is sullied by Freud’s own prejudices, since, according to Lacan, what motivates Dora’s jealousy are not her own Oedipal wishes, which would see Frau K. as a rival, since she is the father’s mistress, and an object for men who stand in for him: Herr K. and Freud. Instead, a correct development of truth would have led Freud to recognize, in Dora’s attachment to Frau K., not a jealousy that derives from identification, but a homosexual object invest-ment that is decidedly pre-Oedipal. This root identification comes to her from the mirror stage and results from a primal masculinity;
this masculinity constitutes her own femininity as a mystery, and even as a symptom—and works against fate, which has assigned her a woman’s place in social exchanges.
What fascinates Dora about Frau K. is, as Freud recognizes, “her
‘adorable white body’” (Dora, p. 61) and as Lacan says, “the mystery of Dora’s own … bodily femininity” (Écrits, p. 180). In other words, for Lacan, she has not been able to recognize her own femininity. To do this, “she would have to assume [assumer] her own body, failing which she remains open to the functional fragmentation (to refer to the theoretical contribution of the mirror stage) that constitutes conversion symptoms”.
Now, her only means for gaining this access was via her earli-est imago, which shows us that the only path open to her to the object was via the masculine partner, with whom, because of their difference in age, she was able to identify, in that
primordial identification through which the subject recognizes herself as I … (Écrits, p. 181).
In writing these ellipses, Lacan invites the reader to switch to the 1949 text on the mirror stage, which provides the theoretical foun-dation of his 1951 analysis of Dora’s identifications. Because she has identified, from the first moment of her life in front of the mirror, with the primal image of a male partner who is older than she is, Dora, according to Lacan:
1. Cannot accept her own female body
2. Falls prey to the fragmentation that motivates her conversion symptoms
3. Sees Frau K.’s body as a fascinating mystery
4. Identifies with her father and thus makes Frau K. the object of her desire, since she identifies with the inheritors of the paternal gestalt (Herr K., Freud)
5. Objects to the message that she receives from the social other, a message that assigns her a place among the women who are to be exchanged.
In other words, Dora’s malaise can be explained entirely by the fundamental disharmony that exists between the imaginary and its identifications—that of the mirror stage, which places her on the masculine side—and the unconscious message, which she receives from the social Other, her network, which orders her to take her place as woman in the circuit of exchange.
Dora or the emblem of the feminine condition
Beyond rectifying the problems of the case, Lacan, in order to give a paradigmatic explanation of the Freudian clinic of hysteria, also connects, on the epistemological level, two elements:
1. What he borrows from ethnologists concerning the analysis of the gift and exchange, and especially from Lévi-Strauss’ analysis of the exchange of women
2. What he had been formulating since 1936, concerning how the mirror stage makes up for what is missing in Freud’s theory of primal identifications.
What is in question here is not simply a secondary clinical problem.
Let me emphasize that with this text:
1. Lacan criticizes Freud’s assumptions about the prevalence of the father in the Oedipus complex
2. He treats these assumptions as Freud’s resistance to the analysis 3. He makes the analyst’s biases the place of the resistance to
analysis, and
4. He shows us finally what is not only Dora’s fate, but that of all the “petites hystéries”, all of whom object to the symbolic system
4. He shows us finally what is not only Dora’s fate, but that of all the “petites hystéries”, all of whom object to the symbolic system