THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN BOOK VIII Transference 1960 - 1961 Translated by Cormac Gallagher from unedited French typescripts FOR PRIVATE USE ONLY http://www.lacaninireland.com Book VIII Seminar 1 16 November 1960 Seminar 1: Wednesday 16 November 1960 I announced for this coming year that I would deal with transference, with its subjective oddity (sa disparite subjective). It is not a term that was easily chosen. It underlines essentially something which goes further than the simple notion of asymmetry between subjects. It poses in the very title... it rebels, as I might say from the beginning, against the idea that intersubjectivity can by itself alone provide the framework in which the phenomenon is inscribed. There are words which are more or less appropriate in different tongues. I am looking for some equivalent for the word impair, for the subjective oddity of transference, for the oddity that it contains essentially. There is no term, except the very term imparite which is not used in French, to designate it. "In its supposed situation" (dans sa pretendue situation) my title also says, indicating by that some reference to this effort over the last years in analysis to organise, around the notion of situation, what happens in analytic treatment. The very word supposed is there again to say that I dispute the validity of, or at least that I take up a corrective position with respect to this effort. I do not believe that one can say purely and simply about psychoanalysis that what we have here is a situation. If it is one, it is one of which one could also say: it is not a situation or again, that it is a false situation. Everything that presents itself as technique must be inscribed as referring to these principles, to this search for principles which is already evoked by pointing out these differences, and in a word in a correct topology, in a rectification of what is in question, of what is commonly implied in the use that we make every day theoretically of the notion of transference, namely as something which when all is said and done it is question of referring to an experience, which it, we nevertheless know very well, at least to the extent that in some way or other we have some practical experience of analysis. I would like to point (2) out that I took a long time to reach what is this heart of our experience. Depending on how you date this seminar in which I have been guiding a certain number of you for several years, depending on the date that you consider it to have begun, it is in the eighth or tenth year that I am tackling transference. I think that you will see that there are reasons for this long delay. Let us begin then... at the beginning, everyone charges me with having referred myself to some paraphrase of the formula: "In the beginning was the Word", somebody else said "In Anfang war dieTat", and for a third, at first (namely at the beginning of the human world), at first there was praxis. Here are three enunciations which appear to be incompatible. In fact, what is important from the position we are in to settle the matter, namely from analytic experience, what is important is 1 http://www.lacaninireland.com Book VIII Seminar 1 16 November 1960 not their value as enunciations, but as I might say their value as enunciatings, or again as annunciations, I mean the way in which they bring to light the ex nihilo proper to all creation and show its intimate liaison with the evocation of the word. At this level, all manifest obviously that they fall within the first enunciation: "In the beginning was the Word". If I evoke this, it is to differentiate it from what I am talking about, this point from which I am going to begin to affront this most opaque term, this kernel of our experience which is transference. I intend to begin, I want to begin, I am going to try, by beginning with all the necessary awkwardness, to begin today around this, that the term "In the beginning" certainly has another meaning. At the beginning of analytic experience - let us remember - was love. This beginning is something different to this self-transparency of the enunciating which gave their meaning to the above mentioned formulae. Here it is a dense, confused beginning. It is a beginning not of creation but of formation - and I will come back to this later - at the historical point at which there is born what is already psychoanalysis and what Anna O. herself baptised, in the initial observation of Studien über Hysterie, with the term of talking cure or again of chimnev sweeping. But before getting to this I want to recall for a moment, for those who were not here last year, some of the terms around which there turned our exploration of what I called The ethics of psychoanalysis. What I wanted to explain before you last year is - as one might say - to refer to the term of creation which I mentioned above, the creationist structure of the human ethos as (3) such, the ex nihilo which subsists at its heart which constitutes to use a term of Freud's, the kernel of our being, Kern unseres Wesen. I wanted to show that this ethos is enveloped around this ex nihilo as subsisting in an impenetrable vacuum. In order to approach it, to designate this impenetrable character, I began - as you remember - by a critique whose end consisted in rejecting expressly what you will allow me to call (at least those who heard me will let it pass), Plato's Schwärmerei. Schwärmerei in German, for those who do not know it, designates reverie, phantasy directed towards some enthusiasm and more especially towards something which is situated or which is directed towards superstition, fanaticism, in brief the critical connotation in the order of religious orientation which is added by history. In the texts of Kant the term Schwärmerei clearly has this inflection. What I call Plato's Schwärmerei, is to have projected onto what I call the impenetrable vacuum, the idea of the sovereign good. Let us say that this is simply to indicate the path taken, that with more or less success of course I tried to pursue with a formal intention; .... what results from the rejection of the Platonic notion of the sovereign good occupying the centre of our being. No doubt to rejoin our experience, but from a critical point of view, I proceeded in part from what one can call the Aristotelian conversion with respect to Plato who without any doubt has been superseded for us on the ethical plane; but at the point that we are at of having to show the historical fate of ethical notions beginning with Plato (undoubtedly the Aristotelian reference), the Nicomachean Ethics.is essential. I showed that it is difficult to follow what it contains as a decisive step in the 2 http://www.lacaninireland.com Book VIII Seminar 1 16 November 1960 construction of an ethical reflection, not to see that although it maintains this notion of sovereign good, it profoundly changes its meaning. It makes it consist by an inverse movement of reflection in the contemplation of the stars, this most exterior sphere of the existing world which is absolute, uncreated, incorruptible. It is precisely because for us it is decisively volatilised into the dust of the galaxies which is the final term of our cosmological investigation, that one can take the Aristotelian reference as a critical point of what in the traditions of antiquity, at the point that we have got to in them, the notion of sovereign good is. With this step we came up against a wall, the wall which is always the same ever since ethical reflection has tried to develop itself; it is that we must assume or not what ethical reflection, ethical thinking has never been able to free itself from, namely that there is no good (bon. gut), no pleasure, unless one begins from there. We are still looking for the principle of the Wohltat. the principle of good action. What it infers allows us to say that it is not perhaps simply a question of the good deed, even if it were raised to the Kantian power of the universal maxim. If we have to take seriously the Freudian denunciation of the fallacy of these so called moral satisfactions, in so far as an aggressivity is concealed within them which succeeds in stealing his nouissance from the person (4) who practices it, while at the same time making its ill effects reverberate endlessly on his social partners (what these long circumstantial conditionals indicate is exactly the equivalent of Civilisation and its discontents in Freud's work), so that one ought to ask oneself how one can operate honestly with desire; namely how to preserve desire with this act in which it ordinarily collapses rather than realising itself and which at best only presents to it (to desire) its exploit, its heroic gesture; how to preserve desire, preserve what one can call a simple or salubrious relationship of desire to this act. Let us not mince words about what salubrious means in terms of the Freudian experience: it means to be rid of, to be as rid as possible of this infection which to our eyes, but not only to our eyes, to eyes ever since they were opened to ethical reflection... this infection which is the teeming foundation of every social establishment as such.