The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book X
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THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN BOOK X ANXIETY 1962 – 1963 Translated by Cormac Gallagher from unedited French typescripts FOR PRIVATE USE ONLY 14.11.62 I 2 Seminar 1: Wednesday 14 November 1962 I am going to speak to you this year about anxiety. Someone who is not at all distant from me in our circle, nevertheless let me see the other day his surprise at the fact that I chose this subject which did not seem to him to be something that had all that much to offer. I must say that I will have no trouble in proving the contrary to him. In the mass of questions that are proposed to us on this subject, I will have to make very severe choices. That is why I will try from today to throw you into the work. But already this question seemed to me to preserve the trace of some naivety or other which has never been checked because it seemed to indicate a belief that it is by choice that each year I pick on a subject, like that, which appears interesting to me to continue on some sort of idle chatter. No. As you will see, I think, anxiety is very precisely the meeting point where will find waiting everything that was involved in my previous discourse and where, together, there await a certain number of terms which may appear not to have been sufficiently connected up for you up to the present. You will see on this terrain of anxiety how, by being more closely knotted together, each one will take its place still better. I am saying still better, because recently it became clear to me, in connection with what was said about phantasy at one of these so-called provincial meetings of our Society, that something concerning this very essential structure called phantasy, had effectively taken its place in your minds. You will see that that of anxiety is not far from it, because it is well and truly the same. I have put on the blackboard for you - even though, after all, a blackboard is not very big - a few little signifiers to guide you or to help your memory: perhaps not all the ones that I would have wanted, but after all it is just as well not to overdo the schemas. You will see this becoming clearer in a little while. They form two groups, this one and that one - this one which I will complete. On the right, this graph which I apologise for pestering you with for so long, but which it is all the same necessary - because its value as a reference point will I think appear ever more efficacious for you - for me to recall the structure that it ought to evoke to your eyes. Moreover its choke-pear shape which perhaps has never struck you is not perhaps evoked 14.11.62 I 3 here by chance; on the other hand, even though last year in connection with the little topological which I made so much of, some people could see being suggested to their minds some forms of the folding back of embryological leaves, even the layers of the cortex, nobody, in connection with the at once bilateral and interlinked arrangement of orientated intercommunication of this graph, nobody has ever evoked in this connection the solar plexus. Of course I am not claiming by that to deliver its secrets to you, but this curious little homology is perhaps not as external as one might think and deserved to be recalled at the beginning of a discourse on anxiety. Anxiety, I would say, up to a certain point the remark by which I introduced my discourse a little earlier, the one made by one of the people close to me, I mean in our Society, anxiety does not seem to be what stifles you, I mean as psychoanalysts. And nevertheless, it is not too much to say that it ought to in, what I might call, the logic of things, namely of the relationship that you have with your patient. After all to sense what the subject can tolerate, in terms of anxiety, is something that puts you to the test at every instant. It must therefore be supposed that, at least for those among you who are formed in the technique, the thing has ended up by slipping into your way of regulating matters in the most imperceptible way, it must be said. It is not excluded, and thank God for it, that the analyst, provided he is already disposed to it, I mean by very good dispositions to be an analyst, that the analyst at the beginning of his practice should experience some anxiety from his first relations with the patient on the couch. Again it would be well to touch in this connection on the question of the communication of anxiety. Is this anxiety that you are able, it appears, to regulate so well in yourselves, to damp down the fact that it guides you, is it the same as that of the patient? Why not? It is a question that I am leaving open for the moment, perhaps not for very long, but which it is worthwhile opening up from the beginning, even if it is necessary to have recourse to our essential articulations in order to give it a valid response, therefore to wait for a moment at least, in the distances, in the detours that I am going to propose to you and which are not absolutely beyond the capacity of those who are my listeners to forecast. Because if you remember, already precisely in connection with another series of so-called Journées provinciales which were far from having given me as much satisfaction, in connection with which in a sort of inclusion, parenthesis, anticipation, in my discourse of last year I thought I should warn you and project ahead a formula indicating the relation between essential anxiety and the desire of the Other. For those who were not there, I recall the fable, the apologue, the amusing image of it which I thought I ought to present before you for a moment: putting on the animal mask which the wizard of the grotto of the three brothers covers himself with, I imagined myself before you confronted with another animal, this one real and supposed to be gigantic on this occasion, that of the praying mantis. And moreover since I did not know what kind of mask I was wearing you can easily imagine that I had some reason not to be reassured, in the case where by chance this mask would not have been unsuitable for drawing my partner into some error about my identity, the thing being well underlined by the fact that I had added that in the enigmatic mirror of the ocular globe of the insect I did not see my own image. This metaphor preserves all its value today and it is what justifies the fact that at the centre of the signifiers that I put on this blackboard, you see the question which I introduced a long time ago as being the hinge between the two levels of the graph in so far as they structure this relationship of the subject to the signifier which as regards subjectivity appears to me to be the key of what introduces into Freudian doctrine the Che vuoi?, "What do you want?". Push a little bit more the functioning, the insertion of the key, and you have "What does he want of me? Que me veut-il?, with the ambiguity about the me that French permits between the indirect and direct complement: not just only "What does he want from me?, Que veut-il à moi?", but something in suspense which 14.11.62 I 4 directly concerns the moi which is not like "How does he want me?, Comment me veut-il?", but which is "What does he want with respect to this place of the ego? Que veut-il concernant cette place du moi?", which is something in suspense between the two levels, ($ ◊ o) - d and e - i(o), the two points of return which in each one designates the characteristic effect and the distance which is so essential to construct at the source of everything into which we are now going to advance, a distance which renders at once homologous and so distinct the relation between desire and narcissistic identification. It is in the operation of the dialectic which links these two levels so closely that we are going to see there being introduced the function of anxiety, not that it is in itself the mainspring of it, but that it is by the phases of its appearance what allows us to orientate ourselves in it. So therefore when I posed the question of your relations as an analyst to anxiety, a question which precisely leaves in suspense this one: who are you sparing? The other, no doubt, but also just as much yourself and even though these two sparings overlap they should not be allowed to become confused. This is even one of the aims which at the end of this discourse will be proposed to you. For the moment I am introducing this indication of method that what we are going to have to draw in terms of a teaching from this research on anxiety, is to see the privileged point at which it emerges. It is to be modelled on an orography of anxiety which leads us directly to a relief which is that of the term-to-term relationships which is constituted by this more than condensed structural attempt which I thought I should make the guide of our discourse for you.