“My unconscious leads me quite blithely to annoyances that I would hardly dream of attributing to it, at least not until I begin to concern myself with it through the refined means of psychoanalysis. And none of this stops me from behaving toward other people with the most resolute egoism, always in the most sublime unconsciousness of my conscious Subject. For as long as I do not try to reach that intoxicating sphere of oblativity—so dear to French psychoanalysts—my naïve experience does not afflict me with the task of unfurling that thread which La Rochefoucauld, in his perverse genius, detected in the fabric of all human sentiments, and even of love: pride [amour-propre]. “All this ‘psychical activity’ thus truly seems like a dream to me. Can this be the dream of a physician who has heard that hybrid chain unfurl in his ears thousands of times—that chain which is made of fate and inertia, throws of the dice and astonishment, false successes and missed encounters, and which makes up the usual script of a human life? “No, it is rather the dream of an automaton maker, the likes of whom Ey and I both once used to make fun of—Ey quipping nicely to me that, hidden within every organicist conception of the psyche, one always finds ‘the little man within the man’ who is busy ensuring that the machine responds. “What, dear Ey, are drops in the level of consciousness, hypnoid states, and physiological dissolutions, if not the fact that the little man within the man has a headache—that is, an ache in the other little man that he himself, no doubt, has in his head, and so on ad infinitum? Polyxenas age-old argument still holds, no matter how one takes mans being to be given: whether in its essence as an Idea, or in its existence as an organism. “Now, I am no longer dreaming; but when I read next that ‘projected into a still more mental reality, the world of ideal values—that are no longer integrated, but infinitely integrating—is constituted: beliefs, ideals, vital programs, and the values of logical judgment and moral conscience’, I see quite clearly here that there are, indeed, beliefs and ideals that become linked in the same psyche to vital programs, which are just as repugnant to logical judgment as they are to moral conscience, in order to produce a fascist, or indeed, rather more simply, an imbecile or a con-artist [filou]. I conclude that the integrated form of these ideals implies no psychical culmination for them, and that their integrating action bears no relation to their value—and thus that there must be a mistake here too. “I certainly do not intend, gentlemen, to belittle the scope of your debates, nor the results that you have achieved. I would soon embarrass myself were I to underestimate the difficulty of the issues involved. By mobilizing Gestalt theory, behaviorism, and structural and phenomenological terms in order to put organo-dynamism to the test, you have relied on scientific resources which I appear to neglect, in falling back on principles that are perhaps a bit too certain, and an irony which is no doubt a bit risqué. This is because it seemed to me that I could better help you untie that noose I mentioned earlier by reducing the number of terms in the scales. But for this to be completely successful in the minds of those whom the noose holds fast, perhaps it should have been Socrates himself taking the floor here [ici prendre la parole]—or perhaps, rather, I should simply listen to you in silence. “For the authentic dialectic in which you situate your terms, and which gives your young Academy its style, suffices to guarantee the rigor of your progress. I rely on this dialectic myself, and feel far more at ease there than in that idolatrous reverence for words which one finds so prevalent elsewhere, in particular amongst the inner circles of psychoanalysis. Beware, however, the echo which your words might precipitate, beyond those walls within which your intentions have animated them.” —From Lacan, ‘Presentation on Psychical Causality’.
Posted on: Sat, 20 Dec 2014 17:38:31 +0000
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