Le Séminaire. Livre II: Le Moi dans la théorie de Freud et dans la technique de la psychanalyse

Le Séminaire #2

by Jacques Lacan

Texte établi par Jacques-Alain Miller J'ai trouvé à votre usage une très curieuse ordonnance de 1277. A ces époques de ténèbres et de foi, on était forcé de réprimer les gens qui, sur les bancs de l'école, en Sorbonne et ailleurs, blasphémaient ouvertement pendant la messe le nom de Jésus et de Marie. Vous ne faites plus ça. J'ai connu quant à moi des gens fort surréalistes qui se seraient fait pendre plutôt que de publier un poème blasphématoire contre la Vierge, parce qu'ils pensaient qu'il pourrait quand même leur en arriver quelque chose. Les punitions les plus sévères étaient édictées contre ceux qui jouaient aux dés pendant le saint sacrifice. Ces choses me semblent suggérer l'existence d'une dimension d'efficace qui manque singulièrement à notre époque. Et ce n'est pas pour rien que je vous fais jouer au jeu de pair ou impair. (...) C'est avec le symbolisme, c'est de ce dé qui roule que surgit le désir. Je ne dis pas désir humain car, en fin de compte, l'homme qui joue avec le dé est captif du désir ainsi mis en jeu. Il ne sait pas l'origine de son désir, roulant avec le symbole écrit sur les six faces. (Chapitres 17 et 18.)

Genres: Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Philosophy, Nonfiction, France, 20th Century, Theory

384 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1978

About the author

Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, and doctor, who made prominent contributions to the psychoanalytic movement. His yearly seminars, conducted in Paris from 1953 until his death in 1981, were a major influence in the French intellectual milieu of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly among post-structuralist thinkers.

Lacan's ideas centered on Freudian concepts such as the unconscious, the castration complex, the ego, focusing on identifications, and the centrality of language to subjectivity. His work was interdisciplinary, drawing on linguistics, philosophy, mathematics, amongst others. Although a controversial and divisive figure, Lacan is widely read in critical theory, literary studies, and twentieth-century French philosophy, as well as in the living practice of clinical psychoanalysis.

Reviews

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a relief! To know that nothing and no one depend on me to be the lone persuasive English voice exhorting you to read this! I don't have to prove anything, least of all that I have--first--completely understood and--second--can readily illuminate for you every shadowy nuance of Lacan, both within the limits of this seminar and fully historicized within the context of his lifelong development (which everybody expects, naturally).

The seminar has a genial, colloquial feel to it. Lacan is still resplendently gnomic in his speech, but compared to the fierce mercurial strategies undulating through Ecrits, he is downright shooting straight here. And--he doesn't know it yet--but he's "early-to-mid" Lacan at this point, making the points that will make his name legendary and naming the legends by which we can make something to point at. "Ego? C'est moi!" Liar, liar, Father can't you see my pants are on fire?!

Lucky for us, we are permitted to do what we must (or avoid it, but that doesn't alter the necessity one bit), and we MUST read Lacan and strive to listen to him: he's talking about us more than we talk about ourselves. In fact, the more we listen the better our chances of giving voice to a self who can do more than bloviate and preen. This includes all the theoretical grandstanding of folks who try to steal your enjoyment of productive confusion and replace it with a sterile Understanding of "what Lacan is really trying to say." They probably mean well, at least for themselves, but take Lacan at his word, not theirs. And do not listen to anyone who says Lacan is incomprehensible. I cannot explain the dense, fecund imbrication of the phallus, castration, desire, drive, fantasy, narcissism, the paternal metaphor, jouissance, the machine, formulae of sexuation, ideal-ego, Ego-Ideal, imaginary identification, the unconscious, transference, repetition, foreclosure, and so on and so on,* and the fact that I don't have to frees me to find in Lacan what I need to find out about myself and others and Others.** Psychoanalysis, the incessant self-critical Aufhebung of science, magic, and religion, may be the only reliable way to restrict the spread of the incomprehensible.

-------------------------------
Edited Sept 7, 2019:
*This is less and less true with each Seminar I complete.

**This is more and more true with each Seminar completing "I."

The seminar explores four pivotal moments in Freud's work to chart the development of the theory and the practice of the ego:

1895-1900ish: letters to Fleiss collected in the posthumously published "Entwurf" or Origins of Psychoanalysis
1905: The Interpretation of Dreams, with extensive analysis of the schema of mnemic traces and "regression"
1915: NARCISSISM
1920: Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Lacan convincingly elaborates how Freud was moving ever closer to Lacan's own positions which erect upon the metapsychological foundation of id, ego, and superego the triad of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. From the early physiological hypotheses regarding neurons, stimuli, and discharge--the organic-mechanic conceptual basis for the pleasure principle--Freud was increasingly driven to formulate the psychic apparatus in terms of energy, specifically libidinal economy. As Lacan explains:

"Not for us the synchronization of the various stages of Freud's thought, nor even getting them to agree. It is a matter of seeing to what unique and constant difficulty the development of this thought--made of the contradictions of various stages--responded."

Even the positions Freud ultimately abandoned retain their fascination. Several of the lectures here are dedicated to unpacking Freud's tortured efforts to coherently articulate the links between perception, consciousness, memory, motor response, and the nascent, disturbing, restless phenomenon of the unconscious as it emerged in clinical practice. By his own admission, Freud never satisfactorily resolved the question, "Where is consciousness?" This conceptual battle unfolds its full significance in the historical sequence of attempts to situate our old friend, the ego. Although it is no simple matter and Lacan obviously is not prone to simplification, an attentive reading and studious re-reading will clarify not only Freud's lifelong self-critical labors but also Lacan's debt to and difference from his Master.

[Hon Lady Selene · Rating 5 out of 5]

Analysts are trained to be subjects in whom the ego is absent. That is the ideal of analysis, which, of course, remains virtual. There is never a subject without an ego, a fully realised subject, but that in fact is what one must aim to obtain from the subject in analysis. That is what the beyond the pleasure principle is. It is the beyond of signification, it is truly comprehending that:

“All sorts of things in this world behave like mirrors.”

The analysis must aim at the passage of true speech, the analyst joining the subject on the other side of the wall of language. That is the final relation of the subject to a genuine Other, to the true Other who gives the answer one doesn't expect, which defines the terminal point of the analysis.

"But the victim of this psychoanalytical cuckoldry is the patient."

[Katherine]

Read most of this while modelling for Viv Westwood so that was cool ig lol. Anyway really brilliant explication of the relation of the ego to the subject, esp wrt Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Lacan's understanding of speech and language is elucidated in later stages of it in relation to the real/symbolic/imaginary triad.

[Sergey Kochergan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Magic of psychoanalysis.

[Rob · Rating 5 out of 5]

This one really nailed some stuff down for me. Great read, besides Chapter XXI where the translator and editor must have gone on vacation because that shit was a mess; there were random question marks in the middle of sentences, misspelled words, poor choices for translation and weird syntax - it felt like it went through an auto-translator from back in my day of French classes. Pretty annoying since the chapter was super informative or had the potential to be!

[Regn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a very nice read, one that — in my opinion — was much clearer than Book I of the Seminar. The most interesting parts to me were Lacan’s interactions with cybernetics and (of course) his (in)famous account of Poe’s ‘Purloined Letter’. This is a fantastic book for anyone struggling with the ‘Écrits’, a lot of the early entries of the latter being developed in this seminar.

[Billie Pritchett]

Instead of reviewing the book, allow me to quote a rather lengthy passage from it representative of its contents.

When Freud maintains that sexual desire is the heart of human desire, all those who follow him believe it, believe it so strongly that they manage to persuade themselves that it is all very simple, and that all that's left to do is to turn it into a science, the science of sexual desire, a constant force. All it takes is to remove the obstacles, and it will work all by itself. All it takes is to tell the patient—you don't realize it, but the object is here. That is at first sight what an interpretation seems to be like.

Except it doesn't work. This is when—and this is the turning-point—it is said that the subject resists. Why do we say that? Because Freud also said it. But we haven't understand what resisting means any more than we have understood sexual desire. We think that we should press on. And that is when the analyst himself succumbs to the lure... The analyst insists on his own way...

In the perspective which I'm opening up for you, it's you (analysts) who provoke resistance... It only resists because that's where you're pushing. There is no resistance on the part of the subject. What's at stake is delivering the insistence that is to be found in the symptom. What Freud himself calls inertia in this context isn't a resistance—like any kind of inertia, it is a kind of ideal point. It's you who presuppose it, in order to understand what's happening. You aren't wrong so long as you don't forget that it is your hypothesis. It simply means that there's a process, and that in order to understand it you imagine a zero point. Resistance only starts once you try to make the subject move on from this point.

In other words, resistance is the present state of an interpretation of the subject. It is the manner in which, at the same time, the subject interprets the point he's got to. This resistance is an abstract ideal point. It is you who call it resistance. It simply means that he cannot move any faster, and you have no say in the matter. The subject is where he is at. The question is one of knowing whether or not he is making progress. It is clear that he has no inclination whatsoever to move on, but however little he speaks, however little value what he says might have, what he says is his interpretation of the moment, and the rest of what he says is the totality of his successive interpretations. Properly speaking, resistance is an abstraction which you locate inside so as to find your way around. You introduce the idea of a deadlock, which you call resistance, and of a force, which makes it move on. Up to that point, that is entirely correct. But if you invariably then resort to the idea that resistance is to be liquidated, as is written all over the place, you are ending with pure, unqualified absurdity. Having created an abstraction, you say—we have to make this abstraction disappear, there mustn't be any inertia.

There is only one resistance, the resistance of the analyst. The analyst resists when he doesn't understand what he is dealing with. He doesn't understand what he is dealing with when he thinks that interpreting is showing the subject that what he desires is this particular sexual object. He's mistaken. What he here takes to be objective is just a pure and simple abstraction. He's the one who's in a state of inertia and of resistance.

In contrast, what's important is to teach the subject to name, to articulate, to bring this desire into existence, this desire which, quite literally, is on this side of existence, which is why it insists. If desire doesn't dare to speak its name, it's because the subject hasn't yet caused the name to come forth.

That the subject should to recognize and to name his desire, that is the efficacious action of analysis. But it isn't a question of recognizing something which would be entirely given, ready to be coapted. In naming it, the subject creates, brings forth, a new presence in the world. He introduces presence as such, and by the same token, hollows out absence as such. It is only at this level that one can conceive of the action of interpretation. (p. 227-229)

If that does anything for you, you'll like the book. If it doesn't, you won't.

[Micah · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Can you really, you analysts, in all honesty, bring me testimonies of these splendid typical developments of the ego of subjects? These are tall stories. We are told how this great tree, man, has such a sumptuous development, how throughout his existence he overcomes successive trials, thanks to which he achieves a miraculous equilibrium. A human life is something entirely different!"

I read somewhere that Lacan was annoyed when Anti-Oedipus came out, because he felt he had already come up with the idea of desiring-machines. Maybe this seminar is what he had in mind, since the machine figures prominently, a place beyond the pleasure principle where messages circulate from no one to no one, bearing on one's destiny. A repetition, an insistence that molds patterns out of "chance," which the ego in its reflective, homogeneous function, shot through with pleasure and aggression, is always gumming up.

[Nic · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although the title of this year’s seminar is in the Ego in Freud’s Theory, Lacan continues, as he does in the previous year’s lectures, to move analysis away from the ego. Here he outlines a fairly readable description of the Symbolic and the Subject. He gestures toward what this means in terms of treatment such as in the case of obsessional neuroses and the role of the analyst, including transference. I’m still less clear on how he distinguishes speech and language, as well as language from the Symbolic. The Real, which will be so important to his later thought, gets some air time. This may also be the earliest he gestures toward jouissance, although he doesn’t conceptualize it here. I’m hoping revisiting this later along with reading his later lectures and some additional commentary will clear up some of the confusion.

[Yahya · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Kuşkusuz, ifade edilmemiş olan var olmaz. Ama bastırılmış olan hep oradadır, ısrar eder ve var olmayı talep eder. İnsanın bu simgesel düzenle temel ilişkisi tam da simgesel düzenin kendisini kuran şeydir -varlık olmayanın varlıkla ilişkisi."

"Simgesel düzen, ben'in yapısı da dahil olmak üzere imgeselin tüm alanını kapsayan libidinal düzenden dışarı atılmıştır. Ölüm içgüdüsü de -Freud'un yazdığına göre- suskun olduğu,, yani kendini gerçekleştiremediği ölçüde simgesel düzenin maskesinden ibarettir.

Hem olmayan hem de olmak için ısrar eden simgesel düzen...
Freud'un ölüm içgüdüsünden var olan en temel şey diye söz ederken kastettiği budur - doğum sancıları başlamış, gelmekte olan, gerçekleştirmek için ısrar eden bir simgesel düzen."

[Dries]

Leçon XVI, La lettre volée

[Madeleine]

End of an Era and onto The Next

[Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

At times unbelievably lucid compared to other seminars, making this a pretty satisfying one to pick through for its concrete and juicy, almost lyrical formulations, yet at other times totally impenetrable, especially during some of the discussions with other analysts; all in all a very uneven read for my beginner eyes.

[Celso Rennó Lima · Rating 5 out of 5]

Com este livro Lacan entra diretamente na discussão da psicologia do Eu, forma que tomou o legado freudiano no pós guerra. Assim ele começa a delinear o salto que propõe na teoria e prática psicanalíticas.

[Enrico Serafini · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fino al capitolo 5

[Troy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Has anyone still got a question to ask? Yes maestro please