Moustafa Safouan - Four Lessons of Psychoanalysis

Copyright 2004 Moustafa Safouan

Production Editor: Robert D. Hack

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Safouan, Moustafa.
Four lessons of psychoanalysis / by Moustafa Safouan; edited by Anna Shane.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-59051-656-0
1. Psychoanalysis. 2. Lacan, Jacques, 1901- 3. Freud, Sigmund, 18561939. I. Shane, Anna. II. Title.
BF175 .S19 2004
150.195dc22

2003022344

v3.1

I wish to acknowledge the contributions of Anna Shane to the production of Four Lessons of Psychoanalysis. It would never have seen the light of day without her commitment. It is a work of interlocution and she was my interlocutor.

Moustafa Safouan, July 2002

I think the best way to begin would be to tell you my conception of the work to be done during this week and if you see points Ive omitted, or if there are others you wish to add, you may make suggestions. My plan can be adapted to your suggestions.

I think Freuds work culminates in a theory that contains a certain number of contradictions. If any one of them remains unanswered, it would be enough to ruin the theory or be considered a refutation of it. Ill limit myself to reminding you of the two most well-known contradictions. Transference is considered the condition sine qua non of psychoanalysis, so much so that analysis came to be considered analysis of the transference. Yet transference is also considered to be the most powerful obstacle to its progress. So, how can transference be both a condition of possibility and a factor of impossibility? The other contradiction concerns the ego. Freud began by defining the ego as a reality function, and this was very important to him as far as desires were concerned. Desires tend, according to Freud, to the hallucination of their objects, meaning they find their satisfactions in objects that have nothing to do with reality. Without a reality function to correct the function of desire, the psychic function would be reduced to hallucination, to psychotic states. With the discovery of narcissism, however, the ego was next envisioned as the agent that makes me mistake what I am for what I want to be. So how can the same agent be both a guide to reality and a source of illusion?

In addition to these two contradictions in his theory, Freuds experience led him to discover some astonishing facts, so astonishing you may say they qualify as unnatural, so their explanation is not easy to find. I allude here to the castration complex. How does it happen that the boy feels insecure about his penis? Where does the threat of castration come from? At the same time, how does it happen that the girl may feel a lack of a penis, which is as reasonable as someone feeling the lack of a third eye, or of a sixth sense?

And there is also the fact that psychoanalytic experience led to the discovery of two different phenomena. First there is the phenomenon of love transference, characterized by idealization. Actually, idealization is the essence of all love. The object of love is seen as a whole, not only in the sense of unity or totality but also in the sense of having all that I lack. On the other hand, we notice in the same experience a number of desires, each one of them valorized by what you may call a partial objectoral, anal, you may add the gaze and the voice, but the main point is their character as partial objects. So you dont easily see the relation between the two phenomenabetween love and desire, or in other words, between the total and the partial object.

To my knowledge Jacques Lacan is the only analyst who has made an assiduous and consistent effort to meet the whole range of these problems, and what I think of doing during this week is giving you the answers that an analyst who takes Lacans work into consideration may give to these problems. Do you agree with this idea?

The first point is that, in his work, Lacan referred to a completely new definition of the psychoanalytic experience itself; he defined it as an experience of discourse. His formula, the unconscious is structured as language, has been repeated so often that now it seems obvious. But before Lacan analysts analyzed other things, for example personality or the dynamics of the unconscious, and speech itself was considered to be something that had no value unless it expressed some reality or other. Of course there was the definition of psychoanalysis as a talking therapy, but once again, the talking was considered to be an expression of some reality outside the talking. Before Lacan no one thought of locating the subject within the very act of talking.

In the final chapter, Psychotherapy of Hysteria, Freud devotes three or four pages to the description of what he calls the disposition of psychic material in what is said during a psychoanalytic session. He says that discourse should be represented not by one single line but by many parallel lines:

that is, like a musical notation. These lines are supposed to represent many themes, such as dreams, memories, descriptions of feelings or emotions, and words that are sometimes acts, according to Austins idea, for instance an apology or a demand. The concrete discourse that is uttered by the analysand, however, cant be represented simply by these straight lines, because someone may start saying something about a memory, and while talking about that memory she thinks of a dream, which makes her think of a linguistic expression, which makes her feel a bodily symptom. So the concrete discourse should be represented by a zigzag movement, which Freud compares to the movements of the horse in a game of chess.

Of course, one line would hardly be sufficient to give a full picture of a real discourse, because someone may start with a fantasy, then go to a dream, then to a linguistic expression, and then to a demand or an apology, and so on. So if you want a fuller picture of what goes on in a session, you must have many zigzag lines that cross each other. And, of course no scheme can really give a picture of the structure of a discourse. But the main thing is, according to Freud, the lines of discourse tend to meet up at the same point. The discourse is apparently free, which is to say that it is a discourse maintained without a special end in view. But psychoanalytic experience proves that it is subtended by a kind of blind intentionality, which unknowingly directs it toward a pathogenic nucleus. This nucleus is surrounded by what Freuds describes as layers of memories, going from the most recent to the most ancient, so you may represent them by circles like this, circles of memory: