— “Psychoanalysis
is not a science”.*
This was
Jacques Lacan’s statement in 1975 in his visit to the United States, in the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He reached this conclusion after some decades of having referred psychoanalysis
to the field of science, first by means of linguistics and anthropology, and
later through of mathematics and logics. Sigmund Freud always thought
psychoanalysis had his references in the field of natural sciences, as
psychoanalysis itself had emerged as a consequence of these sciences, as a
practice derived from medicine. It was in the 50’ and 60’ that Jacques Lacan linked
psychoanalysis, in an epistemological break with natural sciences, to the field
of structural anthropology and linguistics, using the work of Saussure and
Lévi-Strauss, and sometime after to mathematics and logics. Psychoanalysis
would be then a science homologue to the field and function of logics, a field
that he could define as a “science of the real”.
But Jacques
Lacan added something else in his well-known Seminar during those same years —Psychoanalysis
is not a science, it’s a practice that deals with something real, a real that
is different from the real that science deals with.
Therefore, following this statement, the question may be posed: Which is the
real that science deals with, and which is this other real psychoanalysis deals
with? And which is the relation between them, if there is any? This will be, on
the other hand, the theme of the next international Congress of the World
Association of Psychoanalysis to be held in Paris this coming April, with the
promising title: “A Real for the XXIth Century”. I hope to shed some light upon
this question today.
Different reals
First of all,
we have to distinguish two registers that can be never confused, neither in
science nor in psychoanalysis: the real is not reality. In fact, even the
Physics of our days underlines this distinction as necessary in order to construct
its object and its practice. The progress of science itself has been founded in
this distinction: the real calculated and constructed by science has nothing to
do ultimately with the reality of matter. As Jacques-Alain Miller pointed out in
the presentation of the Congress theme: “it has not been possible to make an
equivalence between the real and the matter; with subatomic Physics, the levels
of matter multiplies”. And we must say that the determinate article The in the expression ‘The matter’ doesn’t exist as a universal
thing, that “The matter, like the universal article of The woman, vanishes”.
You know perhaps the surprising statement by Jacques Lacan in the 70’: “The
Woman [as a universal] doesn’t exist”, there is only one woman, another woman,
and another woman, they must be taken one by one but they never make the
universal class of The woman. Well, with matter and real in science we have the
same question: there is no “The matter”. The real conceived and constructed by
contemporary science makes matter vanishes in bits of real, bits that have to
be considered one by one.
Therefore, the
new epistemology of science states that each science has its own bit of real,
different from the bit of real of other sciences. We may say then, as the Spanish scientist
Javier Peteiro states —Javier Peteiro is our respected interlocutor in these
questions—, that “there are different ‘reals’, that the Real in Chemistry is
not the same Real dealt with in Physics, in Biology or in Anthropology.”
For example, the Real of Biology, life itself, is not reducible to Physics. We
don’t know yet what this real called “life” is , we have today the same
difficulties to define “life” as one thousand years ago. The inaugural text by
the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, entitled “What is life?” preserves its enigma
without a clear answer. Life is not reducible to a combinatorial of atoms, or
even a combinatorial of genes that, moreover, are death matter in themselves.
On its part,
psychoanalysis conceives life only as phenomena in the field of language, as
that specific real that has been called “jouissance”, with the French lacanian
word. (There is no accorded translation for this lacanian term, —enjoyment,
pleasure, fruition…—, then the best translators as our colleague Bruce Fink,
have chosen to let it in French). Life is what makes sign of a pleasure beyond
the homeostasis of energy in the universe. Where there is life, there is
“jouissance” and there is an imbalance of energy that introduces his opposite
in the field of language, that’s to say death. And there is only life and death
for a subject of language, for a being affected by this virus, by this parasite
—as Lacan said— that is language. Sometimes, scientists are confronted to this
real of “jouissance” of life with some anguish, when they find a sign of life
that could go beyond its
control and that could expand its opposite in death. Therefore, this real thing
called “jouissance” is a bit of real between the real in Physics and the real
in Biology.
This is an
example of the place that psychoanalysis has today in the field of the
sciences, “its place among the sciences” as Jacques-Alain Miller said some
years ago, in a conference, originally in English, that has been recently
published in the Psychoanalytical
Notebooks with this title, “Psychoanalysis, its place among the sciences”.
“Among the sciences” does not mean out of the sciences, it doesn’t mean out of
the scientific border but, on the contrary, in the inner part of science itself,
in the space between a science and another science, the space in-between, so to speak. Psychoanalysis
finds itself, then, just in the place where the sciences find that real that
cannot be defined by their concepts, that real that Jacques Lacan introduced in
the 60’ with the expression “the subject of science”. The subject of science is
precisely the subject psychoanalysis deals with in its practice, it is the
subject that makes sign of “jouissance”, of a real that breaks homeostasis in
life, the “jouissance” that emerges in the symptom as a malaise.
When we deal
with symptom, we deal with this other real that cannot be entirely defined in
the scientific field. That is the reason Lacan said that “psychoanalysis is not a science”, adding,
however, that “there isn’t any therapeutic practice that constitutes a science,
even medicine is not a science but an art.”
When your are dealing with the subject, with the subject of a symptom, with the
singularity of symptom in the subject suffering, there isn’t any possible
science, there is always an art that cannot be evaluated by scientific
method. We may think perhaps that Lacan
had a very high idea of what constitutes a science and that all his efforts to make
psychoanalysis a science were a sort of desperate enterprise. In fact, in another
class of his Seminar he repeated this statement: “Psychoanalysis, I have said
and I have repeated it recently, is not a science; it has not the status of
science and it can only wait for it, expect it”.
This would mean that psychoanalysis, —a practice that is a product, an effect
of modern science—, is not a science yet,
but a practice that it is in the waiting room to be a science among the
others, perhaps in this XXI century. This may mean that its constitution as a
new science will be sometime operative and that its inclusion in the field of
sciences has to change the status of science itself.
The “one by one” method
But, in fact,
why psychoanalysis cannot be considered as a science in its modern sense? Is a
very simple question, a too simple question at a first glance. Scientific
method, following the natural sciences since the 17th century, is
founded first of all in the quantification of phenomena. Galileo’s principle is
in its fundamentals: “Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what it
is not”. But how we could make measurable subjective suffering? How we could make
measurable the meaning of suffering and malaise, the subjective meaning of a
symptom, even the meaning of an experience, a significant event in subjects
life? When you take this scientific principle and you make it extensive to the entire
field of subjective suffering you reach an absurd thinking. Is the absurd of questionnaires,
labeled sometimes as “scientific”, with questions like this one: “Have you felt happy in the past 7 days?
Check the answer in the scale from 1 to 10.” (It’s a true example that you can
find in the so called “scientific questionnaires”). No, you cannot make
measurable the meaning of a subjective experience; there is a profound mistake
in this extension of scientific method that reaches what is called, by
scientific thinking itself, scientism. Scientism is the belief in the universal
applicability of scientific method, as quantification, to all human phenomena.
When you deal with a subjective experience you cannot take this principle as a
guide.
But there is a
more evident argument to say that psychoanalysis is not a science, following
the conditions of modern scientific method. This method requires at least the
condition of reproducibility of an experience or study under the same
conditions and obtaining the same results. The condition of reproducibility is
in fact an ideal condition, and there are a lot of scientific theories that are
considered as operative in science that cannot be tested by reproducing the experience
that would confirm them.
But how could you
reproduce the experience of a psychoanalytical session, or a psychoanalytical
interpretation? It’s completely impossible. When you deal with the subject of
the unconscious, you deal with a real that cannot be reproduced. You cannot
reproduce under the same conditions the unconscious formations that are the
emergence of the subject of psychoanalysis; you cannot reproduce under the same
conditions a dream and its interpretation, you cannot reproduce under the same
conditions a parapraxis, a Freudian slip, or what is more important, you cannot
reproduce the effect of a psychoanalytical interpretation itself. The
interpretation that has been effective in a case of obsessional neurosis will
not necessarily be effective in another case of obsessional neurosis. The psychoanalyst,
following Freud’s advices, has to take every case as a whole new case, on by
one. Even more, he has to put on hold all he knows about other cases in order
to be able to listen to the singularity of that case, that one-off case. This is
the reason why we define psychoanalytical clinics as a clinics of “one by one”,
that can never be reproduced under the same conditions. Each case has its own
demonstration and its own validation by its own effects in the psychoanalytical
treatment.
In fact, this
is also a question for many of the existing scientific practices. For example,
in the field of Pharmacology there are the well-known clinical trials for a
drug, the clinical trials designed as randomized, the double blind and
placebo-controlled trials, the planned experiments with a trial group and a
control group. But, following the remarks of some critic pharmacologists,
—specially after the big fiasco in pharmaceutical industry with influenza A
virus— the best clinical trial, the most effective and reliable trial is what
is called “clinical trial in an only patient”.
It consists in the modification, in a systematic form, of the disease treatment
in an only patient in a predetermined series of periods. That’s to say, you
have to test a drug in an only patient, taken in his singularity, following its
effects in an incomparable way, in a “one by one” way. You may say that this
method is impossible to follow, too long and too expensive, but in some cases
it will be without a doubt the most effective and accurate. In the case of
psychoanalytical clinics, where you cannot reproduce the same experience or
phenomena under the same conditions it’s the only way to verify the
effectiveness of the method and the treatment.
“Truths that only one can see”
Here, I have
to make a small parenthesis. A few weeks ago, when I was back in Barcelona
working in the development of my speech for today, trying to explain the
impossibility of making a replication of the unconscious phenomena and
formations, I received, at that very moment, an e-mail from my colleague here
in New York, Maria Cristina Aguirre, with a link to a very interesting article published
in the New York Times, an article that
talks about… replication in science, of course! It was really a surprising
coincidence, perhaps an experience of that phenomenon that Lacan evokes as an
“encounter with the real”, a real “Tyché”, taking the term from Aristotle, the
Goddess of Fortune. It’s kind type of phenomena that interested also Jung, Freud’s
dissident pupil, in his interlocution with the Nobel Price in Physics, Wolfgang
Pauli. They had even written an interesting text about this phenomenon that
they called “synchronicity”, the experience of two or more events without an
apparent causal relation. This coincidence is nearly a synchronicity of this
type, because the article deals with what is impossible to reproduce in the
field of science.
The article is entitled “New Truths That Only
One Can See” and it has a number of interesting remarks about the question of
replication or reproducibility at present in sciences. I quote the following
paragraph:
“It has been
jarring to learn in recent years that a reproducible result may actually be the
rarest of birds. Replication, the ability of another lab to reproduce a
finding, is the gold standard of science, reassurance that you have discovered
something true. But that is getting harder all the time. With the most
accessible truths already discovered, what remains are often subtle effects,
some so delicate that they can be conjured up only under ideal circumstances,
using highly specialized techniques.”
Therefore, replication is not really a common practice in present days science.
This is not a secondary or a minor problem. One of the most important
consequences, as a certain Dr. Ionnidis concludes after some meta-analysis of
scientific publications, is that “papers reporting negative conclusions [of the
most part of experiences] are more easily ignored”, and he reaches “the
conclusion that most published findings are probably incorrect”. The journalist
talks about the inevitable “unconscious bias” of scientists that may end in a
vicious circle. That, is: the more scientists expect to find specific results
and, therefore, they build their research towards that point, the more they
find confirmation through replicability methods. The more they find
confirmation of their experiments, the more these experiments are published,
quoted, and lead the perspective of new research. As a consequence, the perspective
of new and different research is set aside. From our perspective, we may say
that this constitutes a good example of the massive effects of the suggestion
phenomena that psychoanalysis discovers as a part of the transference. Scientists talk about a “tacit knowledge” in
their community that hides the real they are in fact researching. The
discovering of a new real in science is then reserved —says the journalist— to
“an experiment as unique as a Rembrandt”. Indeed, the real is always “as unique
as a Rembrandt”, impossible to reproduce.
There is
always something that cannot be reproduced in experience and sometimes that is
the most important issue, the issue that could lead towards a true scientific advance.
However, that is precisely ignored, even obliterated, in those published
researches that confirm each other in a mutual consensus. This issue is
precisely what could allow us to catch a bit of the real, that real that always
slips from language and from research.
I will close
this parenthesis I opened up a few lines above by pointing out that perhaps I may
be also under the effect of that “tacit knowledge” that exists in the same
manner in the psychoanalytical community, as it exists in each community of
knowledge. And maybe this tacit knowledge that exists about the unconscious
knowledge among us also hides the real knot, the real point of the unconscious
that lays in scientific discourse. In any case, I will say that this nearly synchronicity
between my speech and Maria Cristina’s message, with the link to that
interesting article, is an event impossible to reproduce, impossible to repeat
in a scientific method, as it was also an event impossible to preview. And, in
this sense, it is also an encounter with a real, with the real psychoanalysis deals
with.
The Freud’s dream in science
If we have to
approach the real that makes specific psychoanalysis clinics in the field of
science, it’s better to look at the unconscious formations themselves as those
phenomena, so singular, that cannot be reproduced in any way. There is an
original moment of this encounter with the real of the unconscious that is
necessary to remember when we speak about the real, an original moment in the history
of science, a moment that is an unconscious formation, a dream of Freud
himself, the dream that is also in the origin of his text “The interpretation
of dreams”, a text which is in fact the development of this dream. This is a
well-known dream entitled “Irma’s injection dream” and it is linked to the question
of feminine sexuality,of feminine “jouissance”, a question that has made
present a new real in science and in clinics, a new real that cannot be
represented as a complete or as a consistent form, because it escapes always to
scientific knowledge.
Where is
feminine jouissance? It will be
always a question with its enigma preserved in the center of knowledge. And it
is also the enigma that lies in the center, in the navel of Freud’s dream. It
takes place during Freud’s summer holidays, a few days before his birthday, he
has just written a rapport about a difficult patient, Irma, a friend of the
family and whose treatment has not been successful. Irma is announced to assist
at Freud’s birthday party and he doesn’t feel very comfortable with this
circumstance, with Irma’s presence, that is also the presence of a symptom in
the clinics of female sexuality. That night, from July 23th to 24th, in the
year 1895, he has a dream that rests as a real and singular encounter between
scientific knowledge and the question about feminine jouissance. I will only quote some phrases of the manifest content
of the dream, when Freud meets Irma who complains in the dream that all
Freudian solutions had failed to heal his symptoms. At that point, Freud
writes:
“I was alarmed
and looked at her. She looked pale and puffy. I thought to myself that after
all I must have been missing some organic trouble. I took her to the window and
looked down her throat, and she showed signs of recalcitrance, like women with
artificial dentures. I thought to myself that there was really no need for her
to do that. - She then opened her mouth properly and on the right I found a big
white patch…”
The dream goes
on, but it is in this white patch, in this white spot, —this “grossen weissen
Fleck”— where the navel of the dream finds its place, the real point where all
of Freud’s free associations stop at. It is in the blank page of this real, so
horrible as it appears to Freud, where the chemical formula of trimethylamin
appears, —“printed in heavy type”, Freud points out—, a formula of an element
linked to sexuality. Trimethylamin was supposed to be a component of semen, and
its formula is therefore a writing of sexuality on the blank page, on the white
patch in Irma’s throat that is in then center of Freud’s anguish. There are
several associations that lead Freud to the question of female sexuality, but
also to the question of death.
In any case, we
have in this white spot, in this blank page, the point that Freud himself
describes as the navel of the dream, the most real point of the dream; we have
in this image that rests in the center of Irma’s injection dream an excellent
image of the real that escapes to knowledge, a real that is impossible to
represent, that is even impossible to write. It is that real that, in Lacan’s
expression, does not cease to not be written —with two negatives— does
not cease to not be represented. When Lacan tries to formulate the real he
doesn’t find a better formula that this one: the real is what does not cease to not write.
And we may
conceive the structure of Freud’s discourse, all his elaboration about the
unconscious knowledge, as a work-through around this blank page that remains in
every field of knowledge. This is in fact the hypothesis of the unconscious, a
knowledge that doesn’t know itself and that stands in every knowledge, a
knowledge that is heterogeneous in the field of scientific knowledge, the
supposed objective knowledge of the real.
Freud’s dream
and his formalization with the symbolic laws of the unconscious knowledge
emerges therefore as a real point in scientific knowledge, as a real point that
was waiting to be inscribed in its field, a real point that does not cease to not be written until the moment of the formation of this dream, when
something of this real unconscious ceases to not be written. When the real ceases to not be written, we have a
phenomenon of Tyché, an encounter
with the real, always as a contingency, never as a necessary law that would be
previewed or calculated in advance.
Neuroscience’s dream
This is the
real of psychoanalysis and we can now pose the following question: where is
this real in our contemporary science? Is it possible to catch it, to find some
representation of its impossible writing in the scientific knowledge of present
days?
I propose you
the reading of an actual reference in the field of neurosciences, the reading
of someone that at some point was interested in Freud and that tries to
represent the unconscious knowledge in the brain mapping of actual
neurosciences. I am referring to Antonio Damasio, the neuroscientist, author of
some best-sellers in the diffusion of science, the later one titled Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the
Conscious Brain. In this work, Antonio Damasio proposes a representation, a
mapping of the brain, a brain that
would be in its turn a mapping of reality, even a mapping of the real. Even if
he proposes the idea of mapping only
as a useful abstraction, the operation of mapping
the brain activity is today a very suggestive procedure widely published in all
kinds of press with the coloured images of fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance
Imaging). All the thinking activity, all the human thoughts could be
represented in this brain mapping, even the unconscious thoughts, of course.
Even the white patch and the writing of the trymethylamin formula in the
Freud’s dream will be mapped. This is the ideal goal of neurosciences: mapping
the real of human thoughts.
But the real
unconscious is impossible to map, so impossible as the real itself that does not cease to not be written. The real unconscious will always be impossible to
map out by a Magnetic Resonance, just as those parts in the ancient maps that
were represented as a terra incognita,
obscured by clouds, a non explored region where you could only read: hic sunt dracones, there are dragons
here, impossible beings, but not so unreal ones. To catch dragons in the terra incognita of the real unconscious,
Magnetic Resonance is absolutely useless; you have rather to try with Semantic
Resonance, with the resonance that words and language produce in a human being,
a talking being.
The most
interesting moment in the reading of Antonio Damasio’s book is precisely the
chapter dedicated to Freud and the “Freudian unconscious”. We have there the
privilege of reading Damasio’s testimony of his own unconscious, as in the
Freudian text of “The interpretation of dreams”. Contrary to Freud, Damasio
doesn’t extract any consequences of his dreams. In fact, he says that he tries
hard to remember them, but unless he writes them down, they vanish. All of
them? No, not all of them. There is at least a dream that resists to vanish
from the scientific mind of Damasio, “a recurrent soft nightmare” as he writes,
an unconscious formation that usually comes to his mind the night before he has
to make a speech. Damasio himself confesses his uneasiness when someone invites him to give a lecture on
the topic of Freud and neuroscience: “It is the sort of assignment one should decline
vigorously”, he writes. And then, here is the soft nightmare that disturbs him,
with its message of the real unconscious: “The variations always had the same
gist: I am late, desperately late, and something essential is missing. My shoes
may have disappeared; or my five o’clock shadow is turning into a two-day beard
and my shaver is nowhere to be found; or the airport has closed down with fog
and I am grounded. I am tortured and sometimes embarrasses, as when (in my
dream, of course) I actually walked onstage barefoot (but in an Armani suit).
That is why —Damasio adds —, I never leave shoes to be shined outside a hotel
room.”
It’s indeed
one of those dreams of repetition in which Freud found the presence of the real
with its traumatic effects, in a form of a repetition that is always beyond the
pleasure principle. Of course, we would need Antonio Damasio’s associations
about each element of the dream to develop the semantic resonances that are
weaved in the text of his unconscious. But there is something very clear in
this text, something that is always missing, that the subject feels like a
lack, something lost or disappeared that tortures him. The real unconscious is
precisely this lack, this absence, this place impossible to represent in the
map, this place where the subject Antonio Damasio is always late, desperately
late, too late to say that unconscious will be always absent of the brain
mapping. This is the real unconscious that does not cease to not be
written, that does not ceased not be represented, but that insists to be written
in the subject’s dream. And how it insists at being represented? It insists at
being represented as a lack, as an absence, as a lost, as the lack of shoes
that are so present in its absence. —In Spanish we say “brillan por su
ausencia”, literally, “they shine through its absence”, and there is no need to
let them outside the room to be shined, it’s enough to dream of them as the
lack object, as the most real object. The subject misses this object to the
extent that he is always late in his meeting with the Freudian unconscious. The
real unconscious are these shoes Antonio Damasio fears to loose and that does not cease not to be outside his hotel room every night before his impossible speech,
his impossible meeting with the Freudian unconscious.
The shoes of
Antonio Damasio are therefore a brilliant image, as any other unconscious
formation, as any other symptom, to reveal the real that psychoanalysis has to
deal with, the real unconscious that only the subject could decide to decipher.
But, of course, to do that it would be necessary first to admit that those shoes,
as a symbolic element, are
an interesting object to represent the unconscious as a brain.
The red ink of the real
We can go back
now to our first question about the unobvious relation between the real of
science and the real of psychoanalysis. We can name this relation as the real
unconscious that remains among the sciences, among the knowledge of the
different sciences. It isn’t indeed an obvious relation because this real
always appears as a blank page in the book of science. To make it evident, to give
you a short view of this place, I haven’t found a better example than an
amusing and brief story that someone called Slavoj Zizek was telling recently,
here in Wall Street, to some people, perhaps without extracting the most
interesting consequences. The brief story as follows:
“A guy was
sent from East Germany to work in Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors.
So he told his friends: Let’s establish a code. If the letter you get from me
is written in blue ink, it is true what I said. If it is written in red ink, it
is false. After a month his friends got a first letter all written in blue ink
that said: everything is wonderful here. Stores are full of good food. Movie
theaters show all sorts of excellent American films. Apartments are large and
luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink.”
Indeed, we
lack the red ink to say all the truth, and that is the reason Lacan said that
we can only half-speak the truth —to translate Lacan expression “le midire de
la vérité”— which is different from saying: to speak half-truths. There is a
logic impossibility to say all the truth or all the real, because of the
unconscious. We lack the red ink, even to say that what I am saying is false.
But truth speaks by itself in what I’m saying, always beyond my conscious will.
Science is
based on the belief that one can spell out and write all the real in blue ink,
that one can say the truth of the knowledge that is written in the real,
without any lack. However, this belief only lasts to point when one realizes
that some shoes are definitely lacking, that the red ink will always be lacking
in any discourse.
Therefore, I
will say as a conclusion that psychoanalysis is the red ink of science, as the
subject of unconscious is the red ink of scientific discourse. Both, the real unconscious
and psychoanalysis itself are waiting to be written in blue ink. However, we
must be careful, if at anytime that
became the case, one would get, as the most important object always lacking to
the subject’s desire, only a blank page to be read, —with the semantic
resonances that the language offers us in the word “read”.
* Lecture in Barnard College, New York City, February 14, 2014. I thank Howard Rose for his proofreading of this text.
