Psychosis, Ordered Under Transference

(Léalo en castellano)

The solidity of a clinical concept is measured by the effectiveness of its use, especially when it accounts for a field of phenomena for which there did not exist before an established map*. From this perspective, we can doubtlessly say that the concept of “ordinary psychoses”, coined by Jacques-Alain Miller at the end of the 90’s, has come to be an already established clinical concept, a concept of enormous effectiveness given its widely extended use since then in the Freudian Field… and beyond. The ordinary psychoses account for a series of phenomena that at times go unnoticed for their apparent normality, but that when listened to from the perspective of Lacan’s teaching indicate the structural conditions that we have learnt to locate in the field of psychosis. Discreet body events, subtle plumb lines of meaning in the sliding of signification, veiled and allusive phenomena, minimalist substitutes in which the subject sustains the fragile stability of its reality. These phenomena were there, for all to see, but in their frequency they were confused with the landscape of normality. As Jacques-Alain Miller himself indicated in the today well-known “Antibes Convention”: “we have passed from surprise to rarity, from rarity to frequency”.[1] That is, we have passed from the surprise at the encounter with the exceptional and the extraordinary to the registering of phenomena that by their frequency had already become familiar to us.

But precisely where the prejudice of normality operates, that fantasy that acquires in our days the category of statistical truth, what is stake is always the encountering of the strangeness of the clinical trait in its most singular detail. In this way, the ordinary psychoses reveal themselves to us now as a kind of purloined letter of our clinic: they were so open to the view of all that were hidden to that of each. A slight displacement of the clinical focus was enough to make apparent in these phenomena the structure of the psychoses in their diverse forms of knotting, and to reveal with this change of perspective that, in the clinic, the strangest was inhabiting the most familiar. The ordinary psychoses are also in this way the Unheimlich (the strangely familiar) of our clinic. And it is not infrequent to obtain in the practicing psychoanalyst this affect linked to the Unheimlich when the strangely familiar dimension of these phenomena is pointed out.

       So, if the concept of the ordinary psychoses has come to delimit the map of what was until then a terra incognita of our clinic, this is also because it shows that the orography of its terrain is present in every one of the continents previously defined by classical cartography, the cartography distributed according to the categories of psychosis, neurosis, and perversion. Put differently, the map here creates the territory before representing it, even to the point of becoming confused with it. Which is also to say that, before it has a function of the representation of reality, language – including that of the clinic – is knotted in the very operation of the construction and perception of this reality. This is something as strange as it is familiar to someone formed in the most classical Lacanian orientation: perception eclipses structure precisely where this structure reveals the way in which this perception is constructed.

We are now going to consider the nature of the terrain that we know today with the term “ordinary psychoses”. Imagine a kind of Google Earth of the clinic in which we can visualise the terrain and the geographical locations with their names and borders. We find here clearly established, following our classical clinic, the two great territories of the neuroses and the psychoses, with their borders and sub-borders, with hysteria and obsession on one side and paranoia and schizophrenia on the other. We can also locate melancholy and the perversions, although at times they blur a little bit more at some of their borders in order to reveal their condition of traits that can be shared by different countries. Melancholic traits exist, in effect, in various places of the delimited continents, just like traits of perversion, to take up again the theme of an International Encounter of the Freudian Field from decades ago.

       If we now write “ordinary psychoses” in this imaginary search engine of the clinical Google Earth, in order to see how the successive zooms lead us to a precise location, then surprise, surprise!, the list of places that appear in the search window becomes longer and longer, until it presumably becomes infinite. To such a degree that it would seem that the “ordinary psychoses” can be today in any part of the map, without it being possible to either reduce their description to a trait or constitute them as a self-enclosed continent. If we click on any one of these names, it leads us however to already known places. And if we continue to verify the list, perhaps we can then conclude that ordinary psychosis is in reality Google Earth itself as a whole, the very system of representation with which we try to locate the places of our classical clinic. It is a clinic made up of discreet traits, which count because of the difference that exists between each one of them, in the style of the structural system of language (la langue) that we know since Saussure’s linguistics. But the traits are so discreet here – allow me the equivocalness of this word – so subtle, that they disappear from the general view and only appear in the singularity of each case, and each time in a distinct manner. It is difficult to construct a general map and a precise search engine with these conditions of representation, without, as we said, the place in question that we are looking for finally becoming the very system of representation within which we operate.

We should immediately say that this paradox does not seem at all strange to the readers of Jacques Lacan. It is present from a very early point in his teaching. He himself read his entry into psychoanalysis, which carries the title of his famous 1932 thesis, On Paranoiac Psychosis in its Relations to the Personality, by saying a few years later that personality is paranoia, and that it is for this reason that there are not in fact relations between the one and the other. There is nothing more normal than personality, nothing less discreet too, if we take the term “discreet” with the equivocalness that we have pointed out.

But does the category of “ordinary psychoses”, which seemed to us so effective in its use, not then evaporate now precisely because of the extension and effectiveness of this use? Is the same not happening to us as what Lacan drew attention to in the 50’s when he studied the use of interpretation in the analytic medium starting from the observations of Edward Glover? I remind you of his indication concerning this in his Écrit on “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power”. Edward Glover, Lacan writes, lacking the term of the signifier in order to operate in analytic experience, “finds interpretation everywhere, being unable to stop it anywhere, even in the banality of a medical prescription.”[2]

Our confusion of languages would doubtlessly constitute such a going astray, a confusion that would add itself to the current clinical Babel, a clinic that itself seems to disappear in the world of increasingly disordered nosographies, further fed today by the crisis of the DSM system. It is well known that the crisis of this system, in its new versions, has extended in such a way the descriptions of the pathological in everyday life that there is no longer a single corner of human existence that is not diagnosed as a possible “disorder”. Up to the point that someone has said that, if one doesn’t find oneself described in one of the pages of the manual, this is because one really must have a serious “disorder”.

We are dealing in reality with an error of perspective homologous to the one we described with the Google Earth model. With the introduction of the category of the “ordinary psychoses” into the clinic we find ourselves – as Jacques-Alain Miller pointed out in the very moment in which he introduced the term – “divided between two points of view that are contrasting, but that do not exclude one another”.[3] From the first perspective, which we can order using Lacan’s first teaching, there is a discontinuity between neurosis and psychosis, there are more or less precise borders, there are discrete and differential elements, tributaries of the logic with which the Names-of-the-Father function, and of the logic of the signifier which operates in a discretional way, by means of the relative differences between the elements. When there is a border on the map, there are discretional differences between the territories, there is also a possible reciprocity between them in order to define what one is and is not in relation to the other. From the second perspective, which we can order using Lacan’s last teaching, it is rather the continuity between territories that is highlighted, what makes them contiguous, as two modes of response to the same real, as two modes of jouissance confronted with the same difficulty of being. We are no longer concerned in this second perspective with the establishment of borders, but instead with the verification of knottings and unknottings between continuous threads.

In this way, we can say that there is no proper clinical description of the ordinary psychoses according to the classical model, which orders their categories starting from a series of traits present in the interior of a more or less well-delimited set. It would be impossible then to include such a category in the logic of the DSM or the usual diagnostic manuals, where the traits are enumerated that must be present for each clinical category. From the descriptive point of view, the ordinary psychoses could be better defined by a trait that we find to be lacking, never the same one in any case, by that which we feel to be lacking in relation to the classical psychoses, but also by that which we find to be lacking in relation to the classical neuroses. We find ourselves obliged to define them, then, more than ever, case by case, and always according to the context in which we find this lack.

If you allow me to put it like this, the category of “ordinary psychoses” then includes the categories that don’t include themselves: it looks like a hysteria but it isn’t a hysteria, it doesn’t include the traits that we know of hysteria, it looks like an obsession but it doesn’t include the traits of obsession, it looks like a paranoia but it doesn’t include the traits of paranoia… This transforms the ordinary psychoses into a kind of Russell’s paradox, the well-known paradox of the set that includes the sets that don’t include themselves. There are various ways of illustrating Russell’s paradox, one is that of the catalogue that includes all the catalogues that don’t include themselves, without being able to finally conclude with the question of whether the first catalogue includes itself or not.

 In this way, the category of the ordinary psychoses explodes the diagnostic system of the structural clinic. Something similar occurs with them as occurred in the first Freudian clinic with the introduction of the “actual neuroses”, the neuroses that Freud distinguished from the classical psychoneuroses, and that are defined by the lack of an infantile history and the lack of a symbolic overdetermination of symptoms. Every neurosis was an actual neurosis until these two structural elements were found that didn’t stop not writing themselves… up until the contingent encounter that decanted their signification.

Let us say that the only mode of verifying this fact, the only mode of putting to the test this real that doesn’t stop not writing itself in every case, is the very structure of the analytic experience, the structure that is thrown into the light of day in the phenomenon of the transference.

Put differently and to conclude: the ordinary psychoses are only clinically ordered when their phenomena are precipitated, ordered, in the logic of the transference. It is only there that the ordinary psychoses are revealed as ordered under transference.

---

* NLS Congress – Dublin, July 2016

[1] Jacques-Alain Miller, en IRMA “La psychose ordinaire”, Agalma 1999, p, 230.

[2] Jacques Lacan, Écrits: a selection, Routledge, London2002, p. 258.

[3] Jacques-Alain Miller, opus cit. p. 231.

The Paradoxes of Transference

(Lecture in the 7th Clinical Study Days of The Lacanian Compass, February 15, 2014, New York City)

If we define a paradox as a statement that apparently contradicts itself and yet still might be true, then the concept of transference is the best example of this in the field of psychoanalytical experience*. Transference is both the condition of this experience, and also the most difficult obstacle to overcome. Sometimes it is the most apparent reason for the subject’s cure, the cause of spontaneous therapeutic effects, especially if the analyst doesn’t intercept or block them. Sometimes, however, it is also the reason for the subject’s remaining attached to the secondary benefits of the symptom, according to that phenomenon Freud detected very soon as a “negative therapeutic reaction”.

In fact, any practice in the wide field of therapeutics is aware of this circumstance that psychoanalysis interprets according to the varied effects of transference. When specialist physicians observe that there are a lot of therapeutic effects due to the placebo phenomenon, or due to the mere presence and response of a professional, they verify, even without knowing it, the effects of transference upon the subject. They also verify these effects, moreover, when they complain about the lack of collaboration or about the subject’s negative reaction to the treatment. The problem consists in the attribution of these effects to a distortion, or even a falsification, of the correct and calculated effects of the treatment. The effects of transference, also in what we consider to be suggestion, often occur quietly, secretly, but in full view of everyone.

The first paradox of transference, therefore, is that it acts and works in the clinic like that intriguing object described in Edgar Allan Poe’s tale “The Purloined Letter”, commented on by Jacques Lacan in one of his firsts seminars. Transference is a hidden object that is at the same time in everybody’s view; an object that acts and works as a signifier of that which we don’t know the meaning of, and that secretly determines every character’s fate. Transference is the purloined letter that determines a full range of effects in the everyday clinic.

The merit of having discovered this purloined letter in the clinic, of having discovered the power and the mechanism of the transference phenomenon and of having designated it as an operative concept in the origins of psychoanalysis, clearly falls to Sigmund Freud. Freud also brought into the light of day the secret link between the unconscious and transference.

The Freudian term for transference is Übertragung, which also means translation, transcription, displacement from one point to another. The transference phenomenon was considered at first as a repetition of an original relation, a sort of transcription or translation of an original text. However, the question about what is repeated in transference is not answered as easily as the post-Freudians analysts thought. They reduced transference to a simple repetition of an original object relation, usually the mother-baby relation, which should then be recalled and even corrected in analysis. In the first place, this repetition would have to be interpreted to the subject as such. Lacan criticized this conception of transference as a simplistic reduction.

In fact, in his text “Psychotherapy of Hysteria”, Freud speaks of transference as a “false link” between the patient and the physician. It is a false link because of an unconscious representation that is tied, in its turn, not to an object but to a desire, an unsatisfied desire, a desire that already existed before any object relation was conceived. Transference as a false link with the analyst tells us, therefore, about the truth of an unconscious desire. We can see a new paradox: on the one hand, a false link, on the other, a true desire. The problem is not the supposed object that would be in the original relation, and that the transference phenomenon repeats. The question is the translation, the displacement of an unsatisfied desire, a desire that is always already a translation, a displacement in itself.

That is to say: there is no original text of the purloined letter of transference. The original is already a translation, a transcription of a lost original text, a loss that is desire itself, desire as caused by the lack of the object. If Freud can conceive of transference as a “false link”, this is not because there is an original or true object of desire, but instead because transference is always the question about the desire of the Other. There is no “true link” between the subject and the Other, but instead always a “proton pseudos”, an original lie at the origin of desire, as Freud was taught by the hysterical subject. This “false link”, then, will always be at the center of the question of desire.

And this is the moment when transference emerges as a phenomenon in the treatment, usually as the question about the desire of the Other. The analyst is the one who can assume this question that will constitute a knot in the subject’s relation, not to an original object, but to the unconscious itself.

I will give a short example of this — of transference as the question of the Other’s desire, a question that cannot be reduced and explained as a simplistic repetition of an original object relation.

The first time a young man comes to meet me, he says that he has dreamt of me the very night before he called for an interview. He didn’t know anything about me, except my name. In his dream, he drives me in his car. I am in the back seat. He cannot see my face, a face he doesn’t know and which he tries to discover in the rear-view mirror. There is a moment of anxiety in the dream when he realizes that the other can see him but that he cannot see the other. —What am I in the desire of the Other?— this is the question that will become a central question both in his life and in his analysis, as is the case for everyone. He knows where he is going to, to the analyst’s consulting room, but he doesn’t know where he comes from. At the precise moment when he is telling me about all this, in our very first meeting, and before any intervention on my part, he realizes the following: the problem that has brought him to the analyst is a conflict with his father, a father who was… a taxi driver. At this point, I agree with an emphatic and short intervention: —“Aha!” — “You know, —he adds quoting his father— one can never know who one is driving in the car”. And he is right, especially when the person you are driving in the car is the person to whom you will tell the most secret things of your life, the person you usually have in the back seat when you lie on the couch.

But here we also have the paradox of transference: in his dream he is going to the analyst driving the analyst himself. And not only this for, in addition, he is now telling his dream to an analyst that he is meeting for the first time. There are, therefore, at least three analysts in this short story: 1) the analyst the subject is driving in his car, the person he cannot see; 2) the analyst he is going to see and of whom he only knows the name; and 3) the analyst as the real person to whom he is telling all of this in the first interview.

It is worth underlining another fact that constitutes the turning point of this whole short story. The real presence of the analyst was necessary to open up the question about the desire of the Other that was included in the dream. The real encounter with an analyst was necessary, and also necessary was the act of speech, the word addressed to the Other, this real act that is impossible to predict, impossible to repeat. It is in this act of speech that the subject realizes the link between his dream and the question of his father’s desire that brought him to the analyst.

In any case, as Lacan posits, transference is at the beginning of psychoanalysis. This is certain in a historical sense: the encounter between the hysterical subject and Freud, the transference addressed to Freud as a person by the hysterical subject, is at the origins of psychoanalysis. But it is also certain in a structural sense: transference is at the beginning of every psychoanalysis; every subject arrives in a certain manner with the psychoanalyst in his car, even if he doesn’t know it. Lacan says somewhere that the question is to know where the analyst already was in the picture that the subject brings with him to the first encounter with the analyst. In the short story I have recounted, this question is very clear, but precisely because it is very clear, it poses the question even more acutely: Where is the real analyst? Which of the three figures of the analyst we have indicated is the most real analyst in the Lacanian sense?

I will answer as follows: none of them taken one by one, but all of them taken as the knot they form in the speech act of the first interview. If the real presence of the analyst is ensured by the person who has listened to the subject in that first interview, if the real analyst is supported by the person who has received the unconscious message of the subject and has confirmed the truth of that message, the message that links the dream with the question of the father’s desire, if this real presence can be ensured by someone, it is because there previously was someone in the back seat of the car and because this car is going somewhere, even if neither the driver, nor the passenger, for the time being, know where.

That is to say that transference is a knot formed by three registers: 1) the symbolic Other, the Big Other, the symbolic place of word and language that is supposed in the subject’s dream but also in the speech act in the first interview; 2) the imaginary other that the subject conceives as his interlocutor in the reality of this interview, 3) the Other reduced to his real, the Other that the subject cannot see in his rear-view mirror nor imagine when he is going to the analyst’s consulting room for the first time.

From this perspective, transference and its paradoxes are something more complex than a simplistic repetition of an original object relation, a repetition to which the post-Freudian analysts had reduced the transference. This reduction was always accompanied by a conception of transference as a dual relation between the patient and the analyst, a dual relation in which the resistance to the analyst’s interpretations and interventions was understood as the most important phenomenon in a non-empathetic relation. On the other hand, the power of transference was impossible to distinguish from the mere action of suggestion as a consequence of the overwhelming presence of this same empathetic relation. It has to be said that the general conception of the so-called “therapeutic alliance” in the Cognitive Behavioral Therapies of our time doesn’t go very far beyond this reductionism.

When Lacan begins his criticism of this reductionist conception in the 1950’s, he shows the complexity of the transference phenomenon by pointing to the three registers we have underlined —the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real— the very three registers that are implied in its structure.

Psychoanalytic interpretation depends on this structure of transference, understood as a knot. Let us quote two short paragraphs from Lacan’s 1958 text “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power”, where he poses this dependence as follows:

“Let me summarize. If an analyst dealt only with resistances, he would look twice before hazarding an interpretation, which he in fact does, but this prudence would suffice.

‘However, this interpretation, if he gives it, will be received as coming from the person the transference imputes him to be. Will he agree to take advantage of this error concerning who he is? Psychoanalytic morals do not forbid it, on the condition that he interpret this effect, failing which the analysis would remain at the level of crude suggestion.”[1]

An interpretation is received as coming from the person the transference imputes the analyst to be. We will see shortly that this imputation is in the first place a supposition, a supposition of knowledge. It is an “error concerning who he is”. In French, Lacan writes “erreur sur la personne”, literally an “error about the person”. It is the “false link” of transference that Freud had pointed out, and that makes it necessary to distinguish the Symbolic register from the Imaginary one.

From the point of view of an objective analysis, transference is an error, a mistake about the person; it is confusion between the Symbolic and the Imaginary places. The subject imputes the analyst to be someone else. And the analyst can only take advantage of this error in his interventions if he, at the same time, interprets this confusion in order to separate the two registers. Maintaining this confusion without interpreting it would reduce psychoanalysis and transference to a “crude suggestion.” Suggestion is, therefore, the reduction of transference to its Imaginary register, a reduction that fails to interpret its effects. Transference in its Symbolic register is the interpretation of suggestion itself. This is what Lacan remarks in his criticism of the general conception of the “therapeutic alliance”.

There is also a paradox in this remark that distinguishes transference and suggestion through the operation of interpretation. How can anyone take advantage of this error about the person and interpret it at the same time? Perhaps this effect could be interpreted in a second moment, but in any case the analyst must be in a certain symbolic place in order to interpret, and, at the same time, he must interpret the imaginary effects, the effects of suggestion, of this same place. In a certain way, the analyst has to exit with his interpretationfrom the same place that makes possible the effects of this interpretation. We can see the extreme paradoxicality of this operation. You might even say that it is impossible, and I would agree, but I would also add that it is by means of this logical impossibility that an interpretation deals with, touches a real point in the subject’s structure.

Let us give a well-known example, a Freudian example, that it is also a Lacanian example, that you will find in a beautiful text written by the American poet and novelist H. D., Hilda Doolittle. The text is entitled “A Tribute to Freud”. In this text, HD remembers her analysis with the famous Professor Sigmund Freud, which she undertook when Sigmund Freud was already in his seventies. There is an anecdote that carries a particular interest for us. HD had sent Freud a bunch of gardenias, his favorite flowers, for his birthday, a gift she never failed to give him on every birthday up until his death. On this occasion, however, she had forgotten to write down her name on the small note that accompanied the bunch of flowers. Freud was not very pleased with this oblivion and he replied back with a letter assuming that it was probably she who had sent the gift, and although he wasn’t sure, he added: “In any case, affectionately yours…” H D also didn’t know what had so suddenly enraged Freud. In her session she spoke with a certain indifference, a certain non-implication, until Freud interrupted her speech by beating with his hand on the head-piece of the couch and uttering the following words: “The trouble is —I am an old man— you do not think it worth your while to love me.” The impact of these words was too dreadful for her to add anything else, and she wondered about the meaning of what Freud meant to say.

Without any doubt, Freud was in a very admired place for Hilda Doolittle, as a professor, as an analyst, and as a man. She writes: “Exactly it was as if the Supreme Being had hammered with his fist on the back of the couch where I had been lying.”[2] With these words, however, the very Supreme Being who exercises such a great power of suggestion over her, speaks from this place to say that she doesn’t consider him to be such a loveable being. At this moment, the Supreme Being exits from its place. There is always, thus, a lie in the love of transference, an idealization of the object. In this sense, one can play with the equivocality of the subject’s words and say that the Supreme Being’s interpretation is beating on the very couch where she has been lying about the object of love.

Freud’s interpretation therefore strikes the subject and awakes her from suggestion, from her demand to be loved, by pointing to her division with the question: What do you want? What is the object of your desire? This is not an interpretation of the transference itself, but an interpretation that leans on transference in order to interpret its effects of suggestion.

We have to distinguish, then, at least two levels of the Other in transference and psychoanalytic interpretation.

            $ — transference —> A

            $ <—interpretation — A

Firstly, there is transference from the subject to the Other, the big Other that will be invested as the Other of transference, “the person the transference imputes [the analyst] to be”. And, secondly, there is the Other of interpretation, the place of the Other from which interpretation takes place, the Other from which the interpretation will be received precisely as an interpretation thanks to the original transference.      

The question may then be posed: is there an Other which could interpret the very transference to the Other that interpretation leans on?

We can see that a nice paradox emerges precisely in this place of the Other that could interpret the transference from within. It is a paradox that is very similar to the well-known paradox of Russell, which questioned the supposed foundation of mathematics upon a naïve set theory. It is the paradox that Bertrand Russell himself illustrated with the example of the barber: "The barber is a man in town who shaves all those, and only those, men in town who do not shave themselves." The question “Who shaves the barber?” results in a paradox that it is impossible to resolve, because according to the above statement, the barber can either shave himself, or go to the barber (who is, of course, none other than himself). Neither of these possibilities are valid: they both result in the barber shaving himself, but he cannot do this because he only shaves those men "who do not shave themselves".

The statement “the analyst that interprets the place of the Other of transference from where interpretation is received” would posit an Other of the Other in the same manner, an Other of interpretation that would contain the Other of transference that makes possible that very interpretation. There is no solution to this paradox, and all the misunderstandings in post-Freudian psychoanalysis concerning transference and counter-transference, concerning the interpretation of transference and the response to counter-transference, are in some way variations of this impossible solution.

            Lacan will take this paradox as a symptom of the particular structure of transference.

In fact, we may say that, properly speaking, there is no interpretation of transference. That is to say, there is no interpretation from a place exterior to the transference relation. Every interpretation operates and obtains its effects from the inner place that transference allocates to the analyst, from the person it “imputes him to be”. On the other hand, however, an interpretation must always be, in a certain way, an interpretation of the effects of suggestion of transference itself. It must use the place of transference in order to interpret the suggestive effects of this interpretation.

An analytic interpretation would ideally work, then, not – as in classical interpretation – as a machine that feeds the subject with more meaning, but instead, in exactly the opposite terms, as a  sort of self-boycotting device, a self-canceling system of meaning. The analytic interpretation made under transference tends to disable the very place of the Other that is, on the other hand, the place where meaning originates with all the suggestive effects of transference itself.

As Jacques-Alain Miller has recently outlined[3], the so called “great secret of psychoanalysis” for Lacan, the great revelation that would open up a new perspective in his teaching, was enounced in his 1959 Seminar “Desire and its interpretation”. This secret, which was a secret for psychoanalysts themselves, was revealed with the following formula: “There is no Other of the Other”.  This turning point, which has also been formulated by Jacques-Alain Miller with the expression “The Other without Other”, was produced at the moment when Lacan began to devalue the symbolic function of the Name of the Father, the signifier that had accomplished till then this role of the Other of the Other, the signifier that had completed and made consistent the place of the Other. Some years later, in 1967, Lacan added another formula constructed in a homologous way: “There is no transference of the transference”[4]. It was his way of showing the exit from the paradox of transference indicated above. There is no Other of the Other of transference, and there even is no Other of the Other of interpretation.

This paradox and its solution lead Lacan to show a hidden face of the transference phenomenon, a phenomenon that seems to be an intersubjective one, that is to say, a phenomenon that occurs between two subjects. Transference was indeed at first conceived by Lacan in his teaching as an intersubjective process, but this supposition was sustained by the idea of the existence of an Other of the Other, and this Other of the Other was the subject itself.

Transference as an intersubjective process, transference to a big Other that would encounter in the subject itself the reciprocity of an Other of the Other, leads to a paradox that is enunciated with the other well-known Lacanian formula for transference: the Subject Supposed to Know.

The “Subject Supposed to Know” is a conclusive version of the paradox of the Other of the Other in transference, or the paradox of the transference of the transference.

And the entire ethical question concerning the use of transference in psychoanalysis revolves around the use of this “Subject Supposed to Know” by the analyst.

What is this “Subject Supposed to Know”? In the first place, it is to suppose a knowledge in the place of the Other, the Other conceived as a subject, as another subject — or, also, as an Other Subject. This is the most superficial level of transference. You take the analyst as a Subject Supposed to Know and there is a good reason to address him. You take the car of your symptom and you drive to the analyst’s address. But there is another analyst in the car of your symptom, the analyst you don’t know but who is the true cause of your transference, or even of your “agalma”, to evoke Lacan’s term in his Seminar on “Transference”. This analyst has no face, no name and no representation. He or she is an object, in the Lacanian sense of the object, and you are driving it without knowing what sort of object it is. You don’t know what this object is, and you don’t know the knowledge contained in this object that concerns you.

At this point, we need to distinguish more carefully between the two French terms for knowledge: “la connaissance” —which is the knowledge of someone in the sense that you may feel that “I don’t know him, I don’t know who he is”— and “le savoir” —which is the knowledge that is supposed, the knowledge the object contains that concerns you and that you don’t know.

There is another knowledge in the back of the car, it is your unconscious knowledge, the knowledge of your symptom, the knowledge you don’t know but that you may suppose if you take it as a formation of your unconscious. As in the case of a dream, you may suppose there is a knowledge articulated even in its meaningless aspect, or you may not. It depends precisely on… transference.

At this point, however, we encounter another face of transference, or even another logic. Transference is transference with your unconscious, transference is to suppose a subject to your unconscious, to suppose that you are concerned as a subject with your unconscious and with your symptom. The logic of transference as Subject Supposed to Know is not, therefore, only or basically to suppose a knowledge to the Other but, first of all, to suppose a subject to the knowledge of your unconscious. You will find this remarked when Lacan introduces this new logic of transference as Subject Supposed to Know, as a criticism of his own initial conception of transference as an intersubjective process. In his inaugural text entitled “The Proposition of the 9^th of October 1967 on the Psychoanalyst of the School”, he says, for example:

“The subject supposed to know is for us the pivot on which everything to do with the transference is hinged. [...] Here the levitator of intersubjectivity will display his finesse in asking: subject supposed by whom, if not by another subject? [And Lacan answers:] A subject supposes nothing, he is supposed. Supposed, I teach, by the signifier that represents him for another signifier.”[5]

The formula of the transference that Lacan proposes in this text follows the logic of this new conception:

We find on the upper level the link between a signifier S, the signifier of the transference, as Lacan points out, a signifier with an unknown meaning, and another signifier S^q, “that we shall call any signifier”, the signifier that represents the analyst at first, his name, for example, to which he is here reduced. We can see the car driving to the analyst in a line reduced to a link between two signifiers, with an unknown meaning. This is the transference at the beginning of analysis, before its development.

On the lower level we also have some signifiers, —S¹, S²… Sⁿ— ordered in a series, the series of signifiers of unconscious knowledge. This is the unconscious series of signifiers in the subject’s history that are also in his dream: a car, a father, an unknown passenger, perhaps a debt impossible to pay to this father… In fact, this series of signifiers were already on the upper level reduced, condensed, in a single link, the link of transference. But as a result of the real encounter with the analyst, this series acquires a meaning, a new meaning: the car is not a car, the car is a taxi with a taxi driver who is also a father.

And where is the subject? The subject, Lacan points out, is this small “s”, —“le signifié” in French—, the meaning we suppose to unconscious knowledge, the meaning that was “en souffrance”, in waiting, as the unknown passenger in the transference, the meaning that will only appear in the real encounter with the analyst. The analyst is only a Subject Supposed to Know, but he or she is also the only subject that takes a place in the transference.

That is to say: in the transference relation there is only one subject, supposed to the signifying link, and an object, which the analyst must support in this relation.

That is also to say — there is no intersubjectivity, as is shown in the beautiful poster that announces these Clinical Study Days: the man and the woman, they are not talking to each other, “inter” or between one another, but with an object where a subject may be supposed.

We can now pose a final question: who is the real analyst, the analyst that it is impossible to represent in the car of the symptom, the symptom that leads every subject to an analyst? Perhaps we will find some answers in the works that will be presented in these Clinical Study Days.

In any case, we must take into account this paradox: transference is the unknown passenger of psychoanalysis itself, and the destiny of psychoanalysis is the destiny of this unknown passenger in every psychoanalytical treatment that we conduct.

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* I thank Howard Rouse for his proofreading of this text.

[1] Jacques Lacan, Écrits, (The first complete edition in English, translated by Bruce Fink), W.W. Norton & Company, New York – London 2006, page 494.

[2] H.D. A Tribute to Freud: Writing on the Wall-Advent, New Directions Books, New York 1984, page 16.

[3] In his conference “L’Autre sans Autre”, in the NLS Congress, Athens, 19 May 2013.

[4] In his Seminar XV, (29/11/1967). Also in Lacan, Jacques, Autres Ecrits, Paris, Seuil, 2001, page 325: “il n’y a pas de transfert du transfert”.

[5] Jacques Lacan, “Proposition of 9 October 1967 on the Psychoanalyst of the School”, translated by Russell Grigg.