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Also by Andre Green and published by Free Association Books

The Work of the Negative Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism

Time in Psychoanalysis
Some Contradictory Aspects

Andre Green
Translated by Andrew Weller

FREE ASSOCIATION BOOKS / LONDON / NEW YORK

Published in 2002 by FREE ASSOCIATION BOOKS 57 Warren Street London WIT 5NR www.fa-b.com
2002 Les Editions de Minuit Translation 2002 Andrew Weller

Contents

J))! I "'/ S

Br JlS 11 .,{;;; ? S/
2JO'2-

Translator's Acknowledgements
1 Awakening: Time in Dreaming 2 Space and Time in Psychoanalytic Thought 3 The Construction of Heterochrony 4 The Historical Truth 5 The Tree of Time 6 Time in Treatment 7 The Mutation of the Psychical Apparatus in the
Second Topography

vi

The right of Andre Green to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. A elP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 1 85343 550 3 pbk: 1 85343 551 1 hbk

1 4
9

28 33 45 65 75 88 100 131 136 162 164 170 172

8 Repetition: Causes and Characteristics 9 Transference, Repetition, Binding 10 The Object and the Drive 11 On Binding and the Other 12 Time and the Other 13 Figures of Shattered Time

Notes Bibliography Index

10

Designed and produced for Free Association Books by Chase Publishing Services, Fortescue, Sidmouth EXIO 9QG Printed in the European Union by Antony Rowe, Chippenham, England v

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Time in Psychoanalysis

it seems that the analyst alone has the capacity to hear; but com municating what he 'hears' to the analysand does not seem to help the latter who is playing his own 'familiar tune'

ostinato, da capo,

as

if he had become deaf to its sounds and meanings. In order to be able to make any further headway in Our examination of this question, we must first, as is often the case, take a few steps backwards.

Repetition: Causes and Characteristics

Repeating: Why? In 1920, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud made the compulsion to repeat part of the essential machinery of the theory, though, in fact, he had discovered it six years earlier. The fact that he had spent six years reflecting on the question suggests that he did not embark on this mutative change in a rush. It was in IRemembering, Repeating and Working-Through' (1914)1 that Freud announced his crucial discovery: acting out repetitively is a way of remembering which takes the place of memory. This was to have a dramatic con sequence: whereas remembering was included within the framework of analysis, since it was a form of representation that could undergo modification or even be clarified in the great temporal construction underlying the project of lifting infantile amnesia, what was the position with regards to Agieren? Where was repetition observed first? In the transference. In facti Freud opposed remembering - the aim of analysis - and transference} the modality of an actualisation which is not aware that it is repeating. The analysand who manifests a rebellious attitude towards the fundamental rule, cannot, or does not want to remember that in so doing he is repeating his rebellion towards his father - particularly as he cannot remember feeling any opposition towards him. Freud concluded that transference was only a piece of repetition, just as repetition was a transference of the forgotten past. But what Freud had in mind, in 1920, was the case of repetition which undermines the analysis of the transference. Illness, an operative force in the present, is not simply the blocked out memory of an old injurYi it is a very real adversary in the present. And Freud spoke of drives that are sometimes capable of creating disasters in the subject's life owing to the force which feeds their compulsion to repeat. The difference between the article of 1914 and the reworking of themes found in Beyond

the Pleasure Principle in 1920, is quite Signif

icant. The tone of 'Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through' is determined, openly authorita!ian, and shows that Freud was in a
7S

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conquering spirit when he spoke of putting the reins of transference on the untamed instincts. We can sense that in 1920 there was a. whiff of disillusion in the air. Transference, tough by nature, proved itself to be more on the side of action - even uncontrollable action - than on the side of the critical re-evaluation which becomes possible with the benefit of hindsight gained through remembering. In certain cases the acted repetition occurs outside the sphere of analysis. Acting out is in the service of resistance. It occurs outside the session, beyond the reach of interpretation. It is a sign of instinctual evasion and the compulsive need for satisfaction at any price. Alternatively, through its effect of masking, it manifests its refusal to become part of the general representative framework which would allow it to be worked through by means of remembering. Similarly, it reveals what it is unable - or does not want? does not dare? or does not trust itself? to express; that is to say, its incapacity - or unwillingness - to get in touch with what can be shared with another person, in full mutual recognition, by virtue of being put into words. The analysand and the analyst are there, as if isolated from one another, even if the acting out contains a communicative potential that is blocked off by the patient. And this is why Freud thinks of Agieren as a transgression in principle and not just in terms of its content. The drive, he said, was stronger here than the desire to communicate (by word-repre sentations); stronger than the desire to be metamorphosed by representing itself through the network of its different forms. The drive 'pulsates' in the manner of a vital rhythm. Is this a matter of life or death? Hence the importance of the rhythmic element connected with the perception of time. Working-through is about linking, representing, putting in context, deferring, imagining; and, consequently, it is about changing form in order to evolve. The other discovery of the second topography was that of the resistance which is opposed to the uncovering of resistances. This is a further reason for not relying on the patient's claims that he wants to understand. Even more than the death drive, this fact, which no analyst has challenged, has not as yet met with a solution that has made it possible to overcome the situation. It seems to me that there is just as much justification for despairing about this as there is for despairing about the conception of the death drive. Temporary exhaustion through acting out or representative working-through this is the new dilemma that refers to

relating them to the structure of the drive. What explains the short circuiting of- the drives is their preservative function which is not affected by the differentiated modalities of (secondary) thought processes. But what is the meaning of discharge under these conditions? Lessening the burden of a tension? No doubt. Obtaintng satisfaction? Perhaps. But this is not enough to explain either the attraction that the solution represents or the power which allows it to impose itself. In reality, discharge involves a paradox. As I have said, it results from the persistent and monotonous character of the claims of the drives, from the insistent pressure with which the latter manifest themselves and only cease to do so when they have got what they want. But, in fact, through discharge, the drive, which is none the less considered to have a preservative value (phylogenetically, no doubt), allows nothing in the psychical apparatus to be preserved, precisely on account of this fact. Each discharge momentarily empties the psyclie of the conflictual tensions which would allow it to enrich its organisation, make its functioning more complex, extend its field of activity, diversify its investments and vary and nuance its responses. Thus, the effect of the actual discharge (in every direction) is to reverse preservation, in the ontogenic sense; for, if a potential for drive activity is thus maintained in spite of discharge, the interest of what is preserved is very limited, since the major part of this force disappears repetitively through diSSipation, curbing the possibility of new contributions to the ego which are not all on the side of limiting primitive satisfactions. Moreover, in Freud's thinking, this preservation aims at restoring an earlier state. It is thus not simply concerned with maintaining an acquisition that is tem porarily blocked, but draws the potential, incorrectly defined as preservative, back to increasingly 'primal' forms of expression. Strangely enough, repetition goes hand in hand here with regression (non-libidinal). This is the meaning of the death drive. However, in the latter case Freud makes a distinction: this restoration of an earlier state is not equivalent to a regression, for regression only has meaning in relation to an earlier fixation. One could say that regression imitates the natural behaviour of the drive while none the less reversing its directionj yet it necessarily comprises an obstacle (fixation) which halts the regressive process. This limit is pushed back much further for the death drive. While I do not share Freud's views on the tendency to return towards inanimate matter, the disorganisation of the death drive finds expression in increas-

the economy Oftime and leaves

the earlier formulations concerning resistance well behind it. However, the key aspects of this dilemma can only be inferred by

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Repetition: Causes and Characteristics

79

ingly de-differentiated forms. It can be seen, then, that the 'conser vatism' of the drive is ambiguous. Politically, a conservative is someone who wants to hold back progress in order to preserve, in the present, conditions that reigned in the past. Conservative does not have this meaning here, since the 'earlier state' is in reality the primal state, which, for Freud, means the soma. The discharge of repetition is in fact an attempt to create a vacuum at the heart of the psychical apparatus. It is in this sense that the compulsion to repeat

unable to respond to the situation adequately. The liquidating aim of frustration gives priority to the necessity of preserving the trace of the psychic event in order to provide an object for thought, based on emotional experience. Many opportunities are thus lost for 'learning by experience'i for enriching the trace by including it within new contexts; for transforming it through a subjective process which partly adjusts circumstances to suit it, imaginatively at leasti and, for making use of it on various levels- in other words, for temporalising it. Moreover, Bion thought that in psychotic structures, all psychic events, whether enacted or not, referred to the model of the act, and thus of what is actual, fantasy included. In this way, the latter entirely vanishes in its form as a wish - which implies waiting, the delay that is sustained by the hope of realisation. It is not a matter of discrediting action in psychoanalytic thought but, on the contrary, of providing it with a theoretical basiS. For one of the aims of elaboration is to guarantee its symbolic value. One could even say that Agieren is the result of de-symbolising the act; reducing it, as it were, to the level of its factuality, as if it had no need of any other meaning than that of obtaining immediate realisation, without a detour, and without a future, by the shortest means. 'Realisation' is a key word: an act 'realises'; it is a substitute for reality, crushing the polysemic value of action through the urgency of its effectivity. We have, then, the image of a closed-circuit func tioning, which is not only unaware of

murder of time. In his 'Notes on the Theory of Schizophrenia' (1954), published posthumously, Bion wrote that the fundamental
is a dilemma of the psyche was to be able to preserve traces of psychic experience in order to elaborate them; or, on the contrary, to evacuate, outside the psyche, the effects of 'nameless dread',2 which makes a sort of evasion possible. In his works he formulated this as modifying frustration by thought or evading it. Modifying frustra tion takes on a precise meaning here; that is, alpha function is brought into play and transforms psychic material into the stuff of dreams, myth and passion. This transformation takes place under the influence of Knowledge,3 and opposes the beta elements which remain attached to purely sensory stimuli, unsuitable for psychic work. It is a genesis of the psyche, in other words, which is dependent on an unknown function whose manifestations are polyvalent. It is true that beta elements are not an easy concept to grasp: they are represented by the iincrease of excitations' in Freud's vocabulary, to which Bion refers, or by 'things in themselves' in Kant's, adapted for the occasion. These products of the psyche, which are eliminated as

differance

(Derrida) but, in

addition, is closed in on itself; its enclosedness isolating it from any perspective of accomplishing its destiny. This explains why it is tempting to liken it to an automatism. In fact, this is the major idea running throughout Freud's work: he wanted to establish the existence of a mode of functioning which is insensitive both to the appeal of reason and to the lessons of experience; but also to the form of wisdom which knows how to avoid the excessive dangers of suffocating isolation or the lethal risk of taking the shortest route. If what I am talking about only had these negative characteristics, one would not be able to understand unless one thinks human behaviour is totally irrational- the grip that repetition-compulsion can have over the psyche. Furthermore, the attraction it exerts is linked with its power to give dynamism to psychical life, to awaken it, to animate it, to impel it towards the most imperious of its purposes, to give the illusion of making it strive to conform with aims connected with human appetites, without having to take account of the exigenGies that are at the root of repression and later

if through a muscular discharge,

cannot be

transformed/ and -resist psychic 'assimilation'; they pave the way for acting out, which repeats their exclusion, and they produce 'psychic denuding'. The mother's capacity for reverie helps to transform beta elements into alpha elements, the alpha function playing a role in the mother's 'mental digestion' of the child's messages. We should notice here on which side the enigma lies. The nurse in Aeschylus' play

Choephoroe

puts it plainly. The compulsion to repeat has to be

understood, therefore, from two angles: as the impossibility of giving up immediate satisfactionj and, since the level of frustration is intol erable, as a violent expulsion from psychic space in a mode reminiscent of action. This is because there has been no relay by the object who is supposed to transform the situation and make it tolerable by relieving the suffering - even though this relief impov erishes the psyche, and in spite of the fact that the object has been

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Repetition: Causes and Characteristics

81

of the super-ego. This is how it is linked with pleasure, though Freud was to call this into question later on for, sometimes, urgency and irrepressibility are such that pleasure itself succumbs to anxiety which knows neither God nor Devil. But acting out is subject to diverse vicissitudes which can include the most mysterious and least expected solutions. Masochism, with which Freud's work closes, provides the most striking example of this. It is therefore necessary to link these vicissitudes of pleasure with criteria that are capable of transforming an organisation of meaning, potentially open, and animated by a force, into a system which is more or less closed - full or empty - on the one hand; or, which is prone to diverse vicisSitudes, the worst and the best, on the other. This brings me back to my concern to differentiate - but also to link up - the two topographical models. That is to say, the unconscious as a system and as an agency, in which representations and affects governed by primary processes prevail and, on the other hand, the id which is also a system and an agency, but is different from the uncon scious in that it is inhabited by libidinal impulses and governed by processes from which representation,

serves as a paradigm, as a model; it is only understandable in this context in terms of specific criteria linking it with its compulsive character. It is thus

part ofinstinctual acting out, and not of action itself.

The expression 'action scheme' is particularly unsuitable for it, since it is not at all schematic. Its purpose is more all-embracing. In the case of action, intentionality, accepting the need for a detour in order to obtain a satisfaction that can be integrated via the paths of meaning which it transmits - but which is always that of a long cycle - distinguishes the act from the acting out by means of which the drive is able to cross the limits of the psyche, either entering the soma or passing over into reality. It is then over-activated, resulting in a short-circuit. It is an act, then, which would sometimes like to pass itself off as action4 - that is to say, which seems to be motivated and backed up by rationality, with certain objectives in sight - an act which can equally be distinguished from the involuntary or symptomatiC actions whose cause eludes consciousness and which behave like parapraxes. The dominating factor, here, is the irre pressibility and need of

Agieren for

instantaneous satisfaction, and

at this level,

is absent. The

not what makes symptomatic acts seem more like stumblings concerning which one may feel slightly ashamed - because their visibility barely disguises the secret satisfaction they procure - and which one would prefer to keep hidden. Whereas, in the preceding case,

psychic representative of the drive alone prevails. As for representation,


in the strict sense of the word, it is too weakly organised or still too overwhelmed by tension straining for discharge - that is, carrying the risk of an explosion rupturing the limits containing it - tobe able to invest other agencies or impose itself in reality. It is clear that from one topography to another we are dealing with the same thing and yet with something different. The first topo graphical system inclines towards wish-fulfilment - 'fulfilment' being understood here as a manifestation which succeeds in making its appearance, if not in reality, at least in the psyche in a 'realisable' form; that is, a form which can

actingS blinds the one who is doing it,

and even, in most cases,

those who witness it. In this sense, compulsion is the most immediate, the most direct and the most massive fate of instinctual (recruitment'. The distance between soma and reality is at its shortest point here. Never has the role of the intermediary area in the psyche, between soma and reality, been so limited. This is why the most expressive forms of

provide a substitute

for reality.

Agieren are

somatisation and perversion (more or less delinquent);

Notwithstanding censorship, it can be apprehended in the uncon scious psyche but does not necessarily involve discharge into external reality. The only thing that matters, then, is that it is taken into account, recorded and represented; and, that this 'fulfilment' is represented on the psychic stage (what we call 'psychic reality'). Conversely, in the second topographical system, this manifestation

and, less directiy, hallucinations. At a more distant level, psychosis is a more efficient attempt to deal with the threat of complete disorganisation, the fruit of instinc

tual anarchy and decathexis; yet it none the less follows the paths of delusion. In the main, psychoanalysis has only approached these entities from the opposite bank of the river, as it were; that is, from the perspective of the neuroses. Incursions here and there have given a glimpse of some of the characteristics forming their config urations. What finally became apparent retrospectively was the circumscribed and highly contained character, when all is said and done, of neurosis.

has to occur in an active manner

(acted out or in hallucinatory form,

or even somatic if these fail) as a perception or an act, and appear energetically in a motor and/or perceptible form which anyone can see - even if everyone, including oneself, is mistaken as to its origins, the form it takes in the mind, and its ultimate purpose. The act, here,

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In short, two solutions emerged: neurosis, appearing more like a caricature than an illness, the burden of seemingly honest people (,honest people are bastards', sang Maurice Chevalier), made it pOSSible, by the cracks and gaps it opened up, to gain an under standing of normality, very similar to it (when seen in its true light, all hypocrisy set aside), by a process of deduction, starting from the reference to unconscious desire. Conversely, borderline cases, which came on to the clinical stage at a later pOint, provided analysts with the opportunity of investigating the limits of wha(was analysable; that is, not only, as one had believed, the frontiers of psychosis, but also depressions, somatic states and certain forms of perverse delin quency and perversion. The compulsion to repeat was frequently present; it formed the real basis of the psychic functioning which could throw light on these clinical considerations precisely where the concept of the unconscious alone had failed to do so. In my opinion, Schreber had showed this very early on; but he was beyond the reach of analytic therapy, having gone far beyond the frontier situating him within the psychotic realm. With the case of the Wolf Man, Freud came nearer to the truth, thanks both to the direct approach to it which analysis allowed and to the new problems encountered regarding analysability. Not only were the limitations of the latter exposed by the experience, but its difficulties had not been foreseeable in earlier pathological descriptions. There was something that eluded analytic understanding. Freud had already had the sad experience of this with the patient whom he referred to familiarly as 'the Russian'. Now, all these organisations imply different relations to time, to the necessity for delay, to the screens which prevent one from under standing this, to the confusions engendered by its various forms, while simultaneously preserving the categories constituting meaning. But, for the time being, I am only concerned with the 'selected fact' (Bion): the compulsion to repeat thanks to which the theoretical mutation came about.
Characteristics of the Compulsion to Repeat

If Freud was not misled by his intuition, and if the compulsion to repeat is indeed the relevant criterion of the change of paradigm which I believe it is - then it is important to analyse its characteris tics in detail.

(a) Compulsion is above all the expression of a force which sometimes compels one to act out, sometimes just to desire, and sometimes to dream, to put oneself in similar or identical conditions, to reproduce affectively, and to act out in accordance with an uncon scious organisation pushing towards the uncontrollable recurrence of the same or of what is identical (Michel de M'Uzan). It is repetition occurring independently of the pleasure principle. This iterative spontaneity gives it the character of an automatism: once activated, the structure underlying it can only react, and react in one way, that of the same stereotypy/reproduction. Acting out is, above all, the effect of an instinctual mobilisation, often resulting from a trauma, or the revival of it or of another trauma which is in some way associated with it, from an insoluble conflict, or an uncontrol lable, inextinguishable and irreversible internal state of tension. The diversity of causes merges into the uniformity of the consequence. But I should add that although the act itself is the most typical expression of repetition, it is as a vicissitude of acting out, beyond the act itself, that I am interested in compulsion. In other words, what is repeated may not be in the order of action - for instance, a traumatic dream - but it is still true that the psychic manifestations which are not originally in the order of an act acqUire its character istics and take on its 'colours' (emblematically speaking). The act is the manifestation of a short-circuit. (b) In the foreground, then, there is something belonging to the psychical order which 'passes' over into an act. This passage is equivalent to a 'realising' statusj that is, a movement which, once the frontier towards acting out has been crossed, is not capable of any transformation of consequence - the external outlet appearing to be a demand to be inscribed in the field of the Real, as if belonged to it. (c) A forced passage then. The parallel with instinct - different from the drive - can be drawn very superficially, the phenomena involved having barely any resemblance. (d) Its essential characteristic is the return of the same. However, the decisive innovation is that repetition is independent of the quest for pleasure. It is no longer a question of repeating in order to rediscover a lost pleasure, but of repeating due to a constraint, which, in certain cases, even makes it possible to observe the untimely return of unpleasure which ceases to be dissuasive or aversive. 'I can't help it.' Concerning those aspects of it that are either strange, or, on the contrary, reassuringly familiar, the discussion remains open.

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Time in Psychoanalysis (e) This compulsion implies that certain elements of psychical life

Repetition: Causes and Characteristics

85

(the rain coat, the shoe, the braid, and so on). Under these conditions, drive activity turns out to be associated, through the medium of the objectalising function, with functions which are inscribed in temporality, from which the object (unlike the drive) has little independence, except through the discontinuity of its relations with the ego and the alternating satisfactions and refusals the latter offers it. It is clear that the key issue in development is

are interconnected. What is repeated is a set of interdependent elements forming a meaningful whole, even when it presents many difficulties for understanding. Without prior binding, there can be no possibility of repetition; just disorganisation with fragmentation and parcelling. But even this orientation can take on the aspect of repetition, as is the case in attacks of depersonalisation primarily affecting the ego (Bouvet 1960). (I) This enclosed nature of repetition, suggesting its solipsistic nature, links it up with certain inchoate forms of narcissism. This is what I tried to elucidate in the relations between narcissism and masochism in analytic failures.6 Masochism presupposes an orien tation towards pleasure. Narcissism only aims at maintaining its form, in an autarchic manner, without taking any object into con sideration. (g) The coherence of Freud's work shows that, although repetition is subject to a principle of no change, all evolution being erased by the return of what is repeated, it is an integral part of all drive func tioning. On the other hand, the work of the death drive is characterised by the more or less unlimited extension of unbinding. I have argued that, although drive fusion is the work of Eros - and one can see the alternation of binding and unbinding in it - when one wants to speak of a configuration in which the death drive dominates, it is necessary to refer to pure unbinding. What is repeated here is a compulsion to undo even that which has been bound by the compulsion to repeat, thereby obscuring the horizon. 7 It may be inferred from this that here ;ye are poles apart from the idea of the timelessness of the unconscious, the prior condition of which is the preservation of unconscious contents which are peri odically exhausted as a result of compulsion. (h) The life or love drives are, in my opinion, bound up with an

objectalisation. This

process of objectalisalion can be lacking, putting the Eros of the life drives in difficulty, or be paralysed and even dissolved by the destructive drives in the service of the disobjectalising funclion. A nuance needs to be introduced here between regression and disob jectalisation. The former refers to a fixation and pursues an earlier libidinal aim; the latter seeks to undo rather than to go backwards. However, the objectalising process which I have linked with the principle of drive activity is not initiated spontaneously. Paradoxi cally, one can say that what makes objectalisation possible, thereby transforming drive activity, is

the intervention of the object in its relation


where the drive reveals itself to the

to time.
In relations to the object psyche when the object is lacking - the autarchic functioning of primary narcissism decreases during objectalisation. As I have pointed out! the latter does not always take the form of a relation with an object, since it serves to constitute internal objects which may only be related in a very distant way with primary objects and may involve psychical functions necessary for constituting the fabric of the ego. Identification is the result of a work of objectalisalion so that the object can be incorporated into the ego which aims at appropriating it for itself. Consequently, I have suggested that the Object contributions, which the ego seeks to appropriate, cover and 'line', as it were, the bottom of the ego, allowing it to take into itself another part of the object-cathexes which it accommodates in the form of its representations, pOSitioned in this containing space, with the help of other object-cathexes. Consequently! the compulsion to repeat! it exceeds certain limits reflecting a self organised and quasi-automatic drive functioning, is evidence - when of a failure of the objectalising process. thereby signifying, This does not mean that this failure always takes the form of an intention to destroy or to destroy oneself directly or indirectly, a desire to destroy the object. Above all, it

objectalising function.

The aim of drive activity being to transform

drives into objects (to be preserved, loved, tortured, hurt, with all the entanglements possible). This description could equally well be applied to partial formations or to people, and even to functions. Conversely, I have defended the existence, within the context of what is called the death drive, working towards unbinding, of a

dis

objectalising function which

prevents objects from being formed or

tends to disqualify, or even to de-qualify those which have been con stituted, cauSing them to lose their unique character or their originality, or even their individuality, relegating them to anonymity

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marks the breakdown of the objectalising function which, it has to be said, is also more or less equivalent to a death sentence. Thus we may deduce that, behind its autarchic aspect, the compulsion to repeat is a demand for return - more than regression - to a blocked process of objectalisation. One should not conclude, however, that, in order to be heard by the object (of the transfer ence), the person making the demand is ready to recognise that his demand has been heard, or that his grievance (in the legal sense) has been recognised, and eventually accepted, at least in intention. It would seem, on the contrary, that a dialogue of the deaf is taking place, the patient complaining that his demand has gone unheeded, even, and especially, when the analyst has heard it and indicated that he has done so. But what the analyst remains deaf to is the patient's need to believe that his demand has not, under any cir cumstances, been heard, thereby maintaining the process of repetition as the only acceptable mode of cathexis because it safeguards and perpetuates

in the dynamic of a 'will' (in Schopenhauer's sense) to impose oneself which excludes any reflexive dichotomisation. It was a strange evolution which, having set out to conquer unconscious meaning in order to free the ego from the fetters limiting its liberty, was in fact obliged to recognise that, in certain cases, which are far from being exceptions, this same ego is totally subjugated by a tyrannical id. What animates such an agency is no longer in the order of desire, but rather a need for an imperative originating from outside itself which allows its erotic and destructive violence to flow. Is this Freudian pessimism or just 'intellectual impartiality' to use Freud's own words?

his cause

which is sometimes more

precious than his life. In any case, it is not enough to Simply hear the cause of the compulsion; it often needs a response in acts more than words, however exact the interpretations they contain may be. Reluctantly, and too often for his liking, the analyst is obliged to recognise the truth of Winnicott's observation that in certain cases he is primarily used for his deficiencies, repeating fatally, as it were, the failure of the maternal environment in infancy. In the space of a few years, Freud passed from the concept of an unconscious as a storehouse of infantile wishes, that is, as an inex-' haustible reserve of desire originating in the green paradise of infantile loves, whose true colours, lying behind the misrecognition, disguises and defeats to which repression had subjected it, could be uncovered by analysis, to this other concept which spoke of a daiinon lurking in the depths of an impersonal id, driving the individual into an infernal Sisyphean struggle which seems as invincible as it is sterile and even, ultimately, insane, eluding any plaUSible explana tion from the point of view of consciousness. While one can only 'imagine that Sisyphus was happy', one cannot overlook the fact that his fate was a punishment inflicted by the gods for having dared to outwit death. These two forms correspond to two logics of time which are as far removed from each other as it is possible to be. The first is apprehended thanks to the diverse world of representation; the second overwhelms the latter and is no longer pathognomonic of the unconscious in favour of strange libidinal impulses caught up

Transference, Repetition, Binding

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Transference, Repetition, Binding

Concerning Transference

What Freud did not see, for obviOUS reasons stemruing from his the oretical choices as well as the unanalysed aspects of his personality, was that the key to all these problems was to be found in his conception of transference. From the outset he made a judgement - an expression of his intel lectual honesty - in relation to a defined method of approach, contrasting that which was transferable, and thus analysable, with that which was not (actual and narcissistic neuroses) and which, consequently, was beyond the analyst's reach. Quite logically, what fell within the scope of analysis, that is to say, transference, even before he had discovered the latter as such, was limited to the transfer ence psychoneuroses which were psychoneuroses producing transference. For it is the general idea of transference that matters more than the observable phenomenon in treatment/ which is only a part of it. First and foremost, it concerns the psychopathological organisation which has the power of mobilising psychic energy in order to displace it from one sphere to another (towards speech and towards the object); and it shouid lead to the recognition that such a displacement cannot occur in a vacuum, but must always be made on to a transfererice object - a similar other whose psyche can be used as a projective mediation for decoding unconscious messages which the subject is often unable to identify in himself spontaneously. The long route which was to lead him to recognise the importance of transference ended in the impasse of 'Analysis Terminable and Inter minable' (1937a). This might be written as'Transference Transferable and Non-Transferable'. Of course, tOday, the idea that the actual neuroses (or their descendants, the somatoses) and the narcissistic neuroses (and the psychoses) do not lend themselves to transference is outdated. What is still true is that there are different modalities of transference work; and what matters is what one can hope to gain from analysing them. Freud was therefore both right and wrong. For the new advances did not deny that there was a difference from the
88

transferences of analysis stricto sensu. We have already seen that when, in 1914, Freud was writing 'Remembering, Repetition and Working-Through', he regarded transference as the ally of resistance in so far as it resisted remembering. The aim was still perfectly clear. The analyst must fill the gaps of memory and overcome the resis tances of repression. It took him a long time - until/Constructions in Analysis' (1937b) - before he could resign himself to the impos sibility of totally lifting infantile amnesia with a view to reconstitnting a complete history. And yet he had already noticed a long time before, that when traumas occur before language is acquired, remembering is impossible. Analysing the resistance alone gives access to the roots of the neurosis. I have already painted out that, in certain cases, transference is a process of actualisation more than one of remembering; for the analysand does not recognise the return of the past in it. He refuses to regard what he is experiendng as repetition, taking it for a new phenomenon which is self-explana tory, and for which there is no need to refer to the retnrn of the past. I propose to call this phenomenon ' amnesic remembering outside the field of conscious and unconscious memories'. A further step was taken when Freud had to separate transference from the pleasure principle and to think of it as repetition without allegiance to this principle. What is at stake in transference is substitution and, beyond that, symbolisation. That is to say, one must dedde whether the latter has been 'efficacious' (Levi-Strauss) or whether the process which might have led to it has come to nothing. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) Freud asserts that it is in transference that repetition is regularly observed. Thus, repetition which, here, Freud calls 'reproduction' to contrast it with remem bering - plays a role in traumatic dreams just as it does in transference. And in a child's play, too - the importance of this point will become clear later on. What is the difference between repro duction and remembering? The answer outlined by Freud concerns, I think, the constitution and destiny of the trace. Reproduction expresses the tendency to repeat the same in the guise of something different, to relive what is repeated because there is no inscription capable of becoming the object of psychical work; that is, there is a constraint to repeat the same almost automatically (with just one difference) as in reproductive sexuality. There is a trace here that has not been constitnted or is barely constitnted. A pictorial image of this would represent it as being so deeply furrowed 'in the flesh of the psyche' that it ceases to be a mere furrow whose path could be

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retraced in order to remind oneself of the theme it contains. The furrow becomes a crevice which swallows up the cathexis entering it. Re-cathected, it pushes towards actualisation more than it tends towards the mere evocation of the event. In other words, there is a reproduction in the mode of 'before' the pleasure principle: the same produces the same and has no need of another to give birth to a new entity (in this case, representation) which would be marked by difference. Here we are faced with a case of cloning (non-sexual) before its time. And somethnes the present situation only has to be remotely evocative of what one is supposed to have experienced already for it to trigger that which most reminds one of it, with whatever means are available in the current situation. The identical is not related to the circumstantial, which produces effects through mobilisation, but to what one may have imagined about the traumas which have left their mark on the psyche. But one should note that this 'imagination' has much more to do with the analyst's work than the patient's capacity. These traumas are thus often inferred retro spectively. What has been inscribed in the flesh of the psyche has torn the psychic tissue and left a scar which can re-open and bleed at any moment. It is sensitive to time, to its reminders, its echoes, but it does not belong to the traditional forms connected with it (memories, reminiscences, involuntary memory, and so on). It is a breach through which cathexis is swept, as if by a torrent carrying with it everything in its path. Paradoxically, it can be argued that the trace is the locus of a process of transformation which continu ally claims that it allows the trace to be bound and symbolised or, on the other hand, that in certain cases, instead of simply being inscribed in the psyche as a mnemic trace, it has become a solution of continuity in the psychic material which, since it is mutilated, can do nothing with it but re-open its wound. Once it is re cathected, the wound opens up again, for it has never really been healed/memorised. And whenever it opens again, it seems to be repeating the act which was wounding; and yet it also seems to be trying to exorcise it. The trauma changes in meaning, as one can see. Ferenczi understood this even better than Freud. If, as Freud says, consciousness appears in place of the mnemic trace, consciousness does not appear when the mnemic trace is lacking. Neither does insight.' In its place, we find this substitute for consciousness, 'reproduction', which signals without signifying, without 'making a sign'. I would readily postulate the formation of an equivalent of the external protective shield which, one should

not forget, helps to form a limiting surface for the individual and has been theorised skilfully by Anzieu in his concept of the 'skin ego'. Here this device has the effect of encapsulating the immediate environment of the wound. This enclosure prevents any mutilating damage but, on the other hand, as it cannot bind, either by intension or extenSion, and thus distribute itself through difference or similitude, it leaves no other solution than pure reproduction. The structure closes in on itself and isolates itself in an attempt to delimit the grievance; it can no longer function except in an isolated, cut off state, in the manner of compulSion, trying to ward off the distress it awakens, only succeeding in evacuating it at the price of the act condemned to repetition. The object has anticipated neither the wound, nor its encapSUlation, nor the psychic anaesthesia resulting from this isolation. Nor has it been able to inscribe it within an ensemble which opens it to meaning; or prevent any new mobil isation from merely resulting in reproduction. Thus compulsion is a sign both of the trauma which has given rise to the isolating and protective encapsulation, and of the silent cry directed at the object to

signal the subject's distress and make it 'reflect' - both in the sense ofiden tifYing with the child and of thinking of a way to ward off his distress. This amounts to saying that the object will have to experience its defidency as a tutelary power. Winnicott's entire work is about this. The
compulsion to repeat is a ruse of identity. By means of it, the subject finds himself on familiar ground and, at the same time, finds himself. But this identity is useless to him since it cuts him off from others, that is, from the object, without allowing him to profit from this solitude either. The compulsion to repeat implies very strong binding that cannot be condensed. This over-powerful 'intraassodation' does not allow for any 'interassociation'. The strength of the intrastructural links impedes the formation of interstructural links. Everything here lends itself to contradictory judgements. Primal experiences are not present in the bound state and so, to a certain extent, are unsuited for trans formation into secondary processes. When, in spite of everything, this occurs, it happens under the auspices of omnipotent, objectivis ing rationalisations, reflecting a state of mind which is reminiscent not so much of character disorders as of a protest bordering on paranoia without delUSion, in which a persecuting relation, nourished by all the resources of a passionate logic that admits of no questioning, is secretly cultivated. But Freud also says that it is this absence of binding that favours the creation of the wishful fantasies

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which appear in dreams. He switches, apparently without realising it, from one register to the other. When he emphasises the .absence of binding in the traces of primal experiences, his purpose is to show how patients who reproduce do not remember. Then he invalidates this proposition by pointing out that this absence of binding favours dreams. If this were the case, the patient would begin to make advances in awareness. Freud forgets, then, that such dreams would have certain similarities, if not in their form, at least through the use that the psyche makes of them, with the dreams of traumatic neurosis, in which no pleasure can be detected. Binding, Beyond Pleasure Contemporary psychoanalysis has sought to resolve these difficul ties by separating itself from Freud's solipsistic point of view; it has drawn on the lessons of clinical experience and reconsidered his speculations as a whole in the light of object-relations. There were many reasons that led Freud to minimise its role. The most important was his conviction that pre-eminence should be given to the drive, an intermediary concept between

and speculative reflection. Theoretically, he reiterates his constant concern not to confuse the function, which has a fundamental axiomatic value, and the tendency, which is a partial, phenomenal manifestation of it. The function is attributed here to binding; the tendency to the pleasure principle. We should notice what is new in this statement. Formerly, the function was to reduce tensions to their lowest possible level, or, failing this, to a constant level. Now it was binding which played the role of a primordial function. Attempting to reconcile the two hypotheses would raise a number of problems containing contradictions. What is the situation that generates the tensions which need to be reduced most urgently? The state of unbound processes or the states of unpleasure? Are they necessarily connected? This is perhaps the right moment to recall Winnicott's useful distinction between unintegrated states and states of disinte gration. According to Winnicott, the former can be experienced with pleasure. On this issue, Freud remained evasive. The function obliges us to deal with the complicated problems raised by the subordina tion of pleasure to binding, and to the latter'S antedority. This raises questiOns about the conditions that allow the sovereignty of the pleasure prindple to be established, given that it no longer comes first. Logically, this sovereignty appears to be dependent on a principle that determines its appearance. But which? And, if there is one, is there not a risk of it dethroning the pleasure principle? This distinction had been present in Freud's mind since the IProject' where he drew attention to the importance of keeping the amount of excitation at the zero level or as low as possible; or, failing this, at least at a constant level. Freud could not decide which of these various situations should be regarded as overriding the others. He none the less concluded that all of them shared an aspiration for qUiescence, which, ultimately, means the inorganic state.3 One can see from reading Freud that he was divided between restating old truths and discovering new conceptsi and the various aspects of this problem were scarcely ever in harmony. How, indeed, could the new discovery that binding precedes the pleasure principle be conciliated with the idea of aspiring for quiescence which had been present in his thought from the first? Binding can only serve one of these aims; keeping excitation at a constant level. One has difficulty in seeing it identified with keeping the amount of excitation as low as pOSSible, and even less with the absence of excitation. Unless, that is, we accept that binding has only been established to extinguish excitation, which is debatable. The only justification for binding is

bios

and

psyche which

goes hand in hand with the idea of the object's contingency - the latter being the easiest factor to substitute in the drive assembly when it is enVisaged in the context of its relation to the concept of drive. Another vicissitude of the object's function was Freud's aban donment of the libido theory: this had been limited to opposing narcissism and object-relating from a perspective which he challenged on the pretext that it might be suspected of accommo dating]ung on account of its supposed monism; but, in fact, the real reason was to save the central thesis of conflict with its roots in the depths of the psyche. Then came a redistribution of the cards in the theory which opposed the drives according to different polarities, constructive or destructive. Last but not least, there was the fact that he was little inclined to get personally involved in the analytiC process with his patients or, consequently, to grant an important role to the analyst's own action. Perhaps Freud wanted to avoid a possible source of criticism challenging the subjectivism of analytic theories and their relativity in relation to the person of the analyst. The speculation of

Beyond the Pleasure Principle

may be summed

up by the sentence of the last chapter: 'The binding is a preparatory act which'introduces and assures the dominance of the pleasure principle:2 Such is the conclusion of his long clinical, theoretical

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to create an ensemble which acquires meaning by bringing together elements that are insufficiently meaningful in isolation, that is to say, a structural suture. For what purpose? The aim is to make it possible to recognise lbe subsequent situations which are similar to the bound series; lbereby avoiding, each time, the need to begin the work of elaboration all over again, with a tendency towards repeating, in order to reach and safeguard pleasure. The question arises: under what sign is binding carried out? Under the sign of the

formation of a constituted grid which will be evoked in every case having something in common with lbe bound ensemble. It is repro duction of an analogical type, dictated by the necessity of positing a number of minimum reference points which still have to be linked up with a referent. But once he had drawn the lessons from this rev olutionary discovery, Freud returned to the question of binding. The latter is formed in order to constitute the lineaments of meaning; and, through the transition of primary processes to secondary processes. He was very familiar with this latter mode of binding which is why he returned to it. But it was because he could not entirely conceive of the fonner, which was really beyond - one should say 'short of' - the pleasure principle, as if he was trying to save the pleasure principle, in spite of the examples he himself had given of situations where it could not be invoked. He found it difficult to admit that the pleasure principle might find its raison d'etre, outside the infant, in the object. That is to say, that it might be necessary to introduce the pleasure of the object. The question cannot be answered for the moment; but what is sig nificant is the way in which Freud chose to treat it. He forced himself to make a detour via biology, returning to the origins of sexuality which shows that pleasure, psychosexuality and sexuality cannot be dissociated in his thinking; and, that the link between binding and reproduction has many areas of resonance, notably with the con temporary idea of replication, by going beyond the dialectic sexual drives/ego drives, and by distributing its values differently: life (or love) drives/death (or destructive) drives. This investigation into lbe arcana of biology in Beyond the Pleasure Principle was an impasse, a theoretical strategy which did not prove convincing; and we should not pretend otherwise. Freud only resorted to biological arguments - in a way which barely masked their lack of logic - in the last instance, even if he continued to maintain his postulates concerning the psyche's foundations. On lbe olber hand, we should not forget that the work following immediately afier Beyond the Pleasure Plinciple was no olber lban Group Psychology and the Analysis ofthe Ego (1921) in which the role of the object, the object taken in its social context, linked with its role in identification, was given prominence. Never theless, Beyond the Pleasure Principle was not in vain; for Freud had grasped an essential factor: the facts which had led him to identify a 'beyond the pleasure principle' pleaded in favour of a quantitative and qualitative re-evaluation of destructiveness (which is not sadism or even aggressivity) in psychic life. Sadism was no longer enough,

danger of non-meaning and possibly of disorganised chaos; without anything other being acquired through primal binding than a network of meaning which is constantly threatened because nothing allows it, at this stage, to develop and consolidate itself. It still lacks the guide of the pleasure principle which will have an orienting function. One can
understand the necessity to distinguish between pleasure which is established, recognised and appreciated, and the orientation towards pleasure which has not yet been attained. Freud's realisation, in 1920, that there was a Beyond the Pleasure Principle, has to be compared with his relinquishing of the neurotica in 1897 if we are to grasp the full extent of its importance. In fact, even though Freud recognised thiS, he could not bring himself to accept it. Thus we see him retreating from, and contradicting, his title in order to return to his first loves, continuing to stress the importance of the pleasure principle. He none the less made a recti fication: at the beginning of mental life the struggle for pleasure was far more intense, but 'it had to admit to frequent interruptions'.4 In other words, independence vis-a-vis the pleasure principle is simply a sign of the impossibility of attaining it under certain circum stances, of preserving it, maintaining it and attempting to re-find it. Recognising this truth involves accepting the anteriority of binding wilb regard to pleasure; though our curiosity remains partially unsat isfied because Freud seems to have been incapable of theorising the role of the object in this context. Freud's predicament is apparent each time he deals with the problem of binding. He was caught between the horns of a dilemma. He wanted to speak about 'primal' binding, which led him to link repetition and binding, independently of pleasure, but no doubt prior to it - logically speaking. Remember, 'it is a preparatory act which introduces and assures the dominance of the pleasure principle'S by virtue of a reproduction - being the only form of memory possible - a narcissistic reproduction, as it were (finding wilbin itself its own raison d'etre). This reproduction leads to the

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and masochism was not always secondary. His approach was undoubtedly still rather hesitant, since

connected with pain, can be elucidated by libidinal co-excitation. But I am afraid he was mistaken. It should not be explained as occurring

Group Psychology makes no

mention of the destructive drives whose active role is obvious here. Repeating is a more serious matter than regressing. Regressing makes it possible to restore, after an arrest due to fixation, the movement towards progression; whereas repeating is an iterative stagnation of movement, a figure and metaphor of death. It was not until four years later that an answer was found. It was still connected with a theoretical point whose importance had already been glimpsed but not developed. In

in spite ofpain but because afit; hence its association with

hate, something Freud rarely dwells on. For it is a question of preventing the latter from spreading uncontrollably by binding it. Repetition becomes linked with the cathexis of painful affects and has the role of checking the invasion by painful stimuli. Although it has not succeeded in mastering the pain, binding has none the less managed to capture it, circumscribe it, contain it within certain limits, and even, I would say, give it a narcissistic qualification, as a primary form of appropriation. It has been appropriated, but it has not, as yet, been assimilated by the ego. This opens the way for the sovereignty of the pleasure prinCiple which may even be able to embrace pain under the aegis of pleasure. Nevertheless, what is lost en route in Freud's elaboration is his remark that the compulsion to repeat is first noticed in the trans ference, 'in the relations with the person of the doctor', as he says. There is therefore a deliberate intention on Freud's part not to admit of too much confusion between the object of the drive and the object of the transference. It is as if the object of the transference were secondary, of less fundamental importance, because it appears later; and so is less elementary than the object of the sexual drive, the latter being a primal and fundamental force whose object is considered as part of the drive apparatus assembly. It has become common to oppose the standard interpretation of the drive as directly cathecting its object with another interpretation of it as a circuit in which the object is assumed to be situated in the detour that the drive cathexis is obliged to make (Lacan). But for Freud the object must be contingent. In his eyes, its most striking property is that it can be sublimated; that is, displaced, which is why we come across it again, without realising it, in forms of cultural life. The disM placement takes place very early on; so early even that, when it is not available in the outside world, it can be found on the body itself of the

Beyond the Pleasure

Principle,

Freud speaks at a certain moment of (the mysterious

masochistic trends of the ego', without saying any more. None the less, he recognised that primary masochism might be at work here.6 This was new. In

1924, in 'The Economic Problem of Masochism', the questions raised in Beyond the Pleasure Principle were reconsid
ered. Now, Freud described a principle prior to the pleasure principle, which he connected with the death drive: the principle of Nirvana. He was taking up again, then, the idea of the function which tends

to reduce tensions to the level zero. Moreover, it will be recalled that he had already made allusions in

Beyond the Pleasure Principle

to

Barbara Low's views on the question. So, on the one hand he restated the secondary position of the pleasure principle but, on the other, he forgot that he had discovered the anteriority of binding, 'repressed' here in favour of his earlier ideas concerning the prindples of inertia and constancy. In other words, he was advancing the hypothesis antagonistic to binding; that is to say, the reduction of tensions to the level zero, or unbinding leading to nothingness. This contradic tion had not as yet met with its solution; namely, that beyond/short of the pleasure principle there exists a situation in which there are two competing antagonistic possibilities, that is, primal binding or primal unbinding, unrelated to a state of pleasure, but depending on a new axiomatic pair: organisation (and self -organisation)/disor ganisation (and self-disorganisation). Now the solidity of the hypothesis of binding is more convincing than that of the lowering of excitations. Moreover, Freud recognised, did he not, in this same text that there are pleasurable tensions and unpleasurable relaxations of tension? Nevertheless, by defending libidinal co-excitation in his description of masochism, Freud achieved a breakthrough in his search for a solution to the problem. This was a line of investigation which he did not follow up suffi ciently. The original binding, which will even repeat experiences

inf ans. The truth is,

Freud set great store on his theory of auto

erotism and on the secondary discovery of the external object. Another question concerns the relation part/whole. Faced with the excessive realism of the advocates of object-relations, many authors 'boldly' defend the idea that any Object is necessarily a part-object and that, when all is said and done, there is no whole object. Too bad for Melanie Klein, Abraham and their followers. This problem cannot be resolved with lapidary formulations. In my opinion, part-

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objects and whole-objects co-exist, but that is another story which cannot be told here ? To accept the object's role in the theory from the outset, following the model provided by the relationship to the object in the transference, involves the risk of seeing the pedestal of the Freudian construction collapse, based as it is on eroticism originally linked to the relationship with the body, the starting platform for what would later become the ego. And it is not the idea of a graft of the object at the SOurce

Fairbairn maintained that the libido was not pleasure-seeking but object-seeking.8 Freud's positions on the existence of a

beyond the

pleasure principle had already intimated as much. Only Freud did not say that the aim of repetition was object-seeking, since the object was nothing other than the means by which the sought-after libidinal satisfaction could he obtained. As for regarding the quest for safety or security as a justification for change, this would make hell superfluous.

(objet-source,]. Laplanche)

that

will persuade me of the contrary. The search for a solution to the problem of repetition thus involved two lines of enquiry: first, the relation to pleasure, an issue discussed but not satisfactorily resolved by Freud, and second, the relation to the object. The latter was glimpsed and deliberately underestimated by Freud, then rediscov ered by Melanie Klein and Fairbairn but transposed into quite another framework of thinking. One should note, however, that post-Freudian authors, even when they have drawn inspiration from object-relations theory, have, for the most part, not proposed solutions that are any more convincing concerning the questions raised by the compulsion to repeat. One solution, from which analysts used to recoil, though this is no longer the case, is to deny its existence. It would seem} if I am to believe certain recent echoes, that this step has now been taken. No answer has been given, however, to the mystery of the most troubling illustration of it: that is to say, the negative therapeutic reaction. The place given to the object was to lead, in the long term, to the eclipsing of the drive. But we have not been told how the Object should behave to avoid it or dispose of it. Why am I dwelling at such length on this metapsychological discussion which is apparently so far removed from my theme? The reason is because it is in fact related to my subject much more directly than might at first be supposed. The question of the role of the pleasure/unpleasure principle lies at the root of the problemat ics of time. For it is in connection with it that the positions of expecting and searching for the return of pleasant experiences, as well as the possibility of attaining them directly or by virtue of a detour, and so on, emerge. And similarly, the signals of unpleasure will endeavour to avoid anticipating the emergence of anxiety, forestall situations of danger and mobilise warning systems by summoning the object urgently. The question is very much, then, one of kriowing if it is binding that will give us access to the dimension of time or the pleasure principle and its vicissitudes.

The Object and the Drive

101

10

The Object and the Drive

An

Object: What For?

This is a question one might have put to Fairbairn, who introduced the notion of object-seeking. And one would have noticed, in the answer, the return of Puritanism against sexuality, in an attempt to challenge the place Freud gave to the latter, and to minimise yet further the role of the sexual drive and its link with pleasure. Fairbairn took issue explicitly with Freud's hedonism, suggesting that the psyche had less futile purposes such as warding off anxiety, assuring tranquillity or stability, increasing the sense of security and so on. Once again we come across the idea that human beings are good, seeking only to live in peace,'full of 'experience and reason'.! Perhaps this is not such a bad thing, since we have paid for OUI dis obedience by being driven out of the Garden of Eden. But there are other solutions Freud did not think of. There can be no doubt that there are processes of repetition which prove to be independent of the pleasure principle. But why should we not, fol/owing the example of the negative therapeutic relationship, consider the compulsion to repeat as the subversion ofthe pleasure prindple, fol/owing a f ailure suffered by the latter, in conditions which allow it to establish itself and which involve the object's participation? And why should this failure not be attributed to a conflict for which a solution has not been found between drive functioning, on the one hand, and the relationship to the object, on the other? If a different solution is to be accepted, it must not involve sacrificing the thesis of auto-erotism, or that of primary narcissism, or that of the discovery of the object, which presupposes its loss at a given moment and its rediscovery, at a later point, establishing relations with reality. The object, then, has to be 're-found', after the objects which formerly brought satisfaction have been lost. What was the status, then, of these objects when the pleasure principle alone prevailed? Such a state, as Freud taught us, is part of the context of a primary narcissistic organisation, whose existence is only pOSSible, however, 'provided one includes with it the care it [the infant] receives from its mother' " I propose to consider the compulsion to repeat as a state that is established subsequent to the two stages of primal binding and the
100

breakdown of the pleasure prinCiple. It arises, then, from the impos sibility of elaborating an acceptable, compatible solution between drive functioning - erotic and destructive - and dialogue with the object. This incompatibility cannot be explained solely in terms of the drive, any more than it can be explained simply by the lack of the object; but, in any case, it is a product of the coupled drive/object relation. This state generates neither a regreSSion, nor a fixation, nor a defence, but a subversion of the fundamental purposes of the relation between the object and the infant's ego (barely differenti ated from the drives) which endeavour to promote development; that is, which favour the emergence of temporality and the institu tion of the difference between mother and infant, ego and object, desire and defence, and erotism and destructiveness, It has become common to stress the object's uniting function. This function is undeniable, provided one adds that it is duplicated by a discriminating function, the aim of which is to establish differences between erotism and destructiveness, As I have already indicated, the object is clearly absent in the compulsion to repeat, but all the manifestations of the latter urge it to manifest itself, crying out to it. For instance, the wound of an uncompleted task or one that has gone awry, which, while struggling to get out of the quagmire that is in danger of swamping it, Sinks further into it; or, the reproach addressed to a stranger whose role should have been to offer help but who, instead, seems to be encouraging the shipwreck, even provoking iti or again, it may be an apostrophe containing a final hope that this time help will be forthcoming at the height of the cat astrophe but before its conclUSion. All these implicit characteristics point towards an unfathomable, unrepresentable, inaccessible object, in such a way that what has to be repeated and experienced each time, what is 'reproduced', is the act of survival thanks to which the subject has been rescued in extremis, but one which none the less leaves him permanently mutilated. Yet, even without the object's partiCipation, he is ready to renew this mutilation indefinitely; or can conceive of no other outcome than one of a suspended precip itation. For even if the analyst responded to this appeal in the transference, his intervention would be ignored and rejected; partly out of vengeance, and partly through the desperate affirmation of someone who is more dead than alive, haunted by the desire to have someone recognise what has happened to him; that is, who is reduced to dereliction in a situation of distress without end. And by

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making use of this situation, he himself seeks to ignore the role played by the object, out of despair, helplessness or vengeance (negating the object). For paradoxically, the analyst - Winnicott dixit

renewal. It is often difficult to deCide which of the two forms, the similar or the identical, is at work. What one can say is that the latitude left to the creative power of the psyche can be appreciated by the margin of play that is preserved in the treatment of what tends to become rigidified through the return of these manifesta tions. This is the reason why play acquired the position of a key concept in Winnicott's work. Play also appears to be a freely inter preted repetition of another psychic event, the origin of which may have been lost. He provides an admirable demonstration of this in

- is the

mother, without being able to be her, since she is, and can

only be, unique. In the final analysis, no settling of accounts can ever resolve the dispute between the wounded ego and the object at fault. Did not Winnicott say that when suffering goes on too long, only the object's absence has reality; and that, in the future, whether it is present or absent makes no difference, since the consequences of the effect of failure induced by its unavailability have acquired a referential value? Henceforth, the only thing that counts is the 'negative side of relationships'. A comparison can be made here with

Playing and Reality (1971). In the compulsion to repeat there is a need


for repeating play and to be free of this need in order to formulate a grievance that has not been attended to. This appeal is also addressed to the court of individual history so that it can judge the crime of which the subject claims to be the victim. While he never stops speaking about the prejudice that it has caused him, he acts as if he were the prosecutor demanding that compensation be awarded for the ravages of a time that can no longer move on 3 This may also obscure the fact that he played the role of the executioner - unwittingly. This appeal also has another function; that of a booster, in the sense in which it is used for a vaccination. It is as though what is being played out here is an immune system ready to mobilise its defences against an eventual aggressor who is constantly solicited. Elsewhere, I have said that the compulsion to repeat can be linked up with a paradoxical form of memory in effect, this description has really appeared too often in my writing for it not to be regarded as a structural particularity of psychoanalytic concepts - since I have called it

nothing and the no-thing (no sign of the object's presence). While the nothing can only refer to nothing ness, emptiness, the sense of not existing, the no-thing still has the
Bion's distinction between the resource of calling on the psyche to provide a substitution for that which is not where it is expected to be. This is already a matrix of symbolisation, since there is an attempt (or temptation) to make a substitution. We can therefore consider the solution offered in Winnicott's theory of the creation of the transitional object which is produced in the mode of a potential reunion in the very space where the separation occurred. It is easy to understand how all these conceptions which give prominence, directly or indirectly, to sym bolisation, are in fact concerned with the creativity of the psyche. Is this not what Freud was thinking of in his description of halludna tory wish-fulfilment and fantasy? If one thinks about it carefully, contemporary formulations lay more stress on the forms of

return,

that is, of what once existed and exists no longer, but is now called on by the psyche. All this presupposes a moment of suspension; that is, a vacant period prior to searching for alternative solutions. This is what is suggested by theories of chaos. Chaos does not allow an elaboration leading to a solution. The position is either one of a terrifying void or one of compression, a sort of over-condensation in which the respiration of the psyche leads almost inevitably to its apnoea. The advantage of these additions to Freudian theory is that it is not just a matter of getting in touch again with what has been lost, but of stimulating, in this process of rediscovery, the activation of something that is new, other and different. Everything was thrown into question again by the discovery of the compulsion to repeat - a sign of sterility because of its eternal

amnesic memory'. Something re-emerges in someone, beyond his memory, concerning something else which resembles it and yet is different.
I

But the risk of forgetting it is too great. So, under the pressure of a danger that is sensed more than it is perceived, memory formations react en masse. Here, then, we have one of the modalities of repetition, where it is mobilised en bloc, differing from the mode in which it assumes the appearance of a patiently constructed montage. It seems to maintain its regreSSive and progressive movement of its own accord. On the one hand, there is a blind, global sensibilisa tion, in which realisation seems as imperious as it is unavoidable and, on the other, there is a finely tuned mechanism, but one that is as implacable as an infernal machine which governs the course of destiny right down to the last and smallest detail.4

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The Two Ohjects Having discovered infantile sexuality, which showed that the sexual drive was at work from the beginnings of life, Freud only had to make the shortest of detours in order to tackle the question of neurosis. Although he defined it as the negative of perversion, he did not say predsely what this negativity consisted of. Of course, the action of repression was seen as the cause of the change of sign. The continu ation of Freud's work would, however, reveal the ambiguity of the status of repression. It was both one defence among others and also the defence which served as a model for the others. At the end of his work, the relation between repression and the other defences became less clear. This defensive model is less radical or easier to grasp than others, such as disavowal or splitting, whose effects are more disguised. Shortly after, he discovered that the ego is unconscious of its own defences, in other words, that repression remains in place even when an interpretation, however correct, has been given to the patient, Freud described step by step two cases which demonstrate the subtle and crafty strategies of the defensive system. With negation, he showed that intellectual acceptance of the repressed leaves the latter intact. In other words, the truth has to be invested - emotionally, of course, - to be recognised. The second case also dealt with apparent acceptance but in another form: alongside the recognition accepting the judgement of reality, there may co-exist a corresponding refusal which neutralises this recognition without doing away with it or limiting it to an intellectual process. Here, it was perception which was drawn into the peculiar phenomenon that was to acqUire increasing importance, that is! splitting. What is disavowed in this way can exist happily alongside a recognition which is none the less a gain, albeit not of decisive value. But the disavowal is neither lifted nor, so to speak, rendered harmlessi it survives intact. Hence the difficulty of arriving at a recognition that obeys sequential causality: 'Since this . . . then that.' Instead itis more likely to be: 'Maybe yes, but maybe no.' As they say amusingly in Switzerland: 'I'm neither for nor against; quite the contrary.' When Freud was led to give a central status to the compulsion to repeat, he was just as surprised as a chicken would be if it had laid a duck. In fact, having linked the fate of sexuality to neurosiS, Freud con structed his theory without realiSing that he was analysing - at all levels,

discreet, has none the less played a decisive role in the construction of the clinical picture as well as in the transference - which,

a priori,

is what makes analysis possible. This is not confined to the patient's mental functioning, but also concerns his cathexis of real objects, his capacity to accept their temporary suspension - which does not mean abandoning them - and his readiness to accept the conven tions of the setting, not by submitting to the analyst but by acknowledging the conditions under which analytiC work, mimetic of psychic work, and a mode of symbolising the latter, is possible. Lastly, it concerns his accessibility to someone else's interpretation, which does not mean he is readily suggestible. The three aspects are interconnected and contribute to making analysis an experience which, if it is conducted well, it can be brought to its conclusion. What Freud says about the death drive at the end of

Beyond the

Pleasure Principle, namely,

that it works in silence, can equally be said

of the object - I mean the real object. Although the fantasmatic object is able, by itself, to make the clamour of life and the action of Eros heard, it can only do so if the anaclitic object has already fulfilled its role. Earlier, I pointed out the contradiction that exists in Freud's conception of the Object: when he is referring to the Object which is internal to the drive assembly, it is a contingent object which can be displaced and substituted. That is to say, in this case, the object is subordinated to the libido which is perpetually in search of new, 'fresh' cathexes, says Freud, just as the ogre has need of fresh fiesh, in fairy tales. But there is another conception of the object, which Freud sets out in 'Mourning and Melancholia'

(1917), where it is

conceived of as whole, irreplaceable and unique. The breast is a part object, but as, at the time, it is the only one, it functions as a whole object, embracing the mother in her entirety. To such an extent that, when it is lost, the ego sacrifices itself, not simply in order to fill the hole left by its loss, but in order to partially transform itself and take the place of that which is no longer there. What is involved here is not substitution but identification (primary), which is an alteration of the ego. The altered ego is colonised by the other, which, when it existed, had scarcely attained the status of an individual entity. Its existence now has to be inferred beneath the peculiar functioning adopted by the ego which, one suspects, barely resembles itself any longer, and so has to disguise the voice of the other in whose place it is speaking. And it is here that one can become aware of the silent work accomplished by the object, which

practically and theoretically - patients

who came within the

category of clinical entities where the work of the object, though

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only comes to light when the consequences of its definitive aban donment or its loss appear. Our most ordinary form of cathetic energy (so ordinary that denying the existence of such a powerful force is a temptation frequently adopted) never signals its existence better than through its withdrawal, during depression. However, time is abolished in depreSSion, something phenomenologists have understood for a very long time. This was what Freud could not see. Fascinated by his discovery of the role played by sexuality as a driving force behind our quest for pleasure, our appetite for living intensely, and our thirst for an object - often idealised for the purpose of satisfying it - he used it as a support because it is the paint where the order of the world, the appetite for pleasure and the basis of subjectivity coincide. 'That's all they think about.' But it is also because with the sexual, and in a manner that cannot be dissociated from it, with the unconSCiOUS, a level of coherence is attained in which the effects of desire, alterity, detour and delay are intertwined. For desire - unrealistic, imperious and demanding - always counts on the possibility of realisation and does not hesitate to mobilise the resources of fantasy for the most improbable materialisations. This is what I have described under the name of the 'logic of hope'. 5 The unconscious is indeed, then, a 'reserve of time' with a potential for accomplishment, which is con stituted in such a way that it contrives to bring about a realisation elsewhere and differently when circumstances are not favourable to it. Hope may be said to have found refuge in the unconscious and to have re-surfaced - opportunity making the thief - thanks to the primary processes. At the beginning of his work, Freud called these primary processes 'posthumous' because the existence he attributed to them, which was assumed to disappear in the course of develop ment, in fact showed that they are constantly ready to become active again when circumstances demand it; that iSt when reality refuses to fit in with the subject's desires. Should we say that this reserve has only been formed with this realisation in view, or that, once formed, it only serves this aim secondarily? Basically, it makes little differencei for what needs to be understood is that desire does not consent to die. The picture is now taking shape: ignorance of time, contradiction and death. It will even feign to disappear, like Juliette, who drinks the potion given to her by her brother Laurent, aimed at giving her the outward aspect of death so that she can escape an unwanted marriage and wake up later with the hope of eventually accomplishing her union with Romeo. Alterity is implicit here; for

however influenced the subject is by the projections aroused by his desire, the object, which is inside him - and in respect of which he carefully preserves the relics of wishes going back to infancy - also always exists outside him. More specifically, the nature of the duality is such that one can only accept the object's double existence. The latter is internal - not in Melanie Klein's sense} where it is more in the order of the unrepresentable - but in Freud's sense as an object of unconscious phantasy. Without doubt, it eludes direct appre hension, but it can be imagined (constructed?) by the preconscious extensions of the wishes concerning it. Finally, it is also located in the external world as a necessary condition for realiSing satisfaction, provided that this external version fits in with its internal image. Inevitable disparities sometimes arise. The object is thus subject to the uncertainties arising from the fact that it is discovered to be different. It is not sufficient to say of time that it is oriented by the expectation that unconscious wishes will be realised. The structure that characterises it in the field of desire, as the phenomenon of Nachtraglichkeit shows, is that of a contretemps. I say a Icontretemps' because something has thwarted such a desire for realisation, that is, an obstacle representing the prohibiting agency and referring to thirdness. It is also a contretemps because it has been constituted against the course of temporal evolution; its realisation being prohibited. In spite of its apparent submission, it reacts to this situation by keeping the desire for realisation in a state of latency, making it possible to await realisation at a later time when the cir cumstances are more favourable. It is clear that reserve and latency have very similar meanings; but it is the process of keeping something in reserve that throws light on latency. In a way, it provides the justification for it. In development, latency indicates the faint voice of a premature, non 'agree-able' activity, condemned to structural and not simply conjunctural failure, which will attain the level of the tragedy of childhood in the outcome of the Oedipus, doomed to failure. Prematurity is not the only cause. Consciousness of this precociousness, resulting in failure, is repressed owing to the almost indelible, narcissistic injury it entails. It is justified in the eyes of consciousness by the absence of conditions favourable to its sat isfaction or by the judgement that is put in the service of the unconscious which rationalises the reasons why this is impossible. Hence the fantasy of murdering the rival which, if one thinks about it well, would change nothing if the real obstacle is the prematurity, ferociously concealed, of desire. The motive of wanting to get rid of

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someone is not sufficient justification in itself; it is much more a question of the difficulty of accepting that another person is enjoying what you have been refused. For the unconscious, no judgement of reality is definitive; one simply has to await the right moment. It will certainly come. Setting up a device like the wooden reel game and making it serve

What gives it these characteristics in the description ofmelancholy is its adherence to narcissism, but these char acteristics are not limited to it To the extent that one can sense
implicitly the trace of a deficiency on the object's part in this behaviour, which only reproduces, what is aimed at here, by default, is in fact the primary object which no longer carries out its basiC functions because the infant cannot find a substitute for it. This object, which is included in the system governed by the pleasure principle, makes sure that such functioning, for which it is answerable/ is possible - it is often referred to as an object that can be 'leaned on'. I would like to propose the expression 'covering object', since the mother Icovers' the needs of the infant who cannot do without this coverage on account of his prematurity.7 If pleasure can barely function in these cases as a directing principle of psychic processes, it is because the protective 'coverage! of the object which looks after the essential needs, wards off all the major dangers and guarantees psychic management with devotion and self-abnegation so that subjective omnipotence can develop. This

ad usum deJphini

is evidence of

confidence in oneself, faith in the future, a capacity for transposiH tion/ which provide reasons for hoping that/ even if desire is not realised, one will have sufficient resources to find consolation in oneself. The treasure was not found, but the voyage was beautiful, and that is just as valuable as finding the treasure. The mother cannot disappear for ever. This, then, is why the compulsion to repeat took Freud by surprise. He refused to find an answer in the role of the object, looking for the key, instead, in an element intrinsic to the drive. On the other hand, he 'denuded'6 drive func tioning at the same time as he described/ as it were/ its abortion, cutting short its eventual transformations into unconscious mani festations/ even though the unconscious is supposed to free itself from the restricting exigencies of time. To a certain extent, his attempt was fruitful; for, by exposing the ' daemonic' aspect of the compulsion to repeat, he unearthed the roots of our moorings in drive functioning. His relative failure was elsewhere; it was theoret ical. By being obliged to introduce the concept of the death drive, Freud had exposed a vulnerable flank to criticism. Clinically, however/ one cannot say he was wrong; for the compulsion to repeat, pushed to its extreme limits, is indeed evocative of an organ isation that is more deadly than that of mere drive functioning. And though the life drive is supposed to accomplish ever-greater syntheses by gathering and binding together larger and larger ensembles with the help of the energy of Eros, while having, in the very course of its progress, to thwart the tendency towards stagnation, it is true that the destructive compulsion to repeat strives, for its part/ to ignore! and even to undermine/ any coheSion, any plan for accumulation or evolution, prior to the transformations

must exist so that

it can subsequently be relinquished (Winnicott). 'The mother keeps watch', says Anna Potamianou. Itis less a matter of care than of what is rightly referred to as 'primary object love'. But the fact that the mother dispenses 'primary object' love does not mean that the infant responds to her in the same way; for there is a prevalence, at the beginning of life, for withdrawing into the world of sleep where object relations, which are undeniable yet ephemeral, are drowned in the endorsement of narciSSism, no doubt equally 'primary', under maternal protection. However, this somewhat idyllic, and yet quite Inatural' picture, is biased more often than one thinks, putting an end prematurely to primary narcissism, thereby obliging the infant to take into account the object's 'reality' (Winnicott). The situation frequently compromises the ideal state and almost necessarily destroys it - more or less, that is, more or less irremediably. In fact the inaccuracies of Freudian theory have not yet been cleared up. For although the object of melancholy is attached to narcissism, it remains the object of cannibalistic oral incorporation, or the object of an erogenous zone; an object, therefore, which is inevitably objectal but whose libidinal action, in this case swallowing, leaves nothing - or almost nothing - outside it. To clarify the issue, it has to be assumed that at this stage, or at this level, the narcissistic/object separation has very little meaning. Or, if it does have one, the fusion of the two categories will occur under the

necessary for the elaboration of a complex psychical life. Freud's mistake was in thinking that these operations could occur sponta neously, independently of the object. Now, if we examine the compulsion to repeat, it does not seem to refer so much to the conception of the object of perverSion, or to that of the object of fantasy, bur more to the conception of the object of mourning and of melancholy. That is to say, of the object in as far as it is unique,

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primacy of narcissism; melancholy showing, by the prominence that is given to narcissistic identification, that this is indeed how the oral object should be described.
Trauma} Play and Transference

succeeds in representing metaphorically. Here, the object designates both the whole person of the mother and, pars pro toto, the breast. What gives the game its specific characteristic is that the mother can be signified - in the strict sense of the word - metonymically and metaphorically. The signified object can be signified abstractly by resorting to an analogy of the mother/wooden reel (no doubt the breast plays the role of a part, elective, representative, mediator) and be inscribed in a semantic polyphony on the score of the psyche.

Let us return now to Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Freud makes use of three examples: traumatic neurosis, play and transference. As for traumatic neurOSiS, the cause is understood: the trauma is extremely heavy (quantitatively), it is non-sexual and occurs unexpectedly, causing a violent invasion of the psyche. In other words, the capacity for fantasy has been overwhelmed, signal anxiety has been put out of action and the libido struck to the ground. The external situation creates the trauma, coming like a clap of thunder in a clear sky. There is no Signal anxiety: instead of ensuring the continuity of eXistence, in response to the appetitive movement which causes it to be desired when it is lacking, the object is suddenly replaced by another, created by the situation, which penetrates with intrusive violence, is not stopped by any protective device, and manifests itself by a rupture, that is, a catastrophic tear which rips through the psychic tissue with staggering force. This brutal elimination of any sort of distance gives it a new perceptual configuration which is barely dis cernible/ rather like an over-powerful illumination that is dazzling. It is terrifying and, ultimately, unrepresentable. The only meaning which could be drawn from this would be the brutal announcement of immediate annihilation. Especially since, with this singular trauma, there is no wound to alert mutilation-anxiety. The unnameable trauma fills the whole space, no longer allowing the subject to take refuge anywhere in the subjugated psyche. Clearly, what is involved here is actual and metonymic death. The second example is the wooden reel game. But what is the . point of the game? To mime, to symbolise, to simulate the mother's departure and the moment of her return. The wooden reel game is a codicil for Mourning and Melancholy. The difference here is that, rather than having to elaborate the definitive loss, without hope of a return, of mourning, it is the sequence disappearance-return which is enacted and, with it, the playful alternation of presence and absence. Nevertheless, the task - behind the game is to think about and to heal the wound of the loss for an unforeseeable length of time; for it is this loss that gets the game going, and sexuality is only involved very indirectly in the attachment to the object which symbolisation

What is signified can pass through the mesh of the movement (throwing away/pulling back), of perception (there/not there) of affects (pleasure/unpleasure) or through the phonemes of language 0, a (the pairing of which is significant), but without each isolated tenn having a meaning, since this is only reached through constituting the pair opposed to others (R. Jakobson). Each semiological system retains its speci
ficity, though they can all communicate between themselves and be mutually interpenetrating to enrich meaning. This plasticity, this communion between the registers, shows the importance of a rep resentative field with diverse modes of expression in which the object of each system is isolated and suspended as the subject passes over to another mode of expression, yet, in which something of the earlier mode is preserved in the later mode in spite of the transition to a different register. On the other hand, this work on several levels makes it possible to compare the effects of various forms of meaning.

This is why it is improper to remove the phonemiC register in order to make it carry the property of meaning by itself, when it acquires value predsely from being compared with other semantic registers, certain of which only have a minimal claim to this qualifier. Meaning has a range and various properties which are related to a spectrum, all aspects of which have to be considered in the light of their attributions and the way they are intercon nected. Each mode is dependent on its own temporal structure. This is an
example of logocentrism, which is all the more unjustified in that meaning is improperly monopolised here by the phonemic register. Notwithstanding his brilliant contribution, Lacan yielded to the temptations of the linguistic fashion of the time which saw it as the 'pilot' science. This greatly diminishes the interest of his commentary which is otherwise enlightening on several accounts. In any case, it is thanks to this pOlyphony, this polygraphy, even more than to polysemy, that the field of language is linked together with that of the drive in their relation to reality, presented here under the auspices of perception. Here we are entering a world that is inextri-

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cably bound up with time and marked by its rhythm, discontinuity and affective punctuation. Death is none the less on the horizon; and Freud speaks of his grandson reacting to his mother's absence, while he himself was mourning his daughter. The object is menaced by death. The latter is to be found everywhere, even in the peripheral examples given by the author: a father going away to war, or the disappearance of one's own image in the mirror. This is something that should have inspired Lacan, who only saw in the mirror stage the differed effects of the total and constantly present perception of the mother by the child whose body is still fragmented. This signifies the end of perception, opening the way to thinking, freed from any sensory support. Here, Lacan was the prisoner of his earlier theories, just as Freud had been in his own way, though differently. Was it possible for him to go beyond 'jubilatory assumption' or give death another status than that which Heidegger had given to it? Heidegger overlooked the fact that, under the finery of his concept of 'being for-death', was hidden the

intertwining often being accompanied by the fear o f being deprived, perhaps permanently. Lastly, the successive sequences tend to increase the complexity of experience. Thought is able to free itself from the present by retaining something that no longer exists; it will make it inhabit what - it must be hoped the actively initiated movement of is yet to come, but has not yet occurred. The use of the game combines various elements:

propelling/impelling/compelling,

consisting of throwing away and pulling back the wooden reel (which is not experienced passively as in the case of the object's movements); the perception of being there/not being there (but where? And until when?); the phonemic connotation - stimulating language which opens the way to abstraction more than it subsumes alone the different aspects of the experience which, I would prefer to say, come and inhabit it, giving it substance. It is not surprising that even though this example was very instructive, it did not enable Freud to draw any definite conclusion. There were still too many traces of pleasure in the game for it to provide evidence of a beyond which it might have illustrated. But there was no question that a painful experience was being repeated. At least the game helped, in a certain way, to master it, making it possible to construct a meaning. This argument of mastery is often invoked rather hastily. But an examination of Freud's texts shows that, although he notes this possibility, he does not stop there. Perhaps it is less a question of mastery than of transforming a passive position into an active and more symbolic attitude. But, as far as I am concerned, it is not what makes it possible to link this game up with interpretations of the psyche elaborated outside the paths of psy choanalysis that should be emphasised here. Those interpretations which are based on language make it possible to show, by virtue of such an example, how it gives cohesion to the constituents of the psyche during the first stages in the development of language and thought. What we have here is a minimal Unking which constantly couples certain phonemes. The accession of language is confused with the cohesive role of language in the linking which governs the order of words (Hagege). This seems to me to be a consequence rather than a cause. I do not mean to say that this accession is not, in a way, mutative. Nevertheless, it still depends on what is called 'the other of language', where Freud locates the drive, and others the object. My view here is that this difference should be removed from the options and replaced by the inseparable drive/object couple which they form. I am tempted to compare this way of seeing things,

culture Of death to

which he belonged,

without explaining this or elucidating the relations between them. Lacan makes use of death by inciuding it in a game. Facing his adver saries, he plays his own role as well as that of the dummy, pitting himself against ideas which he reduced to flimsiness, pretending to give them a hearing, although in fact he only took account of his own ideas: 'Alone, as he has always been'B. In traumatic neurosis, time has suddenly been frozen and there is a threat of death, actual death. It is the moments preceding this interruption that will be repeated. In Freud's work, there is an entire clinical area relating to the experience of severe, paralysing shock that was left undescribed. This is present in traumatic neurosis, the primitive scene, and is also what he describes with regard to the origins of fetishism. On the contrary, with the wooden reel game, what is repeated is the temporal sequence of disappearance/return. Now this is precisely the paradigm of the object; namely, to be the most powerful agent of the structuring of time through the marked succession of its appearances/disappearances. This is a real illustra tion of the initial periodic cathexis of temporality through its alternating modalities of absence/presence which give rhythm to a series of events by introducing a variable tempo, specific to the object, that is, the time of the Other, interpenetrating with the time of the subject: The latter is doomed to an inevitable period of waiting sustained by the hope which wards off the necessity to defer - their

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which links together the analogies of functioning, the clearly separate marks of affective bipolarity, their co-genesis with the perception of the object's presence and absence, with the other instance in which Freud uses language as an argument, that is, in his article on {Negation' (192Sb), where he recognises its connections with repression, as well as the difference of status and function between judgement of attribution and judgement of existence. These links are organised around differences between the various modes of representation, and between representation and perception. Freud concludes by extending his reflections to the earliest and most fun damental confliCting libidinal impulses, which are thus related to affirmation and negation qUite independently of language.
Transference and

Repetition

In order to assert the existence of a beyond the pleasure principle, Freud made use of the notion of trauma and play. As for trauma, his demonstration was convincing, within the context of the descrip tion he gave of it, and was confirmed by later clinical discoveries. In the case of play, it is less decisive, Since play transforms a painful, passively experienced situation into an active, acted situation, enabling it to be overcome through the emerging pleasure created by this transfotmation. This leaves transference. Here again, Freud was both right and wrong. He was right in thinking that the transference of the negative therapeutic reaction conjures up the idea of a beyond the pleasure principle. He was wrong to exclude himself as the object (transf erence object) of the explanation. Not in terms of his singular, personal, involvement but as the representative of the object's function.9 He paid dearly for his refusal to recognise the possibility of a bad mother image. What he could not conceive of was the con junction of the drive and the object (mother) in the case where it turns towards a negative experience that does not so much generate unconscious material as the destructive compulsion to repeat. Destructive does not mean full of hatred (see Lacan's notion of 'hainamoration" O). An old story repeating itself. With the Oedipus complex, Freud eXCUlpated the father and accused the infant who, he said, could do nothing about it: he is subject to the law of his drives - in short, of his nature. This was in 1897. In 1920, Freud exculpated the mother and made the drives responSible; 'or, to be more exact, that which is situated at the deepest level, within the confines of the somatic, of drive function-

ing. Why was he so bent on excluding the parents from the game? I think it was because Freud did not want to be a prisoner of the aleatory nature of circumstances in the external world, the sphere where necessities alternate with contingencies, as the history of analysands makes quite clear, or to run the risk of minimising the part played by the subject. But there is another way of speaking about this which does not involve making the parents culpable. In fact, Freud shrank from constructing a causality involving the couple. And yet, the idea of a complemental series had been a source of inspiration to him when he was considering the aetiology of the neuroses. But it would seem that, when the really fundamental mechanisms of the psyche were at stake, Freud could only postulate a constituting and instituting subjective causality, bound up with its most basic elements, which places itself above the play of circum stances because it always finishes by having the last word and stamping its mark on it. This was a valid point of view, but one that was qualified by clinical material, making it necessary to look for other explanations. This is why the compulsion to repeat, even though predictable having been observed as early as 1914 - gives the impression of being a theorisation left in abeyance. Those who came after Freud saw the chink in the armour. They were obsessed with pursuing transference and did not have to discover sexuality; this had already been done. But, thinking that it no longer had to be discovered, they had the tendency to forget the subversive potential of the sexual which is why they would lend a complacent ear to the theory of object relations. Let us notice, though, that by placing transference at the centre of everything, the explanations of the negative therapeutic reaction which were constantly advanced did not lead to any really conclusive answer ll However, the novelty of the theory of object relations was imposed at a certain price; that is, of sacrificing sexual libido, as Fairbairn did, and shifting the accent on to destructivity like Klein or, accepting it like Hartmann, while flanking it with an autonomous ego which manages to escape it. In short, one can see that the difficulty lies in imagining the combination of several factors: sexuality andlor the destructivity at the subject's source, and object-cathexis in opposition to narcissism. The question is all the more complicated in that it has to be related to the three agencies of the psychical apparatus. We know what followed. The credibility of the psychical apparatus was progressively diminished - to a large extent because of this id

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which no one knew what to do with any longer (What is that/id?12) and its progressive replacement by references to the 'transfer ence/countertransference' exchanges that were invoked without proper consideration and refracted by the prism of Self/object relations. At first the theory known as object-relations gained ground, but it preserved; at least in Melanie Klein's work, the place of drive activity. It has been pOinted out that, for her, the term 'instincts' (life or death) seemed more adequate than that of drives. But, with the passage of time, it has to be noted that the Kleinians tend less and less to refer to the instincts and the drives en bloc. Alongside the decreasing references to the drive, there was a cor responding decline of the ego. This inadequate concept needed completing with others to make up for its deficiencies. Impercepti bly, the ego of the post-Freudians came to resemble that of the pre-Freudians; that is, it was henceforth required to conform to its phenomenology, with its pretensions to totality, whereas Freud had deliberately presented it as a part agency in order to stress its dependence on more than one master (the id, the super-ego and reality). The shift towards a conception with a psychologising tendency was underway. The idea of a structure involving sub systems in conflict gave way to the search for a global apprehension, as unified as that provided by the illusions of consciousness. And the unconscious? It was increasingly thought of as being independent of any source in the drives. It was the Freudian spirit that was losing its way over the course of time. The investiture of the Self, which occupies the entire stage in Kohut's work, is evidence of this. The Self was gradually to replace the Freudian ego, even for some who
-

did not count themselves among Kohut's followers. A single notion of time was promoted: the here-and-now. The time of the Other no longer had any specificity, since it was assumed that there was only one time which was common to the analysand and the analyst, . interpretations of which become ahistorical. According to this view, time, from the very beginning, has been neither temporal, nor timeless; it has always been atemporal. If this is the case, it calls for reflection on historical causality, which has been remarkably absent from the debate in France as elsewhere. If the truth is to be told, the here-and-now empties the compulsion to repeat of its meaning, since the implied reference to a history which tends to repeat itself disappears. Interpretation shuts the analysand within the pure and simple actualisation of the immediate relation to the analyst. And what if suggestion were to slyly make its return by this means?

Current theories that are founded on early interactions or inter subjective relations are inspired by the same attitude; and they too are the continuation of an evolution which has progressively eliminated any reference to the concept of the drive on the pretext that such a conception does not take into account the relation between the protagonists in the analytic situation. In other words, in order to remind ourselves that there are two protagonists - a legitimate concern - the image of each of them has to be stripped of all libidinal activity. This is the path that Freud's successors have taken. They concern themselves uncompromisingly with the problematics of transference and establish the symbolic equation: 'analyst object' (or another subject); they hear and see only those aspects of psychic activity which are addressed to this interlocutor, the theoretical profile of whom, moreover, they are quite incapable of defining. This approach, centred on the relations of the analytic couple, is assumed to be sufficient to account for everything that is at stake in the situation, without referring to the intrapsychic dimension of each of the partners in the analytic couple. It is clear that this point of view, described as relational, leads us to wonder just how this object is conceived. If the drives are eliminated from the relationship, we are dealing with a subject without drives, to be sure, but also with an object that is Similarly trimmed. Behind the idea of the subject (inter subjectivity) or of the person (interpersonality) is hidden the idea of partners whose psychic structure no longer has any relation to the 'id'. 'Let's get rid of it/id.' 13 What tends to be forgotten is that omitting the id deprives temporality of the most powerful of its dialectical forces, making way, at best, for a naive geneticism which empties those it brings together of all psychoanalytic substance. Is this not to return to a structure of personality peculiarly reminiscent of that which was widespread before the arrival of Freudian thought. What is it that animates the relationship? What makes the object relation 'work'? However much they diverge, all these ideas, from object-relations to Self-psychology to intersubjectivity, which oscillate between accentuating the object or its complementary pair, whatever one calls it - Ego, Self, Subject, I share a common position whose con sequences are infinitely greater than the rejection of drive theory. They imply a return to a conception of temporality inspired by genetiC psychology, breaking with the main elements postulated by the Freudian corpus and returning to a notion of time which unfolds
=

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more or less according to the traditional line of past-present-future. The reason for this change of direction could well lie in the fact that the observational perspective, very closely related to this point of view, was substituted for one which considered this polymorphism in the analytic relationship, centred on listening, as a reference to the mediatisation of shattered time. Laplanche, remaining faithful to the concept of Nachtriiglichkeit, has proposed a compromise, but it requires a considerable feat of speculative acrobatics. On this view, the object takes the place of the drive source. It becomes a source-object, making the drive almost useless. 14 Here one is bound to observe a deficiency: no contempo rary theory can c1atm to replace convindngly all the functions that Freud attributed to the drives. Laplanche acknowledges this at times. But these play a considerable role tu the temporal organisation in so far as they represent a role opposing that which links time to con SCiousness, through the compulsion to repeat, for example. Without being directly linked to it, the timelessness of the unconscious is situated in partial continuity with it. Here, then, are two concepts rather than one with which to combat a conception of time from the standpoint of consciousness. Tbey should be considered as a summons to radically reject this view, however much it is under ptuned by past and present philosophy. The minimisation, and even scotomisation - not to say amputation - of the reference to pleasure, which the organising role of sexuality necessarily implies, has resulted in a de-vitalising of psychic life. On the other hand, archaic fantasies saturated with destructivity raise the question of the motive of psychic progress which is limited, in this context, to warding off danger. It may .be said that we are all survivors. Pleasure can, however, be detected with the naked eye all around us, since its perverse manifestations, barely disguised, are periodically exposed in full daylight - and, what is more, on an impressive scale. We are reminded of them inopportunely, as they emerge from the shadow of disguise, sham and hypocritical falsehood. Mention will no doubt be made of the necessity to fend against terror or the need to search for a secure basis for survival! or again, of the demands of adaptation. All this is derisory if we allow ourselves to open our eyes to what is happening beyond the frontiers of the setting. With regard to Fairbairn's thesis that the libido is not pleasure-seeking but object seeking, it should be pOinted out that pleasure can only be attained through the object which carries out many other tasks such as providing coverage (for auto-erotism, for instance), offering the pos-

sibility of binding prior to the subject/object distinction, confronting the consequences of loss and reunion in order to arrive at the point where pleasure and aJterity meet lS The response originally aroused by Fairbairn's position - which in fact was to have a very limited influence but found an echo in many analysts - is now addressed to English colleagues as a whole, including those who have distanced themselves from htm, starting with the Kleinians, since almost all of them have abandoned the pleasure/unpleasure principle as a referent of psychic activity. I see this something Fairbairn himself admitted as the consequence of an unwillingness to accord so much importance to the sexual, other subjects seeming equally essential
_

and higher in the order of moral values. The Object and Time What Freud, and his successors, failed to theorise, was the function of the object in its relation to time. The object has the function of making the institution of secondary processes tolerable, that is, the processes of delay and of suspending discharge, though it is this same object which is implicated by the subject's primary processes. This point had been noticed from the outset. Yet it is frequently presented as the result of a mere effect of maturation. Freud started out with a fundamental guiding idea: the heterochrony of the psyche. This is constituted by a primary or primitive part, characterised by its inability to tolerate waiting, obliging it to find an immediate solution: this was the idea that materialised in the form of the primary process, a substitute for motor discharge, but already, in itself, a 'symbolisable' mode of psychic discharge. Whereas the other part, secondary by nature and necessity - the organisation permitting it being partly acquired (lateral ego-cathexis) - must 'suffer' delay. This is related to suffering and implies the necessity of putting an end to it by trying to eliminate it. At the same time, it means a capadty for enduring, being patient and waiting. The first expresses the consequence of what is unbearablei the second assumes, on the contrary, that it should be tolerated. Who can deny that the inter vention of the object, simply by its presence, can help to transform the situation dominated by suffering and frustration, thereby favouring the transition to secondary processes and elaboration? This contradictory 'drive/object' couple, which is periodically in a state of tension, was the foundation of a view of temporality which would

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be enriched by the notions of outside-time,

'Nachtriig/ichkeit:,

the

should have encouraged us to return to the drive, yet, in fact, we have moved further and further away from it owing to the tenor of solipsistic automaticity concealed within it. But there is a misun derstanding here that needs to be cleared up. In streSSing the object's role and, more precisely, the role of the drive/object couple, it is not a question of postulating an addition of factors: that is, inside, the drive; and outside, the Object, both acting in concert. Although this is indeed how things appear superficially, this is not how we should imagine their consequences at the level of the psyche seen in terms of its agencies. By emphasising the part played by the object, what is being promoted is the conception that integrates this state of

compulsion to repeat, primal fantasies, and so on. Thereafter, this initial conception was replaced by the instinctual impulses constituting the id. I have already explained the reasons for this change. The object-relation - post-Freudian relations to intersubjectivity, what has won the day. is a In the contemporary reshaping of theory extending from object predominated 'developmental' conception (a progressive construction of the Self and the object) which has resulted in obliterating the various issues involved, each of which serves its own interests and, more often than not, co-exists with the others in a conflictual state. The result is a flattening of temporality: this is inevitable, for what forms the basis of temporal heterogeneity is the contrast between the urgency of the libidinal demand for satisfaction and the work of the ego which requires a relative reduction of differences, a demand for constancy in internal tensions - there being a danger of this upsurge of drive activity resulting in a break in the experience of continuity. The latter is established in an endeavour to make itself less dependent on the quantitative uncertainties of cathexis. The role of the object imposed itself as a result of the modifica tion of clinical structures. This occurred in the process of evaluating, often retrospectively, the indications for analYSiS, where the frequency of borderline cases has been growing and constitutes an increasingly large proportion of patients using the couch (as well as those sitting in a chair opposite). In these cases, moreover, the forms of ego-dysfunctioning are frequently related to the part that the object has played in them, thereby intenSifying the reasons for remaining fixated to it the whole situation being reproduced in the transference. The meaning of trauma has changed and is now understood more in terms of the global affect it has on the psyche rather than in terms of its sexual content. Characterised more often by the absence of a response than by its direct effect - in short, becoming more Ferenczian - it results in more or less serious failures of the psychical apparatusj and, in particular, of the ego, producing anxieties without remedy and deadly repetitions which test the analyst's countertransference, obliging him to vary his technique and driving him to adopt attitudes at the limits of what 'analysabil ity' requires - if I may use this expression to refer to the condition characterising analysands said to be 'at the limits of analysability'. The object was thus called as a witness. Curiously enough, once the concept of mental functioning had been adopted, everything

To put it in another way, the object's response is from now on part of the psychical organisation, in such a way that the latter no longer refers to that which involved pure or primal drive functioning and was added to the primal depths as an acqui sition. The drive-Object couple is no longer presented as a couple but as a unique and fundamental sUbstratum from which the ego and other products Of psychical structuring will ernerge.
affairs at the heart of the structured psyche. The key issue in analytic work, namely, re-appropriation, necessi tates the drive/object couple. If the latter depends on the intrapsychic alone, it is aleatory, precarious and solipsistic. If it is conditioned by intersubjectivity, resistance - in the form of 'he said that, not me' encourages immobility. Only the intrapsychic/inter subjective couple gives insight its binding value. And yet, the thesis of deadly repetition-compulsion would never be illustrated in such a dazzling way as in the evolution of clinical experience. With borderline cases, the compulsion to repeat has revealed a psychic vocation whose purpose is

anti-time.

Everything

has to return to the pOint where it began; it is not possible to consider any conflict with the minimum degree of suspension required for it to be elaborated, and then, perhaps, overcome. Everything has to be actualised and exhausted on the spot; not only to prevent any progression, but also to prevent anything new from emerging.

Where id was, everything has to return - if it had ever gone away from it - so that ego shall not be or shall be in a different way. This agency
cannot become too profoundly separated from its primitive base. It is clear that here, contrary to what a superficial comparison might suggest, we are dealing with a state that is the contrary of mourning; for mourning always comes to an end. It is the expression of a return to the lost object and of an obstinate, but temporary, protest against

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the need to accept its loss. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud finally divided the drives into two groups: those which precipitate towards the end of life, that is, death, by the shortest route, and those which make a detour via sexuality. In making the detour via the object and the distinction between the sexes, sexuality binds the cathexes, restraining their course towards their own destruction. Their fate marks the ego which has nothing else to safeguard but itself, being able, when everything is consumed, to become its own object. It therefore has no other Concern but itself. It can love itself, but then it lives in isolation, unaware of the snare that it has set up as a distorting mirror of itself. This is a conception which, in clinical work, underlines the dangers of the solution of narcissistic withdrawal and makes it possible to imagine the transition from life narcissism to death narcissism. The situation to which Freud alludes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle is one of subverting life; for the drives - whatever he says - do not proceed towards death but only towards the consequences of a deadly stagnation which remains forever immobilised in a mad endeavour to stop the world from evolving by freezing time. Repetition knows no other outcome than to wait indefinitely for the recurrence of the same; even when it could content itself provisionally with the recurrence of what is Similar, since no manifestation constitutes a definitive resolution for the unconscious - particularly as the subject seems to refuse the detour Via sexuality. The latter, which is stili present, prefers, above all else, short-lived episodes, without consequence, or again the stereotyped nature of certain sterile and derisory rituals. The subject needs this reclusive isolation to protect himself against fears of being invaded and carried awa,y, under the grip of pleasure, by a destructive desire to get rid of the object - even if by incorporating it. It is a solution that is ardently desired, but perilous from two paints of View. On the one hand, the ego might perish in the struggle; and if, once the object had disappeared, the subject found himself empty, with his destructivity still unsatisfied and unable to find a new aim, since the object is the only target that interests him, what other alternative would he have but to take vengeance on the ego? Alternatively, the drive might turn back upstream, as it were, the destruetivity then being directed at the subject, confronting him with the sense of despair resulting from the destruction he has just carried out. Under certain extreme conditions, it is the soma which will be affected by specific procedures (P. Marty). Hence the need to protect the object: first of all, by guaranteeing its survival so that the game can

continue. Kept alive, the object will provide recurrent opportunities for exciting destructivity, without there being any definitive solution. For what matters above all is to reproduce, unrelentingly, a painful or traumatic experience which, once it has become inscribed en bloc in a fixed form, is intangible and as insensible to experience as to transformation. This experience, initially connected with an external configuration, has been internalised, thereby ensuring the primacy of psychic reality. It resists being diSSipated or integrated within the rest of the psyche and seeks to reappear in a form that has been modified as little as possible; its elements remaining organically welded together, miming} through the accom panying discharge, a crisis of resolution that never occurs. Repetition is a constant parasite in mental functioning. There is a deadly situation of immobility, but without destruction, except by suicide; though as we know, the latter is exceptional in these circumstances. This is because, behind this apparent masochism, one can discover the fortress of a (negative) narcissistic relationship in which the missing place of an object, definitively marked by its deficiency, can be identified. The situation is thus not one of mourning but, on the contrary, one of an intenninable resurrection of an immortalised object from which one cannot separate; it is impossible to let it die or to replace it Once and for all, spontaneously at least. The Object is only present here in the shape of a ghost haunting the subject; it is stuck to the latter, groaning when in contact with it, exhaling an eternal reproach, drawing up endless charges against it in the course of an interminable trial with no verdict. Underlining the object's role in the fusion of the erotic and destructive drives is necessary, but is it enough? Opening up new Vistas, Anne Denis has brought together a certain number of earlier descriptions in which the psychic quality is 'actively absent; that is, it is the object of disavowal or denial' .16 These descriptions concern various configurations: hypercathexis through a predominantly external orientation or through prevalent destructivity; hyper cathexis of interoceptive and proprioceptive sensibility; the use of the narcissistic nature of the linguistic function, and so on. The point in common between these diverse varieties is their tendency to systematisation. The effect of splitting is found to be at work in the constitution of these systems of thought or belief. Anne Denis accounts for these clinical pictures by the object's failure to promote psyche (ob;et non-psychisant). At the root of such a situation she identifies a fantasy of being contaminated by the object, which is

1 24

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evidence of a fixation to touching, to the detriment of the psyche's orientation towards fantasy. Touching as Freud saw - ow.es this privileged position to the fact that it has a part to play in both libidinal and aggressive satisfaction. In those cases where the non psychically-promoting object is the mediator of drive satisfactions, touching loses the quality which introduces it to the psychical sphere and becomes intrusive. In so doing, it no longer has the capacity - owing to its univocity - to be open to what is paradoxi cal. 'That is to say the psychic quality is either paradoxical or it is not.'17 This reflects an attempt by the subject to construct psychic activity

Anne Denis' deep and thorough study has the merit, in my view, of linking fictional representation with an initial temporal deployment; and of inferring that the psychic and psychically promoting object is indeed the organiser of time in so far as the subject 'takes the time of fiction', that is, fantasises, instead of responding quaSi-automatically to the situations in which he is immersed. It is by making the implicit assumption of the formation of a future that Anne Denis helps us to understand that our conception of the drive should take into account the detour via the object; but, unlike Lacan, she imagines that the reference to psychical representatives of the drive establishes a relation between two psyches, each of which is anchored in its body - a condition that is necessary for fictional animation which is a source of elabo ration for the signifier and thirdness. It will be understood, accordingly, that the compulSion to repeat cannot just be seen in terms of the subject's own drive activity, without any further relation to automatism - unless it is a form of secondary functioning pertaining to self-(dis)organisation - but that it is the product ofthe antagonism, or even the lack of an encounter, between drive and object. We can now understand, better than ever before, that it is not a case of choosing between drive and object, but of thinking about how they are coupled. This, then, was where Freud's error lay. When approaching the question of transference in repetition, he made no mention of its object (the analyst) - apart from simply pOinting out that the latter is led! reluctantly! and under the pressure of circumstances! to play the bad role. He did not go far enough. It was Winnicott who would find the answer. With regard to this bad role which the analyst/object cannot avoid assuming, it sometimes happens that when his patience has run out, and all his benevolent feelings have been exhausted, he really fails, and then he, too, becomes prey to repetition, striving to survive this slow death which the patient is aiming at in an underhand way. This is what led him to make the assumption that in such cases it is most probably the deficiencies of the environment that are being reproduced in the analysis. That is what the transference is aiming at; it is what is expected, uncon sciously, of course, of the object. Naturally, the question arises: is the deficiency a real one or is it projected? No attempt should be made to answer this question; or, rather, one should not answer it since the analysfs recognition of his errors, his inadequacies - or

independently of the contribution made by the object's responses

- which is necessarily doomed to failure. At the same time, mechanisms are set up for avoiding contact perceived as pathogenic. These are equally bound to fail. As she develops her ideas, Anne Denis underlines the inevitably negative aspect of the objectallsing process which occupies the stage entirely; it merely translates the absence of the psychic and psychi cally promoting object and results in a disavowal of the psychic. Consciousness of this lack would lead to an experience of catastro phe to be avoided at all costs. Taking up my ideas on the negative, she refers to the 'colouring' of the def ences by the drives.IS Sh attributes this situation to the absence of the psychical representative of the drive. It was about this, in fact, that the Wolf Man complained, attributing the failure of his analysis to the fact that he felt cut off from his drives.19 Such a psychical rep resentative of the drive - and herein lies the originality of the point Anne Denis is making - does not come about spontaneously, but only emerges thanks to the object which ensures its transmission and favours its development in the child. Here we have an example,

if one is needed, of the inseparability of the drive/object couple,


indispensable for the constitution of fiction as an essential charac teristic of the psyche. Such parents only seem capable of stating truths 'but not fictions'. 'Fictional representation is the prerequisite of transitionality, because it impliCitly conveys a double ante-pred icative negation: , object supplying it is not identified with its representation. 20 Inter

(1) The representation is not the thing. (2) The

preting my conception of the double transference (on to speech and on to the object), she suggests that here we are dealing with trans ference on to language (code and communication) but not on to speech (style and expression of subjectivity).

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even his unkindness - does not bring any relief. The only thing that matters for the subject is that the process continues. The Object between Trauma and Play

forms of significance arising from experiences of loss and reunion, on the other, then one can see that, in the compulsion to repeat, the transference-object is like a hypothetical transitional intermediary. The object is apprehended according to a gradient which varies from the threatening situation experienced repeatedly in traumatic neurosis (deadly instinctual repetition) to the situation that can be observed in the play - which is hypersignifying, but in danger of being too compact owing to the concentration of registers (movement, affect, perception, language) - of the child as an inaugural form of minimal symbolisation. What we have here is a minimal 'metaphorisation' by reducing things to their simple rep resentative elements: wooden reel for mother; phoneme to connote presence/absence; throwing away and pulling back representing instinctual movement, and so on, - the whole forming a link between the discontinuity of experience and discontinuity as a scansion revealing the necessary conditions for symbolisation. It is not difficult to see how the compulsion to repeat involved in the child's game could be deployed in a polysemic representative activity - its playful form is an expression and indication of this - which can bring us closer to the unconscious and its formations of desire. On the contrary, deadly repetition-compulsion will put the analyst in a perilous counter-transference position where the main risk is of making no progress during the sessions and of suffering the stagnating effects of endless reproduction, with the analysis Sinking into boredom. Only when repetition has attained a certain semantic density and a potential for de-condensation and re-deployment, will it be possible to analyse the cathexis of the (transference) object. The object was always there; but it was unlikely to appear under different guises because it was not only inscribed outside-time but also in anti time; that is to say, it was immobile. Although Freud regarded transference - and the compulsion to repeat - as a decisive argument for demonstrating the existence of a beyond the pleasure principle, it was not because every transference manifests this disposition to a greater or lesser extent, but because this characteristic may be observed predominantly in some cases. This being so, the question is one of knowing whether it is possible, before the analysis begins, to assess the likelihood of the therapeu tic relationship taking such a regrettable turn so as to avoid getting involved in it; or whether the main issue is to know how to get out of this impasse once one realises one has been caught in the trap.

The object, in the transf erence of deadly repetition-compulsion, comes somewhere between the object that we pictnre deductively in traumatic neurosis and the object that is represented intnitively by the wooden reel in the child's play. In the second case, we know that it is the mother
who is being referred to, during her absences. Freud described this situation as being one of the 'facts of life'. Separation - a micro mourning - is an integral part of the vicissitudes involved in relating to the object. The latter has an aleatory, precarious, intermittent and discontinuous existence. But while this inevitable, 'fateful' situation, so to speak, can become terrifying, its untimely manifestation occurs in a sudden, brutal unrepresentable form, crossing the ego's limits with force, without delay or preparation. This results in a repetition of the threat of destruction in chaos. The analyst does not encounter traumatic neuroses in his ordinary practicei for they are not among the indications for analysis. On the other hand, the repetition involved in the child's game is within its scope, denoting symbolis ing activity in its essence. What is suggested, then, by Freud's text is that repetition osdllates between two poles: on the one hand there is the massive nature of a trauma which the psyche cannot assimilate because all significant armature of suspension, delay and distance
_

in short, of reflection - is lacking, in place of which there arises a threat of instantaneous disintegration; and, on the other, there is an inviSible trauma, disguised behind the most ordinary conditions from which no one escapes (the 'facts of life'), giving rise to a symbolic network integrated with a game from which not even echoes of pleasure are lacking. From there, Freud went on to look for signs of pleasure even in situations of painful repetition; this brought unexpected results which would complete the picture when, finally, the ego's 'enigmatic masochistic tendencies' were enVisaged. It should be recognised, however, that the solutions which were to come from this direction were not entirely satisfying, and a consid erable number of obscure points persisted. Thus, if on the one hand one contrasts the unanalysable traumatic material associated with the manifestation of an unrepresentable object, endowed with a faceless intrusive power, whose attack would paralyse psychic organ isation, with a minimal but essential symbolisation, centred around

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When, seventeen years after Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud bequeathed his testament concerning analytic therapy in 'Analysis Terminable and Interminable' (1937a), he returned to this problem. There can be no question today that many analysts would take issue with his judgement that castration anxiety in men and penis envy in women are among the factors responsible. But, more generally, he implicates sexual difference and the instinctual dualism divided between life and death, and love and destruction. The description found in Beyond the Pleasure Principle seems nearer to the lessons of experience but it needs complementing in order to be acceptable. However, Freud did not supply us with the means to resolve the problem of repetition-compulsion either in 1920 or in 1937. There are two options open to us here: either one believes that pleasure 'is binding' in all cases, and repetition-compulsion can only be the irrepressible continuation of it in disguised forms (such pleasure, if it is not to endanger psychic structure, will have to be amended by the reality principle as a safeguard of pleasure) - this was the solution for which Freud opted prior to 1920 - or, the idea of repetition, independent of the pleasure principle, suggests that a preliminary binding is constituted to make sense of the inaugural moments of the significant experiences of pleasure and/or unpleasure, this initial matrix being subject secondarily to the principle governing them. Can one see this as an equivalent of Fairbairn's object-seeking? I do not think so, for what matters is to think about the relation between binding and pleasure. The first of the two solutions is sufficiently contested for it to be unacceptable. As for the second, it obliges us to recognise that meaning, in the infinite ways inwhich it is deployed, is such that its most primitive formation cannot be conceived of in any other way than as an organisation} an articulation; and} that it cannot emerge in an isolated state but only within a general contextual agglutination} or a grouping - that is, an ensemble forming a chain of links which makes it emerge. The assembled terms give barely any glimpse of these relations. Each of them loses the condition it had in the isolated state. Does meaning command the chain or does it follow it? This is a difficult question which I will answer by saying that we all collaborate towards achieving this aim; namely, that meaning should be closely tied up with the pleasure principle. In the co existence reuniting meaning and pleasure, they seem to acqUire the power to irradiate themselves mutually, as if to ward off the incom pleteness which confined each of them when they existed in the

isolated state alone. It is as if binding had the power to reveal their discursive potential, the latter resulting from their coming into contact with each other from several din;ctions at once. Even in their assembled state, however, they remain in need of a referent. The first pleasure/unpleasure erected as a principle - is the most imperious since it affects the cathexis which pushes towards their anchoring, their reproduction, but which is open here to an eventual evolution, that is, their mobility and their transformation. The pleasure hypothesis possesses a definite heuristic value, for it reunites within the same contextual matrix the body and the other. One thing is certain: when the pleasure/unpleasure principle has succeeded in surviving, it will continue to be active throughout the whole of life, with varying degrees of restriction. The internal movements of this matrix may include its own contradictions or its apparent negation in the image of the body which suffers, or finds pleasure, in the pain of erogenous primary masochism.
_

One can propose the following model: Stage 1. Tension/discharge Stage 2. Tension/binding to replace the earlier tension/discharge; equilibrium between the erotiC and destructive drives; repetition/binding of repetition, thwarting discharge; psychical discharge of binding/repetition. Stage 3. Cathexis of binding through pleasure destined to seek its repetition or reprodUction, and vice versa. Intervention of the object and integration of the object's response to the demand of drive activity. Sovereignty of the pleasure principle. Repetition under the domination of the pleasure principle. Stage 4. Modification of the pleasure principle under the influence of the reality principle (that is, through the capacity to tolerate temporary suspension and dependence on the object). Stage 5. A formation governed by the pleasure principle at the heart of the reserves which remain under the domination of the pleasure principle at the centre of the territory governed by the reality principle (for instance, fantasy). Stage 6. Sensitisation of the entire preceding structure through singular experiences (transference exciting repetition) or organising it (the setting) - all transference involving the existence of an object.

130

Time in Psychoanalysis a problem that

Writings on the negative therapeutic reaction

cannot be entirely conflated with that of the compulsion to repeat, even though it offers the best illustration of it - leave us unsatisfied to this day, whatever post-Freudian analytic movement they come from. Without claiming to possess the key to the enigma, I shall none the less venture to offer a solution.

11

On Binding and the Other

If binding precedes the pleasure principle and introduces it, then it may well be that the transference is the only means of unravelling the densely intertwined threads of repetition-compulsion, estab lishing a new type of binding whose purpose is to modify the former. Transference is, above all, bound; that is, the analyst offers a rela tionship at the beginning of treatment, the threads of which are woven together in the course of the analytic experience, leading to its final denouement and making way for new relationships with other objects. At least, this is true of neurotic structures which seem to possess the necessary capacities to fit in with this picture. How can one untangle the ties of these interminable transferences, which are deadly owing to their stagnation and infinite repetition, as if they were installed in timelessness? Nothing is more suggestive of the idea of drive-functioning - that is, devoid of all rationality and resistant to any possibility of learning by experience - than the transferences involving a negative therapeutic reaction. In

Chains of Eros, 1

I put

forward the hypothesis of metabiological determinations with reference to certain clinical pictures characterised by their weak capacity for transformation, their defensive rigidity, and their tendency towards repetition. This is why Freud posited the idea of a free - unbound - destructivity, spread throughout all the agencies of the psychical apparatus, which he took pains to distinguish from bound aggressivity, which is integrated within the super-ego and thus attached to an object of some kind. While Freud's hypothesis is only partially satisfying, on a clinical level there persists the idea of a force which is obstinately opposed to change and development. Transference, in these cases, is the untiring reiteration of its refusal to take advantage of the help that is offered, albeit help which has been requested. Repetition, then, but repetition that is loaded with an inexhaustible self-destructive potential. This is the problem that analysts have not always been able to resolve in spite of the experience they have accumulated. It seems to me that the solution, when one is possible, and this is far from always being the case, lies in the attempt to untangle certain tightly knotted internal links which serve to keep the whole situation enclosed and obstinately immobilised; without hoping, however, that the process of

131

166

Time in Psychoanalysis

Notes

167

resistance. How, when he is in the overcrowded waiting room, can he fail to realise beforehand that his time is counted between the clok-timer and the time of the session which, in any case, is less than the length of sessions of analysts from other societies. 7. Lacan, J. (1966) 'Le Temps logique et l'assertion de certitude anticipee', Eaits, Paris: Editions du Seuil, pp. 197-213. Unfortunately, in clinical practice, this distinction can sometimes merge to the point of being reduced to a single moment, between the entrance door and the exit door. I have witnessed this. Chapter 6 1. Translator's note: in English in the originaL 2. Green, A. (199ge) London: Free Association Books (translation by Andrew Weller). Originally published as Le Travail du Negatif, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1993. 3. Donnet, J-L. (1995) 'Sur l'institution psychanalytique et la duree de la seance', in Le divan bien tempere, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. 4. Green, A. (1984a) 'Le langage dans la psychanalyse', in Langages, Paris: Les Belles Lettres. 5 , In order to have a clear understanding of what follows, it is important that the reader refers to my conception of the double transference (on to speech and on to the object) set out in my work on 'Le langage dans la psychanalyse', ibid. 6. See my article 'The Central Phobic Position' (2000d), International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 81, pp. 429-5 1. 7. See Green, A. (1979) 'Le silence du psychanalyste', in Languages, PariS: Les Belles Lettres. 8. Green; A. (2000b). Chains of Eros: The Sexual in Psychoanalysis, translated by Luke Thurston, London: Rebus Press. 9. That is, 'the multiple ways in which the basic forms of messages are rep resented, reproduced and transformed .. .' (see A. Green (2000a) Andre Green at the S quiggle Foundation, London: Kamac Books, p. 21). 10. Green, A. (2000e) 'The Intrapsychic and the Intersubjective in Psycho analysis', Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 69. 11. Cf. Green, A. (1986b) 'Reponses a des questions inconcevables', Topique, 37, pp. 1 1-30. 12. Green, A. (1999d) 'The Intuition of the Negative in Winnicott's Work', in The Dead Mother: The Work of Andre Green, edited by GregoriO Kohon, London: Routledge. Chapter 7 1. Translator'S note: under the general heading 'Acting Out', Laplanche and Pontalis definepassage a l'acte as follows: 'From the descriptive point of view" the range of actions ordinarily classified as acting out is very wide. At one pole are violent, aggressive and criminal acts - murder, suicide, sexual assault, and so on - where the subject is deemed to

2, 3. 4. 5.

proceed from an idea or tendency to the corresponding act (the passage a l'acte of French clinical psychiatry) .,. ' See AeHus Aristide (1986) Discours sacres, translated by A. Festugh';re, Paris: Macula, Green, A. (1984b) 'Le langage du psychanalyst', in Langages, Paris: Les Benes Lettres. Green, A. (1979) 'Le silence du psychanalyste', Topique, 23. Also in La folie privee (1990) PariS: Gallimard. Freud, S. (1940 [1938]) An Outline of Psychoanalysis. S.E. XXIII, pp. 139-207.
.

Chapter 8 1. S.E. XII, pp. 147-56. 2. Bion, W.R. (1992) Cogitations, London: Kamac Books. 3. The K factor; the capital letter emphasising the referential value of the concept. 4. It is unfortunate that psychoanalysts let themselves be taken in, choosing to abandon the concept of drive in favour of that of action scheme. (D. Wid16cher) 5. In italics in the originaL 6. See Green, A. (199ge). The Work of the Negative, London: Free Associa tion Books. 7. Green, A. (1999a) 'Death Drive, Negative Narcissism, Disobjectalising Function', in ibid. Chapter 9 1. Italics in the originaL 2. S.B. XVIII, p. 63. 3. I have already discussed this question at length in 'Primary Narcissism: Structure or State?', in Life Nardssism, Death Narcissism (2001), translated by Andrew Wener, London: Free Association Books. 4. 5. 6. 7.
S.B. XVIlI, p. 63. Ibid.; my italics. Ibid., p. 55.

Green, A. (1996) ILa sexualite atelle un quelconque rapport avec la psy chanalyse?', Revue franaise de psychanalyse, 60, pp. 829-48. 8. Fairbairn, R. (1952) Psycho-Analytic Studies of the Personality, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Chapter

10

1. Translator'S note: from a poem 'Heureux qui camme Ulysse' (1558) by Du Bellay (1522-1560). 2. Freud, S. (1911) 'Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Func tioning'. S.B. XU, p. 215. Winnicott made large use of this note of Freud which had remained in an embryonic state, as a purely formal

168

Time in Psychoanalysis concession. Let it be noted, however, that Winnicott never adhered to

Notes

169

order to defend object-relations theory. 3. This description is reminiscent in many respects of winnicott's (19 4) description in 'Fear of Breakdown', International Journal
-

Melanie Klein's thesis that the object was present from the very first in

Analysis, except that he postulates that a catastrophe has already ten


place without being experienced. The difference here is that repetition

0f

Psyc

3. Pontalis, ]-B. (198 8) 'Non , deux fOis non' in Perdre de vue, PariS: Gallimard.

0-

Chapter

12

is a presumption that it has taken place. . 4. See Bollas, C. (1989) Forces of Destlny: Psychoanalysis and Human Idwm, 5. See Green, A. (1986a) On Private Madness, London: Hogarth Press. London: Free Association Books.

6. Bion enhanced the value of this expression.

7. In 1967 in 'Primary Narcissism: Structure or State?', I said that the : mother covered' the infant's auto-erotism. See Life Narcissism, Death

. 9. After alt it concerns a fundamental issue in contemporary ana ysls. . While Melanie Klein and the English school adopted this posltlOn

8. Founding words of the Ecole" freudienne de Paris.

Narcissism (2001), London: Free Association Books.

unhesitatingly (perhaps in a way that is regrettabl), Laan avoided it . and referred to the Big Other. The most extreme pOSItion IS that held by the intersubjectivists, who only see two subjects at work. .

10. Translator's note: a term forged by Lacan which condenses la hame and

enamoured with. . 11. Green, A. (1999c) 'Masochism(s) and Narcissism in Analytic Failures', In

['amour. It is also homophonically evocative of enamourer: to be

The Work of the Negative, London: Free Association Books. . 12. Translator's note: the French here is QU'est-ce que ("est que 9a? - 9a bemg
the same word in French for both lId' and Ithat'.

8. Kristeva,] . (1994) Le temp s sensible, PariS: Gallimard. Tran slated by Ross Gubennann as Time and Sense : Proust and the Ex perience Of Literature, New York: Columbia University Press , 1996. 9. In the sense in which Freu d distinguishes between supp reSSion/repression and abolition in foredosure (Verw er{Ung) in the case of President Schreber and to a lesser extent in the WoIf Man. 10. Green, A. (199ge) The Work of the Negative, translated by Andr ew Weller, london: Free ASSOCiation Book s.

1 . Thorn, R. (1988) Esquisse d'une semio-physique, Paris: Inter -edition. See also his 'SaiIlance et pregnanc e' (199 1), in L'Inconscient et fa science (under the direction of R. Dore y), Paris: Dunod. 2. Winnicott, D.W. (1969) 'The Use of an Object and Relating through Identifications', in Playing and Reality, London: Tavistock, 1971 . 3. See Green, A. (1992) 'Oedipe, Freud et nous', in La deJiaison, Paris: Les Belles Lettres. 4. Lalande, A. (1968) Vocabula ire de philosophie. Article 'Tem ps' III, PariS: Presses Universitaires de France. S. St Augustine (1998) ConfeSSio ns, Book XI, p. 230, translated by Henry ChadWick, Oxford: Oxford Wor ld ClaSSics. 6. Here my way of thinking come s close to Lacan's, the signifier excepted. 7. Goldschmidt, G-A. (1996 ) Quand Freud attend Ie verbe (Annex), Paris: Buchet Chastel.

14. I say 'almost' because Laplanche acknowledges that 'sourceobject' and 15. All these terms need translations in French which correspond to drive do not completely overlap.

13. Translator's note: the French here is 'faites-mot disparaitre 9a'.

tion, presented at the European seminar run by Andre Green, 3 Octob:r.) . 17. Green, A. (199ge) The Work of the Negative, London: Free ASSOCIatIOn 18. Translator'S note: la puisionnalisatton des defenses. Hogarth Press, 1989. Books.

Fairbairn's expressions. . 16. Denis, A. (1998) 'Geometrie de l'antipsychique'. (Personal commUnIca

19. See Gardiner, M. (ed.) (1979) The Wolf-Man and Sigmund Freud, London:

20. Denis, 'Geometrie de l'antipsychique'.

Chapter

11

1 . Green, A. (2000b) Chains of Eros: The Sexual in Psychoanalysis, translated by Luke Thurston, London: Rebus Press. . 2. Green, A. (1999c) 'Masochism(s) and narcissism in analYSIS and the Andrew Weller, London: Free ASSOciation Books.

negative therapeutic reaction', in The Work of the Negative, translated by

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