Training of the psychoanalyst by Guy Massat

Institut de psychanalyse
88 boulevard de Magenta, 75010 paris

The unconsciousness, the free associations.

The unconsciousness, the free associations. The division between "unconscious psychic apparatus" and "conscious psychic apparatus" was "the necessary and legitimate hypothesis which founded the psychoanalysis", Freud teaches us. For the psychology and the philosophy the unconsciousness is simply what is not provisionally conscious. It is the "in black", from Lacan's expression, that is to say something which does not reflect the light of the mind. This unconsciousness is motionless, passive and not, like the one of the psychoanalysis, active, dynamic, autonomous, and "freely mobile" (Freud). "The unconsciousness is alive, Freud says, capable of developing itself, it entertains relations with the pre-consciousness and cooperates with it." "There can be phenomena which deal with the unconsciousness under these two meanings (philosophical and psychoanalytic), Lacan explains, they still remain strangers to each other. They only have a relationship of homonymy" between themselves. The psychoanalysis does not grant to consciousness an absolute power of synthesis like the psychology and the philosophy do. Freud has unmasked the lie of the consciousness. The consciousness does not know, the unconsciousness does.
The psychoanalytic unconsciousness does not relate to consciousness.

When psychoanalysts do not specify about which unconsciousness they talk, they slip carelessly in obscurantism.

Because, just as "the butterfly effect" is only acceptable for the sub-atomic world, the psychoanalytic concepts operate only in the unconsciousness, and nowhere else. When psychoanalysts handle psychoanalytic concepts over 200 or 300 pages without writing a single time the word unconsciousness, they cannot be granted to have implied it, as in psychoanalysis the point is just to open it and to display it. Are these authors not similar to Kant's dove which thought that she would fly better without the resistance of the air? "This fact is remarkable, Lacan points out, especially because until today and in the world, psychoanalysis worries only to get back on line with psychology". This consists, one more time, to restrict the unconsciousness to the passivity of a waterfall. As bubbling as it is, a waterfall is passive because if it had an autonomous activity, it could climb back to its banks, condense itself as a metaphor, displace itself like a metonymy and spring out where it wants.

The unconsciousness is a constitutive energy of human nature.

The unconsciousness is dynamic, autonomous, "freely mobile", like Freud says. Our unintentional behaviors display it continuously. The unconsciousness is our destiny. The unconsciousness is an irresistible push which seems first blind to mind. However, the unconsciousness is not reducible to its pathology. It is also a force of maturation which protects the individual in its totality. It brings creative solutions, adapted to the existential circumstances of each of us. But, like for reality, vacuity or impossibility, we know only the unconsciousness by the edges which separate us from it. By the "beat" of its edges, the unconsciousness produces formations (figures defined by edges) of representations by which it says (the etymology of say is "show") what it wants, and knows in what consists what it wants. It is dialectic. "Never mind who talks", Foucault says. "The vacuity talks", says Blanchot; in any case we are the subjects of the speech.
The unconsciousness talks, that makes it dependant of the speech, and the unconsciousness resides only in the speaking being. If the unconsciousness produces dialectically painful formations and speaks by symptoms, speech can then also metamorphose its formations (anxiety, fear, depression, ·) in satisfactory formations like energy, pleasure, calmness. From that comes the psychoanalytic technique of "the cure by the speech", speeches touching the unconsciousness, as well as its formations or off-shoots, and not the ones, of course, of a pure verbal declaration. By the way, the unconsciousness being dynamic, produces itself the forces to which it exposes itself; from there comes the topics of Freud and the topology of knots of Lacan.

The healing principle of psychoanalysis is "the fundamental rule".

It consists, during the sessions, in applying in a systematic way the "free association" of the signifiers. " ·Never anybody, explains Lacan, could pin a signification to a signifier; but at the contrary it is possible to pin a signifier to a signifier and see what that does · It always happens something new ·, namely a new signification springs out ·"
The study of unconsciousness, with its method of investigation and treatment, is the fundamental role, it constitutes the essence of psychoanalysis. However, some people still pretend that this fundamental role is impossible to apply because people under analysis have too many difficulties with associations. (this is to forget that they come for an analysis just because they have too many difficulties related to associations, and additional difficulties to associate themselves with work, love, happiness, ·). These critics display that the famous evidence, resistance to treatment and opening of the unconsciousness, can come up paradoxically from the psychoanalyst himself and that psychoanalysis can block itself. The unconsciousness intertwines with body and mind in funny constructions that speech cannot disentangle, metamorphose or associate in a different way. "Man, Lacan tells us, does not think with his soul, like the philosophers imagine it. He thinks about what a structure, the one of language - the word contains it -, about a structure which carves his body, and that has nothing to do with anatomy. Like the hysteric." So the knot of an unconscious conflict can make us believe, like in an optical illusion, in a conflict between ourselves and our unconsciousness, between ourselves and the world, and we will never be at the end of our efforts". The psychoanalysis analyses the unconsciousness, it does not have any authority to analyze what has specifically to do with the body or the mind and which is the objective of other sciences. The oppositions that consciousness distinguishes, in a well-thought or spontaneous manner, it absorbs them itself. That looks absurd; but this is due to the fact that it uses logic in a different way. It does not take appearances and their identity into account. It operates condensations and displacements, crossings, overlaps, interfacings, knots which belong to topology. It can absorb the front and the back faces, like in a Moebius surface, or, the inside and outside like in a cross cap or a klein's bottle. For example, "a sick man", Freud recalls, after a dispute with his brother started to chew over in a obsessive manner the way not to make money anymore. Well, his brother's name was Richard. Here the name Richard has intertwined with the notion of money to repress and displace the destructive impulse against the hated brother. Only the therapeutic success insures us that the reality of the unconsciousness is not simply a projection of the analyst with the complicity of the person under analysis, but the power itself of the real which wants, thinks, imagines and feels with, or against consciousness, and forces it to dialog, one way or another, like concerning Oedipe or Socrates. "Know yourself" says the Apollo's adage, as a life which has not been analyzed up to its end would not be worth living.

Topology of knots and its rigorous metamorphosis, reports on the logic of the unconsciousness.

The knots are the representatives of unconsciousness. Impulses stay unknown as such. Topology of knots treats space points (topos) where language (logos) ties its fantasy history. "Knots, Lacan tells us, are the thing to which mind is most rebel." Then it is most important to distinguish the unconsciousness from mind. For the training of the psychoanalyst, the "Freud's effect" proposes a seminar on the study of the unconsciousness and free associations from the work of Freud and Lacan. The 3 psychoanalytic Lacan's categories: "The real, the symbolic and the imaginary". "The big Other", "The object small a", "the sense", "the phallus", "the borromean knot", its graph and variations applied to the "dream of the unicorn" (S.Leclaire: "psychoanalyse") and to the "five psychoanalysis" of Freud. "The formations of the unconsciousness" of Lacan (differences between the edition Le Seuil and the one of the International Freudian Association), the "forms as motions of the unconsciousness", effects, reasons, motivations, movements of the unconsciousness. The free associations, theory, praxis and clinical examples. On the jokes in zen tradition and the ones of Lacan (J.Allouch).