Rat Man 0814778585, 0814778720

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RAT MAN STUART SCHNEIDERMAN

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York and London

Copyright © 1986 by New York University All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schneiderman, Stuart, 1943Rat Man. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Lanzer, Ernst—Mental health. 2. Obsessivecompulsive neurosis—Case studies. 3. Psychoanalysis— Case studies. 4. Lacan, Jacques, 19015. Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939. L Title. RC533.S36 1986 150.19'52 86-16172 ISBN 0-8147-7858-5 ISBN 0-8147-7872-0 (pa.)

CONTENTS

Preface

vii

CHAPTER 1

OPENING STATEMENT

i

CHAPTER 2

INFANTILE SEXUALITY

19

CHAPTER 3

THE RAT TORTURE

CHAPTER 4

THE WORK OF ANALYSIS

43 69

CHAPTER 5

THEORY OF OBSESSIONAL NEUROSIS

89

References

117

PREFACE

N THE SPRING of 1977, I offered an introductory course on Freud in the Department of Psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII. The content of the course was a close reading of the case of the patient who had come to be known as the Rat Man. After the course I rewrote my lectures in book form. My idea at the time was to provide for American and English readers a pre­ sentation of the kind of teaching that was being offered in France under the aegis of Lacan. The basis of that teaching was Lacan's call for a return to Freud, a return to the text of Freud's writings. Lacan believed that the most productive way of learning psychoanalytic theory was to study these writings intensively. He was not obsessed with the idea of going beyond Freud, with finding fault with Freud. He once said that there could be no question of going beyond Freud when most psychoanalysts, in their zeal to surpass Freud, had arrived at po­ sitions that antedated the discovery of psychoanalysis. Lacan held that the field of Freud's work had been left fallow by succeeding generations of analysts, most of whom were contented to believe that their work had rendered Freud anachronistic. This repre­ sented an intellectual failure of significant proportions, be­ speaking a will to ignorance. Such a will was most patent in those who proclaimed that scientific experimentation and data collec­ tion was the way to prove or disprove the Freudian text. My own reading therefore is far more an appreciation than a critique. This is not to say that there is nothing to criticize in Freud's handling of the case of the Rat Man. It means simply that the first task of anyone approaching the text is to discover its resources, to elaborate and to amplify them, eschewing the easier and more seductive task of one-upping Freud.

I

VÜi

PREFACE

It is probably impossible to approach any text in complete in­ nocence. I read Freud through Lacan and this will be evident throughout. My way of dealing with this has been to show how Lacan's theories devolve from a close reading of Freud. Thus, as is reasonably well known by now, Lacan is best understood in conjunction with Freud, even though the resulting product will likely present a Freudian text that is radically different from the one most people think that they know only too well. The practice of reading a text is not the same as conducting a psychoanalytic treatment. There is no question of treating or cur­ ing the text nor is there a concern with the therapeutic benefits that will accrue to the reader. The text is there to instruct us about psychoanalysis, not about ourselves. We present ourselves before the text as students and we learn from it to the extent that we do not believe that what is in question therein is our own psychic conflict. It is neither necessary nor desirable to see one's own per­ son in everything that one reads. It is so tempting to do so in texts on psychoanalytic clinical practice that a caveat is in order. I would even hypothesize, if only to be contrary, that anywhere you find something in a psychoanalytic text that seems to speak directly to you, that seems to have been written especially for your benefit, then that is the place where you have made the most thorough misreading, the kind of misreading from which it is most difficult to extract a benefit. Given the context of the production of my own text, its strategy should be reasonably clear. I have not made extensive reference to psychoanalytic literature outside of Lacan's school. Nor have I referred to other authors who have provided readings of the case of the Rat Man. Such a procedure would have been out of place for an introductory course, providing occasion for confusion rather than clarification. It happens that there is very little written about the Rat Man; less attention has been given this case than any other in the Freudian "canon." It would certainly be interesting to probe the reasons for this relative negligence, as it would be interesting to make a comparison of the different approaches used by different psychoanalytic schools; this was not my purpose in the course, and it is not my project in this book. You may think that such an attitude is purist to an extreme, and perhaps it is,

PREFACE

ix

but you must remember that until very recently Lacan's teaching was completely unknown in this country, having been the object of condemnation by the International Psychoanalytic Association. Certainly this organization never prohibited anyone from reading Lacan, but the weight of public opinion within the groups that are affiliated with it is clearly opposed to any rigorous study and appreciation of Lacan. While the opposite is not true—Lacan com­ mented extensively on the major theorists in the non-Lacanian psychoanalytic world, and their works are studied with interest in Lacanian circles today—there is a point to be made for a first presentation of Lacan in Lacan's terms and not in the terms of others who have ignored him and who represent completely dif­ ferent attitudes. That such a presentation is instructive is the po­ sition on which I wager in this book. If you should find that the theoretical cost, the cost in intelligibility and incisiveness, is not too high, I will have succeeded. At the time this was written I submitted it to several publishers, all of whom found that there was insufficient interest in a close reading of Freud through Lacan. Lacan's writings were barely known then; the first publication of a general selection of his writ­ ings had just appeared and most readers found it impenetrable. And there was little sense of urgency in the direction of finding a new way of reading Freud. It required a more full understanding of the importance of Lacan's teaching for people to grasp again the resources of Freud's text. In any case I had decided to file the manuscript away, thinking that it was best to pass on to other projects better adapted to the American intellectual context. That I did not jettison it completely is the result of a timely suggestion by my friend Lila Kalinich. Her finding that a reading of my man­ uscript was informative for one attempting to learn about Lacan led to my submitting it to New York University Press. I am in­ debted to Kitty Moore for having sufficient confidence to present it to a wider public. I have made a number of corrections throughout the manu­ script but have stopped short of rewriting it entirely. I wanted to preserve the integrity of the original, whatever coherence there was of style, substance, and approach. Too much tampering would have risked disjointing the text. Aside from that I find that the

X

PREFACE

original ideas presented herein provide a sense of the kind of reading of Freud that was practiced at the École freudienne in the 1970s along with a reasonably full exposition of the Lacanian the­ ory of obsessional neurosis. Were I to rewrite this book from scratch today I would do it very differently; thus I have decided essen­ tially to leave it as is, with only the grossest errors edited out. Replacing yesterday's misconceptions with today's is not always an advance. New York City, April 1986

CHAPTER 1

Opening Statement

UBLISHING A CASE STUDY always engages the psychoan­ alyst in a situation that brings certain risks for himself as well as for his patient. That Freud chose this means to communicate and transmit basic theoretical and practical aspects of psychoanal­ ysis leads us to consider its justifiability in particular cases. Each case Freud published was designed to illustrate one or several aspects of the technique he had discovered. At times, the case study shows the progress of the analytic cure; at others, it ques­ tions the reasons for its failures. If analysis has failed because of the analyst's error, as in the case of Dora, it allows us to study a moment where the analyst's transference or countertransference got the better of the situation and introduced an impasse in the analytic dialectic that could not be recuperated later. In these cases, the published study permits us to evaluate the limits of the treatment, where it has gone awry. In others, we can follow the principles that determine psychoan­ alytic work. In either case, Freud's case studies always seek the basis for the analyst's action and its efficacy. From this point of view a psychoanalytic case presentation dif­ fers radically from its medical counterpart. A psychiatric case study may present a phenomenological description of a patient's illness and conclude by introducing a refinement into the system of clas­ sification of mental illness. This procedure has its value and should not be dismissed as discriminatory or repressive. The psychoan­ alyst ought to know with what he is engaging himself, though not merely from a psychiatric point of view. A second function of the medical case study is to promulgate a

P

2

RAT MAN

method of treatment of a particular illness, to demonstrate and to argue its effectiveness. We know the difficulty of establishing cri­ teria of therapeutic success and failure in psychoanalysis. There is also social pressure to justify oneself against the usual charges of charlatanism. It is altogether improbable that volumes of ther­ apeutic successes will ever succeed in silencing these charges. After all, there are literally dozens of different forms of psychotherapy and each can attest to scores of brilliant successes. The only way to read such cases is with skepticism, especially since they read as though all were following the same outline. The illness and treatment may vary, but the fact that a larger number are success­ ful, coupled with the continuing invention of new treatments for the same problems, make the results dubious. The success or failure of a psychoanalysis is always relative to a number of variable factors, from the abilities of the analyst to the resistance of the analysand; and from the place where the analysand was before analysis to the fact that therapeutic success will not produce the same results for every analysand. Two symptom-free individuals may know exactly what they want yet their desires may be contradictory. As psychoanalytic societies have well demonstrated, bringing together people who have all osten­ sibly completed an analysis does not in any way guarantee a har­ monious fraternal atmosphere. In fact, it almost seems to legislate against such an imaginary "brotherhood of man." If desire is the key to the interpretation of dreams, as Freud declared, psychoanalysis finds its justification in the effort to help a person articulate his unconscious desire and perhaps to act ac­ cordingly. Thus has Jacques Lacan defined the ethic of psycho­ analysis in distinction to the ideal of an adaptation to social norms. This point has often been misunderstood for it in no way means that psychoanalysis renders people asocial. Acting in accord with one's desire does not mean doing whatever one feels whenever one feels like it. If the analysand is to assume anything from psy­ choanalysis it should be the notion of responsibility for his words and actions. But this means that one's desire is in one's language, not in one's affective state. This ethical position also runs counter to a recent theory which sets the goal of analysis as the discovery of a sense of creative

OPENING STATEMENT

3

self-expression. Nowhere in Freud's writing, in the midst of re­ markably astute interpretation based on wordplay, does one have the impression that he was concerned with teaching people to express their emotions. Nor does one sense that Freud thought of himself as releasing creative energies. Psychoanalysis concerns teaching people to read their unconscious in those places where they are not expressing anything of self. And it does not lead to a heterophagic absorption of the desire that is read there. Through analysis, the analysand learns to decipher his desire and to direct his life accordingly. Roy Schafer has studied in detail the problems created by a topology which sees the world in terms of inside and outside. If I read him correctly, the prejudice in favor of this type of spatial organization serves to favor the repression of unconscious fanta­ sies. With Lacan, who has worked more extensively on this ques­ tion, I would add that the division of the world into external and internal is based on a space conceived as a sphere. Psychoanalysis is not a matter of expressing something which has been damned up inside. It is not a question of exteriorizing oneself. Freud's rule of free association, applied first to the case under study here, does not in any way base itself on self-expres­ sion. And if we read the case of the Rat Man carefully, we see that the opening discourse on the patient's sexual development is not offered in the interests of self-expression but rather because the patient supposes that this is what Freud wants to hear. The point is not lost on Freud, who responds: Why are you telling me all of this? When the patient answers that he has read Freud's books, he is telling his analyst that what he could not read in the books he wants to hear directly. He tries to please the analyst by giving him what he wants to hear so that the analyst will in turn tell him things that will be pleasing to him. The Rat Man is not the only one to think that the expression of everything to do with sex is the path to a cure. This misconcep­ tion has been taken up by "popular psychology" and has given rise to an idealism that requires the subject to tell all. The roots of this idea may well be found in a misreading of the rule of free association, which in fact says nothing of the sort. Or else, as Michel Foucault has shown, this attitude comes down to us from

4

RAT MAN

the confessional, defined as the avowal of one's innermost (again the reference is to inner and outer) secrets, assumed before the fact to be sinful. We should also note that the Catholic Church, promising absolution for sins of word, thought, and deed, places itself as founder of what has become a therapeutic institution. Those who consider psychoanalysis as providing a justification for this kind of exhibitionism are off the mark. The fallacy of self-expression might as well be called Chomsky's fallacy, since the man who is the preeminent linguist of our time has made himself the spokesman of a kind of Cartesian philoso­ phy to which he clings as dogma, although it is incidental to his fundamental linguistic discoveries. His point is that language functions to express thought, providing a means to creative self­ expression. By "creative," Chomsky means that an individual through language can speak expressions which have never before been uttered. This is unquestionably true; it remains to be seen how much weight it will bear. It would appear to the naked eye that a system which has so many rules that must be satisfied before an utterance can be grammatical provides an incontrovertible restraint to free and cre­ ative expression. One psychoanalytic way to address the idea of self-expression concerns intention. What is there about thought that gives anyone the desire to express it in words? A scream is more expressive. If we look at the practice of those masters of thinking we call obsessional neurotics, we see that the more they think the less they verbalize their thoughts. Is there not implicit here a reference to an Other who demands this expression or expulsion of product and who will not let the "mind" rest until the thought is expressed? Otherwise why would it not be sufficient simply to think a thought, or to relegate all thoughts to the fate that befalls a large number of them, not to be expressed, but to be forgotten? Certainly there is an unconscious fantasy at work here. We will not attempt to guess what it is, but the theory does seem to base itself on the satisfaction to be gained from the expression of a thought; the greater the freedom of expression and the greater the creativity, the greater the satisfac­ tion. And if the thought must be expressed grammatically or in such a way as to be understandable by someone else, then per­

OPENING STATEMENT

5

haps there is implicit a satisfaction reserved especially for this Other, which Chomsky does not seem to recognize as playing a part in the speech act. At this time we exdude the idea that a psychoanalytic case study is an exposition of someone's dirty little secrets. Psychoanalysis attempts in the best cases to render the unconscious accessible to verbalization. If the sense of the unconscious desire is always sex­ ual, this does not mean that everything is sex in the Freudian unconscious, or even less that the repressed is of interest to any­ one other than the subject himself. As far as the unconscious is concerned content is always sec­ ondary in importance to structure. Where the analysand will often spare no effort to lure the analyst into premature interpretation by offering contents the analyst must believe to be privileged, a true structural approach recognizes that if the subject talks of the phallus, for example, what counts is the wording, the signifiers chosen, and how they are structured. For the Rat Man the signifier that will function as phallus is the word "rat"; and Freud designates this word as such when he de­ clares it the nodal point that organizes the structure of the neu­ rosis. The analysand can talk all he wants about the variety of erotic experience, even to focus exclusively on everything sexual in his life history, but he will not move closer to resolving his neurosis unless he recognizes at what level he is being played on by the signifier, determined by its coming and going, even to the point that without his knowledge his relation to it takes the place of the relation he has to his name. It is not for nothing that the patient whose case forms the substance of "Notes upon a case of obsessional neurosis" came to be named the Rat Man. The obsessional neurotic's revolt against his name, or better against his father's name, will lead to his being renamed by a name that is not really a name but an expression of his being. We will have occasion to return to the question of the being of the Rat Man. We note in passing that Freud in writing about his hys­ terical patients invariably chose a first name, marking therein that repression in the case of the hysteric, having to do with forget­ ting, strikes essentially at her family name: the hysteric acts as if she does not have a last name; her first name comes to be her

6

RAT MAN

whole name. This phenomenon is easily discernible clinically. Address a grave hysteric by the phrase: "Good morning, Miss Jones/' and she will reply: "I'm not Miss Jones, I'm Jane." Here again the relationship between naming and being is paramount. The first name is chosen because it expresses an inviolate being; it is not a name she shares or has received from a man, from a father or a husband. A psychoanalytic case study does not transmit the analyst's knowledge or wisdom, but rather his know-how. The analyst cannot know in any reliable way, apart from fruitless speculation, what it is that inhabits his analysand's unconscious. What he can know is how to permit the analysand to have access to this ma­ terial, to permit him to grasp a knowledge beyond his conscious­ ness. The analysand knows more than he thinks he knows, and if the analysis is to help him he must want to reduce his igno­ rance of what determines his destiny. The motor of the cure is wanting something, wanting to know what causes suffering. If this desire is not present and articulated in the form of a demand for an analysis, any therapeutic intervention will not only be un­ warranted but will be pernicious in its effects. Socrates, if we take him as kin to the analyst, did not slumber in complete ignorance; he did know about one and only one thing, which he called Eros, the form of love closest to desire. The analyst's know-how concerns the handling of the love re­ lation that develops between himself and the analysand, which Freud called the transference. Nothing of the unconscious is ré­ cupérable without the analysis of transference. This takes time. In the case of the Rat Man the opening portion of the treatment, which Freud calls expository, took eleven months. The material of these sessions concerned the exposition of the neurosis, but primarily it concerned the articulation of the transference. During this period, the analyst must find the means to permit the artic­ ulation of the transference neurosis as a retranscription of the original neurosis in function of the analytic setting. Only after this is completed can the analyst interpret effectively knowing where he is in the unconscious fantasy enacted in the transference. Oth­ erwise there is no way for him to act in relation to the structure of the neurosis.

OPENING STATEMENT

7

The psychoanalyst is in a most difficult place, for he cannot promise a successful result. This, not merely because of the vari­ ability of the effort the analysand is willing to commit to his analysis, but because any promise on the analyst's part, once transcribed in the transference, is likely to make the analytic di­ alectic more difficult to sustain. The analyst who promises tells his analysand what he expects of him; this will necessarily orient the discourse of the analysand and act as a suggestion at the mo­ ments of greatest resistance. Then the analysand can either ar­ range things so that the promise is fulfilled, thereby cutting short the treatment, or can stubbornly prolong the treatment to thwart the promise. There is, of course, a judgment in the analyst's accepting any­ one for a treatment; the analyst must judge that there is some­ thing to be gained from the investment he as well as his patient will make. The point is that this certainly has something to do with the analyst's desire, but it should not be articulated as a promise or as a demand. Since the analysand is there precisely because he does not know what he wants and since what he de­ mands is an object that can help him to avoid finding the truth of his desire, the analyst's confusing the demanded object with the object of desire can only block the development of the transfer­ ence. The reason for this is clear. The motor of the transference is the analysand's taking the analyst for what Lacan calls the supposed subject of knowing. Knowing what? Precisely, what the analy­ sand wants. Strangely enough, the analysand who does not know what he wants is convinced that the analyst does. In a sense the analyst sustains this illusion until the analysand reaches a point where he can ask with full conviction and certainty for that which he takes to be the thing. Only at that moment can the analyst's interpretation, in refusing to give the thing demanded and in opening a place where whatever played the role of the thing in the patient's life history can emerge, be effective. Why then does the Rat Man present himself for a psychoanal­ ysis? What is the nature of the demand articulated at this mo­ ment? First, the young man does so because of fears that "some­ thing might happen to two people" of whom he is very fond, his

8

RAT MAN

father and the lady he admires. Second, he is afraid of compulsive impulses, as Freud calls them, such as that he will "cut his throat with a razor." Third, he has wasted a great deal of time fighting against these impulses and life, we might say, is passing him by. (Freud, S. E. vol. X, p. 158). Strangely enough the first thing that comes to this patients mind is not what will or has been happening to him, but something which might happen to two other people. The second point, con­ cerning self-inflicted punishment, appears to be a simple conse­ quence of the first. If something happened to his father or the lady, then he, feeling responsible, would be obliged to cut his throat with a razor. The third point denotes a change in register, for the conflict outlined in the first two points as a conflict in thought (albeit of thought that may spill over into the real through what Freud will call the omnipotence of thought) is now seen as having ill effects on the existence of the patient. He has been wasting time entrapped in his narcissism, the world is passing him by, he is getting older, closer to death, and he finds that he has done very little. In what realm does it appear that life is slip­ ping through his fingers? In the world of sexual experience, he says. We would especially underscore the place of time in this dis­ course. Lacan has said that the obsessional spends his time trying to arrange an encounter with the moment of truth, the moment when he will meet death, thereby hoping to make this encounter take place at a time convenient to him. He wants to master time and by implication to master death. He wants to know when the axe will fall in order to prepare himself, to be ready. The idea of the obsessional's mastery of death is implicit in his opening re­ marks, though it is not until a later session that the Rat Man will declare that this father whose well-being concerns him so has al­ ready been dead for several years. We will not precipitate ourselves into thinking that the Oedipus complex of the Rat Man concerns a wish to murder his father, wish whose fulfillment has been rendered impossible by death. Nor should we limit ourselves to the superficial observation that he feels guilty about the death of this father. Certainly Freud will play on these two thoughts and they will be worked through in

OPENING STATEMENT

9

the course of the analysis. But the fact of the matter is that if we stop a moment and take the communication at its word, the Rat Man is simply saying that even though his father is dead, this does not in any way prevent things from happening to him. If the Rat Man wants to reach his father, he is obliged to seek him beyond death. Much as this thought is revolting to consciousness, nothing prevents us from understanding it as unconscious. Are we to understand that the fear of something happening to the dead father reveals a belief in an afterlife? This is certainly possible, but I would prefer to introduce another reading, drawn from Lacan's analysis of Sophocles' Antigone. The story o£ Anti­ gone revolves around an edict by her uncle Creon, who has just become head of state and whose first act is to order that the corpse of Polynices, son of Oedipus and enemy of the state, killed in attacking the city, not be buried but be left the prey of scavenger birds and dogs. It is in the name of the unwritten law of the gods, the dike which makes burial obligatory, that Antigone will revolt. Lacan's reading is that Creon is not satisfied with the death of his enemy, but must attack his victim beyond death. Only this will satisfy his thirst for vengeance. And even then. . . . The mention of the lady is of interest first because of the use of the term "lady" instead of the term "woman" or "girl." We know that it will take some time for the patient to divulge this lady's name and that his confusion concerns whether he should marry his beloved. The Rat Man has come to be analyzed because he expects that Freud will help him to resolve this question. The rea­ son he cannot resolve to act himself is that his mother has pro­ posed he marry a distant cousin whose father will guarantee him a good situation in life. If what the patient wants is to marry his beloved lady, then the analysis must be considered a success, for, in fact, the Rat Man did marry this woman after his analysis was finished. There is, however, more here than meets the eye. The fact that the patient refuses to name the lady, to name what he desires, is not a good sign. It suggests that the lady is not the one he thinks she is. In naming the lady he risks the revelation of her identity, and if she is not who he thinks she is, he does not want to know who she is.

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RAT MAN

If we jump on the Oedipal possibilities of this situation, we will again go astray. Not that the Rat Man's mother does not play a fundamental role in all this, for her desire is certainly in question; the problem is that its articulation is not all that simple. In fact it is not the patient's desire for his mother that is causing him diffi­ culty but rather the desire of his mother as it concerns him or as he wants it to concern him. Freud will point out later that the problem of marriage is crip­ pling for the patient because it replicates the choice his father faced at a similar period in his life. His father was in love with a poor but pretty girl whom he dropped to many the patient's mother. Since his wife's family had a business into which he was wel­ comed, that man gained in the process a certain wealth and standing. The father placed economic considerations before his amorous interests. If we are to locate the lady anywhere in the Rat Man's history, it will first have to be at the place of the poor girl, loved and left by his father. In this story the father is revealed in a less than flattering light and we would tend to think that this describes a state of affairs. And yet, the patient is far from being entirely negative about his father. Freud suggests that in relation to the impossible task of being a father the Rat Man's father did not do so badly. Our con­ clusion must be that the story of the father's choice has been col­ ored in being told by the patient's mother, or better, through her desire. Her desire is the filter through which the story has been transmitted. This is to say that the Rat Man's mother, unsatisfied with the way her husband desired her, wanted to be desired as she assumed her husband desired another woman, the famous lady. Here we might say that this mother awaited from her son the same attentions that she assumed her husband would have bestowed on the lady who was his true love. But note the following. If the original couple had been the Rat Man's father and the lady he loved, where would Freud's patient have found himself? To be precise, nowhere, or better, in a state of non-being. It is this state of non-being that is translated in his suffering by the coupling of his father and the lady. Something would happen, he tells Freud, to his father and the lady. But he does not tell us what will happen to either of the two; the conse­

OPENING STATEMENT

11

quences are undetermined. It is with his second remark that he tells Freud that he has compulsions to cut his own throat. This gesture is not to be taken as a threat; there is little chance that this obsessional neurotic will commit suicide. What he is symbol­ izing are the consequences of a hypothetical marriage between his father and the lady; as we have said, these consequences are that he sink into non-being, that he would not have been. This non-being comports a castration—not his but rather his mother's—and this necessitates his giving up the idea of being the phallus she desires. As Lacan has noted, he will not be able to have the phallus until he has worked through his desire to be it. We see at what level he is trapped because he sees himself as having inherited his father's failure to act. The only solution to this would be his father's reconciliation with the girl he rejected; given the father's death, this is impossible. Now the Rat Man can desire nothing else, since impossibility is the very condition for his desiring. The impossibility which defines and structures his desire may be understood in terms of his wanting a woman he cannot have. This would refer to the old story (old story since Freud brought it to everyone's attention) of the man who can love only women he cannot have and can only have women he cares nothing about. If on the other hand we read this impossibility in terms of the moth­ er's desire, we see that the reproach she leveled against her hus­ band depends on the idea of an exclusivity in human relations. Not only does she appear to believe that one can be loved for oneself, a common enough illusion, but she also seems to want a man who will be all for her. Since her husband is not up to this calling, she has attempted to fabricate such a man in the person of her son. To do so is not the easiest task, for it implies neces­ sarily a destruction of desire, not only of her son's desire but also of her husband's. She will even go so far, as is seen in other clinical examples, as to encourage her son in the activity of de­ stroying and denigrating his father's desire, and this is the path­ way to the son's not having access to the phallus that will signify his desire. If the son cannot go to his father for the phallus he can go nowhere . . . except perhaps to the psychoanalyst. Freud is not the first person to whom the Rat Man has ad­

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RAT MAN

dressed himself with his self-reproaches. There is another man, called a friend, who has been kind enough to listen to the patient denigrate himself, call himself a criminal, attribute to himself the worst of intentions and acts. We note immediately that the self who is thus denigrated is in the first place his father; no one will miss the point that the father is unworthy of respect for having sold out. But this father with whom the patient identifies in part represents an imaginary father created by his mother. Thus the self-reproach represents an affirmation of his undying love for her, coupled with a sense that he is unworthy of her love for him. Love is something everyone seems to believe in; thus most peo­ ple would accept the mother's judgment unquestioningly. The problem is that this love for a "one and only" attempts to arrange things so that nothing is left to desire. To desire is to be lacking in something; and the subject's wanting should make itself felt sufficiently to prod him to act to get what he wants. The point of analysis is not to help the patient to find love and overcome de­ sire, but to bring him to live as desiring. The Rat Man may stay true to his love, but in so doing he is merely attempting to bring the desire of his mother to fulfillment. Moreover this desire is contradictory with his mother's demand that he marry a woman whose father will guarantee the patient a good life. The mother who reproached her husband for selling out now counsels her son to do exactly the same thing. How can he do such a thing without losing the place he had heretofore occupied as innocent and blameless; and how can his mother be so unconscious as to demand of him something that contradicts her desire? The re­ proaches against the father are visited upon the son, and instead of reaching a decision, he attempts to have it both ways, thereby falling ill. His falling ill is not entirely a solution to the problem of making a decision between two women. In fact, it represents the uncon­ scious choice of a third. In falling ill the Rat Man puts off his marriage, and this delay, extending the time between him and this fateful encounter, is his symptom. Here the symptom is nothing less than the signifier of the desire of his mother. As such it must search for the other signifier for whom it fulfills its repre­ sentative function. We will see that this leads the patient to search

OPENING STATEMENT

IZ

out father substitutes, as they are most commonly called, to offer comfort and approval. I am basing my definition of the signifier on Lacan's: the signi­ fier represents a subject for another signifier. Lacan has obviously put to the side the Saussurian definition of the signifier as linked essentially with what it signifies, its signified or concept. The sig­ nifier is not there to convey a concept or signified; it is there to evoke another signifier. It is only in the coupling of the two sig­ nifies that a sense appears. That a signifier represents means that it does not express the subject. Representation suggests "standing in for" and this concept is essential in grasping the difference between the signifier and the subject who uses a signifier to rep­ resent him. The subject does not seek with his signifier to find another subject who will express himself in his turn. Two subjects mutually expressing themselves are two Hegelian self-conscious­ nesses fighting to the death for prestige. If the subject seeks an­ other signifier, the reason is that he is burdened with the weight of the signifier he must bear. The burden is lessened only when his signifier is coupled with another. In place of a signifier, the subject can represent himself with a symptom. Since the signify­ ing function still operates, the symptom will seek out another sig­ nifier, only it will not be recognized as such. What does the Rat Man seek as the other signifier to his symp­ tom? The answer is found in the second session; the young man seeks a "friend." He repairs to this friend when things are not going as they should, when he is overcome by obsessional thoughts. His friend acts like a friend, telling the young man that his self-reproaches are unfounded and that he has never commit­ ted the acts for which he punishes himself. We have read enough of Freud's writing about obsessional neurotics to know that this tactic never works. The obsessional is particularly impermeable to the effects of suggestion. The classic answer would be that the reproaches relate to unconscious thoughts and that the appeal to reasonableness never makes a dent in the self-punitive system. For our part we note the phonetic similarity between the German Freund (friend) and Freud. Thus the motive is seeking a friend may well lie in the resonance of the word. Evidently this young man seeks a father/son relationship based

M

RAT MAN

on friendship rather than on conflict for a mother's love. We will not understand why therapeutic suggestion on the part of a father figure fails if we do not take into account the place of this third person. This the Rat Man tells Freud in such a way as to leave no doubt that this is not the approach to take. Do not attempt to raise my self-esteem, to play to the strong ego, or the enterprise will finish as did my friendship with an older student during my school years. Thus he might have spoken. Here is what happened. When he was fourteen years old, he says, the older student took such a liking to him, based on admiration, that "he appeared to himself to be a genius." Later the older student's attitude changed into its op­ posite after he had gained what he was really interested in—an introduction to the patient's sister. This, the patient says, was his first great amorous deception. He would hardly have been con­ soled by knowing that he had just discovered one of the truths of desire. All he could see was that he had been used and that his love was a bagatelle to be sloughed off at the opportune moment. This experience reminds us of what we have already seen in the myth of the father's choice between two women. Here the Rat Man experienced the truth that his mother had complained of, but curiously his role therein is closest to that of his mother. The older boy played the role of the father, while the sister represents the money or situation which was (according to his mother) his father's real motive for making his choice. We hypothesize that the Rat Man's mother had nourished the hope that her husband had married her for love, not willing to accept that there was something else that entered into the deci­ sion to make the balance tilt in her direction. Once she realized that her husband could not satisfy her expectations, she did not think to adjust to the situation. Instead she aggravated it by re­ fusing to give up her demand for love. Words of love turned into words of gall, and became a bitterness which she proceeded to feed to her son. Thus the patient asks for friendship, but the demand does not correspond to his desire. His desire is to find a father, and friend­ ship and fatherhood are mutually exclusive. When a father is a friend to him, this is in order not to be a father. If the self-re­ proaches are understood by a friend to be untrue to the facts, this

OPENING STATEMENT

15

friend has misconstrued them utterly. The reproaches turned against the self are in fact aimed at the person to whom they are confided. When the friend says the reproaches are unjustified, he is refusing to take this expression of aggressiveness upon himself. He is saying: I have never done anything to justify your aggres­ siveness. In finding the patient innocent, the friend also finds himself innocent. There is little difference between this tactic and the intervention of an analyst whose neutrality permits him to be a blank screen on which the patient can project his fantasies. If the analyst responds that he has never done anything to deserve the reproaches his analysand levels against him, he is playing the same game and ought to think again. He is refusing the role he has been playing in the patient's unconscious fantasy enacted in the transference. Freud taught as much when he said that the obsessional's reproaches are justified; they are simply displaced. Their analyzability depends largely on the analyst's not fearing to act in such a way as to draw reproaches and aggressiveness and to permit his analysand to verbalize them. If the analyst maintains an inactive attitude, this will also be greeted with aggressiveness, only in this case, it will be more difficult to work through the conflict in the analysis; the conflict will rightly concern something outside the analysis. Nothing is to be gained by saying: I am innocent. Nor is any­ thing to be gained by maintaining a strict neutrality which fosters the illusion that the analyst is not effected by what he hears. For if the analyst believes that his patient's words produce no effect on him, now does he expect his own words to produce any effect on his patient? This in no way suggests that the analytic session or analytic therapy be given over to the acting out of the contents of uncon­ scious fantasies. This technique has gained a certain prominence in non-analytic circles that counsel the enactment of repressed wishes outside the transference as a road to cure. Obviously enough this may remind one of the element of enactment present in ma­ sochistic rituals and be satisfied that these rites do not respond to the requirements of analysis. Whatever ritual character the ana­ lytic session maintains serves as a frame that permits the staging of what we may call non-events. The analyst owes it to his patient

16

RAT MAN

as well as to himself to maintain this frame rigorously to assure that whatever is enacted in the session remains in function of the act of speech. In this way he places the emphasis where it ought to be, on structure and not on content. The following example from the case of the Rat Man will clarify this. At one of the first sessions of his analysis the Rat Man de­ cides he will tell Freud the rat torture recounted by a captain who had, we are told, a particular taste for cruelty. It is hardly any secret that obsessional neurotics have sadistic fantasies, repressed or not. But the patient does not tell the story outright. The inci­ dent is loaded with affect and its telling is so difficult as to be almost impossible. Freud is obliged to intervene to remind his patient of the rule of analysis which forbids any censorship of what is passing through the analysand's head. By responding to the need for this intervention, Freud is unwittingly—and this is, after all, to his credit—participating in the fantasy at the level of its structure. He has placed himself in the position of the cruel captain and, throughout the session, the patient addresses him thusly as though in a daze. Freud does not intervene here, for the mistaken form of address, while indicative of the structure of the neurosis, is certainly not assumable by the patient. What is not assumable is the patient's desire to act as the cruel captain, desire which he attributes to an Other: here, the analyst. We can be fairly sure this is the patient's desire because after all he is telling the story; he is occupying exactly the place that the captain had taken originally. We might call his slip of the tongue, calling Freud the captain, an element in the articulation of the transference. Just as the captain seduced the Rat Man with his story, so will this latter try to seduce Freud. Only the patient's repetition of the scene which unleased his confusional state will put him on the path toward resolving it in analysis. Especially where that repetition casts the analyst in the role hitherto assumed by the patient. In this chapter we have presented some of the elements which are engaged at the opening of a psychoanalytic treatment. In sev­ eral places we have had occasion to refer to explanations that were given only later or not at all. Those not given at all concern the structure of obsessional neurosis to the extent we can generalize it; they are drawn from other work on the subject. In the analytic

OPENING STATEMENT

17

situation as it unfolds in time the analyst cannot know what par­ ticular elements enter into the articulation of the patient's uncon­ scious. Nor can he rely on theoretical generalities to provide a key to a kind of phantom understanding. Any understanding the an­ alyst retains is to be viewed with suspicion. It will probably serve nothing else than his working out his countertransference reac­ tions which are of course hardly negligible. Premature interpre­ tation in which the analyst declares himself the one who knows the answers will hinder for a certain time the verbalization of the unconscious. This unconscious has no particular trouble in ex­ pressing itself through symptoms or character traits, but it will not find its way into speech unless the analyst renounces the nar­ cissistic satisfaction of being the one who knows. In the next chapter we will focus our attention on the discus­ sion of infantile sexuality that the Rat Man launches into during the next session. We will follow the approach of Charles Melman, who asked hypothetically: What did the Rat Man see under his governess's skirt that impressed him so deeply? (Melman's "On Obsessional Neurosis" is in my Returning to Freud.)

CHAPTER 2

Infantile Sexuality

N THE FIRST SESSION the Rat Man talked about his adoles­ cent and adult sexual experiences; in the second he launches without introduction into the tale of his infantile sexual experi­ ences, noteworthy for both their precociousness and intensity. These memories are brought to the fore after a break in his discourse. This is characteristic of the patient's following the rule of free association. We need not ask what links the story of infan­ tile sexuality to the material presented before it. One should not seek too quickly to understand or to explain a transition whose logic is surely unconscious. Later we will read that the obsession to understand characterizes this neurosis; to intervene here to dose the gap would do nothing more than feed the symptom. What­ ever links the first with the second element in the series cannot be evident at first glance; it is enough to respect the patient suf­ ficiently to let him elaborate his discourse as it comes to him. For our own purposes we ask what theoretical stance is implied in this idea that thoughts come to someone, for if they come to him, where do they come from? They come from elsewhere, from an irreducible otherness, to which the patient who respects the rule of free association submits. This is precisely what we want, for it repeats in the transference the infantile situation where the signifiers that determine the patient's destiny came from a dis­ course which pre-existed his birth. When we say signifiers, we distinguish them rigorously from images or memories. The Rat Man takes the cause of his obses­ sions to be an experience that he remembers, and in so doing he latches onto an image in place of a word and becomes fixated on

I

20

RAT MAN

it. One would think that the patient had read some of Freud's early writings about the effects of infantile traumas on adult neu­ rotics. Is it not curious that the Rat Man should begin a narrative of infantile sexuality with precisely such a scene? Listening to hysterics offering this explanation, Freud detected a kind of coun­ terfeiting in the remembering of these experiences. A fantasy had been misconstrued as a real experience and was being used as a lure to distract the analyst's attention from the material of the unconscious. With an obsessional neurotic it is highly unlikely that the same counterfeiting takes place. We follow Charles Mel­ man in accepting that the experience of the Rat Man was actually lived. This does not, however, permit us to conclude that unearth­ ing and reliving traumas is the key to psychoanalysis. This pro­ cedure makes for interesting cinema, but its psychological under­ pinnings are at best dubious. The repressed is not in every case identical with the forgotten. One could easily be led astray by the seductive idea of instanta­ neous liberation from the chains and gloom of neurosis in the discovery of the one precipitating cause. So the neurotic would like us to believe, and he has not always been at a loss for follow­ ers after this false lead. The scene of infantile seduction, whatever the value of its being discovered, is not the key to the salvation of the patient's world. The search after the one corrupting traumatic experience as the unique source of all impurity is the inverse of the search for the perfect mate, the sexual partner who will embody everything the individual lacks, who will complete him and permit him to grow into the fullness of being. The two are interrelated because the structure of this effort declares that the erasing of the one will necessarily lead to the other; the basis of both seems to be love. The discovery of true love or a perfect lover is often conceived as an ultimate experience, one which permits a psychic liberation of such intensity that the individual has the sense of not having lived before. The past and its suffering fall away in streams of glory; the individual can now give himself fully to the one person made for him, and devote his full being to the satisfaction of this other. When expectations are proven unfounded the fault is invariably placed on the side of the other. The intensity of the involvement

INFANTILE SEXUALITY

21

in such a relationship maintains the subject for a time against the discovery of any defect in the other, but once the defect makes itself known, there is precious little that can brake the slide into oblivion, the sense of total loss, or the growth of rancor. Obsessional neurotics may believe in the dogma of psychic lib­ eration, but they do not as rule repress by forgetting. They tend to make trivial or banal such events, holding them fast in con­ sciousness, almost as a means of warding off their effects, dulling their edge. They may feel that life is passing them by, but the reason is not an objective traumatic event; rather it is a subjective state, an affective state of guilt, that bears the burden of being the obstacle to their attainment of true happiness. Usually, obsessionaïs are more than equal to the task of bearing whatever burdens life has in store. They consider it a sign of contrition, a payment in kind that allows them to retain for themselves more valuable means of payment, means that they refuse to relinquish. A more significant reason for remembering the trauma is that the experience provided the incipient obsessional with intense en­ joyment. The Rat Man's traumatic experience with his governess is presented by Freud as the patient told it: I can remember a scene during my fourth or fifth year. (From my sixth year onwards I can remember everything.) This scene came into my head quite distinctly, years later. We had a very pretty governess called Fraulein Peter. One evening she was lying on the sofa lightly dressed, and reading. I was lying beside her, and begged her to let me creep under her skirt. She told me I might, so long as I said nothing to anyone about it. She had very little on, and I fingered her genitals and the lower part of her body, which struck me as very queer. After this I was left with a burning and torment­ ing curiousity to see the female body. I can still remember the in­ tense excitement with which I waited at the Baths (which I was still allowed to go to with the governess and my sisters) for the govern­ ess to undress and get into the water. (Freud, S.E., vol. X, pp. 16061).

Charles Melman has asked what the patient could have seen that fateful evening to make him date his compulsion to see the female sex. No doubt he poses the question as he does because the patient did not see the genitals of his governess; he touched

22

RAT MAN

them. Certainly this is a way of seeing in the dark, of seeing with­ out use of the eyes. His compulsion to see with or through the eyes was then an assertion that he is not blind, not castrated. This assertion became all the more necessary after his discovery of the otherness of the female sex. Melman answers his question by saying that what the child saw that evening under his governess's skirt was the lack of an object. What he must have grasped, there where he could not seize an object to respond to his questioning of female sexuality, was the concept of the lack, the concept of missing. This he seizes in the instant of an illumination and we will see that the question of his own sexuality, the traumatic erections he suffered later and which he will also recount in this session with Freud, is defined in rela­ tion to this lack of a correspondent object in the other sex. In English we say not only that the object is missing but that it is wanting. The concept of lacking does not establish itself with­ out being interpreted; what is wanting is necessarily, as linguistic usage tells us, something desired. Why would the governess be seen as wanting the phallus she does not have unless the patient knows that his organ is the locus of his sexual enjoyment and thus, that a being lacking such an organ would not be able to experience the same enjoyment? The young boy's inquisitiveness, his curiousity over seeing women naked, reveals the following structure. The concept of lacking is defined by the transition between the state of expecta­ tion or awaiting an object and the not finding it where it had promised to be. Somehow somewhere between these two mo­ ments the object disappeared and the subject feels responsible, we would even say guilty, for his desire, which must have caused the object to vanish and die. If Paul expected to find something under his governess's skirt, then he must have had the impres­ sion of having seen it there, of having seen or heard some sign which would have suggested as much. The function of the sign, underscored by Melman, is not to be neglected here. A sign, defined as representing something for someone, is aptly introduced, for the sign is fundamentally une­ quivocal; it has a single meaning, or refers to a single object. If a

INFANTILE SEXUALITY

23

sign appears, then there must be an object behind it. If there is no object, the sign is not a sign, but becomes a signifier, defined as equivocal. The signifier can always be read in more than one way. By Lacan's definition it does not represent something for someone, as a stop sign communicates a message to a driver. A signifier represents a subject, we might say a speaking subject, not for another person, but for another signifier. If the signifier is taken to be the phonetic material of language, then this material is structured by being paired with other phonetic material, with more of its kind. Let us imagine then that Paul, the Rat Man, had been told something by his governess that led him to believe there was something under her skirt, something for him, to be communi­ cated to him. The discovery of the lack of an object means that what the governess had said represented her as subject equivo­ cally, thereby raising the question of why she was letting him do this, what she expected from him. So rather than being someone receiving a sign, the Rat Man was required to provide another signifier. This is not always phonetic material; if the structure functions, other elements may take its place. In the situation un­ der study, the other signifier can only be the touch of his hands. (She did, after all, tell him to remain silent about the experience, thereby providing a sign of its forbidden quality). But if the touch has the characteristic of the phonetic material of language, it does not belong to or express the being of the one who uses it. The point here is that the touch may take on the function of the sig­ nifier, may function as a phallus. The patient told Freud that he had been suffering erections, as though he knew what his gov­ erness wanted from him and was powerless to resist being at­ tracted to her. If he is a good obsessional he will not make the connection between his erections and the allure of a feminine body; he would much prefer to see than as a function of his self, or rather as a function of a part of himself that has not yet been integrated with the rest. Thus he suffers them. The following pas­ sage says this well; note especially the implied connection (through contiguity) between the erections and the phonetic material of language, material which is said to betray the privacy of thought.

RAT MAN

24

The patient says: When I was six years old I had already suffered from erections and I know that once I went to my mother to complain about them. I know too that in doing so I had some misgivings to get over, for I had a feeling that there was some connection between this subject and my ideas and inquisitiveness, and at that time I used to have the morbid idea that my parents knew my thoughts; I explained this to myself by supposing that 1 had spoken them out loudr without having heard myself do it. (pp. 161-2)

Freud has underlined the last part of this passage and it has since become justly famous as a definition of the unconscious. The unconscious speaks, what it speaks are thoughts, and it speaks these thoughts unbeknown to the subject. Whoever is speaking these thoughts is a fading subject, fading under the speech that issues from it. Consciousness is inadequate to grasp this first and fundamental aspect of the speech of the unconscious because it is constituted to justify the being of a subject whose meaning precedes and determines it. In the case of the obsessional neu­ rotic, as Melman has noted, what we see is the banal fear that the subject has committed some crime unbeknown to himself or while asleep. This "banal fear" situates the subject of the unconscious in direct opposition to consciousness, which thus has reason to fear for its authority. Speech is an act, and the speech of the unconscious, as with any act, has consequences for which the subject will be responsi­ ble. We have already seen that Fraulein Peter made the young boy swear secrecy; from this he could have learned that his act was not entirely innocent. He also remembers another governess telling of a girl who had been thrown into prison for abusing a boy who was in her charge. If one of the governesses should suf­ fer from what he did, the boy should feel himself responsible; he would have betrayed his pact of secrecy. There is yet another way of reading the idea that something would happen to a governess if her activities were discovered. This "happening" may well refer to her satisfaction, and the in­ terest shown by another governess for the patient's brother may well have evoked a sense in the subject that the liberties he takes

INFANTILE SEXUALITY

25

with these girls should make something happen—he does not know just what—and that if it does not, he is inadequate. The idea of something happening is thus equivocal; the boy does not know exactly what is wanted of him; he is damned if he does and damned if he doesn't make something happen. The solution the boy lit upon was, simply enough, not to think such thoughts. Later he explains to Freud: There were certain people, girls, who pleased me very much, and I had a very strong wish to see them naked. But in wishing this I had an uncanny feeling, as though something must happen if I thought such things, and as though I must do all sort of things to prevent it. (p. 162).

Freud then asks him to offer an example of what might happen, and the Rat Man responds that the imagined consequence is that his father might die. The death of the father has come out of nowhere to find its way into this sequence. There is nothing in the infantile sexual expe­ riences that would lead us to suspect that titillating a governess causes the death of the father. Rather than requiring the Oedipus complex as answer, this reference poses the question of the link Freud declared to exist between incest and parricide. It is not so much a wish to murder the father that declares itself here but rather an attempt to grasp the concept "father" in its link with death. After all, the Rat Man closes this session by stating that his father, whose well-being has been preoccupying him recently, has been dead for several years. One could with Freud interpret this Oedipally and say that the young man wants to resuscitate his father in order to be the agent of his death. If this is Freud's interpretation, then how could we deny that this is Freud's desire, desire which led him to a particular definition of the Oe­ dipus complex whose value lies in being somewhat off the mark? Another interpretation imposes itself and is closer to the truth. If the Rat Man thinks of his father as being alive when he is dead, why not hear this remark as signifying that his father, even when seeming to be alive, was dead? By this we mean that the concept "father" is best understood detached from the person who bears

2Ô

RAT MAN

this role. To be concerned about the father as a living being is to obfuscate the paternal function, or better, to indicate a man un­ equal to that function. This idea derives from Freud's analysis of the myth of the primal horde. The exemplary paternal function of pronouncing the law prohibiting incest and thus of prescribing a system of marital exchange is enacted after the father is dead, not before. The law is not the expression of the personal interest or intention of a man; it is a purely social function whose interest is the impersonal order of discourse. When the Rat Man links his father's death to his wish to see girls naked, he is reversing the order through which his father's law would prescribe him to de­ sire girls outside of his home. His obsessional recourse to thought represents his father's failure. In the case at hand, we may also suspect that whatever might happen to the father is a displacement and that if the young boy makes such an incredible effort not to think such things as want­ ing to see women naked, then this is because he will have to bear the consequences of his acts. The father who does not discharge his role properly is conceived as wielding the instrument that punishes, and the child wants to know nothing more about the nature of this punishment. From other cases of obsessional neurosis we know of the extent to which these patients live in constant fear of punishment. In the present case, the following session, concerning the rat torture, will evoke that anxiety in its most acute form. For the moment note the following: the child who believed that his parents knew his thoughts believed that if those thoughts were known, then something terrible would happen to certain people, and by exten­ sion, to him. If, however, he were able to entertain such fantasies for his own benefit, without their becoming known to his parents and without there being any punishment, then the parents would lose the attribute of omniscience. More importantly, the myth of a full communication of thoughts between self and others is thereby shattered and the child would be introduced to the concept of otherness. Here, with Lacan, we remark that otherness is intro­ duced at the moment the child realizes that his parents do not know all his thoughts. The Other is introduced as having a defect, a blind spot, where something escapes his knowledge. The ex-

INFANTILE SEXUALITY

27

perience of an Other distinct from the ideal parent who knows everything represents a major deception for the child and he makes a considerable effort to deny it. The discovery that there are thoughts the Other does not know converges with the lack the Rat Man found his governess's skirts. His efforts to keep secret his burning desire to see a woman na­ ked demonstrate that there is at least this that his parents, as Other, do not know. They know his thoughts, because he speaks them out loud without hearing himself do so, but they do not know them all (and here he tries to deny the Other) because he does not think them all. And one thought they do not know they had better not know, because if they find out, then a catastrophe will ensue. This catastrophe will touch two people, as we saw in the first chapter, his father and the lady. In whatever sense the lady is lacking, the subject sees himself in that lack. But is this not translated by the obsessional into the idea of being dead? What is interesting here is that it is not the subject being dead who is the subject of the unconscious. His fear of death is a fear of the loss of consciousness. This loss would allow his dead father to speak. The dead father, representing the subject as lacking, is the sub­ ject of the unconscious; this subject speaks unbeknown to con­ sciousness. In a certain sense, this renders what is practically a truism: namely, that the speaker can never be conscious of all that is said in his speech. This will provide another way of connecting the lack between the legs of the governess with the dead father. It is not only the maternal phallus that is invisible, but perhaps more importantly the paternal phallus is represented in religious texts as something that cannot be seen, that must always remain veiled. Thus the Israelites in Exodus flee from the sight of Moses returning from his encounter with God. If the Rat Man fears seeing the paternal phallus face to face perhaps this is what is involved in reverse order in a scene he stages for his dead father. Therein he would wait until after mid­ night, open the front door so the ghost of his dead father might see him, and then expose his penis and look at it a mirror, (p. 204) Extraordinarily, here the idea of seeing the phallus face to face is mediated by a mirror. It is as though given the impossibil-

28

RAT MAN

ity of ever seeing it directly, the obsessional will settle for seeing its reflection, or better, the impression it has made on a female body. Perhaps this is behind the compulsion of looking at naked girls. Still, the role of the dead father requires elaboration. In a paper entitled "Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning," Freud reported a patient's dream which will help us to clarify the structure in play here. We refer to a young man who dreamed that his father was dead but that he was speaking to him. The dreamer expressed this as follows: he was dead but he did not know it. Freud, we know, interpreted this by filling in the blanks. The father was dead, Freud said, by the wish of his son, and God help the son if his father should find out. Find out what? The expression is equivocal, for in order that the dreaded punishment fall on the dreamer, he would have to find out both that he was dead and that it was his son's wish that had killed him. What can permit us now to identify the subject who is dead and who does not know it with the subject of the unconscious? Insofar as it signifies, the father's speech in the dream can only signify one thing, that he does not know. This is the subject's desire fulfilled in the dream. What the father does not know is the role he is playing in his son's fantasy. We remark that this dream took place in the course of an analysis and that it was told to someone (to Freud, as it were). As such it was a presentation of some aspect of the transference, an aspect Freud himself, we must assume, ignored. As addressed to the analyst, the dream says that the analyst ignores the place he occupies, the place of the dead. Why, the dreamer asks, does the analyst talk to me in a conversational tone, as though he were living? Only the analyst who listens to the dream can appreciate what the dream says to him and intervene accordingly. What should be retained is that the analyst, at the place of one dead, does not speak in the same way as a living being. What we have called the conversational tone of the analyst's remarks can be specified. The analyst speaks as if he knows, as if he were the subject of knowledge; in his interpretations he has placed himself as the one who knows what the subject wants. In interpreting, the analyst tells the analysand what he thinks the analysand wants, this being something the analysand ignores. The

INFANTILE SEXUALITY

2Y

analysand responds by a dream in which the analyst is dead but does not know it. As a transference dream this tells the analyst that the attitude he assumes in interpreting is blocking the flow of associations. At the same time this is precisely what the ana­ lysand dreads; namely that the analyst, in finding out that he is dead, will hold his analysand responsible. We should not in any case see this as a refusal on the part of the analysand to accept an interpretation, however brilliant it may have been. The resistance and the transference are to be situated on the side of the analyst and only his grasping of what is being communicated to him through the dream will resolve the impasse. Here Lacan's distinc­ tion between analysand and analyzed is pertinent. He says that the analysand is the one analyzing and the analyst the one ana­ lyzed. What are called countertransference and counterresistance are in fact, Lacan continues, the true transference and resistance. There is no justification for making the analysand bear a burden the analyst does not accept for himself. What the analyst hears in the dream where he is dead and does not know it is that his being at the place of the subject of the unconscious implies that he is supposed to know, even that he should avoid acting like an ignoramous, but that he would offer a better response if he did not believe that he did in fact know. His appreciation of the role attributed to him in the subject's un­ conscious fantasy is the only thing that can permit the fullest ar­ ticulation of the transference. His interpretations have been mis­ placed, but his error has not been sufficiently serious to prevent the subject from making an appeal for a better response. To return to the case at hand, the Rat Man demonstrated at an early age an awareness of a splitting of the subject into the barred subject of the unconscious and the conscious subject. Analysis ought to bring him to a point beyond his notion that he speaks his thoughts without knowing it. This point is the recognition that there is a knowledge in the Other pertaining to the subject, but which the Other ignores. The parents as Other are the place where the subject can discover a knowledge he cannot reach by his obsessional introspection. If the Other is defined as knowing, this does not merely refer to the patient's inability to keep secrets. After all, before he is born, the subject is implicated in a discourse

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of which he knows nothing; he is defined in his subjectivity by his parents' fantasy about him. It is against this fantasied being that he will battle to establish something of an existence. Freud in The Ego and the Id tells us that death is only represent­ able in the unconscious by figures that denote castration. In the first place the mother's being castrated suggests to the child that the phallus with which he has identified to establish his own sense of specialness is in fact imaginary; there is no such thing as a real self. It is from the place of this lacking phallus that a discourse makes itself heard. We have shown the importance of the concept of lack as defining the sexual curiosity of the child. The question we are attending to here is: Why does this lack immediately put a father into danger? Not so much because a father's life is put into danger; rather his phallus is put into question. This phallus is not imaginary like the mother's; it is symbolic. A father's pa­ ternity, his being named father, hangs, we might say, on a moth­ er's word. And there is no way of knowing with certainty that she speaks true. This may simply be another way of grasping the point Freud made in his essay on the acquisition of fire. Lacking a phallus, a woman is entrusted with the task of guarding the fire that has been stolen by a man. Certainly, there is a fundamental relation of trust here. Freud assumed that a woman did not have an in­ stinctual wish to douse the fire with urine, and that thereby a primitive division of labor was determined. None of this would preclude her letting the fire go out or her ceding it to another man. It is not a question here of female duplicity, but rather of a subjective position which cannot for a human being be inscribed with absolute certainty. Freud's telling of the beginning of the Rat Man's analysis lets us share the drama of the event. This drama is brought to its focus at the moment when the patient avows that this father who has been put in grave danger by his son's thoughts has been dead for several years now. At this point the analyst can only be stunned into silence. He is brought face to face with the impossibility which structures the patient's neurosis. Here Freud takes stock of the situation as it has unfolded and concludes with a diagnosis—not merely a diagnosis that defines a present state but one that sees the present as a faithful repetition of the past.

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Freud's description of obsessional neurosis defines the clinical entity by referring to a struggle between contrary or opposing forces. Melman has pointed out that the German word "Zwang" does not translate exactly into the word we commonly use, "ob­ session." While the word "obsess" implies a beseiging, the Ger­ man "Zwang" means to "penetrate into by force." The obses­ sional is not simply beseiged by his ideas, they penetrate into his consciousness by force, and his neurosis is the struggle the ego mounts to repudiate them. The ego's struggle is carried on in the name of what is "mine." The repudiated ideas are first conceived as being alien to the ego; they cannot be assumed without risking the love of the ego ideal, a figure to whom the ego seeks to render service, generally by living up to the picture the ego ideal has of the ego. The ego seeks the love of the ego ideal and to do so it must wage a constant and unequal battle against the desire of the Other, which desire, if it be fulfilled, would mean renouncing the goal of being loved by the ego ideal. Characteristically the obses­ sional neurotic takes sides with the ego ideal and attempts to de­ stroy the desire of the Other. But in so doing he also destroys his own desire. Since this is something he did not bargain for, his mental activities will be devoted to proving to himself fantasmatically that it isn't true. As he will do later on with this case, Freud attempts to restore the obsessional fear to its original wording. Thus he writes: "If I have this wish to see a woman naked, my father will be bound to die." Here, the incompatability between the patient's desire and his love for his father is immediately evident. It happens, however, that in the case of the Rat Man the role of the ego ideal is played by the patient's mother. It is her love that he risks losing by desiring other women, just as his father has lost her love by not desiring her. Freud continues: We find accordingly: an erotic instinct and a revolt against it: a wish which has not yet become compulsive and, struggling against it, a fear which is already compulsive; a distressing affect and an impulsion towards the performance of defensive acts. (p. 163)

Three elements are isolated to define the structure of the neurosis: a drive, a desire, and an affect. Pitted against each of these is a

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counter-tendency. The point of the neurosis is to maintain and prolong the state of struggle; the obsessional neurotic is not inter­ ested in total victory when his reason for being is to carry on the struggle. If we reflect on the dual structure of the struggling par­ ties, we will not be surprised to find in each case that a third element, call it the copulative, has been omitted. The drive is erotic and concerns looking. It gives rise to the desire to see persons of the female sex naked. While the drive is satisfied by the sight of a naked lady, the appetite of desire is merely whetted. Desire is never identical with drive. The drive to look, as we gather from other material, actually makes an effort to capture the look of an other—the subject wants to be the apple of someone's eye. Something in him revolts against this drive; he anticipates that if this third person were to see him indulge this drive, that person would be revolted. Thus the unbridled expres­ sion of the drive represents too great a risk for the ego. If the subject is afraid of being captured while looking through a peep hole, this is because the base of the drive is the wish to capture the look of the Other, to gain control over the Other taken as a Master. Freud says that the childhood wish was not yet compulsive be­ cause the ego had "not yet placed itself in complete opposition to it and did not yet regard it as something foreign to itself." (p. 163) As far as the ego is concerned, the desire to see women na­ ked is precisely the desire of the Other ("foreign to itself"). One of the structural properties of the ego, mature or otherwise, places it in opposition to the subject's assuming this desire as his own. The ego's position declares that since this desire does not spring from the subject's being, it must be rejected as an invading alien element seeking to capture the subject and to make him act con­ trary to his will. So long as the analyst appeals to the ego, be it strong or weak, this situation cannot change, and the struggle will continue. Even if the element of fear is conquered by refer­ ence to the strong ego—massaging the subject's narcissistic selfesteem—the solution can be formulated only in terms of becom­ ing a believer. Fear can be overcome but only as this happens in religion, by reference to a supreme authority who tells the subject that so long as he believes he will have nothing to fear. He will

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thus be able to keep the desire at bay, and ensure that his defen­ sive posture is unassailable. To call an act defensive is to say that it has lost the name of action. It is a non-act or non-event based on the necessity to do something other than what the desire of the Other (desire which the ego repudiates) directs. As Lacan defines it, the ethic of psychoanalysis is that the sub­ ject act in accordance with his desire. Whether he would join himself with another individual in a relationship or otherwise change something in the real, the subject who assumes the oth­ er's desire as his own acts accordingly. As we have said, this ethic does not mean I should do what I feel like doing, that I should act on my sentiments. That would be precisely the contrary of the ethic of psychoanalysis. It mistakes desire for feeling by assuming that this desire exists within the psyche. On the contrary, desire is without; it is outside, to be read by the analysand, for example, in dreams which Freud, following Fechner, saw as happening in another place. Doing as one feels is diametrically opposed to this ethic. It is a form of narcissistic self-indulgence whose defensiveness is not masked by the depth or intensity of feeling. Its base is the sub­ ject's feeling that he has to do something. He has been touched by the Other's desire and this has thrown him into a situation of distress or even disarray. The Other wants something from him and he would just as soon not know what. Thus it becomes im­ perative that he act to cancel the Other's desire insofar as it is directed to him. He draws back into the cocoon of his narcissism, only to strike out impulsively at the wrong time in the wrong place. He fears being trapped by what society, his parents, or any others, want from him. The distress and disarray derive from the obsessional's coming face to face with his inability to control his fate, to be master of his soul. Since he must act, he strikes back, not forward; any victory he gains will be pyrrhic; yet he feels he has escaped an encounter that would destroy him and his narcis­ sism to boot. For the obsessional neurotic the desire of the Other is the desire of Death. Death is the lady whose desire toward him is more than suspect; it is unambiguously hostile. Not so much because the obsessional fears Death; he retains a supreme confidence in his

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ability to control the time when he will encounter this redoubtable figure. His most important fear is not for his life but for that part of himself which transmits life. The obsessional fears for his male organ, fears for the mortification of the part of himself he loves best, and fears because the erection of that organ into its signify­ ing prowess would no longer be the expression of his feelings, but would be the signifier of the Other's desire for something that the Other lacks, something that as such must define its desire. Rather than face this, he retreats into doubt and uncertainty, end­ lessly whining that he does not and will never understand the Otherness of desire. Why is the obsessional so sure that what the Other wants of him is what he holds to be most precious? Precisely because it is the thing he loves best. The fact that the Other's desire would cost him his love determines his incapacity to assume the Other's desire as his, and sustains the imperative to do something, any­ thing, to ward off what Freud calls evil and what we call other­ ness. The obsessional's protective measures assert that whatever he feels is far more significant, because it is more personal, than anything anyone may want from him. And when someone de­ sires something of him, he sees it as a demand, a manifestation of the other person's narcissism. Ultimately, the two competing egos will reach a stalemate; this is not the most productive form of mating. Thus the rite is designed precisely to do nothing; if it contains two elements, the two cancel each other out, and the world remains as it was before the neurotic had the idea that he had to do something. The following example from the case of the Rat Man will clarify this point. Remember the inexplicable behavior of the Rat Man when he finds a stone on the path the carriage carrying his be­ loved will traverse, a stone which risks upsetting the carriage and injuring his lady. Immediately he feels himself obliged (Freud underlines) to put the stone out of the way of the carriage. But a little later this all begins to strike him as absurd and he feels a counter obligation to put the stone again in the middle of the road. The desire here denied (as it is enacted) concerns a repressed erotic agressiveness, an attitude that appears to be the contrary of

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true love. We might also relate this event to the patient's mania for protecting his lady, which was probably compensating a wish to do her some injury. After performing an act that would have borne witness to his being somewhere, he undoes it, thus erasing the trace of his passage. He might just as well have simply thought about it; the result would have been the same as far as the stone is concerned. And yet, if something should happen to the lady as a result of the presence of a stone in the middle of the road, he can think himself responsible, not because he has assumed his desire but because he has failed his love. In a chance occurrence he would find the fuel for his narcissistic brooding and guilt. For the obsessional neurotic, thought is a substitute for action and events in the real are believed to be determined by what he thinks. Freud fully recognized this element of the neurosis and labelled it the omnipotence of thoughts. Thoughts are all powerful, you can do anything by thinking about it enough. In thought every­ thing is possible. We cannot fail to recognize here a compensation for a more fundamental impotence. His actions are impotent be­ cause he is incapable of engaging himself in an action where he will be recognized by other people. The obsessional finds salva­ tion through thought because that is the place where the most important things happen for him, things he alone knows about. In his imagination he is constantly transgressing and is always contrite. To continue to define the structure of the neurosis we introduce some traits described by Melman. The symptom that characterizes the neurosis is the obsessional idea which Freud writes: "If I have this wish to see a woman naked, my father will be bound to die." This articulation has been associated with an event from child­ hood, but its inscription depends essentially on its revealing a structure that engages the symbolic component of the personal myth. What is characteristically obsessional about the subject's rela­ tionship to this idea? First, Melman notes, for a long period of time, the obsessional does not consider his obsession to be a symptom. He puts up with it for years on end and it does not seem to disturb him. There is a kind of peaceful coexistence or mutual tolerance between the subject and the idea. If the patient

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presents himself to an analyst, it will generally be because the symptom has become annoying to those around him. It is they who will encourage him to seek treatment. The neurotic seeks to be left alone in his shell; his neurosis is precisely satisfying in internalizing and removing conflict from his human relationships. Most often his most significant relationship will be with his symptom. If the obsessional falls ill, it is because his relationship with his symptom is threatened. Some event has touched the vital fault in his narcissistic shell and he turns to the analyst to restore the state of things before this event. The first trait of the obsessional is noteworthy because it is rad­ ically different from the hysterical symptom that leads the subject to seek help quickly; the hysterical symptom is tolerated only with extreme difficulty and is accompanied by complaints about the suffering incurred as well as by reproaches for the person who is incapable of erasing them. The obsessional, on the contrary, tends to think that whatever is to be done, he can do it himself, and if nothing can be done, that he is being called upon to tolerate the symptom as a proof of his manliness or worthiness. The second trait Melman isolates is the lack of questioning as to the origin of the obsessional idea. The Rat Man does not ask himself (nor does the question seem to arise for him) the source of the connection between wishing to see a woman naked and the death of his father. Rather than see himself as the one to whom the idea is addressed from the Other, the obsessional takes himself as the author of the idea. The symptom appears in a kind of timelessness. There is no time in which the idea could have been spoken, nothing to be gained by restoring a context in which the statement may have meant something other than what it means to the obsessional. The idea is a closed unity and nothing is admitted to accentuate one element rather than another, to change the scene, or to reveal the equivocation. Nothing can alter the enclosed and protected purity of the text. A third trait is that the obsessional does not perceive the thought as a sensory phenomenon; he does not hear the phonetic ele­ ments of the phrase, but he grasps it as an idea. The obsessional idea does not have the status of an object that can be perceived

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in the real; it is not at all of the same order as an hallucination. Melman notes that people do not have that many ideas; ideas are not the rule but rather the exception. He adds—and the remark is highly suggestive—that we have ideas ordinarily when we write something. His point is that the obsessional idea imposes itself as a written script rather than as a speech. The obsessional does not place himself as one to whom a speech has been addressed; he does not take his idea as calling for a response that will continue a dialogue. The aspect of dialogue that is most traumatic to the obsessional is the fact that the pres­ ence of the interlocutor prevents him from saying what he feels or thinks in exactly the way he wants to say it. Moreover, the interlocutor in the dialogue may not grasp what the obsessional feels or thinks; he may hear something different from what is intended. If the listener is excluded by the emphasis on the idea taken to be the closed unity of the statement, then the fact that this idea does not make sense has less importance. The idea does not make sense in reference to the rules of a language, but this is of no account, since the idea makes perfectly good sense to the patient. Not only that, but we may say that the obsessional himself is the sense of his idea. By referring himself to his idea he gains and maintains a being that makes him loved by an other who does not have to understand what he is saying. Melman's description of the functioning of the obsessional idea makes it clear that this idea is an inscription or, to use his phrase, what is in question is the typography of the idea. His next point is that the idea usually contains at least two elements or proposi­ tions connected by a series of predicates. The most commonly used predicates are . . . and . . . , either/or, and if/then to which is added the function of negation. The system obviously corre­ sponds to the propositional calculus. There, as Melman describes it, we find a closed system constituted by two elements and two values, the two elements traditionally being p and q and the two values being true and false. For anything that can be written in this calculus, we can decide whether the proposition is true or false. If the obsessional maintains himself in relation to such an idea­

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tional system, might not the reason be that the system permits him to decide or to know the truth value of the self and that after all such knowledge is necessary and sufficient to the purposes of his neurosis? Once this knowledge is established there is no need to test or to risk the self's truth by action. The propositional cal­ culus serves as a narcissistic cage that shelters the neurotic from the imponderables and unpredictables of the real. So long as he remains in the world of thought everything is possible, he can be everywhere and thus nowhere. Maintaining the range of possibil­ ities and establishing it as limitless is of paramount importance. We must remember here that potential and power are defined as states of pure inaction. If they become enacted, they are no longer potential. It is not so much a waiting game, but rather a philo­ sophical attitude in which action is futile because the time is too late for the action to bring the desired result. Time has passed the obsessional by and he has nothing to do but to wait for the ex­ pected end, at the same time trying to keep it at a distance and thus to be the master of time. The obsessional ritual, according to Melman, is most often con­ stituted by at least two acts linked by the conjunction "and." For example, an obsessional, upon waking up in the morning, must perform an elaborate washing ritual. He must brush his teeth while counting up to a certain number, wash his face while counting to another, shave while counting to another, and so on. This exam­ ple shows that the elements of the ritual are in fact linked; each function must be satisfied serially or the obsessional will be inca­ pable of confronting the day. The strictness with which the ritual is kept, the necessity for performing the acts in a particular order and for doing them all corresponds very closely to a religious cer­ emony. The essential point is that nothing be omitted. The per­ formance of the ritual corresponds to a kind of offering to the gods of time, an effort to satiate them so that the obsessional will be left alone for the rest of the day. Another way of connecting propositions occurs when the ob­ sessional is confronted by a choice—for example, between two women. This link is particularly evident in the case of the Rat Man, and we have traced its incidence to the choice his father had made of the wealthy girl he married over the poor girl he

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loved. The father did not act like an obsessional. For the obses­ sional, choice is impossible; he does not know what he wants. Thus he reasons that he may choose one or the other, but if he chooses the one he loses the other and if he chooses the other he loses the one. Melman articulates the problem in these terms and in so doing correctly places the emphasis on the question of loss. The obsessional wants to choose where he has to give up noth­ ing. Thus he maintains both possibilities, as though the world were waiting for him to make up his mind. The two women, let us say, become suspended in time and dependent on the will of the neurotic. At least this is the way he sees things in his mind: by not choosing he can have both and of course neither. What he does not notice is that there is always a third possibility. If he decides that either one or another event may happen, more than likely there will be a third, excluded from his mind, which does come to pass. In this case the either/or becomes a neither/nor. A third logical connective is the implication: if/then. This we have already seen in the idea Freud reworded as: If I have the wish to see a woman naked, my father will die. Obviously this will lead the patient to prevent the second by denying the first: If I don't have this wish, my father will not die. Evidently some­ thing is not quite right here; it happens that the father is already dead. In statements linked by implication the truth value of the proposition is determined by the truth value of the second ele­ ment. In p implies q, the truth of q will render the proposition true, whether p is true or false. The obsessional often gets himself trapped in this form, because whether or not he wishes to see a woman naked, the father is still dead. Melman writes that this produces confusional states, probably because the obsessional can vacillate between wishing and not wishing, thinking that if the one produces one consequence the other will produce the other. He will be unable to figure out which of the two is responsible for the death of the father. He cannot decide whether or not he is guilty, and therefore can feel guilty about his indecisiveness. We will have another occasion to examine the logic of the Rat Man when we take up the question of the rat torture and of the various imperatives that present themselves. Each of them will have a logical form of the kind we have just observed. We will

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discover that this logic serves to mask elements of the story that are either omitted entirely (Freud later calls this an ellipsis) or are relegated to the status of triviality. This chapter began with the question of what the Rat Man saw under his governess's skirts. We have answered with Melman that what he discovered was a lack, a lack at precisely the place where he would have expected to find that which was most precious. Might we also not say that what he found was an opening signi­ fying a desire directed toward him, against which he had to de­ fend himself by a particular use of language. If, by a kind of transgression, he had discovered something of his own desire, then his obsessions signify his effort to bring that desire under the control of his will. Desire is held frustrated in the act of look­ ing; this act creates a distance between him and women and also permits him to avoid letting anyone know he desires. To contain this desire, to keep it under wraps, the patient closes his dis­ course and constructs a world of thought where propositions are unspoken and where intrusive alien signifiers can be reduced to the play of ideas. These ideas are immediately placed within a logical structure whose efficacy is based on the exclusion of the subject of speech. We have identified this subject as the lack that he found between his governess's legs insofar as that lack defines a fading of the subject, fading that corresponds to the betrayal of a promising situation. When thoughts are arranged according to the propositional calculus, the singularity of the subject has no place. The universality of the truth functions is sustainable only in the absence of the mark an individual may leave on the expres­ sion he utters. This mark being quintessential^ phallic, the neu­ rotic is at the root of his being deprived of the phallus as fully as is the governess whose name happens to be a masculine first name. What does he want neurotically if not to be the phallus she is lacking? To do so he renounces all hope of ever having one of his own. As we will see in the next chapter, the being he takes him­ self to be is the rat around whom the torture recounted by the Cruel Captain turns. And the struggle engaged there will concern Freud's bringing his patient to see that this rat is not his being, is not a being after which he would find himself named, but that it

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is a signifier, a nodal point, around which the strings of his his­ tory are knotted. This signifier shapes the Rat Man's destiny, and the analysis will be brought to its term only when the patient can confront the weight this signifier bears for him. This weight must be assumed at the end of a successful analysis, for analysis can in no way untie this knot, however much the neurotic may want this to be the conclusion. If the end of an analysis is marked by the analysand's disarray, as Lacan sees it, this is precisely because he recognizes that the knot holds and that he will have to give up his expectations of holding things together through the force of his will or his per­ sonality.

CHAPTER 3

The Rat Torture

HE FACILITY WITH WHICH Freud's patient talked about his infantile sexual experiences vanished in the next session when he chose to relate the immediate occasion for his seeking help. We are, of course, obliged to take seriously the opening communication of the patient. We recognize, however, that the transference did not organize itself around his memories but rather around the confusion engendered by the tale of the rat torture. This Freud understood perfectly well. He used the opening com­ munication as a means to establish his diagnosis, but could not, with only this material, determine the place his patient had al­ ready attributed to him in the transference. Telling the rat torture posed the greatest difficulty for the pa­ tient; Freud's retelling brings this directly to the fore. The patient needed help in articulating what he had to say, and some ele­ ments remained unsaid or elided. As with any patient in psycho­ analysis, it is of critical importance to know in detail the situations and events that occasioned the demand for analysis. Tracing the path that led the patient from the rat torture to Freud's door is not the least of challenges. Freud at this point makes a preliminary effort to make sense of what he hears, but obviously it will not be until much later in the treatment that the gaps can be filled in satisfactorily. From the beginning it is not a question of separating fact from fiction. The story has all the qual­ ities of a fiction, but an incoherent fiction that obliges the listener to make certain assumptions to make sense of it. Freud is at his best here in respecting the gaps and in not trying to force a sense on the speaker.

T

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This Freud knew from experience. With his particular honesty he tells us of one of his first obsessional neurotics, whose habit of paying for his sessions with brand new bank notes piqued Freud's curiosity. The patient responded that the notes were not new but that he had ironed them out to prevent their transmitting germs. Freud returned to this point when the patient later told of his habit of sexually abusing young girls while they slept. We respect Freud's wish to provide an analysis of this habit; he asked the patient why he had no scruples about transmitting germs by fin­ gering a girl's sex. And we understand Freud's eagerness to reg­ ister such a self-evident conclusion, one which makes sense of the patient's relationship with money through the mechanism of dis­ placement. But the fact is that the patient never returned, and we must assume that the intervention was premature, the patient in no way being able to accept the link between two seemingly un­ related acts. We would go so far as to say that the connection was, in Poe's phrase, a little too self-evident, and in seizing it Freud manifested his refusal to seek any further. The patient's dropping of the treatment cannot simply be attributed to a resis­ tance on his part. If the Rat Man begins the session in which he will tell of the rat torture with a remark about the difficulty he will have in telling it, this suggests that he has already perceived the affection Freud bears toward him and that he is taking the risk of losing this af­ fection by telling a gruesome tale of torture. At the same time he is exercising a kind of seduction in which the telling of this tale will play a major part. And here the roles are confused. For while the telling of the story places the Rat Man in precisely the position of the Cruel Captain who told it to him, at the same time he addresses Freud as "My Captain." Half recognizing the seduction exercised upon him by the captain, the Rat Man tries to do the same to Freud. His story starts at a halt in a march during military maneuvers. During this rest period the patient misplaces his pince-nez or glasses and renounces finding them in order not to delay the march. This kind of consideration for the time of others is certainly admirable; the young man exhibits it in order to be admired and respected by his military superiors. Theoretically the point should not be

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lost, for one of the traits of obsessional neurosis, as Lacan defined it, is being suspended in function of the Other's time, not being able to assert one's own time, and thus living at a time that is convenient to the Other. Obsessionais are very punctual. Since the content of the narrative will concern rats and money, both of whose anal associations may divert our attention onto de­ velopmental questions, we underline the cause of this incident: the losing of a pair of glasses. This aspect of the story pales into insignificance beside the highly charged story of the rat torture. And yet one of the hallmarks of repression in the obsessional is precisely banality; besides, the importance of the scopophilic drive had already been made clear in relation to the patient's intense wishes to see women naked. How can we not remark that with­ out his glasses the Rat Man would find himself in a curious po­ sition if suddenly a naked woman appeared before him and he was obliged to look at her as though in a haze. Doubtless for him this represents castration. It places him in a position where he cannot read texts and he thus becomes prey to the tale spoken by the Cruel Captain. If the castration complex is a structure, the reference to castra­ tion poses a fundamental question; it does not provide us with either a response or a label. The question is: Who is castrated? We have already mentioned that the child's sexual identification is played out in relation to his opinion that his mother has been castrated, this being the only explanation for her lack of a phallus. This he repairs by the addition of an imaginary phallus, which he becomes. One might think that the Rat Man wants to be the object of his mother's look, of the gleam in her eye which denotes loving ap­ proval; but this theory, however satisfactory, is belied by the pa­ tient's exhibition of his sex before his dead father. The Rat Man's father may well be dead, but this does not prevent his look from having lived on, detached from his body. And note that the pa­ tient's behavior represents an effort to capture this look, taken as identical with the paternal phallus. Thus the values placed on pa­ ternal and maternal castration are different. Note also that there is a difference between looking and seeing. Let us say that people look in order not to see, that they stare in fixed amazement at a

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detail in order not to see the scene. Recall the Rat Man's dream of Freud's daughter, where the girl is represented with two patches of dung at the place of her eyes. What better picture of the look as something in excess of the function of seeing, and as essen­ tially blinding. Freud interprets this dream in terms of eyes and not excrement, and we must read the anal reference as a lure to hide something more essential, (p. 200) To continue with the rest of the Rat Man's story—it is during this same halt that the Cruel Captain tells of the exotic rat torture. The Captain's fondness for cruelty evidently extends to the telling of tales which excite the lesser officers. In the punishment he now describes the criminal is tied up and a pot with rats in it is turned upside down on his buttocks. The rats proceed to bore their way into the anus of the victim, looking no doubt for the way out. What retains Freud's attention is the place of the subject; how does the Rat Man relate to this story? And how is he implicated or touched by what he has heard and what he is now telling? Freud remarks: "At all the more important moments while he was telling his story his face took on a very strange, composite expres­ sion. I could only interpret it as one of horror at pleasure of his own of which he himself was unaware." (pp. 166-7) Is the plea­ sure that of the telling or that of the hearing? Does he picture to himself the torturer, or the victim, or the witness? The essential point is that he is unaware of this pleasure and it would have been an error to point it out to him. Freud limits his questions to what is said. Where an intervention based on the patient's words may well lead to his accepting them as his, naming a pleasure he does not even know he has can only provoke his repudiation. It is self-evident that the patient is alienated from his desire. Bringing him to assume this alienated desire through reference to his pleasure is far from an obvious course. What Freud's method shows and what Lacan has elaborated more fully is that interven­ tion in the transference has to proceed from the speech of the analysand, leaving a place open for the patient to articulate some­ thing of what has hitherto gone unsaid. And the unsaid is not the patient's awareness of his pleasure in the affair, but rather his naming of the characters. Only through this naming will he be able to situate himself and his desire.

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The Rat Man continues: "At that moment the idea flashed through my mind that this was happening to a person who was very dear to me." (p. 167) Inevitably his defensive fortifications are penetrated by the discovery that what he hears has touched him. He is implicated in this story to an extent that surpasses the ego's ability to assimilate what is happening. The Rat Man has been poisoned through the ear, no less than is Hamlet by the words of his dead father's ghost. At this moment Freud asks a question, not about the identity of the person to whom the torture is applied, but as to whether the patient is the one applying the torture. The question aims at situating the subject in his discourse. The answer that the torture was applied impersonally, which I take to mean that the face of the torturer was masked, defines precisely this place. Here again he is not aware of what he is saying and it would be counterprod­ uctive to bring it to his attention. Only then does Freud move on to ask about the person tortured (the one who is dear to the pa­ tient), and he receives the answer that it is the now famous lady, whose name, incidentally, the patient has not yet revealed. The patient has not in the least missed the import of Freud's first question and breaks off his story to repudiate the implication that he has anything to do with what passes through his head. He is obliged to recognize the existence of an Otherness to whom he can attribute these thoughts. This is the price he has to pay to assert his own innocence. To the extent that something of a trans­ ference is already in place, the Other who is interested in these things becomes Freud himself, whom the patient is calling "Cap­ tain." Fortunately for all concerned the patient had at his disposal the means to prevent his beloved from being subjected to the punish­ ment. This he did with a gesture of repudiation and the utterance of the formula "but ..." Adding the phrase "whatever are you thinking of?" completes the ritual and saves the victims, both of them. This comes as a surprise to Freud, who had not be in­ formed that there were two victims. But this slip of the tongue leads to the completion of the expression of the thought. The tor­ ture was applied not only to the lady but also to the Rat Man's father, the one who is already dead.

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The dead father and the lady are joined by being subjected to the same torture, which is efficacious on both sides of the barrier that separates the living from the dead. We might be tempted to conclude that the link between these two personnages in the pa­ tient's mind is a sexual relation. This would be far from the truth. On the contrary his story represents precisely the impossibility of such a relation; the patient can still suppose that such a thing did exist in the past, but that he himself will never know its delights: his own base character makes him unworthy of love and the en­ joyment of life. Saying that the young man's guilt for imagined crimes leads him to deprecate his character is insufficient; his place implies an identification in which his being is that of a rat. Who but an ob­ sessional neurotic could understand in a flash the panic of the rats trapped in the pot seeking a way out, mistaking the way in for the way out? It is as though in digging a hole to hide in he had discovered that he was digging his own grave. The situation is ripe to produce a breakdown. And this comes to pass when the same Cruel Captain hands him his glasses, just arrived from Vienna, and tells him that he owes the money for the shipping charges to one Lieutenant A. The Rat Man is as un­ equal to the assumption of his debt as he is to finding the person to whom he owes it. As we learn later, he knew all along that he did not owe anything to A and that therefore the Captain had made a no doubt honest mistake. Before getting to this point the Rat Man will become practically delusional in his efforts to pay the money to A who, as a matter of fact, does not want it. The patient breaks down at the place where he is called upon to admit that the Cruel Captain had made a mistake. For having articulated a signifier that is a nodal point in the Rat Man's history, the Cruel Captain has taken on a role that prefi­ gures but is not identical to that of the analyst. This is the role which Lacan calls the supposed subject of knowing, wherein the analyst is supposed to know what the analysand wants. The an­ alyst's occupation of this place will come to motivate the transfer­ ence. The analysand presents himself for an analysis because, as a general rule, he does not know what he wants and because he suffers from his ignorance. This does not prevent him from sup­

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posing that there is someone else who does know and who, with sufficient prodding, will tell him. In Lacan's example, a man goes to a Chinese restaurant where the menu is written in Chinese and tells the waiter to serve what he, the customer, wants; it is intol­ erable in such a situation that the waiter make a mistake, that he does not know what the client wants. Such is what happens when the Cruel Captain tells the Rat Man to pay the money to Lieuten­ ant A. If the Captain could have been mistaken in this incident, perhaps the patient had been mistaken in thinking that the story of the rat torture was addressed particularly to him. Not until later in the analysis will Freud be able to pin down the place of desire as it involves the patient. He will discover that neither of the persons named above is really in question. The in­ decision was the patient's and concerned having, like his father, to decide between two women: the daughter of the landlord of the inn in the village where the post office was located, and the girl at the office itself who had paid the charges on the glasses. The patient did not know which one he wanted; on top of that, the landlord's daughter's expression of interest in him evoked a defensive mechanism that displaced the conflict onto several of his fellow officers. But why was this situation so impossible? Freud gives us the answer: "Like his father in the tale of his marriage, he could afford now to hesitate upon which of the two he should bestow his favours when he finished his military service." (p. 211) We have still barely exhausted the complications of this inci­ dent. Upon hearing from the Cruel Captain that he owed the money to A, the patient formulated two contradictory impera­ tives. In the first he was not to pay back the money or else the torture would be applied to his lady and his father. In the second he was obliged to pay back the money to A or else the same torture would be applied. It is not too difficult to see that in either case he is responsible for the torture being applied. The logic of the contradictory commands is that of the if/then predicate, where the truth of the second proposition renders the entire proposition true whether or not the first is true. What strikes Freud is the patient's being obliged to follow ex­ actly the wording of the second command. He was obliged to pay the money to A even though A had refused to accept it, even

50

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though A had told him that B was responsible for postal matters. To follow the wording of the command to the letter, he thus con­ cocted the idea that the way out of his difficulty would be to give the money to A, who would give it to the girl at the post office, who in turn would give it to B. Placing the girl in the chain is senseless according to the vows and thus can be read as marking the person to whom the money is truly owed. All this appears delusional, but it is even more important to us that paying the money to Lieutenant A is symbolic. The patient is cursed to pay off a debt that he has not contracted to someone to whom he does not owe the money because in fact he does not know to whom he owes it. We will learn later that the debt is his father's and that as his father's son he bears the weight of his father's debts. The importance of this structure cannot be under­ estimated, especially since it will concern the act of paying for psychoanalytic sessions. If the necessity of paying for his sessions with Freud arranges something for the patient, it is because it permits him to pay off his symbolic debt. What he does not realize is that a symbolic debt can only be paid in part with a real currency. It can, how­ ever, in no way be paid with imaginary money, what Freud calls the "rat currency." On one side there are the real debts that the patient's father never paid, which the patient inherits. On the other there is what we are calling a symbolic debt. What this means is that the patient owes his existence to whatever it was that caused his parents to marry. To pay this debt requires more than money. The patient will pay it with words and also with action in which he engages his being. If the patient has a debt toward his father, this debt concerns his father's legacy to him. It is from his father that he must take a phallus, and he cannot take it without giving up something that is his, something that he had hitherto deployed to represent him­ self. Lacan has pointed out that the problem here is not initially the castrating father, the father who interferes with the sexual enjoy­ ment of the child, in spite of what Freud tries to convince his patient to accept. Because of his mother's deprecation of his fa­

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ther's desire, the Rat Man finds that his father has nothing worth appropriating. The key is the signifier "ratnot so much because of what the word means but because the sounds which are contained therein are also present in other key words of his history. The signifier "rat" is revealed by Freud as the nodal point of the neurosis. The multiple associations around this word tie the patient as surely as the victim of the rat torture was tied up. We quote Freud at length on this point: The patient gave an indication of this connection by reacting to the word 'Ratten' frats') with the association 'Raten' ('installments'). In his obsessional deliria he had coined himself a regular rat currency. When, for instance, in reply to a question, I told him the amount of my fee for an hour's treatment, he said to himself (as I learned six months later): 'So many florins, so many rats.' Little by little he translated into this language the whole complex of money interests which centered round his father's legacy to him; that is to say, all his ideas connected with that subject were, by way of the verbal bridge 'Raten-Ratten', carried over into his obsessional life and brought under the dominion of his unconscious. Moreover, the captain's request to him to pay back the charges due upon the packet served to strengthen the money significance of rats by way of another ver­ bal bridge 'Spielratte,' which led back to his father's gambling debt. . . . Moreover, all of this material and more besides, was woven into the fabric of the rat discussions behind the screen association 'hieraten' ('to marr/). (pp. 213-215)

We will return shortly to the story of the father's gambling debt. When the Rat Man thinks that he is paying his analytic sessions with a rat currency, he is not merely deprecating the value of the treatment he is receiving. He also uses rats as signifiers and uses them as something that he has rather than something that he is. From the very beginning Freud is directing the cure in accord with the patient's desire; on this crucial point he does not in any way compromise with the neurosis. Freud said that the Rat Man's reactions to the imperative to pay back the money must have resonated with his father's gambling debt. (p. 211). When the father was a soldier, he had been en­ trusted with a certain sum of money and one day had lost it gam­ bling at cards. (Thus the reference to the German word for gam-

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bler, Spielratte.) He was, however, fortunate in finding a friend who lent him the money before the loss was discovered. Later the father sought to pay back this money and was unable to do so, having lost track of his friend. Through this story the Rat Man learned the concept of debt. If he had received a legacy from his father, in consequence of the latter's death, this legacy implied a responsibility, which entailed paying off a debt. In the following session the patient proceeded to tell of his fa­ ther's death and received in return Freud's explanation of psycho­ analytic theory. This explanation comes during the introductory portion of the treatment; Freud is not intervening in the transfer­ ence as much as he is setting the conditions in which it can come to the fore. We will consider this intervention as Lacan does, as establishing a pact between analysand and analyst. Before looking at what Lacan has to say here, I should point out the way in which Freud's intervention relates to the discourse he has heard. The analysand is talking about a difficult period of his life the details of which are of minor importance here. What is important is the transition between the statement of the analy­ sand and the intervention of the analyst. What is it that incites the analyst to intervene at this point: He told me that the only thing that had kept him going at that time had been the consolation given him by his friend, who had always brushed aside his self-reproaches on the ground that they were grossly exaggerated. Hearing this, I took the opportunity of giving him a first glance at the underlying principles of psycho-analytic therapy, (p. 175)

Thus writes Freud, and we cannot fail to recognize his acceptance of the confidant's place previously occupied by the friend. The essential is that Freud by his act, his act of speech, accept this place without acting as the friend did. He cannot assume that the transference is there for his asking or that he has nothing to do but to remain silent, awaiting its flowering. Freud declares his own approach to be not at all identical to that of the friend; his role is not to brush aside, but rather to listen, to permit the disengagement of unconscious thought. If the self-reproaches are exaggerated, Freud says, they are dis­

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placed to a content that cannot bear them; in the unconscious they are connected with another more suitable content. The patient has offered to be the analyst's friend, and has of­ fered the analyst the role of his older friend, a person whom he admires and respects a great deal. This offering is accepted, but not as such; the fact that the sessions are paid makes the relation­ ship differ essentially from friendship. The analyst accepts the pa­ tient's offering, but introduces a twist or a turn of phrase that brings forth the existence of an excluded third where the patient had thought he had to decide between two. Freud tells his patient that the guilt he feels is justified, even though he has never committed a crime against his father. He has never done what he fears in the real, but this does not in the least prevent him for having to bear the label "criminal." Freud refor­ mulates the question, directing his patient to look elsewhere for the solution to the enigma. Underlying the enigmatic nature of the question posed for the patient is another place where the pa­ tient's experiences make good sense without his having to deny anything. Another reason Freud chose this moment to intervene is more purely linguistic. This has to do with the resonance in German between the word Freund and his proper name. It is not exactly that the analyst responds when the patient calls him by his name, for this is not what happens. The analyst answers when he hears his name spoken by the analysand who does not know he is pro­ nouncing it. He hears his name across a verbal distortion that would reduce it to a word by scrambling its letters or by making it unrecognizable by embedding it in another word. The attitude manifested in this kind of manipulation of the analyst's name aims toward the destruction of his desire. Freud does not accede to this and takes the occasion to signify his desire in the theoretical ex­ planations he offers. In so doing he maintains his desire, but in such a way as to make it enigmatic to his analysand. Lacan's remarks are pertinent here: But the extremely approximative character of the explanations with which Freud gratifies him, so approximative as to appear some­ what crude, is sufficiently instructive: at that point it is clearly not so much a question of doctrine, nor even of indoctrination, but

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rather of a symbolic gift of speech, pregnant with a secret pact, in the context of the imaginary participation which includes it and whose import will reveal itself later in the symbolic equivalence that the subject establishes in his thought between rats and the florins with which he remunerates the analyst. (Ecrits: A Selection. New York: Norton, 1977, p. 79).

Neither doctrine nor indoctrination is relevant, because psycho­ analytic therapy is not based on the patient's believing in the the­ ory. Psychoanalysis is not religion; if the patient is to be cured, one measure of successful treatment is the extent to which he has shed the idea that he must become a true believer or even a prosletyzer of Freud's views. What counts here is not what Freud is saying but the fact that he is saying it. The analysand does have some right to know what theoretical constructs form the base of the treatment he will undergo, to know that it is not merely a haphazard, medicalized version of confession or conversation. But more essentially, if the analyst will remain for the most part in silence, this silence has to be marked as significant for the analysand and it can only be so in contrast with speech. Nor is it worthwhile for the analyst to foster the illusion that he holds the key to release the patient from his suffering, and that he does not say it because of some per­ verse disposition to retention. The analysand may well arrive at such a theory, especially if he is obsessional neurotic, and while the analyst may not respond with indignant denials, his having spoken his mind openly remains as a counterforce which none­ theless functions for the patient. The analyst's offering of his speech as a symbolic gift sets the frame of the analytic experience. The patient himself will offer just that and will in fact symbolize in the analytic relationship the structure of his neurosis, which heretofore he has merely been able to suffer. When the analyst establishes this symbolic dimen­ sion at the beginning of the treatment, he opens a field in which a symbolization may take place. Finally, whatever interest lies in the analyst's raising a point of theory, it cannot be presented to the patient as a universal truth. As Lacan said: "In order for the analyst's message to respond to the profound interrogation of the subject, the subject must hear

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and understand it as the response that is particular to him . . (p- 79) This much must be kept in mind when using theoretical inter­ vention: if the subject hears the theoretical remarks as applying to everyman, thus implicating him only to the extent that he iden­ tifies with this everyman, the intervention will miss its mark: namely, the implication of the subject in the message he is trans­ mitting. This is precisely the problem that is posed by the Rat Man's story: in repeating something he has heard tell of, he places himself in the most advantageous posture to say eventually that all this has nothing to do with him. Such a position is more dif­ ficult to sustain toward an idea which had floated into his head, namely, that the rat torture is being carried out on someone he loves. Still he remains an inactive observer, and when he attri­ butes to himself the power to save or to condemn his loved ones depending on whether or not he pays back a debt, he has not yet implicated himself as a subject in his message, he merely thinks he has. The first sign that he recognizes his place in all this is his pay­ ing for his sessions with rat money. He of course identifies him­ self with the torturer, and Freud with the victim. Here he engages himself in an action and takes the risk of encountering his desire. A technique that preserves the gesture of payment after every session and that uses it to implicate the subject, bringing him to recognize the active role he plays in creating his suffering, is un­ questionably on the right track. The following remark of Freud to his patient illustrates very well the way in which the analyst moved to implicate the subject in his message. It concerns the responsibility that must be as­ sumed for one's speech: I remarked that he was treating the phrase as though it were one that involved lèse-majesté; it was well known, of course, that it was equally punishable to say "The Emperor is an ass' or to disguise the forbidden words by saying "If any one says, etc. . . . then he will have me to reckon with." I added that I could easily insert the idea which he had so energetically repudiated in a context which would exclude the possibility of any such repudiation: for instance, "If my father dies, I shall kill myself upon his grave', (p. 179)

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We have already asserted that the wish for his father's death, based on the idea that his father is the one who prevents his access to the object of his desire, is not the basic problem here. The insistence with which Freud hammers home these ideas is not necessarily unjustified, however. Freud himself recognizes perfectly well the bearing of his remarks in a footnote: "It is never the aim of discussions like this to create conviction. They are only intended to bring the repressed complexes into consciousness, to set the conflict going in the field of conscious mental activity, and to facilitate the emergence of fresh material from the uncon­ scious." (p. 181) This rather facile presentation of the Oedipus conflict is de­ signed to set up a conflict between analysand and analyst, conflict whose effects are mediated by Freud's occupying a place similar to that of a friend conversing. Such an approach, as with much of psychoanalytic technique, must be used with caution. If by chance what Freud tells his pa­ tient touches directly on the truth of the patient's desire, the sub­ sequent repudiation of this truth may either bring the analysis to an abrupt conclusion or else force the patient to take action in desperation. Freud's offering the Oedipus complex as an explanation is a hedge against the place he will be called upon to occupy, that of the supposed subject of knowing. The analysand who sees Freud in this place will have to come to terms with the fact that the Oedipal explanation is insufficient to lift his symptoms and that if he is to find a solution to his neurosis he will have to articulate it himself. In vain will he wait for the analyst to provide the an­ swer. Whatever the analyst knows, and it is certain that the ana­ lyst bears a knowledge during the treatment, he cannot articulate it in a form that can be immediately absorbed into consciousness. If Freud regales his patient with his knowledge, it is perhaps to impress upon him that it is futile to expect the analyst one day to deliver a bit of wisdom that will set him free. Lacan's definition of the transference sees the patient's love for his analyst as the direct result of his supposition that the analyst knows. He whom I suppose knowing, Lacan declares, I love. Where Freud and the Rat Man discussed the conflicting senti-

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ments of love and hate that the patient manifested toward his father, they should be read as an articulation of the transference. Nothing of substance can be garnered from the patient's uncon­ scious until the transference is articulated and interpreted; there­ fore it is not until the transference fantasies are worked through in the latter portion of the treatment that clarifications will be brought forth to make sense of the stories the patient has been telling. The lecture on love and hate that Freud gives to his patient tends to recognize both of these passions and to state that there is no contradiction in feeling them both. This encourages the pa­ tient to articulate his fantasies concerning Freud and Freud's fam­ ily, and he will do so in later sessions. Freud has shown himself as one who can tolerate being loved and hated without letting these passions color his judgment of the patient's character. This does not mean that the analyst does not react in playing his role in the transference, it specifies that he is forewarned of these re­ actions and thus will give them the weight an actor in a play would give to his emotional involvement in the character he is portraying. Freud places himself as one who does not think he can erase hatred from his patient's life; he does not preach the gospel of love because the interconnection of love and hatred is indissolu­ ble. More importantly, neither of these is the real issue. What is the question is the patient's desire insofar as it relates to his inter­ pretation of his father's desire. If he loved or hated his father, it was to destroy the latter's desire. To the extent that Freud is now at the father's place, he will have to tolerate the effort to destroy his desire, enacted in the seductive discourse that issues alter­ nately from love and from aggressiveness. If the analysand can convince his analyst to love him, thus to respond to his demand, or to hate him, to throw him out as incurable, the neurosis will have won the match. The analyst's response in the first case would be to act as a friend, to enter into a personal relationship with his patient, to believe that his person is in question. In the second case the analyst would set the term of the analysis without the patient's having expressed a desire to finish. This was what hap­ pened in the case of the Wolf Man, and the results were not the

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happiest. There Freud not only set an arbitrary limit to the time of the treatment, leaving the patient alienated from a desire which he had not had the chance to express, but he later collected money to sustain his patient, trying, we must believe, to correct his error with a gift of love. These acts were hardly exemplary. In the best circumstances the termination of an analysis results from a decision taken by the analysand; after all, he is the one who will have to make his way in the real without the moorings of the analytic situation. If he cannot engage his desire sufficiently to decide that he wants to terminate, he should continue. His decision does not in either case concern himself alone; it impli­ cates the time and the desire of the analyst. Again in the best case the analyst will recognize the engagement of the analysand's de­ sire in setting the term, and will signify this recognition. In no sense is this recognition an approval or a permission. If the ana­ lyst approves or permits then he is simply responding to the de­ mand whose infantile base should be self-evident. Such a demand is not a signifier of the end of an analysis, but a manifestation of a resistance that should be treated as such. With the Wolf Man Freud made an error in forcing the end of the analysis; bringing unconscious material to the surface could in no way make up for this error. The forcing which made this material appear not only did not permit the patient to assume it and its consequences for his history, but it may have been the very condition through which the material could make itself known so quickly. Analysis is never a question of getting at the truth at any price. More often than not the problem of love and hate in the trans­ ference is that of the analyst. It is he and not the analysand who does not tolerate the transference and who thus comes to require affection and approval. Analysts believe in affects because they crave affection, but also because something in them feels deserv­ ing of rage. Thus they may either offer their own approval as though it were something real, or else, withhold it obsessively, thus provoking rage. It has never crossed the mind of many an­ alysts that a statement of theirs does not always mean what it says and that this may be therapeutically useful.

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Expressions of approval or disapproval may be effective when they are ironic and equivocal. "That's exactly it!" declares the an­ alyst and his analysand knows instantaneously that that is exactly not it, that he has been following a false lead to gain the approval of the analyst. There is something interpretative about the ana­ lyst's "That's exactly it!" but only to the extent that it opens a gap between what he says and how he says it. The handling of such interventions is delicate. The analysand receives the words of ap­ proval he had unconsciously been awaiting, but once he does he knows that that is not what he wants. His desire is elsewhere. If the analysand is well engaged in the analytic enterprise, he will be led to another subject in his next session. The intervention acts as a cut. Coming at the end of a session, it will in the best of cases introduce a discontinuity between one session and the next. What is commonly referred to as free association is nothing more than this discontinuity, the absence of connectives in a discourse. At the beginning of an analysis, the prospective analysand is told to suspend his censoring agency, his ego. Following this rule is sufficiently unnatural that few are capable of it without the ana­ lyst's encouragement. We should not omit the possibility that free association be used as a defense especially with obsessional neurotics. The obses­ sional may well adopt the forms of free association because he takes the analytic rule as an imperative and he is never more com­ fortable than when he knows the rules he must follow to win the love of his partner. For this reason the analyst is right to articulate his desire enigmatically; the analysand should be kept off balance, should not know exactly what the analyst wants from him. Behind the analysand's demand for approval is his effort to find out what the analyst wants; thus he seeks his own desire in the Other. The interest of the enigmatically pronounced "That's ex­ actly it!" is that it points at the question of desire without pro­ nouncing it directly. "That's it" refers to an answer that the ana­ lysand has proposed before the question. The point is to bring the analysand to pose his question, because once the question is posed correctly, the response will be contained within it. Any therapeutic technique that discourages the patient from asking or

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posing questions and that calls for the therapist to provide an­ swers to questions that have not been posed does not merit the name of psychoanalysis. One way of dealing with the analysand's question is of course to return it to him. Such a response implies a shift in register, for it moves the analyst out of the problematic of a demand for an answer. The analyst may not know the answer, but he knows how to handle questions. Returning the question is precisely what Freud does for the Rat Man at a particular moment of their discussions of psychoanalytic theory. Evidently the value of such a device is in judging the right time to intervene. We will thus examine the context in which Freud returned a question during a session of the Rat Man's analysis. The first remark we make, and we have already signaled its im­ portance, is that Freud intervenes when the patient has come to accept him as a friend, has come to accept the conversational tone of the sessions, thus misconstruing the nature of the enterprise. This misconstruing, in French méconnaissance, demonstrates the patient's conviction that the analyst has been tricked by the pa­ tient's ego into accepting this ego as a valid representative of the subject. For the analysis to move off this point of stagnation, the analyst is obliged to intervene, to introduce a cut, effected here by his fading from the conversation. So when the Rat Man asks how his hostility could have gone into remission, Freud does not respond with a page of affect theory. He returns the question: "To this I replied that whenever any one asked a question like that, he was already prepared with an answer; he needed only to be encouraged to go on talking." (pp. 181-82) What is far from obvious is the third person address. Freud does not know to whom he is talking and thus he is obliged to address himself to anyone. The patient takes the response as aimed particularly at him; he thus identifies himself with the anyone to whom the response is directed and demonstrates one of the essential elements of the structure of his neurosis, the systematic denial of singularity. This trait struck Freud and the place we find it most clearly is in the obsessional use of language. The obsessional neurotic avoids and denies the metaphoric axis of language-usage in leaning most heavily on what is purely grammatical. This class of patients is

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most happy when there are rules that can be followed in a mo­ notonously correct fashion. Use of a metaphoric or an agrammat­ ical device not only breaks a rule but at the same time engages the subject as participant in an action, here the act of speech, through a signifier that represents him. One ingenious way of begging the question is to declare that language usage is essentially creative, and that practically every sentence pronounced is original. The infinite possibilities of sen­ tence formation make it extremely unlikely that the sentence I write here was pronounced before. This argument or rather coun­ terargument was advanced by Chomsky for a specific reason. He used it to refute the behaviorist position in which language learn­ ing represents the child's absorption of the discourse he hears. Chomsky's answer argued for the inherent predisposition to lan­ guage use activated by hearing discourse. If Chomsky's position is to be criticized, this in no way lessens the value of his criticizing behaviorist psychology whose perniciousness is as well known to the psychoanalyst as it is to the linguist. The fact that language is not acquired by mimicry does not necessarily mean that newly formulated sentences express a self or innate ideas. It would be vain to try to convince the obsessional neurotic that he is using language creatively because no one else has uttered the sentences he is speaking. The problem lies in the confusion of creativity with what has never been said before. Most of cre­ ative language use—in poetry, for example—is original, but that does not mean that everything that is original is poetic. If I say The black dog ran down the street there is a possibility that no one else has ever said this sentence, and the same possibility would hold if I said that The black house ran down the street. Nevertheless the sentences are far from being equivalent. The first may de­ scribe a state of affairs as perceived in reality by anyone and artic­ ulated by different speakers in the same sentence to transmit the same message. This differentiates it from the second, which can­ not describe a state of the real and thus refers back to the subject who uttered it or forward to the subject who hears it. The subject who says that a house is running down the road is saying some­ thing either of himself or of the Other, saying it through use of the metaphoric axis of language.

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A sentence's never having been pronounced before is of sec­ ondary interest to the fact that we can conceive of its having been pronounced by anyone competent in the language. Its not having been pronounced is in this case contingent. What is different in a metaphoric sentence is that we cannot conceive of its having been pronounced by just anyone, for the metaphor has the functions above all else to specify something of the subject who is speaking and to tell us something about him, something that is beyond the speaker's self-consciousness. Only with the metaphoric usage of language can we grasp the specificity of the act of speech in dis­ tinction to thinking out loud or idle chatter. Given the relationship between the axes of similarity and con­ tiguity in language usage, as shown by Roman Jakobson in his work on aphasia, we would be correct in concluding that the speech of the obsessional lies on the axis of contiguity. Obsessionais can become powerfully confused when their passion for connections places them before contradictory imperatives; they do not, how­ ever, become dissociated. The question that poses itself at this juncture is: How does the obsessional relate to his metonymic discourse? One answer is that he masks himself, not permitting his listener to pin down where he is in the phrase which repre­ sents him. If he takes himself for anyone, then his place is any­ where. This technique corresponds to the primitive superstition that the revelation of one's name to one's enemy gives the enemy power over oneself. Here the signifier that represents the subject for another signifier functions exactly like a name. The obsessional sees the world within a Hegelian struggle for prestige, the struggle that finishes with the establishment of a master and slave. The slave is the one who gives up first, the one who loves life more than the risk of death. The master is the one who assumes the greater risk, even death, to maintain his mas­ tery. The obsessional lives a constant struggle to maintain his mastery, however much he has to make this mastery imaginary to maintain it. Thereby he collapses desire into command. Lacan has remarked that desire is a metonymy. The speech of the obsessional articulates a desire, but he does not recognize this desire as his, nor does he recognize that this desire concerns him. Whenever he is obliged to recognize it, his first tendency is to run

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for cover, to feel that he is under siege. His failure to engage a signifier that represents him in a phrase is a failure to act in rela­ tion to the desire of an Other. This is because he reads this desire as a demand and sees no way of going beyond this demand. The correct response neither renders the object demanded, nor does it concede the love that is the veritable object of the demand; but it addresses the desire beyond the demand and aims at the emer­ gence of its signifier for the subject. When the obsessional retreats into the fortress of his ego, into a primitive space where he does not have to represent himself for an Other, he falls back on love and elevates its sign to the place of the signifier. The obsessional looks for signs, and these signs are supposed to be unequivocal. They mean one of two things; she loves me/she loves me not, to use a common example. The obsessional seeks these signs everywhere and questions not only the person he loves, but also the sun, the moon, and even astrol­ ogers. In this context the analyst, to the extent that he directs the cure of the obsessional, will avoid giving direct confirmation of the one or of the other. Almost everything the analyst does will be interpreted as a sign at certain moments of the analysis; this does not, however, lead him to act in relation to the demand by avoiding giving signs. His naturalness, his refusing to respond to the demand, his addressing himself beyond the demand to the desire hidden in the generalities, is the best strategy. When Freud addresses the Rat Man in the third person, this is what he does, and the patient is obliged to respond as if the question were re­ turned to him. He is obliged to give up some specific detail of the desire of the Other and his relation with it. The obsessional's choice in reading signs is between "she loves me/she loves me not." It would be wise to retain these and not to think of hatred as the contrary of love. Freud's remarks to his patient about love and hate come at a moment when one of the patient's problems is the inability to hate. Naturally (and at the risk of repeating myself), there is no way the patient is going to assume his hatred, any more than his desire, at the beginning of an analysis, even when the analyst tells of the patient's hatred for his father. The best or worst this can produce is an impotent rage that sometimes can lead to acting it out. This way of striking out

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blindly at the wrong person at the wrong time is an avoidance of hatred. Hatred is focused on someone, and it has the quality of rendering the subject existent. Rather than being based on an af­ fective state of rage, it receives its definition from being articu­ lated in a fantasy. Certainly hatred will have an effect on the sub­ ject's actions, but not necessarily in the sense that it ought to be acted out. It may as easily lead to shunning people and situations. But there are also times, as Hamlet had difficulty accepting, when action of a less gentle sort is called for. To grasp the discontinuity between love and hate, we observe that hate does not seek after signs of the order: she hates me/ she hates me not. The subjectivity of hatred is radically missing in love relations; hatred has no need to be narcissistic and idealizing. With love the importance of the reciprocity of the sentiment out­ weighs all other considerations; the lover wants to know that he is loved, that his love is true and that his beloved is true to him. This leads to the corollary that love cannot be postulated without thought of trickery or cheating or of other maneuvers which con­ cern dishonesty. If love coexists perfectly well with doubt, hatred represents the overcoming of that doubt, the assurance that the passion is well founded, and the impossibility of remaining inac­ tive. When Freud says that one who poses a question "like that" must already be prepared with an answer, this bears on the ques­ tion of hatred. Freud said of his patient: To be sure, the hatred must have a source, and to discover that source was certainly a problem; his own statements pointed to the time when he was afraid his parents guessed his thoughts. On the other hand, too, it might be asked why this intense love had not succeeded in extinguishing his hatred, as usually happened where there were two opposing impulses. We could only presume that the hatred must flow from some source, must be connected with some particular cause, which made it indestructible. On the one hand then some connection of this sort must be keeping his hatred for his father alive, while on the other hand, his intense love pre­ vented it from becoming conscious, (p. 181)

This appears to be an exercise in popular psychology, and it is not the only one in this part of the treatment. We will do better,

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however, to read the text obliquely. While this does not require justification, it is good to know that this kind of intervention is not a part of a consciousness-raising session. What the uncon­ scious hears is not necessarily the meaning consciousness would like to grasp. We would be more correct in saying that it is im­ possible for the two to coincide. If hatred is indestructible, this can only mean that the object of the hatred is indestructible. Hatred can never succeed in finding full satisfaction; something in the real legislates against its gaining all that it wants. Such is not the case for love, which can find, if only for a short time, its wildest dreams coming true. What is most striking in the case at hand is not that the hatred remains alive but that its object (his father) remains alive despite convincing evidence to the contrary. We re­ member the illogical ideas of the patient about his father, expecially insofar as he entertains the idea that his dead father might suffer the rat torture. From what we know now, there is little doubt that the patient hears Freud's remarks in this context. Where hatred aims at the entire destruction of the object, it can never attain that end. There is always something that remains behind, be it no more than a trace of the hated person's presence, which legislates against the completion of hatred. This impossi­ bility to find full satisfaction means that hate cannot be fully ab­ sorbed by even the most intense love. This in no way prevents the Rat Man from staking his hopes and his future on the idea that such a consummation must be possible. Nor does it prevent his desire from being based on the impossibility of attaining this goal. What bothers him about his hatred, which he does not yet rec­ ognize as such, is that it returns. Its expression may lead to an extinction that lasts for a period of months or years, but it always comes back, at just the moment when he thinks he has it beaten. He is not very convinced by all this discussion of hostility, but the fact of the matter is that Freud has touched on one of the nuclei of his neurosis. And his answer, which he offers when Freud tells him that he surely has the answer, brings his desire into play. Freud is doubtless somewhat beside the point here, but his comments still achieve their purpose, which is to help his patient

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to situate himself in relation to his desire. That desire will then permit him to distinguish what is real for him. The patient responds that as much as he loves his lady, nonethe­ less, "he had never felt really sensual wishes towards her, such as he had constantly had in his childhood." Freud retorts that that is the answer to the question. "The source from which his hostility to his father derived its indestructibility was evidently something in the nature of sensual desires, and in that connection he must have felt his father as in some way or other an interfer­ ence." (p. 182) The essential here is first that even with the most intense love, the patient has never felt any sensual desire toward his lady. This shows why he is incapable of making a decision in her regard, of taking action. He is in love, but he does not know what he wants from the relationship. Later on Freud will tell us that the patient was disturbed by the fact that his lady, because of an operation, could not have children, and that this idea was woven into the rat complex. The idea can be expressed: If what he wants is chil­ dren, she cannot give them to him; all she can give him is her love, and evidently that is not what he desires. Freud continues that if the Rat Man feels no desire, this is be­ cause his father interferes with its expression. This is the theory of the castrating father, and, as we have already pointed out with Lacan, this is not the immediate problem. Not to say that Freud's idea does not make sense; it is perfectly logical that the patient's father, jealous of the patient's desire for his mother, should inter­ fere to prevent the expression of this desire. But this interpreta­ tion places responsibility and even blame on the patient's father, and as Freud will note later, it is beside the point. It is probably closer to the truth to say that his father did not interfere enough, did not intervene to prohibit the son's access to his mother. We will quote in full a remark Freud made at a later session concerning development and its ethical bias. We do so because many have received the mistaken impression that psychoanalysis explains everything by reference to development stages. Freud wrote: I pointed out to him that he ought logically to consider himself as in no way responsible for any of these traits in his character; for all

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of these reprehensible impulses originated from his infancy, and were only derivatives of his infantile character surviving in his un­ conscious. He must know that moral responsibility could not be applied to children. It was only by a process of development. . . , that a man, with his moral responsibility, grew up out of the sum of his infantile predispositions, (p. 185)

If anything, these remarks undoubtedly express the attraction the patient feels for psychoanalysis and its theory of infantile neu­ rosis and the unconscious. Thus Freud adds a footnote to help his reader understand the thrust of his remarks, which are delib­ erately misleading, and not to take them for the last word in an­ alytic theory. Unfortunately, too few of Freud's followers seem to be aware of the existence of this footnote: "I only produced these arguments so as once more to demonstrate to myself their ineffi­ cacy. I cannot understand how other psychotherapists can assert that they successfully combat neuroses with such weapons as these." (p. 185) We should not be too quick to place blame, certainly not to place it on a father who could not support his son's feeling desire. In fact, were we to accept this interpretation, we would align our­ selves with the patient's mother; what she had to say about the father was precisely that. A father who sold out his desire for a poor girl to marry a wealthy woman he did not love was hardly a model of a man who acts on his desire. This assumes, of course, that the mother is the arbiter of masculinity. A mother is asking her son for the love she never received from her husband. He, we must suppose, did not love her as she would have wanted to be or as she imagined he should have. The patient does not de­ sire; this derives from his response to the demand of his mother, and for this he is unquestionably responsible. Nothing in the or­ der of things or in the order of the signifier obliges him to con­ tinue responding to this demand, even if at one time he did. Such is the bearing of the intervention Freud makes when he refuses to answer his patient's question, saying that the patient himself knows the answer. If Freud has been taken in by the friendship offered, he recuperates with this intervention, and in so doing he demonstrates the patient's responsibility for his own acts by showing that a pattern of action or inaction in the past need not determine the course of the future.

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Not only is the father's interference not the reason the patient cannot desire, but it would, if it were experienced as an obstacle to the fulfillment of the patient's love, function to cause his de­ sire. The structure we isolate here reproduces the one we have already seen at work in the discussion of hatred. Just as hatred can never be satisfied by the destruction of what it hates, so de­ sire can never be satisfied because it can never have the object that causes it. The patient's hatred never destroys his father en­ tirely, and what remains behind should come to cause his desire. This is the father's look that the patient will try to capture in ex­ posing his sex before a mirror. The problem with the look is its invisibility. To know where it is, you have to be able to see it, so a visual representation is required. Apparently this is the rat, not as signifier but as object. As object of horror, it is connected with both the father and the lady, both of whom are proposed as vic­ tims of the rat torture. When it is linked to the father, the rat may represent his desire, especially taken in its most negative aspect. Linked to the lady, it shows that she has been the object of that desire, that she has been forced to submit to it, thus that she is somehow impure and corrupt, impossible to desire. (Remember that the Rat Man's lady had submitted to an operation on her reproductive system.) Whatever the mother has received from the same father must somehow be different. Instead of receiving from him a rat, she receives children, the patient among them. But how, after all, does the patient know for certain the circumstances that led to his birth; how can he be certain that he is a beloved child, created without desire or emnity, and not a rat?

CHAPTER 4

The Work of Analysis

HE FIRST SESSIONS of the analysis of the Rat Man have shown us how Freud helped his patient initially to get his bearings in the real. Following Lacan's mapping of the course of this analysis, we will see in the next segment the development of the transference and the work of the analysis as it unfolds in time. One aspect of psychoanalysis that defines its specificity in re­ lation to other forms of psychotherapy is its respect for the pa­ tient's time. The psychoanalyst does not expect instantaneous success; he knows that any valid results of the treatment can be gained only by the extensive working through of the transference, which takes time. There are no short-cuts in analysis, and per­ haps for this reason most other therapies promise results in a short period of time with a minimum expense, not merely of money, but of effort. The therapist advertises himself as the one who knows the answer and who is willing to give it to the patient; he seems to be one who promises a great deal and who expects a minimum on the patient's part. To be sure this gives results, if we want to be generous and call them that, and Freud knew that this was true; he had observed early in his career that suggestion works wonders with hysterical structures. Things present themselves otherwise with a case of obsessional neurosis; psychotherapeutic interventions have only a very minor effect on this structure and even less on the symptoms that ex­ press latent conflicts. The reason is that the psychotherapeutic approach does not activate these conflicts in the transference. It does not permit these conflicts to become active within the ses­ sions. The odd couple of promise and suggestion acts as an effec-

T

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tive barrier to the presentation of any difficult situations. The therapist makes himself loved and we might well think that his professional activity is actually defined by this necessity. The transference is the enactment of an unconscious structure. If this structure must be enacted in the analytic situation, the rea­ son is that it cannot be symbolized by the patient directly. The transference concerns the Other, and it cannot be brought to the fore without the complicity of another person. If the analyst en­ courages the development and the articulation of the transfer­ ence, he does it in letting himself be duped, but only up to a point—the point at which the transference comes to a head. It is one thing to see this point, the point at which the analysand poses his question, and it is quite another to interpret it correctly. In the latter case, the analyst will open a space in which the analysand will articulate and symbolize the conflict the transference had served to mask, in a manner even more efficacious than neurosis. There are two aspects to the transference. At the beginning of an analytic treatment the transference is present but not articu­ lated. Here it is a kind of second discourse, thus functioning in the place of the unconscious, and it can be read in the discourse produced by the analysand. The analyst situates himself and his interventions in relation to this discourse, for it is, in the end, all that he really knows anything about. Lacan has articulated this aspect of the transference around the problematic presented by Plato's Symposium. Socrates is the one who accepts knowing noth­ ing except what concerns Eros. We know from Freud that the transference concerns love and that the analyst must be able, if he is to function effectively, to recognize the determinant role of this Eros in the direction of the treatment. His function is to give another person the opportunity to articulate a knowledge that had remained latent because he did not know he had it. Socrates is not the answer man; he is closer to the question man, the man who, based on an answer that is given before the question (and what is neurosis if not that) can restate a question that, while not being the question, nonetheless places the subject in a position to ask or to pose his question. When does the analysand pose his question if not at the mo­ ment of impasse, a moment when the analytic dialectic grinds to

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a Kalt, when the work of analysis cannot continue without an intervention of the Other—here, the analyst. This moment is also called the transference; it is another aspect of the transferential relation, a critical moment when a correct intervention will evoke in reply a signifier determinant in the subject's history. If the analysand is to gain what Freud calls a sense of conviction about the truth of his desire, then the circumstances in which he provides the missing signifiers will be critical to his grasp of the effect they have been producing unbeknown to him. The specificity of the analytic treatment lies in the dialectic in­ stalled by Otherness. This legislates against any attempt to situate the efficacity of the analytic intervention on the side of the self. When a patient presents himself for an analysis and pursues it for a period of time, he has thereby renounced the possibility of achieving a self-analysis, what Lacan calls a writing cure. We can advance this further by noting that analysis is not a transposition of a self-analysis onto a relationship between two persons. No one comes to the psychoanalyst to analyze his self; and if this is what he asks, the analyst has no interest in responding to this demand. He must address himself beyond it, and this means the analyst must recognize that what is bothering the analysand has nothing to do with this self, but rather has to do with his relation qua subject with Otherness. The title of Heinz Kohut's most important book, The Analysis of the Self, participates effectively in the deviation we have criticized. What difference is there between the analysis of the self and self­ analysis? If we base our definitions of the self on the therapeutic ideal that informs its structure, we say: one is supposed to be cured when one has gained a sense of self. Now what is this sense of self if not a sense of autonomy, independence, of a sub­ jective unity that is the possessor of experience, be it mental or physical. Not only does this reject the splitting of the subject, as Freud defined it, but it also misunderstands Otherness by making it either a function of self or else irrelevant to Self. If the analy­ sand finishes with a sense of self, this means nothing less than that he has the sense of having beaten the analyst at his own game, that the neurosis has remained intact, even if some of the symptoms have been displaced. In place of clearly-defined neu­

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rotic symptoms, there appears some sort of syndrome, a person­ ality disorder, which is thought to be resolved when the patient feels good about himself and lives the kind of life the therapist recognizes as proper. According to a doctrine based on self-analysis, the analysand is there to analyze his self. Since he could just as well accomplish this task alone, what role can the analyst reserve for himself? Ev­ idently he must be there to help the ego, or its strong part, to analyze the self, in the capacity of a friend who lends his knowl­ edge to the ego to help it to get the best of the unconscious. The end of analysis in such a theory would have the patient's ego identified with the ego of the analyst with which it has joined forces. At such a time the analysis would be over because the work of the self-analysis could go forward without the analyst present. With this in mind, we can measure the extent of these devia­ tions by emphasizing the importance Freud gives to the signifier in the case of the Rat Man. In such a situation the role of the analyst is to point out that it is only through the signifier that what Freud calls the senseless obsessional behavior becomes meaningful. Once the signifier is isolated, the problem can be said to analyze itself in the telling. The patient has neither need nor desire for the empathy of the analyst; his self is concurrently fad­ ing from the picture. One example Freud gives of an obsession that analyzes itself, that the patient comes to analyze without too much help from the analyst, concerns the German word "dickwhich means "fat." The story is as follows: During his vacation the patient suddenly had the idea that he was too fat and that he should make himself slimmer. He thus prescribed for himself a regimen of exercises that required an enormous effort on his own part. Freud contin­ ues that this activity had no sense until the patient remembered that at exactly the same time his beloved lady was staying at the same resort as he in company of an English cousin named Dick. Since this Dick showed a great deal of attention to the lady, the patient was jealous and wanted to destroy him. The symptom was a destruction of "dick," or his fat.

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The point is not that the interpretation is good or bad; the pa­ tient could surely have pursued the example further. What is im­ portant is that the Rat Man grasp at what level his actions are determined by signifiera, even, as is here the case, to the consti­ tution of his body. The approach Freud recommends for analyzing obsessional ideas is temporalization. Obsessional ideas, as is well known, have an appearance of being either without motive or without meaning, just as dreams have. The first problem is how to give them a status in the subject's men­ tal life, so as to make them comprehensible and even obvious. . . . The solution is effected by bringing the obsessional ideas into tem­ poral relationship with the patient's experiences, that is to say, by inquiring when a particular obsessional idea made its first appear­ ance and in what external circumstances it is apt to recur, (p. 186)

This means that Freud does not ask for the signifier, which would be to put the cart before the horse. Once the patient produces a signifier, the analyst should mark it; but this is not the same as asking for it. Second, the correct approach concerns a subjectivi­ zation of the idea; the idea must be brought into relation with the subject who entertains it and who characteristically considers it as foreign to the concerns of his ego. The function of the ego in obsessional neurosis is to say that the obsessional idea is an un­ wanted foreigner, which undermines the image that the ego wants to present to the ego ideal. Third, just as the idea does not occur to just anyone, it does not occur at just any time or in just any circumstances. This means that the idea has a place in the dis­ course of an Other and implicates the patient in the desire of an Other. How can we not recognize that the dick which the Rat Man wants to shed is the name of someone who spends a great deal of time with the woman he loves. The dick is the signifier of the desire of his lady and it is likely that he heard this word pro­ nounced by his lady. His relationship with the signifier is that he does not want to have it; and if he does not want to have it, he will see himself as being it. We will not enumerate the obsessions Freud clusters with the one concerning dick. We will point out that these are structured

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and connected by their relation to the desire of the lady. This Freud states clearly: All of these products of his illness depended upon a certain circum­ stance which at that time dominated his relations to his lady. When he had been taking leave of her in Vienna before the summer hol­ idays, she had said something which he had construed into a de­ sire on her part to disown him before the rest of the company; and this had made him very unhappy, (p. 190)

We do not know that these obsessions were revealed in the course of the analysis in exactly the way Freud presents them in his study. Our having the original record of the case as Freud wrote it up each evening does provide a point of reference and comparison. We do find in the notes the reference to dick that we have isolated, along with the statement that the connection of this word with the cousin's nickname was offered by Freud and not accepted by the patient, presumably because it was not he who offered it. In repeating this analysis in his case study, Freud makes it ap­ pear that the patient came to grasp the import of the verbal bridge. This may well mean that at a later date the patient returned to this incident and was able to articulate the connection. As a gen­ eral rule, where the presentation of the material of the original record does not correspond to that of the case study, we should consider the case study as the primary source. We may explain the discrepancy by saying that during the first three months of the analysis there is a mass of material presented that is not ana­ lyzed, and will not be analyzed until later. The beginning of an analysis, what Freud calls the expository portion, sees the presentation of a quantity of material in a dis­ connected and confused fashion. There is no chance at the mo­ ment of its original presentation to get at either the unconscious desires articulated therein or the role it plays in the subject's his­ tory. If the material has a bearing, and if it is invested, then it will be repeated at fairly regular intervals, depending on where the analysand is in relation to the transference. During the first months of the treatment there is an interspers­ ing of transference fantasies, in which Freud or his family is in

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question, mixed with elements of the patient's history. Within the original record of the case there is not any particular connection between the materials; they are presented pretty much haphaz­ ardly. What is being structured here is evidently the transference, or­ ganized around Freud's idea that the patient bore a grudge against his father as interférer in his sexual affairs. When Freud writes the analysis of the incident concerning the cousin Dick, he uses this to confirm the truth of his interpretation. We would be more inclined to situate this interpretation under the heading of what the analyst is supposed to know as subject. What will appear most difficult for the patient is first that this interpretation, though somewhat off the mark, is nonetheless efficacious, and second that if the historical material that he will bring forth contradicts the interpretation, he will have to admit that perhaps Freud has been mistaken. Since analysands see their analysts as knowing, it is very difficult for them to recognize any fault in that knowledge. The transference is structuring in the sense that it gives the obsessional a place where he can articulate and entertain his most grotesque fantasies. He does not have to live them or feel op­ pressed by them, because to the extent that the transference is operational he can unload them onto the analyst. If he does so in reformulating them with the analyst immediately concerned by their content, then he has accepted the fact that these ideas come from an Other, and that it is to this Other that they ought to be returned. That he takes Freud for this Other means that Freud plays the role of the X marking the place of someone who remains unnamed. If I read Lacan correctly, fantasies in which the patient sees himself represent his seeing himself as others see him, this being the place he occupies in the discourse of the Other and thus his desire insofar as it is the desire of the Other. Naturally, the pa­ tient does not accept this, does not accept it because he does not accept his being determined by the desire of the Other. He denies it by producing fantasies of his analyst and by telling them to the analyst. He lets the analyst know how he sees him, and this must increase in intensity the more he remarks that the analyst is un­ affected and unflattered by these fantasies.

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The analyst's task is to demonstrate that historically the patient has not been determined by what he supposes the analyst wants from him but rather by what someone else has wanted from him. Part of the analyst's know-how manifests itself in his making this twist operative for the patient. The crux of the matter is the way in which the analyst shows himself to be affected by what the analysand wants from him, for this will open up the place of the someone else who has determined the being of the patient through his desire. The logic of this dialectical situation may be written as follows. First, the patient is not affected by what the analyst wants from him. He shows this in his disregard for the analyst's desire; ana­ lytic interpretations do not touch him. The analyst returns this message in reverse order by showing himself as affected by what the patient has to say even if he is not particularly concerned, in the sense of being named as actor in the story. Second, the patient is affected by what the analyst wants from him and is puzzled because he does not know what the analyst wants. He articulates this in a series of fantasies in which the analyst plays a role. These are designed to seduce the analyst into turning his desire into a demand addressed to the patient. The analyst responds to them with indifference. Third, the patient poses a question which demands precisely what he has convinced himself that the analyst wants. This ques­ tion demonstrates his bringing into play an Other. The analyst in responding that that is not it at all throws off his mask of indif­ ference to reveal the void from which the question has been posed. This the patient will fill with a signifier whose effect has been determinant on his history. Fourth, as the analysis concludes, the patient, refusing to ac­ cept that he is determined by the signifier, reproduces his de­ mand for the analyst's love, thinking that this love is the essential element of his cure; the patient will give anything, even to con­ tinue analysis forever, rather than to accept the constitutive power of the signifier. Thus the patient wants to be affected by the ana­ lyst rather than by the signifier, and to this the analyst responds by demonstrating himself as affected by the patient's signifiers, in a way that the patient had not foreseen. He thus springs a kind

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of suprise; he does not refuse the demand. Rather he signfies to the patient that this path will not permit the patient to avoid pay­ ing the price. At this stage of the analysis there is no recourse, no appeal, and the analysand recognizes that this (the indefinite con­ tinuation of analysis) is not in fact what he wants. Lacan's formula that the sender receives from his listener his own message in reverse form finds its relevance here. The reverse order of which Lacan speaks is not simply a reversal of the order of propositions. We will try to demonstrate how this comes about. To do so we refer first to the text of Freud for, as he says, the order of commands that come to the consciousness of the Rat Man is reversed in regard to the idea that links the wish to kill his lady's grandmother (whose illness deprived him of his lady when he wanted her most) to the punishment that he must suffer for having such thoughts (he is commanded to cut his throat with a razor). As these ideas present themselves to consciousness what Freud calls the "punitive command" precedes the command to kill the old lady who had put herself between him and his love; nevertheless he must have had the idea that someone who thinks about killing an infirm old woman ought rightly to cut his throat. Let us try to state things in another way. In the conscious thought he sees himself as acting to have the lady he desires, and he sees this act as preceded by his own fading under the cut of the razor. Only through full renunciation of his narcissism does he desire and act on this desire. The way the thought is presented to con­ sciousness makes the realization of the action impossible and this, as we have said, marks the structure of his neurosis. After he thinks these two thoughts, he falls to the ground, thereby dem­ onstrating the fading of the subject, showing us that the thought of suicide is a representation of the fading of the subject. Such is the Rat Man's conscious reaction to his desire, predi­ cated on the desire of his lady, desire which signifies itself in the act of caring for the grandmother. This signifies desire because it signifies the patient's not being everything for her; she is capable of leaving him if necessity so dictates. If, now, his lady is signi­ fying her desire, and if that desire is not merely and exclusively for him, then the unconscious thought distorted in its presenta­ tion to consciousness declares that the lady does not want him;

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this is exactly the reverse of the conscious idea that he wants the lady and that he would do anything to have her. Her act of ab­ senting herself has demonstrated that what she wants is for him to signify his desire, to have something that signifies himself for another signifier, which is not the same thing as to let himself be eaten up by an exclusive passion. She wants him desiring but not on the condition that he is all that exists in her life. And we might add that this idea certainly has its weight in pushing the Rat Man to seek the help of a psychoanalyst. For the conflict that rages in his breast, as Freud designates it, between love and hatred, will be transferred onto the analyst with the greatest resistance because it means giving up the lady as sole object of his love. The catch is that naturally he will attempt to reproduce this situation of exclusivity with Freud. It is at times too tempting to conceive the relation of the Rat Man and his lady in terms that we can visualize. The best expres­ sion, the one that is closest to the truth, is verbal, and it is there that we have the most reliable indication of where the patient is in relation to his lover. Thus we will examine, as did Freud, the formula which the Rat Man concocted to protect his lady. The origins of this formula are not without interest. The patient was in the habit of reciting prayers for the benefit of persons he loved. But while he was reciting these prayers, it happened that what Freud calls an "evil spirit" would insert a supplementary word which would render the contrary of the sense, changing the blessing into a curse. Instead of saying to himself "May God pro­ tect him" the words that he would hear were "May God not pro­ tect him." Here is striking evidence of the incidence of another subject that subverts the intention of the ego. The "not" that slips in despite the best intentions of the subject is in this case the signifier of the subject of the unconscious. Freud describes the solution adopted by the patient: "In the end he found a way out of his embarrassment by giving up the prayers and replacing them by a short formula concocted of the initial letters or syllables of various prayers. He then recited this formula so quickly that nothing could slip into it." (p. 193) The way out of the dilemma presented by the "mental" parapraxis is found in reducing time to an instant. This foreshortening of time works to annul the de­ sire of the Other, which had represented itself in the "not."

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The formula that retains Freud's attention is Glejisamen. This is the patient's principal magic word, "an apotropaic against every evil: he had put it together out of the initial letters of the most powerfully beneficent of his prayers and had clapped an 'amen' at the end of it." And Freud could not help but notice in this prayer the anagram of the name of his lady, Gisela, joined to the word Samen, German for semen. The word is the unity of his semen with the body of his beloved, and thus represents his mas­ turbating with her image. Thus Freud analyzes the formula and it would appear that he is right. The Rat Man's love amounts to an urge for sexual union, for a sexual relation between himself and his lady, union that is impos­ sible in the real and that is brought into being by a curious verbal distortion whose sense he obviously ignored. Another interesting point is that while his semen remains whole if disguised within the formula, the name of his lady, which Freud correctly calls her body, is anagrammatized or fragmented, and when it is put back together again, it is unrecognizable. If we accept the idea that the patient's hostility to his lady is repressed, we can see here the consequence of that hostility: in the patient's fantasy he tears her body to pieces. In his fantasy a body lacking a phallus cannot hold together; and if the function of semen is to bring the fragmented parts together, then the unity that they form must be unrecognizable, and thus protected against whomever it is who wants to do her harm. The fate of the body of his beloved is the fate that the body of the analyst will suffer in the transference; the analyst's name will be presented to him cut up into pieces. One way of doing so is to deny the fact that the name is a name and to reduce it to a word. We have already seen this operating in the use of the word Freund, and there are other examples that Freud pointed out in this case, for instance, Freudenhaus-Madchen, which means prostitutes. Corporal fragmentation is linked to the idea of the second death, in which a corpse is reduced to dust and then scattered to the winds; thus the dead would not leave any trace of their passage. Manifestly, the analyst who is presented with such an uncon­ scious fantasy will have to place himself as the trace of the pas­ sage of the dead, he will place himself as Antigone to the analysand's Creon. Creon commands that the corpse of his enemy

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Polynices remain uncovered, to be tom apart by the birds and the dogs. Antigone is one who assumes her destiny to be the repre­ sentative of the laws of the gods, which prohibit such an act. The dead are the property of the gods, and any human interference other than that which is specifically required by the gods is a sac­ rilege to be paid for dearly. The conflict of Antigone pits the laws of men against the laws of the gods. Creon is the representative of the former, and his mak­ ing himself into the author of the Law is an unacceptable transgression. He takes his personal revenge to be coincident with the good of the city. Polynices, after all, had attacked the city and had even defamed the altars of the gods. We can relate the gesture of Creon to that of the Rat Man if we see that Creon's dictum is a violation of Otherness, making it into the servant of Self. Creon requires an immediate satisfaction for his thirst for vengeance, and he admits the mediation of no other— even the gods—which may stand in the way of his obtaining this satisfaction. This short-circuiting of time is what we have seen in the Rat Man's prayers; the second characteristic of the aggressive fanta­ sies is that the phallus is confused with the erectile organ, and that the one who possesses the latter thinks that it is his to dis­ pose of as he wishes, preferably to procure immediate satisfaction of what he will see as a sexual need. The false sense of union that is thereby imagined is represented in Sophocles' play as the union of the will of a man and the good of a city. It is certainly of inter­ est that Creon believes he is acting in the best interests of every­ one, because he identifies himself with this everyone. The only thing that escapes the dominion of Creon's will is Antigone, and the play's irony is that she is referred to constantly as a child. Antigone assumes her desire in transgressing the law of the city and thereby in accepting her paternity as well with its implication of filial obligation. Her place is to restore Creon to his desire, desire that he throws over in the interest of procuring his jouiss­ ance; we see that this this cannot happen without a price being paid. Creon will lose everything that is dear to him before he can confront the cipher of his destiny. In my view this situation gives a good picture of the end of an analysis, and we note the irreduc­

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ibility of the act of payment, or the assuming of certain sacrifices along the path that leads to man's fateful encounter with his des­ tiny. In the case of the Rat Man, Freud uses the question of mastur­ bation in a construction to which the patient responds with an infantile scene that was certainly determinant in his history. Freud's construction derives from the patient's recounting some "curious behavior" that we have already discussed and emphasized. The patient's conduct is described by Freud as follows: Between twelve and one o'clock at night he would interrupt his work, and open the front door of the flat as though his father were standing outside it; then, coming back into the hall, he would take out his penis and look at it in the looking glass. This crazy conduct becomes intelligible if we suppose that he was acting as though he expected a visit from his father at the hour when ghosts are abroad, (p. 204)

The importance of the father's look is here evident. The pa­ tient's desire is to see himself as the Other sees him—thus the intervention of the mirror. It is not at all evident that this scene reproduces the idea that this father was a castrator; it appears to correspond more closely with the idea that the look of the father was the object cause of his desire to see. This is not in fact a purely masturbatory act; it is more like an effort to assume a desire by enacting a scene that brings into play the object that causes the desire. Freud's intervention is thus incorrect, but this does not prevent it from being efficacious: I ventured to put forward a construction to the effect that when he was a child under six he had been guilty of some sexual misde­ meanor connected with masturbation and had been soundly casti­ gated for it by his father. This punishment, according to my hy­ pothesis, had, it was true, left behind it an ineradicable grudge against his father and had established him for all time in his role of an interférer with the patient's sexual enjoyment, (p. 205)

The patient responds with a tale he did not remember but that his mother had told to him; this detail is noteworthy.

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When he was very small he had done something naughty, for which his father had given him a beating. The little boy had flown into a terrible rage and had hurled abuse at his father even while he was under his blows. But as he knew no bad language, he had called him all the names of common objects that he could think of and had screamed: 'You lamp! You towel! You plate!' and so on. His father, shaken by such an outburst of elemental fury, had stopped beating him, and had declared: 'The child will either be a great man or a great criminal!' (p. 205)

One final element of the story is reported later from a conver­ sation the patient had with his mother, where the latter said that the misdemeanor in question was of the order of biting someone. The patient had been beaten because he behaved like a rat. To someone who has assumed that his problems result from events he has experienced, the greatest difficulty will be the obli­ gation to accept a scene that he cannot remember, which he knows only because his mother has told him about it, as determinant of his destiny. Not only is the patient not the master of his destiny, but he will never be able to master it, because the signifiers that define it come from the Other, from a discourse that could just as well be a fiction for all that he remembers. And since he cannot remember, he can recount the incident only by assuming that he is the person about whom his mother has been talking. Imagine the sacrifice this entails for someone who thinks that he is talking about himself only when he has a mental image of himself. On top of that, what guarantee does the Rat Man have that his mother is telling him the truth and has not introduced a distortion into the fiction? None, and this compounds the problem. If Freud's reconstruction is to the point, something we judge by its results, then one of the reasons is that he proposes some­ thing that is also merely a fiction. The transference fantasies that will follow this moment will see the grudge the patient bears against his father transferred onto Freud himself. Why Freud chooses this particular question is another way of asking why the mother just happened to remember and retell this incident. Would it not have been because the child expressing rage against his father is in the position of one whose act eliminates the father's desire? But can

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he do so without eliminating or destroying his own desire to the extent that it is identified with his father's? Having read Lacan's analysis of a case of obsessional neurosis in his article "The Direc­ tion of the Treatment," we answer in the negative. If the scene reported here has the function of destroying the father's desire, the child accomplished as much in unnaming his father, in naming him as one of the objects of the household, to be more specific, of his mother's household. We cannot go much further because Freud does not give us later elaborations on the theme, but we will not be stretching the point if we declare that it was not simply a question of chance that the child seized on certain terms to name his father, nor that the father stopped short in his tracks. I would suggest that the boy had heard these terms being used by someone else to refer to his father in a derogatory manner; thus his phrases are simply foreshortenings of more common metaphoric expressions. The rage the child expressed is not his; rather he is the mouthpiece for the repressed rage of his mother. In the scene that she repeated to him he was simply re­ alizing her desire and in so doing sacrificing his own. From the record of the case as Freud presents it to us, it would appear that Freud's missing this point brought the treatment to a premature end, for there remained no other way for the patient to try to divest himself of his identification with his mother's desire. Freud's wanting him to recognize his rage towards his father would have had the effect of fixing him in this rage and turning it against Freud himself. Thus he is blocked in his effort to love his analyst as well as his father, and the negative transference makes for a situation in which he can no longer consider the analyst as sup­ posed subject of knowing. If we look at Freud's record of the case we find confirmation of our view of the patient's mother. I quote from the entry for the session of December 21: He has been identifying himself with his mother in his behavior and treatment-transferences. ... He had the idea of saying he did not understand me and had the thought "20 kronen are enough for the Parch" (i.e. futile person), etc. He confirmed my construction by saying he used identically the same words as his mother about

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his cousin's family. It seems likely that he is also identifying him­ self with his mother in his criticisms of his father and is thus con­ tinuing the differences between his parents within himself, (p. 298)

He has not, however, connected this idea with the scene from his childhood. Evidently the material needed to resolve the neu­ rosis is present from the moment that the childhood scene comes into the analysis. It would appear that the patient never grasped the import of this scene, though its place is demonstrated by Freud; in his published text, Freud says that following the admission of this fiction, there was a series of transference incidents of great importance whose resolution led to the understanding of the rat torture as we have already presented it. The eruption of an en­ actment of the childhood scene in the transference represents an impasse, a moment of stasis where the dialectic of the analysis comes to a halt against a material that cannot be symbolized. Thus the conflict between the patient's parents, in which the patient had taken a part and which he had come to internalize, comes to be the substance of the analytic sessions. Things soon reached a point at which, in his dreams, his waking phantasies, and his associations, he began heaping the grossest and filthiest abuse upon me and my family, (p. 209)

writes Freud. The patient is obviously very hesitant to admit these thoughts for fear of Freud's vengeance, vengeance that he never receives. He acts as though he has a great terror of a violence that could at any moment attack him. What is interesting here is that he now feels that his words provoke violence, whereas his fa­ ther's violence stopped when the young boy found the words to curse him. It may well be, as Freud ventures in a footnote, that the child's violent reaction to a reproof from his mother or a nurse brought about the intervention of the father. This would add an­ other element to the structure. Where the patient evokes the scene to justify his fear of his father's violent temper, he says at the same time that after the incident recounted above, this violence was never again directed against him. Surely this was something whose lack established a feeling of specialness in relation to the rest of the family; this feeling may well have served to place him,

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in his mind, beyond the problems that trouble other mortals. The patient may well have felt immune from death insofar as that death was represented by his father; in his story he seems to have the words necessary to save himself from the blows of his father, which is to say, from the imprint of the signifier. In place of the blows, he receives the cipher of his destiny; only it represents the father as undecided between two alternative paths. If he is his mother's hero and thereby a great man, then his victory was in standing up to his father's violence: thus she remembers the story and re­ peats it to him. If he becomes a great criminal, he will be the son of a father who did not pay his debts. When the transference reaches a point of impasse in the treat­ ment, the analyst must wait for the patient to pose his question. Thus Freud reproduces in his text the question the Rat Man comes to pose: "How can a gentleman like you, sir, ... let yourself be abused in this way by a low, good-for-nothing fellow like me? You ought to turn me out: that's all I deserve." (p. 209) We hy­ pothesize that the patient has been abusing Freud from the place of his mother. It is her abuse of the Rat Man's father that is in question. I do not believe that the question concerns why the mother did not turn her husband out; rather the question is ad­ dressed to the father, and it asks why that father put up with the abuse. Why did he not just leave? Then again, perhaps in the patient's mind he did; perhaps that is how the Rat Man in his unconscious understands the father's death. Once the question is posed in these terms Freud is in no way obliged to accept the abuse that is being heaped on him. His ac­ ceptance of it is a part of his waiting for the patient's question; once that is articulated he can signify that in fact he does not accept this abuse—which is not, finally, directed at him. He ought to signify that he does not desire to hear this abuse, any more than he wants the patient to remain identified with the rat. It is not quite accurate, then, to say that the patient is identified with his mother; rather we should say that he is his mother's desire, that is, the rat that victimizes both father and lady. One question is why the father did not simply take his leave. Another is why his mother accepted being married to a man she apparently did not respect. If we read this into the history of his

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parents, it suggests that there is perhaps an element of untruth in the way his mother insults his father. Clearly, these insults place the young man in an impossible position of feeling himself to be his mother's beloved, the man she would have wanted to marry. But what if she is lying to lead him to renounce his father, only to let him drop into the status of a good-for-nothing once he does so. If the series of transference thoughts presented during this pe­ riod opened the way to the solution of the rat torture, the pa­ tient's question must have translated the torture itself. I note par­ enthetically that the solution offered is a solution, one that makes sense of the torture, but that it is not the only one. The rat torture is resolved, rather than solved, only when the transference is ana­ lyzed. If the patient's question refers to the rat torture, it does so in the following way. In his question the Rat Man identifies with his mother's desire to destroy the connection between the father and the girl the father loved. The victims, originally doubled into the patient's father and the lady, have now become merged into the person of the analyst. The analyst's virility is put into doubt by his "effeminate" acceptance of abuse. The difference between the torture and the patient's question is the fact that in the torture the victim is not willing, he is forced to receive the rats, whereas in the question the patient supposes that Freud lets himself be abused. The question thus represents the unconscious component that es­ capes the patient's conscious thought. The analyst's correct re­ sponse is that he does not in any way accept or let himself be abused; his love is simply not that totalizing, he will not do any­ thing for love. Would this not signify that in the patient's mind those who love him enough will voluntarily submit to the rat tor­ ture to prove it? Shades of courtly love. In responding, the ana­ lyst inscribes a limit to his transference love and signifies his de­ sire. The rats that bore their way into the unwilling victim's anus mutilate, just as the patient's verbal abuse does. We have seen this mutilation at work in the fate that Creon reserves for Polynices; this is the fate that the analysand reserves for his analyst's name. The patient supposes that the key to the solution of his

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neurosis and the advent of his happiness lies hidden in the ana­ lyst's name. In a certain sense the transference is the analysand's rewriting of his history to justify this operation. In the transfer­ ence the analyst lends himself to this operation, or at least he seems to do so. His response to the patient's question poses a limit, inscribes an irreducible trace that causes the patient's desire and will continue to do so after the analysis has terminated. Freud tells us only one of the cycles of the analysis of the Rat Man. An analysis goes through several of these cycles, which are countable, before the patient becomes reconciled with his desire. In each the dialectic works in a similar way, and Freud has given us the material necessary to grasp the structure of this dialectic. Freud declares in a footnote that he would have wanted the patient to continue his analysis, but that the patient's recovery, corresponding necessarily to the fact that the circumstances of or­ dinary life reassert their claims, made this impossible. The fact that the analysis did not reach a more satisfactory conclusion does not compromise the work that has been done. The Rat Man suf­ fered from a severe obsessional neurosis that responded reason­ ably well to analytic treatment.

CHAPTER 5

Theory of Obsessional Neurosis

N THE SECOND PART of his article on the Rat Man, Freud elaborates a definition of the clinical entity that he was the first to identify—obsessional neurosis. He does not limit himself to the particularities of the patient whose treatment he directed, but at­ tempts to draw conclusions about the functioning of this neu­ rosis. If the patient expends such a considerable effort to maintain his neurotic position, he must be gaining something from the neu­ rosis. This gain is maintained because it is impossible to face ex­ istence without it. An illness does not merely have characteristics, it has structure, and this means that in order to establish a diagnosis, we need more than a description of a ritual, like obsessive washing. If an obsessional neurotic represses, as Freud says, by maintaining re­ pressed elements in consciousness only to erase the connections between them and thus to deprive the elements of their affect, no theoretical approach to this neurosis can neglect the logical con­ necting tissue. We have in an earlier chapter given a full consid­ eration to these points. We will not limit ourselves to what makes the obsessional sick, nor will we pursue the line of thought that puts the value of learning about clinical work in permitting us to identify the path­ ological aspects of our own behavior. We renounce the installa­ tion of a moralizing function that would create a personality well adapted to the demands of reality. Adaptation always relates to a demand; if you try to respond to the demand, you will find your­

I

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self enclosed with your patient in a narcissistic cage. If the obses­ sional boxes himself into a dead-end situation, it is because he has a problem with the question of his desire. The obsessional ritual is a ritual purification of desire. It is along this path that we can link this neurosis to religious practices. At the same time we ask why the individualization of the ritual, its desocialization as opposed to the asocialization that characterizes schizophrenia, leads to a state of mind exactly the contrary of the desired result, a state of mind that is tormented by visions of its own corruption. It is curious that what Freud calls obsessional ideas are so fun­ damentally repugnant to the one who is submitted to them; why does this neurotic, often a paragon of cleanliness, suffer a thought process invaded by filth? What comes to mind immediately is that the obsessional is fixated on the anal phase of libidinal develop­ ment. We would do well to ask ourselves why Freud does not emphasize this point in his case study of the Rat Man, where it is self-evident from the beginning that the rat torture centers in on this specific orifice. We have already seen that Freud puts the theory of phases of psychical development to the side in treating this case, preferring a consideration of the patient's history and the determinant role of the signifier "rat." If the patient would like to consider his analysis as a repetition of his toilet training, the analyst holds fast to the Oedipal context and situates himself in relation to his and the patient's desire. This was Freud's approach from the beginning. Dreams, he says, are fulfillments of wishes, or we translate, realizations of desires. That they refer to phases of ego development is perhaps true, but it is unquestionably secondary. We can still approach anality not as an answer but as a ques­ tion, and we can ask what kind of dialectic is operant therein. As Lacan says: To put it briefly, the instinctual stages, when they are being lived, are already organized in subjectivity. And to put it clearly, the sub­ jectivity of the child who registers as victories and defeats the he­ roic chronicle of the training of his sphincters, enjoying the imag­ inary sexualization of his cloacal orifices, turning his excremental expulsions into aggressions, his retentions into seductions, and his

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movements of release into symbols—this subjectivity is not funda­ mentally different from the subjectivity of the psychoanalyst who, in order to understand them, tries to reconstitute the forms of love that he calls pregenital, (pp. 52-53)

The anal stage concerns the training of the sphincters to retain or to expel in a socially adapted fashion. This is not all nor is it even the essential, for if we were to limit ourselves to this defi­ nition, one might well respond that the domesticated dog or cat is perfectly capable of the same feats. The human child who is toilet trained enters into a dialogue with a person, most often the mother, who takes it upon herself to be responsible for his socialization. This socialization means that there is a pact between mother and child and that this pact permits the child to situate himself in relation to a discourse. Freud made a decisive advance here when he pointed out that to the child the excrements he offers have the value of a gift and are a sign of his love. Thus the mother's demand, be it to retain or to expel, receives an object as a response; this object does not gain its value from its objective reality as waste, but rather from its being part of the discourse opened by the demand. This demand introduces a dimension of temporality, not the time of the child, the time when he feels like expelling his feces, but the time of the other at which his act is suspended. The child's first victory is in retaining his feces, in not following the pleasure principle that dictates an immediate reduction of the tension produced by the need to excrete. His second is in his giving, when he is called upon or allowed to produce. The struc­ turing process here concerns these two aspects of the training and entails necessarily a splitting of the subject. It would appear that the destructuring of the training derives from the different responses the child receives for these two acts. If the mother loves the child who retains and ignores the child who expels, then the child will have more motive for retaining his feces, even when the time comes for him to expel them. He will read the demand to expel as ambiguous and as a challenge to over­ come. What the Other wants from him is not what he has to offer as a gift, but what his being can accomplish in giving itself. The

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result would be an anal retentive personality. Similarly, if the mother goes into ecstasy over the child's expulsions, the child will generalize this act into his behavior towards his entourage, and will use whatever is dirty to aggress others. This is best understood in relation to time. The child who is excessively retentive asserts the primacy of his time over the time of the Other. To put it more clearly, he refuses the time of the Other, makes the Other wait for him, as it were, and in so doing dislocates his own time. His action is nonetheless a reaction, it is an anti-action, and in fact does not establish his own time. In the second case the child who generalizes his aggressions into a be­ havior pattern also refuses the specificity of the time of the Other. For him the time to expel is anytime anywhere, though as a rule, this will be sublimated through his playing and his attitude toward dirt. Thus far we are limited to a dualism of expulsion and retention, and to a dialogue that centers on a demand and an object. Evi­ dently this is not sufficient, and another step is required to go beyond the demand. What a mother asks for during the stage of toilet training is not necessarily what she wants; as a matter of fact the child will be better off if the two do not coincide. It is from the mother's dissatisfaction with what the child has to give her that the question will be posed: What do you want from me? And here things do not arrange themselves very easily. There is no going beyond the anal stage without recognition that the advent of this stage coincides with the child's learning of language. After all, a demand is a demand only if it is articulated, and if the child learns to obey his mother's demands, it must be because he receives something from her, something beyond her love. What he receives is evidently speech, and as Lacan has said, receive is a better term than learn. The child receives words, re­ ceives them through speech, and in his turn he repeats them, he speaks for himself. Through this training he gains, as a supple­ mentary advantage, the desired control of the sphincters. Where demand is directed toward an object and toward the control of that object, desire is based on the letting go of that object. What the mother wants is for the child to answer with words. If the

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child comes to be anally retentive or expulsive, he is answering his mother's desire not with words, but rather with deeds, regressively. He answers but does not recognize, probably because he has not been recognized himself as a speaking being, but merely as clean or dirty. During the anal phase the child learns that he does not speak through his bowels. With the obsessional neurotic the obligation to accept this dictum in no way prevents a displacement that de­ clares: if the bowels do not speak, they write or they think. We cannot fail to recognize that interpreting an obsessional neurosis in function of anality arranges things well for him; trying to make him conscious of how anal he is will simply displace his reten­ tions and expulsions to his consciousness. Dreading castration, the obsessional is perfectly content with the anal context. The in­ terventions of the analyst will for a certain time be understood within this sphere. The analyst, while he cannot ignore the con­ text in which his speech is heard, must address himself beyond this demand to the patient's desire. This means among other things that he will have to work with the symbolism of the movement of release, as Lacan calls it above. This movement represents the body's giving up something, a part of itself, and symbolizes, even if after the fact, castration. Again we return to Freud's observation that for the child his feces have enormous value, for in giving them he is giving a part of himself. What he will learn during the anal phase is that where this part is not received as expected, he will have to re-pose his question. The child's reception of the gift of speech requires him to give up, to let fall, a part of himself, in a sacrificial gesture. The movement of release symbolizes a cut or break that limits the child's capacity for self-expression, another of the casualities of this phase. So long as the words the child must use to speak his demand are not his but are given by the Other, so long as they are public, not private, property, these words can only seem to express something of the self. Obviously, for the obsessional neurotic something goes wrong in all this. The reception of speech with the sacrifice it entails is not accepted, and is displaced into what Freud has called obses­ sive ideas. It is not evident how this happens. Freud begins his theoretical discussion with this question.

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He States with inescapable clarity that obsessional ideas can be resolved only by recovering the original wording of the idea. I would add here that if the obsessional constructs his obsessional acts from an analyzable text, then he has called upon the wording to cover and to compensate the function of speech, a function that the ritual is designed to obfuscate and nullify. The reason is that the speech act calls forth, as Lacan says, a response, and to the extent that that response subverts the subjective certainty of the speaker, the neurotic does not want to hear it. The neurotic will pay any price to retain the certainty of his being. Freud appears to borrow from Descartes when he declares that the obsessional engages his thinking in this task of finding an island of certainty in a world where almost everything can be thrown into doubt. Here we have a clear guideline for the ana­ lyst's intervention, which must make evident that not everything is in doubt and that attaining a certainty about one thing does not resolve the problem. Freud begins with a recall of what he had said in 1896. There he defined obsessional ideas as "transformed self-reproaches which have re-emerged from repression and which always relate to some sexual act that was performed with pleasure in childhood." (p. 221) Even in this formula there are implicit two elements to the structure, the jouissance of infantile sexual activity, and the strug­ gle to overcome this jouissance. This struggle is carried out by means of a castigation, a self-reproach, a mortification of the flesh that provides its own jouissance. Freud in fact tells the Rat Man this unambiguously. While the effort to overcome and to renounce infantile masturbation is a highly laudable enterprise, the obses­ sional neurotic does not entirely give up this activity, but makes use of its investment in the very act that is designed to overcome it. As Freud puts it several pages later: "In time the thing which is meant to be warded off invariably finds its way into the very means which is being used for warding it off." (p. 225) Freud criticizes his earlier definition by saying that it aimed at a "unification"; it thus followed the practice of the obsessional himself in leaning toward an "indeterminateness" that heaps to­ gether "under the name of 'obsessional ideas' the most hetero­ geneous psychical structures." (p. 221) The obsessional character­

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istically plays down distinctions and regards "what remains of these psychical acts after they have been deprived of their affec­ tive index simply as 'obsessional ideas'/' (p. 222) This affective index is nothing other than the signifier. (The accent should be on index, not on affective.) The strategy of the obsessional neu­ rosis reduces the signifier, which could only have been received from the Other, to an idea the neurotic can consider to be innate, or as belonging to him. Through this systematic reduction the signifier comes to be superfluous, thus indeterminate; any signi­ fier from any language would serve the same ideational structure. The innate forms of thought are next elevated to universality to create among other things an impregnable ideational fortress. Thus is the phonetic materiality of the signifier excluded. The ego does not simply refuse the signifiers that it takes as ideas, thus as expressions of self. It engages in a struggle with them, which Freud calls "the secondary defensive struggle" against ideas that he says "have forced their way into consciousness." (p. 222) The struggle aims to neutralize the affective charge of the signifier, to defeat an intruder whose activity aims at the subver­ sion of what consciousness takes to be its primacy. The catch is that the neurotic is never certain that he has succeeded in this task, and he thus must continually repeat the battle. The function of repetition in this neurosis is of capital importance. Unquestionably there is a satisfaction gained from the contin­ uation of the struggle, but this satisfaction derives from the ob­ sessional's unequal battle against his ideas. In the end, as Hegel saw clearly, the neurotic becomes slave to his ideas. The obsessional, according to Lacan, waits for the death of the master; he bides his time and prepares for the death that will liberate him from his ideas. Giving himself over to the fate that will determine the master's death, he decides that his liberation depends on forces outside of his control, and he is pleased for a time with his inaction. He has become freed of all measure of responsibility for what happens in the real and justifies his inac­ tivity by saying that what will be will be, he is powerless to change its course—thus his particularly acute sense of the work of fate, of a fate determined by nothing other than the signifier. He will tend to attribute this fate to a cosmic consciousness that is the

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reflection of his own and that he interprets as serving his own best interests. What he seeks in the world or in the transference are signs that the Other is his counterpart, in French his semblant, and he comes to relate to the outer world as though it were a function of his consciousness. The patient retains his narcissism and adapts it to the exigen­ cies of reality. Instead of renouncing his narcissism to gain his desire, he renounces his desire to maintain his narcissism, at a second degree, as a normal narcissism that is at home in the world. And he is most at home when the world does not require that he do anything to demonstrate the value of his self-image. Everything is possible for the obsessional neurotic; his sense of his power to move mountains is sufficiently satisfying to obviate the necessity for proofs or tests in relation to a recalcitrant reality whose ignorance he scorns. The obsessional does not have to prove anything to anyone. If he has achieved a certainty about his own possibilities, he will then require someone to love him for them. It happens often enough that the obsessional will achieve, through a chance encounter with an other, the love that he requires. This will come about through his seducing the other to accept his con­ ception of himself, his belief in his own potential, to such an ex­ tent that he has nothing to gain and everything to lose by taking action. What will the obsessional ask from his analyst if not a confir­ mation of his capacity to do something, confirmation shaped as a permission. The analyst's answer is necessarily "No" because he must himself relate to the impossibility that exists in the transla­ tion of possibility into reality. The impossibility means that the one-to-one translation between what consciousness takes to be its capacities and their actualization in the real is impossible in the same way that incest is impossible, not because the stars or na­ ture are against it but because the father says "No." The father's "No" is linked to the question of naming, for the name appears there where the father prohibits something from happening. The case of the Rat Man has provided us with a choice example in the scene in which the patient called his father by the names of objects in the room. The father's punishment, which incited this response, represents the incidence of the Law, whose weight

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is felt most particularly in the threat of punishment. Certainly his mother referred to such a Law, thus leaving a place for its artic­ ulation and making it functional. This means that the Law is not foreclosed as it is with the psychotic, where the mother does not open a place for its articulation. In neurosis the place is opened but the father defaults and displaces the prohibition into a state­ ment that aims at the consequences of transgression. We are al­ ready familiar with the form that this takes: If you do this, then that will happen. And we have pointed out that by the logic of implication this statement is equivalent to another: If you do not do this, then that will happen. Obviously the obsessional has a problem in figuring out what he should do. The Rat Man's con­ fusion about what he should do is aptly expressed by his father's comment: "This child will either be a great man or a great crimi­ nal." We have already seen the importance of the either/or structure in an earlier chapter. The point to retain here is that the father does not address himself to the child, but to his wife, thereby objectifying the child as a third person who cannot take the phrase upon himself to repeat it with the shifter, I. The child who ad­ dressed his father in the second person as, for example, "You lamp!" afforded the father an occasion to respond by substituting his I for the you. The second person address gives the Other speech, even if that speech is merely a repetition of the address in the first person. When the address is in the third person, the child is spoken about, he is not spoken to, and he can only reg­ ister a sentence that he cannot subjectify through his own speech. The father has the last word, but this word is closer to thinking out loud. The child receives it as fixing his destiny in such a way that he will henceforth be played by thoughts which render him impotent to act. If the patient did act during the scene he has forgotten, then his father's response undoes that act, recognizing and not recognizing it at the same time. The act is recognized but its subject is annulled. The father's addressing his wife demon­ strates that he recognizes the child only as a pawn in a struggle in which the parents are principals. Thus we return to the question of the wording. Freud says: "The distinction between a primary and a secondary defensive

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struggle is no doubt well founded, but we find its value unex­ pectedly diminished when we discover that the patients themselves do not know the wording of their own obsessional ideas/' (p. 223) The product of the secondary defensive struggle is a distorted form of the original idea, where distortion has permitted the original idea to escape the censorship of consciousness and to coexist beside the mechanism that renders it harmless. If, as Freud declares here, the operation in question corresponds to what happens with dreams, then we are justified in concluding that a completed product of the defensive struggle, the struggle by which con­ sciousness makes the signifier its own, fulfills a wish or realizes a desire. One example that Freud brings forth here is the protective for­ mula Glejisamen. This formula is designed among other things to protect his beloved Gisela, but in fact it fragments her name and thus her body, then to bring it into contact with his semen. Where the patient invests consciousness, the analyst ought never to for­ get that the struggle takes place in language. We have already shown that this formula represents a union of the patient with his beloved; we consider the wish in question to be for a sexual relation in which no gap exists between the two partners. This union is prohibited because if it did exist, it would mean the de­ struction of his beloved's body. As a matter of fact, only the se­ men that represents the patient can become unified with the body of Gisela. If the desire of the patient is the desire of the Other, and if this means (as Lacan says it does) that his desire is for her desire, then the formula as signifying is the desire of his lady, desire to have a name added to hers. She wants more than his semen. This is what the patient does not know about, nor does he want to know about it, for it can be gained only through his tolerating his sadistic unconscious fantasy. One of the principal consequences of the displacement of the Law is that the neurotic does not know the object of the prohibi­ tion. This object is not named where the prohibition is not spo­ ken; thus, not only does the patient not know the wording of his obsessional ideas, but more importantly he does not know the name of the person involved in the prohibition of incest. As Freud said, the patient never noticed that his defensive formula con­

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tained the anagram of the name of his beloved. The analyst will pronounce this name and in so doing will enunciate the signifier of the patient's desire. However obvious this may appear to the analyst, this name, which the patient of course knows, cannot be restored to its signifying function if the analyst thinks that it need not be spoken. Where the patient does not know the name of the object of a prohibition, he protects himself by extending it to include, for example, all women. If he falls in love with one woman, this woman will be the one and only woman, the only one who exists, and she will become Woman. This structure is familiar to students of Freud's work, for it contains the prohibition enacted by the primal father of the primal horde. He who has all the women for himself does not give up any one as long as he has a say in the matter. We are struck by the fact that in Freud's myth, once the sons have murdered the father, the Law that prohibits access to all the women is still operative even more ferociously. This myth is clearly functional in the case of the Rat Man, where the death of the father does not at all bring about the expected results. One point Lacan makes here is that the primitive father to whom all the women are attributed gains this attribution as a result of the enormous love that his sons bear toward him. The couple present in the first communication of the Rat Man to his analyst—that is, his father and his lady, represents this primal couple of the father and Woman, the father and all the women. The curious use of the word Lady instead of girl or woman alerts us to this. That the word comes at the place of a person who originally was not named for the patient is reflected in the patient's reticence about his lady's name; he refuses at first to tell it to Freud, and only does so when it becomes impossible for Freud to follow the patient's story without it. In this context we can understand the bearing of Lacan's state­ ment that Woman does not exist, that there is no such thing as all women. This intervention does not bear on the patient's love for his father, but rather on the attribution of all women to the father. It declares that the father does not have all the women not because he is not up to the challenge, but because there is no such thing as all women, either to have or not to have. There is

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one woman who says "No" to the father, (we cannot help but think of Cordelia in Shakespeare's King Lear,); her reason is nei­ ther obstinacy nor a perverse will to thwart the father's authority, but rather that she has no choice but to stop her father's slide toward the delusion that all women are his. She, not he, repre­ sents the Law. King Lear, of course, did not accept the response of his youngest daughter; he maintained his delusion in the realm of the possible. He thinks it is his shortcoming that he does not have all the women; he has tried to open the possibility of having them all, articulating it in terms of having given them all. If he has given them all, their gratitude should make him all for them and them all for him. It is striking in King Lear that the word that precipitates Lear's spiritual catastrophe does not issue from an omnipotent super­ ego, but rather from the youngest and frailest, the most beloved of creatures. The analyst's "No" is heard as though it were pro­ nounced by some almighty father who has the power to enforce his prohibition; in a second time the analyst will have to demon­ strate that this No is not the No of a living father, but rather the No of the dead father spoken through the agency of the little object. This is another way of saying that only Cordelia is true to her father, though Lear, like an obsessional, can discover this only when it is too late. In the case of an obsessional neurotic the analyst will be obliged to place some little object as obstacle to the identification of the patient with his dead father. The wish that animates the patient here is the wish to resuscitate the father; it was this wish on Freud's part that led him to construct the myth of the primal horde. La­ can's corrective bears on the fact that Woman does not exist, but also it declares that the murder of the father is grounded in the wish to resuscitate the father, when in fact the father was never anything else but dead. Recourse is had to a living father simply to explain the efficacy of his interdiction. First Freud works to recover the original wording of an obses­ sional idea and thereby to restore its meaning, which has been obscured by the defensive struggle waged by a consciousness that could only misapprehend the signifier. Then he fills in the gaps. Consciousness has several means of distortion. One of the more

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prominent in cases of obsessional neurosis is by ellipsis, by the omission of the intermediate steps that link two ideas. Freud gives us two examples of reconstructions that at first glance seem some­ what obvious but upon scrutiny are not at all self-evident. The first obsession is the following: "If I marry the lady, some misfortune will befall my father (in the next world)/' (p. 226) Freud fills in the gaps to write: "If my father were alive, he would be as furious over my design of marrying the lady as he was in the scene of my childhood; so that I should fly into a rage with him once more and wish him every possible evil; and thanks to the omnipotence of my wishes these evils would be bound to come upon him," (p. 226) Thus Freud reconstructs the thought process that links the patient's marriage with the death of his father. He constructs it as the fulfillment of a wish, not merely the wish to marry the lady, but the wish to resuscitate the father. This con­ struction certainly makes sense, but this in itself is insufficient insofar as the meaning is concerned. Freud supposes that the patient's marriage has the same value as the transgression that evoked his father's violent reaction in childhood. This supposition, however, would be difficult to dem­ onstrate. One wonders what could be meant by the idea that the wished evils are bound to be visited on the dead father, where in the childhood scene, as far as we know, no evils fell on the father who heard and witnessed his son's rage. Unless, of course, we assume that the evil was the fact that the father's rage subsided. If we ask why the father would have reason to be displeased by his son's decision to marry the lady he loves, we do not have to search too far for the answer. We remember that this father himself, when presented with the dilemma the patient faces, chose not to marry his lady, but chose instead the patient's mother; this decision not only did not bring him misfortune, but rather brought him a small fortune. This provides another reading that makes sense. Still another might read in the possibility of the father's having married his lady the patient's non-being. The result of this mar­ riage would have been the patient's never having been born. Finally, the patient's intention to marry his beloved Gisela must be understood in relation to the historical complex that defined

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his parents' marriage. The patient's intention directly concerns his father; the Rat Man wants to act in such a way as to show up his father; he wants to be true to his love where his father was false to his. But his father bars the path to this act, and it can only come to pass if his father, so he thinks, is dead. The problem is that his father is already dead and that this has not in the least lifted the barrier between him and his love. This leads the patient to decide that death is not sufficient; there must be a further pun­ ishment inflicted on the father, a second death that will erase all traces of the father and his Law. Only then will everything be possible, and only if everything is possible will the patient be able to marry his lady. This reading is closest to the point; it proceeds by inversing the order of the elements of the original proposition. Freud's second example of ellipsis concerns the Rat Man's niece— his sister's daughter—who was named Ella. The obsession brings into play the prohibition that we have said came to be extended to all women and thus to all heterosexual activity on the patient's part. Since we have attributed indeterminateness to the fact that the object of the prohibition was not named, we note with inter­ est that in the second part of the proposition, a girl is named. We would be even more interested to know whether the patient's niece was really named Ella, for this name is a phonetic part of the name of the patient's beloved Gisela. In any case, little Ella is excluded as a sexual object not only because of her kinship with the patient, but more essentially because of her age. Where the prohibition of incest is not pronounced, the patient will seek con­ crete or physical reasons for not committing the act. Nature pro­ hibits incest where the father does not, and the Law can be read there. The obsession is as follows: "If you indulge in intercourse, something will happen to Ella (i.e. she will die.)" Freud con­ structs the following train of thought, which, as in the first case, makes perfectly good sense. Every time you copulate, even with a stranger, you will not be able to avoid the reflection that in your married life, sexual intercourse can never bring you a child (on account of the lady's sterility). This will grieve you so much that you will become envious of your sister

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on account of little Ella, and you will grudge her the child. These envious impulses will inevitably lead to the child's death, (pp. 22627)

Again Freud's construction deserves close scrutiny because it is not at all evident that it follows from the obsession. Where the obsession was "a warning or ascetic prohibition" Freud's inter­ pretation normalizes it, perhaps thereby missing the link between copulation and Ella; why should the wish to copulate not be di­ rected to her or her mother? Freud remarked the indeterminate­ ness of the patient's sexual partner, connecting this indetermi­ nateness with the overdetermination of the lady. Structurally this is relevant to our discussion above. Insofar as the lady is in ques­ tion, the problem that is posed is posed by her sterility. To be married to the lady means for the patient that he will never be a father. He can never be a father, in the sense of being the progen­ itor of a child with this woman. His not becoming a father is in itself interpretative; it supposes first, that he loves only his lady and desires only her, and second, that if he cannot have a child by her he does not want a child at all. He does not want someone else's child, even his sister's child, because that child would not have the value of being an expression of his love for his lady. This becomes distorted into the thought that some harm will come to his sister's child. Certainly there is a question of fraternal rivalry here, rivalry between the patient and his brother-in-law. Another element that is useful to examine is the patient's role in relation to his niece. For this we refer to the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who has demonstrated in his book Structural Anthropology the importance of the maternal uncle in the family structure—this corresponds to what we call a symbolic father, more father than the progenitor because the uncle is only a father by the system of kinship rela­ tions. The place of the maternal uncle can also be occupied by the maternal grandfather, but in the case of the Rat Man, where the grandfather is dead and the patient is the oldest son of the family, the role of symbolic father to his niece falls upon him. Needless to say, this aspect of his father's legacy is as annoying to him as is the assumption of his father's debts, real or symbolic; he can

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only resent the child whose existence obliges him to assume his masculinity, to assume his masculine sexual identification, and to act accordingly. Little Ella is the little object that causes the pa­ tient's desire. The prohibition is thus presented in inverse order. One other reading of the obsession would remark that the idea is evidently being used in the service of the patient's masturbatory activity. There it functions as a rationalization in the sense that it sees intercourse as an act to be undertaken only to produce children. If children are not to be produced, then he might as well masturbate; the satisfaction for him is identical. In the two examples of ellipsis quoted by Freud, the senseless­ ness of the idea is the subject's way of remaining unmarked by it. He is not engaged by this ideas, whose status as ideas defines their function of countering any impulses to action. If the defen­ sive struggle of consciousness with a signifier succeeds to the ex­ tent that it can make this signifier into an idea within a register that consciousness can relate to, then there is a contrary move­ ment that necessitates the retention of these ideas. They are his own but never sufficiently his own, never sufficiently cut off from their provenance to determine the subject's engagement in an act. Consciousness remembers nothing more than the effort required to master the ideas it receives; it cannot think to let go of the ideas, to find out that they are false by putting them to the test of action, to discover that they are not hard currency in the mar­ ketplace of dialogue. In a sense the ideas are reconstituted dia­ logues in which the subject was not a participant, in which he overheard a dialogue that concerned him but in which he did not have a say. In his mind the neurotic runs through an endless number of dress rehearsals for a play that has already rung down its final curtain. He waits for the cue to come on stage to recite his lines, but since the play has been over for some time, he can wait, as we know, for quite a while. To introduce the questions of time and death and thought we begin with Freud's discussion of superstition, prepared to be sur­ prised by what we can discover in this seemingly commonplace phenomenon as it is lived by the obsessional. The first point Freud makes is that the obsessional neurotic is not superstitious in his own eyes and views others who believe

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in omens with scorn. This does not prevent him from being su­ perstitious, Freud continues, and we are left somewhat at a loss for words. Not for very long, however, for we see here another of the trornpe-l'oeil effects of consciousness. The way in which consciousness entertains alternately "two separate and contradictory" convictions on the subject of super­ stition will teach us a great deal. Where the obsessional gains a sense of victory over vulgar superstition, this is simply a form of belief otherwise known as a sense of self. Consciousness, while not a function of the self, is engaged in a mutual admiration pact with it. For our purposes Freud's description will permit us to grasp the operation in question: His oscillation between these two views quite obviously depended upon his momentary attitude towards his obsessional disorder. As soon as he had got the better of one of these obsessions, he used to smile in a superior way at his own credulity, and no events then occurred that were calculated to shake his firmness; but the mo­ ment he came under the sway of another obsession which had not been cleared up—or, what amounts to the same thing, of a resis­ tance—the strangest coincidences would happen to support him in his credulous belief, (pp. 229-30)

These coincidences are "premonitions and prophetic dreams," where the patient thinks of someone and then encounters the person he has been thinking of. These coincidences, Freud points out, are irrational; moreover the patient is perfectly aware of their irrationality. He knows that they are only occasional and not suf­ ficiently frequent to prove anything. Many of them, Freud is at pains to demonstrate this to his patient, can be explained ration­ ally, especially with coincidences that occurred during the treat­ ment. "I was able to prove to him that he himself invariably had a hand in the manufacture of these miracles, and I was able to point out to him the methods he employed. He worked by means of peripheral vision and reading, forgetting, and above all, errors of memory." (p. 231) In short, the patient is avid for signs that his thoughts have a direct bearing on the real, on events that are seemingly outside their sphere. Evidently the topology behind this does not divide the world into an internal mental space and an external real space

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with which it interacts. It is as though consciousness makes a foray into the world to capture some element and to imprint upon it the stamp of possession, its particular brand; it then retires in satisfaction over its handiwork. If these signs determine the power of the patient's love, they do so in inverted form. They sustain the patient's conviction of the advantages that accrue to him for being the beloved of, for example, his mother. If we risk an explanation of this phenomenon, we will tend to look for it in the relation between demand and object. The situa­ tion that can produce such a set of beliefs is a situation of antici­ pation, where a parent anticipates a child's needs before the child can articulate a demand. The parent then knows what the child wants before the child asks for it; this must appear to be not only economically advantageous but also a sign of true love. But how does the child know what he wants if he does not articulate a demand for it? He discovers what he wants in that which is given to him. Once he receives the object that he did not ask for, he rearranges his mind to decide that he had been thinking of pre­ cisely that object before. If the parent has in fact hit upon a right object, the other explanation can be that the child speaks without speaking, that he lets his parent know what he wants by ges­ tures, by looks that focus on a particular object, by a discourse to a third party that is repeated to the parent. If we begin with the supposition of the anticipated demand, what is striking is that this hypothesis has already been formu­ lated by the patient himself. We have dwelled sufficiently on this point to recall it without adding another complicated explanation. "I used to have the morbid idea that my parents knew my thoughts; I explained this to myself by supposing that I had spoken them out loud, without having heard myself do it." (p. 162) This sentence gives a clear indication of what is at stake in La­ can's definition of the supposed subject of knowing. It also indi­ cates the care the analyst must show when anticipating the pa­ tient's wishes. As a rule, the analyst should respond only to what the patient articulates as a demand; he ought not to anticipate a demand because he can see it coming, or because he knows what the patient means. Interpretation aiming at desire has nothing to do with giving the patient what he needs and does not ask for.

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Such a gesture would effectively short-circuit the analytic dialec­ tic, whose motor is the analyst's desire that the patient verbalize his question intelligibly. This will not of course prevent the pa­ tient from supposing that the analyst knows what the patient wants without having been told. The patient will find signs within the frame of the analytic session to enforce his belief. The success of the analysis will not depend on these signs, and the patient knows it well. His strategy, if he is an obsessional neurotic, will be to lure a response to a demand that he has not articulated. He will pass a considerable time beating around the bush, as it were, making every kind of hint or suggestion as to what he wants. If the analyst is patient while so besieged, he will be rewarded when the patient articulates a demand that corre­ sponds to his question; this demand is one in which he is en­ gaged as subject and which will permit him to recover the signi­ fier of his desire. The purpose of analysis is the verbalization of the unconscious. As we have said, after Lacan, this verbalization cannot proceed without the nodal point of its structure being enacted in the trans­ ference. What is particular about the obsessional neurotic is that his un­ conscious speaks through the least interesting aspects of his dis­ course, in the asides and in the throwaway remarks without rel­ evance to the material he thinks significant. The analyst will err most seriously if he is too eager to look behind the veil of verbiage to find out what the patient thinks or feels. After all, the dis­ course of the obsessional is designed to demonstrate that he is a thinking being, that his thinking predicates his being. The ana­ lyst's resistance in this case is not the same as in the case of a hysteric. The hysteric speaks with her body and gestures and at­ tire; perhaps it was because of the seductive effects of this dis­ course that Freud was originally incited to turn his eyes away from the spectacle; otherwise the interest of the movements of the hysteric's body may surpass what she has to say. With the obsessional neurotic the problem is posed in different terms. The temptation with this structure is to listen for what the patient is thinking, to attempt by a process of divination to put him in touch with his deepest thoughts. One of the reasons the

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obsessional may be led to present himself for a psychoanalysis is to perfect his thinking, to bring his thought to a level of clarity and precision that will make it unassailable in the intellectual marketplace. Faced with this neurosis, the analyst ought not to engage in an intellectual dual to show who is the more intelligent, to overpower his patient with the brilliance of his interpretations. The significant difference is between a thinking being and what Lacan calls a speaking being. If the obsessional asks for nothing more than to be confirmed in his suspicion of the former, the analyst ought never forget that he must address his interventions to the latter. To the extent that he slips, his resistance will evoke an increasingly banal response from the analysand. If the analyst knows what the patient thinks before he speaks it, then the pa­ tient has only to say just anything and the superior powers of analytic penetration will permit his interlocutor to guess his thoughts. The fundamental rule of psychoanalysis does not say that the analysand ought to say everything; it says that he should say what passes through his mind. The two are to be rigorously distinguished, as André Albert has done in his article on "La Règle Fondamentale" (Scilicet 6I7). Concluding his discussion of superstition in obsessional neu­ rosis, Freud returns to the characteristic form of repression used by consciousness. In this disorder . . . repression is effected not by means of amnesia but by a severance of causal connections brought about by the withdrawal of affect. These repressed connections appear to persist in some kind of shadowy form . . . and they are thus transferred by a process of projection, into the external world, where they bear witness to what has been effaced from consciousness, (pp. 231-32)

What purpose could be served from the point of view of con­ sciousness in erasing—the reference to writing should not be overlooked here—the connections between the elements of the patient's history? Part of this process of erasing is the attribution of these connections to what happens in the external world, to a kind of reality that represents the being-there of the subject. What purpose other than to bear witness to consciousness' status of being other to itself, being fundamentally alien even to itself. This

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reading would demonstrate why consciousness is so interested in establishing objects as its own, as belonging to it, and by so doing becoming consciousness of self. Certainly if a consciousness of self is to be won, it is to be won against long odds, for conscious­ ness does not start out with a sense of self as a given; the evi­ dence would suggest that it begins as an other, and only through a dialectical relationship with the being-there of what is effaced from it does it attain self-consciousness. Such a process should in no case be confused with the goal of analysis; the dialectic of self­ consciousness parodies the dialectic of desire without bringing the subject any closer to his desire. It gives him in the place of his desire a purified will to action that remains pure only on the con­ dition that its action counters desire. Self-consciousness, as a goal toward which an obsessional neurosis tends, can justify action only insofar as it is the expression of the will of the subject. Con­ sciousness can act only if it is convinced, if it has gained the cer­ tainty that eludes the obsessional so consistently, that this action is its own, the expression of its self, and is not determined by the desire of the Other. And at this point it can only act precipitously, for the longer it waits, the easier it will be for doubt to creep in to corrupt its will. One possible end point of such an attitude is a state of constant readiness that never crosses the barrier into a corrupt world that is unable to support the patient7 s act. One other way for the person in this state to act is to convince himself that the act is self-expressive; this involves an extensive self-deception that is not uncommon here. A third leads him to act impulsively out of desperation. Obsessionais are thus disaffected. Freud links in an exemplary passage the traits of uncertainty and indecisiveness with the obsessional^ attitude toward death. Their thoughts are unceasingly occupied with other people's length of life and possibility of death; their superstitious propensities had no other content to begin with, and have perhaps no other source whatever. But these neurotics need the help of the possibility of death chiefly in order that it may act as a solution of conflicts they have left unresolved. Their essential characteristic is that they are incapable of coming to a decision, especially in matters of love; they endeavor to postpone every decision, and in their doubt which person they shall decide for or what measures they shall take against

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a person, they are obliged to choose as their model the old German courts of justice, in which suits were usually brought to an end, before judgment had been given, by the death of the parties to the dispute, (p. 2)6)

We have dwelt sufficiently on the place of the possible for the reader to have remarked the importance Freud attributes to it in the obsessional's attitude toward death. Rather than decide for himself, the obsessional lets chance decide; he submits the power of decision making to the absolute master called death. This im­ plies a very particular relation with time, a constant postponing of the moment of truth, a keeping at a distance, designed to pre­ serve the alternatives within the thought or the mind of the ob­ sessional. The possibility of death represents a liberation or the possibility of a liberation from the dialectic in which the obsessional has to choose to be on one side or the other. This liberation is not merely a future possibility; it can be actualized in the present through the activity of thought. Thinking serves as the proof of a freedom that is not an existential event, but an essential state. In thinking, the obsessional is self-contained, free from the influence of the Other, sustaining two contraries in a unity of thought. This unity of thought finds its witness in the patient's unity of being, and he thus fulfills his wish to be the union of the two sexes, a union that abolishes the difference between the two and raises it to a higher unity of being. Lacan recounts a case that demonstrates this in his article "The Direction of the Treatment." An obsessional neurotic who has been trying to convince his analyst that his impotence is a function of his age and his latent homosexuality (neither of which the analyst accepts) tells his mistress that she should find herself another lover and make love to him while the patient looks on. The union that the patient seeks is not in the sexual act itself but in the mental image he can have of it. The couple that he creates, that he puts together, will become one only by the presence of a single wit­ ness. This is what his mistress tells him when, the next morning, she recounts a dream in which she could feel under her dress that she had an erection. This did not, however, prevent her from having a vagina or from desiring sexual relations as a woman.

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What does she represent if not the unification of the two sexes in one individual, indivisible? Her dream fulfills the patient's desire, but it shows him that this desire is the desire of an Other, an Other whose desire he would have just as soon nullified, to make her an instrument of his will. What did the mistress say, Lacan asks, if not that her having the phallus does diminish her desire for it? Not having a phallus does not prevent the mistress from signifying her desire in a way that the patient finds eminently satisfying. He, if he cannot do the same, must be determined not by the desire to have the phal­ lus but to be it, to be his mistress's phallus. This dream reveals the impossibility of this desire because, as the woman says, the place is already taken. The coexistence of contraries in a unity of thought is the goal the obsessional works to attain. He can attain it only in seeing it subverted before his eyes, for this unity is nothing more than the patient's conception of the Other. What the patient seeks in his mind is to justify his conception of the Other as his counterpart, as what resembles him the most. The discovery that this Other is wanting is reversed in a dialectical movement proper to desire. Then the obsessional must also be wanting; and the ambiguity of the expression serves well here. The patient wants something, but the only way he can have it is in not being it. Only in not being the phallus can he have it. Does not the dream of the mis­ tress say to her lover that he is not her phallus? And at the same times does it not, as Lacan says, point up her complicity with the patient's idea that she is his counterpart, that her sexual consti­ tution resembles his? The two aspects of the dream have to be grasped before the patient can assume his own sexual identifica­ tion. Freud observes the relation between thought and sexuality in the constitution of an obsessional neurosis where the epistemophilic instinct is preponderant: "The thought process itself be­ comes sexualized, for the sexual pleasure which is normally at­ tached to the content of thought becomes shifted onto the act of thinking itself, and the satisfaction derived from reaching the con­ clusion of a line of thought is experienced as a sexual satisfac­ tion." (p. 245) We should distinguish this definition from what

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happens in sublimation, where the satisfaction of the drive is asexual. Here the satisfaction of a sexual act, satisfaction that for the male is phallic, is transformed in its entirety to the thought process. This process necessarily involves being, for it is only in being the phallus, in identifying with it, that the obsessional can produce a phallic jouissance while arriving at the conclusion of a chain of thoughts through a unification of contrary ideas. This activity is not in itself stabilizing in the case of the neu­ rosis, for as Freud shows, the relation between thought and ac­ tion is such that the procrastination that characterized action soon comes to characterize thought also. "But procrastination in action is soon replaced by lingering over thoughts, and eventually the whole process, together with all its peculiarities, is transferred into the new sphere, just as in America an entire house will some­ times be shifted from one site to another." (p. 245) If thought was originally a compensation for inhibition in action, the repressed symptom returns to invade thought itself. If the mind becomes phallic in order to sustain the satisfaction Freud spoke of, then this phallus, being the signifier of the Other, will have to submit to the same fate as the phallus before it, and consciousness will come to make it into an aspect of its self. Thus Freud determines that the major characteristic of the ob­ sessional thought process is uncertainty and doubt. The obses­ sional's doubt extends over everything, in a way that cannot fail to remind us of Descartes' systematic doubting of everything of which it was possible to entertain a doubt. Where Descartes was able to find something to limit his doubt—he could not doubt that he was doubting, thus that he was thinking, thus that he was subject of his thoughts—the obsessional's discovery of the limit beyond which he cannot doubt does not appear to happen in the same way. Freud says that the repetition of protective acts results from the patient's doubting the efficacy of the act. We will return to this point. One phenomenon that the obsessional does not doubt is the contingent event that provides a sign that he is loved. In Freud's analysis the relation between doubt and love, particularly selflove, is paramount.

THEORY OF OBSESSIONAL NEUROSIS

IIA

The doubt corresponds to the patient's internal perception of his own indecision, which, in consequence of the inhibition of his love by his hatred, takes possession of him in face of every intended action. The doubt is in reality a doubt of his own love—which ought to be the most certain thing in his whole mind; and it becomes diffused over everything else, and is especially apt to become dis­ placed onto what is insignificant and small. A man who doubts his own love may, or rather must, doubt every lesser thing, (p. 241)

What Freud writes can be read as a footnote to Descartes. Where Descartes thought it was by his own will that he threw everything into doubt, he was in fact scrupulously preserving the subject. For Freud this is not at all the way it happens in obsessional neu­ rosis. In the first place, the systematic doubt proceeds from some­ thing specific that is in doubt, and is in doubt not because the subject puts it into doubt, but for reasons inherent in the dynam­ ics of inhibition. The patient doubts because he imagines his being for others, he imagines the way he must appear to other eyes. The doubt is thus a direct consequence of the splitting of the sub­ ject between the way he would like to be and the way others see him as being. Doubt spells the difference between intended action and the recognition by others; the latter bears most often only on committed action. If I cannot act on my love, so the obsessional says to himself, that is because I do not love enough or well enough. He will then set out on the path of the purification of his love. (It would appear that Descartes' project corresponds to such a purification, but in his case love of knowledge is in need of purification.) This involves the elimination of all vestiges of hatred from love, for the obsessional feels that hatred is his adversary. To conquer this hatred the obsessional gives it free play in a lim­ ited mental space to work its destruction on everything, down to the most insignificant and trivial details; it is as though hatred were to be burned out in being given free rein in consciousness to raze everything in its path. Once there is nothing more to hate there will be no more hatred. The question is not what one may doubt but rather what one must doubt in order to maintain impossibility as a signifier of de­ sire. The obsessional is driven by a moral obligation to purify his

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desire to the point where what he takes himself to be corresponds in all its particulars to what others take him to be. Cogito ergo sum would thus be translated in his case: "What I think I am is equal to what I am for an other consciousness that loves me." Here the omnipotence of thought, a major characteristic of this neurosis, is revealed in its structure as both predicating being in itself and being for others in one act of thought and predicating them as identical. The identity gained herein has nothing to do with sex­ ual identification. "I think" and "I am" may be written "I think . . and "I am. ..." This writing indicates the function played by elements of a phrase that stand alone in the nullification of their object. They correspond to what Lacan isolates in the case of Schreber as the index terms of a message, the terms that indicate the place of the subject in the phrase. This articulation corresponds, Lacan contin­ ues, to the elision of "the properly lexical part of the sentence, in other words, that which comprises the words that the code de­ fines by their use, whether the common code or the delusional code is involved. . . ." (Ecrits, p. 186) The obsessional's doubt involves those elements of the linguis­ tic code that do not function to define him as subject. These are the words whose usage is defined by a code whose otherness makes it eminently suspect. How can the obsessional express himself in words whose usage is defined by a code that reflects nothing else but the common usage of words historically? The usage of words is diachronic and the obsessional doubt bears heavily on this element of experience. The limit of this enterprise is found in a message, again with Lacan, "reduced to that in the code which indicates the mes­ sage." Why then is the obsessional neurotic so interested in the message he can send, the message that can transmit his being only if it is cut off from "the lexical part of the sentence"? The reason would be that what he awaits from the Other is an answer to a question he has not posed. In the case of the obsessional neurotic as distinct from that of the psychotic who was the occa­ sion for Lacan's formulation, the articulation of the index terms of a sentence is the patient's sign that he is demanding an answer to his question, answer that he already knows himself.

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We have already discussed the place the analyst ought to oc­ cupy in relation to this demand. We have also remarked that if, at the right moment, the analyst knows how to turn the question on the questioner, the patient, obsessional as he may be, will have in his grasp the answer that completes the message. As Freud says to the Rat Man: Anyone who poses such a question must be prepared with the answer; one has only to encourage him to con­ tinue for him to fall upon it.

Paris, Chatillon-Coligny February-August, 1977

REFERENCES

Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works. [S.E.], ed. and trans, by James Strachey. London: Ho­ garth Press, 1955. -------- . "The Ego and the Id" in S.E., Vol. XIX. -------- . "Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Function­ ing," in S.E., Vol. XII. -------- . "Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis," in S.E., Vol. X. Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection. New York: Norton, 1977. Melman, Charles. "On Obsessional Neurosis," in Returning to Freud: Clinical Psychoanalysis in the School of Lacan, ed. and trans, by Stuart Schneiderman. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980.

"Lacan believed that the most productive wav of learning psychoanaly­ tic theorv was to study [Freud's] writings intensively. He was not obsessed with the idea of going bevond Freud, with finding fault with Freud. He once said that there could be no question of going beyond Freud when most psychoanalysts, in their zeal to surpass Freud, had arrived at posi­ tions that antedated the discovery of psychoanalysis. Lacan held that the field of Freud's work had been left fallow bv succeeding generations of analysts, most of whom were contented to believe that their work had rendered Freud anachronistic. This represented an intellectual failure of significant proportions, bespeaking a will to ignorance. Such a will was most patent in those who proclaimed that scientific experimentation and data collection was the wav to prove or disprove the Freudian text. Mv own reading therefore is far more an appreciation than a critique. This is not to sav that there is nothing to criticize in Freud's handling of the case of the Rat Man. It means simply that the first task of anyone approaching the text is to discover its resources, to elaborate and to amplify them, eschewing the easier and more seductive task of oneupping Freud." Stuart Schneiderman From the Preface of Rat Man

STUART SCHNEIDERMAN, a Lacanian psychoanalyst, has a private practice in New York City. He is the author of laccjues Lacan: The Death of an Intellectual Hero and An Angel Passes: How the Sexes Became Undivided.

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