The Freudian Thing

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29 1955 (36 pp.)-LA CHOSE FREUDIENNE OU SENS DU RETOUR A FREUD EN PSYCHANALYSE (THE FREUDIAN THING, OR THE MEANING OF THE RETURN TO FREUD IN PSYCHOANALYSIS)-1956 On November 7, 1955, Lacan gave a paper at the neuropsychiatric clinic of Prof. Hoff in Vienna, followed by a discussion session among analysts. He gave an account of the paper in Seminaire III (30). Then, after the fact, he wrote it for the E.P. and later, in 1966, he revised the text again. This shows how all ached he was to this digest of "four years of teaching." After the outdated rhetoric of the preamble, the presentation is organized around force�ful subtitles and contains inspired accents: the unforgettable prosopopeia of truth ("I, Truth, will speak"), like Diana speaking to men, her lovers, through Actaeon-Freud (Lacan?), and telling them to hear "literally" what "the professor-Freud" (Lacan?) said about her. Also unforgettable are the parodic prosopopeia of the "desk" where the object speaks, "the unripe grape of speech" (on the Father's side) and "the bunch of wrath" (on the Mother's side) that inhabit the child, or the avenging expressions against his opponents, these" managers of the soul." What remains of all this? It may be surprising that Lacan rediscovered Freud through a line of moralists (Gracian, La Rochefoucauld, Nietzsche): "The latest to join them, and, like them, stimulated no doubt by a properly Christian concern for the authenticity of the movement of the soul, Freud was able to precipitate a whole casuistics into a map of Tendre,c which has only to be set in accordance with the offices for which it was intended." Against the Anglo-Saxon "success" or "happiness," the reign of the Other in the Schema L (27, 31) "extends as far into the subject as the laws of speech reign," the laws that are the binary laws of cybernetics (presence-absence) as well as the laws of kinship and alliance (Oedipus) where the commerce in women is held to be prior to all others. Finally, the Wo Es war, soil Ich werden (There where it was [La Ol~ c' (s') hair], must I come to be [dois-Je c. The Pays dCl Tel/dre was an allegorical country in which love was the sole preoc�cupation. It was the creation of Mlle. de Scudcry and other novelists of the seventeenth century.

advenirl) , more amply commented on than in the Seminaire II, takes on the weight of a sacred word. Here, it is a question of a "murder party. "d Everywhere, indeed, metaphors of death blossom. Logically, then, the function of the analyst is to "cadaver�ize his position" by his silence. Whether he embodies the Other or the other, "he makes death present." Is this the vision of an analysand or of an analyst? Is it the emblem of the founding dead Father? Jung is supposed to have passed on to Lacan Freud's words as he was sailing towards the United States: "They do not realize we're bringing them the plague."