View source for Remarque sur la rapport de Daniel Lagache 'Psychanalyse et structure de la personalité'

[http://aejcpp.free.fr/lacan/1960-04-00.htm link]


1958-1960 (38 pp.)-REMARQUE SUR LE RAPPORT DE DANIEL LAGACHE: 
"PSYCHANALYSE ET STRUCTURE DE LA PERSONNALITE" (A COMMENT ON DANIEL LAGACHE'S REPORT: "PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE STRUCTURE OF PERSONALlTY")-1961 
In 1958, at the Colloquium in Royaumont where Lacan presented La Direc�tioll de la cure (40), Lagache gave an important theoretical presentation on Psychallalyse et structure de la persolllla!ite (Psychoanalysis and the Struc�ture of Personality), and Lacan took part in the discussion that followed. That was the starting point of this text, carefully written two years later for a spe�cial issue of La Psychallalyse. Besides the author's foreword (" a piece of writing can only be attested to at the moment of its definitive writing"), the article integrates clcmcnts that had bccn elaboratcd between 1958 and 1960 in Le Dbir et .1'011 illterpretatioll (41) and L'Ethique (43). At this point in timc, thc two Icadcrs of the S.F.P. still belonged to the same camp, against the opponcnts of the S.P.P. and the I.P.A. Lacan needed to broaden thc audi�encc of his scminars. His tone, therefore, remained polite, in spite of several biting commcnts. The points of agreement were always stressed before the developmcnt of divcrgences. However, evcrything tended to show the incom�patibility of the two teachings and the superiority of Lacan's conceptions. The onc talked of the "structure of personality" and the other, who had aban�doned his project of a "science of personality" (2) long ago, responded with the "structure of thc subject." The two texts should be read together because a truly essential discussion that goes beyond the psychoanalytic field takes place here. Against what he called "personalist ideology," Lacan declared that he was resolutely "structuralist" and explained why. 
Four subtitles organize the development of the article: "Structure and the subject," "Where?," "On the individual's ideals," and "For an ethics." The reader will base his own judgment on the text itself, a detailed controversy and a presentation argued with propositions that claim to be scientific. The graph of desire, created in 1957-1958 (36), was about to become the true graph of the (Lacanian) subject, which it would be in the article written at the end of 1960, Subversion du sujet et dialectique du desir (46). In the present text, this graph, organizing three types of functioning of the subject, attempts to replace the traditional economic and dynamic points of view in psycho�analysis, ultimately grounded in biology. The optical schema of the inverted bouquet, which dated back to 1953-1954 (25), is finally published. Lacan carries on his systematization of the mirror stage, adding new commentaries on the idcal cgo, the ideal of the ego, and the relations between the imagi�nary other and the objet a. Finally, the following statement closely follows L'Ethique (43) and is in the same vein: "The true subject, the subject of 
	The Wol1ls of Jacques Lacan 	1711 
desire, is nothing other than the Thing that is the closest to him but that, at the same time, eludes him the most." 
In fact, two major concepts are involved in the conflict, structure and inter�subjectivity. For Lagache, structure is "a theoretical model" constructed from experience and allowing for a return to experience in a sort of testing process. In this way, it differs from the structure produced by a description conceived as the reproduction of the natural structure of things. Lacan rejects this op�position. For him, if the psychoanalytic field is "the field where it speaks," "the distance of structure from experience fades," since structure operates "not as a theoretical model but as the original machine that places the subject in it." The Real and structure coincide, but in an essential reversal because what prevails are "the effects that the pure and simple combinatory of the signifier determines in the reality where it happens." To convince us, Lacan gives us his famous model-example, that of the turbine (a pure chain of equa�tions) and of the waterfall in the production of energy. For him, anteriority and supremacy are undoubtedly on the side of signifying organizations and symbolic laws, not on the side of the body and of lived or empirical experi�ences. Here he was in total agreement with Levi-Strauss's principles in eth�nology. Far from the relativism accepted by Lagache, which Lacan considered to be timid thinking, Lacan shared with Levi-Strauss the following ambition: to reach the point where theory is the reality it analyzes, not only because it constructs it, but because it produces it, and even more so because it is one and the same with the universal laws of the human mind that are its origin. 
All this is not without consequences for the analytic field. Hence, the id [Ie 
(a I, if it is indeed impersonal as Lagache says, is not an aggregate of object relations in which the subject is dispersed; rather, it is an aggregate of signi�fiers. It exists because "discourse was there, from the beginning, if only in 
its impersonal presence." Intersubjectivity defined by Lagache can, therefore, only belong to the order of the Imaginary. It is only defined as exchanges with _~ the surrounding human world, a play of interactions, a mere "For-the-Other" IPollr-Autruil. One must restore to it its symbolic dimension by inscribing the locus of the Other as the "transcendental locus" that governs the subject and his relations with others. This brilliant sentence was meant to settle things: On "the Tablets of the Law," "nothing is written for whomever can read, except the laws of Speech itself." 
Is the Thing not a metamorphosis-a new name-of the id? What exactly is the signifier for Lacan? According to him, the fading I of the subject is not linked, as Lagache believed, to the emergence of thought. It is originally linked to "the suspension of desire," to the "eclipse" of the subject in the signifier of demand, and to the fascination of the fantasy in which "the subject himself becomes the cut that makes the part object shine in its inexpressible 
i. In English in the original. 

'" 
	178 	00881 ER 
oscillation." One loses track. So did Lacan. In the seminar on identification. L'ldelltificatioll (50). he tried to define this signifier or this primary signifying operation. The definition remains enigmatic, but for the first time he appealed to mathcmatical thcories of topology. The sentence we just quoted contains in cmbryo all the developments of the previous twenty years: would those consist of a more in-depth development of the theory or of a desperate movement of cscapc forward?