In 1938, the rise of Nazism forced the Dr Freud, Austrian Jew residing in Vienna, to exile in London, where he died. In 1932 the Dr Lacan, a young psychiatrist, had published his doctoral thesis on a case of paranoia in Paris. Called to the front, after the 2nd war he continued an intense training in the field of philosophy and science. Member of the French Society of Psychoanalysis, he began, in 1955, in his 1st public seminar, a reading of Freud’s texts like never before. “Return to Freud” whose consequences, displayed in his teaching until his death, were to transform the theory of psychoanalysis and the practice of analysts.
At the invitation of Clark University and in front of the famous statue that illuminates the universe, Freud told Jung: “They don’t know that we bring them the plague.” Lacan warned that Freud had been wrong since he believed that psychoanalysis would be a revolution for America when in reality it was America that devoured his doctrine, removing the spirit of subversion from him.
Lacan’s desire was to reintroduce this plague in the spirit of a dormant Freudianism that, after having survived fascism, had adapted to the extreme of forgetting the virulence of its origins. Little remained of the idea of his mentor who expressed in this sentence the disturbing connotation of his discovery: “If the gods do not allow themselves to be broken, I will appeal to hell.” Far from his affinity with that feat, psychoanalysis had put itself at the service of an adaptation to the current order so harshly criticized by Freud. Lacan considers that this fact is not due only to a conjunctural avatar, psychoanalysis is threatened from its very birth and I would say that all his teaching starts from never having forgotten this principle. The greater the force of a truth, the greater the force that will try to drown out that truth in order to transform it into digestible, understandable, light, easy knowledge.
Lacan wanted his writing not to be an easy nut to crack, just as our unconscious is not, just as our singularity is not where the market tries to make us tame, subordinate. Lacan is accused of being cryptic, baroque, it is not understood that his intention that psychoanalysis should not be muzzled by bookish knowledge made a style not easily understandable. It is branded as dark when its most pressing purpose was precisely to rescue psychoanalysis from the obscurantism into which the post-Freudians had plunged it, to free concepts from the gloomy mess in which they were sunk, to shake the intellectual comfort of the silence of undisputed truths. . Lacan’s work flourishes at dawn, it is in the debate of the lights that he challenges analysts to demonstrate the reasons for his practice.
Much can be said about the great influences that inhabit his work: He was an excellent psychiatrist trained in the best French tradition represented by Clérambault, He was a detailed reader of Freud’s work to the extreme of finding unsuspected edges in that work, he rubbed shoulders with the surrealists, appreciated the tradition of humanist moralists, knew philosophical modernity very well at the hands of Koyré and Kojève. An indefatigable reader, an avid and curious man, he made a passion out of that appetite. He was interested in the West and even more so in the East, in history and in the knowledge of his time to such an extent that an infinite number of imprints can be recognized in his work, a path that I consider fruitless if the vow that summons them is elided: that psychoanalysis had an incidence in culture that would go beyond its place as a curative treatment for neuroses in order to be able to affirm itself as a reading of civilization that would trace its mark on it. His detractors accuse him of infidelity with respect to the cited authors, of little rigor regarding the real content, of treason in short.
But it is not taken into account that Lacan did not want to be a teacher and that he did not limit his place as an analyst to the confines of the consulting room, so his reading of the texts is close to that of a clinical account where he finds a saying that goes beyond what is what was trying to say. Lacan interpreted culture from psychoanalysis and in order to do so he was always very clear that he should not be reabsorbed in it, he would say that he identified himself with the essence of psychoanalysis itself. He was expelled from the International Psychoanalytic Association for having questioned to what extent the current frames violated the very principles of psychoanalysis.
He founded a School that he wanted to be faithful to those principles, he invented a device called “pass” with the objective that those who went through an analytic experience testify to its effects, he wanted these stories to teach that this experience does not stand in the unknowable and that it can Demonstrate, in an approach to the scientific order that the cure is not alien to logic or opposed to rigor. She dissolved her School when she saw her move away from these principles, she loved psychoanalysis above all else and she was not going to give it up for the sake of comfort, that comfort which, according to her words, was the root of all corruption. “I am a Freudian – she said – you will have to be Lacanians”. Miller embodies that “you” and is -without a doubt- the best interpreter of it. His opponents accuse him of having simplified the teaching of his teacher, of having acclimatized it to make it accessible. I think that Miller rather combats that reader who only took an aphorism from that teaching to the extreme of repeating it to the four winds, Miller leads us to read Lacan from his questions, far from having simplified Lacan, he shows us a Lacan who replies to himself and not to the prophet who claims his certainties.
Silvia Ons. Analyst Member of the School of Lacanian orientation and the World Association of Psychoanalysis
