Meetings with Jacques Lacan
Lacan and JPP
April 15, 2007
A few years ago I had money problems. I then decided to sell an original letter I had received from the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. A psychoanalyst at Paris VIII University, Fabrice Guyot, offered to buy it and the deal was quickly concluded. In the process it turned out that I had been one of the last to meet Lacan, and at least to have dialogues with him on a subject that had greatly interested him in the last years of his life: topology. Guyot therefore wished to interview me about these meetings, and here is the report, published in a psychoanalysis journal.
There may be many readers who will say "but, who is this Lacan?".
Some, of my generation, discovered him during the spring of 1968, when he gave numerous lectures at the Sorbonne, attended by intellectuals and show business personalities, famous actors, filmmakers, etc.
I cannot say that I fully understood the whole of Lacan's theory. I only have vague memories, emerging from readings I had after our meetings. It all started in 1979 when an article we co-authored, the blind mathematician Berbard Morin and myself, appeared in the January issue of Pour la Science, on the sphere eversion. The paper also contained an eversion of the torus that I had just invented.
Lacan immediately made his presence known. Morin sent him away immediately. I decided to meet him, out of curiosity. This interview is the account of these meetings in his office on Rue de Lille, in Paris. This episode allowed me to be an eyewitness to the last technique that Lacan implemented in psychoanalysis, which could be called fast psy. He had a secretary named Gloria and smoked cigarillos. In the waiting room there were a number of clients, slumped. Gloria would then appear and point a finger at one of the clients:
- You!
The person would immediately get up. Lacan would appear in the corridor leading to his office. The patient did not have to lie on the couch to start talking. He would start talking in the corridor about the last dream he had had, stumbling over his words. Why such haste? Because the Master had just invented a new technique based on sessions that lasted ... five minutes. I was an eyewitness to all of this. The first thing Lacan did was to extend his hand, into which the client immediately placed a bill. How much? I didn't count. Some were sent back to the door without even being received in his office. Lacan simply concluded by saying:
- Make an appointment with my secretary.
I have no value judgment to make on this quite original conception of psychotherapy. I only know that when we went to dinner in the apartment that Lacan also had on Rue de Lille, he left with, in a cardboard box, the day's earnings. The pile of bills was impressive.
Freud discovered the unconscious. Lacan advanced the idea that "the subject" manages to fit the essence of his psychological structure into the slightest of his sentences, even the most secret. According to Lacan, every segment of language must have a double meaning. One knows the joke where two psychoanalysts take an elevator. During the trip the elevator operator says:
- Nice weather today.
and the two leave wondering what the other could have meant by that.
Lacan had borrowed the concepts of signifiant and signifié from another psychiatrist or linguist. This can be illustrated by taking, for example, the sentence:
an man is a man
The word man appears twice in the sentence. The first time as signifié (or maybe it's the other way around, I don't remember very well). There, the word man refers to the male representative of the human species. In the second case, this word is used to designate the attributes of man, whether it be his masculinity, his weakness, it doesn't matter. I think that in the second case, the word man is then used as signifiant. Lacan took this to the extreme by saying that in every sentence there is a signifiant side and a signifié side. Hence the reaction of the two Lacanian psychoanalysts, leaving the elevator. He used the word énantiosémie.
In geometry we have the word énantiomorphie. Two objects are enantiomorphic when one can be derived from the other by a mirror symmetry. Thus, your right hand and your left hand are related by an enantiomorphic relationship (morphe: the form). In Enantiosémie we find the Greek root semios, meaning meaning. For Lacan, sentences are subject to a double reading. Thus, under an appearance as simple as "nice weather today", this sentence could reveal, given a context to be discovered, the expression of the deep neurosis that the elevator operator suffers from. Because, for a psychoanalyst, as for Doctor Knock:
- Every apparently healthy individual is a neurotic who is unaware of it.
All men (and women) have fantasies. Their very life is nothing but the expression of a fantasy, which Lacan called "the fundamental fantasy". The psychic structure of human beings, for Lacan, was essentially linguistic, and we know his famous phrase:
- The human being is not a speaking individual, but an individual who is spoken.
Nothing exists except language. We believe we live, but in fact we are only linguistic cells, swimming in a two-sided broth: language. Hence a second phrase, which made Lacan famous:
- The sexual act does not exist.
Of course. Nothing exists outside of language. Everything else is illusion. "Reality" is there only to serve as a support for language and when something happens, whatever it is, it is to say something. And Lacan concludes:
- It says something.
This concept of enantiosémie led Lacan very early to be interested in surfaces, and in particular in one-sided surfaces, such as the Möbius strip. It was a way of showing how a linguistic element could have very different meanings, depending on whether it is heard "from the signifiant side" or "from the signifié side". Take a piece of tracing paper or rhodoid and form the word:
MOT
By moving this word, treated like a decalcomania, and making it make a complete turn, you will obtain its mirror image, that is:
TOM
which has nothing to do with the previous word.
Where it becomes dazzlingly complex is when Lacan tries (he acquired these elements of geometry through contact with the mathematician Guilbeau, whom I once met when he came to give lectures at the Faculty of Letters in Aix-en-Provence, on the theme "mathematics and human sciences") to model the structure of the human psyche using a one-sided surface. I told you that when you go around a Möbius strip, the signifiant and the signifié are exchanged. At least that's how Lacan understood it. Finding one's balance, that is, succeeding in a Lacanian analysis, consisted in "going around oneself" by discovering, through an exploration, what one could possibly want to signify with a signifiant uttered at any time or the reverse. To perform this turn, one had to maintain a respectful distance from a central point, called by Lacan l'objet petit a, or phallus linguist...