Jacques André

Laura - or the sexual borders of need.

Laura comes for analysis four times a week. These are face-to-face sessions; she rejects the couch. It is imperative that she does not lose sight of me; the same vigilance that prevents her from falling asleep at night accompanies every one of our sessions. She knows about being abandoned on a couch and underwent its alternately frightening and infuriating effects with a woman analyst over several years. The same anger is directed at this woman and her mother for the same reasons: coldness, distance, incomprehension and indifference ... In the armchair, her body sends messages of discomfort and exhaustion that led me to invite her to use the couch, at least as a bed to rest on. She curtly informed me that I should not imagine she would fall into any trap as crude as that: ‘‘I’ll move to your couch when the analysis is over’’. On the day she has no session she feels the scarcely woven thread of the analysis unwinding and something inside her collapsing; several times a day she can decide to break off the analysis. The sessions themselves often still bear its trace: ‘‘I’m not here, I’m out the door’’ [in French, je me barre also literally means ‘I block myself’]. However fundamental, the statement of the analytic rule is not universal; it preserves the trace of its own particular history – the discovery of repression at work in the psychoneuroses. What does the rule (‘‘Say whatever goes through your mind ...’’ [Freud, 1913, p. 135]) mean to the person to whom it is addressed? Abandon the constraints of ordinary conversation, allow room for any secondary thoughts that occur to you, do not hesitate ‘‘to go a long way back’’ [Freud quote here, literally ‘‘to go back to the Flood’’]. Do not give into intimidating criticisms – ‘That is irrelevant here, or is quite unimportant, or nonsensical’ – to the contrary. And if it were necessary to summarize the path to take, then: ‘Lose the thread; loosen your tongue’. More than a rule, the rule is a ruse: to breach the barrier of repression, to take by surprise the catenaccio [in Italian, a door bolt, a form of soccer defence to prevent goals] and overturn the most intractable resistance. It is not a matter of saying what we would prefer to keep to ourselves, what feels shameful – which is only how the obsessional translates the message – but of saying what we do not know. The hope of such a statement is double: on the analysand’s part, to allow the idea to become incidental; for the analyst, to permit his attention to float freely. Laura’s analysis starts with a different gesture. The phrase that comes at the end of the preliminary interviews instead of the rule is put this way: ‘‘I suggest that you come four times a week (indicating that I would have preferred five) in face-to-face sessions, keeping the possibility of the couch for later on’’. The wording is well received (the couch apart) as she is seduced by the time that I want to devote to her. This utterance is therefore as

A violência no rosto: o après coup dos traumas precoces

Quando, ao encerrar as entrevistas preliminares, infor-mei a Lorenzo o valor dos meus honorarios, ele se mostrouapreensivo quanto ao reembolso. Informei-lhe dessa impos-sibilidade, ao mesmo tempo em que sugeri, se assim ele de-sejasse, encaminha-lo para um colega psiquiatra-psicanalistaque poderia responder a sua demanda. Apos um tempo de si-lencio, ele fixou o olhar brevemente nos meus olhos... Acei-tava minhas condicoes. Muito tempo depois ele retomaria essacena. O que o fez decidir foi ter percebido que “eu nao es-tava nem ai”,

L’inconscient ignore le temps, a fortiori la patience

L’impatience est un mot relatif, il evoque moins l’inexistence de la categorie psychique du temps que la violence conflictuelle que le temps fait subir a la vie psychique. A partir de figures cliniques conjuguant le couple patience-impatience, on interrogera ce meme couple a travers les variations historiques de la technique psychanalytique.

Les destructions de Narcisse

La premiere « destruction » a mettre au compte du narcissisme est metapsychologique. La notion ne fait pas qu’ajouter une pierre a l’edifice freudien, elle en desequilibre la construction et anticipe le « tournant » de 1920. Le narcissisme, sa passion de l’Un, met paradoxalement fin au reve d’une theorie unitaire. La menace pratique n’est pas moindre, quand la plainte narcissique (« je me sens vide ») transforme l’analyse en dissertation sur les « etats d’âme ».

« Psyché est corporelle, n'en sait rien »

Theorie et pratique du conflit psychique, la psychanalyse est par « essence » dualiste, tout en constituant une critique radicale d’une vue substantialiste du dualisme psyche/corps. « Psyche est corporelle, n’en sait rien », la formule de F. Coblence peut s’entendre comme ce qui advient du dualisme psyche/corps de l’interieur de la situation psychanalytique.