Lacanian Interpretation

Lacanian interpretation is not a technique. It is not pre-established in a series of rules that would make the remarks of the analysand and the interpretations of the analyst correspond in a bi-univocal way. Nor is it a mere transposition of the analysand’s message. It is without standards. It is more pragmatic: left to the greatest freedom of the analyst, as Lacan says in ‘The Direction of the Treatment…’, it is gauged by the effects it produces.[i]

            It is, however, regulated. Lacan furnishes its principles in ‘L’étourdit’.[ii] It must always be equivocal, which does not consist therefore in saying the true meaning, but in half-saying. This does not mean that it should be completely incomprehensible, but rather that it cannot be explicative, that it stays open to being taken up the analysand. This equivocation plays across three registers, as Lacan specifies again in ‘L’étourdit’: homophony, grammar and logic. Homophony detaches from immediate meaning and opens onto a pas-de-sens in the sense of a sidestep in the direction of a semantic crossing. Grammar implies the place of the subject of enunciation and it may also be likened to what Lacan called ‘rectification of the subject’s relations with the real’ in ‘The Direction of the Treatment…’.[iii] Finally, logic, which has to participate in any interpretation since without it the interpretation would be imbecilic.[iv] The interpretation that is supported by logic stretches over several planes. It draws on the impasses of logic: not-all [pastout] and hommoinsun.[v] It runs counter to the completeness of meaning, it distinguishes between impotence and impossibility[vi], it targets the real by supporting the contingency of the symptom which responds to a singular impossibility.

            With equivocation, Lacanian interpretation does not therefore aim at meaning, but it does not plunge into mere nonsense either. On occasion, it highlights a particular signifier that is insisting, and in this sense it is close to the letter (in the sense that the instance of the letter is the insistence of the signifier), but it also includes a form of not-all. On the side of the Post-Freudians, analytic interpretation is often taken up in terms of meaning: it is the meta-linguistic interpretation that transposes the exact meaning of what the analysand says in his own language onto a higher level. Lacanian interpretation is not a meta-language, it is rather creationist[vii] in so far as it modifies the analysand’s sentence. Interpretation is not therefore the translation of a message into another language, but ‘translation of the subject into the text.’[viii]

            Two things said by Jacques-Alain Miller enable us to get a good grasp of the exact place of Lacanian interpretation: ‘the unconscious interprets’[ix] and ‘the analyst is the editor of the analysand’s text’[x]. That the unconscious interprets means that the text of the unconscious is itself both a ciphering and its deciphering. Let’s take the example of the dream: the manifest content is an exercise of ciphering, but at the same time the latent content, i.e., the associations it opens onto, is an exercise of deciphering. This work on the part of the unconscious is therefore the mode of interpretation that falls to the analysand. The analyst-editor punctuates, he brings the punctuation to the text. He insists, he highlights, he inserts the inverted commas of quotation, or the point that ‘quilts’ the sentence and the session. His silence also participates in interpretation.

            In this respect, Lacanian interpretation is a cut too. By virtue of this it founds the short session. Moreover, in the short session it is less a matter of a duration than a matter of shortening. The session is shortened, i.e., cut, before it has got too long, before meaning has looped back on itself and closed up. Interpretation as cut aims at constituting the session as an asemantic unity.[xi] Once again, by virtue of this, interpretation does not aim at meaning, but at the search for a quilting point, oriented by the symptom and within the perspective of a construction of a sinthome. This quilting point is at the very least the acknowledgement of an occurrence of the analysand’s act of saying, it may be a step taken in meaning, a new inscription within a social bond, or more often something well said [un bien-dire] or simply better said regarding the symptom.

            It is because Lacanian interpretation aims at this quilting point outside meaning that it is also able to operate efficiently in psychoses. Of course, interpretation is already taken care of by the subject here. This is especially explicit in the various forms of paranoiac delusion, which are illnesses of interpretation. But it is also explicitly present in some delusions that are more anchored in the body, like the sensitive delusions, and it is well to the fore in melancholia when the subject interprets everything that concerns his Being with the negative judgements that the superego brings to the ego (to cast it in Freudian terms). And in the ordinary psychoses this interpretative slope is always present, at the edge, whether allusively or explicitly.

            Lacanian interpretation in the psychoses thus aims at the quilting point of discourse which is both the point at which the subject finds an anchoring point for the jouissance that invades him and a pacification of his problematic relations with the other. It is both a stopping point (cut or punctuation) upon the word that has been found which most accurately translates the jouissance that invades the subject[xii], and the support given to the rewoven social bond. In this double movement, interpretation helps the subject to calm himself and orients him on the path to his own construction.

            The next NLS Congress will be the opportunity to take up this theme of Lacanian interpretation afresh so as to develop it, especially based on its effects such as they may be gauged in the cases of applied psychoanalysis. Proposals for papers on this theme may be addressed to Pierre-Gilles Guéguen and myself. The texts should be sent no later than 8 March 2009.

Alexandre Stevens

Scientific Director for the Congress

Translated by Adrian Price for the NLS

[i] Lacan, J., ‘The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power’ in Écrits, Norton, New York, 2006, p. 491.

[ii] Lacan, J., ‘L’étourdit’, in Autres écrits, Seuil, Paris, 2001, pp. 490-2.

[iii] Lacan, J., ‘The Direction of the Treatment…’, Op. Cit., p. 500 [where Fink translates: ‘rectification of the subject’s relations with reality’].

[iv] A detail furnished by Lacan in ‘L’étourdit’, Op. Cit., p. 492.

[v] Explicit references from ‘L’étourdit’, Ibid., p. 479 [TN: hommoinsun is homophonic with au moins un, ‘at least one’, but Lacan’s spelling also foregrounds homme or homo].

[vi] Lacan, J., ‘Radiophonie’ in Autres écrits, Op. Cit., pp. 445-6.

[vii] Laurent, É., ‘Interpreting Psychosis From Day to Day’ in Bulletin of the NLS, Issue 4, 2008, p. 88.

[viii] As is said again by Laurent in this same text, Ibid., p. 90 [Translation modified].

[ix] Miller, J.-A., ‘Interpretation in Reverse’ in The Later Lacan (Ed. Voruz, V., & Wolf, B.), Suny, p. 4, and The Bulletin of the NLS, Issue 4, Ibid., pp. 69-70.

[x] Quoted by Éric Laurent in ‘Interpreting Psychosis From Day to Day’, Op. Cit., p. 89.

[xi] Miller, J.-A., ‘Interpretation in Reverse’ Op. Cit. p. 9 in The Later Lacan; p. 74 in Bulletin of the NLS, Issue 4.

[xii] Cf. Laurent, É., ‘Les traitements psychanalytiques des psychoses’, in Feuillets du Courtil, Issue 21, 2003, pp. 7-24.

Bibliographie – Bibliography

Jacques Lacan,

-          « L’instance de la lettre dans l’inconscient ou la raison depuis Freud » [1957], Écrits, Seuil, Paris, 1966, pp. 493-528. ‘The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud’, Écrits, transl. B. Fink, Norton, 2006, pp. 412-441.

-          « La direction de la cure et les principes de son pouvoir » [1958], Écrits, Seuil, Paris, 1966, pp. 583-645. ‘The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power’, Écrits, transl. B. Fink, Norton, 2006, pp. 485-542.

Jacques-Alain Miller,

-          « L’interprétation à l’envers », La Cause freudienne, 32, 1996, pp. 9-13. ‘Interpretation in Reverse’, Psychoanalytical Notebooks, 2, 1999, pp. 9-16; see also website London Society: www.londonsociety-nls.org.uk. Revised version published in The Later Lacan, An Introduction, Ed. V. Voruz & B. Wolf, Suny, 2007, pp. 3-9. Reprinted in Bulletin of the NLS, 4. 2008.

-          « Les contre-indications au traitement psychanalytique », Mental, 5, 1998, pp. 9-17. ‘Contraindications to Psychoanalytical Treatment’, Psychoanalytical Notebooks, 4, 2000, pp. 65-73.

-          « La séance analytique », La Cause freudienne, 46, 2000, pp. 7-15. ‘The Analytical Session’, Psychoanalytical Notebooks, 10, 2003, pp. 9-25.

-          Cours  «L’orientation lacanienne », Département de psychanalyse de l’Université Paris VIII, leçon du 26 mars 2008/lesson of 26 March 2008, diffusée sur/circulated on AMP-UQBAR, Ten Line News, n°388. See also website of the WAP: www.wapol.org (untranslated).

Eric Laurent,

-          « Interprétation et vérité », La Lettre mensuelle, 137, 1995, pp. 5-9. ‘Interpretation and Truth’, Bulletin of the NLS, 4, 2008.

-          « Interpréter la psychose au quotidien », Mental, 16, 2005, pp. 9-24. ‘Interpreting Psychosis from Day to Day’, Bulletin of the NLS, 4, 2008.