20/05/2019
JACQUES LACAN ON ACTING OUT (3)
Interpreting it, prohibiting it, strengthening the ego
"Prohibiting it, naturally, raises a smile, even from the author herself, who says - well, one can do all kinds o f things, but telling the subject that there’ll be no acting-out is rather hard to do. Anyway, no one dreams of doing that. All the same, one can observe in this regard the interlocutory prohibitions that are always to be found in analysis. Indeed, much more forbidding goes on than is thought. A good many things are done, clearly, to avoid any acting-out in the session. And then, patients are also told not to take any essential life decisions during analysis. It is a fact that, wherever one is applying one’s grip, there is a certain relationship to what may be called danger, either for the subject or for the analyst.
Essentially I shall say, to illustrate my point - both because we are doctors and because we are good people. As it was put by I no longer recall whom, we don’t want the patient who comes to confide in us to get hurt. And the most astonishing thing is that we manage this. The fact that we notice acting-out is all the same the sign that we prevent a great deal of it. Is that what Mrs Greenacre is speaking about when she says that a true transference has to be allowed to establish itself more solidly?
I should like to point out here one aspect of analysis that people don’t see. Its accident insurance aspect, its health insurance aspect. It’s very funny, though - at least once an analyst has got what is known as experience under his belt, that is, everything that, in his own specific attitude, he is most often unaware of 一 just how rare short-term illnesses are during analyses, just how much, in an analysis which goes on a bit, colds, bouts of flu and suchlike, vanish, and even where long-term illnesses are concerned, if there were more analyses in society, we’d all be faring much better. I think national insurance and life insurance too should take into account the pro- portion of analyses in the population to alter their rates.
Conversely, when accidents do occur, I’m not only speaking about acting-out, it is very frequently ascribed, by the patient and those around him, to the analysis. It is in a way ascribed to the analysis by its very nature. They are right, it’s acting-out, so it’s addressed to the Other, and if one is in analysis, then it’s addressed to the analyst. If he has taken up this place, then too bad for him. He still has the responsibility that comes with this place that he has agreed to occupy.
These questions are perhaps designed to clarify for you what I mean when I speak about the analyst’s desire and when I pose the question of this desire.
I won’t be stopping, however, to examine what shifted the ques- tion of the way in which we domesticate the transference in the direction of strengthening the ego the third of the hypotheses - because as you’ve heard me say, it’s not straightforward. Nor will I be stopping to affirm what I’ve always stood in opposition to, because as is admitted by those who have been walking this path for over a decade, and more precisely for so many decades that people are starting to speak about it much less now, this is a matter of leading the subject to identification. An entire literature admits as much.
It is not about identifying with an image as the reflection of the ideal ego in the Other, but with the analyst’s ego, resulting in what Balint speaks of, the veritable manic 自t that he describes as standing at the end of an analysis thus characterized.
What exactly does this fit represent? It represents the insurrection of the a that remains entirely untouched."
Seminar X, pp. 127-28