This is the text of a talk. It is not known when or where or to whom this talk was addressed.
Translated by Antoni Vicens
Published in Psychoanalytical Notebooks, #19 Ordinary Psychosis, July 2009, p89-98
Available at www.LacanianWorksExchange.net /authors by date or authors a-z

Context: The paper focuses on the clinical practices of the CPCT (Centre Psychoanalytique de Consultations et de Traitement – Psychoanalytic Consultation and Treatment Centre) in Barcelona, highlighting quick, short-term psychoanalytic treatments and demonstrates how clinicians use discrete signs and transference to diagnose and treat patients who exhibit mild symptoms without traditional, overt psychotic breaks.

References

P91 of Vicens

[1] Lacan, J.; ‘On Structure as an Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject whatever’ in Macksey, R. and Donato, E. (eds.); The Language of Criticism and. The Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy, John Hopkins Press, London 1970 pp.786-195

Vicens, So we listen in each analysand, to the way he or she has managed to live with his or her resources. These resources stem from the constellation of his or her birth, the contingency of what he or she has encountered in the course of his or her life, the traces his or her jouissance has written. In his conference in Baltimore (1966), Jacques Lacan said about the course of life that it “is something which goes, as we say in French, à la dérive”[1] [adrift – close to the Freudian drive, the English term Lacan proposed]. Life goes down a river, from time to time touching on a bank, staying here and there for a while, without understanding anything.

Of Structure as an inmixing of an Otherness prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever : 20th October 1966 : Jacques Lacan. See this site/ 4 Jacques Lacan (19661018)

P17-18 of www.Freud2Lacan.com, I have never understood this, for if I am a psychoanalyst I am also a man, and as a man my experience has shown me that the principal characteristic of my own human life and, I am sure, that of the people who are here — and if anybody is not of this opinion I hope that he will raise his hand — is that life is something which goes, as we say in French, à la dérive. Life goes down the river, from time to time touching a bank; staying for a while here and there. without understanding anything — and it is the principle of analysis that nobody understands anything of what happens. The idea of the unifying unity of the human condition has always had on me the effect of a scandalous lie.

***

P91 of Vicens

[2] Laurent, E.; ‘The Tao of the Psychoanalyst’ in Voruz, V.; And Wolf, B.; The Later Lacan: An Introduction, State University of New York Press ,2007 pp.25-52

Vicens, The trace that jouissance leaves in life gives existence to the emptiness that we can then consider as the white surface on which writing is drawn, or the silence, where the voice is heard. You can read in a paper by Eric Laurent[2] in the volume The Later Lacan edited by Véronique Voruz and Bogdan Wolf, how Jacques Lacan extracted this logic from the art of Chinese calligraphy. The writer puts himself in the position of the creator of the world, but in the sense that when he lets the pencil touch the paper, this paper becomes the emptiness as such. The writer creates the emptiness.

P36-37 of Laurent, We can see, thus, this abolition of the imaginary: “reflections push into the shadow all that does not shimmer.” It is not the sign, for the sign indicates something, but we have this trace that does not even come to underscore a preexisting aspect of the world. It is not even the opposition of the river and the mountain; there is no deception—no opening out of a path—it is a pure trace that operates.

He tells us he is coming back from Japan, but, as he says, he is coming back, above all, from a certain relation to writing. He draws his inspiration mainly from China. During those years, he reflected deeply on Chinese. We know from François Cheng, and from the interview published in the Freudian magazine L’Âne No 48, that between 1969 and 1973 he had very thorough conversations with Lacan once a week on the Chinese classics and on three of them in particular: Lao Tzu, Mencius, and Shih-t’ao. Cheng had published the latter’s treatise on painting as an addendum to his essay on Chinese painting Le vide et le plein published by Seuil in 1977. Furthermore, the combination of the characters “mountain” and “water” in Chinese means the landscape in general. Obviously, it is not without this reference to Chinese painting that Lacan reads Siberia as calligraphy, as a pure trace that operates without indicating, without signifying what is there: nothing human, not a single human product on the horizon, that is, no dustbins (the human par excellence—here it is the dustbin, rubbish); this is what industrial China is going to produce by way of radioactive rubbish and which always leaves a trace. Here the beginning of Beckett’s Endgame is evoked: “no trace of living life, hurry up, sprinkle on some powder.” This is the pure operation of the letter taking place. “And there,” he says, is established “the dimension, the demansion* . . . of the nomorthunwonn [papeludun],[2] that which is evoked by the part of the subject, the part I set up in the Wonn-mor [Hun-en-peluce],[3] as such it fills the anguish of the l’Achose.”

Notes

*JE : Dimension/Demansion is also a neologism, usually spelt dit-mansion/said-house. See this site /4 Jacques Lacan (14000000 Quotes from Lacan/Jacques Lacan’s neologism ‘dit-mansion’)

  1. The neologism “papeludun” is a homophone of the French pas plus d’un, which could be translated in English as “not more than one.”
  1. The neologism “Hun-en-peluce” is a homophone of the French un en plus, which can be translated in English as “one more” or “one extra.”

***

P93 of Vicens

[3] Strachey, Lytton; Portraits in Miniature and Other Essays, Chatto and Windus, London, 1937

***

P96 of Vicens

[4] a Freud, S.; Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious [1905]; Standard Edition SE VIII, Hogarth Press

See Jokes and their relation to the Unconscious : 1905 : Sigmund Freud, on this site /3 Sigmund Freud (19050101 or Index of Sigmund Freud’s texts)

Vicens p96, On the Internet he finds recognition and success, but in Spain, he is even mistaken for a clown which he is not. This confusion is very painful for him. At that point we entered into a conversation. I explained my point of view, taking from what I leamed in Freud’s book ‘Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious’.[4] Humour depends very much on the context. A joke that somewhere, sometime is very successful, can be completely incomprehensible in another place and at another time. Therefore, he was of course very successful in the culture he grew up in, Latin-America, but in Spain he could not be understood that easily.

This is a general reference to Freud’s text

***