Is 'psychoanalytic experience' a concept?
Psychoanalytic experience (expérience psychanalytique)1 was not exactly a concept for Lacan, but it was certainly a problem.2 While the French twentieth-century psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan did not 'invent' the idea of psychoanalytic experience, he reintroduced the question of it into the problematics of post-Freudian psychoanalysis, 'with a completely original content.3
What I try to outline in my discourse - which, although it reinterprets Freud, is nevertheless centred essentially on the particularity of the experience it describes - makes no claim to cover the entire field of experience.4
Following Lacan's trajectory, this chapter does not try to construct 'psychoanalytic experience' as a concept in Lacan's teaching of psychoanalysis. Rather, it asks whether 'psychoanalytic experience' can be constructed as a concept for contemporary psychoanalytically oriented thought. In other words, can it function as a specific theoretically articulated problem that is put to work as such? The 'problem' that this work attempts to address is: how can one work with psychoanalysis within the academic discourse, while maintaining fidelity to the actuality of the psychoanalytic experience and the knowledge(s) constructed from it?
The use of the term 'psychoanalytic experience' here underlines that (I) the attempt to address 'psychoanalysis' in an academic form is not a simple affair, particularly (2) if the aim is to avoid collapsing 'psychoanalysis' into 'philosophy' (as mere theory) or to address it simply within psychotherapy research (that is, only as a form of clinical or therapeutic practice). For these reasons, this chapter addresses the specificity of this experience theoretically, attempting to determine it as a concept (the psychoanalytic experience), and pragmatically, as the grounding element of any psychoanalytic formation (the experience of an analysis). The general psychoanalytic postulate that the use of the term carries is as follows: there is no psychoanalyst without the psychoanalytic experience. This is applicable for any school of psychoanalysis. But the question remains, what to do with such a 'postulate' in an academic context?
Today psychoanalytic thought has to begin from an acknowledgement of the pluralism5 of psychoanalytic theory. This means that there exists a multiplicity of theoretical approaches to the clinical practice of psychoanalysis, to the extent that it is increasingly difficult to speak of psychoanalysis 'as such' even if the foundation of the discipline of psychoanalysis remains in Freud's clinical research and therapeutic invention. Furthermore, different contemporary orientations of psychoanalysis,6 even within a particular school or theory of psychoanalysis, operate very differently, to the degree that at times their constituted clinical approaches - in the actuality of how psychoanalytic treatments take place as well as the discussions around them - appear as if they are not even the same therapeutic discipline. Hence the question of theoretical specificity carries a lot more practical weight in the varied fields of psychoanalysis. The argument that follows is that the specificity of psychoanalytic concepts, for each particular orientation of psychoanalysis, requires a reference to the psychoanalytic experience. However, 'specificity' in this sense cannot be reduced to stagnant definitions of psychoanalytic concepts. In relation to the psychoanalytic experience, specificity has to do with contingency and the constant rearticulation of psychoanalytic concepts, realized anew in relation to the logic from which they are drawn. In a way, then, this chapter asks: can we even speak of 'concepts' when we try to articulate psychoanalytic theory in relation to the actuality of the psychoanalytic experience?
The theoretical research from which this chapter draws was conducted in a department of philosophy, while the way to think of and work with 'psychoanalysis' comes from a particular orientation of Lacanian psychoanalysis.7 The research was conducted in the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), alongside psychoanalytic work as part of the collective clinical research conducted in and around the New Lacanian School (NLS) and the World Association of Psychoanalysis (WAP).8 The aim throughout this research has been to think from the antinomic relation between the university and the psychoanalytic school - as distinct approaches to knowledge and as actual ways to organize individuals around a discourse - but without aiming to resolve the impossibility of this very attempt. That is to say, in order to pose the question of how to think of psychoanalysis within academic discourse, without immediately collapsing 'psychoanalysis' into either 'theory' or 'clinical practice', it is necessary to articulate theoretically and to put to use the term 'psychoanalytic experience'. In this way the research responds to the contemporary socio-political demand for 'psychoanalysis' to renew itself, by arguing: 'not without specificity of the psychoanalytic experience'.
Psychoanalytic experience
There is something truly remarkable here, which would be paradoxical if we gained access to it without having an awareness of the meaning [sens] it may take on in the register of speech [parole], which I am trying here to highlight as being necessary to the understanding of our experience.9
During the first lesson of his Seminar on 'Freud's Papers on Technique' (1953-1954) Lacan articulates what is essential for any concept of the psychoanalytic experience: the register of speech. The psychoanalytic experience, as a term, does not refer to the lived experience of an individual in therapy. In the first lesson of Seminar III (1955-1956), Lacan distances himself from an understanding of 'experience' as grounded on any empiricist notion of sense perception:
Make no mistake, though, I'm not going to fall into the myth of immediate experience that forms the basis of what people call existential psychology or even existential psychoanalysis.10
For Lacan, the Freudian experience brings resources into play that are beyond immediate experience and 'cannot be grasped in any tangible fashion.11 The psychoanalytic experience is 'mediated' by speech and through language. To speak of the psychoanalytic experience is to underline that, for Lacan, psychoanalytic 'experience', first and foremost, (I) is structured, and as such can be reduced to its minimal formal elements (the presupposition of the 'signifier', for example, in its materiality, foregrounding the existence of the speaking being), and that (2) the experience of a psychoanalysis (necessary for there to be a psychoanalyst) takes place in the field of language and discourse, as an experience of speech, of the speaking body (corps parlant).12 This means that the psychoanalytic experience, as an experience of speech, is necessarily to be considered in relation to what the term 'jouissance'13 aims to capture for the conception of the speaking being (parlêtre).14 The question of jouissance, or, more specifically, the question of 'how to act on jouissance from the field of language', is central to the psychoanalytic experience.15
During a talk given before the published Seminar begins -'The Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real' (1953)16 - Lacan underlines the necessity to maintain the question of what psychoanalysis is, what is brought into play in analysis, as a constant for 'those who try to formulate a theory of psychoanalytic practice [expérience]'.17 The emphasis is again on the question of speech for the psychoanalytic experience, against any simple psychology or superstition and the idea that thoughts 'in themselves' bring about effects in the world (i.e. magical thinking):
Of course, in analysis everything goes in this direction: we fall in with a certain number of the patient's more or less partial psychological views, we speak about magical thinking, we speak about all kinds of registers that indisputably have their value and are encountered in a very dynamic fashion in psychoanalysis. There is but one step from that to thinking that psychoanalysis itself operates in the register of magical thinking, and this step is quickly taken when one does not decide to first raise the primordial question: What does the experience of speaking involve? What is the essence and exchange of speech? And to raise at the same time the question of psychoanalytic practice [expérience].18
The English translation of the text reveals a tendency to confuse the term 'psychoanalytic experience' with 'psychoanalytic practice'. The argument here is that these two are not the same, not equivalent for one another. In French, the term expérience carries two senses, 'experience' and 'experiment', which continue to resonate in the use of the term in English.19 The French physician Claude Bernard already noted these two senses of the French term in his book An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (1865). Bernard's project was of course distinct from Freud's (as well as from Brücke's school of physiology, from which Freud emerged),20 distinct from Lacan's project and indeed from psychoanalysis in general. It was to define what conditions would be necessary for physiology to become part of an experimental science: 'a condition which, in turn, would allow medicine to exist free from doctrines, dogmas, systems and uncontrollable assumptions.21
In French the word expérience in the singular means, in general and in the abstract, the knowledge gained in the practice of life. When we apply to a physician the word experience in the singular, it means the information which he has gained in the practice of medicine. ... Subsequently the word expérience (experiment) in the concrete was extended to cover the facts which give us experimental information about things.22
During the first lesson of Seminar III (1955-1956), Lacan specifies that his conception of the 'Freudian experience' is 'in no way pre-conceptual'.23 This means that the psychoanalytic experience in line with Freud's invention is not 'pure experience', in so far as it is structured by 'something artificial'.24 In Seminar III this is the analytic relation itself, as it is constituted by 'what the subject recounts to the doctor and by what the doctor does with it'.25 It is by setting out from this initial mode of operation, a leap from speech to construction, that everything gets worked out.26 Furthermore, Lacan is already moving away from an intersubjective understanding of the psychoanalytic relation as a form of communication, the notion prevalent in the first phase of his teaching. The analytic work is understood here to occur on two distinct levels.
The second important point in deploying the term 'psychoanalytic experience', is also already highlighted by Lacan in the first lesson of Seminar I: the singularity of the psychoanalytic experience (la singularité de l'expérience analytique).27 This 'singularity'28 concerns the changing status of the psychoanalytic symptom for Lacan, and later the 'knowing how to do with it' (savoir-y-faire)29 drawn from the symptom's construction, in the course of an analysis taken to its formal - not therapeutic - end. In Seminar I Lacan points to Freud's 'nascent' (germinale) experience in psychoanalytic work, in so far as in his clinical practice Freud started from the complete reconstruction of the subject's history (in distinction to the concrete or lived history or factual past of the individual). Lacan underlines the effect of this reconstruction, the rewriting of subjective history rather than merely remembering and reliving a set of past events, as the element that is 'essential, constitutive and structural for analytic progress.30 What was at issue for Freud, according to Lacan, was the understanding of an individual case. This is, he continues, what gives each of the five case histories their value. But the term 'singularity' also comes to name what in Freud's case histories goes beyond the limits of the individual. It also means that the character of this experience cannot be 'reproduced in its concrete reality.31 Lacan describes Freud's work as follows:
It really was Freud who opened up this path of experience. This in itself gave him an absolutely unique perspective, as his dialogue with the patient demonstrates. As one can sense all the time, the patient is for him only a sort of prop, or question, or sometimes even a check, along the path that he, Freud, took alone. Hence the drama, in the true sense of the word, of his quest. The drama which, in each of the cases he gave us, ends in failure.32
Following the logic of Lacan's statement here, in so far as the reading of the term 'singularity' is at stake, this means in the first instance that Freud's work cannot be replicated as such. Freud does not construct a (universal) model for the psychoanalytic experience, but on the contrary - and as Lacan underlines - demonstrates his psychoanalytic 'quest', his questions as well as his failures. In this sense, the Freudian experience does not count as the natural number one from which the rest simply follow in an infinite and undisturbed concatenation. Freud's case studies are not the model for the psychoanalytic experience, regardless of whether a method is derived from them. On the contrary, they should be read as demonstrating the earliest operation of the analyst as a 'function',33 put to use by a particular analysand in the presence of a specific analyst. This, however, is not to say that Freud's case histories have ceased to teach about psychoanalysis, nor that the unique cases of Freud would not lend themselves also to some generality - 'since there is more than one psychoanalyst.34 But with Freud, as Lacan points out in Seminar Book I, 'the analytic experience represents uniqueness carried to its limit, from the fact that he [Freud] was in the process of building and verifying analysis itself'.35 We cannot, as Lacan continues to emphasize, 'obliterate' the fact that it was the first time that an analysis was undertaken: 'doubtless the analytic method is derived from it.36 But, it is only a method for other people, in so far as Freud, for his part, 'did not apply a method.37
A final point drawn from Seminar, Book I on the psychoanalytic experience continues to concern the question of therapy. For Lacan, a therapeutic approach is aligned with what appears to be 'harmonious and comprehensible' - escaping what is paradoxical in the human experience - but which nevertheless harbours some opacity.38 In contrast, for the psychoanalytic experience it is 'in the antinomy, in the gap and in the difficulty that we happen upon opportunities of transparency'.39 The term 'psychoanalytic experience' inscribes, from the very beginning of Lacan's teaching, a contradiction (for example, between language and a living body) as an opportunity of transparency, rather than as a problem to be overcome. It is, for Lacan, 'the point of view on which our method is found, and so I hope, our progress.40
'Temps Logique' contra therapeutic experience
The German language, however, distinguishes between Erlebnis and Erfahrung, which both translate as 'experience' but differ in so far as the former implies knowledge from an event, from a specific experience (seen in the verb erleben in its meaning of 'to witness'), whereas the latter connotes knowledge gained through practice, a 'journey' of sorts (connected to the verb fahren, to travel; erfahren, to learn).41 With this in mind, Freud's discussion in the Preface to the third edition of his seminal Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), calls for some attention.42 In this Preface (written in Vienna, October 1914), Freud distinguishes, on the level of the psychoanalytic experience, 'accidental factors' (akzidentellen Momente) from 'disposition' (die Disposition).43 He does so in a manner typical of his way of introducing distinctions that do not collapse into fixed binaries but rather introduce a supposed opposition that he extends to a variety of very precise interrelated articulations, opening their difference anew. First, for Freud the composition of the text itself, the arrangement of its topics, is drawn from the actuality of the psychoanalytic experience:
The fact that this book is based upon the psychoanalytic observations [den psychoanalytischen Erfahrungen]44 which led to its composition is shown, however, not only in the choice of the topics dealt with, but also in their arrangement.45
Freud underlines how, throughout the entire work, the various factors, which have emerged not from the literature but rather from the analytic encounters themselves, are placed in a particular order of 'precedence' in so far as 'preference is given to the accidental factors [or, in other words, actuality], while disposition [or, in other words, logical structure] is left in the background'.46 Freud thus inscribes the 'essence' of the psychoanalytic experience: the fact of contingency in relation to the fact of structure (inscribing 'in the background' the antinomic relation between the signifier and jouissance).47 This means that even though the fact of structure ('disposition') grants knowledge(s) generated through the psychoanalytic experience some generalizability, contingency (also in its modality of surprise) nevertheless takes precedence:
For it is the accidental factors [Das Akzidentelle] that play the principal part in analysis: they are almost entirely subject to its influence. The dispositional ones [das Dispositionelle] only come to light after them, as something stirred into activity by experience [Erleben]: adequate consideration of them would lead far beyond the sphere of psychoanalysis.48
Structural factors of the psychoanalytic Erfahrung are activated through the contingent instance of Erleben. For Freud, in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, a similar relation holds between ontogenesis (the development of an organism) and phylogenesis (the development of organisms as the evolutionary history of a species).49
The relation between ontogenesis and phylogenesis is a similar one. Ontogenesis may be regarded as a recapitulation of phylogenesis, insofar as the latter has not been modified by more recent experience [Erleben]. The phylogenetic disposition can be seen at work behind the ontogenetic process. But disposition is ultimately the precipitate of earlier experience [Erlebens] of the species to which the more recent experience [Erleben] of the individual, as the sum of accidental factors [der akzidentellen Momente], is super-added.
Disposition, or the phylogenetic 'structure', is the abrupt ('the precipitate') coming together of the species, rather than a natural given organizing individual organisms according to an uninterrupted gradual development due to an innate cause. The effect of time is underlined by Freud in relation to the 'accidental' in so far as der akzidentellen Momente in German inscribes not only an accidental 'factor' but also an unexpected instance of time into the supposedly uninterrupted concatenation of 'experiences'. Hence the alignment of Das Akzidentelle to contingency seems appropriate. The contingent can have an 'instantaneous' character in so far as it can refer to a sudden (however persistent) emergent (factor). But in relation to the psychoanalytic experience, it is aligned neither with the phenomenal experience of time (or historical time), nor with time in the sense of physics, but rather with what Lacan calls 'logical time' (temps logique).50
In the article 'Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty: A New Sophism' (first published in Cahiers d'art 1940-1944, 1944), Lacan constructs his concept of logical time as having three constitutive moments: (I) instant of the glance (or seeing); (2) the time for comprehending; and (3) the moment of concluding.51 Decades later, in his second constitutive intervention for the organization of his School, 'Proposition du 9 October 1967 sur le psychoanalyst de l'École', Lacan outlined psychoanalysis as distinct from therapeutics by further noting the structural effect of time in the psychoanalytic experience:
In fact, we can forget its important raison d'être, which is to constitute psychoanalysis as an original experience, to push it to the point where its finitude is revealed, in order to allow the 'aprèscoup,' the effect of time, which, as we know, is radical for it. This experience is essential to isolate it from therapeutics, which does not distort psychoanalysis simply by relaxing its rigour.52
The distinction Lacan makes between therapeutics and psychoanalysis is based on his conception of logical time. According to him, the actuality of the psychoanalytic experience distinguishes itself as a finite experience in order to 'enable its retroactivity', an effect of logical time which is fundamental to it. It is fundamental in so far as what matters for the psychoanalytic process is not so much when something took place (as a mere representation of reality conflated to 'objective' time) as in what order events manifest themselves (implying a psychical and, as such, 'subjective' causality). This means that psychoanalytic experience is a finite experience, like any therapeutic experience attempts to be, but that its finitude cannot be known a priori. For the psychoanalytic experience, according to Lacan, 'time' is not measured as an 'objective' entity but, on the contrary, is subjective and 'measurable' only after the (logical) effect of it.
Lacan's conception of 'logical time' aimed to answer for psychoanalysis how 'rational' certainty can only be reached by introducing a cut; by breaking the successive effect of time with the 'moment of hesitation', inscribing in this way the subject (as the effect of the signifier which produces a gap, a break in the signifying concatenation) into this conception of material temporality (that is, the movement of signifying articulations and their libidinal effects for a speaking being) for the psychoanalytic experience. It introduces a retroactive finitude, while making it possible to arrive at demonstrable - and only as such 'objective' - certainty for psychoanalysis. It does this in contradistinction to the consecutive effect (continuous and formally infinite) of physical (real) time, which runs ahead without any breaks.
Therapeutic experience, in the light of this conception, cannot arrive at real (demonstrable) 'objective' certainty with regard to the logic of its effects (on patients). This is in so far as therapeutic activity aims for generality in terms of the normative (contra pathological) functioning it aims to restore for the individual patient. The therapeutic effect is supposed to be known a priori, pointing to a non-subjective (general) finitude for the therapeutic experience. Curiously, with Lacan, it is the inscription of the 'subjective' into the concept of time (formally introducing a break in the idea of movement) that allows for 'objective' certainty (for example, universal knowledge). But this is only in so far as the steps of rationalization can be formally demonstrated - that is to say, without any individual interpretation or psychological experience.
In this sense, the term 'psychoanalytic experience' refers to a structural understanding of experience, which is distinct from a 'structuralist' approach to human psychology. The 'Proposition' (1967) constitutes a crucial example of Lacan's conception of the psychoanalytic experience. In just a few remarks, Lacan outlines how psychoanalysis is distinct from therapeutics, through this experience that cannot be reduced to either a purely rational deduction or a mere continuum of empirical observation. The element or idea of 'discontinuity' is therefore important with regard to the term 'psychoanalytic experience', particularly in so far as Lacan emphasizes the latter's distinction from therapy and clinical experience. The subject produced by this experience is not the result of an undisturbed process of individual progression or therapeutic utility because the cause-and-effect relation for Lacan is never without a 'gap' in between,53 which in itself introduces the structural place for the Freudian unconscious 'something that does not work'.54
A leap to the concept
To refine the theoretical scope of the term 'psychoanalytic experience' a letter from Louis Althusser to Lacan (4 December 1963), is helpful.55 The letter is intriguing, not only because it outlines some of the themes Lacan takes up in his opening lesson of Seminar XI in 196456 - the letter and the lesson in terms of their content are almost equivalent - but because in this letter Althusser articulates his view of Lacan's importance in taking seriously the discontinuity between theory and experience (in terms of a practice). This, however, does not lead Althusser to disclaim the clinical practice of psychoanalysis for its theory. On the contrary, he poses the question of the relation between them: how can one accede, from the very heart of a practice pursued or experienced, to its concept?57 Lacan, in Althusser's view, does something remarkable, in so far as a 'leap' from experience (practice) to its concept (theory) is a matter which in itself requires some theorization. It is not, in fact, to be taken as a mere attempt at bridging a preexisting gap or closing in on the route between two opposing 'territories'. First, there needs to be a conception that distinguishes the practical realm of experience, which is strictly distinct from theory proper: 'One does not pass without a break from a practice to its concept, from experience to its concept.58 Second, 'theory' has to come from doing a particular theoretical work (for example, a systematic enquiry into the functioning of a certain problem in order to move it forward), against mere reflection (a retrospective turning back on prior experience), 'and in a sense this is why theoretical work is intrinsically connected to writing.59
Althusser is not unaware of his position of 'exteriority'60 to the psychoanalytic experience, and to the school of Lacan. In his relatively stark view, Althusser claims that before Lacan the theory of psychoanalytic practice (that is, 'psychoanalytic experience' as a 'concept' that inscribes a break in the subjectobject relation that it founds)61 simply did not exist; 'a common experienced but unthought practice'.62 Althusser reads in Lacan's work the inscription of discontinuity between the experience of a 'lived' practice and the process of its formalization into a 'concept' (that is, its theory). Lacan, according to Althusser, has 'admirably' shown that problems of analytic technique cannot be resolved at the level of technique, 'that a leap was needed - the recourse to theory.63
It's an entirely different problem that concerns the transition from what I would call a 'practical truth' (which is practiced or experienced) to the theory of that truth or to its concept. Now this problem is, at bottom, a specific - and crucial - theoretical problem.64
In the final analysis, only theory describes and determines problems of technique. What does that mean? For Althusser, there is no pure and simple technique, which would be only technique, 'practiced by people without any idea of theory', and furthermore to whom that theory must be taught so that they can then reform their technique. The conflict, for him, is not between a 'pure' technique without theory and pure theory. There is no 'pure technique', which Lacan, as Althusser points out, has shown. Any technique in Althusser's view that wants to be pure technique is, in fact, an 'ideology' of technique - that is, 'a false theory.65
Correct distance, vis-à-vis 'mathematical experience'
If 'psychoanalytic experience' is a framing device, aiming to delimit as well as to make apparent certain problems within, discussions on psychoanalysis - expressing thereby a new way of looking at psychoanalysis 'and therefore a way of looking at a new psychoanalysis'66 - what do we gain by aligning this term to another notion from the field of philosophy of mathematics: 'mathematical experience'?67 Posing such a question prior to engaging in the very attempt requires caution, since such an engagement may in fact cause more confusion than provide added clarity. A similar 'caution' is not alien to discussions in the field of philosophy of mathematics. Brice Halimi describes the problem faced by any philosophy of mathematics in situating philosophy at the correct distance from mathematics:
too close and philosophy will end up being nothing more than an illustrative paraphrase of the concepts and results of mathematics; too far away and philosophy of mathematics merges into a general theory of abstraction - of both abstract objects and the conditions under which they can be known - with the risk of losing the specificity of mathematics, particularly mathematics as symbolic activity.68
Could we say that in the field of psychoanalytically invested academic writing, the term 'psychoanalytic experience' indicates, or is, the very distance between 'psychoanalysis' and 'philosophy', 'psychoanalysis' and 'psychotherapy', and even between 'psychoanalysis' and the academic discourse as such? As a 'concept' it is, then, a measure of practical commitment in the field of theory.69 It underlines how one does not get away from simply stating that 'clinical' (plainly practical) concerns are not relevant in the field of theory. It proposes an antinomic conjunction between a theory of psychoanalysis and its application as 'therapeutics' worked anew each time the 'concept' is put to work. And it also takes us beyond such an appellation. For this, a brief discussion of the concept70 of 'mathematical experience' (l'expérience mathematique), constructed by the French philosopher and historian of mathematics Jean Cavaillès (1903-1944), may prove to be useful.
In 'The Structure of Mathematical Experience According to Jean Cavaillès', Paul Cortois describes mathematics, for Cavaillès, as a body of knowledge growing and changing under the pressure of open problems that are first and foremost internal to its own development. This description presents 'mathematics' as a structured body knowledge that moves under a contradiction: its development necessitates an open form for internal and, as such, enclosed problems. However, this contradiction is not resolved by extending the reach of solutions to problems in other fields of knowledge. The tension is held 'within' mathematics. There is a precise resonance here with how the term 'psychoanalytic experience' functions as locating and sustaining similar tensions in the field of psychoanalysis (for example, with the idea of the unconscious as a construction from within the psychoanalytic experience). Furthermore, for 'psychoanalytic experience', a problem (a symptom) is open to the extent that it manifests itself regardless of specialist knowledge, but the trick is to 'capture' it in speech and put it (and a knowledge constructed of it) to work in the process of an analysis. For this, an analyst must learn to speak a language of the analysand. And it is precisely the question of how to hold open some margin within academic writing for any articulation of such processes, against the collapse of the entire field of 'psychoanalysis' into 'psychology', or just another set of theories on subjectivity, enjoyment and language.
For Cortois, the crucial steps in mathematical development - the moments solennels in the history of mathematics, as Léon Brunschvicg called them - often occur due to 'unpredicted encounters' between theories seemingly far remote.71 The role that Cavaillès, according to Cortois, gives to the 'post-foundational' philosopher of mathematics is to give an analysis and description of these mechanisms of mathematical abstraction, 'making intelligible the very character of mathematics as an experience, an adventure of conceptual progress.72 Mathematics is the paradigm case, for Cavaillès, of a 'self-correcting process of intrinsic conceptual innovation.73
The character of mathematics as an unpredicted adventure of conceptual progress serves to demonstrate how 'invention' is not alien to conceptual (structured) process if it remains open to an 'encounter'. For Cavaillès, however, the requirement of inserting any new insight into a freely growing system of demonstrative concatenations subject to no other test than mathematical practice excludes the dependency of mathematics on any 'external loan'.74 Instead, for Cavaillès, mathematical thought is constructive, 'in the sense that existence is always dependent on the possibility of some form of actualization'. But it is not, as Cortois also says of the mathematical experience, constructivist, 'since the set of means of actualization and effective attainment are never founded or definable of fixed principles or restrictions.75 Similarly, the question of the (generating) act realizing the object, and the contingent cause of the problem 'without an initial term' speaks to the psychoanalytic experience:
The [mathematical] objects attained are engendered by acts, but we have no way of keeping a control on the set of actualizing mechanisms since the necessity of the acts involved is dictated by the objects already brought into existence (and the problems internal to them) and the interactions of these objects and problems with the ones that are about to be generated. Thus the generating acts themselves are characterisable only in terms of the reality of the objects generated. Perhaps this involves a kind of regress, but for Cavaillès, then, this regress is typical for the very being of mathematics as a never-ending concatenation of concepts without initial term.76
Psychoanalysis is not a never-ending concatenation of concepts. However, the term 'psychoanalytic experience' does imply generating acts that themselves are characterizable only in terms of the reality of the objects generated. For example, the 'unconscious' that matters for the psychoanalytic experience is the one constructed within it from the real effects of speech that go beyond the grasp of language. In this sense the term can only be a framing device. It delimits and focuses discussions on psychoanalysis, drawing out the conceptual contours of a discourse put to practice in the actuality of the psychoanalytic work.77 And if it calls for fidelity to this actuality, it does so in order to realize anew the theoretical concepts inscribed into its practice. In this way the term proposes a means to think from the incompatibility between academic discourse and psychoanalysis, in a way that does not merely state an impossibility, nor advance without any attention or sensitivity to this problem. The overall aim, therefore, of the theoretical effort in this chapter is to further the possibility of clarifying how this incompatibility can come to contribute to a conception of 'psychoanalysis' as a distinct discipline that pertains to its own logic of operation.
*
Endnotes
Footnotes
1. The French term is specific in so far as the 'psychoanalytic experience' (l'expérience psychanalytique) is different from both the experience of an analysis (l'expérience d'une psychanalyse) and the experience of psychoanalysis (l'expérience de la psychanalyse). ↩
2. Even at the end of his teaching, the problem kept engaging Lacan: 'I'm still at the stage of questioning psychoanalysis as to how it functions. How is it that it constitutes a practice that is still occasionally effective?' J. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 24: L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue, s'aile à mourre (1976-77), ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. Dan Collins (unpublished manuscript, 2015), p. 53 [17 May 1977]. ↩
3. É. Balibar, 'Marxism and War', Radical Philosophy 160, March/April 2010, pp. 9-17, p. 9. This juxtaposition between 'concept' and 'problem' is borrowed from Étienne Balibar. He begins 'Marxism and War', by explaining how 'war' is for Marxism not a concept, but is introduced as a problem into its field, stretching historical materialism to its limits, while showing how it could not give an account of these limits. ↩
4. J. Lacan, Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (1964-65), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan, Norton, London, 1998, p. 72. In a lecture titled 'Conferencia del Coliseo' Jacques-Alain Miller underlines Lacan's point by stating that each psychoanalyst interprets what psychoanalysis itself means. Freud, in Miller's view, interpreted psychoanalysis first as a cure, Klein as communication, Jung as elevation, Anna Freud as pedagogy, and Lacan 'as an experience - as a logical deduction'. J.-A.Miller, 'Conferencia del Coliseo', Buenos Aires, 26 April 2008; published online by the ECF Lacan Web Télévision: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pkuml-dmWwg. ↩
5. Here 'pluralism' of psychoanalysis refers to the variety of psychoanalytic schools (each with distinct theory, clinical practice and training), whereas pluralistic practices (for example, integrative, multi-modal or eclectic) refer to those therapeutic approaches which conflate different therapeutic approaches within one practice (in a varied manner, either with a client or therapist focus). ↩
6. 'Orientation' refers to the variety of psychoanalytic schools (for example Lacanian, Adlerian, Jungian, Kleinian) as well as to specific and distinct 'orientations' within each of them. The term names both the particular theoretical approach to clinical research (the collective work of a school of psychoanalysis), and the capability to orient clinical work psychoanalytically, in each encounter with an analyst (without a wild or solely psychotherapeutic approach to psychoanalysis). ↩
7. The 'Lacanian Orientation' refers specifically to the teaching of the French psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller, most notably during his Course at the Université de Paris-8 (1981 to 2011), and more broadly to the particular kind of Lacanian psychoanalysis practised in the schools of the World Association of Psychoanalysis (WAP). What is particular to the Lacanian Orientation of psychoanalysis is that the question of what exactly 'psychoanalysis' is never settles entirely. For this reason, to work as a psychoanalyst is, in a way, to never cease asking 'What is the psychoanalyst?' It is also a stake to which each analysand in formation must subjectively implicate themselves, in order for an analysis to take on a formative function, which goes beyond mere formal clinical training in psychoanalysis. ↩
8. Throughout this doctoral research, I have been in psychoanalytic formation within the Lacanian orientation of psychoanalysis. I have been a psychoanalyst member of the NLS and the WAP since 2024, and a member of the London Society of the NLS since 2018. ↩
9. J. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud's Papers on Technique (1953-1954), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester, Norton, London, 1991, p. 14. ↩
10. J. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses (1955-1956), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg, Norton, London, 1993, p. 8. ↩
11. Ibid., p. 8. ↩
12. In Seminar I Lacan does not use the term 'speaking body' ([corps parlant), in so far as his theory of the 'subject of the unconscious' is prevalent; he only later shifts to emphasize the effects of jouissance ('real' effects of speech) on the living body by the signifier, distinct from the 'effects of meaning' (also brought forth by the signifier). ↩
13. The term jouissance is functional for Lacan, rather than simply being a concept. It constitutes a doctrine which aims to speak, in discourse, of that which is beyond discourse and language. As such, it points towards the structural incompatibility between language and a living body. For the psychoanalytic experience, it names the field that, for a speaking being, borders on pleasure, on the one hand, and on displeasure (suffering and pain) on the other. As a term it implies the corporeal dimension for the speaking body: that which animates living creatures but also causes havoc in any signifying relation. ↩
14. In the eleventh lesson of L'Un tout seul (2011), Miller discusses the difference between the subject of speech and the parlêtre in relation to the dimension of 'having' a body (that enjoys itself). J.-A. Miller, 'L'Un tout seul' (2011), L'orientation lacanienne: le cours de Jacques-Alain Miller (1981-2011), Département de Psychanalyse de Paris-8, unpublished, Lesson XI, 4 May 2011. ↩
15. In his own teaching, Miller articulates this question during his course L'expérience du réel dans la cure analytique (1998-1999). From there onwards, it becomes one of the key questions for the contemporary Lacanian Orientation, in so far as it has very direct implications for the psychoanalytic experience. It is a question that 'animates' the psychoanalytic experience. ↩
16. Lacan gave this talk just before writing the seminal 'The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis' (1953), which marked the public debut of 'Lacan's teaching'. ↩
17. J. Lacan, 'The Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real', in On the Names-of-theFather, trans. Bruce Fink, Polity, Cambridge, 2015, pp. 1-52, p. 7. ↩
18. Ibid., pp. 8-9. ↩
19. An analysand recently recounted their experience: 'Psychoanalysis is like an experiment, not like therapy; you take the material things that occupy someone, shuffle them around and sometimes something sticks. For me it has had the effect that what was before completely unbearable has changed into something that is somewhat bearable.' ↩
20. On Freud's early epistemology, see for example J. Tran The, P. Magistretti and F. Ansermet, 'The Epistemological Foundations of Freud's Energetics Model' (2018), Frontiers in Psychology 9, 1861. Doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01861. ↩
21. González Recio, 'Who Killed Historical Positivism? An Approach to Claude Bernard's Epistemology', Ludus Vitalis, 7(22), 2004, pp. 61-82. ↩
22. Claude Bernard, An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (1865), trans. Henry Copley Green, Dover, New York, 1957, p. 11. ↩
23. Lacan, The Psychoses, p. 8. ↩
24. Ibid., p. 8. ↩
25. Ibid., p. 8, stress added. ↩
26. Ibid., 8. ↩
27. Lacan, Freud's Papers on Technique, p. 15. For the French, see J. Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre I, Les écrits techniques de Freud (1953-1954), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 1975, p. 22. ↩
28. For the notion of the 'singular' within the discourse of the Lacanian Orientation, see for example, F.F.C. Shanahan, 'The Path of the Singular, a Singular Path', LC Express, 7(3), March 2024, pp. 2-6. ↩
29. Lacan begins Seminar XXIV by asking what one identifies with at the end of analysis. He immediately delocalizes this question, away from identification as the analyst, as well as from the concept of the unconscious. Instead, he moves to situate the question as a concern with the status of the symptom at the end of an analysis. He asks, 'might it be a matter of identifying, by taking one's guarantees from a kind of distance, with one's symptom?' The symptom, as he further states, is what one knows (connait) best. Lacan, Seminar XXIV, Lesson 16 November 1976, unpublished. ↩
30. Lacan, Seminar, Book I, p. 12. It is to be noted that the 'subject' is neither the individual nor the ego, nor is 'subjective history' a matter of supposed objective reality. ↩
31. Ibid., p. 15. ↩
32. Ibid., stress added. ↩
33. In his lecture 'Function and Concept' (in The Frege Reader, ed. Michael Beaney, Blackwell, Oxford, 1997) G. Frege discusses how the word 'function' was originally understood, then develops his theory of 'function' distinct from 'concept'. His starting point was what was called a function in mathematics. The answer, he explains, that we are likely to get to this question is: 'A function of x was taken to be a mathematical expression containing x, a formula containing the letter x' (p. 131). This answer, however, is not satisfactory for him, 'for here no distinction is made between form and content, sign and thing signified [Bezeichnetes]; a mistake, admittedly, that is very often met with in mathematical works, even those of celebrated authors' (p. 131). Rather, he argues, a function by itself must be called incomplete, in need of supplementation, or unsaturated, '[a]nd in this respect functions differ fundamentally from numbers' (p. 133). This description already allows for the (supposed) concept of the psychoanalyst to be distinguished from a 'function' an analyst operates for a singular speaking being (that which supplements a particular function). ↩
34. Lacan, Seminar, Book I, p. 21. ↩
35. Ibid. ↩
36. Ibid. ↩
37. Ibid. ↩
38. Lacan, Seminar, Book I: p. 108. ↩
39. Ibid. ↩
40. Ibid. ↩
41. This is what the prefix 'er' also implies, to gain something by going through, rather than merely engaging in an activity. ↩
42. I owe a mention to an NLS cartel with Maryam Shahidifar, Tuulikki Toropainen, and Alasdair Duncan: we undertook a close reading of the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality together. ↩
43. S. Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume VII, 1901-1905, trans. James Strachey, Hogarth Press, London, 1953, p. 131. ↩
44. Again, the term 'psychoanalytic experience', and also the particularity of Erfahrung, are lost in the English translation, collapsing psychoanalytic practice into mere 'observation'. See S. Freud, Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie, Fünfte, Unveränderte Auflage, Franz Deuticke, Leipzig and Vienna, 1922, Vorwort zur dritten Auflage (emphasis added). ↩
45. Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, p. 131. ↩
46. Ibid. ↩
47. For further discussion on the antinomic relation between the signifier and jouissance, see J.-A. Miller, 'L'Un tout seul' (2011), L'orientation lacanienne: le cours de Jacques-Alain Miller (1981-2011), Département de Psychanalyse de Paris-8, unpublished. ↩
48. Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, p. 131. ↩
49. Freud borrows these terms from biologist Ernst Haeckel (1866), diverting instantly from his claim. See K. Sander, 'Ernst Haeckel's Ontogenetic Recapitulation: Irritation and Incentive from 1866 to Our Time', Ann Anat, 184(6), November 2002, pp. 523-33. doi: 10.1016/S0940-9602(02)80092-9. The importance of the question of ontogenesis, and its intricate relation to phylogenesis, for contemporary psychoanalysis from the point of view of Lacanian theory is currently being investigated by Emily Laurent-Monaghan ↩
50. The conjunction temps logique is found both in Lacan ('Le temps logique et l'assertion de certitude anticipee. Un nouveau sophisme', Cahiers d'art, 1940-1944, pp. 32-4) and in G. Bachelard (Le rationalisme appliquée, PUF, Paris, 1949, pp. 60, 96). For this reference, see the 'Conclusion' by Matt Hare in 'The Effective as the Actual and as the Calculable in Jean Cavaillès' (2022), Noesis: L'objectivité en mathématiques/Objectivity in Mathematics 38, 2022, pp. 213-35. Hare writes: 'I take the conjunction "logical time" to name a cluster of theoretical problems that arise around attempts to theorise an intrinsic "time" of reasoning or of science, one which would not be derived from "temporality" understood as indexing first-person temporal experience. The formulation of such theories of logical time tends to be constitutively negative: what is it at stake is not the phenomenal experience of time, not historical time, not time in the sense of physics, and so forth. But it remains unclear whether this median position occupied by a supposed "pure" time of reasoning is a consistent theoretical category' (private correspondence). ↩
51. J. Lacan, 'Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty', Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink, Norton, London, 2006, pp. 161-75. ↩
52. J. Lacan, 'Proposition du 9 octobre 1967 sur le psychanalyste de L'École', Autres Écrits, Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 2001, p. 246, emphasis added. ↩
53. Cause // effect (and not cause effect). ↩
54. For Lacan, in short, there is cause only 'in something that does not work'. And this is in so far as, by approximation, the Freudian unconscious is situated at that point, where 'between the cause and that which it affects, there is always something wrong'. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 22. ↩
55. L. Althusser, 'Louis Althusser to Jacques Lacan' (Paris, 4 December 1963), in Writings on Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, Columbia University Press, New York, 1996, pp. 151-8. ↩
56. The seminar on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis which began Lacan's teaching at the École normale supérieure, ENS, by the invitation of Althusser. ↩
57. Althusser, 'Louis Althusser to Jacques Lacan', p. 151. ↩
58. Ibid., pp. 154-5. ↩
59. Hare, private conversation. ↩
60. 'that constitutes the witness that I am'. Althusser, 'Louis Althusser to Jacques Lacan', p. 151. ↩
61. For Althusser's theory, the idea of the 'break' indicates the mutation of a pre-scientific problematic into a scientific problematic. This is already the case in his description of Lacan's contribution to the history of psychoanalysis. In his own work, Althusser established the contours of the double function of the 'epistemological break' in Marx's theory, which divided Marx's thought into two essential periods: the 'ideological' period before, and the 'scientific' period after the break in 1845. See also Althusser, 'Louis Althusser to Jacques Lacan', p. 154. ↩
62. Althusser, 'Louis Althusser to Jacques Lacan', pp. 15, 154. ↩
63. Ibid., p. 152. ↩
64. Ibid. ↩
65. Ibid. ↩
66. This paraphrases Wittgenstein's discussion of a new way of looking at calculation, in L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar, ed. Rush Rhees, trans. Anthony Kenny, Blackwell, Oxford, 1974, p. 438. ↩
67. L'expérience mathématique was, as Paul Cortois points out, the title Cavaillès had in mind for a book he wanted to write about the specific characteristics of mathematical knowledge. See Paul Cortois, 'The Structure of Mathematical Experience According to Jean Cavaillès', Philosophia Mathematica, 4(1),1996, pp. 18-41. ↩
68. B. Halimi, 'Logic, Cavaillès's Sought-After Science', Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 106(2), 2020, pp. 145-164. The stake for the kind of philosophy of mathematics that matters for Halimi is to distinguish it from 'philosophy of mathematical practice' (PMP) and, on the other hand, from a general theory of knowledge. It could be said that the idea here is also not to implement a kind 'philosophy of psychoanalytic practice'. On PMP, see for example, J. Carter, 'Philosophy of Mathematical Practice - Motivations, Themes and Prospects', Philosophia Mathematica III, 27(1), 2019, pp. 1-32. ↩
69. That is, theory has to come from somewhere; it cannot be mere reflection. ↩
70. The term 'concept' is used here in a broad sense to mean a conception of something specific. The question of the concept in Cavaillès is a matter for those invested thoroughly in his philosophy of mathematics. See, for example, M. Hare, 'The Philosophy of the Concept and the Specificity of Mathematics', in Peter Osborne, ed., Afterlives: Transcendentals, Universals, Others, CRMEP Books, Kingston upon Thames, 2022. ↩
71. Cortois, 'The Structure of Mathematical Experience', p. 5. ↩
72. Ibid., p. 4; emphasis added. ↩
73. Ibid. ↩
74. Cavaillès in ibid., p. 4. ↩
75. Ibid. ↩
76. Ibid., p. 5. ↩
77. This notion of 'work' is not without what Éric Laurent referred to as 'un-work' in the article, 'Private Language, Private Jouissance' (delivered at PULSE held in Paris on 2 May 2010): 'The issue is not to work, it is to un-work; ... The connection with jouissance is beyond any possible work.' E. Laurent 'Private Language, Private Jouissance', Hurly-Burly 6, September 2011.6, September 2011. ↩
Cite this article
Aino-Marjatta Mäki. Is 'psychoanalytic experience' a concept?. Conjunctions: humanatures reproduction disjunctions, 2025. CRMEP Books, London, UK.