Interpretation Is Not about Believing in It!
Alan Rowan
The scandal of the unconscious can be stated in terms of an irreducible subjective disturbance in what we know about ourselves. Here one encounters a knowing without knowing that one knows, a believing without believing that one believes, or as Lacan succinctly put it, “I am thinking where I am not, therefore I am where I am not thinking.”[1]
However, it is a mistake to conclude that this unconscious contains a treasure trove of mysteries, that once unlocked, gives access to some ultimate truth, whereby, one would be in command of the “deep truth” of oneself – the idea that, after all, there really is a (supposed) subject of knowing.
It is why, in his discussion of Glover, as Éric Laurent notes[2], Lacan highlights that the opposition between the true and the false is insufficient to capture what is at stake in the praxis of an analysis. Of course, as Jacques-Alain Miller[3] indicates, there does exist a necessary work of construction in analysis, precisely from the fragments of the (neurotic) unconscious to the construction of the fantasy, via an editing of what is said, in order to make manifest what, for the subject, does not cease to be written.
The paradox here is that this jouis sens resonates in a re-ciphering in order that the subject may separate from it, in other terms, no longer believe in it. It is not a question of arriving at a new or liberating understanding (e.g. concerning one’s suffering – though something of this occurs) but rather, one can say, to put in question the semblant nature of meaning itself. As such, it entails an encounter with the void of meaning and purpose, which all religions answer to.
In a stunning way, but true to the logic of his teaching, Lacan extended this “there is no Other of the Other” to psychoanalysis itself, insisting that analysts themselves not take its “chatter” as a “père-version”, that thus, in some form, might seek to save the Name-of-the Father.
[1] Lacan, Jacques, “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud,” Écrits, The First Complete Edition in English, tr. B. Fink,W. W. Norton & Company, New York/London, 2006, p. 430.
[2] Laurent, Éric, “Interpretation: From Truth to Event,” The Lacanian Review, No. 8, NLS, Paris, 2019, pp. 115-132.
[3] Miller, Jacques-Alain, Marginalia to “Constructions in Analysis,” Psychoanalytical Notebooks, Issue 22, London Society of the NLS, London, 2011, pp. 47-74.