Reproducing Innocently Produced Traumatism
Luc Vander Vennet
I found it interesting for the Congress theme to line up three texts by Lacan, all of which are from 1975.
In “L’ombilic du rêve est un trou” [“The Navel of the Dream is a Hole”][1], Lacan responds that the parlêtre – a new designation of the unconscious – retains a trace at the very level of symbolization of the fact of being born of a particular womb. The world of language of two particular beings into which the subject arrives has the consequence of situating him in a singular way in language. The parlêtre will be excluded from this origin. The scarring that bears the mark – a scar on a part of the body – is a hole, an Unerkannt, which is impossible to “recognize.” This troumatism is at the limit of analysis.
In his “Geneva Lecture on the Symptom”[2], Lacan calls the form in which this particular language of these two beings intervenes lalation. This lalangue models the child in the function of symbolism. He will always bear the mark of this mode of speaking that has been instilled in him. Two new definitions come out of this. First, the grip of the unconscious lies in this motérialisme. In dreams, in mistakes, and in all sorts of ways of saying, the way this language was spoken and also heard will emerge [ressortira]. The unconscious is therefore no longer concerned with meaning but with resonance. And finally, the parlêtre can sustain himself by this first imprint of the encounter of words with his body only through the symptom which then becomes a body-event.
Let’s move on to Lacan’s Seminar XIX ...or worse.[3] New definitions of the unconscious and of the symptom require a new mode of operation, a new apprehension of interpretation. The analyst’s operation must be articulated with the traumatic lalangue of the parents who innocently produced the neurosis. The analyst must reproduce this neurosis and converge, starting from its “efflorescence” (S1– S2), towards that signifier which has marked the body in order to extricate a dose of jouissance! Because that which speaks is that which enjoys the body.
Translated by Arunava Banerjee
[1] Lacan, Jacques, “L’ombilic du rêve est un trou”, Jacques Lacan answers a question posed by Marcel Ritter, La Cause du désir, No. 102, June 2019, pp. 35-43.
[2] Lacan, Jacques, “Geneva Lecture on the Symptom”, tr. R. Grigg, Analysis, No. 1, 1989, pp. 7‐26.
[3] Lacan, Jacques, … or Worse, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XIX, tr. A.R. Price, Polity, 2018, p. 130.