The Resonance of Words, the Voice
Susana Huler
In our days, we do not have to prove the existence of the unconscious. We believe that it is real and we rely on transference in order to allow, or to search for a path in which the psychoanalytical experience brings the analysand to use the enunciations of the subject supposed to know. To use them means, ultimately, to abandon them and choose one’s own sinthome as a solution rather than an impediment. A meaningless but useful solution. Good only for oneself.
The paradox is that in order to achieve this meaninglessness, we have to go through words, and words have this tendency of creating meaning and even hypnotizing us.
This is one of the reasons the analyst offers silence as an object capable of causing desire. Desire to speak in a strange loneliness directed to another.
Lacan[1] says, about analytical interpretation, that it has to take into account the fact that in what is said exists the sonorous, and that the sonorous has to sound together (consonner) with the unconscious.
In Yale, he had said that a psychoanalytical intervention does not have to be theoretical or suggestive – that is, imperative. It has to be equivocal. It is an interpretation that is not made to be understood, but to produce waves.
What produces waves? Is it the voice? Is it a special chain of words?
About the voice as object a, Miller[2] taught that it does not belong to the register of sound, and yet listening to oneself is present in the most intimate of subjectivity. It is a logical consistency, separable from the body and out of sense, inaudible, but which has the effect of assigning a place to the subject. Sometimes a very bad place.
There is also the voice as an organ of the body, that talks, screams, weeps and can also be whispering or silent. When we deal with the speaking body, we learn and practice the jaculation that sounds and says everything and nothing. Its power consists in a perplexity that shakes certainties and awakens what is written in this plurality of meaningless but powerful master signifiers of the real unconscious.
[1] Lacan, Jacques, Columbia University 1 December 1975, Scilicet 6/7.
[2] Miller, Jacques-Alain, IVRY, 23 January 1988, Freudiana 21, 1997.