Your Tears, They’re a Mystery

Bruno de Halleux

To enter into analysis is to believe in meaning, to believe in the encryption of the unconscious, to believe in a hidden truth which would give a response, a meaning to the question of the subject, who am I?

Thus, the analytic operation is grasped as a long verification, a long process of deciphering the formations of the unconscious with the hope of discovering an ultimate meaning as to what it is that constitutes the analysand’s question.

However, what is discovered at the end of the analysis is a discovery opposed to what formed the very engine of the analytical process. The Other is reduced to its real, the subject liberated from the meaning that he has not stopped seeking throughout the process.

Nevertheless, before concluding with the discovery of an unpredictable real, a real without law, and of an Other freed from meaning, there must be this process of deciphering the formations of the unconscious, there must be this reduction of symptoms to their bone, there must be this final deduction in action of the analysand in order to consent to this effect of real sense.

Thus I grasped an interpretation of the analyst in the final stretch of my cure. Each time that I became closer to some of my primordial signifiers in the unfolding of my words, a torrent of tears prevented me from speaking.

I asked of the analyst the reason for the tears. He didn't respond to me with meaning. He did not refer me to another signifier that would have relaunched me once again into an interminable quest. His response was brief, it was an asemantic interpretation: your tears, they’re a mystery.

I was then in a conclusive moment of the analysis. If these tears are outside sense, then they must be taken for what they are, without any other supplementary signification.

Only the primordial signifiers separated from all possible meaning remained.

There is no longer any intention, no more want-to-say, no more meaning to my master signifiers, there is only the real unconscious which, for its part, falls under an it is thus, an amen which one clearly understands henceforth one will have to know how to do with it, with these signifiers alone, with this real relieved of meaning.

Translation by Raphael Montague