TIMING AND THE UNCONSCIOUS

Nympha Amaral

It is in the psychoanalytical practice that the unconscious is unveiled. Created by Freud’s geniality, the psychoanalytical mechanism creates, hides and reveals the act of the unconscious. The freudian unconscious is distinguished, related to time, as much by the logic of atemporality aas by the " aprés-coup " what means that instead of being a contradiction of terms it is a demand.

The Oedipus as a structure, in case it is not produced as a chronology certainly develops in a succession of time, in which the logic of the " aprés-coup " will interfere making the final timing, which is the time of producing a signification for the subject to coincide with the same time of its constitution.

The practice with children, however, may arise questions that although they are not enough to defy the logic of the unconscious timing, they represent to the psychoanalist an extra burden in order to enable the production of the theory of the praxis.

When we work with very small children, specially psychotic (including autism) we notice that the development of a funcion will appear even before a suposed time to respond to the Other appears, through the occurrence of a special way of structure in a logical sequence.

It is as if a conjuction of timing errupted, making an only synchronic occasion by putting together the moment of the glance, the time of the understanding and the moment of finishing, throwing the subject into a structural operation which I will call precocious, as a way of translating a certain "I"ve already seen, I know, it is only a way to project myself".

I will present this question through a brief clinical case, to try to discuss it afterwards.

Robin is a two year old boy who was sent to the Institution where I work with autist children by his pedriatician. His mother thought he had an intermitent blindness and deafness, as sometimes he could hear and see something, so she thought.

The mother reported that this boy, at four months of age, was in the

street with her and her mother and suddenly started crying desperately, which he did for the ten following days, stopping only when he was asleep. After ten days, during which he was submitted to all possible medical examinations, the boy silenced and, since then, he was completely indiferent to everybody and everything. The story of this child came to me through the psychonalitical work with his mother which occurred in paralel to that of the child. It reveals that he had a very specific place in the mother’s psychic economy: he was the incestuous gift from his mother to his grandmother. The fatherly brands are there radically destituted and excluded, as if they were really inexistent which practically comes with an inevitable destitution of the father.

This destitution is effected in favour of an incestuous deplaced mother-daughter relationship and then replaced by Robin’s mother in her family of origin(and destination) having Robin as an element of connection and support , as from his birth, but apparently always promissed. Stories such as this one are not so rarely found. They may result in means of functioning , however, very different between them, and appearing only at the logical moment named by Freud as "second-wave" of the investment of the libido. I brought up this case because it clearly illustrates a development that ignores the "only after" logic.

There is a question remaining for the psychoanalist through the contact with the mother and the child: how is it possible that a four months old person starting from the encounter with the language has already concluded enough as to drive him to stick to a so unleashed psycothic structure? What causes structure and unleasshment of the clinic situation to happen at the same time?

How to think of the structure of an unconscious in a synchronic punctuality?

When we study Freud and Lacan’s works on paranoia, we may suppose a similar temporal sequency to that of the neurosis, in the sense of a posteriori ressignification of the elements of the structure.

Those elements cause the irruption of the symptom or the irruption of the elementary phaenomena and reveal that the structure of the person was always founded by the repression, or by the exclusion of the Name-of-the-Father. How to explain a structure that condenses its originary moment with its dechainment? How to think, in logical terms, the character of the temporality of those structures?

Lets start with the hypothesis that there is the possibility of a person to structure his unconscious starting by his meeting with the Other of the language , ignoring its diachronic dimension and being captured/throwed in the field of the significant to meet a significant in holophrasis , capturing all the Other’s Field in one sole point. We know that the subject of the unconscious constitutes itself in the intermittent topology, in the sliding of the significant chain between S1and S2. We believe that the dimension lived by the subject in the field of reality, as timing, results of this chain topology and of the transfer between the significant points of boundary.

However, in the case of autism and child psychosis, we can think of another possibility of the constitution of the subject which will result from its hard meeting with the significant holophrasis of the other. This would eliminate the possibility of its constitution in two logic times throwing it immediately in a functioning exclusion of the Name-of-the-Father without encountering with the One-Father in a logic second time.

This possibility excludes the operations of allienation and exclusion as, the person who finds language, in this case has no chance to find the sense, being chained to a field of language-without-production-of-sense and without significance (being impossible to operate the fatherly methaphor).

By borrowing significants and supposing the existence of a subject is that the psychoanalist who works with those children can reveal a function besides the sole absence that the heavy autist seems to impersonate.

Starting from the initial placement of the psychoanalist himself instead of any other this is how he can feel the effects of bringing the child off his bubble of silence, as if previously the field of the language would make the childfilll like drowning as a scuba-diver without his equipment.

These children, far from the registers of the most commom psychoanalitical literature, quickly answer to a work. As a hypothesis and possibility of sustaining a treatment, we can suppose a subject in front of us, and why not? a subject to the unconscious.

The character of the unconscious resulting from this constitution operatioon needs to be established and elaborated. However, being these children subject to transfer and so to the analytical intervenience, we can suppose an unconscious "adrift" that can be affected by the clinical treatment.

I present this work to our colleagues as an hypothesis, moved by the intriguing challenge that the work with children, specially the psychotics can bring, and I hope it can be accepted and discussed in this Meeting to which I entusiastically concur.