The unconscious structured as a language : free association in clinical work

CONCEVOY Liliane


In "The unconscious structured as as language", Lacan proposes language as the organizer of human existance.

The idea each subject will have about himself depends on how and with what elements he realizes the operation.

The way he articulates what he hears, what he listens to, what he feels (linguistic structuring operation), will determine the scenario he constructs, a scenario that will then become CONSTITUENT.

The scenario tries to explain and give logical meaning to living experiences. The earlier the constitution of the scenario in the history of the subject, the more violent it will be. It will be constructed as if it was a real trauma, in the same way as it can be observed in the real of psychosis, but without forclusion.

Analysis involves the revelation of these scenarios created by the patient in the constitution of himself. They can be condensed into a phrase by the use of metaphor and metonymy and fonction as a signifier.

This means the scenario is inscribed as a phrase using language structure.

These structuring scenarios or phrases will attract all real or imaginary elements of the system and fix them in a stereotypic manner, impeding their free circulation. These scenario-phrases will be revealed in the repetition of transference.

Charles, 10 years old, consulted for a symptom that bothered and anguished him : he was afraid of aliens and unidentified flying objects (UFO). He knew these did not exist but.... they could appear and he avoided seeing television, going to movies just in case...

He will write two texts and it is the reflexions these texts inspired in me that I wish to share with you.

Charles does not find any reason for his anxiety, but thought it might be linked with an event in his past history. He knew he had been hospitalized at birth for convulsions (without fever or organic cause), but he did not associate them with his present anxiety. What HE DID NOT KNOW was that his mother covered him with a sheet to avoid seeing his seizures and that on the day of his birth, his father had an attack of ulcerative colitis which required hospitalisation and that his mother went to care for her husband who "needed her" three days after giving birth to their child. Curious fantasy of a shared delivery.

We know that the symptom, in so far as it is a signifier, speaks, but how can we know what it is saying if the patient does not give associations.

I do not think the difficulty to associate is characteristic of children. It il more likely a difficulty on the part of the analyst. Although the fundamental rule of free association is considered fundamental to psychoanalytic technique and the basis for interpretation, this does not mean it is respected. There is a tendency among analysts in the last decade to become im-PATIENT, in a hurry, unable to wait for the patient's associations, providing his own and thus running the risk of perverting the analytic situation into one of sugestion, potentializing and over signifying the symptoms. Listenning for free associations forces the analyst to reconsider the hypothesis he has made about the patient and requires time which is sometimes uncompatible with the actual tendency toward shorter sessions (instead of ponctuated sessions).

The proposals of Lacan that the analyst should remain in the position of little "a" and that he should direct the cure so that the the desires of the patient in analysis are set in motion, suppose two conditions : first of all, the savoir-faire ot the analyst in the facilitation of free association and the desire of the analyst to listen, so that the inconscious contents represented by the symptom can come to light. The analyst asks for associations in order to uncover the constructed scenario that became a phrase and which cristalized into a symptom.

Charles organizes battles between bad and good snakes, with noise being the most important aspect of his play. There was only the noise of the battles without dialogue or plot in spite of incitations to associate. Even though diverse productions such as body language, acts, drawings, noises, etc. can be considered like free associations, verbal free associations have a special fonction and quality because it is narration (like dreams) that produces effects.

Since associations did not come spontaneously to Charles, I asked him to imagine his history since his birth or to invent one if he could not imagine it. This proposal can also be made to adults. The scene that Charles constructs-imagines is the following : a newborn baby is alone in his cot at the hospital, attached to the intravenous tubing and he receives injections from nurses. He has pain and is afraid because he does not know anybody (this construction is completed during several sessions)

LC : He did'nt know anybody ?

Charles : No, because the nurses are not part of his family.

LC : Are they like aliens who scare him ?

Charles : uh... yes.

LC : Then they might be the aliens and the unidentified living objects...you did'nt know that they were nurses and that the injections were to cure and not to attack you.

The symptom disappears not long after, when the signifier lost its value because it became transformed. Aproximately two years later, Charles starts an activity that amuses him and makes him laugh a lot : he writes words or phrases that he deforms in one way or another.

Either he maintains the phonetics, but changes the spelling and the punctuation :

eg. i in bite u two mI any verse R ee (I invite you to my anniversary)

Or he maintains the correct spelling in some words, but they are as he says "nonsense words"

eg. "The holydays of our Xaviers !"

"That walker in three People, with coffee through grill the circus tent. Awful mess musical score goat ; clown ? Xaviers the cat ; the piano and the tricolor fire ! The board, trains if you can! Your Wind for Xavier afraid thing come ?"

I find this text without gramatical structure interesting because it confronts us with the question of the translation of the unconscious in so much as it is structured as a language. The text has a succession of words without subject or predicate and few verbs. But...there are PUNCTUATION MARKS. And if there is something that cannot be translatated, it is the puctuation marks. In any language, the point is a point . and the sentence is a sentence because there is a point at the end of the sentence. We could even draw a sentence : I-------; -----, -----?.

In each session, Charles writes some lines (that is in transference) and asks me to read them out loud. While I read his strange text, with my foreign accent, he could not stop laughing (because of his text, not because of my accent....or because of my accent ?).

I, on the contrary, find it boring, I do not find it at all funny, I do not understand anything at all. I should say this lasted for about a month, at a rhythm of two sessions a week.

The uncanny was the guiding thread in his life since birth. To his mother's eyes he vas strange (uncanny). She could not tolerate the sight of him with convulsions. This strangeness became an identity.

I point out to him something obvious : his attraction for strange things and the excitement they provoke in him. Before strange things scared him and now they make him laugh. He agrees with my interpretation, but nothing changes. He continues to write (he had written one and a half pages already) and he asks me to read it out loud, introducing once in a while other themes.

Through reading and re-reading, I become impregnated with something in his text and without realizing it, I start modulating my voice. I respect the punctuation. And listenning to myself read, I had the feeling I was talking to somebody. So that's the translation !

All of a sudden, something in the text starts amusing me and making me laugh without knowing exactly why. It took me some time to lend him my voice ! Lend him my voice for this babbling baby talk. Babbling is not confortable or obvious for the analyst; though we babble more than we think. I insist that this is not only characteristic of psychoanalysis with children.

Language as far as it is a manifest expression can produce in the analyst the illusion that he understands. The patients speech is taken for a shared language code.

It is only then, when the text amuses me too, that the unrelenting repetition falls off. Charles finishes his text, makes me read it and puts it away.

This type of writing, seems closer to a psychotic expression or a depersonnalisation than to a literary creation.

I think it is important to underline that it is the acoustic, the intonation of the phrase, the sound that becomes a signifier different from the significance. The meaning of the writing will be given by the rhythm because it is the censorship that gives the meaning.

The laughter it provokes in me and in him makes me think of "the joke" that allows for censured elements to get through. In addition, could not the laughter and its relationship to sound be related to the mother's phallic pleasure ?

I remind you that Charles' mother could not laugh or be fascinated by her baby. As soon as she gave birth, as soon as the baby left her womb, as soon as he was outside of her body, he became the uncanny stranger. She covered him with a sheet so as to avoid seeing the convulsions of her uncanny stranger.

His strange writing, crazy in appearance, that takes my voice, allowed Charles to construct and de-construct- invent a missing scene that he could not, for this reason, symbolize. A scene that can be a phrase in transference and that can give rise to a writing, as it did in his case.

One day Charles arrived with a literary text he had written in a writing atelier during the same period in which he wrote the agramatical text in session. In this text he tells the story of aliens that landed on Earth with the intention of destroying everything. "They machine-gunned the undefenseless, like a hunter and his prey." They are victorious.

Then he writes : "And then the words THE END appear on the screen. The spectators got up from their seats. The museum guide explained : This type of passtime was very popular in the 20th century? It was called movies. What you have just seen is a typical example of a science fiction movie. The machine that made possible the viewing of the film includes the movie screen, very well conserved, and the reel, which though a bit used by time, is in an acceptable condition. The object was discovered the 21 July 2671 in the heart of lower Paris. It is the latest adquisition of our museum. The visitors went off to their dwellings above the clouds. And in the sky of Paris, one could see spaceships of turists disappear in the twilight, setting sun that charms dreamers."

This gramatical language, may correspond to the inscription in a signified chain, that unables him to take his place in the generational chain. This might be what this new text tries to let through.

For the time being, a new interest has appeared in his life. He is interested in foreign languages (!!!). He is 15 years old and later on he would like to study linguistics.

DEE ND