THEORETICAL TEACHING AND THE DISCOURSE OF THE MASTER

FERRER Norberto

In all dialogue the ego agency always imposes the function and modes that are particular to the imaginary relationship that form it. These modes are represented by the necessary opposition to the other and their aim is to support the ideals of authenticity and non-dependency on this other, which form this ego, thus achieving the appearance of absolute autonomy and dominion. This paranoiac ego ( which regards itself as Being) needs, in order to achieve its aims, to support itself on ostentation and lies, thus reinforcing the constant denial of ignorance, limitations, impossibilities, in other words, the castration of the subject himself.

We take into account this deceptive ego when we propose the teaching of bodies of doctrines and concepts, including those of psychoanalysis. All pedagogy disposes itself towards an operation of dominion whereby the educator, from an ideal position, seeks to mold, with his knowledge, the subjects to the image and likeness of his theses. Furor educandis takes possession of the masters in their zeal to inculcate (from latin: to press something by stepping on it) and introduce into the students textual and encyclopedic learning. The teacher’s desire is that of establishing a law whereby knowledge is directed towards an indisputable Mecca of invention of further rational learning. This is the wrong way to take, if it is the only one, for psychoanalytic schools if, besides this, they promise qualified training and require the uniform discipline of corporative fidelity.

Beginning with Freud and with Lacan, we today conceive the complex puzzle of the teaching of psychoanalysis as two essential, inseparable and interdependent chapters: theoretical orientation and practical experience. As for the theoretical training, we distinguish: 1: the study of the texts, 2: the work with other colleagues in the Associations, 3: the relationship with the teaching body, and 4: participation in cartels. The theoretical teaching is marked, preponderantly, by the discourse of the master and its imaginary and ideal correlation.

PRACTICAL EXPERIENCE AND TRANSMISSION

As for practical experience, we point out: 1: the analyst’s personal psychoanalysis, 2: clinical practice in listening to analysands, 3: case supervision, and 4: the act of the clinical and social "passe". In common to these four aspects of practice is the experience of the transference - as an enactment of the unconscious - and the essential and possible working through of it, as well as the practical experience of castration and lack. These circumstances create the necessary conditions for transmission.

The practice of psychoanalysis transmits that the unconscious desire can neither be governed, nor educated, nor domesticated. The ego discourse contains and inevitably opens the way to unconscious formations that drive to return from the repressed and express the truth of the desire, producing a new sense for whoever can listen to it just as if it were the paint on a fresco, which conceals and reveals in its brushstrokes, in its expressions, in its waverings, the preliminary drawings or sinopias, the reading of which at times reveals the painter’s original intentions and modifies the sense of the pictorial text.

Each analyst needs to reinvent psychoanalysis, which finds itself bound through the theoretical legacy, psychoanalytic practice and institutional social bond. Reinventing means: 1) on a theoretical level: the reading and interpretation that each one can carry out, depending on his particular moment of analysis and transference with the texts and teachers, as well as the contributions that the theory can offer, generated by his own clinical and institutional work with other analysts; 2) on a clinical practice level: depending on the particular working through of his castration and fantasm and the theoretical-clinical articulation deriving from this; 3) on an institutional level: in the associative bond one inevitably must go through the student-master, analyst-analysand dialectics, the dissertations, authorizations, nominations, teachings, transferences and transmissions.

PSYCHOANALYTIC DISCOURSE AND THE ACT OF TRANSMISSION

The psychoanalytic device creates the conditions for the inauguration of a new discourse that allows to make the most of the effects of these new senses or of the non-sense that is revealed, and which allow the subject to become aware of the conditions of his desire and the stereotypes of his jouissances.

In opposition to the ego discourse (oppositionist, deceitful, ostentatious and negatory) and the superego discourse ( imposing, controlling and ideal), the analytic discourse brings into play and allows one to know about the drives and signifiers that form us from the beginning of our lives, and which, through incessant unconscious activity, repeat themselves, transferring a forgotten or repressed past onto the analytical bond.

This enactment of the unconscious in analysis reveals that what in fact can be transmitted is a lack; something that is related to the unconscious desire and to its causes, as well as to the enigmatic jouissance and to the ‘real’ of the drive. The other discourses that support the social bond: that of the master, the univesitarian and the hysteric, are different ways of not wanting to know about castration, different ways of dealing with the ‘real’ and the impossibility of a sexual relation. From this stems the resistance to psychoanalysis and the upsurge of religions and science.

All act of transmission under transference is an analytical act and reveals that the psychoanalytic discourse determines it. Only the act admits the dimension of the ‘real’ and its articulation with the ‘symbolic’. The act of transmission is usually verified during a session of analysis, during a supervision, when the suture that the blind spot represents can be unstitched, or during the social "passe", when the "passeur" can act as a transmitting "medium", from the "passant" to the cartel of the "passe", as well as a "medium" of the vicissitudes of a desire of an unbribable analyst, whose evident cause is his drive. The psychoanalytic discourse determines the conditions whereby a slip (of the tongue of the analysand or the analyst), an intervention, a scansion, an interpretation can have the value of an analytical act allowing the subject to re-encounter his division of unconscious subject between the wisdom of the words and the lost jouissance that he imagines he can recover in the fantasm. From then on the subject knows: a little more

concerning what he is lacking, and that he himself, as a speaking being, is a consequence of this lack. This is what is transferred or trasmitted in personal analysis, clinical practice and in the "passe". It can also appear in the position of plus one in the cartel and in the teaching style of a few colleagues or masters that teach something about lack, something that is lost, and that situates them, in this teaching, in the position of analysand. From this position, their discourse has the effect of an act and can transmit this lack which will touch some unconscious knowledge in the other and will put him to work for psychoanalysis. The ethics of the lack, of the ‘real’, of the impossible, of the inexistence of the sexual relation, marks this act as an effect of an opening up of the unconscious.