The logic of subjective disparity
(The unconscious as a social bond)

MOURAO Arlete

The Lacanian advancements on the Freudian unconscious allow us to think that there is a logic in the social bond which is different from that of massen-psychologie. In the bond among psychoanalysts, what are the implications of such a logic to the transmission of psychoanalysis?

In my view, such a logic can be thought of in terms of a subjective disparity which stems from the very logic of the unconscious - of the unconscious structured as a language. This perspective brings the dimension of the transference both to the social bond and to the transmission.

Here, however, transference is taken in its specific relation vis-à-vis the opening of the unconscious, that is, within the Lacanian frame of the unconscious structured as a language. By placing the unconscious in the domain of discourse, the transference is no longer conceived of exclusively in terms of a bond between patient and analyst (the closure of the unconscious), and thus can also be considered in its utmost specificity, that is, the entstellung: the transposition of signifiers pointed out by Freud or, still, the presentification of the division of the subject. So, the concern here is with this notion of transference which, by itself, poses an objection to the notion of "inter-subjectivity".

The logic of subjective disparity can also be thought of from another perspective opened up by the unconscious structured as a language, that is, the non-existence of sexual relation, which introduces both in the social bonds, as well as in the transmission, the dialectics of impossibility and/or absence.

Placing the questions of social bonds and transmission in the perspective of the transference and of the non-existence of the sexual relation - which entail subjective disparity - becomes relevant in so far as this perspective opposes itself to the register of identifications. Such an oppostion enables us to question the fate of identifications at the end of an analysis, particularly the Subject supposed to Know (SsS), and to relate subjective disparity to the destitution of the subject.

At this point, I recur to what Lacan puts forth in Seminar XI: " it is in as much as the analyst's desire, which remains an x, tends in a direction that is the exact opposite of identification, that the crossing of the plane of identification is possible, through the mediation of the separation of the subject in experience. The experience of the subject is thus brought back to the plane at which, from the reality of the unconscious, the drive can be made present."

This statement can be read in two ways. One of them is to conceive the analysis and its end in terms of the logical time: a moment when the drive is attached to the discourse of the Other, that is, the time of identification; another time when the drive moves away from the SsS and constitutes the rest of an operation metaphorized in the signifier of the Name-of-the-Father -- time of the passage from analysand to analyst. A third moment is when the subject, due to the fall of the Other, who no longer gives him any guarantees, rearranges the drive and reintegrates it to his own discourse, that is, the time of the effects of transmission.

Another possible reading of Lacan's statement is to think that if identification is grounded in the field of demand, the presentification of the drive entails the domain of desire, and the object that causes it is no longer attached to the Other. At this point, the Other of desire begins to hinge solely upon the alterity of the signifiers - a cliff in which the drive anchors itself. Hence, the economy of desire is marked by a relation of transference to the parole, that is, to the Other of the parole, in which the reference -- and not the identification -- is to the Other of the signifier (an Other which ex-ists). It is no longer a reference to the signifiers of the Other, taken here as an Other that can be incarnated.

These two readings allow us to consider the analytical experience as a parcours of the transference in so far as they imply a kind of logic which is beyond the field of identifications. This is the logic of subjective disparity, i.e., the subjectivized version of the logic of the signifier, which helps us to further clarify the ethics that presides over our social bonds and the transmission of pychoanalysis.

Such an ethics has to be intimately connected with the destitution of the subject in the different spheres of extension. In other words, the concern is with the effects of such a subject who is "separated in the experience", as Lacan pointed out above. Since these effects refer to a knowledge which incessantly slides under the signifiers, we can say that they inevitably ask for in-ter-locutions.

Ruled by a logic of subjective disparity, these in-ter-locutions find their specificity in the constitution of a kind of social bond informed by differences. This means, first of all, that these bonds will inexorably be failed bonds. Secondly, this type of bond differs from other social bonds based upon affinities or identifications, as well as from relations "among peers". From the standpoint of subjective disparity, among peers there is only dis-parity.

This bears consequences on the transmission. Since the latter is based on an in-ter-locution of differences within the register of the signifier, the existence of these "failed bonds" imply not a failure of transmission, as often claimed, but the transmission of a failure.

Thus, transmission and social bonds can be (re)viewed as ascertaining the dimension of desire in its acceptation of impossibility or insatisfaction. So, it can be said that the bond among analysts is determined by a geography of desire which comes from a geography of the transference, that is, transference to a discourse and not exclusively to a "plus-one" or to a master. It can also be said that the social bond and the transmission refer to the enactment of a transference to the analytical discourse.

It is within this frame that we can consider our "encounters", our "convergences" as being, in actual fact, "dis-encounters", "di-vergences" in so far as they are structural consequences of a knot constituted from our differences. This means that, along with the logic of the commom, there is the logic of the "one to one": the knot of what makes us different.

Summing up these thoughts it can be said that, similarly to sustaining the desire of the analyst, the social bond among analysts is an exercise of castration. Such an exercise can have effects of transmission in so far as there is a production of knowledge, which does not take itself as truth, and thus reminds us of a lack of knowledge, of an impotence, of a non-sense. This reminder is supported by a logic of subjective disparity.

Instituição: Intersecção Psicanalítica do Brasil (Brasilia)