Book Review

Edited by Riva L.Tait, Ph.D.

After Lacan: Clinical Practice and the Subject of the Unconscious, by Willy Apollon,Danielle Bergeron, and Lucie Cantin, edited and with an Introduction by RobertHughes and Kareen Ror Malone, SUNY Press, New York, 2002, 197 pp.

Enlightenment comes to the most dull-witted ... the man begins to understand the inscrip-tion ... deciphers it with his wounds. —Franz Kafka ([1946] 1971, p. 150).

At a recent conference, I had the good fortune to encounter GIFRIC (the GroupeInterdisciplinaire Freudien de Recherches et d’Interventions Cliniques et Cultur-elles of Quebec). I say it in this way because in encountering several members ofthat organization, I felt as though I had encountered something quite solid andunique — a frame of mind, really — that profoundly altered my view of psycho-analysis. When I returned home, I found that this encounter had affected the waysin which I conceptualized clinical work and also the ways in which I interactedwith my patients and my students.

For me, the crux of the matter was the idea of the Subject who becomes caughtby the desire of the Other. I had heard these words before, but they had neverhad quite this meaning, of becoming utterly objectified and thereby lost to one’sself. Suddenly, there was a new illumination on the field — a light shining thathad not been there before — and I was eager to learn more. One thing that fasci-nated me was that the clinical insights that I had gained in listening to these indi-viduals from GIFRIC talk about their work did not depend on ‘‘learning a newanalytic language’’ or accepting a particular dogma but, rather — much as theconceptualizations of Freud, Klein, and Bion have done for me — on opening upthe field and shedding greater light on some very important and very complexclinical realities. And yet, the language itself seemed to mark and to further eluci-date these experiences.

I found myself wanting to share my newfound discovery with colleagues andwith my students, most particularly. The idea I found most compelling was theway in which the analysts from GIFRIC spoke of the Subject — of the importanceof finding the subject; the subject who has become lost, caught by the desire ofthe other. How, then, do we encounter the subject as subject: not as a functionof our own subjective desire but, rather, as a function of the analyst’s moregenerative desire; the analyst’s determination to provide an opening throughwhich the other can come to his or her own truth vis-a-vis his or her own subjec-tivity. I found that my students were able to take in this idea and to use it

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constructively in their work. For them, too, it provided a useful perspective on theclinical field that opened up the work in a new way.

I also told them of another pivotal idea I had encountered, of how the analystsat GIFRIC work with psychotics such that the price of entry is a dream. Thedream, these analysts told me, is initially the same as the symptom, but with animportant difference. The dream was dreamed by the dreamer and so becomes away of marking subjectivity and of distinguishing self from other, thought fromdelusion, memory from persecution. The dream takes us out of the oppositionalframe of the persecutory world of the delusion and offers the possibility of coexis-ting together in a mutual endeavor. In joining with the patient in an investigationof the possible meanings of a dream, we take a stand regarding who might be‘‘the one who knows’’ and we also affirm our belief in the inherent value ofinvestigating the other’s internal productions. We refuse to accept the position of‘‘the subject-supposed-to-know, the sujet suppose savoir’’ (Apollon, p. 126), refus-ing to preempt or overrule the dreamer as the subject — or object — of thedream.

This brief encounter left me wanting to delve further into this line of inquiry, tounderstand more, which was how I discovered the book After Lacan. In writing thisreview, I hope to invite you into this exploration as well, so that you might discoverfor yourself some of its riches. Although this is a dense book, and difficult readingfor one not well versed in the language of Lacanian thought, it is also a very richclinical book, well worth the investment of wading through the language. If one iswilling to immerse one’s self in the language, and through this language engagewith the conceptualizations, one then encounters the very rich clinical vignettes inways that vitally enliven and illuminate this very difficult work we do.

Most profoundly, as the editors note, what is at stake in this exposition is anunderstanding that is beyond mere understanding: ‘‘Whereas understanding is areality we can master and believe in, Savoir supplies an access to subjectiveresponsibility in the face of the Other’s castration’’ (p. 4). In other words, we arein the realm of Bion’s ‘‘O’’ or Lacan’s ‘‘real,’’ where each person must confrontthe limits in being human in terms of whatever individual constraints are his orhers to bear. The analyst, then, does not have any answers, but rather, as WillyApollon puts it, ‘‘the analyst has the desire for the patient to know, to encounterand come to grips with their own savoir, their own subjectivity.’’ From this frame,it is the clinical experience — not the analyst’s knowledge — that reveals thesavoir. ‘‘The analyst’s action in relation to the symptom will not be of an interpre-tation, but rather a maneuver by which the analyst appeals for an ethical positionfrom the analysand. This ethical position reflects the subjectivity at stake’’(p. 112).

Lacan was in many ways a master linguist, playing with words in enticing butoften obfuscating ways. Paradoxically, however, he also had a profound apprecia-tion for the experiential aspects of being. Through the lens provided in thisvolume we are brought back to the body, the seat of primary nonverbal experi-ences that holds for us the riches of the unconscious but tends to be relegated toa back page or afterthought in many analytic circles. With the current renewed

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appreciation for primary experience as highlighted by Klein and then furtherilluminated by attachment theorists, we are in a good position to revisit Lacan’sbody, which is not merely the organism itself but rather the lived body, theexperiential repository of meanings.

For Lacan, one is born as a body that has already been inscribed by language.Lucie Cantin describes language as the primary trauma that ‘‘has transformed usinto beings subject to a logic that is other than biological or natural logic’’ (p. 35).Language, itself, proscribes and prescribes meanings, inevitably altering our expe-rience of self, other, and world. Adding complexity to this picture are the moreidiosyncratic desires of our parents and forebears that also have an impact suchthat we are inscribed by the desires of those whose fantasies, hopes, and fearshave infused our very beings. This issue of inscription has a long tradition,depicted perhaps most strikingly in Kafka’s ([1946] 1971) Penal Colony, in themachine that will inscribe the prisoner’s crime upon his body so that he mightcome to know it, even as it bleeds the life from him. This is a very dark but vividmetaphor for the meanings inscribed upon us, that we come to know by thetraces left upon our bodies, as we move forward according to the laws that havebeen ’’written.’’

From a Lacanian frame, meaning is always waiting to be discovered, encoun-tered in the moment of rupture, the gap in the appearance of things, throughwhich we might perhaps glimpse the underlying meanings that structure ourperceptions. The symptom is a way of both marking and obscuring what seemsimpossible to know. ‘‘What is required,’’ then, suggests Apollon, ‘‘is an ethics, asavoir faire with truth.... In truth, what the symptom turns into an obstacle bycovering it over is the lost truth that would enable the subject to learn the causeof his or her desire’’ (p. 131). In these constraints upon desire ordained byculture, suggests Lucie Cantin, inhere the ‘trauma of language.’’ Languageimposes and circumscribes meaning, thereby highlighting these difficult truths. Ifwe can accommodate to these constraints, we can find a workable path. How-ever, when the parent has not come to terms with his or her own unsatisfieddesires and imposes these upon the child, the child is then held captive by thedangerous fantasy of an unbounded jouissance that Cantin characterizes as equiv-alent to the death drive.

Jouissance is described as the fantasy of an unbounded satisfaction. Counteringthis fantasy is the Law of the Father, which becomes the designation of boundedness.Acceptance of boundedness, of limits, enables us to discover possible avenues forsatisfying our desires but, in the process, ruptures the fantasy of perfection, attributedto the other who seems to possess this jouissance. The authors point out the difficultyof making the transition from experiencing the other not only as the source of satis-faction, but also as the authority on value, aligned with our hope that we mightsomehow attain what the other seems to possess. Apollon describes this dilemma interms of ‘‘the subject’s relation to the other [that] becomes the logical framework forthe subject’s structural encounter with the impossible, or what Lacan calls the ‘real’’’(p. 57). The developmental challenge is to relinquish the hope of perfect satisfactionand learn to engage with the world more directly in creating and accepting imperfect

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resolutions to this question of satisfaction, in this way discovering our own desires,our own values.

There is something in us, however, that resists this moving forward: this accep-tance of a lack in the other and in ourselves that cannot be filled. The authorsdescribe their work with those who are most fundamentally captured by this lackof resolution: the psychotic, who marks the dilemma with the delusion, but ishopelessly caught up in it. If we are to discover the dilemma, the point of rupture,we would have to listen for the voice of the unconscious. Danielle Bergeronpoints us back to this task, quoting Lacan (1978), who highlights the importanceof the failure in the facade that reveals a facet of the real, saying ‘‘somethingstumbles’’ (p. 25). Bergeron notes that it is there, in that stumbling, that one mightdiscover the unconscious at work, as

the signifier is revealed in a slip of the tongue that pierces the compact mass of the narcis-sistic parade. Such traces are the ribbing of precious metal leading to the subject’s uncon-scious. Put technically, the signifier is the writing of a loss establishing the subject as areal, a position determined by the other. (p. 61).

In analysis, it is the subject’s meaning we are attempting to discover: a meaningthat has been hidden by trauma and reveals itself in the symptom, in the silence,in the slip, in the dream.

In searching for this meaning with the psychotic patient, the authors suggestthat the dream is of vital importance, a step away from a condensed savoir thatkeeps the psychotic in utter isolation. Bergeron describes the delusion as a ‘‘totali-tarian knowledge ... a closed and dense imaginary construction’’ (p. 74) withclosed meanings. The dream, in contrast, is not yet known entirely by eitherpatient or analyst, and so, meanings may be discovered. In contrast to the delu-sion, which must be absolute in order to forestall the terrible truth that one is butan object to an all-powerful other, the dream contains possibilities: meanings thatmight be thought about.

In the dream, signifiers are not absolute but, rather, might yield other signifiers;meanings might be built.

The dream, moreover, yields signifiers which recall events that marked the psychotic’s lifebecause they operated a rupture in that life by remaining nonrepresented, unassimilable,and unspeakable, These memories derived from the dream-work, then, uncover gaps,loose threads in the fabric of the delusion, and thereby put the delusion in question.(Bergeron, p. 74).

This gap provides a foundation on which knowledge might be built, a newhistory.

based not on the logic of the delusion that makes the psychotic the object for the Other,but rather on signifiers that will allow access to his or her truth as a human subjectmarked by lack. The analyst grounds the analytic ethics in the fact that there is a symbolicorder and that it is incomplete. (Bergeron, p. 75).

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It is when a connection is made between a dream element and a piece of theindividual’s history that meaning itself begins to open up, and the analyst andpatient can begin to look at how the dream is structured and how this structurereveals something essential about the dreamer and his or her relationships. Muchlike Bion, who tried to pull back from the content in order to attempt to compre-hend the underlying structure, Lacan points to the structure of the relationshipbetween self and other, exemplified by the structures of these relationships in thedream.

In highlighting the relationship among self, other, and world that can be under-stood by attention to the dream, these authors affirm for us the possibility ofunderstanding the dilemma in which the psychotic individual finds him or herself.In later chapters, they also discuss other ways in which individuals becomecaught by the desire of the other and thereby objectified and profoundly lost.Much like the Kleinian conceptualizations of perverse relations between parts ofself described variously by Rosenfeld (1971) as a ‘‘narcissistic organization’’ andby Steiner (1981) as a ‘‘pathological organization,’’ Cantin notes that perversion isan issue of structure rather than a specific type of psychopathology. What charac-terizes the perverse position is the enactment of the fantasy of being able to livewithout limits, ‘‘without any guilt or anxiety, in the relation to jouissance anddeath. Basing the relation to others on the Law of nature, the pervert excludesdesire by demonstrating the absurdity of the prohibition based on the laws oflanguage, which have no foundation’’ (Bergeron, p. 151). This position appears toresolve the dilemma of limits, but does so at the price relationship with self orother.

The authors point not only to the various resolutions individuals make toseemingly impossible dilemmas, and the ways in which they become caught bythese resolutions, but also to the ways in which people find others with reciprocalbeliefs such that each is complicit in sustaining the position of the other. Theynote, for example, how the willingness to be master fits perfectly with the desireto abdicate responsibility for one’s self, to position one’s self as victim of thedesire of the other. This complementarity can give the illusion of ‘‘truth’’ and canbecome a hazard for patient and analyst, if they are willing to believe that one’sauthority can ever replace the other’s savoir. This deep respect for the ultimateauthority of the individual’s own savoir—and awareness of how elusive this savoircan become—permeates this volume and reminds us of all that we do not know,and yet might come to better understand, if we are willing to take our patients,their dilemmas, and their dreams more seriously.

Marilyn Charles, Ph.D.

The Austen Riggs CenterP.O. Box 962

Stockbridge, MA 01262-0962mcharles@msu.edu

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REFERENCES

Kafka, F. [1946] (1971). In the penal colony. In Kafka: The complete stories (pp. 140--167).New York: Schocken Books.

Lacan, J. (1978). The four fundamental concepts of psycho-analysis. A. Sheridan (Trans.). NewYork: W. W. Norton.

Rosenfeld, H. A. (1971). A clinical approach to the psychoanalytic theory of the life and deathinstincts: An investigation into the aggressive aspects of narcissism. International Journal ofPsycho-Analysis, 52 169--178.

Steiner, J. (1981). Perverse relationships between parts of the self: A clinical illustration.International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 62 241--251.

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