History, Memory, Poetry: Forms and Constructions in Psychoanalysis

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

– W.B. Yeats

Psychoanalysis involves the telling of a history. This is a personal history but never just the history of a person. It implicates one’s family history and its generational transmission. We can think of a psychoanalysis as an effort to give this history a place, or give oneself a place within it.

The telling of this history entails the drawing of a line – a connecting line, or perhaps a dividing line, a frontier – between a personal and a family history. We live in what Lacan called the “transformed cipher in our filial lineage”¹ in which what it means to be a subject is the effect of “the symbolic chain… that founded his lineage before his history was embroidered upon it”.² This is one way to understand Lacan’s idea that the unconscious is the discourse of the Other.³ 

Sometimes this history speaks through us; sometimes we speak it. A question, problem, or contradiction in one generation is repeated in a later one, though in a ciphered, condensed, compressed way. One of the ironies of a psychoanalysis is that despite the profusion of words what actually takes place when you’re in one is something less like an elaboration and more like a compression. 

Take for example this exchange between Steven Spielberg and the movie critic James Lipton. They are discussing the pivotal scene in Spielberg’s 1977 movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind:

Miscegenation by Natasha Trethewey

Natasha Trethewey’s poem Miscegenation has intrigued me for some time. I think of it as akin to the way psychoanalysis allows for the writing of a history in this compressed form. It appears in the former US poet laureate’s 2007 Pulitzer Prize winning collection Native Guard.⁴ Trethewey is the daughter of a white father and a black mother who married in defiance of laws against interracial marriage. She was born in the Deep South and the poem begins with the story of her parents’ marriage against the backdrop of racism in 1960s America. Although just 160 words, its scope is vast. Miscegenation is Trethewey’s creative condensation of her personal, familial, and cultural history. In psychoanalysis this fictional compression is sometimes called a ‘construction.’⁵

Although clearly autobiographical, Trethewey’s poem doesn’t give a neatly wrapped up account or explanation of the poet’s life story; it simply plots the points through which a history is constructed. It does not declare ‘I am this’. Rather, it borrows another writer’s fictional character – Faulkner’s Joe Christmas – to draw a parallel, expressing personhood via a persona. “I am not a poet but a poem”, Lacan once said.⁶ 

Neither is Trethewey uncovering some hidden history or revealing a repressed past. Often, when in analytic circles the term ‘construction’ is invoked, it is to account for what we might plug in the place of memory. Yet Miscegenation is full of memories. It is not a poem that pushes through some unspeakable trauma or which is driven by “a dynamic impetus towards the inscription of erased events”, as the psychoanalyst Max Gaudilliere imagined it.⁷ Instead Trethewey has written, in a tightly condensed form, a personal history that links her to the “filial lineage” Lacan described. It is, in fact, mostly a pre-history. Almost nothing in it comes from Trethewey’s own lifetime.

I don’t want to analyse the poem, but what is done with or via the poem. There is no need to try to interpret Trethewey’s life through this poem because, as we will see, the poem is its own interpretation. If, as Lacan told one of his analysands,⁸ your life is a novel and analysis makes it a novella, here it becomes shorter still, more distilled. We learn far more about Trethewey in these 160 words than we could by reading her Wikipedia profile. 

Let’s first say something about the poem’s form, its ‘construction’, though now in the sense of its poetic architecture rather than in the analytic sense of that term. 

Miscegenation is a ghazal. These kinds of poems are recognisable by their couplets, each of which express different ideas, but the ghazal form holds these ideas together through the repetition of a single word at the end of each couplet – here, Mississippi. It is from ‘ghazal’ that we get the word ‘gazelle’, an animal that is capable of moving in different directions quickly and elegantly. So ghazals like this one can distill different events of Trethewey’s pre-history into a compact form and switch between them in a way that remains linked by a single connecting term, Mississippi. The cleverness of the poem lies in the way it presents a history marked by racism and displacement with such concision and economy. The repetition of Mississippi is also what gives the poem its resonance. Coming back to it at the end of each couplet separates the sonorous from the sensical, each instance presenting Mississippi in a new light. 

What is the function of this repetition? We can think of how Freud asked the same question of the Fort-da game played by his grandson,⁹ and answered it by supposing that the child was re-staging the absence of its mother in order to master that absence. Perhaps the repetition of Mississippi does the same here, restaging the parents’ departure and return from the southern state so that with each stanza a certain charge or investment is drained from its pivotal place in a complicated history. As if, simply by returning us to it again and again, a wearing down or exhausting is accomplished with each successive signification. 

In his later life, Lacan referred to the way in which a signifier can be split from its signification as mot-erialism, emphasising the materiality of the word, the mot.¹⁰ Repetition of a term, in which each instance is linked to a different context or idea, accentuates the material quality of language. In poetry, the sonority of this repetition also shows us that language is about more than just the transmission of information. 

Analytic ‘shrinkage’

Something similar can happen in a psychoanalysis to produce a therapeutic effect. If there is a fixation of a given term – perhaps as a mark of identification – introducing that same term into a different context where it can take on a different meaning can go some way to dissolving the problem to which it was so tightly attached. A woman complained of feeling “abandoned” when she left my consulting room at the end of our appointments, linking this to being “abandoned” as a child by her mother. Subsequently, she told me how emotional she had become at seeing a story on the news about the blocking of an aid convoy intended for children in a warzone. “That’s abandonment”, I said, to make a distinction between the abandonment of endangered children and the habit of leaving one’s analyst’s office at the appointed time. 

In ‘Direction of the Treatment’ from the Écrits Lacan draws attention to what he calls a “subjective rectification”¹¹ that is engendered through analysis. Trethewey’s use of the Mississippi refrain might give us a sense of what he meant. Lacan thought that the analyst’s job was not to make what is unconscious conscious by establishing a “topographical priority”¹² of the latter over the former, but to instigate what he described as a dialectical process through which the subject would be situated differently in relation to the problem they complained of. This process “takes off from the subject’s own words in order to come back to them”,¹³ as if in a kind of ‘looping’ that would set them on a different course with a renewed signification. For Lacan, this was less ‘progress’ in analysis as it was the progression of an analysis; not towards a goal or ideal but simply the setting of a different course that would demonstrate to the analysand the way in which something said could be heard differently. One man spent much of our sessions lamenting what he felt was an inexorable pressure from his parents “to succeed.” Yet the way he phrased this suggested something else was going on. Instead of telling me about this pressure “from my parents to succeed” he described the pressure “to succeed from my parents,” a hyperbaton suggesting a concern around taking over from or replacing his parents in some way. 

What Trethewey does with the Mississippi refrain traces a progression similar to the one Lacan referred to in analysis. In his short book on the course of a psychoanalysis, L’os d’une cure (literally: The Bone of a Cure, but translated into English under the title Analysis Laid Bare), Jacques-Alain Miller uses the analogy of a bone to denote something hard or resistant that is worked on in analysis. The analysand’s speech, he says, “revolves around this bone, in a spiral, squeezing it closer and closer, until it sculpts it.” In analytic work “it is a question of encircling, of tightening, of forming the turn.”¹⁴ The bone does not block the work, though it may give some resistance to work done on it, just as a sculptor carves into seemingly unmalleable marble. Switching from allegory to logic, Miller calls this work an “operation-reduction”¹⁵ of analysis. If analysts are ‘shrinks’, this is the type of shrinkage that is at play.

Miscegenation then is a poem that accomplishes a kind of sculpting and condensation of the history it narrates. This history is one in which time is marked not through memory but through construction. The use of Falkner’s Joe Christmas is the prelude to the introduction of Trethewey’s own birth into the poem, and the story of her naming is accessed through her father’s reading of War and Peace. 

It is not from a pile of chronological facts that a biography is built; other people’s stories, and other people’s stories about stories are employed in this construction. Rather than being an object of history, or subject to one, Trethewey becomes, through the poem, the writer of that history. 

Miscegenation is the construction of a personal story that lends a kind of consistency to symbolic identifications – in this case, via Joe Christmas – which can then either be assumed or rejected but which, through the poetic form, allows the subject to take a stance apart from an identification. It does not matter, in fact, whether a coherent unity results. Poetry, like analysis, does not have to be a narrative art, and analytic constructions are rarely explanatory tales. What matters are the ways in which the elements – or points – are plotted and the extent to which they are capable of mobility, rearrangement, such that there is some space between them. 

Cutting, linking and punctuating

In poetry, as in analysis, this is achieved through cutting, not linking. In Miscegenation, each stanza is cut at Mississippi, and with each time a new resonance:

Here, the proper noun is cut to an abstract noun and at the same time cut from its context. The mis is snipped from Mississippi, the sin from Cincinnati. The word is cut to an estranged and blunted particle, isolating the signifier. Cuts create space, a space into which something else might come or in which something else might resonate. So too in analysis. 

We can contrast the way a history is constructed in Miscegenation, from these precise cuts, to the way some people approach psychoanalysis (and psychotherapy in general) by envisaging the task to be one of linking different memories or events together to form a causal chain. As if to be able to say: ‘This happened and then this happened and so I am like this.’ That might be very helpful and important work for some people. But of course, there will always be gaps in any causal account, and not just for reasons of historical record-keeping. Distortions are valuable in themselves as they indicate points where unconscious processes (condensation and displacement, for instance) are at play; and there are important reasons why we should respect the fact that things are not remembered or recorded.

We can also contrast cutting with punctuating. As Jacques-Alain Miller has pointed out, when we punctuate we nonetheless create a new signification. Yet punctuation is still semantic, it still acts as a quilting point (point de capiton) in discourse. When we cut however we separate two signifiers – S1 and S2 – preventing them from “folding in on themselves.”¹⁶ 

In a session, we might sometimes want to employ an interpretation as a way to produce a semantic unity, to give a different signification to something which had been troubling to the analysand; or we may simply want to indicate a way in which something could be heard differently. At other times we may want to disrupt the production of a semantic unity, and so we cut, leaving something in suspense to mark a point that is opaque in the analysand’s history or their enjoyment. 

Clinical example

A woman talked about the way her mother described her when she was a child. She had told her daughter there was something unnerving about her, which my patient expressed with the words, “‘Something unsettling’, my mother said.” When I echoed this back to her I removed the punctuation: “Something unsettling my mother said.” The difference was intended to evoke what she had told me earlier: the memory of an incident when she was very young in which her mother had revealed to her something sexual which, at that age, she could not make sense of. The status of this knowledge – not just what it meant, but what it meant for her to be entrusted with it by her mother, and what it implied about her mother and her mother’s enjoyment – was echoed in my patient’s later choice of profession. A remnant of the enigma of the mother’s desire, we might say. 

This intervention removed the punctuation rather than instated it. Styles of interpretation which seek to connect signifiers – an S1 with an S2 – sometimes use punctuation to reach that end, and the result is a new meaning. Here however, no new meaning was introduced, only the isolation and underlining of S1 – the enigma of what the mother had said – without an S2 to give it sense. Rather than supplying another meaning, it was the lack of meaning that was pointed to; an aporia or gap in which the question of what the Other desires is allowed to resonate.

For Lacan, we find something quite special in this gap. There will be an appeal to an element outside the signifying order, something that is not a representative of anything, something that resists representation. This something he called the object a, and the barred subject’s relationship to it he expressed with this formula: $<>a, fantasy.¹⁷ This relation is in microcosm someone’s fundamental stance towards the world. We see it clinically in the repetitions that constitute the transference within analysis, and in the scenarios that are the hallmark of their encounters outside of it. In my view, the best definition of fantasy is the one that Jacques-Alain Miller provides of it: everything the subject is capable of understanding.¹⁸

Trethewey ends her poem with a fable around her name, creating for it an origin story that both links it to and separates it from Falkner’s character. They are both ‘Christmas’ children – she for the Russian meaning of ‘Natasha’, he for being left at the orphanage on the day of the nativity. But whereas Joe Christmas was named for the day he was found, Trethewey has already told us she was born at Easter. 

Nomination, in Lacanian thinking, is often presented as an ultimate quilting point, and this is supposedly what is at work with the Name – or Names – of the Father. When Lacanians talk about names and poets they often talk about Joyce, and how Joyce supposedly made his own name.¹⁹ I don’t think Trethewey is doing quite that here. But ending the poem with her name provides something of a fixing point in the creation of her biography. Nomination grants the semblance of a fixity to identity. If the rest of the poem attempts the creation of a link to her family history, her name is the denouement of this effort.  

Interpretation does not make sense

Miscegenation might be read as Trethewey’s creation, through poetry, of her personal and family history; and analysis too tends to unfold in this direction. But can we equate this with an effort to ‘make sense’ of one’s history? There is another aspect of poetry which goes beyond this. In his later work, Lacan had the idea that a psychoanalysis, taken to term, entails assuming the uninterpretable part of one’s symptom. This is the idea of ‘identification with the symptom.’²⁰ 

It is not such a new idea. Freud wrote about the “bedrock” of sexual difference as the point beyond which analysis could not analyse;²¹ and of how each dream has a “navel”²² marking the limits of our ability to interpret it or decipher meaning. These are points where the attempt at making sense itself has to be abandoned, so that instead we can ‘make do’ with what remains.²³

Can we really say then, that to analyse – whether a poem or a person – involves a ‘making sense’? The everyday meaning of interpretation is exactly that: to interpret is to understand, or at least to help us understand, so we proceed in handling the text of a poem or the story of a person in essentially the same way. Lacan’s idea that we might identify with what we cannot understand of our symptom suggests this is not so simple. 

What then is the point of interpretation? For Jacques-Alain Miller, psychoanalytic interpretation establishes a limit.²⁴ This is a limit to the enjoyment (or jouissance) that words fail to treat. Interpretation, in the analytic sense, would entail marking the point of this failure itself rather than hoping we can replace it with the bright optimism of understanding. As Eric Laurent has put it, if the symptom is a kernel of enjoyment, and this enjoyment is often experienced as excessive and destructive, then psychoanalytic interpretation needs to be “a matter of introducing the modality of the impossible as limit.”²⁵ For Laurent, interpretation neither translates nor concatenates a first signifier to a second, an S1 to an S2. It aims not at a meaning but at a void, an absence of meaning. This void is that of a lost object, a ‘non-object’, which as we saw earlier Lacan names object a. 

What poetry does with ‘Clanguage’

Initially, some of Lacan’s followers tried to bridge this gap between the signifier and the object with the concept of the ‘letter.’ Lacan had used this term himself in the Ecrits, referring – in the ‘Instance of the Letter’ – to “What I call the “letter”—namely, the essentially localized structure of the signifier.”²⁶ Later, in the hands of his contemporary Serge Leclaire among others, it is given a far stronger link to the body:

“We have defined the letter, let us recall, as the materiality of the trait in its abstraction from the body, abstraction being understood both in the ordinary sense and as an operation of detachment from the corporeal surface. The body is thus taken to be the first book in which the trace is inscribed before it is abstracted as trace and hence endowed with its essential attribute of being repeatable as the same, or almost the same, in its elementary materiality.”²⁷

Then, towards the end of his life – in particular in Seminar XX in 1972, the superb Geneva lecture on the symptom from 1975, and in his twenty-fourth Seminar in 1977 – Lacan returned to his interest in this aspect of language that marks the body in early life, the impact of language “that one receives the first imprint of.”²⁸ He was thinking of language in its sonority, “in the way in which [it] has been spoken and also heard as such”.²⁹

He called this lalangue (sometimes translated as llanguage), conjoining the article and the noun. It is the kind of language we find in dreams themselves, rather than the words we use to describe our dreams when we’re awake.³⁰ If the unconscious is structured like a language, lalangue is what stops the unconscious being merely communication.³¹ “Lalangue”, Lacan says, “is used for completely different things than communication.”³² Signifiers are extracted from this lalangue insofar as they are distinct from one another,³³ but lalangue itself is something much more like a babble. We might think of the babbling of an infant, or of the babytalk the adult uses with it, where the ‘blahblahblah’ is not for information transmission but more for the baby’s – and perhaps the caregiver’s – enjoyment. Or we can think of lalangue as comparable to a “jingle”, as Lacan calls it at one point.³⁴ Like the jingles in TV commercials, their purpose is not to persuade us to buy something via the force of rhetoric but to impact us more subtly, reminding us of what’s being advertised despite ourselves. This is why we often can’t get jingles out of our heads.

‘Clanguage’ is my favourite translation for Lacan’s lalangue because it brings out what I think Lacan is stressing here: something that resonates in a slightly jarring but fully equivocal way. Sometimes language chimes or resonates, as in poetry. Sometimes it clangs. When it clangs, it reminds us that language is really quite strange. Think of the way a Freudian slip might lead us to inadvertently say one thing when we mean a mother; or the way the punchline of a joke can startle us into laughing, even though a surprise like this in another context might produce fright or fear. It’s easy to see why Lacan loved this sonorous versatility to language beyond the pure difference of a signifying network. His terrible puns – mot-erealism for instance – show the fun he had with it, and this only intensified in his later years. He routinely drags these out in his late teaching. Witness, for example, the Geneva lecture in 1975 where he refers to the ne in French (the indicator of a negation) sounding like the noued of his beloved knot; or the pas (a different kind of not) sounding like un pas (a step). 

‘Equivocation is the only weapon we have against the symptom’

But equivocation isn’t just an idiosyncratic stylistic preference of Lacan’s. It is a technique in analytic practice, one absolutely key – he thought – to the alleviation of symptoms and to interpretation as a method towards that end:

“When all is said and done, that is the only weapon we have against the sinthome: equivocation.³⁵ 

Adding shortly after that it is: 

“… Playing with this equivocation which might liberate from the sinthome. Because it is uniquely by equivocation that interpretation works. There must be something in the signifier that resonates.”³⁶ 

Sinthome, as he tells us at the start of Seminar XXIII, is an old way of writing symptom,³⁷ and there is little doubt from the way Lacan phrases it here that he is referring to the form of our suffering which analysis seeks to alleviate. 

To equivocate is not to mislead but to be ambiguous or unclear – that is, to avoid sense-making. This is what Lacan felt made poetry special. Poetry, he said in Seminar XXIV, “can make something else ring out, something other than sense.”³⁸ Poetry could inspire us to approach analytic interpretation less as a way of understanding and more as a way of evoking:

“Sense deadens things, but with the help of what one can call poetic writing, you can get the dimension of what one could call analytic interpretation…. You are inspired eventually by something of the order of poetry to intervene…. It is in as much as a correct interpretation extinguishes a symptom, that the truth is specified as being poetic.”³⁹

Lacan counterposes this ‘poetic’ interpretation not only to sense and logic but to beauty. A poem might be pretty, but clanguage is jarring. “We have nothing beautiful to say”, Lacan announces.⁴⁰ After all, if we think of jokes and witticisms, is a punchline pretty? We might describe it as sly, clever, enjoyable – or, as Lacan offers here, ‘economical’ – but hardly beautiful. In this respect, it is a strange kind of poetry that Lacan has in mind. But, as he would see it, so is truth. 

Clotilde Leguil’s Eaux, O, 0#1 

I want to return to the condensing function of poetry that we began with, and which Miscegenation demonstrated so well. If Trethewey’s poem can be called an ‘interpretation’ of her history it is her own interpretation, not that of some analyst. As Jacques-Alain Miller has argued in his compelling ‘Interpretation in Reverse’,⁴¹ it is the analysand’s unconscious that interprets. That is, unconscious productions are themselves interpretations of the material they spring from. Miller critiques a kind of interpretation in which words refer to things and interpretation refers to the code which would decipher those things. This would be an interpretation which makes “the unconscious an object-language and interpretation a meta-language”;⁴² as if, for example, water refers to H2O (an object-language) and is a symbol for birth (a meta-language).

We can contrast this to a clinical example taken from the pass testimony of Clotilde Leguil and related in Eric Laurent’s excellent paper ‘Interpretation: from Truth to Event.’ I would consider it to be a kind of companion piece to Trethewey’s Miscegenation, a telling of one’s history through an analysis which is poetic in Lacan’s sense, without being a poem.

The end of Leguil’s analysis begins with a dream about ‘bad water’ – les mauvaise eaux – in various forms, and how it can lead to death. This dream is then followed by another in which her dead father returns and writes down a phone number which he attempts to give her. Only two digits of this phone number are recorded – 0 and 1 – and in the dream they appear with a hash between the digits: 0#1.  

In French, the eau of ‘water’ is pronounced ‘O’, a signifier which also denotes the blood group indexing the generational bond – the filial link to the father – and the most minimal way of inscribing the body in that relationship. We have a signifier condensed to a letter – ‘O’, and an equivocation –  0#1. But how to understand the passage from the first dream to the second, the transformation from O to 0? 

While we could conjure up an interpretation in which this zero marked what was un-representable in the father’s death, or what was un-representable in the link between father and daughter, we would still wonder what the # and the 1 are doing in the second dream.

Leguil was her father’s first child, and the imperative to be first was something of a superegoic requirement running through her life. The enigmatic 0#1 seems to be a kind of formula – in the sense of a condensed expression – for Leguil’s own life, and perhaps for life and mortality as such. It is as if the hash between the two digits indicates the incompatibility of the 0 with the 1, something that gets hashed in the ciphering of the dream, marking what Freud had called its “navel.”⁴³

In his commentary on Leguil’s testimony, Laurent takes the 0#1 as a writing. Not in the sense of the transcription of speech, but as, 

“the writing of the Borromean knots, the writing of RSI [real, imaginary, and symbolic registers] which comes to border the holes of trauma in the body around which all the signifying accounts [récits] come to link up in again, in its most generalized sense.”

There is an old Woody Allen joke that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. But if we think of writing as something that expresses equivocation itself, between two conflicting ideas, then do we not have a pretty good definition of poetry? Close, in fact, to Auden’s definition of poetry as the clear expression of mixed feelings. In this sense, we can treat our two ‘writings’ – Leguil’s 0#1 and Trethewey’s Miscegenation – as “different equivoques of subjective myths.”⁴⁴

By Owen Hewitson, LacanOnline.com

All content on LacanOnline.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

1. Écrits, 372 ↩︎
2. Écrits, 392 ↩︎
3. Écrits, 10, 316, 366 ↩︎
4. Natasha Trethewey, Native Guard, 2007 ↩︎
5. SE XXIII, pp.255-269 ↩︎
6. Seminar XI, p.viii ↩︎
7. Jean-Max Gaudillière, Madness and the Social Link: The Jean-Max Gaudillière Seminars 1985 – 2000, p.33 ↩︎
8. Interview with Eric Laurent, Rendez-vous chez Lacan, 2011, clip here ↩︎
9. SE XVIII, pp.15-16 ↩︎
10. Geneva Lecture on the Symptom, 4th Oct 1975 ↩︎
11. Écrits, 502 ↩︎
12. Ibid ↩︎
13. Ibid ↩︎
14. Jacques-Alain Miller, L’os d’une cure, pp.20-21, my translation ↩︎
15. Ibid ↩︎
16. Jacques-Alain Miller, ‘Interpretation in Reverse’ ↩︎
17. Jacques-Alain Miller, L’orientation lacanienne – 1982-1983 – Du symptôme au fantasme et retour, session of 8th December 1982 ↩︎
18. Jacques-Alain Miller, Granada Conference – ‘An ethic without the superego’, 24th November 1989, clip here ↩︎
19. ‘Joyce the Symptom’, and Seminar XXIII, 11th and 17th February 1976 ↩︎
20. Seminar XXIV, 16th Nov 1976 ↩︎
21. SE XXIII, p.252 ↩︎
22. SE IV, p.111 n1; SE V, p.525 ↩︎
23. For instance, Lacan jokes that we might, through our sexual partner, be able to “cash in” this symptom (Seminar XXIV, 16th Nov 1976). ↩︎
24. Jacques-Alain Miller., “The Monologue of l’Apparole”, tr. M. Downing Roberts, Qui Parle, 9 (Spring/Summer 1996), pp.178-179 ↩︎
25. Eric Laurent, ‘Interpretation: From Truth to Event’ ↩︎
26. Écrits, 418 ↩︎
27. Serge Leclaire, ‘The Unconscious or the Order of the Letter’, in Psychoanalyzing, p.88. For a clinical example, see how Leclaire employs it in the analysis of his patient Philippe with the example of the formula Poordjeli, referenced here. ↩︎
28. Geneva Lecture on the Symptom, 4th Oct 1975 ↩︎
29. Ibid ↩︎
30. Ibid ↩︎
31. Seminar XX, 21st November 1972; Seminar XXI, 13th November 1973 ↩︎
32. Seminar XX, 21st November 1972 ↩︎
33. Ibid ↩︎
34. Seminar XXI, 13th November 1973 ↩︎
35. Seminar XXIII, 18th November 1975 ↩︎
36. Ibid ↩︎
37. Ibid ↩︎
38. Seminar XXIV, 19th April 1977 ↩︎
39. Ibid ↩︎
40. Ibid ↩︎
41. Jacques-Alain Miller, ‘Interpretation in Reverse’ ↩︎
42. Ibid ↩︎
43. SE IV, p.111 n1; SE V, p.525 ↩︎
44. Eric Laurent, ‘Interpretation: From Truth to Event’ ↩︎