The Bat Question

To begin with there's this “bat question,” as Jacques Lacan poses it in a subtitle from 1955—and returns to in 1964—followed by the imperative: “Examine it in the light of day.” So what has been kept in the dark, and only against the background of Lacan's “excommunication” brought to light, is thus the question: “what is psycho-analysis?” (Lacan, 1988, p. 3). Now, this is a moment of uncertain groundings, of uncertain foundations, propelled not only by the notion of the importance of examining praxis but raising the unsettling question itself: what makes me qualified to talk about the fundamentals of psychoanalysis?

Lacan's answer at that point—an answer that reestablishes the return to Freud's discovery of a field relating desire to language, that is the domain of the unconsciousness—that answer points out the necessity of taking into consideration the desire of the psychoanalyst, not only in the sense that it is the presence of the analyst that calls forth the unconsciousness, but that it was through Freud's own desire that he in the hysteric saw the relation between desire and language. Following this, then, our question for bats distinguishes praxis by putting in play an encounter that is not only potentially open, but also potentially dangerous.

As Lacan reminds us, this is also part of a legacy, this original sin: something in Freud remained unanalyzed.

So, to me, it is decisive that when Jean Laplanche again poses this question for bats—stating, “If we cannot let in at least some daylight, anything goes,” referring to the concurrent drift between psychotherapy and psychoanalysis—he does so in dealing with what he calls “framework and rules” (Laplanche, 1989, p. 154f). Handling this question for bats becomes an insistence on the need for containment. Let us say that Laplanche is maintaining the legacy of a certain Dracula by acknowledging a danger: the possible danger of seduction.

Perhaps this project, therefore, of formulating “new foundations” for psychoanalysi