Throwing Out the Baby and the Bathwater

Is the unconscious the condition of language? Or is language the condition of the unconscious?

How can we win a debate with such a lame formulation—“language is the condition of the unconscious”? It sounds like utter nonsense. To begin, we will turn back to what it is to listen as psychoanalysts. The difference between Laplanche and Lacan must, above all, be clinical, meaning it concerns a question of technique at the deepest level. In Laplanche, there is a sense of the unconscious as already there, as structured by the enigmatic relation with the Other, whereas, for Lacan, the unconscious is something that the analyst and analysand bring into being. One is past, traumatic transmission, one future invention, a future evoked in the present through language and repetition. Laplanche's question about the enigmatic seduction by the (m)other is there—one can hear it at the most critical moments, in particular as one gleans a patient's account of their history. Lacan, however, asks us to do something with it in particular, and this concerns the direction of the treatment and the cure.

One might ask, what is Laplanche's idea of the cure? Laplanche speaks about analysis as the tub, the container of all containers, where the patient meets the provocation of the analyst as enigmatic Other. This thesis is perhaps Freudian to the extent that all this, everything in a patient's history, eventually exhausts itself in simply finding its locale—in the bathtub—all interpretations being equal in so far as they remain tied to this point of enigma. But we cannot simply throw out the baby and the bathwater, which is why the action of the signifier and the symptom, in the bathwaters of jouissance, is the force of the cure in Lacan.

Why Lacan? The Clinical Examples

Case 1: What's in a word? A long-time analysand walked into session and I had the strange spontaneous thought—She's pregnant! Wrestling with this internal outburst, I tuned in as she began to speak about a dr