The Action of Form

The free-floating attention required of the analyst is simply the counterpart of the rule of free association prescribed for the patient on the condition that we consider that transmission always takes place indirectly, thanks to the capture and conversion of an ensemble of perceptions. Even if depth is an indispensable auxiliary representation for thinking about the architecture of the psychical apparatus, we have no other way, in practising analysis, but the psychic surface for entering into contact with unconscious structures. A surface made up of visually and auditorily perceivable formations (dreams, symptoms, parapraxes, etc.), but also constituted by the effects of acts impelled by the transference.

Now, whether it is a matter of forms that offer themselves as such or of effects of the acting of the transference, the activity of distortion imposed by the censorship scrambles the systems of semantisation directly. This is true of the disguise of the latent contents (dreams, parapraxes, symptoms) that make themselves known without the conscious mind being able to represent to itself what is presented to it in this disguised form, but the same is true of the “distortion through transference” − the transference neurosis being a “recreated” neurosis thanks to the reactivation of the repressed impulses by means of fragments of reality available in the analytic environment. Thus, the form that presents itself to consciousness is always the fruit of psychic

work in which antagonistic forces, namely, the realisation of unconscious impulses and the power of resistance are entangled. Within this horizon, the performative influence of speech in the session, that is to say not only what is said, but how it is said - the rhythm, the prosody, the inflections - participates in the action of the form.

A man whose analysis was marked by intense excitation maintained by relations with multiple partners had sought for a long time to keep me on tenterhooks by telling me all about