The Site of the Stranger

Pierre Fédida (2009a) considers the psychoanalytic situation as a “site of the stranger”, based on the foundational myth of the murder of the primal father. In Freud's work, the “event of the murder of the father” mainly concerns the origin of humanity and the constitution of a primitive ego, but Fédida, transposing it in an original way to analysis, sees it as both the point of origin and the horizon of every analysis. The patient's speech, depending on the phases and periods of the treatment, is addressed either to the primal father, whose murder (meurtre) is always “to come” - which he calls “meurtralité” - or to the father who is already dead, hence his theorisation of absence.

He thus puts “negative hallucination” at the centre of his theory of analysis: the analyst is the stranger and his presence is an “absent presence”. That is why he does not answer the analysand in person and avoids any form of self-representation in the transference as father, mother, etc., leaving the place of the interlocutor empty. This conception of the psychoanalytic situation goes hand in hand with a preference for construction rather than interpretation. According to the author, construction is better suited to marking the separation between the scenes of the patient and the analyst. Fédida is thus opposed to a “communicational” and “interrelational” conception of analysis.

The site of the stranger is a place of passage, of transportation, that is marked not only by the strangeness of the analyst but also by other forms like that of the unconscious, that of language that welcomes it, a language worked on by transference regression, that of the fossil memory of the infantile, and, finally, that of the transference of which the dream is the paradigm, which can only be interpreted in a language where meaning and substance are one, that is, a language that restores through its enunciation the sensory imagination of words in attractive affinity with memory traces.

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