Milk Money

Numerous analysts have shown that in therapy the free attention of distracted listening allows both the patient and the therapist to create areas where the plastic traits of speech betray networks of obsessions that otherwise do not break through the closure of grammar. The listener, whether analyst or analysand—but especially the analysand who listens to his or her own speech—“happens” upon nonverbal twists or quirks that seem to fit the field of memory or experience being described in words, but that map out more directly shapes that reasoned inquiry does not grasp. These twists have been variously named. For Guy Rosolato they are “perspectival objects” that concretize vanishing points of speech or transitional objects embedded in discourse. Piera Aulagnier coined the term “pictogram” to locate the visible areas of speech that, when seen in their fleeting flickers, would begin work for even psychotic cases. Jacques Lacan gave them a philosophical aura in his notion of the “instance of the letter in the unconscious,” or the “points de capiton” that seem to linger between dialogue and symbol in the formative period of subjectivity.

Hollywood cinema plays a role in the production of what these concepts confirm. What generally goes by the name of “mainstream” cinema may reverse psychoanalytic processes by establishing seamless networks of forms aimed at arousing, pleasing, and baiting its spectators. The desiring relations of viewing mime the labor of analysis in the attention brought to transitional points that bind to and detach from different discursive inflections. In other words, the film narrative “works through” the very enigmas its visual codes take care to establish. Mainstream films offer the illusion of a telescoped view of a case history and seductive means that in the duration of viewing bring the satisfaction of false resolution. The films afford fixes of pleasure that are far more complex in design than what goes by the name of “entertainment,” and for t