In the Hollow of Transference: The Analyst's Position between Activity and Passivity

Jean Laplanche teaches us how to read Freud and, in his own reading of Freud, he outlines a theory of general seduction—or, alternatively, a general theory of seduction—that maps out a crucial context within which to theorise both the human condition and psychoanalytic practice. The human condition since Laplanche identifies a dimension of reality that is specific to it: the reality of the message as it emerges in the fundamental anthropological situation, constituted by the asymmetry characteristic of the infans's confrontation with the adult world as bearer of unconscious sexual;2 the analytic practice, insofar as this message is endowed with a sexual reality that is marked by repression. The translation

of this message, already attempted by the analysand, must be undone in the analytical setting, in order to open up the possibility of a new translation. These two crucial dimensions are also present in Laplanche's acknowledgment that the person we are most concerned with in human communication is the second person. Not the person whom I speak to but, above all, the person who speaks to me, the person before whom I am in a state of fundamental passivity; this term does not denote a form of behaviour but a relationship in which the other's message contains something extra, some excess. For my part, I have long opted, in the matter, for the term suggested by Lyotard, i.e. passibility, because it profitably does away with the ambiguity as to the kind of passivity at stake. However one could equally refer to Levinas when he evokes a ‘passivity (…) more passive still than any receptivity’ (Levinas, 1991 [1978]: 48), a passivity that therefore precedes any kind of deliberate or forced passivation, a primal passivity that holds us hostage to the other, besieged, persecuted. Levinas's account resonates quite unambiguously with Laplanche's suggestion that man stands ‘between seduction and inspiration’, with persecution lodged in this in- between.3

Just as Levinas never brought psychoanalysis into play, Laplanche has not drawn on Levinas's philosophy and the kind of persecution Laplanche is concerned with in his writings has more to do with Schreber than with man in general (Laplanche, 1999 [1999a]). But only a view of psychosis as an extra-human phenomenon would fail to see how persecution, hyperbolised as it is in its delusional expression, seems fundamentally tied to the human condition. The other speaks to me and his words haunt me, excite me, incite me, inspire me, with or without my knowledge. Freud did not miss the contiguity of theory and delusion when reading Schreber's memoirs. Such contiguity is equally confirmed by the fact that what the theory of seduction foregrounds through complex theoretical efforts is generally perceived by psychotics in a seemingly more direct and concrete way. The former efforts consist in a deconstruction of certain pivotal moments in Freud and in the patient ‘stabbing the knife’ into the various epicycles that psychoanalytic theory began to require, once its Copernican revolution was overlooked.

When the de-centering carried out by Freud's theory of seduction was replaced by a re-centering on fantasy—conceived of in terms of

the first person singular—psychoanalysts actually set out to find a construction of reality on the basis of the ‘egocentered’ position that was subsequently devolved on the subject. Fantasy is hardly insignificant in psychoanalytic practice or in the psychic reality arising from the theory of seduction which posits a process of radical de-centering. Laplanche's theory, however, is critical of the fact that, as a result of the theoretical re-centering on fantasy, the origin of the latter seems unaccountably neglected—or relegated to innateness—if one fails to see it as a response to the reality of the message and its enigma. This reality is thus primary and not in need of being constructed; however enigmatic, it is a prior reality in relation to which fantasy constitutes a form of subjective engagement. This subjective engagement must be addressed by the analyst with all the respect due to the freedom bestowed on each and everyone when translating the other's enigma for oneself. Otherwise, the risk of partaking in a kind of ‘objectivism’ likely to smother all forms of individuality. In this sense, the analyst's intervention does not address fantasy. Rather, the analyst assists the analysand in the necessary deconstruction of fantasy, insofar as the subjective positioning achieved until then and crystallised in a fantasmatic scene has led the subject to an impasse that underlies the demand for analysis.

In this short essay, I would like to explore in more detail the second-person position, that of the person who speaks to me, in the sense that the one who ‘is spoken to’ is not only the subject requesting an analysis, but is also embodied by the analyst himself. For it seems clear that the analyst is expressly positioned as the one who is spoken to in the second-person and who is, consequently, in a state of relative passivity. This position, unless I am mistaken, has not been explored yet by the theory of general seduction. Indeed, in this theory of general seduction, the analyst is active because his enigma yields the provocation of transference (Laplanche, 1999 [1991a]). If the analysand positions the analyst as ‘the subject who is supposed to know’, that is because from his own position as ‘guardian of the enigma’, the analyst is the bearer of an ‘excess of message’, an excess that triggers a process of translation-detranslation, of transferential projections and fantasizations, whose elaboration, in the course of the analytic session, might elicit the advent of some form of unbinding—the prelude to less rigid reconstructions

of meaning. This essentially consists in a process of mourning, mourning that does not ‘liquidate’, but carries out a process of unweaving-reweaving, a re-reading of the other's message, a re-interpretation (Laplanche, 1999 [1991b]). However, this marks a return to a hermeneutic position featuring, this time, the encounter between a subjectivity that was until now unaware of having any active role in the preceding interpretations and a reality that could not be located in the proper place, i.e. the place of the message left by the other. The acknowledgment of this reality, in hermeneutic solitude, will elicit the emergence of the other's trace, a trace stamped by the repressed that operated in him, just as it already operated in the issuer. In short, under Lapanche's magnifying glass, the analytic situation reinstates this connection to the other's message. As the analyst holds the pole of activity, the refounding of the analytic space first pertains to him and his ‘refusals’.

So let us precisely start from the analyst's refusals, in order to examine more closely how his position evolves in the context of the session, once such refusals have been embraced. For example, I would regard the mere advocacy of the active refusal to know as insufficient, unless one sees how it coincides with a basic form of passivity in the analyst himself. For while the analyst may actively refuse to know or act, this refusal stems from a position of withdrawal which would be unthinkable as the mere effect of a technique, cut off from any relation to the primal passivity that applies to analyst and analysand alike. Such passivity precedes—even though the issue of situating it in time is not at stake—the passivity before the message of primal seduction; it is not a return to something ancient but it consists instead in the reactualisation of an ever present predicament: i.e. the fact of being besieged, persecuted, held hostage by the other, as one might posit following Emmanuel Levinas.

I make this link with Levinas's thought not as a philosopher—which I am not4—but as an analyst. I am bound to notice that, if I provoke transference thanks to the ‘excess of message’ embedded in the enigma that emanates from my own unconscious in my desire to analyse, by the same token I nonetheless surrender to the ‘grip’ of transference, I expose myself to a kind of ‘possession’. The displacement onto me—the result of having accepted being the receptacle of what is being transferred—leads

me to substantiate the human condition's accusative mode in general, which is relocated and foregrounded here by the additional constraint operating within the framework of the analysis. It would consequently be reductive to tackle this effect as a simple artefact of psychoanalytic technique. Such propensity to possession converges with the typically Kleinian account that posits the analyst as the recipient of the transferred objects (my point here is not discuss whether this takes place through projective identification or not). This is another possible illustration of the human position as passible, an actualisation, for the benefit of the analysis, of the basic passivity-passibility that any person encounters when facing the other. Such a position does not result from a technique; it emerges, conversely, as the very condition that elicits the analytic method itself, provided the two protagonists, in the course of an analysis, are tacitly required to carry out an épochè, a suspension of their ego, a departure from their ego-centered position. The analysand is prompted to associate as ‘freely’ as possible; the analyst is to sustain an equally free-floating form of attention. These two stances do not complement each other. According to Freud, they operate on two different stages (Freud 1937). Yet they both rely on a general disposition that must be recaptured through a specific effort, which goes against the grain of natural inclination. The fact that access to such disposition requires an effort against the grain comes from the need to accommodate a more basic position with which the ego is constantly confronted. This clearly resonates with the ‘underlying bedrock’ discussed by Freud in the conclusion of his text ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’ (Freud, 1937). Whereas Freud relies, when accounting for the process of ultimate resistance, on differentiated forms following the man/woman split (i.e. the refusal of passive submission to the father and penis envy, respectively), one could arguably envision this resistance as based on a common stratum. The latter consists in the refusal of primordial passivity insofar as this refusal is a process of closure to the other, to the other's impact, to the other's message. According to Laplanche, the enigma in the other's message is seen as the quasi empirical outcome of the adult- asymmetry regarding the Yet, seemingly, one could and should consider this at another level, because the mere inclusion of the empirical field implicitly refers to a developmental theory. On the contrary,

Inserting the sexual into a Levinassian context may seem incongruous but there are arguments in support of such a connection with psychoanalysis. For instance, when Levinas is asked to give an example of the ‘there is’ in an interview with Philippe Nemo, he ends up describing no other than a primal scene! First he evokes a childhood memory: “One sleeps alone, the adults continue life; the child feels the silence of his bedroom as ‘rumbling.’” (Levinas, 1985 [1982]: 48). And as if the pregnance of the sexual scene implied by the term ‘rumbling’ were not obvious enough, Levinas further evokes related notions borrowed from his friend Maurice Blanchot. “He [Blanchot] has a number of very suggestive formulas: he speaks of the ‘hustle-bustle’ of being, of its ‘clamor,’ its ‘murmur.’ A night in a hotel room where, behind the partition, ‘it does not stop stirring’; ‘one does not know what they are doing next door.’ This is something very close to the ‘there is.’” (Levinas, 1985 [1982], 49–50) And very close, let us add, to a seduction scene par excellence! This connection would nonetheless be a dreadful reduction if, in reading a primal scene into Levinas's illustration of the ‘there is’, we would claim to explain away this ‘there is’ on the basis of the sexual scene. This is not what is at stake. The point, rather, is to see how the primal scene itself is the representable form of a ‘thing’ that is impossible to describe otherwise than in an impersonal form: i.e. the ‘there is’ for Levinas, the enigmatic in the message adulterated by the sexual for Laplanche, or, one might add, das Ding mentioned by Freud in the Project and revisited by Lacan in his Ethics Seminar (Lacan, 1959–60). What is at stake, in any case, is something impossible to master or translate completely into a familiar representation, something which, besides, exposes our primordial passivity. This passivity is opposed by the ego that becomes, in the process, all the more entrapped in the effects of that ‘thing’ as its resistance to otherness reinforces the rigidity

of the Same.5 In an analysis, if the attempt to suspend the ego is in any way successful, a more flexible and inclusive symbolisation will ultimately emerge, without any claim to exhaust the enigma of the other's message. This is achieved, in any case, through a re-opening of the fundamental anthropological situation, through a reinstatement of the 's position of passivity. It seems to me that Levinas's claims also point in the same direction when, in the interview quoted above, he concludes: “to escape the ‘there is’ one must not be posed but deposed; to make an act of deposition, in the sense one speaks of deposed kings. This deposition of sovereignty by the ego is the social relationship with the Other (…)” (Levinas, : ).

In a given analysis, if the re-opening of the fundamental anthropological situation places the analysand before the analyst's enigma, thus prompting transference, the analyst, according to Laplanche, still offers a ‘hollow’ for this transference, a holding capacity (contenance) (Laplanche, 1999 [1991a]). How can one conceive of this ‘hollow’ bestowed by the analyst upon the analysand? Where could the analyst find such a hollow within himself if he did not ‘deposing’ his own ego in order to recapture a primordial disposition which, though generally unnoticed in everyday life, is called upon in exquisite fashion in the disposition for analytic listening? In this sense, one could argue that the opening carried out by the instatement and the reinstatement of the analytic situation presents itself as a philosophy in action, or rather, as the methodically performed actualisation of an ethical stance that would be termed psychoanalysis. Such ethics is also our epistemics, granting access to facts that would otherwise remain unavailable to our experience.

In fact, the analyst's function as ‘the one who provokes transference’ would be utterly intolerable if such active re-opening of the fundamental anthropological situation did not simultaneously comprise the signs of a proper deposition of the analyst's ego, of his being ‘caught up’ within the very situation. In other words, the analyst does not merely and empirically reinstate the adult-child asymmetry which the analysand once experienced. This asymmetry is not only historical: it transcends the dateable empirical fact in yet another way, insofar as the analyst remains caught up in it, in his personal reality as a human being as well as in his specifically analytic positioning. The provocation of

transference by the analyst is in fact not traumatic since, unlike what happens in the case of ordinary seduction—and even more so in the case of perverse seduction—the analyst's active part is doubled up by the hollow he bestows in order to host transference, a kind of hospitality that echoes the primordial passivity evoked by Levinas. Without granting primacy to such passivity-passibility, without becoming the actual hostage of the transferential hold, the analyst would only be able to comprehend, not hear. Despite the positive value it may present at the outset, understanding ‘refers back to an act of grasping’, as Levinas suggests (1989: 76). It implies a grip, a control, a seizure.

Analytic practices in which the analyst essentially puts himself in charge of interpreting, i.e. of translating on behalf of the patient the words uttered by the latter, are rightfully subject to criticism in the light of their subjectivist and relativist potential. So much so that some authors, in the United States in particular, have simply given up in the face of this apparently unavoidable aspect of the analytic practice and have willfully embraced their ‘irreducible subjectivity’. But the result has been a discarding of any claim to analytic neutrality and an advocacy of the psychological self-disclosure of the analyst in the course of the session (among others, see Renik, 2004). I believe the origins of this drift may be seen as a reaction to the traditionally hermeneutic position adopted by analysts, a position which, in its extreme form, has yielded the figure of the omniscient analyst. The theory of general seduction, combined with a translation model of mental functioning, is sited against the grain of both aforementioned positions. It places the analysand in charge of the hermeneutic work while the orientation of the analyst's work is anti-hermeneutic (Laplanche, 1999b). Yet, such antihermeneutics cannot, in my opinion, be reduced to a purely negative activity. In other words, the analyst cannot merely refuse to know or understand. Hearing presupposes a greater form of openness: what is to be heard has to do with a quality in communication whose comprehension is only graspable on the side of the Same, whereas the encounter summoning both analyst and analysand is the encounter with the other. Hearing implies welcoming the analysand's speech without immediately reducing the latter to an assured ‘I hear you’; it implies allowing the alien-ness that dwells in that speech to run its course, through the analyst's

attempt to depose, if not revoke, his own ego. The analyst's aural offering thus denotes a disposition in which attention cannot be exclusively paid to signifiers, insofar as the other's speech, received in a state of passibility, is to give way to felt experiences in the analyst, leading to perceptible changes in his listening. It is a matter of states—the states in which the analyst finds himself—which are somewhat reminiscent of what was referred to as possession during the pre-Freudian era. It is the ‘grip of transference’, a grip from which the analyst will have to disentangle himself, but whose advent he must first allow for (Gantheret, 1996). This grip means that analytic listening cannot claim to be immune to the reorientations resulting from the particular transference of a particular analysand. The analyst's active part in the reinstatement of the originary enigma is therefore doubled up by the analyst's essential passivity-passibility: through his listening disposition, he agrees to be affected on a very different plane than the relatively controllable plane of understanding.

In his formulations, Jean Laplanche has hesitated between the terms ‘enigmatic signifiers’, ‘enigmatic messages’ or ‘compromised messages’. Regarding signifiers, he has nonetheless specified that he mostly retains the fact of their address, the fact that they ‘signify to’. So far as the other's message is concerned, then it cannot be a question of keeping to signifiers alone, linguistically or semiologically speaking. For my part, I would add that, in the other's message, all is not addressed either. Jean-François Lyotard does not discuss messages but rather is interested in phrases as irreducible units (Lyotard, 1983). Phrases, on the one hand, consist of a content which is, say, semantic (lexis); on the other hand, they include a phônè which is located in the sonority, the grain of the voice, in the tone (Lyotard, 1991). In the phrase regime, Lyotard foregrounds the existence of an affect-phrase which is not a phrase strictly speaking (Lyotard, 2000); it is transmitted but not addressed or formed according to any grammar or syntax appropriate for signification—it neither ‘signifies that’ nor ‘signifies to’. Applied to the psychoanalytic sphere, this would refer, as I understand it, to whatever emerges from a more originary source than the adult's repressed, the repressed which, in the theory of seduction, contaminates the message intercepted by the infans. For example, this is what causes the aesthetic experience

passed on by the painter and which one encounters in front of a painting. The affect-phrase is inarticulate; furthermore, ‘the encounter between articulated phrase and affect-phrase can only be a missed encounter’ (Lyotard, 2000: 47). The analyst's listening, made liable to influence because of its passivity, paradoxically imposes an address on what is not necessarily meant to be heard—because it was not addressed, even unconsciously. Listening in passibility consequently does some violence to the phrase because it commandeers the phrase, so to speak, turning it into a transferential address (Scarfone, 2008.) But this necessary violence—the violence of the passivity-passibility—is the violence that unveils the indissoluble link that speech ties between the Same and the other; it also discloses the inevitable reference to something beyond meaning that transcends any form of understanding, leading the analyst to welcome without mastering. As previously seen, the welcoming host is a hostage: he is caught up, possessed. His act of welcoming is nonetheless able to transform what he receives, through the imposition of an address on what originally had no addressee. It is the listener's responsibility, however, to position his act of listening so as to refrain from exerting secondary violence against the intercepted phrase ; in other words, he must keep only to what is exactly called for in order to send back to the speaker the hint of another phrase, so far unbeknownst to him.

A question emerges at once: does this act of listening that imposes an address not open, after all, the path for some arbitrariness in the interpretation? What would be the extent of our departure from the analyst-as-hermeneut if our analyst-as-hostage presented himself as the expert interpreter of the inarticulate? This is, I believe, the locus of one of the analyst's refusals, which Laplanche posits as the condition for the establishment and the sustainability of the analytical situation. More specifically, the point will consist, in the present case, in knowing how to take account of the peripatetic elements in the world of phrases, without, however, making the analysand answerable for what he could not put into words. What would then be the point of listening to the non-articulated, one might ask? The point will be to modulate the listening modalities of the translations generated by the analysand, prompting the two protagonists in the course of the session to pay attention to what would otherwise not be featured ‘in person’ in the analysis.

The non-articulated phrase evoked by Lyotard, an adjunct to the logos without being reduced to it, is a reminder that the bottomline in the issue of the unconscious does not pertain to representation but to presentation; not language but a-phasia, a speechless voice. Such presentation is to occur provided the process of de-translation at work during the session—i.e. the deconstruction of the formations produced by the subject in response to the other's enigmatic message—is not a process of a cognitive order; such de-translation is essentially magnetised by the act that lies in the psyche's originary strata.

Indeed, the non-articulated phrase does not evoke. It is mere presence, it is in action. Now, transference would not be more than banal role-play if it was not essentially led by action. If, then, transference is provoked by the analyst, this nonetheless requires, on the part of the one who provokes, an openness likely to welcome the ensuing effects, however painful or unsettling they might sometimes be. I would thus venture to argue that the analyst who takes full account of the theory of seduction cannot overlook this effect of a counter-hold induced by transference, even though this transference is a response to the enigma of which the analyst is the guardian.

Let us be clear: in my present argument, there is no symmetry in the founding seduction of the analytical situation. Acknowledging the necessity, for the analyst, of a state of passivity-passibility does not imply that the analysand may equally be seen as the issuer of compromised messages. In everyday life, naturally, he is the issuer of compromised messages too but not when his position is the analysand's. In this position, he finds himself re-immersed in the asymmetry of the fundamental anthropological situation. For his part, the analyst must not overlook his own position before the other's sexual enigma, if ‘the other’ does not refer to ‘such-and-such’ analysand, or even to analysands in general—as analysands, that is—but to the Other (Autrui) following Levinas's use of the term. It is therefore in his own infancy that the analyst is reached, in his in-fantia, that is to say his own a-phasia.6 The latter is brought back into play, put to work again in every analysis: it is the fundamental aphasia against which language emerges, the hollow core of the infantile; it is the inarticulate underside of any spoken word; it is the aphasia the analyst himself seeks—in vain, like everyone else—to remedy and for which the possible antidote is always temporary

and flawed, a stutter that arises among words. The analyst can potentially hear this stutter in a new way, when, in the analysand's articulated speech, he manages to catch something of the inarticulate phrase that reaches and affects him in the hollow of transference. A paradoxical thought then seizes the analyst who, against his will, finds himself caught up in that strange entity referred to as ‘the analytical chimera’ by Michel de M'Uzan (1994). What I will retain here from this chimera is merely the fact that it imposes, within the session, a lived experience of alterity—provided the analyst does not brace himself against the advent of this ‘it thinks’. This ‘it thinks’ has the same modalities as ‘it rains’: it is a thought devoid of any attributable subject but a usable thought all the same, the outcome of what the analytical apparatus reinstates and foregrounds better than any other human practice, something pertaining to a state of fundamental passivity.7 The only validation of the relevance and efficacity of this thought will consist in the de-translating effects arising from the subtle balancing act between the seduction set off by the analyst's enigma, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the analytical holding capacity () and its ‘hollow’ constituted by the analyst's refusals—refusals that refer back to a state of passibility, passivity more passive than receptivity.

Notes

• Translated from the French by Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz.

• Translator's note: ‘sexual’ refers to Laplanche's use of the German term sexual, which Laplanche distinguishes from the French term sexuel and denotes an expanded view of sexuality in the light of Freud's theory. See Jean Laplanche, Sexual: La sexualité élargie au sens freudien, PUF, 2007.

• Aware of the differences at work between these two authors, I am drawing the above parallel with some hesitation. As I was writing this paper, I came across some of Judith Butler's work (2005) that explores various aspects of the connections between Laplanche and Levinas. Due to a lack of space and time, I could not go into the details of Butler's arguments in the context of the present paper, but my understanding is that my conclusions differ from Butler's regarding the possible compatibility of Laplanche's and Levinas's reflections.

• I am endebted to Professor Bettina Bergo, my colleague in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Montreal, for shedding such a helpful light on Levinas's thought. However, she is not to be held accountable for my understanding of this author.

• Levinas often uses the term ‘Same’ to refer to the Ego, a designation psychoanalysis can easily endorse.

• I like to point out the fact that a-phasia (Greek etymology) and infantia (Latin etymology) equally designate the inability to speak. One could even suggest that, even after his famous 1891 neurological study, Freud never stopped dealing with cases of aphasia.

• “It is not the discovery that ‘it speaks’ or that ‘language speaks’ that does justice to this passivity. One must show in saying, qua approach, the very de-posing or desituating of the subject, which nonetheless remains an irreplacable uniqueness…” (Levinas, : ).