This article compares the way in which language structures the subject in poetry and the analytic session. By means of J.L. Austin's notion of the performative, the author considers poetry and analysis as act. The use of signifiers in poetry and analysis, as set out by Lacan in his Seminar III, is considered, and their importance in structuring the subject via metaphor and metonomy is defined. Lacan's notion of scansion is employed to explore at length the importance of analytic punctuation in analytic sessions, and to draw parallels with John Donne's use of line breaks and verse structure to give form to his poetry. Finally, the allegiance of poetry to the voice, understood by Jacques-Alain Miller as the pre-eminent object of desire in analysis, is taken as emblematic of the need at the end of an analysis for a move from the analyst as poet to the analysand becoming the author of her own poem.
In his subtle song lyric, ‘The Dangling Conversation’, Paul Simon conjures the scene of a couple sitting together reading poetry and drinking coffee, apparently fully at ease with one another. Yet over the course of the three verses, he makes plain the distance that now separates the two. This is conveyed partly by minute word changes between the three stanzas, and by the falling away of the stronger rhythm of the first part of the stanzas. He ends the song like this:
You're a stranger now unto meLost in the dangling conversationAnd the superficial sighsIn the borders of our lives
And that dangling conversation: aren't all conversations dangling? Especially those between people familiar with one another, who no longer guard their words. These conversations are sometimes haunted by the unspoken questions, demands and complaints that, as Simon shows, are the rocks on which a relationship founders. They are also the very stuff of analysis, those dangling ends, the coat tails trailed by the analysand that the analyst needs to pick up. W.H. Auden defined poetry as ‘memorable speech’. In this paper I will explore a comparison between the analytic session and the poem, the ways in which the structures of each are both expressive and containing, and finally how each, in their different ways, come to an end: in the poem, memorably, in analysis, in being forgotten.
Certain aspects of poetry have great appeal to children and adolescents. When I was a teenager, I had on my bedroom wall not a poster of Napoleon Solo or Illya Kuriakin—the TV stars then dividing the loves and loyalty of pubescent girls—but an illustrated poem. It was ‘Fern Hill’, Dylan Thomas's beautiful lyrical lament for lost childhood. An overdetermined choice, I now see. On the face of it, I was entranced by the lyricism far more than the meaning, which came as something of a surprise to me re-reading it in 2011. I do not remember noticing the meaning consciously, and I think this applied to most of the poems I loved. But no doubt in the mix there is regret for the childhood suddenly lost with the death of my father, and perhaps a hidden fascination with the figure of Dylan Thomas (who died in the year in which I was born) for his raffish lifestyle. My non-Conformist mother very much disapproved of him!
John Bayley in a review in 1991, comments on the attractiveness of Gerard Manley Hopkins to adolescents, and he too was a favourite of mine. Bayley writes:
To read the poems in youth is still an intoxicating experience, for he is very much a young person's poet: but comparatively few of the poems mature and increase in our understanding with age. (Bayley 1991)
His grounds for this opinion are that Hopkins's early poems are either too directly expressions of ‘having a crush on someone’ or too accomplished, and empty. Far from sharing a conventional analysis that Hopkins would have been a better poet if he had had a wider range of experience, rather than his religiously imposed celibacy, Bayley sees the Jesuit discipline exercising a restraint which safeguards his freedom to write in such exuberance. Bayley goes on to say that Hopkins and another of my poetic heroes from adolescence, T.S. Eliot, are the poets whose verse approximates most closely to normal speech patterns:
The rhythm of ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ … has a clear though paradoxical relation to colloquial speech: indeed it could be said that Hopkins is the first English poet since Shakespeare to find a wholly new way of conveying think-speak in metre (T.S. Eliot was probably the second) (Bayley 1991)
Here is a first clue to the function of poetry, and to my contention about its relation to psychoanalysis. In certain circumstances, poetry approximates to Lacan's notion of lalangue, the first babbling of the infant, possessed by the pure jouissance of words, as words. There is no concern on the infant's part with meaning, no struggle with the signifier or its source in the Other. Ordinarily, the persistence of lalangue into adult life is only possible for the psychotic. I recently encountered in a patient's material the compulsive rhyming which marks the discourse of some psychotics. Poets, though, I suggest, help us to recapture some of that jouissance without the psychotic terror of entirely falling away into endless meaninglessness. Or conversely, of having to rely obsessively upon convention and cliché. In poetry, we are set free from, or at least find more relaxed, some props of the imaginary which hold sway in the novel or short story: character, plot, narrative and so on. Paradoxically, poetry is both binding and unbinding.
The most basic conception of a talking cure envisages the centrality of putting feelings associated with lost memories into words and thus exorcising them. Freud and others in the early, optimistic days of psychoanalysis saw such abreaction as the cure, with the definitive release of all accumulated tensions on a clear hydraulic model. Words were a
kind of action, and as such released the surplus energy of affect. (Breuer and Freud, 1893: 59) His later development of the concepts of ‘word-presentation’ and ‘thing presentation’ in his paper ‘The Unconscious’ (Freud, 1915) is an important extension of these earlier and more naïve constructs. Comparing the thought processes of neurotic and psychotic subjects, Freud, as Lacan did later, remarks on the inflexibility of movement in the latter's processes. The psychotic withdraws investment from objects, barring the unconscious to him, in effect. Instead, he invests all the force in the word itself. This is ‘word presentation’. Here, words are not imbued with enjoyment, (as in the Lacanian child's lalangue), but are stuffed and over- determined, top heavy with significance. They indicate, says Freud, the first desperate attempt at self-cure. (Freud, 1915: 209)
A neurotic employs word presentation too, but additionally, being a divided subject, invests the ‘thing’ (object) in the unconscious. Energy is thus dispersed, in the Freudian model. The neurotic's thought processes can move between conscious, pre-conscious and unconscious systems fluidly, impelled by the endless search for the lost primary object. (Freud, 1915: 209-10) Thus, words are not endowed with the same fierce intensity as they are for the psychotic, and they remain linked, in a retrievable way, with memory traces—the serial imprints left behind by past experience. They do however retain a more limited amount of force and energy, precisely by reason of their connection with object investment, rather like a body knitted together so that nerve impulses can communicate with muscles and joints to stimulate movement. Both word presentation and thing presentation are needed if our discourse is not to become arid, as Freud reminds us:
When we think in abstractions there is a danger that we may neglect the relations of words to unconscious thing presentations, and it must be confessed that the expression and content of our philosophising then begins to acquire an unwelcome resemblance to the mode of operation of schizophrenics. (Freud, 1915: 210)
By contrast, poetry, arguably the most disciplined and worked over of literary forms, is the one which conveys emotion most accurately
and evokes a scene most memorably. It does this in spite of, or perhaps precisely because of, its more sparing use of words. How can a few words come to carry so much power? Part of the answer lies in Freud's idea of the energy of word presentation. Here I draw on an unlikely parallel; swearing. A few years ago, I was attempting to make sense of the effect a single verbal insult had on an analysand of mine. She was an apparently robust character, yet when a dispute with a colleague at work resulted in a stand-up row in which a female colleague shouted in her face, ‘Fuck your mother!’ she was enraged, but also deeply wounded. Contemplating a complaint against the colleague, she was advised that as she had defended herself verbally and insulted the other woman in her turn, she had a rather weak case. Those particular words held a unique power and gravity for her. Though we spoke about it at length, I could not readily account for their power, beyond a general sense that she had been brought up in a Christian society in which swearing was frowned upon.
The abusive words teeter on a knife-edge between Lacanian orders of real and imaginary. They also have a complicated correlation with meaning: evocative, we might say, rather than carrying a literal meaning. Post-Kleinian psychoanalysts speak of words having the force of blows in what they term a symbolic equation, a primitive stage in the development of symbolism. Hanna Segal cites the case of a psychotic man who could no longer play the violin because that was fully equivalent to masturbating in public. (Segal 1957: 391) In a similar way, here we find words which have lost their ability to symbolise and instead have acquired a direct and active force. I do not believe this analysand to have been psychotic, however. Rather, I think she was experiencing words ripped from their usual moorings and carrying too strong a charge for their context.
In her book Excitable Speech, Judith Butler uses the notion of the performative, a term coined by JL Austin in his 1955 William James lectures How to do Things with Words. Austin differentiates illocutionary speech acts from perlocutionary ones. (Austin, : 100) Butler glosses these as ‘actions that are performed by virtue of words and
those that are performed as a consequence of words’. (Butler, 1997: 44) In the former category, Austin puts naming a ship, making a marriage vow or other kind of promise, and placing a bet or making some other kind of contract. Butler connects this concept to hate speech and thereby places them in a social and political context. She suggests that Austin does not go on to consider the separate existence of the words themselves; her project is to expand the thinking about the action of words. For example, she asks, ‘what would it mean for a thing to be “done by” a word?’ (Butler, 1997: 44) and ponders on the nature of the bond between the word and the thing done. At what point would it become indissoluble? These seem to me important questions too for psychoanalysis, for a praxis which claims precisely to undo such dissoluble bonds—but only once they have been satisfyingly established, and verified (in being spoken to the analyst). Therefore, I now want to argue that perhaps we can usefully think of a poem, and an analytic session, as illocutionary acts. Or in other words, that in psychoanalysis and in poetry, an action is being performed by virtue of words. Further, that if it becomes action as a consequence of words, we have strayed into the realm of suggestion.
What kind of acts, then, might we be performing in poetry and in an analytic session? Austin seems to have no great regard for poetry, and specifically excludes it as a context for the performative. However, I want to defy this argument, and see if poetry can indeed have a performative aspect. On many occasions it is claimed that poetry must be spoken, not read silently to oneself. W.H. Auden called poetry ‘memorable speech’. In this way, it belongs with psychoanalysis in its allegiance to the voice, which Lacan placed alongside the oral and anal, as objects of the drive. Jacques-Alain Miller, in his paper ‘Jacques Lacan and the Voice’ (Miller 1989) shows how one of the sequelae of the structuralist view of psychoanalysis, which Lacan first delineated, is the replacement of the individual ‘as support of development’ (Miller 1989: 138) that is, the kind of individual promoted by the theory of stages, with the subject. This subject is the subject of signifiers, is “caused” indeed by signifiers. He explains how “the voice comes in the place of what is properly unspeakable about the subject, what Lacan calls the subject's surplus enjoyment” (Miller 1989: 144). In performative speech acts, the intention is, I would argue, to approach this surplus enjoyment, so troubling to humanity.
Lacan and Miller point us to the use of signifiers in this approach.
For Lacan, signifiers are the words, fragments of words, phrases or sentences which are the vectors of meaning for a subject. There is no one-to-one correspondence of word and meaning, but a constant slippage. He gives precedence to the signifier over the signified:
There is thus an enduring bar to be wrestled with between meaning and word, and, as the signifier only exists in its relationship to the whole network of signifiers, a sense of satisfaction in ever fully expressing anything is impossible to achieve. Meaning, the signified, only ever points at ineffable meaning, and thus always threatens to melt into meaninglessness. On the other hand, signifiers speak us; we do not choose them freely. We must choose from the signifiers available to us in the Other, the common language of all, not the purely individual one of lalangue. We grope for the ‘right’ word, or we hear ourselves saying something we did not intend. This is a sacrifice of jouissance we have to make if we are to make ourselves understood, for it is in the net of signifiers that we catch not only meaning but also a measure of jouissance, albeit diminished.
In Seminar III: The Psychoses, Lacan uses poetry and poetic metaphor to explicate the nature of psychosis and its differentiation from neurosis. He likens the ‘overflowing, inundating’ character of psychotic originality to ‘the verse’—or as he says ‘the word for, the solution to, an enigma—the soul of the situation’ (Lacan, 1993: 33). He goes on to describe how, by contrast we see (also in psychosis):
At the opposite pole there is the form that meaning takes when it no longer refers to anything at all. This is the formula that is repeated, reiterated and drummed in with a stereotyped insistence. It's what we might call, in contrast
Page 21to the word, the refrain.
These two forms, the fullest and the emptiest, bring meaning to a halt, it's like lead in the net [plomb dans le filet], in the network, of the subject's discourse—a structural characteristic in which, once we approach it clinically, we recognise the mark of delusion. (Lacan, 1993: 33)
The psychotic subject is seen as trapped between the terror of unchecked production of words and images, and the aridity of cliché.
Later in the seminar, Lacan says that he has noticed that Schreber's Memoirs are devoid of metaphor. He then devotes much space to teasing out the distinction between metaphor and metonomy by means of two poetic metaphors. One is from ‘Booz endormi’, a well known French poem by Victor Hugo: ‘His sheaf was neither miserly nor spiteful’. (Lacan, 1993: 222). I want to draw out two points from these. Firstly, Lacan insists that the Hugo line is a metaphor not a simile, because the sheaf, standing in for Booz, is the subject here. At this point, anyway, he falls under this signified, the sheaf; it stands for him. The identification, that is, of Booz and the sheaf, here allows for the transference of the signified (his characteristics of generosity and bounty) and it is this transference of the signified that is seen as essential both to psychoanalysis and to life as a whole. Meaning can never be satisfactorily pinned down, but it can be flexibly and enjoyably expanded, opening new and rewarding vistas. We win some, we lose some.
The second metaphor is contained in a line from an unnamed surrealist poem, ‘Love is a pebble laughing in the sun’ (Lacan, 1993: 226). Lacan includes it to develop his thinking around meaning and non-sense. Surrealism allows us to see very clearly that it is the structure of language that is vital. The further writing is pushed towards non-sense, the more we see this. He quotes dialogue from a short play in which words are substituted ‘one word for another’: ‘My dear, my dearest, how many pebbles is it since I have had the apprentice to sugar you?’ (Lacan, 1993: 226) and so on. I seem to remember the two Ronnies doing something similar! Meaning is still carried, if anything more vigorously; certainly more capaciously, and it is carried, says Lacan, by the structure of language. The transference of the signified, essential for exploration and expression
of meaning, in both poetry and psychoanalysis, is underwritten by the independence of the signifier and the signified. Examination of any metaphor will show that, as I will show later. Of course, no-one's love is really like a red, red rose, but all sorts of romantic resonances are sounded by the line.
For me, these are essentials of psychoanalysis. The bringing to birth of the subject, the subject of signifiers, is the guidewire among the often bewildering threads of an analytic session. Nearly everyone starting as an analytic practitioner is faced with the problem of how and when to formulate interventions. Even if we are told to concentrate upon the patient's signifiers, we may ask which those are! The solution lies in both seeing, as it were, which are the words and phrases emphasised in italics or bold, and in spotting repeated words and phrases of this sort, and noting their proximity to others; constructing a network, in other words. Seeing where metaphors gather and briefly define a subject's position. To draw on an example at random, a new analysand, explaining why she had come for help, said she ‘keeps breaking down crying. I don't know why’. She keeps these tears secret, not wanting her children to see them. This woman, it seems, is the strong support for a whole extended family. I ask how long she has noticed this need to break down and cry? About two years. And what was happening two years ago? ‘My mother had a breakdown’. It seems mother too had been hiding mental suffering for many, many years in order to keep her family together. In this way, we begin to make a few links and uncover the identification of mother and daughter. Who knows where that will lead?
It is noticeable that there is much theorising ink spilt about psychoanalysis and literature, but the vast majority of it about the novel or short story. To take poetry as a model, though, might be more fruitful. So, to borrow another title, from Roustang this time, not ‘The Patient a Novelist?’ (Roustang, 1983: 134) but ‘The Patient a Poet’. As analysts, we too seek by means of words to free our analysand's speech without unleashing psychosis.
Whilst writing this piece, it occurred to me to wonder what it would be
like to record one's session notes in a poem. For example, imagine this case.
The analysand is a young, affluent man. His family had fled from political trouble a couple of generations back in a Middle Eastern country, and whilst they made good here too financially, so that he could mix with the best crowd, he felt he was never wholly accepted, in spite of a public school and Oxford education. He could not decide on his own stance towards the religious and political convictions which had driven earlier generations. Sometimes he was caught up in a world of hedonistic partying and womanising. At others, he saw this in sharp focus as empty and indulgent, himself as pampered and privileged. Perhaps in search of some certainty, he had spent time in Palestine as a human rights observer. But all the time, he felt divided. He had a series of passionate affairs with women, which caused friction with his family. At this point, he came into analysis. This is how one of his sessions went.
He said that Emma, his current lover, had sent him a jet ring this week, with a silver band inside with their names engraved into it. What is she trying to say? He cynically remarks, ‘I feel kind of insulted. She only sent it because it's what all the girls are doing. Jet is the cool thing just now. It's all I am for her, just a fashion item; a good looking guy she likes to be seen with. Ironic, when you think of those Victorian jet mourning brooches and so on. They were meant to symbolise that the girl would mourn you forever if you died and never marry again. Like Queen Victoria. Emma can't even keep her legs together while I'm alive. I know she slept with Harry when I was away. And of course, I am really besotted with her, can't stop thinking about her. I could never think of shagging anyone else, not now. I was never like this with any other woman.’
The talk moves on to different topics. What should he do with his life now he's back in the UK? Ma wants him to settle down and get a training contract with her cousin who is a City solicitor. She and Pa, so dull now, so conventional, comfortable. But maybe that's no bad thing. Supposing he and Emma had decided to marry; that would please them. They'd be shopping for gold rings instead. Certainly he's never thought this way about any other girl. This time is so different, perhaps marriage is what should be happening. He adores her. ‘And I guess it
could be that part of Emma wants that too. Maybe she's had enough fooling around. This ring could always be a message.’
Suddenly he gets the ring out of his pocket, looks at it, then puts it on his finger. ‘She has worn this. She'd have put it on her thumb. Emma has so many rings she wears, one for each finger. Well, perhaps I'll keep it safe. At least that much of her I can have. If she kept it, she'd only lose it, or break it. I think putting the jet ring on is the closest I'll get to having her for keeps.’
The analyst says: ‘We'll finish there.’
I am cheating here, because I have based this on the following poem by John Donne:
Thou art not so black as my heart,Nor half so brittle as her heart, thou art;What would'st thou say? shall both our properties by thee be spoke,—Nothing more endless, nothing sooner broke?Marriage rings are not of this stuff;Oh, why should ought less precious, or less toughFigure our loves? except in thy name thou have bid it say,’—I'm cheap, and nought but fashion; fling me away.’Yet stay with me since thou art come,Circle this finger's top, which didst her thumb;Be justly proud, and gladly safe, that thou dost dwell with me;She that, O! broke her faith, would soon break thee.
T.S. Eliot in his Foreword to a new edition of the Metaphysical poets, (Eliot 1969: 287) draws an interesting distinction between turning thoughts into poetry (the Metaphysicals) and meditating poetically on thoughts: something exemplified for Eliot in later poets, the Romantics and Victorians, who sacrificed directness and energy for a more sophisticated poetic language. This is vividly on show here.
Donne ‘s famous immediacy makes it easy to conjure the moment behind the poem. He addresses the ring in an arresting way, as a witness. Then a simile, black, is elaborated. In that era, black signified constancy (since black has no shades) and mourning. She, the unfaithful (brittle) lover, has sent him, the constant one, a fashionable jet black ring. Notice the play of sounds in ‘as her heart, thou art’. A contrast between artistry and heart, in the sense of genuineness? The ring is an unwitting emblem of their different characters: ‘nothing more endless, nothing sooner broke’ implies the irony of her sending an endless ring, symbolising a potentially enduring bond that, for her, is so easily broken. The notion of constancy is displaced metonymically from the ‘black’ signifier to the circle.
The next stanza gives play to these alternatives. It contrasts, by means of the jet ring and the golden marriage ring, the two destinations of their affair: this present ambiguity and mutability, or enduring marriage. Further word plays extend the trope: ‘jet’ at the time had also the meaning of throwing away, ‘to jettison’ would be the modern equivalent, according to the notes in my edition, so the dimension of fashion, ephemera and dalliance are put into play.
In the surprise turn of the last stanza, the action of putting the ring on his finger, because of its former closeness to his love's thumb, which it formerly circled, evokes notions of intimacy. There is the idiom ‘she had me wrapped around her little finger’. Almost certainly, ‘come’ should be read in its sexual meaning; Donne was not prudish. There is a conjunction then of intimate, and sexual, connections. A union between the lovers does exist. In the last line he again contrasts her faithlessness, emphasised in that little ‘o’—another circle—which she will break, as she could break the ring if she kept it. The signifiers combine and are elaborated in complex metaphor and metonomy, to hold as possibilities all the questions and doubts plaguing the lover.
The placing of line breaks and stanzas is a most powerful tool in forming a poem. Looking again at Donne's poem, the breaks between stanzas correspond to changes in direction of the poet's train of thought. The effect is so natural-seeming as to go almost unnoticed, but it is essential. Without the break, we would not take the point. Similarly with line breaks, the second line of the second stanza gains so much power by ending, and therefore pausing, on the word ‘tough’,
whose short, strong sound matches well its meaning.
The poem's end is carefully crafted:
She that, o, broke her faith, would soon break thee.
The little particle, ‘oh’ mimics the broken faith by its interruption in the line. Finally, the poet's decision to keep the ring at least safe from her infidelity, almost as if it were a person, conjures a mood of sadness and resignation, tinged with cynicism. There is no happy ending here.
There are clear parallels with the Lacanian notions of scansion and punctuation. In order to heighten the significance of a word, the analyst may repeat it, in a different tone, maybe. Or she may deliberately remain silent where the pressure of the analysand's speech goes towards her response. Silence reflects lack and allows room for desire. As for the Lacanian cut, the point upon which the analyst chooses to end the session, its purpose is twofold. It points up meanings, in the same way as the punctuations. But in a particular way, as its function is also to install closure and castration.
Let's return to my contemporary version of John Donne. I am aware that these creations are imperfect, in that signifiers by definition are produced from repressed unconscious elements, and thus only available at all to the subject himself. In other words, these signifiers are finally only mine. But for similar reasons, using the material of real analysands risks either losing the necessary specificity or betraying confidentiality with clearly identifiable material. So, here is my version of an analyst's attempt to craft an analytical poem in another (made up) session.
John began with some casual, even blasé, remarks about the analysis. ‘A week already since we last met. The time goes so fast!’ After a short pause, he said he now felt settled in his mind about Emma; he wants to have a committed relationship, but if she does not, what can he do? The analyst just gave a questioning, ‘Uhm?’
‘Anyway, I need to generally get my life together. I'm doing this totally boring temp job. Such a pain the last job did not work out, I enjoyed that so much. And on the flotilla; I felt so much more alive there.
But never mind. I hate to think about boring stuff like that; I want to be happy at work and get on with everyone.’ He's about to rush on to another topic. The analyst says quite insistently, ‘Well, you say “never mind” but clearly you do mind.’ There is a palpable feeling of the analysand's flow being broken and he is slightly put out. The analyst forces the start of a new stanza.
‘Oh, I told you about that project leader. She was always insisting I do everything by the book, kept saying I did not keep the team informed of my plans, where I was going, who I was meeting. How did she expect any new things to get going? I was really good at new initiatives. In the end, they just said they had to part company with me, all over something really petty. My friend said the project leader wanted rid of me all along. I couldn't see that.’ To which the analyst responds, ‘No, I imagine not.’ A line break: the same topic, but a small challenge, allowing a doubt to arise.
‘What do you mean by that? I couldn't stand her. It was all about her and her own ideas. She thought she was so great. You should have seen her being the mover and shaker, always shoring up her own career, no thought for the cause.’
‘The cause? Whose cause?’ asked the analyst.
‘There's only one cause!’
‘I can see at least three. I wonder which is the most worthy cause?’
Here the analyst ended the session. She/I had in mind Othello, another meritorious warrior, who, on first seeing the sleeping Desdemona, whom he has decided he must murder, says:
It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul.
Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars.
It is the cause.
I am trying here to create a possible nodal point where strands of thought and signifiers could converge. ‘Cause’ has several possible meanings: a legal one, as for Othello, and for John as well. In his case, the wide dimension of the legal rights of the Palestinians and his own heritage of political persecution and dispossession. This has its own pull on him, but like Othello's appeal, can have its deadly inheritance
too. But then there is the meaning of having and speaking up for one's own cause and interest, which John is not good at; he prefers, as we have heard, to keep his eye on the greater good than on his own, unlike the project leader. In another similarity with Othello, his preference is to preserve the fine sounding rhetoric of politics with himself as hero, than to get down and dirty, fighting for himself—and in Lacanian terms, his desire.
As analysts, we constantly try to maintain our evenly suspended attention and listen out for the signifiers which are speaking the analysand. These signifiers keep recurring, coming in and out of the analytic frame, but define the specificity of the subject before us. On some occasions, these signifiers will cohere into a metaphor, as they do in a poem. Uniquely, but only transiently in the analytic session, the metaphor will point at the objet petit a, the lost object of desire. John Donne's jet ring captures all this lover's conflictual longings and desires in one elegant, lively whole. In the untidiness of a session, it is much harder to see. My recreated session sees the analyst trying to create a metaphor out of the signifier ‘cause’. She is attempting to evoke different resonances of the word, to facilitate the transference of the signified Lacan discusses. At this point, the analyst is taking the role of poet, we might say, and of course this is not her role.
A poem is usually spoken by one voice. Psychoanalysis, of course, is a conversation between two voices, albeit the analyst's is heard less, her words more sparing and carefully chosen. Returning again to Jacques-Alain Miller, he sets out how, for Lacan, the voice is the pre-eminent object of desire, in contra-distinction to the anal and oral objects, which are objects of demand. He means by this the contrast between the much more definite and substantial materiality of the oral and anal objects, their relation with bodily functions, their link to supply and demand, offer and refusal, in the relation with the Other. Whereas the voice, for all its inescapable nature (the ears being the one set of orifices we cannot close off) is so much more complex. Its production is after all tied to the whole complexity of the speaker's mouth, lips and palate, as well as to the hearer's ears. The breath is involved too, coming
and going. It is ephemeral, and almost impossible to recall afterwards. All this is what fits the voice to be the object of desire. Thus, Miller says, usually the oral and anal objects will appear in analysis well before the voice. We can then usefully link the voice with the end of analysis, I think. In fact, Miller says, every signifying chain is an invocation, and every tone of voice evokes the unspeakable object. We all speak and listen in order primarily to drown out the terrifying prospect, infinitely postponed, of the unspeakable being spoken. He writes:
If I had to formulate the invocation of the signifying chain, I would say that it is this: ‘Do not give me what I am asking you for, because it is not what I desire.’ But perhaps we may put it more briefly under the form of this fundamental injunction to the Other: ‘Shut up!’ (Miller 1989: 145)
Knowing when to stop and how to stop is never easy. A colleague was telling me that her tutor in a creative writing workshop said, ‘Every poem should slam shut like a door’. Reflecting on this advice, it seems to me that then the poem becomes an object with hard edges that we can caress and live with, pore over. The act has been performed, and now it is ended. With analysis, it is perhaps both similar and different. The analyst can try poetically to slam the door shut at the end of the sessions, as I have tried to show, but the end of analysis is ultimately the analysand's to determine. At that point, it is no longer the analyst who is the poet, but the analysand. It is the analysand who must finally tell the analyst: ‘Shut up!’