Reading in psychoanalysis

An approach to the problem of the materiality of analytic experience

Abstract

Psychoanalysis is not a practice of “listening” but of reading. In his essay “The direction of the treatment and the principles of its power”, Jacques Lacan proposes that in the psychoanalytic process, what is listened serves to comprehension, and criticizes the idea of “listening” as auscultation. From the beginning of his work, i.e. “Function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis”, he highlights the function of reading as a condition for interpretation. He insists on the idea that the unconscious is what is read, for example in “The instance of the letter” (1957), “The subversion of the subject” (1960), “Position of the unconscious” (1964), his Ninth and Twentieth Seminars, his epilogue to his Eleventh Seminar (1973) and “Radiophonie” (1970). He also suggests that the direction of treatment is related to acquiring the desire of the letter.

The following questions are presented: what does the psychoanalytic reading involve? Which are its specific characteristics as an operation of treatment? Which are the differences between psychoanalytic reading and other types of “reading”?

Would reading be related to “clarify a “case” resorting to a concept? Would it be a way to link a theoretic fragment to a problem from the practice in order to making it “readable”? Would it be “oriented” by theory towards practice, thus rising “clinical” questions?

It is frequently asserted that “reading” is a necessary operation in psychoanalysis: on what “material” does this reading operate?

The notion of “material” is fundamental when considering the effects of reading in psychoanalysis, which brings back the “material condition” of psychoanalytic experience, its “reading” conditions: signifier, letter, writing.

In this regard, Jean Allouch proposes that psychoanalysis is a clinic of writing, and this singularity validates the consideration of reading as preeminence of textuality. The condition of analysis entails the reading, on the part of the speaker, of his/her own trace, so that he/she can re-inscribe himself/herself in a place that is different from the one from which he/she has taken it. Reading, for Lacan, implies “reading with the writing”, that is to say to inaugurate a clinic in which reading relies on writing. The question is what kind of writing is appropriate for the object of the reading practice: reading is set on dependence of what is written, and the object emerges as the result of putting into practice what is written onto the reading process.

It is also interesting to examine how Lacan works on the notion of signifier in relation to the notion of trace; the latter seems the necessary lead to the introduction of subject’s spaltung on which psychoanalytic practice operates. 

The signifier -as material- is articulated by erasing the dimension of trace, from speech to voice, thus inscribing itself as text, letter or place. The signifier is different from trace because of its evanescent nature, which is in fact one of the conditions of existence of the signifying material, i. e. the erasure of any trace or mark. That is why the signified content is not listened: it is an effect of reading the signifier, a transition to the letter in  the place of the absence of trace.

The aim is to determine the signifier’s cause and the status of subject by articulating them with the function of reading in psychoanalysis.

The corollary is that the literal status of psychoanalytic practice will depend on the notion of subject with which we operate in practice: effect or interval between signifier and letter, a product of what is read.

In conclusion, there are two resultant paths for the examination of the reading issue: 1) The problem of the subject in relation to the signifier and the letter in search of a logic of castration and the analytic act (Ninth to Fifteenth Seminars); 2) the function of what is written in the analytic discourse: the letter as a shore, the letter as a matheme, the letter as writing (Eighteenth to Twentieth Seminars).