Internal Eights at the End of Analysis
Do you recognize the diagram on this flyer? It’s the final diagram in Seminar XI — and the central topic of tonight’s concluding lecture on this key text in Lacanian psychoanalysis.
By way of preview, some quick definitions: D = demand, I = identification, T = transference, and d = desire. Simple enough — and all clearly stated in Seminar XI. But how, exactly, do these terms hang together in analytic theory and technique?
At the risk of saying too much too soon, I’d like to suggest that there are two clinical and conceptual pathways through this internal eight at the end of Seminar XI — one which leaves analysands in the straits of desire and another which brings them to the end of analysis:
A maladaptive, regressive circuit of demand, desire, and fundamental fantasy extending from the righthand arc of demand to the downward slide of transference to the clockwise curve of identification back to righthand arc of demand. Yes, there’s enjoyment here. But it remains limited to symptomatic expressions, transgressions of the law, and heteronomous relations to the Other.
A livelier, more productive circuit of drive satisfaction extending from the righthand arc of demand to the downward slide of transference to the counterclockwise curve of desire to lefthand arc of demand. Here, there’s not just enjoyment, but also, crucially, an ability to enjoy one’s enjoyment, uninhibited by the law (read: desire) and its keeper (read: the Other). Where the matheme of fantasy was, that of the drive becomes.
It’s here, on this second pathway, that Lacan ends Seminar XI. And it’s here, in the final sentence of the seminar, that we find the clinical and conceptual horizon of analytic experience: “There only may the signification of a limitless love emerge, because it is outside the limits of the law, where alone it may live” (276).
How to live and love beyond the limits of the law — this will be our topic tonight.
See you in a few hours — and stay tuned for the recording tomorrow morning if you can’t join us live.