Introduction
Three themes predominate in the first session of Lacan’s eighth seminar. Firstly, Lacan squarely foregrounds the topic of transference, summarily dismissing then dominant approaches—including Melanie Klein’s (1952) notion of the “situation of the transference”—to this crucial clinical phenomenon. A series of links with the previous year’s seminar (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis) are, secondly, set in place (particularly the themes of beauty, ethics, and the rejection of Plato’s idea of the Sovereign Good). Lacan then, thirdly, moves on to foreground the importance of conceptualizing transference as experience and the experience of love and, furthermore, erotic love by highlighting a series of parallels between Freud and Socrates—who, of course, questioned those he came into contact with, claiming to know nothing other than how to recognize love—so as to assert that both men chose to operationalize love in the search for truth.
In the Beginning…
Lacan opens the seminar with three rapid-fire qualifications, immediately distancing himself—in characteristic fashion—from prevailing clinical conceptualizations of transference. Transference, he insists, is to be discussed in its “subjective disparity”—a term that Lacan uses to stress that he is dissatisfied with both intersubjective frameworks and the ideas of transference as a dissymmetry between subjects. He likewise highlights the idea of “supposed situation” of transference, striking distance thus from Melanie Klein’s ideas as expressed in her influential 1952 paper “The origins of the transference” (included in Envy and Gratitude, a subsequent collection of her writings). It is useful here, in grounding Lacan’s opening comments, to offer a brief description, drawn from Klein (1976/1997) herself, of this idea of the transference situation:
We are accustomed to speak of the transference situation…in unravelling the details of the transference it is essential to think in terms of total situations transferred from the past into the present, as well as of emotions, defense and object-relations.1
So, whereas transference has typically been understood in terms of direct references to the analyst, Klein insists on a broader purview whereby clinicians become aware of how a transference is not limited merely to the parameters of a projected relationship, but includes affects, defensive arrangements, and broader patterns of object-relating. Klein’s views involve a series of developmental assumptions. And while she suggests that transference is more than an ego phenomenon—a view Lacan would likely agree with—her comments imply a far broader interpretive latitude than Lacan would be likely to prescribe:
My conception of transference as rooted in the earliest stages of development and in deep layers of the unconscious is much wider and entails a technique by which from the whole material presented the unconscious elements of the transference are deduced.2
Lacan’s prioritization of signifying material cannot be squared with such a free-ranging attention to “the whole material presented [by] unconscious elements,” inclusive, one must presume, of affects and fantasy approached without attention to the structuring influence of the symbolic domain.3
Existing ideas of transference “technique” are likewise problematized by Lacan. Technique must be viewed in relation to principles that must in turn be derived from a correct topology, that is, with reference to the foregoing theoretical constructs (most notably the registers of symbolic, imaginary and real) established by Lacan himself in his previous seminars. The goal in rectifying the notion of transference—something that is extremely familiar to clinicians albeit inadequately theorized—“is to relate this notion to an experience.”4
Plato’s Schwärmerei
Lacan toys with his audience, evoking variations on the Biblical pronouncement from John 1:1: “In the beginning was the word.” This enunciation has value in its demonstration not only of the ex nihilo character of creation, but of the evocative power of speech so intimately connected to it. Frustrating the expectations of his audience however, Lacan uses the statement to point not—as one might have expected—to the primacy of the signifier (that is, of the word), but to direct us to what the term “in the beginning” might more specifically invoke in the sphere of analysis, namely: “there was praxis.” More directly: “In the beginning of analysis practice was… love”—as was made so painfully apparent in the inaugural case of Breuer and Anna O—and this love was not simply of a performative variety, that is, it “was not akin to the self-transparency of enunciation.”5
This interest in ex nihilo creation clearly links to Lacan’s (1992) previous seminar (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis), and Lacan glosses the objective of that seminar as explaining “the creationist structure of the human ethos as such, that is, the ex nihilo that subsists at its core, constituting the ‘core of our being’.”6 Ethos (i.e., the subject’s ethical substrate, their way of being) “wraps around the ex nihilo” and subsists as such in an “impenetrable void.”7 This is a reference to the notion of das Ding, which played such a central part in the first half of Seminar VII. Das Ding can be described as a voracious absence, which can, following Freud’s (1950) comments in The Project for a Scientific Psychology, be identified with that thing-like element of the other that cannot possibly be retrieved into symbolic or imaginary registers.
The reason that this notion plays such an important role in Lacan’s seminar on ethics is that with das Ding we are dealing with the radical alterity of the Nebenmensch (neighbor), with a blind spot in psychical and moral apprehension that cannot be overcome by attempts at empathy or intersubjectivity. Ethical commonplaces such as “loving the neighbour as one’s self,” the ideals of utilitarian ethics, the notion of the “right action,” and Plato’s notion of the Sovereign Good will not suffice here. Why so? Well, das Ding cannot be reduced merely to “otherness”; it is tantamount instead to a cavity of desire, a “swallowing abyss” that induces a response—a vacillating economy of attraction and avoidance—within the subject. With this concept, Lacan effectively supplements Freud’s idea of the lost primordial object of jouissance with a place, with a power of emptiness which, like the astronomical configuration of a black hole, both mesmerizes and yet potentially spells the doom of the subject. It is this “non-object,” this elevated position—incidentally, also that of the sublime (hence Lacan’s refrain, according to which an object, once raised to this position, assumes the dignity of das Ding)—that takes center stage in Lacan’s rethinking of ethic...