One Holophraze Two Teachings

Malka Shein

In the argument for the NLS Congress, A. Stevens notes: “Jacques-Alain Miller is the one who connected this fixation with the One of jouissance in the last Lacan, where jouissance is no longer taken up in the dialectic of desire but becomes a purely contingent shock." He also points out that in Lacan’s last teaching, repetition will find a radical formulation, since it becomes the sinthome itself. He concludes by saying: “the sinthome is the repetition of a fixation, it is even the repetition + the fixation", when the One of the signifier, outside the symbolic, which strikes the body and leaves a mark of jouissance repeats, iterates.

Even if the initial shock of language on the body “can never be directly reconstructed" in analysis, as Anne Lysy argues1, holophrase is given a prominent place in what may constitute such a “purely contingent shock". For example, in Araceli Fuentes`s testimony2, she recalled the sentence she repeatedly heard back in her early childhood from mourners in her village – old women who knew her late mother before she died, when Araceli was 8 months old. “Ah! If only your mother could see you!" was the out-of-meaning sentence, which took the form of an holophrase, and established in her body a foreign and recurring jouissance. It had a crucial effect, she attested.

In Laurent's lecture in 19843: “The impact of Lacan's teaching on psychoanalysis with children", he broached Lacan's response to Maud Mannoni`s thesis. In the 1960s Mannoni generally posited the child as the object of the mother's fantasy and argued that when the child is trapped in this position it seems to be causally sufficient for a series of disorders, from mental retardation to psychosis.

According to her, the child and his mother then form one body, in which the desire of the one may be confused with that of the other. Since the structure of desire is that of being the desire of the Other, the “fusion of bodies" was Mannoni`s criterion to distinguish what is pathological in that confusion.

Noting the publication of Mannoni's book4, Lacan questions her thesis in his Seminar XI of 1964 and he rectifies its thesis. Laurent summarizes his articulations: “The bodies of mother and child do not become fused; rather, the first couple of signifiers becomes a holophrase when the child is reduced by the mother to “being no more than the support of her desire in an obscure term […]. Making the signifying chain continuous is then presented as the common point for an entire series of cases which are different from one other in so far as the subject `does not occupy the same place in each`. This place, indicated by the notation (i(a, a', a", a"', . . .)), will be written simply as a in Lacan's subsequent teaching." Based on Miller`s remarks, Laurent emphasizes that the novelty that Lacan`s teaching of those years presents, is the polarity, recently promoted between the subject of jouissance and the subject that the signifier represents for an other signifier.

Lacan's articulation in seminar XI: “I will go so far as to formulate that, when there is no interval between S1 and S2, when the first dyad of signifiers become solidified, holophrased, we have the model for a whole series of cases—even though, in each case, the subject does not occupy the same place."5

In my view, this articulation goes beyond the consequences of the holophrase on the polarity of structures of the subject, neurosis or psychosis – Lacan's early teaching precedes his last teaching, linking the initial shock of `the one all alone` holophrase on the body, to the one-by-one sinthome, as fixation + repetition.

References

1 Lysy A., Body Event and the End of Analysis, 2012. NLS Website - orientation texts.

2 Araceli Fuentes, GIEP Pass evening in Tel Aviv, 2015.

3 Eric Laurent with the collaboration of Robert Lefort, Rosine Lefort, Esthela Solano-Suhez and Marc Strauss The impact of Lacan's teaching on psychoanalysis with children for the Third International Encounter of the Freudian Field, Buenos Aires, 1984.

4 Mannoni M., 1972, The backward child and his mother; a psychoanalytic study.  (A. M. Sheridan Smith, Trans.). New York: Pantheon. (Original work published 1964)

5 Lacan J., 1981, Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. (A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York W.W. Norton & Company,Inc. p. 237.