FromTheLettersToThe Letter
Tsvetelina Ivanova
FromTheLettersToThe Letter
A really tough period! In the waiting room between the end of the analysis with my former analyst and my first session continuing with another, in limbo after the withdrawal of the transference and the fragile appearance of a new one - left to the mercy of the drive.
“At first, the unconscious is manifested to us as something that holds itself in suspense in the area, I would say, of the unborn. That repression should discharge something into this area is not surprising. It is the abortionist’s relation to limbo.”¹
Thinking of the letter, there is an image arising - my first signature that I would inscribe in the psychoanalytical books I collected like treasure when I was a child. Barely understanding anything from the texts, the signature, consisted of the first letter of my name Ts/Ц ⃰…and the first and the second letters of my family name AR/AP, conveniently skipping the first letter of my father’s name S/C - which, by accident or not, is the first letter of the name of my childhood love and my husband’s name. Is this the missing letter? The gap in the knowledge, the point of the impossibility that I repeatedly used to look for in love…
What repetition is at stake here?!
As Daniel Roy says in “Introduction to “Note on the Child” about what is passed on in a family: “[…] an embodied desire […] [T]his is what gives way to a diffraction into two avenues for this embodied desire: the path of lack, and the path of the name.”² The name- linked to the fantasy and the lack linked to the real. One in a union with the meaning, the other provokes “Something of the order of the non-realized.”³ Fantasy, being on the side of meaning could operate endlessly creating various scenarios, all of them resembling one another in their core.
And what appears once the truth transmitted by the family no longer supports the defense against the real? What happens when the lack is revealed? This is unthinkable! It is of the register of the unbearable. It touches the point of impossible and opens the door of the limbo: “It is therefore the repetition of a trauma”₄, Alexandre Stevens teaches us in his argument. These scenarios which are similar have the effect of covering the hole, to make it just possible for life to go on and to reduce the tension of the death drive.
So, what about my missing letter then?!
The letter as a part of other letters, as a part of words, of sentences, of speech, is missing. No law or knowledge can find a place for it. This missing letter is weaved into the flesh, into that point from which life has started.
References
¹ Lacan J., Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis J-A Miller (Ed.). trans., A Sheridan, London: Hogarth, 1977, p.23.
² Roy D., Introduction to “Note on the Child”, The Lacanian Review 4, 2018, p. 5.
³ Lacan J., ibid.
₄ Stevens A., Fixation and Repetition – Argument, available online here:
⃰ Ц, is a letter in the Slavic alphabet – missing in the Latin alphabet and pronounced like “Ts”.