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CLINICAL NOTES
Jacques-Alain Miller (1996). ‘An Introduction to Seminars I and II: Lacan’s
Orientation Prior to 1953 (II),’ Reading Seminars I and II: Lacan’s Return to Freud,
edited by Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, and Maire Jaanus (Albany, SUNY Press),
SUNY Series in Psychoanalysis and Culture, pp. 15-25.
In the second of the three lectures that Jacques-Alain Miller gave in Paris in 1996 on
Lacan’s orientation before 1953, he explains that Jacques Lacan’s most important
theoretical concerns or ‘antecedents’ were the following: the structure of language;
the psychoanalytic model of communication; Freud’s libido theory; and the
theoretical differences between the ego and the subject.
Needless to say, Lacan being a clinician wanted to understand how a better
understanding of these phenomena would make psychoanalytic interventions more
effective.
As Miller points out, Lacan was always mulling on ‘how psychoanalysis works.’
That is why I am summarizing these aspects of Miller’s lectures under the aegis of
‘clinical notes.’ This is, needless to say, the question which every clinician must
ponder on.
Lacan was certainly not the only French psychoanalyst to be preoccupied with the
structure and function of language.
It is impossible for any analyst who has interpreted a dream in the analytic situation
to not get interested in the ‘formations of the unconscious’ in general and with the
dream-work in particular and find some similarities between these structures and
that of language.
What made Lacan different was that as a reader of Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman
Jakobson, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, he was able to formalize the similarities between
‘oneiric’ phenomena and ‘linguistic’ phenomena; posit structures in common; and
work out a method for translating between the concepts of linguistics and those of
psychoanalysis.

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Lacan must have been a careful reader of Freudian meta-psychology because he was
always trying to relate the ‘two systems of mental functioning’ – i.e. consciousness
and the unconscious.
Freud and Lacan are united in their contention that mental phenomena are not
necessarily conscious to the knowing subject; and that, in fact, consciousness is only
a small portion of the psyche which remains not only ‘unknown’ but ‘unknowable.’
So even while psychoanalysis attempts to make the ‘unconscious conscious,’ it
cannot succeed in doing so to the extent that it would like to or which ‘the early
Freudians’ thought necessary during a clinical interpretation.
The main question for Lacan in his early years was whether the structure of
language, communication, and the analytic experience could be subject to a
phenomenological description.
What Miller means by a phenomenological description is ‘to present what is going
on without any preconceptions.’
What this means is that Lacanians work with a coherence model of truth and not a
correspondence model of truth. That is because only a coherence model of truth can
explain the fact that a patient’s symptoms are mediated by fantasy.
Lacanian analysts don’t contact the patient’s parents, for instance, to ask if the
patient’s account of his own childhood is correct because that would be a complete
misunderstanding of the fact that the patient’s ‘take’ on his symptom is what is at
stake in the analysis.
The only stuff in contention in the analytic situation then is language and the
fantasies that the patient expresses through the act of free-association on the couch.
It is therefore extremely important for the patient to be the main source of
information for the analyst and that he reports whatever appears to the surface of his
mind without pretending that he really understands what it going on. This is
however easier said than done.

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The transference itself, Miller points out, is related to the fact that the analytic
situation is asymmetrical; the analyst ‘punctuates’ the discourse of the patient and
does not talk back like in everyday life even though analysis is known as the ‘talking
cure.’
This leads to a situation of dependency on the part of the patient. That is why
‘regression, repetition, and transference’ are inevitable in the analytic situation.
Unlike most other forms of communication, the listener is in a position to determine
the course of what will happen in the analytic situation since he gives form to what
may seem like a chaotic number of utterances on the part of the patient through his
interventions.
The Lacanian experiments with the variable sessions are of consequence in this
context because the length of the session will determine what the meaning of the
session really is.
A variable session also helps to precipitate the disclosures of the patient’s
unconscious which might not have been the case in the context of a regular session
in which the patient will be able to resist more effectively.
This is just another way of saying that the obsessive patient has to be ‘hystericized’
and the only way to do that is to vary the length of the session or punctuate in a way
that precipitates the fantasy hidden in his symptoms.
These then are a few of the theoretical developments and clinical innovations from
the ‘later Lacan’ that is available in an embryonic form in the ‘early Lacan.’
These are also some of the reasons that Lacan was not only hugely preoccupied with
the structure of language (given his axiom that ‘the unconscious is structured like a
language’), but his ongoing attempt to understand the relationship between the
structure of language and the asymmetric form of communication that constitutes
‘the analytic situation’ in psychoanalysis.

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That is also why these Lacanian innovations in both theory and practice are
important for the history of structuralism in France.
Unlike most structuralist thinkers, Lacan was interested in using the analytic
situation as the prototype of communication; hence his formula of communication
which states that in analysis the subject receives his own message - albeit in an
‘inverted form.’
This structural inversion is a way of ensuring that the analyst is not only better
informed on what the patient’s fantasy structure really is in any given act of free-
association, but is also useful for finding out whether or not the patient is projecting
from the couch.
Lacan’s invocation of the word ‘complex’ is also important here since he is using it to
mean something akin to the term ‘structure.’
An important problem for psychoanalysts of Lacan’s generation was to decide
whether they should describe oedipal phenomena from a structural or a dynamic
point of view.
Another complicating factor was the fact that the term ‘complex’ occurs in the
writings of a number of psychoanalysts who were working with different
assumptions and precepts about the structure of the family and the emergence of
oedipal phenomena; these analysts include Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Alfred
Adler.
Two important papers - in addition to Lacan’s work on the ‘reality principle’ - that
Miller mentions in this lecture are those that he wrote on the ‘mirror phase’ and on
‘aggressivity in analysis.’
These papers are important not only because they explain the order of the
‘imaginary’ (i.e. ‘dual relations’), but can also be read retroactively as being
implicated in the Lacanian order of the real.
What is important in these papers is not the imaginary as such, but the fact that the
imaginary has effects of the real.
Linear readings of Lacan’s theoretical trajectory invariably overlook this obvious
point and essentialize the imaginary as an order that is completely unrelated to the
real.
Hence, the inability on the part of some readers to differentiate between the ‘effects’
of the imaginary and the ‘effects’ of the real within a psychoanalytic theory of

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fantasy; and the conflation of the je with the moi; and the ‘subject’ with the ‘ego’ that
constitutes the problem of the ‘self’ in ego-psychology.
And, finally, as Miller points out, the main challenge in teaching psychoanalysis is to
relate language with the libido (jouissance).
It is not clear how exactly that is to be done.
Here is a possible way: It is important to remember that there are two theories of the
unconscious in the Lacanian doctrine.
There is the Lacanian unconscious structured as a language (that is dear to literary
critics) and there is the Millerian unconscious that is not structured as a language,
but which encounters a limit in the ‘jouissance of the Other;’ this relates to what
Miller terms the ‘extimacy of the Other.’
In order to relate a theory of language with that of Freud’s libido theory, it is
important to invoke the extimate object.
While Miller doesn’t invoke the extimate object in this lecture, he differentiates
between the ‘Other of the hysteric’ and the ‘Other of the psychotic’ in terms of their
fantasy structure and the existential questions that they feel compelled to ask in the
symbolic.
For Lacanians, the subject is not a pre-determined object, but a locus; the subject is
not an answer but a question. To conclude, then, ‘the subject is a question mark.’
Miller’s intervention in this series of lectures is an attempt to disambiguate precisely
a number of conflations in the attempts to appropriate Lacanian theory and restitute
it to the trajectory that can be worthy of ‘the Freudian field’ or termed ‘Lacanian.’
SHIVA KUMAR SRINIVASAN