Download The Analyst Confronted with the State Legitimacy, p. Guy Le Gaufey

GUY LE GAUFEY
THE
ANALYST CONFRONTED WITH
THE
STATE
LEGITIMACY
There are many ways to enter this question : until now, it has mainly been presented as a
matter of law, especially regarding the making of new laws in Brussels today. Is it true that a sort
of European status of the psychoanalyst is soon to fall on us ? Are we going to pay taxes as
psychoanalysts ? (and if so, on what basis ?), Don't we need to be protected against all that ?
etc., etc. I don't mean that these questions are worthless and out of place, but I do know that
they need some more light to get any valuable answer. In my opinion, all of them start up from
the same single mistake : they purely and simply identify the analyst as a citizen, without paying
any attention to the fact that such an identification is grounded on a wrong basis and that it is
incorrect to pass from one of these qualities to the other without realizing the gap between them.
There is an obvious symptom of such a gap, at least for French analysts : whatever school,
group, association they belong to, they don't have any diploma which qualifies them as
psychoanalysts, which clearly means that the state authority doesn't recognize them as such. I
am not trying to assert that all of them are happy with this situation : but we must notice as a
starting point that numerous generations of psychoanalysts have taken care not to obtain such
diplomas. Why ?
Here, I could line up a lot of facts, or alleged facts, to describe what have been the
relations between analysts and the state authority in France, or I could try to comment all over
again on Freud's Lay Analysis. But I will be satisfied with only noting the apparent basis of this
very special relationship between analysts and state authority. On the one hand, the State has
never been very much involved with so few people, and it didn't take the least initiative to do so.
On the other hand, even if some analysts repeatedly tried to solicit for establishing a special
relationship between the State and the professional, they failed, not because of the State, but
primarily because they failed to be representative of the analysts in general – and the state is
unable to treat with people who are not representative. This is the point, and we would make a
The Analyst Confronted with the State Legitimacy, p. 2
very serious mistake if we only thought that such a failure occurred because the french analysts
already were (and still are more and more) divided into groups, associations, schools and sets
of any kind. This view would only be the tree screening us from the forest we have to go into.
The impossibility of unifying psychoanalysts has very deep roots, and must not be attributed only
to the whims of their different membership. After all, why couldn't they have built throughout
these years a sort of confederation gathering together their numerous, different and specific
groups, as doctors did ? It would have taken time, of course, but it was not so impossible a goal.
And I must recognize that today some people still feed hopes to reach such a goal, considering
that it is but a mere question of time. I clearly don't think this way, and even if I am not so sure of
being right, I'd want to show you that, just as for us there is no ratio between man and female,
we'd better think that there is not any ratio between the one who distributes legitimacy to
everyone today — that is the State — and the one who is paid for knowing what any legitimacy
is made of —I mean the analyst. The gap between them is essentially to be referred to this
matter of legitimacy, and instead of blindly asking for any kind of this stuff from the Great
Dispenser of it, we'd better now pay attention to the way this State became such. We have to
pay attention to history.
How did the modern state become the only spring of legitimacy ? To answer this question,
we must go much further back than the French revolution, for since this date the modern state
has inherited from all the legitimacy the ancient kingdom had succeeded in establishing. But
before that, there was a time where such a legitimacy was not so well-founded. To put it briefly,
let's call it Middle Ages, with only one question about it : what happened when the King died
without any heir or heiress ? Or, to put it another way : how did people of that time manage
when there was a break between two different dynasties ? When a new dynasty was taking
charge of the realm, what kind of explanation would the new King give to his subjects and to
himself ? What kind of legitimacy was he claiming then ?
It's only with a question of that kind that we have some chance to understand the very
special relationship we have to respect between analysts and state authority. In fact, we do
know that to understand the nature of the relationship between father and son, we need to know
how this father became such, that is : how he managed with his own childhood. It's just the
same with the state authority : we must know at least the main features of the process which its
apparent unlimited legitimacy came through. So : how did the new King account for his rights to
enjoy and possess the crown ? For strength alone, which was so necessary to get the job, was
clearly not enough to justify the right to stay in charge as a legitimate king. So for us the real
question is about the making of legitimacy ; if we only inquired about how an analyst could be
legitimated by an already given legitimacy — that of the state — we would miss the point of this
question and, thus, we would be entangled in a lot of unnecessary difficulties.
The Analyst Confronted with the State Legitimacy, p. 3
The problem of this making can be put in a mathematical way : given a continuity —
which in this case will be named the Realm or the Crown — how to manage to adapt it to the
inescapable discontinuity of the kings in charge of this crown ? For, despite their innermost
feelings and their usual practice, these kings were clearly not owners of the realm and,
consequently, they could not hand it down as a property. In that remote past, they did have their
own personal real estate as feudal Lords, but as kings, they had to respect the properties of the
other Lords. So, what kind of legal relationship did they have to keep with this realm which they
had, moreover, to protect and fight for ? For centuries the answer was not so easy to find out,
and the solution came slowly through the structure of the Church (who had to solve the same
kind of problem for itself), and through the patient work of medieval English jurists.
In its details, this answer is very intricate ; but from a distance, it looks like Columbus' egg
since it asserts that there is only one king for one kingdom, despite the discontinuity of all the
kings, and even despite the discontinuity of dynasties themselves. How did these jurists obtain
such a result, for they were very rational men (or at least not less than us)? The roman jurists
had already invented on their own the notion of a 'Corporation', which meant the lawful capacity
to gather together a plurality (of human beings, of houses, of goods, and so on) into the unity of
a single 'moral' person. For instance, during the Middle Ages, a lot of towns won their
independence from their feudal Lords in turning them into corporations : in that situation, in spite
of the succession of the town's people and the general changing of the town, it remained the
same through all these alterations, thanks to this new species of legal being named
«corporation». Each human being, each piece of this town no longer belonged to a Lord, but
belonged to this new unity given by the Corporation. The corporation was a sort of solution to
keep a unity through a discontinuity, and it could work as such because its very crucial
relationship belonging to was maintained by the creation of a new addressee. The English
medieval jurists went even further by extending this notion of a corporation gathering a plurality
to a notion of a corporation including only one person at the same time : the unitary corporation,
as they immediately called it.
And why such an oddity ? Exactly to line up the kings of one crown into the same corporation, to assure that each king belonged to the same and single 'Corporation', no matter what
dynasty, family, religion, etc., he was belonging to at the same time. They had thus created a
new and stupendous addressee : the body of a corporation which always has only one member.
So that, if someone became king — whatever means he employed to do so — he immediately
belonged to this corporation, after the former King and before the next. The only imperious
necessity was the absolute impossibility of having two kings at the same time, even for a few
minutes. If not, the whole system caved in. One king could never meet another king of the same
kingdom. From nowadays, it seems very simple and natural, but in fact it was rather complicated
to manage it during the burial of a king. The new one couldn't meet the former until he was
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officially deprived of all his kingly qualities, and finally buried as a private man. This could last
months.
But even with such a unitary corporation, the question of legitimacy still remained at stake.
How to distinguish, during difficult times, between a regular pretender to the throne, and a
successful go-getter ? Who was in charge to recognize the good one and, accordingly, to give
him his new legitimacy ? The Nation ? But it didn't exist as such. The Church ? Of course its
approval was absolutely necessary since the King had to be a representative of Christ, but we
must take into account that this approval was not enough. So, the Lords ? Certainly not : they
were very often pretenders too. And even if this picture I give you of such a situation is hardly an
outline, the point is that there was no person, no corps, no referee to play as a bridge between
the ancient legitimacy and the new one. There were not any proceedings for such a leap, and
we can already notice that it is a situation every one who expects to become soon an analyst
knows very well : how impossible it seems to cross this gap of legitimacy since there is clearly
not any proceedings which would show the way for becoming what you are not yet.
That means, for medieval kings at least, that it was obviously a matter-of-fact question :
the pretender, whoever he was, had to be recognized by a lot of groups and people, including
the Head of the Church, the Pope himself, but once he belonged to the royal unitary corporation,
he was definitely legitimated. After this, he could let this legitimacy fall from him onto anyone he
chose, since he had then become the very spring of legitimacy, like the modern state today.
Once this man belonged to this unitary corporation,
the Crown, the Realm (which were
obviously a plurality of things and human beings) were gathered together afresh under the
authority of one single person. The Crown, the Realm could then turn themselves towards this
man and belong to him — as transitory as he was on this earth — because this man belonged
to the unitary corporation of kings. In spite of the multiplicity of kings, the unity of this addressee
was thus protected, and this link between legitimacy and the making of a unity is our turning
point.
But at first, it is revealing that such a unitary corporation doesn't claim to give anyone any
clue about who would be the better candidate to fulfill it. It doesn't give any definition of what a
King is, has to be, or is expected to be. It strictly says nothing about all that jazz. It only asserts
that there is but one person who has to be in charge of the Crown at one time, with a strange
consequence : the King had obviously two bodies. First, his own as a person, a body which was
born, which will die one day, which can be mad or ill, and the King's body, the addressee he
himself belongs to and which was never born, will never die and can't by any means be mad or
ill. This latter was, properly speaking, the body of the unitary corporation itself, therefore the
place of an absolute legitimacy which, like the kantien Pure Reason, has neither beginning nor
end, and can't be impaired.
The Analyst Confronted with the State Legitimacy, p. 5
A lot of Shakespeare's plays marvelously show what a tragedy it can be for a human
being to endure such a splitting, to stand for a being larger than him, up to the point where he
has to be identified with it. But, for the time being, I invite you to consider this strange body of
the unitary corporation as the very spring of the state legitimacy today. So that asking for any
kind of legitimacy is just the same as asking to belong to this body as one of its parts, as a
citizen clearly is. That is why I first said that if the analyst is also a citizen, that doesn't allow us to
equal the two. For since his birth, a citizen is named, registered and recognized as part of this
body, and till his death he is permanently linked by a lot of rights and duties to this body. Why it
shouldn't be the same for an analyst ?
Let's have a closer look at this unitary corporation, for I think that this kind of
corporation — with its strange idea of two bodies for one single person — is valid not only for
medieval kings, but for the analyst as well, at least as far as we try to catch him in the
transference game, or, better, the transference playing.
This parallel between kings and analysts holds on the question of the existence of a third
party, a third person. We just had a glance on the fact that this theory of the king's two bodies
came out in a time when neither state, nor any authority could jump over the gap created by
king's death. The body of the unitary corporation was then the only thing concerning the
legitimacy which was not supposed to vanish during this lapse of time. But all this brilliant theory
caved in when appeared a jurisdiction able to keep on functionning during the in-between. In the
french History, this event is very precisely dated: when Henry the Fourth was murdered in 1610,
his only son, Louis the thirteenth-to-be, who was only nine years old then, was taken by his
mother in front of the Parliament of Justice, in a very special session called in french «un lit de
justice» (a bed of Justice), and this Parliament, for the first time in its own history, recognized
the new King as such, which was enough to legitimize the Regency of Marie de Medicis.
After that, every new French king — Louis the fourteenth, the fifteenth, the sixteenth —
did the same with the Parliament of Justice, and they had more and more only one body
because the other one was more and more that of the State, embodied at first by this Parliament
since it was still in action whereas the previous king's body had died out, and the next one was
not yet legitimated. Between the king and his kingdom, a third term became stronger and
stronger, up to the point where it seemed to need not any longer the other body, that of the king
himself, so the head of Louis the sixteenth could fall down as a sign of the uselessness, and the
superfluousness of this body. Till then, the State is the unquestionnable third party, beyond
kings, beyond presidents, in fact : beyond any individual. Properly speaking, this state was never
born, it is not supposed to die any day, and it can't be mad or ill. Politics can ever be such ; but
the State is not to be confused with politics. I don't want here to caricature anything ; I am not
talking about Big Brother and the like. Only about the state as, for instance, the jurisdiction able
The Analyst Confronted with the State Legitimacy, p. 6
to warrant that a contract between two partners will be respected, especially in case of
unwillingness. This strange and omnipresent being of the State has gradually come loose, bit by
bit, from the intricate king's body, and stands now as the unquestionnable third person and the
very spring of legitimacy.
I'd like to describe now the stance of the analyst in the transference playing as that of
someone who knows that such a third jurisdiction is out of any reach for him. On that precise
topic, I am impelled to contradict Freud on one of his judgments. At the end of the first part of
the famous chapter seven of his Interpretation of dreams, Freud is talking about the
fundamental rule. He writes that the utterance of this rule boils down to a complete giving up of
any purposive idea from the patient. But he notices that, even in the most favorable cases, two
purposive ideas, two Zielvorstellungen, remain at stake :
When I instruct a patient to abandon reflection of any kind and to tell me
whatever comes into his head, I am refering firmly on the presumption
that he will not be able to abandon the purposive idea inherent to the
treatment [...] There is another purposive idea of which the patient has no
suspicion — one relating to myself.
The last one clearly puts the transference itself. But the former one, which is presented as
a «presumption» — not a fact — must be linked to what we know as Freud's wish to keep the
transference under control. If the transference playing came to be played too seriously, Freud
kept within himself (thanks to this precious «presumption») the possibility to argue, in the name
of transference, that something was going wrong. I don't know if he frequently worked that way,
but if he did, I must recognize that such a presumption is not mine, and that my technic is
different from his on a major point. I can't elaborate further on this topic, but I think that a
presumption of that kind was at stake when he wrote, later on, that psychotic people are not
good for transference playing.
But for the time being, the point I wish to stress is that this possibility for the analyst to turn
to any purposive idea which would stand between the patient and himself is useless, worthless
and dangerous. The only assumption I can do on this matter is that there is not any end, not any
aim we can share with the patient without disregarding the transference we are supposed to
take care of. If transference is actually the link between patient and analyst, each of them has to
manage with it, but the analyst is the one to know that this link must not be supplanted by any
reference of any kind, whatsoever it could be : to get better, to become an analyst, to be free of
any anxiety, to achieve a certain kind of treatment, etc., etc.
We must also realize that the State and any purposive idea are very close together : they
are something which individuals can refer to when they find themselves in disagreement. They
both have a sort of vocation to make a third in any game — except in the one I name the
transference playing. I perfectly know that there is a large current in psychoanalysis today to
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pretend that between patient and analyst there is a contract, an agreement. Of course, there is a
deal about time, about money, maybe about many other things. But a contract implies the third
one able to carry it out, or even to enforce it, if necessary. If there is not such any «third one», it
is not a contract. If you agree with me in considering that the analyst can't resort to any kind of
third party in the transference playing — neither that of the State (which is clear for everybody, I
think), nor that of any purposive idea (which is not so obvious) — you will be led to consider it as
a very restricting point in the analytical technic, fraught with consequences in the positionning of
the analyst in regard of the state itself.
I don't preach any romantism which would depict us as pirats, but I do assert that the
analyst is working, in regard of the State, in an obvious extraterritoriality which has to be
respected. Lacan had had a bright insight on this topic : in the very grating tone he used in his
text : «The Situation of Psychoanalysis in 1956», he gave a sort of ironic solution of this
problem : the American Congress could let a little territory — like a philatelic state, let's say :
Ellis Island — to the I.P.A., so that this organisation could have then promulgated its own
decrees, or its own dictates, according to its own legitimacy as a state among others. This
remark perfectly pointed out that even a psychoanalytical group, whatever it could be, is not the
third one able to play as an institutionnalized third party between a patient and an analyst.
Of course, the place of the Other is not exactly empty, if we mean through this word the
symbolic order itself. But this order is never complete, and its own incompleteness prevents us
to give it too much a consistency and, above all, to personify it. If an analysis must meet the
point where this Other is questionned as a being, we have to stand aside from any recognition of
a third party as such, and therefore from any recognition from the State.
To put it frankly : running after a legitimacy from the State leads to a misunderstanding of
the transference playing, and begs the question of the consistency and the completeness of the
Other. If the analyst lends his person to embodying this Other, he is the one who has to know
that this body — which is that of language, that of money, that of exchange — has the exact
texture of the unitary corporation body.
Did medieval kings truly believe that they had two bodies ? They certainly did. In regard of
this, a freudian analyst is certainly not a king ; but he is more than half of a king, at least if he
realizes that the stuff dreams (and symptoms, and transference, and so on) are made of is a
body, but a body deserted by any subject of any kind, included the one represented by a signifier
for another signifier.