Conversation with Identity, the Identitarian, and Identification

Published online, December 2024.

To access the references for this text, download the article in PDF format.

“If in Reaps and Sowings I address someone other than myself, it is not a ‘public.’ I address you who read me as a person, and as a person alone. It is to the one in you who knows how to be alone, to the child, that I would like to speak, and to no one else. The child is often far away, I know that well. He has seen all kinds of things and for a long time. He has hidden God knows where, and it is not easy, often, to reach him. One would swear he has been dead forever, that he never existed rather—and yet, I am sure he is there somewhere, and very much alive.” “

1 — Identity Misgenders the Sky

2 — Without Consent, the Identitarian

3 — A Community of Solitary Individuals, Far from Identification

Hello everyone,

Welcome to this third session of Conversations on the Unconscious, Social Bonds, and Sexuations.

I see you did not go to the reopening of Notre-Dame with Donald Trump.

Today, I am leading the conversation solo. In January, we will welcome our first guest, Bruno Perreau, political scientist and professor at MIT in Boston. We will converse with him about intrasectionality, intersectionality, minoritarian universalism, and queer theory.

***

Let us turn to today’s subject.

Identity, the identitarian, and identification do not constitute an exemplary trinity in the psychoanalytic field; it is neither constituted nor envisioned. Most of the time, these signifiers are used as qualifiers for one another, or as symptomatic shortcuts designating pathogenic or morbid elements.

While identification is a fairly well-known notion in psychoanalysis, through its conceptualization and use, this is not equally true for identity or for the identitarian. Under these conditions, the ordinary recourse to these two notions, regarding psychoanalytic clinical practice, seems delicate or inevitably approximate. Indeed, it remains difficult, even impossible, to sustain and define what it would be, for example, the analyst’s identity—whether they may be qualified as Freudian or Lacanian or Marxist or fetishist—or the identity of psychoanalysis, nor even what an identitarian clinic or non-identitarian clinic would be.

Yet we easily perceive, upon hearing them, the current necessity of confronting what the identitarian and identity have to teach us about certain dimensions of clinical practice and theoretical elaboration. But without a hypothesis of definition or minimal metapsychological reference point, we would risk ideological speculations without being able to usefully address the questions and practices engaged with these signifiers. I will therefore propose to you, once again, a table, as a hypothesis.

Some works arising from psychoanalytic experience have already confronted identity and its stakes. Various journals have taken an interest in the clinic of identity, monographs have been devoted to this perspective.

However, defining what identity is in psychoanalysis has not found a sufficient answer at present, beyond the fact that its emergence subsequent to the birth of psychoanalysis immediately questioned Freudian psychoanalysis, without it being possible to grasp its qualities in favor of attention focused on the disturbances and disruptions it induces outside itself rather than the study of its internal troubles.

The identitarian, for its part, immediately raises another question, that of its political use aimed at designating, on the one hand, a form of radicalized claim of an identity in identitarian movements, notably those we call “the identitarians” on the side of far-right activists (for example, Némésis, these days, in the news), and on the other hand, the identitarian hole of the lost memories of jihadist terrorists that their fanaticism attempts to reduce.

We are compelled to explore simultaneously three territories—psychic, sociological, and political—by taking advantage of their overlapping zones, their intersections.

Here then, in three points and three stages of an itinerary guided by the object, which we will follow in its traces, is how to illustrate the use of these two reference tables for identity, the identitarian, and identification and that of gender, sex, and sexuation.

Diagonally, a possible path emerges: in the imaginary, identity and gender share being objects, just as identification and sex are in the symbolic, but also the identitarian and sexuation as impossible objects in the real.

We will follow the object in three parts, as we can represent the maneuver of a treatment, which does not constitute a model, in three acts. This by inviting recent sexual actualities.

1 — First Movement — S/R — Identity Misgenders the Sky: from supposed knowledge to the real unconscious.

2 — Second Movement — R/I — Without Consent, the Identitarian: from the real unconscious to the specular imaginary.

3 — Third Movement — I/S — A Community of Solitary Individuals, Far from Identification: from the non-specular imaginary to supposed knowledge.

1 — Identity Misgenders the Sky

Whether national, sexual, cultural, political, hybrid, mixed, or deconstructed, identity tirelessly conceals, beneath its appearance of stability, its true state, which is that of crisis. What we lose sight of every time identity presents itself, each time it manifests, whether we defend it or attack it. We no longer know that identity is not separate from identity crisis, wrongly considered as a disturbance of identity, a temporary turbulence leading one to believe in its imaginary reestablishment toward its fantasized homogeneity, forgetful of the crisis that founds it and continually agitates it.

Identity, however, appeared for what it is in our era, let us say since the mid-20th century, under the features of identity crisis, and more particularly the adolescent crisis, in 1968. It was a patient of Anna Freud who elevated identity to its rank of contemporary usage, his name was Erik Erikson (nothing to do with the Erikson of hypnosis).

Strange coincidence… gender, as we envision it in our era, was itself elevated in discourse by John Money, notably, in 1955. Thus, gender and identity appeared with the meaning we currently attribute to them at the same moment in history, in the 1950s-1960s, therefore after the war of 1939-1945.

Identity and gender have shared since their concomitant emergences not being considered psychoanalytic notions, while they nevertheless testify to the seizure of two processes of subjective crises that interest and challenge the unconscious: that of the identitarian (not designated at that time), and that of the real of sex (not mentioned either at that time). Since then, identity and gender have danced around sex in the blind spot of our vision.

John Money would develop, in the 1950s-1960s, the notion of gender identity, and that of core gender identity, leaving these signifiers open to their dynamism, which Robert Stoller would shortly thereafter formalize and excessively fix in a mechanical developmental psychological conception of gender anchored to sex, to the point of having lost sight of their matter (the identitarian, the real of sex, the sexual) in favor of their form (identity, sex, gender).

Gender identity has been, and remains since then, the best means of fixing gender in an identitarian fantasy: that of a subjective sexual homogeneity. This allows political leaders, these days, to declare their commitment to the fight against Gender Theory and especially the erasure of the notion of gender identity from sex education programs. While sexual identity will be maintained there.

This partial blindness, which is not the prerogative of politicians, preferring form to matter, has been able to encourage an overdetermination of our attempts to think about sex, gender, and identity based on their state rather than their process, in the psychoanalytic field. This is perfectly visible in theoretical conceptions about gender anchored, they too, to sex as natural data, solely due to the coincidence between the genital organ and the procreative function, which, as we know, does not withstand the experience of the unconscious.

If anatomy is destiny, it is not a genetic or biological question, but a psychosexual and organic one, therefore unconscious.

To account, however, for their development, their process, at least on an individual scale, referring to their circulation, their crossing, and their mutation has been necessary for those interested in sexual actualities. I have said it, identity and gender dance around sex. The era of mixing, fluidity, hybridity has opened in this way from the too-firm ground to be softened of discursive fixities, cultural and institutional assignments. But this has not cleared the initial ambiguity, leaving part of the proposals for categorical deconstructions, which have proliferated for more than twenty years, prisoners of the statement to the detriment of enunciation—and consequently of the unconscious.

Not that these attempts have deliberately chosen to abandon the unconscious, but without returning strictly to the original coordinates of identity and gender/sex, namely a crisis and two semblances, the results of this research encounter definitive limitations, at each stage of their development, requiring the preference of form over the consideration of matter. This is not unrelated to the performative prevalence that encourages this sidelining of the signifier—we addressed this in our previous session. This has effects on our theoretical efforts. Incompatibilities appear between theoretical models that we want to bring together without being able to truly connect them. This is noticeable, notably, in the philosophical approach to psychoanalysis (based primarily on Foucault), which constitutes the majority approach currently for elaborating from gender.

And it is not only the unconscious properly speaking that finds itself sidelined, but more precisely the real that finds itself denied, the real of sex in particular which, being confused with the sex it is not, corrupts the reference to gender aimed at illuminating this sex by attempting a marriage between theories where we need to bring forth a new theory from our experience and our practice of the real, of the real of sex. Producing philosophy about psychoanalysis has become, since the return of French Theory to its lands of origin (European) after its American blossoming, a seductive path for addressing the urgency of conceptual surpassings on the path to equal rights or the fight against discrimination. But this fails to produce new psychoanalytic conceptualizations about sex, gender, the real of sex, identity, etc.

What are these attempts? Connecting queer with the unconscious, Foucault with Lacan, object a with the biopolitical, biosubjectivity with the subject of the unconscious and many others still, which allow softening, this is an essential contribution, certain too abrupt angles of the Sexual Theory of psychoanalysis, univocal, though diverse. These attempts encounter an obstacle, a gap, a difficult-to-locate or reduce incoherence that is felt with a scent of failure: everyone can experience it when it is a question of resolving a problem with existing theories in a joint vision, those of the unconscious on the one hand and those of sociopolitical critique on the other, or psychoanalysis and cultural studies: with each attempt at rapprochement or collaboration one experiences having to choose between two languages, one feels the untranslatability of concepts and notions, their geographical distance as situated knowledges established on distant continents: we are caught in their tangible convergence which nevertheless does not make community. A point of passage to be invented is missing, to restore to the encountered failure its etymological truth which is that of being booty, a treasure. In the hollow of the fault of what does not conjoin slumbers the matter of a form to come unknown to all.

For example, let us take the notion of subjectivity. Widely highlighted by Foucault, its perimeter agrees with that of the individual, while with Lacan it stands for the epoch that would have to be joined at its horizon. It is then appropriate to approach with more precision what Foucault emphasizes and transforms of subjectivity by supporting the advent of the notion of biosubjectivity which, undoubtedly, is indeed the one that deserves to enter into dialogue with psychoanalysis, in particular to confront it with the consequences of the notion of subject of the unconscious. If we remain at the level of the form of these notions, we can only note their incompatibility and devalue the opportunity of their coherence. Conversely, if we commit to mobilizing their reciprocal matter, that which provides the form we know them by with its possibility of being, a space opens where various lines of flight and new fabrics can be knitted, as if it were a matter of painting pictures that would in truth be authentic sculptures.

So as not to weigh down the session, I will indicate to you, in the appendix of the full text, an example of Freud-Foucault connection on the biological.

***

Related to language, to poetry, this matter is already well known thanks to the ultramarine and transcontinental proposition of Édouard Glissant. Far from appreciating the rhetorical effectiveness (I add performative) of mixing, Glissant firmly opposes Creole identity, a figure of mixing and hybridity that kills creolization. The essential is in this nuance. The process of mixing, as it is thought from certain shores, if it absorbs what was to produce what is, where the things invested in it disappear by merging into it, has no interest in the eyes of the poet. Creolization, for Glissant, leads neither to mixture, nor to the predictable, but to the unpredictable and the surpassing of mixture; the interactions are consensual, none of the elements embarked in the dance directs any of the others, all are surprised. Here departs the perspective of Aimé Césaire determined by the production of an identifiable hybridity that Édouard Glissant refutes in his poetic act (he establishes there the limit of hybridity while numerous thinkers of hybridity take him as reference in an abusive manner, just as J-L. Mélenchon does on a political level by reference to creolization of which he has manifestly understood nothing).

This proposition of the poet partially joins the imaginary consistency of identity defined in the conclusion of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s seminar on identity in 1975 “[…] identity is a sort of virtual focus to which it is indispensable for us to refer to explain a certain number of things, but without it ever having real existence. […] a limit to which in reality no experience corresponds.”

Thus conceived, identity is an object without border other than imaginary, which can be neither a symbol nor an emblem. Conversely, if identity is thought of as a thing to defend or combat, it becomes a symbolic burden devoid of its imaginary values. Worse, it frequently requires defending its borders rather than cherishing its coastline. It is here that identity can become, and, let us say it simply, it has become an obstacle to the opening of language, the hoped-for one, the epicene, the Creole, which from ils and elles makes the iel·es which one uses to report their words by no longer saying celles or ceux who say, but ciel who say. Iel is the singular of ciel, where one finds what is heard in the Réunion Creole expression zot tout heard [zote toute] to say you all : another relationship to the letter where all are pronounced, without exception, not one of them is silenced, even if it means producing new sounds and signifiers. An authentic invention, signature of an experience of freedom, a poetic experience from which we have much to learn to soften our fearful westernities.

2 — Without Consent, the Identitarian

The identitarian is a wound; it is the dark matter of trauma that identification shapes on behalf of identity. Approaching it exposes one to vertigo, in all directions, in a disparate concert of political facts, societal movements, and historical remnants disturbing reality.

According to some analyses, Kamala Harris would have been defeated because of questions relating to transidentity and wokism, from which the Republicans promise to protect the United States. Democrats, the fact is established, would have refused to vote for her for these same reasons. The excesses of gender would be harmful to youth, responsible for the sexual misery of incels or more broadly the subjective unhappiness of men prevented from seducing in the manner of old, prevented from enjoying like Papa.

But Kamala Harris did not base her campaign discourse on either transidentity or wokism. Conversely, the Republicans spent millions of dollars making people believe it, in anti-woke advertisements accusing Harris of being yet another Trojan horse in the attempt fantasized by reactionaries to see the improvement of living conditions for sexual minorities corrupt the sexual integrity of their offspring forced to join the margins of society and culture.

What was decisive, in the vote of voters in early November, was purchasing power and employment against poverty instrumentalized by an ideological battle of the first order that encourages poor people to identify with two billionaires hoping to be saved by them—Trump and Musk, as Batman and Robin, a regression of Comics. We cannot mock this American exaggeration as we can do quite often by stigmatizing all those armed-to-the-teeth yokels who vomit their hatred in front of the camera in a Walmart parking lot, red with anger, at the back of their pick-up trucks equipped with bull bars. We cannot mock because we are in the same situation in Europe, therefore in France particularly.

History repeats itself… For more than twenty years, Gender Theory has been incriminated in France, regularly. It was particularly so during parliamentary debates on marriage open to all couples. Except that Gender Theory does not exist as such—no more than wokism—it was invented, with the same ideological ambitions, by the Vatican.

Last week, an underling of the Minister of Education professed faith in the fight against Gender Theory, promising to erase from the sex education program the notion of “gender identity” but retaining that of “sexual identity.” He was rebuked, blah blah blah. Meanwhile, the youth of our country does not use condoms for more than one-third and educates itself either through pornography, or through series such as Sex Education, Glee, Elite or Heartstopper — Beverly Hills in the 1990s. Today, the invention of wokism by reactionary movements is part of the same tradition, by identitarian passion for tradition.

Several years ago, when I began participating in psychoanalysts’ meetings, I was very surprised to hear in meetings the formula “we can no longer say anything” almost always associated with its false twin “we cannot speak” exactly as in all the groups I had had the opportunity to frequent before, in associative, medico-social, or even activist circles. It was very surprising. For strange reasons, I did not expect this at all, not in these places that I had idealized.

These two slogans, so representative of the life of groups or families, are present in all communication spaces, particularly in places of debate or in collective organizations. They are not only heard on television sets, such as those of Cnews or C8, for example.

Behind these denunciations is hidden each time the same fantasmatic construction linked to a lost jouissance, of oral origin in appearance, but upon closer examination reveals a confusion of orifice between the mouth and the anus making detritus remains pass for thoughts with which the entire world should be wallpapered, as one would spread shit on a wall. A matter of waste seeking to give form to an experience of castration, of loss refused on one side to come out the other.

We also find this construction in certain current complaints of analysands about their experience of impediment and/or prohibition of their subjective expression, especially regarding what they feel as their sexual or sexed identity in the action of seduction. Most of the time, these are men, but not only.

Seduction, which Isabelle Alfandary’s latest work examines from Freud’s first theorizations to MeToo via Oedipus, to remind us that to seduce is founded, etymologically, on the following meanings: to lead aside, to lift up, to subtract, to bring toward/to oneself, to divert from the right path… this to recall the centrality of infantile, perverse sexuality in the affective development of speaking-beings becoming adults.

Persistence of infantile sexuality claimed in a column in the newspaper Le Monde, in January 2018, which opened with these words: “Rape is a crime. But insistent or clumsy flirtation is not an offense, nor is gallantry a sexist assault.” Catherine Deneuve declared there: “We defend a freedom to importune, indispensable to sexual freedom.” This text denounced the accusations and impediments induced by the MeToo movement toward certain men abusively implicated, to defend, globally, seduction in its oldest sense, namely the agreed exploitation of the sexual roles and functions of one by the other and reciprocally, according to established social codes and norms, whose questioning seemed experienced as a major wound, a destruction, a deprivation, a theft.

Men, today, suffer from not being able to say or do certain things, while women finally say, today, what was done or said to them. Discourse has changed. The Master’s Discourse orchestrating sexual discrimination is replaced by a Feminist Discourse that reverses the production of surplus-jouissance to the detriment of the historical beneficiaries of the Master’s Discourse regarding the sexes.

***

From my point of view, let us say in my clinical practice, an interpretation has gradually imposed itself, it is, I believe, valid for these various situations, I call it: the fantasy of stolen jouissance.

The Other, with a capital A for the occasion, as each time it is nuanced or called into question, by the expression of alterities less conforming to the figure of authority proper to the norm, to the majority supported by the mythical Father (of whom we nevertheless know that he does not hold up), this Other must be saved, repaired, reinforced, reified a little more still to guarantee the expression of its subjects, of all those who experience this impediment that can lead them to perfectly real pains and sufferings to which they prefer alienation to the Master, the only one capable of speaking the truth of the sexes in his Discourse. Of which the Psychoanalytic Discourse can say nothing—of the truth of the sexes—, if need be to recall it… Only the Master’s Discourse has the power to decree this truth about the sexes: its followers and its slaves recognize themselves in it.

This is currently valid in the various contestations of the effects of the MeToo movement, which give vertigo to many men, and also to many women.

The fears and experiences of muzzling or hindrance being denounced should be understood as updated figures of castration anxiety; they are not to be taken literally, unless one is navigating the subtleties of a psychotic dialogue that views paranoia as a way of arranging the ingredients of these current new sexual configurations. For others, they are to be taken where they arise: at the site of fantasized enjoyment being stolen by another who is not the big Other, but the brother, the sister, the tactless peer claiming their share or their possibility of being, and their liberated capacity to rob someone of a portion of their enjoyment, to pull it toward themselves: in a sense, using seduction in a new way.

We can observe, on one hand, a multitude of women speaking out in movements that are initially singular before sweeping up the collective movement, and on the other, men suddenly isolated from their peers by legal cases, about whom it should be said, as soon as possible, that they are not “ordinary men,” as Elisabeth Roudinesco did in the newspaper Le Monde, reinforcing the social group of men in the process: this reactionary configuration is interesting. Hundreds of women are banding together to succeed in speaking out, and on this battlefield, there are supposedly men, reduced to one-by-one status like lonely prey and victims of the exaggerations of the #MeToo phenomenon. I am not in a position to assess the veracity of these situations, about which it is very difficult to obtain solid information. However, I note the accounting reversal taking place on the chessboard of public speech. Women victims of assault, once solitary, are beginning to speak and group together, while men from the dominant group of our culture are brought back to their individuality by the real or supposed wound for which they must answer before society.

Some people consider this to be proof of a criticizable reversal of violence. Others prefer to count, and consider the mathematical difference of victims sufficient in a moment of possible profound upheaval that could not avoid “breaking eggs” as journalist Sonia Mabrouk lamented on the C8 channel—it is true that eggs are fragile. Studies are being conducted on these issues; abusive or unfounded denunciations (and thus complaints) reportedly fluctuate between 2% and 9% of all denunciations, while more than 90% of rape complaints are closed without further action because they are insufficiently characterized. A question arises: in this count, where has the quantum of enjoyment of the offenses and crimes concerned gone?

This disparity circulates, structured on a significant loss of crimes and offenses accounted for by being denounced and dismissed for being insufficiently characterized. A loss and a modeling of the assessment of crimes and offenses continue to be illustrated in a relationship that raises the question: how many female victims does it take to make one male aggressor? Highlighting singular situations that might serve as examples of dangerous exaggerations having caused, for instance, unjustified legal or social accusations or convictions, cannot be accepted as an argument in the main debate, although these catastrophic deleterious consequences must obviously be addressed.

Moving from the “I believe you” which includes, by necessity, a prior “I am listening to you,” to the sole “I am listening to you” recently promoted by Caroline Fourest may well be motivated by a whole host of benevolent considerations, but it remains nonetheless a subtly orchestrated denial, through the graces of rhetoric, allowing the listening of subjective truth to be reduced to the simple reception of an individual complaint: an operation of leveling the truth that we can describe as an operation of denial in the purest Freudian tradition. What I describe further on as a refusal against stolen enjoyment, in this case that of the expert elected to the rank of censor aiming to ensure the restoration of the status of this other with a capital O in the heaven of the phantasmatic arcana necessary for the stabilization of the subjective vacillations tirelessly fought by the individual proud of themselves.

A jouissance stolen by the effect of radical strangeness of the a-patride fantasy, capable of robbing the heteros-patriarchal fantasy of its quota of jouissance coupled with the conventional alterity of the dominant norm. Thus, I can clarify the minor critique addressed to Butler’s recourse to the notion of the psychosocial fantasy: what is at stake here is not the effect of a fantasy, but a war of fantasies, all sexual, where they compensate for the absence of sexual norms by supporting the possibility of being through social norms for lack of anything better. Social conventions and norms are, until the fantasy is recognized for what it is, defensive weapons against the sexuality of others, supposed thieves of the individual’s jouissance, whereas one would only need to consider the subject, and not the individual, to place all these elements back into a more workable equation, reducible to the point of extracting lines of work and progress in analysis, and perhaps beyond in society.

At the heart of these various examples lies a determining element that is not objective: identity as the dark matter of the subject’s trauma. This pushes for the denial of subjective consent—the very thing that allowed the defendants in the Mazan trial to admit their participation in rapes while simultaneously refusing the intent to rape, justified by their individual perspective on the situation, detached from any subjective implications that might have exceeded their free will. This free will must, in extremis, be attributed to the malice of the machiavellian husband manipulating their behavior, as if there were no question of their totalitarian adherence to this other with a capital A, of whom they made themselves subjects, as if to a Master, preventing them from being subjects themselves, subjects of the unconscious.

Fighting against gender inequality is not a psychoanalytic ambition; it is a democratic necessity. Thus, it becomes a condition for the survival of enlightened minds—those fighting against discrimination, and therefore woke by definition—and consequently for psychoanalysis, which does not need to demand gender equality, but rather to maintain its historical commitment to the fight against gender inequality. On the condition, however, of highlighting the psychoanalysis spoken by women analysts throughout history, those who inspired male analysts with a series of essential theorizations, such as the death drive with Sabina Spielrein, who also explored, through writing, several ways of ending one’s analysis without analysis sessions (we will return to this shortly).

Is there not, however, a risk, despite everything that has just been said, at this moment in the history of our (patriarchal) societies? Is there not, despite everything, a sense of vertigo?

Yes, there is a massive one: the product of the experience of fantasy. This possibility, not so commonly encountered in a lifetime unless one has been forced into it: to perceive that we are sustained, on the side of desire, by fantasy. It is perceived in the break of a trauma, traversed in a psychoanalytic cure, shaken unknowingly at every decisive moment of social history, often confused with the identity that one feels must be defended, etc.

The vertigo in question, the one that agitates and shakes identifications, is not to be taken lightly. With every quarter-turn that shifts from one discourse to another, authentic moments of the pass occur, repeating as many times as necessary until it becomes possible to place oneself at the service of the Psychoanalytic Discourse, for example.

Trauma, or traumas when they are denied, pushed away, or avoided, mechanically feed the possibilities of break-ins, aggressions, and intimate cleavages. These are illustrated in this bouquet of emerging violences intended to address age-old violences, in a competitive battle often blinded by the suffering to be treated. Identity fuels both liberations and condemnations, on the edge of a distress that risks—and this calls for our vigilance—no longer being linked to the opportunity and necessity of Ethics if we do not value consent at the level of the subject, preferring instead the agreement of the individual (which the introduction of consent into the judicial definition of rape could generate). The individual serves as a pretext for the discourse of prevention that avoids the subject; the individual serves as an argument to denounce the excesses of a current fantasy traversal, broader and deeper than previous waves qualified before it as sexual revolution or liberation.

3 — A community of solitaries, far from identification

In July 1956, during a congress of the Société Française de Psychanalyse dedicated to the state of psychoanalysis and the training of analysts, Jacques Lacan delivered a lecture that would be published in an issue of the journal Études Philosophiques that same year, and later in the Écrits in 1966, under the title “Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of the Psychoanalyst in 1956.”

The text is virulent, more than critical; it is mocking, even insulting, but effectively humorous. Everyone gets their due, no one is spared—neither the institution, nor the training, and even less the members of these analytic institutions, described as “Sufficiencies” or “Small Shoes.”

This text presents several questions that remain relevant today. Historical in nature, they have not faded with time nor with repeated attempts to do things differently, notably a few years later in his school, the EFP founded in 1964, through the introduction of the experience of The Pass starting in 1967.

One of these questions, chosen among others for our business today, is that of identification. And specifically identification with the analyst’s ego theorized as the end of analysis at that time, within the didactic perspective that prevailed within the IPA. Contrary to Lacan’s convictions, this troublesome identification draws its energy from the effects of imaginary identification in masses and groups, for which he refers to Freud’s 1921 text “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.” This text develops the ways in which the identifications of group members in a regressive movement allow for the establishment of a libidinal regime centered on the leader or the group itself—the institution whose qualities, values, and limits must be defended. This is, therefore, contrary to the emergence of the subject’s desire, which appears where it separates from the desire of the Other. Identity is thought, with Lacan and Freud, from the separation that undoes alienation. Separation is unavoidable for every subject; alienation is indispensable for every individual.

This raises the question of the training and transmission of psychoanalysis against the current of the psychoanalytic tradition of the time.

With Lacan, psychoanalysis is to be reinvented in its possibility of lasting, implying at every cure.

For some time now, other proposals have appeared, such as restarting psychoanalysis. I also recently read about rebooting psychoanalysis. These appear in arguments for colloquia or seminars, and in social media publications.

Lacan’s reinventing, one by one, suggests that this happens without him, but rather in each cure for each analysand and their analyst.

Restarting psychoanalysis seems to invite a return to the Freud point, perhaps even without him, or even in his place, in certain versions. Rebooting suggests the reactivation of an engine that has been turned off. These proposals are provocative; they will need to be thought through.

Reinventing psychoanalysis is a weighty phrase; it refers to a declaration by Lacan in 1979. The full quote is as follows: “As I now come to think of it, psychoanalysis is untransmissible. It is very annoying. It is very annoying that every psychoanalyst is forced — since he must be forced — to reinvent psychoanalysis. If I said in Lille that the pass had disappointed me, it is for that very reason, for the fact that every psychoanalyst must reinvent, based on what he managed to take from having been a psychoanalysand for a time, that every analyst reinvents the way in which psychoanalysis can last.”

The implication is that psychoanalysis exists now that Freud started it, and that following him, every psychoanalyst must invent anew, re-invent, so that psychoanalysis can last—not only by being maintained, but durable because it is supported by additional inventions following previous ones, and above all the continuous invention of its ways of lasting, and thus the means of transmitting these new inventions arising from ongoing experience, from ongoing cures.

This is supported by a disappointment, of which Lacan previously said that “this Pass is a failure.” The Pass was hoped to shed light on the transition to becoming an analyst, and thus the transmission of psychoanalysis. Failure (echec), whose Arabic and Persian etymology combined with Old French we might recall for the occasion, carries within it two layers of meaning: the king is dead on the one hand, and on the other, booty.

Since then, the experience of The Pass could have, even if continued, convinced itself to explore inventions subsequent to the death of the king as a legacy. The death of the king resulting in booty, which, as early as 1979 at the time of this declaration—ten years after the start of the experience of The Pass at the EFP—proposed, from my point of view, a further surpassing of the beyond of the Father of the horde, the Master, and the Title that The proposal of 1967 on the analyst of the School carried within it where Lacan perhaps hoped to address the effects of the ranks that his school could not help but grant (AME). These titles, whose weight was not avoided during the founding of the École Freudienne de Paris and the implementation of The Pass, could, after the stated failure, be left behind, so that the experience of The Pass could be lightened and the Transmission (reinvention) of Psychoanalysis could venture into terra incognita.

At present, almost all pass procedures are moribund, at a standstill, or under renovation. All question the history of this experience since 1967, its evolutions, its findings, and its impasses. None, as far as I know, question what sexual current events have, since the 1980s, come to impact this experience. Yet, very often, when individual testimonies can be gathered, a recurring element appears: the non-conformity of the passers with respect to an erotic norm fantasized by some has acted as an obstacle, and still acts as an obstacle to letting the material come without prejudging the form to be read or translated. The imaginary phallus is maintained as an icon where it nevertheless has no face, but where many would like to be able to recognize themselves by demanding the conformity of the other’s desire to the measure of the One (with a capital O), in a perspective that has nothing to do with the essence of this 1967 proposal by Lacan.

Alienation is often preferred over separation. This is unfortunate, and it is dangerous.

In this experience of The Pass, I was a passer (passeur), then a passing one (passant).

An experience as extraordinary as it was mad, determining and essential. But equally problematic and deleterious.

As a passer, I was designated as such by my analyst, then contacted by a first passing one who had drawn my name from the hat of passers. It was a breathtaking and exhilarating experience. I will say no more, for it is a matter of the passes of the passing ones concerned, those I had to hear, so my lips are sealed.

As a passing one, I became so voluntarily a few years later. The encounters with my two female passers were wonderful, kind, serious, concentrated, sometimes funny, and determining on many points that my analysis could not address or construct without this extension allowed by the procedure of the pass.

Then, on the side of the procedure, at the end of the work of the pass cartel, a non-nomination that was to conclude this pass — my pass — presented itself in a way that was not brilliant at all, but completely shattered.

On one aspect of this conclusion of the experience, which in my eyes concerned the life of the psychoanalytic school involved, I wrote a text titled On the Form of Nomination.

Long after the end of this pass, against all expectations, statements came to further clarify the shattering in question — which, by the way, should never have happened: once the procedure is completed, the milk is not supposed to boil over from the pot of the procedure.

But these excesses, gushing out like from a poorly maintained septic tank, served me nonetheless. They gave rise in my thoughts to the necessity of thinking about the heteros-patriarchal fantasy, and a-sexuation to move beyond simple patriarchy. This was to consider more seriously the conditions of a separation that can be written, proof of a real treatment of alienation, and not just an imaginary compromise relished by collectives within which identification often acts as a symptom more than it supports identification with the symptom as the formulation of the end of the cure, of its term by Lacan.

***

During my pass, I wrote a lot: in a journal, letters, poems, etc. I gave some to the passers. A little, then much more, telling myself that this would probably come back to me as a negative critique of this gesture of passing writing beyond my speech addressed to the passers. It did not fail to happen. Writing is often a target for an erotic normativity bolted onto its castration anxiety. One only has to see the fate reserved for epicene writing, which some say makes their eyes bleed, no less!

After my pass, I was told, without having asked for anything, of my non-conformity to the norm of the fantasy of some. And also that it was a mistake to have wanted to submit writings. I will dwell a little on this second element, writing.

The pass is not through writing. How foolish! For me, there lies a failure, one of the most precious failures of my experience of the pass, which allowed me to know a little more, and even more firmly, about what writing subverts in the always deceptive reality. Writing, unlike texts recognized under the pens of phallic authorities, remains suspicious when it diverges from this norm; when it develops as not-all phallic, it is accused of exploring the dark continents that feed the castration anxiety of the erotic normativity of those adhering to the heteros-patriarchal fantasy.

Of course this is false; the pass also passes through writing, and since in this milieu one must justify oneself through Lacan, I have a totem of immunity to say this, for even Lacan suggested it both explicitly and implicitly.

Writing, with Lacan, draws its strength at the threshold of understanding when it fails, where the letter carries beyond meaning the access to a truth too real to be spoken. In the seminar, The Moment to Conclude, in 1978, he says this: “It is indeed through writing that forcing occurs. It is written, nonetheless, the Real. For it must be said, how would the Real appear if it were not written? That is precisely how the Real is there. It is there by my way of writing it. Writing is an artifice. The Real therefore only appears through an artifice, an artifice linked to the fact that there is speech and even saying. And saying concerns what we call truth. That is precisely why I say that truth cannot be spoken.”

And even more directly: “In this story of the pass, I am led… since the pass is something I — as they say — produced, produced in my School… in the hope of knowing what could possibly arise in what is called the mind, the mind of an analysand to constitute himself, I mean to receive people who come to ask him for an analysis. It could perhaps be done in writing. I suggested it to someone, who moreover was more than in agreement. Passing in writing has a chance of being a little closer to what can be reached of the Real than what is currently being done, since I attempted to suggest to my School that passers could be named by a few. “

I learned to write, out of necessity, because of my cure and then my desire. Before that, I did not know how to write, from trying so hard to write like a Man. Analysis offered me, forced me even, to approach more closely what I suspected in my first readings of Freud: psychic bisexuality is a promise greater than life itself. Psychic bisexuality, which is the unconscious, opens up writing to men the color of women, among whom are those who are to become analysts.

I would like to conclude this third session with three references to Pascal Quignard, Sabina Spielrein, and Hélène Cixous, who knew how to benefit from and account for, through writing, a solidarity that is neither fraternal nor sororal, neither individual nor collective, but only subjective, founded on a truth not weighed down by the burden of being, as the path of writing requires.

These three wrote things that convey something not unrelated to what is at stake in The Pass, the Subject of the unconscious and its relationship to History, the Living, and the a/Other.

Sabina Spielrein, in 1909, wrote her medical thesis, which would be the first clinical writing on a case of psychosis, and the first thesis focusing on psychoanalysis as an object and method. A text that allowed her to conclude, alone, but not quite alone, her unfinished analysis with Carl Jung, by addressing elements of her clinical work to Freud through written correspondence (sic). She asked Freud to take over her healing from Jung; Freud suggested that she write to him to bear witness. She set to work, through texts that indeed testify to the discovery of a new knowledge, here that of the death drive – which Freud would develop after her – which allowed her to separate, to disidentify from her analyst and from the analysis by constructing the term of her healing with and beyond its end, finite and infinite, like a movement, like a poem: a past work.

Pascal Quignard, in his small book titled On the Idea of a Community of Solitaries and in The Roving Shadows , exposes the solitude inherent in the human condition, finds the path of his withdrawal, that of silence opening to sharing and to the place of a community of the bond founded on absence, on the gap, on the outside, without communion or agglomeration condemning one to fusion.

Hélène Cixous, in her famous text, said to be feminist, The Laugh of the Medusa , from 1975, writes this: “The new history is coming; it is not a dream, but it exceeds the masculine imagination, and for good reason: it will deprive them of their conceptual orthopedics; it begins by ruining their machine of delusions.” She adds: “It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing […] for one can never theorize this practice, enclose it, code it, which does not mean that it does not exist. But it will always exceed the discourse that governs the phallocentric system; it will take place elsewhere than in the territories subordinated to philosophical-theoretical domination. It will only allow itself to be thought by subjects who break automatisms, the edge-runners whom no authority ever subjugates.”

There lies a perspective, a path of writing.

Thus,

Identity is creole

The identitarian is rape

Identification is a symptom

Thank you for listening,

VB.