Hearing what the unconscious has to tell us usually carries risks.

In It’s not turning round , Mardi Noir, psychologist and psychoanalyst, returns each week to a psychological question or problem.

And if I focused on the term “risk”. Yes, there is quite a salutary risk to be taken in order to meet one’s truth, one’s desire. The closer we approach it, the less certain we are of wanting to know more. However, it is on. It is always possible to go back, only, what pushed the subject at the start to have to unravel his symptoms risks continuing to make noise, in spite of his pleas.

In the documentary Rendez-vous chez Lacan , Gérard Miller remembers the words of the famous psychoanalyst. Miller had shared with him the difficulty he was encountering in pursuing his own analysis and Lacan had replied that what one finds there is not always what one thought one wanted. So much so that he was skeptical of those who came to see him to get to know each other better. Insufficient reason, according to him, to take the risk of hearing what the unconscious has to tell us. Something must be wrong to risk it.

To risk, from the Latin resecum : what cuts. Still in this documentary, which I recommend to you with enthusiasm, Gérard Miller questions a former analysand of Lacan, Antonio Di Ciaccia, who, at the time of entering analysis, was a priest. For him, Lacan “caused a split between an ideal to which [he] had held since childhood. [He] entered the convent at 10 and ordained a priest at 25. [Lacan] made a cut between this ideal and what was [his] passion.” I imagine that this gentleman means “passion” in the religious sense, this action of enduring one’s suffering.

And then a symptom arises

What should be noted is that at the time of filming, he is married and a father. He has, in a way, divorced himself from the Church . And to the question, probably even more relevant: “Has psychoanalysis detached you from the Church, but also from God?” , Di Ciaccia responds: “It’s weird, it’s stayed the same. I doubted before and I doubt now. Still, can this be considered bizarre? Or on the contrary of an almost implacable logic? I have no idea why he entered analysis, only the change of situation can lead us to some leads.

Most of the time we are stuck, entangled in a whole bunch of imaginary projections of what our lives should be like. For Di Ciaccia, as we have understood, this was organized by the religious, bathed in a strong cultural environment. He is very young when he takes this path. In the same way that a young girl can identify with the place of the family, of the couple , of motherhood without really questioning this course. … read