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. Getting married at 20, like her sisters, cousins, aunts and mother did before her . She can flourish there, more or less. She can find interests, joy there. And then, one day, a symptom pops up, as if out of nowhere.
However, to consider it well, it would seem that it is sometimes older, quietly, that there is an echo at the bottom of the well. She consults. And the language, the shrink’s questions resonate differently than when she talks about it to her friends. As if it cut into his convictions, which, moreover, are not that strong. As if it divided her.
Doing an analysis is not comfortable
To the question “why did you get married ” , the answer is first stated as follows: “I don’t know, I met him, it didn’t go too badly and we got married because it is the normal sequel, and then I got pregnant, I don’t know, everyone does that.”
However, in psychoanalysis, it is “one by one” that things work. Committed work is not massified, generalized, even (especially?) in the face of situations that the norm validates as being the course of life. And when the answer sounds like “I’ve never asked myself the question so much, that’s how it works” and paradoxically a symptom screams the opposite, then it’s the symptom that we’re going to make speak and this he has to say will perhaps turn this long, not-so-quiet river upside down.
Yes, the risk exists. Doing an analysis is not comfortable. We come here because there is something that is more and more unbearable and which is starting to make too much noise. So, is it really psychoanalysis itself that will cause this change? Or is the change already initiated, in a disorganized, unpleasant or even odious way, and the role of psychoanalysis, if not to treat or cure, is to see things a little more clearly. A tiny bit. It’s already a start.
