Moments in a Love Story
[excerpt]

Marie-Hélène Brousse

translated by Asunción Alvarez

The experience of analysis, unlike the demand for psychotherapeutic help, is characterized by a belief, the belief that there exists a truth, a truth which is hidden, which escapes us. This truth is placed by neurotics in a causal position as the cause of their symptom, the cause of their suffering, of their malaise… They outwit it, they seek it where it is not, convinced that knowledge of the truth will transform what "is not working" into something that "works." The love of truth is thus at the start of every analysis, together with the desire to know.

In psychosis, the subject arrives with a truth which he does not believe in, given that he is certain of it this truth that inhabits him, that arranges the world according to an unbreakable logic.

Thus we can deduce that truth is the mode of access to knowledge for every speaking subject. We can also think that truth constitutes the libidinal face of knowledge, the face of knowledge related to the drive, to the structure of speech. But we can move on to writing—I mean, mathematical writing—in order to erase the link between knowledge and truth, or, more precisely, to remove its satisfaction aspect from truth, to detach it from meaning, as stressed by Lacan. Thus it is reduced to the binary opposition of truth and falsity[…]

Art: Albert Herter
There Is No Sexual Relation, 2011
Black chalk on paper



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