What is the Real?
JACQUES- ALAIN MILLER
Beyond Prince Charming
& Pink Swords
MARIE HÉLÈNE-BROUSSE
Note on the Treatment
of the Symptom
by the Analytic Act
PIERRE-GILLES GUÉGUEN
Lacan's Legacy:
From the Universal to
the Particular
NATALIE WULFING
Lacan as Analysand
ÉRIC LAURENT
The Real
& the Semblance
JACQUES- ALAIN MILLER
Everlasting Couch
MARIE HÉLÈNE-BROUSSE
The Emperors Heron
FRANÇOIS REGNAULT
[...]Here is another facet of Lacan’s analysis. Faced with all of these normative devices, everything seemed to happen as if Lacan wished to force something in his love life. He tried to normalize himself. He, the one who defined man’s desire as a centrifuge, was, since 1929, dividing his affection between Marie-Therese Bergerot and Olesia Sienkiewicz. Olesia was the second (neglected) wife of his friend Pierre Drieu la Rochelle. It is Olesia who typed Lacan’s thesis that was published in 1932. Their liaison lasted until the fall of 1933, that is, after one year of analysis. At that point, the analysand, Lacan, fell in love with the sister (Marie-Louise Blondin) of one of his friends in residence at the hospital, and asked her to marry him. They married less than one year after. (They met in the autumn of ’33 and they married on February 29, 1934, about six months after meeting.) This marriage lasted until he fell madly in love with Sylvia Bataille in November ’38. Although, in the meantime, Lacan was often torn between two women. We have, therefore, the impression that the first effect of psychoanalysis on Lacan, the analysand, was an attempt at normalizing his relations with women. The marriage seemed for him a solution only as long as the analysis lasted—that is, a mere five years of marriage. The moment he stops analysis, the marriage breaks down.
The failure of the imaginary normatization during his psychoanalysis is also marked in Lacan’s relations with the analyst. In 1953, when the scission happened within the Paris Analytic Institute, his analyst was still driven by a jealous passion, and the will to defeat his former analysand. This we see in the letter he sent to Princess Bonaparte during the scission, as well as in the pathetic theoretical response to Lacan’s texts of 1953 called, “Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis.” The response was a text published by Loewenstein under the title, “Speech in Psychoanalytic Technique.” He mixes Saussure and Jakobson in a bloodless description of the verbalization of the ego. He can only quote Lacan as editor of the first issue of the journal Psychoanalysis. This gives us quite an idea of what, really, their relationship was beyond the analysis, the relationship between the analyst and the production of his analysand, the analysand who was too well-gifted.[...]