The question, To Say It All? touches on the very principle of the analytic setting, its fundamental rule as Freud stated it: “Say whatever comes to mind.”
The care with which we can state it—in various ways, more or less explicitly—is the same care with which the subject can respond:
“To Say It All? If they have to add a question mark, it’s because they don’t believe it’s possible to comply with this rule, however fundamental it may be.”
Let us see. First of all, we have not simply asked him to “say it all,” much less have we asked him to promise to comply with that traditional legal formula, “Tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”
“I know your Lacanian maxim, the one about that truth which cannot be fully said. However, what do you mean by: ‘Say everything that may come to mind’? And what about what I don’t think of? Couldn’t I eventually say it? Actually, I came here to learn something that has never occurred to me, even to be able to say it. Will you tell me? Besides, if you look closely, you’ve phrased your impossible request with an imperative—‘Say’—followed by the subjunctive [in Spanish, an expression of possibility]—‘everything that may come to mind.’ If you haven’t followed it with the present indicative, ‘Say… everything that comes to mind,’ it’s probably also due to some subtle precaution. You surely anticipate that I’ll think of things I won’t want to say, that I’ll be tempted to say to myself ‘that this or that is irrelevant here, or is quite unimportant, or nonsensical.’ [1] Isn’t that a bit misleading?
In reality, if we have used the subjunctive, it is due to a linguistic artifice that has something of a trick about it. We have, momentarily, wanted to observe ourselves from a place outside ourselves, as if we could position ourselves outside, before or after, the very act of enunciation, and talk about what we say, as if we could even legislate on the act of speaking, on what can or cannot be said, from a superior language that would take our saying as its object.
“Yes, I also know that other maxim, ‘there is no metalanguage.’ That would be the illusion of wanting to say everything, everything about my language.”
In fact, it is with a similar image that Freud wanted to explain his fundamental rule: “Act as though […] you were a traveler sitting next to the window of a railway carriage and describing to someone inside the carriage the changing views which you see outside.”[2]
“But it turns out that, if I am that landscape, if I am the very object I am trying to grasp in the flow of my thoughts, I cannot simultaneously be inside the train carriage saying what I think, what I see of the external landscape that is myself. I will then try to think what I say. But if I think what I say, I will surely never manage to say what I think, neither all nor even a little. His rule now seems even more impossible to fulfill.”
Let us say, then, that the subject of the analytic experience is constituted precisely as the very frame of the Freudian train window. It is not in the supposed interior of the train carriage, but neither is it in the exterior of the landscape in which it is only supposed. The subject is properly the very frame of the train window, the frame of the fantasy in which it is divided by the fact of speaking of an object that inevitably eludes it.
The fundamental rule, as Freud formulated it in German, then acquires its raison d’être: Sagen Sie also alles, was Ihnen durch den Sinn geht would literally mean, Tell me, then, everything that happens to you (that transpires) durch den Sinn, through the mind, through the Sinn which is also meaning. The train passing through the landscape is indistinguishable from the landscape itself that seems to be passing by, the passing of meaning as it flees, from an ungraspable referent.
Let us note in passing that the different languages of the Congress modulate this landscape in different ways. In French, “Dire tout?”, and in Italian, “Dire tutto?”, make One of the All, while the grammar of Spanish, “¿Decirlo todo?”, and of English, “To Say It All,” require it to be reduplicated with the pronoun.
The fundamental rule asks the analysand to describe the landscape unfolding before their eyes—their own discourse, which will always be the discourse of the Other—knowing that this landscape is already a fragment of the real and that, moreover, the more they try to grasp the real from a supposed exterior or interior, the more it eludes them. It is only by accepting this wager, by acknowledging this division, that they can come to know something of that which they never thought to express. It is only by relinquishing the desire to say everything, by accepting to repeat what they already believe they know, that they will come to say something new of their unconscious knowledge.
Thus, Freud’s formula of the fundamental rule is a polite way—Sagen Sie…, “Say…”—of putting into action that other, more abrupt formula, which Nietzsche put in the mouth of Zarathustra when he said to himself, Sprich dein Wort und zerbrich!—“Speak your word and break!”
[1] Sigmund Freud, “On Beginning the Treatment” (1913), trans. James Strachey, SE, vol. XII, 1955, 134.
