TO SAY IT ALL?
by Yves Vanderveken, Congress Director
To Say it all? That is the question posed by the title of the next Congress of the EuroFederation of Psychoanalysis, PIPOL 13.
The objective will be to study and interpret what emerges from the ideal, or even genuine contemporary imperative, of transparency that defines our era: Say it all. It will be a matter of questioning this imperative, in the clinic as well as in discourse, in the light of the experience of psychoanalysis.
Transparency/Surveillance
Is transparency just another illusion? Its effects, however, are very real. In many areas, it is now a time of unveiling, tracking down what is hidden, unsaid, unseen, secret and true, but also for exposing the intimate in all its forms: public confessions, revelations, disclosures, coming-outs of all kinds, whistleblowing, rampant “sharing” on social media, and so on. Everything is said, everything is shown. Everything is known, or should be known. All modesty is cast aside and all shame is swallowed.
At the same time, there is a growing anxiety about generalised algorithmic surveillance and a search for vital strategies to ensure that something of the private and the intimate can still elude the demand that everything be trackable.
What Can One Say?
At a time when “talking spaces” are becoming widespread, this sometimes leads to a veritable push to speak [pousse à dire].
Considered to be the primary form of therapy and an inalienable right, this question of saying it all traverses many fields.
How should we announce or speak about serious events, whether personal, public or in the news? What should be said, what should be shown, what should we speak about and how should we say it?
In politics, what should be said to citizens, or “to the people,” as some put it? Has confession, originating in the religious sphere, spread beyond the domain proper to it, thereby changing its very nature? Where can the dimension of confession be located? Does it have a place only in courtrooms or in autobiographical accounts?
The Unconscious
Say it all also brings us back to a number of prejudices regarding the fundamental rule laid down by Freud for psychoanalytic treatment: the abolition of all censorship, of what is hidden, denied, and rejected, in order to lift repression and the suppression of the symptoms that result.
This rule, known in psychoanalysis as free association, which carries a form of saying it all, underpins its practice and aims to produce effects of truth capable of liberating us from the burden of this censorship. For the question that will be the focus of PIPOL 13, we will need to draw lessons from a fundamental opacity that nevertheless defines the unconscious. Not the opacity of something left unsaid, of a not-all can be said, but of the unsayable, of an impossible to say that is structural.
We must therefore be precise in order to show that all ideologies of so-called mindfulness are, in fact, rejections of the logic proper to the unconscious.
The Statuses of Speech
To Say It All, as such, is not a psychoanalytic concept. Yet All and Saying are extensively addressed and articulated in Lacan’s teaching. What can we draw from this?
Psychoanalysis is founded on speech. But speech takes on various statuses. There is empty speech and full speech, idle chatter and a striking phrase [phrase marquante], the said and the saying, the statement and the enunciation, the unprecedented detail and the trivial, the intimate and the obscene, the lie and the half-said truth. To these we might add tact and insult, as well as modesty [pudeur].
It is interpretation that allows the different statuses of speech to be distinguished. If Lacan says that interpretation must be equivocal in analytic practice, is it not precisely to make room for the not-all of saying [pas-tout dire]—that it cannot say it all?
Clinical Resonances
We shall therefore need to explore the manifestations of saying it all that find resonance in clinical practice.
Let us recall that Lacan identified the moment when the child discovers that the Other does not know everything they think as being inaugural for the functioning of a neurotic-type unconscious—with its share of unsayable fantasies, daydreams and, consequently, repressed thoughts. Without this crucial moment, the child would remain exposed to the onslaught of an all-encompassing, invasive, and persecutory knowledge about him, which would bar access to any dimension of his “inner self,” of his intimacy, and thus to the experience of modesty. Does not obscenity find a home in the voices of hallucinations, just as does the impossibility of the thing remaining unsaid? In the field of the logic of psychosis, must the psychoanalyst not guard against wanting to lay bare the truth?—there where in psychosis, the real speaks, announcing, to the subject, his truth.1 Is this not illuminated by what Jacques-Alain Miller also states, namely that “the father is […] the one who does not say it all, thereby preserving the possibility of desire. He does not claim to encompass the real”?2
Speech and Desire
What, moreover, of the fields of love, desire and sexual jouissance? Do we tell our partner everything? Should we tell our children everything as well? What is it that, at this level—including that of the sexual—provides the basis for the mark of desire and its very possibility. How can we grasp the significance of what Lacan says about Freud—that his blind spot was in wanting women to tell him everything—in what he describes as the “chimney sweeping” of the talking cure?3What, too, are the effects of wild revelations?
These are the many questions, variations, distinctions and entry points that should open avenues for the work of elucidation to which PIPOL 13 and its theme invite us.
1 Miller J.-A., “L’orientation lacanienne. Choses de finesse en psychanalyse,” annual course delivered within the framework of the Department of Psychoanalysis, The University of Paris viii, lesson of 3 December 2008, unpublished.
2 Jacques-Alain Miller, “L’orientation lacanienne. L’Un-tout-seul,” annual course delivered within the framework of the Department of Psychoanalysis, The University of Paris viii, lesson of 6 April 2011, unpublished.
3 Jacques Lacan, Anxiety, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. A. R. Price (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2015), 130.
