Table Of ContentINCURABLE
UmBR(a) 2006
A JOURNAL OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 2006
U M B R (a)
ISSN 1087-0830 ISBN 0-9666452-9-4
EDITORS: UMBR(a) is published with the help of grants from the
following organizations and individuals at the
Sorin Cucu
State University of New York at Buffalo:
Andrew Skomra
The Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture
MANAGING EDITOR: The Graduate Student Association*
Andrew Skomra The Group for the Discussion of the Freudian Field
The English Department
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The English Graduate Student Association
Sorin Cucu
The David Gray Chair (Steve McCaffery)
Peter DeGabriele
Alexei Di Orio The James H. McNulty Chair (Dennis Tedlock)
Moriah Hampton The Melodia E. Jones Chair (Gerard Bucher)
Ryan Hatch The Samuel P. Capen Chair (Susan Howe)
Shane Herron
Alan Lopez *The views expressed herein do not necessarily refect those of
Sol Pelaez the GSA.
Andrew Skomra
Roland Végső
Marc Zagelbaum
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Andrew Skomra
Special thanks to Éditions du Seuil for granting permission to publish an excerpt
from: Georges Canguilhem, Écrits sur la médecine © Éditions du Seuil, 2002
and, to Éditions QUE for granting permission to publish an excerpt from: Serge
André, FLAC © Éditions QUE, 2001
4 editorial:tHe iNSUFFeraBle SYMPtoM
andrew skomra
9 iS a PedagogY oF HealiNg PoSSiBle?
georges canguilhem
23 tHe UNtreataBle
willy apollon
41 “StatioNarY ProCeSS aNd iNFiNite SPeed”:
PSYCHoaNalYSiS WitH PSYCHoSiS
monique david-ménard
53 tHe aiM oF tHe aNalYtiC aCt
colette soler
65 tHe SexUal SiNtHoMe
geneviève morel
85 CHoiCe aNd tHe UltiMate iNCUraBle
renata salecl
101 iS tHere deatH aFter liFe?
rudi visker
119 vox
mladen dolar
143 WritiNg BegiNS WHere PSYCHoaNalYSiS eNdS
serge andré
178 the ŽiŽek report
CONTENTS
EDITORIAL:
THE INSUFFERABLE
SYMPTOM
andrew skomra
The incurable indubitably interrogates
the ends and limits of psychoanalysis as
a clinical practice and discourse. Freud
certainly encountered a vast array of
o bstacles in his quest to treat his patients.
He exhausted his faculties, in the end, over
the dilemma of the “negative therapeutic
reaction,” his patients’ paradoxical de-
fense against the cure and its entailments.
After continually butting up against this
“resistance against the uncovering of resis-
tances,” Freud was met with “the central
diffculty of psychoanalysis”: treating the
symptom that satisfes. The precise func-
tion of the analyst and even psychoanalysis
as a clinical enterprise were radically called
into question insofar as Freud was solicited
to provide the antidote for something that
went beyond the bounds of what was clini-
cally possible. By Freud’s assessment this
was the monumental impasse of castration.
Continuing to conceptualize the objective
nature of this incurable excess, however,
is a central task for maintaining the speci-
fcity of psychoanalysis, and the ethics of
its cause.
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Given the status of the incurable as a and more mistaken for merely a biological
negative entity we can only hope to ap- entity, a rampant medicalization of the
proach it obliquely. The clinic of psycho- symptom has ensued. Such anesthetizing
analysis is exemplary in this regard, given practices are indicative of a general push,
the fact that the style of its theory and within contemporary discourse, toward the
practice is modeled after the very object of de-subjectivation of society. The symptom,
jouissance that it questions. One need only in this epoch, is typically viewed as a hap-
consider the psychoanalytic understanding less neurological accident whose effects
and treatment of the unconscious produc- must frst be quantifed and then silenced
tion of the symptom in order to appreci- as effciently as possible. For psychoanaly-
ate the importance its practice places on sis, however, the symptom is conceived as
following the detours, and half-sayings, of the encasement of the truth of the subject.
signifcation. Accepting that symptoms only At its core, then, the symptom is taken to
allude to something, somewhere, that is be a meaningful invention, the inaugural
structurally failing, Freud came to consider attempt to contain an unwieldy sufferance.
these pathological elements as variations This is to say, ultimately, in opposition to
on a universal theme: the inconsistency of other medical practices, psychoanalysis
the subject’s relation to sex. Intrigued by asserts that the silencing of such symp-
what the source underlying and supporting toms would be to irremediably sever the
their construction might be, Freud was ul- subject’s relation to desire.
timately compelled to disconnect his clinic
We might even say that the symptom
from the standards of all previous discur-
begins, for the subject of psychoanalysis,
sive regimes. Thus he established his own
where science fails—the exposure of a
principles and, with them, psychoanalysis’
necessary limit internal to the scientifc
proclivity for contesting the very criteria
method of paranoid critical disclosure. Wit-
used for circumscribing and constituting
ness the hysteric—that most unmanageable
the real.
subject—fnding strange comfort in using
Although the symptom brings psychoanal- her body to signify the very ignorance of
ysis into contact with medical discourse at the scientifc Other, who vainly searches to
the level of the word, it essentially distin- know the cause of her affiction. Psycho-
guishes psychoanalysis from science at the analysis does accept that science, in the
level of the concept. The political and so- form of psychiatry and its discursive bedfel-
cial consequences of analysis’ conjectural lows, may produce knowledge, but asserts
act are not to be ignored, and more impor- that none of it will properly correlate with
tantly, beg for further elaboration. As the the reality of these symptoms. The inten-
subject outside of psychoanalysis is more sity of their effects will only strengthen
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when mitigated sheerly with a combina- course requires the transfguration of the
tion of feigned certainty, in the form of subject’s symptomatic insistence. In the
prefabricated knowledge, and the reckless very repetition of its presentation, some-
drive to cure. To use Freud’s phrase, there thing is hit upon that signals a brush with
is an inevitable “lacuna in the knowable,” the real. The analytic act does not entail
which suggests that the standardization a dismantling of the particularity of each
of care, at its core, is an epistemological symptom, but the realization that each—in
failure. What these sciences overlook is the the end—is a singular bid to signify some-
bare fact of singularity, or more specifcally thing wholly dissimilar to signifcation.
that a singular, displeasing satisfaction is There is a form of knowledge locked within
the square root of these symptomatic for- the symptom that is essentially incommu-
mations. Science will not accept into the nicable, marking the limit of what can be
circuitry of its discourse the knowledge said, while at the same time manifesting
that something of the subject goes against the insufferable and “forbidden jouissance
life. The process of psychoanalysis, by that is the only valuable meaning that is
1
contrast, could be conceived as a work of offered to our life.” Thus, while the im-
reduction solely intended to bring one to potence of castration was the end point of
encounter this element. That is, rather Freud’s clinical theory of the incurable, it
than demand that this element be purged, is the constitutive impossibility advanced
the psychoanalytic clinic elevates it to the by Lacan that rearticulated the limit of the
dignity of a unique knowledge, accepting p sychoanalytic project. The impossible,
it on its own terrain. much like the return to the inanimate that
Our wish to reinscribe the obscure sense Freud pondered, can only be hypothesized,
that is the incurable within the feld of dis- given that it is strictly unaccounted for
UMBR(a) 6
within the symbolic. Nevertheless, to the 1. Jacques lacan, “of Structure as the inmixing
credit of psychoanalytic discourse, such of an otherness Prerequisite to any Subject
Whatever,” in The Structuralist Controversy,
a point can and must be inscribed in a
eds. richard Macksey and eugenio donato,
structure. The ethic of the psychoanalytic
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1970), 195.
clinic is to be located in this very act of
positioning this impossibility at the heart
of its practice. Such a constitutive failure in
determining the subject is the affrmation
of the fundamental fact of the subject’s ex-
istence: its non-coincidence with itself. It
is impossible for one to directly approach,
or possess, this incurable truth. One can,
however, suspend and even seperate
oneself from its incendiary effects. All
that psychoanalysis and its epistemologi-
cal allies demand is that this impossibility
be formalized, that is, that one seek to
establish a discourse that coheres while
still containing a non-signifying element.
Heeding this demand comes from the real-
ization that it is the logical way out of the
subject’s metonymic slippage between the
remedial semblances that contemporary
life readily traffcs.
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As an event within the relation between patient and doctor, healing is,
at frst sight, what the patient expects from the doctor, but is not always
what he obtains. There is thus a disjunction between the patient’s hope,
founded upon a presumption about the power that the doctor supposedly
possesses by virtue of his knowledge, and the doctor’s consciousness of the
limits of his own effcacy. This is undoubtedly the principal reason why, of
all the objects treated by medical thought, healing is the one that doctors
have considered least often. But this reluctance is also due to the fact that
the doctor perceives in healing an element of subjectivity, a reference to
the benefciary’s evaluation of the process, while, from his objective point
of view, healing is the goal of a treatment that can only be validated by a
statistical survey of its results. Without making an ungenerous allusion
to those laughable doctors who make their patients responsible for their
own therapeutic failures, one can agree that the absence of cure will rarely
induce a doctor to doubt the commitment of his patient to applying his
prescriptions. Inversely, whoever wants to speak pertinently about an
individual cure should be able to demonstrate whether or not healing,
defned as the satisfaction of the patient’s expectations, is really the
direct result of a prescribed therapy, scrupulously applied. For, such a
demonstration has never been more diffcult to produce than it is today,
given the use of the placebo method1, observations about psychosomatic
factors, the interest in the intersubjectivity of the doctor-patient relation,
and the presumption by certain doctors that the power of their own pres-
ence has the power of a medication. We now know that, when it comes
to remedies, the way of giving them is sometimes more important than
what one gives.2
In brief, for the patient, a cure is something that the doctor owes him,
while, still today, for most doctors, what he owes the patient is the best
studied, tested, and widely used treatment currently available. Whence
the difference between a doctor and a healer. A doctor who does not
succeed in healing anyone can still be called a doctor, licensed by a
diploma sanctioning a conventional set of knowledges to treat patients
whose illnesses are explained, in the medical textbooks, in terms of their
symptomatology, their etiology, their pathogenesis, and their therapy.
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IS A PEDAGOGY OF HEALING POSSIBLE?
georges canguilhem
A healer can only be one in fact, because he is not judged on the basis of what he knows, but for
his successes. The doctor and the healer thus have an inverse relation to healing. The doctor is
publicly licensed to claim to cure, while it is the cure itself, experienced and avowed by the patient,
even when it remains clandestine, that bears witness to the healer’s “gift” in a man whose own
presumed power, very often, has been revealed to him by the experience of others. To verify this
point, there is no need to go observe the “savages.” In France itself, forms of wild medicine have
always prospered on the doorstep of the Medical School.
It is therefore not surprising that the doctors who frst addressed healing as a problem and
subject of interest are, for the most part, psychoanalysts or men for whom psychoanalysis exists
as a occasion for questioning their own practice and its presuppositions, men such as Georg
Groddeck who, in 1923, in his The Book of the It, is not afraid to reduce medicine to charlatan-
3 4
ism, or such as René Allendy in France. If, according to the traditional medical optic, a cure
was considered the effect of the treatment of causes, and functioned to sanction the validity
of a diagnosis and the prescription that follows from it, and thus to manifest the worth of the
doctor himself, according to the psychoanalytic optic, a cure becomes the sign of the patient’s
5
rediscovered capacity to surmount his own diffculties. A cure was no longer ordered from the
outside; it became a form of regained initiative, because the illness was no longer treated as an
6
accident, but rather a failure of conduct, if not a conduct of failure.
It is well known that, etymologically speaking, to heal is to protect, to defend, to arm in a quasi-
military fashion, against an aggression or sedition. The image of the organism thus emerges as
the image of a city threatened by an external or internal enemy. To heal is to guard, to harbor
[Guérir c’est garder, garer]. This was the image well before certain concepts of contemporary
physiology, like those of aggression, stress, or defense, entered into the domain of medicine and
its ideologies. The tendency to reduce healing to an offensive-defensive riposte is so profound
and originary that it has penetrated the very concept of illness, considered as a reaction of op-
position to an effraction or a disorder. This is the reason why, in certain cases, the therapeutic
intention was able provisionally to respect the very ill that the ill person expected would be tar-
geted without delay. The justifcation for the apparent complicity between therapy and illness
gave rise to certain writings, the best known of which is entitled Treatise on Illnesses That It Is
7
Dangerous to Cure, a turn of phrase that J.M. Charcot used for his own purposes, in 1857, in the
conclusion of his thesis, On Expectation in Medicine. This thesis, which claims that the illness is
a doctor in spite of itself, along with an extenuated Hippocratic tradition, latent beneath many
mechanical or chemical disguises, from the 17th to the middle of the 19th century, contributed
to the representation of the animal organism as an “economy.” The animal economy is the set of
rules that preside over the relation between the parts of a whole, in the image of the association
between the members of a community, governed for its own good by the authority of a domestic
or political leader. Organic integrity was a metaphor of social integration before becoming the
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