text: “The Analyst and the Semblants” (H Tizio)
The Analyst and the Semblants
Hebe Tizio
The question of semblants in the psychoanalytic discourse seems complex to me and I will reveal here my first questioning on this subject. To begin with, my question will be about the position of the analyst, as Lacan brought this difficulty to our attention. There is the risk of a certain oscillation between the identificatory tendency that leads to confusing oneself with the subject supposed to know, for example, and the one that consists of thinking that everything is semblant, forgetting the real behind the sense.
I am not claiming this by referring solely to the clinic, but equally by taking account of the discourse of the master present in various institutions. Indeed, depending on the function of the semblants at play, a certain modality of the treatment of the real ensues. In other words, the use of semblants is not without consequences.
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In the analytic discourse the question of the semblant depends on the antinomy between sense and real. The semblant is dependent on sense, and Lacan first situates it between the symbolic and the real. Then, he defines it in opposition to the real in so far as the latter excludes sense. Without a doubt, this poses questions for analytic practice. Indeed, if we say that the real excludes sense, this claim seems to contradict the fact that analysis is underpinned by the idea that words have an impact, which is verified in the practice.
J.-A. Miller, in his course of the 21st of March 2007 takes this question up and opens it up in order to address it in two ways. He points out the hiatus between psychoanalysis as practice and psychoanalysis as perspective. As a perspective, psychoanalysis has on the horizon the real separated from sense; as practice, psychoanalysis operates by way of the connection of sense and semblant.
Although the sense varies, the symptom remains, which would allow its assimilation into the real, which is what psychoanalysis works with. There would then be the real that harbours the symptom on which one cannot have any direct impact. Psychoanalysis thus offers a mechanism where something can be reached with the semblant…if we consider that ‘it’ has a sense. This takes us to the theme of interpretation and the effect that Lacan always preserved: its resonance. How does the semblant operate? Is the resonance the form that has an impact on a point in the real? Lacan talks about the poetic effect, and we must indicate the equivoque that would be a resonance that makes a hole. Is this kind of interpretation closer to the object a?
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