In the dissemination and transmission of Lacan’s teachings, what relationship do we establish in relation to what is located outside in the address to those who are beyond the community of members of the School? How should this topography be conceived? When addressing the public, how can we concretely envisage the events, publications, and possible interventions in the debates of the city? To what degree should we be open? What are its spatial and temporal limits?
Here, we could invoke the traditionally accepted relationships between exotericism and esotericism and draw inspiration from the way in which Leo Strauss renewed their terms. Instead of a frank separation between a restricted communication of truth (in this case Freudian truth) to an audience of initiates, and an exoteric teaching capable of a wider and uncontrolled dissemination, Strauss studies classical authors whose writings intermingle public and secret teachings, exotericism and esotericism. According to him, it is not a question of separating the two. On the contrary, it is a question of holding together the different levels of reading without prejudging the interpretation, we could say, will be made of them.
To orient ourselves in this questioning, two other references will serve as a guide.
Let us start with formation as Lacan outlined it and which places one’s own analysis at the center of the formation of an analyst. He thus indicates from the outset a tension between the knowledge resulting from the cure and the knowledge that is more epistemic. Jacques-Alain Miller, in his text “To introduce the formation effect”, proposes a small schema on this subject: a circle with a smaller inner circle, representing the analysis and its end, the pass. Around it, on the periphery, there are knowledges acquired by ordinary means, thus existing in an exoteric mode. What attracts attention is that the central zone representing the formative value of the cure, as close as possible to the subjective mutation obtained, is designated as the extimate zone. The formative effect of the cure is located there as the extimate effect. Let us remember that the core of formation is to be thought of in terms of extimacy: what is most intimate conceived in exteriority, internal to the subject himself. No interior, no interiority.
All nuances are possible between the two extremes of the purely subjective extimate part and the exoteric part of the desubjectivized formation, from “the cancellation of specialized knowledge, to liberate the extimate effect, to the reduction of the extimacy in relation to the benefit of the transmission of effective knowledges”.
This schema is very useful because it splits to distribute the extension and the intension of psychoanalysis. In this respect, it is a compass for thinking about the relationship between the two. Extension is sometimes conceived as the exterior of the School in connection with the city, and the intension as the interior. Isn’t it rather a question of thinking about them from this schema as concentric circles, in which their core remains that of the cure? There is no extraterritoriality of analytic discourse, because it is part of the discourse of civilization which has all its impact on the psychoanalytic field.
What consequences can be drawn from this regarding the address of our activities or seminars? If the essential part of formation concerns the cure, then the address of the School calls for an audience that is as open as possible (with the necessary precautions in regard to clinical cases), because what is to be disseminated, transmitted is the salt of the experience of a cure, where the only hidden part concerns the truth that cannot be all-said. “It is when there is nothing to hide that one hides; one discloses without reluctance when what is hidden is hidden by structure”.
It is worth taking an interest here in private life, as Lacan recommends. What is private life? He asks if, “from the moment we make an analysis there is no longer any private life?” Private life refers to everything that maintains and preserves all the fictions that make us believe in sexual rapport. As far as the analyst is concerned, these fictions have nothing to do with his function, which is to occupy the place of a. In his position as an analyst, he must know what place he occupies in the life of his patient, but the reciprocal is absolutely unnecessary.
In the same way, by neglecting the discourse of his position from a, he will teach about everything, all kinds of fictions, except psychoanalysis. IN his reference to private life, Lacan indicates to us that extension must be based on a discourse like no other, on a, and not dissolve into the reigning fictions.
<1> Miller J.-A., « Pour introduire l’effet de formation », Quarto, 76, p. 6-9.
<2>Id.,ibid.
<3>Id.,ibid.
Translated from French by Renata Teixeira. Revised by Jared Elwart.