Urgent! LS2 Reading Seminar towards the 19 th Congress of the NLS Tel Aviv 1-2 June Session 1 Contents

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1 Urgent! LS2 Reading Seminar towards the 19 th Congress of the NLS Tel Aviv 1-2 June 2019 Session 1 Contents Bernard Seynhaeve Jacques Lacan Jacques Lacan The Argument for the Congress Preface to the English-Language Edition of Seminar XI in the original translation by Alan Sheridan On the Subject Who is Finally in Question

2 URGENT! 2019 Congress of the NLS Argument Subjective Urgency and the Transferential Unconscious In his Preface to the English-Language Edition of Seminar XI, 1 Lacan speaks of his urgent cases. The urgency that Lacan speaks about in this text from his very last teaching is not the subjective urgency that he speaks about in On the Subject Who Is Finally in Question, written in As Jacques-Alain Miller reminds us in his course, 3 when Lacan speaks of a subjective urgency in 1966 it is already a question of the formation of psychoanalysts: [ ] there will be some psychoanalyst who responds to certain subjective emergencies [urgences subjectives]. 4 This text is contemporary with the Proposition of 9 October 5 on the invention of the pass. In this 1967 Proposition, Lacan uses the concept of the subject notably to introduce the matheme of transference on the basis of the subject supposed to know. A subject he says, is supposed [...] by the signifier that represents him. 6 From which it follows that the algorithm of transference is deduced from the concept of the subject of the signifier. Urgency, as Lacan conceptualises it in these texts of 1966 and 67, is at Archimedean point of the establishment of transference. Situated at this logical moment of subjective destabilization, it accounts for the precipitation of the subject in the direction of haste, making it possible to put him to work. This urgency [urgence] is the traumatic moment when, for a subject, the signifying chain has been broken. The psychoanalyst is the one who listens to those who complain of an acute rupturing of the signifying chain. 1 Lacan, Jacques, Preface to the English-Language Edition, The Seminar, Book XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. A. Sheridan, W.W. Norton & Co., New York/London, 1998, pp. vii-ix. 2 Lacan, Jacques, On the Subject Who Is Finally in Question, Écrits, trans. B. Fink, W.W. Norton & Co., New York/London, 2006, pp [TN: In this text, urgences subjectives, which appears in Lacan s concluding sentence (where he is speaking about what an analytic formation permits one to respond to), is translated as subjective emergencies, which is indeed one of the meanings of the word urgence.] 3 MILLER, Jacques-Alain, L orientation lacanienne. Le tout dernier Lacan ( ), class given at the Department of Psychoanalysis in the University, Paris 8, 15 November A first version of this text, established by C. Bonningue, was published as, L inconscient reel, in Quarto (December 2006), pp. 6-11; a second version established by C. Alberti and P. Hellebois will be published in November 2018, with an English-language translation by R. Grigg, in The Lacanian Review 6. Unrevised by the author. 4 Lacan, Jacques, On the Subject Who Is Finally in Question, Écrits, op. cit., p Lacan, Jacques, Proposition of 9 October 1967 on the Psychoanalyst of the School, trans. R. Grigg, available online at: 6 Ibid.

3 The subjective urgency or emergency, this urgence subjective, is the point of departure that presides over the establishment of the signifier of transference in its relation to le signifiant quelconque to any signifier. Lacan refers to what we call the demand of a potential analysand as an urgent request [la requête d une urgence]. In the psychoanalytic sense, subjective urgency implies a call to the Other, to S2. Urgent Cases and the Parlêtre The Preface to the English-Language Edition of Seminar XI is a three-paged text that Lacan wrote in 1976 as an extension of his Seminar, The Sinthome; Miller even considers it to be this seminar s last lesson. This short text is a new way of taking up his Proposition on the pass. It is for this reason that Miller considers it to be, in some way, Lacan's last will and testament. When he brings up the pass again at the end of his teaching, Lacan no longer uses the signifier subjective urgency, but that of urgent cases. Other signifiers are also not found in this text. While transference finds its algorithmic definition in the 1967 Proposition, this signifier is nowhere to be found in the later text. And for good reason, for in his very last teaching, the subject supposed to know is itself thrown into question. The subject supposed to know is the hypothesis of the Freudian unconscious, the transferential unconscious. In this final text, the signifiers knowledge, subject supposed to know and transference no longer appear. In this regard, Miller points out that he prefers that we say that we come back from one session to the next because ça pousse, it pushes, ça urge, it urges rather than because of transference. Knowledge is no longer there because Lacan no longer believes in it. He considers knowledge to be only a semblant, a hare-brained lucubration about lalangue. 7 On the other hand, while knowledge produces nothing but lies, we find another signifier, that of lying truth. 8 And instead of the signifier of transference we find these urgent cases. Admittedly, urgency here is, on the one hand, just as in 1967, what presides over the analysis, what presides over transference. In the analytic situation, the psychoanalyst is this person, this quelconque or whomsoever who embodies this place of address for analysands these speaking beings that run 9 after the truth the one who agrees to pair with these urgent cases. We meet an analyst when we are in a state of urgency. But, on the other hand, Lacan takes an additional step that goes beyond transference; there is another urgency. In analysis, there is always urgency, there is always something that pushes, that urges, that presses and that is beyond 7 Cf. Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar, Book XX, Encore, trans B. Fink, W.W. Norton & Co, New York/London, 1999, p Lacan, Jacques, Preface to the English-Language Edition, The Seminar, Book XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, op. cit., p. xi, but also p. vii, There is no truth that, in passing through awareness, does not lie, and p. viii, The mirage of truth, from which only lies can be expected. 9 Ibid., p. vii, But one runs after [the truth] all the same.

4 transference, even if one takes one s time or lets it drag on. 10 Urgency is something that presses the parlêtre. Something of the order of the urgency of life, as Dominique Holvoet magnificently emphasised in his teaching as an AS 11. This indicates that there is a causality operating at a deeper level than the transference, one that Lacan characterizes as a level of satisfaction insofar as it is urgent and analysis is its means. 12 We run after the truth, says Lacan; this is what happens in free association, but truth cannot be caught by the signifier. What is urgent for Lacan at the end of his teaching the analytical urgency, that which pushes the parlêtre consists therefore of running after truth, of pursuing the truth that harbours the real. But this truth cannot be captured with words. The urgency in question is the attempt to catch hold of a truth that can never be reached. This race to pursue the truth that we never can catch is what provides the satisfaction of these urgent cases, of the speaking bodies. This is why one can say that analysis is the means for this urgent satisfaction. Satis, etymologically the Latin enough, constitutes the root of the signifier satisfaction, the it is enough of the pass. Consequently, satisfaction comes in two modalities: that of satis it is enough, and that of a new way of knowing how to do with one s real, with the non-resorbable jouissance. In this final text, Lacan no longer says the psychoanalyst derives his authorisation only from himself, 13 because the subject produced by free association is thrown back into question. Instead, he emphasizes what is urgent, the impulse that pushes the subject to hystorize from himself [ s hystoriser de lui-même ] 14, namely to hystorize himself without making a pair with his analyst. As you can see, in the very last Lacan, at the Archimedean point of the pass, what is at stake is urgent. The pass is done via the urgency of life. Bernard Seynhaeve Translated by Philip Dravers 10 Cf. Miller, Jacques-Alain, L orientation lacanienne. Choses de finesse en psychoanalyse ( ), class given at the Department of Psychoanalysis in the University, Paris 8, 21 January A first version of this text, transcribed by J. Peraldi et Y. Vanderveken was published as La passe du parlêtre in La Cause freudienne, Navarin, Paris, 2010, No. 74, pp ; a second version established by C. Alberti et P. Hellebois, with an English-language translation by R. Grigg, will be published in November 2018 in The Lacanian Review 6. Unrevised by the author. 11 Cf. Holvoet, Dominique, remarks pronounced during an «Interview pour PIPOL 5», conducted by Patricia Bosquin, January 2011; «De la causation du sujet à la logique de la cure», talk given on 19/02/2011 at Bruges, published in INWIT; as well as many times during his teaching as AS. 12 Miller, Jacques-Alain, La passe du parlêtre, op. cit. 13 Cf. Lacan, Jacques, Proposition of 9 October 1967 on the Psychoanalyst of the School, op. cit. 14 Cf. Lacan, Jacques, Preface to the English-Language Edition, The Seminar, Book XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, op. cit. p. viii.

5 PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE EDITION When the space of a lapsus no longer carries any meaning (or interpretation), then only is one sure that one is in the unconscious. One knows. But one has only to be aware of the fact to find oneself outside it. There is no friendship there, in that space that supports this unconscious. All I can do is tell the truth. No, that isn't so I have missed it. There is no truth that, in passing through awareness, does not lie. But one runs after it all the same. There is a way of sorting out this muddle that is satisfactory for other than formal reasons (symmetry, for example). Like satisfaction, it is acquired only with use, with the use of an individual who, in psycho-analysis (psych = fiction of), is called an analysand. And, as a matter of simple fact, there is no shortage of analysands in our lands. That is a fact of human reality what man calls reality. It should be noted that psycho-analysis has, since it has ex-sisted, changed. Invented by a solitary, an incontestable theoretician of the unconscious (which is not what one imagines it to be the unconscious, I would say, is real); it is now practised in couples. To be fair, the solitary was the first to set the example. Not without abusing his disciples (for they were disciples only because he knew not what he did). This conveys the idea he had of psycho-analysis a plague except that it proved to be anodyne in the land where he brought it; the public adopted/adapted it quite painlessly. Now, a little late in the day, I add my pinch of salt: a fact of hystory, or hysteria: that of my colleagues, as it happens, a case of no importance, but one in which I happened to find myself implicated for concerning myself with someone who introduced me to them as having imposed on myself Freud, the Beloved of Mathesis. vii

6 PREFACE I would have preferred to forget that: but one does not forget what the public constantly reminds you of. So one must take account of the analyst in psycho-analytic treatment. He would have no social standing, I imagine, if Freud had not opened up the way for him Freud, I say, to call him by his name. For no one can call anyone an analyst and Freud did not do so. Handing out rings to initiates is not to call by a name. Hence my proposition that the analyst hystorizes only from himself: a patent fact. Even if he is confirmed in doing so by a hierarchy. What hierarchy could confirm him as an analyst, give him the rubber-stamp? A certificate tells me that I was born. I repudiate this certificate: I am not a poet, but a poem. A poem that is being written, even if it looks like a subject. There remains the question of what could drive anyone, especially after an analysis, to hystorize from It cannot come from himself; for he knows something about the analyst, now that he has liquidated, as they say, his positive transference. How could he contemplate taking up the same function? In other words, are there cases in which you are impelled by some other reason than the wish to set yourself up, that is, to earn money, to keep those who are in your care, above all your.. self; according to Jewish morality (to which Freud remained attached in this respect). One must admit that the question (the question of another is necessary to support the status of a profession newly A hystory that I do not call eternal, because its aetas is only in relation to real number, that is to say, to the serial Why, then, should we not put this profession to the test of that truth of which the so-called unconscious function dreams, with which it dabbles? The mirage of truth, from which only lies can be expected (this is what, in polite language, we call 'resistance'), has no other term than the satisfaction that marks the end of the analysis. viii

7 PREFACE Since the main aim of analysis is to give this urgently needed satisfaction, let us ask ourselves how someone can devote himself to these urgent cases. This is an odd aspect of that love of one's neighbour upheld by the Judaic tradition. But to interpret it in Christian terms, that is to say, as Hellenic jean-f.. trerie, what is presented to the analyst is something other than the neighbour: it is the unsorted material of a demand that has nothing to do with the meeting (of a person from Samaria fit to dictate Christic duty). The offer is prior to an urgent request that one is not sure of unless one has weighed it. I have therefore designated as a 'pass' that putting of the hystorization of the analysis to the test, while refraining from imposing this pass on all, because it is not a question, as it happens, of all, but of scattered, ill-assorted individuals. I have left it at the disposal of those who are prepared to run the risk of attesting at best to the lying truth. I have done so by virtue of having produced the only conceivable idea of the object, that of the object as cause of desire, of that which is lacking. The lack of the lack makes the real, which emerges only there, as a cork. This cork is supported by the term of the impossible and the little we know about the real shows its antinomy to all verisimilitude. I shall speak of Joyce, who has preoccupied me much this year, only to say that he is the simplest consequence of a refusal such a mental refusal! of a psycho-analysis, which, as a result, his work illustrates. But I have done no more than touch on this, in view of my embarrassment where art an element in which Freud did not bathe without mishap is concerned. I would-mention that, as always, I was entangled in urgent cases as I wrote this. I write, however, in so far as I feel I must, in order to be on a level (au pair) with these cases, to make a pair with them. Paris J. L. ix

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9 190 Ecrits Meta, the post that marks the turning point to be approached as closely as possible in a race, is the metaphor I will give him as a viaticum in reminding him of the new [inedit] discourse I have been pronouncing every Wednesday of the academic year since that time, whose circulation elsewhere he may possibly attend to (if he does not attend in person). Regarding the subject who is called into question, training analysis will be my point of departure. As we know, this is the name for a psychoanalysis that one proposes to undertake for the purpose of training especially as an element in qualifying to practice psychoanalysis. When a psychoanalysis is specified by such a request [demande] [made by a potential analysand to an analyst], the supposedly ordinary parameters of analysis are considered to be modified, and the analyst thinks that he must deal with that. Accepting to conduct an analysis under such conditions brings with it a responsibility. It is curious to note how that responsibility is displaced onto the guarantees that one derives from it. For the unexpected baptism received by that which proposes to undertake training, in the form of a "personal psychoanalysis" 1 (as if there were any other form of analysis) assuming that in it things are brought back to the uninviting point desired does not seem to me to in any way concern what the proposal leads to in the subject whom we welcome in this way, in sum, neglecting that "personal analysis." Perhaps we will see more clearly if we purify the said subject of his preoccupations, which can be summarized with the term "propaganda": the ranks of analysts which must be swelled, the faith which must be propagated, and the standard which must be protected. Let us extract from this the subject who is implied by the request [demande] in which he presents himself. The reader will take a step forward if he notes here that the unconscious gives him a poor basis upon which to reduce this subject to what the realm of precision instrumentation designates as "subjective error" assuming he is prepared to add that psychoanalysis does not have the privilege of a more consistent subject, but must rather allow us to shed light on him in the avenues of other disciplines as well. This ambitious approach would unduly distract us from acknowledging what we in fact argue on the basis of: namely, the subject whom we qualify (and significantly so) as a patient, which is not the subject as strictly implied by his request [demande], but rather the product that we would like to see determined by it.

10 On the Subject Who Is Finally in Question In other words, we obscure the picture in the very process of painting it. In the name of this patient, our listening too will be patient. It is for his own good that techniques are elaborated so we will know how to measure the aid we provide. The point is to make the psychoanalyst capable of this patience and measurement. But, after all, the uncertainty that remains regarding the very end of analysis has the effect of leaving between the patient and the subject that we append to him only the difference, promised to the second, of repeating the experience [with patients of his own], it even being legitimated that their theoretical equivalence is fully maintained in the countertransference. How then could training analysis constitute a problem? I have no negative intention in preparing this balance sheet. I am simply pointing out the way things are a situation in which we find many opportune remarks, a permanent calling into question of technique, and often odd glows in the enthusiasm of avowing in short, a richness which can certainly be understood as the fruit of the relativism that is characteristic of our discipline and that provides it with its guarantee. Even the objection that stems from the total absence of discussion of the end of training analysis can go unheeded given the unquestionable nature of the usual routine. Only the never broached question of the threshold that must be reached in order for a psychoanalyst to be promoted to the rank of "training analyst" (where the criterion of seniority is derisory) reminds us that it is the subject in question in training analysis who poses a problem and who remains an intact subject there. Shouldn't we, rather, conceptualize training analysis as the perfect form which sheds light on analysis itself, since it provides a restriction to it? Such is the reversal that never occurred to anyone before I mentioned it. It seems to force itself upon us, nevertheless. For while psychoanalysis has a specific field, the concern with therapeutic results justifies short-circuits and even tempering modifications within it; but if there is one case in which all such reductions are prohibited, it must be training analysis. Should someone claim that I am maintaining that the training of analysts is what psychoanalysis is most justified in doing, he would be barking up the wrong tree. For such insolence, were it such, would not implicate psychoanalysts. Rather, it would point to a certain gap in civilization that must be filled, but which is not yet clearly enough discerned for anyone to boast that he has taken it upon himself to do so. Only a theory that is capable of grounding psychoanalysis in a way that preserves its relationship to science can pave the way for this.

11 19* Ecrits It is obvious that psychoanalysis was born from science. It is inconceivable that it could have arisen from another field. It is no accident but rather a consequence that in those circles where psychoanalysis distinguishes itself by remaining Freudian, it is considered self-evident that psychoanalysis has no other support than that of science and that there is no possible transition to psychoanalysis from the realm of the esoteric, by which practices that seem to be similar to psychoanalysis are structured. How then can we account for the obvious misunderstandings that abound in the conceptualizations in vogue in established circles? Regardless of how their creations are slapped together from the supposed feelings of unity, where, at the height of the treatment the bliss that we are led to believe inaugurates libidinal development is found anew, to the muchballyhooed miracles obtained by reaching genital maturity, with its sublime ability to join in all regressions we can recognize in them the mirage which is not even debated: the completeness of the subject. People even formally take such completeness as a goal which should in theory be reachable, even if in practice infirmity attributable to the technique or to the aftermath of the patient's history requires that it remain an overly distant ideal. Such is the crux of the theoretical extravagance, in the strict sense of the term, into which we see that anyone can fall, from the most authentic explorer of the analyst's therapeutic responsibility to the most rigorous examiner of analytic concepts. This can be confirmed regarding the paragon I mentioned first, Ferenczi, in his biological delusion about amphimixis; and in the second case, where I was thinking of Jones, it can be gauged in the latter's phenomenologicaiya«*/?cw, the aphanisis of desire, to which he was led by his need to ensure the equal rights of the sexes with respect to castration that scandalous fact that can only be accepted by giving up on [the idea of] the subject's completeness. Next to these illustrious examples, we are less surprised by the profusion of economic recenterings to which each theorist gives himself over, extrapolating from the treatment to development, and even to human history for example, transferring the fantasy of castration back onto the anal phase, or basing everything on a universal oral neurosis... without any assignable limit to his... etc. At best it can be taken as evidence of what I will call the naivete of personal perversion, the thing being understood to give way to some illumination. I am not referring here to the inanity of the term "personal analysis," about which one can say that all too often what it designates is as inane as

12 On the Subject Who Is Finally in Question 193 the term itself, being sanctioned only by highly practical rearrangements. Whence rearises the question of the benefit this curious fabrication offers. The practitioner who is not inveterate is probably not insensitive to a reality that has been rendered more nostalgic by rising up to meet him, and he responds in this case to the essential relationship between the veil and his experience with myth-like sketches. A fact prevents us from qualifying these sketches as myths, for what we see in psychoanalysis are not authentic myths (by which I simply mean those that are found in the field), which never fail to leave visible the subject's decompletion, but folklore-like fragments of these myths, and precisely those that have been used by propaganda religions in their themes of salvation. This fact will be contested by those whose truth is hidden by these themes, who are all too happy to find in them corroboration for their truth on the basis of what they call "hermeneutics." (A healthy reform of spelling would allow us to give their exploitation of this term the import of a famillionaire practice: that of the fauxfilosopher, for example, or of fuzzyosophy, without adding any more dots or i's.) Their radical vice can be seen in [their approach to] the transmission of knowledge. At best this transmission could be defended by comparing psychoanalysis to those trades in which, for centuries, transmission occurred only in a veiled manner, maintained by the institution of apprenticeship and guild [compagnonnage]. A master's in the art and different ranks protect therein the secret of a substantial knowledge. (It is, nevertheless, the liberal arts, which do not practice the arcane, that I will refer to later in evoking the youth of psychoanalysis.) The comparison does not hold up, no matter how slight it may be. This is so clear that one might say that reality itself is designed in such a way as to reject this comparison, since what it requires is an entirely different position of the subject. The theory or rather the hackneyed views that go by this name, the formulations of which are so variable that it sometimes seems that the only thing they have in common is their insipid character is merely the filling of a locus in which a deficiency can be demonstrated without our even knowing how to formulate it. I propose an algebra that tries to correspond, in the place thus defined, to what the sort of logic that is known as symbolic does when it establishes the rights of mathematical practice. I realize full well how much prudence and care are required to do so. All I can say here is that it is important to preserve the availability of

13 194 Ecrits the experience acquired by the subject in the characteristic structure of displacement and splitting in which that experience had to be constituted referring the reader to my actual discussions of this topic. What I must stress here is that I claim to pave the way for the scientific position of psychoanalysis by analyzing in what way it is already implied at the very heart of the psychoanalytic discovery. The reform of the subject that is inaugural in psychoanalysis must be related to the reform that occurs at the core of science, the latter involving a certain reprieve from ambiguous questions that one might call questions of truth. It is difficult not to see that, even before the advent of psychoanalysis, a dimension that might be called that of the symptom was introduced, which was articulated on the basis of the fact that it represents the return of truth as such into the gap of a certain knowledge. I am not referring to the classical problem of error, but rather to a concrete manifestation that must be appreciated "clinically," in which we find not a failure of representation but a truth of another reference than the one, whether representation or not, whose fine order it manages to disturb... In this sense, one can say that this dimension is highly differentiated in Marx's critique, even if it is not made explicit there. And one can say that a part of the reversal of Hegel that he carries out is constituted by the return (which is a materialist return, precisely insofar as it gives it figure and body) of the question of truth. The latter actually forces itself upon us, I would go so far as to say, not by taking up the thread of the ruse of reason, a subtle form with which Hegel sends it packing, but by upsetting these ruses (read Marx's political writings) which are merely dressed up with reason... I am aware of the precision with which it is fitting to accompany this theme of truth and its detour [biais] in knowledge which is nevertheless the crux, it seems to me, of philosophy as such. I am only mentioning it in order to point out the leap made by Freud therein. Freud sets himself apart from the rest by clearly linking the status of the symptom to the status of his own operation, for the Freudian operation is the symptom's proper operation, in the two senses of the term. Unlike a sign or smoke which is never found in the absence of fire, a fire that smoke indicates with the possible call to put it out a symptom can only be interpreted in the signifying order. A signifier has meaning only through its relation to another signifier. The truth of symptoms

14 On the Subject Who Is Finally in Question i<)5 resides in this articulation. Symptoms remained somewhat vague when they were understood as representing some irruption of truth. In fact they are truth, being made of the same wood from which truth is made, if we posit materialistically that truth is what is instated on the basis of the signifying chain. I would like to distinguish myself from the level of joking around at which certain theoretical debates ordinarily occur. I will do so by asking how we are supposed to take what smoke, since that is the classical paradigm, proposes to our gaze when it billows out of crematorium furnaces. I do not doubt that people will agree that we can take it only in terms of its signifying value; and that even if we were to refuse to be dumbfounded by the criterion here, this smoke would remain for the materialist reduction an element that is less metaphorical than all the smoke that could be stirred up in debating whether what it represents should be broached from a biological or a social standpoint. By taking one's bearings from the joint between the consequences of language and the desire for knowledge a joint that the subject is perhaps the paths will become more passable regarding what has always been known about the distance that separates the subject from his existence as a sexed being, not to mention as a living being. And, indeed, the construction that I provide of the subject in following the thread of Freudian experience removes none of the personal poignancy from the several displacements and splits he may have to undergo in the course of his training analysis. If his training analysis registers the resistances he has overcome, it is insofar as they fill the space of defense in which the subject is organized; it is only on the basis of certain structural reference points that one can pinpoint the trajectory he is following, in order to outline its exhaustion. Similarly, a certain order of construction can be required regarding what must be attained by way of what fundamentally screens the real in the unconscious fantasy. All of these verification values will not stop castration which is the key to the subject's radical dodge [biais] by which the symptom comes into being from remaining, even in a training analysis, the enigma that the subject resolves only by avoiding it. At least if some order being established in what he has experienced later gave him responsibility for his statements, he would not try to reduce to the anal phase that aspect of castration that he grasped in the [fundamental] fantasy.

15 19<S Ecrits In other words, analytic experience would be protected from sanctioning theoretical orientations that are likely to lead to the derailing of its transmission. The status of training analysis and of the teaching of psychoanalysis must be understood anew to be identical in their scientific openness. The latter involves, like any other teaching, minimal conditions: a defined relationship to the instrument as an instrument and a certain idea of the question raised by the material. The fact that the two converge here in a question, which is not thereby simplified, nevertheless, will perhaps close this other question with which psychoanalysis redoubles the first, in the form of a question posed to science, by constituting a science by itself which is raised to the second power \au seconddegre]. Should the reader be surprised that I am raising this question so late in the game and with the same temperament which is such that it required two of the most improbable echoes of my teaching to receive from two college students in the United States the careful (and successful) translation that two of my articles (including "Function and Field") deserved he should realize that my top priority was that there first be psychoanalysts. At least I can now be happy that as long as there is still some trace of what I have instituted, there will be some psychoanalyst [dupsychanafyste] who responds to certain subjective emergencies, should qualifying them with the definite article be saying too much, or else still desiring too much Note 1. A means by which people avoid having to decide at first whether a psychoanalysis will or will not be a training analysis.