The Specimen Story of Psychoanalysis - Shoshana Felman

Beyond Oedipus: The Specimen Story of Psychoanalysis
Author(s): Shoshana Felman

Source: MLN, Vol. 98, No. 5, Comparative Literature (Dec., 1983), pp. 1021-1053
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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BEYOND OEDIPUS:
THE SPECIMEN STORY
OF PSYCHOANALYSIS
ShoshanaFelman
What is a Key-Narrative?
"We are forever telling stories about ourselves," writes Roy
Schafer, in an essayl that most suggestively defines the crux of the
relation-and of the differentiation-between psychoanalysis and
narration: between the daily practice (need) of telling stories and
the narrative experience that is at stake in a practical psychoanal-
ysis:
We are forever telling stories about ourselves. In telling these stories to others,
we may ... be said to perform straightforward narrative actions. In saying that
we also tell them to ourselves, however, we are enclosing one story within an-
other .... On this view, the self is a telling ....
Additionally, we are forever telling stories about others ... we narrate others
just as we narrate ourselves ... Consequently, telling "others" about "ourselves"
is doubly narrative.
Often the stories we tell about ourselves are life historical or autobiographical;
we locate them in the past. For example, we might say, "Until I was fifteen, I
was proud of my father" or "I had a totally miserable childhood." These histories
are present tellings. The same may be said of the histories we attribute to others.
We change many aspects of these histories of self and others as we change, for
better or worse, the implied or stated questions to which they are the answers.
Personal development may be characterized as change in the questions it is ur-
gent or essential to answer. As a project in personal development, personal
analysis changes the leading questions that one addresses to the tale of one's life
and the lives of important others.2
Freud changed, indeed, our understanding of the leading ques-

tions underlying his patients' stories. The constitution of psycho-
analysis, however, was motivated not just in the patients' need to
? 1983 Shoshana Felman

1022 SHOSHANA FELMAN
tell their stories, nor even merely in Freud's way of changing the
essential questions that those narrative complaints addressed, but
in Freud's unprecedented transformationof narration into theory.In
transforming, thus, not just the questionsof the story but the very
status of the narrative, in investing the idiosyncrasies of narrative
with the generalizing power of a theoretical validity, Freud had a
way of telling stories-of telling stories about others and of telling
others stories about himself-which made history.
My dear Wilhelm,
My self-analysis is the most important thing I have in hand, and promises to
be of the greatest value to me, when it is finished.... If the analysis goes on as
I expect, I shall write it all out systematically and lay the results before you. So
far I have found nothing completely new, but all the complication to which I am
used.... Only one idea of general value has occurred to me. I have found love
of the mother and jealousy of the father in my own case too, and now believe it
to be a general phenomenon of early childhood.... If that is the case, the
gripping power of OedipusRex ... becomes intelligible. The Greek myth seizes
on a compulsion which everyone recognizes because he has felt traces of it in
himself. Every member of the audience was once a budding Oedipus in phantasy,
and this dream-fulfilment played out in reality causes everyone to recoil in
horror, with the full measure of repression which separates his infantile from
his present state.3
"Only one idea of general value has occurred to me. I have

found love of the mother and jealousy of the father in my own
case too." From the Letters to Fliess to The Interpretationof Dreams,
what Freud is instituting is a radically new way of writing one's
autobiography, by transforming personal narration into a path-
breaking theoretical discovery. In the constitution of the theory,
however, the discovery that emerges out of the narration is itself
referred back to a story which confirms it: the literary drama of
the destiny of Oedipus, which, in becoming thus a reference nar-
rative-the specimen story of psychoanalysis-, situates the vali-
dating moment at which the psychoanalytic story-telling turns and
returns back upon itself, in the unprecedented, Freudian narra-
tive-discursive space in which narration becomes theory.
This discovery is confirmed by a legend which has come down to us from
classical antiquity: a legend whose profound and universal power to move can
only be understood if the hypothesis I have put forward in regard to the psy-
chology of children has an equally universal validity. What I have in mind is the
legend of King Oedipus and Sophocles' drama which bears his name....
The action of the play consists in nothing other than the process of revealing,
with cunning delays and ever-mounting excitement-a process that can be lik-
ened to the work of a psycho-analysis-that Oedipus himself is the murderer
of Laius, but further that he is the son of the murdered man and of Jocasta....
If OedipusRex moves a modern audience no less than it did the contemporary
Greek one ... there must be something which makes a voice within us ready to

M L N 1023
recognize the compelling force of destiny in the Oedipus. .. . His destiny moves
us because it might have been ours-because the oracle laid the same curse
upon us before our birth as upon him. It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to
direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our
first murderous wish against our father. Our dreams convince us that this is so.
King Oedipus, who slew his father Laius and married his motherJocasta, merely
shows us the fulfilment of our childhood wishes.... While the poet ... brings
to light the guilt of Oedipus, he is at the same time compelling us to recognize
our own inner minds, in which those same impulses, though suppressed, are still
to be found.4
Freud's reference to the Oedipus as a key-narrative-the spec-

imen story of psychoanalysis-is structured by three questions
which support his analytical interrogation:
1) The question of the effectivenessof the story (Why is the story so
compelling, moving? How to account for the story's practical
effect on the audience-its power to elicit affect, its symbolic
efficacy?)
2) The question of the recognition (The story has power over us
because it "is compelling us to recognize"something in our-
selves. What is it that the story is compelling us to recognize?
What is at stake in the recognition?)
3) The questionof the validityof the hypothesis,of the theory("a legend
whose profound and universal power to move can only be
understood if the hypothesisI have put forward in regard to
the psychology of children has an equallyuniversal validity").
Any further inquiry into, or rethinking of, the significance of the
Oedipus in psychoanalytic theory and practice, would have to take
into account the implications of those three questions: the question
of the narrative's practical efficacy (and hence, its potential for a
clinical efficacy: its practical effect on us, having to do not neces-
sarily with what the story means, but with what it does to us); the
question of the meaning of the theoreticalrecognition (what do we
recognize when we recognize the Oedipus?); and the question not
just of the mere validity of Freud's hypothesis, but of the very status
of the theoreticalvalidation througha narrative, that is, the question of
the relationship between truth and fiction in psychoanalysis.
I would suggest, now, that Lacan's reading of Freud renews, in-
deed, each of these questions in some crucial ways; and that an
exploration of this renewal-an exploration of the way in which
the Oedipus mythic reference holds the key to a Lacanian psycho-
analytic understanding-may hold the key, in turn, to the crux of
Lacan's innovative and enriching insight into what it is that Freud

1024 SHOSHANAFELMAN
discovered, and consequently, into what it is psychoanalysis is all

about.
The Psychoanalytic Story: Oedipus the King
Nowhere is there in Lacan's writings any systematic exposition

of Lacan's specific understanding of the significance of the Oed-
ipus. As is often the case, Lacan's insight has to be derived, through
a reading labor, from an elliptical and fragmentary text, from spo-
radic comments, from episodic highlights of (often critical and
corrective) interpretations, and from the omnipresent literary
usage of the reference to the Oedipus in Lacan's own rhetoric and
style. My attempt at a creative systematizaton of what may be called
Lacan's revision of the Oedipus would organize itself, in a structure
of its own, as a relation between (the refraction of an insight
through) three dimensions: 1) the purely theoreticaldimension: how
does Lacan understand (or modify the traditional understanding
of) the basic psychoanalytic concept of "the Oedipus complex"? 2)
The practical and clinical dimension:what is, in Lacan's eyes, the prac-
tical relevance of the Oedipus to the clinical event, to the practical
dealings with a patient? 3) The literarydimension:How does Lacan
understand the way in which the text of Sophocles informspsycho-
analytic knowledge?5
While Freud reads Sophocles's text in view of the consolida-
tion-the confirmation-of his theory, Lacan re-reads the Greek
text, after Freud, with an eye to its specific pertinence not to theory
but to psychoanalytic practice. Freud, already, had compared the
drama of the Oedipus to the process of a practical psychoanalysis
("The action of the play consists in nothing other than the process
of revealing . . . a process that can be likened to the work of a psycho-
analysis").But while this comparison between the literary work and
the work of the analysand leads Freud to the confirmation of his
theory-a theory of wish, of wish-fulfilment and of primordial Oed-
ipal desires (incestuous and patricidal), Lacan's different analytic
emphasis on the relevance of Oedipus to the clinician's practice, is
not so much on wish as on the role of speech-of language-in the
play.
What Freud discovered in, or through, the Oedipus-the un-
consciousnature of desire-implies, in Lacan's view, a structuralrela-
tion betweenlanguage and desire: a desire that articulates itself, sub-

M L N 1025
stitutively, in a symbolic metomymic language which, thereby, is

no longer recognizable by the subject.
It is always at the juncture of speech, at the level of its apparition, its emergence,
... that the manifestation of desire is produced. Desire emerges at the moment
of its incarnation into speech-it is coincident with the emergence of symbolism.
(S-II, 273)
No wonder, then, that OedipusRex, dramatizing as it does theprimal

scene of desire, in effect takes place on the other scene of language.
"The unconscious", says Lacan, "is the discourse of the other."
Oedipus Rex could be viewed as nothing other than a spectacular
dramatization, a calculated pedagogical demonstration, of this for-
mula. For Oedipus' unconscious is quite literally embodied by the
discourse of the Other-of the oracle.
Oedipus' unconscious is nothing other than this fundamental discourse whereby,
long since, for all time, Oedipus' history is out there-written, and we know it,
but Oedipus is ignorant of it, even as he is played out by it since the beginning.
This goes way back-remember how the Oracle frightens his parents, and how
he is consequently exposed, rejected. Everything takes place in function of the
Oracle and of the fact that Oedipus is truly other than what he realizes as his
history-he is the son of Laius and Jocasta, and he starts out his life ignorant
of this fact. The whole pulsation of the drama of his destiny, from the beginning
to the end, hinges on the veiling of this discourse, which is his reality without
his knowing it.
(S-II, 245)6
The unconscious is this subject unknown to the self, misapprehended, mis-
recognized, by the ego.
(S-II, 59)
The Oedipal question is thus at the center of each practical psy-

choanalysis, not necessarily as a question addressing the analy-
sand's desire for his parents, but as a question addressing the an-
alysand's misapprehension, misrecognition [me'connaissance]of his
own history.
The subject's question in no way refers to the results of any specific weaning,
abandonmnent, or vital lack of love or affection; it concerns the subject's history
inasmuch as the subject misapprehends, misrecognizesit; this is what the subject's
actual conduct is expressing in spite of himself, insofar as he obscurely seeks to
recognizethis history. His life is guided by a problematics which is not that of his
life-experience, but that of his destiny, that is-what is the meaning, the signif-
icance of his history? What does his life-story mean?
An utterance is the matrix of the misrecognized part of the subject, and this
is the specific level of the analytic symptom-a level which is de-centered with
respect to the individual experience, since it is, precisely, what the historical text
must integrate.
(S-II, 58)
Analysis is, indeed, nothing other than this process of historical

integration of the spoken-but misrecognized-part of the sub-

ject. To do this, the subject must-like Oedipus-recognize what

he misrecognizes,namely, his desire, and his history, inasmuch as
they are, both, unconscious (that is, insofar as his life-historydiffers
from what he can know, or own, as his life-story).
What we teach the subject to recognize as his unconscious is his history-that is
to say, we help him to complete the present historization of the facts that have
already determined a certain number of historical 'turning-points' in his exis-
tence. But if they have played this role, they did so already as facts of history,
that is to say, in so far as they have been recognizedin a certain sense or censored
in a certain order.
(E 261, N 52, TM)
As in Freud's case, the reference of the clinical practice of psycho-

analysis to the literary drama of the Oedipus hinges on the central
question of the recognition (as opposed to what the subject had,
beforehand, censored or misrecognized, misapprehended, or re-
pressed). Recognition is, indeed, for Freud as for Lacan, the crucial
psychoanalyticstake both of the clinical and of the literary work.
The nature of the recognition is, however, somewhat differently
conceived, in Freud's discussion of the Oedipus as validating psy-
choanalytic theory,and in Lacan's discussion of the Oedipus as il-
luminating psycho-analytic practice. In Freud's analysis, Oedipus
recognizes his desire (incest, patricide) as (unwittingly) fulfilled,
whereas Sophocles's reader recognizes in himself the same desire,
as repressed. The recognition is thus constative, or cognitive. In
Lacan's different emphasis, however, the psychoanalytic recogni-
tion is radically tied up with language, with the subject's analytic
speech-act, and as such, its value is less cognitive than performative7:
it is, itself, essentially a speech-act, whose symbolic action modifies
the subject's history, rather than cerebrally observing or recording
it, at last correctly.
To bring the subject to recognizeand to name his desire, this is the nature of the
efficacious action of analysis. But it is not a question of recognizing something
that would have already been there-a given-ready to be captured. In naming
it, the subject creates, gives rise to something new, makes something new present
in the world.
(S-II, 267)
Analysis can have for its goal only the advent of an authentic speech and the
realization by the subject of his history, in relation to a future.
(E 302, N 88, TM)
The analytical speech-act by which the subject recognizes, and per-

formatively names, his desire and his history (insofar as the mis-
apprehension of the one has in effect structured the other), has to
be completed, consummated, by an ultimate analytic act of speech

M L N 1027
which Lacan calls "the assumptionof one's history", that is, the ul-
timate acceptance-and endorsement-of one's destiny, the ack-
nowledgment of responsibility for the discourse of the Other in
oneself, but also the forgiving of this discourse.
It is certainly this assumptionof his history by the subject, in so far as it is con-
stituted by the speech addressed to the other, that constitutes the ground for
the new method that Freud called Psycho-analysis.
(E 257, N 48)
Oedipus the King, however, in Lacan's eyes, while recognizing,

naming his desire and his history, does not truly assume them; at
the end of Oedipus Rex, Oedipus accepts his destiny, but does not
accept (forgive) himself. This is why Lacan would like to take us,
as he puts it (in a formula that once again is resonant with many
meanings), beyond Oedipus: that is, first of all beyond Oedipus the
King and into Sophocles' tragic sequel, Oedipus at Colonus.
If the tragedy of Oedipus Rex is an exemplary literary work, psychoanalysts
should also know this beyondwhich is realized by the tragedy of Oedipusat Colonus.
(S-II, 245)
II
Beyond Oedipus: Oedipus at Colonus

It is only in the tragic sequel that the true assumptionof his des-
tiny by Oedipus takes place:
In Oedipus at Colonus, Oedipus says the following sentence: "Is it now that I am
nothing, that I am made to be a man?" This is the end of Oedipus' psychoanalysis-
Oedipus' psychoanalysis ends only at Colonus.... This is the essential moment
which gives its whole meaning to his history.
(S-II, 250)
What Lacan refers to is the following scene, which I will now quote
twice, in two different translations:
Oedipus
And did you think the gods would yet deliver me?
Ismene
The present oracles give me that hope.
Oedipus
What oracles are they? What prophecy?
Ismene
The people of Thebes shall desire you, for their safety,
After your death, and even while you live.
Oedipus
What good can such as I bring any man?

1028 SHOSHANAFELMAN
Ismene
They say it is in you that they must grow to greatness.
Oedipus
Am I made man in the hour when I cease to be?
(Walting's translation8)
Oedipus
You have some hope than that they [the gods] are concerned
With my deliverance?
Ismene
I have, father.
The latest sentences of the oracle...
Oedipus
How are they worded? What do they prophesy?
Ismene
The oracles declare their strength'sin you-
Oedipus
When I amfinished, I supposeI am strong!
(Grene's translation9)
"Is it now that I am nothing that I am made to be a man?" What

is it, then, which makes for Oedipus' humanity and strength at the
very moment at which he is "finished", at the moment when, re-
duced to nothing, he embodies his forthcoming death? What is it
that Oedipus, beyond the recognition of his destiny, here assumes,
and which exemplifies "the end of his analysis"? He assumes the
Other-in himself, he assumes his own relation to the discourse of
the Other, "this subject beyond the subject" (S-II, 245); he assumes,
in other words, his radical de-centerment from his own ego, from
his own self-image (Oedipus the King) and his own (self-) con-
sciousness. And it is this radical acceptance, and assumption, of his
own self-expropriation that embodies, for Lacan, the ultimate
meaning of Oedipus' analysis, as well as the profound Oedipal
significance of analysis as such.
This significance is historically consummated by Oedipus at the
moment when he awaits-and indeed assumes-his death. But this
is not just a coincidence: the assumption of one's death is inherent
to the analytical assumption.
You will have to read Oedipusat Colonus. You will see that the last word of man's
relation to this discourse which he does not know is-death.
(S-II, 245)
Why death? Here Lacan is at his most hermetic, at his most

elliptical. I believe, however, that this ellipsis embodies one of his

M LN 1029
most complex, profound and important psychoanalytic insights,

and I will try-at my own risk-to shed some light on it by con-
tinuing, now, the analysis of Oedipus at Colonus "beyond" what
Lacan explicitly articulates, by using some Lacanian highlights bor-
rowed from other texts (other contexts). Let me first make an
explanatory detour.
The Oedipus complex, in its traditional conception, encompasses
two fantasized ("imaginary") visions of death: the father's death
(imaginary murder), and the subject's own death in return (ima-
ginary castration). The Oedipus complex is resolved through the
child's identification with his father, constituting his superego; in
Lacan's terms, the resolution takes place through the introjection
of the Father's Name'0 (embodying the Law of incest prohibition),
which becomes constitutive of the child's unconscious. As the first,
archetypal linguistic symbol ("name") which represses, and
replaces, or displaces, the desire for the mother, the father's name
(and consequently, in the chain of linguistic or symbolic substitu-
tion, any word or symbol used metaphorically or metonymically,
that is, all symbols and all words), in effect incorporates the child's
assumption of his own death as a condition-and a metaphor-
for his renunciation. Since symbolization is coincident with the con-
stitution of the unconscious (the displacement of desire), "the last
word of man's relation to this discourse which he does not know"-
his unconscious-"is [thus] death": to symbolize is to incorporate
death in language, in order to survive.
So when we wish to attain in the subject what was before the serial articulations
of speech, and what is primordial to the birth of symbols, we find it in death,
from which his existence takes on all the meaning it has.
(E 320, N 105)
Thus the symbol manifests itself first of all as the murder of the thing, and this
death constitutes in the subject the eternization of his desire.
The first symbol in which we recognize humanity in its vestigial traces is the
grave, and the intermediary of death can be recognized in every relation through
which man is born into the life of his history.
(E 319, N 104, TM)
What, now, happens in Oedipus at Colonus which is new with

respect to the story (to the recognition story) of Oedipus the King
(besides the subject's final death)?
Precisely the fact that Oedipus is born, through the assumption
of his death (of his radical self-expropriation), into the life of his
history.Oedipus at Colonus is about the transformation of Oedipus'
story into history: it does not tell the drama, it is about the telling

1030 SHOSHANAFELMAN
(and retelling) of the drama. It is, in other words, about the his-
torizationof Oedipus' destiny, through the symbolization-the trans-
mutation into speech-of the Oedipal desire.
Oedipus
My star was unspeakable.
Chorus
Speak!
Oedipus
My child, what can I say to them?
Chorus
Answer us, stranger; what is your race,
Who was your father?
Oedipus
God help me, what will become of me, child?
Antigone
Tell them; there is no other way.
(Scene 1, 89)
Oedipus
Or do you dread
My strength? My actions? I think not, for I
Suffered those deeds more than I acted them,
As I might show if it were fitting here
To tell myfather's and my mother'sstory ...
For which you fear me, as I know too well.
(Scene 2, 91)
Chorus
What evil things have slept since long ago
It is not sweet to awaken;
And yet I long to be told-
Oedipus
What?
Chorus
Of that heartbreak for which there was no help,
The pain you have had to suffer.
Oedipus
For kindness' sake, do not open
My old wound, and my shame.
Chorus
It is told everywhere,and never dies;
I only want to hear it truly told.
(Scene 2, 102)

M L N 1031
Oedipus
There is, then, nothing left for me to tell
But my desire; and then the tale is ended.
(Scene 3, 105)
Messenger
Citizens, the briefest way to tell you
Would be to say that Oedipus is no more;
But what has happenedcannot be told so simply-
It was no simple thing.
(Scene 8, 147)
Embodying the linguistic drama-the analytical speech-act-of

Oedipus' assumption of his radical expropriation, Oedipus at Co-
lonus tells, thus, not simply the story of the telling of the story of
the Oedipus, the drama of symbolization and historization of the
Oedipal desire, but beyond that ("beyond Oedipus"), as the final
verses indicate, the story of the transmutationof Oedipus'death (in all
senses of the word, literal and metaphoric) into thesymboliclanguage
of the myth.
The fact that Oedipus is the Patronymic hero of the Oedipus complex is not a
coincidence. It would have been possible to choose another hero, since all the
heroes of Greek mythology have some relation to this myth, which they embody
in different forms.... It is not without reason that Freud was guided towards
this particular myth.
Oedipus, in his very life, is entirely this myth. He himself is nothing other
than the passage of this myth into existence.
(S-II, 267-268)
It is natural that everything would fall on Oedipus, since Oedipus embodies the
central knot of speech.
(S-II, 269)
Freud at Colonus
At the same time that Oedipus at Colonus dramatizes the "eter-
nization" of the Oedipal desire through its narrative symbolization,
that is, Oedipus' birth into his symbolic life, into his historical,
mythic survival, the later play also embodies something of the order
of an Oedipal death-instinct,since Oedipus, himself the victim of a
curse and of a consequent parental rejection, pronounces, in his
turn, a mortal curse against his sons. Oedipus' destiny is thus
marked by a repetition-compulsion, illustrating and rejoining, in
Lacan's eyes, Freud's tragic intuition in BeyondthePleasure Principle.
Like the later Freud, the later Sophocles narrates, as his ultimate
human (psychoanalytic) insight, the conjunctionbetweenlife and death.

Oedipus at Colonus, whose entire being resides in the speech formulated by his
destiny, concretizes the conjunction between death and life. He lives a life which
is made of death, that sort of death which is exactly there, beneath life's surface.
This is also where we are guided by this text in which Freud is telling us, 'Don't
believe that life ... is made of any force ... of progress, life ... is characterized
by nothing other than ... its capacity for death'....
Freud's theory may appear ... to account for everything, including what re-
lates to death, in the framework of a closed libidinal economy, regulated by the
pleasure principle and by the return to equilibrium....
The meaning of Beyond the Pleasure Principle is that this explanation is insuf-
ficient.... What Freud teaches us through the notion of primordial masochism
is that the last word of life, when life has been dispossessed of speech, can only
be this ultimate curse which finds expression at the end of Oedipus at Colonus.
Life does not want to heal.... What is, moreover, the significance of the healing,
of the cure, if not the realization, by the subject, of a speech which comes from
elsewhere, and by which he is traversed?
(S-II, 271-272)
What Lacan endeavors here is obviously not a simple reading of

the literary Oedipus in terms of Freud's theory, but rather, a re-
reading of Freud's theory in terms of the literary Oedipus. Lacan's
emphasis, as usual, is correctivewith respect to a certain psychoan-
alytical tradition that tends to disregard Freud's speculations in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle as "overpessimistic" and "unscientific,"
not truly belonging in his theory. For Lacan, however, Beyond the
Pleasure Principle is absolutely crucial to any understanding of psy-
choanalysis, since it embodies the ultimate riddle which Freud's in-
sight has confronted-and attempted to convey:
... Freud has bequeathed us his testament on the negative therapeutic reaction.
The key to this mystery,it is said, is in the agency of a primordial masochism,
that is, in a pure manifestation of that death instinct whose enigma Freud pro-
pounded for us at the climax of his experience.
We cannot turn up our noses at this problem, any more than I can postpone
an examination of it here.
For I note this same refusal to accept this culminatingpoint of Freud's doctrineby
those who conduct their analysis on the basis of a conception of the Ego [ego
psychology], and by those who, like Reich, go so far in the principle of seeking
the ineffable organic expression beyond speech that ... [they expect from anal-
ysis something like an] orgasmic induction.
(E 316, N 101, TM)
In reading Freud across Oedipusat Colonus, Lacan is doing much

more than to suggest an affinity of subjects between Freud's and
Sophocles's later works (the constitutive, structural relation be-
tween life and death: primordial masochism, death-instinct, rep-
etition compulsion). Lacan is using the relation between Oedipus at
Colonus and Oedipus the King (the undeniable relation, that is, of
the later literary work to the specimen narrative of psychoanalysis)
in order to illuminate and to make a claim for the importance of

M L N 1033
Beyondthe Pleasure Principle. Oedipusat Colonus,says Lacan, is taking

us beyond Oedipus, in much the same was as Freud is taking us
Beyond thepleasureprinciple. By this multi-levelled, densely resonant
comparison, Lacan is elliptically, strategically suggesting two
things:
1) That Beyond the Pleasure Principle stands to The Interpretationof
Dreams (the work in which Freud narrates, for the first time, his
discovery of the significance of Oedipus the King) in precisely the
same relation in which Oedipusat Colonusstands to OedipustheKing;
2) That the significance of the rejectionof Freud's later text by a
certain psychoanalytical establishment (embodying the consciousness
of the psychoanalytic movement, that is, its own perception of it-
self, its own self-image), is itself part of an Oedipal story: the story,
once again, of the misrecognition-misapprehension and mis-
reading-of a history and of a discourse.
The unconscious is that part of the concrete discourse ... which is not at the
disposal of the subject in re-establishing the continuity of his conscious discourse.
(E 258, N 490)
The unconscious is that chapter of my history which is marked by a blank .. .
it is the censored chapter.
(E 259, N50)
The Oedipal significance of psychoanalysis'misrecognitionof its own

discourse, of its own history, can only be seen from Colonus. In
confining itself, however, to Oedipus the King and to Freud's con-
comitant discovery of wish-fulfilment (as theorized in the Interpre-
tation of Dreams), the psychoanalytic movement, far from going-
as did Freud-beyond Oedipus, is still living only the last scene of
Oedipusthe King, in repeating consciousness' last gesture of denial:
the self-blinding.
Lacan, on the other hand, strives to make the psychoanalytic
movement recognizewhat it misrecognizes, and thus reintegrate the
repressed-the censored Freudian text-into psychoanalytic his-
tory-and theory.
Why is Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle so important? Why
is it not possible to dispensewith this final phase of Freud's thought,
in much the same way as it is impossible to dispense with Oedipus
at Colonus? Because, let us not forget, "Oedipus' analysis ends only
at Colonus.... This is the essential moment which gives its whole
meaning to his history" (S-II, 250). In what sense can Beyond the
Pleasure Principle be said to give its whole meaning to psychoanalytic
history?In the sense that what is beyondthe wish for pleasure-the

1034 SHOSHANAFELMAN
compulsionto repeat-radically displaces the conception both of his-

tory and of meaning, both of what and how history means and of
how meaning comes to be, and is historicized. This radical dis-
placement of the understanding both of meaning and of tempor-
ality (or history), far from being episodic, marginal, dispensable,
is essential both to psychoanalytic theory (what has happened in
the subject's past) and to psychoanalytic practice (what is hap-
pening in the subject's present: the concrete unfolding of uncon-
scious history in the repetition of the transference [E 318, N 102]).
Since the compulsion to repeat is, in Lacan's view, the compulsion
to repeat a signifier, Beyond the Pleasure Principle holds the key not
just to history or to transference but, specifically, to the textual
functioning of signification, that is, to the insistance of the signifier
in a signifying chain (that of a text, or of a life).
What is, then, psychoanalysis if not, precisely, a life-usage of the
death-instinct-a practical, productive usage of the compulsion to
repeat, through a replaying of the symbolic meaning of the death
the subject has repeatedly experienced, and through a recognition
and assumption of the meaning of this death (separation, loss) by
the subject, as a symbolic means of his coming to terms not with
death but, precisely, with his life?
The game is already played, the dice are already thrown, with this one exception,
that we can take them once more in our hand, and throw them once again.
(S-II, 256)
This is what a practical psychoanalysis is all about; and this is what

Freud tells us in his later speculative narrative, which seeks its way
beyond the pleasure principle, beyond his earlier discovery of wish-
fulfilment, beyond his earlier wish-fulfilling way of dreaming So-
phocles.
"The Oedipus complex", says Lacan in one of those suggestive,
richly understated statements (pronounced in an unpublished
Seminar), "the Oedipus complex is-a dream of Freud." This ap-
parently transparent sentence is, in effect, a complex re-statement
of the way psychoanalysis is staked in the discovery that The Inter-
pretationof Dreams narrates: a complex re-statement both of Freud's
discoveryof the theoryof wish-fulfilment as the meaning-and the
motivating force-of dreams, and of Freud's discoveryof the nar-
rative of Oedipus as validating the discovery of the theory. It was,
in effect, through his self-analysis, out of his own dream about his
father that revealed to Freud his own Oedipal complexity, that

M LN 1035
Freud retreived the founding, psychoanalytic meaning of the lit-

erary Oedipus. "The Oedipus complex is a dream of Freud."
Now, a dream (to any psychoanalyst, at least) is not the opposite
of truth; but neither is it truth that can be taken literally, at face
value. A dream is what demands interpretation. And interpreta-
tion is what goes beyondthe dream, even if interpretation is itself
nothing other than another dream, that is, not a theory, but still
another (free-associated) narrative, another metaphoricalaccount of
the discourse of the Other.
In this respect, it is noteworthy that Beyond the Pleasure Principle
was at first conceived by Freud as, precisely, a rethinkingof his theory
of dreams. This is born out by a paper Freud gave at the Interna-
tional Psychoanalytic Congress at The Hague (1920) under the
title, "Supplements to the Theory of Dreams," and in which he
announces his forthcoming publication. Here is how the paper's
goal is summed up in the "author's abstract":
The speaker dealt with three points touching upon the theory of dreams. The
first two ... were concerned with the thesis that dreams are wish-fulfilmentsand
broughtforward some necessarymodificationsof it ....
The speaker explained that, alongside the familiar wishful dreams and the
anxiety dreams which could easily be included in the theory, there were grounds
for recognizing the existence of a third category, to which he gave the name of
"punishment dreams"....
Another class of dreams, however, seemed to the speaker to present a more
serious exception to the rule that dreams are wish-fulfilments. These were the
so-called "traumatic" dreams. They occur in patients suffering from accidents,
but they also occur during psychoanalyses of neurotics and bring back to them
forgotten traumas of childhood. In connectionwith theproblemoffitting thesedreams
into the theoryof wish-fulfilment, the speakerreferredto a work shortly to be published
under the title, "Beyondthe Pleasure Principle."
(Standard, XVIII, 4)
Beyond the Pleasure Principle is thus itself a sort of (differential) rep-

etition of The Interpretation of Dreams, in much the same way as
Oedipusat Colonus is a (differential) repetition of Oedipusthe King.
Indeed, like Oedipus the King, The Interpretationof Dreams is the
story of a riddle-and of its solution. Oedipus solves, first, the
riddle of the Sphinx (by the answer "man"), and then the riddle
of who is responsible for Laius' murder (by the answer "I, Oed-
ipus"). Freud solves the riddle of the meaning of the dream (by
the answer: "wish-fulfilment"). While Oedipus goes from the gen-
eral, theoretical solution ("man") to the singular, narrative solution
("me"), Freud goes from the narrative solution (self-analysis, me,
Oedipus) to the theoretical solution (Man, wish-fulfilment).
The later text, however, in both Freud and Sophocles, is not a
simple "supplement" or sequel to the early work, but its problema-

1036 SHOSHANAFELMAN
tization. Both later works address the riddle generatedby,precisely,the

solution, the question constituted by the very answer. Both later
works embody the enigma of an excess, a subversive residue, to
(from within) the earlier solution: the enigma of the traumatic
dream,11 in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, insofar as this compulsion
to repeat manifested as death-instinct is not reducible to (goes be-
yond) wish-fulfilment; the enigma, in Oedipusat Colonus,of Oedipus'
assumption of (the gift inherent in) his own death, of (the blessing
incarnated in) his own radical self-expropriation, insofar as this
enigma is not reducible to (goes beyond)Oedipus the King's ulti-
mate self-recognition, amounting to the self-denial and the self-ap-
propriation inherent, paradoxically enough, in the final gesture of
self-blinding.
In both Freud and Sophocles, the final text narrates, thus, the
return of a riddle. In much the same way as the author of Beyond the
Pleasure Principle talks about (to borrow Lacan's terms)-
this mystery. . . that death instinct whose enigma Freud propunded at the climax
of his experience-
(E 316, N 101, TM)
Oedipus at Colonus (very unlike Oedipus the King) talks about (to
borrow Sophocles's terms)-
These things [which] are mysteries, not to be explained.
(Scene 7, 145)
And Oedipus, like Freud, is conveying this residual enigma from

the position of a teacher:"Indeed, you know already all that I teach"
(Ibid., 146), says Oedipus to Theseus.
This final teaching is, however, dramatized in Oedipusat Colonus
as a blessing Oedipus imparts by the mystery in which his death is
destined to be wrapped. Now, a blessing is, not the gift of a solution
(in the manner of Oedipus the King), but nonetheless a gift-of
speech. At Colonus, Oedipus ends up presenting, then, not a so-
lution but the very paradoxical gift of an enigma: the gift (of speech,
the blessing) of the enigma of his own death. And in Sophocles's
words, in which Oedipus announces, at Colonus, both the gift of
his own death and (the gift of) the return of a riddle, we may
assume Lacan is hearing Freud's own words beyond his pleasure
principle, in that work in which Freud, in his turn, talks about
death as a riddle:
Oedipus
I come to give you something, and the gift
Is my own beaten self; no feast for the eyes;
Yet in me is a more lasting grace than beauty.

M LN 1037
Theseus
What grace is this you say you bring to us?
Oedipus
In time you'll learn, but not immediately.
Theseus
How long, then, must we wait to be enlightened?
Oedipus
Until I am dead, and you have buried me.
(Scene 3, 105-106)
The psychoanalytical establishment may have come to the con-

clusion that they no longer have "to wait to be enlightened," since
they may believe they have, indeed, in burying Beyond the Pleasure
Principle, buriedFreud. If Freud, however, is like Oedipus, Oedipus
is, paradoxically enough, not buried-not yet buried-since the mys-
tery (the riddle) of his mythic disparition is precisely such that
Oedipus does die (or disappears), but without leaving a corpse.
And it is Lacan who tells us, in the words of Sophocles' mes-
senger, this essential thing, that Freud is not yet buried:
Messenger
Citizens, the briefest way to tell you
Would be to say that Oedipus is no more;
But what has happenedcannot be told so simply-
It was no simple thing.
(Scene 8, 147)
While Freud, as Dream Interpreter, may have, indeed, said in the

very words of Oedipus,
There is, then, nothing left for me to tell
But my desire; and then the tale is ended.
(Scene 3, 105)
-and while psychoanalysts may take Freud at his word, believe,

in other words, that in the meaning of the wish-fulfilment, in the
meaning of Freud's story of desire, the tale is ended-, Lacan is there
to tell us that not only is the tale (Freud's, Oedipus') not ended,
but that Freud is bequeathing us Beyond the Pleasure Principle so as
to tell us nothing other than this ultimate discovery, this ultimate
enigma: that the tale has, in effect, no end.
Lacan at Colonus
Thus, it is psychoanalysis itself, and not its object, which is now

staked in the literary narrative, in the story of the Oedipus. From
the perspective of Colonus, Lacan is telling us, re-telling us, the

very story of psychoanalysisas "whatcannot be told so simply: it was no

simple thing." And the story of psychoanalysis is not just the "not
simple" story Freud tells (and re-tells), but the very story of Freud's
telling and re-telling, the narrative, in other words, of Freud himself
as narrator. And Freud as narrator is also far from being-says
Lacan-a simple narrator.
Indeed, this non-simplicity of the narration-of Freud's narra-
tion of his theory-is crucial to an understanding of the theory
itself. If Beyond the Pleasure Principle is, like the Oedipus, not a
simple story, it is to the extent that it is, first and foremost, a
strategic story. And what we have to understand, what Lacan is
urging us to recognize in Freud's account, is the thrust, precisely,
of Freud's strategy as narrator: not just what the story teller means
to say, but (once again) what the story teller in effect is doing with,
and through, his story.
In the final analysis, ... we can talk adequately about the libido only in a mythic
manner. ... This is what is at stake in Freud's text....
At what point, at what moment, does Freud talk to us about a beyondof the
pleasure principle? At a point where the psychoanalysts, engaged in the path
that Freud has taught them, believe theyknow. Freud has told them that desire is
sexual desire, and they believehim.
(S-II, 265)
The Freudian experience starts out with a notion which is exactly contrary to
the theoretical perspective. It starts out by positing a universe of desire ....
In the classical, theoretical perspective, there is between subject and object a
co-fitting, a co-gnizance [: knowledge, that is, possible adaptation, possible ade-
quation]....
It is in an altogether different register of relations that the Freudian experi-
ence is inscribed. Desire is a relation of a being to a lack. . . . The libido is the
name of what animates the fundamental conflict at the heart of human action.
... Insofar as the libido creates the different stages of the object [oral, anal,
etc.], no object would ever again be it [:of no object can desire ever say: that's
it.] ....
Desire, a function central to the whole of human experience, is the desire of
nothing nameable.
(S-II, 260-262)
When Freud maintains that sexual desire is at the heart of human desire, all
his followers believe him, believe him so strongly that they persuade themselves
that it's all so very simple, and that all there remains to do with it is science, the
science of sexual desire. It would suffice to remove the obstacles, and it should
work all by itself. It would suffice to tell the patient-you don't realize it, but
the object is there. This is how, at first, the stake of interpretation is understood.
But the fact is, it doesn't work. At this point-the turning point-it is said
that the subject resists. Why? Because Freud has said so. But one has not un-
derstood what it means to resist any more than one has understood the meaning
of sexual desire. One believes one has to push. At this point, the analyst himself
succumbs to a delusion. I have shown you what the insistance means on the part
of the suffering subject. Now, the analyst is putting himself at the same level,

M L N 1039
he too insists in his own way, a way which is however much more stupid, because
conscious. ...
Resistance is ... the current state of interpretation of the subject. It is the
manner in which, at this moment, the subject interprets the point where he's at.
This resistance is an abstract, ideal point. It's you who call that resistance. It only
means that the subject cannot advance more quickly....
There is only one resistance, the resistance of the analyst. The analyst resists
when he does not understand what is happening in the treatment. He does not
understand what is happening in the treatment when he believes that inter-
preting is showing to the subject that what he desires is such and such sexual
object. He is mistaken. ... It's he who is in a state of inertia and of resistance.
The psychoanalytic goal is, on the contrary, to teach the subject to name, to
articulate, to pass into existence this desire which is, literally, beneath existence,
and for that very reason, insists....
To bring the subject to recognize and to name his desire, this is the nature of
the efficacious action of analysis. But it is not a question of recognizing something
that would have already been there-a given....
Since, in a sort of balancing, we always place ourselves between the text of
Freud and our practical experience, I urge you to return now to Freud's text,
so as to realize that the Beyond [of the pleasure principle] situates desire, in effect,
beyond any instinctual cycle, specifically definable by its conditions.
(S-II, 266-267)
"In the final analysis, we can talk adequately about the libido only
in a mythic manner: this is what is at stake in Freud's text". In
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud creates a new myth-that of
the "death-instinct"-so as to demystifythe literal belief in, and the
simplified interpretation of, his first myth of the Oedipus. Freud
is thus, essentially, a demystifying narrator. But the narrative
strategy of demystificationtakes place only through a new narrative
mythification.In urging us to go beyondthe myth, Freud also tells
us that beyond the myth there is, forever, but another myth. And
it is in this sense, among others, that "the tale" (Freud's, Oedipus',
Lacan's) is never "ended."
But who is speaking here? Whose irony is it that here traverses
the narration of the psychoanalytic story, and which unends the
(Oedipal, or Freudian, or Lacanian) tale? Lacan's voice fuses here
with Freud's in what Lacan would doubtless call, a [narrative] "in-
mixture of the subjects"'2: the story of Freud's strategy as psycho-
analytic narrator is, simultaneously, the story of Lacan as psycho-
analytic educator. So that if we ask, "whose story is it (Freud's?
Lacan's? or Oedipus'?)?"-the answer is not clear. And if we ask,
"whose narrative voice is carrying through this narrative perfor-
mance (Freud's? Lacan's? or Sophocles'?)?"-the answer is clear.
But if we ask, what is this narrative performance doing?-the an-
swer is quite clear. If we ask, that is, in a Lacanian manner, the
question, not of who is the true owner of the story (to whom does

it belong?), nor of whom Lacan is quoting in the story, nor of what

Lacan means by the story, but of what Lacan is doing with this story,
the answer would be unambiguous: Lacan is training analysts.Lacan
as narrator of Freud as narrator, Lacan as narrator of Sophocles
as narrator, Lacan in everything he says of does, and in the very
way he breathes (breathes texts and breathes psychoanalytic prac-
tice), is always, above all, a training analyst.
And this is why, no doubt, he picks Colonus as the truly psy-
choanalytic place: for if Colonus-and Colonus only-marks "the
end of Oedipus' psychoanalysis," it is to the extent that Oedipus'
tale of desire ends only through its own dramatic, narrative dis-
covery that the tale has, in effect, no end: "the end of Oedipus'
analysis," in other words, is the discovery that analysis, and in par-
ticular didactic self-analysis, is in effect interminable.In dramatizing
Oedipus' assumption of his own death, of his own expropriating
discourse of the Other, and his analytic passage beyond his ego,
Colonus, as "the end of Oedipus' psychoanalysis," marks the mo-
ment at which the analysand becomes an analyst, ready to bestow,
indeed, (precisely that by which Lacan has characterized the ana-
lyst's spoken intervention:) a gift of speech. Colonus echoes, thus,
Lacan's preoccupation as a training analyst.
But if Colonus resonates so forcefully in Lacan's heart, strikes
such a forceful chord in Lacan's insight, it is because Lacan, per-
haps unconsciously, identifies with Oedipus at Colonus. While
Freud identifies quite naturally with Oedipus the King or the con-
quistador, the riddle-solver(who is, incidentally, a father-killer and
a mother-lover: King to his own mother),even as he knows that this
stupendous riddle-solving in effect will bring about "the Plaque"13,
Lacan identifies quite naturally with Oedipus the exile (a survivor
of the Plaque), since Lacan has been, precisely as a training analyst,
expropriated, excommunicatedfrom the International Psychoana-
lytical Association.
I am here, in the posture which is mine, in order to address always the same
question-what doespsychoanalysismean? ...
The place from which I am re-addressing this problem is in effect a place
which has changed, which is no longer altogether inside, and of which one does
not know whether it is outside.
This reminder is not anecdotic: ... I hand you this, which is a fact-that my
teaching, designated as such, has been the object of a quite extraordinary cen-
sorship declared by an organism which is called the Executive Committeeof an
international organization which is called The International PsychoanalyticalAsso-
ciation. What is at stake is nothing less than the prohibition of my teaching, which
must be considered as null and void insofar as it concerns the habilitation of
psychoanalysts; and this proscription has been made the condition for the affil-

M L N 1041
iation of the psychoanalytic society of which I am a member with the Interna-

tional Psychoanalytic Association....
What is at stake is, therefore something of the order of what is called ... a
major excommunication....
I believe ... that, not only by the echoes it evokes, but by the very structure
it implies, this fact introduces something which is at the very principle of our
interrogation concerning psychoanalytic practice.
(S-XI, 9)
Colonus thus embodies, among other things, not just Lacan's own
exile, Lacan's own story of ex-propriation from the International
Psychoanalytical Association, but Lacan's dramatic, tragic under-
standing that psychoanalysis is radically about expropriation,and his
assumption of his story, his assumption, that is, all at once of his
own death and of his own myth-of the legacy of this expropria-
tion-as his truly destined psychoanalytic legacy and as his truly
training psychoanalytic question: "Is it now that I am nothing, that
I am made to be a man?"
"It was ordained: I recognize it now", says Oedipus at Colonus
(Scene 1,81). It may be but my own dream, but I can hear, indeed,
Lacan's voice in the very words of Oedipus the exile:
Oedipus
That stranger is I. As they say of the blind,
Sounds are the things I see.
(Scene 1, 85)
Ismene
The oracles declare their strength's in you-
Oedipus
When I am finished, I suppose I am strong!
(Scene 2, 96)
Oedipus
I come to give you something, and the gift
Is my own beaten self: no feast for the eyes;
Yet in me is a more lasting grace than beauty.
Theseus
Oedipus
Theseus
Oedipus
(Scene 3, 106)

1042 SHOSHANAFELMAN
Psychoanalysis at Colonus
At the same time, then, that Lacan is talking about Oedipus at
Colonus, he is telling and retelling, not just Freud's, and his own,
psychoanalytic story, but the very story of psychoanalysis, seenfrom
Colonus: the story of Freud's going beyond Freud, of Oedipus'
going beyond Oedipus, the story of psychoanalysis' inherent, rad-
ical, and destined self-expropriation. Lacan thus recapitulates at
once the meaning of the story in which Freud is taking us beyond
his own solution to the riddle, and the narrative voice-or the
narrative movement-by which Freud expropriates,in fact, not just
his own solution, but his own narrative.
In subscribing to Freud's psychoanalytic self-recognition in the
Oedipus, as the moment of psychoanalysis' self-appropriation, its
coming into the possession of its ("scientific") knowledge, and in
censoring Beyond the Pleasure Principle as "non-scientific," the psy-
choanalytical establishment has, precisely, tried to censor, to re-
press this final Freudian self-expropriation, and this ominous nar-
rative annunciation, by the "father of the psychoanalytic move-
ment," of an inherent exile of psychoanalysis: an exile from the
presence-to-itself of psychoanalytic truth; an exile from a non-myth-
ical access to truth; an exile, that is, from any final rest in a knowl-
edge guaranteed by the self-possessed kingdom of a theory, and
the constrained departure from this kingdom into an uncertain
psychoanalytic destinyof erring.
Counter this rejection of Freud's text, counter this repression,
not just of Freud's insight, but of the very revolution involved in
Freud's narration (in the unprecedented, self-trespassing, self-ex-
propriating status of his narrative), Lacan has raised his training,
psychoanalytic voice; but this protestation is, then, censored in its
turn. Whatever the polemical pretexts, or the political reasons,
given by the Censors, it is clear that the profound (and perhaps
unconscious) thrust of the repressive gesture is the same: to erad-
icate from psychoanalysis the threat of its own self-expropriation
(to repeat the Oedipal gesture of self-blinding); to censor, thus, in
Freud as well as in Lacan, the radically self-critical, and self-trans-
gressive, movement of the psychoanalytic discourse; to pretend, or
truly to believe, that this self-transgression and this self-expropri-
ation, far from being the essential, revolutionary feature of the
psychoanalytic discourse, is (nothing other than) a historic acci-
dent, one particular historic chapter, to be (easily) erased, elimi-
nated.

M LN 1043
However, the repeated psychoanalytic censorships illustrate only

the effectiveness (the working truth) of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure
Principle (or of Sophocles'/Lacan's Oedipus at Colonus): in drama-
tizing the compulsion to repeat in the very midst of the psycho-
analytic institution, they bear witness to the very Freudian story,
illustrate the very Freudian myth of (something like) a death-instinct
of psychoanalysis itself: the (Oedipal) repetition of a curse in a
discourse that is destined to bestow speech as a blessing.
Through his call for "a return to Freud"-a return to Colonus-
Lacan himself embodies, in the history of the psychoanalytic move-
ment, a return of the repressed. This is why, like Oedipus at Co-
lonus, he too announces (and his entire style is but a symptom of
this announcement) the return of a riddle.
Theseus
Oedipus
Theseus
Oedipus
Lacan's narrative is, however, at the same time a dramatic repeti-

tion, a reminder, of the radical impossibility of ever burying the
(speech of the) unconscious. The riddle, thus, persists. And so does
Lacan's story, whose subject, in all senses of the word, is, precisely,
the insistenceof the riddle.
What, however, is a riddle, if not a narrative delay ("In time
you'll learn"), the narrative analytical negociation of some truth or
insight, and their metaphorical approximation througha myth?The
rejection of Beyond the Pleasure Principle under the pretext that, as
myth, it is "unscientific" ('just a myth"), involves, in Lacan's view,
a radical misunderstanding both of what a myth is all about and
of the status of the myth, as such, in Freud's narration and in
psychoanalytic theory. (But then again, the misrecognitionof a myth
is what psychoanalysis-and Oedipus-are all about.)
In the final analysis ... we can talk adequately about the libido only in a mythic
manner ... This is what is at stake in Freud's text.
(S-II, 265)
In trying to decipher the significance of Freud's work, Lacan

insists not just on the significance of Freud's myths, but, even more

1044 SHOSHANAFELMAN
importantly, on the (too often overlooked) significance of Freud's

acknowledgementof his own myths:
At this point I must note that in order to handle any Freudian concept, reading
Freud cannot be considered superfluous, even for those concepts that are hom-
onyms of current notions. This has been well demonstrated, I am opportunely
reminded, by the misadventure that befell Freud's theory of the instincts, in a
revision of Freud's position by an author less than alert to Freud's explicit state-
ment of the mythical status of this theory.
(E 246, N 39, TM)
Freud's own terms of acknowledgement of his own myth are, in-

deed, enlightening:
The theory of the instincts is so to say our mythology. Instincts are mythical
entities, magnificent in their indefiniteness. In our work, we cannot for a moment
disregardthem,yet we are never sure that we are seeing them clearly.
(Standard, XXII, 95)
Myth, in Freud, is not a supplement to, or an accident of, theory:

it is not external to the theory; it is the very vehicle of theory, a
vehicle of mediation betweenpractice and theorization.This complex
acknowledgement by Freud of the mythic status of his discourse is
reflected, echoed, meditated in Lacan's response:
I would like to give you a more precise idea of the manner in which I plan to
conduct this seminar.
You have seen, in my last lectures, the beginning of a reading of what one might
call the psychoanalyticmyth. This reading goes in the direction, not so much of
criticizing this myth, as of measuring the scope of the reality with which it comes to
grips, and to which it gives its mythicalreply.
(S-I, 24)
The analytical experience,, says Lacan, has been involved, since its
very origins, not simply with fiction, but with the "truthful" struc-
tural necessity of fiction, that is, with its symbolical non-arbitrari-
ness (E 12, 17). Like the analytical experience, the psychoanalytic
myth is constituted by "thatvery truthfulfictitious structure"(E 449).
Insofar as it is mediated by a myth, the Freudian theory is not a
literal translation or reflection of reality, but its symptom,its meta-
phorical account. The myth is not pure fantasy, however, but a
narrative symbolic logic that accounts for a very real mode offunc-
tioning, a very real structureof relations. The myth is not reality; but
neither is it what it is commonly (mis-)understood to be-a simple
opposite of reality. Between reality and the psychoanalytic myth,
the relation is not one of opposition, but one of (analytic) dialogue:
the myth comes to grips with something in reality that it does not
fully apprehend, comprehend, or master, but to which it gives an

M LN 1045
answer, a symbolicalreply. The function of the myth in psychoana-

lytic theory is thus evocative of the function of interpretation in
the psychoanalytic dialogue: the Freudian mythical account can be
thought of as Freud's theoretical gift of speech.
What does that mean? In much the same way as the gift of
speech of analytical interpretation, within the situation of the dia-
logue, acts not by virtue of its accuracy but by virtue of its resonance
(whose impact is received in terms of the listener's structure),
works, that is, by virtue of its openness to a linguistic passage
through the Other, so does the psychoanalytic myth, in resonating
in the Other, produce a truthful structure.The psychoanalytic myth,
in other words, derives its theoreticaleffectivenessnot from its truth-
value, but from its truth-encounter with the other, from its capacity
for passing through the Other; from its openness, that is, to an expro-
priating passage of one insight through another, of one story
through another: the passage, for example, of Oedipus the King
through Oedipusat Colonus;or the passage of the myth of "Instinct"
through this later and more troubling myth of "Death":
As a moment's reflection shows, the notion of the death instinct involves a basic
irony, since its meaning has to be sought in the conjunction of two contrary terms:
instinct in its most comprehensive acceptation being the law that governs in its
succession a cycle of behaviour whose goal is the accomplishment of a vital func-
tion; and death appearing first of all as the destruction of life ....
This notion must be approached through its resonancesin what I shall call the
poetics of the Freudian corpus, thefirst way of access to the penetration of its meaning,
and the essential dimension, from the origins of the work to the apogee marked
in it by this notion, for an understanding of its dialectical repercussions.
(E316-317, N 101-102)
The psychoanalytic experience has discovered in man the imperative of the
Word as the law that has formed him in its image. It manipulates the poetic
function of language to give to his desire its symbolic mediation. May that ex-
perience enable you to understand at last that it is in the gift of speech that all the
reality of its effects resides; for it is by way of this gift that all reality has come to
man and it is by his continued act that he maintains it.
If the domain defined by this gift of speech [says Lacan to an audience of
psychoanalysts] is to be sufficient for your action as also for your knowledge, it
will also be sufficient for your devotion.
(E 322, N 106)
Lacan's involvement with the Freudian myth (viewed as the lit-

erarygift of speech accomplished by Freud's discourse, through the
dimension of narration and of narrative in psychoanalytic theory)
is, thus, radically involved with the differenceFreud is introducing
into the conception and the practice of narration, a psychoanalytic
difference that Lacan himself is replicating, in his own way, in his
own theoretical and mythical gift of speech. Lacan's own involve-

1046 SHOSHANAFELMAN
ment with the psychoanalytic difference in narration has three

aspects: 1) Lacan's narration (both the story that he tells and his
narrative voice, or style) is very differentfrom the usual psychoana-
lytical narration of Freud's accomplishment and theory; 2) Lacan's
narration is about [not identity, ego psychology, but the psycho-
analytic myth as the story of the introduction of a] Difference; 3)
The psychoanalytical narration, in Lacan's conception (modeled as
it is on analytic dialogue), is always, necessarily, differentfrom itself.
In the very way it is narrated, the psychoanalytic theory inscribes
(is constituted by) a radical self-difference.And this self-difference,
this Spaltung in (within) the theory, this unavoidable breachof theory,
is embodied by the myth, is the myth. The myth is thus at once
the Other of the theory and that which gives the theory to itself,
that which, from within the literary gift of speech, founds the
theory. And while there is no possible cognition of the myth-no
constativeexhaustionof the myth by theory-, there should be a perfor-
mative acknowledgement ("recognition" and "assumption") by the
theoryof its relation to the myth,and of the irreducibility of the myth,
as something in the theory which, paradoxically enough, both ex-
propriates it from its truth, and at the same time founds it as "a
fictitious truthful structure." The myth is structurally truthful, and
psychoanalytically effective, valid, not just in function of, but in
proportion to, its capacity for narrative expropriation.
And this is why, precisely, Freud has privileged the Oedipus
above all other myths. In dramatizing language as the scene (the
acting out) of the unconscious (in both its clinical and its literary
implications), the Oedipus is achetypal of the psychoanalytic myth
in that it is the story of the narrative expropriation of the story by
itself, the story of, precisely, the acknowledgementof the misrecog-
nition of the story by itself. Misleadingly, the Oedipus appears, at
first, to be the myth of a possession (of a kingdom, of a woman, of
the solution to a riddle, of one's own story). But as it turns out,
the Oedipus is not the myth of the possession of a story, but the
myth, precisely, of the dispossession by the story-the disposses-
sion of the possessor of the story. Any kingdomor possessioncoming
out of the psychoanalytic riddle-solving is, in fact, incestuous,and,
as such, is bound to bring about a Plague. Psychoanalysis can only
be a gift of speech from the exile of Colonus.
As a narrative of this discovery, as a narrative, that is, not just of
a discovery but of the discoveryof difference,the story of the Oedipus
exemplifies the psychoanalytic myth in that it exemplifies the prob-
lematic status of psychoanalysis telling its own story of discovery

M LN 1047
and, while telling, acting out its own unconscious, that is, doing
something through the telling that the telling fails to account for,
and thus discovering and re-discovering the difference between
what it's telling and what it's doing in the telling, as the scene of
its own dismantling by the literary myth and of its own theoretical
self-subversion. The Oedipus is privileged, thus, as a myth, notjust
because it is about the creation of the myth ("Oedipus himself is
nothing other than the passage of this myth into existence"), but
because it is, specifically, about the subversivelyperformativeaspectof
this mythical creation. The story of the Oedipus is archetypal of
the psychoanalytic myth in that it dramatizes speech not as cog-
nitive but as (self-subversively) performative, in that it embodies
this performative self-difference of (within) its own narration, this
practical discrepancy, forever re-emerging, between its narrative
or mythic statementand its narrative or mythical performance.
How, indeed, could speech exhaust the meaning of speech, .. . except in the
act that engenders it? Thus Goethe's reversal of its presence at the origins of
things, "In the beginning was the act," finds itself reversed in its turn: it was
certainly the speech-actthat was in the beginning, and we live in its creation, but
it is the action of our mind that continues this creation by constantly renewing
it. And we can only turn back on that action by allowing ourselves to continue to be
driven by it evenfurther.
I know only too well that this will be my own case, too, in trying now to turn
back upon the act of speech.
(E 271, N 61, TM)
Beyond Colonus: Truth and Science, or

What Remains to be Narrated
If Freud's psychoanalysis is, then, a symbolical replyto a realityit
tries to come to grips with; and if this symbolical reply is made of
myth-of radical myth which, in Lacan's conception, is absolutely
irreducible from psychoanalytic theory-, it is to the extent that,
in its function as a gift of speech, the psychoanalytic myth em-
bodies, and derives from, a residue of action in the very process of
cognitionof that action. In another sense, this is equally what Freud
has talked about, in his reference to his theory of the instincts as
"his mythology":
Instincts are mythical entities, magnificent in their indefiniteness. In our workwe
cannot for a moment disregard them, but we are never sure that we are seeing them
clearly.
(XXII, 95)
Myth is something which we cannot be sure we are seeing clearly,

but with which we work, because it works.Myth is thus a mediation

1048 SHOSHANAFELMAN
between action and cognition, between theory and practice, a nar-

rative negociation of difference and self-difference in the very
practice of a discourse which purports to be cognitive and theoret-
ical. As we have seen in the Oedipus, myth is, first and foremost,
practically efficacious, both clinically and literarily.And it is, perhaps,
because it thus combines the performative power of the clinical
event and the performative power of the literary resonance, the
unique performative encounter, that is, of the literary and the clinical
dimensions, that the Oedipus has worked so well as the specimen
story of psychoanalysis: a specimen story which, however, in the
very act of grounding psychoanalytic theory, also points to the
irreducible, expropriatingresidue of action in cognition, of fiction
(narrative) in truth, of practice (dialogue) in theory.
Action, fiction, practice, are thus bound together in the (Oed-
ipal) irreducibility of myth from the science of psychoanalysis. For
the acknowledgement of the radicality-the irreducibility-of the
mythic element in psychoanalytic theory is by no means an abdi-
cation, in Lacan's case as in Freud's, of the commitmentto psycho-
analysis as science. "It may perhaps seem to you," writes Freud, "as
though our theories are a kind of mythology and, in the present
case, not even an agreeable one":
But does not every science come in the end to a kind of mythologylike this? Cannot the
same be said of today's physics?
(XXII, 211)
In following Freud's mythical and scientific path, Lacan's inter-

rogation, as opposed to Freud's, concerns, here again, not the
theory but the practice. Can the practice of psychoanalysis have a
scientific claim? Does the practice work (and if so, how?), out of a
reference to a truth which is of the order of a science, which can be
accountable by science? Lacan replies in the affirmative. But his
answer is, as usual, paradoxical and challenging in the way it (an-
alytically) displaces our expectation as to what a science is, and
where the science of psychoanalysis would reside. If science is in-
volved, suggests Lacan, in the practice of psychoanalysis, it is not
because the analyst is scientific, but because the patient is, or can be.
But the patient is not, as we would expect, the objectof the science
of psychoanalysis, but its subject. The (scientific) question of psy-
choanalysis thus becomes the questionof the subjectof a science.
To pose that the subject on whom we operate in psychoanalysis can be nothing
other than the subjectof science, may seem like a paradox.
(E 859)

ML N 1049
The "subject of science" is a subject who can be defined by the

structure of his "relation to truth as cause" (E 873). This (psycho-
analytic) truth as cause (a cause that is at once material, formal,
and efficacious) is, in Lacan's conception, "the incidence of the
signifier" (insofar as it has caused the subject's unconsious). And
this scientific cause is what the subject-the analysand-is after.
I would like to ask you, analysts, the question: yes or no, does the exercise of
your profession have the meaning of affirming that the truth of neurotic suf-
fering is-to have truth as its cause [to have a rational causality which, though
symbolic, has both a reference to, and a bearing on, the Real]?
(E 870)
This is why it was important to promote before all else, and as a fact to be
distinguished from the question of whether or not psychoanalysis is a science
(whether or not its field is scientific),-this fact, precisely, that its praxis implicates
no othersubjectthan the subjectof science.
(E 863)
Contrary to received opinion, Lacan's preoccupation is not with

theory per se (with games of "intellectualization"), but always, with
his practiceas a psychoanalytical clinician. He is, first and foremost,
a practitioner; a practitioner who happens to be thinking-and
rethinking-about what he is doing in his practice. His theoryis
nothing other than his training practice-his practice as an edu-
cator, as a training analyst-who introduces others to the prag-
matic issues (questions) of the practice.
Now, this commitmentto thepractice of psychoanalysisas science, con-
comitant with the acknowledgementthat psychoanalytictheory is fun-
damentallyand radically composedof myth-that the knowledge, that
is, which is theorized out of the practice cannot transgress its status
as a narrative expropriatingits securedpossessionas a knowledge-, has
repercussions both in theory and in practice. It means that, to be
truly scientific, the practice has to be conceived as antecedent to
the knowledge: it has to be forgetful of the knowledge.
Science, if you look into it, has no memory. It forgets the peripeties out of which
it has been born; it has, in other words, a dimension of truth which psycho-
analysis puts into practice.
(E 869)
[To be a good psychoanalyst is to find oneself] in the heart of a concrete history

where a dialogue is engaged, in a register where no sort of truth can be found
in the form of a knowledge which is generalizable and always true. To give the
right reply to an event insofar as it is significant is ... to give a good interpre-
tation. And to give a good interpretation at the right timing is to be a good
analyst.
(S-II, 31)

Any operation in the field of analytic action is anterior to the constitution of

knowledge, which does not preclude the fact that in operating in this field, we
have constituted knowledge....
For this reason, the more we know, the greater the risks we run. Everything
that you are taught in a form more or less pre-digested in the so-called institutes
of psychoanalysis (sadistic, anal stages, etc.,)-is of course very useful, especially
for non-analysts. It would be stupid for a psychoanalyst systematically to neglect
it, but he should know that this is not the dimension in which he operates.
(S-II, 30)
The peculiar scientific status of psychoanalytic practice is then such

that psychoanalysis (as an individual advent and process) is always
living and re-living the very moment of the birth of knowledge:the
moment, that is, of the birthof science.Like Oedipus at the beginning
of his mythical itinerary, psychoanalysis has no use for the Oedipus
mythinsofar as it has entered, through the oracles, the domain of
public discourse. Like Oedipus, psychoanalysis has no use of a
preconceived knowledge of the mythic story, no use for the story
insofar as the story is, precisely, in advance, well known. In practice,
there is no such thing as a specimen story. The very notion of a
specimen story as applied to the reading or interpretation of an-
other story is thus always a misreading, a mistake.
This mistake exists in every form of knowledge, insofar as knowledge is nothing
other than the cristallization of symbolical activity which it forgets, once consti-
tuted. In every knowledge already constituted there is thus a dimension of error,
which consists in the forgetting of the creative function of truth in its nascent
form.
(S-II, 29)
Paradoxically enough, it is precisely insofar as it embodies its own

forgetting that the Oedipus myth is constitutive of the science of
psychoanalysis. And this science only takes itself complacently
(non-problematically) to be a science when it in effect forgets the
fictive, generative moment of its birth, when it forgets, in other
words, that it owes its creativity-the productionof its knowledge-
to a myth. In this respect, psychoanalysis, which treats the Real by
means of the symbolic, is not so different, moreover, from any
other science (physics, for example). There is a fictive moment at
the genesis of every science, a generative fiction (a hypothesis) at
the foundation of every theory.
To borrow a metaphor from physics, one could say that the
generative, fictive psychoanalytic myth is to the science of psycho-
analysis what the Heisenberg principle is to contemporary physics:
the element of mythic narrative is something like an uncertainty
principle of psychoanalytic theory. It does not conflict with sci-

M LN 1051
ence-it generatesit-as long as it is not believed to be, erroneously,

a certaintyprinciple.
The question of science in psychoanalysis is, thus, for Lacan, not
a question of cognition but a question of commitment. And the
concomitant acknowledgement of the psychoanalytic myth is, on
the other hand, not a question of complacency in myth, but a
question of exigency in and beyond the myth.
Science is the drive to go beyond.The scientist's commitment is
at once to acknowledge myth and to attempt to go beyondthe myth.
Only when this (mythical, narrative) movement of 'going beyond'
stops, does science stop. Only when the myth is not acknowledged,
is believed to be a science, does the myth prevail at the expense of
science. It is precisely when we believe we are beyondthe myth that
we are (indulge in) fiction. There is no 'beyond' to myth-science
is always, in one way or another, a new (generative) myth.
There is no beyondto the narrative movement of the myth. But
the narrative movement of the myth is precisely that which always
takes us-if we dare go with it-beyond itself.
"Many complain", writes Kafka14, "that the words of the wise
are always merely parables and of no use in daily life, which is the
only life we have":
When the sage says, "go beyond,"he does not mean that we should cross to some
actual place, which we could do anyhow if the labor were worth it; he means
some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something too that he cannot
designate more precisely, and therefore, cannot help us here in the very least.
All these parables really set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is in-
comprehensible, and we know that already. But the cares we have to struggle
with every day: that is a different matter.
Concerning this a man once said: Why such reluctance? If you only followed
the parables you yourselves would become parables and with that rid of all your
daily cares.
Another said: I bet that is also a parable.
The first said: You have won.
The second said: But unfortunately only in parable.
The first said: No, in reality: in parable you have lost.15
NOTES
1 Roy Schafer, "Narration in the Psychoanalytic Dialogue", in On Narrative, ed.
W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1981).
2 Ibid., p. 31.
3 Freud, Letter to Wilhelm Fliess of Oct. 15, 1897, in The Origins of Psychoanalysis,
translated by E. Mosbacher and J. Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1954, pp.
221-224).
4 Freud, The Interpretationof Dreams, in The StandardEdition of the CompletePsycho-
logical Worksof Sigmund Freud, translated from the German under the General

1052 SHOSHANAFELMAN
Editorship of James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of
Psychoanalysis, 1964, Vol. IV, pp. 261-263). Unless otherwise indicated, quo-
tations from Freud's works will refer to this edition: following quotations, in
parenthesis, roman numerals will signal volume number, and arabic numerals
page number, of the Standard Edition.
5 For lack of space, I had to skip here a detailed analysis of the first and second
dimensions. This essay will therefore concentrate on the third dimension, trying
to implicate the first two through the third.
6 The following abbreviations are here used to refer to Lacan's works:
S-I (followed by page number), for: J. Lacan, Le Seminaire, livre I: Les Ecrits
techniquesde Freud (Paris: Seuil, 1975);
S-II (followed by page number), for: J. Lacan. Le Seminaire, livre II: Le Moi
dans la theoriede Freud et dans la techniquepsychoanalytique(Paris: Seuil, 1978);
S-XX (followed by page number), for: J. Lacan, Le Seminaire, livre XX: Encore
(Paris: Seuil, 1975).
All quoted passages from these (as yet untranslated) Seminars are here in my
translation.
S-XI (followed by page number), for: Le Seminaire, livre XI: Les Quatre concepts
fondamentaux de la psychoanalyse(Paris: Seuil, 1973). The following abbreviation
"N" (followed by page number) will refer to the corresponding English edition:
The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, translated by Alan Sheridan
(New York: Norton, 1978).
E (followed by page number), for: Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966); the following
abbreviation "N" (followed by page number) will designate the page reference
in the corresponding Norton edition, Ecrits: A Selection, traslated by Alan Sher-
idan (New York: Norton, 1977). When the reference to the French edition of
the Ecrits ("E") is not followed by a reference to the Norton English edition
("N"), the passage quoted is in my translation and has not been included in the
"Selection" of the Norton edition.
The abbreviation "TM"-"translation modified"-will signal my alterations
of the official English translation of the work in question.
As a rule, in the quoted passages, italics are mine, unless otherwise indicated.
7 I am using here the term "performative" in the sense established byJ. L. Austin.
Cf. "Performative Utterances", in PhilosophicalPapers (London and New York:
Oxford University Press, 1970) and How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge/
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975). For a different perspective on the re-
lation between speech-acts and psychoanalysis (as well as on the theoretical
relation between Austin and Lacan), see my book, The LiterarySpeech-Act:Don
Juan withJ. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1983). [Original edition in French: Le Scandale du corpsparlant: Don Juan
avec Austin, ou La Seduction en deux langues, Paris: Seuil, 1980.]
8 Sophocles, Oedipusat Colonus, in Sophocles, The ThebanPlays, translated by E. F.
Waiting (Baltimore: Penguin Classics, 1947; reprinted 1965), Scene 2, p. 83.
9 Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, translated by David Grene, in Sophocles I, The
CompleteGreekTragedies, ed. D. Grene and R. Lattimore (Chicago and London:
The University of Chicago Press), Scene 2, p. 96. All subsequent quotations
from Oedipus at Colonus will refer to this edition, by scene number followed by
page number.
10 Cf. E 277-278, N 66-67: "Even when in fact it is represented by a single person,
the paternal function concentrates in itself both imaginary and real relations,
always more or less inadequate to the symbolic relation which constitutes it.
It is in the name of thefather that we must recognize the support of the symbolic
function which, from the dawn of history, has identified his person with the
figure of the law."

M LN 1053
11 This insight was first suggested to me (in a course on the Oedipus myth which
tried to come to grips with the present questions) by my student, Teddy Cohen,
to whom I here address this purloined letter of my thanks.
12 E-415. Cf. my essay, "The Originality of Jacques Lacan, In Poetics Today, Vol.
2, Number lb (Winter 1980/81), pp. 51-52.
13 Aboard the ship which transported him to the U.S. to give the "Clark lectures",
Freud, apparently, said to Jung (who reported it to Lacan): "They don't know
that we bring with us the Plague. ..."
14 Franz Kafka, "On Parables", in Parables and Paradoxes (New York: Schocken
Books, 1970), p. 11.
15 The present essay is (part of) a chapter from my forthcoming book, Psycho-
analysis in ContemporaryCulture:Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight.


The Specimen Story of Psychoanalysis - Shoshana Felman

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Beyond Oedipus: The Specimen Story of Psychoanalysis

Author(s): Shoshana Felman

This content downloaded from 137.140.1.131 on Sun, 15 Dec 2013 13:07:05 PM

Freud changed, indeed, our understanding of the leading ques-

This content downloaded from 137.140.1.131 on Sun, 15 Dec 2013 13:07:05 PM

"Only one idea of general value has occurred to me. I have

This content downloaded from 137.140.1.131 on Sun, 15 Dec 2013 13:07:05 PM

Freud's reference to the Oedipus as a key-narrative-the spec-

This content downloaded from 137.140.1.131 on Sun, 15 Dec 2013 13:07:05 PM

discovered, and consequently, into what it is psychoanalysis is all

The Psychoanalytic Story: Oedipus the King

Nowhere is there in Lacan's writings any systematic exposition

This content downloaded from 137.140.1.131 on Sun, 15 Dec 2013 13:07:05 PM

stitutively, in a symbolic metomymic language which, thereby, is

No wonder, then, that OedipusRex, dramatizing as it does theprimal

The Oedipal question is thus at the center of each practical psy-

Analysis is, indeed, nothing other than this process of historical

This content downloaded from 137.140.1.131 on Sun, 15 Dec 2013 13:07:05 PM

ject. To do this, the subject must-like Oedipus-recognize what

As in Freud's case, the reference of the clinical practice of psycho-

The analytical speech-act by which the subject recognizes, and per-

This content downloaded from 137.140.1.131 on Sun, 15 Dec 2013 13:07:05 PM

Oedipus the King, however, in Lacan's eyes, while recognizing,

Beyond Oedipus: Oedipus at Colonus

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"Is it now that I am nothing that I am made to be a man?" What

Why death? Here Lacan is at his most hermetic, at his most

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most complex, profound and important psychoanalytic insights,

What, now, happens in Oedipus at Colonus which is new with

This content downloaded from 137.140.1.131 on Sun, 15 Dec 2013 13:07:05 PM

This content downloaded from 137.140.1.131 on Sun, 15 Dec 2013 13:07:05 PM

Embodying the linguistic drama-the analytical speech-act-of

This content downloaded from 137.140.1.131 on Sun, 15 Dec 2013 13:07:05 PM

What Lacan endeavors here is obviously not a simple reading of

In reading Freud across Oedipusat Colonus, Lacan is doing much

This content downloaded from 137.140.1.131 on Sun, 15 Dec 2013 13:07:05 PM

Beyondthe Pleasure Principle. Oedipusat Colonus,says Lacan, is taking

The Oedipal significance of psychoanalysis'misrecognitionof its own

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compulsionto repeat-radically displaces the conception both of his-

This is what a practical psychoanalysis is all about; and this is what

This content downloaded from 137.140.1.131 on Sun, 15 Dec 2013 13:07:05 PM

Freud retreived the founding, psychoanalytic meaning of the lit-

Beyond the Pleasure Principle is thus itself a sort of (differential) rep-

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tization. Both later works address the riddle generatedby,precisely,the

And Oedipus, like Freud, is conveying this residual enigma from

This content downloaded from 137.140.1.131 on Sun, 15 Dec 2013 13:07:05 PM

The psychoanalytical establishment may have come to the con-

While Freud, as Dream Interpreter, may have, indeed, said in the

-and while psychoanalysts may take Freud at his word, believe,

Thus, it is psychoanalysis itself, and not its object, which is now

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very story of psychoanalysisas "whatcannot be told so simply: it was no

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This content downloaded from 137.140.1.131 on Sun, 15 Dec 2013 13:07:05 PM

it belong?), nor of whom Lacan is quoting in the story, nor of what

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iation of the psychoanalytic society of which I am a member with the Interna-