What Speaking Means
A knowledge of what speaking means. The phrase is Serge Leclaire's, from his chapter "Sygne, or Transference Love" in A Child Is Being Killed (1975), and it arrives in the middle of a paragraph that has just reduced the entirety of analytic technique to one fundamental principle. Presence, kindness, neutrality, silence — Leclaire writes that these are merely "inadequate or approximate ways of marking" something else. And then the demand: "what we can absolutely demand of an analyst is a knowledge of what speaking means, what decisive shadows words can hide, and how they can show the subject crossing their web."
The various traditions of psychoanalysis do not usually agree on what to ask of an analyst. There are different vocabularies, different techniques, different ways of understanding what the work is and what its aims are. For Leclaire, these are all secondary concerns. His demand, that the analyst must know what speaking means, formulates something that is elementary to psychoanalysis. Not a vote for one approach against another, but the question all attempts to codify technique are reaching toward.
What does it mean to know what speaking means? Not what is being said. Not what is meant by what is said. Not even what is being repeated. Something prior. Something the vocabularies of technique — abstinence, attunement, neutrality, presence — are trying to make room for without quite being able to name.
Leclaire does not give us a definition. What he offers instead is writing that itself enacts the demand, staying close to the clinical scene rather than rising above it. The chapter is full of small, attentive registrations of the affective movement between analyst and patient: the smile that "lights up the eyes or the voice," the silence between two words, the "infans rather than adorable cherub" who finds room there. The chapter's central figure, Sygne, is the name Leclaire gives to one of his analysands, a thirty-year-old researcher whose pseudonym carries the resonance of Claudel's heroine. She gives the chapter its central formulation: your smile in your face, my pain on your face, your pain on my face, my smile on my face. A chiasmus that is also the structure, Leclaire suggests, in which the transference takes shape.
The chapter is not about transference in the abstract but about transference-love: Sygne's love for Leclaire, and what his response to it must be. Throughout, Leclaire refuses to relativise the love. "Recognizing transference love as real," he writes, "means first of all that we somehow wished for it" — the analyst is implicated in its appearance, not its passive recipient. Sygne loves "the person who invited her to speak and lets her speak"; her love is the condition of her analytic acuity, not an obstacle to it.
It is tempting to read these registrations as a defence of warmth against coldness, of presence against impassivity. Leclaire's own polemic invites the reading: he writes explicitly that he does "not believe in the neutralizing illusion of the impassive mask." But the refusal is made in a specific context, in front of an analysand whose love must be received rather than defended against. It is not a generic preference for warmth but a refusal to retreat into standardised technique to escape what this particular love asks of him. The argument is not really about whether the analyst should smile but about what the smile, or the silence, or the kindness, or the neutrality, is for. Each of them, including the impassive mask on a more generous reading, is an approximate way of marking the place where speech can happen. The place where, as Leclaire puts it, "another ear opens to which the pain of being nothing and of being born of nothing can at last be told without pathos, in the voice of truth."
This is where the demand widens. Later in the chapter Leclaire writes that words "are prey to the universal work of repression in which every family unit, group, or social 'order' takes part, and they never stop reverting to muteness." Only by giving "the most vigilant attention" can speaking be kept alive. Speech is not given. It is not the natural medium of human relation. It is being suppressed at the same rate it is being produced. Words revert to muteness. The work of analysis, on this account, is the work of holding them open against what would revert them to silence — against the basic tension between what is socially admissible as speech and what is not. In the Sygne chapter, what is centrally at stake is the speech of a woman analysand: Sygne's love for Leclaire, and what it takes for that love to be heard.
A knowledge of what speaking means, then, is not a doctrine or a technique. It is the orientation that lets the analyst notice when speech is slipping back toward muteness, and how one must intervene in order to enjoin the analysand to speak. It is what every analytic tradition, in its own idiom, is trying to make room for, and what one's own analysis at least begins to open. In the Sygne chapter, this knowledge takes the form of Leclaire's handling of the transference: by not retreating from her love, by receiving it as real, he allows her to speak, and to say what she needs to say in her analysis.
The Case as Exception — On Luis Izcovich, The Clinical Case in Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective
What is a case in psychoanalysis? The question Luis Izcovich¹ poses at the opening of his new book is, on the face of it, a question that should already have been answered. The case is the most familiar form psychoanalytic transmission takes — what one presents in cartels and seminars, what an analytic training is supposed to prepare one to construct. And yet, as Izcovich notes, the question of what constitutes a case in psychoanalysis has not been adequately settled in the century since Freud invented the talking cure. The form belongs to medicine, where a case verifies a diagnostic category against the universal of a syndrome. The DSM is the contemporary expression of this logic: the category precedes the patient, the patient verifies the category. It is Izcovich’s contention that psychoanalysis adopted the case-form without ever clarifying precisely what distinguishes the psychoanalytic as such.
The book's answer to this question, its central thesis, can be stated thus: a case in psychoanalysis is the production of an exception, not the verification of a category. The case is what Izcovich, in a recurring phrase, calls the beyond of the structure: the moment at which an analysis demonstrates how the singularity of a subject's relation to jouissance exceeds the structural classifications, and forces those classifications to be rethought. In this way, the book sharpens a distinction Lacan states but never fully develops: the distinction between the particular and the singular.²
The distinction has a long philosophical history. The terms universal and particular descend from Aristotle. The singular as a separable third category emerges later, with the scholastic problem of universals, and receives its most consequential settlement in William of Ockham's nominalism — the position, against the realism of universals, that only singulars are real. Kant, beside the universal and the particular judgement, marks out a third logical species: the singular judgement. He leaves it, Lacan notes in Seminar IX: Identification, as "something like a toothing stone," present in the architecture, unbuilt-upon. Izcovich enters the lineage through Pierre Alferi's Guillaume d'Ockham le singulier (1989),³ which supplies the formula that does much of the philosophical work in the book: "Singularity is the absolute as such, only heart of things, every being's coincidence with himself.”
What Izcovich draws from this lineage is the distinction itself, put to clinical work. The particular is the subject in a set: the clinical structure, the identifications, the symptom-formation that allies a subject with hysteria or obsessionality. The singular is something else: the off-standard marks of infantile jouissance, the irreducible mode by which language has impressed itself into the body of this subject and no other. The structure-based clinic aims at the particular; the case-based clinic aims at the singular.
The distinction is fundamental, and also one Lacanian clinicians often fail to maintain in practice. Anyone who has sat through clinical seminars will recognise the slippage. A case is presented. Within minutes the discussion has settled into the well-worn grooves of "a case of hysteria" or "a case of obsessionality" — here the unsatisfied desire and the question of being a woman, there the postponing doubt and the dead father who cannot be relinquished. The singular case recedes behind the diagnosis made to recognise it. Izcovich's argument is that this reflex, however well-intentioned, closes off our attention to singularity. It returns the analytic clinic to the medical diagnostic method from which the case-form was inherited. The psychoanalytic case is not the illustration of a category. It must exceed it.
Izcovich is not claiming that the analyst can simply abandon the particular for the singular. The analyst still needs to recognise what kind of subject is speaking: the structure that allies this analysand with hysteria, that one with obsessionality, another with psychosis. The structural reading orients how the analyst listens, the position taken in the transference, and the form that interpretation can take. Furthermore, without the structure-based clinic there is no psychoanalytic clinic in the proper sense: no shared discourse, no transmissible knowledge between practitioners, no way for one analyst's work to speak to another's.⁴ The case-based clinic adds a second move. The structural placement does not contain the subject, and the analytic act has to operate on what exceeds it. Both are required for psychoanalytic work: the particular as its precondition, the singular as its proper object. Izcovich's case for the singular is not a case against the particular but a case against the particular's monopoly on how we think about a case.
The rest of the book extends this thesis through further moves. The case is a clinic of the real, sustained by what Izcovich calls a "learned ignorance" — the most elaborate form of knowledge. With the parlêtre, interpretation shifts from truth to the jouissance of the speaking body. Psychosis is read as singularity rather than deficit. The case clinic shifts what psychosis can be in analytic work. The late symptom, the sinthome, is used logically. The book lands, at the close of Chapter 6, on a sentence I keep returning to: "The case-based clinic, as a clinic of the real is a clinic à deux. Not two subjects, but two partners of jouissance." The analyst is the second partner of jouissance, except that the analyst's speech is itself emptied of it. The case is what the two of them produce.
Having put the book down, I am struck by how vital its intervention is for clinical practice. It gives Lacanian psychoanalysis its clearest statement to date of what the case in psychoanalysis is, and how it can be transmitted. Izcovich keeps the argument within Lacanian clinical work, its proper home, but the form of the claim is more general. Anyone who wants to think with singularity, clinical or critical, faces the same question: whether the case, the work, the subject is being read as the verification of a category one already had, or as an exception that reorganises the very category itself.
Footnotes
1) Izcovich is a senior analyst of the IF-EPFCL (International of the Forums of the Lacanian Field / School of Psychoanalysis of the Forums of the Lacanian Field), the strand of Lacanian work that took shape after Colette Soler and others departed from Jacques-Alain Miller's World Association of Psychoanalysis (WAP) in 1998.
2) Lacan's preface to the Walter Verlag German edition of the Écrits (1973), in Autres écrits (Seuil, 2001), pp. 557 ff. Not yet in a formally published English edition.
3) Pierre Alferi (b. 1963), French poet and philosopher, son of Jacques Derrida; Guillaume d'Ockham le singulier is his 1989 doctoral thesis, an influential reading of Ockham's nominalism as a metaphysics of the singular. Untranslated.
4) An alternative approach to this problem can be seen in the WAP/Millerian current, where the Borromean clinic of knots — drawn from Lacan's late teaching — has come to supplement or partially displace the structural categorical clinic as the central diagnostic framework.