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.