It is in Seminar XV, The Analytic Act, that Jacques Lacan sets out to convey what he proposes and introduces as truth, that men and women are not connected. The most surprising thing? Precisely because they are not connected, the psychoanalyst has something to do with this business. "This business," cette affaire-là, requires Lacan to invent a new writing: Staferla.
It is of course Sigmund Freud, who by his pen transmits his own invention, via what he calls a case history and through the contingency of a unique encounter at a mountain lodge.
With each new reading of Katharina's case history, we witness what we might call "the Freudian act." An inaugural moment in which the determined demand of a very young woman wrests him from contemplation, obliging him to re-enter the world of the neuroses, from which he had decided to take a break for a time.
Without any hesitation, following a good meal on the terrace of the Inn, he set about abandoning the former royal road, hypnosis, to venture into what he called "an attempt at an analysis,"1 made possible by a tell me or a "Sit down […]"2 and speak to me.
It is through his interventions—his questions, "And what happened then?" his interpretations, which he called at the time "guessing,"3 or his formulations—You thought: "Now he's doing with her what he wanted to do with me that night and those other times"4—that a movement took place whose effects Freud verified, not only in the reading of the subject's account, in her enunciation, but fundamentally in the body described by Freud as "like someone transformed"5—Katharina went from a sad and pained expression to a lively and cheerful one.
If the psychoanalytic method did not yet exist, if the concept of the unconscious had not yet been formulated, then what guided Freud in his reading of the case, in his interventions?
The secret Lacan speaks of in his Seminar XIV, The Logic of the Fantasy, "The secret of psychoanalysis, the great secret of psychoanalysis, is that there is no sexual act."6
When it comes to that which is impossible to realise as knowledge, Freud will say: "I had found often enough that in girls anxiety was a consequence of the horror by which a virginal mind is overcome when it is faced for the first time with the world of sexuality."7
[1] Freud, S., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol II, "Studies on Hysteria," Hogarth Press, London, 1955, p. 127.
[2] Ibid, p. 126.
[3] Ibid, p. 133
[4] Ibid, p. 131
[5] Ibid.
[6] Lacan, J., Le séminaire livre XIV, La logique du fantasme, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, Seuil, Paris, 2023, p. 259. [Unpublished in English]
[7] Freud, S., "Studies on Hysteria," op. cit., p. 127.
