The Time to Understand

I heard some years ago about a man who was hypnotised and told that between him and the door there was a chair here, a table there, a box beyond that. Back in his normal state of consciousness he was asked to walk from one end of the room to the other. He did this by moving in a zigzag fashion to carefully avoid the imaginary obstacles that had been put into his mind by the hypnotist. Asked why he had taken the zigzagging route through this evidently empty space, instead of laughing in astonishment at his mystifying behaviour, he made things up that sounded sort of plausible: There was a draft from the window, I suddenly remembered something, I wanted to see a mark on the wall, etc. The conclusion drawn from the study was that the ego pretends to know what it is doing, and can't be relied on to speak the truth even to itself. 

Thomas came for an encounter with Bree and said that he was looking forward to touching the horses: he stretched out his hand as he spoke. I asked him to say something more about that, and whether there was another dimension which might be "touched," but he could only repeat the words and the gesture, and seemed a little defensive. When we entered the space in which three ponies were standing, Thomas kept up a stream of chatter interspersed with compliments to the nearest pony, and began running his hand down its shoulder and belly. Something was happening unconsciously – the speech and the gesture seemed a little "automatic." After a few seconds, the pony made a precise movement and then backed into Thomas, making him take a step or two backwards and stop talking; his hands had dropped to his side. When I asked him if he wanted to say something about that, he said "I had stopped stroking him, and then he moved, backed into me and stamped his foot." After a short pause, Thomas added thoughtfully: "But I don't think he was asking me to continue stroking him."

In Freud's "Project for a Scientific Psychology" (1950), you can find the idea that we humans are little hallucinating machines governed by the pleasure principle who avoid reality unless it impinges somehow on the hallucination in which we enclose ourselves. There is a stunning case that illustrates this idea by psychoanalyst René Spitz. He found babies in an orphanage who turned their backs on the nurses with the feeding bottles, evidently preferring the hallucinated breast to the unloving procedure that reduced them to an object.

Using Lacan's idea of logical time (1945), we can see that Thomas had caught a glimpse of something and acted in an instant. The pony moved out of the reach of his hand, backed into his space, causing him to step away, and then stamped its foot. Thomas glimpsed this and responded. But he had not had the time or the opportunity to understand it. If he is to understand it to a degree that would be useful to him, to a degree that includes his own personal truth, he would have to give the moment more words and follow their threads and connections. He would only be ready to come to a conclusion relevant to himself if he took the time to think things through without the "help" of the ego. I asked him about it afterwards and he was able to speak about it in a more measured way. He was thinking about it as he spoke. He began to put it into words and enter the process of understanding. 

Back to the pony: we might think that its gestures had been understood in an instant, though I know of another stable that would "understand" it as rudeness on the part of the pony, which would lead inevitably to punishment. But within the framework of our conversation at Kingsmead, a conversation that I had taken the trouble to initiate in the structure of the analyst's discourse, and using what I know of the structure and function of the field of speech and language, we had given the pony a place to "speak" from.  We gave the pony's movements and actions the value of signifiers addressed to an other who must interpret them. The place from which we interpret is a place in a structure of language that Freud discovered, and that Lacan formalised as "the analyst's discourse." This is the structure that operates when you talk to an analyst. The analyst is responsible for holding this discursive structure, which allows you to hear what would otherwise remain unconscious. If there is no one there to hear it, it is as if it does not exist.