One knows what price was paid for Freud's having permitted the psychoanalytic group to win out over discourse, becoming a Church. The International, since such is its name, is no more than the symptom of what Freud expected of it. But it is not what weighs in the balance. It's the Church, the true one, which supports Marxism insofar as it gives the Church new blood… of renewed meaning. Why not psychoanalysis, when it veers toward meaning? I am not saying that out of vain banter. The stability of religion stems from the fact that meaning is always religious. (Lacan, 1980, p. 130)[3]
The coincidence of the notion (if not institution) of analysis with dissolution in Lacan’s letter and Tal’s theses on it cannot but command attention on the basis of their linguistic proximity alone. Both contain a root whose earliest version is “leu-” meaning “to loosen, divide, cut apart,” analysis finds its origin in the Greek prefix “ana-” meaning “up, back throughout.” “Dissolution,” however, is traceable to the Latin dissolvere, itself a Latinized form of the Greek “katalysis/katalyein” whose prefix “kata-/cata-” suggests “‘down, downward,’ but also ‘through, on, against, concerning’” (the prefix notably also appears in the etymology of the word “catholic,” kata-holos).[4] What is one to make of the subtle difference between the etymologies for analysis and dissolution, sharing “loosening” in common but distinguished by a subtle and strange sense of direction, up or down? The “Lacanian extension” of “Koyré’s interpretation of the modern scientific revolution” to psychoanalysis, Samo Tomšič (2015) writes, stood for “the abolition of the cosmological division on the higher sphere of eternal mathematical truths and the lower sphere of generation and corruption, where the use of mathematics made little sense for the old episteme” (as well as “the abolition of the hypothesis of the soul, which is replaced by a new hypothesis, that of the subject”) (p. 236). In the analysis/catalysis-dissolution distinction, one can hear something like this division between sublunary and superlunary spheres that characterized the Aristotelianized science that held a hegemonic position from roughly antiquity to the scientific revolution of 16th and 17th centuries as much as the doctrine of the Catholic Church, who had tailored its theology to the teachings of Aristotle (in particular, as Lacan [1975/1998] highlights, its codification in the texts of Saint Thomas Aquinas) (pp. 99, 114).[5] In Seminar 20, Lacan (1975/1998) will claim that “analytic experience encounters its [own] terminus (terme)”—that is to say, the end of analysis—in the fact that “the only thing it can produce, according to [Lacan’s] writing is” the master-signifier, “the signifier of even the most idiotic jouissance – in the two senses of the term, the idiot’s jouissance ... and also the oddest jouissance,” both “particular” and “peculiar” (p. 94, 94n14). In this gesture, Lacan combines (Aristotelian) formal and final causes in a manner that may sound foreign from the perspective of Lacan’s (1966/2006) earlier association of formal causality with the imposition of hierarchy on communication, the International Psychoanalytic, and Catholic Church in the earlier “Science and Truth” (p. 744).[6] Just as he asserts the consistency of Lacan’s teaching from the utterance that “there is only one kind of psychoanalysis, the training analysis” through the October Proposition of 1967 to the 1980’s Letter of Dissolution, Tal’s (2023a) text gives an instructive analytic method for interpreting this turn in Lacan’s work demonstrating that “the neurotic’s use of fantasy (i.e., the pervert’s fantasy of the Oedipus complex), as opposed to the pervert’s, comprises the failure of this very fantasy, a failure whose function is to preserve a lack in the Other” (p. 59). On these grounds, Tal clarifies that Lacan tells us nothing “other than that neurosis is a perversion of perversion” (p. 59):For where the pervert offers themself as the Other’s unmistakable object, which they make much of in terms of the Other’s jouissance, the neurotic doesn’t offer more than a postiche a—that is, a deception they use as a lid to cover their anxiety. The whole point for the neurotic is to keep their jouissance out of the Other, to keep the Other lacking it by making sure that he desires it in them without ever getting it; but all that, on the basis of believing that the Other has it, that the Other is one, which is the source of the neurotic’s anxiety. What Lacan shows us, here, is the only clinical entry point into an undeceived concept of neurosis. For the cutting edge that distinguishes the neurotic from the pervert, at the moment where the Other has taken this postiche a to be real—when the Other has been deceived, when the Other enjoys, when he doesn’t lack anything—is anxiety. For Lacan shows us later on how this function of anxiety fails in perversion (Lacan 2014, 165). This is where it becomes clear for us that what the neurotic was after in the first place was no phallus at all. This reversal of the classical conception of neurosis—which placed it for a long while in position of the first criterion, inasmuch as perversion was conceived as being a perversion of neurosis—certainly scrambles theoretical aspirations in the linearity of psychic development, which have always ended in a rebranding of normality. (Tal, 2023a, p. 59–60)
Tal’s text shows a great sensitivity to reversals like this that bring to mind Lacan’s own situation of not only the master’s discourse as the other side of the analyst’s discourse, but also the reverse, whereby the analyst’s discourse is the other side of the master’s but “‘does not explain the outside’ of the master’s discourse and its offshoots, not to mention account for them from the outside”(Chiesa, 2022, p. 362).[7] The doubling of this “other side” and the structure of double negation implied by it immediately evokes the “Lacanian dictum: There is no Other of the Other” (Dolar, 2012). Although, per Mladen Dolar (2012), “Lacan first maintained that the Name of the Father was the Other of the Other, the guarantee of the symbolic,” he “gradually came to demote it, to pluralize—Names of the Father—and eventually to turn it into the symptom of the symbolic rather than its guarantee.”[8] In this sense, just as neurosis is a perversion of perversion, mastery is the other side of the other side of analysis (Hegel presents a similar argument in the “Force and Understanding” section of his Phenomenology, where the non-inverted world is itself an inversion of the inverted [i.e. “supersensible”] one) (Hegel, 1807/1977, p. 96).[9] This emphasis on directionality also figures into Tal’s argument on the end (i.e., telos, maybe, per Lacan, more in the sense of aim than goal) of analysis itself. Because “therapeutics is a suspension of analysis in intent” since “therapeutics all responds [sic] to affect by sealing the question opened by desire’s impossibility (what am I?),” Tal (2023a) will oppose Aaron Schuster’s “qualification of analysis as ‘anti-therapy,’ for as long as one departs from the ontological fact that binds us to repetition, it is rather therapy that is to be considered as anti-analysis than the reverse” (p. 100). Moreover, Tal’s lucid analysis of “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” comes to a head in supporting Freud’s opposition to Ferenczi’s idea that “the dissolution of the crystalline structure of a character [is] a recrystallization” (Ferenczi 1982, as cited in Tal, 2023a, p. 9) that effectively collapses the moments of two different turns—“a dissolution of structure whereby a new structure is achieved”—into one (p. 14). In doing so, Tal claims that Ferenczi “dismisses the symptom,” contra Freud, who is “even ready to willingly sacrifice the question of the end of analysis, for that of the symptom, which he considers a more essential one: Why does it return? What function does it hold? What is symptom the name of?” (Tal, 2023a, p. 9; my emphasis). Freud offers no such certainties, and Tal’s focus on these reversals demonstrates that when a subject chooses analysis, there is no “natural” end and “recrystallization” per Ferenczi. Instead, one encounters the reversal of the idea of a subject at the end of analysis into the realization that “analysis is not a choice” at all (Tal, 2023a, p. 100). It follows, then, that “all subjects are divided subjects and thereby analysands” (Tal,1923a, p. 100; my emphasis). That “analysis”—again: up-loosening, the return back throughout—“is the only possible unfolding of [this] dialectic” of the subject’s “questioning of being (what am I?)” might compel us to add to Tal’s formulations (Tal, 1923a, p. 100). If not a “natural” solution of analysis in a new form of mastery or a dissolution that is itself a recrystallization, then symptom is the name of the analytic (in this literal sense) procedure whereby a fall posits the very ideal from which it has fallen retroactively. Lacan (1975/1998) makes an argument homologous to this point about symptom and analysis in the section of Seminar 20 entitled “On the Baroque.” The baroque “storyette” that consists of the incarnation of God in Christ and his subsequent murder on the Cross, Lacan notes, stands not for “the enterprise of saving men, but … that of saving God” (p. 116). Here, Lacan follows Freud’s “interpretation … of the murder of the son as founding the religion of grace ... a mode of negation (dénégation) that constitutes a possible form of the avowal of truth” (p. 108).[10] The “enterprise” effectively represents a response to an obvious logical problem pertaining to the tripartition of the God of monotheism: if “the count 1-2-3 pre-exist[s]” God, then God has no unity, is one God among others, one moves within the logic of polytheism; if this is not to be the case, then God “takes into account the retroactive effect (l’apres coup) of Christian revelation, and it is his being that suffers a blow” (contra the Aristotelian Supreme Being) (p.108).[11] “Whence,” Lacan says, “it becomes conceivable that God’s salvation is precarious and ultimately dependent upon the goodwill of Christians” (p. 108).[12] Lacan will therefore go as far as to claim the psychoanalytic teaching that is nothing but “the Christian revelation”—namely, Christians’ recounting of Christ and the jouissance of his suffering body in speech—inasmuch as it reveals that “speech (une parole)/a word ... concerns jouissance” (p.112).[13] In Christology, the “blow” God suffers in his being through the incarnation and crucifixion of God the son (which, if one sets aside the aforementioned logic of polytheism attests also to the fact that, as Lacan states elsewhere, “God is unconscious” [Lacan, 1964/1973, p. 59]), “sav[es] the Father” in positing His very in-existence (Lacan, 1975/1998, pp.108–109). In other words, the fact that Christ “came down from Heaven” (per the Nicene Creed) posits the very semblance of Heaven from which he came down (here one can see again the evocation of the Aristotelian sublunary and superlunary spheres). If, as Lacan (1975/1998) claims, “Freud saves the Father once again,” and “in that respect ... imitates Jesus Christ” (p.108), it is insofar as he does so in a similar respect but with regards to the relation of the speaking subject to the question of jouissance’s existence. Tal will relate the experience of the “Other’s will to castrate” at the end of analysis to the scene of the crucifixion, pushing beyond “che vuoi” (what do you want from me?) as the limit of analytic experience:[14]What gets voiced out in Jesus’s last words, right before becoming signifier, is not “ché v[u]oi?”; for, at the bottom of one’s destitution one doesn’t ask the Lord “What do you want from me?” one rather answers it: “Don’t you see, Lord, that the jouissance you want is my destitution?” Or, to use the brutal scansion whereby Freud ends his Interpretation of Dreams, “Father can’t you see, I’m burning.” (Tal, 2023a, p. 90)[15]
Thus Tal (2023a) locates “following desire till its end” in the realization “that the jouissance one was after is the Other’s—a necessity forged by its incompleteness—and that, thus, it is one’s own destitution” (p. 90). Crucially, Tal quotes Lacan speaking of this moment of “submitting oneself to ‘the Other’s will to castrate’” as one in which they become something akin to “‘the mummy of some Buddhist initiation’ (Lacan 2006, 700)” (p.90). That Christ’s suffering and death on the cross in the face of the Other’s will to castrate is tantamount to the revelation that speech concerns jouissance (for Lacan) bolsters Tal’s broader point that “all subjects are divided subjects,” to which Tal adds: “...and thereby analysands” (p. 100). Despite the ascension of Christ to heaven,[16] the Christian theology of the incarnation leaves us subject to this division and marks an irreversible point where the superlunary realm from which God is thought to have “fallen down” is revealed in its loss, establishing in the process the association of jouissance with this very property of irreversibility. Lacan’s earlier elucidation of the relation between the signifier and jouissance in terms of the reversibility or irreversibility of processes (in Seminar 17: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis) is apt here:I defy you to prove in any way that descending 500 meters with a weight of 80 kilos on your back and, once you have descended, going back up the 500 meters with it is zero, no work. Try it, have a go yourself, and you will find that you have proof of the contrary. But if you overlay signifiers, that is, if you enter the path of energetics, it is absolutely certain that there has been no work. (Lacan, 1973/2007, p. 48-49)
In view of this distinction between the orders of reversible signification and jouissance that pertains to irreversibility, Tal’s (2023a) “end of analysis” will hinge on the fact of this end’s own un-ending-ness: paradoxically, it represents “the end of the one and final end” since “there isn’t a final end that analysis can reach” (p. 48). More specifically, that “the end has already taken place, and that it will continue to do so indefinitely” thereby means that “analysis may be considered as terminated when it has become interminable, when it has ended the idea of its final end” (p. 48). In a roundabout way, these formulations give an answer to the question of what is rendered impossible with the irreversibility associated with jouissance: namely, the prospect of reversing or completing the end itself.[17] In the aftermath of the end—or, when “analytic experience encounters its [own] terminus (terme)” in the production of “the master-signifier”—“something like grammar ... commands” the “confused embrace wherein jouissance finds its cause, its last cause , which is formal” (Lacan, 1975/1998, p. 25; my emphasis). Lacan will supplement this claim with reference to the theological-political struggles of the early Church organization—namely, the mid-1st century “Incident at Antioch” in which Peter and Paul came to a confrontation over whether or not Christians must pass through the rituals (circumcision) inherited from the Old Hebrew Covenant (p. 25).[18] That Lacan figures the issue of grammar’s command where jouissance would find its cause after the end in relation to the antagonism between two figures whose Church came to be predicated with the terms apostolic, holy, and catholic[19] among others suggests once more the problem of catalysis or dissolution’s larger historical (and theological, since the notion of Holy Spirit consists in nothing but this diremption, per Hegel) import. The fact of antagonism or the splitting of factions is here a necessary product of the loss of beginning or foundation, itself already an end. What then, if anything, remains of the superlunary sphere after its abolition from within the sublunary sphere, or of God after the “blow” to his being? Or to phrase the question in a way more directly in response to Tal’s arguments: where, if anywhere, is—or was—the imaginary in the The End of Analysis’ subtitle Dialectics of Symbolic and Real? Lacan argues that it was Aquinas who attempted to revise this “end” of Christian theology and transform the Christian God into an Aristotelian Supreme Being until the Counter-Reformation returned to the sources (Gospels) of the Christian tradition and “parad[ed]” them (Lacan, 1975/1998, p. 116). Tal’s (2023a) highlighting Lacan’s mention of the later Aquinas as a figure of subjective destitution in the “October Proposition” is a welcome emphasis in the literature regarding Lacan’s comments on the Aquinian-Aristotelian Church doctrine and its analogue in the “ego psychological” notion of the properly developed, strong ego—even and perhaps especially as the philosopher of Being, insofar as he is cata-holic, dissolves in the end (p. 121).[20] In the broader span of Tal’s argument, this entails that castration “becomes the object itself, the object lack that turns jouissance as such into its possibility, that is, in turn, that of the Subject” when considered “beyond its imaginary function” (p. 53). Per this problem of being, Tal will curiously maintain that “Lacan assigns to the analyst (in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis) no other criterion of formation than their conviction that [jouissance]” — which, again pertains to irreversibility of signification — does not exist,” even in light of his claim that the end of analysis consists in the recognition “that the jouissance one was after is the Other’s” through “submitting oneself to ‘the Other’s will to castrate’” (Tal, 2023a, p. 91). It is on this note that Tal gives the most consequential of his “reversal” formulations. Echoing his introductory axioms about the reflexive dimension of analysis with regards to its own concept (“The bottom line is that no pass worthy of the name has ever been a pass of the analysand who undergoes it, rather that of the analyst as such if not that of psychoanalysis altogether” [Tal, 2023a, p. 128]), Tal returns to the issue of in whose service an analysis acts: “such is the difference between an analyst taken for a passer and a passer taken for an analyst” (p. 131). Tal’s position here is consistent with his stance in another recent essay on “imposter syndrome”: the analyst is not only “not less of an imposter than the subject he assists,” but “can only start to operate the moment he is taken for the exact opposite of what he intends to reveal (the object being nothing more than a lack), the analyst is an imposter par excellence” (Tal, 2023b). He also advances his exemplary figure of “the Dialectics of Symbolic and Real” in the idea that “even the original act of interpretation—which Freud defined as ‘where id was there shall ego be’—shows the subject as what represents him as signifier, only to reveal to him in that signifier where he (as Real) was not” (Tal, 2023b). In The End of Analysis, Tal gives an arguably even more radical formulation of the analyst’s imposture. It is not just that “whoever is not an imposter is not an analyst” and “only as imposter that one gets to analyze” (Tal, 2023b). Rather,there is also not a sufficient reason not to acknowledge in the passer (in line with, but not limited to, the passer’s designation by this “Proposition”) an established political category that replaces that of the analyst in their discursive function—for no analysis is ever ended before the analyst is unveiled, in fact, as having been a passer all along, and a passant. What else than in having been no more than a passer does the analyst dispense the subject supposed to know into exchange? (Tal, 2023a, p. 130; my emphasis)
Tal ultimately proposes nothing less than the “liquidation” of the analyst altogether at the conclusion of the text (“there is not a valid necessity to conserve the idea of analytic institution as a beyond of the liquidation of transference—provided the beyond of one is already the beyond of all” [Tal, 2023a, p.130]). The crux of this argument would seem to be the following: since an analyst is an imposter, then every analysis is a training analysis where an analysand, in the capacity of passeur, could come to find themselves in the analyst’s position, since, per Lacan, “the analyst is only authorized by himself” (“l’analyste ne s’autorise que de lui-même”); since every analysand comes to occupy this non-position of the analyst “in the end,” passer replaces analyst in its discursive function. While questions remain about grounding the analytic discourse in imposture—namely, of what is the analyst an imposter (“the object being nothing more than a lack” [Tal, 2023b])?; what does the analyst impose, so to speak?—the effect of this idea would seem to have clear implications with regards to the issue of “authority” in analysis, bringing forth something like a psychoanalytic version of the Protestant solae (justification by faith alone, scripture alone, grace alone, Christ alone, and God alone [taken here, ironically, together])—with the caveat, of course, that it is the text and practice of Freud that orients the issue of authorization, which itself points toward the analyst’s self-authorization and, as we have seen above, “no other criterion of formation than their conviction that [jouissance] does not exist” (Tal, 2023a, p. 91). This self-authorization along with Tal’s earlier refutation of “the choice of analysis”[21]—a kind of predestination hypothesis—in this context brings to mind Herman Westerink’s reflections on the common intellectual ground shared by Lacan in the Ethics seminar (in which he advances the above “criterion”) and its antecedents of Reformation thought:Freud’s concept of libido never completely loses its Christian connotations. It is Augustine of Hippo who explains libido in terms of concupiscentia, which usually denotes sexual desire, although both libido and concupiscence can also indicate a desire for power (libido dominandi), i.e. a desire for mastery and not to be submissive to others (including God). Libido thus indicates in this way all the sinful desires that fundamentally distort the natural inclination to the good. Avoidance of evil through free choice and self-control, as Augustine’s opponent Pelagius proposes, is impossible as slips of tongue and the unwilled erection of the male genital prove (Augustine, 1998, ch. 23-24; Brown, 1969, pp. 259ff; De Kesel, 2009, pp. 15-16). Here we see how certain unconscious desires rooted in the body are postulated next to a conscious will that tries in vain to control and repress them. It is a distinction between the libido and will that seems analogous to Freud’s distinction between the Id and the superego. However, Augustine also argues that in the future man’s original goodness will be restored. Freud thought otherwise: man’s constitution must always be thought in terms of the drives’ polymorphous perversity and their vicissitudes in the context of cultural demands. (Westerink, 2012, pp. 14–15)
Concupiscentia also plays an integral role in Tal’s commentary, too, when he draws on Lacan’s own attribution of the “linkage of anxiety to the function of cause” to Kierkegaard, for whom “concupiscentia must precede prohibition as much as it succeeds it, and therefore, “the fall [of Adam in sin] becomes something progressive” (Tal, 2023a, p. 65; my emphasis). With regards to analysis, the liquidation of transference with the analytic institution writ large “can only be questioned in retrospect from the order it reforms, ‘(not what is, but) what was analysis?’” (Tal, 2023a, p. 120). While this point would seem to come about as an effect of dissolution, the beginning of analysis—as described, for example, in Freud’s “On Beginning the Treatment” text (Freud, 1913a)—is, notably, no less vexed. Tal’s text follows the spirit of Freud’s “On Beginning the Treatment” when he interrogates the end of analysis from the standpoint of those “analysand[s] who abandon their regular sessions on the conviction that whatever it is that they desire—now that analysis has revealed enough of it—it will always remain a fantasy” (Tal, 2023a, p. 119). Perhaps, then, insofar as “a traversal (if one does not hold onto the liquidation of transference) only becomes traversal when it gets formalized in a testimony—that is, the symptom in knowledge that founds the analytic act” (Tal, 2023a, 120) if the analyst attests to having been a passer all along (as much as the analysand turned analyst-passer), one might wonder if “analyst” does not function in this framework as “something like a nameplate which attaches itself, just like that, onto the real”—a designation that Lacan characterized as “nominalist” and “opposed to scientific discourse” in which “one can only find the real insofar as it depends on the function of the semblant” (cited in Žižek, 2012, p. 780). In other words, if this is the case, whither Lacan’s les non-dupes errent (or at least insofar as “analyst” is revealed to have been a “passer” all along and not, say, a mask on the passer that has its own truth as a semblance)?[22] While it does seem to follow from Tal’s premise that an “analyst” is an imposter (conceived as that which hides the passer) that ought to be turned into a “passer,” it is worth inquiring into the assumption that the symptomatic “imposture” named by “analysis” should result in the assumption of the analyst’s position (in every analysis, since once again, per Lacan and Tal, every analysis is a training analysis). Put another way: what of the signifier “analysis” standing in for the Real of the analyst, now as a semblance/appearance (as Tal demonstrates in his reading of Freud’s “wo es war” in the “Imposter Syndrome” essay)? There are multiple ways one could conceive of an analysand’s testimony not limited to the analysand’s assuming the analyst’s position (let us call this the sola scriptura/sola fide option). Per Tal’s earlier example, “analysand[s] who abandon their regular sessions” moving from analysand to non-analysand (perhaps contradicting the earlier thesis that “all subjects are divided subjects” means that all subjects are analysands and the concept that “analysis is not a choice”). Or yet further, even an “end of analysis” where one’s being an “analysand” is opposed then to others’ being analysands and analysts (as opposed to the self-authorizing notion of analysis, we might name this something like “the catholic option” insofar as it posits something like a clergy/laity division from a logical standpoint, in a variation on Freud’s “The Question of Lay Analysis” where the division is assumed but involves no necessary effect on the possibility of laity’s becoming an analyst).[23] I am reminded that Lacan gives another formulation of “the criterion of formation” other than the “conviction that [jouissance] does not exist” (Tal, 2023a, p. 91). “What we can see on the basis of analytic discourse,” Lacan (175/1998) says, “is that we may have a slight chance of finding out something about it, from time to time, by pathways that are essentially contingent” (p. 116). In the same seminar session, Lacan evokes the notion of a “pathway” again in the discussion of Taoism, where “what is at stake is not truth but the pathway, as the very name ‘Tao’ indicates, and to manage to prolong something that resembles it” (p.108), later adding that this approach is “what is best when one wants, naturally, to get out of this infernal business, as Freud called it” (p.115). In statements like these as well as Lacan’s earlier thesis above wherein “submitting oneself to ‘the Other’s will to castrate’” one transforms into “‘the mummy of some Buddhist initiation’” (Tal, 2023a, p. 90), the specter of monasticism looms large.[24] Setting aside the direct move toward the Tao-pathway “as such,” that something about jouissance could be known through “contingent pathways”—and more importantly, that this knowledge through contingent pathways would characterize the analytic discourse—brings us back to the ongoing monastic “les religieux” that Lacan opposes, at the moment of his School’s dissolution, to the end of analysis. From this angle, the opposition to this monastic principle in the “Letter of Dissolution” that Tal squares with Lacan’s other dissolutive positions apropos analysis brings about an association with the most arguably well-known historical dissolution, that of the English monasteries themselves by Henry VIII from the late 1530s to early 1540s. I rely here on Diarmaid MacCulloch’s (2022) commentary on the event, worth quoting at length given Lacan’s evocation of the association of monasticism and dissolution in the Letter:The dissolution of the monasteries is an old tale oft told: the most decisive and dramatic change of the English Reformation. It was the speediest such operation in Europe: Henry VIII’s phase of the process spanned a mere eight years between 1532 and 1540, while Protestant Scotland took around forty years from 1560 to empty the convents.... Protestants, anxiously scrutinising Henry VIII’s eccentric effort at Reformation to see whether it chimed with their theological concerns, rejoiced amid the wreckage. They regarded monastic life as part of the confidence trick played on the people of Europe by the bishop of Rome’s corrupt Church. Communities of useless and idle celibates offered false roads to salvation, pretending to save the faithful with their prayers and feigned contemplation of the divine, teaching them lies in sermons, doling out meaningless penitences in the confessional – generally stopping people from finding out God’s truth for themselves. In the late 1540s, the much more self-consciously Protestant government of Henry’s son, Edward VI, delivered the coup de grâce to the old system. It closed and confiscated the endowments of the thousands of chantries where non-monastic priests still celebrated masses for souls. In doing so it killed off a host of accompanying devotional practices and beliefs. Protestant joy was checked when it became obvious that the huge wealth released by the dissolutions had generally gone into the pockets of the wealthy, rather than being redeployed for godly purposes. (p. 1)
In the Introduction to Tal’s text, Dolar also remarks that Lacan’s dissolution “in 1980 strangely (uncannily?) coincided with…a very different kind of dissolution, the dissolution of some basic nature of the social tie” under Thatcher and Reagan (Dolar, 2023, p. vi). In our time, the only true contender with Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries for the title of most notorious among historical dissolutions is the Christmas 1991 Dissolution of the USSR, roughly contemporaneous and ideologically consistent with the events alluded to by Dolar (and perhaps anticipated by Lacan in his association of the Church, the Marxists and their International, and of course the International Psychoanalytic Association from which he was excommunicated more than a decade earlier). For Dolar, the perseverance of Tal’s text on the path of dissolution “continues, 40 years later, on the track of dissolution to counteract this other disastrous dissolution we are faced with” (p. ix). How, precisely, might one distinguish between dissolution and a counter-acting dissolution? Tal supplements his early question “what is symptom the name of” with the insight that Freud considers the symptom to be “emptied from any symbolic formation that a deciphering may dissolve,” adding, “‘where there is the symptom, there is the drive,’ [Freud] tells us, as one would enounce the law of gravity” (Tal, 2023a, pp. 9–10). In this formulation, the potency of dissolution appears to be circumscribed; the possibility of turning this symptom into something new through decipherment is nullified. Lacan also mentions the law of gravity at a formative moment in his teaching. In Seminar 20, he comments that “the subversion” of the Copernican Revolution, “if it existed somewhere, at some time, was not that of having changed the point around which it circles (point de virée) – it is that of having replaced ‘it turns’ with ‘it falls,’” and that this achievement should be thought to belong less to Copernicus in his heliocentric model of the universe than already to Kepler’s laws of planetary gravity and their formalization of the laws according to which things “fall” (Lacan, 1975/1998, pp. 42–43). In Tal’s drawing out the consequence of where “Lacan attempts … to abandon the many for the few where Freud had abandoned the few for many” and turn back the psychoanalytic Fall, the distinction between this abandonment and counter-abandonment sets up an opposition between transmission and discontinuity; Tal rejects the former as a “liberal ideal” and affirms the latter (Tal, 2023a, p. 119). Few and many would seem to be aligned with discontinuity and transmission, respectively, since the curtailing of a group to “few” represents a break opposed to transmission to “many.”[25] The reasoning here is reminiscent of the abovementioned solae that themselves stood in opposition to the extension of doctrine “on the whole” (kath' holou) or something like the transmission to many on the assumption that this doctrine was administered by even fewer (or even one—the pope).[26] As solae (or, several principles taken alone), they are grouped together as “few.” In returning to this “few” of self-authorization, the Protestant theology seeks to return directly to the Word of God and the incarnation. Does dissolution complete or end its own process (contra Tal’s points about the lack of a final end [Tal, 2023a, p. 48] and the indissolubility of symptoms themselves [p. 9])? In both this case and that of psychoanalysis, the problem would seem to be yet more fundamental—and dire. The assumption of the purity of this “few” would seem to have a status that might appropriately be called “imaginary.”[27] Following Tal’s brilliant homology of the scene of Christ’s passion to the Freudian “Father, can’t you see I’m burning?”, it is worth remembering that the suffering words of the son take place in the father’s dream, the burning child’s speech attesting in the most horrible of ways to the father’s own guilt. As Lacan refers to the child’s words as an instance of tuché (Lacan, 1964/1973, pp. 52–68), we might suitably associate this not only with Christ’s passion, but also with the “contingent pathways” to jouissance that mark the situation of many who speak for Lacan. Even if God has fallen asleep and dreams the avatars of his own guilt (Lacan, 1964/1973, p. 59),[28] he has done so only for the dream to eventually end—per Lacan, to go on dreaming in waking life after the dream’s end. As it regards the end of analysis, Lacan will reverse matters, speaking as if the following words fall from Freud’s lips in Seminar II:I am he who wants to be forgiven for having dared to cure these patients, who until now no one wanted to understand and whose cure was forbidden. I am he who wants to be not guilty of it. I want to be (born) that. [Je veux n’être pas cela.] Instead of me, there are all the others. Here I am only the representative of this vast, vague movement, the quest for truth, in which I efface myself. I am no longer anything. My ambition was greater than I. No doubt the syringe was dirty. And precisely to the extent that I desired it too much, that I partook in this action, that I wanted to be, myself, the creator, I am not the creator. The creator is someone greater than I. It is my unconscious, it is this voice which speaks in me, beyond me. (Lacan, 1977/1988, pp. 170–171)
“That,” says Lacan (1977/1988) in his interpretation of the dream that inaugurates psychoanalysis, “is the meaning of this dream” (p. 171)—likewise, the dream of analysis itself?