Moustafa
Safouan is one of the first generation of Lacan’s students, a participant in le
Séminaire from its inception in the early 1950s onwards. Like other notable analytic theorists from
this first Lacanian generation (for example, Jean Laplanche, Serge Leclaire,
Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, as well as Octave and Maud Mannoni), Safouan maintains
a respectful degree of distance from le maître absolu; as the cover
blurbs for The Seminar of Moustafa Safouan accurately indicate, he
explores psychoanalytic issues from a Lacanian vantage point without getting
lost in the labyrinth of Lacan’s own discourse. 
Safouan spends as much time discussing Freud as Lacan, and he frequently
utilizes the former to clarify some select obscurities in the latter—as Safouan
shows, Lacan’s “return to Freud” only makes sense if one actually bothers to
literally return to Freud oneself.

The five
essays collected here in this volume were lectures delivered at the Lacanian
School of Psychoanalysis in Berkeley
and San Francisco in November of
1997. The editors succeed in preserving
the flavor of this particular format; 
that is to say, the word “seminar” in the book’s title isn’t just there
to emptily echo Lacan’s famous forum for the dissemination of psychoanalytic
thought. After each talk, an extensive
question-and-answer period follows. The
questions range from requests for minor terminological clarifications to
detailed queries aiming at the heart of Freudian-Lacanian theory. Safouan’s recorded answers in response to his
interlocutors are crystal clear and of direct relevance to the topic under
discussion. Those who believe that being
a Lacanian is tantamount to being nothing more than a jargon-mongering
obscurantist slavishly repeating the master’s mantras should take a close look
at Safouan’s work.

The opening
lecture, “Direction of the Cure, the End of Analysis, and the Pass,” is
primarily concerned with those aspects of psychoanalytic theory most directly
connected with clinical practice. 
Safouan spends the first half of this discussion explaining the
relationship between transference and love (in the course of doing so, he
succinctly summarizes Lacan’s reading of Plato’s Symposium from the
eighth seminar on the transference). He
remarks that the, “psychoanalytic experience constitutes somehow a
quasiexperimental isolation of the narcissistic dimension that is present in
all love” (pg. 4). Then, Safouan
proceeds to observe that, “One cannot love oneself immediately; in this sense,
there is no unmediated narcissism” (pg. 5). 
Hence, the analysis of the transference highlights those aspects of the
analysand’s narcissism as mediated vis-à-vis the history of his/her
relations with others. Safouan goes so
far as to claim, against certain of Freud’s proclamations, that love blurs the
distinction between anaclitic and narcissistic forms of libidinal
investments—“According to Freud, there is an opposition between object love and
narcissism, but as a matter of fact in real states of love you can’t
distinguish the one from the other” (pg. 9). 
In the second half of this first lecture, Safouan addresses two
conceptions of the culminating point of an analysis: the later Freud’s contention that analysis
ends by running up against the “bedrock of castration” and Lacan’s notion that
the process concludes with the patient “traversing the fantasy.” Safouan links these two conceptions together
through the concept of “identification.” 
He interprets Freudian castration as Lacanian “symbolic castration”
(i.e., the subject’s alienation in the “defiles of the signifier”). Self-identity’s unavoidable routing through
signifying matrices—this theme dovetails with the above claim that all
narcissism involves external mediation—generates, according to Lacanian theory,
the subject-as-void, namely, the “barred subject” ($). This subject seeks in vain to substantialize
itself, in its ephemeral negativity, through identification with the mediating
representations of its Imaginary, ego-level
selfhood—“identity is always resolved in identifications. But identifications never capture identity”
(pg. 21). Fantasy-objects, as
incarnations of objet petit a, are identified with by the subject as the
fictive fillers of this absence of (self-)identity—another
way of putting this is to say, as Safouan does, that, “object a is meant
to fill or deceive this gap of castration” (pg. 11). Consequently, traversing the fantasy is a way
of confronting castration. In both
cases, the analysand is brought to that point where he/she recognizes the
particular fashions in which the reign of a specific cluster of fantasy-objects
has dictated the contours of his/her identity as an answer to the abyss opening
up through symbolic castration.

The next
two lectures are jointly entitled “The Unconscious and Its Scribe” (referring
to a book published by Safouan of the same title—L’inconscient et son scribe). 
The main contribution of these lectures is the manner in which they
clarify the best known, and yet, perhaps, least understood, aspect of Lacan’s
thought: “the unconscious is structured
like a language.” Safouan is careful to
note that the Lacanian unconscious is not, in and of itself, composed of the
same linguistic material that circulates about through consciousness. The unconscious (as Lacan himself repeatedly
insists in the face of various misunderstandings) is not simply a jumble of
elements from everyday, natural language; the unconscious isn’t simply the
obscure underbelly of English, French, German, etc. Safouan argues that Lacan’s famous thesis
does not concern the repressed as such (i.e., the unconscious as a separate
system divorced from the rest of the mental apparatus), but, rather, the manner
in which the repressed returns. The
repressed is “structured like a language” because it surfaces within a
conscious field permeated by linguistic organizations. As Safouan adeptly clarifies, the central
axiom of Lacanian structuralist psychoanalysis is interested specifically in
the traces left behind by the activities of unconscious cognition—“the very well-known
thesis, the unconscious is structured like a language, is simply a way
of explaining the return of the repressed, insofar as you admit that repression
always strikes signifiers. Insofar as it
strikes signifiers, it is always doubled by a return of the repressed” (pg. 36). Safouan subsequently explains the
relationship between repression and Lacan’s two psychical tropes of metaphor
and metonymy (as borrowed from the linguist Roman Jakobson). Repression goes hand-in-hand with metaphor,
since the obfuscation of one sort of ideational representation is accomplished
by displacements of various sorts onto other ideational representations (i.e.,
one thing is substituted for another). 
The return of the repressed, as an evasion of repression’s censorship
via a “compromise formation,” is effectuated through a metonymic sliding from
the eclipsed content to other ideas loosely connected with what previously fell prey to repression (these tangentially connected ideas
being themselves admissible to consciousness).

The fourth
and fifth lectures, “The Object of Psychoanalysis” and “Jouissance and
the Death Drive,” both delineate what, from a Lacanian view, is involved in
theoretically going “beyond the pleasure principle.” As in Slavoj Žižek’s interpretation of the
mechanisms at play in the libidinal economy, Safouan establishes a direct
equivalence between the Freudian death drive (Todestrieb) and Lacanian jouissance: both concepts refer to something excessive in
human nature, something compulsively driving individuals to ignore their
self-interests and well being as governed by the normally reigning equilibrium
between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. Whereas the pleasure principle’s pursuits are
modified in accordance with the obstacles and prohibitions erected against it
by external reality (whether this Umwelt is natural or social), jouissance
jeopardizes the individual’s bodily and/or psychical welfare in forcefully
ignoring the constraints exerted by the empirical-material environment. Instead of treating Freud’s distinction
between the pleasure and reality principles as a matter of diametrical
opposition, Safouan, following Lacan, posits that these two principles are
ultimately reflections of the same mechanism—“the pleasure principle, meaning
pleasure with its natural limit… is exactly the same as the reality principle”
(pg. 96). Safouan argues that the
tragedy of the human condition, according to Lacan, is that individuals are
condemned to perpetual dissatisfaction with the pleasures they can and do
obtain, always chasing after a fantasized form of absolute enjoyment that is
itself, ultimately, incapable of ever being attained (and, if the impossible
did miraculously happen, the procurement of full jouissance would be a
crushing trauma equivalent to psychical death). 
The tension between (as Lacan puts it in the twentieth seminar) “jouissance
expected” and “jouissance obtained” is an irreducible feature of human
nature, a feature incarnated in the drives as the fundamental units of the
psychoanalytic theory of the libidinal economy. 
As Safouan puts it, “the difference between the satisfaction obtained
and the satisfaction looked for constitutes the driving force, the sting, that
prevents the organism from being satisfied with any given situation but ‘pushes
it to go ahead, always ahead’” (pg. 91). 
He continues, saying, “We only know that the complete satisfaction they
seek is never the same as the one obtained, and that it is precisely in this
distance, in this lack of the same, that the sting lies that ‘pushes them
ahead’” (pg. 91). In the final
question-and-answer session of this set of lectures, Safouan makes a variety of
remarks. He claims that theoretical
recourse to a pre-Oedipal phase is “stupid” (pg. 98), since the onset of the
Oedipus complex retroactively modifies pre-Oedipal object-relations in such a
way that the traces of their prior configurations are, for all intents and
purposes, obliterated (i.e., subjected to primal repression). He also reminds his audience of a point he
made earlier in the course of commenting upon one of his own clinical
vignettes: in Lacanian psychoanalysis,
“traversing the fantasy” often amounts to bringing the analysand-subject to the
moment when, in seeing their deepest unconscious fantasies for what they are,
he/she recognizes the idiotic contingency of these ontogenetically formed
templates. Fantasies thereby lose a
power they exert only so long as they remain indiscernible.

The Seminar of Moustafa Safouan
is highly recommended to anyone who already knows a little Freud and wishes to
gain some insight into Lacan’s ideas. In
an elegantly straightforward way, Safouan deftly leads the reader through some
of the most important concepts in Lacanian psychoanalysis. He cuts through numerous Gordian knots of
complexity embedded in Lacan’s massive and difficult corpus, and, in so doing,
succeeds in displaying the power and relevance of Lacanian theory as an
unparalleled analysis of the nuances of psychical reality.

© 2002 Adrian Johnston

Adrian Johnston, Ph.D. holds a position
as interdisciplinary research fellow in psychoanalysis at Emory University.

Categories: Psychoanalysis