Freud compares the formation of fantasy to the formation of a chemical compound and explains that sounds and images come together without the chronological corrections of consciousness, much like a collage.[1] According to Freud, the path that leads to the formation of the symptom also passes through this process of “symbolic” connections[2], allowing us to trace the mark of historicization in Freud’s work.
Following the analogy established by Freud in 1896, it is not the analyst but the analysand who must take up the shovel and the pickaxe in order to dig, rewrite, and reformulate their own history.[3] According to Miller, this reformulation gives rise to different, successive truths of the past and future contingencies of the analysand’s history.[4] Historicization involves different versions of history and thus a varity of history. Chronology itself varies over the course of the process of historicization.
Truth is not something that requires chronological verification through the analysand’s chronological past. Lacan’s proposition that the past is past only insofar as it is “historicized”[5] aligns with Freud’s view in Letter 52 to Fliess[6], according to which the most important characteristic of memory is that it is constructed in a repetitive manner. Truth varies throughout the successive reconstructions that take place in an analysis.
For this reason, analysis verifies the variety of truth and, consequently, its “structure of fiction.”[7] As Lacan states, the “discourse of the unconscious,” presupposed by the formations of the unconscious, is not the “final word” of the unconscious,[8] because through the variations of truth, a point emerges that is neither true nor false, but rather a point of jouissance. It is precisely at this point that the analysand will assume his or her history, as P. Bosquin-Caroz indicates in her argument. At the moment when this encounter with one’s own mode of jouissance occurs, all the signifiers that the analysand has used to narrate his or her history take the form of an hystory that the analysand presents in the pass. Hystory is the outcome of all the variations of truth that isolate the fictive, lying character of truth.
This is psychoanalysis’s response to all modes of thought that proclaim the end of history. There will be as many ends of hystory as there are analysands in the world.
- Freud, S., “Draft M [Notes II]”, Revised Standard Edition., Volume I, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2024, p. 277. ↑
- Freud, S., “Studies on Hysteria (1893–95)”, Revised Standard Edition., Volume II, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2024, p. 5. ↑
- Freud, S., “The Aetiology of Hysteria (1896)”, Revised Standard Edition., Volume III, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2024, 200. ↑
- Miller, J.-A., “The Lying Truth,” The Lacanian Review 7, 2019, p. 153. ↑
- Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan – Book I Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953–1954 trans. J. Forrester, London: Norton, 1991, p. 12. ↑
- Freud, S., “Letter 52”, Revised Standard Edition., Volune I, pp. 260–265. ↑
- Lacan, J., “Columbia University Lecture on the Symptom,” The Lacanian Review 12, 2022, p. 76–77. ↑
- Lacan, J., Formations of the Unconscious – The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book V trans. R. Grigg, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017, p. 240. ↑
