“In truth, in a psychoanalysis, there is nothing to see and there is everything to say. […] In this shipwreck of the image, some nevertheless remain.” [1]
My analysis has certainly been punctuated by multiple scansions and interpretations. However, these are three dreams that have come to reveal – and therefore to loosen – how the speaking being was coordinated with his enjoyment; three dreams, therefore, of the pass, insofar as, as Jacques-Alain Miller puts it, “The pass means something like seeing the window and knowing oneself as the subject of the drive , that is, what you enjoy by going around it in a never-ending failure.” [2] – the window, that is to say the object a as a hole. [3]
What did I see then through
The first dream woke me up : it was that of a cannibalistic kitchen scene taking place behind the scenes of Pol Pot, dictator of a people that I knew were susceptible to the occasional devouring of human flesh by my aunt’s adopted daughter, who is Cambodian. In this dream, through the hole of my gaze, I saw the “image-phrase” of my fantasy, reduced to its axiom: “A child is eaten.” I saw the coordinates of my mode of enjoyment, a subject who imagined himself devoured by the other. It was my fantasy response to the position of enjoyment of my martyr-mother, a position that she had scripted on the model of the Christ-like imperative pronounced during the Last Supper: “Take and eat of it, all of you, this is my body.” A position that is all too real, when the body offered as sacrificial food is an amputated body. Seeing the scene of fantasy through “the window I constituted” awakened me to its iron law: namely, that it was nothing other than such a law. [5]
See the fixation of enjoyment
The second dream separated me : while climbing a mountain path by its shortcuts, I caused a landslide; turning around, I saw a torn-off leg emerging from a pile of stones. I named it, “the one that is torn off .” It is a “sinthome name [7] ,” stated [8] during a session that is, logically, the last. It is the status of the body-image that is at stake here. I had been brought into the world as a spare part for an Other body, a body in spare parts. “Separating without tearing oneself away [9] ,” is how I had titled my first testimony: the torn-off leg of the dream allows me to see my status as a member of the body of the Other, a status that caused me a lot of anxiety when it came to being a member of anything. This nomination had an effect on enjoyment: I am no longer the one who spends her time tearing texts from the body at the last minute, and even if my “pulsional style”, as I called it at Question d’École , remains of the order of a “no time to lose [10] “, I can bear to live in the present.
