W.Ver Eecke
Georgetown University
I wish to thank Justin Weinstein for the many stylistic improvements
he suggested.
I remember François as a warm human being, an experienced Lacanian clinician, an insightful member of group discussion and a perceptive academic writer.
In the early eighties, François was part of a group, reading
Lacanian texts in French, convened under the initiative of Bill Richardson.
He volunteered to read aloud the texts in his sonorous voice. When he passed
away the group did not look for an alternative reader. Instead, we shifted
to a method of selectively discussing problems rather than analyzing every
point. François' passing away did not only deprive us of his sonorous
voice, it also created a void in the group's willingness or ability to
confront Lacanian texts in their literality. François gave us the
confidence and many times the necessary help to understand Lacan's dense
texts.
As an inseparable part of the reading sessions which took place in New York, Montréal, Boston, Providence, Austin Riggs and Washington,D.C., we had lunches and dinners together. When the reading group met in Montréal, François invited the whole group to stay at his house. This allowed us to get a glimpse of his wide ranging interests in art (pictorial as well as musical). But what I remember best from our reading group's meetings in Montréal is what must be called the gargantuan dinners served and prepared by François in an elegant, proud, and magisterial way. The skill and speed with which François prepared the meal was matched only by the pride with which he did it. When the group met in Washington and my wife prepared the lunch, François enjoyed it so intensely and with such refined hedonism that everybody almost automatically enjoyed the lunch more intensely. Afterwards, he thanked my wife profusely and in another gargantuan gesture he sent her the next day a flower arrangement bigger than we had ever seen before or even afterwards. In Lacanian terminology, where François passed by, he left his marks.
François' clinical experience ranged from the simple to the extraordinary. The Lacanian Forum directed by John Muller was a place where that experience became an invaluable pedagogical tool. Thus in order to clarify Lacan's schema L, François stressed that the analyst must remain aware that the patient often tries to seduce the therapist into a maternal position. If that seduction succeeds, then the analytic relation degrades into an imaginary one and does not leave room for the work, the labor and the pain of a symbolic relation. The pain of the symbolic relation, which allows for psychic labor, is caused by the introduction of distance or--in François' words--by imposing a cut. He then proceeded by giving an example: that of patients who complained that they do not get much out of the analysis and that the analysis is maybe not worth the time, the money, and the effort. François interpreted these complaints as strategies to transform the analytic relation into an imaginary relation in which the therapist would assume, as a kind of omnipotent mother, the guilt for any lack of success in the therapy and would hence forth take responsibility for improved success in the therapy as experienced by the patient. Instead of falling into the trap, so François continued, I respond to such strategies by increasing the fee. Such a response allows me to maintain my symbolic position. It makes it clear to the patient that analysis is not mothering.
A more dramatic example of François' clinical experience, which
allowed him to maintain his symbolic position, was the case where a patient
came in his office and told him that he--the patient--would kill François
or share a cognac with him. Instead of being overwhelmed by terror, François
was able to remain in the symbolic domain of the word. He spoke and said:
"If I have a choice, I prefer the cognac." At this point the patient proceeded
with pouring the cognac.
In our Lacan reading group, François often helped solving difficult textual problems or brought in new perspectives. I remember, in particular, François' contribution to the understanding of Lacan's seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Seminar VII). He highlighted the difference between the concept of object (die Sache) and the concept of the thing (das Ding) as Lacan read and amplified it in Freud. Using an amazing amount of erudition, he connected what Freud had said in his article on "Negation"(1925) with what he had written in his posthumously published Project for a Scientific Psychology (written in 1895) and in his Three Essays on Sexuality (1905), and used Lacan's commentary on these three Freudian publications as well. François' insights, that the participants in the reading group were able to share privately, were also shared with the broader public by a series of lectures that the group gave at several universities and the yearly meetings of three professional associations: the American Philosophical Association, The American Psychological Association and the American Academy of Psychoanalysis. The joy of hearing François' insights being presented in a systematic lecture were even enhanced when François agreed to publish his paper. The published paper allows me to better illustrate François' keen insights. It also brings me to the last part of my testimony: his exceptionally clear and rich writings.
I will demonstrate the exceptional richness of François' writings by studying the article resulting from our reading group, a paper involving an autobiographical detail that illustrates in a crystal clear way a Lacanian concept and lastly, a paper whose content François first presented at one of the Lacanian Forums and which concerns the function of the letter.
In his article resulting from our group discussion, François concentrates on Freud's concept Das Ding (the thing) which Freud used in different contexts than the concept Sache (object). Freud uses the word Sache in compound words like Sachvorstellung (object representation). The word Ding is never used in such a compound formation. François infers form this observation that for Freud "the thing" refers to something that is unrepresentable. The object on the other hand is what is represented and thus submitted to the rule of the signifier and of language. Peraldi uses two of Freud's publications to make his point:the article on "Negation" and the posthumous Project for a Scientific Psychology. From this last publication François quotes a text which he uses to argue that "the thing" can be understood as the dimension of the mother which makes of the mother a totally alien being for the child. It is the mother as someone who is capable of jouissance, a French word which François interprets as sexual enjoyment. The mother's sexuality is thus both the origin of the child and the cause of the inevitable separation between mother and child. This inevitable separation from the mother puts the child in a position where it is never able to capture fully the mother and thus has to look for partial substitutes for her. This is a lesson Lacan learned but that Karl Abrahams did not. Instead of accepting this radical dissatisfaction present in desire, Abrahams argued that human desire is in search of a satisfactory object: i.e., the genital object.
Pressing his insight that Freud must have tried to capture something of a radical separation between mother and child by his concept of "the thing", François points out the fact that Freud in describing "the thing" presents the mother in a very unusual manner. In his oeuvre Freud often describes the relation between mother and child as a kind of perfect, even idyllic relation. (312) Here he talks of a mother who screams while she is close to her baby. The question that emerges naturally is: what has Freud in mind with this unusual scream of the mother? Confessing that he now moves on his own, François then summarizes both the Indian myth of Kali and the clinical case of Nicole to prove that the raw experience of the sexual enjoyment of the mother is painful, even intolerable for the child and that it is thus plausable that the scream of the mother--in Freud's mind-- is meant to describe a mother "in bed with her sexual partner" and with "the tiny little infant in the crib nearby." (312) For Peraldi, the myth of Kali, the clinical case of Nicole, and Freud's careful distinction between Die Sache (the object) and Das Ding (the thing), all indicate that the child experiences some radical otherness in the mother. That radical otherness is located at the level of the mother's sexual desire, where the mother's desire is directed to some one other than the child. In this paper, though, François does not address the question as to why the enjoyment by the mother of her sexual desires is in some cases pathogenic and in other cases the condition for a normal maturation process.
In a second piece of writing, François provides one of the best examples illustrating the difference between the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic. It concerns an autobiographical detail given for the purpose of defending his interpretation of the artistic work of Marguerite Duras. François tells us that he was about eighteen months old when his father left for the war. Just before that time the little Peraldi had been very sick. His father had treated him "very motherly"(41). The father clearly had for François maternal and thus imaginary characteristics. He tells us that indeed he was very pained when his father left. He was so pained that his mother had to intervene. She gave her child a picture of the departed father. François remembers that he cherished the picture and put it next to his bed. One year later the father returned from the war. He was "unshaven, skinny and dirty"(41). François tells us that as a small child he absolutely refused to recognize his father as the man returning from the war. Instead, he ran to his bedroom, took the picture and "screamed with extraordinary force at his mother that the man on the picture was his father" (41). Peraldi confesses that he has never been able to accept that the unshaven, skinny and dirty man who returned after a year; the man who came to live with his mother; the man who had left little François and caused so much pain, was the same man as the one represented in the picture. Peraldi continues by saying that in his personal analysis he revived the pain of the separation of the father, but even that analysis was unable to let him make the connection between the man in the picture and the father with whom he spent part of his life. (41) What was it that prevented the little Peraldi from making the connection between the different aspects of his father? A close analysis of the information provided by Peraldi might help us. We are told that Peraldi was about eighteen months old. He had been sick and the father not only had taken care of him but had treated him very motherly. In the pre-Oedipal period children treat the father so much as an extension of the mother that psychologists use the concept of "united parents" for this phenomenon. Peraldi's father's maternal care provided objective ground for such a subjective attitude. That subjective attitude includes the child's believing that the parents are omnipotent and exclusively interested in the child. The child thus relates to its parents as it imagines them, i.e., in an imaginary way. Against all expectations of the little Peraldi, the imaginary father broke the rules of the imaginary. He left the little Peraldi. As the imaginary is a protection of the vulnerability of the child, we are not surprised to learn from Peraldi that enormous pain was caused by his superimaginary father breaking the rules of the imaginary. The mother provided a means for the little Peraldi to protect himself. She gave him a picture. I assume that for Peraldi, the man in the picture represented for ever the superimaginary father. Peraldi confesses that this is the only father he emotionally accepted. Peraldi describes three other aspects of his father that he could never connect with the man in the picture. First, there is the father who broke the rules of the imaginary and caused him so much pain. Second, there is the father who returned "unshaven, skinny and dirty." Finally, there is the father who came to live with his mother. That Peraldi could not accept the man who came to live with his mother as the man in the picture could mean that Peraldi was unable to accept the symbolic father, the father who transforms an imaginary relation between a child and its parents into a symbolic triangular structure. That Peraldi was unable to recognize the father who had left him could be interpreted as the understandable inability to deal with the pain of the real. The imaginary, motherly, protective father suddenly showed himself to be a father of the real. As to Peraldi's inability to recognize the "unshaven, skinny and dirty" man returning from the war as the man in the picture, it seem to me possible to give two interpretations. One could argue that being "unshaven, skinny and dirty" reminds the young Peraldi too much of the pain of the real. One could also argue that these three characteristics destroy the idyllic image connected with the original imaginary conception of the father and that the little Peraldi is unwilling to make the transition to a symbolic father whose status does not depend upon idyllic imaginary features. The aforementioned article gave me concrete examples for distinguishing the Lacanian categories of the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic. From a personal discussion with François, I learned something more. He told me that he had not been able to make the connection between the imaginary and the symbolic father. That, he said, is a very difficult thing to do.
The third and last piece of writing by François that I want to analyze is his masterful study on the function of letters in an analysis he conducted and whose results he also presented in one of the meetings of the Lacanian Forum in Austin Riggs. The first part of the analysis can be explained in classic Freudian terms as the discovery of an unresolved Oedipus complex. The second part of the analysis makes use of a technique present in Freud but stressed theoretically by Lacan: the unconscious is available if one follows the chains of signifiers.
Let us start with a description of the case in a classic Freudian framework. Mr. D., the patient, came to analysis ostensibly because of "ejacualtio praecox." His marriage was falling apart and his wife had moved out. He was under the firm grip of his mother and mentioned that his mother had had two brothers aborted--something about which she talked freely to Mr.D.(56).
During the first phase of the analysis three archaic imagos of the mother emerged. First, there was the image of the "cold, hard, headstrong, farsighted, asexual and non-desiring woman"(57). Second, there was his memory that as a small child he was afraid that his mother's "hairdresser might inadvertantly cut the black spot" (57) on the back of the neck of the mother and that a new one would grow, but one which would be out of control. Peraldi interprets these memories as the expression of a fear and a denial of the mother's castration and her castrating powers. A third imago of the mother emerges in a dream in which Mr.D. is condemned to death, but he has a choice between two kinds of deaths. In the first option he would be carved up like an animal in a butcher's shop--like the one of his mother's family, where his mother worked in her youth. In the second option he would be "thrown into a gigantic glass funnel shaped like a woman's body"(57). In the glass funnel there was "a magma of rotting flesh"(57) of half digested bodies. Mr. D. related this to "his two unborn brothers killed in his mother's womb"(57). This dream brought back the story of the seven little goats liberated by cutting open the belly of the wolf. Peraldi interprets this last imago as proof that Mr.D. is entering the first phase of the Oedipal structuration. In Lacanian language, Mr.D. is concerned with whether he is or is not the phallus of the mother and he is therefore imprisoned in an imaginary dialectic(58). Aptly, Peraldi tells us that this developmental phase has been overemphasized in the case of Mr.D., because he slept in his parents' bed, between his father and his mother until the age of eight years, "his own body fitting his mother's, like `spoons in their box!'"(58).
In the first phase of the analysis the father was totally absent. The mother's brother, the butcher, functioned as a paternal figure (58). Mr.D. admired his uncle's ability to stand up to his mother's temper tantrums, but was puzzled about the dirt and disorder of the butcher shop. In the transference, Peraldi functioned as Mr.D.'s uncle. This allowed the patient to work through his maternal imagos, to diminish the tension with his wife and bring her back home, and to get rid of his ejaculatio praecox. The connection between the presence of a substitute paternal figure and the disappearance of the symptom is made clear by Peraldi when he mentions that the symptom disappeared when Mr. D. "associated his uncle carving the meat with the gestures of love, his fingers following the depressions between the muscles, exacltly as his uncle's knife would do to separate them"(58). Attentive to the literal power of words, Peraldi picked up a summary of his patient's situation by a play of words, when the latter said that he had a mère-poule (an overprotective mother), as well as a mère-poulpe (a devouring mother[, like an octopus])(58).
The second part of the analysis consisted in recovering the repressed image of the father. The recovery was promoted by the story of the seven goats, the image of the mother-octopus (mère poulpe), and by a minor surgery of a fibro-xanthome which looked like an octopus(58). It was the father who had told Mr. D. the story of the seven goats, just as he had told other stories. He also had taught the patient to do things and took him along when he went somewhere, in particular when he went fishing octopus, which included killing them by turning their pockets inside out with the fingers. Up till then Mr. D. had felt that his father had been alien to him. Now he discovered a secret version of his father. He discovered and held on to that version of his father by means of plays on words as Freud taught us to listen to them in his analysis of forgetting of proper names (Botticelli and Boltraffio instead of the correct name Signorelli) and of dreams (Autodidasker means autor (author), autodidakt and Lasker). The new father was un père pêcheur whose double meaning Peraldi picks up because the French expression can be heard both as a fisherman and a sinner (un père pécheur). Furthermore the expression relates to parties-de-pêches (fishing sessions loved by the father) which Mr. D. associates with parties-de-cul (fucking sessions) which he in turn associates with the early years of his parents marriage when his father was a taxi driver (in Mr. D.'s mind the back seats of taxis were the ideal places for parties-de-cul). In a further memory he recalls a discussion between his mother and grandmother in which his mother confesses that she used to like going dancing, but that was long ago. For Mr. D. this was the first memory of his mother as a lively, "desiring woman"(59).
A new dream opens the door to the at first unsuccessful reconstruction of the primal scene. Mr. D. pointed out that the story of the seven goats was really about six plus one goats(59). Associating with the six goats, Mr. D. recalled that he was six years old in 1954, the year the family went to Switzerland on a holiday trip of which he had no good memory. Also in that year, his father had a surgical operation on the anus, leaving the father weak and "looking half dead"(60). Finally, the night he recalled the holiday in Switzerland, he had a dream in which two spiders could be seen through the opening of their nest, and who were going to make love. One memory from Switzerland is of the patient walking with his mother, who showed him two white swans, "mentioning something about a father and a mother swan and the purity of their aspect"(59). The German translation of swan (Schwann) reminded Mr.D. of "Schwein" (pig), which he associated with something "disgusting and vaguely sexual"(60).
Peraldi interprets the preceeding associations as connected with Mr.D.' primal scene. He argues that his patient must have watched his parents make love as he slept in their bed until age eight, but given his lack of distance he must not have been able to symbolize those events(60). Things were different in Switzerland where, for the first time, he did not sleep in his parents' bed. Peraldi speculates that his patient watched his parents make love--possibly through a key hole and in the presence of his cousins, who were of similar age. This experience might have allowed Mr. D. to enter the second structural moment of the Oedipus complex. Having discovered that his mother had pleasure with his father, while he was excluded, Mr.D. could have moved from the question of whether he was or was not the phallus of his mother to the question of whether he did or did not possess the phallus which could satisfy the mother(60). He would have had to realize that he did not have the phallic power the mother was interested in and would therefore have been forced into a position of rivalry with the one who had such a power, the father. However, nothing of the sort happened, according to Peraldi. Instead, when he came home from Switzerland, he again joined his parents in their bed. But the new knowledge acquired in Switzerland forced Mr.D. towards a defensive strategy. He completely separated the images of his mother and his father. Furthermore, he used the image of the operated father and his weak and deadly appearance as a means to castrate him and thus to make him a totally insignificant figure which he then could ban from his emotional life(61). This made Mr.D. regress to the dialectic of whether he was or was not the phallus of the mother. The work of the analysis remained incomplete since Mr.D. was unable to undo the separation of the images and signifiers representing his father and mother and since he could not recall his reaction to the primal scene(61).
The liberation from the enslavement of the primal scene started by a play of words and was completed almost exclusively by following the hints given by a chain of words and wordplays (signifiers). After Mr.D. had rediscovered his father as père pêcheur (the father fisherman and sinner), the transference had changed and the patient referred to that change with le ton a varié (the tone has changed). Helped by a recent scandal involving rotten tuna fish, that chain of signifiers could also be heard as: le thon avarié (the rotten tuna fish). The patient discovered the double meaning immediately and reacted strongly to it (he "burst into laughter") (61). The rest of the analysis consisted in discovering the chain of signifiers associated with the double reading of le t[h]on a [-]varié.
Let us turn first to Le thon avarié. The patient noticed that the two parts of the expression represented his two parents. Thon was the first of a series of signifiers representing several aspects of his father. Avarié was the first of a series of signifiers representing his mother. The chain of signifiers representing the different aspects of the patient's father consisted of the following elements: thon(tuna)® poisson(fish)®pêche(fishing)® père pêcheur(father fisherman and sinner)®poulpe(octopus)® poulpe retourné(octopus turned inside out). The chain of signifiers representing the different aspects of the patient's mother consisted of the following elements: avarié(rotten)® viande avarié(rotten meat)® contenu du corps de la mère(content of the body of the mother--refers to the dream of the glass funnel)® boucherie sale(dirty butcher shop)® mère bouchère et sexuelle (the mother as butcher, sexual)®crasse (dirt). The two chains included sexual themes. The father was described as a sinner who turned the pockets of the octopus inside out with his finger and the mother appeared as a dirty sexual butcher(62).
One further step remained to be done. With some uneasiness the patient recalled a slang word for feminine sex: a cra-cra. The report on the rest of the analysis shows both the humility of François and his great talent as a psychoanalyst. The patient had provided a further association for the maternal chain of signifiers. It was François' question to the patient which allowed the patient to discover in his own unconcious the paternal signifier which was required to bring the analysis a crucial step forward. François asked his patient a question about the two last elements of the paternal chain of signifiers poulpe(octopus): i.e., what is the German word for it? The patient answered Krake, and noticing the great similarity between the words Cra-cra and Krake, he was "suddenly filled with a terrible anxiety" (62). Writing Cra-cra phonetically we get Kra-kra. Thus the chain of parental signifiers can be unified as: Krak era.
This unification used the signifiers for both parents as they were found in the unconsious of Mr. D. and, according to Peraldi, this unification of signifiers symbolizes the reunification of the parents "in a sexual coïtus"(62). Peraldi remarks that "Mr. D. was stunned"(62).
Having finished the analysis of le thon avarié, it remained to be seen what le ton a varié means. Mr. D. associated ton with the German word for magnetic tape, Ton-Band(62) and the verb varier with the German abändern. The patient saw as common element between the two: "band", which led him to "the idea of being morally bound on one hand, but also of bander, in French, having a `hard on.'" (62) Peraldi reports that the patient suddenly remembered that this was exactly how he had reacted to the primal scene: he had had his first erection during his trip to Switzerland. Le ton a varié thus leads to the signifier band-er which allows Mr.D. to recover his reaction to the primal scene, a reaction to which he had had no access up to then.
In what did the work of analysis consist for Mr.D. and Peraldi? It consisted not just in listening to the history of Mr. D. It was also not just listening to reports about emotional reactions to past events or dealing with the negative feelings against an overpowering mother. In effect, it also consisted in a substantial way in recovering the repressed image of the father by following the lead of signifiers and searching actively for such leads (Peraldi's question: what is the German word for octopus?)
It was in working through the relation with a substitute father, his
uncle Wotan, that Mr. D. overcame his "ejaculatio praecox" and that the
groundwork was laid for the discovery of the emotionally ambiguous image
of his father. Working through that ambiguous image led to the resolution
of the analysis. In the work to uncover the repressed image of the father
and its ambigous significance, Mr.D. and Peraldi used chains of signifiers
as a kind of ladder to discover a new territory, or to use another metaphor,
they used chains of signifiers as a ladder to climb a building from where
more could be seen. In each significant case, the chain of signifiers had
a double meaning to which either Mr. D. or Peraldi first were attentive
and which both ended up accepting. Thus the father discovered as un
père pêcheur (a father fisherman) was also un père
pécheur (a father sinner), since the two French expressions
have the same pronounciation. The change in tone in the analytic session
occasioned by the discovery of the repressed image of the father and commented
on by Mr. D. as le ton a varié (the tone has changed) could
also be heard as le thon avarié (rotten tuna (fish)). Commenting
on this work of chasing signifiers, Peraldi writes that he and Mr.D. discovered
the chain of signifiers which had been used in a deferred action to symbolize
and repress Mr. D.'s primal trauma(63). The patient in turn was now freed
from the repression imposed on these signifiers. These signifiers now did
their full work of symbolization such that Mr.D. lost his bondage (as in
"Band" of morally bound) and became a more liberated person, free to be
more his own agent. In this analysis, Peraldi teaches us how to use ambiguous
chains of signifiers in order to let the unconscious reveal itself. It
is a new tool he made masterly use of and that he was proud to share with
the Lacanian Clinical Forum and with the readers of his published article.
I hope that this paper has provided some hints of the rich personality and the many contributions of François Peraldi.
Bibliography
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