Although we all act nearly the same at the beginning of the first session, after one or more preliminary interviews, one does not seem in the psychoanalytic milieu to agree on the meaning nor the implications of the terms which fix the limits of the psychoanalytic setting. The terms which are uttered by the analyst at the very beginning of the first psychoanalytic session as when I said to Karl for instance:

All sorts of things have been said about these preliminaries. But I would have been quite embarassed only a few years ago if I had been asked the reasons for my doing so. I would certainly have found something to say: "This is how my own analysis began" or if I had found nothing to say on my behalf I would have called on the authority of Freud: "Freud gave us these technical indications and up to now they have proved to be quite useful". But if one tries to dig out Freud's reasons for setting them up, one learns that it was because he was told to shut up by one of his hysteric patients and also because he disliked to being looked at all day long, which gets us nowhere.

Is Lacan any more explicit when he reminds us that: "Whether it sees itself as an instrument of healing, of training, as exploration in depth, psychoanalysis has but one single medium: the patients speech. That this is self-evident is no excuse for our neglecting it. And all speech calls for a reply.

I shall show that there is no speech without a reply, even if it is met only with silence, provided that it has an auditor: this is the heart of its function in analysis" (Ecrits, Norton, p.41)

But what about the position of both the analyzand and the analyst during the analytic situation? Nothing is said about that. Indeed Lacan said much about the use of speech and its function, about the position of the analyst when he "cadaverizes himself" in order to listen more carefully to chains of signifiers. These signifying chains, as Bill Richardson reminded us in his paper on Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis, are to be seen, in Lacan's terms: as "rings of a necklace that is a ring in another necklace made of rings" (B. Richardson, p.8), but he did not say much about the other side of speech: silence, whether it is the silence of the analysand or of the analyst. This is why I would like to raise today the question of the function and field of silence in psychoanalysis.

The implications of these preliminary indications and their significance - not their reasons - struck me as I was reading a book written by one of our greatest thinkers: What is called thinking by Martin Heidegger. I was then reflecting on whether it was possible or not to define psychoanalysis as on act of thinking.

Let's be clear I do not want to explain psychoanalysis with philosophical argumentation. I just want to indicate points of resonnance between psychoanalysis and Heidegger's thinking.

In What is Called Thinking, and in Logos as well (a text which Lacan translated into French at the time he was preparing Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis) - and please forgive me Bill if I tread without caution through a domain which is yours, not mine - Heidegger tried to isolate a more fundamental significance for what is called "thinking" than its reduction to reason which took place at the time of Aristotle and is overwhelmingly triumphant in our technical era.

To do so, Heidegger relies heavily on the presocratic significance of two verbs, the second of which is somewhat subsumed by the first: legein and noein both referring to the act of thinking but in a dissymetrical way.

The prime and original meaning of legein is to lay: to place in a position of rest on the ground or other surface and equally to gather together, to reunite; to dispose or arrange properly on a surface.

The second meaning is of course: to say, to speak... which is still to be found in a lay: a short lyric or narrative poem intended to be sung, to be heard and to be listened to -`legein', concludes Heidegger, originally means: `laisser - être - étendre - ensemble devant' / `allow - to be - stretched out - together - in - front - of' whatever is rendered present by its being named or spoken of.

All this, is exactly what I "do" when I ask the analysand to lie down on the couch and speak. I ask him to begein and I mean noein when I add: "I am listening to you", meaning thus, " I am going to take (not you) into my care, but to take your legein into my care; I am going to harvest it, to shelter it and to house it". In fact I set up the psychoanalytic framework by acting out the original significations of one of the most fundamental terms in Greek philosophy one of the main concepts in Heidegger's thinking: Logos. This is perhaps the central connecting point between psychoanalysis and Heideggerian psychoanalysis.

It may very well be that unlike the Thinker, the psychoanalyst will probably be nore attentive to repetitive insistance of some phenomenas, some signifiers as well, and to the gaps, the fissures in whatever is 'allowed-to-be-stretched-out-together-in-front-of' him by the analysand. Gaps which do not indicate any probable concealement but Forgetting - L'Oubli- or Repression.

Although the Thinker himself makes a sharp distinction between chattering on any issue - in Heidegger's questionning: the truth of Being, for intance - and what he calls Building, Dwelling, Thinking "the simple and upper speech (haut parler)" as when the truth of Being comes to language. I am tempted here to juxtapose Heidegger's distinction and Lacan's opposition between empty speech (le discours courant, le disque ourcourant) and full speech (when truth speaks in whatever else is being said).

In defining the function of speech, Lacan does not say much about silence as being the condition allowing true speech to emerge and as the condition for the possibility of harvesting, sheltering and housing the legein of the analyzand, when true speech must be separated from empty speech, Heidegger, however, has a little more to say about it.

I cannot resist reading a passage from Being and Time even if Bill might read it too and titillates its significations at some length. In the fifth chapter of The Preparatory Fundamental Analysis of Dasein one finds a sub-chapter entitled 'Being-there and Discourse. Language.' Hearing and silence are defined as two possibilities belonging to discursive speech. "Hearing", in Lacan's perspective - not in Heidegger's - is related to hearing the chains of signifiers. When I first presented the case of Mr. D. to the Lacan Clinical Forum, some years ago, I showed how one can listen to the signifiers. But what about silence?

"Keeping silence ," writes Heidegger, "is another essential possibility of discourse, and it has the same existential foundation. In talking with one another, the person who keeps silent can make 'one understand' (that is, he can develop an understanding), and he can do so more authentically than the person who is never short of words. Speaking at length [Vielsprechen about something does not offer the slightest guarantee that understanding is thereby advanced. On the contrary talking extensively about something [like the analysant when he talks about himself, his ego, or his alter ego] covers it up and brings what is understood to a sham clarity - the unintelligibility of the trivial... He who never says anything cannot fall silent at any given moment. Keeping silent authentically is possible only in genuine discoursing. To be able to keep silent, Dasein [why not understand for our purpose the analysand] must have something to say - that is, he must have at his disposal an authentic and rich disclosedness of himself. In that case one's reference makes something manifest, and does away with `idle talk'.

"As a mode of discoursing, reticence articulates the intelligibility of Dasein in so primordial a manner that it gives rise to a potentiality for hearing which is genuine, and to a Being with-one-another which is transparent."

This particular monstration of the function of silence could easily be read and understood as describing some of the silences of the analysand. Another reflexion on silence to be found in Letter on Humanism (1946), says : "Perhaps then, language demands a just silence more than precipitate speech. But who amidst the men of today that we are could ever imagine that his attempts at thinking are quite at home upon the path of silence. If our thinking extended far enough, it might tell the truth of Being and tell it as that which is to be thought. If so it would be free from pure opinion and conjecture and put back with the craftsmen,scarce though they have become, of the written word. Those things that have weight even though they may not be fixed for eternity, also have their hour, even if that hour comes around at the latest of times."

Thus - if this is true - silence on the analyst's part can very well indicate this path to silence along which, in his effort to think as a Subject whereas before "it" was thinking in his stead, the analysand progresses on his way to true speech toward his essence as a subject.

In an unpublished seminar - The Logic of Fantasm (1966-1967) - Lacan returning to his definition of the subject (of the unconscious) in his relation to language, notices that to say nothing (in Latin tacere or in French se taire) is an attribute of the subject along with the function of speech. But even more, in the act of saying nothing culminates the essence of the subject : "it is precisely where the demand has stopped being spoken that the world of drives begins". We will illustrate the clinical signification of this remark later on.

In fact, Lacan makes a very interesting distinction between "se taire" and "silence" which he bases on the distinction between tacere and silere in Latin. Tacere means to avoid speaking, to keep silent about something which exists but still has to come back to language. Silere means the absence of something which has never been symbolized as yet, something which is foreclosed. It is unfortunate that this distinction is far from being as sharp in English. I'll therefore use `silence' to translate tacere, I could also use 'reticence'. I'll use `muteness' for silere: i.e. the forclusive dimension of silence as Jean David Nasio - commenting upon Lacan's distinction- describes it (p.122).

As I am about to talk about Karl's analysis I keep in mind a question that Bill Richardson kept asking about another patient of mine whose name is Rachel. "Who is Rachel," asked Bill after I presented a moment of her analysis. "Who or what is that Thing called Rachel?" I'll keep asking: "Who is Karl, who is that Thing or that Being called Karl?" I am not sure I can give an answer, but I can keep asking - if only to myself and in silence - silence being the condition for maintaining concretely the dialectic of the analytic process: that is to say "playing dead, cadaverising my position as Chinese would say, either by keeping silent when I occupy the position of the Other (Symbolic silence), or in suppressing my own resistance when I am only the other (Imaginary silence)". But here I have to talk and although I am a person who is accustomed by nature to speak little (at least during the psychoanalysis sessions) I am not sure I am better able "to show that I have kept silent as I should have or that I am the sort of person who can do so." This, which I have just said in Heidegger's words (B & T p.165), is at the very core of the doubts I expressed at the beginning of the paper I sent to you when I wrote that "I was not sure whether any psychoanalytic work has been achieved by Karl or not, or if so, to what extent".

During the preliminary interviews Karl's main explicit motives for undertaking analysis appeared to be:

Karl, due to his extensive knowledge of psychoanalytic literature, was not far from considering this failure as what Winnicott calls an "anti-social act" or the manifestation of an "anti-social tendency". I only silently and partly agreed with his ready-made interpretation of this act in respect to the fact that "when there is an anti-social tendancy there has been a true deprivation... that is to say, there has been a loss of something good that has been positive in the child's experience up to a certain date, and that has been withdrawn; the withdrawal has extended over a period of time longer than that over which the child can keep the memory of the experience alive" (this was Winnicott's description as quoted by Masud Khan in his paper on Silence as Communication (p.171 The Privacy of the Self).

During the preliminary interviews I was struck by the contrast between on the one hand the stiffness of his body, the almost total absence of gestures, the immobile expression on his face, the monotony of his voice, and on the other hand the extreme elegance of his speech and the subtlety of the rhetorical movement which animated - most gracefully - his verbal presentation of himself. Although he spoke perfect French - which is nowadays as unusual in Québec as it has become in France and most French speaking countries at least in the Psychoanalytic milieu - I was especially struck by the fact that the elegance and the style of his speech were those of a written text, not of oral speech. He spoke as one writes - which was surprising since he claimed he was unable to write - but in addition I felt there was something discreetly seductive in the literary aspect of his speech due to the fact that it sounded vaguely familiar although it took some time before I could put my finger on it.

He ended up his last preliminary interview by stating that be thought a three years' analysis would definitely suffice and that he had made financial arrangements only for that length of time. I kept silent since I knew he knew that no a priori decision about the duration of analytical work is possible. I kept silent because I also took this statement as soliciting an answer ego to ego, as a narcissistic display of power proper to the Imaginary which, since it was putting me in the position of alter ego, of other, I had no intention of resisting or acknowledging in any possible way other than in total silence which ended abruptly since I put an end to the interview, fixing simply a date for the beginning of the analytical work which would take place three times a week.

I was to keep almost totally silent during the first three years of Karl's analysis.

For Karl, my silence was of the same kind as his father's. It was felt on the one hand as an obstinate and contemptuous refusal on my part to consider him as a possible object of desire or even as an existing human being worthy of my attention. But at the same time his wish to make me speak, to make me talk to him about himself was quickly re-enacted in the analytic situation. It was probably so because the frustration produced by my silence was much less damaging than the frustration that any kind of spoken answer, even and especially any kind of approbation of his demands to the soliciting display of his Imaginary world, would have inevitably caused.

Why would Karl believe that contrary to his silent father I would finally speak and recognize him as whatever he wanted to be recognized as?

Because on the one hand Karl had read some of my papers before choosing me as his psychoanalyst, and because these papers dealt with subjects dear to him: the poetry of Stephane Mallarmé and Marguerite Duras' novels among other topics.

Before undertaking his medical and psychiatric studies, Karl studied literature at the University of Montreal. He had thought of becoming a professor of literature and pursuing a literary career. Among French writers and essayists he greatly admired first of all Roland Barthes, then Mallarmé and then Marguerite Duras.

I soon understood that it was my friendship with Roland Burthes, which I have talked about in certain papers of mine, which had attracted Karl to me in particular, along with my interest in Mallarmé and Duras.

Although he never clearly mentioned it, Karl might very well have thought of my friendship for Roland Barthes as a homosexual one since Roland Barthes was already known at the time as a overt homosexual, added to the fact that my being a unmarried man whose private life is indeed very private has led to all sorts of public rumors especially among my colleagues regarding my sexuality. Rumors which increased in variety and fantasy when I edited a special issue of a New York Journal, Semiotext(e) on what I called "Poly sexuality". It so happened that Karl had found this Journal in Montreal. In this respect undertaking psychoanalysis with me in the context of Montréal could also be seen as an anti-social act on his part.

All this had created a priori, before the analysis began, an Imaginary transference where he wanted me to be his alter ego, his ideal ego, the one he suspected was deeply repressed by his silent father.

Karl, who was then 32 years old, was an overt homosexual and a bachelor. Before undertaking his analysis he had just moved in with his boyfriend whose name Ronald was close enough to "Roland" to give him a thrill each time he would think about it. Ronald came from the same kind of social milieu that Roland Barthes was known to have chosen his lovers.

Karl himself comes -like Barthes- from a Catholic middle-class family. Both his parents are alive and quite elderly. They were in their forties when Karl was born. He has a sister, Diana, who is six years older than he: she was married and divorced and has a child who was 8 years old when Karl's psychoanalysis began. His mother's sister Donna came to live with the family when Karl was 4 years old, and she died of cancer when Karl was 28 years old.

During these first three years, Karl did not speak about the father's side of the family nor did he speak much about his father either, except to mention here and there his frustration at their non communicating at all with each other.

He was much more talkative about his mother's side of the family. He told me - among other things - that his mother's mother died when his own mother was 18 years old. His mother and his aunt had to take care of both their father and their much younger brother - who was also named Karl - until he died of uremia when he was still in his teens and under their care.

Of his mother's father, Karl only knew that she respected him very highly. He had been a butcher who for same unknown reason had gone bankrupt during the childhood of his daughters and was to became senile after his wife's death. She always presented him as an ideal of strength and masculinity as opposed to her silent and almost paralysed husband.

During the first three years of his analysis, Karl on the one hand explored the Imaginary world and the memories he shared with his mother and his aunt and on the other hand, he displayed his tastes and his knowledge in whatever field I might have been interested in, watching me, almost begging for any sign which might lead him to believe that I was ever so slightly interested in the image of himself and of the maternal world he was building up in front of me, for me. A few weeks ago, looking back at the beginning of his analysis almost five years ago, Karl said: "When I first came here I thought I was going to stage for you the whole opening/closing relationship with my mother. I was totally unware of what I was repressing at the time".

A picture Karl talked a lot about during several sessions summarizes both his relationship to his mother and his attempt to seduce me in the name of Roland Barthes. It is the picture of Roland Barthes himself almost in his teens in his mother's arms called La Demande d'amour.

Karl adored his mother and was fascinated by her constant chatter. As soon as she was home (otherwise she worked with her husband in a restaurant since Karl was 4) she would create around Karl an imaginary world of fantasy and fairy tales. Every evening until he was 13 or 14, he would sit silently on her lap both of them in a rocking-chair, and she would invent stories for him.

When Karl was feeling depressed or anxious, he would scream: "the chair! the chair!" until his mother would take him on her lap an hug him tightly. But very early in his childhood - although he could not recall during this first period of his analysis anything before the age of 4 - he also felt the weight of her domineering personality: he would then seek refuge with Donna his aunt (who came to live with his family when he was 4). He loved her in a most discreet and quiet manner: she was the one who had taken care of his needs, who had fed him, reassured him when he was overwhelmed by the stimulating presence of his mother or depressed by the silence and the total indifference of his father, or later when he had to face the harshness of the outside world. She was probably all the more attentive to Karl's welfare as she had been unable to keep her own brother Karl from dying.

Very early in his life he would also seek refuge in the fictional world of novels, poetry and music and would drift away into a private world of fantasies. He also had an uncanny talent for mimicking, at least in his speech, his literary idols style, and especially Roland Barthes'! This is why I felt from the start that his way of talking sounded strangely familiar to my ear.

I also learned during this period of time that he had never been attracted by girls. He had been a solitary boy, had very few friends and began to have homosexual fantasies in his teens, but it was only when he went to university that he decided to act out these sexual fantasies. He oscillated after this between short periods of promiscuous sex in dark back-rooms, country clubs and alleys; and long lasting love relationship with male partners. Ronald was his third partner. He stopped having random sex before he began analysis because of his immense fear of AIDS about which he could not say a word for a very long time, up until very recently in fact.

During most of these three years during which session after session he patiently built the world of maternal imagos, I remained as I already said almost totally silent and when I spoke it was mostly done in order to give a new impetus to his "mythical fomentations". I thought that no revealing interpretation could he done before the staging and the reconstruction in psychoanalysis of his Imaginary world, of his world of images, imagos, of his world of narcissistic identification was completed. It is possible that Karl might have also understood my own silence while I was listening to him as his own silence while he was listening to his mother's chattering but that would have simply been another manifestation of his mirroring identification with me thus putting me in the position of the other... the other in the mirror, namely himself.

From my point of view, my silence during this period of three years had three functions:

In other words if I had believed too soon that I knew the true meaning of Karl's imaginary discourse instead of its function, I would have spoken but by doing so I would have stopped "acting as a support to his speech" and Karl's unconscious would have remained closed. This became very clear when the dream about Marie Antoinette came up.

While I was keeping silent, but listening attentively I kept in my mind a certain number of elements as warnings:

This first period culminates with a dream he had toward the end of the three years : he and I are watching at a fantastic show with Diane Dufresne on stage dressed as Queen Marie Antoinette. He described in great detail the production which was like an apotheosis of the imaginary world he had reconstructed during the last three years. Marie Antoinette's sister, Madame Elizabeth was also on the stage. I was sitting in silence; he was both watching the show and was Marie Antoinette herself walking to her death in an incredibly beautiful costume. The executioner could be seen in a shadowy corner of the stage. And Karl in his commentory described in detail the complex network of glances at work.

Then Karl remained deeply silent for quite a long and unusual while. I thought then that he had reached that moment Lacan referred to in a previous quotation : "when the subject even recoils before the shadow of demand". And "when the demand is silenced" as Lacan explained a few years later while commenting the graph of desire "then, the drives appear".

The castration of the mother and the shadowy presence of the executionner was much too obvious to be a track to follow. In fact what was probably the most intriguing aspect of his explanations regarding the dream was the complex intricacy of the games of looking, being looked at; monstrating in full light and hiding in the dark: At this point, I thought, the scopic drives were the crux. This is why I asked what stood under or behind the beautiful costume. After more silence, Karl answered in a very puzzled tone: "a maliferous body". I was struck by the unusual word he used. I repeated it but to no avail. Karl kept silent and was very tense. As we shall see "maliferous" is the first signifier of the mother and - later on - it will lead to the truth of the aspect of the mother thatKarl had deeply repressed and so had she.

Shortly after this dream, Karl came to a session and said: "Well I have come regularly for three years; that was the duration I had decided to spend in analysis. I have finished; I feel much better; I think I can write (but actually he had not began to). I'll finish at the end of the month." I answered: "In a way yes, you have finished something but you had decided to put an end to your analysis before you even begun. Now that you have reached your end, you can really begin your analysis!"

Karl was struck by my remark and after several sessions of total silence decided to continue his analysis; although it would become more of a financial burden since one of the reasons he produced to justify his wish to stop was that he had just bought a condominium as he had proviously planned to do at the begining of his analysis.

After Karl's decision to stay on - without this time any duration being decided upon a priori - the whole analytic atmosphere completely changed. Somehow and quite suddenly Karl stopped interpreting my silence as an Imaginary silence - i.e. as contemptuous and despising : he was feeling more at ease - at least regarding my silence which had become a supportive silence i.e. a symbolic silence and when he resumed speaking he said he could walk toward me naked, with his maliferous body. Both our silences were finally in tune even if they were different in function.

(I have made here an adaptation of his signifiers in English but very little of the actual content of the analysis will be modified by so doing, I just want to avoid going back and forth from the French signifiers to an impossible English translation.)

The stage of the maternal imagos had suddenly vanished, along with the beautiful poetic almost Barthesian utterances Karl used to describe it, even the melodious low monotony of his voice changed into a more raucous and choppy tone.

Karl began with great difficulty to (re)discover a totally new version of his father. If Karl's father had indeed been a silent man and if he was now almost paralysed, when Karl was young and even very young, his father had been a very active and industrious man. He would do a lot of things in the house and even build with his own hands furniture, cupboards, etc. Karl, very slowly, and as he was himself working in his newly bought apartment (something he had never done before), began to remember with uneasy and uncertain words intertwinned with many embarrassed and industrious silences, that when he was very young, even before he was 4 years old, at a time when his father was more frequently in the house, and before his aunt came to take care of him and his sister when the parents bought the restaurant, his father would show him how to learn to do things with his hands. He would sustain the achievements of his son by his attentive presence and would approve of them in silence.

Instead of the missing Names-of-the Father, Karl rebuilt and named the Doings-of-the-Father, something he could identify with and which although they were "Doings" were nevertheless part of a silent language. The rediscovery and the naming of the Doings-of-the-Father which had probably set a limit between Karl and the primary mother acting thus as No-of-the-Father, allowed Karl to go further in the analysis of the maternal imago. But before entering the third phase of his analysis, let me quote here a most remarkable passage of What is Called Thinking which I had read many years ago and which was the ground for my assuming that the Names-of-the-Father could be something else than spoken words, that they could be silent manual doings for instance, which nevertheless only exists as such because language exists.

Not only did Karl rediscover how to use his hands as a speaking being, "un parlêtre" as Lacan would say, but he also learned to put into words the Doings-of-the-Father, and even more he also started to put into words the symptoms of his father : il commença à mettre en mots les maux du père. It is most remarkable to note that during this period his inhibition to write was lifted.

My silence which was felt by Karl for what it was, a supportive silence, allowed him to rediscover on the one hand the silent language which took place very early in his life between his father and him, but on the other hand it allowed him - along with the reenactment of the Doings-of-the-Father to unveil or unmask the fundamental and deadly muteness of his mother.

A dream was the turning point which led to the third phase of Karl's analysis.

The dream of the secret of the Saint: Karl enters a catacomb, the catacomb is known as "the tomb of the Saint". His aunt is the Saint. She is in a coffin which is closed and Karl's mother is sitting totally mute and seemingly lifeless near the coffin. Her absolute muteness protects the secret of the dead Saint.

The Saint was not so much Karl's aunt as the maternal grand-mother and beyond her the greatgrandmother whose name was Antoinette.

The name Antoinette brought back the memory of the dream of Marie Antoinette and the maternal signifier which appeared in answer to my interpretative question: Maliferous.

By associating around this signifier after I repeated it as: mali - ferous, he transformed it into two words of which maliferous was the condensation = malediction and ferocious. These two signifiers gave birth to two distinct chains of signifiers which led to the unveiling of the secret of the Saint.

This secret was twofold:

1) The name Marie Antoinette brought back a memory. Karl had heard that Antoinette, his maternal grandmother gave birth to 25 children - although or because she was a Saint - but 18 of them were to die almost at the same time of "Spanish influenza" at the end of World War I; among the survivors was the maternal grandmother. Perhaps this is the collective tragedy which made her into a Saint - at least in the family hagiography! In the dream the signifiers malediction is attached to Antoinette and her offspring. The malediction is the transmission through the maternal lineage of a predisposition to malignant tumors: Cancer of the breast. Karl's sister discoverd, about that time, that she had cancer of the breast. Karl remembered that his aunt had died of a similar cancer as well as her mother: Karl's maternal grandmother and her mother (the Saint). All women on the mother's side were bearers of malignant and deadly tumors in their breasts. But total silence had been kept about this malediction. And Karl had to rediscover it bit by bit and against his mother's advice who was very reticent to talk about it and mostly kept silent about all this. This silence about the malediction could be understood as a means to eliminate confrontation with death. "We use all our strength" wrote Freud, "to put death aside, to eliminate it from our life. We have tried to cover it with a veil of silence." This silence could also be seen as the context in which the death drive is at work : "As long as this drive is acting within ourselves, it remains mute, it only appears when it turns against the outside and becomes a destructive drive."

But this silence was in fact only a part or even a cover for a more complex muteness which was to be unveiled in the second aspect of the secret of the Saint.

2) The other aspect of the secret was discovered by Karl by following many complex and intricate chains of signifiers. I won't go into detail here since my main goal remains the study of the different aspect and functions of silence in Karl's analysis. All the chains stemmed from the second part of the signifier `maliferous',`ferous', interpreted as a contraction for ferocious. The chains also stemmed from the dream of Marie Antoinette where the executioner could be seen in a shadowy corner and seemed ferocious.

Karl said about the executioner thet he was like a butcher, not a hangman. The butcher led to his mother's father who was a butcher before his whole life collapsed. Of this butcher, Karl only knew that in addition to selling meat he would also slaughter the animals for the shop : a ferocious butcher.

Another chain of associations intertwined with childhood memory led from ferocious to ferocious rats then to rats - This signifyer `rat' appeared to be at the point of articulations of several chains.

This was the secret of the mother and the dead aunt. This was what they had been mute about and as far as the mother was concerned deeply depressed about, in spite of her incessant brilliant chatter. This was the deadly depression he - as her male child - had had to protect her against and which forbade him to display in her presence any sign of aggressivity or sadism, even the ones that occur normally in infancy.

Of the muteness of the mother I cannot say much, but I would be tempted to see it as the manifestation of the foreclusion of the destructive and deadly version of her own father. Could it be called then a Real silence? or the muteness of the Real? Karl decided not to mention to his mother what he had discovered. His keeping silent on that subject was intended to protect her muteness and prevent her from falling into a horror which she had foreclosed rather than repressed. I silently agreed with Karl's decision which allowed him to slowly drift away from his mother's grip but at the same time to go on listening patiently to her chattering knowing what abyss of horror it covered.

II. E. Toward an Oedipal Issue.

The exploration of both the silent language of the father and the deadly muteness of the chattering mother, which had been rendered possible by the supportive silence of the analyst and which had allowed Karl to symbolize both paternal and maternal new versions, led to another dream which in turn, led to the fourth and - perhaps - final phase of Karl's analysis.

A man who owns a Rolls Royce buys two sweaters for several thousand dollars in a shop kept by two women.

Karl decides to buy one at a much cheaper price. The two women wonder whether they asked him to pay too high a price or not.

Karl leaves the shop with his new sweater. He meets his cousin; she is radiant and he is moved by her beauty and her carnal vivacity.

But as he examines his bill he realises he has paid too much. The women have charged him a 20% tax instead of 5%, four times too much.

He goes back to the shop to get a refund. The women are gone. A man is standing by the cash register. As Karl is about to complain, he suddenly realises that the part of his bill where the tax was written is missing. He therefore has to face the biting sarcasm of the man and he wakes up furious and frightened.

Contrary to what I said in the text I sent you I'll keep silent regarding the analysis of this dream for I have reached the limit of my talk ... and all the rest is silence!.

F. Peraldi

le 28 avril 1990