[Citation d'Amiel en français]

Zürich, july 7

I have decided to go and spend a couple of days at Freiberg im Brisgau before going on to Paris. I want to go and listent to the echos of the most powerful philosophical voice of our century; and once more sit on the step of die kleine Hütte at Todtnauberg. Not so much to see "scattered at the narrow bottom of the valley and upon the side opposite, the farmhouses with their broad overhanging roofs each one spaced far apart", not so much nor to see "higher up on the slope meadows and pastures spreading to the dark firs ancient, majestic" devastated by the acid rains of to-day. That is not what I want to see - something one can see in every little valley of the Black Forest. I want to feel once again this countryside that was the universe where a thought was worked out; a thought that I admire and that has nourished me for more than thirty years. I want to remain there long enough so "I can feel it as it changes from hour to hour, day to night, in the great surges and falls of the seasons; the weight of the mountains and their timeless and impervious rocks, the careful growth of young firs, the luminous but modest splendour of the meadows and the flowers, the roar of the mountaon torrent in th vast nights of automn, and the strict simplicity of the expenses deep in snow". I am not looking for the dubious pleasure of an articial identification - a world and a language sperate me from Heidegger - but rather to vibrate in tune with his work without relying merely of reading a text that has been translated and published, but steeped in the absolute certainty that "the progress of this work is rooted deeply in whatever happens in this countryside," and a ountryside that I will only go through as a traveller. I am at the point in my travels where I profoundly feel the truth of the remark that the philosophical task, for Heidegger - or the task of psychoanalytic thought in my case - "does not occur as an isolated occupation of an excentric".

To accede to Heidegger's philosophical task as it unfolds in his text and reverbarates in the space of thought (the Symbolic, as Lacan would put it), it is useless to rush into so-called political comitments, but first of all to understand that the "task is part and parcel of the pesant's work". I think I can understand better if I recall my own childhood and my peasant adolescence, , but I have always thought that I had to live it in the place where this work was in conjunction with the factual reality of the mountains. I want - if only for the space of a momentary halt in my drift, in my endless exile - to feel the following which is both so foreign to me and yet so familiar : " When the farm lad drags the heavy sled of the slope, or guide it in its perilous descent towards the house, piled as it is with beach logs; when the shepherd drives his flock up the hillsides with his slow and pensive step; when the farmer at his work bench carefully prepares the countless shingles for his roof - my work is of the same type. It is rooted therein and belongs directly to the world of the peasant".

I maintain that whoever has not made the effort to go there and go through the experience of the studious silence of that world in its constant working state, has absolutely no right to pronounce himself on Heidegeer's work and still less on the essential component of his work, which is also the most fundamental substratum of any textual production which would not be anything but mere noise, nothing but chatter : silence.

*

* *

Hinterzarten, July 9

To escape the noise of the city, I took a room in a hotel at Hinterzarten located at about 20 kilometers from Freiberg, near lake Titisee. Living in cities where, day and night, the noise of machines never stops reverbarating in one's head like a pernicious fever, one forgets the quiet soughing of the wind in the trees and the songs of the animal. we forget that noise has once and for all destroyed silence in the cities, whereas the whisperings of the peasant's mountainous realm still puts essntial silence in relief -but for how long? For silence settles "when, in the deepest night of winter, a furious snow storm rages around the little hut, banging and butting, covering and concealing everything, that's when it is hight time for philosophy" That's when a great silence is necessary as the prime condition for the elaboration of any thought if it is to be strict and rigourous, when the tall firs outside stand firm in the storm. I didn't find any snow, but I did experience the heavy stormy downpours of the summer.

From the iron gates of the hotel, a path leads toward the lake through the tall, slender pine woods, " pleasure of pine woods : one can move about at one's ease (amidst the tall trunks that suggest something between bronze and rubber)" , One's footsteps make no sound, "thick carpeting on the ground", at times the outcropping of a grey rock, smooth and lichen-covered. At the top it gives on a broad meadow beyond which Titisee sparkles in the noonday sun in the valley below. A wooden bench "freshly hewn" is there under a tall oak inviting one to rest. The path continues its winding way, saying nothing, and I slowly took in its silence : " when, in the dawn's silence, the sky slowly brightens over the mountain" until the eleventh hour has sounded when " the silence deepens still more" with "the last stroke. Spreading toward those who were sacrificed prematurely in II world wars"

*

* *

Hinterzarten, July 10

Hinterzarten is a village where fairly well-off Germans spend their summer holydays - they are usually older folk who do not like to leave Germany to go on vacation. I feel somewhat uncomfortable here, being French and not speaking German very well; I don't feel welcome here. The village bookstore is right in the middle of the main street and this morning it revealed to me the secret of my uneasiness. A window of the bookstore displays the text of what the inhabitants of the village or its habitués are used to reading. There are two windows, each one with its own text. One gives ont the main street and displays travel books, guides to fauna and flora, a few popular German novels, but no foreign books. The other window is more discreet and gives on a little side street; it is entirely filled from top to bottom with hundred of books splendidly bound in cloth and all of them about the Third Reich, the glory of the German troops and their victories; about the German Marine, Air Force and a thick recent book on Hitler with his photo on the cover was placed right in the middle of the window surrounded by works on Rommel, Van Doenitz, Goering, Goebbels and Speer's Memoirs. Completely at the bottom of this vast assemblage as though flattened under the black pyramid of German history - as though crushed underfoot by the nazi boot, there were two of three American books, including Shirer's book , lying there as though grovelling beneath the generals, cleansed of defeat and awakened from death, such as eternity has changed them forever in the German doxa.

When I went passed the door to the bookstore after my long contemplation before the side street window, the owner gave me a sly silent smile. He knew I was French because I had asked him for some information earlier in the day and since I was a little ashamed of my rusty German, I spoke to him in French and in English. He understood me perfectly but he answered in German as though to say : "Hier wir sprechen deutsch, und deutsch allein!". I had said to myself somewhat naively at the time that he was right and that I was somewhat arogant to expect everybody in Germany to speak French and espacially English. My reading, however, of his second window made me see things from another angle; something a little like : "non, rien de rien, rien, nous ne regrettons rien" without the street accent of Edith Piaf but with the German accent.

This afternoon I went to Todtnauberg, passin through Todtnau alon a splendid road. At Todtnau there was a cascade in the forest reminiscent of the German Romantic painters. At Todtnauberg that was completely steeped in fog, I did not find the path leading to the little hut, and a dense crowd of German tourists strolling in the fog and the night as it started to fall drove me away.

*

* *

Freiberg, July 12

If one goes to Freiberg via Martinstor, to the south, and enter Joseph Strasse, one soon sees, on the right, the window of a bookstore whose sober display of books immediately attrackes one's attention and makes one want to go in and explore. A big in folio in one corner contained fac similes of Hölderlin's manuscripts. In lovely and very simple editions there was Gottfried Benn next to Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke beside Peter Handke; in another corner the leather binding of an old collection of Goethe's complete works gloewed softly in the shadows; and again, in another corner, there were translations of Joyce, Proust, Tolstoi and occasionaly works in foreign languages including an extremely rare copy of the Journal de voyage en Italie, by Montaigne. Everything in that window displayed order, beauty and the quiet love of books and the workings of thought. But two photographs, one above the other, hanging from a kind of pillar supporting a corner of the window, touched me deeply. The top photo showed Martin Heidegger in his fifties with his heads turned towards the other picture and smiling tenderly with his gaze lowered as though he were contemplating it. The latter was a portrait of Hannah Arendt who is also in her fifties, her face full of remarkable serenity, with her eyes raised so as to make contact with Heidegger's gaze. The montage was a discreet evocation of the impossible, passionate love they had had for each other for one year, more than thirty years before these photos were taken, when the young and firy Heidegger was writing Sein und Zeit and Hannah, seventeen years his junior, and in all the somber splendor of her eighteen years discovered that, whereas she thought she was German, she was in reality a Jewess and that the more the Jewess in her was recognised as such, the more the German in her was erased. Heidegger paid absolutely no attention; je loved her with the same feverish passion with which he wrote and thought his thesis, but with a love that curiously enough was to leave no trace in the text itself of Heidegger's thesis, that Hannah Arendt later on would deplore as being a book without love. It was Hannah who, tore herself away from him after one year, refusing any longer to keep him from his wife and sons, probably suspecting thet he could not do so but leaving him deeply disturbed by the break. It was not until 1949 that Mratin Heidegger told his wife about this great and impossible passion, after he had seen Hannah again who had come to visit him in Freiberg from her home in America. Hannah was more open than he and unstingtingly would criticize the thought of her former lover and "master", but she never took part in any action against the person she called in die Schatten, "eine starre Hingegeben heit an ein Einziges" . She remained aloof from the international hubbub about his alledged nazism, and her profound effection for him never waned. Some time before their death they both decided that their amourous correspondance should not be destroyed, and it is interesting to note that this correspondance should survive them but would never be rendered public and that the pure power of the words of desire exchanged between them would be for ever protected by silence.

I spent an extraordinay afternoon in that bookstore where the owner had recognized my foncdness for exceptional books as soon as he saw me paging through, wide eyed, Hölderlin's manuscript. He showed me his treasures that he kept in his den at the back of the shop : there was a handwritten copy on parchment of the Book of the Hours of Maximilien d'Autriche, illustrated in the margins with the flora and the fauna of the Germany of the time. Amidst all of this we ere chatting in a curious mixture of German, French and English (the lingua Franca of the Europe of today) about European literature and in particular German literature after the last war. We did not mention the "Heidegger affair". Anything he could have said was already evident in the choice and arrangement of the two photographs in his window. When I complimented him on his montage, he merely smiled and said nothing. He also demonstrated to me - very discreetely - his profound knowledge of two of the purest jewels of German thought - one from the Bade region and the other from Jewish background - and that silent declaration said in the purest words - the words of the tribe - that which the immense, endless chatter - scandalized but scandalous - the chatter of French Professors - has neither been able to destroy nor to harm and still less to meditate upon.

II. Account of a silent analysis.

Although most analysts act in a similar fashion after one or several preliminary encounters and at the beginning of the first analytic session proper, nevertheless they do not seem to be in agrreement about the meaning and the implications of the term they use to define the framework of the psychoanalytic setting. I am speaking of the words they utter at the very beginning of the first session; similar to the ones I myself have uttered to Karl and to so many others :

- "Lie down on the couch (implying in front of me since I always sit behind the patients head),

- "say everything that comes to mind; do not make any selection and do not hold anything back."

- "I end up with : "i am listening"".

All sorts of things have been said about this curious arrangement in space of the protagonists as well as about the basic rule. At the time however when I accepted Karl in analysis - many years ago - if I had been asked why I was acting in that particular way, I would have had some trouble to answer. I propbably would have found somethimg to say like : "because my own analysis was carried out in the same way" or if I could not thimk of something to say I would have hidden behind the authority of Freud's bequest. But if one attempts to find the technical reasons that Freud applied in this case, all one discovers was the command of one of hysterical patients whom Freud was told to listen to and not interrupt, and his own malaise at being stared at all day by his patient.

Is Lacan any more explicit when he tells us at the outset of his teaching that psychoanalysis "whether it sets out to be a factor of healing, training or inquiry has but one medium : the patient's speech. The fact that this is obvious is no excuse not to take it into account. And speech requires a response.

But what about the respective poisitions of the analyst who is seated and the analysand who is lying down on the couch in front of him. No one has said anything conclusive, not even Lacan when he alludes to the necessary cadaverisation of the analyst in order to better hear the tinkling of the chains of signifiers. No one has said very much about the other side of language either : silence, whether the analyst's or the analysand's. This is why I want to bring up here the question of the function and the scope of silence in psychoanalysis before extending it - while crossing the textual feild of literature and philosophy - to the question of Martin Heidegger's silence. Don't expect any sort of justification for a journey apparently so disparat. I have no need to justify anything at all - not even myself : I am a traveller, perpetually in exil and I am recounting my travels.

*

* *

The implications of the basic rule and its true meaning became apparent to me while I was re-reading What is called thinking by Martin Heidegger, and once more I was struck by certain points of resonance between his thought and psychoanalytic thought which is so very different.

In What is called thinking, but also in Logos, Heidegger attempted to pinpoint the basic significance of the term "to think" and what we do when we think. The point was to deconstruct the reduction of thought to that reason produced by Aristotle, with its sinister triumph in our age of technique and in which Heidegger saw the most relentless contradiction of thought.

To do so, Heidegger had to go back beyond Aristotle to the very spring of Greek thought and find the original meaning of two verbs the pre-socratic thinkers were particularly fond of : "legein" and "noein", both which asymetrically refer to the act of thinking.

The prime and sensuous meaning of "legein" is "to place, to lay down, to put down in a state of rest upon the ground or on any other kind of surface". It is also "to group together, to unite, to arrange or dispose properly on a surface".

The secondary meaning, of course, is its usual acception : "to speak, to say" which is still to be found in the English word "lay" : a short lyrcal or narrative poem to be sung, heared and listened to. The primary meaning of "legein", for Heidegger was thus : "let -to be-to lay down-together-in front of" to which should be added that which has been rendered present from having been named or because it has been spoken of.

This bundle of meanings is exactly what I act out (or put on stage) when I ask Karl, for instance, to stretch out in front of me on the couch and to speak. I ask him to "legein" but I also imply to "noein" when I add : "I am listening"; in other words : "I shall take into my care - not you - but your "legein"; I shall gather it up, store it away and give it shelter." The analytical mise en scéne is nothing more than the putting into action of all the primary meanings of one of the most fundamental terms of Greek philosophy and of Western thought in general and of one of the primary working themes in Heidegger's thought. Heidegger's thought and psychoanalytical thought enter into harmony around the concept of Logos which subsumes our more restrictive concepts of words and language.

Unlike the thinker the psychoanalyst at work will probably pay particular attention to the recurence of certain phonemes or signifiers in the analysand's speech, or to slips, and to the blanks which mark all that which is "left-to-be-heared-together-in front of" the analyst by the analysand. Blanks or silences which are not so much the sign of concealment as of forgetfullness, or repression - even forclosure in the shadowy world of psychosis.

Since the thinker himself has established a sharp distinction between what he calls chatter - chatter turning around the truth of Being and constantly denounced by Heidegger - and that which, in Bâtir, Habiter, Penser, he calls "high and simple speech", such as when the Truth of Being comes into language, I am tempted to juxtapose Heidegger's distinction between chatter and high speech with Lacan's opposition between empty speech (the doxa, the everyday speech, "le discours courant, le disque ourcourant") and full speech (when "it" speaks in what is said).

When Lacan defines the function of speech and the field of language, he says little about silence as a condition for the emergence of true speech and the possibility of gathering, putting order upon and storing away the "legein" of the analysand, when the time comes when the time comes to separate true speech from empty speech. Heidegger is a little more explicit in Sein une Zeit - we shall see in more detail what he says about it in the third part - but let us point out here that for Heidegger " making silence is one other essential possibility of speeh and it has the same existential basis. He who makes silence in being one with another is better able to create comprehension, in other words is better able to in-form than he who never departs from speech". Thus silence is in direct opposition to excessive chatter that says nothing; it speaks, if placed in a context of language, of a silent and essential speech.

This philosophical presentation of the function of slience seems perfectly adequate to me for describing certain silences of the analysand which cannot always be interpreted in termes of resistance cause bya sudden and too intense feeling of the analyst's presence. In addition, if it is true - i.e., if it supports the analysand's speech the silence of the analyst may very well indicate the path of silence along which, in his effort to think like a subject where previously "it was thinking", the analysand walks toward full speech, towards true speech, towards the very essence of his subjectivity.

In Lacan's seminar (still unpublished) that he gave in 1966-1967 on the Logic of the fantasm, and revising his definition of the subject (of the unconscious) in its conncetion with language, remarked that "se taire" (latin, tacere) is an attribute of the subject on the same level as speech. And that it is even in the fact of saying nothing that the essence of the subject combinates "it is when the request is interrupted that the world of drives opens up". We shall illustrate the clinical importance of this remark a little further on.

In fact, Lacan makes an intresting distinction between "se taire" and "silence" which he draws fron the opposition in Latin between "tacere" and "silere". "Tacere" means to avoid speech, render tacit something which although it exists has not yet come back into speech. "Silere" means the absence of something which has not yet been symbolized, something which is forclosed. Despite the possibilities of confusion and ambiguity, I shall call " mutisme" rather than silence this manifestation of foreclosure within speech and I shall keep the term silence to designate the act of "taire" or "se taire".

The reasons Karl gave for undertaking an analysis were the following :

1) His inhibition to speak and to write, or, in Heideggerian terms, to attain the "the craftmanship of writing".

2) His incapacity to confront persons in a pposition of authority. And in particular, the director of his department in the computer company wehere he worked - a certain monsieur Ferrat. Whenever a conflict arose, Karl would freeze and be unable of speaking or thinking.

3) His incapacity to accept the realm of drives : "Anything at all (he declared in the first session) rather than confront the pettiness of drives ( and he added after a long silence) their pettiness or their morbidity. Every thought, every deed that might have any sort of connexion with the realm of drives must be strictly controlled if they are not to be deadly".

4) The feeling he had of being trapped in a relationship with his mother that was both loving and oppressive; she was authoritarian and a constant chatterbox whereas his father, who had become an invalid due to the slow evolution of multiple sclerosis, was almost completely mute. During the first years of his analysis, Karl interpreted his father's mutism as the manifestation of an intense repression of his drives. During his entire childhood and his adolescence, Karl had waited for his father to come out of his mutism and reveal to him at last that Karl had always been the object of his silent love. He had arrived at the conclusion that his father's mutism was the irreversible and chronic symptom of the paternal neurosis on the same level as the sign of scorn he showed towards his son in partyicular and for those around him in general.

5) His failure in a competition which should have allowed him to go up several rungs in his company's hierarchy. He had been all the more mortified as he had always been a particularly brilliant student in data processing. He had already interpreted his failure as an act of rebellion against the authority of his employers (and against his mother's authority who dreamed of his becoming director of his company's local branch).

From the outset of his university studies, Karl had been interested in psychoanalysis after reading an odd, short text of a lecture by Lacan : Psychanalyse et cybernétique ou de la nature du langage. He hd acquired a certain psychoanalytical cultureand looked upon his failure as, in the words of Winnicott, "an anti-social act" or the manifestation of a " antisocial tendency". He would often bring up a remark to back up his hyopthesis which he had gleaned from his readings in English (Karl was originally from Geneva and had studied in international colleges thus speaking and reading French, German and English fluently) :

When there is an antisocial tendency, the a been a time 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".

During these preliminary interviews I was particularly struck by the contrast on one hand between the extreme stiffness of his body, the lack of gestures and the fixed expression on his face, and on the other hand the extreme preciousness of his language and the subtelty of the rhetoric he used to present me with his self-portrait. His French was impeccable but the elegance of his style was that of a written text rather than the spoken words. He spoke as one writes - which was surprising since he never stoped complaining about his incapacity to write. But I had also felt a discreet attempt to seduce through the literary, written aspect of his speech which seemed stragely familiar to me although I was unable to identify it at the time.

He finished his preliminaru interviews by declaring that in his opinion a three-year analysis of four sessions per week would be ample, and in any case the financial arrangements he had made were for that duration only. I said nothing thinking that an initial narcissistic confrontation of one ego to another about this question that he was trying to involve me in, was fruitless.

I remained silent during the first three years of Karl's analysis.

For Karl my silence was along the same lines as his father's. He interpreted it as an obstinate and scornful refusal to consider him as a possible object of desire or even a human being worthy of my attention. But at the same time his desire to make me speak, to make me make him speak about himself was soon reactivated in the transferance. His frustration caused by my silence was nevertheless definitely less dangerous than his frustration he would certainly have felt at any response on my part to his demand or at the unfolding of his Imginary Universe.

Why did Karl believed that, contrary to his father, I would finally speak and recognize him for what he wanted to be recognized as?

- Because on one hamd Karl had read some of my texts before coming to see me. The texts spoke of authors he was fond of : Montaigne, Amiel, Valeery and Butor.

- On the other hand he had studied data processing at the same time as he was studying literature at the University of Geneva where he had taken courses with Starobinski and dreamt of becoming a writer and a teacher of literature. Among the contemporary French essayists he was particularly fond of, he admired Roland Barthes. He fantasized that, since he had been my doctoral research director and since I was not married thet I had been his lover as well as Lacan's for that matter - he had heared rumors that he could be seen dancing naked in the company of "ce cher Crevel" at the Bal Negre at the hight the mad twenties. In addition, undertaking an analysis with me and presuming tht I was if not homosexual at least polusexual could be considered as an antisocial act within the French provincial context where this analysis took place.

In any case, this whole context of gossip and rumors had created a priori and even before the analysis began an Imaginary transference in which Karl looked upon me as both his alter ego and his ego ideal, the very one he suspected that his father repressed in the bottomless pit of his silence.

Karl, who was thirty two years old at the time was a honosexual and when the analysis began he had just set up housekeeping with his lover Roland whose name reminded him of Barthes' first name and made him shiver with pleasure every time he thought of it - especially since Roland was of Arabic origin like certaibn of Barthes' lovers.

Karl was from a Swiss family, bourgeois and calvinistic. Both his parents were still alive. They were no longer young when Karl was born. Karl had a brother who was eight years older than he, married and the father of two children, and who did not play an important role in Karl's analysis. Bertha, a cousin of his mother's, came to live withe family when Karl was four years old. She died of uterine cancer when Karl was 28.

During the first three years of his analysis, Karl spoke very little of the paternal side of his family, that was of French-Swiss origin, and very little about his father except to indicate occasionally the frustration he felt because he was unable to comunicate with him.

He did speak however quite readily of his maternal side. They were Germans who had settled in Swisserlan just before the war. His maternal grandmother died when his mother was 18. His mother, assisted by cousin Bertha, had to care their own father and their younger brother - who was also called Karl - and who was to die at 17 of cancer of the testicles.

The only thing that Karl knew about his maternal grandfather was that his mother adored him. He had been a cattle farmer and, for an unknown reason, had gone bankruped when his daughter (Karl's mother, Irma) was still young; he apparently became senile after his wife's death. Irma had always spoken to Karl about him as being a paragon of strength and masculinity, at the extreme opposite of her own sickly and silent husband.

During the first threee years of his analysis, Karl first of all explored the Imaginary realm and the memories he shared with his mother and his cousin Bertha, and at the same time he was displaying his tastes and his knowledge in every domain he thought would interest me, as he watched for the slightest sign of approval or even interest that could possibly make him think that I was interested ever so slightly in his image of himself and the maternal realm he reconstructed before me and for me like a veritable stage play or baroque film in the style of Sternberg or Von Stroheim. Many years later, when Karl recalled the beginnings of his analysis, he told me : "when I came to see you, I believed taht I was going to put on stage for you the opening/closin relationship with "mutty". I was completelay unconscious as to what I was repressing at the time".

Karl adorted his mother and her constant chatter fascinated him. As soon as she came into the house (she and her husband ran a fine food grocery), she would spin Imaginary tales of fantasy and magic around the wonder-struck Karl. Until he was 13 or 14 Karl would sit in her lap every evening in a rocking chair near the big ceramic stove and she would tell him stories.

When Karl felt worried or depressed, he would scream in German "Die Stuhl, die Stuhl!" even though his mother told him his storie in French only occasionally speaking German with him for things of day to day interest. His mother would always end by placing him on her lap and rocking him. But very early in his childhood, he had also begun to feel the weight of her domineering character and would seek refuge with his cousin Bertha whose presence was more discreet and whose love less invasive. She had cared for him, fed him looked after him, protected him and conforted him when he felt crushed under his mother's excessively stimulating presence or depressed by the silence and inaccessibility of his father; and later on when he had to face the harshness of the outside world, she was there to listen to him. Bertha was probably more ettentive to Karl's well-being since she had been unable to prevent Irma's younger brother - the other Karl - from dying.

Very early in his childhood, Karl also learned to take refuge in the ficticious world of the novel, poetry, music and films. He also developed a remarkable gift for imitating his literary heroes (at least through speech), Roland Barthes in particular. This is the reason I had felt something strangely familiar about his way of speaking without being able, however, to identify it immediately.

During these first years he also told me that he had never been attracted to girls. He had been a solitary child (his older brother had gone off to boarding school in another city very early), and had very few friends; he began entertaining homosexual fantasies in his adolescence but he did not carry them out until he had left home and his childhood village to pursue his studies at the University of Geneva. At the time, he switched back and forth between periods of intense, violent sexual promiscuity that he satisfied in bars of ill-repute in Zurich and other calmer periods made up of lasting liaisons with younger men than he. AIDS had not yet appeared on the sexual scene of the time.

During almost all of the first three years of his analysis, session, after session, Karl reconstructed and staged the baroque flamboyant world of maternal images. I kept silent and intervened only occasionnally with remarks that retriggered his "myth fabrications." I felt that no "revealing interpretation" should be attempted before the completion of the reconstruction and the staging of his Imaginary universe, his universe of images, of imagos, and his universe of narcissistic identification. Karl may have interpreted my silence when I was listening to him as the equivqlent of his own silence when he listened to his mother telling him stories of chattering away : another manifestation of a mirror identification.

From my point of view, my silence - during that period - had three functions :

1) First, I took care not to be caught up in the specular relationship that Karl tried constantly and by every means at his disposal to establish with me, although it was in silence, I nevertheless responded to his speech by listening to him carefully and analyzing within myself the imagos that came and installed themselves one after the other in the Imaginary space that he staged to seduce me. I start from the hypothesis that in most analyses - no matter what their duration - the first phase is devoted to the construction of the Imaginary universe of the analyzand as well as the establishment of the Imaginary transference within which a revealing interpretation, a Symbolic transference will finally be able to occur. During this initial phase, as was the case in the city of Orsena, one can see unfolding every defense mechanism constituting the ego against an attack which, as in this beautiful novel, remains forever on the horizon on the other side of the sea bordering the city. I do not feel that during these preparatory steps it is necessary to speak to any great extent in order to attempt to analyse the Imaginary transference, or even to respond to the demands of the analyzand or even to attempt to dismantle his defenses pointing them out, although this task must be undertaken by the analyst, but in silence because it is not in this register that the analyst should intervene and where his interpretation will be performative.

Lacan : " the analyst must aspire to a mastery of his speech that is identical with his being. For he will not need to use it often during the treatment, even so little that one is tempted to believe that he will need none at all to hear, each time with the help of God, i. e. the subject himself, , he will have conducted a treatment to its term, the subject proferring the very words to him in which he can recognize the law of his being."

2) The second function of my silence was to back Karl's demands without responding but by listening carefully to them since I did not want to frustrate Karl with my silence in the false hope that he would respond to his frustration with an aggressiveness that would allow him to reactivate within the analysis the more archaïc logical moments of his subjective structuration. What I was aimimg for was to allow the signifiers to which Karl's frustration was linked (namely the maternal signifiers of the primary demand) to reappear at the call of my silence. As Lacan might have said had he used this vocabulary : it is when the analyst silences in himself the intermediary discourse ( the discourse whose emergence is brought about by the demands and the empty speech of the analyzand) thet he puts himself in a position to gather and to store away the rue speech of the analyzand and produce a revealing interpretation.

3) Lastly, by my silence, I wanted to allow Karl - when he was ready - to be aware of my presence, when - for example - the flow of his speech began to dry up.

Lacan : "The keenest awareness of thwe analyst's presence is linked to a moment in which the subject can only be silent, in other words when he retreats even from the shadow of the demand." It is certainly not when the analyst could say at that moment that would constitute the support of the speech and the silences of the analyzand but that which he is. If the analyst's being acts when he is silent, " it is at the level of truth supporting him that the subject will profer his speech".

In other words, if I had thought I understood too rapidly the true significance of Karls' Imaginary discourse instead of its function, I would have spoken; but had I done so I would have stopped supporting his speech and his unconscious would have remained closed. This is very clear in the dream about the Scarlet Empress.

As I listened to Karl in silence I kept in mind certain features as though they were caveats :

1) His failure in the exam thaqt I looked upon as a signal, one of those antisocial acts that Winnicott said that one might attribute to a genuine deprivation, to the loss of something which up to a certain time in childhood was positive and good and which was suddenly taken away without there remaining any trace in the memory. In this sense I concurred with the interpretation which Karl himself had given for this failure from his own reading of Masud Khan.

2) The silences during certain sessions, tense and heavy, which were not like the father's silences, but like the silence of someone upon whom Karl would have depended a great deal at a precocious period of his life : His mother or his cousin Bertha? These silences were all the more remarkable as they were in such vivid contrast with the dazzling elegance of the Imaginary universe his words conjured up for me.

3) A dream he related to me during the second session of his analysis - many years later - gave me the key to his silences : it was his mother. But was she the only one? His dream : "I am at table with Mutty. She has gone mad and her madness is intensively depressive. I see only her closed face and I say to myself : "This time it is for real, we could not prevent it."" Whatever the "it" was, we had to wait more than three years for this depressive and mute aspect of the mother could be brought up again and analyzed (even though it was constantly present in the signifier "Mutty").

4) Another dream, which occured the night previous to the first session kept me on my gard : Karl is in a car with an unknown companion. At lat he has found true friendship with this man who, even though seated in the back, is driving the car. Later, Karl is taken to a country where two super-powers are at war. Karl is only an observer of the conflict but just when he is about to be involved, an old man gives him a document bearing his name and which he must sign. Karl pretends to accept the contract all the while thinking inside himself that he will be able to get by without taking sides.

Among the associations, he will mention that contrary to some of his friends in analysis, he had not the slightest intention - as far as he was concerned - of being duped by his analyst. This first period was to reach its climax in a dream he had near the end of the third year : both of us were watching the coronation of the Scarlet Empress, with Marlene Dietrich as the Empress. He gave a very detailed description of the coronation hall which was very similar to the hall in Josef Von Sternberg's film, and which was like the baroque hypostasis of the Imaginary world Karl had constructed for three years. The sharp hallebarde of a guard or of a courtisane, glimpsed in the shadows concealed behind one of the somptuous braziers surrounding the imperial throne, foreshadowed the violent death of the Empress who - in Karl's dream - and after having thousands of her subjects beheaded, was doomed to have her head cut off as well. We were both in the dream watching the sopmtuous ceremony and the triumphal march of the Empress advancing towards her death; Karl was also the Scarlet Empress, decked out in royal purple robes and covered in jewels of infinite splendor.

When Karl commented on his dream, he insisted on the extremely complex network of eye contacts that was established everywhere in the coronation hall.

Then he fell silent and remain so for a lomg time. I thought to myself that he had just reach the moment "when the subject retreats even from the shadow of his demand, the moment when the drive emerges to describe its loop.

"The castration of the castrating mother and the shadow of the executionner with his hallebarde, seemed to me to be signs the were a little too obvious not to be deceptive. In fact, the most remarkable aspect of Karl's associations with this dream, seemed to me to be the complex intricacy of the eye contacts, the monstration in the glint of the braziers and the brilliance of the chandeliers in addition to the concealing shadows of the drapes. Il thought of scopics drives and I asked Karl what was hidden under the imperial purple, " un corps malingre, a skinny body " he answered unhesitatingly. We shall see that "malingre" was the first maternal signifier to overcome the wall of repression. It will lead us to a version or an imago of the mother that Karl had deeply repressed and which she had done everything to hide from her son and from herself as well.

Shortly after Karl's dream about ther Scarlet Emppress, he declared at the beginning of a session : "Well, I have come to my sessions for three years on a very regular basis. That's how long I had planned to devote to my analysis. Which I have now finished. I feel much better. I think that now I will be able to write (in fact he had not yet tried). I will thus terminate at the end of the month.

"You have indeed finished something" I answered immediately, "but you had decided how long your analysis would last even before you began it. Now that your analysis is over, your analysis can begin".

Karl was stunned by my response and after a few sessions spent in total silence, he decided to continue his analysis without deciding on when it should terminate and despite the financial this represented : he had just bought a small farm to which he hoped to retire a few years down the road, so he could devote himself to the pleasures of writing and raising animals as his ancestors had done.

II. B. 3. The second phase of the analysis : the doings-of-the -father.

After Karl had decided to continue or - to use a thought provoking expression by Lacan - to start on another tour, the analytic ambiance changed completely. Karl stopped interpreting my silence as an Imaginary silence scornful and disdainful. He felt much more at ease and began to look upon my silence as a support for whatever he might have to say. A Symbolic silence in a way. When he begab to speak again, he told me that henceforth, he could advance towards me "in the nudity of his skinny body (de son corps malingre)". To a certain extent our silences had begun to resonnate together, even though they did not have the same function.

The setting in which Karl's maternal imagos had been displayed suddenly disappeared as well as his elegant and poetic - almost Barthes-like - speech. The low and melodious monotony of his voice was replaced by more raucous tones and more jumpy rythms.

Karl began to (re)discover - recalcitantly and by many a circuitous path - a completely new version of the father. If Karl's father had indeed always been a taciturn man who had grown almost completely crippled over the years, he nevertheless had been an industrious and vey active man when Karl was still very young. In the family home, he had made alsmost everything with his own hands : the furniture, the cupboards, all the carpentry work. And Karl, who was starting to renovate his small farm, remembered, reticently and with some embarrassment, often puntuated by lon silences, that when he was very young his father had taught to make many things with his hands. He watched over the accomplishments of his son and approved in silence.

Instead of the Names-of-the Father (or the No-of the-Father since "nom" from "Nom-du-Père" sounds in French like "non", no), Karl constructed and named the doings-of-the-father. Doings with which he had been able to identify and which, although in the form of doings, were part and parcel of the silent speech of the father. The contruction and verbalisation of the doings-of-the-father which had undoubtedly helped to set up a limit between Karl and the primary mother by acting in a way as a primary interdict, a "No-of-the-Father" allowed Karl to continue the analysis of the maternal imagos instead of remaining trapped by the fascination of the shared eye contacts.

But before starting the third phase of Karl's analysis, I want to introduce here an extraordinary passage from a text by Heidegger that I had read many years before beginning Karl's analysis and which had made a very vivid impression upon me. The memory that I had of the passage resurfaced when Karl started talking to me about the doings-of-the-father. It caused me to think that the Names-of-the-Father, so essential to the structuration of the subject, could very well be something other than words, that they could very well be manual deeds for instance, but which, nevertheless, owed their existence as manual deeds only to the prior existence of language.

"Only a being who speaks, which is to say who thinks, can have a hand and accomplish the work of the hand in a handling.

Not only did Karl rediscover the use of his hands as a talking being, as a "speakbeing" (parlêtre) Lacan would have said, but he also began to verbalize the doings-of-the-father and what's more he began putting into words the ills of the father. It was then that his inhibition towards writing disappeared.

During this period of his analysis. Karl took my silence for what it was : a supportive silence allowing him on one hand to rediscover the silent language of the father that he had shared very early in his life and which, on the other hand, and parallel to the re-activation of the doings-of-the-father was to support him when it became necessary to reveal and to unmask the deadly and fundamental muteness of the mother.

A dream was the reversal point marking the third phase of Karl's analysis : Karl goes into a subterranean crypt in the cathedral of Sienna. The name of the crypt is the cryot of the mystic. Cousin Bertha is the mystic. She is locked away in an opaque reliquary. Irma, Karl's mother is seated near the reliquary; she is mute and completely immobile. Her mutebness protects the secret of the mystic.

The mystic was not so much cousin Bartha as, through associations : myatic-Catherine of Sienna-Katharina, Karl's maternal grandmother whose name was Katharina. In addiotion, the name of Catherine of Sienna alos brought to mind Von Sternberg's film, The Scalet Empress in which the empress, played by Marlena Dietrich could have been a fictional representation of Catherine the Great of Russsia. This association brought to mind the signifier "malingre", the skinny body beneath the royal purple.

II. B. 5. The third phase of the analysis : the mute mother.

The analysis of the signifier "malingre" was at the center of the third phase of analysis. Karl had recognized in "malingre" the condensation of two other signifiers : "malin" (eveil) and "ingrat" (ungrateful). The two signifiers both constituted the trigger of two distinct signifier chains, the reconstruction of which enabled the mystic's secret to be unveiled.

The secrat comprised two parts :

1. The name of Katharina brought to min a memopry. Karl had heared that his maternal grandmother had given birth to 12 children, 10 of whom were to die in less than one week during the terrible epidemic of the Spanish Flu , which in 1918, carried off 18 million persons in a few weeks at the end of the First World War. The only survivors were Irma, and her younger brother Karl who was born after the epidemic. It may well have been this terrible tragedy that was responsible for this ipous woman's entry into a projound mysticism.

But a curse seemed to hover over the family for Katharina was to die of a malignant tumor (cancer of the breast) and her son Karl as well (cancer of the testicles). Odly enough, it was during this period of Karl's analysis that his elder brother discovered he too had cancer of the testicles. Then Karl remembered that Bertha's mother, Katharina's sister, had also died, like her sister of breast cancer. And Bertha had died of uterine cancer. The curse seemed to focuse on the reproductive and sexual organs in both the women and the men. And yet these death were never spoken of and Karl learned of them only after a metodical study of the family archives and despite his mother's annoyance at seing him looking through the pages of the family saga. She would say that it was better to let the dead sleep in peace. It is tempting to think that this silence surrounding the maternal curse - which seems to me to be along the lines of repression - allowed the family to eliminate any confrontation with the idea of death. As Freud wrote, "We strive with all our might to brush death aside, to eliminate it from our lives. We have attempted to cast a veil of silence upon death." This silence can also be understood as the context in which the death drive was at work in the maternal phyllum. Freud again :"As long as this drive works internally as the death drive, it is mute and only manifests itself to us when, as a destructive drive, it turns towards the exterior."

In fact, however, this silence was to be revealed as the cover of a muteness that was much more complex and did not deliver its secret until the second part of the mystic's secret.

2. Karl deciphered the second part of the mystic's secret by reconstructing an extremely complex network of signifier chains (rings of signifiers in a necklace made of rings, the necklace itself being a ring in another necklace of rings...) the details of which I shall not recontitute here since my purpose is basically to present the experience of the diverse functions of silence in the course of this analysis. The network of signifier chains was linked to the second part of the signifier "malingre" : "ingrat", as well as to the sherp halleberd in Karl's dream where he had recognizer the sign of the future beheading of the Scarlet Empress and the ingratitude of her courtiers.

With respect to the halleberd, Karl stated that it reminded him of an executionner's axe. From the idea of axe, Karl went on to the idea of slaughter house and butcher, and then what was said about his maternal grandfather who slaughtered his own cattle and sold the meat to the butcher shops in the region, before going bankruped and sinking into madness.

Another chain of associations mingled with childhood memorie led him from "ingrat" to "rat". The signifier rat was to be found at the points of articulations of several important chains :

a. One brought to mind the memory of his father trying to kill a rat witha garden fork on the cellar stairs. Karkl was terrorized by the graessive fury of the trapped animal and by the ferocious look in its little bloodshot eyes;

b. this memory caused Karl to comment - not without a dash of humour - on his uncontrollable fright (but which seemed to him suddenly to be quite ridiculous) of his employer Monsieur Ferat.

c. He also brought up the "ratenloch" in Zurich, the sordid homosexual bars were, in whose dark and silent toilets he would give himself over to brutal and intense orgies. In particular he stated that before that time he had never practiced fairly violent sado-masochistic acts. He mentioned a big sado-masochistic rally that took place in the woods at a few kilometers from Zurich where thousands of bikers and "leather" guys from the four corners of Europe had assembled for a gigantic open air orgy that lasted four days and three nights. During the orgy, Karl had liberally struck a mosochist's back with a nail-studded board, which caused him a good deal of amusement until he suddenly realized that in the manner of a craftsman he was re-enacting the torture Kafa describes in The Penal Colony.

d. Then he remebered that his mother had told him that when he was a young worker at his father's farm, there were huge rats in the slaughter house which the father killed with an ax with fierce glee which terrorized her. Actually Karl had obtained this confidence when he read a passage from a novel which had disturbed him considerably but which disturbed his mother even more. He had asked her with a kind of sly innocence wether the grandfather's slaughter house was similar to the one in the novel : "It was almost completely dark inside the barn and all we could see right near the entrance was a butcher's table upon which a hide was stretched out. Behind the table there were, against the shadowy background pale and sponge-like shapes.We could see swarms of steel-grey flies or gold colored like a swarm of bees flying towards the shapes. And then the shadow of a great bird felle across the clearing. It was the shadow of a vulture which flew down upon the offal in a great swoop of his wings. It was only after we saw the vulture poking its beak up to its red neck in the ground that we realized there was a small figure working there with a pick and which the bird was following the way a crow follows the ploughman.

The little figure wistled as he put down his pick and started for the barn. He was clad in a grey justaucorps, and we saw him rubbing his hands as though he had just finished a good job. When he was in the barn, we could hear him knocking and scraping the butcher's table, and his wistling constantly acoompanied these noises with funeral glee. And then we heared the wind, as though it meant to accompany him as it blew through the grove, and we heared the dry sound of the whitened skulls as they knocked against one another throughout the trees. And as it blew the wind carried the sound to us of the hooks rattling and the rustling of dried hands against the barn wall. The knocking of the bones and the wood sounded something like the movement of puppets in the kingdom of the dead. At the same time, the wind carried a strong smell of decay, sweetly cloying, that made us shiver to the bone.'

"My father was not small - he was strong and tall " Karl's mother respnded immediately ver upset by what her son had just told her. All the more so as at the Köppels-bleek slaughter house it was not steers, sheep or pigs that the little man in his grey justaucorps slaughtered, but humain beings, thus anticipating by a few years the vast slaughter houses of Dachau, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen etc.

When Karl attempted to have his mother talk to him about his grandfather, about his ruin and his moral and physical collapse, he was very syrprised at the vagueness of his mother's answers, or even her hostile and stubborn silence. His mother's absolutely extraordinary muteness in a woman who never was short of stories or memories struck him as the return in the Real of her muteness in the dream about the mystic's secret. For the first time in his life, Karl had the notion that his mother was hiding something of which she herself was perhaps not conscious - some terrible suffering or something worse. He undertook a veritable investigation into the grandfather's collapse, much assisted by the legendary meticulousness of the Swiss and their habit of keeping files. In the psychiatric hospital where the grandfather had been commited for a few months in 1940, a short time after his wife Katharina died, Karl discovered that he had been commited forcefully. The neighbours had finally alerted the police because of the extreme violence and dangerous aspects of his behavior. The peaceful peasants were probably worried about their safety and that of his children who were living alone with this man who had just lost his wife and seemingly his reason as well; but it was especially because of the cruelty with which he butchered his cattle that would scream for hours that made them decide to intervene. In the peasant way of life, animals are not to be tortured - as regards people, it is not as serious.

A remark in the psychiatric file made Karl make up his mind to go on with his research even further into the past. Thanks to the intervention of a influencial public servant, a homosexual friend, he had access to a police dossier which revealed to him, to his great surprise and stupefaction that during the twenties and thirties his grandfather had joined the nazi groups in Bavaria and his participation in cetain political massacres was not excluded. A piece of information which a posteriori confirmed the anticipatory knowledge which had induced him to read the strange and terrifying description to his mother of the fictitious slaughter-house of Köppels-bleek. Whence it follows that fiction precedes - if not the cause of - reality.

This was the secret his mother's muteness concealed. But it was a secret that had not been so much repressed as was forclosed, since it is very probable the the mother knew nothing about the criminal activities of her father, but in a certain sense, she must have come up against them - as a child comes up against the Thing, (das Ding) - without really Symbolizing them as such. Forclusion is of course quite a different tning from repression and it definitely created in the psychic structure of Karl's mother an extremely depressive psychotic core, encysted within a hysteria-like structure, if you don't mind my using a vocabulary that is so heavy. such was the nature of the deadly depression that Karl, her preferred son, was obliged to protect her from by being, in a way, her fetiche. But he was obliged, in order to remain at this locus, to repress very severely the agressive manifestations and normal sadistic tendencies of a young child. This repression could only end in Karl as an adult being swept along the paths of sado-masochistic sexuality.

What could be said about the mother's muteness except to mention that she joined what one might call the silence of the Real where the death drive work. Karl, for very good reasons, decided to keep to himself what he had discovered and while probably tolerating a little more readily the endless chatter of his mother to accept on one hand to participate in the protection of her forclusive muteness and the deadly secret her muteness encapsulated, in order to prevent her from sinking into the horror fo psychosis, should she discover the truth behind the criminal madness of her father. But on the other hand, he began to distance himself from her and to cease being his mother's fetich object, his mother's phallus. However his distancing from his mother did not at all have any decided or willfull aspect in Karl's analysis. In fact the process was a slow one, unconscious to a large extent and was only made possible by the rediscovery of the Doings-of-the-Father which triangularized, Symbolized the Imaginary relationship with his mother. By relying on my silence, Karl managed to Symbolize new versions of the parental imagos, and after having an oedipal dream (his very first one) to undergo the fourth and lat phase of his analysis and to proceed towards a crisis and the beginning of an oedipal structuration.

III. The silence of Martin Heidegger.

Paul Celan, afther the second world war and after the horror of the nazi slaughter houses was revealed to the whole world, urged Heidegger to say something abut these human slaughter houses and the horrors which the german soldiers had comitted in secret in the camps.

"Ja, aber was?", Heidegger apparently replied.

When Celan asked him the same question, Heidegger answere that he would keep silent about this specific point of word history. He kept his word and never spoke of it either in public or in private - at least not in direct terms.

In the phenomenal ouputs of books, documents, coma, films, reports about what wah termed somewhat inadequately "the holocaust", it was sometimes forgotten that if the holocaust had claimed six million victims, the second Worl War had claimed nearly fourty million - i.e., the equivalent of the population of France at the time. Amidst the concert of denunciations, protests, judgements, jeremiads, Heidegger's silence became heavier and heavier, but in the clamour orhestrated by the power apparatuses of the media and editorial appartuses of power of all kinds for over thirty years, his silence partly passed unnoticed until the libellous book by Viktor Farias was published which, once more, launched the question of Martin Heidegger's nazism upon the sensationalist mode of articles appearing in Police Gazette or the Nationa Enquirer.

What followed is well known, especially the way in which certain parisian intellectuals pounced on the issue shrieking all the while as they made it the target of their scandalized moralism, and not missing the chance at the same time to settle a few accounts among themselves that had ramained suspended and especially to draw attention to themselves by emphasizing more than ever this time the silliness of their arguments and the prcipitous vacuousness of their shoked srieks. Whatever the positions were as regards Heidegger's comitment to the national socialist movement in 1933 - the year of his recotorate - or even until 1945, as Farias claims basing what he says on doubtful documents about which he does not even daign to criticise historically - not to mention those documents which he presumes to exist - all these indignant representatives of public morality seem to agree at least on one point : Heidegger ought to have said something about the death camos and the extermination of the Jews.

The interpretation of this silence vary according to individual interest :

- certain people took it as proof that Heidegger remained loyal to national socialism until he died;

- others ( completely ignoring what Anna Arendt had written or said) thought they recognized therein his anti semitism;

- still others thought they saw therein the sign of his cowardice or even a kind of incipient psychosis, encapsulated by the exercice of the thinking process and protected by his wife, who apparently succeeded in rendering him completely indifferent to what was happening around him and to the sufferings of humanity;

- others still thought they recognized therein the absence of any kind of political judgement. It is a pity that amidst the clamor of protest and denounciations one is forced to note that for many it was simply a question of making themselves heared at the opportune moment, rather than attempting to hear something true on the issue - no one thought of suspending his judgenebt long enough to attempt to weigh Heidegger's silence. I suppose that an objection can be made in the sense that these are issues that are too grave to suspend one's judgement and that confronted with the organized massacer of six million Jews, one must not and cannot suspend one's judgement. And yet, if one looks a little closer, it is obvious that the most virulent detractors of Heidegger were not even born or were still in diapers during the Second World War, whereas those who lived throught the period of European facism and the war as adults, those who lived through the experience in their bodies and in their daily lives are infinitely more moderate, more cautious in their opinion and judgements. I am thinking of Anna Arendt, of course, but of other thinkers like Jaspers or René Char and I could add many others to the list.

I find it impossible to attempt to give a meaning to Heidegger's silence in termes of the contents of his work and the movement of his thought, nor even in terms of a scrupulous analysis of the relationship between the evolution of his work and what one might know about his political stance on a period of over a half century. The latter task, was accomplished admirably by Jean Michel Palmier, one of the few who did not run howling with the pack and who cannot be suspected of pro-fascist leanings. What I would like to do instead is to rely on the experience of the silence or silences that I witnessed in my clinical presentation and to indicate by means of a few remarks that will remain related peripherally to the question, another direction in which it would be possible to hear this silence.