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We can thus understand the inertia characteristic of the formations of the I, and find there the most extensive definition of neurosis -- even as the ensnarement of the subject by the situation which gives us the most general formula for madness, not only the madness which lies behind the walls of asylums, but also the madness which deafens the world with its sound and fury.
The sufferings of neurosis and psychosis are for us the school of the passions of the soul, just as the scourge of the psychoanalytic scales, when we compute the tilt of their threat to entire communities, gives us the index of the deadening of the passions of the city.
At this junction of nature and culture which is so persistently scanned by modern anthropology, psychoanalysis alone recognizes this knot of imaginary servitude which love must always undo again, or sever.
For such a task we place no reliance on altruistic feeling, we who lay bare the aggressiveness that underlies the activity of the philanthropist, the idealist, the pedagogue, and even the reformer.
In the recourse of subject to subject which we preserve, psychoanalysis can accompany the patient to the ecstatic limit of the 'Thou art that', wherein is revealed to him the cipher of his mortal destiny, but it is not in our mere power as practitioners to bring him to that point where the real journey begins.
( 1949 -- translated by Jean Roussel)
Notes
| 1. |
Translator's note: 'I' is used here and throughout to translate Lacan's 'je', in 'le je', 'la fonction du je', etc. 'Ego' translates 'le moi' and is used in the normal sense of psychoanalytic literature. On 'je', see Note 2 below. |
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| 2. |
Throughout this article we leave in its peculiarity the translation we have adopted for Freud's Ideal-Ich (i.e. 'je-idéal'), without further comment, save that we have not maintained it since. |
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| 3. |
Cf. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, London 1968, Chapter X. |
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| 4. |
See Jacques Lacan, Écrits, Paris 1966, pp. 111, 180. |
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