ABSTRACT
At the beginning of an analytic session, what state of mind am I in for responding to what the situation requires of me? I think I am adopting an analytic position when, having endeavoured to keep my attention as free floating as possible – we will see that it is not straightforward, and sometimes runs into serious difficulties – I hear the analysand’s communication from two perspectives simultaneously. On the one hand, I try to perceive the conflictuality within him and, on the other, I consider it from the angle of the message, implicit or explicit, that it constitutes for me.The conflictuality to which I am referring does not concern the particular dynamic conflicts that could be identified by interpretation,but the way in which the discourse alternately moves towards and away from a meaningful nucleus or a set of meaningful nuclei which are trying to enter consciousness. It is not necessary to have a precise idea of what is activating or, on the contrary, inhibiting or diverting the communication, in order to notice the movement which sometimes carries it towards a more explicit or precise expression, and sometimes distances it from the verbalization of what is trying to communicate itself. One can, then, notice these variations intuitively even if one does not know the exact nature of the focal point around which they gravitate.This will appear more or less suddenly, sometimes perfectly clearly, and sometimes in a more accidental manner, in the course of the discursive process. It is in this latter case that floating attention undergoes a change of state and becomes investigative acuity, during a phase of reorganizing what has slipped under the fluidity of the ‘suspended’ reception of the analysand’s more or less free associative discourse. In this description it is not just a question of naming the resistance, as it is encountered when activated moments of transference are approaching. I am referring to the background state against which
movements of the discourse appear while waiting to be heard, or to the basic oscillation inherent in the analysand’s impulse to speak, uncertain of its acceptability, both for the consciousness of the speaker and for that of the addressee. A convergent movement – but one that is far from being synchronous – thus causes the analyst’s thinking to evolve from the identification of the analysand’s punctual transferential position in the present moment towards a more global picture of his conflictuality insofar as the flux of the discourse allows it to be apprehended; or alternatively towards that which, at a given moment, bears witness on the one hand to the activation of a particular conflict and, on the other, to the manner in which this conflict stands out momentarily within a general configuration.The general conditions of verbalization,divided between that which seeks satisfaction through expression and that which translates a fear of expressing itself freely, are thus placed in perspective. In other words, there are two factors involved here: on the one hand, there is a particular local conflict relating to a more general state of conflictuality in the analysand which can be understood in the light of the relations between the parts of the discourse and the way in which the object’s presence excites and inhibits their figures; and, on the other, an examination by the analyst of the significance of the present moment evaluated in terms of the general conflictuality of psychic life as it is expressed in the analytic relationship.The latter is caught between the ideal of a communication free of any censorship and the vicissitudes of a desire to speak, thwarted by imaginary fear and its consequences, which suggest that here speaking has lost, in part, its distance from doing.
