ABSTRACT
Jean-Claude Rolland is a psychiatrist, full member and former president of the French Psychoanalytical Association. It seems that both speaking and renouncing involve the same outpouring from the mind, that they are both in themselves and indistinctly the constituents of conscious thought. Before being a speaker, the human being is a seer. The human being has to speak to divest himself of this gift of envisioning that has fallen to him like a destiny. The human being's envisioning, which can be called a gift in the sense that it binds what Freud referred to as Hilflosig-keit, the primal helplessness of the human subject, and in the sense that it moderates its economy by inscribing it in a pair of opposite psychic impulses. The binding of an unconscious representation to a satellite signifier impedes its access to utterance, the only psychic operation that can accord a representation the quality of 'consciousness'.
