ABSTRACT

“If no act without language has a meaning, there are maybe acts which have no meaning. I think of the differentiation between acting in and acting out and what the French call a kind of action without signification, no symbolized action. For example, when Freud discussed the case of the nineteen-year-old homosexual girl and he tried to interpret the jump into the ditch, the suicidal act, he said it was a significant act translating the wish to be pregnant by jumping down, which means in German niederkommen, like to give birth. Then there was a rereading of this by Lacan, who said no, it’s not, it’s out of the symbolic—it’s when she as a subject is disappearing, she’s identifying with a falling object and now it’s going into the Real and in the Real there is no symbolic. I wanted to discuss whether the sentence is true that there is no act without meaning.”