To name what can staple the knot
Bernard Seynhaeve
I invented my symptom from early childhood as a return of the repressed based on the signifiers of my history. My mother's desire made it possible for my symptom to flourish in the project of becoming a priest, with the consequence of my being denied access to the other sex, a metaphorical way of assuming castration. There was an urgency for me to enter into analysis... as one enters the seminary.
My analysis got off to a flying start by a production of the unconscious, a dream that had arisen as a result of the analyst’s intervention and turned into a nightmare. I give the account of it here:
"I wander through the corridor of the Refuge de la Sainte Famille - it's the hospital where my mother gave birth to all of her children. This corridor has the shape of the letter L, it is tiled in checkerboard, loose black and white tiles. I move around taking care not to step on the joints. I suddenly feel the urge to urinate. The toilet is at the corner of the L. It has two doors, one on each side of the L. It is necessary to choose a door. I enter the toilet and start urinating in the bowl without being able to stop. The bowl overflows and I wake up urinating in bed.”
As we can see, in this account, the letter L, taken from a letter that presided over the union of my parents, is isolated. My uncle, my mother's lover, had written to his brother - before he was killed in the war - "Take care of her". So his brother became my father. This letter L, which arose from the unconscious at the moment of the dream of entering the cure… I isolated it. This letter L is not only an identification "you are that" but an I submit [je souis] to that in my body. This L is what ties the letter to the body. We see that the L, which comes back three times in the dream, is an equivocation, ELLE [SHE], of which I make my name of jouissance, my sinthome. Sinthome that will also insist throughout the duration of the cure, in the form of the symptom of walking on the curbs of footpaths.
Concerning the dream, the reduction of meaning erases the myth and thus the domination of the Other and the modality of the necessary. This reduction then allows a writing that is outside of meaning and linked to the gullying of the contingent traumatic nucleus which makes the “bone” of the sinthome.
Translated by Joanne Conway