“But it just doesn’t make any sense.” Heard in session at least once from each of my analysands, this little sentence is one of my favourites. Something happens there… It feels like we’ve reached the edge of what is usually sayable, and ’it speaks’, as Lacan would put it. Is this small sentence trying to close up a breach?
Freud has trained us to this inversion: what appears meaningless is often, in analysis, what carries the sharpest meaning. The absurd dream, the insignificant detail, the ’ridiculous’ phobia are compromises, tight assemblages of desire and defence.
When an analysand comes out with ’it doesn’t make any sense’, they are, in their own way, stating what Freud brought to light: the structural gap between manifest meaning (the one that satisfies the ego) and latent meaning (the one tied to desire). What I savour inwardly is that we are then right in the encounter with those formations of the unconscious whose architecture Freud mapped out.
With Lacan, another nuance emerges: the unconscious does not mean that ’everything has a meaning’ in the sense that one would just have to decode it. Meaning unravels; and at that point the analysand moves closer to what organises their life unbeknownst to them, to that knowing-that-does-not-know-itself, that ’hard kernel’ around which metaphors and metonymies are wrapped.
But today, it was Françoise Dolto who came to mind.
In the adult analysand’s mouth, ’it doesn’t make any sense’ carried the trace of that ’something’ he understood too early, too alone. He patched together his own ’meaning’ out of fragments, a meaning then despised, denied, covered over and ridiculed as well. That child comes back into the session with his words, his images… To sustain what he says as something serious seems precisely not to let it be silenced once again in the name of ’common sense’.