It continues to write itself

The end of analysis does not suture the fault that the unconscious is. After the dissolution of transference, which signals the end of analysis and entails a deflation of the transferential unconscious, what governs the production of dreams? In his course Le Tout Dernier Enseignement, Miller points out that the pleasure principle “is truly the only law which [Lacan] recognises at the level of the One, the only law which he recognises as the principle of the sinthome.”[1] From the unconscious reduced as closely as possible to the register of the One[2] in an analysis taken to its end, dreams continue to emanate in order to regulate the continuing iteration of a non-eradicable jouissance as it gets taken up in the life of the speaking being. In my case, three extremely striking dreams came to radically reorganise my libidinal economy post-pass. I have elaborated on the dream that produced the fall of the image with which I had made a world for myself – the unseen and yet indelible image of my parents’ climbing accident, which pre-dated my birth by eight years – in a few of my testimonies.[3]

More recently, two dreams operated an extraction and a nomination which put an end to the maddening ebullition of a supplementary jouissance which had been produced by the infinitising love speech of a man, a speech that had produced the effect that a man can have in making a woman Other to herself[4] – albeit in the sense that Éric Laurent gave to Lacan’s expression.[5] The first dream came after my breaking off this relationship: an object was extracted from my spine, and I was put back together with a massive suture. The comment from the dream was: “oh but it holds, nonetheless”. A few days later, a second dream gave me the signifier “endocentrism”, which I did not know existed but means that one sees the world from the perspective of the inner group, such as the family cell. The second dream named the solitary jouissance I continued to derive from my lalangue and the extreme figures of the family romance. This double operation of extraction and nomination, nearly one year on from the end of my mandate, came to finalise the fall of my primary defence against the lack of love or interest my parents had for their numerous children: contempt, a passion of being which undermined my relation to the Other and rendered love near-impossible.

Dreams, after the pass, continue to inscribe a limit to jouissance on the body, and to herald significant shifts in a speaking being’s libidinal economy. In my case, they make life as a succession of encounters divorced from automaton ever more possible.