Il Sogno
Traumdeutung | Inventario

Turning Oneself Into Smoke

Florencia F.C. Shanahan

“… the absence of the subject, which is produced somewhere in the
unorganized id, is the defense that one might call "natural" — however artificial
the circle may be that is cleared by burning the brush of the drives…”[1]

A mark of my "malady of identity" (one of the names I gave to my case in the transmission to the passers) was the almost total absence of slips, especially of lapsus linguae, during the many years that my analysis lasted.

My relationship to speech left me at the mercy of the tyranny of accuracy and precision. Everyday life was not worthy of being spoken about in session. How banal reality is when compared to the potency of speech! For a long time I could not mention theory either. What an imposture to want to grasp the truth of the real by means of concepts! The well-saying confused with the all-saying left me captive to a deadly silence. It was another version of my "not being able to (re)count."

Dreams, on the contrary, there were many. Dreaming relieved me. Even today, after the Pass, dreams are a place to verify the “it” which inhabits me without me being able to dominate it or rule over it. What use is there for the dream when it is no longer a call to deciphering or nourishment of the Other embodied in the transference?

If sleep involves suspending something of the body's relation to itself from the point of view of jouissance, of what disturbs, the unconscious means that, even when one is asleep, "the signifier is still on the go."[2] And the end of the analysis is not the end of the unconscious.

The dream can be a mode of inscribing a limit to the jouissance in the body,[3] but a mode that is able to do without the one-saying fixionalized according to the fundamental fantasy. It is a question of differentiating, in the difficult zone of ​​the unconscious as “mystery of the speaking body,”[4] between what is written and what is counted.

A dream produced some time after my first testimony as AS: “There is a circle formed by twelve ethereal, transparent women. They dance on the grass. Suddenly they turn into smoke, leaving only their trace.” The number twelve refers to what I had called “the age at which the core of my subjective drama was constituted,”[5] as well as to the twelve grapes eaten at midnight to welcome the New Year in Spain. Something in me says: "One per month [Una por mes]”.

Laughter erupts on reading “mess” there. Name of the ineliminable, of the only thing of the speaking being that is not and cannot be turned into smoke: the mess I’m in. The entanglement turned sinthome.

NOTES

  1. Lacan, J., Ecrits, p. 558.
  2. Lacan, J., Seminar 19, p. 193.
  3. Cf. V. Voruz, It continues to write itself, https://congresoamp2020.com/en/articulos.php?sec=traumdeutung&sub=inventario&file=traumdeutung/inventario/19-10-17_it-continues-to-write-itself.html
  4. Lacan, J., Seminar 20, p. 131.
  5. F.C. Shanahan, F., “First Testimony: Dejar que pase…”, Ghent, September 2019, in Mental and The Lacanian Review [in press].