Real, symbolic and imaginary: the times that bind
David Pereira /1
Papers of
The Freudian School of Melbourne
Volume 2004 Anguish & Erotics
I want to begin by saying a few words before the time of the lecture. This instantly presents us with a question, if not a problem. How can I, having already started to speak, having already faced you, having already anticipated you, now speak of the time before the time? It is a question not unheard of in the passage from the door to the couch, assuming the form of something like: "Before we begin" or, "I want to say something before the session starts or after it finishes". The demand that is made there supposes a time outside of the analysis, outside of the transference and yet, in marking a temporal boundary, equally creates an inside of that time such that the request to speak outside of the fixed bounds of the session is nonetheless clearly within the transference.
So, my few words have no choice but to find themselves within the time of the transference; Blanchot's "outside time in time".
Time is something you give, you have given up, to be here this evening in order to hear what it is that I have to say. The time I give you, the time I give and have given to this project, does not keep a reciprocal relation with the time that you have given up. It is neither continuous nor consistent with it and yet they weave together here now. From this non-reciprocity, from this non-relation, let us see what conclusions might be drawn.
Not long ago, perhaps yesterday, maybe even tomorrow, although I will say it now, I was speaking with a friend - a woman - who is pregnant; she is heavy with child. Among other things we were speaking about the temporal shift brought about by the fact of pregnancy. Specifically, the fact that menstruation, the periods, cease for a time, and give way to a form of expectation. Periodicity is suspended by a form of expectant anticipation.
Periodicity is not continuity
Now, am I about to embark upon a theory of temporality based upon periodicity and gestation? In one sense, yes; though not so that we restrict this form of expectation to women who are heavy with child.
that is to say, not so as it pertains to a bio-logic. There is of course a moment in the history of psychoanalysis in which, in the context of the intensity of Freud's transference, the possibility of this path arises. Specifically, we find it in relation to the work of Wilhelm Fliess on periodicity and Freud's attempts to correspond with it. Counter, however, to Fliess's essentialism and bio-logic of rhythm and periodicity, Freud attempts, early on, to accommodate Fliess's theory - proposing a male period of 23 days and a correspondent 28 day female period - within a logic of time which did not fall prey to a bio-logic.
1 Psychoanalyst. Analyst of the School, The Freudian School of Melbourne.
In the letter of 25th May 1897 Freud writes that:
I was very amused by your analysis of the gestation periods. If only I had the geometry for this algebra The obscurity arouses the most interesting expectations. /2
What appears to be established here is a relation of periodicity to expectancy as arising out of the transference of Freud to Fliess; a transference which leaves Freud pregnant with the germ of an idea.
In the letter of March 29th 1897 Freud, in referring to Fliess's lecture outlining his theory of periodicity as occupying "an equally important place in biology", writes:
Cordial thanks for your lecture; it reveals an unbelievable power of condensing thoughts and in twenty minutes leads one through the universe. /2
What particularly holds our attention here is this power of condensing the universe to twenty minutes. Described is a reference to a temporal quality whereby the universe is condensed to a point. This quality is one which I suppose — at the outset at least - to arise out of a relation of periodicity to expectation. In any case this is our starting point; periodicity as inviting a possible structuring of the universal and the particular - eternity and its ex-sistence in the instant indicating itself in the condensing, the closing down or tapering of time as a point of density.
This reference to a relation between an instant and a universal or infinitised extension of time is something of a motif in Freud's correspondence with Fliess around the question of periodicity. It is clear, for example, in the letter of October 3ra 1897 where Freud, once again in the context of Fliess's theory of periodicity, differentiates between the eternal life of the protoplasm - absolute time, and the life of the individual - life time.
These distinctions are some of the first - appearing in response to the biologism of Fliess's theory of periodicity - where Freud develops a logic around time which will allow him to nonetheless claim the unconscious to be timeless.
The unconscious, therefore, Freud tells us is timeless, and yet it is also caught up in the knot of time given by the transference; the way in which anything of the unconscious is able to be known. The transference is what gives time its density as well as its consistency or continuity, and its periodicity. Freud's contention about the timelessness of the unconscious, then, given the many references he makes to the question of time, may be viewed as a critique of the notion of time taken purely as continuity as such; continuity which is carried by the consistency of the measured phenomenon of duration. Freud's critique thus concerns the phenomenology of time as something given to experience and subject to measurement, subject to spatial extension such that the analogue of time is given by the continuous straight line.
The assertion about the timelessness of the unconscious, therefore, may be viewed as a critique of the essentially Aristotelian conception of time taken up most notably by the likes of Brentano and Bergson. In these conceptions, continuity, given as measurable, reigns supreme. It is a conception which, contrary to our pregnant moment, fails to be able to recognize a difference between continuity and density whose border is drawn by periodicity. Freud's correspondence with Fliess around the question of periodicity, then, serves to establish a separation from the notion of time as measured in its continuity by duration. This, in its turn, leads to the possibility of the condensing, the density, of time as given by the transference and the weight of expectation.
2 Freud, S. Letter of 25th March 1897, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887-1904, Jeffrey Masson (Ed.). Harvard University Press, 1985.
Gaston Bachelard, in his work The Dialectic of Duration (1950) takes up in his turn a critique of Bergson's notion of duration. /3 It is instructive for us inasmuch as in this instance, it is a turn away from psychoanalysis. Starting from a similar initial critical position with respect to the question of temporality, Bachelard arrives to a different conclusion. Why? Bachelard is influenced by the Brazilian philosopher of the 1930's, Pinheiro dos Santos, whose work Rhythm analysis, a work which was never published and the only known copy of which was sent to Bachelard, produces a theory of a vibratory harmonics which finds its roots in biology and nature at large. Ultimately these vibratory harmonics find expression in "the solidarity of couples" articulated as a moral principle.
From our point of view it is instructive to note that the critique of time as duration made there, nonetheless maintains through the "solidarity of couples", a continuity and consistency which avoids the rupture of density as that element that we are drawing attention to in these pregnant moments.
Density ex-sists to periodicity and continuity
To turn again, to re-turn, to these pregnant moments in the analysis, we find them to possess a certain weight marked by a tightening or heaviness in the session given by the subject's relation in the transference.; the subject as pregnant with the other, pregnant in his relation to the other. What constitutes this moment of density in which something is said as much as it is withheld? It is a moment which both expresses something but also suffers as inability to tell it. The simultaneity, in Levinasian terms, of the clandestine and the exposed.
These are fertile moments in the analysis marked by a relation of periodicity to expectation and the density it engenders. One finds in these moments a tightening, a contraction or closure of time, a ripening productive of an expectation, which in being given by periodicity, yet exceeds it in the direction of what is not realizable as an empirical entity but a temporal one. Time is suspended in its flow despite the fact that the clock keeps ticking; suspended in an interruption to the flow, an interruption to the measurable hiatus of periodicity. It is suspended by an intensity calling for a judgment, an action. These are moments of realization, moments of the weight of words which no longer wait on yet another signifier, but in being marked by haste move irrevocably. The contraction becomes of the order of a contract which binds one to an unspeakable proximity, to an uncommunicable immediacy.
To refer to these moments as "subjective" does not capture what is at stake, if by "subjective" we understand them to be given as an experience, a phenomenon, to a subject with a guaranteed a priori existence. If we are to view them as "subjective" it can only be insofar as time is of the subject and the subject is of time. The question is no longer the one which has detained philosophers throughout the ages - "what is time"? But "who is time" and what it is that becomes of time through the assertion "it is time".
What might be expected of an analysis hinges on these moments, these pregnant and concluding moments where one encounters something more than what one expected; one encounters a density.
3 Bachelard, G. The Dialectic of Duration. Clinamen Press, 2000.
Real, symbolic, consistence imaginary - density, hole, consistence
The density being referred to, the weight, separates itself from the notion of the consistent and the continuous; separates itself form time as duration - whether fixed or variable. Such a density even separates itself from time as structured solely by the dimensions of presence and absence given by periodicity. There is a distinction to be made then between the consistency of continuity and density as such which ex-sists to, is tied outside of, such consistency. /4
Within the work of the mathematician Richard Dedekind we come across such a distinction between continuity and density. For Dedekind density is given by the fact that between any two moments there is a third and therefore infinitely many others. This density between any two is, somewhat counter- intuitively, called a "cut".
It marks a non-continuity or non-relation between one moment and the next. There is no solidarity of the couples so favoured by Pinheiro dos Santos. One moment ex-sists to the next; that is, is non continuous. The "cut", in the sense in which Dedekind defines it, is a density which ex-sists to the continuity it
nonetheless forms part of. It is tied to it from outside of it. The cut, then, is not simply a matter of an absence or a void which could be given by periodicity. The cut defines a density beyond periodicity and consistency and yet is not entirely separable from them.
The third, then, that is supposed between any two as a tempero transferential phenomenon, is not a phenomenon of continuity given to experience in the way of the Aristotelian conception of time and the Bergsonian notion of duration, but a non-phenomenon of density and "cut".
4 Such a distinction, as we have been arguing, is made possible by the fact of periodicity.
This "cut" is the ex-sistence of the real of expectant density, given by the hole of symbolic periodicity, separating itself from the imaginary consistency of time measured as duration, which it nonetheless forms part of. Density therefore is not consistency of continuity, neither the structuring of simply the periodicity. Density ex-sists, that is to say, is linked to them whilst at the same time being outside of them. /5
Cut and knot
The moment of the "cut" in Lacan's first formulation of the logic of time, is a moment of conclusion with its logical function of haste and anticipated certainty. A question we might ask is what happens with a "topologic" of time once Lacan places the real, the symbolic and the imaginary within the functioning of a knot? Is the knot one way in which we might think through this moment of a tightening and binding to the point of a certain density; this pregnant moment in the analysis? Initially at least we ought to separate the notion of the cut, as we have elaborated it, from its degradation in being seen solely as the "cutting" or ending of a session or even an analysis. Such would constitute a practice which would confuse the cut with an interruption. With this the cut would be relegated to the status of periodicity rather than den ity; joining hands in a solidarity of couples with Pinheiro dos Santos and his Rhythm analysis.
Neither do we get very far, however, by simply grafting the three registers onto three times. There is little value in grafting the imaginary onto the instant of the glance, the symbolic onto the time of comprehending and the real onto the moment of conclusion. The question we are left with concerns the relation between the cut and the knot.
5 Near the end of the Second Division of Being and Time, Heidegger similarly writes of temporality as "the originary outside itself in and for itself"'. In its ex-sistence, its ecstasis, temporality finds its density.
In the first formulation on the logic of time — the prisoners' dilemma — the prisoners' task in order to escape captivity was to draw a conclusion based upon logic concerning the colour of the disc upon his back via what he sees and comprehends concerning the discs on his two fellow prisoners' backs. After the theory of the real, the symbolic and the imaginary functioning as a knot, Lacan proposes that the analysis concerns a turning and re-turning such that one passes twice around there where one is a prisoner, producing then a knowledge of where/why one is held captive /6. The moment of conclusion is tied to the function of the knot and how it is tied. The analysis is not simply a cut and run.
6 Lacan, J. Le Séminaire 1977-1978. Le moment du conclure. Lessons of 17/01/1978 and 14/03/1978.
It is in this way that I have understood an assertion made by Maria Ines Rot miler de Zentner in her paper The Follies of Time - one of a series of papers dealing with this question of time in clinical psychoanalysis:
I do not oppose interpretation to the cut, on the contrary, they are equivalent when they are not the same. /7
What this leads me to conclude, following what I have just said about the definition of a "cut' offered us by Dedekind is that we ought not confuse a "cut" with an ending of a session or even of an analysis. The "cut" is that which produces a subject out of non relation, non-continuity, as indicated by the pregnant temporal moment we are here examining.
Where then, you ask, is the conclusion? Everybody asks about the conclusion. It has the currency of a certain fascination. The conclusion cannot be a question; it has the form of an anticipated certitude. It is an assertion. Not, "what is the time?", for a certain Mr Wolfman an eternal question which never condenses to the weight and density of a point; but rather an assertion, "It is time"
The conclusion which we arrive to comes not just with the "cut", but with the knot and the way it is tied in producing this cut. When Lacan explicitly returns in 1974 to the three registers of the real, the symbolic and the imaginary designated in 1953 as three distinct registers essential for human reality, it is in order to reveal their function within a knotting and chaining.
Can we not suppose that Lacan's reference in his seminar Moment of Concluding, to the end of an analysis as a turning twice around there where one is a prisoner, refers us once again to the prisoners' dilemma of his earlier sophism on time? Such a re-turn to the value of this sophism, even if not explicit, introduces us to the temporality of this turning and re-turning as a method in which a knotting takes place.
What we are proposing then is that the function of the cut is one which is produced through a knotting derived from a turning and returning. It is through this that the knot's relation to the cut as temporal density is established as a manifold of relations as much held together as kept apart; this being one of the particular features of a knotting.
What the knot does is tie this temporal density within a turning and a re-turning which does not see time exhausted by the categories of duration and periodicity (which we cannot do without), but gives to it the density necessary for action. The temporal modalities of the three registers of the real, the symbolic and the imaginary - the density of expectation, the hole of periodicity and the consistency of duration and continuity - are linked in such a way as to produce an outside of itself from inside in order that a moment conclusion be realized.
Proximity
To what is it that we tum and re-tum? My pregnant friend, whom I have not forgotten, reminds me that the relation between periodicity and expectation places time, not on the transcendental horizon as it was for the Heidegger of Being and Time, but as it was for the Heidegger of some 40 years later in On Time and Being, provoking a return to the other; a turning and re-turning which leads to a sheer proximity to the other in his presence at hand to me.
Heidegger's Being and Time stops at this point of return as marking a place on the horizon of time. With Time and Being, however, time is no longer on the horizon but in a density given by proximity to the other. This is the time of concern, of care; the time of dealing with the other as ready to hand. In these pregnant moments we are faced with a turning an re-turning from the temporality of distant horizons to the dense proximity of "everydayness". The other demands a response from me which can be neither too early nor too late, but also not in conformity with time measured as duration and continuity but as a time of concern in which the density of the my relation to the other is given there where I am trapped with him.
His present at hand is not a gift for me, other than the offer of a moment in which the insufficiency of the present as ontological horizon, as full presence, is no longer redeemable through a relation to a past as a simple dynamism of past and present. Neither is it a gift through a relation to the future as the hope to which the present eventually arrives. Rather, in my turning and re-turn to the other, in my anticipation of the other, in the manner in which my expectation is constituted, I constitute my openness to the arrival of the future to the present as a density which interrupts my destiny as pre-given, as fully pre-sent. These are the fruitful, fertile, pregnant moments of the transference within which the possibilities of analysis are to be taken.
These moments may be thought of as turning points, a turning and re-turning which produces a temporality whose density indicates a presence at hand. This hand, however, carries no gift for-giving. It is a presence which ex-sists and is devoid of the waited upon and longed for consistency of the gift of time - its consistent and continuous duration. The presence, then, is without the fullness of the present.
7 Zentner, M..R. de, "The Follies of Time." Papers of the Freudian School of Melbourne. D. Pereira (Ed.), Vol. 17, Melbourne, 1996, p. 141.
"Presence at hand" both joins and separates the fullness of the present, the past and the future. It both joins and separates the ex sistence of the density of the real, the periodicity of the symbolic hole and the continuity of imaginary consistency. The later Heidegger of On Time and Being designates this presence at hand, this proximity, as a fourth dimension of time separated from and yet joining past present and future. It is he writes an "interplay" through which the three other dimensions remain near one another and yet separate. /8
Is this not the transference itself which constitutes a fourth dimension of time, a fourth knot which is produced out of a turning and re-turning which both joins and keeps separate the other three within a knot? The time of transference, then, is the time of the immediacy and density of presence at hand. If psychoanalysis is a practice of cutting and splicing, of cutting and knotting, it is a practice still grounded in the transference as a presence at hand; a the time which binds the consistency of imaginary duration, the periodicity of the symbolic hole and the ex-sistence of the density of the real as an effect of the analysis.
8 Heidegger, M. On Time and Being. Harper and Row, 1972, p. 15.