Grammar

Abstract

In this chapter we will be concerned with the structure and location of the language that forms both the means and the object of psychoanalysis.⁴ Firstly, we are obliged to take note of a fundamental ambiguity introduced into Freud’s theory from the start, when he recognized both that symptoms are structured like a language — in the sense that they are only comprehensible when ‘read’ as a concealed and distorted expression of thought, whose translation into words allows them to take a place in the chain of events that constitute the experience of the subject — and that the means by which this ‘place’ is discovered, and by which the symptom is cured, consists in finding this translation, but this time in spoken language. Surely we cannot treat these two languages — the language of the symptom and the language of the cure — as the same? Surely it is precisely because the symptom is not spoken language that psychoanalysis becomes necessary? Having made the discovery that a symptom is the equivalent of a spoken message, a discovery that constitutes the very possibility of the talking cure, we are obliged to make a fundamental distinction between the language of neurosis — the incomprehensible ritual of the bed-chamber, the chronic and perpetually elusive ache or pain — and the talk with which the subject will conduct a boot-strap pulling operation, straining to bring into a coherent spoken account the little incomprehensibilities that open up to him the possibility of secreting his meaning inside a ‘symptom’.

I fear that we do not get rid of God because we still believe in grammar.

Friedrich Nietzsche¹

Old rule of grammar: what does not lend itself to declension, attribute to — transference.

Sigmund Freud²

The idea of passive includes in it the case, in which the action that I suffer is performed by myself.

A Greek Grammar, 1824³