Symptoms as Knowledge: The Origins of Psychoanalysis

In psychoanalysis, the symptom is the primary form of knowledge. It is not merely that it guides a specialist’s investigations with a view to treatment, as is customary in medicine, but that it constitutes in itself, to use Lacan’s phrase, a case file: insofar as it is the manifestation of an unconscious conflict, the symptom conceals a truth about the subject who bears it. Of all the symptoms with which our discipline is concerned, it is the hysterical symptom that enjoys the dual privilege of having provided something akin to proof of the unconscious—that, for those who swear by Freud, the unconscious is not a hypothesis but a reality of psychic life—and of having become, by generalisation, the model for all psychoneuroses. In the hysterical woman, the conversion of libidinal quanta associated with repressed material into convulsive fits and motor disturbances—such as muscle spasms and arcs of the body—brought about the "miracle". A strange nebula made up of images and crossed-out words, of taboos and repressed impulses which, having fallen prey to repression, become detached from the emotional charges that go into the formation of the symptom. Psychoanalysis emerges with an original conception, which goes beyond medical semiology and links the exit of any possible treatment of neurosis to language: not the sign of an illness, but a compromise between antagonistic parts and a site of jouissance for the patient. All this dates back to Freud’s early days in psychopathology, when E. Brücke brought him into the orbit of J.-M. Charcot via a scholarship to attend his Mardis à la Salpêtrière in Paris. With these initial considerations, we have the first building blocks of an answer to the question of the place of knowledge in psychoanalysis: it is always elsewhere, out of step in terms of its modes of enunciation, not quite within medicine nor within philosophy; sometimes embodied (like a fingernail) in the somatic, sometimes a free-floating quantity in the psychic, or a wandering sign in the post-Derridian meanderings of Lacanianism – ectopic knowledge, in a sense, as Lacan says of the Oedipus complex in his "Proposition of 9 October 1967"… Or is it in Seminar XI: The Four Concepts?