Simultaneously

 
“It is an extremely dynamic and dramatic schema. One sees, first of all, a superposition of strata corresponding to what Freud notes, at the lower left, as the ‘depths of repression’. ‘Scenes’ or representations, potentially traumatic, are embedded there, like nuggets in a thickness of sediments. And then all of this literally begins to rise up: from the deposited-buried images, figured by Freud in the form of small horizontal dashes, three ‘symptoms’ surge forth, each of them associating several repressed scenes.
The energy of these emergences is emphasised by the abundance of diagonal lines, solid or dotted, which go back and forth but all converge toward these three small symptomatic tips: they seem drawn so as to suggest to the reader the idea that they would be capable of tearing through all the protective surfaces. They are like ‘arrows of time’ that have been raised up from their habitual and comfortable horizontality. They are untimely in that they are unexpected, aggressive, disruptive and almost, if I may say so, as joyful as they are dangerous. Like pikes brandished in the course of some revolutionary procession.”

Georges Didi-Huberman, Imaginer recommencer, Les Éditions de Minuit, p. 62

Félix’s notebook
Notes after the session with Lucian
(grey notebook)

I have just lived through one of those sessions where, by one of those reversals that only deep clinical work allows, the analyst finds himself caught in the trap of his own symbol.
Lucian brought me a complicated case; I find myself with a double case.
The discovery I made — or rather, that was made through me — is of the kind one cannot simply attribute to chance. The face that appears in the drawings, that half-erased, half-obvious figure, so vibrant one might take it for alive, resembles Lucian and, simultaneously, this Don Carotte who today calls himself Igniatius.
I cannot help seeing in it a form of telescoping: two lines of subjectivity, two unfinished silhouettes which, instead of opposing each other, overlap in the same shadow. This is not a coincidence; it is a superposition.
In Lacan, this takes on a very particular form. When a subject sees his own face in the other, and the other sees his face in the subject, this is not recognition. Nor is it a mirror effect. It is the revelation of one and the same symbolic place where each believes he is seeing the other, when in fact he is finally touching himself.
But here, the matter is subtler still: it is not Lucian who drew this figure, it is Igniatius. And yet this figure resembles Lucian… as much as it resembles him.
I tell myself that the person or persons we distinguish there are not a portrait… rather… that it would be a point of access. A door.
A strange urge came to mind. I said to myself that if I wanted to understand better how they function, I too would have to start drawing… and the result — a surprising result — did not take long to appear, despite my inability to render the depths of my thought legible. Very quickly there emerged from this little sketch something, a kind of illumination, that I can connect with what I have heard from Lucian… and… probably from Igniatius as well…

I am jotting this down quickly, before my gaze changes… but I already notice changes in my sketch… or else I am forced to admit that it may be my gaze that is changing…
A kind of race has set in without my noticing… as in my sketch, done as quickly as possible, barely a few minutes, so as to let in as much unconscious material as I could… I drew with large, marked strokes, strong contrasts, no greys at all, only solid black and white left blank — just a few elements to clarify my ideas and above all to try not to deceive myself…
The line is energetic, at times trembling, with contours not entirely closed. Horizontal format, delimited by an irregular black frame. One might have the impression of looking at a scene through a frame or a screen. One has to start somewhere… set a frame… even if later it might explode.
On the left, without even thinking — I will do that later — I traced a large descending diagonal, like a mast or a railing, bordered by a series of dark, repetitive shapes which, for an instant, I thought I saw as shadows of figures or as openings. Suspended at the top left, a sort of lantern or lamp, hanging by a ring, sharply tilted, almost about to fall. At the bottom left, broad oblique bands, alternating black and white, evoking a tent cloth, a sail, or a striped curtain… That is how, in the moment, I saw it…
Numerous cables, ropes and poles cross the image in every direction… On the right, two large dark curtains frame a lighter space, like a theatre stage or a recess. In that recess one sees a small suspended object: a circle with a little hanging shape below… I thought, without much conviction, of a clock, a mobile, a pendant, a stylised moon. At the bottom right, clearly, I saw a small human figure lying down or leaning very far forward, wearing a hat, seeming to pull on a rope or to be caught in the rigging. It is tiny in relation to the rest of the composition.
Once the sketch was finished, I allowed myself a few hypotheses… without in any way making a diagnosis…
There are diagonals everywhere in this sketch, the absence of a stable base, the ropes pulling in all directions create an impression of instability. Nothing is settled, nothing is really flat — like a ship’s deck in mid-sea, a tent whipped up by the wind, a stage out of balance.
I see tension there. The ropes are taut, they pull, they hold back, they support as well. One can see in this the way the subject tries to hold together something within himself that threatens to fall apart or collapse.
I also see control. Ropes also serve to control a mast, for example… or a curtain… which might be a sail, or a puppet. This can evoke a mode of functioning in which one must maintain tight control over emotions and thoughts so that “things don’t fly off in all directions”.
In a patient who does not speak much about himself, or who flatly refuses to talk about himself, this could suggest someone who feels an internal chaos but puts in place many devices to control it, order it, tie it down.
In a way, if I apply methodically my own therapeutic path and the analysis I normally apply to my patients, I have to say that I had, in my two hands, two destinies. In my left hand, that of Igniatius and the follies… not to say the dancing lights of the one he had become: Don Carotte locked in his struggle with the fire of language (I almost said “at the mercy of language”…); and in my right hand, that of Lucian, his therapist, apparently more stable…
— Igniatius, abandoned subject, without parents, without known origin, has always been searching for a form, a boundary, a face from which to speak himself. And now, into his life, there enters a man
— Lucian, who accepts, by inadvertence or by unconscious desire, to offer him a border of speech, a space of listening.
— The face in the drawings would then be the sign of a rarer phenomenon:
the appearance of a third-figure: a composite face, a face that belongs to no one in particular but that two subjects co-produce because they share the same hole, the same lack of origin. Both are, in different ways, foundlings. One by life, the other by language. That is why the drawn figure resembles them both: it is the imaginary form of their common point. A kind of absent ancestor who has slipped into the drawing as a synthesis of their two solitudes.
What worries me — and fascinates me — is that Lucian saw nothing until I pointed it out. This is where the dimension of desire emerges. The unconscious, Lacan says, is the discourse of the Other. Well, here, Lucian’s unconscious resides in Igniatius’s drawing. It speaks in the lines of the other, as though Igniatius had anticipated the form of the subject who would recognise him.
I must remain lucid: Lucian is caught in a relation of recognition, not narcissistic, but originary. He recognises a figure that is lacking in him and that appears in the other.
Igniatius, for his part, recognises in Lucian a figure he has never had.
This is not simply transference; it is a knotting.
Sibony would say that they are both seeking each other in the “between”: in that space where two lines do not quite touch, but where their distance becomes a bond stronger than presence.
And now, the crucial point:
Why did Lucian leave his notebook open?
I do not believe in the “forgetting” at all. I believe in the desire to see the other read what one does not dare to say.
I believe that Lucian, without knowing it, was waiting for Igniatius to discover this double face. Perhaps he was even waiting to see it himself — in another’s eyes.
What is at stake here is dangerous, because it is beautiful. And what is beautiful, in analysis, is always a little perilous: one seeks to enter into it rather than to pass through it.
My task is to guard the boundary. To prevent the vertigo from hardening into identity. To prevent one from becoming the other inside that silhouette that engulfs them.
But also: to protect this discovery.
For that is what it is.
Something is being invented here, between them, that I had never seen so clearly.
The drawn figure is neither Lucian nor Igniatius. It is what both of them lack. It is also their common point of origin.
The face of a scene that has never taken place, but which is waiting for them in the shadows.
To be watched very closely:
Where is this face going to lead us?