Pioneers in Object Relations Clinical Thinking:
What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?
But what Freud showed us… was that nothing can be grasped, destroyed, or burnt, except in a symbolic way, as one says, in effigie, in absentia.
That the Sadian fantasy situates itself better in the bearers of Christian ethics than elsewhere is what our structural landmarks allow us to grasp easily. But that Sade, himself, refuses to be my neighbor, is what needs to be recalled, not in order to refuse it to him in return, but in order to recognize the meaning of this refusal. We believe that Sade is not close enough to his own wickedness to recognize his neighbor in it. A trait which he shares with many, and notably with Freud. For such is indeed the sole motive of the recoil of beings, sometimes forewarned, before the Christian commandment. For Sade, we see the test of this, crucial in our eyes, in his refusal of the death penalty, which history, if not logic, would suffice to show is one of the corollaries of Charity.
The sentence completes its signification only with its last term.
Desire is the central point or crux of the entire economy we deal with in analysis. If we fail to take it into account, we are necessarily led to adopt as our only guide what is symbolized by the term ‘reality,’ a reality existing in a social context.
An interpretation whose effects one understands is not a psychoanalytic interpretation.
The analyst asks neither that the subject get better nor that he become normal; the analyst requires nothing, imposes nothing. He is there so that the subject may gain access to the truth of his desire, his own desire, and not so that he may respond to the Other’s demand.
All speech is demand. Every demand [is] a request for love.
