Words, then, are not made to name things. Are they made so that we can communicate? As a means of expression or transmission, they are of no use. For example, if I am with someone and I say Quiroga’s phrase A cold wind blows from the river, I am far from having transmitted meteorological information about the world or having expressed something about me. This is demonstrated by the wide variety of responses that my phrase could logically provoke. Here are several such possibilities:
–A cold wind blows from the river.
–If you want a coat, go get it yourself.
–A cold wind blows from the river.
–Yes, my dear, this place is very romantic.
–A cold wind blows from the river.
–Are you depressed again?
–A cold wind blows from the river.
–Don’t change the subject!
–A cold wind blows from the river.
–I’m tired of the wind too.
–A cold wind blows from the river.
–Yeah, I wonder where we can score some blow.
Look in any dictionary for the senses of the verb to communicate, and you will see how difficult it is to make these dialogues, perfectly possible and common, fit into one of those senses. These examples should be enough to dismantle the idea that words serve as a means of expression, since it is clear that the meaning of what we say will always depend on the way the Other reads it, and that is the ultimate reason why Lacan invented the matheme
s(A)
where s is the signified and A is the Other: meaning depends on the Other. The phrase A cold wind blows from the river does not state anything about the world and does not express anything about me, it does not refer to things or to the person who pronounces it.
In short, words are not made to name things or to communicate or to express, and yet they are here, in our universe and among us. Or, rather, we are there, in the universe of words. They were there, constituting our world, long before we entered the scene. Words, those strange things whose function is so hard to define, pre-exist us and even forge us as we are―those stranger things Lacan called speaking bodies.
But notice that, if we are outside the autistic world, from the beginning and long before we develop the slightest linguistic competence, we are spoken bodies, since words attract us irresistibly. They amuse and fascinate us, they calm and excite us, they scare and lull us to sleep, and in general they exert upon us the most varied effects. More suitable for something known as equivoque than for nomination, more favorable to misunderstanding than to communication or expression, words constitute a proper and autonomous order of reality; they alter those speaking and spoken bodies that we are, and so they weave all possible ties between us.
In a paper that may be the clearest watershed of his work, written in French as a neurologist but published five years later as a brand-new psychoanalyst, Freud compared the characteristics of organic and hysterical motor paralyses, and discovered that the latter were only possible due to the speaking nature of the body they affected. Indeed, the most striking thing is that this sort of paralyses does not obey the laws of the organism in general and the nervous system in particular, but the laws of speech. Hysterical motor paralyses affect the body as a function of the common names of the extremities: “the leg is the leg, until the insertion of the hip; the arm is the upper limb as it is drawn under the dresses.” The disturbance responsible for these paralyses does not affect bundles of neurons, but links between words. If the hysterical condition depends on the incidence of words onto the body, the most logical thing is to bet that words can cure those diseases of the speaking body. This is the way that psychoanalysis was born.
Hysteria is not the only disease of the speaking body. Depression, which is the great illness of the century, and addictions, which follow it closely, are endemic conditions of human beings—that is, of those bodies that speak and are affected by words. The same can be said of psychoses. No animal hears voices! Before discussing the problems of psychoanalytic interpretation, it is important to be clear about the fact that certain conditions depend essentially on the speaking nature of human beings, since no one should advance on that complex terrain if they do not understand why we interpret. Do we do it because we are hermeneuts eager for meaning, because we proclaim ourselves contemporary oracles, because we consider ourselves disciples and heirs of Champollion? Unlike what happens in Argentina, the precarious survival of psychoanalysis in the United States is based on the innumerable literary and cultural studies that use it as a kind of semantic-production machine. But what does that have to do with the analytical experience and the suffering of those who turn to it to live and feel better? A screwdriver can be used as a hammer, but…
The truth is that we do not interpret in order to produce meaning, but because words affect the body. One will never sufficiently appreciate this mysterious daily miracle. You attend a good stand-up show, and a handful of words will make you laugh until you cry and even may leave you breathless. A simple I love you can be enough to lift you through the air and pin a smile on your cheeks until they cramp. The fateful word metastasis can produce an effect equivalent to that of a fist that would like to break through your throat and tighten your neck from inside. In summary, words affect the body, and the way they do it depends on the words used and the way they are used. I mention this fact, which seems trivial but is enormous, because it is the key to what I will discuss afterwards about how the different ways of interpreting modify the economy of jouissances. At the same time, this opens a no-less important issue, an issue that I especially appreciate because it was the one that―twenty-five years ago and as a result of a bad experience as an analysand―motivated the writing of my first book, namely, the calculation of interpretation and the correlated responsibility of the analyst. Indeed, if different ways of interpreting have different effects, one can expect that it is possible to define interpretation according to the sought-after effect; and, as this calculation is necessary, the action of the analyst is an ethically responsible practice. Now, since I cannot deal with all these matters at the same time, I must leave this one for later.
What I cannot postpone is a terminological clarification required to avoid a new cupcake story. It is not another discussion related to the sense of interview, but a clarification on the meaning of to interpret. This verb comes from an ancient Indo-European root used to designate the action performed by the person who translates between two traders that speak different languages—i.e. what we still call an interpreter. Therefore, the fundamental, basic and primary sense of to interpret is to translate. What ancient dream-interpreters did was something of this nature. It was believed (and some people still believe) that dreams are messages from the gods, expressed in an encrypted and generally incomprehensible manner, and that the interpreter must decipher and translate them so that they could become intelligible to the dreamer. Freud deals extensively with this issue in his book on dreams, which also equates interpretation and translation.
Even if interpretation-as-translation is part of the arsenal that every analyst has in order to face the symptoms of their analysands, it is clear that such a way of interpreting did not wait for the advent of psychoanalysis to see the light of day. Therefore, there must be something that characterizes interpretation-as-translation better than what we have done so far and that, at the same time, shows what is innovative about psychoanalytic interpretation. On the other hand, I have translated many books and articles into Spanish, written by Lacan and other authors, and I can tell you that the translator’s job in translating and the analyst’s action in interpreting have almost no points of comparison.
To grasp the difference even better, the first thing to be understood is that interpreting is not understanding. In its usual sense, to interpret something is to understand it, but to interpret a dream is not to understand it. Freud noted that