Therefore, there are three dimensions of the signifier. One is the diachronic dimension, which corresponds to the fact that the chain of signifiers unfolds in time and that at any moment the presence of a signifier excludes that of any other; in this dimension, anticipation of the meaning to come and retroaction of signification a posteriori (après-coup) take place. The second dimension is the diacritical synchronic one, where each signifier is what the others are not. And the last dimension is the synchronic non-diacritical one, which is that of equivoque. Although this would force us to represent the chain of signifiers three-dimensionally, for simplicity I will make it two-dimensional, with an implicit third dimension perpendicular to the plotted plane. For instance, consider the definition of subject given by Lacan in his seminar on identification: The signifier is what represents the subject for another signifier. This allows us to place the subject between two signifiers, that is, in reference to four places, since each signifier is defined by means of a difference―the barred S stands for the subject.
(I clarify, for those who are accustomed to using Lacanian algebra, that what I call here S1 and S2 does not have a necessary or rigid relationship with the mathemes of the four discourses, for example.) The third dimension (omitted here) corresponds to equivoque and must be imagined to be perpendicular to the plane of the graph.
Well, these signifiers are not necessarily those that interest the linguist, since they can be phonemes, syllables, word fragments, whole words, noises, silences, phrases, stories, scenarios, and in general they are a whole life for those who are caught between them. The challenge is to insert there (S2) a new signifier that allows the subject to change their position. Therefore, we will focus on that new signifier and on what might be calculable in its finding.
The subjective position is a place that we only conjecture once the subject has left it, just like an electron that may have revolved around the atomic nucleus since the Big Bang emits a photon when changing its orbit, thereby allowing us to conjecture where it was… once it is no longer there. We only know where the subject is due to some effects correlated to a change of its position.
This change is the minimum effect to be found in any interpretation, to the extent that symptoms, on the contrary, fix that position. Consequently, if subject position is defined as a function of two signifier pairs, interpretation will be defined as a function of three: two of the first position and two of the second, with a pair common to both. A couple of decades ago, adapting a Freudian expression, I called that common pair the bridge-signifier, since the subject must cross it when changing position, and that’s why I chose, for the cover of the corresponding book, the image of one of the bridges that I like most: San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. (The second edition of the book, published two years ago, has a smaller but famous bridge in Buenos Aires: Puente de la Mujer.) Thus, the sketch of any interpretation must contain that of the change in subjective position:
In the horizontal diachronic dimension, I include arrows pointing to the right, to mark the anticipation of the meaning with which each signifier operates avant coup (beforehand) on those that follow them, and arrows pointing to the left, to indicate the signification that, from each signifier, relies après coup (afterwards) on the precedents.
When the meaning of S2 anticipated by S1 is a posteriori validated from S3, there is no surprise, and that means that we are fully in the discourse of understanding, which, as it was already seen, we must avoid. When that is not the case,
the operation of S3 alters us in a peculiar way: it baffles us, or makes us laugh, or distresses us, or saddens us, which puts us on the path of psychoanalytic interpretation.
Let’s look at an example where it irritates us. That is the usual case with dad jokes. Dialogue: –How do I look? –With your eyes. Here S1 is How do I, which anticipates for look the meaning of appear to be (S2), but instead of an S3 that validates that sense (You look tired, for example), a surprising one appears (With your eyes), which makes the equivoque present in look resound, and extends the same operation to How, which passes from In what manner to By what means. The corresponding sketch has then this nature.
This is the structure of a joke. I could show you and explain to you similar sketches for the structure of puns, slips of the tongue, ellipses, etc., but this would force us to spend too much time discussing the linguistic aspects of the interpretation, which language scholars and hermeneutists can deal with, and it could make us forget the main thing we know about it, insofar as it concerns centrally the analytical experience: interpretation is based on misunderstanding and on equivoque of the signifiers that constitute the analytical tie, so that some of these signifiers, in search of the singular, touch the body in a homologous and inverse way to that of the symptoms, and so make it feel better.
Therefore, I propose to follow a different path, starting from what happens to the body in the symptom. Since hysteria illustrates this mechanism in the best way, I will take one of Freud’s oldest cases as reference, which he mentions in a fragment of his correspondence with Fliess published posthumously under the title of “Project for a Scientific Psychology” (Entwurf einer Psychologie). Freud discusses the case as a paradigm of the proton pseudos, which has nothing to do with a proton from atomic nucleus but instead with the previous (proton) falsehood (pseudos) required for such an illogical consequence to be derived from it as the hysterical symptom.
In fact, Freud introduces his commentary on this paradigmatic case by recalling that hysterical compulsion originates from a peculiar kind of symbolization which resembles the one at work in dreams, and you will notice that, if he talks about symbolization, premises and conclusions, it is because he emphasizes the signifying structure of symptoms. But then he adds that clinical observation tells us that all this happens only in the sexual sphere; in other words, a special psychical chain of representations is to be found in that sphere. This is what Freud intends to illustrate by an example: the way in which a concatenation of signifiers affects what he calls sexuality, which does not refer to sex or sexual relations, but―as you will see―to what in his 19th seminar Lacan defines as jouissance, that is, that disturbed relation to our own body. Disturbed by what? By words! Let us see how.
Here is what Freud writes about miss Emma Eckstein, an almost 30-year-old woman whom he had been treating since age 27:
Emma is at the present time under a compulsion not to go into shops alone. She explained this by a memory dating from the age of twelve (shortly before her puberty). She went into a shop to buy something, saw the two shop-assistants (one of whom she remembers) laughing together, and rushed out in some kind of fright. In this connection it was possible to elicit the idea that the two men had been laughing at her clothes and that one of them had attracted her sexually.
Next, Freud outlines a sort of logical analysis of this sequence. He says:
Both the relation of these fragments to one another and the effect of the experience are incomprehensible. If she felt unpleasure at her clothes being laughed at, this should have been corrected long ago―ever since she began to dress as a lady. Nor does it make any difference to her clothes whether she goes into a shop alone or in company. It is not simply a question of being protected, as is shown by the fact that