The body knot

Abstract

The text starts from the affects that are expressed through the body: rage, shame, sadness, joy, among which anxiety plays a key role in the Freudian work. The paper focuses on the central value of «the relation» between affects and representations and the extent of the term «soldering» (Verlötung) in order to link «affects» and «representation», which also applies
to Freud’s concept of the drive and the sexual object and the way in which the phantasy operates. If in Freudian orthodoxy there was an attempt not to consider the separation between affect and representation as essential that even led into thinking of a repression of affect just as there is a repression of the representation. Lacan clearly objected to the possibility of the
affect being repressed (a reason for the attack by Green), exposing himself to the criticism of an «intellectualism» that reduced the human being to the «parlêtre», who would only be of interest for the analyst in so far as he can talk, and cannot but talk. This is due to the fact that the «primacy of the symbolic» led to excesses and turned to the support on the Borromean
knot in order to sustain what he called «equivalence of the three consistencies ». None of them dominates and there is no coupling between two of them; there is no «soldering». The author thinks that the notion of consistency that led Lacan towards this equivalence of the three dimensions is better that the Freudian soldering, though they may accomplish the same
task: to tie together heterogeneous consistencies. In Lacan’s equivalence, what unites the real and the imaginary is conceived as the symbolic; what unites the symbolic and the imaginary is conceived as the order of the real, as long as this real moves away from the Freudian dualism in order to reach a triplicity that is more compatible with the analytic thing. Each one of the orders has the same value in the determination of the subject we accept in the transference. And it finally enumerates all that can happen to the body and which is part of what «perforates the word of the analysand», as long as the analyst can accept with simplicity these experiences with his presence, silent and respectful for the patient.