The place of voice in psychoanalytic clinic

Abstract

Title: The voice and the psychoanalytic clinic.
Author: Jean-Michel Vivès. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Back Cover, 2012,

Go, naughty book,
And tell her
That one day I sang this song of Lawes:
Had in us
More song, less themes,
Then my sorrows would be over,
My defects healed in poems
To make it eternal in my voice.

Erza Pound - Envoi (1919)

The change of position of the place of the voice in the clinic inaugurated the psychoanalysis. The promotion of patient listening and the recognition of the value of his speech overlapping the voice of medical knowledge established psychoanalytic practice as such. This innovation could happen because Freud listened and was docile to the hysteric. In resisting hyponse, they forced him to listen to them. He silenced the voice by taking it as a pulsional object and offering him the enigmatic field of silence necessary for the dictation of his patients to modulate a saying. To speak and to listen, circuit that evidences the effects of the said on the saying according to a hiatus in which we situate the subject and the borders of his joy.

The voice as a drive object was conceptualized by Jacques Lacan based on Freud's list of instinctual objects, which essentially located the oral (sinus), anal (faeces) and phallic objects (the phallus). In the work of the French psychoanalyst, the voice approach has its origin in the study of the psychotic hallucinations that invade and possess the subject, as can be seen, notably, in the paranoid delirium. Lacan, however, quickly extracts the voice object from this psychopathological particularity to include it in the very dynamics of becoming subject. This démarche introduces the voice as an object of the invocation, alongside the sinus (oral drive), the feces (anal drive) and the gaze (scopic drive).

In the drive field, the invoking drive acquires, little by little, particular status because of its close connection with the signifier and the speech. Since then, we know that the emergence of the subject and his inscription in the human group must be understood as being strictly linked to the mobiles of the concert of the voices that surround him. Lacan's developments on object voice, however, are rare and sparse, especially if compared to the various lessons of The Seminary, book 11; the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis (1964) consecrated to the look as object of the scopic drive.

Today, those affiliated to the transmission line of Freud and Lacan know that, in the experience of the clinic, giving voice to the analysand corresponds to making it work under the conditions of a discourse, so that it may produce something new, as a consequence not of the unprecedented sense of the mutation of the regime of enjoyment that accompanies it. The analyst's listening promotes a deciphering of the material conveyed by the voice, whose presence is the manifestation of the unconscious under analysis. The material revealed by the unconscious is subject to discourse, interpretation, all sorts of misunderstandings, whereas the voice is what disturbs the meaning, stuns the said, breaks the logic and produces a different physical resonance from the one that is He fixed it on the guy. In other words, the interpretation as cut breaks the sense and highlights the voice as object: what remains forgotten behind what is heard.

Such a question about the voice behind the sayings constitutes the axis of this book. Jean-Michel Vivès's research focuses on the pulsional dimension of voice and the materiality of sound in its acoustic, gestural and graphic modulation. In the texts gathered here, he seeks to specify the mobiles of the voice in psychoanalysis, approaching them both via the metapsychological and the light of psychopathology.

Throughout the reading, the reader understands the radical ambiguity that characterizes the voice. It pacifies because it transmits the law by marking the scansions in speech, but also subverts because it seduces by the absence of meaning and is endowed with the power to ignite passions. Vivès elaborates his hypotheses and conclusions by crossing over two privileged places. On the one hand, taking advantage of its clinical practice, it makes its commitment to a very particular ethic emerge from its text, namely, to accept what is of the order of the unknowable and the impossibility of ready answers; On the other hand, he extends his research to some expressions of the voice in the culture, like the opera, considering it a staging of "voices", since the song "tries to approximate what speech can not apprehend." It should be added that his training as a musician favors him in his arguments about either positivity or the negativity of the role of the voice in the constitution of the subject.

From both places where the author speaks, the path of his transferential links is revealed: the return to Freudian texts, the Lacanian orientation, the taste for research and the arts. It is possible to weave a text without removing it from the dimension of the libidinal satisfaction at play in every production, that is to say, the literary space, expression wielded by Maurice Blanchot, can be approached psychoanalytically as a field of enjoyment, one who writes to transmit something capable of involving us. In co-writing another book of the Janus Collection, the Freudian Body of Rio de Janeiro, Institution Member of Convergence, Lacanian Movement for Freudian Psychoanalysis, once again offers readers the opportunity to get in touch with texts that contribute to the transmission of psychoanalytic discourse, in his bet to exercise the "what is said", so that the unheard.