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Every week, we invite you to explore a striking quote from a great psychoanalyst to reveal its depth and richness. These lapidary, often provocative formulas open up new perspectives on the intricacies of the human psyche. By deciphering these quotes with rigor and pedagogy, we invite you on a fascinating journey to the heart of psychoanalytic thought to better understand our desires, anxieties and relationships with others. Ready to dive into the deep waters of the unconscious?
“A Failed Act Is a Successful Discourse,” Jacques Lacan
Following S. Freud, who developed this theme in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, J. Lacan emphasizes through this aphorism how what his predecessor called “little signs” reveal what we seek to hide from ourselves and others.
Failed acts are phenomena that escape our conscious control and surprise both us and those around us. We often judge them as insignificant accidents, but this is far from the case.
They include slips of the tongue (in spoken or written language), forgetfulness, confusion of names or objects, clumsiness or even accidents. They are most often linked to our unconscious and to repressed thoughts, feelings or desires. Therefore, a failed act should not be seen merely as an error or misstep, but rather as the subtle means our unconscious uses to express itself. What we consider a mistake is actually a message to be deciphered, revealing the subjective truth of a person. For instance, repeatedly forgetting to attend an important appointment, meeting or class might express a certain ambivalence towards these situations, a reluctance or difficulty in assuming one’s subjective position in the given field. Similarly, calling someone by another name reveals the true buried feelings of the person making the slip towards the present person and the absent other.
The cited Lacanian aphorism is from his Écrits. He asserts that failed acts are true formations of the unconscious, just like dreams or symptoms. They constitute a discourse carrying meaning that escapes the subject, bearing witness to the subjective division between the more or less conscious ego and the unconscious subject. Where conscious intention fails, another discourse emanating from the unconscious makes its way and is heard.
This perspective profoundly renews the way we conceive the relationships between language, the body and the unconscious. It invites us to pay attention to the gaps and misses that pepper our words and actions to detect traces of hidden knowledge. Since the unconscious is structured like a language, it becomes the place where a speech unfolds that escapes the subject yet determines them. Formations from the unconscious are manifestations of what Lacan calls “lalangue,” signifying the infiltration of speech by unconscious jouissance lodged at the very heart of our discourse.
The following examples illustrate this eloquently: In 2010, Rachida Dati, then French Minister of Culture, stated in a television interview, “Increasingly, these foreign investment funds have only financial profitability as their goal, at excessive rates. When I see some demanding a return of 20–25%, with almost no fellation…!”
The same year, Brice Hortefeux, then Minister of the Interior, replaced the terms “genetic fingerprints” with “genital fingerprints”!
The following year, Claude Guéant, who succeeded Hortefeux, slipped by using the expression “electoral gode” (dildo) instead of “electoral code!”
Unbeknownst to them, these public figures express something of their unconscious truth, a truth that intrudes upon the smooth and controlled image they strive to present. Failed acts thus destabilize appearances and reveal the subject in their flaw, their fundamental lack of being.
For all speech, even the most controlled, is inhabited by another discourse, an internal otherness that escapes and defines us. We are spoken more than we speak.
It would be very erroneous to interpret these slips in light of an obvious sexual connotation. Indeed, one must beware of what Freud called wild interpretation. For, just as with dreams or symptoms, an interpretation can only be made in the presence of the concerned subject and with their voluntary and convinced collaboration.
This Lacanian theory has major implications for understanding individual subjectivity and for the practice of analytic therapy. Far from reducing unconscious formations to a univocal explanation, the analyst, through interpretations aided by the analysand’s free associations, patiently works to unravel the complexity of the unconscious’s enigmatic messages, to uncover their multiple significant resonances, enabling the subject to discover an “Other scene” that guides their desires, to become aware of it in their speech and behavior, and to assume the unknown part that determines them.
Experiencing this in analytic therapy is an opportunity for the subject to free themselves from imaginary identifications and invent a new relationship with their desire and being of speech.
