Under the sign of Plato

THE SEMINARY, BOOK 8 THE TRANSFERENCE
By Jacques Lacan-(Paidós)-Trad.: And Berenguer-580 pages-($ 48)

It does not stop being a strange phenomenon to the fact to be celebrating, with the own enthusiasm of the newness that finally arrives, the edition of a book that dates from more ago than forty years… Although it is certain that the education of Lacan has not familiarized to us with a temporalidad notion that goes to contrapelo of all idea of chronology ("Times logical, nonchronological", usually it is said in the union), is either question to exaggerate.

In this case, the temporary discordancia has been favored, in addition, for another reason. The seminary on the transference - the eighth of a total of twenty-eight that dictated Lacan- was published initially in France in 1991, but the edition presented/displayed a significant series of erratas that forced to review it and inhibited at its moment the translation to the Spanish. The book that today we commented is, then, the result of the corrected version one decade later.

Let us go to the text. A clear wire, of net raigambre freudiana and that does to aspects medulares of this singular office, crosses of end to end the twenty-seven classes of the seminary: Which must be the place of the analyst in the cure? From where it has to respond to the demand of the analyzed one properly? Which is its "true position"? What is, in short, the desire of the psychoanalyst?

And, peculiarly, Lacan is going to look for the answer in the banquet of Plato. In fact, first half of the seminary is consecrated to explore the speeches that follow one another in the platonic symposium, where each one of the personages makes the praise of the love. Until everything changes - and there the psychoanalyst with the entrance of Alcibíades in the scene puts the accent, a intempestiva, scandalous entrance, nonfree of etílica load, from which no longer she will be to do the praise the love but the one of the neighbor of the right. That is to say, one will be the love in act.

With the famous public confession of Alcibíades he is born, according to Lacan, the "first analytical transference": an eloquent loving declaration directed to that exactly considered wise person "only in the things of the love", Sócrates. But the answer of this last one, that it rejects to be the loved object ("it is not for me for who you have spoken, but for Agatón"), presents/displays all the characteristics of a psychoanalytic interpretation. From, Lacan it will accredit the enigmatic figure of Sócrates with the freudiana position there before the speech - sufriente and, of course, loving of his first histéricas.

Perhaps in the second part of the seminary, without the mystic of the first, tone he is more exploratory and appear outlines of theoretical developments that the author would shape in later seminaries. A critic to the contratransferencia notion, a commentary of the Trilogy of Claudel and a revision of the doctrine of the identification are some of the subjects of a route in which they stand out, in special, a class consecrated to the anguish and another one, the last one, to the duel of the analyst.

Anyway, one of the problems more interesting than crosses these pages has to do with the relation between the love and desire: how they articulate, how they take, how, after all, the love can so include in its heart - the finding socrático- something of the order of the lack. What the suggestive lacaniana definition remembers: "to love it is to give what it is not had".

We remained, first of all, with the echoes of the exquisite commentary of the platonic dialogue, that the own French psychoanalyst does not deprive itself to weigh. In addition to the one of Sócrates and the one to Freud, Lacan makes the praise of Lacan. For who never in these four decades has read this book 8 of the Seminary , in more or less legible versions, will be a true one to please. For who already has done it, also.