The Plague of Fantasies (13)

From Slavoj Žižek's The Plague of Fantasies, (London: Verso, 1997), pp. 35-6:

The truth of desire, the knowledge of fantasy

The opposition desire/drive coincides with the opposition truth/knowledge. As Jacques-Alain Miller emphasized, the psychoanalytic concept of 'construction' does not involve the (dubious) claim that the analyst is always right (if the patient accepts the analyst's proposed construction, that's OK; if the patient rejects it, this rejection is a sign of resistance which, consequently, again confirms that the construction has touched some traumatic kernel within the patient...). Rather, psychoanalytic treatment relies on the other side of the same coin, which is crucial in psychoanalysis--it is the analysand who is always, by definition, in the wrong (like the priest from Jutland who, at the end of Kierkegaard's Either/Or, repeatedly claims: 'You do not say "God is always in the right"; you say "Against God I am always in the wrong"'). In order to grasp this point, one should focus on the crucial distinction between construction and its counterpart, interpretation--this couple, construction/interpretation, is correlative to the couple knowledge/truth. That is to say: an interpretation is a gesture which is always embedded in the intersubjective dialectic of recognition between the analysand and the interpreter-analyst; it aims to bring about the effect of truth apropos of a particular formation of the unconscious (a dream, a symptom, a slip of the tongue...): the subject is expected to 'recognize' himself in the signification proposed by the interpreter, precisely in order to subjectivize this signification, to assume it as 'his own' ('Yes, my God, that's me, I really wanted this...'). The very success of interpretation is measured by this 'effect of truth', by the extent to which it affects the subjective position of the analysand (stirs up memories of hitherto deeply repressed traumatic encounters, provokes violent resistance...). In clear contrast to interpretation, a construction (typically: that of a fundamental fantasy) has the status of a knowledge which can never be subjectivized--that is, it can never be assumed by the subject as the truth about himself, the truth in which he recognizes the innermost kernel of his being. A construction is a purely explanatory logical presupposition, like the second stage ('I am being beaten by my father') of the child's fantasy 'A child is being beaten' which, as Freud emphasizes, is so radically unconscious that it can never be remembered [....] The fact that this phase 'never had a real existence', of course, indicates its status as the Lacanian real; the knowledge about it, a 'knowledge in the real', is a kind of 'acephalous', non-subjectivized knowledge: although it is a kind of 'Thou art that!' which articulates the very kernel of the subject's being (or, rather, for that very reason), its assumption desubjectivizes me--that is, I can assume my fundamental fantasy only in so far as I undergo what Lacan calls 'subjective destitution'. Or--to put it in yet another way--interpretation and construction stand to each other as do symptom and fantasy: symptoms are to be interpreted, fundamental fantasy is to be (re)constructed....