Hebdo-Blog [1]: Jean Reboul, at the end of 2018 you published a book by Éditions Érès titled From the Clinic of Infertility to the Rendezvous of Desire.[2] Our colleague Augustin Ménard from the ECF, begins the preface as follows: “this book is above all, intended to transmit an original experience which from its singularity opens up valuable possibilities for many.”[3] For over four decades, you have published a dozen books on this question, written and edited several plays and directed two or three films (including one with Marie-José Nat). So, why this last book?
Jean Reboul: This book is not the last one, you have heard [me say] it [here]. Writing is an incurable symptom for me … a finished book is a soothed writing. The surprise is exhausted. The unexpected belongs to the one who will accept this encounter … From the Clinic of Infertility to the Rendezvous of Desire is a turning point in my practice. It is a review of a long clinical experience of my previous work. It carries another meaning, to testify to an openness, to an effort to encircle closely a real as impossible that I encountered very early on in my practice. You mention the diversity of my clinical approach and the means of transmissions used … Indeed, they testify to my desire to explore every possibility to account for an irreducible point of real that escapes science.
HB: Gynaecologist, hospital consultant, chief resident, PhD in biology – your practice of psychoanalysis allows you to form a hypothesis which is reflected in a number of fundamental propositions. This hypothesis is simple and clear: it is because science wants to explain everything that it does not explain everything. By going back to the course of this will, by challenging its hegemonic claim – and certainly not the benefit that it is in itself – we see how it annihilates singularities. Your first proposition is as follows: when its wonderful technology fails, medicine can be at the origin of a painful symptomatic dissatisfaction which, by its resonance in the body, leads to a paradoxical form of infertility jouissance. This then becomes an “obstacle”[4] to the desire for a child as such. Could you elaborate a little on this?
JR: You mention here a fundamental issue in my clinical experience. It is true, jouissance has destructive effects on vital energy by giving the illusion that everything is possible. The position of failure for a woman expresses itself in the infertility situation, when jouissance takes precedence over desire. Clinical cases, today as in the past, teach me every day in their singularity. Some of them, in the book, which I call timeless by the modernity they express, always surprise me when I mention them. Impotence is not the impossible and the illusion of the “whole” fills the bed of the desire for a child. It obstructs the latter by killing the desire itself and jouissance irrupts.
HB: A word often comes up, sometimes several times and almost in each chapter: that of mystery. On two or three occasions you even mention the mystery of incarnation. Undoubtedly, you mean the limits of our knowledge regarding conception. Lacan warned his students against what he called the “mystagogy” of not-knowing (non-savoir). A question then arises: do you exploit this vocabulary on purpose? Is it a way to counter “the excesses of the discourse of science that keep us away from fertility?”[5]
JR: Of course, the limits of our knowledge regarding conception you say. When it comes to the beginning, you have noticed that I speak more readily about procreation, of the enigma of origin. Procreation also refers to death. And the most subtle steps in the representation of images that biotechnology offer us do not open the secret door to the enigma of the beginning, which closes on a fantasy of omnipotence. Moreover, a woman is never appeased by the representation of these histological images that only capture a moment of the advent of life. Of course, it is not about the mystagogy of not-knowing, it is about this stumbling block of not-knowing and of what Lacan calls “sexual opacity.” As I repeatedly refer to the enigma, I really liked it when you mentioned that you heard what it carries in its function, that I try to protect in fact, by keeping it in the field of speech (parole), by giving it its full role. The enigma carries the fall of meaning as a possible cause of this singular time of which the subject complains, here infertility. It is an encounter with the unknown “in its operative decision.”
HB: You reproduce this incredible line from one of your colleagues – ‘eminent colleague’ as we say in a sort of antiphrastic way – who one day in the middle of a congress, threw at you: “today we have something stronger than desire.”[6] By a large number of well-argued and truly compelling clinical vignettes, you respond and demonstrate that “today, it is by filling the lack by all means that creates more symptoms that bear witness to an unconscious refusal.”[7] While you are still teaching at the Faculty of Medicine, is this what constitutes the mainspring of your work of transmission?
JR: During the drafting process [of the book], perhaps even more than the previous books, I heard more emphatically my desire to share with the medical world. Already in 2012, my project of a university degree at Montepellier’s Faculty of Medicine was realised with the agreement of the provost at that time, Mr. Bringer and now Mr. Mongin and with the support of Professor Pierre Marès. It is important to discover in the field of knowledge itself, each one from his place, that a purely objectifying elaboration always lets life escape. And that the desire of the physician has to be enlightened by the desire of the analyst. The clinical presentations that I prefer in this type of transmission – as mentioned by A. Ménard in his preface – refer with interest to the contributions of technique and speak to us about the subject of desire, the body that is spoken, the speaking body and the enjoying body. Last year, “the question of the subject in the time of neurosciences” generated exciting discussions with the most knowledgeable neuroscientists, who also opened up the essential space of the subject. This year, among patients but also clinicians confronted with their desire to heal, we will discuss the real of the symptom and its function of jouissance.
HB: You write: “there is no child without the function of the father that carries language.”[8] Is it not rather the opposite that contemporary issues illustrate? Or is it by considering that the function of the father subsumes all those of language?
JR: It is not about saving the father in the Freudian sense. The pluralisation of the Names-of-the-Father by Lacan demonstrates many variations of symptomatic knotting beyond the sole function of the Name-of-the-Father. I admit that in many cases, the de-subjectification of the human being leads to the arrival of children outside of the symbolic field. Despite the probable evidence, I think it must be considered on a case-by-case basis because it unveils the intimacy of desire. The clinic sometimes offers us the unexpected of a dead father, still alive: the love of a “realised” father. Of course, aside from the paternal metaphor, some of the clinical cases in this book evoke, for neurotics, the place of the Name-of-the-Father. But, indeed, it is otherwise for those who are outside of the Oedipal field.
HB: One of your chapters is titled: “Triumph of the Human.” There is an express humanist claim in your book, which is not one of the least interests that you support and which is accurately inspired by what Lacan reminds us of in the first years of his teaching. The decentralisation of the subject with the Freudian invention of the unconscious, does not make a return to the “humanist tradition” very effective. When you advance that “it is appropriate to protect {…} the enigma of life {…} which escapes representation,”[9] do you not think, that it is a courageous way of supporting that it must be kept in the field of speech and language, for the elementary reason that it is only in this field that each individual can encircle their conditions of singularity?
JR: Of course, the enigma of life can only be encircled by language. Let me refer to one of the clinical cases in the book and “the impossible choice as cause of desire.” After a treatment, an infertile woman informs her therapist of an insurmountable surprise when she discovers that she is carrying twins. The physician offers to eliminate one of them. When I meet her, the first word that comes to mind is, which one? Her quick decision is expressed by a soothed body, allows us to hear that these two children embody her division and that there is no question of separating from any one of them. Thus, it signals the analytical orientation of her quest. While remembering that speech allows each one in their singularity, to be as close as possible to the unsayable, but what is still necessary, is the use of language by interpretation, the equivocation of the word, which produces resonance in the body as the place of the Other.
HB: You quote your colleague – and, I believe, your friend – Professor René Frydman: “what we offer, is to increase women’s liberty, not to invent new constraints for them.”[10] Is it this ambition which realises what you call the rendezvous of desire?
JR: You point out here what I mentioned earlier about transmission in the medical field by means of the university degree. The “rendezvous of desire,” this place without place, applies both to the patients and the questioning of the physician’s desire to cure, which allows a greater freedom for the other.
HB: On two occasions, you speak a lot about your personal involvement and the analysis of unconscious reasons which have likely motivated your practice. Initially, in the first chapter, when you write the story about your encounter with this patient which allows you to accept to be overwhelmed by your act. Then, in the chapter titled “Presence,” you talk about – in a genuine way which is admirable in our opinion – of a screen memory analysed in your own cure. In your long and persistent use of psychoanalysis, is it one of the stones that you bring to the permanent work-in-progress of our Freudian cause, in recalling what Lacan taught that the analyst’s desire is not a pure desire?
JR: The analyst’s desire is not a pure desire …. thank you for bringing up the chapter “Presence,” which for me is essential. It is not about an example but about an experience that speaks in this book of what my analysis led me to. By allowing me to hear better the other’s desire. I leave it to your discretion and that of my readers to hear whether, in my “long and persistent use of psychoanalysis,” I bring a stone to the permanent work-in-progress of our Freudian cause, by recalling what Lacan taught …
Translation: Manuela Rabesahala
Review: Caroline Heanue
Photography: ©Reddman Frédéric : www.instagram.com/frederic_reddmann/
[1] Previously published article in Hebdo-Blog; issue 170; 2 May 2019.
[2] Reboul. J., From the clinic of infertility to the rendezvous of desire, Éditions Érès, Toulouse, 2018.
[3] Ménard. A., “Preface” in Reboul. J., From the clinic of infertility to the rendezvous of desire, op. cit.
[4] Reboul. J., From the clinic of infertility to the rendezvous of desire, op. cit., 22.
[5] Ibid, 67.
[6] Ibid, 30.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid, 49.
[9] Ibid, 66.
[10] Ibid, 26.
