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Topology
Is there a robin sitting on the desolate branch of the tree that overlooks the window in my study? I said there is but by the time I could click a picture, the bird flew away. Does that mean the robin wasn’t there a moment back? What evidence do I have to prove it was sitting right there on the branch where it seems to have left no trace—not the least of shadows? My speech is my only evidence! This is a speech that reaches out into the world to all the robins that disappear by the day, by the month and by the year!
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There is something strikingly perverse in writing about evidence in psychoanalysis. The clinical method of talking cure has historically resisted the psychological idea of evidence-based medicine and insisted on suggestion and conjecture rather than scientific and experimental evidence. In our post-truth era of fake news, when the notions of evidence and verifiability themselves have undergone substantial revisions, can we revisit the idea of evidence in psychoanalysis? The point is to re-imagine evidence outside the structure of a strict correspondence between articulation and reality. Clinical speech is the only form of evidence in psychoanalysis and as we know psychical reality may not be in correspondence with facts of the situation. To invoke a much-discussed case of psychosis, the German judge Daniel Paul Schreber (1842-1911) felt that he was being turned into a woman by god. This fantasy is his psychical reality but there is no evidential relation between this and the real world around him. If belief without correspondence with reality is true in itself, how can we think of evidence as the verifiable machinery of truth? The only form of evidence we have is Schreber’s clinical speech that finds a personal expression in the memoirs of his illness. If speech is the only form of evidence for the unconscious, topology is the basic mechanism for this speech to function. In what follows, I will briefly lay out the idea of topology as a possible evidence for the subject of the unconscious in psychoanalytic psychotherapy from a Lacanian perspective.
Freud invoked the unconscious mind as a topographical space while Lacan introduced a more mathematical idea of topology to mark the space of the unconscious. Topological shapes like mobius strip, Klein bottle, cross-cap—show how the inside can be turned into the outside and vice versa. In Lacan’s vision, the unconscious is structured like a language and human speech is the psychoanalytic function we are dealing with in the broader field of language. This speech is topological because it is by its very conversational nature, outbound. Speech externalizes the internal in a topological way as we bring out words from within us to reach out to the Other, to touch the Other with our words. Speech as a social link situates the unconscious at the topological border between the subject and the Other. The unconscious in this sense is no depth of the individual mind but an inter-subjective social surface. Lacan grounds this surface through the warped models of topological space where the divide between the inside and the outside of the psyche melts away. The unconscious is thus intersectional. Speech as the condition of the human unconscious is intrinsically topological in its fundamental act of going inside out and outside in. We can understand how it goes inside out, but how does speech go outside in? It comes in from the outside by way of resonance. Hearing in this sense is part of speech. What we hear gets sedimented in the psyche in complex forms. When a trigger point arrives, we are able to remember (and hear again) sentences heard long back in the past. Topology works reciprocally between the inward and the outward turns of resonant speech.
Borromanian Rings
For Lacan, the subject of the unconscious is triply divided among the orders of the imaginary (image), the symbolic (language) and the real (the impossible that can never be pinned down by linguistic and imagistic expressions). This is another kind of topology, i.e., the topology of the unconscious subject. Lacan maps the intercutting of these three orders of the unconscious through the topological shape of the Borromean chain. In this minimal knot of the three, no one-on-one correspondence exists and yet the three rings are strung together by way of a topological twist that turns the inside of a surface into its outside. These three intersectional areas of unconscious topology are related to the practical function of the cut that shapes speech as a social activity. The analyst cuts into the analysand’s speech to mark the subjective pointers of truth that are housed in that order. The question remains how we can posit this topology as evidence in psychoanalytic speech.
It is common to find ‘transference dreams’ in clinical studies in which the analysand dreams their analyst as an evidence of the ongoing contact between the two unconsciouses. Another form of evidence often discussed is the negation of denial. Lacan observes, “There is no stronger evidence that we have been successful in our effort to uncover the unconscious than when the patient reacts to it with the words ‘I didn't think that,’ or ‘I didn’t (ever) think of that’” (Écrits, 753; emphasis mine). Let us see how a topological move underwrites this situation of negation. When the analysand negates the analyst’s interpretive suggestion, affirmation and negation lock horns. Together they generate a topological space of internal externalisation and external internalisation between the analysand and the analyst. The analyst says x but the analysand negates: it is not x. The x crosses over to the non-x as much as the non-x creeps around the x. The x and the not-x knot up, twist around each other and produce a dialectical truth. The evidence lies in this very labour of truth in speech as it wraps around the words of the analysand-subject and the analyst as a role-playing Other and creates a warp in the clinical space.
As analysts, we cannot verify what the analysand brings to the analytic table. But we have to trust the words that come to us and work with them. Let me finish with an evidence of transference from my practice. One of my analysands (let us use the name A) who had repeatedly experienced moments of self-observation in the past, one day told me about a dream. In this dream, A was sitting on the lounger and instead of sighting the self as an Other, standing in front of them, A saw me in that position. In other words, the analyst had taken the place of the Other in A’s self-observations. The analyst had thus supplemented a figment of the divided unconscious subject and established a transferential bridge with the analysand. But what if A’s reporting is not true? How can I determine the truth of this speech in the clinic? I cannot. But is there a reason for me to mistrust the speech? If there is no such reason, this speech itself is an evidence of subjective topology. The scenario is topological because the dream involves a continuous deformation of the space of the Other in the analysand’s psyche. The psychoanalyst comes to occupy a spot that was previously taken up by a part of the analysand’s unconscious self. To sum up, we need to conceptualise evidence beyond factual corroboration in trusting the speech of the suffering Other to pose it as evidence in psychoanalytic therapy.
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Last evening, I saw a woodpecker on the branch overlooking my window. It was absolutely motionless. I was worried if it had died, pecking the hard wood and yet somehow stuck to the bough. I had heard of such cases from my grandmother. With that troubling thought, I closed the window for the night. When I opened it the next morning, there was no woodpecker there. I looked down. Nothing. Was it alive? Did it fly away? Or else, if it was dead, was it swept away by the cleaner in the morning after falling from the tree? Did I hear the sound of its fall? Was there a woodpecker at all last evening or did I conjure it up? What is the evidence for any of this? There is none and yet I have a mind to write a story about the phantom woodpecker. The story will be my evidence. It will come back one day. I will wait.
Reference
Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Trans. Bruce Fink, Héloise Fink and Russell Grigg, London and New York: Norton, 2006.
