When Jacques Lacan
died in 1981, a critical commentary in Le Monde accused
him of perverting psychoanalytic practice, using among other things
seduction and manipulation of the transference. This book could be produced as
Exhibit A, despite the fact that the author wrote a letter of protest to Le Monde which it did not publish; it is
included here at pages 268-70.
Consider the following,
from early on in these notebooks:
Now, without the transference, one
can’t act (page 92)
Monday, 10 May 1976
I look at my watch as I ring the
bell: 17h 43. Gloria opens the door and tells me to go into the library. I go
there, meet the Master who tells me to go in [to his
consulting room]. I come out at 17h 45,
two minutes later. It’s very good for my transference because that pulverises
it. Thus am I stripped clean. Two hundred francs a minute! .( p 93)
11 May 1976
Before Lacan’s Seminar,
Lacan says to her ….. Come and find me
straightaway, when it’s over. My neighbours are agitated and ask me, Was that
addressed to you? … Yes, to me. I feel like she to whom the Sultan has tossed
the handkerchief (p 95)
And so it continues for
some two hundred and fifty pages: He loves me, He loves me not.
I read this book for a
personal reason: I met Elisabeth (Sanda) Geblesco and her sister Nicole in 1971
and kept up a friendship with them until about 1978 when we lost contact. We first met on a train: they were sitting facing
me and introduced themselves by professing curiosity to know who was this
person reading a cheap French paperback of The Logic of Port Royal (Arnauld et
Nicole, La Logique ou l’art de Penser
1662). Elisabeth died in 2002; Google gives me no information about Nicole
later than 2017.
Un
Amour de Transfert was published in 2008 and transcribes
in two hundred and fifty pages the notebooks in which Geblesco kept a
session-by-session record of her supervisory (contrôle) meetings with Jacques Lacan in the period 1974-1981: Lacan died in September of 1981, aged 80. The notebooks were kept private
and not shared with anyone, not even her sister with whom she lived; they were
a secret diary. The meetings took place in Lacan’s consulting rooms (5 rue de
Lille, Paris) and Sanda travelled to them from her home in Monaco where she had
lived for most of her life, since the late 1930s in fact. I never knew her age,
which seemed indeterminate, and the introduction to this book does not give her
date of birth - curious in relation to a culture where necrology is taken
seriously and birth dates are always given along with death dates. My guess is
that she was born between 1930 and 1935. There is no English translation of
this book (it exists in Italian and Spanish and would merit an English version),
and translations below are my own.
I have left this rather
cumbersome review in note form, taking each notebook in turn:
Notebook
1
(pages 21 - 54) covers the period October 1974 - May 1975 and caused me a great
deal of amusement. Here Sanda discovers what it means to travel up from Monaco
and pay 400 Francs (cash in hand) to be supervised by Lacan: sometimes you get
8 minutes before he gets up and looks for you to hand over the money (p 25);
sometimes 3 minutes ( p 26), another time 10 - 12 minutes (p 28 - with the
additional comment that she got longer than any of the others who had gone in
for their appointment before her; one got 2 minutes). On the other hand, there
is also a session of 45 minutes and this is equally notable (p 26). But the
coup de théâtre has to be when Lacan is bored, stops listening, and turns his
attention to something else: he has
opened the drawer of his table and is counting his money … I have never seen so
much at one time, real money, except in the banks or shops (pp 39-40). From
this passage I conclude that during their meetings, Lacan sat at his desk and
she to one side, not opposite [ see further discussion below]. By page 47, Geblesco is expressing fury (The whole thing having lasted five minutes,
I’m furious) and calls what is happening a comedy. But she keeps going back for more …
By the end of the first
notebook, one begins to see the other side: the tragedy and first of all not
Lacan’s but Geblesco’s. In the course of their meeting on 27 May 1975, Lacan
compliments her on her work with a client whose case she has been presenting:
I
am delighted and leave feeling much better. He must have realised that it
wasn’t working anymore and was as warm as in the first trimester. Still, it’s
marvellous to hear it said by LACAN, the being who I admire most among the
living, that one is a good analyst!! I said to him that I was very happy and I
had the courage to thank him. He called me “mon petit” and that greatly calmed
me [me
repose beaucoup]. It’s him [ i.e, for once it’s him - TP ],
miracle, who has forgotten that I must pay him (p 54).
Lacan is seventy four; Geblesco
is forty or forty five. She was one of the two daughters of a Romanian
diplomat. Before 1939, Bucharest was the Paris of eastern Europe, French the
language of its upper classes in the way it had once been in Tsarist Russia. So
it may not have been at all strange for this diplomat to marry Berthe
Guillemin, direct descendant of the Bonapartist Marshall of the Empire, Jean
Lannes (1769 - 1809), first Duke of Montebello. And when the parents divorced,
it perhaps indicated something of Berthe’s social status that she took her
daughters to live in Monaco on the Boulevard du Jardin Exotique where Sanda and
Nicole shared an apartment for the
rest of their lives.
But Monaco was
also close to French home territory: the Guillemins were of the south of
France, not Paris, and Sanda was in contact with that extended family - one of
her cousins was married to the Duc d’Orléans, the person who would have the right to claim the
French throne if it was on offer.
In World War Two, the
diplomat Geblesco was consul in Geneva; whether he had any contact with his
daughters, I do not know [ but see my summary of notebook 4]. The war would have made it difficult but not
impossible. But, on balance, I suspect not. And I also suspect that he was born
around the same year as Jacques Lacan. And as a third suspicion: that Lacan did
not know the family history of the person who was paying him 400 francs to meet
him for a few minutes a couple of times each month. So when he called her mon petit it was a piece of guesswork,
though perhaps not entirely without calculation. (Why not ma petite? That is not common; the generic is normally used - it
abbreviates mon petit enfant).
And did Sanda Geblesco
realise that when she started keeping her secret notebooks, they might one day
be read as a young girl’s diary? Such inferences and questions are the obvious
ones, though maybe more obvious if you have read The Purloined Letter (to which Geblesco refers page 44).
I was a little in awe
of the Geblesco sisters. They did not fit easily into any of the English
categories I had available to me at the age of twenty four. They could be
imagined as blue stockings from their
dress, the intensity of their intellectual interests, the uncertainty of their
age. But they were also grandes dames
- a couple of times Geblesco refers dismissively to Lacan as a (mere) bourgeois.Yet they did things which blue stocking don’t do - when
Bob Dylan performed at the Isle of Wight festival in 1969, they made the trip. And
grandes dames don’t usually work for
child welfare services, Sanda’s background before she became an analyst. Both
sisters gave support to the Irish Republican cause, and when Sanda died
Republican Sinn Fein was represented at the funeral; the Sinn Fein obituary notes her
religious faith. (The editorial footnotes to this book are fairly minimal and
could easily be expanded to incorporate such information).
Notebook
2
(pages 57 - 95) gives us more information about Lacan’s waiting room. Since
sessions do not last for a fixed period of time, one arrives at an approximate
hour and waits to be called. You look at the others who are also waiting and
you time how long those who go in before you stay in the consulting room before
they exit. Lacan’s secretary Gloria is also introduced and one suspects a
little jealousy (page 90). [ Much later, Gloria is caught listening at the keyhole
(p 206) ]. Geblesco's loyalties are expressed without being demanded:
there’s no need to go to see Hélène Cixous’s play because it will be bad (page
86).
But Geblesco is not
simply a patsy; she turns the situation to her own advantage and gets value for
her money in other ways. She is building up her career in Nice and she does the
necessary negotiations for a lecture visit Lacan will make. She asks Lacan to
support her application for membership of the Ecole Freudienne de Paris (EFP),
his organisation. He authorises use of his name and when she makes the
necessary moves, she finds herself promptly admitted and publicly listed as a
practising analyst without so much as a CV submitted (p 71). [ Much later, when
it seems that her meetings with Lacan are coming to an end, she worries about
its impact on her professional standing in Nice (p 214) ].
Meanwhile, Lacan’s
degree of interest in the supervision can be gauged by whether or not he is
counting his money: Lacan stops counting
his money … and takes a lively interest …. Lacan starts counting his money
again. I continue… (page 74).
There was a thought
which occurred to me which I will not try to elaborate. On a couple of occasions,
Geblesco presents dream material attributed to a client; I felt it could have
been her own. Of course, it is a hazard of (rather amateurish?) supervision
that the person supervised brings along a thumbnail sketch of an analytic
conversation, inevitably re-shaped by their own preoccupations. Geblesco and Lacan are not sitting down together to listen to
an extract from a tape recording of an analysis which might reveal a different
tale. In supervision, the analyst tells the analysand’s tale, and in this case tells
it to Lacan who has very definite ideas about what he wants to hear.
Notebook
3
(pages 99 - 137). I drafted the two previous sections after finishing the
notebooks to which they relate. Now I feel I am more or less obliged to leave
them as they stand. Notebook 3 begins with a dozen quite extraordinary pages
covering just May and June 1976. It then re-starts at the end of October. In
France, nothing is allowed to disturb les
sacreés vacances, not even madness. (Holidays in France have the same
religious status as the NHS in England).
But the long break may have functioned
rather like the clock ticking away in the traditional analysis: the patient
saves the important things until the last five minutes. Geblesco treats June
1976 in the same way. On the 24 May, Geblesco tries to develop her own ideas
about female paranoia in relation to castration, the ideas linked to the
scandalous Japanese film Empire of the
Senses (Ai No Corrida). Lacan
turns his back on her (p 99). At the next meeting on 15 June, she launches her
attack; the extraordinary narrative takes up eight pages (pp 100 - 112) and the
editor rightly illustrates part of the text in its original holograph form.
Geblesco wants to distinguish the transference which forms part of every
analysis from what goes on (or should go on) in a supervision. She acknowledges
but attacks her own transference - her fixation (she doesn’t use that word) -
on Lacan. She says it’s ridiculous (p 101). She’s had a dream (she doesn’t tell
Lacan but inserts the narrative at this point) in which her jealousy towards
Gloria is obvious. In the dream the psychoanalyst Leclaire (who she does not
know) appears as a jealous scoundrel who tells her Lacan is dead. And so on.
Then she moves on to develop an interesting argument (to which Lacan gives his
full attention) about how an analyst is a specific, real person in ways which
mean that they cannot be helpful to any and every client indifferently. She
turns this argument onto Lacan and interrogates herself - in front of him - as
to what he might offer her, specifically, as a human being …. It continues at
length and then, Thus, my question
remains: What is it, beyond all the rest, of the BEING of the analyst, how does
it intervene in the analysis, what is it of their specificity, what is it as a
result of your being, of you in the analysis, and of me who receives? (p
105). It’s a passionate speech. Long silence. Lacan slowly and gently responds,
and she says he has difficulty looking at her. By the time she leaves, she is
high as a kite - at page 112 we get Aphrodite and Zeus and Dione, followed by
St John the Evangelist, filia
[brotherly love] in Greek and Laudate
Dominum in Latin - and then a flashback to the divorce of her parents.
But there is something
she says in launching her attack which suggests to me that she has also pulled
rank on the bourgeois Lacan who counts his money in front of her: I was brought up as one of Racine’s
princesses (p 103).
*
Meetings resume at the
end of October (p 112) with the first session reckoned “a good quarter of an
hour” (p 114) and continue up until Christmas (p 133) with the meeting on 14
December reckoned a “long session” - “at least twenty minutes” (pp 130-31)
included in which time is a discussion of what Geblseco should do about a
patient who she thinks may act suicidally during the Christmas break. Should I
tell her she can contact me in an emergency? Lacan: It’s up to you and, then, She
won’t do it (pp 129 - 30).
Geblesco reflects on
her intense feelings for Lacan and acknowledges the Father-identification (p
120); comments on other female visitors to Lacan (“high fashion” p 116; “very
beautiful” p 128); notes the hateful and frightened atmosphere in the general
assembly of the Ecole Freudienne (pp 121-22), and links her reaction on the
death of André Malraux at seventy five to the fact that her father died without
her seeing him again ( p 125), though she does not indicate for how long she
had not seen him [ see now summary of Notebook 4] - much later there is a very
curious reference to a psychiatric examination demanded by her father at the
time of the divorce (p 135). In this notebook, Geblesco acknowledges that she
may be writing for eventual publication ( p 131).
And so on. There was a
sentence which struck me very forcibly and deserves quotation: Beaucoup d’humains sont morts sans avoir
jamais parlé à personne - Lots of people die without ever having spoken to
anyone. ( p 125).
There is then a very
long gap before the last entry in Notebook 3, dated 2 April 1977, in which
Geblesco writes that she has been very ill - from the description, a reader
will infer cancer.
Notebook
4 (April
1977 - May 1978) opens with a statement that from the waiting room she can
overhear an analysis going on in Lacan’s consulting room (p 141); a second
incident, more dramatic, is reported at page 148. The salle d’attente system which Lacan operates strikes me as
amateurish at best and unprofessional at worst.
She says she is drawn to a male client, not
classically beautiful but … Lacan isn’t happy and at the end of the session
insists she returns the following week (p 143). On 13 June Geblesco writes a
sentence which could be a very good essay question, Love is analysis itself (p 147) and wants to know if one can get
beyond the conventional explanation of love, Because it was me and because it was him/her. Lacan issues a warning about her attraction to her
client. At page 148 there is a first remark about the fact that Lacan is
getting old.
Everything stops for Les Vacances and we jump from 14 June to
18 October 1977 on which date there appears to be no recognition that an
improvement in one of Geblesco’s patient's mood may be due to the fact that she
has had thyroid surgery and hasn’t been in analysis for the period of les vacances.
Geblesco criticises
Freud for a reductive/positivist failure to allow for any mysticism (p 150) and
Lacan wants her to come back for another meeting the next day. She asks herself,
Do I have to pay ( p 155). Yes, she does ( p 158 ) though she makes him take a
cheque. I love discussing with him but if
I have to pay for that, my means don’t allow me to do it often. At page 161
she finds it tiresome that there is no time to discuss a client’s case in
depth. Page 167 she makes a slip and asks for her next appointment on 14
February; Gloria laughs, presumably recognising a Freudian slip when it’s put
on a plate. In the entry for that date she writes that she has been talking to
Julia Kristeva about him. Kristeva says that she loves Lacan a lot. Geblesco
adds, Moi, aussi je l’aime beaucoup.(
p 168).
There is then an
important passage at page 169 where Geblesco appears to summarise what happened
to her relationship to her real father: one day he takes you to the cinema and
you never see him again.
Notebook
5
(June 1978 - September 1981). This last notebook chronicles the decline in
Lacan’s health and the eventual acrimonious dissolution of the Ecole Freudienne de Paris. The language becomes more religious - Bible phrases and so on with
magical numbers thrown in - and in other respects more abject: only illness has prevented me from obeying
him and to be there when he wished (p 212). This is not quite true: she has
shown herself capable of standing up to him and there is in this notebook 5 a
passage where she seems to be making a pitch to occupy Lacan’s place as a
thinker.
She says she wants to work up
the idea that The unconscious is
structured like a lineage and immediately Lacan terminates the session
which has only just begun (p 209).
(She is thinking of the way in which a psychological burden can be carried over
more than two generations, which I think is true). Lacan doesn’t like it when
she expresses approbation for anyone else’s psychoanalytic work: I believe he didn’t really like it that I
had expressed appreciation for A Didier-Weill. Not that he’s megalomaniac but
he’s fragile …(p 203).
We learn more about her
relationship with her own father. Lacan
is much more for me than my own father (p 216) and she cries when Lacan
dies, me who didn’t cry when my father
died (p 250). These more frequent references to her own life in the last
notebook, linked to Lacan’s decline and death, bring into the foreground the
tragic aspect of these notebooks. Geblesco has spent six or seven years of her
life making tiring journeys from Monaco to Paris and paying 400 ( latterly 500)
francs a time to talk for a few minutes to someone who treats her badly. And
maybe just because her own father treated her badly.
