Truth has the form of a fiction. It is always “half-said,” but there is no other “half” to match it and complete it. This is true about the truth of psychoanalysis. I think that Lacan would refer to the “Purloined Letter” to talk about the truth of psychoanalysis and how it is inseparable from the subject and the signifier. I have a fantasy about Lacan always repeating this fiction throughout his career, in every critical moment, in order to say something about such truth; there is something in this detective story that functions like some sort of remainder of the Real, something that is always there and always comes back to the same place. It is not the story (or the character of Dupin) that hints the formula of “those who are not-duped err” or the formula of “there is One,” but rather the letter is the One that hints so.
An analysand comes to his analyst, complaining of his symptom–it has the form of an envelope. The symptom is not only the letter’s content but also its materiality. Psychoanalysis tells us that his complaint is, in fact, that of losing the symptom which he thinks is not truly his own but faked (we can say that his complaint is that of its extimacy). He sees his analyst as the “subject-supposed-to-know,” i.e. as the Other. Yet he, the analysand, is not a male, but “The Queen” and even if it is not so, he must be it; this is the meaning of the function of “hysterisation.” As Freud says, “Wo Es war, soll Ich warden;” where the hysteric is, the analysand must be.
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To read the compelete version, go to the following page (from lacan.com):
http://www.lacan.com/thesymptom/?page_id=1108