Thoughts on Lacan's Seminar V : Obsession and Death Drives

Metamorphosis of Narcissus by Dali.

Public Domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamorphosis_of_Narcissus

This title is deliberately odd. First of all I refer to the text I have been reading as a "seminar". However, it was never written as a book. It was delivered orally and then transcribed. The afterlife of these transcripts, is best in the hands of archivists and Lacanians, who are gathering the various documents, oral testimonies, and notes.

It follows from this that it is impossible to cite any definitive Urtexte because Lacan’s seminars have been subject to interpretation and reinterpretation from their transcripts and hearers, let alone dozens of translators.

Third, it must be underscored that these texts remain raw. Though the seminars craved editorial input, it never happened for decades. The transcripts anonymously amongst the Others, who in this case were devoted colleagues and pupils. Not surprisingly the circulation of raw transcripts led to suspicion, legal debates about ownership, and -the very big question- as to whether Lacanian teachings and the psychoanalysis he constantly reconstructed could ever be transmitted in an authoritative, unitary, and smooth fashion.

For the purposes of this brief note, I indicated how, towards the end of this seminar, Lacan comments on the concept of obsession. He believed the root obsession was a persistent rumination as to whether the Subject itself was alive or dead. Death is therefore a necessary association (or signifier) for any Lacanian account of obsessiveness.

Freud’s death drive is perplexing. Is it singular, plural, or both? A similar question can be asked of his love or life drives. The answer of course, is both. Whatever Freud meant by drives, their trajectories are not immutable. A drive can trigger and change into  its opposite. Drives have circuits indeed, but their timings, trajectories, comings, goings and spheres of operation can be inscrutable….. in other words “unconscious”

What I find strange about Lacan’s interpretation of Freudian death drives is that he studiously avoids any reference to anything physical or organic. Freud’ death drive was primarily interpreted by himself as organic. As in Dali’s representation of Narcissus, subjects undergo or desire to undergo metamorphic changes -especially from organic sates to inorganic. Of course there was a psychological dimension to such a drive or drives. But death was not solely restricted the associations of signifiers -however unconscious.

The history of psychoanalysis can be perplexing. Even when Freud was still working and writing, there were many analysts who completely rejected Freud’s death drive. Max Schur, was such a one. Schur (1897-1969) became Freud’s GP in  Austria after the founder of psychoanalysis lost confidence with his previous doctors. He accompanied Freud to London. Schur wrote an incredible book about Freud which remains first class but sadly ignored.To be forthright -it was Schur who looked after Freud’s cancer and assisted him to die. Doctor and patient had a pact. When the old man experienced his pain as unbearable, Schur agreed to inform Anna of her father’s decision and administer a lethal dose.

There were other contemporaries that welcomed the theoretical and practical presence of death drives. Kurt Eissler (1908-1999) was a veteran Austrian analyst who later worked in America. It was Eissler who for many years was responsible for the Freud Archives and collecting interviews from contemporaries- like the family of Little Hans. Finally an abiding inspiration for Lacan was Melanie Klein for whom death drives were psychological, imaginary, symbolic and real processes operating within and without subjects

During the final sections of Seminar Lacan speculates about the word in the beginning. Obviously a reference to the opening of the fourth gospel, whose author is named John. The biblical text continues:

 Καὶ ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο,

καὶ ἐσκήνωσεν ἐν ἡμῖν — καὶ ἐθεασάμεθα τὴν δόξαν αὐτοῦ, δόξαν ὡς μονογενοῦς παρὰ πατρός — πλήρης χάριτος καὶ ἀληθείας.

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only Begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth. John 1:14 King James’ Version

But does Lacan’s word ever become flesh? The opposite seems more apposite to me. Rilke tried to make the world invisible with his poetry; similarly Lacan’s signifiers dissolve things fleshly into an infinite succession of associations (or signifiers). It is pertinent to maintain therefore, that the signifier kills the flesh.

The genius of Lacan’s signifiers, as well as Freud’s death drive, that helps one to appreciate the words of Thomas Beckett in T S Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. The play dates from 1937, the very year Freud published Analysis Terminable and Interminable

I have smelt

    Death in the rose, death in the hollyhock, sweet pea, hyacinth,

      primrose and cowslip. I have seen

    Trunk and horn, tusk and hoof, in odd places;

    I have lain on the floor of the sea and breathed with the breathing of

      the sea-anemone, swallowed with ingurgitation of the sponge. I have

      lain in the soil and criticised the worm…………………

 Corruption in the dish, incense in the latrine, the sewer in the

      incense, the smell of sweet soap in the woodpath, a hellish sweet

      scent in the woodpath, while the ground heaved. I have seen

    Rings of light coiling downwards, leading

    To the horror of the ape. Have I not known, not known

    What was coming to be? It was here, in the kitchen, in the passage,

    In the mews in the barn in the byre in the market-place

    In our veins our bowels our skulls as well

    As well as in the plottings of potentates

    As well as in the consultations of powers.

Notes

K Eissler: Death Drive, Ambivalence, and Narcissism, The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child XXVI (1971)

Melanie Klein : On The Sense of Loneliness 1963. Available at https://www.scribd.com/document/377411574/Klein-1963-on-the-Sense-of-Loneliness

Max Schur: Freud: Living and Dying 1972 International Universities Press

Lacan’s Seminar V

French: http://staferla.free.fr/S5/S5 FORMATIONS .pdf

English by Cormac Gallagher http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Book-05-the-formations-of-the-unconscious.pdf?utm_source=newsletter_654&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=reading-group-reminder

English by Russell Grigg Formations of the Unconscious: Book 5: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book V  Polity 2017

See also:

In 1925 Rainer Maria Rilke wrote this to his Polish translator Witold Von Hulewicz

Nature, the things we move among and use, are provisional and perishable, but they are. For as long as we are here, our possession and our friendship, sharers in our trouble and our happiness, just as they were once the confidants of our ancestors. Therefore it is crucial not only that we not corrupt and degrade what constitutes the here and now, but precisely because of this provisionality it shares with us, that these appearances and objects be comprehended by us in a most fervent understanding and transformed. Transformed? Yes, for our task is to stamp this provisional, perishing earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its being may rise again, “invisibly,” in us…

we are continually overflowing toward those who preceded us, toward our origin, and toward those who seemingly come after us. ... It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again “invisibly,” inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible

From the notes contained in the Duino Elegies,  translated by Edward Snow  North Point Press, p.70

Maurice Merleau-Ponty Le Visible et l'invisible, suivi de notes de travail Gallimard 1964

Sigmund Freud 

https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/freud/endlich/endlich.html

Forgetting and Reinventing Analysis: Mutual Analysis in Ferenczi

The author and Qtmir, Liverpool

I have given up attempting to form a study cartel devoted to the various  revisions  Ferenczi and Lacan made to their psychoanalytic projects.

Groups and Cartels

A cartel is a lacanian invention. It was a small study group with a facilitator that lasted a limited period of time and then stopped. Afterwards members were encouraged to join another study group devoted to a different or similar topic. Lacan had learned from Bion that groups regularly become dysfunctional, cease working for a while at least, and even pursue totally different objectives from those adopted at the outset. Lacan cut out these diversions by giving his groups a limited time frame that was non-negotiable. In reality however, Lacan's cartels often had a limited membership drawn from his followers. Although topics changed and cartels ended, membership could never be completely fresh but only ever recycled. Eventually Lacan avoided dysfunctional group dynamics, ideologies, rivalries, and analytical prima-donnas by closing the organisations he founded. From the short-session, to the brief cartel, and series of abandoned Schools, Lacan's social and psychoanalytic formations would never produce rival masters.... or indeed any magister whatsoever. In this Ferenczi anticipated him:

I know the excrescences that grow from organized groups, and I am aware that in most political, social, and scientific organizations childish megalomania, vanity, admiration of empty formalities, blind obedience, or personal egoism, prevail instead of quiet, honest work in the general interests

But even the venerable founders of psychoanalysis failed to establish any working group that catered to the "general interests" of psychoanalysis alone. Instead there arose complicated factions, splits, secessions, excommunications to name but a few group phenomena arising within psychoanalysis. In short the notion of "a working group" remained part ideal, part fantasy.

So now I begin an idiosyncratic cartel for one devoted to Sandor Ferenczi's experiments with mutual analysis. These started in the 1930's when he was already a celebrated figure in international psychoanalysis and leader of an influential group of analysts and doctors in Hungry. The most important collections of texts documenting this experiment are first his Clinical Diary,  next the voluminous Correspondence with Sigmund Freud, third, his exchange of letters with Groddeck. The Sandor Ferenczi - Georg Groddeck Correspondence 1921–1933. Open Gate Press. 2002. There are two late essays which I believe are crucial for approaching late Ferenczi. One is dated 1929 The Unwelcome Child and His Death Drive, another paper is from 1933 called Confusion of Tongues between Adults and the Child. This paper also has an alternative title namely The Language of Tenderness and of Passion.

Finally the Other involved in mutual analysis was Elizabeth Severn, known by the cipher RN in Sandor's texts. She wrote her own book on the cure The Discovery of the Self: A Study in Psychological Cure thoughInteresting historically, I am far from certain how much this writing helps to evaluate the late work of 

the analyst.

Was The Cure failing?

The immediate background to Ferenzci's experiments comprises of three weighty factors. First of all there is what Freud called Ferenzci's "mania" for curing to which he gave a Latin epithet, furor sanandi. There was international recognition for Ferenczi being analyst of last resort. He would invariably accept analysands that had been failed, dismissed, or deemed "incurable" by other contemporaries. Not without a certain amount of self-irony the analyst himself once referred to his own "super-performances" ! His reputation matched that of his physician friend Georg Groddeck, who was also noted for accepting patients deemed incurable by physicians and alienists alike.

Though Ferenczi might occasionally conduct analyses by correspondence, he preferred to see patients face to face. Moving to Budapest was an option available to the rich and desperate only, so this in itself was effectively a criterion for selection or exclusion. A notable exception was Melanie Klein who was already living in Budapest from 1910. She herself reported

My interests in psycho-analysis and in the analysis of children arose

during the time when I lived in Budapest. By that time I already had

three children. I had come across [‘some’ deleted and replaced in pen

by ‘one’] of Freud’s books and was deeply impressed by [‘them’ deleted

and replaced in pen by ‘it’]. I was analysed by Sandor Ferenczi,  and it

soon became clear that I was very much drawn to understand more of the

inner life first of all of my own children, and then of children in general.

Ferenczi told me that I was gifted for this particular, and at that time

still very little developed, branch of psycho-analysis (See the Autobiography of Melanie Klein in  https://melanie-klein-trust.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/2013_Klein_autobiography___Janet_Sayers_transcription.pdf)

Klein here judiciously glossed over her own therapeutic needs of the time. Since 1908 she sought contemporary fashionable "cures" for her nerves, depressions, bladder problems, and post-natal conditions.  Klein needed regular periods away from her children in order to rest and recover. It was following the birth of her third child that she turned to Ferenczi for analysis in 1914. Klein didn't have to travel. She happened to be at the right place at the right time to benefit from five years of therapy with him. Even then five years of psychoanalysis was a long-term treatment, compared with the much briefer treatments of the first generation hysterics or Freuds impromptu, ad hoc, training analyses.

Alongside his passion for healing analytic incurables, two further factors pushed the Hungarian analyst's experiments in mutual analysis and other techniques. Suspicions began to circulate amongst analytic communities after 1918 that eventually shook the foundations of Freud's psychoanalytic cure  One was an anxiety that freudian sublimation had become less effective or even completely useless. Freud witnessed many of his earliest clients surrender or forget their neurotic tangles when they found some demanding social role. Anna O. for instance, who invented psychoanalysis along with Breuer and Freud, eventually became a pioneer in women's social work.  After 1918 this form of sublimation seemed less attractive, particularly to women.

Another worry had an equally dramatic impact. This was the rumour that psychoanalytic "interpretation" had become less effective in clinics. Analysts of course continued interpreting the dreams, words, behaviours, and even the transferences of their patients; yet sadly these interpretations often led to no corresponding "mutative response" from clients. In other words patients remained stubbornly neurotic, however hard or frequently analysts might attempt to interpret their dreams, behaviours, or transferences.

Many post-Freudian developments occurring during the inter-war years originated to address the apparent failures of both sublimation and interpretation. Correspondingly, what was originally designed to be a quick cure, analogous to a few modern counselling sessions, became progressively longer; lasting years instead of weeks or months. The costs of analytic listening inflated in tandem. This is the sitz-im-leben for all Ferenczi's work: his restless experiments with technique and frequent theoretical revisionism, though he was certainly not the only one to harbour doubts about the effectiveness cure. Whereas debates about the effectiveness of psychoanalytic treatment and techniques were largely undercover, confined to internal debates, Ferenzci  boldly went public with his doubts, struggles, and continuing efforts to revise and reinvent psychoanalytic treatment for new generations. 

Ferenzci himself acknowledged mutual analysis to be exhausting and demanding. He did not recommend it as a "technique" available to all clinicians. Rather it was an exceptional adaptation forced upon him by a set of particular circumstances. He openly admitted learning from this adaptation, but it was a costly process that ultimately failed. 

During the final years of his life Ferenczi was battling with pernicious anaemia that eventually forced him to abandon his clinic. When the eight year enterprise with RN (Elizabeth Severn) finally ceased, she moved to Paris in a distressed state to receive alternative support from her daughter Margaret, a dancer. Eventually Elizabeth moved to London and practised therapy there, whilst remaining  determinedly aloof from all psychoanalytic groups and organisation in the capital city of Great Britain. Had she wished to practice as what was then called "a lay analyst" there were more opportunities available in London than in her native USA where the psychoanalytic profession had become restricted to all but medics. But as her daughter once acknowledged, Elizabeth was always a one woman band who had very limited tolerance for colleagues.

For Debate

1. Psyche/Soma: Pernicious Aenemia

What is the influence of serious illness on psychoanalytic practice? The Clinical Diary is testament to the final struggles of an increasingly sick man. Various contemporaries, like Abraham, had died, and leadership of the psychoanalytic was already passing to a new generation. Freud himself had been forced to reduce work because of cancer. Ferenzci, though taking more rests and holidays than usual, continued to engage in what he called "the problems" of psychoanalysis until he succumbed to pernicious anaemia, which some analysts unscrupulously misrepresented as psychotic depression.

How then does the presence of a life-threatening illness, whether for analysts or their analysands, impact psychoanalytic treatment? A question of weighty significance in view of Freud's conviction that the unconscious offers no hospitality in either space nor time to the concept of its own extinction

2. What was "schizophrenia progressiva"

RN the main person for whom mutual analysis was designed, received a weighty diagnosis in a diary entry for January 2nd 1932. She was believed to be suffering from an illness which resulted in a permanent psychotic state; so why risk psychoanalysis with an already fragmented and fragile person? The clinical diary speaks of the dynamics of psychosis and death believed to be present in the analysand since very early infancy. How did Ferenzci's own worsening condition enter into the mutuality of death and psychosis. One article believes symptoms were already present in 1932

In August 1932, Ferenczi was already manifesting symptoms of his fatal illness, pernicious anemia. This was diagnosed between September 20 and October 2 of that year, less than a month after the Twelfth International Psychoanalytic Congress in Wiesbaden. Despite seemingly successful treatment with injectable liver extract, he underwent an acute psychotic episode in March 1933, triggered by the neurological symptoms of his illness.

Hoffer & Hoffer Ferenczi's fatal illness in historical context Am Psychoanal Assoc Fall 1999 

The same authors claim that despite an initially successful treatment with injected liver extract, the analyst suffered an acute psychotic episode in March 1933. The final entry in the clinical diary was dated 2 October 1932. There he acknowledges to have not only been RN's persecutor, but also her confessor. His experiment with mutual analysis concludes with an act of mutual absolution

I released RN from her torments by repeating the sins of her father, which then I confessed and for which I obtained forgiveness CD 214

This poignant, but strange interpretation illustrates one of the attributes added by Ferenzci to Freud's death drives. In his hands it becomes drive and desire for conciliation

3. Ferencz on the limitations of mutual analysis

Mutual analysis, one must emphasise, was not intended to be a final statement about the "problems" aims, methods, or proposals for Ferenczian analysis. It is perhaps a natural mistake absolutise this concept, but it was one in a series of Ferenzcian experiments  or rather, proposals, regarding the methods and nature of psychoanalytic cure. That psychoanalysis was a "cure",  seems never to have been doubted from his earliest encounters with Freud's proposals. His need to be a healer, even of the most intractable, awkward analysands, led him to propose a number of modifications to the then evolving Freudian orthodoxy. By contrast these stalwarts of organised psychoanalysis, almost unilaterally attacked  anything connected to Ferenzci's projects after his death. Mutual analysis, for instance, became an example of wild analysis conducted by a near-psychotic individual who was working without boundaries  -to use an over employed phrase in psychotherapy.

4. Trust and Interchange: Ferenczi & Groedeck

5. Unsuccessful, messy endings

6. Psychoanalytic Cure and death drives.

7. Idealising and Killing one own fathers

8. Confusion amongst the Reals

Notes

1. I began this writing in the July of 2025 aged 73. For decades I'd struggled with generalised arthritis and during the July of 2024 I received a second knee replacement. Simultaneously I was undergoing a divorce involving court appearances online, as well as regular threats of imprisonment whilst recovering from this surgery and simultaneously mourning the loss my treasured retirement home on the banks of the River Dee. If this was not enough, at the end of July 2024 I heard  tests had found secondary cancer, despite successful treatment by radiation and hormone therapy around a decade ago.  July 2024-July 2025 therefore was a time of sickness, social dislocation, and continued threats by aggressive lawyers more interested in escalating fees than any form of justice or equity.

2. Although "self analysis" has an honourable tradition since Freud, it inevitably suffered from the stigma of being idiosyncratic and delusional. In the theocratical  language of Freud, self-analysis invariably borders the territory of "wild analysis' -despite the fact that Freud himself was the original wild analyst, he found it extremely difficult to remain friendly with a whole series of colleagues including Ferenczi himself and Georg Groddeck, the famous physician and the inventor of the unconscious Id (das Es). See The Ferenczi-Groddeck Letters, 1921-1933 Open Gate Press 2002.

3. Psychoanlytic sublimation, like every other technical term in psychoanalysis, is a multifaceted concept. In Freud's earliest practice, his middle and upper-class patients exchanged neurotic, sexualised preoccupations for activities with a practical social role. Of course intellectual achievements, particularly literature and art, involved sublimation in Freud's theories, but for individuals eager for the cure before 1914 social sublimation remained the most privileged avenue to escape neurosis available to both men and women.

4. Lacan offered one of the most important revisions of Freud's concept. Already a qualified doctor and psychiatrist, he began a training analysis lasting from1932 until 1938. These were precisely the years when psychoanalysts became increasingly  worried about the effectiveness of interpretation and sublimation. His own proposal involved crafting an ethics for psychoanalysis which simultaneously offered analysands or followers powerful avenues for intellectual sublimation with his constantly evolving theories and their battery of ever-changeable concepts. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960 exists in a variety of French texts and an English translation.

5. An excellent summary of the mural analysis between Severn and Ferenczi is offered by Berlin Psychoanalytic on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZ_ytqz_qAM.

6 . The website of the Pernicious Aneamia Society says people who have been diagnosed as having Pernicious Anaemia will be unable to absorb Vitamin B12 from food. Until the 1920’s when it was discovered that feeding patients raw, or very lightly cooked liver could keep them alive, people died from the disease. Injectable ‘artificial’ B12 became available after the Second World War. Now, as long as A correct diagnosis is made, people seldom die of the disease. Once the Vitamin B12 Deficiency is corrected patients can live a more or less normal life. However, a great many people still have problems with symptoms after the deficiency has been corrected though doctors don’t know why this is so. 

7. This quotation is from the first volume of the translated Correspondence between Freud and Ferenczi p xxiv

8. Linda born in 1961, tells her own story about pernicious anaemia.

I’ve always been active – cycling, swimming, and a physically demanding job kept me fit. Then, the subtle changes began. In 2015 I was diagnosed with a vitamin D deficiency and was prescribed vitamin D. Around 2016....

The turning point was a severe fall in 2018. I hit my head hard, and the fatigue became unbearable. I then had a second neurological event in October when, reaching up in the garden, I had a dizzy spell. I went to go indoors but staggered, felt as if I was being pulled down to the right and had to fall into a bush; I was then unable to get up and was worried that I had had a stroke. Following this I experienced dizziness, a first serious attack of vertigo, and even migraines – something I’d never had before...........The initial shock was immense. How could this have happened to me? I ate a balanced diet, including plenty of meat and dairy. With hindsight the way the symptoms crept up on me felt like a rope pulling me backwards. I had tried hard to explain to friends and health care professionals, but I just wasn’t listened to. I became irritable, scatty and felt detached from the world, personality traits I had never experienced before. I was offered anti-depressants which I refused even though my mood was low, I knew it wasn’t depression....

Ferenczi lived through similar periods of illness accompanied by physical and psychological uncertainties.

WORDS & FLESH: OBSESSIONS & DEATH

ENDING SEMINAR FIVE

Salvador Dali Metamorphosis of Narcissus1937 

This title is deliberately odd. First of all I refer to a text which was a seminar. It was never written as a book, but delivered orally and transcribed. The afterlife of these transcripts, is better left to some future archivist, who might be able to gather the various documents, fragments oral testimonies, and notes

Second it is impossible to cite any definitive Urtexte because Lacan’s seminars have been subject to interpretation and reinterpretation from their first transcripts and hearers. My

own preferences for this seminar is a French edition and two English renderings.

Third, it must be underscored that these texts remain raw. Though the seminars craved editorial input, it never happened for decades. The transcripts circulated anonymously amongst the Others, who in this case were devoted colleagues and pupils. Not surprisingly the continued circulation of raw transcripts led to suspicion, legal debates about ownership, and -the very big question- as to whether Lacanian teachings as well as the psychoanalysis he constantly reconstructed could ever be transmitted in an authoritative, unitary, and smooth fashion.

For the purposes of this brief note, towards the end of this seminar Lacan comments on the concept of obsession. He believed the root obsession was a persistent rumination as to whether the Subject itself was alive or dead. Death is therefore a necessary association (or signifier) for any Lacanian account of obsessiveness.

Freud’s death drive is perplexing. Is it singular, plural, or both? A similar question can be asked of the love or life drives. The answer of course, is both. Whatever Freud meant by drives, their trajectories are not immutable. A drive can trigger and change into  its opposite. Drives have circuits indeed, but their timings, trajectories, comings, goings and spheres of operation can be inscrutable….. in other words “unconscious”

What I find strange about Lacan’s interpretation of Freudian death drives is that he studiously avoids any reference to anything physical or organic. Freud’ death drive was primarily interpreted by himself as organic. As in Dali’s representation of Narcissus, subjects undergo -and sometimes desire to undergo- metamorphic changes -especially from organic to inorganic. Of course there was a psychological dimension to such a drive or drives. But death was not solely restricted the associations of signifiers -however unconscious.

The history of psychoanalysis can be perplexing. Even when Freud was still working and writing, there were many analysts who completely rejected Freud’s death drive. Max Schur, was such a one. Schur (1897-1969) became Freud’s GP in  Austria after he lost confidence with his previous doctors. He accompanied Freud to London. Schur also wrote a book about Freud which remains first class but sadly ignored.To be forthright -it was Schur who looked after Freud’s cancer and assisted him to die. Doctor and patient had a pact. When the old man experienced his pain as unbearable, Schur agreed to inform Anna of her father’s decision and administer a lethal dose.

But then there were those contemporaries that welcomed the theoretical and practical presence of death drives. Kurt Eissler (1908-1999) was a veteran Austrian analyst who later worked in America. It was Eissler who for many years was responsible for the Freud Archives and collecting interviews from contemporaries- like the family of Little Hans. Finally an abiding inspiration for Lacan was Melanie Klein for whom death drives were psychological, imaginary, symbolic and real processes operating within and without subjects

During the final sections of the Seminar Lacan speculates about the word in the beginning. Obviously a reference to the opening of the fourth gospel, whose author is named John. The biblical text about the word (ο λογοσ) in the beginning continues, but the following is not quoted by Lacan:

 Καὶ ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο,

καὶ ἐσκήνωσεν ἐν ἡμῖν — καὶ ἐθεασάμεθα τὴν δόξαν αὐτοῦ, δόξαν ὡς μονογενοῦς παρὰ πατρός — πλήρης χάριτος καὶ ἀληθείας.

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only Begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth. John 1:14 King James’ Version

Does Lacan’s word ever become flesh? The opposite seems more apposite to me. Rilke tried to make the world invisible with his poetry; similarly Lacan’s signifiers dissolve things fleshly into an infinite succession of associations (or signifiers). It should be said therefore, that Lacan's signifier kills flesh.

It is the genius of Lacan’s signifiers, as well as Freud’s literalism, that helps one to appreciate the words of Thomas Beckett in T S Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. The play dates from 1937, the very year Freud published Analysis Terminable and Interminable

I have smelt

    Death in the rose, death in the hollyhock, sweet pea, hyacinth,

      primrose and cowslip. I have seen

    Trunk and horn, tusk and hoof, in odd places;

    I have lain on the floor of the sea and breathed with the breathing of

      the sea-anemone, swallowed with ingurgitation of the sponge. I have

      lain in the soil and criticised the worm…………………

 Corruption in the dish, incense in the latrine, the sewer in the

      incense, the smell of sweet soap in the woodpath, a hellish sweet

      scent in the woodpath, while the ground heaved. I have seen

    Rings of light coiling downwards, leading

    To the horror of the ape. Have I not known, not known

    What was coming to be? It was here, in the kitchen, in the passage,

    In the mews in the barn in the byre in the market-place

    In our veins our bowels our skulls as well

    As well as in the plottings of potentates

    As well as in the consultations of powers.

Notes

K Eissler: Death Drive, Ambivalence, and Narcissism, The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child XXVI (1971)
Melanie Klein : On The Sense of Loneliness 1963. Available at https://www.scribd.com/document/377411574/Klein-1963-on-the-Sense-of-Loneliness

Max Schur: Freud: Living and Dying 1972 International Universities Press

Versions of Lacan’s Seminar V

French: http://staferla.free.fr/S5/S5 FORMATIONS .pdf

English by Cormac Gallagher http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Book-05-the-formations-of-the-unconscious.pdf?utm_source=newsletter_654&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=reading-group-reminder
English by Russell Grigg Formations of the Unconscious: Book 5: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book V  Polity 2017


In 1925 Rainer Maria Rilke wrote this to his Polish translator Witold Von Hulewicz
Nature, the things we move among and use, are provisional and perishable, but they are. For as long as we are here, our possession and our friendship, sharers in our trouble and our happiness, just as they were once the confidants of our ancestors. Therefore it is crucial not only that we not corrupt and degrade what constitutes the here and now, but precisely because of this provisionality it shares with us, that these appearances and objects be comprehended by us in a most fervent understanding and transformed. Transformed? Yes, for our task is to stamp this provisional, perishing earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its being may rise again, “invisibly,” in us…
we are continually overflowing toward those who preceded us, toward our origin, and toward those who seemingly come after us. ... It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again “invisibly,” inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible

From the notes contained in the Duino Elegies,  translated by Edward Snow  North Point Press, p.70

Maurice Merleau-Ponty Le Visible et l'invisible, suivi de notes de travail Gallimard 1964

Sigmund Freud Analysis Terminable and Interminable 1937 from the Standard Edition 23 translated by Strachey & others. Available online in German and English

https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Freud_Analysis_Terminable_Interminable.pdf 

https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/freud/endlich/endlich.html