You must not leave him until he loses his place as analyst for you

In the letter dissolving the school, Lacan launched the Cause freudienne, conceived not as a School but as a movement. In Miller’s account, the period that immediately followed is defined above all by his conflict with Charles Melman, with whom he was then in analysis. The facts and judgments cited below come solely from Miller and are the testimony of one party.

France Jaigu asks:

She (France Jaigu): Would you like to go into detail?

He (Jacques-Alain Miller): To oblige you. Because it gives me very little pleasure. To encourage the dissolution of the École freudienne, I had set up evenings called Delenda est, where papers were presented on institutional matters as well as on theoretical themes. I gave three papers there on the question of the passe, to explain that the thing must not be liquidated, as many members wanted, because it was an essential element of the analytic experience. They were published at the time, and I received warm congratulations from my analyst. Except that six months later Claude Dumézil showed me the other side of the picture. He told me: “We both came to hear you, Melman and I,” and on the way out Melman said to him: “That fellow has to be stopped right away.” Apparently he was quivering with rage.

According to Miller, his choice of Melman as analyst was decided by Melman’s professed devotion to Lacan, which gave the impression of being unconditional. Melman served in the École freudienne as secretary for teaching, and Miller charges him with having eliminated, in that role, anyone who stood out. Miller’s account further suggests that Melman, presumably with the question of succession in mind, sought the post of vice-president of the School and asked Miller to intercede on his behalf with Lacan; Miller refused, arguing that since Melman had overstepped the limits of his role towards him, he himself had no reason to overstep the limits of his own role towards Lacan. Solange Faladé was eventually appointed vice-president, and Miller sees in this disappointment one of the possible causes of Melman’s later change of stance.

Through Dumézil, Miller also learned of an earlier anecdote about Melman, which he recounts in the conversation with Jaigu:

One day the group of young psychiatrists they both belonged to went out as a gang to a restaurant to eat oysters. They ordered a great many. So many that the bill was steep. What does Melman do? Without a moment’s hesitation he summons the maître d’hôtel and tells him: “We are doctors, and we are going to be ill from your oysters, which are off.” He was so convincing that they were let go without paying.

In Miller’s account the turning point was a dispute over the premises of the École freudienne, which Melman managed. Lacan had expressed the wish that the premises be used from then on by the members of the Cause freudienne. However, at the meeting of the co-owners, who were also members of the School, Melman called for the request to be rejected and won the support of the majority. Miller, who was present at the meeting, judges this intervention a betrayal devoid of all ambiguity.

After the meeting Miller telephoned to announce his visit to Gloria González¹. He recounts the conversation at Lacan’s as follows:

He: I go to his place and tell him that I am going to leave Melman. It is then that Gloria steps in: “No, don’t do that. You must not leave him until he loses his place as analyst for you.”

She: Gloria said that? Gloria?

He: Yes! I couldn’t believe my ears. And then Lacan lets fall: “She is absolutely right.” I was perplexed, I admit, but I complied.

In accordance with this advice, Miller continued the analysis. Two days before Melman circulated the letter that Miller calls a pamphlet, Melman invited him to his home at ten in the evening, announcing that he would give him a text to read that might interest him:

He: Once again I go to Doctor Lacan and tell him that Melman seems ready to negotiate something, since he is inviting me to his place that evening. Gloria urges me to go and see what it is about. Lacan, for his part, says: “No. Don’t go.” I didn’t go, and two days later Melman put a vile pamphlet into circulation.

The content of that letter is known from Miller’s account. In it, Melman is said to have invoked the authority conferred on him by his position as Miller’s analyst to claim that Lacan was good for nothing now but to be buried, to have cited a quotation from Shakespeare, and to have attributed the whole situation to Miller, presenting him as its deus ex machina. According to Miller, Melman also commissioned an expert examination of Lacan’s signature on the statutes of the Cause freudienne, suspecting that Miller had put it there.

Miller stresses that an analyst’s disclosure of an analysand’s supposed confidences ought to have provoked objection from the psychoanalytic community. Instead, as he relates, that community raised no objection against Melman and even regarded his position as Miller’s analyst as a guarantee of the reliability of what he put forward; Miller describes this attitude as the dishonour of that milieu and the loss of its legitimacy. At that time letters against Miller circulated daily among the six hundred members of the École freudienne, and some of the older members, together with their analysands, went over to the opposing camp, which led to the gradual disintegration of the School.

Miller nevertheless, in keeping with Gloria González’s advice as approved by Lacan, did not break off the analysis. He speaks of the sessions of that period as follows:

She: How did he receive you?

He: Normally. Of what I said, I remember images of great deserts and of wind, of sand lifted by the gusts; I remember saying the formula: “For ever and ever.” I had a feeling of eternal return. And I think it did me a world of good to have kept going until that final point where he fell in real time, if I may put it that way. Because he was the one who stalled. During the Christmas holidays he sent me a letter saying that he would no longer see me in analysis.

Over the Christmas holidays Melman ended the analysis with a letter, which Miller kept and made public for the first time in the conversation with Jaigu. The letter reads as follows:

Sunday 21 December

Charles Melman to Jacques-Alain Miller,

You will agree that it is difficult to pass off as “analysis” an experience in which, in situ, the analysand strives to lie while outside he seeks to harm his analyst. You know that nothing in this situation is of my doing. I have therefore decided to put an end to what would henceforth be, on my part, nothing but participation in an ever-growing imposture.

Charles Melman, this Sunday 21 December.

Miller left the letter unanswered, and the discussion of this period closes with a question about his state of mind at the time:

She: How exactly did you manage to bear it?

He: Look, I went to bed an hour earlier than usual, that was all. What mattered to me was to be with Lacan, to protect him, to support him. The rest mattered little to me compared with that task. I was a fatalist. I regarded the crisis as an earthquake: at some point, an earthquake stops. My idea was that if they carried off the whole School, I would still have my friends, the fifty or so young analysts and teachers of the Department of Psychoanalysis gathered around the journal Ornicar?, and that it would then take me ten years to build a School again. If, on the other hand, about a hundred of the six hundred members of the École freudienne remained, everything would go much faster. And those hundred members stayed. That is how the École de la Cause freudienne was able to begin.

Footnotes

1. Gloria González worked for Lacan from 1948 until his death in 1981, first as his housekeeper and later as secretary at his practice at 5, rue de Lille, where she received analysands and managed his affairs. She recalls those years in Le Docteur Lacan au 5, rue de Lille, in: Lacan Redivivus, Ornicar? hors-série, 2021, pp. 377–392. ↩