There may not be any good reasons at all for what I wanted to present to you today.

There are a certain

number of bad ones, which are to investigate a certain tendency to cooptations, which is perhaps my
failing. But I sometimes feel a need to take account of if, because of being alone, we are far apart as
well. Well, I have the feeling that we are not that far apart.
Balint wasa few days agothe order of the day, and Dr. Lacan has taken the opportunity to
say he has had the feeling that the winds are changing. And this is simply one of the small
manifestations of that changing wind that I wish to present to you. In fact, certain notions are currently
being put in question once more for certain reasons. Among these are the two that have been cited by
Dr. Lacan: on the one hand, the fact that a certain number of terms have seen their meaning fade from
usage; on the other, that the obscurity that resulted from them has engendered the secondary problem of
the necessity of being redefined.
A few days ago the term the transfer of emotions was pronounced here in relation to an article
of Balint's. It seemed to us that he would have been spared this extreme position if he had studied the
analysis of the clinical case that he recounts, if not exactly, at least in a fashion that permits him to
interpret it according to the three registers at the base of our conceptions. Well, as chance would have
it, in this spring of 1954, a few slightly obscure authors, in a review that once was glorious but is quite
fallen these days, pose some questions that are not without relation, not to the point where we are in
our development, but to the point of departure.
A certain obscuring orientation of analysis has definitively brought the authors back to a bygone
cycle, by all indications, to repose the fundamental questions. The history of the movement being in
this regard only to obey the laws of other sectors of human activity which...the ray of a curve
proportionally...and brings the voyager back to the point where he left. For leaving this impasse, the
authors have different motives, like Balint, of which we are familiar here.
This is what I would like to make you glimpse, especially after the last seminar, in the two
articles entitled Emotion, Instinct, and Pain-pleasure by a certain Chapman Isham, and A Study of
the Dream in Depth, its Corollaries and Consequenced by Bennitt in the Psychoanalytic Review, April
1954.
On their subject, a brief remark: it doesn't seem irrelevant to me that the two authors have had
recourse to the fundamental study of dreams in order to pose their argumentation.
Isham's article starts from the confusion that reigns about the confusion of the terms need, drive,
and instinct. He poses the question, what must be understood by the word emotion? And he tends to
approach by the two classic routes called experiential and expressive.
Neither of these two routes took sufficient account of dreams that illustrate the aspect he calls
ideational or signifying emotion. And, engaging in this debate that isn't without relation to the
discussion of Benassy's relation on the instincts, he denounces as prescientific the avoidance of sense
I translate meaning in different waysin favor of stimulus. Personally, he woud prefer to introduce the
notion of object.
Freud discovered that emotions cannot be displaced, although on this point he has been
contradicted, but that objects could be displaced, substituted one for another, inverted, etc. That was a
great advance for our comprehension, the application of which was hardly brilliant. He makes allusion
to the symposium Feelings and Emotions, 1950.