The Urgency of a Living Body

The Urgency of a Living Body
Marina Frangiadaki

The plane touches down. I grab my suitcase and I race to my analytic sessions, my supervisions, the activities of the School. After fifteen years in Paris, it’s been a while now since I moved to Athens and I continue the analysis with a rhythm of short stays.

A repeated urgency operates, linked to a satisfaction of the deciphering of the unconscious in an analysis that has produced a change of subjective position and extraordinary therapeutic effects for the subject.

I arrive in the quartier of the analyst's office. For once, I decide to have a coffee before going there. In this pause, I begin to sing a song from my early childhood. A love song whose chorus expresses an unconditional love: “I decided that without you I could not live.” The little girl that I was used to sing this song to her mother, but she had transformed the lyrics into a renewing looping of syllables outside of meaning, accompanied by a jouissance of lalangue. This gave a refrain where the negation of the sentence was effaced: “[...] without you I can live.” A declaration of love with a will of separation from the Other.

I recount it in the session; I broach the transference: “I thought you would be here, for life [là, à vie].” Cut of the session.

The phrase, “here for life [là à vie]” resonates differently decomposed with its equivocation. I sketch a writing of a knot of the transference.

Là, La femme – Here, The woman, whom the analyst had incarnated for a time for the analysand in search of the mystery of femininity.

à – the object a that I had lodged with the analyst, and notably the object voice, having long suffered from a tenacious symptom that prevented me from speaking.

Vie – Life, the sentiment of life, or a real whose quest for meaning was an impasse. In fact, this is the subjective urgency that led me to analysis, an urgency of life and death.

Consequently, the urgency arises under the mode of another satisfaction: that of a body [corps], again, [encore], my living body which is displaced in a desiring circuit.

Translation: Raphael Montague