The Urgency of the Entry into Analysis

The Urgency of the Entry into Analysis
Anne Béraud

The veil of fantasy was torn. It failed to protect against the real of anxiety. The object without representation coming to fill the lack, anxiety arose. The first traumatic instant of the glance connected to the real unconscious, led me into the analysis via the urgency to get out of it, that is to say by first veiling it by restoring the signifying chain S1 – S2, with meaning.

So I ran to an analyst at the age of twenty-four years after the breakup of a love affair that had lasted four years. The coordinates of the separation had exposed the fantasy. In the final scene, in the street, clinging to him, he had to drop me. The fantasmatic scenario was complete: to make myself seen as a dropped object. To extract this phrase, years of analysis, strewn with the pitfalls of maternal ravage and its repetition in my married life, were necessary.

Living in a couple had confronted me with the dissatisfaction that left no room for the impossible, and with my fierce determination to make the sexual relation exist. Above all, I wanted this complementarity of desire and love with a man. I ran into this nameless impossible that confused me. It enraged me and gave consistency to a wall that I then located between my mother and me. My symptomatic attachment to the Other through relentlessly making the wall of the sexual relation consist was the echo of an early traumatic event, which then knotted itself to two statements, one maternal, one paternal that allowed the construction of the fantasy.

Translated by Joanne Conway