The Letter 59 & 60 Summer – Autumn 2015, pages 57-62

This paper considers the notion of psychoanalysis as a ‘mapping out’ which
was put forward by Lacan in his 24th Seminar, L’insu que sait de l’une bévue
s’aile à mourre. The implied synonyms for ‘mapping out’, such as, ‘identifying
with one’s symptom’ and ‘turning inside out’, are highlighted so as to gain
some insight into this notion. How one is to understand and situate the symbolic
intervention of the analyst and interpretation as a cut are also explored,
as are the notions of the symptom – a symbolic representation with an effect in
the Real and the possibility of dissolving this effect. Lacan’s toric depictions
of these ideas are also presented.
Keywords:inside; outside, inside-out, unconscious, mapping out, identification,
symptom, sense, meaning, torus, Borromean knot, Real, Symbolic,
This paper begins with two quotations from Jacques Lacan’s (1976-1977)
seminar, L’insu que sait de l’une bévue s’aile à mourre, in which, talking
about the clinic of psychoanalysis and its aim, Lacan refers to an inside, an
outside and a turning inside out:
That psychoanalysis is attached to putting outside what is inside,
namely, the unconscious… – [though this] is not without posing some
questions
…what do we see by proceeding as we usually do by a cut, by a split,
to turn the Symbolic inside out?