Perversion the Social Relation

"I Know Well, but All the Same ..." 91Freud invites us to explore what becomes of such beliefs when death andmourning are involved. Again, we know that there are cases in whichthe subject has serious problems because of his fear of losing what he"knows well" that he doesn't have.We should add a word about the method utilized in this study, for itwas not the result of a deliberate choice: it seemed to be dictated by thenature of the subject. We had a few ideas at our disposal in setting out.Freud had provided Verleugnung. We had the topography that Lacan haselaborated. This furnished us with two axioms: that there is no unconsciousbelief, and that belief presupposes the Other as its support.That, however, did not point us in the direction of theoretical work,work of the kind meant to develop or test the abstract, coherent apparatusknown as a theory. Furthermore, there is virtually no clinical dimensionto our discussion; nothing in it resembles a case study.But there exists something that might be called a Freudian phenomenology;it differs from the phenomenology of the philosophers, and tendsrather to have something of the meaning the term had before Hegel madeuse of it. Freud does not often employ the word (it figures,for example,in The Rat-Man), but he assigns the method a considerable role in hiswritings. It is (chapter 7 aside) virtually the only method used in The Interpretationof Dreams, where it consists in trying to present examples,without regard for chronological order and without appealing to principles,in such a way that these examples interpret each other, as it were.Many of Freud's texts are similar. In The Rat-Man, he confronts examplesof different obsessive phenomena, without being able to formulatea theory. The passage that seems to be devoted to the clinic in factconsists of examples of transferential phenomena.To be sure, the support provided by a theory and illustrations drawnfrom clinical practice are present throughout; but, in the absence of thephenomenological dimension, which plays a mediating role, theory andclinical experience would each be applied to the other non-productively,with clinical experience illustrating the theory except on the rare occasionson which, in accordance with the methodology of the empiricalsciences, the clinic contradicts the theory and invites us to formulate newhypotheses. This would bring us back to Claude Bernard. Freud does attimes proceed in that fashion, or, at any rate, seems to, but he does notproduce anything new when he does, and that is not the method thatwe recognize as being typically his. Careful consideration shows that