Figuration

Some experiences belong neither to represented conflict, nor to the symptom in its classical sense, nor to a shortcoming that might be described negatively as a failure of symbolisation. They act; they weigh upon the body and upon relation; yet they do not present themselves in a form firm enough to be taken up in the language of meaning.

This site is devoted to the psychic labour carried out between the formless and the symbol — a taking of form that I call figuration.

The book

Figuration. From the Taking of Form to Subjectivation. A Metapsychology of the Originary.

The book begins from a difficulty that clinical work imposes without respite. It isolates the psychic labour performed between the formless and the symbol, and draws out its operators, its regimes and its two aspects: figures that close against excess, and figures that border an absence.

It does not stop there. Its second movement shows that form, once found, may cease to be a passage towards meaning and become a dwelling. Certain subjects settle within their figure; some prefer it to meaning and hold that preference against a symbolic order experienced as a seizure. Not I do not wish to know, but I do not wish to be known. The book establishes the reason of this position, restores its active part, then thinks its possible exit: how meaning may become accessible again without being paid for by dispossession, and by what tests such an exit is recognised — so as to promise nothing that no analysis could honour.

The argument stands within Freudian metapsychology and its continuations — Ferenczi, Winnicott, Bion, Aulagnier, Green, Abraham and Torok, Roussillon, Jacques Press — in a dialogue of proximity and divergence with Lacan, and centrally in the wake of César and Sára Botella: where their figurability thinks the work of the session, figuration makes of it a general morphogenesis of the originary, and then a theory of the styles of subjectivation. It is tested across a clinical and literary hinge of four chapters: a case of bodily closure, the writing of Marie Cardinal, Georges Perec’s La Disparition, and the transmission of a form across generations.

Sixteen chapters in two movements and a hinge, a conclusion, two envois, three appendices and a bibliography. Some one hundred and sixty-five thousand characters. The book addresses practitioners and theorists of psychoanalysis, as well as the general reader whom a thinking of forms concerns.

Manuscript complete. Currently under editorial submission.

To be told when the book appears, write to me: feblanc@proton.me

The concept

Figuration names the labour by which a still formless psychic matter takes a bearable form, before it becomes representation at all. It is articulated by three operators. Interference is the encounter of what exceeds with what receives. Normation is the instituting of the rule that makes this encounter endurable. Arrangement is the lasting solution the subject draws from it, and within which he holds himself.

The forms so obtained are not of equal worth. A living figure remains open to rework: it holds, and it lets through. A supplementary figure stands in for what was missing, at a cost. A frozen figure is reworked no longer; it protects and it confines.

Born of the teaching of the sociology of organisations before becoming metapsychology, figuration is natively made to articulate the subject and the system, the intimate and the institutional. An institution is itself a collective figuration.

Writings

This page will gather the texts, papers and studies that extend the book.

The author

A psychoanalyst, trained as a jurist and senior civil servant, I devoted my career to leading change and to accompanying directors in organisations with high stakes.

The first texts on figuration arose from my teaching of the sociology of organisations and of epistemology, in the early nineteen-eighties; they were taken up and deepened over more than thirty years, of which this book is the outcome.

I attend the lecture cycles of the Société psychanalytique de Paris and the congresses of French-speaking psychoanalysts.

Blois, France — feblanc@proton.me