“Other” in Latin:

ALIUS… ALIUS… (ALIUS) = one… another… (an other)

ALII… ALII… (ALII) = some… others… (others)

ALTER… ALTER = the one… the other (between two)

ALTERI… ALTERI = the ones… the others (between two groups)

ALIENUS, ALIENI = alien, aliens / foreign, foreigners (to me, to us)

Freud’s brief text on Negation (1925) is an attempt to synthesize no less than the very genesis of subjectivity. Hence its extreme density, but also its sweeping ambition for comprehensiveness. Philosophers would call it a genealogy of the logos. The symbol ‘no’ is thus not merely a symbol within language, but a symbol of language itself: language is all a ‘no’... to what?

In brief, Freud argues that subjectivity is constituted in a way that complements the real, such that the internal and the external, the ego and the world, are mutually founded in an original movement of self-cleavage. In an essay on Freud’s Verneinung, I called this archi-chorismy, from the Greek χωρισμός, separation. To tell this in metaphysical terms, according to Freud reality is not being but not-being-myself. It is like establishing the difference between black and white: neither can be conceived without the other.

Some readings of the essay on negation take it for granted that the ‘no’ Freud refers to is the logical ‘not’ (1). That noble ‘not’ which can only be expressed by a digital code, since analogue codes are incapable of expressing either negation or temporality (temporality is ultimately the constant negation of presence). Today, we all navigate computers using analogue codes, like PDFs, or digital codes, like .doc files. Animals use analogue codes, whereas human language is a digital language. The ‘not’ would then be the fundamental transition from the animal analogue code to the human digital code. A thesis that is hardly Lacanian, given that it attributes to the unconscious an analogue logos.

Unfortunately, however, negation in Freud's clinical examples is not logical but rhetorical. A ‘not’ that is certainly less noble. Significantly, the preferred French translation of the term is dénégation or déni, not negation, that is, ‘denial’ or ‘disavowal’ rather than formal negation. The adverb ‘not’ is rhetorical when, in order to grasp the sense of an utterance, we have to suppose the speech act that gives this utterance with the adverb ‘not’ its meaning. And any enunciative or speech act always presupposes an other to whom it is addressed. When Freud gives the example of someone recounting a dream and saying “that figure is not my mother”, the adverb of negation implies the presence of the other, the analyst, who is meant to believe that the figure is in fact precisely the mother. In short, ‘not’ is a critique of the other, and perhaps an outright attack on the other.

A statement of negation like “It’s not raining” is logical until we ask why someone would say “It is not raining” in the first place. For example, someone might have asked me online whether it is raining where I am—in that case, my negative reply still implies a question from the other to which I am responding. But if I say to that same person, “It’s quite humid, but it is not raining”, the not here is rhetorical because I have used ‘but’, that is, I am effectively saying: “Usually, when it’s this humid, you’d think it would rain, but on the contrary it’s not.” As we can see, the not here is rhetorical because it presupposes a you would think, a knowledge held by the Other that is being contradicted, as signalled by the propositional phrase on the contrary. Rhetoric is at work whenever statements presuppose the knowledge, desires, fears, or beliefs of the other to whom we speak. Rhetoric always wants to épater le lecteur, impress the reader.

Many analysts, however, are reluctant to accept Freud’s clinical recommendation to translate the analysand’s negative statements into positive terms. For Freud, if the analysand says “I’m not saying this to insult you in any way”, we should read: “I am saying this to insult you in some way”. According to many, in such cases the analyst is taking too much hermeneutic liberty. Even Laplanche and Pontalis denounce this liberty in their famous Vocabulaire, under the entry “Dénégation” (2).

Yet, in my clinical practice I find this positivization to be an almost infallible interpretive tool, at times even with a comic edge. But on one condition: that the denial is seen as a moment in the problematic relationship between the subject and their Other. I will refer to this Other with a capital ‘O’, in the broadly Lacanian sense, as Alter: the Latin term for a constitutive alterity in relation to a ‘one’, as opposed to alius, which designates any other that is left outside a given enumeration. Here, then, the ‘not’ functions as an assault on the knowledge of the Alter.

An analysand tells me a dream and then says, with a near-mocking smile: “I know, you’re going to tell me that this dream means I wanted to sleep with my mother, bump off my father, and get rid of my younger brother. How trite!” The implication being: “this is the sort of waffle poor dogmatic analysts like yourself go in for”. In any case, I reply: “That’s your interpretation, not mine”, meaning that, precisely because he thought of it, it is probably right.

But what does “a correct interpretation” actually mean? This is a fundamental question, and to address it directly would lead us into the quicksand of a philosophical debate on knowledge and truth. It is “correct” perhaps in the sense that it expresses something the subject can only think by attributing this thought to the Alter, embodied by the analyst. In that interpretation the “not” was absent; but instead we found the term “trite”—which, however, carried what I would call a denying alteration, namely: “I do not know this myself, the Alter does; and precisely because this knowledge comes from the Alter, it must be false”. In other words, negation is the denial of the analyst’s supposed knowing, to use Lacanian parlance. It is a way of evading transference. A thought that is not one’s own is alienum, which in Latin—unlike alter and alius—indeed denotes the alienness of the other. The analysand thinks, “The psychoanalytic corpus induces me to think this, that is, it is not my thought, therefore it is false”, yet fails to see that in using the alibi of an alien corpus they speak a truth about themselves. By mocking the analytic key, they nonetheless accept it in order to know about themselves. The analyst, the Alter, thus enables them to recognise their desire precisely as alienum. This is what Lacan said about the human message returning to the subject in an inverted form, that is, in an alienated form.

Another form of negation without a not consists of asking the analyst questions that are really already answers to the analysand’s implicit question. As Lacan said, the analyst is a subject supposed to know—that is, analysts function as the Alter of knowledge. In an initial phase, many patients take this supposition of knowledge literally, in the sense that they ask general, almost academic questions, as though the analyst could provide them with definitive knowledge about themselves. Early on, they even make the slip of referring to sessions as “lessons”. They expect the kind of ready-made answers now commonly provided by websites or AI.

A young woman asks me during a session: “Do you think I reject men because I want to remain faithful to my father, whom I loved so much as a child?” I reply: “That question is your answer”. Here again, I hadn’t thought yet of a strong Oedipal love, perhaps because this time it was I who found the explanation rather trite. But the fact that it was the analysand herself who offered it in the form of a question was a sign that it was the right explanation. I can say that this was right because it would later emerge that the figure of “unrequited love for her father” has played a crucial role in her life to this day. After all, this is what the unconscious is: the return of certain signifiers, always within the same circuit.

Here too the assumption of that desire through an implicit negation requires the presence of the Alter as interlocutor. The Alter is the one who knows, even if they know the wrong things, because “you [the Alter] don’t really know anything about me”. Some analysands actually say, “You don’t know anything about me, because you are not me”. Conversely, certain analysands berate the analyst, convinced they understand fundamental things about them but refuse to reveal them because they are mean. It is on this alienation, I would call it, that transference operates: against the backdrop of the Alter’s non-knowing I can understand something about myself, at last.

Transference appears as the repetition of an affective childhood relationship precisely because the significant adult in childhood functioned as the interpreter of the time. Adults position themselves as those who know, imposing their interpretation of the world and of subjects on the child. And for that very reason… “the adult doesn’t understand me at all”.

There is an even more sophisticated form of negation, one particularly indulged in by obsessive individuals. The Alter is no longer identified with the analyst, but with analytical theory as a whole.

An analysand recounts a dream involving a sexual encounter between three people: a man, a woman, and himself. I ask what he makes of it. The analysand, well-versed in psychoanalytic literature, chuckles awkwardly and, almost blushing, says: “Oh well, I had a very silly thought! I thought the older man was my father offering me my mother’s body while being present during the sexual act!” Needless to say, this ‘silly’ interpretation was the correct one, in the sense explained above: that this theme recurs continuously, in various versions, in his dreams and fantasies. It is a common theme in our practice—the father who castrates the son not by denying him his wife, but rather by offering her to him. A father from whom one expects to receive even the woman. In analysis, we mostly find ourselves in a similar position to Vladimir Propp when he studied a corpus of Russian folktales (3): he realized that all these tales were essentially the same story, with some variations. Even in my patient’s dreams, the characters changed, but the plot remained constant. Unconscious is everything that keeps repeating itself.

Here the Alter is the body of knowledge established by psychoanalysis, separated from the subject’s lived experience, posed as an anonymous monument of crystallised answers. This is the point: the Alter is not only the subject supposed to know, but—precisely insofar as the subject-analysand knows it is supposed to know—they do not believe in it. Paradoxically, it is through a denial of psychoanalytic discourse that some analysands end up analysing themselves. We might say that the psychoanalytic knowledge they are more or less versed in is their alium, but it is precisely by constituting an Alter in relation to this alium that they ultimately come to appropriate that 'understanding-what-it-is-that-one-desires' which is the aim of analysis.

In my view, the fundamental alienation in language that Lacan sees at the origin of the unconscious subject needs to be formulated a little differently, freed from the assumptions of structural linguistics on which Lacan initially drew. Language causes us to lose both ourselves and the real, insofar as it compels us to conceive of ourselves, others and the world as structured by an I-you exchange, a relational backdrop that underlies every linguistically articulated utterance. Even when I say “The rain tires out the earth” (4), this is something I am saying to some alter; and this alter, were it to emerge in the utterance, would be addressed as you. The real question, then, is why I feel the need to tell a you that the rain tires out the earth. (And I wonder why I chose this particular line, which seems so denotative. Why do I like it? That’s a long story. Let’s just say I see in it a kind of allusion to the idea that “language tires out the world”).

Subjects can never fully disentangle themselves from being speakers who must always address a you—singular or plural—and who must always describe something, even themselves, based on the other’s knowledge of the world. We always think and speak in the Alter and for the Alter. I would say that language dooms us to intersubjectivity, i.e. to communication. The Italian philosopher Mario Perniola published a book entitled Against Communication. This title created some hilarious reactions because a book is precisely an act of communication. It is reminiscent of the joke about the association of anti-conferences activists from all over the world who decide to hold a conference to discuss their opposition to conferences. But this is the paradox, communication is snubbed and denounced precisely because we would like to finally communicate something that is non-communicable. Intersubjectivity is often invoked today as our blessed, authentic condition, and communication is exalted as the triumph of modernity. In actual fact, intersubjectivity is the very inconsistency to which language condemns us. Communication seizes those who try to communicate. Hence the frustrating feeling we get when we truly want to express who we are and what we think through media: the more we communicate, the less we express. Pragmatism is not the solution; it is the problem.

The no, as Freud ultimately tries to tell himself even more than tell us, is intrinsic to the symbolic function, to linguistic signification, insofar as negation is already present in the interlocutory dimension of language. The Alter is that negation which constitutes me as ‘I’; i.e. fundamentally only as a pronoun. Rightly, it seems to me, Lacan bypassed a paradigm dominated by the opposition between in versus out, container and contained, in order to articulate a paradigm with a different topology, one in which the subject ‘I’ exists only in correlation to what is other to it. Consider the ubiquity of the container/contained distinction in W. R. Bion. A container can exist even if empty, but the I/Other distinction cannot: like the black and white of a chessboard, they cannot exist in themselves. Therefore, as alter, alius, or alienum, we find alterity at every level of our being: in heaven, on earth, and in the depths of our heart. Language binds us inextricably to it, precisely insofar as it negates us. The Alter is not then within us or outside us; rather, we are within the Alter, we are inside our very negation. From this comes our common feeling: that more we express ourselves, the more we deny and betray ourselves. This is what hinders many people from writing, even though they would very much like to: a barrier separates what they think they are from what should be written.

Hence the importance of the reality test (Realitätsprüfung) that Freud discusses in his essay. The reality test is not, as many believe, a matter of comparing one’s desires with reality to see if they match with the latter; quite the opposite: it is wanting to rediscover in reality what was already within us, in the world we had constructed for ourselves. In the world, we are always searching for our home. And we look for it at the antipodes of ourselves. It is by negating alienness that we find ourselves again. We do not give in to reality; we colonise it, and this colonisation is what we naively call realism.

In fact, language separates us once and for all from any contemplative relation with the world, relation which can take place only in silence. Silence, the non-speech to which so many mystics aspire, or those seeking ecstatic experiences, as was the case with Elvio Fachinelli (author of The Ecstatic Mind). I do not recall ever having had ecstatic experiences, sadly. But my feeling is that ecstasy is when you touch some sort of vibrant reality, a hard core that resists the crumbling of language, something overwhelming that is felt but cannot be communicated.

The paradox lies in the fact that my sentence “The rain tires out the earth” has a descriptive and contemplative form, yet, like every utterance, it is an act. The ‘not’ is what transforms, degrades, contemplation into an act. One of hostility and rejection. In separating itself from things, negative language becomes an irreparable dependence on the Alter. The Alter: our treasure trove, our persecutor.

APPENDIX

According to Freud, every structure deemed pathological - what we now call mental disorders - is based on a form of negation. Later Lacan expanded on this, detaching it from psychopathology and turning it into three fundamental subjective structures into which each of us would fall. A Procrustean bed, many might say; but we will take it here as a simple starting point for a discussion that will, inevitably, become more articulated.

Following Freud, Lacan identifies three structures which are themselves the result of three different types of negation. The neurotic structure is based on Verdrängung, repression. The perverse structure is based on Verleugnung, disavowal or rejection. And the psychotic structure is based on Verwerfung, foreclosure. Let us take a closer look at what these forms of negation entail.

Freud offered forgetting as the paradigm of repression, though I would say it is more generally based on “setting aside”. Repressive negation, however, “returns” in the form of a symptom—in other words, the symptom is the positive side of this negation. The neurotic symptom could be expressed as “I would like to enjoy, but instead I suffer,” and Freud closely links it to a conflict between agencies, that is between desires. Here, negation asserts itself as conflict, insofar as each agency seeks to negate the other.

The model of perverse disavowal is fetishism: the child disavows the absence of the penis in the female, not in the sense of saying “No, that girl has a penis even if you can’t see it!”, but in the strict sense of ignoring. The primary sense of ignore is not taking something or someone into account: “I ignore, I give no importance to that absence”. Just as a man may disavow his wife not in the sense of denying she was ever his wife, but in the sense of no longer recognising the marital bond with her. To disavow means to withhold significance from a lack. Perversions always regard the relation between a man and a woman, or between a man and another man if the perverse subject is homosexual. The perverse act is a way of enjoying a kind of simulacrum; it has the quality of a performance or mise-en-scène, even though it may lead to disastrous consequences such as the killing of a woman or the rape of a child. So the formula is: “I enjoy something that is not true”. Whereas in the neurotic symptom I do not enjoy at all because my desire encountered an opposition, in the perverse act I do enjoy, but I enjoy a non-truth.

In fact, the exhibitionist enjoys the fiction of a woman’s admiring gaze directed at his penis, while the voyeur enjoys the fiction of a woman who wants to be watched as she experiences sexual pleasure. The fetishist enjoys a female phallus he knows does not exist. The masochist enjoys the simulacrum of a woman’s phallic domination over him. The sadist enjoys the fiction that the woman must be punished for being female. The cross-dresser enjoys the fiction of being desired as a woman with a phallus. The paedophile enjoys the fiction that the child experiences genital pleasure. In a beautiful book on perversions (L’imposture perverse), Serge André spoke of perverse imposture—except that the object of the imposture is the subject himself. It is a case of self-imposture.

As for psychosis, let us consider what primarily characterises it: hallucinations and delusions. Like the neurotic, the psychotic generally does not experience enjoyment; but in psychosis, enjoyment is entirely reversed towards the Alter in the Lacanian sense: the subject becomes the passive object of the Alter’s jouissance. They are its victim in the sense that the Alter invades them more or less completely. The paradigmatic hallucination is the insult delivered by others who embody the Alter, or by the Alter itself in its most radical, delusional form; as when the despotic and lustful God of President Schreber addresses him with the degrading term “Luder!”, meaning “slut”. From verbal insult, the delusion progresses to the belief that one’s very thoughts are dominated by the Alter, and the invasion becomes totalised. Psychosis, then, amounts to: ‘The Alter enjoys me at my expense, at the expense of my being”.

As we can see, three distinct gravitational forces are behind the interplay between affirmation and negation. 

Repressive (neurotic) negation is linked to a conflict between desires, resulting in a certain impotence. What is repressed, that which is denied to the subject's consciousness and capacity for care, acts by denying the subject the enjoyment they desire.

Disavowing (perverse) negation leads not to conflict, but to using another for a personal mise-en-scène, which revolves around what I would call a passion for “doing justice to women”. The problem for the perverse subject is not the resolution of a conflict between himself and what has been swept under the carpet, but rather a kind of passion for giving the woman her (imaginary) due: that is, redeeming her, satisfying her claim, or, on the contrary, punishing her. The fetishist returns to the woman the phallus she is presumed to lack. The masochist is driven by the need to endow the woman with a power she does not have; the sadist acts on his supposed duty to punish the woman for her power to enjoy and give pleasure. The exhibitionist wants to give the woman pleasure by offering her an erotic display; the voyeur wants to offer the woman the experience of being-seen-in-her-enjoyment. The transvestite offers the mise-en-scène of a woman desired for the phallus she lacks. The paedophile makes a claim to the genital pleasure in a girl (or a boy, if his orientation is homosexual) that is denied her. In some manner, the pervert is always in some way an avenger who enjoys giving the woman or the sexual partner what is due to them, through reward or punishment.

Foreclosure (psychotic) negation hinges on the violation of the boundary between self and the Alter; the individual complains of being disrespected by the Alter. The conflict is not between psychic agencies recognised as one’s own, like in neurosis, but in a radical confrontation between one’s own existence and that of the Alter. Just as a person cannot set foot in a foreclosed house, even if it legally belongs to them, the psychotic experiences something of themselves as alienated, no longer accessible. The Alter infiltrates every part of their being. Hence the psychotic’s tendency to disturb the social order: just as they experience themselves as infiltrated or invaded by the Alter, they tend to act on the social environment around them, pestering it, as if the problem lay in that environment itself.

NOTES

1. This analysis was undertaken in: S. Benvenuto, “On Sigmund Freud’s ‘Negation’”, in Duane Rousselle and Mark Gerard Murphy, eds., Negativity in Psychoanalysis. Theory and Clinic, Routledege, 2024, pp. 61-87.

2. J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis,  “Denial” in The Language of Psychoanalysis, Routledge, 2018.

3. Morphology of the Folktale, translated into English in 1958 and 1968.

4. A line from Eugenio Montale’s poem The Lemon Tress.