Full and Empty Speech (2 of 5) : ’Live’ speech

It is not just images that work to create imaginary (ego-substantializing) effects - ’empty’ forms of speech do this also. We need think critically about personal (ego centered) narratives when it comes to effective clinical psychoanalytic work. Freud’s technical device of free association, like Lacan’s ideas of the variable session and interruption (’scansion’), helps disrupt the stories the ego wants to tell about itself and open up the prospect of ’full’ speech. We briefly discuss how speech itself enacts division within the subject (as in the difference between the dimension of the statement as opposed to that of enunciation). Even the signifier ’I’, as used in speech, for Lacan, enacts division. Having stressed these possibilities of division in speech as a way of accessing the unconscious, we turn to the idea of ’listening to the different staves of a musical score’ in how we might attend to speech. Keeping an ear open for ’switch-words’, attending