The Subject of the Quest1

Willy Apollon

I will begin our work this weekend with the concept of the Subject of the
Quest, a concept that is my own, but through which I want to evoke the
subject of the Freudian unconscious, which is the true human subject,
in opposition to the ego, understood as the subject on the stage consti-
tuted by the social link that language defines within a given civilization.
In the context of the situation that mondialisation plunges us
into, psychoanalysis is the only theoretical and clinical frame where
the question of the human subject still has meaning and can be treated
accordingly. By mondialisation I mean, among other things, the confron-
tation of civilizations, and not simply what we allude to when we refer
to globalization in North America. This will be an important dimension
of the discussions we will have this weekend. You will no doubt have
the feeling that there is a profound shift in the definition of our frames
of reference.
I would like first of all to bring your attention to several dimen-
sions that will structure my intervention. First I want to emphasize the
dimensions of the spiritual [spirituel], the psychological [psychologique],
and the mental [mental], along with the specific differences between
them, in order, second, to confront these dimensions with the stakes of
the aesthetic and ethics that sustain the quest that mobilizes this human
thing that speaks. I would also like to situate historically these constitu-
tive dimensions of the human, in order to better mark the distinctions
and the contradictions that are at the heart of the way psychoanalysis

1 Text produced for the occasion of the Clinical Days of the Cloud Circle of
the Freudian School of Quebec (École freudienne du Québec) in 2017.

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functions today.

The Speaking Being

If we are to believe scientists, this thing that speaks (Homo sapiens), the
speaking being (Lacan’s parlêtre), appeared 300,000 years ago. There is
something here that not only grabs our attention, but astonishes us: the
same scientists situate the historical era when Homo sapiens created lan-
guage about 50,000 years ago. This requires us to be more attentive the-
oretically, and especially clinically, to the radical difference between the
object of speech and the object of language, to which we will return later.
The astonishment here has to do with the object of speech,
which seems to fade if not disappear as language is installed. Language
is installed both in the history of humanity and in the life of the child.2
What is there to say about this precious “thing” that speaks, to
which we immediately attribute taste and wisdom by calling it Homo
sapiens [from the Latin sapere, “to taste”; “to know”]?
This immediately situates us in the dimension of the Spirit,
which is both a distinctive feature of the human and the sign of its
appearance. Four poles will structure this spiritual dimension that is
specific to humanity, which must not be confused with, or reduced to, religion
(which humans created only 6,000 to 10,000 years ago).

a) A pure mental representation

This being who speaks thus has the capacity to produce a pure
representation, one that is not preceded by perception and that there-
fore requires speech if it is to be accessible to others. This being has the

2 Editor’s Note: The fading of the object of speech can be identified both
phylogenetically, in the life of the species, and ontogenetically, in the life of
the individual.

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capacity to represent something that is not perceivable in the environ-
ment, or to represent something that is already perceivable in a man-
ner that is so different that the other cannot have access to it except
through speech.

b) A creative energy

This capacity to represent the environment [to oneself] other-

wise than it is, or to introduce representations that are not perceiv-
able by the psyche,3 mobilizes energies in the speaking being that are
no longer dedicated either to survival or to the being’s adaptation to
the environment, and that henceforth serve to modify the environment
through the creation of these representations. To put it simply, every-
thing that is around us and was not there before we came along was

3 Editor’s Note: The term in French used by Apollon is “le psychisme.” While
it is a common term in popular culture to refer to one’s experience about a
part of oneself that is not body but instead thoughts, emotions, and aware-
ness, or an immaterial part of oneself, Apollon’s use of “psychisme” distin-
guishes it sharply from what he defines in this essay as “esprit.” The usual
translation of “esprit” as “mind” fails to capture its radical departure from
a register of cognition, especially in an age of cognitive and neuroscience.
Freud of course schematized what he called the psychic apparatus, with ego,
superego, and id in the later development. Freud located the unconscious in
the id and claimed that even parts of ego were unconscious. In the framework
Apollon lays out in the present essay, “psychisme” is an adaptive function
within the pleasure principle and in the service of survival of the species.
Animals thus also have a “psychisme,” a cognitive and sentient capacity.
One can say, literally, that “psyche” is the object of psychology, but not
of psychoanalysis, especially as it is practiced in the École freudienne du
Québec. As the Greek etymology of “analysis” (from ana- “up” + luein “loos-
ened”) evokes, in psychoanalysis “psyche” is “loosened,” to make room for
the unconscious, beyond the register of psyche and the goals of biological
and ideological reproduction.

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created in this manner by us, by those who speak. Speech is concerned
both with this non-perceivable mental representation and with the
drive, that energy that is diverted from the organism in the creation
elicited by this representation that is outside of perception.

c) A desire that goes beyond the limits of the collective and

environment

The consequence for the speaking being is that what Spinoza

designates as desire, and considers to be the essence of the human,
pushes the human being beyond the limits that the environment im-
poses on the survival of both the organism and the collective. What the
being represents [to her or himself] is not determined by the collec-
tive, because the other has no access to it except through free speech
–– which already goes beyond the conditions of the environment. This
capacity for pure representation, as Kant would say, makes the being
transcend both his or her existence and his or her membership in the
collective.

d) An irrepressible and unknown quest that transcends the be-

ing’s very existence

This transcendence that desire makes surge up in the speaking

being — the parlêtre — plunges the being into a quest that is as un-
known as it is irrepressible and for which neither the being’s existence,
nor the existence of the group, can serve as limits. Freud recognizes (in
his own way) this transcendence of the unconscious quest that inhabits
the human with the concept of the death drive.

The Spirit, the space particular to the spiritual

From the very beginning, therefore, there has been a space that is spe-
cific to the human, which the ancients designated as the spirit. I main-

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tain this concept. This space that distinguishes Homo sapiens from oth-
er hominids is first of all characterized by speech, which is the sign of
Homo sapiens’ power of representation and creation. This space can-
not be reduced to the psychological, which it subverts in childhood and
puberty, but neither can it be effaced or repressed by the mental space
that language creates for adolescence or by religion, which scientists
seem to think that speech precedes by many hundreds of thousands of
years in the history of evolution.
With the surging up of the speaking being there is a veritable
effraction of the psyche, which had itself already existed for millions of
years. But what interests us here is, first of all, the fact of this effraction
of the psyche in human childhood. What the dynamic of the spirit ef-
fects in the child as a consequence of this spiritual space does not seem
to be manageable by the psyche, which itself develops according to the
rhythms of the maturation of the nervous and endocrine systems and
especially of the brain. The result is that there are a certain number of
situations where the child must live in an unforeseen solitude with this
effraction by the spirit of a psyche that is still being formed. It is this
set of situations that we must consider, from the perspective of psy-
choanalysis, as childhood properly speaking: infancy, the time when it
does not yet speak.

The Psyche

Fundamentally, when we consider the psyche in psychoanalysis we are

talking about a set of mechanisms linked to the limbic and the immune
systems, which articulate the individual to his or her group, immediate
environment, and the environment of the group. This articulation of the
individual to the group comes about through situations that jeopardize
both the survival of the individual in the group and the very existence
of the group in its environment. And when the speaking being — the
parlêtre — surges forth with its capacity to represent otherwise both his
or her link to the group, and the very existence of the group outside

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of its environment, the psyche experiences an effraction not only of its
function, but of its very structure.
Indeed, the psyche establishes limbic and immune limits in the
relationship of the individual to its group and environment. The spir-
itual space of the quest of desire breaks with the limits of the psyche.
Underestimating this effraction that subverts the structural relation-
ship of the being to both the group and the environment leads to all
sorts of confusion between the psyche and the spirit, which are differ-
ent ways of denying the experience of real castration that is at the very
heart of the speaking being.
We are dealing with such kinds of confusion today, in the clinic
and in theory, and it is urgent that psychoanalysis bring some clarity,
given what mondialisation is already forcing us to confront. The child
is confronted with this effraction in the solitude of his or her lived ex-
perience because of the amount of time that is required for the brain
to mature with respect to the creativity of this human “thing” in him
or her. Also it is important that this contradiction encountered by the
child’s eyes and ears, determined as they are by what the child already
represents as human and confronted with the perception and con-
sciousness that sustain the parental discourse in the language of the
child’s culture, be considered and treated with finesse. Something there
risks imposing itself on the child as a prohibition on what can be said,
insofar as what is said still has something to do with speech. Indeed,
what the subject of speech, the speaking being, has to say, does not
have much to do with what can be perceived, just as the object sought
by his or her gaze does not seem to have anything to do with what the
world of adults has to offer. This contradictory experience, the effect of
the effraction, opens a space for the child where the fantasy will come
to lodge itself like a foreign body in the psyche, provoking a symp-
tomatic immune reaction that our psychologists and psychiatrists have
such a hard time managing clinically without recourse to pharmacolog-
ical interventions.
The effraction of the psyche by the spiritual space that is opened
up by this human “thing” that speaks –– which seeks a space for the ob-
ject that already haunts the child, founding his or her desire for some-

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thing else — already takes the child outside the limits of psychic space.
The child thus has the same irreducible experience that for tens of
thousands of years has already marked the humanity that came before
the child, giving rise to creations whose impact we cannot yet imagine.

The Aesthetic

In its double dimension of the feeling of the beautiful and the

feeling of the sublime, which are already taking form in the little speak-
ing being — in the parlêtre — as the structure of his or her spiritual
space, the aesthetic becomes the only recourse that the child has in this
situation, where he or she is alone with the effraction of the psyche as
it is still being formed. It is common for psychiatrists and doctors to
underestimate the solitude of the human being, which is the experience
of all humanity, and which is here reexperienced by the child. The aes-
thetic comes to compensate for the effraction of the psyche by substi-
tuting the feeling of the beautiful for the loss of the limits of the limbic
system, and by substituting the feeling of the sublime for the loss of the
limits of the immune system.
The feeling of the beautiful structures the spiritual space and
allows desire to be arrested by those forms that are preserved, thereby
ensuring the continued presence of this creativity. Beyond the limits of
the limbic system the beautiful articulates the individual to forms that
transcend the limits of his or her existence. Beyond the immune defens-
es that protect the survival of the living being, the feeling of the sublime
articulates the individual to the group in dimensions that transcend his
or her own existence –– and even, in certain cases, the very existence of
the group –– in order to articulate the individual to the human as such.
The feeling of the sublime is constitutive of the collective, and solicits
the individual beyond his or her very existence in order to promote the
human. The aesthetic thus promotes a beyond of the limits of the indi-
vidual as the space of the spirit, thereby defining what is specific to the
human in its difference as an objective that is unknown, but absolute.

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Language

Some 50,000 years ago, according to what scientists tell us, humanity
created language, imposing new limits on its own creativity to ensure
both its survival in new conditions of existence and its creativity in its
profound quest.
From that point onward, a mental space promoted by language
imposed itself on the human spirit through a control of the aesthetic,
which allowed for the development of, and new achievements by, col-
lectives. This phenomenon corresponds to what we will here designate,
from a clinical point of view, as symbolic castration, which is specific
to the installation of the collective. Real castration, on the other hand,
refers to the effraction of the psyche, and is thus concerned with the
installation of subjectivity as such.
Four dimensions that are opened by the creation of language
will characterize this mental Space.

a) Language as such structures the social link, defining the pos-

sible relationships between the members of a social group so
that the group can become a collective.

b) It does this through nomination, which creates and imposes

a shared reality.

c) In doing this, language produces consciousness. Indeed, in

the social group, from this point on, reality is what is sustained
by nomination and by consciousness. The structure of space-
time for each member of the group is delimited by this reality.
That which is not named, which therefore does not fall under
the sanction of language, but is a lived experience of the being

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 that could eventually be named and made part of reality, will
belong to the preconscious.

d) Regarding this reality and the consciousness that confirms

it for each person, language poses the Other as a limit that is
absolute, yet at the same time internal to the Collective: guaran-
teeing this reality against the pure representation that takes the
being out of the Collective.

The mental space that is created in this way with language en-
sures that the Collective maintains its grip over the creative power of
the individual and controls the individual’s spiritual space, which can
then be mobilized in creative enterprises whose scope is greater than
that of an individual creation.
With respect to the real castration represented by the effraction
of the psyche and its effects on this spiritual space where the quest of
desire is at work in the speaking being, especially for the child, lan-
guage represents a symbolic castration that prioritizes shared reality
over subjective representation and collective consciousness over feel-
ing, thus articulating the individual to the collective. Any such situa-
tion where reality takes priority over representation causes the autistic
person to withdraw: but it does not leave others indifferent, either. This
symbolic castration, whereby culture censors the feminine through a
sexual montage, is at the heart of the stakes of adolescence, where one
must create a way to articulate the subjective quest of desire to a con-
cern for the human within the undertakings of the collective, after the
traversal, in puberty, of all the consequences of the real castration that
the effraction of the psyche by the quest of desire represents.

Civilization

The efficacy of the mental space created by language depends not only
on the control of the pure representation in the speaking being — the

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parlêtre — but on the limitation of aesthetic feeling. This is very pre-
cisely what every civilization undertakes. The oldest information we
have about civilizations comes from 25,000 or 30,000 years ago. Ana-
lyzing this allows us to make two observations. The first is that a civili-
zation is founded on beliefs, and the second is that civilization exerts a
veritable affective formatting upon its members in order to ensure the
efficacy and permanence of these beliefs.
We can therefore say that all civilizations promote beliefs whose
ultimate goal is to control the pure representation in the individual.
Once these beliefs are decreed, or simply named, they determine a col-
lective reality that radically orients consciousness. For the individual,
it constitutes a risk of the highest order to deviate from this reality or
from collective consciousness. Belief within a civilization thus defines
the frame within which, for an individual, a pure representation is re-
ceivable. It is thus the very field of the action of the spirit that belief
aims to enclose and control. It is important, both in the psychoanalytic
clinic today and in the context of mondialisation, to take the constraint
of civilization into account, where beliefs are presented that sustain the
fantasies and the dreams of patients. The beliefs that support the struc-
ture of the Jewish social link are not the same as the beliefs that found
social relationships in a Shinto society. The collective representations
through which these beliefs are expressed orient the consciousness of
reality for the individuals in these civilizations in ways that are quite
different.
It necessarily follows that what I have described as an affective
formatting functions to guarantee the limits through which the mental
space that is overdetermined in this way will constrain the action of the
spirit and control the quest of desire. For a given civilization, taking
into account the beliefs that sustain the social link, the formatting of
the limbic system will have the double effect of limiting and orienting
the feeling of the beautiful in the development of the individual. What
is considered attractive, or what provokes a reaction of fear, will neces-
sarily have a profound link to the founding beliefs of the social link and
will limit the feeling of the beautiful in the individual. In the same man-
ner, the formatting of the immune system with respect to the founding

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beliefs of the social link ensures the control of the feeling of the sublime
in the way in which it sustains membership in the collective.
By controlling and limiting the aesthetic through an affective
formatting, a civilization encloses the action of the pure representa-
tion and the quest of desire in the feminine. All the members of the
collective come out of women’s wombs and they depend during the
first years of life on this quest of feminine desire and on the pure rep-
resentation that sustains this quest in the woman beyond the frame of
the reality established by language. The existence of the feminine thus
constitutes a challenge at the very heart of the enterprise of civilization.
The montage of the sexual, as a means to control and repress desire in a
civilization, organizes itself both around and against the stakes of fem-
inine jouissance. The history of witchcraft, which is still to be worked
through, will always be there to remind us of this.

Cultures

Cultures are the expressions of civilizations in different circumstances

and geographic contexts. They produce the norms, prohibitions, and
models that are necessary for achievements and productions that are
specific to the civilizations they give expression to.
In general terms, cultures act on collectives and produce the
norms and prohibitions necessary to maintain beliefs and the affective
formatting they require. In this way, cultures support and strengthen
the reality produced by the civilization, and reinforce collective con-
sciousness against the subjective representation of the quest of desire.
Cultures thus produce the models that simultaneously define
and mark out the limbic and immune limits that affective formatting
imposes on the expression of the beautiful. In certain civilizations reli-
gious practices sustain beliefs in order to control, in the individual, the
feeling of the sublime that links the individual to the collective.
In all cases, the practices of the cultural control of the aesthetic
that function to link the individual to the collective pass through the

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structure that links the ego to ideals and to the superego. But with
mondialisation the weakening of ideals will reinforce the link to the
superego.

The Subject of the Quest

The history of the subject of unconscious desire is in a sense structured

on the model of the history of humanity. The dates that I borrow from
scientists do not really matter. What is important is to mark the force
of the differences between the structures that are in play. The child,
in his or her private experience, struggles with the stakes of speech as
they are determined by the way that his or her civilization regulates the
child’s relationship to real castration, or to the effraction of the psyche
by the quest of desire. The adolescent must face the reality of the social
link where he or she must create a specific aesthetic space for what in
the quest escapes the limits and controls of culture, which will allow
the adolescent to articulate him or herself to the future of the human
beyond the stakes of civilization. In the context of mondialisation, psy-
choanalysis is led to think the quest of desire not only in the specific
space of a civilization but from the perspective of the becoming of the
human as the concern of unconscious desire for every subject.
The quest of desire that institutes the human subject in its ca-
pacity to create its own space in which to live and to participate in
the achievements of the collective, is imposed at the moment of real
castration, where this quest transcends the limits of the psyche. This is
undoubtedly one of the dramas of childhood to which the autistic per-
son testifies. The reality imposed by language in the civilization leaves
a part of this quest untouched, which, beyond symbolic castration, es-
capes communal consciousness and subverts the life of the adolescent
for whom desire will follow paths that diverge from those established
by the expectations of culture. The adventures and the impasses of the
young pervert, like the impossible hopes of the young psychotic, tell us
much about this subject.

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 This untouched part of the quest and of human creativity that
thus escapes the controls of civilization and the limits of culture consti-
tutes the real object that maintains, at the heart of the speaking being,
the irreducible desire to create something else. An analysis establishes
a space for the speech that sustains this quest, beyond the stakes of
civilization, in service to the human and to the future of the human in
collectives.

Ethics

The intimate responsibility that the subject feels for this untouched
part of humanity that he or she carries as an unconscious quest re-
quires a subjective space of expression that articulates the person as
a subject to the destiny of the collective. In these new spaces that the
quest of desire requires, and where nothing is planned or anticipated
within the frame of the civilization or culture, the freedom of the sub-
ject has no other guide than the aesthetic that has allowed the subject to
take a certain distance from the reality of the social link. The aesthetic
point of reference that is the feeling of the sublime articulates the sub-
ject of desire to the concern for the human in the collective, beyond the
immune reaction of an ego that is captive to the social link. Taking re-
sponsibility for the becoming of the human in oneself and participating
in this becoming in the collective becomes, for the subject of desire, an
ethical beacon that sustains the aesthetic that nourishes the quest of the
subject in everyday life.

Translated by Daniel Wilson

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Willy Apollon is a philosopher and a psychoanalyst. He was
born in Port au Prince, Haiti, and he lives and works in Que-
bec City, where he has developed, with a few colleagues, anal-
ysis for psychotic individuals and founded “The 388,” a related
center for treatment that gives psychoanalysis the central role
and aims at enabling young adults to participate in social life as
free citizens. He defended his doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne
in Paris under the supervision of Gilles Deleuze, subsequent-
ly published as Le Vaudou: un espace pour “les voix”, by Galilée in
1976. In 1977, along with humanities colleagues and graduate
students from Université Laval, he founded the non-profit or-
ganization GIFRIC: the Freudian Interdisciplinary Group for
Research and Critical and Clinical Interventions. In 1997 Gifric
created the École freudienne du Québec [Freudian School of Que-
bec], which now includes circles in Quebec, the United States,
and Puerto Rico. Some of his essays in English have appeared
with those of his colleagues Danielle Bergeron and Lucie Can-
tin in edited volumes such as After Lacan, edited by Robert Hu-
gues and Karen Ror Malone (SUNY Press, 2002), as well as
in the journals differences, Konturen, and also Umbra, the former
journal of Buffalo’s Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and
Culture.

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