L’acte et son énigme. Entre l’indicible et l’innommable

Contiguous with social spaces, the prison is invested with a degree of secrecy. However, those who are incarcerated tolerate the space, which imprisons them with difficulty, insofar as this place, which punishes them, does not allow them to approach an act where the significance escapes. The act, which led them to this place, identifies them, more than it interrogates the “acting out of the act”, which is profoundly enigmatic and rarely questioned. The legal procedures fix behaviors by a ruling, which is hardly suitable for clarifying acts, which inhibit the significance. Based on clinical situations, we have attempted to conduct investigations concerning the act, defining the role, which the psychologist, orientated by psychoanalysis, must have in the individual work that he maintains with the prisoners. Far from numbing the significance, the aim is to articulate the statements with the contradictions, which compose them, to let an aborted word appear under appropriate discourse; the one which touches on the unspeakable. Taken literally, the significant point of the act is revealed to be less expressible than it had seemed and allows a glimpse of unsuspected areas.