The Urgency of Mourning

Michèle Laboureur
 
 
The position of mourning is an urgency that arises when faced with the loss of a close one. The hole that has opened in the real as a result of the disappearance cannot be filled¹ by signifiers so long as there is a lack in the signifier minus phi. In his Seminar on The Sinthome, Lacan speaks of the ex-sistence of the real, but of the hole of the symbolic.²
 
Freud indicates that the mourning process takes time. It consists in undoing the libidinal bonds that tie you to the deceased one.
 
The question arises: what was he for me? What was I for him? How am I to peel away from what I was for him? How am I to separate from him? This is one definition of the castration of the Other. Thus, this process seems to me to encounter a parallel with the identification that comes about by means of the trait, the identification with the unary trait.³ Furthermore, Lacan comments on Freud, saying: “Mourning consists in authenticating the real loss little by little, piece by piece, sign by sign, element capital I by element capital I, until they are exhausted.”⁴
 
In the twenty-fourth Seminar⁵, Lacan takes up the modes of identification⁶ once more and articulates them with the topological models he had put forward, which are obtained by making different types of cut.
 
In mourning, we are sent back to our original distress. The reduction of the living being to the inanimate is a real that ex-sists, an impossibility. This is why Lacan turned to the Borromean knot and above all to topology, which clasps and accounts for this real.
 
It is a particular object, whose mourning was impossible for Hamlet: the mourning of the phallus, this being a term that Lacan also uses to designate what Freud called the Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex.⁷ Lacan tells us that once Hamlet was mortally wounded, he renounced any narcissistic investment,⁸ and then, “he identifies with the fatal signifier,” “with the mortal phallus.” ⁹
 
Before referring identification to the three registers of I, S and R, Lacan specifies two types of identification: one signifying, the other related to the object a and which introduces a process of separation. This object a, discerned in the drive, is what introduces “the meaning of sex”, and “its significations are always capable of making present the presence of death.”¹⁰
 
Hence at the end of analysis, there is “the mourning of the object,” the fall of the object, where formerly stood the analyst, and separation from the object.¹¹
 

Urgency and Satisfaction
 

Esthela Solano-Suarez

A psychoanalysis is an experience that is accomplished in the course of a rather extended temporal period. Many testimonies attest to this. It takes time. It is also in this respect that one can make an objection, at a time that is characterised by the urgency that governs the search for satisfaction.  

All throughout his teaching, Lacan did not stop questioning the temporal dimension that is in play in analysis. One knows well the price he had to pay for substituting the canonical time of the chronological session with the logical time founded by reason on the basis of a signifying logic. The scansion of the session, the cut of the signifying chain as well as the analytic act respond to the aim of operating from the symbolic on the jouissance of the symptom. The dimension of logical haste is put in the foreground, as an eminent function in the production of a precipitation of the effects of truth.

We owe it to Jacques-Alain Miller [1] to have identified the crucial importance of the value of the term urgency that we find in the last text written by Lacan. [2] In this text, urgency is paired with the term satisfaction.   

Satisfaction is that which “marks the end of an analysis” [3] – satisfaction not of the order of truth, that proves to be false, but satisfaction that concerns the register of jouissance. “[…] giving this satisfaction is the urgency over which analysis presides, [4] Lacan writes, indicating that analysis is only accomplished by thwarting the routine of the signified and the intention of meaning – in short the dream of eternity – in order to touch “the echo in the body of a fact of saying”. [5]

It remains to know “how someone can devote himself to satisfying these urgent cases” [6] not out of love for the neighbor, because the one who is in “the request with an urgency” is not a neighbor, nor does the analyst offer himself as a good Samaritan, but as one whose offer precedes the urgency, an urgency that he must weigh, because he is not sure of satisfying it in every case.                                            

The ethic of the formation of analysts is thus measured by the yardstick of the satisfaction of an urgency. The pass is the device that permits the analysand to testify to the satisfaction that marks the end of analysis, presided over by urgency. The School appoints as Analyst of the School “ill-assorted oddments” [7] who testify “at best one can to the lying truth” [8], whose term ended in a satisfaction, supposing that they are able to satisfy urgent cases.
 

Translated by Joanne Conway