life of the electronic cartel in the NLS and the effects of elaboration
that it produces, but it also constitutes in fact a leading
theoretical-clinical document extracted from a remarkable work of
research.
us thank Despina Andropoulou, responsible for cartels of the outgoing
EC, for this precious work of both knotting and tightening.
It can but produce a desire for the cartel in our School.
*****
The
great secret of psychoanalysis: Generalized forclosure
“The great secret [of psychoanalysis], is –there is no Other of the Other”[1].
This sentence, pinned down by J.-A. Miller in Seminar VI, Desire and its interpretation,
will serve us as a compass to present the preparatory work of the cartels
towards this year’s NLS Congress, having as an orientating thread to “put this revelation to
the test of the clinic.”[2]
The
theme of the Congress “What cannot be said. Desire, fantasy, real” “unfolds between what cannot be said
except between the lines and what is impossible to say”[3]. In
other words, the fact that the signifier is lacking in the Other [S (barred A)],
leads us to the conclusion that there is “an inadequacy between the real and
the mental” and consequently, “about the real, we cannot but lie”[4]. This
condition is experienced by the speaking subject as a trauma, from which he
defends either by means of the desiring experience of the fantasy, of delusion
or of a sinthomatic invention, sometimes precarious. In any case, one has
always to deal with the relation of the subject with an object of a more or
less veiled nature, which constitutes his truth[5]. That said,
there is a continuum extending from the neurotic and perverse fundamental
fantasy to the delusion. This consideration makes of neurosis and psychosis two
modalities of analogue psychical organizations, each one providing the aid of
an established discourse in order to face the disturbance introduced by jouissance[6].
The
panic point before the unsayable in the Other
In
the 14 vignettes presented by our colleagues, we will first identify that which,
in each case, constituted the "panic point"[7] for the
subject, namely the time in his life when he was led to "face his
existence", the moment when, hilflos [helpless], he was erased, deprived from the support with
which the guarantee of the Other previously provided him, so as to find a way
to put an order to his world.
The
moral cowardice experienced as sadness leads a young woman to question herself
about her subjective position, about her responsibility towards her desire.
More precisely, the desire to know [savoir]
the reason for which she chooses men who are already engaged to other women,
leads T. to the analyst at a moment when the fantasy of the “perfect child” she
was for the other vacillates, and the ideals collapse, leaving room for
dissatisfaction, disgust and loss of meaning in life. (case 9)
Other
subjects, as we could observe, face the hole that the inexistence of the Other
left open, especially at the moment of the separation from a beloved
one. In one case, the subject remains perplexed due to cumbersome thoughts
(case 7), in another, he finds out his incapacity to give an answer that would
involve his desire, as up to then he had acted according to the Other’s will, from
the position of being his object (case 1). Separation marks for another subject
the beginning of a period of disconnection from the Other and of the laisser
tomber regarding the relation to the body (case 10). Just after her
separation from a boyfriend who haunted her through insults regarding her body
image, a young woman regresses to the mirror stage and then jouissance takes a
ravaging symptomatic form (case 12).
In two other cases, the subjects face the hole
opened up by the questions of sex and death at the time of separating from
their children when they reach adolescence. Thus, a mother facing the young
woman that her daughter has become, confronts the mystery of sexuality through
this other woman[8]
"who does not speak, is very beautiful, apathetic …" and who questions
her in relation to her own sexuality which is restrained to the signification
provided by science; for her it is just about hormones (case 5). In the same
vein, the fact that the son has left home to go to boarding school awakens the memory
of the missed celebration of the mother’s 15th anniversary.
Integrating this failure in speech made family
taboos emerge. These taboos -like black spots- suffocated the subject as
a sexed being (case 11). The enigma of sexuality springs in another subject in
the form of the obsessive idea that he is gay, a thought that torments him whenever
he is rejected by a woman (case 13); while for a 14 years-old girl, it is the
words coming out from the maternal mouth that become pure real. Since the
subject does not have access to metaphor, the word is the thing[9] that
aims at it [the subject] (case 4).
In
another register, the separation from the intact Other is effectuated by the
arrival of a new-born in the family. The subject’s encounter with the lack in
the real, following its own destitution as an imaginary phallus of the maternal
Other, caused the dereliction of Being (case 2).
Other
factors that bring the unsayable to light are life events that reveal the
inconsistency of the Other and uncover the raw jouissance (threat of death,
disappearance and murder of the brother, forced exile, asylum) making of injustice a real trauma that forces the
subject to traverse the impossible. The appearance of God as the only guarantee
that can bring order into his world seems to be, at this time, insufficient to veil
the real (case 3).
Modes
of rebellion of the id
We
know that, since Freud, neurosis and psychosis are both expressions of the
rebellion of the id against the external world, [expressions]of its
displeasure, or of its inability to adapt to the real necessity, to the Ανάγκη[10].
The forms that this rebellion takes up, in each
case, against the displeasure arisen from the encounter with the bar in the
Other and the flaw that it thus opens for the subject, are worth being examined.
We
verify that nightmares are a mask of the real in its unbearable version
that we often come upon in the cases presented. The death drive is mediated by
images exemplary for their ferocity (amputation scene in cases 3 and 14,
suffocation in case 3), announcing the imminent death of the subject (case 5).
In
other cases, it is the experience of anxiety –as an affect that does not
deceive and an index of the object that the subject is for the Other – that is
the major sign of the unbearable real. In the form of panic attacks and
suffocation, anxiety indicates the fixation or better the petrification of the
subject in a position of absolute object of the Other whose desire is enigmatic
(case 11, case 13). This position of subordination in other cases causes anger
and a feeling of inner emptiness at times of separation (case 5, case
10). In some cases, the subject is often paralyzed, with no energy,
inhibited, disintegrated (case 10), desinstituted (case 8) before
the hole in the symbolic making explicit the status of waste that he is for the
Other.
Moral
cowardice that reaches the point of melancholy is often observed
in cases where the superego overwhelms the subject through some signifiers –
"You're poor, you're nothing, you're nobody" (case 1 ), " You
will become just like your father, compulsive and violent ( case 13)",
which have as effect an excessive assignment of being, fixating the subject in
a position under a massive master signifier, which is supposed to represent him
in an univocal way in the Other. These statements that pretend to lift the X of
the desire of the mother and which are often articulated by
her, debase the subject and push him to identify himself with an object of the
maternal fantasy, the object of a death wish[11]. We see
an illustration of this mortifying petrification in the case of the girl for
whom her mother's words reveal the paternal grandmother’s will to kill her.
These words are taken by the girl as absolute statements outside any dialectic,
causing an anxiety of death in the real (case 4).
Thereafter,
the return of the symbolic in the real, can be traced in the cases of hallucinations
and bodily phenomena. It is the case of the articulation of "ugly
and dirty words" of which the subject is nothing but the witness. These
are words coming out of the desert of a non-subjectivised instance where
"the absence of the subject” in the id is revealed (case 4)[12]. The
emergence of the voices of the beloved ones who accompany the subject in his
solitude (case 3), the shaking of the body as a strange body satisfaction
occurring at the moments when the subject finds the right word (case 5), the
experience of the autonomy of body parts (case 6), are phenomena of the return
of the unsayable -of what has been foreclosed from the symbolic- in the real.
The
symptom is a response that the subject builds in order to respond to a
reality to which it is always impossible to adapt and, at the same time,
constitutes for the clinician another way to approach the drive in each case.
In psychosis, the symptom reverberates the object in the real[13], for
instance in the form of an insulting voice, while in neurosis, the symptom
establishes a connection between a signifier (S1) and the object of the
drive (a). In all cases, the symptom
is an effect of the symbolic in the real.
In
at least three cases, the oral object in the form of anorexia, bulimia and
alcoholism becomes the real object to which the subject clings in moments of
dereliction. Bulimia would be the subject’s effort to fill the void in the real
(case 2 ), while anorexia is a way to localize the jouissance allowing for the
young woman to stay alive through the worries it raises[14] and to
expose before the others’ gaze her inner hell ( case 12). When facing
the fear of her annihilation, a teenager realizes [reelise] her will
"not to be a burden for her mother" and starts losing weight, while at
the same time she provokes the Other’s reaction. It is a way of existing for
the Other -the crying of the mother and the disputes between her parents are
the moments when they are reminded of her existence -embodying the object she
is for this other, a being for death (case 4). Another young woman, who is
identified with her father’s jouissance, clings to alcohol in order to avoid
the encounter with her own desire. The identification to a loser, a loser that
she wants to save, becomes a fantasy that separates her from the invasive
maternal will, but at the same time leads her to the worst, through risky
practices and choices of partners who abandon her. The anxiety that arises when
confronted with a man who could desire her, takes thus over the fantasy of being
rescued by a failed other (case 7).
In
a number of other cases, we note the devastating effect of being the object of
an intrusive Other and then letting oneself be dropped, a fact that reveals the
subject's will to be the exclusive object of the Other (cases 5, 10).
Treating
the unsayable: modes of suppletion and function of the analyst
The
symptom allows us to tame jouissance in what it has of unsayable[15] but we
see that in cases of psychosis, which constituted the vast majority of the
cases presented, symptoms fail to limit jouissance; the fact that jouissance
remains untamed, unlimited, pushes the subject towards other inventions in
order to regulate the intrusion of jouissance. In case 2, the introduction of the
cuts [of the session] by the analyst, has the effect of stopping the unfurling oral
jouissance, while in case 7, the introduction of the father figure in the
patient’s discourse patient also has a pacifying effect. In case 5, the analyst
becomes the outlet for the subject’s anger when the mother fails to make
One with her daughter. The analysis is in this sense a place where
to lodge the anxiety aroused by the encounter with another living being. In
another case, keeping a woman away from the perplexity that the questions about
sexual identity arouse in her, and recognizing her lifestyle as a performance
that follows written orders (S1) pinned all over her apartment in
the form of little notes, are means of stabilisation supported by the analyst
(case 6). On the contrary, what revitalized the life of another subject was the
fact of speaking about the family taboos, which up until then prevented him
from weaving his filiation history and which had major inhibitory effects (case
11).
The
richness of the cases presented cannot, of course, be exhausted in a few lines
commentary. The space of the e-cartel
offers the possibility not only to present cases but also to have serious
discussion and exchange, or even debate on issues that the contemporary clinic
poses to the practitioner. The question posed by cartel 14: "Neurosis has
a particular structure, but if it is not there, does this automatically mean
that it is a psychosis?” is an example of the important questions that the
cartel among several may give
rise to.
I
would like to thank all the colleagues –and especially the Plus-Ones and the extimes– who contributed to and
supported the work of the electronic cartels this year.
Despina Andropoulou
Responsible for Cartels of the NLS 2012/14
[1] Lacan J., Le Séminaire, Livre VI, Le
désir et son interprétation, Paris, éd. de La Martinière, p. 353.
[2]
Miller J.-A., Presentation of the theme of the next NLS Congress in Ghent (May
2014), closing conference of the XIth NLS Congress of the NLS,
Athens, 19 May 2013, published in Hurly-Burly,
Issue 10, December 2013, p. 15.
[3]Holvoet
D., Argument for the XIIth NLS Congress in Ghent, published in Hurly-Burly, Issue 10, December 2013, p. 30.
[4] Miller J.-A., Lacanian Orientation. Course Choses de
finesse en psychanalyse, teaching
delivered within the setting of the Department of Psychoanalysis, University of Paris 8, 2008/2009, unpublished.
[5]
Lacan J., The Seminar, Book XI, The Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Norton, London, 1998, p. 5.
with Véronique Eydoux, José Rambeau, Catherine Stef, Pierre Sidon, Dominique
Wintrebert (plus-one). Reporter: Dominique Wintrebert.
[7] Lacan
J., Le Séminaire, Livre VI, Le désir et son interprétation, op. cit., p. 108
[8]
Comment by the extime L. Vander
Vennet
[9] Miller J-A., «Ironic Clinic», in The Symptom, Issue 2, Spring 2002, p.
3. Available on-line: http://www.lacan.com/contributionf.htm
[10] Freud, S., Névrose, psychose et
perversion, PUF, Paris, p. 301.
[11] De Georges Ph., Par-delà le vrai et le faux, Vérité, réalité
et réel en psychanalyse, Éditions Michèle, Paris, 2013, p. 181.
[12] Lacan, J., «Remarks
on Daniel Lagache 's Presentation», in Ecrits. The First Complete Edition in
English, Norton, London/New York, 2006, p. 543.
[13] Miller
J.-A., Lacanian Orientation. Course Ce qui fait insigne, teaching
delivered within the setting of the Department of Psychoanalysis, University of Paris 8, lesson
of 3 June 1987,
unpublished.
[14]
Comment by the extime J.-L. Monnier
[15] Miller J.-A., ibid.
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