Suture is a Lacanian concept, but not a concept of Lacan’s. According to Alain Badiou, Jacques-Alain Miller’s paper, ‘Suture (Elements of the Logic of the Signifier)’ was “the first great Lacanian text not to be written by Lacan himself” (Badiou, ‘A Contemporary Use of Frege’, in Number and Numbers, p.25). In simple terms, the achievement of Miller’s text that has gained it the reputation Badiou acknowledges was to find a place for the subject in structure – to demonstrate how the structure could essentially become subjectivised through a suture between the subject of the signifier and the signifying structure. Moreover, the sort of subject Miller demonstrates in his paper is one that doesn’t require any consciousness, any psychology, any ‘imaginary’ to use Lacan’s term.

Miller’s paper was first delivered as an intervention at Lacan’s seminar ‘Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis’ on 24th February 1965 (full seminar available here) and then written up to feature in the first edition of the Cahiers pour l’Analyse the following year. Two recent events give us occasion to return to Miller’s paper and look at it more closely.

Firstly, the publication at the end of last year of two volumes on the Cahiers pour l’Analyse, Concept and Form, under the editorship of Peter Hallward and Knox Peden. Secondly, Miller’s own announcement that after being wound up in 1969 publication of the Cahiers will be resumed, with the first of the new editions scheduled for release in early 2014.

In this article we will look in depth at Miller’s paper, with the aid of commentary provided by Hallward, Zizek and others. ‘Suture’ first found its way into English translation for the journal Screen in 1978 by Jacqueline Rose (a copy of which is available here), but for the purposes of this article I will be referencing the version which appears in Hallward’s volume, and all page references will be to that.

Before looking at the body of the text, a note on Miller’s rather bold opening remarks which have a certain resonance for psychoanalysis today. At this point in his life Miller was neither analyst nor analysand; indeed, the initial presentation at Lacan’s Seminar took place barely a few days after his 21st birthday. His introduction to the presentation thus quite bravely takes the form of questioning why the audience should be listening to him at all. Yet the answer he offers is quite eloquent and creative, appealing to the topological model of the Mobius strip, which by this time Lacan had already employed in previous seminars, to challenge the pure binary of inside/outside in respect of the psychoanalytic community:

“… The Freudian field is not representable as a closed surface. The opening up of psychoanalysis is not the effect of the liberalism, the whim, the blindness even of he who has set himself as its guardian. For, if not being situated on the inside does not relegate you to the outside, it is because at a certain point, excluded from a two-dimensional topology, the two surfaces join up and the periphery or outer edge crosses over the circumscription.” (p.91-92).

Pushed to its logical horizon, the implication here is that there is no such thing as a psychoanalytic community. Of course, read in one way this is not just conceptually but empirically true – the history of psychoanalysis, to this very day, has been the history of dispute, split, dissolution and division amongst psychoanalysts themselves, and by extension their various schools and orientations. But in a sense more specific to the context in which Miller delivered his paper, it is worth noting that Lacan’s audience in the mid-1960s was not limited to current or trainee analysts, but a wide spread of academics, intellectuals and the curious grounded in a range of disparate disciplines. Fortunately, this is still true today. Lacan himself never confined his thinking to standard psychoanalytical reference points, declaring with a hint of uncharacteristic modesty at one point, “I take things where I find them, and I hope nobody minds” (Seminar X, 14.11.1962.)

We can also note in passing that Miller’s methodology is very close to the one Lacan became famous for employing. Taking a word out of ordinary everyday usage, he plucks it from its common context, and applies it to the domain of psychoanalysis. As Lacan did with foreclosure, so Miller does with suture.

“Suture names the relation of the subject to the chain of its discourse; we shall see that it figures there as the element which is lacking, in the form of a stand-in [tenant-lieu]. For while there lacking it is not purely and simply absent. Suture, by extension – the general relation of lack to the structure – of which it is an element, inasmuch as it implies the position of a taking-the-place-of [tenant-lieu].” (p.93).

A crucial reference for Miller in this text is the nineteenth century German mathematician Gottlob Frege. What interests Miller about Frege is the way he addresses the following question, which Miller specifies at the beginning of his paper:

“Here then is the question posed in its most general form:

what is it that functions in the series of whole natural numbers to which we can assign their progression?

And the answer, which I shall give at once before establishing it:

in the process of the constitution of the series, in the genesis of progression, the function of the subject, miscognised, is operative” (p.94)

So, jumping ahead to his conclusion, Miller is saying that the subject is the element that makes possible the progression (whether of signifiers or numbers), the moving, from one number or signifier to another. Miller notes that Frege would disagree, however, as his theory is designed precisely to exclude the subject (p.94).

But if Frege does not have a concept of the subject, Miller elucidates a concept of identity that he does have. Let’s follow Miller in his outline of Frege (or at least what he takes from his work), looking first at this definition of identity which Frege in turn borrows from Leibniz:

“Those things are identical of which one can be substituted for the other salva veritate, without loss of truth.” (p.96).

For everything not identical to itself Frege employs the concept zero. Zero therefore fails the test of truth – “in the autonomous construction of the logical through itself, it has been necessary, in order to exclude any reference to the real, to evoke on the level of the concept an object not-identical-with-itself, to be subsequently rejected from the dimension of truth” (p.97).

With this established as a starting point, we can move on. Frege’s theory has three elements:

Concept – the thing identical with the concept of X [where X here stands for a thing]

Object – the concept as a unit

Number – 1, assigned to the concept of X, but not 1 as a number (for example, in the sequence 1,2,3, etc) but 1 as a count of the concept of a thing, X.

Frege also specifies two relations between these three elements:

Subsumption – of the concept to the object

Assignation – of the concept to the number

Miller summarises: “A number is assigned to a concept which subsumes objects” (p.94).

To pick up Miller’s text at p.96 in Hallward and Peden’s volume:

“Let us now put into operation Frege’s schema, that is, go through the three-stage itinerary which he prescribes to us. Let there be a thing X of the world. Let there be the empirical concept of this X. The concept which finds a place in the schema is not this empirical concept but that which redoubles it, being ‘identical with the concept of X’. The object which falls under this concept X is itself, as a unit. In this the number, which is the third term of the sequence, to be assigned to the concept of X will be the number 1. Which means that this function of the number 1 is repetitive for all things of the world. It is in this sense that this 1 is only the unit which constitutes [the] number [le nombre] as such, and not the 1 in its personal identity as a number with its own particular place and a proper name in the series of numbers. Furthermore, its construction demands that, in order to transform it, we call upon a thing of the world – which, according to Frege, cannot be [done]: the logical must be sustained through nothing but itself.” (p.96)

Then Miller explains the importance of being able to introduce zero to this system:

“In order for the number to pass from the repetition of the 1 of the identical to that of its ordered succession, in order for the logical dimension to gain its autonomy definitively, without any reference to the real the zero has to appear.” (p.96-97)

As we have seen, Frege uses the concept of zero to encompass anything not identical with itself. As Hallward puts it in his introduction to Concept and Form:

“For Frege, following Leibniz, any concept can only subsume an object insofar as that object can indeed be treated as an object, i.e., as a self-identical unit or ‘one’. Anything that counts as a thing counts insofar as it can be counted as one thing, and science (or true discourse) excludes anything that does not count in this way. The number zero, then, can be assigned to the number of things that do not thus count, i.e., that are not self-identical: there are none such things.” (Hallward, p.48-49).

In other words, the concept of zero is independent from its object, because there is no object that cannot be counted as ‘one thing’. It is a concept without an object, in Frege’s sense. Hallward continues his exposition:

“But there is also only one number that quantifies this absence, i.e., there is only one zero. We can thus derive the number one as the ‘proper name’ of the number zero, and by repeating this derivation (i.e., by repeating the exclusion of the non-identical) we can generate the unending numerical succession of 1+1+1…” (ibid, p.49).

To put this idea in simple terms: you can only count something that can be counted as one; but at the same time you have to have a concept of nothing, and so you need a way of counting nothing as something, and this is what zero as a number does – it provides an assignation of the concept of nothing. As a number, a countable number, rather than a concept, zero sutures the lack – stitches up the gap between the concept of nothing and the fact of there being something that represents or counts that nothing. Miller refers to this process, the operation of this logic, as a summoning and rejection. It is summoned as something – namely, zero, (with as Hallward says, 1 being the ‘proper name’ of zero) but it is then rejected as nothing on the grounds that it fails the test of truth that Frege employs following Leibniz. Zero is thus, in effect, an excess; as Miller puts it, “the excess which operates in the series of numbers” (p.99). And, he follows, the subject is equivalent to this excess.

The appearance of the subject in the signifying structure also shares the characteristic of summoning and rejection that Miller sees operative for zero as outlined above. He describes a way in which we can think of this process at the end of his paper:

“By crossing logical discourse at its point of least resistance, that of its suture, you can see articulated the structure of the subject as a ‘flickering in eclipses’, like the movement which opens and closes [the] number, and delivers up the lack in the form of the 1 in order to abolish it in the successor” (p.101).

“Our purpose has been to recognise in the zero number the suturing stand-in for the lack” (p.99).

The signifier represents the subject in the same way that zero as a number represents lack, or ‘nothing itself’, as a concept. If the subject is just a product of the signifying chain, if the subject only exists as a lack in the gaps between signifiers, then, as Hallward explains, “given this gap, a signifier can represent it as a (or one) gap for another signifier, and can do so indefinitely.” (Hallward, p.49). In other words, the gap, lack or absence itself can count as absence, as one, and thus be represented signifier to signifier.

An important implication thus arises. Does this mean that in order for the movement of signifiers to get going there has to be a subject to be represented as lack for other signifiers? This is the conclusion that Miller states at the beginning of his paper that he will reach when he writes that “the unity which could be called unifying of the concept insofar as it is assigned by the number is subordinate to the unit as distinctive insofar as it supports the number.” (p.95) In his commentary on Miller’s paper, ‘‘Suture’, Forty Years Later’, Zizek elaborates on the necessity of this representation of lack for the cohesion of the structure:

“If the identity of a signifier is nothing but the series of its constitutive differences [e.g., night from day - a signifier can only be defined in opposition to what it is not], then every signifying series has to be supplemented – ‘sutured’ – by a reflexive signifier which itself has no determinate meaning (no signified), since it stands only for the presence of meaning as such, the presence of meaning as opposed to its absence…. Every signifying field thus has to be ‘sutured’ by a supplementary zero-signifier…. This signifier is ‘a symbol in its pure state’: lacking any determinate meaning, it stands for the presence of meaning as such, in contrast to its absence” (Zizek in Hallward, p.150-151).

And this appropriately-named zero-signifier is coextensive with the place of the subject as Miller locates it in his paper. This can be seen as Miller’s great triumph – demonstrating that for the structure to have any coherence it needs a subject. However, the question would then be – does this subject have to be identical to a lack, fulfilling the same function as zero does for Frege? In other words, is Miller  just drawing on Frege’s use of the concept of zero to provide a handy way to think about Lacan’s famous dictum ‘the signifier represents a subject for another signifier’?

The suture at work for Miller is between zero as a concept (nothing, lack, basically something which is impossible to conceptualise) and zero as a number. But in the same way, Miller’s argument is that the subject cannot be represented in the signifying chain – because it, like the concept of zero, is non-conceptualisable – so it’s sutured into a number, basically, a ‘one’. Hallward explains this point:

“… From one link to another of a signifying chain, a signifier represents, places or ‘sutures’ (i.e., treats-as-identical or counts-as-one), for another signifier, that essential lack of self-identity or place which is all that can be represented of the subject qua subject” (Hallward, p.50).

This is what Miller is getting at in the quote at the beginning of this article:

“Suture names the relation of the subject to the chain of its discourse; we shall see that it figures there as the element which is lacking, in the form of a stand-in [tenant-lieu]. For while there lacking it is not purely and simply absent. Suture, by extension – the general relation of lack to the structure – of which it is an element, inasmuch as it implies the position of a taking-the-place-of [tenant-lieu].” (p.93).

“Now, if the series of numbers, metonymy of the zero, begins with its metaphor, if the 0 member of the series as number is only the standing-in-place suturing the absence (of the absolute zero) which moves beneath the chain according to the alternation of a representation and an exclusion – then what is there to stop us from seeing in the restored relation of the zero to the series of numbers the most elementary articulation of the subject’s relation to the signifying chain?” (p.99)

This passage shows how clearly Miller draws a parallel between the function of zero for Frege and the place of the subject for Lacan. (We can note in passing that, in this, Miller can be seen as responding to the famous question he posed to Lacan which helped first bring him to the latter’s attention – namely, at the start of Seminar XI, whether Lacan’s conception of the subject supposes an ontology.) As if to reinforce the equivalence he draws, in the passage above Miller also highlights the correspondence to Lacan’s use of the operations of metaphor and metonymy. We can schematise this as follows:

An online synopsis of ‘Suture’ put together by Hallward and Peden elaborates on this point:

“Miller argues that the ‘verticality’ of this movement from zero to one, by which ‘the 0 lack comes to be represented as 1 [...], indicates a crossing, a transgression’; the successor operation installs a ‘horizontal’ sequence of numbers on the basis of this primary ‘verticality’ (46-47/31). Whereas ‘logical representation’ tends to collapse this construction, the Lacanian concepts of metaphor and metonymy are capable of articulating this construction within a logic of the signifier.2 The primary ‘metaphor’ of the substitution of 1 for 0 is the motor for ‘the metonymic chain of successional progression’.” (Text available here)

In the same way that zero works to suture between absence (the concept of zero) and number (zero as countable number, 1 being the ‘proper name’ of zero), what Lacan calls the unary trait – and what Freud had designated as ‘ein einziger Zug’ – sutures between what is outside the field of the Other (the subject) and what is inside the field of the Other (the signifying chain):

“What constitutes this relation as the matrix of the chain must be isolated in the implication which makes the determinant of the exclusion of the subject outside the field of the Other its representation in that field in the form of the one of the unique, the one of distinctive unity, which is called ‘unary’ by Lacan.” (p.100, for the reference to Lacan see Seminar XI, p.141).

In other words, the subject is the lack, the signifier is the trait, and by extension “the relation of lack to the trait should be considered as the logic of the signifier” (p.99).

Just as zero sutures between nothing (lack) and something (the numeral denoting this lack, 1) to guarantee the progression of numbers (1,2,3…), we can say that the unary trait sutures between the signifying structure and the subject as lack. As Zizek (in the quote above) highlights, it is necessary to have a signifier to signify the lack in the signifying structure. This is why Miller states that “… the definition of the subject comes down to the possibility of one signifier more” (p.100).

Essentially, what Miller is doing is to show that we cannot find a place for the subject if we just have the concepts of signifier and signified – with only these concepts we inevitably fall into structuralism.

An important implication of the way Miller presents the subject here is that you can have a subjectivity without a psychology – there is no need for any reference to consciousness, for example. As he explains:

“… The representation of the subject (as signifier) which excludes consciousness because it is not effected for someone, but in the chain, in the field of truth, for the signifier which precedes it. When Lacan faces the definition of… the signifier as that which represents the subject for another signifier, he is stressing that insofar as the signifying chain is concerned, it is on the level of its effects and not of its cause that consciousness is to be situated. The insertion of the subject into the chain is representation” (p.101).

It is thanks to this ‘consciousness as effect’ that Miller avoids psychologising the subject.

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This is the first of four articles on subjectivity. Or more precisely, the first on four ‘shades’ of subjectivity because, with so much Lacanian ink having already been spilt on this topic, attempting a comprehensive treatment of subjectivity would cover too much familiar ground and present too little that is new. The aim of these articles is far more modest – to present just a handful of different ways in which the notion of subjectivity can be examined through a Lacanian lens.

By way of introduction then, we can give an equally modest definition of subjectivity that goes something like this: subjectivity means nothing other than that each and every one has the chance to tell their own story. Lacan has a concise way of expressing this – referring to human beings as parles-etre, literally, ‘speaking-beings’. A psychoanalysis itself is a particular approach to the integration of one’s history, the telling of one’s own story. This is essentially all that happens in a psychoanalysis, which I have called elsewhere the purest practice of free speech. There then comes the point of making sense of what is said, of making sense of one’s life, a demand for which likely brings someone to the psychoanalyst in the first place.  

An equally rudimentary definition of subjectivity can be found in Lacan’s work. Subjectivity refers to the “sentiment de la vie chez le sujet”, translated by Bruce Fink as “the subject’s sense of life” (Écrits, 558). This definition has the advantage of being much more serviceable and easily graspable than those that drag the full weight of Lacanian jargon in their trail. Something which, as always with Lacan’s work, should be especially welcome.

As well as being an essentially contested concept even in the small world of Lacanian studies, ‘subjectivity’ is not a term that is very frequently used in reference to the human experience, even within the psy- field, the field of talking therapies. Freud doesn’t use the term subjectivity as a concept – the index of the Standard Edition contains no reference to the term used in this sense – but we can certainly say that the question is an imperative implicit in both his clinical and theoretical work, even if the term is not used to articulate it as such.

The lack of attention paid to subjectivity is perhaps a consequence of this contestation around the term itself rather than an indication of its serviceability as a concept. Indeed, there are various definitions of subjectivity, concordant with the fact that for Lacan there are different modes of subjectivity according to the particular structure by way of which the subject has found a place for him- or herself in the registers of the real, imaginary and symbolic. But what is common to all of these structures is the way that the subject is able to constitute, negotiate a position in regards to certain fundamental questions. These questions are universal, characterised by discordant elements that resist meaning. The particular response to each will constitute a subjectivity in the sense of a sentiment de la vie, to use Lacan’s phrase again. Amongst these questions are:

• The question of origins (where do I come from, of which the Oedipal question is the articulation par excellence);

• The question of death (we are reminded of the Lacan’s formulation of the classical obsessional question, am I alive or dead, but this question is perhaps equally pertinent in melancholia and depression);

• The question of knowledge or meaning (the epistemic question, one which often brings people to psychoanalysis itself);

• The question of the body (the way in which the subject negotiates a corporeal unity, a bodily integrity)

With these introductory remarks in mind, let’s now look at the first ‘shade’ of subjectivity, which explores its difference to objectivity.

Shades of Subjectivity – I

In common parlance subjectivity is often held to be the antonym of objectivity, the latter being used to refer to the side of facts, reason, measurability and – ultimately – control. But in the psychoanalytic use of the term subjectivity is not opposed to objectivity. ‘Subjectivity’ in psychoanalysis does not imply a relativism but rather an ontology. Psychoanalysis is a practice which insists on the absolute specificity of each individual’s experience, meaning that subjectivity escapes all attempts at objectification. As the Edinburgh Encyclopedia of Psychoanalysis defines it, subjectivity is “The subjective experience of the individual person which can never be reduced to objectivity” (p.442)

Without falling into the trap of ‘psychoanalytic exceptionism’, this understanding of subjectivity goes very much against the grain of the current climate in the psy- field and in other specialist fields. In these, ‘objectivity’ is increasingly valourised as being equivalent to the demonstrable, whilst ‘subjectivity’ is equated with a lack of rigour or specificity. Indeed, this is perhaps how the two terms are understood in everyday parlance.

This has several consequences in the psy- field. Let’s look at a couple of examples.

The first is in the use of randomised control trials (RCTs) as determinants of clinical accuracy. Their applicability to certain branches of medicine notwithstanding, a psychotherapy demands that the analyst or therapist respect the absolute specificity of an individual’s experience for the very simple reason that a particular symptom may indicate a very different problem for two different people, or for the same person at different times in their life. RCT’s, by their nature, require the lumping into groups of patients assumed to present with precisely the same characteristics – a control group, for instance. The logic of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) here in the UK seems to be that if RCTs did not do so they would not be effective – the fact that they do means they must be effective and so proposed treatments be measured against the outcomes they purport to reveal. The strangeness of this logic has not gone unchallenged. The Alliance for Counselling and Psychotherapy in the UK recently intervened in a letter to the Times Higher Education supplement to point out that RCTs are not applicable to a psychotherapeutic clinic where the question to be answered is rather how to respond best to a unique individual who makes a demand for help.

Another consequence of the facile equation objective-real/subjectivity-indefinite-or-imprecise is the seemingly pervasive idea that there has to be a physical correlate to something in the mind in order for a subjective experience to be ‘real’. Subjectivity is completely experiential. Simply understanding chemical processes in the brain that lead to it does not make it any more or less real, and nor can it provide an explanation of that subjective experience. Author of Bad Science Dr Ben Goldacre has written eloquently about what he cites as this ‘neuro-realism’:

“All mental states have physical correlates, if you believe that the physical activity of the brain is what underlies our sensations, beliefs and experiences: so while different mental states will be associated with different physical states, that doesn’t tell you which caused which…. But far stranger is the idea that a subjective experience must be shown to have a measurable physical correlate in the brain before we can agree that the subjective experience is real, even for matters that are plainly experiential. If someone is complaining of persistent low sex drive, then they have persistent low sex drive, and even if you could find no physical correlate in the brain whatsoever, that wouldn’t matter, they do still have low sex drive. It’s a slightly strange world when a scan of blood flow in the brain is taken as vindication of a subjective mental state, and a way to validate our experience of the world.” (source)

The reality that is at stake here is no less real for it being subjective in nature. We often see an inability to appreciate this point coming from within the psy- field as well as from outside it, a point not lost on Lacan during his lifetime. In 1964 Lacan gave a warning very pertinent for the contemporary understanding of subjectivity in reference to a reality:

“In analytic practice, mapping the subject in relation to reality, such as it is supposed to constitute us, and not in relation to the signifier, amounts to falling already into the degradation of the psychological constitution of the subject” (Seminar XI, p.142).

It is worth remembering here that Lacan had very little respect for psychology and saw the object of its study as different from that of the that of the subject as conceived through psychoanalysis. More on this elsewhere on this site. That is not to say that psychoanalysis is the sole guardian of subjectivity, but it does mean that a certain insensitivity to a person’s subjectivity, resulting from an overly-zelous commitment to ‘objectivity’ as a supposed alternative to the relativism of ‘subjectivity’, is unwise, at least as far as psy- practices go.

A nice example of this is given in a vignette related by Lacanian analyst Darian Leader. It illustrates the folly that popular current therapies such as CBT are founded on – simply aiming to correct a person’s mistaken beliefs by convincing them that what they think is not in accordance with reality:

“A woman convinced that she emits an unpleasant smell is persuaded to travel around on public transport with a portion of fish and chips to monitor how people react to her. This will allow her to assess the “evidence”: she will realise that there is a difference between times when she is the bearer of a strong smell and when she is not, and this will help her to “correct” her beliefs

[...]

“After her strange sojourn on the tube, the woman with the fish and chips would meet her therapist and discuss the events of the day. If she realised that people in fact reacted to her less when she didn’t have the malodorous meal, then she might be able to change her thought pattern, to see her life in a more positive way. She would learn that her symptom was an incorrect interpretation of reality and hopefully come to see the world as everyone else does.

But why did she suffer from this olfactory symptom in the first place? What function did it have in her life? If she was certain about it, what role did certainty play for her? Could it have been a solution to some other, less obvious problem? And if so, what would be the consequences of trying to remove it?” (source)

The approach of psychoanalysis to the truly human, subjective experience is to interrogate how it is that something a subject relates about him or herself  - an element of their story, their history, however fragmentary or arbitrary – has come to be invested with a particular meaning. This meaning is always very personal, and its resonance for that subject cannot be responded to – or intervened on – except with respect for these particularities.

Ways in which this is smothered or ignored are many – sometimes by prescribing a pill, sometimes by offering advice, sometimes by offering the subject the label of a particular symptom or behavioural disorder – but what they all do is ignore the absolute specificity on which subjectivity insists. Rather than dealing with a symptom in a way that seeks to eliminate its mode of expression (the problem someone complains about) it is better to see it as telling some truth about the nature of that person’s subjectivity itself. This is nothing new. Four hundred years before Christ, Hippocrates wrote of how  “It is more important to know what sort of person has a disease than to know what sort of disease a person has.”

To illustrate these points about subjectivity we can borrow from an analogous and perhaps related field, that of studies into the nature of consciousness. The answer to the question ‘what is consciousness?’ is certainly one of the great philosophical debates yet to be settled. That Freud did not consider himself equal to the task of writing a metapsychological paper on consciousness alongside his others in 1914-15 can be taken as an indication of the respect with which we should treat this subject and the utility we can find in the considerations that animate it.

The argument so far has been that whenever we try to use objective means to understand subjectivity there is always something that appears to get left out, to be amiss. This problem has been articulated by the American philosopher Thomas Nagel with the question that forms the title of his famous paper ‘What is it like to be a bat?’. Nagel was writing about consciousness but his argument is apt for our purposes in examining subjectivity. His proposal is that when we think about consciousness we have to think about subjective experiences, specifically the ‘what is it like’-ness of something. When we talk about a subjective experience like pain or love there is often a tendency to account for it by appealing to objective coordinates, just like the researchers cited by Goldacre above did. But the two cannot be so easily conflated. We might think that we can understand what it is like to be a bat because we know so much objectively about how bats sense and perceive their environment through echo-location, but this does not answer the question of what it feels like to be a bat. It only gives us an idea of what it would be like for us humans to live as bats. We can know all we want about the bat’s brain and its physiology but not what it feels like to be a bat.

Last month in London we saw an example of one of the common ways in which this dimension is completely elided in Dr Allen Frances’ address as the 2013 Freud Memorial Lecture. The topic of his talk was Freud’s legacy, and he focused his critique of Freud’s thought on what he saw as the latter’s incorrect conceptualisation of human nature. Perhaps he was right, as he suggested, that Freud created a “Procrustean bed” for himself in how he saw the subject, stretching his theory so far as to be meaningless. But Frances simply traded one Procrustean bed for another. Freud “Developed a metaphor but the wrong metaphor”, he argued. For Frances, Freud saw the mind as working on the model of a steam engine whereas Frances countered that it is well-known nowadays that “the brain is not a powerplant, it’s a computer”. As one of the bullet points in his Powerpoint presentation confidently declared, the correct metaphor was that of “Information processing, not engines”, and “Symptoms [were the] result of hardware and software malfunction”.

What is wrong with this? We can see that it falls into the same trap highlighted by Goldacre above. To say that the brain is just a computer does not tell us anything about subjectivity, a topic at the heart of Freud’s project – indeed, perhaps a reason for his abandonment of neurology – even if Freud does not use the term itself. As the Australian philosopher David Chalmers notes, as adept as we may be in pinpointing causal roles and physical realisations in the physiology or brain chemistry of human beings, we can say the same for inanimate objects like robots or computers. The need to explain phenomenal consciousness, or subjectivity, remains.

Chalmers’ point can be seen as a modern version of an argument made by Leibniz, in his Monadology (1840):

“Suppose that there be a machine, the structure of which produces thinking, feeling and perceiving; imagine this machine enlarged, but preserving the same proportion, so that you could enter it as if it were a mill. This being supposed, you might visit it inside; but what would you observe there? Nothing but parts which push and move each other, and never anything that could explain perception.” (Leibniz. Monadology. Section 17. 1714. Paul Schrecher and Anne Martin Schrecher, trans. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965. 150.)

If humans are just machines, if the brain is just a computer, we still need to answer the riddle of subjectivity – a question different to that of the workings of these physical mechanisms. In other words, if the brain is just a computer, we need to explain how what we experience as subjectivity – indeed, the mind itself – is just an epiphenomenon of the brain, emitting puffs of subjective smoke from the steam engine of the brain (to borrow Frances’ caricature of Freud’s metaphor).

Another nice apologue that illustrates this point can be found in Frank Jackson’s famous thought experiment known as Mary’s Room. Mary, a neuroscientist in the future, knows everything there is to know about human vision and colour perception. Having studied this subject for years she has an expert knowledge of the objective, measurable, physiological workings of colour perception. Yet, tragically, she has never herself seen any colours herself. But one days she walks out into the street and there she sees a red rose for the first time. At that moment, Jackson claims, her knowledge changes. She understands not just the physical qualities of colour and how it is perceived, but also the subjective experience – what it feels like – to see colour. This knowledge is additional to her academic knowledge but, as Jackson argues, constitutes a crucial phenomenal, experiential, subjective adjunct. Subjectivity here is in an entirely new register to that of what we could call the material or physical.

Although Frances credits Freud with pointing out that humans are not rational animals – something that people win the Nobel Prize for nowadays – Frances’ view of subjectivity has very little psychoanalytical theory left in it, and he makes no bones about crediting Darwin as the true innovator of human psychology. In his Freud Memorial Lecture he raised the question of where we can recognise the subject of natural selection, but offered the very odd answer that a woman chooses a man with qualities she wants in her children. It is so rare that the choice of sexual partner conforms to this logic that even purely anecdotal knowledge would be enough to dispel this idea. Although in many ways his recent book ‘Saving Normal’ has done so much to counter the absurdities of the DSM-V, the clue is in the title – Frances believes in the category of ‘normal’.

With this first article setting the scene by referencing current treatments of the idea of subjectivity, In the second article in this series we will look at subjectivity with reference to Freud and Lacan’s work. We will look at what sort of a subject Freud’s work implies, how Lacan build on this to elevate subjectivity to a place of prime importance in psychoanalysis, and how his ideas have been interpreted by post-Lacanians.

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This is the second of four article on the subject of subjectivity (the first is here).

Just as in the last article we opposed subjectivity to objectivity, so here we can oppose subjectivity to identity, both in ordinary parlance and in psychoanalytic terminology. Subjectivity is not reducible to identity. Identity is a purely imaginary category in Lacan’s work, and stems from Freud’s observations on identification. In a sort of shorthand way of bringing the difference between them into relief we can say that whilst a person’s identity is malleable and can change, subjectivity persists as irreducible and irrevocable.

Let’s start by positing an equation between the ego in Freudian terms and identity. One of the great lessons of psychoanalysis is that identity is coextensive with identification – the ego is simply the sum of all abandoned object cathexes, to use Freudian terminology, and as Freud puts it, “Identification is the earliest and original form of emotional tie” (SE XVIII, 107). By extension, this might be taken to imply that all subjectivity is constituted on the basis of inter-subjective relationships.

Lacan follows Freud in believing that our identity is constituted on the basis of successive, compounded identifications, the result of which we know as the ego. This is one of the key elements of Lacan’s theorisation of the imaginary register. However, Lacan highlights the consequences of a too close a dual-imaginary bond as malevolent and destructive in so much of his early work. He builds on Freud’s idea of a correspondence between identity with identification in his early work of the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s, but adds a darker twist. Identity is not something one has but something one develops in one’s relation to the other, to the imaginary counterpart. One’s identity is always therefore essentially a dual-imaginary identification that is borrowed from the other. And yet in all the work he presents at that time he privileges a certain violence, the destructive and homicidal consequences of the reality of identity formation. We need only think of his comments on the case of the Papin sisters, Aimée, and his work on aggressivity. What Lacan gives us amounts to the idea that the imaginary dimension can be characterised as the ‘hell of other people’, to paraphrase Sartre.

If there is a conflation of subjectivity with identity it is perhaps because of the overpowering push to identification that Freud highlights in his Group Psychology essays from 1921 (SE XVIII, 67) and that Lacan sees as constituting not just the structure of paranoia but, by extension, the structure of all human knowledge.

That one’s identity is defined in relation to the other is absolutely prevalent today, so much so that there seems no way in which identity, much less the subject, can otherwise be thought of. We are expected to see ourselves as someone’s employee, someone’s lover, someone’s husband, a positioning that Lacan drew attention to with his distinction between subject of the statement and the subject of the enunciation (something discussed elsewhere on this site).

Today, the requirement to think of ourselves in inter-relational terms has a new and perhaps more exacting character to the one Freud and Lacan were commenting on. In our time, the predominant mode of inter-relational interaction is realised through the network, and via a very recent medium. Indeed, Jacques-Alain Miller, in his commentary on the recently-published Seminar VI (which he edited) cited the network as a new form of social discourse distinct from that of patriarchy:

“We are in the process of leaving the age of the Father. Another discourse is in the process of supplanting the old one. Innovation in the place of tradition. Rather than hierarchy, the network.” (Blurb to Seminar VI, Desire and its Interpretation, translation from the French my own).

The kind of linear identifications that Freud and Lacan saw in hierarchy are now found to be much more diffuse through the network. We can see how this shift is redefining identity simply in the change of vocabulary that accompanies it – modern day terms such as ‘identity theft’ denote how a totally digitalised experience simulates a kind of pure big Other because ‘identity theft’ entails the loss of who you are – without your digital identity you are simply not known to the Other. Likewise, Facebook only allows an account holder a single account so as to be commensurate with their identity, and Google Plus describes itself, using a slightly sinister term, as an ‘identity service’ rather than a social network. This kind of identity promises a means to express individuality – that you can share your thoughts and experiences whenever you choose. For some, this is the very essence of subjectivity. But isn’t the expression of individuality far too often just the compensation offered us by capitalism for the price we pay with our subjectivity? As the now rather worn truism goes, if you’re not paying for it, you’re not the consumer, you’re the product. The odd thing is perhaps that this does not lead to a confusion of identity but of a solidification of it.

On what grounds then can we justify any reference to subjectivity and try to distinguish it from identity?

A distinction between the two that is at least implied if not fully articulated can be found in both Freud and Lacan’s work. If in the Group Psychology papers of 1922 Freud is referring to identity as the result of identification, mulling over its darker side in terms of human susceptibility to worship a leader, a few years later he is doing something very different when he makes his pronouncement in the New Introductory Lectures that “Where It was, there must I come to be”, the infamous Wo Es war… statement (SE XXII, p.80). And if we take Lacan’s observation about this formula seriously – in which he criticises Strachey’s translation of “Where id was, there ego shall be”, noting that Freud does not put the articles on the pronouns, does not say ‘Where the id was, there must the ego be – we can see that Freud is making an ontological statement. What is at issue here is something quite precise, quite different to the question of identity as he phrased it earlier. Interestingly, we find the same distinction in Lacan. It is as if both Freud and Lacan follow the same trajectory of pointing to the imaginary aspect of identity and its darker side (Freud’s analysis of the crowd; Lacan’s thesis on paranoia and the mirror stage), but then turning to privilege an ontology grounded in something more formally impersonal (Freud’s Es or It and Lacan’s big Other/symbolic order).

This formality through impersonality marks the move from identity to subjectivity in both Freud and Lacan’s work. Jacques-Alain Miller has elaborated on how Lacan treated this, drawing attention to a term that Lacan uses infrequently in his work, but expresses this idea in a beautifully compact way: that of ‘extimacy’. The idea of ‘extimacy’, a portmanteau of ‘extimate’ and ‘intimacy’ expresses precisely the radical alteration to the subject’s sense of self, the subject’s ‘me-ness’, that Freud is articulating in the move from identification to the Es. As Miller writes,

“If we use the term extimacy in this way, we can consequently make it be equivalent to the unconscious itself. In this sense, the extimacy of the subject is the Other. This is what we find in ‘The Agency of the Letter” (Écrits, 172), when Lacan speaks of “this other to whom I am more attached than to myself, since, at the heart of my assent to my identity, to myself, it is he who stirs me” (translation modified) – where the extimacy of the Other is tied to the vacillation of the subject’s identity to himself. Thus the writing A—> $ is justified.” (Miller, ‘Extimacy’).

We can also use Lacan’s own Schema L from the Rome Discourse to express this as a movement from a > a’ (identity founded on an imaginary identification with the other) to A > $ (a subjectivity that is radically Other, extimate.)

But what sense does it make to say that the subject is to be found in the Other? If subjectivity is distinct from identity but both are founded on different types of alienation, is subjectivity anything substantive? Levi R. Bryant offers some reflections on this question worth quoting in full:

“… The Lacanian subject is quite literally a void or emptiness.  It’s a sort of empty point, a mobile empty space, that language can never fill.  Symptoms are perpetual (failed) attempts to fill that a priori hole.  In this regard, the Lacanian subject is the ruin of every identity or attempt to ultimately say what we are.

…

As Lacan argued, language introduces something into the world that wasn’t there before for the biological human being:  constitutive absence. Constitutive absence is not the absence of this or that thing, such as being out of coffee in the morning, but is a sort of a priori or transcendental absence…. Most importantly, it is an absence that can never be filled.  Consider the sliding puzzle game [featured here]. Notice the empty square? That empty square allows the substantial squares to be moved about and combined in a variety of different ways, creating a variety of different patterns.  However, the square itself will never be filled.  It will always be empty no matter how much we slide the other squares about.  The various combinations of squares and the patterns they create can be thought as formations of the unconscious.  As the mobile and empty square moves about, it creates different patterns or formations.  The empty square, by contrast, can be thought as subject.  This is how it is within the Lacanian framework.  Subject, transcendental absence, is nothing substantial, nor it is an agency that you are directing like a little homunculus.  Rather, it is that which is perpetually shifting about in the system of language, creating all sorts of nutty formations.” (source)

Jacques-Alain Miller has come up with an idea of what subjectivity in this (minimal, depreciated) form might look like in his game-changing article Suture (read a summary of his argument on this site here). Under a logic which Miller borrows from Frege the subject is conceptualised independently of any consciousness, psychology or agency. Miller presents the subject as empty place, co-extensive with a zero-signifier. Only as such can the subject have a place in the structure of the Other. An effect of the fact that the subject evades representation in language, as Bryant points out above, it can only be represented to other signifiers as a zero. This is the way that Miller understands Lacan’s famous formula ‘the signifier represents the subject for another signifier’: the signifier represents the subject in the same way that zero as a number represents lack, or ‘nothing itself’, as a concept. This gap, lack or absence itself can then count as absence, as one, and thus be represented signifier to signifier. As I have argued more fully elsewhere about Miller’s conception of the subject in this paper, the subject in this sense also effectively animates the signifying chain itself. In the same way that the pieces of the puzzle in Bryant’s diagram referred to above can only move if there is an empty square, so the structure needs a representation of a lack in order for the differential nature of the signifying chain to be realised, for the structure to become mobile as such.

We can conclude with a third expression of this idea, this ‘shade’ of subjectivity, in the form of an anecdote taken from Slavoj Zizek’s best work on the topic of Lacanian psychoanalysis:

“At an art exhibition in Moscow, there is a picture showing Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife, in bed with a young member of the Komsomol. the title of the picture is ‘Lenin in Warsaw’. A bewildered visitor asks a guide: ‘But where is Lenin?’ The guide replies quietly and with dignity: ‘Lenin is in Warsaw’.” (The Sublime Object of Ideology, p.159).

The point of Zizek’s anecdote is to show that the title of the painting names the object that is missing in it. The visitor’s mistake is to assume that the title is talking about what is in the picture. For Zizek, the painting’s title is equivalent to what Freud calls Vorstellungreprasentanz, often translated as ‘representative of the representation’, which Zizek defines as “the representative, the substitute of some representation, the signifying element filling out the vacant place of the missing representation”, or of the depiction of Lenin in the painting (The Sublime Object of Ideology, p.159). The title of the painting thus has a structural equivalence to the missing square in Bryant’s illustration – the only difference is that in Zizek’s apologue the title itself is the signifier of lack, of a lack in the Other. A signifier of this sort does not represent an object as such (the empty square, Lenin in the bed) but precisely the lack of an object.

In the next article we will look at a third ‘shade’ of subjectivity which can help us find our way between the two ontological definitions of subjectivity presented in the latter part of this article: between, on the one hand, an ‘experiential/phenomenal’ subjectivity; and on the other, a ‘formal’ subjectivity without agency that amounts to the mark of a lack. To step back from all this abstract theorisation to the level of the psychoanalytic clinic, the question can be phrased as: what kind of subject presents itself to a psychoanalyst in the consulting room? Is there anything more substantial to this subject beyond the marker of an empty place, or is there nonetheless an experiential/phenomenal subject that it’s worth making the case for? We will look at how a psychoanalysis might address what Lacan refers to as “the subject’s sense of life” (Ecrits, 558), and whether this sense of life is nothing more than the exchange of one alienation (in imaginary identifications) for another (in language). If this doesn’t suppose an agency for the subject, the question which follows is one that preoccupied Lacan throughout Seminar XI (spurred by an intervention by Miller): what kind of ontology are we dealing with in subjectivity?

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 In an attempt to separate subjectivity from identity in the last article, one of the questions we were left with was whether the subject simply exchanges an imaginary alienation (in the rivalrous world of semblables and imagos) for a symbolic alienation (in the Other of the signifying network). We noted how the shift in Lacan’s interest from the imaginary to the symbolic registers had a parallel in Freud’s move from the Group Psychology essays of the early 1920s to the presentation of an ontological formulation in the New Introductory Lectures a decade later. This shift has led Lacanians to elaborate a more minimal, ‘formal’ conception of subjectivity in place of the ‘experiential’ or ‘phenomenal’ formulations that we referenced in the first article in this series.

It might seem odd for a Lacanian to privilege subjectivity when Lacan is clear that the subject is only an effect of the signifier. “The subject is born”, he tells his audience in Seminar XI, “insofar as the signifier emerges in the field of the Other. But, by this very fact, this subject… solidifies into a signifier.” (Seminar XI, p.199). Indeed, the reason that Lacan writes the subject with a barred S – $ – is to show that “it is constituted as secondary in relation to the signifier” (Seminar XI, p.141), that “the subject that speaks is determined through an effect of the signifier” (Introduction to The Names-of-the-Father Seminar, November 20th 1963, published in Television, p.82).

Is there even room for a substantive concept of the subject in Lacan’s work, and even if so, would this subject have simply traded an alienation in the imaginary register for an alienation in the symbolic, given that a signifier refers not to oneself but to other signifiers?

We can respond to this question by looking at how Lacan takes a seemingly small and insignificant remark Freud makes in one of his papers and elevates it to the status of a concept. In chapter VII on identification in his paper ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’ from 1921, Freud gives the example of his patient Dora who imitated the cough of her father. “Identification”, Freud writes, “has appeared instead of object choice… object-choice has regressed to identification” (SE XVIII, p.106-107). Dora’s identification is not to a person as such but to a particular trait of that person which borrows what Freud, in German, calls ein einziger Zug, a single trait:

“It is noticeable that in these identifications the ego sometimes copies the person who is not loved and sometimes the one who is loved. It must also strike us that in both cases the identification is a partial and extremely limited one and only borrows a single trait from the person who is its object.” (SE XVIII, p.107).

Lacan refers to this einziger Zug many times in his work, using both Freud’s German term and the French equivalent he chooses, trait unaire, which in turn is translated into English as ‘unary trait’ . The word ’unary’ is often mistaken for a neologism of Lacan’s, or for ’unitary’. It is neither. Unary (unaire) is a term he borrows from set theory, and it is opposed to singular (unique). There are two points that we can make about how Lacan uses it in reference to subjectivity.

Firstly, Lacan shows that if the subject is an effect of the signifier this does not necessarily mean that the subject is in some way insubstantial, a pure lack.

Half way through Seminar XI Lacan refers to how prehistoric cavemen would signify the killing of an animal by marking it off with a single stroke, perhaps on a cave wall or on the weapon they used. The killing of the animal is represented by a ‘one’, and the subject counts his first kill as ‘one one’. Lacan explains,

“The subject himself is marked off by the single stroke, and first he marks himself as a tattoo, the first of the signifiers. When this signifier, this one, is established – the reckoning [or perhaps ‘counting’] is one one. It is at the level, not of the one, but of the one one, at the level of the reckoning [or ‘counting’], that the subject has to situate himself as such. In this respect, the two ones are already distinguished. Thus is marked the first split that makes the subject as such distinguish himself from the sign in relation to which, at first, he has been able to constitute himself as subject.” (Seminar XI, p.141).

The difference between the two ‘ones’ is that the first is in isolation and the second is linked to a chain. The subject has to find a place for himself, “has to situate himself”, Lacan says, in the chain. In other words, we can say that the subject comes into being as a substantive, countable entity, through this single stroke. The single stroke is a way in which the subject can represent himself to himself, and as such gives the subject a sort of consistency, fixity, or singularity within the signifying structure. The important point is that whilst the strokes do not refer to him, the strokes nevertheless enable him to situate himself in a signifying structure.

As Lacanian scholar Calum Neill points out, there are two subjects that Lacan is bringing out with this apologue. Ostensibly the caveman is just representing a kill as ‘a one’, and then successive kills with ‘two ones’, ‘three ones’, ‘four ones’, etc. But rather than just signifying the count of kills, the caveman is signifying his own act of killing to himself. The caveman is not just signifying the kill of the animal but signifying to himself. The subject is both the one who puts the notch on the cave wall and the one to whom it signifies something. In other words, he is both the sender and receiver of the same message. The notch is a representation to himself and of himself. (Calum Neill, Lacanian Ethics and the Assumption of Subjectivity, p.18). This entails a division by the signifier for sure, but it also points to the way that the subject can constitute himself as subject in the Other. The subject is barred but not entirely swallowed by the Other, and Lacan says as much in Seminar XI when he tells his audience that this single stroke, this ein einziger Zug, constitutes the subject “at the level in which there is a relation of the subject to the Other.” (Seminar XI, p.256).

The second point to be made about Lacan’s discussion of the unary trait is that he uses it to designate the precise point of intersection between the imaginary and the symbolic, a point which allows the subject to effect a movement that situates him in the latter rather than the former. The unary trait marks the point at which an imaginary identification with this einziger Zug that Freud wrote about can start to function instead as a signifying identification. Lacan’s innovation on Freud’s initial insight was to move us beyond thinking of these unary traits as merely imaginary traits, and instead conceive of them as purely formal marks, like those made by the prehistoric cavemen in the description given by Lacan above from Seminar XI.

The unary trait can thus be thought of as a sort of ‘frontier concept’ between the imaginary and the symbolic. As Lacanian writer Ian Parker notes, it is an object firstly that is then elevated to the status of a signifier:

“The unary trait does not simply appear randomly as a particular signifier that will represent the subject. The unary trait is intimately connected to the object; Lacan says ‘it is from the object that the trait emerges, [and] it is something of the object that the trait retains: precisely its unicity’ (10th January 1962, p. 5).” (Source)

It is not the unity of the object qua imaginary object – as one’s semblable, for instance – that is important, but something in the object that can be used to raise the subject out of a purely imaginary relationship. The einziger Zug is the mark or trait of the transition between the imaginary and the symbolic itself, the point which marks how the subject is to position himself in the latter rather than the former.

What is the common thread between these two points? We can say that for Lacan, an essential character of subjectivity that is inherited from this ‘single trait’ is its singularity.

Lacan highlights this singularity as a feature of the signifier itself. If language is a series of differential elements, pure differences, then this single, unary trait, this einziger Zug, is a signifier of pure difference, bringing into relief the minimal differential structure of language. This is what Lacan means when in Seminar IX Lacan he says that the einziger Zug functions as “a support for difference” (Seminar IX, 06.12.1961.) It designates “the power of radical otherness” (ibid). It is in this way that the alterity of the Other, of the signifying chain itself, lends singularity to the subject.

Returning to the prehistoric cavemen hunting animals that Lacan referenced in Seminar XI, we can see that the strokes or notches made every time an animal was killed is an example of this structure of difference. Rather than drawing a visual representation of the animal killed – a sketch of a bison or buffalo on a cave wall, for example – there is simply a notch. Whereas a picture of the animal would put us in the imaginary register, the inscription of a different notch to signify each kill puts us instead in the symbolic register. The succession of notches constitutes a counting, a minimal signifying chain based on difference. But this difference is not at the level of the image (a resemblance to the different animals killed) but at the symbolic level as a pure, formal difference, for which is notch or stroke is the best way to mark this difference. The image at the top of this post, of the engraved metatarsal of a reindeer depicting a horse’s head with notches engraved at the top and bottom, illustrates this.

In highlighting this aspect of singularity Lacan gives us a way to think of subjectivity not in terms of identification based on a dual imaginary bond, but in terms of how the subject can represent itself in a symbolic order of differential traits.

From Seminar VIII in 1961 through to Seminar XI in 1964 Lacan keeps returning to the subject of the einziger Zug and there is a plethora of references that we could examine about it. Let’s pick just one from Seminar IX on Identification in 1961 to illustrate the point above.

Lacan tells his audience a story about his visit to Salle Piette, a room of a museum located just outside Paris called the Musée d’archéologie nationale de Saint-Germain-en-Laye (Yvelines). On his visit he notices the bone of an animal, and as he bends over the glass cabinet, he sees that on it is scratched a series of little strokes or notches. He also notices that the primitive men of the same pre-historic era made little replicas out of bone, and that one of these is a replica of a horse’s skull. In other words, a replica of a horse’s skull made out of a horse’s skull. Why bother making such a replica, Lacan asks:

“But what is more, at the same epoch people made in bone on a very small scale, a reproduction of something that it might not seem one should have taken so much trouble over because it is a reproduction of something else in bone but which is much bigger: a horse’s skull.

Why redo in bone on a small scale, when really one imagines that at that epoch they had other things to be doing [...]?” (Seminar IX, 06.12.1961.)

We can say as such that there was a drive on the part of pre-modern man towards creating representation, an artistic representation even, which we can situate at the simplest level in the imaginary register. But it is not because each one of these little strokes is different that they function as different, but “because the signifying difference is distinct from anything that refers to qualitative difference” (Seminar IX, 06.12.1961.). In other words, it is not because they are longer or shorter strokes that they are different, but in what they signify as strokes. The signifier “serves to connote difference in the pure state”, Lacan says (Seminar IX, 06.12.1961.). It is not the image itself that marks difference (that the model horse made out of horse’s skull is a representation of a horse – this is a bit of a dupe) but in the formal qualities of the signifier as a notch or stroke.

So, it is the fact that the signifier can connote difference as such that makes it valuable in understanding subjectivity. As opposed to the imaginary where the only kind of subject conceivable is a mis-mash of one’s image and his counterpart’s, like a cubist painting, the singularity of subjectivity can come only from the register of the signifier.

But if the signifying network has a differential structure and can thus be distinguished from the imaginary through the singularity of purely formal differences, is it legitimate to extend this to the subject itself? Many writers on Lacan have interpreted his famous maxim that the signifier represents the subject for another signifier as meaning that the subject has no ontological consistency, that subjectivity is just an effect of the animation of the signifying chain. But in his work at this point, Lacan offers us some clues that enable us to show that the subject is not just an epiphenomenon of the signifying chain but that it itself has a singularity.

Lacan takes the example of the Marquis de Sade in Seminar IX. He notes the way that Sade inscribed notches on his bedpost for every sexual conquest he made. Why would he do this? Intriguingly, Lacan says it is so that one can “locate oneself in the sequence of one’s sexual accomplishments” (Seminar IX, 06.12.1961.). In other words, he is representing himself to himself – he is both the sender and receiver of the message, in the same way that Calum Neil pointed to in the reference from Seminar XI above. Lacan says that the notch on the bedpost stops the “immanence” of the subject to his action (the sexual act), “to discern what exists as difference in the real” (Seminar IX, 06.12.1961.).

Lacan’s implication is that a minimal symbolic inscription is necessary to fix subjectivity, to give it a permanence – as opposed to the immanence of the imaginary.

Signifiers help us to introduce difference into the imaginary (and into the real), to annul qualitative differences, like the differences in hair colour or eye colour that Lacan points out to his audience between himself and Laplanche:

“You will say: “Laplanche is Laplanche and Lacan is Lacan”. But it is precisely there that the whole question lies, since precisely in analysis the question is posed whether Laplanche is not the thought of Lacan and if Lacan is not the being of Laplanche or inversely. The question is not sufficiently resolved in the real. It is the signifier which settles it, it is it that introduces difference as such into the real, and precisely in the measure in that what is involved are not at all qualitative differences”. (Seminar IX, 06.12.1961.)

The unary trait, he then says, is what allows for a distinction to be made between two elements beyond “an identity of resemblance” (Seminar IX, 06.12.1961.)

In this session of Seminar IX Lacan also talks about the importance of differentiating the unary trait as a signifier from the sign. What is the difference between the two?

“A sign, we are told, is to represent something for someone: the someone is there as a support for the sign. The first definition that one can give of a someone is: someone who is accessible to a sign. It is the most elementary form, if one can express oneself in that way of subjectivity; there is no object at all here yet, there is something different: the sign, which represents this something for someone. A signifier is distinguished from a sign first of all in this which is what I tried to get you to sense: the fact is that signifiers only manifest at first the presence of difference as such and nothing else.” (Seminar IX, 06.12.1961.).

In other words, a sign may signify something, perhaps to someone, even if that someone doesn’t know what it is. But a signifier doesn’t have to signify anything except pure difference. Signifiers do not relate to signifieds – they only relate to each other. The difference a signifier signifies is a difference from other signifiers, and as such they can only function as signifiers when they are part of a network, even if that network is just a minimal binary – day/night, in/out, right/left, 1/0, etc.

The reason Lacan says that “the someone is there as a support for the sign” in the passage above and not vice versa is that a sign only makes sense if there is someone there to see it. We can think of being in a foreign country and seeing a signpost, knowing that it is meant to represent something to someone, but because you do not speak the language it means nothing to you. Nonetheless, we know it’s a sign even if we don’t know what it it means. Signifiers, on the other hand, according to Lacan, represent first and foremost difference itself before anything else. And this means that there needs to be more than one of them – one signifier can only exist as a signifier if it is different from another. The sign and the signifier can be the same thing (e.g., a notch or stroke) but can function differently according to whether it is alone (a sign) or part of a series that establishes its difference (a signifier). In other words, we can see things as signifiers even if we can’t tell what they are supposed to signify. Later in Seminar IX Lacan affirms this point when he says that signs can be taken as signifiers “insofar as they operate properly in virtue of their associativeness in the chain, of their commutativity, of the function of permutation taken as such” (Seminar IX, 13.12.1961).

In another session in Seminar IX Lacan describes the unary trait or einziger Zug as “that through which every being is said to be a One” (Seminar IX, 13.12.1961).

Ein einziger Zug is a signifier that can give to the subject a place in the symbolic order. It provides both a substantive presence and a singularity, a uniqueness, that is the opposite of the pathological coincidence of self and other that is a feature of the imaginary register.

In this article we have focused a lot on the function of the unary trait in providing a bridge from the imaginary to the symbolic. But we have said very little about the third Lacanian register – that of the real. Although the subject can achieve some degree of stability by representing himself in the symbolic order through a notch or stroke – like that Lacan believed Sade achieved by scratching the notches representing his sexual conquests onto his bedpost – the question of the real is one that involves the body. What helps the subject tie the corporeal unity of the body (given through the mirror stage) with what is most real (‘real’ in the Lacanian sense) about subjectivity – the experience of jouissance?

It is this latter question – about the subject of the body, and how it can ‘treat’ jouissance to maintain a corporeal integrity – that we will address in the final article in this series.

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 About half way through his fifteenth Seminar on The Psychoanalytic Act, Lacan suggests to his audience that Freud’s contribution to a psychoanalytic theory of subjectivity can be summed up in the latter’s idea of castration. Rather than getting hung up on the old Freudian term ‘castration’, for Lacan this simply means that the subject does not have a means of making his enjoyment, his jouissance, cohere:

“The task to which the psychoanalytic act gives its status is a task which already implies this destitution of the subject…. It has a name, and Freud did not soften it for us, which is something all the more to be highlighted because as subjective experience this was never done before psychoanalysis. It is called castration, which is to be taken in its dimension of subjective experience in as much as nowhere except along this path can the subject be realised…. The subject is only realised exactly qua lack…. The subject realises that he does not have, that he does not have the organ of what I would call unique, unary, unifying enjoyment (jouissance). It is a matter, properly, of what makes enjoyment one in the conjunction of subjects of opposite sex.” (Seminar XV, 17.01.1968.)

When we refer to the subject in psychoanalysis we must remember that it is fundamentally a ‘castrated’ subject, meaning that the subject is only realised qua lack, a minus phi. The idea that Lacan expresses towards the end of the passage cited above – that there is something leftover in the process of sexuation, something that fails to unify jouissance – is later elaborated in his formulas of sexuation given in Seminar XX:

Without providing too comprehensive a reading of these formulas (as has been done by others) we can just note that the formulas on the left and right hand sides above state that ‘there is a subject that is not subject to the phallic function’ (top line, left hand side), and ‘not all of the subject is subject to the phallic function (second line, right hand side).

So, starting with this idea of castration being the bedrock of subjectivity, how does Lacan ‘think together’ the notions of the unary trait that we discussed in the previous article in this series, and a unity of jouissance. And what can this tell us about human subjectivity?

In the previous article in this series we tried to justify a notion of subjectivity that would amount to more than just the epiphenomenon of the signifying chain. If we take Lacan’s reading of Freud above seriously – that the subject is fundamentally castrated and so will fail at any attempt to unify jouissance – we face a similar problem. Just as the subject experiences a constitutive lack in the symbolic (the fact that signifiers refer not to the subject him- or herself but to each other), so the subject faces a constitutive lack in the real (the fact that castration leaves him with a fundamentally curtailed enjoyment which Lacan labels phallic or ‘paltry’ jouissance).

A crucial reference in the previous article was to Freud’s ein einziger Zug, translated by Lacan as ‘unary trait’. All the references we looked at there were from Seminars IX and XI, but Lacan returns to this concept right at the end of his teaching in Seminar XXIII, R.S.I., in 1976.Here he introduces, by way of a discussion of the Borromean knot, a different support to the unary trait, which he calls DI - droite infinie, or infinite straight line:

“The infinite straight line in question, this is not the first time that you have heard me speak of it, it is something that I characterise by its equivalence to the circle (XI-1), it is the principle of the Borromean knot. The fact is that by combining two straight lines with the circle, one has the essential of the Borromean knot (XI-2). [Note: it is not clear why Lacan refers to two straight lines here - he refers to just a single straight line in all later references]. Why does this infinite straight line have this virtue, this quality? It is because it is the best illustration of the hole. Topology indicates to us that in a circle, there is a hole in the middle. And even that we start to dream about what constitutes the centre, which extends into all sorts of vocabulary-effects: the nerve centre, for example, which no one knows exactly the meaning of. The infinite straight line has as a virtue having the hole all around. It is the most simple support of the hole. So then, what does this give us if we refer to practice?” (Seminar XXIII, 11.05.1976).

Lacan is saying here that if you draw a circle you draw it with a straight line. What is the easiest way to make an ‘infinite’ straight line of the kind that Lacan is describing? Quite simply, to draw a circle, because with a circle you can’t determine the start or end point. This might remind us of another of Lacan’s topological references – the Mobius band, which also has this property of an ‘infinite straight line’ because if you were to trace your finger along its surface it can never be determined which is the top and which is the bottom.

Lacan continues by positing a trinitarian conception of the subject (the Borromean knot, which Lacan was obsessed with at this time in his work, is one such trinitarian form) with the unary trait as a unifying element:

“The fact [is] that man, not God, is a trinitary compound; a trinitary compound of what we will call elements. What is an element? An element is what makes One. In other words, the unary trait. What makes One, on the one hand, and what, because of making One, initiates substitution.” (Seminar XXIII, 11.05.1976).

We can pause on this last line and note that Lacan’s comments here support Miller’s thesis in ‘Suture’, that by the very fact of making a one (of making a zero count as one) a substitution is able to be initiated (the movement of the signifying chain, discussed in greater depth here). Lacan continues:

“The characteristic of an element, is that one proceeds to a combinatorial of them…. What I am trying to introduce with this writing, is nothing less than what I will call a logic of sacks and of cords. Because obviously, there is the sack, there is the sack whose myth, as I might say, consists, consists in the sphere. But no one it seems, has sufficiently reflected on the consequences of the introduction of the cord. And that what the cord proves is that a sack is only closed by tying it. And that, in every sphere, we must indeed imagine something which, of course, is in every point of the sphere and that knots this thing into which one blows, and which knots it with a cord.” (Seminar XXIII, 11.05.1976).

These passages seems quite esoteric so let’s recap what Lacan is saying with an explanation. Firstly, the trinity corresponds to the three registers and constitutes the sack. Secondly, the cord corresponds to the infinite straight line which is equivalent to the einziger Zug or unary trait, and this knots the sack. The sphere is a representation of unity, but Lacan is here proposing that we think instead of a sack, because a sack is something which only attains its unity or coherence when it is tied with the cord.

With this in mind, Lacan then moves to talk about Joyce, his muse throughout Seminar XXIII, promising to relate this abstract theorising to a concrete instance of human subjectivity.

“People write their childhood memories. This has consequences. It is the passage from one writing to another writing. I will speak to you in a moment about the childhood memories of Joyce, because obviously I have to show how what is described as a logic of sacks and cords is something that can help us. Help us to understand how Joyce functioned as a writer.” (Seminar XXIII, 11.05.1976).

Lacan goes on to recount an odd tale from Joyce’s childhood. One day the young author was tied to a barbed wire fence by another child and severely beaten. Despite this ordeal Joyce recounts that he bore the perpetrator no malice. What Lacan takes from this is that Joyce “metaphorises something which is nothing less than his relationship to his body. He notes that the whole affair has drained away. He expresses this by saying that it is like a fruit skin.” (Seminar XXIII, 11.05.1976). For Lacan, this indicates to us something about “the relationship between a body which is foreign to us which is a circle, indeed an infinite straight line, which in any case are one and the other equivalent, and something which is the unconscious” (Seminar XXIII, 11.05.1976). Rather than being worked through, the affect from this brutal experience is simply dropped, discarded like the skin of an orange or apple peel, to use Lacan’s simile.

Lacan says that this would be very suspicious for an analyst because it would indicate that there is no unity between the real, the imaginary and the symbolic for Joyce. The latter’s willingness to forgive the perpetrator is due to a missing link between the register of the imaginary (the loss of bodily unity in getting beaten up) and the real (the experience of pain at the level of the body). As Lacan suggests in this seminar, it is through his later writing that Joyce can link these two registers with the symbolic but in this reminiscence the link is yet to be established. There is no knot – or cord/infinite straight line, as Lacan calls it here – which can bind these three registers together. For Lacan, this indicates a different subjective experience, a different quality of subjectivity produced for Joyce by a different configuration of the three orders than we might usually expect to encounter.

This is a very different type of subjectivity to that which we usually find with non-psychotics. In these ‘neurotic’ cases, so the theory goes, the three registers are sufficiently tightly bound such that only some catastrophic moment of crisis in a subject’s life can unknot them. These moments, where there is an unknotting of the imaginary from the symbolic and the real of the body, indicates that the subject has lost some bearing, and they may report the sensation of not knowing who they are (for the other), having lost their place in the symbolic (the big Other) or had it changed irrevocably, producing the estrangement of themselves from their bodies, even to the extent of a neglect of their vital functions.

There’s an example of this is in the film Crazy, Stupid, Love. At the very start of the film Steve Carrell’s character finds out, over a fairly innocuous dinner with his wife, that she wants a divorce. Sitting dumbstruck from her admission in the car while she drives them home, she then admits that she has been sleeping with someone else. He tells her that if she doesn’t stop talking he’ll throw himself out of the car. She doesn’t, so he does.

When the subject experiences his imaginary or symbolic co-ordinates being thrown into question there is an impact at the level of the body – a certain ‘de-phallicisation’ of the body follows (to hijack Lacanian terminology), a loss of all narcissistic libidinal investment (to use Freudian terminology), which is illustrated in this clip by the jump from the car moving car. We can also think of the way that many people lose their appetite at particularly stressful moments – the death of a loved one, some tumult at work. A disregard of the body follows this kind of symbolic or imaginary rupture in the subject’s sense of self.

So the lesson of this story for our study of subjectivity is that there is a difference between subjective structures (chiefly, neurotic or psychotic) at the level of the unity (or lack of unity) of the three registers. And in psychoanalysis – indeed, in any type of psy- therapy, Lacan is adamant that it is crucial for the practitioner to know how the subject has managed to knot these three registers together (or not) and therefore how to orientate the direction of the treatment.

How do these three registers come to co-exist with a relative degree of stability?

At the start of this post we touched on how the operation of symbolic castration forces jouissance to be evacuated to the margins of the body – henceforth becoming the classical Freudian erotogenic zones. We also saw in the previous article in this series how an identification with the unary trait can help the subject to separate from the fixations, traps and lures of the imaginary. Let’s look at another way that Lacan formulates this, which he calls separation. In the previous article we looked at the way in which the identification with the unary trait or einziger Zug allows the subject to avoid a total alienation in the imaginary, to move from the imaginary to the domain of signifiers (even at the expense of trading an alienation in the former for an alienation in the latter). Now we will look at how separation, a process of appeal to a partial object, allows the subject not just to escape a total alienation in the signifying network but, moreover, to provide a grounding to his particular mode of enjoyment, hooking the experience of jouissance to an object.

The process of separation involves an appeal to a partial object that provides a degree of libidinal fixity or coherence. To avoid the experience of total alienation in the big Other, the signifying universe, the subject ‘separates’ from the signifying network to a partial object. This object therefore gives the subject a refuge for his jouissance as a relief from the experience of alienation he undergoes when barred as an effect of the signifier. It is a refuge in the real away from the symbolic. The subject appeals to a partial object – an object linked to one of the four drives (oral, anal, scopic or invocatory) – to cope with the overbearing alienation of the symbolic.

Whilst appearing very abstract, this idea is actually very simple to find in everyday life. Many people feel a compulsion to turn to an oral object (a stiff drink, or even heavy drinking) when something goes wrong at work, for example. Or search for a certain gaze (the scopic object) or tone of voice (the invocatory object) in their partner as recompense for a sensation of encumberment when facing the weight of the symbolic in some way. All these objects provide precisely the kind of libidinal fixity, the unity of jouissance, that Lacan believes was so manifestly lacking in the story related by Joyce above, or in the scene from Crazy, Stupid, Love.

Lacan gives another example of a method for providing the same form of stability, a practice that achieves the three ends of unifying the real of jouissance, the imaginary corporeal body and the symbolic: tattooing. In Seminar XI, Lacan says that the tattoo has the double function of materialising the libido and giving the subject a place in the Other:

“One of the most ancient forms in which this unreal organ [the libido] is incarnated in the body is tattooing, scarification. The tattoo certainly has the function of being for the Other, of situating the subject in it, marking his place in the field of the group’s relations, between each individual and all the others. And, at the same time, it obviously has an erotic function, which all those who have approached it in reality have perceived.” (Seminar XI, p.206.)

Much earlier in his work, in Seminar V from 1958, Lacan wonders a great deal about the function of tattoos, or more widely the marking of the body, as they relate to the subject’s place in the Other and how they might help him give stability and coherence to bodily jouissance. Let’s conclude this article by looking in depth at some of the speculative thoughts Lacan shares with his audience at that time:

“We can say that at the very least a minimum should be retained in what the castration complex is in its essence, the relationship to a desire on the one hand. And on the other hand to what I will call on this occasion a mark.

“In order that desire, Freudian experience and analytic theory tell us, should successfully traverse certain phases, should reach maturity, it is necessary that something as problematic to situate as the phallus, should be marked by this something which ensures that it is only maintained, conserved, to the degree that it has traversed the threat of castration properly speaking, and this must be maintained as the essential minimum beyond which we go off into synonyms, we go off into slippages, we go off into equivalences, we go off at the same time into obscurities.

“We literally do not know any longer what we are saying if we do not retain these characteristics as essential, and is it not better first of all and above all to direct ourselves towards the relationship of these two poles, we say, of desire to the mark, before trying to go searching for it in the different ways in which this is incarnated for the subject in the reason for a liaison which from the moment that we leave this point of departure, is going to become more and more enigmatic, more and more problematic, and soon more and more evaded? “ (Seminar V, 26.03.1958.)

Picking up on our discussion of tattoos above, in this passage Lacan is saying that at a most basic level the tattoo is a mark on the body. And, as we have seen already, the mark is another term for the signifier – it functions just like the strokes on the cave wall or the notches on Sade’s bedpost that we saw in the third article in this series. But Lacan says we have to look at the more fundamental relationship of desire to the mark. The example of this marking par excellence in analytic theory is the mark of castration on the phallus. But for Lacan the mark itself is more fundamental – castration is secondary to the function of this mark to desire. This is quite surprising – Lacan isn’t saying that the mark is just a manifestation of castration, in fact he’s saying the opposite. It doesn’t matter what type of mark it is, it’s the mark as such that matters.

Lacan continues:

“I insist on this character, this character of a mark which moreover has in all the other manifestations as well as the analytic, interpretative, significant manifestations, and quite certainly in everything that is embodied ceremonially, ritually, sociologically, this character of being the sign of everything that supports this castrating relationship whose anthropological emergence we began to perceive through the mediation of analysis.

“Let us not forget that up to then the religious signs, incarnations, for example in which we recognise this castration complex, circumcision for example, to give it its name, are again one or other form of inscription, of mark in the rites of puberty, of tattooing, of everything which produces marks, impresses on the subject, in connection with a certain phase which in an unambiguous fashion is presented as a phase of accession to a certain level, to a certain stage of desire. All these things make their appearance always as a mark and an impression.” (Seminar V, 26.03.1958.)

The mark denotes some kind of change in desire, an “accession to a certain stage, a certain level of, desire”, as he puts it in the passage above. We might think for example of the way in which in classical analytic theory castration marks the stage of genital maturation, or how a tattoo marks the beginning or end of a relationship, the accession to membership of a tribe or group. But it does more than just mark the subject out (as reaching a certain point, as becoming a member of a group, etc), as Lacan goes on to develop:

“And you will tell me: there you are, we’ve got it! It is not difficult to encounter the mark. Already in our experience, when there are flocks, every shepherd has his little mark in order to distinguish his sheep from those of others, and it is not such a stupid remark. There is indeed a certain relationship, even if it is only because of this: it is that in any case we shall already grasp in this that the mark presents itself all the same with a certain transcendence with respect to the constitution of the flock.

Should this satisfy us? It is quite true in a certain fashion, for example that circumcision presents itself as constituting a certain flock, the flock of the elect, of the sons of God.

Is all we are doing here rediscovering this?

Surely not. What analytic experience, and what Freud from the beginning contributes, is that there is a close, intimate relationship between desire and the mark. The fact is that the mark is not there simply as a sign of recognition for the shepherd, whose position we would find it difficult to know in this instance, but that when we are dealing with man, this means that the marked living being here has a desire which is not without a certain intimate relationship with this mark.

It is not a question of advancing too quickly, nor of saying what this mark is which modifies desire. There is perhaps from the beginning in this desire a gap which permits this mark to take on its special incidence, but what is certain is that there is the closest relationship between that which characterises this desire in the case of man, and the incidence, the role and the function of the mark. We rediscover this confrontation of the signifier and of desire which is that on which we should here bring all our questioning to bear.” (Seminar V, 26.03.1958.)

If it is something about the mark as such which denotes desire, what is this something? Lacan’s remarks are very careful here – he is simply suggesting to his audience rather than proposing a theory – but in the context of his later work we can see his comment on “a gap which permits this mark to take on its special incidence” as heralding the future elaborations we have noted in the other three articles in this series. The mark, like the einziger Zug of Freud, or the unary trait that Lacan is later to elaborate a theory of from Seminar IX, has the character of singularity that allows the subject’s desire to be assumed more as his or her own and less as the desire of the Other proper. Whilst many Lacanians might retort immediately with the famous Lacanian aphorism that ‘man’s desire is the desire of the Other’, is this enough to end the question? In his Seminar VII on ethics, which bridges the comments above from Seminar V and the introduction of the unary trait in Seminar IX, Lacan clearly leaves room for agency in subjectivity. The subject cannot merely be thought of as an epiphenomenon of the signifying chain or the sum of alienating imaginary identifications. Maybe we cannot say more than this, and it is clear that Lacan is reluctant to grant the subject the ability to determine itself by attributing to it a psychology. But if there is no agency to subjectivity what possibly could an ethics of psychoanalysis – which Lacan strove so hard to articulate – look like? And why would he conclude that this ethics amounted to the duty to be speak well of one’s symptom  (“du devoir de bien dire”, Television, p.22), if the subject lacked the agency with which to do it? Finally, and perhaps most crucially, how would an analysis have any effect if there was no agency to subjectivity?

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1. The Absent Father

Case in point: Man of Steel

I start this short series with what is perhaps the most consistently ubiquitous and easily noticeable of all cinematic clichés to harbour Lacanian overtones. To name just a few of the biggest films of the past 12 months, Man of Steel, World War Z, Skyfall, and Only God Forgives each have the Absent Father as a central motif. In these and so many other films the function of the absence of the father is a key plot element that motivates the actions of the protagonist. Hollywood at least varies its repertoire – in some cases this is the death of the father, in others simply his not being there. For instance, in the majority of Hollywood films and TV series that feature male characters as fathers there is a plot point that involves their failure to bring together their status as biological fathers with their position as symbolic fathers.

Man of Steel

To take a particularly concise example from just one recent Hollywood film, the latest episode in the Superman franchise presents the father as both dead and absent under the guise of two separate fathers.

On the one hand, we have Superman’s biological father, Jor-El, played by Russel Crowe, seen at the beginning of the film evacuating his son from his dying native planet. On the other, we have the ‘symbolic’ father, Jonathan Clark, played by Kevin Costner, who adopts Superman when he arrives on earth.

(Spoiler alert!) 

It is the latter’s death halfway through the film that provides the plot element mentioned above that motivates Superman to become Superman, and allows him to accept his destiny and confront the threat facing earth.

But what both characters mesh is the Lacanian idea that to perform the function of father his status must be symbolic and not just biological.

The ‘No’/’Name’ of the Father

In a key scene, the Clark family comprising the young Superman and his adoptive parents are caught in a tornado whilst driving down the freeway. While Clark and his adoptive mother run to safety under a bridge, Jonathan Clark stays behind with the car. As the tornado gathers pace, Clark becomes aware that his adoptive father is in real trouble and realises that he can save him using his superpowers. However, Jonathan Clark, fearful that the public revelation of his son’s powers will have terrible consequences, stops him with a single gesture of the hand:

 This scene perfectly illustrates why Lacan uses an ambiguous term to denote the father’s symbolic role. What he calls the Name-of-the-Father is in French the Nom-du-Pere. However, punning (as he was wont to do), Lacan often refers to the Non-du-Pere, or No-of-the-Father, the French words nom and non being pronounced identically in that language. What more perfect example of this ‘No’ of the Father could there be than Kevin Costner’s injunction to Superman not to save him from certain death in the tornado?

This scene is a crucial turning point in the film. It gives the protagonist, Clark Kent, a sense-of-self that is only realised as a result of the prohibition – the No/Non of the Father.

Following this scene, Clark goes in search of his true identity, to find out who his biological father was. It is at this point that he discovers the Name of his Father – Jor El – and his own – Kal-El, meaning ‘son of El’. Both father characters thus illustrate the ambiguity that Lacan highlights in the role of the father with his play on the French term above.

The key Lacanian point is that the father continues to function as symbolic father despite his flesh-and-blood absence. In both cases the father is dead, but in both cases he continues to operate in the way that Lacan specified with his ambiguous expression. In the Kevin Costner character, the adoptive father functions in respect of his prohibition, his Non [No]. In the Russell Crowe character, the biological father functions in respect of his Nom [Name].

As in other instances of this cliché in Hollywood, this plot device is vital to the protagonist’s development – the character of Clark Kent only transitions to the character of Superman as a result of the absence of the father. The father’s death or absence is the causal, motivational factor compelling the protagonist’s personal mission, something that we see again and again in Hollywood films.

The passage through the Father

Man of Steel also nicely illustrates a key aspect of the oedipal relation that both Freud and Lacan were interested in – the idea that something is passed from father to son. In the case of Man of Steel this is a role, a destiny. For Freud, this passage marked the successful resolution of the oedipal conflict – rather than remaining in homicidal competition with your father (biological or symbolic) for something that he has (in Freud’s mythical form from Totem and Taboo, this is the women of the primal horde) the oedipal drama ends with the father bequeathing to the son a role that he has to assume and which effectively passes the role of ‘man’ onto him. In Man of Steel, this is the role of Superman, the destiny that Clark Kent accepts from the avatar of his biological father which he encounters following the death of his adoptive father. The father himself, whilst physically absent, nonetheless still performs his function in order to effect this transition.

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2. The Male Exception

Case in point: Zodiac, The Usual Suspects, all Bond films, almost all movies about unsolved murders committed by men, and virtually any superhero film of the last 10 years

For the second of the cinematic clichés in this series we need to invoke Lacan’s formulas for sexuation from Seminar XX:

Immediately after sketching these on the blackboard at his seminar, Lacan issued a warning to his audience – “After what I just put on the board, you may think you know everything. Don’t.” (Seminar XX, p.78). Lacanians tend to over-egg these formulas so we will heed Lacan’s caution and just look at the top left hand side of the formulas, the upper quadrant that applies to men:

We can translate these formulas as follows: at the top of the red box, ‘There exists a subject who is not subject to the phallic function’; below that, a proposition that seems to contradict it, ‘All subjects are subject to the phallic function’.

To get Lacan’s point we have to quickly wade through some Lacanian jargon. The ‘phallic function’ here refers to a particular kind of limited enjoyment or, in Lacanese, a ‘paltry jouissance’. ‘Phallic’ jouissance is ‘castrated’ jouissance because the ‘phallus’ in Lacanian terminology refers to the mythical potency of the male organ plus the idea of its lack. Lacan’s idea is that for men there is something that curtails or limits the experience of full enjoyment, whether that enjoyment is overtly sexual or otherwise. This limit is called symbolic castration. And the agent of castration is the Name-of-the-Father, or more precisely, the substitution of the Name-of-the-Father for the desire-of-the-mother in what Lacan calls the paternal metaphor.

This is true for all subjects on the male side, all men:

Except one, because Lacan also says that there is a subject that is not subject to this limit: 

There is one who escapes, an exception.

This is an idea he derives from Freud’s Totem and Taboo, which we touched on briefly in the first cliché in this series on the Absent Father and Man of Steel. The subject who is the exception is the mythical father of the primal horde, the one who has access to, and total enjoyment over, all the women of the clan. In presenting the formulas Lacan describes this upper line as “the function of the father” (Seminar XX, p.79). That is, this exception does not pertain to the father as an actual person, nor even to anyone who exists, but to the formal possibility of such a subject.

And it is this sort of subject that is the source of so much fascination among all other men. We find its manifestation in the cinematic cliché of characters that represent the male exception.

All examples of this cliché imply someone who is beyond the law. Translating the top portion of Lacan’s formulas as ‘There exists a subject that is not subject to the phallic function’ implies a man who is not subject to the same rules of the game as other men. In crime films this character is literally beyond the law – beyond its reach, a character not subject to the law but a law unto himself. A central theme of crime films, either fictional or about unsolved murders, is that of ‘the man who gets away’. These films establish a ‘male exception’ for a character who is able to escape detection. Hollywood knows the potency that this idea has for a male audience, to take just two examples initially: 

The male fascination with unsolved crimes committed by (presumably) other men, like that of the ‘Zodiac’ killer, extends very far – just think of the enduring fascination with the Jack the Ripper legend, and the numerous iterations it has gone through in Hollywood, from Hitchcock’s The Lodger in 1926 to the Johnny Depp vehicle From Hell in 2001 and the plethora of TV movies in between. Rather than seeing this fascination as an indicator of the audience’s misogynistic tastes (though this element may well be present), perhaps one of the reasons why these characters resonate so well with men is because a figure like Jack the Ripper has no face, no name, no established identity. He is purely formal, in the same way that the formulas are purely formal, in the same way that the Totem and Taboo myth, which Lacan draws on to elucidate the male side of his formulas, is also formal.

Going a step further, what we often find when we encounter this Lacanian movie cliché is that the character is never represented as fully  ‘unlimited’ (or ‘uncastrated’, to use Lacanian jargon). The implication of Lacan’s male formulas is that ‘men’ as a category oscillate between the ‘all men’ (the lower formula) and ‘the exception’ (the upper).

There are a lot of films that play on the oscillation between these two poles which characterises the male position. This might explain the enduring popularity of the James Bond franchise – Bond is a man (he is not a superhero, he is mortal, human) but at the same time he is not like other men (in all the Bond films he fulfills the role of the Freudian primal father by having access to as many women he wants). But in their more recent incarnations the current vogue is for the Bond films to highlight something of the character’s weakness at the same time. The latest installment of the franchise, Skyfall, opens with Bond at his lowest personal ebb – addicted to drink and painkillers, struggling to get back in the game. In Die Another Day from a few years earlier, we see him abandoned by MI5 to waste away in a North Vietnamese prison, questioning himself and the agency he serves.

Similarly, in all of the superhero films which have dominated cinema since since 2000 the superhero is not simply completely omnipotent – he (and it is always a male character) shows his human weaknesses. As per the first cliché in this series, we could count Superman as one example: a man who embodies the contradiction in Lacan’s formula for men – who is like other men (‘All subjects are subject to the phallic function’) but one who at the same time is not like other men (‘There exists a subject who is not subject to the phallic function’).

Likewise, in each of the new wave of superhero films that have come out since 2000 we find a transformation from a man who is a man, to a man who is more than a man, but still a man nonetheless. These characters can thus be seen as a kind of reification of the oscillation between the two lines of Lacan’s formula – the ‘all men’ and the ‘not all men’. The psychobabble in the most recent Batman films – the Dark Knight trilogy – isn’t just there to lend depth to the character but to affirm that in spite of being the male exception he is still subject to the same laws of castration as all other men. More broadly, these examples can perhaps be read as reiterations of the same ontological problem of identity brought out in the trinity – how can God be both God (divine, unlimited) and man (Jesus Christ)? How can a character be both a man but more than a man?

What about women? We can ask simply: in what films is there a transformation of a woman who is more than a woman, a woman who becomes something other than a woman but is a woman at the same time? Is the simplest proof of the validity of Lacan’s idea the lack of female superhero films, or the lack of success of the very few that there are? Lacan seems to be onto something about men in particular if the same can’t be said about women. But to go into this point would take us to the right hand side of Lacan’s formulas, where The Woman does not exist, an idea that is of a completely different pedigree and requires a completely different type of logic in order to understand it.

Of course, the wider question is whether the formulas tell us more about patriarchy than they do about women. Do Lacan’s formulas just reinforce gendered identities or is he saying something unique about sex/gender itself? In introducing the term ‘sexuation’ Lacan is trying to give us a good enough conceptual tool to avoid the trap of patriarchy. We’ve looked at the cliché of men in this article, but in respect of women Lacan is trying to show a feminine ‘in itself’ that is not just a male cliché.

Not everyone likes these formulas. Some Lacanians think they’re over-used, boring in how classical they have become. Non-Lacanians meanwhile will often bemoan their binary appearance and accuse them of being too essentialist. Both are points worth thinking about. But the fact that Hollywood recognises that male audiences love characters that embody the formulas for men Lacan articulated, and the frequency with which they appear in cinema, are at the very least clear validations of the fact that Lacan was onto something here.

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3. Horror Movies and the Mirror Image

Here’s a horror story in just two sentences:

This sends a chill down most spines. The ideas that it plays on – the duplication of the image, that specular representations can’t be trusted, that one’s image is actually someone else’s – are ideas that Lacan explores again and again in his work on the imaginary register, and not just in his most celebrated theory of the mirror stage.

In the third part of this series we’ll look at how an incredibly ubiquitous horror movie trick encapsulates these elements. Here’s a montage of this cinematic cliché in all its glory:

What adds the shock factor to these scenes? The short Lacanian answer would be that they bring into question the solidity of our own image. What we expect to see in the mirror – our own reflection – is actually that of someone else. And is that not the essential lesson of Lacan’s mirror stage? That our own image is ultimately that of an other?

We depend on our image, and we count on seeing it looking back at us when we look into a mirror. This helps us establish a bodily integrity which, so Lacan’s theory goes, we mis-identify as I, as our ego. When this fails, as the cliché above so nicely illustrates, it always produces horror. This is why Hollywood loves using it so much.

“This illusion of unity, in which a human being is always looking forward to self-mastery, entails a constant danger of sliding back again into the chaos from which he started; it hangs over the abyss of a dizzy Assent in which one can perhaps see the very essence of Anxiety.”

- Lacan, ‘Some Reflections on the Ego’ (presentation to the British Psycho-Analytical Society, 2nd May 1951, reproduced in Influential Papers from the 1950s, Furman & Levy (editors), p.303-304.)

Lacan’s words are very apt for describing what the mirror cliché plays on. The stability that your own image gives you is always something anticipated, something you are “always looking forward to”, as he says here. When you lose that stability, that point of reference, there emerges Anxiety (which Lacan gives the dignity of the upper case). Freud might call this experience Unheimlich, uncanny.

And yet this raises a question. If the “self-mastery” Lacan refers to can only be obtained through the medium of the image of the other, why should the presentation of the image of the other be so disturbing and not reassuring? In other words, why does the mirror trick work so well in horror movies like those above and never in romantic comedies?

Running through all of Lacan’s work on the image, from the Aimée case to the mirror stage to aggressivity, is the tension of a fundamental ambivalence: the mirrored image is both the source of our bodily coherence (good) and the object of our vengeance and our homicidal tendencies (bad). The price to be paid for the coherence and stability of our ego is perpetual alienation, rivalry and jealousy.

This is something that French psychiatrists before Lacan had noted in their study of paranoia. They labelled it ‘transitivism’, a term Lacan himself was later to take up. And when Lacan comes to write about the crimes of the Papin sisters in 1933, it is interesting to see that he draws attention to the power cut that precipitated the brutal murders. We can wonder whether it was any accident that it was when the lights failed and the stability of the body image suddenly vanished that the sisters’ murderous “paroxysm of rage” exploded?

Run forward a few years and Lacan is writing the original draft of the mirror stage paper for presentation at the 1936 Marienbad conference. The connection between murderous rivalry and the image was already in his mind. However, the version of the mirror stage paper that we have in the Écrits was re-written in 1949 for the IPA congress in Zurich. Barely a year earlier, he had put the finishing touches to his paper on ‘Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis’. So here we have further proof that Lacan theorised the mirror stage and aggressivity together. And of course the two ideas share not just a temporal closeness but a thematic one: the papers sit side-by-side in the Écrits.

It is no surprise then that the classical clichéd shot of the woman looking in the mirror only to see the killer behind her is so popular in Hollywood’s horror films. It works so well because it plays on the traumatic juxtaposition of self/other. And where the cliché appears it is always in the context of a threat or menace, something that parallels the essentially rivalrous character of the imaginary register.

But there is another nicely Lacanian aspect to this cliché. In movies such as Prom Night, Orphan and the aptly-titled Mirrors each featured in the compilation above (at 0:22, 0:28 and 0:33 respectively) the moment of shock comes not from the presence of the killer in the reflection, but a friend, boyfriend or husband. Sometimes, like in What Lies Beneath (2:06), the killer is the friend, boyfriend or husband. Ostensibly, the initial horror is replaced by the reassurance that the other person has no malevolent intent, but the cliché also plays on our essentially ambivalent relation to the image of the other. As in the two-line horror story reproduced above, it is not whether the other is a friend or foe that matters but the alterity of the image itself. As Freud very aptly remarked, “No one can tolerate a too intimate approach to his neighbour” (SE XVIII, 101). What’s more, in the final clip in the compilation above, from The Broken (3:40), it is the woman’s own image which turns against her, perhaps the ultimate apex of Lacan’s theory of the imaginary.

If you want to test Lacan’s theory about the alienating nature of the self-image out for yourself here’s a fun little game: try staring at yourself in a mirror for more than two minutes. As time passes, most people experience the strange sensation that they are no longer looking at themselves – their image seems to change (some say to age, some say to blur) into something else. The experience is so unsettling for some that they can’t bear it and have to break away. And so we can return to Lacan’s wise words:

“This illusion of unity, in which a human being is always looking forward to self-mastery, entails a constant danger of sliding back again into the chaos from which he started; it hangs over the abyss of a dizzy Assent in which one can perhaps see the very essence of Anxiety.”

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4. The Subject Supposed to Know and the ‘Magical Negro’

The ‘Magical Negro’ is a cinematic cliché in itself. The term was coined by director Spike Lee to denote a cinematic trope in which a black character has a special – often mystical – insight or ability, which is then imparted to a white character. The ‘magical negro’, for Lee, is nothing more than a narrative device Hollywood uses to further the progression of the white character, the hero. Although Lee was specifically thinking about the 2000 film The Legend of Baggar Vance, his term has been adopted by critics and commentators in the literary, cinematic and cultural fraternity (check out Hughey’s paper on cinethetic racism here for more on this idea). Even outside academic circles, the web is awash with examples of where the ‘magical negro’ can be found. The Shining, The Green Mile and, most recently, The Hunger Games have all been cited as instances where this cliché can be found.

Lee’s stereotype could be taken as an instance of what Lacan refers to as the ‘subject supposed to know’. In psychoanalysis, put simply, Lacan’s idea is that the analysand imputes to the analyst some kind of knowledge of what is going on in the analysand’s head, what he ‘really’ means, some capacity to unveil or decode the intricacies of his or her life. Lacan conceives of the ‘subject supposed to know’ as the basis of the transference (Écrits, 308) and thus the motor of the analytic work. But crucially – a point we’ll return to – he says that the subject supposed to know is not necessarily the person of the analyst (Seminar XI, 233).

Coming back to Hollywood, rather than being limited to black characters like the ‘magical negro’ Lee describes, this ‘subject supposed to know’ is found with high frequency in movies depicting characters from other ‘minority’ groups. Think of the number of movies in which the Native American character has a mystical ‘bond’ with nature (the recently-deceased actor August Schellenberg virtually made a career out of this). Or, more commonly, movies in which a ‘stranger’ from ‘the East’ teaches the hero a martial art in order to help them accomplish revenge on a bitter foe. Kill Bill and The Karate Kid might come to mind here.

Wax On, Wax Off

However, to take the last example, The Karate Kid has a very important Lacanian lesson beyond the racial stereotypes. Check out this scene:

Mr Miyagi has seemingly employed the kid, Daniel, as slave labour,  forcing him to perform menial duties like waxing his car, sanding his decks and painting his house. However, this is not all it seems. As the clip above illustrates, Miyagi is actually teaching the kid karate – the kid just doesn’t know it yet.

Lacan used exactly this technique on his patients, as a beautiful story from Lacan’s practice illustrates. It’s related in Jean Allouch’s charming little book Les Impromptus de Lacan, but as this is only in French, here’s a rough translation:

“She doesn’t stop complaining about the number of excess kilos she’s put on, of the ineffectiveness of all her diets, the diets, besides, that she no longer believes in.

She knows that the problem is elsewhere, etc.

One day, however, Lacan intervenes:

- ‘Ask Gloria [Lacan’s secretary], she knows a good diet to lose weight [maigrir]

Once in the corridor, she meets Gloria, who is rather thin; she hesitates however, as the topic appears to her incongruous, to ask her what the diet is.

Once outside, the apostrophe imposes itself:

- … a diet to embitter me [m’aigrir]”

(Les Impromtus de Lacan, p.62, translation my own)

Lacan’s trick turns on his use of the signifier maigrir, to lose weight. In French, this is pronounced identically to m’aigrir, which means ‘to embitter myself’. The woman goes on and on about her inability to lose weight, but at the same time admits to knowing that the problem lies in something other than all the diets she unsuccessfully follows. Lacan’s ‘interpretation’ shows her that the signifier she uses to describe her weight indicates an unconscious bitterness (towards whom we can only guess).

What is fantastic about this anecdote is the efficiency with which Lacan delivers his interpretation. Lacan does not simply tell the woman that when she speaks about losing weight she’s actually speaking about bitterness towards someone. Rather, he gets her to enact this strange, theatrical little game in which she has to go and ask Gloria, Lacan’s secretary, about a diet Lacan says the latter recommends. Why does he do this? In order that she hear the ambivalence in the words that she uses – the m’aigrir in place of maigrir.

Lacan is playing the same trick that Mr Miyagi played with Daniel in The Karate Kid. Like Lacan, Mr Miyagi doesn’t just teach Daniel karate by imparting knowledge about it. In making it into a little game he gets Daniel to realise what he is actually doing in spite of his conscious awareness.

Even if the ‘subject supposed to know’ takes its form in the Hollywood cliché of the ‘Magical Negro’/Asian/Native American, the scene above from The Karate Kid demonstrates the Lacanian way in which this knowledge can be transmitted. Lacan describes his method in a compact little maxim: the speaker “receives from the receiver his own message in an inverted form” (Écrits, 41). This is something he teaches his pupils again and again:

“The analyst awaits the subject, and sends back to him, according to the formula, his own message in its true signification, that is to say, in an inverted form.” (Seminar XII, p.139-140.)

But the real trick of Lacan’s idea of the ‘subject supposed to know’ is that it’s not the analyst at all: it’s the subject him- or herself. Right at the end of his life Lacan emphasises this to his students:

“There is something of the One (Y a de l’Un), but there is nothing other. The One, as I have said, the One dialogues all alone, since it receives its own message in an inverted form. It is he who knows, and not the one supposed to know.”

- Seminar XXIV, 10th May, 1977 

But we could go further still – isn’t this very similar to what Lacan does with his audience? There is a strange phenomenon that everyone who has studied Lacan (deeply) will be familiar with. When you’re reading Lacan’s texts or the transcripts of the Seminar, you very often get no sense of his direction, no sense of the point he wants to make except in retrospect, only after you have taken one of his bizarre, meandering detours. This is a deliberate ploy by Lacan: he is drawing on Freud’s idea of Nachträglichkeit. In French, the translation is après coup; in English, Stratchey’s Standard Edition translates it as ‘deferred action’ but I prefer Laplanche’s term ‘afterwardness’.

As Hegel says, the owl of Minerva only spreads its wings with the falling of the dusk.

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5. Men in Love

Case in point: Friends with Benefits

‘There is no such thing as a sexual relationship’ is a slightly odd translation of Lacan’s well-known maxim Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel. In the French, Lacan uses a word that is so commonly employed in English that it doesn’t really need translation to get the intended meaning: rapport. To have a ‘rapport’ with someone is to have an ‘understanding’ with them, to ‘get’ them. This is what both men and women look for in relationships. But Lacan’s maxim implies that this understanding is, unfortunately, not going to happen. And not because of societal repression or the malignant effects of discourses that frame the way we think about and experience sexuality. No, Lacan goes further: there is a fundamental lack of rapport because of the different ways that men and women obtain their ‘jouissance’, their enjoyment.

Lacan elaborates these fundamentals in his twentieth Seminar, Encore, in the early seventies. Recent developments such as the sex scandals in the UK that have dogged television personalities from the 1970s, together with a handful of new movies such as Lovelace and The Look of Love that mockingly depict seventies attitudes to sex and sexuality, would suggest that this era offers little that can be instructive for a modern audience. Things are changing, Hollywood’s attitude is changing, and movies like these point to how the sexuality of that time is being re-conceptualised. But this change is also reflected in movies of the last few years about present day relationships such as Friends with Benefits and No Strings Attached. These movies show us the new forms that relationships and attitudes to sexuallity take in the twenty first century.

The Lacanian community is hardly behind the times here. Last year’s Congress of the World Association of Psychoanalysis spent a lot of time debating these new forms and prominent Lacanians like Jacques-Alain Miller had, as early as 1999, speculated that new forms of sexuality would be the saviour of the psychoanalytic field (see Miller’s response to the final question from the audience at the bottom of this presentation).

Friends with Benefits

In the final piece in this series on Lacanian clichés in Hollywood we’ll look less at the clichéd representations of men in love from yesteryear (Sleepless in Seattle, The Notebook) and focus in particular on one movie that is definitive of contemporary attitudes to sex and relationships: Friends with Benefits. Not only is it a movie rich with Lacanian overtones, it provides a nice antidote to the dreary references to courtly love with which Lacan peppers Seminar XX.

The movie is about a couple (Dylan, played by Justin Timberlake, and Jamie, played by Mila Kunis) who meet when their former respective relationships end disastrously and Jamie arranges a new job in New York City for Dylan. They become friends but after bemoaning their single lives and the complications of relationships strike a deal whereby they’ll sleep with each other but nothing more – no commitment, no emotional involvement, just sex. One night they sit watching a romcom together listing the clichés in the genre. She asks “Why don’t they make a movie about what happens after the big kiss?” He replies, “They do. It’s called porn”. This prompts Timberlake’s character to the subject of sex, and the proposal “Why can’t it just be a game, like playing tennis?” After this, they agree to play tennis.

Ostensibly, this deal is a mutual one, which would make an enjoyable movie in itself. However, feelings get in the way and with this being Hollywood, it’s no spoiler to reveal that in line with the cliché, over time the two fall for each other.

Friends with Benefits gives us the opportunity to look at Lacan’s formulas of sexuation again (see cliché number two for the first commentary on these). Although the movie errs on the side of masculine jouissance, shrinks from Freud onward have had a bizarre obsession with feminine jouissance, and so it is to the feminine side of the formulas to which we’ll first turn.

How to read Lacan’s formulas without looking like a sexist asshole

Let’s look at the lower portions of the formulas for sexuation.

On the woman’s side, one of the two arrows points to the phallic signifier, the other to the signifier of the lack in the Other. This is where things get tricky. Let’s imagine how a mis-reading of these lower quadrants would go.

Firstly, it would be very easy for someone to look at the arrow pointing towards the phallic signifier and immediately think of Freud’s ghastly idea that this represents a desire for a penis. If they knew a bit of Lacan, they would surmise correctly that desire for Lacan is lack, and so in lacking the phallic attribute women are lacking something fundamental. Ergo, they are fundamentally incomplete.

Secondly, they would look at the other arrow pointing towards the signifier of the lack in the Other and reason that this expresses the same idea of incompleteness. Ergo, Lacan is equating female jouissance with the something ineffable. Women lack the phallus but, as if by way of compensation, they have access to a ‘special’ kind of jouissance.

Of course, if you made this mistake you’d end up looking pretty patronising and offensive.

So how should we read Lacan’s formulas for female sexuality?

One suggestion comes from Lacanian analyst Alexandre Stevens, who tries to give the female side some finesse by referring to this ‘Other’ jouissance as “not corporeal but discursive. It is a jouissance of speech, for it is a jouissance that includes love.” (Love and Sex Beyond Identifications, in The Later Lacan, p.218). And if we think about how the romantic relationship blossoms in Friends with Benefits – and indeed in real life – it is not through sex but through the spoken relationship between the two characters, the deal-making itself, the witty banter, etc that things take hold. Stevens has grounds for this – Lacan says in Seminar XX that to speak of love is in itself a jouissance (Seminar XX, p.64).

But Jacques-Alain Miller provides an even better suggestion. In one session of his long-running course L’orientation lacanienne from 1998 (available in English as ‘Of Distribution Between the Sexes’ here) he points out that what appears as incomplete should instead be thought of as infinite. Contrary to the man’s relation with the ‘not-all’ (discussed in cliché number two, here), on the woman’s side the relation is to the ‘not One’. If man’s relation to his jouissance is characterised by a reference to an exception (the character who evades the law that binds all other men, as we saw in the second cliché), a woman’s relation to her jouissance is, as we see by the arrow pointing to the signifier of the lack in the Other, not bound by a reference to a totality of any sort. To use Jean-Claude Milner’s formula, “the infinite is that which says no to the exception to the finite” (Milner, L’Oeuvre claire, p.66).

Miller expresses the difference like this:

The dotted line indicates the absence of a structural limit, in other words, the infinite. The arrow pointing to the signifier of the lack in the Other should be read as ‘other’ to the Other and therefore not part of the ‘One’. The Other that is not one. This is what Lacan means when he says in Seminar XX that “the Other cannot in any way be taken as a One.” (Seminar XX, p.49).

Slovenian philosopher Alenka Zupančič picks up Miller’s interpretation and expresses it in similar terms, arguing that we have to understand this ‘infinite jouissance’ in a mathematical and not in a metaphorical sense (Alenka Zupančič, in ‘The Perforated Sheet’, in Sexuation, p.295-296). “The infinite”, she writes, “is not a set but a virtual point excluded from the action of the finite” (ibid, p.290).

Does Lacan believe men can fall in love?

Friends with Benefits portrays an ideal male fantasy – the hot female friend who is completely cool with a purely sexual relationship with no strings attached. This chimes very nicely with how Lacan positions the male attitude to the sexual relationship in his formulas:

What strikes the eye about the lower quadrants of the formula is a weird asymmetry. The woman’s side has two arrows indicating the direction of her desire; the man’s side only has one – to the object a. But if all the man is interested in is the object a – which Lacan conceives of not as the other person, but as the partial object, the prop for masturabtory fantasy – how can a man love?

Lacan makes some very disparaging remarks about love at the start of Seminar XX – that being in love is just like the parrot that nibbles at Picasso’s shirt, that it is essentially narcissistic, and that it is impotent (Seminar XX, p.6). Although he also says that “Love is impotent, though mutual” (ibid) this is only so because there is a desire to be One (in the sense of a conjugal union between man and wife) and this desire is born of the fact that a rapport between the sexes is impossible.

So we can view the lack of elaboration in Seminar XX on the male position either as the weak point of Lacan’s argument about men, or its radical conclusion. Is he suggesting that the character of love for a man is really nothing more than a sort of over-valuation of object a? Is this all it’s about for a man – that he can love only insofar as object a is there to support his jouissance?

Lacan doesn’t seem to offer an answer, and despite the huge volume of work devoted to these infernal formulas, not many people seem bothered by the question.

Even Miller concedes that on the woman’s side there is “a jouissance which requires that one pass via love”, and then blithely adds “while jouissance on the male side does not require that it pass via love” (L’orientation lacanienne, available in English as ‘Of Distribution Between the Sexes’ here).

Men in love  - between the object a and narcissism?

Nonetheless, because Friends with Benefits is a Hollywood movie, it ends in the characters falling in love. But the way in which this happens itself contains interesting Lacanian lessons about the character of love for a man.

Object a

If Lacan’s formulas suggest that men only relate to the object a in their sexual lives, in the deal between Dylan and Jamie in Friends with Benefits are we supposed to conclude that Dylan is just using her as the prop for his fantasy?

In actual fact, the movie is full of characters that pursue only the object a. This can lead us to conclude that it’s the movie itself that’s a male fantasy rather than just the character of Dylan (the film was written and directed exclusively by men). The character of Tommy, Dylan’s gay colleague, is the most obvious example – towards the end of the movie he stages a photoshoot with bunch of naked guys in which he is the photographic director arranging them as he pleases, and earlier he even jokes about how the offers from women “keep rolling in”. Similarly, Jamie’s mother is essentially the female equivalent of Timberlake’s character – she sleeps around and is quite open about the fact with her daughter, to whom she confesses not even being able to remember who her father was. Pure enjoyment, unfettered by relationships and committment.

Narcissism

Right at the start of Seminar XX Lacan proclaims that love is essentially narcissistic (Seminar XX, p.6), and he later elaborates on this when he declares that “when one is a man, one sees in one’s partner what one props oneself up on, what one is propped up by narcissistically.” (Seminar XX, p.87). Dylan’s narcissism is all over this movie, and often we see it reflected back by Kunis. Dylan works for GQ (a company most well-known for specialising in representations of the male ideal) as its art director (creating these representations of perfection). Even when Dylan is in bed with Kunis, there is a not-so-subtle reference to Timberlake’s day job as a popstar: for no apparent reason he tries to relax her in the most narcissistic way – by singing Third Eye Blind songs.

The route to love is via another man

Friends with Benefits ends very clumsily with Dylan all of a sudden coming to the realisation that he loves Jamie. But aside for the narrative imperfections, there is a nice Lacanian message. It is only when he hears his father, who is confused by Alzheimer’s, mistake another woman for the girl he confesses was the love of his life in his younger years, that Dylan realises he loves Jamie. The route to love is not straight to the woman (Lacan’s formulas show nothing of the sort, of course) but via another man. The absurdity of the movie’s conclusion is that he quickly admits his love for Jamie after this set-up – he showed no indication of having felt it before. In Lacanian terms, we can say he has taken lack as his object.

But the route to love is also via another man in a different sense. Friends with Benefits is peppered with references to the possibility that Dylan’s character might be gay. These are mostly insinuations by other characters, but in any case the movie wasn’t scripted by accident. We see it in the constant misunderstandings of the gay friend Tommy, played by Woody Harrelson; the references by Dylan’s nephew to the Harry Potter fascination he had in his boyhood; and, most flagrantly, to Dylan’s interest in anal sex in the movie’s opening scenes. Even the fact that Kunis’ character has a traditionally male name – Jamie – is suggestive. The introduction of a gay subtext can in itself can be read as indicative of the changing nature of sexuality that the movie points to, beyond the relationship between men and women.

At the end of the movie, after the declarations of love, we see Dylan and Jamie on their first ‘official’ date. They sit in a diner with nothing to say to each other. And in a beautiful parallel to the end of Eyes Wide Shut, Dylan gives up entirely on the falsity of the situation and says wearily, ‘Yeah… Fuck’, and they get it on.

Perhaps therefore the final lesson about male love that Friends with Benefits offers is that there is only one sexual relation possible – the one with your object a.

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The title of this short article will resonate with readers of the Écrits,but rather than Kant or Sade here I am going to argue for why Lacan should be read with another Master of his art – the father of modern-day karate, Gichin Funakoshi.

At the end of his twenty-fifth Seminar, The Moment to Conclude, Lacan makes a few remarks about what the end of a psychoanalysis looks like:

The imagery with which Lacan begins these remarks is interesting. We turn round, we turn round twice. A psychoanalysis involves telling the same story twice, perhaps three times, four, five times, revisiting the same experiences in our history again and again, exploring them from different angles.

The thread of speech goes round and round. And when we turn round and round we can get tangled in that thread. We cannot be free from something that entangles us, which is why Lacan goes on to say that we shouldn’t feel obliged to keep turning round.

What’s interesting about these remarks is that Lacan is saying something very different from the received wisdom that ‘talking helps’. Indeed, in this passage he goes on to say the opposite – a psychoanalysis is not about liberating you from your symptoms, from what’s troubling you. Instead, psychoanalysis helps you to make of these symptoms what he calls a sinthome.

So what is a sinthome?

At the simplest level, Lacan says that it’s another way of spelling ‘symptom’. The two are pronounced identically in French.

Gichin Funakoshi was Japanese, he lived on the Ryukyu Islands in present day Okinawa. In Japanese, different characters are pronounced identically, and a single character may have different pronunciations, depending on the context. The term ‘karate’ is an excellent example of this. Breaking it down, the term te means ‘hands’, but the term kara can be written with two very different characters, both of which are pronounced identically, as kara. One means ‘empty’ and the other is a Chinese character referring to the Tang dynasty which can be translated as ‘Chinese’.

So, just like with ‘symptom’ and sinthome, we have two ways in which the term ‘karate’ can be written. Funakoshi’s achievement was not just to develop the shotokan style of karate, but to popularise the change in how karate was both written and thought about – from ‘Chinese hand’ to ‘empty hand’.

Karate is an ancient art the origin and history of which is obscure. But what is known is that it can be traced back to the Ryukyu Islands in the early 17th century. Around this time, the victorious invading army of the Satsuma clan promptly banned all weapons from the hands of the defeated islanders, forcing them to develop a form of self-defence that didn’t require armed combat. Hence the meaning of the term ‘empty hands’, and the reason why – until Funakoshi popularised it in the early twentieth century – karate was banned so knowledge about it was passed down and practiced in secret.

The same elegant trick Lacan played in rewriting ‘symptom’ to sinthome Funakoshi played with rewriting ‘karate’ from ‘Chinese hand’ to ‘empty hand’. In both Lacan and Funakoshi’s move there is an act of re-writing, an orthography, a playing with the texture of signifiers. “Try playing around with spelling”, Lacan told an audience in Lyon in 1967, “it’s one way of dealing with ambiguities, and it’s not entirely pointless” (My Teaching, p.18)

But if we return to the quote from Lacan that we started with we can see that the similarity between Funakoshi and Lacan goes deeper. The parallels are not just in their orthography but between the two arts that they practiced.

When we re-write something we tangle the signifier. But this is different from the kind of tangling Lacan suggests we get into when we turn round and round the threads of discourse talking about ourselves in a psychoanalysis. With the idea of the sinthome Lacan was trying to find a way to turn a tangle into a knot.

The beginner in karate will get themselves in a terrible tangle – limbs flailing, balance lost. But as they get better they will be able to find form in the tangle. They will move from a tangle to a knot.

What made Funakoshi a Lacanian before Lacan was the way he envisaged that karate could knot a tangle. The difference between a tangle and a knot is that things are intertwined in a different way. Under Funakoshi’s re-writing, ‘karate-do’ means ‘empty-handed Way’. Thus, karate becomes not just a martial art, but a ‘Way’, a way of living that knots what we can recognise as the Lacanian registers of the real, the imaginary and the symbolic. The aggression inherent to the imaginary register, the pangs of symbolic slights, the shock of the real in being thrown a punch in the face unawares – karate is a way of knotting the threads of these three registers.

Funakoshi was no stranger to the significance of the knot. On the very first page of his autobiography he starts by talking about the importance in his life of a particular kind of knot, the topknot, a masculine hairstyle widespread in Japan in the late nineteenth century. As part of a drive to modernisation, the Meiji government abolished the topknot when Funakoshi was young. The move faced great resistance in Okinawa, and great resistance by Funakoshi’s family. The medical school which he hoped to attend refused admission to students still sporting a topknot, but he kept it nonetheless, abandoning it only later when he started his new profession as a teacher. Thus it is that the first chapter of his autobiography is titled ‘Entering the Way; Losing a Topknot’. (Funakoshi, Karate-Do: My Way of Life, p.1).

The kind of solution that Funakoshi saw in karate Lacan saw in the construction of a sinthome through the process of a psychoanalysis. The nature of these solutions are absolutely not superficial – they are ways of living for the subject. In his book Funakoshi doesn’t distinguish between the practice of karate in the dōjō and the lessons that he believes karate can teach outside it. A quick glance at a few of his ‘Twenty Principles’, his collected maxims on karate, is enough to make this clear – ‘Karate goes beyond the dōjō’; ‘Karate is a lifelong pursuit’; ‘Apply the way of karate to all things, therein lies its beauty’. (Funakoshi, The Twenty Guiding Principles of Karate.)

For Lacan, to identify with the sinthome is to identify with that part of one’s symptom that cannot be untangled through the symbolic (for example, through lying on the couch talking to a psychoanalyst or a psychotherapist). The sinthome is a particular organisation of what Lacan calls jouissance, a kind of unmasterable enjoyment or excitation. The sinthome is a formulation that allows one to live with what cannot be assumed in the symptoms from which one suffers.

Like Funakoshi, Lacan has a particular knot in mind. With the Borromean knot that so fascinated him in his final years, Lacan was proposing an intertwining of the real, imaginary and symbolic registers that is bound by a fourth term – the knot of the sinthome. The theoretical obsession with topology that Lacan entertained at the end of his life, and that some find so baffling, was borne of a search for a practical solution to a universal problem – how can psychoanalysis make the suffering inherent in human life more bearable?

Image credit: http://www.lacan.com/semofmemf.htm

This article has been as much about a guy who did karate in the 1920s as it has been about Lacan. Why choose this character Gichin Funakoshi to talk about psychoanalysis?

Lacan once said, “Take a leaf out of my book – don’t imitate me”. Lacan was unashamedly interdisciplinary, perhaps even to the point of being a plagiarist. As he once said, “I take things where I find them, and I hope no one minds.” (Seminar X, 14th November, 1962).

In his very last public talk, Lacan joked, “It is up to you to be Lacanians, if you so wish. As far as I am concerned, I am a Freudian” (Seminar of Caracas, 1981). But look at his points of reference and it’s clear they are much wider than Freud alone – surrealist painters, abstract painters, Joyce, Plato, Aristotle, Melanie Klein (Melanie Klein!), Edward Glover, Kant, Sade….

Lacan’s ideas didn’t come from nowhere. He took them where he found them. If we want to follow Lacan’s path, we should take a leaf out of Lacan’s book and do the same – we too should take things where we find them.

When he joked “It is up to you to be Lacanians…. I am a Freudian”, Lacan was teaching us a great lesson:

Lacan’s work is not important.

It is about something important.

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In The Question of Lay Analysis from 1926, Freud imagined himself being asked by an ‘Impartial Person’ whether psychoanalysis is a confession. He imagines the following question being thrown at him:

At a press conference in 1974 Lacan was asked the same question by an Italian journalist. But he replied more emphatically:

We think of a confession or the revelation of a secret as a moment of candour, of sincerity. We imagine that this is rare and that it’s something only done under certain circumstances, like when visiting a priest or a psychoanalyst.

But is this the case? Let’s take two recent, high profile, very public confessions. Firstly, from disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong to Oprah Winfrey. Click the link below to view the full interview:

Full interview: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/videos/lance-armstrong-oprah-interview-part-1/

What stands out most from this interview is that, because of the extent of Armstrong’s evasiveness, his biggest confession is not about his doping but rather to tell Winfrey how he is going to lie to her. Of course, Armstrong does not state this outright, but anyone with a Lacanian ear will be able to detect in his ambiguous choice of words a more revealing meaning than he had consciously intended. Time and again in the interview, when Winfrey pushes for more detail about something, he tells her he is lying to her. “Again, I’m gonna tell you what’s true and not true”, he says at 41:00, a turn of phrase that can be read in two ways. Earlier, at 9:33, he says, “If you ask me if it’s true or not I’m going to say ‘It’s true or not’”. This can also be read in two ways, either as “I’m going to say, ‘It’s true or not’”, where the intended meaning was to answer honestly, or it can also be understood as, “I’m going to say, ‘It’s true’, or not” – that is, I’m going to choose whether to tell you the truth. As Freud said, negation is the hallmark of the unconscious (SE XIX, 236).

But perhaps the most revealing indication that Armstrong was guarding a secret can be found in his most famous speech – the one he gave immediately after winning the 2005 Tour de France for a seventh consecutive time. Here as well, from within his own words a meaning is present that exceeds the one he intended. This 30 second, impromptu speech is so rich with unconscious content that it’s worth spending a few paragraphs taking it apart:

In this short excerpt, Armstrong starts by talking about belief. Ostensibly, he’s addressing “The people that don’t believe in cycling – the cynics and the sceptics”. But then he makes a curious turn in his discourse – he apologises twice. Again, ostensibly this is an attack on his critics who can’t “believe” in his victory – but why express it as an apology?

Immediately after, he uses a very odd turn of phrase that can’t help appear out of place: “You should stand around and believe”. This is enough to make a Lacanian’s ear prick up, but it is quickly followed by the oddest statement of all – “I’m a fan of the Tour de France for as long as I live and there are no secrets – this is the hardest sporting event and hard work wins it”. And there are no secrets? Why, we might ask, did Armstrong choose to express himself by referring to secrets? Ostensibly he’s referring to the hard work involved in winning the race, and some may argue that it’s over-analysing his words to latch onto the term ‘secrets’. But why state that there are no secrets when he could have said there are no shortcuts, no easy answers, or the dozens of other turns of phrase available to him? As Freud never tires of pointing out, when someone speaks about something we have to treat with respect the words that they use, that it is this word rather than that one that occurred to them at that moment and none other. Armstrong’s statement that there are “no secrets” is the perfect illustration of what Freud meant when he said that negation was the hallmark of the unconscious, “a way of taking cognisance of what is repressed” (SE XIX, 235).

Secondly:

Naturally the focus of most commentators in the media and online has been on the intended topic of Daley’s very admirable and courageous admission. But if – as we saw in the two quotes above – Freud’s idea is that a psychoanalysis involves telling both what you know and what you don’t know, and if Lacan is content to abandon the model of confession entirely, what might have piqued their interest in Daley’s account? Perhaps the odd reference to feeling “safe” that he uses twice when describing his partner, a signifier that evidently has some kind of personal significance that might tickle a Lacanian’s ear (the fact that he has used this same signifier in other interviews about the same subject further suggests this). Or perhaps the remarks about his father which bookend the video point to a connection between these two aspects of his life. Of course, we can’t possibly know what significance they hold without hearing more from Daley himself, and further speculation would be pointless. But as we will now see, for both Freud and Lacan the important lesson is to listen for these sorts of contingent details that stand out in a person’s speech and exceed the bounds of the subject matter being discussed.

When Lacan said that the point of a psychoanalysis was not to confess, but to talk about anything, his confidence in this approach stems from his belief that what is of interest psychoanalytically hides in precisely the sorts of the minor details that are, ostensibly, of no interest whatsoever. The subject matter of a confession – like the two very different examples we have just looked at – is not as interesting psychoanalytically as the form that the confession takes, the way in which it is expressed. Indeed, a confession or admission of a secret itself can actually conceal the material which is the most revealing. As Lacan argues,

In a similar vein, twice in the Écrits we find Lacan making reference to speech happening on different “staves”, like in a musical score:

This implies that, like the way we can’t read music except by taking into account the different staves of the score, we also can’t understand someone’s speech without taking into account the different ‘staves’ or resonances that the signifiers they use may harbour. This is a feature of Lacan’s theory of language. For him, language – and speech as an act of language – operates on both a vertical (synchronic) and horizontal (diachronic) level. As we have already seen in a previous article, Lacan teaches us to be alert to the ways that the unconscious expresses itself without using the first person pronoun:

Another way of looking for these contingencies in a person’s speech that point to unconscious thoughts, ideas or fantasies is to look for what Lacan describes as redundancies. All speech – but admissions, confessions and secrets in particular – are never simply transmissions of a message. In their telling, they contain discreet elements that exceed the topic being discussed. This is what we saw in the testimonies of Armstrong and Daley. Lacan believes that it is these elements that we should foreground in order to divine the unconscious. In the Écrits he writes:

Lacan is elaborating here on some remarks he made in Seminar II a few years earlier. There, to illustrate this idea of redundancy, he gave an example from the Bell Telephone Co. in the United States. In the early 1950s Bell had a problem. More people wanted to make telephone calls, but Bell didn’t want to shoulder the cost of investing in extra lines to carry them. So they needed to transmit several conversations on a single telephone line simultaneously.

This meant reducing the transmission of the human voice to the barest modulations that still made the message communicated understandable. The meaning of what was being said was, of course, neither here nor there – Bell’s was just a technological solution to an economic problem. As Lacan noted, “It had nothing to do with knowing whether what people tell each other makes any sense…. It is a matter of knowing what are the most economical conditions which enable one to transmit the words people recognise. No one cares about the meaning” (Seminar II, p.82).

The point that Lacan was trying to make with this example was that a psychoanalysis is not about making sense of what someone says, but in treating what they say as signifiers, and then paying attention to the ‘materiality’ of those signifiers. “Doesn’t this underline rather well”, Lacan suggests about his Bell example, “the point which I am emphasising, which one always forgets, namely that language, this language which is the instrument of speech, is something material?” (Seminar II, p.82).

But returning to Armstrong and Daley’s admissions, at a more fundamental level than that of the content of these confessions is the timing of them. Daley for example states at the start of the video that his motivation for making it was due to being “misquoted” in an interview; Armstrong’s is the accusation that he doped even after his return to the sport in 2009.

This gives us a clue to answering an important question – at what point does someone decide to make this sort of declaration? And more specifically, at what point does someone make a demand for a psychoanalysis or turn to a priest? The timing is not arbitrary – it’s an indicator of what is important to that person. As in our examples, we can say that what motivates a confession is the experience of having oneself spoken for. Daley for example was misquoted, an act in which something someone says about you takes the place of your own words. This has the effect of calling upon you, the subject, to make a definitive statement about yourself and have that statement recognised by the other. Having a receiver of this speech that comes from oneself about oneself is a vital element in the revelation of a secret, as much for Daley or Armstrong as it is for those seeking confession with a priest:

“Who will speak if not you?”, as Lacan asked of one of his patients in an anecdote from his practice related in this earlier article. To speak for yourself rather than be spoken for: this is the essence of psychoanalysis, the purest practice of free speech.

At the very start of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams is a quote from Virgil that Freud chooses as an inscription to his most important and ambitious work: acheronta movebo, ‘I will move the infernal regions.’

We tend to think of the confession of a secret as being something mined from the deepest parts of our soul. This is what gives a confession its weight, it’s value. We think that someone’s candour is the result of a pained effort of self-expression. And indeed the difficulty of a confession, as Daley testifies to above, would corroborate this assumption.

But as we have seen, Lacan’s idea seems to imply that it’s not ‘from the depths’ that a secret is pulled – rather, it is hidden in plain view. The surface is not the superficial.

There has been a certain historical trend in psychoanalysis which assumes that what Lacan calls “the subject’s division between truth and knowledge” (Écrits, 864) has to be bridged. This means, for many psychoanalysts or psychotherapists, making the unconscious conscious, an infectious idea which has its heritage in Freud’s ambiguous formulation from the New Introductory Lectures that “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden” (SE XXII, 80).

But the making of a confession or the admission of a secret is not the same as, and does not necessarily imply, the emergence of unconscious content. In other words, just because you are able to confess or reveal a secret doesn’t mean that that secret is what has previously been unconscious, and that therefore you have been successful in making it conscious.

Certainly there is a cathartic value in being able to make your own words your own, in being able to give an account of your experience. But this is not the end of the story. Being able to put something into your own words does not mean ‘case closed’ – honesty, frankness and candour are not hallmarks of the unconscious.

This important difference constitutes a fundamental point of divergence between Lacanian psychoanalysis and many other psychotherapies, or counselling as a practice. The Lacanian lesson here would be: do not confuse a confession with the unconscious.

Let’s now look not at who makes the confession or reveals the secret, but to whom they do so. This brings us to a second Lacanian lesson: that it is not some power of the psychoanalyst or the psychotherapist that elicits this confession. It is not the context of the analysis or the person of the analyst that matters. Rather, the unconscious always pushes for expression, and it doesn’t only do so in the discretion of the analyst’s consulting room or the priest’s confession booth.

This was something that Lacan warned his pupils about:

Here we see the relevance of Lacan’s remarks about the ‘staves of discourse’ we quoted earlier. The mode of analytic intervention is to respond to the analysand about some-thing else.

One of the ways in which Lacan described the psychoanalyst’s mistaken mastery of the analytic situation, his or her ability to elicit a ‘deeper truth’ about a patient, was with the term ‘subject supposed-to-know’. A lot has been written on this concept, but a story about Lacan is revealing of his attitude towards it.

A translator of Lacan’s work into Spanish, who suspected that the idea of the ‘subject supposed-to-know’ had previously been mis-translated, once asked Lacan what he meant. Lacan said, “The subject supposed to know, it’s the unconscious” (as related in Jean Allouch, Les Impromptus de Lacan).

This is the most fundamental meaning we can give to Lacan’s enigmatic expression. Now that most Lacanian psychoanalysts have finally disabused themselves of the notion that the ‘subject supposed to know’ means the ‘analyst supposed to know’, Lacan’s works are all the more a guide to the kind of knowledge we are talking about in psychoanalysis. Lacan jokingly said to his audience at the Catholic University of Louvain in 1972 that the idea that the analyst knows something “is not all that widespread” nowadays (18:46 in the video below):

If this knowledge is unconscious, or if, more precisely, the unconscious is a knowledge of which you are unaware, one doesn’t necessarily need a psychoanalysis to express it – the unconscious is that which seeks for expression through any forms of speech, whether that be an interview with Oprah or a YouTube video.

Of course, there will always be shrinks tempted to trade on the allure of a ‘secret knowledge’, a kind of allusive mystique that suits them – and really only them – all too well. Lacan was probably attacking exactly these practitioners with his remarks. But Lacan’s lesson is that the analyst doesn’t have any special powers, that the practice of his or her art is just to be the conduit for unconscious material.

And this, then, is the deepest secret of psychoanalysis: that there really are no secrets. That the truth pushes for expression through contingencies, redundancies, through the discreet and ostensibly unimportant details of a person’s speech. What’s more, the truth of a secret does not necessarily lie in the admission of that secret itself.

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Hip hop, it is sometimes claimed, is born of an absent father. If this is true perhaps rock music is born of an absent mother. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Elvis, Jimmy Hendrix – to name just a few – all lost their mothers when they were young. As did Bono, lead singer of U2, whose description of the tragic events of his mother’s death quoted above form a prominent part of the subject matter of his band’s latest album, Songs of Innocence.

This article is less about him as it is about how psychoanalysis has conceived of the absence of the mother, or more precisely its effects. Nevertheless we will return to Bono’s testimony about the death of his mother when we look at some of the ways in which people can metabolise this absence, whether as loss or release.

To start, here are three of the most interesting themes that emerge in the psychoanalytic literature on this topic, and that we’ll explore in what follows:

1. That what appears at first like the abandonment by the mother is actually the abandonment of the mother;

2. If mourning involves a loss, and lack conditions loss, why this lack requires a support… and what happens when there is an absence of support for that lack;

3. What it is which links what Freud called the “work of mourning” and the process of artistic creation.

To quickly survey the psychoanalytic treatment of mothers is to see how they are always presented as a figure whose role needs to be subsumed, overtaken, or deposed by that of the father.

- For Freud – the mother relegated in favour of the father privileged in the Oedipus complex;
- For Lacan – the mother as the biggest Other, the ‘Thing’ (das Ding), her over-proximity forcing the subject to pose the question about her enigmatic desire. This is Lacan’s famous Che vuoi? which crowns the question mark-shaped third iteration of his Graph of Desire (Écrits, 815). The crisis thus resulting is resolved thanks to the salvation through the paternal metaphor – substitution of the mother’s desire for the Name of the Father… but at the price of eternal castration (a loss of jouissance which can only be reached again on the inverted ladder of the law of desire).
- For Klein – the mother as object of ambivalence. The ‘good’ and ‘bad’ objects that constitute the mother producing an oscillation between love and aggression that results in the depressive position.

The message seems to be: unless the relationship with the mother is relinquished or mastered in favour of the father, bad things will happen. Psychoanalysis knows no better warning of this fate than the myth of Oedipus. Even more recently, a problematic relation to the mother has been used in some psychoanalytic quarters to provide dubious accounts for autism (the so-called ‘Refrigerator mother theory’), which many French Lacanians have had to spend a large amount of time over the last couple of years distancing themselves from.

But what happens when the bond to the mother is severed in the wrong way, perhaps with her premature death?

To describe this using classical psychoanalytic terms, it’s not that death produces a sudden severing of libidinal attachments – these attachments remain strong, and the experience of pain comes from a slow reconciliation with the fact that the object is no longer there. Freud often describes these bonds in hydraulic terms: libido flows like water from object to object. This might sound very metaphorical but most people recognise this description from their everyday lives – with a breakup, for instance, there is often the ‘rebound’ guy or girl who ‘absorbs’ the intensity of affect and receives a massive over-investment of libidinal cathexis, which albeit is quickly exhausted.

Which then poses the question of why an exhaustion of cathexis is so difficult in the case of mourning, to the extent that this absence can sometimes never be overcome? If the psychical economy functions on this libidinal hydraulic model (a dynamic model), where there is a certain quota of libido shifted from object to object (an economic model), why do we have such trouble letting go of certain key figures in our lives?

Let’s look at probably the most famous and often-cited example of how to deal with the absent mother in the history of psychoanalysis.

Freud describes watching his young nephew play:

Freud sums up his interpretation of what his nephew was doing:

At the start of his career as a young psychiatrist, Lacan goes along with this idea – the infant masters the experience of the mother’s absence by repeating it on his own terms through an effort of symbolisation (see for example Family Complexes, p.18). But then in Seminar XI he proposes another, very different reading:

The child is symbolising through repetition for sure, says Lacan. But what is being repeated is not so much the disappearance/reappearance of the mother, but her disappearance/reappearance as the cause of the subject’s split. The repetition, is not to master absence but to establish presence – the presence it establishes being that of subject him- or herself.

After all, how can absence itself be represented? How do you represent something that isn’t there? The classical Lacanian answer would be through an appeal to the signifier to stand in the place of an absence – the child’s fort and da, here and gone. Signifiers are capable of indexing an absence in the same way that a missing book on a library shelf still has a place by virtue of the classmark assigned to it. The book may not be there, but its place is. Fort and Da are thus a minimal binary signifying system for the child.

But Lacan goes on to say that just assigning a signifier to represent this absence – to be the Reprasentanz of the Vorstellung, to use Freud’s German – isn’t enough. A simple fort or da can’t bridge the gap of the lost object.

And this is where the reel that the child plays with comes in. Psychoanalytic theory offers several names for an object like this – Winnicott uses the term ‘transitional’ object; Zizek uses the term ‘biceptor’. As for Lacan, he calls the reel the ‘object a’ (Seminar XI, p.62 and p.239).

The object a is a remnant of the process of separation from the mother. It is a partial object not just in the sense that it is linked to a ‘partial’ drive – oral, anal, scopic, invocatory – or to the ‘part’ of the body that this drive corresponds – mouth, anus, gaze, voice – but partial also in the sense of belonging neither to the subject nor to its object – neither to the child nor its mother. It is in between the two, “the excluded intersection of the two sets”, as Zizek calls it (The Puppet and The Dwarf, p.59). This is another shade to Lacan’s notion of ‘extimacy’ – something that’s both external and intimate at the same time. Shortly after Lacan first used these ideas, psychoanalyst Otto Isakower offered a model for how the superego is formed through the introjection of invocatory commands by way of a comparison to how small crustacea would insert foreign objects into their shells – something both external and intimate at the same time (for more, see this great paper).

Although this may just sound like fanciful theorising, we find a very concrete example of this ‘foreignness’ in how people describe the experience of mourning a loss. ‘A part of me has died’, people often say, or ‘It felt like I lost an arm’, ‘I am nothing without him’. And accompanying a loss is a sense of emptiness that disrupts the experience not just of one’s identity, but of one’s own body. The mourning process is often accompanied by a complete loss of appetite, for instance.

So we have in the case of Freud’s nephew a situation in which the absence of the mother affords the child the chance to establish his place as a subject. And through playing with the reel we see he needs not just this lack (the absence of the mother), but the support of a lack (the reel). Speaking about the child’s game in Seminar X, Lacan tells us in no uncertain terms what happens when we are faced with the absence of a support of the lack: anxiety.

Lacan’s idea here is very radical – the “possibility of absence is what gives presence its security” does not imply that we value presence only when we know absence, but that we can bear presence only when we have the possibility of absence. What the child masters in the fort/da game is not the absence but the overwhelming presence of the mother. The reel is the object that enables the child to get some distance from her, to prise an independent space for its own desire.

Of course, the child still needs the mother to fulfill its basic needs. But the mother is not simply the giver of the breast or bottle – she is the one who gives “the sign of signifying articulation” (Seminar V, 19th November 1958) not just through words but through games like hide-and-seek or peek-a-boo. These are instrumental in providing the child with a way to establish the notions of presence and absence not just in bodily terms but in symbolic terms. Peak-a-boo, hide-and-seek, and fort/da are games, after all, a second order from actual presence and absence. Through this symbolic inscription – a minimal signifying binary such as fort and da or peek and boo – the child gains the means to move past its mother.

But all this seems very far away from the experience of mourning. After all, lack is not the same as loss. It might however offer us a clue to the way that the work of mourning can be better undertaken.

Contrary to the psychoanalytic tradition of ‘metaphorising’ the mother for the father, in Bono we find someone for whom the two are closely intertwined under very tragic circumstances: his mother collapsed at the funeral of her own father and never regained consciousness:

Iris Hewson died 40 years ago to the day that Songs of Innocence was released, a fact the U2 singer claims to have found out only later, but which is not without psychoanalytic significance. (See Corfield and Leader, Why Do People Get Ill?, p.69-93). His writing about her death spans the almost 40 years of his life as a singer and on this album a short essay in the liner notes (quoted from above), and a song that shares her name – Iris- continue what Freud aptly calls the “work” of mourning (SE XIV, 245).

Before we go into specifics, we can note a few things worthy of psychoanalytic comment, no more than lines of enquiry, but which offer us some insight into how the loss of the mother has been negotiated in his case.

1. The use of the proper name

Bono uses his mother’s proper name, Iris, both to title a song and when writing about her in his essay in the liner notes:

As it’s odd for a son to refer to his mother by her proper name, what’s the significance of doing so here? Why not just write a song called ‘Mother’?

Firstly, using the proper name rather than ‘Mother’ indicates a change in – or loss of – her symbolic status, a move from the woman as ‘mother’ to the woman as ‘Iris’. The work of mourning here involves a kind of re-making of the object, a reintegration of the object into the subject’s psychical economy to enable a new relationship to be possible.

Secondly, in referring to his mother by her first name, it is almost as if Bono was writing from someone else’s perspective, describing a woman known to someone in a way other than as a mother. The status of the son, as much of the mother, is therefore here in question, and it’s perhaps no accident that this album, Songs of Innocence, contains that very signifier. This is even highlighted in the album’s cover artwork. The gap between letters cannot be accidental:

Thirdly, the use of the proper name shows a fidelity to the absolute singularity, the un-exchangeability, of the object. Freud comments on this function of naming in Totem and Taboo (SE XIII, 56-58). We could say that what animates the artistic process – the writing of a song, or successive songs, about the death of a mother, for instance – is a permanent memorial to the singularity of the object denoted by the proper name: that this loss cannot be metaphorised, it can only be exchanged for the person herself. As psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche put it, “All the limitations of the dead person can be reworked: but his name is untouchable, impossible to metabolise.” (Laplanche, Essays on Otherness, p.244). If we were to paraphrase Freud’s comments in Analysis Terminable and Interminable, the proper name is a kind of ‘rock of mourning’ (SE XXV, 252).

2. The gaze

Taking it less as a proper name however, the signifier ‘Iris’ also links the mother to the scopic register. In Lacanian terms, we talk about the gaze as the partial object of this scopic drive. Telling the story of his mother’s death in the liner notes to Songs of Innocence, Bono employs the same scopic terms, demonstrating an associative link between the gaze and death:

Bono is, of course, a man famous for permanently shielding his own eyes by wearing shades, so we might wonder what significance this has given the way he describes death as a “staring match that death always wins”.

The duality of the gaze as something both comforting and threatening illustrates nicely how, as an indicator of desire, it can be a double-edged sword. Several times in the early sixties Lacan provides an efficient little apologue to describe this effect, which he borrows from Maurice Blanchot’s first novel, Thomas l’Obscur (as Lacan references in Seminar IX, 27th June, 1962).

Imagine, he says, you are in front of a female praying mantis, known for biting off the heads of their partners after sex. You are wearing a mask of another praying mantis, but the catch is you don’t know whether it’s the mask of a male or a female. As such, you don’t know whether you’re going to be eaten or not, because you don’t know how the creature in front of you – this ultimate Other – sees you (Seminar IX, 4th April 1962; Seminar X, 14th November 1962).

The story contains at least two Lacanian lessons. First, that I am constituted by the Other’s gaze. Who I am, my experience of myself, is suspended on the way I interpret the desire of the Other, as manifested in the story through its gaze. When I am not certain who I am because I am not certain of how I am seen, anxiety results.

Secondly, that the relation to the object, even the mother, is never so simply one of unconditional love. As Klein’s work emphasises more than any other psychoanalyst’s, love is never a purity. It is always refracted through a prism of ambivalence, dread, anxiety, and aggression. Lacanian psychoanalyst Darian Leader, writing about Britain’s most prolific serial killer Harold Shipman, notes that immediately after the death of his mother Shipman went on a ten mile run around his home city of Nottingham in the pouring rain. Tempting though it may be to assume this was a desperate attempt to escape the situation, it could also indicate a new-found vigour, a new sense of life, following the death of the mother (Leader, What Is Madness?, p.282).

We don’t know enough about Bono’s family history, and he himself claims to have only a few remaining memories of his mother. But a few are contained in the song Iris, and echoed in the liner notes to the album, which give us a starting point from where something of significance might follow.

For a psychoanalytically attuned ear, the reference to burial here is the most likely to tickle the attention. But rather than focussing exclusively on that we can connect the scene on the sand in an associative chain to another event concurrent with the death of his mother. In his short essay in the album’s liner notes, immediately after writing about the death of his mother, Bono remembers meeting his future wife Ali when he was 14, the same age as when his mother died:

Leaving aside the reference to a crime scene in the last line – which we can connect to the ‘Innocence’ of the album’s title; and the protestation in the last lines of Iris quoted above that he is not responsible for his mother’s death – it is the associative link between the sand dunes of Dublin, the mother, and meeting his future wife, that provide a more interesting line of enquiry.

We know from published interviews with Bono that these are the same sand dunes he describes in the memory of his mother from the lyrics quoted above. The Hewson family would visit there frequently for short breaks, a point we’ll return to. So we have a proximity between the sand dunes, his mother, and Ali, his future wife, established on three levels:

- Temporal proximity – He and Ali meet the same year his mother dies.
- Geographical proximity – The first date with Ali taking place on sand dunes “as unknowable as any great beauty”, as he describes them.
- Ideational proximity – Without making any bold analytic interpretation we can at least recognise an associative chain that connects the burial of the mother; the sand he describes being buried in by his mother, as recounted in the lyrics above; and the same sands where he takes his later wife on their first date.

Questioned in 2003 by the journalist Michka Assayas about his childhood memory of his mother’s funeral, it is fascinating therefore that of all the topics Bono could have associated in connection with the tragedy of his mother’s death, it is a scene on the same sand dunes of the Dublin coast that he turns to:

Assayas: Each time you discuss your childhood it seems like things only come out in a kind of haze. For obvious reasons, the strongest memory seems to be your mother’s funeral…
Bono: Yeah, I’m just trying to think. I have some strong memories about that railway carriage my grandad had, out in a place called Rush, on a beach.
Assayas: Oh yes, you told me that story.
Bono: I remember the strand and the sand dunes, and wandering around. (Michka Assayas, Bono on Bono, p.244).

Later in the interview Assayas elicits more about this memory:

Assayas: I once read that as a child, you spent your family vacations in a trailer on a wasteland by the sea. Then the property was developed, and you weren’t allowed to stay there anymore?
Bono: There was a railway carriage that belonged to my grandfather, in the sand dunes, on a beach in the north of Dublin. There was an extraordinary moment in my childhood when we arrived. The farmer who had sold the land to my grandfather had died. When his son was looking for the contract that my grandfather didn’t have – it was just a cash transaction – he had told him he had to get off. My grandfather wouldn’t get off, and he bulldozed this train carriage, just smashed it. It was an extraordinary moment I remember as a child. I remember throwing rocks at his glass houses. I was very angry about it” (Assayas, ibid, 140-141).

Although we don’t have enough material here to speculate further, it is at least interesting to note in this memory a further associative connection, this time between the sand dunes and the grandfather. Whether this is the maternal grandfather at whose graveside Bono’s mother collapsed is not clear, but the connection to the death of a father is duplicated in this story – the farmer’s father’s death being the catalyst for the scene of destruction on the sand dunes.

Without more to go on, we can’t speculate further. But what we can at least see is how a significant event in a person’s life – the death of the mother, for example – is knitted to a series of associations that reappear in their creative work, even without their conscious knowledge, and which it would be the job of a psychoanalysis to pursue.

There are stories to tell that are not songs.

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No film in recent years has had quite as much input from the field of psychology as Disney and Pixar’s latest offering, Inside Out. Charming though the film is, its portrayal of emotional life tells us a lot about how current psychological theories treat the study of emotions. This gives us an excuse to contrast these ideas with the somewhat more intricate and careful theories Freud and Lacan developed on the subject.

Inside Out centres on Riley, an 11 year old girl who moves with her parents from Minnesota to San Francisco, an event which precipitates the emotional convulsions the film chronicles. The central premise is that Riley’s feelings can themselves feel. Every time an emotional experience is registered, a memory orb drops into the internal world, called Headquarters. Memory orbs affect the personified emotions – Joy, Anger, Disgust, Fear, and Sadness – characters which march on and compete with each other to take charge of the control panel in Headquarters which determines how Riley reacts.

What is an emotion? Psychologists involved in the making of Inside Out speak with great confidence about the nature of emotions. Their commentaries explaining the psychology supporting the film are peppered with phrases such as “We know…”, “Scientific studies find…”, and “The truth is…”. These are followed by quite bold claims which should demand some caution unless we are sure we know what we mean when we refer to emotional experience.

Here is one such claim, from two psychologists involved as consultants on the film:

So, our emotions are the basis for our identity and our experiences will be determined by them, or at least by those that “principally define” us. This model puts a lot of explanatory weight on emotions so it is worthwhile to start by questioning what an emotion actually is. Most fundamentally, is it so easy to identify an emotion like joy, sadness, or anger as a distinct, separate thing?

Freud and Lacan’s ideas about emotions are rich and complex. For Freud, emotions are compounds: they can be transformed, combined, or displaced. What we feel is very often the result of this process of distortion which produces a disconnect between the emotion we feel and the idea we associate with it. For instance, we may be angry at person A and produce a raft of reasons why we feel this way. But Freud was suspicious of this link. He believed it could in fact hide a grievance against a person B of which we are unconscious. His theory is that person A is chosen as the target of the anger on the grounds of an associative link, and the reasons we feel angry towards him or her are in fact rationalisations to disguise the link to person B. The job of a psychoanalysis then is to uncover the mechanism behind this link: for example, a displacement from A to B on the basis of a common feature or facet between the two characters.

This severance between an emotion and an idea is the result of repression. But strictly speaking there are no such things as repressed emotions. While an idea itself can remain unconscious – Freud thought that ideas exist in a network, as “actual structures in the system Ucs” (SE XIV, 178) – feelings tend to get expressed. Behind the emotion displayed is an idea which cannot be articulated, and so in its place comes another idea – a ‘false connection’ or rationalisation.

For this reason, Freud believed that emotions can never be taken at face value or used as an indicator of what is actually going on in a person’s life. Any emotion is susceptible to being the product of a transformation, exchange, or displacement from an unconscious idea (SE I, 188). Lacan later expressed this in stronger terms: all* emotions lie.

This then is the first problem with the psychological theories behind Inside Out and the portrayal of emotional life presented in the film itself. How do we know that what we are looking at is joy, sadness, or anger if emotions are the compound result of a process of distortion and transformation, rather than purified, precise entities? If an idea and an emotion can have different destinies in our psychical economy, then the link between any given idea and the expression of an emotion is not so clear cut, and one does not necessarily follow the other in a way that is immediately apparent.

This has important practical consequences. If an idea and an emotion have different fates, then presumably the ways of dealing with them are different too. Hence the importance of a psychotherapeutic approach that looks beyond the manifest emotion someone presents with – whether that be anger, love, fear, or sadness – rather than simply taking it at face value. Yet contrast this to the claims of psychologists involved in the making of Inside Out:

The problem with this focus on the manifest emotion is that it could absolve us from understanding why someone is sad in the first place. If we take Freud seriously, the expression of sadness can be very far removed from the experiences behind it, so a failure to recognise this could mean we address the emotion at the expense of the experience.

Inside Out offers us an example of this. Riley, the 11 year old protagonist, is forced as a result of her father’s job to move house from Minnesota to San Francisco. This is presented as an intensely upsetting experience for her, and over the course of the film we watch Riley pine for a return to her former home. But notice how, in the words of the film’s psychologist-consultants, the importance of the experience can be quietly dismissed with an appeal to the ‘science’ of emotions:

There are two problems with this. As a claim this sounds dubious in itself, but more importantly it relieves us from actually questioning what is behind Riley’s sadness. No consideration is given to the weight of the experience itself, and no attention to the specificity of what it might mean for her. One clinical psychologist – who describes herself as practicing ‘Superhero Therapy’ – easily brushes this off with “Riley initially seems to be having symptoms of an Adjustment Disorder with Depressed Mood”.

Secondly, it demonstrates a facile division that many psychological interpretations seem to cling to: that emotions can be classified as either ‘positive’ or ‘negative’, and scientific studies designed to measure this. We sense the fallacy of false precision is at work here. What measurement of ‘positivity’ would allow us to quantify an emotion like that? In the field of psychology we often find false precision used to instill a misleading confidence in a quantifiable and therefore ‘scientific’ study of emotions, even if applied to a notion that is inappropriate for quantification. Experiments that attempt to study the nature of emotions like pain or fear by threatening subjects with an electric shock, or by looking at what areas of the brain light up under neuroimaging, are all susceptible to the same critique. If we think, for example, of the pain felt in mourning a loved one, or the pain accompanying the end of a relationship, it is easy to see that the experience of pain is infinitely more complex than something which could be measured and quantified experimentally. To then deny that this is really pain on the grounds that it cannot be measured or quantified is to deny the reality of human experience. And when science is used as a justification to overrule human subjectivity this can lead to some very dark places.

Again and again in the psychological commentaries on Inside Out we find an appeal to neuroscience to cover over an unestablished premise about emotions. One psychologist commenting on the film gives us a great example of this when he confidently states that compassion is “caused by an activation of the compassion centers of our brain (the insula and the anterior cingulate cortex, among other structures)”. But how do we know that what we are seeing is compassion in the first place? We hardly have to subscribe to everything Freud said to recognise that emotions are complex, compound things; not discrete, identifiable entities that can be found in the brain.

The division of emotions in this crude way, between those which are ‘positive’ and ‘negative’, is perhaps reflected in the somewhat facile depiction of emotions in the film. The character of Sadness is blue; Joy a luminous yellow. Yes, this is a kid’s film, and using personified emotions as a narrative device in a movie about the life of an 11 year old girl is fine. Inside Out is a charming film. But this depiction of emotions belies the simplistic psychological theories underpinning it.

Worst among these is the way that emotions are presented as deficiencies in thinking, rather than as indicators that something is wrong and worth looking into. As could be expected from a Disney film, Joy is the protagonist, but each of the personified emotions parrot glib psychological language of the sort commonly found in behavioural practices like CBT. In one scene, the character of Sadness says: “Crying helps me slow down and obsess over the weight of life’s problems”.

The contrast to Freud and Lacan’s approach is stark. For the psychoanalysts, it is not the expression of the emotion – the fact that Sadness is crying – that would be of primary importance, but what “the weight of life’s problems” means for her. In a psychoanalysis, attentiveness to a person’s testimony, rather than any outward emotional manifestation, is the only route to an understanding of the experience they are going through.

An example from Freud’s 1917 paper Mourning and Melancholia may help illustrate this difference. Freud hypothesised that the experience of the loss of a loved one is what both mourning and depression have in common. But for the depressive (or melancholic) precisely who this person is and the place he or she holds in their life is not immediately obvious. Freud writes of how a mourner might be aware of whom they have lost, but not what they have lost in them (SE XIV, 245). As a result, feelings of sadness and worthlessness reported by those suffering from depression cannot be combatted by reassuring the person of their worthiness, or pointing out how wrong they are to feel the way they do. Rather, Freud suggested that we should look for a special attachment to someone in the person’s life lying behind these feelings. Sadness and worthlessness are the result of what he referred to, in a beautiful expression, as the shadow of this other person falling on the ego (SE XIV, 258). In contrast to the character in Inside Out, sadness is not about whether or not you cry, but why you cry in the first place.

Psychological commentaries on Inside Out however turn this the other way round through a privileging of the emotion:

(We will leave aside the question of what standard we could use to consider a thinking as “rational”)

The assumption here is that an emotion is a sound basis to start from; that anger, just as sadness, can be easily identified and – moreover – can “enable effective responses to the current situation”. But would we really judge the feelings of sadness and worthlessness reported by sufferers of depression as likely to “enable effective responses”? For the psychologists consulting on Inside Out the assumption of a solidity to emotion is accepted so uncritically that by extension all aspects of identity stem from it:

But as we have seen, on the Freudian model emotions are actually the shakiest premise to start from. An emotion never exists in a purified form. The characters presented in Inside Out – Anger, Disgust, Fear, Sadness, and Joy – do not exist as separate things in the brain. Instead, emotions emerge through transformations and distortions as complex compounds. The final manifestation of this process is what we perceive as a feeling, but the link between what we feel and why we think we feel it can never be taken for granted.

This model implies an important difference between the expression of an emotion and the experience of an emotion. In one scene in Inside Out, Riley’s mother asks her to support her father in moving the family to San Francisco for his job, despite Riley’s discomfort. ‘You can do that for us, can’t you?’, she pleads. Riley smiles and says ‘Sure’. Immediately, in Headquarters, Joy steps up and pushes a button on the control panel that causes Riley’s face to light up with a smile.

This nicely illustrates the difference between the expression of an emotion and the experience of an emotion. We may laugh or smile, but simply observing this outward expression is no guide to a person’s emotional experience. Emotional expressions have an intersubjective character which becomes evident in any given social situation or context: if you smile, I tend to smile; if you get angry, I am likely to get angry too. It is in the presence of other people that our emotional expressions are formed, and as such we can say that there is a mirroring function to emotion. But rather than refer to oft-cited neuropsychological theories about so-called mirror neurons to account for this, Lacan draws a more fundamental implication: that what we think of as our own emotions could actually belong to someone else. In Seminar X, Lacan highlighted the very simple point that the reaction of Pavlov’s dog was conditional on the presence of the experimenter – what Lacan called “the dimension of the Other” – incarnated by Pavlov himself (Seminar X, p.58-59). The dog, like us humans, need not be aware of this effect, which should lead us to question the solidity of constructing broad theories of personal identity on the uncertain basis of emotional expression.

What about memories? The second article on Inside Out will look at its presentation of how memory works, and the psychological theories behind it.

* Except one – anxiety. For Lacan, this is the only emotion that does not deceive (Seminar X, 19th December 1962).

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– Evan Spiegel, founder of Snapchat (now Snap), announcing the launch of his company’s camera-embedded glasses.

When we look at a sunset, or into the eyes of our partner, or at pornography, what do we see? More precisely, what are we looking for in what we see?

Capturing what we perceive in an image is not the same as experiencing it directly, and an attempt to bridge this gap between image and experience is what Evan Spiegel, founder of Snapchat, is articulating in the quote above.

But most of the time, we can never experience something ‘directly’, as it were. Many people have the experience of trying to take in the view from the top of a mountain or a skyscraper, but at the same time feel somewhat distanced from it. This is perhaps what, unwittingly, the compulsion for image sharing through apps like Snapchat is servicing.

Psychoanalysis is also interested in how this gap is bridged. At the centre of his early model of how the psyche works Freud puts the effort to create what he calls an ‘identity of perception’.

This article will be about that concept.

In approaching this concept, problem number one is how to explain pornography.

Growing reports of ‘porn addiction’, seemingly fuelled by the ease of accessing it online, tells us something about the nature of satisfaction. But even if the category of ‘addiction’ needs justification here, it nonetheless indicates an important point: that the compulsion to search for a particular object of satisfaction is ongoing, perhaps endless. Members of Reddit’s ‘NoFap’ community frequently complain that they are seeking something very specific that will admit of no compromises, but which at the same time is never found. What testimonies like these tell us is that even if there is an abundance of sensory stimuli (porn), this isn’t enough. There is still something missing in the experience of satisfaction that compels the search perpetually, to the point of ‘addiction’.

The gap between an understanding of Lacanian thought versus the impressions gleaned from popular psychology often comes down to the extent to which this gap between an experience – and all the practices of representation, inscription, and registration that encode and transform this experience – can be appreciated.

By the late 1890s, what Freud needed was a ‘metapsychology’ – a theory of how the mind works, and how it works with the body – that he could use to explain the things his patients were reporting. His training was as a neurologist, but Freud thought what he was seeing were not neurological problems, they were psychological ones. Neurology did not furnish a good enough theory, so he decided to come up with his own. James Strachey, Freud’s English translator, calls the collection of ideas that Freud produced the ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’. Freud however left his manuscript untitled, but referred to it as a “psychology for neurologists” (Letter 23, in The Origins of Psychoanalysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fliess, Drafts and Notes, 1887-1902, p.118).

Over the course of 1895, Freud laboured over his project, but constantly hesitated over its release. “To make an announcement on this now would be like sending the six-months’ foetus of a girl to a ball”, he wryly quipped (ibid, Letter 25, p.121). The problem he was trying to solve, despite being a neurologist, was to understand the psychological mechanism of defence. But Freud’s project ballooned, and he soon admitted, in candid letters to his friend and confidante Wilhelm Fliess, that he had become engulfed in a project to understand “something from the centre of nature…. In fact, the whole of psychology” (ibid, p.123). In the end, he gave up. “Anyhow, skittles and mushroom-hunting are far healthier”, he wrote in one letter to Fliess (ibid, p.123).

The project is shelved in early 1896 and does not appear again for another fifty years.

But some of these ideas Freud comes back to. In 1899, as part of The Interpretation of Dreams he is trying to explain, in metapsychological terms, his idea that dreams represent wish fulfilments. But what is a wish? If wishes are – as he believed – the “sole motive force” for the construction of dreams (SE V, 568), where do they come from, why do we wish in the first place, and what explains the form they take?

Freud’s idea is that every wish involves a curious process of establishing what he calls an ‘identity of perception’. Understanding this concept is crucial in answering the questions we began with.

Here’s how he explains it. Let’s picture, as he did, the experience of the newborn baby:

So whenever we hear the term ‘identity of perception’, we should think: ‘identical of perception’. What we are trying to do in establishing an “identity of perception” or “perceptual identity” (SE V, 566) is to search for the same thing. The process Freud describes represents an ongoing effort inherent in the psyche to make one perception match another; a constant drive to establish correspondence.

Lacan comments on this idea throughout his work. But one of the important points he highlights is that this process of establishing an identity of perception will happen irrespective of whether the reality fits it. “It doesn’t matter whether it [the perception of satisfaction] is real or hallucinated”, he says, “such an identity will always tend to be established. If it isn’t lucky enough to coincide with reality, it will be hallucinated” (Seminar VII, p.31).

Elaborating Freud’s idea, Lacan believes consciousness itself is made up the “consistency of perceptions” that results from this process. What we understand as reality is based on “the articulation of perceptions between themselves in a world” (Seminar IX, 10th January, 1962).

Stepping away from the theory, we see the attempt to establish an identity of perception especially clearly in autism and obsession. In autism for example, there is often a hyper-sensitivity to something missing or out of place in a room, and autistic subjects may appear uncomfortable in unfamiliar environments. Likewise, we could see the obsessional passion for orderliness – arranging furniture in a particular way, or insisting that everything be in its proper place before it is possible to feel comfortable – as attempts to reach an identity of perception. In both cases there is an urgent need for a correspondence of detail.

But there is a further elaboration. Our experience of the outside world is developed from the perceptual function, but not through it alone. Part of the work of the psyche is to bind perceptions into representations, which will take the form of thoughts.

In this sense, the gap that interests Freud lies less in the difference between perception and reality and more in the difference between perception and thoughts. What needs to be explained is the process of turning one into the other, of moving from perception to representation.

So Freud separates the work of the psyche into two parts: the primary and secondary processes.

So just as ‘identity of perception’ meant a search for the same perception, so ‘thought identity’ means a mapping of thoughts to the memory of satisfaction. Although Freud elaborates on this in The Interpretation of Dreams, the heritage of the idea is in his abandoned Project from 1895 where he postulates that “The aim and end of all thought-processes is thus to bring about a state of identity” (SE I, 332). The two processes aim therefore towards the same end.

Freud had thought about this problem before. On 6th December 1896, he writes the so-called Letter 52 to Fliess, which picks up some of the themes abandoned from the Project the preceding year. Here he presents a process by which:

Lacan’s preference for the term vorstellungreprasentanz from Freud – meaning what comes in the place of representation, or the representatives of the representation – approximates this gap between perception and memory that so interested Freud at the start of his work.

But let’s think about this point. If a perception furnishes – at best – an index, we still have to explain how the perception is translated into something that means something for the subject. In other words, how can we move from a simple indication or registration of perception to something with a signification? This is the question asked by Jean Laplanche – a contemporary of Lacan’s, though not one of his followers – in the mid-sixties.

Despite theoretical divergences, he too thinks that the critical point comes with the infant’s encounter with what is at first an enigmatic signifier.

Both Lacan and Laplanche agree that what makes this signifier enigmatic for the young child is that it indicates something about the desire of the other, and that – crucially – this desire is of a fundamentally sexual nature. Indeed, Lacan even says in Seminar XI that he believes the whole process of negotiating an identity of perception is conditional on this enigma being confronted and responded to by the child:

Some scholars of psychoanalysis – like the former director of the Freud Archives, Jeffery Masson, believe this indicates a literal ‘seduction’ (i.e., sexual abuse). He claims to have found evidence of this in Freud’s former patients, but which he believes Freud himself cowered away from.

On the other hand, more considered theorists note that Masson makes no attempt to engage with Freud’s abandoned seduction theory or the reasons for its abandonment. Jean Laplanche, who devoted a large portion of his work to a reassessment of Freud’s seduction theory (into what he called a ‘general theory of seduction’), argues that we do not need to specify how this sexual desire was manifested to the child – whether intentionally or otherwise – and is careful to point out the different senses in which we can understand ‘seduction’ in Freud’s theory (see Laplanche, New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, chapter 3).

Whether we take this to mean the unintentional actions of the child’s caregivers or their words does not matter, this ‘enigmatic signifier’ still functions as a signifier which the child has to assimilate in some way in order to make sense of the world. In trying to come to terms with this enigma, Laplanche’s conclusion is very minimal: “The human being is, and will go on being, a self-translating and self-theorising being” (New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, p.131).

On this question of ‘self-translation’, Lacan goes one step further. For him, the psyche’s drive to a ‘thought-identity’ means the subject is enmeshed not just into an entire signifying system, but moreover that this system operates completely autonomously to him or her. For Lacan, we do not get to choose the translations we make. In the effort to repeat or re-find an original experience of satisfaction, the unconscious will lead us from thoughts (Gedanken) to a “concatenation of thoughts which escapes from us” (Seminar IX, 10th January, 1962). In place of the experience itself, there will only ever be the invocation of signifiers as attempts to denote it.

Whether humans are translation-making animals (Laplanche’s view) or whether they are simply the effects of an autonomous system that works irrespective of them (Lacan’s view), it seems there is a fundamental push to encode perception into a symbolic system on the grounds that the presentation alone will at some point fail in guaranteeing an identity of perception.

Think for example about how we establish someone’s identity. We can never just rely on recognising their face. Identity has to be encoded into some kind of symbolic system in order to be recognised. DNA, biomarkers, ID numbers, and unique identifiers are not just supplements to establishing identity but almost inevitable consequences of the effort to do so.

We see the same thing happening even when someone dies. When the individual is no longer around, their identity is not simply obliterated, but neither is it enough to live on in the memories of their loved ones. Funeral rituals, memorial services, and commemorations on anniversaries all mark this loss in a symbolic system that is able to persist independently of the people involved. When Lacan noted that “The human object always constitutes itself through the intermediary of a first loss”, and that “Nothing fruitful takes place in man save through the intermediary of a loss of an object” (Seminar II, 136), he was alert to the fact that it is only after the loss of the object that the push to a symbolic, combinatorial system becomes activated, as if in response to the inability of the psyche to process the object’s loss.

André Green – another of Lacan’s contemporaries who didn’t fully agree with him – saw the push to establish an identity of perception at work elsewhere.

Invited to speak at Lacan’s Seminar in 1965, he presented the idea that the phenomenon of negative hallucination (not seeing something which is there; as opposed to positive hallucination: seeing something which is not there) – demonstrates the gap between perception and representation encapsulated in the term vorstellungreprasentanz (Green, Seminar XIII, 22nd December, 1965).

A classical Freudian example of negative hallucination at work can be found in fetishism, as Freud explains it in his 1927 paper (SE XXI, 149). Freud’s argument is that it is the lack of the representation of the phallus in a member of the opposite sex, even though it is perceived, which leads to a disavowal, a refusal to acknowledge, which is the mechanism behind the fetish:

The fundamental point that Green notes in his presentation at Lacan’s Seminar is that in order for something to be deemed ‘identical’ it’s not enough for it simply to be perceived:

We saw that Freud thought there are two fundamental processes – the primary and secondary processes – and two associated attempts by the psyche to establish order – via an identity of perception, and an identity of thoughts (SE V, 602).

Lacan’s idea is that one thought leads to another and they can be linked in a chain of signifiers. On his view, the unconscious is a signifying system in the way it inscribes or binds perceptions.

The problem comes when we recognise that the key thing about a signifying system is that it first of all represents difference. Any signifying system needs to mark one element as separate from another, regardless of its material properties, just like a reference system for a book in a library will indicate that one book is different from another, irrespective of what is in them.

Satisfaction however, as per the laws of the primary process, will seek for the same. Even though both processes strive towards an identity, the process by which any element – the stuff of thoughts being one – is taken up into the signifying universe will inherently lead to the establishment of difference. In this way, satisfaction and the signifying system are fundamentally at odds.

Lacan states this paradox in Seminar IX from 1962:

The search for an identity of perception can never be fulfilled because of this contradiction between two processes. On the one hand the drive towards identity but on the other the necessity for differentiation.

With this paradox in mind, we can see then why it was a mistake for many post-Freudian analysts to try and trace a path further and further back to find the original object or experience. When someone comes into a psychoanalysis it is often with some form of the question ‘why am I the way I am?’ But this can lead to a fruitless regressive search, trying to pinpoint the moment in early childhood that can explain everything.

But it’s not that the object never existed in the first place, rather that the apparatus of the psyche prevents a perfect coincidence with it again. As the paradox described above implies, the repetition that the secondary process sets in motion – the perpetual displacement of the signifier that characterises the symbolic – may nonetheless have the establishment of identity as its aim, but this will be a ceaseless, repetitive search for an object that will forever be out of reach. Once you are fucked by the symbolic you cannot get un-fucked.

This problem was put in a slightly different way by Jean Laplanche. Trying to look for an ‘original’ or ‘primal’ scene is foolish because the only means of access to it would be through a chain of representations, thoughts, or memories. But this is exactly what any such experience is logically prior to. The ‘original’ scene, object, or experience was itself what demanded the effort of self-translation or signification that Laplanche describes, but was yet to be taken up into the network of representations that would have allowed any meaning to be conferred on it. This is why any ‘discovery’ of a primal scene or primal object seem like a dud. As Laplanche puts it:

The effect of the paradox described above is to make it appear as if something was always already determined, that it could never have been any other way. The weird logic of time brought about by this effect of retroactive signification is captured in Freud’s use of the term nachtraglichkeit, translated brilliantly by Laplanche as ‘afterwardness’.

So we have a contradiction that turns on the fact that if the primary process aims to establish identity the secondary system has the effect of establishing difference. An ‘original’ object or satisfaction is therefore out of reach as soon as the secondary process is triggered.

Even if it is futile then to look for a ‘primal’ scene in our personal history, Freud noticed something strange when he talked to his patients. In a way that was very subtle and often unnoticed by the patient themselves, Freud detected a kind of condensation of seemingly disparate elements around a theme, or a collection of themes, in the things his patients told him. It was as if the things they chose to speak about – although seemingly part of an unrelated train of thoughts – nonetheless orbited a central locus. Even if this could not be articulated directly, it found expression in the constellations built around it. As a result, Freud thought he could allow his patients to ‘free associate’, confident that wherever they started he would be led to something of importance.

This was not just a feature of Freud’s patients on the couch but is a feature of our everyday lives. In the seemingly unrelated things people do or say, we can often detect certain kinds of patterns, as if a central enigma in someone’s life needs to be grappled with, or a fundamental question demands to be answered. Indeed, the idea that a neurosis represents an attempt to answer a question was for a long time Lacan’s model for neurosis. Questions such as ‘Am I a man or a woman?’ and ‘Am I alive or dead?’ characterised the different ways neurosis structured itself.

Much like a detective in a murder mystery will search for a criminal’s ‘M.O.’ – a modus operandi – the psychoanalyst may orientate the analysis by asking what scene a person is trying to stage in the things that they do or say.

Lacan called these repetitive elements that condense around a theme ‘neuroses of destiny’ and in the mid-sixties he connected them to Aristotle’s distinction between tuche (something accidental, whether the result of good or bad fortune) and automaton (the drive to repetition that coat-tails off this accident) (Seminar XI, 69). Even if x, y, or z happened to someone as a child, why is it that this particular event matter to them? Why is this experience remembered and given weight over any other? Although we won’t go into it here, this problem has been grappled with by psychoanalysts from Freud onwards in the form of the question, ‘What makes a trauma traumatic?’

But let’s explore the basic idea – shared by Freud, Lacan, and Green – that our words and actions have a tendency to organise around a central nucleus.

The way that we use language is preconscious: we can choose at a preconscious level what we want to say and how we want to say without having to think about it. Nevertheless, it retains a relation to what Lacan calls an “unconscious reserve”. By ‘reserve’ here Lacan says he has in mind an Indian reserve, with a social network already established (Seminar XI, p.68). When we speak, the force that Freud detected has the effect of clustering our words around a nucleus, but very often this condensation is only detectable at the signifying level. Someone may use a certain word, for instance, to describe their relation to two things that appear unrelated in their everyday life.

Green’s idea in the commentary he gives in the session of 22nd December, 1965 is that this condensing force compels certain combinatorial mutations at the signifying level, the level that Lacan describes as being the (‘Indian’) reserve of the unconscious. Rather than being a repository of seething lust and violence, the unconscious is much more like a social system in the networks it establishes between differential elements.

Lacan gave a beautiful image to this in 1975 when he said that “the soul of the symptom is something hard, like bone” (Conference et entretiens, in Scilicet 6/7, p.60). What Lacan meant by the ‘symptom’, in the widest sense, corresponds to this M.O. of the subject, the point to which they are led to return through a repetition that seems to have a life of its own, but which has a hard core that is unmoveable through traditional practices of psychoanalysis. This is why Lacan felt he had to totally reconceptualise what a psychoanalytic psychotherapy meant at the end of his life, beginning with the idea of a ‘universalised’ symptom which existed as a kind of knot, as if tying together the different threads of the subject’s life.

In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud gives us a fascinating example of how this works.

The process of establishing an identity of perception is essentially a process of deduction – of asking, ‘does x correspond to y?’ This is the experience we have, Lacan notes, when waking up. If we are disorientated when we first awaken we have to ask ourselves essentially this question to become re-accustomed to our surroundings and the fact we are awake again. (Seminar XI, 68).

This is why, when Freud discusses identity of perception in The Interpretation of Dreams he does so starting from a dream that appears to be constructed entirely around a waking up – the dream that has come to be known as the dream of the burning child. It is the dream of a bereaved father who has fallen asleep while the body of his recently-deceased son lies in the adjacent room. At some point, a candle falls over and sets fire to the pall that covers the coffin. Before awakening, the father dreams that his son is approaching him with the eerie plea, ‘Father can’t you see that I’m burning?’

What’s interesting in this example is not simply that the dream is constructed around the reality of the overturned candle, but rather the form that his construction takes. Lacan suggests that what we find in the son’s ‘Father can’t you see that I’m burning?’ points to something much more anxiety provoking and fundamentally traumatic in their relationship (perhaps, Lacan speculates, blame for the son’s untimely death) (Seminar XI, 68-69). It is as if the series of representations that proceed from the smell of burning or the light of the fire start to have a life of their own; that the tuche or accident of the toppled candle generates the automaton of some uncomfortable truth in the father-son relationship.

The fascinating thing about this dream is that it shows how the search for an identity of perception (making sense of the smell of the burning or the light from the fallen candle) gives way to something more frightening and unpleasant at its core (the reproach to the father that can be read in the son’s haunting words). This is what Lacan labels the Real.

If we picture the attempt at an identity of perception (the primary process) leading to the concatenation of thoughts or representations (the secondary process) as a spiral, what sits at the centre of this spiral is something that is un-reachable, un-representable, and ultimately the common heritage of all that is both satisfying and horrifying.

This then is the second fundamental paradox of satisfaction – that there comes a point when the pleasure we aim for stops being satisfying and starts being horrifying. Early in his work Freud labels this point das Ding (the Thing); later he calls it beyond the pleasure principle.

In what can be read as a precursor of Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage, Freud suggests in the Project of 1895 that the infant will perceive another child in terms either of itself, or what cannot be assimilated to the idea of itself. We can recognise here the search to create an identity of perception by matching what we understand about ourselves with what we recognise in others. In Lacanian terms, this matching takes place in the register of the imaginary. But at the same time there is something which cannot be squared with the image, something inassimilable which remains fundamentally alien to the subject. In Lacanian terms, this is the real.

Freud’s idea is that if the drive to establish an identity of perception aims at the restitution of an experience of satisfaction, when the infant confronts another child there will be a two-way reference: first to itself, and then to the caregiver that provided or did not provide the experience of satisfaction. This will result in a relationship marked by a profound ambivalence. The infant’s reasoning is that,

The part that is not like himself is what Freud labels the Thing (das Ding). Lacan makes this foreign element even starker in two ways. Firstly, by arguing that there is no such thing as a primary narcissism (the infant lacks a ‘self’ to compare the other child to, and so is fundamentally alienated in the image of the other). And secondly, that the central question posed by the subject in the process of establishing an identity of perception is whether one can even trust the Other; whether what we receive from ‘outside’ is a reliable sign (Seminar IX, 10th January, 1962).

This opens the door to what Lacan calls a psychoanalytic ‘ethics’. Ethical living means appreciating this second fundamental paradox of satisfaction, and recognising that it is viable neither to live in a state of ascesis or in a permanent hedonistic pursuit. What Lacan is teaching us is to be wary of taking our own pleasure too seriously. Devoting our lives to whatever we might consider to be the Supreme Good – whether religion, sex, or career ambitions – is not necessarily what is good for us. What saves us from ever having to experience the intensity of an overly-close proximity to the Thing is the automaton, or repetition, inherent in language as a symbolic system, which keeps us circling around it but never having to confront it. In its place we simply have sexual desire – a paltry satisfaction but a safe one – which we see in the endless searching for the perfect object of pornography that is evident from the testimonies of Reddit’s ‘NoFap’ community.

In this sense we are both fucked and un-fucked by the symbolic.

The third fundamental paradox of satisfaction is that we get pleasure not from an object as such, but from the path taken around the object.

This illustrates the fundamental characteristic of human sexuality – we get turned on not by a direct confrontation with the object, but by tracing the path of representations that lead around this object. After all, pornography does not show us the direct encounter with the flesh and blood partner, but instead presents a scenario in which the marginal elements of that encounter are hyper-invested in place of the ‘perfect object’ that meets our exact requirements for arousal, the thing that ostensibly motivates the scenario in the first place.

Just as the network of representations circulate around the Thing, the search itself becomes the libidinal object, rather than any object at the end of it. Thanks to the process of socialisation into the symbolic order (the “Indian reserve” of the unconscious) this in itself brings satisfaction.

The essential motor of human desire is the attempt then not just to re-find the object (through an identity of perception) but to re-constitute the object through the defiles of a symbolic system. This is what is redemptive in what pornography offers us.

By Owen Hewitson, LacanOnline.com

All content on LacanOnline.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

What does it mean to say that something is ‘unconscious’?

The idea of the unconscious is the single biggest differentiator separating psychoanalysis from all other ‘psy-’ practices. Fidelity to a certain understanding of the nature and character of the unconscious is at the bedrock of psychoanalysis as a discipline. So it follows that a theory of psychoanalysis should give an account of the ‘stuff’, ‘workings’, and ‘product’ of the unconscious.

This article will trace the history of the debate about the nature of the unconscious over three major turning points: 1915, 1928, and 1960.

Right now though, in 2017, one of the largest Lacanian schools in the world is about to meet for its annual conference under the title ‘About the Unconscious’. Hundreds of psychoanalysts will gather in Paris to discuss what is evidently still a difficult, but very relevant, topic.

And with good reason. When psychoanalysts – particularly Lacanians – make bold statements like ‘the unconscious is structured like a language’, this does not absolve us from being able to answer certain ‘naive’ questions about the unconscious:

Many have happily called bullshit on the psychoanalytic idea of the unconscious over the years. Hans Eysenck wondered why, at the start of the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud offered the dream of Irma’s injection as some kind of exemplar of his theory. If it showed that dreams represented the fulfilment of unconscious wishes, but Freud’s own interpretation showed only the wish to be absolved of medical malpractice, what was so unconscious about that? The question is made trickier by the fact that, at the very end of the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud admitted that “Whether we can attribute reality to unconscious wishes I cannot say” (SE V, 620, his italics).

So let’s try and answer some of these questions, beginning in 1915, with Freud.

While pretty much everyone these days accepts the idea that a thought can be conscious or unconscious, in his metapsychological paper of 1915 Freud wanted to distinguish a descriptive unconscious from the unconscious as he saw it – a separate system that has a distinct character and plays by different rules. For Freud, we are not talking about a non-conscious, like another version of consciousness, or even a sub-conscious at one level ‘deeper’ than conscious, but something distinct in itself, as if on a second stage or in another scene (ein andere Schauplatz).

There are effectively two (psychical) realities at play, he thought – one conscious and the other unconscious. The laws governing each are completely different. This is why Freud denoted them by Ucs. for the system unconscious, and Cs. (for the system conscious/pre-conscious). How these two systems work – as part of an overall psychical economy, and as a result of the dynamics of interactions between the psychical forces within that economy – give us the metapsychology that Freud was outlining in 1915.

How do we see this unconscious in action? Returning to the dream of Irma’s injection as an example, we can divide the dream into two ‘texts’ – the manifest text, the part Freud remembers when he wakes up, and the latent text, the thoughts and associations that come to him when thinking about the dream.

Rather than one being conscious and the other unconscious, it’s clear that both ‘texts’ are in fact conscious or perfectly capable of becoming conscious. So we have to look for the unconscious in a system that operates on the connection between the two. Less a ‘contents’ and more a series of processes that work by interpolating or inserting something of a different nature from one scene to another at the point where there are certain gaps or breaks. As Lacan’s student and sometime confidante Anika Lemaire described it,

Importantly then, if Freud’s latent thoughts correspond to a ‘first text’, this isn’t the same as the meaning of the dream from which we might infer an unconscious wish. The fact that the latent thoughts are not represented in the dream itself is not an indicator that they are in any way hidden or concealed. This ‘first text’ is just the material that unconscious processes work on. But it is the distortion itself that we are interested in, what happens between the first and second texts.

To flesh out this process, Freud hypothesised a psychical dynamism involving censorship, repression, and compromise formation that takes place between a wish on one hand, and a defence against the wish on the other. We are presented with a view of the psyche as animated by little dramas involving a cast of psychical actors or agencies constantly fighting each other. The danger here of course is one of over-personification. In itself this could diminish Freud’s point about the unconscious being a separate scene or stage with its own rules. But as we tend to picture psychical dynamics in these terms, let’s focus instead on the common currency between the two systems: a thought.

What would make a thought either conscious or unconscious? Freud presents two options:

1. There is a single inscription of the thought – it exists in either the conscious or the unconscious, and whether it is one or the other depends on the level of (libidinal) investment (what Strachey translates as ‘cathexis’) it receives, as if a different light were being shone on the same thing. This he calls the functional hypothesis.
2. There is a double inscription of the thought – the same thought exists in both the conscious and the unconscious systems at the same time, so there is a qualitative difference between the two systems. The ‘two texts’ in question therefore are not just the manifest content of the dream and the latent thoughts, but a double inscription of the same thought. This he calls the topographical hypothesis.

Each option has its advantages and disadvantages.

Key to resolving this problem, Freud thought, is the idea of a counter-investment or ‘anticathexis’ of another idea from the preconscious. This is all-important because it might explain how repression is not just maintained but established.

Freud distinguished two types of repression. The initial establishment of repression by a counter-investment – which he called primal repression – and its maintenance by a kind of ‘after-pressure’, secondary repression (Freud, SE XIV, 180-181). It is this double-action which keeps repression in place and refines the two options above into an economic model.

We can then build up the following picture of what happens to a thought or idea under this economic model.

In the case of repression: the investment of Idea 1 is transposed to a second, substitute idea, Idea 2, which then takes on an affective weight through the process of ‘anticathexis’ described above. Idea 1 remains conscious, though neutralised, but on the double-inscription model it also becomes unconscious. So we have two registrations of the same idea, conscious and unconscious, and a substitute idea in the conscious.

In the case of the return of the repressed: the reverse happens – Idea 1 receives a conscious investment or cathexis, regains its affective weight, and so becomes conscious again. However Idea 1 still retains a registration in the unconscious, where it has formed associative connections that crystallise into an unconscious complex. Analytic work can undo some, but never all, of these tight associative binds – they constitute the ‘hard core’ of the unconscious.

The idea of anti-cathexis or counter-investment is therefore very important. And behind it sits a theory of psychical dynamism – the so-called libido theory – from which this investment springs. Freud’s model of the psychical economy – the semi-personalised interplay of ideas, agencies, and forces – is based on this ‘metapsychology’, as he calls it in 1915.

1928

Fast forward to 1928. Freud is still alive and living in Vienna, but from France comes the publication of a major attack on his metapsychology. Georges Politzer’s Critique of the Foundations of Psychology was to greatly influence a new generation of French psychology students.

Politzer was a principled man at the forefront of the French communist movement. When the Nazis invaded France he was picked up by the Gestapo and given the option of either turning his talents to indoctrinating French schoolchildren or being executed. He chose the latter and was murdered in 1942 (Giorgi, foreword to English translation, p.xxiv).

Politzer wanted to emphasise the individual, personal, and subjective status of the unconscious. In this sense his was a fundamentally phenomenological position. The unconscious, for him, expresses a first-person drama via a “personal dialectic” as he called it (Politzer, p.69). The job of interpreting the formations of the unconscious – dreams, for example – is one of uncovering these intimate rather than conventional significations.

So far so Freudian.

But this insistence on the unconscious as a first-person drama put him at odds with Freud. Politzer rejected what he saw as Freud’s impersonal characterisation of the unconscious in terms of agencies, forces, and psychical economy. Politzer was opposed to any abstraction in psychology, and he thought Freud’s metapsychology had created just that.

Where Freud’s theory started to go wrong, he thought, could be pinpointed in the progression of the Interpretation of Dreams. As we saw, Freud started that book with the dream of Irma’s injection, a dream in which Politzer believed we can clearly discern the ‘I’, in the form of Freud’s own psychology, taking a front seat.

But by chapter VII of that book, Freud had constructed a metapsychological theory of the psyche which – even though he had already been working on it for years – had the effect of swapping out the subjective for the impersonal. For the rest of his career, as Politzer saw it, Freud pursued this path: the psyche was the battleground of warring forces or agencies like the ego and the id; the censorship operated like a nightwatchman or a border guard between the unconscious and consciousness; life and death drives vied over civilisation itself just as they did within the individual, and so forth.

Politzer’s idea was very simple: there is no ‘disguise’ at work in the products of the unconscious, just a different way of expressing the same thing. He returned to the example of the dream of Irma’s injection. If we think in terms of a manifest content of the dream and the dream’s meaning this doesn’t lead us to assume there are two ‘texts’ at play – for Politzer it’s either one or the other. Irma’s sore throat simply means ‘I wish for an error of diagnosis’ just as the French word pere means the English word father (Politzer, p.107). They are just two ways of saying the same thing, two forms of expression:

Instead of two texts in reality we have just one. The dream isn’t derivative of anything – like an interplay of psychical forces in conflict, as Freud thought. It is simply the same idea expressed differently. For Politzer, it is this mode of expression – highly idiosyncratic – that we should be studying and not some abstract notion of an agency of censorship.

Politzer gives a cunning analogy to illustrate this: the manifest content of the dream is related to the latent thoughts – and thereby, he thinks, the dream’s meaning – like a play to its theme.

Just as we would not expect to find the theme of a play written down in a separate text next to the play itself, so the meaning of a dream is not like a separate text inscribed in the unconscious (Politzer, p.42). We can still say the dream has a meaning, but that meaning is immanent to it in the same way that the theme of a play is immanent to its text, or the laws of gravity are immanent to the forces of nature. It does not exist separately alongside them:

For Politzer, the ‘reality’ of the unconscious is much like the reality of the laws of physics. The unconscious is ‘discovered’ like laws of physics are discovered – we see them at work in events, like gravity acting on a falling body, but we would not expect them to have their own material reality.

This is in some ways a very helpful idea. Politzer teaches us to avoid a ‘reification’ of the unconscious, as if there existed some independent meaning of the dream with a special ontological status, awaiting the skilled psychoanalyst to pluck it from the depths and bring it to light.

In this he is right. But true aim of Politzer’s critique is more than that – it is to do away with the entire Freudian metapsychology on the grounds that if we don’t need a ‘two texts’ model to explain the unconscious, then we don’t need a theory of psychical conflict to account for how one text gets ciphered into another. There is no need for the process that Freud labels the ‘dream work’, replete with its supposedly impersonal mental forces, if the only difference is in how the same idea is expressed as part of a subjective narrative.

Note that this leads to a fundamentally different conception of the unconscious to the one Freud began with: it is no longer a separate scene or stage, operating on separate rules to that of consciousness. There is nothing really unconscious about this unconscious.

But what Politzer’s phenomenological critique does retain is the assumption of an ‘intentionality’ to the unconscious. The dream still has a meaning, there is still a way this meaning is communicated, and – like Freud thought – that meaning is of the order of a wish.

The consequence of Politzer’s dogged phenomenological insistence is to give unconscious formations an intentionality, so that the meaning of every dream can be expressed in the form: ‘I wish that….’ For Politzer, this intentionality is inherent in the dream in the same way a theme is inherent to a play, even if we don’t immediately grasp how its expression changes between the manifest and latent contents.

1960

We reach 1960 and something of a turning point for psychoanalysis. It was an exciting time! Politzer’s critique had been ringing in the ears of a new generation of psychology students who had read Freud with an avidity but also a critical distance.

In the small French town of Bonneval a conference on the unconscious, organised by Henri Ey, was held at the end of October.

Up stepped Jean Laplanche and Serge Leclaire to deliver the standout paper, ‘The Unconscious: A Psychoanalytic Study’. It would later be published in 1966, the same year as the Écrits. The pair began by directly addressing Politzer’s challenge with a commendation of how it had reopened the debate: “It would be difficult to find a clearer introduction to the problem of the unconscious than a discussion of this [Politzer’s] text”, they said (Laplanche and Leclaire, p.224).

Yet their paper was not just a response to Politzer but an ambitious attempt to account for the origins of the unconscious using the terminology of structural linguistics which Lacan had by then introduced to the psychoanalytic field. From Leclaire’s own clinic there was also the brilliant example of the application of this theory to a dream of one of his patients, which we will look at in depth later.

Nevertheless the pair remained rooted in the Freudian heritage and there was a limit to how far they were willing to subscribe to Lacan’s ‘creative misreading’ of Freud. After all, Laplanche and Leclaire were not just students of Lacan’s but analysands of his too – Leclaire from 1949-1953, and Laplanche until November 1963.

Lacan himself was at the conference and it would be fair to say he did not like what he heard. While he delivered a response at the conference itself, this was later rewritten in 1964 and appears in the Écrits as ‘Position of the Unconscious’.

For the next ten years following the Bonneval conference Lacan would remain embittered and critical of Laplanche and Leclaire’s view of the unconscious, and what he saw as their misuse of his work. Whether this demonstrates the importance of the topic, or the extent of the slight Lacan felt he had received, we find him penning a sustained attack on his former students in January 1970 as a preface to Anika Lemaire’s book Jacques Lacan. Lemaire, clearly fascinated by this controversy, had gone to interview him about it, and the purport of their conversation from December 1969 can be found in the appendix of her book. (Lemaire’s own assessment is in Chapter 8, Part 4).

We will look at just one part of their disagreement on the unconscious in this article. But first, let’s look at how they handle Politzer.

Arguments against Politzer – from Laplanche

Laplanche and Leclaire open ‘The Unconscious: A Psychoanalytic Study’ with a number of responses to Politzer’s challenge. We can summarise three of them:

1. Just because the workings of the unconscious are impersonal doesn’t mean that the formations of the unconscious are impersonal. Politzer can keep his phenomenological adherence – the meaning of the dream isn’t any less subjective if we can’t translate it directly to the first person. Rather, subjectivity itself is never really in the first person, in any simplistic sense.
2. A second text is not necessarily a hidden text. A ‘dynamic’ view of the unconscious entails that ‘surface’ and ‘depth’ are never easily distinguished. We shouldn’t expect to detect the unconscious through ‘discovery’ or ‘translation’ of a disguised wish – we should look for its signs in the small, discreet failures and compromise formations (garbled words, slip-ups, contradictory ideas and so on) that emerge at what Laplanche calls certain “load-bearing points” (Laplanche, p.41). Instead of looking for alternative modes of ‘expression’ of a fully conscious idea, the notion of a ‘dynamic’ unconscious means that the output of the unconscious will bear the mark of its processes. Interpretation therefore involves interpolating the manifest text as if the unconscious were a kind of lost discourse (Laplanche and Leclaire, p.230). This approach would not just restore the value of interpretation, but it would put the ‘otherness’ back into the unconscious, as Freud originally conceived it.
3. Politizer’s assertion that there is an ‘immanence of meaning’ in actual fact does nothing but diminish the subjectivity he’s trying to restore to the unconscious. If there’s really just one ‘text’ of the dream – that is, if Irma’s sore throat explains the wish to be absolved of medical malpractice the way the word pere explains the word father – we would have to assume a kind of fixity of meaning. Interpretation would then be a pretty weird business. To take the dream of Irma’s injection, it would mean we would have to ignore all associative chains – all the things in the manifest ‘text’ of the dream that pointed to something other than the idea of medical malpractice. But of course how would we know this was the meaning of the dream? And why stop here? Laplanche gives a hypothetical example. Let’s say someone dreams about a Mrs X wearing a red scarf. He associates this to his mother. Under Politzer’s approach, this would lead us to a dead end: red scarf = mother. But it would not explain why the red scarf was associated with the mother. This is the essential question Freud ponders in the Interpretation of Dreams and which leads him to detect the mechanisms of condensation and displacement characteristic of the primary process; and from there a psychical dynamism that could account for why the ‘red scarf’ was overdetermined as a result of a compromise formation stemming from a psychical conflict (Laplanche and Leclaire, p.227-228).

For Laplanche, what’s so unconscious about the unconscious is not the wishes it may or may not harbour but the processes it exhibits. The unconscious:

On this model,

Arguments against Politzer – from Lacan

Lacan too is completely opposed to Politzer’s view of the unconscious. He is an adherent of the ‘two texts’ model of double inscription, and views the unconscious as a completely separate reality from that of consciousness:

Here Lacan is talking about an unconscious that is most definitely a second structure. But where Lacan goes further than even Freud is to privilege the text or message itself over the sender of that message. Lacan – famously, perhaps infamously – extends Freud’s view of the unconscious by granting an autonomy to this text that completely ‘jams’ the idea of first-person subjectivity that Politzer was so keen to preserve. For Lacan, ‘it’ speaks, and it speaks in more than one person:

Instead of an unconscious that articulates a wish in the first person, the unconscious for Lacan is a series of processes that operate independently of the subject. If there is a ‘meaning’ to the unconscious it doesn’t belong to either the subject or to the analyst interpreting it. Instead it is a feature of an autonomous system. This is how Lacan reads the ‘other’ scene or stage that Freud envisaged. “The unconscious only has meaning in the Other’s field”, as he puts it, but

As a result, our interpretation of the unconscious should sit between citation and enigma, simulating the primary process of the unconscious itself, Lacan thought (see Leader, ‘Interpretation’, in Introductory Lectures on Lacan, p.91). The ‘otherness’ of the unconscious means we have to think of it as a second text, but not one that can be said to belong to a first-person narrative in the way Politzer conceived it:

If we think of the unconscious as a ‘second text’ it is one that is personal for sure, but at the same time is a kind of lost, censored, or crossed-out discourse. It won’t fit our view of a first-person narrative in the way that can be articulated with a wish. This second text is inscribed, but we need to look for its inscription in strange places, which he says may range from the body, memories, distortions of memories, semantic evolution, and cultural traditions (Écrits, 259).

How do we square this with Freud?

Freud’s 1915 solution to the single or double inscription problem was essentially to divide the idea (vorstellung) into what he called ‘word-presentations’ on one hand and ‘thing-presentations’ on the other. The conscious system would consist of the thing-presentation plus the word-presentation; the unconscious of just the thing-presentation alone (Freud, SE XIV, 201).

Irrespective of how helpful this solution might be, it certainly does not mean that the unconscious is composed of signifiers, as Lacan suggests (Écrits, 799). Freud is not speaking about ‘presentations of things’ but ‘thing-presentations’. Whilst it’s conceivable that these could be taken as signifiers in their raw materiality, what’s clearly important for Freud is the level of investment or cathexis these presentations receive:

Signifiers are really neither conscious nor unconscious. The same signifier may be subject to two quite separate processes in the unconscious system compared to the conscious. In either case, Freud thought the operative determinant of whether something is conscious or unconscious had to come from the realm of libidinal investment and – ultimately – the drive. This is the powerhouse that fuelled Freud’s dynamic model of the psyche, and Laplanche had an interesting way of conceiving the interaction.

Solving Freud’s problem – Laplanche’s Napoleon’s hat analogy

Prägnanz is the idea, drawn from Gestalt psychology, that our visual perception has the tendency to organise the images we see into a neat, regular cohesion. From a series of disparate shapes a coherence emerges as a result of a clustering of these elements into definable patterns.

Like this:

For Laplanche, this provides a model for how unconscious and conscious systems interact (Laplanche and Leclaire, ‘The Unconscious: A Psychoanalytic Study’, p.237-238).

Let’s think of the entire scene, taken as a whole, as a prägnanz established by the conscious system. Although we see the trees, the beach, and Napoleon’s grave, the image of Napoleon himself is always there, latent. It’s nonetheless capable of being revealed through a shift in our attention, in much the same way that Freud thought cathexis could shift on or off a single inscription of an idea.

But what makes us see the image of Napoleon in the first place, rather than just a collection of leaves or the silhouette of an anonymous man? The answer lies in the hat. It is the ‘load-bearing point’ of the picture, to use Laplanche’s phrase. This iconic element denotes the context of the Napoleonic legend. The hat is the part of the image which is cathected or receives investment; the legend of Napoleon is the cathexis which gives the image of the hat its weight.

Similarly, the arrangement of the leaves of the tree, which ‘disguise’ the hat, are like the anti-cathexis. Laplanche’s neat comparison helps us understand why repression and the return of the repressed are two sides of the same coin – anticathexis works by establishing a counter-investment that reweaves the fabric of representations in order to mask what has been repressed. But the repressed itself is always still there, as if hidden in plain sight.

But what’s important in determining whether we see either the outline of Napoleon or the leaves of the tree is not whether our attention can shift from one to the other, but the hat itself. The hat – corresponding in Laplanche’s analogy to an idea or ‘presentation’ in the psyche – has a special value as what Laplanche calls the “isolated equivocal element” (ibid, p.237).

We can use the hat to answer Freud’s 1915 question – whether there is a single inscription of the idea in either the conscious or unconscious, or whether there is a double inscription in both systems at once. If it were only a question of how our attention oscillates to invest either one perspective on the image or the other we would only need to suppose a single inscription of the idea. But Laplanche comes down on the side of the double inscription model because the hat is effectively inscribed twice – first in the context of the Napoleonic legend (the cathexis) and second in the context of the leaves on the tree, where it hides in plain sight (the anticathexis). Repression, as Freud said in 1915, “operates in a highly individual manner” (SE XIV, 150, his italics). A single element – in this instance, the hat – is seized upon and made an organising part of the dream or symptom as it is the image in this scene. The outline of the hat is still there materially, in two separate contexts, regardless of whether we notice it or not.

Lacan also comes down on the side of the double inscription model (or topographical hypothesis) of how the unconscious works. But he thinks it can be explained using a far simpler analogy than Laplanche’s.

He asks us to imagine a single hieroglyph inscribed on two sides of the same obelisk.

The first point to make about hieroglyphics is that what they depict pictorially isn’t what they represent as signifiers. A hieroglyph of a bird or a crouching man does not mean the author wanted to express something about birds or crouching men (Écrits, 510). It is a signifier that points to other signifiers, not to a fixed signification. In the same way, as Lacan highlights, the Rat Man’s obsession about rats did not always refer to the creatures scurrying around in sewers – the signification changed depending on the other signifiers it was linked to.

Lacan’s idea is that the same signifier can be present in two different batteries, just as the same hieroglyph can be written twice on two sides of the same obelisk. But its signification will change from one side to the other depending on the context it’s placed in – the signifiers that surround it. This is why, consciously, the Rat Man could link the signifier rat to the torture involving rats he heard from the character known as the ‘Cruel Captain’. Unconsciously however it was linked to a series of other signifiers with a quite different signification – Hieraten (to marry), Spielratte (a gambler), Raten (installments). Each of these signifiers were of course conscious to him, but the network of their connections in another system – the unconscious – were not.

With this analogy Lacan not only demonstrates Freud’s topographical or double-inscription hypothesis, but also make the difference between the unconscious and conscious systems much more explicit than it had been in Laplanche’s analogy. The comparison to two sides of an obelisk emphasises the ‘otherness’ of the unconscious that Freud had insisted on with the comparison to another scene or stage. Additionally, the distinctness of these two sides give us a perspective on why Lacan privileged the bar that separates the signifier and signified in the old Saussurean formula:

While Lacan’s analogy does not find a place for the libidinal cathexis so important to Freud’s metapsychology, it is a less complex way of accounting for how a single idea or signifier can exist in two separate batteries at the same time. Propounding the merits of his own analogy, Lacan explained:

Let’s test out some of these ideas with one of the richest dreams in the whole of psychoanalysis. It is the dream of Philippe, a 30 year old obsessional patient of Leclaire’s, and it is analysed in great depth by Leclaire in the third part of ‘The Unconscious: A Psychoanalytic Study’ (Laplanche and Leclaire, p.238).

It begins when Philippe falls asleep still thirsty from the Baltic herrings he had consumed earlier that evening. This is what he dreams:

Leclaire draws out some of latent thoughts from Philippe’s associative connections:

This bring us to a second dream Philippe relates:

It would be very easy to see the emblem of castration in the motif of a wound that can’t be seen. But the challenge that Politizer’s critique lays down is to explain how a dream can be a highly personal formation even if the unconscious mechanisms that produced it are not.

Leclaire finds an answer in the scar that Philippe bears on his forehead and which is listed on his French identity papers under the section ‘Identifying marks’. This establishes a link between the unicorn’s horn and the comma-shaped wound in the billhook dream. Neither explicitly point to the scar on his forehead, but both are substitute formations for it – and perhaps also for the theme of castration (Laplanche and Leclaire, p.250). We therefore have a series that runs:

The dream is constructed around a series of what Freud calls “switch words”, which act like points at a junction (SE VII, 65). Our dreams appear to make no sense because they are not linked by conjunctions – ‘and…’, ‘then…’, ‘so…’, etc – as in a normal narrative, but instead by these ‘switch-words’ that act as load-bearing points and lead us from the manifest text of the dream to the latent thoughts.

‘Unicorn’ [licorne] is exactly such a switch-word. It does multiple jobs at once: being the over-determined element that links Philippe’s own name; that of Lili; the idea of phallic potency from the unicorn myth; the memory of wishing to drink from the unicorn fountain in the town square; and even the corns on his feet that come up in reference to the billhook dream and the sandy beach on the Atlantic.

We have the two unconscious mechanisms of condensation and displacement at work here to produce the ‘unicorn’ signifier which Leclaire – following Lacan – aligns with metaphor and metonymy. If metaphor is a substitution, metonymy is a bridge. On one hand ‘licorne’ allows for a substitution of Philippe and Lili in their pure materiality as signifiers. On the other, the bridge of metonymy “is much more arbitrary and singular” (Laplanche and Leclaire, p.249). It depends on the particularity of Philippe’s associations, running from the unicorn fountain, to the myth of the unicorn and the idea of phallic potency, to the scar on his forehead as ‘identifying mark’, and back to the identifying mark of ‘Philippe-I’m-thirsty’ that Lili gives him when as a child he complains to her of being thirsty.

The unicorn is therefore the ultimate metabolic element in the dream. As a ‘switch word’ it serves as a kind of junction that connects all the elements of Philippe’s associations. Like the hieroglyphs on Lacan’s obelisk it has a double inscription – while being entirely conscious, the networks it forms in the unconscious system obey a different logic to that of conscious association.

But the unconscious is not just a play of signifiers. We need to connect Leclaire’s explanation to a theory of psychical dynamism – as Freud had intended – if we want to justify why Politizer was wrong to junk Freud’s metapsychology. To do that we have to account for what might ‘power’ unconscious processes behind the signifying constellation of ‘unicorn’. That is, the nature of the investment or cathexis that led Freud to a model of the psychical economy, and on which Lacan’s analogy of the hieroglyphics falls short.

Let’s go back to the instigator of the dream – the salty Baltic herrings that Philippe consumed before falling asleep. Freud tells us that a wish provides the sole motive force behind the dream (SE V, 568). And here we appear to have a simple enough wish: to drink in order to quench a thirst.

So why is the fulfilment of this wish not represented more simply in the dream? Why does Philippe dream of a unicorn and not of drinking from the unicorn fountain he remembers from his childhood?

Leclaire’s idea is that behind this organic need another kind of ‘thirst’ is at work, one which is connected to the drive (Laplanche and Leclaire, p.241). This has a quite different character from the organic or instinctual need that would be satisfied by the wish to drink, and while Freud vacillates about its nature we can say at least that it has a libidinal quality. These two types of ‘thirst’ mean the dream is supported from two ends, as it were.

In between we have all the animation of the ‘dream work’ – the garbled processing of elements like licorne that make the operation of the unconscious system different from that of consciousness:

The drive sneaks into the dream like a trojan horse, via ideas or signifiers that – in Laplanche and Leclaire’s beautiful phrase – are “electively assumed” (Laplanche and Leclaire, p.262). The drive can never be directly expressed so we never find it speaking in the first-person. We know the drives only when they attach to ideas. “Even in the unconscious”, Freud wrote, “a drive [trieb] cannot be represented otherwise than by an idea” (Freud, SE XIV, 177).

The implications of this for countering Politzer’s critique are powerful. If we want to grasp the meaning of a dream – or defend the idea that it represents a wish fulfilment – this meaning or wish is not going to be found by tracing back along an associative chain to latent thoughts and expecting to find at their end an unconscious intentionality expressed the first-person. Philippe’s dream is saying neither ‘I want to drink’, ‘I want to have sex with Lili’, or ‘I am scared of being castrated’. Instead, starting from an organic need (thirst), what might have begun as a simple wish to drink goes through a complicated, combinatorial processing so that what comes out the other side is a contradictory formation which loses all connection with a first-person, wishful, intentionality.

It would look something like this:

What’s especially interesting about Philippe’s dream is that it shows how this ‘elective assumption’ of the signifier licorne sits at the junction of the oral drive, the libidinal object, and the identifying mark of the subject himself:

We find another example of how a weird, nonsensical signifying formation can condense the enjoyment of the drive, the libidinal object, and the subject’s own person in the following compromise-formation from the Rat Man’s case history:

Leclaire, in fact, goes even further in Philippe’s case and attempts a somewhat adventurous boiling down of the unicorn dream into a formula that would be the elementary text of Philippe’s unconscious: Poor (de) J’e-Li’. (We won’t go into it here but Lemaire presents an excellent summary of how this construction is broken down – p.143-144).

This combination of drive and idea via an “elective assumption” gives Leclaire a refined definition of ‘signifier’ which shows that what’s unconscious about the unconscious is not just a process of linguistic combination, but a capture of drive energy in the web of the signifier:

Conclusion – Radio Unconscious

What can we say by way of conclusion about the nature of the unconscious? Let’s summarise the above into five points:

1. The unconscious is a dynamic system characterised by a series of processes that operate according to fundamentally different rules to those of consciousness/pre-consciousness.
2. In this sense the unconscious is an entirely different reality – as if in another scene or on another stage to that of consciousness – but not simply a ‘sub’-conscious or another form of consciousness.
3. We should therefore approach it as a second text. Even if the terms it uses are the same as those of consciousness (a double inscription), the mechanisms of its writing are particular to it.
4. The unconscious can be said to transmit a meaning, but this meaning does not imply an intentionality. We can never pin an unconscious meaning down to a single wish expressed in the optive, first-person form ‘I want….’. The unconscious only finds expression in a contradictory, combinatorial character.
5. To quote Laplanche’s own beautifully concise conclusion, “The unconscious is a phenomenon of meaning, but without any communicative finality” (Laplanche, The Unconscious and the Id, p.103). The unconscious, in other words, communicates nothing. There is no ‘intentionality’ on the part of the unconscious to push a certain meaning or signification forward.

But perhaps the last word – for now – can be left to Leclaire, who in his 1970 article La realite du desir provides our final analogy for how to explain what is unconscious about the unconscious:

By Owen Hewitson, LacanOnline.com

All content on LacanOnline.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

This is Abdoulaye Yerodia Ndombasi, helping Lacan into his car as he leaves his seminar in March, 1980.

And this is Yerodia again, around the time of the international arrest warrant issued against him by Belgium, for serious violations of international humanitarian law under the Geneva Convention.

This short article is about his story.

But more generally, it is about what psychoanalysts should do in the face of ethical dilemmas.

It is based on Dany Nobus’ solid appraisal of the Yerodia case and the issues it raises, which was published last year in the excellent journal Psychoanalytic Discourse.

Abdoulaye Yerodia Ndombasi (Abdoul to his friends; Yerodia hereafter) moved to Paris in December 1960. Like many of the young student revolutionaries and Maoists that surrounded Lacan, Yerodia was already deeply political. But unlike many of his fellow students, by the time he arrived in Paris he had already fought in guerrilla campaigns in his native Congo. He even counted himself among Che Guevara’s comrades. He also had a doctorate in philosophy. This propelled him towards Lacan’s Seminar at the École Normale Supérieure and helped ingratiate him with members of Lacan’s inner circle.

In 1967 he married Gloria Gonzalez. Gloria was Lacan’s long-serving secretary, but her responsibilities went much further, encompassing every part of his life. Lacan’s biographer Élisabeth Roudinesco tells us that she looked after his diary, greeted all his patients, took care of his correspondence and manuscripts, and even supervised his bank account.

In everything, her husband assisted her. “From 1970 on, Gloria and Abdoulaye were entirely absorbed into the Lacan household”, Roudinesco reports (Jacques Lacan, p.345,). Yerodia assumed the mantle of butler, assistant private secretary, and chauffeur until Lacan’s death in 1981.

It is fair to say he could not have been any more central to the Lacanian world at that time.

In the years after Lacan’s death Yerodia moved back to what was by then the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and in 1998 took up the first of many high-level posts in the government of Laurent Kabila.

At the start of August that year, fighting broke out between rebel forces in the east of the country and Kabila’s government. The DR Congo accused neighbouring Rwanda of inciting the rebels, and by the end of the summer the whole situation has escalated into what was to become known as the ‘Great War of Africa’ drawing in countries running the entire length of the continent.

In the middle of all this, on 27th August 1998 Yerodia went on the radio to announce that the government needed to impose a curfew so that the army could pursue the “eradication and total crushing of this vermin”.

This triggered a genocide. The massacre of ethnic Tutsis started the following day, with hundreds of charred corpses reportedly strewn across the land surrounding Kinshasa. Although it was widely reported in the press at the time, Yerodia didn’t hesitate to praise what he saw as the purging of the rebels, comparing it to the liberation of the French people at the time of the Revolution.

Here he is, talking unapologetically about events that summer:

In April 2000, Belgium (the country’s former colonial ruler) lodged an international arrest warrant against Yerodia under the Geneva Convention, hoping to bring him in front of the International Criminal Court. It wouldn’t matter, they thought, which country issued the arrest warrant as Yerodia was accused of breaking international humanitarian law.

But in October that year the DR Congo filed an opposition to the warrant with the International Court of Justice. This was none of Belgium’s business, they argued, and in any case because Yerodia was still serving as Minister for Foreign Affairs he enjoyed diplomatic immunity.

The International Court of Justice eventually ruled in the DR Congo’s favour, a decision which has become famous in international law. “Jurisdiction does not imply absence of immunity”, said the judge. Yerodia would have to be stripped of his immunity by the DRC before Belgium could have him arrested. On Valentine’s Day 2002 the ICJ cancelled the arrest warrant.

Yerodia went on to become Vice-President of the DR Congo in 2003 – a ceremonial position created especially for him, perhaps to guard against his deportation – and remained in that post until 2006.

At time of writing he is still alive, aged 87.

In his article Nobus highlights that throughout all of this the psychoanalytic community remained pretty silent. The only voice that spoke up publicly was that of psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Patrick Valas. At the time of the genocide he penned an article for French newspaper Libération calling it out. “We followed the same teaching. That of Jacques Lacan, who had never ceased denouncing racism and genocide”, he emphasised.

Even as this was going on, Valas noted that Yerodia remained a member of the École de la Cause freudienne (of which Lacan was the founder and president) and the Association mondiale de psychanalyse (its international extension) throughout this period. Nobus also adds that in 1999 the ECF made Yerodia an honorary member. Even when the European Court of Human Rights temporarily ratified the Belgian request, he received no sanction from either the ECF or AMP.

Unphased by the media attention, Yerodia repeatedly justified his role in the genocide. But he did so with a direct appeal to psychoanalytic doctrine.

In an interview with the New Yorker magazine in 2000 he said,

Indeed, as late as 2006 Valas reports Yerodia was still threatening the Tutsis with extermination. “You will suffer the same fate that Hitler inflicted on the Jews”, he warned.

What do we, the psychoanalytic community, do in the face of serious ethical issues like these?

Nobus’ article offers three options. These can be summarised as:

1. Assert a more robust ethical stance.
2. Junk ethics from psychoanalysis altogether.
3. Re-define what it means to be ethical.

Let’s look at them one by one.

This is the position associated with French-Canadian analyst René Major. But Nobus points out it is Derrida to whom Major is most heavily indebted. Specifically, to an intervention Derrida made at a 1981 conference in Paris attacking the lacklustre response of the IPA to torture and human rights abuses in Argentina at the time.

Psychoanalysis should get stuck in with helping to develop a kind of meta-ethics, Derrida thinks. A bit like the one held by Amnesty International or proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Psychoanalysis is unique in understanding human suffering, he argues. Even if such a stance isn’t entirely apolitical – and even if psychoanalysis shouldn’t be solely responsible for developing this ethics – it shouldn’t be afraid of throwing its hat in the ring of this dialogue (source).

All sounds great. So what’s the problem?

Firstly, Derrida’s not really saying very much. Who really disagrees with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or Amnesty International? We don’t need psychoanalysis in order to come up with this kind of ethical vision, nor does psychoanalysis really add anything to it. When Derrida admits that psychoanalysis doesn’t have an ethics of its own but is best placed to inform law, ethics, and politics he accepts for psychoanalysis a quite limited role. On his model, psychoanalysis does not really address the issue of torture, only psychical torment. But this is a problem if the condemnation of torture is the issue at hand. To paraphrase the art critic John Berger, psychoanalysis speaks to the wounds but not to the torturers.

Secondly, it’s vague. “Is that to say that there is no relation between psychoanalysis and ethics, law or politics?”, Derrida asks. “No, there is, there must be an indirect and discontinuous consequence”, he answers.

But what does that actually mean?

The second position Nobus associates with Jean Allouch, and is the exact opposite of the first. Who is really against ‘ethics’, Allouch asks. No one is going to disagree with a proposal to take a more ‘ethical’ stance in psychoanalysis. The problem is that evil itself has an ethical ‘vision’ – it’s perfectly possible to torture and commit human rights abuses and still claim to be acting ‘ethically’. Yerodia did just this, telling a Belgian journalist in 2001:

So is ethics itself the problem? Allouch’s argument is based on the fact that any ‘ethical’ stance we could come up with for psychoanalysis wouldn’t be able to escape the same self-rationalisation Yerodia exhibits: that, in whatever minimalist way, it aims to make better human beings. This project is exactly what Yerodia advocates in the quote above.

Of course, Allouch’s position is itself ethical, as Nobus fairly notes. From where does the psychoanalyst stand to put him or herself ‘above’ ethics? Is ethics itself really the problem, or does a psychoanalytic ethics we already assume contradict a more generalised ethical position? What should we do if, for example, a torturer wants to come into a psychoanalysis? Surely to refuse them would be to make a judgement on the part of the analyst, and therefore adopt a moral position. Jacques-Alain Miller, for instance, argues that “there are no contraindications to the encounter with the psychoanalyst”. That is, there is no situation in which psychoanalysis should not be appropriate.

But would such a stance be tantamount to complicity? If – as is the state of the law in the UK – an analysand were to admit to actively abusing children, the analyst is obliged to report this to the authorities. Although no analyst would advocate child abuse, note that the choice is effectively made for them in this situation. Ethical decisions are, at a practical level, delegated to the state. The position of psychoanalysis in such matters becomes commensurate with it (even if many psychoanalysts would like to think of their ethical position as being independent of the state).

The third option is the one Nobus attributes to French philosopher Alain Badiou. Virtually everything about modern ethical ideology is opposed by Badiou. Even the most minimal ethics – the ‘do no harm’ model or so-called ‘Golden Rule’ – is derided on the grounds that it functions to keep the status quo where it is. Western liberal notions of ethics – including charity, compassion, and brotherly love – are nothing but the guarantors of conservatism, for Badiou. They serve to stifle all radical engagement. Even – let’s note – when it is violent.

Badiou doesn’t have a great track record here. He famously penned a piece for Le Monde in the late seventies in support of the Khmer Rouge, even as it was becoming clear that the regime had ushered in a wave of frenzied genocide against imaginary foes among its own people.

Despite having later issued a somewhat qualified mea cupla, the dirt continues to stick.

But rather than aligning himself with Allouch’s position and suggesting we junk ethics altogether, Badiou proposes his own: the ethics of what he calls the ‘truthful event’. Although much could be said about the idea of an ‘Event’, we can roughly describe it here as a point that disrupts and completely changes the established order of a given situation. Fidelity to the event is the most important thing for Badiou, and it matters more than whether someone is considered evil or not. Everything else is just embracing conservatism.

His reasoning is that we shouldn’t work on identifying evil, and then decide to do good; we should decide to do good, and then identify evil. We only become evil when we lose sight of the truth of the event, so we need to focus remaining faithful to this. In a manner that is just as obtuse as Derrida, he puts his commandment in these terms:

Practically, this leads him to advocate an abolition of the International Criminal Court and the European Court of Human Rights. Many could write about how nuanced and clever his argument is, but the practical result of subscribing to it could be – as we have seen – catastrophic.

Where does he get this from? Nobus suggests it’s based on Badiou’s reading of Lacan’s Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis:

The problem here is that Badiou’s stance lets violence in through the back door. His position is falsely radical. As Nobus correctly points out, there is a massive difference between a universal ethical rule and Lacan’s ‘don’t give up on your desire’. The latter is not a maxim for Lacan. He’s talking about guilt quite specifically in the passage Badiou is referring to (Seminar VII, p.319), and quite specifically to the psychoanalytic setting. Moreover, fidelity to desire doesn’t necessarily impose an obligation to do something on us, but perhaps to not do something. That is, to keep desire going, metonymically, as a protection from a more deadly jouissance. (Incidentally, Lacan is most certainly not saying ‘do whatever you want, only you are the judge of the good’. What if – Nobus wonders – my desire is to exterminate Tutsi rebels?)

One particularly brilliant observation Nobus makes is how easily violence can shade off into aesthetics. Although Nobus doesn’t reference it explicitly we find this idea in Seminar VII. In his reading of Antigone, Lacan claimed that Beauty is the last barrier before the encounter with the Thing (Seminar VII, p.248). In other words, an appeal to aesthetics is frequently invoked just before the most horrific acts of violence and suffering are committed.

Think of the way that Sadean victims remain beautiful even in spite of their tortured suffering, or how the scene of the crucifixion has becomes such a venerated theme in art (Seminar VII, p.261-262). Beauty is the ultimate veil of horror. (For more on this topic, read the article on jouissance here). Nobus reports how, at a 1998 press conference during the genocide, Yerodia waxed lyrical about blossoming trees and singing birds as he recounted his vision of what the extermination of the Tutsis would bring. An appeal to beauty is very dangerous when invoked to put someone beyond the reach of ethics.

So where does all this leave us?

Nobus points to instances where Freud himself suggested it was altogether too ambitious to task psychoanalysis with the aim of making better human beings. To do so would be to put too much weight on its shoulders.

As for Lacan, the very first thing Lacan says as he opens Seminar XX in 1972 piques Nobus’ interest. Looking back on his seventh seminar, Lacan remarks:

The one thing we don’t find in Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, is an ethics of psychoanalysis. Why not? Nobus takes the above remark very seriously (maybe more so than Lacan intended), detecting in it a fundamental pessimism about ethical interventions. Lacan is not an Allouch – he does not want to junk ethics altogether – but like Freud he is resigned to his conclusions about flawed human beings.

Instead, Lacan says in Television that we have a duty to be “Well-Spoken” (devoir de bien dire, Television, p.41). Is this enough to constitute an ethics of psychoanalysis? Jacques-Alain Miller seems to think so (Pas de clinique sans éthique, 1983). Nobus is not so sure. Lacan’s position is not a refusal of ethics altogether, but it’s also not the decisive answer many look for from Lacan and – here as on so many topics – never find.

For his own part, Nobus suggests we remove from the ethical realm the expectation that a psychoanalyst should unconditionally accept anyone and everyone into analysis:

But what else is this criteria except an ethical position? Nobus is not proposing we accept everyone, or only accept certain people, but simply that we could exempt such decisions from ethical questioning. This seems slightly unrealistic. Surely we have to make a call on this to avoid the complicity problem. What’s more, Nobus’ proposal only seems to move the problem one step back. Practically, it would surely devolve responsibility for ethical issues to a body like the state, a situation psychoanalysts throughout the years have sought to oppose.

What would Lacan do? As we’ve seen there are few clues, and we can’t equate what appears as indifference to deferral, devolution, or disinterest on Lacan’s part. In his conclusion, Nobus suggests Lacan offers us only a technical approach to knowledge itself. In the face of ethical dilemmas we have to “work through knowledge in order to discover its point of impossibility”, he says.

It’s up to the reader to judge whether or not this just deflects the burden of real, live ethical questions onto the terrain of epistemology. The real test is the one we faced with Yerodia – what to do, in practical terms, with someone involved in situations of violence, torture, or genocide. This is the question we have to answer.

Psychoanalysis speaks to the wounds but not to the torturers.

Amuse-Bouches is a series of short articles on LacanOnline.com offering glimpses into psychoanalytic issues that are often overlooked. This article was first presented as a paper to the Earls Court Clinical Group in London on 27th July, 2017. The paper by Dany Nobus to which this article refers can be found here.

By Owen Hewitson, LacanOnline.com

All content on LacanOnline.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Who is ‘allowed’ to tell your story? Are you and you alone the only one that can represent your unique experience, past, and identity? Or is it sometimes okay – perhaps even better – for someone else to do this in your place?

This month marks the 50th anniversary of a radical answer to these questions by Lacan. The proposal, a procedure which he called the ‘Pass’, also answered the question of how to end a psychoanalysis and authorise someone as a psychoanalyst.

But the Pass was an idea that fundamentally split the School he created and led many of his followers to abandon him. Its use is contentious even today.

Fifty years later this topic is more pertinent than ever in society at large. When we ask whether only minority actors should portray minority characters, or if only a black trans woman can tell the story of a black trans woman, we are dealing with the same issues that were at the heart of the debate in Lacan’s School fifty years ago.

This is the story of two competing ideas on those questions.

The first, Lacan’s, encapsulated in the Pass, which was introduced in his ‘Proposition of 9th October, 1967’.

The second, represented by one of his former students, Shoshana Felman. It was at Felman’s invitation that Lacan visited Yale in the 1970s, and it was from her position at Yale that Felman became one of the first people to introduce Lacan to American academia. Her later work in the 1990s and 2000s, on the importance of personal testimony among survivors of traumatic experiences, presented a model that appears opposed to the one suggested by Lacan with the Pass.

Paris, 1967

To tell this story, let’s go back a bit.

Lacan had always been a divisive character in the psychoanalytic establishment. But in 1963 the International Psychoanalytic Association had had enough of him. It removed him from the position of training analyst, depriving him of the authority that the association Freud had founded bestowed.

Rather dramatically – and probably in homage to his intellectual hero, Spinoza – Lacan called this his ‘Excommunication’. The following year he went it alone – “as alone as I have always been in my relation to the psychoanalytic cause” – and founded his own School, L’Ecole Française de Psychanalyse.

By 1967 all seemed to be going well. Lacan’s dominance in his School, and French psychoanalysis in general, was well-established. But France was on the cusp of social upheaval. Authority of all kinds, in particular the hierarchy of the established order, was about to be radically opposed.

In May 1968 a massive wave of demonstrations and general strikes began. The universities that were Lacan’s powerbase were occupied.

Perhaps Lacan saw this coming. Likely not. But with the Proposition of 9th October 1967 he seemed to anticipate the problems so pertinent to France a few months later.

For his students at least, it offered an answer to a question that still bedevils the Lacanian world today: how to avoid the ‘cult of Lacan’.

If Lacan was going to run a psychoanalytic training programme on his own terms, there had to be a way to prevent it churning out “little Lacanians by the assembly line”, as Sherry Turkle puts it in her memory of Lacan’s School at that time (Psychoanalytic Politics, p.123). The design of the Pass would, Lacan thought, circumvent all the problems of institutionalised hierarchy and dogma that he had so opposed in the IPA.

What is the ‘Pass’?

The Pass is a mechanism by which someone can give a testimony of what has happened in their psychoanalysis when they feel it has reached its end. It was also a way for someone to transition from the role of psychoanalysand to psychoanalyst and be recognised as such by the School.

But when we hear the term ‘Pass’ we shouldn’t think of the opposition pass/fail, but instead of a relay. As in, ‘to pass something across’, or ‘to allow the passage of something’ from one place or person to another.

As Roudinesco notes, a passeur, in French, is a ferryman, someone who guides another across difficult terrain (Jacques Lacan, p.338). As a device for training and authorising psychoanalysts at the end point of their analyses, we might also think of the phrase ‘rites of passage’ as carrying a similar meaning. One makes a Pass rather than achieves a Pass.

The Pass works like this:

• When someone feels their analysis is coming to an end, they get in touch with two other people at roughly the same point in their own analyses.
• These people are the ‘Passers’. The candidate for the Pass tells them the story of their psychoanalysis, their testimony. They say why they think it is over, and why they want to become a psychoanalyst.
• The Passers then relay this to a jury of the School’s analysts, who in turn decide whether what they have heard is enough to grant the position of AE, or Analyst of the School, to the candidate.

The core idea here is that of the double-relay, the process of entrusting your testimony to outsiders, and entrusting them in turn to represent it to a committee on your behalf.

This, Lacan thought, would bring out what is most essential in someone’s psychoanalysis and avoid the caprice, favouritism, and prejudices that characterised an institutionalised psychoanalytic training. Lacan said he was attempting to prise apart a hierarchy from what he called the ‘gradus’: a simple classification of analysts from non-analysts, or analysts from analysands.

Lacan’s rationale for this was rooted in two things he believes happened at the end of a psychoanalysis:

1. Subjective destitution – in the simplest sense, this is the feeling of being alien to yourself, of your very thoughts and desires being foreign. It is the effect of bringing forth unconscious material. “Subjective destitution is written on the entry ticket”, Lacan says about a psychoanalysis. So, what does it matter that someone else, the ‘Passers’, bear witness to your story instead of you?
2. Traversal of the fantasy – not just any old fantasy but the fantasy of becoming a psychoanalyst. Rather than identifying with your psychoanalyst as a ‘subject-supposed-to-know’, Lacan argued that the end of an analysis entails a falling apart of this position. Part of the job of the ‘passers’ as semi-anonymous figures with no stake in the analysis, and no authority to make you a psychoanalyst, is to help identify what’s leftover.

The Pass – the Controversies

When Lacan’s students of the time looked back on the introduction of the Pass in the years that followed their opinions were very much mixed.

“The institution of the pass caused more conflict and violence than anything except Lacan’s invention of the short session”, wrote Stuart Schneiderman, one of the few Americans to travel to Paris in the 1970s to train with Lacan (Schneiderman, Jacques Lacan: Death of an Intellectual Hero, p.66).

For Jacques-Alain Miller though, “However difficult its implementation may be in analytic groups (the École Freudienne certainly did everything possible to pervert its procedure), the pass is and remains one of Lacan’s major advances. It confirms and sums up the fundamentals of his teaching.” (Miller, ‘Another Lacan’).

So what were the problems with it?

The first and most obvious was that you couldn’t speak for yourself. By entering the Pass you were entrusting total strangers to give a testimony of what was most personal to you.

This didn’t mean you were under any obligation to offer up the most intimate details of your life. “It is not obvious to me that this procedure should be intrinsically horrifying”, Schneiderman remembers. After all, our lives are shaped by people and events beyond our control. But, he admits, “Nevertheless it was” (Schneiderman, p.68).

Sherry Turkle, these days an MIT Professor (above), joined Lacan’s School in the 1970s and in her account of that time lists broader concerns about how the Pass was supposed to be used to certify psychoanalysts (p.124-126):

• What would the training committee, which received the testimony from the Passers, be looking for in order to pronounce the candidate a ‘psychoanalyst’? How would this be any different from the judgement of ‘fitness to practice’ espoused by the IPA?
• What about the Passers themselves? They were chosen by the candidate’s analyst from a pool of analysands, and then selected at random by the candidate him- or herself. (Incidentally, Turkle says that Passers were three other members of the School (p.123); Schneiderman “always two” (p.67)). They were intended to be “ambassadors”, as Miller calls them (Miller, ‘The Second Pass’).
• But if you were selected as a possible Passer by your analyst should you feel privileged? Was it a sign that you were a ‘successful’ analysand? Perhaps it meant you were a good listener… but the job of the analysand is not to listen but to talk.
• And what if you didn’t want to do the Pass? The alternative on offer was the status of AME – Analyst Member of the School. But this was often taken as showing an unwillingness or unreadiness to participate in the full theoretical life of the School, a sign that you lacked a wholehearted commitment to psychoanalysis itself (what Miller would later label ‘The Second Pass’).

Turkle summed it up by saying that the Pass muddied the waters by “making the implicit explicit” (p.124). It seemed to usher in hierarchy by the back door – the very thing it was designed to avoid.

But for some the real problem was Lacan himself.

Lacan’s School was supposed to have a structure in which the President served a five-year term, working alongside a five-member Directorate. Yet it was never proposed that anyone other than Lacan would be President. When the Directorate one by one resigned, it left Lacan in de facto control (Turkle, p.126).

In the School’s official journal – Scilicet – all the articles were written anonymously… except Lacan’s. As one follower joked, “How else are the rest of us supposed to know what to think?” (Turkle, p.127).

In his position as head of the training committee, it was also Lacan who had the final say on who got to be a psychoanalyst. Would he abuse this position to keep an eye on analysands that might threaten him?

The paradox was that the ‘Return to Freud’ seemed to be turning into a fastening to Lacan. Whatever else it did, the Pass was certainly not a success in dislodging the ‘Cult of Lacan’.

In January 1969, the School voted on Lacan’s Proposition of 9th October 1967. Lacan gave no ground. Ten of his closest followers split and formed the so-called Quatrième Groupe, “Lacanians without Lacan”, as Turkle calls them (p.129, 260-261). Lacan himself continued but increasingly surrounded himself with non-analysts – mostly philosophers and mathematicians – until his death in 1981.

1975 – Enter Felman

Shoshana Felman first heard about Lacan while completing her PhD in France in 1970. Her initial encounters with his work are described in amusing terms in her book, Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight.

By 1975 she had a position at Yale, and invited Lacan to give a couple of lectures there during his trip to the United States. Robert Jay Lifton, one of the people Lacan had dinner with during his visit (and, incidentally, one of the few people about whom Lacan was very complimentary – “Je suis Liftonian!”, he declared), described Felman as Lacan’s “right-hand woman of the time” (interviewed in Listening to Trauma, p.21).

Although strongly influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis, in the 1990s Felman became very interested in the notion of testimony, and what it means to tell one’s story.

Her book Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, co-authored with psychoanalyst Dori Laub, appeared in 1992. It was followed by The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century ten years later.

Felman makes a comparison to the judicial process. To testify is to take the witness stand. Like in a courtroom, providing testimony means taking responsibility for the truth of something that happened, to make a commitment of one’s own narrative (Listening to Trauma, p.322). And also like in a courtroom, the crucial factor is that this testimony be addressed to others, received by them even if not fully understood by them. To testify is “always a use of memory or of one’s own experience in order to address another” (ibid, her emphasis). And so she believes it is important that this testimony be absorbed into the wider culture and even into a kind of collective memory.

However, even if a personal testimony has resonances “beyond the personal towards the public or the general or the universal”, Felman maintains that “there is only one specific person, one specific subject who can bear witness to what he/she has experienced, and no one else can report what this particular subject has lived and narrated” (ibid). To testify is what she calls the “performative utterance” of one person.

This is very different from the model Lacan had proposed with the Pass, a situation in which one’s personal testimony can be given by others.

Where did Felman get her ideas?

The Holocaust Survivors Film Project

On the evening of 2nd May 1979 a film crew from WTNH-TV-Channel 8 in New Haven, Connecticut met with Felman’s later co-author, Dori Laub, and for more than six hours videotaped Laub’s testimony of being a childhood survivor of the Holocaust. The filmmakers immediately realised that what they had was a unique historical – but at the same time deeply personal – record of survivor experience.

They decided to set about collecting as many personal testimonies as they could, spreading to the rest of the United States and then to Israel. The result was the incredibly powerful Holocaust Survivors Film Project (HSFP).

This is the Laurel Fox Vlock, the Project’s visionary, recounting its origins:

In 1981, the original tapes of 183 interviews were transferred to Yale University and have been housed there ever since. Steven Spielberg got involved in 1994 following the release of his film Schindler’s List, and provided funding that allowed the collection to balloon. Today it is known as the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies and has served as the model for similar projects in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.

The Pass vs The Trial

Through her work with Laub in the 1990s, and her position at Yale between 1970 to 2004, Felman was very familiar with the Holocaust Testimonies Project.

By later developing the analogy with the judicial process she echoed the language that Lacan had employed in his 1967 proposal on the Pass, even if her conclusions were very different.

“From where then could a fair testimony on whoever goes through this pass to be expected, if not from another who, like him, is still in this pass?”, Lacan asked in 1967. As both peers and ambassadors of this testimony, Lacan thought the experience of the Passers themselves was a crucial to what was relayed to the committee. “The testimony that they will be able to receive from the quick of their own past will be of a kind that no committee ever picks up”, he argued. “The decision of such a committee will therefore be illuminated by this, these witnesses of course not being judges” (Lacan, my emphasis).

What both Felman and Lacan’s comparison to judicial proceedings share however is the notion that a testimony needs to be heard. That is, they both highlight the importance of the appeal to the other, an element present in both the Pass and on the witness stand. Whilst it might be pointed out that an appeal to the other is the not the same as a deferral to the other, both the judicial process and the Pass are mechanisms by which personal testimony is used as part of a process to determine – via one’s peers – an outcome that is one step removed from personal testimony.

But there is a problem with these legal analogies.

Even if personal testimony may form part of a legal trial, it is not the suffering of the victims but the acts of the perpetrators that are the focus for judicial proceedings. This is a very different context to that of Yale’s Holocaust testimonies archive.

Eichmann In Jerusalem

The paradigmatic case of how personal testimony can conflict with legal protocol is the trial of Adolph Eichmann by Israel in 1961, most famously chronicled and theorised by Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Arendt thought there was a failure in the trial precisely because of its use of survivor testimony. For her, it was a show trial which for political reasons laid more emphasis on the suffering of victims than the question of Eichmann’s guilt. When it is the perpetrator on trial, it would be wrong to focus on the victims’ testimonies, thought Arendt. This provoked a furious response and a barrage of accusations of victim-blaming. To characterise Eichmann as a petty bureaucrat exemplifying the ‘banality of evil’ was to diminish the effect of his crimes, some thought.

For Felman however the trial was a “groundbreaking narrative event”. It gave the victims the voice they were denied at the Nuremberg trials. Whereas Arendt criticised the theatricality of the Eichmann trial, Felman saw this element allowing a “legal process of translation” that condensed what had been the private, secret traumas of the Holocaust to “one collective, public, and communally acknowledged” experience (p.207). Those who testified against Eichmann were made the subjects, not the objects, of testimony. For Felman this meant that “the Eichmann trial created a new language by converting the victims into witnesses” (p.330).

But whose testimony was being given? Notice that, on this model, testifying is not simply a matter of giving a personal account of one’s own, unique experience.

Holocaust survivors often say they are not simply telling their own story but keeping an oath to those who did not survive, to relay something of theirs too. There is a difference between, on one hand, fulfilling an oath to testify about an experience common to a group of people on their behalf; and on the other, testifying to your own experience in its singularity.

But for Felman, to bear witness is always to offer one’s own testimony as one’s own. She quotes the Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel – “If someone else could have written my stories, I would not have written them” (p.322).

The opposite is true in the Pass. There, the condition of giving your own testimony is abandoned. There is a deferral to the ‘Passers’ to do so on your behalf, a deferral which is more than just an appeal to the other for recognition.

The problem with extending the judicial analogy is that Felman expects the legal process to do two things at once: to provide a forum for the recognition of a collective, communal experience; but also to acknowledge the subjective suffering singular to each individual.

But, as Arendt would argue, this is not really the point of a trial. “There is a chorus of testimonies; everybody tells a fragment, but then a total picture emerges”, Felman believes (p.331). While this may be true of the Pass, a trial is a process designed to establish facts in a way that they can be judged against the law, not primarily a way of giving the victim a voice. As Cathy Caruth points out, there is a difference between the legal idiom and the idiom of personal experience (p.336).

Caracas, 1980 – Back to the Pass

So what about the Pass? Does it offer a solution to this problem of separating historical truth, as in the judicial process, from personal truth, the narrative of one’s own testimony?

After the dust had somewhat settled on the debate over the Pass, the remaining Lacanians gathered in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1980. Although Lacan was present, it was his son-in-law, Jacques-Alain Miller, who dared to tackle the issue of the Pass head on in a presentation he called ‘Another Lacan’.

Here is a particularly interesting passage from his talk:

“The existence of a master of truth may be argued on the basis of the semantic retroaction of S2 on S1. So considered, S2 becomes the master-signifier of truth. However, the notation S1 —> S2 implies the contrary as well in that there is no signified master of truth, since any signification depends on a subsequent signifier. Signification essentially shifts along the signifying chain; its metonymy accounts for the impossibility of all the truth being said.” – Miller, ‘Another Lacan’.

This is a tricky passage, but we can explain it by relating it to the problem of separating this clumsily-labelled ‘historical’ truth from ‘personal’ truth.

Let’s say we have an historical event, perhaps a traumatic experience or encounter – ‘S2’ in Miller’s terms here. We want to testify to this, to bear witness to a truth, as it were. Miller’s point is quite simply that making this testimony – the “performance utterance” Felman described (p.322) – will have an effect on the signification of the event. This effect is one of retroaction – ‘afterwardsness’ as Laplanche has called it. It is a consequence of the fact that meaning or signification is never fixed in one point. “Any signification depends on a subsequent signifier”, as Miller puts it in this passage.

Psychoanalytic efficacy, the very curative effect of a psychotherapy, depends on the operation of this effect. We alter the meaning of an event by talking about it, in the same way that we would alter the meaning of a sentence by a different punctuation, or the meaning of a word by following it with another word.

The counter to this idea seems simple – doesn’t this just lead to a kind of hopelessly relativist, even nihilist, predicament? That there is no history, there is no event, just the testimony of it at a certain moment, interpretable however we choose, and constantly subject to change and resignification?

Miller’s riposte to this objection is that the difference between personal testimony and historical record does not depend on our ability to fix a signification, or on an appeal to the other, but fixation to the object a.

The problem in a psychoanalysis, as in testifying to a traumatic event, is the same – why can’t we simply create a new signification at will? It’s not so easy to ‘move on’ in the way a chain of signifiers supposedly moves on.

So what stops this? Miller thinks that the subject is “tethered to a fixed point, to a stake about which it drifts in a circle”. This fixed point is the object a. Whatever might be said about the object a, it is not the other person – whether the here-today-gone-tomorrow partner, the subject’s peers in a jury, the ‘Passers’ in Lacan’s procedure, or the ‘desiring other’ that Laplanche privileges his account of the ‘afterwardness’ effect.

The name that Lacanian analysis gives to the relation of the subject to the object a is fantasy. (Though not meant in the usual sense that we understand ‘fantasy’). The Pass is a method that attempts to pull out the fantasy from the analytic situation, to isolate and interrogate the object a that conditions it.

“The pass”, Miller said in Caracas, “is Lacan’s name for the disjunction of the subject and object brought about by the analytic experience, for the fracturing or breaking of the fantasy.”

So the difference between the ‘historical’ and ‘personal’ truth of an event in testimony can be represented as the difference between:

S1 > S2

vs

$ > a

This does not mean that historical truth (whether someone underwent terrible things during the Holocaust, for example) doesn’t matter. Simply that the form of their testimony will bear the mark of the relation to object a, which in turn governs the terms of the fantasy.

The Easy Lacan and the Hard Lacan

Nevertheless, the implications of this idea aren’t easy to swallow. The title of Miller’s Caracas paper – ‘Another Lacan’ – refers to the Lacan that isn’t just about the endless passage and rewriting of the signifier. “When the so-called “influence” of Lacan is used solely to endorse the play of signifiers”, Miller suggested, “it has the effect of completely disorienting the analytic experience.”

His somewhat cheeky suggestion in concluding is that those who got so worked up about the Pass in the late sixties simply preferred the ‘easy’ Lacan of the signifier. Less so the tougher, later Lacan who was more concerned with how to address, unpick, or re-wire the fantasy.

This is the ‘hard problem’ for Lacanians. Indeed for all practitioners who aim at bringing about a change in someone’s life, whether they be psychotherapists, life coaches or self-help vloggers on YouTube.

By Owen Hewitson, LacanOnline.com

All content on LacanOnline.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

A few months back I wrote a rather long article tracing the historical debate about the nature of the unconscious in psychoanalysis across three key turning points – 1915, 1928, and 1960.

It was a bit wordy (material for my PhD) so here’s a video version for those who prefer watching to reading.

Expect more of this sort of thing in 2018. Here’s my YouTube channel so click the Subscribe button in the top right of that page – or the red YouTube button on the right of this page – for more.

Video below. Here’s the original article.

All content on LacanOnline.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

It is often said that psychoanalysts should look at structure, not surface symptoms, in order to make a clinical diagnosis. There are two problems with this.

First, the definition of a particular structure has to be rigorous enough to recognise it when you see it. The question is: what characterises this structure, and is particular to it and it alone, to adequately distinguish it from others? How broad can a definition of a structure be before becoming indistinct and unhelpful? Given that the Lacanian community has spent the last 20 years debating how to define ‘ordinary psychosis’ – sufficient to make a differential distinction from psychosis proper, or even from neurotic structure – this is easier said than done. And it is not made any easier in Freud. Obsession in particular, he tells us cryptically, appears as “a dialect of the language of hysteria” (SE X, 157).

Second, obsession in particular appears to undermine this focus on structure. We find an extraordinary recurrence of certain symptoms that seem to persist throughout its recorded history. Whether we’re talking about the ‘scrupulosity’ of the 16th century; the ‘doubting mania’ of the 19th century; the ‘obsessional neurosis’ of Freud’s time; or the ‘OCD’ of today; there is a permanence and recurrence of certain symptoms or symptom-groups, which appear irrespective of time or culture.

These cluster around binaries.

For the obsessional, the light switch must be turned on or off a certain number of times. The door opened or closed. An entranceway or portal must be crossed a certain way to mark the distinction between inside and outside. Repetition, counting, superstition – much of what is usually recognised as symptoms of obsession – all point to the oscillation between these binaries.

This doesn’t necessarily undermine the search for structure, and the presence of an alternance between binaries may be a second-order phenomenon. But it forces us to ask how such recurrent and permanent symptoms can point to something characteristic of the structure itself.

Freud had noticed these binaries in the diphasic nature of obsessional compulsions. The doing-and-undoing of an act – of which the Rat Man’s moving and removing of a stone that sat in the pathway of his beloved’s carriage is the prime example (SE X, 190) – was linked, he thought, to two different attitudes towards the love object. It was a manifestation of a fundamental emotional ambivalence that characterised obsession. This also explained the prominence of doubt in obsession, as if the obsessional reasons ‘if I can’t be sure of my love for you, how can I be sure of anything else?’ (SE X, 227-228; 243).

But there are also two different moments in obsessional acts. The contradiction is first and foremost temporalised in these diphasic acts. The obsessional shuttles between binaries that appear to have little connection to the object, and which take on a life of their own when transmuted into the form of rituals. The turning on and off of a light switch, the opening and closing of a door, may be heavily displaced from the object, but their recurrence in this simple form itself deserves explanation.

So rather than resorting to Lacanian jargon to explain obsession, let’s try to account for the everyday phenomena that is manifested in recurrent symptomatology like these. If ‘ordinary psychosis’ and new forms of hysteria have gotten all the attention in recent years, why did Freud declare that obsession was “the most interesting and repaying” of all clinical phenomena? (SE XX, 113).

The Subjunctive

The subjunctive is a tense more often used in languages like French than English (though its use in English is perfectly correct). It is used after expressions that imply uncertainty – that something may not happen.

In French , for example, instead of saying ‘You have to…’ do something, you might say ‘It is necessary that…’ (Il faut que….) you do it, and then you would use the subjunctive. ‘It is necessary that you be there’, rather than ‘You have to go there’, for instance. The subjunctive therefore expresses a kind of ‘to-be-or-not-to-be’ in its implication of uncertainty.  

As a tense, the subjunctive is also about time. It temporalises a possibility that exists between two different outcomes. One of the features of obsessional compulsions is a conditional structure – they are performed on the basis of something that may, or may not, happen. The obsessional feels compelled to perform a certain act or ritual to avert a danger that might befall they themselves or – more often, when probed – a loved one. In the form of rituals these may be ego-syntonic; in the form of compulsions they may be highly troubling. But the conditional structure that indicates the subjunctive is always implicit.

In the life of the obsessional more generally we find a contradiction between two different attitudes that characterise his or her ‘subjunctive’ mode of living.

On the one hand, Lacan said that we can recognise the obsessional very early in life. He or she is the child who has very “fixed ideas” (Seminar V, 14th May 1958). What he wants and what he believes will admit of no compromises. Lacan’s one-time student, Serge Leclaire, noted that “there is nothing in the obsessional’s world that escapes from the constraint of necessity” (Leclaire, ‘Philo, or the Obsessional and his Desire’). Any demand for satisfaction – when he eats, when he goes on holiday, his schedule – is treated as rigidly pressing and is always presented in the form of a need. As Leclaire puts it, “‘It is necessary that’, or ‘I must’, constitute the common denominators of the obsessional’s activity” (Leclaire, Philo).

But on the other hand the obsessional is beset with uncertainty. Doubt, questioning, and a desire that appears eternally unfulfilled or unreachable are well-recognised hallmarks of the obsessional’s character.

Where does this come from?

Serge Leclaire

We will look at two cases of obsession from the clinic of a great psychoanalyst and one-time follower of Lacan, Serge Leclaire.

An unusually poetic and vibrant writer, it is a pity more of Leclaire’s work is not translated into English. But these two cases are an exception, and you can read them here and here. We will refer to them by the names Leclaire chose for the patients at their centre – the case of Philo and the case of Jerome.

Leclaire believed we have to introduce “the category of the possible” into the life of the obsessional (Leclaire, ‘Jerome, or Death in the Life of the Obsessional’), and a lot of what Leclaire went on to say about his two patients revealed the dilemma presented by the subjunctive mode of living the obsessional inhabits.

But Leclaire begins with the origins of obsession. In contrast to many other writers on the topic (including Freud himself), Leclaire thought the key to understanding obsession lay not with the father but with the mother. The “nodal complex” of obsession, as he calls it, is to be found in the way the obsessional responds to the mother’s perceived desire (Leclaire, Philo).

Story time!

What’s the developmental history of the obsessional? Leclaire relates the oedipal schema of the obsessional child which in simple terms we can put like this:

• In the beginning we can picture a harmonious dyadic relationship between mother and child.
• The child identifies with the presumed object of the mother’s desire (which, in Lacanese, we call the ‘imaginary phallus’. But that doesn’t matter for now.
• Then at a certain point it becomes clear to the child that there is something else in the mix – something beyond him that the mother wants but which is not him.
• It’s not clear what this is, and so it gives an enigma to her desire.
• What usually happens at this point is a metaphorical operation – in Lacanese, the substitution of the desire of the mother for the ‘Name-of-the-Father’.
• But this is not – as Leclaire notes – necessarily the substitution of the father himself, or even a living person. Like the grammatical ‘third person’, Leclaire describes how the Name of the Father “appears as a being to whom one refers (to honour or to scorn) and to whom one refers as to a law” (Leclaire, Philo, his emphasis). A ‘law’ in this sense means something that limits or constrains, and hence can put a box around the enigma of the mother’s desire. So a ‘Father’, in Lacanese, operates not as a flesh-and-blood person but as a point of “refusal and of reference”, as Leclaire says.  
• With this metaphorical operation the child is able to exchange ‘being’ for ‘having’. That is, instead of identifying with the presumed object of the mother’s desire, he is able to recognise it as something he can possess. And so begins the rites of passage journey through manhood that will occupy him for the rest of his life. In Lacanese, we refer to the difference between the ‘imaginary phallus’ and the ‘symbolic phallus’.
• But this doesn’t happen in obsession, and it’s not clear why. A few of the suggestions proffered by psychoanalysts down the ages include:
• A ‘weak’ father – Leclaire notes that his patient Philo’s father is a good guy but, as he poetically puts it, this only serves to “muffle a virility that is exercised parsimoniously and with regret because it is considered to be sinful” (Leclaire, Philo).
• A ‘strong’ mother – in the sense of one who is so overbearing or neurotic as to shift all of her desire to the child and make this fact implicitly clear.
• The infant’s own ‘choice’ in some respects
• The upshot is that the young obsessional doesn’t properly move from ‘being’ it to ‘having’ it and therefore cannot renounce the identification with the presumed object of the mother’s desire.
• So instead, he undertakes a strategy to find a point of identification that might ‘be’ this enigmatic object for the mother… and then seeks to become it himself.

A model for being a man

In later life, we will find the marks of this origin in two contradictory attitudes to ‘being’.

On the one hand, the obsessional will always retain the belief that he is something special, a conviction of his own superiority and exceptional status among others. Leclaire calls this “an unshakeable and secret self-confidence” (Leclaire, Philo) and it’s a hangover from his attempt to incarnate the presumed object of the mother’s desire. What’s more, he will demand recognition from others of this exceptional status, and in so doing assert what looks like the ‘strong ego’ so often noted as a feature of the obsessional’s character. Outwardly then, there’s often nothing wrong.

But on the other hand, the obsessional will harbour a permanent reference to some figure of ‘master’. He will eternally try to put in place a character imbued with what, in Lacanian terms, we call the ‘phallic’ attribute. This is also a hangover from the uncomfortable recognition that there is something outside the mother that he does not have access to, indicating her desire is never entirely for him and him alone.

The inability for the obsessional to actualise a desire of his own is thereby premised on the fundamental idea that another should act in his place. The obsessional needs a model for being a man – whether this is a living figure, or even a character idolised from film or literature. His relation to this master figure will always be a submissive one as he will never be worthy himself. Even if this relationship shows an undercurrent of rivalry, his actions will take place in the permanent shadow of this other man – which is why taking the decisive step on his own is so problematic.

This we see in the Hamletian inaction, doubt, and procrastination that shrinks and layfolk alike have always taken as the hallmark of obsession:

Hamlet’s famous soliloquy is so apt because it encapsulates the permanent to-be-or-not-to-be – the very signature of the subjunctive – in the life of the obsessional. In relation to the master figure he attempts to install, Leclaire rephrases this existential question as “am I subject or object”? (Leclaire, Jerome).

Desire of the other vs desire as such

But Leclaire is not duped. This identification strategy is just a ploy by the obsessional, an attempt to find an object that could be “the illusory support of a sterile desire” (Leclaire, Philo). The obsessional is trying to peg the mother’s desire to an object – to name her lack by locating it in another man.

In his patient Philo’s case, this is a figure from the family history cryptically referred to as ‘Gonzago’. He is a martyred hero, a model for outstanding virtue held in esteem by both the mother and the father. Gonzago creates what Leclaire calls a “hybrid paternity” for his patient (Leclaire, Philo).

But if we follow Lacanian theory we appear to have a problem. It’s not as if the paternal reference isn’t operative, or that the Name-of-the-Father hasn’t been ‘metaphorised’ in place of the mother’s desire. Operationally, everything is in place through this figure of Gonzago. There should be no reason why the oedipal pass is not successfully negotiated.

The key to establishing what turned the young Philo into an obsessional lies in the actual father, Philo’s own flesh-and-blood father. Being himself so enamoured with his mythical ancestor Gonzago, the father fails to perform the one act that is crucial of the paternal function – prohibition.

Lacan intended his Nom-du-Pere to be heard as a homonym of Non-du-Pere, a ‘No’ establishing the prohibition which would nudge Philo onto a non-obsessional course. But without it, the veneration of Gonzago continues, allowing Philo to identify with Gonzago as the presumed object of his mother’s desire. For both mother and son “This desire is a dream in which to commune in the sterile satisfaction of a shared wish”, as Leclaire loftily summarises it (Leclaire, Philo).

And yet, note that it’s not really Gonzago that Philo cares about. His strategy is a crafty one in which the Gonzago character is merely a prop. The real hope is that through a shared identification his mother will reveal to him something even more precious – her desire as such.

“In dreaming of Gonzago, Philo did not expect that his mother would dream with him, but on the contrary, that she would reveal to him what she had found that was better than this dream” (Leclaire, Philo, his emphasis).

We see how important it is to make the distinction between a shared wish for an object (whether a person, either living or dead) and a desire (desire as such).

This is the crucial difference that Lacan highlights in Seminar V between the hysteric and the obsessional (Seminar V, 14th May, 1958):

Hysteric – aims at the desire of the other

Obsessional – aims at desire as such

But what does ‘desire as such’ actually mean? How do you identify it if desire, by definition, surely has an object?

The obsessional’s problem is exactly this. He doesn’t get, or doesn’t accept, that desire means lack (Seminar VI, 10th June, 1959). “Desire as such” for the obsessional entails the destruction of the other as object (Seminar V, 14th May, 1958). It is not a desire for this or that particular man, whether that be the living father or some ancestral figure like Gonzago, but for the secret source that enlivens this desire.

Hampered by this blind spot, the character of desire for the obsessional will forever be marked by a disavowal of this fact that desire means lack. For this reason, he will strive to peg it to an object and never allow it to be unpegged in an attempt to ensure that desire is never permitted to be fully enigmatic. Having a gap where the presumed object of the (m)other’s desire should be is intolerable.

To close this gap, the obsessional does two things:

1. Conflate desire with demand – insofar as demand entails the insistence on a given, specified object.
2. Give demand the character of need – insofar as need entails an urgency to satisfaction, like a biological need for food or drink.

But this will also plunge the obsessional into kind of existential ambiguity whereby his desire “is impotent to recover its autonomy and its value as mediator between need and demand” (Leclaire, Philo).

What does this conflation of desire, demand, and need actually look like in the life of the obsessional?

Just as Lacan had noticed the obsessional child will be the one with very “fixed ideas” (Seminar V, 14th May 1958), the obsessional approaches life with an impatient, unassuaged insistence that Leclaire recognised in Philo. All the character traits that in the popular mind are associated with obsessionality – being a creature of habit, sticking to routine, insistence on minor particularities – are marked by Leclaire in his patient, as they are by other analysts in theirs.

Their root in a disavowal of the idea that desire means lack leads the obsessional to an avoidance of points of discontinuity. We see this manifested in certain commonly-recurring injunctions in the life of the obsessional:

• Cracks in the pavement have to be avoided
• Light switches have to be on or off
• Doors open or closed
• And every moment filled with activity (even if, ultimately, it is to no end).

The obsessional has what we might call a passion for binaries which we can see as a reification of the problem with gaps as indicators of lack, desire as such in its enigmatic form. Gaps signal that there is a question about desire – the same marginal possibility of uncertainty that we find in the subjunctive.

What does a psychoanalytic psychotherapy of obsession look like?

What does all this imply about how we should handle obsession therapeutically?

At the broadest level, the aim is to get the obsessional to realise the register of lack. That is, that lack equals desire, and that lack is part of the mother’s structure. Lacan calls this the “principle of sacrifice” (E822). Let’s not worry, Leclaire thinks, about whatever theory of transference or theory of the ego we would usually have recourse to (Leclaire, Philo). We know already that the obsessional has a strong ego, so there’s no point strengthening it further. And a theory of transference is surely based on a theory of desire which, like Lacan, he believed was lacking in the psychoanalysis of the time.

What we shouldn’t do therapeutically is the caricatured Lacanian gesture of introducing desire as a pure question, throwing in an enigma to the analysis with a clever pun or the sharp cut of the short session. This will just piss them off, Leclaire thinks. The obsessional is not interested in existential questions of the kind this would elicit and will take them as invasive and threatening.

What we should do is actually the opposite – recognise their demand in all its forms. Hear them out, receive their complaints and gripes about the world. But recognise at the same time that these demands are “intentionally confused” (Leclaire, Philo). That is, we should “be attentive to the fact that for the obsessional there is no demand that is not marked with the seal of desire” (Leclaire, Philo, his emphasis). For the obsessional, Leclaire says, wanting to be recognised means not just wanting to be loved but wanting to be fucked. The task of the analyst then is to “introduce a cleavage between demand and desire, between the world of the law and that of the dream” (Leclaire, Philo).

Negativity of absence vs negation of presence

Leclaire has a nice way of putting this. We should separate negativity of absence from negation of presence.

A negativity of absence would refer to everything that puts being in question or is marked by a lack. Death, the figure of the martyred hero Gonzago in Philo’s case, the Rat Man’s dead father, or the figure of the master for the obsessional in general would all be examples.

A negation of presence would refer to everything that puts having in question, encapsulated in a role that exists but does not function. The actual father is indeed there in the family situation, but for whatever reason does not perform the role that would imbue him with a symbolic attribute which would curtail the effect of the enigmatic question posed by the mother’s desire. Of Philo Leclaire writes:

“We must distinguish… the negativity of the absence of the martyred hero from the negation of the paternal presence, to distinguish being it from having it, all the while being cognizant of their linkage, not confounding the demand for recognition with the desire to sleep with someone” (Leclaire, Philo, his emphasis).

Death as a junction concept

Much has been made of death as a preoccupation in obsession. We can see it as a junction concept between Leclaire’s ideas of negativity of absence and negation of presence.

Leclaire separates the theme of death from the question of death for the obsessional. Death is never an answer for the obsessional – it can’t provide the kind of finality or full-stop that it does for other folk. And likewise, Leclaire thought, it shouldn’t for psychoanalysts.

The problem was that,

“Psychoanalysts, with the exception of Freud, have been principally interested in the theme of death, as though what mattered was to veil death in themeatising it” (Leclaire, Jerome, his emphasis).

His point was that death can function as a blocker to thinking – as if we didn’t have to think about something anymore once we introduce the concept because death, it is assumed, is the end. This also goes for the Freudian ‘death drive’. It is treated as a necessary assumption in order to make the rest of the theory work. “Even today”, Leclaire wrote in the 1960s, “there are those who believe in the death drive only in the same way that they believed in Santa Claus” (Leclaire, Jerome).

So if death isn’t the end, what is it for the obsessional?

Let’s remember that Freud didn’t conceive of the death drive as a push to the end of life, but rather as an inorganic state.

“In the case of the destructive instinct we may suppose that its final aim is to lead what is living into an inorganic state. For this reason we also call it the death instinct.” (SE XXIII, 148, Freud’s emphasis).

Leclaire follows this precision, recognising in his patient Jerome’s fascination with corpse-like inertia “the force that tends towards the stability of the inorganic” (Leclaire, Jerome).

So why describe death as a question – not just a drive – for the obsessional?

As a student of Lacan’s, Leclaire takes some inspiration from his teacher’s reading of Freud. In Lacan’s hands, the question for the obsessional will be ‘Am I alive or dead’? But it’s worth noting that Lacan treats the death drive less as some kind of inorganic state – as Freud thought – and more as the very excess of life, the exact opposite of inorganic inertia. Here the conceptual field is somewhat muddied by Lacan’s introduction of the term jouissance into psychoanalytic vocabulary, which – like the death drive – he locates at the point Freud specified as being beyond the pleasure principle. There lies what Lacan described as a “super-abundant vitality” (Lacan, Seminar VIII, 18th May 1960). And this is a phenomenon existential in nature – not simply some affect or emotion.

Leclaire grants death this same existential ring. And we shouldn’t necessarily see Freud’s description of the death drive, in terms of an inorganic state, as something we can’t square with Lacan.

Leclaire blends the two cleverly by drawing attention to the curious mix of procrastination and feverish hyper-activity that we find in obsession. This recalls the oft-repeated clinical observation that the obsessional is on the one hand beset by inaction and the inability to do anything truly determinate; whilst on the other being always frantically busy, squeezing vital tasks into last minute slots in a desperate show of productivity.

.

What’s behind this ambivalent attitude to action? Once again, we can relate it to the obsessional’s more fundamental strategy to escape the confrontation with the question of the other’s desire. At first glance, this seems to work. The obsessional finds the ‘answer’ to his existential question by establishing death as “the perfect Master, uncontested, the one and only” (Leclaire, Philo). In so doing, he can avoid bringing the question of his own action in the face of the other’s desire into sharper focus, thereby safeguarding the sterility of his desire as is.

For Leclaire’s patient Philo, this meant keeping the focus on the mother’s desire, not his own in response to it, and doing so by maintaining the belief in Gonzago as master-figure and object of her desire. This means he can effectively ‘play dead’ while at the same time disregarding the ‘otherness’ of the other – a strategy we find in the reduction of his love objects from being “another warm and living being” to “docile shadows” (Leclaire, Philo).

Whatever ‘other’ the obsessional has in his life, they are not an overly significant other. Instead, Leclaire characterises them as the “fancied other, the illusory support of a sterile desire”, set up in order “To give to the inanimate object the appearance of life, to make it live and die, to care for it, then to destroy it” (Leclaire, Philo).

This is what Leclaire means when he says ““The impossible quest for the other remains the most notable characteristic of the obsessional’s desire” (Leclaire in Philo).  

‘Death’ then, is never simply death. Its function is not to mark the end of life but to give the obsessional a way to maneuver away from the otherness of the other. It’s for this reason that Freud had noted in the Rat Man case that obsessionals need the “possibility of death” to resolve their conflicts (SE X, 236).

Which raises an interesting question – why isn’t the Rat Man’s a case of failed mourning?

This is not simply a question of perspective. Freud detected something odd about the obsessional’s attitude to death that led him to present the case as one of obsession rather than mourning. He had noticed that the Rat Man’s preoccupation with death was much wider, carrying on even after his father had died. Freud records that the Rat Man himself kept forgetting that his father was dead:

“For a long time he had not realised the fact of his father’s death. It had constantly happened that, when he heard a good joke, he would say to himself: ‘I must tell Father that’. His imagination, too, had been occupied with his father, so that often, when there was a knock at the door, he would think: ‘Here comes Father’, and when he walked into a room he would expect to find his father in it” (SE X, 174).

While this isn’t an unusual feature of mourning, it does tell us that the death of the father didn’t mark the point of finality for the Rat Man. Neither can we say that the father’s death was the realisation of a patricidal death wish against the father. There may have been ambivalence – of which the Rat Man’s attitude to death was a manifestation – but, like Hamlet, the father’s death did not lay him to rest.

Death operated neither as a marker of finality, nor a marker of time, for the obsessional.

And yet there is still something enigmatic about this death.

Notice that Freud talked about how obsessionals needed the “possibility of death” rather than death-as-such – whether we understand that term as mortification, inorganic inertia, or existential finality. Death is the place of a question, something that Leclaire realised when his patient Jerome told him that he always found it hard to understand the expression of a judge when passing a sentence of execution: “You will hang by the neck until dead”. Jerome was puzzled because he couldn’t see the difference from saying “You will live until dead”, as if there was a continuity rather than a strict separation between life and death; as if life itself were a death sentence.

But Leclaire saw this puzzlement as pointing less to an impossibility and more to a refusal. In what can be taken as a lesson to many Lacanian commentators of our day, it would be all too easy for Leclaire to throw his hands up and declare death an instance of the ‘Real’, a category beyond thought, something impossible to conceptualise. Leclaire doesn’t do this. Like Freud, it was the possibility of death that he saw as important:

“With these words, Jerome proposes the category of the possible to our analytic experience, and on that basis I will formulate the notion that the obsessional structure can be conceived of as the repeated refusal of one’s own death” (Leclaire, Jerome, his emphasis).

‘Possibility’ points us once again to the subjunctive. And we have another reason why death means living in perpetual motion for the obsessional. “For me to keep going, I must turn at 3,000 rpms”, Jerome tells Leclaire. Another one of his patients reports, “If I stop for an instant, I am afraid I will turn to dust” (Leclaire, Jerome). Here we see the dreadful paradox for the obsessional: death equates to the excess of life, animated by a fervent and ceaseless pseudo-activity without (temporal) end.

“I want for once to be up to date; I want to liquidate all the files that have piled up on the left side of my desk, finally to be able to breathe. When I succeed, anxiety grabs me and I have to find another unfinished task quickly. I exhaust myself in catching up on my lateness, the work that I undertake ought already to have been finished. I have no free time; there are no Sundays for me.” (Leclaire, Jerome, his emphasis).

Jerome never lives in the moment – always at one remove – something Leclaire connects to his patient’s fascination with immobility, stasis, and petrification. Jerome is fascinated by mummified bodies, which he sees as expressing the “perfection of a realised, definitive form”, like a marble statue. The carrying of a mummy’s body for Jerome demonstrates the “excellence of passive movement, where one is entirely submitted to others” (Leclaire, Jerome).

Time is a Landscape

Then Jerome says something else interesting. He tells Leclaire a story from his holiday:

“‘I was next to a lake’”, Jerome tells me one day. ‘The place was lovely, but I was insensitive to it. Believe me, I am more moved by a beautiful postcard or by the photos of my trip’” (Leclaire, Jerome).  

Aha! says Leclaire. “Time is like a landscape for him” (Leclaire, Jerome). The obsessional marks time like he’s taking photos of a landscape. Why? To immobilise it, Leclaire thinks, like Jerome immobilised the mummified corpses of his daydreams. Spatialise time and you suspend it, like in a photo.

As the name would suggest, Instagram was originally intended as a way to capture the moment, but instead it immobilises it, perfectly realising the strategy Leclaire’s patient is pursuing. That we are ceaselessly harangued by such images is not a sign that everyone is having so much fun, but that every gesture of documenting it is staged, crafted, petrified.

So in obsession, ‘death’ doesn’t mean death, it means freeze-framing. ‘Death’ refers to the spatialisation of time, rather than its end. The corpses keep returning for Jerome; the father’s death is annulled for the Rat Man, as if he doesn’t know he’s dead. Death doesn’t exist in time, at some point in the future or past, for the obsessional. But neither is it in the frame. More precisely, death is the frame itself, the very process of freezing something in a frame. “What he does is to mark time”, Leclaire says of his patient (his emphasis).

“Jerome is convinced that his death will not arrest clock time, and that is what matters for him. He has a truly spatisalised time that keeps life suspended or framed. Within this time, death is the marker of a frontier that has virtually already been attained” (Leclaire, Jerome).

With this particularly astute observation, Leclaire moves beyond the Freudian notion of the death drive as simply an inorganic state. “I am convinced that this spatialisation of time, this freezing of becoming is in part the work of the death drive”, he declares (Leclaire, Jerome, his emphasis).

The question about the death drive is not therefore ‘Am I alive or dead?’. It’s ‘What does it mean to be alive?’

Obsession is a question about life itself.

By Owen Hewitson, LacanOnline.com

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