What the neurotic does not want, and what he strenuously refuses to do right up until the end of his analysis, is to sacrifice his castration to the Other’s jouissance, allowing it to serve the Other. (Lacan, Écrits, 826).— — — —
A Lacanian point, that seems enigmatic, is that a difficult thing for the neurotic, in fact what constitutes neurosis is letting one’s castration serves the Other’s jouissance. What does this mean?
When we grow up, part of our parents’ ‘education’ of the child is to prohibit certain forms of satisfaction. What Freud called the reality-principle is not reality per se, but rather a socially constructed reality, it means a reality cut through with what is permitted or not in this reality. Societies and cultures are different in terms of what count as “reality”.
The parents will tell the child not to put its finger in its mouth when it has reached a certain age. At first such satisfaction is allowed, but sooner or later parents will prohibit it, because such satisfaction is not “proper”. Or the child will be allowed to do it at home, but not when they are out shopping. Or the child might as very young be allowed a certain satisfaction touching its genitals, but quite soon this will be prohibited. When we enter the symbolic order, our cultures social space, we have to make sacrifices. This space is first represented by our parents. They constitute the Other of the child. Later we see and learn that behind the parents is a whole society, then represented by teachers, and other representatives of “what one does”, the ideals that constitute the coherence of a world.
The child, if it’s normal-neurotic (a psychotic is another problem), will eventually cave in to these prohibitions. It will do so, in order not to receive punishment and in fear of losing all satisfaction of the body part (the ‘erogenous zone’) or because it is afraid of loosing the parental love and care it is dependent on. By renouncing satisfaction they child still clings to satisfaction here and there (like touching it’s genitals in private, sucking it’s thump when upset or any other ways to not be totally bereft of satisfaction). This is why the reality principle is still in favour of the pleasure-principle. By postponing satisfaction the child hopes to get it later or in more permitted ways.
It will in a way accept these prohibitions that are what Lacan calls “castration”. This castration is in some ways similar to Freud’s ‘reality-principle’ over pleasure-principle, as long as we keep in mind, that this is a social reality. What is prohibited or not is not universal, but changes with each historical epoch. Parents today are much more lenient with certain forms of satisfaction, than they were in Freud’s time for example.
The neurotic, however, only accepts castration on the surface. In his or her fantasy life he or she keeps dreaming about gaining access to a full satisfaction. The myth of full satisfaction only occur after the prohibition. To put one’s finger in one’s mouth only becomes really exciting once it has been prohibited. This is where pleasure or gratifaction changes into jouissance or enjoyment. The kind of of enjoyment is now no longer simply pleasureable in itself, but gets the surplus effect of being a defiance of parental law. To do what is prohibited has a meaning it did not have before it was prohibited.
The child might have accepted castration, the parent’s prohibitions, because it expected something valuable instead. This could be esteem, love, recognition — but for many these things come up short compared with the gratification the child has originally given up. As said, we only know how ‘good’ it was, once it is prohibited, once it is no longer immediately accessible. This means, that it comes into effect as full gratification only retroactively once it is no longer there, once we have given it up. Freud uses the word nachträglich, for example to refer to the retroactive effect of trauma, but Lacan develops it into a proper concept.
The child if it is neurotic to some extent accepts castration. We can distinguish between the prohibition imposed on the child, and the stance adopted by the child towards the prohibition, how the child position itself in relation to the parents demand. This means, that the child may very well begrudge the parent, that it had to sacrifice satisfaction, even though this is necessary in order to live a social life, a life with other people. The child blames the particular parent for a necessary loss as a result of entry into the symbolic order. This loss is structural, but the neurotic continues to believe that the sacrifice was only contingent, a result of parents being too strict or not strict enough. If you think about it, and most of us are neurotic, that being the closest to “normal” in psychoanalysis, have you ever met a person who simply had an uncomplicated relationship with their parents? A person who simply said: “I get along great with my parents, nothing more to be said there”, and really never uttered the slightest complaint or dissatisfaction with his or her upbringing, would probably rather strike us as mad (i.e. psychotic).
In terms of neurosis, the child position adopted to the prohibition is that of revenge and demand for compensation. One example is that of “not letting your castration serve the jouissance of the Other”. This means, that the child unconsciously says: “you may have forced prohibition on my, but in turn I will take revenge by making my life miserable, by never amounting to anything and in way cause you grief”. “After what you forced on me you also are not allowed to be happy”. The neurotic’s basic stance is: “No to the jouissance of the Other!”.
In this way, the parents happy faces in light of say the child’s success in school is something the child cannot bear, so it will sabotage it’s own accomplishments. While it consciously might pursue good grades something always seem to happen so it flunks the exams, or turn out to fail, precisely in order to say to the parents: “see, you made me sacrifice jouissance, and look where this has brought us…”.
There are many, many ways to think about this. The problem is that parental demands are always made through signifiers, that is for the sake of simplicity, words. And words are never clear, can never simply ‘say what they mean’, but are always up for interpretation. Meaning is like a carrousel. In order to get to the meaning of one word, you need to explain it with another. Meaning is never exhaustive. If we could really say what we mean, we would stop talking. There is always more to be said. While words give the illusion of transparency, so that I can signify the object elephant with a word “elephant”, it is never clear what I mean with precisely this word. The word never refers to the object elephant, but to the concept “elephant”, with all the connotations it brings. The word is never a 1:1 label, that is stuck on to the thing.
When we start talking, when we become speaking beings, we enter a world, that does not consist of things, but of words. Of course, we the world is not simply made of words. Real elephants do exist. But we have no way of reducing our words to simply designating these elephants. When I say the word “elephant” in this essay it never simply refers to an elephant, but also to a concept of signifier within the context of my explanation. Or an “elephant” has connotation of colonialism, or an exotic animal. The word is never just the thing.
If we now go back to the parent’s prohibition, it is never clear why the prohibition is made. Children usually also ask their parents a lot of “whys”. This is not just because they are “naturally curious”, but because they are social beings, that faced with the trouble of language and the way words are never simple.
If the parents prohibit the child from a certain genital satisfaction, they usually just say “don’t do it”, or “that’s not nice”. But they do not explain what exactly it is that they WANT the child to do instead. The demand is never clear as to which desire lurks behind the demand. “you, parents, are telling me this, but what do you really want with it?”. Much of the psychoanalytical work in the first years with neurotics is simply to make the neurotic stop asking for demands from the psychoanalyst about how to live their lives, to give them some ideals with which to strive after or rebel against, a bit like the way that parents gave demands, that the child could then try to live up to, or try to transgress (in private for example). Many parents have seen how when you give a prohibition or demand, your children, when they think they are alone are extremely captivated with doing exactly that (in this way trying to transgress the parental Other’s demand).
What lies behind demand is desire. Whenever a parent issues a certain demand: “do not touch that vase”, the child can always ask about the desire behind the demand: “why are you saying this to me, do you really want me to touch it, or what do you see in me that you would say this…?”. This is the problem of parental desire, the Other’s desire, that tags along the demand, so to speak.
The problem is we can never pin-down the Other’s desire. Parent’s desire with their demands, can never be spelt out, because every signifier, every demand or word, is up to interpretation (decided in the locus of the Other as Lacan says). We are never in control of how our words gets interpreted by other people.
“Just as an audience can make a lecturer’s statement into a joke by laughing at it, or a joke turn into a boring statement by remaining deadpan — and just as a mother can turn every cry by her infant into a demand for food by feeding her baby every time it cries — so too, the analyst, as a listener, can read what the analysand says either as a demand or as an expression of desire. The listener or public has the power to determine what someone had said. There is obvious a distinction between what a speaker “means” or “means to say” and what the public hears. Meaning is determined by the public, or, as Lacan says, in the locus (or place) of the Other. Despite your conscious intention to communicate something very specific, the meaning of your words is always determined by other people, by the Other.” (Fink, 43).
The meaning of what I say is not my conscious intention, but what you reader interprets out of these lines. Communication in Lacan’s sense is always mis-communication. If communication succeeded, there would be nothing more to talk about. When we communicate we constantly produce something missing, and our follow-up words are there to try and catch what we miss, only to produce more ‘waste’ (that is things that fall out, that are captured in the signifying chain).
We can try to adjust, but ultimately we can’t know what is going on their heads, and how they make decisions based on their interpretation. The same in terms of parental prohibition: we can, as parents, never know how the child will adopt a stance vis-a-vis the parental demand. This means that the adoption of a stance points to the child as subject. If children were simply obeying demands in a uniform way, if signifiers were simply like a machine’s communication, there would be no subject. Children would simply be marionettes.
Subject is not what is usually thought of the subject in philosophical tradition, as an active agent against the object of natural world for example. The ego thinks it such an active agent, but the unconscious subject that speaks through it, that for example causes slip of the tongue, shows, that as Freud says, the “ego is not master in his own house”. While many people have tried to trivialize Freud’s point, how many of us still in some ways cling to this belief, that we are really conscious agents of our own discourse, that we do what we want, that we want to pursue happiness etc.
The subject, if anything, is, in the psychoanalytical conception, much more a primordially passive stance. The subject in this sense, is the result of the way the child, chooses to adopt a stance vis-a-vis the parental Other’s prohibition. We should think of this choice as very different from free choice in common parlance. A free choice is modelled on some version of several options, that are all readily available and then I choose, in full consciousness one option over others. I chose this insurance policy, because I think it is better than the other one. I chose strawberry cake in stead of chocolate cake. These are all models of choices, that have colonized what we think of as a ‘choice’.
As I said, there is both the parent’s prohibition imposed on the child, but also the child’s choice in relation to this prohibition. This is however a forced choice. It is, unless you opt for psychosis a forced choice to let words represent you. If you want to communicate with others, you have to use words. They cannot read your thoughts. You have to speak. This means that you let something step in, something that comes between “you” and the “other”. It means that you pass into the medium of language and thereby must obey the logic that is internal to words. This is why the study of language and how it works is so important for psychoanalysis. When we read Freud’s early works they are all obsessed with the “logic of the signifier”, that is how the unconscious works through linguistic mechanisms. If the unconscious was not manifested in words, or gestures which we can read, as though it was a language, we would not even know of it. As Lacan will go on to say in seminar 11, the unconscious is not a substance. It is a “thing”, but something we can read in the what is said.
Let us take one example used by Freud. A young man pledges his love to a young woman. Yet, every time they are supposed to meet, something comes up, or he forgets it, or is too late. He claims this is all just a coincidence. She on the other hand, reads these many acts as a sign, that he is “just not that into you”. She reads his failure not simply as random, but as a pattern, where a sense, a meaning can be read. In this way an other unconscious meaning can be found, namely that he doesn’t like her that much. In this sense, the lady reads the acts (his consistent failure to show up), as a message, that is, as a language. She interprets an unconscious meaning to these gestures. But she can only do that because she takes the gestures as “signifiers”. The unconscious is not a profound substance, lurking somehow behind all these gestures, it is manifested in these gestures. The unconscious is on the surface, not in the depth.
Freud can therefore be seen to proceed in to moves. In the beginning of psychoanalytic movement, he tried to emphasize the meaning of the unconscious. When a person made a slip of the tongue, this was not simply a random act (because he was tired), but the content of the slip had a certain meaning. To take one example from Freud’s book on jokes. A wife says to her husband, “I am so tired of work, I cannot wait for the alcoholidays”. She made a slip of the tongue, saying alcoholidays instead of holidays. As Freud says, she probably made the slip because she was tired. But the content, the word, alcoholidays, is not just random. It has a meaning, which we can pursue — here maybe that she only wanted to drink and not spend time with her husband. Freud’s point here is that there is meaning (Sinn) in such slips. They can be read, there is “full psychic act”, similar to a conscious act in her slip.
The more important gesture was always present in Freud, but he had to emphasize it in a later edition of the Interpretation of Dreams. Here psychoanalysis had gotten some measure of success and it was time for Freud to issue a warning. Now people were searching for meaning all the time in slips, dreams, jokes. But they thought the meaning was behind the words, buried deep down in the person’s psyche. In this way, they took the unconscious as a substance, that ‘expressed’ itself through words. On the contrary, says Freud, the unconscious is not the latent thoughts, but in the form itself, it is manifest. In the case of alcoholidays we can read the unconscious because it was manifested in the word combining alcohol and holidays. If we simply stop to pay attention to the form the unconscious takes, we miss the entire Freudian innovation. As Freud says about the technique of jokes, we get pleasure out of them, a joke, through the technique, not simply the “meaning”. Through a certain play on words. To take a silly joke from the movie First Cow: “which side of the tree has the most branches?” “The outside”. Here “side” unexpectedly refers not to left or right, which we presume, but is used in another way, as inside or outside, “side” is a signifier that points to a several signifieds (meanings). We would not get a joke if we formulated it in other words, the unconscious “stick” to the words, like branches on a tree, we might add.
Let’s go back to the child’s adopted stance vis a vis the parent’s prohibition.
The child does not much have a choice in the matter. To completely refuse the prohibition is to enter psychosis (which I will address in another post). Freud talks of “unconscious choice of neurosis”, meaning that the child as a subject is born through the choice. It is not so much a subject that makes a choice, as a choice that makes a subject. This is another way to understand the logic of retroactivity. We didn’t know we had a choice, until it is already too late, since we only get to be subjects as a result of a choice.
To give an example: one child will adopt a stance of trying to live up to the prohibition. Take a class-room: we all know the over-achieving students. The seem somehow too ready to listen, to eager to please. It is this very exaggeration in complying with demands, that give you an indication of the subject. There is no perfect way to comply with a demand, because we can never know the desire behind the demand. In my own experience in school, we often had teachers that said: “don’t cheat on the test because you only cheat yourself”. Then however, the teacher would go out of the classroom, clearly indicating that you COULD cheat now by looking at the smart kid’s answers and simply because other people did it, you would be stupid not to. The teacher’s message was therefore something like “please cheat, but do it in such a way that I do not see it, and can keep my good conscience”. The problem was that if we did not cheat we would not get as good result in the test, which would then have an effect on the teacher. In other words, you had to cheat out of loyalty to the teacher, but you also had to do it in such a way, that the teacher could keep his good conscience. We therefore interpreted the teacher’s desire to be: “cheat discretely”. The demand was “don’t cheat”, but the desire behind, which can never be stated as such, was “cheat, but don’t let me see it, allow me my innocence, so I can look at your fine exam results with a straight face!”.
There is no way to comply simply with a demand. A demand always leaves something to be desired, something that is not completely stated, and which the child carries the burden of interpreting. This will be very important in the psychoanalytical work, since part of the work is to work through the interpretations we did as children, that still influence so many of our choices later on, without us consciously knowing so.
So, the child’s desire is an interpretation of the parental desire. Lacan’s seminar VI is simply titled desire and its interpretation, and in a way they are the same thing, since desire is always a result of an interpretation. This is why children are so focused on half-uttered statements, or gestures, called by Jean Laplanche “enigmatic signifiers”, that is signifiers that seem to mean something, but the meaning of which we cannot decipher and therefore is like a material density on the child (what do they mean by….). I had a friend who, as very young 3–4 years, had a father, that whenever he was upset, said loudly in the room, “oh yes, now what kind of human rights have been violated now”. The point was that my friend, being 4 years old at the time had no sense of what human rights were, or what his father meant with it. He did however sense, that this refrain was somehow directed not simply towards him, but towards some Other, someone who was supposed to understand what it meant. He also sensed in the tone of voice, that the father was sarcastic. This was not a “stern” father, but this refrain became an enigmatic signifier, something the child had to situate himself in relation to, offer some kind of interpretation to lift the weight of the words that pressed themselves upon him. He sensed distress creaping through the father’s words — but what they meant was incomprehensible to him.
He interpreted that, since this refrain came often, that it was the father’s protest against him and his being. But also that this protest was not directly meant for him, although he was the only one in the room. In other words, it points to a level in the parental Other, where the Other also do not know why he is saying what he is saying: Where the father doesn’t know. To echo a reversal made by Slavoj Žižek: and where the Other doesn’t know, the Other enjoys. This meant that the other side of these enigmatic signifiers were not “more meaning”, something ineffable, (some deep hermeneutical meaning), but rather enjoyment, that didn’t have any meaning, that only meant a certain suffering and complaint, where the Other enjoys is also where a certain “non-meaning” occurs, enjoyment in the field of the Other can only appear as non-meaning, as meaningless signifiers, as in the child’s listening to the father’s complaints of “oh no, which humans rights have NOW been violated…”.
This is one aspect of what Lacan means with the formula, mostly of his early to middle years of “man’s desire is the Other’s desire”. During psychoanalytical work we discover that many of our desires, are precisely interpretation of parental desire. In my friend’s case, for example the interpretation of parental desire, that he should rather not complain about anything, and that the slightest complaint meant, that the father would rather wish not to have become a father. It can also be the opposite, since to formulate a desire of constant complaint to take revenge, only acquires a meaning through transgressing the parental desire. In either case, one is caught in the dialectic of the law and its transgression.
When we discover that our desires are parental desires, or desires of the Other, we can go the next problem which by Lacan is called the fundamental fantasy. In this case, the fundamental fantasy refers to as what Rey says in Star Wars to her master Luke: “I need you to show me my place in the world”. In other words, where do I fit in, what is the meaning of life? Every child is a result of something that preceeded its own birth. It comes into the world that has already talked about it, giving it a name, it has not chosen itself, and as a result of parental desire. These desires rarely converge on the parents’ part (they have different reasons for wanting, or even not wanting a child).
The fantasy is not about the child as a subject, but as an object. The child’s stance in relation to the parental desire: what do I need to do in order to make my parent’s not desire (not be lacking and unhappy anymore): “Fantasy is the prop and index of a certain position of the subject in desire.” (Lacan, VI, 499/422). Fantasy is not so much the child’s own desire, fantasy helps the child coordinate the desire of the Other and where the child itself fits in. In French the genitive can be taken as both subjective and objective in desire of the Other (desir de l’Autre). It means both the desire FOR the Other (the child’s desire to be the object of the Other’s desire) and the desire OF the Other (to know what this desire is so the child can become its object).
In the case of my friend, the fundamental fantasy could be: which object do I have to be in order that my father may be happy? It could also be that the child interprets that the father gets a lot of enjoyment out of this complaint, fantasizing himself of what a great life he could have had, if not the child had been born, and in this sense, continue to complain “I must be an object that fits within my father’s fantasy space as an object that complains”. The fundamental fantasy therefore concerns a fundamental scenario, that places the child as an object in a certain story or narrative. In Freud’s famous essay: “a child is being beaten”, the fantasy refers to being an object, that is being beaten by the father (who presumably, in the fantasy enjoys this).
Fantasy is not so much something already fully formulated, but is often constructed doing analysis. It is unconscious before, but also only half-said. in Freud’s example, there are three steps of fantasy, and it is only the first and the third that exist, the second being purely fantasmatic. “A child is being beaten” is the explicit fantasy, but through the psychoanalytical work it can become clear, that it is really “my father is beating me” that is the fundamental fantasy. As Freud says, it does not matter, whether the patient ever really formulated this fantasy, or if it’s constructed doing the psychoanalytic work, it determines the core of the subject’s being. The fundamental fantasy has the same valence. It is also the hardest to give up, because it is the one that determines the only substance that the patient has to hold on to, his “sense of reality” is bound up with the fundamental fantasy. To traverse the fundamental fantasy is therefore akin to a loosing one’s footing in the world, as though reality as such breaks down.
One of the ways in which the child tries to get revenge on the parents or the parental Other is through not allowing the Other to enjoy on their behalf. It is as if the child said: “ok, I will give up satisfaction, but never shall YOU, my parent, come experience any satisfaction from my existence!”. A big part of the psychoanalytical work in its final stages is therefore to go through the fantasy, and allow the Other to enjoy, without seeking compensation. The child keeps waiting for compensation for the initial sacrifice of enjoyment, but such a compensation never comes. To go through the fantasy is therefore first to accept the fantasy as a choice of interpretation that has no real justification in the parent, what the parent said or did. Ultimately only the child’s own interpretation can be put to blame, and if it was not so, there also would be no “cure”, it would not be possible to change anything in the patient’s mode of existence.
When the patient goes through the fundamental fantasy he accepts, in a way, that the parental Other does not have all the answers. Fink calls this with a nice formulation, subjectifying the cause. This means, that the patient takes over the desire, that was hithertoo formed as a foreign element, based on the interpretation of the parent’s desire. This is also what Lacan means with dialectizing desires. This means to bring desire into a movement, to make it “move” from the fixity of a certain parental demand about what the child should be (which object it presumes to fill in the parental fantasy). This means that subjectifying desire is that the subject takes over “subjectifies” the cause of its own desire. So far the cause was seen in the parent’s desire (my desires are formed as a result of the interpretation of what my parents really want me to be). But if the patient realizes that this is really his or her own interpretation, he comes to be “where he already was”. Instead of really the parents desire, it becomes more obvious that this was the child’s interpretation. In a way we can say that the patient becomes “like a child again” (echoing Nietzsche’s refrain about a ‘second innocence’ as the necessary state of creation), precisely because he gets to “re-do” the prior interpretation he or she did as a child.
The patient becomes less concerned or fixated with the Other’s desire or the Other’s jouissance. “So what if my parent enjoys my success?”, the patients desire is taken over by him or herself and is dislodged from the superego demand of the parent. Lacan also refers to this as the “cause of desire”, also called objet petit a. This cause is now the subject’s own. In a way it allows the Other’s desire to come forth, because desire is founded in a lack (the Other can only desire if the Other is lacking). This allows the lack to persists, in a way to say, that the Other really doesn’t know why it desires, since desire is not fixed to any particular demand. In case of my friend, it means, that precisely in the father’s complaints “which human rights have now been violated?” — there really is no reason, no profound meaning in this phrase, it rather refers to the non-knowledge, the lack in the parental Other itself.
We should note how different it is to permit the Other its jouissance from providing the Other its jouissance which is the perverts strategy. While the neurotic is precisely saying no to the Other’s jouissance, the pervert aim is to make himself an object or instrument of its realization. The end of the cure for the neurotic is much more like an indifference to the Other’s jouissance, whereas the pervert is anything but indifferent. He only exists in so far as he can feed the Other with jouissance. It is therefore also a strategy of avoiding anxiety that occurs when we have to face the lack in the Other, the pervert is constantly ‘stuffing’ this lack with jouissance. (see my essay on perversion).
Recommended reading:I rely in this heavily on Bruce Fink’s outstanding and ‘readable’ reading of Lacan, Fink t is turn based on both Jacques-Alain Miller’s seminars in orientation lacanienne in France and Colette Soler’s writings.
Bruce Fink: A Clinical introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Theory and Technique. Cambridge. Harvard University Press. 1997.
A supplementary note:
It should be noted that this essay does not deal with the Other’s jouissance from seminar XX. This Other jouissance is related to feminine sexuation, but I will write on this in another essay.
No comments:
Post a Comment