Anxiety Between Desire and the Body

What Lacan Says in Seminar X

Bogdan Wolf

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429655449
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book provides a unique analysis of Lacan's conception of anxiety as presented in one of his most fascinating seminars, Seminar X. The seminar took place in the lead up to Lacan's infamous excommunication from the IPA.

Revisiting Freud's work on the topic, Lacan conceives anxiety in an "anxiety chart" which includes adjacent terms such as inhibition, embarrassment, and turmoil. He sees desire as the kernel of anxiety, before turning attention to the body.

Anxiety Between Desire and the Body: What Lacan Says in Seminar X is written from the perspective of the analytical experience, its logic, and its surprising discoveries. It will be of great interest to students of Lacanian psychoanalysis, as well as philosophers interested in Lacan's work.

1

To begin – between anxiety and love

The politics of Lacan’s Seminar X: why anxiety?

I want to start by raising the question of the theme Lacan chose for his Seminar in 1962 – anxiety. This will perhaps be best done if I sketch out the situation Lacan was in at that time. To introduce this gripping Seminar that turned out to be crucial and instrumental for what we now habitually call “later teaching” of Lacan, one must speak about its politics – politics of the Seminar X, in particular, and of Lacan’s teaching at the threshold of his separation from the institution he was a part of for over a decade at the time. I propose to address these questions in the following points:

1. By the early 1960s Lacan achieved a considerable status, having concluded a decade of work referred to by him and others as his “teaching”.
2. For some years, this teaching already raised many eyebrows because of Lacan’s formulations and proposals, especially that of the object a – which is the case here, but not only.
3. Lacan did not speak about the object a to suit and adjust it to the scientific requirements, not even for the purpose of the “solidarity of church and science”. In fact, the object a became what I would call a point of indeterminacy that renewed psychoanalysis by keeping it as separate from science and opened new lines of addressing Freud’s discourse – the famous “return to Freud”. Lacan’s discourse was not to the taste of the scientific community that nevertheless surrounded him. His focus was rather on the mysterious object a that allowed him to make statements like “I desire you even if I don’t know this”. Imagine a scientist saying: the world is made of genes because I want it to be clearer and more understandable.
4. In short, Lacan took as a start the enigma of desire, of which object a was a reminder, and not its science or even interpretation. And that began to cause problems “to the mass-effects entailed in the delusion of scientism”, as Recalde put it.
5. Then, there was the infamous session, the Lacanian session, not measured by the time of the clock but by the logic of the unconscious and the vicinity of the object a. This session, often called “short” or, more precisely, “variable”, turned out to show, as Jacques-Alain Miller remarked, that its true dimension was that of infinity. We can think here about the “anxiety effect” at the moment of the cut. This anxiety effect appears in analysis in an encounter with the analyst, i.e. with the infinity of the Other’s desire.
6. Lacan came to the point of anxiety only in effect of undercutting the well-formed and established discourse. To achieve this, he began to speak about his teaching, again. He embarked on a revision of his own formulations to rearticulate them and resituate them – an already anguishing exercise – to circumscribe the place of the object a as the point of indeterminacy that cannot be defined by science. According to Jacques-Alain Miller, Lacan wanted to demythologise psychoanalysis as a concept, and that implied a certain disenfranchisement, even disenchantment of psychoanalysis. In short, Lacan presented his Seminar on the object a, but not without anxiety, making it the sine qua non of anxiety.
7. All this led him to the point when his teaching came under growing scrutiny. We could say that during his seminar lessons at the time a certain “dossier” was being jotted down by his colleagues on the man and his work. And this led others to find him on the edges of the orthodoxy. But Lacan’s teaching was neither unFreudian nor unorthodox – it rather followed the meanders of the real with the object a. Towards the end of 1963 Lacan wrote to Leclaire that all he wanted in that past ten years of his teaching was “to have a training/formation that would not be a lie”. That’s why, before speaking about the analyst’s desire, which was new at the time, Lacan spoke of the anxiety of the analyst, which we will address in detail later.
8. There was something else that made Lacan bring the object a to the fore and to speak of anxiety of the analysand, and of the analyst, as conditioned and constituted by the object a. Lacan was already anticipating a moment of separation from the French Society. It is what Jacques-Alain Miller makes plain in his commentary. In short, Lacan’s choice was not accidental, and this will gradually emerge in relation, among other coordinates, to the revision of countertransference I will undertake here.

Desire not without anxiety

Lacan starts with anxiety that can be experienced as a moment when we can no longer speak about the concept and, in particular, the concept of anxiety. He approaches anxiety as raw, rather than cooked, to use Lévi-Strauss’ opposition, although for Lacan this opposition does not correspond to the one between nature and culture. In other words, anxiety emerges at the moment when our entire arsenal of means of transmission, the lexicon of concepts and conceptualisations, of definitions, quotations, oppositions, like the raw and the cooked, come to a dead end. What remains at this end is only the desire to say an unknown real. At the end of the road the real begins to be felt.

This anxiety effect I have just mentioned coincides with the infinity of desire. Already Lacan says that those who only train analytic technique or who use the ready to hand concepts in their clinical work, aim at nothing else than regulating and pacifying the anxiety effects (2016, 5). It amounts to a certain mortification of desire. The discourse of science and religion always served this purpose until one began to speak about anxiety of the priest and of the scientist. This tendency to regulate talking therapies, as coming from the anxious analysts, to erase the anxiety effects by reducing them to a technique of management, and therefore to an algorithm, amounted to stifling and stagnating the effects of the analytic process and of psychoanalysis. That’s why Lacan returns to anxiety in a different way. I would put it like this. When the distance between concepts, which are signifiers, with which we navigate in analysis or in life after analysis, and that which remains of the real, is no longer certain, no longer to be regulated, calculated, and determined, then this is the time for anxiety to emerge …

In 1962, Lacan spoke about a certain end of the subject’s happiness. As you know, the happy subject is how Lacan defined the speaking subject who through speaking, associating, and the incessant blah-blah, covers up his division and lack. The subject comes to the session after session and speaks about his problems, shortcomings, things he is not, does not have, cannot do, and how the others fail him, and so on. And in doing so, in this incessant speech about his lacks and grievances, he no longer speaks about his lack but about what he in fact does not lack, his happiness to speak, his jouissance to keep the object hidden away from him. The happy subject is therefore on the side of the drive. Lacan started to put this drive-speech and the subject’s happiness not to cease to speak into question. The subject may be happy in alienation, but he is no longer happy in separation where the object is at stake, e.g. in the question what I am for the Other.

And this was a little indication Lacan gave at the time, it seems to me, that the psychoanalytic treatment can turn into a scientific delusion if we assume that everything the subject says can be defined, measured, categorised, which is what you do in science. As Masters and Jones did, for example, in sexuality, trying to measure sexual jouissance, define its duration, intensity, beginning and end, and so on.

Throughout Seminar X, anxiety is tied with speech. And through speech anxiety is tied with desire. In fact, Lacan’s indiscreet proposition is that there is no speech without desire. I call it “indiscreet” because it indicates that the subject is put on the spot in his speech and that he is, in fact, not at all happy or not happy at all. And this can be embarrassing as we shall see. But Lacan also proposes here that the reverse is also the case, and that there is no desire without speech. It is a bold proposition that does not leave room for manoeuvre and we may feel a bit pushed to the corner. Topologically speaking, speech and desire are connected as interlinking tubes of the torus, which Lacan only spoke about a year earlier. In fact, a few months before Seminar X, in lesson 14 of his Seminar IX “Identification”, Lacan says that desire is constituted from that part of demand that is “hidden from the Other”. What does it mean? It means that in the constitution of desire, and on the account of what is hidden, nothing can be guaranteed to the subject by the Other qua truth. Truth guarantees nothing, because the truth itself lies when one speaks – “I, truth, lie”, as Lacan said earlier. In this sense, the truth is a veil covering the object a which the subject does not want to know anything about. At that moment, when speech and desire appear as interlinked, there is no way to escape from the object a, nowhere to hide which can be indiscreet. The a is to be located in the interface which is also a knot and an entrapment. As you can see from the start, Lacan approaches the constitution of desire on the fringes of the network of the signifiers.

First then, for anxiety to emerge, it has to be constituted at the level of desire. Speech, we could say, is not only the catalyst of anxiety but also its carrier – it carries what is not the signifier. Lacan always told us that this carrying derives from the fact that while being addressed to another, speech is also an effect and even a remainder of that part of the Other’s demand that is hidden from the Other. So now, Lacan can say, which he does indirectly, that speech carries and, in this sense, transmits and arouses anxiety to the extent that it links various forms of constitution of the object a in the speech act. As you will see later this goes not only for the voice and gaze but also relates to the oral and anal dimensions.

The link between speech and the object of desire was highlighted by Jacques-Alain Miller who said that in Seminar X the object a is a spoken object, always relates to speech in so far as speech always relates to desire. In Seminar X, Lacan goes even further by providing us with clues as to how to link speech to those body phenomena and bodily orifices that are not organised by the master signifier, such as oral, anal, respiratory, orgasmic. Through speech, then, desire is not without anxiety, just as anxiety itself is not without an object whose emergence is an indication of the lack at the heart of desire. In fact, anxiety becomes manifest as an experience of the Other’s desire in speech.

From the perspective of the constitution of desire, and in a paradoxical way, Seminar X comes after Seminar XXIII Sinthome that Lacan devoted to reading, to topologising Joyce because the dimension of the letter has nothing to do with anxiety. The writing of Joyce, its function and its knottings with jouissance, has nothing to do with anxiety’s connection with desire in speech, let alone with the object a through which, and not without which, we can speak of an emergence of anxiety. On a different level, the process of writing may arouse anxiety by coming close to the object a in which case the question arises what kind of object is at stake in writing that involves the scopic, but only as we shall see, dimension where the object a of desire in the field of the Other is the gaze.

Beyond castration anxiety

In this overview, I am introducing you directly and indirectly to what awaits us in our journey through and around Lacan’s Seminar on Anxiety. I have found the Seminar gripping as Lacan gives for the first time an in-depth elaboration of a, articulating the ways in which it causes desire to emerge not without speech and not without anxiety. This multiple entanglement is what we have to approach not to disentangle it but to single out and isolate the threads that constitute it.

The constitution of desire is rooted in the phallic function as its sine qua non to the extent that the phallus is never on the scene it nevertheless organises. And if it does appear on the scene, then there is anxiety. In its “normal” function, as Lacan calls it, the phallus is where it is not, and it is not where it is. In so far as the phallus fails to capture the object a as raw, as jouissance that remains at the end of passing through the signifier, Lacan marked for us this function of the phallus as -φ.

The phallus always raises certain hopes for both women and men. It makes them search for it in different ways. The woman searches for it due to not having it. And the man finds it only when he loses it at the moment of the copulatory function, which is the cutting point by the interference of anxiety that Lacan assigned to orgasm at this level. In orgasm, anxiety marks the certainty with a lack. So, according to the logic of castration, the man can only have the phallus at the post-erectile moment of detumescence.

Freud spoke of castration, and more specifically of castration anxiety, solely in relation to the man. Lacan questioned this central concept of Freud on two levels: one, castration (division of the subject who relinquishes his claim to the all-powerfulness of the signifier) has nothing to do with anxiety; two, both men and women experience castration, and Lacan’s answer to this is the division of the subject. The question that arises here is: why anxiety when the phallus is at issue? Freud answered the question by linking anxiety with the loss of object. This, in the case of man, translates into man being threatened with the fear of losing his most precious possession. But Lacan goes further. Having is interlinked with being as they show two sides of identification. Both having and being, concern desire, and not some preordained metaphysics. If the subject does not have what he/she wants – which of course is not only on the side of the woman but also of men who likewise want to have possessions, for example women as wives, but also careers, wealth, and even fatherhood that are imbued with the phallic value – then the subject will embark upon the path of wanting to be what the Other has which is the other side of identification.

So, when wanting to have leads inevitably to failure, producing anxiety of not having enough, of not knowing for how long or how to enjoy what one has, which comes down to the destitution of the subject on the side of having, then the direction changes to being. Being the object of and for the Other may give some desire to want to have – back. That’s why Lacan’s starting point in the libidinal organisation is not castration but privation. Privation implies the real hole in the sense of the lack of the real object which is the cutting point – I cannot have what I am for the Other.

In Seminar X, Lacan goes beyond Freud on castration and surprises us again (2014, 46). Lacan takes us straight to the crux of the question of castration by stating that what the neurotic runs away from is not his castration, even less an anxiety of it. What the neurotic runs away from, what he flinches is turning his castration into the lack in the Other. In the first moment of castration we have a denial, which Lacan elaborated in his text “The Signification of the Phallus”. Castration is first to be recognised by the neurotic by way of the denial of the castration of the Other. Hence fetish is given straight away a status of the cornerstone of neurosis. Secondly, by doing so, by denying the Other’s castration, he denies his own castration. Flinching from turning his castration into the lack in the Other appears as an effect of the denial, which Lacan brought down, following Freud, to the denial of the lack of the phallus of the mother. Castration has then a double effect of the subject’s castration being implicated in the castration of the Other. It would be another matter, but within the structure, to consider a case of denial, say of the Holocaust, which carries a punishment in law. This means it is forbidden to deny, which is precisely in the heart of denial, that the Other, God if you like, did not have enough power to prevent it. Auschwitz thus confirms God’s impotence, which does not make humans less impotent or more powerful.

For the neurotic to admit his castration, then, amounts for Lacan to admit the lack in the Other, which he already placed in the upper part of the graph of desire in Seminar V and thereafter. But that’s precisely what the neurotic refuses to do. In refusing to recognise the Other’s lack, the neurotic refuses to recognise his own. Anxiety emerges in the interface of the supposed confusion: whose lack, mine or yours? Or, in effect, which is my aim here, the question points to the object: where is the object of the Other’s desire, the object with which I can identify, given the side of having has proved insufficient and unsatisfactory? Is it hidden, where, in which orifice? In the third step, Lacan can now say that the lack in the Other provides the only guarantee available of the function of the Other. In other words, only having gone through castration allows for the Other to function.

Lacan’s position to show the Other’s lack led him in the direction of the subject, not only a child, who always believed in the Other as the sole support of the signifying existence. The Other is therefore a seat of fiction, an almanac of unfinished stories and unwritten histories. If these stories were to achieve a status of the myth of the absolute or have ever become what Descartes called “indubitable certainty”, there would have to be a jouissance that not only accompanies but seals these fictions and turns them into unquestionable reality. And just when the neurotic approaches this almanac of stories, online or in print, we are inundated with day in and day out, to find there a signifier that would give him the final and conclusive seal of guarantee, this signifier appears to be missing and exposes his castration...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1. To begin – between anxiety and love
• 2. Anxiety chart
• 3. The cause of desire and the object a
• 4. “Perverse Solutions”
• 5. Revision of countertransference (1)
• 6. Revision of countertransference (2)
• 7. Signs of love – women know best
• 8. Phenomena of the speaking body
• 9. The constitution of the object a
• 10. The phallus and the silent voice
• 11. Psychoanalytic clinic – anxiety and the obsessional neurosis
• Bibliography
• Index