Let's Keep Talking

Lacanian Tales of Love, Sex, and Other Catastrophes

Yael Goldman Baldwin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429915659
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Let's Keep Talking: Lacanian Tales of Love, Sex, and Other Catastrophes is a collection of original Lacanian case studies of young people today as they struggle with their own modern existential dilemmas of sex and love, life and death. The context, background, and forms of expression may be contemporary, but the clients' problems, structures, and existential dilemmas are quite classic. The five narrative tales highlight the role a Lacanian orientation played in the interactions, formulations, and results, from initial meetings to terminations. Grounded in concrete clinical material, the case studies illuminate specific and universal themes of human suffering and how we can treat that suffering by speaking. Yael Baldwin argues that in our cultural milieu of "connective technologies", and the rise of biotechnology and psychopharmacology in particular, we are in need of mental health treatment methods that highlight talking and relationships as essential to our personhood, our suffering, and our healing and growth. Let's Keep Talking argues that now, more than ever, we need the endeavour of analytic talk therapy.

Chapter One
Needling the virgin: navigating the pathways of hysterical desire

In each of these five case studies, I have chosen a few aspects of therapeutic work, from amongst the myriad, to bring to the fore. In this case, I focus on the role of speech in recognising a person’s (Lacan would say subject’s) desire, and how that desire relates to the Other’s desire, maps onto ego identifications, and is embedded in the workings of the signifying chain. I also explicate Lacan’s formulation of “the hysteric’s question”. And if only fragments or possibly none of those opening sentences made sense, the case itself will hopefully shed much light. I often tell my students that when working with Lacanian theory, we must take a breath and remain calm in the face of uncertainty. Lacan’s teachings remind us to dwell in the realm of unknowing, to listen, and to follow the signifiers. The following case also offers an example of working with a client with hysterical structure. First a brief discussion of Lacan’s specific diagnostic scheme is in order.

Diagnostic distinctions, Lacanian style

A main feature that distinguishes a Lacanian approach from other therapeutic models is the adopted diagnostic system. Clinicians use diagnostic categories as short cuts to reference a client’s problems, symptoms, style, and pervasive relational patterns. These categories orient clinicians regarding treatment recommendations. Currently, the majority of mental health professionals in the United States rely on the DSM model.¹ Lacan’s diagnostic schema, however, is not your regular DSM, and the difference in systems can make dialogue between clinicians of varying schools more difficult. We are utilising distinct vocabularies; the translation barriers of English and French are repeated in the DSM versus the Lacanian diagnostic divergence. In an effort to further conversation between practitioners across theoretical orientations, Lacanians must elucidate our diagnostic system in a manner that resonates with other mental health professionals.

There are a number of excellent theoretical accounts of Lacan’s diagnostic schema available in English (see Fink, 1997 & 2005; Grigg, 2008; Guéguen, 2013; J. -A. Miller, 1996a; Nobus, 2000; and Soler, 1996). For present purposes I will draw upon the five case studies presented here to illuminate two of the categories, also known as subjective structures, that fall under the neurosis category: hysteria and obsessional neurosis, of which a very brief elaboration is in order.

Lacan’s diagnostic schema is based upon the works of Freud, as well as various classical European psychiatrists including Kraepelin and Clérambault. Unlike the DSM, with its ever-burgeoning diagnostic classifications, the Lacanian schema has only three main categories: neurosis, perversion, and psychosis. From a Lacanian approach, the clinician must work on situating the subject by distinguishing between structural categories. One of the first questions the clinician asks herself is whether the client has a neurotic, perverse, or psychotic structure. This distinction is particularly important because one works quite differently with neurotic patients than with psychotic ones.² One certainly does not want to trigger a psychotic break in a client with psychotic structure, which is possible if one is not careful.

If a client is believed to have neurotic structure, then one determines more specifically whether he or she falls under the hysteric, obsessional, or phobic type. These categories are not comprised of a variety pack of symptoms as the DSM’s are. While people with shared structures are likely to exhibit similar symptoms, these alone do not guarantee structure. One must decipher how the symptoms relate to psychic structure. A main task in describing a Lacanian approach is articulating how to recognise structural differences between diagnostic categories, what they can actually look like in practice, and how we work differently depending upon the diagnosis.

Differentiating between hysteric and obsessional structure, Lacan poses that both are concerned with the question of their being. However, obsessionals are more concerned with the question of existence, “What am I as a living being?” or “To be or not to be?” Whereas the hysteric’s question concerns her sexual being, “What is it to be a woman?”³ Those somewhat acquainted with Lacan may have heard that the hysteric’s question is “Who am I? A man or a woman?” and still may not have understood it. People who have heard of this formulation have asked me, “But what does that actually mean?” I find that fully understanding these questions, in relation to the two structures, is possible only in relation to actual human/clinical experience.

In this chapter, I explore the diagnostic category of hysteria and emphasise the hysteric’s question. Certainly, a client does not (usually) embark upon therapy articulating, “I want to know what it is to be a woman”. Rather, the neurotic’s question is a “secret and muzzled question” (Lacan, 1993, p. 174). One asks her or his question via symptoms, parapraxes, and relationships to others and the world. Lacan deciphered and distilled these questions from Freud’s texts and clinical phenomena. Indeed, one of Lacan’s leading contributions is his formulation of these questions in relation to neurotic structure.

In the following, I discuss how Lacan’s formulations of hysteria guided my clinical work with a client whom I shall refer to with the pseudonym Mona. I chose this name, in part, because the sound “Mona” simultaneously captures a reference to both sexuality and suffering. It evokes the sense of pleasure and pain related to sexuality. It also connotes a complaint. Indeed, this client bemoaned her circumstances, particularly in the sexual relationship arena, and blamed the Other—an important term we will return to below—for her misery. Also, the meaning of Mona’s actual given name implied sadness and had a sexual connotation, and thus while the name I have bestowed upon her is fake for the sake of confidentiality, it also remains true. Readers may also notice that the signifier Mona shares phonetic similarities with the name “Dora”, who was Freud’s hysteric par excellence, and we will have occasion to discuss Dora later in this chapter.

To be sure, there is always something in a name. A child’s given name is a signifier par excellence of the parents’ desires. As a therapist, I make a point to explore a client’s given name and why a particular name was bestowed—the story around the name. Names often play an integral role in situating a person, unconsciously and consciously, within a family and the larger social environment.

The case: the other, the signifying chain, and coming attractions

Early in our work together, it became clear that Mona fit into the hysteric category rather neatly. My first clue was what Mona talked about most—she spent the majority of her sessions discussing her relationships with men. Whereas the hysteric tends to fill up her⁴ analytic sessions speaking about her relationship to the Other and where she fits into the Other’s desire, the obsessional, as we shall see in Chapters Two and Four, endeavours to eliminate the Other from his discourse and speak about theories, the world, or himself divorced from the Other, as much as possible. One thing was clear—Mona’s discourse was intent on questioning the Other’s desire.

Lacan explicitly distinguishes between the “other” and the “Other” with a capital O (in French it is “autre” and “Autre”, hence the symbol A for Other and a for the other in Lacanian algebra). The “other”, also known as “the little other”, “small other”, or semblable, refers to other people, people who are like you or me, often with whom one competes, in the form of ego rivalries.⁵ The “Other”, also known as “the big Other” takes on many forms—the Other as language, the Other of speech, of law, of desire, and the Other of the unconscious, to name a few. Perhaps it is easiest to think of the difference between “other” and “Other” in terms of a position that stands in relation to the person. Whereas I can point to an “other”, for example, a sibling or friend, and say she is so and so and is like me or not like me, the “Other” is abstract; it is actually not a person at all but a locus, a place, that is present in any relationship I have with another person and mediates the relationship between us. The Other holds a locus or position, which may be, for example, of demand, desire, or power. One example is the notion of “Big Brother”, which we interpret as a group of people who have desires and power over us, but we have trouble pinning “them” down. We can also make a comparison with a game of chess where the relationship I have to the other player is mediated by the rules of the game. There is always an imaginary component in any game—of bluff, intimidation, rivalry, and seduction—but ultimately, in a game like chess, the rules of the game determine how the players relate. Similarly, the Other always mediates one’s relationship to others, though obviously in a much more complex manner. If we take sexual relations as an example, we can say that Oedipal issues will mediate access to a sexual partner. Indeed, psychoanalysis has shown that the Oedipus complex is close to being the bedrock of the Other.

Mona’s position in relation to the Other proved to be representative of the hysteric’s position. What also unfolded in our work together was how Mona’s romantic relationships served as supports for her desire, which also proved to be characteristic of an hysteric logic of desire. Mona’s neurotic strategy can be most clearly elucidated if we look in turn at her relationships with five significant men in her life. Each relationship formed a triangular circuit of desire, which contained the imperative presence of another woman. These relationships provided the material out of which Mona formulated the hysteric’s question “Am I a man or a woman?” via complex identificatory processes that are characteristic of hysteric structure. We will also see how Mona embodied the hysteric’s question with her very being, including her somatic (i.e., conversion) symptoms, which are characteristic of, although not definitive of, hysteric structure. In addition to the case material, I utilise both Freud’s case of Dora (1963), who in analytic literature represents a classic case of hysteria, and Lacan’s commentary on the Dora case (1994), to shed light on the logic of hysteric desire.

With respect to the way in which the Other is present in the life of a subject, Lacan invokes what he calls the “insistence of the symbolic chain” (1994, p. 135).⁶ Lacan seems to use the terms “symbolic chain” and “signifying chain” somewhat interchangeably. For some reason, the former was used more in his earlier work, and the latter in his later work. If we bear in mind Lacan’s remark in Seminar III that “discourse [...] is a signifying temporal chain” (1993, p. 176/155), then the signifying chain appears to be an amalgam of the symbolic chain and the chain of discourse, and, of course, discourse is tied to the symbolic and to the unconscious. Lacan states, “The symbolic order subsists as such outside the subject, as distinct from, determining, his existence” (1993, pp. 111/96–97). The symbolic chain or signifying chain at once “determines” the person’s existence, but is also separate from and goes beyond the person. It touches upon the larger social and symbolic matrix and context in which an individual is embedded. Language is a perfect example. This chain precedes a person’s birth and continues after her death. When Lacan says, “the unconscious is fundamentally structured, woven, chained, and meshed by language” (1993, p. 135/119), he provides another image of the signifying chain. This signifying or symbolic chain also embodies the implicit rules by which a subject lives her life. For as Lacan explains, “Once you have entered the play of symbols, you are always forced to act according to a rule” (1993, p. 63/51). A main aim of Lacanian analytic work is to explicitly articulate this implicit chain and the rules governing the client’s life, unbeknownst to the client and to put these into words. Paying very close attention to and highlighting a client’s words, illuminates this chain, this mesh, this web that holds and moves one along in ways of which she or he is unaware.

Both the signifying chain and the hysteric logic of desire can be viewed more concretely via a discussion of Mona’s relationships to five important men in her life. Thus, I turn to Mona’s narratives of John, Luke, Matthew, Mark, and last but not least, her father.

The presenting problem

When Mona commenced therapy with me, she was in her late-twenties and in graduate school. Mona usually attended therapy once a week, but when she felt either acutely distressed or especially interested in her own discourse, particularly when she associated to dreams, she came more often—twice or three times a week. I recommended she maintain two sessions a week, but she often resisted and refused to comply with my desire. We can detect in her fluctuations in the number of weekly sessions a propensity to keep the Other’s desire both alive and unsatisfied, which will be discussed below. After fourteen months of sessions, Mona took “a break” during the summer, for three months, and said this was due to scheduling problems. She was working full time and finishing a degree. However, we had also reached a place in our work where we were discussing Mona’s own involvement and role in orchestrating relationships in certain ways that will be fleshed out below, and which threatened her “comfortable” way of being with others. Her “break” can be viewed as an evasion of assuming responsibility and as avoiding knowledge of it, even though, at some level, it was also an admission. On yet another level, she may have also felt that I was too forcefully pushing her own role and responsibility in what she had deemed to be the other’s fault, and her break may have been this message to me. Or her desire for a “break” could have signified that I was simply barking up the wrong tree, getting things wrong; although I did not recognise any particular evidence for this (that does not mean it was not the case).

Importantly, I phoned Mona after the summer break and invited her to return to therapy. My inviting her to return was premised on Lacan’s theory of “the analyst’s desire”, which, as Lacan states, is what ultimately operates in psychoanalysis.⁷ This desire must be open and enigmatic, a placeholder for the client’s desire as opposed to a specific desire for the client to do x or be y. However, there is one desire that must be manifested. As Fink states, “If there is a desire in therapy that serves as a motor force, it is the analyst’s, not the patient’s” (1997, p. 4). The analyst holds a desire for the work to continue, most importantly for the client to speak and then say even more. This is an area that distinguishes a Lacanian approach from many others. While many therapeutic schools place the responsibility for the drive or eagerness to engage in the analytic work in the client’s hands, and thus leave it up to the client as to whether or not to attend or continue sessions, Lacan claims this is naïve. The passion for ignorance and the satisfaction and enjoyment one obtains from symptoms and resistance in general is a given. The analyst must “hold the place” of a desire to continue the work, to say ever more, and I adopted this position when I called Mona and invited her to continue to talk with me.

Mona initially began therapy because she was “distraught” over her love life. A string of relationships with men had gone awry. A man she had recently “fallen for” had abruptly “broken it off”. This word, “fallen”, uttered in our first session, was particularly apt. Mona was raised in a Catholic family for which sex before marriage was taboo, and this was principally true for females. Mona interpreted that her family did not mind if her brothers had sex before marriage, even though they too were raised Catholic, and she, understandably, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• INTRODUCTION Talking as the best medicine
• CHAPTER ONE Needling the virgin: navigating the pathways of hysterical desire
• CHAPTER TWO The male in the coffin: a case study of an obsessional
• CHAPTER THREE Speaking of throwing up the id: symbolically situating symptoms
• CHAPTER FOUR The case of the poisoned salami: doubts, dreams, guilt, and love
• CHAPTER FIVE Family ties that bind: the waitress, lack, and loss
• CHAPTER SIX More or less rough around the endings: the diverse ways therapies end
• REFERENCES
• INDEX