Jouissance

Sexuality, Suffering and Satisfaction

Darian Leader

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781509548842
  9781509548835
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781509548859
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

Although the term 'jouissance' is common currency in psychoanalysis today, how much does it really tell us? While often taken to designate a fusion of sexuality, suffering and satisfaction, the term has fallen into a purely descriptive use that closes down more questions than it opens up. Although assumed to explain the coalescence of pleasure and pain, it tends to cover a range of quite different issues that should be distinguished rather than conflated.

By returning to some of the sources of the concept in Freud, and their elaborations in Lacan, this book hopes to stimulate a debate around the relations of pleasure to pain, autoerotism, the links of satisfaction to arousal, the effects of repression, and the place of the body in psychoanalytic theory. Leader aims to provide context for Lacan's work and encourage dialogue with other analytic traditions.

Jouissance

Let’s start with two clinical vignettes. A man complains of what he describes as a compulsion to begin affairs with married women. He recognises the excitement in this but says that it ultimately just brings him suffering. During sex, he is only able to sustain an erection if his partner inserts her fingers into his anus. He also suffers from pruritis ani, and finds himself unable to stop an intense scratching of the anal region, while knowing that this exacerbates the pruritis. He explains that his situation must somehow be linked to his “devouring mother”.

A woman also begins her analysis with a complaint linked to her love life. She is drawn repeatedly to men who drop her, generating a terrible anxiety and sense of abandonment. Despite the abundance of partners, sourced through social media, she is unable to orgasm except by masturbation when she is alone in her home. She describes an “oversexed father”, who would often comment lasciviously about women’s bodies.

Now, without knowing any more about these cases, I guess that most Lacanian readers would have little difficulty in distributing the term ‘jouissance’ quite widely here: there would be a jouissance in the presenting symptom, a repetitive behaviour that might promise enjoyment yet which brings pain; jouissance in the sexual excitement, with its prerequisites; jouissance in the apparently autoerotic activities, involving friction at the mucosa; jouissance ascribed to the parental figure; and perhaps jouissance in the recounting of some or all of the above to the analyst.

If we accept these uses of our term, we could ask the question of what exactly they have in common. Yet the very fact that they all seem valid should make us pause. We know nothing else about the cases beyond these brief vignettes, which consist of not much more than surface detail. And indeed, we find today with an increasing frequency that the term ‘jouissance’ is used purely descriptively. We speak of the ‘jouissance of the symptom’, for example, without a proper theory of what exactly this jouissance is or why it is there. When we go a bit further here, we tend to end up either with formulations that seem embarrassingly simplistic – invoking a ‘frozen signifier’ or ‘One of jouissance’ – or fall back on certain Freudian notions that, as Lacanians, we are supposed to have corrected.

Yet the popularity and currency of the term is beyond dispute. Sophisticated Lacanians are those who have a ‘clinic of the Real, of jouissance’, yet what this actually means in practice is that they profess to recognise the limits of sense, and the place of enjoyment in what is experienced consciously as pain. No attention is paid here to the possible differences between pleasure mixed with pain, pleasure that takes the place of pain, pleasure about pain, pleasure as a sequel to pain, and pain as a sequel to pleasure. And whether these two terms are the most useful here is also an open question, as analysts would surely agree that they are not opposing poles of an equation and, as the editors of a collection on Pleasure Beyond the Pleasure Principle point out, that less of the one does not necessarily mean more of the other.¹

Lacan of course had a lot to say about the limits of sense, but much less about the enjoyment in pain and, curiously, this idea was made popular by authors who most Lacanians have little time for: Georges Bataille, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and a few others. Freud’s explanations of enjoyment in pain are generally not accepted, as his various categories of masochism are deemed inaccurate. Curiously again, Freud’s earlier thoughts on a stimulus barrier, with their quantitative model of psychical excess, rejected for good reason by most post-Freudians, resurface with astonishing regularity in contemporary Lacanian accounts of jouissance. Jouissance is defined as a “too much”, yet this approach, as we shall see, had been dismantled or at least seriously questioned by Freud’s students.

So why is the notion of jouissance, or the label, so appealing? Its multiple meanings seem evident, yet whereas we can all approvingly cite Freud’s criticism of Jung’s distended use of his concept of libido, with jouissance things seem different. The history of psychoanalytic practice is seen as a prelude to the cutting edge of a clinic of jouissance, yet, the more we scrutinise this, the more we see that the term has settled into a lazy and descriptive use. It has come today to close down more questions than it opens up, and expositions tend to revert to binaries such as ‘desire/jouissance’, which, if examined carefully, are conceptually not always as robust as we might wish.

As Nestor Braunstein laments at the end of a chapter on ‘Desire and jouissance in the teachings of Lacan’: “Regrettably, after Lacan’s death in 1981 and with the passage of time, Manichean formulations have arisen that tend to oppose the two terms, provoking a forced choice loaded with hidden agendas between the first Lacan (the Lacan of the signifier and desire, allegedly a ‘primitive’ or ‘archaic’ Lacan), and the second Lacan (the Lacan of jouissance and the object (a), who would be the desired one, a point of arrival only ‘advanced’ Lacanians could reach).”² This might invite us to reflect on the question of why binaries are so popular in Lacanian thinking today, despite the fact that Lacan tended to use non-binary models in his seminars and writings.

When we turn to the detailed studies of the Lacanian term, the commentaries on jouissance are at times reminiscent of the low points of medieval theology. Scholars debate clearly inconsistent usages, desperate to prove coherence and order. We are told that Lacan has multiple categories, most significantly:

• Jouissance of the body image
• Phallic jouissance
• Jouissance of the Other (subjective genitive)
• Jouissance of the Other (objective genitive)
• Other jouissance
• Surplus jouissance
• Jouissance of meaning
• Jouissance of being
• Jouissance of life
• Jouissance of the body

Offhand remarks and scraps from the seminars and writings are taken as synecdoches of differentiated theories, with the assumption that the term ‘jouissance’ itself must somehow be indexing the same thing. When one then asks what this thing is, the answer tends to be along the lines of: well, Lacan said that jouissance is “the only substance”. Cue amateur expositions of Aristotle on substance. We could recall here once again Freud’s criticism of Jung for using the term ‘libido’ for the energy of so many different drives, as well as Erikson’s poke at the assumption of early analysts that libido was “the prime substance” that both social convention and the rest of psychic structure did their best to contain.³

Although Lacan could say that if a “Lacanian field” were to exist, it would be that of jouissance, this does not make of it necessarily a psychoanalytic concept, and its subsequent translation into a descriptive commonplace is disappointing.⁴ Rather than pretending we have some sort of refined and heightened knowledge of the psyche and of psychoanalytic practice because we can manipulate the label, it may well be worth pausing to see what our uses imply and presuppose. In this essay, I hope to encourage a questioning of the term, to comment on some of its appearances in Lacan’s work, and to try to return to some of its sources in Freud. To put my cards on the table right at the start, I think that we are better served by a plurality of concepts rather than one catch-all term, which risks obscuring and covering over important differences in matters both clinical and conceptual.

*

Now, the standard exposition of the development of Lacan’s term goes something like this. First of all, jouissance is linked to the body image, present in Lacan’s references to the jubilation of the mirror phase; then we have a Hegelian use where jouissance is tied to questions of appropriation and ownership; then, in the 1950s, jouissance emerges as the antagonist of desire; then at last it comes into its own in the Ethics seminar, with the concept of the Thing; it is developed further in ‘Kant with Sade’, becoming the fulcrum of Lacan’s approach to most clinical and metapsychological issues in the later 1960s and 1970s, from repetition to his rethinking of male and female sexuality.⁵

Introductory accounts usually trace the geneology of ‘jouissance’ back to Freud, and start by mapping out a territory: the negative therapeutic reaction, the refractory qualities of the symptom, and the coalescence of satisfaction and suffering to be found in so many human practices, from the use of drugs to the sense of compulsion that accompanies forced behaviours and repetitive acts. Freud had a fairly comprehensive model of what he called this “strange satisfaction” of the symptom some years before the more celebrated introduction of the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and we could take this as our point of departure. Elaborated in the Introductory Lectures of 1916–17, it both recapitulates and revises earlier concepts, using a schema of libido and frustration.

Libido here is carefully distinguished from any instinctual attachment to the mother, and Freud describes it in terms of how the infant repeats the experience at the breast but without a specific demand to be fed. Libido is not driven by hunger, and it is characterised by a sensual sucking – what later writers would call ‘non-nutritive sucking’ – that precedes sleep. It is this “pure act of sucking” that has brought satisfaction, and the libido is identified with “the effort to gain satisfaction”.⁶ The infant thus “performs actions that have no purpose other than obtaining pleasure”, caught up clearly with vital functions but not defined by them.

Freud’s account here of an oral satisfaction distinct from nutritive demand has often been described as a jouissance, defined as an autoerotic enjoyment. Autoerotic is taken to mean with no link to the Other, or, in the unfortunate language of some Lacanians, a pure One of jouissance, that is temporally prior to the imposition of the symbolic. The infant turns away from the Other to procure its own isolated enjoyment. But Freud’s autoerotic is slightly more complicated: it is both relational and sequentially secondary. The oral drive, he argues, is not primarily autoerotic but only “becomes” so by...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Jouissance
• Index
• End User License Agreement