Lacan, Mortality, Life and Language

Clinical and Cultural Explorations

Berjanet Jazani

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000442441
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Salute mentale in psicologia

This work presents thoughts on the Lacanian subject: What are we as a speaking being? What makes us a human subject from a psychoanalytic perspective? Is it feelings and affect that make us a human? Or was it the Freudian invention of the unconscious that drew a line between human and a non-human?

What can be learnt from the subject of the unconscious in the clinic of psychoanalysis that can help us to approach these questions? Berjanet Jazani takes examples from the psychoanalytic clinic as well as cultural references ranging from ancient Persia to London's Theatreland in order to elaborate the question of subjectivity, reality and truth from a psychoanalytic perspective. In the era of hyperreality, the agency of branding and marketing strategies has overshadowed the reality of a human being, his true nature and agency. The hyperreality of contemporary society creates in each individual a false hope of becoming a high-fidelity copy of their idols, and such a fallacy has led many to believe that this is what determines their being in a social bond. Jazani explores the question of the reality and mortality of a subject through a Lacanian prism, from the theorising of analytical subjectivity that starts with the Freudian Oedipal myth more than a century ago to the futurist aspiration to fabricate human beings according to some ideal model.

This book will be important reading for students and academics of Lacanian psychoanalysis, as well as professionals concerned with complex social problems.

Figure 1.1 The Unconscious, photograph by Bardia Moeini

Chapter 1

Freud’s second topic and the Lacanian subject of the unconscious

DOI: 10.4324/9781003184799-2

Introduction

How did Freud’s theorising approach the concept of the subject? Where did Lacan start to formulate his concept of the unconscious? Where is the unconscious situated in a topological formation, and what happened to the Lacanian theory of the unconscious (towards the end of Lacan’s teaching)? I will approach these questions by examining the different potentialities in Freud’s second topic (Freud, 1923) through Lacan’s critique of the Freudian unconscious, which led him to conceptualise his transgressive subject of the unconscious and, later, the concept of the speaking being or “parlêtre”.

The high castle of psychoanalysis was built on the hill of the unconscious. Freud’s invention of the unconscious opened up a space to explore what we are as speaking beings. The concept of the unconscious as discovered or invented by Freud was not a philosophical construct, nor did it accept medical views on consciousness and unconsciousness. The Freudian unconscious and its formations (dream, bungled action, lapsus and symptom) were worked through by Lacan in a way that led him to theorise the subject of the unconscious as something very different from the Cartesian subject, as a subject whose unconscious defies any philosophical understanding. The Lacanian subject is a sexed being who has agency over the formation of the symptom and montage of the drive, a subject who comes into being with a mortal body. The subject’s drives – with their repetitive and excessive nature – originate from certain zones/area in the body and are marked by the culture which he is born into.

Now, if the enjoyment gained through the drive montage in the endeavour to trick the Real of sexuality fails the subject, leaving him in pain and anguish, he might find himself before the gate of the castle of psychoanalysis. The gate is the “transference”, which brings him inside the castle. The password that is needed in order to gain admission to the castle – the moment when he becomes an analysand – is the manner in which he subjectifies his suffering. It is only after an exhaustive tour of the castle, built upon the unconscious, that the Real of the sexual non-rapport (in Lacan’s expression) can become more tolerable for the subject. At the end of analysis, the explored castle, which was previously known as the castle of psychoanalysis, become something different – it is converted into the subject’s own way of dealing with his sexuality and mortality, that is his “sinthome”. The sinthome would be his new purpose in life, giving a meaningful position in the language to his being, to his three-dimensional being consisting of Real, Symbolic and Imaginary (Lacan, 1975–6).

The concept of the subject from Freud to Lacan

If one had to locate Freud’s second topic inside the castle of psychoanalysis, it would surely be found in the cellar – a room where one finds dysfunctional, abandoned objects and sees some potential use in them. Freud’s semi-topological representation of the psyche is just such an archaic object with potential. Although the second topic is a structurally fundamental model, it is not as functional as it could be. It required, not complete demolition, but more or less substantial reworking. Lacan’s first and second seminars would not have been possible if there had not been great potential in Freud’s second topic, and Lacan’s later theories on R, S and I (developed through the 1950s and 1960s) crystallised around his critique of the Freudian model of ego, id and superego.

The second topic could not entirely resolve Freud’s interest and puzzlement over the existential dilemma of a civilised man (mortality) and of his relation to an accessible form of enjoyment (jouissance). But the topic was capable of a reworking and reformulation that took it further in that direction, as Lacan showed when he approached the question of the formation of the subject. It is from the second topic that Lacan begins his work on the subject of the unconscious.

Lacan offers an alternative reading of the second topic, not as a structural model of the psyche consisting of three agencies – a strict ego, forbidding superego and an unruly id, with a more or less competent ego doing its best to mediate between them, but as a foundational model of the subject of the unconscious, theorised by Lacan in terms of his three orders of the Imaginary, Symbolic and Real.

The Freudian “ego” was considered by Lacan to be partially unconscious and was certainly not equated by him with the subject (Lacan, 1953–4). In Lacan’s work, a subject appears in language through an “enunciation” at a precise moment of surprise. Is this where Freud’s idea of “id” comes into play? Or, is it only due to the ego’s incompetence in performing its principal act of censorship that such “being” manifests itself? Where is the unconscious to be found in the second model of the psyche? To approach these questions, Lacan in the early 1950s introduces his “L schema” as his first topological representation of the subject (Lacan, 1954–5). The L schema consists of four elements (ego, other, subject and Other) and emphasises the Symbolic dimension over the Imaginary. This is the first topological model in Lacan’s work to theorise the formation of the subject in language. The Other of the subject is language, and it is where subjectivity is constituted. Here, the Freudian id coincides with Lacan’s subject as “I”, but not as “me” or ego. The relation between the ego and the Other is in the Imaginary dimension, while the subject and the Other are linked in the Symbolic register.

Figure 1.2 L schema

When developing his theory of the subject in the early 1950s, Lacan started with the two agencies of “ego” and “id” from Freud’s second model. He came to an exploration and reformulation of the super-ego in the 7th seminar, later in the same decade. The Freudian triadic structure – a non-topological formation – that had been left in the cellar of psychoanalysis became a foundation for Lacan’s theory of the formation of the subject, via the mirror phase and identification, the use of topological objects such as the interior 8, the Möbius strip representation of the unconscious, the torus to show the structure of the subject and the concept of extimacy, developments around the theme of ethics, and the famous command to “Enjoy!”, leading finally to Lacan’s elaborated work on R, S and I, the object a, the sinthome, the Real unconscious and parlêtre.

If Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams is considered the bible of Freudianism, Lacan’s 11th Seminar in 1964 can be viewed as foundational for all of Lacan’s work from that time onwards. It is where Lacan reinvents psychoanalysis, although there is much in previous seminars that demonstrate his desire to challenge what he saw as misunderstandings of Freud’s legacy and to establish a firm platform for what was referred to as “psychoanalysis”. He had elaborated the concept of the unconscious using the media of linguistics and topology on several occasions prior to 1964. He had emphasised the impossibility of articulation, of naming absolutely everything. What makes the 11th Seminar particularly significant is that it marks Lacan’s break with and turning away from the Freudian unconscious as outlined in the second topic. If the Lacanian “subject” had already been conceptualised to some extent, the term is now used for the first time in place of the “unconscious”. Lacan’s famous phrase: “the unconscious is structured like a language” (used and misinterpreted over and over again, to this day) pales alongside the significance of his reinvention, which gave birth to a new idea of the subject – a subject, which, as an effect of language, goes through alienation and separation and then forms a desire in relation to a lack in the Other and enjoys the montage of the drive. According to Lacan, the subject begins to appear by realising his existence as separate from the Other. Such a realisation and separation always have a price for the subject. The residue of primary jouissance will remain. We will return to this later.

The unconscious, then, which is and remains an essentially Freudian term, is located by Lacan in the field of the Other. Lacan, unlike some other post-Freudian interpreters of the concept of the unconscious, did not believe that the unconscious is merely the result of repression and that it has a “primordial”, “archaic” and “instinctual” nature. The repetition and resistance that occur in the course of an analysis testify to an active mode of agency in the field of the Other. The subject in analysis has an unconscious with a pulsation and inconsistency, his being is inscribed by a lack of being (manque-à-être) in relation to the Other. In other words, the subject in his very core is not independent of the Other. But, on the other hand, there is no Other without a subject.

In the early 1960s, Lacan defined the subject of the unconscious as what one signifier represents for another signifier. Lacan’s teachings on the unconscious, at this stage, revolve around the manifestation of the subject in gaps or splits, the “béance” where the unconscious is. This idea coincides with the presence of the unconscious in the field of the Other having an inconsistent “pulsation”. Precisely this was the justification for Lacan’s practice of cutting sessions short – making them of variable length, which became a matter of dispute between him and the IPA. A cut at the precise moment of pulsation saves and guarantees the continuity of a course of analysis. It is a cut at a “béance” – not a termination of the present session but rather the start of the next.

The question here would be when or, to be more precise, from where the analyst should decide upon a cut. This concerns the question of where the cut is made. Lacan’s idea in the 11th Seminar is that it is made at moments of uncertainty, when the unconscious is enunciated, at moments when the thinking ego fails and the subject of the unconscious speaks. Once in a session, as a response to an “enunciation” by the analysand, I stood up and terminated the session without saying a word, and did so automatically, without giving it a thought. Such an action by the analyst causes surprise on both sides – for the analyst and for the analysand – and produces a certain unconscious knowledge. It is, in fact, a formation of the unconscious as found in the analytical space between two speaking beings.

The aim of the analyst’s act is not simply the return of the repressed. The return of the repressed signifies a mark of jouissance on the body. The analytical act targets the structure of the subject where it has come into being for potential transformation. The analyst is a subject who has already worked or is working on the subject of the unconscious in another space, yet again, with another subject of the unconscious. In his own consulting room, he is another subject whose unconscious is the Other for that of the analysand. They are working both in and on the unconscious that exists between them (Harari, 2004). As such, the unconscious is another name for what we call “the clinical work”. The analyst does not induce or create it from the position of analyst, but, with the help of transference, he creates a space where the birth of the unconscious can happen. Similar to a midwife – he delivers the unconscious. Lacan used the Möbius strip as a representation of the subject of the unconscious. The surface of the Möbius strip is not divided between inner and outer sides, and it thus illustrates the return of the repressed as well as the analytical cut (interpretation) that aims at transforming rather than dissolving the subject of the unconscious – the cut, which goes against the repetitive continuation of the subject’s narratives and complaints. Such transformation targets the core of the subject’s primary division or loss: the unary trait. The unary trait, which had stood for the loss of the Thing, supports the subject, but the subject disappears when the unary trait appears. So the unary trait stands for a double loss.

According to Lacan, the subject, coming from a union, first passes through an alienation. The subject is called on to choose between bad and worse: “your money or your life!” Alienation and separation are two operations, which result in the formation of the subject of the unconscious. After alienation, which results in the subject’s division, the subject has to go through a separation in order to form a desire in relation to the lack in the Other. In this operation, according to Lacan, S1 (as “the first signifier, the unary signifier” (Lacan, 1963–4, p. 218) produced in the mechanism of alienation) is replaced by the objet a as the cause of desire. While S1 stands for a loss, the object a stands for a lack in the Other, which ultimately causes the subject’s desire. In alienation, the divided and “fading” subject is faced with S1 as the first representation of the subject for another signifier in the signifying chain, while in the operation of separation, the subject comes face to face with “the weak point” of the signifying articulation. This weak point, in Lacan’s words, is in fact another name for the objet a. So the S1 is the signifier of the first loss in the operation of alienation and the objet a is the lost object of the Other’s jouissance. In the course of analysis, the subject is helped to find some solution to this lack; a lack that results from separation and, in addition, is pushed towards alienation and primary loss. To choose or not to choose one’s alienation/division in life is to go in a contrary direction along the earlier path that led to the birth of the subject; a subject that always remains barred.

As an attempt to clarify this, let us take a clinical example:

A few years ago, I was consulted by a woman suffering from panic attacks. She was at a time of crisis in her life. She had broken up with her partner in a row, repeating what had happened with her previous partner; her academic performance had been greatly affected, and she was on the verge of being expelled from her course. She had found herself a new boyfriend after the second break-up, who had asked her hand for marriage, to which she had agreed. She wanted to settle down in life and find what had eluded her in recent years. One day, after an episode of food poisoning, she was given a serum intravenously, and her fiancé had to leave her in hospital in order to return to work. This was when her first panic attack occurred. She was somewhat settled in an initial consu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Series preface
• Introduction: some thoughts on the Lacanian subject: from Oedipal myth to poetry of knots
• 1 Freud’s second topic and the Lacanian subject of the unconscious
• 2 Symptom formation
• 3 Subjectivity and fairy tales
• 4 Psychoanalysis and clinical diagnosis
• 5 The body
• 6 Feelings
• Index