Paradoxes in Lacanian Psychoanalysis

Yehuda Israely

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000523447
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book explores the nature of paradoxes in Lacanian psychoanalysis, how they can be approached in treatment and how they can be resolved.

Building on Freud's and Lacan's own work in resolving paradoxes, Yehuda Israely considers psychic distress, and its amelioration, by means of the study and clarification of the many life situations that can be described as paradoxical. Among the paradoxes examined in this book are the nature of longing (the object's presence in its absence), the wholeness of the broken heart (the subject's existence in relation to the lack that defines her or him), drives (the more you feed it, the hungrier it gets) and the pangs of conscience (the righteous suffer). Israely's innovative approach considers several questions which can be used to orient treatment and focuses on shedding the erroneous beliefs and assumptions that can lead to dead ends. Paradoxes in Lacanian Psychoanalysis also explores those paradoxes – involving anxiety, perplexity, wonder and creativity – that cannot and are not meant to be resolved.

This fascinating book will be essential reading for Lacanian psychoanalysts in practice and in training, and for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists of other theoretical backgrounds who are interested in understanding the nature of paradoxes.

Chapter 1 1 The paradox of existence

DOI: 10.4324/9781003232285-02

The paradox of existence occurs in the domain of ontology, the part of philosophy that addresses questions of being. An object is something that is or exists – How did it come into being? How do objects emerge? In the Lacanian discourse, objects are things that may or may not exist, and it is this very fact that enables us to treat them as such: existent. For Lacan, the object is an object of need first and foremost: it is defined by need, and this need in turn is defined by the absence or lack of the object.

It is on condition only of its not being self-evident, or in other words of its not necessarily being present, that the object becomes an object of need. I must be thirsty if the word water is to have meaning when I drink it. Water must be missing to be defined. The definition circumscribes lack, thirst in this case. Hence the definition “water” is based on thirst, on the absence of water. There arises, for the Innuits of the North Pole, the need not to crash through the treacherous thin ice. To cater to this need, they discern shades of white that convey the various thicknesses of ice. Someone had to fall through the thin ice and into the cold water for a word for that precise shade of white to be invented. It is the yearning for a certain type of gratification that gives birth to an object: thus, acquisitiveness antecedes and creates property.

What is property? We have certain feelings and a sense of possessiveness about it. If we do not have these feelings, nothing will turn it into our property. An object comes to supply for a need, and the need is grounded in the lack of an object. In this sense, we can say that the object exists in so far as it can be absent.

From this, it follows that the subject who experiences lack precedes the object: the object would not have come into being were it not for the subject whose needs defined it. This is not self-evident: positivism claims that objects exist in a world that exists a priori; the subject is the one who defines them. On this approach, we learn to recognize and name these preexisting objects as we develop. For Lacan, as said, the process is inverse: subjective experience comes before objects, and the object emerges in the infantile psyche depending on the infant’s needs, drives and desires. The encounter with the organic world forces the human creature to experience needs like hunger and thirst and the frustration of not having them satisfied. The distress of experiencing need is only resolved when the object that satisfies the need comes to have a shape and a name, for example the mother’s breast in the case of thirst and hunger. In the infant’s experience, it achieves definition by way of an object only from the moment it has served to satisfy a need.

So here we have the paradox of existence. Things exist; they are defined as objects, because of and thanks to their absence, which is indispensable for making the subject experience lack. This way of seeing things cancels the dichotomy between object permanence in the affective sense (e.g., in attachment theory) and object permanence in the cognitive sense (e.g., in Piagetian developmental theory). Any cognitive definition of the object as a separate entity follows from a need that gave rise to it qua distinct object, as an object of need, and next, also, as an object of drive, demand or desire. If the object lacks the psychic value of coming in response to a need, it cannot be identified cognitively.

Lacan shows how Aristotle’s preoccupation with categorizing phenomena in the animal and vegetable world follows the logic of “absence as a condition of presence”. According to Aristotle, mammals as a category are defined by one attribute, namely, the breast – or mamma (Lacan, 1961–1962, Session 9, p. 110), but what is a breast? To answer that question, we must be able to point out creatures that have no breast. Then, when we first encounter a creature that does have one, we will be in the position to state that “it does not have the no-breast”. It is the creatures without breast who serve as the necessary background against which we can distinguish a breast and define it. Absence inaugurates presence, producing it in so far as it is a phenomenon achieving its contours against a background.

One of my earliest memories is of myself telling my parents that I am going to sleep. I closed my eyes and said: “I am asleep”, after which I immediately opened them to announce: “I am awake”. I don’t remember how they responded. They may have laughed. They may just have ignored me. I fell asleep. On awaking the next morning, I remembered I had been preoccupied as I was falling asleep. Again, I announced that I had woken up, but this time I had woken up after my consciousness had closed down, together with my closing eyes. This is how I discovered what consciousness was: this thing that also wakes up in the morning when you wake up. It was only by experiencing its absence that I discovered consciousness. I tried to stay awake to catch hold of my consciousness at the moment of its disappearance (as I fell asleep). Every morning I woke up disappointed, each time consciousness had eluded me at the very moment when I wasn’t there to take note. This was my first encounter with the impossibility of being conscious of losing consciousness. No notion of consciousness had presented itself to me up until the moment when I experienced retroactively how it disappeared as I fell asleep. But once I saw that consciousness could also not be, it emerged as something, something in the world. More precisely, it was my desire to grab hold of consciousness and fall asleep without losing my grip that gave rise, for me, with hindsight, to the concept of consciousness.

How does this paradox of presence through absence manifest itself clinically in various afflictions and forms of distress? Or how can the analyst first construe these experiences of suffering in terms of this paradox, then to help solve them by not accepting their premises? Here for instance is a paradox we see frequently in the clinic: “I want her when she’s not there, and don’t want her when she is”. A man stops loving a woman once he and she start a relationship, once she returns his love. He wants to fall in love, but infatuation passes soon. Desire wears off, and together with it the object’s value disappear to thin air. This represents a paradox if we assume that the man’s object of desire is the woman. After all, we would expect him to be satisfied once he manages to gain her love. The question that will dissolve this paradox turns to the nature of the man’s object. Maybe the object is not the woman but the man’s sense of self-value? Once this is where we situate the object, the following picture emerges: the woman’s desire defines him as an object of the kind “desirable man”. Had the woman been his object, he would have gone on desiring her even in her presence. After all, obtaining her love is not the same as “having” her. In fact, since she is a subject, there is no way of “having” her and so desiring her can continue in her presence.

While I have until now discussed the absence of object and its creation from a generic perspective, Lacan singles out three mythic variations concerning the missing object and the subject creating it. These are the clinical formations constituting the core of the Lacanian diagnostic system: psychosis, perversion and neurosis (including hysteric and obsessive personality structures).

If the object as such is situated in the gap between word and thing, then the oedipal replacement of the mother by the father is a metaphor for the essentially undefined thing being substituted by the defined and distinct word. In Lacan’s terminology, this is captured by the transition from the Real to the Symbolic.

In the case of the psychotic person, the object is never lost in the first place. Psychotic people may treat words as if they were things: they may raise an arm to protect themselves when someone hurls a curse at them. Here the word appeared without replacing the thing. The gaze which relentlessly assails the paranoid person is that kind of a persisting object. At the same time, this gaze also defines the psychotic person as an object stuck in the field of vision of that gaze. The psychotic person herself or himself is a kind of object that never became separate from the mother’s body. Paranoia is fear of being swallowed because the subject never separated from his or her surroundings. We can identify the psychotic person’s inability to be separate and to absent himself or herself in the phenomenon of erotomania, where it seems to the psychotic person that everybody is attracted to him or her, out to sexually exploit him or her. It seems to the psychotic person that she or he is constantly present in the other’s mind.

Regarding the person with a perverse personality structure, the object is absent; as a result, it can be defined qua object, but with an inherent lack in stability. Here the object shifts between a phase of separateness and a phase when it reverts to merging with the background, as it were, when it becomes indistinct as a figure. The perverse subject, too, undergoes separation, but only during the one phase, after which, in the other, he or she becomes indistinct from the other – usually the mother figure. There is not enough frustration attending the necessary separation from the mother required for subject formation. In the case of fetishism, we may observe an attempt to constitute the object. We might think, here, of a semi-object, like for instance the high-heeled shoe. This semi-object is connected to the body in a way that constitutes it as not entirely separate. The perverse person’s jouissance (pleasure-pain-excitement) of the object involves the object’s alternating existence and nonexistence. The semi-object exists, on the one hand: in that sense, it is separate from the body as something the body lacks. On the other hand, it is inextricably bound up with the body. This concurrent relating and non-relating to the body can be observed in masochistic behavior when the subject positions himself as the rejected, cast-off object, thus leaving a vacant place that is open to definition. On the one hand, the situation is a mere performance. He is not truly being cast off: the ritual, for him, is finite and in the end, he belongs to the person who just now rejected and humiliated him. In the necrophiliac personality, this becomes even more obvious. The soul that left the body has not totally left it; some life is left in the dead corpse. Life is the object which in effect is no longer present in the dead corpse; in the necrophiliac act, this object is restored to it once again.

In contrast with the perverse and psychotic subjects, the neurotic person has already undergone separation. Here there are both lack and desire. For the neurotic person, words, which are objects formed from the absence of actuality, are valid. The hysteric strategy of desire is to define the object as absent through a sense of being ill-treated: “The object exists but it isn’t mine because I was treated unjustly and unfairly”. This allows for the preservation of a positivist principle which posits that the object exists without being absent; its absence is an avoidable accident, a cruel caprice of someone out to dupe us, a state of affairs that must be protested. But the crucial point here is that this positivist principle only obtains in fantasy.

The obsessive strategy is to create desire by aiming at an impossible or forbidden target. Here is the statement that underpins the status of this type of obsessive object: “If only we could turn back the wheel of time, or if the powers that be only allowed us, surely then the coveted object would be ours”. Obsessive persons believe that prohibition or impossibility are the reasons for lack and frustration. They therefore wait patiently for the powers that be to die, after which they will be set free and live unconstrained. The specter of authority continues to haunt them.

An unsolvable paradox is, as said, at the root of subject-object relations as such. Since absolute ownership of the other cannot be achieved, full gratification remains unattainable. The object exists to the extent it stays unattainable: what keeps it in place is not-wholly-satisfied desire. This is what bestows a sense of satisfaction, albeit partial. It is as the negative image of the experience of frustration that the object exists. When the figure is isolated from its background by means of a cut, this is done by means of metaphorically circling the knife around the potential object twice over. The first circular movement, or framing, takes the shape of a vague sense of frustration, clinically described as a feeling of restlessness, confusion or even anxiety. This is the stage at which lack becomes manifest, though a definition of the nature of this lack is still missing. On the next encircling, there is a sense of need the shape of whose gratification is already known; a fantasy has already formed of the gratification the object is likely to produce.

One of the names that psychoanalysis has for an object which exists in its absence is the phallus. This originates in the transformation of the actual male sexual organ, the penis, into a symbol; in other words, it is replaced by a signifier. The phallus, in human history and individual development, serves to produce primitive binaries. One such binary signals the sexual difference between men and women by pointing at its presence in men or absence in women. Another binary of this kind signals the presence or absence of sexual desire by means of its two different states: erection or flaccidity. A third binary is the absence and presence of the object that gratifies desire, for all desire, including sexual desire whose symbol is erection, exists provided its gratification, or the gratifying object, is absent. This is how Lacan came to call the process of symbolization by the name of phallization (Lacan, 1973 [1964], p. 187). The price paid for the transition from things to words is the loss of gratification, since the things, as said, are objects of gratification. And because phallization of the penis turns the latter into a symbol – among other things, of masculinity – it is, from that moment onward, no longer the thing itself, or in any case, it is no longer only or simply that. The symbolic value of the thing comes at the expense of its value as need-fulfillment. This is obvious in each of the three previously mentioned binaries: thus, phallization is not merely a cognitive process of replacement of thing by symbol, but it regulates the libido. Need becomes eroticized and thus any need – whether it is of food, drink, or nicotine consumption – fails to reach complete satisfaction. This is because substituting thing by symbol introduces the dimension of the intrinsic impossibility of full satisfaction.

There is for Lacan one primary psychosexual stage without which the others (oral, anal, etc.) cannot emerge, and this is the phallic stage. (He disagrees with the approach that gives all these psychosexual stages equal status.) The phallic stage occurs when language enters a human’s existence. From the moment “the signifier” in Lacanian terminology – appears in the person’s life, he or she is no longer driven by need, and it is desire that takes its place. Unlike need, desire, as mentioned, is never satisfied. Words will never sate us in the way that real objects may do. Phallization connotes the transition from the full gratification of need to desire which, while not leading to satisfaction on the organic level, does sustain the subject. It is desire that takes the subject to a condition described by: “I yearn, therefore I exist”. Freud’s psychosexual stages can be considered variations of phallization, a string of losses and the replacement of the lost object by signifiers – starting from loss of the breast, through loss of the anal object, up to the discovery of sexual difference, which is the loss of the possibility to be both man and woman simultaneously.

How is all this reflected clinically? A main objective of analysis is to help raise consciousness re...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents Page
• List of figures Page
• Introduction: paradox as a contradiction due to a mistaken assumption
• 1 The paradox of existence
• 2 The paradox of being: the subject exists under the condition of its lack, or “There’s nothing more whole than a broken heart”
• 3 All is foreseen, and freedom of choice is granted: the paradox of fate versus free choice (Babylonian Talmud, Pirkey Avot 15:3)
• 4 Putting the subject into the picture
• 5 Paradoxes resulting from choosing one physical paradigm which are solved by choosing another
• 6 Dimensions
• 7 The dimension of time: afterwardsness
• 8 The paradox of the act
• 9 Paradoxes without a solution
• Index