Psychoanalysis has always traded on the figures of identity and interior depth. Even when these two are placed at odds with one another they are still bound in a tight embrace. I have become more and more wary, or weary, of both these figures. Is there a way of thinking of the subject without identity? Is there a way of thinking about the mind without reevoking, yet again, the trope of what is ‘on the inside’? These questions seem to run head first into the wall of epistemological queries concerning what can be known, not simply about identity or the mind, but also how we place any knowledge or knowing in relation to them. It is not simply a question of how we know what we know about the mind, the body, and the self, but also how we envision what we think is known or supposed to be known and how. One might imagine that beginning to even ask these questions would have the most profound effect not simply on discourse but also in the actual consulting room of the psychoanalyst—how they conceive of what they are doing with patients. Is the analyst pursing the subject, even if it is Lacan’s evanescent subject of the unconscious , or is it something beyond this?
Present-day psychology, neuroscience , and the empire of therapies trade on different visions of interiority, not only establishing a certain kind of doctor—so regal, so well informed, so clean—but also his or her object, which is often an identity to be consolidated, a depth to be plumbed and exposed, or a body that should be rendered seamless or declared out-of-order. I would like to find a different vision of psychoanalysis, or a different vision in psychoanalysis itself—one that finds a way to stop this machine and open into another territory. I imagine this as a territory that speaks of the drive more than it speaks about it, one that locates the limit of subjectivity in the direction of an outside.
Anxiety often is depicted by classical psychoanalysis and psychology as the affect of interiority par excellence, the signal of a certain humanization or existential quandary. Anxiety was distinguished from fear by appealing to an inside as the coordinates of identity. But, if one revisits the origin of Freud’s theory of anxiety , it was not this ‘inside’ that mattered most, but a very strange ‘outside’—what he would call coitus interruptus, which is how he explained the genesis of anxiety . Anxiety is an interruption of sexual enjoyment.
Lacan’s reading of this psychoanalytic myth shows not the way back to a more secure subject, but a very particular relationship between a subject and nonhuman sexual objects. Lacan provides a rare and fascinating elucidation through one of his own cases, showing the importance of these concepts for a psychoanalytic cure. In this case, coitus interruptus and the object coalesce in a vision of a female sexuality that gives one a sublime map for a less-than-human psychoanalysis.
Coitus Interruptus
Of all the silly psychoanalytic ideas laid bare for all the world to see, perhaps none is as easily derided as the notion that ‘anxiety’ is a result of coitus interruptus—there, a terrible joke, along with Freud’s other, early, childish theories of sexuality , such as the ones involving menstrual cycles and the nose. When it comes to anxiety in particular, Freud seems to need the link between neurotic angst and the nonhuman—albeit sometimes taking the form of biology, or some grain of the drive—to give substance to what is purely psychological, existential, and thus nebulous in the phenomena of anxiety . Yet, anxiety for Freud is a foolproof argument against any easy Darwininism, for it embodies an evolution gone haywire; the involuting effects of the civilizing function of society; and, simply, the sheer problem of sexuality. Anxiety alerts one to neurosis better than even the hysteric can, for at the very least, anxiety is something everyone knows about, whispered along back channels concerned with a delirious fear of an explosion of something unwanted or unwarranted, not on the inside, but always on the outside.
Orgasm, Freud tells us, is the ejection into the outside of the scraps or grains of libido , the exteriorization of the drive in bodily coitus. Anxiety , on the other hand, is these scraps trapped on the inside, unable to enter the stream of thought, or to simply return to the body, caught between here and nowhere. One can begin to see why coitus interruptus was an intriguing proposition for Freud. Something has been cut off mid-stream. Anxiety , both body and not body at once, or perhaps better, inhabiting the thin line between the two, must speak to some impossible process taking place between a body and the world, my body and yours. The theory is an unwitting early nod to the intersubjective matrix of the mind.
So, while Freud was developing the earliest threads of his theory of the pleasure principle, the question of anxiety and orgasm hovered in the background, tied to a deep hope of Freud for etiological explanations—coitus interruptus—that are also a diagnosis of culture. Let us turn this ‘around’ on Freud. The whole sexual apparatus of anxiety is seemingly not anxiety about sex or because of sex , but instead is the conflictual, tightly bound relationship between sexuality and anxiety . Freud makes anxiety a half-enjoyed interruption, the stoppage of orgasm, the characterological choice of this anxious pain against the pain of uninterrupted enjoyment —fulfillment as it might be called, with a degree of irony.
Anxiety is the choice to reinternalize the drive against its most absolute form of externalization, orgasm or conception. In this configuration, the perverse relationship to anxiety seemingly triumphs over the neurotic one to the extent that the perverse choice will always be to put it out there, on the outside—to act it out. The ‘pervert’ externalizes anxiety by making it belong exclusively to the other person, by making him or her anxious about sex , unveiling an anxious desire, while maintaining oneself at a remove. The ‘neurotic,’ on the other hand, stands still, refusing to confront the outside, screening out any involvement with the other, or making them simply an object of hate or repugnance. If the drive must be crystallized externally, but not in a perverse manner, in the form of what object would this take?
Anxiety is not a question of the delineation of something absolutely on the inside, but a question of how to place something on the outside. What is inside, what is outside, what is in between the two is not easy to distinguish, and anxiety alerts one to the problem. If we read Freud’s correspondence with Fliess and his early musings on coitus interruptus and anxiety , he focuses quickly on what he calls the ‘alienation’ experienced between the somatic and the psychical, which, at this early point, is embodied by the choice of protection against conception, or hesitation around the repercussions of intercourse and the inability to find what he calls adequate satisfaction in a secure relationship. It is not clear what he means by this, especially ‘a secure relationship,’ but ultimately, the point is that the patient appears to choose a half pleasure to no pleasure or full pleasure. This half choice erodes one’s somatic sexual constitution over time, leading Freud to a rather tense symptomatic loop—anxiety...