Clinical Lacan by Joel Dor

Author:Joel Dor [Dor, Joel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-59051-660-7
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2013-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

HYSTERIA

We can also point out several differential features between male hysteria and the perversions in connection with the relationship to women.

In male hysteria, however, the situation is more vivid and rich than in obsessional neurosis. The relationship to women, although in some respects reminiscent of the pervert’s relationship to his object, is ambiguous, because the hysterical structure lends itself to perverse manifestations. The hysterical man’s relationship to the female other is most often alienated, right from the start, in his representation of the woman as idealized, placed on an inaccessible pedestal. But here we are not dealing with a pure, untouchable virgin who feels no desire. On the contrary, the woman is exalted as a valuable object precisely because she is desirable and desiring. She functions for the hysteric as a means of enhancing his prestige.

The woman must be pitilessly seductive, always offered to the gaze of the fascinated and envious other, if the subject is to idealize her. What matters to him is that she never fall from that place lest she immediately lose all her seductive advantages. Should she be dethroned, she becomes a threatening, hated object who must be destroyed. She must atone for her fall from the pedestal, the pedestal on which the hysteric’s libidinal economy had placed her for the sake of his own comfort.

There is, of course, quite a subtle interplay between the woman idealized as a showpiece and the woman suddenly dethroned and responsible for all ills. We find here the hysteric’s ambivalent relation to the phallus (see Chapter 14). For the male hysteric, woman constitutes the object par excellence that allows him to get his bearings with regard to possession of the phallus. As we shall see further on, the problematics of the phallus, for the hysteric, remain strictly confined to not having it. Because the hysterical male does not experience himself as having the phallus, he tends to respond to a woman’s desire as if he did not have a penis, or did not have it completely, whence the familiar symptom picture of impotence or premature ejaculation.

This accounts for the hysteric’s sudden turnabout in his representation of the woman. All is well as long as she is the seductive and brilliant object who enhances his prestige, since she serves as an object of phallic admiration offered to everyone’s gaze. The hysteric can thereby consolidate his symptom, which consists of thinking that he has been deprived of the phallus—yet it is still available to him through the woman, a brightly shining object in the gaze of others. The woman is thus a jealously guarded possession even though, at the same time, she is held out for unrestricted admiration. And the more she is coveted by others, the more the hysteric receives the paradoxical confirmation that this is so only because it is his phallus that is being coveted through her. Thus, as long as such an object is his inalienable property, everything is for the best as far as phallic possession is concerned.

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