Hysteria From Freud to Lacan by Juan-David Nasio

Author:Juan-David Nasio [Nasio, Juan-David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2020-10-13T00:00:00+00:00

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THE ANALYST LISTENING TO THE PATIENT HAS A MENTAL REPRESENTATION OF THE CASTRATION FANTASY

With these imaginary portraits of the hysteric we have located ourselves in the psychic space of the analyst. But at this point a question arises: What do these images, cropping up spontaneously in the practitioner as he listens, have to do with the central scene of the castration fantasy? What role does the castration fantasy play in the concrete work of the analyst with his patients?

A word in advance. The scenes I have been describing in the preceding chapters, as I set forth the male and female castration fantasies, their obsessional and phobic variants, and the fantasy of the uterus, do not in any way correspond to events that actually occurred. The fantasy scenario of castration is not a real fact, and few of its details will be confirmed by, for example, the observable behavior of a child encountering the nakedness of an adult woman whom he loves. Nor does such a scenario correspond to the narrative imagery that a patient might present in a session; we rarely hear the account of such a fantasmatic sequence. But then where do we get this story of castration that is neither a real fact nor an account we have heard? It is important to be extremely clear here. The brief scenes that I have encapsulated like snapshots in this text are just abstract schemas of a fantasy scenario invented by the analyst to account for his clinical experience with hysterical patients and with neurotics in general. But are we dealing, then, with a whimsical reverie on the part of the analyst? With what justification does he—following Freud—construct such a fantasy, posit it as the basis of hysterical suffering, and state, as I have done, that this fantasy is the unconscious work of the subject himself?

The castration fantasy has a twofold legitimacy, both theoretical and practical. It is theoretically legitimate because the castration scenario as I have described it remains rigorously coherent with the entire conceptual edifice of psychoanalysis. Castration is one of the concepts most solidly based in theory. But its practical legitimacy is more important, because this scenario, though it may seem as stereotyped as an old-fashioned color print, recurs over and over again in an endless succession of imaginary variants in the course of treatment, an infinity of images that constantly prove, in our work with our patients, to be faithful expressions of the castration fantasy at the root of their suffering.

Now, concretely, what does it mean for the abstract schema of the castration scenario and its derivative images to be confirmed in our clinical work? First of all, when an analysand speaks to us and tells us about his conflicts and his complaints, we begin, of course, to understand the unconscious origin of his suffering from the vantage point of our place in the transference, but also by means of our mental representation of the fantasy schema offered to us by theory. There is

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