The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis by Webster Jamieson;

Author:Webster, Jamieson;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Karnac Books
Published: 2011-07-06T16:00:00+00:00

Unlike the elaboration of a symptom in psychoanalysis—the work of unraveling the network of signifiers—writing is closer to the formula of desire. It is closer to the formal qualities of unconscious desire: the very interplay, or play, of the signifier.

Patients come and they are certainly their particular selves. I do not intend to invoke the opposite register as one of diffusion, pathologizing as a vindication of identity—the Athenians were playing at that game long enough. If desire inhabits us as something that must remain alien, then it is not that the alien is gone once and for all at the end of analysis, a kind of anal fantasy. Where we stop cannot be a point of assimilation or imagined eradication. Lacan’s play with this idea of signature is one way to talk about the end of an analysis—a singular mobilization of desire, a radical change in structure. This act of writing or signature is a way of putting to use a particular symptom rather than stagnating in the face of it.

I think the distinction between knowledge (conaissance) and know-how (savoir-y-faire) is important here. One does not understand desire— which in any case would be interminable—one finds a know-how through it. What analysis cultivates is one’s unique signature that is both a way of being with desire and desires way of being. Signature and signifier become the formal play and act, not as a source of meaning, but a means of punctuation. Period. Exclamation. Semicolon. End. Lacan says in the Les Non-Dupes Errent seminar (1973), “one has to stop. One even asks for nothing but that” (L.13.11.73, p. 22). Meaning is endless.

The question of desire becomes central for Lacan in reinterpreting the importance of the limit and act of psychoanalysis. He discusses Freud’s essay, The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex (1924), noting that if the child has to reconcile himself with a narcissistic investment in his own body, the castration threat, against his incestuous desire in the familial complex, he will always choose to salvage his narcissism and turn away from his desire. But this is no solution. It still leaves the question of desire hanging in the balance. It seems that the child must come to terms with incestuous desire and abandon a narcissism that can only be a way station on the path toward desire for other objects.

For Lacan, a work of mourning must take place. In the case of the boy, for example, to desire his mother leaves him vulnerable to the threat of his father’s punishment, while on the other hand, to be the object of his father’s desire leaves him likewise castrated since he is in the feminine position. However you render this story, sexuality, having a body, conflicting gender identifications, locating yourself in the generational turn, have a significant impact that requires signification. The temptation to resolve these through being the object of desire (rather than the complicated subject of it) is a problem that Lacan called the problem of being the phallus for the Other—wanting to be for them what they are irrevocably lacking.

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