What can we do with nothing? We try to fill it, with a feeling or a word. We try to turn it into a thing.
We look outwards, and we see things. Things hit us, they are perceived by us. We look inwards, and we see nothing except fantasy objects
What do we do with nothing? We call it “nothing”.
What are we talking about here, if not a terrible confusion between the signifier and the signified? A confusion between thoughts and things? We take “things” for granted, take it for granted they there are there.
“Intolerance of a no-thing, taken together with the conviction that any object capable of a representative function is, by virtue of what the sane personality regards as its representative function, not a representation at all but a no-thing itself, precludes the possibility of words, circles, points and lines being used in the furtherance of learning from experience. They become a provocation to substitute the thing for the no-thing, and the thing itself as an instrument to take the place of representations when representations are a necessity as they are in the realm of thinking”.
People ask, why are you (still) having therapy? You cannot sociably say “I don’t know” to this question. So we say something else – anything. The something else is our symptom – a cover for our analysis. What if we dispense with this cover? We say something like, “I don’t know why I am in analysis” or “I am in analysis because I don’t know know who I am” or “I am in analysis because I have made a fuck-up of my life”.
So why have you made such a fuck-up? I could tell you, but if I did, I would have to give a reason, a cause. It’s because my father left when I was young. It’s because my mother held me too close. It’s because I didn’t think my father loved me. It’s because my mother loved me too much. That’s why I don’t understand how to be a man. That’s why I can’t stand up to certain people. That’s why I flirt to get my own way (which never works). Etc etc.
This is very nice: a rationalisation of my own sense of persecution. Rather that than the awful sense of loss I would feel if I couldn’t name the reason, if I couldn’t be a little paranoid.
