#sinthome

[vaguesteph]

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[lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis]

These are marks whose trace we can see in the unconscious.

I mean that a body has another way of consisting than what I was just referring to as a spoken form, in the form of the unconscious, in so far as it is from speech, as such, that it emerges.  These are marks whose trace we can see in the unconscious.  These are marks that have been left by a certain way of relating to knowledge that constitutes the fundamental substance of the unconscious.

Lacan- Geneva Lecture on the Symptom. 4th October 1975

[thegoodenoughblogger]

Lacan/psychosis

I am struggling with this, but I will write and see if that helps.

I am glossing Annie Rogers book, Incandescent alphabets, again - in it, she describes the trajectory of Lacan’s ideas on psychosis.

In Seminar 3, from 1955-56, Lacan sees the entry into a psychotic structure (though not necessarily a psychotic break) as the foreclosure of a particular signifier - that of the Name of the Father.  Note well - there is no exclusion of the real father himself here, only the symbolic father, the father’s function and name.

And in that great French pun (”nomme”/”non”), that is also the no of the Father - the signifier which says: “No, you cannot fill your mother’s lack”.  This is the signifier of the Oedipus complex, the signifier that integrates the subject into a wider social order, into language, norms, laws, customs (and this may take the form of acceptance or rebellion - either way, the idea of the norm itself has been accepted).

The neurotic subject, who has heard and absorbed the Name/No of the Father has something around which he can orient himself and his questions about himself.

But when this signifier is foreclosed, when even the possibility of its existence is denied, a fundamental hole appears in the Symbolic order.  And not surprisingly, psychosis tends to first hit in adolescence, when the need to position oneself, to find a network in or around which to locate one’s identity, is so important.

*

A couple of years later, 1957-58, and we have a text called “On a question prior to any possible treatment of psychosis,” in which Lacan makes a structural distinction between psychosis and neurosis (as Freud had done, albeit differently, in a short essay published shortly after The ego and the id) - that is, the distinction between repression and foreclosure.  What is foreclosed, or refused, by definition cannot be spoken of - when it returns in the real, there is no way of symbolising or binding it - or rather, the only way to do so is via a delusion, via a voice that seems to come from without.

From this hallucination, the psychotic builds her delusion.  The delusion is an attempt to make sense of the material in the hallucination.  “Hallucinated experience comes in at the very point where language as a symbolic system becomes derailed” (Rogers).

What normally happens is that the Symbolic circles around the Real - via metaphor, it does its best to approximate the Real.  It never quite hits the mark, but it’s good enough.

But in psychosis, words don’t circle the Real: “the Real imposes itself on speaking, and signification is shot through with impossible holes”.

*

Fast forward almost 20 years to Seminar 23: the Joyce seminar of 1975-76.  Here, Lacan argues that one can do without the Name of the Father, the signifier of prohibition, ok, but also the fundamental signifier of the possibility of signification itself.  In the previous year’s seminar, Lacan had moved away from the Name of the Father as the “lynchpin of the Symbolic”.  The function of the father has changed from that which comes between and dilutes the desire of the mother, to that which produces the neurotic symptom.  And we can do without this - we do not need the Symbolic to hold together the Real and the Imaginary via the Borromean Knot, if we can find the sinthome, the fourth ring, to repair it.

(This is where I am struggling - and writing it down isn’t really helping - yet.)

Colette Soler writes: “Lacan ends up by asserting that this knotting takes place via the nominating-saying, sliding from the Name of the Father, to the Father of the Name.”  Which I think means that the paternal function switches from prohibiting and opening up the space for signification, to naming - and that naming, saying, is not a signifying function (it does produce meaning, as such).  Rogers: “rather, saying links the Symbolic and jouissance.  Any deconstruction of language (such as done by Joyce, or created at the end of analysis) leads to a reconfiguration of the Real as a saying of the Real, where saving is an event”.

I am quite lost - but I detect here a separation of speech from signification, and a conjoining of speech and enjoyment.

[lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis]

The unconscious – it’s that – it is that which we have to learn to speak

Analysis consists of what one knows of why one is entangled in it. It is produced by virtue of the fact that there is the symbolic. The symbolic is the language [le langage] we learn to speak and it leaves its traces. It leaves its traces and, by virtue of this, it leaves consequences which are none other than the sinthome, and analysis consists in giving an account of why one has these symptoms. So analysis is linked to knowledge. Is that very suspect? It is very suspect and it lends itself to all suggestions, which is the very word we must avoid. The unconscious – it’s that – it is that which we have to learn to speak, and therefore we leave it, by language, to suggest all sorts of things.

Lacan -  Seminar XXV, 10.01.1978.

[lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis]

A clinical orientation on jouissance as it is ciphered in the subject’s discourse foregrounds singularity and so dignity. Subjects are not to be cured; they are neither deficient nor helpless victims of their family circumstances.

A clinical orientation on jouissance as it is ciphered in the subject’s discourse foregrounds singularity and so dignity. Subjects are not to be cured; they are neither deficient nor helpless victims of their family circumstances. We recall that Freud saw sexuality as the root cause of neurosis; but for Lacan it is the absence of sexual relation that differentiates the human subject from animals. Humans cannot behave instinctively; they need a symptom, or a construct, an invention of their own, to be inscribed in the social bond. Unlike cognitive-behavioral therapies, for the later Lacan the symptom is thus neither to be removed nor to be cured, for the symptom is a real invention of the subject that anchors him or her in language.

Psychoanalysis may not seek to remove the symptom, and so not be a ‘therapy’ in the usual sense, yet it has profoundly therapeutic effects. So in what way does psychoanalysis improve the life of a given subject? Following the later Lacan, the analyst takes his or her bearings from the fantasy rather than the meaning of the symptoms complained about by the analysand, and the therapeutic benefits proceed from a radical decrease in suffering, obtained not through an eradication of the symptom but through a reduction of the symptom to the sinthome. This reduction entails an isolation of—and separation from—the fantasy. This analytic strategy, driven by what Lacan was the first to recognize as the ‘desire of the analyst’, denotes an uncompromising belief in the possibility that the dignity of the subject can return in the separation from the fantasy. It is the fantasy that gives consistency to the Other, and a consistent Other commands alienation. Dignity, then, for the neurotic subject, is asserted in a process of separation from one’s own investment in one’s position of alienation.

Véronique Voruz, Bogdan Wolf - The Later Lacan. (SUNY, 2007)

[lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis]

In his late teaching, Lacan highlights the impact of saying [dire] on the body...

In his late teaching, Lacan highlights the impact of saying [dire] on the body prior to any implication of the gaze in the mirror stage. This impact on the body accounts for the troumatisme, the border that joins the body and the site of language. The troumatisme can also be qualified as generalized hallucination in the sense that the body perceives language as making a hole through its impact of jouissance. In this sense troumatisme is correlative to a new definition of the symptom. It is no longer the symptom as metaphor, as meaning effect, but as a body event, an emergence of jouissance, as sinthome.

Dominique Laurent - The New Norms and the Ordinary of Psychosis. PAPERS 7.7.7.N°2- Towards Barcelona 2018: The Ordinary Psychoses and the Others, Under Transference Disorders, Symptoms and Discreet Signs  

[lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis]

The Unconscious and the Speaking Body

As you know, the symptom as a formation of the unconscious structured as a language is a metaphor, it is an effect of meaning, induced by the substitution of one signifier for another. On the other hand, the sinthome of a parlêtre is an ‘event of the body’, an emergence of jouissance. Moreover, there is nothing to say that the body in question is your body. You can be ‘another body’s symptom’….

Jacques Alain Miller- The Unconscious and the Speaking Body (2014)

[lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis]

the sinthome, the symptom as body-event, is the only compass that our modernity has left us with...

The next quilting point in the aggiornamento of psychoanalysis in our community came when J.-A. Miller, in his 1998-1999 lecture series, decided to foreground a dimension of the symptom which had been thus far been left aside, although it is present in Freud’s 1926 text Inhibition, Symptoms, Anxiety. I am referring to the symptom as a body-event, which one often finds equated with sinthome in today’s literature. From our vantage point, we can see that this move by Miller initiated a complete reversal of the perspective which Freud, then Lacan until his last teaching, had given to psychoanalysis: where psychoanalysis was seen to stumble upon an irreducible real, something untreatable by language, and so to fail to some extent, Miller will gradually argue that the sinthome, the symptom as body-event, is the only compass that our modernity has left us with, to the extent that even the dispositif of the pass is to be rethought to take into consideration the fact that what Lacan called the pass in his Proposition of 1967 does not take the sinthome into consideration – in his 2011 lecture series, Miller suggested that we call this outrepasse. So what is this symptom as body-event? In the 1998-1999 Course, the symptom as body-event is apprehended in two ways: first, the symptom is a modality of libidinal satisfaction (which Freud notes in the 1926 text). Second, the symptom as body-event is an effect of the traces of discourse on the body of the speaking being (not a repressed representation, as with the conversion symptom). In what way does a re-definition of the symptom as a body-event help us to find a compass for our practice? It removes the symptom from the classical set of the formations of the unconscious, identified by Freud as distinct modalities for the repressed to return using the mechanisms of the signifying chain such as displacement, transference and condensation. It also amounts to recognizing that was Freud called the symptomatic residues, the unanalyzable, are not an effect of the subject’s virile or feminine protestation in the face of castration, as Freud hypothesized in Analysis Terminable and Interminable. The symptomatic residues are equivalent to the symptom as body-event.

Véronique Voruz. London Society of the new Lacanian School, 20 February 2016.