#symptom formation

[lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis]

A psychoanalysis, consists in speaking freely, in not hushing the ideas that go through your head, like we’re doing right now. Little by little, from within your own words, another meaning forms and surprises you, then falls apart, taking the pain with it.

A psychoanalysis, consists in speaking freely, in not hushing the ideas that go through your head, like we’re doing right now. Little by little, from within your own words, another meaning forms and surprises you, then falls apart, taking the pain with it. Usually, you discover just how conditioned you had been by apparently minute elements encountered in hazardous circumstances: things from childhood, meetings, certain words said to you, and we keep coming back to them until the malevolent charge of these elements softens. Each case is different.

Jacques-Alain Miller, ‘Response to the Anti-Freudians’, Le Point, 22.09.05.

[lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis]

Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write yourself. Your body must be heard.

Helene Cixous - The Laugh of the Medusa. Signs. Vol. 1, No. 4 (Summer, 1976)

[lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis]

Language, the unconscious, the parents, the symbolic order: these terms in Lacan are not exactly synonymous, but they are intimately allied. They are sometimes spoken of by him as the ‘Other’ — as that which like language is always anterior to us and will always escape us…

Language, the unconscious, the parents, the symbolic order: these terms in Lacan are not exactly synonymous, but they are intimately allied. They are sometimes spoken of by him as the ‘Other’ — as that which like language is always anterior to us and will always escape us, that which brought us into being as subjects in the first place but which always outruns our grasp. We have seen that for Lacan our unconscious desire is directed towards this Other, in the shape of some ultimately gratifying reality which we can never have; but it is also true for Lacan that our desire is in some way always received from the Other too. We desire what others — our parents, for instance — unconsciously desire for us; and desire can only happen because we are caught up in linguistic, sexual and social relations — the whole field of the ‘Other’ — which generate it.

Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction. Wiley-Blackwell. 2008.

[lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis]

What is at stake in analysis is to make truth out of what has happened. There are things that failed to become true, traumatism, that which makes a hole, which is what Lacan will later call troumatisme. It is a question of bringing discourse to what could not take place in it, of saying what could not be said, or could only be said in an indirect way, between the lines.

What is at stake in analysis is to make truth out of what has happened. There are things that failed to become true, traumatism, that which makes a hole, which is what Lacan will later call troumatisme. It is a question of bringing discourse to what could not take place in it, of saying what could not be said, or could only be said in an indirect way, between the lines. Analysis would then be the chance to rectify what had been said badly. To say [dire]. The solution would be to say. This notion of psychoanalysis has been popularised under the slogan The Words to Say It.

It is nonetheless the case that in practice, we are constantly confronted with that-which-cannot-be-said, and that Lacan’s earlier teaching also took its bearings from the central question of the unsayable.

When developing his theory of desire, at the time of Seminar VI and his écrit entitled “The Direction of the Treatment...”, Lacan underlined that desire is inarticulable, only to add that it is articulated: it is articulated in signifiers, without for all that giving up its last word. The last word is what remains, in the practice of psychoanalysis, forever tangled up in problems, that is, as an aporia. The last word is the basis of the appointment: “See you next time.” And when the last word comes, when one stops, in what- ever mode this happens, the last word remains in suspense, remains prob- lematic. Hence this notion of granting an extension to those who think they have the last word. This extension of analysis is what Lacan called the Pass. It means: “Go on speaking!” To others, to two others and no longer to only one, so that they in turn go off to speak to a jury who will consider whether you have arrived at the last word in your case or not.

Jacques-Alain Miller. TRUTH IS COUPLED WITH MEANING. Hurly Burly, 2016.

[lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis]

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.

Analysis consists of what one knows of why 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, The Moment to Conclude. 10.01.1978.

[lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis]

If you suppress the listener [of the unconscious], you silence the unconscious.

If you suppress the listener [of the unconscious], you silence the unconscious. You don’t suppress the unconscious, but, on the contrary, you nourish it by silencing it. I would say you intensify or exacerbate the drives. If you silence the unconscious, you exacerbate the drives. You exacerbate the death drive. And the repetition, instead of being spoken, is acted out. And, we insist on that. We are in the world which is taken by a powerful death drive in the name of security and health.

Jacques-Alain Miller: Lecture at the ‘Rally of the Impossible Professions. Beyond the False Promises of Security", held under the auspices of the Federation of European Schools of Psychoanalysis.

[lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis]

So what is this symptom as body-event? 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

The next quilting point in the aggiornamento of psychoanalysis in our community came when Jacques Alain 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… So what is this symptom as body-event? 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 what 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. New Lacanian School. 20 February 2016.

[lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis]

the symptom is a mode of satisfaction. It can be deciphered like a message, but it is not only a way of speaking, it is also above all a form of jouissance, the key of its rebus being always the drive which is secretly satisfied.

Lacan came to the point where he recaptured the first as well as the last of Freud’s theses on the symptom: the symptom is a mode of satisfaction. It can be deciphered like a message, but it is not only a way of speaking, it is also above all a form of jouissance, the key of its rebus being always the drive which is secretly satisfied. This is also why I have called Lacan’s second step his “second return to Freud.” The first step emphasized the linguistic implications of the technique of deciphering and produced the famous thesis of an unconscious structured like a language. The second step, which is less visible, emphasized another aspect: the language of the symptom is, so to speak, incarnated, embodied; it organizes and regulates jouissance. Hence, the surprising formula one finds close to the end of Encore: “The real, I will say, is the mystery of the speaking body, the mystery of the unconscious” (S XX, p. 131).

Colette Soler - The paradoxes of the symptom in psychoanalysis. The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Cambridge University Press (2010).