"This reformulation begins, in a sense, with Lacan's elaboration of the notion that the analyst must play the role of object a, the Other as desire, not as language. The analyst must steer clear of the role in which analysands often cast him or her, that of an all-knowing and all-seeing Other who is the ultimate judge of their value as human beings and the final authority on all questions of truth. The analyst must maneuver away from serving the analysand as an Other to imitate, to try to be like, to desire like (desire's tendency being to model itself on the Other's desire), in short, an Other with whom to identify, whose ideals one can adopt, whose views one can make one's own. Instead, the analyst must endeavor to embody desirousness, revealing as few personal likes and dislikes, ideals and opinions as possible, providing the analysand as little concrete information about his or her character, aspirations, and tastes as possible, as they all furnish such fertile ground in which identification can take root. Identification with the analyst's ideals and desires is a solution to neurosis advanced by certain analysts of the Anglo-American tradition: the analysand is to take the analyst's strong ego as a model by which to shore up his or her own weak ego, an analysis coming to a successful end if the analysand is able to sufficiently identity with the analyst. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, identification with the analyst is considered a trap, leading the analysand, as it does, to still more alienation within the Other as language and as desire. Maintaining his or her constant enigmatic desire for something else, the Lacanian analyst aims, not at modeling the analysand's desire on his or her own, but rather at shaking up the configuration of the analysand's fantasy, changing the subject's relation to the cause of desire: object a." (Fink, 1995, pp. 61-62)
Clarification of my use of gender-neutral pronouns in the text below:
- "S/he" stands for "she" and/or "he".
- "Hir" stands for "her" and/or "his"/"him".
- "Hirself" accordingly stands for "herself" and/or "himself"
Here are some comments and reflections on the subject's relation to desire and objet petit (a), the so-called object-cause-of-desire, based on Bruce Fink's book "The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance" (1995):
Those who navigate Lacanian waters, know how many different portraits Lacan gives of “desire”. “Desire” is not a static concept within the Lacanian oeuvre, but an everchanging concept, standing in relational tension with other concepts. As an example, the conceptual pair of “desire” vs. “jouissance” is paradigmatic for such a tension.
Probably one of Lacan’s most well known refrains about desire is the following: "Le désir de l'homme, c'est le désir de l'Autre”. What can we make out of it? Several interpretations are possible. We could read it as a statement about our alienation within the Other, even when it comes to our very own desire. “Human's desire is the same as the Other's desire”, implying that humans not only desire what the Other desires, but that they also desire it in the same ways, their desire being structured like the Other's desire, alluding that humans learn to desire as an Other. Humans are thrown into a pre-existing Symbolic order which in some sense begins to position them already before their first breath. Our own wants and fantasies are shaped by the discourse of the Other, a discourse that surrounds us and subsequently will come to inhabit us. As children we learn to express our needs through the distorting medium of the Other, most notably through language, hence creating signifying chains of “Other kind”. This alien system, through which we learn to communicate, will also get to represent us within it, we will become speakable within it. This is crucial. We not only express ourselves through this medium, no, the Other becomes constitutive of us within symbolic alienation: in a way we are turned into the Other, into a being of language, and our needs are being moulded and shaped through this language, making us into beings who are never fully in control and mastery over our own fantasies, demands and desires. In alienation, the subject exists, inasmuch as it exists within the Symbolic, here the subject is now part of a discursive universe, it can be talked about. As a consequence of alienation goes a certain death of the Real Thing, since every symbolization involves a cut of the Real within the Lacanian topology of RSI (Real, Symbolic, Imaginary, which can be described as the realms of impossibility (R), absence (S), and fraud (I)). The subject is split and cut, but also produced and spoken by the Other, leaving us more beingless than before in a certain sense. Lacan speaks of “manque-à-être”, a lack of being. “The subject's first guise is this very lack”, as Fink points out.
We could also read the above statement as “a human´s desire is for the Other to desire hir”, implying that humans desire to be desired by an Other. When someone says: “I desire you”, what is often implied is that this person does not desire a specific part of the "you", but that s/he desires "your" desire, s/he desires to be desired by the desirable object. This reading shows that desire is in some sense an opening and dependency to the Other: our own desire becomes dignified and given-value-to by the Other. When we talk, we want to be listened, because it is only the listening of the Other that truly dignifies our speech. Talking to walls just doesn't make the cut. This reading gets very close to the Hegelian notion of subjective recognition, in which desire is a desire of the Other’s desire.
Otherwise we could say that “human´s desire is the desire of something Other”, implying the metonymical and endless character of desire, the property of desire that never stops, that is never satisfied, but that goes on desiring, in such a way that one could say that the aim of desire is the desiring itself. This portrait introduces us to a scene in which desire pushes us always to "something else", to the elsewhere. From one object to another object, but none in particular, since the aim is in the motion itself. Here the difference between the structural properties of desire and the bending of desire within the clinical structure of hysteria get slightly blurred, at least potentially, which is also one of the reasons that Lacan calls science, which is not scientism, a hysterical enterprise: always pointing to the elsewhere, never satisfied with the constituted knowledge.
Instead of going into any further depth about the above readings, I will rather speak about the relation of desire and “objet petit a”, also known as object-cause-of-desire. Object (a) takes a major role in the Lacanian framework, being essentially a major contributor in the fantasmatic organization of the neurotic subject.
Lacan suggests that a subject's own desire is brought into being and indeed caused by the (m)Other's desire. Here, what is intended is not so much the desire-for-the-(m)Other but more precisely the desire-of-the-(m)Other itself. It is not so much a question of the child desiring the (m)Other, but rather the enigma of the (m)Other's desire which sets the child into motion. A child attempts to uncover in hir own fantasy and/or by trial and error in action, what it is that the (m)Other lacks and desires. What is it that s/he wants? "Che vuoi"?
What to do with this knowledge? The child could fill that lack, so s/he thinks, possibly even with hirself, hence becoming the one-and-only for the (m)Other, hir absolute everything.
Is this to remain an impossible endeavour for the child? Whoever will come to play the role of the (m)Other in the subject's fantasy will inevitably direct hir/their desire not exclusively to the child. Hir/Their desire could not be brought back exclusively to the child even in the purely hypothetical scenario in which the child would know precisely what it is that the (m)Other desires. Obviously, a further problem lies precisely in this "knowing", or better put: in the impossibility of fully knowing. The child will namely run into the complication that it will inevitably crash into the impossibility of fully deciphering the (m)Other´s enigmatic desire entirely, to fully understand the “X”, the unknown variable that sets the (m)Other in motion.
In a sense, what is truly desirable to the child is the pure desirousness of the (m)Other, be it directed towards the child hirself (the way s/he looks at me/ speaks with me, etc.) or be it directed towards external objects, objects that instantly gain in importance within the child's fantasy as soon as the (m)Other has directed hirself towards them. However, hir desirousness per se must be distinguished from the empirical outgrows of possible objects towards which s/he can be intentionally directed in hir desire.
In the events of separation and alienation, in which the child will be slowly expelled from the initial child-(m)Other unity, however, object (a) will come to fill the loss of the Real (m)Other and henceforth constitute a rem(a)inder, a last trace of that unity, able to sustain an illusion of wholeness, a fallacious sense of completeness. The subject is thus able to sustain an ignorance on the division to the (m)Other within the realms of fantasy and desire. Indeed, this is the very core idea behind what Lacan calls fantasy, the matheme of fantasy being written as “$ ◊ a”: the barred subject in relation to the object (a), the rem(a)inder of the Real Thing. The fantasy itself concerns neither the subject, nor the (m)Other, but rather the relation between them. While it is usual to define alienation in the Lacanian field as an "either-or" with a forced choice, separation can be seen as relating to a "neither-nor" in its fantasmatic outcome.
The analyst tries to get a sense of how the analysand subjectively and unconsciously positioned hirself in relation to hir rem(a)inder of the Real. How does one still cling to the Real after one's alienation in the Symbolic order, after the word killed the Real Thing? One has to notice that the Symbolic Other is barred as well in Lacanian terminology, which postulates the incompleteness of the Symbolic Other, the castration of the Symbolic Other to fully symbolize all.
Of course, there are different ways of relating to object (a), the object-cause-of-desire. As object (a) enters the realm of fantasy, it becomes a plaything for the subject, thus the subject will influence it and its relation to it, in order to derive from object (a) one´s maximum level of “jouissance”, a term that is only uneasily translated into “enjoyment” or “excitement”. Hence, in one´s positioning and playing around with object (a), the analyst can come to understand the structural positioning of the subject to the rem(a)inder and the Symbolic Other. It is in one´s fundamental positioning in respect to object (a) that one can find what Lacan calls the fundamental fantasy, constituting that which structures and gives fuel to all empirical manifestations of fantasy within a subject.
Turning to jouissance and the idea that the subject casts object (a) within hir fantasy in such a way as to derive the maximum of jouissance: here jouissance can be understood as a Real excitement that can either provide strong feelings of pleasure or turn to disgust and horror. Strong excitement is possibly a more accurate translation of jouissance than enjoyment. Excitement alone can be interpreted pleasurably or painfully/horrifically, which fits to the notion of jouissance better. Jouissance shall also contain some phenomena of excitement that seem best described as both, “horror and pleasure” (e.g. Lacan tries to describe this phenomenon by making us imagine a never arriving orgasm, constantly being on the edge to orgasm, yet never coming to climax). Within Seminar X on “Anxiety” (1962-63), Lacan mentions that Freud has already described the jouissance found within each symptom, a symptom always manifesting one´s relation to the rem(a)inder and to the Other, and that he has done so most tellingly in the case of the Rat Man (found in Freud´s 1909 paper called “Notes Upon A Case of Obsessional Neurosis”), who, as Lacan writes, “[was in] horror at a jouissance of which he was ignorant”, in horror at the sight of the hidden excitement that he took from his symptomatic sufferings. Jouissance is connected to the Real and as such one can speak of jouissance prior to alienation and separation, "J1", and of jouissance posterior to these, "J2", a second-order jouissance posterior to the cut-of-the-letter and to the expulsion of symbiosis from the Real Thing. While J1 corresponds to the jouissance derived from an unmediated and Real oneness between (m)Other and child, S2 (the Name-of-the-Father) comes to signify that which comes to neutralize J1, transforming the (m)Other into something symbolizable retrospectively (S1), bringing about a change of one's relation to the (m)Other´s desire, a desire that gets played out as a rem(a)inder of J1 in the form of object (a), the manipulation of which within fantasy provides the subject with J2. The letter kills (namely J1) leaving one with only the rem(a)inder, something that pales in comparison to the original Real Thing. Neurosis is the "choice" to give up some original jouissance. In psychosis we find a person that did not make this “choice”, but rather continued to carry the J1 inside of hir pockets, so to speak. Object (a) and the J2, the latter being derived from the manipulation of the former, can be seen as those elements that adhere to the Real within the neurotic subject, providing the subject with a sense of being, at least something Real to go on. Essentially, it is through object (a), as neither the subject nor the Other but something neither-nor, that one sticks to being and desires to fill up one's lack-of-being.
Importantly, starting with Seminars XIV (“La logique du fantasme” (1966-67)) and XV (“L'acte psychanalytique” (1967-68)), as Lacan starts to develop the technical-clinical idea that the analyst must constitute hirself in the role of the object (a) for the analysand, Lacan adds the notion of “la traversée du fantasme” (which can be translated as: “the crossing over, traversal, or traversing of the fundamental fantasy”) to the dynamics of separation described above (in some minor detail).
One central goal of analysis, as induced by the positioning of the analyst as object (a), an analyst seeking to “hit the cause" or "hit the Real" with hir interpretations, is to shake up one's fundamental fantasy, the subject's most profound relation to the Other as desire bringing about a reconfiguration of fantasy. This moment of subjectivation entails a “traversal” of positions within the matheme of the fundamental fantasy whereby the subject assumes the place of the cause of desire, object (a), thereby assuming responsibility for the traumatic cause that brought one into being as a desiring subject. Lacan talks about the "subject of the unconscious" and its mission to "come to be there, were It (the traumatic cause of desire, object (a) as foreign) has been", in its “assomption” thereof (this is an obvious reference to Freud's: "Wo Es war soll Ich werden"). “It” comes to stand for multiple things within some of Lacan's reflection: the interrupting, signifying chain of the unconscious, or the “It”, qua cause of desire, object (a) - yet always something that is Other and not subjectivized: essentially we are talking about the subject's assomption of a new position with respect to the Other as cause of desire, as desire and as the Other qua language. In other words, the move of the traversal functions to make the analysand subjectively inhabit that which has brought her into existence as a split subject and into being as a desiring subject.
This “further separation” involves a curious and seemingly substantially and chronologically paradoxical move by the subject, to become one's own cause, to invest itself there were the cause was. As such, the subject of the unconscious comes to state: “I was, I did, I cried, etc.” and not “it happened to me”, “fate had this reserved for me”, etc. (Fink, 1995, pp. 62-65).
The temporal conundrum posed by assuming one´s subjective responsibility for something that was there (chronologically) before one's subjectivity and hence responsibility even arised (in the Lacanian sense) seems to be overcome when one thinks of the traversing of fantasy as following a dialectic of the signifier rather than a strict temporal line. This is to say that the time of the signifying chain does not follow a strictly straightforward line of signification. As an example: if the analysand expresses, in free association, three chunks of interconnected signifier chains (e.g. three sentences) within analysis, it is not as if meaning contemporaneously unfolds with the straightforward enunciation of those chunks, as if meaning would behave like a temporally linear and additive function where each subsequent chunk is simply added to the previous chunks: “chunk A” plus “chunk B” plus “chunk C” equating the meaning of a sentence. The dialectic of the signifier does not work that way, for anticipation of meaning and retroactive re/determination of meaning are two constitutive functions of this dialectic which implies that meaning-making is not a solely additive and linear function where one sedimentation simply adds to the former ones, but rather implies that meaning can be added just by what the listener will expect to hear and (more importantly in this context) that, once said, a new chunk of signifiers can influence prior chunks in several ways, even changing their meaning altogether.
In this light, one can come to understand that the temporal conundrum posed by the traversing of fantasy is actually not paradoxical in the context of the signifier, where the effect (as meaning) of the first word is (usually) only brought out after the word has constituted itself in a semantic context, linking itself to other signifiers, and where the first word is usually retroactively re/determined after the last word has fallen.
Clearly, it can be seen that the concept of retroactive re/determination is nothing else than Freud´s “Nachträglichkeit” (often translated as “deferred action”, “afterwardness”, “retro-action” and/or “après-coup”), a concept infused with great importance within Lacanian psychoanalysis. Referring back to the signifier of the (m)Other, S1, and the retroactive signification thereof by the Name-of-the-Father, S2: while the traumatic encounter with the (m)Other’s desire occurs prior to the instilling of the Name-of-the-Father, the former is signified only as a consequence of the latter. This, essentially, is the dialectic involved within the traversing of fantasy. A dialectic, where a retroactive relation between two signifiers justifies us to assume the possibility that a subject has passed that way, yet never being able to pinpoint the subject within linear time. This hints at the fact that the very subject that brings about this signification, is a subject of only fleeting being: the subject of the unconscious has no other being than this flashing linking together of signifiers, it comes and goes in an instant, providing only the retroactive movement involved in the signification and then disappearing beneath the very signified that it produced. The subject of the unconscious is to be found in the very act of Nachträglichkeit and the product is nothing else than a subject. Sometimes there may be no subjective involvement whatsoever in certain symptoms and fantasies prior to one's analysis, with the subjectification of the former brought about after the fact of entering analysis. As such, the analyst then tries to make the analysand realize, what subjective part s/he plays in the "choice" of hir symptoms and fantasies.
A traversing subjectification is, not surprisingly, manifested in the analytic act of “dialectization”, an increasing turning into signifiers, especially dialectization of the Real "black holes" that function as master signifiers, as “Freudian Things”, within us. The challenge of Lacanian psychoanalysis consists in finding ways how to “hit” those black holes in interpretation, naming them and inducing into the analysand a dialectization thereof.
It can be realized that essentially three metaphors constitutive for subjectivity exist for Bruce Fink's rendition of Lacan. These three subjectivities can be understood as substitutional metaphors, which can be schematized according to the dialectic of the “cancelling out”, where the above term effectively overshadows another term that lies beneath it in each metaphor. These three moments can be described as (i) alienation, in which the Other substitutes the subject, barring it within the constitutive function of language, (ii) separation, in which the Real object (a) takes on the main role, overshadowing the barred subject in importance, and (iii) the traversing of fantasy, in which the subject substitutes the cause of hir desire by subjectification thereof. The subjectification of the cause consists of a "further separation", insofar it drains the Real cause by substituting it with the subject (of the unconscious), effectively killing more and more of the Real rem(a)inders of the (m)Other.
Fink adds to these substitutional metaphors a further layer stating that the psychanalytic subject according to Lacan can be understood as essentially having two faces: (i) the subject as precipitate and (ii) the subject as precipitation (see Fink, 1995, pp. 69-79).
(i) The subject as precipitate
When talking about the subject as precipitate, Lacan intends to talk about the subject as existing as the result, the sedimentation/residue/precipitate of these metaphors (Fink, 1995, pp. 70-75). Within the paper “Position of the Unconscious” (originally 1960), Lacan states that this precipitate is nothing else than what one signifier represents to another, the sedimentation of meanings found in their linked relationship as temporally fixated. The subject is not the signifier X nor the signifier Y, but precisely their link, as “a signifier represents a subject to another signifier”. As such, the subject as precipitate can be understood as a temporally fixated signified meaning, as the latter is defined in the exact same ways, as the result of what one signifier represents to the others within the net of signifier chains. Insofar as this subject corresponds to the subject of alienation, that has come into existence, as the result of the first metaphorical split, hence barring the subject, Lacan speaks of the subject as precipitate also as the subject as signified, as “dead meaning”, where it seems clear that “dead meaning” refers to the notion that the “letter kills” and to the fact of fixation: the precipitate is unmoving, it is only the result of metaphorization, in its dead and inert crystallization. It shall be noted that, while one can speak of the precipitated subject as fixated meaning in one sense, this fixation must always be understood weakly. What should this mean? It is trauma, qua Real, that implies strong fixation as a true blockage. As such, strong fixation always comprises something which cannot be symbolized, language being that which concedes for substitution and displacement in the very first place, as such an antithesis to strong fixation. In this sense, one can speak of weak fixation, instead, by implying that a metaphor creates a universe of understanding, which delimits the horizon of meaning one can take out of the metaphor: it is not until a new metaphor is made, that a radically different meaning can arise, entailing that, within one metaphor, one can only understand that which the horizon delimits, as such not radically shifting between significations.
(ii) The subject as precipitation
Whereas the subject as precipitate was the meaningful result of an already made metaphor, the subject as precipitation is essentially what was referenced as active subject of the unconscious, the very subject that forms a metaphor, the flash of a metaphor´s creative spark, each and every metaphor implying subjective participation (there is no metaphor without involvement of the subject). Lacan calls his subject of the unconscious also the “subject in the Real” and describes it in functional terms: this subject creates breaches in the Real, cutting gaps into it and then establishing, in a burst of precipitation, links between parts of the Real and the existing chain of signifiers (Symbolic). As such, this constitutes, once again, but in a slightly different gloss, what we have called the further separation and can hence be exemplified in the third metaphor seen above. It is in this context, that Lacan speaks of the dialectization of master signifiers, the precipitation of subjectivity through breaching and metaphorical sparks, the subjectification or “assomption” of the cause, the draining of the Real or of the rem(a)inder, etc., which indeed all mean similar notions (roughly speaking) and are functions of the subject of the unconscious.
Taking the example of the unary or master signifier, S1, on the one hand, and the binary or primordial signifier, S2, on the other hand, we can hence recognize that it is the subject as precipitation that links the two signifiers together, first creating a breach in the Real and then linking the two signifiers together within a flash of a new metaphor´s creative spark (it shall be noted that S2 herewith retroactively installs S1, which implies that a new connection can also be made retroactively). Once connected, this new metaphor, which is so important within Lacanian metapsychology, sets primordial repression in motion where the Name-of-the-Father is repressed/disavowed/foreclosed and thus one´s split between ego and unconscious thought within language as barred subject is realized (at least for the repressing neurotic). It follows that the master signifier is symbolized by S2, creating the possibility of ever greater dialectization leaving only the rem(a)inder of the (m)Other functioning as a master signifier. In neurosis, the primal repression implies that the repressed S2 will function as a “signifier of the (m)Other´s desire” (the Name-of-the-Father as that which the (m)Other desires and intentionally directs her away from the child) within one´s unconscious thought and that all subsequent signifiers within the unconscious, qua language, will link to this primordially repressed S2, thus making the binary signifier the one signifier to which all other signifiers represent a subject (as the precipitate meaning of their links).
This, of course, strikingly contrast to the function of the master signifier within (or actually without) the signifying chain which will function as a Real black hole, isolated from the connection of other signifiers around which the other chains will circle, but never link, except within the subjectification of the cause and its sudden breach-formation followed by linking. By the same token, a true master-signifier shall be visualized in theory as a signifier that points to itself and to no other signifiers (prior to dialectization), thus being a signifier to which no signifier represents a subject. In other words, the Real consists of black holes of unsymbolizability, as such forming “Things” that the Symbolic can only orbit around, creating an impossibility to form signifiers with it. What remains possible, however, is dialectization which drains the Real and adds meaning to a former hole qua nonmeaning (Johnston, 2018). While this is surely a goal of analysis, it also entails a dilemma: the more the Real is drained, the more meaning one acquires, the more one can be said to exist, but the less one “is” (in being).
There is a dilemma between (i) being, which is found in the rem(a)inder of the (m)Other, S1, which effectively overshadows the alienated subject (barred subject), qua sedimentation of meaning, and (ii) meaning (as existence), illustrated by the signifier to which all other signifiers represent a subject (Name-of-the-Father), S2, which effectively overshadows the object (a) as the cause of one´s desire and being. In this light, analysis can be viewed as a confrontation of the analysand with hir question of existence and being, where all three metaphors of subjectivity become of importance. How the analyst and the analysand go about this dilemma is a clinical and technical question that lies beyond the scope of this post.
Main reference to this article:
Fink, B. (1995). The Lacanian subject: between language and jouissance. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.