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Chapter 6 The Letter of the Body WILLY APOLLON Under the rubric of the “letter of the body,” we have developed in our clinical work with psychotics a psychoanalytic conception of the body as, precisely, the writing of a lost jouissance in the speaking being. Such a concept of the body is latent in Freud’s own writing, but Lacanian theory brings it to a fuller articulation, proposing the theoretical conditions of its limit and its clinical action. Such a conceptualization may find its greatest clinical urgency in the treatment of psychosis, but it remains— even if unacknowledged—a fundamental one in any properly Freudian psychoanalytic treatment. The present chapter shall propose a clinical exposition of this concept of the body through the questions of the letter of the body, of the symptom as a writing of jouissance, and of the aesthetic field of the object that causes the subject’s desire from the fantasy. If the signifier, the dream and its interpretation were the touchstones of the first period of analytic treatment, these new questions may be thought to bear more on the second period of analytic treatment, dealing with the real of jouissance through the symptom and the fantasy. Transference and theTrauma of Language: the Subject, Jouissance, and the Signifier In chapter 1, Lucie Cantin described the human subject as one who speaks as the effect of a trauma.This insight is generated out of the clinical experience of psychoanalysis, as well as out of a specific conception of human being. It contradicts, to some degree, Freud’s early position on 103 This chapter is based on an essay that was first drafted in February 1989. a biological and genetic development of the human psyche.We can see Freud’s theory as relevant to the social and scientific milieu in which it emerged. Lacan, who recasts Freud’s theory as a structural outgrowth of the action of language on the living being, simultaneously recontextualizes Freud’s discovery within French culture and modern science. Following Lacan’s position, we in Québec have posited the work of language on the subject as, precisely, a traumatic event.The question of the truth status of such a trauma—whether one hypothesizes it as a real historical event or as an imaginary one—is an academic question and of no consequence within the ethical act of psychoanalysis.What is significant and of great practical consequence, however, is the very fact of that hypothesis as such: it stands as an unpredictable basis of analytic discourse, and as a scientific myth which frames the work of the analysis. As such a starting point, this hypothesis is not, in principle, subject to falsifiability. So Lacan radically transforms the metapsychology that was founded on Freud’s desire ; and the new frontier Lacan delineates serves as the basis of the ethical action of the psychoanalyst in assuring the conditions of that action. Thus, the trauma of language emerges as an axis in the ethical action of the analysis. An initial approach to this peculiar and central hypothesis might be made by way of anthropology. Anthropology, as a science of culture, highlights the dominant role of language and the symbolic order in shifting the regulation of the whole existence of a human life away from the logic of its own animal satisfactions to the necessities and exigencies of the group. Amazingly, psychologists tend to ignore this fact to pursue their research from a hypothesis of human development as some complex neuropsychological maturation. As a matter of fact, at first glance, the living being seems to look for satisfaction of need in the immediate natural neighborhood and expects objects of satisfaction from these first efforts.The consuming of those natural objects, to the extent that their access may be immediate and free of obstacle, is an act of jouissance in terms of right as well as in terms of enjoyment. For the human being, however, such conditions of living are pure fantasy . Anthropologists cannot provide any credible example of a society— whatever degree of freedom of behavior is accepted or promoted—that would suffer such access to the objects of satisfaction without any rules or myths to both justify and prohibit. It is a fundamental fact of the social relations of speaking beings that satisfaction of need must, unquestionably , be negotiated through rules of coexistence. Lacan stresses the effect of that symbolic order on the human being as one of castration. As a matter of fact, Lacan posits the...

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