The Subject of Lacan: A Lacanian Reader for Psychologists

7 Jouissance in the Cure

123 7 Jouissance in the Cure André Patsalides and Kareen Ror Malone Introduction I n American circles, Lacanian psychoanalysis is often associated with structuralism, linguistics, and the supervalence of the signifier and language in the understanding of the unconscious (e.g., Mitchell & Black, 1995; Barratt, 1993). One, in fact, cannot fully understand the import of Lacan without a substantive appreciation for the role of language and speech within psychoanalysis and for the human subject (Lacan, 1966/1977b). However, the Lacanian subject is heterogeneous and arises out of the effects of the signifier’s instantiation and within the context of its transmission . It is this broader context of effects that is missed in the North American reading of Lacan. As a result, the innovative nature of equally significant Lacanian concepts, such as the objet a or jouissance, are often overlooked. The former is glossed as something like object relations and the 32582 Chap 7 4/18/00, 9:27 AM 123 124 André Patsalides and Kareen Ror Malone latter as something like orgasm, while Lacan’s emphasis on the signifier takes center stage. Unfortunately, this vague assimilation obscures Lacan’s important recasting of the biological and psychological qua the structure of the drive, and his conception of the object as the presupposed of the lost cause of desire. As one delves more deeply into the Lacanian corpus, it becomes apparent that his formulations of jouissance, objet a, the signifier, the real, imaginary , and symbolic, stretch the traditional Western antinomy of the mind versus body to its limit. Lacan’s theoretical innovations reinvigorate the psychoanalytic field and they cannot be recognized if we continue to see his contribution as asserting language as a monolith that simply dominates subjectivity. Theorizing Jouissance? In psychology, the body is usually conceived using metaphors from biology (evolution), mechanics, or through models of consciousness. At some point, however, the frames of adaptation, functionality, transparency, and rationality break down. There is an extremity to the human condition (whether its result is survival or destruction) in which privation, sacrifice, and defeat become, in a sense, inverted in their psychological meaning. Rather than being goaloriented functional organisms, human subjects sometimes insist in repetitions that work against their self interest. One finds a suspicious pleasure in one’s complaints, one is drawn to “dis-satisfying” sexual objects, one’s sense of duty becomes deliciously rapacious in its demands. In another context, one can consider a patient’s symptoms as founded, in part, in these anomalous pleasures—which are different from secondary gain. Symptoms are, of course, metaphors (Lacan, 1966/1977c), but there is as well an intrusive enjoyment— jouissance—in the symptom. The attempt to simply remove the symptom, advocated in some psychotherapy circles, leaves the subject’s relationship to that jouissance untouched. Lacanian psychoanalysis , on the contrary, recognizes and theorizes the “causation ” and subjective effects of that jouissance. Jouissance is precisely what does not fit into the coherent network of signifiers that are available to the patient—it reflects the difficulty between subject and body, a difficulty that creates a certain excess and indicates that either term is irreducible to the other. As is the case with all of Lacan, one cannot understand the concept of jouissance without factoring in the unresolvable rela32582 Chap 7 4/18/00, 9:27 AM 124 Jouissance in the Cure 125 tionship to the Other. Jouissance cannot simply be defined through the categories of affect but it can be theorized through the three registers of the Imaginary, the Real, and the Symbolic. Lacan’s elaboration of the analytical concept of jouissance appeared for the first time in “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” (1966/1977a), although it was mentioned in some of his previous texts (Lacan, 1958/1966a; Lacan, 1958/1966b;1959/1966c). In the seminar Encore (1975a), Lacan gave his most elaborate articulation of two forms of jouissance: the phallic jouissance, and the jouissance of the Other. In La Troisième, “The Third,” Lacan (1974) refers to the third jouissance—“jouis-sens”—the jouissance of meaning, which is the jouissance of the unconscious. Retroactively we could say that Freud invented psychoanalysis in order to deal with this mysterious third jouissance. Jouissance and the Limit of Sexuality In “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire,” Lacan (1966/1977a) addresses jouissance in relationship...