The lost cause of mourning

This paper examines the evolution of Jacques Lacan’s concept of mourning from his treatment of Hamlet in Seminar 6, “Desire and Its Interpretation,” to its transformation in the tenth Seminar on “Anxiety.” It is a transformation that occurs in tandem with Lacan’s reconception of anxiety as lack of the lack and his reshaped conception of the objet a as object/cause of desire. The key point is the way that Lacan’s renovated conception upends the common sense notion of mourning, that which assumes that suffering the death of a loved one means accommodating oneself to an absence where there was previously a presence. On the contrary, says Lacan, part of what is most deeply to be mourned is the lack in the Other around which the love relation was constructed. The paper concludes by asking to what extent Lacan’s account of mourning should be distinguished from those of both Hegel and Freud.     

Dora's Gift; Or,Lacan's Homage to Dora

Lacan reopened Dora's case in 1957. In his 1951 talk (published in 1952), transference was the key; in the 1957 seminar, he focused on hysteria. Dora loved by proxy and refused to be an object of heterosexual desire. Her object was homosexual because Mrs. K embodied Dora's essential question, femininity—a question that cannot be divorced from that of the lack of the phallus and her father's gift of nothing, which is the gift of love. There is no greater gift than the gift of what one does not have. Drawing from Mauss and Lévi-Strauss, Lacan concluded with an analysis of the cultural meaning of the gift.     

Love,Desire, Jouissance: Two out of Three Ain't Bad

The author demonstrates in this paper the different dynamics of love, desire, and jouissance. This impossible affair of loving whom one does not desire and desiring whom one does not love is analyzed through the writings of Jacques Lacan and Stephen Mitchell. The author illustrates Lacan's use of the “objeta” as the fragment in the Other that gives the desiring individual the illusion of completeness whereas the desired Other has no notion for whom or what she or he is desired. Desire is unmasked as this hide-and-seek game of narcissistic illusions where one is wanted for what one does not have and one desires what one cannot have. Both Lacan and Mitchell suggest that love is a far more risky encounter because all narcissistic illusions risk to be jettisoned. Although Mitchell suggests that it is only through the Other that one can discover the otherness in oneself, Lacan states that to love is to give nothing of oneself and to accept the emptinessin the Other. Texts from popular culture are used to illustrate the dynamics of live and desire and the limits of jouissance.     

The Neighbor Between Rosenzweig and Lacan

Death is the persistent kernel of a human life in both Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory and Franz Rosenzweig’s theology. Lacan’s reformulation of the Freudian drive conceives of death as the annihilating force behind each person’s desire. Accordingly, the other assumes death’s absolute impenetrability. Rosenzweig likewise insists that perpetual acknowledgement of death must individuate a human life; however, his theology of revelation allows for the disclosure of the absolute Other in a commandment to love. Two ethics proceed from these two figures of death: a Lacanian ethics of distance and a Rosenzweigian ethics of communitarian love. Finally, I consider whether a Rosenzweigian posture toward the neighbor must be predicated on a transcendent faith.     

'The healing power of love': The literary/analytic bond of marriage in Freud's essay on Gradiva

Freud 's declared position regarding the management of 'transference love' advocated 'abstinence', objectivity and even 'emotional coldness in the analyst'. However, his essay on Jensen's Gradiva reveals an identification with an involved and responsive 'maternal' analytic position associated with theorists such as Ferenczi, Balint and Winnicott. These theorists attribute the origins of transference love to the pre-oedipal stage, shaping their analytic model on the basis of the early relationship with the mother. Freud generally had difficulty identifying with such a position, since it entailed addressing his own inner feminine aspects. Yet a literary analysis of his 'Gradiva' reveals this stance in his textual performance, i.e. in the ways in which he reads and retells Jensen's story. Freud 's narration not only expresses identification with Zoe, the female protagonist, but also idealizes her 'therapeutic' conduct, which is closer in spirit to that of object-relations theorists. His subtext even implies, however unintended, that an ideal treatment of transference love culminates in a psychical 'marriage' bond between the analytic couple, a metaphor used by Winnicott to describe the essence of the mother–baby (analyst/patient) bond. Freud 's reading process is itself analogous to Zoe's 'therapeutic' conduct, in that both perform a creative and involved interaction with the text/patient.     

The new social psychology of France: The heritage of Jacques Lacan

In recent years psychology has taken on a new cenerality in French thought, but the extent and character of this development is not well understood and its religious dimension is generally overlooked. It is misleading to think of Jacques Lacan as a Freudian; his thought is rooted more in that of Hegel (via Kojève) and involves a fundamentally non‐Freudian theory of desire. Freud's focus was biological. For Lacan, as for Kojève, human appetite is oriented more toward the subjectivity of others (in a struggle for recognition between ‘self and ‘other') than toward pleasure or a release of physical tensions. The religious dimension is closely associated with the theme of a possible relation to the other as other and the question of whether recognition is something to be coerced through domination or given in the mode of love. Even without belief in a God, the Law is needed to support sublimation and to teach the love of neighbor. Other Lacanians continue this theme. François Roustang has criticized Lacan for failing to realize the full theoretical import of his own prophetic message about respect for the other, especially with reference to the transference relation and its exploitation in the analytic process. Marie Balmary brings the Lacanian thrust full circle by analyzing the way the Bible itself deals with psychological issues.     

“Das Ding”: Excessive Existence: Discussion of “Melancholic Psychosis”

Derek Hook’s (this issue) excellent paper provides illustrations of complex Lacanian concepts through the relatively rare presentation of Lacanian case material. His paper lends itself to reading Freud with Lacan. This reply to his paper engages such a reading to show that the idea of the over present object emphasised by Lacan is prefigured in Freud in his 1917 paper on Mourning and Melancholia. My reply to Hook affirms the additional clinical themes he introduces and indicates that these themes would be anticipated if, as Lacan argues, melancholia is seen to be underpinned by a psychotic structure. Finally, the reply argues for a resurrection of the Lacanian notion of Das Ding, as it connotes differently to objet a despite overlaps in meaning and the fact that in later Lacan the term Das Ding was dropped.     

The theme of love in Henrik Pontoppidan's Nattevagt (Night watch) and other short novels

The subject of love may not seem an appropriate topic of scientific discourse, for we prefer turning to poetry to learn something meaningful about love. Nonetheless, we find three texts on the subject in Freud's work, all of which underline an internal division in love. He discussed the contrast between the affectionate and sensual aspects of love, while Lacanian writers have supplemented by pointing to the division between pleasure and desire. This article illustrates these concepts with cases taken from the Danish author Henrik Pontoppidan, one of the most prominent Danish writers from the turn of the 19^th century. He is well-known for his novels and for his short novels. One of these, Nattevagt, from 1894, has been read by critics as a marital conflict between the painter Jørgen Hallager and his fragile wife Ursula Branth, who succumbs to the brutality of her husband. The author supplements this simple version of the story with aspects made visible through the idea of an internal division in sexuality, which Freud elaborated into his theory of the death drive around 1920. By way of introduction, a few words are said about Pontoppidan, focusing on the theme of love in his short novels. Following is a brief summary of the plot of Nattevagt. Finally a more detailed reading of the dialogue between the two protagonists, Jorgen and Ursula, opens the way for a psychoanalytic interpretation of the tragic outcome of their love.     

You never know your luck: Lacan reads Pascal

In this paper the question of the object in Freud’s metapsychology is sketched out from an economical point of view, that is in terms of pleasure and displeasure. This allows for a reading of Pascal’s wager that makes clear what interest Lacan had in discussing this one pensée at length in his Seminar on the Object of Psychoanalysis. The central issue in Lacan’s reading concerns the object a as a stake the subject has lost.     

Misers or lovers? How a reflection on Christian mysticism caused a shift in Jacques Lacan’s object theory

In his sixth seminar, Desire and Its Interpretation (1956–1957), Lacan patiently elaborates his theory of the ‘phantasm’ ($?a), in which the object of desire (object small a) is ascribed a constitutive role in the architecture of the libidinal subject. In that seminar, Lacan shows his fascination for an aphorism of the twentieth century Christian mystic Simone Weil in her assertion: “to ascertain exactly what the miser whose treasure was stolen lost: thus we would learn much.” This is why, in his theory, Lacan conceptualizes the object of desire as the unconsumed treasure—and, in that sense, the “nothing”—on which the miser’s desire is focused. But the more Lacan develops his new object theory, the more he realizes how close it is to Christian mysticism in locating the ultimate object of desire in God, in a sevenfold “nothing” (to quote the famous last step in the ascent of the Mount Carmel as described by John of the Cross). An analysis of Shakespeare’s Hamlet allows Lacan to escape the Christian logic and to rearticulate the object of desire in an ‘unchristian’ tragic grammar. When he replaces the miser by the lover as paradigm of the subject’s relation to its object of desire, he substitutes a strictly Greek kind of love—eros, not agape—for the miser’s relationship to his treasure. Even when, in the late Lacan, “love” becomes a proper concept, its structure remains deeply “tragic.”     

That obscure object of psychoanalysis

This essay examines how psychoanalytic conceptions of the subject and the object in the works of Freud and Lacan may contribute to a re-examination of the vexed issue of the subject–object relationship in science, philosophy and epistemology. For Freud, the ego is the essential subject, yet he regarded it as an always already objectified subject, which is objectively thinkable yet never subjectively knowable qua subject. Lacan conceptualised this Freudian principle of subjectivity with his notion of the divided (barred) subject, which he initially designated as an effect of the symbolic order of language. As to the object, both Freud and Lacan emphasized its constitutive partiality, which explains why no object is ever fully capable of providing full satisfaction and why each and every object is flawed and cracked, thus triggering desire. Extending Freud’s idea of the ‘shadow of the object,’ Lacan captured the fundamental inadequacy of the object with his concept of the object a. As such, for Freud and Lacan, the subject–object relationship is problematic, because it concerns a relationship between a divided subject and a non-object (object a). In this relationship, the subject is not purely object and the object is not merely subject (in the Kantian sense), nor is the Hegelian subject–object identity more than an idealist aspiration. For psychoanalysis, the subject is always traversed by the object, yet the object can never be fully integrated into a subjectified structure of knowledge. The only way to conceive of an adequate subject–object relationship is at the level of fantasy.     

Sublimation and das Ding in Mahler's Symphony no. 8

This paper addresses sublimation in Gustav Mahler's Symphony no. 8 through Lacan's (1986, 1992) notion of das Ding, the Thing. The author reads Lacan as using das Ding, a term taken from Freud, as shorthand for archaic experience. Lacan provides a reference point when he states that "the Kleinian doctrine places the mother's body there" (1992, p. 117). Das Ding refers to unmediated contact with the Other, usually mother, in which traces of a primitive gratification mark the loss of immediacy, point to a lost object, and establish the trajectory of desire. Sublimation is an attempt to bring us into contact with das Ding.     

The transference neurosis in Freud's writings

This paper reviews the evolution of the concept of transference neurosis in Freud's writings. It suggests that the language in which the concept of the transference neurosis is originally expressed by Freud includes an idea of the analyst as aggressively pursuing the analytic cure by waging a solitary battle against the patient's disease. With the representation of the death drive and the larger role accorded to sadism as its external manifestation in Freud's revised drive theory of 1920, the patient becomes the ally; resistance, in the sense of the conservative forces, not disease, in the sense of libidinal conflict, becomes the enemy. It is thus difficult to speak of a transference neurosis in the circumscribed way Freud originally meant it, and he ceased to use the term after 1926 rather than redefine it to fit his broader perspective. In this broader perspective, relative resolution of conflict replaced radical liberation of the patient from disease. That Freud did not redefine the term does not imply that he discarded it, or that we necessarily should. This paper suggests that Freud implied a functional distinction between transference as transforming agent and transference neurosis as result of that transformation. That distinction defines psychoanalytic cure in terms of the understanding of a symbolic transformation which is, through the transference neurosis, reexperienced as part of the psychoanalytic process.     

Capitalism and the Banality of Desire

ABSTRACT

This paper elaborates on Todd McGowan’s perspicacious, psychoanalytic explanation of capitalism’s resilience, due to its formidable ideological insinuation into the banal micro-desires of consumers. I outline his contention that capitalism’s false promise of future satisfaction is subverted by the psychical change indicated by Freud’s re-evaluation of the desire/satisfaction relationship. This is elaborated on via Lacan’s claim, somewhat underplayed in McGowan’s reflections, that desire is essentially narcissistic. Lacan’s claim raises the stakes of capitalism’s psychic appeal, but also indicates how Lacanian psychoanalysis offers a point of intervention. I briefly point to the consistency between Lacan’s conception of the actualized subject and Deleuze’s and Guattari’s articulation of desire in terms of “the process” and the complex metaphor of “desiring machines”. I finally turn to ?i?ek’s conception of the developing world as “the place of rupture” and a major fault line internal to capitalism that threatens to disrupt its operation.     

REEXAMINING SCHREBER THROUGH THE LENS OF A PRESENT‐DAY CASE: FANTASIES OF DEATH,REBIRTH, AND GENDER TRANSFORMATION

In the history of psychoanalysis, the Schreber case has long been a source of controversy. Speculations about Schreber have abounded essentially because none of the speculators, including Freud ( 1911 ), has been constrained by the reality of interactive dynamics with Schreber on the couch. This author contends, however, that knowing someone analytically must involve the transference experience. He presents the case of Z, a middle‐aged patient of his who described a fantasy that was uncannily similar to Schreber's, permitting a present‐day reexamination of the original case, as well as ongoing speculations that include the way in which live clinical material can interact with the reading of a historical document.     

How translations of Freud’s writings have influenced French psychoanalytic thinking1

Translations of Freud ’s writings have had a lasting influence on psychoanalytic thinking in France. They have, all the same, given rise to some conceptual distortions as regards the ego and the id, the ideal ego and the ego ideal, and splitting. Lacan’s ‘return to Freud ’ certainly reawakened interest in Freud ’s writings; however, by focusing mainly on Freud ’s early work, Lacan’s personal reading played down the importance of the texts Freud wrote after his metapsychological papers of 1915. The fact that there is no French edition of Freud ’s complete works makes it difficult for French psychoanalysts to put them in a proper context with respect to his developments as a whole. The Oeuvres Complètes [Complete Works] edition may well turn out to be the equivalent of the Standard Edition, but it is as yet far from complete – and, since the vocabulary employed is far removed from everyday language, those volumes already in print tend to make the general public less likely to read Freud. In this paper, the author evokes certain questions that go beyond the French example, such as the impact that translations have within other psychoanalytic contexts. Now that English has become more or less the lingua franca for communication between psychoanalysts, we have to face up to new challenges if we are to avoid a twofold risk: that of mere standardization, as well as that of a ‘Babelization’ of psychoanalysis.     

From nature in love: The problem of subjectivity in Adorno and Freudian psychoanalysis

This paper investigates the potential of the concept of sublimation for thinking subjectivity at the intersection of psychoanalysis and critical theory. I first rehearse a recent argument by Whitebook that Freud’s notion of sublimation presents a nonviolent integration and expansion of the ego, which can mediate the modern dichotomy between the rational subject and nonrational impulse and desire. On this view, sublimation turns subjectivity into a site of possibility in the context of modern, rationalized thought and society. I then argue that the concept of sublimation offered to critical theory in this form is insufficiently developed. Both Freud and Adorno analyze a deep-seated destructiveness of the modern subject, which turns up right at the heart of attempts to mediate the dichotomies of rationalized modernity. What is needed to counter this problem is a theory of love in which love is not separated from, but, rather, correlated with drive and desire, and can thereby get on a level with the unconscious or unacknowledged, impulsive nature of death-bearing subjectivity in enlightened modernity. A central conception in Kristeva’s development of Freudian psychoanalysis, the idea of transference love, delivers such a theory and thereby develops the concept of sublimation in the way that is needed at the intersection of psychoanalysis and critical theory.

Catharsis: Psychoanalysis and the theatre

The notion of catharsis, in relation to tragedy, was introduced by Aristotle in his work Poetics. Over the centuries, Aristotle's innovative and enigmatic reference to this process has been widely commented on and given rise to intense controversy. In 1895, Freud and Breuer reconsidered this notion in their Studies on Hysteria, where they present the so-called cathartic therapeutic method. It is not, however, this aspect of psychoanalytical theory that the author of this article seeks to elucidate: drawing on a detailed study of the references to tragic catharsis in the work of Freud and Lacan, the author proposes to examine their implications for psychoanalytic treatment.With specific reference to Freud's article Psychopathic characters on the stage (1905) and Lacan's commentary on Sophocles' Antigone (1960), the author argues that catharsis is to be understood not so much as a mechanism of discharge linked to abreaction, but rather as the actual analytic process itself during which the Subject is 'unveiled' and thus faced with the enigma of his own desire.     

Lacan's Concept of Desire and its Vicissitudes

This paper counterbalances Lacan's dictum that desire is structured like a signifying chain by highlighting his dependence on a biological understanding of the sexual drive. Reiterating (and reinterpreting) Freud's “leaning on”—hypothesis about the genesis of desire, Lacan maintains that the sexual drive originates in the vital function. His ideas about male and female sexuality most clearly presuppose a biological understanding of the sexual drive. At various times, Lacan blurs the lines of his own conceptual difference between phallus and penis, up to the point of reducing the difference between the sexes to an opposition.