Events

Region de Lahich- Danny Barnea

The aim of this rubric is to gather different commentaries, reflections or questions that emerge from chosen quotes, or from extracts of Freud’s or Lacan’s texts. By gathering different thoughts and voices, ‘Reflections’ will take us towards ‘Reading a Symptom’ and in the end to our meeting in Tel Aviv. ‘Reflections’ invites you to participate in this project.

Claudia Iddan

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“A symptom is a sign of, and a substitute for, an instinctual satisfaction which has remained in abeyance; it is a consequence of the process of repression. (p.91) (…) [It] is that the instinctual impulse has found a substitute in spite of repression, but a substitute which is very much reduced, displaced and inhibited and which is no longer recognizable as a satisfaction (p.95) (…) [T]hus degrading a process of satisfaction to a symptom…”.

S.Freud; “Inhibition, Symptom and Anxiety” [1926], Standard Edition, Vol. XX, Hogarth.

Natalie Wulfing*

Freud formed this theory of symptom formation in terms of a defence against ‘incompatible representations’ in the much earlier, pre-psychoanalytic text of The Neuropsychoses of Defence [1894]. He differentiates symptoms in Phobia, Hysteria and Compulsion, but the common ground is that a sexual experience (the incompatible idea) gives rise to attempts at erasing it from consciousness. In hysteria this attempt is at the level of ‘repressing the thing’, Freud says, at forgetting, which leaves a trace. This memory trace and the affect attached to it cannot be completely ‘rooted out’, however, the weakening of the representation by removing the affect is a partial success. In Compulsion a‘false connection’ defuses the original representation, in hysteria it is ‘conversion to the bodily’. (SE1)

When we think of the symptom as a satisfaction, it is this different ‘use’ of the affect that is in question. How has the removal – which in this early text is not at all a removal, but a filteringthrough to a different function, that of the body in hysteria and that of thought in compulsion – maintained a satisfaction and created a symptom? Freud deals with this question in the later text of 1926. The symptom as a sign and a substitute for a satisfaction, evokes the trace that cannot be got rid of.

In his Presentation for Tel-Aviv, Jacques-Alain Miller, making the link to Lacan, positions the symptom in its cause in language, as what, after the effect of repression, ‘abeyance’, brings what did not exist in language, into existence. Language is a symptom in the sense that it performs this function of makingsomething exist, through the use of metaphor.

“Clearly, what is repressed is a want-to-be par excellence. […] Language has the function of bringing whatdoesn’t exist into Being.”

The symptom makes something exist that has no other form of expression, or, hitherto only had an “instinctual satisfaction” at its disposal.

In one sense, the symptom is that which succeeded in bringing into speech, in the patient’s own take on the situation he is in, the expression of something that does not work: ‘I cannot do it, it stops me from living the way I want to, it takes up all my time’. The complaint is part of a discourse and a structure that belongs to the category of the deficit, ‘it does not work’, hence we think of a desire and a lack in being.

However, Miller’s argument points beyond the metaphoric element of the symptom:

“Under the name of symptomatic leftovers Freud came up against the real of the symptom (…) [what] falls wide of meaning.”

Beyond the complaint, the ‘success’ of the symptom (it does not work), is the failure of the symptom (the ‘it does not work’ does not work). Is the failure the same as the real of the symptom? We are reminded of the formula of the real as impossible ‘what does not stop not writing itself’. The impossible comes to the fore when the symptom’s successful satisfaction leaves something open that disturbs. The ‘reduced’ satisfaction Freud speaks about, the satisfaction of the symptom, begins to show gaps that let the real of the body come through  unprotected by symptomatic solutions.

“Indeed, a symptom vouches for the fact that there has been an event that has marked his jouissance in the Freudiansense of Anzeichen, which introduces an Ersatz, a jouissance there ought not to be, a jouissance that troubles the jouissance there ought to be, i.e. jouissance of its nature as a body.”

J.A.Miller; ‘Reading a Symptom’  

For Freud, it is the degrading of a satisfaction that becomes a symptom, the grading down of intensity. With Lacan we can say that the fact of having a symptom is indeed a form of taming an otherwise ferocious drive demand. The clinic of the object teaches us that in cases where the object does not function, in states of mania for example, the ‘it does not work’ is missing, leading the subject to experience the drive in unmediated forms, in ‘its nature as a body’.