Bernard Nominé
Tel Aviv, November 2013
Whatever it might seem, the symptom, as psychoanalysts understand it, is an economical position. This is why possibly we hold on to it. I think it is something that doctors are well aware of: there are some symptoms for which the patients are fond of. It is the case for many ailments considered as chronic and for which the patient is not ready to be relieved from. Better to suffer than to give something up; it is the principle of savings and it is not very difficult to make the connection from savings to jouissance. The will to save is the will to limit the expense, to hold on to what we own; that is to say exactly what we take enjoyment from. Roughly speaking, we can say that savings are on the jouissance side whereas desire is on the side of expense.
As a matter of fact the symptom is at the service of jouissance and somehow is opposed to the fulfilment of a desire.
It is the significance of the first step made by Freud towards the acknowledging of the unconscious. Even before he could give a meaning to the symptom, to decipher it as a message from the unconscious, Freud had the idea that the symptom was the demonstration of a gegenwillen, namely a counter-will opposed to the fulfilment of a desire.
We can find this notion in a paper written by Freud about a case of hypnotherapy.
Freud is not yet bothered to decipher the symptom; he is only interested in giving it the following meaning: it reveals a counter-will which is opposed to the fulfilment of a desire.
Freud’s patient is a young woman who has just given birth to her child; she wants to breastfeed her child but she cannot because of vomiting fits and no treatment was found to help her. Three hypnosis sessions will be enough to cure her. For Freud, this shows a counter-will which is opposed to the conscious motivation of the sick person. This phenomenon always exists more or less, but it only shows up in the case of neurosis or neurasthenia. Every time you intend to fulfil a desire, there is always a distressing antithetic idea which is linked to it; but this association, purely linguistic, which is an automatic reflex of the language, can only be noticed in pathology because a healthy life assumes that this archaic linguistic association should be inhibited. It will be a certain length of time before Freud abandons hypnosis and thus gives this counter-will another meaning: the expression of an unconscious desire which is opposed to the conscious desire.
As every time Freud puts a step forward, this new step does not rub out the previous thesis. This is why I think very interesting to keep in mind this notion of counter-will. After all, what exactly is this counter-will that is based on the archaic binary scheme of the language and that is opposed to desire? It is nothing other than what we call jouissance. In other words, from the beginning, Freud has understood the symptom as an expression of jouissance.
There is a logical way in Freud’s process. He has been marked through Charcot’s lessons by the influence of the speech upon the body, as a short circuit of the conscious. In hypnosis, the conscious must be put out of the game. Then we can measure the influence of words, but not just any words, the words that constitute what we call a saying.
It is a Lacanian concept that is often used without really being explained. A saying is a different thing from what has been said. What is said can be written but it has not the same impact as the saying that enunciated it. Likewise, a saying is not simply a vocal effect. A saying always has the dimension of an act. It means a commitment, it has significance, and it has an effect.
We all have noticed that an analytic cure gets started upon a saying. It often occurs that one of my analysands tells me during his analysis what has occurred for him during our first meeting. It is not unusual that he should mention words I have said and which have been decisive for him “you told me that…” In general, this surprises me, for two reasons; either I do not remember having said that or these words seem very ordinary to me. But in fact, they were not ordinary for the one who heard them and who turned them into a saying, words that affect and have effect.
When Lacan introduces this concept of the saying, he takes two things into account: love and the unconscious. Love is a saying that becomes an event. To tell someone: I love you, has consequences, it creates an event. Women often complain about their partners who do not tell them enough how much they love them. And the latter to cry out loud: Can’t you see how much I love you? Contrary to what we might think, women do not necessarily ask for proof, but they want to hear it said, because to say “I love you” is a saying that creates an event.
There is another category of saying, it is the unconscious. The unconscious is in the same vein as the saying and this is why the interpretation matches so well. It is obvious that interpretation functions as a saying and if it is operating, it means that it answers to the saying of the unconscious.
What characterizes the unconscious is that it is a saying knotted to the body. Hence the definition given by Lacan: the saying is a word that makes knot.
This is the meaning of my previous remark about a saying from the analyst which makes the analysand enter into the therapy. This saying which makes knot at this very moment demonstrates the transference. The transference is surely a knot; this is why we can consider it under the angle of love. What is knotted within the transference is the symptom.
The symptom is a knot in more than one way. It is a knot because it is a saying which creates an event in the body; the symptom is an event for the body, but it is a knot too as the analyst is taken as a complement of the symptom because he is supposed to have the key to this enigma; because the symptom stands as an enigma to decipher.
The symptom is an event for the body but to become a symptom in the analytic sense of the term, we must yet add to it the belief dimension. And what makes of this event for the body a symptom is that we believe that it has something to say.
As for the hysterical symptom, this belief goes far back in time. It has always been more or less supposed that hysteria was proof of the possession of the female body by some incubus or by the devil. It was Charcot who first made the symptom clearly appear under its sexual form.
As I previously said at the beginning of this lecture, Freud did not immediately take to the bait of the idea of the sexual meaning of the symptom. He was first struck by the submission of the body to the saying of the Other during the hypnotic experience.
It is in a second phase and through the intermediary of his female patients who take a lot of pleasure to talk under a so called hypnosis that he discovers the virtue of free association which inevitably leads them to talk about sex.
The concept which was, to start with, only a counter-will becomes now the coded message of an unconscious desire which is opposed to the conscious desire. The figuring is made through a linguistic substitution.
This change of status of the counter-will is noticeable in Freud’s work thanks to a section from the Psychopathology of everyday life when he analyses the sense of the counter-will which makes him forget that he needs to go and buy some blotting paper. He does not understand why this counter-will is opposed to his project until he gets aware that there are two ways to say blotting paper in German: Löschpapier or Fliesspapier. He realizes then that, through this linguistic association, this counter-will expresses his desire to forget the problems he had with Fliess at the time.
If the hysterics showed Freud the way towards the unconscious, the fact remains that it is through his auto-analysis that he discovers the mechanism of the unconscious figuring. The term itself of auto-analysis has to be reconsidered because we have known for a long time that this deciphering work was sent to Fliess, precisely, this funny ORL who indulged in strange calculations of frequencies in relation with sex and which would explain the occurrence of all sorts of symptoms. We know now that Fliess was probably paranoid. Freud used then the morbid interest of his colleague and friend for this cabalistic to address him his own figuring which is of course of quite a different sort.
In other words, Fliess has been Freud’s partner in his search for unconscious; he became the complement of his symptom.
As I was reading the complete version of letters from Freud to Fliess, I stumbled upon an interesting section from letter n° 192. Freud puts forward his theory of the symptom as formation of a compromise: “a contradictory couple of wishes fulfilments is too the meaning of the symptom” And he describes a symptom of hysterical vomiting. “Do you know why XY vomits in a hysterical manner? Because in her fantasy she thinks she is pregnant… she cannot do without bearing the child of her latest lover as a fantasy. But she might also vomit because she is starving, skinny, because she is losing her beauty and thus nobody will fancy her anymore!”
In other words, beyond the sense that we can decipher, the primary function of the symptom is to articulate opposites.
Freud very quickly understood that the unconscious was built in a similar pattern to a primitive language in which opposites are articulated without taking care of contradiction. That is why it is not abnormal to find this statement under his pen that the symptom has the function to couple up opposites.
So if the symptom has the function to couple up opposites, we are lead to consider it as element of a speech because the speech is the apparatus which articulates signifiers. Without a speech, can the possibility of a symptom exist? In principle no, this is why in principle a psychotic subject does not address the analyst via a symptom. It is often a diagnostic argument as we reflect upon clinical presentations. Besides to be unaware of a psychotic structure and to interpret what we will have taken for a neurotic symptom can have upsetting consequences. For when we raise the question of the sense for a psychotic subject, the chance is that everything might start to take sense in an uncontrolled way.
Yet we shall see in a while that Lacan, at the end of his teaching, as he studied in particular the case of the writer James Joyce, considered the possibility of a psychotic symptom but he specified that it was a solitary symptom which does not interest anybody, which does not create a social link but which acts as a knot to support the psychic reality of an individual in the absence of the function of the name of the father which assumes this knot in the neurotic subject.
Before going any further with this particularity of the solitary symptom that Lacan calls sinthom, we shall closely examine the neurotic symptom and we shall see that it appears as an enigma that the analyst must decipher.
The principle of deciphering was given by Freud for whom the sense of the symptom has always a sexual nature. For this, I shall refer to the XVIIth conference about introduction to psychoanalysis: the meaning of symptoms.
Freud presents then two cases of obsessional symptoms which seem to have stopped after the interpretation which deciphered the sexual sense of these obsessive rituals.
In the first case, the ritual is used to protect the husband’s impotence during the wedding night and to exhibit fake traces of a sexual intercourse that never existed. The second case is about rituals before going to sleep that delay bedtime and which come and disturb the parents’ intimacy. I think that the second case is more interesting for it illustrates clearly how the ritual is used to make the signifiers copulate: the bed head with the pillow, the big pillow with the small pillow, the vase, the clock, in short everything is organised according to a sexual polarity.
Anyway, we can see how the speech of the symptom tries to articulate signifiers by organising them according to sex difference. This leads us to say that the symptom articulates the jouissance and in that answers to the absence of sexual relationship. In saying that there is no sexual relationship means to say that nowhere can be written a rational relation of what is going on between sexes. On the other hand, the symptom is written with letters, with a grammar and we could even say that it never stops to be written. What the analysand expects from the analysis is precisely that this repetitive writing should stop.
In this respect, I advise you to read the conference on the symptom that Lacan gave at Columbia University in December 1975. He declares some very clear things that differ from the psychoanalytically accepted way at a time when it was best that the psychoanalyst should stay totally silent and also best to proclaim high and loud that the analysis was not made to cure. “When he talks (the analyst), he is supposed to tell the truth, but not just any truth, the truth the analysand must hear. Why that? Because of what he expects, that is to say to be freed from the symptom. What could it mean that, by saying, someone is freed from the symptom? It supposes that the symptom and this kind of involvement of the analyst are of the same nature. The symptom too has something to say. It is another form of true saying and all in all what the analyst does, is to do more than just pass over it quickly… the analyst’s interpretation must always take into account that, in what is said, there is the sound and the sound must resound with what it is of the unconscious.”
This is why we only have the equivocal answer as a weapon against the symptom.
Clinical illustration: phobia of the restaurant
This is about a patient of about thirty years old who came to see me because of relational difficulties, especially with women but also with his superiors at work. He was brought up as a king by a divorced mother. The father was no more than a good friend but without any further bond. He admits that in life he always manages to claim and get a privileged place. But he has difficulties to admit that it is a problem, as it suits him very well. I took advantage one of his symptoms, the phobia to go to the restaurant, to help him understand it. In the word restaurant, in French, we can hear the imperative form that he cannot stand “reste au rang” (stay in the rank). This interpretation made his phobia disappear.
If his phobic symptom gave way, his narcissistic posture has not changed much. It is not because a symptom stops that the mode of jouissance that exists through it has been modified. The knot has probably moved. But it has not come undone.
This is what Lacan underlines by answering the question of an American colleague during a conference in the MIT. Is the purpose of analysis to untie the knot? Lacan answers: no, it holds tight. This is why you should not be surprised that the symptom resists.
The symptoms might disappear; it is what is expected, but the sinthom as an image is a knot that holds on. It is the way that everybody gets on with one’s jouissance, that is to say how everybody knots it to the body by the intervention of the language of the unconscious. This theme of the symptom as a knot is correlated to a revision that Lacan operates in relation to Freud and in relation to his own teaching about the question of the paternal function.
The father considered from his symptom
What is figured in the symptom is always the same thing, that is to say jouissance which is not suitable. Thus from the male side, the unsuitable jouissance is jouissance of the mother’s body. A man chooses a woman, without knowing it, because she represents this unsuitable jouissance object. This is what makes of a woman the symptom for a man. For who is encumbered with a phallus, what is a woman? She is a symptom. A symptom expresses a mode of jouissance; in general it embarrasses us but at the same time, we hold on to it. It then defines well enough what a woman is for a man who chooses her as a companion. She represents his jouissance, he is embarrassed with it, but he holds on to it. Obviously, he is dupe of all this but he does not know up to what point his jouissance is involved in his choice for the object. But regardless whether he knows it or not, for his descendants, it is better that he has made the mother of his children his symptom. It is better that the father should have a symptom and that this symptom is a woman who is all dedicated to give him children”.
The place of a woman in the male libido is then a function of symptom. A woman is the symptom of a man: a woman but not the woman, because THE woman does not exist. If THE woman existed, we would call her God. But precisely THE woman does not exist because a woman is never whole. A woman is neither totally a woman nor totally a mother.
Here it is for the male side: a woman is a symptom for a man. Is it the same in the other way round? No, it is not; there lays the dissymmetry of the comparison between sexes. If a woman happens to occupy the function of a symptom for a man, it does not mean that this man should be in his turn a symptom for her.
To say that there is no sexual relationship comes down to say that in the encounter of both sexes there is no reciprocity, no symmetry. What is symmetrical and mutual is love because love involves a displacement. You will then understand this obvious fact that we are old enough to have verified that love is the unique remedy to the dissymmetry between sexes.
Every encounter between two persons which involves sex means that one plays the role of the man and the other that of the woman; or to say it in a more elegant way, one takes the place of the subject and the other one take that of the symptom. The encounter is then fundamentally heterosexual. The experience of homosexual couples does not differ from this law. But once again, love gives the illusion that this dissymmetry can be overcome because love allows the displacement.
I recently heard a good example of a case given by a young colleague in a supervision.
The colleague was telling me about one of his female patient who came to start an analysis in order to deal with the trouble she had in her couple. She is in love with a man who loves her too. It is then a true love but the little problem is that he prefers to go and find other women, fleeting affairs, prostitutes, who can ensure the function of the symptom. It is quite common for men as Freud had noticed: there is the woman for love and the woman as a symptom. Thus this woman suffers as soon as her husband gets away from her, because she very well knows where he is going to. She does not want to complain as she is afraid to lose him.
As they love each other, they try in a straightforward way to find a solution to this situation and the husband is really keen to initiate his wife to play the role of the symptom he would like her to be. For this, he wishes to take her into a sex shop. At first, she refuses it, and then she decides to accept on the condition that he chooses himself the accessories he would like her to wear. As a matter of fact this man chooses a dildo strapped on a belt. This virile man is dreaming to play the role of the symptom for his wife wearing this prosthesis. You could say that this is a case of real sexual perversion. Yes, of course, but it is not surprising. The sexual desire is always perversely orientated. This woman suffers not to find her place as a symptom for the man she loves; it is certainly because she does not want to see that it means that she adopts his perversion and does as if she was making him become her symptom.
f course the whole idea is in the expression “as if”, for a laugh as kids say, because in fact she is not keen on doing that. If she accepted it, it would only be for love! What wouldn’t a woman do for love? This is a trait of character typically feminine. It can be easily explained in Freudian terms. What man is most afraid of is castration. But for a woman who has no penis, castration is not to fear; the major fear is to lose love. Because the fact of being loved makes the woman exist in her function, not as a symptom, but as a phallus being a desired object. She wants to be this phallus but she does not want to have it. This is how we can see the grounds of the perversion of this woman’s companion I have just mentioned before. He asks his wife to be the phallus because he loves her and asks her to have it as he dreams to see her wearing the prosthesis.
Between being and having, one must choose. It is either one or the other; it is a way to consider castration. Perversion is the denial of castration; it is very clear for this patient’s husband; he wants his wife to be the phallus and at the same time to pretend to have it. This would allow him to have an idea of the feminine jouissance without having to play the role of the woman for a man that is to say without suffering castration.
This case seems a good example to me as it shows the Freudian classical distinction between the woman of love and the woman as a symptom; but it shows too the necessary subtlety and misunderstandings in order that a woman of love should play her function of sinthom without her companion knowing it. In this case, the sinthom of this man is his way to use a woman to satisfy, unbeknown to him, his homosexual jouissance.
This man shows us how he uses his partner to knot the jouissance which does not suit him (the feminine jouissance) to his virile man’s body. Everything goes through his unconscious. By accepting these games, this woman makes herself a symptom, that is to say a partner of his unconscious.
The couple has children and I do not think that it causes them the slightest problem. The children do not need to know what makes knot between the parents, that is to say what makes symptom. The main thing is that the father and the mother’s jouissance are turned into a metaphor in a speech where one of them makes of the other’s body the metaphor of one’s own jouissance. It is important to note that there is no symmetry whatsoever in this speech because if a woman is ready to metaphorise with her body her companion’s jouissance, she does not obviously take pleasure out of it herself. More than that, we must underline that in the economy of the male desire, it is best that the man should ignore the true nature of the object of his jouissance whereas in general his companion is aware of it. This is the principle of the Oedipus myth.
Thus if a man takes pleasure from a woman’s body who is ready to incarnate the object of his fantasy, it does not give us any idea of her own jouissance. Where does she get her pleasure from?
I must leave this essential question unresolved as we shall get back to it further on during this seminar.
