Presented at the English seminar in Paris 2007
Susy Roizin. Forum Tel Aviv
Psychoanalysis deals with the subject in his singularity. This singularity can be defined as the way the subject positions himself in relation to castration either in the oedipal process or while facing the impact of the language that will transform the infans into a subject of culture. The vicissitudes of this metamorphosis determine the different clinical structures, by means of repression, denial or foreclosure, and they constitute the basis of what would be the unique answer of each one, as a man or a woman. However, the symptoms, the inhibitions and the anxieties that patients bring to analysis, are not indifferent to the ideals, to the styles of enjoyment and suffering and to the way of binding with objects that are characteristic of the era of the communications and of the global neo-liberal capitalistic world in which we live today. I’ll try to examine their influence on subjectivity, especially on anxiety, and how psychoanalysis can operate transforming some obstacles into opportunities towards the direction of the cure.
There seems to be a vicious circle: while the capitalistic discourse reinforces the neurotic tendencies, the neurotic structure itself serves as a propitious ground to perpetuate the capitalistic system. I dare to say, not without certain optimism, that the analytic discourse entails the possibility of a change that goes beyond the limits of the clinical work. The analytic discourse does not propose any alternative Ideal but we may assume that a subject transformed by psychoanalysis, adverted of his unconscious desire, would be able to achieve a different position in relation to castration and thus become more resistant to alienation.
Neo capitalism is characterized by the active push towards consumerism. In today's market Companies engaged in permanent competition have to increase their sales and worry about maintaining their credibility in the stock exchange. The race towards consumerism makes use of intrusive marketing strategies as a means to convince people to buy more and more products, persuading them of the enormous benefits that will be obtained in new acquisitions. This method is efficient even if the previous product is still in use or, as in the case of some sophisticated gadgets, even if all the functions and utilities they offer have not been completely learnt. Experts in advertisement know it very well: nothing has such a captivating effect as the word “new”. The new thing, not being born yet, opens infinite possibilities, and conquers the neurotic market, thirsty for promises of complete satisfaction and reticent to accept the limits that language imposes on its enjoyment. Lacan has demonstrated how irreducible the structural lack in the speaking-being is by smashing topological thoruses and crosscups, drawing Euler circles and repeating operations of division that always leave a remainder. He also said in Seminar “Ou pire”, that without castration it “would only be worse” but neurotics are not interested in consenting with castration. It is indeed in that refusal where the constant push towards “The New” finds a fertile land. But why is the expectation of finding an ideal satisfying object renewed permanently, even though it is never fulfilled?, we could say that it is precisely for that reason: the everlasting disappointment is experienced by the neurotic as if it were his own fault, as if he himself were the responsible for the failure. This in turn causes distress and culpability. But this clear state of discontent has another side in the form of the illusory belief of escaping the impossible: if the obstacle is only a contingent error, in the endless new opportunity, everything will be possible again. The lack in being thus is believed to be solved in the field of having.
According to this, as the value of the acquired objects rapidly expires, it seems to be anachronistic to have a broken down electrical device repaired, when it is relatively less expensive to buy a new one. Payment by credit and loans are accessible to everyone and computers offer all the information and the means to carry out the purchases without effort, sometimes even without leaving the home.
The influence of consumerism is also evident in the realm of human relations, thus when the slightest conflict arises in a relationship with a specific partner he is rapidly replaced by a new one, as if he were a broken device. Why should someone make efforts to clarify misunderstandings? Why should time be wasted in disentangling the muddle created by the encounter between phantasies when all that is needed to stop a relationship is to push a button while remaining anonymous? The offer is wide and new candidates are available in long Internet chatting lists. Their images, mirrored in photographs and videos can be obtained along with a catalog of qualities, habits, body measures and many other details that allow to research the advantages and the disadvantages of each acquisition. Going out on a date is rather a check-up, a sort of comparison test, like a trial run before buying a new car. People communicate with each other literally from a distance, often chatting with several persons simultaneously, like zapping the remote control of the television. The excess of offer suffocate the dimension of desire. And it is not without anguish, the contemporary clinic is full of new names for anxiety: panic attack, stress, nervous collapse, post traumatic syndrome, anxiety disorder, etc. The idea of “the lacking of the lack” is developed in the Seminar on anxiety in which Lacan makes one of his known inversions of Freudian thought. In Inhibition, Symptom and Anxiety Freud described a detailed list of libidinal objects that replace each other along the human development. Anguish appears in the face of the threat of losing them, the breast, the faeces and the penis. Lacan gives a phallic value to every object and from his structuralistic point of view he says that the imminence of the presence of the object is the threatening factor. Today we find both of the conditions for anguish: the threat of losing the lack expressed in the excess of offer produced by the aggressive marketing and the threat of losing the object, in the rapid replacement and the frequent interruptions of social relations.
Advertisers make profit of the inherent human needs and in addition to the products, they “sell” friendship, love and “the membership to a club” of faithful clients. They take care of supplying gifts along with the purchases and never forget one’s birthday. Telemarketers know how to create a feeling of closeness and personal involvement. All that manufactured love pretends to be a bond, perhaps as a reactive compensation at the social level because the capitalistic discourse is precisely, among the five different discourses, the only paradoxical one that even if defined as a discourse does not really make a social link. It commands to enjoy, more precisely the objects seem to be those that command. Jouissance and symptoms become autistic, generally focused on the body.
Discourse, as such, presides over the values, the tastes and the satisfactions of a given culture. Colette Soler calls this function “Screen discourse”, paraphrasing the Freudian term because it interposes, using its semblants and its ordering function, as a protective membrane, between the subjects and the Real. In the book “The era of the traumatisms” she says, “When significations that organize social relations are stable and shared, subjects are less exposed to traumatic situations because they are protected by a series of practices and also by a covering of sense. In the inconsistent and holed current discourse the subject becomes more exposed to traumatic factors”…” But there are no standard traumatisms, the traumatic conditions vary from one person to another. These conditions are associated with the protection threshold that is defined, in economic terms, as the relation between the amount of excitation and the strength of a particular subject.
In order to demonstrate the way the subject becomes exposed and fragile to traumatism I have chosen two scenes in the life of a 16 year old computer addict analysant. He lives alienated in a world of images, identified with virtual figures and disconnected from his body and his pulsional life. There are two moments of anguish in which words do not appear, and time seems to have stopped. In these moments identifying referents, symbolic and imaginary resources, have fallen down producing a paralyzing effect. They are two moments of subjective destitution, but they occur in different conditions.
I’m going to call him Dave Marjera, which is his name…. in fact, it is the name he gave the virtual little man who represents him in the games of strategy in which he likes to play in the internet. Marjera is the name of the host of a television program in which people get prizes for demonstrations of courage and boldness. This name is a symbol for him and the other competitors in the game which are children from all over the world. I am not presenting the construction of the case, but only an example of the impressive contrast between the easy way in which human relations take place through computers on one hand and the poverty of resources available to them in order to face a real encounter on the other. He had come to treatment due to decrease of interest in school. The low performance, the frequent absences from class and the lack of school grades endangered the continuance of his studies. So different was the picture seen from within the virtual world where he used to spend long hours…: unquestionably present and with the best grades, especially when he was devoted to keeping up his desired and finally achieved first place. Scores in these internet games are obtained by killing monsters while bringing to life virtual players from the computer at home. The weapons they use are the loot of former struggles and they can also be bought with virtual money. Men in virtual reality are able to obtain and lose what is called “potencies”, “experiences” and a number of “lives” that are registered through a little clock that constantly appears on the computer screen. Battles take place in tri-dimensional fields whose pictures have an amazing level of resolution and realism. Children identify themselves with these characters resembling a complicated new version of the optical scheme. Undoubtedly the amount of successes in the game is a function of the amount of time invested in front of the computer. Many children go astray in those worlds. They spend hours and hours… without moving, exposed to the publicity and pop-ups as long as they are fed by a false hyper-power. This is of course in addition to the passive hours they stay in front of the television just as witnesses, making a libidinal investment in images on the screen and occupied with things that do not touch their realities and their bodies.
The analytic sessions were sort of a hybrid between psychoanalysis with children and with adults: half-lying down on the couch he used to play with games of skill while talking about his life, his shyness and the avoidance to talk in class or in social events because of the embarrassment he felt when the other’s gaze was directed towards him. Dave began to communicate by chat forums with girls. He began to show interest in one particular girl who studied in the same school, but they talked only through the computer or via the cellular phone. They used to E-mail each other written words, pictures, animations and many expressions of love, all of it stored in the memory of their devices.
The first scene is the traumatic moment of the real encounter with the girl, following some weeks of intense virtual communications. After a short conversation it was the girl who took the initiative to hug him and kiss him, while he remained completely motionless and confused. He had a sudden weakness in the body, heart-palpitations, trembling and he felt that he was going to faint almost on the verge of falling down.
The encounter with sexuality always seems to be misadjusted and jouissance as a Real can not be calculated or anticipated. On that particular occasion the object did not fulfill its function as a cause. The subject became reduced to his body and anguish appeared as, a wild subjective destitution.
The second scene took place in the following session in which Dave was almost unable to articulate sentences. His corporal position was more centripetal than usual, his face was hidden by his woolen cap and he gave the impression of being ashamed and embarrassed. It was not easy to hold that anguish. Lacan refers to this difficulty experienced by the analyst in “The Direction of the Cure”, and warns the analysts not to hurry in trying to calm it down, because anguish is the only affect that does not deceive thus operating as a compass that helps to orient the cure. But, does all anguish orient the cure? A disappointment in the field of the narcissistic image can also be very intense and traumatic. Dave spoke in the session with enormous intervals of silence, placing himself in the position of a victim, as a spectator, saying: “I do not know… my heart was about to explode… my body was weak….she embraced me….. she kissed me….I was almost dismaying….Suddenly he looked at the analyst, he smiled and said "I did not breathe", and remained silent for a while. Breaking that tense silence, a peculiar and surprising question emerged from the mouth of the analyst provoking laughter in the room. The question was: "did you forget to breathe?" In the middle of a remarkable difficulty, those words, arose as a formation of the unconscious, as a Witz, and cut the catastrophic sense that had been created by the very few signifiers that Dave had pronounced until then.
The laughter was generated by the sudden changes of meaning. The first change was made by the patient himself departing from the first dramatic and astonishing connotation towards a scientific explanation of the malfunctioning of the body as an outcome of a concrete lack of oxygen at the level of the organism. The second change occurred at the moment of the witz accompanied by the unusual idea that breathing should be remembered by someone, in contrast to the common conception of respiration as an automatic function. I might say that the intervention had the effect of an interpretation because it was a first step in the passage towards the subjectivation of that scene. It was an appeal to a subject who should be able to respond about that disturbances in the automatic function in the organism and about the silence in the session. The resulting moderation of the intensity of anguish allowed him to work again according to the basic rule and he began to talk. The subjective destitution, as the aim of psychoanalysis, is expected to produce finally: an analyst that is to say that the subject may situate himself in a place equivalent to that of the object petit-a. However, during the analytic process there are also bascular moments of subjective institution. In this case, symbolic and imaginary resources that had apparently disappeared were mobilized. He wondered about his place in the field of the other. A rather ambiguous message led him to the conclusion that she would not want to meet him again and indeed, in the spirit of the epoch, he did not attempt to contact her any more. In fact both of them assumed the disappearance of the other, as if they were a XXI century version of Romeo and Juliette destinated to a tragic end. I thought it was love. I am quoting: “I thought it was love” was a sentence that Dave finally arrived to, sailing along the river of his associations. When he said it, he was fully orientated towards the ENUNCIATED, to the SAID. The first meaning generated by his words, was a clear complaint directed to the other. A beautiful soul was regretting his beloved girl's uncommitted attitude. It was also a demand for reciprocity that should have come to provide a suppletion to the "non- existent" relation at the level of the drive. I thought it was love. The gravitational center was displaced at the moment in which Dave could add the quotation marks to his statement and the same signifiers gained a different resonance. He could listen to himself saying " I thought" in the very place where “he is not”. In “Position of the Unconscious” Lacan says, in reference to Descartes and his Cogito: “I exist where I do not think”.
One of the worthiest moments of the analytical process is that in which a cut is produced in the fixated sense and the dimension of the unconscious desire emerges, as an enigma. Since the signifier chain drives into alienation, namely S1 calls to S2, it is the analyst who works in the direction of the separation and de-crystallization of the identifications, reviving in this way the pulsation of the unconscious.
This young man, the hero of the virtual battles realized that he had made a wrong calculation: he created a semblant of love with little drawn hearts, phrases and animations full of artificial tenderness. This is a simple story, but for him it was his heart aching drama, his own neurotic misery. Lacan says in Seminar On Anxiety:” And what are the stories, but an immense fiction? What may reassure a relation of the subject with this Universe of significance if not that there is somewhere. jouissance? This can only be assured by means of a signifier that is necessarily missing. In that missing place, the subject is forced to make his contribution by means of a signal, his own castration”. The Desire of the analyst points out to that missing place, in the upper floor of the graph where the arrow leaves the position of the Demand for love and arrives at the turning point, to the Signifier of the lack in the Other. The subject responds with his phantasma and his symptom. The symptom that psychoanalysis is concerned with, never works according to the general rhythm and it is rebellious against universality. The ethics of the psychoanalytic work are directed to the subjective responsibility in relation to it, working case by case. The signifiers of a given language pre-exist the subject and they have only a differential value, like the notes of the musical scale in the field of the sound. It is each "parletre", conditioned by his unconscious, who creates his own invention, his metonimic and unique melody… but it might not be unheard in the background, as the echoes of the uncanny bell-tower in the narration of Chekhov, the dissonant chords of our time.
Susy Roizin
